Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category
Enhanced Internet banking using tags April 3rd, 2008
This is a cross post from my personal blog. The idea isn’t so much to use social tagging but more to apply tagging technology in a very pragmatic and useful way.
Here is a thought for the likes of Standard Bank and FNB (the two banks I use at the moment): add tagging functionality to your Internet banking services to improve their usefulness.
My thinking is that it would be great to have the ability to add descriptive tags to line items in my bank statements/transaction listings. My bookkeeper often has to check with me what various transactions are for and it would be really handy to be able to go in and tag various line items with references or even add descriptions to items.
Just a thought …
Technorati Tags:
internet banking, tagging, descriptions, utility
Posted in Infrastructure, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Commenting for microblogs March 21st, 2008
One of the issues with some microblogging services is that you can’t really comment meaningfully on posts. Meaningful comments, to me, are comments which are linked to the source post and which can be viewed with the source post (so the ‘@’ convention in Twitter isn’t a meaningful commenting method as far as I am concerned - it is just too easy to miss out on responses and too time consuming to try draw them all together into a coherent comment thread).
A pretty good example of this is Tumblr which doesn’t allow for comments at all. That being said people are increasingly running their microblogging feeds into lifestream services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed which do have commenting functionality for incoming feed items. What seems to be missing is some way to link to a series of comments on a source post in, say, Tumblr which can be found in, say, FriendFeed. It seems to me that we need some sort of add-on (like the “Share This” plugin in WordPress) that can either be added to microblog templates or overlaid in a similar way CoComment can be applied to commenting forms on blogs.
Using this sort of add-on, people can read a post, click on an icon of some kind (or activate a bookmarklet) and link to the lifestreaming service of their choice to leave a comment which can then be made visible to the next person who visits the post. Perhaps this could be a sort of CoComment meets StumbleUpon type service?
Heck, this could even be applied to service that have commenting options available. The point is to make those commenting features of lifestreaming services more useful and to focus more attention on a lifestream than on the source content.
Technorati Tags:
lifestream, lifestreaming, comments, commenting, tumblr
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Infrastructure, Lifestreaming, Tools | Comments (0)
Huddlemind.net: a niche social network March 11th, 2008
You are going to hear a lot about Huddlemind’s new site in the coming days (if not already) and for good reason.
Huddlemind.net runs on Ning, the fabulous and easy to build and customise social networking template/platform. What is great about Ning is that it is basically a social network in a box and what Dave Duarte, Huddlemind’s founder (or at least one of), has done is create a niche social network using a freely available tool. In Dave’s words:
It’s a network for people interested in collaborative learning, new teaching methodologies, and organizational development through Education.
Through it we hope to directly connect members with other leading thinkers and doers in business education.
It is also a space to explore questions and issues of importance around business education, teaching methodologies, and learning technologies.
I think it is fantastic. I have been thinking about Huddlemind as an ideal platform for anyone wanting to establish a community orientated site for a little while now and while I had a couple questions about things like domains and ease of use, Huddlemind pretty much clears those issues up for me.
I played around with Ning a little while ago and discovered how easy it is to add Google Gadgets and all sorts of other customisable bits and pieces. I didn’t spend too much time because I didn’t see the value of having my own social network (do I even have that many fans??) but there is tremendous potential here. Maybe I should play some more …
Oh, did I mention Ning is part of Google’s OpenSocial?!
Either way, Dave has done a great job.
Technorati Tags:
dave duarte, opensocial, social network, ning, huddlemind, niche
Posted in Infrastructure, People, Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Plaxo Pulse: Facebook clone or innovation? February 4th, 2008
One of my new favourite services on the social web is Plaxo’s Pulse. Plaxo is one of the few companies that seems to be putting out updates every few days. I have had the rare experience of asking for a feature only to be told that it is there already, baked into the service (not that I am the most attentive of users, mind you). Anyway, Plaxo announced a new public profile for users which is developed using Google’s new Social Graph API. One of the things that struck me about my updated profile on Plaxo is its similarity to my Facebook profile, at least in terms of it structure and appearance. Here is my Plaxo profile:
And here is my Facebook profile page:
There is an obvious similarity between the two and aside from a couple layout issues, the real difference between the two is that there is more content and more applications on my Facebook profile, thanks to the Facebook application platform. I don’t think this status quo will persist too long because Plaxo is part of Google’s Open Social initiative so it is really only a matter of time before I should be able to start adding Open Social widgets/gadgets/thingies to my Plaxo profile.
So one question that comes to mind is whether Plaxo is hard at work mimicking Facebook or whether Joseph and the lads are aiming for something more? The one big thing about Facebook that detracts from it, at least for me, is that I have to jump through a couple hoops to get some of my content imported into my profile and to create a lifestream in my Facebook profile as opposed to a steady stream of application updates. I don’t use many of the native Facebook services like its photo sharing service or notes for my blogging mainly because that stuff is all intended to be used in-house. Sure there are feeds for certain items that I can publish and pass around to my friends but the portability of my Facebook lifestream is pretty limited.
Plaxo, on the other hand, is taking a different approach. Plaxo doesn’t dictate to me which services I have to use to share my photos or blog posts in my and the public activity stream (aka my Plaxo “news feed”). Instead Plaxo gives me the opportunity to basically add anything with an RSS feed and then decide who gets to see it (business contacts, friends, family, specific groups etc). It is also worth mentioning that Plaxo enables users to create distinct personal and professional profiles which is sorely missing in Facebook. This is what the Plaxo activity stream looks like from my perspective (like Facebook it depends on who I am connected with):
By comparison, here is my Facebook news feed:
Again there are similarities but one of the main differences is that the Plaxo activity stream/news feed/public stream takes advantage of incoming feeds and streams to populate it and uses finer controls over who gets to see what to ensure that incoming content is more relevant to the person seeing it and privacy is respected (items shared with friends are only shared with friends, they don’t appear in the public stream). I am not a fan of the relatively closed system Facebook is to me. The recent hubbub over Scoble and the Plaxo script he ran serves as a reminder that despite the apparently open nature of the Facebook application platform (especially with recent reports about Facebook opening up even more), I am still forced to use approved Facebook services and not the services I am using anyway (at least not directly).
This is pretty much where the similarities end. It is also important to look at the bigger picture and at what Facebook and Plaxo offer holistically. From Facebook’s perspective, what you get is a profile and the ability to connect to other Facebook users as well as to take advantage of the Facebook applications. It is all about the Facebook experience. The way I see Plaxo, it is a facilitator and not your entire social ecosystem. Plaxo began with the ability to synchronise your address book and keep up to date with your Plaxo contacts’ changes in their address and contact information. Since adding Pulse to the mix the whole Plaxo experience opens up completely and becomes more of a base for your social experience. Plaxo doesn’t make any claims to own your information and your content (explicitly or implicitly) but rather seeks to facilitate your sharing of that information with the people you choose to connect to.
To me, my address book is the focal point of my social experience on the Web and this is borne out whenever I see a service invite me to tap into my address book to find my friends and contacts. Plaxo didn’t add that service after establishing the social network, it started with that and the social network is an overlay on top of my address book. What I really like about my Plaxo profile is that I can comfortably use that as my “home page” because it contains my public contact information as well as a sample of what I am doing. My Facebook profile also has my contact details but I want to be able to present that information in an uncluttered environment and also present the appropriate information to different groups of people. With Plaxo I can show personal information to my friends and family and my business info to my business contacts. I like being able to do that.
So while there are similarities between Plaxo Pulse and Facebook at some level, I don’t see Pulse as a Facebook clone but rather an illustration of what Facebook just can’t be for me - a really useful and fun service that appropriate in multiple contexts, not to mention more open and flexible. Now all I need to do is figure out how to expand Pulse’s functionality with OpenSocial …
Technorati Tags:
data portability, facebook, opensocial, plaxo, scoble, public profile, lifestream
Posted in Companies, Infrastructure, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Google’s Social Graph API February 4th, 2008
Google released its Social Graph API a little while ago and I first noticed it when I read about Plaxo’s update to users’ public profiles. The goal of the Social Graph API is pretty straightforward and consistent with current trends towards data portability:
With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.
Here is an introductory video from Google about the Social Graph API which is useful background stuff:
The idea of a lifestream (aka the Social Graph although I still don’t like that term) appeals to me as a model for a social web application and this API is obviously an important part of that.
Technorati Tags:
social media, social network, social graph api, social graph, google, lifestream
Posted in Infrastructure, Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services January 27th, 2008
I read this post on the Jive Software blog titled “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services”. A lot of the technical stuff goes a bit beyond me so this summary on Read/Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick was pretty handy. As I understand the whole idea, XMPP (also known as Jabber), the protocol that powers Google Talk and a couple other IM apps/services may be better suited to many new media services and applications than the protocol that is so dominant on the Web at the moment, HTTP. The important aspect of XMPP is that it enables a two way communication process rather than the one way flow that we see with HTTP (ok, I know that isn’t strictly correct but this is how I think about it) so instead of you initiating contact with a Web service using your browser by clicking a link or something like that (HTTP), a Web service can contact your machine first, let it know there are updates and initiate an update process (XMPP). Maybe a better way to explain it is like this:
- When you want to update a page in your browser you need to click “refresh”. You initiate the process of communicating with the web server the page is on and request the updated page data; and
- When you use an XMPP IM client like Google Talk, for example, the IM server will contact your Google Talk app and send it updates without you having to do anything. This process is more efficient than constant polling the server to check for updates.
XMPP opens up possibilities for people wanting to develop services and apps that spontaneously update as and when updates are available rather than constant polling a server for updates. The one application of this that appeals to me is my feedreader. Your feedreader polls the various feeds you subscribe to for updates on a schedule and downloads new feed items when they are available. Imagine what happens if your feedreader runs on XMPP:
Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I’d love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else’s server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.
Receiving your feeds as and when they are published may not be a priority for you but this is a pretty good illustration of some of the possibilities. It is also pretty interesting that Google’s Android Mobile OS incorporates XMPP, at the very least because I can certainly see how XMPP could be a great protocol for widespread mobile applications, particularly where those mobile devices are constantly using a cellular connection or wifi.
I doubt very much that this is the end of HTTP but rather it could be the expansion of a generation of apps and services running on this dynamic protocol. It is probably the sort of development that could once again fuel speculation that IM (or the likes of IM) could overtake email as our dominant means of communicating across the Internet. Not sure about that but it is an intriguing possibility although I am not sure that an email replacement that shortens the already pretty quick delivery times of our messages is a good thing. It is bad enough that email creates an expectation of much faster responses to messages we receive (so much so that productivity gurus recommend you only check your email every couple hours or so to maintain some semblance of meaningful productivity) but if we start exchanging data between people using XMPP-based solutions that expectation becomes more unmanageable.
Where XMPP will probably be a tremendous benefit will be for machine to machine communications, the kind of services that are not immediately apparent to us humans and perhaps even running behind the scenes. IM is in your face, you see the updates coming in and either have to respond to watch messages pile up to be dealt with later. The feedreader example may be a good application for XMPP not because of the immediacy of the updates but because it could mean that my less powerful device can pick up updates automatically and on the fly using a more efficient update process. I can imagine that waiting for a mobile device to scan through hundreds of feeds could take time to update whereas a feedreader running on XMPP is almost always up to date so I can grab my device and run instead of waiting a couple minutes for an up to date sync.
Of course there are probably dozens of more useful applications of XMPP that haven’t even occurred to me that we could see rolling out.
Technorati Tags:
xmpp, jabber, protocol, internet, web, http, android, im
Posted in Feeds, Infrastructure, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Why Google doesn’t need Facebook September 2nd, 2007
Facebook is a tremendous success and I am certain Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t wake up in the morning regretting his decision to drop out of college and start Facebook. He has turned down huge reported offers of $1 billion for his social network and continues to innovate and improve Facebook. There have been rumours that everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo! (again) to Google are looking to buy Facebook and none of them have turned out to be accurate (so far).
This morning I realised why Google probably isn’t betting its business on being able to buy Facebook. It has a social network of its own with a userbase that dwarf’s Facebook’s and while it isn’t quite as good looking and functional as Facebook, it is getting there. So what is this social network? Ever heard of Orkut? If you are outside India and South America you may not have. Orkut is pretty popular in those two regions, one of which is one of the most populous regions in the world. To give you an idea where Orkut stands in the scheme of things, take a look at this table I found on the Lightspeed Venture Partners blog:
Another helpful table is this table based on the amount of time spent on each social networking site:
Both tables present an interesting take on the top social networking sites. While Facebook has had far more exposure in the West and here in South Africa, Orkut is big where it counts. It is popular in countries with massive populations and is owned by another giant, Google. As you can see from the screenshots I took of my profiles on both services, Orkut is getting there but doesn’t quite overtake Facebook in terms of functionality and overall usability but it is getting pretty close.
Facebook:
Orkut:
Orkut allows users to import feeds into their profiles, include images uploaded to Picasa, Flickr and other photo sharing sites and also to add videos uploaded to YouTube using the URLs for those videos. There are a number of communities which are searchable by keyword and category. What would be really useful is the ability to scan my Gmail contacts for friends who use Orkut and who are in my address book already. Orkut allows for integration with Google Talk so my Orkut friends can see when I am around and get in touch with me through Orkut on Google Talk (if I understand that correctly). I can also add my other IM account details too.
Facebook has the advantage with features like the newsfeed (although I am yet to add friends to my Orkut profile so I may find that this is possible in Orkut too), its applications which add functionality. So why should we care about Orkut, even if it does have a significantly larger userbase than Facebook and doesn’t quite match up to Facebook’s many wonders? Here is what Scoble said a little while ago:
Anyway, why could Orkut come back and get us all to shut up about Facebook? Do you remember who owns Orkut? Yeah, those evil kids over at Google.
Now, why is that important? Well, for one, most of the early adopters I know are on Gmail. I’m on it too, even though I keep my crusty old Hotmail account. Google has the best mobile app on my mobile phone too. Maps, if you’re on the iPhone, but if you’re on Nokia the Mobile Google app suite is really great. Lots of you, I know, are on iGoogle, which looks a little bit like Facebook’s profile page. Lots of you are using other things from Google. Picasa, for instance. Or customized Google searches. Or Google Reader. All of which would really benefit from having a Google Identity System.
So, could Google redesign Orkut, make it nice looking and functional (one of Facebook’s greatest attributes) which would appeal to people like me who are looking for the next shiny thing to use functional identity system and application delivery platform that gets everyone excited.
I don’t see anyone else who could get us all to shut up about Facebook. Do you?
There is one other big benefit Orkut adds straight out the box. Facebook is being used quite a bit as a business networking tool and is being punted as a LinkedIn killer. What I found interesting is that Orkut supports business profiles alongside personal profiles and while it doesn’t quite equal LinkedIn’s or even Plaxo Pulse’s functionality, the potential is right there.
What would happen is Google did a little more than a facelift and started building more functionality into Orkut? We could soon see Orkut not only dwarf the other network sites in terms of users but also surpass them in terms of functionality. For the time being it is worth maintaining a presence on Orkut if you want to be part of such a massive network, especially if you do business in either South America or India.
(Inspiration for this post: protocolinpractice)
Technorati Tags:
business networks, facebook, facebook platform, google, linkedin, social media, social network, social networking, social networks, orkut
Posted in Infrastructure, Sharing | Comments (0)
Social Media is dead August 30th, 2007
Here is my column published in The Times this week. It has been up for a day and has already stirred up a mini-controversy. What do you think?
Social Media is dead. What are we going to talk about next? What is the next cool thing going to be now that Social Media is old news? You are probably a little confused because of all the hype you see and hear around you about Social Media and all the wonderful new tools we have to share our lives on the Web. You may even be a little confused because for the last few months you have read my columns about the wonders and benefits of these tools. That is ok, this idea will take a little getting used to. To paraphrase my friend Jonathan, it isn’t all bad just yet. It is just the demise of Social Media.
Although Social Media is only just picking up steam here in South Africa, if you read the feeds on blogs and news sites in the United States and Europe it is fairly obvious that the whole thing is running out of steam. We saw a flurry of Social Media sites like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and lots more in the early months and years of the Web 2.0 era. It seems industry pundits were right and there has been a Bubble 2.0 which has reached its limits and there is a noticeable hissing sound as the air escapes and the whole thing collapses.
The fact is there is nothing new of any real substance. All the new launches are reinventions of Social Media companies that have been around for years now or are simply new applications of existing tools. There is no real innovation in this space. Social Media has climaxed. It is all downhill from here.
Sure, all those Web 2.0 sites and services are still running and have millions of users but the fanfare is over and Social Media isn’t the Next Big Thing anymore. The tide has gone out, the train has left the station and there is a note on the wall that reads “Will the last person to leave please turn the light off?”. Social Media is dead. It was fun while it lasted.
Technorati Tags:
social media, web 2.0, Social Media, trends, Next Big Thing
Posted in Infrastructure, Sharing | Comments (0)
chilibean on Jaiku and Flickr July 10th, 2007
You may notice an addition to the sidebar on this blog. I have created a Jaiku channel for chilibean content.
The channel will update as new content is published to a number of sites including the chilibean blog and a new chilibean group on Flickr which I just set up for photos of anything to do with chilibean media. At the moment there are photos from the WebPR+ conference a while ago. The Flickr Group is open to any one to join so please feel free to submit photos of events which we attend or organise or anything that is relevant to chilibean and our quest to promote new media.
I’d like to add other content feeds that have to do with chilibean too so drop me a line and let me know if you have a chilibean related content feed I can add to the Jaiku channel.
In a way this is an experiment with a new communication channel. Jaiku has the benefit of being mobile as well as Web-based and its ability to aggregate a number of feeds and content streams makes it a great short form aggregator. It is a bit like a specialised feed aggregator and microblogging platform for a specific topic. As I write this I have added the chilibean blog feed (which should contain the podcasts we publish as well as the blog content), a feed from the Flickr group, a Technorati keyword search feed for the term “chilibean” as well as a feed for an Amatomu search on the term “chilibean”. In time I’d like to add del.icio.us feeds as well as other feeds which chilibean features in with a view to providing a single channel of chilibean related content which subscribers can scan at a glance and then click through to anything of interest.
If you would like to subscribe to the channels feed, click here. You can also subscribe to the channel on the Jaiku page by adding the channel to your list of contacts/channels.
Technorati Tags:
jaiku, channel, #chilibean, flickr group, content stream, feeds
Posted in Feeds, Infrastructure, Sharing, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
A quick look at Amagama June 25th, 2007
I have been meaning to publish a post about Mail & Guardian’s relaunched blogging platform, Amagama, for a couple weeks now and just haven’t gotten past staring at my open browser tabs before tumbling back into some other task. So what is Amagama? Well, put simply is is a public blogging service based on the WordPress Multi-User edition where anyone can create a blog and be up and running in just a few minutes.
I asked Vincent Maher, one of the brains behind Amagama, about their plans for the service and whether they involve world domination. He hesitated, briefly, before changing the topic. Amagama is the successor to the first hosted blogging solution in South Africa called Blogmark. Interestingly, Blogmark ran on version 3 of Drupal, the ancestor of the content management system which powers this site. Blogmark had about 5 000 blogs and of those about 3 500 were identified as inactive or identified as spam. 1 500 blogs were migrated across and the response has been interesting. Some bloggers objected to the default comment moderation. Some people have raised concerns that bloggers can edit comments left on blogs and yet more who first threatened an armed revolt armed with nail files and who subsequently capitulated and made offerings of Jagermeister.
For the most part Amagama is part of the Mail & Guardian’s social media strategy that fits with other social media developments like the popular Amatomu. Vincent told me that there are more developments coming that will expand the social media offering and judging from Amatomu (which I am a big fan of, personally) and Amagama, I think the social media space in South Africa is going to be a more vibrant space very soon. One of the other big players in this space is Johncom which operates the Sunday Times and its spin off, The Times (disclosure: I write for The Times and am being paid for it) and it interesting to see how each media company is developing its own social media platform.
When I asked Vincent about Mail & Guardian’s social media strategy, he said the following:
The ultimate goal is to offer a comprehensive collection of social media services that all fit into each other and make logical sense to the user when used in conjunction.
Matthew Buckland mentioned to me that in a month or so Amagama is generating around 120 000 page impressions. That is pretty impressive. I thought I would run a comparison for the last month between Amagama and two other similar services in South Africa (MWeb blogs and My Digital Life) and the result was pretty interesting:
Of course the big appeal of sites like Amagama to me is that they help introduce the mainstream to blogging through easy to use blogging tools and that is pretty important. Perhaps more important than which service is the most popular, at least from a new media evangelist’s perspective. That being said, great job to Matt, Vincent and the Mail & Guardian team!
Technorati Tags:
amagama, amatomu, mail & guardian, blogs, blogging, vincent maher, matthew buckland
Posted in Blogging, Infrastructure, People, Sharing | Comments (3)