Archive for the ‘Sharing’ Category
A suggestion for Muti May 4th, 2008
I just started submitting stuff to Muti again and I thought I’d see what happens when I submit a duplicate post so I re-submitted the Iron Man/Audi ad post. When I submitted it I got the following message:
My suggestion is that where submit a duplicate link, there should also be a link to the item being duplicated so I can either vote on the already submitted item or check out the original link and decide whether to submit anyway. Just a thought.
Technorati Tags:
muti, submissions, duplicate, suggestion
Posted in Sharing, Useful stuff, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)
Exciting improvements for Ning users March 22nd, 2008
Ning is a great way to set up a niche social network, pretty much on the fly. These networks look great and are pretty customisable and flexible. A great example of a nicely implemented Ning network is Huddlemind (check it out if you haven’t already and are interested in “collaborative learning, new teaching methodologies, and organizational development through education”. Anyway, I just watched this video which reveals a couple more improvements to Ning which make such a big difference:
Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators
When I see stuff like this I find myself wondering if there is a network I can create …
Technorati Tags:
ning, features, updates, huddlemind
Posted in Design, Sharing, Tools, Web 2.0 | Comments (2)
Flurry of tweets in FriendFeed March 18th, 2008
A couple people have complained about the sheer volume of Twitter posts on FriendFeed. Stii has joined a growing call for people to remove Twitter from their FriendFeed profiles to ease the constant stream of content. I’d tell you who else has echoed that call except I would have to wade through about 157 000 tweets from the last few days alone.
Although I can understand the frustration many people share when all they want to do is catch up on the meat of their friends’ postings and interactions on the social web through aggregators like FriendFeed, I don’t share the call for Twitter to be removed from these aggregators. I don’t think that adding your Twitter stream to these lifestreams is the problem. Twitter posts are part of your social media experience and have as much a place in there as any other feed.
The problem is more how Twitter is being used. Twitter is not a chat client. It may have a way to respond to tweets and even have a loose conversation but that is not its purpose. We (and I include myself here to a degree) have been using it as a kind of IRC and I can’t help but wonder if everyone else who has the misfortune to be following prolific Twitter users is tempted to just cancel his/her account altogether when a mad flurry of inane comments and chirps (excuse the pun) start flooding the Twitter stream.
If you want to ease the flow in lifestream services like FriendFeed then the solution is pretty simple: stop using Twitter like a chat service. It doesn’t work well as a chat service at all. One big reason is that replies are not threaded so if you are not watching Twitter religiously you will miss part of the conversation. Instead what you have is a virtual field of soapboxes where people shout at each other from across the room, hoping that someone will respond and some noisy conversation might just take shape. If you want to have a conversation, Twitter is really not the best place for it. Try Jaiku, Pownce or even the comments sections in FriendFeed, Pulse or some other lifestream service. Or (and here is a crazy idea), have a group chat using Skype, Google Talk or something similar.
Like … hello?!
Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, twitter, noise, messages, better use
Posted in Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (4)
Thoughts on FriendFeed and lifestreaming March 15th, 2008
ReadWriteWeb has a post comparing FriendFeed to a competitor still in private beta, SocialThing! (I don’t think it is really a comparison post because there is very little information about SocialThing!). I signed up for FriendFeed a week or two ago and it is a great lifestreaming service and does a couple things that appeal to me. For one thing there is a commenting feature which makes it possible to comment more meaningfully on items that may not have commenting features built in natively (a good example is Tumblr which lacks a commenting feature or even services like del.icio.us which are perhaps less about discussion and more about one way sharing). One benefit of something like FriendFeed which I think I have started taking for granted is the following:
FriendFeed has a bit of a head start, but even barring that, there are more intuitive features in place despite its visual shortcomings. The most notable is that it links you to your friends’ content even if you don’t have access to a particular service. The reason is that when you friend someone on FriendFeed, that person has generated an actual account on the service, so they’ve elected to port in all of their desired feeds. So my friends can read my Ma.gnolia links even if they’re a Del.icio.us users and vice versa. It’s in this feature that its real power lies.
With all the excitement about FriendFeed and the lifestreaming’s sudden uptake, it is important to bear in mind that lifestreaming has been around for at least a year or so in the form of services like Jaiku and, more recently, Plaxo Pulse (there are ongoing upgrades and improvements to Pulse so be sure to check back there often if you use the service and consider signing up if you don’t already).
I’ve been talking about lifestreaming for a while now and there seems to be a looming tension between content centralised on a single site (whether that be a blog, wiki or personalised/niche social network) and content that is distributed across a number of lifestreaming services. I have had most of my content streaming into Jaiku, Pulse and FriendFeed for a while now and I am curious to see whether the distributed model gains traction and I will start receiving comments on my comment in those lifestreaming services rather than on the source services? Certainly with content sources like my tumblelog, that is pretty much the only way to comment on posts (at least until Tumblr adds commenting).
If this shift does happen then we will probably see new advertising models emerge with the drop in page views and attention paid to the source sites generally. I am not sure how you would monetise a lifestream being run through a 3rd party service. Perhaps a revenue share option?
Another issue which I want to explore further is content licensing on lifestreaming services. There doesn’t seem to be much attention given to this at the moment but it is an important issue for people who, like me, license their content under something like a Creative Commons license. The services’ own terms regarding how content is to be licensed on their site will be important because they may seek to override a user’s own content licensing preferences. In fact, this will be an issue regardless of whether users retain all rights under copyright or they license their content under specific licenses. Either way, I’d like to see these services facilitate these licensing options.
I see lifestreaming becoming more prominent as services like FriendFeed become more popular and as that happens, it will be pretty interesting to see how advertising models shift and how people manage their content in this context.
Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, jaiku, lifestream, pulse, lifestreaming, socialthing, readwriteweb, advertising models, page views
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, Sharing | Comments (2)
Yahoo! embraces the Semantic Web in a big way March 13th, 2008
I am not sure if anyone has taken a look at this in much detail (I haven’t), but it looks like a pretty significant step …
Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry
Stii, any thoughts?
Technorati Tags:
yahoo, semantic web, search, open architecture, open search
Posted in Companies, Search, Semantic Web, Sharing | Comments (2)
Springleap is sprung … March 13th, 2008
Eric Edelstein asked me to take a look at an exciting new project he is involved in called springleap. I’m a little new to springleap so I got in touch with Eric and his partner, Eran Eyal, to chat about springleap on Skype. Here is the transcript of our chat:
And now for the interview. You will note that it has been edited down a little but just to remove some fluff (largely my own). The interview is pretty long so I have shifted some of the conversation to an extended section (apologies).
2008-03-13
Paul Jacobson:
17:05:41
Ok, baby with mom, let’s chat about Springleap
17:05:53
fantastic
17:06:01
what would you like to know Paul?
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:35
Everything
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:44
what is Springleap, where did the idea come from?
17:07:22
Well - Springleap is an empowerment initiative for South Africa
Paul Jacobson:
17:07:57
ok, sounds broad …
17:08:26
ranging from the cotton manufacturing trade, through the garment manufacturing industry to the retailers and all the amazing talented artists who deserve a platform for exposure
Paul Jacobson:
17:09:08
so basically bringing clothing and local artists together?
17:09:31
Eric and I opened the doors to eSquared Fashion 2 years ago and our business model was to scour the world for amazing artists producing original desings on 100% cotton
17:09:41
specifically with an emphasis on Asia.
Paul Jacobson:
17:10:09
Yeah, Eric mentioned it to me when I met him last year
17:10:19
TO answer your question Paul - yes : in a way that has never been done before.
17:10:26
Basically..
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Design, People, Sharing | Comments (2)
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)
Pownce has more to do with email than Twitter March 9th, 2008
I use most of the new social web services that come out (at least the more popular ones) at least once. I have active accounts on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce and I have found it a bit difficult to consistently stick to one service so I have been using all 3 in varying degrees. Not too long ago I used Jaiku almost exclusively until I decided to rather use Jaiku as one of a couple lifestreaming services I use (others include Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed).
I have tended to use Twitter as my primary “status” service and I have a bunch of contacts on Twitter already so it makes sense to keep using it. That being said, I really like Pownce (good design gets my attention) and I would like to find a place for it in my online repertoire that makes sense. A number of people cross-post to Twitter and Pownce simultaneously and if you see Pownce as a glorified Twitter then I suppose that makes sense.
Pownce and Twitter are both services I enjoy using and which feed into my lifestream services which are, in turn, intended to be convenient points of contact for people who want to keep tabs on what I am doing, saying and creating. So it doesn’t really make sense for me to have two identical streams of content running into my lifestreams.
At the same time there is tension between Pownce and Twitter and the groups of people who regard their preferred service as the better one. I can see how people could think that Pownce is a Twitter/Jaiku competitor (I certainly did for a while) but I don’t believe that this perception is accurate. Pownce’s competitors, if anything, are email and perhaps even tumblelogs although Pownce is really more of a messaging platform than a tumblelog lite. I listened to an interview with Pownce founders Leah Culver and Daniel Burka earlier today because I really wanted to get to the real business model as a way of working out where Pownce fits into my toolkit. I recommend the interview because, in it, Leah talks about her vision of Pownce and it isn’t to replace Twitter. It is a pretty flexible messaging service and given a number of suggestions that IM is going to replace email as the preferred communication tool of choice, Pownce as a messaging platform makes a lot of sense to me. So you can use Pownce as a Twitter-style tool but try thinking of it more as an email-style tool.
Heck, people are even using Twitter in ways that it was not intended to be used. Twitter is designed to answer a single question: “What are you doing?”. It isn’t meant to be a general chat service but because of features like the @ reply thingy and even direct messages, that is what it is used for daily. Me? I’d rather open an IM session for a chat. At least then I can better track what people are saying to me.
Anyway, you can find me on Pownce here. Feel free to connect to me.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, messaging, chat, intended use, leah culver, daniel burka
Posted in Lifestreaming, Sharing, Tools | Comments (3)
Is Pownce emerging as the new Twitter? March 3rd, 2008
There must be something in the air (pun not intended!) or it is that time of year again. SXSW is coming up in two weeks and I wonder if any particular service will emerge from SXSW as the Twitter of 2008? You may remember that Twitter rocketed in popularity during and after the 2007 SXSW and has been cruising since then. Unfortunately Twitter has also been plagued by a series of outages to the point where it is no longer news that Twitter is down anymore. That isn’t great news for Twitter and it must be really frustrating for the Twitter people that the service isn’t coping with the phenomenal demand.
It was probably only a matter of time before talk returns to Twitter alternatives like Pownce (although people who I have read who are talking about Pownce and Twitter are talking about each as having their place in the ecoystem rather than Pownce being a Twitter killer). There is a little buzz at the moment about Dave Winer’s post raving about the updated Pownce API.
Sorry Ev and Biz and Jack, but they got your number over there at Pownce.
I’ve been asking Twitter to support payloads for months now, and now I have what I was asking for, but it came from Pownce, and it’s beautifully implemented, far more than what I was asking Twitter for.
…
Twitter was my first love, but now I’m seriously considering a fling with Pownce.
Leo Laporte chatted to Winer on This Week in Tech 134 (looking forward to that one) and I am sure there will be even more about this in the coming days. What I am wondering is whether Pownce is going to suddenly pick up loads of users in the coming weeks due, in part, to frustration with Twitter going down so often. While Pownce and Twitter are intended for different things, you can use Pownce for status updates and IRC-style chats that people use Twitter for. There is even a mobile client for Pownce in addition to the AIR app. I am not saying Pownce is going to overtake Twitter and become the new black. I just think it will be really interesting to see what happens next.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, dave winer, twit, leo laporte
Posted in Applications, Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Lifestreaming is all the rage back home March 2nd, 2008
I’ve been on a lifestreaming kick for a couple months now, in fact I’ve been talking about lifestreaming in one form or another since I started using Jaiku about a year ago. The basic idea is that a lifestream is a stream of content from a variety of services in one location so your friends/followers can visit one site and see which photos you uploaded, what your Twitter updates are, your latest blog posts and more. Here are a couple examples of lifestreams, they really explain the whole idea pretty well:
First, my Plaxo Pulse lifestream
Next, my FriendFeed lifestream
There are a couple issues and questions that emerge from what seems to me to be a surge of interest in lifestreaming. The one question I find myself asking is about the value of “traditional” blogging when much of the content people might blog about are fed directly into the lifestream. What I mean here is that before my various lifestreams (I think I have 4 or 5 running concurrently in various locations) I would blog about just about anything that happened that I wanted to talk about. If I took a cute photo of my puppies, I would blog about it on my personal blog. If I found a great link or blog post and wanted to mention it, I’d blog that too.
Of course there are services like Flickr, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to do those sorts of things too but that also meant that my followers would have to subscribe to or visit each of those services to keep up to date. That isn’t really a big deal in this age of RSS feeds but if someone has more than a couple people to keep tabs on, the process of tracking all those feeds/sites becomes a pretty time consuming one.
Social networks like Facebook can do a pretty decent job of giving people a single point of contact. If most or all of your friends are on Facebook then you only really need to visit one site to keep up to date on what everyone is doing. It is a great idea the immense popularity of these sites is a testament to that. The big thing, for me, is being able to put my stuff out there and have multiple points of contact to enable me to reach out to the most people. Not all of my friends use Facebook. Some use Jaiku, Pulse and, increasingly, FriendFeed … just to name a couple examples. Facebook is great but it doesn’t really allow me to distribute my content freely so I plug my various content streams (such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, interesting feed items, bookmarks, Last.fm profile and many others) into my various lifestreams and create multiple (and hopefully consistent) update streams for my friends using those services. If course friends are free to subscribe to the original content streams too. These items are convenient ways to keep up to date of pretty much everything I do online.
So, back to blogging. With all this source content zooming through lifestreams of one sort or another, does blogging become less relevant? Would you blog less if you used a lifestream as your primary content distribution channel. Although this post has the makings of “Blogging is dead” post, I think anyone thinking along those lines is likely getting caught up in some hype and/or drinking too much of the Koolaid. As this post clearly shows, there is still very much a need for longer form blog posts or even blogs that are more customisable than the lifestreaming services permit. The value of a lifestreaming service is its utility and the content stream itself. Blogs can take it a step further and some bloggers create fantastic experiences on their blogs that enhance their posts. Lifestreams really won’t kill blogs, they will, however, help spread blog content further if you plug your blog feeds into your lifestreams. Each of the services we use have their place in our information/content creation activities, the challenge is working out those roles and using them effectively/efficiently.
As I was writing this post John McCrea (VP of Marketing at Plaxo) raised a really interesting issue in a comment on one of my status updates on Pulse:
I think there’s an interesting tension between lifestreaming in public and richly sharing with one’s family and friends. An interesting strategic question for Plaxo as to which is more important for us in the near term.
To me this question begs other, interesting questions about the value of more personal lifestreams to a service provider. There is a lot of focus on business and on people who are tech savvy and who don’t think twice about sharing everything with everyone but what about the majority of people who just want to share their stuff with their small group of friends or their family members and not the rest of the world? I don’t think there is enough attention on this invisible majority. Six Apart focussed specifically on these people when it released Vox which Mena Trott, one of Six Apart’s founders, said was a blogging service her mother could use. A lot of these people who are using the Web use services like Facebook and it works out really well for them. My mother in law uses Facebook to see what we are all up to. Introducing lifestreams to these people is the next step although it may still take a year or two before ordinary (as opposed to us geeks) people start exploring lifestreams more consciously (people who use Facebook are lifestreaming to a degree anyway, they just don’t think about it that way).
Depending on how you present lifestreaming to this massive potential group of users and how you build a sustainable revenue model around that group, this could be a tremendously lucrative model. It sounds a bit cold to talk about it that way but money is what keeps businesses, well, in business. Once the money is taken care of there is more time to focus on making the service appealing to these non-technical users.
These are just a couple thoughts I have had and I am sure there will be more ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you use any lifestreaming services? Are you going to try them out?
Technorati Tags:
blog, facebook, lifestream, plaxo, pulse, vox, mena trott, john mccrea, friendfeed, trends
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, People, Sharing | Comments (3)