Archive for the ‘Sharing’ Category
Facebook still excite you? February 25th, 2008
Scoble has asked a question that has been in the back of my mind for a little while now:“What do you think about Facebook? Has the patina worn off for you?”
I have found that my visits to Facebook have grown less and less frequent, mainly because the time has reduced to such a point that I barely have time to update my own social spaces, never mind monitor other people’s updates. What I also find myself doing is spending more time on Plaxo’s Pulse which is starting to mimic some of Facebook’s functionality.
Facebook is a great social service and I think my wife has Facebook open just about all day. I have over 300 friends on Facebook but I just don’t have time to track what everyone is doing over and above the myriad applications people are using and inviting me to use. It can get a bit much sometimes. It also doesn’t help that I prefer using services like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter for photo and video sharing and status updates. Pulse recently added Twitter/Pulse status update synching which is really handy (although Pulse’s updates use the old “Paul is …” format and although you can delete the “is”, you have to think carefully about what you post so it comes out right in Twitter).
In a way it is a bit silly to not take advantage of the community of friends I have on Facebook but the service doesn’t excite me as much anymore, especially when I hear that Facebook cans people’s accounts for getting too chatting with their friends or whacks you if you post too much external content to your Facebook profile.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, plaxo, pulse, social graph, social network
Posted in Sharing, Tools, Web 2.0 | Comments (2)
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)
Ronaldo Lemos @ Google January 28th, 2008
I came across this video of a talk given by iCommons chair, Ronaldo Lemos, at Google in November last year. The talk is titled titled “Cultural Production and Digital Inclusion in Developing Countries” and I thought I would share it with you.
It is quite a thrill to have the opportunity to work with people like Ronaldo and the other directors of iCommons (including, but certainly not limited to, Larry Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Paul Keller, Tomislav Medak and Catharina Maracke) and I am really looking forward to watching this talk in its entirety (no, I haven’t watched all 52 minutes just yet …).
Technorati Tags:
presentation, ronaldo lemos, ronaldo, lemos, google, cultural production, developing countries
Posted in Media, People, Sharing | Comments (1)
Amazon MP3 to the rescue January 27th, 2008
I have ranted about how decent music downloads are hard to come by here in South Africa, at least legal music downloads. There is the iTunes Store workaround but then that isn’t exactly in accordance with Apple’s terms of service. There are a couple options available like eMusic but the catalogues are rarely chock full of mainstream releases.
Thankfully there is light at the end of the tunnel. Amazon has announced that its Amazon MP3 service is going to open up to international customers sometime this year.
“We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”
Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes(R) or Windows Media Player(TM); and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
This service is currently restricted to US customers and enables them to purchase DRM-free, 256kbps MP3 files which you can play on the device of your choice. Amazon MP3 is one of the few real competitors iTunes has and if Amazon opens the store up more than the iTunes Store then I can see Apple having a tough time hanging on to its dominance in the digital music download market.
I will certainly be there with my credit card to buy music from Amazon if the store becomes available here. Songs cost between $0.89 and $0.99 and albums cost between $5.99 and $8.99. To boot, Amazon is selling music from all 4 music labels and you can be pretty sure this is partly the music industry’s response to Apple’s refusal to introduce flexible pricing for music historically.
What a win!
(Source: Engadget)
Technorati Tags:
apple, amazon, amazon mp3, music downloads, mp3, drm-free, no drm, announcement, legal music downloads, itunes
Posted in Companies, Entertainment, Media, Sharing | Comments (8)
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)
What is data portability all about? January 15th, 2008
You may have seen something on the Web about the Data Portability Workgroup lately. Every day someone seems to be joining the group. Do you know what it is all about? I came across this video in my feeds that tells you pretty much what the group is working to achieve:
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
To me, data portability is a sort of Holy Grail for the Social Web. It means there is a collection of data stored at a central location that I can import into whichever service I use. It means I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I create a profile. I am not sure if Google has anything to do with this yet but it sounds a bit like the promise of OpenSocial.
Technorati Tags:
dataportability.org, data portability, video, open standards, explanation
Posted in Sharing | Comments (0)
chilipod 1-15: Merle Dietrich of JoziKids (part 2) September 24th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present the final part of a two part interview with Merle Dieterich from JoziKids. The more I think about it the more excited I am that this service exists. I think Merle has done a fantastic job with JoziKids.
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
jozikids, merle dieterich
Posted in People, Sharing, Tools, chilipod | Comments (0)
chilipod 1-14: Merle Dieterich of JoziKids (part 1) September 2nd, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present part one of a two part interview with Merle Dieterich from JoziKids. I really enjoyed this interview and I think you will find it pretty interesting.
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
jozikids, merle dieterich
Posted in People, Sharing, Useful stuff, chilipod | Comments (0)
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)