Archive for the ‘Tools’ 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)
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)
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)
“Die Twitter, die!” March 18th, 2008
I love social media. I can post my thoughts about Twitter in FriendFeed on this blog and on Twitter and in the space of 18 minutes a debate has broken out and has largely finished. Current consensus is that FriendFeed ought to modify how it treats incoming tweets or perhaps even remove Twitter streams from the other streams.
That is an oversimplified solution to a problem FriendFeed didn’t create. It also presents a bit of a challenge. What about the people who use Twitter to answer that old question “What are you doing?” rather than as a very public chat room? Why should those people’s often pithy comments not be added to a lifestream in realtime or even excluded because other users use it for a purpose it wasn’t intended for and wind up flooding it with chatter?
And as for the way Twitter is being used, well, this response doesn’t quite cut it for me either:
I am all for people using these tools in ways that work well for them. What I am not in favour of is this sort of complaint that the way we have been using Twitter is working too well. Users are so used to it as a chat service that it is working a little too well even though it isn’t well suited for the purpose. The end result is a truckload of tweets of little real value out of the context of a conversation.
I am deliberately being sticky about this. Try again …
Technorati Tags:
twitter, chatter, uses, users
Posted in Lifestreaming, Tools, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)
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 a 140 character limit so important? March 5th, 2008
I was listening to TWiT 134 and the discussion about Twitter and Pownce’s APIs and I started thinking about Pownce versus Twitter again. I know, I know, this is not a new story and I am going to try not to get into the same old one versus another debate here.
For starters I agree with many commentators who say that it isn’t a Twitter versus Pownce issue because both have their place. What I have been thinking about is the emphasis on 140 characters and that characteristic of Twitter as one of its benefits. I suppose being forced to keep messages short ensures (in theory) that you publish direct and pithy messages and that has value. I am not sure how big an issue this is for users. I have also seen Twitter become a kind of IRC channel and I am not entirely comfortable with that mainly because I got into Twitter as a status update service, not a chat service per se. That may just be me though and a function of Twitter not having integrated and threaded comments.
I understand that the 140 character limit on Tweets is primarily because sms messages in the USA are limited to 140 characters. Firstly our sms limit is 160 characters and it is probably fair to say that most people have phones capable of handling more than one 160 characters part in a message. I could be talking out my butt, I don’t think so.
Anyway, one thing with Pownce is that the messages are not limited. If you take into account the Pownce mobile site (m.pownce.com), the AIR desktop application and the site itself (not to mention what I understand to be a pretty potent API), I wonder what the importance of the 140 character limit is. Services like Pownce can do what Twitter does and a bit more so it begs the question what Twitter’s massive appeal is? The next question is whether Twitter’s strained infrastructure will have an impact on Twitter’s userbase?
I don’t really know what the answer is. I use Pownce and Twitter and have the Pownce desktop app and Twhirl (my current favourite Twitter app - also runs on Adobe AIR) running. I use both for different things and enjoy both. I guess time will tell how these services fare on the ever changing Web.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, 140 characters, musings
Posted in Lifestreaming, Tools | Comments (0)
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)
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)
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)
Microblog upgrades August 30th, 2007
Jaiku users will be pleased to see that there are a couple handy additions to their Jaiku service. Many of these features have been requested many times and it is great to see them incorporated. For starters, the Jaiku IM service has been released to the masses. It runs on a Jabber platform so you can send and receive Jaikus using Google Talk or your preferred Jabber compatible IM client. This is one feature which Twitter has enjoyed for some time (even though it doesn’t always work) and which Jaiku users have been virtually begging for.
Other additions to the Jaiku service are focussed on the Jaiku site and include person and channel search (I have been asking for this for a while now and I am really glad it is finally here), a more streamlined Explore page which only shows new Jaikus. I really love the Google search results when you run searches for people or channels. The search results seem to be drawn from Google searches on the Jaiku site itself. Just the same, they add some balance to the results.
The Explore page also includes a side panel with the most active conversations on Jaiku at the time. Some of these conversations have quite a following and this is a fantastic way to generate and sustain buzz about a particular topic.
Of course Jaiku isn’t the only microblogging service to have revealed some upgrades. Twitter recently announced some handy new features. Twitter users now have a search function so they can find all their friends on Twitter and add them. This is aided by the ability to search through your Gmail contacts for Twitter users based on their email addresses. I tried this out and found a number of my contacts active on Twitter and I was able to add them all by clicking on a single link.
These additions have certainly enhanced my experience of both services, particularly Jaiku. The IM option is a great help because I can now spend less time on the Jaiku site posting updates (or running 3rd party software to do that) and I can use the tools I am already using to keep up to date and to keep my updates flowing.
Technorati Tags:
jaiku, twitter, upgrade, features, jabber
Posted in Blogging, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)