Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ 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)
Video on Flickr! April 9th, 2008
There have been rumours that Flickr might get into the video business too after being so successful with photos and these rumours have been confirmed! If you are a pro (in other words, a paying user) you can post small video clips to the site. I like the way Flickr sees these short video clips as “long photos” …
Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and ‘soon’ is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.
90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of ‘long photos,’ of capturing slices of life to share.
Will this service replace your regular video services? Probably not, but it does add another option for those short clips you’d like to include with photos rather than go and post them to some other location and try string them all together.
(Source: Laughing Squid)
Technorati Tags:
flickr, photography, video
Posted in Media, Useful stuff, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
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)
“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)
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)
FlockedUp: a social network for thought leaders March 18th, 2008
Here is a pitch for a new social network called “FlockedUp” made by the wise and hysterical Merlin Mann at SXSW recently. It adds an entertaining filter to how we see social networks and the promises they make.
Technorati Tags:
social media, social network, social networking, merlin mann, sxsw
Posted in Fun, People, Web 2.0 | 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)
Blueworld revamp March 6th, 2008
I never thought I would see myself writing this (or even saying this) but I felt like an old fart wandering around Blueworld the last day or so. Charl asked me to take a look around after an update so I created an account (easy enough) and started poking around.
The first thing that strikes me is that Blueworld is a bit of a mashup of MySpace, Facebook and JHBLive (there is even an hint of Orkut). It is a social networking site that allows you to create a personal profile, check out events and just generally what your friends have been up to. Profiles have the usual categories of information about your likes, your specifications and your current mood. I battled a bit uploading a photo to my profile and eventually gave up on that, moving on to other things.
Blueworld gives users the option of uploading photos and videos and publishing blog posts on the site. Much of the content comes with Muti-style voting so you can either vote “Love it” or “Hate it” and presumably affect that piece of content’s ranking on the page concerned.
Tags are a useful way to just mooch around and find stuff and if you do find something you want to share you have the option of sharing with the usual sites (Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us etc). Blueworld also has its own internal bookmarking function. The groups are very similar to Facebook groups.
A really nice feature is the ability to drag and drop elements on your profile page around so you can make your photos, videos or some other aspect of your profile more prominent.
Although Blueworld has members who are a bit older, the site seems better suited to people in their late teens and early 20s. I am certainly not the best demographic for the site (getting older and I can’t handle so much excitement 
). If I were 10 years younger I could see myself spending a fair amount of time on the site although there would be a tension between Blueworld and Facebook for me. It would be interesting to know how many Blueworld users also use Facebook and which of the two services are used more. Blueworld has an advantage in that it is local and more relevant to what people are presumably doing here. Facebook is great as a connector but lacks that local feel.
There isn’t anything unique to Blueworld in terms of functionality and features but what makes this site work are its local flavour and the collection of tools and features like content sharing, bookmarking, social options and more. In a way it is similar in concept to the Zoopy site (albeit with far more functionality). Although their focuses are different, both sites are seeking to appeal to a local audience who want a South African site for their social interaction. You can do pretty much what you want to do on Blueworld and with a mobile element (which I haven’t really explored all that much but seems to be an sms service), Blueworld is a really funky site. I think there should be a mobile site of some sort (unless I missed it) given that the people likely to be using Blueworld spend most of their lives on their mobile phones. That is a feature that could take the site far beyond the Web site itself and out there into the general population.
Technorati Tags:
blueworld, review, south africa, social networking, social media
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Fun, Web 2.0 | Comments (3)
Carte Blanche and the importance of complete conversations March 3rd, 2008
There is buzz today about last night’s segment on something along the lines of social media which aired on Carte Blanche. If you haven’t seen the segment, here it is:
Most of the complaints about the segment which have been doing the rounds on Twitter and a couple blogs. The segment reflects a small part of the interviews conducted with, among others, Rafiq and Dave, and a particular viewpoint I would expect to be shared by people who don’t understand social media and are quite frankly baffled by this whole Internet thing. While the degree to which the segment accurately portrayed social media’s role and the people who use social media daily, the importance of having an uninterrupted conversation about a topic emerged out of it. The segment was about catchphrases and putting a cynical slant on social media for the folks back home who don’t use it and who are probably likely to dismiss it as some silly geeky thing the kids do.
I watched another interview about social media that was conducted by Jennifer Jones at PodTech’s Marketing Voices. She interviewed Shel Israel, one of the authors of “Naked Conversations” and what struck me was what a difference a normal conversation about a topic makes as opposed to a hacked up interview for the sake of extracting a couple catchphrases and sentences. Here is the interview with Shel Israel both as a comparison with the Carte Blanche style and because the interview was really interesting:
Like Nic, I am not overly impressed with Carte Blanche but at least they dealt with the subject matter, in some form or another. It is important to bear in mind that while most of us have been playing in this pool for a couple years now, we are not representative of the mainstream. There are a lot of people in South Africa who don’t use the Web and wouldn’t know a blog if it jumped out from behind a tree and said “boo”. This shift online will take time and, until then, we can only hope that the people doing the reporting are a little more balanced in their approach to the topic, even if they don’t understand it or appreciate it.
Technorati Tags:
social media, carte blanche, rafiq phillips, dave duarte, web 2.0, interview
Posted in People, Web 2.0 | Comments (5)
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)