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Socialthing aggregating several websites at once.

Byrichard

I’m active on more social networks than I have time to go through in a day and that’s where Socialthing comes in. It allows me to follow news from facebook, twitter, pownce, tumblr, flickr, vimeo and livejournal. What I like about this site is how easy it is to see everything that goes on.

Whereas friendfeed is nothing more than a few lines of text this version of a social feed aggregator is the visual aspect. At a glance I can see which social network is giving the content and I can post accordingly. If I see a status update on facebook for example I can view the profile and add a comment. There’s that option with twitter too. I can see everyone’s tweet and I can reply to any friend’s post quickly and easily.

As a positive sidenote I can follow what’s going on on pownce without logging in. I’ve often felt that the limitations of that site is the lack of people outside of California using it. At least this way I may find my interest growing.

If I’m in a rush or there’s an important message to get out I can simply select to “post” a message to all these social networks at once. That saves a lot of time although as expected this should not be used too frequently as it adds a lot of “noise”. I’m looking forward to more services being included

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Plaxo Pulse and Facebook

Byrichard

For all of those privacy advocates I’m on your side for this issue. With a lot of communitis you create a profile and friends can see it. What you give them are both your name and possibly phone number but no more. When you’re building a database of contacts you must ask for it.

When you add friends to outlook, address and other applications you’ve done research and the users have given their consent. That’s not the same as harvesting them direct from facebook. No one said they wanted you to have their e-mail address. No one chose to give you those details.

If you want them ask for them. Taking contact details from 5000 people is unethical and wrong. That’s very similar to spam behaviour.

What makes this worse is that Plaxo is associated with this. I use Plaxo pulse and you can see it on the right side of this column.  I don’t mind their services but for people to harvest their friend’s data without prior consent will help increase this feeling of insecurity.

We’ve had that debate on Seesmic, on Facebook and other online communities. If we want real communities transparency and trust are key. Stop abusing it.

The friendship Wheel

Byrichard

Whilst looking at another person’s Facebook profile I noticed something. Two thirds of the people were connected to each other yet one third had no connections. It made me think about the nature of the friendship wheel and how it demonstrates how you use facebook.

If you use facebook for real world friends and connections then the friend wheel will show that the connections are many and diverse. Everyone knows everyone else and there is a real sense of community. In contrast take a look at the friendship wheel of someone who adds people they have never met and the nature of the friend wheel changes entirely. Everyone appears isolated.

I like seeing that there are so many connections between my friends on Facebook and aim to keep it this way for as long as possible.

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Open Social vs Portal facebook

Byrichard

Loudmouthman, amongst others was expressing his desire for a means by which to aggregate all our online data through one central account. I though of Freebase and Openid and how they could work. Google though had other thoughts. Whilst Facebook behaves like a portal opensocial helps agggregate content. Facebook assumes thatyou come to their website, spen an hour there and then disconnect. Opensocial assumes that you are an active participant of the new socialmedia landscape on several websites at a time.

We currently have a growing number of people that spend more and more time using new technologies to communicate with others. Most of us have flickr accounts, joost accounts youtube and more but for our friends to keep up is a challenge. Getting them to sign on to any social network is particularly hard. Myspace was the key website for a while before facebook overtook.

In the past two days I’ve joined Lijit and Open Social. Both work the same way. They take your user id. in my case warzabidul and you tell them which networks you’re part of. The content is then aggregated to a central pag. As more and more friends join open social and lijit so you should get a greater sense of what they are up to. It’s a convenient way to keep up to date with what friends around the world are doing.

Look at the sidebar to get an idea of how Plaxo Pulse is using the opensocial idea. Florian Seroussi also pointed me to this article that should help you understand what it’s about.

I’m looking forward to more people using it and I love the great flexibility that it will give it’s users. If you’re using it them write a comment and I’ll visit your site to see your social media presence.

The Facebook Friend Density Map

Byrichard

The Friend density map is an interesting one. It shows you where the highest concentration of your friends is. It’s a good idea when you’ve got friends spread around the world as we do. It’s a shame it’s limited only to the US at the moment. I can only see six percent of my friends this way.


Friend density map


I sent a quick message to the creator of the API and I hope he resolves this issue in the near future.

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England is Top EU country for social networking

Byrichard

According to a recent article in the Times England is top EU country for social networking with 5.6 hrs a month spent on social networking websites such as Facebook:


Britons are the ‘social networking’ champions of Europe, displaying a far greater appetite for websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo than fellow citizens on the continent.


British internet users spent an average of 5.8 hours a month – about a 11 minutes a day – on such sites, in comparison with their nearest rivals the Germans, who spent 3.1 hours a month (6 minutes a day), according to research.


source It’s an interesting figure. Why would England be the top country for social networking? Does university attendance and movement from town to town make a difference? Does the fact that people are so spread across London mean that they are more inclined to stay in touch via electronic methods rather than in person?


I’d like more information on how they came up with these figures.

Patent Misuse

Byrichard

A recent blog post is bringing people’s attention to a group who want to sue Facebook for patent infringement. The problem with this patent is that it is so broad in it’s language that it would include almost all social networking websites.

An Information and Application Distribution System (IADS) is disclosed. The IADS operates, in one embodiment, to distribute, initiate and allow interaction and communication within like-minded communities. Application distribution occurs through the transmission and receipt of an “invitation application” which contains both a message component and an executable component to enable multiple users to connect within a specific community. The application object includes functionality which allows the user’s local computer to automatically set up a user interface to connect with a central controller which facilitates interaction and introduction between and among users.

From what I understand as a non patent lawyer is that this patent is so broad in scope that it could include all social networking websites.

Facebook Is Down

Byrichard

Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.


Facebook down


source 


One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Hotmail and yahoo is that they became slow and clogged up in spam. What this meant is you’d waste a huge amount of time waiting for pages to load and even more time deleting all the junk. That’s why I moved. Myspace is another case in point. Whilst it’s an interesting website there are several flaws such as page load time, too much freedom in layout, and more.


Facebook is currently the flagship of the social networking community worldwide because it’s simple, fast loading, and reliable. Today that has not been the case and I hope that they are not going to take too long with their upgrades. It was working fine therefore taking the website offline with no visible change in layout is just inconvenient and will see me looking for another solution… in fact, I have one. My website. This has been a constant since 1997 and has seen me through my IB, my HND, my BA, and now career building.


We’re living in a different age. Anyone can follow me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and one or two other websites but my flagship is my part of main-vision.com because this is where I have full control of the website. Facebook has become a very useful tool thanks to the number of people joining the website but recently they’re going through a bad period. I’m not talking about a bad period where they’re struggling to keep users or make money but rather bad in that it’s a hormonal teenager trying everything at once before gaining the stability of a mature website like Flickr after it was bought by yahoo or last.fm after CBS purchased it.


Whenever a website goes down I wonder about my future use of websites. One of the greatest things about RSS feeds is I can operate facebook remotely due to all the apps they’ve added. I add a few RSS feeds, take a few website API and it gives the impression that I’m on Facebook more than I really am.


The worst thing about social networking websites is that when they start offering a crap service you have no choice but to keep using them in order to keep in touch with what friends are doing. Last night for example I went to an event which was advertised both on Facebook and on myspace. There were not that many people but it was a practical way to keep in touch. That’s why I went to a silent disco, a silent rave, and know what others are telling us they’re doing.


I hope that this is nothing more than Facebook sneezing and that the quality of service we have grown to expect from the website resumes once more.

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Map Your Friends – Facebook Api

Byrichard

As I was looking through the applications I found an application that helps to map your friends according to the geolocation details they added to their profile. As your social network is more global so you will find that your friends are more spread around the world. As you’ll see for me there’s a lot of clustering around London where most of the people I know on Facebook are living.


There is a nice spread in other parts of the world. Some of them are in Australia, various parts of Asia, Africa, and the US. As you zoom in you can see a nice amount of detail as to where they live. With high-resolution satellite images you can see the street they live on. They can see the street where I live as well.


This is one of the Facebook applications which I feel is not there to fill your profile with junk but rather to provide an interesting insight as to the global spread of friends you’ve met over the years.


For further info

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There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web

Byrichard

the future of the web

the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.

People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings

to be developed

For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.

These websites are not websites  in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.

Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.

It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.

This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.

Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.

It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.

In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.

Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.