Social Media

Now that twitter has gone mainstream and fewer people are obsessive about it I’ve been trying to walk the gang plank and arrived on friendfeed. It’s an rss aggregating site, much like facebook where you have none of your friends, but don’t worry. You can populate it with various news rss sources for colour. That’s not the reason for this blog post. What I wanted to really tell you about is the friendfeed notifier thing. It’s a useful application that shows you the latest item transiting through your home friendfeed feed in real time. As a result you can work on other projects whilst occasionaly seeing what is happening there.

Paul W. Swansen - Mar 6, 2009

My first impressions were that the new FaceBook looks a lot like FriendFeed. I’m also noticing some other things in the new Facebook layout that apparently were not fully thought out prior to the new launch.

I do like the features of FaceBook and Friendfeed where I can actually have a discussion/conversation in more than 140 characters.

Facebook is now a mixture between friendfeed and twitter. You get videos, photographs, status messages and more from all your Real life friends networks. One of the most powerful new features is that by using the group feature we can now see our friends according to a number of settings. If I want to look for Uni friends I click on that list of friends. If I want twitter friends I press on that list. If I want Geneva friends and their status I’d press that and get the required information. Now we’ll see a decline in facebook user time due to them not understanding it and not having the time to figure it out but within the next week or two they will use it more and more. The real time view also means that conversation will now be emphasised and help people in different geographic regions stay connected. As my distaste for the way people use twitter grows ever stronger so the new facebook layout encourages me to engage with more of my real life friends there. It’s a big “see what you missed out on” to the twitter owners and their poor website implementation and innovation cycle. I was struggling to see a reason for being on twitter. That has just become stronger.

Snowboarding is a fun and safe sport as long as you know what you’re doing. Occasionally of course we push the limits. A few years ago whilst snowboarding with someone around La Dole we decided that rather than go back down via St Cerque we would snowboard home by passing over the ridge and down the other side. For decades both us had hiked those slopes so we knew them well. I took one step and felt myself falling. I was face down in the snow and I called to the person I was with to know whether he could see me. He could, so I knew there was no problem. We both strapped our snowboards on and from that point we snowboarded down the slope. In Verbier a 29 year old Entrepreneur lost his life after falling from a cliff into a rive below, from a few articles I’ve read. The conditions are unclear at the moment. What is clear though is that the people did not have a proper contingency plan or experience of the mountains. If the conditions are adverse the last thing you want to do is go off piste, especially when you’re not with a local guide who knows the mountains. The reason I’m speaking about this particular story is that these people had some of the latest technology at their disposal. GPS enabled iphones and twitter, as is written in this article. If you’re lost in the mountains with this type of device you can get a geo loc within twenty meters of where you are. You can see a satellite view of where you are and you can see which way would be the best to get home. You can also stay put and let rescuers find you rather than attempt to make it back down. If your GPS location is within 20 meters it’s not that complicated to find two people. The other reason I’m speaking about this is that some of those who were part of the group were tweeting the adventure. One tweet speaks about the great time they were having and how they “finished the ski day due to complete whiteout”. The next is about the 2 people missing. Screen grabs of the tweets are here. This demonstrates the weakness of the iphone and the GPS functionality. With my phone whenever I go outdoors the GPS tracks my exact location within 20-60 meters. What this means is that if I go missing within a minute you’ll see exactly where I am if you’ve added me on Google latitude. On that note I’ve invited a few more people to follow me on google latitude. If you have an S60 Symbian phone maybe you could do the same, just as a backup. It’s a shame it had to happen to anyone, especially since that type of accident is easy to avoid. It’s even more of a shame that Hermioneway, whom I met at LeWeb in Paris is one of those that had to go through the experience. Switzerland is a beautiful country for all those that enjoy outdoors sports and beautiful landscapes so it’s a shame that it’s overshadowed by that event.

elisa - Feb 2, 2009

Thanks for your kind words!
Elisa – @feedly

I really do like feedly, I was using it to check blog posts at the time when you were commenting. Works well for me.

Venture capitalists love to invest in something that works, something that’s concrete. If it’s got a 900% user growth rate overall and tripled in size in the UK alone then this is excellent. That’s the perfect website to invest in. Of course I’m speaking here of twitter. The 140 character twitter website that no one has time to use yet everyone flocks to. With the recent twestival you see that it’s gone local, and that can only mean one thing, that it’s gone mainstream. Perfect, now the web celebs can come in without looking too geeky. Cue Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry to name just two individuals. It’s passed though. The golden age of twitter is behind us. 140 characters and social presence have moved on from there and I think the companies we should be focusing next are feedly. friendfeed and google reader. The reason for this is simple. We all love to create content and we all love to talk about it. We all love to show others that we’ve found something but the drawback is that we create a lot of duplicates. These duplicates aren’t bad if you’re only following five or six friends. When you follow twenty eight thousand though it does start to get tedious however. That’s where I feel real enthusiasm for feedly. As you go from blog to blog you find a lot of content that’s interesting but aside from what’s written in the comments for each post you have no idea of what others have thought or said about this. Feedly gives you a small box at the bottom right corner that tells you the number of conversations that have taken place and a quick method by which to see which are the most active references to this post. As a result you don’t need to wait for the kettle to boil to start a conversation. It’s already there. That boiled kettle of course is Friendfeed. That’s where people will be moving next. That’s where we will find the conversation moving next. Watch the realtime thread and you can see who liked the post, who was vocal about it and when the most recent comment comes in. What this implies is that the limitations felt by twitter will become a thing of the past. We’ve got a high end solution for our content needs. Of course we’re individuals. We all like to have our own rss feeds and personal content and that’s where google reader integration comes in. At the start and end of the day, when all those we are following are taking care of their children or walking their dogs we can go hunting for original content. We share that content and once people wake up they can comment and so the cycle continues. Other websites are now providing more interesting options and deserve at least part of that pie.

Recently I started using feedly which is a great tool for managing rss feeds and content into an easy to view form. Connecting with google reader, friendfeed and a number of other surfaces it provides you with three principle displays for viewing the content you have selected to have aggregated. The first display shows your content by theme. In my case these themes are social media, video, technology, explore, and of course my own content output, to some degree. From this display I can quickly see a number of topics. The second display is named digest. It displays three of the top unread stories with the title and a quick description of the articles in each category. You can cycle through these articles using the ever popular J and K keys, j for going back, K for going forwards. A counter tells you how many items are left for each category. The list view gives you a quick headline for every blog post. It’s a quick way to go through your rss feeds. The articles expand to their full length once they have been selected. [caption id=“attachment_1010” align=“aligncenter” width=“307” caption=“Conversation tracking according to article”][/caption] Above is what I think is the most interesting feature of all. It’s a demonstration of how feedly is integrated into your every day browsing. Anytime you go to a blog you’re made aware of the conversation that is taking place and how active it is. You may also share that content to a number of platforms, from google reader to friendfeed, twitter and more to add. You can add a note to explain why you think that blog post is relevant to your readers. Of course the reason I love this application, requiring firefox, so much is that it allows for the entire world wide web to be something your share with those who are interested in where your attention is being drawn. It syncs with google reader, integrates with friendeed and just provides a great all round user experience. I strongly recommend using it.

Bernie Goldbach - Feb 5, 2009

I like Friendfeed because it helps me thread Twitter, just like Jaiku natively threaded posts.

I really like Friendfeed and what it’s becoming. What I love is how easy it is to follow many people and converse with them about everything they share. It’s the future of web sharing but it may take several months for people to move towards it. There are a number of things I love. First of all it aggregates your live stream in one place, so anyone who has an interest in you can share what they like about your work and you can follow this conversation. The second aspect that makes it so strong is that you can do the same for them. You can select those you think are thought leaders and follow everything they do and say. It’s mature, it’s like a web forum but grown up in that it branches out to blogs, twitter, plurk, youtube and flickr to name but a few networks. That’s just a small part of what makes it so interesting. Something else that makes this website and service interesting is the level and depth that conversations can take. If you get a few people talking together you get a debate and a dialogue, or conversation going. This contributes to the continuation of the discussion. What’s more is that it’s less name based. You can see what FOAF (Friends of a friend) are discussing and joining in. That’s not where it stops though. The rooms, albeit a little geeky for now will be a great place for people to come and discuss new topics, from political elections to festive events where they live and more. It’s specially designed for this. Look at the Davos room for example. RSS feeds from a variety of sources are aggregated into one place for easy digestion, especially when using the realtime feed option. The biggest weakness of the site at the moment is user numbers. With just a few hundred passionate users the discussion means the creation of a strong community bond that has long since dissapeared (or at least changed) for Twitter. Add Feedly to this and you’ve got one of the most interesting services yet to come out. Feedly makes it easy to share your content to many social networking websites, of which friendfeed and Google Reader are part. Read your google reader items in feedly, share them, add notes and more. It’s all synced from one place and it’s not website specific. You don’t need to be on the feedly website to use it. Just add the plugin and it works. I look forward to welcoming you there.

jonmaim - Feb 6, 2009

Come back warzabidul, we are geeks and proud to be so :))

I’m still active on Jaiku, plurk and friendfeed but I need a break from twitter. I played my best game of pool yesterday, possibly thanks to not thinking of twitter.

I’ll be back on that network on the 14th of February but there is a good chance that I will no longer follow quite a few twitter users, especially those that do nothing but tweet how great what they’re working on.