18th Moon Station

Embrace and Expand (part 2)

How about a social media client first ? I always wanted a place where I can almost do all my internet services from.

Imagine…

• A full Facebook & Twitter client, complete with file upload services and a lot of extendable functions.
• An RSS reader with deep integration of commenting services such as for Wordpress.com, or Disqus. You can comment from the client and read other comments from the client too.
• Check-in client for various services that can monitor all the locations from single interface.
• Media upload and browser client for services like Youtube, Flickr, Picasa.
• …all of this ever expandable with modules that can be installed to the system.

And not to forget is a dedicated community that will quickly develop the clients for more obscure services. As the smartphone platform war has shown, service providers wont bother with smaller platforms, so you will have to take matters to your own hand. But the majority is not developers. Sadly, there’s also developers who only want to do what they think is cool when they have the time, so this is nigh impossible.

One of the best services I ever had is FriendFeed for one single killer-feature. Virtual friends. This make the service into a specialized RSS reader grouped to “Person”. I always love this feature because it address a grave issue of social network, they want to spread virally and force you to invite friends before the service can be enjoyed. If your friends don’t want to bother, you’re all out of luck and the new place is just a dead failed ghost town.

Early adopters, who’s enthusiastic to have their friends joining should have the ability to prepare the land.

• Prepare the “virtual friends” and curate sources before inviting their friends to join. This way, when that friend joined they won’t feel troubled because they’re “alone”. They will get stream of information from their friends from the time they joined. Why not just use Facebook and Twitter integration ? Because we need something more than just a Facebook/Twitter client.
• Prepare the account and connections, because their friends wont bother connecting their services. They want it to just work and since they’re invited, they would expect it to be all prepared.
• Help with setting up and troubleshooting user-side things.

The point is, make the whole service work out of the box without much need of setup.

After the mass is secured, then expand the feature and functions. Play nice with the other services, but also give added value that peoples would want to use.

Display yourself, version 3

This came to my Inbox in the morning.

An invitation to DooID version 3’s private beta.

Private beta of version 3, focusing on mobile accessibility and lifestreaming

Simple introduction, DooID is an online business card/profile service. The service give you a page where you can present yourself and your contact information, much like an elaborate online business card.

Something in line of Retaggr (no update for long), About.me (private beta), Chi.mp, Cliqset (is dead), Flavors.me, My Name is E, etc.

Not so much like FriendFeed (felt neglected), Lifestream.fm or Facebook (if you’re a connect & share junkie) which is an Activity Stream aggregator.

The makers nicely give credit of the idea to Tim Van Damme’s mini site, which is the concept of how your profile in DooID would looks like. Big background space and a small box that shows your profile information grouped and shown one by one using AJAX animation (over simplification, I know).

Easier to blog pics to supported services

via blog.flickr.net

Today, Flickr announce they’re renewing the sharing feature. They support easy connection to Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter and Wordpress.

The option to grab link also now has a checkbox to grab the short URL (the flic.kr short url when posting to Twitter). There's also the good old grab HTML or BBCode for posting to website or forum.

But something is lost. Previously, there's option to blog to any blogs that support XMLRPC, even the (late) Windows Live Space (condolences). But now, other than the 8 supported sites (including Yahoo Pulse), there's no way to quickly reblog picture other than doing copy-paste of the HTML code.

And like any other updates, resistance is already firing up. *grins*

Redundant official channel, more noise

This is getting ridiculous. Few days ago, there are sudden growth of account by my workmates in Twitter and Facebook. Those who already have one used theirs, while those who clearly showed no interest in social media use name added with their publishing label.

The entry inside is also made solely for the purpose of blasting ads about products and doing customer support. When asked for reason, it’s simple, “boss told us to make one”.

Disregarding any logic in that, I’d rather have a single corporate account, or per product group, managed by the staffs (there are tools like CoTweet or HootSuite) rather than a whole group. Disclaimer first, I don’t learn marketing communication, but do they think of doing the advertising as adding more “vector of attacks” towards the customers? Giving false impression of closeness?

If I’m following staff account, I’d rather it be their personal account with rants about work and personal comments, at least that’s how I treat mine, although probably not many readers are following since my updates are mostly in incomprehensible Japanese (＾－＾；

SEO for free

This morning, while rummaging through the setting in Wordpress.com, I found a new section I didn't see before, probably something new.

The said section is for webmaster tool. It allows users to add the verification key needed for search engine's webmaster tool. Not just the ever overly popular Google, they support also Yahoo and Bing.

Loved it. Admitedly, I'm not keen on using analytics tools yet and block them out anyway, but it's not just webmaster with their own hosting that want to try their hands on analytics. But the verification methods used, with meta tag or uploading XML files, are too limiting. Especially for bloggers that used free platforms, they're not allowed to change the template for even a bit, and adding meta tags are also out of reach. To get that, they must still pay premium price and yet that's not really a guarantee that they'll have the feature.

Recently when complaining about IntenseDebate, I get a reply for the tech support saying they're planning on merging the Automattic properties' account. I guess this also means Wordpress.com could get IntenseDebate commenting built in ?

In the other hand, the other blog hosting I used are still in their limiting stance. At least the two I used the most in Hatena and LiveJournal. Hatena needed premium account, which I wonder if the point can only be bought with Japanese credit card. (I used my WordPress once in a while to write down story ideas only).

Hope this will change, or better yet, those analytics should provide alternative verification, something not necessarily involve having to change the template to do, such as posting a verification text (like Technorati). But seeing a comment about “that means you don’t own the server” remark from someone in the support forum, maybe they won’t care.

Checking out

I’ve been using Brightkite for location-based social web service rather than the more popular Foursquare. I just loved that there’s no badge obsession in BK, only interaction and plain basic functions. Thus, I don’t really understand why Brightkite seems to become synonymous with uglier Foursquare.

The main problem Brightkite had over here IMO is one, momentum. There’s just not enough peoples using it to arrange meeting and real-world interaction. The venue database also doesn’t go as complete as the competitor. Even though I tried adding venue, it’s impossible to find the venue again by search, which I would assume other users wouldn’t be able to do it either, leaving us to the mercy of providers like Google.

By the way, there is a missing feature that got closed and sealed. The feature is checking out, a way to say “I’m not here anymore”.
Just now… well, maybe this is a bug, but I managed to check out a location by deleting my latest post. Then the status showed me to be “@Somewhere in the world”

Reply with Retweet

On @RTbukanReplyTo, seems like there’s mass of peoples starting their own Twitter Groups (like the Facebook Groups for anything) to demonstrate their protest on the retweet to reply practice.

Retweet is originally a practice done like e-mail forwarding, sending a tweet to all followers. It’s used to share an interesting content to all friends someone think would be interested in it. In development, Twitter embraced the de-facto standard by making Retweet API which has its plus and minus.

• Plus: it shows as the original tweet and count how many has retweeted.
• Minus: it doesn’t have any space to reply.

Well, if I may say, I always hoped Twitter would implement a 2-dimensional timeline to their discussion. This is more known as threaded comments. The justification of this is for practical reason.

Twitter always have “in reply to” link, but this will open a new window, not really the most convenient method if you ask web designers. Most client applications also used this behaviour.
Perhaps, Twitter never expect it will evolve into platform for conversation too, just like it used to be “what are you doing now” instead of “what’s happening” like it is now. The single dimension timeline doesn’t look adequate for long and more involving discussion with the capability of excluding peoples who is not in the topic.

In the other hand, if you checked Twitter Search you can see they have a conversation view in it. Also not all application had the feature, especially the most popular client, web.

Opening new window just to check what someone is replying to is annoying. Same with the person who replied, they need to trace back what the hell did they just replied to. The problem is amplified for chatty folks that replied to many things at once to many peoples on many threads. To make it easier, they put a retweet behind as a note to check back what they’re replying to.
Also they might want to invite their friends to reply on the topic too.

What raged some peoples is that retweet practice though. They had their timeline set to private, not sharing with someone out of their specific social circle. They feel better not having “online stalkers” or worrying about case of humiliation or career disasters when unwanted persons read what they’re saying. This protection is not available when their post are included on replies by a follower with public timeline wide open.

I’m still with my suggestion above. If the reason is for trace back, threaded discussion is the way. At least make it easy to trace back a discussion without the need of opening new window. That way, they wouldn’t need to quote the original message, like peoples using Gmail doesn’t put quote in their replies.

Side note, the corporate Twitter account here where I worked in always asked to retweet with reply though.

Aggregator, mass and variation

Just how useful is aggregator services? This is like Friendfeed, Cliqset, Lifestream.fm. These services that aggregates from various services you use is very useful, not just because you can check your friends’ updates (and they can check yours) in a single location, but also because we can comment about contents from other places, especially if you had resistance to join certain services (like some peoples are anti-Facebook, and I don’t have a single Google account).

But I think, the usefulness of such middleman services are hindered by some factors.

• Critical mass or friends already in the services. This is the issue of is it worth the bother to register and regularly check yet another services.
• The quantity of services used. The beauty of these services are, they aggregate updates from many sites that would else be too much to check regularly. You can comment and discuss in single place with closer friends instead of going to the origin service. But if everyone use only a certain set of services (Facebook & Twitter) then there’s not much point isn’t it? Just check it in the original service everybody use. I still rarely found peoples around who used Digg or De.icio.us for example, because it doesn’t have that bumper clique effect of Facebook.
• The variation of services. Still in relation to the two points above, variation of services used make these aggregators more useful. For example, even without registering to Facebook, a friend could still comment on status update. This is really practical, although would be better when the internet finally agree on a protocol to link together discussion from many services together.

Facebook, somehow succeed. It has critical mass that make it “worth the trouble” for many web services to create their own application or use Facebook Connect to share their content to the News Feed.

That old time dilemma isn’t it. Which came first, crowd or product. Since money is involved, seems like many choose to have crowds first before product. Let someone else do the marketing and they’ll ride the wave.

Account not found (Friendfeed)

Although deemed to be on death row since acquired by Facebook, FriendFeed is still a great aggregator service.

But sometime, the trouble is adding services. Most of the services had no problem, but there are some that’s troubling. Here is some I met and how to get through it.

• Hatena (はてな) is a popular bookmarking service along with other services in the portal such as blog, picture sharing. But seems like you’ll need to add at least a diary entry first before you can add.
• Photobucket needed friendly public URL to your picture gallery. This can be set on Photobucket site.
• Reddit, also a news bookmarking service, seems to need at least one share to import your whole activities. This means even if you have thousands of reply but no posting new item, seems like FF wouldn’t be able to import it.

Mixin

First time I read about this service is from Webware and loved the idea and interface.

Simply said, this service is like Twitter for agenda. You’ll have a timeline of your events and your friends events (sorted by event time by default) which you can join and talk about. But unlike most other scheduling services, the charm of mixin is that it doesn’t instantly gave the impression about business appointment, or even special formal events; instead, for casual events.

I only use the service to write down and share where I’m planning to go. If my friend is using this service too (which unfortunately not), they might be able to drop by (and vice versa).

To reduce the data redudancy, I import the webcal feed to my other calendar applications such as Windows Live Calendar.

Sadly, adoption seems to be low. The public timeline is infested by spam entries and the staff blog hasn’t been updated for a long time so I guess it’s safe to assume this is into the deadpool.