Tag: Friendfeed

  • Everybody, Friendfeed, right now!!

    In a way, Friendfeed’s latest offering has revolutionised my usage of social media services. My experiments with FF had been limited since Twitter used to give me a fair amount of good conversations on various subjects of interest – from Bollywood to advertising campaigns to social media to social issues. I didn’t see any value that Friendfeed could’ve added, inspite of it being an aggregator of several services i use including blogs, Google Reader, delicious, Linked In, twitter, Google Talk status messages and recently last.fm among others.

    With every new service, I’ve needed a catalyst to use the service more. With delicious, it was the toolbar plugin, with Facebook, it was the critical mass of friends to get me in there, and then apps like Scrabulous. With Twitter, it was the browser plugin. I’ve been lax on most services which make me open a separate web page. And that was the case with Friendfeed, Kwippy and Social Median. These three, because they are excellent services which i should ideally have used more. A quick plug for the last two before we move on.

    Kwippy, a very neat Indian startup, about whom I’d written about a few months back, has moved on from a ‘twitter like service’ to a great place to have focused discussions. It has an awesome crowd too. But I do wish they’d work on a few things I had mentioned in the earlier post. Critical since information overload is bound to cause a consolidation soon. Social Median, with whom i was very impressed, and had written about sometime back, is a great filtering service that connects you to people and topics, by sharing links that interests you, and then have conversations around them. You can also create customised news networks on topics you’re interested in and then add sources. It is well connected with other networks and even has a toolbar plugin that allows easy sharing of links. In a sense, it works better than FF on many fronts.

    And so, back to the catalyst. Last week, FF added a new feature – real time updates. What it does is that it helps me get instant reactions to the things I have shared via various other services. It can be anything from a comment to a blog post to a photo to a tweet to a Google Reader shared item. One small snag i see in the real time interface is the lack of bundling that the standard view of FF provides. It could mean I miss out comments and end up replying to them much later. I also have issues with my Google Reader shared items since they aren’t reflecting on ‘real time’. And lastly, why can’t I include my Facebook statuses??!!

    A look at how all this affects my usage of other services. Twitter Search has real time updates for specific queries, and as Louis Gray points out about FF, “the team hasn’t yet connected its capability to search or keyword filtering, which, if ever delivered, could be a body blow to Twitter search.” (via The Inquisitr). Now,  when i see a friend’s tweet on FF and decide to comment on it on FF, i am given an option to also send an @reply to twitter. How about pulling all the @manuscrypts tweets live for me on FF and giving me the same option?

    My usage of Google Reader as a sharing device was limited. I have noticed that with real time FF, that has increased. I am sure that will also influence the posts I do here. Meanwhile, I can use FF to share links, with a comment. I can also choose the room I want to share it in. What does this mean to Delicious and Social Median, especially if FF can bring the easy search (and tags) features of delicious and the functionality and interface of rooms is jazzed up to the levels of Social Median?

    With conversations happening everywhere, the need for aggregators will only increase, and whatever be your take on noise (there’s a great note here) a service like Friendfeed can only help. It’d be interesting to see the other services’ reactions to real time.

    until next time, when there’s information overload, a friend in need…..

  • Social Factories

    What self respecting social media blog could let the Facebook redesign slip by without a post dedicated to it. Now is a good time considering that Mark Zuck has deemed that we shut down our silly protests and just accept his virtual reality. Inspite of short term solutions offered, well meaning advice, and groups consisting of millions of supporters, Facebook was unruffled, plodded on with migrating everyone to the new design, and was perhaps quite sure of the premise that there wouldn’t be an exodus of users because of a design change. I, for one, am not unhappy with the new design, since functionality has been improved (for me) but at the cost of a relatively (since Fb was never known to be easy) ‘cosier’ design. I also thought that apps suffer a lot since they are relegated to a separate tab, and are not automatically seen when i visit a person’s profile. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

    I was quite intrigued by Startup meme’s smart comparison of the new Facebook design and Vista, and possible strategic implications. The possibility of Microsoft’s increasing interest was further fueled by a TechCrunch article I read recently. It raises a good point of how, to a functionally conscious generation, Windows and Office might be dispensable, in favour of the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn etc. With the rise of collaborative tools, and cloud computing in the horizon, this might be bad news for Microsoft, especially since the success of Windows and Office has always been taken for granted. In such a scenario, a Facebook collaboration (and perhaps acquisition later) makes a lot of sense. After all, Facebook is trying to become a web OS, as this post suggests. Its a great read and goes on to wonder where the Facebook browser is. But to get back, all this means Facebook would open up a crucial second front for MS. 

    The interesting part for me is who will influence whom more. Microsoft, to me, has been an old style capitalist product company which just sends out factory made stuff without listening to consumers, while Facebook, notwithstanding its latest design move, is a ‘social’ service that listens to consumers. Hey, Mark Zuck did write a post to address the plebeians, and as Mashable points out, 4 out of his 6 posts has been to address user concerns. But with 1% MS in its lifestream, Facebook quite firmly put down the user created anti new design rebellion, I wonder if its a change in attitude we witnessed. If MS influences Facebook than vice versa, it could be fatal to both. Or perhaps Mark Zuck is just promoting this movie, just like this Facebook app does. 😉  Speaking of Facebook apps, a new one – Rock the Vote, allows Facebook members to register their names in the voting list, online. (via Startup Meme)

    While on social media and design, there’s been some activity happening on Friendfeed too, they released a new beta version recently, changed the design, and after listening to user feedback, made additional tweaks which were appreciated. The new beta had shifted the navigation structure from the top to the right, and made provisions to organize friends into different groups. Two additional features are photo hosting, and allowing users to view the FriendFeed stream of other users easily from the interface. Following user feedback, the navigation bar was moved to the left. But I think the best addition would be the grouping of same stories. What used to happen was thats everal people used to share the same story when it broke, now the first share will be shown with the option below to check out who else shared the same. The options below is for all services – a tweet, a delicious share, a google reader share would all be displayed. This would go a long way in reducing what makes up a large portion of ‘noise’. Nice to see good changes and the importance they are giving to user feedback.

    Sometimes, I wonder whether organisations, including social media ones, are just like a ‘famous people’ stereotype. Do they stop being friendly and have lesser conversations when they become famous?

    until next time, when socialism turns to capitalism…..

  • Linkin Parks

    I’ve been a fan of del.icio.us for a long time, and was extremely happy with the plug-in they’d made for FF3.  Although this offers a perspective of people who don’t bookmark, I’ve found the idea of a taggable, online database that can be shared, extremely valuable, which is why the question of what Del.icio.us 2.0 would offer was an intriguing one. But I was quite disappointed with the url change, to delicious.com . There was something cool about the earlier url, but they have their reasons, as has been well documented by another fan here.

    So what did they say the improvements were? You can hear it right from the horse’s mouth here. To summarise, they have promised speed, a faster and more social search and a new design. Hmm, good, but I think they could have done better, because to me, this is a maintenance job, albeit a good one. As a die-hard fan, I wanted something radical, like Facebook (another favourite) taking the pedal off social networking and putting it on conversation sparking off comparisons to Twitter and Friendfeed. Yes, it has its detractors, and they’d say not many conversations seem to be happening there, but hey, only a small % of my fb friends are on twitter, its early days, and I, for one, am getting responses to my status messages, video uploads etc.

    But meanwhile, more than an FB progression path, this user generated discontent has been sparked off by a couple of entities I happened to come across, each of which could have been the lateral step that Delicious could’ve taken. I’ll start with Social Median. Its an online community where you can share links. So?  Well, if you use twitter, you’d realise the number of link sharing that happens there. Well, you can submit news to SM through Twitter. So, in this age of ‘noise’ you get like minded users to do “collaborative filtering to help people with similar interests identify/discover what to read/view.” And it’s not just people you can follow, its topics too. It is packed with features, perhaps thanks to an extremely user feedback based alpha mode. You can vote on the ranking of the keywords, sources that are used to seed the networks and can rank topics based on how important they are to you. In essence, it allows you to customise how frequently you want to read about ‘x’ topic and from ‘y’ media source. You can share the news you add, find through mail, and even twitter. You can also add a bookmarklet to your toolbar and add news to SN as you browse. A short term problem I see is the noise level, since many people would want to be community makers first. But the system will filter it in due course. They’re also planning to use the Google Social Graph API in some pretty advanced ways. While it seems closer to Digg, or Mixx, as a user, to me its fundamentally a collection of links, and shared interests,  and that’s Delicious’ premise. Meanwhile, there’s another one with the same idea, though not as feature packed.

    The other site I came across is httpfuse (via pluggd.in). The idea here is to allow the community to build a set of ‘fuses’ (bookmarks/links) around a topic of interest. Their differentiation wrt Digg, Delicious etc is clearly explained here. While I agree with the explanation on Digg, I am not quite convinced on the Delicious part. Maybe I need to explore more. But one thing I’ll grant, and I’ll use an example for this. If I search for ‘India’ in Delicious, I’ll get links bookmarked by other people with all the tags they have used. But when I do the same in httpfuse, it shows me the subtopics under India. And that’s definitely better.  I’d like a browser plug-in though, or did I miss it? Again, a focus that Delicious could’ve tried out.

    The last entity, is Browzmi, a browser within a browser. It not only allows real time collaborative browsing and bookmarking, with comments, but also has a chat functionality built in. You can also clip photos from a site you’re visiting, and share only that. All your actions are stored and can be viewed like any lifestreaming service. Unlike say, Yoono, its not an extension, and is actually quite a cute social browser which can be just another tab in your FF/IE browser. This is way lateral, but no harm in imagining. 🙂

    That said, you are still my first bookmarking love, Delicious. But the competition is getting hotter, and  you seem very absorbed in a linear way, so please buck up.  I really wouldn’t want to see you in this list. You could at least have added image bookmarking, you know.

    Meanwhile,a couple of other things you should check out, Feedly, an FF extension, which brings Google Reader closer to home, er homepage 😉 and this one – iglue, which reminded me of Snap (only reminded, its not the same) and left me very impressed, with its potential.

    until next time, spread some link love

  • One Stop Shops

    I’ve always had a soft corner for Rediff, perhaps because, once upon a time, it was the site that led me to new things on the internet. First it was email, and though I had the eudora and usa.net and a few other mailboxes too, this was the one most frequented and used. Then it was blogs. My first blog was thanks to Rediff again, they got me curious with the messages on the homepage, more than 5 years back. And though I did sulk with them later for taking away a favourite id of mine in an upgrade that happened a few years back, and switched to blogger because of the code wrestling matches they made me go through, like I said, Rediff is still special, a brand that I hold in high regard.

    So it was wonderful to find that they’d done a :p to the strict media portal outlook and introduced Orkut and Facebook feeds inside their mailbox. Yes, it is a great bit of innovative thinking, but nothing stops it from being copied by others. So they can’t stop there, they have already taken steps to integrate iShare, I wonder if having newsfeeds inside the Inbox area makes sense, like perhaps an iGoogle. Rediff is also active on the mobile scene (they even , so if they can move fast, they can actually do a lot of innovations quickly, thanks to their numerous services, and oodles of content.

    And it looks like they are moving fast – they have already invested in Vakow, an sms sharing site, and one that I know a lot of people are using to update on Twitter. Interesting. A mobile based microblogging platform should be fun. But the big news was at proto.in, when they announced their developer platform. What is great is not just the announcement, but the fact that it was announced at proto and not just as some PR release. Rediff is being sensible, and thats good news for the Indian internet scene. Ouch at this allegation though. (via webyantra)

    Meanwhile, the guys who had massive success when they opened their API, had a surprise for me when I logged in today morning. And that was the new Facebook design. While the Home page is more a design reorganisation than anything conceptual, the Profile page is a totally different story. Well, its actually profile pages. From home, a click on your name (as opposed to profile earlier) takes you to the first of the four pages – Wall, where you can use filters for others’ posts and yours, and has your basic profile and friends as well. The Info page has all the details that used to be Information, Group and Pages. Photos are the next page and the last is ‘Boxes’, all the apps you’ve been adding, though I did see a few apps (common) on all pages. Are they Facebook’s own? I doubt that though.

    The important part is that it looks like a deviation from the earlier social networking promise. Though that remains, this seems increasingly like a Twitter and more possibly Friendfeed like direction. This was something that was visible sometime back when a ‘+’ sign could be seen near all news feeds, encouraging readers to start conversations. That soon became a very conspicuous ‘Comment’ tab.

    While I like all this, since it gives me more chances at conversations with ‘real’ friends, (there is only about a 20% overlap with my Twitter friends) I wonder if this is a regression as far as keeping the conversation within Facebook goes. If Facebook provides all the features that say, a Twitter and Friendfeed does, would you be okay with spending the lion’s share of your virtual time within Facebook?

    until next time, the rise of socialism 🙂

    PS. This is the 100th post on this blog :D. Thanks, all the commenters and the silent types. 🙂

  • Buzz Off

    Even after building an entire army of twitter tools, the mania still continues. Hopefully its only a matter of time before the tweeding happens 🙂 Meanwhile, this is a fairly good top 5 list. And since we have a new player in the social scene, a bit of attention has been diverted there too. So it wasn’t surprising to read about Moopz, a tool that tries to reduce the noise in Friendfeed. And its not the first of its kind, there are already other entities, and I’m sure more are in the pipeline.

    Now, as an (almost) twitaholic I’d always agree that any tool which helps reduce the noise would be a blessing. I haven’t used friendfeed as much, but from what I have seen, noise is an issue there too, though I have always wondered about the term ‘noise’ since we are free to choose those we wish to connect to. I think my views have not changed much since I wrote this. And since its difficult for me to categorise noise, I’ll only say that I am missing out on some conversations, and perhaps its more a question of subjective time management than anything else, and creating ‘algorithms’ that work for you.

    And that train of thought makes me wonder whether it would be a good idea to have some sort of a shake up of current services, that helps us better organise our conversations. Something that filters the buzz  conversations we are interested in from the random ones. I realise that it is a flawed proposal to begin with since each service has its own die hard fans. I, for one would love for social networks like a Facebook to be integrated into these social media aggregators, including friendfeed, because there are still conversations I have only on Facebook, since there is already a group of people there, who I have connected with over time,  and who are interested in the same things I am. So how about services that combine all existing ones and then provide some additional value? Well, there already are aggregators (will talk about a few in a while), but I’m not sure if they add to the noise or reduce it. Friendfeed was an aggregator, and now we have aggregators that include Friendfeed as one of the services. Is that an improvement?  So, is it better to just stick on to a couple of services and derive maximum benefits from the conversations that happen there. Yes, I agree that not all conversations need to happen there, but what about the ‘cost-benefit’ between the number of services used and the ‘noise’ you have to wade through to reach the conversations?

    Meanwhile, I read another new entity that aggregates Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed, and Tumblr. Its called Posty and seems to be interesting. (via The Inquisitr). And though I am yet to utilise it completely, this one – Swurl seems much more interesting, one because it includes Facebook, and two, because it also automatically became a follower on Twitter. Smart! Do check out the timeline feature, I could see what I was upto in 2003!! Wow. Yeah, i know my archive can tell me that, and there is no comment feature yet, but still Wow!! 🙂

    As the services increase, the conversations also do. But does the converse also have to be true?

    until next time, fed up?