Tag: Social Median

  • More delicious stuff on the horizon?

    Social Median has been a pending site in my things-to-do list for such a long time that guilt no longer describes the feeling enough 🙁

    I’ve liked the concept of the site a lot, and while I’ve been following developments there, and have added the bookmarklet to the browser, and though I’ve started several groups (example) I’ve just not managed to become a regular user. The SM bookmarklet has been idle. But more importantly, while the site sends me updates every single day, I rarely manage more than a cursory look at the shared items.

    Why am I so bothered about my non usage? To put it as simply as possibly – it brings together the link sharing capabilities of Delicious, the voting of Digg, topic based groups in which you can add sources and stories get pulled automatically, commenting on shared stories, ranking keywords and topics, and most importantly uses collaborative filtering through people with similar interests to serve you content you should read. A compelling proposition and I don’t have a logical explanation for my non usage.

    So, what’s the context? A few days back, I got a mail stating that Social Median has implemented Facebook Connect, and I feel that’s really big news. It essentially means that you can sign up for Social Median with your Facebook account and share the stuff with your Facebook contacts!! While I do admit that the newsfeed is a complete mess after the redesign, I’m also looking at the enormous data of user preferences that Facebook will now gain, and how Facebook can leverage itself as a news sharing source much more now. In future, this could reveal tons of data on news consumption patterns and interests. Facebook Connect’s importance is something I’ve been stressing on for quite sometime now, and this strengthens that thought. I wonder what this does to Digg’s Facebook Connect plans though.

    Another ‘link’ based service – Google Reader (okay, feed based), one which I use a lot,  has also done a small tweaking and added a commenting feature, though its utility The debate on that is still on. There is a feeling that it will become the place of conversation and take comments away from the source (blog/site). Also, as The Inquisitr mentions rightly, the implementation is quite clunky, and if a full feed is published it takes away most of the reasons for the reader to visit the site. I hope that at least a plugin similar to the Friendfeed one (where the conversation is synicated back to the original source) will be developed soon, but since there’s been no API release, they’d have to do it themselves. Doubtful.

    Friendfeed has been around for sometime now, and though its a perfect place to have threaded conversations based on links shared from practically anywhere on the social web, it is still deemed to be a geek service. I wonder if a tags feature to categorise all imported data makes sense. Speaking of Friendfeed, I also read about a new service launched recently called Streamy. According to TechCrunch, “Streamy is a personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.” Streamy does boast of an extremely good interface and suggests interesting stories to you, which you can then share with friends on supporting networks from Streamy itself. And its implementing Facebook Connect. So, a package with potential. (RWW has a comprehensive post on the service)

    Now the social bookmarking service I use regularly is Delicious, though its via the browser add on, and its been ages since I visited the site. But while they were one of the pioneers of social bookmarking, they really haven’t developed further. They could easily build conversations around the links shared by different people, make it easier to create communities around topics of interest – all the stuff that Social Median is doing, and definitely make it easier to share the links on say, Twitter – the reverse traffic of Twitticious, like what Krumlr is doing. I think enabling BOSS to pull stuff (history and top tags) from Delicious is a good step in the right direction. I have just started using a Firefox plugin called tweecious. What it does is go through your tweets, find those with links and post them to your delicious account. Pretty neat, though it would help if it gave me more control over what data needs to be transferred to delicious. (eg: I tweet a lot of posts from my blog,  and perhaps some topical news from news sites, I wouldn’t want that on delicious, so a feature to ignore links from a particular domain?)

    Reports indicate that Twine, another service which i have not used much, (despite L Bhat sending me an invite and taking pains to explain it 🙁 ) could soon challenge Delicious, in terms of unique visitors, and with the kind of work it seems to be doing in the semantic web space, would easily become a more useful tool. I also got a mail a few days back announcing a Twine bookmarklet, with which you add content to Twine as well as tweet it to Twitter!!

    until next time, linking in

    PS. While on links, check out the following too

    BackTweets, a very useful resource to see who’s tweeted links to a site

    OneRiot, a new Twitter search engine which shows the links shared on a particular keyword (instead of tweets)

    Twazzup – another Twitter search engine which shows the regular search results as well as trends , popular tweets and links, with more visual appeal

    Fleck, a social bookmarking service, which has a bookmarklet for FF and IE, it also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers and delicious, and gives you the option to share links on twitter

    ambiently, which calls itself the web’s first discovery engine.  – it’s a search mechanism with a bookmarklet, which you can add to your browser. Now, when you’re on a particular page, and you click the bookmarklet, it opens up an ambient page that lists web links related to the page you’re currently in.

    PPS. The post feels a bit incomplete without Digg. Since I’m not a regular user of the service, I have not attempted to draw comparisons. However I do know that the latest on that front is the Diggbar. You can catch the action here.

  • Just Business?

    A few days back, LinkedIn added a feature that I’d asked for the last time I wrote about the service – the ability to add RSS feeds to groups. Depending on the functionality enabled by your group manager in any group, you could add a site/feed that fits the group profile and all the members could benefit. From the comments on the page, there seem to be a few implementation issues. Vijay, who manages the Digital Marketing India group on LinkedIn (the one I most actively participate in) has added a few feeds, but we’re yet to play with it much 🙂

    He also pointed me to this interview with Allen Blue, a LinkedIn co-founder. Allen mentions in the interview that ‘groups’ is the most exciting thing they’re working on now, though they seem to be doing things to limit the functionality of the groups. He also says that (among others) he’s impressed with Ning and Facebook. Will come back to that in a bit.

    I am wondering if this feeds functionality will also be made available to company webpages. For now the pages are pretty impressive, with a whole lot of data being provided. But there are possibilities – like allowing page managers to create an RSS feed of news about the company, which any user could subscribe to and be updated. (a Google alert approach). They could also allow multimedia uploads (haven’t seen any yet) and more interactivity. In short, become the second interface of the company, right after their corporate site – what brands are doing with Facebook fan pages, only on LinkedIn it will be more of a serious interaction.

    Ning has been making waves and I have been seeing a lot of people utilising it to make networks. As of Sep 08, it had 2955000 users and a YOY growth rate of 251% (LinkedIn was right behind at 193%) (via StartUp meme) But (at least) for now, I don’t see it operating in the same space as LinkedIn, since Ning is more on building groups around common interests, and that’s only one of the things LinkedIn does.

    The real action will happen when Xing, the European business network will start deriving some synergy from its recent acquisition – SocialMedian. Towards the second half of 2008, Xing had 7 million users as against LinkedIn’s 12 million, and was making profits. Though I’ve not come across a lot of Xing users in India, even LinkedIn is not an ancient phenomenon here. So there’s definitely time to catch up. Xing has most of the functionality that LinkedIn has, but more importantly has a brilliant resource in Social Median, and its implementation of Facebook Connect. During its acquisition, the then CEO had said that Social Median, with its news gathering (from 19000 sources) and custom filtering was a perfect fit for Xing. I couldn’t agree more. The value it could add to the individual and the groups he/she is part of is tremendous. This is an area that LinkedIn has not fully tapped.

    Meanwhile, the service that I thought might be a good buy for LinkedIn – Yammer, recently announced that Twitter updates can now be imported into Yammer. When I had written about Yammer first, I had mentioned a ‘bridge’ between Yammer and Twitter. This move has solved part of it, for me the more important part is the (filtered) Yammer updates going into Twitter, and come to think of it, LinkedIn. But of course, this is connected a lot with an organisation’s levels of transparency.

    And if all this wasn’t enough, we now have a new player – Blellow. TC called it a Yammer meets LinkedIn meets Twitter entity. Blellow describes itself as a productivity microblog, that  allows users to collaborate, find jobs and solve problems via a Twitter like interface with ‘followers’ and ‘following’, private messaging, @ replies, (the question here is ‘What are you working on?’) Where it differs from Twitter is that updates can go upto 300 characters, users are organised into groups, and there are threaded discussions. One can create a profile, form groups based on projects or interests, ask questions in groups and give ‘kudos’ for answers that help (a rating mechanism), post jobs (for a price), plan meetups..  From the looks of it, its a great niche package for freelancers and people looking for quick help in specific fields, maybe LinkedIn could acquire and scale up? 🙂

    With the personal-professional lines blurring, the Xing-SocialMedian-Facebook Connect association is something LinkedIn should be looking closely at. It either has to get an equally strong partner or develop features and data portability by itself, and perhaps acquire services that complement its own services.

    until next time, mind your business 😀

  • 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…..

  • So, who else wants to be social?

    A few weeks back, I’d read about the New York Times launching the public beta of its social network. Its called Times People, but is not a Facebook kind of social network. It allows you to discover, read, share and comment on interesting things on NYTimes.com. The account is directly linked to the NYTimes.com account, so a user is logged in to the service as soon as he logs in to NYTimes. The activities the user does is stored on a personal page, and there’s even a Facebook application, which allows the activities to be displayed in the Fb mini feeds. Given WSJ’s foray into social networking, its interesting to see NYTimes becoming social , but i personally think a service like Social Median, which allows multiple sources of news, subscribing to different channels that one is interested in, and a tool bar plugin which allows sharing of content as you browse, is much more community friendly and useful.

    Meanwhile, I read today that the latest player to enter the world of social networking is none other than IBM. It has launched a service called Bluehouse,  and is an online collaboration network. It allows users to host meetings, network wih partners, share files, start surveys and so on. There are several sites which allow many of these services in isolation, do you know a service which allows all of the above? (via Inquisitr)

    We are not far behind. I read an article about India Konnects, (about whom I had written about earlier) which is creating communities exclusively for industries and companies in India. It is also planning to launch city-specific and business-specific communities, and is starting with an online networking portal exclusively for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Gujarat.

    So, three different entities from three different categories working on three diverse social/business networking models.

    until next time, man is after all, a social animal

  • 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