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Tag Archive for 'social networking'

It’s a Conversation

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Phil Crissman
on May 29, 2008
in www
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Interesting discussion going on on FriendFeed, started by an email Bob Bly sent to Scoble.

Now, because I spend a ridiculous amount of time browsing almost every section of the bookstore, I know exactly who Bob Bly is. He’s the author of a list of books about copy writing as long as your arm, and several other topics as well (though mostly related to that sort of thing).

In a nutshell, Bob asked Robert (pretty respectfully, I thought) why the heck he gets so excited about everything he writes about (Twitter, FriendFeed, so on). Robert’s answer… was maybe not quite as civil as one might expect. This was pointed out in the discussion on FriendFeed, and Robert asked (reasonably enough) — Well, how would you answer the question?
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Facebook morphs into… Twitter?

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Phil Crissman
on May 23, 2008
in Asides
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The New Facebook interface.

I’m not sure yet if you must be logged in to see the above; let me know.

Looks an awful lot like a more featureful Twitter.

It still seems pretty incomplete, to me. I can’t find the option to post a link or note at all, only the “Wall” option; and links in your “Wall” don’t actually reformat as links, so that’s a big lose for Twitter-like functionality. I think we can assume this will be fixed, though.

So what do you think? Will this work for them?

Turn FriendFeed Into A Twitter Client

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Phil Crissman
on May 22, 2008
in Asides
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Internet Duct Tape has a great Greasemonkey script which will effectively turn FriendFeed into a Twitter client; adds the ability to tweet directly from FriendFeed, complete with a 140-character counter to keep you within Twitter parameters.

Still “client” is a bit misleading… to be able to see the messages of everyone you follow on Twitter, you would still need to follow them on FriendFeed (if they’re there) or add them as imaginary friends… which as I said before, is actually a really sweet feature. The same source also has a downloadable script to do just that; if you are on windows.

On Why FriendFeed Makes A Twitter Replacement Unnecessary

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Phil Crissman
on May 21, 2008
in www
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Every so often you see rumbles on Twitter about the likelihood of someone building A Better Twitter, with the idea that everyone will jump ship after getting fed up with Twitter’s downtime. Arguably, Pownce already is a “better” Twitter in some respects — yet the jump hasn’t happened.

I could be wrong (sources say this has happened before), but I think FriendFeed makes a new, improved Twitter… well, basically unnecessary.
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Google’s Friend Connect == “Openbook”?

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Phil Crissman
on May 20, 2008
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I’m signing up for a “sneak preview” of Google’s Friend Connect, and it’s looking an awful lot like the Openbook I just described in a recent post.

So what would this mean? Hopefully I’ll get to look at it pretty soon. I’m not stuck on the idea of building something from scratch, so if what Google is attempting is moldable into the same sort of scenario I described as “Openbook,” I’d be more than happy to piggy-back on their efforts.

Of course, there is again the potential problem of who has the data and exactly how much you can do with it. Google’s Friend Connect and OpenSocial seem promising, though, and I don’t see any reason why the data that interacts with their APIs couldn’t be on a non-Google database server, or an Openbook-style social network which simply plays nice with their APIs.

Scoble also mentioned Friendfeed as a potential Facebook replacement. I can see this working, also — in a sense. Not necessarily FriendFeed as it exists on their site, but more as an API or a platform that you could build a client for. I has sort of neglected to use or think about FriendFeed for quite awhile; Paul Buchheit said this at Startup School (approximately 23 minutes into the talk), which made me reconsider:

I don’t really consider FriendFeed as an aggregator. It performs aggregation… in the same sense that an email client aggregates SMTP traffic. So… it’s a different experience; it’s a different product.

The ability to import feeds makes it a lot more useful than… if it didn’t do that. Just as an email client that couldn’t receive email wouldn’t be as useful.

This drew a big laugh, of course. But the fact that Paul described and thought of the product in that way definitely made me want to take another look at it as something more than just a mashup of a bunch of feeds.

At any rate, I do think the concept of an “open,” distributed social network is something that would be of value. Whether or not Google’s Friend Connect has the potential to be a major component of it probably remains to be seen.

(Gosh I hate ending blog posts that way. I’m not writing a throwaway piece of crap for WIRED or something. How many retarded say-nothing magazine articles all end “whether or not X does Y still remains to be seen.” Yes, we know it remains to be seen. It’s in the future. It hasn’t happened yet. That is why we call it “the future”. Um, okay. Rant done. Maybe. It remains to be seen.)

We Need an Openbook

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Phil Crissman
on May 19, 2008
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Reading Scoble’s post on Facebook & Microsoft, and I have to say, it sounds like something Microsoft would do. It sounds like an offer FB would be crazy to refuse.

My first thought is that we need an alternative to Facebook that is not only open architecture, but open source. Ideally, it would be distributed.

I’m thinking of Wordpress as an example; I host my Wordpress blog on my own server, but because I have an Wordpress.com account, I get some benefits of being automatically connected to Wordpress.com: stats, akismet, the rest of the Wordpress network, etc.

What if we had a distributed social network? That is, a social network a la Facebook or MySpace where you could be connected to everyone you know who is using the system (or a compatible system)… but you could, if you wanted, host your personal profile on your own server. If you were to have ads on your profile page, you would make the money, not Facebook or MySpace. It would be just as connected, just as networked, using API’s, maybe OpenSocial to play nice with others… whatever. An… Openbook, if you will. Though it could be called anything.

I’m not building something like this yet, but I’d be happy to talk and work with others who’d want to. I think it’s technically feasible, and given the possibilities of a closed Micro-face-soft-book, sounds to me like a really good idea.

Social Networking and the handshake problem

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Phil Crissman
on April 6, 2008
in www
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reposted from blog.philcrissman.com. Since I’m moving back here, I may repost a few of my last few months blog posts, just so they are all in one place.

There was a lot of discussion awhile back about Facebook and its limit of 5,000 friends. The discussion, in case you (mercifully) missed it, was largely driven by social networking power users like Scoble.

I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Between now and then, I’ve thought a few times about social networks, and how they are implemented. Not the front end, but the back matter; the model. The database; users and connections.

A social network is fundamentally a graph. Most social networks are analogous to non-directed graphs – that is, there is no distinction which “direction” a connection goes. If you are friends with someone in Facebook or MySpace, they are also friends with you. Pownce and Twitter have taken a directed-graph approach, in which friendship (following) is not automatically mutual. I could follow you, but you might not follow me. And so on.
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