Category: Blogs

Social Networks at Work

~ rbonini

IF you’re surprised that I’ve gone so long without posting here properly, its because I’ve been spending so much time on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed suits my style so much better than blogging. With its link/article centred comments threads, it allows short comments about a particular subject that aren’t a blog in length. Its suits my free ranging style, commenting of just about anything that I’m interested in.

Two incidents this week, both well publicised on Friendfeed illustrate the power of the social network.

The first, and arguably most public, is the PR battle now erupting between Thomas Hawk (the photographer) and his supporters on the one side, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the other. In the middle there are a few moderates keeping a steady and cool head.

Thomas Hawk:

After purchasing my family membership and visiting the museum today I was forcibly thrown out of the museum by two museum security guards at the direction of the Director of Visitor Relations Simon Blint.
My crime? Taking a photograph from the second floor stairs in the SFMOMA’s atrium (an area where the SF MOMA’s own website explicitly says photography is allowed).

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And again ( the following day):

One allegation that has been raised is that Blint threw me out because he felt that I was shooting down a low cut blouse of one of his employees sitting in the atrium below where I was shooting. The photo above is a photo that I snapped of Blint as he was publicly admonishing me from the floor, that’s him with his arms crossed there — he’s about the size of an ant in the photo.

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I can vouch for the absurdity of shooting down a low cut blouse with  14mm lens from the top of those stairs

The comments are prolific on both these posts with a number of differing viewpoints about Thomas’ account. While most are not explicitly for or against, there is a searach for a middle ground between emphasising Photographers Rights and the way in which the situation was handled. Just do a search for “Simon Blint” on Friendfeed. Here.

SFMOMA responded with this Press Release:

Last Friday an incident occurred in our museum in which a visitor was asked to leave the building. We stand firmly behind the actions of our director of visitor services, who acted appropriately to ensure the safety of the museum’s admissions staff. He took measures to protect another staff member who according to witnesses on our staff and among the general public was being photographed in an inappropriate and harassing manner. SFMOMA welcomes over 600,000 visitors annually; disputes and disagreements between our guests and our staff very rarely occur.
This was not an issue relating to the museum’s official photography policy. In fact, SFMOMA recently made a policy change to allow photographers to take pictures of the permanent collection, the architecture of the building, and the museum’s public spaces.

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The comments on this link on Friendfeed are quite interesting, you can find them here. Most are wondering why the other side of the story is not being told here (Since all the information we have is from Thomas). I can understadn them drawing a line under the incident. I’d want to as well:  the issue of Photographers rights has well and truly been highlighted.

This whole discussion has gotten way out of hand. Someone even posted a link to Simon Blints Facebook page ( Which I will not link to, on principle). On the one hand, this will dominate any Google searches for Simon and potentially portray him in the wrong light. On the other it portrays him as on his toes, looking out for the needs of his employees and visitors alike (tenuous, I know, but still).

Do I think Thomas should have blogged this? Yes indeed. Do I think both sides could have handled it better. Yes again.

In closing, Jeremiah Owyang said the following:

Thomas Hawk’s skewering of Simon Blint: Thomas is a community leader (and photo site CEO) he needs to wield his power with responsbility

And you can see the level of discussion that generated below:

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The other one, which I am less informed about is a solely a twitter affair. Usually Twitters popup in my feed entirely out of context. This time, however almost my entire page way covered in Twiters between Jason Calcanis of Mahalo and Andrew Baron.

And boy were the insults flying back and forth.

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It takes up the first page and a half of this FF search.

That last entry in the picture above refers to this chart regarding Mahalo traffic numbers:

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And that’s how this whole thing kicked off. Exactly what was the bone of contention, I’ve no idea.

Again, the power of social networks was leveraged since the combined communities of Twitter and Friendfeed were spectators to the whole debacle.  What ordinarily would be solved via email just a few years ago, now is thrust on to the Internet for all to see.

What is particularly troublesome of this kind of behaviour across multiple social networks is the effect that they have. No matter who was in the right or wrong, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

These two incidents also shows the difference in format between two highly successful social networks (can you even describe FF as a social network?). It emphasises that we can either interact with the content or which each other. Interacting with the content gives us a starting pint for conversation, interacting with each other, apparently, can be much shakier.

Of the two choices, I would rather join a discussion centring on something solid, a blog post, link, photo or even an informative twitter.

As the World Turns – Social Median, Cuil, Knol

~ rbonini

Its quite interesting that the Internet continues to spawn new incarnations of social networks and search engines.

One question: Why?

I think is got to do with the fact that we all perceive things differently. Twitter and FreindFeed is the perfect example of this. I’m on FriendFeed (excuse the extra hype) but not on Twitter. This is because FreindFeed is the kind of social network I can use. Twitters central axiom of “What are you Doing?” is very different to FreindFeed’s approach whereby we share things. I’m more comfortable with the thought of having something more concrete to talk about and comment on.

In like manner, there are a Billion people on the Internet today and there is not going to be a one size fits all solution to the way people want to interact with each other. There might as well be as many social networks as there are people. Consider that Flikr and  SmugMug are social networks in themselves, yet they use photographs as a catalyst for conversation. So this illustrates my points about different approaches to the social interaction that people crave.

This weeks entry into the Social network race was SocialMedian. I have not tried it myself anad reviews seems to be mixed. We will see what happens.

Search is another area that people use based on how comfortable. I’m a Google user at the moment. yet there is Windows Live Search, Yahoo and now Cuil, a new take on the search engine by former Googlers. Its presentation of results in a magazine format is instantly recognizable to readers of print publications. Its presentation of possibly related information- for example I searched for myself and got my blog posts as a expected, but also a list of Italian football players – is very well done as well.

So my point is that even for something as simple as search, people have different perceptions and there will always be ways to improve to better meet users expectations.

Google Knol, and I’m mentioning it in passing is an attempt to upset Wikipedia’s cup. A Knol is supposed to be a unit of knowledge. And I’m sure you can see where this is going. And remember that not everything Google comes up with is an instant hit. It will probably be in perpetual beta for a while. So don’t write it off just yet.

Will there be an end to this? Its possible that some form of consolidation will take place if these startups, and others, take off. After all, the big players will continue to want to improve their offerings and some of the radical ideas now days come out of the startups rather than the established companies.

FriendFeed gets my posts, Twice

~ rbonini

I’ve noticed that there is a lag between my post being published and it showing up in FF (From Michel Arrington’s stream):

 

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I’ve actually noticed that this is becoming the exception rather than the norm slowly but surely:

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Nevertheless I wrote a plugin for Windows Live Writer that automatically posts a link to FriendFeed every time I publish a post. In fact the link in the above picture ws posted using this plugin

Since I’ve never written a WLW plugin I used the Twitter Notify plugin that is included as part of the SDK as a springboard. You might notice that there is very little code left of the original.

Since it uses the new SDK feature unavailable in WLW 2.0, you’ll need the WLW 3.0 CTP for this plugin to work.

You can get it from Codeplex here.

It will ask you for your FriendFeed username and Remote Key as well as a preamble to accompany the posted link. This is set, by default, to “Blog Post”. As you can see mine is set to “New Blog Post”. All these settings can be changed from the Plugins page of WLW options.

Suggestions are welcome as are bug fixes, etc.

The plugin is working well for me and I’ve encountered no issues, other than WLW taking slightly longer to start up ( this could be a CTP issue).

I currently thinking of:

  • Putting a link to the discussion on FF in the post( as far as I can tell this would require a re-write)
  • Linking to FF when you Update the post

Anyone else got any ideas?

Online Aggregation – a la FriendFeed

~ rbonini

If you read regularly, you’ve probably begun to wonder where i’ve been these past few weeks. I’m not blaming you.

Between FriendFeed and exams there aren’t enough hours in the day.

FreindFeed itself is great. Being able to aggregate so much data in one place is very useful. FF ( as FriendFeed is shortened to) supports 35 ( or more) services directly and more through the use of the RSS feed(s) that you can add.

Robert Scoble is the prime example of this. The sheer amount of online output the man generates makes you wonder if he ever sleeps.  Go on, click the link and admire this river of news, posts, tweets, videos and photos. Then take a look at how many friends the guys has- well over 10,000 people as friends ( people that either are subscribed to him or he subscribes to). FF has a Friend of a Friend feature that add some of his friends posts to your home page on FF. This gives you a tremendous amount of noise to wade through.

And combine this with all your other friends. This gives you a long, long river of news to read through.

However, FF is not a true social networking site. It aggregates data from a huge amount of sites. But your Friends are nothing more than people you’ve subscribed to for their feed. Its rather like saying that because you have a subscription to the NYT you are their friend and they’re yours.

To reinforce the point there is zero information about you save a picture – which suits me as you’ll notice I don’t have an About Me page ( I’m thinking about putting one up, though). And I’m dithering on what picture I should put up.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo made the point that its very personal having all this information in one place. Possibly. It depends on what information you share. Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have no problem with this – they’re subscribed to practically every service available. I mean, its darn interesting to see what photos Thomas favourites on Flickr. I’m sure its possible to figure out his taste in photos and his political leanings from his content. Even how he likes Mac and  Microsoft solely for its Windows Media Centre.  But there is no real, personal  information being shared here.

On Jennifer’s second point about no real interaction – come on!! I comment more in FF than outside, often commenting as a post comes in, and as part of a conversation. I like a lot as well ( comments and likes are another way if discerning peoples taste – but no real information is there. See above). If there is anything to suggest its no otherwise the case, its that comments don’t follow items as they are ReShared or posted within FF. This inevitably leads to fragmented conversations and a reduction in interaction. Also blog and FF comments should be synced in some form that will lead to even more interaction.

And Jennifer’s last point about information overload is just plain wrong. We have fine grained control of what turns up in our feed. from hiding friends of friends completely to hiding on a per-friend-per-service basis ( you can also blanket hide a service entirely – so no Twitter tweets show up from any friend, ever).

The Flickr favourites feature I mentioned above is a compelling reason to join Flickr ( I’m with SmugMug and intend to stay – you’ll see my photos show up).

One thing that is surprising is that FF is slowing taking attention share away from Google Reader. Not just when it comes to commenting, but I post links that I find interesting. Steve Rubel, for example, tweets and posts links fairly often that point to interesting material – I share some. But those don’t show up in my Shared items to your right ( from Google Reader Shared items). I’m thinking of some way to integrate them together using the FF API.

Another reason is the Imaginary Friend feature. I currently only have one at the moment – MarsPhoenix. If that sounds familiar to you its that lander NASA just put on Mars’ north pole. Its got two blogs and a twitter feed. This Friend combines them into a one feed with posts from both blogs mixed in with the numerous tweet updates and makes it dead easy to follow via FF or RSS. These appear as fart of my feed on the FF homepage along with everything else, making it doubly useful.

FF is literally Google Reader gone wild (rather than Twitter). Its subscriptions based. And, one up on Google Reader, shares all of your online activity back to the community. Its not even Digg (I can’t remember the last time I logged in to Digg).

Many belive that Robert will be going on about another service in a few months time. But FF has the traction ( its many services and thus audiences that it serves) and the leverage (the huge number of adopters it has at the moment) to survive. It straddles the difference between a true, thoroughbred networking site like Twitter ( or Facebook, if you prefer) and the disconnected consumption of content of a RSS reader. Its perfectly situated to bridge the gap between all these disparate services.

Quote of the Day (this one is actually funny)

~ rbonini

Robert Scoble and 20000 people walk into a bar. The bar man goes….

Speaking about ears, I have to say that Robert had some of the biggest ears ever seen on a human being, with the possible exception of Barack Obama. While people always talked about Robert’s big mouth, Robert said that his big ears, which allowed him to hear almost anything, were more important than his big mouth.

Know Robert Scoble? Know Twitter? Heard of FriendFeed? Read the rest of the (hilarious) story here.

Microsoft-Yahoo

~ rbonini

I was thinking about the merger this morning and it struck me that the model tech merger is… Adobe’s buyout of Macromedia for $ 3.4 billion.

Now it is nowhere near the size or complexity of the Microsoft merger offer. But the point is that both companies brought their software together to create the Creative Suite series.

I mean think of it, different software, different programming, different programming culture, ethics and architecture.

Now I currently have CS3 installed. Its quite amazing how Macromedia’s software ( Flash, Freehand – now Illustrator) works quite well with the rest of the suite.  My point is that it works, not that its amazing ( which it is).

In similar vein, Yahoo and Microsoft are totally different companies. 

The problem isn’t the technology. The different technology might be good, it’ll force Microsoft to take another look at Linux. The problem is the people, the culture. No matter how good your team may be, they’ll never turn out anything is they can’t work together.

Getting the two cultures to play nice is simple: phone up Adobe and ask who their  consultancy company was in 2005 for the merger, and hire them 🙂 . Or hire, Jim Rohn, Antony Robins, and Tim Berners Lee. As teams are integrated, send them off on a team building course or something.

Now, is $44 Billion too little for Yahoo! ? The board seems to think so. Forget the “only logical option” argument for a second here and think it though. As Kara Swisher said it:

Indeed, some think that if the company was managed more aggressively–and that has been a big if at Yahoo for far too long now–Yahoo shares could be trading closer to $30 a share.

And that makes $31 kind of a bargain.

It’s not such a leap of faith, in fact.

Many mid-level and senior Yahoo execs have told me that CEO Jerry Yang’s too-cautious approach has been the problem and that there was pressure building for a change

In fact, the more you think about it, the more it sounds as if Microsoft have jumped the gun looking (hoping?) for a quick deal.

Now for the de rigueur Scoble quote:

“Are they crazy?”

I said “probably, and arrogant too.” Then she wondered why they would do such a thing. I told her that I agreed with Philip Greenspun, who says that to reject this deal is lunacy. Since I know Yahoo’s board members aren’t lunatics, I figure there must be some other answer. I told Maryam “they are probably trying to see if the offer will go up.”

Yahoo! are playing a high stakes poker game. the winners get bask in all their glory for the next few decades and losers look for new jobs.

If you are going to pay money for something – make sure that you get your moneys worth. If Microsoft think that they are going to get Yahoo on the cheap ( relatively speaking, that is), they need to rethink their attitude. Yahoo is worth shelling out for, but is above being treated like a second class citizen.

And If Microsoft have such an attitude with Yahoo!, any merging will be a disaster. Yahoo’s minds (linux or not) will leave and the empire will suffer ( sounds like Star Wars). Microsoft will be left with a rotting hulk that will drain money and resources for no observable gain. It’ll be like Alice in Wonderland where she has to run faster  and faster to stay where she is (the translation being that Yahoo will require more and more to stay  the same).

So although this sounds like a 7 Habits lecture, Microsoft’s attitude will determine how this ends up.

In the words of the immortal Spiderman:

With great power comes great responsibility

File Sharing- Oh the Humanity!!!

~ rbonini

Via Hugh MacLeod – who did a cartoon about this.

The IFPI – the International Federation of Phonographic Industries – is the global music industry organisation whose very name tells you how long ago progress overtook it. On Thursday it published its digital music report for 2008, which says boldly that “the spread of unlicensed music on ISP networks is choking revenues to record companies and investment in artists, despite a healthy increase in digital sales in 2007, up approximately 40% on the previous year”. (If you’re wondering, those sales were $2.9bn (£1.45bn) for the year, including ringtones.)

The IFPI’s solution? Sort it out at the internet service provider level. “ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled. Independent estimates say up to 80 per cent of ISP traffic comprises distribution of copyright-infringing files.”

You know what I say? Damn right. Let’s get ISPs to stop copyright infringement. But, um, music people? Better form an orderly queue. You think you were the first to suffer from your content getting ripped off and spread to the four corners of the earth? Get to the back of the line, bud. There’s a few people ahead of you.

 

Read the rest of this fine article here.

Photography: Beginning

~ rbonini

Whew, Photography isin’t easy. You need the camera, the software,the online storage and so on. Not to mention the accessories.

I bought a Nikon D40x a few weeks ago and haven’t stopped playing with it since. Which is one reason the blog has been suffering. Got a 55-200mm lense in addition to the supplied 18-55mm lense. And a flash and tripod for night shooting. Though I might have to take the tripod back and get a better model.

After thinking about the moment for a while I finally settled on Smugmug mainly because I get a kick from dealing with faceless corporations everyday (not 🙂 ).  Take a look at their About us page to see what I mean .Plus they really have a good reputation.

I’ve got a few photo’s from holiday (4,300, to be exact – I went overboard). A good portion of that is from Luxor, Egypt and they’ll be the first ones up once I get them sorted. And I’ll cross-post the best of the best here.

I came within a whisker of splashing out and buying the Educational version of CS3 Design ( I qualify as a Second Year undergraduate). Though I definitely get it next month. What really sealed it was the fact that Smugmug  has a CS3 add-on for uploading your newly tweaked shot from within CS3. I’m getting it mainly for Photoshop, but Acrobat and Illustrator would be useful as well.

Once I have that I can start shooting in RAW and acting like a proper photographer 🙂 .

One thing that really would make life easier is a WHS Add on for Uploading straight to Smugmug from your Photos folder.

As a side note I subscribe to Thomas Hawks’ Blog. He has some really great shots.

Also see this list of the best photoblogs of 2007.

Great things to come…

Data: Mine or Theirs?

~ rbonini

Although I’m writing this under the fallout of  Scoble-Facebook, I don’t think the issue of who owns your data is either confined only to Digital identity or has been very well thought out.

First, a roundup of the various reactions:

It’s not about data portability. It’s about trust.

Offline, my friends and I share a mutual connection. Maybe it’s around work, maybe it’s around our kids or something in our past. Whatever it is, they’re my friend because they know something about me beyond what’s easily accessible to others. Keyword here is mutual. I know a bit about them too. Their relationship with me is unique as compared to their relationship with others.

…

Online, those lines are blurred. For what I would guess is at least 4,500 of the 5,000 “friends” Robert Scoble has on Facebook, he is the equivalent of a magazine publisher and you are his subscriber base/audience. He says it’s mutual and that’s the beauty of the social and connected web, but he only cares about you when you put something on the table that he’s interested in. It’s not about you. Yet, he’s “sitting” right next to your real friends, getting the same information about you that you’re sharing with them. If he takes that information and abuses it, however un- or good-intentioned, it serves you both right.

…

Robert Scoble valued his relationship with Plaxo more than he valued his relationship with his “friends,” otherwise he would have posted to them what he was doing with an experimental, alpha-quality and untested script before he did it…or he wouldn’t have done it at all.

Judi Sohn

I think there are two questions here. The first is whether users should be able to extract their data [including social graph data] from one service and import it into another. I personally believe the answer is Yes and this philosophy underlies what we’ve been working on at Windows Live and specifically the team I’m on which is responsible for the social graph contacts platform.

Dare Obasanjo

Then there is the oft-cited  post by Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail).

Now I’m not on Facebook et al for a reason: data, in the case of a person,  is that person. Whereas data for iTunes is essentially  the signals sent to your sound card. Se the difference

Is it important to guard those things? Yes, or course. At the end of the day, its all you are left with if everything goes to hell: Your sense of self and identity, and your friends ( real friends, that is).

So we essentially have two options:

  1. Manage that data ourselves in a way that gives complete and utter control over every aspect of things
  2. Give our data over to a less than trustworthy service that essentially controls who you are, your identity ( on- and off-line) and who your freinds are and what your realtionship is with them

I’ll take option one any day of the week. Why? Becuase of control. It is all about control.

Plaxo may or may not keep your data after you opt-out ( i think its the former rather than the latter). Facebook has the awesome power of wiping out very single trace of you from its universe with a simple mouse-click. Add a hundred and one other web services that suck your data out of Google, Hotmail and the like.

There is a missing element in the above situations. Find it yet? And its not trust. Its control. And I mean, complete and utter control.

At least Twitter gives you more granular control( in terms of message recipients)  and has a proper API.

Better yet, Open ID, while somewhat flawed, is a brilliant idea insofar as you have a digital identity provided and vouchsafed by a trusted source ( AOL, for example). This blog is my digital identity ( since WP supports Open ID).  I can decide what to do with that identity, what to reveal, what to password protect. If I move on to from one blog to another, I can export all my posts and import them else where.

In short I have complete control of that Open ID identity (short of running my own webserver).

So because I have control I can never be in a Scoble snafu like that ( And I don’t care for the fact that Scoble was pressing FB’s buttons on purpose – he gave up his control over that data and he knew it).

In a  sense, its the MS DOS command line all over again. And  loss of control is like letting Vista hide the RUN command and the task manager and tickle itself silly with crashes.