Rewinding the Facebook Beacon

November 30, 2007 at 2:34 pm · Filed under: facebook persmission

I wonder how many people in the UK are aware of the Facebook beacon launched recently. It tracks your usage on partner websites (say a retailer) and when you buy something from them it places a story in your news feed. As far as I can tell there aren’t any partners in the UK yet. The problem with this scenario was that you couldn’t stop it happening - ie you couldnt opt out, it just happened automatically.

Thankfully (and unsurprisingly) Facebook have changed the system - now it will only appear if you give express permission for it to do so. Good news indeed. But I wonder if they solved the other issue I heard about - if you have multiple people using a single computer, it added the news to the first person who logged into their facebook account. So if Person A buys a book and person B logs into Facebook first. The action appeared on person B’s newsfeed.

At least you can now say no to the info being public (Facebook still has the data about you in their systems mind)

podtech network and popout videos

November 30, 2007 at 8:17 am · Filed under: podtech scoble

I am a regular reader of Scoble’s blog but since his move to PodTech I really haven’t had time to watch most of the videos he produces.Apart from the fact video requires a lot more of your time to watch (compared to skimming), the extra click through to the podtech website emphasised the time requirements further. Then the video became embedded in the RSS feed itself so I started watching a few. But because I scroll through Google Reader and don’t necessarily want to watch it then and there, I used to star them and watch them later.

Today though, I decided I’d click the “pop out” link and queue them up on my desktop to watch later. I came back to it later and found this didnt work Each popout showed the first video I clicked. I’d lost the links to the other videos and had to scroll through Scoble’s feed to find them again Not quite as time saving as I’d hoped!

old websites

November 28, 2007 at 8:39 am · Filed under: blogging cnet delicious firefox flock neowin

One of the differences using Flock is that I do not have a delicious shared toolbar at the top of my browser like I did in Firefox. That means that its an extra step to access the same favourites I use both at home and work. I haven’t tried installing the delicious plugin yet but maybe that will rectify it.

In any case, one of the results of this change is my old favourites which I no longer saw is now visible again and it was interesting to revisit some of them. Some like Neowin and The Register hadn’t changed and I’ll probably continue to visit them infrequently but it was interesting to see how much CNET had changed - there seems to be a much greater integration with and emphasis on individual commentary (ie blogging). I wonder if that makes it better?

flock image uploader

November 26, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under: facebook flock

Shame about the facebook image uploader in flock - it’s not clear enough. I thought I was uploading one photo and ended up uploading them all. It wasn’t obvious how to move around the images either. Why can’t I just select, upload and tag like facebook?

tumblr

November 26, 2007 at 10:26 am · Filed under: aggregators blog facebook linkedin tumblr

I’m a regular reader of a vc and in a recent post he talked about one of his investments in a company called tumblr. To use his words “It’s the next logical step in the blogging phenomenon. It allows you to blog quickly, easily, from your phone or your computer, it encourages reblogging and pulling content in from twitter, typepad, wordpress, blogger, flickr, delicious, last.fm, etc, etc”

Sounds interesting..

But do I really need another aggregator of information? I already have my blog, facebook and to a very limited extent Linkedin. Broadly speaking, I use facebook to track my personal stuff, Linkedin for my work stuff and my blog for writing about things that interest me. None of it is perfect and thats what made me look at tumblr.

The problem with the other aggregators.

Facebook - it just doesn’t do a good job of letting me decide who can see what. But for public stuff using addons I will over time be able to aggragate all this info there. The downside - I have little control over the layout today. But it’s easy to use.

My blog - over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

LinkedIn - the orginal place for all my work contacts - it does nothing more - I wonder whether this will shift into a group within facebook because of this - what if it did allow you to aggregate work related content? Would I use it more?

So again I wonder why use tumblr. Fred Wilson’s tumblr page reminds me of the news feed inside facebook. There is no context so flickr photos are mixed with twitter posts which in turn is mixed with blog posts. Sure I get to see everything Fred Wilson - is that useful?