razorshine
by riaz kanani
April 11, 2008 at 7:37 am · Filed under: attention email facebook friendfeed life stream relevance services social networking
Dylan Fuller (from A Fuller View which I highly recommend subscribing to) commented on an earlier post asking what was the difference between life stream aggregators do and standard social networking - and even more importantly should he join them.
My short answer, was not right now. Here is the more longwinded answer!
Firstly, life stream aggregators vs standard social networking. Let’s list some of each to start with:
Standard Social Networks:
1. Facebook
2. Bebo
3. MySpace
Life Stream Aggregators
1. FriendFeed
2. Tumblr
3. Social Thing
If you look at the standard social networks they all offer pretty much the same thing with different emphases (MySpace was music, Facebook was connecting with friends). Here are some of the things they offer:
1. Ability to connect to friends
2. Photos
3. Public (and private) messaging
4. Status updates
5. News feed of events (usually) done by your friends.
Amongst Internetphiles, people have been moving more and more away from Facebook and towards individual specialised services and until recently there has been nothing to bring it all together.
Life stream Aggregators brings many of the different items (and more) listed above into one feed for all your friends across the web and across services. The real problem is one of scale.
It has one single feed and treats everyone the same. The feed gives so much information that you can never keep up with everything - and worse most of the information is not relevant. It suffers from the same issue as Twitter - if you follow too many people you lose the value of the service. What is needed is a way of saying I want to see in my main feed photos, news, mutterings from Group X, and only shared items and posts from Group Y. Even better I want to be able to have multiple feeds. Once this starts to happen, this could become a great tool to manage your attention data (ie see what you need to see at the right time).
In the meantime, if you are using specialised online services such as Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, Seesmic etc it is worthwhile keeping an eye on life stream aggregators (especially Friendfeed and Tumblr) and even worth trying with a small group of close friends.
On a separate note - I wonder when email will get integrated into this stream..
March 17, 2008 at 10:57 pm · Filed under: aggregators attention attention data friendfeed lifestream services socialthing
Friendfeed and socialthing are both lifestream aggregators. They pull in your information stored across multiple services on the internet into one place. You can then use those aggregators not just for your information but also to follow the lifestreams of others.
Louis Gray believes that friendfeed should win because of one key feature - its ability to build a community or network by allowing users to comment on items posted inside friendfeed.
Muhammad Saleem believes that SocialThing’s ability to allow users to comment outside socialthing inside the external service is the better solution.
I have not yet seen SocialThing (it is in private beta) - but it strikes me that SocialThing’s methodology is the way to do things provided you can still see the conversation inside socialthing.
Of course, Duncan Riley of Techcrunch thought that Friendfeed is just another lifestream aggregator (compared to Plaxo Pulse, Tumblr, Spokeo, Second Brain, SocialThing and Iminta) and that why would you even want to republish Twitter and Google Reader shared items. Can’t you just go to their sites?
I think right now they are all much of a muchness in comparison with each other. Friendfeed does have the ability to connect to 30 other services online and a huge following, SocialThing has a lot less services and even less of a following. I completely disagree with Duncan on the lack of need to republish.
My view is that these lifestream aggregators have huge potential for consumer benefit online. It could become the platform for web services, allowing users to choose their favourite photo/video/blog/whatever provider whilst not forcing their friends to sign up or worse visit lots of different sites to see them all. Duncan makes a valid point though about Twitter, its very nature means it takes up a huge portion of the overall feed. What I would like to see is the ability to separate items into different areas so I can follow people’s Twitters in one area, photos in another and blog posts/interesting items somewhere else. ie customizability of the lifestream.
March 17, 2008 at 6:21 pm · Filed under: aggregators attention attention data friendfeed internet services
I have been a reader of Louis Gray’s blog and his Google Reader shared items for a while now and I think he is straying into the territory that Scoble used to drift into when he was at Microsoft. Namely, tunnel vision on one topic. Lous’ shared items is one huge mass of Friendfeed coverage, whilst his blog has been mentioning it in a majority of recent posts. It is starting to get a tad boring.. you like friendfeed I get it! What I don’t understand is why cover them so much? Is there some connection between Louis and friendfeed? Is this just a way of giving Louis Gray some attention? Or is it just a great service that incites this sort of coverage?
Some thoughts on Friendfeed coming up shortly..
February 29, 2008 at 8:50 am · Filed under: attention blog images interaction
I am amazed it has been such a long time but I took a conscious decision to stop being picky about the design/layout of my posts back on August 3rd and removed my own requirement to have an image on every post.
The reason for the decision in the first place was simple - I removed posts I hadn’t got round to sorting an image out for because they were no longer timely or interesting - in effect I was censoring myself. Since then 99% of posts have just been text and the volume and frequency of posts has increased.
But has it devalued the look and feel of the blog? I think in some small way it is not as easy to read, certainly longer posts. For long posts, it is just too much text - I like visual aids when moving through text 
As I look through my RSS feed, there are a lot of people who write long posts that I find myself skimming. Some with images, some without. I find that if an image catches my eye I may give it more attention than a post without images so for longer posts at least it should improve interaction with your readers.
So do I go back to adding photos? I think it’s a question of using quality images rather than using one every post and more important still, not letting the lack of an image stop you from posting in the first place.
February 5, 2008 at 8:41 am · Filed under: attention dashboard pageonce personal internet assistant
I love the idea behind PageOnce - to use their phrase: the first Personal Internet Assistant web site.
In more words, the idea is to bring together your various online data points in one place - so far it covers social networks, email, banking, utilities, mobile phones, entertainment and even how many airmiles you have collected. So on one dashboard you can get an update of whats happening in all these places.
It is nicely laid out according to type of information but I’m not using it.
There are 2 major problems as I see it:
1. I’m already using Netvibes as my portal - it shows me the social networks and email and the news sites I follow - ie the information I need continuous updates on. PageOnce doesn’t allow me to add RSS feeds or track my stocks so it cant replace Netvibes.
2. I access PageOnce through a single username and password. With all that personal information on me stored in one dashboard, I just want more comfort. I haven’t added most of the accounts possible for this reason. It just feels like too much of a security risk despite the Hackersafe, Verisign and TRUSTe logos at the bottom of the page and the https protocol. Besides, I know from when Egg launched their central money manager here in the UK, that banks refused to protect customers who used such systems.
All this has meant I have logged in sporadically which is a shame. I still love the idea. Hopefully these two issues will be overcome.
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Designed by Peter Andre Jensen. Edited somewhat by Riaz Kanani.
