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..
April 3, 2008 at 8:30 am · Filed under: email spam
The BBC wrote an article on spam which you can read here.
Some key takeaways - according to Spamhaus more than 90% of email is spam 
BT, Bulldog, Wanadoo and Tiscali are failing to tackle the problem of botnets (spam sent from ordinary household computers that have been hijacked by hackers).
I’m not sure whether it is an omission or whether the 2nd and 3rd largets ISPs (Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse) in the UK are doing a better job of dealing with this.
March 3, 2008 at 5:46 pm · Filed under: email facebook google microsoft plaxo
There has been a bunch of rumours that Plaxo will get bought by Google or Facebook. But I think Microsoft would be a much better fit? Plaxo has great integration with Microsoft Outlook - which fits well with Microsoft’s connected applications strategy, it has a large base of registered users and could add to Microsoft’s online portfolio. It would also allow for Outlook to become more “socially” aware and take advantage of the email social network. Of course Yahoo has a social network so maybe this is only a go-er if the Yahoo deal falls through.
I do not see any positives though for Facebook buying it or for that matter Google really. What am I missing?
January 16, 2008 at 8:59 pm · Filed under: email from address gmail relevance
It has been common knowledge among email marketers that the “Friendly from name” is more important than the subject line. People scan the friendly from name to decide which emails are from people they recognise. If it is from someone they know then they are less likely to treat it as spam.
Roll on my Gmail junk folder. It was getting big so I thought I’d take a quick scan before deleting them. Of course with the emails being in the spam folder, I had only the from name and the subject line to go on - the images themselves are obscured. So I see “River Island” and “M&S” and thought I might want to see their emails in the future and click the “not spam” button. No sooner do I look at them with images do I know immediately it is spam and Google got it right.
Darn! I should have expanded the friendly from name so I could see the actual from address. It was obvious this was not from the sender it purported to be but this is hidden by default in the Google Apps version of Gmail. This doesnt seem to be the case in my standard gmail account.
January 14, 2008 at 8:40 am · Filed under: ces email fast google microsoft newsgator search xobni yahoo
A rapid fire post on the past week having been away from it all in Atlanta.
FAST is being bought by Microsoft - Dylan Fuller, formerly of FAST has a good run down on it. I do think it is interesting that Microsoft bought it rather than Google - it’s an obvious fit for Microsoft in the enterprise search space where it is strong but I thought Google wanted more of this space - is it that they think they can do it themselves? or does it not fit with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy?
Xobni launched its beta. Scott Voigt saved me the trouble of installing it right now by giving me a preview. It looks nice enough and gives you some interesting information about your inbox but it doesn’t aid your productivity. It will be interesting to see if this can evolve into a “Email 2.0″ plugin for Outlook, creating a social network through which it prioritises your email. Very early days right now though.
CES happened, the only highlights I heard about were Yahoo Life (integration of the various Yahoo services to give a better user experience - more in a later post); great looking TVs (very thin, bigger..) and Bill Gate’s disappointing keynote looking more at what we know Microsoft is doing rather than anything new. Still it was his last one..
Finally.. Newsgator went free. Finally. The question is whether it is too little too late for them.
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Designed by Peter Andre Jensen. Edited somewhat by Riaz Kanani.
