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 25, 2008 at 5:45 pm · Filed under: dataportability facebook im microsoft
So you can now add your facebook friends to your windows live (or MSN) messenger account. (You can also add your msn messenger friends to facebook). I gave it a quick test and sure enough it pulled all my contacts out of Facebook and offered me the option of adding htem to my messenger account.
One problem.
It did not differentiate between those that already have a Messenger account; those that I am already connected to and everyone else.
Basically I have to spam all my friends asking them to sign up for Live Messenger, surely Microsoft can check who has a valid account or not? I am ignoring the fact my friends could be using Yahoo Messenger (whom I can also connect to using Live Messenger) - as I assume Yahoo will not let Microsoft check for a valid account.
Another major issue, is that it also only pulls in my main email address from Facebook - not my Live messenger account which I have filled out in my profile so anyone using this would connect to me using the wrong account anyway.
Oh dear.
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 3, 2008 at 5:38 pm · Filed under: attention dataportability facebook twitter
Scoble has set a fire under Facebook for not letting him move his data out of their network and into another network. He has posted about it here.
Data portability (and interchange) is going to be an important part of 2008 with people using more and more services to meet their needs. Amongst the tech crowd, people seem to be using Facebook less and less and moving to specialised services like Twitter, tumblr and Flickr for “status updates”, life feeds and photos respectively. The ability to move between services can only be good for the consumer - increasing competition amongst similar services and providing better functionality. I am hoping this will allow for better attention based tools to come to the fore - Twitter is definitely better at putting quality information in front of me than the Facebook currently because of the tighter audience. Of course, if Twitter took off in the same way as Facebook then it too would suffer as it would need to prioritise or at least group messages.
There is a new group I have just joined called dataportability.org which is looking to help this happen. It seems to make sense.
I wonder if this idea could be replicated at the operating system level? It would make for more interesting competition - the ability to remove microsoft’s components and replace them with others. Is it technically feasible? It would need Microsoft to open up the OS significantly.
December 24, 2007 at 12:57 pm · Filed under: attention facebook information outlook relevance rss twitter
It’s more than a year since I gave a talk on Attention based management systems and how I envisaged they would become key to managing all the data that is thrown at us everyday. If anything attention as a buzzword has decreased in the past 12 months, whilst the amount of data has increased massively thanks in no small part to Twitter and the Facebook newsfeed.
It would be interesting to see whether a prolific rss reader like Scoble saw a decrease in the number of posts he read compared to last year. Back in September, the BBC reported that the time required to use Facebook has come about at the expense of worker productivity.
So why are attention tools not getting attention? (sorry!) It is actually rather simple. It’s built into everything we use already.
The very Facebook newsfeed that has increased the amount of data we see, is customisable to show what we want to see. Facebook rolled out the ability to give feedback on what you do and do not want to see (I trust it will be used eventually as it doesnt seem to be yet!). It is early days but this very newsfeed allows you to keep in touch with more people using less time.
The major reason more people have been using Google Reader is the flexibility it gives you to read blog posts efficiently. I definitely read more posts now then I used to with Bloglines a year ago. Fav.or.it is another RSS reader that attempts to place content most relevant to you in front of you.
Even the workhorse of the office worker, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has taken a huge step with its task features. It now places tasks both in a new right hand panel so you can see it immediately as well as the relevant tasks in your calendar. I used tasks sporadically before but could not do without it now.
As for the applications I looked at a year ago, Touchstone (now Particls) and Attensa still exist and I’ll take a closer look at both in later posts.
Oh and one last thing - just like in marketing, attention is all about relevance.
Next entries »
Designed by Peter Andre Jensen. Edited somewhat by Riaz Kanani.
