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January 19 2012
Passive Sharing of Your Lifestream on Facebook Timeline is Here
Today Facebook officially announced 60+ apps and web services that will now utilize their new open graph protocol to passively share information while you use them to your Timeline. Last year when Timeline was first launched to developers there were a few apps that were immediately available. This included Spotify and Rdio to share the music you were listening to in real-time to your newsfeed, Timeline, and Ticker.
Now a whole slew of ways to share have become available that cover travel, food, shopping, fashion, fitness, entertainment, causes and several others including some fairly unique ones shared over at AllThingsD. You can get a complete breakdown over at The Next Web. If you want to get in on the action and start your sharing right away just visit this page and start adding apps.
What are you waiting for? Go add some apps!
Look for a deluge of passive updates starting to appear on people’s timelines over the next few weeks. Even though Facebook has taken extra precautions with regards to privacy there will surely still be some snafu’s we’ll hear about. It’s unclear how the reception to this onslaught of information to an audience that is already fatigued will play out but hopefully as users we’ll see some value from the wealth of new data we will willingly share. I’m hoping that more tailored recommendations and other patterns will help surface more useful and interesting information. I know, wishful thinking but we’ll have to wait and see.
Passive Sharing of Your Lifestream on Facebook Timeline is Here
Today Facebook officially announced 60+ apps and web services that will now utilize their new open graph protocol to passively share information while you use them to your Timeline. Last year when Timeline was first launched to developers there were a few apps that were immediately available. This included Spotify and Rdio to share the music you were listening to in real-time to your newsfeed, Timeline, and Ticker.
Now a whole slew of ways to share have become available that cover travel, food, shopping, fashion, fitness, entertainment, causes and several others including some fairly unique ones shared over at AllThingsD. You can get a complete breakdown over at The Next Web. If you want to get in on the action and start your sharing right away just visit this page and start adding apps.
What are you waiting for? Go add some apps!
Look for a deluge of passive updates starting to appear on people’s timelines over the next few weeks. Even though Facebook has taken extra precautions with regards to privacy there will surely still be some snafu’s we’ll hear about. It’s unclear how the reception to this onslaught of information to an audience that is already fatigued will play out but hopefully as users we’ll see some value from the wealth of new data we will willingly share. I’m hoping that more tailored recommendations and other patterns will help surface more useful and interesting information. I know, wishful thinking but we’ll have to wait and see.
September 25 2011
Facebook Ushers in Lifestreaming for the Masses
If you had been watching me as I watched Mark Zuckerberg present the new Facebook Timeline you would have seen a smirk on face. It was also interesting to see how many other people picked up on how Timeline was Facebook’s migration from Newsfeed to Lifestream. I’ve been writing about Lifestreaming here since 2007. As I first discovered the concept that started as a php hack to aggregate multiple RSS feeds to the launch of countless startups all taking very different approaches, I truly felt it would evolve into something big that would eventually make it’s way to the mainstream. Facebook will soon unleash Timeline which takes its cue from many of the Lifestreaming services that preceded it over the last few years.
The “timeline” approach to Lifestreaming, and there have been many different approaches, became pretty popular with several services over the last few years. Recently, Memolane has emerged as one of the more popular ones and very recently I reviewed Glossi which is very nice as well. I liked the timeline approaches but wanted a little more and wrote about wanting a calendar based UI for Lifestreaming in 2009. It’s pretty funny that my mockup for that post used FriendFeed as an example which eventually got bought by Facebook and made co-founder Brett Taylor their CTO, but I digress.
Timeline brings Lifestreaming to Facebook (click image to visit my page)
So what are my thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline? Well I think they’ve done a great job building it to visualize our posts and milestones over the years. It also seems that there will be apps that will allow us to segregate sections of it to focus on specific actions such as music, books and movies. I’m a fan of the segregated content approach and Flavors.me is my favorite site in this area. All of that said, I feel that they should have provided timeline as a supplemental view to our existing profiles and not a replacement. The simplicity and consistent experience of viewing the newsfeed when you visit a users profile will soon be gone. Status updates will now begin much further down on profiles pretty much “below the fold”. As we see more custom apps to publish content as boxes in the timeline, you will see a very diverse experience when travelling from profile to profile. I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.
Two other announcements that will have huge implications are the Open Graph and Ticker initiatives. Open Graph will take “Liking” things to a whole new level with the introduction of additional actions that will now appear potentially both on your newsfeed as well as the newly introduced real-time Ticker. So you will be able to share new actions such as “read” a “book”, or “watched” a “movie”. I feel this is a great expansion on the limited nature and context of what “liking” something offered which I wrote about last year in my post on the evolution of likes as social gestures which hinted at the future we are about to see come to fruition.
An interesting aspect of this is that up until now you’ve explicitly shared information by clicking on the like, share, or recommend buttons on Facebook or other websites. Louis Gray wrote a post describing the value of user behavior in regards to explicitly sharing selective content on social networks. His post questions whether the noise and minutiae of implicit sharing is of any value. As an example users may currently use a service like Getglue or Miso to selectively share tv shows or movies they watch. But in that example you choose what viewing you want to share. Now developers will be modifying or releasing new apps that can take your actions that are occurring natively within a service and automatically share them on Facebook. So for example a modified Facebook app by Netflix they will add the ability to automatically post everything you watch on the service on Facebook.
I have some mixed feelings about how implicit gestures may get integrated into Facebook. I think it depends on several factors including:
- Can people get value from it?
- Can they control it?
- Can the resulting content be hidden easily?
Let me answer these points…
real-time posting of songs I listen to on Last.fm
I’m fine with automatically sharing all the music I listen to in real-time because I’ve been doing this already for years scrobbling to Last.fm. For my following example implicit sharing means giving an app or service authorization to continually post an open graph verb / noun combination passively in the background for you while you’re using it. In the case of a music service this becomes “listened” to “song”. The value I’ve gotten from this implicit action is being able to discover new music from my friends that have also been doing it. Facebook is taking scrobbling to a whole new level by aggregating users real-time listening across multiple streaming music services including Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and others directly to the Facebook ticker. The Facebook ticker has been added to the chat sidebar and can easily be hidden away. So in this scenario I think implicit sharing and the method Facebook has implemented it is a good thing on the service.
I do however think that Facebook will run into problems with how developers implement implicit sharing on Facebook using the open graph. My example above is one that I think many people will enjoy and has very few implications from a privacy standpoint other than exposing your crappy music taste to friends. There will be other instances where this will not be the case. My guess is that the process for authorization of apps that leverage the open graph will be in the form of an additional item on the standard Facebook permissions dialog box which people will glance over in the same way they currently check TOS boxes without reading them. Most people won’t realize that they’ve authorized the implicit sharing to the ticker from apps they grant permission to and we will no doubt hear some horror stories from this in the future.
Chris Saad wrote an analysis of Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph. It generated an interesting conversation over on Google+ that I participated in. His post poses several interesting questions including whether other services will implement similar strategies, whether independent websites will also try to gather their users data in the same ways Facebook now will. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially re-launched the much lauded Beacon product with the release of these features. While Beacon was squarely aimed at creating and leveraging user data for targeted ads, these new features weren’t described to resurrect that…yet. I did however go read up on Beacon a bit to refresh my memory and found this interesting blog post from Zuckerberg apologizing for the Beacon missteps and in it he stated “People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, [and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.]” I have a feeling that with the open graph’s method of implementation Mark will be challenged on this point once again.
Facebook Ushers in Lifestreaming for the Masses
If you had been watching me as I watched Mark Zuckerberg present the new Facebook Timeline you would have seen a smirk on face. It was also interesting to see how many other people picked up on how Timeline was Facebook’s migration from Newsfeed to Lifestream. I’ve been writing about Lifestreaming here since 2007. As I first discovered the concept that started as a php hack to aggregate multiple RSS feeds to the launch of countless startups all taking very different approaches, I truly felt it would evolve into something big that would eventually make it’s way to the mainstream. Facebook will soon unleash Timeline which takes its cue from many of the Lifestreaming services that preceded it over the last few years.
The “timeline” approach to Lifestreaming, and there have been many different approaches, became pretty popular with several services over the last few years. Recently, Memolane has emerged as one of the more popular ones and very recently I reviewed Glossi which is very nice as well. I liked the timeline approaches but wanted a little more and wrote about wanting a calendar based UI for Lifestreaming in 2009. It’s pretty funny that my mockup for that post used FriendFeed as an example which eventually got bought by Facebook and made co-founder Brett Taylor their CTO, but I digress.
Timeline brings Lifestreaming to Facebook (click image to visit my page)
So what are my thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline? Well I think they’ve done a great job building it to visualize our posts and milestones over the years. It also seems that there will be apps that will allow us to segregate sections of it to focus on specific actions such as music, books and movies. I’m a fan of the segregated content approach and Flavors.me is my favorite site in this area. All of that said, I feel that they should have provided timeline as a supplemental view to our existing profiles and not a replacement. The simplicity and consistent experience of viewing the newsfeed when you visit a users profile will soon be gone. Status updates will now begin much further down on profiles pretty much “below the fold”. As we see more custom apps to publish content as boxes in the timeline, you will see a very diverse experience when travelling from profile to profile. I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.
Two other announcements that will have huge implications are the Open Graph and Ticker initiatives. Open Graph will take “Liking” things to a whole new level with the introduction of additional actions that will now appear potentially both on your newsfeed as well as the newly introduced real-time Ticker. So you will be able to share new actions such as “read” a “book”, or “watched” a “movie”. I feel this is a great expansion on the limited nature and context of what “liking” something offered which I wrote about last year in my post on the evolution of likes as social gestures which hinted at the future we are about to see come to fruition.
An interesting aspect of this is that up until now you’ve explicitly shared information by clicking on the like, share, or recommend buttons on Facebook or other websites. Louis Gray wrote a post describing the value of user behavior in regards to explicitly sharing selective content on social networks. His post questions whether the noise and minutiae of implicit sharing is of any value. As an example users may currently use a service like Getglue or Miso to selectively share tv shows or movies they watch. But in that example you choose what viewing you want to share. Now developers will be modifying or releasing new apps that can take your actions that are occurring natively within a service and automatically share them on Facebook. So for example a modified Facebook app by Netflix they will add the ability to automatically post everything you watch on the service on Facebook.
I have some mixed feelings about how implicit gestures may get integrated into Facebook. I think it depends on several factors including:
- Can people get value from it?
- Can they control it?
- Can the resulting content be hidden easily?
Let me answer these points…
real-time posting of songs I listen to on Last.fm
I’m fine with automatically sharing all the music I listen to in real-time because I’ve been doing this already for years scrobbling to Last.fm. For my following example implicit sharing means giving an app or service authorization to continually post an open graph verb / noun combination passively in the background for you while you’re using it. In the case of a music service this becomes “listened” to “song”. The value I’ve gotten from this implicit action is being able to discover new music from my friends that have also been doing it. Facebook is taking scrobbling to a whole new level by aggregating users real-time listening across multiple streaming music services including Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and others directly to the Facebook ticker. The Facebook ticker has been added to the chat sidebar and can easily be hidden away. So in this scenario I think implicit sharing and the method Facebook has implemented it is a good thing on the service.
I do however think that Facebook will run into problems with how developers implement implicit sharing on Facebook using the open graph. My example above is one that I think many people will enjoy and has very few implications from a privacy standpoint other than exposing your crappy music taste to friends. There will be other instances where this will not be the case. My guess is that the process for authorization of apps that leverage the open graph will be in the form of an additional item on the standard Facebook permissions dialog box which people will glance over in the same way they currently check TOS boxes without reading them. Most people won’t realize that they’ve authorized the implicit sharing to the ticker from apps they grant permission to and we will no doubt hear some horror stories from this in the future.
Chris Saad wrote an analysis of Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph. It generated an interesting conversation over on Google+ that I participated in. His post poses several interesting questions including whether other services will implement similar strategies, whether independent websites will also try to gather their users data in the same ways Facebook now will. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially re-launched the much lauded Beacon product with the release of these features. While Beacon was squarely aimed at creating and leveraging user data for targeted ads, these new features weren’t described to resurrect that…yet. I did however go read up on Beacon a bit to refresh my memory and found this interesting blog post from Zuckerberg apologizing for the Beacon missteps and in it he stated “People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, [and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.]” I have a feeling that with the open graph’s method of implementation Mark will be challenged on this point once again.
September 10 2011
Glossi Takes a Fresh New Approach to Lifestreaming
As I mentioned in my 2010 year end post the Lifestreaming services area has pretty much vanquished from the heydays back in 2007 & 2008 when I first created this blog. It seemed like a new service popped up every other week back then. But ultimately I believe several factors that included the inability to monetize them and the lack of mainstream acceptance ultimately doomed this exciting service niche.
The last service I covered was Memolane which went live late last year. They took a timeline based approach to Lifestreaming and provide the ability to import very deep archived data from the services they support. They also allow the Lifestreams to be embedded on other sites. These were a few of the distinctive features that brought a taste of how new services may be able to provide a resurgence to the Lifestreaming services arena. With all of the new innovations with regards to Visualizing and accessing data via API on the web not to mention the emergence of HTML5 there are many new tricks that can start to become apparent to liven up this old dog (in web years of course) called Lifestreaming.
And then along comes Glossi which is the first Lifestreaming service I have written about this year. I discovered Glossi from this post on The Next Web where Nancy Messieh not only provides a glimpse of this currently in private beta service, but also gains access to the inspiration and future plans from the founders. Luckily they were offering invites so I quickly snapped one up so I could take this new service for a spin. [Spolier alert: I have invites for readers below]
In the past, the the majority of Lifestreaming services took a pretty dry visual approach by simply aggregating posts from all services in a bland list format. Glossi has taken a fresh new approach taking queues from newer visual designs and taking advantage of richer methods to display data.
Creating and setting up the account was super simple. Just plug in one or more of the current five services supported including Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. I believe all services used a quick and simple oAuth process to connect your accounts. You also have the ability to set individual accounts to be either public or private, meaning that the content is only viewable by you. After you’ve connected all your accounts you can visit your profile page which depending on the services you’ve added will provide a nice visual display of your posts from each of the services.
The first thing to note with Glossi is that they break down your Lifestream into weekly chunks. So each page is comprised of all the posts within that week. For a profile that added Foursquare they will get a map with pushpins that represent all the checkins with a sidebar that offers a nice sliding list of the posts from each location along with a photo if one was added. Also, if you click on any of the pushpins it anchors directly to the post on the sliding bar. This is an example of using new thinking both from a presentation and functionality standpoint to add value to otherwise bland Lifestream data.
Below the Foursquare block you will get a random output of boxes that display tweets, photos, and posts from all of the other connected services in a visually appealing way. Also, each weekly page renders randomly upon every refresh. At the bottom of each weekly page are previous and next buttons to continue navigating through the timeline and if you mouseover a graph at the bottom you will get details of the number of tweets, checkins, posts, and photos as you slide through each week. The top of the page provides some basic profile information and avatar along with links to the external services you have linked up. Beyond that there is a button to visit other random Glossi profiles and there is a friending mechanism that acts as a way to bookmark other users profile pages.
So that’s Glossi in a nutshell. I like how they’ve taken the basic Lifestreaming data principal and have infused some newer ideas to make it more visually appealing. The Foursquare module is my favorite and I’d like to see some more innovative grouping of content done that way. In the interview Nancy did for The Next Web they mentioned that their top priority is to improve the visualization algorithm and then they will focus on adding new services including RSS, Posterous, Flickr, Gowalla, Vimeo, Last.fm. I hope they add YouTube as well.
I’m happy to see that although Lifestreaming services have languished, that there are still people that see the value and continue to try and provide new approaches to creating services around them. I look forward to watching Glossi progress with their development roadmap.
Glossi was nice enough to provide 100 invite codes to their private beta for Lifestream Blog readers. Just visit this link and go test out their service.
Glossi Takes a Fresh New Approach to Lifestreaming
As I mentioned in my 2010 year end post the Lifestreaming services area has pretty much vanquished from the heydays back in 2007 & 2008 when I first created this blog. It seemed like a new service popped up every other week back then. But ultimately I believe several factors that included the inability to monetize them and the lack of mainstream acceptance ultimately doomed this exciting service niche.
The last service I covered was Memolane which went live late last year. They took a timeline based approach to Lifestreaming and provide the ability to import very deep archived data from the services they support. They also allow the Lifestreams to be embedded on other sites. These were a few of the distinctive features that brought a taste of how new services may be able to provide a resurgence to the Lifestreaming services arena. With all of the new innovations with regards to Visualizing and accessing data via API on the web not to mention the emergence of HTML5 there are many new tricks that can start to become apparent to liven up this old dog (in web years of course) called Lifestreaming.
And then along comes Glossi which is the first Lifestreaming service I have written about this year. I discovered Glossi from this post on The Next Web where Nancy Messieh not only provides a glimpse of this currently in private beta service, but also gains access to the inspiration and future plans from the founders. Luckily they were offering invites so I quickly snapped one up so I could take this new service for a spin. [Spolier alert: I have invites for readers below]
In the past, the the majority of Lifestreaming services took a pretty dry visual approach by simply aggregating posts from all services in a bland list format. Glossi has taken a fresh new approach taking queues from newer visual designs and taking advantage of richer methods to display data.
Creating and setting up the account was super simple. Just plug in one or more of the current five services supported including Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. I believe all services used a quick and simple oAuth process to connect your accounts. You also have the ability to set individual accounts to be either public or private, meaning that the content is only viewable by you. After you’ve connected all your accounts you can visit your profile page which depending on the services you’ve added will provide a nice visual display of your posts from each of the services.
The first thing to note with Glossi is that they break down your Lifestream into weekly chunks. So each page is comprised of all the posts within that week. For a profile that added Foursquare they will get a map with pushpins that represent all the checkins with a sidebar that offers a nice sliding list of the posts from each location along with a photo if one was added. Also, if you click on any of the pushpins it anchors directly to the post on the sliding bar. This is an example of using new thinking both from a presentation and functionality standpoint to add value to otherwise bland Lifestream data.
Below the Foursquare block you will get a random output of boxes that display tweets, photos, and posts from all of the other connected services in a visually appealing way. Also, each weekly page renders randomly upon every refresh. At the bottom of each weekly page are previous and next buttons to continue navigating through the timeline and if you mouseover a graph at the bottom you will get details of the number of tweets, checkins, posts, and photos as you slide through each week. The top of the page provides some basic profile information and avatar along with links to the external services you have linked up. Beyond that there is a button to visit other random Glossi profiles and there is a friending mechanism that acts as a way to bookmark other users profile pages.
So that’s Glossi in a nutshell. I like how they’ve taken the basic Lifestreaming data principal and have infused some newer ideas to make it more visually appealing. The Foursquare module is my favorite and I’d like to see some more innovative grouping of content done that way. In the interview Nancy did for The Next Web they mentioned that their top priority is to improve the visualization algorithm and then they will focus on adding new services including RSS, Posterous, Flickr, Gowalla, Vimeo, Last.fm. I hope they add YouTube as well.
I’m happy to see that although Lifestreaming services have languished, that there are still people that see the value and continue to try and provide new approaches to creating services around them. I look forward to watching Glossi progress with their development roadmap.
Glossi was nice enough to provide 100 invite codes to their private beta for Lifestream Blog readers. Just visit this link and go test out their service.
June 09 2011
The Unveiling of a New Distributed Social Platform Called Glow
Today my friend Louis Gray got the scoop on what Cliqset cofounder Darren Bounds has been working on since the recent sunsetting of that site. First off if you weren’t familiar with Cliqset, it was a great Lifestreaming site that I covered in the past and packed more features and accordance to open standards than any other service out there. Unfortunately it came at a time near the end of the Lifestreaming (social service aggregation) craze and just like all the sites before it including Friendfeed, ran up against the difficulty of gaining mainstream adoption and finding ways to monetize it.
Lucky for us folks that still see the value in Lifestreaming, Darren is building something new based on that knowledge and experience albeit taking it in a new direction. His new project Glow aims to take a crack building a social network utilizing both a hosted and distributed approach. This is no easy task. As we’ve come to find out by the recent attempt by the Diaspora team to do this after forced into the spotlight over a year ago. It wasn’t short after the Diaspora announcement that I wrote about the need for an open and federated social network but citing that Diaspora is probably not the likely team to build one. Fortunately for us Darren’s previous experience and clout within the open standards community is one of the few people that is qualified.
Glow takes a departure from the complexities of aggregating 3rd party services and tries to take a simple approach. This is probably a good thing as keeping things simple will be crucial for any service to gain adoption. Here’s some more details from Louis’ post:
At launch, Glow will offer a centralized option, as well as the opportunity for you to launch your own dedicated node, the equivalent of running your own single user copy of Twitter that looked and felt just like it does on Twitter.com, with the same users and experience.
From a feature perspective, Glow will support all the features of a modern social network, with the usual status updates, photo and video sharing, implementing the “follow” model, along with likes, mentions and comments. Additionally, the service is location-aware, which brings forward its own opportunities.
So on the surface it sounds very similar to a basic mashup of Twitter and Facebook. He’s also developing an API for the service. I don’t have to tell anyone that it’s going to be very challenging to get new users to migrate to a new social network. I think there are several key things that any aspiring service needs to do to attempt such a lofty goal of trying to supplant Facebook, Twitter, or both. They need to ease folks in by offering the ability to syndicate to those outposts as well. It will take time to transition people to a new network and by offering the ability to let them continue to post and share on existing services they use will be important.
Another key ingredient is getting other services that users participate on to add syndication options. I used to struggle with the all or nothing aspect of Lifestreaming services when connecting 3rd party sites. Now with great services like Instagram and Picplz I have the power to easily select the external services I want to syndicate to on a per post basis. This has been a huge advantage for me as I can now selectively choose which images to share on which networks. Getting these types of service to offer syndication options can also be a great way to lower the barrier to entry.
Of course Glow and Diaspora aren’t the only new services out there trying to build a distributed social network. If you read this blog with any frequency you’ve probably noticed that I’ve become a Locker Project fanboy of sorts. This project (primer here) is also in a position where it could become a big player in the distributed social network race and hopefully we’ll soon get a taste of their offering. Their approach of creating an open source project that will also have a simple hosted option in Singly will also prove to be a serious contender.
I’m glad that we have several great minds working in this area. It’s hard to say what direction both users and each of these projects will go in, but the fact that they’re being built is a great thing wherever they ultimately take us.
The Unveiling of a New Distributed Social Platform Called Glow
Today my friend Louis Gray got the scoop on what Cliqset cofounder Darren Bounds has been working on since the recent sunsetting of that site. First off if you weren’t familiar with Cliqset, it was a great Lifestreaming site that I covered in the past and packed more features and accordance to open standards than any other service out there. Unfortunately it came at a time near the end of the Lifestreaming (social service aggregation) craze and just like all the sites before it including Friendfeed, ran up against the difficulty of gaining mainstream adoption and finding ways to monetize it.
Lucky for us folks that still see the value in Lifestreaming, Darren is building something new based on that knowledge and experience albeit taking it in a new direction. His new project Glow aims to take a crack building a social network utilizing both a hosted and distributed approach. This is no easy task. As we’ve come to find out by the recent attempt by the Diaspora team to do this after forced into the spotlight over a year ago. It wasn’t short after the Diaspora announcement that I wrote about the need for an open and federated social network but citing that Diaspora is probably not the likely team to build one. Fortunately for us Darren’s previous experience and clout within the open standards community is one of the few people that is qualified.
Glow takes a departure from the complexities of aggregating 3rd party services and tries to take a simple approach. This is probably a good thing as keeping things simple will be crucial for any service to gain adoption. Here’s some more details from Louis’ post:
At launch, Glow will offer a centralized option, as well as the opportunity for you to launch your own dedicated node, the equivalent of running your own single user copy of Twitter that looked and felt just like it does on Twitter.com, with the same users and experience.
From a feature perspective, Glow will support all the features of a modern social network, with the usual status updates, photo and video sharing, implementing the “follow” model, along with likes, mentions and comments. Additionally, the service is location-aware, which brings forward its own opportunities.
So on the surface it sounds very similar to a basic mashup of Twitter and Facebook. He’s also developing an API for the service. I don’t have to tell anyone that it’s going to be very challenging to get new users to migrate to a new social network. I think there are several key things that any aspiring service needs to do to attempt such a lofty goal of trying to supplant Facebook, Twitter, or both. They need to easy folks in by offering the ability to syndicate to those outposts as well. It will take time to transition people to a new network and by offering the ability to let them continue to post and share on existing services they use will be important. Another key ingredient is getting other services that users participate on to add syndication options. I used to struggle with the all or nothing aspect of Lifestreaming services when connecting 3rd party sites. Now with great services like Instagram and Picplz I have the power to easily select the external services I want to syndicate to on a per post basis. This has been a huge advantage for me as I can now selectively choose which images to share on which networks. Getting these types of service to offer syndication options can also be a great way to lower the barrier to entry.
Of course Glow and Diaspora aren’t the only new services out there trying to build a distributed social network. If you read this blog with any frequency you’ve probably noticed that I’ve become a Locker Project fanboy of sorts. This project (primer here) is also in a position where it could become a big player in the distributed social network race and hopefully we’ll soon get a taste of their offering. Their approach of creating an open source project that will also have a simple hosted option in Singly will also prove to be a serious contender.
I’m glad that we have several great minds working in this area. It’s hard to say what direction both users and each of these projects will go in, but the fact that they’re being built is a great thing wherever they ultimately take us.
June 07 2011
New Service Zerply Provides Your Business Profile on the Web
Today I tried out Zerply which is another new entrant into the “business card on the web” services. You can easily and quickly create an account by authenticating with Twitter or Facebook and then bring over your work experience by authorizing LinkedIn to import it. You can then supplement your knowledge and skills with keywords and tags. Then you can add many of the services supported to your profile and even add external ones that aren’t supported.
Here's a snip from my profile page (click to visit)
I learned of this new service from Louis Gray’s post in which he likens it to Flavors.me and About.me. After playing with it for a little while though, I wouldn’t quite make that comparison. Sure some of the same on-boarding process and features are there, but ultimately you don’t end up with quite the same robust profile that’s available on those services. With Zerply you’ll be able to import your LinkedIn experience and selectively edit it on your page as well as add 3rd party services. But your profile will only show the work experience statically from the import and only provide links which ship you away from your profile and onto the 3rd party sites. In both Flavors.me and About.me’s case you get a dynamic stream from those site on your profile page. This is a key differentiator between these services and Zerply.
Beyond that you have a choice between 3 custom themes for your public profiles but nothing much else in the form of editing your profile. After you create the account there seems to be a component to add influence metrics to users by offering up endorsements for people’s skills that they’ve submitted and an ability to create an address book. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on their early launch and I if you’re curious to try it out and see if some of features are of interest, I wouldn’t sway you otherwise. You can also learn more about the service by visiting Louis Gray’s post.
New Service Zerply Provides Your Business Profile on the Web
Today I tried out Zerply which is another new entrant into the “business card on the web” services. You can easily and quickly create an account by authenticating with Twitter or Facebook and then bring over your work experience by authorizing LinkedIn to import it. You can then supplement your knowledge and skills with keywords and tags. Then you can add many of the services supported to your profile and even add external ones that aren’t supported.
Here's a snip from my profile page (click to visit)
I learned of this new service from Louis Gray’s post in which he likens it to Flavors.me and About.me. After playing with it for a little while though, I wouldn’t quite make that comparison. Sure some of the same on-boarding process and features are there, but ultimately you don’t end up with quite the same robust profile that’s available on those services. With Zerply you’ll be able to import your LinkedIn experience and selectively edit it on your page as well as add 3rd party services. But your profile will only show the work experience statically from the import and only provide links which ship you away from your profile and onto the 3rd party sites. In both Flavors.me and About.me’s case you get a dynamic stream from those site on your profile page. This is a key differentiator between these services and Zerply.
Beyond that you have a choice between 3 custom themes for your public profiles but nothing much else in the form of editing your profile. After you create the account there seems to be a component to add influence metrics to users by offering up endorsements for people’s skills that they’ve submitted and an ability to create an address book. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on their early launch and I if you’re curious to try it out and see if some of features are of interest, I wouldn’t sway you otherwise. You can also learn more about the service by visiting Louis Gray’s post.
January 27 2011
Postpost is a Nice Alternative for Viewing Your Facebook Content
On the heels of my post on the social content reader evolution comes a new entrant called Postpost. This new service provide you with a several custom views for the content generated on your Facebook account. Simply connect your account to their service and within less than a minute you will have a completely new way to view your Facebook newsfeed.
After your data is imported and displayed in a very elegant way where individual items will appear as content boxes on a page devoid of all the other Facebook site clutter. Also, the content will dynamically adjust itself depending on the resolution you are viewing the service with. I even stretched out a window across 3 displays to view the service at a whopping resolution of 5120 x 1200 (see below). Postpost is available through their website as well as a Chrome web app. I tested both versions and I recommend going with the Chrome web app. It takes advantage of some very nice UI enhancements not found on the Postpost website version and also seems to offer much better performance as it fetches new content dynamically while you scroll down the page.
Postpost running at 5120 x 1200 spanning 3 displays
Within each content box you have the ability to comment on and share each item on Facebook from within the app. Unfortunately you can’t share the content yet on other services such as Twitter. They also plan to add the ability to like in the near future. One of the more exciting features that the service provides is the ability to filter your Facebook content by several types. This includes a viewing filter for photos, videos, and links each displayed in their own isolated sections. This is a great feature that is also offered by the Newsmix iPad app but does this for both your Facebook and Twitter accounts. I expect this media filtering feature to start making its way to more social content readers in the future.
Overall this is a very nice way to view your content with visual enhancements and filtering not available to you on the Facebook service itself. My first question is if and when will they add Twitter support? I would also love to see Google Reader support. As I stated in my previous post I also find it very important for thew new readers to offer a way of prioritizing content so as to not just show me the most recent items. Lastly some deeper integration for filtering Facebook data by friends lists, or groups would be nice.
Robert Scoble recorded a video with the creator of Postpost which you can see below. There are also many good comments on Robert’s post which you can read here.
Postpost is a Nice Alternative for Viewing Your Facebook Content
On the heels of my post on the social content reader evolution comes a new entrant called Postpost. This new service provide you with a several custom views for the content generated on your Facebook account. Simply connect your account to their service and within less than a minute you will have a completely new way to view your Facebook newsfeed.
After your data is imported and displayed in a very elegant way where individual items will appear as content boxes on a page devoid of all the other Facebook site clutter. Also, the content will dynamically adjust itself depending on the resolution you are viewing the service with. I even stretched out a window across 3 displays to view the service at a whopping resolution of 5120 x 1200 (see below). Postpost is available through their website as well as a Chrome web app. I tested both versions and I recommend going with the Chrome web app. It takes advantage of some very nice UI enhancements not found on the Postpost website version and also seems to offer much better performance as it fetches new content dynamically while you scroll down the page.
Postpost running at 5120 x 1200 spanning 3 displays
Within each content box you have the ability to comment on and share each item on Facebook from within the app. Unfortunately you can’t share the content yet on other services such as Twitter. They also plan to add the ability to like in the near future. One of the more exciting features that the service provides is the ability to filter your Facebook content by several types. This includes a viewing filter for photos, videos, and links each displayed in their own isolated sections. This is a great feature that is also offered by the Newsmix iPad app but does this for both your Facebook and Twitter accounts. I expect this media filtering feature to start making its way to more social content readers in the future.
Overall this is a very nice way to view your content with visual enhancements and filtering not available to you on the Facebook service itself. My first question is if and when will they add Twitter support? I would also love to see Google Reader support. As I stated in my previous post I also find it very important for thew new readers to offer a way of prioritizing content so as to not just show me the most recent items. Lastly some deeper integration for filtering Facebook data by friends lists, or groups would be nice.
Robert Scoble recorded a video with the creator of Postpost which you can see below. There are also many good comments on Robert’s post which you can read here.
November 19 2010
Creative Use of New Bitly Bundles Feature to Curate a Lifestream
Today I came across this tweet from Joshua Auerbach who announced having used the new Bitly bundle feature to share key moments of his day. If you haven’t yet seen what the new Bitly bundles feature can do, I urge you to go read the blog post and then try it out. When I first heard about it I had a “that’s pretty cool” ho hum attitude without having read about or tried it with an assumption about how it would work. After using it for the first time yesterday, turns out that it’s actually a powerful curation tool.
Lifestream in the form of a Bitly bundle by Joshua Auerbach (click image to visit the page)
The features Bitly has packed into their new bundle tool are fantastic. If you provide a link to a tweet they offer a screenshot with clickable links, if you link to a Flickr photo there is a preview, if you link to a Foursquare checkin there’s a map and details of the location, if you link to a YouTube video an embed is placed on the page. Other features include providing an overall description and commentary for each of the links added to the bundle, tracking of clicks for each link in the bundle, stats and url sources for the bundle, and ability for people to comment using Disqus on the bundle page. These are just some of the high level features I’ve seen so far.
So I find it pretty interesting to add this new wrinkle of personal curation to Lifestreaming. The original concept is to just link up some services and aggregate all content generated across them in a reverse chronological order. Giving this some thought based on new tools we can make them much more interesting at times by self filtering the full stream. We can also weave the items together to add more context or tell a story with a tool like this which adds more value. While we wouldn’t necessarily do this on a daily basis, there are definitely times when it would make sense.
So while this post was about one person’s use of Bitly’s new feature for Lifestreaming, the bigger story here is actually about using curation tools and services to both filter and augment our Lifestreams. I’ve played with several other of these new breed of curation services besides Bitly and also really like Storify which offers one distinct advantage in allowing a bundle to be embedded elsewhere.I’m also watching curated.by. I think this is a new territory for Lifestreaming that may provide some more interesting stories for us to watch of one another in the future.
Creative Use of New Bitly Bundles Feature to Curate a Lifestream
Today I came across this tweet from Joshua Auerbach who announced having used the new Bitly bundle feature to share key moments of his day. If you haven’t yet seen what the new Bitly bundles feature can do, I urge you to go read the blog post and then try it out. When I first heard about it I had a “that’s pretty cool” ho hum attitude without having read about or tried it with an assumption about how it would work. After using it for the first time yesterday, turns out that it’s actually a powerful curation tool.
Lifestream in the form of a Bitly bundle by Joshua Auerbach (click image to visit the page)
The features Bitly has packed into their new bundle tool are fantastic. If you provide a link to a tweet they offer a screenshot with clickable links, if you link to a Flickr photo there is a preview, if you link to a Foursquare checkin there’s a map and details of the location, if you link to a YouTube video an embed is placed on the page. Other features include providing an overall description and commentary for each of the links added to the bundle, tracking of clicks for each link in the bundle, stats and url sources for the bundle, and ability for people to comment using Disqus on the bundle page. These are just some of the high level features I’ve seen so far.
So I find it pretty interesting to add this new wrinkle of personal curation to Lifestreaming. The original concept is to just link up some services and aggregate all content generated across them in a reverse chronological order. Giving this some thought based on new tools we can make them much more interesting at times by self filtering the full stream. We can also weave the items together to add more context or tell a story with a tool like this which adds more value. While we wouldn’t necessarily do this on a daily basis, there are definitely times when it would make sense.
So while this post was about one person’s use of Bitly’s new feature for Lifestreaming, the bigger story here is actually about using curation tools and services to both filter and augment our Lifestreams. I’ve played with several other of these new breed of curation services besides Bitly and also really like Storify which offers one distinct advantage in allowing a bundle to be embedded elsewhere.I’m also watching curated.by. I think this is a new territory for Lifestreaming that may provide some more interesting stories for us to watch of one another in the future.
November 17 2010
Backtype Now Has Influence Scores, but Only for Twitter Data
Today I read on the Backtype blog that they were adding profiles to their service to identify influencers on Twitter. I got excited because I like stats and I’m intrigued by how services are being created to try and solve this. I recently wrote about Klout and Peerindex. That post discussed how a users blog and commenting should be factored into influence. It also discussed a scoring problem when a blog is mentioned on Twitter not referencing the user who created it which doesn’t contribute to the calculation. These are several pieces of data that Backtype does collect, so I was excited to hear about their announcement.
Unfortunately, after reading their blog post and visiting my profile, I was pretty disappointed that their influence score and metrics only take Twitter data into account. This has already been done and they have the potential to offer so much more. What a bummer. Hopefully they will incorporate additional data points they are already collecting to modify the scoring algorithm.
In any case it’s still worth checking out your profile on their site as they do offer one interesting graph that provides the percentages of tweets broken down by updates, @replies, retweets, and links. Looking at user profiles and analyzing those 4 data points is pretty interesting. I personally like following many people on Twitter because of the content they share so the links percentage is a good metric for me to determine whether I want to follow new people. Also, after doing some a/b comparison testing on a few people to see their scores on Backtype and Klout, there is definitely scoring differences so I’m curious to what they are. I’ll have to dig in some more.
In any case the influence scoring sector is getting hot and I’m sure more will be joining this area. It should be nice to watch it mature and incorporate more data. Let’s see if Backtype can push the needle further quickly as the race is on.
Backtype Now Has Influence Scores, but Only for Twitter Data
Today I read on the Backtype blog that they were adding profiles to their service to identify influencers on Twitter. I got excited because I like stats and I’m intrigued by how services are being created to try and solve this. I recently wrote about Klout and Peerindex. That post discussed how a users blog and commenting should be factored into influence. It also discussed a scoring problem when a blog is mentioned on Twitter not referencing the user who created it which doesn’t contribute to the calculation. These are several pieces of data that Backtype does collect, so I was excited to hear about their announcement.
Unfortunately, after reading their blog post and visiting my profile, I was pretty disappointed that their influence score and metrics only take Twitter data into account. This has already been done and they have the potential to offer so much more. What a bummer. Hopefully they will incorporate additional data points they are already collecting to modify the scoring algorithm.
In any case it’s still worth checking out your profile on their site as they do offer one interesting graph that provides the percentages of tweets broken down by updates, @replies, retweets, and links. Looking at user profiles and analyzing those 4 data points is pretty interesting. I personally like following many people on Twitter because of the content they share so the links percentage is a good metric for me to determine whether I want to follow new people. Also, after doing some a/b comparison testing on a few people to see their scores on Backtype and Klout, there is definitely scoring differences so I’m curious to what they are. I’ll have to dig in some more.
In any case the influence scoring sector is getting hot and I’m sure more will be joining this area. It should be nice to watch it mature and incorporate more data. Let’s see if Backtype can push the needle further quickly as the race is on.
September 24 2010
New Dating Service with Matchmaking Powered by Facebook and Your Lifestream
I’ve stated before that some of the largest benefits we will see from creating and maintaining our Lifestreams will be the services created on the backbone of that data. We are starting to see the first big service phenomenon from that coming in the way of content readers that are built specifically for us based on the data shared by our social graph.
Early on when I first started writing about Lifestreaming I gave thought to services that could be built off of the data and one of the first that came to mind was a dating site. In fact I had multiple interviews at a top dating site a few years ago that was very interested in my knowledge and thoughts around Lifestreaming data. I didn’t get the job, but I still felt that Lifestreaming data would at some point help power the matchmaking process. Well apparently a new dating service called Wings feels the same way.
Wings has taken a unique and interesting approach when it comes to dating. They figured that instead of creating a site from scratch that people need to join, they’d just tap into the 500+ Million Facebook users and build a dating app within their eco-system. The innovation doesn’t stop there as when you join there is no super long, multi-page questionnaire. After joining the service will analyze your Facebook data and let you also connect your Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts to help paint a picture of who you are. I feel this is a much better way to build a profile for someone. Instead of a static survey filled out and frozen in time, your profile is dynamic based on the data collected on a daily basis.
After Wings collects all of your data they run it through their social compatibility algorithm which analyzes multiple personality dimensions of their users’ social profiles to find you a perfect match. Technology Review recently wrote a story on Wings and they provide some more background around the algorithm’s logic.
From Technology Review Article
All that data is fed into the service’s recommendation engine. That system combines Bayesian modeling, a type of mathematical analysis that lets computers draw inferences from huge data sets, and machine learning, where the more data and feedback the algorithm is fed, the “smarter” it gets.
The idea is that the computer’s analysis of your behavior provides a richer analysis than what you’d say about yourself. “We serve as our own blind spot in that it’s difficult to accurately answer questions about oneself without biasing toward recent experience, current mood, etc.,” says Sunil Nagaraj, chief executive and cofounder of Triangulate, the company behind Wings.
You can read their great full article on the service here.
It really sounds like an interesting service and if I wasn’t happily married with kids I’d love to try it out. I was thinking about it for this review but I think I might have a hard time explaining this app on my Facebook profile to my wife and friends. I do hope some of you readers give it a try though and post your comments below. Also, if one of you wants to write a full review of the service as a guest post here, I’d love to post it.
New Dating Service with Matchmaking Powered by Facebook and Your Lifestream
I’ve stated before that some of the largest benefits we will see from creating and maintaining our Lifestreams will be the services created on the backbone of that data. We are starting to see the first big service phenomenon from that coming in the way of content readers that are built specifically for us based on the data shared by our social graph.
Early on when I first started writing about Lifestreaming I gave thought to services that could be built off of the data and one of the first that came to mind was a dating site. In fact I had multiple interviews at a top dating site a few years ago that was very interested in my knowledge and thoughts around Lifestreaming data. I didn’t get the job, but I still felt that Lifestreaming data would at some point help power the matchmaking process. Well apparently a new dating service called Wings feels the same way.
Wings has taken a unique and interesting approach when it comes to dating. They figured that instead of creating a site from scratch that people need to join, they’d just tap into the 500+ Million Facebook users and build a dating app within their eco-system. The innovation doesn’t stop there as when you join there is no super long, multi-page questionnaire. After joining the service will analyze your Facebook data and let you also connect your Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts to help paint a picture of who you are. I feel this is a much better way to build a profile for someone. Instead of a static survey filled out and frozen in time, your profile is dynamic based on the data collected on a daily basis.
After Wings collects all of your data they run it through their social compatibility algorithm which analyzes multiple personality dimensions of their users’ social profiles to find you a perfect match. Technology Review recently wrote a story on Wings and they provide some more background around the algorithm’s logic.
From Technology Review Article
All that data is fed into the service’s recommendation engine. That system combines Bayesian modeling, a type of mathematical analysis that lets computers draw inferences from huge data sets, and machine learning, where the more data and feedback the algorithm is fed, the “smarter” it gets.
The idea is that the computer’s analysis of your behavior provides a richer analysis than what you’d say about yourself. “We serve as our own blind spot in that it’s difficult to accurately answer questions about oneself without biasing toward recent experience, current mood, etc.,” says Sunil Nagaraj, chief executive and cofounder of Triangulate, the company behind Wings.
You can read their great full article on the service here.
It really sounds like an interesting service and if I wasn’t happily married with kids I’d love to try it out. I was thinking about it for this review but I think I might have a hard time explaining this app on my Facebook profile to my wife and friends. I do hope some of you readers give it a try though and post your comments below. Also, if one of you wants to write a full review of the service as a guest post here, I’d love to post it.
September 14 2010
Flavors.me Continues Improving With Latest Release
I’ve written about Flavors.me in the past, and they continue to improve this great Lifestreaming service. They’ve just announced a slew of new updates that include the following:
- Support for more services including Formspring, Digg, Tripit, Github, and Soundcloud with more coming.
- Custom Favicons
- Color Transparency
- Ability to refresh service-data on demand
- Option to display your favorite service on initial page load
- Rounded corners option for basic, widescreen and accordion layouts
- Control over footer position (contact/share)
- Ask questions via Formspring
- Brand new, hand crafted WSIWYG editor
- New premium layouts
You can find out more in their latest newsletter and If you haven’t yet tried Flavors, I highly recommend you do as it is a very beautiful and simple service to get up and running quickly.
Flavors.me Continues Improving With Latest Release
I’ve written about Flavors.me in the past, and they continue to improve this great Lifestreaming service. They’ve just announced a slew of new updates that include the following:
- Support for more services including Formspring, Digg, Tripit, Github, and Soundcloud with more coming.
- Custom Favicons
- Color Transparency
- Ability to refresh service-data on demand
- Option to display your favorite service on initial page load
- Rounded corners option for basic, widescreen and accordion layouts
- Control over footer position (contact/share)
- Ask questions via Formspring
- Brand new, hand crafted WSIWYG editor
- New premium layouts
You can find out more in their latest newsletter and If you haven’t yet tried Flavors, I highly recommend you do as it is a very beautiful and simple service to get up and running quickly.
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