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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.
December 29 2011
The Year in Lifestreaming for 2011
This year has been a tipping point for Lifestreaming. It has evolved quite a bit from the super geeky bailing wire and duct tape method of being a DIY project I started covering back in 2007. With advancements in technology, primarily through the proliferation of API’s, it has penetrated and mutated its way across the web. But the one place it landed to now become ubiquitous is with Facebook’s creation of the Timeline feature which has brought it to over 800 million people.
Facebook Timelines
There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.
During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.
The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.
Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.
As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.
The Year in Lifestreaming for 2011
This year has been a tipping point for Lifestreaming. It has evolved quite a bit from the super geeky bailing wire and duct tape method of being a DIY project I started covering back in 2007. With advancements in technology, primarily through the proliferation of API’s, it has penetrated and mutated its way across the web. But the one place it landed to now become ubiquitous is with Facebook’s creation of the Timeline feature which has brought it to over 800 million people.
Facebook Timelines
There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.
During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.
The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.
Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.
As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.
October 04 2011
Facebook Built the Timeline, but Will They Come?
I followed this Poll on Mashable that asked if people planned to go back to fill in the gaps of their Facebook timeline. There were 3,101 votes at the time of this posting with ~11% stating they will and ~60% saying they won’t. I find that 11% to be a pretty small number and surely not one that would make Facebook happy about the rollout. Sure it’s a relatively small sample size, and Mashable users may not equate to a mainstream Facebook user, but I think this number will be pretty close to reality. You can also argue that polling whether users will go back to update versus whether they will configure their timeline moving forward are two separate questions, I believe the answer will be about the same.
I stated in my previous post that:
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.
I also felt the timeline should have been a supplemental view instead of a profile replacement and if only 11% of users embrace it, then it will most likely fail miserably. It’s a distinct departure from both the current utility and UI of the service. I went through my timeline and there are huge gaps and the primary reason for that is that I don’t use Facebook as the hub of my Lifestream. Most of my content was posted on other services. Most of photos were posted on Flickr, my status updates on Twitter, my videos on YouTube…etc. Unless you’ve been using Facebook as the central repository for all of your social sharing, or plan to do so moving forward, then it doesn’t quite make sense to be your Lifestream’s home base.
This blog was created because I was researching tools that gave me the freedom to aggregate the content I created to create a Lifestream across various different services I wanted to use. I think many people enjoy that freedom and don’t want to be confined to the limitations of a single service and its limitations to do this. Facebook does appear to have built in the hooks to offer us the ability to cobble together a few custom apps that we will be able to place on our timelines (such as the spotify app) to provide a way for 3rd party services to power our Lifestream on Facebook. However I’ve also stated in the past that mainstream users won’t go down this path and Facebook could presumably become a Lifestream for them. With the rollout of timelines we shall soon see what mainstream users think of it and whether it will resonate with them.
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.
June 01 2011
Your Life Captured from Facebook and Visualized in a Museum
Today I came across a nice little piece of viral marketing courtesy of Intel. It’s a little project called “Museum of Me” in which you provide access to your Facebook account and in return get a fancy flash video presentation in the form of a museum tour based on your Facebook activity. There are several different sections of the museum that you visit all broken down by the various content and actions that make up your Facebook account. This includes friends you interact most with, your photos, locations (presumably from places checkins), A wall of words that appears most frequently on your wall, images and video from content that you liked, and a few other neat visualizations. The data doesn’t appear to be perfect and recent content is what is highlighted, but you can’t argue with the beauty of the presentation and associated music.
After you watch your gallery you can share images created from it on your Facebook profile. Unfortunately, you can’t share the flash videos created which is a major bummer. In face you have to manually go back to the original URL after playback if you want to watch it again. Based on how the museum shows a timestamp and uses recent content, I’m guessing you can come back later in the future to create a new experience if Intel leaves it up. In any event, it’s worth the time to try it out.
Create your own museum of me here.
Your Life Captured from Facebook and Visualized in a Museum
Today I came across a nice little piece of viral marketing courtesy of Intel. It’s a little project called “Museum of Me” in which you provide access to your Facebook account and in return get a fancy flash video presentation in the form of a museum tour based on your Facebook activity. There are several different sections of the museum that you visit all broken down by the various content and actions that make up your Facebook account. This includes friends you interact most with, your photos, locations (presumably from places checkins), A wall of words that appears most frequently on your wall, images and video from content that you liked, and a few other neat visualizations. The data doesn’t appear to be perfect and recent content is what is highlighted, but you can’t argue with the beauty of the presentation and associated music.
After you watch your gallery you can share images created from it on your Facebook profile. Unfortunately, you can’t share the flash videos created which is a major bummer. In face you have to manually go back to the original URL after playback if you want to watch it again. Based on how the museum shows a timestamp and uses recent content, I’m guessing you can come back later in the future to create a new experience if Intel leaves it up. In any event, it’s worth the time to try it out.
Create your own museum of me here.
March 22 2011
On the Rise of Social Magazine Content Readers and a Comparison Chart
If you’ve been reading my blog over the last year you probably know that I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing and thinking about social content readers. Actually, I’m pretty obsessed with them. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and last year finally posted my thoughts on the features and functionality I’d like to see built into a social content reader. Well a few months after that post Flipboard was released for the iPad and with its success they have now paved the way for many new entrants.
Curation is still one of the top buzzwords in tech. By connecting our Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts, These social content readers give us the ability to have our social graph curate the news for us. The problem for now is that most of these either only show us the most recent content shared by our friends at the time we decide to fire them up, or use a relevance algorithm that we can’t tweak. I feel we really need to see some more advanced filtering and prioritizing features built into them. I’m currently seeing a few glimpses of these features but they are dispersed among many different readers. Newly launched BroadFeed provides logic that is similar to Tweeted Times by ranking the news based on the number of people sharing it on Twitter. Newsmix puts photos and videos into their own segregated buckets where you can isolate viewing that content type in its own section. Lastly Zite and My6Sense use proprietary algorithms to determine how to deliver the most relevant content to their users.
Most of these social content readers are materializing as apps for iOS to follow in Flipboard’s footsteps but they are also hitting Android, the web, and appearing as extensions for browsers. These readers are proliferating for several reasons. I primarily find the rise of these as a way of helping fight the battle of ongoing noise in the firehose. Other reasons are that they provide a very clean and beautiful reading experience on the booming iPad / tablet space. Then the ability to share the content on social networks, bookmark the content, and save them to external services like Instapaper add another level of sophistication. Since these apps and web services have so many varying goals it’s going to be difficult to find one that will capture all the specific features every user wants. Many also see this category of apps as a way to democratize news by not limiting big media’s control of it.
In any case Flipboard, nor the slew of other apps and services have yet to provide all the features I’m looking for. Still, their popularity have almost cemented this category to skyrocket over the next year or longer. Below is a comparison chart I’ve created to identify some of players in this space. You can bookmark this post as a reference as I plan add more apps and services as well as update this embedded Google Doc as I continue to follow these closely. If you have any tips on modifying this or know of any services to add, or find mistakes, let me know in the comments.
Here’s the comparison chart and you can also visit the direct link here
On the Rise of Social Magazine Content Readers and a Comparison Chart
If you’ve been reading my blog over the last year you probably know that I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing and thinking about social content readers. Actually, I’m pretty obsessed with them. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and last year finally posted my thoughts on the features and functionality I’d like to see built into a social content reader. Well a few months after that post Flipboard was released for the iPad and with its success they have now paved the way for many new entrants.
Curation is still one of the top buzzwords in tech. By connecting our Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts, These social content readers give us the ability to have our social graph curate the news for us. The problem for now is that most of these either only show us the most recent content shared by our friends at the time we decide to fire them up, or use a relevance algorithm that we can’t tweak. I feel we really need to see some more advanced filtering and prioritizing features built into them. I’m currently seeing a few glimpses of these features but they are dispersed among many different readers. Newly launched BroadFeed provides logic that is similar to Tweeted Times by ranking the news based on the number of people sharing it on Twitter. Newsmix puts photos and videos into their own segregated buckets where you can isolate viewing that content type in its own section. Lastly Zite and My6Sense use proprietary algorithms to determine how to deliver the most relevant content to their users.
Most of these social content readers are materializing as apps for iOS to follow in Flipboard’s footsteps but they are also hitting Android, the web, and appearing as extensions for browsers. These readers are proliferating for several reasons. I primarily find the rise of these as a way of helping fight the battle of ongoing noise in the firehose. Other reasons are that they provide a very clean and beautiful reading experience on the booming iPad / tablet space. Then the ability to share the content on social networks, bookmark the content, and save them to external services like Instapaper add another level of sophistication. Since these apps and web services have so many varying goals it’s going to be difficult to find one that will capture all the specific features every user wants. Many also see this category of apps as a way to democratize news by not limiting big media’s control of it.
In any case Flipboard, nor the slew of other apps and services have yet to provide all the features I’m looking for. Still, their popularity have almost cemented this category to skyrocket over the next year or longer. Below is a comparison chart I’ve created to identify some of players in this space. You can bookmark this post as a reference as I plan add more apps and services as well as update this embedded Google Doc as I continue to follow these closely. If you have any tips on modifying this or know of any services to add, or find mistakes, let me know in the comments.
Here’s the comparison chart and you can also visit the direct link here
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 12 2010
How Will Our Online Lives be Preserved?
I’ve often given thought to how our digital legacy will be preserved after we die. Each day we continue to generate content and leave footprints on so many places online. One post where I delved into this quite a bit was “Thoughts on using a Lifestream to create a memorial“. The concept of the post still holds up well although some of the services mentioned may not. I’m sure we’ll collectively be putting more thought towards this and finding better ways to capture our digital history to share with future generations.
My thoughts on this were rekindled yesterday when I saw the poignant video A Life on Facebook below:
We are still spending so much time just making sense of how to improve the creation and filter the consumption of our digital lives being published online that nobody seems to be tackling how we can package the information to share with our grandchildren. I’m hoping as social services evolve that serious thought will be put into making preservation a goal in the future.
How Will Our Online Lives be Preserved?
I’ve often given thought to how our digital legacy will be preserved after we die. Each day we continue to generate content and leave footprints on so many places online. One post where I delved into this quite a bit was “Thoughts on using a Lifestream to create a memorial“. The concept of the post still holds up well although some of the services mentioned may not. I’m sure we’ll collectively be putting more thought towards this and finding better ways to capture our digital history to share with future generations.
My thoughts on this were rekindled yesterday when I saw the poignant video A Life on Facebook below:
We are still spending so much time just making sense of how to improve the creation and filter the consumption of our digital lives being published online that nobody seems to be tackling how we can package the information to share with our grandchildren. I’m hoping as social services evolve that serious thought will be put into making preservation a goal in the future.
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 09 2010
The Evolution of Likes as Social Gestures
I recently wrote about the emergence of “Likestreams” and how new tools and services are being created around our adoption of “likes” as a universal social gesture. Thanks to Svartling I came across this very interesting post titled “The like as interest and social gesture” written by Adrian Chan. It really made me give some more thought to “likes”, other similar gestures, and their implications.
Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookmarks — a simple expression of interest in a bit of social data. That is, a selection of one thing among many things, an expression simplified in order to communicate to an audience. Let’s break this down somewhat. For the Like isn’t a clear and direct expression of the user’s interest, or like. The reasons for this are several-fold. One gesture is not capable of capturing differences in degree. Clearly, when we like something, our like varies by degree A one-word gesture is not a linguistic statement. This limits the expression of interest. There will be ambiguity in the selection itself, owing to:
- The reason for liking is not provided;
- The kind of like is not provided;
- The purpose of sharing the like is not stated;
- The audience intended in sharing the like has some ambiguity (due to the medium);
- Any interest in soliciting conversation or commentary is ambivalent.
Adrian’s uncovers the many different contexts in which the like gesture is initiated. His post goes on to provide quite a bit more insight as you peel away the many layers of the like gesture and is worth reading. Since the Facebook like button can be placed on almost any online object it definitely can be a bit confusing to determine the context of the gesture depending on the location and provocation for the click.
It’s nice when the like gesture is an explicit action on a given service. If you’re a user of Cliqset you can now both create an aggregated likestream and view the ones from other users on their profile pages. Here’s mine where you can get a filtered view of only the items I’ve liked on Flickr, fast.fm, YouTube, and Twitter. I’m not sure of all the services supported here but it doesn’t seem to be importing my likes from Google Reader, Buzz or Facebook. Still it’s a great way to just get the data your friends have liked across multiple services. I just wish that I could get this in a single stream for all the users I follow. Better yet, sum up the same items that were liked by multiple people and prioritize those in the stream (you listening Darren? 
)
My likes from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and last.fm on Cliqset
Adrian talks about the ambiguity of the like and I also see many instances where that can be the case. In the case of Cliqset they are importing the explicit likes from a given service but there are also so many implicit gestures which could be construed as likes online as well. Generally speaking, every time I bookmark something on Delicious, or ReTweet an item, or Blip a song I am also most likely implicitly liking that item. In the case of Twitter, most users utilize the RT as a like gesture as opposed to clicking on the favorite button. I use Twitter Times to filter my news which is based on the tweets and retweets of links that were sent out by the people I follow. Implicit likes definitely throw a wrench into things and can complicate the process of determining likes.
Ok, this part of the post is going off the tracks and into another lane a bit but I’ve been focusing mostly on how the like could be used a gesture by my social graph to highlight content for me. I could see how certain aspects of “liking” could find their ways into other areas of our online lives. It’s a pretty strong datapoint that could become a universal and portable gesture then we could perhaps see them propagated based around the object they are in reference to.
For instance lets say I loved a song on last.fm that gesture of “liking” that object is limited to just that service and my social graph that I’ve built there. But that song may be available across many services and I may want my “like” to be shared to all of them. What if there was a way to associate an object to multiple services and propagate our likes to them. So what if after I loved the track on last.fm associated objects could also be liked such as the same song on Pandora, a video for the song on YouTube, or the song on Ping.
So for the example with Ping it shows how our likes can be used as social recommendations for commerce sites. Another cool example for this would be if when I liked items over at GDGT if they then showed up on the Amazon product pages. It would be great to see recommendations from my social graph on product pages when I shopped online.
Ok, well that’s the latest brain dump on my current obsession with likes. I’d love to hear what others think about the evolution of likes.
The Evolution of Likes as Social Gestures
I recently wrote about the emergence of “Likestreams” and how new tools and services are being created around our adoption of “likes” as a universal social gesture. Thanks to Svartling I came across this very interesting post titled “The like as interest and social gesture” written by Adrian Chan. It really made me give some more thought to “likes”, other similar gestures, and their implications.
Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookmarks — a simple expression of interest in a bit of social data. That is, a selection of one thing among many things, an expression simplified in order to communicate to an audience. Let’s break this down somewhat. For the Like isn’t a clear and direct expression of the user’s interest, or like. The reasons for this are several-fold. One gesture is not capable of capturing differences in degree. Clearly, when we like something, our like varies by degree A one-word gesture is not a linguistic statement. This limits the expression of interest. There will be ambiguity in the selection itself, owing to:
- The reason for liking is not provided;
- The kind of like is not provided;
- The purpose of sharing the like is not stated;
- The audience intended in sharing the like has some ambiguity (due to the medium);
- Any interest in soliciting conversation or commentary is ambivalent.
Adrian’s uncovers the many different contexts in which the like gesture is initiated. His post goes on to provide quite a bit more insight as you peel away the many layers of the like gesture and is worth reading. Since the Facebook like button can be placed on almost any online object it definitely can be a bit confusing to determine the context of the gesture depending on the location and provocation for the click.
It’s nice when the like gesture is an explicit action on a given service. If you’re a user of Cliqset you can now both create an aggregated likestream and view the ones from other users on their profile pages. Here’s mine where you can get a filtered view of only the items I’ve liked on Flickr, fast.fm, YouTube, and Twitter. I’m not sure of all the services supported here but it doesn’t seem to be importing my likes from Google Reader, Buzz or Facebook. Still it’s a great way to just get the data your friends have liked across multiple services. I just wish that I could get this in a single stream for all the users I follow. Better yet, sum up the same items that were liked by multiple people and prioritize those in the stream (you listening Darren? )
My likes from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and last.fm on Cliqset
Adrian talks about the ambiguity of the like and I also see many instances where that can be the case. In the case of Cliqset they are importing the explicit likes from a given service but there are also so many implicit gestures which could be construed as likes online as well. Generally speaking, every time I bookmark something on Delicious, or ReTweet an item, or Blip a song I am also most likely implicitly liking that item. In the case of Twitter, most users utilize the RT as a like gesture as opposed to clicking on the favorite button. I use Twitter Times to filter my news which is based on the tweets and retweets of links that were sent out by the people I follow. Implicit likes definitely throw a wrench into things and can complicate the process of determining likes.
Ok, this part of the post is going off the tracks and into another lane a bit but I’ve been focusing mostly on how the like could be used a gesture by my social graph to highlight content for me. I could see how certain aspects of “liking” could find their ways into other areas of our online lives. It’s a pretty strong datapoint that could become a universal and portable gesture then we could perhaps see them propagated based around the object they are in reference to.
For instance lets say I loved a song on last.fm that gesture of “liking” that object is limited to just that service and my social graph that I’ve built there. But that song may be available across many services and I may want my “like” to be shared to all of them. What if there was a way to associate an object to multiple services and propagate our likes to them. So what if after I loved the track on last.fm associated objects could also be liked such as the same song on Pandora, a video for the song on YouTube, or the song on Ping.
So for the example with Ping it shows how our likes can be used as social recommendations for commerce sites. Another cool example for this would be if when I liked items over at GDGT if they then showed up on the Amazon product pages. It would be great to see recommendations from my social graph on product pages when I shopped online.
Ok, well that’s the latest brain dump on my current obsession with likes. I’d love to hear what others think about the evolution of likes.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
Facebook Built the Timeline, but Will They Come?
I stated in my previous post that:
I also felt the timeline should have been a supplemental view instead of a profile replacement and if only 11% of users embrace it, then it will most likely fail miserably. It’s a distinct departure from both the current utility and UI of the service. I went through my timeline and there are huge gaps and the primary reason for that is that I don’t use Facebook as the hub of my Lifestream. Most of my content was posted on other services. Most of photos were posted on Flickr, my status updates on Twitter, my videos on YouTube…etc. Unless you’ve been using Facebook as the central repository for all of your social sharing, or plan to do so moving forward, then it doesn’t quite make sense to be your Lifestream’s home base.
This blog was created because I was researching tools that gave me the freedom to aggregate the content I created to create a Lifestream across various different services I wanted to use. I think many people enjoy that freedom and don’t want to be confined to the limitations of a single service and its limitations to do this. Facebook does appear to have built in the hooks to offer us the ability to cobble together a few custom apps that we will be able to place on our timelines (such as the spotify app) to provide a way for 3rd party services to power our Lifestream on Facebook. However I’ve also stated in the past that mainstream users won’t go down this path and Facebook could presumably become a Lifestream for them. With the rollout of timelines we shall soon see what mainstream users think of it and whether it will resonate with them.