16th
October
2008
Yuu may have noticed a lack of activity here of late, partly because I’ve been so busy and partly because my online presence (like that of many other people) has sharply veered into the realm of facebook. I hate to say it (because I really hated it at first) but I think the “new” facebook has ultimately turned out to be an improvement, greatly enhancing the social interactivity of the site whilst reducing a lot of the spam and the preponderance of silly applications that were dragging down the old facebook. They are all still there, but much more nicely compartmentalised. In fact the new facebook has also in my mind effectively replaced Twitter - it gives the same functionality of microblogging with status updates, but allows for a much more elegant way of replying and communicating based on these updates, and with a much larger “audience.” I’ll still cross post to twitter using ping.fm (in fact as of today I now have the Australian leader of the Opposition “following” me on twitter) but facebook is where it’s at. Amazing how it continues to grow, and penetrate into more and different demographics. Wonder if the creators of facebook ever imagined how far this would go - from a niche site for uni students to arguably one of the two most crucial sites on the web (along with Google).
The other thing area that facebook has tentatively moved into is chat, with the little web-based chat in the lower right corner. I’ve used this a couple of times now and it’s not bad, although a little unreliable. The potential utility of this is that if facebook is becoming your communications hub, then instantly all of your FB contacts are on your chat list. It keeps it all centralised. At present though, facebook chat is under-cooked and very low powered. If they want this to compete with MSN, AIM, Yahoo etc then they will need to beef up it’s features and create stand-alone desktop software so it will run when your browser is closed, allow more customisable contact lists, availability status, invisibility, file transfers, and ultimately video and audio chat. Not sure if this is their goal but the potential is there. For Mac users, you can go part way to achieving this using Adium, a neat and powerful program that combines all your different chat accounts into the one client - and facebook chat is one of those. So you can chat with facebook friends even without your browser open. Probably there is similar software for Windows, but I haven’t been bothered to look for it.
I’m not planning on abandoning this blog any time soon, but the chances are you’ll be seeing me a lot more on facebook…
Tags : facebook, Twitter
Categories : Internet |
15th
August
2008
Social networking - it’s the big buzzword at the moment. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many others are the latest extension of the blogosphere, and are reaching a much greater crowd for whom maintaining a proper blog would not be considered. Politicians such as Barack Obama and many other well known personalities are using these sites to their advantage. Even my wife now has her own facebook!
The two main sites I’ve used are facebook and twitter, which have different, but sometimes overlapping, uses. Facebook has been good for connecting with current friends and family, old friends from school and Uni and elsewhere, and even allowed me to maintain some contact with some Canadian friends I met in Uganda last year. The applications of facebook are myriad - from messages and chat (as Jen discovered for herself last night), photo and video sharing, through to a vast range of mini apps, ranging from the useful to the completely stupid.
Twitter is much simpler - you just post a short, SMS length message which goes onto a timeline of messages from you and your twitter friends. It’s hard to explain the appeal of this but it can be good for just posting quick status updates or having extended (though sometimes difficult to follow) conversations. A primary use of twitter for me (as for ob1 and others) is to feed twitter posts into my blog so as to maintain a level of activity here when I am to busy to create full blog updates.
And these are just two examples - there are plenty more other overlapping and different social networking sites.
The problem for some of us then becomes that if we are signed up to 2 or more of these sites it becomes :
- (1) a chore to keep them all up to date
- (2) difficult to keep up with the activity on all of them
I know there are some apps which attempt to solve problem 2 but I am yet to investigate them. However I have found an excellent solution to the first issue - http://ping.fm
Using this site you can type in your twitter style update (or a longer blog for sites which support that) and it will be instantly sent to as many of these different networking sites as you are registered for. As I said my 2 main sites are twitter and facebook, however along the way I have signed up with plurk, livejournal, myspace and several others - so this stops them from lying completely idle. It also has the advantage that I can update ping.fm (and hence everything else) not only from a web interface but also by IM and a range of other mini-apps, which is useful for mobile updating. Definitely worth checking out if you use any of these sites. Currently it’s still in Beta (though works perfectly) and you need a code to register. The current code is “pingitlikeitshot” but if you find that doesn’t work let me know and I’ll try and get you a newer one.
EDIT (Aug 16) : new code for ping.fm is “vivalaping”
Tags : facebook, Internet, ping.fm, social networking, Twitter
Categories : Blogs, Internet |
