Aug 21
Cloud Services David
facebook, google, networks, plus, social, socialnetworking, Twitter
I’ve been trying Google Plus for a few weeks, and I think it has promise. It gets right all the things that Facebook got wrong, in terms of controlling which groups of people you interact with and share content with. Add to that the awesome Hangout feature which gives easy access to video conferencing.
My gripes with it is the +1 system, which seems to be a confused mix between the Facebook like button and the Twitter favourite function. I’m still trying to work out exactly the benefit of the +1 one button in terms of interaction on Google Plus. Of course, the +1 button serves to tailor search results for you, based on your social graph. Whether that is a good thing or an evil thing is a debate for another day!
The thing I’m really missing from Google Plus is an easy way to share content with my Plus followers. At the moment, if I want to share a link with my Google Plus circles, I have to go to the site and manually post the link. Instead, I want to have sharing buttons (or at least a browser plugin) to have a one-click share, like we have with Facebook and Twitter.
The only social buttons for Google that are appearing on blogs are the +1 buttons, which do not send content to your Google Plus feed! Of course, the +1 button can’t do this because you have to tell Plus which circles each of your posts are going to. Therein lies the rub.
Still though, if you’d like to try out Google Plus for yourself, I have 150 invites. All you need to do is click this link. If you’ve read this far, a Flattr wouldn’t go amiss either 
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Oct 19
Mobile News David
atom, facebook, flickr, furtive, google, media, mobile, nokia, phones, picassa, s60, series 60, sharing, social, social media, Twitter, youtube
Nokia Share Online with Furtiv's added social media gateways for Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube
Furtiv, a new internet start up in Helsinki, is creating a service to be a social media gateway, making it easier to send content from your phone to all of the various social media websites.
Their first beta project is an addition to Nokia’s Share Online application. Most new Nokia handsets come with the Share Online application allowing you to upload photos to Flickr, Ovi and Vox. Furtiv uses the API from this application to create gateways to more websites, like Facebook, Picassa, Twitter (via Twitpic.com and Vid.ly for video) and Youtube.
They are using the open Atom standard to achieve this, and they implement it in such a way that you don’t even need to have an account with them. Furtiv’s presence is completely transparent, once you get everything set up by visiting http://furtiv.mobi on your Nokia browser. Further instructions on getting set up can be found here.
I’ve tested this service out and it works perfectly. To qualify this, I tried it along with other readers from AllAboutSymbian.com who read about it there. Possibly coincidence, or possibly with us all flooding the service, but there were some early teething troubles. This is to be expected with any new system, although the Furtiv team had it fixed again surprisingly quickly, so kudos for that.
The benefits of this service are clear to see. Being able to plug-in to existing services on your handset saves having to install any extra phone applications. It also saves you having to figure out how to use e-mail portals and mobile site uploads. Every site you could want to upload to is there in your phone’s own services. This has the potential to remove more inertia in the way of the proliferation of social media, especially for non-technically inclined users, which can only be a good thing. Not withstanding Facebook becoming littered with as much mindless content as can be found on Youtube!
You can find Furtiv on Twitter, @furtiv, and read their blog and FAQ. Thanks to @rafeblandford from AllAboutSymbian for posting a heads up article about this.
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Aug 31
How-To Guides David
applications, facebook, filter, social, socialnetworking, socialnetworks, status
Pretty much everyone I know on Facebook has had enough of seeing inane stories from their friends running the multitude of pointless Facebook applications. Well I’m glad to say that I was told how to filter all of this out from the Facebook home page, by fellow blogger, Mike Davies.
I’m posting this guide as I discovered that when I tried to explain to friends on Facebook how to do this, I couldn’t quite get the message across. So, like the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words!
Cleaning up Facebook - Click to Enlarge
All of the following instructions refer to the left hand column of the Facebook site.
- Expand the column by clicking “More”
- Notice the little grips that appear on the right of every item in the column.
- Using these, drag all the the types of post you are interested in (e.g. Statuses and photos) to the top, making sure that they all rank above “News Feed”.
- Once you have dragged up all the types of posts you want to see, click “News Feed” (this will then re-display all post types rather than just the last one you clicked on).
- We are done! So click “Less” to close up the patient.
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Aug 11
Editorial David
aggregation, Buchheit, facebook, friendfeed, social, socialnetworking, socialnetworks, Zuckerberg
On first impressions, I feel kind of sad about Friendfeed being swallowed up by Facebook, although let’s look past this.
First – Friendfeed and Facebook overlap on an area that is at least of use to bloggers. That being a aggregation and resyndication for tonnes of social networks (and RSS feeds). The key thing here is that this is the core of Friendfeed’s site, and you’d have to be crazy to not think Friendfeed do this better than Facebook. They certainly support more sites.
Second – Friendfeed can be private, but is like Twitter in that it is at its best when public. Whereas Facebook, imho, doesn’t work that well as a public profile site. I have always considered Facebook to be everyone’s own walled garden (have you checked your privacy settings lately?). So there is a dissonance here, assuming the two sites are going to eventually become one site.
Now, it could justifiably be said that Facebook has just bought itself a big heap of talent, seeing as Friendfeed was founded by notable ex-Google employees. However, that’s not of a great deal of interest to me, what is of interest to me, is how this affects me as an end user. At this very moment, the whole thing seems very mixed up. On one hand, while I do resyndicate all of my content to Friendfeed, I don’t actively participate on the site (but it was on my list of things to learn). On the other hand, it would seem a great waste on Facebook’s part if they didn’t add the functionality of Friendfeed into their own site. However, doing the latter would suggest the powers that be at Facebook want more public facing profiles, so as to attract even more users. Well, I’m sure that would be great for the shareholders, but thta’s not why most of us are with Facebook. See the news stories of people getting fired from their jobs because of some off the cuff comment they made on Facebook. This strongly suggests that, apart from that some people are idiots, people come to Facebook with the expectation of a closed environment. In short, Facebook is not Myspace!
A question which interests me, and only time will tell, is will anyone miss Friendfeed once it has been fully assimilated?
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Aug 1
Editorial David
facebook, firefox, search
Facebook search comes to Firefox!
Minor tech news, but no one else has reported it, so here’s me hoping to get the scoop
If you’re a Firefox user, you’ll be familiar with the search box in the top-right corner. Long-time users, probably know that the search box has a drop down list of search engines, other than Google, and that some websites offer a Firefox search for which you get an install option at the bottom of said list. Now, Facebook is one of these sites!
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