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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Oct 24
Website Updates David
friendfeed, retaggr, sidebar, wordpress
Even though we’ve officially launched, I’m still tweaking around the look of this blog. Do expect this sort of thing to continue for, like, ever 
Anyway here’s what I’ve done to save you going crazy looking for differences:
- I’ve set up with Feedburner and edited the theme to point at my Feedburner feeds accordingly. I’ve done three Feedburner feeds, one for the blog, one for comments and the other for my Friendfeed. You can access them all via your browser’s feed auto-discovery system. I’ve also linked the Feedburner feed of the blog into the big Subscribe link in the top right of this theme.
- I’ve expanded the set of Web2.0 icon links in that sidebar widget over there, top-right. I’ve now split them up into named categories, and I’ve also added a couple of badges underneath.
- Speaking of badges in the top widget. The contact me page has gone. The contact page was merely displaying my Retaggr card, so I’ve now put an image link which you can click to display said card. It seemed a worthwhile trade, a static page for a sidebar badge. Let me know if you think it’s cluttered.
- The “About” page has been renamed to “About David”, for obvious reasons.
- I’ve also suspended the “miniBlog” page, which displayed the entries of my Friendfeed. I haven’t deleted it, merely marked it as “pending review”. I wasn’t sure if the page was too unweidly to make sense of. I also reasoned that if someone knew enough about current web services to know what a Friendfeed was, then they could just click the icon in my sidebar and go directly to my Friendfeed page, rather than seeing a much rougher Javascript rendered version on my site.
So all in all, I’m two static pages down, and just up a little by some sidebar clutter
Feedback is welcomed, as ever.
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Oct 20
Personal David
digg, facebook, firefox, friendfeed, google reader, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, tags
Last night I started thinking about a topic that could become a substantial future article on this blog. That topic was social bookmarking. This has been a subject that’s been creeping up on me more and more recently, the more I’ve used web services like Digg and Friendfeed.
Not so long ago, I made a rant against social bookmarking in that I did not care what other people were reading, and I expected the feeling was mutual. So, what changed? Well, some sort of sense of wanting to participate in large networks, and also I desire to self-promote. Let me clarify that, I didn’t want to get into social bookmarking simply to promote my own content; no, I was more thinking along the lines of enhancing my internet reputation.
What you soon discover if you look at any blog or news site, is that according to all those strange little icons you see at the end of an article (this blog has them too), that there are lots of them out there. Surely this indicates that there is a great deal of redundancy and repetition out there. Well yes, but also, if you look at all the big names, sure they publicly list user-recommended sites, but they all do have slightly different angles on how they do it. Being of a vaguely mathematical mindset, seeing all this chaos made me want to dig into them all and try to find some structure. The primary question in my mind being “When should I use which?“. Of course, the tacit assumption here being that surely not one system could be the best, most optimal, site that everyone should use!
Aha! I had myself a research project on. First step in such an exercise is not to bite off more than you can chew, therefore limit the scope of what you are looking at. Therefore, I picked what I thought were the most distinct social bookmarking services out there. Some I already participate in, some would be new to me. So here are services I’m looking into:
Friendfeed’s presence on that list is debatable, but I definitely believe it has an important role to play, even if I don’t yet understand it fully (and I confess to being a fan of the site).
In looking into this subject, it got me thinking about my own browser bookmarks. I firmly believe that my browser bookmarks are private to me. Social bookmarks are public, browser bookmarks are private. I’d be interested to hear arguments against this point of view, but that is the basis that I am working on. I digress, in relation to my own private bookmarks, I started thinking about organisation. Much as I was a sceptic about it, Firefox 3’s awesome bar and bookmark tags is really starting to change how I think about things.
I once asked a while ago on Twitter, when would people use tags and when would they use folders for organising arbirary objects. The answer I got back was to use folders only when hieracy was important (I apologise for not citing the tweet, but it’s a while ago and I cannot remember who said it).
So I shall ask you the reader, is hierarchy important to how you store your browser bookmarks? At the moment, my mind is somewhat swirling in the idea. That is because I have some sets of bookmarks where hierarchy does matter, but others wouldn’t matter so much.
I can imagine that hieracy certainly would not matter in a public/social context, which is exactly what Delicious does, it works solely on tags.
Anyway, I would love comments on this subject, and I shall continue to look into the subject with the aim of publishing a comprehensive review.
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Sep 25
Website Updates David
friendfeed, static pages, wordpress
In an attempt to organise and relieve the sidebar of information/links I want to share, I have two new static pages.
- miniBlog : This simply shows my Friendfeed (via the Friendfeed widget). I mentioned earlier, that it’s called “miniBlog” as it’s more than a micro-blog (i.e. Twitter), but it’s less than a blog. So mini is between micro and full.
- Links : Here I have taken the favicon links that were atop of the sidebar and but them as a simple list.
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Sep 17
Website Updates admin
blogging, friendfeed, hosting, theme, widgets
Okay, so here is my second attempt at a Wordpress blog. The first one disappeared into a failing hard drive last week. I should also say, many thanks to my old friend and host, Ryan Hitch, who has given me this space while I teach myself how to use Wordpress.
Fortunately, I had saved the HTML of the two static pages I’d written on the first blog, so they are here now in their original form.
I will just say for anyone reading this for the first time, that this site (www.digitalranger.org.uk) is my test site. I’m learning Wordpress here and working on designs, when I have achieved some level of competancy and have a design I like, it will be going to “www.davidgilson.co.uk“.
The only different thing I’ve done so far is that I’ve installed a Widget (go me!), to display my “FriendFeed”. In other words I’m showing a feed of all of my activities on other sites. I’m happy with it, although what I don’t like is that is showing all of the photos I’ve uploaded in each batch to Flickr, making the whole thing longer than it needs to be.
The next thing I need to do is look at some themes. I have some downloaded from Wordpress.org and other sites.
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