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 13
Editorial David
bookmarking, social, Twitter, url
Posting your Delicious links to Twitter
If you are a user of Delicious and Twitter, then the lovely people who develop the former have snuck in a very clever new feature to help you bring the two together. While you are adding a page to delicious you now get an extra field to fill in, “Send” which covers your delicious contacts, someone’s email address and yes, your twitter account. Selecting the latter opens up a message box for you to type your accompanying ‘tweet’.
When your post is added to Twitter, your message is posted along with a short-code URL; something that should be familiar to most web users these days. As a way of stamping their own brand on this, the short-code is from their own domain, “icio.us”, which does give your tweet a certain air of exclusivity.
This has come hot on the heels of flickr adding thier own flic.kr short codes for tweeting photos directly from your flickr account.
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Aug 12
Editorial David
communication, micro-blogging, social, socialnetworks, Twitter
Last week, Twitter was brought down by a denial of service attack, and yes, shock horror, no one could post to Twitter. To be sarcastic about this, you could say oh no, we can’t post pointless information about our lives which nobody cares about anyway and that national productivity shot up. In a lot of cases, this was frankly true.
Resistance is futile, you will join Twitter!
Although, I think there was another effect which only regular participants of Twitter would understand. We were all suddenly disconnected. I noticed quite a few people either posting more to Facebook or forums, as a substitute for Twitter. I think this hints at the subconscious need we build on these web services. First of all, if you are so inclined to talk about yourself, then there was no where for you to share your thoughts during the day. No matter who answers you, you know that on Twitter there’s always at least someone out there, who’s going to see what you want to say, which is kind of comforting, if you are so inclined.
Conversely, if you’re so into Twitter that you have a desktop or mobile application where you see a constant, automatically updated, stream of Tweets from those who you follow, you get used to seeing what other people are thinking, to which you may or may not react, or find useful. This is something I have started to think of as the hive mind, not unlike a “borg” from Star Trek being linked to The Collective.
When I put it like this, Twitter sounds suddenly unhealthy, although last time I checked I didn’t have any metallic implants sicking out of me. I really do think that this is in fact a great show of how dependant we are on the internet, and that it is actually a good thing. The internet itself is just a thing, what we are in fact dependant upon is having connections to each other regardless of geographic distance. I don’t know about you, but I think that is an incredibly powerful idea, so long live the dependance, and let’s dissolve those national boundaries!
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