Risks in the Cloud
Channeling Floyd a bit here, I’m reminded of “Get off of My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones. I’m not a huge fan of the term cloud computing. Not entirely sure why, but I prefer using some variant of service, e.g. service-based computing or SaaS, because including “service” more accurately reflects what’s really going on in the cloud. [...]
Facebook Buys FriendFeed
So, I take a couple days off and Facebook buys FriendFeed. A bit ironic considering there hasn’t been much to discuss lately. Chet cordially invited me to comment on the acquisition, and even though I planned to anyway, let’s just give him credit for being the tipster. There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of coverage [...]
Do You Think Social Has Jumped the Shark?
Way back in April 2008, Paul remarked that Web 2.0 had jumped the shark, at least for him. For the last six months or so, I’ve been feeling the same way about social, which is essentially analogous to Web 2.0, but more focused on applying social aspects to everything. I’m not alone in this belief; [...]
Twitter for Reporting the News
The events surrounding the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death last week bring up issues with news reporting that I think are worth discussing. Granted, this discussion isn’t new, but it’s interesting, at least to me. Twitter offers a new channel to reporters, due to its immediacy and network effects, i.e. it’s very quick to publish [...]
An Interesting Trust Experiment Begins
I’ve been yammering on about trust as the key component to encouraging participation in online communities for a couple weeks. Today, Facebook opened its walls to allow search engines to index anything you publish, meaning the layer of trust can be removed, and all your updates *could* be released into the wild. The change has [...]
Measuring Influence and Reputation
The debate about whether FeedBurner’s inclusion of FriendFeed subscribers is a good or bad thing has me thinking how to determine a person’s reputation and influence. As I keep saying, trust is the key component to New Web. Without trust, it’s difficult to build a community around anything. Reputation and influence are the next big [...]
I Need to Use FriendFeed More
Did anyone notice a larger than normal bump in their FeedBurner stats last week? Last week, the FeedBurner numbers shot up from about 1,000 readers to more than 1,500. I’m behind on my reading, but so far, I haven’t seen this covered anywhere but on the FriendFeed blog. Some movement in subscribers is common. However, [...]
Implications of the 90-9-1 Rule
Last week’s post on the 90-9-1 rule was pretty popular. It bounced around Twitter and FriendFeed, and thankfully, Disqus’ Reactions feature allowed me to track comments on it. So, like any good blogger, I’m going where the traffic is. The 90-9-1 rule interests me for a number of reasons beyond the obvious applications it has [...]
The Race for Your Identity: Twitter vs Facebook
It’s been a while since I blogged over here, the last few months have been intense adding new members to my team in the national security group. We’ve been working on some really great projects that I’d love to talk about but I’d have to kill you. There is something new on the horizon that [...]
Connect Flirts with 200,000 Pageviews
April was a big month for Connect, if you consider 195,000 pageviews and 11,000 unique visitors big anyway. If you’re Facebook or Twitter, that’s a slow morning, but for our little network, which has a capped number of possible users somewhere around 80,000, it’s gangbusters. Since January, Connect has been growing each month, and I [...]
Musings on Relationship Symmetry in the Enterprise
The title sounds pretty highbrow academic. It’s funny to me. Anyway, I just read that according to ComScore, Twitter grew 131% in March. Insanity. That number doesn’t include international or client-based usage. While I read through my feeds today, I got five new follows, all from people I don’t know. Oh, and there’s the whole [...]
Disqus Adds Comment Aggregation
I suppose I blog a lot about Disqus because we’ve been using it here for a while. I’ve gone back and forth about whether we should keep it, especially after WordPress introduced threaded comments. Although I’m not in love with the idea of a) not owning the comments and b) taking a performance hit on [...]
Feeling Lucky?
I always find it noteworthy when a handful of stories about a single company or service pop up within a day or so. Usually, none of them alone is all that interesting, but as a collection, they sometimes form a story that I find blogworthy. This time it’s Google’s Web Search. Totally weird to see [...]
TweetDeck Adds Facebook, What’s Next?
As is usual during the weeks before and during South by Southwest, there are a lot of product announcements. I’m not quite sure how/when it happened, but SXSW Interactive has become a nexus of startup activity and geekery, e.g. Twitter’s first bump came when the service won the SXSW Web Awards in 2007. So, it’s [...]
Another Facebook User Revolt is Coming
Today, Facebook previewed changes it plans to make to their site next week. There are quite a few: A redesigned home page with live updates, filters and a universal publishing model (very much like FriendFeed’s). One minor change that’s part of the universal publishing box is changing the verbiage “What are you doing right now?” [...]
Bummer 2.0
I have a few friends that were avid users of Ma.gnolia, which was a social bookmarking tool, similar to Delicious. I had an account there, but never really used the service much. I say similar to Delicious and use the past tense because Ma.gnolia’s database crashed on January 30. They recently announced that all user [...]
What is Blogging to You?
This post on Mashable today about another WordPress plugin that can integrate and surface your FriendFeed and Twitter activity on your blog got me thinking about what a blog means anymore. Blogging used to be the ultimate form of self-expression (or navel-gazing, depending on your perspective) on the ‘tubes, but now, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook [...]
On Avatars
I found this interesting post from Hivelogic about avatars in Rich’s shared items this week. Turns out it’s both timely and exactly in-line with my own experiences and thoughts about avatars. Dan’s post is definitely worth a read, and to encourage a click-through on your part, I’ll only cite him when we happen to agree. [...]
Things about Me Meme Comes to Facebook
My wife and several of my Facebook compadres have engaged in the latest version of the “things about me” meme. Only this time, it’s 25 things and 25 people. You may recall about a year ago, I started up a version of this meme, a.k.a. blog tag, with the eight things/eight people format. If you [...]
Social Hacking is Primetime
No sooner had the ink dried on my post about tweeting with care, than my feeds yielded this post from TechCrunch. The short version is that a phisher hacked into some poor dude’s Facebook account, then whipped up a friend-in-need story and tried to sucker one of his friends into sending money using FB chat. [...]
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