Socially Aware Christmas Lights
Hello. My name is Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) and this is my first official post on the theappslab. I’m an avid fan of all things connected to the Internet (aka the internet of things) and love hacking and tinkering away in my free time. This year I decided to join other folks in a social Christmas [...]
Readtwit May Reenergize Twitter for Me
I’ve been pretty burned out on Twitter lately. Its popularity has brought droves of spammers and marketers, a bit too chatty and self-promotional for my tastes. I know, social media and self-promotion are like peanut butter and jelly. Let’s just say, Twitter isn’t as small and cozy as it used to be. One of the [...]
Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K
So, we had some downtime overnight, not sure anyone noticed. Rich and I decided to make a couple tweaks to make the blog load faster. I removed Google Friend Connect, which didn’t seem to do much beyond create a static network with some infrequent discussion. I expect future changes to GFC that might be interesting, [...]
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 [...]
Oracle on Twitter
Even as we debate the ongoing utility of Twitter and other social tools, there are still ways to get good information from social sites. One easy way to cut through the noise is to use your personal network for recommendations. Assuming you consider this blog a trusted source, I have a couple recommendations for you. [...]
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 [...]
Citizen Journalism Gets a Test
Twitter has a pretty impressive list of news stories its users have broken and covered more accurately than mainstream news outlets. To name a few: Hudson River plane crash Iranian election riots Several earthquakes in multiple countries, e.g. Southern California, Mexico City Wildfires every year, e.g. Fall 2007 Terrorists attacks in Mumbai Virginia Tech shootings [...]
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 [...]
90-9-1 Rule Skews the New Web
You’ve probably heard of the 90-9-1 rule of communities, outlined here by Jakob Nielsen. If not, here’s the summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. News over the past couple weeks underscores this [...]
OraTweet Ready for Flight
I mentioned a few weeks ago that OraTweet, Noel‘s mirco-blogging package built in APEX, would soon be released to the public after he made some tweaks to get it production-ready. Today, he unveiled it. You can download OraTweet here. It’s provided free of charge, as-is, and requires Oracle 10g or 11g and APEX 3.1.x or [...]
Use Twitter to Leave a Comment
I’m so far behind on my reading, having been on vacation and currently attending WebVisions. Still, I noticed a post to the Disqus blog from last week announcing their support for sign-in via Twitter. You may recall they also support Facebook Connect, which I enabled back in March, and now you can also use your [...]
Twitter’s #fixreplies Boo-Boo
Update: Twitter founder Biz Stone has posted exactly the explanation we (all 3% of us) wanted, and I completely understand the hurry to rush out without fully thinking through the loud ramifications of the squeaky 3%. Kudos. You’ve probably heard about the Twitter @replies fiasco by now. Marshall has a good recap and explanation of [...]
Follow COLLABORATE 09 with the ORACLENERD
Wow, that’s a lot of shouting for one headline. I’m not at COLLABORATE 09 this year, and right now, as Spring reminds those of us in Portland why it’s so lush and green in the Summer, I think I’d rather be in Orlando where it’s in the mid-80s and sunny. Then again, like most conferences, [...]
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 [...]
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