Who Likes Me?

In my previous entry, Fun with Facebook, I described how to pull data from Facebook’s Graph API Explorer, organize it using NodeBox, and turn it into representations of friends, posts, and the “likes” that connect them. Here is the final result: The above image is a snapshot of a high-resolution poster with many fine details.… Read More

Fun With Facebook

I am often surprised by which of my Facebook posts are the most liked and by who likes what. I wondered: are there any interesting patterns there? Could I visualize them? My next question (as always) was: could I get the data? Thanks to the rise of  the API economy I could. Companies have discovered… Read More

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.… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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.… Read More