Five Things I Meant To Blog About

You know how this goes – you mark it for later and then don’t get around to it. Maybe these wouldn’t have filled out an entire blog post or maybe there’s not that much to say about them, but they’re worth a mention nonetheless. They’re kind of awesome. This is no spliced in del.icio.us link list – I killed that long ago, please go do the same. This is a list of worthy links.

I’ve done this before, but it’s not a regular feature. Anyway, here we go:

• I found some hacker’s blog with a tip on how to get a 3G iPhone for $199 without a contract. Totally exploiting a loophole. My guess is that loophole is closed now, but I’m not certain. Anyone want to try it? It’s sort of a lot of work and probably illegal, so I think I’ll just wait to buy one later. 
• From CNet, a post on gAttach: “gAttach is a small utility that reassigns Gmail as the default mail account from Windows documents. With gAttach installed, selecting Send from Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Microsoft Office automatically attaches the files to a Gmail composition instead of opening a new e-mail in your mail client.” Oh hello! I totally needed that.
• From DownloadSquad: Last.fm integration into geeky media player, VLC. The pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 Media Player for both Windows and Mac now supports Last.fm (Audioscrobbler). To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber.
• You’ve seen FriendZone but have you seen FriendVenn? FriendVenn is a FriendFeed app that divides your relationships into a venn diagram of people who you subscribe to who don’t subscribe to you, people who both subscribe to you and who you subscribe to, and people who only subscribe to you.
• Another excellent FriendFeed script from the man who brought you the better recommended page and the better subscribed to me script. It’s the FriendFeed Profile. This script adds a user profile section on FF user pages. It retrieves Twitter and LinkedIn info if available and allows customization of which fields to display by editing the script and setting the variables at the top. Now I can figure out who all of you people really are. Nice!

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I’ve been looking into ways to get my followers in sync between the various services I’m using, mainly FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Identi.ca. It’s not easy. Of course there’s the Twitter 2 FriendFeed Importer, but ultimately, adding contacts is still very much a manual process these days. I tend to batch this process on a regular basis by going through my email and opening tab after tab (see?). This is insanity, actually.

My need for data portability is desperate. I’m literally wasting huge amounts of my time adding, adding, adding the same friends over and over again. If you’re my friend online, then you should just be my friend no matter what service I sign up for. I’m quite sick of it.

And for the most part, what we’re getting from developers are YAWA offerings – that’s “yet another web app” - instead of tools that help us manage the ones we have today. And because they’re these shiny new objects, we sign up, add friends, and the cycle repeats. It repeats because we’ve just proved to the app’s creators this is what we want. It repeats because we’re going to sign up for the next app, too.

So when I see someone trying to address this issue, I get excited. Whether it works or not, I’m excited because they care. They’re at least moving in the right direction.

I was excited about the post I did today on Genome. They’re trying to make identities flexible and portable, but did this get a lot of positive comments? No. And the ones left weren’t even that nice.

I don’t get it. Explain it to me, because today, I’m lost. Do we, as social media enthusiasts really only care about the next cool thing and not about the process of actually making these tools effective for the everyday user. Is that just “oh, ho-hum, that’s for someone else to worry about?”

I hope that’s not the case. Hey, I love the next new thing as much as the next guy (see identi.ca early adopter tips), but I give equal time to the problem-solvers, too.

So, on that note, here’s your problem solver tip for today:

From the same guy who brought you the Better FriendFeed Subscribed To Me script, comes the Better FriendFeed Recommended Page. It works by finding the subscriptions of your subscriptions and sorts them by popularity (mutual subscriptions) as shown below:

There you go, equal time. Something useful. That deserved a post.

It’s been a hectic week. I’ve had my sister visiting me from Paraguay where she’s serving in the Peace Corps, so there hasn’t been as much time to delve into things like usual. (Case in point, as I began to write this last night she came in to ask where was that website to find album art for her iPod? AlbumArt.org I re-googled for her. Yes, her American splurge was a new iPod classic. Apparently there are only so many episodes of America’s Top Model dubbed in Spanish you can handle.)

However, I have run across some interesting things this week that I’m going to be trying shortly. Since I’m a little behind, feel free to comment with your thoughts on these items if you’ve already given them a whirl.

1. feedly+delicious: The new Google Reader synced-up start page, feedly, has integrated del.icio.us bookmarks. As long as you’re running feedly 1.0b3.2 and the latest add-on, you’re good to go.

2. PicLens 1.7 Launches: Firefox plugin PicLens launches their FF3 compatible plugin with new features like Return to PicLens, Discover, and Shop Amazon (read more about these here). This plugin really makes you feel like you’re surfing some futuristic version of the web with its 3D Wall and 3D Video Search features. So cool it’s almost scary.

3. Torrent Relay: Will the next generation of pirates use their mobile phones to steal music and movies? If so, TorrentRelay may be their tool of choice. The software takes existing torrent links and turns them into http links instead. Give that nearly everything supports http, downloading torrent while mobile may be a real possibility. MakeUseOf has a walkthrough.

4. Mento Goes Mobile: Thanks to this SocialGeeks podcast, I was intrigued enough to give Mento a look, but honestly haven’t transitioned there yet. And now they have a mobile website at m.mento.info. I’ve never been 100% satisfied with bookmarking services. I want a simpler service that presents itself like a Google search engine that I can query. Hasn’t been invented yet? Oh, and I have 6 Mento invites if you need one. (First come, first serve. I just need your email address).

5. Blackberry Media Sync: Whoa! Seriously? iTunes to Blackberry sync? NO FREAKING WAY.

Image Courtesy of Crackberry

6. Last.fm Integrated Open Source iTunes Competitor: With lots of features, this cross-platform media player called aTunes that’s built on Java is worth a look. Of course, without the iTunes music store, it could be harder to impulse shop…which may be a good thing.

7. Fox’s Private Social Network: OK, can’t demo this but want to! Fox is pairing with social networking service Passenger to launch a private community for giving feedback on programming and marketing. Since I love me some TV and tend to watch a lot of Fox shows (House, Terminator, Bones, SYTYCD, AI, Prison Break Family Guy, Simpsons, etc), I think I should qualify. It’s like HeyNielsen! for Fox shows.

8. Earth Album: Mashup Google and Flickr and explore the world with Earth Album, a simple service that mashes up flickr photos overtop a Google Map. It’s no Virtual Earth or Deep Earth, but it’s still a fun timekiller. (Thanks, Appscout).

9. MyBlogLog Connector: OK, back to work…MyBlogLog launches Connector, your own personal social directory. With this, you can find missing links in your social network. Connected to one person here but not there? Connector will then take you to their page so you can add them. Once direct authentication is supported, they say they’ll then include built-in friending. Now, that would rock.

Plurkair: Now that I have an Adobe AIR app, will I actually start Plurking? Is plurkit better? Do I even need to Plurk?

The only question now is where do I start?

As social media enthusiasts, we’re always playing with the latest shiny new objects – we’re blogging about them, tweaking them, and putting them through their paces. However, it’s rare that we find new web apps or services that we really fall in love with. When we do – you’ll know. We’ll talk about them so much that it becomes borderline ridiculous. Services like Twitter and FriendFeed for example, have gotten so much coverage in the blogosphere, that those who never drank the Kool-Aid have become decidedly sick of hearing about their awesomeness. However, as of today, I’ve started using two services that I immediately fell in love with. I’m not going to say they’re going to rival the blogosphere insanity that Twitter caused – they’re much too niche for that. But they are pretty amazing.

The services I’m referring to are Feedly and Xoopit. I’m not going to delve in and give thorough and exhausting reviews because they’ve both been reviewed to death, but I’ll give you the highlights.

Feedly

First up is Feedly, this service/Firefox plugin broke onto the scene Monday thanks to Louis Gray. The service is a social start page, but unlike web 1.0 start pages filled with widgets and lolcat pictures, Feedly focuses on leveraging your Google Reader subscriptions to present you the news. There are many different views of your feeds available – a magazine cover which uses your own reading habits to show off the most interesting stories; a what’s new page that combines recent updates with recommended stories from friends; the wall which integrates Twitter and FriendFeed updates as well as other news sources like Netvibes, My Yahoo! or “Best of” streams of news. With Feedly, you can annotate, share, tweet, recommend, email, and search (thanks to built in Google Search) items. But the craziest part is that Feedly is 100% synched up with Google Reader. Read it in Feedly and it’s marked as read in Google Reader. This is downright incredible to me and makes Feedly one of the best web apps I’ve seen in ages.

More on Feedly:

• The Last Podcast: Feedly: Bring Your Feeds Home
• Scribkin: Quick News From Around the Net

Xoopit

Also on my radar is Xoopit, which got covered by just about everyone today. Xoopit is essentially a Gmail search tool. With Xoopit, you can search for files, photos, and videos by means of yes, another Firefox plugin. In a Xoopit sidebar loaded right in your Gmail inbox, you can view all your media hidden deep in your mailbox. Xoopit also offers integration with other services on the social web like Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, so you can easily share items with others.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with Xoopit – and one I didn’t see mentioned in any of today’s breathless reviews – Xoopit doesn’t currently support Firefox 3. Oops! Didn’t we all just download that yesterday? Yep, sure enough, no FF3. I found this out after downloading the plugin, of course. Script errors galore led me to the help page where I read that devastating news. 

However, they say that they’re working on FF3, and the service is so promising that I’ve subscribed to their blog in anticipation of the day they announce this has been fixed.

This is a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

What are the three hottest web 2.0 social services right now?  Judging by the latest buzz amongst early adopters, these services are Brightkite, FriendFeed and that perennial love/hate favorite, Twitter.  What’s interesting about each of these services is that Google is noticeably absent from the market. Or is it?

Brightkite is the latest in a string of “geo-social networks” that allows members to check in at real world places via SMS, notifying their Brightkite friends of their physical location - just perfect for those spur of the moment stalkings serendipitous meetings with your nearest and dearest. (You can read more about what Brightkite has to offer over at ReadWriteWeb.)

FriendFeed (for those living in the stone age or still pining for the days of Compuserve) is a ‘”social aggregator” start-up by a bunch of ex-Googlers that lets users aggregate the output of a large number of online services into a central point.  According to the FriendFeed FAQ, the goal of the service is to “make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information“.  While that sounds like a steaming pile of aspirational nothing to me, FriendFeed has been picked up enthusiastically by the early adopter crowd.  It can crawl websites for your publicly available information and it also supports a long list of sites with APIs such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Mixx and last.fm (here’s the full list ).  Part of the excitement - and controversy - around FriendFeed is that the service enables other FriendFeed users to leave comments on your items in FriendFeed itself, providing not just an aggregation of your content but an aggregation of comments on your content.

And as for Twitter… well, if you haven’t heard about Twitter by now you’re probably reading this page by accident anyway.

But What About Jaiku?

In October 2007 Google acquired Jaiku, the Finnish social network that was the brainchild of two ex-Nokia employees Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen . Jaiku first came to the attention of many when Leo Laporte announced on his blog in April 2007 he was moving over to Jaiku from Twitter due to confusion between Twitter and his TWiT podcast network.  The influx of new users was sufficient to actually crash the service (such is the power of the Leo effect).

Let’s check off what features Jaiku boasts:

1. A geo-aware mobile phone app that reads your location based on names reported by mobile phone towers

2. The ability to import information from a selection of website APIs as well as any RSS feed

3. 140 char SMS friendly micro-blog status updates

… not to mention a slick user interface and threaded comments.

However, following the acquisition by Google, the silence was deafening. The usually highly responsive dev team didn’t post nearly as often. The API went missing in action a number of times. The normally rock solid service often either crawled to a halt or regularly reported 503 gateway errors (a database problem).  The blog went quiet, although the developers raised their heads above the trenches in January of this year to proclaim “big things are coming” (‘We’ve joined Google. Now what?’).  In April it was announced that Jaiku was being ported to the Google App Engine, which goes someway to explaining the lack of development.  Unfortunately, the momentum was lost.  Users started to slip back to Twitter.  Developers just didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the API so there no was no widespread developer ecosystem like the one that sprung up around Twitter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Of course, Google does have some history doing the same thing before:  Dodgeball, anyone?

This has been a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

Today, our online world is very much a reflection of the "real" world - we have good friends, acquaintances, colleagues, mentors, peers, family, and others, all of whom join us online in some way, shape, or form. And for those that live in big cities, especially tech meccas like San Francisco, Seattle, or New York, those virtual friendships often intersect with the real world, becoming just an extension of what already exists in real life. However, for many other people, the online world is a place where they go to make friends - friends who hail from all over the globe, friends who will never meet in real life, and friends who, for all the camaraderie and shared interests, don’t really know each other.

The honest truth is that for many people, their online persona is only a fraction of their whole self. For various reasons, many people choose to draw the line between what is publicly shared and what is private. This concern for privacy is even more prominent in older generations, who remember the infamous case of Heather Armstrong, the woman who was fired for blogging about her job online. Along with her, there were many others who had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Even years after the "dooce" incident, sites like EFF were still recommending that the "best way to blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously," and provided tips on how to do so. This led to a rash of anonymous bloggers, who shared personal details of their lives, work, and relationships online, making friends with other anonymous bloggers who did the same. You still see this trend quite a bit in the mommy-blogger circle, where the writers went by pseudonyms like "Mrs. Tiramisu."

But then, as Web 2.0 took root, more people began joining social communities where the value of making friends and sharing your interests in a more open fashion was an integral part of the interactions that took place there. Web 2.0 was all about personalization - adding your unique voice to the community as a whole, where everyone benefited from these individual actions. It became harder to hide your individuality when services like online bookmarking exposed what you thought was interesting, networks like MySpace and Facebook let you share your personal interests and hobbies, and sites like flickr let upload your personal photos. People began connecting, and those connections felt almost if not equally genuine as connections that were had in the "real" world.

And yet, even today, as Web 2.0 morphs into "social media," the fact remains that people are still withholding information about their "true" selves. For some, this is done because of the need to present a professional image online. For others, it’s just a matter of just not being comfortable with revealing the most personal details of their lives for the world to see and for Google to index. Michael Martine of Remarkablogger dove into this subject recently, in an excellent post on the subject of what social media can reveal about you. It began:

Sorry, but I didn’t Stumble your post, even though you asked nicely and you’re my friend. Why didn’t I? After all, it was a great post about overcoming addiction. Sorry, but I didn’t Digg your post, even though normally I would do so. But I didn’t touch your Digg submission, which was a news article about the upcoming 2008 presidential election. Your Reddit submission on a religious topic? Nope. Your del.icio.us bookmark of revealing photographs of a beautiful celebrity? Nope…..With each tweet that I write, each @reply I send, I could be adding brush strokes to a picture I never intended to paint. It could be an unflattering self-portrait or it could be a joyful, exciting slice-of-life image of a real human being others want to get to know.

In other words, we’re carefully choosing the aspects of our personality that we broadcast to the world. A poll on FriendFeed confirmed this to be true. Some people agreed that personal life, politics, and religion were not subjects they brought up online. What’s interesting about these responses from the tech community is the fact that another online community - the political bloggers and blog readers - would have no problem revealing their political opinions online. Politics is the aspect of their life that they’ve chosen to share.

Of course, there were some who felt that they were "pretty much themselves" online and online friends knew them just as well as anyone else, but they seemed to be the minority. There was also the question of differentiating between who is just an online acquaintance vs an actual friend. That’s a good point, but I would argue that even my closest online friends don’t know me as well as my offline friends do. No matter how many different ways there are to communicate via the internet, there isn’t anything that compares to face-to-face interaction.

So, what can we do to be "more real" online? The conclusion of the Remarkablogger post had a few ideas including using separate accounts for public and private selves and/or using privacy settings in the services we use. Maintaining multiple accounts is a hassle, but privacy settings - if done well, like in flickr, for example - don’t have to be. However, it was their last suggestion that’s really inspiring: "Just Don’t Care."

While that may be easier said than done (especially for those who like their jobs) this is a trend you’re going to see more and more of in the future. Gen Y and the other digital natives don’t care. They grew up over-sharing and, quite frankly, they just don’t see what the big deal is. So what if you had an embarrassing picture posted online? We’ve all been there, they would tell you. They would think you were crazy if you were worried about putting a political badge on your web site or posting a curse word in your blog post. The rest of us, however, got a little anxious just thinking about doing so. 

Are we wrong for holding back? Outside of business owners who need to present a professional image, what is really stopping us from saying this is who I am?

It’s good to have programmer friends. One of mine made a tool just for me and he said that I can tell you about it now, too. The tool is called Feedpour and it’s the kind of thing any pro blogger would love. Why pro bloggers? Because for those of us that write professionally, part of our responsibility is turning in invoices that list our blog posts and the rate we’ve charged. For many, I would imagine this is a manual process. It had been for me, at least until Feedpour. What this service does is take an RSS or Atom feed and allow you to export it to XLS, RTF, or PDF formats, which you can download and save to your computer. To begin using the service, you just register your feed on the site, after which you can then export your blog posts at any time by entering in a start date and end date for the posts you want to retrieve. You also must specify whether you want the the data arranged by columns or rows. And last, just pick your preferred export format and you’re done. What a huge timesaver this is! If you have any comments or questions about Feedpour, you can send them in here.

Do you agree with this? If not, you can join the debate going on at the web site CreateDebate. The site aims to take the classic internet flame wars and turn them into a more civilized event. Debates can spring up around any sort of topic and the homepage features the hottest ones. Expect to see topics involving religion, politics, morality, and, yes even Mac vs PC. (PC is winning right now!)

Each user on the site has a profile, which automatically builds itself over time. Your allies, enemies and hostile relationships are tracked and a news feeds provides personalized updates. Debates can be sorted by most heated, most arguments, most recent, etc. and there’s even a handy "Research" section which can help you craft your arguments. Within "Research," there are articles you can click on to become the focal point of a new debate. Each article has a little RSS feed icon next to it - different colors for different blogs. It’s subtle features like this that make CreateDebate stand out as one of the better debate sites.

I’m opinionated, but I like debating via a blog platform myself. However, I can see where this site could appeal to casual internet "arguers," who like to just pick a topic and riff on it. The site is also well designed, so it’s easy to navigate through the myriad of debates going on as well as access the other features, like your own profile for example - a feature that’s often, surprisingly, hidden on some of today’s services. There’s also a Facebook app to check out, which extends CreateDebate out into your social playground. If this sounds like your kind of internet fun, you’ll definitely want to try it out. 

Oh dear lord. As if we didn’t already have enough with the war between Twhirl and Alert Thingy (and Feedalizer and bTittleTattle!), here comes yet another AIR app for Twitter/FriendFeed users. This one is from the makers of the Firefox extension, MySocial 24×7, and, like the extension, the app focuses on consolidating your social streams into one desktop app.

This app has a few nice features, like a built-in media browser and consolidated alerts, but for Twhirl devotees, losing one-click access to archives, directs, replies, etc. would make switching nearly impossible.

Out-of-box, I had issues with the app. Sorry, but I don’t have my FriendFeed Remote Key memorized, and even though the app requires its entry, there was no button to push to quickly pull it up in the browser. FriendFeed fanatics may know that it’s available at http://friendfeed.com/remotekey, but others will just be confused, and will try entering their password to no avail.

Another issue occurred after I entered in my Twitter credentials. I got a message that literally said "Some Problem." I imagine this means that I’ve hit the API wall, but at least Twhirl tells me that it’s "paused for 5 minutes," not "some problem."

There are also weird scroll boxes around the "Everyone" button (see picture with this post). This is probably because I resized the app, but that shouldn’t happen. Resizing also seemed to screw up the "Like" and "Comment" buttons, which now display with the text cut off.

However, there is one great feature of the MySocial app - the media browser, which basically means you don’t need a web page to view some content -  like YouTube videos, for example. The videos just pop-up in their own window for you to play instead.

It’s also nice that the drop-down at the bottom serves as a FriendFeed filter, allowing you to display only items from a selected service - like flickr, Google Reader, Last.fm, etc., but that alone does not a killer app make.

In the end, for everyday Twitterholics, this app may be fun to try, but it’s no where near being a Twhirl replacement.

You may have seen my post over on Read Write Web about the concept for Twitpitches. I see that some companies are starting to use this system and I thought I would feature a few I thought were interesting:

Tweetlater: This Twitter app lets you schedule tweets for a later date/time so it appears that you are always on Twitter! But even better, it can (in theory) be used to send automated thank you notes to new followers. I tried to set it up to send an automated public tweet to my new followers, but it kept thinking that I had specified the DM option (I had not) and wouldn’t let me auto-welcome anyone unless I auto-followed them, too, which I’m not going to do since they could be spammers! However, if they get that fixed, it would be a great service. So, A for the idea, but they need to make it work!

Toonlet: According to their Twitpitch, Toonlet lets non-artists create webcomic blogs featuring their own characters: http://toonlet.com.

Zebtab: A desktop widget to bring RSS to the masses. It could work since the masses love their gadgets, but would be better if it was also available as a Google gadget, Yahoo widget, or gadget for Vista/Mac.

Hey, remember Twitpitchers:

Hashtags is an opt-in service. You must follow @hashtags for the service to index your tweets.

You can get the Twitpitch RSS feed here.