05.17.07
Posted in community building, mobile, social networks at 8:47 am by Matthew Reinbold
As you may remember I was pretty bullish about Twitter. It seemed like a fantastic way of staying in touch with like minded people and staying motivated throughout the day. I even won business for Vox Pop Design because Twitter made me available, helped me network, and become fast friends with others. A quick scan of Twitter’s traffic the last couple months shows that I’m not alone.
Lately, however, Twitter users are much more likely to see the dreaded ‘network kitties’ than they are their social chums. The site has not been able to successfully scale to the demand of users (as one peer pointed out, ironically enough on Twitter, that when one update could potentially kick off hundreds of SMS messages the technical curve to support it becomes very steep).
As Duncan Riley, speaking on TechCrunch, says (my emphasis added)
It’s not just down time on Twitter lately that has made the service sit somewhere between frustrating and useless. Even when Twitter is up, updates/ refreshes fail, pages don’t load and third party tools can’t connect. There has been a lot of downtime.
I’m already noticing that there are decidedly fewer posts among my inner circle since the outages became worse. The disruptions cause a breakdown in what made Twitter so good at – spontaneous, geography free discussions. For many, one to many views of the kitty at work and they’ll be off to something that works. It would have been much better for Twitter to have capped their users (ala GMail when it was starting out). Limits not only allow the technology to scale gracefully on its own measure. It also provides a sense of exclusivity that can create additional demand.
Unfortunately, its too late to implement something like that for Twitter. The best we can hope for is that Twitter fixes their problems before any more people leave for functional pastures.
Permalink
05.07.07
Posted in fear/uncertainty/doubt, social networks at 10:17 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Apophenia had an interesting post up yesterday discussing a new site called BarbieGirls. If you’ve never heard of it I wouldn’t be surprised. I highly doubt that the mutednoise audience moves in the same circles as BarbieGirls’ intended 8-12 year old girls. However, the social networking site does raise some interesting questions due to its stated intent:
We also monitor chat to help ensure it stays safe and appropriate. Barbie Girls administrators frequently review reports of chatting in the environment and adjust the word filters as needed to block or allow new words or phrases. This monitoring is strictly for the purpose of maintaining a safe chat environment – chat reports are not used in any other way, and we do not save or store any private information.
As Apophenia asks:
What does it mean that an entire generation is growing up to believe that the only way to be safe is to be constantly surveilled?
In the comments I posted my reply:
I find it incredibly naive that, after 10 years of language filtering failures, we still have companies believing that we can control darker emotional outbursts with regular expressions.
If you walk into any online game lobby it doesn’t take long to see the creativity of foul mouthed players. Spellings are changed. Spaces are inserted. Language ITSELF changes in order to avoid censorship and convey the intended meaning.
Attempting to filter these tendencies superficially reassures parents and clears them of any legal ramifications. But it is foolish to think that an authoritarian approach to communication will insulate children from that which they weren’t meant to hear.
Of course anyone in the poddy-mouth filtering business will never admit to that – its not good business. That’s not to say I’m going to take my two-year-old and have him sit in my lap during Pulp Fiction. He’ll be able to watch those types of movies when he has a set of social tools and understanding for dealing with what he’ll see.
And it will be the same set of tools that he’ll have to have before I set him loose in any Internet community. I’m not going to rely on someone else’s content filtering algorithm to keep my son from being hurt online.
Permalink
04.19.07
Posted in Social Media, crowd sourcing, social networks at 9:52 am by Matthew Reinbold
I don’t want to belabor the tragedy of what happened at Virgina Tech; it was obviously a very damaged individual who methodically planned the worst shooting rampage in American history. It will be some time before the family, friends, and community surrounding Virginia Tech will be able to find closure from the senseless violence.
A by-product of those events, however, is the emergence of technology in the telling of this story. On one hand, as Liz Gannes reports, places like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal are essential tools for the students to getting word out to loved ones – “I’m ok” seemed to be a reoccurring statement. I found very interesting that despite the public nature of these forums those looking for a story – or profiteering from the grief – were quickly put in their place:
In many cases this happened through groups that are publicly accessible, in part so people who don’t attend Virginia Tech could see them. And on these same message boards on the highly organized and easily searchable site, reporters arrived looking for sources, and were derided — appropriately, in many cases — as vultures looking for a soft spot of a carcass.
Despite the fact that students were expressing themselves to the world, they didn’t want someone else to come in and retool those expressions for another venue. Despite the utter lack of privacy of the public forum of user-generated content, mourners expected to be left in peace. And the standard brusque “no comment” was expressed in a public forum, accessible to all.
More chilling is the multi-media CD (DVD?) of materials that the shooter sent to NBC. In the month preceding the event he had put together an elaborate video and text package. Rather than unanswered questions or the mute ramblings of a note goodbye the victim’s families are left with a leering, vocal testament to the madness that took them.
The package is said to have contained a DVD or CD which held a PDF document with embedded QuickTime videos, digital photos, and 1800 words of run-on psycho text. The contents of the disc are said to have amounted to a total of 27 video clips and 43 still photos, each of which was separately captioned.
NBC has had to walk a fine line. On one hand the killer didn’t send the material to the FBI or a spurned lover – he sent it to a major news outlet for the express purpose of having it exposed. Playing clips only seems to be granting him his final wishes and torturing those left behind. On the other hand, there are comments like Dave Winer’s:
NBC has a dozen Quicktime videos of the Virginia Tech killer. They’re sifting through them and deciding what to release and what not to release. This is wrong. It’s 2007, and it’s a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what’s on those videos. Given enough time the focus will go on their process, much better to just let it all out now, with no editorial judgement.
So what is appropriate here? If we have the technology to effortlessly distribute is it always appropriate to do so? Are there some boundaries that should be observed? Or is that naive in this day and age?
Permalink
04.05.07
Posted in social networks, tools at 10:42 am by Matthew Reinbold
In the past several weeks more and more details are coming to light about the next version of Firefox, the main browser competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Excitement is growing for two very seperate audiences:
First, development guru’s are jonzing about the possibilities of local client storage. While this is possible with runtime environments like the newly released Adobe Apollo, Firefox 3 promises to not require a seperate download and installation. How they decide to sandbox each application running in a browser window – that is, protect it from doing harm to the user’s file system, will be very interesting.
The thing that had made headlines yesterday, however, is a portion of the app called Coop. As Stan Schroeder describes it:
Users will be able to add friends directly in Firefox, and send them notes, images and web pages. The idea behind Coop is to move the popular practice of sending fun web pages via e-mail directly to the browser, but it’s obvious that Coop could become more than this…
Personally, I love little innovations like this – abstracting redundant functionality that’s normally implemented on a site-by-site basis and putting it into the browser. A prime example of this innovation already in Firefox 2.0 is their spell check. Why have every website try and implement their own version of this utility? It’s certainly not unique to a website. And by pulling it back into the browser level a user can now do much more useful things – like adding their own vocabulary that may not exist in a generic dictionary – and have it be available to any site they browse.
Coop promises to do this with social networks too. Why recreate the same social networks over and over again when what you really want to do is have them available at all times? Why build your posse in a closed system to talk about the wider web when you could just take them with you as you explore? Schroeder comes to the conclusion that Flock (the struggling social browser) may be in trouble with these developments. I would be looking more at sites like MySpace.com, Bebo.com, or even Twitter and ask myself how these siloed social networks will compete in an community environment that will become website agnostic.
Permalink
03.13.07
Posted in community building, social networks, tools at 5:46 am by Matthew Reinbold
As you might have read in my original post I was kind of disappointed with Twitter. Despite it being the darling app of the SXSW conference I was really unsure how sharing brief, one line statements as to what I was doing could be useful – especially when the time tracking is extremely generalized and the reporting lackluster.
It didn’t make sense to me until I had linked to a few friends. Once I began seeing other active people’s daily lists of accomplishments and activities did I see the real value of Twitter – a personal motivator. Working by oneself can be extremely satisfying but it can be hard to be disciplined – the only one keeping you from knocking off early or sneaking in a few rounds of Pirates Online is oneself. By not only seeing what others are doing but reporting back what you’re up to it creates a kind of active community – a friendly competition of productivity. Its similar to when I used to jog in college. Getting up early in the morning and running a few miles is extremely hard when you are the only one doing it. However, toss in a few friends who agree to run together and you find yourself making an extra effort – nobody wants to be seen as the ‘lazy’ one of the group.
If you’d like to add me as a friend my Twitter user name is ‘libel_vox’. Has anyone else picked up Twitter yet? How are you using it?
Permalink
02.15.07
Posted in blogs, social networks at 2:04 am by Matthew Reinbold
Recently Barack Obama launched his bid to be the next president of the United States. Along with his announcement was the unveiling of MyBarackObama.com, a social networking site for supporters. Steve O’Hear has his impressions on ZDNet:
The site invites supporters to create a profile, blog their campaign experiences, plan and attend events, find other supporters, and help raise funds for the campaign. Obama already has an official presence on Facebook and YouTube, as well as an unofficial page on MySpace (presumably created by a supporter) which currently has 36,674 ‘friends’. Of course Obama isn’t the only potential candidate to utilize social software (see my post ‘YouTube on the campaign trail‘) but is the first to create a fully fledged social networking site of their own.
While neat some very knowledgeable web folks have had trouble with the site. Fred Wilson, a great blogger and venture capitalist lays out the problems with the site:
So then I saw that they let you write your own blog. That’s smart too. But what if you already have one? No way to import my political blog posts into my profile. The people who are most likely to blog for Obama already have blogs. It’s silly to shut them out.
I think this dilemma is going to be faced by many ‘grassroots’ efforts going forward – do you build a self-contained silo or do you spread a thousand seeds to the wind? A silo provides a controlled environment where messages can be carefully monitored, active users rewarded, and antagonizers clearly cut out. Letting self-forming groups build with whatever tools and platforms they’re comfortable with creates a more ‘authentic’ feel, acts as a natural extension of what those people are already doing, and offers functionality that may not be possible with one central system.
The answer, of course, is having both. But both systems need to feed and nurture each other; the central site provides video, photos, scheduling, etc. to keep the individuals primed. And it must also provide aggregation of the best back into itself – it validates user efforts and encourages extra effort. That creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that grows with every iteration. That’s something that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment with MyBarackObama.
Permalink
12.19.06
Posted in social networks at 2:07 am by Matthew Reinbold
As I mentioned yesterday Time Magazine made social content makers its ‘person’ of the year. Tonight, by way of the mashable blog comes Google’s list of top search terms. Incredibly four of the top 10 are some kind of social network.
The top ten are:
1. bebo (very popular in England and with anti-Myspace hipsters)
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe (anybody used/seen this one? I’ve heard of it but never joined)
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia (everyone’s favorite source of breaking info on KFed)
7. video
8. rebelde (wtf? is this some Spanish language thing?)
9. mininova (arrh! here be da pirates!)
10. wiki (while not a specific social network, its the tech behind many)
Meanwhile, in another corner of cyberspace, Khoi Vinh posits that the days of the ponderous, large social networks are numbered. From his site:
These networks will continue to thrive, no doubt, and continue to be influential. But it seems to me that next year what weÂ’ll see is the emergence of the post-social Internet, in which the tools of social networking take on the qualities of ubiquitous givens, and in which the previous style of expansive, cross-demographic digital hubs like those mentioned above are going to be joined by a score of smaller, more focused niche networks catering to narrower tastes.
And thus the rub:
The question IÂ’ve always asked is: how many of these networks can a single user remain faithful to? In this coming world where everything will include some form of social networking, I have to scratch my head and wonder if IÂ’ll be able to remain current on anything more than two or three of them. Who has the time for more, if even that many?
*sigh. I can personally relate to this. Over the course of 2006 I’ve found myself behind four different ‘communities’ – mutednoise (social media), Bloomburst (software development), MilitantGeek (TShirt and Tech Commentary), and CodeAway.org (programmer socializing and web working). To date they’ve all grown out of my natural curiosity. However, it’s really too much for just one individual to due justice to. What makes each valuable and interesting to read on a daily basis is constant updates. The obvious solution is to bring other contributors. But odds are those that are interested in writing are already off doing their own thing. Professional media networks get around this by paying for content. Of course, if the sites made the kind of money where I could pay for other authors I would be able to spend much more time on them myself. 
What’s someone with too many domains and not enough time to do? If micro networks are the future how will anyone keep up?
Permalink