Archive for April, 2009

Learning More About Google Profiles

Published on April 29, 2009 in Google, social media, technology and video. View Comments

I must admit that up until yesterday I didn’t realise the full extent of the functionality inside Google Profiles. Ive had the opportunity to spend some time investigating what they are about by playing around a bit with my existing profile, which I’m going to add more content to soon.

I’ve realised that some of the features could become pretty useful in the context of Google Friend Connect, which I’m considering adding to this blog soon to try it out.

Google Profile functionality includes being able to receive messages from anyone with a Google Account without revealing your email address to them, adding photos from Picasa or Flickr (which I’ve now started to do), writing a short bio (which I’ll add more to later), adding contact information and controlling who sees it. Links to other social network profiles, blogs and sites can also be added. As I edited my profile, it actually found and suggested other profiles of mine to add, such as Twitter and Facebook.

You can also show your location in “My Places” if you want to, which shows up as a map image in your profile. What might be good to have in the future is to be able to embed Google My Maps, video and other multimedia right into your profile page.

When you edit your profile you also have the option to use your gmail username as your profile url, or if you don’t have one you can choose an available username to be part of the url. My url is of course http://www.google.com/profiles/jjprojects

It’ll be interesting to see how Google Profile develops in the future. There seems to be quite a lot of potential there, especially when conbined with Google Friend Connect, to become quite a powerful social networking tool.

Real-Time Digg On The Way?

Published on April 23, 2009 in technology and video. View Comments

This is a half hour TechCrunch interview with Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. Rose runs through the four year history of Digg, which sounds like it has been a fun ride to have been on. He mentions that Digg now gets 35 million uniques a month, that’s some serious traffic right there.

Rose also hints at some of what he says are major changes on the way for Digg. He hints at some real-time features, saying “I believe that it’s time for Digg to get a little bit more real-time in nature”. This is interesting considering Friendfeed has just released a new real-time beta, as I wrote about a couple of posts ago. Real-time seems to be where things are heading.

Obama’s Call For A Renewable Energy Future

Published on April 21, 2009 in clean tech, environment, politics, technology and video. View Comments

As you can see in this video, President Obama has been talking of a race to a renewable energy future, and about ways to spark the massive transformation needed in the U.S. and around the world.

This kind of rhetoric is quite a contrast from the previous administration. Of course it remains to be seen whether he gets the necessary support. Repower America is asking people to call congress to let them know they “stand with President Obama and millions of other Americans in calling for a clean energy economy”.

Twitter Goes Mainstream, Celebs Aplenty

Published on April 20, 2009 in Twitter and social media. View Comments

Okay, so Twitter has been in the process of going mainstream for quite a while now, with the advent of various celebrities joining and enthusiastically advocating the network. I’d say it really started to intensify a few weeks ago when Diddy (@iamdiddy) appeared on The Ellen Show and spent a good deal of his time talking about how he uses Twitter all the time from his BlackBerry. Ellen then started tweeting as @theellenshow and even did a monlogue on her show about it. She also kept plugging her twitter profile and mentioned that she wanted to have a million followers.

Famous couple Demi Moore (@mrsktucher) and Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) have been on Twitter and singing its praises for a while now. Actually, as I’ve been consulting on social media for Earth Hour Global, I was pleased that Demi Moore tweeted out Earth Hour (@earthhour), encouraging her followers to participate just before the event in March. Just one tweet from a person with that many followers can have quite an impact in terms of raising awareness across the network.

If you’re on Twitter no doubt you’ll know (it was hard to miss) that last week Ashton Kutcher and CNN (@cnnbrk) were involved in a much hyped race to reach one million followers, which Kutcher won by a slim margin. Both got to a million, Twitter most probably got a lot of new sign-ups, everybody won.

If the fact that a Hollywood star and a major media company raced each other to get that many followers wasn’t enough to indicate that Twitter is going seriously mainstream, then Oprah (@Oprah) promptly got involved. You can’t really get much bigger than that in terms of mainstream media exposure. Although I haven’t seen it yet (but I read all about it one Twitter), I understand that Oprah did a show featuring Twitter, with Kutcher and one of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams (@ev).

Now please correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t remember Facebook getting this much attention from very famous media identities when it hit the mainstream. Back when Second Life was the social media network the traditional media was focusing on, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have seen Larry King or Oprah in there! Twitter is exploding in popularity right now. Many tv talk shows, newspapers, magazines and radio shows seem to be talking about it. Well known media personalities seem to be joining in droves to get in on the some of the new media action.

I have to say that the rise and rise of Twitter isn’t a surprise to many who’ve been using it for a couple of years, as I have. It’s always been growing at a fast pace. The explosive rate at which it’s growing right now is simply amazing but Twitter reaching a tipping point and moving into mainstream territory isn’t surprising to me at all. It’s always been pretty simple to use, you can take it with you on your mobile, and it can be quite addictive. My 32,000+ tweets attest to that!

Twitter has had its fair share of technical problems, especially when it comes to stability, but even throughout those problems it has kept growing at a fast pace. The question that remains now is, just how big will Twitter get? Will it grow and evolve to become a multi-billion dollar company? Will it reach the heights of Facebook, with around 200 million users worldwide?

First Impressions Of Real–Time Friendfeed Beta

Published on April 12, 2009 in Twitter, social media and technology. View Comments

My initial impression when I first visited Friendfeed’s new real–time beta was that it was too fast to be able to keep up with the flow of posts. However, after using it for  just few days and getting to know the interface and some of the new features, I think the new version is definitely a step forward. I’m really starting to enjoy it.

It can be fast but it’s become a lot more engaging. No manual refreshing of the content is necessary, that’s great in my book. The more people you are subscribed to, the faster the Home stream content updates. At present, I’m subscribed to over 800 hundred people and that can make the content update pretty fast at times, depending on the time of day. This fast flow of content can be managed with the powerful Filters feature, previously called Lists.

I have a number of filters including one for Friendfeed regulars, those people I subscribe to who regularly comment on and “like” posts. For the time being, I’m keeping these subscribers separate from those who just tend to feed in their content but don’t engage and interact very often with others on the network. I also have a filter for local (to me) subscribers, which I’m hoping will grow over time (hint, hint if you live in Australia or New Zealand) ;). I also have a number of other lists.

You can also manage the fast flow of content by pausing any of your streams for as long as you need to. This is a great feature when you want to read a particular post with a lot of comments (most of Robert Scoble’s posts for instance), or if you want to leave the Friendfeed site for a while to follow a link to a particular blog post.

 I think the “My Discussions” stream has also increased the amount of ongoing conversation. This now contains your own posts as well as posts from other people you’ve commented on or liked, instead of having these as separate streams. It’s good to be able to see these posts all at once, and to see these conversations updating in real-time.

The addition of direct messaging is also a welcome new feature, which I’m sure quite a few people who use Twitter thought was a bit of a stumbling block to starting to interact in Friendfeed regularly. Well, this and the fact that more people are on Twitter, so it’s easier to interact over there.

I’m not one of those in the one-or-the-other camp when it comes to Twitter and Friendfeed. I like using both, they are quite different animals. It should be noted that both have some good real-time features (love Twitter’s real-time search), and I’d say we’re going to see many more instances of real-time action on the web soon enough. I’m all for it :)

 Feel free to join me on Friendfeed.

« Older Entries