Social networking services — one year on

Some of the problems of Social Networking « Alec the Geek

issues with this type of online social networking

It’s actually more than a year since I first blogged about social networking and the world of web 2.0. The web, and the practices that surround it, have moved on so I thought I update my thoughts as well. By a strange coincidence, just as I was starting this post I came across crazeegeekchick’s thoughts on how to use social networking — well worth reading before you carry on.

Generally social networking has been a huge consumer of my attention and time; and to be honest I don’t think the medium given me a very good return on my investment, except as a learning exercise.

1. LinkedIn has become an online list of business contacts. But of limited use because I can’t add my own notes to profiles. I have had some networking activity — but to be honest it has not made a huge amount of difference to my working life. I think now the number of people on the service is becoming so large anyway that it’s becoming less useful, but I hope I’m wrong
2. Facebook has become pretty pointless. I don’t have time to become a zombie and most of the other stuff I do use is not terribly useful. e.g. I just became a facebook fan of Gordon Ramsay — but so what? Nothing happens much.
3. Blogging gives me a certain amount of satisfaction and I often refer back to my old blog posts for information. I also know that a few people have found help from ramblings so I count the blog as a success. However it’s rare for me to get over 100 readers a day so it’s not a huge success
4. Lifestream (twitter, jaiku,identi.ca). This is very distracting and I need to find some way to stop keep looking at my friendfeed stream. However on the positive side it does provide me some of the support that I miss being a solo worker. It’s probably a good idea to whittle down my ‘posse’ to as few as 10 people to reduce the noise; question is which 10 — I’m generally pretty choosy who I “friend”.
5. Geo Location (e.g. brightkite, dopplr). I am just so over that. In Australia it’s hard to use anyway because we have limited network coverage and I don’t have an iPhone. I keep thinking they a potentially huge personal security issue as well
6. I have accounts on delicious and flickr which I find useful. Delicious in particular has proved very useful professionally and personally.

As I mentioned earlier the major upside is that I now think know a lot more than the general population about this stuff — perhaps I can become a media pundit? Easier than doing real work, talking of which…

Can’t help but feel a little smug

Smug

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hi-tech criminals target Twitter

Only those using Microsoft Windows are vulnerable to infection from these malicious programs.

It perhaps aught to read “… and are stupid enough to download unknown material” as well?

Having fun with robots on the Intertubes

The British rail system has deployed a web based interactive robot, called Lisa, to help people with rail travel enquiries. Much innocent fun can be had if you are not busy. For example…

You asked: Are you a train spotter?
Lisa says: I’m not a Train Spotter. But I do have some guidelines for railway enthusiasts, if you’d like to take a look?

You asked: Does it include how to avoid dressing in an anorak?

Lisa says: I’m afraid my specialty is travelling by train and I cannot answer questions about clothing.

You asked: But I need to meet girls and want help on how to dress

Lisa says: If you let the Train Operating Company know you’ll need assistance in advance (ideally, 24 hours before), they can usually arrange for staff to meet you at your departure station, accompany you to the train and see you safely on board.

Alec’s “stream of consciousness” posting set-up

A long with a lot of other sad people, I have been throwing my random thoughts onto the intertubes in the belief that they are of interest to people. In order to maximise the spread of mental drivel and minimise the effort involved I have spent far more time than I should investigating and setting up (playing with) various services and feeds to spread my ‘goddness’ far and wide. Here is how it works

1. I have conversations on Jaiku
2. I use twitter to hit as many people as possible
3. Friendfeed allows me to see information from many more people than Jaiku
4. ping.fm allows me to post to Jaiku, Twitter and facebook
5. ping.fm also posts pownce, tumblre, plurk, Identi.ca and myspace but that’s probably a waste of time although I do have a limited number of followers there
6. I do not post to LinkedIn as sometimes my comments are not that professional
7. Both Jaiku and Friendfeed also receive feeds from my WordPress blog, my Flikr photos, del.ico.us book marks and my dugg stories

So I monitor friendfeed for the ‘big picture’, post to ping.fm and watch jaiku for interesting conversations.

Handy Hack: Display WordPress post title correctly in Jaiku

When displaying your WordPress blog RSS feed (e.g. http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/feed/, as given by the RSS button on the lower right of this page) in another tool or website, it may be that each entry has the name of your blog where you would expect to see the post title. In that case change the feed URL to http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/?feed=rss (…?feed=atom also works).

Tested using Jaiku, but I’m guessing this applies in other tools that consume feeds.

Update 27/Aug/08 — also works with other WordPress installations (besides than WordPress.com) and is needed by Friendfeed

Which fuckwit thought this would work?

BBC NEWS | UK | Sex offenders face website bans

Sex offenders’ e-mail addresses are to be passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children.

As a parent of two young children and someone who has worked with survivors of childhood sexual assult in the past I am 150% behind measures that will provide protection to the young. However someone needs to educate polititions on what is effective, as opposed to measures designed to chase votes and lull people into a false sense of security.

All measures such as filtering, blocking email addresses etc. can be easily circumnavigated. They only effective protection is to physically ensure the children are safe at the point of delivery (i.e. the child’s computer). In the same way I don’t let my young children wander onto the road or alone into potentially risky situations, I make sure that I know (see) what they are doing online and educate them on safe internet practices.

As you can tell naive ideas as the one outlined above annoy me intensely.

Spending far too much time…

pinging data around the intertubes.

I’m currently trying to use Jaiku, ping.fm, feedblitz and email to spray the world with news of this blog post.

Is that self-referential?

Sage advice from Tim Berners-Lee

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web creator rejects net tracking

a warning for young people about putting personal data on these sites.

“Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.”

I’m putting this here mainly for the benefit of my son, although he is very responsible online. Hopefully it will be a useful reminder for everyone else as well, including me.

Thanks to my father for sending me the link.

How to present the modern way

Another presentation by Paul Fenwick, this time a lightning talk on Greasemonkey that was awarded best lightning talk at LAC last month. What is intresting is the presentation style, which we are starting to see a lot more at conferences. It makes a refreshing change from death by  Powerpoint

SaaS to conquer the world?

An presentation from Bob Worrall, CIO at Sun, on the the future of the IT dept predicts that significant in house application development and hosting is finished as we all integrate Software as a Service (Saas) offerings from various 3rd party vendors.

However, whilst we are seeing traction in this area, I have yet to see any significant architectural solution to handling the security and integrity of corporate and private data. Until that happens I can see that any significant adoption of SaaS across large enterprises will be a train wreck.

Wait for the first scandals as organisations and individuals lost control of their data.

Stephen Fry shows social networking as the same ‘ol, warmed over

Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Social networking through the ages

For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago?

This was exteremly well timed. I have been thinking over the last 24 hours about shutting down my LinkedIn account. As I can be easily found using Google why do I need to maintain a separate profile?

However how can I keep my address book up to date?

Lifehack 101: Get rid of facebook

I have decided to start 2008 by cutting out the serious waste of time that is facebook. My first life hack of 2008, I hope there are many more

The continuing of rise of the Web OS in 2008?

BBC NEWS | Technology | The technology with impact 2007

the rise of web apps that are flexible, platform-neutral and accessible from anywhere I have a net connection has made my life almost pain-free

Darren Waters of the BBC explains why Web OS is his killer technology for 2008. He gives a brief personnel and lucid explanation of why he thinks they are important. Whilst the idea is not new I thought it was a nice outline of what it’s about from a user perspective.

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Jack’s first foray into video publishing

Is it me, or is this really sad?

LinkedIn Web Store

LinkedIn, the social networking site for business wonks, has started a line of branded clothing.

Who would want to wear that?

LinkedIn as never been cool (or has it?)

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Intresting tool — will this increase the public commons of IP?

Slideshare.net provides a web application to allow the sharing of slideshow presentations, with verbal commentary, on the Intertubes. My fellow Perl Monger Paul Fenwick has published a great presentation on how to use Hiveminder for Lifehacking.

Hacking the meat and Second Life at the same time

This post is specially for my son Jack.

Jonathon Oxter has a video on Google showing how to connect the real world (electric lights, RFID chips embedded in the body etc.) to things in the Second Life game

It’s an hour long and very, very, geeky — but it’s Oh So Cool.

Some of the problems of Social Networking

I have got involved in a thread over on Jaiku about social networking, which I started by asking how people used it. It’s made me crystallise some of my thoughts about the subject as I have never felt the whole Web 2.0 thing can live up to it’s hype (oh — that is such a surprise!)

The discussion was specifically about sites such as MySpace and facebook.

I can see a variety of issues with this type of online social networking:

1. As one of the posters said, it becomes self selecting. You only make new friends with other members of the network or people you already know from other networks.
2. Currently it’s an issue for us grey beards as few of our social contemporaries are on-board. It significantly reduces how useful this type of service is
3. How can you separate your personnel profile and professional profiles? For instance I have my ‘professional’ persona at LinkedIn. I also have personnel information on facebook and it’s easy to think about types of information, or comments, that you would not want to pass from one to the other. With geographic separateness it’s easier to keep what goes on at the pub away from the office for instance. However with Google it’s easy to find all the information about someone, personal and professional.
   I guess it’s fortunate that my personal life is pretty boring :-).
4. The social sites are balkanised in the same way that IM networks are. I guess that’s an opportunity for the current generation of net entrepreneurs.

On a slightly different note, I am really struggling to find something worthwhile to do with services like Jaiku and Twitter — although I use them just to see what is going on (I may be grey, but that’s no reason not to keep up).

Accessing Gmail from multiple pop clients

Gmail: Help Center - How should I use POP on mobile or multiple devices?

If you’re accessing your Gmail using POP from multiple clients, Gmail’s recent mode makes sure that all messages are made available to each client

Update Nov/2007: Gmail now supports imap, which would be a better choice than POP for most purposes. Use imap in preference to POP if you can and ignore the information in this post

In Gmail default POP setup once a POP client has downloaded a message is no longer available to other clients :-(. I currently use my laptop, smartphone and occasionally an iMac for POP access to Gmail.

I recently found this very brief documentation on using Gmail recent mode, which is claimed to fix this issue

The documentation is not clear so my initial, experimental, set-up will be as follows:

1) Set my main laptop mail client to be in recent mode (Evolution), this has made it download 800 email again. I assume that is the only the first time
2) I will leave my smarphone in default mode so it only gets new email
3) I will probably make Mac mail start in recent mode as well.

UpdatedAugust 2007: I ‘ve made all my email clients use the recent:account@gmail.com format and it works well.

Top tip. Delete all the gmail pop email from your client before you make the change as it all gets marked for download again and you end up with loads of duplicates.

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I have a Spock account

In my current quest to understand more about the world of Web 2.0 I have scored a Spock account and I have three invites to give away. If you want one please leave a comment