Library clips

The other week I posted on searching your social filter, and your blog network as your social filter, one of the main players in this field is Lijit, where you can search across your lifestream and Reading List. You can also add others Lijit users to your search filter, so you are searching across the filter of you and someone else, or you could just choose to visit that other users profile and search their Lijit.

Anyway the purpose was that social filtering is a way to deal with the enormity of the web, and achieve some quality by searching people you trust as a filter. These people you trust have interests similar to yours, people you admire, people that are experts in a field, so searching across these people you know is a perfect filter. If you are researching a new interest, you may search an expert locator/lifestream service like Lijit or Ziki and find someone’s profile and search their filter.

Social filter can work in other ways other than search, we can share our RSS Reader subscriptions on the sidebar of our blogs by using a Grazr widget, or join a RSS Reader social network like FeedEachOther or Streamy and browse someones profile, read their feed subscriptions and share links…or share your OPML at an exchange type service like SYO.

BlogRovr

Another way to use a social filter is BlogRovr, which I briefly mentioned a little while back.
This totally unique tool built on a simple idea has become an instant addition to my regular web 2.0 daily experience.

How it works?

Upload a bunch of feeds by importing your OPML Reading List.

From now on when you browse the web, if any of the subscriptions in your Reading List have, in one of their blog posts, linked to the webpage you are currently on, you will be able to read these blog posts.

How cool is that…surf to anypage on the web, and pleasantly be told if people you trust have talked about this site in the past.

If there is breaking news about an article or a new website, instead of searching your RSS Reader to see who has posted about it, just surf to the webpage everyone is talking about, and BlogRovr will tell and show who in your OPML has posted about it.

Now I’m coming to the purpose of this post…what if I want to see who else other than people in my OPML is talking about the newest hot website.

I guess I could consult a memetracker like TechMeme or megite.

NOTE: Megite also allows you to personalise a memetracker to your OPML.

Back to it…

What if at the BlogRovr website I could add friends, not really a social network, but just making a favourites list.

When I am reading a webpage, I could ask BlogRovr to show me content through someone else’s eyes.

eg. I’m reading a webpage about the latest web 2.0 product

- BlogRovr tells me who in my OPML has already posted about this product

- I can ask BlogRovr, who else has posted about this product according to friends A’s OPML,

- and I wonder if there are any posts from friends B’s OPML, and so on

- and maybe saying, show me posts about this webpage from all my BlogRovr friends, or just a group of my BlogRovr friends

This way I can surf the web and get reviews not just throught my immediate social filter, but the social filters of my friends.

What about mashing up BlogRovr and Techmeme…Adam Green already has a mashup where he can make a dynamic OPML of the sources that have a current post on TechMeme.

If I was looking at a webpage, I could ask BlogRovr, tell me if any of the sources that have a current post on TechMeme have posted about this page I’m viewing.

Same goes with the TechMeme Leaderboard, a Top 100 list of TechMeme sources.

When I’m on a webpage I could ask BlogRovr, tell me who has posted about this webpage from people in the TechMeme Leaderboard.

What about topics, I could ask BlogRovr, who in the Technorati blog topic “wiki” has posted about this webpage I’m on.

Any thoughts?

[ADDED: If you include your own blog feed into BlogRovr…you can find out which of all your blog posts have linked to one of your blog posts]

[ADDED: BlogRovr is a feature of a bigger product called Stickis…annotate the page you are on, and see other stickis people who have already annotated the page you are on…see more. Basically a sticky note blog social network.]

[ADDED: While we are there why not include some type of live impressions of a webpage, by being able to chat with others on the same page…a la Gabbly, Others Online, etc… NOTE: medi.um is more than this as you can click on a friends profile to see where there at, and join them at that webpage and chat, and then browse to other webpages together.]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Blogbar : search your outlink sources]

I posted on Spark open source instant messaging the other day, when I went to consult their help page, I got a pleasant surprise…it wasn’t a FAQ, it wasn’t a forum, it was a mixture of social networking and communities.

The Ignite Community uses Jive’s Clearspace service for forums and network blogs, I’ve posted on Clearspace before, but here is another look at a live example.

Community home page

- a list of community under community topics
- members
- tags
- polls
- What’s new stream with an RSS feed
(each piece of new content is identified by an icon; forum post, blog post, or new document…you can also limit the view to one of these content types…each new item has a link to the content source and the author)
- each content set on this homepage has a link to its own page

A selected community eg. Support

- this has sub-communities
- recent discussions (forum and blog posts)
- recent documents
- see just blog posts
- tag cloud
- top members

Also see a sub-community eg. Spark Support

Here is a random user profile.

- latest blog posts
- latest forum posts
- latest documents
- send an email
- send a private message
- lacks a comment wall
- tag cloud
- list of blogs this user owns
- RSS feed for this user

You can also have a watchlist to be updated on content of your choice.

Blogs

I tried to create a blog, but I couldn’t find how, I could only add a document or forum topic…when I add a forum topic it asks what community I want to add this to.

So I don’t really know how blogs fit into the scheme of things with Clearspace.

Perhaps each community has a few group blogs, and just like forums, when you add a new blog post, it asks which blog you would like to add it to…this means a blog is not personal, but confined to a community.

Perhaps each user has a personal blog, and when you add a post you can also decide if you want to send it to a community as well.

Perhaps a bit of both, each user can have a personal blog and send posts to community pages, and a community may also have resident blogs.

I see this as social network blogging co-existing with communities.

Related:
Blogs : the many ways “many” come together
Bandwidth and community platforms

Just been playing with Ignite’s Spark Enterprise Instant Messaging (IM), and am really impressed, although I haven’t played around with others so I can’t compare eg. Communicator, Parlano, etc…

Spark Features

- IM chat
- multiple one-on-one chat in tabs
- profiles
- on-the-fly conference chat
- on-the-fly one-on-one private chat with conference attendees
- public/private persistent chat rooms
- message blasts
- poke/alert (makes your IM chat box “buzz” or “shake”)
- contact list with create your own presence/status indicators
- create groups for contacts
- instant screenshots and send
- send files (drag and drop)
- VOIP
- conversation archive
- tasks
- notes
- pop up toast
- plug ins

etc…

What I like is persistent chat, instead of chat sessions…when you click on a friends name you can see all the conversation organised by date. So if you send a msg you can close the chat box, when you send one later it’s the same daily chat session…this way you don’t have to have all these chat sessions open.

Feedback

I can’t search my chat history across all contacts

I can search people by name (not by tag), but I can’t browse an A-Z directory, like Outlook GAL.
It would be easy to enhance the profiles as expert locators, also an expert tag cloud…perhaps it could show people tags on a users profile, but clicking these would launch to the expert locator website, so instead of having it’s own expert locator, it just integrates this information from a 3rd party.

I can’t include userB into the chat I’m having with userA, instead I have to create an on-the-fly chat room, and invite both users, then close my chat with userA.

What else could be included without becoming beyond IM…see Vyew for web conferencing, YackPack for audio conferencing and wiki collaboration.

Is it possible to cc: userB whilst chatting with userA, by using a (@) symbol?

eg. I heard the other day that @userB finished the report, I wonder if it has been submitted…
This would automaticallly open a chat window with userB with only that msg in it…if all 3 want to chat together they need to do a on-the-fly conference

Online IM presence

I really like the online presence/status indicator, and that you can make your own.

Sometimes when you are looking for someone at work, you might see a post-it note on their monitor saying “Gone interstate for today, back tomorrow”…why not also put this as your online status as well.

Problem with this is that if this person is not one of your added contacts, you won’t know their online presence, unless searching in the general contact directory could show everyone’s online presence.

Other issue is that it’s “online” presence, so if this person is not logged onto a PC, then their presence will be “offline”, and that’s it…I wonder if you can create an offline presence msg.
So someone goes to their IM contacts and see’s that I’m offline, and that I have left a brief offline status msg.

I suppose you can’t go wrong with an email auto-responder, or perhaps even an IM auto-responder, but this means you have to do something, instead with “presence” all you have to do to be informed is look at the indicator next to the contact name.

Presence as publishing

Hmmm…this takes us to the beauty of a presence blogging service like Twitter.
For a starter this is not ideally chat, it’s purely presence, this whole service is around one feature, your presence (whether you are online or offline), it’s not an IM service.
But like IM, you have a contacts list, the difference is that you can “follow” people’s presence (these people don’t need to add you back as contacts), and you can be “folllowed” (you don’t have to add these people back as contacts).

Basically your presence is being published, all users can see this on the public page, or in their own space if they have added you as a contact. If an IM contact directory allowed you to see presence next to a user, this would be similar, as you don’t have to be friends to know each others presence.

So the difference here is not a strict black and white status indicator, it’s moreso presence published as content…what I’m doing now type thing.

Since it’s on a web platform instead of a desktop application, you can always see presence from where ever you are.

The other powerful feature is that technically it’s not “online presence”, it’s just “presence”, because you don’t have to be online to post your presence, or see the presence of others, as it can be used by email and SMS (not just at the website, IM, desktop apps, browser apps, mobile web, etc…).

Now if that worker has gone interstate, and they are not online, and they are not one of my contacts anyway, I could look at their enterprise presence (if we used a service like Twitter), and see their latest published presence.
When I look at their user space, I might see they posted they are “interstate for one day, back tomorrow”, but I might also see about 5 more posts about; the weather, about to meet client, how the meeting went, plane is delayed, etc…it’s not only presence crossed with publishing, but you have an archived presence stream, so it’s presence in context to some extent.

Twitter has made a whole service out of presence with a publishing bent, similar to blogging, perhaps micro-blogging, and because it’s on the web, we can always see the latest presence, and we can even engage with it when we are not on the web, by using SMS. And since it’s more than a status indicator we have space to explain a little about our presence…because presence in this way is more like publishing, we tend to update our presence a lot.
This is different to status which is more “available/unavailable”, with perhaps a little context about why you are available/unavailable…this type of presence is within the context of availablity, whereas presence blogging is moreso about what you are doing, or an announcement, it’s not restricted to just availablity.

IM content is in a chat box with a presence indicator in the contact list, whereas micro-blogging content is the actual presence.

Just to spice is up a little, micro-blogging also has asynchronous conversation, if in your presence update you include a users name with a reply symbol eg. @johnt….this user will be notified you have talked about them in your presence.
Some say using your presence space to chat to someone, is using the service different to its purpose.

IM is part of a bigger picture labelled Unified Communication (UC), something Mike Gotta tells us Microsoft and Cisco are tackling…let’s not forget Google’s array of services that could be all connected and the inclusion of their new acquisitions Grand Central and Jaiku.

Related:

Twitter for business and presence social network

Just came across Melcrum’s Communicators’ Network, a community based social network.

I’ve just had a snoop around and it seems to be social networking across groups.

All users have a profile, showing:
- latest blog posts
- contacts
- documents
- comments
- expert tags (by interest, and by specialisation)

- it doesn’t say what groups a user is a member of
- it doesn’t have the latest forum posts by a user

Here is an example user.

The Communicators’ Network has lots of groups, and each group has members, and there is a forum for each group…I don’t see a group events, documents, wikis, etc…doesn’t seem very set up for groups, moreso for individual networking.

I can’t even see the latest blog posts, and comments by members in a group.

Here is an example group.

All the blogs and forums are aggregated into their own view.

Not sure if it works this way, but what I’ve said before is essential that you can publish blog posts in your own user space, and decide to tag particular posts you want to appear in a group you are a member of…as not all your blog posts will be relevant to a group, or perhaps any groups.

Anyway, the Communicators’ Network are in the same space as others I’ve posted on such as; Blogtronix, Ning, Clearspace and CollectiveX…they all have their subtle differences.

I have a few more services offering groups and networking at my post, A community or network around your blog.

Just read a great paper by Motorola on mobile motion presence, using your mobile phone to keep track of when a friend is stationary or in motion.

There are lots of way you can do presence, Twitter for example is on the onus of a user to publish their presence, followers are pushed an SMS, etc…another service Groovr, is well into location presence a similar way by using check in/out commands.

Then we have GPS location tracking services where you can exactly know where a person is located, this is no messing around.

Motorola could offer anything, but this study is careful, it’s testing different types of users: couples and friends, and how they feel about different types of presence methods.

There was a general feeling that full on GPS location tracking was a bit intrusive, I tend to agree.

Anyway, their idea is motion presence using cell towers, if you are on the go, you pass different cell towers, if your phone registers passing these towers, then it means you are moving…they are kind of like check points.

When your phone passes 2 cell towers within 5 minutes that were not visible within the previous 15 minutes, it is considered “moving”.

The updates are passive meaning you don’t have to ping to find out, or you don’t get notifications, basically it’s always on (it works by SMS which lives in a log)…just check your phone to see your list of friends and next to each friend there will be a status “moving” or “not moving” and also a number denoting how long they have been in this state.

I tend to agree, in my opinion this is the most non-intrusive way for this type of information, but then Motorola want to know if it’s too far removed and useful at all.

Usage

I know my wife is sick at home today, but I see she has been in motion for 30 minutes…aha what’s the bet she’s shopping again.

My friend has a meeting but I can’t remember the exact time and I don’t want to ring him, but I see right now he is “moving” so here’s my chance.

My wife doesn’t need to ring me to see if I’m on the way home, or how far I am, as she knows I have been “moving” for 45 minutes, and I usually take 60 minutes to get home from work, (this gives her time to do her own stuff before I get home) if I’m still moving at 75 minutes she’d probably call me.

It’s 2.30pm and my husband should have picked up the kids and be on the way home, but he’s “not moving”, turns out he was asleep.

We have a sick child at home and my husband went to pick up some medicine, it’s been 15 minutes and I see he is “moving”, I can infer that he’s on his way home.

It was also documented that some people checked the log frequently for something to do or as a habit, but on busy days they may never look at it…thanks to no notifications it doesn’t bother you if you choose not to care.

In all these examples motion doesn’t really have any context itself unless you know the person, or their plans for the day, in this light you may be able to infer location or activity.

Some particpants wanted a little more information, like if they were waiting for a lunch meeting, knowing the person was “moving” was not enough, they wanted to know how far way they were.

Others wanted a history of motion, like todays motion of person A so far is:
not moving 60
moving 10
not moving 120
moving 10
not moving 240

From this a person can infer that my partner has gone for a 10 minute drive to her friends house, stayed 2 hours, then drove back home, and has been home for the last 4 hours.

Others stated it would be useful to check up on their kids “hmmm, I dropped them off at their friends house, so why have they been moving for 30 mins, what are they up to?”

Motion presence could still be seen a bit intrusive, depends on the situation, I guess you have to weigh up if it would be more useful than not, and put up with the nots, in the end you have to infer, it’s not telling you direct stuff.

Here is the paper.
Here is the slide deck.

More on Social Presence

Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button
New Presence

List

Here is a list of location-specific presence services I know of, as you can see presence location is a hot space.

The Swarm
iotum Talk-Now
Jaiku
Groovr
dodgeball
mycitymate
buddyping
WhoAt
FriendsTribe
Socialight
Flagr
Earthcomber
enpresence
mysaki
playtxt
Jambo Networks
Mates
mobiluck
SLAM
Loopt
helio
ContextPhone
Reno
WatchMe
Plazes
Dopplr
Meetro
RadiusIM
GyPSii

[ADDED 6/12/07: Google Maps pinpoints your locations by triangulating between cell towers (for those without GPS)]

[ADDED 7/2/08: Companies Betting on Location Based Mobile Ads]

[ADDED 7/2/08: Mobile presence : Iotum-Talk Now and “The Swarm”]

[ADDED 12/2/08: Path Intelligence Monitors Foot Traffic in Retail Stores By Pinging People’s Phones]

[ADDED 5/03/08: JotYou: Location-Based Mobile Phone Messaging]

[ADDED 16/10/08: Share Your Earthly Journey in Detail on Trailino]

Related:
A list of SMS groups and services and mobile social networks