Library clips

twit.io - from Matt Terenzio who created @locals (a location based twitter hack, see another below) comes another Twitter gem.
twit.io is called a social database, it’s kind of like channeling a tweet, maybe moreso a message board stream.
A bit like hashtags you can post to streams, but these are inhouse streams like: jobs, events, videos, location, and instead of using a symbol like #, you just use text. The awesome part is you can command search the database by tweeting.

What you have to do:
Follow the user Twitio
Send replies to @twitio to post to or search the database
- there are 3 things that have to appear in your tweet before the body of the msg (@twitio post channel)
eg. @twitio post event Meetup tonight at Arthur’s Tavern in NYC. Great Jazz. Starts at 8:30

…and to search, just replace the word “post” with “search”
eg. @twitio search videos mentos diet coke
You should receive a direct message back to your twitter user with some info on your search and a link to results.

TwitterWhere - not to be confused with another TwitterWhere which allows you to post your location, instead with Matt King’s TwitterWhere you can generate a feed that will update with Tweets from a geographic location. Great for a local timeline, or an event…there’s even a TwitterWhere desktop widget.

Here’s an RSS feed for Perth Tweets, graze it here:

vcasmo - powerpoint and video like zentation…Slidecasts are presentations to audio, and webslides is presentations for bookmarks.
See here for regular presentation sites.

Kwout - all in one simple image tool which also has a link to the webpage you got the image from.
1. hit the bookmarklet on a webpage
2. crop the image
3. embed the image widget into your blog post (private or public-has a link to a Kwout permalink)…you can also post it to Flickr and Tumblr.

Example:

Other tools are SnipShot and Pixenate they both capture and edit, and host it on AllYouCanUpload (where you get an instant URL to include in your blog post). Also see thumbalizr.

ControlC - a web clipboard social network (install required), the difference is when you hit CTRLC, what you copied is stored at their website (private, public, encrypted)…log in anytime to find a list of stuff you have copied from the past (now that’s useful).
If it’s public, others can rate, and leave comments, add and msg friends, plus you have an RSS feed.

This last bit pushes blog posting to the extreme, because when you hit CTRLC it means you have just published, in fact your profile is like a blog…each post is time stamped, can have comments, can be rated, you can search archive also by date, and filter by type of item (text, link, image, video). And it’s not a standalone blog, you are in a social network.

Just imagine re-syndicating your CTRLC RSS feed into a blog like SuprGlu, or Tumblr or Jaiku or even Twitter (using Twitterfeed)…you would be publishing from the web or your desktop.

eg. when your in Word or Outlook just CTRL-C some text or an image, and presto, you have posted to your ControlC blog which in turn will re-syndicate the post to Twitter or Tumblr, etc…I HEART RSS.

This is the most extreme edge feed (eg. publi.sh) I have seen, especially that you are able to post from your desktop apps.
[via TC]

Tweetmeme - this does what Techmeme does for the blogosphere, as a matter of fact it looks exactly like it. Techmeme tracks popular tweets in the tweetosphere, and clusters similar tweets. Tweets are considered popular if there are lots of tweets about the same thing, and how influential they are…perhaps using a similar influence method as Tweeterboard.

It only deals with tweets that have links, and it displays the meme so the link is the title, it’s also sectioned into different types of links…blogs, images, video and audio.

Some tweets may be popular with the same word appearing a lot in a small time eg. bushfires, but this won’t appear in Tweetmeme unless the tweet has a “link”…for this we will have to rely on word burst services like TwitStat, Twitterment and others. Not sure why Tweetmeme can’t have a word burst meme section, or even a topical word burst section like Politweets.

There is RSS for each section, an archive that is made every 5 mintes, a river of news view, and Tweetmeme will also notify you through a Twitter reply if you are the first person to post a link to Twitter that leads a popular thread on Tweetmeme.

Now all I’m waiting for is the mobile web version, just like Mini-TechMeme, which you can also see on NewsGang-TechMeme (which renders heaps better, but doesn’t show the full post)

Shouting Mat.ch - basically the same as Tweetmeme, only tweets is a channel in a bigger service, it’s also a blogosphere topic memetracker for lifehack, politics (competitor to Memeorandum), tech (competitor to TechMeme), gossip (competitor to WeSmirch), sports (competitor to Ballbug)

Twitter100 - Imagine you grabbed the RSS feed of 100 people you follow on Twitter and entered all the feeds into a startpage, so you had an enormous widget poster of the latest tweets from people you follow. Well you don’t have to go to the trouble, just head over to Twitter100, enter your username, and your done, plus you can click on a users name to see their Twitter100…check out the very similar Gridjit.

Hellotxt - similar to Brabblr, it’s a meta-posting page where you can post to one or multiple services at the same time. The main services covered are Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and Tumblr…now all we need is a desktop widget version.

Heysan - mobile web based multiple IM service (mobile page). I’m already using ebuddy and finding it great…the mobile version is web based and also a download version.

Mike Gotta has a brilliant post on traditional Knowledge management structured systems compared to networks and free form systems…especially in regards to the two kinds of participation; direct and volunteered.

I’m going to highlight some gems in this post…

- Stakeholders (incl. employees) have a greater influence on long term success over products or services
- Informal networks and social relationships have greater influence on long-term success over managerial practices

“…social software is considered a complimentary component for delivering applications that engender greater levels of contributions from stakeholders that have been disenfranchised by outdated human capital management tactics…”

Form follows Function

“…applications (representing “form”) in response to business requirements (representing “function”)…”
“…automate the transactional, informational, and analytic needs of those work functions…”
“…worker contributions can be constrained by applications designed to support formal and structured work tasks…”

I think this paragraph says it all concerning the lack of free form systems up until now, and why email has been so important:

“Systems designed to support functional requirements do provide ways for workers to contribute, however the contributions are part of their explicit work actions and generally known ahead of time. Such systems cannot effectively support contribution scenarios not captured as part of the design process. Those involved in the application design process often place little effort on requirements that address the social and emergent aspects of communication, information sharing and collaboration. Workers resort to e-mail to solve such contribution gaps – a key reason why e-mail remains the most popular tool used by workers to express themselves. E-mail is one of the few universal tools workers have access to that allows contributions in a free-form manner.”

Directed vs. Volunteered participation

There are many reasons why people contribute beyond the task at hand, and the solution to store and share these contributions (knowledge) has still followed the “form follows function” approach…basically a structured system designed to capture knowledge. This hasn’t worked as these systems are rigid and not a natural way or inducive to want to share, plus they are hard work when you want to find stuff related to your needs. I think the most important mistake is that sharing knowledge has been seen as a task, it has been a chore for people to contribute as they don’t see what it will do for them later on.

Just before publishing this post I came across Bill Ives’s post on the Fastforward blog, which echoes my comments on the new KM:

“…when I say workflow or work process I do not mean the static inflexible workflow of old style content management or project management tools. The advantage of these new tools is that they allow work processes that are more organic and dynamic. They allow the users to control the workflow or process, build it up from tasks and make changes as needed. And, to repeat, they allow for transparency and archiving, and thus KM, to be a byproduct of work, rather than an added requirement.”

My past posts on social computing as the new KM (km 2.0 enablers: blogs, wikis, and social networks, CoPs and Informal networks, More on the new knowledge diffusion, and Knowledge sharing in the new KM) delve in this new situation of KM as part of getting things done, in the end it’s not even really KM, it’s just social computing (blogging, social networking, and sensemaking).
In one of these posts I point to a podcast with Andrew McAfee explaining the emergent quality of free-form publishing tools, and since then I have come across another podcast, this time a video clip interview with Andrew McAfee by David Weinberger at the FastForward 07.

This short interview goes over the failed KM 1.0 approach of knowledge as objects, systems with pre-defined structures, and how this database approach is restricting as these fields might not map to how a worker might want to share information…so they may walk away.

There is also the personal point of motivation to share information, it shouldn’t feel like a task, people were asking why am I doing this, and what will I get out of it. This robotic method just isn’t effective ie. sharing information in a rigid way as a task, and searching a massive database to find information related to your needs.

The new free-form tools are much more unstructured, information nuggets can be published very easily, this is two fold; one click publishing and a text box to write anything.
Then others can subscribe to everyone else’s “log”, this way information is filtered and flows to you…rather than your relationship with of the rest of the social capital being limited to looking for information only when you need it, you are reading knowledge worker information as daily news (educating each other).
When you do need to discover if a nugget of information exists, instead of relying on search skills in a massive database, and spending all day sifting through results, and finding as Euan Semple says “out-dated documents”, you can search blogs, etc..as these are human interfaces to the filing cabinet. Why search directly in a document management system, when you can search blogs that have filtered the cream of this stuff, and not only that, blog posts are content in themselves.
You don’t have to just rely on searching the internal blogosphere, you can discover content by tags, plus just looking at a tag cloud gives you a picture of emergent patterns, or what people are talking about, and what is important. As I’ve mentioned before blog posts may give you information around the object you are after, more context and peripheral insight.

The third way (after search and tags) is, as mentioned before, subscribing to blogs as your social filter, or asking your social filter (social network) your information requests…a contact in your informal network will point you in the right direction.

Being connected to a network where information comes to you far outweighs being on your own searching the corporate intranet.

Subscribing and networks makes this a perpetual process as part of your daily work life, rather than a task or thing in itself. It enables you to read and converse the daily enterprise worker news…one day you may require a piece of information you read 3 months ago in one of your subscriptions (network contact).

In the old approach we wait till we have a need, and then search for documentation. We can still do this in the new approach, only we are no longer on our own, but the added benefit is that we are knowledge sharing even if we don’t need or require the information, we can tap into the flow of discussion, and be educated by colleagues everyday…a staff generated internal news and conversation market.

See more on search vs networks on Dave Weinberger’s interview with Euan Semple at FastForward 07.

Is KM 1.0 really about a knowledge exchange?

Mike goes on to say: “…form-follows-function applications play a role in reinforcing cultural messages that social interaction, relationship-building and knowledge sharing are not valued.”

Traditional KM tools indeed don’t allow people the freedom to share and connect, creating their own ecosystem…the design simply isn’t geared towards this at all. They are great to streamline work processes, but what about stuff you learn along the way, stuff you don’t anticipate…the tools aren’t designed for what life brings to the table as they are not organic enough. I agree KM 1.0 tools are great to automate, and make things efficient, but they lack flexibility, and when it comes to extracting tacit knowledge, they are just not designed to how humans work…with KM 2.0 we now have tools that are not designed for a specific task, instead they are more open ended tools, that can be used and mashed up for any use case, and most importantly a way to instantly publish personal information and findings.

What knowledge sharing or sensemaking should be about it not an explicit task “you must share knowledge”, it is more simply the way you do work. You are documenting or publishing snippets of stuff you do in your normal day, it’s how you get things done…it’s not a thing in itself, it’s just part of your regular process of doing work.
This in turn becomes sharing knowledge, as others can tap into your daily flow and benefit…and indeed sometimes you may explicitly publish and push knowledge onto certain people, as you know what you have mused is relevant and can be applied right now.

In what environments or circumstances do “volunteered” contributions thrive?

Mike divides participation into “directed” versus “volunteered”, and contrasts this against 4 participation models which have been quoted below:

“Process: A process is a structured collection of tasks that are often sequences in a particular way with workers interacting based on their respective roles and duties within that collection of tasks.

Activities: An activity is a collection of semi-structured tasks that are not rigidly sequenced but are often co-dependent and completed within a certain time period.

Communities: A community is a relationship-based group structure (as opposed to a task-based structure) that forms around a shared interest area (e.g., anyone who is interested in improving customer service) or a shared practice (e.g., all nurses who want to improve patient care).

Networks: A network is a social structure comprised of people that have some inter-connecting bond based on a variety of factors (e.g., personal friendship, similar values, shared relationships, common educational or work experience). Social networks are rarely driven by tasks or activities per se. However, people reach out to their network contacts frequently in response to a process, activity or community event. “

Most work is driven by management and is processed based that is supported by tools based around this function.

Activities are less structured and more dependant on a deliverable…“Joint work dependencies do indeed solicit participation and contribution from those that have a vested interest in the activity but the majority of the participation and contributions remain directed towards the outcome of the activity (e.g., a document or a presentation).”

Communities are a place where people join of their own accord, this is a much more volunteered environment.

Networks are also volunteered environments, but whereas a community has a group purpose or aim, a network is an aggregate of individual nodes, so participation is in a flow environment, where individuals seek and share what they need to get things done…“Networks are almost always informal and based on voluntary relationships.”

People need different tools to participate and contribute, these new tools enhance the ability or drive to voluntary participation, which in turn creates a knowledge flow culture where people are sharing or tapping in to what they need.

I’ll leave with Mike’s summary:

“What excites strategist are social applications that catalyze volunteered participation and user contributions – a long-standing objective of knowledge management and human capital management strategies for decades.”

There are a few ways to interact with “presence”, some are triangulating or motion via cell towers, others are GPS location, and then there are explicit ways by presence-posting your location.

Motion and “location aware” methods are seen by some as too intrusive; it is found very handy, but at other times invasive, so it has good and bad points.

In contrast posting your availability is you letting others know…without you telling them they will not know where you are or if you are available. Since this is a push method it is not intrusive at all. The difference here is also that you’re not trackable (location aware), your recent locations are as frequent as you like to post them.

This method could be annoying as you are often having to update your availability/location settings…if you don’t update your availability often it may be out of date.
A way around this would be to have a few programmed day sequences
eg. choose “work day” setting, this will program your availability and location for the day (like auto pilot)
- 6am wake up (unavailable)
- 7am train (available)
- 8am work (unavailable)…you may want to manually override at this point
- 1pm lunch (available)
- 2pm work (unavailable)…you may want to manually override at this point
- 5pm train (available)
- etc…

Or perhaps it could be a little less programmed eg. set availability to lunch (available), and ask the phone to revert this back to work (unavailable) in 1 hour.

Examples

Cell tower - Motorola, Google
GPS - Loopt
Presence - Groovr, TwitterWhere

NOTE: Meetro is an IM client that is location aware on your PC, also see RadiusIM (requires no download)…this post is focusing on mobile communications.

Iotum Talk-Now (mentioned before) is a little different as it allows others to visit your profile to see what your status is, and leave a message, and this is what “The Swarm” (mentioned before) is all about, as well as being a virtual room.

Iotum Talk-Now

Specifically for the Blackberry, this is a product that augments the availability scenario and hopes to end phone tag ie. leaving messages/voicemails on each others phones. If we could just see the availability of the person we are calling we could save a lot of time and messiness. Also since we know availability and status we may choose not to call as we don’t want to interrupt.

From their website:

“SHARE your availability without losing control.
SEE who is available and who wants to talk with you.
NOTIFY people you need to talk to and be notified when they become available.”

SHARE - personalize your availability (similar to Instant Messaging status) and calendar…you can also show different availability to different people

SEE - able to see at a glance who is trying to reach you and who is available to talk with you, right now. No need to call someone just to ask if they have time to talk or if you are interrupting them.

NOTIFY - If you visit a contacts profile and they are unavailable, put them on a To-Call list, and Talk-Now will let you know as soon as they become available.

You can also leave a message, the receiver logs in to see this, it’s not pushed or interrupting like usual voicemail/SMS.

They have also teamed up with JahJah for VOIP calls.

Talk-Now is now integrated with the phone address book, so you don’t have to go to the application to find availablity of a contact, also some icons have been revamped…see more changes.

The Swarm

“The Swarm” by Christine Satchell is based on a similar way of dealing with presence/status/availability.
The idea is a way for your contacts/network to see your availability from your profile page and choose the lowest form of interruption.
Instead of ringing/VoiceMail/SMS’g a friend, first check their availability, depending on what their icon and/or text note describes, you may decide to leave a note for the next time they login or check in again later…or their note may be detailed enough to follow without having to explicitly contact them.

So right off the bat you can see how this is built off the IM status idea, and augmented into a more detailed status indicator and profile page.

There is also an element of publishing content, which hearing these words one would assume a social network akin to Facebook mobile, but it’s more about decorating your virtual room with media.

So it’s a way to avoid unnecessary contact and yet still be connected to availability information, and also a way to spontaneously form a group or hook up.

www.pixelshifter.net/client_login/swarm_2007/

The Study

Nomad
Contextualising Mobile Presence with Digital Images (PDF)
ABC Radio National: The Buzz 8 January 2005 - Swarm Phone

In true research methodology a design and test study was set up to deliver a useful product…these days you would probably have a more marketing 2.0 style and give your test users a social network for feedback.

THE NOMAD

The youth culture are always on the move, and don’t often have regular meet up places, it’s more a individual centric lifestyle, very busy, not always at home, on the go, just hook up as it happens…

The idea of a mobile phone and “The Swarm” is a virtual home, no matter where you are physically.
An avatar in your virtual home will represent what you are currently engaged in.

SELECTIVE CONNECTIVITY

A need to be connected without being contacted.
The ability to not be contacted is as important as the ability to be contacted…with the virtual home, this has an improvement on current mobile phone communications, as contacts can see your profile availability without having to disturb you. This is solving an etiquette issue, knowing whether your call or SMS is going to disturb someone before hand is a handy thing to know for both parties.

COMMUNICATE VIRTUALLY AND IDENTITY

A way both sender and receiver can communicate a message without pushing an SMS/VoiceMail/Ring.
This is the main feature of “The Swarm”, the owner of the phone has a choice of avatars to indicate their presence (activity), you can use different avatars for different people (hmmm, us humans are deceiving), and further to this you can leave a message (voice tags) on your avatar, and even push a message to a contacts profile…when the contact will login to their profile they will see the message.
There are also exploding avatars, which revert back to default mode so the user is not constantly updating their status/availability.

In a further design the avatars were replaced with colour coded icons, the coloured bar reveals a mode (status) of the user. eg. choosing the orange coloured bar represents “social”, it displays all the contacts that this user is conveying this status to.
As seen in the screnshot this user is indicating this mode to Ben, Darren, and Vicki. At this point in time this user may be displaying other modes to other people…if we clicked on green for “work” it may display contacts who think this user is at work.

At this stage it seems a bit time consuming to not only remember to set your availablity, but the fact that you can have multiple availability indicators at the same time. I assume there is a “clear all” button to reset your availability to the same for all contacts…maybe organising people in groups would help.

Here’s another screenshot showing what the users contacts are up to now…in this example the contacts (tiny person icon) are coloured, representing status.
Besides the standard colour bar, users can also overlay extra images over the icons to convey more context.

We can see Kym is “asleep” as her avatar is blue, and we see Ben’s avatar as orange, meaning “social” and is overlayed with a “martini glass”, meaning he is having drinks.

Another screenshot of what your contacts are doing now shows the extra images eg. martini glass, plus also user generated images such as photos, etc…

Kym is blue, meaning she is “asleep”, and she has a camera icon “picture” that brings more context to her current activity. Hmm, Kym is saying to this user she is asleep, and pimped up her presence with a photo (as seen below) of her socialising and having drinks during the day…maybe this represents what she last did before going for a long long sleep

Anyway this visual enhancement describes her activity more vividly, perhaps motivating others to join her, those that cannot can see the great time they are missing…all this without explicitly talking to each other.

This is about logging in to communicate and be connected or in the loop to see the latest, you don’t have to be interrupted in the way we currently use our mobile phones.

From this last screenshot we also see that status and availability have been augmented with more context via user generated content such as photo’s, given more of a presence feel…not just an indicator of your presence, but a contextual publishing of presence, similar to the effect of Twitter…I guess you could even use this feature to ask a question.

PUBLISHING CONTENT

Text, images, video can be posted to the walls of your virtual room where others can visit to see, basically a social network type thing like Facebook (but more decorative).

The Scenario

Jade is always on the move….. - Swarm scenario

A mobile phone owners “virtual home” is always on.

- Jade looks in her room
- there’s a note from Sarah
(Sarah would have seen a lecture avatar, signifing that Jade was in a university lecture)
- Jade clicks note and sees a business avatar of Sarah
- Sarah’s avatar has a note tag for Jade
- Jade selects a shopping avatar of herself
- Jade attaches a note tag for when Sarah logs in to “meet her on Collins St”
- Jade then pushes this shopping avatar and note to Sarah’s room
- Jade leaves a lecture avatar in her room, so when others visit her profile they see she is busy

At this point if anyone visited Jade’s room, other than Sarah, they would choose to not bother her as her avatar signifies she is busy in a university lecture.
But Sarah has been pushed a message by Jade, so when Sarah logs in to her own room she will see this note from the Jade shopping avatar…if Sarah looked at her contacts list she would also see a shopping avatar for Jade.

cont…

- Sarah rings Jade to get the exact location
- later on Jade logs in to her room
- 3 friends have left notes

I really like this idea of a non-interrupting type of SMS, only it’s web-based…ie. you login to see your messages rather than be interrupted to view the message.

- Jade clicks on her friends avatars and reads that they want to party.
- Jade changes her avatar to “party” so whoever visits her profile knows her status
- Jade notifies friends she really wants to see by pushing her party avatar and note tag ” come to amber bar” to her friends rooms.

During the night, from what I can gather, Jade is looks at her phone and see’s visitor’s in her room, she is able to hang out with them virtually.
She also decorates her room with pictures and video’s stored in her phone.

Questions

What about inviting contacts into your room for a virtual synchronous chat.

What about if one of your contacts is ringing from someone else’s mobile phone or what about if someone who isn’t your contact rings you…would it be possible to set your phone to not answer and instead send an automatic SMS availbility report. The caller would have to pay for this.

I wonder if a contact has a news activity feed of what their friends have been doing…not only for their publishings, but also a log of their avatar status…at a glance you know what activities your contacts have been doing.
If your contacts are doing something to you, then this would also appear in a Notification stream, a la Facebook.

Instead of SMS/ring them, could I poke/nudge/buzz them to look at my profile, as in Facebook, Twitter, Nimbuzz. But then if I’m nudging them (vibrating their phone to get their attention), I might as well SMS, as this communication costs money just the same.

What about being able to check a profile from the web, so you can check or set availability, send or set a note tag…and also be able to VOIP call from web to mobile phone.
Further to this, what about a web widget, so I can use either of these services in Facebook, or elsewhere.

The way the icons augment presence reminds me of Jaiku…as well as a micro-post you can add an icon to the post to enhance your presence.
Hmmm, what’s Google up to with Jaiku, perhaps a presence network with an availability or status component, just like “The Swarm”.

How is “The Swarm” (TS) different to Facebook mobile (FB), and Instant Messaging (IM)?

Availability indicator
- IM yes
- FB no
- TS yes

IM can only have a colour that says “yes or no”, accompanied with a status message that is “one to many”.
TS has a choice of colours to cover varied availabilties and also an accompaning icon and message, plus you can set multiple statuses at the same time to apply to different people.
FB has a status message, but this is more like a micro post or presence post, it’s not specifically an indicator for availability.
The regular FB on the PC does have a “friends online now” feature, this could be applied to the mobile version and turned into an availability indicator.

Interrupt
- IM no
- FB no
- TS no

IM and TS can first see availability before interrupting.
TS and FB can leave a message without interrupting (FB has both private and public messages).
FB has a “poke” feature which is very non intrusive.

Profile/Publish
- IM no
- FB yes
- TS yes

FB is more about publishing.

Notifications (must look at your profile to see if you have any)
- IM no
- FB yes
- TS yes

TS profile page may show an availability icon and message pushed to your profile by a friend.
TS contacts page allows you to see latest availability of all your friends.
FB home page will list notifications of what people have done to you eg. public or private message, message blasts.
FB Newsfeed informs us of what our friends have been doing to each other, TS could do this with a virtual room update, telling us what friends have published text or media to their room, and what friends have done to each other (not sure if this last one could be applied).

More on presence
Social Presence: Time To Push The Reset Button
Proximity dating is HOT!
Fluc: Put Your Mobile Phone to Work For You
Otetsudai Networks
Mobile motion presence and location awareness
The Mobile Phone as the Globalizing Icon of the Early 21st Century
CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems
3G Multimedia Content Production as Social Communication
‘Sharing Places’, Digital Content and Lived Life

[ADDED 7/2/08: From the Jaiku website:

Jaiku Mobile works like the phone’s regular phone book, and enhances the standard contact list with presence information. It displays the buddy icon, availability, latest Jaiku message, and location for you and your Jaiku contacts in your contact list. It enables you to:

- Browse and post Jaikus
- Add comments
- Share your availability based on your ring profile (green light = ringing, yellow light = vibrate, red light = silent)
- Share your location (neighborhood, city, country) based on cellular network towers
- Share your calendar events (if you don’t want to share your calendar, Jaiku only displays your status as “busy” when an event is active)
- Share who you’re with based on nearby Bluetooth devices]

Ideajam - similar to social bookmarks but for ideas, seems more focused on products, as you select an IdeaSpace to post to, and it’s very focused on IBM, must be similar to ThinkPlace…see more idea sites like Bank of Ideas, Acorn, and IdeaWicket.

SHOULD do THIS - similar to an idea network as above, but focused precisely in a few words (micro-blogging style) towards what a service/product should do. Wish I found this earlier, as I’ve been posting these product wishlist type of posts to Twitter and tagging them #Qjt via Twitter Hashtags…but then again Twitter has a great community.

Here is a product page for Twitter…it has a feed and a widget.

Here is an example of an entry, people can leave comments, cheers and agree.

Here is a user space.

I’m not sure if the staff from these products are listening like Satisfaction (a forum for web 2.0 services), I know CommonCraft does as they have integrated SHOULD do THIS into their own website.

digFoot - yet another profile aggregator service, not sure if streams your stuff. It also acts as a social network directory as you can submit sites.

Tweeterboard - has indexed a slice of Twitter users (2600) and tracks conversations by monitoring @replies to a person, and @replies from a person.
There is a ranking system for users based on the frequency of conversation ie. replies to you, and I guess if people replying to you have lots of replies given to themselves, this makes you all the more popular. Brass tacks, if someone popular replies to you over a rookie, then this gets you more juice. Check out one of the 2000 users, and the Top 100.

I like the idea of trends, to see who you talk to the most, and who talks with you the most…at the moment on our Twitter homepage we just have a reply stream and that’s it, but visitors to your site cannot see your reply stream.
This is unlike the blogosphere where for any given post you can see comments. This is not exactly the same as a stream of all comments on your blog, but you can get this via the comments RSS feed, and even re-syndicate it to a HTML page.
I’d like to see TwitterBoard or Twitter itself allow me to organise my reply stream by user.

Here is an example user, here you can see the reputation score, frequency of posts, a list of users they talk to, a list of users who talk to them, and a list of links from their tweets with an RSS feed (also see Twitterbuzz).

Similar Analytics:
TwitStat - wordbursts, replytweetsphere, replies to user…filter by user
Twitterholic - top 100 Twitterers based on followers.
TwitterPoster - similar to Twitterholic
Twits like me - similar people.
Twitterment - wordbursts, trends, search…see more search and wordbursts.

Gridjit - a layout view for a Twitter user rather than a stream, this should really be an available alternate view on the Twitter website.

Just a quick sharing post…I was looking for a tool where I could jot down a note, link or file and retrieve it from another PC, or just as a quick jot down note to use the next day.

This is not really a to-do or formal note feature, it’s for when I find something and I haven’t got time or I have to leave, I just want to put it somewhere and look at it when I have time in a couple of hours, or from another PC…basically it’s like a waiting bay or clipboard.

Choices

email - yuk…even if I can use a simple email me bookmarklet
bookmarks - don’t want to mix this stuff with stuff I collect…perhaps temporary bookmarks like listmixer
online storage - mmm, nah
wiki - not really…at times I have used the lightweight wiki feature on Blummy

WorkHack - limited entry space
ChangeToLink - not what I’m looking for
RTM, Zettels - too much for my purpose
For mobile phone (or mobile email) I like the new RTM intergration into Gmail
Google Notebook, Notefish - very good

TwitterNotes - maybe for direct messages on the go
IMified - too many clicks
Gubb - awesome email and SMS access, but too many clicks to quickly save a note

cl1p - second place

…and the winner is an old favourite, Webnote.

cl1p was my tool of choice, but I’ve grown fond of Webnote again, it’s just dead simple…it’s focused on one thing and that’s it.

- create as many pages as you like, add as many notes as you like to each page
- when you are in a page press CTRL-B to create a bookmarklet…next note you add, highlight text and click the bookmarklet
- there is no login to manage all your pages
- no private pages

cl1p has all these features (you can manage all pages, and private settings)
- it also has a forum setting for on the fly discussions
- you can also add files upto 2 mg, so I’ll be using it for this feature for sure…see more.

Both these services have gone for the non-tag approach, which is a good thing, because I’m just using it as a temporary waiting bay. I’ve got two Webnote URL’s, one for blog ideas, and the other for temp clipboard stuff.

As mentioned Webnote is smooth, simple, clean, and easy to use…it does one simple thing.

[ADDED 24/01/07: Rob Mayhew from cl1p emailed me about more features:
“You can now upload more files to cl1p - up to ten 2MB files, or ten 30MB files for owned cl1ps. Simply click the ‘Add More Files’ button at the bottom of your plain text cl1p.

Firefox users can now install the cl1p browser button. Once installed you can select text on any webpage and click the cl1p button. The value of the selection and the website it is from will be appended to the bottom of your cl1p.

Install cl1p in your office! Clipboard Core is here, offering a version of cl1p you can install on your own local network. Clipboard Core is perfect for businesses who do not want to send data outside of their local network. Visit clipboardcore.com for more information.”]

[ADDED 1/2/08: Just noticed Google Notebook has a mobile version, this may become my main tool. Post via Google Toolbar, browser extension, mouse extension and now by mobile web. This way I have one site with lots of notebooks…and I can tag each note I add to a notebook, this means I can view notes across notebooks. Plus I can make it public or invite people to collaborate…hmm, maybe this is the winner.]

RescueTime - an attention clickstream for your desktop, also see Wakoopa…web clickstreams are Cluztr and slifeshare.

Web-Alerts - SMS of lastest blog posts, even filter by keyword, can’t do it across an OPML…powered byFeedM8, see my mobile updates post for more.

FixMyStreet - not quite hyperlocal, like StreetAdvisor, YourStreet, or LifeAt…this is more based on reporting a story, photo and map to the council about something to be fixed in your neighbourhood.

Wixi - online media storage that looks deluxe

Hyplet - is a flyer or online profile card widget, use it on your profiles, email signature, blog sidebar widget, etc…also see mevu, findmeon, pidy, and showyourself.

Lately I’ve been writing about distributed networks, let’s face it we all use different services as no one service does it best, and your friends may be using different services than you which at the moment aren’t not connected for communication and flow.
So far I have talked about the blogosphere as a distributed network, centralising the different networks you and your friends use into one interoperable flow, and Where is the real Google Reader social network?

In my Google Reader post Udi from FeedEachOther (FEO) alluded to my desire to join FEO as I’m forever talking about how it’s the future of RSS Readers.
RSS Readers and blogs are the wisdom of crowds approach or social delivery from the word go, a blogger may write original content, but they also read stuff and link to it in their blog posts…so you are subscribing to the bloggers thoughts and perhaps responses to other bloggers thoughts, but you are also getting links to other sites filtered through these bloggers, they are your social filter for the web.

Not only are all these blogs of interest filtering the web for you, but you can read them in your RSS Reader, kind of like your “come to me web” reader.

Now Google Reader is trying to further this social game, but FEO has already gone the whole way. The problem for me is that the RSS Reader comes first for personal reasons, and the social bit comes second. I use Google Reader because it’s fast and has great reading and organising features, I think it will slowly get there with networking features and story clustering (memetracking)…I live in my RSS Reader so I have to feel comfortable as it’s my home. Moving your stuff to another reader is no hassle via OPML export, but the hassle may be to set up your folders again…and also Google Reader kind of has you locked in if you publish your Shared Items page.

Anyway, I don’t think the answer lives in one RSS Reader, I think it is about an interoperable RSS Reader ecosystem. Once, some how we get to organise the universal buddy list, maybe using openID, and XFN then we can plug this into our RSS Readers, perhaps a 3rd party sidebar plugin.

If I use Google Reader and see an article my friend likes I will just drag that article to her name in my buddy list (sidebar plugin). This friend may use Bloglines, but I don’t even need to know, all I do is click on her name and the article will be deposited into her RSS Reader.

It would be great if the plugin also had access to the buddy list underneath each item in your RSS Reader.

I suppose the great issue is to set the standard and then get all the services to adopt it, but 2008 seems to be the movement for dataportability and OpenSocial, so let’s hope.

What do we want connected:
- the blogosphere as a social network
- blog comments network
- various social networks (eg. message a friend from Facebook to MySpace)
- widget platform
- RSS Reader network
- presence network
- etc…

Basically we need standards to be adopted and some sort of web operating system, full stop.

I’m getting very frustrated using Twitter with IM…I’ve posted on the Satisfaction support site, but no help as of yet, and I’m impatient so I’d thought I’d use my blog as a shoutout.

I’m having issues with the settings and IM commands, I think it’s a few things causing the confusion: some commands are outdated, and functionality is not user friendly or working properly…otherwise it may be just me not knowing how things work (if so this is still a usability issue as I’m quite familiar with road testing web 2.0 services).

Once I get this ironed out, I plan to do another post on using Twitter IM commands.

Here we go…

If I IM “on” or “off” this reflects the changes in my Twitter settings “Phone & IM” page…that works ok.
ie. if my settings are set to “off” and I IM “on”, my settings web page will then change to “on”.

My homepage sidebar has a short-cut to this settings page, under the sidebar heading “Notifications”, I can choose “IM” or “web-only”.

If my settings are set to “on” (meaning I have switched on to receive IM tweets), and I select “web-only” on the sidebar, shouldn’t this change my settings to “off”…when I visited my settings page this wasn’t the case.

I don’t get it, what is the relationship between the Phone & IM settings page and the Notification sidebar?

Next…

If I want to follow a user the functions work fine for me, I can either click on the “Following” link on the sidebar, and on a user select Notifications “on”.

Or I could do it via IM, by typing “follow personA”.
If I then type “leave personA” or “off personA”, then when I visit the webpage I will see that the notifications next to that user has gone to “off”

NOTE: you can also use “F personA” and “L personA”

NOTE: on the webpage next to each user it should be called “follow” and “leave” next to each user to match the IM commands.
Even moreso as “notifications” means something else as I understand it.

NOTE: The IM command “get personA”,is just a once only latest update from a user…it’s not persistent.

Another thing…

Does the command “follow all” still work, ideally I just IM “follow all” and I will start receiving tweets from all the people I follow.

At the moment this is not happening for some reason.
When I visit the “Following” link on the sidebar, I assume that “notifications” (which I thinked should be called “follow”) is still set to “off” on all users. Shouldn’t this turn to “on” for all users, I see it as a bulk way of doing “follow personA”.

And if I IM “off all” or “leave all” (or perhaps “O all” or “L all”) I assume the opposite to happen, that is, no longer want to receive updates from all people I follow, and the settings on each user on my web page will all go to “off”.

NOTE: The IM command “get all” (not sure if this is a command), is just a once only latest update from all people you are following…it’s not persistent.

This is how I understand it to work…

“follow all” or “follow personA” is getting persistent updates in IM.
“leave all” or “leave personA” is removing persistent updates in IM.

Just say my settings are “follow personA”, “follow personB” and “follow personC”.

Even though I have this set to have persistent updates in my IM from these 3 people, I will still not get the updates till I set my notification.

If I IM “on” then the flood gates are open and I will start seeing the tweets.

If I then IM “off” I will put receiving these tweets on standby.

I assume that the settings “Phone & IM” page is a standby switch.

So just say I’m following these 3 people and have IM “on”…like mentioned before I will see persistent tweets from these 3 people.
If I then say “leave personA”, then I will only see tweets from person B and C.
If I IM “off” I will get no updates, if I then IM “on” I will see updates from person B and C.

So…

As mentioned I think the term “notification” next to each user on your following page should be called “follow” to match the IM command, and not only that, but because notification means something else, which is the standby switch.

If the sidebar on the homepage is a shortcut to the settings “Phone & IM” page, then the sidebar heading could read “Phone & IM Notifications”, and the selections could be a drop down “on or off or direct messages”.

I want clarification on how to receive updates from all people I’m following and how to disable this…as I mentioned I believe the on and off settings are just a standy by switch.

Please help!!

There’s been a lot of talk in the past about Twitter channels, and now we have them with Twitter Hashtags. Just put a hash (#) before any word in your Tweet and it will appear in a tag stream at Twitter Hashtags.
But first you need to follow Twitter Hashtags, and it will follow you back…this is kind of like a registration/enabler.

I’ve been mostly using it for personal tags, like #Qjt, this is a unique tag I made up with my initials and “Q” represents a question, check out my tweets that are questions.

Hmmm, no RSS feed…this can be generated at Terraminds, pity it doesn’t accept hash (#), I could leave out the hash and search for “Qjt“, but then this defeats the purpose, and there’s noise in the results. The idea is a stream of purposefully indexed tweets, not appearances of keywords.

UPDATE - see comment below, hashtags does have RSS feeds.

You can get delivery in IM and SMS, by using the Twitter tracking feature, just IM - track #Qjt - and you would get only those tweets of mine that I label with this tag.

A similar 3rd party tool is TweetChannel, also see my channel hack. My channel hack tracks a word without it needing a hash, so people don’t even know their tweets are turning up in the stream. My hack is a stream for all the tweets with the word “electronica“, and the stream is in a twitter account itself, so basically you can follow that Twitter User (bot), or it’s feed to keep updated. So this is more about keyword appearances, rather than indexed tweets.

Back to Hashtags…

NOTE: since a tweet only has 140 characters it helps when a word in your tweet is the hashtag, in my case above my hashtag is not a word in my tweet, so I always have to allow for 4 more characters, ie. #Qjt”.

If I tag a lot of my tweets (with the beauty of a tweet having multiple tags) this could generate a tag cloud for my tweets. It would be good if I could get into the sidebar of my Twitter and view a tag cloud, and click to see just tweets with a tag.

Maybe in the future I wouldn’t need to put “jt” in my tag, maybe it could just be “Q”…in Hashtags I could view a stream of tweets with the tag #Q, then limit it to just a user.

Emergency 2.0

Check out a post by Chris Messina, on how useful hashtags are in a time of emergency. The only issue is that at a time of emergency the word must be spread across the twitterverse of what hashtag to use to index tweets about the emergency/disaster. And hopefully that same tag is being used on YouTube and Flickr, so we can get a great insight into what’s going on.

Actually we need some kind of emergency/disaster website that streams Twitter hashtags, Flickr Tags, and YouTube tags…I know there’s lots of photo and video services, but what can you do…perhaps this is something Technorati could specialise in. Why not throw in a wiki and maps as well.
As soon as there is a disaster, we could consult the disaster page tag to see the stream of what’s going on. The homepage could also have an admin blog, with posts like check out the “parkervillefires” tag for the latest, check out the “gisborneearthquake” for the latest, and each tag page could have its own blog for announcements…maybe if this got going we could use shorter tags like “Fparkerville”, “Egisborne”.
This way we have got a tag page for each emergency/disaster…you could make a social network, but I’m thinking of it more as an aggregator with some inhouse features thrown in. Maybe a social network and wiki could help for post-disaster, co-ordinating activities.

There is also the point of locating people with GPS, etc…and breaking down the tweets to location with TwitterWhere.

For more on emergency 2.0 check out Dennis McDonald’s blog, here are some posts:

School Communications & Emergency Response: What are the Implications for Social Media?

Potential Applications of Social Media and Social Networking in Local Disaster Response

What I’m Learning About Applying Social Media to Disaster Response

A Variety of Disaster Response Communications Options

Collaborative Decisionmaking in Disaster Response Situations

Also some posts on the FastForward blog:

Fires in California - How Social Media is helping + Moblie Phones

Social Media & Emergency - Update on KPBS - Lessons for Public Broadcasters

Social Media - News - The Fire - KPBS

Emergency and Twitter - Now the Quake

More posts:

Firestorm 2.0 - Using Social Media Services to Track The California Fires

Social Networking and Disaster Response

[ADDED 6/05/08: Report: In emergencies, people turn to Facebook]

[ADDED 13/05/08: China Quake - Twitter Comes of Age as THE Breaking News Tool]