Library clips

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]