I stopped by to check email today and noticed that my blog was listed as one of Blogger.com’s blogs of note. That’s a cool little achievement, thanks Blogger team. You’ll all be hearing from me again next week when I return from vacation, its been a lovely week here at the shore.
June, 2007
25
Jun 07
Working with Facebook Platform
I’ve been busy on many fronts lately, but last week I found a little time to play around with Facebook Platform. John Edwards, whose presidential campaign is based in my own backyard, lacked a Facebook App, so I set to building one for him (unofficially, of course). Techpresident covered the app last week, and it is slowly-but-surely drawing adopters.
The app is very simple – a first start – and I plan to take community feedback as I develop it. If you’ve got suggestions I’m all ears. It might be a fun experiment to see what we can put together.
The bigger news, however, is that I’m going to clean up the code, and release a GPL version that any campaign/organization can use to set up a very simple application in Facebook. As Josh Levy correctly points out, there’s an enormous, important audience in Facebook – so it’s worth the time and effort to attempt to reach out.
I hope to have this code ready sometime next week. In addition, I will be writing two articles on Facebook platform for AOL Developer Network/O’Reilly, which will explain and document how to use the platform (and why). So keep your eyes peeled, and if you support Edwards or would like to try out the app, check it out here.
15
Jun 07
In-Between Places
This morning, I was reading an interesting post from Chris Messina. In it, he talks about his in-between blogging behavior. Messina says:
I also screenshot as a way of in-between blogging, I guess. Y’know, like Twitter, Tumblr, Ma.gnolia, Plazes and Last.fm (among others) are all forms of in-between blogging. They’re where I am in the absences between longer posts (such as this one) where I record what I’m up to, what I’m seeing and what’s interesting to me.
As I sat back a little from that statement, I started wondering just when exactly blogging lost the battle for the in-between places. In the very beginning, we starting blogging because blogging made publishing easy; before blogging, we were marking up HTML and uploading it. With this revolution in simplicity came expectations – that we’d blog a certain way, that we’d have a set of links to famous bloggers on our blogs, etc. These expectations marked a recomplication of the medium, a depersonalization of sorts.
Another complication of blogging that arose was discoverability. If blogging is a personal medium, how do we find the blogs of people we care about (or are relevant to our interest areas). Looking at our feedreaders, we read the blogs of people we don’t know because it’s often hard to find bloggers we do know (San Francisco, you don’t count here). A blog search engine can find a million entries matching a certain word or topic, but it generally can’t find my friends or neighbors, or other people I care about.
Let me place a caveat by saying that these problems aren’t really deal-breakers to lots of people, and moreso there are lots of real world analogies. I don’t know John Markoff but I’ll always pay attention to his articles when I come across them. Many people don’t know Michale Arrington, but they enjoy Techcrunch, and the communities that grow up around these extremely central places.
However, as Messina describes, blogging is losing out to the in-between places. What are these in-between places? Well, they are social networks, the attention streams, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on. Unlike blogging, where your words are cast to an ether, these in-between spaces are inherently friend-centric. You explicitly build your networks in these services; furthermore, the onus isn’t on creating the networks of the largest size. Rather, the important thing is to create the network of most personal relevance to you. Compared to blogging, these spaces are less complicated and more relevant. To these networks, you can quickly and easily share the things more appropriate for the in-between: links you enjoy, quick updates, one-off thoughts. This is Dunbar’s grooming, an absolutely essential part of the friend maintenance process.
Rather than purely looking at this as blogging “losing”, we may consider these in-between tools as affording us new ways to enrich and deepen friendships. At the same time, they are places where the content is purely relevant to us, because the networks are made up of people we care about. This type of friend maintenance is something that many patterns of blogging don’t afford.
Examining my own behavior, I can identify a number of areas where blogging is losing to the in-between places. It seems that that places like Twitter and del.icio.us are moving from social backchannels to unique primary channels. This marks an advancement in the way we converse online; rather than using the brute-force, one-size-fits-all of blogging, we’re moving our conversations to the more relevant spaces. This transition is interesting and powerful, and it marks an advancement of our online communication behavior.
13
Jun 07
Hacking Fun: Never forget a birthday
For a long time, I’ve wanted a little robot to mail me and remind me of birthdays. Yeah, I know there are some online services that do this, but they are notoriously spammy. So last night I took a few hours and wrote my own, and I’m sharing it here with you.
The program is a pretty simple perl script designed to be run on a cron. You basically unpack it, configure it a little, and give it a list of birthdays. The program emails you a week before, a day before, and on the day of the birthday. Perfect.
This page has links to the download and instructions. If you find any bugs drop me a line or a comment. Of course, this program comes as-is, no warranties. Hope that some of you find it useful.
8
Jun 07
The Subscription Curve
Yesterday, I found myself frustrated as I looked at the number of unlistened podcasts in my iTunes queue. With no long plane flights on my immediate radar, where was I ever going to find the time to listen to 16 podcasts! This led me to pondering how my patterns of media consumption, supposedly cutting-edge in their subscriptive nature, had led me awry.
First, a thought experiment. What are your subscriptions? How many newspaper or magazines arrive at your doorstep? How many blogs or podcasts do you subscribe to? What alerts do you get? How many mailing lists are you on? How many shows are on your DVR? How many people do you follow with Facebook feeds or Twitter? As I went through this process, I found that more and more of my consumption was through subscription – and I wondered how happy this “freedom” of subscription was making me.
Let’s remember the old days for a second, when you used to have to type in a web address or click on a bookmark to visit a website. Or a time where you had to be in front of the TV at a certain time (or set the VCR, egad) to catch a show. What about a time when you didn’t know immediately when your friends were breaking up, or you occasionally missed NPR’s Fresh Air because you were doing other things. I’m the last one who is going to make an argument that the past was “better”, that’s not the point; however, it might be useful to consider whether in solving the old problems we simply created a slew of new ones.
Let’s think about information consumption in the old model. Without subscriptions, media flew by you – you had to make time for media, essentially. Maybe you caught two television programs, three radio programs, and visited an average of ten websites regularly. Granted, there were some inefficiencies there, but consider how vastly things have changed. Look at your podcast queue. Look at your DVR queue. Look at how many blogs you have in your feedreader – through the power of subscription, we’ve turned information underload into information overload. As we collectively adopt, how will we deal with the sheer volume of information subscription-based models afford?
This led me to wonder if media becomes primarily subscription based, does that increase the insularity of the consumer? For example, if someone has 300 feeds in their newsreader, the web may seem vast, but 300 feeds in the scope of the entire web is actually quite minuscule. Of course, the counter-argument is that before subscriptions, a human could only pay attention to X people – I realize that. But going forward, as everything becomes a subscription, will it become more and more challenging to look out of our bubble? I think this is a genuine question.
Subscriptions mark a paradigm shift in our information-consumption patterns. Because we can offload the storing and filtering tasks, we can now subscribe to potentially endless information streams. At the end of the day, however, there’s still only so much we can consume. And to that extent, it seems like all of us will have to make peace with our subscriptions and consumption. Looking at those 16 unlistened podcasts in frustration, I simply clicked the “mark as not new” button and freed myself from the obligation. Just because we now can listen to, or read, or watch anything, doesn’t mean we have to. At least for now.
