Monthly Archives: January 2009

Please no conversations on Twitter

Blogging January 16, 2009 Comments: 2

I love Twitter, hell I even secured myself the wonderful username “o“, which is a naturally scarce username length for those that have not noticed. :)

But that is not what this is about. The thing is that I think there is one relatively simple thing, among others, that makes Twitter so successful: it hinders conversations. I do not mean on a grander scale. It’s the wonderful enabler for long-term disconnected conversations. Maybe the more correct term for what twitter does not have so much is chatter.

Yes do you have lots of people talking about stuff that might not be interesting to you, but it is your decision who you want to follow and there is an option to even follow a lot of people and still see what is going on. Perhaps those of us who have grown up in IRC times remember that a chat with 200 people was impossible. Thinking about it and comparing it to twitter, it’s as if you had 2 million people in one chat room but you are only seeing those lines of the people you follow. That models brakes conversations over the entire space in a big way and hence keeps down the volume immensely.

The reason I am bringing it up at this point is that I really hope that Twitter will not put too much emphasis on enabling more conversation to happen. It is already happening but not real chitchat among 5 people and that should be something that should not happen. Imagine somebody asking something and then being able to go into the thread of that question and have a discussion easily by referencing that post. For all people just seeing part of that discussion it is totally useless and making the discussion easy means it will happen. So please people of Twitter, make it hard as it is now.

And while I am at it, please remove Re-Tweets. I admit, I did it once because it is so much easier to Re-Tweet then to write your own words, but that again is the point. It gets too easy. Twitters goal should not be the highest volume of Tweets by each user, but the long term bonding of relationships. This is where possible value comes from.

So how many people that still tweet more than once a week (fully enough) have an increasing number of friends in both direction? That would be the core user group I’d say, next to the echo chamber ;)

The death of news papers

Life in General, Web 2.0 January 15, 2009 Leave a comment

John Battelle has a great post with a few ideas about the death of the print industry and journalism.

Go read it and there are some very true points to it. The big problem I see is that journalists have rarely been truly measured as they can be in the internet times. You can write the best article out there, if you do not have a following and do not have something to say that people want to read, it is hard to get a good readership. Then the question only becomes about the importance of your message and somebody pushing you.
The big problem is that journalists were what sold magazines, or so they thought, and they have really good salaries. Really good salaries in some cases. So the newspapers have a big amount of people writing articles, with huge salaries and nobody in their right mind will tell me that my 17 month old sun will get a subscription of the local newspaper delivered to his home each morning, let alone read it.
You can employ all the consultancies that you want to give you the numbers you want to hear, but the problem is that you will not believe it yourself once you think about your own child. My sun might have a kindle like thingie, but not real print I would say.

There is no clear way out of this yet, especially because I want good journalism (not highly paid people reprinting AP and Reuters), and online newspapers just do not make the same amount of money as print magazines did.

The problem is that you really need to understand the needs of the internet and you need to think about what you really are good at. Standard management stuff really and I don’t buy it that all the big publishers should become investment houses. It will be interesting to follow John in his series of thoughts and I sense a good book coming out of it, probably focussed around conversational marketing.
This will result in painful changes and it will be interesting to see of what becomes of the big publishing houses. I for one know that I want some of them to survive, but mostly for some good solid journalism, not reprinting AP for Google Juice. Let’s see who pulls it off. At least I don’t want to see the death of the news papers.

My Torrent Setup for TV Series

Web 2.0 January 14, 2009 Comments: 2

I still have an old MacMini at home and I really like it but it is not really doing a lot. Thanks to a few wonderful tools out there I now have a wonderful machine to deal with my downloading pleasure. I am always looking for ways to use the systems I have here and this has turned out to be something where I think the TV world can or needs to go to.

So what’s the setup?

First of all I have Transmission running at all times, and it is configured to watch a special directory for torrent files and start downloading whenever it finds something in that directory (deleting the torrent file while it is at it). That folder actually resides on my DropBox account, so I can always push stuff into that directory from where I might be at the time. This comes in handy when somebody suggests a movie, which I might add directly or just create a task in Remember The Milk to do so.

Next up is the Series part. Here I am currently trying out FeedMyTorrents just to see how it works and it is working like a charm. What that does is uses an app called “Automatic” for OS X where I can add RSS Feeds and it automatically downloads the enclosures into a given directory.

Next up is running a little script that takes any series and converts it to iPod High format via the Elgato Turbo.264, which does that in really wonderful speed and without making the fan of the mac mini run at 150% ;) Also I need to find a solution to really get TV series running here in Germany into the system. Currently I am recording them live on TV with a hard disk video recorder, but what I really would like to have is just Boxee down in the living room having all those movies/series via Bittorrent automatically. I do not need to see them live and that might be easier than making Boxee record live TV.

So what do you do to automate your television pleasures? I know I am just starting to see the pieces fall together in real life, not just in my head.

4 Golden Globes for Slumdog Millionaire

Books, Films, Music January 12, 2009 1 Comment

It’s actually a way too short post for the blog but hey, I just read that Slumdog Millionaire won 4 Golden Globes over at The Inquisitr and I need to send out my congratulations.
The thing is that the movie is just plain wonderful to watch, with a great story and everything. Not a lot more to say really without giving away the story so I will leave it at this and let you watch the movie. :)

6 Technologies to use now as of Wired

Web 2.0 January 12, 2009 Leave a comment

Wired has an article about 6 new web technologies of 2008 you need to use now and I have to agree. It’s nothing earth shattering for most people here on this blog but it is an interesting list and I would like to add a few comments.

1. Identity Management: They are talking about OpenID, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect here even though they are slightly different things. The thing is that Google and Facebook are trying to be the central location where your friends graph, your social graph, are stored. Whenever you log in somewhere they want to know and will allow you to use your social graph within any service, taking your friends with you. But your friends would still belong to Google and Facebook. OpenID wants to be a standard for you to log in everywhere with one identity. There is no social graph bit there.

So there is not really one solution there, but identity is an important thing and it would be best if you control it somehow. I recently wrote about Address Book Sync and about Self Generated Content Infrastructure which is connected to this. It probably warrants another post. What is your identity online and are you at risk of loosing it?

2. HTML 5: Agreed, very important but I know one or two security experts that are not all too thrilled about future features in things like HTML and JavaScript. But who am I to talk. We’ll all here enough about this when things start getting more concrete.

3. Lifestreaming: This is what my SGCI post was about. I am running Noserub already, but I actually need it in a little bit different form, to really log my lifestream, because like blogging, I want my stuff searchable. And you need to make sure that whatever you use to generate your lifestream, you need to be able to get it out. Changing your status via Twitter is a good thing as it can be imported into Facebook and so on, but using Facebook would mean that you can hardly get it out again, so not into Twitter.

4. Firefox 3: Yes, my most used browser, even though I am trying to get a bit more use out of Safari just because it is faster, but I tend to gravitate back to Firefox. I am looking forward to using Google Chrome (their point 5) on OS X though.

6. Location Awareness: This is slowly getting into the mainstream but will really take some time to really get there in terms of people sharing their current location. I like Aroundme as an iPhone app and it is really becoming one of my favorites and I co-founded Ormigo for a reason. For sharing your location the best I found up till now is Brightkite because they got the security part just right.

Getting that Damn Address Book in Sync

Web 2.0, Web Development January 11, 2009 Comments: 5

This will likely be an ongoing problem I have to say but I really hope somebody will start building something that works. The even bigger problem is that the real problem (understand by now that it’s a problem? ;) ) that likely the players that hold (part of) my address book will need to support any move for a sync.

But let’s move one step back. I tried a beta service called Soocial and didn’t back up my address book. Stupid me, agreed, happens a lot of times recently because I have my head full with other stuff and I expect things to work (it’s taken care of now). It synced with my local address book (close to a 1000 contacts), then with GMail (up to 1600) and suddenly it was going up, doubling contacts left and right and I was up to close to 3000. All that happened in the background. The service provides backup possibilities meaning it should have had a backup from my first sync but that backup was empty. And it got worse and worse and suddenly all was gone. Thankfully I have a sync with GMail and long ago decided to try to bring a large part of my contacts into Xing.

So one export from GMail, fill up with Xing data, and I am moving in the right direction again. I now set up an account with Plaxo, after I made them delete my last login. It is amazing to see what kind of diverse group of people are in Plaxo I have to say and I am now using it as a focussed system to sync address book data. I would love it if they would hook up with Xing.

Strangely enough I did not find any way to export my previous address book uploads to LinkedIn, which would also have been a wonderful way to get back that data.

I really would like somebody to take care of all of this. There are different backup solutions, and I might try Soocial again at a later date, who are now probably the closest of the bunch I know to solve the problem. Plaxo for example only has one way Sync into GMail.

What I would like is something that really syncs what I have. I mean lots of people have a photo inside Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter or Noserub or whatever so why do I need to add them to my address book damn it! So this would be another interesting project for all of you out there. A real sync of my personal connections. Go cracking. Thank you. :) Suggestions of course always welcome.

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