in my experienceTwitter doesn't own the world yet.
March 23, 2010 11:07 AM
More often I'm hearing people describing Twitter as the place to get all of your news and to connect to everything and everyone. More than a few times I've heard people say RSS is dead and Twitter now owns the empty hole in your soul that can only be filled with up to the second news. They may be right, but there's one hole in my soul that Twitter couldn't fill and that a good old fashioned blog could.
I've been playing We Rule on the iPhone, which is a Farmville clone (cue the moans and groans). Anyway, there's a social component to the game and I posted up my Plus+ name (which We Rule uses to connect players) and got only one reply. I then posted my name on a We Rule story on tuaw.com and got 20 replies that night (and they continue to come in as I type). So, maybe it's not a shocker that a specific story and a comment posted on it would garner more results, but consider the fact that I posted my name on Twitter in a standardized format.
There's an in-game feature that spams Twitter saying you're looking for people to play with. It's done in the same format every time and only the name in the post is different. You can do a search for that right now and you'll see tons of people looking for each other. Now, I'm just one person, but it's worth pointing out that a blog comment in the right place can be far more productive than shouting into the Twitter abyss.
Oh yeah, add Circk on Plus+ when you get a chance. :D
Social Graph
February 16, 2010 11:17 AM
- This is the place where I share personal stuff with people I actually know. If I don't know you directly and know something personal about you, then I don't have a connection to you on Facebook. It's ironic that Facebook is the service that scares me the most when it comes to privacy issues but is the service where I have my most personal relationships.
- I have one account that's "me" that covers nerd stuff. My other account is for games and Warcraft related stuff which I assume people on my personal account don't want to hear about. I tend to use my normal account for quasi-bookmarking of links and ideas.
- Buzz
- This is much like my personal Twitter account, but it feels much more directly identifiable as ME since it's attached to my email account. It seems that in Buzz I should watch what I say more carefully and have to keeps things on the techie side of the world.
- Xbox Live
- These are people I know well, or that I don't know very well at all, but all of them are people I've met online and aren't annoying. I have know some of these people for six years now and have been promoted up into the Facebook realm of my social graph.
- Flickr
- I'm not using this, but I feel like I should be. I've been taking a lot of pictures with my iPhone and processing them with Mill Colour and have posted some of those pictures here. But they are a part of what I think of as a 'collection' and want to get them out there.
I haven't mentioned Posterous, Tumblr or Plurk, which I could use, but don't since those all seem like people are shouting in the abyss. They all seem to relish a stream of consciousness that amounts to nothing.
All of the services mentioned are ways to create and consume noise about our lives and I'm looking for ways to aggregate them all here on In My Experience in some meaningful (and yet automated) way. I looked into Storytlr, but it's a pain to get running and I have a wife, career and kid. Occasional blogging and manual labor will have to do for now, but I know there's some layer in between a personal blog and all of these other cloud services that can make things easier, meaningful and vaguely permanent.
Google Buzz
February 10, 2010 2:03 PM
I'm guessing people's Twitter habits and social graph have solidified enough where Buzz isn't a real threat, but we'll see what happens. My guess is that this lives somewhere between Twitter and Movable Type's Motion.
The funny thing is that I could have Buzz'd this, but I blogged it instead. I'll now share the link to this on both services and create more ancillary inside-baseball noise. I'm wondering when the madness will end.
No Comments, Revisited
February 2, 2010 1:41 PM
Today, Engadget, the king of gadget blogs, turned off comments site-wide. I did the same thing here a while back due to spam reasons, but Engadget has done so due to "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening" comments posted on the site. User and community involvement is a double edged sword, and I have to say, that on my own site, I miss seeing and reading the comments from my readers (I never had very many, but they were loyal).
So, what to do with comments on blogs? You'll never escape spam nor offensive comments, but there are ways to manage the issue...
- Tweetboard uses Twitter which has seen wide adoption, but has had some reliability issues (eg, the recent database migration was fubared). I like it though since it has some viral (eg, po.st link) qualities to it.
- Disqus offloads the commenting engine onto someone else's shoulders, but since it's somewhere else you can't control it's availability. Also, user have to go sign up for another account at another site.
- TypePad exists, but nobody I know ever talks about it. I never see it on the web (it's a Wordpress world these days).
I'll be watching what Engadget does since they are a part of a much larger network of blogs and there has to be a better way to do this (or at least a way that allows for comments that doesn't totally suck).