Disruptive Conversations

In its article today, "Fogeys Flock to Facebook" (cute alliteration of the letter F, by the way) Business Week talks about the rise in Facebook usage by the older crowd:

But older users are behind the recent traffic surge at Facebook, which says it signs up 150,000 new users a day. In June, 11.5 million of the individual visitors to the site were 35 or older, more than double the number a year before, according to market researcher ComScore Media Metrix. The 35-and-up crowd now accounts for more than 41% of all Facebook visitors.

Given that yours truly counts among the 35 and older crowd, I had to comment on that.  As Facebook claims now to have 33 million members, does that 11.5 million individual users mean that we of the older set now represent a third of Facebook's population?

Readers have seen my writing about Facebook and my various concerns, but I do continue to use the site.  I do, though, think that if Facebook is to keep the older crowd, it will need to grow up a bit in the way it handles members.  For instance, the way networks are sorted is skewed toward dating and setting up Facebook events is really all about partying!

It will definitely be interesting to see: 1) if the old fogeys stay around without some changes; and 2) if the college-age crowd sticks around as their parents come into Facebook!  (At a recent conference another Facebook user talked of joining the site and then "friending" her teenage daughter, who wasn't entirely sure about that!)

Jeff Pulver also wrote a companion article, "Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout", that continues the thread he began on his blog back in mid-July where Jeff has said that he's stopping his regular use of LinkedIn in favor of Facebook.

Meanwhile, over on his blog, Jason Calcanis is declaring "Facebook Bankruptcy" and saying he's overloaded, which he follows up with a post on "Social Network Exhaustion".

All in all, just more signs that life in the world of Facebook will continue to be quite interesting!

 Why doesn't TypePad Mobile work with Blackberries?  As I was loading my new Blackberry with apps that I use, I thought to myself "Hmmm... doesn't TypePad have an app for posting from your mobile device?"  Not that I'll type long entries on it, given the keyboard size, but there are times when it would be great to dash off a quick entry from my mobile device.

Sure enough, they do... TypePad Mobile.  But it only works on:

• Palm OS 5
• Windows Mobile 5
• Symbian Series 60

Um... excuse me, TypePad folks... if you are trying in general to cater to business users, aren't you kind of forgetting a certain platform from that list?  Like, oh... the millions of business users of RIM's Blackberries?

Now, granted, I can update TypePad via the web browser on the Blackberry, or email in a post (however, you can only set up email posts for a single TypePad blog and I write across several blogs that are under the same TypePad account), but it would be very nice if TypePad could make an app available for Blackberry users that made it easier to post from that platform.

Recently I've given some thought to doing some experimentation with a video podcast.  My initial thought is something in conjunction with my Disruptive Telephony blog to show/discuss some of the things happening in the world of telephony.  I anticipate doing it with a webcam on my laptop and then perhaps also with recording video on my Canon digital camera (once I get a new one).  For my current experimentation, I'm thinking that I'll just use Windows Movie Maker to add title and end slides and do whatever minimal editing I need. 

But my question is this: where do I host it?

What I am looking for is a site where I can upload the video in some format and have it automagically converted to appropriate viewing formats, complete with the ability to embed video players in blogs.  Though I expect that I'll primarily promote the blogs on my own web page, I would like to be able to have a "show" web page on the hosting site.  At the moment, I'm not really interested in running ads, I don't think, but I guess at some point that might be an interesting option - but I want control over exactly what ads go where.  Today, really all I'm looking for is a publishing platform.

A year and a bit ago, when I first looked at doing something with video, there didn't seem to be all that many choices other than, say, YouTube.  But today, there seem to be a great many players in the space.  I'm NOT looking to do a live show, so that pretty much seems to rule out ustream and blogtv.com.  It seems that to me that some of the major players are the following:

• blip.tv
• hipcast.com
• brightcove.com
• podshow
• and then, of course, YouTube

So my question for you all out there reading this is - if you are doing a video podcast or video blog or vlog or whatever you want to call it, where are you hosting your videos?  And why did you use that site/service?

Any thoughts/comments/feedback would be most appreciated. (Thanks!)

As did many users this morning, I tried to login to Facebook this morning only to find the message displayed on the right - sorry, we're down for maintenance.  I've been too busy in the last couple of days here at the conference to go onto Facebook, but I've seen a number of messages on Twitter that people have been having problems getting into the site over the past couple of days

Given that Facebook wants to be the "social operating system", the question is - what is their plan for being available?  Are they having scaling issues?    If people come to use Facebook as a communication medium, what plans does Facebook have in place to ensure that it is available when people want to communicate?

Burlington, VT, airport.  Gate 15, Jet Blue's gate.  It's 6:15pm.  For almost all of us, our flight out was supposed to be close to 2 hours ago at 4:30pm - and they are saying we won't now leave until 7:30pm at the earliest. Severe thunderstorms in New York City/Philadelphia have completely screwed up air travel on the East Coast.  Something like 18 connecting flights out of JFK have been canceled - including my own.  I've been rebooked on a 9:45 connection that will get me in to Florida now at something like 1am (instead of 10:30pm).  People all around have been talking in their cell phones trying to rebook flights - or using their laptops with the free WiFi... or standing in long lines at the gate.  As the gate agent makes her periodic announcements of more connecting flights that will be missed, there are audible groans around the large room.

But right now... for at least a little while... the mood here in the terminal is pretty darn happy, with smiles around and a bit of light-hearted banter.

Why?   Simple...

Jet Blue brought in pizza and soft drinks for everyone to share!

Yes, indeed, a few minutes ago the Jet Blue ground crew brought in about 20 or so pizzas from Dominos.  This after having previous cracked open a few cases of soft drinks and water for people to have.   People lined up nicely and everyone in the gate area got at least one if not two pieces of pizza.

As readers of my various blogs know, I travel a good deal (probably a week or two a month), but I have to say that in probably 15 years of regular flying, this is the first time I can honestly say I've ever had this experience.    What a simple thing to do...  what did it cost them?  Maybe $200?  Probably less with a discount.  But what a wonderful way to just help improve the customer experience.

True... our flights are still all messed up.  The odds that we will actually get out of here at 7:30pm tonight are probably right up there with the odds of the Pope converting to Judaism.  The odds that all of us will make our connecting flights in JFK are probably quite similarly slim.  It's pretty clear that today's a pretty lousy day to be flying on the East Coast of the US. 

But up here in Vermont at the Jet Blue gate... at least for a moment... instead of a terminal full of grumpy, angry, upset customers whining and complaining about the airline, there is instead a crowd of calmer people who have at least had the edge taken off of their hunger.

Way to go, Jet Blue!

As I've always been fascinated by ways of visualizing data, I naturally had to try out the "FriendWheel" application now available inside of Facebook.  One result, taking all the defaults, is now visible on the right (click for a much larger image).  The "What is this?" link on the page says this:

The circle shows part of a social network. Around the edge of the circle are Dan York's friends. If two of them are connected by a line, it means that they are friends with each other. Relationships between different groups of friends (eg. "Home friends" and "University/College friends") can often be seen in the circle. It's also brightly coloured and looks pretty.

Once you add the app to your Facebook profile, you can then configure it using a range of settings and then generate the wheel image.  It takes a little bit because it has to get information about your friends and their connections in order to generate the information. 

Naturally, I was a bit concerned about the fact that data about all my friends and their connections were going to someone else's computers, at least for the time required to generate the image, and so did read the privacy policy, which states this:

Friend Wheel will retrieve the names of all your friends and all links between your friends. This data will be shown on the friend wheel image. This image is not publically viewable (but you can show it to whoever you want by sending them the entire URL of the enlarged image).
Your Friend Wheel will be accessible to anyone who knows the pass-code for your wheel. This is shown (as part of the URL) in the "Friend Wheel" box on your profile, so anyone who can see this will be able to see your wheel.
To configure who can see the wheel on your profile, visit the Applications Settings page (click on "edit settings" next to Friend Wheel and choose from the drop-down box).
You can remove the application at any time. Your Friend Wheel will then be deleted.

However, this doesn't answer the larger question to me about the fact that the data about all my friends and their connections is at least temporarily residing in "Thomas Fletcher's" computers while the script is running.  I guess we have to hope he's not doing anything with the data (or else we don't use the app).

In any event, potential privacy concerns aside, the tool is quite interesting.  You can choose to graph only a subset of your friends, graph one of your networks, graph a random assortment of friends, graph mutual friends of one of your friends... and more.  Lots of other tweaks you can make to it.  In the image to the left, I changed the "grouping algorithm" from the default of "FriendGroupster-4000", which appears to put blocks of your friends together, to just a straight alphabetical grouping.  This, obviously, doesn't really help you see a whole lot.

I noticed today that the developer has added an "Interactive Flash Map" which lets you play even more with the data:

You can mouseover friends to highlight their links, click and drag to move friends around, zoom in and out by using the buttons in the top left, and pan by clicking and dragging in white space.

All in all an intriguing little app that helps highlight the connections between your various "friends" within Facebook.

UPDATE: I meant to note that where I first saw Friend Wheel being used was in Phil Wolff's new banner for Skype Journal (described here).

What if you have a set of slides that really needs audio to make sense?  That all alone doesn't really work?  That was the case with my "story of SysAdmin Steve" presentation that I did back at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony conference earlier this year.  A number of people commented that without the audio, it was hard to really know how it went.  This was deliberate, really - there was a reason for me doing it that way.

Well, I'm now delighted that the SlideShare folks already updated their "slidecasting" audio synchronization tool so that now I can show the presentation in line with the audio.  So here it is... in all of its 243-slides-in-15-minutes glory... enjoy my little story (and I think that even if you aren't interested in VoIP security, you may (or may not) find the story entertaining):

Press the green play button to begin.  The first slide starts changing about 3:45 seconds into the show - and then they start changing at a rate averaging about once every 2-3 seconds.  I tried as best I could to sync the slides to the audio... I may adjust it in some places (and the cool part is that you can adjust it!).

Feedback is, as always, quite welcome.  This was a fun presentation to do... and using SlideShare's slidecasting interface does let me relive a bit of that fun!

Have you ever heard a podcast or recording of a presentation and wished you could see the slides or materials that went along with it?  Or perhaps even worse - you have the slides, but you wish you could know when the speaker advanced to the next slide?  Wouldn't it be great if there was some way you get the audio synced to the slides?

Welcome to the world of "slidecasting"!  Later today, Slideshare.net will be rolling out a new audio interface that lets you sync an MP3 file to a set of slides.  The process is ridiculously simple:

1. Upload a slide set to Slideshare.net (after creating an account if you don't have one)
2. Click on Edit and then the "Edit Slidecast" tab.
3. Provide the URL for an MP3 file to link to. (the file will then be retrieved and loaded into the interface)
4. Use the synchronization interface to indicate the beginning and end markers for each slide.
5. Preview (if you want) and then publish.

The result can be seen in this sync'd presentation below.  It takes the audio podcast from Blue Box Special Edition #16 and combines it with the appropriate set of slides. The slides start changing about 3 minutes into the presentation (since there is the intro and such):

(If you are incredibly impatient and can't wait the 3 minutes, you can click the arrow button to advance to the first slide and then you'll see the slide movement.)  Other examples are also available on the blog of SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha.

The slidecasting interface (step #4 in my list above) itself is quite trivial to use (click on the image below  to see a larger version):

You simply click on the slide you want to sync, starting with the first one, and then adjust the start and end markers with the mouse.  You can obviously play the audio (shown by the red line on the image) and then sync the slides as you go along.  Very easy to do. It's all AJAX/Flash/etc. so it just works in a standard browser. Kudos to the SlideShare team for making it as easy as it is.

The interface will still evolve, too.  During the beta period (I was a participant), there were some issues found. For instance, I would very much like to sync the audio for my "Black Bag Security Review" presentation since it is a presentation that really needs syncing with the audio to make sense.  However, the slide set is 243 slides in about 15 minutes, which works out to about 3 seconds a slide.  In many cases the transition is about 2 seconds!  However, the user interface only allowed for the smallest interval to be about 5 seconds.  For 99% of presentations out there, that's probably perfectly fine... for this "story" presentation, though, I need that shorter time.  The SlideShare folks are looking into what can be done, so hopefully I'll be able to get that out there soon.

In any event, the slidecasting interface will apparently be made available to all SlideShare users later today and it will be very interesting to see what people do with it.  For me, given that I speak at conferences and also record my presentations and put them out as podcasts, it's a wonderful way to sync the two pieces and give people who could not attend a bit closer of a view of how the presentation went.  I could see this being used for corporate presentations... for training materials, etc.  I imagine one the primary uses may be conferences that record the speakers and then want to sync them to slides.

A criticism, of course, is that you could just take this type of material and create a video out of it.  Either directly record the presentation and slides using a video camera, or use a tool like Camtasia to create a "screencast" of a presentation and then upload the resulting video somewhere.  That's certainly true... although I would wonder if screencasting tools are out there that sync the audio with slides as nicely as this. Obviously you could have the presenter doing the recording on the PC and moving through the slides, which would result in a great screencast.  However, this does involve the presenter being involved with the recording, whereas the SlideShare slidecasting capability can take the audio from a presentation and have it be synced to slides much later.

I'll write more as I use the interface more, but in the meantime, you can head over to SlideShare.net and try it out yourself.  The interface should be out of beta sometime today. (We were asked to hold off on blogging about it, but once TechCrunch posted about it, the embargo request was lifted.)

What do you think?  How do you see this service being used?  What would you use it for?  Do you currently use other services? 

Last week I wrote about Facebook's Terms of Service and the fact that they basically own all the content you upload, but over the weekend legal student and blogger Andres Flusche wrote: "Facebook Isn't Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know".   He nicely summarize the content licensing issue (that was at the heart of my own post on the subject) with this:

In plain English, this means you’re giving up copyright control of your material. If you upload a photo to Facebook, they can sell copies of it without paying you a cent. If you write lengthy notes (or import your blog posts!), Facebook can turn them into a book, sell a million copies, and pay you nothing. This deserves careful consideration!

Indeed it does deserve careful consideration!  For instance, I'm debating whether the additional visibility garnered by importing this blog's postings into Facebook Notes balances out with the fact that, as Andres notes, Facebook can do whatever they want with them.  For the moment, I'm continuing to import my entries... but I'm debating and may very well stop the import.

Another point he makes is the "personal use only" nature of Facebook.  He quotes the Facebook Terms of Service:

You understand that except for advertising programs offered by us on the Site (e.g., Facebook Flyers, Facebook Marketplace), the Service and the Site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only.

One wonders then, how Facebook aims to be the "social operating system" if it is all to be for your "personal, non-commercial use only".  What about the large number of "business" users flocking to Facebook?  If I bring in my business contacts is that a personal or commercial use?  What if we exchange Facebook messages about a potential opportunity?

His other points about the ability to change the terms, legal issues, etc. are well worth a read.

 If you are involved with PR or communications, how do you find out what blogs make sense to follow?  Or which podcasts makes sense to listen to in your limited time?  If you are looking for a site or resource about a particular topic but don't want to have to sort through a zillion results in Google or Technorati, where can you go?

Well, in a new addition to the site, Melcrum's Communicators' Network would like to be that answer. Back in May, I wrote about my initial experience but haven't written much since then.  The site, though, has continued to expand and grow and just recently rolled out a "Reviews" section which lets users of the site review - and rate - blogs, podcasts, websites and more.  The idea is that these are reviews and comments by communicators and for communicators.  So in theory you should be able to tap into the collective views of other communicators to find resources that might be of value to you.    Over time, as more people use the site and contribute, the "top-rated" blogs, podcasts, etc. should in theory drift to the top.

Right now, of course, it is just getting started and so the reviews/ratings are a bit sparse and the rankings represent the input of only a very small number of people.  Over time, though, this should even out and, assuming people are ethical in their rankings, the reviews should be useful.

If you are a member of the Communicator's Network, do login and check it out (and while you are there, please add some comments with ratings and reviews!).  Note that it's very easy to add more resources to the lists if you want to add one that isn't there. If you aren't a member, it's easy to join.