Disruptive Conversations

While I have historically been a huge fan of Technorati, I'm increasingly getting disappointed with the site (as can be seen in my recent posts) and today provided yet another disappointment.  Since my employer, Mitel, had a major reseller conference last week, I was searching technorati for postings about the event.  There seemed to be a number of photos, so I followed the link for the page of "photos about mitel".  However, once there, I found there was no way to sort by date!

Huh?

Did I imagine this?  Am I missing some option somewhere?

Why should I really care about photos posted 362 days ago?  or 131 days ago?  (Or even, amazingly, 806 days ago?)  How about something closer to, oh, today?  When I did scroll down the page I did find a few posted 4 days ago... but that was all the way at the bottom... and there would seem to be at least 6 more pages of photos... would I really have to scroll through them to find more recent photos?

Now, I don't really think of Technorati as a place to go search for photos, but that's part of what Technorati aims to be, by their own admission.  If they do want to be "the place to go" to search the multimedia web, though, I do think they need to improve things like sort capabilities!  I want to see the search results not only in terms of what my be most relevant, but also in terms of timeframe.  I want to see new photos first.

I know the team there is working hard on improving the site.  Hopefully some of these changes will be made.  In the meantime, I think I'll pretty much ignore the photo search capability.

On Day 2 of using Pownce - and remembering that it is in "beta" - my initial reaction was one of complete disgust at the sheer number of email messages that the site generates by default.  I mean, who in their right mind would think that people would want email notifications for basically everything that happens on the site?  Now, maybe there are people out there who don't get as much email as I do, but sheesh...

Thankfully there is a way to turn off the notifications to reduce the flow.  I think the "Plain message received" is the biggest culprit.  It seems that anytime any of your "friends" send you a message you wind up with an email message letting you know that you have a new message!  Get more than a few friends and... ta da... your email inbox is deluged!  So here would be my #1 feedback item to the developers:

Turn most of the notifications OFF by default!

Maybe just the "Pending friend request" and "Event invite received".  Or put the notification screen as part of the signup process so that when someone is joining Pownce they see all this and can specify what they want.  All I know is that my initial reaction on opening up my personal email this morning was that I almost immediately wanted to get out of Pownce!

As the bright, shiny object chasers keep moving to Pownce, there are the inevitable comparisons to other darling, Twitter, and while I don't have the time to write up my own thoughts today, a blogger named Tamar Weinberg posted a nice  comparison: "Twitter vs. Pownce: Who Pwns?" that captures a lot of the differences very nicely, complete with screenshots.   I agree with most of her points.  The biggest difference to me seems to be APIs.  With Pownce you must use either the (non-auto-refreshing) web page or the separate Pownce application.  With Twitter, you can use the (auto-refreshing) web page, but there are now a ton of other apps that allow you to update Twitter.  You can also connect to Twitter from other applications/devices that fit within your normal daily workflow.  So, for instance, when I am in my home office, I use "twitter4skype" to read tweets from friends directly in a Skype IM chat window and post my own updates to Twitter.  When I am on the road, I use my blackberry to SMS in updates (and could read them on my BB via SMS if I wished to do so).  I have also updated Twitter from within Facebook.  The key point is - I don't have to run yet another app on my PC, or be limited to having to go to a specific web page.

We'll see.  I like the "Sets" that are part of Pownce, and the idea of sending files is interesting (but, gee, I can do that with any of my IM clients!)... but I really don't like having to go to the one web page (or using the app).

Noah Mittman also chimed in with a post comparing the two and offering the view that Twitter is aiming at being a multiplatform messaging system while Pownce is aiming to be a multipurpose "sharing" system.  I understand the difference he's making, but it seems to me that right now people are viewing Pownce as primarily a better version of Twitter.  It still to me is a micro-blogging/status/presence system.  As to the "sharing", my ongoing thought is that we already have so many different ways to share files and links (as I count the number of IM clients I am running), that I'm not sure we really need yet another.

I think both Pownce and Twitter are stepping stones toward something else that amalgamates all these different communication needs.... I'm not sure what precisely that is (or I'd launch a startup!)...

Does this sound familiar?  There is suddenly a site about which absolutely "everyone" you know is suddenly talking.  Suddenly, you have just got to join that site - but of course you must have an invitation and they are hard to get.  You are, though, being asked by all sorts of people you know... who keep telling you how great it is and how this new site will completely revolutionize the Internet and fundamentally alter the way in which we communicate.  Once you give in and join you suddenly find yourself deluged in requests to be added as a "friend" by some people you know and then also by many others you have no clue who they are.  It's the "new" Internet.  It's the end of everything old and the start of everything new.  It's the best invention since sliced bread.  You just gotta see it!

What site am I talking about?

Hmmm... how about Orkut in 2004?

That was certainly the view in those days.... everyone was madly adding Orkut friends, filling out their Orkut profiles... wildly creating "communities" within Orkut and finding new communities to join.  Just like today's Facebook Groups, you could learn a great amount about someone by the communities they joined.  Private messages were flying back and forth and it was just the place to be, even if many were uncomfortable with the focus of the site on dating.

But then somewhere along the way a good number of folks, myself included, were off to chase the next bright, shiny thing and we stopped checking in to Orkut all that often.  Spam increased within the site, the Brazilians took over ... and the rest is history.  There are obviously still a lot of folks using the site, and occasionally I get a message in email that reminds me I need to go visit (usually to remove the "scraps" that spammers leave).

The pattern repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats....

After Orkut, the place to be was LinkedIn... Friendster... Xing... LiveJournal... MySpace... today's darling seems to be Facebook.

Over the past months "presence services" have seemed to be the rage.  First it was Twitter... then there was a "great migration" over to Jaiku.... then some folks started thinking Facebook status updates were the best... meanwhile all the IM addicts were wondering how these new services were all that different from the IM "advisory" or "mood" messages people had been changing for some time.  (And fundamentally they really aren't different, except that you can get them via RSS or on a web page and thus have a history.)

Now, today, some of the Twitter-addicted seem to be convinced that Pownce is the next bright, shiny thing and it will solve all the problems with Twitter and bring us to communication nirvana.  Naturally, being a professional chaser of bright, shiny things, I had to sign up for Pownce.  First impression is that it's a lot like Twitter with better replies and a way to have both public posts and also ones only visible to your friends.  (Which, of course, I've had from a blogging point of view with my LiveJournal account since back in 2004.) Okay, and it has its own desktop software.

Of course, to use it means that I have to rebuild a list of "friends" similar to the lists I already have in all the aforementioned presence, IM and social networking services.  I will, naturally, because there is something in my mental makeup that compels me to try out new services like this.

Meanwhile, of course, someone else is telling me that Hictu.com is really the place to be... if I'll just go there and sign up, the mist will be lifted from my eyes and everything will be amazingly clear.   Hmmmmm.....

Ever since I started using Twitter, I have often been quite amused (and annoyed) by the various images with kittens that appeared whenever there was a server error.  The typical image has a cat inside a computer with words like "IM IN UR SERVER".  I usually either laughed or cursed... but I didn't realize that I'd missed the larger meme of which these are a part - a meme called "LOLCats". The Wikipedia entry for LOLcats naturally has plenty of interesting links.  It seems that this began about the beginning of the year or late in 2006.  The premiere site really seems to be "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" which started with this eponymous entry.  Around April 2007 there seems to have been a big explosion in interest and coverage.

I missed it all.  If you did, too, here's some links to get caught up:  :-)

• Slate slide show: "You cannot resist lolcats"
• Houston Chronicle: "I'M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM"
• im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
• Anil Dash: "Cats Can Has Grammar"  (about the grammar and forms of writing in LOLcats)
• lolcatr.com: the lolcat community and social networking site
• Tech.Chick.Blog: Thunderkits (a collection of LOLcats)
• im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology  (about a computer programming language based on LOLcats!)

And of course, should you wish to create your own LOLcat images, you might want to first read:

• LOL-Kitteh as a Second Language (LKSL-101) in Five Easy Steps

and then visit the:

• LOLCat Buildr

The linguist and lover of languages in me finds this all rather amusing... yet another way to abuse the English language!  Yet I admit that many of the images are amusing and fun...  just another one of those curious things to emerge from this thing we call the Internet.

On my flight out to Las Vegas, I finally got a chance to listen to FIR episode #250, our tribute show to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out!  And I understand why both Shel and Neville were blushing. 

You see, Sallie Goetsch and I were running around contacting all sorts of people to see about getting contributions while Lee Hopkins had volunteered to do the audio mixing and post-production.  We were getting people to send those contribs into a special gmail address I took out, from where Lee was going to pull the clips.  In the midst of this, Sallie was on vacation and I was in the normal chaos that leads up to going on a week of vacation... and in the middle of things Lee's email server was having problems and was not reliably receiving email from Sallie and I... so it was all a bit chaotic.  But the net of it is that the episode was published while I was offline, so it wasn't until today when I could really listen to it.   Mr. Hopkins did his usual shenanigans with all sorts of audio clips and other things... and the contributions from folks were all very nicely done and great to listen to.

The only bummer was that we left out Bryper's contribution.  He was one of the early ones who sent something in... but it didn't go to the special gmail address and I guess none of us realized that in the run-up to getting the show done.   The good news is that you can catch his comment at the beginning of FIR #251.  Sorry about that, Bryan.

In any event, I thought the episode (and other comments) were definitely a great demonstration of the community that can be built around a show.  I'm glad that both Shel and Neville liked it... and it's great to see them climbing on with #251 and #252... let's see where the next 250 shows take FIR!

Don't expect to see much from me here for the next bit.  In a few minutes I'm shutting down my systems and heading offline on vacation for the next week.  I'll be back online Monday, MayJune 25th, although I'll be travelling to a Mitel conference in Las Vegas for most of that week.

We're not planning to go anywhere extravagent... maybe some day trips around Vermont... some camping... work around the house... all in all just a pleasant way to spend some time before the heat of summer hits.

See you in a week!

Hint... I made it blindingly obvious with the red circles.

Oops.

Methinks they got a wee bit carried away with making their form templates generic!

Ever wonder why I wound up in Burlington, VT, after living in Ottawa, Ontario, for most of 5 years?  Well, maybe you haven't... but that and other items about me are now available in an interview that Martyn Davies has posted as part of his new "Bending the Needle" podcast series.  When Martyn was over here and visited me back in the winter, he recorded this brief interview sitting in my home studio.  He just recorded it on his handy little Zoom H4 portable recorder which worked quite well.  He also took this picture to the right, which remains among my favorite as far as pictures of me go.

Martyn had told me that he was teaming up with Dean Elwood from VoIPuser.org to do a podcast series and this "Bending the Needle" seems to be their work.  The subtitle is "Interviews with the Leading Edge Personalities in the VoIP Space" and so it's an honor to be among the first interviewees he has up there.  I'll subscribe and will be interested to see their other interviews.

(Originally posted over on my Disruptive Telephony blog... but I thought it made sense here as well.)

I have not really written about Jaiku here at all... I have been meaning to explore it a bit more, but just haven't had the time.  What limited time I have had lately has been more focused on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and the evolving mashups of all of those.

But Ken Camp has been writing and advocating Jaiku, and is starting a series of posts with his one today: "Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 1"  Ken is going to talk more about the new client for Nokia S60 phones.  But this part of his first post is perhaps more revealing:

First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a used can share brief snippets of information - current status, pose a question, leave a thought - for others to see.

Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is apprach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective.

I agree with Ken that this type of "lifestream aggregation" represents a direction in which social networking is evolving.  The challenge, I think, really comes back to where you do that aggregation.  Jaiku would like to be your aggregator.  So would Twitter (which can bring in RSS feeds through sites like Twitterfeed.com).  And so indeed would Facebook which now includes an RSS application as part of its platform.

So which do you choose?

All are, to varying degrees, walled gardens of some sort.  Ken can't follow my status updates because I primarily use Twitter.  Alec Saunders does most all his updates within Facebook.   We do need to have some kind of common aggregator.   We need to tear down the walls so that we don't wind up in isolated islands of communication.

But in the meantime, if you want to read about how pretty and nice it is inside of the walled garden of Jaiku, head on over to Ken's post to read more.  This is Part 1, with the others to follow soon thereafter, I would expect.

As readers of this blog know, I built this blog (and the companion Disruptive Telephony) back in January by using the 3-column hack from TypePadHacks.org to essentially beat TypePad's standard templates into submission and give me the format I've wanted.  Overall, it's worked well... except for the fact that when you leave a comment you get squeezed into a tiny central column.  John Unger had a workaround for that which involved re-generating your Advanced Templates and copying/pasting a lot of things around... which is why I never quite did it.

So now comes word that TypePad has finally released a native template in this format!  I'm delighted because I very much like the format and think it's a great way to have a blog set up (obviously!).  I look forward to using it on several of my other blogs.  I am assuming it will also fix my issue of having a narrow comment field.  It will also allow me to very easily manipulate sidebar content using the standard TypePad tools.  I do it now through the Advanced Templates and, while it can be done, it's not overly fun at times.

And... those users out there still stuck on Internet Explorer 6 will hopefully no longer have a problem viewing my blogs!

Unfortunately, it will probably be a bit for me to move these two blogs over to that new template.  I've now customized and tweaked them so much in the Advanced Templates that it will probably take a while for me to get them moved over. (For instance, I have to move over the navigation bar that appears on the top.)

Still... I'm glad to see the format out there.  And now if you are a TypePad user, you, too, can have a format like this blogs format... without all the pain!  (The pain did, though, force me to learn an awful lot about TypePad Advanced Templates!)