SuperSatellite

Pingilactic, you say?

// June 6th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Web

Yeah, I have no clue why people feel the need to combine words for the sake of marketing either. Pingilactic sounds like something that happens to your nipples when you don’t change the oil regularly. Or something. Anyway, the masterminds behind this new word for 2008 are Profilactic and Ping.fm.  Profilactic I’ve mentioned before, but Ping.fm was a new one.

Trying to create order in the increasing chaotic sphere of the social web is getting considerably harder, not easier, lately.  This is surprising in a way, but when you consider the number of competing services coming out, and quickly changing features, it’s hard to marry yourself to one brand.  But the past several days my corner of the web has seen a lot of chatter amongst people about Twitter’s trouble with scaling up to meet the service demands.  This flagship Ruby on Rails application has been struggling with problems in their architecture that is hindering its ability to meet the increasingly heavy demand.  There are a handful of us who have been playing with a new competitor in the microblogging realm called Plurk.com.  It’s one of the dumbest names I think they could come up with for a service, but the site itself is pretty neat.  It boasts the same 140 character limit, but has some natively supported action verbs, threaded discussions, a neat timeline, friends and followers, cliques, and nice privacy features.  The largest complaint is that it lacks the support that Twitter gets from people developing things like Adobe AIR interfaces using Twitter’s API (Application Program Interface).  So far, I don’t believe Plurk has opened their API, and that’s a shame.  And more to the point, there hasn’t been a way to kill two birds with one stone and post to Plurk and Twitter together so that one doesn’t have to alienate an established group of friends to switch services.  The ideal solution would be something like an AIR application that can monitor and post to both, so that you can keep your friends wherever they might be, but not double the effort to keep your thoughts up to date.

Okay, moving on in the same vein.  A similar conflict also came up between the options of using FriendFeed and Profilactic.  Some of my friends are on one, some the other.  Like Twitter and Plurk, those that have chosen their side are pretty married to it.  I’ve been using Profilactic in part because it supports a HUGE number of services, and I like the sidebar widget it creates (that integrates nicely with WordPress).  But, it seemed like more people I know use FriendFeed.  Ahh challenges.  I discovered the easiest way to solve this conflict was to push my Profilactic lifestream RSS to FriendFeed.  So, one down.  Sadly, the Plurk/Twitter deathmatch can’t be solved quite so easily.

Now, let’s bring this all home.  I ended up spending some time going around all four of these services, looking for answers to the question: what to pick?  The Profilactic/FriendFeed debate was simple, since the idea of a Lifestream is pretty straightforward, and RSS is totally portable.  Subscribe to either of my accounts, you’ll get the same information.  Part of what convinced me to kick FriendFeed into the #2 spot though was what I mentioned earlier, Ping.fm.  Ping.fm has partnered with Profilactic to allow you to update supported services from you Profilactic lifestream page.  This is cool, because it helps address the problem of updating several microblogs at once.  It’s not exactly what we had been seeking, but it was an answer nonetheless.

Ping.fm supports many different services, and groups them by things like status (Facebook, MySpace), microblog (Twitter, Plurk), or blogs.  Selecting the group and posting will send your update to all services in that category.  With the partnership, this functionality is now exposed to you right in Profilactic on your lifestream page.  Ping.fm is addressing a central problem of how do you easily update everything you’re in.  I tried to tackle this a while back with Netvibes, but it is surprisingly hard to do since you can never be sure just how much a company will expose in their API (after all, they still want you to go to their site).  Ping.fm is still in beta, and you need to be a member of Profilactic to sign up (or I might let it slip that “profilactic” is the signup key.  Oops).  As it is, Ping.fm is FAR from the holy grail of social web updating, but it has the right idea.  It doesn’t have great handling of services’ custom features (Plurk default verbs for instance), and it doesn’t seem that you have a way to control how it groups services.  Mostly, it’s pretty basic and simple, but it does work.

Hopefully, assuming they are paying attention to how people are using Ping.fm, I suspect they will work to make inroads on some of these ideas.  At the moment it seems like the best option if you want to try and address several sites all at once though.  Then again, it’s a little like using Pidgin or Trillian for instant messaging, where the cost of merging services is losing features.  And as a corollary, just because you update several services at once doesn’t mean you escape needing to read several sites to keep up with replies.  You still need to go to Plurk for threaded discussions, and Profilactic doesn’t necessarily keep up with Twitter’s @ replies.

Ultimately, I think it’s just a matter of waiting.  Ping.fm is a solution, if you really aren’t willing to double up some effort.  Given time, I think Plurk will open up, and I think that Plurk and Twitter have enough in common that someone (smarter than me) will be able to make one application that will handle them both simultaneously.  And even though Plurk is neat, there are a whole lot of people in love with Twitter’s simplicity, downtime or no downtime.  It’s up to the services in the end to provide the APIs necessary so that we can use them the way we want.  But, such interaction is a privaledge, not a right, so we just need to suck up to the developers of our favorite services.

Explaining Profilactic’s new “Post something” feature from sMoRTy71 on Vimeo.

Social Web: Gearing up without burning out

// March 7th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Web

The Experiment: Do more with less. Could I increase my “presence” within the “social web” without increasing time or labor to do so, and without having to navigate through a dozen sites a day in order to keep up?

I mentioned this little experiment in my post yesterday, and thought I’d go into it a little bit more and get some feedback and your thoughts on ways I could improve on my process. With the tools out there now, it is getting easier to consolidate things that you do into one place. Google was the first place I tried some of this at, and I rather liked it. Their Google Personalized Home (iGoogle) was great for bringing in a handful of my favorite RSS feeds, and a couple other tools like movie listings and the weather. I stuck with it for quite a while, until recently, when I discovered NetVibes. NetVibes is basically iGoogle on steroids. The features are better, widgets are more controllable, and the site feels more responsive and useful.

Since I’ve used NetVibes the past couple months, I decided I’d use that as my launching pad. They also just upgraded to the Ginger version, which has an option called the Universe page in the spirit of social media that is a page you can share widgets with other people at. I am not yet doing this, but will probably expand to it as the experiment progresses.

The first thing I did was to take RSS feeds from every site I visit regularly: PerezHilton.com (shut up, like you don’t have vices), Astronomy Picture of the Day, Motivational Images, The Middle Way, NFL.com, and others. This allows me to keep up with all of those, without needing to actually go to the sites. It’s all tossed onto a tab in NetVibes, so I know when new stuff is out there.  Granted, some sites only offer excerpts in their RSS feed, and not full articles, so in some cases I would have to leave NetVibes to visit the site.  Turns out that a lot of sites do offer full posts in their RSS though.  I’m already finding this useful.
Next, I started thinking about social web sites that I am a part of. Any of us might have several accounts like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, DeviantArt, Ning, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, or any of a million others. I needed to start piling up on more of these, as part of this project is to do more social networking, but with less time. Twitter is the first I’ve taken on, largely because I hate the idea of it, which means I need to understand it better. Off I go back to NetVibes, where I find a Twitter Widget. I also find a Twitter application for Facebook and install that, to help tie different social sites of mine together. Plus there’s the Twitter plugin for WordPress I have on my blog now (and my blog also has plugins to feed posts to my MySpace and Facebook pages, for further social integration). So, as far as Twitter goes, I can keep up on it wherever I might be.

I also pulled in a Facebook widget for Netvibes, so that I don’t have to visit Facebook to keep up on what my network there is doing. The MySpace widget I found was not so useful, unfortunately, because they do not have the same open API (Application Program Interface) sites like Twitter and Facebook are adopting. Boo MySpace (add it to the list of things that suck about that site).  Now I have a tab in NetVibes that will serve as my social nexus, if you will.  As I start working with other networking sites, I will try to tie them to that tab, so that I can use it all in one place.  I’m also open to suggestions for social tools I should try out.

So, that’s the long and short of it.  Make NetVibes bridge the gap to sites I visit regularly, and build in tools where I can keep up a social web presence in one tab so that I’m not continuously bouncing around sites.  This is what their site is for after all, creating a personal web dashboard, so I want to see how far I can push it.  So far, I’m not unhappy with how the mold is forming.  I’ll keep up with how it’s going on here once in a while, and I’ll even tweet about it from time to time when necessary.

What have you tried new today?

// March 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Web

As a webmaster, I generally find it part of my responsibility to keep up on new things that come out, in case they might have a value to us here in some way, be it functional, monetary, or just ohh shiny factor.  One I have generally resisted was Twitter.  The concept is very simple, and one that as a normal course I find to be unproductive.  Twitter is a microblogging system, a site that allows you to make quick posts of 140 characters or less quickly to keep people up on what’s going on with you.

The concept is an extension of a Facebook or MySpace status.  But it keeps track of your “tweets” and allows you to follow and combine those with tweets of your friends.  The problem I have had with this is that at what point are you spending so much time maintaining blogs and profiles that the “social” web has destroyed your “social” life.  Not that you have one, of course, but I do.  It rocks.  I’m out at a club right now, dancing and drinking a martini.  There isn’t much more to it than that for the most part.  Like any social site, you follow friends, and post for people to read.  They can RSS your tweets, or whatever they want with the Twitter API (Application Program Interface).

So why my change in heart?  I’m doing an experiment.  In an attempt to simplify my surfing habits, I’m trying to consolidate a bunch of feeds to my NetVibes page.  Why visit ten different sites when I can just read their feeds, and go to the page when I want more info?  NetVibes supports a number of widgets, one being a Twitter widget.  I figured that being as I will go to that page as a central contact point for a lot of my web vices, there was no harm adding the widget, thereby making it so that I don’t go out of my way if I use Twitter.  So far, that’s working okay.  I also added a WordPress plugin here that allows you to see my tweets at the right in the sidebar.

What I give them credit for doing well is that if you want to use it, there’s a ton of ways.  They have a simple, open API that a lot of kind folks have already put to work.  So, I have a NetVibes widget for it.  You can also use a Facebook application with it.  There’s the WordPress plugins.  You can even send messages from a cell phone over a text message when you’re on the run.  No need to even visit their site, since most any of these can show you your tweet feeds, and allow you to add your own tweets.

So far, I don’t have many people I know on it, so if you are, drop me a line one place or the other.  My page is http://www.twitter.com/fienen.  I’ll be interested in how useful it is once I have more people on it.  I get the impression that it might become more mess than it is worse, but I can’t know without trying.  At least they had the foresight to not call it Twittr, or something equally stupid and Web 2.0-y.

Social Education

// December 6th, 2007 // No Comments » // Web

In the field of higher education, universities have a unique roll in terms of their web site and the services that we provide to visitors and users. Because the landscape of a university is so expansive, it can be easy to get caught up trying to showcase and provide for many different fields. Common features like e-mail are being augmented around the world at colleges and schools with things like e-portfolios, web storage space, blogs, photo galleries, e-learning software, and user communities. It is the latter that I am interested in focusing on today.

While doing web development, the important question to answer is: “What need are we fulfilling?” Often times we will rush head long into development to keep up with the work load that piles up. Until recently, this was a relatively safe procedure, because we often were trying to keep up with everything, so even if what we did wasn’t needed right then, by the time it was done, there would be a use for it. Now, however, that is changing. The big buzz word is “social media” or “Web 2.0.” Let me be perfectly straightforward with my dislike of the phrase Web 2.0. I think it is a misnomer that is dangerously abused, particularly by those not in web development.

It is this social web that is creating development and support challenges for colleges and universities. Many have tried to create their own social networks, or play off the popularity of others. So what’s the problem? Money is painfully finite. So are developer resources. By creating a network, you create a sort of implied agreement between yourself and the user that you will support that service for them. Worse than that, you create a service that people might use, that by comparison is still inferior to private sector counterparts. Eventually usage will drop off, and you are stuck supporting something that only a handful of people still use, but by that point you can’t justify simply scrapping it.

This creates a huge problem for college staff. How do you handle the constant complaints and feature requests? Remember, we are in the business of education and student support. By getting into these new areas, you are suddenly binding yourself to new areas of support and growth it fields that didn’t even exist five years ago. Why put that pressure on yourself? This is especially true in the face of tools being made available like Facebook’s API (Application Program Interface), which are there to make it easier to let them handle our needs. Facebook makes a lot of money. Certainly more than us. They have a huge support network in place. Dedicated people. By leveraging them in place of a homegrown solution, you solve a number of issues. First, growth into that area becomes a marketing issue, where it belongs. Web marketing staff can get in, set things up, and use the tools without any real need for us to step in. You don’t expend resources developing and supporting something that is, in essence, a fad. Ten years from now certain aspects of social media will survive, no doubt, but there will be a new big thing on the block. But if you decided to make your own tool, you are stuck playing catch up. Instead, you could have just dumped and moved on. At worst, you are out a little time that you spent working in the API, but that’s minor compared to the alternative.

Let us not forget the biggest issue. This is social media. It’s all about people, and people are around long before they ever get to us. In today’s world, it is the social norm to already have a MySpace, and a Facebook at the very least. The more adept kids are running Photobucket or Flickr, del.icio.us accounts, checking Technorati, blogging, and on, and on. Unless you can do a better job than these sites, why compete? If you could do better, you probably wouldn’t be working in higher ed in the first place, so why would we want to reinvent the wheel? If students come in already tooled up for their social networking skills, we are better off augmenting them in their domain, rather than trying to graft a new one on top of it. We see this a lot with .edu e-mail accounts, where the student gets it, and tends to use it grudgingly when they have no other choice. They are here for four years, and will get more e-mail addresses from ISPs and employers in the future, why should they hang on to this one? The same goes with social networking, since there isn’t anything we can effectively offer that would make sense for them to add one more thing they need to get on and check every day. Instead, get out and make a MySpace profile, and invite students to it. Go to them, and show that you are willing to work with them on their level. Then, once the fad dies off, just kill off the profile and move on. It was time well spent, and you can get focused on the next big thing.

There is a perception issue that associates with all this: embracing vs. chasing. First off, there is the community of people that will take any opportunity to criticize something a university does when it is the slightest bit deficient. Not to mention the ones that pipe up when things really are deficient. If you create a social networking portal that is weak and uninteresting, you will be reamed for it in the kids’ eyes. That also attaches a stigma to you that you just don’t “get it,” and are trying to play catch up with, and invest in, something that’s just a fad. That’s the “chasing.” On the other hand, by embracing and leveraging existing sites, you avoid that criticism. How can they come down on you for something everyone is using (unless you really screw it up)? You also gain credibility at the management level because of the time and money you’ll save, as well as your ability to stay with the trends. Instead of being a second rate copier, you suddenly are seen as an organization that understands how to actually use the tools that are out there. You get it. You see the power that others have made and can make it your own. In a single day you can have Facebook and MySpace profiles, in a week networks are growing, you can be reaching people through YouTube, and you can be making impressions on kids in a fraction of the time had you tried to redevelop similar tools.

What we finally boil down to is the concept that a “web presence” today means much more than just running a .edu on a box in our server room. That used to be it. Now the landscape is different. Things are evolving, and so too must we. Entertainment industry professionals are latching on to this idea, promoting movies, games, and music in the blogosphere and on social networking sites. People’s entire job description consists of creating these profiles and commenting on people and networking to the web users. If it works for them, why can’t we make that same strategy work for us? We must create “presence.” Show that we can operate in space and that the technology out there is something we understand and can use to reach people. If we do it all ourself, we become internet xenophobes, holed up on our domain, unwilling to exist outside the confines of our server room. This means being daring, and possibly adding staff to address it, but in the long term, it is time and money well spent, and your web staff and programmers can stay focused on true university needs.