SuperSatellite ||

If you have been following my tweets lately, you might have noticed that I’ve been fighting over which service I would prefer to use: Flickr or Picasa. This has resulted in far more headache than I would have initially thought, and I still don’t feel any closer to coming up with an answer. I thought by sharing my opinions, maybe you could toss some feedback my way that might help the decision making process. You may also ridicule and taunt me, as it pleases you.

I am not a photographer. I enjoy taking pictures, and I believe that I take relatively good ones, given my amateurish state. But I admit that it’s just a small hobby. Until now, I have used a Coppermine powered gallery that I kept on my personal server for managing and sharing my pictures. This works relatively well. To be perfectly honest, the only real reason I even care to switch is because I’d like to connect to more social tools through my photos. My own hidden little gallery site doesn’t do that. I also don’t have a lot of interest in keeping the software maintained, so I end up with older software that is a pain in the butt to update. But, I’m also not looking for 100,000 people to drool over my pictures. Mostly it’ll be stuff from plays I work on, or trips I take, things none of you care about (even though you try to act interested).

And here’s the matchup. Flickr is clearly a more socially driven web site. It’s purpose is more closely linked with my goal, I think. But, they lack a good desktop app for organizing pictures like Picasa does. They have an uploader application, which seems to work well enough, but I’d like my offline archive to basically mirror what I have online (at the moment, my photos folder is a pretty big mess, I admit it). Flickr is also pretty crippled if you don’t spend $24.95 a year on a pro account. Without it, you only get to use three sets (albums), which is, frankly, useless to me. You also only get to upload 100MB of photos a month, which if you are trying to migrate to their service, is also pretty useless. I said I’m not a photographer, but I still have a solid 2GB+ of photo (not that I need to share them all, but if I can, I probably will share most). However, with pro, you get unlimited everything for the most part. Storage, bandwidth, sets, collections, even video (if you care. I don’t).

Picasa has a slightly different purpose. It is geared more towards what Coppermine did for me; simply provide online gallery/album functionality. It’s desktop app is nice for organizing offline, and it integrates right into web albums. You get unlimited albums out of the gates, and a full gig of storage with no upload limits per month. But, extra storage (10GB) starts at $20/yr. Cheaper than Flickr Pro, but Flickr Pro gives you unlimited storage for five bucks more. Alternatively, you can do more for free through Picasa, just at a loss to some of the social networking features Flickr has. If you need more than 10GB, the price starts hurting.

My problem is basically that I can’t easily decide what kind of user I am, or what my goal is. I fall right in the middle of one big gray area, like Nick-at-Nite TVLand poop. Ideally, the systems should just merge into one super warehouse, like my crappy Photoshopped graphic above intimates. $25 a year isn’t much, but a lot of what I’d pay for I could have through Picasa for free. And using Flickr leaves me stuck managing stuff offline through something else. I could use Picasa as a purely offline file manager, but that’s like using it and wasting half the purpose of it. Half a dozen of one, six of another. I sure as hell don’t want to do both, I’d like one solution that answers my needs.

You could solve this problem for me, of course. Just sponsor a Flickr Pro account for me, and that will make up my mind for me. It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I’m cheap.

Update: I almost forgot to mention; Brad Ward has a nice blog writeup on Flickr over at SquaredPeg on Flickr, and using it to manage your photos.  I read it the other day and it was really what got me thinking that Flickr might be the way to go.

The great part about today’s blog, is that the people most likely to read through it won’t get much out of it because it’s all old news, and the people that would benefit the most probably will skip it because usually my tech blogs aren’t so entertaining. So, if my tech stuff normally doesn’t interest you, take the time to read this one. The rest of you, read it anyway. You owe me. You know why.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about the social web lately. Hopefully, it’s been thinking about me too (Why won’t you return my calls?!). My experiment with operating solely through NetVibes was neither a success or failure. You could call it a “failcess.” Some things worked, some didn’t, which I think is to be expected. After all, Facebook doesn’t want to reveal their whole system through their API (Application Program Interface), since they want you to keep going to their actual site so they can show you ads. Heck, MySpace hasn’t even opened an API for use (shame on you MySpace, you’re in danger of becoming the next Netscape as it is). So as a social web consumer, there’s really only so much that you can do effectively. As a social information provider, however, that’s a different story.

How many sites do you have accounts on? MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Digg, Hi5, Beebo, Flickr, LiveJournal, Technorati, Last.FM…? This list can go on and on. The great part is that there are sites making a good effort to help you centralize ownership of your web identity. SocialThing, Profilactic, FriendFeed, Tumblr, and plenty of others. The best part is, not only do these sites help you mashup feeds and information from friends, they can help you take some ownership over your own identity (they know how to make a mean chocolate shake too). More than any other time, potential employers and clients are doing background checks on you through things like Google. Imagine for a moment your name was John Wilson. Are you confident all the hits would be right if someone was looking for you? Turns out, John Wilson is not an uncommon name. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send someone somewhere, where you maintain (the appearance of) full disclosure, and can provide correct, confident links to sites about you?

First step, buy your name as a domain. Vanity domains are becoming increasingly popular (and occasionally sexy), and can be valuable as a tool in promoting yourself professionally (I’m looking at you, Midwest Melissa). It also keeps someone from trying to be a fake you, like your evil, goateed twin that keeps trying to take your place. Suck it up and spend the $7.95 to register it, then spend a few more bucks either on hosting or point it at a blog or whatnot. Step two, I mentioned Profilactic, which is what I am using here to handle my social identity control. Granted this domain is not a vanity name, but it’s still the one I send people to. On the sidebar, I created a section called “My Stuff” and plugged in the code Profilactic gives you:

Now, I have an instant gateway to my sites, and my visitors can be confident that anyone else out there with my name can be distinguished from me-me. Not only that, but it also creates a convenient way for me to get to my own stuff as well. In effect, what you are creating is your own social portal type of page. A page that becomes a central repository of links and gateways to the things you want people to identify with you (you might leave AdultFriendFinder off that list, just a suggestion). Providing a resource like that will also discourage people from looking elsewhere. If you have two MySpace pages, one nice and professional, and one that you made three years ago that you forgot the password to where you have…sexy pictures…having this kind of portal you can preempt a search and send someone to the current page.

Hopefully you see the obvious value this would create to you as a web site consumer. Centralization is the big thing now. Finding ways to simplify and streamline access to your data, wherever it might be located. Having your own site also opens up additional centralized solutions, like using your own blog/site URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) as an OpenID login (I recommend MyVidoop as a provider). Not everyone is on the OpenID train yet, but it’s growing fast. It never hurts to have options like this available to you should you want to leverage them, and it all starts with taking control of your identity. Know the size of your digital footprint. It’s easy to forget just how much stuff you put out there and make available. It’s also easy for it to get out of date. The better job you do controlling it all, the better you ultimately serve yourself.

Hey look, the theme is done! At least, done enough that I’m ready to start taking feedback. Use the comment form below for that. Even if it’s just to say “neat colors” or “I h8 u kthxdie.” But really, feel free to let me know what does and doesn’t work for you. I’ve tried keeping things simple, but engaging enough to make it worth looking at. I’ll also consider making it into a downloadable theme, if people are interested anyway. But I am very interested in what you think of it. I’m not really a designer at heart, but I do think this is a big improvement over the last layout.  I have one more change slated for the main frontpage, but I’m battling a vicious, nasty little bug, and I’m not gonna hold up the theme because of it, so that part’ll get done when it gets done.

I have not yet upgraded my blog to the famed Wordpress 2.5. No, instead, I am taking the cautious route for a change, which is a little unusual for me since I normally am not afraid of being bleeding edge. The thing is, I am dependent on a couple plugins I’d rather not lose. And having just finished this theme, I want to make sure all the hooks and functions I call aren’t being deprecated. I did help a buddy get going in 2.5 last week though, and it looks okay.  I just wish they’d done more with care towards backwards compatibility.  In the end, once I upgrade, you actually shouldn’t notice. So, you probably don’t really care. Sorry to waste your time on this paragraph. I love you for it though.

On that note, am I the only one that doesn’t like the WordPress site?  It always feels like content is out of date/sync with other parts, and the support areas are painful to navigate and find what you need.  I feel like I get led in circles a lot.  And the forums always come across very hostile, even those users marked as “moderators.”  That might just be me, but it always seems like for every question with a good answer, there is one with a snarky one and one with no anwsers.  But, at least the wiki has good information, which is all I normally need.  But if you want my advice, avoid their forums like the plague, and if you can’t, don’t even dare asking a remotely vague-ish question.

I am continuing to try to stick with an active social web presence. My attempt to live mostly through my NetVibes page didn’t go so great though, but I can say it’s sped things up in a couple places at least. It’s just that there’s too frequently not enough info in the feeds I’m reading, so I find myself visiting the sites about as much as always. I did do a new thing in the sidebar for my blog though, with the integration of Profilactic. Which is nothing like what you might think. It has nothing to do with sex that I have discovered (so far), and trust me, I’m looking. It’s a site designed for lifestreaming. That is, coordinating feeds from all your various social web stomping grounds. You can also use it like I did at the right to make a nice link list that can be styled up so people can see you in other areas. Then it adds pretty icons and all that jazz without you needing to screw with it (well, technically you do have to screw with it if you don’t like their default styling, which I didn’t, but it’s classed well and can be changed with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) easily). At the site, it then creates a mash up of all the sites’ RSS feeds that you can send to people who want to keep with you on various fronts, but at one source. One feed to rule them all, one feed to bind them. Stupid hobbitses.

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.

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.