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.

Flickr vs. Picasa Deathmatch

// April 29th, 2008 // 25 Comments » // Creativity, Digital, Photography, Software, Web

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.

Centralized Socialism

// April 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Life and Times, Web

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.

For your viewing pleasure

// March 31st, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Digital, Web, XHTML

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.

Social Web: Gearing up without burning out

// March 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // 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.