cubicgarden.com...

Is facebook poking dirty or just clean fun?

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: poking  facebook  video  poke 

I've been poking people on Facebook for a long while now, but I was talking to Kate on the weekend and she seems convinced its slightly dirty. Now this might just be Kate's strange but fascinating mind, however I got to say I'm going stop poking some people from today.

Cory on the short life span of social networks

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: cbcradio  twitter  friending  facebook  socialnetworks  following  corydoctorow  searchengine 

Cory Doctorow came to the BBC's Festival of Technology last week and during his short time there (well Alice is ready to give birth any moment now, good luck by the way) he mentioned his thoughts on social networking sites like Facebook. I didn't have my camera turned on but I remember the thrust of the talk which was something like this.

Click To Play

I certainly have got fed up of people asking to be a friend. And rather that flat out reject people, I've collected a good number of people who I haven't responded to yet. It is painful when I open facebook to see there are still 45 requests to be my friend, but I do after a while log on and start ignoring the requests - simply because there are too many and i'm in a bad mood. On Linkedin I'm less strict because the data on my profile is public anyway. While on Plaxo Pulse I'm super strict about tagging people because it affects what they can see about me. I don't watch everyone who watches me on twitter or jaiku because messages sometimes go to my phone or mostly pop up in my im client.

I was once believe it or not told off by someone for not "friending" them back on Twitter. I told the person, if they know anything about me they won't be offended. I follow currently 124 people and 585 people follow me. Thats almost 5x the amount of people following that me watching. So I started looking around to see what the ratio was like for other people I know.

• Tantek: roughly 4.5x
• Jeremy Keith: roughly 5x
• Briansuda: almost exactly 4x
• NicoleSimon: almost exactly 2x
• Suw: roughly 3x
• Tom Coates: almost exactly 8x
• Tara Hunt: roughly 4.25x
• Chris Messina: roughly 3x
• Molly: almost exactly 3x
• Simon Wilison: exactly 6x
• Chris Saad: roughly 3.25x

I don't think this says much but its interesting that only scoble gets a 1x ratio, the nutter that he is.

Spam by any other name

[ Socially Online ]

This was dropped in my email today from partricia500@yahoo.com.

Hi cubicgarden

pice23 (a SlideShare user) has sent you a private message. 'HELLO My name is partricia i saw your profile today at(www.slideshare.net) and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address ( partricia1000@yahoo.com ) I believe we can move from here. I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life ) p/a/r/t/r/i/c/i/a/1/0/0/0/@/y/a/h/o/o/./c/o/m/'

(*note: This is a private message. You can message back "pice23" on his/her profile page)

(**You can change your message permissions by editing your profile here)

How did I know it was spam? Easy, look at the writing style first, very child like and very jumpy. Speilling is also bad. Why the hell would I send a email to the email address which is spelt out twice (as to beat most spam catchers). The call for action "I am waiting for your mail to my email." Then the profile page has no slideshows, joined in Jan 2008, no contacts or friends, no activity and last logged in 5 hours ago. Go social engineer someone else losers.

Technorati Tags: spam, email, yahoo, socialenginnering, socialengineer, crap, scam

Bubble? Maybe but different this time

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Funny video which seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. I would say there is a slight bubble in some corners but there is a genuine change which can not be ignored (oh did I meantion I posted a powerpoint about whats changed).Back in bubble land, there is few IPOs and therefore no money from the general public. This is important, as there won't be such a large crash if a bubble pops.

Technorati Tags: slideshare, video, bubble2.0, bubble, money, ipo

Uncluttering your friends list

[ Socially Online ]

While at BarCampLondon3, I noticed there was little discussion about Facebook. This is unusual because everywhere else you go, its all about facebook. I first thought it was the influence of being in Google, but actually no. I mentioned it Rachel Clarke and she reminded me that that BarCamp is made up of people who are really in the know, the people actually doing stuff and not just talking about it. Facebook was put into its real context at BarCampLondon3 rather that most conferences where's its over hyped or talked about to death.

Anyway one of the talks I did go to talked about friends lists and how artificial they really are. One of the points which really got me, was the notion of old friends which drop off the radar. The speaker asked how many im buddies to we all have compared to how many we actually talk to? I looked at mine afterwards and saw I have close to 250 im buddies across 6 im accounts (3 jabber, 1msn, 1aim and icq, 1yahoo). Its time for a clean up. So to simplfy things, I'm sticking to just my cubicgarden gmail one and maybe my ian forrester jabber.org one. If you want to talk to me on any other network (except skype) your out of luck now sorry. But it doesn't really matter, you can still email me on facebook.

Some may say this stupid or even brave, but the face was that looking at the gaim logs, most of my talking was done over the jabber network and my msn/aim/yahoo friends to be on facebook anyway. Also Miles mentioned to me today, that you can send messages via other jabber servers on to other networks now. I am tempted to im everyone on the other networks and say I'm moving but why bother? I like to think of this as uncluttering my im list using network effects. This is also a great time to do this, as having my phone im client running up to 4 different im accounts was frankly stupid.

Technorati Tags: im, barcamplondon3, barcamp, jabber, xmpp, friends, facebook, gmail

Google Announces the OpenSocial API

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: google plaxo facebook linkedin social api open 

Google has announced OpenSocial, a new open API for social networks. The new standard will allow developers to create Facebook-like apps on any social network site that implements it with the same calls.

The open API will have three parts

• People
• Storage
• Activity stream

All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and Javascript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.

This is huge because finally we're starting to see a common standard being build into different social networks. There are some caveats however like no support for Facebook or Myspace. But good to see Plaxo and Linkedin involved in this API project. I told you Google were up to something...

A non-technical view on social software from a friend

[ Socially Online ]

I recently asked a friend about why they had joined Facebook as it tends to hate internet applications which collect data and involves some kind of social aspect.

well, to me all these manage-your-friends-online apps only have one purpose: advertising and adress collection. they are one of the reasons people receive f*cking penis enlargement spams and similar trash.

i believe in modern communicaton, face to face and i already hated the expressions facebook and ringo from day one. they describe that the people are incabable of communication although they have all the best means in our modern society. facebook - i collect my friends faces, the exterior apperance gains importance over real personality values, a quick glance instead of a serious conversation, that's what it symbolises. the people are plain lazy and comfortable, that's all, i hardly receive any proper emails like the real letters i used to get, ususally short sms style messages like abbreviated postcards. hm, i find that sad ;(

i still receive and send a lot of snail mail and i love it!

Its weird because I only get snail mail with bills and official documents in it now, the rest is junk or miss-directed mail (I get a lot of this).

Live Webcast of Pop!Tech 2007

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Pop!Tech is one of those conferences you would love to go to if you could one afford it and two are special enough to be invited. But whats great about Pop!Tech is that they have every year since about 2004 provided a live stream into the conference. With Maine only 5 hours behind London, its not too difficult to catch most of it at home or while working. Tomorrow being Friday, I might have to find a spare machine and have Pop!Tech streaming on it to the whole department. But to be honest the best way to experience Pop!Tech is at home on a Xbox running Xbox Media Centre.

Its very simple to get Pop!Tech streaming on xbmc. Simple create a blank text document with *.strm on the end for an extention. Then stick one of the urls in the file. So for example I have 2 files, one called Poptech-300k.strm with the url - http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1592848 inside of it and Poptech-700k.strm with http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1592849 inside of that. Navigate to the files via the xbox and select them. The Xbox should now start to buffer the content. I've set my buffer to 10meg which is insane but I'm watcing the 700k stream over the 300k version.

What seems to have changed this year is that Pop!Tech has now included archives. This might something to do with the TED talks coming online a while back as podcasts you can download without any DRM. Well Pop!Tech have gone one further by applying a Creative Licence, so you can share, edit and remix under a non-commercial use. Can things get any better?

Facebook and Dopplr united at last

[ Socially Online ]

Maybe i missed this or this is still pretty new. Dopplr now has a facebook application. Its pretty smooth and works as expected. Good work guys!

Now if only there was a facebook application for Upcoming events instead of Facebooks own dodgy events system. I would also love to totally replace the facebook images with Flickr.

Do I TRUST mint with my money management?

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: mint  finance  money  online  trust  privicy  security   

So I've been using Microsoft Money for quite a while to manage my money but since moving to gnu/Linux, I've not really converted the money file over to anything else. I was checking out the KDE application Money2 but started thinking there has got to be a better way to do this?

Well in steps Mint fresh faced from the Techcrunch conference. When I first heard rumours about it, I thought it was something to do with that terriable credit card company in the UK with the same name. However Mint.com promises to refresh money management by adding all the goodness of Web 2.0.

So I've been checking it out, and to be honest I like what I see but I'm not convinced they can be trusted with my finanical information. Now don't get me wrong I'm no hot shot with millions in the bank but I still wouldn't want what how much I pay for lunch (not a lot thanks to Tesco) in the public domain. I'm not saying Mint are leaking this information, I'm just not sure. I've been reading there Privicy policy and it all looks ok but I have this naggy feeling that this is dangerious and should be avoided for a while longer, at least let someone else be the test muppet. I had this feeling when I first heard about Paypal and to be honest I do use it but tend not to keep money in it for long and I use its most basic features. All those advanced features like hooking it into your bank i've avoided because it worries me. Although in a recent episode of Security now, Paypal's Director of Account protection was on talking about the levels of security and privicy they have for users of their service. SecureID was one of the solutions and to be honest, if my bank offered that, I would gladly use it.

I guess my fear of using Mint is a little overboard but like linking my facebook profile to some of the other sites I use, I think somethings are maybe left alone till I can trust them. Trust is a funny thing, I mean I trust my bank, paypal, amazon, Tesco, Plaxo, etc. But I don't trust Facebook, Mint, etc with my credit card details. They haven't been around long enough to prove their trustworthness. There rep is 0 in my book. I need Facebook to stop mining my information and start offering me real uses. Mint I guess will have to rely on good feedback from people on there own blogs before I start using it.

Its all useless anyway, mint is american centric, requiring a zip code before you can sign up. Have they never heard of Open ID? Simon Wilison was right, all startups should use Open ID if they want people to use their service. Now Mint you've lost a customer because although I could make up a zip code, why the hell should I?

Google launch presentation to google apps

[ Socially Online ]

Excellent now you can create powerpoint presentations online using Google Apps, just perfect for those last minute presentations but whats this? No export? Oh dear me... Just imagine presentating your killer new startup and the wifi goes down. Next slide fails to load, actually all slides fail to load, and you have to babber on about how great it was going to be. Maybe it will support Google Gears in the future?

Plaxo 3.0 beta. I actually quite like it

[ Socially Online ]

Ok so I'm not going to do some complete review of Plaxo 3.0 beta, but I'm seeing some interesting new features being added to the next version of Plaxo.

The first major change is Open ID support. Now to be fair this adds to the already AOL login support on top of standard Plaxo login. So now there's 3 different ways to log into plaxo. Unfortually its not that simple because the Plaxo clients seem to only support the previous types of logins. But then again, how would you do Open ID in a desktop application? On the plus side you can attach your Open ID(s) (yes multiple open ids) to an existing plaxo account or start a new one in the same way.

There's this new feature called Pulse which is like a life stream from all your contacts. How it seems to work is Plaxo looks through all your contacts and finds all the blogs, flickr feeds and amazon wish lists attached to that contact then display them in your pulse section. This is very much like the activities part of facebook and like that there is no rss feed of the aggregate results which is a real shame.

The last major change is Calendaring sharing. Which for me does away with the major advantage of upgrading to Outlook 2007. Instead of subscribing on the client you can use Plaxo's inbuild ical client to subscribe to ical feeds and other types of feeds. This actually makes mores sense that telling your laptop to update that feed every hour. My only problem is it won't subscribe to my friends ical from upcoming, which is a pain. You can also make your own calendar sharable as a ical feed (either full or just free/busy time can be used). So in actual fact this would have solved me and Sarah's calendaring problems. We could have both gone back to Outlook 2003, although I have to say I quite like 2007 and since I've stopped using the ical options, its a hell of a lot more stable. Could the endless calendar

Plaxo already had a developer API for years and a whole of host of goodies like the ability to export and import almost every type of file including Mozilla's LDIF format. But finally a minor addition is... sync to Google Calendars. Yes now you can sync them up and Plaxo also added Linked in support (premium only right now), Windows Live and Hotmail syncing. Now if they would just add sync to Thunderbird and Facebook, then I'd be really happy.

Generally Plaxo just needs to open up a little more by adding back the ability to export data (without switching back to the previous version), work more on their mobile options (please give us over the air syncML support) and keep adding more sync choices. I do for some reason trust Plaxo a lot more with my data that Facebook or even linkedin. Plaxo has always been good about not mining my contacts for data to be used in advertising or anything sketchy like that. However Plaxo isn't facebook and this pulse addition is worrying that they will try and follow suit. I mean it kind of makes sense because they have your contacts already but I don't want to be too social about my private data, thank you very much.

Will all this help more get into Plaxo? Yes I think so and to be honest I just signed up to their premium trial because of useful services like duplicate watching and linked in support. If I stay on beyond the free trial is questionale but worth exploring non-less.

geekdinner.co.uk/about

[ Socially Online ]

I was writing to someone on Facebook and spent a hour or so writing the about page for geekdinners.

Been meaning to do it for ages but now its at least started

Enjoy!

twitter + delicious + im = Pownce?

[ Socially Online ]

I've been avoiding Pownce since hearing about it on Diggnation a while back. A whole heap of invites have been sent to me but I've resisted till I got one from Sheila. I started writing reasons why not to use Pownce but then changed my mind about writing a rant back and decided to actually try it out first before blasting it.

So you can see from the title I think Pownce is basically a combination of twitter/jaiku, delicious and im. This is no bad thing but... what I think is bad is the closed network aspect of it all. This all leads back to a comment I got back from Regular Jen about Facebook.

Also good to hear that Facebook won't become the main 'hangout' for Geek Dinners, as I know I won't be dipping my toes in their shark-infested site again. I still am not clear on why a Facebook Geek Dinners group is necessary, but I hope you find it useful and wish you the best.

And you know what shes right. I forgotten why I use to hate these non media social networks. Closed networks. I signed up to facebook because they started to open up with a 3rd party API and the sheer pressure from friends. Pownce on the other hand has none of these and yes its early days, I can't get over the simple combination which to me has no benefit except speed and convince over the larger combination. Yes it has a public timeline like twitter so you can tune into someone elses public recommendations but for f-sake delicious has had this ability for years. For example I send links to some delicous friends using the syntax or machine-tag for:username. Once you've done that you can link to anything including binary objects. Some would say the problem is that anything you recommend appears in your own bookmarks. So what? Anything you recommend should be good enough to keep.If not then use email, im, twitter, jaiku, etc, etc. What about privicy? Or like Jen you want to opt out?

Anyway this is really about Pownce but social networks for the sake of social networking. Something I've forgotten...

And at that I'm unsubscribing from Pownce now.

updated

Is there no end to this madness?

Pownce Invites For Sale On eBay  —  Proving that everything has a market, invites to Kevin Rose's P2P service Pownce are up for sale on eBay.  —  Bidding on Pownce invites start at 1c with buy it now prices at $5.  —  It wasn't that long ago when Gmail invites were available for sale on eBay

London Geekdinner Facebook group

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: Facebook  privacy  socialnetworking  social  networking  reglarjen  rachelclarke  relationships  api  openness 

After some minor issues with Facebook networks, I have finally sorted out a global geekdinner group on facebook. You can sign up here or search for geek dinner to find the girl geekdinner group along side the geekdinner group.

As you may have noticed in some of the blog comments else where (Regular Jen) not everyone could sign up to the previous group because I left the default network of London instead of setting it to Global. This was stupid because I even after I knew the problem I couldn't change it. So please makes ure you're signed up to the correct group (the one with the geekdinner logo not the red x).

I do make the joke that everyone is on Facebook but I won't be using Facebook as the official way to tell people about events and news. As Regular Jen points out.

The catch, as I see it, is that you still have to be a member of Facebook to view it. That is not what I would call open… it is open to members of Facebook only. That’s fine and fair and there is no reason to hold back from creating such a group, however, it absolutely divides the followers of London Geek Dinners (and London Girl Geek Dinners). You now have a group within Facebook and ‘the rest of us’

Total agreement and I expect to be using some sort of aggregation to allow good communication between the different spaces. This isn't the first time I've had this problem. It would be very easy for me to stop using our tradional geekdinner blog and setup some group on upcoming and urge people to use that instead but I don't. Instead I prefer the older comment system on the geekdinner blog and then allow sign up on upcoming.org. Ideally I would aggregate the upcoming results via there API back on the geekdinner site but this will all make sense hopefully in the near future.

I want to address something Jen talked about in the same post.

Making something very clear: this isn’t about London Geek Dinners, but the recent LGD Facebook group creation solidified a feeling I already had forming in my subconscious about Facebook dividing people. I posted about Facebook last week. I caved to social pressures and joined the service. I wish I hadn’t. I have only me to blame for that (well, and Facebook. Bastards. .
What I hope I’ve brought forward more than anything is that every time a link is posted to a page within Facebook to the world outside of Facebook, that link (and its poster) excludes people. The ‘welcome’ page non-members get is a stark, uninviting login screen with no other content— it’s the equivalent of a giant, muscly body guard outside an exclusive club’s door. You aren’t welcome to the content within the Facebook walls unless you give up something in return, and in this case, it’s your data. Forever. I have never felt so unwelcome on a site. Even without the information brought to light by the video I linked to in another post, I felt this way.

This is not the way to start or nurture relationships. It’s high-level data mining wearing a social network cloak and at the same time subtly creates social outcasts out of the ones who want nothing to do with it.

I joined it and now I can never truly leave. Sounds dramatic, but Rachel called Facebook a new Hotel California. She’s right you know

 

 

 

I hate social networks for the sake of social networking, this includes Facebook. Facebook is the new roach motel as one of the gilmor gang use to say. I like Jen resisted till the bitter end but once they included a developer API and I started to see some applications being built I signed up.

I heard rumors that the facebook guys didn't sell to Yahoo because they are working on a operating system or something. Well currently you can certainly see how once your in facebook it would be easy to ignore most of the net if your thinking that way already. Its like the portals of the late 90's but with social networking layed through-out it. This may be all good for most people and at this very moment just about bearable for me too. I still can't find a way to put my blog rss into my facebook profile for example and I'm a sucker for owning my own data.

I think Facebook is almost unstoppable without some radical game changing from someone else. I'm hoping that other thing is open and decentralised (the first person to make the concept of FOAF work or the concept of FOAF work will bite a huge chunk out of Facebook) and puts a end to facebook but till then i'm forced to use it because thats where the attention and people are right now. Sad but true.

Please note I haven't mentioned Plaxo 3.0 or Plaxo Pulse which I'm sure will come up when I decide to do a post about lifestreams.

Yeah I've caved in and finally joined Facebook

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: facebook  socialsoftware  profile 

Do I have to say anything more?

Every bloody person I know is on Facebook now. And since Facebook started opening up to 3rd party sites like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Upcoming, Flickr, Last.FM, etc there's even more of a reason to use it. The weird thing about facebook for me is how odd a mix it is of web 1.0 and web 2.0. For example its got the community and participation stuff down really well but its interface and experience is franky dirty and feels like it belongs in the internet archive.

I heard a interview a while back talking about how facebook was going to replace the operating system on your machine. Although I laughed, I can see what they mean now. I imagine its the starting destination for a lot of people, and with its mixture of chat, photos, groups, etc all blended together. I guess this what Yahoo tried to do with Yahoo 360 somewhat failed?

Recieved on 10th May, but I missed it...

[ Socially Online ]

Hey cubicgarden!

Your slideshow Join us at Hackday 2007 has been featured on SlideShare

Enjoy your day!
the SlideShare team

Titbits from the last few weeks

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: trustedplaces  pipelines  xtech  dopplr  rss  particls  foaf  linkedin  socialnetworking  paris 

So there is a few things which I've twittered but not blogged recently. Rather that use up tons of entries with one liners (tom), I prefer to roll them into one large entry.

Linked-in

I caved in the other day when Plaxo added support for Linked-in. I had been thinking about it for years but choose not to be involved because I simply didn't see the point. The one which almost tipped me over the top was Linked-in support in Particls (touchstone). I wanted to see what extra information it might add to the APML file but didn't have an account to try it with. But now I do. I would just add, Chris and the team you should add linked-in support as a input adapter not bolt it on to the Feed adapter. This code might be useful too, because I and others might be able to hack together other input adapters for Flickr, Delicious, etc. I still want to play a lot more with my FOAF profile because I think thats so much more powerful. So anyway, you can link to me using my bbc email address or search for my name.

Particls

Recently something has gone wrong with Particls (touchstone) it happened when it tried to swap my account from Touchstone to Particls directory. I need to sort it out as my APML file is too neutral now and I'm not getting those good sharp posts coming through like before.  The RSS screensaver (sent to lifehacker btw) is also doing lots of repeating, so I suspect the Pebble output isn't work correctly. I got a feeling I might end up doing a complete post with screenshots because its changed so much since I last looked at it.

Trusted Places and Dopplr

I've been using reusing Trustedplaces recently when I go away to a different cities. Now I have trusted places in New York, San Francisco and of course London. I have also started using Dopplr which tracks your trips and shows your friends trips. Its really cool but I wish it would keep your old trips so you can compare in the future and maybe hang things off of it like flickr pictures, trusted places reviews, etc. I look forward to when Trustedplaces and Dopplr get APIs or tons of feeds.

Xtech: Pipelines

I'm wrote the paper for Xtech recently and I'm in the process of writing the presentation. I'm still playing with my flow * setup but the presentation is the most important thing. I'm hoping to get the Eurostar to Paris but it looks like I'll be getting a plane because the BBC don't have a eurostar account. I'm in Paris for a week but the last part will be with friends from Minneapolis.

24 Hours of Flickr

[ Socially Online ] | Tags: flickr  24hours  tag  5thmay  may 

Starting today...All the details are here. But basically, grab your camera and shoot everything you did today (5th May).

My addition to the 24hours...

Yahoo! rolls out Upcoming.org 2.0

[ Socially Online ]

Single sign comes the way of upcoming.org. This time Yahoo! seems to have sweeten the deal with a free offer of a T-shirt. However its only available to America and Canada. Wouldn't it be great if Yahoo sent a load over for T-shirts for Hackday or before? hint hint...