Webmonkey » communities

FriendFeed Filters Find the ‘Best Of’ Your Friends

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:31:32 +0000

FriendFeed, the data aggregation service that lets you see all your friends’ updates in one spot, is working hard to make that overwhelming stream of information easier to sort through. The company recently add a new “best of” filter that allows you to see only the posts you care out. Or presumably care about.

Just beneath the search box on your FriendFeed homepage you’ll find new links to see the “best of” FriendFeed from the past day, week, or month. The criteria for “best of” seems to be based on the number of stars from your friends, as well as number of comments and other data.

In other words, it’s more like most popular rather than best of, but either way it does allow you to filter the amount of data FriendFeed presents.

The one thing FriendFeed still lacks is a way to filter duplicated data.

Personally I still haven’t found a compelling use for FriendFeed that my news reader doesn’t already cover — after all, for the most part, it’s just RSS feeds. But if the service starts adding more filters that can actually narrow things down to what I really care about, and get rid of the duplicate posts, I may have to give FriendFeed another look.

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Wikia Search Launches Wikipedia-Style Search Engine

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:43:34 +0000

Back when Wikia Search first unveiled its alpha preview, we found it wanting. On Tuesday, the site was relaunched, and not only has its index expanded, but the community editing tools are live and ready for your input.

The basic idea behind Wikia Search is to take the Wikipedia community model and apply it to the search engine. Searchers can edit, add, remove, re-order, rate, annotate, and comment on the search results.

The site’s new Ajax interface allows you to drag results up and down the page and you can edit the title or description of a result using a nice edit-in-place interface.

The index itself is up to 30 million pages, which obviously is nowhere near the big search engines. But even Wikipedia was once just a single page, and look where that’s gone. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the same sort of community interest will develop around the search engine, but with the involvement of Wikipedia’s founders and Jabber creator Jeremie Miller, it has some momentum. PCWorld has an overview of the project’s recent enhancements.

If you missed out on the early days of Wikipedia, here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor of a growing community. With the editing features in place you can help Wikia Search become more effective and share your best results with everyone else.

However, the community-driven aspect also opens Wikia search to spam and abuse, so it will interesting to see how effective the community is in policing and removing spam.

While it’s too early to replace Google for the serious search engine user, Wikia Search is definitely one to keep an eye on.

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Tune Out the Noise With FriendFeed Rooms

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:25:13 +0000

In an effort to personalize the site, FriendFeed has added a new feature dubbed “Rooms.” Similar to Reddit’s personal Reddit feature, or Flickr Groups, Rooms are designed to act as a filter on FriendFeed’s noise level by offering topic-based discussions.

The new Rooms feature allows you to carry on conversations without involving the entire FriendFeed community — think of Rooms as your own private area of FriendFeed.

Depending on the privacy settings you use, FriendFeed rooms can be a place for niche conversations between like-minded users, or as an entirely private conversations limited to family members or co-workers involved in a project.

There are scores of rooms already active on the site — a quick Google search reveals topical FriendFeed discussions ranging from DSLR cameras and tech blogging to baseball. The Laughing Squid community also has a feed room.

To create your own room just head to the Room tab and then invite other FriendFeed members. That’s about all there is to it. You can create multiple rooms and each one will show up as a sub-tab under the main Rooms tab.

There are options to control whether or not posts to your Room show up in your main feed or remain private.

Rooms does slightly complicate the process of posting to FriendFeed since you’ll need to select a destination for your posts, but it isn’t too difficult to sort out.

The FriendFeed API has also been updated to support the new Rooms feature.

Given the amount of noise sites like FriendFeed generate, the ability to section off a small part of the site and make it your own could go a long way toward making FriendFeed more useable for those who don’t want to put up with the boggling amount of simultaneous conversations the site inspires.

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Is the All-in-One Personal Website Headed for Extinction?

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:10:08 +0000

There’s a major shift underway for personal sites on the web. Personal pages started off as a kind of calling card, some bio information, a resume, perhaps a contact form, but often just a small, random site on Geocities or Angelfire servers.

Then came the blog and a shift to frequent updates accompanied by comments from friends, family and colleagues. But now, thanks to sites like Flickr, Twitter, Ma.gnolia and other social web communities, many of us have offloaded the content that used to make up a personal site, leaving behind a single page that just links to our various accounts elsewhere.

We’ve outsourced our own content, leaving little point to a fullblown personal website.

As noted web designer Jeffery Zeldman recently wrote, “we are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments.”

Of course, as Zeldman points out, we’re not just passively witnessing this shift, we’re the ones doing it, “we are the ones making our own sites disappear.” The conversation has moved from blogs to places like Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and other locations.

One of the hallmarks of the new web is that the conversation happens everywhere. Part of the reason less people are creating personal sites, says Zeldman, is that the original goals of a personal site are being fulfilled without the trouble of building one.

“If your goal in creating a personal site way back when was to establish an online presence, meet other people who create websites, have fun chatting with virtual friends, and maybe get a better job, well, you don’t need a deep personal site to achieve those goals any more.”

As a commenter on Zeldman’s post deadpans, “many folks, me included, blogged for years simply because we didn’t yet understand that we were really just twitterers.”

I don’t know that the disappearance of personal sites is necessarily a thing to mourn, but it does have some interesting consequences. For one thing it means many of us no longer have full control over our content. If FriendFeed shuts down or Twitter dissolves, our content, and out virtual connections, goes with them.

Some of us, myself included, have found a halfway point. By using Flickr, for instance, I get the handy uploading tools, tagging and mapping capabilities as well as the chance to interact with the Flickr community. But just to be on the safe side I use Flickr’s API to scrape all my data back out and my personal site includes what amounts to a “local” copy of my Flickr account on my own domain. Ditto for Ma.gnolia, Goodreads, Twitter and most of the other services I use.

While many people don’t have the sort of data loss paranoia that plagues me, there is one thing I think we’re all going to miss as more and more personal domain fall into disuse — the “carefully designed” element that Zeldman mentions.

I’m not a designer so my own site isn’t all that great, but I do miss that sort of amazement of stumbling a cross a really beautiful, and uniquely designed, site like Zeldman’s or Jason Santa Maria’s or Greg Storey’s, to name a few. All of those sites are still active, but after reading Zeldman’s piece last night I realized how long it had been since I stumbled across something similar.

Nowadays when my friends tell me they have a new web presence they invariable mean a Facebook account or a Flickrstream they want me to follow. I like Flickr as much as the next person, but sometimes it would nice to see a different design every now and then.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

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Photobucket API Offers Developers New Mashup Possibilities

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:52:59 +0000

Photobucket, an online photo and media sharing site, has launched a new application programming interface (API) that allows developers and programming hobbyists to interact with the site and create mashups, web apps and widgets using Photobucket data.

Given that many of Photobucket’s members are coming from MySpace and other social network sites, which are themselves rolling out APIs, this should be good news for users since it provides the tools necessary to do more with your Photobucket images.

Photobucket competitor Flickr is way ahead in the API game, but the new Photobucket API goes a considerable way toward closing that gap.

The new API exposes just about everything in Photobucket’s services including the ability to create, edit and access albums, upload new content, search through public images and grab metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, EXIF, etc.)

Photobucket also gets points for leveraging OAuth, a standardized authentication method that Flickr still doesn’t support. One other very nice API method that Flickr doesn’t offer is a resize image option which allows you to pass in a variety of preset image dimensions and resize your photos.

The only real drawback to the API seems to be that a handful of features are only available to “premium members” (I believe the premium members bit refers to Photobucket pro accounts, which are $4/month, with slightly cheaper options if you pay in advance).

More details about the new API can be found at the new developer section of Photobucket.

As part of the release, Photobucket has put up a new application gallery where you can check out all the various tools developers have created. For the launch there are some featured apps from the likes of Adobe, Blogger, FotoFlexer and many more.

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Blockbuster Sued for Facebook’s Lack of Discretion

Paul Adams — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:22:16 +0000

While I’ve been posting blog posts quietly puzzling over the role of Facebook and how it seems unnecessarily intrusive, a Dallas woman, more proactive and litigious than I, has sued Blockbuster Video.

The woman rented videos from Blockbuster. Blockbuster told Facebook which videos they were. Facebook’s controversial Beacon program published the information for the world to see, the suit alleges.

Here‘s the story. It’s always interesting, if not enlightening, when technology issues go to court.

Does somebody want to search for Cathryn Harris on Facebook and see what the videos were?

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Consume Your Web With The New Facebook Mini Feed

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:47:25 +0000

Facebook has made good on its promise to expand the site’s “Mini Feed” feature, allowing users to import data from popular external services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, Digg and Picasa.

Content aggregation, pulling in posts from a wide range of sites, is the current hotness among social websites and Facebook’s new features are in many ways an answer to services like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed and Iminta which offer similar capabilities.

But since Facebook is already more popular than the dedicated aggregation sites, the new features mean Facebook’s competitors face an even tougher fight for users.

However, despite the fact that you can pull data into the mini feed, Facebook’s importing support is still a limited. For instance, if you’d like to pull in your Flickr or Picasa photos and have them show up in you Facebook photo albums, you’re out of luck. The images will show up in the mini feed, but that’s it.

There are some third-party Facebook apps which can pull photos from Flickr and add them to your Facebook albums, but the best one I know of, Flickr2Facebook, is still a one-photo-at-a-time process, which isn’t practical if you have thousands of images on Flickr (if anyone has a better alternative, let us know in the comments).

Still, despite the shortcomings of the new Facebook mini feed tools, the announcement should be welcome news for those pining for a richer Facebook experience. To use the new features just look for the “import” button at the top of your mini feed and get ready to hand over your passwords.

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Facebook Is In The News

Paul Adams — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:26:00 +0000

All over the industry news, all the time, and as far as I can tell there’s not terribly much to say about it.

lynx --dump http://techmeme.com/index.html | sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | grep -c Facebook 41

That’s 41 mentions of the word Facebook currently on the front page of Techmeme, the tech news aggregator.

As my investor friend remarked last night, “This kid had a brilliant idea for a web site, and now his site is worth a billion dollars. And his idea was: copy Friendster.”

I’m not that dismissive — I know all about the apps and the API and the innovation. I just don’t fully share the excitement. Would someone like to explain what I’m missing?

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Embrace Flickr Video’s Limitations With ‘Long Portraits’

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:02:25 +0000

Flickr’s new video upload options are bit limited with a ninety-second cap, but sometimes limitations inspire interesting new ideas — like the “long portrait.” Long Portraits are simply short video clips that attempt to capture the “essence” of a person and still fit the limitations of Flickr video.

Create for the idea goes to the inventive folks over at Photojojo who were inspired by this post from Jason Kottke.

The Photojojo blog describes a long portrait as:

a 30-second (or less) portrait of a person, kind of like a video snapshot. It lets you capture the essence of a person: not just what they look like, but who they are right now.

As Michael put it in his initial review of Flickr video, “that’s really the point of the limitations — to highlight those sorts of short, emotional moments shot on the fly while on vacation, on a stroll or on the morning commute.”

If you’re a Flickr Pro user and you’d like to get in on the long portrait fun, just fire up the video capture feature on your digital camera and find a willing subject to record. And remember, this is Flickr, not YouTube, eliminate the camera wobbles by using a tripod.

Upload the results to Flickr using the new video tools and use the tag “longportrait.” Photojojo will be featuring their favorites on the site next week.

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More Ways to Expose One’s Mundanities

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:57:00 +0000

Following my screed about putting the details of your lunch online, a couple of people pointed out FoodFeed.

FoodFeed is a Twitter-based feed in which you tell the world exactly what you’re eating when. It’s searchable, so you can find other people who like coffee too.

What do you think? Is this useful? Is it fun? How much quotidian detail do you like to share online?