Tag: social networks

SlideShare moves from Flash to HTML5

SlideShare is a social network where people share presentations and other documents.  If you ever attended any conferences, talks or group meetings, chances are the slides for that were uploaded and made available on the SlideShare.  Until now, though, using those slides was a bit awkward, since they were always converted to Flash.  Your browser had to have a plugin, it was difficult or impossible to copy-paste text from slides, search was weird, and access from the mobile was very limited.  Gladly, SlideShare announced that they are moving from Flash to HTML5 which by itself should fix all those nuances and provide for some more useful features.

Here are their reasons for switching:

  1. The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers. This is great from an operations perspective. This saves us from extra storage costs, and maximizes the cache hit ration on our CDN (since a desktop request fills the cache for a mobile request, and vice-versa). It’s also great from a software engineering perspective, because we can put all our energy into supporting one format and making it really great.
  2. Documents load 30% faster and are 40% smaller. ‘Nuff said on that front, faster is ALWAYS better.
  3. The documents are semantic and accessible. Google can parse it and index the documents, and so can any other bot, scraper, spider, or screen-reader. This means that you can write code that does interesting things with the text on the slideshare pages. You can even copy and paste text from a SlideShare document, something that was always a pain with Flash.

Read the full story to learn about some of the difficulties they experienced during this migration.

ifttt – if this then that is awesome

If you are somehow involved with online tools, publishing, or social networks, then you should definitely check out ifttt.  It is an abbreviation for “if this then that” and it is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. ifttt is an extremely easy, or perhaps even trivial, tool that helps you to connect and integrate web services.  Say, for example, that you use Google Reader and you want to publish your shared items to Twitter and Facebook and save starred items to Evernote or Delicious.  Can you do it? Sure, the solutions are out there.  But you will be solving each problem separately.  And good luck with technical support.  How about email or SMS integration?  Or Foursquare check-ins to Google Calendar?  You probably haven’t even thought of that…

iffft has a tonne of ready made solutions.  And even if there is something that you need which is not there, you have super easy tools to make it.  All you need to do is basically choose a trigger, like a new post in the blog, a new check-in, or a new shared item, and then choose an action like publish to Twitter or Facebook.  iffft will handle the gory technical details on its own.  If there is a need to authenticate a service, you don’t have to worry about it – it is already implemented.  If you don’t like some of the defaults, you can almost always change them – for example, how the descriptions of the Google Calendar events are formed from the Foursquare check-ins.

Emails, voice calls, and SMS are supported with loads of web services and notification systems.  The interface is very clean and simple.  And everything just works.  It’s been a long while since I saw something so well designed and implemented.  Give it a try, if not for the specific functionality, then just to have more experience with good systems.

Media landscape after 9/11

GigaOm runs an article on how much media landscape changed since 9/11.

But what strikes me every time I think about September 11 is how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news.

When the attack happened, we were still in pre-social network era.  No Twitter or Facebook or Google+.  And even though quite a few people had blogs, the majority of the news were still coming from the TV and newspapers.  For those of you, who don’t remember, most news websites were dead for a day or two immediately after the attack.  Slashdot – a popular IT news website which is very much used to having tonnes of traffic was on the edge of collapsing too.  Here is their article for this year with a link to the September 11th, 2011 archives.

I remember working in PrimeTel office at the time.  I was involved with a project that dealt with video walls and window TV ads in multiple branches of a client’s business.  I had a large 40-something-inch plasma TV mounted on a stand next to my desk.  I was working on a piece of software that would combine video clips and images into a continuous playlist.  I was using sample ads from the client as well as a bunch of landscape photography images for my tests.

Once the attack happened and most of the news sites went down, we established a public folder where all colleagues could drop images and videos they found anywhere on the web and those would get automatically added to the continuous video that was playing on the TV.  I remember it was quite something.  By the end of the day people from other departments and other floors started to come by to watch it.  I remember even the owner of the company came in for a few minutes.

What I couldn’t realize then was how social that thing was.  It wasn’t me or anyone else in particular.  It was a collective effort of a few people.  Each one would come across something and then share it in the public folder.  That was very similar to how social networks like Twitter and Facebook distribute things these days.  And with the last 10 years, it was proved several times of how well this works.

As Mathew Ingram notes in that GigaOm article:

Now try and think about what it might have been like if September 11 happened today, with ubiquitous smartphones featuring cameras and video and web access. Although cellular networks were overloaded in the aftermath of the attacks, some Blackberry messages got out of the towers — and today, we would almost certainly have gotten a real-time flow of tweets and images and video from people in the towers, at the Pentagon, even on the plane that flew into the ground in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania.

Update: Joe Wilcox of BetaNews also reminds that there was no YouTube back then.

Twitter – social glue that is here to stay

Today, while playing around with the Lovely Charts, I decided to make a quick diagram of a few social networks that I use.  The purpose of the diagram is to illustrate why Twitter is here to stay.  Here is the diagram itself.

As you can see, I use Twitter as a glue.  It aggregates favorites, likes, shares, bookmarks, etc from all other social networks that I use.  These are all gathered together and automatically published back into my own blog as ‘Day in brief’ summaries.   This way, I can own most of my social activities in the space, which I actually own – my blog.  So even if a social network dies out and disappears, I still have bits and pieces of content in my archives.

As for the Facebook, I don’t really use it so much myself, but a lot of people find it more convenient to follow me there than anywhere else.  So I configured Twitter to forward all tweets there too.  And since my WordPress blog is tweeting every post I publish, I get a very nice exposure overall.

Since Twitter is so simple and popular, pretty much every web service and social network does some sort of integration with it.  It would be way more complicated to configure integration between my WordPress blog and each and every social network that I use.  I’ve recently learned that quite a few people use Twitter the same way.  That’s something that no other social network gives you yet.  Google+ is a good potential candidate, but it still has no APIs.  And Facebook could do it easily  if it wasn’t for their moronic attitude towards exporting users’ own data.

P.S.: Thanks to all those people who made the social networks logos that I used in my diagram.

LinkedIn email love

In the age where pretty much each and every websites considers it its duty to ask for your email address and subscribe you to some kind of mailing list or notification system, it is still rare to see an email integration done right.  Showing bad examples is not my favorite approach to treating the problem, since there are too many of them and they seldom do any good.  Today, however, I have a good example to show.

As many of you know, I am a member of LinkedIn social network for professionals.  One of the things you can do on LinkedIn is join the groups according to your professional interests.  These groups are very much like forums – full of discussions.  The groups you are subscribed to also show up on your profile, so other people can easily see what are you interested in.

LinkedIn has a system of notifications, where you could get an email for when something happens in those discussions.  You can get individual emails or digests.  In most systems that I’ve used until now, the setting is only up to the user.  If one gets too many emails, a switch to digest mode usually happens.  If too few are coming in, then the opposite occurs.  I can’t remember a system that was helping the user to make a decision or to realize a need for the change.

Today I received the following email from LinkedIn.

Apparently, the system is smart enough to realize that I’ve been busy and didn’t have the time to follow up discussions in this particular group.  So it not only suggested, but automatically changed a preference for me.  It notified me accordingly, and provided a quick way to change it back (‘Change Settings’ button).

This is how you tell your users you love them.  I have no other way to interpret this.  Very well done!