Tag: web services

Feeding on friends with FriendFeed.com

One of the things that people on the web do is follow each other.  Reading blog posts, watching favorite video clips, stare at shared photos, reply to comments, get status updates, and so on and so forth.

In the previous years, the number of people who were online was much smaller.  And they weren’t publishing as much as they do now.  Everyone and their dog has a blog.  Pictures and videos are flying around.  Playlists and favorite songs are shared.  Micro-blogging is blossoming.  How can anyone follow all that?  Well, RSS, of course, is one of the common answers.

But, RSS has its share of problems.  It is still too technical to be used by many people.  Good tools are a few.  And grouping things around people isn’t much fun yet.  Also, feed discovery is still an issue (from a person’s point of view, not the aggregator point of view).

FriendFeed.com web service recently went public and solved a few problems.  It starts off with feed discovery.  When you register and login, you can easily specify all the places that you publish at – blog, Flickr photostream, del.icio.us bookmarks, LinkedIn profile, Twitter, and so on and so forth.  This way, when somebody is interested in following you up, he or she will just need to subscribe to you once and get all the stuff from everywhere where you publish.  This is cool.

FriendFeed screenshot

Another problem that FriendFeed solves is the problem of virtual people.  In social networks, it is often that you can’t follow a person who hasn’t registered yet.  You can invite them in, wait for them to join, and then be notified when they joined.  But it is often impossible to follow people who decided not to join the network.  In FriendFeed, you can create “imaginary friends”.  This way, you can group people and sources in any way you like best.   This is priceless.

For example, you can create an imaginary friend for a person who hasn’t registered, and you can assign a blog and a Flickr photostream to him.  Or, you can create an imaginary friend for a real person, who even registered, but who publishes so much that you can’t take it.  Instead of following of their stuff, you just pick things that you are interested in (say Twitter messages and blog, but not Flickr and YouTube) and link those to your imaginary friend.

With this functionality, following topics or events becomes extremely easy.  If you are interested in kebab cooking ,or in Cyprus switching to Euro, or  anything else for that matter, you can create an imaginary friend for the topic and assign it blogs, Google Reader shared items, Picasa photos, or whatever else is supported.  There is a lot of potential in here.

Another thing that FriendFeed does right is presentation of data.  There are links to original sources whenever possible, and there are thumbnails for whatever possible.  Also, people have avatars, which makes it very easy to distinguish who is who and who published what.

And if all that wasn’t enough, you can subscribe to updates via email.  Which means that you can really improve your productivity while still following a whole lot of sources.  No need to run around the web looking for updates.  No need to interrupt your work flow to see if there is a reply to your comment.  You just get used to getting back at all the updates once a day in a brief, but nicely looking digest form, and that’s it!

FriendFeed is a really nice services which a lot of people were waiting for and which they will appreciate now that it is finally here.  Oh, and just in case, here is the link to my FriendFeed profile.

del.ishli.st – my wishlist is back

Long time ago I used to have a wishlist on this site.  If I remember correctly, I even had a few.  It was a rather helpful piece of information for the times when I was doing online shopping, as well as for my friends and family before the big holidays (hint: presents).

There were two problems with keeping up a wishlist.  One was rather small – people couldn’t find it easily, since it was hidden in the archives.  And one big – it was a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date.  I kept losing it myself all the time, and I was always forgetting to update it.   These two problems caused it to finally be lost in the sea of other posts on this blog, and, probably, never to be found again.

I’m glad to say though, that a better version of my wishlist is back.  It’s something that I wish I had years ago.  It’s dead simple, easy to see (no registrations required or anything of such non-sense), and it’s also extremely easy for me to keep updated.  This new wishlist is on del.ishli.st.

The name sounds good, but the link is impossible to remember, much like the original del.icio.us one.  del.ishli.st is a very simple, yet very smart way of wishlisting.  It utilizes my del.icio.us account and the “wishlist” tag, which is something very natural to use for tagging items of the wishlist.  And so that I won’t try to remember the URL, or, even worse, attempt to type it, or lose this wishlist in the history of posts once again, I decided to make a big and important link to it, at the top of the site.  Yes, that’s right, you can see it together with the rest of the main navigational menu.

The webmail observation

Interestingly, out of Gmail, Yahoo Mail! and Hotmail, only the first one does not append advertising messages to actual emails.  I am rather surprised by this, given we just started with the year 2008.

I remember back when Hotmail and other webmail services were just starting, it was a common practice to monetize on advertising banners shown to webmail users, while also embedding advertising messages into outgoing emails.  That was a really ugly situation, but a lot of people suddenly got free access to email, which was great, so we lived with it.

While free webmail has always been useful, most web people prefer to have a mailbox under their own domain.  Or at least they preferred before Gmail came into play.   Nobody ever took you very serious if you were communicating using a well known free webmail service.

When the coolness of your own domain started to grow, many webmail services tried to meet the needs of their users and attempted to hide the obvious facts of them being free webmail services.  This was the time when webmail services registered tonnes and tonnes of domain names and offered their users a choice of any for their mailbox.  It was also the time when some stopped embedding advertising into outgoing emails.

For a few years, I stopped caring much about this issue, since I got a proper mailbox, as did many other people with who I communicated.  I knew of webmail existence, but it was mostly outside of my scope of interests.   Until Gmail came out.

With Gmail, Google changed the perception of webmail once again.  Two things that they did differently were AJAX interfaces, which provided for a much faster and more responsive user experience, than traditional web sites; and plenty of space.  If I remember correctly, Gmail offered something like 1 GB mailboxes.  That was in time when most other webmail services were giving out 10 or 15 MB.  “You will never have to delete an email message ever again“.

Google managed to make webmail popular again.   They implemented most of the good stuff, ignored mistakes, and came up with a few smart things of their own (conversation grouping, labels instead of folders, etc).  And, of course, one of the things that they did right was the advertising.  While reading mail, users see ads for related stuff – in clean, text, no blinking manner.  And no outgoing message is ever modified by Gmail to include advertising or to suggest that recipient should  give Gmail a try, or any of such nonsense.

I move all my mailboxes to Gmail.  This my only email interface these days.  And I’m pretty used to it now. And a lot of other people are back to webmail. And so it amazes me to no avail that some web services still don’t get it.  After all this time and all these lessons.  They still including their ads in outgoing messages.  This is really weird…

To all of you using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, et al, – you should really give Gmail a try.  At least you’ll know for sure that your recipients will get messages exactly as you send them.  No more, no less.

On the battles of the software industry

Here is a quote from Scott Rosenberg’s insightful post, titled “Clash of titanic business-press cliches”  (emphasis is mine):

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.

Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

A little something from the Flickr guidelines

After reading this post at Gonzo Engaged I decided to take another look at Flickr Community Guidelines.  After all I have more than 11,000 pictures there and I don’t want to have any surprises, if you know what I mean.

Here are two quotes that I think are worth a reminder:

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.
This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be terminated at any time.

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

Oh, and just in case you noticed that somebody took your pictures and uploaded them into their photo stream, and done so without your permission, here is an advice from Flickr on how to behave:

Copyright Infringement
If you see your photographs in another member’s photostream, don’t panic. This is probably just a misunderstanding and not malicious. A good first step is to contact them and politely ask them to remove it. If that doesn’t work, please file a Notice of Infringement with the Yahoo! Copyright Team who will take it from there.
You may be tempted to post an entry in our public forum about what’s happening, but that’s not the best way to resolve a possible copyright problem. We don’t encourage singling out individuals or their photos in our public forum.