Testing out LifeCast from iPod Touch
Testing out the iPhone application of LifeCast on my iPod Touch. Interested to see how it will update my Tumblelog :-)
Posted with LifeCast
Testing out the iPhone application of LifeCast on my iPod Touch. Interested to see how it will update my Tumblelog :-)
Posted with LifeCast
My reply to Mashable’s artcile on Identi.ca and Twitter death:
I’m a massive fan of both Twitter and FriendFeed. They’ve managed to knit together social networking with websearch to create much more personal and (most importantly) trusted results. People on the web are becoming a lot more savvy, by which I mean they’re becoming more skeptical about the information Google suggests.
While it only takes a click to check if the information is pertinent to you, it’s still a fairly redundant path to take which will only be amplified the less you know about what you’re searching. But as more people become savvy online, they’re getting smarter too.
They (like me) are beginning to understand Google is a great place to go for facts & figures. Many people half the time using Google only end up searching to confirm something they already knew. But when it comes to opinion, Google really won’t help. It may suggest popular bloggers/reviewers on the subject of interest, but is that meaningful to you?
It’s becoming easier online to get to the top of a search engine. I for example have managed to claim most of the top slots on a Google search of ‘jake fudge’ by simply being a member of a few linked social networking sites. This is useful if I wanted to sell something, but does my topspot on Google make my opinion more important that anyone else’s? Short answer, no.
So what are we getting at here? Trust. We are looking for people online who we trust by tapping the power of social networking. Wouldn’t you listen to a friend or a friend-of-a-friend’s review of the latest game over some worldly popular games reviewer who gets a million hits? More often than not, yes. And isn’t that ridiculous? 1 friend’s recommendation versus 1,000,000 others, and you side with your friend. Surely this is redundancy gone mad?! Well, there are several factors we need to consider for this info to be trusted - such as recommending a game you’ve bought as opposed to hearsay from the popular sites we are dubious to trust; or trusting a friend’s knowledge in a certain field that you know nothing, but they know plenty. I for instance know nothing about cars or insurance or politics, but I know others who do because they partake in those communities and I trust their views to the point I might vote for the same Party or invest in their insurance company almost blindly! True enough their opinion might have come from looking at the no.1 hits on Google, but what I get out of it is a distilled result which is worth 1000’s of man-hours on behalf of my friend. If you can’t decide on something after that, then there’s probably no helping you ;¬)
So it’s clear that their are levels of trust for the types of search you want to carry out. Now I wanted to briefly talk about some services I currently use that are utilising the power of people - Summize & FriendFeed. I won’t say more about either than to say Summize empowers Twitter with search, and FriendFeed aggregates your online activity which can be shared/searched by friends or friends-of-friends.
Both services have incredible marketing potential, whether you’re analysing trends, shopping round for customers or indeed shopping round for friends with similar interests. Thanks in part to fairly open API’s offered to 3rd party developers, it’s now possible to harness the previously discussed ‘distilled knowledge/experiences’ of friends & trusted individuals immediately.
For this the ‘advanced search’ option is your friend, which I have taken the liberty of comparing Google alongside Summize & FriendFeed.
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First off we look at old faithful, Google. The problem here is that Google lacks the human touch. While they do pick up people’s Twitter accounts and certain blog posts, they by-and-large don’t pick up on much useful content. Google Advanced Search has some very nifty features like finding specific filetypes (yes, search for .mp3’s at your risk!), but I find Google these days to be only useful when I know almost exactly what I want or where to get it but feel too lazy.
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Next up we have Summize. Just looking over their advanced search options, there is much to choose from:
…using several search fields combined together you can get some very specific/useful results and opinions from people literally down the road!
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Next is FriendFeed. Great aggregation of all my likes and comments I make throughout the web. Truly Stalker-ware in the making ;¬) (j/k)
And considering FriendFeed includes Twitter feeds, this must be the best choice - right? Well, not really. Just take a look at their advanced options:
I think that really speaks for itself. Slim Pickin’s. Okay, you can probably get quite a good few results from these options, and you’re scope is slightly larger than that of Summize as you can search by more sites users aggregate. But that’s pretty much it. I tried today to search for news about a game today that a friend apparently managed to get a day earlier than usual UK release. I wanted to see if this had been mentioned anywhere online, but restricted by the lack of options on FriendFeed I had to wade through a lot of content not directly associated with my search. And because this game has already been released in the US, my search was ‘tainted’ with more popular results from when they got the game, not us. Having no region or time/date options to search against I was forced to give up and try elsewhere.
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So to sum up, Trust will become a large part of Web2.0 and what I’m sure is already coined Marketing2.0. Many developers realise this and are well on their way to unlocking the potential of the ‘trusted user’ base.
And to FriendFeed - supe-up your search! I really love using your service, and I understand you are still in the start-up phase, but don’t leave it up to the 3rd party Greasemonkey scripters to do all the work. You have the know-how & resources to make it happen :¬D
[NB: I wanted to give a brief shout-out to Mahalo who are trying to take on Google, but instead use real people to verify the most important info.]
Just to begin, I don’t have the answer to this question. If anything it was more an idea I had a while ago when I started to use services like TinyURL more and more. And since the explosion of use of Twitter, many people rely on these shortening service to share information or provide trackbacks to main articles.
But it has been bugging me for a while why there is no service that can take multiple tabbed webpages, compress them down into a single short URL, then spit the original tabs on the other end? It’s safe to say that every modern browser these days supports tabs. Heck, most mobile version for PDA’s, phones etc. have this same functionality. But if I want to share a browser session with someone, I’m unable to do this. Why?
FireFox & Internet Explorer both allow you to set multiple tabs up as your homepage through pretty much the same standard of:
My Homepage: www.cannongod.tumblr.com | www.google.com
Using this vertical bar will tell these browsers how to open up each web address in separate tabs. Unfortunately this is where the limitation lies - you choose to allow those pages to open, so the browser responds accordingly. But with firewall and limited virus protection for your browser, clicking a link that tries to equivalently ‘reprogramme’ the browser won’t be permitted (and rightly so).
However, knowing this I still wanted to experiment with the range of information I could lockup inside a tinyURL. Unfortunately entering the above information won’t work, but I’m pretty sure I could shorten down JavaScript and get it to activate throught the link. Maybe with some modification a JavaScript file could be written that take’s each weblink and tinyURL’s it all down. Thus once clicked it runs and proceeds to open each in their own tab. Not entirely sure if that’s entirely secure and make the browser throw a wobbly, but definitely an area of investigation. All I know is that right now I can write something like:
Zip this up into a TinyURL and when you click on http://tinyurl.com/595up2 it should at least list each link you wanted to share. The browser won’t like it, but it will at least unzip each link into the address bar for you to cut and paste into separate tabs as you wish.
Following on from a del.icio.us link saved by AJCann (you probably don’t know it, but cheers!) - I came across a review of Kyte versus Qik and Flixwagon on TechCrunch written by arch bloggosaurus Robert Scoble.
After a read of the review, I started to play around with Kyte and what it had to offer. The overview video by Kyte was very informative as to how their service operates and can even monetize your content, which I thought was a nice addition :) It was from messing about leaving various video/audio/text chats from the web and my mobile phone on my initial video post - I started thinking if this had the potential to overshadow Seesmic. Here are my thoughts about the services, both the initial Kyte post followed by my post on Seesmic to get some feedback.
KYTE:
SEESMIC:
Feel free to leave me a comment in any form you see fit ;¬)
