Punctuating The Silence » Social Networking

Upcoming Changes to Facebook Look Really Promising

Steve — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:07:44 +0000

Note: I first posted this on my Facebook account, and decided it would be good to post to a larger (hmmm, do I really have more people reading this blog than I have friends ignoring my ramblings on FB?) audience…well, ok, potentially larger, anyway.

I watched parts of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the F8 conference yesterday, and I liked what I saw.

So I’m not a Facebook developer, and as such I don’t yet have access to Timeline, but when I fired up Spotify this morning, it offered to connect with my Facebook account and add the things I’m listening to to my timeline (and I did it, but as I wasn’t sure what it would do, I’ve initially set it to show up for me only. (In a slightly ironic twist, I was just semi-deriding that option this morning!)).

Either Timeline’s coming very soon, or we’ll be able to have all these external data sources feeding into FB well in advance of the launch, which means it’ll come pre-populated, which is cool. It also means they’ve been thinking about this for a bit, and the recent changes have been more about the behind-the-scenes stuff needed to make this work than the up-front cosmetics.

I think that, especially as someone who’s been interested in the Memex/Gorden Bell-MyLifeBits-type projects for some time now, I’m really looking forward to see this. And if Facebook has a full export feature day one, we’re looking at a pretty useful thing.

More Social Networking For Me, Thanks to OSCON

Steve — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:30:54 +0000

Looking through my blog’s archive, I never did blog about my getting started with Facebook, but I’m blaming, er, crediting the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). They had put up a note that Facebook was to be the social network of choice for that year. Previously, I had been avoiding Facebook, but with that final nudge, I relented and created the account. And Facebook has been great for reconnecting with people, and glimpsing little bits of peoples’ lives you wouldn’t necessarily see.

There’s a new social networking concept that I’ve dabbled with, but never really got into, called “microblogging”. This is where you make short posts, usually only a sentence or two, or a link. The site that’s been around the longest and is the most successful is Twitter, and no, I do not have an account there. Yet.

I just finished reading an interesting entry on the TED Blog called “How To Talk While People are Twittering“, and it discusses an article on how, as a speaker, being aware of the backchannel communication of your audience can benefit both the audience and you. The point for me is that I’ve been going to OSCON for several years now, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered the traditional OSCON backchannel: IRC. From that, many of the points this article enumerates, I know first-hand to be true.
So, going to the 2009 OSCON site, seeing that the very first icon in the list of social networks and media to be used this year is Twitter, I have very little doubt that in addition to IRC, Twitter is going to be heavily used and will be another great source of commentary and information (we *are* talking about a group of notorious early adopters).

I know I can easily follow the twittering without an account: there are lots of aggregators out there, but I’m guessing that I’ll create an account for 2 reasons: the first is to be able to participate in the discussion, and the second is that I’ve been saying for the last few years that I’ll blog the conference, and while last year I did ok, I don’t have the greatest track record. Twitter might not be great, in-depth prose, but it will be (micro) blogging, and it will provide a trail that will serve as a memory aid should I then go back and write real blog posts.

Look for me on Twitter. Coming Soon. Summer of ’09. Maybe before.

The Cost of Reconnecting

Steve — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:15:32 +0000

I’ve been slow to jump on the social networking bandwagon, but one that I’ve been enjoying great success with is LinkedIn. I’ve been able to reconnect with people I haven’t had contact with for years. One person in particular I’ve been trying to find for several years. They’re the sort to keep a low profile – unlisted phone number, nothing returned when Googling them, etc – so when I did my periodic search on LinkedIn, I was excited to see their name pop up. The only problem, though, is that while we’ve been friends since high school, we share no post-secondary educational institutions, and we’ve never worked together. Of the remaining catagories in LinkedIn’s “Invite this person to your network”, they require an email address. I understand why they do this (I don’t like spam as much as the next person), but now I seem to be stuck.

Almost, anyway. I have a free LinkedIn account, so to send messages within their system, I either need to upgrade to a paid account (the cheapest is $20.00 per month), or order an “InMail” a la carte, at $10 per message. So yesterday I paid my $10, and sent my message. Totally worth it, and will be even more so when he responds!

Update: I just got email from him, so I’m calling this unqualified success! Money well spent.