Disqus - Latest Comments for AlexSchleber

Re: Techmeme vs. Twitter lists?

AlexSchleber — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:54:04 -0000

A complete list like your tech-news-brands is great, as long as it also has persistence and searchability for the items over time. That's been the problem with Tweetdeck & Seesmic so far, that they have been compromised on both counts.

FriendFeed solved it for the most part, but the integration with Twitter was less than elegant. As long as Twitter doesn't offer the RSS or similar feed off of each list page (to pipe them into FF or similar), or Tweetdeck and Seesmic create a mass-storage/archiving option, the Lists will be compromised as described above.

And as long as that is the case, surfacing a la Techmeme will work better for people that can't/don't want to spend the amount of time monitoring that you do, Robert.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

AlexSchleber — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:00:45 -0000

I think a large number of people came to the same conclusion because the FF founders employed an amateurish PR strategy during the buy out at best, at worst simply didn't level with the community that yes, FF is eventually going by the wayside. (Let's hope they at least keep the servers on for archiving purposes.)

So that made it pretty hard to keep investing a ton of time into FF. Heck, I had started modifying some Greasemonkey scripts to customize FF, hoping that FF would eventually launch those features natively. Now pretty much all new development on FF has ceased. That's no way to keep people around in earnest.

And parallel to the "death throes" of FF, everybody after a few weeks of shock has gotten way more emo than is good for everyday consumption.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/twitterfall-launches-twitter-reply.html

AlexSchleber — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:48:17 -0000

Louis, the best way I know of to show ongoing conversation between 2 Twitter users regardless of whether the "in reply to" chain was broken or not (by Twitter clients, etc.) is to simply search for both users' usernames (MINUS the @ symbols), as in this example:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=alexschleber...
(should have about a 7 day shelf-life)

The only case where this breaks down to mostly show third-party tweets is if both usernames are (relative) Web celebs such as in this example:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=scobleizer+l...

I had actually considered writing a Greasemonkey script to surface these queries: On clicking a special link added to each FriendFeed entry from Twitter starting with or containing an @username, scrape the Twitter Search result and display as a small "popup" overlay DIV.

Thoughts?

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:20:51 -0000

FriendFeed guys used the term "for the time being"..which could mean..well..anything.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:16:55 -0000

+1 Louis.

Re: louisgray.com: Hi Facebook, It's Me, FriendFeed. This Relationship? It's Complicated.

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:42:23 -0000

Wow Louis, congrats on keeping your wits about you to write this powerful post. Your analogy reminds me of the quote from Dickipedia.org I used to point people to at times:

"In 2004, Zuckerberg debuted a primitive online social networking site called Facebook, named for the annual publication that collegiate upper classmen use to identify attractive freshmen girls with low self-esteem. At the time, Zukerberg planned to offer the service only to students within the Ivy League, because, as is widely known, Ivy League students have long had problems finding ways to network with one another."

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:40:39 -0000

OK, so: "FriendFeed is dead. I will keep using it until Paul unplugs the last server, which could be years, but let’s be honest"

but also: "put me down as excited. Very excited. I’m looking forward now to that next walk with Mark Zuckerberg"

?!?!?

How do those two go together?

If the FriendFeed functionality and archived data/archiving capabilities become inaccessible that is going to suck, frankly. I guess the bottom line is that (cloud-based) social services can't be trusted with your data for the long haul. Grab what you can while you can, but make sure to draw all the data you really want into your own systems.

With Twitter Search being essentially broken, FF was a way to archive/search/filter Twitter, and even though only about 1/3 of my following on Twitter were on FF, it was getting pretty productive to manage both mostly from within FF (even though there were tons of further FF/Twitter integration improvements I could think of, and began to implement to some extent via Greasemonkey scripts).

Obviously, with the uncertainty, it makes no sense to invest much thought into this until some clarity is provided. In the meantime, we'll have to scour for other tools, and I for one am becoming more and more inclined to build my own. It may well be that the social "mega" services will permanently be unable to give good back-data access due to shear volume.

So I guess use them for discovery only, and then "hoover up" what you need from it into your own systems. Of course if you're relying on RSS to do this for you, you better save the feed to somewhere from day ONE! (Biggest issue of RSS, it always only goes back 20 or so items from the time you set up).

IMO blogs and their comment systems became a lot more relevant again today due to this development.

Re: tr.im announces shutdown (Scripting News)

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 04:32:42 -0000

Dave, here is a simple "Roll your own" solution using Wordpress: http://3on.us/diy-tinyurl

Re: Twitter’s platform shortcomings

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 04:14:54 -0000

Great post, Robert. Couldn't have really said it better myself. I have previously warned about the URL shortener "captive" issue here: http://3on.us/diy-tinyurl

It is a shame that Twitter is already displaying some of the same signs of big co. arrogance that MSFT and more recently Apple (see Jason Calacanis' current post/email) are tending towards. Before Twitter ever having earned a dime no less...

Just wrote this today as a footnote to Jason's post:

"... am musing about the question of whether all large/successful companies (in this case a post-1997 resurgent Apple riding the wave of their iPod and iPhone dominance) are more or less "doomed" to live out "The Powerbroker" archetype, becoming paranoid/controlling, throwing their proverbial weight around, and beginning to bully all and sundry.

Maybe I have been a little too harsh in judging Microsoft in the past, maybe these developments are psychologically... almost unavoidable...?!?"

Re: Twitter’s platform shortcomings

AlexSchleber — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 04:05:25 -0000

The reason: branding / brand names. "Twitter" works well, while Jaiku and Pownce sucked as brand names. Yeah, it can be as simple as that...

Twitter and the "Tweety-bird" are evocative to some extent of what Twitter is all about, hence the mass proliferation of an entire Twitter/Tweet lingo, tons of new 3rd party app names, etc.

Re: Facebook? Up 10%. Twitter? Up 16%. FriendFeed? Flat

AlexSchleber — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:24:43 -0000

You point is well taken, AND shows the way that FriendFeed can win:

1) Make a few addtl. changes to become a robust Twitter client (needs Reply and RT links/buttons, as well as easy import of all Twitter "following" accounts not yet on FF as Imaginary Friends - or some other way if that were too resource intensive).

2) Become the de facto feed reader better than Google Reader by adding a "Subscribe to this" bookmarklet and similar button on items within FriendFeed that link to an RSS'able source. These subscriptions (to sources rather than users) could be managed either as Imaginary Friends, or as "Groups/Rooms" managed by FF admin, asf.

3) Find a way to import the Facebook Home page (friends' updates), and you then have a unified inbound feed with everything important going on (say under "Favorites").

I have been doing something close to this, minus the FB import, for a while now manually, and it works, it's just too much work to set up currently for most people to do it.

Once you combine the 3 top Web 2.0 uses this way, it becomes a lot more compelling. That's what FF needs, a compelling use case that is easy to set up and easily DEMONSTRATED. Loic just came out with the Seesmic Web-based Twitter client, FF is not that far off at all from offering that and more.

The infrastructure is there, now all it needs is a few tweaks.

Re: Really Secret Scoble

AlexSchleber — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:21:25 -0000

Gladwell's "Tipping Point" had a whole chapter on this phenomenon "5: ... the magic number 150" (Dunbar Number) that is a worthwhile read. It seems that the human brain on average is equipped to handle about that number of social group connections but not many more.

Of course, you Robert have been pushing the envelope on this for quite some time :)

Have our Web 2.0 technologies enabled us to do things that turn out to be unsustainable? Quite possibly. Then again, improved filtering/sorting may be the answer. We're all experimenting with a way that might work for us...

Re: Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge?

AlexSchleber — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:42:55 -0000

Jesse, the Google search on your Tweet Stream is a very poor substitute, as it still has more holes than a Swiss cheese. So far I've found only piping of (single user) Twitter RSS feeds into Tumblr to be a reasonably simple/sound solution as far as archiving is concerned (tweet frequency can't be too high, else Tumblr will shut it down).

Of course that won't solve Robert's wish for Time-bound snap-shots that can be easily resurfaced: Google itself, even with the recent "Recency Operator" improvements (Last 24hrs/week/month/year), still has a way to go before you can say "give me date range from: ... until: ..."

Sound to me like there are plenty of business opportunities around providing archiving abilities around given real-time queries. I.e. Robert can find what he wants on a given day or recent sequence of days SHORTLY AFTER the event, and then says: "Hoover up" all of this info and archive it for later... e.g. for the recent "140conf" or "140tc" etc.

That implies taking timely action because Twitter seems in no mood to let you back-search past about 30 days (at best, often it's only about 7 days anymore during daytime loads). They may of course already be selling access to the full range to corp. researchers for a lot of money.

Re: Facebook vs. Twitter: Round two with URL shorteners as the judge

AlexSchleber — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:33:45 -0000

The result is not that surprising, since Twitter users have been "trained" to practice openness, engagement, and most importantly propagation via Retweets (which Facebook "Likes" cannot match as they don't create the same degree of surfacing, largely because FB users don't (yet) expect to interact with other users' Friends of Friends or their "fanned" FB Pages, etc. to the same degree as on Twitter's wide-open platform).

Granted Zuckerberg is hard at work at retraining them...

Nonetheless, smart bit of research using a relatively simple tool like bit.ly. Shows how important it is to get actual confirmation/feedback via stats on how postings to the various communities are received.

I have been arguing this over on FriendFeed for a number of weeks now, as there currently is no good way to measure clicks on either links shown internally on FF, or the shortened ff.im links shown if FF actions/postings are forwarded to Twitter.

Ever since I've been using FriendFeed in an accelerated fashion starting about two months ago, this has been an issue, since I have no real way of knowing to what degree my Twitter followers are engaging with my FF materials. Anecdotally, it seems that click-throughs on ff.im are currently much lower than on bit.ly links, in part simply because fewer users are familiar with them, asf.

Here is the thread:
http://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-feedback/481ec...

Re: Twitter: “We Screwed Up” on #fixreplies

AlexSchleber — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:22:20 -0000

Now you disappoint me, Scott Stratten (@unmarketing). You didn't want to see what your closest 25k friends were writing to others? :)

(Ironically the larger your following/follower set gets for someone such as yourself, the larger the % of @ reply tweets that will surface in your timeline even with the default setting.)

I am now seeing A LOT less of you, is that truly what you are arguing for? See, I used to click through a lot of your little "Well played Sir!" and "...and by XYZ, I mean..." type @ reply banter with peeps. Most of it is GONE now... If anything, Twitter should be integrating MORE conversation threading/visibility into the platform, not less. It already works on Search.twitter.com, so what gives?

The point is, it's better to have access to the full data set (which should also be less expensive database lookup-wise), and then filter down from there as you see fit. Twitter's spirit is openness (maybe a lot more open than its founders foresaw), why deny access to an entire class of Tweets out of hand?

BTW, I find Mashable's lauding here of Twitter's apology as "frank and honest" almost as Orwellian as Twitter's language in all of this from the get-go. They (Biz, et al.) still continue to try (rather clumsily) to tell us what to think. Propaganda that can easily be spotted is... 2nd rate propaganda.

Also agree with people further down that the 3% of users number feels "massaged". If it were % of active users it should be a good bit higher. Don't trust any statistic you haven't forged yourself...

(Wrote a longer retort here:

http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comment-on...
)

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/dont-tempt-online-mob-they-come-bearing.html

AlexSchleber — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:06:08 -0000

Totally agree with you Louis, see what I just wrote here:

http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comment-on...

In a word, @Biz explanation is baloney, and the tone of the posts is only getting MORE Orwellian. Plus this latest PR fail has none of all that "aw shucks FailWhale grass roots" cuddliness (which has already had them getting away with A LOT).

Oh, and @Victor, you are wrong: The users are what build the value of SOCIAL MEDIA. So it would behoove the people expecting to (someday) make money from their creation to treat that resource with some care. Anyone can throw up some servers and code, the value is in the USERS.

Re: Digital Signals: Hashtags - Communicating via Twitter . . Faster

AlexSchleber — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:58:15 -0000

I'd say that hashtags can provide extremely valuable meta-information, because they signal both intent, as well as a certain amount of sophistication/insider information (compared to "incidental"/unconscious use of the same keywords).

E.g. during SXSW Interactive, Twitter's time-line on Search.twitter.com was overflowing with SXSW references, and cutting that down by searching for the #sxsw hashtag only was a first step toward cutting through the noise.

And the great thing is that they can be added to the text flow without needing to repeat the term twice. E.g. you can just write: "This post deals with the way #wordpress handles...". What's not to like? Only 1 character need be added...

Agreed that people need to avoid abusing them by making anything a hashtag. Basic rules for viral "spreadability" still apply: Keep it short, logical/meaningful, easy/enjoyable to say ("#followfriday") , etc.

But if used properly, each tweet using them adds an entire additional dimension of communication opportunities, because a vast number of people monitoring Twitter, who are not yet your followers, can find you via hashtags (that number will only grow with increasing Twitter Search literacy coming to the mainstream).

You can join a much larger conversation. Also see the success of #journchat, #brandchat, etc. as virtual, timebound meetups on Twitter.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/03/3-twitter-tools-that-enhance-new.html

AlexSchleber — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:23:12 -0000

This is important stuff, as the number of steps for diligent following are cumbersome, even if you abbreviate the sequence you describe by simply going to one's /followers page. Since Twitter is so far only showing people's bios on mouse-over on that page, rather than at least that plus following/follower numbers, it is increasingly difficult to guess the spammers up front without clicking through first (they are getting smarter on their bio texts).

I will test out some of the services you mention, but really email without 1-click follow/block from within the email client is still extra steps. Twitter should make decent solutions natively available, especially when they could reduce their server loads (showing the following/follower #s to weed out spammers should be cheaper than loading a full profile page, #s plus bio plus 5 tweets could even be on-click inline AJAXed to avoid potentially unnecessarily loading it 20 times per page).

Also, frankly there should be a 1-click option for blocks as well (as you really don't want spammers in your follower list, especially since some have been using the "top of follower heap" approach to follow/unfollow multiple times for exposure), the current 2-step process can be cumbersome especially when Twitter has slowed down. This should be inline AJAXed as well.

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Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

Re: http://mashable.com/2009/03/24/newspaper-best-practices/

AlexSchleber — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:00:08 -0000

"Doing nothing is not an option" - I strongly agree.

E.g. I am working on a post about how it's crazy not to have 1) commenting 2) that is easy & OPEN (moderate later, filter only for offensive words & obvious multi-link spam) and instantly visible (without immediate feedback you are subtly disincentivising the behavior) on just about every single content item placed by your media outfit. In the age of blogs, people have quickly gotten used to and then come to expect this and other Web2.0 realities.

It feels downright strange now to read something where we can't comment, or only after running a gauntlet of sign-ups, then mostly unnecessary moderation hold-ups, only to be relegated to some labyrinthine sub-page.

ENGAGEMENT is the key. Embrace the new realities, anything else is madness.

Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

Re: The Potential for Facebook Search Kicks Twitter’s Butt

AlexSchleber — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:08:03 -0000

Jesse, I see a huge problem for Facebook getting the majority of their users to (knowingly) allow their personal feed stream to be publicly accessible.

Because the entire service was started on the premise of a Walled Garden where it was safe and private to connect with your (mostly real) friends and acquaintances. Already, I am hearing (via Steve Gillmor) that supposedly as many as 94% of Facebook users responding to a poll about the new "Twitterized" design dislike it.

Twitter is in a whole other gear in terms of speed, and the felt need of it's most ardent users to express themselves. Currently, due to the number of very active Twitter users who employ any number of client programs to send and read updates, the raw data from Compete.com re:visits does not tell the whole story. My guess is that the current 20:1 visit ratio in Facebook's favor is off, I could easily see it being only 10:1 or even better.

And most importantly, except for a few unfortunate souls on Twitter who have set their updates to "Protected", there never has been a supposition of privacy, indeed, it tends to attract those that do not mind, do not care, or WANT to overshare… :)

While on Facebook users treasure their privacy a lot more, and would react VERY negatively if e.g. the Personal Feed were to be opened to the public by default. Remember what happened with Beacon?

I would agree that there are data mining opportunities on Facebook, it's just that Facebook likely has to sell those to the highest (corporate) bidders, i.e. you or I are not likely to be getting open access to it. Even with that Facebook would have to be very careful as to privacy issues, real or perceived, or the backlash could make the recent TOS disaster look like a complete cakewalk.

Re: Gary Vaynerchuk - How will Twitter monetize? So many people at...

AlexSchleber — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:20:41 -0000

Damn Gary, while I've been thinking the same things,

http://alexschleber.posterous.com/vinsightful-v...

you say it in a way that drives it home to anyone with ears to hear... Awesome job... just sent this out to EVERYONE I know. Cheers!

Re: Did You Get Caught Trying to Boost Your Follower Count?

AlexSchleber — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:00:30 -0000

Very well said, & just posted your great "when the marketers start Doing It Wrong(tm)" quote to Twitter. Which brings me to the question, where is the link to your Twitter account (on this blog, or otherwise... :).

Cheers!

Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

Re: Archiving your tweets in XML (Scripting News)

AlexSchleber — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:51:58 -0000

Very interesting, though this may become cumbersome for large numbers of followees ("following"), say in the thousands. I've been experimenting with piping the "with friends" RSS feed into Thunderbird (Mozilla's Email client), and do some Filtering Rules stuff on keywords, etc. in it.

It will comfortably hold 100k tweets at a time, but then starts to get slowish for searches (on my average laptop). They'll still work though, and at about 250MB memory usage holding nearly 200k tweets, the app itself does not crash like Tweetdeck tends to. Extra bonus: no issues with the API limit running out before the hour is up, and tweets being "missed".

Other solutions I have seen for at least archiving your own tweets include piping the RSS into Tumblr, or using Twistory.com and then pipe the iCal formatted output into e.g. Google Calendar. Drawback with the latter is that Google Calendar does not retain a link back to the original status update page, nor does it make links in the Tweet clickable (which I consider a bug at this point...).

Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

Re: BackTweets API and Feedback

AlexSchleber — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:10:50 -0000

See if you can't sell this to Twitter, this really should be integrated under a "mentions" tab that combines Search.twitter.com results for "@username" like RT's, mentions, and now, thanks to you, non-RT-credited backtweets.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/03/serial-early-adopters-get-it-all-wrong.html

AlexSchleber — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:27:38 -0000

This kind of behavior is totally predictable and has been thoroughly discussed in Malcom Gladwell's "Tipping Point" chapter 6 on adoption patterns and translation from early adopters to early/late majority. The early adopters don't like the mass adoption for the same reason that they sought out the phenomenon in its infancy in the first place: Feeling special.

Once you get 5M new users per week(!) on Facebook, it's certainly no longer special. That said, I agree with Cyndy that there are benefits to the mass adoption, one just has to be able to recognize them. Some are personal (as described in the post), some are business related, if you have the eyes to see... [cough]... Groups + Video... [cough]...