Social Networking Thoughts
I’m still alive…I promise to write more too!
Here is one side of an emerging conversation that I’m having with a friend. The subject, as becomes apparent, is the prevalence of Social Networking sites. The response that I crafted (below) was prompted by the question, “where are you? what services are out there that I should be on?”
Enjoy.
Will
ough question to answer. I am invited to (and try out) a lot of social network type sites. Rarely, though, do they reach enough audience to make it worth my while.
That being said, I do find my way around a few.
LinkedIn - professionals
Facebook - friends, sometimes colleagues
Twitter - the geeks, realistically
Seesmic - like twitter, but video
Some others find their way in and out. I still have a MySpace for example. Rarely do I find that I login to check it out. Too much spam and not enough quality content.
The thing that I really like about twitter are the replies. Facebook has seen this and has recently added their own sort of reply mechanism. It still isn’t the same. Seesmic is very similar to twitter with regard to structure and design. The problem is that the whole thing is really video-based and, therefore, somewhat difficult for most people to really accept.
Pownce lacks the draw that twitter has. Aside from file sharing, there aren’t any features that it has above twitter. I love Kevin Rose, but it really was a day late and a dollar short. Kevin proved it himself when he started promoting his twitter account publicly while basically ignoring his own service.
BrightKite interests me a bit. I haven’t had enough time to really dig deeper, though. Maybe it’ll happen. Don’t quite know yet.
Something that’s apparently important to me is that the service initiate and support some sort of conversation. Really, that is what socializing is about. What good is a social network that makes it difficult to converse or becomes basically a one-way mechanism for self promotion (one of the bases for my dislike of MySpace). Of course, there are some people who use Twitter and others for self promotion (twitter.com/tferriss) but they really miss the point. (I say this knowing and quite enjoying Tim’s ideas…still, it’s the truth).
Those are just some thoughts though. Everything changes and morphs over time so my position is bound to do the same.
Using Twitter for More . . .
…more than the usual AIM-esque status updates, self promotion and such. I’ve been spending some time this afternoon (only an hour or so) setting up a very cool bit of technology that I see as a greater use of the resources that we already have.
The Background: Ithaca College has a section on the ithaca.edu site specifically dedicated to college news and announcements called Intercom. There’s an RSS feed (of course) and there’s some sort of CMS on the backend — though I can’t seem to pinpoint what it is without a little looking around — which is updated by various folks at random intervals.
What I wanted was a breaking-news style site, not a feed, that I could forward anywhere and that would be current (within a few minutes) with the site. Finally, I didn’t want this to cost anything or take any of my time (on a day-to-day basis) for setup or maintenance. Using a few different services (most of which I have already been using for other, various purposes) I was able to make this happen in under an hour.
Naturally, the Google helped me to find some tutorials that were of assistance. Though, I found, most of them were very specialized for things that I didn’t really want to do. Others were focused on setting up plug-ins for existing sites (I have no ownership of the site, no access to the CMS, and a high level of doubt as to whether or not they would install such a plug-in and support my geeky wants). That being the case, I was still able to get enough out of each of these independent sources as to figure out a solution that would work for me.
Services Used: Twitter (of course), TwitterFeed (and, as required OpenID), FeedBurner (not 100% necessary, but good for tracking), WordPress (with the FeedWordPress plug-in)
The Problem: I ran into an error when using the TwitterFeed service by itself. Initially, I was going to go the easy route and have TwitterFeed handle everything. However, for what ever reason, the feed coming from Intercom doesn’t have valid time/date information and, therefore, wouldn’t work to be pushed-out in a reasonable way.
The Solution: is probably much more complex than it needed to be. It works, though, and should provide some degree of expandability. What I did is, essentially, setup a WordPress weblog that mirrors Intercom (or any site, really, using the FeedWordPress plug-in) and (to fix the problem with time/date) keeps a local copy of the Title and Permalink back to the original Intercom story (the only two things I want in the Twitter updates). Of course, the output feed from this WordPress weblog (which is private, by the way) goes through FeedBurner, then TwitterFeed and gets the Title and Link in the Twitter status updates.
Pretty Slick, huh!?
As an aside, I’ve got lots to talk about here, just not enough time to write it all down and make it sound somewhat logical…I try anyway… Hopefully, my plan of carving out designated time slots will work and you’ll be hearing from me in less than a few months.
