"Agree entirely. Extensions / add ons will doubtlessly come - it is open source after all. But they're testing the browser so having additional, third party, possibly buggy code in this first release would be simply stupid." - David Sim
"It's an application platform - so expect solutions to arrive in time. Right now, adding extensions would complicate testing of the actual browser. (Just look at firefox, where many problems are caused by extensions, not browser code)." - David Sim
"Quick review: Very, very fast, no crashes or site issues yet. Unsurprisingly Google Apps work (didn't on Safari). Simple interface. No doubt many will miss extensions, but this is an application framework so is a different proposition. Application shortcuts great for webmail. Overall, amazing first effort. My default browser already." - David Sim
"Thanks for using the VisitAviemore.com example, which we at 4tm-services.com helped to create. Your New Zealand example is spot on too and was a source of inspiration to us.
I promise VisitAviemore didn't cost anything like $100,000, but the feedback has been excellent. Visitors don't want to read marketing hype, they just want to get information fast. So we provide the core information on facilities, accommodation and things to do; visitors - through their blogs, YouTube videos and TripAdvisor provide their own ideas and take on what's great (and what's not) in the area.
It's been a fun project!" - David Sim
"In 1940, the British military formed an organization as a part of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, called the “Underground Propaganda Committee” or UPC whose mission was to create and disseminate rumors as defensive weapons against the expected Nazi invasion of the the English mainland. They code-named the rumor weapons “sibs,” short for siblare, latin word “to hiss.” During the war they developed the craft and science of designing rumors and developed international networks of agents to spread the sibs. (Psywar.org has a great history of the UPC.)" - Igor The Troll
via Bookmarklet
"We got an irate email from a Mashable reader this morning who was upset at the way he was being pitched by way of Twitter. Scott V. Kaiser wrote us to say:
I contacted Daniel Ha via Twitter for a little help on custom CSS implementation of Disqus. i sent him one, and only one, tweet found here. No where else did Daniel and I talk publicly nor did I mention I was looking to implement Disqus on my blog to anyone else.
Earlier this evening I received a tweet from Khris Loux, a JS-Kit employee, pitching his product. His tweet found here specifically mentions helping me with CSS for implementing his product on my blog. The only place he could have ascertained that information is by either reviewing Daniel Ha’s Twitter timeline or by searching for Disqus on Twitter and contacting me. Either way his tweet to me was unsolicited." - Igor The Troll
via Bookmarklet
Appalled that he would choose to do business that way, I took a look at his timeline found here. It is obvious that he has approached other potential and existing Disqus users the same way. I tweeted back to him asking him not to send my unsolicited tweets. I wrote Twitter to report him as a spammer and I let Daniel Ha know what happened. I then blocked Khris Loux from following me on Twitter. - Igor The Troll
WTF? What a Douchebag! Reported him to Twitter! Fascism! Dude get a freaken Life! - Igor The Troll
If this is not spam then it is some other kind of junk mail... uh twitter. What they are doing is sending unsolicited messages to a competitor's customers, that is spam when it is email, and spam on twitter. - Eric Dorsett
Everyone is "Spamming" Twitter, including you and me! All of us just have a different message in a public forum! Spam is when you send the same "message" to multiple recipients! And I do not mean a few but many! - Igor The Troll
Approaching a perspective client with a product is what Twitter is about! We are all selling something, even if it is our name! - Igor The Troll
If you hold discussions in public, you must surely expect others to read it / use it / act upon it. If you don't like it, make your timelines private. - David Sim
bit of both, really. There's a very thin line between agressive marketing and spam. - john conroy
1. They automatically resize my browser 2. Takes FOREVER to load 3. SO unintuitive. When I see the "loading 24%" bar? I hit the little "x" on the tab. UGH - Mona N.
Mona N, symptoms of bad flash sites, sans maybe the loading bar. Plenty of those on non flash sites too. - Mo Kargas
That resizes my browser and there're tons of graphics are flying around? Link please. - Mona N.
Keh? I meant there's plenty of loading bars on non-flash sites - Mo Kargas
Oh, miscommunication. I was listing the instances, which immediately make me go DO NOT WANT :) - Mona N.
4. They often don't support standard functions like copy, paste, print and back. They almost always have terrible usability. I don't mind flash, but not for whole sites. Usually you can create the same functionality with CSS / DHTML and / or Javascript which are much lighter and let the browser do its thing. - David Sim
Ugh, that is THE worst. When you hit back, while browsing through a pages of items and it kicks you back to the homepage. WHY is taht ok? Seriously. - Mona N.
Yep....flash still sucks. I run a Flash blocker. If I go to your site and all I see is a bigass square with a nifty little play button in teh center for me to activate flash...well...I'm hitting C-w - Rah™
Deep linking doesn't work (applies for frames and some ajax-pages, too) - Jemm
Move to Europe and Asia. They tend to favor Flash out there ;) - Mona N.
funny thing...i was talking to a photographer who need a website. she kept asking about flash and i kept telling her i don't know flash. Eventually she decided to go a different direction (without me) because she wanted a full flash site. I just didn't get it. - Justin Korn
Heh. I've been a Flash BITCHR since it came out. Waaaaaay back in the day, they were changing the code every 3 days. As soon as you got something built, you had to convince the client to download the updated plugin. "Didn't I just do that? Does it do that every time? Why would people visiting my site want to have to install a plugin just to see my site?" - Chris Kim A
And while I'm at it, waaaay back in those days, QuickTime was a monster at the things Flash was struggling to do. Again, the plugin requirement issue, even harder to convince the 99.999999% PC user base to install an Apple plugin. Man, I had all these cool QTVR navigation buttons, all slick and such, but alas, QTVR, we hardly knew ye. - Chris Kim A
Justin, I think a lot of artist types think flash looks nice, so that must mean the site is gonna be awesome. Chris, I have been a flash hater for quite a while. It has gotten better than back in the day, but it's still guilty until proven innocent in my book. - Rah™
AGREED re: plug-in!!!!! Imagine, if the client has no idea how to install the plug-in, are average consumer going to know how? I'm with David who stated, CSS / DHTML suffices. Loads SO much quicker! RE: QT, we've come a LONG way. wow. - Mona N.
Flash = FAIL, If you provide alternate regular site = Semi-FAIL. - Mitchell Tsai
I can not see how the software is a deceiding factor in the usability. When deeplinking is not needed (and navigation is clear enough to prevent the browser button to do bad things (it's a browser problem, not flash's)) you can make great stuff with Flash. There are just as much bad sites in html, xml, ajax, ruby on rails and what have you then there are in Flash. Okay. I admit. I am from Europe. I like the experience vs just information :) - Ruud van Wijngaarden
There's more bad sites in 'al dente html' even. +1 Ruud - Mo Kargas
Some sites need a good experience for the widest possible audience while other sites need a specific experience for a very select audience. When the second is true then Flash / Silverlight is completely appropriate. - Soulhuntre
via twhirl
@Mo Kargas: that's simply because there are more sites made with HTML, it's like saying there's more coffee drinkers in the US vs the UK. It's not the number that counts, it's the percentage. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
I just want to keep hitting like on this one. Most Flash sites break the stuff I use all the time; tabbing to controls, the scroll wheel, keyboard shortcuts like ' to jump to links, etc etc. - Michael C. Harris
so can I assume that most of the flash haters don't mind it if it's used sparingly for small aspects of the site that are non-essential but also hard to implement using other technologies like javascript? Like Flickr's slideshow, for instance? - Ben Reierson
Websites made entirely out of Flash do suck. The major reason is that even though they may be visually appealing but the usability is poor (e.g., cannot navigate without a mouse), accessibility is also poor, and are generally not parse-able by search engine (is changing). - imabonehead
Flash usage is often a triumph of "design" over function but because its ubiquity and relative stability in many cases it is the only way to guarantee near universality and longevity of media content delivery over the web. It is a failure of browser and media delivery standards that force many content providers into this. - Brian Sullivan
I hate full Flash sites as well. I can understand people wanting things to look pretty, but not everyone has a computer fast enough to navigate the site without causing freezing and crashing. - Aden
Freaking Ditto on that. My computer ain't that fantastic running on Mozilla firefox(which takes a ton of memory on my computer) if a page is flash everywhere! - Shawn aka ringking
@briansullivan - a good point. While many folks will say use HTML / Ajax / CSS to do something the reality is that there are often many more hacks, special cases and workarounds required to do it... and blaming it all on IE isn't accurate. The specifications of these technologies are often ambiguous and incomplete while the feature set is inadequate. Using Flash / Silverlight can alleviate almost all of that issue. Again... not when your goal is the largest audience but when you know your users it is ok. - Soulhuntre
Flash is almost always the wrong choice for an interface, unless you have a captive, locked-down audience, or you're doing something so complicated that other approaches will be super-slow and fragile. I install extensions in my browser to improve my experience, and if your site renders them useless, I just hit the back button. - Roger Benningfield
Hear, hear! I have been ignoring all-Flash sites more and more. I installed a Flash-blocking extension in Forefox and it's made for a much more peaceful browsing experience. - Stephen Shores
via twhirl
I detest full flash web pages with all of my heart and soul. I say we boycott them! - Not Not Geoff Schultz
That is COOL! Being relatively coordinated, I figured, PSSHHAW! but I'll be damned. I am totally going to bleed bet money out of people on this one. - Josh Haley
forcing it NOT to do it kinda makes me convulse - Eric Rice
@Yuvi yeah drawing an 8 is definitely wacky. Can't wait to use this with friends next week. - Annie Boccio
Once "someone" returns my monitor cables, I'll be able to set-up FFSpy on the second monitor and just stare at it all day... - Carlos Granier-Phelps
via twhirl
Spying, Stalking, Trolling! Who is your target and why? - Igor The Troll
Been staring for ten minutes. Mesmerised. And yet, haven't actually seen one item to which I want to click through! - Bob Kingsley
Sure it's noise if you leave it default. Sigh. I got the Google Reader shares going and I've found quite a few interesting stories. And *gasp*, it's not all tech! - Bwana McCall
@Bwana - point taken. But hey - I've only just discovered it and I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes :) will play with it over the weekend. - Bob Kingsley
"socialmedian is all about personalized news - helping people get the news that matters most to them on any number of topics from any number of sources. Our hunch is that people with common topical interests can help each other filter and discover personally relevant news.
If you think about it, for decades news organizations have been filtering the news for their readers/viewers, suggesting what they should pay attention to on any given day.
Our site basically asks (and is attempting to answer) a big question: What if, instead of just the media companies filtering the news, we could collectively filter the news for each other down to the specific topic level, for an infinite number of topics? Imagine, for instance, if you could know on any given day what articles just your most trusted friends or colleagues are finding important. Or, if you were able to know what every person who has your job title is finding interesting. Or, if you could know what thousands of people from all around the world are f" - Jay Deragon
via Bookmarklet
First impression, from the alpha stage...not new, and a lot like news spam. Second impression, form today's release - could be decent but I need to let it run for a day or 2. Still not convinced it is more valuable that my Google Reader account or FF. - David
I like the ease and speed of clipping news stories, that's for sure, and I'm already growing a following, which I like. - Tamar Weinberg
I don't know what it is, but for some reason socialmedian seems rather fiddly. Perhaps it's the sheer number of options and ways to vote. I'm still using it though - for me it's a lot faster than the similar Twine which is a bonus. And like Tamar, I've already got a following, albeit small. Sadly the auto-share with Networks feature hasn't yet worked for me. :( - David Young
I like the concept, but think I prefer FriendFeed for as a source of links. An intelligent hide option to easily get rid of unwanted stories (and lower the priority of similar stories) would be good - a lot of noise there. - David Sim
Delicious 2.0 is finally here! First socialmedian’s open beta, now this… Too many social bookmarking sites to try in one day! - David Young
via Bookmarklet
As Dennis has posted before, the need for proper cost and return analysis of projects is more important than ever. - David Sim
Great article, and so true. So many here (early adopters) are so bullish on these technologies (myself included) and yet few have proven ROI to point to, or anything more than "gut feelings" they will be pervasive.... - Alan Edgett
THIS post is EXACTLY why I love social media so much.
An idea begins and then others, each with their own experience and expertise begin molding, adding and strengthening. - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
via Mento
If you send the same message starting with @TwitterUser to more than one user Twitter will Ban you! Time to move to identi.ca How many of you have identi.ca account? - Igor The Troll
what the heck? So how are you supposed to thank more than one person using a single tweet? - Glenn Batuyong
I think there's more going on here than that specific process resulting in spamming, Igor. I'd say you're probably flagged. - Greg Lexiphanic
Oh really? I guess that means Twitter is no longer allowing retweets to a particular follower. Funny, I haven't read anything about that on Twitter's blog. You sure they don't mean sending the same message individually to more than one follower using the @ sign can be considered spam? - Sharon Bray-McPherson
I did this a couple of days ago - haven't been banned yet! As Greg says, there's more going on. I'll move to identi.ca if / when my network moves there. However, I'd expect them to have to take anti-spam measures too if they became popular. - David Sim
Where did you find this out? Have you got a source? Doesn't make sense to me how will this stop spam? - Gez
but sometimes we do want to send the saem message to more than one preson..... voila, then we have the twitter account banned.. how aweful!! - Moksh Juneja
via twhirl
The only mention I can find on Twitter's blog about spammers is related to the jerks who follow thousands of peeps in the hope that some will follow them back, so they can blast them with links to their site. http://blog.twitter.com/ Quite honestly Igor, your pattern of 'I've been banned for no good reason' rants have become more than a litle annoying. - Sharon Bray-McPherson
"As noted originally, you have more than once used the @ reply functionality to spam the same content to multiple users." I was told this in an email by Jason Goldman Twitter representative. - Igor The Troll
Sharon Bray-McPherson I have not be Banned from Twitter yet! LOL But I know a few people who have! - Igor The Troll
Trying to create a global brand... yet making it an inferior brand in most of the planet. It makes no sense. - David Sim
via fftogo
Witness the Canadian DMCA kerfuffle, and you start to get the idea that the only way these global intellectual property issues are going to go away is if the remainder of the world's governments to adopt U.S. copyright law--which I'd almost swear must have 'Max Korn' scrawled at the bottom--as their own. - Derrick Burns
It seems to me this (frankly laughable) 'regionalization' of digital content is just a convenient way of simultaneously pushing a pro-global-copyright political agenda on the momentum of loyal-but-deprived MTV viewers while simultaneously passing the buck for their own piss-poor marketing and brand control. Boring. Much like MTV. - Derrick Burns
Hmmm... I'd add "filling up site with tons of lurid ads" to that. ;) - Cyndy
Here is a presentation I made few weeks ago about the subject. A lot of peopole thinks that social media is only about marketing, or maybe sales. That's not correct at all. My presentation goes through the processes of a generic value chain showing that every process can be supported or even redesigned with social media. Enjoy it: http://marcello.delbono.eu/200... - Marcello Del Bono
Marcello, I think you hit many important points, but I wonder how much to present in the area of costs of implementing, using, and supporting social media in an organization. I get the impression that that topic tends to be swept under the rug by a lot of people, either because (a) they don't really know what the costs are, or (b) because they don't want to be too up front about what the actual costs will be. I tried to address the issue (http://www.ddmcd.com/fix.html) but it's not discussed openly. - dennis d. mcdonald
Dennis you're right, costs tend to be forgotten sometimes. I think costs can vary tremendously, considering the different objectives and solutions adopted. When you talk about strategic programs costs and benefits should be addressed with serious business cases, evaluating impact not only on financial objectives but also on your value proposition and customers relations, your critical processes, your internal skills, systems, climate and and organization - Marcello Del Bono
Marcello, all of those measures are great for doing a business case -- as a consultant I've done that many times -- but the first step should be understanding the costs, and I am just raising the question of why costs of social media aren't discussed more. - dennis d. mcdonald
Probably because it is difficult to foresee them? Also, once you set them, you are supposed to deal with them. And we all know about projects ending up with final costs more than twice the original estimate? - Marcello Del Bono
costs is a very important issue. costs in terms of money, for sure. but also costs in terms of other factors, mostly named by you marcello. but i also see a very important cost factor which lies in privacy. how much privacy does a company give up using social media? of course, it depends on the extent of using it. but here in germany i guess many companies fear this factor most above all. just think of putting private data on an external kind of intranet like google pages for example. - Lars Wehmeyer
and then i just read this article about a company using facebook as its intranet (http://tinyurl.com/6z2kw4). this is a great post which gives nice insights on the why and how. - Lars Wehmeyer
That's right, privacy is abig concern in Italy too. Expecially clients from conservative sectors like finance for instance, are really afraid, and that fear is really slowing down the adoption of the new social tools. Anyway they are not totally wrong: social media providers are not giving fully satisfactory answers... - Marcello Del Bono
Great debate. Marcello, thanks for sharing for slides. Dennis - you raise an important issue about cost. I'm used to cost justifying implementations and there's not much point in hiding it. On an Intranet it's relatively easy: the cost of the technology is usually explicit and there will be a number of centres of information creation that can be costed. With SM the cost of technology is low. The cost of training is not insignificant. The cost of staff time is very significant but difficult to quantify. - David Sim
... You could say the greater the success of SM within an organisation ,the greater the cost of staff time using and contributing to it. The key metric is return on investment, which is perhaps easier to demonstrate on a case by case basis. If team A shares documents, what is the time saving for team B? If individual A finds individual B to help with a project, what is the cost saving and improved product / customer support? It is complex: we need to co-develop more case studies and return metrics. - David Sim
Yes, David, case studies and return metrics is what I'm also looking for. Any idea on how to get this sorted out in a sensible way? I'm thinking about this for a couple of days now. I guess, I would like to see kind of a presentation (ppt) with rough overviews of the use cases provided (eg company, what, when, how, outcome positive/negative) and a link to the blog entry where details are given. Any other ideas? Why doing that kind of work alone when collaboratively we can get much better results... - Lars Wehmeyer
Lars, if you are going down the route of case studies and return metrics, you don't need to limit yourself to reviewing other examples of social media implementation if you are looking for ways to cost-justify. Firms justifying any software or database implementation project have been doing this for many years. Some are so structured now that software tools are available for automating part of the estimation process, e.g., justifying investment in call center technology with savings in seconds per call. - dennis d. mcdonald
Dennis, good point indeed. This will definitely work in this area of topic as well. But isn't it still hard to pinpoint what the real effects of social media marketing/management are? I mean, what is your answer on: "And what exactly is it now what you can do for us?" Of course, I immediately come up with a lot of answers. But in the end, a potential client always wants to see hard facts and get there ideally pretty soon. - Lars Wehmeyer
I think I'll try to address this in a blog post over the next week - I'm on leave so have some time to think about it! Dennis raises some valid points on his blog. As a general observation, low cost pilots to demonstrate success in an organisation are critical. These pilots must have clear objectives, can be selective, and must have measurable outcomes, agreed with the organisation. Because culture and org structure plays such a big part, case studies can only take us so far. - David Sim
Lars, this is why I suggest looking at software application justification practices in other areas like call centers. If we are talking about facilitating collaboration in a corporate setting, what are we hoping the collaboration will lead to? There is always the idea of more/better/faster. More what? Better how? How much faster? Small pilots may clarify costs and processes but they may not flesh out all benefits. - dennis d. mcdonald
Putting aside the rest of the article, I'd guess the Sprint launch will be later than the T-Mobile launch not because of Google "catering to T-Mobile", but simply because developing for CDMA is notoriously harder than for GSM. Also, had any major platform ever been launched without similar stories? - Didi Chanoch
Is it me or is every single blog turning into Valleywag? - Cyndy
identi.ca is still nothing more than a Twitter clone best I can tell. A step back from FF. Not sure why anyone would want to spend time there when we've got this. - Thomas Hawk
Tease: And even more so in the coming months. Spoke with Evan last night and there are some interesting things on their way. - Austin Hill
I personally think it will be interesting to see what identi.ca does to differetiate itself from twitter - Mike Hamilton
@Thomas - Twitter clone hasn't begun to cover what's possible. I think that's like calling Wordpress a Blogger clone back in 2004. I wish the Twitter guys all the best, but there is a lot of innovation to come in Microblogging, Lifecasting and Activity stream aggregation. Twitter seems to have it's hands full scaling and I'd love to see some innovation on features in the market place. I think identi.ca will be part of that market for innovation. - Austin Hill
Why should identi.ca differentiate itself? It's really about recognizing that federating status updates should become a "taken-for-granted" part of social infrastructure. Next step is Interop with Twitter, not differentiation. - Chris Messina
Austin, but isn't identi.ca a step back from FriendFeed really? Why spend any time there? - Thomas Hawk
I don't want to "like" the post, but I do want to "like" chris messina's comment :) - Karl
I know what it is! David Winer has found out that identi.ca has turned into a wishing well and he's keeping it to himself. I'm going to like this so he remembers who his friends are :-) - Jonas Anderson
"With today's addition to Identica, you can now follow people!" - Bryan Woods
One reason I spend more time on identica and less and less on FF is comments like 'Eh ? It's just a Twitter clone.' - Andy C
evan did say last week that a Twitter-compatible API was on track for this week. Hopefully, that's the news. And it's NOT about a twitter clone; it's about making microblogging an open standard -- like email -- that allows you to use your access method of choice (local client, web, mobile, etc.) Interoperability to microblogging will FREE it! Remember MCImail? cc:mail? Remember Profs? Remember VAX All-in-1-mail? All frontrunners in the email channel. All closed. All dead (or on life support). - Bundini
I am waiting to see who is the first one to fall. After Twitter bought Summerize and their increasing stability I doubt it will be them. Obviously it won't be Friendfeed either. - Parvez Halim
via feedalizr
The TwitterAPI is already available on identi.ca and in the darcs repository. maybe something else? - Markus Heurung
Parvez - increased traffic to admire the new Ajax has brought the fail whale back (again). Got any stock tips you want to share ? - Andy C
Come on Dave - apart from the Twitter compatible API which was already in the public domain, precisely what was the exciting, new development on identi.ca yesterday ? SMS, a desktop client for identi.ca, replies that cite the correct post - what ? - Andy C
@Thomas Hawk - Why do you see FriendFeed as a step forward from Twitter? FriendFeed is something different - you can't really compare the two when you look at the core use case. - sebmos
@Thomas: as someone who never really got into twitter, I thought the same as you. However, after becoming addicted to ff, I began using twitter more as a great way to post messages to my ff (there are just so many ways to get things *in* to twitter). I'm rooting for identi.ca, though, simply because i think it will one day do all that twitter does using an open source system. That, and I have no real follower base on twitter to worry about abandoning anyway. - Trent Olson
I also use Twitter primarily as a way of posting onto FF, with the bonus that my followers on Twitter who haven't moved across the FF (still a majority) get the message two. I'll move to identi.ca if there are people there I want to share ideas with, not because of features... well... unless they're killer! - David Sim
I know exactaly how much. I downloaded the MeeTimer plugin for FF. - Sonciary Honnoll
i moved almost completely off of twitter. i still set off a tweet here and there when the subject is not FF worthy; like "I'm drinking my protein shake by the pool". All in all its alot more interesting on FF. - Carlos Ayala
I tried Twitter and didn't like it. Since starting FF, I hate to admit it, I actually like FF. It is sort of like a group instant messaging utility. - Herschel
Since I used RescueTime for a week, I have reduced all my soc net time down drastically. - Sally Church
I don't waste my time on twitter anymore. I spend all my time on FF; that's where the conversations are. - John Budnik
Well, most of the people I follow on twitter are here, so I turned off device updates on twitter. And as for the rest, twitter has not been sending me IM's for a few weeks now. So outside a short twit now and then, or my script posting what I'm listing... I'm not wasting much time on twitter. - Grant Bierman
None at all. Just FF. Anyone worth talking tech with on the internet is here on FF. We could use a bigger crowd, but for now this is where it's at. - Tad - the Meme Maker
