Since Google launched Google Buzz, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around their strategy. One of the first public (Buzzes? Buzzez? Buzz’s?) I received was from Jeff Pulver, who posted a rather “wait and see” opinion on Buzz…
“Feeling a little buzz around me. It will be interesting to see how this platform evolves. Seems like another piece in the items which will help define the future of how we communicate using non-telephony platforms.” – Jeff Pulver via Buzz.
This prompted a flurry of other comments, including:
Joel Mark Witt - I’m loving Buzz. It is bringing the conversation to me… in my Gmail inbox … where I live most of the time.
geo GELLER - i am not sure this is not another distraction and too landlocked in email – its not twitter – its your email list which is nice but but but and further more hmmm
I commented on the similarity to FriendFeed and how I felt like my Gmail inbox was starting to become almost as forgotten as MySpace (or Orkut!)
Part of the conversation included a discussion of how people are linked up in Buzz. Google apparently has been autoconnecting Buzz profiles to other Buzz users based on who’s already in your Google Contacts list and this is causing a bit of a stir in the privacy world…
Anyway…I agree with Jeff and certainly think the Buzz has some growing to do. It’s already much more user-friendly and easier to grasp than Google Wave (I wonder how many Waves there are about Buzz?). Picasa provides photo sharing…Google chat is already integrated. And if you integrate Google voice, then you have AudioBoo functionality as well. Connect your Twitter and Facebook feeds, and suddenly Google is your social networking glue. They should’ve called it Gluegle.
Buzz might just be Google’s secret back door into social networking.
Oh, and if you’re trying to figure out how to get started with Google Buzz….go here: http://www.google.com/buzz
There’s an increasing breakdown of the traditional social boundaries between workplace and homelife, and personal and public information.
Let’s say a Facebook user in England sues another user in Australia for defamatory comments posted on the site. Who has jurisdiction over the case, which country’s laws should be applied: England’s, Australia’s or those of the United States, where Facebook is based?
I wrote a post about this a while ago, and it’s been quite popular. Facebook has recently changed things again and everyone’s in a tizzy about it. Here’s some ways to get your Facebook news feed looking like it used to look:
OPTION 1: Increase the number of Friends in your feed
The new default newsfeed on Facebook puts a heavy emphasis on what’s popular. How does Facebook know what’s popular? It counts comments and “likes” and puts those posts at the top of your feed. Additionally, by default, it only puts 25o of your friends in your feed. To change this, follow these steps:
Go to your HOME page. Make sure you are in “View Live Feed” mode.
Scroll all to the bottom of your screen, click “Edit Options.”
You will then see an optionfor “number of friends.” Change the 250 to 5000 for Facebook’s friend limit.
If you have a lot of friends, increasing this number to 5000 will greatly improve your default newsfeed.
OPTION 2: Change your Default Feed to only show friends Status Updates
On the menu at the top left (right under the Facebook logo), click on MORE.
Find STATUS UPDATES and drag it to the top, above NEWS FEED.
After dragging it to the top, click on it. Now your default feed will only show status updates. You can switch to the other modes just by clicking.
Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and Facebook to get their members’ public status updates and messages indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine.
The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize how Bing crawls and indexes “tweets.” Microsoft in turn will apply search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not only be able to see a real-time feed of “tweets” but also rank them by how relevant they are to their query..
Rob Volpe from Howl at the Moon and The Orlando Show joins the Crew again and talks about Lonely Island’s “I’m On A Boat”, Diggz pranks his Facebook Status, and talks about attending the Hitchens/DeSousa religion debate at UCF and much more.
UPDATE: 24 hours later and I’m extremely pleased. They did a great job with this app, and I’ve noticed an uptick in traffic.
I’m always on the lookout for ways to make my life easier. No longer than 5 minutes had past after I posted about MySpace Twitter integration (including a note about how I use the RSS Facebook import feature to import my blog into Facebook Notes), did I see a post from one of my Facebook friends regarding NetworkedBlogs.
The last time I looked at bringing this blog into Facebook was about 6 months ago. I looked at several 3rd party apps, Wordpress plugins, Facebook Connect…but none of them did what I wanted.
So I settled on the RSS import function of Facebook’s Notes application. Which did just fine. It’s a little slow on the import (maybe once an hour at best), and it never brought in any embedded content correctly (so if I ever just posted a video without an accompanying link, the post would just look blank).
Enter NetworkedBlogs. They claim they’ll promote my blog to 400,000 users and solve my Facebook connect problem at the same time. I have installed it and this is the first post I’m trying. Let me know what you think.
The folks at MySpace, always keen to jump at new emerging technologies, have finally opened up their platform to talk to Twitter. Facebook did this about a year ago, about the same time I decided that MySpace was no longer useful.
So about a year ago I changed my status on MySpace to say “Find me on Facebook”. I turned off all email notifications and said goodbye to that platform.
But now they’ve made it simple to link your Tweets to MySpace…perhaps injecting a digital amphetamine into MySpace’s arm. I’ve hooked my Tweets up to WordPress (I use a plugin called Twitter Tools). So, when I publish this message, a notification goes out to Twitter…and, theoretically, it should go to MySpace.
For Facebook, I use the RSS import function and import each blog entry as a Note. I’ve found that linking Facebook status updates to my Tweets is a bit annoying because while my followers on Twitter are not always the same as my Friends on Facebook, enough of them overlap that I think they’d get tired of the redundant updates.
Some choice quotes from the comments to Palin’s Facebook announcement of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death…
“thank you for maintaining my belief in you as a real american, however this country is now much better off, one less socialist, anti freedom senator.”
“Now if we could just talk God into taking Arlin Spector, Harry Reid,and Nancy Pelosi America would be Eutopia!”
“Ted Kennedy dying has made my day….”
“If he makes it into Heaven (& I doubt he will with his stance on abortion) I hope that God makes him babysit all the aborted children for eternity. God have mercy on his soul.”
Someone went to great lengths to target the Internet identity of one man: a 34-year-old blogger and economics professor in the Republic of Georgia named Cyxymu.
Attackers first unleashed a wave of spam email and then a distributed denial of service attack aimed at sending huge amounts of traffic to the professor’s Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, causing many to buckle and some to break under the strain of the traffic.
The motive is still a bit unclear, seemingly something to do with a Georgia / Russia territorial dispute? Anyway, I’ve been on the receiving end of a DDOS once and they’re not very easy to defend against.
Wednesday, February 10
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