Posts tagged “social media”

After 20 years running online communities, I know "inclusive" and "safe" are mutually exclusive at the extremes. Eventually you must choose who to exclude. My advice: define your space clearly, own your choices, let incompatible communities fragment naturally, and don't agonize over free speech obligations.

RSS never solved its business model problem: publishers give away content for free with no compensation. Feedburner failed, AdSense for Feeds failed, and now Google Reader is dead. Tumblr's reblogging model works better for everyone: publishers get viral distribution, readers get a social feed that surfaces the best content naturally.

Twitter's new UI is a mess of small but infuriating design failures: a useless right-column layout, duplicate tweet composition interfaces, broken conversation controls, and a chaotic interactions tab. None alone warrants outrage, but together they prove nobody's minding the store. A billion dollars buys better than this.

Integrating a bad product into a good one doesn't make the bad product good, it just ruins the good one. Microsoft, Yahoo, RealNetworks, and Apple all learned this. If Google bakes Google+ notifications into Chrome instead of fixing the actual product, users will just abandon Chrome.

I hate Instagram because it lets people deliberately destroy their already-limited phone camera photos with fake vintage filters. These are irreplaceable memories. They'll look vintage on their own in five years. Stop wrecking your photos for faux-nostalgia.

I'm leaving Yahoo! to join Snowball Factory as technical lead and employee #1. We're building tools to help content creators use social media more effectively and measure their results. It's several hard problems at once, which is exactly why I'm excited.

Check out my mini-review of Google Buzz on Flickr.

I've revived my old web development blog with a guide to promoting your website without resorting to spam or sleazy tactics. Yes, it says "Social Media Optimization," but I promise it's mostly douchebaggery-free.

Citizen journalists are self-serving? So are professional journalists. This keeps "surprising" old media types, but everything that happens in real life happens online too. The conflict of interest Carr is clutching his pearls about has always existed. His byline gives him away.

I'm a huge Twitter fan, and watching it go mainstream means watching people completely misunderstand it. It's not replacing email, Google, Facebook, or blogs. It's not a competition or a celebrity toy. It's not even about what you're doing. Twitter captures what people are *thinking*, and that's genuinely new.

Google's PageRank dominance is crumbling as conversation shifts from blogs to Twitter, Facebook, and other real-time streams it can't effectively index. Whoever figures out how to measure authority across all these channels, not just the web, will have a shot at unseating Google in search.

The Daily Express ran a shameful hit piece on Dunblane survivors, trawling their Facebook profiles for ordinary teenage behavior to portray them as louts, without speaking to any of them. Lazy, disgraceful journalism that exploits trauma victims twice over. The paper owes them an apology.

My favourite tweets from 2008, collected in a zero-effort year-end post. Heated leather seats, Madonna's lifestyle choices, slow iPhones, pressure-sensitive sellotape and Gloria Gaynor's uncertain survival prospects. These are the tweets that made me laugh out loud this year.

Still here, just exhausted. Follow me on Twitter and the linklog in the meantime.

Twitter's real competition isn't Friendfeed or Pownce. It's nobody, because nobody else does what Twitter actually does: SMS and XMPP. Twitter isn't a web service, it's a global mobile communications platform accessible to literally every person with a phone. That's not a niche. That's everything.

Twitter's value is its SMS interface. Friendfeed and Pownce miss this entirely. Without SMS, they're not real competitors, no matter how many people switch during outages.

Twitter's down, so I'm blogging like it's 2003. Anyway: gym is finally awesome. Pushed past the constant soreness stage into the feel-incredible stage. Wooooo!

I used a handy web service to visualize my Twitter habits: I tweet most on Wednesdays, peak at 9am on my morning commute, and my monthly volume eerily mirrors my quality of life, dropping off when a big deadline crunch hit in July.

Twitter, email, IM: American colleagues, Trinidadian friends in Turkey, my brother in London, a Ukrainian who might be in Paris, British friends at work. All while having lunch in San Francisco. I'm pretty plugged in.

I started a Facebook group dedicated to keeping parents off their kids' social networks. Nobody needs their mum reading their risque status updates or their boss seeing their job complaints. Join up and resolve to never crash your children's social networking party.

Got six Pownce invites to give away. Not sure it beats Twitter without mobile alerts, and I can't figure out how to pronounce it. Get in touch if you want one.

Facebook Mobile means UK pokes literally vibrate in my pocket, which is strange and delightful. Also had a great weekend: sneak preview of Ratatouille, then an 11-mile bike adventure around San Francisco with some WWDC geeks. Next weekend is Pride. Oh dear.

Twitter crossed a threshold for me today, from "website I use" to "service I can't live without." Add me if you want 140-character windows into my daily life. You'll get Twitter eventually. Just like blogging.

Google Music Trends has the same problem as LaunchCast: it's all aggregate stats with nothing personal for the user. Last.fm succeeds because it gives people personalized charts and recommendations. Without a personal hook, why would anyone sign up, other than to give Google more of their data?

Coolness is just the respect of your peers. My peers aren't on MySpace judging my music taste, they're respecting my dancing, my conversation, my domain collection. So forget the hand-wringing: I'm not uncool, I'm unbelievably cool. And so are you.

I have at least one close friend I would never have met without the internet.

I've helped another Trinidadian school friend, Colin, start a blog. Three days in and he's already covering all the bases. Meanwhile, I'm barely blogging myself lately. Still alive, just swamped.

Maybe blogs aren't journalism but a new kind of social performance: "here I am, do you like me?" If so, I'm doing mine wrong.

Joined Friendster and finally discovered MoveFlat.com for London flatshares. Loot has been useless lately because everyone migrated there. Still searching for both a flat and cute single gay men.

Been neglecting this blog while focusing on GayGeeks. Managing multiple blogs is tough!

Celebdaq is a BBC celebrity stock market game where you trade fake money on famous people's fame. It's totally addictive. Start with £10,000, win £100 real money weekly. Play now and buy Beckham.