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Archive for the ‘social networking’ Category

Flock

Thursday, March 6th, 2008
I first tried Flock when it came out in it’s initial beta many many moons ago, but with the recent death of Netscape and some fortunate stumbling I downloaded and gave the 1.1 beta release (now final) a go…
 
Now for those who have never tried Flock as a browser I can best describe it as Firefox inside with a social networking wrapper on the outside. My default layout for Flock (shown below) is to have a left hand ‘People’ frame showing all updates from my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr friends sorted by the most recent updates first and have a media stream of pictures my friends have uploaded to Facebook (although that’s usually hidden to gain browser space).
 
 
 
The one thing which does really annoy me is that some people update their Facebook status using Twitter and obviously this causes duplicates in my people feed (not flocks fault). I can see why they do that, but for me a tweet is different from a status update; it’s just plain lazy and pointless duplication (as Kerry is demonstrating here - sorry Kerry) 

You also have a ‘My World’ page which aggregates all of this as well have any Atom/RSS feeds I have into a single page view.

 
 
 
And if that wasn’t enough you can save your bookmarks to del.icio.us, post directly to Twitter and Facebook and even write a blog posting. All of which I think is pretty damn cool.
 
OK all that’s all great and I do use it as my default browser, but what wrong with this picture …
Personally I think at the moment this is a cool, but ultimately a fringe browser for people who are interested in social networking or earn a living by it; there just aren’t that many people who will find it useful (i.e. most of my friends and family would never need it - yet). Also unless you already have accounts of Facebook, Twitter and Flickr etc.. the appeal is very limited and you can’t easily add more services to the browser as the ones which are there are baked in. 
 
Then again I do have accounts on all those web services and I am interested in social networking, so it might as well be called Milan’s browser. I’m looked forward to future updates. This post was written using Flock

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More on facebook

Saturday, July 28th, 2007

Sorry for *another* facebook blog, but I just went for a drink with a mate of mine who was convienced that nothing will ever replace facebook. I strongly disagreed and tried to explain to him that facebook is a walled garden and it doesn’t federate information etc. etc… but I lacked the ability to clearly expalin why he was wrong.

My view (which he didn’t accept) was that facebook, like myspace, linkedin all the way back to sites like friendsreunited are just a progression on the way to a better sematic web. His reply was that people are just lazy and now they are on facebook they won’t leave as alot of people on facebook aren’t or haven’t been the sort of people who would have tried that before. My argument was that people are fickle and once a small but influencial proportion of the people on facebook move onto the next big thing (whatever that might be) then alot of other people will join them.

I’m not sure who’s right, but he would accept the £20 bet that I offered to prove him wrong :-) Utimately the thing for me that I don’t like about facebook (although I do like alot about it) is that I lose a permanent record of what people have said to me. I have a record of emails going back 10 years (I know this isn’t common and a bit strange), but lately most of my emails have been from facebook rather than the actual communication from people I know. I don’t like this, facebook shouldn’t for me be replacing email … basically the facebook wall is evil. I like seeing friends statuses, but I no longer want to communicate with my friends through it!

What I do like about facebook:

  • A permanent record of friends information
  • RSS feed of my mates statuses
  • Applications like last.fm, twitter, picnik (although not the zombie, vampire crap)
  • Photos & Videos (that can be tagged)
  • Facebook events
  • Networks and groups
  • and finally Birthdays :-)

    • Ultimately this is the beginning of the next stage of social networking and I can’t wait till the next big thing …

    Posted in social networking | 2 Comments »

    I joined Facebook

    Saturday, May 26th, 2007

    In my last post I asked what the point of Facebook was, so I decided to sign up and I found it surprising easy to use. Firstly it can connect to your Hotmail (or other) address books and check to see if any of your mates are already on, which I thought was pretty neat (although I did accidently invite one person that I shouldn’t of!).

    Once you’ve done that I set up a simple profile, I quite like the design they’ve used, much better than some myspace pages i’ve seen as most people create some stunning ugly profiles (i’m never ever going to join myspace).

    The whole thing is a bit like linkedin, bits of google calendar, yahoo groups, twitter (you can add your twitter noise to your profile page) and it has some flickr like aspects as well.

    On the whole I like it, if you’re a social nutter like me then I reckon you might even find it useful, which is strange for the more recent buzz sites that have been popping up lately.

    Posted in friends, social networking, web | No Comments »

    Flock

    Tuesday, November 30th, 1999
    I first tried Flock when it came out in it’s initial beta many many moons ago, but with the recent death of Netscape and some fortunate stumbling I downloaded and gave the 1.1 beta release (now final) a go…
     
    Now for those who have never tried Flock as a browser I can best describe it as Firefox inside with a social networking wrapper on the outside. My default layout for Flock (shown below) is to have a left hand ‘People’ frame showing all updates from my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr friends sorted by the most recent updates first and have a media stream of pictures my friends have uploaded to Facebook (although that’s usually hidden to gain browser space).
     
     
     
    The one thing which does really annoy me is that some people update their Facebook status using Twitter and obviously this causes duplicates in my people feed (not flocks fault). I can see why they do that, but for me a tweet is different from a status update; it’s just plain lazy and pointless duplication (as Kerry is demonstrating here - sorry Kerry)

    You also have a ‘My World’ page which aggregates all of this as well have any Atom/RSS feeds I have into a single page view.
     
     
     
    And if that wasn’t enough you can save your bookmarks to del.icio.us, post directly to Twitter and Facebook and even write a blog posting. All of which I think is pretty damn cool.
     
    OK all that’s all great and I do use it as my default browser, but what wrong with this picture …
    Personally I think at the moment this is a cool, but ultimately a fringe browser for people who are interested in social networking or earn a living by it; there just aren’t that many people who will find it useful (i.e. most of my friends and family would never need it - yet). Also unless you already have accounts of Facebook, Twitter and Flickr etc.. the appeal is very limited and you can’t easily add more services to the browser as the ones which are there are baked in. 
     
    Then again I do have accounts on all those web services and I am interested in social networking, so it might as well be called Milan’s browser. I’m looked forward to future updates. This post was written using Flock

    Tags: , , , , ,

    Posted in social networking | No Comments »