I’ve written before about how SocialTech’s main purpose is to present each of us as an API, and I want to expand on that a bit more here.

First of all we need to talk about the concept of presenting a person. You are your thoughts, your ideas, your preferences, your sense of humor, etc. These things are finite, tangible, and can be captured. When you interact with someone, all the things that you are affect that person. Your frequency interacts with theirs to stimulate both parties. It’s the intersection of interests, likes, dislikes, etc. that creates the unique composite frequency that makes up a friendship.

The point of SocialTech is to broadcast oneself (as defined by these preferences and nuances) as a stimulus frequency so that it’s available to more than just the person in front of you. It’s the transmission of the same force you exude during a personal, face-to-face interaction–but publishable. All the things that make a person unique are simply being isolated, magnified, and made available to the world. It’s the broadcasting of YOU as a frequency.

::

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how others leverage the tools available.

[ Steve Rubel's Lifestream Workflow | steverubel.com ]

We shouldn’t be comparing Twitter to Friendfeed; they’re not the same. Doing so is like comparing a tomato to a lasagna. This doesn’t work because a tomato is an ingredient of lasagna, not a competing dish.

Friendfeed is a hub. It’s network-agnostic. It says, “use whatever you want–track them here”. Twitter is a religion with something to lose. It says, “use Twitter, it’s the best”.

I like the Friendfeed story better; it’s less fleeting. The inputs will come and go, but the hubs can flex with that change. And yes, I know that some hubs serve as inputs, and some inputs can be hub-like. But fundamentally it all comes down to the identity of the company. If you are a Mormon church you might play nice with others in public, but ultimately you’re selling only one thing.

Friendfeed isn’t selling Friendfeed so much–at least not directly; instead they’re selling a superior interface to all of its inputs. The distinction matters. It’s easy to understand this when put in this way, but it’s also easy to forget.

Pick your inputs, pick your hub, and know the difference between them. ::

A while back I wrote a short post on why people should be using FriendFeed. Well, here’s a better one.

[ Why You Should Use FriendFeed | inquisitr.com ]

Read that, and hopefully between it and the one I wrote you’ll start to see the reason it’s the way to go.

FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing.

Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your picassa/flikr photos, or your Amazon wishlists would have to add those things separately.

FriendFeed solves this problem by consolidating updates into a single interface, and providing syndication feeds (RSS/Atom) as well. So what you do, as a user, is get a FriendFeed account and add then add the services that you use, i.e. your blog, your Twitter account, your Google Shared items, your Picassa account, etc.

Once you’ve added your accounts, you can continue using those disparate services like usual, but when update one of those services, FriendFeed will update as well. So, as an example, I have the following services in FriendFeed now:

• My Blog
• Twitter
• Google Shared Items (shared links)
• Google Picasa (photos)
• My Amazon Wish List

So all someone has to do to keep up with me is subscribe to my FriendFeed feed, not to all those different services. Not only that, but it also has a full vote-up and comment system where people can give input on the content you publish.

It’s an extremely powerful platform, and if you’re into Twitter and other “connectivity applications” like it, I strongly suggest looking into FriendFeed.

Links

[ FriendFeed ]

This is the type of thing I’ve been looking for for a long time now, and the iPhone is the platform that will bring it to us first.

So picture this: you’re walking around on in NYC’s SOHO district and are able to see the chatter for everyone within a certain radius.

For anyone interested, Mars Volta just showed up unannounced to play a set at my favorite bar.

And of course you just click on where they are to get directions. This is the kind of app that defines the new Internet. It’s a promise that people have been talking about for like a decade, but it’s just now becoming possible. I can’t wait.:

Twitter is one of the most interesting web services to come out in recent memory. Many are aware of it but most don’t use it. The reason is usually one of these two:

1. Not knowing what it is.
2. Thinking it’d be a constant annoyance.

What It Is

Twitter is basically a text message broadcast service. When doing something interesting (interesting is key, as we’ll see later) we are often compelled to send one or more of our friends a text message. With Twitter you send that same text message to a single place and have everyone who’s following you on Twitter receive it at the same time.

That’s how it works, but it’s not the important part.

The important thing to realize about Twitter is that it gives us the ability to reconnect with the lives of loved ones that are outside our geographic area. It’s so easy to let people slip from your mind — people who’d be part of your daily life if they lived closer. Nothing is more sad than realizing that you haven’t communicated with a friend or relative that was once so close to you in months.

Avoiding the Annoyance

Another problem with Twitter for many is the fact that each tweet represents an interrupt. If you subscribe to any of the Tim Ferriss or David Allan systems for time management, you’re likely to be adverse to the idea of having people constantly blasting you with text messages. Fair enough.

The trick is to come to an agreement with those you subscribe to. It all comes down to managing the quality and frequency of what gets Tweeted. If people use it too infrequent you don’t feel entwined with your them, and if they abuse it it’ll become a nuisance.

Try and communicate that tweets should be interesting to others (it’s been called micro-blogging). Posting things like, “Going to the bathroom again.”, or “Heading home from work.” is likely to make people stop following your account — or even unsubscribe from Twitter altogether.

Summary

So that’s the balance we’re looking for — get the benefit of re-connecting with friends while simultaneously avoiding the annoyance of too many interrupts. If we keep this in mind it’s possible to get quite a bit out of Twitter. Give it a second look.:

Like others, I think Facebook is cool but is waiting to be obsoleted. I’m waiting for Google’s offering, which should be out in November.

They tend to be more open with their stuff…because they can, and because their entire suite of products benefits from each individual product’s ability to interoperate. What does Facebook benefit from being able to export your data out of the application? Right.

Google wins here hands-down. Making all your own information available isn’t just something they happen to do; it’s part of their mission statement. Google’s just making people look silly at this point.:

You can barely go a day on Digg or Reddit without hearing the cry of poor and declining content quality. It usually comes in the form of, “This place used to not suck so much” or, “Is it just me or is the content here getting worse and worse every day?”. Perhaps it is, but I have a crazy idea:

Stop complaining and submit your own content. Write something. Create something. Comment on something. Tell us what you think. Contribute.

And don’t worry about the stigma of submitting your own content; the whole concept is crap. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit. It limits what we see to two groups:

1. Money-seeking spam leeches
2. An extremely small minority who can see through the stupidity of the self-submission stigma.

The first group isn’t going anywhere, so the only long-term solution is to increase the ranks of the second one.

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people, and academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress. And it’s the only way to keep the quality of a site at a consistently high level.

If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the solution. That means two things:

1. Appreciating quality writing even when it’s submitted by the author
2. Creating and submitting our own material without fear

I’ve moved to Google Bookmarks. It lacks some features — most notably the social element and the ability to share all feeds over RSS — but I’m sure Google will eventually catch up and then surpass Yahoo! in those respects.

So I can still search all my bookmarks (I imported them from Del.icio.us) using the Firefox URL field, but now my queries are instantaneous.

What bookmark solution are you guys using?

• Alternative News
• Politics
• Technology
• Science
• Religion/Philosophy/Atheism
• Humor
• Prose
• Miscellaneous

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[ Link: Rate My Network Diagram ]

[ Link: whos.amung.us ]

Well, KuiperCliff just hit me, so now I am going to spread the joy.

1. Dangerous Intersection
2. Steven Harms
3. Zhasper.com
4. Adam Rawlings
5. Jeff Milner

A number of plugins can be installed in your blogging software to enable this functionality, but what happens if you want to use these little jems on your own static content? I wondered the same thing and made my own.

Here’s the code (click the image):

[html]     [/html]

Ultimately, the goal is to minimize the time it takes someone to get up to speed on the most original/interesting content within a given area of focus, be it technology, politics, or whatever. When done correctly, the concept is quite beautiful.

Spamming vs. Contributing

The system breaks down horribly, however, when these communities fail to understand the difference between submitting original content and blogspamming. Many are confused about what blogspamming actually is: it’s not posting a link to something on your own blog or website (if it’s decent and original, that’s called “contributing”). Blogspamming is actually very specific (I had the Digg staff spell it out for me) — here are the requirements:

1. Find interesting content somewhere on the Internet
2. Post that content on your own website
3. Post the link to your website rather than the original source

This is blogspamming, and it’s every bit as evil as people make it out to be. But it should not be confused with people posting their own original content. That practice, i.e. sharing ideas, is what makes the Internet so wonderful.

The Idea Bazaar

When it comes to sharing ideas, the Internet should be viewed much like a traditional, open marketplace — where people bring the artwork, pottery, clothing, woodwork, etc. for public review. It’s like open-mic night in front of billions of people.

Hello, everyone. Here’s a short story I just finished. I hope you like it…

This is what the Internet is about, and I think Digg, Reddit, and their successors should be more open to this philosophy. We shouldn’t penalize people for offering their own original content to the world just because they submitted it themselves. It’s far more genuine to do that, after all, than to artificially manufacture a third-party submission (which so many people do).

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people. Academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is an absolute must in any system that values intellectual progress.

Communities that rely on a constant flow of quality content need to adopt a mantra of judging offerings based on only two things: originality and merit. Any would-be resource that fails to grasp this concept (or later forgets it) is doing its users a disservice by discouraging would-be contributors from participating.:

We pushed through the awkwardness (which wasn’t helped by our being dressed in business attire) and were able to mingle pretty easily. I got to speak with one guy who was something of a regular/leader on a range of topics, most noteworthy of which was a brief discussion of assassins-mace weapons.

The main conversation I had was with a very cool guy who does graphic design and has a background in programming. We discussed all kinds of stuff, including how we both hated those who write HTML but don’t take the time to learn how to do so correctly.

Meetings end in the final group going downtown for dinner, which we did. There it was a bit more difficult to blend in because the group was just a bunch of friends. It was pretty clear to me that they were going to raz us when we left because of how we dressed, but I think they might have a few good things to say as well.

Overall it was a really good experience. I intend to go back for the December meeting.