By the way the banner in the background is the now famous (in some circles ) ‘Bill of rights‘ for users of a ‘Social’ Web. I grabbed some information of the OpenSocialWeb.org which is basically the group pushing this idea. Below is an excerpt for the curious..
We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
Ownership of their own personal information, including:
their own profile data
the list of people they are connected to
the activity stream of content they create;
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Date Published: August 2nd, 2008 / Comments / by Roger Kondrat
Why Sarah(inTampa) was talking about Posty a micro-blogging client and how it has many new features that were highly requested I would like to bring your attention back to the drawing board or foundation if you will.
What are Posty and Twhirl? They are tools and what do to tools do? They helped us hunt once and that made life easier, then fridges came along and they made sure we only had to hunt in patches, then came microwaves making life easier further by allowing us to cook our food in a few short minutes.
TOOLS ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE LIFE EASIER!
Twhirl and Posty don’t make my life easier and this crazed early adopter push to ‘integrate’ more and more services I don’t care about and actually don’t offer much value is starting to wear on me.
What I need so for Twhirl to stop ‘integrating’ services that are not a priority such as Seesmic (sorry Loic) and make my life easier. Can Twhirl publish to identica? Yes, but so what? So can Ping.fm and they probably have an API that Twhirl could have piggy-backed off and saved their Dev energy for more important things like threading and conversation integration.
Guys let me just throw the baby out with the bath-water and tell you I hate using your tools AND I use them because they are the only game in town. I need to not because I actually like having 3 windows open and endless streams of data, but because no one has thought to take it to the next level and no I don’t want TweetDeck either.
What I want is a service that threads all these conversations (not content my FF friends) together in one stream so that I can have one interface and have a cross-platform chat with contacts in FF, Identica, and Twitter and possibly with a Jabber client too. Then in the near future I want something including cross-platform VOIP.
This is the value proposition for me. This would make MY LIFE easier. When I choose to interact I with my communities I am constantly jumping from Twitter, Disqus, Identica and FF. It is enough to drive one mad and although I have chosen to be a blogger so I can’t complain about the lifestyle I can tell you that you are not living up to my expectations - NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Loic and the Posty guys, make us a tool that will make life easier because right now I have windows open that I can pretty much have open in my browser with only a few features that actually make life easier e.g. link shortening and search.
I need more! And I don’t believe I am alone. Comment your thoughs my friends, speak your thoughts and tell me if I am wrong or if you agree I would like to know.
PS. And make it mobile too. Don’t forget the mobile, because I hate my computer too!
Date Published: August 1st, 2008 / Comments / by Roger Kondrat
Jeremiah recently held a competition asking everyone one question
I’ll be giving it away to who bests answers the following question: “24 months from now, where will Twitter be? What will Twitter look like, how will we use it differently than today?”
Apparently there was several entrants to the event and 8 finalists when Andrew Finkle surged past everyone with this theory for Twitter in 2 years and I must say its a good one. Identica are you taking notes?
Twitter will look more like an operating system in 2 years. The Majority of its users will not even have to go to twitter.com to use the service. Twitter will instead be the platform whereby others embed twitter functionality directly into their own applications. As a result, Twitter will be different things, to different people.
For some, the twitter OS will allow them to join a social network on the fly. This might be based on the location of a tweet, the content of the tweet, the profile of the tweeter. Some Tweeters will not even be human, they will be anyone or anyTHING.
A Tweet will be whatever one wants it to be (not constrained by 140 characters of text)..A Tweet might be multimedia, voice, video, etc.
The truest value of Twitter will be how it allows one to broadcast whatever (voice, video, data), to whoever (followers, family, friends, readers (a better RSS), however (via browser, sms, email, etc) Twitter will be one of the most valuable net properties (along with Firefox)…why? Because they are OPEN. They ARE the ecosystem.
What my question is to all of you is what do you think of Andrews winning answer? Would you agree, disagree or is he way off swimming in shallow water?
The chat was initiated by John as he wanted to 1-1 feedback on their product. Below is a summary of our chat in interview form.
1. Does Slinkset offer anyway to embed code to drive people to my main site/homepage?
John: Widgets are now available. Simply scroll the bottom of your page and click the “Widget” link, or you can go to http://news.techwinter.com/widgets. Anyone can embed these widgets including your readers.
2. A plugin or badge that allows people to auto-submit my site and theirs to our News Engine? This would be very helpful to our readers.
John: These auto-submit badges are on our to-do list
3. On the invite box I have no easy way to invite new users. I know adding those fancy scrape systems for Gmail, Yahoo, et al are more challenging than just a CSV import but even a basic CSV import would be nice to have?
John: Yes, we’ll have to put something in place for this eventually.
4. Can comments be made more prominent? Also it would help if those who submitted to the News Engine were told of any comments made to their submission.
John: Users are able to subscribe to the comments feed, but yes having this automatically into the slinkset site is a good idea.
5. Integration with FF would be really nice as I get tonnes of traffic from FF now and I think a great many social bloggers do too.
John: What do you think would be the most useful way for us to integrate here? Auto-post to FF?
TechWinter: An Auto-post feature could be really useful. Regarding FF I would say look at how Twitter is integrated rather than Disqus as their implementation is rather unpopular with fixes on the way.
6. Can we expect a bookmarklet that includes summaries rather than just the article title and link? Mixx does this and Digg does not.
John: Agreed, in future plans.
7. Can I include Adsense Ads as I didn’t see that anywhere yet?
John: The ability to place your own ads is already in place through the use of the HTML sidebar, but the ability to run a full ad campaign has not been vetted out yet.
8. Will we ever be able to include our own GA code for tracking?
John: The HTML sidebar allows for you drop anything you want in there, JS, Adsense, GA code, kitchen sinks. You can check out it out in the admin section Settings->Advanced. GA code fully integrated might be something we add in the future. But we’re more likely to have our own robust stats app, for users to get data more pertinent to their slinkset site.
All in all I learned lots from John about their upcoming feature development and some of their current features that I had overlooked. If you are looking for a tool to drive users to your site by aggregating news, quality links, or topical conversation then this may be a good tool to start with since it took 10 minutes to set up.
Have you tried out our News Engine yet? If not please do give it a go the content turns over regularly and we always adding users.
*You can also find this post published at Posterous. I have decided to give them a try, one of these days I will possibly write a review of the service if it proves interesting. Thanks to Duncan Riley for promoting it enough that I just had to try it.
