Tag: social networking

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Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books:

Remember how Facebook sneakily changed your default email address to @facebook.com? … Some smartphone users…are reporting that their on-phone address books have been silently updated to make @facebook.com email addresses the default way to send a message to their contacts.Graham Cluley at Sophos

The lesson: Whenever you change something, always consider the impact on things that depend on it.

This reminds me of the ill-fated Network Solutions attempt to replace failed DNS lookups with responses directing web browsers to search pages, not considering that web browsers aren’t the only software that uses DNS, or that some of that software might depend on accurate “this domain does not exist” info.

Originally posted on Google+

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Community participation pyramid: the 90-9-1 Rule (Jakob Nielsen)Sometimes it seems like more people are talking about Google+ than using it, but it really depends on the community you’re looking at. Comics fans? Not well represented. (But they’re even harder to find on Pinterest.) But “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait has a thriving following.

It seems like Speed Force’s Google+ Page is starting to attract a bit more participation, and I think that might be in part due to it passing the 100-follower mark. I vaguely recalled something about a 90-9-1 Rule for community involvement, which turned out to be pretty easy to find once I searched for it.

Basically, the rule states that:

  • 90% of community members are “lurkers” who read or observe, but don’t contribute.
  • 9% contribute occasionally (i.e. comment, “Like,” +1, share)
  • 1% contribute frequently, and account for most contributions

Continue reading →

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Klout’s methodology confuses me. When I first signed on with two profiles — one personal, the other for Speed Force — they classified my personal profile as an “explorer,” and Speed Force as a “specialist.” This makes sense to me. Speed Force also had a higher score for quite a while (it certainly has a bigger audience on any given network).

Sure, there were oddities like their conviction that I was influential about Washington DC rather than DC comics, or Reading Pennsylvania rather than, well, reading, and so on. But at least the overall classifications made sense.

Recently, that’s flipped. My personal profile is scored as having more influence, which I guess makes sense because it’s associated with more social networks (Flickr, Google+, etc.) and I actually do interact more through my personal profiles, especially on FB.

But the weird thing: Now my personal profile is a “specialist,” while Speed Force, which I use exclusively to discuss comics and plug blog posts about comics, is a “socializer.” Huh? Did I post too much about SOPA or something?

Notes: 1. Originally posted on Google+. 2. Klout was a service that tracked your social media influence across multiple networks. You could link Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. to one Klout account and it would try to analyze how you interact with other people on all those networks.

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Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.

  • Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
  • The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
  • YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement)
  • OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

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Between the ticker and the plans to auto-share even more activity on the timeline, I’m beginning to think that Facebook should call itself Firehose instead.

I’m tempted to ask, “Who the hell wants this?” but based on past experience, that usually means I’m just not in the target audience.

TechCrunch | Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again.

(Originally posted on Google+)

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Google has released the first taste of what will become a larger Google+ API for third-party applications built on their social network. So far, all you can do is authenticate, retrieve someone’s public profile, and read their public activities. That doesn’t sound like much, does it?

Well, here are some ideas I came up with over lunch:

  • Add Google+ activity to a lifestream.
  • Allow someone to comment on your blog using their Google+ identity.
  • Create a map of movements of based on public checkins.
  • Analyze posting frequency & times.
  • Analyze most popular posts based on reshares, +1s, replies (basically: add Google+ to Klout [Update: That was fast!])
  • Associate a person with other profiles you might have from other social networks, based on their profile URLs.
  • Build a list of people who work at an organization and speak a particular language.

Of course, it’ll really start taking off when they enable write access and the link-sharing and cross-posting services can get in on the act.

So, how about you? What else do you think can be done with the limited API released today?

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I spotted something interesting while walking to lunch, took a photo with my camera, and then took a photo with my phone so that I could post it to Twitter immediately.

Then I thought: why?

  • Is it breaking news?
  • Is it going to be any less interesting if I wait?
  • Would it add to an in-progress conversation?
  • Really, is there any reason that posting it now would be better than posting it later?

And on the flip side:

  • Does the photo quality matter?
  • Does it need more explanation than I can provide at this time?

I decided that in this case, it was self-explanatory, and neither the timing nor the quality made much difference. But since I had the better photo, I might as well wait until I could upload it. (Sometimes the photo quality really matters, though: my phone’s photos of that rainbow cloud just weren’t worth the effort, so it’s a good thing I rushed back to the office for a better camera.)

There was a time when if I wanted to post a photo online, I had to finish a roll of film, send it to a photo lab, wait for them to develop it, and then scan the print. I really like not being limited by that, whether it’s because I’m posting about a current event like Comic-Con or an election, or just because I think something’s fantastic (or hilarious) and really want to share it.

Sometimes it’s really useful to be able to post photos online instantly. Other times, it’s worth asking: Is now better?

A bit of craziness: I wrote this post in June 2010, about this sign. Then I decided it needed a bit of work before I posted it…and forgot about it. Interestingly enough, the post is still just as valid as it would have been a year ago, and it demonstrates that sometimes, now isn’t better, even if it’s not worse.

Of course, it also demonstrates an advantage of posting immediately. There’s no chance of forgetting about it that way!