The Question

It’s not really a bad thing, which Zeldman also stresses. The question is, now that you’ve scattered yourself all over the place, how are you going to put yourself back together?

Not that you need to; I’m sure not everyone would be interested in painstakingly picking up the pieces one by one and gluing them together. That’s why FriendFeed became an instant hit. But if you ask me, using another social network to put them all together does not feel good. Not one bit. I’d consider it another convenient (even organic) way to spread my own content. But that’s it. I still dream of the day I manage to tastefully put my stuff together in one place. Like these websites:

Jeff Croft and Denna Jones

Truth is, Jeff Croft‘s recent site redesign is more than an exercise in consolidating “stuff”. It also experiments with CSS3 (view it in Safari) and prides itself with fancy Tufte-style bar graphs on the sidebar. Lots of API-wrangling here, from Flickr (with photo-cropping to boot) to Google Maps to Upcoming to Authentic Jobs.

Denna Jones’s website behaves like a portfolio up front, but as Jon Tan relates, practically everything on the site is extracted from elsewhere. The header is made up of the basic blurb placed on top of a photo from Denna’s Flickr account. This gives a dynamic, interactive, and personal feel all at the same time.

Coming Together

Although an out of the box solution like FriendFeed seems like a godsend, those who care about a great user experience will find a better way to present content from several external sources. Will doing so become an easier task? Let’s hope so, at least by some degree.

Pull the brakes?

We’ve seen people dumping Facebook and still not getting the Twitter mania, but here’s something pretty recent: the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is making the meme rounds for those who suffer from social networking overexposure.

Most of the time we just hop on the bandwagon, publish the smallest details of our lives with abandon, and regret our actions only when it’s too late. Sites like My Parents Joined Facebook and Lamebook capitalize on those slip-ups, and we’ve all heard stories of people getting fired for something they posted online. A clean break from it all could be the answer. Or an exaggeration.

Interestingly though, Facebook has blocked the Suicide Machine. Thanks for playing!

Shift into high gear?

Tina Roth Eisenberg a.k.a. Swiss Miss tweeted that her unborn son already has a “gmail account, 3 domain names and a twitter account”. Pretty sweet, I’d say.

Again, this isn’t really a new phenomenon, but not many people are looking that far ahead. After all, who knows what the Web will be like in five to ten years. If domain names will still be the way to access websites.

Or maintain cruising speed?

Most of us probably lie in the middle and won’t think to axe their accounts or be so protective of their online identities as though they were real estate. Even if your new year’s resolution for social networking isn’t anything drastic, it’s still important to stay on top of your privacy concerns and online persona. Have you tweaked Facebook’s Privacy Settings yet? How about all the authorized third-party apps that have access to your Twitter account? Do you Google yourself every once in a while to see how other people find and paint a picture of you?

Bonus: try integrating a workout into those beloved websites. Now there’s a productive idea.

I was one of those who, although somewhat intrigued by the new format, did not want to change because I already liked the way my profile looked. A few weeks later, well, what do you know? I was informed that the new design was being rolled out to me whether I liked it or not. A few friends who had skipped Facebook for a couple of days were a bit disoriented after having discovered the complete overhaul in the look of their profiles.

I didn’t really whine much because Facebook is, after all, a free service, and I never really trust freebies. To restate a friend’s wry comment, it’s “just like love, free but under certain conditions.” Nevertheless, it made me a bit cranky, because hey, I like my status updates right up there. I clear that space when I’ve got nothing to say, but when I do put something up, it’s because that’s what I want my friends to read, not those wall posts and links other people have added in my absence (no, I am not on FB 24 hours a day) that would otherwise push my status update down my wall.

Anyway, in the interest of understanding why Facebook has, once again, shaken us out of our comfort zones, let’s take a look at what has been changed and more importantly, why. A note released by one of Facebook’s employees attempts to explain these.

The new profile features:

• A quick summary of who you are (like where you live, work and grew up), right at the top of your profile
• A row of recently tagged photos so friends can see what you’ve been up to lately
• Room to highlight meaningful friendships (like teammates, co-workers or roommates)
• More of your favorite activities and interests
• The ability to tag your friends in important life experiences

I have to admit, the row of photos at the upper portion of the wall did appear somewhat stylish to me, UNTIL I realized that these were tagged photos and NOT profile pictures. Instead of snapshots of me with my friends, I could see photos of birthday calendars, items being sold online, and other inane things that I’ve been tagged in but really don’t want on my wall. There’s an option to remove pictures from the lineup, but really, do you want to spend your time clicking away, removing all of the tagged photos you don’t like?

Boxes for applications have also been done away with. Now I can’t really say I was crazy about those. In my opinion, they made pages look a tad cluttered. I do wish we still had more control over the “About Me” field. Reading about where a friend works just doesn’t interest me as much as seeing more personality on people’s pages. If I had wanted to know about employment specifics, I would have clicked on the tab for that sort of information, anyway.

In any case, the new profile design is here and it’s here to stay. Facebook hasn’t shown signs of succumbing to public clamor, so it’s either we live with it or bail out. Personally, I’m keeping my account because the new design isn’t going to kill me and Facebook is still the easiest way for me to stay in touch with my networks. Still, I’m not sure about the new look. It doesn’t seem to accomplish all that much for me, which makes me think that the new look isn’t providing the kind of function preferred by many (if not most) users.

Amidst all of the annoyed/irritated/violent status updates and comments complaining about Facebook’s new profile design, let’s try to be level-headed here. What do you think about the new look after having had a few days or weeks to get used to it? Is the purpose for the change clear, and is Facebook successful in tying up their supposed objectives with the preferences of the public?

Photos via facebook.com

Recently, however, founder Mark Zuckerberg gleefully announced a host of new features that they are rolling out – features that are supposed to ensure the privacy of Facebook users. One would think that this just might put an end to all the concerns – NOT.

Even more recently, news about several popular Facebook applications giving away private information to advertisers. Zynga, the group behind the ubiquitous FarmVille and Mafia Wars, and LOLapps are among the platform developers that have been earmarked for the privacy breach. The official statement is that the leaking of private information was due to “technical details,” and that everything was accidental. Did we really expect them to say otherwise?

To give credit to Facebook, they admitted the breach, and say that they are taking steps to address similar issues coming up. Then again, isn’t this what press releases are for? Are the guys at Facebook really taking serious steps to solve security issues? Will the new features actually make access more secure for the average user?

Here are some of the new features that are supposed to make this so:

• Ability to remotely log out of Facebook: “Under the Account Security section of your Account Settings page you’ll see all of your active sessions, along with information about each session. In the unlikely event that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can also shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer.”
• Temporary passwords: These are to be used when accessing Facebook in unsecure locations. “Simply text “otp” to 32665 on your mobile phone (U.S. only), and you’ll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you’ll need a mobile phone number in your account.”

Check out Jake Brill’s blog post for more details.

As for the effectiveness of these features, we will just have to see in the coming weeks and months. Personally, I haven’t had the chance to use them!

Photo via pcworld.com.ph

I don’t think that Simler will be a Facebook or Twitter killer, but there are several features that interest me enough to not stop thinking about it. (That’s gotta be a good sign right? Knowing how that went for Twitter?)

• Instead of reading and discussing topics with your friends because they are your friends, Simler lets you find the topics (tags) that interest you, so you can consume and create content under them. You could say it’s a reformatted message board or chatroom, so is it really a new thing?
• The tagging concept keeps me on the fence as well. I like the idea of trying to define yourself with these keywords, but the novelty wears off when you realize it’s not much different from the way we list interests in virtual profiles and slambooks. And what does it mean when I add the IE6 tag to my profile? It definitely does not mean I like using it! What about the “Awkward Silence” tag? Eventually it will become a race to see who comes up with the wittiest name.
• I’m not sure it will actually scale. Will there be a way to organize the tags a user collects as time passes? Surely some people’s egos will find anything less than a thousand tags to be insufficient to describe their interesting selves. Then again, the Twitter era answer to that is: when there’s an API, there’s a way.

Simler poses interesting questions regarding how we pursue our interests on the Web. Do you join groups because your friends are in it? the cool kids are in it? or because you’re interested in the discussions? Are you tired of the insipid updates filling up their live streams? Should you take a more active role in choosing the content you see? Is the level of control for doing so enough?

Why? Because it’s spammy crap, that’s why.

First there’s these Facebook Apps. Some are actually quite good and add something, like a charity drive in October for breast cancer, and boxes for displaying your Flickr photos. These are good things, they add to the experience.

Being bitten by a poorly drawn werewolf doesn’t.

Not the tenth Fun Wall invitation, or Top Friends yada-yada either.

I realize that you can use a service like Facebook for several reasons, one being to just kill time. Personally, I don’t think it’s interesting enough for that, I’d rather just play a Tetris clone online or something, or IM a bit, browse around Pownce, or whatever. The web is huge, and while Facebook might be an easy enough way to throw away your day, I’d say it’s only an option because of you being lazy not finding anything better.

Still, whatever floats your boat I guess.

Me, I’m done with it. I’ll keep it around for people wanting to message me, but that’s about it.

2008 is a Facebook free year for me.

Sounds great, huh?

Actually, Flock is a great browser – read my review over at Devlounge, and do check it out for yourself as well.

My question, however, is if this is the future? Online applications being branded into browsers, the next logical step now that each and every social network’s got an API to connect to. And if that actually is the next step, how will this change how we browse the web?

What do you think? Is Flock 1.0 a pointer of thing to come?

The Web 2.0 love-in is already fizzling out. I’m not alone in thinking that we need a new term for what’s happening around us. Om Malik proposes that we just start calling what’s going on “innovation” again, while Steve Rubel coughs up the “Cut and Paste Web“. Very punk rock Steve, but I prefer to think of what’s going on as the pornographization of information design. *Insert your lewd buzzword here*

Military R&D pushes forward the boundaries of domestic technology. What starts off as the latest way to annihilate existence on a massive scale steadily mellows in old age into Stuff To Sell The Plebs. And what military R&D does for domestic appliances, porn does for the web. Long before we had user-generated content, there were readers’ wives. The Long Tail hardly came as a surprise to the purveyors of ultra-niche web smut, who had been nicely profiting from the divide-and-conquer rule long before Chris Anderson turned up on the scene. And Chris Pirillo’s 24-hour bedroom Ustream is little more than a noxious geekette blip in the world of camgirl telesex.

Porn knows how to survive, and evolve. As the Web 2.0 party starts to flag and falter, pornography offers four key lessons in how to weather the storm. They are an emphasis on:

1. Presence
2. Personalization
3. Paucity
4. and Promiscuity

Presence

Static content is screwed, and the content that will kick through to the next wave has presence built in. Pornographers know this and have long been using the web to offer premium content that titillates and entertains. The freebies are an incentive, but for presence you have to pay, register as a community member, or otherwise pass into the inner sanctum. The throwaway content is designed to be just interesting enough to lure you into engagement, into action. And presence is the lure.

So now, after a significant lag, we have live streaming video broadcasting for the masses, and in place of cybersex booths, the teenage bedrooms of Stickam users, hat-mounted camera of Justin.TV, and one-to-one call-in action of ubergeek Chris Pirillo.

But presence goes much further, and is only going to evolve from here as a crucial part of web media. Tumblr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Facebook status-updates are only the tip of the iceberg of the presence economy. Dynamic engagement at every turn is becoming a crucial component of effective information design. Ignore it and be ignored.

Personalization

Girls and guys are waiting to meet you in your area, and porn knows exactly where that is. It even knows which type you’d like to meet, because you’ve already given some helpful hints about your thoughts on the matter through your clickstream. But personalization of web content is quickly moving beyond ISP-tracking and ultra-niche-targeted content.

The semantic web, bastard child of spyware, is slowly coming into being through – among others – microformats, folksonomy, and the evolving APML standard. With Firefox 3.0 set to bring microformats into the limelight, if you haven’t started using them in your content already, now would be a good time to start. The semantic web will be an increasingly niche-focused web, as rich as the gamut of human perversion.

Paucity

Still reading? You are in the minority.

Keeping information as brief as it can be, and preferably just a bit shorter than that is the order of the day. As with porn, you need to focus on delivering bite-sized, perfectly timed chunks of gratification, while still leaving them wanting for more. Overkill isn’t going to win you any friends – that’s why MySpace and Plaxo in their uniquely horrific ways are never going to be Facebook. And why the most popular blog content at this point in time is made up of snappy content-lite, information-rich top-lists.

Piling on surplus features, ostentatious visual flourishes or superfluous information is like making someone sit through the pre-coital storyline of the worst type of porn. Twitter has more users than Pownce for this very reason – it does one thing, well. No plumber, no photocopier that needs mending. Straight down to business.

Promiscuity

The widgetization of the web isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Closed content, content that refuses to be shared, is not going to be seen. By anyone. Like a porn star that won’t put out, taking a walled garden approach to information design is a sure-fire way to put a swift end to your career or business.

Informational promiscuity is thriving in the world of the widget, the Creative Commons license, p2p file-sharing and the host of other technologies that enable the easy copying and sharing of your information. YouTube videos, Netvibes start-up pages, desktop widgets and mashup-ready APIs are fast becoming mainstream. Focusing on portability and working with the promiscuous nature of bits and bytes are going to be even more important information design traits in the next couple of years – as the web moves out of your browser, and makes a lunge for your desktop.

Naked Information

Pornography is laser-targeted by niche, succinct, mono-functional, dedicated to broadcasting presence and very open to the concept of ready sharing. The standout services and content in the web industry today bear an uncanny resemblance, and it seems likely that the next breed in the strain will succeed by being even more so.

Michael Pick doesn’t sleep. When he isn’t forging tremulous connections between web++ and porn, he blogs, makes videos for the web and sometimes gets paid to tell people how to do the same. His far from erotic blog can be found at http//www.Michael-Pick.com.

You acknowledge and agree that any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, feedback or other information about the Site or the Service (”Submissions”), provided by you to Company are non-confidential and shall become the sole property of Company.

As if this scare (and especially the noise in the feed reader) wasn’t enough yet, Plaxo is set to launch another social media platform life stream aggregator for members tomorrow.
An early version of the not working new Pulse platform was rolled out on Friday and gave every early bird a taste of how frustrating a non working platform is. All in all, the minimal, already visible features (import your flickr and blog feeds) show no reason for anyone to sign up to Plaxo.

Nice would it have been if the early email address book service had given us a phletora of new features, but (non-working) feed imports are too little to launch as a social network. Especially since a service like MyBlogLog offers much more profile options and actually  generates generates (minimal) traffic for bloggers.
Plaxo? Who cares?

No one.

I just imported 300+ email addresses to Plaxo, majorly bloggers, and less than 30% are present at the service. Unless something changes, and the Plaxo team reveals real and exciting features… the hype (what hype?) around Plaxo will never see the daylight.

Plaxo is an all time loser online. No matter what they try, the team doesn’t have the innovation spirit to set a new mark online. I’ld gladly stand corrected, but I don’t hold my breath.

Uglification

The introduction of F8 (Facebook applications platform) was the big breakthrough for non-students and myspace freaks to join FB. The huge plethora of useless time wasters such as Super Poke, FoodFight, Happy Hour and many more applications, turned FB within weeks from a much hyped platform in to the next MySpace. A MySpace with white background and thousands of multi-colored bitmaps on most profiles. Exactly what Joe and Jane love.

Fatigue

Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time. After having poked all your friends hundreds of times, there only are two options. Whether you have become the typical FB drone or you realize that what you are doing makes no sense at all.
Third possibility is that you have already been fired from your job because of all the working time you spent at FB.

Marketing

The implementation of sponsored platforms, multinational corporations using FB for marketing is nothing new. Many brands use Myspace or even LiveVideo.com for their marketing campaigns already. Facebook is nothing more than a new platform to those conglomerates.
For FB this opens the doors to the world wide internet user, the internet user who loves brands, labels and celebrities, but dislikes text-only sites. Commercial brainwashing.

Aggressive and Ugly Advertising

If FB/Microsoft manage it to keep the advertising, banner policy as is, the platform won’t suffer too much. The banners shown on FB are of acceptable visual quality. But who guarantees that application builders won’t soon build in fastmedia/clickmedia smiley and casino banners? Even application developers need to make money sooner or later.

Mix those four elements up and you have exactly what a websites needs to become really popular: a butt ugly looking flashing and blinking banner farm. Is it a surprise that 4 out of the 6 most popular websites according to Alexa are just as ugly time wasters: Yahoo, MSN, YouTube and Myspace (#1, #2,#4 and #6 accordig to Alexa.com).

The geeks and A-Listers, who prefer slick looking sites, will leave Facebook for exactly the same reason as they left Myspace for Facebook. Is the myspacecification of FB what Virb needs to finally go viral?