Nick Cowie

A funny thing happened on the way to Plurk

Nick — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:39:01 +0000

About six weeks ago, the Twitter failwhale raised it’s ugly head and like many of my twitter friends headed off to look at alternatives, the two new kids on the block that week where Plurk and FriendFeed. Over 50 of my twitter friends joined both Plurk and FriendFeed.

Most of my twitter friends only had a brief encounter with FriendFeed, before heading over to Plurk, where a few have become regular users. From what I can gather most of my twitter friends found it difficult to locate their friends on FriendFeed, this was before Better FriendFeed recommended script appeared and you had to rely on the limited tools available on FriendFeed of importing friends from Twitter with the same username. It was easier to get accquire friends from friends in Plurk than FriendFeed.

Instead I stuck round FriendFeed, made use of the of the recommended friends which was promoting A-list blogger and found some new friends, or rather interesting people who talked about subjects that interested me.

So now I have two distinct social networks, Twitter based around people I know and have met, with a number of friends of friends and few interesting people I have not met. FriendFeed is mainly interesting people I have not met and a few friends from Twiiter who made the jump.

What have I learnt from this experience

If you are creating a social network:

Your best chance of keeping users past the initial exploration phase, you need to make it easy to import your friends from other networks and also make it easy to acquire friends from friends.
If you can not do that, make sure they can find interesting people. Because a few people might stick around and might even bring a few people back

If you are a user investigating a new social network and can not find your usual friends, why not explore and find some interesting people, you might be surprised what the rewards will be.

This blog has been pimped

Nick — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:20:04 +0000

I was hoping for a quiet night watching the Tour De France, checking FriendFeed occasionally. I was surprised to see Duncan Riley posted 70 fresh blogs for your Feed Reader on Inquisitr and in the OPML file is the feed for this blog and the feed for my side project Gov2.info. So I thought I better pull a Louis Gray and write a blog post in 20 minutes thanking Duncan for the plug.

So Duncan thank you for the plug. I did not expect this to happen, when I added my two RSS feeds to Duncan&38217;s FriendFeed post, requesting blog post feeds of his friends and friends of friends. I might be shameless self promoter, but not on this scale.

So if you are reading my blog for the first time, welcome. I will try to post more regularly, though I have made that promise before. At the moment I tend to write about social networks, because that is what I am interested in as well as well as front end web development.

Journalists vs Bloggers

Nick — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:07:29 +0000

The underlying themes of the recent Future of Media and PubCamp seems to be Journalists vs Bloggers, as ilustrated by posts by Stephen, Stilgherrian and others.

Seriously old media types, this story is over 10 years old. New media has been making inroads in old media well before then.

Want a good example, 10 years ago I used to write for a local music website, today you would call it a blog, a few passionate people covering the local music industry. Which covered news and reviews and was widely read by local music fans and industry heavyweights. Our competition was a weekly music liftout in the only daily mainstream newspaper The West Australian, the weekly street press Xpress, a weekly radio show on a couple of the community stations and that was about it. The student press covered gigs, a couple of print fanzines and a couple of web sites but nothing on a regular basis.

The powers that be at The West Australian did not consider the Perth music industry worthy of investing resources in. They rarely reviewed local bands, the only news they carried news that came through press releases and at one stage decided that the liftout was not returning enough revenue and stop producing it.

Xpress was run on a shoestring budget, the news depended on press releases and if the editor went out the weekend before and talked to people. The reviewers were paid a pittance (I know I was offered a job reviewing for them) and the quality of some of their reporting was questionable. One of my favourite reviews of one my favourite bands, mentioned how great two songs they played. However, the review I wrote, mentioned the same two songs, as songs they did not play, because a guitar string broke on one song and the other was on the play list, but not played as the band ran out of time.

The local music news on two community radio stations was provided by passionate amateurs, but it was the best source of news. I know because the blog team provided it to one stations and my friends did the other station. It was the best source for news because the people who reported the news, where out talking to people finding out what was happening, checking sources and reporting.

Passionate amateurs whether they are working for old media or new media, who care about the subject and take the time to talk people are always going to better, than a professional with limited resources who relies on press releases.

The other exception, I take with this Journalists vs Bloggers dispute, is that old media types value the work I did for the student press, street press, newstand magazines and even press releases I wrote appearing word for word in newspapers are more important than anything I wrote for a blog.

FAUC (Future AUstralian Carrier) Interest Group

Nick — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:25:17 +0000

A lot of Australian are unimpressed with the offerings of three telcos offering iPhones in Australia. All the plans are heavy on telephony and light on mobile data. The exception are the Optus who are offering low telephony, moderate data plans. For $39 a month you get 500Mb of data + $34 worth of calls, but to get a 1Gb you need to pay $99 a month. On the other hand for $39 a month you get 5Gb from Optus on their mobile data plan.

So Brian Ballsun-Stanton and Mark Pesce have created FAUC (Future AUstralian Carrier) Interest Group on Facebook, with the aim of gathering a group of supporters for a new mobile carrier in Australia. A Co-Op, run by the users and for the users, which is designed to offer data pricing plans that reflect real network charges.

So what are you waiting for, go sign up now.

OZIA 2008 is go

Nick — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:43:59 +0000

Eric Scheid has confirmed that OZIA 2008 is at the Stamford Plaza in Double Bay on 20 & 21 September. So I have booked my flight for OZIA 2008 and WDS08 and my accommodation for both conferences, and I am not the only one.

So why I so excited about a conference, 4000 kilometres away, when there only official announcement is the dates. Simply because the last one was so good. The speakers where great, they got me thinking (a good sign) and I learnt a lot. The single stream with breaks between sessions, meant you were always discussing the session just gone with other conference goers. The twitter chatter in the sessions was interesting, the socialising fun and it was just a great conference.

So if you have an interest in IA or UXD and want to attend a great conference, I suggest you book your tickets to Sydney for 20 & 21 September (and you can stay for WDS08 the following week) and head to The Savoy Hotel Double Bay website to get your accommodation around the corner from the venue.

Goodbye Newsgator, hello Feedly

Nick — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:38:18 +0000

In the past few days since it’s release Feedly has been generating a huge buzz, a quick look for Feedly on Summize(Twitter search engine) gives you an idea of the impact this extension for Firefox 3 has had on early adopters in that time.

Up until the beginning of this year, I was using Bloglines as my feed reader. I had experimented with a number of online feed readers, including Google Reader, but I stuck with Bloglines because I preferred it’s interface, despite it’s shortcomings. And I needed an online feed reader as I used different devices to read feeds.

Then Newsgator started giving it’s feed readers away and they could synchronise with Newsgator Online. So I quickly installed Feed Demon on my work and home PC, NetNewsWire on my Mac and NewsGator Go on my mobile. Despite different UI for different devices, I was relatively happy until Feedly was released to coincide with the release of FireFox 3.

Feedly is not a huge step forward in feed reading UI, I am still coming to grips with the magazine influenced layout. It is not available for my mobile, so I am having to go back to Google Reader for the mobile. The big change is feed recommendations. That was available already with Google Reader, but only for people whose email was in my Gmail address book.

Feedly goes beyond that small circle, adding all my friends on Twitter or FriendFeed who use Google Reader and then providing recommendations from their friends. I am now getting recommendations from a couple hundred of people.

So that is why I am now I huge fan of Feedly and are not going back, recommendations. At some stage, I would like to be able to block some friends of friends, I have some strange friends and they have even stranger friends who read really weird feeds.

So make you feed reading more social by checking out Feedly and if you do and your are not one of my Twitter or FriendFeeds friends, you will have to wait a couple of weeks to see what strange feeds my friends read.

A quick history of conversation on the web

Nick — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:30:25 +0000

Conversation has been a hot topic on the web recently, with TechCrunch, Duncan Riley, Alex van Elsas and Julian Baldwin amongst others. The main concern seems to be that new comments solutions are taking the conversation away from the originating web page. The opposing view is that conversation in the real world it is fragmented. With different people joining and leaving the conversation at different times.

This got me thinking about my views I expressed in Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed as discussion tools, and my experience with conversation on the web over time. So here is a potted history of my history with conversation on the web. Note I was a late starter, not starting using the web until 1993.

Web 0.5 c1995

Back in the good/bad old days of the web the main place conversation was happening on was email, either on lists or amongst individuals. A web page might spark the conversation, but the conversation would usually take place in the relative privacy of email, because that was were the community was. Some list archives where open, but not all, and some of the most of the interesting conversation took place between individuals and quite often offline.

Not all conversations, took place in closed environment. Back then I use to contribute to a local music webzine, for your newcomers to the web, it was basically a blog published weekly which had a basic commenting system called a guestbook which covered the whole site. I had conversation with a friend on the guestbook about a review I written. That evening I walked into a bar to see a band and bumped into a couple of other friends. One who said “We where just talking about the discussion you where having on the website and …”. Which is a good example of conversations going well beyond the original source.

What surprised me at the time was the two friends in the bar, were the two most powerful people in the local music industry at the time (a record company exec and the editor of the local music print mag) and they were interested in a conversation between two fans. That night I learnt that conversations in the open online had a much bigger impact than offline conversation and could start conversation in other places. I had seen the future of the web.

Web 1.0 c2000

While a lot of conversation was still happening on email and some had switched to IM. Forums had become popular, and more conversations were happening in this more open environment, because communities where developing around these forums.

This was the start of the centralisation of comments. A web page might spark a conversation, the discussion would take place on one or more forums, where there was a community. The problem was that discussion were separate from the original source and a lack of tools made it difficult for the original author to find any conversations they started unless they were members of the community.

Web 1.5 c2004

With the advent of blogs, conversations took place on that blog or on a series of blogs as long as there was a community around the blog/s. However, if there was a strong community outside of the blog, such as a forum you would often find conversations taking place there.

Web 2.0 c2008

The communities are moving on, no longer do people visit blogs to read posts, they use RSS. As people no longer visit blogs, the conversation now takes place in the community where they are in. Which is now Twitter, FriendFeed and other social network services.

The future

As the web evolves and develops, conversation will always occur in the communities. Authors will no longer have the conversation occurring right in front of them on their blog, because the community that existed has moved on. However there are a range of tools for authors to keep track of the conversations they started (ie summize), unlike the good old days. Still the best way to be part of the conversation is to be involved in the community.

On my way home meme take 2

Nick — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:26:04 +0000

After getting tagged again by Ruth and speaking to Miles who was visiting the State Library to work on his special project. I decided to have a second go at the On my way home meme. This time a more typical trip home, by train and bike, last Friday.

Leaving the library on a Friday evening, there are always a few people using the free wifi outside the building, as the library closes at 5:30pm on Friday.

I walked through the main part of the station on Friday, I need to go past all the other platforms to get to my train.

While waiting for my train, a train on northern line arrived and the crowd descended on it. The train on the northern line takes a lot more passengers than the southern line at the moment.

I got stopped by a security guard at this stage. asking why I was taking photographs. He was not concerned about security issues, but the privacy of the passengers. I explained I wanted a photo of how crowded the northern line was and that my camera was not likely to take photos that could clearly identify people. I demonstrated that by showing him, the photos I had taken.

By comparison, my carriage was almost empty. I was going to demonstrate that with a photograph with a beautiful sunset over the Swan River, but all I got was the reflection off the window. So here is photograph taken a stop earlier. Photos taken, laptop on and headphones on.

Off the train and time to retrieve my bike from the locker. The flash on the Dopod 838Pro is not that effective, so here is a photo taken earlier in the day.

The first part of the ride home is 800m decline down a wide well light road. This photo does not show this interesting obstacles I faced that night, which include two large piles of organic fertiliser on the road’s edge. Each pile was roughly 2m high and 4m in diameter and had a very strong odour. The final obstacle was a burst reticulation pipe, shooting water 4m into the air and covering most the road. So I made an radical detour the wrong way around a roundabout.

The next 600m is a long a crushed limestone track through bushland, that little LED light, gives off enough light to navigate the track at 20kmh, any faster and it gets very interesting.

The next part of the journey, is to hop a couple of curbs to cross this dual carriageway, 100m along a cycle path, 300m uphill along an unlit road, hop a couple more curbs then I am home.

Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed as discussion tools.

Nick — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:30:53 +0000

Following up from my previous post on Conversation vs Noise. This is about carrying out discussions, this is not about status updates like “I just had baked beans on toast for dinner”, nor is it about the reliability of the service (given Twiiter’s recent problems). This is purely about using the service to carry out conversations with intelligent people, yes there are people like that on the internet.

Twitter

You only carry out conversations, with your friends. If one of your friends replies and on of their friends (but not one of your friends) joins the discussion, you miss part of the conversation and it becomes fractured. The only way to stay on top of this, is if good Twitter etiquette occur with lots of @ and you follow this up adding new people as friends.

This a great way of finding friends with similar interests, but it can be a lot of work. And once you start following people this generates a great deal of noise. Particularly when your friends are talking to their friends who are not your friends.

Another one of the disadvantages of twitter, depending on your number of friends, that unless conversations are tagged with #something, it is difficult to follow conversations and if you leave even for short period of time, you are lost.

Plurk

If you start the conversation it is carried out with your friends, if somebody else starts, you are part of a discussion with their friends, which may or may not be your friends. If you want your all friends involved, you either start the conversation again with them or convince them to become friends of the other friend.

The big advantage of Plurk is that conversations are threaded, you can go have lunch come back and get right back into the conversation.

FriendFeed

You start a conversation, if a friend joins it, it becomes available to their friends. If friends of friends join in, then it becomes available to their friends. So if you start a truly engaging conversation it wil expand well beyond your circle of friends. The downside is there is a lot of noise,

The conversation is threaded, so you can leave for a short period of time, you do not miss anything.

What I do

So what do I with 190 Twitter friends, 55 Plurk friends and 45 friends on FriendFeed. I used Twhirl to connect to Twitter and FriendFeed and keep it open, when I am on the computer which is most of the day every day. I will visit Plurk site a few times a day, more often if there is an interesting conversation, less if I am busy. Other social networking services, I am lucky to vist once a day.

The future

Personally, I do know who much longer I will keeping using Plurk. It is a good service to carry out conversations with a closed group of friends. The lack of a desktop application is hurting, as does not knowing if you are talking to your all friends when you comment on another friend#&8217;s post.

Twitter, I will keep using even given the recent problems. I have close to 200 friends and find it a great service to exchange small pieces of information.

FriendFeed, I am finding this service more and more useful, both for conversation and information discovery and it appears to be evolving. The desktop apps and there are number of them and the ability to hide conversations or services (only on the FF website) make FriendFeed so usable.

A few changes happening around here

Nick — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:40:20 +0000

If you happen to be reading this post through my website, you might notice a few changes. Which should be hopefully be the first of many, it is time I dragged this blog out of 2006, the last time I did any major changes into 2008.

Find Me On

The easy way to find me on the social networking services I regularly use.

Add a comment on FriendFeed

I am using FriendFeed more and more, and this is a way of capturing comments there and to let people who use FriendFeed comment here.

FeedBurner

When I set this blog up three years ago, I set up a FeedBurner account, but after reading their terms and conditions at the time and not understanding their revenue model, I did not make use of the service. With hindsight it would of been great to use them and have feed statistics. However, now the features of a FeedBurner feeds give me good reason to use then.