When if at all, will Google+ allow people to add their own RSS feeds?Friendfeed took off when rooms were added, harnessing the power of the so-called social interest graph, but it started to lose appeal again when they allowed the automated inclusion of rss feeds into those rooms by the room owners, slowly drowning out the interesting and genuine conversations.Facebook allows the automated inclusion of feeds via 3rd party apps, but between the Facebook users and Facebook themselves, they have managed to deprecate content from feeds so that original content and human shares take priority over feeds.Now some Google+ users are clamouring for the ability to be able to add their own streams from elsewhere directly into their own circles, which would amount to the same mistake as Friendfeed made. But Google+ hasn’t even enabled some kind of groups, rooms or interests yet, either because they still don’t understand the dynamics of social networks, or because they are rolling out such features in waves, and this one hasn’t arrived yet.Google’s record with groups isn’t a good one. They bought Dejanews, the web interface for usenet newsgroups, one of the original computer facilitated social networks, and did nothing much with it for nearly a decade. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhen will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?Related posts:Friendfeed for microblogging – a screencast videoReclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron softwareFriendfeed and Social Objects
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
When will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/07/when-will-google-allow-rss-feeds
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- social media
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- social networks
- circles
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- mistake
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- social interest
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July 7 2011, 1:21pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?
Some social apps are really cool but it’s unlikely your actual friends are using them
This article titled “Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.28 UTC Another day, another innovative smartphone app based around photo-sharing. Color is the work of a team assembled by Bill Nguyen, the entrepreneur who previously sold streaming music service Lala to Apple. Backed by $41m (£25.3m) of venture capital, it lets users post photos tagged with a location, browse the latest pics of people around them, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place. It brings to mind another hotshot photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members — a deliberately restricted social network. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs. Here’s my question: are these kinds of apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Not in the financial sense — although that $41m for Color may fuel the debate around that too. More of a cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on to the same cool new apps as you. Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either. For now, all these apps only let me connect with other mobile industry geeks like myself. That’s where the suspicion of a bubble comes in: the assumption that if all your friends and colleagues aren’t using these new apps already, they’ll want to when you talk about them. Color may have an additional focus on strangers sharing pics, but while that’s a perfect storm of virality in Silicon Valley, it’s rather more of a lonely cul-de-sac in, say, Bishop’s Stortford. The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already, to widen the distribution to … well, to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Color is an interesting app with lots of money behind it. Investing in features that break it out of that Silicon Valley cultural bubble will be essential if it’s to amount to more than a geo-restricted social plaything.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogAre social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?
Related posts:Country diary: Bere Alston, Tamar Valley Open Social Objects? I18n coming to Google apps
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March 24 2011, 10:57am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Reclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron software
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/12/02/reclaim-your-lifestream-feeds-with-sweetcron-software
How significant is SweetCron for lifestreaming and Web2.0 Every now and then some new idea or process or thing pops up that isn’t a slow burn, it jumps out and says “Hey, this is the way to GO”. Friendfeed was one such, and further back WordPress, Flickr, MediaWiki, Furl etc etc. Today I was introduced to the latest and have to blog about right away, it’s called sweetcron. Bee Tweets about Sweetcron lifestream software So this tweet from my friend Bee on Twitter caught my eye earlier this evening.
“have just downloaded Sweetcron and installed it on my server to create my lifestream http://barbaradieu.com/lifestream/ …” Intrigued I took a quick look and instantly understood that this was something important. A piece of opensource software called sweetcron that allows you to run your own lifestreaming site is exactly the missing piece to all of this blogging, microblogging, web-2.0-ing and friendfeeding messy business. No longer is it necessary to leave all your own writing and other content scattered about on websites owned by other organisations large and small, where at the drop of a hat they might suddenly introduce lots of adverts, go selfishly no-follow like Wikipedia (and now Friendfeed too), start charging a membership fee or get taken over by google, yahoo or whoever. Sweetcron is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) I was delighted to see that the sweetcron software Bee installed to make the lifestream site is Free and Open Source, just like WordPress, so I determined to have a go myself straight away. Google brings up the site http://sweetcron.com/ which could have been guessed. Its by a developer called Yongfook who self proclaims to be an internet Z-list celebrity. I put in my email address to join the public beta and received an email confirmation request. On reply I got the link to download the software, view documentation and join a googlegroup support list. Great, I like that.
Andy Roberts blog is born Meanwhile I registered a new domain - andyrobertsblog.co.uk I can’t believe that’s the first Andy Roberts domain I’ve ever bought, but the whole story about why it’s been problematic was documented 8 years ago on the Andy Roberts FAQ Anyway, I pointed the new domain at my Hostgator account and within minutes the DNS had resolved and I was up and running. All that was left was to set up a mySQL database, upload the sweetcron software and edit a couple of config files to put the database and domain details in. Literally 5 minutes work if that.
I’ve reclaimed some of my own feeds already, and I can now add any others just as easily to my own site as to Friendfeed, Lifestream.fm, SecondBrain or SuperGlu etc. What’s still missing in Sweetcron Sweetcron is not yet a mature product, and there are some holes that need filling. One is perhaps to allow comments to be hosted alongside the items in the stream. At present it is suggested to use Discus for that. Another is that the title tags in each permalink are duplicates for each element from a single feed. That’s not very clever but can probably be fixed in third party themes and plugins which will no doubt start to appear once the enormous advance that this sweetcron way of hosting lifestreams represents is more widely appreciated. Should you set up a sweetcron lifestream blog? Personal brands are often overlooked but have a habit of becoming important to whatever it is that you do, eventually. Things are only going to get tougher for all of these Web2.0 applications companies, and in my opinion, whether you already have a self hosted personal blog or not, the sooner you get started and set up your own sweetcron lifestreaming blog on your own domain the better. Reclaim the feeds!
Posted by Andy Roberts Reclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron software
December 1 2008, 5:32pm | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Friendfeed 3 - Four tips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Tmzw7z_0M
May 30 2008, 9:07am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Friendfeed for microblogging
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyM0xFlrJ1U
May 26 2008, 5:12am | Comments »
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