social-hardware – Page 5 – Cubicgarden.com…

Oversharing and living in public

I was listening to Twit networks Triangulation number 28 with Jeff Jarvis recently… Jeff Jarvis’s way of approaching the world is similar to the way I see things. Funny enough Leo Laporte also lives his life mainly in public too.

Known as an American journalist, co-host on This Week in Google, author of What Would Google Do?, and his new book Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis, is this week’s guest.

Most of the talk is generally about Jeff and his work on Buzz machine and other mainstream news organisations. Where it gets interesting is when he talks about blogging his cancer therapy and the series of following concerns which followed.

This certainly chimed with me because of my own experience when my ex-wife convinced my family to post updates of what was happening with me last year during mybrushwithdeath. I also experienced people who felt it was all too public and they shouldn’t be doing such a thing. They also experienced many people who were happy things were not as bad as the wild rumours suggested.

I specially liked the quote… by Jeff in response to someone who complained about Jeff oversharing…

“Really what he was doing was over listening.”

It was a excellent interview and reminds me why I do follow Jeff Jarvis on Twitter… Might have to go buy the book now

Tweet digging the rules

The concept is simple… Imagine if your Twitter client was crossed with your mail client?

Tweetdig is exactly that.

Currently in private beta although it feels slightly more like a alpha. I was lucky to gain a activation code when they previewed it at BarCampBlackpool last weekend.

So how does it work? well it works very well. Like most twitter clients you have the tweets going up the screen but theres a few options to do a bunch of things including create a filter based on the tweet you’ve selected. You can just write a filter but the best way is to start with something.

So in the screenshot above I have a folder called BBC discussions which usually come from my boss Adew, Si_lumb, or a number of other people. I actually added a bunch more people from the BBC, so now any tweets from them containing one of the others is classes as a conversation which I might want to be aware of.

The filters are pretty much what you’d expect but there a great start. I’d really like to see a better way to group people, so instead of listing everyone on each line, I could say if anyone in my BBC list says something to 2 or more BBC people, drop a copy of the message in a folder. In actual fact I’m not seeing much in the way of the twitter lists being used in tweetdig. Most likely because they haven’t got around to them yet or maybe because lists are not used much?

I’m sure the team will be all over lists at some point, they may even make it transparent, so when you create a grouping in tweetdig, it actually creates a list automatically?

To be honest, it really needs a lot stabilising, and I know there all working on that right now. But they certainly have plans to make a mobile client and maybe a desktop client. Once you start using it, its hard to go back and even more frustrating to use a mobile client without the rules and folders. In fact it would be great if you could assign clients to a folder. For example my mobile client would only show certain folders instead of everything and me having to cascade through it.

I did have a word with them on the side at the barcampblackpool and asked if they knew of any clients which support filtering or rules? Got thinking it would be good if you could simply export your rules out of the site and into your choice of client instead of waiting for them to create a client for your platform.

I’ve already created the dream filter which removes all tweets with the hashtag #sxsw to the bin so I don’t have to hear how much fun people are having in Austin next year. I’ve also setup the same for #iphone5 #iphone4s and #ipad3. Yes it may sound a bit crude but what I really need a little more structure so I could say, ignore all those unless @bbcnews tweet something.

As usual I’d also like to see a more Xpath type logic and the ability to do conditional things like, if @tdobson tweets a link to a video and its retweeted by at least 2 of my followers tell me about it (usually I can never trust what @tdobson links to, as its usually balls or great). Also like to see stuff like the ability to mute someone if they tweet more than x times in a set period of time. Automatically send anyone who tweets the same thing over x times in a set period of time to the junk folder.

Lastly I’d really like to be able to feed Facebook/Buzz/Google+/Idents status/updates/messages into the same thing. Maybe these guys are sitting on the perfect idea of the social operating system (stowe boyd?)

You get the general idea…

The humour of the startup is fun and reflects the people behind it. Its great to see a original idea being pushed forward by these guys who are regular barcampers and such friendly people.

I wish them lots of luck and I think they got something that in the end may be copyable by others but at least they can say, we had the original idea and followed through with a decent product. I can already imagine Tweetdeck or Seesmic with rules which span across not just twitter but also Facebook and Buzz.

So impressed with this service, I’ve closed down Tweetdeck (for now) and made this my number 2 in Top10 interesting tech startups. Novel service with a good solid concept, although I do feel the email methodology will trap them in the end. Its all about the rules 🙂

The next few months are very busy

I knew September onwards was going to be busy but this is getting a little out of control…

17/18th September – BarCampMediaCity
24/25th September – Stag-Do in Manchester for Harry Jones
1/2nd October – Harry’s Wedding
4th October – #SMC_MCR
8th October – FLOSS UK unconference
11th October – Geekup
14/15th October – CityCamp Manchester
15th October – BarCampBlackpool3
29/30th October – BarCampLondon9
4/5th November – Mozilla “Drumbeat” Festivial
8th November – #SMC_MCR
15/16/17th November – The Media Festival
7/8/9th December – Le Web

As you can see a whole bunch of them take place within or close to Manchester, so luckily i won’t have to go too far… However I’m also looking to finally go to Le Web for the very first time and maybe the Media Festival again.

Its cranking up to be a hectic autumn but hopefully a decent one full of lots of great experiences and people…

New Services I’ve found interesting recently

I’ve been playing with a few services recently and I thought it might be worth blogging about…

Diigo.com
while moving away from delicious I found diigo did everything I needed a whole lot more.
Ifttt.com
also posted about if this then in a previous post too but I’m finding nice new ways to use it for example to get read items on my kindle back in a form I can blog about again.
DeskSMS
Not quite installed this yet but I’m very tempted because I’ve always wanted a way to manage text messages from more than my phone and it looks like DeskSMS might be the best way to do so. Although a lot of people swear by Mighty text too
Glos.si
I read about Glos.si in the Lifestreaming blog, and decided I’d give it a shot because its been quite some time since I’ve really played with a decent lifestreaming service. The one I host on my own blog is alright but is missing quite a few of the great stuff Glos.si or the old fav’s Sweetcron and Storytlr had. This also reminds me I should kill all the other lifestreaming services I’ve used in the past
Storify
This has always interested me but its only now I’ve gotten around to looking at it with some time.

Tags vs Circles for Friends

I’m in total limbo when it comes to Google and my friends

Google Plus delivered a new way to classify your friends (although it was first seen in diaspora’s aspects) but I was using Gmail’s Contacts with the tagging previously.

What this boils down to is Taxonomy vs Folksonomy and credit goes to Stowe Boyd, Thomas Wanderwal and others.

I’ve been thinking about the merits of both approaches and concluded that even if Google included the ability to have circles within circles, it wouldn’t be as flexible as a purely tagging/folksonomy based system. The problem seems to center around classifying friends and people full stop. Categories, Circles or rather Taxonomy’s are too ridged and forced. Which to be frank classifying your relationship with people isn’t.

I refer to this table…

Taxonomy	Folksonomy
Brittle	Flexible
Accurate (if done well)	Less reliable
Compliance must be forced	Rewards but doesn’t force compliance
Hard to add to	Easy to add to
Centrally controlled	Democratically controlled
Predictable	Organic

The attributes of Folksonomies sound a lot closer to the emergent nature of relationships than Taxonomies.

There is a question which remains however… What happens if Google do adopt Circles within Circles? Or even follow the Twitter lists way of doing things?

Hopefully Google will adopt their own Gmail folksonomy approach in the future, but it does looks very unlikely…?

The Future of Social Media Cafe Manchester

Josh and Martin said they would write up what happened a while ago. I didn’t know but Martin wrote up the evening on the Social Media Cafe website, some time ago.

Last week, a good 25 or so people joined us at Common to discuss the future of Social Media Cafe Manchester. We thought it would be good to give you a bit of an update on what was discussed and what happens next.

A number of successes for Social Media Cafe over the past (almost) three years were noted. Particular highlights included the way it’s spurred a wide range of projects and other events around the city, the debate about the impact of the iPad, and the talk by Greater Manchester Police about their Twitter experiment.

However, there was a general agreement that the event had lost a lot of its edge of late and that ‘social media’ was now such a commonly used term that the event’s name was heading towards irrelevance – you might as well have a monthly ‘Email Cafe’. Therefore, whatever Social Media Cafe becomes, it needs to capture the zeitgeist of digital culture and continue to attract a diverse crowd of professionals and hobbyists while welcoming anyone who wants an introduction to the Manchester digital ‘scene’.

There were mixed feelings as to the ‘professionalism’ expected from the event. While some felt there should be more time put into arranging ‘headline’ speakers weeks or months in advance, others felt that the relaxed, ‘human’ aspect of the event was more important than any ‘professional’ image.

With regard to a venue, there was a feeling that a regular, predictable home would be beneficial, allowing people to always know where they’ll find it. The Northern Quarter (including The Castle), Ancoats and Salford Quays (the BBC) were mooted as possible locations for venues, although there was a debate as to whether or not people would be willing to travel to the Quays.

Branding for the event was given some thought, with a suggestion that changing the name may ‘throw the brand out with bathwater’. Others thought a new name was a necessity, although there were no suggestions as to what that might be. Another change suggested was simplifying the online presence – suggesting that “The Ning” (this site) was perhaps not focused enough.

Thanks to everyone who came down to take part – it was really encouraging to see so many people turn up and offer their input. Julian, Josh and I will be meeting to make some decisions informed by the discussions we had last Tuesday and we’ll be posting an update soon with more information about what happens next.

There’s a whole number of comments from people but I’m not sure most of the people who were at the meeting even know the post went up sometime ago. I only found it when I was wondering if I could sign up to talk at the next one.

A lot of people don’t know but Social media cafe is based on Lloyd Davis’s Tuttleclub which was based on Ian Forrester’s London Geekdinners. So I’ve got form in this area…

So my thoughts are…

Yes keep the name, social media cafe Manchester works but I like even better the smc_mcr shorten version. Maybe moving away from the social media part by using smc_mcr could work?

A mix of headline and adhoc speakers seems to make sense, this does require more preparation but this can be a shared responsibility between a small group of people. Not the 25 who showed up but maybe 20-30% so 5 or so people, could share the responsibility. Different speakers attract different crowds of people, as I discovered doing Geekdinners, of course some will regularly come turn up no matter what. In Manchester and surrounding area there is plenty of talent so there’s plenty of space for dual tracks or a a single track. I personally could find something to talk about at every smc_mcr, sometimes it would be work related and sometimes it would be personal.

Having dual tracks is better but I’d put up with a single track of 3-4 speakers if they were short and kept the time for presentations down to about 10mins. Something like a double length ignite may work.

Moving it to Media City UK makes a lot of sense to me. I know people say its too far but frankly its once a month. If you can’t make it there because you can’t be bothered then, maybe Smc_mcr doesn’t actually need you. But I’m also thinking it should switch between venues (alternate). Sounds a little crazy but it could work and its certainly better than 3months one place, 1 month in another then another 3 somewhere different before having to find somewhere else. Smc_mcr is a good enough event to travel for.

I also don’t but this argument that there’s no venues in Manchester… Why not use Home sweet Home (which just opened up next to Commonbar), Speak to the people at Drip cafe and ask if they can stay open longer once a month, now Moon bar is open again I’m sure they will be looking for a regular influx of people. I’m also sure there’s been quite a few venues I’ve wondered pass who would love regular events like smc_mcr. My biggest bet was on the new vivid lounge which has a delayed opening once again. Point is, I’m sure with a little bit of work, I’m sure we’ll find somewhere suitable, it may not be in the Northern Quarter, but it will be within the city centre. Theres places like Rainbar which could be ideal. I refer to the Manchester map…

Something which never got talked about was charging for smc_mcr? No I don’t really like it too, but it means the venues in the city centre will be much more open to hosting such an event. Most bars do drink minimums, which can be easily hit with 50+ people. It might put some people off, but for the sake of having a quiet room with a projector, I’d certainly give it a shot.

What ever happens, its rapidly heading to the first Tuesday of the month… I got plenty of stuff to publicise including barcampmediacity.co.uk and salfordcinemaclub.wordpress.com.

Google plus and unlinking feeds

I’m now on Google Plus which seems pretty good but I got issues with it.

First up I like the circles methodology but what bugs me is the fact that those circles only exist within the Google plus ecosystem and thats even with the Google plus application on my Android phone. Weirdly enough I already tagged most of my contacts in Gmail and that does sync with my phone.

Ideally Google plus would understand the tags I’ve assigned to people in Gmail and allow me to automatically translate those into circles.

Google Plus also feels like a early Facebook right now, everything is deep inside its walls. It looks like Google might be catching up with Facebook by not making the same mistakes. But I do wonder about the integration with other Google products? I noticed the profile is synced with your Google profile so thats good, it looks like Buzz makes up the Stream part and I think I saw Google Talk somewhere on the stream bit.

One of my biggest complaints is the ability to send twitter microblogs into Buzz/Stream. I wrote on the stream space something like that. Just on a off point, it is great to see the privacy options in Google Plus, hence why I can actually link directly to the thread of discussion. In the end Adewale send a link to Unlink your feeds.

You need to unlink your feeds.

I understand why you did it. I’ve made the same mistake myself. But it’s hurting your friends, it’s hurting you, and it’s hurting the Internet. You need to stop.

You need to stop automatically dumping your feeds from one account into another.

Look, I know it’s tempting. New service, not sure how you’ll keep up with the ever demanding maw and there’s the “import your content” button, right there in the sign-up process. A quick trip through a login screen or an OAuth link and there you are: All your stuff automatically aggregated into a new one-stop-shop of the genius things that pop out of your head.

No muss, no fuss, right?

This is an illusory solution. It’s a false idol. It’s contributing to noise pollution on the Internet and the only people it helps are company execs who want to make spurious claims about “user engagement”. It’s diminishing the quality of your output and of others’ experiences.

You need to unlink your feeds and put a tiny bit more effort into using each service for what it is.

So I disagree and I’ll give you my reasons why… Of course this may only apply to me… And I understand this may not be true for everyone.

Its hurting your friends.

My friends are very divided and so those on facebook don’t use twitter, so there’s little duplication. I get the spamming idea but frankly if I didn’t dump my twitter into facebook, I would say little to nothing on facebook. This might also sum up how I feel about facebook generally…

Its hurting you.

Oh agreed but we covered the lack of respect I have for facebook. I would also add why the heck would I spend so much time on crafting messages which work in favor of the company hosting the social network? If there was an argument for a distributed social network, this would be it.

Its hurting the internet.

"Stop thinking like a spammer and starting thinking like a person." Well I would say this is nonsense. I’m one person and what I say is generally what I would say in a public space. Facebook isn’t a public space (or at least it mixes the public and walled garden too much) ideally I would be able to link (maybe even xinclude) my comment.

I know some of my friends on Facebook do wonder whats with the # and @ but they’ve mainly got over it now. Hopefully one day it will be easier to almost xinclude your thoughts from one to another and slightly alter it. Right now a linked feed is the best way to do this…

There’s a better way.

At last something we do agree on…

I have a vision of a new social networking paradigm. Handcrafted social networks.

I imagine a world where people take each network for what it is and participate (or not) on those terms. Instead of a firehose slurry of everything buckets, I imagine separate streams of purified whatever-it-is-each-service-does. I envision users that post when they’re inspired and don’t mind skipping a few days if nothing particularly interesting comes up.

I’m like Thumper’s mother. “If you can’t think of anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I imagine people taking the extra 10 seconds to reformat a post for each service if the message is so relevant and important that it needs to show up more than once. I imagine being able to choose who I follow and what subset of their postings I get with a high degree of granularity.

There may come a day when this vision gets implemented on the server side. When all the social networks give me fine grain control for hiding subsets of the updates sent out by my contacts. But until that day comes, it’s gotta be solved on the client side.

I thought Google plus would be along this line but its not. It does a lot of things right including Dataportability, thanks to the Data Liberation front’s Data takeout service.

So my general thoughts is Google plus has got the basics kind of right but there overlooking some of the advantages they could bring to plus like Gmail contact sync and the Android application. The Facebook application on Android is pretty poor to say the least (i don’t even know why I got it on my phone), and frankly Google+ is even worst. Where’s the contract syncing once again? And heck why is no one doing event syncing?

I noticed Google plus does actually have my connections to Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, etc but isn’t make use of them at all. I know there’s conflict between Google and Facebook but hey if I choose to pull stuff from these other services to Google plus, thats my decision.

Google plus does feel a lot more open (and funny enough a lot like Diaspora) that the closed wall system of Facebook but they really do need to improve on certain aspects before I use it fully.

Switching over to Tweetdeck

I switched over to Tweetdeck a while ago… I use to use Gwibber on my laptop/desktop machines and Peep on my Android phone but recently switched…

HTC Peep was ok but honestly it use to wind me up when it wouldn’t update when the storage was quite low. No warning either. Gwibber was great but I found it slow when adding lots of columns. I tend to have a column for all the people I’m following (home) one for replies (@replies) and finally one for Private messages (d msgs). On top of that I have searches for events and the such things. Tweetdeck handles these pretty much in its stride, but Gwibber use to do odd things.

I think it might have something to do with being connected to Twitter x2, Identi.ca, Facebook and other services.

The one thing I do miss from Tweetdeck is the ability to connect to a identica and status.net server. Instead there’s accounts for Facebook (which actually works very well) and Google Buzz. Honestly I’d switch out Buzz for status.net anyday.

I don’t know how the news Twitter might buy Tweetdeck will effect everything but it looks like status.net and even the open microblogging standard isn’t coming any time soon. I may switch back one day, specially if Gwibber 3.0 is as good as it could be.

Hiding in plain sight: Social Steganography

I know its quite old (all of a year) but I’m really intriguing…

Privacy in a public age

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies. And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

I would also add the suggestion that deep down they also know that technical methods are seriously no good for privacy. So they deploy there own privacy by adding steganography to there imprint on the web. Its also not just teenagers…

Frank Rose – The Art of Immersion – Wed 13th April

The amazing Herb Kim asked me a while ago if I’d be willing to be on a panel with Frank Rose, as part of the think and a drink session in Gateshead college. Of course I thought about it for maybe a few minutes and agreed. No but seriously this time, I checked out the topic and wondered if I would bring anything to the session. Luckily the subject matter is something I think about a whole lot plus I happen to be writing a technote for Perceptive Media (previously known as Intrusive Media)…

Think and a Drink – The Art of Immersion

We’re delighted to welcome one of the world’s most insightful technology writers, Frank Rose, to the North East in April for the launch of his new book ‘The Art of Immersion’.

In the book Frank explores the future of media, advertising and storytelling. Frank Rose is a long time contributing editor of Wired Magazine (US) and he’s making the long trip from San Francisco especially for the event. As a contributing editor at Wired, Frank has spent the past decade writing about the impact of technology on media and entertainment. Along the way he covered such stories as the making of Avatar, Sony’s enormous gamble on the PlayStation 3, Samsung and the rise of the Korean techno-state, and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood.

The event will be the next Think and a Drink in the calendar and will be run in collaboration with Wired Magazine, Gateshead College, Northern Film & Media and WW Norton Publishers. Frank will talk about his life and give an overview of The Art of Immersion.

A panel session will follow Frank’s talk and we’re pleased to have some important local figures from the digital world, offering their thoughts and insight into the where we are now and where we’re heading in the digital sector. The panel will consist of Paul Smith, Never Odd or Even, Agnes Wilkie, Northern Film & Media and Ian Forrester, BBC R&D.

There’ll also be the chance to meet Frank during a book signing session and of course as with all our Think and a Drink events, we’ll have networking, food and refreshments.

Getting people together is what I do

I seem to be a connector…

I have identified there is something in me which gets excited about getting people together. Its almost like my brain releases extra dopamine at the notion of getting people together.

Recently I’ve been made the social committee chair for my flats (islington wharf). Well I kind of made myself it really. But so far we’ve had one drinking meeting and 2 dinners (last friday dining club). The last one was just last Friday and it was good fun for everyone. 12 strangers around a dinner table made for 8 in the northern quarter on Friday night.

On the way back on Friday night, I walked home with Brian and in my slightly drunken (well only really slightly tipsy) state started to talk about my role in the islington wharf community.

I felt my role was as a connector.

When I first moved to London, I knew no one and lived out in deepest south London (Thornton Heath) with my cousins and aunt. After about 2 years while at college at Ravensbourne Design College, I started to get to know more people via my jobs in Central London and of course the college its self. But it wasn’t till about 3 years in London that things really started happening.

I attended in the early days meetups across London and had so-so success with them (best one was when I met Lucas, who I’m still friends with today). Then I attended a few blogger meetups including one where I met lovely people such as Suw Anderson-Charman. Anyway at some point I attended a geekdinner and was intrigued by the simplicity of it. So when I arranged with Tim O’reilly to come to the BBC, it made sense to throw a geekdinner for him too. At that point was my first go at social organization. The rest is pretty much history but you can read a good account of the geekdinners events in over 5 years of blog entries [1][2][3][4].

During the geekdinners I got mixed up with BarCamp via Ben Metcalfe. Once again you can read all about those in blog entries over the years [1][2]. I built a large body of friends who I could go out with almost any time because at least one or so of them would be out doing something at some point during the week.

But then of course I moved to Manchester.

I moved early which meant I didn’t really know many people, in actual fact I only got to know people who had come to previous barcamps I had run. Then I got to know friends of friends, not many but a few. But generally I was alone like I was in London when I first moved there.

Now I feel after almost 4 years in Manchester and its been a struggle I grant you that but I think finally its starting to click…

Theres something in me which kind of thrives on building communities and connecting people.

When I moved in to Islington Wharf, there was a promise of a community and to be fair there was something but I can hardly call it a community. So rather that sit there and moan about it, something in me grabs the opportunity to make things better for myself and everyone else whos not willing to do something about it. My first party which was attended by only a few people but I did knock on every single door on my level and the level above and below. Most people haven’t even knocked on there neighbors door!

Later I arranged a halloween party which was a lot more successful and afterwards kicked off a whole range of parties and friendships. Another idea later was to start a last Friday dining club. Someone elses idea but executed by myself… I’m also flirting with the idea of setting up a cinema club but to be fair I’m putting it on hold since someones already started one. I got a feeling Ben might need some help with it and I’m not certain of the format (but I’ll reserve comment till I go along).

So what is it about me? I just don’t know… But I won’t stop and I’ll be doing what others won’t.