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2010 Social Media Predictions aka Know your rights, aggregate & own your stuff and back it up

Posted Sun, 2010-01-03 20:14 by Roland

I have been blogging for 10 years, started Dec 1999 (dreadnet.editthispage.com which sadly died a few years back due to my own negligence) so some  2010 social media long term predictions and gratuitous advice which again is worth what you paid for it

Social Media 2010 predictions and gratuitous advice:

  1. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr and other walled gardens are over in the long term; an open solution will replace them in 5 years or less.
  2. Don't be afraid to use and experiment with the walled gardens but recognize that your stuff can be deleted at any time and unless you have backed it up to an open format like HTML, it won't last forever (most likely scenarios: service goes out of business or your account is deleted for an arbitrary reason). I wouldn't shed a tear if all my tweets were deleted, YMMV. If you have fun with the walled gardens, get your domain and start a blog, videoblog,podcast, etc., you won't regret having an online presence you own and control
  3. If you care about your closed garden stuff, back it up to an open format. If you aren't geeky enough to figure this out, ask a geek, there's lots of them, just don't ask me :-)
  4. Have a "hook" and nurture and grow it. Not good enough in 2010 to be a jack of all trades social media whatevah :-) You actually need to *know* something. Most people do (they just don't realize it!) so that's not a problem.
  5. Don't know why I have to write this in 2010 department: Don't trust reviews or content on Urban Spoon, Yelp (i like the idea of yelp & other aggregators  but in practise most of the reviews are shall we say not helpful), Gowalla, Facebook etc unless you know the person in real life or have read their stuff over a period of time. Most restaurant reviews like most content on the Internet are wildly biased but that's a good thing because objectivity in food reviews is ridiculous.
  6. Get your most valued content out of the walled gardens and your email (email rocks but it's not a place for long term knowledge storage and retrieval) and back it up. The best way to back up is to put the content in an open format like HTML on your own domain and backup all the stuff on your domain. Again, ask a geek. And really most people's stuff that is truly valuable is not a lot, myself included :-)  e.g. I bet my best emails, best photos, videos and blog posts for the last 5 years could fit on 1 DVD!

"These are my Kid"s / Kinzin's world wide shipped 10 photos / month for 2.50 is fantastic

Posted Sun, 2008-06-08 14:03 by Roland

[Disclaimer: I am a friend of Kinzin honcho Michael Fergusson and Kinzin social media marketer Megan Cole]

I love Kinzin's aka "These are my Kids"'s new (well not so new my blog post is late!) "Print Pack" feature. This feature allows you to ship 10 prints for $US 2.50 plus shipping anywhere in the world!

I use it to send 10 photos per month to my family in Belgium and Ontario and also to us. Great idea (which I and probably others suggested to them!)

Digital photos are great but having hard copies is also great. And finally through the Print Pack Feature I have an easy way to do it from flickr (or from your local drive or facebook but I don't store my photos on local drives or facebook).

Feature Request: do the same thing for videos i.e. how about a DVD from my flickr videos shipped once a month for say $5 / month plus shipping?

Feedback on These are my kids:

  1. Could we please have it as an independent website? There's no value for me having it as a facebook app (but I can see why it is a facebook app; the community is there, still I'd rather use it using my kinzin login rather than my facebook login)
  2. The default privacy settings are to make everything visible in your Facebook feed. I'd prefer the default to be that everything is NOT visible but I concede I am over zealous about the privacy of our child.
  3. Adding a photo to my print pack is not intuitive. You can't add all 10 at once, why not? Also I would prefer to have to be able to add photos via a tag e.g. kinzinprintjuly08 to my print pack.

Running N95-1 Firmware V21 and ShoZu 4.0 but can't update Facebook Status

Posted Wed, 2008-03-26 17:41 by Roland

So far so good. The only bug I can see is that I can't seem to update my Facebook status from ShoZu 4.0. Everything else works (e.g. I can see the last few status updates from my 341 ShoZu "friends"). I am sure the ShoZu folks will make it work pretty quickly; it'll be cool to use my unlimited EDGE for updating my Facebook status for free (rather than SMS which would cost me $).

Iotum's Facebook conference call looks excellent

Posted Wed, 2007-09-05 08:17 by Roland

[UPDATE: Mac Skype has a keypad icon which you click on to send DTMF tones which  means i can easily use the Iotum app without paying, cool! hopefully this works on N800 Skype too] 

I tried a conference call to myself on the weekend and it worked fine! I couldn't get it to work with Mac Skype (couldn't figure out how send my phone number, how does one send a DTMF tones in Mac Skype?) but that's Skype's fault and I am sure will be easily remedied. This will be great for impromptu calls.

Question: is this a Lypp competitor? Answer: I think it could be but is not directly!

From "Finally, a useful application on Facebook" — Alec Saunders .LOG:

QUOTE

For North American users, the calls are free. You call our bridge in the 218 area code, and pay only the charges you would normally pay, whether that's airtime on your cellular phone, or long distance on your land line. As Jim Courtney at the Skype Journal discovered yesterday, you can even make the calls from Skype — great if you have an unlimited Skype account.

END QUOTE

Facebook's RSS feeds leak confidential data! Fix it by using basic auth over SSL and flickr style revokable URLs

Posted Fri, 2007-08-17 05:03 by Roland

It's 2007 and a well funded company like Facebook can't implement secure RSS feeds (RSS feeds served over SSL and protected by HTTP Basic Authentication). Aaargh how many years have we been blogging about the need for secure RSS feeds and that security by obscurity doesn't work? (Answer: since at least 2004) (And I am not impressed by the Facebook Chief Privacy Officer's apologia; sorry the technology exists, 37 signals does it for example with Basecamp so implement it !). If RSS feeds over SSL with HTTP basic authentication are too much of a technological challenge :-), allow the feed URLs to be revoked like flickr does for its guest pass URLs.

FROM » Facebook’s data feeds a data leak? | Lawgarithms | ZDNet.com:

QUOTE

So where’s the data leak? Here’s where. These feeds are public. All one needs in order to view and use them is the feed’s URI. There’s no requirement that a reader or user of the feed be the “friend” of individuals whose data is in the feed, or even that the person be logged into Facebook. Are you following me?

END QUOTE

Up4 from ActiveState

Posted Thu, 2007-08-16 06:22 by Roland

Up4 (you need to login to Facebook to see it, hello walled garden!) sounds promising! Can't wait for the official blog post :-) on the ActiveState Blog or David Ascher's Blog. Sounds like a great app to discuss at a Vancouver Facebook camp or at BarCamp Vancouver 2007!

FROM Facebook | Up4:

QUOTE

Use Up4 to express when you're open to doing something, and the kinds of activities you're up for. Up for the beach after work? Checking out a show Friday night? Or just hanging out Sunday afternoon?

Use Up4 and others can let you know they're up for it too. Up4 makes it easy to spend more time with your friends.

So... what are you up for?

END QUOTE

Phillip Jeffrey on Facebook and flickr tagging June 6, 2007

Posted Thu, 2007-06-21 16:32 by Roland

Phillip Jeffrey presented on Facebook and Flickr tagging at the UBC Magic Workshop on taging on June 6, 2007. As always Phillip was engaging and articulate! Phillip is becoming quite the Facebook poster boy as he was recently on CBC Radio as well. Go Phillip go!

 

Facebook: I've seen this movie before but this sequel is different & better because it's a blockbuster and everybody's doing it

Posted Thu, 2007-06-14 06:32 by Roland

Facebook - The blockbuster seqel to all the geeky prequels! To paraphrase Tim Bray, I've seen this movie before. Only it's different this time. Unlike UUCP email, profs email, Nortel's Cocos, BBSes, Usenet, The Source, Compuserve, The Well, etc non geeky people of all ages are using Facebook to privately and semi-privately blog, share interests and email each other. Which I think is great! And I love that Facebook is becoming a platform.

But until you can get all your stuff (your status messages, your private messages, your wall posts, your events, your profile information, etc) out like you can get all your photos and all the associated metadata out of flickr using its APIs, I would be careful.

Just like everything else on the Internet, if it's not on a domain you own or control then it could be shut down and removed at any time without any prior notice.

In other words have fun with facebook but recognize that's the stuff on there is ephemeral and ethereal and mostly invisible to Google; if you want something permanent that the world can see whether or not they belong to Facebook, stick it up on a website or blog or wiki or other web app with permanent public URLs on your own domain.

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