A friend at work, Magnus Hultberg, put together this excellent overview of some of the latest "micro-blogging" services available. I asked if he would mind if I could reproduce it here and he kindly agreed.
Magnus writes...
"A current Internet trend and social network primer... Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are so last millennium.
For an interesting overview of how Team Obama used services like this in conjunction with networks like Facebook, Orkut, AsiaAve, Blackplanet and so on to drive fan base and leverage their own web site and all their digital communication, see this PDF:
blog.guykawasaki.com//OBAMA%20SNA%20Strategic_1.pdf
I am playing around with a lot of these micro blogging services right now. Two other very hot trends because of all of this mobile tweeting from Blackberries, iPhones and normal phones (almost all phones have a Twitter or a Jaiku app for on the go micro blogging) are location tracking (where are you in the world) and identity management (where are you on the web), parts of which is often refereed to as “lifestreaming”.
Brightkite, as I mentioned, is one of the most known location in the world services, another well known one that is up and coming is Fire Eagle (a Yahoo service).
www.brightkite.com , fireeagle.yahoo.net
When it comes to online identity management it is just a fancy expression for aggregating all you do online using APIs and RSS feeds to provide users with one central hub where all information they push out can be found, and verified as coming from them. Profilactic is a well known one, Friendfeed another. In these days of people using lots of online services distributed in the “cloud” that today is the Internet the need for such services are getting more and more apparent.
www.profilactic.com , www.friendfeed.com
Taking it one step further is Chi.mp, which does proper identity management in the sense that if you sign up for their service (still invitation only) you actually get what is called an Open ID which is a standard for authenticating you in any web site (as long as the site is integrating with the Open ID API of course). Portable online identity, one user name and password everywhere. Included in the standard is functionality to, as you sign in with a site the first time, decide how much of your personal information you want to share with them and if you want to do so one time only or indefinitely. Very interesting, and certainly something that potentially will be a big part of the future.
I am at manne.mp.
Geekier than most, I am of course using my personal web site to aggregate all of this stuff.
www.hultberg.org
Thursday, 29 January 2009
Sunday, 25 January 2009
To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?
So, my experiment with Twitter has started.
Twitter is either going to be the biggest Internet phenomenon of this year (think YouTube in 2006 or Facebook on 2007) or I will eat my hat. Well, it will be IF the tipping point is reached. Quite what this tipping point is I'm not sure, but when enough people get absorbed into it's crazy ways then it might just be a hit. It's been around for a while (I've been aware of existence for over a year anyway), but more and more famous people seem to be using it and celebrity endorsement never hurt any product, even strange social networking sites.
Might be a hit? Well, the great thing about Twitter is that not only can you track what your friends are up to, but you can also track the celebs. One of my favorites so far is Lance Armstrong, but plenty of others including the newly elected Pres of the US have a Twitter feed.
So - how does it work? Simple. If you know the "status update" tool in Facebook, imagine that, all by itself. Just status updates, and nothing else. You are meant to type in, in no more than 140 characters (that's one sentence or two), the answer to "What are you doing now?". Then, you select friends or other people you want to follow and they get added to your page so that when you log on, at any time you can see what they are up to. Kind of bizarre, strangely addictive.
According to Hitwise, Twitter traffic has grown by 984% in the UK in the last 12 months. That is fast fast growth. The tipping point might be coming soon.
Why do it? I really don;t know the answer to that. Everyone will have their own reason. If you get something out of it, you'll come back. If that something is keeping up with mates, colleagues or heroes, you sometimes need to give to receive.
This century, enabled by the Internet, one-to-one communications and business will take off. The Internet is the ultimate middle-man. Who needs Hello magazine when Jonathan Ross will tell you what he's up to in real time?
To Tweet or not to tweet? You decide.
Tips:
Use the TwitterBerry application to view or edit "Tweets" on the move
Use www.tinyurl.com to create short urls to save text
Use www.ping.fm to update your status on your different social networking sites at the same time
Twitter is either going to be the biggest Internet phenomenon of this year (think YouTube in 2006 or Facebook on 2007) or I will eat my hat. Well, it will be IF the tipping point is reached. Quite what this tipping point is I'm not sure, but when enough people get absorbed into it's crazy ways then it might just be a hit. It's been around for a while (I've been aware of existence for over a year anyway), but more and more famous people seem to be using it and celebrity endorsement never hurt any product, even strange social networking sites.
Might be a hit? Well, the great thing about Twitter is that not only can you track what your friends are up to, but you can also track the celebs. One of my favorites so far is Lance Armstrong, but plenty of others including the newly elected Pres of the US have a Twitter feed.
So - how does it work? Simple. If you know the "status update" tool in Facebook, imagine that, all by itself. Just status updates, and nothing else. You are meant to type in, in no more than 140 characters (that's one sentence or two), the answer to "What are you doing now?". Then, you select friends or other people you want to follow and they get added to your page so that when you log on, at any time you can see what they are up to. Kind of bizarre, strangely addictive.
According to Hitwise, Twitter traffic has grown by 984% in the UK in the last 12 months. That is fast fast growth. The tipping point might be coming soon.
Why do it? I really don;t know the answer to that. Everyone will have their own reason. If you get something out of it, you'll come back. If that something is keeping up with mates, colleagues or heroes, you sometimes need to give to receive.
This century, enabled by the Internet, one-to-one communications and business will take off. The Internet is the ultimate middle-man. Who needs Hello magazine when Jonathan Ross will tell you what he's up to in real time?
To Tweet or not to tweet? You decide.
Tips:
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