The Map My Name project aims to find out how many people are using the web, one person at a time. I freaked at first after I mapped my name and looked at the closeup map view - I thought the little dart was pointing directly to my address. But no, it's just the Austin dart.
How long do you think it will be before they're acquired by Google? I say 4 months.
A mere month ago I was playing with Twitter at SXSW, thinking there could be some interesting uses for it. Already a couple of interesting new applications have sprung up.
You can join the Drive, uh, flock? covey? murder? Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. The show and the star had a tremendous following - no doubt they'll be turning out in hoards to test Drive (sorry). Apparently the director of the show is going to serve up commentary via Twitter during the premiere Sunday night. Clever - I'm signed up. Advertisers have to love this. Normally I'd DVR the show and watch it without commercials. Instead I'll be watching real-time to follow along with the tweets.
Dave Armano reports that several media outlets such as Fast Company and USA Today appear to have reserved accounts, while BusinessWeek and Newsweek may have been hijacked by squatters (nesters?) if the silly email address associated with the account are to be interpreted (both are associated with pleasantcreature @ gmail.com). Still, Flicker is a great platform for quick updates from media feeds. Nothing revolutionary here, but it falls into the useful category.
BART in San Francisco uses Twitter to announce up to the minute schedule changes.
What have you found out there that looks promising?
There's plenty of chatter going on about whether or not Twitter has any real value. Twitter is sometimes called a microblog. It's basically group SMS with a web interface and social networking features. Sign up, and you have a 140 character limit per post. You can post as often as you want - in theory you post throughout the day: heading to work, at Foo's for lunch, blogging, going to bed. Then you add friends to your network, and you can keep up with who's doing what when. You can see updates via the web, or receive them via SMS or IM. I signed up for a SXSW Twitter group (flock? conflagration? murder?) just for fun. When I sent a Twitter to the group number, it was broadcast on several plasma screens sprinkled throughout the convention center. I assumed I'd also see twitters on my phone from the rest of the group, but I only saw those of the developers and others in my twitter network, which was only Tori. Not too useful. Did I need to know that Jack was in line at Magnolia Cafe at 3am? No. No I did not.
After SXSW, Tori was none too happy. She emailed me:
I’m really aggravated at Twitter. Not at the technology, but at the sheer gall of the Twitter guys who evidently think I want to be on the end of a one-sided conversation. I’m completely convinced that’s what has happened. You sign up, and you get grouped with them, and no one else (unless you go to the effort of adding friends, like we did). Did you ever, once, see one of them respond to anything you had typed?
No. Why?
Because they aren’t listening. I’d even venture to guess they had some flag set so that they see only messages to one another. Meanwhile, I have to listen to their banter, and am bound to a group where there’s no chance of me have any sort of interaction with anyone new, or even participating. Gee thanks, that’s awesome technology, guys.
Put that in your blog and smoke it.
That said, now that I know how to use it, I can see how it could be useful.
Feel free to check out my Twitter page, and sign up to follow or as a friend. You can see that it's not getting a whole lot of use right now, but it's still kind of fun to play around with it.
Ok, so blogging during a conference is harder than it seems, I admit. So much to catch up on! Day 3 of SXSW was Monday. The Henry Jenkins interview was fantastic. His book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
Thanks to an unannounced (at least via SMS) room change and the ridiculous layout of a recent convention center addition that forces everyone to take a circuitous route to one set of rooms I've named "the dungeon", I missed the first half of the When Communities Attack panel. On the other hand, it didn't seem that I missed much. Granted, this was one of those panels I could have given, but judging by the grumbling in the halls afterward, I wasn't alone in my disappointment. It's really clear that some of the presenters simply didn't bother to prepare, or bother to look into presentation skills 101. There was too much assuming the audience knew all the acronyms, web sites, and personalities mentioned. Unfortunately, this was pretty common. The panel I attended after that was Virtual Teaming. Again, some basic presentation skills would've been helpful. This was one of many 30-minute "power sessions". 30 minutes simply isn't enough to really cover much meaningful information, IMO. In this case, the presenters wasted 10 minutes telling us what they were going to tell us, which just doesn't work in such a short session. Could've been good. Wasn't.
Not long ago I did a post on Delicious Library - the well-executed book/game/music/movie cataloger for Macs. I'm afraid I'm already switching, despite the fact that Delicious Library has some features I'll miss. I have discovered Library Thing. Kind of makes me wonder if the folks running things got tired of trying to come up with a decent name.
Unlike Delicious, it doesn't allow you to catalog anything other than books. Also unlike Delicious, it doesn't allow me to use my groovy built-in iSight camera. And the Library Thing bookshelf view isn't nearly as pretty as the one in delicious. You're probably wondering why I'd switch, given all the downside.
The Good News
The Even Better News
The social pieces of Library Thing appear to be done very well. You can join groups and talk in forums. You can write reviews and help fix errors and tweak entries in the global catalog. Judging by the author tag cloud, it's a pretty literate group so far, with heavy bias toward early 20th century literature and science fiction.
There are amusing stats all over the place - it's a data-lover's dream. A few high points:
I figure I'll gradually catalog my library over the next several months. It's something I've always wanted to do - I'm glad the tools are finally ready for prime time.
There's also a LibraryThing blog.
When I discovered that you could type "define:anyword" into a Google search box and get a definition, I pretty much left dictionary.com behind forever, except for the occasional thesaurus lookup. The new Wordsource works similarly - you type http://word.sc/anyword in your browser and get your definition.
Wordsource, however, defines itself as a social dictionary. Anyone can tag a definition and upload pictures to associate with the word. Strangely, they're even encouraging people to attach their own pictures to the word "genius". The definition page itself has several useless facts at the bottom of the page, along the lines of "x people like/dislike this word", "x people can say this word 5 times fast" and "x people think they are this word". I'm not sure folks who regularly use dictionaries are really interested in frivolity with their definitions.
I think the social aspects here are forced. Gimmicks don't make a community. I'm not even sure calling this a social dictionary makes sense. If you click on a picture, you view that person's profile (even, apparently, if they've uploaded a picture describing the dictionary entry). There doesn't appear to be any way for people to gather or actually interact.
Wordsource does have one really nice feature - the ability to look up words "starting with" and "ending with".
I always thought the tours in VPchat had potentially interesting business applications, but the general nature of the chat community really prevents it from entering that realm. VPchat has been doing place-based chat for (holy crap!) 11 years. Finally, place-based chat has come of age. The products out there are small, and new, but they all have great potential. Place-based communication can be a great adjunct to IM for business communications. There are several options out there now. No avatars, no chat room backgrounds, just text chat anywhere you go.
I didn't find many people chatting, for the most part. These products definitely need a little critical mass to get them going.
They all seem to be working on directories - right now, there's really no good way to find people.
Peekko
Firefox extension, also works with Flock
Peekko is an IRC client. It adds a toolbar at the top of your browser to show you how many people are chatting. It creates a text chat window that sits across the bottom of your browser for that page.
Gabbly
Nothing to install or download
Supports FF, IE, Safari, and Flock, they're Yworking on Opera
“Chat about any content on the web – just add gabbly.com/ in front of any url”
By default, Gabbly floats an actual chat window in the upper right corner of your browser. You can adjust this to be a sidebar or a bottom frame. It's pretty noisy, but you can turn off the audio with one click.
Yaplet
Nothing to install, just drag a bookmark to your toolbar.
The chat pane appears in a sidebar to the right. They also offer a “poplet” that opens the chat in a small window. You can also IM or leave a message for someone.
Yakallike
Firefox extension, IE favorites link,
Compatible with Jabber
This is small-time. Coded by Adam. Funded by Adam. I got an application error when I tried to register. Still, it's a decent interface, and they seem to be getting some good attention. Ya never know :)
