Category: SocialMedia

Useful links: Hide that app, SXSWi, ChatRoulette

Sandia Mountains

Since I stopped posting the monthly summaries of what I have published at eHow, I’ve stopped showing you my occasional photo. Here’s a photo, apropos of nothing, that shows the mystical Sandia Mountains on a cloudy February morning.

How to Hide Farmville (and such) on Facebook. OMG, this is the best thing I’ve learned in ages!

sxsw interactiveOnly a couple of weeks until South by Southwest Interactive. I’ll be there. I don’t think I’ll live blog as much as I have in the past, but I’ll be taking lots of photos. I didn’t take near enough pictures last year. I intend to make up for it this year. If you see me there, say hello. I’m looking forward to seeing friends, the keynotes, a New Riders author gathering, and I have a whole list of panels I want to see. How many times have I been to this event? Ten, Twelve, Fourteen? I’ve lost count. All those wild nights at SXSWi must be the reason my hair turned gray.

Here’s something new for educators (and parents) to think about: ChatRoulette. apophenia has a description of what it is and her early response to it.

How much sharing is too much?

I’m talking specifically about sharing your whereabouts on social networks. Do you?

The article Please Rob Me: The Dangers of Online Oversharing yesterday got me thinking about this. Sometimes I do promote the fact that I’ll be somewhere, for example if I’m trying to get people to attend something I’m doing at a conference. However, I generally don’t mention going away from home, even though there are people in my house when I’m gone.

Even when you don’t actively push your whereabouts, there are still ways to figure it out. If I update Facebook from a computer with a Texas IP number, Facebook notices it. If I’m tweeting from somewhere in Chicago, Twitter notices it. Even if you think you aren’t oversharing, the horse is already out of the barn on privacy.

I constantly see tweets and Facebook updates announcing specific locations for people: a specific coffee shop, a specific gate at an airport, a specific table in a specific restaurant. How much sharing of where you are is too much?

Useful Links: Backchannel, adoption rates, Scrunchup

Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome has some thoughts about Twitter in the backchannel at LeWeb 09 in Paris. His ideas are a little different from some of those I’ve mentioned previously in posts about the backchannel. Give a listen. There’s talking on the phone while driving, there’s texting while driving, and now there’s video while driving, Pirillo style.

Matrix: Social Technology Adoption Curve Benefits—and Downsides from Jeremiah Owyang compares technology adoption rates with success in the social media world. Very interesting categories and opinions. He offers three suggestions that I think sum it up for those who want to make the most of social media for a company. Especially significant are “Be a Category Ahead of Your Company” in terms of adoption and “Track the Category Ahead of You.” Or, to quote myself, Keep up with what’s changing and learn how to use those changes to achieve your goals.

Issue #4 of Scrunchup is available. I’ve mentioned this new magazine already, but if you still aren’t turned on to it, this is your final clue. Become a reader of Scrunchup now.

Useful Links: Transitions and Transforms, the written word, Chrome

CSS3 transitions and 2D transforms by Opera’s Molly Holzschlag and David Storey is an excellent tutorial explaining these exciting new CSS properties. Browser support isn’t universal yet, but don’t let that stop you from making the most of CSS3.

The word is dead. Long live the word. Study: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated at Wired reports on a study finding that the rate of reading tripled between 1980 and 2009. Go see what they think the reason is.

Google’s Chrome grabs the No. 3 browser spot from Safari. In just 16 months, Chrome has outpaced Safari in browser numbers. Firefox is still at number 2, and IE remains on the top. But the good news that IE8 is overtaking the train wreck of IE6 in significant numbers.

Useful Links: Textbooks by Sony, Ads by . . . you, A mashup of youness

Blyth education, a Canadian high school, announced that they will replace textbooks with Sony Readers. When U.S. schools tried to do this with the Kindle Reader, they were hit with accessibility lawsuits. Be interesting to see how it goes with the Sony Reader.

The Medium is No Longer the Message–You Are is an article at TechCrunch by the co-founder of socialmedia.com. The article itself is interesting, but the real significance behind it is what is happening to advertising at socialmedia.com. You should check out what this company is doing. Advertising will never be the same.

Post and Read via Twitter API combines Twitter with WordPress. The Twitter app Tweetie will be the first app to provide you with the ability tweet directly to your WordPress blog. This article puts me in mind of Posterous: My New Social Media Addition. Posterous offers a life streaming mashup of everything you post from everywhere. In some situations I can see a lot of value in these efforts to combine social media into one big bundle of youness, but I also think there are times when streams of information are best kept separate. What do you think?

Why Can’t Twitter Be More Like Facebook or Linked In?

It can. Are you looking for a way for Twitter to locate mutual friends or people who know people you know? I love this feature on Facebook and often find BlogHers or long-lost classmates based on the application’s suggestions as to people I may know because they know people I know. People who know people. Or some such.

Now there is a Firefox add-on that will help you locate mutual friends you may share with the people you follow on Twitter. (Yeah, sorry, it only works in Firefox right now.) It’s not exactly like what happens on Facebook, but it can be helpful.

Several tools for finding mutual friends on Twitter are described in the Web Worker Daily article by Doriano “Paisano” Carta at How to Find Mutual Friends on Twitter. The tool from the article that appealed to me is the Ul.timate.info add-on for Firefox.

It wasn’t just me who found it interesting. Heather squeeed about it on Twitter, so I thought I should give it a try.

Before I get too far into the description of what ul.timate.info does in Twitter, you need to know that it also adds features to Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, foursquare, and bit.ly.

Here’s what happened when I installed the add-on. It was a bit confusing at first. Normally, when you install a Firefox add-on, you set up your preferences for the new tool using the Preferences button in the add-ons window. But the Preferences button for Ul.timate.info was grayed out.

grayed out button

The instructions on the web site said to right-click (or ctrl-click on Mac) on a Twitter name or image to see a menu that would allow you to find mutual friends. I tried this about 50 times. It didn’t show me the menu! (The definition of stupidity; when it doesn’t work keep doing it the same way.)

Finally I noticed an ul.timate.info menu option way up at the top of my screen in the Firefox menu. Why didn’t the download instructions say this? Especially since it departs from the norm for add-ons? Application developers don’t spring for good technical writers to explain their new apps—one of my pet complaints.

the menu in the top menu bar

I selected Settings, then entered my Twitter name and password. Now the magic worked. A right-click (or ctrl-click) showed me all these lovely new menu options, including the longed-for View Mutual Friends.

the new menu options

I tried out a few people to see how many mutual friends we have. I have zero mutual friends with singer @dianebirch. That’s okay. I just follow her in case she ever leaves New York and goes on tour somewhere close to me. I don’t care who her followers are. But I have 34 friends in common with @jenlemen. I care about who her followers are. We share some interests. I may check her followers (I can do that with the ul.timate.info menu) to see if she found someone I’d really like to follow but don’t. Yet.

my mutual friends with jenlemen

I wish ul.timate.info would be more like LinkedIn or Facebook’s friend recommendations. I wish I could click on someone’s name and get a few suggestions as to who might be a good fit for me to follow. Even though it isn’t quite effort free to find mutual friends, I can still get some helpful tips and information from this tool. Plus, it stays out of the way when I don’t want to use it, always a good thing.

If you try it, let me know what you think of it.

Cross posted at BlogHer.