Friendfeed: I’m doing it wrong

Alun Digital Academia 3 Comments , ,

I’ve been put­ting together a work­shop on social media for the Phys­ics depart­ment here at Leicester. It’s two hours to cover Web 2.0, so to cover it all I’d have to work at the rate of 1.0 per hour. Instead I’ve opted to cover a small range of the most use­ful tools. deli­cious, Google Reader and blog­ging, which I’m using Pos­ter­ous for. The more ser­vices you sign up for the more dif­fuse your pres­ence, so I’m put­ting Friend­feed at the centre of the work­shop to pull it all together.

The model I’m using is one I’ve stolen from Alan Cann which is that Friend­feed is Face­book for sci­ent­ists. I know it’s not exactly, but it’s close enough as an intro­duc­tion. In some ways it’s a Twit­ter sub­sti­tute too. I’ve left Twit­ter out of the work­shop, which I know is a big hole, but Twit­ter takes a couple of days to under­stand because it doesn’t make sense without the replies and inter­ac­tion, while Friend­feed has more tools for shar­ing stuff. Friend­feed needs inter­ac­tion too, but it is at least a bit easier to see the point of Friend­feed using the Face­book model. If you’re not really plugged into the idea of net­works then Twit­ter looks like a dull and crippled rip-off of Facebook.

So while I’ve been put­ting this together I’ve also been think­ing about how I use web­sites. Blogs are still the place for gath­er­ing longer ideas like this, and reflect­ing on them. They’re not so good for some other things. I find inter­est­ing things on the web and I want to share them. This is a prob­lem, and it’s one that Brett Hol­man blogged on while I was put­ting this post together.

How do you put together links for a blog post? You could just put up the links and titles, but that doesn’t make for much of a post. You could blog on each one, but that’s a lot of work. In the past I’ve used things like deli­cious or ma.gnolia to com­pile posts from book­marks. The prob­lem with that is that you need a cer­tain num­ber of book­marks in a post else almost every posts is Links for %date%. On the other hand if you store up links in groups of 10, then link 1 could be out-of-date by the time you have ten links to make a post. Blog­ging used to be the best way to share links, but now there are bet­ter ways. Brett Hol­man is using Twit­ter. I’m using Friend­feed, because the way it handles com­ments is easier and it can post to Twit­ter any­way; it’s not an either/or choice.

I don’t see it as blog­ging versus twit­ter­ing as some people have either. You could see the move to put links onto Friend­feed as cut­ting back on blog­ging. I prefer to see it as free­ing the blog from hav­ing to carry posts that don’t suit it. Friend­feed or Twit­ter is the per­fect place for point to this photo of cute nuzz­ling chee­tahs.

There are some prob­lems with Friend­feed. People import their twit­ter streams, and that doesn’t usu­ally work very well. Con­ver­sa­tions appear out of con­text, but it’s an easy enough issue to solve. Friend­feed has a ‘hide’ but­ton, and you can hide all entries from Twit­ter unless they get a ‘like’. You’re rely­ing on other people to find the note­worthy tweets for you, but if you’re on Friend­feed you’re prob­ably also on twit­ter too — so it’s no great loss.

Fol­low­ing that, I’ve made a slight change to the front of the blog, with the Friend­feed stream going to the front instead of the fea­tures gal­lery. If you want to fol­low me, then you can find my Friend­feed account at http://friendfeed.com/alun and if you tell what account you’re using I can fol­low you back.

I’ll be post­ing a link to the work­sheets for the work­shop once the class has star­ted on Friendfeed.

Meanwhile in the Lifestream today

Alun Life 1 Comment ,

Sci­ence of the Invis­ible: How I learned to stop wor­ry­ing and love Friend­Feed
After read­ing this post I’m think­ing about how I use Friend­Feed. I think there are dif­fer­ences in how AJCann and I would use Friend­Feed. There’s a large and act­ive Life Sci­ences posse on Friend­Feed, no so much for the Human­it­ies. Still there’s bet­ter ways to hook up Twit­ter and FF. And I’ve never been happy with using Twit­ter­feed to announce posts. Friend­Feed (or even RSS!) can do that much bet­ter. I’m also exper­i­ment­ing with hook­ing up the ‘Fresh from Friend­Feed’ plu­gin for Word­Press to the sys­tem. That may work, or it may be unplugged rapidly.

BBC NEWS | Land­scape photo of the year 2009
Some amaz­ing pho­tos here. I par­tic­u­larly like the Aber­deen and Kilnsey pho­tos and now have a huge urge to get a wide-angle lens.

This was an exper­i­ment with a plug-in which pulled in posts to Friend­Feed. It’s not really work­ing well for me, so I doubt I’ll be using it in the future, but I’ll be blog­ging about it.

Friendfeed: Tech Tuesday

Alun Digital Academia, Life 1 Comment , , ,

So far we have Twit­ter, Flickr and pos­sibly Audioboo. We could add more ser­vices like deli­cious or Zotero in the future, but we’re get­ting messy. How can you pull them all together? The answer is Friend­feed. I found Friend­feed easier to under­stand than Twit­ter, but I’m told I’m in a minor­ity, so I’ll try and take it slowly.

If you sign in to Friend­feed you can then sign in to all your other online ser­vices. Friend­feed then pulls together a page of the latest things you’ve been post­ing around the web. So in my case if I com­ment on AJCann’s web­log, which uses Dis­qus for com­ments, those com­ments will appear in my Friend­feed stream. That’s because I’ve told Friend­feed where to find my Dis­qus account. It’s a bit like a col­la­tion of what you do on the social side of the inter­net. Like a lot of social things it gets more inter­est­ing when you add people.

If you have a Friend­feed account you can go to my page, sub­scribe, and you’ll see what I’m up to on your page. Do that with sev­eral friends and it starts to look like the social web in one con­veni­ent loc­a­tion. You won’t just see our tweets, you’ll see pho­tos, blog posts and many other things. You can also add unsup­por­ted sites if they have an RSS feed, because Friend­feed can read RSS. This is how Friend­feed knows what’s in my Cite-U-Like account, and when I get around to tack­ling Zotero prop­erly to store my ref­er­ences, it’ll be able to handle that too.

On top of that, each entry on Friend­feed is open to be com­men­ted on or ‘liked’. Com­ment­ing is fairly obvi­ous, but like is more ambigu­ous. If you ‘like’ some­thing you’re merely draw­ing atten­tion to it, so that other people fol­low­ing your stream can see it. For instance if Bora Zivkovic men­tions a nat­ural dis­aster, click­ing ‘like’ just means that I think it’s import­ant. Sadly the Friend­feed inter­face is poorly designed here, because if someone put up the mes­sage “OMG! An aster­oid hit Essex and wiped out Basil­don” and I thought it was import­ant, my response would look like:

n-smile Alun liked this.

You can add com­ments, like Twit­ter. You can also add links eas­ily through a book­mark­let. You can also set up for­ums for dis­cus­sion using the rooms or groups fea­ture. One of the feeds I’ve added to the right is a list of what’s recently been added to the Archae­ology group. Like Flickr, I would have thought it would be use­ful for a schol­arly soci­ety, because you could make the feed pub­lic, but limit the abil­ity to post and thus pub­li­cise your own work, to soci­ety mem­bers. Like Flickr, I’ve prob­ably over­looked some very basic point about schol­arly societies.

You can fol­low me at http://friendfeed.com/alun. If you sign up to the site leave your use­name below and people will be able to fol­low you.