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Socialthing: in which my quest for the perfect lifestreaming service continues

Published
by
richard
6 months ago
in Lifestreams and Social Networks
. 2 Comments

Update: Now that socialthing! is in official beta, they’ve issued users with a bunch of invites. If you’re interested, leave a comment.

Lifestreaming, a new buzzword I’m most comfortable with, has had its iron grip on me for a few weeks now. I’m constantly checking out new services, with one goal in mind: to consolidate all the services I’m using on the mighty Intarwebs (for everyone fed up with constant ironic misspellings of what any other person would call the data-highway, I’m sorry, I just can’t resist).

There are various approaches to the problem, and every approach has been tackled by a few services. And now that even Yahoo! has been chiming in with their own version, namely the profile page of their acquired service MyBlogLog, the once rocky introduction of activity feeds has arrived in the safe harbour of mainstream acceptance. And when that’s the case, it doesn’t suffice for a service anymore to just have an idea, it has to execute it well to a certain extent.

One such service is Friendfeed, which lets you aggregate your activity on a certain number of services and then add friends (who ideally are also using the service - you can add “imaginary friends”, but that’s only half the fun - similar to real life). It’s a good service, but limited in that it only connects the dots via RSS feeds, and instead of aggregating your existing contacts from all the various services you have plugged in, you have to build yet another circle of contacts within FriendFeed.

Another approach, the API connecting one, is used by SecondBrain, which I’ve already written about. They plug into the services you’re using and create a library of the content you’ve been generating over the years. What they neglect, just as FriendFeed does, are the contacts you’ve got within those services. Meaning you’ll have to build up your contacts all over again.

Enter socialthing! , which, like SecondBrain, connects to your services via API and, tada, creates a contacts activity-stream. Yes, finally it’s a service that doesn’t focus on what you are doing, but rather on what your countless contacts scattered all over the web are up to.

Ironically, the execution is rather anti-social, as the stream is not public and doesn’t offer a feed either. Which is fine by me, considering that it’s my contacts, and I am the only one who’s interested in the activities of that motley crew.

Right now they are in closed beta, accordingly the service is still quite basic. Which is not a problem, as the service they are offering doesn’t need a whole lot more than what they’re already doing. There’s only one thing on my wishlist: a widget (or an API so people can create them).

Jaiku - not Twitter, obviously

Published
by
richard
6 months ago
in Blogging and Mobile
. 1 Comment

Today I received one of the coveted invites to Jaiku*, the micro-blogging service that’s been likened to Twitter a lot (even though it has been around longer). While Jaiku used to be open for registrations, it closed them down when they were bought by Google.

Now, what is it that differentiates Jaiku from other micro-blogging services, most notably the larger-than-life but downtime-ridden competitor Twitter? Well, first of all, it’s fast. I haven’t tested it for long now, but unlike Twitter, it actually opens up the links I click. Which is, let’s be honest, fucking rad!

Difference #2: Jaiku is a lifestreaming service. While Twitter was refreshing in its simplicity when it launched, sooner or later one just longs to spice up terse text-messages with a few shenanigans. Jaiku lets you import RSS feeds from Flickr, YouTube and whatever blog or service you see fit. Thus, it rivals sites like Tumblr or new-kid-on-the-block FriendFeed (which I just recently wrote about here Actually, I thought I did, but what do you know, I didn’t).

Just like Twitter, Jaiku offers integration with your mobile phone, letting you update and receive Jaiku content. IM is supported as well, setting it all up is a breeze.

And as has been mentioned on this site already, Jaiku is doing a good job when it comes to community building. How? Well, there’s something called channels, and it’s a not a whole lot more than the grouping of people around a certain topic, area, etc. While this doesn’t sound too spectacular, it’s something that comes in handy for creating microcommunities on the fly (which sounds a lot like a marketing phrase, and I think I just invented it, and I’m sort of proud of it now).

All in all, Jaiku provides a compelling service, and while it suffers, like so many social networks, from a lack of mainstream adoption, I hope Google will have learned from their Dodgeball disaster and help Jaiku to bloom rather than whither (and I am, officially, a poet).

* I received my invite via Jaiku Invites, a website that facilitates the sharing of invites. It worked like a charm, I absolutely recommend it!

How not to do stuff

Published
by
richard
6 months, 1 week ago
in Feedreader
. 0 Comments

What’s a feed reader? Well, it’s a piece of software that lets me read RSS feeds. So what’s a good RSS feedreader? One that at least lets me read the feeds I want to read. What’s a bad feed reader? Well, a feed reader that won’t let me read my feeds. One that actually goes as far as to establish that my feeds are just not good enough to be put into the feed reader.

But surely, no feed reader would do this, right? Well, there’s one. Fav.or.it. Launched today into private beta, it shows this message to users (click to view in full):

favor.it

Well, here you go. If those stupid users weren’t so inconsiderate as to try to import their feeds, the feed reader would actually work. I don’t really care how many great new features, including commenting of posts directly from the reader, a reader has. As long as I’m told what to actually read, it sucks. Ass. Especially when it’s used as an excuse for not scaling.

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