Tag Archives: social

Use Google Reader as a delicious.com alternative

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Google Reader has only recently added social features (following, liking, people searching) but I’ve found them to be amazingly powerful.

Consuming information

If you use Google Reader, you likely consume a lot of information through it via RSS feeds. Everything from news (BBC, NYTimes), sports, humor (ICHC, xkcd) to photos from your Flickr contacts, Twitter mentions and so on. Reader is one of my most important online web applications.

Consolidated contacts

And to pile on even more Google fanaticism (friends in college thought I worked for Google), all of my friends and family contact information are stored in Google Contacts. The best part about this is that my Gmail, Google Voice, iPhone and Address Book contacts are all pointing to the same place: Google. Some argue that’s a bad idea, but that’s another discussion. Point being: there’s no need for me to try and messily sync lots of contacts across multiple sites.

Google Shared items

Since Google now has public pages to display your ‘Shared’ items (through Google Reader, you can have one spot where you consume and share the cool content you find. In essence, you can help filter the signal from the noise for your contacts and friends.

Once you share an item, other people that ‘follow’ you will be notified of the new item. Awesome, I can read consume new cool things that my friends have filtered.

Replace delicious bookmarks altogether

If you visit your Shared settings page (Your stuff > Shared items > Sharing settings) and scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll notice:

Try the Note in Reader bookmarklet to share non-feed items from around the web.

Drag and drop the ‘Note in Reader’ link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar and suddenly you can ‘share’ content from all over the web. Friend linked to something cool on Twitter? No problem, just ‘Note in Reader’ and everyone else knows about it. Tags and comment come standard. It’s that easy.

Twitter is the new MySpace

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I get a lot of good emails but Rachel made a great observation today:

Not only is “Spongebob” a trending topic on Twitter, but it’s “Wich Spongebob.” The fact that we have gazillions of people taking quizzes about their similarity to a Spongebob character is sad, but not nearly as sad as the fact that the word ‘which’ is being so persistently misspelled.

Twitter has become MySpace.

We knew it was coming when celebrities showed up. We knew the site was a big deal even before the illegally stolen, internal, not-for-public-consumption documents were released.

The obvious difference being the “openness” of Twitter. MySpace, Facebook, etc. required at least some level of friendship to get to people’s intimate details. Not to mention this level of aggregation, which is only skimming the surface, has never been so public before The original beauty of Twitter was the quick-yet-personal musings that everyone could see (private profiles are often condemed by “social media experts”) and chose to follow.

But now the rest of the world is here and it’s a bit frightening. Its not the small ecosystem that we initially enjoyed being a part of. Senators, porn stars, real estate agents, company executives: they’re all here. Plus, everything is indexed, searchable, retweetable, and easy to find.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more people revert back to a more “closed” system in the near future. We are teetering on the edge of novel and unnerving.

Overlooked feature in Facebook

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When the new site design launched nobody realized that Facebook added the ‘Top Friends’ functionality:

Always Show These Friends

I don’t see TechCrunch, Mashable, or anyone noticing this. But everyone was very quick to get upset when slide’s ‘Top Friends’ app was taken down (it was a legitimate security concern).

I hate this short-term-memory-loss-lynch-mob we like to call the internet. Uproar and knee jerk reactions over perfectly understandable non-issues. But no praise for the good anyone does. It seems the consensus is: “let’s move on to something else we can get upset about”. This is why Valleywag is dead. Nobody likes complainers. Do something about it. On the other hand, this is the same pandering nature that network news channels commit every day. The same ones that “we” bloggers say we’re up against.

Oh, and if you’re still reading and waiting for the punch-line, here you go. From the Facebook help page taken today:

Facebook Friends cannot be edited

The internet is weird.