Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

Facebook is a persistent Julie McCoy

Posted on by charlie

I was trying to figure out why I can’t seem to get into Facebook. Now I think I know why.

I don’t like how Facebook is an annoying persistent overly intrusive Julie McCoy.

For those not in the know, Julie McCoy was the activity director on the TV show ‘The Love Boat’. As activity director, her job was to get people to mingle (and, apparently, fall in love).

Well, most of the Facebook apps that I’ve seen or been invited to join have been gimmicky like a cheezy-activities director. Also, all, All, ALL of them seem to make it way easy spam anyone I have ever sent an email to, like a client or some unknown sucker on an organization mailing list whom I do not even know.

<dripping sarcasm>Wow. That’s proper social etiquette.</dripping sarcasm>

I understand that Facebook wants to be the electricity that fuels all these cool apps (oooh, oodles of comments there, too). But, really, they should have some standards.

And don’t give me this ‘openness’ krap. Facebook shouldn’t mar their brand with krappy stuff.

Example: If I said that I was going to build a pork-fat rendering plant across your street, you’d freak out and wave the zoning laws in front of my face, right?

Same here.

I never used Facebook ‘in the day’. But, I spoke with a lot of users early last year (pre-platform) and all they spoke about was connecting to people through various forms of messaging, direct human to human communication.

And these post-platform apps don’t even act as useful social objects that trigger conversations, either.

I’ve been fighting starry-eyed Web 2.0 wannabes for a long time to get them to realize that the wildness at Facebook is not something to emulate. Sure, openness is great, but let’s not let the developers build willy-nilly and mess with a brand we are working hard to build and keep.

Zoning laws can be helpful and stimulate, too. I made the mistake of calling it ‘curating’. That smacked too much of untouchable objects behind a window. A colleague suggested ‘steward’, promoting the good and discouraging the krap.

What do you think?

Strategy/Tips & Tricks

Aggregating your social network – a list of services

Posted on by charlie

Ah, a nice day browsing ideas on the Web, taking me forward and backwards.

I found this nice list (below) from last summer on a bunch of services (many I knew already) for helping users manage multiple social networks. These services do it in different ways, which is good, since it samples the possibility space for me.

Yeah, my head had been deep in this area for a long time and I’m now particularly interested in one facet of it (almost frantic about it).

Alas, the most I will be able to do is pass on the thinking to the Ovi.com team as I wrap things up (hopefully this week).

Link: 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles:

In an inspired blog post, Jason Kottke said that social networks aren’t helping us organize; since all of them require different credentials to log in, they’re just adding to the noise. He just might be up to something there. It’s getting harder and harder to remember all those logins, passwords, and most importantly to remember which of your friends are using what network.

Social network aggregators is a relatively new breed of applications which try to consolidate all your various social networking profiles into one, with varying success. Let’s check out 20 biggest competitors in this field.

Uncategorized

links for 2008-01-15

Posted on by charlie
Science/Strategy

It’s not infoglut on my mind, but infoswim (or something like that)

Posted on by charlie

After a deep conversation with my dad on semantic web stuff, he pointed me to a site (of some guys he works with) that had this quote (below, pulled from another site to give it more – context).

Link: Managing Information: Infoglut:

“Information overload is not a function of the volume of information out there,” he says. “It’s a gap between the volume of information and the tools we have to assimilate that information into useful knowledge.”

But, it is really not infoglut that is on my mind, but how we can revel in the glut, navigate it, annotate it, contribute to it, and extract knowledge from it to generate new knowledge.

A lot of thoughts on this in my backlog of posts. I hope I can get them up during my lifetime…