Cloud tattoo
Uno as Tattoo's
Dec|7|2007
Pretty cool tattoo’s:
One above his bicep, and what might be a heart on the wrist
via.
Best Firefox hack… EVER
Uno as Online
Dec|7|2007
Oh this is soooo cool….
I’ve found a hack, not really, but I’ve just discovered it, for you to browse mobile sites, or any other sites in your sidebar.
It’s really simple, and most people are probably doing it anyway…
I was looking for a simple notetaking plugin for Firefox that would load in the sidebar. Reason being is that I want to be able to write comments about a site in the sidebar. You just can’t get that with 2 seperate windows.
So I stumbled across this site:
Open Google Notebook in Firefox Sidebar » Mitchelaneous
That lead me to this site:
Add Google Talk to Firefox Sidebar
Basically, you bookmark a webpage, then you edit the properties to Open Site in Sidebar.
Hang on… this got me thinking… A while back I had to do lot of research on mobile sites, so I installed all the mobile plugins for Firefox that allows you to view mobile sites in Firefox. the problem though is that the sites often don’t scale well enough.
I really wanted to browse the sites in my sidebar - it would give me the exact same experience as I had on my mobile (barring the keys etc).
Now along comes this solution!
All you need to do, for e.g. is bookmark this link (or any link): http://m.twitter.com and then edit the properties, select Open in Sidebar. And there you go! Stripped down mobile versions of websites!
Gotta love it! Now All I need is tabs and then I’m set!
Technorati Tags: mobile, firefox, sidebar, hack, bookmark, trivial, useful, productivity
Pretty cool lifestreaming app for Wordpress
Uno as Products
Dec|5|2007
If you’re big into lifestreaming, check this little app out:
I recently got word from Kieran Delaney about his new Lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress called Simplelife. It’s based on the Simplepie
RSS parser instead of the built-in MagpieRSS one that has issues and is
used by some of the other Wordpress Lifestreaming plugins out there.
It’s currently an Alpha version and although I haven’t tried it yet,
it appears to offer some good functionality and have a nice layout. I’m
hoping that a future version will make the addition (and editing) of
the feeds easier. Perhaps from the admin dashboard as opposed to having
to add / edit them in a php file.
Technorati Tags: wordpress, lifestream, plugin
Myspace is entirely contextless
Uno as Web2.0
Dec|4|2007
Myspace doesn’t know anything about me - the events page lists general events, for stuff happening in New York and Fort Lauderdale. Is it any wonder that I’m only using facebook?
Ego vs Object centered social networks
Uno as Identity, Social Networks, Web2.0
Dec|4|2007
Two brilliant posts I discovered yesterday, one at Unit Structures and the other at Bamboo Project blog.
Both deal with the difference between object and egocentric networks.
Object centered networks
Networks are object centred if they have a social object around which users can activate. This is typically an element like a video (youtube), news (digg), photo’s (Flickr). If you take the social objects (photo’s, videos, etc) out the network would fall flat. If you took the profile data out of Digg all the news would still be there, it just wouldn’t have an anchor
Ego Centered
Networks where people are the social object and you connect around each other. If you take the people (profile data) out the network would fall flat
Typically, Object centered networks have started to move into becoming more Ego centered - like when Digg launched enhanced profile pages and friending. If you take a look at Youtube, it’s really not a social network, yet people love to call it that. It’s not. It’s a videosharing site with comments on the videos. How many casual users add friends and actively participate in the community? I don’t think it truely classifies as a social network, it’s a social site with networking features.
Now, here at 24.com we’ve had a few distinctions for a while. Elan Lohmann has been using the distinction between Content centric and Community centric networks for his presentations for ages - I first saw the difference in one of his slides. I would put them up here but they’re still intellectual property. These sites sit on a spectrum, with Content on the one side and Community on the other. It’s a very similar concept to the Ego/Object centered networks.
Now, a lot of this kind of thinking went through our thoughts with Utterbuzz. When I joined 24 it was to take a youth social network to market, but the product wasn’t near ready. In the time leading up further development, Facebook simply shot up in traffic and penetration. This shows what a ridiculous amount of traction Facebook has in the market. Our initial research showed that there were few 17-year old’s on Facebook - little enough for us to be able to go ahead and offer a competing product.
But this changed quickly. Within 2 months penetration rates amongst highschool kids shot up, so much so that we decided we had to change our strategy. We couldn’t offer a duplicate of Facebook - kids just won’t be interested. We’ve changed tack now, but not entirely.
What we realised is that Facebook is the ego-centric network of choice, and we shouldn’t try to compete with them head-on. It’s going to be a futile exercise. What we need to be focusing on is creating an object-orientated approach, offer something that kids can do on the site and interact with. We don’t want them to replace Facebook usage with Utterbuzz usage, we see this as more of concurrent usage. We’ve now changed tack to allow you to login to Utterbuzz with you Facebook account and take all your friends with you - in other words your friends discovery is still happening with Facebook, but your content discovery happens in Utterbuzz.
It’s an important distinction we believe will ensure our success. We are much less focused on people discovery (”Hey! All of my class is on Utterbuzz now I can message them!) - that happens in Facebook. People get really despondent if they have to fill in new friends on each single network they want to join. We want people to be able to say, “I’ve done all my friending, now I want to interact around content with them.”
Do you think this is a good approach?