Paul Jacobson

I have discovered The Social Web TV. The episode I am watching features John McCrea and Joseph Smarr from Plaxo and David Recordon from Six Apart. Here is the basic intro to the new Web TV show:

Who owns your data and content?

Why don’t the social networks and communication tools you use work well together? Tune in each week to learn about the progress being made toward opening up the Social Web.

With a revolving cast of characters, we’ll have some of the key technologists working on building the Social Web to explain what is going on; but this isn’t a show about technology. It’s about explaining what’s going on in the fight to make sure you have control of your data, your content, and your privacy — and the freedom to access your stuff from all over the Web.

It is a pretty easy to watch show running on Viddler which I really like. It is also great to see John McCrea in person, so to speak, talking on a panel with Smarr. It is no secret that I am a Plaxo fan and the work they are doing to keep the Social Web open.

I am still trying to figure out if there is a feed off the site itself I can subscribe to in NetNewsWire though … Nevermind … found it. I clicked on the feed icon in Firefox’s location bar.

Technorati Tags:
john mccrea, social graph, social media, joseph smarr, david recordon, the social web tv, viddler

No Comments yet »

I am really excited to share the news that FNB has just launched Shine 2010:

Shine 2010, an online social networking platform which offers a place for South Africans to congregate, learn and communicate in the run-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup^TM.

Shine 2010 will serve as the first port of call for 2010 good news, offering insights into the critical infrastructure projects and serving as an outlet for the positive stories that aren’t currently being told.

Apart from providing news and feature articles, Shine 2010 leverages the power of online media to offer interactive and engaging content. This approach ensures that the community can consume the good news according to their own preferences. These include a blog, regular podcast interviews, a Facebook group, a YouTube channel and the FNB Roving Reporters interviews. The FNB Roving Reporters - a first for a South African corporate - will serve as citizen reporters, hitting the streets to source video interviews with key influencers, whilst also polling public perception ahead of 2010.

Shine 2010 is yet another one of FNB’s digital initiatives and follows the launch of FNBTV in early June 2008. Furthermore, the bank continues to engage in social media with MXit and FNB Facebook employee groups.

I had the fantastic opportunity to work with FNB’s PR people, specifically Casey Monteiro at Fleishman-Hillard, on the legal side of this project over the last 2 weeks or so. The terms and conditions will feature Creative Commons licenses for content published on the site that FNB’s people produce (an aspect which I am pretty excited about) as well as some pretty interesting tie-ins with a variety of social media platforms including Flickr (the images are licensed under a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license), YouTube and del.icio.us. There is already a lot of content available which you can share. I understand there is also going to be a Facebook application so look out for that! Oh, don’t forget to get the code for the countdown clock on the site too (top right):

Visitors to the site will find positive news about South Africa and the upcoming World Cup in news articles, blog posts and even a podcast. It is really good to see a major corporate in SA like FNB launching an initiative like this. Sites like Shine 2010 and SA Rocks go quite some way to balancing out the often overwhelmingly negative news that sells newspapers. I am privileged to have had an opportunity to work with Casey and FNB on this project and contribute in my small way.

Technorati Tags:
creative commons, del.icio.us, flickr, youtube, shine 2010, fnb, fleishman-Hillard, fifa world cup, world cup, soccer

No Comments yet »

Dear Uncle Steve

Like half of Mac-dom I was keenly following each and every update posted on the Web during the recent WWDC. I even downloaded the video of your Stevenote just in case the coverage I watched missed something important. I drank deeply of the KoolAid that night and was determined to wait my turn for an iPhone 3G, until a day or two later when your narcotic wore off.

Last night I decided to try another of the seemingly fabulous items you announced: MobileMe. At least I decided to try out that 60 free trial of .Mac which, according to all reports, will soon be reborn into MobileMe.

Signing up was really easy and, at first, there was quite a thrill as I starting to plug all my applications into .Mac and watched everything sync with everything else in the background. I even got myself another email address (not quite the one I wanted but one that works). It was fun and I was starting to see how I could share my calendars with my wife so easily and how I could just do all this cool connected stuff that has probably been possible all along using other services but which just didn’t share the Mac karma like .Mac does and like MobileMe will.

Heck, I even got my wife to roll her eyes and that is the single biggest indicator that I am deep in Macland without a GPS.

As before with the iPhone I spent a little more time looking at what other people think about MobileMe on its own and compared to other solutions like Google’s basket of goodies and it turned out that all was not golden or delicious in the land of .Mac (soon to be MobileMe). Sure there is some cool stuff like automatically pushing updates to all my devices (at the moment I only really have one - my MacBook) but I can access IMAP mail already using Gmail. I have Google Calendar too which theoretically syncs well with my Mac using Spanning Sync (ok, the less I say about my Spanning Sync experiences the better) and Plaxo itself. You even made it possible for me to sync my Mac address book with Yahoo! and Gmail straight out of Address Book.

The fact that there are other services out there which do similar things isn’t the end of the story for me. .Mac does it all so much better and I am sure MobileMe will be even better than .Mac. What is a bit of a show-stopper is the $99 price tag for a single user (compared to that the $149 price tag for the family account isn’t too bad, but still). Granted that works out to less than $10 a month, it still costs more than I pay Plaxo for my premium subscription and what I dropped on Spanning Sync a couple months ago for this year’s subscription. I don’t know why you do this to me Uncle Steve. That is a lot of cash to spend on a service that is so similar to the free options and double the cost of a paid service that does almost the same thing. And it isn’t like the deal is that good to justify such a price. Sure 20GB is a lot of space for mail and files but I pay a lot less than $99 for a lot more storage space on Amazon’s S3 service and I get a 6GB mailbox (and counting) on Gmail. So what’s the big deal with MobileMe? The cool interface and built in connectivity with my Mac? Sure that is in your favour but the price tag just doesn’t cut the mustard or do whatever it should do to make sense to me.

Of course I could be missing something and I’ll be using the rest of my trial to figure that out. I don’t think I am missing anything though. I just think you are being a little unreasonable here.

Your loyal, yet slowly fading fan,

Paul

Technorati Tags:
mail.app, plaxo, mobileme, .mac, sync, address book, steve jobs, uncle steve, letter, push contacts, push calendar, push email, mac, integration, spanning sync

1 Comment »

So says Bev “Feisty Female”:

If you haven’t heard about the Rocking the Daisies Music Festival you’ve been hiding under the wrong rock! Now in its third year, this is the coolest festival by far and the fact that it’s eco-friendly to boot, is commendable. (Their pay-off line is PARTY HARD, TREAD LIGHTLY.)

Bev’s question for a couple people (myself included) is what I would take along to this eco-friendly music festival. These are the five things I would take along:

1. My mobile phone for updates;
2. My camera for stills and short videos to be edited and posted later;
3. Possibly my MacBook (although I tend to go a little light at these sorts of events);
4. Sunglasses, sun cream and maybe even a hat; and
5. My iPod (I know it is a music festival but my iPod has my own personal music festival for those moments when I need some familar inspiration (the iPod would probably necessitate the MacBook to charge up and sync).

Technorati Tags:
feisty female, feistyfemale, rocking the daisies, bev, eco friendly

2 Comments »

There is quite a bit of chatter about moving the conversation away from Twitter to FriendFeed. The advocates of this move are not just less known FriendFeed fans but some of the bigger personalities on the Web. Jason Calacanis recently declared that he was shifting his conversation almost exclusively to FriendFeed from Twitter for a week. Leo Laporte confessed that most of his attention is on FriendFeed which is more conducive to conversations than Twitter. I talked a little about this a while ago when I was using Jaiku as my primary status service.

The one big issue with Twitter (aside from his reliable unreliability) is that conversations can be difficult to track and contribute to. Tools like Twhirl help you keep track of replies and respond to posts but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to view all the replies to a particular post in one place so other people can engage in a conversation both with the original poster but also other commentators. There are a couple services which are far better suited to conversations than Twitter: Jaiku, Pownce, Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed are just the ones I use (although my focus tends to be more on Pulse and FriendFeed). Each of these services have proper commenting and reply features so you can view the post and the comments about the post and, in the process, track and participate in the conversation. The “@” reply mechanism in Twitter is crude and a bit like shouting out across a room hoping that the person you are replying to hears you and responds. With proper commenting and replies it is more like standing in a circle have a group conversation.

As much as the Twitter loyalists swear by Twitter because everyone seems to be using it, I have to wonder why everyone remains so loyal when there have been a series of outages and crashes and Twitter just doesn’t have the functionality other services do have. Although Twitter has multiple access points, they are not all available on an ongoing basis so using that as a differentiator is disingenuous. That being said, it would be helpful to have more developed mobile clients for FriendFeed and Pulse (Pownce has a pretty good mobile interface and Jaiku is probably has the most developed and integrated mobile application yet - it is just a pity Jaiku is pretty much closed off to new users for the time being). Thankfully popular apps like Twhirl make it really easy to track and contribute to FriendFeed items too so that may well give FriendFeed an edge over the other aggregators even though Pulse has a number of cool commenting and reply features too.

Notwithstanding my reservations about Twitter, I enjoy using as an easy way to get thoughts out there into the ether. I do prefer to engage in the conversation on Pulse/FriendFeed/Jaiku where my Twitter stream is fed (of the three, FriendFeed picks up my new tweets the fastest, followed by Pulse). I tend to use the aggregators as access points for people who may follow me there to my content so Twitter still has value to me as an important stream of consciousness which feeds into Pulse/FriendFeed/Jaiku. Despite what many say, Twitter is really not a conversation tool. It isn’t designed for that and doesn’t do a very good job managing and representing conversations. What makes a lot more sense is to stimulate conversations on the aggregators.

Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, jaiku, leo laporte, lifestream, lifestreaming, plaxo, pownce, pulse, twhirl, twitter, jason calacanis

3 Comments »