Paul Jacobson

Ok, so you know that Nokia has given away navigation for life for Ovi Maps, right? Nokia also released a new version of Ovi Maps which makes location sharing that much easier.

So what makes Ovi Maps interesting now? Well, the “Share location” icon is your key to more dynamic location-based social activity. Ovi Maps connects to your Facebook account (I’d like to see Nokia connect to a range of services and let users pick which ones to update but for now its all about Facebook) and you can publish status updates coupled with location information on the go (you can also add photos to your postings). I went out for breakfast this morning:

If you click on that link in that post, it takes you to an Ovi Maps application in Facebook:

What means for you is that you can start sharing not only what you are doing but where you are too. There are lots of ways this could be useful. Nokia calls this Lifecasting:

Simon Dingle wrote a bit about some of the other features in Ovi Maps that are really useful for travellers. I think there is a fair amount of potential for local tourism too so if you are curious about what is going on in your own city, take a look at the Events and Lonely Planet guides too!

I’ve mentioned that I’ve had difficulty getting Ovi Maps to lock onto my location in anything under a few minutes (or sometimes at all). It turns out that there is a bug or some technical issue with SIM cards issued by MTN (this doesn’t surprise me) which have 14 digits serial numbers (there is a technical term for the serial number). The bug/issue interferes with A-GPS which is meant to speed up location tracking. I tested out a patch which will find its way into a future firmware update which fixes this issue and Ovi Maps now locks onto my position in seconds. Makes a big difference.

I received a Nokia 5800 Xpress for a follow up review (my original review is here). I have been hearing rave reviews about the phone in recent weeks and I mentioned to Nokia’s General Manager for SA, Mathia Nalappan that I wouldn’t mind revisiting my initial review. Nokia’s PR/communications agency, Fleishman Hillard kindly send me a review unit for a second take and I decided to use the 5800 exclusively while I have it and see how it fits into my day to day activities and how it performs generally.

I thought I’d do something a little different for this post and I am going to basically live blog my experience with the phone so you can get a sense of either a) what you may experience picking up the 5800 and integrating it into your life, or b) what a crazy person such as myself gets up to with the 5800 under the guise of productivity. I am going to integrate a FriendFeed channel/post where I will post updates as I use the 5800 and where you can respond, reply or voice some of your thoughts in addition to commenting on this post as usual (entirely up to you). I’d like this to a more interactive experience so feel free to pitch in. I am open to trying new apps or new things with the phone too (within the bounds of reason, the law and my budget). I may post a couple more photos and videos in this post, below the FriendFeed stream so be sure to check back here.

To begin with I’ll give you an idea what kind of user I am. I use my phones to access the Web quite a lot. They are not replacements for Firefox or Safari but very useful on the go. I email, tweet and sms a lot, hence a big reason I opted for my Nokia E71 when I replaced my N73 last year. I take my phone everywhere and I have to force myself to put it down. Build quality has become important to me since I got my E71, as is speed and reliability.

With that intro aside, here I go …

One of the debates that almost inevitably come up when touchscreen devices are discussed is the debate about physical keyboards and onscreen keyboards. It does come down to personal choice but my view is that a combination of a physical and an onscreen keyboard is probably best. A device like an E71 or a Blackberry is great but you can’t match a full touchscreen with the small screen on a device like that.

At the same time there is still something about a physical keyboard that I prefer. I live blogged an event last night on FriendFeed using the 5800 and while my typing speed and accuracy is definitely improving, I couldn’t help but think how much faster I was on my E71. This is one of the reasons I am more excited about the N97 than I am about a future iPhone. They N97 has a physical keyboard (as well as the onscreen keyboard) and that will make full screen Web browsing, tweeting and blogging so much easier (for me at least). It could be that I just need more time with the touchscreen and I’ll see how that goes during the course of the next few days as I continue using the 5800.

Leaving aside typing, S60 5th Edition touch interface works really well. I am still figuring out what I need to double tap and what I can tap once but buttons do what they are supposed to do when I tap them and there is a little fade transition between screens in the home screen that adds a nice visual element to the navigation experience. I like the way the menu options are laid out in applications like the Web browser and when making calls. I keep looking for menu items in the menus and forget about the icon that opens an onscreen set of options using icons. This is when I begin to appreciate a touchscreen device even more. Navigation is that much easier although it still isn’t as smooth as the iPhone/iPod Touch.

You may ask why I keep referring back to the iPhone/iPod Touch. The reason is that I believe the iPhone UI is probably the gold standard at the moment for touchscreen UIs. As much as the iPhone’s hardware specifications disappoint, its software is well thought out, powerful and works brilliantly. At the same time hardware does make a big difference, to me at least. I wouldn’t compare the 5800 to the iPhone (there is really no real comparison, the iPhone is in a different class) but I can see myself comparing the N97 to the iPhone (when I get my hands on an N97 either to review or when I buy one) and saying that the iPhone’s UI is still superior in many ways but the N97’s superior hardware and pretty decent software make it a winner. Of course Apple may yet surprise me if/when it announces its next generation iPhone.

Back to the 5800. I still have the phone for another 2 weeks and I am glad I have been given this opportunity to use it as my day to day device. Looking back at my original review, my views about the build quality haven’t changed all that much but now that I am actually using the device, those issues are less important. If anything the 5800 is a little too small for me and my hands (another reason why the N97 hits a sweet spot for me) and, as I pointed out in my FriendFeed stream, the screen is a little too narrow for me to have a more satisfying browsing experience (it feels like I am missing some screen space).

Melissa Attree has been talking about her 5800 quite a bit and she seems to love it. She is a “marketing and communications professional” and has adopted her 5800 as her business and personal phone. Her comments about the phone got me curious about it again and sparked my desire to try the phone out again. I am glad she did because I am a lot more positive about the 5800 now than I was initially.

I haven’t used the 5800 in place of my iPod yet and I’ll make a point of doing that in the coming days. I have played around with the Nokia music player on and off and the speakers on the 5800 are terrific. I am going to try integrate the 5800 with my Mac using Nokia’s media transfer software which integrates with iTunes and use that bridge to load music and videos onto the 5800. The standard headphone jack means I can use my usual headphones (unlike my E71 which has a smaller, incompatible jack).

Bottom line for me is that I can recommend this phone. If you want a more serious business or messaging device this might not be the phone for you but it is worth taking a look at it before you make your decision. I’ll be happy to return to my E71 when I am finished with the 5800 but I will miss the touchscreen enough to feel there is something missing in my mobile experience. I’ll post more thoughts and impressions to the FriendFeed stream and it looks like those posts are being mirrored in the comments to this post (apologies for the duplication).

While blogging is not the be all, end all that it once was in the social Web experience, it would be a mistake to write blogging off as outmoded and no longer relevant (even if it is for those sufficiently ahead of the adoption curve that blogging is old hat already). The one big advantage that blogging has over other media we increasingly use on a day to day basis is its capacity to communicate ideas and messages in longer format posts. Sure Twitter is great for putting stuff out there and (arguably) having interesting real-time conversations, but Twitter is constrained to 140 text characters at a time. Anyone who thinks that Twitter is an appropriate medium to communicate a thought process, possibly with multimedia, is deluding himself.

It is easy to get caught up in the new Web bling and declare old media obsolete. To an extent we have seen that with the “newspapers are dead” debate (I believe that paper based newspapers are on their way out but the professional newspaper will still be around for a while longer if publishers can make successful transitions to digital options – preferrably RSS, even if this is a paid subscription option). The real shift from blog centric communities a year or so ago to where we are (or where we are heading) is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to establish new communal centres focussed on our blogs as the background noise increases. Instead the answer is to consider shifting to a distributed community model and send your content in its various forms out into the social Web using a variety of distribution channels, whether those be lifestreaming services, social platforms or individual services at a time. This is at least the model I have adopted because my friends (real-life and online contacts) are all over the place. Some of them use FriendFeed, some prefer Jaiku. Others use Flickr as their primary photo service and many use Facebook for their social interactions. The point is that it makes more sense for me to send my stuff out to my friends rather than trying to persuade them to subscribe to and follow yet another service or content stream. This is about finite attention and how not to divide your friends’ attention even further unnecessarily.

Coming back to my thoughts about blogs, the format of a blog may vary, as may its platform but there is a place for longer format content pieces and that is something blogs are great tools for. I sometimes forget this in my rush to try out the new stuff and then I remember the value of a blog when I read some of the better written posts in my NetNewsWire subscriptions.

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blog, blogging, distributed social networking, lifestream, lifestreaming, social media, social networking, community

I’ve been thinking about blogging in the context of all the other ways we can express ourselves on the Web today quite a bit lately. For the most part I have been thinking about a distinction between a more centralised blog-type publishing platform and a distributed approach to publishing as an extension of my thoughts about lifestreaming as a primary means of connecting/reaching out/publishing.

A blog has been a focal point of discussion for a while now in the fringe of the SA Web community. It isn’t anything new and the novelty has pretty much worn off and those people who continue to blog regularly do so because they are more committed to the platform as a medium for their messages than because blogging is the new Big Thing. Of course this is not indicative of the state of the SA Web generally because the mainstream is only really becoming aware of this “blogging thing” in addition to arguably the better known “Facebook thing”. For the mainstream blogging still represents potential for online interaction although somewhat shrouded in mystery. This, at least, is my sense of things at the moment.

Turning back to those of us who have been blogging for a while now (I will have been blogging for 4 years in December), some of us may be re-examining the value of a blog in the context of the broader social Web. Most of us use Twitter/Identi.ca/FriendFeed/Plurk/insert-name-of-new-thing-here daily, often far more often than we actually post longer form blogs. I have a strong leaning towards a more distributed approach to social media through lifestreaming and I have my various content streams feeding into Jaiku, Pulse, FriendFeed and, recently, Facebook in more stripped down format (mainly because I don’t seem to have much luck getting the Facebook apps I use to present my stuff the way I want it presented).

A blog’s success depends on persuading readers to either visit the blog regularly or subscribe to its feed. In that sense it can be somewhat limited in its reach and, ultimately, its influence. You may have the best written posts on your blog but if no-one reads them, do they exist in any meaningful way on the Web? Anyone who has watched a presentation given by any of the social media gurus doing the rounds knows that the appeal of a blog is its ability to reach out to potentially huge audiences. That potential is still there but with the growing number of blogs, it is that much harder to stand out. That being said the usual ways of building blog traffic still apply. If you post regularly on your blog, engage with your readers, establish a regular and persistent presence on other blogs through commenting or trackbacks (and so on), you may well find your readership growing.

Short of achieving a sizable readership another way to expand your reach is to cultivate networks of contacts either across a number of properties or by focussing your efforts on more pervasive platforms. We do talk about social networking after all. These properties include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and any number of more obscure or focussed networks. A more distributed approach means you have a better chance of reaching more people although the further afield you go the more difficult it is to maintain a cohesive network. Maintaining meaningful relationships takes time and there is only so much of that available so it becomes important to limit your scope to the networks that will best support your intentions. This is a big reason why people tend to stick with the likes of Twitter despite it having a sad history of poor reliability. The fact is people who have been using Twitter have a sizable network on Twitter and that is an incentive to keep using the service. People may try out a range of new services but ultimately return to their bigger networks.

On the other hand you can have a longer reach using single services that have a more integrated approach to and which may even require a redefinition of all your social media activities. The very concept of a blog has to change and Nic posted a pretty good take on this distinction a little while ago in his post titled ‘Facebook’s “Note Bloggers” must outnumber us “Real Bloggers”‘ where he talked about how Facebook users who publish their thoughts using Facebook Notes may well outnumber so called “real bloggers” who publish on the more traditional platforms like WordPress, TypePad and Movable Type. At the time I commented that the distinction Nic drew was a false distinction:

I didn’t really think about Facebook notes as “blog” posts but you do have a point. I probably do have a fair number of my friends seeing my notes and other entries so from a visibility perspective that is pretty potent.

Another factor is that most of my friends have a stronger connection to me and interest in what I am doing than many of the visitors to my blog which makes the views more meaningful.

I also think the distinction you draw between Note Bloggers and Real Bloggers is probably the wrong distinction to draw. Real bloggers are bloggers who, among other things, share a strong personal connection to their readers. If Note Bloggers can achieve that on Facebook and we struggle to achieve that on our islands in the blogosphere, who are the *real* Real Bloggers?

I do think he made a good point about not underestimating Facebook Notes users. If you divorce the concept of a blog from the specific platform the content is published on and rather focus on the activity of publishing your thoughts on the Web in a way that enables and facilitates feedback from readers (my Mac’s dictionary defines a blog as “a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces an ongoing narrative”) then blogging extends to Facebook and pretty much any other platform that allows for this sort of publishing. The point is that when you consider “blogging” in this light the so-called “regular blogs” Nic spoke about become less significant in the context of the broader local blogosphere. When you add a variety of lifestreaming services and online contact points to a person’s profile you can imagine the reach an average person can have just by updating her status or publishing a photo.

In a sense my Facebook example isn’t the best example. Facebook is a pretty self-contained ecosystem from a user perspective. Facebook may import a variety of content from various sources using Facebook Apps but Facebook’s outputs are pretty limited. The idea with Facebook is to concentrate activity in Facebook. I read a while ago about how Facebook is the biggest photo sharing website, as an example. You could probably do all your social networking in Facebook alone and never step outside into the broader Web.

That form of interaction we spoke about in the context of blogging last year and the year before that is available on a bigger scale in services like Facebook (which has continued to see tremendous growth recently) and FriendFeed. Between these sorts of services the relevance of a blog in the conventional sense, as opposed to the broader definition I suggested above, requires some thought. Dave Duarte wrote about a perspective of blogs as amateur publishing tools on his blog last month. Nic commented on this idea and wrote a bit about how his blogs have proven to be valuable networking tools in their own right.

I am not sure I agree with Dave’s portrayal of blogs as amateurish because I think this devalues blogging as an activity in the broader sense. I do wonder about the absolute value of a blog in the broader sense though and while there are many blogs (in the narrower sense) that are tremendously successful both in South Africa and elsewhere, when it comes to the social Web, blogs are not the only or even most effective way of engaging effectively with people in our social networks.

Taking it all a step further I am beginning to wonder if it is possible to establish and maintain an effective and coherent presence on the Web using a more distributed approach in a business context. I have been mulling over a variety of options for my business presence on the Web which has primarily been focussed on a WordPress blog. Could that change to a more decentralised model where I maintain a presence on a variety of sites ranging from the high density Facebook to lower density spaces out there, whatever they may be? Is a single content-based focal point necessary for a modern business or could something like this serve as a focal point for an effective and pervasive Web presence?

Photo: River-Porter waterfall post-floods 2 by Earthwatcher licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 2.0 license

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blog, blogging, blogosphere, facebook, friendfeed, lifestream, lifestreaming, pulse, distributed social networking

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 it 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

I just came across this introduction to FriendFeed for the, as yet, uninitiated:

It was posted by Tim Steward over at Web2-Oh. Catchy name Tim.

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friendfeed, introduction

I noticed John McCrea’s post about this meme known as the “centralised / centralized me (depending on your language preference)” meme which has started to do the rounds on the some of the more popular blogs, like TechCrunch and Loic Le Meur’s blog.

Much of the focus is on FriendFeed and given that FriendFeed seems to be the new Twitter these days, this is hardly surprising but as I pointed out a little while ago, this idea of you as the focal point and origin of your many content streams is hardly new.

Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur really seem to be missing the point here with FriendFeed. Arrington has the following concern:

But there’s something just a little weird about FriendFeed, some people are starting to mumble. It’s an aggregated “me” but it sits in a centralized site (in fact, centralization is kind of the point). FriendFeed is a (and hopes to become “the”) Centralized Me. It’s a data silo. True, it’s a friendly data silo, with APIs and RSS feeds to move some of the data around, but it’s ultimately housed on their servers, and always will be.

Le Meur pitches in with this concern:

The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it’s not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody (except the software and host, TypePad of course, needless to say).

The value in FriendFeed is not as a centralised “data silo” but as one of many possible channels for content. Sure once you run all of your content feeds into FriendFeed then those content streams are centralised on one server but FriendFeed is merely one of the latest such aggregators to have surfaced. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, don’t forget about Jaiku, Tumblr, Plaxo Pulse and even the dubious Facebook (not to mention an even more recent entrant, Social Thing!). Each of these services can perform a similar function: aggregating and streaming your multiple streams of content, whether they be blog posts, images, videos or interesting feed items. If you make use of a few of these services as distinct channels of your content then the focal point shifts from these services back to you as the originator of the content.

FriendFeed becomes one channel out of many, each of which aggregates the content you posted to the source service (for example, Flickr, Vimeo and your blog). Your content is not centralised on FriendFeed, FriendFeed is one distribution channel for that content. The idea of a data silo just doesn’t fit with this model. Sure you don’t exactly own your FriendFeed page the way you own/control a page you set up on your own server or a hosted service but how important is that model of ownership when you remain the owner of your content and can distribute it on any similar lifestreaming service?

The “centralised me” is exactly that. I am the focal point, the centre of my lifestreaming experience on the Web. FriendFeed is just one of half a dozen vehicles I could use at any time and perhaps even use at the same time.

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lifestream, lifestreaming, centralized me, arrington, le meur, missing the point