Paul Jacobson

I haven’t seen this much hype about a Google product since Gmail launched a few years ago. Invitations to use Google Wave have been trickling out to eager users for a couple weeks now and I managed to secure one thanks to Gavin Magid who sent me one of his invites. Like many of you, I watched the demonstration video a while ago and I have been pretty excited about Wave since then although probably not for the same reasons you may have been excited about it.

Wave was touted as a replacement for email and a cure for world hunger almost from the beginning. This has created some really unrealistic expectations, more in the minds of email addicts than people fighting world hunger (unlike the email addicts, they knew immediately Wave wasn’t going to fix world hunger). I know some people have said that the Rasmussens said that Wave would replace email but I don’t remember that (Lars Rasmussen did tell the Wall Street Journal that Wave is a modern version of email though). What I do remember is how they demonstrated that Wave could revolutionise how we collaborate. Unfortunately there is so much hype about this “email replacement” that there has been a fair amount of negativity about the actual product now that more and more people have had a chance to work with it. Scoble initially took a pretty dim view of Wave (also be sure to read his follow up post about how the email metaphor is unhelpful) although I think he pretty much summed up Wave’s value (in my opinion, at least) when he said the following:

See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave.

That’s really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.

But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people.

It also ignores the productivity gains that we’ve gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

His focus on Wave as a social networking tool is representative of a number of perspectives I have come across already. A couple people I have been testing Wave with have commented on Wave’s value as a Twitter replacement (Really? Is Twitter really something every vaguely similar tool has to replicate?). I think those people are missing the point, just like their email focussed colleagues.

That being said, Wave can replace email for our collaboration oriented tasks. I see Wave as a potential Google Docs+ service. While it lacks decent text formatting tools at the moment (ok, remember Google Wave is still very much a preview version at the moment and is actively being developed and improved) I see this as being a terrific way to collaborate in a team on a document or project. Like Louis Gray, I don’t see Wave being suitable for mass communication, it just gets way too crazy and will only take more time just trying to track multiple branches of conversation threads. Here is a quick demo I made which will give you an idea how chaotic a wave can become:

I’m still messing around with Wave and the product is clearly still in early days but I can see this becoming a tremendously helpful collaboration tool in my business. I work with people in different cities and countries and having Wave available through Google Apps would enable us to collaborate both realtime and asynchronously pretty effectively. Bear in mind that Google Docs already has collaboration functionality built into it (heck, Google Docs is designed around collaboration) but Wave just does it so much better based on what I’ve seen.

I mentioned the debate about Wave as an email replacement earlier in this post. I don’t agree with that characterization when it comes to run of the mill email. Email is built on well established standards and is pervasive. Wave is built on a mix of open protocols and what seems to be a new set of protocols (I could be wrong here) and while Wave is meant to be federated, you’re basically asking people to roll out support for a new infrastructure to replace email where the benefits for certain types of email are not clear.

On the other hand I do see Wave as replacing email for some forms of collaboration. Just like wikis had the potential to change email behaviour by presenting opportunities to collaborate on documents and projects on the wiki rather than using loads of emails, Wave has a similar promise. In fact it is probably more useful to think of Wave as being more like a combination of a wiki and a document service than email per se. Email is really a means to communicate ideas, changes to documents and so on. Wave is where you can actually do all that work without using email as an intermediary.

Now what Wave may have been intended for and what people actually use it for are two very different things. Twitter wasn’t meant to be a chat service and yet that is exactly what we have been using it for (well, in addition to the other stuff). If you are planning to use Wave to replace Twitter or have rampant email conversations with loads of people you are going to become pretty frustrated pretty quickly. If you are planning to use Wave for focussed collaboration then you are on to something.

Ultimately we are going to have to wait a little longer to see how Wave impacts on our activities online. The “new, shiny” quality will fade soon enough and if it doesn’t help us become more productive it will quickly fall by the wayside. I don’t think it will but I do think that, despite all the hype, Wave will probably become a little like Gmail and Google Docs and part of our workflow wallpaper. Its probably better that way too. I don’t want to focus too much on the tool but rather on the work it helps me get done that much better.

FriendFeed has been largely ignored by the Twitterati and they are poorer for that lack of attention. This may well include you if you have ignored FriendFeed in favour of Twitter thinking that the absence of your Twitter community on FriendFeed renders FriendFeed irrelevant. The simple fact is that FriendFeed is probably one of the underappreciated services in the social Web today and it could well prove to be one of the most disruptive.

FriendFeed was perhaps easier to ignore when it still looked like this:

It wasn’t as clean and simple as Twitter’s UI:

… or as feature rich as Facebook:

It seemed to fall between both services and it didn’t occupy an compelling enough space to persuade a significant number of users to switch from Twitter or Facebook to FriendFeed. Admittedly I was one of those people who still focussed on Twitter and FriendFeed and preferred to use FriendFeed as another aggregator, perhaps even as a backup to my Plaxo Pulse profile.

This isn’t the first time a new service has emerged which has been regarded as a contender for Twitter’s throne. Jaiku was in a very similar position not too long ago and while it has been relegated largely to the Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda category, Jaiku’s offering is/was similar to FriendFeed’s and it was, for various reasons, a superior option. Unfortunately Jaiku failed to attract a sufficient following and doesn’t really feature in this space anymore.

FriendFeed is, in part, an aggregator. It enables you to aggregate your various content streams and feeds to create a lifestream. There are a couple other services which do this (or purport to do this) but FriendFeed seems to be one of the bigger services.

Another powerful feature (which was highlighted during a recent episode of the Gillmore Gang) is the FriendFeed search functionality. Robert Scoble goes to some length emphasising the value of FriendFeed’s search functionality compared to Twitter’s own search functionality. The value of a decent search engine attached to and indexing these types of services is the sheer amount of current data you can turn up on a given topic. Search results are frequently more immediate on Twitter or FriendFeed than they are on Google. That can make a big difference to some people.

FriendFeed launched a new design earlier this week and I’ve been using the beta site almost exclusively.

There are a couple aspects of the new design which will be familiar to Twitter and Facebook users alike and this is for good reason. Whatever you may say about Twitter, its basic design has proven to be very appealing and that is worth emulating. That said, the comparisons between Twitter and FriendFeed begin to fade from that point onwards.

Twitter is popular largely because of its simplicity. You type in 140 characters, keep an eye on mentions (formerly known as replies), direct messages and you can run searches. That is pretty much it for the main site. An array of 3rd party applications add additional functionality like saved searches (Twhirl) or category lists for Twitter followers (Tweetdeck).

What really distinguishes FriendFeed from Twitter is how it is so much better suited to meaningful conversations. Twitter users use Twitter to engage in conversations all the time using the “@” or “D” conventions and it works reasonably well in most cases. Replies are not threaded but you can click on certain links to see which reply tweets respond to which messages. The result is a somewhat fragmented conversation with replies scattered all over the place in the main Twitter stream. The mentions/replies page collates your replies/mentions in a single window although you still need to click on a link to see which mention or reply links to which post.

FriendFeed represents comments inline so it is very simple to follow responses from the person you replied to or who replied to you. FriendFeed also allows you to see what other people are saying about the item you commented on and engage in conversations with them! This is not so easy in Twitter. If you doubt what I am saying here, compare a typical Twitter conversation with a typical FriendFeed conversation (take a look at the screenshots above and below for examples of FriendFeed conversations – notice the comment below the entry? You don’t have that on Twitter.

Facebook has been doing this for a little while now too. Its a model that works. Another thing FriendFeed does really well is it enables users to create conversations out of an array of content streams by applying the same commenting and “Like” functionality to all imported streams. Facebook also has a “Like” option although this is a recent addition. This is a handy way to indicate your preference for something without having to actually comment on it although Facebook seems to think you need to comment to explain a Like. It brings up a comment box if you just click to Like something whereas FriendFeed simply adds you to the list of people who Liked an entry.

Search plays an important role in both Twitter and FriendFeed. Both give you the ability to create realtime searches on various topics. The way you create the searches differ but both will update the search results dynamically as more users discuss or post about that topic. Twitter’s search is limited to what is posted on Twitter whereas FriendFeed’s search includes all content post to the site. Scoble has argued that FriendFeed will actually give you more accurate and more relevant search results but I haven’t done any comparisons.

A related benefit of FriendFeed is discoverability. It is much easier to find new content and new, interesting people on FriendFeed with such a wide variety of content entering the stream. FriendFeed also has a sort of “friends of friends” feature which shows you what your friends’ friends are posting and that is another great way to find new people and their new content.

I discovered one piece of information which appealed to me. When you look a user up on the beta site you can also get a sense of how many posts to expect from them.

This is useful if you are concerned about being overwhelmed by someone’s posts. Of course you can create filters to enable you to focus on specific groups of contacts. Filters are pretty important in the new FriendFeed and although the main stream can be a little overwhelming, the power is in these filters and how they give you the ability to focus on what is most important or relevant to you at that point in time. You can see some of my filters on my profile page:

Ok, I’ve talked a little about what Twitter does and what FriendFeed does. The best way to really compare both services is to take them for a drive yourself. It is worth also comparing the current FriendFeed site and the beta site to see the differences and also get an idea which features are still to be added to the beta site.

There are two ways you can approach FriendFeed. You can look at it as a Twitter replacement and it will certainly do that job well (except if you have a substantial community on Twitter which isn’t also on FriendFeed) or you can look at FriendFeed as a complementary service to Twitter. While I am tempted to see it as the former in my more fanatical moments, in practice I use the two services in tandem. I have two categories of content services. One category includes services which I create or post content to first and the second include those services I repost that content to in order to create lifestreams. The diagram below illustrates this quite well and gives you an idea what my thoughts are about Twitter and FriendFeed in particular:

FriendFeed could take over from Twitter but it could take a while before your FriendFeed community would match your Twitter community and that is a challenge. One of the reasons people stick with Twitter is because everyone is there and that is still the central draw. What FriendFeed brings to the party is a better developed set of conversational tools. As handy as the “@” convention is, it is a terrible way to conduct a real conversation. Twitter itself seems to agree. Instead of “replies”, it talks about “mentions”. FriendFeed’s threaded (there is another term they used which I can’t remember) comments gives you the ability to comment directly and transparently on a specific entry and, having the benefit of seeing what everyone else is saying, engage in a conversation with those people too. It is all right there on the page, no extra clicks required to track a whole conversation. What would be handy is if FriendFeed could somehow determine which “@” replies are responses to specific Twitter posts and represent those threads in FriendFeed itself.

No-one is saying you must stop using Twitter. This isn’t an either/or question. It is about using the best tools for what you want to do. Twitter is a quick and easy way to get something out there in 140 characters or less (FriendFeed can do the job just as easily, albeit it to a potentially smaller audience if you have spent most of your time on Twitter). FriendFeed can take those posts, together with all your other posts from all your other services and help you conduct real conversations around and about them.

In other words, if you have dismissed FriendFeed as a non-starter contender for the Twitter throne, you have misunderstood FriendFeed completely. You can stick with Twitter to the exclusion of all else and you’ll probably be happy with that but if you want a richer experience of the realtime Web, you really should take a look at FriendFeed. Create an account, add your Twitter and other feeds to it and see what happens.

One more thing (update): Scoble captured much of the presentation FriendFeed gave to a closed group before the beta site was made available to everyone. It is worth watching his videos because you get a sense of what the thinking was behind the scenes.

I had a debate with Eve Dmochowska recently about her choice of platform for a business group. She picked LinkedIn for the group and one of my initial thoughts is that I’d like to see the group on Facebook rather than LinkedIn. I have two reasons for this: the first is that I have an aversion to LinkedIn and see it as evil and the second is that I no longer see Facebook as just a social (as in personal) network but rather as a multi-purpose networking platform.

Eve essentially explained that she believes LinkedIn gives the group greater credibility as a business group given LinkedIn’s business focus (LinkedIn isn’t and will never be a social/personal networking site). I respect her and I understand her perspective. Eve is one of the smartest people I know in the SA social media space. She isn’t alone in her view that LinkedIn is a far better choice for business networking activities than Facebook. I was chatting to Gaby Rosario earlier today about her thoughts on the matter and I believe she feels similarly.

At the same time I have a different perspective of Facebook after long maintaining that Facebook isn’t a business networking tool. I remember having a conversation with Paul Walsh when he declared he was quitting LinkedIn in favour of Facebook. I didn’t agree with him and insisted that LinkedIn was a superior platform for business networking. Suffice to say my two reasons I mentioned above have persuaded me to change my mind about Facebook. Given what awaits us in the form of Facebook’s proposed governance structure I am also far more comfortable to invest my time and content in Facebook going forward.

What clinches it for me is this little graph and a post I just read about Facebook’s increasing prominence on the social Web, most likely alongside Google as its only real counterpart.

LinkedIn may be the single biggest business network but it looks pretty flat to me compared to Facebook’s dramatic rise depicted in this graph. While LinkedIn is hardly fading away (I still have an up to date profile on the service) I don’t see it as a focal point of my business presence online.

Facebook started off as a personal social networking site and that is its emphasis. At the same time it has much to offer businesses in the form of its pretty appealing Pages. I also read somewhere that we may see the introduction of personas that would allow Facebook users to present distinct personas based on their business and personal needs. Put all this together and you can’t help but see Facebook as a multi-purpose networking platform.

So you have comments enabled on your blog, you get notifications when someone comments, you may reply, life goes on. That may have worked just fine when your social space was your blog and a couple other blogs. That doesn’t work anymore on a Web characterised by lifestreams, shared posts on social networks and content, tweets and comments distributed across the Web. One thing that bugs me is that I might comment on a post somewhere and miss responses to my post or other interesting comments just because I have forgotten about the blog in the meantime.

Comments sections are increasingly where the conversation is and confining comments to a single site is anachronistic. If comments are to have their place in the greater conversation they need to be allowed to roam free and return to you with friends. So if you are serious about comments and about the conversations they convey, it is time to step up to the plate and do something about it.

Make comments social

I’ve used CoComment for a while now and it tracks comments you post to blogs and their responses over a period of time. For a while it was one of the very few services that went some way to keeping me engaged in a conversation through comments on a blog even though the interface through my browser was a little clunky and painful at times.

Disqus integrates into most major blogging platforms and creates a kind of social overlay on top of your existing commenting functionality (at least, that is how I understand it). Disqus users can track conversations they are participating in on Disqus enabled sites across the Web and share those conversations with their contacts and followers on services like FriendFeed. Disqus turns your comments into more effective conversation pieces and enables your commentators to engage in conversations that they can track and contribute to even if they are not on your site.

It gets better because Disqus integrates with Facebook Connect and Seesmic so you can not only comment on the site itself but also feed your comments directly back to your Seesmic stream or your Facebook public stream too. Oh, Disqus comments can also sync with FriendFeed (another great conversation tool you may be underestimating).

Mashable is currently testing the next iteration of Disqus which aggregates comments about your posts elsewhere on the Web in the comments section of your blog. Just take a look at the Mashable post for more about this and for an illustration of how this looks in practice. If you still think I am drinking the Disqus Koolaid, read Fred Wilson’s post about why you should use Disqus.

I just started playing around with another service that takes the comments-based conversation to a new level. Ever hear of a service called Backtype? I saw something about it recently and created a profile in case something came up in future. It wasn’t until I listened to an old episode of TWiT that I realised what a cool service it really is. Backtype heads off on to the Web armed with a little information about you and finds out where you have been commenting about stuff. It then creates a kind of comments lifestream using that data. You can set up keyword alerts (very similar interface to Google Alerts) that let you know when people actually talk about you in comments.

It is certainly a departure from the humdrum site specific comments so why not check these cool tools out? Another tool to take a look at is IntenseDebate (a bit like Disqus). Of course you may not be all that interested in what other people have to say (which is ok, I guess).

Technorati Tags:
commenting, comments, friendfeed, seesmic, disqus, intensedebate, backtype, conversations

I woke up this morning to news that Pownce, a microblogging service created by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose (the Digg guy), Ariel Waldman, Daniel Burka and Mike Malone is shutting down in about 2 weeks. It turns out Six Apart, creators of TypePad, MovableType and Vox have acquired Pownce, largely for its team:

I am pleased to announce that today we are welcoming the Pownce team and technology to Six Apart. Pownce launched in June of 2007 and opened to the public earlier this year, but, as mentioned on the Pownce blog, Pownce.com will be closing in the next few weeks. We have a lot of respect for what this team has done and believe we share a common vision about making the Internet more social.

We have been impressed not only with the vision for Pownce but the great work of Leah Culver and Mike Malone and are very happy that they will be joining us. We’re also very excited to welcome Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as advisers to Six Apart. The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging and we’re really proud to have them on board.

It appears that the team has been taken on to help develop Vox further and I am curious to see which direction Vox goes with the addition of this talent. I thought I’d take a look at how Vox compares to services like Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku and Pownce and the result is pretty interesting. According to Alexa, this is what the last 6 months look like:

With the exception of Twitter, the blogging services are far more popular than the microblogging/status services. I wasn’t expecting Vox to be quite so popular and seeing that its reach is pretty close to Twitter’s, it is a service worth paying more attention to! Certainly at least as much attention as I paid to Pownce …

Technorati Tags:
blogging, microblogging, pownce, vox, six apart, shutting down

I just watched this video about the new UI in WordPress 2.7. I haven’t been using the beta builds so I haven’t seen this yet.

One thing for sure is that WordPress has really come a long way since its early days. I vaguely remember a lot of serif fontwork and limited options when WordPress first came out and how flaky it seemed alongside TypePad (which I started blogging on).

Oh, if you have the bandwidth for it, switch the video to HD view and maximise the video to full screen.

(Source: Blog for Profit)

Technorati Tags:
video, wordpress, wordpress 2.7, dashboard, ui

I had a mildly alarming experience with Facebook Notes this afternoon. I published a note and specified friends who would be able to view the note using Facebook’s very welcome and pretty granular privacy settings. I published the note and a couple hours later I saw that a couple people had commented on the note who I hadn’t included in the distribution/access list.

The privacy settings on Facebook are very flexible. They allow users to choose whether to open a note up to everyone, friends of friends, just friends, specific friends (when you select those friends you even have an opportunity to create a new friend list on the fly) or to keep the note private. I took advantage of the option to restrict access to the note to specific friends mainly because I felt the content of the note should perhaps be limited to those of my friends who are closest to the news.

I certainly didn’t expect the note to be published publicly anyway to all my friends. While I didn’t exactly give away nuclear weapons secrets, this does serve as a reminder that not everything goes as well as it is intended to go on these platforms, especially platforms still being tested like the new Facebook platform.

In addition, don’t expect Facebook to take responsibility for any glitches in the system. Its privacy policy is pretty comprehensive and doesn’t leave much wiggle room. Ultimately it comes down to this one line:

You post User Content (as defined in the Facebook Terms of Use) on the Site at your own risk.

That being said, I am really glad to see the privacy options available to me when I publish content on Facebook. I also appreciate Facebook’s two core principles which are set out at the beginning of the privacy policy:

Facebook follows two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.

These two principles address some of the criticisms levied against Facebook and mirrors some of the language in the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web which was published a year ago tomorrow (5 September) little while ago. They are welcome provisions in a privacy policy and ideals to strive for. They are also subject to the technical features of the platform they govern.

As with any platform on the Web which you store or publish your content on, you take a risk when you use the services. Outages occur (less frequently, thank goodness) and services can be hacked. Just bear these risks in mind and act accordingly.

Update: I just read a recent post Paul Walsh published about privacy on Facebook in the context of photos that is worth reading.

Technorati Tags:
bill of rights, facebook, privacy, control, privacy controls