Social Networks

Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.

A maze of twisty little passages, all alike

The other day I read that a bunch of my friends were moving from Twitter to Jaiku. I set up my Jaiku page and subscribed to the RSS feed of my Twitter page. I tried sending an SMS, but it never got through. I checked around. I then tried snowballing my contacts, and the only person I found there was Scoble, and he didn’t have any contacts there. So, I’m not currently using Jaiku in any significant manner.

However, it does have the nice feature of bringing in a bunch of different feeds, so I added Orient Lodge, Blip.TV, Flickr. Later, I read about someone trying to tie their Facebook status to their Twitter page, and I poked around a little bit on this. If you go to your Facebook status page, and change profile.php? to minified.php?status& you will get the minified page that has your statuses. From that page you get the RSS feed for your statuses, which you can subscribe to with Jaiku (or any other feedreader).

The next question became, could I subscribe to any of these via Twitter? One person recommended TwitterFeed. This raised a new issue. To sign into TwitterFeed, you need to use OpenID. LiveJournal uses OpenID, and I could have used that. However, TwitterFeed also pointed me to idproxy.net. idproxy.net provides a service where you can use your Yahoo! id as an OpenID. In addition, they have details on how to set up your own site for OpenID, using idproxy as the server. I’ve added that to Orient Lodge, so I can now log into sites using OpenID using Orient Lodge and Yahoo’s authentication.

I logged into LiveJournal, and that worked. I then started to set up ClaimID. I didn’t see ClaimID doing a lot for me, so I’ve left it with only a little information.

Back to TwitterFeed, I added Orient Lodge to my Twitter feed, and every time I add a blog entry on Orient Lodge, it is now showing up nicely on Twitter. I then tried to add the Facebook feed, but that isn’t showing up properly.

Twitter This!

This weekend saw an explosion of Twittering for me. One group of friends were all down at SXSW. I’m getting lots of twitters from there. Another group is following John Edwards on Twitter. I’ve started to subscribe to breaking news alerts on Twitter. Then, there are friends that are twittering about the use of Twitter for non-profits, and the group of people just living their normal daily lives on Twitter.

So, what is this Twitter stuff all about? Well, put simply, you can IM, text message, or submit from the web, a quick message that all of your followers will see. They get a choice of seeing it either via IM, text message or the web. It is a pretty cool tool, but there are a lot of things I would like to see enhanced.

Twidget

This morning, Steve Rubel noted that John Edwards was one of his followers on Twitter. Sure enough, Sen. Edwards has over 500 friends and followers on Twitter and he’s also following me. I figured it was time to get a little more involved with Twitter.

Freedom to Connect

If I hadn’t of spent most of last week down in DC live blogging the Libby trial deliberations, I would be down there right now to participate in Freedom to Connect. Fortunately, it will be streaming online with a live chat back channel going on at the same time.

There are many aspects to our freedom to connect. Some of the bigger issues are things like net neutrality, municipal wireless and the digital divide. Yet there are other things that inhibit our ability to connect. How usable are communication tools to use? How well do they interconnect?

Regionalized Social Media

Over the past several months, I’ve been involved with various regional efforts in the progressive political blogosphere. I keep posting on my own blog, as well as various national blogs, but I also participate in Connecticut’s progressive political blog of record, MyLeftNutmeg. From time to time I visit neighboring regional progressive political blogs of record like BlueMassGroup, Below Boston, Blue Hampshire, Green Mountain Daily all in New England, and blogs like Culture Kitchen in New York, and Blue Jersey in New Jersey.

Yet social media is much more than just progressive political blogs. In New England, the New England News Forum is convening a conference on how changing media is changing civic involvement. It will include journalists, bloggers, educators, people interested in economic development and social issues.

I will be co-leading a session, “From DC courts to NH campaigns: Has blogging gone mainstream media?” I hope that many of my friends from New England regional blogs attend, and participate in discussions of how the broader spectrum of social media interacts in New England for the benefit of us all.

(cross posted at a bunch of the blogs listed above)

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