Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
The EntreCard Twitter Fiasco
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/06/2008 - 12:38Yesterday, EntreCard announced a widget that would display tweets that anyone posted about them. The blog post, included an update:
Just a quick note that Entrecarders are expected to be on their best behavior. Any intentional use of profanity or harassment directed at other Entrecarders or Entrecard Staff using Twitter will result in immediate account deletion. We have a zero tolerance policy for harassment at Entrecard.
It is not clear if this update was put up before or after Turnip of Power tweeted Is that asshat from Entrecard still wearing his asshat?.
As a result, Turnip of Power has been banned from EntreCard. One person asked, “Can I still speak poorly of Entrecard’s users on my blog? How about in my living room?”
It appears as if Entrecard is making the classic mistake of inexperienced startups online. The danger of online social marketing is that you can’t control what people will say about you. An even greater danger is what happens when you attempt to do so.
It isn’t a new lesson. Last November, conservatives used the #dontgo to try and get their message out on twitter and beyond. The problem is that liberals hopped in and used that to promote their own message. The website that was set up to monitor #dontgo messages was quickly modified to filter out message that the conservatives felt were inappropriate.
It is even more problematic when people running one website place conditions on what people can say about the site on other websites. A response on the Entrecard blog is entitled ‘Embracing negative publicity’. It sounds like the classic mistake done in damage control. Instead of admitting an error and trying to address the problem, it is a defensive, “I meant to do that” response.
Meanwhile, more people, including top droppers have been leaving EntreCard. The discussion on Twitter is predominantly critical. It is too bad. EntreCard is a great idea, run horribly. It is surprising that a viable competitor to EntreCard hasn’t sprung up yet.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
power.com
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/02/2008 - 23:12Techcrunch has an article about Power.com, a new “social inter-networking” site that links Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5 and other sites into one site.
They are a Brazilian based company with about five million users already, I suspect mostly gathered from Brazilian Orkut users.
I've gone in and played with it a little bit. Other than random places where Portuguese slips through, I haven't found any obvious glitches or anything especially noteworthy.
They are trying to grow the site virally and anyone that gets 100 people to join in the first 100 days gets $100.
I could send out email blasts through them to my friends on these various networks but that seems a bit spammy.
Instead, I'll post the banner they provide:
If a bunch of people sign up this way and we find good reasons to use other than simply as innovators and early adopters, I might send emails to some people as well, but probably not.
So, take a look at power.com and let me know what you think.
Two Views of Twitter for Journalists
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/02/2008 - 15:20The Columbia Journalism Review, in light of the New York Times article, Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks is asking, How Should Journalists Use Twitter?
What does Twitter add to the coverage of such stories? What does it subtract? ... Is Twitter anything more than just a stupid human trick? Where does it—where should it—fit into the larger universe of Web-based journalism?
Well, I’m no expert on journalism. I’m a blogger and a microblogger and people always get stuck on the relationship between blogging and journalism. As to Twitter, I have a pretty good ranking according to sites like Twitter grader and I have been on Twitter for over two years now, as well as just about any other microblogging system I can find, so I do have a few opinions.
Recently, I wrote a blog post entitled I Get My News on Twitter.... I talked about tools that I use to organize the information I get from Twitter and emerging tools in the space. This points to two ways that I believe journalists should be using Twitter.
It is a great place to get raw information. It is standing in a virtual crowd, listening for voices that have something to say. When you hear someone saying something interesting, you sidle over to them, listen to what they have to say, and if possible and appropriate, join in the conversation. This is useful for finding people on the ground who are smart and have something to say at a disaster far away, like the terrorism attacks in Mumbai.
It is also useful on a local beat. An editor of a local paper mentioned to me at dinner one evening that his reporters use Twitter to get reports from local emergency services, sort of like a twenty-first century police scanner.
I’m currently trying to get as many of my sources to use Twitter as possible. If something important happens at the capital, I might not get the first call or text message, unless it is a text message sent to Twitter, and then I get it as soon as everyone else, or maybe a little sooner if I’m better at using Twitter than others.
Beyond that, Twitter is a great way of getting your message out. When I create a blog post, Twitterfeed reads my RSS feed and creates a Tweet for me with a link back to my blog post. If I want to be the first person to get a message out, I’ll send a quick headline tweet out letting people know what is going on, and follow up with a blog post later.
I currently subscribe to the Twitter streams of quite a few news organizations. Twitter becomes my news scroll. News organizations that want me as a reader need to try and get in my news scroll.
To me, Twitter isn’t just another stupid trick and while it is using a new medium and a new format, it doesn’t seem all that new either. It sort of reminds me of the teletype at the college radio station that I would gather around with my friends decades ago. It will be interesting to see what other people have to say.
Oh, and by the way, I heard about the CJR article on Twitter.
XRI, OpenID, FOAF, XFN and Open Social Networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/29/2008 - 20:04Today, I stumbled upon QDOS’ FOAF Search Tool and spent a bit of time exploring FOAF and related technologies. I’ve been interested in these technologies for quite a while and always enjoy checking back to see what has been going on.
I Get My News on Twitter and How to do it Better
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/27/2008 - 11:03At the journalism conference at Central Connecticut State University, I told one of the organizers that I had heard about the conference through Twitter. She was pleased to hear that and mentioned it in part of the introduction. Twitter is changing the way people gather news. As I sat there, it occurred to me, “I Get My News on Twitter”.
When major events, or even minor events happen, I usually hear about it first on Twitter. Yesterday, Colin McEnroe talked about Twitter on his radio show, and I heard about that via Twitter. I heard about the attacks in Mumbai via Twitter. When there have been earthquakes or tornados, I’ve heard about that first from Twitter.
One problem is that I currently follow over 900 people on Twitter. It can be hard to keep them straight. One tool that I used to try and help with this is FriendFeed. FriendFeed aggregates information from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Identi.ca, Flickr, and many other services. Beyond that, it allows you to set up rooms where people can gather. I’ve set up rooms for various groups that I’m part of and that has been helpful.
Another site that I’ve really liked recently is My Social Chatter. It brings up a Twitter screen in half the page and a FriendFeed screen in the other half. Every two minutes it refreshes.
It was watching the FriendFeed section of MySocialChatter, that I learned about PeopleBrowsr. When I first started playing with it last night, it was very slow, perhaps because Robert Scoble had just mentioned it. It is still listed as being in Alpha testing; as I write this, it is listed as version 0.691.
This morning, I went back, and started to use it to tag people that I know from EntreCard. It was very easy to find a lot of friends from EntreCard on Twitter using PeopleBrowsr and to tag them. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way to see a stream of all the people with a specific tag. I hope this is coming soon.
As I write this blog post and continue to test PeopleBrowsr and post tweets about it, I received a message from NutureGirl about PeopleBrowsr being in Alpha and a new version coming soon. In a subsequent Tweet, she talks about PeopleBrowsr as one of her clients. She describes herself as a ‘Community Flow Catalyst’; a great title. If the folks launching PeopleBrowsr have a ‘Community Flow Catalyst’ working for them on Thanksgiving morning, while they are still in beta, I have very high hopes for the project. Other sites should learn from PeoleBrowsr and make sure they have ‘Community Flow Catalysts’ in from the very beginning.
Another site that I’m keeping an eye on is tarpipe.com. Unlike PeopleBrowsr, they claim to already in be in Beta, but their beta seems much less reliable than PeopleBrowsr’s Alpha. What I like about tarpipe is that it uses OpenID for authentication. However, the signup process just isn’t working, at least for me. I’ll check it again some other day.
On the topic of OpenID, many people are lauding the Obama administration for including OpenID support on change.gov. I’m also very excited about it. They are using intensedebate to handle the OpenID authentication. The one problem I have is that intensedebate does not appear to fully support OpenID v 2.0.
In particular, OpenID v 2.0 supports xri. So, using one of my inames identities, I can log into sites that support OpenId v 2.0. The two inames identities that I use are =aldon.hynes and @ahynes1. They use different inames services, but what is really cool is that if the site supports OpenID V 2.0, like identi.ca does, then I can login simply as @ahynes1. Pretty cool for microblogging services. I just wish I could login a =aldon.hynes on Change.gov
