Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Making Better Use of Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/24/2008 - 11:29More and more of my friends are using Twitter, and now Media Shift on PBS has an article on How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It. So, I thought I’d share a few of my tips for making better use of Twitter.
Adding material to Twitter
There are plenty of tools for accessing and adding content directly to Twitter. I have a Twitter Gadget for Windows Vista on one of my machines. I run Twirl. I run TwitterBox in Second Life all in addition to simply sending material directly from the Twitter Web page or to Twitter as an SMS message from my cellphone.
However, there are some other tools that I like to use as well. One is Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed will subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog, or other sites, such as BlogTalkRadio feeds, and submit them to Twitter under your username. I use this to send messages to Twitter when I add a blog post to Orient Lodge.
BrightKite works essentially the same as Twitter, but is focused on your location. It can feed Twitter. I use BrightKite sparingly. If I’m going to meetings or a conference in New York, I’ll use it, but I don’t use it for more mundane activities, like stopping at the gas station. Other sites also feed Twitter. I like to use Utterli.com to send audio messages from my cellphone. Unfortunately, Utterli sends indecipherable messages to Twitter and I think it has driven away a follower or two.
If I want to leave a voice message that people are more likely to receive, I like to use TwitterFone. TwitterFone uses voice recognition to take an audio message and leave it as a text message on Twitter. The voice recognition can be hit or miss, but then again, my typing on my cellphone is also often hit or miss.
Two other tools that I like are ping.fm and hellotxt. Both of these sites, as well as some others allow you to send one message that then gets sent to many of your microblogging at status update sites.
Reading and sharing information on Twitter
At the other end of the spectrum is FriendFeed. Friendfeed pulls together all of the material you publish online. If you are using both ping.fm and FriendFeed, your FriendFeed can get overloaded with duplicates, so be careful about how you arrange things.
One thing that I really like about FriendFeed is the rooms. You can set up a room to show all the activity of a group of people. Currently, I’m following 835 people on Twitter and it can be hard to keep track of all the different discussions. So, I group people into rooms. I’m in a couple rooms for that contain my political friends on Twitter. Other rooms are dedicated specific online communities, like the EntreCard Room.
Another tool that I use a lot, for various reasons, is TwitterLocal. It allows you to find recent Tweets from people around a specific zipcode.
Sometimes, I like to look at Tweet 2 Tweet. I stumbled across them quite accidentally one day. What they do is allow you to put two Twitter names in and see any discussion back and forth between these users.
On last organizing tool that I recently heard about is My Social Chatter. It displays Twitter on one side and FriendFeed on the other side and updates every two minutes.
Dealing with Followers
Currently, I’m following 839 people on Twitter and have 1,408 followers. Obviously, I’m not following everyone that follows me. I do get emails when people start following me, but when my email box gets really full, I don’t always see or follow up on those emails. With LessFriends, you can go out and see who is following you, whom you are following, and when you and someone else are mutually following each other. They do note that it can take a long time, especially if you have lots of followers or are following a lot of people.
I grabbed the report and threw it into Excel and it seemed to miss a lot of people. It only returned 859 different people, and I have more followers than that. However, I was surprised at the number of people that I’m following that are not following me back. Some are national organizations which I can understand that they don’t follow me back. Others are friends that use Twitter only to highlight their blog entries. Some, on the other hand, are friends that I would have thought would follow me. Perhaps they aren’t following me for the same reason I’m not following others, simply because we didn’t get the email, or the email got buried.
When I started checking people that are listed as following me that I am not following, I’m finding that it is inaccurate, and I’m actually following them.
When I discovered this, I decided not to take the report all that seriously, and, for example, unfollow people that it lists as me following, but not following me.
It does seem, however, that other people are using this strategy. Recently, I found another interesting site, Qwitter. If you sign up, it will send you a message whenever it finds someone that has stopped following you on Twitter. Each morning when I sit down to my email, I find many new people following me and many old people qwitting following me. In many cases these are sites about making quick money online, and I don’t follow them when they follow me, and I don’t mind when they stop following me. However, at times, I find people that I care about stopping following me. It makes me sad, but so far, I haven’t contacted people to ask why.
There is a lot you can do with Twitter and related sites. You can simply keep friends informed about the moment to moment events in your life. You can publicize your other content, and you can join in fascinating discussions. To do this, there are a lot of sites worth investigating. If you know of some other good sites, please tell me.
The Effect of Technology on Education Meetings
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/21/2008 - 09:41There is a lot of talk about the effect of technology on education, but not a lot of it focuses on the effect of technology on meetings about education. However, last night, I observed three different meetings about education that provided an interesting contrast of how technology is affecting these meetings.
The Woodbridge Board of Education met last night for their monthly meeting. Yet this meeting was different. It was the first time that they used a program called Emeeting from the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE).
“CABE-Meeting is a user-friendly online service specifically designed to assist the board and superintendent, in preparing and running board of education meetings. “
At the beginning of the meeting, Nick Caruso from CABE, together with members of the technology staff at Beecher Road School assisted school board members get connected to Emeeting and learn their way around.
Superintendent Stella spoke about the importance of the board adopting new technology and modeling the appropriate use of technology for students, teachers and staff. He also discussed a committee being formed, headed up by Rick Wood, the technology educator at the school. The committee will include members of the Board of Education, and parents from the community and will address the three-year technology plan.
Dr. Stella also discussed the Connecticut Educators Computer Association (CECA). They are holding their 2008 CECA Conference today, “Surviving and Thriving in an e-Literate World”.
It was noted that Nancy White and James Crawford from Beecher Road School will be attending as 2008 CECA Award Winners for their work in Digital Storytelling.
This digital storytelling project involves a sixth grade class, a general education teacher and a special education teacher. This project integrates various elements of Language Arts, Social Studies and digital media to express the students’ thoughts and ideas on various subject matters. Students gain the necessary skills to produce their digital stories through a four-tiered approach in which the special education teacher is incorporating the teaching of successively sophisticated technical skills in a series of four mini projects. In this tiered approach the students learn how to take digital still photographs, create music soundtracks, record narration, use digital video cameras, and import these media into the iLife suite of software on their groups’ computers. Students then publish and/or present their work. Students are asked to evaluate their movies as they would for their writing for ideas, organization, voice, word (picture) choice, fluency and conventions. Digital Storytelling exemplifies a project that showcases how technology can be used to enhance learning for all students.
As part of the Superintendent’s report, there was also a discussion about the Connecticut Mastery Test and how the school is working on improving the already high results that BRS students receive.
I am not a big fan of standardized testing, the CMTs or No Child Left behind, and the presentation did not hold my interest. So, I checked on Twitter to see what some of my friends around cyberspace were doing.
This is how I observed a second meeting about technology in education. Christine, a woman I met through Twitter and Podcamp goes by the username of PurpleCar on Twitter. She was at some meeting where Katie Kessner was speaking. (For a brief bio of Ms. Kessner, check here.)
PurpleCar’s first Tweet about the talk said, “waiting for a 'the dangers of webkinz' talk to begin. If this woman has no facts and spreads panic, I'm politely gonna go BOOYAH on her.”
I noted that Fiona is working on her reading, writing, typing and math skills by using Webkinz. PurpleCar reported that the speaker talked about “the students denied access to college because of their facebook pages”. Another Twitter user, nazgul, noted “@dulceamargo got a scholarship to study motion picture arts at Interlochen because of an ad on Facebook. Life-changing.”
The discussion, both where PurpleCar was, and on Twitter, continued on and on, with many of us on Twitter coming to the conclusion that Ms. Kessner is an ill-informed fear monger.
The contrast between the Board of Education members, learning their way around a new system and talking about how technology is being used at BRS to improve education provided a sharp contrast to the meeting PurpleCar was at. It also provided an interesting insight into the standardized tests.
Standardized tests, like information technology can, and too often are, used to instill fear which thwarts education. However, they can also be a valuable tool to improve the educational process. It was clear from the presentation that the staff at Beecher Road School understood the benefits and dangers of standardized testing and were working hard to make sure they are used to the students best benefit.
The folks of Woodbridge should be proud of all the efforts that the teachers, staff and administration at Beecher Road School are doing to make sure that all tools, information technology, standardized tests, and so many other tools are being used in the best interests of students. I know I was.
Social Browsing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/03/2008 - 16:20Recently, I’ve been experimenting with different tools for ‘social browsing’. By social browsing, I mean having the ability to chat with others about the webpages you are visiting. In a sense, people have been doing this for a long time. When I find a webpage that is interesting, I may send an IM to my wife, and we might chat about the page in IM for a while. I’ve talked about websites with other chat tools, from IRC to Twitter and other microblogging sites and to virtual worlds.
I’ve also bookmarked sites that I like using Mento, which automatically book marks to del.icio.us and ma.gnloia, as well as a greasemonkey script that automatically bookmarks to some other sites, I forget which ones right now, since I lost the script in one of my upgrades, and never got around to finding it again.
Yet none of these tools are specifically aimed at synchronously sharing and talking about bookmarks. This is starting to change, and I’d like to highlight some different tools that I’ve been exploring.
The first is RocketOn. In RocketOn you get an avatar that walks around the website you are visiting. You can chat with other avatars that are visiting the same website. As you explore websites, you win prizes that you can use to modify the appearance of your avatar, and who knows what else.
When I first started using it, I chatted with a few different people. However, it seemed that most of them were refugees from AOL Chat rooms and none of them had much of interest to say. I’ve kept the tool running, but normally in a disabled mode, because there is one annoying downside. When you click, most of the time, RocketOn intercepts the click and makes your avatar walk to where you clicked. Not particularly friendly.
Today, I downloaded Weblin. I was struck by how similar Weblin is to RocketOn. At first glance, it does not seem that Weblin has the same level of avatar customization available. The little icon for controlling Weblin sits in the lower left hand corner of the website right on top of the RocketOn control button. I played with Weblin briefly, but soon wearied of it. The one feature that I did like was Weblin’s ability to bookmark a page to various social bookmark sites like Digg and del.icio.us from their control button.
Another tool I tried briefly was Exit Reality. It seemed similar to Weblin or RocketOn, with a little bit of Google’s Virtual World, Lively thrown in. Unlike Weblin or RocketOn, Exit Reality is three dimensional, and you can change the look at feel of a room. However, when I ran it on my machine, it slowed Firefox down to a crawl, and would crash if I went to any complicated pages. So, I disabled it, and can’t figure out or remember how to restart it. Maybe I’ll check that out again in more detail later.
Social Browse approaches things a little differently. Instead of having avatars running around the screen, they are much more like Twitter or some other microbrowser customized for sharing bookmarks and talking about them. They have a sidebar for Firefox, where you can see the latest messages. The sidebar is fairly similar to the Plurk sidebar for Firefox. In addition, they add some buttons to the navigation tool bar, so you can quickly share a link or comment on a link. One final aspect, they have a popup window, similar to GoogleTalk’s popup window so you can see messages of your friends.
However, as far as I can tell, you can only see the messages and links of your friends, and so far, none of my friends on Social Browse are posting that many links or comments that have drawn me into discussions. Nonetheless, I can see this as being a tool that has great potential.
If you use any of these tools, or any other interesting tools for sharing and talking about links, let me know.
Entrecard For Sale
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 09:21Entrecard users are all talking about Entrecard being for sale. In some of the posts some details emerge. Let’s look at the Entrecard model and try to make a little more sense of offering. In many ways, Entrecard is like BlogAds with a little bit of MyBlogLog thrown in. It is like BlogAds in that the user places an ad on the site and receives compensation. It is like MyBlogLog in that it is community based and you can see who visited you and return the visit.
Each time a user clicks on an Entrecard, they receive a credit, as does the person whose card is clicked on. A user can click on up to 300 cards for every blog that they have in the system. There is also a limit to the number of clicks that can come from a single IP address. Currently, there are 3 million such clicks a month. In addition, to place a card on another person’s site, you need to buy an ad slot. Currently, the price rises exponentially based on the number of ads in queue. Unknown sites cost two, four, eight, or sixteen credits. Well know sites go for thousands of credits. The person whose site the ad runs on gets 12.5% of the revenues.
Identi.ca, OpenID and XRI
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 19:25Recently, there has been an interesting question about user nomenclature in federated micro blogging systems. By micro blogging systems, I’m talking about sites like Twitter, Plurk, Rejaw, and Identi.ca. Right now, Identi.ca is the only one that truly supports the ability to subscribe to be subscribed from other micro blogging systems, although there are some sites that that facilitate exchanging messages between different micro blogging systems.
So, the question of nomenclature: How do you refer to a person on a remote micro blogging system? Typically, users are referred to with an at sign prepended to their username. The problem is that @bob might be one person on one system and someone completely different on a different system. So, to clarify, people have been kicking around ideas of how to refer to people at other systems.
Personally, I like the format @username/system e.g. @ahynes1/identica Concerns are to keep the name short. After all you only have 140 characters to deal with in an SMS message and putting in full qualification can eat up valuable message space. Others have suggested using the at sign as a separator between the username and the system, e.g. @ahynes1@identica To me, that looks cumbersome and kludgy. On my cellphone, where spacing is harder to differentiate, I would be confused about whether this were to the user ahynes1 on the identica system, or to two people, ahynes1 and identica.
Another reason I like the @username/system format is that it fits nicely with XRIs which fit nicely with OpenID 2.0. @username/system is an accepted shortcut to xri://@username/system which can be accessed via the http protocol as http://xri.net/@username/system The at sign is an indicator of a company, which isn’t great. Registering a company in XRI costs $55/year, which is pretty excessive. Nonetheless, I thought it would be nice to register @ahynes1.
A long time ago, I registered =aldon.hynes. I never ended up using it much, other than for some software testing and as a forwarder so people could send me email without knowing my current email address.
As OpenID 2.0 came along and started supporting XRI logins, I found that I could login to identi.ca using =aldon.hynes. I thought that was pretty cool and changed my OpenID delegation to point to my XRI registrar. Unfortunately, many sites do not yet support XRI based OpenID logins, but it seems to be growing.
So, to test things out a little bit, I registered @ahynes1. Initially, I was going to use 2idi.com, since that is where I have =aldon.hynes registered. Unfortunately, for some reason, they wouldn’t take my credit card, so I checked out some other services and found that 1id.com took Paypal and would gladly take my money.
The next step was to set up a few forwarders. I set up @ahynes1/identica to point to http://identi.ca/ahynes1 and @ahynes1/twitter to point to http://twitter.com/ahynes1. So, for any microblogging site that takes @username/system and uses it as an XRI reference, at least my name will resolve in both Twitter and Identica.
With that, I then tested an added benefit. Would @username XRI references resolve properly in OpenID? I logged into Identi.ca as =aldon.hynes and added @ahynes1 as a valid alternate OpenID. So, now I can log into my Identi.ca account by using the OpenID @ahynes1 Pretty cool.
Now, there are people that have voice concerns about XRI. Why do we need XRI if we already have URIs? For me, XRIs are how we identify resources. URIs specify a transport to get to the resource. So, =aldon.hynes, or xri://=aldon.hynes identifies me. http://xri.net/=aldon.hynes is how to get to my identification information over the http protocol. Nice and clean in my name.
The other issue is pricing. $55/year is very steep for registering an XRI corporate domain. I can register a corporate DNS domain for something like $10/year. If XRI is going to take off, the pricing structure will have to change. At $12/year for an individual I-name, it is still a tad expensive, but a little more reasonable.
So, Identi.ca, OpenID and XRI work nicely together. It will be interesting to see where things go from here.
