Technology
Entries related to technology.
Social Network Contact Management System, Gathering People Details
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/05/2009 - 11:13The other day, I wrote a blog post talking about my desire for a Social Network Contact Management System. Essentially, I would like a system where I could easily see which services my friends are on, and track my contacts with these friends.
I’ve received some great comments on the idea and want to expand a bit on this. Joe Cascio spoke about some of his efforts in this area, which were based upon people self identifying and suggested it probably wasn’t likely to take good shape until OpenID became more ubiquitous. Willem Kossen asked if we couldn’t get a bunch of programmers together to build something closer to what I was envisioning.
Meanwhile, I’ve done a little bit of programming and my ideas are starting to take better shape. Already, there are many sites where people can self identify the networks they are on. Some of these sites provide a programmatic interface.
The first one that I worked with was MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog provides a FOAF file listing all of the services you are on, all of your friends on MyBlogLog and all of the services they have listed for themselves.
I wrote a program that analyzed my FOAF file. I found that I have 369 contacts showing up there. 176 of them, or 48% have identified their Twitter accounts. 72 have identified Friendfeed accounts, and on an average they have about 8 accounts each.
I mention Friendfeed, because they are another service where people can self identify. They have a nice interface that returns all of the friends and all of the services for a given user. They do not combine all of this in a single file, so I would need to write a program that would iterate through my 250 friends on Friendfeed.
DandyID provides a great list of services that users can self identify and has APIs to extract the information. However, on a first pass, I didn’t get the API to work. However, I did get their Portable Contacts feed to work very nicely. DandyID is still a fairly new service, so I only have twenty friends there. 19 of them are on Twitter, and my average friend on DandyID has 35 services.
Twitter has a decent API and I can retrieve my followers and whom I am following. Identi.ca returns a FOAF file of connections as well, but like Twitter doesn’t track other services. By combining the data from these services, I should be able to get a fairly good view of my contacts.
There are a bunch of other services I would like to add to this list. BlogCatalog allows users to self identify their other services, and I can find my friends and neighbors on BlogCatalog programmatically, but I haven’t found a way to extract services via the BlogCatalog API. It does provide a way to retrieve which BlogCatalog users have recently visited your blog, which could be helpful in the second part of the project, tracking contacts.
EntreCard gathers user’s services but doesn’t provide an obvious mechanism to retrieve that information. They do provide an RSS feed where you can extract people who have recently dropped a card on your site as well as who has dropped the most cards on you.
Disqus, Lijit, and Retaggr also gather information about services but don’t provide any obvious method to programmatically access this information. I haven’t even started looking at Facebook or FriendConnect.
With this, I just need to come up with a good data schema, normalize the data and I’m on my way. In a later post, I’ll probably get more geeky and talk about the data schema and normalization and then talk about how to track what has gone on with contacts on the various services.
Any thoughts about other services that I could use to build up a better view of my social network contacts, as well as thoughts about the data schema or normalizing the data would be appreciated.
As to where I go with this, my current thinking is to make all of this available as an open source project. If you are interested in looking at my code, let me know. However, at this point it is still a bunch of small disconnected pieces of code, more like a developers notebook then something like alpha version 0.001
Building A Social Network Contact Management System
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/02/2009 - 11:16As my number of followers on Twitter approach 2000, Friends on Facebook approach 1,000 and the number of social networking sites I’m on approach 100, I need to find a better way to manage my networks and my contacts within these networks. I can’t find a good tool, so perhaps I need to build it myself.
Let me start off by describing what I am looking for. I would like a nice, easy to use tool that would list all of my contacts along with what networks they are in. As an example, many of my followers on Twitter are also friends on Facebook. My contacts on DandyID, overlap on an average of thirty social networks each.
DandyID comes the closest to the first part of what I would like my Social Network Contact Management system to do. However, it is still in its early stages and the only people I know there are the experimenters. I would like something that includes everyone from all my networks. In addition, while it does provide an API, it doesn’t provide easy tools to act upon the information. As an example, I’d love to be able to pick any social network and find out which of my overall contacts are on that specific social network that have not yet connected with. MyBlogLog also provides a very nice cross reference list of different social networks my contacts are in, which I can retrieve in a FOAF file, and several other sites provide similar information.
Yet this only gets to the first half of what I would like my social network contact management system to do. The next part is to keep track of my contacts. Part of this would include the sort of social network aggregation that a site like FriendFeed does.
I would like to be able to see all of the content that my contacts have recently put up. Ideally, it would combine duplicates. For example, I use sites like ping.fm, HelloTxt, and Posterous to send the same message to multiple sites. Also, some sites have the ability to feed or pull posts between their network and other networks. When you put all of this together it can get pretty complicated, as seen in the Social Media Map that I created last summer.
Yet more importantly, I want to know when I’ve actually contacted someone in my online social media meta network. When did I last sent them a tweet, retweet something they wrote, write on their Facebook wall, send them a message or give them a call? Whom haven’t I contacted recently that I really should contact? Do I have other notes about them that are important? Who are their friends and relatives online? When are their birthdays? How do they fit into whatever my goals are in using social networks?
To push it even more, I would like to add information such as whether I’ve visited or commented on their blog recently, or whether they’ve shown up on my blog, as noted by tools like dropping EntreCards, or showing up in recent readers lists like those provided by MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog.
Some of this is the standard sort of things that a good customer relationship management system does. I briefly looked at CiviCRM
What do you think? Are you looking for a tool something like this? Are there other things that I should consider? Are there tools out there that come close to this? Feedback is greatly appreciated. I’ve already come up with some initial design ideas which I will share later, perhaps incorporating some of the feedback I get.
This Week and Beyond in Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/27/2009 - 21:35It has been another week preoccupied with computer programming, although I did get a chance to participate in some social media activities this week, as well as get through at least a little bit of my email.
It started off with a few messages that I sent out from the Woodbridge Board of Education meeting. I used ping.fm so my messages went to a bunch of different locations. My first two messages were
At Woodbridge Board of Education where there is a discussion of twenty first century curriculum linking world languages and technology
One of the students is doing a wonderful presentation of the food pyramid in Spanish using the Smartboard.
On Facebook, a Connecticut State Representative, Jonathon Pelto responded ‘wow – cool’. Over on LiveJournal, a friend from Michigan whom I met years ago when her teacher used a text based virtual world that I ran to teach a class on ‘Brave New World’ responded ‘Smartboards are sweet…especially when properly used.’
After the meeting was over, I chatted with the chair of the Board of Education as well as the Superintendent about the real time online discussion I had about the meeting. It says something important about the world our students are being prepared for. There is so much more I want to write about this when I get some free time.
On Tuesday, I received an email from another longtime friend. The Rev. Kate Heichler of Church of Christ the Healer, together with The Rev. Mark Lingle of St. Francis Church, both in Stamford, have set up a Lenten Reflections blog. Kate suggested that I might offer to help the church I attend, Christ Church, Bethany set up a similar Lenten Reflections blog.
I’ve been very busy, so I quickly threw together to live for a season and when I get a little more time will help people at the church with the blog some more.
Thursday, I went to a Mystic Sushi Tweetup. I joined @JoeCascio, @trishdarling of smashingdarling.com, and @EmrysTetu of WellnessWithFood.com at Peking Tokyo in Mystic for a dinner of sushi. We had a great discussion covering a wide selection of topics.
Today, I receive a message on Facebook from State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield inviting people to the Judiciary Committee Public Hearing. In the invitation, Gary said, “"If you care about the Raise the Age legislation and or abolishing the death penalty and you have time on Monday you should come testify." He provides information about testifying at the hearing.
As I went through my emails, I’ve found plenty of other important events. Next Wednesday at 7 PM, Kim will be speaking about election day registration at the Democracy for Fairfield County Meetup at the Silver Star Diner in Norwalk. Ned Lamont will also be speaking there about the stimulus package. Democracy for New Haven will be meeting at Wednesday, starting at 6:30 at Wall Street Pizza in New Haven having a discussion about the Connecticut budget proposal. State Sen. Toni Harp, Co-Chair of Appropriations Committee, and Sal Luciano, Executive Director of AFSCME Council 4 are among the speakers expected for an action oriented public discussion.
The Shoreline League of Democratic Women is also having a meeting the same evening. Their meeting will start at 7:30 at the Guilford Library and will host a panel of State Legislators talking about smart growth.
Then, on Thursday, the Energy and Technology Committee will hold a Public Hearing about four bills, including AN ACT CONCERNING PUBLIC ACCESS TELEVISION CHANNELS, along with three other bills. I haven’t read the proposed bill closely enough to have any opinions on it, but would love to hear comments from others.
Also on Thursday, Common Cause volunteers will be helping get the spring mailing out starting at 5:00 PM at the Common Cause office at 55 Oak St in Hartford. Then, starting at 6:10 in Room 128 of the Main Hall of Yale Law School, the Yale College Democrats, the Yale College Republicans, and the Yale Law School Democrats will sponsor an event with Common Cause to discussion election day registration. State Rep. Lesser and State Rep. Winfield will be speaking.
Friday, the Connecticut Fund for the Environment will be holding its 19th Annual Long Island Sound Citizens Summit: Investing in Clean Water: for Sound health, jobs and the economy. The summit will take place from 8:30 until 3:15 at the Holiday Inn Hotel and Conference Center in Bridgeport.
Looking further out, there are a few important social media related events coming up. On March 12, is digiday:Mobile and digiday:Social at the W hotel in New York City. These are two half-day conferences set up back to back to talk about marketing using mobile and social technology.
On March 21st will be Newsout, “What to do when the newsroom lights go out: Options and strategies for New England communities.” It looks like it will be a good discussion with some great speakers.
Then, ending off the month is Freedom to Connect, a yearly gathering of some of the most interesting thinkers about communications and the Internet.
So, I’ll continue to try and balance some computer programming with some family time and lots of social media, both as quick messages on various sites and face to face meetings as well. What are you up to? Will I see you at one of these events?
Writing from Matlab to Excel Using ActiveX
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/17/2009 - 21:47On a project that I am doing for Toomre Capital Markets, I have needed to compare two versions of complicated financial model. One is written in Excel and the other in Matlab. The model uses over 150 different input variables, so it can be a challenge to make sure that essentially the same variables are passed to both models. Today, I modified one of the routines to use ActiveX to send data from Matlab to Excel. The process was not easy to figure out, but once I figured it out, it is extremely straightforward.
Initially, we were using the Matlab command xlswrite. It is a quick and easy way to write data from Matlab into Excel. It uses a COM server, and can be a little slow, especially if you are making multiple calls. However, if you want to do anything more than simple reading and writing of data to a spreadsheet from Matlab, you need to start using the ActiveX server functionality that Matlab supplies.
Tracking Online Identities
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/10/2009 - 22:47Another day of focusing on programming has gone by, and I’ve had little time for reading emails, blogs, or messages on numerous social networks I’m on. One blog I visited was DedeAndro. He’s been playing with the Lijit recently. I started using Lijit about eighteen months ago, and have left one of their widgets on my sidebar. It shows recent searches and links to some of the different social networks I’m on. They’ve evolved a bit since I’ve added them, and I’ve just added the ability to see more of the information that they’ve collected about me.
They also link into PostRank, a tool which ‘measures audience engagement’. I’ve signed up for PostRank and started playing around with it, but don’t have much of an impression of it yet. I did add the Greasemonkey script so PostRank can interoperate with Google Reader.
The other news I got today about tracking online identities is from EntreCard. They’ve added the ability ten different social networks on your profile. Currently, I list twelve identities on lijit. On MyBlogLog, I list 34 social networks, on Retaggr I list 54 social networks, and on the most powerful of all, so far, DandyID, I list 76 different networks.
So, I filled in the ten networks that EntreCard looks at, simply copying the links over from DandyID. One of the networks that EntreCard lists is MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog makes the list of networks available in a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) file. It would be nice if EntreCard could have simply read that file. DandyID is supposed to be working on some sort of API as well, although I’ve suggested that they might want to suggest FOAF as well. It would make it easier to have one tool that could life network information from various sites that support FOAF.
So, as the number of social networks grow, so do the interconnections between them, as well as the tools for listing which ones you are on. So, which networks are you on that I’ve missed? What tools are you using that I should consider?
P.S. I just got seriously spammed by some program going out and creating 200 userids, apparently in an effort to spread some sort of Trojan horse. I’ve deleted the userids and changed the registration process. If you’ve created a userid and I deleted it, I apologize.
