Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill June 6th, 2008

I don’t totally get the point of FriendFeed- or maybe I just don’t like it. I consider it a meta-social network because it doesn’t do a lot that is totally new. It aggregates my contributions across the web (and those of people I follow), but there isn’t very much to actually do on the service.

At the same time, I would love a social web “home base”- a place I where I could both aggregate and contribute. I use Twitter and Brightkite a lot, but one friend might post often to Flickr and another to Yelp. Home Base would be a single place from which I could both keep track of my friends’ activity, and also interact with their photos, tweets and reviews.

Friendfeed lets me post to Twitter, but still isn’t as dynamic as that platform and it ends up being just another place for me to check, but not to post from.

In the end, it comes down to where most of my friends are. I have the most contacts on Facebook currently, but interact with people less there than any other other social network I’m on. That’s just me, I know. Plenty of people have entirely fulfilling internet social lives on Facebook.

I’ve realized that the place I interact with friends the most is Twitter. In addition, many other services feed into Twitter easily, so I can add a new service and not have to rebuild my social graph there before it becomes useful.

I’m close to the point of putting my Twitter ID on my email signature because it’s such a good way to get in touch with me, but at the same time I’m afraid of getting any more attached to Twitter because of its reliability problems. It’s really a shame. The service is so easy and so valuable. I sure hope they can overcome their “we built the wrong platform at the outset” issues and become the powerhouse they deserve to be.

twitter.com/park3

• Twitter , social graph , social media

Jay Parkhill February 9th, 2008

OpenSocial, OpenID and the rest of the shared-social graph ideas are promising, but they are starting to make me channel Rodney King and ask “can’t we all just get along?” Everyone seems to love the idea, but no one knows how to manage the details.

Meanwhile, I use Zimbra on my Mac. My wife uses Yahoo and Outlook. I want to share my calendar with her, but can’t figure out how to do it. If there is a cross-platform calendar sharing utility I definitely have not found it.

In a similar vein, I use Last.fm, Pandora and occasionally Hype Machine and Seeqpod (whose days seem sadly numbered) to stream music, and Sonic Living for event updates. They should all talk the same language so I don’t have to enter my favorites over and over- or at least work from the same starting point using my iTunes listening habits. I understand that each site’s “secret sauce” is its music-recommendation algorithm, so by all means wow me with great picks. Just don’t make me tell you again and again what I like. Is that really so difficult? Apparently.

• Uncategorized

Jay Parkhill October 12th, 2007

Update:  Linkedin apparently agrees with me.  They just announced a developer-API program to create widgets that allow “business functions like conference organization or travel planning”.  But no superpokes.

There’s been lots of talk about walled gardens in social networks. Plenty of people seem to be asking for “network portability”- the ability to move one’s social graph of contacts and connections across platforms. Given that the revenue stream for most social networks depends almost entirely on advertising, which depends on page views, I am starting wonder if that puts the cart before the horse.

Also like many people recently, I have been thinking about how I and my friends really use social networks. My conclusion is that they are a nice adjunct to offline communications- they can help me deepen connections with people I don’t see regularly- but they don’t actually *do* much.

For example, my Facebook news feed is almost entirely full of “___ became friends with ___” and “___ added the ___ application” updates. Do people actually do anything meaningful other than friending, adding applications, joining groups and updating status?

What about “___ beat __ in scrabblicious”, or even “Brad Fitzpatrick nailed his 95 theses on the opening of the social graph on Facebook’s door”?

Facebook seems to be mostly a tool for casual, superficial interactions and ways to show off one’s interests and affiliations- joining groups, marking favorite movies/music/books, showing where one has been, etc.

I’d love to see the platform and the feed represent real activity, not just connection-forming. Maybe the “next Facebook” (which may or may not be Facebook itself) will be the one that lets us really collaborate and not merely connect.

The next question, though, is on what we want to collaborate. I suspect it is probably different for different people and groups. That thought leads me back to the open social graph issue- maybe the open social graph is the horse after all and useful (as opposed to entertaining) applications are the cart. Oh dear, thinking in circles again. Time to quit.

• Web , social graph