Why social networking is getting suckier by the day...

In no particular order…

Productivity

Most social apps are centered around leisure/pastime. Hence, leveraging social contacts for any productive work is left to the imagination of the user (eg: Facebook/OpenSocial apps). For closed APIs even this option is non existent. I don't ascribe to the view that social networking is ONLY a pastime.

High User Involvement

Configuring personal settings, adding friends, checking mail, viewing/replying to random messages, deleting spam and so on. No intuitive interfaces and/or automation of mundane tasks.

Static profile

I have a permanent identity on the network – I cannot have role-based access to suit specific situations, eg: Suppose I only want to communicate quickly with my batchmates in college, I have to search by tags then select all and send a multicast. I cannot choose my interest group based on my ever-changing interest/aims.

Clutter

The popular and ‘correct’ philosophy of opening up APIs leads to a lot of useless and spam applications which spoil user experience.

Privacy

Feeds+Facebook='Open' Book. The most arbitrary and irrelevant updates about friends flooding my home page and vice versa add to the nuisance. Third party applications have ushered in limitless leakage points of personal information; and the absence of sensible defaults makes the user unwary of the situation.


Social networking needs to be seen in a different light. But we haven't yet reached that level of maturity where we can consciously demand and use better services on the web. As usual, we settle for convenience and shun the login button for a while. And after that, its back to where it all began..

[Linux] Useful AIR clients for Twitter/Friendfeed

After a long hiatus, I am finally back on the blogosphere. I have permanently switched to Linux from Windows and the transition has taken a fair amount of my time. However, it has been an enjoyable (though somewhat bumpy ;-) ) ride.

If you are like me and have wondered why social messaging sites like twitter are so addictive, you've come to the right place. While I've never really been a twitter buff, I have recently been spending a lot of passive time on twitter, courtesy desktop-based clients like Twhirl and AlertThingy (there are many more...):

If you primarily use Twitter or Friendfeed from the web, it must have been quite a tedious experience. With extensions like Twitterfox, Twitbin etc., browser based access is now possible, although the experience is not without anguish. The most convenient and enjoyable way to use these services is via desktop-based RIAs quite analogous to email clients. Both Twhirl and AlertThingy integrate with twitter and friendfeed, but Twhirl sets up different windows for the two services, which is annoying to some. AlertThingy is slightly slow on Linux, so I'm sticking with Twhirl for the time being. But its supposed to be great on windows.

I've put forth a small tutorial for setting up these apps for Linux users.

Windows users can just download and install the Adobe AIR installer and thereafter download/install the softwares in point and click fashion.

Linux users:

1. Download the AIR binary from the site.

Alternately, fire up your terminal and type:

$ wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

2. Change the file permission to executable using*:

$ chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

* You need to be in the same directory as the downloaded .bin file

3. Execute the binary with root/superuser permissions:
$ sudo ./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

Done!

Now you can download Alertthingy or Twhirl .air files and simply click to install.

The alertthingy site sometimes does not recognize AIR on your system,so you can download it here. Thanks to Rober MacEwan for the same.

Immunity

ScribeFire: Excellent Firefox add-on for blogging

ScribeFire is a really useful Firefox add-on that lets you blog from within your browser without signing in to your service. Now is that slick or what! There is a customizable ScribeFire toolbar and you can split your browser into two, thus blogging and surfing at the same time.This is really useful for bloggers like me who include a lot of backlinks in their posts. Adding links is a breeze as you can simply open the relevant window and add the link via the editor. A handy pane that includes all the other blog controls like tagging, trackbacks, previous posts etc. lets you completely manage your blog from within Firefox. A rich editor allows you to add Flickr photos or YouTube vidoes at the click of a button. Sharing the page on popular networks is also easily possible.

This is my first post using ScribeFire. And I am ecstatic.

Friendfeed - love it, hate it, but you can't ignore it

Of late, there has been a lot of buzz over Friendfeed- the rapidly evolving personal feed sharing service. In fact, the above description seems hopelessly inadequate, given the increasing social form Friendfeed is acquiring. It has received mixed reactions and people I know who use Friendfeed either love it or hate it.

Let's begin with the flaws.

The foremost problem with Friendfeed seems to be privacy. Anyone (literally ANYONE) can subscribe to your feed and essentially keep tabs on you 24-7. Of course you have the option of making your feed private, but there is very little user control when it comes to selectively restricting feeds and subscribers. Another problem: I don't need your consent to subscribe to your feed; which seems fair. But a 'friendfeed' is not like a targeted RSS/Atom subscription, so again some user control over both content and subscribers here is critical. Then comes etiquette: Since Friendfeeds are quite personal, can I add your feed even if I barely know you? What about total strangers? Before you know it, your Flickr photos, Twitter updates and Gtalk statuses will be visible to the curious monkey from the other side of the world.

Most of the negatives stem from lack of privacy control, which can be easily remedied. But the beauty of Friendfeed lies in free exchange of resources, and it is important to preserve this aspect.

One way of improving Friendfeed is to give it a definite purpose, an identity. I feel this can be achieved without stereotyping or restricting the scope of the service. If people have a clear understanding of the concept, they will use it more freely and effectively. And the guys at Friendfeed seem to be working on it - a new feature called 'Rooms' has very recently been added:

" A room is like a mini FriendFeed for a particular subject or group of people. Everyone in your room can share stuff with each other and leave comments that only other people in your room can see. You decide whether to make your room public, where anyone can join, or private, where you have to invite or approve each member. You can even choose to view everything from your rooms in your feed, instead of just in the rooms themselves. "

Friendfeed is/can be novel in many ways. It quite surreptitously is taking on the big guns:

1. It has a bare-bones, functional approach to community sharing. A relief in today's cluttered, over-decked social networking and sharing sites.
2. It can be used for community chat, by exploiting the private 'Rooms' above.
3. It has made feeds much more accessible, and eliminated the need for feed aggregators(I hardly use FeedDemon any more...)
4. It can be a recommendation site through selective link sharing(eliminate Digg, Reddit?).
5. It can be used for sending updates (Twitter under fire?) and a mobile version is in the pipeline.

Whether it can come up trumps in the long run, is something only time can tell, although I do sense a revolution in the offing.

Of ideas...and feedback

Backboard is a cool new app coming out of the Valley. It adds feedback capabilities to scribd like document embedding. You can upload any document (Word, Excel, pdf, html pages among others) for others to see and comment upon - a secure URL will be generated which can be shared amongst select people ala mailing lists.

While the UI is impeccable, backboard falls seriously short on the features and flexibility front. It can, for example, incorporate social features like widget-based sharing, importing email contacts for easy sharing and integration with niche professional and academic networks. Backboard is the creation of Increo Solutions, a Silicon Valley based startup focused on enabling effective exchange of ideas and projects. Given that they've launched backboard just last week, it'll only be a matter of time until the offerings are decked up. They also have an interesting SaaS in the Increo platform, which, inspite of reeking of the project-management odor, still has a refreshing side to it.

Note: Interested beings can check out my analysis of monolithic DTMF receiver architecture here. For the clueless, I am bragging about my recent academic milestones.

Foolproof security?