Technology

Distributed Social Networking

August 30th 2010, 08:08am

For all their utility, a draw back of the social media tools I use is that they are centralised. One monolithic, commercially operated platform acts as a repository for all of my (and my friends’ and contacts’) content, links and networks.  In a fun debate yesterday on the email question (during which I did my bit to help Seafarers UK) one major point in email’s favour was interoperability – the fact that its a plural market with any number of provides, an established standard, and everyone has an email address. While it’s getting easier to conceive of the time when everyone has a Facebook account (even my brother) much in the way everyone now has a mobile, concerns over the privacy, longevity and usage of our content still stand.  If Flickr shut down or dramatically changed its operating conditions I would lose all the meta data and comments for the few hundred photos.

If we were to host our own content, we’d still need some way to authenticate those who we wished to permit access.  But if we could host our content, while we used a network to connect to others’ – in my mind I imagine this as being a little like the arrival of peer to peer networks for file sharing and distribution – we could have the best of both worlds. Especially if the software that enabled the hosting and powered the network were open source.  And this, as I understand it, is what Diaspora will offer when it is launched in a couple of weeks.

The best of both worlds for me, though, is not necessarily something my friends will want or enjoy. Most of them are unlikely to want to host their own seed, or even know how to. So Diaspora could then easily become a ghetto for techies and nerds, if they did not have their eye on the WordPress model of free open source software (.org) for those who want flexibility and power and hosting (.com) for those that want the convenience.  Although with hosting you’re still trusting to a provider, you have choice and there’s no lock-in: it’s all portable if you want to switch.  The critical factor will be over whether anyone can find a way to offer Diaspora hosting for free, in the way WordPress.com (and of course FB) are free.

If so perhaps Diaspora can repeat Firefox’s trick of carving out a share of a market heavily dominated by one player.

Of course the key thing in terms of its success for me will be how many friends will join. Alas, I got no responses at all to a post on both Facebook and Twitter last week, suggesting my friends are all happy to stay put.  I’ll either have to stay with them, or end up on a social network talking only to myself…

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Technology

Spotify Can Do What iTunes Can’t

May 30th 2010, 11:05am

Apple have shied away from subscription and streaming for a long time, but Spotify have copied all the best bits of iTunes so it now offers better iPhone syncing than the Apple product.  Will iTunes now copy the best bits of Spotify?  It’s a sibling rivalry – the digital music equivalent of the brothers Milliband…

Subscription services have come and gone as Apple’s iTunes has gone from strength to strength.  But Spotify have developed a compelling service copying iTunes in providing a simple and intuitive client and a very comprehensive music catalogue – and to cap it all, offering it all in a free (advertising supported) option too.  In the “next generation” Spotify service, two major features were added: social and local.

The former is essentially integration with Facebook which pulls in your current friends (if they’ve linked Spotify to their accounts too) and offers familiar features such as feeds and recommendations.  It’s simple, but not only is it more sophisticated than Apple’s limited Facebook/Twitter recommendations options in the iTMS, it has far higher utility because if you have Spotify already you can listen to the full tracks and playlists your friends are subscribing to and recommending with no purchase and no risk (for example, if you’ve got Spotify you could listen to my playlist of commercial tracks from Doctor Who or House, M.D.).  If iTunes wants to get more social, it’s going to be hard to resist the subscription model for much longer.

But the feature that must really have made Apple sit up and take notice is the local feature, the effect of which is to make possible wireless syncing of your iTunes library to iPhone.  This is because Spotify brings in all of your local tracks, and if you have the mobile app (I don’t yet, because I haven’t bothered to sign up for the premium subscription) when you’re on the same wifi network you can make a playlist containing your local tracks (or a mixture of local and Spotify tracks) available for off-line listening. Presto!

Spotify is almost ready to persuade me to give up iTunes altogether.  But there are a few things it lacks (smart playlists, podcasts and audiobooks) and sadly the wifi syncing feature that’s available on the phone isn’t available to other computers on the network (i.e. local files on one network machine cannot be streamed to others).  So Apple has an opportunity here to make a comeback, and here are the three things I want from the next generation iTunes:

  • Streaming/subscription service with social features
  • Let me access music on any of my computers registered to iTunes from anywhere, including streaming it to my iPhone
  • Let me wirelessly sync files to my iPhone for offline listening

And if anyone will (finally) offer me the facility to annotate playlists, I’ll be ecstatic!

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Wordpress

Commenting Should Be More Social, Discuss

May 26th 2010, 07:05pm

When you find a blog post that’s interesting and you are motivated to comment on it, where do you discuss it?  Once upon a time you’d have had the conversation right there, on the site, on that page.  Essentially a one-to-one with the author, other posters reading it might come along and join in (perhaps friends you recommended it to).  Just as likely now, you make your recommendation along with your comment, on Facebook or Twitter, and the discussion kicks off there.

I’ve been looking at commenting systems over the past couple of days.  This is motivated partly by curiosity (a vast number of sites I look at offer login via something called Disqus) and partly because I think it would be neat if the conversations could be brought back together.  Here are some of the advantages systems like IntenseDebate and Disqus (the two of looked at) can offer:

  1. As a commenter you can log in with your WordPress/IntenseDebate/Disqus, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or OpenID identity.
  2. When you make a comment it can be tweeted out to your followers as well. They’ll see not just a link to the post but also (the first part of) your comment.
  3. Discussion elsewhere (eg. on Twitter) gets pulled back in so everyone reading the post can also see the discussion.
  4. As a commenter you get a lot of control over the information you share about yourself, not just linking to your own website (as is typical on a comment) but also to your social network profiles etc.
  5. As a commenter you get a lot of control over how the comments are displayed to you.
  6. Commenters’ profiles are also linked to all their other comments.  So if someone has said something interesting in response to a post, you can see what else they’ve been reading and what comments they’ve made on it.

There are probably other things, those interested me the most.

There are some alternatives that can do just some of these things, and there are some drawbacks:  There are plugins for WordPress that do 1 & 2.  (And, it turns out, 3).  And the drawback with 6 is that it only applies where the commenter has commented on another blog that also uses the same commenting system (the classic dilemma for social networks/IM systems/mobile phones etc.)

Yesterday the Independent adopted Disqus.  Now, I don’t read the Indy, but it was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.  I installed Disqus on the blog, and it’s there now.  But it might not be in a couple of hours.  There are some niggles, in ascending order of niggliness:

  • Reactions (which I call mentions) didn’t show up at first (though they do now).
  • A comment from 2007 got duplicated (but just the one!)
  • The counter which tells you how many comments (and mentions) there are before you go and look is ALWAYS wrong. Grrrr.
  • And (most seriously) it appears to have borked comments for those viewing the mobile version of the site.

Also I don’t yet know to what extent I’ll be able to style the comments back how I want them (they’re functional and usable, but I want them to fit in with the Little Storping aesthetic!)

I can just switch Disqus off anytime.  All the comments get duplicated into the WordPress system anyway.  So, if I can do 1, 2 and 3 (using the Backtype plugin) how much value should I place on 4, 5 and 6.

Maybe the most important thing is what the users think…  Oh. Ahem. Um, comments, please?

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