Nova Spivack likes to differentiate interest networks, like Twine, from social networks like Facebook. The problem is that people also use social networks to follow their interests, especially as in the case of Twitter. The result is that if we want to follow, say, Dave Winer’s thoughts on RSS, we also have to follow his interest in baseball. Microbloggers like Robert Scoble have begun to create separate Twitter accounts for their aggregation of Links and comments. Others use hash tags. But most simply continue to send all their tweets to the same into the unified stream. If Twitter had a tagging option, we could fine-tune the service to follow only Steve’s RSS related tweets, and Robert wouldn’t need to make all those different Twitter accounts. Twitter would suddenly become much less noisy and more useful. The same formula should be adopted by other social networks.
October 2009
Streaming vs. Blogging
I just finished reading Louis Gray’s blog post about streaming versus conventional blogging, With the example of Steve Rubel’s Posterous. Then had another look at Rubel’s writings. Rubel conceives a situation where content producers might abandon traditional websites – the “hubs” of today’s web – in favor of placing their content on services like Facebook (the “spokes”, from which content emanates outward from blogs and websites).
Whether or not this proves to be true, I think that it requires no less writing acumen to produce an interesting stream than to author a traditional blog. Parts of Rubel’s Posterous are quite boring, Successful streaming and microblogging require stylistic adjustments in order to create interesting content.
I’d love to see greater stability in Google Docs
I have found it possible to create documents in Google Docs that it is impossible to convert to MS Word docs, or download or email. In such cases you can only copy and paste. Some Google docs can’t even be opened by Google Docs. If these are things that I’ve come across, as a fairly light user, it means that there’s a nest of other bugs waiting. Google needs to spend time stabilizing its Docs platform more than it needs to add new features.
But if Google is thinking of new features, user-customized templates should be introduced to standard edition Google Apps or regular Gmail users, and it would be nice to see shared folders. For both of these features I found workarounds*, but these shouldn’t be necessary.
* The workarounds:
– for templates, create a “Templates” folder, create a new template. Open the template as a document, and just remember to change the name to something else. If you make a mistake and change and save the template, you can always revert to a previous “version”.
– as a workaround for the absence of shared folders, I create folders in a shared Google Site, then place links to the documents there. Update: Google has just introduced a shared folder feature (see The Next Web article from October 12) This shares a folder with all of its files. But does it allow another user to place files there? If so, it isn’t clear from Google’s explanation.
Tags in document organization
Just noticed the tags feature in Windows 7, which corresponds to keywords in Office 2007. It would be possible to forego folder organization and just use tags. Folders are an old fashioned way of organizing files, and we really should no longer be using these today. With tags we could also bring together files which would normally be stored separately, like photos and emails.
However it isn’t possible to add tags to other formats like pdf, rtf or odt. Although keywords can be added to Openoffice files within Openoffice, these are not recognized as tags by the file manager in Windows 7. That’s a pity.
Win 7 file manager