Why iGoogle’s ‘Social Gadgets’ Should Kill Facebook — Datamation.com.

Mike Elgan writes:

iGoogle as a social networking site sits directly between MySpace and Facebook in the area of customizability. It’s more customizable than stodgy, boring Facebook, but less customizable than garish, horrid MySpace.

Strong words, yes.  I somewhat agree with them. I haven’t seen iGoogle yet as social media, more personal homepage. But a clear transformation has been happening; I for one am excited about it.

We have application classes to work with–and understanding them is going to be of assistance in our attempt to accomplish things at any given time.  I’ve noticed more noise in regard to this.  It’s a great question to ask.  Social Networking, Social Media, Personal Home Page, News Reader, Portal, and so on.   At this point, out of all sites and all application types, my home is Google Reader.  I’ve got my sources and I’ve categorized them into groups.  No fuss, no gimmicks.  Just stories and opinions.  This is where morning coffee happens.  Information as far as I see it.  And I chose it over iGoogle–but I’m at iGoogle before long.  I’ve got a Google Reader widget in iGoogle (as well as a twitter gadget and a weather gadget and 20 other of those 60,000), but the widget in too clunky in iGoogle to really get a grip on it.   So I’ll get over to it in a tabbed window and switch around a bit.

We’ll see how iGoogle transforms. It seems with widgets these days, an introvert’s index.html could turn into a social networking site.  Cut and paste some code.  Get some FaceBook connect implementation happening and then promote it.

I’ll be checking out those new igoogle gadgets for sure. I have been an iGoogle user for quite a while now and have preferred iGoogle over FaceBook and MySpace. With the $ at stake, changes are going to be taking place in nanoseconds.  Oh yeah, and good luck killing FaceBook.

A hearty thank you to the inventive, brilliant Dave Winer. His suggestion to do a #blogpostfriday versus a #followfriday is most welcome, and I’m going to follow this new tradition. We have become so used to the short form. 140 characters can convey a good deal, no doubt–especially with hyperlinks. But there must be a place for more thorough thought than this.

It seems that in this day and age we are conditioned to follow.  It’s a snap to follow by clicking and supplying a few grunts and mindless reactions of acceptance, conformity, and compliance.  Will we go beyond that?  We certainly have.  I have been a writer for many years and for many reasons I see it is imperative to continue to put words down at length.  Paper, screen, anyplace–keeping the hands moving, keeping the connection with what goes through my mind, hopefully keeping this brain healthy.

Every Friday,
rain or shine!.

We are focused on those clicks, on catching the latest fad, the latest gadget, the snappiest way to snap our fingers on our MacBooks, Toshibas, iPhones, G1’s, Wings, and other “miracle machines”. We forget about taking the time to think things through, to savor ideas, maybe outline and plan a little bit. We need vehicles to carry our thoughts–so we can save them for ourselves or convey them clearly to others. To have a meaningful exchange.

Dave’s name has appeared quite a bit in my FriendFeed, through his direct posts or through the admiring words of others.  To find out that he was a pioneer of the RSS protocol and more, and he is still continuing to work on ways to enhance these open technologies–these are  noteworthy accomplishments indeed.  How small do you feel when you stand beside the ocean?  How small do you feel when you stand beside one of the inventors of it?!  This is the man PC World calls “The father of modern-day content distribution.”. So when he speaks about blogging, I would be inclined to listen.

This whole world seems ADD’d out to the max.  Focus seems next to impossible in this uber-rapid information age.  I fight for it every moment, for my clients, for my friends, for my wife, for myself.  Let’s say there’s room for improvement.  How about for you?  Are you ready to cast that first stone?

What are we sculpting?  What are we planning?  Is there structure to it, or is it a formless ramble?  I for one see value in randomness, in quick shots, thoughts in spurts–but settling back and really saying something.  That’s what I want to be about.  I want to think.  Complexities abound; shouting as well.  Extended words, built sensibly, with balance, solid construction, direction and detail.  That’s my goal.  At least now and then.

Imagine folks taking time to assemble their thoughts, their responses to events, to stimuli–careful, considered responses.  How much would be different!  The moments to be still and get to know a subject a little bit, to live with the words, chew on them–there’s a novel way to approach the day.  A novel way to approach a Friday–a #blogpostfriday!

Write on.

Enjoying xml pruning for IMG Thumbnail Gallery. Hope to check out the RSS capability soon.

Making great use of the ScreenGrab Firefox plugin.  This one’s might convenient, with a very unobtrusive icon at the bottom right and handy options for cut/paste or save to folder.

It’s a quick download then smack into WP media library.  Working well in FireFox 3.x on both Mac and Windows.

FriendFeed - Top 10 Reasons to Stick With FriendFeed

Mommy, I Don’t Wanna Go Anywhere Else! See before and after shots of TOS The reward, the reward It’s the tightest community I’ve seen, just about It simply can never be unstuck.  Too sticky! I needed that blank space where my embed was. Random Facebook content in my FriendFeed embeds could be so entertaining, so serendipitous The R&D could still show up here, before it does anywhere FriendFeed is a friend indeed.  I have the need. Do I really need a reason?

The nicefishfilms interview with Scoble et al provided good insight into the scenario, the enthusiasm, the reasons why FF made such an impact. FaceBook’s app universe is so robust and deep and open to coders it’s going to be a very difficult one to match by anyone. FriendFeed wasn’t necessarily about that out of the gate–it apparently was moving in that direction, but there are only so many resources to make that happen alongside its brilliant piece of web poetry. And the upside with this acquisition is infinite. FriendFeed gets to contribute to that, bring blindingly fast innovation to that community. I’m faithful that we’ll see the benefits within the FriendFeed interface and embed system, that it won’t go away.

I mentioned to my wife–who’s on her way to DevLink– this morning how amazed I was that Mr. Buchheit was present (not to mention the other stellar folks), that I could get a glimpse into his thinking, what he sees as something that matters; that he was at least virtually there, this master, this key creative force in the maturing of this living, breathing internet.  It’s a privilege.  It’s going to keep going.  I know it.

In thinking about what’s incredible in this online paradigm, we are sharing our knowledge, and hopefully our friendship, and hopefully there’s good karma with it.  We syndicate ourselves, our thoughts.  We have control over where to share, how much to share–and it will continue to be refined.  I was more than stoked at how FriendFeed took this syndication to the next levels, beyond what any of us thought was possible.  These are tools to help us spread, it is hoped, good words, and exchange anywhere we wish to in this vast, amazing virtual world in which we work and play.  The great minds and creative forces that made FriendFeed such a fantastic tool will be present and continuing to create.  I’m staying tuned, that is for sure.

Twitter’s a Mess: First the DDOS, Now Koobface Returns.

I haven’t laid too heavy on the tweeting.  It is a challenge to get beyond microblogging.  At least it’s challenging for me, so I’m looking into “longer forms”. <g>

Regarding Koobface:  with this and other worms, a buyer beware should ring from every email received.  We click without thinking–I know this from experience.  One thing that Outlook has is a review of the URL–in emails Outlook will highlight the email if the href is different than the text which is enclosed by the <a> tag.  I’m not sure about the proliferation of these shortened url’s–I’ve seen various scripts to show the fully resolved url, but I click through these links.

What is certain is that miscreants would love to bury the big tweety bird!

Thought I’d head into a little reading this morning, via my iGoogle setup. Fished around, read a great Frida Kahlo quote via a Motivational Quotes gadget (you’ll need to have iGoogle). Then headed to the Scobleizer feed. In the midst of his recommendation to “turn off the internet”, he linked to a site called twittervision. If there’s anyone whose links I check out, it’s Mr. Scoble.

You could call it a glorified chat room if you’d like, a pointless exercise in assembling feeds, or tweets if you will; but this is an amazing work of technology. A very quick page source view revealed a bunch of javascript links. I was thinking it might be flash (there’s a 3-d view that is Flash, but it appears that “Classic View” is a google maps call). Too funny to call this “classic”. I thought classic meant 25 years old. Tell me this is 25 years old! <lol>

Well, I’ve got to check out more tweets. Hey, it may be easy to impress me–this blows me away. MegaMashup. OK, real work to do now.

The link came a while back from my friend Doak:  To the video of this last lecture, taken from an Oprah Winfrey show.  The lecturer, Randy Pausch, inspired completely, and now this experience is expounded upon in the new book The Last Lecture.  I had not known of this custom among orators to perform such a lecture, but learning of it let me appreciate the group more.  What a hold the video has taken, millions of views.

One of my favorite performing songwriters, John Gorka, has a line in a song–”get your compass and your sharpest knife, because people love you when they know you’re leaving soon”, and the situation reminds me of this line, the truth of it.  Pausch admits that the dying has so much to do with the attention.  The self-help literature talks about how you’d like to end up, what would people say at your funeral.  This lecture relates to that, though somewhat in a reversal of roles.  People love you also, or they have to reiterate it, when they know they’re leaving soon.  Mortality is such a core part of our world.  I feel more alive seeing, hearing and reading this brave set of words.