•
Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it's a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter. The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge. Sponsor Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo , the world's leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project . Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project's mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors. Length Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention - it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from WordPress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters - call it "microblogging mode". I don't think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation. Real Time While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days. Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging. The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that's faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It's an open standard called PubSubHub and it's supported by both Blogger, WordPress, Buzz and countless other smaller services. Blogs are already real time. Identified Subscriptions One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count. Why couldn't we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user's own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header. Addressability This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, "Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy" and I will get it in my message stream. Blogs can't do that right? Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability - using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references. The only problem with this model is that it's not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don't understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly. So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber? To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of "@", they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user's microblogging site. Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world's open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL. The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items. Clients Why can't existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site - anywhere. The Future As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well. There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way. Discuss
See more here:
Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative
Tags:
api,
bbc,
Chris Saad,
Echo,
follower,
france,
language,
markup-language,
marvelous invention,
person,
personal,
product direction,
project,
search,
technology,
time,
Twitter,
user
•
"Advances in science and technology can launch from unassuming springboards," says a recent article in Scientific American, chronicling how brilliant thinkers "reached back to childhood to help them develop tiny transistors, study particle separation, make microfluidics devices, and fight cancer." More specifically, they reached for Etch A Sketch, Legos, Shrinky Dinks and balloons. The modern era is intrigued by the possibility of finding answers in unexpected places. In fact, the allure of genius ex machina has gone so far as to revolutionize corporate innovation processes at large; they now accommodate - nay, solicit - user input. Sponsor Guest author Kim Gaskins is a writer for Latitude, an international research consultancy exploring how Web technologies can further enhance human experiences. Visit life-connected.com for other Latitude studies or to learn more about working with Latitude. Dave Stanton of the Poynter Institute leads an SxSW session: "My Three-Year Old is my Usability Expert." Are you the parent of a child 12 years old or under? Click here to take a survey about how kids perceive the Web. Recently, PayPal's Developer Challenge crowdsourced ideas for better integrating payment into developers' own applications. And last year, Netflix awarded $1 million to the team that improved its recommendation algorithm by more than 10%. (Over 50,000 contestants entered the challenge.) With so much impetus behind technological advancements, some innovative minds -- particularly in the areas of design and usability -- are looking back to a kind of vintage simplicity in distilling the problem and solution principles underlying their creations. Last month at SXSW, Dave Stanton , a cognitive researcher and Technology Fellow at The Poynter Institute , ran a session entitled "My Three-Year Old is my Usability Expert." In certain contexts, children's natural limitations turn to strengths. "Children are terrific UI testers because they haven't developed the language necessary to parse text instructions; they have to rely on visual cues," explains Stanton. "Children can help us balance intuitive interfaces with the domain-specific attributes designers use to convey personality." My 3-year-old daughter is my usability expert Young children adopt a fundamentally different approach to technology. We can see this at work in simple ways - in the toddler who, accustomed to her mother's iPhone, instinctively approaches a laptop by swiping a finger across it. "We are moving toward more naturalistic interfaces utilizing feel, sound and sight for both user input and device feedback," describes Stanton. "I'm excited to see the elegant modes of human-computer interaction we can uncover by studying how children leverage these mechanisms in problem-solving scenarios." In conjunction with ReadWriteWeb, Latitude Research is taking children's unique approach to technology one step further. "This project is a step toward understanding how children can help us generate abstract solutions with potential real-world applications," Stanton says. As part of an open innovation study (whose lead analyst is Jessica Reinis ), we're asking kids, age 12 and under, to create ideas for future Web technologies (or, more likely, to demonstrate the underlying, creative-thinking principles which beget these types of innovations) by drawing the answer to a simple question: What would be really fun or interesting to do on your computer or the Internet that you can't do right now? "The difference between today's children and yesterday's was what technologies were available to them as they tried to make sense of the world around them," said ethnographer and social media researcher danah boyd , when we asked her how pervasive digital culture might be affecting younger generations. "But youth accept whatever contemporary technology is available and try to see if it makes sense in their lives. Adults are the ones who have to shift their understanding of the world based on technology." Naturally, we're interested to see how Web solutions can be informed by more technologically "intuitive" sensibilities when child becomes creator. Screenshot of the Latitude/RWW study: Kids' Future Requests for Computers and the Internet. To participate in the study, click here . Latitude's open innovation privacy policy is available here . Photo by cell911 . Discuss
Read the rest here:
Kids on the Web: Innovation From Unlikely Experts
Tags:
computers,
design,
future-requests,
internet,
Jessica Reinis,
language,
Latitude,
poynter,
project,
research,
Social Media,
technology,
toddler,
understanding,
World
•
In a memo to its advertisers, Facebook quietly announced that it would change the phrase "Become A Fan" to "Like" in what, at times, seems like an ongoing effort to confuse and enrage its users. "Like" has had a very specific, while malleable, usage for Facebook users and changing it to gear towards advertisers and Fan Page subscriptions is deceptive. Not only does the move seem like a confusing one for users, but it opens up their actions to the public, as becoming a fan of something is completely public to all who view your profile. Sponsor While the memo says that "users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and aesthetic differences", we expect that the majority of users will only find out the difference between liking now and liking then when they "Like" something that suddenly bombards their feed with stories and advertisements. The memo offers an example of how an ad for a page will look with the "language change". According to an article in Clikz on the change , the memo also points out that "Facebook users have been clicking the current 'Like' feature nearly twice as often as the 'Become A Fan' button". The reason, it seems to us, is apparent - clicking "Like" was a quick and easy way to convey approval, support or other simple sentiment, not a way to commit to being a fan and subscribing to news updates in their News Feed for perpetuity. "Like" offers a light-weight, consistent way for users to connect with the things they are passionate about. This lighter-weight action for connection to a Page on Facebook means that users will be making more connections across the site, including your Facebook Page. Changing what Facebook has identified as a "lighter-weight action" into an action that deeper implications is at the core of what we find deceptive here. Was there anything wrong with the language of "Become A Fan"? With that language, it was clear that there was a separation from any time I might "Like" something. I would be connected to that Page and would receive updates in my News Feed. It would show up, publicly, to anyone and everyone that viewed my page on the Internet, as a result of the privacy changes to the site last December. Were users clicking on "Become A Fan" less for a reason? Likely so - they didn't want to subscribe to that particular content in their news feed and, if they understood the privacy implications, because they didn't want to broadcast to the world what they saw as private thoughts and opinions. Discuss
Read more here:
Do You Like Us Or Like Like Us? "Become A Fan" Changing To "Like" On Facebook
Tags:
across-the-site,
difference,
distinction,
facebook,
internet,
language,
memo,
news,
twice-as-often
•
One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites , a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks , for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities. In Siegel's latest book, Pull , he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards. Sponsor Siegel's definition of 'Semantic Web' is much broader than that of many technologists. So, just as many Web standards advocates derided Siegel's version of web design back in the 90s, will they also cry foul of his version of the Semantic Web? Pull is being positioned as a business guide to the emerging Semantic Web. It has similarities to Creating Killer Web Sites , which caught the wave of an emerging big trend of the mid-90s (web site design) and became a bestseller. Siegel is attempting to catch a second big online wave, with the Semantic Web in 2010. Siegel explains the title in the introduction: "This book describes the pull era , where customers pull everything to them on demand - products, services, information, knowledge, and advice. Much of the foundation for pulling is called the semantic web , a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will change business from a lead-push model to a pull-follow model of interacting with customers." It's hard to argue against the vision that the book outlines. However for many Semantic Web proponents, the foundational technologies are Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). These standards allow web publishers to encode meaning - semantics - into their sites. David Siegel's definition of Semantic Web is far broader. On the book's accompanying website, The Power of Pull , there is a " Semantic Web Acid Test ." It defines a semantic web business as one that has an "unambiguous" structure for its data. The book states that "some technologists feel that semantic web data must be expressed using a language called RDF," but Siegel disagrees. Instead, he believes that "simple, unambiguous formats are part of the semantic web." The book is ultimately about how structured data will change how we do business. Frankly, the use of the term 'Semantic Web' in this book feels forced. Even so, I think it's a very useful book and offers detailed scenarios of how structured data will improve business. For example, chapter 4 is about retailers and outlines the benefits of RFID tags in retail - including describing a visit Siegel made to forward-thinking German retailer Metro Group. Overall Pull is a solid and well-researched book. It's a good introduction for business people to structured data and the Semantic Web. My one issue with the book is that Siegel's appropriation of the term 'Semantic Web' leaves me feeling a little uneasy. On the home page of his personal website is a blog post (entitled 'Why I Should be Apple's Next CEO'), in which Siegel claims that he "started talking about the Semantic Web in 1998, before Tim Berners-Lee coined the term." Whether that's true or not, it does beg the question: is Siegel's definition of the Semantic Web the same as Tim Berners-Lee's? Discuss
See the original post:
David Siegel: From Killer Web Sites to Semantic Web
Tags:
analysis,
apple,
book,
Business,
creating-killer,
german,
language,
personal,
power,
RFID,
semantic,
siegel,
term,
web-design
•
Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome , the company's increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome. Sponsor Read 52 Languages Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don't need it for. One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google's servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post. Better Privacy Controls In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new "Content Settings" option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls. What About the Mac and Linux? With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn't easy. While these new features aren't available for Mac and Linux users yet, it's likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome . Discuss
Original post:
Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation and New Privacy Features
Tags:
better-privacy,
browser,
browsers,
Chrome,
Google,
language,
languages,
Linux,
MAC,
mainstream users,
privacy controls,
Read,
technology,
through-the-new,
time,
translation,
translation feature,
uses-the-stable,
version,
windows