Category — social networking

Since I marked my first 100 Twitter followers with this post back on July 4, 2009, I thought I’d mark my second hundred followers with this post. It took 13 months to reach 100 Twitter followers and just over five months to pass the 200 mark on December 7, 2009.

As was the case in my earlier post, I still only follow a relatively small, but terrific, group of people (currently 64). When I follow someone new, I try to cull another. All with the view to reading (or at least scanning) most every tweet they make.

Twitter has changed the way I use the Internet. These exceptional 60+ sources feed me almost all of my daily tech news. I rarely surf from blog to blog the way I used to. I have also abandoned RSS feeds altogether. Twitter-sourced news is superior.

I have also abandoned Friendfeed. Despite some strong lobbying by Davis Freeberg, I just didn’t see the point. Everyone is on Twitter. And, since Facebook purchased Friendfeed back in August, its future is uncertain.

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Today, July 4, 2009, Robert Jones became the 100th person to follow me on Twitter. Dave Zatz was the first non-automated follower to follow me. Thanks Robert & Dave. Joining Twitter on June 4, 2008, it took exactly 13 months to go garner my first 100 followers.

Having reached the 100-follower milestone, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on my experience to date.

On Followers and Following

Who I Follow: For the most part, the only people I follow on Twitter are those that I have an ongoing relationship with (about 15 to 20 people) and thought leaders (about 35 people). In order for me to continue following someone they must have a high wheat-to-chaff ratio. Meaning, most of their tweets must be about topics I am interested in – not what they ate for lunch.

Loyalty: I am a rather loyal sort. If I follow someone, I follow them. The reason the list of people I follow is short (by Twitter standards) is because I read/scan most every tweet that comes in.

The Kawasaki Exception: Early on I followed Guy Kawasaki. He was/is an interesting Twitter user. But this guy (pun intended) doesn’t know when to stop! He sends out torrents of tweets each day. I couldn’t take it any more. He is the only person I unfollowed because of too many interesting tweets. FYI his post: “How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter” is pretty good except for his advice to follow everyone that follows you – ugh!

How I Found those I Follow: The best way of finding interesting people is to mine the following list of the people that I already follow.

Who I do Not Follow: Anyone else. I know, this makes me an anomaly on Twitter.  I don’t have the time to follow many more people. If I follow someone new and stick with them, I’ll usually remove someone else.

I Do Not Follow to be Followed: Most people that have huge follower lists also follow a huge number of people. How can someone follow 10,000 people? 1,000 people?  Really!? I can barely keep up with the 50 people I follow.

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Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google. In the 2 minute video below he describes what he believes Web 3.0 applications will be.

In summary, he defines, Web 3.0 as:

• Applications that are pieced together.
• They are relatively small.
• The data is in the cloud.
• The application can run on any device, PC or mobile phone.
• Applications are fast and customizable
• Applications are distributed virally via social networks and email.

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The Microsoft Press Conference can be viewed here. See also: My 2008 Microsoft E3 coverage.

Big Announcements:

• Halo Reach: Bungie teased this new Halo game, set for a fall 2010 release. Whoo hoo! If its a Bungie shooter, and it has the name Halo on it, I’m in! Is ‘Noble 1’, Will Master Chief?
   
• Metal Gear Rising: The next Kojima / Konami Metal Gear game is coming to the Xbox!!! Holy Cow! The final coup de gras against Sony.  Kojima seemed genuinely happy to appear on stage for the announcement.
• Project Natal: A ‘controller free’ , full body motion capture, item scanning, facial and voice recognition. Will work on every 360. See demo here. I’ll believe it when I see it! I don’t believe the Lion’s Gate Milo demo pictured on right. It had to be heavily scripted (click for larger view).

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Following recent reports (see here, here and here) on the growing number of U.S. Senators and Congressional Representatives that use Twitter (about 120 right now), I decided to look into which Canadian Cabinet ministers, party leaders, Senators and Members of Parliament use Twitter. Below are my preliminary results as of May 12, 2009. I have included the number of each person’s Twitter followers in parenthesis.

This list is not exhaustive. If you know of other Cabinet Ministers, Senators or MPs using Twitter, please add them in the comments with a link to their twitter profile. Many thanks.

Cabinet Members

Stephen Harper – Prime Minister:

http://twitter.com/pmharper (12,219)

Jason Kenney – Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism:

http://twitter.com/MinJK (702)

Tony Clement – Minister of Industry:

http://twitter.com/TonyClementMP (501)

[Update: This must be someone spoofing a Tony Clement profile.]

Stockwell Day Minister of International Trade:

http://twitter.com/Stockwell_Day  (2 – hasn’t posted anything yet)

Steven Fletcher – Minister of State (Democratic Reform):

http://twitter.com/stevenjfletcher (377)

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Have you ever wanted to share a blog post, website, video, music or news story in Facebook?

There are two ways to do this, by using either: (i) the ‘Share on Facebook’ bookmarklet’ (depicted in the image above); or (ii)  the attach ‘Links’ method.  Either way, your friends will see what you share in their Facebook feeds. Shared music and videos will be directly playable by them from within the feed.

Using the ‘Share on Facebook’ Bookmarklet

This is the easiest way. Get the the ‘Share on Facebook’ bookmarklet here. You’ll be taken to this page:

Follow the instructions. Grab (point and hold-click on) the ‘Share on Facebook’ bookmarklet icon on that page, then drag and drop it onto your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Later, when you are on a website, YouTube page, whatever, that you want to share:

• click on the ‘Share on Facebook’ bookmarklet. A page like this will pop up:

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The Twitter apps, tools and widgets I use are constantly changing. Below are the tools I currently use (click on the images for larger views):

Desktop Client – Twhirl

I use Twhirl as my desktop twitter application. I looked at TweetDeck but it was overkill and it takes up too much screen real-estate. I tried the gorgeous blu (works only on Vista and Windows 7), but it does not have an adjustable font. The default font is too small for my aging eyes. Twhirl is surprisingly feature rich but it takes awhile to figure out all the intricacies. I’ve tried others, but keep coming back to Thwirl.

iPhone App – Tweetie

Tweetie is terrific. I had previously used Twitterific and Twinkle on the iPhone but Tweetie ($2.99) satisfies me the most. Tweets are presented in bubbles similar to the iPhone’s SMS bubbles. Thankfully, the font is adjustable. Functions and information are an easy swish away. Twitterific does have the advantage of supporting both Twitter and friendfeed.

See also: 29 Twitter Apps for the iPhone Compared (Mashable)

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Taking a queue, once again, from Dave over at ZNF, I added the new Twitter Widget to the Daleisphere (currently below my Disqus comment box) and my other Wordpress sites.

Previously I had used Twitter Widget Pro and Twitter for WordPress for this purpose with mixed results.

The most important benefit of changing to this widget is that it works! The other widgets yielded spotty results with too many fail whales.

The other obvious benefit is that it allows me to embed many more tweets in my sidebar than the others did – through a scrollable interface.

Downsides:

Performance: Occasionally it doesn’t work. The result, a  black fail whale rectangle with nothing in it. While annoying, so far the black rectangle appears less often than the fail whales I experienced with the other Twitter widgets. Also, sometimes the black box turns into the proper widget if you give it long enough. Odd.

Flash: On the downside the widget requires Flash. As a result, it does not work with the iPhone. Note: There is an html version of the widget available – though it’s not as nice or useful.

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[Update: As of April 18, 2009, the Facebook Connect glitch under Disqus discussed in this post appears to be remedied. As you can see, I have re-activated the Facebook Connect option on The Daleisphere.

I also note that commenters using Facebook connect have the option (when leaving a comment) to allow that comment to be posted back to their Facebook feed.

Finally, I have updated my ‘Why and How to Integrate Facebook Connect with Disqus’ post to reflect recent Disqus/Facebook implementation changes.]

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Disqus is in the process of enhancing their Facebook Connect feature. However, for the last day or so, with the feature enabled, only logged-in Disqus users were able to leave comments on The Daleisphere and on my iMedia Law blog. Neither Facebook users, nor regular commenters could leave comments here.

I recently updated sections 4.6 and 4.8 of my ‘Why and How to Integrate Facebook Connect with Disqus’ post describing the changes that Disqus recently instructed me to make on the applicable Facebook developer pages to facilitate the latest enhancements.  Clearly, they are not working.

For more information on the problem, I wrote a detailed description of Facebook Connect / Disqus problem here in the Disqus forums.

So, as of March 18, 2009, I have shut off Disqus’ Facebook Connect functionality on my Daleisphere and iMedia Law blogs. 

I will update this post when this problem is resolved.

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The primary reason I switched from Intense Debate to Disqus, is Disqus’s integration with Facebook Connect. Below I describe why this is important. I then provide a step-by-step ‘how-to’ guide on how to integrate Facebook Connect with Disqus.

[This Post was Updated on April 18, 2009 to reflect the changes made to the setup process, both on Disqus and the Facebook developer pages.]

1. Why Facebook Connect is a Big Deal

Discussion via comments draws users back for repeated visits to their site while engaging them in conversation with the blogger and other commenters. Bloggers want traffic to drive more ad sales and, frankly, they want more people reading their content. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Users are understandably reluctant to leave comments on blogs. Most bloggers, including myself, require users to leave a name, email address and an optional URL. The reason for this, at least in my case, is to weed out spam commenters and to develop a sense of community among commenters. Requiring such information has the unfortunate side effect of dissuading most readers from commenting because they don’t want:

1. the ‘sign up’ hassle just to leave a comment; and
2. to provide personally identifying information.

Facebook Connect solves these two problems and provides other terrific benefits.

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Earlier this month I described How to install Intense Debate in Wordpress 2.7 blogs. In my ‘Why I switched from IntenseDebate to Disqus’ post [coming soon] I describe why I made the switch.

The Disqus installation instructions are out of date (written for pre WP 2.7 blogs) and surprisingly difficult to follow.

Happily, both Disqus and IntenseDebate mirror/sync comments within a blog’s databases (though there are still problems with threaded comments not retaining structure – see part 6 below). This makes it possible to switch back and forth between the two at will.

Below I provide a step-by-step guide for integrating Disqus within a Wordpress 2.7 blog. I first make some preparatory recommendations. Then I describe the steps needed to set up with Disqus, download and install the Disqus WP plugin, how to import your historical comments into Disqus and, finally, how to reclaim straggler comments.

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For those  of you wondering what this twittering business is all about, below are links to a few good articles on the topic that should get you started:

• Ten Things you Must Know before Using Twitter (a good primer)
• Twittering Tips for Beginners by David Pogue has written a good
• What I know about Twitter by Harry McCraken
• The top 7 mistakes new Twitter Users Make
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers by Kevin Rose
• The Twitter Apps, Tools and Widgets I Use by yours truly
• Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins and Services a huge list of Twitter resources

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Since joining Twitter a few months back, I have wanted to understand how it overlapped/interacted with the web-content aggregator friendfeed. I looked at friendfeed at least two or three times and never quite ‘got it’ – until today.

Robert Scoble was a guest on the recent episode 81 of net@night. This guy is quite the friendfeed evangelist (Arrington suggests he’s addicted to it). So much so that the net@nite discussion made me want to take another look. Leo mentioned that Scoble had done a ‘how to’ type video on friendfeed. A quick Google search lead me to this very informative 26 minute video: ‘Robert Scoble: 20 Things About Friendfeed”:

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Since listening to this net@night podcast back in May 2008, where Amber and Leo interviewed Daniel Ha, the founder of the Disqus, I have been interested in implementing this kind of a community-oriented, commenting/discussion system on my blogs.

Early on, I had compared the feature set of Disqus and its competitor, IntenseDebate (“ID”), and Disqus’s feature set and looks won. Concerns surrounding the ability to import, export, sync and otherwise control my comments, held me back. I was not going to join any system where I lost ownership/control of my users’ comments.

In the interim, both Disqus and ID have added dynamic comment importing, exporting and synchronization features. I became comfortable that I would not be locked into any commenting system if/when I chose to leave. Scot Jangro’s December 30, 2008 post, ‘Comment System Review Redux’, compared the the two systems afresh and gave me substantial comfort that ID’s feature set had evolved to near parity with Disqus (see other comparisons: inquisitr.com | Mashable).

But the clincher came on Sept 23, 2008 when Automattic, the owner of Wordpress, purchased IntenseDebate. (See: Matt Mullenweg’s comment – IntenseDebate’s comment – Disqus’s comment). I expect Automattic to integrate IntenseDebate’s community comment / discussion system into the Wordpress core at some point. So, as a Wordpress user, it seemed a no brainer to go with IntenseDebate.

[January 23, 2009 Update: Despite what I wrote above, I ultimately switched to Disqus not long after implementing Intense Debate. In my ‘Why I switched from IntenseDebate to Disqus’ post [coming soon] I describe why I made the switch.]

IntenseDebate’s WordPress Plugin features are discussed here.  The newest Wordpress Plugin (v 2.0.18) has been completely overhauled, making the installation and comment import/export/sync process much easier than it was.

Below I describe why I installed ID. I then walk you, step-by-step, through the IntenseDebate installation process in Wordpress 2.7.

CONTINUE READING →

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