Archive for July, 2008
On Friendfeed, I am currently subscribed to 190 people. This post lists the top 10 people I find the most interesting, according to Friendfeed. If you share the same general interests in social media as I do, you should consider subscribing to their feeds. If you are currently subscribed to me on Friendfeed, then you should already be seeing there feeds courtesy of Friendfeeds FOAF feature.
1) Louis Gray
Short Bio: Louis is a 31 year old technology blogger, and as of recent, father of newborn twins. In his day job, he works in corporate marketing for a Silicon Valley technology company.
Topics: Web 2.0, Social Applications, RSS, lifestreaming, Aggregation, Twitter, Friendfeed
Web: http://www.louisgray.com/live/
2) Hutch Carpenter
Short Bio: Hutch is a reformed banker and MBA who has been in the technology industry since 2000. Hutch recently left BEA Systems, where he did product marketing for its suite of Web 2.0 apps for the enterprise: wikis, blogs, mashups, widgets, and social search.
Topics: Web 2.0, Social Applications, Social Media, Enterprise, Friendfeed
Web: http://bhc3.wordpress.com
3) J. Phil
Short Bio: J. Phil is the webmaster of scribkin.com,”The site where code and culture converge”. The site focuses on social applications, social media bookmarking and networking sites, as well as creating primers on Web 2.0 applications.
Topics: Social Applications, Social Media, Social Bookmarking, Friendfeed, Twitter
Web: http://www.scribkin.com
4) Mitchell Tsai
Short Bio: Mitchell was a child prodigy who began college at age 10. He is currently retired. He was founder and CEO of DotCom Director, a venture capital accelerator that invests in and/or raises capital for technology companies.
Topics: Start-Ups, VC, Social Media, Social Applications, Friendfeed, Photography, Travel
Web: http://spiritualbusinesscompanions.blogspot.com
5) Franklin Pettit
Short Bio: Franklin Pettit is a South Carolina software developer. His blog was recently “Louis Grayed.”
Topics: Microblogging, Firefox and Extensions, Web/Social Applications
Web: http://www.fpettit.com
6) Charlie Anzman
Short Bio: Charlie Anzman runs SEO and Tech Daily. He is a skilled, SEO, SEM consultant.
Topics: Start-Ups, SEO, Analytics, Web 2.0, Social Applications
Web: http://anzman.blogspot.com
7) Steven Hodson
Short Bio: Steve Hodson is the webmaster of winextra.com. Steve is a die hard technologist with over 20 + years experience in the computer industry. Topics: Web 2.0, Web/Social Applications, Social Media, Friendfeed, Twitter Web: http://www.winextra.com
8 ) Tim Hoeck
Short Bio: Tim Hoeck is a coder, highly skilled in most programming languages. He currently works for a technology corporation, as a technical support trainer.
Topics: Analytics, Social Bookmarking, Mashups, Aggregation,
Web: http://timhoeck.com
9) Sarah Perez
Short Bio: Sarah has been blogging about technology since 2004. She had worked as an I.T. professional up until recently when she became a full-time professional blogger. She now works full time for the website Read Write Web and Microsoft’s Channel 10.
Topics: Microblogging, Social Applications, Social Media, Social Bookmarking, Friendfeed, Twitter
Web: http://www.sarahintampa.com
10) Mark Trapp
Short Bio: Mark is a IT manager for a graphic design company located in NY. Mark adds tremendous insight, and thought provoking commentary.
Topics: Culture, Politics, Social Applications, Social Media, (Mixture of topics)
Web: http://friendfeed.itafroma.com
I focused in on my last post, about how Friendfeed could be a great resource for spammers. Delving further into the subject, it got me thinking. With Friendfeed becoming a social bank of information, it would be an ideal tool for private investigators, law enforcement, debt collectors and so forth. We are so quick to be active contributors to social media, the majority of us, sadly do not sit back and think about the implications of how our digital footprints can be used against us.
What most of us do on sites like Friendfeed, Myspace, Facebook etc, can be classified as a type of life-streaming activity. Life-streaming is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Friendfeed is one of the platforms that facilitates the process. Friendfeed takes it a step further. It added the community aspect to life-streaming, something the competitors in the space, such as Socialthing & Profilactic were late to figure out.
Friendfeed allows one to add a multitude of services to compose their life-stream. You can broadcast your online status, your favorite music, videos, images, bookmarks. Location-based social networking, such as Brightkite takes it a step a further, and allow one to broadcast your location in real time, tracking not only you, but your networks of friends and family as well.You are archiving and broadcasting these activities simultaneously in real time, leaving a traceable, easily accessible digital profile behind in the background. There is not much we can do about that. This is a small price we all pay using social media online. We all have done Google queries on our names at some point. We find hundreds, some several thousand pages of archived public, life-stream data. This data is accessible to any person, corporation, and even law enforcement entity.
Most private investigators and law enforcement use search engines as their primary source for fact finding information. Circumstances permitting, they would use social media as a second avenue for investigative research. Think about how beneficial the information an individuals lifestreaming feed could be . An instant profile can be created of the target. This profile could contain an individual’s photos, websites, comment postings (with time stamps), music play lists, tweets, employment and business affiliations etc. The scope of the profile and data will vary based on how active the target is, and what social media applications they use.
Friendfeed being the main hub for all these services to plug into, makes it the ideal one stop shop to monitor and profile a target’s activities. Private investigators, and cyber sleuths would have a field day monitoring sites like Friendfeed. They could easily monitor a potential cheating husband or wife’s daily whereabouts, twitter conversations, etc. This all can be done from the comfort of Google Reader, by simply importing the targets Friendfeed RSS feed. Law enforcement is one example, there is a whole slew of industries who can and are using an individuals life-streaming activities to track them down for whatever reason. I am not blogging about anything new. It’s common knowledge for most of us that everything we do online is logged, archived and stored somewhere. The question is, have we become to complacent on what we broadcast online? What are your thoughts on the negative ramifications of life-streaming and how it can be used against you?
Related reads:
With the steady growth that Friendfeed is experiencing, it’s just a matter of time before the problem of spam infiltrates it.Friendfeed is still the shiny new toy that only the people in the know, know about. Because of this, the critical masses and the spammers have not caught on quite yet. The clock is ticking….
The convenient 6 click registration form makes it’s easy for spammers to sign up for “disposable accounts”, and to set up shop in seconds. The smarter spammers will use scripts to automate the sign up process. This will allow them to create several hundred or more throw away accounts at any given time.
The spammers have an arsenal of forty one services at there disposal. Any one of these services can be set up and deployed in seconds. Rooms can be created for any topic or product imaginable. It wont be long before the Viagra spam email of the day arrives and is directing us to the Viagra room on Friendfeed.
Friendfeed gives the spammers multiple ways of getting a message out. The most common would be to post the spam-vertised sites directly to the feed. The handy Friendfeed bookmarklet would accomplish this with ease. The rooms would be filled with link bait galore, allowing spammers more ways to monetize courtesy of, RSS feeds injected with AdSense as one example. The purveyors of porn might stand to monetize the most. They can take full advantage of full multimedia, using video clips, images, text and now even audio, making their rooms into free mini adult porn sites. Rooms have made the possibilities endless. The spammers will pick up on this soon enough.
The community, up to this point, has a done an excellent job of policing itself. What I would like to see is some type of flagging mechanism put into place, such as is implemented on Craigslist. I would also like to see visible “report or flag this” links on all member feeds and rooms.
What other forms of spam will Friendfeed face?
Friendfeed is at its core, a content aggregator, but it is transforming into so much more. It’s becoming an online buffet of social media. It will satisfy any virtual hunger one may seek. It’s a smorgasbord of social interaction, and it keeps you coming back for more. It satisfies even the most insatiable appetite for social networking.
Beyond just being a content aggregator, it’s the community aspect that appeals to me the most. The community is comprised of people from all walks of life, age, professions, etc. What separates this social community from the rest, is the active participation from what some call,the “A Listers” or “Virtual Heros“. The virtual heroes are one of the essential ingredients that is building this robust community. They start, create, share and provoke the stimulating content that drive this community. The other great aspect of this community is that anyone can participate and be heard immediately, what I call “instant social gratification”. We all need a healthy balanced diet. Too much of one thing is not healthy. On Friendfeed the balance in the food chain is that there is plenty of lesser known voices to fill the void. These smaller ,lesser known independents, or what some call the “Z Listers” are the other crucial ingredient that make participating on Friendfeed so rewarding. Friendfeed’s simplicity is that it makes the playing field equal for all to engage and participate. If you apply the the five c’s of social media. you can reap the rewards.
The community on Friendfeed is quick to reward others as well. Rewards come in the form of likes from your subscribers, foafs and potential new virtual friends waiting in the wings. Lesser known bloggers are getting a chance to be put on the radar, and share the spotlight with the virtual hero’s of the community. A rewarding moment for me was getting a notable mention from one of said “virtual heros” back in June. More recently today the spot light was shined on Five obscure blogs that sparkle. So lesson learned the more you contribute to social media, the more you will get out of it. Stay involved with the community and the community rewards you.
Related reads:
The 6 Best Ways to Rock FriendFeed
Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.
One of my favorite functions on Friendfeed is the “like” feature. The higher “likes” an item gets, the more attention it gets from the community. Think of likes as a reward system. The Friendfeed tech savvy crowd instantly recognizes quality and rewards the content authors and distributors with likes. Having a bigger subscriber base helps. This will dramatically increase the amount of likes on an item. Let’s not forget the swarms of FOAF’S (friend of a friends) that will follow the queen bee. The ultimate reward for having a large number of likes on your content , is to be listed with the creme de la creme on the “best of Friendfeed.” This page highlights the best liked content from the past day, week, or month according to the people you’re subscribed to. The like system on Friendfeed allows one to get instant social gratification.
Today I started a discussion on Friendfeed. I asked my fellow Friendfeeders a simple question, classify the type of liker you are. The responses varied and were very interesting. Among some of the reasons why I like content are to show support to the author or content distributors. Then there are topics that hit home and bring out emotion. I also like content as a substitute to commenting. A lot of time I am too busy or tired to leave a thoughtful comment, therefore a silent comment, by liking, still gives your seal of approval.
I decided to classify some of the types of likers on Friendfeed.
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- The Super Liker - Is a person who has a huge following and influence on Friendfeed i.e Robert Scoble. Whatever they like usually turns to gold.
- The Active Liker - Is a person who is really active on the site - They frequently take part on the site by sharing, posting, and commenting, and are an integral part of the process.
- The Average Liker - Is a person who use’s the site recreationally, just to pass time whether screwing around at work or school to kill spare time. They typically do not submit or share a lot of content. They instead use the site for their own entertainment. Once in a while, the they might comment and get involved on something they are passionate about. Mainly they pretty much go about their business, adding friends now and again and checking in a few times per week.
- The Selective Liker - This is a person who is as selective with his likes, as a sommelier is with his wine.
- Supportive Liker - This is a person who always supports quality content. They fearlessly standby their network of friends. These likers bring a special trait to the game, it’s called loyalty.
- The Random Liker - Is a person who randomly likes any type of content. They are usually non-discriminatory.
- The like it likes it’s hot Liker - Is a person who strikes only when the content or a topic is hot…
- The like to go back to it later Liker - Is a person who use’s likes as a bookmarking system.
Coincidentally on Friendfeed, Julian Baldwin started this thread, which brings us to the last type of liker on the list I coined a “Drive by liker”
Quoted from Julian
“ When you’ve liked every f*ckin piece of media that flows through FF then you’re not participating - that requires true assessment “
What type of liker are you?
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