Category Archives: Collaboration

Facebook and the giant sucking sound of all your content coming in… and never leaving… forever… (and Facebook can do whatever it wants with it!)

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Three vignettes to set the stage for the entry. First, Chris Brogan realizes that Facebook is a walled garden through his Twitter stream:

Facebook messages doesn’t have FORWARD??? WTF??? You can’t be an email product and not have the BASICS. 09:59 AM July 16, 2007
So, when you’re *IN* facebook, using the messaging feature is cool. @Spin and I are having a video conversation and it’s so cool! 10:09 AM July 16, 2007
but I just realized, I can’t DO anything with the last video, that made me laugh and roar. I wanted to remix it. No download. No embed code. 10:10 AM July 16, 2007
Dan York wrote the article I was going to write tomorrow. Just read his: http://tinyurl.com/27jxxw 01:14 PM July 16, 2007
Sick of Facebook not letting out data. Mr. Zuckerberg : TEAR DOWN YOUR WALLS! 12:59 PM July 17, 2007

Second, a friend  and I are having an IM chat:

<name> says: I looked at your blog and noticed also the facebook entries
<name> says: Do you think that it is a cool stuff?
<name> says: I wasn’ t quite sure.
<name> says: Whenever I looked at it I just didn’t see anything where I could have said “That’s really cool”.
Dan York says: Facebook is… well… “interesting”.
Dan York says: What intrigues me the most is that there is now a whole class of (typically younger) people who are basically experiencing “the Internet” through the lens of Facebook.
<name> says: That does not make sense to me.
Dan York says: Basically, they don’t use “the web”, per se, but instead use Facebook and have components of the web brought into them that way.
Dan York says: They are always logged into Facebook.
<name> says: Really?
Dan York says: Instead of email, they use Facebook messages.
<name> says: Why would someone want todo that?
<name> says: That’s quite restrictive.

Third, Jeff Pulver makes the declaration in multiple blog entries, such as this one:

Facebook IS the internet portal of 2007. And it is where you will find me.

Let’s face it… at the end of the day, Facebook is a “portal play”.  If you want to use Facebook as your “lens through which to see the Internet”, it has amazing capabilities and possibilities.  There are an incredible number of applications now being developed.  Facebook now reports having over 30 million active users.  They say their search engine is now among the top 20 on the web.

You would be completely and utterly stupid to not think about a “Facebook strategy”.  With its growth curve and the sheer amount of content flowing into it, I think you ignore it at your own peril. 

To be honest, I like Facebook. I have an account there which, at this point, I am in pretty much daily.  I’ve been using “groups” there to see about building stronger communities.  There is now a “network” of employees at my company.  The “Facebook Platform” is quite intriguing and it’s fascinating to see the apps that people are developing.

But…

The challenge remains that the walls around Facebook are actually open a bit – but only in one direction – inbound!  Through the “Platform”, you can bring into Facebook all sorts of content.  On my Facebook profile page, you can find such things as:

  • Updates I’ve made through Twitter
  • Blog entries that have been automatically pulled in from an RSS feed
  • My Skype status
  • My latest del.icio.us links
  • My latest Pownce post
  • The status of my SIP phone connected to VoIPUser.org

And much, much, MUCH more… basically at this point I can pull pretty much anything in and display it on my Facebook profile page – and also have it in my “Newsfeed” that I can see and monitor on my home page.

image Ah, but wait, if you aren’t a Facebook user, you couldn’t see it, could you?  No, you have to login first in order to see any of that content.  Only once inside the Facebook walls can you see it all.  Naturally you could go to any of those services individually and see the information from a standard web browser, but if you want it all aggregated and displayed along with other content, you have to login and become part of the portal.

On one level, I definitely appreciate what Facebook is doing.  They are succeeding as a portal where things like Yahoo!’s personalized pages or Google’s iGoogle or <pick your portal play> have not… in part because of the API that let’s so many users in, in part because of the “social networking” elements of the site, in part because of the “News Feed” that let’s you see what your friends are doing and contributes to the viral flow of information.  There’s a really nice aggregation of various social services going on.

But what if I want to make content inside of Facebook visible outside?  As Chris said:

but I just realized, I can’t DO anything with the last video, that made me laugh and roar. I wanted to remix it. No download. No embed code.

It can’t be shared with anyone who isn’t inside of Facebook.  It can’t be posted to YouTube or made available as a blog entry.  Outside of widgets to show your status and the one single RSS feed that seems to be available for your friends’ status messages, everything else is inside of Facebook.  If someone sends you a great message, you can’t forward that outside of Facebook.  You can’t share content you create with those on the outside.

It’s there… inside Facebook.  In fact, if you take a look at Facebook’s Terms of Service, basically anything you create inside of Facebook really belongs to them (down under “User Content Posted on the Site”, second paragraph):

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Note especially the part in bold.  All your content belongs to us. Irrevocably. Perpetually.  “To use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute… to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works…”  Even after leave, they will have an archive of your content.  Forever.

Translation:  All your content belongs to us.

Now consider this… through the various applications, I’m bringing into Facebook my entries from this blog, my Twitter posts (tweets), my del.icio.us bookmarks.  Potentially videos and pictures.

It would certainly appear from the ToS that I’m giving Facebook a license to do whatever it wants with all of that content.  Forever.

Interesting.

If you are a Facebook user, are you aware that you are giving Facebook that right to all of whatever content you bring in?  (Do you care?  Perhaps not.)

And do you care that in order to really use Facebook to its fullest, everyone with which you communicate really needs to be a Facebook user?

Don’t get me wrong.  I have no intention of not using Facebook.  With its incredible growth in terms of users and apps, I do believe you ignore it at your peril.  It may very well be “THE Internet portal of 2007”.

But let’s realize that that is what it is… a portal… a “lens” through which you can see Internet content and collaborate with friends.  Granted, it’s a portal with a really nice platform for bringing in content from the rest of the Internet into its own private garden. But the walls around the garden are quite high… and no one can really play inside that garden unless, they, too, come inside the walls.  (And bring their content with them…)

UPDATE: There is some synchronicity happening on the web today… shortly after posting this article, I noticed two other posts today related to the same theme:

Jing – a new "project" that lets you quickly add links to screenshots to IM, email, Twitter, etc.

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image Have you ever been in an IM or email conversation and wanted to quickly show someone a screenshot or screencast/video of something on your screen?  But didn’t want to go through the hassle of saving a file and then uploading it or attaching it?  Or you wanted to add something to your Twitter feed but didn’t want to put the image somewhere first?

Well, yesterday the folks over at TechSmith (makers of SnagIT and Camtasia Studio) released an “experiment” to do just that in the form of a project called Jing at the URL www.jingproject.com.  As they talk about on the Jing blog, and also on the TechSmith Visual Lounge blog, this is truly an experiment in how to enhance communication:

The Jing Project is our journey to discover how we can improve everyday conversation. Think of all those IM chats, emails, blog posts and comments you’ve made over the years. Now imagine a more visual world where integrating screen captures and screencasts into those took nothing more than a matter of seconds. Can you imagine it? I can – I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it – it’s Jing.

Our goal is to explore this with all of you and together see how we can bridge the visual world and our daily conversations into a richer, more effective way to communicate.

I have to say I’d admire any company that experiments publicly (although one could argue that pretty much all of “Web 2.0” is one big “beta”) and they have been very up front about the fact that Jing is really a “proof-of-concept” more than a “product”… they aren’t sure what this will turn into, what the business model will be, etc.  They are more just throwing it out there to watch what people do with it.

So what is “Jing“?  Well, essentially it is a screen capture program that sits on your Windows or Mac and, when triggered, captures an image or records a video/screencast – and then uploads the image/video to screencast.com and… this is the key… gives you a URL on your clipboard that you can paste into an IM chat, email, Twitter post, whatever.  So the Jing logo I have above is now also available as a screenshot at:

http://www.screencast.com/t/PrPAEoQdZ

It’s pretty cool in that you can just make a quick screen capture or a quick video/screencast.  For instance, here’s an incredibly riveting video of me updating my status on Facebook:

http://www.screencast.com/t/Fk_6Th17s

Now, not terribly exciting in a blog, where I can just embed a video, but could be quite useful in an IM chat, Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce post or an email. For instance, just this morning I used it to email my corporate help desk and included a pointer to a screen capture of my Task Manager while trying to diagnose some performance problems. (And being security paranoid as I am, I didn’t have an issue putting the screen cap on an external server because it didn’t really show anything about my machine other than the fact that I’m pushing my laptop way beyond what I should! 😉

  Since it’s hosted on screencast.com, you can actually login there and then find other ways to share the screencast or screen capture.  For instance, I can do the much more blog-appropriate thing and embed the screencast right here:

So in my limited experimentation, I can definitely see the use for it.  The one “catch” that some of the others playing with the released version have latched onto is that right now it is tied to screencast.com, which actually is a commercial hosting service that you have to pay $70/year to have an account there.  Right now, and according to TechSmith “for the life of the Jing project”, however long that may be, you don’t have to pay to use it.  This is again an experiment and TechSmith seems to be figuring out how or if they can turn this into a business.  At the moment, Jing and the associated hosting on screencast.com is free.

imageNow the program does show its pre-release rough edges a bit when you first download and install it.  For one thing, because it uses Windows Presentation Framework on a PC you have to download Microsoft .Net 3.0 which took a while and was a separate install process.  The other major issue I had was that once you do the install… it seems like nothing happens.  If you are an astute observer (or have been clued in by someone) you will notice that you now have a new icon in your systray – image  If you click on that icon and choose “Preferences” you get the big yellowish-orangish ball that you see in the image on the right.  Yes, that’s the preferences screen. (The TechSmith folks are perhaps going a bit overboard on the “experiment” angle, although it is at least interesting to see someone thinking about a different UI for dialog boxes.)  The middle button gets you into the preferences where you can create a screencast.com account and set up a hot key to trigger the Jing capture.  (And yes, I submitted feedback with my concerns about some of the UI roughness.)  When you are done, you press the checkmark icon and you’re set to go.

After that, it’s just a matter of triggering Jing to take a capture.  You do that either through the hot key you assigned or through the strange little ball (half-circle, really) that appears at the top middle of your screen above all other windows in the title bar area:

image

When you go up to that ball with your mouse, it expands and you can initiate the capture. (Funny, but I can’t seem to find a way to capture a video of it because the ball disappears as soon as you start the capture.)  Personally, I’m a keyboard guy, so configuring it to be Ctrl+Shift+S worked fine for me.

I guess my only major knock is  that even just sitting there idle waiting to be triggered Jing seems to consume about 15-20% of my CPU (per Task Manager). The TechSmith folks seem to think this is related to .Net 3.0 but it is a bit annoying (see previous mention of performance problems on laptop).

All in all, I think it’s an interesting “experiment” and it’s great that TechSmith has made it available for people to play with.  It’s definitely still got some rough edges, but I know that the TechSmith folks are currently drowning in feedback right now so I’d expect they’ll be making some changes.   I don’t know how much I’ll honestly use it, in part because I’m a bit reluctant to put content on a service where I’m not sure how long the service will be available… but I will continue to experiment with it when I have the need to add visuals into IM or other communication.

Could you see yourself using something like this which makes it easy to include images or video?  What do you think about it?

 UPDATE: There is a good amount of conversation going on right now about Jing. Some posts you may find interesting:

How to send messages to Twitter from Skype – and using Skype to view/search your tweets (and wishing OpenID could be involved)

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image In one of the ongoing Skype public chats today, Julian Bond clued the rest of us into a post he had found “How to Twitter from Skype“.  This actually takes you out to the “Twitter 4 Skype” site in Japan that is essentially running a Skype “bot” that acts as a gateway between Skype and Twitter.  You add the “twitter4skype” user to your Skype contact list, and then you can send/receive messages to Twitter.  Since I have been trying with very limited success to use the existing IM service to post to Twitter via Jabber, I thought I’d try this service out as well.  My immediate issue, though, was this:

You have to give this “twitter4skype” service your Twitter password!

Naturally… how else is it going to connect to Twitter and post as you?  But that’s the issue… who is behind this service?  It’s some site in Japan?  Do I trust them with my login credentials?   Who are they?

This would be a great place for something like OpenID where I could give them my account name, but not have to provide my password… but for that to work, of course, Twitter would need to support OpenID as well.

image Given my interest in experimentation, I did, of course, suck it up and provide my credentials.   The result was the chat window you can see on the right.  Now, what Julian Bond pointed out to me – and that I admit is very cool – is that you now have a list of your Twitter messages in a Skype persistent chat window…. where you wind up with a history that is very easily searchable!  Rather cool!

Sending a twitter update (aka “tweet”) is as simply as typing it into the Skype chat window.  Of course, you don’t get the bit of Javascript that tells you how close to the 140 character limit you are.  I also don’t know yet about automatic tinyurl wrapping… but it seems like it is going into Twitter’s web interface, so one would imagine that this works.  (I’ll know in a moment.) (Update – yes, it does the automagic tinyurl wrapping.)

All in all an interesting service.  If you are interested (and willing to give your Twitter password to an unknown service out there), you can follow the instructions on the website. 

P.S. Do note that to make it work, you send in a message like:

/account
danyork
password

When I first tried it, I followed the instructions too literally and did “twitter danyork” and “twitter password” (which, of course, is not my password!).

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the Return of the Walled Gardens of E-Mail

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"Email? I only use that when I have to contact old people!"
      – frequent quote these days from teenagers

When I started using "the Net" back in mid-1980s, the world of "e-mail" was an incredibly fractured place.  There were the big services of CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, The Well… there were the thousands of small BBS’s… there were "corporate services" like MCI Mail and IBM PROFS… and there were all sorts of others services in the middle (my particular focus in those days was EcoNet, given my involvement then in environmental activism).  They all shared one thing in common:

They were all walled gardens.

Users on the system could only e-mail other users on the same system.  CompuServe users with their (then) numeric accounts could only talk to other CS users.  GEnie users to GEnie users, MCI Mail to MCI Mail… and so on.

But a funny thing happened along the garden path… the walls started to slowly break down.  UUCP started interconnecting UNIX systems.  FidoNet started linking together BBS systems.  X.400 came out and had corporate interest.  And then along came SMTP, which ultimately became the "one email protocol to rule them all" (paralleling the emergence of TCP/IP and the "Internet" as the dominant network in the midst of all the network walled gardens). 

While the fight against the interconnection continued for quite a long time, especially with some of the largest services continuing to try to go it alone, eventually all the services succumbed to the inevitable and provided SMTP gateways that allowed their members to send messages to everyone else. 

All was good – and everyone could send messages to everyone else.

However… a curious thing seems to be happening more and more on this thing we call the Internet.  Increasingly, our messages are NOT moving over what is traditionally known as "email" but instead are migrating to other services.

You could argue that this started some time ago with the walled gardens of instant messaging.  Users of AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, MSN/WLM, Jabber, Skype, IRC, etc. all can have really nice conversations with each other… but no one else.   As IM has continued to grow in usage and replace "traditional" email (which we could argue about why but I personally think it has a lot to do with "presence", but let’s save that for another post another day), we’ve moved to a different messaging paradigm where we write shorter, quicker messages.  And we’ve also become quite comfortable with our IM walled gardens.  It’s routine for people to run several different IM clients (or use something like GAIM that works with multiple services).  Looking down at my task bar, I count 4 IM clients, and I know there are 3 more on my laptop that I could be running.  Now, the walls of IM are slowly breaking down… there’s "federation" now between MSN/WLM and Yahoo.  GoogleTalk can work with Jabber.  Other interconnection services are appearing.

But looking beyond IM, so many conversations now are moving to "social networking services".  The quote I started this article with did not come from any particular place, but it’s the kind of thing that I’ve seen repeated again and again in any interview with teenagers (or even those in their 20s).  The service we know as "email" is today just a "communication mode of last resort" or "least common denominator" to communicate with those too old or clueless. All meaningful communication occurs within the worlds of MySpace, Facebook or any one of a zillion other websites that seem to be popping up on a daily basis. 

And all those sites are chasing each other.  Facebook started out as something of a "college/university version of MySpace"… now it’s added "professional" settings like LinkedIn.  LinkedIn has gone the other way in adding "college" features to attract the college/university crowd.   Orkut started out as more of a dating site and then added other fields and settings. MySpace continues adding new features.  Not a day goes by when there isn’t some notice about a new service that has been launched.

Even Twitter, which I personally use more as a micro-blogging platform, is used as a messaging platform by many.  And the "status" format of Twitter can be found in Facebook as well as newer services like Jaiku.

What do they all have in common?  Simple:

They are all walled gardens.

Each one is a messaging world unto itself.  Facebook users can only see messages from other Facebook users – and only generally when logged into the site.  Ditto LinkedIn…. Xing… MySpace… and others.  Twitter allows the public viewing of messages, but you can also change it to give only updates to friends.  (To "reply" in Twitter, of course, one would need to be a member… and also be "followed" by the person you are replying to.)  Sites like YouTube and Frappr blur the lines by providing messaging as well.

The result, of course, is that like running multiple IM clients, we all have multiple social networking accounts.

How many do you have?

For me, I can remember at least:  LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, ecademy…  There’s probably a dozen others where I signed up to try it out and then forgot about it.  In each one, I can send and receive messages to and from the other members.  I can post updates and see messages from my "friends".

Interestingly, most all of these sites fall back on that "least common denominator" of good old e-mail to let me know that I have messages waiting for me.  I have to go back to those sites, of course, to read the messages.  Yes, some sites do updates via SMS and some let you subscribe via RSS, but generally you have to go back into the site.

The other intriguing difference is that within those sites, you can generally only see messages from the people you choose to see.  Within Facebook or Twitter, you only see updates from people who you have added as a friend.  Your friends or contacts can send you messages in many services, but others can’t until they are your friend.

We’ve gone from the closed communities of email services to the complete openness of Internet e-mail and now seem to be returning back to those gated communities, with email/SMS helping keep us aware of updates.  Given the amount of spam plaguing email, this may in part a reaction and a desire for purer message flow.

So how do you communicate with others within this space?   Or stay up on what someone is doing?

It’s not enough even to follow someone’s blog anymore, because they may be posting more updates to their Twitter, Facebook or other account.

Given that email may not be the best way, how do you best reach someone?  Which IM service?  Which social networking site?  Which ones do they use?  Which ones do they monitor the most?

In which walled garden do they spend most of their time?

Microsoft: When simply having an IM conversation becomes a tool to raise money for nonprofits… is this for real?

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We’ve all undoubtedly seen the chain-letter email messages that circulate around telling you that by forwarding the email you will make money or receive gifts and most people with half a clue understand that this kind of thing is pretty much impossible.  So it was with a whole lot of skepticism that I first greeted Microsoft’s “i’m” campaign because the premise is: for every IM conversation you have with Windows Live Messenger, we’ll donate some money to the nonprofit of your choice (from among nine choices).  To me, it sounded just a wee bit fishy.   

Read more over on my Disruptive Telephony blog…  (well, it sort of fit on either blog, so I chose to post it there and link from over here) 

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ecademy – joining yet another business-focused social networking site (and doing so because of a Skype public chat)

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Today my friend and fellow blogger Alec Saunders invited me to join ecademy.  I hesitated and almost just deleted it.  I’ve been a LinkedIn user for something like 3 years.  I’ve had a Xing (OpenBC) account for about that long as well, although I don’t use it as much.  I’ve recently joined Facebook and I still have an Orkut account floating around from when it first launched in 2004.  There’s probably a few others out there that I joined at some point and have now forgotten about.

Why do I need yet another membership in yet another social networking site?

If anything, I need fewer and to just focus my networking there. So my inclination was to simply decline the invitation (well, just delete the email). 

So what stopped me?  Why did I actually click the link and join ecademy?

Basically, because of a Skype public chat.  Well, two Skype public chats really.   Ever since Skype rolled out the beta for Skype 3.0 back in November or so, there have been a number of us who have remained logged in as participants in a public group chat that Jaanus Kase started up from the Share Skype blog and then a second public chat started up by Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal. These chats are “persistent” in the sense that you basically never leave them unless you click the “Leave” button or are ejected by the host. (Jaanus occasionally “cleans up” his chatroom by ejecting people who haven’t been participating, primarily because there’s a limit of 100 participants and its usually at the max with others looking to come in.)  Discussion goes in spurts, sometimes without any discussion for days… and then a whole flare up.  I read it every now and then and contribute from time to time… it’s just a background thing that actually winds up providing some great info for my main line of work (VoIP).

So what was that got to do with ecademy?  Well, one of the other participants in both chats since those early days is a gent named Julian Bond, who is… well… the CTO of ecademy!  (Gee, I’ve noticed a number of CTO-ish types in these public chats… might have a wee bit to do with being charged with evaluating emerging technology….)

So just as I was about to delete Alec’s invite, my brain thought “Hmmmm…. isn’t that the site that Julian Bond is involved with?  Maybe I should check it out.  Hmmmm.”

In the end, it so often does come down to recommendations from “people you know”.

Will I stay there?  Or will I check it out for a bit and then just go back to using the other sites?  I don’t know… time will tell.

In the meantime, if you are an ecademy user (and I know you) feel free to add me as a connection.   I’d also love to hear why you use ecademy versus the various other ones out there.

Google to add PowerPoint/presentation capability… but will it work when you are presenting offline?

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You knew it had to come. Google already had documents and spreadsheets-  the remaining major office category was, of course… presentations.  And so yes, sure enough, here comes word from Google that they’ll be adding presentation cababilities this summer through the recent acquisition of a company called Tonic Systems.

As a huge user of PowerPoint, I’ll certainly be curious to check it out.  From a collaboration point-of-view, I could certainly see the benefit.  It also makes it rather easy to get your presentation to the conference staff or display it, i.e. no need to plug in your laptop to the display, just pull up a web browser and login.

However, I think about the fact that very often when I am presenting I am either:

  • At a conference in a room/facility with NO Internet access.
  • At a conference in a room/facility with crappy/overloaded Internet access.
  • At a customer location presenting behind a corporate firewall – and not always with Internet access.

In all of those places, you really need an offline version.  Perhaps Google will provide a way to export to PowerPoint or PDF.

For public presentations I could certainly see the utility.  Many of my own presentations include proprietary info, though, and so I wonder what the security of the system will be… will companies feel comfortable putting their data up into Google’s servers?

It will also be curious to see if Google just puts it up as a presentation tool or whether they will include social networking aspects like those in SlideShare.

Anyway, it’s interesting to hear about… I look forward to seeing it whenever it comes out this year.  Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to see what Google does with JotSpot, which is annoyingly still undergoing “integration” with Google.