Category Archives: Tools

Reflections On Ello – October 5, 2014

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Ello logo 180 pixelsAs people who follow me on Ello know, I’ve been experimenting a good bit with the platform. In order to capture some thoughts for own recollection (and also for the FIR report I need to record this morning), here are some quick thoughts and links about Ello that reflect what I’ve learned over the past few weeks.

First, as I wrote, we have to remember that Ello is not Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., and we have to just go in with an open mind.

The Ello platform is very definitely still a “beta” with a long list of features that they want to add, but over the past bit there have been some changes of interest:

I love the display of photos in Ello, but there’s one bit of brokenness that does bother me:

I asked the question of why should Ello have to have a mobile app and wondered about how Ello behaved different from other apps… and I learned a bit more about why (and what you can do)

Clay Shirky had two great posts about Ello being a conversational versus annotative medium:

He also had two other good articles and threads:

Oh, and there’s now a parody social network… Owdy! 🙂

Please do join me on Ello if you are interested in the continuing experiments… and please feel free to share your own tips and insights!

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R.I.P. Orkut, The First “Social Network” Many Of Us Used

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Orkut logoI find it somewhat ironic that as many of us play with Ello, the newest social network to catch our attention, today marks the end of Orkut, one of the first “social networks” that many of us used. Google has shut it down, and the Orkut home page now is the home to the “community archive” of many of the group discussions that happened there over the years. A Google support page has more information about the shutdown – and how to export your data if you want to save it.

Orkut was quietly launched in late January 2004 … ten years ago … and I can dive back into Advogato where I used to write in those days and see that:

And… then that’s pretty much all I seem to have written about Orkut… outside of a post in 2008 about Orkut planning to use OpenSocial (remember OpenSocial?).

And that’s somewhat symptomatic of what happened to Orkut… other sites and social networks emerged that captured more of our attention. As the Wikipedia article about Orkut notes, the site became for a while a huge community for users in Brazil and also India… so huge in Brazil, in fact, that the site wound up ultimately being managed by Google’s office in Brazil (and this is undoubtedly why the “community archive” appears in Portuguese).

But for many of us outside those regions, we moved on. Some to Friendster and MySpace… then to Twitter in 2006… Facebook… and tens of other social networks that are now lost to history… (ReadWrite has a nice timeline about the rise and fall of Orkut, including how Facebook overtook Orkut in Brazil in 2012.)

When Google announced back in June that Orkut would be shutting down today, it had been so many years that I couldn’t even easily find my account on Orkut. With all of Google’s various “accounts”, there were a bunch of “Dan York” accounts… and my Orkut account wasn’t among them. Obviously I’d missed that point in time when Orkut users were supposed to link their Orkut accounts to their Google accounts.

Still, it’s worth pausing for a moment to remember Orkut. It was the first time that many of us dealt with “friends” and “fans”. It’s instructive to read this rant from danah boyd, venting my contempt for orkut… the whole “social networking” thing was so brand new in those days. Friendster was around, and a few others, but not many. Danny Sullivan’s piece from that time is a good read, too.

And sadly, we never really got the “protocol for networking the social networks” that David Weinberger thought might arise (although there have been many attempts (recent example, the “IndieWeb”, although that is more about linking publishing sites than true “social networks”, but there is a ‘social’ aspect to it)).

R.I.P., Orkut … you had a good run… and you helped introduce many of us to the concepts that would become simply part and parcel of the “social” world in which we live today.

UPDATE 1 Oct 2014 – Interesting infographic about the history of Orkut: Bye bye Orkut – A Look back into the History of Orkut

You can hear an audio commentary on this topic on SoundCloud:

Watching ‘Known’ Grow… via Github

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KnownIt’s kind of fun “watching” the Known publishing platform grow – and growing it is… each and every day in terms of new features and functions. Known, as you may recall from my recent post, is a new publishing platform available in either a hosted platform (withknown.com) or as software you can install on your own server. Last week I wrote about why Known and the “Indie Web” are so incredibly important.

But the cool part about Known is that like most open source projects it has an open issue tracker… in this case Known uses Github. The overall Github account is https://github.com/idno (“idno” was the original name of the project before they changed it to “Known”) and you can find repositories there for the main Known source code (/idno) as well as various plugins that work with Known, themes and other materials.

But it is the “issues” that I find most interesting. If you go to:

https://github.com/idno/idno/issues

You’ll see all the currently open issues along with the ensuing discussion. Perhaps more interestingly you can see the closed issues at:

https://github.com/idno/idno/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed

to see all the great work the Known development team has been doing.

Being a Github user, I have “watched” the idno repository and chosen to receive email notifications when there are new issues or new posts about issues.

The result has been a fascinating glimpse into the development process of the team… and it’s just been fun to watch how they continue to build more functionality into the platform. Great to see!

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The Importance of The ‘Known’ Publishing Platform And The Rise Of The Indie Web

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Known logoHow do we retain control of our content? How can we make sure what we write and create online remains online? How do we make it so that we can post our content in one place and distribute it out to social networks? And the bring the conversations that happen out on social networks back into your own site?

In a time when Facebook, Google, Apple and others seem to be intent on owning and controlling all our data and content, how do we regain control over our presence online? How do we stop being the product?

These are questions of focus for the “IndieWeb” movement that are perhaps best stated by this text on the top of indiewebcamp.com:

Your content is yours
When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected
Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control
You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

As well as in greater detail on the IndieWeb principles page. A key point is what is called “POSSE”:

POSSE = Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

The idea being, again, that you own your own content and then share it out to the other services where people can engage with that content.

Another way to think of this is that the IndieWeb is distributed and decentralized … kind of like the “Web” used to be before people increasingly started using centralized platforms such as Facebook and Google’s properties.

The “IndieWeb” has been around for several years now, but this month it gained some momentum with the launch of Known, a new blogging platform built on IndieWeb principles. Mathew Ingram introduced it on GigaOm with:

The Known software is available in two forms:

And yes, this is very similar to WordPress with the hosted version at WordPress.com and the standalone version at WordPress.org. (And in fact, WordPress can support many of the IndieWeb principles through various plugins.)

One of the interesting aspects is that your instance of Known can use some of the IndieWeb protocols such as Webmention to communicate with other instances of Known – as well as other sites that support the IndieWeb protocols.

The Known software is also “responsive” so that it works well on mobile devices – and the entire code base is open source so that anyone can see what it is all about and modify or extend it.

On For Immediate Release (FIR) Podcast #773 I devoted most of my report to talking about Known and the Indie Web – and Shel Holtz spoke at some length about the platform, too. And both Shel and I referenced Leo Laporte’s This Week in Google 266 where he had Known co-founders Ben WerdmĂ»ller and Erin Jo Richey on as guests, as well as Kevin Marks. I would encourage you to listen to them all if you are interested in further discussion.

To me this issue of owning your own content is critical. Perhaps THE most critical question in many ways to me personally.

It goes back to the question of what kind of Internet do we want?

Do we want one in which we are in control – and have control of our own data and content? Or do we want an Internet where the content we create is locked inside of corporate walled gardens? (Even if those gardens let us display it to the world… we still may not be able to easily get it out.)

I don’t know if I’ll honestly keep using danyork.withknown.com in the long term, or whether I’ll install the Known software directly on one of my servers… or whether I’ll just look at making my WordPress installations play as nicely as possible with the IndieWeb protocols.

I’m certainly going to continue to experiment for some time… I’ve been watching the Github repo and their issue tracker and have been quite impressed with the ongoing work of the Known team.

The key point is that wherever I post my intent is that I will not be locked in to closed proprietary systems. Known and the IndieWeb are more tools that we have in our toolbox that let us retain our freedom and control!

P.S. If you want to give Known a try, visit the withknown.com hosted platform to get started! It’s free and easy to sign up.

NOTE: Given that Ello has been getting quite a buzz in the last few days (and I can also be found there: ello.co/danyork ), it is worth pointing out the difference:

  • Known is an open source, freely-available blogging/publishing platform that you can either use in a hosted version or on your own site. You can publish your own status updates, blog posts and audio content – and share those posts out to social networks. Think of it as similar to WordPress.
  • Ello is a closed source (proprietary), invite-only (right now) social network where you can follow friends and share status updates, photos, links, etc. It currently has no APIs or method to export your data. Think of it as similar to Facebook.

That’s the key difference – Known is a blogging platform while Ello is a social network.

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The Live Video Streaming Nightmare: What Do You Do When YouTube Won’t Start? (And Lessons Learned)

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What do you do if you go to start live video streaming of an event – and the streaming service you use won’t start??? How do let people waiting to watch know? How do you fall back to another service?

Last month at the IETF 90 meeting in Toronto I experienced this nightmare of anyone doing live video streaming across the Internet. We had a presentation at noon on Thursday that we had widely publicized in social media and via email. The cameras were all set up. The producer was all ready to do the switching and encoding out to YouTube. Everything was good to go.

Then at 11:45am, I went to do my part in the process. I needed to login to the IETF YouTube account and basically click the “Start Streaming” button inside the “live event”. At that point the YouTube servers would accept the encoded stream from the producer’s gear and the stream would go live.

BUT… instead I got this message in a bright red bar across the top:

Ytl maintenance 500

The message read:

YouTube live is undergoing maintenance. Events cannot be created, started or stopped. Events already started will continue to stream uninterrupted.

Yes… we had no way to START the live video stream!

Over the next few minutes I kept refreshing that page but the warning stayed up there. I was getting rather nervous as the launch time approached!

Now, as it happened, we had already planned to have a second live video steam going out for the event through a different service, Livestream.com, for a different reason.

Why The IETF Uses YouTube For Live Video Streaming

To explain a bit more, we have been using Google’s YouTube live video streaming for some of the larger IETF plenary sessions for five reasons:

1. The live video stream is available over both IPv4 and IPv6.

2. The stream works easily across pretty much all desktop and mobile devices.

3. Google’s live streaming infrastructure seems able to scale to whatever capacity is needed.

4. The recording of the stream is immediately available after the event in the IETF’s YouTube channel.

5. There is no cost for using the service beyond our local costs to produce the content (and no infrastructure that the IETF itself has to maintain).

Of these, really the most critical reason for using YouTube live streaming is the first – that it streams out over IPv6.

The IETF is the organization behind the IPv6 specification and has declared that all new IETF standards need to incorporate IPv6. Therefore in the spirit of “eating your own dog food” the IETF tries to use services that work over IPv6 whenever possible. Other live video streaming services have met the reasons 2-5 above, but not the #1 reason of working over IPv6.

We have specifically been using what Google used to call “YouTube Live” but now seems to just be calling “YouTube live events” versus Google’s newer “Hangouts On Air (HOA)”. These YouTube live events are events you schedule in advance and can use with advanced video encoders. An advantage is that these events provide streaming configuration info that I can provide in advance to the company running the audio and video at the event so that they can be prepared in advance. YouTube also helpfully provides a countdown timer for people visiting the event page. We haven’t switched to using HOAs because they haven’t yet provided the advance configuration information we want.

Anyway it has all worked well for live streaming out plenary sessions for a couple of years now.

Google Doesn’t Live Stream Into Germany

However, as we discovered again that week…. Google will not stream live video into Germany! It seems Google has a legal dispute with a German intellectual property rights organization (GEMA) and Google has decided that rather than run into trouble with GEMA they will simply NOT allow live streaming into Germany.

So, alerted to this issue by some IETF remote participants in Germany who were unable to watch the live video streams of the technical plenary earlier in the week, we had arranged to also stream this Thursday session out over the Internet Society’s Livestream.com account. Now, unfortunately it would not be available over IPv6 because Livestream.com still only works on legacy IPv4 networks, but Livestream.com did not have the streaming restrictions Google had and so at least people could view the stream in Germany. As a bonus, all the “subscribers” to the Internet Society’s Livestream.com channel would also get notified and potentially be able to watch the stream – but the primary reason was so that people in Germany could watch the video stream.

The great thing about IETF meetings is that a massive amount of Internet connectivity is brought into the meeting hotel (because you have 1,200+ engineers who do most of their work across the Internet!) and so there are NO bandwidth problems for streaming. We could probably stream out to a dozen different live streaming services simultaneously if we set up our local software/equipment to do so.

Making The Alternate Stream The Primary Stream

The good news for us was that this “alternative” live video stream set up purely for viewers in Germany could now become the primary video stream. I rapidly updated the Google+ “event page” for this session to note the new URL for streaming and we spread the word through IETF social media channels and email lists. It wasn’t 100% seamless but we were able to get people watching the live video stream.

We were also able to direct people to some of the other IETF remote meeting participation mechanisms, including audio streaming and a conferencing system called “Meetecho” that streamed the slides and lower webcam-quality video.

Throughout the hour-long event I kept checking the Live Control Room inside of YouTube to see if we could start the original stream, but we were never able to do so. A couple of times the red warning box went away, but we could not establish a connection from YouTube’s streaming service to our equipment on the ground there in Toronto. Finally, as the time went on it became clear that the connection wasn’t going to happen and so I just gave up trying.

The good news is that the producer was also making a local copy of the stream that we would be able to upload later to the IETF’s YouTube channel.

Lessons Learned

I took away from this experience three primary lessons for all future live streaming sessions. Do note, too, that I think of these as generic lessons for all live streaming services and events. It happens that this time the failure was with Google’s YouTube live events service, but the failure could have been with Livestream.com, Google’s Hangouts On Air, Ustream or any of the many other live video streaming services out there.

1. Always Promote An Event Page Separate From The Streaming Service

We were able to rapidly redirect people to the new location of the live video stream in large part because we had been promoting the Google+ event page as the place to go to watch the live stream. We had promoted this on the IETF’s Twitter account, Facebook page, Google+ page and also over various IETF email lists and on various other websites. All the promotion pointed people to this page.

So the good news was that all we had to do was update this page with the new info and people could switch over to watch the new stream.

We had NOT been promoting the direct YouTube link for the stream. Had we done so, we could have still updated the page through editing the description of the YouTube video and/or leaving comments – but it would not have necessarily been as easy for visitors to see.

Promoting a separate page was a deliberate choice I made based on some previous bad experiences with live streaming where I had to stop a streaming session and restart with a brand new URL. For that reason I’ve been promoting a separate page.

In fact, for the IETF Plenary sessions, we’ve been promoting a separate page under IETF control on the IETF website – http://www.ietf.org/live/ – where we can embed the live stream video and also keep the page updated. At the IETF meeting it is possible for me or someone else to easily go in and update that page. Plus it is a very simple URL that we can promote widely.

I don’t honestly remember why we didn’t use the www.ietf.org/live/ page to stream out this Thursday morning sponsor presentation other than that the decision to live stream the session happened the day before and for whatever reason we went with a Google+ Event page as the page to promote.

Next time we’ll probably promote the www.ietf.org/live/ page.

The key point is that you have a page separate from the live streaming service where you can post updates.

2. Have An Alternate Live Stream Either Active Or Ready To Go

As I mentioned previously, in this case we happened to be set up with a second live stream out through Livestream.com purely because we wanted to test the live streaming into Germany. Had remote IETF participants in Germany not asked about this after being unable to view the earlier technical plenary, we wouldn’t have had this second stream active.

Next time, we will have a second live streaming service either active or at least on standby ready to go.

At the IETF meetings, we have the luxury of having an insane amount of bandwidth and so there are not the typical connectivity constraints you find in meeting venues. The software and equipment our producer was using could go out to multiple live streaming services. There is really no reason we can’t run multiple streams.

For the IETF we still have the IPv6 requirement, which unfortunately Livestream.com does not yet meet. However, it occurred to us after the session that we could have streamed to a Google+ Hangout On Air (HOA) as that would have also streamed out over IPv6 in addition to IPv4. Of course, that would mean relying on two Google services and so you run the risk of having the technical issues affecting one live streaming service also affecting the other – plus there was the whole “streaming into Germany” thing.

We’ll definitely keep investigating what other live streaming services may work over IPv6. There are a good number of live video streaming services out there and the number seems to be growing. The company producing the video stream for us also had their own streaming server that we might be able to use as a backup, too. And, yes, we can also have an IPv4-only streaming service available if everything else falls through.

Now, in non-IETF environments where I do have to worry about bandwidth constraints, I will at least have a plan for how I can rapidly spin up a second stream if the first one fails. That’s really the key point. What is Plan B and how fast can you make it happen?

3. Have Access To Relevant Social Media Accounts And Other Methods Of Letting People Know

This is perhaps a subset of Lesson #1, but another critical part of our success in redirecting people to the second live stream was that we had access to the relevant social media accounts and other means of spreading the word. I had access to the IETF Google+ page and could make the updates there. Someone else was able to send out a tweet with the new link to the live stream. An email was sent out to all attendees and to other relevant email lists letting them know about the link.

The key point is that when we updated the event page with the new information, we could let people know!

In The End…

… the session was streamed live across the Internet. It was recorded and made available for later viewing. And… we learned a few lessons to make sure our live streaming infrastructure is more resilient next time so that this potential “nightmare” becomes nothing more than just a minor bump and redirection.

What about you? If you do live video streaming what steps have you taken to ensure you can keep streaming in cases like this?

I also recorded an audio commentary about this situation:

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WordPress.Com Restores Ability To Add Media When Using New Post Window

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Last week people in one of the various web forums I’m in started complaining about the new “WordPress” user interface for posting and how they couldn’t easily add images or access their Media Library. I and others were completely confused because nothing had changed in our WordPress installations.

It turned out to be that the people were using the WordPress.COM hosted service while we with no problem were using self-hosted WordPress on our own servers. (What Automattic folks call “WordPress.ORG” software.)

I still have a WordPress.Com account and so I logged in and hit the “New Post” button and… sure enough… there was a brand new user interface. Well… first there was a “Beep Beep Boop” 🙂 :

Wp com beep 500px

And THEN the editing window appeared:

WordPress com new post 500

And yes, indeed, there was no way to add an image! You could create a “gallery”, but there was no way to add a single image. Nor could you get to your Media Library to add an existing image! There was also nothing on the WordPress.com main blog or in the support forums – although there were many threads asking about this.

You could still add media to a post by going into your Dashboard and then doing “Posts -> Add New” to get to the traditional editing window, but this “new” window was the default if you just clicked the link at the top of the admin window.

I found this quite bizarre and even talked about this in my report into last week’s FIR podcast episode.

I went as far as opening a new topic in the WordPress.com support forums where it was confirmed on July 5th that there was no way to add media.

But two days later on July 7th a post to that topic alerted me to the fact that the “Add Media” button was back… and indeed it is:

Wordpress com add media 500

So all seems well and people can get back to adding media from the window.

I still haven’t seen any explanation other than that the team is “working on some updates and changes”. I would hope that in the future if they are going to remove something big like this they’d give people a bit more of a clue… but… by the same token I commend the WordPress.com team on all they regular work they keep doing to that site. While I use self-hosted WordPress software, I do recognize that many of the changes and improvements to that software first get tested out on the WordPress.COM hosted service.

Anyway, if you were frustrated about this last week… it’s back! All is good now. 🙂

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Critical Need To Update Tweetdeck (If You Haven’t Already)

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Tweetdeck logoIf you are a user of Tweetdeck, as I am, and you somehow missed the security warnings from last week, you need to update Tweetdeck!

There is a critical security vulnerability that allows an attacker to remotely execute code on your system. Granted, “all” it can go is send out tweets from your account, follow users or do other tasks that your Twitter account can do, i.e. it can’t access your local hard drive or system. Still, though, having tweets go out from your account(s) via Tweetdeck could be harmful in any number of ways.

More information is available in these articles:

It seems to be the stereotypical case where a programmer didn’t check to see if the text that is about to be displayed contains only allowed HTML code. This is the kind of error that has been found in any number of web applications over the years.

The net is that you need to update Tweetdeck to the latest version through whatever means you use to update your computer.

If you are a regular user of Tweetdeck you should have seen an update notice come up last week – and hopefully you did so! If you only occasionally use Tweetdeck, you may want to go in now and make sure you update to the latest version.

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What Major Change Is SoundCloud About To Make To Their Mobile Apps?

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Soundcloud 250What is SoundCloud planning for their next mobile app release for at least iOS and presumably Android? On Friday (June 6, 2014) I received an email stating this:

We noticed you’ve used our app to record and upload tracks to SoundCloud. With an upcoming version of the app, we’ll be making changes to the way tracks are stored on your phone. If you have tracks that you’ve recorded but haven’t uploaded, please follow the instructions below to save them. You can upload the tracks to your SoundCloud profile, or you can download them to your computer. Please do this as soon as possible to ensure that you don’t lose anything you’ve recorded.

I cringed when I saw this… because I do use the SoundCloud app on my iPhone to record tracks for my “The Dan York Report” podcast and I do keep a number of different unpublished tracks sitting in the SoundCloud app. Often I may record a sound somewhere with the intent of later folding that into a recording (and which, admittedly, I often wind up never getting around to doing).

The key message of the email from SoundCloud is this:

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR TRACKS THAT YOU HAVE NOT UPLOADED UNLESS YOU TAKE ACTION BEFORE THE UPGRADE!

The email points out that all you need to do is upload the tracks to your SoundCloud account – and you can do so and make them “Private” so that they are only visible to you. They also note that you can download your sounds to your computer if you would prefer to do that. I chose to upload my tracks to SoundCloud as private recordings.

IMPORTANT: Note that when you upload your tracks to SoundCloud, the original date information will NOT be saved! That track you recorded in December 2012 that has the title “Sounds from Tuesday evening” will be uploaded to SoundCloud with a timestamp of when you upload the track. So if the date of the original recording is important to you, you may want to incorporate that date into the title of the track BEFORE you upload the track.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the email from SoundCloud helpfully provided this image showing tracks that have not been uploaded:

NewImage

I cringed when I read the email from SoundCloud for a larger reason. This upload of local tracks was no big deal. I was done in maybe 5 minutes. My larger concern though is… what is SoundCloud going to do to the recording experience?

Right now I mostly used the SoundCloud iOS app to record my TDYR podcasts (as I explained in an episode) as my TDYR podcast is all about trying to see how minimally and easily a podcast can be recorded.

However, the SoundCloud app seems to continue to move to being more about music consumption rather than creation. This started a while back when they moved “Record” from the home screen to being under the “…” menu choice. And then we haven’t really seen any improvements or changes to the recording capability.

Will they improve the recording experience? Or further de-emphasize it?

We’ll see… but in the meantime if you have any local recordings in the app you need to do something if you want to retain any of those recordings.

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As Of April 15, Yammer Will Be Effectively Dead To Me

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Sadly, as of tomorrow, April 15, 2014, Microsoft’s Yammer service will be effectively dead to me. For that is the day when the Yammer desktop client dies:

Yammer mac

Yes, indeed:

This app is out of date and will be discontinued on Apr 15, 2014. For the best Yammer experience, please use your web browser.

Except, of course, that the web browser isn’t the “best” Yammer experience for me.

This change was first announced earlier this year with a brief statement on Office365 site that had this as an answer for “why?”:

We are refocusing our desktop efforts on creating a companion app to our web experience, rather than a replacement for the website. We’ve seen that our users prefer our desktop experience for real-time alerts, but prefer our web experience to post messages and share content. We’ve developed our Windows Notifier with this in mind – the app will provide real-time notifications on desktop to complement and serve as a companion to the Yammer web experience.

As noted by multiple people in the comments to that page, I’m not sure who Microsoft asked, but for many of us the desktop app was the way we preferred to post and share content.

Microsoft notes that they offer a “Desktop Notifier” app for Yammer, which they do, but it has one wee little problem:

Desktop Notifier Yammer Desktop App

Yep, it’s only for Windows. I’m a Mac user. They apparently don’t care about me.

That app also seems to only generate notifications… not let you actually interact with the Yammer feed. It is very definitely NOT a “replacement”. As stated in one of the community support threads on Microsoft’s site by a user named Rob Sparre:

A decision has already been made by MSFT to kill the nice streamlined and useful Yammer desktop app and replace it with the horrible desktop notifier and force us to keep a web browser open with a busy and bulky screen layout. It is disappointing to lose the nice app and have to use a big fat confusing web page.

You may as well close this thread as I do not foresee any good news about it in the future.

Exactly.

Even if I had the new “app” on my Mac, my only choice now is to use the web interface to interact with Yammer.

The problem with using a web interface is that at any given moment I’ve typically got 57 zillion web browser windows and tabs open on my system and… somewhere … buried in all those windows and tabs is going to be Yammer.

Yammer is already “yet-another-place-to-check” that isn’t fully part of my workflow, and so I don’t check it all that much… but having the separate desktop application provided several benefits on my Mac:

1. A SEPARATE APP I COULD SWITCH TO – If I ever wanted to see what was being posted in Yammer I could just click on the Dock icon or Alt+Tab over to Yammer and check in on the flow of messages.

2. A DOCK ICON WITH NOTIFICATIONS – Similarly, Yammer has its own icon in my “dock” on the bottom of my Mac’s desktop where it can get a little red circle with the number of new messages in it. A visual indicator that I might want to go check it out.

3. A SIMPLE, COMPACT WINDOW – As the user Rob Sparre pointed out above, the Yammer Desktop client provides a nice easy way to keep track of the feed and interact with messages there. Simple. Easy.

Now judging from other comments I’m guessing that keeping up another desktop client – and one based on rival Adobe Systems’ AIR technology, at that – was too much effort for the current staffing level that Microsoft has for Yammer developers.

I understand. You have to prioritize and part of that involves looking at what you remove. I get that. I’m a long-time Apple user… I’m used to having functionality stripped away. 🙂

But it’s just a disappointment, particularly that they offer no other replacement for Mac users (and a shadow of a replacement for Windows users).

Yes, there are the mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android… but the thing is that when I most post to Yammer it is when I am on my work computers… NOT when I am mobile. I often want to share links to things I am working on or articles I find interesting. I’m not going to switch to a mobile device to do that!

So as of tomorrow I don’t expect I’ll be using Yammer nearly as much as I have been. Sure, I can login to the bloated, Facebook-like web interface… and sure, I can bookmark it or make a pinned tab or something like this… but as I said, Yammer was already “yet-another-place-to-check”. The app just made that easier.

Goodbye, Yammer Desktop… ’twas nice knowing you…

UPDATE, April 15, 2014 – As promised, the Yammer Desktop app is dead today:

Yammer desktop dead

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TypePad To Start Using Akismet To Fight Blog Comment Spam

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Yes! The folks at TypePad announced today they going to start using Akismet to fight blog comment spam! As a user of TypePad since 2005-ish, I’ve long been frustrated with how poorly TypePad’s anti-comment-spam mechanisms have worked and have written about that, although granted that particular incident was now 3.5 yrs ago and things have improved a bit in that I’m not seeing quite as much spam. However, I’ve also turned on full moderation on the couple of remaining blogs I still have on TypePad.

All my new blogs and other sites are over on WordPress where I’ve been very happy with the anti-spam services that I get from Akismet. (And some day I’d like to move this blog and Disruptive Telephony over to WordPress, too – if only I can carve out the considerable time that will be involved with the move.)

I’m pleased to see TypePad moving this way. It may not be enough to get me to stop using full moderation on my articles… but hopefully it should mean fewer spam comments to look at in the admin interface.

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