If you’re following me on twitter you should be fully aware that I launched my new theme Saturday night, today I put the final design touches on it.
On Friday I had a simple design idea and with all of the ideas and inspiration that have accumulated over the last 6+ months I was obsessed in getting things cleaned up around here.
Here are some important points and areas of focus:
I still have a laundry list of things to do, some of the biggies:
I was about to post this on twitter but I need more than 140 characters to share/vent my perspective:
It’s official: “social” networks ruin relationships by allowing us to know each other enough to not like each other…
What I wanted to say: I’ve come to the realization before that actively sharing your opinion sifts out the real friends and arguments amplify this. Blogging made this apparent a long time ago, especially in the ‘04 election cycle, but it’s amplified now.
Social networks like Twitter and facebook demand attention–it’s making all of us post about every thought, afterthought or quip–regardless if it’s about us or not. I’m sure there’s some phd thesis on this topic but when I think about how relationships interacted just a few years ago it didn’t happen like this.
There’s a ton of differences but attention is one. It would be impossible to get this attention way back when AIM was cool.
Imagine being at a party with all of your “friends”–all of those on your follower/lists:
How many conversations could you possibly have?
With everyone broadcasting we all get an equal voice ( as long as you post as much as the next person )…
Who would you tend to gravitate too?
…we’re also broadcasting without exclusivity…
What topics would be discussed?
…without exclusivity, the friends we talk to everyday hear as much as our friends we meet a few times a year.
Let me circle back, since I’m clearly processing thoughts as I write this post ( that’s how I roll, sorry ).
Social networks are not bad, nor are they ruining relationships–people are accountable for what they share, how they share and whom they share with…
…get to the point already…
I’m coming to the realization that this new dynamic of friendship ( that being twitter and facebook ) is speeding up the inevitable–someone getting to know you ( and I ) enough to build a respectful friendship regardless of disagreement, or to grow existing relationships, or neither, or worse.
disclaimer: I didn’t have any one person in mind when I wrote this, this is rather a collection of my experiences through blogging and the new “real time” web. But if you’re thinking this post is still about you, you’re probably right and here’s the test; contact me immediately; WAIT…if you were truly about to call or write, you passed the test and rest assured you’re wrong; if you hesitated ask yourself, “do I really care what he really thinks?”; if you answered “yes”, you’re wrong, see you soon; if you thought “no”, you’re right this post was personally about you –only you– and you should stop following me on Twitter and de-friend me on facebook, it will be best this way, maybe we can be friends in real life though.
I just wonder how nervous Twitter is right now. A few months ago a few said Twitter didn’t have a structural problem, they clearly do – people are leaving.
For what? First FreindFeed, now identi.ca. Both have their upsides: freindfeed has true conversation and identi.ca has the potential to replace twitter’s functionality.
FriendFeed is not a “communication service” but it is a great conversation service. Their issue is integration; Twitter replies was a great start but it shouldn’t stop.
Identi.ca, running the open source tool laconica is clearly gunned at replacing twitter. It’s creating buzz, probably because of the open platform. However, I wish the buzz was about its ability to federate, of course we would then would have to explain federation (federation allows you to run the software yourself and be tied to all the others running the the same software. Think of a thousand independent twitter servers all connected).
Which leads me to my hopes that FriendFeed would WAKE UP!!…
FriendFeed should run its own federated laconica service, making it a one stop shop for conversation and communication. What about Identica? Identi.ca wins because freetards groping identi.ca right now will refuse the “walled garden” and more importantly the federation would automatically give identi.ca a large majority of FreindFeed’s base.
So twitter looses right? They could, then again “I wonder how nervous twitter is right now”. They may not be nervous at all. Because they see the numbers behind people leaving vs. talking about leaving.
Regardless: Twitter should fix their current situation; FriendFeed needs to partner and integrate more; Identi.ca needs a user base.
view the services I currently use at friendfeed
Here’s a screen grab of all the apps I’ve downloaded already. I can’t give any full reviews just yet; no time and I haven’t played with them all just yet. First impressions though:
AIM: Why did I download that, I don’t use aim. Looking forward to a GTalk (native) app, the special iPhone web version will do for now.
Facebook: Pretty awesome. It’s going to be a great contacts backup.
Google Mobile App: I don’t really get it. It’s a start page for all of their iPhone web apps but has some great search functionality on the start page.
Loopt: Very interesting. It’s going to be a cool Twitter app, because of it’s location based social features.
Twitteriffic: Excellent twitter app: location, photos and all tweets. I hope Hahlo comes out with a premium app, I’d really like to see summize integration.
Pandora: didn’t work so well on edge the first time. Let’s see how it works tomorrow on 3G. I’m really stocked about this one.
Remote: Oh man, can’t wait to get this hooked up to the AppleTV.
Super Monkey Ball: graphics are excellent for a phone but I’m not very good at it…yet.
and the best app so far…
Enigmo: This game is fun. It’s going to be a blast to play this in line somewhere or just waiting around.
What I’m really looking forward to is the Wordpress App, now Jared and I wont be asked to update Mobile Admin anymore.
I recently added Disqus commenting to my site. Having a service manage my comments has a lot of benefits:
Functionality – Seesmic integration is pretty cool, not like I’m expecting any video comments but it’s going be be cool when that first one is made.
Ownership – not only should I own the comments on this site but the commenter should too. I’ve always liked the idea of a service that collects your comments (I had the idea well before CoComment 
) and since Disqus is taking off it’s seems appropriate to allow my commenters to take their comments with them.
The list of ancillary features stack up, especially for the commenter.
How I’ve enbled it here at Scattered:
I’ve only enabled it for new posts and existing posts without comments, so I haven’t started over…even though I would prefer starting over.
Without Disqus allowing for importing of historical comments I’m not about to throw out years of comments. It already allows for you to export all of your site’s comments and knowing that allowed me make the move over the weekend when I enabled the service.
There are somethings I’d like to see:
FriendFeed integration. I’d love to see comments made from friendfeed show up on site’s using Disqus.
Twitter Integration. Not sure how this would work or what purpose it would serve but people like to comment on posts with Twitter and it should be shown on the post page.
Importing. Allow us to import our comments, finally. There are a few older posts I have that really need Disqus’s threading and voting features.
I’ve been giving FriendFeed a second chance and I’m glad I did. At first I really didn’t know what to think, it seemed to be comprised of noise which led me to think of it as a social RSS aggrigator on par with Google Reader.
Now that I’ve been using it for the last week I’ve really enjoyed it. Even though I may not be participating as much as I want, it’s a wonderful way follow other’s social streams and more importantly have conversations around them.
Rooms are extremely useful. I’m only participating in one but having a place to share links and feeds (something the group I’m a part of doesn’t allow) is excellent. facebook groups, probably the only other good option I can think of is…the modern day forum, too complex with about no additional functionality. FriendFeed keeps rooms simple and that’s where it excels.
That simplicity works into the interface. The homepage gets to be a burden at first but don’t fret, it’s an easy fix. Not sure when they added the “hide” feature but this is the feature that allows me to use the service. What I do: not saying it’s the perfect solution, is to hide all of the blogs and other items that I would normally get in GoogleReader and I don’t want to comment on at FriendFeed. I’m currently keeping Twitter in the mix so I can comment on the tweets with it being sent back to twitter as an @ reply. More importantly I keep twitter and other feeds that thrive in conversation, which are just about impossible to follow or find on twitter.
Those conversations run ramant on FriendFeed and they really make the service. I just wish more people were using the service, not just my “real friends” but I would like to see FriendFeed aggrigate conversations no matter where they originated.
I’ll try to expand on what I mean by aggregating conversations in another post, I should also bring up the terrific FriendFeed bot after I get more use out of it.
After some debate with Nathan, Jared and I, then some twitter posts today [quotably is cool], I’d like share my point of view here: AdBlockers are wrong.
Simply, they’re built to circumvent revenue from the site owners.
Before you point out that I have ads on this site; I don’t care if you block my ads. I do not count on any of that money on a monthly basis, those few dollars are a benefit or reward of having a blog. But, if this blog was my day job and I was trying to survive off advertising from my content I would be pissed if I knew people were inhibiting me from earning money from my hard work.
There are a lot of web 2.0 startups that would not be here if it weren’t for ad services like adwords, even the ones that provide subscription models rely on ads to cusion the overhead of providing a popular free service.
There’s a viscous circular argument of hypotheticals because web advertising is not like anything else:
And that’s were I agree to disagree. Just because it’s not written law doesn’t mean it’s right (ethically).
As I’ve mentioned before I’m not trying to persuade anyone, make your own desicion. I use TLA on my site and a lot of people disagree; some say it’s unethical for the same general reasons I think adblocking is wrong and I’ve concluded they’re different.
Add RSS Detection
I’ve uploaded Add RSS to Wordpress Extend and updated it to version 1.5.
Description: Add RSS Feeds to your template header for Firefox and other browsers to detect automatically. Plugin facilitates adding your comments feed, per-post comment feed and allows for custom RSS feeds to be added. Feeds are not excluded to local RSS feeds of your site. Forexample you can add your Twitter or Pownce feed just as easily as adding a comments feed.
It’s a very basic plugin but I’m going to bet a lot of people would benefiting from it’s ease of use, especially the option to add per post feeds. And it works with any wordpress theme which is a plus.
AJAX CSS Switcher
I’ve also added CSS AJAX CSS Switcher (I’ve changed the name) to the repository and I’ve updated it to version 1.5. Hopefully this release will help the ailments of the last version which had problems with the version of prototype in wp-includes.
Description: This Wordpress Plugin allows you to add CSS switching to your theme without any reload. It also stores the users selection for future visits. This plugin uses UDASS The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher.
“The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher combines the power of Server Side processing and DOM scripting to swap style sheets on the fly with the power of Ajax. If JavaScript? is disabled – UDASSS degrades gracefully to improve your website accessibility. Needless to say, it is very sexy indeed.”
After the comment on how I added additional RSS feeds for browser detection I went ahead and made the least necessary plugin I’ve ever released. Maybe Movable Anything is unnecessary for more users but this plugin might take the person longer to download and install than just modifying their header file in their template, even though it has an options panel.
For those who do not want to edit their header template I scraped this plugin together in 30 minutes. Add RSS is:
Add RSS Feeds to your template header for Firefox and other browsers to detect your additional RSS feeds. Feeds are not excluded to local RSS to your site. For example you can add your Twitter or Pownce feed just as easily as adding your comments feed.
Updated version just uploaded, 3pm PST.
Commenting threads is what I really miss from twitter and the more threads that happen at pownce like this the more I’m loosing my grip on using twitter except to keep track of the people that I miss over there.
Which makes me think of why Pownce hasn’t used the API of Twitter to merge the two. … Read More »
July 27
