Picture of Nyviara Benavente

In my second life, I am known as Nyviara Benavente. Personality-wise I am no different than I am in my real life, but I think it’s safe to say that I dress a tad bit edgier. In fact, while participating in the meeting night, my mother happened to walk in and asked me why I would have my avatar dress in such a way.  Maybe because I wish I could rock rollerblades on a daily basis…? (haha).

In any event, even my mother has grown to accept the existence of such a thing as what Second Life has created. This is because I’ve shown her a couple of the places that I have discovered in my travels. It’s not all red light or casino…there are some genuinely awesome and creative sims. I will give a word of warning that often times the more original or thought-provoking locations will be like a ghost town. Finding the popular hangouts is sometimes a bit of work.

So what are three interesting places?

• Greenies Home – SLurl

This is a gem that I found thanks to the Creative Thinking course here at SBCC. The instructor uses Second Life for critiques, meetings, and to show off the Second Life world as a great canvas to experiment in. I don’t even want to describe what this place is because it will potentially ruin the great feeling that you’ll inevitably get upon your first visit. So please, just give it a go. I will give a warning that it is a potentially laggy area for those on not-so-good computers or connections so make sure you pay attention to the information that is shown upon first arrival which has you change your settings to something more optimal. I had a great time exploring this area and hopefully you will too. This place actually does tend to have others there regularly also.  When you first get there you’ll run into a doorway where it says “Rezzable…”.  Don’t go in here (but you may want to come back and check it out).  Walk past it and you’ll kind of turn right to see the real main feature I want to show you.

• Squeebee’s Mystery Science Theater (MST3k) – SLurl

This is my favorite place in all of SL (at least, out of all the places I’ve been to and know about).  If you’re a fan of the old (hilarious) television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3k) where a guy and a couple robots make fun of really bad scifi movies, then you’ll love this place. It essentially is a movie theater that plays episodes on demand and every Friday night there’s a special feature. The ability to read the commentary of others that add to what is being said makes it that much more funny. Thanks to this virtual space, fans from across the world can get together and have a shared viewing experience.  Generally if I login to SL, it is to come here.  As a member of their group, I get regular emails updating on me what’s happening.

• Numbakulla Island Project – The Pot Healer Adventure Game – SLurl

This is a mystery quest game where you walk around the area and find clues.  A beginner may find this tricky as you have to “wear” an object they give you (the Numbakulla Notebook).  Wearing this object while playing the game lets it remember what inventory items you have.  To wear it, you have to right click it in your inventory and choose “wear.”

For the my chosen event, I responded to a listing for an Amusement Park Carnival by Artoare Allen.  It turns out that I can get just as dizzy on virtual rides as I can on the real ones.  The key to this place is that you need to change your view to that of first person (so you can’t see your avatar).  On a PC, I just use my mouse scroll button to zoom in as far as possible.  There were only one or two people there, and I think one of the major problems is that the event listing has basically turned into an ad listing where true events get swallowed up and covered.  It would be nice if that was mended in the future.  The new viewer is great though.  I like the new look and how it is organized and laid out with everything under tabs in one sidebar.  The favorites bar and teleport history is also nice along with changes in group communication display.

Dancing in SOMA Radio Station during meeting. Takes skill to dance in rollerskates!

Here's me in Kenley's Office sitting in the infamous chair.

As for how Second Life fits into my branding project, I’m not entirely sure yet. The fact you have to download a viewer and then find the location makes it somewhat difficult to use for anything more than “extras” or things not completely vital to the project. I wish I didn’t have to say that but I think just the opinions from this class shows that many are not entirely convinced by it and there is a learning curve. For example, just moving around was cited in the class meeting as one of the big hurdles to cross. I do consider it to be a good space to demonstrate and prototype ideas I have for green living situations though. You can take advantage of the space and toolset and use screencasting even. Those who are interested and happen to stumble upon my area also can learn something. It’s just another potential point of contact with my audience.

For those interested in learning how to build in SL, check out the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives.

Overall, I enjoy many aspects of Second Life and highly dislike others (not because of the content exactly or the fact that people enjoy it, but because it is too easy to stumble upon that it scares away newcomers).  I think it has a lot of potential, especially for business purposes, but people need to get creative in how they advertise within this realm.  This is a living, breathing, 3d environment and more importantly it is very social.  There are many “cool” places there though that get very little traffic and a lot of it is because they don’t continually provide new content or create a social experience in their spaces where people will want to come and hang out or repeatedly visit (there are some exceptions like training areas or simulations where it’s more about education than anything).  Many of the popular shops for example participate in “hunts” where a bunch of shops get together and hide an object with a free item in their shop.  This drives traffic in and it’s a lot of fun for the participants.  Squeebee’s  Theater is popular not only for its ability to play funny videos but for the social experience it creates.  Second Life is a place where you really have to pay attention to what we’ve been told all along, which is to make it worth a person’s while!

I understand the importance of the SEO concept of the long tail of content though, especially when it comes to blogs which are a great way of accomplishing it.  I really don’t think I fully understood the long tail concept as described in my previous course.  I now look at it like this:  each of my blog posts are potential entry points to my website as a whole.  By optimizing each for their own keywords based on their unique, specific content,  I am adding to the potential search phrases that my audience can use to find me.  Ideally, they’ll search for something specific that I’ve optimized for (after all, less competition for less broad keyword phrases), they’ll find a specific blog post of mine and enjoy the relevant content and go on to explore the rest of the site which probably has something else to offer them.  So,  how does one go about optimizing a blog post with the long tail in mind?  There are a couple of elements to pay attention to although you’ll have to direct your attention to the actual source page of the post to see some of them.

The primary element is the actual page title, which in most cases is setup to be the title of the blog post.  Other elements include the meta tags which include keywords and description.  It’s important to note here, that optimizing the title and description goes beyond catering to just search engine spiders/bots; these will be what appear in the organic listings of the search engine result pages.  In a nutshell, these two are also for the search engine users (potential audience) and should be optimized to catch their attention and get them to click on your link.  The title is also what is usually shown by default in social media services like Delicious or when your link is shared on Facebook.  Other elements to consider optimizing are the page URL which in my case is also the same as the blog title and the header tags.  If you look at the visual post editor box in WordPress, you should see a drop down list under the bold, italic, and strikethrough buttons that says “Paragraph.”  If you click on this, you will see that you can easily include html formatted headers.  How they appear aesthetically in your post is up to the mercy of your theme’s CSS.  The important thing to remember is that the keywords should focus on the specific blog post’s content.  Not the website as a whole’s content or other keywords that have nothing to do with anything.  Not only do the search engines look down on this but the users won’t appreciate being taken to a non-relevant site either.

Although I plan on optimizing all of my posts and pages (including this one), here are three examples:

• About Page (Yes the plugin works on pages too!  FYI- You can optimize the title of the page while not having to lengthen the menu name. )

Optimizing Blog Page Keywords

SEO changes made to title tag of About page source.

SEO changes made to meta keyword and description tags of About page source.

• Facing the Frustrating Reality with Facebook
  • facebook, facebook page, facebook events, facebook page updates, facebook event sharing, facebook page fan updates, facebook page branding

Facebook Page Post SEO Title Changes

• Five Usernames to Brush the Dust Off Of
  • sites, social sites, social media sites, social networking sites, plurk versus twitter, social links

Site Re-visitation Post SEO Title Changes

Source Page SEO Title Changes to Social Site Post

Source Page SEO Meta Tag Changes to Social Site Post

In case you were curious, I came up with my keyword phrases with some help from Google’s Keyword Tool and this keyword density checker.  I don’t know about anyone else but the Google tool didn’t seem to come up with anything useful or really relevant for me.  I’m really bad with keywords and need to work on it.  I felt like the keyword phrases I could use were all broad by the nature of what we are talking about in our blogs, and that’s one of the reasons covered in Tyler Suchman’s Top 5 Reasons Keywords Aren’t the Search Engine Silver Bullet.  The other four include too little relevant content on the page (afterall content is king), there hasn’t been a long tail of content established (which is what I’m trying to setup now), and two other reasons or factors that can affect search engine rankings outside of page optimization.  The two other factors are the number of incoming links and the age of the domain the website resides on.  Incoming links are kind of a seal of approval of sorts in the eyes of the search engine algorithms.  They figure if the links are of quality than it’s a sign that someone has found the content relevant and that it can be trustworthy.  Trust is also established with an older domain.

So there you have it…a quick and simple explanation of how and why to start optimizing blog posts for search engines and that is the long tail of content.  With a well updated blog consisting of good, relevant content, there’s no need to keyword stuff or use black hat SEO tactics, and you’ll hopefully be providing valuable content that others would easily want to link to bringing in the incoming links as well.  It takes effort, but it’s a win-win situation for you and your target audience.

There is one last item that I’m not 100 percent clear on and that is how to handle optimized URLs when the site and posts have already been in existence awhile.  I have left my current URLs alone even if I changed the title for the time being (as you’ll notice mine were already setup to include the title in the URL).  Do you just start optimizing this from new posts forward, change the old and redirect the old to the new, change the old and just forget the old and break any links in existence out there, etc.?

If you’re on Facebook and Twitter, they’re really noisy these days…there’s a lot of what I call absentee activism. But on this thing, you have people who are truly interested.

Also, Ning offers many capabilities that add flexibility that would otherwise be absent on Facebook or even Myspace.  This isn’t to say that I won’t be making a presence on both of these networks.  Although I personally detest Myspace (I foresee a future blog post on this subject), I am willing to make a presence on there if it will connect me with more people.  It helps that Hootsuite just integrated with Myspace also making it easier to keep track of activity on there.  The real goal is to direct people who don’t know about the project to my website/blog, help get the news out of new content for those that support the project and are friends, and hopefully, if they are serious about it, get them to participate and actually share and teach other on the Ning network.  In my opinion, Myspace is far too spammy to really facilitate any real type of consistent conversation on the page outside of the blog discussions and Facebook news streams are filled with news from a hundred other different people and it’s easy to miss things.  The Ning network on the other hand is dedicated to just this project.  LinkedIn will be useful when connecting with professionals that could actually help me out with the project along with other professional ventures in my life but for this assignment I really focused on Ning.

The Setup

Well they aren’t lying when you can have a network up and running in less than 30 seconds.  Plan on spending a significant amount of time if you want to actually customize the network to your liking though.  I ended up tweaking my Twitter background to also work here.  They provide some nice themes and easy to use options for those without html and css knowledge, but they also give you access to the full css so you can really customize it to your liking.  For example, I wanted my background to be fixed so that it wouldn’t move when you scroll (like on Twitter) and I was able to do it easily even though it doesn’t give me the option when I set the background image in the basic options.  For the most part it is easy to manage the network although I find it a little annoying that you can’t just drag and drop the different feature boxes on the home page like you can while editing your profile or with boxes on Facebook for example.  You have to go to Manage>Features and makes your changes, go and look at it, and then go back if you want to continue tweaking (and you will).  Also, when I was setting up my description, I realized my personal one wasn’t really going to work (which I had sort of predicted).  In the spirit of branding though and trying to maintain a consistent message and image, I slightly tweaked it to make it more community friendly.  You’ll instantly recognize it though so I think the tweak was fine.  Other things I setup were:

• Facebook, Twitter & Flickr Integration- I like that I was able to setup Facebook and Twitter apps that allow my members to crosspost their status updates to these other networks/services.  Not only is this attractive to me from a user standpoint, as the project head I’m also thinking about how this helps me gain exposure for the project.  Most of the people that will be using the network will be local and they will be posting these updates on their Facebook which will be read by other people who are local.  Since their friend is involved it gives the project more credibility and they are going to be more likely to join in themselves or at least ask about it.  I think everyone wins.  Also, it provides a link back to the network which is neat.  I wasn’t sure whether to have it as “Sprout Change” or “Sprout Change Network.”  I thought that by adding Network to the end it may spark interest more.  Let me know what you think.  It’s easy to change in both app settings.

The Flickr integration, although nice to have, has some drawbacks.  Instead of linking to the actual pictures on Flickr, it imports them into the gallery so you now have two copies floating around the internet.  I wish it would just show them from Flickr and that it would take you to the page when you clicked on them.  Also, it doesn’t look like you can just import one picture.  It’s rather bizarre to be honest.  To get the two pictures I wanted to upload, I had to upload all that I had labeled as “branding” and then go through and delete the others.  The Youtube integration (along with other video services) is also a little strange to me because it gives you an embed code that is linked back to you and not Youtube if you were to want to share it from the network.  I feel like I’m almost stealing these people’s videos even though I’m clearly not.  Anyone else kind of feel this way?

• Gifts- I was all excited for this feature at first.  I don’t like the “credit” part of it but I thought I’d be able to set my gifts as free and as awards, which means that only I, as the admin, could distribute them.  It was even more amazing that I could create my own custom awards.  The grand idea was to use the gifts like badges of honor and accomplishment.  The idea behind the project is that I would attempt different things that would help us live greener, do all the the research and using that and my own experiences, come up with a guide for my neighbors to follow.  My neighbors would use this network to actually show their own journey of following my guide and offering their own experiences so that it may be improved upon.  After they’ve shown proof and have completed it, I’ll award them a badge.  Not only is this a sign of accomplishment and progress, it also can be used to show their expertise to other users on the site which makes their advice more credible like when talking in the forums for example.  It all fell apart though when I discovered that awards are an automatic 25 credits and admins can’t distribute them for free, even if they were made themselves.  Absolutely silly and at $1.50 / graphic absolutely ridiculous.  Needless to say, I disabled gifts on the network until they change this.  Very disappointing since it could have been a very neat feature.  I’m thinking of other ways I can implement something like this.
• Apps-  Another neat feature is the ability to add apps to the network.  I was specifically looking at the YouTube, WordPress, Polldaddy, and Feedly apps as I think they’ll come in handy.  I think my Flickr issue would be solved by an app too but they don’t have one on there yet.  Unfortunately the Feedly app doesn’t work as it won’t let me pick which feeds to use.  Also the application pages suffer from a rather large amount of spam in the comments so they are less than helpful.  Also, on the profile page, a member can add an app by url but this flexibility doesn’t seem to be available for site-wide apps.  Very strange.
• Profile Questions- I added custom profile questions that people can fill out.  Not only does this allow people to get to know one another better, but I have a couple private questions that will help me gain a better perspective and the type of people that are joining the project.  I ask them questions like have they ever gone to a farmers market, composted, etc.
• Groups & Forums- I setup two example groups and some starter forum categories.  I noticed that the No Impact Experiment uses a Ning network and that it is rather hard to navigate now that it is populated with members and many posts and discussion boards.  It looks like they actually did a major cleanup recently to solve the problem but since I saw what occurred, I’m going to try and avoid  that.  I’m trying to decide whether to have the topics as separate groups because each has its own discussion area or make each topic its own category in the main forums.  One option is to have the main topics (that the guides talk about) as the main forum categories but then have groups for the specific separate local areas here in Sacramento so those that are actually near each other can have their own discussions with each other.  I’m still waffling on what I’m going to do about this.
• RSS-  Of course the activity stream along with groups, forum, etc. has its own RSS address which I’ve added to my reader and will be adding on the main project blog sidebar.  Also, you can add RSS feeds to your homepage if you’d like with the RSS module.  I used this to add the Twitter @sproutchange and delicious feed to the page.
• Badge-  I like the badge that members can post in other locations to show their membership and hopefully get others to join as well.
• Chat-  I like that the chat bar shows at the bottom of the screen which allows you to see who is online and let you talk to them in real time.  It is a lot like the Facebook chat.
• Blog- I wish there was a way to integrate this with blogs that people may have in other locations but oh well.  They can use the RSS box to add a feed to their profile page at least except they only get one.  I wish you could add as many text boxes and RSS feed boxes as you wanted (up to five)  like you can on the main site.  I was surprised to see that blogs had features like setting a time for it to be published in the future and the ability to save drafts.  Members will be encouraged to blog about their experiences and efforts along with contributing in the forums about specific issues and questions.
• Event-  It’s rather painful for me to have events both on here and on Facebook.  I’ll probably just have to get over it though as I don’t see an app for this yet either.  At least this way, other members can also add events.
• Pages- If you go to the tab manager, you can actually create new pages.  To edit the content, first create the page and then go to its tab.  You will then see an edit button.  You can also layer tabs to create dropdown menus to consolidate the navigation and organize it.  I added an About page with dropdown links to the main project blog feed (which doesn’t exist yet so it shows this feed) and a feed of tweets that mention Sprout Change.  I haven’t written the actual copy for the page so it’s just a placeholder.  You’ll notice I did little fillers for many of the features so I could just try them out and see how they’d appear on the homepage.
• Analytics-  I didn’t set this up yet but I was happy to see that they have included the ability to add this if needed.  When we cover this later I’ll have to come back to it.

The Result

Visit- http://sproutchange.ning.com/

Overall, there are things I love and things I’d love to change but for what it is, it is a great solution to being able to create your own social network.  I’ll just have to get a little creative with RSS feeds and the widget abilities of the text boxes to fulfill my entire vision for what I’d like to have for my project I think.  I’m still tweaking the positions of the different features on the homepage but my current theory behind my choices is heavily based on the fact that the right sidebar is always visible.  When a user refreshes or goes to another page, it will get updated.  I figured that’d be the best spot to put the latest activity and Twitter feeds.  The left sidebar contains kind of the “resource” boxes such as photos, videos and shared Delicious links.  I also stuck the events there high up so they’d be noticeable as they are time-constrained.  I didn’t feel like they needed to always be visible though.  The middle section contains the real meat and potatoes such as the members, which I feature at the top as it’s suggested to keep them prominent, groups, recent forum and blog posts, and the chat box (which is then at the bottom of the screen on all the other pages).  I stuck the informational image in the middle for now just to show how this site fits into the plan I had set out.  It needs to be modified to be more readable at that size but I doubt I’ll be keeping it there anyways.  I do think I will keep something more graphic-y there to break up all the boxes and add some informative fun.

If anyone has advice regarding whether to use groups or the forum categories to confine the conversations, whether to use “Sprout Change” or “Sprout Change Network” as my Twitter and Facebook application titles, or any other advice for layout, please comment!

In any event, my Facebook profile (facebook.com/lindsey.t) has always been personal.  If my friends aren’t family members, they are old school classmates, international friends, or social game friends I have never ever done professional networking or handled any business-related communication on the network which is evident when you take a gander at my current friend lists:

Facebook Friend Lists

In fact, I felt a little uneasy as I read through Mashable’s HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook.  While I can certainly understand why one should probably be mindful of their audience, when it started talking about personal branding I started to frown.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand branding and its benefits but I’m not willing to scrutinized my every status message or link shared to make sure that it fits into some big strategy I’ve come up with for how to portray myself in a positive light.  I’ve been repeatedly told that it’s about being “real” on Facebook and I can’t think of anything less real than a some grand PR scheme of my own making.  I feel like I have good enough judgement to not post something that would get me into hot water (after all, my family is on here like I said) and I know how to use the new privacy settings so that I can make sure that certain things I say are only read by certain people.  Even if I were to screw up, there wouldn’t be anything tragic as a result.  I’m not willing to turn off tagging because someone may post something embarrassing of me or stop people from posting on my wall.  This kills the fun and positive factors that the network has for me.  I’d like to think that it is the cumulative whole and trends of my status updates and shared media that makes me rather than a few, hand-picked updates that makes me look like some robot with an obvious agenda.  I prefer to be real and I live my life as if any moment of it could be made public at any time because really, it can be with smartphones, the internet, and websites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

I am willing to dip my toes into more professional and business-minded use of Facebook though and I was actually glad to see that Facebook pages are kept separate from the admin account running them.  Of course, Kenley points out the annoying fact that you cannot post as yourself on your page and with that in mind, I received the permission of another family member to use their account to make my page on.  They are involved with the page’s topic but don’t use their Facebook account and therefore don’t really mind if they can’t post or not.  I’m sure Facebook probably would frown on this but it’s their own fault for creating such restrictions.

This brings me to my first con and that is Facebook’s help department is pretty terrible at responding to user concerns, questions, and suggestions.  As of right now, there is a huge uproar over the inability for a page creator to pass on all administrative rights to someone else.  This is a problem because a company employee can create a page and then be fired but still have control.  While you can add and remove admins, the creator can never be removed at this point.  Also you can never change the name, category and other details about the page without completely deleting it and starting over.  This of course means you lose all your fans and post history, etc.  So if you’re setting up anything on Facebook think for the long, long term and how you’ll deal with any changes that come up in the future while hoping Facebook becomes a little more flexible in their ways.

I stepped away from my branding project and decided to use Facebook to help solve a couple management issues my father and I are currently having with our indoor soccer team.  The problem areas were (1) communication between management and players, (2) recruiting new players, and (3) finding a sponsor.  I came up with a plan for how a Facebook page could help in all three.

Twitter Promo for New Facebook Page

The idea is that the team’s page can be the central hub for information regarding the team, and that the players would all become fans and get updates from it.  Since we’ve been having issues with players only telling other players they won’t be at games which doesn’t help us any because we only find out at the actual game through the other person (obviously no time to get a replacement), I’ve decided to try and use the events feature to track who won’t be there ahead of time.  It takes two seconds to use and we no longer have to play phone tag with one another or remember far in advance what other people’s schedules are.  I’ve created an event for the next upcoming season asking for people to RSVP as to whether or not they will be playing.  Once I get everyone added as a friend on Facebook, I’ll send out an invite.  I’ll do this each week with games and send invites out to the teammates so I’ll have a good idea come Saturday who will be there and who won’t be.  I can also send reminders with the event regarding fees, etc.

The ease in which events can be shared also makes it an ideal tool for recruiting.  When we are looking for a certain type of player, I can create an event for it and have everyone share it on their own walls for their other soccer-playing friends to see.  Those who are interested can RSVP and share their info on the event wall for us to get back to them.  Unfortunately, this isn’t really the intended use of events but once again, this is to make up for a lack of a way to effectively share a regular status update.  At most, a person can comment or “like” something and one can hope that a friend of theirs will get curious and click to see what their friend responded to.  It does not say what the status message said or anything though.  Sure you can hope that the player will maybe copy and paste or write their own status message to pass on the news but it’s more ideal to make it as easy as possible to share without much effort on their part.  What can I say, I know people can be inherently lazy on the web and I’d like to cater to it.  This is one area of communication that Twitter excels in with its “retweets.”  Facebook has implemented the “via” feature which lets some people share links that other people have shared but that’s just it…it’s only available for links.

Another problem I spotted is that you cannot send truly targeted status updates.  On my personal account, I can send out a status message that only the actual current, active players can see.  I cannot do the same from the page.  At most I can just send a status message to someone based on location and language.  I cannot separate fans into lists and I cannot send any private messages to certain fans.  Updates can be targeted but once again it’s extremely limited to location, sex and age.  This is frankly a problem for me and I’m shocked it is like this.

One of the reasons it is a problem is because of the last need I have for the page which is to help find a sponsor.  I thought of a plan where I’d try to get as many local people to become fans as possible to help us with this.  That way, when my dad and I start going around to businesses, we’ll have an audience just waiting for them and we’d probably have a better chance of finding someone.  Along with team news, we’d send out updates from our sponsor(s) and to make it worth our fans’ while, we’ll make sure that it is relevant and have special deals and promotions.  All of this would be known up front.  That is my dream plan anyways and I think it’s worth a shot.  Of course, that means there’s going to be a bunch of random people mixed in with players so getting the players-only news to them and anyone considering playing for us is going to have to be done through other channels like my personal account, or maybe I’ll check out groups and see if an invite-only one will work in that respect.  I can share events between the page and group.  We’ll see after I do more playing around and actually start using it in a real situation.

It seems like for all its networking capabilities and userbase, Facebook makes it awfully hard to effectively and efficiently take advantage of its features for different purposes, especially when they limit everyone to a single account (e.g., you can’t have a personal and a business one) and businesses are essentially corralled into pages with stunted features.  While big corporations are probably fine with large targeting features, smaller businesses would probably like more options to have more personalized and meaningful communications with their fans.  It is very frustrating to me.  Despite the major drawbacks, given its large number of users, their frequency in signing-in, the fact it is being incorporated into everything lately, and features like events, ads, and the ease in communicating with one another (at least with normal profile capabilities), Facebook is still a good location to setup a landing spot for your business.  You just need to leverage the features that are available to you while keeping in mind the limitations and mold your communications accordingly (and don’t forget page applications like Static FBML that can extend basic capabilities although this will soon be drastically changed with wall boxes being removed).  My five year high school reunion was completely setup and managed using Facebook.  It’s all about using it for what it’s good for in a way that will improve communication and interaction while at the same time help gain you exposure.  That’s why I focused on events.  It makes it easier for players to communicate with me and for me to spread the word about recruiting opportunities and other events due to its ease in sharing compared to normal status updates.  The only workaround for sharing a status is to click the direct link of the status update (you do this by clicking on the time like we did to isolate our promotional tweet) and then post it as a link with added commentary if needed.   Then future people can share it easily from that point on.

Last but not least, a word of warning (and another complaint): users cannot hide the pages they are fans of.  If your page topic may be controversial or be about something maybe someone wouldn’t want their coworkers to know about, they probably won’t become a fan if they know this.  Once again, I don’t understand the reasoning behind this but it’s one privacy issue that hasn’t been touched on it seems.  I’d be keeping my eye on the Developer Roadmap to see what changes lie ahead in the area of pages in the future as they like to change things on a regular basis and it could have repercussions for any apps your business is using, how you display information to your fans, and how you can communicate with them.  If you could pick one change that you’d like to see Facebook make to help you use pages for effectively, what would it be?

As of the last couple of days, I now have three Twitter accounts:

• @Linzers- personal (this is the one I’ll be using for my Twire and #mat149 tweets)
• @SproutChange- pet project (this is where I’m focusing my branding efforts)
• @nyviara- Second Life avatar

Already I’ve gotten a little mixed up on which one I was logged into on Twitter.com since it doesn’t say the username at the top all the pages (really wish it would), but posting to some or all of them has been made simple with the web-based Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.  Of course, there are positives and negatives associated with all the options I tried when it came to managing my Twitter existence and its goals and usage needs.

The Sprout Change Geek- Just one of my personalities…

Although the Sprout Change project I am focusing on is quite personal in nature, I decided to give it its own Twitter account separate from my (more?) personal @Linzers account.  The reason has to do with the fact that my interests vary and it became very clear when I was giving some thought to personal branding, that my multiple personalities would make it difficult to create a cohesive online existence.  In short, I don’t have one audience and trying to force the use of one outlet for multiple inputs would probably result with little followers as they wouldn’t be interested in everything I was tweeting about; only bits and pieces.  One can’t separate their tweets by categories and have people only select those categories in which they wish to view when they follow you.  While a personal hashtag system could probably be used, it doesn’t encourage people to follow you as their clients and home page will still show all and I don’t like being left in the dark on who is interested in my thoughts/actions.

In a nutshell- The Sprout Change project is quite focused on more healthy and eco-friendly living choices and if people are wanting to follow me in regards to this project, that is what they are expecting; therefore, it gets its own account.  There will be some overlap though as I’ll probably retweet (RT) at least one direction when I want to.  It makes more sense to first tweet on @SproutChange and then RT on @Linzers.

@SproutChange will be used for:

• sproutchange.com updates (e.g., new blog post)
• glee-filled discoveries while out-and-about in the world; mid-hands-on-project updates; little tidbits of info and tips
• retweets from those I follow
• a way to have conversations with those following me who are interested in my project
• listening in on current worldwide, green, collective conversation by following hashtags and the conversations taking place on other relevant twitter accounts
• aiding exposure for the project by using popular hashtags (responsibly) to allow people to find me easier
• another way for me to stay updated on people, organizations, and businesses I’d like to follow

The same thought went into the decision to create a separate account for my Second Life avatar.  SL has its own culture and universe (metaverse) with its own inhabitants and it seemed only fitting that I should make it its own account.  Of course, once again I’ll cross-tweet certain things on @Linzers when I see fit especially when it comes to showing off the results of my design efforts.  I’ve already been thinking of some SL applications for the Sprout Change project and those will of course be mentioned on that account also.  The quantity of tweets that my “first life” friends would want to hear about is definitely outweighed though and I look forward to having the accounts separate.

#sproutchange & The Use of Hashtags Versus @ Dilemma

One reason for RT’ing is to create another link point for the project.  As I was thinking about this and the personal hashtag idea earlier, it dawned on me to check to see if a relevant hashtag could be had for my purposes.  A quick search turned up the result that #sproutchange hadn’t ever been used, so I have given it its first exposure.  The use of hashtags is still a topic that I’m trying to figure out in terms of when to include them and when not to.  Afterall it can seem quite redundant with my choice of having a project-exclusive Twitter account.

Use of #sproutchange hashtag.

I’m starting to believe that I should just use it when I see fit and it feels natural and let the users take it where they may.  Afterall the goal is to promote change and if it becomes connected to any movement or relevant tweet then it’s accomplishing its goal.  It seems silly to try and keep it project-specific.  I do hope that followers will use it when they are posting a relevant tweet and they haven’t included an @ back to me.

Geotagging

Another neat feature that I can take advantage of is Twitter’s Geotagging API.  Since my project is local-based, it makes sense that the people I’d most like to reach out to are those who live around me.  Twitter’s geotagging is perfect for this as everytime I tweet something with geotagging turned on, it will show up in the “nearby” or local searches that most mobile apps have.  Unfortunately the geotagging features can’t be used on the actual Twitter.com site (although that’s where you enable it) and desktop clients don’t seem to have the ability to add location info either but Tweetdeck does show a map indicator if someone has included location info in their tweet.  I tried out Twitterrific and Tweetie for Mac also to see if maybe I’d have more luck than in my PC-realm but they too didn’t include any sort of location-based abilities when creating a tweet.

With this geotagging travesty uncovered, I’m now facing the dilemma of how to tweet.  If I want to take advantage of geotagging it looks like I’ll need to always tweet from my iPhone which is quite inconvenient.  Also, I’ll really only be reaching those who also have mobile phones that they tweet from (which is growing) as Twitter.com’s local trending is still in its infancy and my city is not supported yet.

Twitter Client & App Dilemmas: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Since I have other Twitter accounts that don’t need location information I thought I’d share my experiences with testing out different third-party apps and clients.  It’s another case of me wanting to take the best features of each and mashing them together into the perfect solution.  Unfortunately that’s not possible at the moment so I’ll list my thoughts so far regarding what I’ve tried and liked but also my suggestions for further improvement.  What I was looking for was: multiple account capabilities in terms of reading and writing tweets, the potential for managing accounts outside of Twitter as well in an effort to continue to consolidate my tools, geotagging, URL shortening, and the ability to save searches and access lists.

• Tweetdeck:  This is my favorite desktop and iPhone client to use.  It lets me manage all of my different accounts from one window including accounts outside of Twitter.  You create columns that filter out specific information you want and then you scroll horizontally through these columns when you want to review what’s going on.  For example, I created a column that shows all tweets with the #mat149 hashtag and a column that shows the @kenleyneufeld/mat149 list.  The downside is that there isn’t an ability to filter which columns show by active username so when you have three accounts you’re managing and they each have had columns setup, you’re going to be scrolling…a lot.  They introduced a little column navigator at the bottom but you still have to hover over the non-distinct column icons to see what the contents are.

• Hootsuite:  I like that it is web-based so I can access it anywhere.  This is especially great while in Second Life because I can access it from the media browser.  It too has a column format but it excels where Tweetdeck failed for me in that it keeps the columns for the different accounts separated under tabs.  I never have to see columns for other accounts and that makes me happy.  It has some downsides though.  It doesn’t use the new RT feature like Tweetdeck does (they give you the option to use the old or new) and it forces the use of the ow.ly URL shortening service while Tweetdeck lets you choose.  This is important as many people highly dislike ow.ly because it hijacks the browser’s URL bar and frames the webpage with their “social bar.”  I haven’t looked into comparing their analytic capabilities yet, but in the meantime I’ve decided to install the bit.ly extension for my browser to get around this.  You can find their Firefox and Chrome extensions on their tools page.  As I showed in a previous post you can also have the bit.ly url show in the Shareaholic listing but I would have to forgo being able to track my specifically shared links which is a downer.  Now when I find something I want to tweet about, I click on the bit.ly fish icon in my browser toolbar, hit the copy button and then paste it into my tweet on Hootsuite.  Also, you can tweet directly from the bit.ly extension but only from whatever account you’re currently logged in with so this is a feature I won’t be using.  Having a bit.ly account will also help me with my need to have to use my phone for geotagging.  I can click the bit.ly extension here on my computer, and then access their mobile site on my phone and see a list of my saved links.  From there I just copy and paste into the app I am using.

Hootsuite issues with bit.ly sidebar workaround.

• Seesmic:  The various products and services offered by Seesmic seem to be the happy medium between Tweetdeck and Hootsuite when it comes to desktop and web applications.  Seesmic Desktop is also column based but has different ways of filtering what is shown or not.  It’s not as great as the tab filters of Hootsuite but it’s certainly a step-up over Tweetdeck’s complete lack of column showing/hiding flexibility short of deleting.  While I can’t show lists and searches specific to accounts in their dropdown menus, their list and search specific pages makes this less aggravating over Tweetdeck.  I like to keep things compartmentalized and while some have no problems seeing everything at once for all their accounts, I find it distracting and confusing.  I don’t like information overload.  The downside is that the PC version only allows managing Twitter accounts and not Facebook also like the Mac version and Tweetdeck.  They also have a web-based application like Hootsuite but it only allows you to manage one account at a time.  On the other hand it lets me shorten urls with bit.ly and in terms of what I was going to use it for (in Second Life) this is a perfect alternative.
• Twitterrific: I currently use Tweetdeck as my iPhone app, but I liked this app also except for one thing- it currently doesn’t support lists it seems.  It does let me manage from more than one account but I can only post to one at a time and not simultaneously like with Tweetdeck.  It’s great for less demanding Tweeting though and more aesthetically pleasing to look at in my opinion.

Don’t Forget Twitter.com

While many may use Twitter outside of the actual website, it’s still nice to spruce up my @SproutChange page.

New Twitter Background!

As you can see, I leveraged the work I put into my images last week to help me out.  I feel it’s maybe a little too plain (especially at my large resolution) so I’ll be experimenting with some other variations in the future.  I also added three lists to the account that I can use in the future as I start doing my research related to the project.  These include:

• inspiration: people who are doing similar things and inspire me
• neighbors:  those who follow me and are also joining in on the adventure
• resources:  helpful resources online with twitter feeds that I’d to follow and would provide good retweet fodder (especially local resources)

My other two accounts also got a spring cleaning and I assigned all the people I’m following to lists (or created categories for the future in the case of @nyviara).  I still need to do custom backgrounds for my other two accounts.

No Longer Have Separation Anxiety

Until this point, I have only (badly) managed the one @Linzers account.  For some reason I had a lot of anxiety about creating different accounts for tweeting about different subjects.  While I don’t think I was completely wrong, as I’d still like to keep myself as least-fractured as possible, I think certain things do merit their own account and everyone benefits.  I can tweet freely without having to worry about follower-interest and I can always RT or even post the same tweet to all relevant accounts at one time.  So while I feel great about the break up, it’s more of a “let’s still be friends” situation (although I hope it works out better than my previous experiences with this…).

My Overall Verdict

Overall, Twitter offers many benefits especially when it comes to my project.  The positive aspect that makes it so great is that it gives you an open audience, not a closed one.  You can use hashtags to join in conversations with others from around the world you have never met and then use them in conjunction with the search tools to track what is being said about you or your organization.  It’s very easy to pass on information with the retweet feature which also turns it into a grapevine and it’s very easy to spread news fast.  Just think of the power of Twitter when the Chile earthquake hit and tsunami warnings went out.  A quick search on #hitsunami gave you all the tweets in one spot and it even updates in real time letting you see what is literally being tweeted about right this second from around the globe!  Local trending now lets you track conversations of people right in your area.  Conversations can take place with a simple @ mention in a tweet to anyone!  Nowhere can you find something like this.  It’s really quite amazing how easy and powerful Twitter is if you use it in all its capabilities.

The only downsides I can see is the character limit and the fact that there are only two privacy options.  Your profile is either all public or all private.  In my opinion, it’s these radical restrictions that actually give it its power, simplicity and allows it to be as open as it is.  It’s hard to really consider these downsides as a result.  Also, conversations aren’t nested so it can be hard to track specific responses and the order of what was said.  Some apps like Twitterrific and Tweetie offer this viewing ability when it comes to your own tweets though.  It’s unfortunate that many dismiss Twitter without giving it a try because simply writing it off as unneeded because you already have a Facebook to update your status really isn’t giving it justice.  Although you’d be limiting yourself, you wouldn’t need to write a single tweet to probably still gain some value from following others and the collective conversation taking place on the service.

What’s in a name?

Don’t get me wrong…I made a valiant, mindmap-crazed effort to come up with something great, but all my ideas were crushed under the boots of greedy domain squatters.  Since the usernames were generally completely free when it came to social networks and other locations on the Internet, I’ve decided to ponder maybe having a more creative URL until I can grab the one I really want when it expires (some within this year).  I could then just forward the old URL to the the new.  I need to research the SEO repercussions for such a thing though (if there are any).  In the end, the name I give my project is very important so I’ll be giving it some more thought.  I do know that I want my usernames to be that of the project’s name.  As I’ve been coming up with options I’ve not only checked GoDaddy.com for the URL availability but namechk (for a quick check of major sites) and knowem (for a more indepth search). [Tip: If the domain name is taken, you can click on the get more info link to see when the current owner's hold on it will expire assuming they don't renew.  There are services that you can sign up for at GoDaddy that will also grab a name for you if it becomes available or, if you don't want to wait, try and negotiate and deal and transfer with the current holder.  Of course there's fees to deal with though.]

But enough about the failures, let’s take a look at what I did manage to get done-

What am I branding?

I decided that I would brand a pet project I’ve had in mind ever since I read No Impact Man.  Essentially Colin Beavan and his family did a year-long experiment where they tried to make zero impact on the environment while living in New York.  They went to the point of living without electricity, reducing their trash, not buying anything new, and only eating locally grown foods.  It became fairly obvious to me that in order to really make changes necessary to turn our environmental situation around, there is going to need to be big changes made at a local-level.  We’ve created a culture where our food comes from across the country and the very people growing it are struggling to make ends meet, and we often have a hard time safely getting anywhere on our power.  Meanwhile, change from the top level moves at a snail’s pace and basically aims to maintain a somewhat cleaner status quo as much as possible because business is involved so that really won’t make the changes necessary either.  While changes in business practices do need to happen on  national levels (and there are organizations like Greenpeace all over that), I think the local level is where the real magic can happen and where the changes need to be made so that’s what I want to focus on.

Living in Sacramento, California, I’m in a pretty ideal spot when it comes to living more eco-friendly, especially when it comes to one of the things I want to focus on which is eating only local foods.  I’m in a great growing spot with local farmers around me.  I feel that people often want to be better when it comes to their own impact, but they don’t know how and don’t have to the time to do the research.  Sure there are a lot of internet sources talking about various topics but they aren’t localized.  They give you the general idea but you still have to figure out how to apply them where you live and every place is different.  I’d like to take on the work myself as I do my own personal experiment of making changes overtime that contribute to a greener lifestyle.  I’ll document it all and use what I learn to encourage community participation and shine a spotlight on the resources we have right here at our disposal.  I want to de-radicalize the idea of greener living while I’m at it.  I’d also like my project to serve as an example for potential projects in other cities and locations.  I’ll get more into my ideas regarding how to do all of this in the next installments of my adventures where the promoting and marketing will be discussed.

In a visual nutshell…

Here are some images of what I have been playing around with.

There are some alternate version on the  Flickr page.

So what do I have for my branding kit so far?

Well the (available) choices for my name that I have so far include:

• sprout change:  It works and that’s what I’ve chosen to go with at the moment, but it seems a little trite to me although apparently not popular enough to actually have a domain name claimed yet.  Seriously, out of ALL of the ones I tried, I would have thought for sure this would have been a taken one…who knew?  It also has a little too bit of a broad feel for me and that’s not the image I want to project right off the bat, but I think it is a good domain to have for the community end.  [sproutchange.com/.net/.org; all usernames open elsewhere (at least those I'm interested in...I've already grabbed some including the .com, Twitter, Google, Yahoo/Flickr)]
• humble sprout
• greenphyte

To be honest, I’m not really feeling it as far as the blog goes and it’s hard to describe what I’m aiming for.  I’m a “I know it when I see it” kind of person and I haven’t seen it yet.  [Since I first wrote this section of the post, humble sprout has been growing on me as the name for the personal side of the project since I've become quite fond of sprout change.]

I have my biography which is just a to-the-point compilation of my overall project objectives and description.

A project that found its humble beginnings in the backyard of Lindsey, a self-proclaimed geek/nerd/dork and neophyte to green living.  She hopes her neighbors will follow her successes and misadventures in trying to live a more healthy and eco-friendly existence in Sacramento, CA and be inspired to sprout some adventures and change of their own (with her seeds of guidance of course).

The above one seemed a little long so I made a shorter one which was tested successfully against Twitter’s 160 character profile limit.

The success and misadventures of Lindsey, a complete green newbie, as she uncovers how she and neighbors can live more healthy & eco-friendly in Sacramento, CA.

I’m not that thrilled with it as the more I read it, the more I feel like it doesn’t have enough personality.  I was thinking maybe something along the lines of below for more personality (I’m a big gamer and I do have a point-system in mind for tracking effort) but I didn’t know if it crossed the line into too corny or if the term “game” would be maybe taken the wrong way.  I’ll have to continue thinking it over.

The success and misadventures of Lindsey, a complete green newbie, as she helps herself and neighbors raise their scores in the game of living healthy & eco-friendly in Sacramento, CA.

In terms of branding, the image I project is important when it comes to my overall goal which is to help convert and convince normal people (not only the already hippy-inclined) to test out a new way of living one step at a time.  I applaud organizations like Greenpeace’s enthusiasm and standards, but their generally disruptive and in-your-face methods seem to backfire when it comes to the general public (in my opinion).  I don’t want to scare off the locals.  As I already said, I want to try and make this a popular, fresh, trendy sort-of movement and give it a calm, if-I-can-do-this-you-can-do-this normalcy.  As a result, I’m basically branding myself along with the project.  It will start off as a personal project and I hope take off and grow organically into a community-based one so I want to have all my ducks in a row and a plan to allow this to happen smoothly.  I want the branding and image to be able to transfer and be sustainable from the beginning to end-game points as much as possible.

I also have an image for my image toolkit.  This is of course a very raw Photoshop composite of an idea and in the future I’d have an a actual good picture taken with the assistance of my sister’s incredible new digital SLR but you get the idea.  I am not one for static images, and I plan on changing my image at regular intervals but it will be done with thought given to it and have a branding consistency.  Those who are new to my sites will be able to see it everywhere and those who knew it before won’t be confused but get a sense of freshness and the feeling that the project is active and very much alive and changing.  One of my ideas that I’m mulling over would let me do something similar to what we saw in the Death of the Blog Post (Smashing Magazine) occasionally.

It all needs some tweaking and I look forward to playing around with it but I feel like I have a better idea of where I’m going with this project at least.  I’m starting completely from scratch on this so if you stay tuned for updates you’ll get to come along for the entire ride!

Well not quite. I felt bad enough a couple weeks ago to pull an “archive all” move which is basically the cleaning equivalent of just shoving it to the back of the closet.  Out of sight, out of mind right?  I’m not sure when I started letting the Internet defeat me, but I do know it’s time to turn it around and start taking charge.  It’s time to declutter my Internet life.  I plan to do this in two ways:  consolidate my intake and output points and prioritize.

Google Reader & Feedly

What I mean by “points” are the different locations or tools I have that help me stay updated on a daily basis.  For example, to reduce my intake points I am going to utilize RSS more.  Rather than me having to navigate through a series of bookmarked blogs to have to determine what is or isn’t news to me, I can use an RSS to do this for me and consolidate it all into one spot- my reader.  I have actually had a Google Reader account for quite some time but haven’t really used it.  I’ve decided to stick with it since it is web-based and connected to my Google account meaning I can access it just about anywhere easily (including on my iPhone).  It also the common Google features that I’ve come to love such as starring items I’d like to keep and anything I share or like is now also shown through the new Buzz.  In turn, I can see what the people I follow also like or share.  I also discovered some features I hadn’t seen:

1.  Send To-  I’m not entirely sure why this isn’t shown by default, but when I went into my reader settings I noticed a “Send To” area.  Here I was presented with a list of other services I could easily share items to like Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, etc. and the Send To option was added to the bottom of the individual reader item area making it super easy to use and access.  Since it allows you also to add in other options that they don’t have already there, some people have shared some helpful Send To items (and here) if you would like to save as a PDF or use Instapaper, Posterous, etc.

2.  Bundles-  These are prepackaged groups of RSS feeds that can be shared.  Usually the bundles have a theme or topic such as news or sports.  If you go to the “Browse for stuff” on the lefthand side, you will be taken to the “Discover and search for feeds” page and these bundles will be located under “Browse.”  I discovered that the Staff Picks bundle is full of fun and interesting feeds I hadn’t ever heard of.  You can also bundle and share your own groups of feeds from that page or by right-clicking on one of your feed folders.  The “Discover and search for feeds” page also allows you to search for feeds by keyword, through other  people you know, or using something like Google Alerts.  There is also a Recommendations area that shows feeds based upon those you already subscribe to.  While the idea of adding more feeds to my reader seems to defeat the purpose of decluttering, I have a new secret weapon in viewing my subscribed feeds while still taking advantage of Google Reader.

That new weapon is Feedly and boy was I happy when I saw that it was Google Chrome compatible.  It takes my subscriptions (folders and all) from Google Reader and presents them in a much more aesthetically pleasing manner.  As I was going through the list of the Top 10 Windows RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators to see what was available, something became glaringly obvious to me.  When you look at the screenshots, what seems to be the common features?  Lots of text, a heavy lefthand sidebar, and those guilt-tripping numbers.  Just one look at many of the readers had me already feeling defeated and I didn’t really feel drawn-in to the content it was parading before me when all I could see was an endless list of blog titles or a neverending scroll through full posts.  Google Reader doesn’t have quite such a heavy feel to it, but I couldn’t help but feel that there was a gap between the “extended” view which shows the whole post in its entirety and the “list” view which simply shows the name of the feed’s source and the title of the individual post.

To be frank, I like pictures as they not only grab my attention but when combined with a title, generally give a better idea of what a post is about and whether it can be skipped or not. Feedly’s various views provide me with a picture along with the title and opening text effectively filling in the presentation gap of Google Reader.  If I ever did need to quickly see a list of feed items, I can also do that in just a couple clicks.  Although there is still a lefthand menu/sidebar (which is moved to the top if the window is not wide enough), it has a much quieter profile and takes a backseat to the actual content.  I also can’t forget to mention that I can still star items and share them (including with other services), but there is one issue:  I can no longer just “like” something as I can in Google Reader, as the “like” function in Feedly is connected to sharing.  This isn’t a dealbreaker by any means though.  Sharing actually helps other readers more than simply liking something which I can’t even track as far as I know.  In the end, Feedly is by far the most elegant and flexible reader option I have seen and used and although it still lists the unread numbers, they don’t seem so scary anymore.

Shareaholic

Speaking of sharing, I find many things outside of my reader that I’d also like to share and if there’s anything cluttered in my life, it is my browser toolbars.  I recently upgraded to Windows 7 from XP so I got a fresh start, but I guarantee within a few weeks a dozen +bookmarklets would have reappeared.  Now, I don’t have to worry about this though as I have the Shareaholic extension installed and it’s sitting nice and cozy next to Feedly’s icon.  My only complaint about this extension is that you can’t add your own services to the list like Google Reader’s Send To settings.  One of my favorite features of Shareaholic is actually the fact that it shows the bit.ly address at the bottom of the pop-up which you can click to copy.  I noticed that if you have more than a 21 services, this disappears in Chrome though.  My second favorite feature is the keyboard shortcuts that make it so I don’t even have to go click the extension icon to share something quickly.

Delicious

While I sync my everyday bookmarks to my Google account (you know the ones that actually sit in my toolbar), when I share articles and websites I find that I think are interesting, I’ll often want to save them and share them myself or find them later.  The best way to do this is with an online bookmarking service such as Delicious.  By tagging them not only do I help others who may want to discover my links, but I can make it so they are easy to find in the future when I’m looking for resources on certain subjects.  I can also share certain tag lists with others.  Unfortunately, there isn’t really a good Delicious extension for Chrome right now.  I can use Shareaholic to add links quickly but unlike the handy Firefox extension which opens a side panel where you can easily browse your saved bookmarks, there’s no official extension to view easily without having to navigate to the actual website.  Right now I have a third-party extension called Chromisious which opens a pop-up window that lets me search and browse my tagged bookmarks.  I also use Diigo which is another social bookmarking website that lets me also save my bookmarks to Delicious automatically.  Diigo is nice because you can highlight and annotate pages.  It unfortunately is another service that doesn’t have a complete extension and I have to go to the website to see what I have saved although I can highlight, add notes, and bookmark from anywhere.  I really hope to see more support for Google Chrome in the future from these social media services.  Zotero is the only thing keeping me from completely abandoning Firefox at this point!

Threadsy

Last but not least, Threadsy is a service that is relatively new and still in private beta.  Threadsy embodies what I mean by trying to consolidate my intake and output points.  It is a one-stop shop for keeping track of email, facebook and twitter.  It is separated into two sections: the inbound which includes incoming mail from Gmail, messages and (your) wall comments from Facebook friends, and Replies and Direct Mentions from Twitter shown all in one inbox together (you can filter also); and the unbound which includes status updates from both Facebook and Twitter, but nothing meant specifically for you.  The unbound window also lets you update your own status to both services at the same time, and when you click on a piece of mail or status update, it will show you the person’s profile which pulls their information and media from all sorts of sources around the internet such as Flickr and any other profiles they have.  Another neat thing is that it includes a chat bar at the bottom that lets you connect to to the browser-based instant messenger client Meebo.  You can also reply to anything from within Threadsy and have it appear on the appropriate website.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t incorporated all of Gmail’s features so I can’t use it as a fulltime email client but if it did, I’d be very tempted to use it!

My quest to consolidate how I consume and contribute content is always a neverending one but I think I’ve made some strides over the last couple of days.  While Threadsy may embody the spirit of my ideal situation, where I have one social media center that gives me access to all I want to keep tabs on and separates it in a way that makes sense, it’s not quite there yet.  For those who would like to give it a try, I have 10 invites to give out.  Threadsy also reminds me that although some services or tools may be “cool,” they may not be necessary.  I think sometimes it is important to take a step back and honestly evaluate if something is actually helping you be productive or perhaps just an overly-featured novelty.  I’m secretly hoping that Threadsy or something like it will grow to be a part of my personal productivity solution though.

Is Facebook the Future Hub?

With Facebook being integrated into everything recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes my social hub in the future in terms of being updated about friends’ activities in services I use also.  There would just need to be a way to filter status updates by source which I don’t think really exists at the moment although it has the information.  When you look at status messages, you can see that the update or notification was sent “via” something. Also some of my application tabs like Goodreads show the activities of Facebook friends on the outside services.  The game dashboards that I talked about in The Ever-changing Face of Facebook also have some notification numbers built in per game so I think the it’s very possible to notify users of friend updates in specific applications.  Could the change of applications taking such a focal point in that lefthand sidebar and these new notification numbers be a sign of this move to come?  What do you think will happen?

There are countless social sites that exist that one can become a part of these days but when it comes to finding those I haven’t used before, it makes for an awkward post considering my obsession with trying out betas of new tools and websites.  I’ve sometimes gone to a website and tried to sign-up only to realize that my email is already in use because at one point or another I had already taken it for a test drive.  My lack of memory can sometimes stem from the fact that these sites and tools go through some massive functionality changes and face lifts between the time they first enter beta to when they actually become popular and I hear about them again.  It is also because I will fully admit that while I love to play around with them, sometimes my time spent with them is very shallow and I try to avoid putting myself into the dilemma of “now how do I personally use this” and the even more frightening “this is really cool but I still like x and y features of [insert competitor tool/site name here].”  What is a girl to do?  Sometimes I wish I could just mash two sites together and create the ultimate solution.

There’s also the problem of a newer tool being tagged by me as “awesome” but it relies on other people I know using it and they are already entrenched in the databases of other websites serving generally the same purpose.  The good news is that one can often find ways of doing something once, and having it propagated to all these different sites like Facebook and Twitter.  TweetDeck is a good example of this which lets you simultaneously post to both.  I think it’s important to remember though, that just because it has been made easy to reach out to the users of these different sites in one click, you may not want to use the sites in the same way and if you really want to take an interest, you’re also going to have to be able to monitor responses which is another whole different beast to tackle.

So what sites would I like to try, revisit or perhaps use better than what I currently am doing now?  Well I’m glad you asked…

1. Plurk

This site is a lot like Twitter in the sense that it revolves around sharing short status updates of 140 characters or less.  It has some very unique features though like the ability to select colorful “qualifiers” which are words (verbs) that start off the “plurk” which is the equivalent of a “tweet.”  This makes it easy to identify the type of plurk when you’re panning through their equally neat horizontal-scrolling timeline where yours and your friend’s plurks appear.  Not only does the timeline give me an opportunity to use the normally neglected side-scrolling button on mouse, but it’s kind of fun to see the time relationship of your plurks with your friends.  Like Twitter, you can also share links to media and have followers but Plurk actually lets you comment on specific Plurks in a nested fashion like a blog post.  There are also some achievement-based awards to keep up the participation such as a karma score (although I’m not sure what this really affects) and earnable badges.

I know that many Second Life users like to use this and although it may never take over Twitter, I think it has its charms and potential uses if there’s an application that can benefit from how it displays the information and resulting conversation or you want to gain access to a niche community that uses it (which is my personal aim).  Some other blog posts of interest that comment on Plurk’s place within the microblogging world (although dated) include Plurk versus Twitter: They’re Not the Same, and Here’s Why and Plurk: Like Twitter, in good and bads ways.  Apparently Microsoft China found it interesting enough to even copy it.  If anyone has seen a site that has formatted their tweets in a graphic timeline like Plurk I’d be anxious to see it!

2. Tumblr

This is a “short-blog” or microblogging site that I actually signed up for when it came out but never used to any extent.  One of its advantages is how easy and simple it is to add content.  From the dashboard, you can easily add text, photos, quotes, links, chat logs, audio, and video.  You can also email your post like Posterous.  There’s somewhat of a catch though which is that you can only really include one type of media in a single post (except for text since you can always add captions).  It is limiting but that is kind of the point.  Tumblr has actually setup a page to showcase why different types of users (like companies) would like Tumblr.  In the same vein as Twitter, it also lets you follow tumblr blogs and there’s a “reblogging” feature which is like retweeting.  In fact, Twitter actually uses Tumblr for their status page.  Another nice feature is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the information automatically posted to your blog.  It can act as an aggregator of sorts.  The reason I’m interested in this is because I’m looking for simple options to post things that may be too big or inappropriate for a tweet but too short or lack enough substance to fit a “regular” blog either.  I have an idea of using Tumblr blogs for tracking the progress of different facets or just regular short progress updates of some larger effort.  Big milestone updates or summary posts based on the collected content of the smaller, “sidebar-relegated” Tumblr blogs would then appear on the main blog.  I’m hoping that made sense.

3. NING

This is a site that I also created an account on a long time ago in early 2007 and it looks like it has gone through many changes since.  It is essentially allows you to create your own social network…fast.  Members can sign up and have their own profile pages, add media like videos and pictures, participate in discussion boards, have their own blogs, form groups, etc.  My biggest pet peeve about this site is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of searching for existing networks.  The options they give you to explore are extremely limited and I’m not entirely sure why.  Although I’ve played around with creating a network and modifying it, I have not actually participated in one but that will change in a couple weeks when I do the No Impact Experiment which uses a NING network to allow those participating to communicate and share their experiences.  I think this is a great use of the site’s offerings and I look forward to giving it a try.  One of the things I’ll be focusing on is why it’d be worth it to start your own social network on NING rather than just create a group of Facebook.

4. Digg

In all the years I’ve been on the Internet, I don’t think I have ever hit a “Digg This” button.  When trying to come up with a logical reason as to why, I think it’s because I actually don’t read a lot of blogs.  Sure I get linked to about a dozen a day along with various YouTube videos but I’ve just never felt compelled to use it.  After spending time on it today, I’ve found that like StumbleUpon, it is a great place to get linked to content I would otherwise probably never see.  I should have known this earlier as I have watched the (usually hilarious) internet show DiggNation which is based on covering the top Digg sites.  To remedy this, I signed up for the “Best of Digg in your Email” mailing list and I plan to more actively contribute to the voting process.

5. Delicious

This is another site that I do have an account on and have occasionally used but have never taken full advantage of which is why I’m going to cheat a little and list it here.  It is a social bookmarking site where you can tag your saved links and share them with others.  I was essentially just using it as an online copy of my bookmarks which was useful but the site can be used for so much more like the discovery of new links that I’d be interested in.  The site’s homepage shows the top bookmarked sites which makes it somewhat like Digg, but thanks to the tagging feature, you can also search for a topic or a particular tag, subscribe to a tag and get notified when new relevant links are added, and see who else shares bookmarks with you and maybe go take a peek into their collection to see if they have similar interests which could lead to a goldmine of new resources.  I would like to start using Delicious in these ways.  One of the issues I wrestle with though is how I use it while also using Diigo, another social bookmarking site that has the added benefit of highlighting and annotating.  I can automatically send my Diigo’d links to Delicious, but the minimalist in me weeps at the thought of being involved in more than one social bookmarking site when it honestly wouldn’t hurt me or take any extra effort.  Am I the only one experiencing this aversion?

If there is any theme to this post, it is that there is almost always alternatives to every social media site or tool out there and it can often be hard to choose which ones to use and for what.  While coming up with my list of five sites I want to use in the future, I had some specific purposes or applications in mind for four out of the five choices.  I want to use them to get a better feel for how they work and how other people use them, which will also help me figure out how I can personally apply them as a part of my own personal endeavor when it comes to issues of communication, collaboration, education and entertainment.   Now the next step is to figure out- how do I possibly keep up with all these sites that are constantly pumping out content and expect my contributions as well?  And more importantly just starting out, how do I use these different social media sites together efficiently and effectively?  I already gave this some thought in my discussion of Tumblr but this is the question that I am really set out to answer over the next couple of weeks.

My personal problem with the change is that they removed the ability to filter the news feeds by application.  The news feed has always been a source of major confusion for users, especially after a previous upgrade before this one brought the “live feed” into the equation, but its saving grace was that I could click “Farmville” as a feed filter and only see the relevant news updates from my friends.  That is no more and now the news feed is cluttered with the gaming updates that even I can’t wade through.  I’d like to hide them, but I can’t without ruining my gaming experiences.  Now I know a lot of you may have just rolled your eyes at even the mentioning of “Farmville” or let out your own mini-rant at your own frustrations with constantly being asked to help rescue the pink cow that wandered onto your friend’s farm, but it doesn’t have to be this way- why can’t the gamers and non-gamers live peacefully together?  Why does Facebook have to make it so hard?

As a player of these games, I know that the only real way to enjoy them or get ahead is to have a bunch of friends that play too, so the goal is that other non-playing friends will see an update and become curious and perhaps join in the fun themselves, but it’s become very clear that many users do not like it and the players themselves want an easy way to see all their news in one spot.  I thought the new game and application dashboards would fulfill this but it turns out they don’t which is quite baffling.  Since I’m rather responsible with how I wield my gaming news updates, I have all my game friends in their own lists and using the new privacy settings, make sure my status updates are only viewable to those lists of people who care (I also only leave the status updates on my page for an hour or two and delete to avoid clutter).  Since I have friend lists, I can still use my friend list filters to filter my news but that really isn’t a substitute as I still can’t see just the specific game updates I want.

And this isn’t the only thing that has had me uttering “what are they thinking?” lately.  A glance at their developer roadmap tells me that the boxes on the wall/profile page are soon to be disappearing also.  If you have a box of handy information like my Goodreads box which shows what book I’m currently reading and my page progress, it will have to be moved to its own tab.  In my opinion, the removal of the boxes is silly and so far no reason or justification has been given as to why it is being done.  Already both users and developers are complaining about this change, but a part of me does have to wonder that if what you were showing in a box was really important and interesting, why wouldn’t people still go to a tab to get to it?  I still don’t like the proposed change though and I feel Facebook is cutting off what customization and personalization options we do have on our profiles.

The sections highlighted in pink should be of interest to all users as they change how you will be interacting with one another. The line highlighted in yellow is the change that will be taking away profile boxes. Click on the image to be taken to the roadmap and go to the discussion tabs of the changes to read concerned comments.

And that is actually one of the widely held beliefs around this change- that Facebook is trying to not become what Myspace was where too much customization led to a hot mess, but I think it’s safe to say that they’ve already thwarted anything like that, except when it comes to the games which they are now trying to make such a focal point.  If anything were to mess up and cause people annoyance, it would be these overly-social games and yet they don’t seem to make any easy way for those who want to play and those who don’t to get along.

Am I the only one that doesn’t get it?  Do you think Facebook should pay more attention to those who actually comprise their social network (aka- the users) and their responses to all these changes that have been made or are looming in the future?  Are the users the ones asking for too much?  Does Facebook have an obligation to the concerned developers whose apps are being affected by these changes?  While I may not go instantly join the numerous “I hate the new Facebook” groups, I do feel like they are damaging their relationship with their users and causing a lot of headaches with their constant changes to the navigation.  What do you think?