Topic: Social Networking

Big Changes Underway at LinkedIn for Groups

Joe Gillespie, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 5:42 pm

LinkedIn has made several significant changes along the way. The changes that are underway now are in regard to Groups. In the past, members have been able to join as many groups as they want. I’ve found it’s a great way to reach out to people and explore areas of common interest, since the group logos generally appear on your profile. If you are logged in, when you view someone else’s profile it shows you the groups you have in common with that person.

The changes underway with groups have some positive and negative attributes. First, as a negative, LinkedIn is imposing a cap of 50 groups that any member can belong to. Changes have already started but effective 9/12/2008 if you haven’t already reduced the number of groups down to 50 LinkedIn will do it for you based on the sequence of when you originally joined various groups. While 50 may sound like a lot to some people, I was in 1,351 groups and deciding which groups to keep has been difficult, especially since I initiated and sponsored over 10 groups myself.

On the positive side groups will now have the ability within LinkedIn to support discussion groups, blogs. That means for a lot of groups you won’t need a Yahoo Group or something akin to that as a base and although the feature set may be more limited you’ll have tighter integration. Another negative is that LinkedIn could ultimately control your group since they control membership in LinkedIn. Stay tuned for updates as to how this is progressing.

If you haven't experienced what's available in terms of groups from LinkedIn, here's a way to check it out. Groups are free to join and when you perform a LinkedIn search, you can specifically search within specific groups. Support Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid by clicking the link below and Joining the Chicago 2016 LinkedIn Supporters Group:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/54811

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disruption

FriendFeed: Now I get it

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, May 21, 2008 @ 12:11 pm

I first encounted the social-data aggregation service FriendFeed back when it was in beta. I didn't get it. At the time, I wasn't generating or consuming a lot of attention data. I couldn't really understand the value of a service that sucked up all my photos, blog posts and other ephemera into a single activity stream.

Now, though, the service has matured - and I have entered the fray on a range of social networks, from Flickr to Tumblr. Suddenly, FriendFeed makes sense. It's a single URL to hand out to my friends and a central place to track the activities of those friends.

FriendFeed also has a nascent API. I've been playing with it a lot over the past several weeks, specifically the unauthenticated JavaScript API, which offers client-side develpers quick, down-and-dirty JSONP access to public feeds. Sure, I could embed my own personal FriendFeed stream into my personal homepage with a readymade widget, but it's a lot more fun to build something myself.

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Software Development

“Crowds can be wise, but they can also be destructive” – Annalee Newitz on social media censorship at Web 2.0 Expo

Brian Dillard, Thursday, April 24, 2008 @ 7:29 pm

Given my previously professed obsession with sci-fi blog io9, I had to check out the Web 2.0 Expo session hosted by its editrix, Annalee Newitz. User Generated Censorship tackled the ways in which community policing and content flagging can damage the value of social networks.

Using case studies from Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Wikipedia, Newitz explored the various ways in which user-generated content can be flagged by community members and summarily banished to the void. She harshed on services - Blogger, Flickr, Digg - with poor transparency into their processes and insufficient recourse for those flagged. She also showed the love to services - Wikipedia, YouTube - with more complex, detailed and "byzantine" rules for flagging content.

Her logic? Such complex rules force would-be community censors to get specific about why they're flagging particular items. Wikipedia, for instance, offers seven different directives for its content. To flag content for removal, users must cite the specific directives that have been violated. Lots of discussion ensues.

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Software Development

20 useful Facebook/FBJS developer resources

Brian Dillard, Thursday, January 3, 2008 @ 12:19 pm

The Facebook application platform is less than a year old, and Facebook JavaScript (FBJS) made it out of beta less than four months ago. It's therefore unsurprising that comprehensive developer resources for both are a little thin. Most of the real content comes from official Facebook properties. Still, a little digging helped me uncover some decent tutorials and a wealth of open-source wrapper libraries for Facebook's RESTful API. Interestingly, I didn't uncover any big attempts at Prototype-style FBJS toolkits - just a few scattered examples of utility classes. It seems that Facebook development experience is still enough of a competitive advantage that the experienced few aren't rushing to create helper libraries for their hapless peers.

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Software Development

FriendFeed, Jaiku and Plaxo Pulse: Networks within networks

Brian Dillard, Friday, October 19, 2007 @ 2:00 pm

I'm as sick of signing up for new social networks as anybody. I'll never get back the hour I spent establishing an Orkut profile I never used just because two hipster friends momentarily thought Orkut was cool and badgered me into submission.

That said, I'm a little dismayed by the identity-management land rush. For a couple of years now, we've been hearing about this glorious world in which we'll be able to aggregate our online identities across multiple social networks. In just the last few weeks, I've gotten invitations to beta-test three new identity aggregators (FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Jaiku). And now Facebook announces that it wants to make my data portable so I can take it with me to whatever network I want - a move unsurprisingly endorsed by Plaxo and other bit players.

Facebook's announcement is obviously a marketing move - just another step in its strategy to position itself open ecosystem rather than a closed network. But FriendFeed and its ilk are another matter. I have no doubt that the future will involve a procession of new, flavor-of-the-month social networks. But it's hard to imagine any one of these meta-networks building the ubiquity of the networks they cannibalize.

Most of these services fall into three categories: content aggregators, identity managers and reputation protectors. Content aggregators (such as FriendFeed and Profilactic) try to mege all of your "attention data" into a single stream for syndication. Identity managers (such as FindMeOn) seek to create a "master" online identity with permissioned access to all of your other identities. Reputation protectors (such as Naymz and ClaimID) help you establish and protect your online "brand."

There's a lot of overlap between the three concepts, but they all suffer from the same problems:

• They're too complicated to use: I gave FindMeOn a whirl about a year ago, but I found its system of "badges" and "digital keys" complex and annoying. It didn't help that its visual design and Ajax interface were so cluttered and quirky. FriendFeed, which is still invite-only, offers a much cleaner and more direct user experience. But its RSS mash-up strategy is far less ambitions than that of FindMeOn and its nebulous parent, Syndiclick. Regardless, none of these services really reduces the complexity of managing your online identities. If anything, they add to it, forcing you to keep one more profile up to date.
• They solve a problem most average users don't have: Tech professionals and early adopters may all have a zillion online identities, but most social-network users have at most a handful of accounts. As they discover new services, they're likely to stop using older ones. I loved Friendster as much as anybody back in 2003, but I never log on anymore because none of my friends do. Ditto MySpace circa 2005. I may have a trail of social-network accounts, but only a few are ever going to be truly active at any given time.
• They're a little too good at what they do: As earlier commentators have pointed out (here, here and here), social networks often derive much of their value from being walled off from one another. Users may want to share different data with friends, family members, colleagues and romantic prospects. Aggregating all of your identities just to re-segment them seems like too much work.

Is anybody out there actively using these services and, if so, how useful are they? As always, I'd love to hear in the comments.

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• Friendster
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Software Development