Recently I’ve noticed the vast amount of sites collecting all sorts of information from other social networks. Three good examples are FriendFeed, SecondBrain and LifeStream.fm. There is however one thing that strikes me when I use these services and especially when I add my twitter account: Why don’t they connect the dots?
Every time I’m done adding my services I start to think: “what now”. I have no idea how to find my friends and I don’t want to use the “invite your friends services”. They hare here, I know it, I just don know exactly where! They could easily find my friends on twitter and then connect it to accounts at them who are associated to my friends twitter accounts. This way I would already have some of my social network ready when I’m done adding my services.
There could be services that do this already. Since, it shouldn’t really be any rocket science; they just haven’t gotten my attention yet.
Book Glutton is a community where you can read books with others, and comment paragraphs and discuss parts of the book with others. I do like the idea of communication; however I rarely read any books on my computer screen. When I read a book I‘m in bed, and I don’t bring my computer to bed. I just don’t. (Unless its Saturday or Sunday morning). You should still check it out.
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The other community that caught my attention was COLOURlovers.com. It’s a simple, easy community to exchange color palettes, patterns and so on. Being a horrible designer, I often stress finding the right color combinations, and finding palettes is something that takes a lot of time. This site was just simple, easy, neat and helpful.
Last night the tech crew of Facebook evidently focused partly on Norway. After a good nights sleep the chat app integrated in Facebook meet us. It’s not global news, other regions has already testet it, but new for the 4.5 million people living in Norway.
There’s nothing sensational about Facebook Chat. However there is some things that make this interesting to follow regarding market share in the “instant messaging world”.
- No need for any download. Once your’re logged into Facebook your chat is available
- The popularity of Facebook (still hot among the average user)
- No need for finding your friends twice. They are already defined through Facebook
- No new account needed (we got a cuple of hundred on the web already)
We will follow the market (and specially MSN) close in the near future.
The Norwegian communications bureau Colt Kommunikasjon referred today to an article (Norwegian only) on dagbladet.no about politicians and new media. The sum-up: New media is a good and cheap way to measure their standings, popularity and what people thinks about them. They also needs to take part in the digital conversation, something most of them don’t do today. Gordon Brown (British prime minister) however was the first European prime minister to use Twitter.
Marius Eriksen, senior advisor GCI Communique states the following:
- They [politicians] need to listen, engage and influence, in that order.
Krikkit discovered this service today called KoolWIRE, which let you convert mp3’s to wav, wav to mp3’s, Word (doc, docx), Powerpoint (ppt, pptx), Excel (xls, xlsx), Visio (vsd), MS Project (mpp), Jpeg, GIF, TIF, RTF, txt to PDF, and PDF to DOC using EMAIL!
Yes, that’s right. Just add your files as attachments and send them to the appropriate address provided by KoolWIRE.
An excellent service, and that’s not all..
You can send multiple attachment with one email, and what if your files are too big to send by email? (limitations from the email provider maybe?) Then you can upload the files directly to KoolWire, and have them shipped back to you in an email! More info on what address to send to for different conversions can be found here
As I wrote yesterday I changed the settings, of feed stream if you’d like, into 3 separate streams that were all fed into twitter.
What happened? Well, it was to darn optimal. What I hadn’t taken into consideration was that when the news sites peak in their publishing frenzy, they flood. Every once and a while during the day they just cleared my twitter home with news. Interesting news, but it just became too much.
I haven’t really done anything to it yet, since there aren’t really any followers. However, this experience turned out to be quite valuable. Try not to over-do it.
It also seems that the NRKbeta blog and their Twitter testing made almost the same experience at the coverage of a conference.
On Friday I wrote a post about being heard on the web. I also involved myself in the discussion with Twitterfeed just being spam. That post was written some days ago and I had held it back. During that time I decided to give it a go and try.
On Thursday I noticed Dagbladet.no was feeding their RSS into Twitter and how nice it looked on their Twitter account. I’m not afraid to say that I do read Dagbladet everyday, and I think they do a lot of neat stuff.
At the corporation I work we have multiple regional news sites from all over southern Norway. Not all of them publish articles every hour, and some just 2-3 times a day. Even if they are quite small, they do have a lot of interesting articles which in turn is being cited on the larger national news sites.
I set up an account for Edda Media and syndicated all the RSS feeds I could find on our sites into one Feed. This feed was again fed into Twitter by Twitterfeed. I had it running there for one day before I noticed that many articles weren’t fed to Twitter. The problem is, that twitterfeed only checks every half an hour for new articles, and especially in the morning, during lunch and afternoon most of the sites publish articles. This rush then exceeds the 5 article limit by far during those periods.
I have now set up multiple syndications with 3 feeds onto 1 and each feed is fed into Twitter by one twitterfeed each. I am quite curios to see how this might work out and if the optimalization works, or if some mechanism stops it on the way.
This experiment was none the less interesting, the whole thing took about 40 minutes to set up, and had no costs what so ever. It just runs, and it’s marvelous. Now I just have to see if someone starts to follow it. ^^
Following the last post about Wireds note on the lack of income in social networks; Alex Burmaster (Nielsen Online) states the following to BBC Click: “The slow down in social networks is being somewhat exaggerated. It’s a natural form of any growth that we see in the online eco-system.”
Burmaster is the analyst which compiled the figures showing that there has been a 5% slowdown in new UK users to Facebook and MySpace between December 2007 and January this year.
The Norwegian company Colt Kommunikasjon did a somewhat similar study which they published a week ago. It shows that 50.000 (out of 1 070 000) Norwegian Facebook users left the social network from february to march (one month!).
Today I received a mail from bMenu, which Håvard gave me a discreet tip about some months ago, telling me that they had launched in Beta. I had absolutely no clue whatsoever what this concept was about before I installed their toolbar.
What bMenu does is that they have indexed an amount of the biggest websites in Norway and the toolbar changes from site to site. To put it quite simple, they show a more standard menu for different sites in a toolbar. I’ve tried it for some minutes and it seems okay. Many websites do have trouble with their navigation and this does also give me as a user a broader picture of available services on different sites. The backbone of their application is powered by Fast. However I have not dug any in the code of the toolbar yet.
I have also tried to do some research of the company behind bMenu. The company was founded in the Norwegian register of companies on the 30th of November 2005. CEO back when it started was Bjørn Holte and Chairman of the board was Tor Andersen (CEO A-Pressen 88-89 and former Chairman in Chess). Eva Andersen was set up as a board member in the beginning. They also seem to be well funded by Alliance Venture. In May this year they included Jan-Erik Hæreid and Erling Maartman-Moe (several startups over the years (New Media Science)) to the board. They have also set up offices in New York and San Francisco.
I am pretty excited about this and I wonder what they have up their sleeves. I for sure am going to pay attention!
Just a few minutes ago 
Last night the tech crew of Facebook evidently focused partly on Norway. After a good nights sleep the chat app integrated in Facebook meet us. It’s not global news, other regions has already testet it, but new for the 4.5 million people living in Norway.
Following the last post about 