This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

Me the Writer

However, while I am there, my short term memory shuts down and my mid-term memory is impaired.  I know this about myself.  It happens whenever there are a lot of bright, shiny distracting things in my environment.  Now, if I was a stockbroker, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But as a writer, it is pretty devastating to my ability to write anything cohesive.

I’ve been reflecting on my post quality from the point where I started my blog, 4 or so months ago.  At first, quality went up, as I got more comfortable with my writing and I came up with new ideas and new subject matter.  More recently my posts have become less frequent and sometimes lacking critical information, like references to similar posts, even sometimes key observations.

For me, There is definitely a strong inverse correlation between participation on FriendFeed and post quality.  I have to internalize the information I gather and make sense of it.  When I feel it is time, it isn’t hard for me to write a great article.  But if I try too hard, or try to write an article when I am distracted by a thousand other things, my article suffers.

And then, correspondingly, I also feel depressed because the work I have done seems wasted.

Stream or Digest… or Both?

They say there are two types of people in the world, those who organize things into groups, and those who don’t.  With that advice in mind, I am proposing that there are two broad groups of people divided by their ability to process information:

• Stream: Stream folks live in the now, the breathe in the information, they put things together as they happen, they can make use of the information right away.
• Digest: Digest people love to accumulate information, ruminate on what they have learned, and then when they are ready, can push out some quality analysis and insight.

Of course, nothing is that simple.  I’m going to turn this scalar into a vector by adding a different axis: critical thinking.  I believe people’s ability to think critically is also affected by what mode they are in when they receive information.  For example, I personally am not critical when I hear new information.  It is only when I have had a chance to mull what I have learned later that the critical thinking kicks in.

Speaking of modality by the way, I do believe we all have the ability to operate in either mode, or both simultaneously if we are lucky.  But I think we all prefer one mode over another most of the time.

To further illustrate my point, I have tried my hand at one of those popular domain graphs.  See it below.

Thus, I would consider myself a digest personality, at least when I want to write and contribute what know or have learned back to the larger community.  I definitely like playing in the stream mode though, but I’m definitely no editor.  I’m better at being the historian, and occasionally make a decent pundit.

Other People

Everyone is going to see themselves in the chart above differently.  However, I can gamely make a stab at a few standout folks on FriendFeed and in Social Media at large:

• Robert Scoble: Robert is always critically evaluating anything he absorbs.  I would say he’s usually an editor, and switches to pundit to write his blog posts.
• Louis Gray: I think Louis a strong archivist in the stream, and switches to historian or pundit when writing.. though, of all the folks on FriendFeed, Louis can move into direct critical thinking at times.
• Corvida: One of the few folks I really follow outside of FriendFeed, Corvida stays a lot in stream mode and uses her archivist talent to write about new stuff, or pundit when voicing an opinion.
• Mike Fruchter: Michael seems to be in stream mode most of the time, occasionally moving up to editor as needed and writes mostly from a historian persepective.
• Duncan Riley: Duncan stays directly in the pundit zone almost all the time.
• Cyndy Aleo-Carreira: Cyndy is almost always in editor mode, trending toward pundit when she writes.
• Steve Hodson: Steven definitely spends most of his time either as a pundit or an archivist.
• Franklin Pettit: Franklin can be very quiet (at least on FriendFeed) but I know he’s gathering info so I would say he stays in digest a lot, moving up to historian for his blog posts.
• Edythe (Polly): Edythe loves a very broad variety of things on FriendFeed, making her most comfortable in stream.  She will occasionally jump to editor.
• Mitchell Tsai: Mitchell is probably the most pure archivist I’ve seen on FriendFeed.
• Shey Smith: Shey is heavy stream and editor mostly, moving to historian for his blog posts.
• Sarah Perez: Sarah is finely tuned to write in editor mode, sometimes switching to historian, but usually not dwelling in pundit too much.
• Hutch Carpenter (BHC3): Hutch seems to spend a lot of time in stream and will dive into pundit as necessary.
• Allen Stern: Allen splits his time between archivist and editor, and jumps often to pundit for posting or video.
• (Jeff)isageek: Jeff loves the stream, and either hangs out there or archivist.
• Mark Dykeman: Mark comments a lot on things he likes, making him an editor in the stream, and a pundit when writing.

Thanks

I wanted to thank NiceFishFilms (Michael Sean Wright) for writing about different perspectives on FriendFeed and giving me the seed for this blog post.   It’s great to see new faces and new blogs, and I’m definitely going to follow him!

If I didn’t list you above, I’m sorry!  I am really interested on knowing how you rate yourself (whether you are listed or not).  Keep your eye out, I am going to re-post this with the graph so you can rate yourself on FriendFeed.  Thank you!

That happens to me all the time.

But the great thing about most startups are their agility and drive to succeed.  If you take your eye off of them for a moment, when you re-visit them it seems like a whole lot of great new things happened during your absence.  Contrast this to some big, established web application companies where you are lucky to get a great new feature once a quarter or so.

Here are a few examples.  Please note:  Clicking on the logo will take you to the product blog page.

Socialthing!

Here’s an app that is really trying hard to make itself unique in an ever-growing pool of social-aggregator type apps.  When I first logged in to Socialthing!, right after SXSW Interactive this year, it was still struggling with performance issues, and services were being added and removed every few days.

In the interim, they have not been sitting still.  Performance is great.  Their interface has undergone some appearance improvements.  A couple services have been added.  You can view updates by user or by timestamp.  You can now post to several services a la Ping.fm.  You can reply to tweets from within their interface.  Here’s a big one:  They now have a public user feed page!  Here is mine.

So they aren’t focusing on supporting every service out there.  They are trying to get the big services integrated correctly.  In a nutshell, their drive to make Socialthing! your social dashboard is starting to come together.  Also, I apparently have 20 invites if anyone needs one.  Just leave a comment.

Spokeo

I wote a lengthy article covering Spokeo on SheGeeks a couple of months ago.  The core app and goal remains the same: you put in your friends’ email addresses, and Spokeo goes and finds them on social networks across the internet.

However, now it does it with a lot more style.  Their interface used to be, to be polite, a bit spartan.  The content was the focus and the interface was mostly left up to the user to figure out.

However, they have been polishing up their visuals quite a bit to the point that its now much more of a status dashboard when you login, sorting your friends by latest upates and the categories you have defined.  Support for customizable keyboard shortcuts are till there and work great.

Spokeo is apparently being positioned for HR staff to use to ‘help’ vet a new employee, at least from their home screen.

BlogRize

BlogRize is still a fairly small single-developer site that was developed to be a social media meme-tracker.  Still somewhat under-the-radar, it has nonetheless added a few new features in the past month or two.

The ability to notice if an article that is being tracked has been shared by one of the users in the database.  This used to be a manual process, where you voted an article as interesting, funny, insightful or lame.  Interesting seems to be marked automatically now, if you share an article.

I love all the memetrackers out there, but this one is fun and I’d like to see it become more public.

Shyftr

Shyftr is a new entrant in the social feed reading segment.  It got into a bit of a bruhaha because it was taking full feeds and aggregating them inside the interface, and there was some worry that if advertising was added, it would take eyes away from the originating blogs. Shyftr to their credit quickly changed to partial-text feeds and I’m still not seeing any advertising, so I think the fears may have been a bit premature.

Shyftr has been working hard on its interface look and feel as well.  It is responsive and easy to use, actually quite a pleasure to navigate.  It reminds me a bit of the interface design in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with lots of white space and clear, two or three-color icons.

I don’t think this upstart is going to kick Google Reader out of its throne anytime soon, but the social features are better integrated and its fun to use.

Others

I have my eye on a few other services that are staying under the radar but continue to improve, like  Whoisi (my entry), Noiseriver, Swurl (my site), and Aviary.

Tweetbar

First let’s look at Tweetbar. This a brand-new plugin from Mike Demers that makes use of that sadly-underutilized sidebar to give you an almost-fully-featured twitter client, in the style of TwitBin. What this plugin does right is capture the essentials of the Twitter site in a sidebar-friendly format.

The essentials are all there — tabs to follow everyone, people you follow, people who follow you, and the vaguely-entitled tab friend which shows you who you are following, and their last tweet. You can also change your refresh timeout and clear out any of the tabs.

The bad part is that’s where the good bits stop. There is no “reply” or “favorite” or “direct message” buttons anywhere, not around the user icons, nowhere. So you have to do your tweet maintenance the old-fashioned way, typing it all in the input window. Also, if someone posts a link in their tweet, Tweetbar helpfully makes it a link, but when you click the link it uses the current tab. There doesn’t seem to be a way of changing that behavior. Worse, it does not honor ctrl-clicks to open a link in a new tab! For me, that’s makes it worse than the original Twitter interface, in all honesty.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox, from Naan Studio, takes a different approach to integrating Twitter on Firefox. It places a small, unobtrusive Twitter icon in the bottom status bar. From there you can left-click on the icon to log in and get tabbed window that defaults on recent friends’ tweets. You can switch to replies you have sent and a direct message window. There doesn’t seem to be any support for viewing all tweets, and you probably wouldn’t want to — the window is only 345 pixels high, good for about 4-5 tweets at a time. Also, it is not re-sizeable, which is definitely a drawback.

Each tweet has an “arrow” button in the upper-right-hand corner, making it easy to quickly shoot off a reply to incoming tweets. Also, TwitterFox keeps a tally of how many new general and directed tweets you receive. Another nice touch is a subtle fading of tweets you have already read, which acts as a sort of “bookmark” to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Finally, if you right-click on the TwitterFox icon, you can turn off TwitterFox popups, force an update, change Twitter accounts or set your preferences. The Preferences Pane lets you add/change a password for a selected account, change your refresh time and popup timeout, and assign hot-keys to TwitterFox actions. You can also enable/disable a notification sound.

Some people will find the tiny un-resizeable window a definite showstopper. However for me, and the number of tweets that I get, it seems to work and it’s fast. I definitely like this addon more than Tweetbar.

Firefox Compatibility

A final note about compatibility. I found that TwitterFox installed on pretty much any version of Firefox I had installed, but Tweetbar definitely was limited to versions older than Firefox 3 Beta. This might not be a big deal for you, but if you live on the edge it might make a difference.