A few days ago (May 30th) I got my usual twice-monthly  Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter.  Usually I just skim and toss, not finding that much of interest.  But in this one I found not one, but three interesting links!  It sort of jolted me, in a way.. I really didn’t think Microsoft was doing anything really breakthrough in the social media space, I mean Live Spaces has been covered to death, and let’s not even bring up MSN.

Social Bookmarks

The big social app news from them is a social bookmarking service cleverly called TechNet Social Bookmarks.  Currently a preview (beta?), and confusingly referred to in the FAQ as MSDN Social Bookmarks, it seems to be very similar to del.icio.us.  Although they only support Internet Explorer explicitly, they say that other browsers will work if they support javascript.

They support bookmarking in the form of a javascript bookmarklet.  They have specific support for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has been my experience that most bookmarklets written for Firefox also work in Safari.

I am guessing that this is one of Microsoft’s first pushes to open MSDN to a wider social networking community.  How do I know?  They happen to have published an introductory video as well, linked below.

In the video, Microsoft Evangelist John Barton gives some details about this new direction and also gives two links to the Social Bookmarks application:

• technetbookmarks.com
• msdnbookmarks.com

Except for the color of the banner and the default homepage link, I’m not seeing a huge difference in these two URLs, and in fact my login works in both and my avatar appears the same.  So, I’m guessing that your private bookmarks will work in either and it’s mostly differentiated by what public bookmarks appear.

Updated Useful Microsoft Apps

Also in the newsletter were links to a couple of updated applications:

• Process Monitor 1.33 – this is a great utility for any Windows-savvy user to have in their toolkit.  It allows in-depth examination of any running processes, with a number of different sort and search options.
• Autoruns 9.2 – This has been a key tool of mine for many years.  Similar to msconfig, this will examine the registry and other places for any programs set to run on startup.  It is extremely thorough and allows you to directly disable or remove anything you might think is suspicious or useless from starting up when you log in to your PC.
  • A similar utility (but much smaller) is Mike Lin’s Startup Control Panel.  This is a real gem and I definitely recommend it.

To be honest, the first time I found Autoruns, it was not from a Microsoft site.  So I was a little surprised to see that it came out of the MSDN labs.  In my eyes, that just gives it a big dose of legitimacy and trustworthiness that I hadn’t afforded it before!

And in fact, with a little more research, I learned that Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006!  How did I miss that!

I know what you are thinking…

This is the 35th FriendFeed post I have read in the past week!

And you are absolutely correct.

I Need A Fix

FriendFeed has been a big news item for a while and especially recently as a result of Twitter downtime.  Apparently, when (to use a crude metaphor) the heroin runs out, people start glumly looking at methadone, but not with any real sense of excitement.  Sure, it takes the edge off, but it just isn’t the same.*

In any case, this post isn’t going to be comparing the two services at all.  My goal with this post is to raise some questions I had about FriendFeed when I first started using it, and what I learned to address those questions.

So, on to the questions.

Why Use FriendFeed?

This is the elephant in the room.  Why, indeed?

Ok, let me turn it around: Why use Twitter?

Because it is paradigm changing? The future of the internet?
Web 3.0?

The answer is the same: Why indeed?

So basically, I can’t answer this one for everybody.  We all have a different reason for using Twitter.   Similarly, everyone has a different reason for using FriendFeed.

From personal experience, my reasons for using both services have changed over time, and respectively my involvement in both have fluctuated.

FriendFeed Doesn’t Consolidate Similar Items

Yuvi (also known as The Stat Bot) recently wrote a post grumbling about the fact that FriendFeed will not consolidate identical links from different sources, a major issue perceived by most who use the service.

Basically, it has a clever algorithm for consolidating all the posts on the same service within a certain small window (for example if you send a bunch of tweets you might get something like below.)  But, if you bookmark the same article in 3 different services, it shows up three times in FriendFeed.

Consolidated	Not Consolidated
	shamelessly stolen from Yuvi

I have to admit, this was a cause for quite a bit of consternation for me when I started using FriendFeed as well.  But now I am not as worried about it.  Not because it isn’t a problem, but because of a handy filtering feature FriendFeed has called hide.

See, what I wasn’t taking into account originally is that other people are smart enough to see what they want to see.  In Twitter, you don’t have a choice.. you are either following someone or you aren’t.  But in FriendFeed, you have a very flexible way of only seeing what you want to:

• View everything
• Hide an entry
• Hide all x service entries that don’t have any likes or comments from a specific user
• Hide all x service entries from a specific user
• Hide all x service entries from everybody with no likes or comments
• Hide all x service entries from everybody

This means all the power is in the hands of the FriendFeed user.  I should not need to care if I use 9 different social bookmarking services, because eventually my followers will notice that I bookmark everything to all of them, and filter out all but the one (or more) that they use.

And in fact, it could actually actually hurt me!  If I consistently link up the same URL to the same 9 sites, my followers will learn that they aren’t missing anything by hiding the other services.  If, on the other hand, I share one article to del.icio.us, another to tumblr, and a third in Pownce, my followers have to follow everything, and the moment I use more than one service to promote something.. what happens?  Annoying redundancy!

I Can’t Keep Track of It All!

This does indeed take some getting used to.  The key thing to remember here is that the flow of new links and updates is not set it stone.  It’s not like listing a directory or even watching tweets float past.

In FriendFeed, any entry that has a like or comment (that isn’t hidden) jumps to the top of the feed.

So there are actually two observations you can take away from this fact:

1. You don’t have to read everything the first time. For a number of reasons, actually, which I will go into below.
2. If you have seen the same entry more than once, it’s been noticed by someone. This is actually a good thing.  With time, you will get skilled at noticing where the conversations are happening.

Where Are the Conversations Happening?

That question has a complex answer that has just gotten more complex with the advent of FriendFeed rooms. Before late last week, I could have given you some fairly simple instructions to make the most out of conversation-hunting in FriendFeed.  Well heck, let’s start there anyway.

• The default method of (hopefully) getting some enjoyment or value out of FriendFeed is to follow a bunch of people and just refresh the main (friends) tab.  You will see a combined lifestream of what your friends are doing online.  Now, just look out for the postings that have a yellow smilie face (like) or dialog bubble icon (comment) under them.
• If you want to filter by service, the easiest way to get started is wait until you see the icon for the service you want appear, and click on it.  FriendFeed will refresh, only showing you items from that service, from the people you follow.
• If you notice someone posting some very interesting things, or making some insightful comments, click on their name.  This will bring you to a filtered feed specific to this user.  You can actually click on anyone, not only people you follow.  Also, you can hover over a name to get more info about that person and if you are following them (and they you).
• If you want to see who has liked/commented on your stuff, click on the me tab at the top of the window.  That will show you everything you have posted.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a way of showing just your entries with likes or comments.
• If you want to see what you have liked or commented on, or the same for someone else, look for the discussion links in the right-hand nav bar.  Click on see both.  Alternatively, you can add the word discussion to the end of any user’s URL except for rooms.

What Are Rooms?

A very good question, and one that is still being answered.  Rooms have just been added.  Currently, I can give you what I know about them, but you will have to draw your own conclusion about their usefulness.

• Rooms can be public or private.  If a room is private, a user will have to be invited to the room in order to join it and participate.
• Rooms have their own history and conversation space.  You will not see updates from a specific room unless you join it and check the box to see the updates on your home page.
• If you click on the rooms tab you will see a combined updated feed of all the rooms you have joined.
• Rooms use the same namespace as users.  This means you will never have a room and a user with the same nickname.  Think of a nickname as a handle.. just like your login name (or handle) is unique and often different than your name, a rooms nickname is unique.  However, the room name can be anything at all, including the same name as a different room or even a user’s name.
• If you use the bookmarklet to share an item in FriendFeed, you can choose where to put the link.. either in your main feed, or a room you subscribe to.

Random Stuff

I’m going to wrap with some other useful FriendFeed tips:

• If you want to follow a friend who is not on FriendFeed, you can make an imaginary friend with links to the services you want to follow.  That way, you can share or discussion things they have found in FriendFeed.
• Every page you see on FriendFeed has its own RSS feed. If you want an RSS feed with just the stuff that Joe Blow marked as liked, pull up that view and subscribe.
• FriendFeed has its own API and already there some enterprising developers making sites that take advantage of it.  For example, FF To Go or the FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin.
• If you hide somebody’s FriendFeed entries, you will hide both links and comment-only entries.  Currently FriendFeed thinks of FriendFeed entries of all types as a single type.
• There is no way of blacklisting or blocking someone completely.  Even if you stop following someone, and hide everything they post, you will still see their comments.  If they comment on your updates, however, you can delete those.
• Your name appears as a link on every lifestream update, friendfeed post, comment or like.  Why does this matter? Read my article on FriendFeed and your personal brand over at SheGeeks.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh Read more about this book…

* I have never taken IV drugs but I have read Trainspotting. And I am sure that’s about as close to taking heroin as I want to get.

I was just reading an article from Louis Gray about how to use the very cool and capable FriendFeed bookmarklet.

That got me thinking about just how many bookmarklets I have gathered in the past couple of months, and what they all do. You can see them in the screenshot over there.

Social Media Bookmarklets

Ok, be careful clicking on these.. the bold text (in most cases) is the actual bookmarklet. Just drag them into your bookmark toolbar or a folder to use them:

• Add to Mixx
• Share on Tumblr: A custom bookmarklet to clip pictures and quotes to a Tumblr tumblelog.
• gReader Comments: A fantastic bookmarklet from Paul Arterburn that lets you create/participate in a Disqus discussion on any web URL.
• Share on Facebook
• Share on FriendFeed
• Subscribe in Google Reader via Toluu: Use this bookmarklet instead of adding feeds manually to GR and you will also get them in Toluu, which will alert your friends on the service.
• Add to S|B: This is a bookmarklet for the lifestreaming app Second Brain
• Diigolet: Brings up a cool javascript Diigo bar, handy if you are using a browser that does not have support for the Diigo addon yet, like Safari.
• Twurl this!: Drop a link into Twurl.
• Note in Reader: The latest bookmarklet for Google Reader, highlight a section of an article and then click on this. Also allows you to add a personal note.
• Clip to Evernote: Handy way to save parts of the web to Evernote, a web-based image and html storage and search utility.
• Tweetshot: A special utility for making a consistently-perfect screenshot of a Twitter tweet.
• View in Google Earth: Highlight an address or some co-ordinates and use this to bring up the location in Google Earth.
• Clip it! on s|m: A Social|Median bookmarklet, used the same way as the Mixx one.

.. and that’s just my set of social media bookmarklets. The reason I don’t have bookmarklets for certain things (like del.icio.us, Iterasi, StumbleUpon etc.) is because they primarily use browser addons. However, especially in the case of Iterasi, I would love to see a bookmarklet version.

Web Development Bookmarklets

If you are using FireFox (or, to a lesser extent Opera or IE), there is another group of bookmarklets that are really handy that you must check out. They are called web development bookmarklets and they can do magic with CSS.

I would call these essential if you do any sort of web development or are interested in CSS at all.

If you have any bookmarklets you find essential or really useful, please link them up in the comments! Especially a good Digg bookmarklet, for some reason it doesn’t seem to exist.

StumbleUpon isn’t very much like any social bookmarking site out there. And, in a way, that is good. If you are relatively new to web surfing, or even if you feel like you are going to the same 5 web sites every day, StumbleUpon is the perfect remedy.

(more…)

Every modern operating system comes with a web browser. On Windows, it is Internet Explorer. On a Mac, it’s Safari. Linux usually comes with more than one, but usually has at least Firefox. All of these (arguably) are decent web browsers and do the job of displaying web pages. Generally, you should never need to install another browser on your computer, except for maybe on Windows. There, many people are not satisfied with Internet Explorer for a number of reasons, and tend to install Firefox as their primary browser.

So, why switch to a new browser? Isn’t it possible to do everything you want to do with the one you are using, via plugins or mods? Well, perhaps. But maybe you will find a browser that works just as well as the one you are using, and provides a level of integration and convenience with services and sites you already use. Maybe that web browser is Flock.

(more…)

I found this video on YouTube when doing a Google search for (ok, I admit it) my own social bookmarking article.  Enjoy!

In fact, I just discovered that the group that did the video above has a whole bunch of useful videos, which you can find at their site, The CommonCraft Show.