Category Archives: Web 2.0

I’ll admit to a bias towards technology drivers for fundamental change.

Status of my Facebook Applications

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Here’s a quick look at the Facebook applications I’ve tried on my profile, the ones I’ve kept and the ones I’ve disabled.

I removed links below the profile for Del.icio.us, Feed friend, and Where I’ve been.

Disabled

  • Word-A-Day, Zoho Online Office, – just didn’t use
  • Questions — would more likely use this on LinkedIn, not Facebook
  • Flashcards and FC Test – developer seems to be off on other things, and until there’s a search function it seems minimally useful

Remaining Applications

  • Facebook Basics
    • Friends
    • Groups
    • Ads and Pages
    • I am a Fan of (like groups for pages)
    • Mini-Feed
    • Information
    • Education
    • The Wall
  • Information I provide
    • Notes – miniblog items and imports of this information stream
    • Posted Items – links that I want to highlight
    • Flickr Badge – photos I post on Flickr rather than Facebook
    • Wordbook – import of the branch news
    • Virtual Bookshelf – not used very much
    • Where I’ve Been – not used very much
  • Information I find that might be of interest to others
    • Feed Friend RSS – primarily AAUW related RSS feeds
    • del.icio.us – primarily items tagged aauwtech
    • SlideShare (for slide shows written by others; I tend to post my own slides elsewhere)
  • Fundraising applications
    • Change.org – campaign based. Useful for linking nonprofits to a “change” to educate the change supporters about the mission and capacities of the nonprofit.
    • Changing the Present – campaigns linked to a specific nonprofit. Good for micro-payments to honor a friend or for a group to collaborate to raise a specific (usually not very large) sum. Seems well matched as a substitute for secret Santa gatherings — at least for groups that are just too serious for such frivolity as Dollar Store gifts.
    • Causes – campaigns linked to specific nonprofit. There’s no AAUW presence, and it’s not clear the volunteers are empowered to create one.
  • Social Networking applications
    • Introductions – allows me to introduce one friend to another
    • Top Groups – provides quick links to my most used groups (but has even less information about recent updates than the standard Groups application)
    • Interactive Friends Graph – works with Introductions to visualize friends who don’t yet connect

Current concerns

  • Very few apps work on pages. How to find good ones there is a challenge. In particular would like to use the notes feature, particularly if enabled to import a blog.
  • A simple training app like Flashcards would be helpful

More on Facebook pages

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In the previous post, I said

Groups offer “news”, “posted items” and “related groups” that don’t seem to have comparable features in “pages”.

Well, that’s not quite right. It seems that Facebook is moving in the direction of allowing folks to add applications to pages, not just individual profiles. In particular, the “Posted Items” application can be added and works well.

There are still major hurdles:

  • While you can browse through the applications that are appropriate for pages, any attempt to search sends you back to the apps appropriate for individual pages, so you have to click the application to see if it has the new “install this on a page” button.
  • Even if you do select to install the app on a page 3 or 4 of the ones I tried, ended up putting the new content on my profile, not on the page I was trying to edit. Maybe user error, but another savvy facebooker had the same problem, so at a minimum it’s a poor user interface. If anyone dopes this out, let me know.
  • Several Facebook-created apps are available for pages, but I did a complete sweep and didn’t see the Notes application (which would allow importing news from an external blog) or any other way to import from an RSS feed. I’ll ask the Facebook powers that be about that, but they don’t seem too sympathetic to that problem. [It’s not just “what’s in Facebook stays in Facebook” but also “if it wasn’t created in Facebook, why do you even care?”.]

Changes in the Social Networking Landscape

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My head hurts… You’d think that after 25 years of working with open source software, I’d be accustomed to change in software environments, but this Social Networking stuff is just crazy.

In the last couple of weeks, Google announced that they were getting into the game in a more serious way, Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook, and Facebook changed its model of advertising (just when I thought I understood the old one). If you even partially accept that social networks will serve some of the role provided by operating systems in the past, watching the 100 pound gorillas fight it out will be interesting.

I’m still not sure what Google’s strategy means for us chickens. Out here on the “I just want to use the stuff” edges, it’ll take some application developers to be the intermediaries before we “get” it. On the other hand, Facebook’s changes (discontinuing the relatively simple flyers and replacing them by “social ads” and “pages”) seems to make their platform even less user-friendly for the purposes of nonprofits and such.

Differences I’ve noticed between flyers and social ads –

  • Flyers could be directed to networks. Ads are directed to cities/town. For relatively amorphous areas like the Triangle in NC, this seems awkward.
  • Ads have a really restrictive editing window: c. 135 characters, no line breaks, can’t have more than one punctuation mark in a row (e.g. no Read more …) I created a couple of flyers and don’t remember it being quite so hard to craft legal copy.
  • Ads do give you some feedback on the size of the population targeted by the ad. For instance, if you select Raleigh NC, it says there are about 151,340 subscribers. If you then say you want to target those 25 and older, it says the audience size is about 33,740.
  • Be careful not to overspecify your audience. For instance, if you check all possible political views, you’ll cut out a significant portion of the audience (about 2/3 in the case of Raleigh) — those folks who didn’t list a preference or said something other than Liberal/Moderate/Conservative.

That said, I’ve just posted an ad for the Raleigh/Wake County Branch’s Interpreters Directory. I targeted those 21 and over living Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and a few smaller cities in the area. I offered $.25/click with a $5.00 max per day. If we get a volunteer/dollar it’ll be well worth it. I’ll let y’all know how it works out. [Placing an ad put a new application on my left-hand sidebar in Facebook — but I need to download the latest Flash player to actually use it. Ah, well.]

As for “pages” — I’m not sure they make much sense. A fellow member of the AAUW Facebook Strategy group checked out Facebook pages, and decided to go back to groups. Groups offer “news”, “posted items” and “related groups” that don’t seem to have comparable features in “pages”. And it just seems odd to ask folks to “become a fan” on a page rather than “join” a group. But, as I said at the outset, things change quickly and perhaps features will be added to pages (RSS feeds anyone? general access to the applications that individuals can put on their own pages?), or perhaps not.

Report back from Facebook …

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Well, this forum has been neglected in the last month while I’ve been spending time over in Facebook. Over the last month, a team of AAUW members has come together in Facebook — using both Facebook messaging and the discussion boards and Google docs they’ve produced an introduction to Facebook for AAUW members and that’s been advertised to the branch/state web managers e-mail list.

It’s been an interesting exercise, and we have plans to extend the introduction beyond its current state: applications, fundraising, etc. But, realistically, those will be goals for sometime in 2008 (perhaps coordinated with the release of information on the June 2008 student leader conference).

Do look for me on Facebook if you’ve got an interest in knowing more about my experiments there.

Lessons learned on Google Docs

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Recently, I’ve been part of a group that’s using Google docs to discuss a particular topic. While we’ve got a draft document as our deliverable, we’re still at the stage of figuring out what the outline of the document should be and drilling down in to a few fundamental questions. Essentially, we’re using Google docs as an “asynchronous chat room”. Here are a few lessons learned:

  1. Make sure everyone knows how to use the “insert comment” feature. That automatically signs, time-stamps and color codes comments. [Some folks were using the highlighter tool to color-code their comments.]
  2. Encourage folks to use a separate section of the document for “discussions” and to indent comments to show how the thread is evolving — e.g.

    Mary makes a comment on section xx

    Jane comments on Mary’s comment

    Alice replies with another comment on this same topic

    Sally starts a new thread

    Try to get people to keep separate topics separate. You can then do some quick cut and paste and/or indenting to show the “conversations”.

  3. Use the print icon to print the document with comments. At least in Firefox, print from the browser or Preview/print shows just the document, not the comments.
  4. Once you get to editing the document itself, you can also use comments and go back and “accept/reject” them, or make the edits in the document and uses the revision history to track the who and when.

If you’re doing this in a Facebook context, look at the Zoho application (like Google docs, but integrated with Facebook) or the Box application (uses Box.net) to share files of types that Facebook doesn’t allow you to upload directly. It might be easier to have the “discussions” on Facebook and leave the “document” as “just a document”.