Profile aggregators

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At an STC meeting earlier in the year, I heard a presentation that mentioned Naymz. It sounded like too much work to keep yet another professional profile up to date, particularly since there was a “popularity contest” or “feeding the virtual pet” aspect to the whole thing, so I passed when a couple of other folks at that meeting invited me to join that network.

More recently, it appears that there are networks popping up that will pre-populate your profile with info gleaned from the web. You then may be stuck between a rock and a hard place: join to make sure the site’s picture of you is accurate, or ignore it and hope that it will either fade away or that the AI engine behind it will pick a reasonable representation of you. If you’ve been careful about maintaining a public web presence, and if your contacts are intelligent in filtering info they find on such sites, there’s probably not much incentive to put effort into correcting/enhancing these profiles.

Two that have popped up recently:

  • Zoominfo.com – I don’t even remember how I tripped over this. My profile’s relatively rich. In a search for my college roommate, I found she was quoted in USA Today earlier in the year. Who knew?
  • Spock.com – there has been a fair amount of traffic about this on the ISF mailing list (see, e.g. zenofnptech). I must admit I was really surprised to get a “trust invite” from Cyber-Yenta Deborah Elizabeth Finn who barely knows me and who was quite clear about her policy of “don’t expect me to accept your LinkedIn invite unless I really can vouch for your work.” It turns out that Spock is one of those sites that’s fairly promiscuous about using any address info you provide and sending invites to others on the site even without your permission will use information, including contacts’ e-mail addresses in ways you don’t expect. The community seems to be hoping it dies a quick death. If someone as smart and ‘net savvy as Deborah can be spoofed here, ordinary mortals need to beware.

But since we’ve been arguing for Open APIs and all data on the ‘net is subject to remixing, these sites, for good are ill, are here to stay.

Be careful out there…

Clarifying edits added in response to comment.

Site has been updated

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This site has been updated to WordPress 2.3.1. Aside from the new theme, the updates include

  • The site now supports tags (see the sidebar and the meta information on each post).
  • The “Join the Conversation” links (register, login, rss, comments rss) have moved to a navigation bar at the top of each page.
  • There’s a new credits page that lists the plugins being used.

If you notice anything that’s not working right, please let me know.

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.

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
    • 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; has changed in the last month to put info in my mini-feed
    • 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
    • Entourage – panel of friends’ pictures, can be easier to find them there
    • Circle of friends – public or private “circles”. Allows for messaging groups of friends in an ad hoc way (i.e without setting up a group). Compare address lists you keep in your address book vs. e-mail lists hosted on the server.
    • Bumper sticker – allows for sharing “badges.” The app, though, has some serious problems and is too flakey for a general recommendation.
    • My links – links to me on other social networking sites

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

Disabled

  • Virtual bookshelf — may reactivate once I have time to read
  • 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

Web conferencing redux

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I’ve got a meeting scheduled for next week where I’ll need to give a tour of of Facebook features. I thought we’d use Yugma, and I was looking forward to using that as a test platform for the tour. Yugma’s “10 connections for free” make it an attractive web conferencing system for AAUW applications…

But, Yugma just doesn’t seem to work well. I had trouble getting the client window to respond at all (seemed to depend on whether I started the session “now” or “later” and when I had the guest connection join the session). When I brought up the annotation tool, I couldn’t find a way back to the main window. I needed to use Task Manager to kill the session when things went squirrelly. Not a pretty picture to think about having members use software like that.

On a lark, I did a Google for “yugma worst” and got review that was relatively positive, but it did point me to Glance.net. Now this is interesting — an excellent example of “less is more”.

Glance is “a simple, quick desktop sharing tool for hosting live web demos, sales presentations and more.” It supports up to 100 connections.
It’s a quick download of the software (Windows or Mac) for the host. During the registration process, you choose a URL (e.g. yourname.glance.net). The download puts an icon on the taskbar (on Windows — I haven’t checked it on a Mac).

Starting a session means clicking the icon and getting a session id. [There’s an indication that you can choose the session id, but that didn’t seem to work for me on the free trial.]

To join a session, a guest simply goes to the host’s selected URL and enters the session id. No muss, no fuss.

What’s left out (compared to other web conferencing systems):

  1. A list of participants. Guests don’t have to give any info, and the host doesn’t see any info.
  2. The annotation toolbar.
  3. A way to display just one window/application instead of the entire screen.
  4. A chat or text window that can be used for notes. Since the entire screen is being webcast, it would be difficult for the host to take notes in another window. Will have to think about this one.
  5. There’s no feedback on the screen resolution of the guests. Guests can zoom in if their screen is much smaller than the presenter’s — and then scroll to see different portions of the screen. It appears the host needs to fine tune the window that’s being screencast to be the right size.
  6. No integrated phone conferencing. They just point folks to freeconference.com (and see #1).
  7. A way to transfer control to another’s desktop, not just give a guest mouse/keyboard control of the host’s desktop (with the personal edition). This may be another sticking point.
  8. Session recording. This always seems like a good idea in a training application — but is it really the best way to produce an online resource?
  9. No way to transfer control to a particular guest — everyone or no one has the option to take control of the mouse keyboard.

Pricing:

  • $49.95/month for individuals and small companies. Host one session at a time. All hosts install the client and register it to the one account.
  • $119/month for larger companies. This allows for one session at a time, but, unlike the personal edition, there can be multiple ids registered with the account. Additional concurrent sessions are $99/month — so it makes sense to purchase personal editions for the heavy users. If there’s a need to see a guest’s desktop that can be implemented by giving them a temporary account on the corporate plan.
  • There are discounts for purchasing an annual plan.

Random comments:

  • The window scrolling seemed pretty jerky.
  • There were times when the the connections went flaky.

Both of those might be attributed to using two machines on one home network for the test — but maybe not. I’ve used the same two machines with other systems and haven’t noticed delays like the ones I saw with Glance.

Overall, Glance looks like a reasonable solution. Will probably use the free trial for next week’s test rather than continue to fight with Yugma. [Though Yugma does seem to be working better after a reinstall and reboot.]
I should probably check Michelle Murrain’s references again, and double check to see if there’s an Idealware note or more recent info at TechSoup. Anyone with other suggestions?