the love of change
Hey folks- over the next two days I’ll be posting dispatches from the Netroots Nation conference in Austin. The beauty about a conference for bloggers is that nobody gives you a funny look when you’re in the audience for a panel hacking away at your laptop.
I’m waiting for my first panel to start:
Well, it’s been over two months since Facebook integrated chat into its offerings. In my preview post, I said that Facebook Chat “will probably have the most significant impact on the user experience since the introduction of the News Feed” and that it would “revolutionize the social networking experience.” Harping on the real-time notification feature rolled out with Facebook Chat, I wrote:
This is but one example of how Facebook wants to turn your asynchronous social networking experience into a synchronous one. By being able to instantly notify you of changes in and updates to your social graph, they give you the feeling that you are actively engaging and interacting with your friends. Your graph is no longer a snapshot, but a moving, fluid web of connections and content. Of course, by giving you that feeling they also want to attract you to stay online longer to see more ads. Genius.
Boy, did I have it wrong.
Continue reading ‘Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless’
Hey, I’m Jarred. You may have forgotten me, but I write here sometimes! Seriously, though, sorry for my absence. Life’s been a little hectic lately — LSAT, birthday, and some other secret projects have all come between me and my blogging. Though you’ve heard it here a hundred times before, sorry for being lame.
This week, the Mozilla Foundation released a major upgrade to their increasingly popular Firefox browser. We’re big fans of Firefox because of its speed, safety, simplicity, and customizability. If you’re going to trust me on anything, trust me on this: give Firefox a try for one week. You’ll never go back to Internet Explorer again. (If you want to show Tropophilia some love, download Firefox using the button at the bottom of the left sidebar. - Ed.)
Today, I want to focus on some of the great add-ons that you can implement in Firefox. This where the true power of this browser comes into focus. Add-ons are “extensions” to Firefox, usually developed by third parties, that give you new features — sometimes eye candy, sometimes extremely useful.
For example, in the 20 seconds before beginning this paragraph, I browsed to Firefox’a recommended add-ons, read a brief snipper about URL Fixer (”URL Fixer corrects typos in URLs that you enter in the address bar. For example, if you type google.con, it will correct it to google.com”), and installed it in my browser. Boom — I just saved myself some future frustration.
Some add-ons like URL Fixer are so simple, you wonder why they’re not native to every browser. Others, however, are super-powerful and feature-rich.
Common Craft has done it again, this time with an excellent video explaining social media. Watch this video if you don’t understand social media, or if you like ice cream:
No relation between me and “Jarret.”
Since we’ve been lame again this week, I thought I’d share it here instead of in the sidebar. We’re running out of excuses, I know. GRE, LSAT, work, travel. Such is life. Bear with us!
Jealous of Taylor’s recent gig as a guest poster, I decided to accept an open call for contributors made by Sarah Perez for her excellent blog sarahintampa.com. Sarah regularly blogs for ReadWriteWeb — one of the preeminent resources for technology news and analysis on the web . Thanks to Sarah for letting me jump in!
My guest post talks about how FriendFeed is going to encounter enormous, if not deadly, pressure from the recently launched Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiatives.
Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site. In “the real world”, we have one social graph of our friends and one identity. Both are centrally located in our brain. We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph. This is how the web should, and will, work. Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains. [...] When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you. You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.
What does that have to do with FriendFeed? Well you’ll have to head to Sarah’s blog to find out!
Recent Comments