Eyes & Ears On Social Media

I’m A SocialThing!

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

FriendFeed has been getting quite a bit of coverage lately, but SocialThing! is slowly but surely creeping up on users. I finally got my beta invite and after playing around for awhile, I have a slight preference for SocialThing! (damn I love that exclamation mark)

Here’s a screenshot from my SocialThing! page (click for larger view):

I\'m A SocialThing!

What I like about it is that it brings whatever your friends are doing to you. If I wanted to, I could ignore Twitter and Facebook all day and just rely on SocialThing! to give me the updates I need. Google Reader can do the rest for blogs (which is a function FriendFeed essentially duplicates).

Two other benefits of SocialThing!:

  1. My friends don’t have to be on it - That’s why FriendFeed isn’t attractive to me at the moment (yes I know you can add them as imaginary friends, but it isn’t quite as fun)
  2. Less worry of information overload - If 5 friends save the same post on del.icio.us on FriendFeed, I see all 5. With SocialThing!, just one post.

The one advantage FriendFeed has over SocialThing! is the ability to comment and interact directly on the FriendFeed interface, like this (click for larger picture):

However whether or not you want to have two separate conversations going on at the same time (comments and FriendFeed) is something I’m struggling with personally.

I’d argue that SocialThing!’s job is to let me know what my friends are up to, then if I want to, I can head over to Facebook to comment or reply to Twitter directly from SocialThing!. Pretty cool, no?

If you’re on either/both platforms, let me know what your thoughts are. If you want an invite to SocialThing! let me know and I’ll pass on one to you if I can.

If you want to know more, there’s much more coverage of SocialThing!:

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If I Have Unlimited Choice, How Do I Decide?

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Just over a week ago I highlighted a chance to get on AssetBar as provided by Louis Gray, as well as introduce LinkRiver, picked up from the same source.

I don’t know how many people took up those invitations, but I sure did and I have to admit my reaction is kinda mixed. I liked the features of AssetBar, but not the UI (user interface). I liked LinkRiver’s functions, but found it a little hard to find friends. All in all, great products, but I wasn’t sure they would ever take the place of Google Reader. Not that it really mattered, I wasn’t looking for a replacement, just different ways of using the same RSS function on the web.

As a pretty typical Internet user, my attention span isn’t great, and I thought “Ok nice programme, doesn’t do a lot for me, I’ll try to keep it in mind.” What changed it was that creators from both applications dropped me a message at my blog to say “look out for this” or “just to clarify this”.

In other words: they were listening. I commented on this somewhere, which lead to Louis beating me to the punch (on time, but not message), that companies that listen to their users will win in the end

And that alone was enough for me to consciously set aside time to continually explore their applications, and I’m sure one day they’ll give Google Reader a run for their money.

If you’ve had similar stories, or other such applications/programmes to share, feel free to comment and share them!

By the way, I am well aware that these posts are just flying over the heads of many of my friends, but I’m going to be introducing 2 things that have totally changed my internet usage habits: RSS and del.icio.us. So if you’ve been one of them who’s been telling me “your blog is so technical now” or “why do I want to be even more connected?”. Stay tuned and read on.

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Posted in Blogs, Search, Social Networks, social media | No Comments »