Are Seven

Since I first wrote about trying to get people to use FriendFeed, I’ve been getting more than a few friends (actual, real-life friends) telling me, “I don’t get it.” And I don’t blame them. It seems alternately too simple and something that only a pile-on tech geek could love.

So let me try to make the case again in a slightly different way: a nice story. Grab your juice boxes, put your alphabet books back in their cubbies, curl up with your nap blankets and settle down for a nice reading of…Hans, stop poking the gerbil! I’ve told you a million times: It is dead. Leave it alone. Lie down quietly with the rest of the class. Okay? We all settled? Here’s the story:

“Two Guys” by A. Seven

Once upon a time there was a guy named Huckleberry but was better known to his friends as “Ted”. Ted was absolutely crazy about social media. He joined EVERYthing, and bugged his friends about it.

“Hey, friends! I’ve just joined backlesplack.com and lammylammykazatt.com! You should add me as friends and subscribe to my rss feeds on both of those!” And they would, because they’re good friends and were slightly curious about such things, but they didn’t have nearly as much time or interest as Ted, and certainly didn’t get to do it for their job like Ted did.

Then, only a few weeks later, Ted would write to his friends again and say something annoying like, “So I stopped using backlesplack.com and have switched to gozzleflack.com, which is almost identical to BackleSplack, but slightly different and MUCH better. So unsubscribe to my backlesplack.com feed and log in to the site to stop getting the spam you started getting when you signed up.”

And Ted’s friends would, but they were getting pretty fucking annoyed with it all and were just about ready to give up entirely.

Then one day, Ted wrote and said, “Hey guys! I just joined FriendFeed! You should too!” And all Ted’s friends thought, “Here we go again.” But then they realized that all FriendFeed was doing was aggregating all of Ted’s services into one place. When Ted signed up for the newest thing, they saw it on the FriendFeed page. When he stopped using a service, it just didn’t show up on the FriendFeed anymore. They could subscribe to his FriendFeed RSS feed and just get all of the various crap he subscribed to. When he added in a new service about the books he was reading or the stories he was sharing or the songs he was listening to, his friends didn’t have to do a damn thing. If he added something in that they didn’t want to see anymore, they could just hide that service from Ted’s FriendFeed, and he’d be none the wiser.

And in spite of his internet overkill, Ted had some interesting things to say and some good articles to share, and FriendFeed allowed all of his friends to leave comments on absolutely anything that came through FriendFeed; comments like “Woah!” and “Wow!” and “Hot” and “Meh.”

Ted had a friend…

…named Dynomutt. Where Dynomutt was from, the name “Dynomutt” was really common, so everyone just used his nickname: “Pete”. Pete wasn’t so into all the various internet apps. He liked Facebook and used an RSS reader, but he has better things to do with his time than try out every internet app out there. MUCH better things to do with his time. Like, say, almost anything else.

But Pete liked sharing articles with Google Reader and he used GoodReads and he enjoyed this idea of letting people know, because it created community and let his friends know some of the things he’d been reading. It caught everyone up on the smaller thing in his life. And he liked Twitter, but only wrote something on there every few days, and found the replying to other messages kind of difficult.

So not being a social media butterfly, Pete figured that FriendFeed was not for him. He only heard FriendFeed being mentioned by Ted and his other ubergeek friends, so he figured it was just for that social media elite.

But this is where Pete was all kinds of wrong. Even though Pete only used three services (Google Reader, Goodreads and Twitter), FriendFeed was perfect for him, just as much as it was for Ted, and even though he had no plans to try any other services. But he could set up a FriendFeed for those three services and forget about it. Then he could easily pipe it into his Facebook profile, where other people could see what he was reading. Plus, he found that, with FriendFeed, you could reply to Twitter messages much more easily, and that you could reply directly to older Twitter messages.

Pete and Ted talked about FriendFeed every now and then, but mostly, they talked about other stuff and let FriendFeed do the web work, both the light-lifting and the heavy stuff. Later on, Pete stole Ted’s girlfriend, and they didn’t talk much after that.

THE END.

Hm. That probably didn’t help at all. Maybe a list would have worked better. Oh, well. Everyone just do some quiet reading until the end of class.

The downside of social networks and media software is the weariness that comes with having so much. The weariness sneaks up on you. One second you’re enjoying one great new web software after another, and the next thing you know, you feel to-do list-like weight on your shoulders. Managing this weariness has become an essential skill for anyone who dives into the social media waters, to prevent what experts are calling “Fuck It All” syndrome.

Facebook is obviously a spot where you can feel “Fuck It All” syndrome without ever even having to leave the site. All those applications seem like fun for a while, and the next thing you know, you’re smothered and even typing in facebook.com into your browser starts to bring on the shivers similar to shell shock (apologies to all WWI veterans reading this for such a crass comparison).

There seems to be a definite dividing line of Facebook users who can’t keep up with it all, and it seems to have a lot to do with age. Only it doesn’t go the way you might think. I’ve found that the people on Facebook who find it most interesting and useful are the older ones; people who are much less likely to overload their profiles with every application they see, and more importantly, have a manageable number of friends.  They use it to keep in touch with the people who have moved away or who they just don’t see as often as they like.

On the other hand, people who got into Facebook in school are a lot more likely to be burned out.  They got into Facebook at a time in life when you added every single person you came in contact with to your friends.  Most of the recent college graduates I know have well over 200 friends and some have over 500.  And not only that, but they associate Facebook with the dumb fun college shit and start to sour on it as a whole once the notices of the zombie application turn from hilarious to annoying.  Meanwhile, the thirty-somethings are reveling in the ability to suddenly be back in constant contact with people they haven’t spoken to in decades.

The lesson to learn for anyone in the Facebook space (especially those new to it, Hans) is to not overdo it, and this goes for any social media.  It’s tempting to start a blog and post four times a day or join Twitter and tell everyone everything you’re doing, but doing a lot off the bat heightens the chances that it will start to annoy faster and shortens the time you’ll ever be interested in it.

Nutshell: Mint, an online financial management tool, is everything Quicken should be, and more…if you can get over the privacy concerns.

Last summer, in a fit of productivity, I decided to give Quicken a try to get my financial life in perspective, if not in full order. Like 95% (estimated) of all people who get Quicken, I used it for a few weeks, before the difficulty of keeping up with it became too much of a pain, and it sat unused in my applications. True, you could automatically import data from your financial institutions, but most of them charged a ridiculous monthly fee to do so. The only way I could get around it was to go in and tag each and every credit card transaction, and I don’t have that kind of time. No, wait…I have that kind of time; just not that kind of patience.

I was interested to see that people in the tech world were talking positively about Mint, an online version of Quicken. Like pretty much everyone else, my first reaction was somewhere along the lines of “no way in hell”. That was also my second through forty-fifth reactions as well. Plug in your usernames and passwords to all your financial institutions in one place? Seemed like the quick road to identity theft, and I prefer my identity to be my own and no one else’s. I’m selfish like that.

But my curiosity got the better of me (as it always does) and I went and took a look at Mint. Their privacy statements are comprehensive to say the least. They obviously realize that asking people to plug in their financial data is going to make people skittish, and they addressed that really well. Plus, I started to realize that, while Mint may compile the numbers, it’s really not that much of a leap from having any of your financial data available online. That is, if you’re worried about identity theft from online financial data, you shouldn’t be using online financial management at all: no online banking, no online access to your stocks or retirement plans, etc.

So I dove in.

I love it. What I immediately realized that Mint does that Quicken doesn’t is it just aggregates. It accesses your online accounts and starts storing the data from the day you sign up. Quicken, on the other hand, wants to access your entire financial history, which is why a lot of banks charge for the automatic download of data into Quicken. But I didn’t really care about that. Sure, it’d be nice to have my full history in the software, but I’m fine with just watching it from this day forward.

The interface of Mint is fantastic: smooth, clear graphics that make navigation a snap and comprehension a breeze (and, apparently, provoke the use of cheesy expressions like “snap” and “breeze”). You can create rules for the entries from your bank account so that when, say, “2 Amy’s - Restaurant” shows up as “Amy’s Nails - Hair and Nails”, you can rename it from there on out. You get a great pie chart showing your spending trends (big shock: I spend a lot of money going out to eat) and even a chart that shows your spending habits compared to other people in your city.

Mint makes money in a way that works out to be one of the biggest benefits of the software: companies pay to have your bills, credit cards and bank accounts compared to theirs so that, in a single click, you can see how you can switch services and save money. I even saw that I could save almost $600 a year by switching from one plan in Comcast to another. Something tells me that Comcast wouldn’t call me up to tell me that.

Now I just need to do something about all that money that eating out is costing me…

The internet’s become a noisy place, and while it was always the pinnacle of distraction, it’s gotten even more so. Every five minutes, there’s someone tugging at your sleeve asking you to friend them on some new software that seems exciting for five or ten minutes before you get distracted with your actual life.

Enter application-of-the-moment FriendFeed. It’s not a new or original idea, but it’s off to a perfect start and has nowhere to go but up. The concept is integration–something I’ve always been a huge proponent of with internet apps–and nothing but integration. It simply takes the public profiles of all the applications you’re using (or just trying out) and puts them in one place. You now have one place with one feed that takes in whatever you want it to, and just as importantly, can exclude those apps that you’ve stopped having any interest in. Should you get an itch to try something new, you just add it onto your FriendFeed and know that you don’t have to ask your friends to join that new one to see what you’re up to.

My footsie with FriendFeed started tentatively, but now I love it. In fact, I signed up to both iLike and Goodreads, knowing that the single point of FriendFeed not only makes it easier to manage, but I’m reminded of the services. You can embed the feed on any HTML page and in Facebook (where you can also have it display on your news feed, though I turned that off). It has the fantastic features of being able to comment on anything that a friend posts as well as post individual pages to FriendFeed, two features that Google Reader (among others) sorely needs.

But this is a service not worthwhile only for those of us who can’t control our application gluttony. It’s just as (if not more) useful for those who are only on a couple of the services available to plug into FriendFeed.

Wishlist for FriendFeed:

• The ability to turn off services by friend. So let’s say that you wanted to follow the Twitter and Shared Items of a friend, but not their Diggs. You could turn off just Diggs for that one person without affecting anything else by that friend or any of your other friends.
• Your own updates not coming through the Friends page and RSS feed. I’m the one sharing my stuff…why would I want it to come through my “Friends” RSS feed as well?
• Statistics. If FriendFeed could start reliably tracking and ranking articles being shared through their service, it would immediately turn it from a useful service to a marketing must.
• Exclusions. As with all the services it pulls in, FriendFeed is exciting for a while, until you’re overwhelmed with so many updates that it ceases being useful. FriendFeed needs the same ability to exclude certain services from certain friends if it gets too loud.
• Being bought. This is a fantastic service, but can you imagine how much more powerful it could be if it was automatically included in Google or Facebook? To be able to pull in everything into a single profile that you’re already connected with your friends through, not as separate applications or extensions, but as a feature of the product? That’s what the world’s looking for.

Of course, if you jump on the FriendFeed wagon: feed me, friend.

Nutshell: Create groups of your own to segregate out who sees different parts of your Facebook profile.

One of the most common reasons given for not joining Facebook is feeling skittish about who gets to see your all-too-personal pictures and comments. Facebook knows that this is an issue and is even moving (I’m told) towards becoming a place where people can make more professional contacts. And you don’t really want those people seeing your pictures of you obviously drunk on the couch, holding two drinks towards the camera. Not that there’s any pictures of me like that on Facebook.

Anyway, the purportedly-good people at Facebook are constantly tweaking their privacy settings, and just this week pushed out a useful feature to control who sees what. So if, say, your boss or parents were on your friends list, you can now put them in a list that will limit what they see, while continuing to let the rest of your friends see all the sordid details.

To do this: Read the rest of this entry »

I began the day thinking about passwords. And believe it or not, I’m keeping this story short.

Lately, I’ve been a fan of features like the “friend finder” in Facebook: applications within social websites that allow you to add friends by putting in the user and password of your email account and automatically adding in all the people it finds by their email. Once I got over the jitters about putting in my info, I got to love it. It lets you kick off any site use quickly and easily.  I figured that as long as I kept on sites I knew were reputable, I’d be okay.

Then I read this article this morning on Techcrunch about a useful external application that was actually a scam.  Purporting to archive your email messages from gmail on your harddrive, it actually sent your username and password to the guy who built it.  Pretty smart of this guy, but pretty scary for the rest of us.

It’s one of these issues that pops up every now and then, reminding us that the web isn’t nearly as safe as we think.  Sure, we never forget about viruses and spyware, but we still get complacent.  Then again, where does it stop?  The web is damn useful (you heard it here first), but it’s stories like the one today on Techcrunch, or ones where people get their usernames and passwords stolen from them and then end up getting domains stolen or having their email addresses used for scams that make me think that we’re still a long way off from total security on the web.

Coming soon: my write-up of online financial service Mint, which has you put in the username and password of every financial service you use.  Incredibly useful or idiotic move?  A little of each!

A lot of the people that I talk to have plenty of ideas for the web. We all sit around and talk about it, comparing ideas for brilliant web services and sites. For all of us, our ideas usually come from the experiences of our lives, naturally.

But for me, while I would love to implement one of my ideas and make a ton of money, I mostly just want someone else to make my features reality, for my convenience, which I think we can all agree is priority one. This happened today, with Google’s announcement that Analytics will now have a benchmarking feature, where other Analytics users can choose to share their numbers anonymously, creating a way for us all to compare our numbers to the numbers of similar sites. I’ve wanted this for a long time, and while it takes one of my Great Ideas off of the table, I’m glad to have it.

The second announcement from Google is small, but fun. In Google Reader, you can apparently now “easily check” the number of subscribers that a feed has by looking in the right-hand corner. The number of subscribers (which isn’t the total number; only the number subscribed through Google services) has been available for a while, but you have to search in the Add Subscription box, so this is a nice addition.

Homer: You can’t enjoy money when you’re dead, so why not have fun now?
Marge: Don’t you think you’ve had enough fun? Last year you spent five thousand dollars on donuts, two thousand on scalp massages, five hundred on body glitter.
Homer: Hey, I earned that money! While you lounge around here doing laundry and putting up drywall, I’m at work busting my hump.
Marge: Oh, please! From what I hear, you waltz in there at ten thirty, take a nap on the toilet, then sit around “Googling” your own name until lunch!
Homer: Who told you that?!
Marge: You shouted it while we were making love!

While I can’t recommend spending the whole afternoon Googling your own name, Homer’s on to something. I was reminded by this great article in Lifehacker that you really should meet your online persona, because you may not really know your online persona like you think you do.

At the very least, Google your own name in quotes (so that you get your name exactly) and just go through the first 4-5 pages of search results. Are you satisfied with what you’re finding? Does it represent you? This is what people see about you. “People” could be as benign as an old friend who wants to see what you’re up to, but it could be a future employer or coworker, or–worst of all–an ex.

Just a friendly reminder and/or tip that there are steps that you can and should take to control what’s ending up in the world, and to make sure that what’s out there is what you want out there.

Update: Welcome to folks coming from DC blogs! I try to write about tech stuff (”Tech for the Technophobic” as it’s unofficially titled) a few times a week, giving tips from what I learn. If you’re interested, there’s piping hot RSS feeds, one specifically for tech. There’s also music and everything else. Don’t be a stranger, stranger.

Nutshell: Using the rating function in iTunes may seem excessive and pointless, but it can be extremely helpful in organizing your music and optimizing your listening.

When I first got iTunes once upon a time, I turned up my nose at the ability to rate things one-to-five stars. I’m only putting my music in there, I figured. I like it all, so why rank them?

I first started rating songs when I figured that I could make mixes that were immediate decade best-ofs, and it grew from there. I started finding that rating songs in iTunes was a fantastic way to:

• Mark songs that I liked as I stumbled across them while shuffling. When I’m shuffling my “Never Played” playlist (play count=0) or my 2007 Radio playlist, there’s songs that I come across that I like, so I mark it with three stars, and then when I return to that album or artist later, wondering “what was that one song I liked?”, I’m immediately reminded.
• Easily keep my iPod healthy. When I ran out of room on my iPod, I knew that I wanted to keep music on there that was recently added or never played, but what else? Simple: everything rated three stars and higher.
• Have a constant go-to playlist. I always had my five-star and four-star playlists, but when I made one that had everything three-and-up, I found that ultimate decider. When I can’t decide what I’m in the mood for, I just put that on shuffle and let it go, and I’m treated not only to my favorites, but songs that I don’t know very well but had tagged with three songs.

I can understand why someone might object to rating. But I highly recommend it. In my rating system, much of my library remains unrated, but the stars start for these songs:

• Three stars for songs to mark songs that I like on first listen as well as songs that I want on my iPod, but don’t necessarily love. This last part is especially for those songs that bring out nostalgia in me, but aren’t exactly good. Lots of early ’80’s stuff there.
• Four stars for, “Oh, this is such a great song.”
• Five stars for, “I will not be able to do anything at all until this song has finished playing.”

Do you rate your library? What system do you use? If you don’t, is it a contentious objection or just nothing you’ve ever really considered?

Just a few unsorted broadcasts on the tech tip…

First off is that, now that the areseven.com feeds are working, those of you who are subscribed to both the Are Seven feed and the Tech feed are going to be getting tech posts twice: one in each feed. If you’re an Are Seven glutton and like it this way, you’re welcome to keep it that way. Just sayin’ you don’t need to, so you can unsub from the Tech feed and still get all of the tech posts with no problem. Those of you who want only the tech posts don’t need to do nothin’.

Second is a thought: while this site remains ad free, I thought I’d point something out to you. You know those “sponsored ads” on Google searches? They’re actually worth clicking on. They show up based on your search terms and Google does a great job at making sure that they’re going to the sites and services they say they are. It’s natural to brush them off as just advertising, but you can really find some good stuff that way. Let your eyes wander right on your search results and you just might find some good stuff.

Where you really should be clicking is on people’s blogs. Bloggers and site owners make money off of those ads, and the easiest way to financially tip the people who give the content that so entertains you is to take a look at these ads when you visit the site and click on the ones you see. As always, click sincerely. Don’t just click an ad that doesn’t interest you at all. But if something looks even mildly interesting, go ahead and click, knowing that it’s essentially a small donation to your favorite sites that costs you nothing.

Finally, there’s something you may not know about email newsletters you get.  You know how email programs will now ask you if you want to load images?  The reason that they do this is that the only way that the sender of an email can know that you opened an email is if the images are loaded.  Even “plain text” messages have a tiny image in them that sends open information.

The reason that the email programs have made it standard to not load images is obviously because of spammers.  But there are a lot of legitimate companies out there that gauge interest in the content of their newsletters by the open rate, and if you’re not loading the images, your opens aren’t being counted as a vote in favor of that newsletter.  So the next time you get a newsletter from an online magazine or nonprofit you support, load those images on up.

You’re done now.  Great job.  Go ahead and take the rest of the day off.