Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.
» via The Official Google Blog
How Communities Really Behave (via Davezilla was taken)
More messaging options
I’ve been experimenting with adding third party messaging and sharing applications to tumblr.
Disqus works well, in that it allows visitors to comment directly on individual posts on your page, rather than by reblogging it themselves - which they can’t do if they’re not tumblers.
Sometimes I’d rather see timely (and more directly personal) acknowledgement and sentiments rather than the convoluted ‘hit and miss’ dashboard notification.
To add it to your tumbler, you need to join Disqus as an administrator, set some parameters, and then copy the code into your theme’s HTML. If you’re not familiar with navigating the code, it might be a little tricky, but for anyone who’s already fooled around with customizing their theme, the instructions provided by Disqus are clear - and they work.
The option to display messages received, requires some more code ( again, settings can be adjusted) to be copied and pasted into your Info, and those messages then appear under your avatar and where your other information is displayed.
Joining Disqus as a commenting member (as opposed to a Disqus blog owner) is something I did a few months ago, and it’s a handy way to leave authenticated comments on this and other social networking sites. But you don’t need to join to be able to comment; you can simply leave your message as a ‘guest’.
Next discovery: A modified way to send and share sites.
Stay tuned :)
SU v Tumblr, a personal view
Liked best about SU (these days):
Easy sharing of sites and quick messaging.
In other words the toolbar, as a utility, is the focus of activity for me now because SU’s other features are compromised in so many ways
Reasons to retain my account:
Three years plus worth of links, reviews and jottings — plus the ability to contact people and send and receive pages.
I am still on SU because I have a history there, not because of what it offers now
Most missed:
Visual editor, dropped in V4 (made up for by Onyxstone’s fantastic SUEditor, which however limits you to Firefox, and is not supported by SU)
Drift of general change that alienated me:
Thumbings seen as more relevant than reviews
And what got my back up over a period of time:
The admin policing that became part of the culture as SU yielded to “family values” and SEOs
Biggest disappointment in recent times:
Lack of support — the “customer service” staff appear to either not know what’s going on or follow a tight script, and they often miss the point of complaints raised in the forums, or avoid addressing them
I have a personal experience of this, btw, in that a fleshy av I used for about three weeks recently made visits to my page rocket.
Some stumblers use this ploy intentionally of course but I did not, and the many men who contacted me were oblivious to the intended satire (it was a fat version of the pop star Shakira who I didn’t see as sexy!).
_______________
Now what I really love about Tumblr …
The whole set-up for bloggers encourages and fosters creativity (never mind the fact that most Tumblrs use the tools only in a very basic way)
There is support for seven different types of posting according to the material you have, you can upload files straight from your computer, and the “Theme Garden” contains an amazing array of 310 supported page designs. Most of those are customisable, and if you’re savvy enough you can even adapt them to your own needs or make your own. This excited me from the start, and still does!
And the other huge bonus for me is that there is no interference from above (see comments on SU policing, above).
________
My only frustration after 3-4 months’ use is that I sometimes find the different voices in some of the reblogging threads hard to distinguish. It is not a big deal though, and you can always look up the hyperlinked names to get a handle on people (or move on to the next item).
A large proportion of postings to Tumblr are simply mindless rebloggings and/or MySpace-type “noise” (and I’m not talking about the music), that criticism is valid; but if you dig, search and can attract people to your own pages with something you post, it becomes much more rewarding.
As a result of following trails from the search box and subscribing to particular tags, I have found more good blogs than I can keep up with and am excited to log in for a session. (I last remember feeling that way about SU a couple of years ago.)
Tumblelogs I love include hard news, original writing, special subject areas and the just plain quirky.
There is a small element of commercialism — if you search on anything that can be thought of as a commodity you’ll find it being offered for sale.
However, unless the “Ask” feature becomes problematic, there is no spam problem and that is another huge bonus.
_______________________
If you have a different point of view on either of these networks or something to say about “social media” in general, please feel free to submit it to Team Whiner.
Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search
It’s often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company’s categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.
» via ReadWriteWeb
An alternate view
I’m starting to realize that tumblr isn’t big on substance or originality, but it seems to suit the many people who want to use it a ‘re-blog-by-adding messages-and-sending-around-to-my-friends’ kind of chain letter.
Some of the tumblrs formerly known as stumblers (and the most publicly dissatisfied ones at that) are turning tumblr into another circle-jerk enclave of recycled images and regurgitated words.
I’m seeing the same alts, the same obsessions and the same lack of meaningful content. Which is fine, for those who like it quick and easy. Tumblr makes it simple to populate pages with content, but from what I’m seeing, it ‘s not providing much by way of creative entertainment on anything other than quite a superficial level.
After three months of giving tumblr a fair try, my initial enthusiasm (and I was VERY enthusiastic) has waned. I have actively explored many other tumblogs to try to find good ones to follow, but they are few and far between.
I’m not going to wax evangelical, and I’m not going to bang on about it on other forums or make any more posts about it here.
I leave the ‘broken recording’ method to others, so here’s my point.
I DO have one ;-)For stumblers who never really embraced tumblr, and for those who are still searching for an alternative to SU, I’ve found posterous to be quite a surprise package.
As a blogging platform it appears deceptively low-key, and that’s its great appeal. There’s nothing obviously flashy here, but think of anything you’d like to do with a blog - and on posterous, it already works.
You can’t send shares or messages the SU way, but you can subscribe to people, you can enable comments on your posts, you can embed virtually anything you want (widgets, videos, music ) and you can customize the themes with a little extra work.A downloadable bookmarklet makes it possible to add content from other webpages and you can even upload your posts - attachments and all - via email. Yes, email - your own, or web based.
Posterous will host multiple pics as an image gallery and allow you to have multiple other blogs and group blogs, and it will do it all efficiently.
Posterous will also export your posts to most other social networking sites. This week I’ve been creating my posts there and enabling the auto export so that it sends to my tumblr and twitter. It does that seamlessly, preserving the formatting and links.
Conversely, I experimented with importing - and all my tumblr posts were imported intact. The import / export / bookmarklet facilities do not work well with SU, just in case you want to try. Smarter tech heads than me might possibly find a way, but the way SU is coded isn’t compatible with blogging platforms, as far as I can see. Mainly because SU ISN’T about blogging and doesn’t want to be.Best of all, the four guys who run the place are approachable and responsive - and that’s a huge plus. That type of attitude is SO refreshing, and diametrically opposed to what long-suffering stumblers have had to deal with.
There are some incredibly interesting people on posterous. Writers, media people, tech people and skilled bloggers.
There are also plenty of people just putting their own stuff there to share with others. I’m not claiming to be able to create some kind of extraordinary blog, but I like having the opportunity to at least try.
After a couple of weeks there, I’ve barely scratched the surface, and I’m constantly getting sidetracked by some excellent content.I guess that’s what’s been missing for me with tumblr. Content.
Stuff to read about and think about…not rehashed angst or pretty fluff.Most of my tumblr posts will in future be originating from my posterous place
I find Lamebook horribly addictive ;=)
In fact, having been brought up on the cliche “what would the neighbours think?” (thanks, Mum), I find it down right jaw-dropping to read what some people will “put out there”.
Ellie, could you write us a theory on this particular aspect of Facebook?
There’s plenty to research at the blog!
Is it possible the writers don’t know these conversations are public?
Surely not … I think more likely they just “have no secrets” (or “standards”, as my parents would probably have said).
Haven’t seen Lamebook?
Go see, but I should warn you some of the entries are downright depressing or just plain sickening if you’re not already a hardened cynic.
And what if a visitor from outer space is reading Lamebook as a gauge of what humans are about?
I suppose he (they’re always “he”) would be more convinced than ever that we are the result of a mutation.
Ellie?
Anyone?
Social Networking .. Lets Get Real (or not)
Ahh reality .. now theres a slippery concept. Show me the person who says they can define it precisely and I’ll show you a fool. Lets have a chat about ‘reality’ and online ‘identity’ today unless you’re in a rush to be off somewhere else.
Take Facebook and Myspace. In theory they’re all about reality. You post a ‘real’ picture of yourself and ‘real’ details about your life and share them with your ‘real’ friends. In some cases thats exactly what happens but in others its exactly what *doesn’t* happen. The ‘real’ picture someone posts there may not ‘really’ be them. The ‘real’ details may be made up. The ‘real’ friends are, in many cases, total strangers. You read stories on a regular basis that confirm this. There was the teenage girl driven to suicide by a broken romance with a ‘boy’ on Facebook who in reality was the mother of a girl in her class carrying out a vendetta. There was the long-running romance a girl had with this dreamy US military guy who turned out to be another woman. A useful lesson I learned, which I’ll freely share, is this … some things that seem ‘real’ can be more unreal than others which don’t.
Tumblr (and Stumbleupon) differ from Facebook or Myspace et al. Their emphasis is on blogging (Tumblr) and content discovery/sharing (Stumbleupon) rather than ‘social-networking’. Many choose to post ‘anonymously’ here, to have a ‘non-personal’ avatar and an online presence that isn’t all about themselves. They post about ideas, issues and interests instead. Some people with a conventional ‘Facebook’ mindset find this anonymity strange or even downright suspicious but many value the differentiation from other networks. One of the main reasons I like Tumblr (and Stumbleupon) is because I am deeply uneasy about the whole idea of opening your life life up to total strangers online. Not everyone does that on other networks, of course, but millions do. Cool if thats your thing but I don’t buy into it
But why would anyone not want to share personal information about themselves, like pictures and details of their lives, some people ask ? What harm can there be in that ? Well, for a start security experts always advise us to be very careful about posting any personal details whatsoever online. Leaving a public trail of your personal identity, actions and even indiscretions online can create all kinds of problems, not only criminal but social, professional and emotional. For example, I have a friend who posts strong views about politics but works for the government in a job that prohibits any public expression of political bias. I know someone else, a teacher in the ‘bible-belt’, who would be silly to make her romantic preferences a matter of pubic record. People have lives outside of the internet.
Whether anyone chooses to live their life in public online or retain their privacy is entirely a matter of personal choice. There are pros and cons to each approach and neither would suit or be appropriate for everyone. If someone wants to post personal pictures of themselves and details of their lives online thats fine with me, as long as they understand the risks they’re running and that what they perceive as ‘reality’ often isn’t. If someone else chooses to use a non-personal avatar and pseudonym to post about ideas and issues then thats fine by me too. Its really not my place to question other peoples choices about privacy.
Because I use a cartoon avatar I often get asked ‘but what are you really like?’ and while I’m flattered by the interest I always reply politely that if anyone reads my blog they”ll know. The silly humor is me and the left-wing, bleedin’-heart-liberal, socialist, pinko, commie, agitator rants are me too. The issues I discuss are those that interest me. Its all me, for good or ill. I’m just here to relax, learn, and share some thoughts and ideas. A bit of creativity, a bit of letting off steam and a bit of fun. I enjoy that. People who have talked to me for a while and earned my trust sometimes get to know more about me than I post and that works fine. Beyond that anyones curiosity is their own problem and not mine.
Me ? Well I don’t think my way is the only way. I’m friendly within the limits of what I feel safe and comfortable with online. I try to enjoy what others offer without fretting about what they don’t offer. I try to not take things too seriously. But then what do I know ? I’m just a cartoon ..:))
Ellie
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