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By Tai, January 6, 2010 11:21 pm

Beside being a Facebook user, are you a blogger? vlogger? Twitter user? Friendfeed? Tumblr?

Have you noticed that Facebook has been sucking interactions with your content from your original source into Facebook feed?

If yes, that’s how Facebook is becoming the skeleton of the Internet.

Facebook has become ubiquitous that people keep staying inside Facebook, expecting to consume information from everywhere. Facebook is doing well to satisfy this need of convenience, allowing information inflow by both implementing functions itself and providing being the platform for respective service provider to develop Facebook applications.

Results:

1. Convenience for users
2. Explorability of information from the world’s largest hub
3. Distribution of interactions from original site to other hubs, notably Facebook
4. Facebook ecology is becoming Facebook economy, centralizing human connectedness depicted by social graphs

Anything has its down side. The issues are

1. Interactions within original service (Twitter, Tumblr) are always richer in essence than two actions “Comment” and “Like” on Facebook. Twitter has retrievable favorite, retweet; Tumblr has retrievable like, reblog… If people keep using Facebook and neglect the other services, this richness is not utilized to its fullest potentials
2. As a result of (1), innovation elsewhere other than Facebook is gradually killed off
3. As to fuel destruction of their “complementors”, Facebook has been cloning interesting nice features of elegant services including Twitter, Tumblr and swallowed Friendfeed

As for me, interactions with my Tumblr items by my connections who use both Facebook and Tumblr are now done on Facebook. More “likes” on Facebook, fewer “reblogs” on Tumblr. These posts are read, liked, then dispersed down Facebook stream. They have not been recreated and passed on by being reblogged.

By becoming the main stream of information, Facebook is depressing contents and innovation.

There’s the price publishers pay to distribute information on Facebook. There’s the price other service providers pay to spread contents hosted on them onto Facebook. The price by information consumers residing on Facebook will only be realized when real casualties have been done.

Are you a publisher or a consumer? What do you think?

Addendum

Facebook gives power to the crowd, turns innovators & trend-setters into followers of the consuming herd.

Comments (0)

By Tai, August 3, 2009 9:11 pm

I don’t publicize my email and instant messaging IDs because…

• I rely on them to communicate with trusted partners
• I’m afraid of spams
• I want to maintain certain privacy

Social Media come as a rescue, adding more communication layers.

The inner layer have emails and IM IDs is to be used for trusted partners and everyday conversations

The middle layer consist of my blog and profiles (LinkedIn being public and Facebook being semi-public)

The outer layer is where I maintain the so-called “public parties”, where I redirect all initial connections there.

***

In this sense, it is sensible to claim that Twitter is the new generation of communication, at a different level from real-time chatting.

• Twitter provides a communication channel that is less prone to spams
• Twitter offers asynchronous conversation mechanism, which does not require the other party to actually be there to communicate. We can be sure that they will receive our messages later on, and the messages will stay there without getting lost like Yahoo! Messenger offline messages

***

Moreover, I used to use IM status to host various quotes and thoughts. Now with Social Media, I have many options to choose from.

Can we generalize by saying that Social Media are adding values to online communication and competing with Instant Messaging at the same time?

Comments (1)

By Tai, May 7, 2009 11:52 am

A response to Techcrunch Steve Gillmor’s controversial article Rest in Peace, RSS

Comments (4)

By Tai, November 23, 2008 12:03 am

On the occasion of Yahoo! 360 being closed in April 2009, I have some personal recommendations for alternative blogging solutions.

Where to migrate automatically copy legacy Yahoo! 360 contents to

Yahoo! 360plus Vietnam

This product is the official product for Vietnam market with Vietnamese interface.

Click here to see instructions of the utility.

Pros

• Compatibility between Yahoo!’s products
• Local events

Cons

• Community outspread: 360plus Vietnam is for Vietnamese users only

Publish to FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a Google’s property to manage contents via RSS.

This method requires certain technical experience.

Publishing using FeedBurner does not migrate your data to another SNS, but to HTML format where you can backup your contents manually.

How to do that

1. Set your 360 blog to public mode
2. Register an account at FeedBurner or login using your Google account
3. Burn your feed
   
4. Go to Publicize, select BuzzBoost
5. Fill in the form activate the BuzzBoost function
   

Considerations

1. You go where your friends are. Is Facebook where most of your friends reside now?
2. You may want to choose the platform that will be easy to backup your contents. WordPress is best to fulfill this desire

Recommendations

Before you go on with further introduction on the blogging alternatives, here are a few immediate recommendations:

1. Professional blogging: Blogger, WordPress
2. Personal blogging: Facebook
3. Blog to update family and friends: Facebook
4. Don’t really care about receiving comments (but still can receive response): Tumblr
5. Mostly copy & paste: Tumblr

Best choices today

Facebook

Facebook is world’s #1 Social Networking Site. It has a powerful Notes function with very good privacy settings

Click here to see its Notes.

Pros

• Contained within world’s #1 SNS, which means all your social graph and contents are in the same place
• Your friends are updated of your blog post
• Person tagging, which notifies the tagged persons
• Privacy option to item level

Cons

• The ’sense of blogging’ is drowned within a complex SNS
• Ads

Blogger

Blogger is a well-known blogging platform from Google.

What people usually hesitate about Blogger is that it seems to be stand-alone, i.e. no feeds.

However, few know that it has a very useful Follow function where you can get updates from other bloggers using Blogger.

Update from Official Google Blog

KhanhLNQ, Tính năng Following mới nhất của Blogger

Pros

• Professional platform with many built-in widgets
• Good SEO optimization
• You can choose your own domain
• No ads

Cons

• N/A

Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Spaces is in Live network with more than 40 millions users.

Pros

• Professional platform with many built-in widgets
• Very trendy themes
• Potential to integrate into the new Microsoft’s Live product package
• Privacy option to item level

Cons

• No permalinks
• Ads

WordPress

WordPress is a highly regarded blogging platform. WordPress is offered in two ways: a blog on WordPress.com or software package to run a self-hosted blog.

This blog is WordPress itself.

While WordPress has limited social networking features, one can use plugins or external service to achieve this goal.

For example, MyBlogLog connects readers with the author(s).

Pros

• Professional platform
• Free plugins developed by many supporters
• Free theme designed by many supporters
• Good SEO optimization
• Full control over the contents on self-hosted blog
• One’s own domain
• Privacy option to item level
• No ads

Cons

• Limited built-in social networking features

Tumblr

Tumblr is not a blogging platform, but instead a tumblelog, which is much more of a free-form log.

There are interesting features of Tumblr:

1. You can Follow other tumblrs. All posts of yours and people you follow are displayed in the Dashboard
2. You can reblog other tumblrs, which means copy exactly the content into yours
3. Privacy option to item level
4. No ads

It is much different from a regular blog in ways that:

• There is no comment function
• There is no category or tag

Then why would people want to use it?

• Just log it, no need for meticulous and time-consuming editing

Tumblelog creates a much different experience so it is incomparable to a full-pledged blogging platform. Try it and see it.

Other global sites

The services that I mention here are perfectly social network sites with blogging, photos sharing and communication channels. Explore them as you please

1. Multiply
2. Xanga
3. MySpace
4. Friendster
5. opera

Sites targeting Vietnamese market

YuMe

YuMe’s features and design remind me of Vietnam 360plus Vietnam. However, I find the themes more attractive.

The team behind YuMe is also high active and helpful.

A data migration tool from Yahoo! 360 is provided.

faceViet

faceViet is a Facebook clone built by a team based in San Francisco.

faceViet also provides the data migration tool from Yahoo! 360.

TheGioiBan

Among Facebook clones for Vietnamese, TheGioiBan is the most advanced in terms of design and features.

Until this entry is written, certain features of TheGioiBan is under construction, however.

Trivia

Technically speaking, Blogger and WordPress are purely blogging platforms with certain connecting features. Others are social network sites that provide blogging feature.

You might be interested to read my ponders over Content-centric Social Networking one year ago. One year has past and I’ve witnessed Follow feature standardized by Twitter it has spread to Blogger.

Tai Tran’s presence

While the majority of my blog content is right here on this blog, I am present on all the sites that I have mentioned.

Kindly comment if you want to connect to me via any site listed above.

What is your choice?

Comments (5)

By Tai, September 6, 2008 6:55 pm

1. 360plus started off in April 26, 2008.
2. Reaction was very weak. None, yes, none, of my 360 friends moved to 360plus. Even the non-tech users lost their confidence in Yahoo! products. When they saw the buggy 360plus, they even backed off farther.
3. Later on we learned that 360plus Vietnam was the product for Vietnam. What was meant to replace 360 is Yahoo! Universal Profile.
4. With no old friend on 360plus, I made friends with some a few new people though. However, it was neither an information goldmine nor a communication platform I was looking for. The community there was filled with spams, unthoughtful and inconsiderate bloats from younger users, despite some very nice efforts to guide the new users. I lost my patience after around 500 entries.
5. I tried to come up with around 20 suggestions for features for the 360plus team before quitting nevertheless.
6. Not until early September did they introduce a data migration tool from 360 to 360plus. What flabbergasted me was that the tool looks like it bases on public RSS feed from 360 to import to 360plus, which means the 360plus team has limited access to the 360 global database. Where is inter-department collaboration inside Yahoo!?
7. But I’m sorry it was too late I was not even trying the tool out. I have backed up entries I want to keep to my Window Live Spaces blog, manually.
8. Many of my friends on 360 have moved to Facebook.
9. Will 360plus Vietnam hit the 2 million cap that 360 did in Vietnam?

Addendum

Yahoo! shut down their “social network experiment” Mash just a few days before. Generally people agreed with this decision, Mash was too weak even for a marginal project to last.