facebook Archives - SheenOnline

February 9, 2011March 22, 2011

my6sense Still Makes Sense

Last year I talked about why services like my6sense make sense. Nothing has really changed except that my6sense has gotten bigger and badder than before. I still use the Android app on a regular basis to keep up with what’s going on. It automatically figures out what I want to read based on my behavior using a technology called Digital Intuition.

When you create an account with my6sense through Twitter or one of our mobile apps, we start building your personal preference model, your ‘Digital Intuition’. Constructing an accurate graph of your preferences & interests takes time, and your ‘Digital Intuition’ will only start growing after a few interactions with your content. So please be patient – it may take a while to kick in, but we assure you that once it does, the results will be jaw-dropping.

With my6sense, I see a lot of content about Android, social media, and technology with a smattering of random postings from people I find interesting. The Android app incorporates a number of RSS feeds and sites as well as Twitter and Facebook.

Of course, when Louis Gray hit me up to try out the my6sense Chrome extension for Twitter beta, I was pretty excited. Twitter is probably the most difficult service to keep up with because I don’t have enough attention to pay to all the people I actually find interesting.

I’m currently following over 3,000 people and my6sense uses their magic Digital Intuition algorithm to dig through them all and pick out the updates I would most like to see. Rather than creating yet another Twitter List to help me keep up, I just let my6sense do the hard work.

There are currently apps for Android, iPhone, Twitter.com in Chrome, and a Firefox add-on on the way. One thing I do wonder is if the my6sense team could implement their Twitter interface as a Twitter List. This way, any Twitter user on just about any Twitter client would be supported.

In any case, the web should be about what you want to see. With many of us interacting in so many different places and sharing so much of ourselves, it’s about time a service started using that information to do something more interesting and useful than serve ads.

September 23, 2010

How To Update All Your Social Networks Using Google Voice Actions #teamandroid

A while back, Lifehacker reminded us that Google Voice Actions can be used with any web service that supports SMS or Email. You can easily send SMS and Email messages by speaking into your phone, so any service that lets you interact via SMS and/or Email is fair game. Keep in mind that most of this also applies to Vlingo or any other voice command software.

Simple Scenario

One primary example would be Twitter. By activating your mobile phone on the Twitter home page, you can send a tweet by texting it to 40404. Combined with Google Voice Actions, you would be able to say something like “SMS Twitter, That Rahsheen guy is some kind of awesome” and GV handles the rest. Of course, this assumes you have a contact in your address book named “Twitter” with a phone number of 40404.

Kicking It Up 10 Notches

If you want to be a Social Media Mogul, you will immediately recognize that this just isn’t powerful enough. There are other worlds than Twitter and you need to be able to update them all on the go using GV. Most of you already know where I’m going with this: Ping.fm. Both a blessing and a curse, Ping.fm is a powerful tool for updating all of your social networks simultaneously.

Once logged into Ping.fm (you do have an account, right?), navigate to ping.fm/sms and save the number in your contacts as something simple like “Ping.” You want to make sure you pick a name that will be easily recognized when you say it and “Ping” works pretty well. While you’re at it, go to ping.fm/email and add your unique posting address to this contact as well.

Now, you can long-press your search button, say what you want, and broadcast to everyone everywhere. As always, feel free to leave a comment here or hit me up on Twitter (@rahsheen) if you have questions, comments, or concerns.

Simple Examples:

“SMS Ping, I just ate a mango”
“Send Email to Ping, Flipmode is the greatest”

Lifehacker Post: Use Google Voice Actions with Any Web Service that Supports SMS or Email

August 14, 2010

Getting Started with TweetDeck for Android

TweetDeck for Android is awesome so far. Not only is it extremely nice to look at, but it carries much of the burden of your social media life. It covers Twitter (and multiple Twitter accounts), Facebook, Google Buzz, and Foursquare. It’s one thing to say that an application covers multiple services and completely another when that application does a good job of it. TweetDeck, even in it’s beta state, handles everything surprisingly well.

Many things that you will need to get set up are not immediately clear. One major stumbling block for me was the lack of a Settings menu. It looks like TweetDeck opts to integrate the settings into the user interface.

Adding Accounts

If you already have a TweetDeck account, sign in with that and it pulls in all your other accounts.

If not, go ahead and add your Twitter account. It doesn’t matter if you hate Twitter or don’t even want to use Twitter, you can’t activate TweetDeck for Android without a Twitter account. Not sure why this is.

Once you’re done adding accounts… Uh… Hit Done.

One thing I didn’t like about the setup process is that I had to specify usernames and passwords for Foursquare and Twitter. Facebook and Buzz pop-up login windows to those sites and do seem to do some type of OAuth action.

Basics of Columns

This section is of utmost importance. Your columns are your primary method of interaction and tie into your notifications settings. Initially, you have 3 columns:

Home – This is everything from every service you’ve plugged into TweetDeck. The whole shebang.
Me – These are the posts from all your services that have something to do with you: Twitter @mentions, comments on Facebook items, etc.
Direct Messages – These are private messages to you from Twitter. If private messages from other services are supported, I haven’t seen any.

Each column has the relevant messages from all of your services. Instead of giving each service its own column, they’re blended together. This is a blessing and a curse. If you follow a decent number of people on Twitter, your Home stream will pretty much be useless because Twitter will bury everything else.

Hopefully, an option to create separate columns for each service is coming.

Managing Columns

Until then, you can simply use Twitter lists. I was already using Twitter lists to keep an eye on a few interesting folks, but didn’t know how to manage lists in TweetDeck for Android until @jbrotherlove gave me the heads up and directed me to the tutorial video embedded below.

If you look in Manage Columns, you won’t see an option to add anything. The only actions you can do here are to delete columns.

To add a column, you need to first find/create a column you want to add. This could be based on a search, someone’s Twitter stream, or a list. For instance, to add a column for one of my own lists, I did the following:

Opened a tweet with my name in it, then clicked my name. You could also just click the Contacts button (looks like a grid) and search for your Twitter username.
Scroll down to the bottom of your profile and you’ll see the lists you’ve created. Pick one.
You should see a huge button across the bottom of the screen that says “Add Column.”

Managing Notifications

TweetDeck for Android has the most basic of notifications systems. Each column will notify you when it has new tweets in it. This drove me crazy at first because I don’t need notifications on my Home feed. If you go back to Manage Columns from the main menu, you will see that each column you’ve created has an On/Off button. This button toggles notifications.

Are you using TweetDeck for Android? Sign up for the beta and share your thoughts in the comments.

July 20, 2010

Chum.ly Just Keeps Getting Better: Redesign and Feature Updates

The Chum.ly team is staying on the grind and actively responding to feedback from their growing community. This has resulted in a complete redesign of the user interface, implementation of OAuth, and an upcoming iPhone application. I have to say, the UI update is a big difference from what they were working with a couple of weeks ago and OAuth makes it that much easier to jump in and see what Chum.ly can do.

Here is Chum.ly before the redesign:

And here is the new interface:

The new interface is a lot easier on the eyes, but also makes more efficient use of space and is a little more intuitive for new users.

OAuth means you don’t have to give up your username and password for Buzz, Twitter, or Facebook. Just click a button and you authorize Chum.ly from the original site. This is a much more secure option and I applaud Chum.ly for getting it done about a day after my original post on Chum.ly.

Chum.ly no longer depends on third-party services like TweetPhoto, TwitVid, and TweetAudio to do rich media. They have moved to a simpler system where the handle media directly, eliminating the need for Chum.ly users to have a Twitter account. This is an important step in changing the perception from a Twitter or Facebook interface into a messaging platform in its own right.

Next up for Chum.ly is better integration of your Facebook account, much like what they’ve done with Twitter. There is also an iPhone app coming fast over the horizon, so keep an eye out for that. Chum.ly is definitely an advanced tool with a lot of power under the hood, but you really have to try it out to see what it can really do.

You can find me there.

February 19, 2010

How to Connect Google Reader Shares to Facebook via Hootsuite

I have a Facebook Fan page, but I rarely post there because they make it so difficult to do so. There is no bookmarklet that facilitates this action. I’m sure there is some obscure Facebook application that might help with this, but I haven’t found it yet. My only recourse has been to actually visit the page and cut/paste a link. Very time consuming and inefficient if you’re working at the level I am when it comes to social media.

I came across a discussion on piping reader shares into Twitter using Reader2Twitter. This got me thinking about Hootsuite‘s RSS/Atom feature, which lets you pipe a feed through Hootsuite and out to the social networks you choose. Rather than have to deal with yet another 3rd party web application, why not just use an existing feature in an application I already use daily?

Adding Your Facebook Fan Page to Hootsuite

The first step is to connect your Facebook Fan Page to Hootsuite. I actually stumbled across this by accident in simply trying to get my GReader shares into Twitter. Note that once you have done this, you can easily post updates to your Fan Page from within Hootsuite on a per-update basis, making it simple to keep your page updated with fresh content for your fans.

Click Settings at the bottom of Hootsuite
Click the Social Networks tab and then Add Social Network on the right
In the popup, choose Pages under Facebook to connect your page to Hootsuite

Adding Your Google Reader Shared Items Feed

Adding your Shared Items feed is simple. The hardest part is finding the actual feed link. I found my Shares page from my Google Profile (your Google Profile is here). It should be listed as one of your websites. You should see the actual feed link on the right side of that page, just copy it. Alternately, you can go into Google Reader, click Shared Items on the left, and then show details on the right. The feed URL should appear, right-click and copy it.

Back in Hootsuite and under Settings choose the RSS/Atom tab and Add New Feed. Paste your shared items feed URL into the first text box and decide how often you want the feed checked and how many tweets you want Hootsuite to send out each time. Be conservative here. If you send any more than a couple of tweets out at a time, you will look like a spammer or a n00b. Make sure you choose which accounts you want updates from this feed sent to at the bottom. Check the screenshot below to see how I have mine setup.

If you need any further assistance or clarification, please comment here. I would appreciate your feedback and would be happy to help. Also, if you have a better or alternate way of doing this, I’d love to hear it.

January 29, 2010January 29, 2010

One-to-Many Posting Options Still Lacking

I just recently (today) started using a service called Amplify that I learned about on Twitter. It’s supposed to let you easily share things across your social networks and provides a central place for discussion. I won’t get into too much detail about the specifics, but there is one major thing that instantly bothered me. Here is a screenshot of a post on my Ampblog regarding the RPM Challenge:

Looks good, right? The bookmarklet is excellent. Let’s you select regions of the page and intelligently pieces them together into a baby blog post. I was impressed, until I took a look at how Amplify posted to my other services.

Ok, fair enough. Twitter doesn’t do images and is limited to 140 characters. This is good. I believe the URL is only that long because I hadn’t connected Bit.ly yet.

Uh, what’s this? It looks just like the tweet. I’m quite sure Facebook is capable of handling images and including thumbnails of stuff when you share it, so why is this Facebook share so bland?

Here is the Amplify post on my Posterous blog. Again, no images. Why is the good stuff being stripped away?

As you all may know, I’m a Ping.fm-aholic. It’s my go-to service when I want to speak to everyone everywhere. My problem with Ping.fm has always been that it doesn’t really do video and images (well, it does photos to flickr). I can’t be mad at that because Ping.fm wasn’t created that way. It’s all about status updates.

The other tool I use a lot for posting one-to-many is Posterous itself. It actually does do a better job of carrying over video and photos, but it has the same problem that Amplify does when it comes to Facebook. No Media!

Well, sometimes photos show up, but videos don’t embed. Oh, I also have to run it through Feed-buster to get images in FriendFeed (yes, I still FriendFeed).

I am well aware that there are probably technological, underlying issues with getting media into Facebook and getting it to display nicely. I’m also aware that there may be issues with trying to get external images and video to show up on a 3rd party service. As a user, though, none of that matters. The point is still that I can’t share stuff the way I want. I have to settle for less…and that kinda sucks.

April 2, 2009

Chi.mp: It Only Sucks Because You Don’t Know What To Do With It

I previously talked about Chi.mp in regards to uniting your online identity. After getting a chance to speak directly to the Chi.mp team (Thanks guys and gals!), I gained new insight as to what the service is for. Chi.mp does have the ability to aggregate your data, but that’s not really what it’s for. It isn’t competing with any of your current social networking sites.

Click through to read the whole article (written by yours truly)

via Chi.mp: Not Just Another Data Aggregator

March 26, 2009March 26, 2009

Disqus Dumps Voting and Implements Likes

: Image by BenSpark via Flickr

Just caught a Tweet from Daniel Ha mentioning a new Disqus upgrade. Looks like they’ve dumped their normal ratings system for something more like FriendFeed, allowing you to Like comments. This just goes to show that FriendFeed hit the nail on the head with that simple feature as Facebook and 12seconds.tv (bumps) have both also implemented something similar.

How to Upgrade

I thought I would be able to simply go into my WP admin interface and automatically upgrade the plugin, but it turned out to not be that easy. I wasn’t given any notification that the plugin had an update available. When I accessed the Search/Install interface and searched for Disqus, I saw the updated version, but WP told me my current version was newer. I’m not sure what logic they’re using, but 2.0-xxx is definitely not newer than 2.1-xxx in my book.

I had to uninstall the version I had and manually install the new plugin.

Other Notes

According to the Disqus blog, this update speeds up Disqus in all browsers:

Internet Explorer is up to 5x faster
FireFox is up to 3x faster
Webkit (Safari and Chrome), and Opera is up to 2x faster

There is also a Media menu that allows you to post a video comment (via Seesmic) and Disqus indicates more media functionality may be on the way.

I’m hoping specifically for 12seconds.tv support since that would make video commentators get to the point in a hurry (12 seconds, to be exact) and not ramble on for 20 minutes. This might actually make video comments feasible to view for the average person. As it stands, people avoid looking at video comments like the plague.

December 19, 2008December 19, 2008

Automation Defeats the Purpose of Social Media

: Image via Wikipedia

The fact that Twitter is so simple and so revered makes it a perfect example to use when talking about social media in general. It provides the most basic framework for what more complicated networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are built upon. You find people and connect with them based on the value they have to offer you. That is the most basic action that occurs and everything else builds from that simple choice of “following” someone.

Auto-Follow

When you follow someone, that’s supposed to mean that you’re interested in what they have to say. Remember, this action is the basis of a social network. This alone will make sure that your network is valuable to you, so what happens when you automatically follow everyone that follows you? As time goes on, the quality of your network approaches zero.

The proliferation of spammers and marketers is just one single variable that ensures this to be true. There are many other reasons you shouldn’t use auto-follow. There are a large number of people on Twitter who you would view as “noise” if you took a look at their Twitter time-line and those same people are going to follow you at some point during the growth of your network.

Let’s use a real-world example. You and I are both content creators. I happen to write about a subject that you could care less about, but I think your content is the bee’s knees. Do you subscribe to me just because I subscribed to you? Isn’t that being dishonest? Fronting? Perpetrating? Patronizing? You don’t care about what I have to say, why pretend?

Auto-Reply

Why? What is the usefulness here within the context of a social network? We keep forgetting the fact that “social” means interactions with real people. That is what makes it different from everything else. When you replace that interaction with a robot, you are telling me that I’m not important enough for your attention. You’re telling me that you’re not there. You’re telling me that you’re kinda rude.

What you’re actually telling me is that you don’t really have time to interact. You are not really interested in all this socal media stuff, but you know that it’s supposed to be good at building your brand or making you money, so you’re making a half-assed attempt at it. Keep in mind, these things may not be totally true, but it’s the impression I get.

Remember when you could call a company and a human would pick up? Wasn’t that nice? Now, you have to speak to an automated system that doesn’t even understand what you’re saying. You probably end up using foul language to get to an actual person. How does that make you feel about that company or brand? Do you feel valuable? Do you feel as if they care at all about you or what you have to say?

“Tweet” or Get Off the Pot

Don’t get me wrong, there are certain specific cases where automation is acceptable within social media. Some entities in this area are known bots and we are simply using social tools to get information from them (@rtm, @timer, etc). There are even cases where you may want to follow everyone who follows you for the sheer purpose of growing your network and kick-starting your ability to interact. Conversations regarding these are all over FriendFeed.

There is also a danger here. We may render our social networks completely useless because of the sheer number of people auto-following, auto-replying, pushing RSS feeds as messages, and sending out automated updates. This is not social. This is spam. This is getting ridiculous.

If you are not willing to put in the time and effort it takes to really be active in social media and to actually interact with real people, please delete your account. If you don’t feel that you have time to build real relationships and you need a robot to speak for you, please delete your account. If the majority of your social interactions are actually automated, you may need to rethink your strategy. Social media may not be for you. I hear mailing lists are all the rage.

November 30, 2008

How I Keep Track of Facebook Without Visiting Facebook

I can’t stand Facebook. It’s not really anything they did. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t really like going there. It wasn’t as bad before the site redesign, but they managed to do exactly what was necessary to make the interface more annoying and confusing. The redesign does have some redeeming qualities, but mostly it makes my head hurt.

My friends over on FriendFeed actually got me interested in using Facebook again. Not that they all love it or anything, but some of them do use it. After adding them as friends, I found I was actually getting comments on my status messages, people were throwing sheep at me, and I felt kinda bad that I wasn’t engaging them there.

Via SMS

I use a combination of methods for tracking what’s going on with my FB friends when I’m not there. The first method is via my mobile phone. I don’t have the web or a camera, but I do have text messaging. I went to my Account Settings->Mobile and activated Facebook Mobile. The default settings seem to work just fine.

Via IM

This part was a little trickier, but only because I had no clue how to do it at first. The solution was Notify.Me and I would have liked to link to the article where I read about it, but my ADD has since pushed that out of my mind for newer and shinier things. Notify.Me is definitely the primary method I use for keeping up…with Facebook.

Once you have signed up for Notify.Me, visit this tutorial on their Wiki. It details how to follow your Notifications and Friends’ Status updates. Depending on your friends, you may not want the status updates feed. It could possibly get annoying.

Via Email

Facebook recently lost everyone’s email notification settings. I think they did it on purpose to mess with us, but I can’t prove it. I don’t really use email to track things like Facebook because I don’t live in my email like some people do. I want my Facebook interactions to be immediate and not rely on me checking anything. Some people may find this option useful, though. You can configure this in Account Settings->Notifications.

You can also have Notify.Me send you email alerts if you prefer these over IM alerts.

Conclusion

This is just how I do it and, while I hope this setup works for you out of the box, keep in mind that you have a lot of options here. Play around with what feeds you track and which notification methods you use. If you do decide to tweak things or know of a way to improve this, leave a comment. I’d be interested in hearing about it.

July 31, 2008

Ping.fm: Updating Your Social Networks Without Spamming FriendFeed

Ping.fm is a service that allows you to send out updates of various types (status updates, blogs, micro-blogs) to multiple social networks. I have been using it for some time and my results have been mostly positive. This is not a tutorial on how to use it. After seeing the topic on numerous occasions (here, there, everywhere) and reading DeSoto’s “Must blogging be a balancing act?“, I decided to share my Ping.fm strategy to see what others think.

Why?

This is all about increasing my social networking influence. I want to interact with a diverse selection of people because I have diverse interests. Ping.fm allows me to keep all these different groups updated with whatever is going on with me. I can share new music I create, content I’ve written, whatever I choose and I can share it across multiple social networks. I want to learn from others and get their feedback on what I’m doing.

Updating all of your social networks from one place is definitely a time-saver, but it could also have the community thinking you are a spamming moron if done incorrectly. For instance, Most of the services supported by PIng.fm are also supported by FriendFeed, so you could potentially send one update and have it show up several times. This is usually not desirable. I say “usually” because some FF users actually advocate turning everything up to full blast and allowing the user to filter accordingly.

That solution is less than ideal for me. I really don’t want anyone to Hide any of my FriendFeed services because I haven’t really figured out how I’m going to organize them yet. I may duplicate content now, but that may very well change in the near future. So, I decided to devise an updating scheme that allows me room for more flexibility.

What?

Before we get into those details, it’s important to understand how each Ping.fm update type shows up on each social networking service you subscribe to, so here is a table describing a few:

Ping.fm Update Type	Bebo	Facebook	Hi5	Identi.ca
Statuses	Changes	Status	Scraps	Dent
Blogs	Blog	n/a	Blog	n/a
Micro-Blogs	n/a	Status	n/a	Dent

Ping.fm Update Type	LiveJournal	MySpace	Tumblr	Twitter	Xanga
Statuses	Blog	Status	Blog	Tweet	Pulse
Blogs	Blog	Blog	Blog	n/a	Blog
Micro-Blogs	Blog	n/a	Blog	Tweet	Pulse

Yeah, I have Bebo, MySpace, and Hi5. Big Whoop. Wanna fight about it?

Using Ping.fm, I can actually stay active on networks that I don’t really visit any more than once a week. Here is how I decided to break everything down:

I will post full, original content here at SheenOnline. I will also post more personal or off-topic content on LiveJournal and/or Xanga. I haven’t really figured out how this will work yet.
The social networking sites that provide a blog service will get excerpts and links back to whichever blog has my full article. I also would like to send excerpts to LJ and Xanga which link to my posts at SheenOnline.
Obviously, Identi.ca and Twitter both get my statuses, but I’m mainly only watching for responses on Identi.ca at this point.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with Tumblr. I’m thinking I want to pipe everything I write online to Tumblr, but I haven’t researched how much of a pain that would be.

Now that we have a basic (hah!) Ping.fm strategy, how will this fit into FriendFeed? If I were to pipe all this directly in, I would post a total of around 4 items anytime I made a blog post and I don’t think my followers would appreciate that very much. Also, I don’t want any of my services to get hidden.

Services that post to FriendFeed:

Identi.ca – Center of my micro-blogging world 🙂
LiveJournal – “Personal” blog
SheenOnline – Primary blog

Services that didn’t make the cut:

Twitter – This would just end up being a duplicate, I rarely post here directly
Xanga – Not sure what will go here yet. Possibly nothing 🙂
Tumblr – This may end up aggregating just about everything, so definitely not needed for FF

Caveats and Notes

One of the main points of all this is to be able to link everything back to my primary blog here at SheenOnline. Here are the details I found out as far as linking and HTML go:

Bebo will make a link clickable automatically
Facebook does appear to convert a link properly for statuses
Hi5 handles HTML weird. I haven’t figured out reliably how it handles links
Identi.ca and Twitter handle links just fine (duh?)
LiveJournal converts your links
Myspace will convert your links and handles HTML
Xanga will handle HTML links

In order to explicitly create a blog post, you can either go to the Ping.fm website, or you can send the content via email (Settings->Edit Profile to find your posting address). By default, Ping.fm sends out a status message, so your email should be of the form:

@b <title>^<body>

Conclusion

Please keep in mind, this is not a step-by-step guide that you should follow. I am simply posting this to describe my thought processes surrounding how I leverage Ping.fm to maintain my online presence. Maybe you don’t subscribe to some of the stuff I do and you’re not trying to balance eleventeen blogs.

In a future post, I will talk about drinking from the firehose or “playing in the stream” as J. Phil puts it. If your efforts at connecting with others actually pan out, you will have a lot of incoming data to deal with.

How do you use Ping.fm? Do you use a different service for this? Tell me about it.

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Simple Scenario

Kicking It Up 10 Notches

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Adding Accounts

Basics of Columns

Managing Columns

Managing Notifications

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Adding Your Facebook Fan Page to Hootsuite

Adding Your Google Reader Shared Items Feed

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How to Upgrade

Other Notes

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Auto-Follow

Auto-Reply

“Tweet” or Get Off the Pot

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Via SMS

Via IM

Via Email

Conclusion

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Why?

What?

Caveats and Notes

Conclusion

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