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Posts Tagged ‘Marshall’

Real-Time Web Summit Keynote

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick kicked off our Real-Time Web Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today. Marshall, who spoke with over 40 different vendors over the last few months in preparation for this event, presented a high-level overview of what he thinks the recent developments around the real-time web will mean for companies and users. Specifically, Marshall stressed the fact that real time doesn’t just mean speed but also creates value by including presence data, flow and data syncing. All of this, according to Marshall, will lead to radical changes in how users will experience the Web in the near future.

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Creating Value on the Real-Time Web

Starting out, Marshall discussed some of the usage cases of the real-time Web, ranging from people-to-people services like Twitter and Olark to services that focus on machine-to-machine communication and enable services like Friendfeed and Google Reader. Services like Advark, which provide links between people and machines, and machine-to-people services like NotifyMe and PostRank fall in between.

Information Overload

This new river of data, of course, could easily lead to total information overload. In the best case scenario, the tools will get so good that we won’t be overwhelmed by all of the data coming at us. In the worst case, of course, we could lose the usefulness of the real-time Web if the flow of data becomes too overwhelming for users, or compromise usefulness in order to reduce information overload.

Standards

As Marshall pointed out, though, we are only laying the railroad tracks for this future of the real-time Web right now. Services like Pubhubsubbub and RSSCloud are currently building the infrastructure that will make these major changes on the Internet happen, though the standards that will make the real-time Web possible are still evolving.

The question, of course, is how these standards will evolve. While some standards bodies are currently trying to create them, chances are that some standards will evolve naturally as certain vendors become dominant.

Bringing the Real-Time Web to the ‘Slow Web’

Marshall pointed to Facebook’s Global Happiness Index as an example for the kind of product companies can develop based on data created on the real-time web. He also looked at a number of companies like Evri, FirstRain and JS-Kit’s Echo that are bridging the gaps between relatively static pages like blogs and the real-time web.

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Screen Grabs: Palm Pre stumps the experts on Numb3rs

The Palm Pre showed up on a recent episode of Numb3rs, and we can only assume that confused look on Charlie’s face is the simplistic calculator that ships stock with webOS. Or could it be something much more sinister?

[Thanks, Marshall]

Filed under: Cellphones

Screen Grabs: Palm Pre stumps the experts on Numb3rs originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to Use Facebook: 5 Tips For Better Social Networking

Facebook is a social networking site that is enormously popular, but it can be a frustrating user experience. The design of Facebook leaves a lot to be desired and there are almost too many choices for things to do on Facebook. Also some of the more popular Facebook activities are trivial instead of useful – throwing sheep is an oft-quoted example.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that Facebook is a powerful social networking tool. So how can you best utilize it and find the good apps? In this post we aim to find out. We’ll be focusing specifically on social activities, rather than the many other potential uses of Facebook (work, brand management, etc).

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Tip 1: Update Your Status Regularly

This is a simple thing to do to keep your Facebook profile active. Right at the top of the page there is a place where you can "write something." Usually a comment about what you’re doing or thinking. Once a day, or even once every few days, is enough. But update it enough to keep your page interesting.

Tip 2. Use Groups (a.k.a. Lists in Facebook Terminology)

Groups are a core feature of social networking on the Web. To effectively use Facebook, we recommend you set up some groups so that you can filter content. One person who does this very well is our own Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall says that he generally scans his Facebook homepage first, then clicks to his groups for family and old friends from school. He noted that "this way most of my time spent on Facebook isn’t re-reading the same things I’ve already read on Twitter."

There is a bit of a trick to setting this groups feature up. Facebook calls this feature "lists," probably to differentiate them from its other Groups feature (which have been usurped by ‘Pages’ now). Confused? Get used to it, Facebook navigation is awful.

To set lists up for your Facebook account, go to your Facebook homepage and click the "more" link on the left-hand sidebar. You will see a link entitled "Create new list" at the bottom – click on that to create a new group.

Tip 3: Add Your Content From Other Sources (Carefully…)

In this day and age, you are likely to be creating content in more than a few places on the Web. This ranges from the extreme cases (early adopters who have personal RSS feeds coming out their ears), to those who may just use YouTube and a couple of other niche social websites.

Many early adopters use FriendFeed to aggregate their ‘lifestream’ of content from multiple sources. Facebook just bought FriendFeed, so expect to see it integrated into Facebook over time. As of now, if you have more than a few content sources and they aren’t necessarily the well known ones like YouTube or Last.fm, then you’ll need to use FriendFeed or an equivalent lifestreaming product to aggregate those feeds. But if you find FriendFeed just a bit too geeky (and many people do), then you can adequately enrich your Facebook profile with external content.

One thing we’d caution, which this author took too long to notice: don’t pipe your FriendFeed content into Facebook if you aggregate a lot of content into FriendFeed! It quickly overpowers your Wall and will likely annoy the friends you have who also subscribe to your FriendFeed.

To add external content to Facebook, on your Wall page click the ‘Options’ link on the top right. Then click ‘Settings.’

You can then choose to "import stories" to your Facebook wall from a select number of sites: Flickr, Digg, YouTube and others.

You can add content from other external sources to Facebook by clicking the ‘application settings page’ link further down the page.

Tip 4: Brighten Up Your Profile With Photos and Videos

This almost goes without saying, but adding multimedia makes your Facebook profile interesting and attractive.

If instead of Facebook you usually use a specialist photo site (like Flickr) or video site (like Vimeo), then you’ll need to search around for ways to export your files. I use Flickr and didn’t find a satisfactory way to export photos from Flickr to Facebook’s Photo albums. But via my Twitter network I managed to discovered a plug-in for iPhoto, which allows Mac users to bulk export from iPhoto to Facebook.

Tip 5: Search Out the Best Facebook Apps

Ever since Facebook became a development platform back in May 2007, thousands of apps have been built to add to your Facebook page. As noted in the introduction, these range from trivial (e.g. sheep throwing) to very useful. The best tip here is to find apps that complement your interests.

Our advice is to search the directory for keywords of interest to you. The quality of apps varies greatly and often there are errors (at least I came across them several times when researching this article). When you find an app you like, you can add it to your profile. I added an Art app recently, for example.

You can browse a user’s apps by clicking the oddly-named ‘Boxes’ tab on their profile page.

Tell Us How You Use Facebook!

We hope this post inspires you to spruce up your Facebook page a bit. For more tips, check out Facebook’s own Influencers page.

Let us know in the comments what tips you have, or what you use Facebook for every day!

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