BuzzKillor

The grand experiment is over.

If you follow(ed) me on Google Buzz, you have been subjected, for the last month, to an endless barrage of imported tweets. I tried to keep them as boring and mundane as possible but unfortunately a few tweets containing actual amusing content slipped through.

One of the highlights:

buzzkillor buzz was the matrix revolutions of google
10:28 PM Apr 8th via web

But for the most part the tweets were as boring as humanly possible.  You can check them out in all their asinine glory here:




So, what the hell was the point of all this? Well, when Twitter first came out I decided it was the Stupidest Thing Ever, mainly because it seemed like Facebook status updates with minor sugar- and easy enough for Facebook to implement the features necessarily to replicate and kill Twitter. I have now amended my position to say that Twitter simply does not suit my needs- although it is still true that Facebook could easily implement the features required to kill it. When Google Buzz first came out (and still to this day), it was the new Stupidest Thing Ever. Google has customarily been known for releasing products that are a clear cut above the competition. Google search had the most accurate translation of your query into usable results. Gmail had huge mail storage capacity and conversation-threading, among other great features. Google Maps had the best UI (click and drag map scrolling and zooming in and out via mousewheel). And so on.

So what did Google Buzz have? Nothing good.

• No ability to require followers to authenticate first.
  Yes, I realize that one can remove followers after the fact but that is hardly a solution.
  
• No ability to filter out friends' Buzz content by import stream.
  For example, the ability to filter out all imported YouTube updates but still get everything else. Do we really have to wait for Farmville to get ported to Buzz before Google realizes the value of being able to selectively filter out feed content? Of course haha I'm just kidding, Zynga wouldn't be dumb enough to waste their time porting to a failed social media platform.
  
• No privacy controls whatsoever.
  No concept of groups of friends with differing levels of visibility, the aforementioned inability to require authentication before allowing a follower, etc, etc.
  
• Use of email for notifications, effectively devaluing email.
  Note the way Facebook uses a separate notification system, a separate requests system, etc. Using email for everything will just cause people to either start ignoring email (which won't happen) or turn off Buzz (which will).
  

Anyway, it was a clusterfuck, and their worst product launch ever, as far as I can remember. So, in response, I combined my twin hates of Twitter and Buzz and devised a plan. If only I could have done it all on a Netbook, I would have achieved the trifecta.

I created a Twitter account aptly-named "buzzkillor", set Buzz up to automatically import its tweets, then disabled buzz in my GMail. What this amounts to is that I would be able to annoy the everliving fuck out of people following me on Buzz without actually being on Buzz and thus not receiving any of their annoying updates or comments or likes or whathaveyou.

Here were the results (click for bigger):

day 1. mar 21: 39 followers
day 2, mar 22: 35 followers
day 3, mar 23: 35
day 4, mar 24: 32 followers - end of day 4, admission: no i'm not on buzz
day 5, mar 25: 31 followers - sera hill follows on twitter
day 6, mar 26: 28 followers - rachel stops following
day 7, mar 27: 28
day 8, mar 28: 27 followers
day 9, mar 29: 27
day 10, mar 30: 27
day 11, mar 31: 27
day 12, apr 1: 26 followers
day 13, apr 2: 26
day 14, apr 3: 26
day 15, apr 4: 26 followers - started ikariam tweeting
day 16, apr 5: 25 followers
day 17, apr 6: 25
day 18, apr 7: 25
day 19, apr 8: 24 followers
day 20, apr 9: 24
day 21, apr 10: 24
day 22, apr 11: 24
day 23, apr 12: 24
day 24, apr 13: 24
day 25, apr 14: 23 followers, mentioned that everyone should unfollow me the day before
day 26, apr 15: 23
day 27, apr 16: 23
day 28, apr 17: 23
day 29, apr 18: 23
day 30, apr 19: 23
day 31, apr 20: 23

I started with 39 and quickly dwindled down to a very Discordian 23. I can only assume that the 23 followers who remain are some combination of the insane, stalkers, and/or also have Buzz disabled and thus haven't seen my deluge of tweets.

I'm hoping that Google fixes the problems with Buzz, but thus far their response has been fairly weak. Facebook is in serious need of strong competitor, especially given their repeated privacy violations/questionable moves.

Designing a social media platform today without placing privacy considerations at the top spot is a recipe for failure.

Bring Back the Old Facebook- wait, no, not the Old Old Facebook, but the Old New Facebook*

* title courtesy of Jeremy Tan

So now that the initial "I HATE ALL NEW THINGS" furor over the latest "new Facebook" has subsided somewhat, here's my beef with the most recent overhaul, in a nutshell. Facebook has upgraded to a social networking site that has killed the power of social networking. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's certainly true that they have stifled the very forces that make social networking spread like wildfire.

First of all, let's look at what the perceived problem was and what Facebook sought to resolve with the new iteration. As far as I can tell, the main issue was balancing overburdening people with every single item from their friends' minifeeds (the old real-time feed) vs the haphazard culling of pseudo-random items into a summary feed. Their solution was to decide that some kinds of content were more important than others and to present this subset of all generated friend content in their totality.

There's a number of big problems with this.

1. One is that Facebook has decided what feed information is important to you (which may not be accurate). This is the "killing the power of social networking" part of things. A lot of seemingly innocuous or unimportant information that was previously the source of great amusement (such as one's changing of one's profile picture, or one being tagged in some content, or one joining a group) would flow down to one's friends and spread in that fashion- now that information is lost, except for friend-specific stalkers.
2. A second problem is that for those who were used to the completeness of the old real-time feed, this is a step backwards. Admittedly, though, the overkill of the real-time feed is for the obsessive and not for everyone.
3. Thirdly, because the only stream available is a "real-time", because no summary/randomized feed is available, and because not everyone is a 24hr/old posts-checking Facebook junkie, a real-time-only feed means casual users miss out on a lot of things, potentially. The "Highlights" are an attempt to address this sort of thing, but, again, only certain kinds of content qualify, which bring up the same sorts of problems as in (1) above. Also, folks in different timezones from one another are likely to miss each others' updates, given the time differential, unless one, again, goes through the trouble of scouring old posts.
4. Fourthly, and this is a general problem that existed before "new" Facebook, blanket user feed filtering doesn't really work. Generally, some types of updates from some users are problematic- but not *all* their updates. Case in point, twitter-esque status updates from one friend might be annoying but you don't want to completely ignore their updates and miss out on their photo uploads, for example.

In my opinion, there are ways to address these issues and still address the issues that Facebook wants to improve on.

Here's my suggestion, in a nutshell, of how to fix Facebook.

• First, we need the concept of "Publisher" settings (i.e.: for a user updating his/her status or posting a link, or otherwise creating anything that would create an entry in their feed) vs "Reader/Filter/Feed" settings (i.e.: for a user reading his friend's updates).
• All of the things that qualify, i.e.: anything that can appear in a feed entry, should be atomic and treated equally, and should default everything on for writing (publishing) but, in the interests of backwards-compatibility with current Facebook, only the same items that currently show up in the feed should be enabled. Turning on everything from the reader-side would be equivalent to the old real-time feed and appeal to the hardcore/obsessive.
• Instead of blanket per-user filtering, what we really want is per-user per-atomic newsfeed item filtering, same for publishing. In other words, anything that can be published can be filtered, on both a global or per-user setting basis.
• Bring back some variant of the old feed, but call it something like the MishMash Feed or the Summary Feed. This is great for casual users. This could also be achieved by simply provided a Feed-like interface to Highlights, but with more "old" entries.

I'm pretty sure that this would do it. You'd satisfy the crazy Facebook junkies like me, giving us complete access to the information we used to have in the old Real-Time feed, but you'd still have the less overwhelming options for the general/casual user.

On a separate note, it's probably only a matter of time before this happens, but if one can re-arrange the positions of items in one's profile, why can't one have similar control over (at least some) of the options in one's home/feed page? I can understand not being able to move the position of the ads around, but I for one would much prefer having my Upcoming Events near the top, and my "Friends You May Know"/"Suggestions" near the bottom.

Yes, I may be a jazz musician, but I used to be a software developer in another life. Can you tell?

[2009/04/20] Addendum: The other problem with having a Real-Time feed and no Summary Feed is that an extremely active user (or anything that can publish to a feed, such as a Public Profile or an Application) can easily monopolize one's feed. Both selective filtering on the Reader side and Summary Feed as an option would address this problem.

The Importance of Backups

Backup, backup, backup, backup, backup, backup, backup.

Everyone says to backup one's data reguarly, but how many people actually do?  Besides, buying an extra hard drive, installing it, and setting up a system for regular backups- this can easily become a non-trivial task, especially for non-technically-minded folks.  There are a few one-stop-shop solutions, that offer some kind of do-it-all box to cover your backup needs, but these do tend to be expensive.  Apple's Time Capsule does try to bridge all these gaps, but no idea how it fares in the non-Mac world, though.

My friend Kevin pointed out a great solution called Mozy that provides network-based backups.  Basically you create an account, download a piece of software (for Mac or Windows), choose what you'd like to backup, and then your files are uploaded (encrypted) to a backup server using the Power of the Internet.  I just started using it and it seems pretty great so far.  Network-based backups just make so much sense to me, and from Mozy's business-case perspective, I would think it makes sense for them too, when considering the relative cheapness of hard drive space and bandwidth for the operations involved.

The free version offers 2GB of backup space, which is just barely enough for me, but I manage to offload the space a little considering that I have my photos backed up on Picasa Web Albums already, and I'm electing not to backup my mp3 collection for time being.  The pay version ($4.95/month) offers unlimited backup space.  Also, if you use my referral link to signup, we each get an additional 256MB.  Woohoo!  Signup here!

As it turns out, I know a couple of the folks who work for the company that bought Mozy, so I'm hoping that they'll alert me before Mozy starts snooping around in my backup data, and make millions taking my avant-garde atonal jazz charts and converting them into Top-40 hits.

Mozy (with referral code)

Why Twitter is doomed to failure, or what Facebook has to do to kill Twitter

So, added to my list of things that I believe are doomed to failure is Twitter.  Why?  It seems that all Twitter amounts to is a very limited featureset that is easily superceded by the featureset of other social-networking sites.  As far as I'm concerned, Twitter is essentially Facebook status updates with minor additional features.  And I'm guessing those additional features will be coming to Facebook soon, in a much more complete/all-encompassing fashion to boot.  Sooner still if Facebook wants to curb Twitter's growth.  Here's what Facebook needs to do to match Twitter:

• Subscribing to Non-Friend Content: Provide the ability to "subscribe to"/follow people's status updates without being their friends.  People can elect to make their status updates "public" or "subscribable" to their non-friends in order to make this happen.  This is already possible with public videos and public notes, so this isn't much of a stretch.
• Commenting on Non-Friend Content: Provide the ability for people to comment on public status updates.  Again, already possible with videos and notes, so not difficult.
• More Control on Updates: Provide the ability to more finely control what friend updates one receives, and how one receives them, in particular with regard to cellphone integration.  I don't use Facebook Mobile (mainly due to the absolutely ridiculously exorbitant data rates up here in Canada) so I'm not sure how much control one has, but I would assume one does not have the option to receive a text message (or equivalent) for every friends' status update, currently.

Now, here's the additional features Facebook needs to kill Twitter, and other websites, entirely, or at least to aggressively compete against them:

• Generic Publishing: Provide the ability for people to mark any content as public and "subscribable".  For example, a film-maker could make their status updates, notes, and videos public and "subscribable", thus competing with, respectively, Twitter, Blogger, and YouTube.
• Generic Subscribing: Within Facebook, one only gets notifications on updates for items that one has been explicitly marked as participating in- this could be via a tag, a comment, and so forth.  This shouldn't be necessary, however.  If someone posts a really neat photo that I know will inspire a lot of comments (and I want to read the comments), I should have the option to subscribe to said photo whenever updates are posted to it, and thus opt-in to receive comments, etc on it.
• Content Labeling: Provide the ability for people to mark their content with GMail-esque labels, and then set privacy settings, such as subscribability, on that.  This is slightly different from friend lists but perhaps the two could be merged.
• Facebook Connect 2-Way Communication: Facebook Connect allows external websites to report a user's activities as Facebook newsfeed items.  In order to become more seamless, the reverse should occur as well.  Actions on Facebook should also be reflected on external sites.  Currently, for example, one can import blog entries into Facebook as notes.  When users within Facebook comment on the imported notes, those comments are not exported back to the source blog- but they could be, keeping one conversation thread across multiple reading interfaces.  Taking this a step further, why not have my Facebook-uploaded videos also appear on YouTube?

Now, to be fair, I don't actually have a Twitter account, so I may be missing out on some key features here, or mis-representing the featureset.  Still, I can't imagine that there is all that much more that would be hard to reproduce on the Facebook side.

Some of these features could perhaps be introduced via Facebook Pages, so that people could maintain a private account and a public persona as two separate entities, but I think the bulk of these features would be desired by general Facebook account holders.

So anyway, that's it!  Twitter, your time is up.