Daily Tech Bits

Lifestreaming With Profilactic

Lifestreaming is all the rage now and there are tons of tools to help you do it. The one I’ve been using most recently is Profilactic. I have to say that I detest the name (which the founders say is ’something to do with profile’), but I love the service. Profilactic calls itself a ‘digital life aggregator’ which prevents an online identity crisis. Like other lifestreaming applications/sites, you can add the services that you belong to and amalgamate them into one nice, tidy feed.

It took only a couple of minutes to sign up for the site and add a list of all the places where I contribute content online. Profilactic supports a large list of social sites as well as RSS, and also lets you add custom sites, so in theory you can add any site to your lifestream. I have yet to test that, though. Once you’ve added your sites, you can build your lifestream automatically. Again, this works well and if Profilactic can’t retrieve a particular feed, there’s a discreet little message at the top of the page.

In another page you can retrieve your friends’ lifestreams. I don’t think this is working right on my profile, because I only seem to have the things I have shared on Digg, for example, so there’s still some tweaking to do there. As usual there are widgets and badges to allow you to display your lifestream on other sites. The interface is clean and easy to read, and provides handy links to all your stuff, so I think I’ll be working with this one for a while.

A killer feature is that it uses Ping.FM so that you can update all your microbloging services from your account. I still plan to do some more testing. To find out more about Profilactic, especially planned developments, visit their blog.

Playing With Plurk

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to try out new things, so when I heard about Plurk, I couldn’t resist signing up to see what it was like. Many people suggest that it’s a Twitter clone, and it’s true that there are some similarities, like the 140 character limit for sending status updates. You can follow and be followed (having friends or fans in Plurk). But for me, that’s where the similarities end.

Plurk’s interface is very different. It’s a scrolling timeline moving from right to left, which seemed counter intuitive at first. However, it means that the latest content is always on the left where you read first. You can see all the updates you choose to follow (you can befriend people without getting their updates) in the top window. The bottom window shows your friends and fans and your karma (which is points you get from participating in the site.)

What I like about Plurk is that you can use lots of different verbs to describe your updates (thinks, feels, and so on) as well as a blank one so you can roll your own. You could end up talking about yourself in the third person, or you could behave Twitter style and just say what you want to say anyway. You can also set up an extended profile, MySpace style, but I haven’t done that yet.

A great feature is the ability to reply to a Plurk and see the responses in a drop down window, making it much easier to follow conversations than Twitter. The interface is definitely an improvement, but there’s one thing that’s lacking.

Goodness knows that the search features in Twitter aren’t anything to get excited about, but it’s virtually impossible to find your friends from other services in Plurk. You can add people from email accounts and IM but what I wanted to do was import my Twitter friends. No can do. Instead, I’ve been playing a hunt and click game to get a grand total of nine friends so far.

Plurk also makes it easy for you to group friends into cliques, though I haven’t tried this feature yet. Will I stick with it? I have no idea. I’ve got a lot of good friends on Twitter and unless they all move to Plurk it will probably remain secondary for me. That said, I think Twitter could learn a lot from Plurk, and it’s one to watch.

Here’s my Plurk profile if you want to add me.

Plurk Or Twitter?

Everybody’s talking about Plurk and wondering whether this is the Twitter killer.

Who knows? With Twitter more down than up recently, and having to resort to Tumblr to keep users updated on statuses, perhaps it’s time for a new service to take the throne. One thing that Plurk offers that Twitter doesn’t have is the ability to group your friends - something that would certainly make Twitter more useful.

Don’t think that Twitter will give up easily, though. Although everyone’s talking about Plurk, there are still a lot of things that Twitter has got right, like allowing multiple ways of sending status updates.

Twitter Tool: My Tweeple

One of the things that drives me crazy about Twitter, which I mostly love, is the impossibility of managing my followers and followees easily. The inbuilt interface is clunky and not very helpful and there’s no way you can match up who you are following with who follows you. (Call me a statsaholic, but I like to know that kind of thing.

That’s why I was happy to discover MyTweeple, which syncs with your Twitter account to provide an easy way to manage the people you are following and those who follow you. You can see at a glance:

• who is following you
• who you are following
• if the following is mutual

And that’s not all. You get an at-a-glance view of their profile, so you can see their website, the number of updates they have made, the number of people they are following and who follow them and the ratio of followers to followees. (Not that important to me, but kind of interesting, all the same.) You can block, hide, follow and unfollow from that page and it updates your Twitter account.

Another cool feature is the ability to see people’s latest updates by clicking on the ‘view’ link. You can even indicate which people are being spammy by clicking a ‘ding’ link. I was pleased to see that most of the people who appeared in my stats had no dings, and I plan to look at the others very carefully.

I think that MyTweeple provides some much needed Twitter functionality, and I plan to use it at least until Twitter improves its own tools for managing followers.

Tweeting The News

When I first signed up with Twitter, I didn’t really get it. Not at all. In fact, I suspected that it would be a humongous waste of my time. I did a couple of experimental tweets, then left it alone. Fast forward to March 2008 and I rediscovered Twitter and found all sorts of interesting ways to use it. That will be the subject of another post, perhaps, but it’s made me search out new ways that other people are using it.

The guys at ReadWriteWeb have been using Twitter for journalism. They see it as a great source of breaking news as the 140 character limit actually helps with making quick updates. They’ve also mastered the Twitterview and see it as a good way to poll the public.

We recognize that people using and replying on Twitter may not be generally representative of the population at large, but for qualitative interviews it’s a tool that’s hard to beat.

They also use it for QA and promotion. Read the full article to get some ideas.

Facebook Psychology

If you thought Facebook was just for connecting with friends and playing silly games, then think again. Facebook is more than just a particularly successful social networking site; now it’s also a psychology course. Stanford University professor B J Fogg is teaching a course called Psychology of Facebook. The inspiration from the course came from seeing the social media site as a new form of mass persuasion, in which an unknown application could go viral almost overnight.

The class dissects different aspects of Facebook to see how they work and what users are trying to do with them. Understanding how Facebook works is not just about the social networking site itself, but about other sites that may use similar methodology in the future or, as Fogg puts it, ‘those blockbusters yet to be invented’.

Want to know more? Read this account of a typical Psychology of Facebook class.