Joshua Guffey

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Twitter has lists & hashtags. That’s fine.
Facebook has lists, groups, pages, fine-grain privacy controls and the ability to hide users from our stream. That’s fine.

So what’s the problem??? — Relevance!

Is the data relevant for you in this moment? If you work in the tech world or even (and especially) in the social media space, it’s pretty likely that managing all of your connections  and non-stop, real-time data can be a major undertaking.

Twitter and Facebook have provided us with some basic tools for managing our data streams, but they are still relatively rudimentary and require us to manually categorize our connections by placing them, one-at-a-time into lists or groups of contacts.

I haven’t yet seen anything that goes beyond this level of sophistication for segmenting and filtering out, in real-time, data based on RELEVANCE and not merely upon the source of the data.

Hashtags and Twitter Search begin this process but there are some issues with these tools.

Hashtags are not used by everyone and therefore lose relevance as a tool since important information may not be tagged in a way that brings it to your attention.

An advanced Twitter Search can turn up some pretty relevant data in real-time; and some fancy RSS feed action can make this data more useful, but this tends to cast a wide net and still requires some significant wading to find the data that is most relevant for you. You can build some very specific searches that turn up more targeted data but this also typically filters out some terms you may not have thought of and ends up in a multitude of Twitter search RSS feeds to manage.

If this all sounds like a hell of a lot of work…that’s because it is.

As more of the world adopts Twitter, Buzz and other real-time data sharing technologies, we will have more people connecting with us, and hence, a bigger challenge then we’ve ever seen in trying to read more of what helps move us to forward and less of what doesn’t.

Social media isn’t going away. So how can we stay on top of our game? Well right now you can geek out and plug some Twitter search feeds into Google Reader and you’ll find your reader full of interesting things.  But it takes a special type of geek to even consider playing around with this level of “real-time, data-piping architecture”.

So what do the rest of us do?
I have a few ideas that may help moving forward.

Redundant tweet filtration

It’s my guess if you’ve read this far, that you know a lot of people on Twitter, many of which re-tweet and share the same articles. How many times do you really need to read a tweet about Google’s new policy change? Tweets that share the same links or information could be filtered out or downplayed to make room for unique information.

Real-time tweet relevance filtration

Google certainly has the advantage in this area.  In fact this technology is already in place in Google’s own search engine in the form of suggested search queries.  And even more robustly in the keyword selection tool for their ad network, Google Adwords.

The system knows what words and phrases are generally synonymous or in some way related. On Google.com the technology returns the most popular search terms based on the search habits of entire populations.  Imagine though if your tweet stream (tweets from those you follow) were filtered by relevance to your interests and even the specifics of your current project.  This reality isn’t far for Google.

Better collaborative spam filtration

Perhaps unfortunately for Twitter, Google has a clear lead here again. Gmail has provided a surprisingly spam resistant email experience based upon the ability to block spam message across the entire network given the input of the community it serves, Gmail users.

Yet over at Twitter, auto DMs haunt Twitter like an over-friendly neighbor with bad hygiene. Much of it outright offensive spam that has NO basis on any relationship with you or specific interest of yours as a prospective customer. [dramatic rant]

Google has always been about relevance and “organizing the world’s information”.   Given their ability to provide content in a relevance-centric fashion, I see potential for Google to truly move into social media in an even bigger way in the coming future when there is a potential for more noise in the social space.

Written by Joshua Guffey.  You can follow me on Twitter: @JoshuaGuffey

What do you have to say about this?
How else can we mere mortals manage to keep up with the increasing influx of information?  How  do you think the playing field will change in the next 6-12 months?

If you attempted to use Google Wave when it came out last year, it’s likely that you met with the same fate as I did.  Honestly, I tried it for a bit, found (at least at first) that NO ONE was on the service, and discovered that, worst of all, there were no notifications of any kind when ‘waves’ were updated.  (They also don’t have a practical version for iPhone yet, but I won’t go into that.)  So I dropped it.

Well yesterday Google announced that they have created the option for email alerts when waves are updated.  It’s a bit tricky to find the option to turn it on.  You’ve got to push the arrow to the right of your Wave inbox tab to view the option.

Google hasn’t gotten it perfect yet, as you can see from their psuedo-disclaimer below.  Still, this is a huge leap forward with a feature that, in retrospect, should have been shipped out-of-box for a service that has positioned itself as a tremendous advance in online collaboration.

How do you use Google Wave?

I’m writing this post because an increasing number of friends appear to be getting their Facebook accounts hacked. I hope it will prevent some people from falling prey, while helping others to recover. This is just a pointer post since people seem to be having trouble finding the “what do I do now” post in Facebook’s help section.

If your Facebook account has been hacked and you can still access the related email account (the one you used to signup for Facebook) then Facebook has some specific instructions for you here:

this link

Basically, if you still have access to the related email account they ask you to perform the “I forgot my password” reset.

If you cannot access that email account any longer, then contact via Facebook via this link for possible resolution.

Additionally, I’d just briefly like to mention one simple thing you can remember that will prevent most hacked accounts from ever happening. If you are EVER asked for your credentials for ANY website, it is just good practice to visually confirm that the URL in the browser’s address bar is, in fact, the website that you would expect to be asking for those credentials.

Please pass this along freely and be careful about clicking on links and entering your account credentials.

Happy computing!

Just yesterday I posted “How To: Block Facebook application invites from specific friends“.  Today I thought I’d point out that apps that you DON’T authorize can still access your information if you don’t fix it.

To fix this go to:
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=friends_share

As you know, Google Buzz hasn’t even been out a week yet and it’s been big news…and yet not.

What I like about Google Buzz

• My Gmail contacts are already there.
• Since this is a Google service connected to Gmail, it’s likely that it’ll
  draw more of my non-Twitter friends into a social media space…where I live.
• Inevitable integration with Google’s gamut of innovative and powerful products.
• Nearby feature which is pretty good (like Tweetie for iPhone does)
• Integration of tweets into my buzzstream.
  • I’m already on Twitter & Facebook. I don’t need a new place to consider posting to. It’s nice to be able to buzz without ‘going there’ on my iPhone or MacBook. Then I get updates via email. And if I want to see what’s happening outside of ‘my’ conversations I drop into Buzz and look around.

What I don’t like about Google Buzz

• If I comment on anything Mashable posts, my iPhone buzzes like mad
  for hours. This is fixed easily enough by ‘muting’ the gmail conversation.
• The eery feeling I get that Google is going to release something so
  integrated and so powerful into the mobile space that I will love my iPhone a little less.

What I’d like to see Google Buzz do

• Location based check-ins. Of the major players in this arena I prefer
  Foursquare, but I don’t like the way they format links in my Twitter.
  And I’m over the ‘game’ aspect of it. Google’s got great positioning
  to enter the local check-in game. (maps/local+reviews+buzz=useful!)
• A Google Buzz widget that I can install on my website so that peeps
  can Buzz me from there.
• Easier integration of pics and other multimedia using iPhone
• Functional @mentions and some type of tagging, perhaps #hashtags
• Local, regional, national and global trends.
• Aardvark integration (they bought Aardvark this past week)
• Google Talk integration to take a thread to private chat
• Integration with analytics like bit.ly’s stats but better, perhaps
  with Google Analytics
• Filters as powerful as Gmail’s filters
• Integration with Google Voice (click to call). Permissions would be
  highly important here.
• Alerts like ‘Google Alerts’ but applied like a persistent Twitter Search.
  So you know when your company’s name is mentioned or when people
  buzz about your product or industry.

What did I forget? Please add your thoughts to the conversation in the blog comments.