Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

So instead of just making sure you have your company’s domain name, you need to start thinking about whether you have your company’s username on major social networks.

Geico is learning a hard lesson.  A user on Twitter is holding their name for money.

Interested in purchasing this twitter? Contact me at jondoeb83@yahoo_.com without the underscore!

If Geico ever wanted to use a Twitter account to give company updates, they’d have to use a different name or buy it off the guy.

(Thanks Peter for the tip. )

Every once and a while you’ll notice that i’ve gone a day or two without blogging.  This doesn’t mean that i’ve gone completely off the grid.  It just means that I’ve probably gotten really busy between my work and after work lifes.

Chances are that during a lull you can probably find some type of my activity on a number of different Web 2.0 applications…

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Del.icio.us
• Flickr
• LinkedIn
• Cork’d
• Pownce
• Digg

If you wanna keep up on my various comings and goings when I’m not blogging, by all means please add me as a contact or friend on one of these services.

If it’s possible to put in a message with your “friend request”, just say that you read my blog.

I remember when I got into the World Wide Web for the first time.  I was just a boy in mid-Michigan sitting in front of a computer with my dad.  The world seemed very large and incredibly inaccessible.  That was all about to change.

With the Web, information and people become infinitely more accessible. You get to meet people on the other side of the state, the other side of the country, or even the other side of the world who have common interests to you.    Before my friends would have been restricted by who I lived geographically near.  With the Web, this all changed very dramatically.

A few years ago, Shel Israel to me was just a guy who I admired, co-authored a book about blogging, and lived on the other side of the country. Because of the Web and specifically our blogs, we were able to connect and I now consider Shel to be an old friend.  He’s become what he likes to call part of my “global neighborhood.”

I could have never imagined that I would have had the opportunity to get to know and become friends with Shel but that’s the power of the Web.  It has the ability to allow to people from different backgrounds, ages, and parts of the world who have a similar interests or passion to get to know one another, form a conversation, and start a friendship. It’s sooo cool.

Today, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Shel in person at the Social Media in Government conference that was being held in Washington DC.   It was a blast.  If Shel didn’t have a plane to catch, i’m confident the conversation could have gone on for most of the day.

At the conference, I also had the pleasure today of meeting Kyle Hansen.  He wrote a blog post a while back which made a lot of people’s attention, including Shel’s.  He said “to my future boss: please let me blog.“  Kyle is an outstanding example of the revolution that is taking place with how people communicate.  He’s also very bright.

Someone in Washington DC, please hire Kyle.  We want him on this coast (he goes to school in Calif but is at an internship in DC).

I’m proud to say that Kyle is now a part of my global neighborhood.

The Web is and will change your life.  It will give you the opportunity to connect and meet truly amazing people.

Who have you met or been able to connect with via the Web?

I read a lot stuff on the Web. A lot of what i read is just people rehashing other people’s ideas and calling it there own. But… every once and a while, you come across something and you’re like DANG that’s brilliant.

I’ve been really enjoying Jyri Engeström’s stuff on object-centered sociality and social objects. Go read, watch, and inhale this stuff right now…

• zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don’t Or: the case for object-centered sociality
• zengestrom.com: What makes a good social object
• Jyri Engeström @ Geek Dinner London

This is what others have had to say about Jyri’s ideas…

• The Social Graph and Objects of Sociality - Bokardo
  
• RussellBeattie.com - The Object-Centered Sociality
• hugh macleod - more thoughts on social objects

I wanna add my 2 cents in about this stuff but i’d be curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.  Does this stuff make sense to anyone else???

I continue to be amazed by how the DC tech community is really starting to take off.  The latest twist is that there’s going to be a Facebook Developer Garage in Washington DC.  It’s on Wednesday, October 10th at 6pm at Edelman.

As you all know, I’m continually fascinated by Facebook.  I know this is going to be a great opportunity to get some of my questions answered.  It will be a great opportunity to dive deeper into the Facebook platform.

Hopefully see all of you there.

There is an interesting thread in the blogosphere about how Facebook might just be a gigantic way to be unproductive.  Web standards luminary  Jeffrey Zeldman and even Facebook app consultant/self-proclaimed Facebook addict Nick O’Neill have  admitted to its unproductive qualities.

The question I ask is… if the best thing Facebook has going for it is its ability to help you waste time really well, can’t it be easily replaced or won’t it slowly die out?  How can this be a long term viable platform?

Some other Web application or social network is going to help you waste time in an even more fun way and people will flood to that, in the same way that people are moving away from MySpace to Facebook.

At TechCrunch40, everyone got super excited when Mark Zuckerberg announced the new venture fund they’d be starting to spur on the growth of Facebook applications.   They have apparently set away $10 million for this.  I guess this means I can apply to get $25k to build the next generation in Zombie biting Facebook applications.

Please, someone build me a Facebook applications that blows my mind.  Build me an application that really takes advantage of the social graph in an meaningful way.   Show me how you use it in a way that is beneficial to your day to day.

I like Facebook Events but I’d rather use Upcoming or Evite because its not as restrictive.   I like Facebook Photos but I like Flickr better because everyone can see it.  Facebook Video is great but I don’t use it that much.

I need more.

I have been really busy lately. Work has had my que loaded pretty non-stop. When I’m not working, I’m getting ready to move into the city, organizing conferences, and hanging out with friends. It’d be incredibly easy for me to go a week without using Facebook.

I’ve been thinking about, talking about, and writing about Facebook and I’m still not really sure what extraordinary thing it does.

Facebook is the place where I find out whats up with my friend from third grade who I haven’t talked with in 10 years. Facebook is where I get bitten by the Zombie application from the person who I met at a conference but haven’t talked to since. Facebook is where my friends join groups which do absolutely nothing.

I challenge all of you who read this to not use Facebook for a week. See if you can live without it. I bet you can.

If you can’t live with out it, tell me why. Like Robert Scoble, has it become your address book? Do you have 5000 friends you have to keep track of?

Also… I challenge my friend Nick O’Neill to live without Facebook for a week or to write me a post convincing me why he can’t live without it (and the reason can’t be that its the center of his business.)

To continue the conversation about Facebook and to respond to Daniel’s comment, there is a way in Facebook that you can control the level of noise in the News Feed.

From the news feed, you can click “Preferences.” You’ll be presented with some sliders. There you can choose how much of what story types you to see. These look cool but you can’t really tell if they have any effect or not on what stories are present.

You also have the option of seeing more or seeing no updates from certain friends. This seems like it could be more useful.

While it’s good to see that Facebook has some preference options like this, I’d really like to see something more.

There is this really cool conversation going in the blogosphere right now about real friends vs. online friends and how they’re played out in social networking applications.

Facebook has allowed you to stay in touch with more than just your close day to day friends. It has given you the power to track and keep in touch with your whole friendship ecosystem.  It allows you to keep in touch with everyone from your best friends to the person you met a conference once to your long lost friend from third grade.

The thing is for the most part all of the relationships are seen as the same in Facebook.  This makes it incredibly hard to filter out the noise and just hear the signal because you have this constant stream of everyone’s activity.

Robert Scoble has very elequently stated in some recent videos how Facebook knows who you’re close to.  They can tell you interact with, message, poke, attend events, went to school with and so on.  You think they could put in some type of automatic filter that allowed me to see my close friends more prominently then the person from the the conference who I don’t really talk to or know that well.  The thing is… they don’t have this feature.

Facebook should be using all of this activity and attention data to shape how we see the dat that is being presented to us.

Right now there is a Facebook Application where you can choose who your “Top Friends” are (which I still think is a dumb idea). I’d love to see an application which would show you who your top friends are purely based on the history of all your interactions on Facebook.

Tonight, we continue our walk through Facebook, looking at what it has to offer.

In today’s active global society, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on with all of your friends. Facebook is ingenious because its convinced users to record their social history in one central location. That social history can then be easily exposed to those that are within your social network.

Within Facebook, this was first done with by getting a very high level view of what friends had changed their profile. Later, Facebook added the ever infamous News Feed, which makes every change within a users social history available for public view. As we all knew this caused a outcry.

During the outcry, users finally started to realize the level of detail that they were exposing to their friends. Now instead of just exposing less of their social history through Facebook, users decided to just hide themselves from the News Feed. It’s entirely possible that there could be things happening with your friends that you don’t know about because all you’re doing is paying attention to the news feed.

What if I wanna expose my social activity history to some people and not to others? One of the biggest added values of Facebook is being able to see that aggregated view of your entire network’s activity. If key people are being hid, it makes it less useful. The thing is I’m forced to treat my long lost friend from 5th grade the same way I treat my best friends. There is no way you can choose who you expose information to.

I think so much could be done with the News Feed. I’d love to see it be rethought or redone.