Bloglines is still better for Power Users

Unless I’m not a Power User. But I do have 293 feeds to which I’m subscribed. I would think that’s enough to put me in the Power User category.

Maybe I just read my feeds wrong or something. Is there a disconnect between the way I like to go through my feeds and a way that would be more “efficient”? Well, technically yes. More efficient would probably involve me using the so-called River of News view, and just going through all the feeds in the order of either newest or oldest posts. I don’t really like doing that. There are feeds that are of a higher priority to me, and I like to read those before I get to other things that can wait. And I don’t like the idea of “starring” things and coming back to them. That’s never worked for me. I tried it with Gmail, and I end up just forgetting about/ignoring things.

Speaking of newest vs. oldest, am I missing something here too? I like to read the news in the order it’s printed. If there are rumors about KG being traded, I’d at least like to see those before I see the news of an actual trade. I like having that history. It also helps for reading blogs that like to refer to their earlier posts. If I’ve seen the earlier post, then I know what they’re referring to, and that would seem to be more “efficient” than having to open up the old post, scan it, and then go back to the original post, only to come across the old post later in the feed.

I can see how Newest First makes sense for bloggers who need to be on the latest tip (mostly tech and entertainment bloggers, no?) so they can write about a news item as soon as possible after it’s published. So, maybe those guys (and/or gals) are the real Power Users, and I’m just a sucker with 293 feeds.

All that aside, if Google Reader would add one little thing, it would be the best and fastest RSS Reader. I already prefer their method of opening news items* to Bloglines method**. But if you don’t want River of News, you have to use Shift+J, and then Shift+O to get to the next folder of feeds. In Bloglines, you just press “s” to get to the next subscription in the folder, and if the folder is empty it goes to the next one. Can you see where this is going?

(* Pressing “v” to open in a new background tab – I think that probably only works for Firefox, though)
(** Middle-click to open in a new background tab)

If Reader would just go to the next folder when the current one is empty, everything would be SWELL. Can’t I just “j” my way through all of my feeds? How hard would that be? It would certainly be A LOT easier for me. It’s been suggested via the Google Reader Google Group more than once.

Vertical Social Networking

This is another one of those question posing posts. The question for this post is: Is Vertical Social Networking important? Or do we just need more fine-grained privacy controls?

vs.

The question is one raised indirectly by Scott Gatz in his Keep Facebook Fun post.

I will freely admit that I’m a member of Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Oh, and Yahoo 360, for good measure. I also will admit that I was sort of faced with the same issue as Scott when I started delving into Facebook after they launched The Platform. There are some people who are not my friends on Facebook because I’d consider them business associates or contacts, and for those people, I don’t really want them to know what level I’m on for the iLike Music Challenge. I don’t really care if they read my movie reviews, but I’m not sure if I want them to see all my Twitters (this is kind of a separate issue, but my Twitters are restricted to my “friends” on Twitter, but I think that all of my friends on Facebook can see them; yet another reason not to be friends with people you aren’t really friends with on Facebook).

But, instead of having two different social networks – one for “fun” and one for “business” – couldn’t I just have one social network that will allow me to place my friends/contacts into different groups with different levels of privacy?

Flickr actually does a pretty good job of this, allowing me to have Private (only me), Family, Friends, Family+Friends, and the more generic Contacts. But the privacy is really only 3 levels deep instead of a more desirable 4. I.e., My House, Walled Garden, Public. The Walled Garden is divided into two spaces, but it would be nice to have one addition level between Walled Garden and Public. There’s some photos that I wouldn’t mind sharing with my Contacts, but I don’t want to make them public to the world. So, they remain as Friends photos, and my Contacts don’t get to see them.

Of course, as I mentioned above, wouldn’t it better to let me designate what my groups are and which groups can see what? It would certainly be better for me! I know for a fact that it’s more difficult for the programmers on the other end. How do I know? Yahoo 360. (Just for good measure, remember)

I’ve tried sharing photos on Yahoo 360, but the permissions just don’t come out right. I LOVE LOVE LOVE that they let me create my own groups and put people in as many different groups as I want. Of course, if it really worked, that would be even better. But as far as I can tell, it’s still a little buggy. I’m pretty sure that no one else has tried this approach for that very reason. It’s always going to harder code and test.

But (but!) if someone could give people a social network where all the contacts are grouped into categories that are centered around the user, wouldn’t it essentially eliminate the need for any other social network? I believe it would.

Now go build it! I’d do it, but I’m working on my America’s Next Top Model fantasy game.

One of the better days

I mean, first off, it’s Friday, and it’s 71 degrees outside.

Next, and I have to backtrack a second here, we had a tree branch break off yesterday when it was really windy. But my wife ran into a city garbage collector on the way home and asked him about it and he offered to have a friend chop it up for us and he’d haul it away. So, today, his friend showed up right at 8, and cut the branch up and put it in the alley. Then he came by this afternoon and picked up all the branches for us. Awesome.

More:

I got an offer for some more advertising on Give Me The Rock.

My wife got her teacher rating for the year. And it was a good rating.

I had my “compensation discussion” today, and it went as well as I could have realistically hoped.

I forgot about this giant fudge brownie that I’d bought on Wednesday and not eaten, and then I didn’t eat it yesterday, and it was just sitting there, waiting, knowing that today was going to be a good day.

And a small, but cool, bonus: I got this month’s copies of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Chicago magazine – the only two magazines that I actually look forward to getting (sorry GQ).

Now I’m going to a Barbeque for dinner! Hooray for Friday!

iRock at the iLike trivia game

Score: 1,005
Questions answered: 134
Correct: 103 (76.9%)
Average time: 2.9 seconds

Of course, they don’t have anything more than a friends leader board (and I only have one friend who’s played it), so I can’t really say if that is that good, but I’ll take it for now!

By sheer coincidence

Bob Lee at crazybob.org made a post yesterday listing his recent Twitterings. Funny because I’d just been wondering about the same sort of scenario.

At first I thought, what the heck is the point of using Twitter if you’re going to be posting your Twitters on your blog? Well, to attempt to answer that question, one could argue that having your Twitter feed separate from your normal blog feed means that people who like your long-form postings can subscribe to that feed and not be inundated by the constant Twitter chatter (this is a link to Bob’s Twitter page so you can see what I mean). So that’s nice for those people. But the people who want to just read everything you post now have to subscribe to two different feeds (and if they’re like me, they have to worry at least once or twice a week if the feed is updating correctly since there haven’t been any new posts lately).

But, in fact, it appears that Bob is thinking nearly the same kind of thing I’m thinking since his most recent Twitter (at the time of writing) is:

I’m starting to wonder if I should just start a high frequency blog–kind of like Dave Winer. Or maybe I should convert my existing blog.

Exactly.

The question, I guess, is: are more people going to be annoyed by having to read more, shorter, Twitter-style posts in between the longer posts that they’re more interested in? Or are more people going to just wish that you’d only have one feed for everything?

I will do some searching about this magical “meta” feed, of course, right after I finish this post. Just as I did some searching yesterday after that post and found that Facebook will import blog entries for you from any RSS feed and post them as “Notes.” So, now, everything I post here will be crossposted to Facebook automagically. For the meta-feed, though, I’m imagining something that will include public Flickr photos integrated as well. But then the question still remains, will people want to see somewhat random photos just appearing in my feed whenever I happen to upload them, mixed in with the .plan posts as well as the more-than-one-paragraph posts? Or is it just better to have 3 separate feeds for photos, twitters, and posts, and let people subscribe to whatever they choose?

Another potential solution – perhaps the easiest for everyone – would be to add a “post” or “longform” category to this blog, and make sure that all posts that are not twitter-like in nature are included in that category. WordPress is nice enough to create feeds for each category, so anyone who wanted to get only the posts without the twitterpations, could subscribe to that category and get what they wanted without all the other stuff. To provide for the eventuality that this idea becomes the implemented solution, I have added said “Longform” category now, and this is that category’s inaugural post.

Twitter me this

Why is it that with Twitter, I feel like I can post just about every though that comes to mind (at least while I’m sitting in front of my computer and don’t feel like I’m going to annoy my Twitter friends), but when it comes to “actual”, “real” blogging, I feel like there has to be something to say, or something to talk about, or some point to make?

I mean, there are certain things I can say on Twitter that I probably wouldn’t here, since my Twitter feed is only viewable by my Twitter friends, and I can control who my friends are, so I know who is going to see what I write.

But something like “How is it 3:23 already?” could just as well be available to whole world (and still no one would care). Of course, I don’t want to start something along the lines of having to crosspost to Twitter, Facebook (cause those two aren’t quite integrated enough yet), and my blog. That would be the ultimate waste of time, and futile effort in futility. On the other hand, something I could do would be to add a category like “Twit” or “Snips” or “.plan” to this blog, and let people who want those shorty posts subscribe to that tag/category. I’m fairly sure the related statistics would blow your mind. In a “why is he still talking about this?” sort of way.

The problem then becomes that, on the surface, this blog seems to be more of a one way street of communication, where as Twitter feels much more like a two-way, albeit asynchronous, communication. Of course, I’m already to subscribed to a couple separate feeds of info that come from my Twitter friends, in addition to their Twitter feeds, so really, perhaps it only seems like more of a two-way communication because of the framework that Twitter has put in place.

Following that, though, is the ability to post from Twitter via cell phone (though I haven’t actually done that yet), and also via IM. The same applies to the ability to receive Twitter chatter via cell phone (again, haven’t done that) and via IM (which I do, and enjoy, but by which I am sometimes annoyed). Furthermore is the integration (weak though it is) of Twitter with Facebook (with which I am currently totally obsessed). I do see, though, that someone is working on a wordpress app for Facebook that would make posts show up in the Mini-Feed. If that worked, then posting “twits” to my blog would essentially eliminate the need to post them to either Twitter or Facebook. Perhaps I can get in touch with the developer of that plug-in and help him along with it.

And while this post may have appeared to decide nothing, it does serve as the birthplace of the .plan category.