Puffbox

About a month ago, I wrote that I didn’t ‘get’ Facebook. But given the hype surrounding it, particularly in the media sector (as Sky’s Simon Bucks rightly points out), I’ve persevered – and it’s starting to make sense.

Facebook is absolutely nothing without its sociability. As I noted before, most of its actual content-based functionality is done better elsewhere. But it does the sociability thing better than anything I’ve ever seen. The ability to see the minutiae of everyone’s daily activity is addictive: so much so, that I’ve even set up the RSS feed in my desktop sidebar for a nigh-on real time view. There’s an undeniable thrill at being able to look through other people’s contact lists, to see if there are any names or faces you recognise. Plus of course, with so many users worldwide, it’s fun to see how many people out there share your name… and precisely what they look like.

As time goes on, I’m steadily reaching the unexpected conclusion that Facebook might actually be the app which brings RSS to the masses. IE7 hasn’t had the impact I expected. I’ve been using Vista for just under 24 hours, and I’m surprised that it didn’t force RSS upon me. Only Google Reader seems to have made a big splash in terms of ‘specialist’ applications. And then there’s Facebook.

So many of Facebook’s third-party applications are actually just consuming RSS (or something close to it) from other sources. And unlike most RSS usage scenarios, signing up to Facebook is a doddle. Even better, the first thing you see when you join Facebook is a bunch of your friends, particularly if you don’t mind it scanning your address book. Far more welcoming than a bunch of generic feeds that you probably aren’t at all interested in.

And crucially it’s the publisher (rather than the reader) who takes on responsibility for the RSS subscription process: I’ve imported the details of my blog, my Flickr account and my Jaiku account, all of which now feed into my Facebook stream. By signing up as my friend, you effectively sign up for RSS alerts from all my personal sources.

I’ve been using the web since early 1994. I still remember most of the ‘eureka!’ moments. The last one was when I realised how reliant I was on RSS feeds. Given the number of times I ‘just drop by’ Facebook at the moment, I’m wondering if this might be one in the making.

Quick update: as if to prove my point – the first example I’ve seen of (effectively) an RSS feed applet for a specific site. Techcrunch, inevitably.

Our little ‘NewsMap’ application attracted more attention than we ever expected, and must faster than we could ever have imagined. I’m really grateful for the complimentary references and links from people like Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis… and I’m sorry we didn’t have anything more tangible we could show people. But we do now.

The NewsMap demo site shows most (but not yet all) of the application’s functionality, including most notably the interaction between map and sequential sidelist (which you won’t have seen on the initial Sky News examples). So if you click on the first item in the sidelist, you’ll see a ‘forward’ arrow linking to item #2 in the sequence, and so on. This, to me, is the killer function: allowing me to tell a story, from start to finish, based on geographic points. (To use Dan Gillmor’s phrase, it allows you to tell a story that moves in space.)

I mentioned we were working on a polygon feature: that work is now complete, and is being tested to within an inch of its life. Mapmakers will be able to draw any number of coloured polygons on the map, by clicking to fix the corners. Click three times, and you get a triangle. Click a fourth time, and it becomes a rectangle. (And so on.) We don’t propose to allow an on/off function for the end-user, although I assume it’s feasible.

Please do try the demo, and let me know what you think. I’ve set up a special feedback form over at puffbox.com, or feel free to use the comments facility on my wordpress.com blog.

Yes, for real this time – Alastair Campbell has taken up blogging. He’s writing ‘the diary of the diary’ as part of the website promoting his forthcoming diaries. I only saw him up close a couple of times, but on both occasions he was truly awesome. For all the criticism he took from the Westminster Village hacks, then and still, they were absolutely under his spell. The blog is actually quite a good read, and bodes well for the diary itself itself.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=w1RUf5KrCYg]

The forthcoming Turkish general election hasn’t really found its way on to my radar, to be honest. But it should be interesting to see how Ben Hammersley uses the new distribution channels (YouTube, Flickr, etc) to tell ‘the story of the story’. Actually, I wonder if the Turkish thing is just an excuse for doing the rest? (Interesting to see him billing himself on YouTube as simply ‘journalist’, by the way.)

It’s probably fair for the University of Maryland to put Sky News bottom of its rankings of ‘openness and accountability (among) 25 of the world’s top news sites’. A quick skim of its website won’t find a lot in the way of corporate documentation, or corrections notices. But having worked there, I can assure you it’s not down to any kind of unwillingness on the part of the team, or any secretive activity. It’s a tiny team, something like a dozen staff compared to the hundreds at their rivals, trying to do a full-scale news production effort with (until very recently) little credibility among the ‘proper’ production staff on the TV side. But now they’ve got some senior people taking more of an interest… and they’ve got Puffbox on board. 😉

Over on the BT Business blog, we’re running a short video clip from last week’s webcast on the subject of social networking. I can’t help noticing that although the panel managed to reach a consensus on what ‘web 2.0’ is, they couldn’t actually agree on how to say it.

One said ‘web two point oh’, which – I have to say – is my own personal preference. One said ‘web two point zero’. One said ‘web two oh’. One said ‘web two dot oh’. Four panellists, four pronunciations. (Oh, and a couple of my own clients are currently favouring the rather terse ‘web two’.)

We talk about ‘word of mouth’ marketing. Looks to me like the spread of the ‘web 2.0’ ethos has been entirely via the written, rather than the spoken word.

As exclusively revealed here last week (er, as far as I know) – Mark Mardell is the latest senior BBC journalist to take up blogging. He’s been writing a weekly ‘diary’ column on the BBC website for ages, and sought readers’ opinions on whether to stick with that format, or switch over to a proper blog. The practical difference is pretty minimal, with Mark even promising to keep up his practice of a ‘regular column’ on a Thursday. (Thanks to Aaron for the tipoff.)

Having been stung for international SMS messages when using Twitter, I’ve found the perfect alternative: using Nokia’s rather fantastic Widsets application instead. Widsets is (basically) a widget platform for mobile phones, which means (even more basically) little RSS feed applications for selected websites, some with extra functionality. In this case, it’s a mini-Twitter app which lets you see other people’s updates, and post your own from your mobile – crucially, using your data connection rather than SMS. So if you’re on the right tariff, you can update as much as you like, at zero extra cost.

Or indeed, don’t use Twitter at all – use Jaiku instead. I wasn’t overly impressed by Jaiku’s own application for the Series60 mobile phone OS. But their Widset app is much more like it! The ability to ‘mash up’ feeds from other places makes it much better in my book… and besides, we Europeans should stick up for each other. 🙂

I’ve just installed the new public beta of Apple’s Safari browser on my Windows PC. It works, it looks like a Mac app, and it seems pretty quick. Will I be switching from Firefox? Er, no. And I can’t imagine many others doing so either, speed boost or no speed boost. I’ve yet to discover anything I’d consider (a) innovative and (b) worth having. I’ll keep it installed, but probably only for testing purposes. It’ll be nice to know something works on a Mac, rather than just assuming so. Although we’d have had that same benefit if, say, Apple had embraced Firefox (or Camino) as its default browser…?