TweetDeck Is The Cleaner Simpler Facebook

TweetDeck is a much used, much beloved Twitter client that you could say has branched out in to being a social client. Yes it still does twitter but they've added support for Facebook, Google Buzz and Foursquare. In particular the Facebook functionality takes you out of that now ad laiden, cluttered Facebook interface and gives you the nice clean columns and blocks you are used to with your Twitter account. With the right set of columns and search terms you can re-create almost the entire Facebook environment with out the annoying crap. The only thing that doesnt come across are direct messages and real time IM but beyond that you can do status updates and a single post to most or all of your networks(depending on what you use). In addition the web version high lights the associated color to the account. Facebook and Foursquare are Blue, Twitter is Grey and Google Buzz is Red. So if you are tired of all the crap on facebook but don't want to leave those friends behind try using TweetDeck to unclutter your social networks.

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Why the Telegraph & Twitter Are Full of Crap

So a hot topic this morning has my blood boiling. Now usually this is just because Mashable posts something ridiculous, most times some Apple loving spew. I'd like to think I keep my temper in check. I usually vent by posting some kind of overtly logical comment, reaping a few "likes" on Disqus and then moving on to something more useful like writing for Teknami. This morning the level of blind ridiculousness hit a new level when several, supposedly, respectable social media personalities were re-tweeting a story from the UK's Telegraph news paper found here that says, only in its title, that more Indians have cell phones than there are toilets.

The first issue is that no where in the article does it quote what the title states. Second there is no link or statement of any kind to back this up. Even the quotation used from the UN individual doesn't include a statement to that effect. The UN individual does state a total sum of money that is needed to meet UN sanitation targets for India but beyond that there is no indication that more phones exist than toilets.

Like wise if we use a little logic and know a little history it's pretty obvious communication has always been more valuable than sanitation. Just pulling a few broad examples. Pheidippides was a greek messenger more interested with delivering the message than stopping to shower up. I have to imagine he also wizzed all over and probably dropped a duce along the way. From the Wikipedia entry:

The legend states that he was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated in the Battle of Marathon (in which he had just fought),^[3] which took place in August or September, 490 BC.^[4] It is said that he ran the entire distance without stopping and burst into the assembly, exclaiming "Νενικήκαμεν" (Nenikékamen, 'We have won.') before collapsing and dying.

 Like wise sailors through out history have gone with out proper sanitation to deliver reports of war, plague, famine and all sorts of other things back to their hiring parties. Are we all freaked out because soldiers routinely deal with high tech equipment like ROV vehicles, weapons and all sorts of technical toys even though they go weeks at a time in the field with nothing more than wet wipe showers and no toilets. Not so much. The point is the two things are totally unrelated and yet some how this is considered news. Are we seriously so bored with ourselves that we have to literally make crap up?

To top it off the old fashioned news paper style of writing what you want and ignoring the consumer/customer is still holding strong with no method to comment on the sorry excuse for a story. There by shoving this garbage down our throats. When are we as citizens of the internet going to start worrying about the sanitation of the net? Internet garbage like this seems to be piling up!

P.S. In what I thought would be a cute turn of play I borrowed the post image from the telegraph. What was more amusing was finding that that Telegraph apparently has a sort of potty mouth. The image came from an article about Britons tweeting or surfing on the toilet.

Social Networking: Out not In

Image via Wikipedia

Unlike a lot of people on the internet I'm not going to claim to be some sort of social media guru or consultant or what ever BS word people like to attach to themselves to try to garner some sort of authoritative position. I will say I'm a long time geek with a proven track record of, more or less, knowing what the heck I'm talking about. I use Twitter and Blogger and Facebook and I read websites like Mashable. I also take an interest in sociology and psychology and the way things and people work. More importantly how they work together. UI's, work flows, interfaces all the stuff that puts most people to sleep in 3 minutes.

This brings me to talk about context and "the social graph". I hate that term but that aside it's what folks in the social media market use. As I'm sure most have experienced if you go to a social website and "like" something or go to a market website and look at something majority of the time you get adverts and links for more of the same. Amazon is a prime example. Go look at TVs. When you come back to your home page on amazon you'll have a giant list of TVs. This is a prime example of in. This is starting at the outside edge of your social graph. What did you look at? Ok now lets find more of that. The software either moves inwards on your social graph or doesnt move at all. Shouldn't these systems be helping you to discover new things, new people and new products instead of telling you what you all ready knew? You all ready know you want a TV so you'll be searching for them, researching them and looking for the best price. Throwing a hand full of random TVs at you isn't really helpful. Like wise if you were just recently searching for a TV you might want to know about either types of TVs different from the ones you were looking at or other devices that are TV related but not exactly TVs per say. Like Boxee or something.

In terms of things like Facebook it's more about whats most relevant vs. whats most popular. Unfortunately children are popular with most of the crowd my age. They post all kinds of things about their kids. While it's most popular I've marked my profile as being single and yet my "top news" is still dominated by what kind of poop some ones kid took last night. All this shows a lack of context building on the part of the social networks. I all ready know all my friends have kids. I'm sitting at the same point on my social graph with this information or moving in to the social graph of married friends instead of moving out in to meet new people singles land.

I'm not claiming I have all the answers. I'm sure building these networks isn't easy but as I look at the churn that happens in my information, in the recommendations that happen on my social network sites. I keep looking at what appears to be a mirror. They keep telling me what I all ready did or urging me to look at more of what I all ready have. Please for the love of all that is good give me useful, interesting, new information instead of letting me know I looked at TVs. That, in fact, did JUST HAPPEN!

Video Game Blogging From Inside The Game

Those who have been using Steam as their gaming platform of choice will know about a little built in feature called the browser. It isn't your average browser. It's actually integrated in to Steam's in game interface which over lays what ever game you happen to be playing at the time. It isn't very fancy, it doesn't support tabs or even a right click menu. It does however support javascript and most of the functionality of Google's web apps. This includes mail and Google Docs. That last one is what I wanted to focus on in this post.

Steam plus Google Docs makes a wonderful platform for writing about games. More specifically writing reviews that some times require using names and places specific to the game that are easy to find when you are playing but not as easy when you are searching the web. A simple two button combination switches between live game play and your word processor. What could be better for writing about such dynamic content as games?

You also have access to the IM and chat client built in so you can bounce your ideas off your gamer friends. As well as get input and feedback on what you've all ready written. You can use it to get quotes to add some spice to your write up. Community and game groups also give you some data and statistics on how many people are playing a particular game which is also very useful. So many wonderful uses for the system!

Of course it doesn't have be limited to Google docs and I could see this being useful in quite a few ways. Blogging is another similar use of the system. Simply fire up your web based blogging interface and you are set to go. Twitter would be another great use for it. Tweet your clan matches or LAN party games as they happen. You can even use Pandora radio to give your game an alternate sound track. What other crazy things can you come up with to use the steam built in browser for?

Look Later: Seesmic Look Follow-up

I wrote an initial look at the new Seesmic Look sporting a little Metro interface action. You can read that here. This is the follow up to that. I've been running Seesmic Look on all my computers since I wrote that initial post. I love the look, layout and balance between features and functionality. There are just a few small issues that have been nagging me and hopefully as Look iterates these will be addressed.

The first thing is the re-tweet function. In every other client re-tweeting copied the original tweet to a new tweet field and you could edit or add to the re-tweet. This does not exist in Look. It's an exact dupe or nothing. Kind of a curious usability decision on the part of Seesmic and it's a little disappointing to not be able to add several extra exclamation marks to emphasize how awesome something is. The fix here is obvious. Make the field editable.

The second issue I've had is another usability issue and not a technical one. The issue is with readability and scrolling. It's hard to explain the issue here. When scrolling you can only use the function icons(reply, retweet, DM) the tweet that is at the top of the column. While it isn't hard to tell where the top of the column is often its hard to tell that the scroll has taken place to get the tweet you want at the top of the column because the tweet below it may be similar or have the same sort of sentence structure as the one you were after. This is as much an issue with the graphics that frame the tweets as it is with the scrolling. The fix here is less obvious and would probably require some trial and error. Possibly changing the outline word bubble graphic around which ever tweet is at the top of the column might help. Like wise may be just a change in font size for the "selected", or top of the column, tweet would help distinguish it from the rest. I think it would also be helpful if the scrolling was a little smoother.

While it isn't the most feature rich client around it's certainly one of the easiest to look at and fun to actually use. I highly recommend it for the casual twitter user.

Look Seesmic Look

Seesmic Look is the newest Twitter client on the block coming from the creators of the original Seesmic Twitter client. It's also one of the first real life, on your desktop examples of Microsoft's Metro interface. This seems to me to kind of come out of left field but I'm not going to complain.

The layout and app is definitely a beautiful thing. There are two themes, a dark and a light, that are both equally beautiful and easy to read. It's not hard to figure out lists that slide out of the way as the next one comes in to view. It also has a hint of comic book charm with it's word bubbles and big soft edged fonts. If you can apply the word charming to software this app would be the one to use it with.

As for functionality it isn't a power users app. There is support for all the standard functionality that you would expect from virtually any Twitter app all of which is easily accessible. The few additional features seem aimed at the newcomer to twitter who might not recognize who the go to people are on twitter. This is broken down in to interest categories which then break down to individual twitter accounts of famous people, sites or groups. Along the same lines are trends which as the title implies is a list of whats trending and a brief explanation of each. Again nothing earth shattering but if you don't need a ton of features and you like pretty things then this is definitely for you.