Stowe Boyd has an extensive post titled, “Efficiency v Belonging: The Real Heart of Social Tools” where he proposes that many of the critics of social tools are chasing a red herring when they claim social tools do not improve personal productivity. Stowe correctly points out that this “lynch mob” is barking up the wrong tree.
Social tools were never really designed to improve productivity or efficiency (some may in fact do so), but instead he suggests that social tools “are about social involvement, learning and enlarging perspectives through connection…”
My favorite social tools (that don’t save me time) include: Upcoming.org, Wikipedia and Flickr. Why? They help me stay connected. In the case of Yahoo’s Upcoming and Flickr, they help me connect to a small group of people who I care about. In the case of Wikipedia it helps me stay connected to the world. Just ask my wife if adding pictures to Flickr help me save time…
Posted by amuse | September 1, 2006 - 11:05am | 2 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: adaptivepath, flickr, Social Media, socialtools, wikipedia
I wrote about Upcoming a while back in a post titled, “My Favorite Social Tools: Upcoming” and I am pleased to announce that Upcoming is getting better. Yahoo has announced they have added a number of new features including:
- Undiscovered Events: now Yahoo! Local events are automatically included in metros in an effort to kick-start slow moving metros like Dallas.
- Event Filters: making RSS or iCal feeds better.
- Flickr Photos for Events: add your upcoming tag for an event to a flickr photo and Flickr will auto add a link back to the Upcoming page and vice versa.
- Buddy Icons: I could care less, but if you are excited about using your Flickr buddy icon on Upcoming – woot! you are going to be happy.
- New Events Pages
- New User Experience
Posted by amuse | August 29, 2006 - 8:45am | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: Feeds, flickr, rss, Social Media, socialtools
Our team is working more and more with companies seeking to launch wikis in their businesses (internal and external wikis). This summer we spent some time with the Socialtext guys in our effort to recommend and support the best products available to our cliens. Joshua Porter pointed out that Apple might be a direction our team needed to explore. Boy, was he dead on!
Apple is now making push into social tools such as wikis. With their new wiki server as described by Apple:
“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�
Of course the wiki server is only one great social tool included in Leopard. Others include iCal calendar sharing (say goodbye to Exchange?), iChat screen sharing and social iTunes. Oh, and of course Apple is going to allow “teams” to turn on these features. Apple explaines:
“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�
Posted by amuse | August 15, 2006 - 6:25am | 2 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: apple, joshuaporter, Social Media, socialtools, wiki
I started with Flickr, clearly “The best way to store, search, sort and share your photos” and now I am ready to show you Upcoming. Both Flickr and Upcoming were bought by Yahoo and are great examples of social tools that work for me.
What: Upcoming is a social event calendar website that uses iCalendar and XML for content syndication. You can compare it to Evite (please stop using that service). What makes Upcoming so important is the ability for users to build connections between each other. For example, one of my contacts was attending an event called STIRR 1.5. I knew this because my friends events are listed on “My Upcoming” page. I clicked to see what Kristie was up to and found out that STIRR 1.5 was, “STIRR Mixers are blend of tech-social mixer and launchpad for new startups in an innovative format (the 60 second spot).” Neat, I should go to that so I clicked “Attend this event.” I was added to the event and then receieved an email from one of my contacts confirming that I would be there so that we could meet. He doesn’t know Kristie Wells, the contact that allowed me to discover the event in the first place, but he does know me. Kristie would have never thought to invite him, but now he will be coming.
Why: You can view events through your contacts or by metros. I have four metros setup on my account: Dallas, Austin, San Francisco and Miami. I can see public events in each metro regardless of whether or not a contact of mine is going. If I see an event that I am interested in I might click “watch event” instead of attend. Often one or more of my contacts will ping me to see if I am going, more often than not I am more interested in going if there are going to be people I know at the event. See how this works?
To Do: Sign up for an Upcoming account and add me as a contact. Check out my events or check out your metro. Start “watching” or “attending” a few events. Have fun!
Posted by amuse | July 31, 2006 - 1:00pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: Social Media, socialtools
More of you need to start using social tools so I decided to start a little series of posts called My Favorite Social Tools. I will start off with Flickr. Wow what a great tool. I have been a paid user since July of 2005 (I only know this because I had to renew my account the other day). At first I did not understand why Flickr was so great, but as the number of people I met from around the world added me as a Flickr contact I understood the value of Flickr. Let me start with the basics:
What: Flickr is a social picture sharing site started in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The best feature of flickr is the ability to add one or more “tags” to each photograph added to the site. Why is this so powerful? Take me for example: I have more than 8,000 photos on Flickr and finding a specific picture would be impossible if it were not for the tagging function. Each time I added a photo of my son I used the tag ethanmuse, that helps me narrow my search to just photos of him. But I have more than 1,000 photos of my favorite little guy, but good news, I used other tags such as soccer to describe the photos in greater detail. So I use the advanced search feature and search for photos of ethanmuse and soccer and find his soccer photos. You get the idea. Ethan’s Grandmother can search my photos for her tag (bethmuse) and Ethan’s tag to find photos containing both her and my son. Neat huh?
For Networking: I live in Dallas, Texas, but I have met lots of people on the West coast that I want to keep in touch with. It is hard to stay in touch with people you don’t see more than once or twice a year. More often than not I don’t have anything to say, certainly not anything worthy of an email or an IM, but I want to stay connected. Each day when I log into Flickr I am presented with the most recent picture added by each of my contacts. Usually five or six of my contacts has added a new picture each time I log in, so I open each photo in a browser tab. If the photo is comment worthly I might just make a note. Why? Why do you say hi in the hall when you walk by someone? It is a good way to say, “hey I am interested in you and your life, thanks for sharing it with me.” I know I love it when someone comments on one of my photos. Earlier this year I went to India and met almost 200 programmers and business people, many of whom have Flickr accounts. I have been able to stay connected to them from across the globe with pictures.
For Business: Back in April I wrote a posted titled, “Flickr as PR Tool…EyeFi” and wrote, “Got a great new product? Want to get a lot of people to see it? Get a power user on Flickr to take a picture of it. Scott Beale, also known as Laughing Squid, is a well know photographer. In fact, he may be the second most ‘internet famous’ photographer (Thomas Hawk is perhaps the most famous). So if you are going to create a product for photographers call up Scott and get him to take a picture of it. That is exactly what the Yuval Koren, the guy behind Eye-Fi, did. What is Eye-Fi? An SD memory card that will turn your camera into a wi-fi camera – no more USB cable. This is going to be huge! And Yuval, by simply showing it to one of the best know ‘internet famous’ photographer is getting his product in front of thousands of people who WILL buy the Eye-Fi. Very smart. More on Gizmodo here.” Check out Scott’s eyefi flickr pics.
To Do: Okay get a Flickr account right away. Add me as a contact, add a photo, tag it with a couple of tags (be specific) and lets start being social. You can setup your phone to send photos directly to Flickr (lots of people do it). You can use your photos to make books, prints, calenders and so on. Have fun!
Posted by amuse | July 31, 2006 - 8:18am | 2 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: flickr, Social Media, socialtools
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