FeedsBeyond Facebook, Finally
It's no surprise that I, and others, have grown exceedingly tired of Facebook. To that end, I have been searching for the Next Worthwhile Social Network. It looks like Google is on the verge of providing something like that. It's about damn time.
From my understanding, it's going to be more massive amounts of integration between all of Google's services and less a simple social networking site. From the Techcrunch article:
The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader. Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your search history. Overtime, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.
I don't know about you, but I'm excited about it.
However, I'm also impatient, so last night James and I started playing around a bit with Orkut. It's nice, responsive, and completely full of foreigners.
The bigger challenge for Google in the U.S. is Orkut itself. While there may be 24.6 million monthly visitors to Orkut worldwide, only 500,000 of those are here in the U.S., according to comScore. Cool social apps aren’t much good if none of your friends use them.
It's also a very different approach from Facebook and is requiring some getting used to. To find somebody, the easiest way is to simply try and invite their gmail address (in the bottom left hand side). It'll say "This person is already an Orkut member, want to add them as a friend?" rather than trying the tedious search. There are also different degrees of friendship that you can set a person as. I definitely approve of that.
In general, right now Orkut is cool, and less annoying than Facebook. It also has more potential, I think. Again, though, Facebook annoys me.
Soon, once Google begins their megaintegrationawesome plans, it should be amazing.
Stumble It!We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options,
try reading the
wikipedia article or the
official style guide.
Comments
Comments from site editors have a darker background than comments from everybody else.That sounds absurd and awesome. But what about all my facebook friends? My photo albums, of which I have 71, many with 60 photos. That's entirely too many to move.
But I love Google, and everything they do, so at the very least I'll give it the old just graduated from Reed College try. Which means I'll look at it lazily, think about getting Maka Maka, and be jealous of the small percentage of my friends that actually have Maka Maka.
But in all seriousness, that looks cool.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
If you upload all your photos up to Flickr, then you can put in your flickr latest photos feed and your friends can see them. Or, use Picasa Web Sharing, or whatever that is - that's integrated too.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
Now that the old folks have infected Facebook, you kids want to move on, is that it? This may be one of those generational things, but I still haven't seen the enormous benefits of social networking. The imperative to put everything into one place has a certain philosophical satisfaction--the unified field theory of human connections--but it doesn't seem to actually buy me anything. But I'll watch and learn.
Here's another generational thing: doesn't that kind of integration of Google research about you, us, them, give you the heebie jeebies? Somehow I trust the bumbling feds a lot more than I do the tech whizzes at Google.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
I guess I've never seen any benefits to social networking sites that rely simply upon friends and whatnot. There is a benefit when you need to look up somebody's information - cell phone number, whatever - or just when you want to get to know somebody more in general, but overall it's.. hmm.. what's the term I'm looking for... entirely useless.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
To be fair, Orkut is full of old people, especially people in the United States.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
All four of them.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
I've found facebook to be a great way to find out about events (okay, mostly lame parties at Reed), contact information for different people, a way to more easily stay in touch with what my friends in other states are doing, and there are other small things like playing Scrabble against my twin brother who is all the way across the country. There's an easy to use facebook app for that.
But the biggest use of facebook for me, is photography. It allows me to distribute photos quickly and easily among people I know, to gain a reputation as actually being a "photographer". I've had a lot of people "Friend" me, meet me, or otherwise hear about me because of photography and how facebook allowed me to more easily give access to lots of people.
Hell, without facebook inflicting my meager photo attempts on others, people encouraging me to take more photos of them, go to their games, and the like, I would not have pursued photography as a hobby to the extent that I have today. For me it is a highly appreciated skill at two internships, and a source of income and pride.
Facebook may not be incredibly useful, discounting stalking people and spamming every cute girl you can find on Myspace/facebook/etc. Facebook and similar it can help satisfy the average person's need to be social involved and connected, which is a very powerful drive in most people. While it may not dominate a person's life, social interaction definitely is a necessity for most people.
Unless you're Michael. In which case the consistent week day trips to the bars for Dirty Martinis, Zeppelins, and Midori Sours fills that void.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
To be fair, Orkut is full of old people, especially people in the United States.
Old people! Excellent, social networking for geezers. Maybe that's what I need.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.