Deep Jive Interests » Asides

Better Question: Would a Social Media Revolt “Matter” If Nothing Was Remedied?

Tony Hung — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:32:59 +0000

Ben Parr asks “Why Social Media Revolts Take Place”, and goes through the usual places (crib notes: they do something that seriously cheeses its users, obviously visible in hindsight). I think the better question is “what would have happened if said sites didn’t cave to their users?” Hulu, Facebook, Twitter (and, say Digg) all generate controversy when a “revolt” takes place in part because there are enough users to create a fuss. They’re also so category-defining, and more importantly, contain critical numbers of individuals per network to matter, that I would wager, most people *couldn’t* switch even if they wanted to. That’s not to say there aren’t alternatives, but a) some of them are not better (in fact most are not) and b) there’s a cost to switching if you’re entire network is on an existing network.

Twitter As Real Time Search? Very Awesome.

Tony Hung — Sat, 16 May 2009 21:17:36 +0000

Last morsel of a half baked thought: I know you know, but I wanted to write this down any way. Twitter as a search for real time events is absolutely unparalleled. For events that are happening right now — as in the past few minutes, hours or even days, there’s nothing that touches it. You can’t count on Google, because by its nature Google indexes web pages — and doesn’t quite rank Twitters high enough for topical queries. For events, for example, that are particularly ephemeral and idiosyncratic, no one may find it important enough to write a post / article / web page on. That’s besides the fact that it takes time to write. And time to index. On Twitter people are yakking about all manner of things. The 140 characters allow people to easily communicate on tons of things, also including the ephemeral and idiosyncratic. And it happens instantly. Example? Blinksale.com is down. Wondering if anyone else had noticed. Google can’t tell me anything substantive. Even if I shorten by time period. Or narrow by Blogsearch. But Twitter has. Awesome :)

Joost on the iPhone: Luxuriate in its Deliciousness

Tony Hung — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:01:33 +0000

Not much else to say, other than it is slick and delicious, and unfortuantely only available using Wi-Fi. I’ll be honest. I haven’t checked out Joost in months (years?), and they’ve boosted their line up considerably. Full length movies? Check. Anime? Check. Music Videos? Check. Downsides? Totally unconfirmed reports (i.e. me) suggest that it drains the hell out of the iPhone’s battery (a two hour movie may not last two hours, if you know what I mean). Other than that, to quote the immortal Cory Booker — I think a ton of people are going to luxuriating in the Joost deliciousness … and since people from all over the world aren’t banned from using it (cue in Hulu, and even some iPhone apps, like Pandora or AOL Radio), Joost just boosted itself back into the limelight for a whole bunch of people.

Three Things I Love About WordPress 2.6

Tony Hung — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:39:24 +0000

If you’re a user of WordPress, you should probably always upgrade when a new version comes out for security reasons. However, with the new release of WordPress 2.6, there are three features that really stand out for me — in addition to the security enhanced goodness and all the other new stuff, that is — and these are “versioning”, the way they’ve cleaned up the plugin page, and “turbo”. The latter two things are small, but they’ve meant a great deal to me, in terms of my work flow {“Turbo”, of course, refers to WordPress installations now using Google Gears to speed things up (it is now pretty snappy)}. “Versioning”, however, is a really nice feature, which allows you to go back to different draft versions at WordPress is automatically saving drafts. If you find that you do think about and revise posts repeatedly (as I sometimes do), it gives you a lot of lattitude to recover thoughts and ‘forks’ in your arguments that you may have deleted and want to get back to.

Addendum: One extra cool thing is that when you browse themes, and click on a theme, WordPress 2.6 previews that theme with your current content “configuration” of pages, posts and so on (and literally, the content in your WordPress database). Very slick.

Who Almost Has As Many RSS Subscribers As TechCrunch?

Tony Hung — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:17:26 +0000

I guess its debatable about whether the number of RSS subscribers is a useful metric. Now that we’ve all acknowledged that it *might* be debatable, here’s a tiny bit of techblogger mind candy for you to enjoy — know which tech-related blog that almost has the same number of subscribers as TechCrunch? I should add at the time of writing, TechCrunch has a mindboggling 900K subscribers. Mashable? Nope — Rizzn’ et al. have around 185K. BoingBoing? Nah. Cory, Violet Xeni and co have around 600k. Answer: TechDirt. Mike Masnick and friends have been tirelessly working to provide insight, and don’t seem to be as much of a fixture on Techmeme as they were, say, a few years ago. Number of subscribers? 829k. Bravo! In other bet-you-didn’t-know-they-were-RSS-giants news, a recipe site called Simply Recipes outweighs Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch, coming in at 1.1M subscribers. The gorilla-king? Engadget, at 1.8M subscribers.

Running Adsense? Do You Have A Privacy Policy? (You Need One Now)

Tony Hung — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:48:02 +0000

As per Jensense, the place for all things Adsense, if you’re running Adsense, you may have noticed that updated Terms of Service they made you sign over the past few weeks. Buried in all that dense text was something about having a mandatory privacy policy — something I admittedly glossed over. Jensense has a sample template that you can use (which I did). If you haven’t created one, go ahead and use this one, because Adsense now requires you to have it.

* Will Diggers Leave If Digg Is Acquired By Microsoft?

Tony Hung — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:05:22 +0000

… and what about Google? I think there’s one intangible that not enough people are yammering about with respect to new rumours that Digg maybe bought out — and that is, what happens to the community? These are either geeks are geek wannabe’s that make up the Community at large (large “c”), irrespective of how active they’re engaged with the community. I think a large part of what makes Digg attractive is not only its content, but its Brand — its independent, laissez-faire, pro-Geek, Linux/Apple-loving streak that is rooted in its founder, Kevin Rose. If he goes, and its sold to Microsoft, will Digg lose its cred? Peering at the comments over at Digg, one wonders if that might be the case. If that perception happens (and that’s all that matters: perception), what will happen to Digg thereafter? Could being acquired by Microsoft be the thing that does Digg in? Well, I guess we’ll all find out soon enough (if these new rumours are to be believed). Interesting question — would the community act as strongly if Google acquired it?