Monthly Archives: October 2005

Furl: Help! I Can’t Take It Anymore!

Update: I just had a good conversation on the phone with the CTO of LookSmart, the parent company of Furl. He was very responsive and interested in this and other feedback. I am excited to see some changes that he says are coming up.

I have used Furl.net as my social bookmarking and archiving service for as long as I’ve known such things existed. But I am fed up. The following is an email I sent to Furl tonight. In the past they’ve responded to about 50% of my emails, but never the ones that address these issues in particular. So we’ll see if they respond. I hope they do. I hope they tell me “we were just about to start doing everything in an awesome new way that reflects the best of what the new web has to offer.” Otherwise I’m going to be exploring my bookmark-exporting options here in a hury. I know I’ve been complaining a lot lately, and I don’t intend to focus on criticisms, but this is important to me.

For more info, see my Furl archives on Social Bookmarking and Tagging.

To: Furl@furl.net
Subject: Help! I Can’t Take It Anymore!

Dear Furl feedback, I have been a vocal advocate for Furl for some
time now. I teach all my web 2.0 consulting clients to use Furl. I
push for the inclusion of Furl in every tag-based attention stream I
find. I post comments to other peoples’ blogs about how great Furl is.
I’ve had Furl in my email sig for the last 6 months. I used to
advocate for Furl almost every day. But I can’t take it anymore.
Where is your blog? Where can I read about what you were thinking
with your recent UI changes? WHY has “Furl news” on your front page
and RSS not been updated for 3 months?

Most importantly, what were you thinking when you changed your UI and
failed to change your awful “topic” option?? You’re a social
bookmarking service – everyone uses tagging now. Why is the default a
single “topic” and why does the drop-down SHRINK when I select
multiple for multiple topics? Have none of you ever looked at
del.icio.us? Or Spurl or anyone else out there? I just broke a
minute ago when I wanted to Furl an AJAX enabled, web-app word
processor (itself a genre that’s becoming cliche.) I wanted to TAG it
word_processor AJAX web_apps but it was such a pain in the ass I had
to write you this email instead. It would have been a breeze, fun
even, with del.icio.us.

I have stayed with you for several reasons, but primarily because of
your cache of each page I Furl. That is wonderful but it’s not worth
it anymore. Del.icio.us is catching up to you in feature set (where’s
the Furl API?).

Please help me out. I want to stay with Furl. I want your service to
be usable to me and the rest of the world. But it feels less so every
day.

Sincerely,
Marshall Kirkpatrick (username:marshallkirkpatrick)


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Check out my new website at http://marshallk.com

Training and consulting in new tools for effective web use.
Research, communication, promotion – for individuals, organizations
and small businesses.
RSS, Search, Blogs, Wikis, Folksonomy, Podcasting and more.

See my bookmarked websites and tools at at
http://furl.net/members/marshallkirkpatrick

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Technorati Acquisition? News or Just Query?

Quick note here, I’ve had two folks come to my site today via a Technorati search for “Technorati acquisition.” Both from users in San Francisco. Hmmm… Now I know that the Web 2.0 conference is going on in S.F. right now, and given the flurry of buy outs this week maybe it’s just a logical query. But you have to wonder. Who would you prefer, MSN or Yahoo!? Since the recent creation of Google Blogsearch that most discussed possibility appears out of the running. Sure wish I was in S.F. More than that, I sure wish these Web2.0 companies would be satisfied with their own success and continue creating a new web. If it’s all about innovation, what will the consequences be of a Web 1.0 buyout of Web 2.0? Or am I over reacting?

Update: There are some critical comments similar to the thoughts here over at PaidContent.org, the folks who broke the AOL-Weblogs Inc. story.

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Reputation Tracking and Inbound Links

Update: I’ve added a list of recent places I’ve been quoted over on the sidebar using the following tools: Furl.net to tag links as “citations” and FeedDigest to turn the RSS feed of that tag into a javascript-to HTML code snippet in my sidebar template. So now when I find places I’m quoted I can just tag them and they will apear here automatically. Pretty cool, huh?

I was excited to wake up this morning and find visitors coming in from News.com, where I was quoted in a story about the blogosphere’s reaction to the AOL purchase of Weblogs Inc. I think that’s testimony to the idea that stepping out on a limb to share your opinion about something can really be appreciated. I was concerned that readers would consider my take on acquisitions like that (“is independence no longer a viable business model?”) naive or silly. But I felt that way, so I said it, and apparently it sticks out enough in the discussion to have been quoted elsewhere. Fantastic. Admittedly I also stayed up too late last night reading about and writing that post, so early poster’s advantage might be part of it.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some links to a number of places I’ve been cited or linked to lately. This is the sort of thing that bloggers are supposed to be able to tell via blog search engines – technorati, pubsub, feedster, google blog search, etc. You search for your URL and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search. I’ve created a separate folder in my RSS reader titled “Rep tracking” that holds all the above search feeds and lets me know (in theory) whenever anyone else links to me. It often does work, but just as often I find out first by checking my traffic logs and seeing where visitors to my site are coming from. Sometimes traffic logs show me first and the search feeds catch up hours or days later. A combination of both methods works best for now, I believe.

This is something I set up for all my clients who use RSS as well, and sometimes I track inbound links myself for clients who don’t use RSS and just notify them of anything interesting. The blogosphere is all about interconnected conversations and rapid response and this is a key way that happens.

So, who else has been citing me or linking back to this or my old blog lately?

That’s a snap shot of how you can use a blog to participate in online conversations. Linking, reputation tracking through search to RSS and traffic monitoring are all keys to that participation. But so is having something to say and not being afraid to say it.

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Web 2.0 to Be Bought Out?

Updates: 1. Add to this list the rumored sale of Weblogs.com ping service to Verisign. Hmmm…Wonder if they’ll do something about the spam-blogs. Pingoat is great about that. Maybe someone should give them millions of dollars. 2. The Gawker Media Empire (owners of the rad LifeHacker blog, is loud and clear about not being for sale. In fact they’ve made a deal instead to get their content translated into multiple languages to reach more readers. Cool.

A series of interesting developments in the world of corporate acquisitions over the last few days:

So what does this mean for Web2.0? This is certainly becoming the dominant business model – build something cool, get a large user base, then sell to a larger company. (Like eBay buying Skype just last month.) It kind of makes me sad. Isn’t independence a viable business model? What examples are there of such acquisitions not slowing innovation, openness and responsiveness to a crawl? Please tell me if you know.

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Web2.0 is Exploding!

For some indication of how intense the explosion of web based services and applications is, check out these pages:

What do the things highlighted on these pages have in common?

  1. They reley on serious bandwidth
  2. cheap data storage
  3. storage done on the network and not on your computer
  4. user supplied data and network effects( Amazon.com’s users’ book reviews, Craig’s List classified ads, and items tagged in social bookmarking services are some traditional examples)
  5. AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) a programming method that loads more into your browser than is shown at any one time, so your clicks can be responded to immediately without sending a signal back to the host server. Slick.

Those are some of the key components of Web2.0 and the number of new tools being created, mixed, mashed-up etc. can be overwhelming. I’m here to help you figure out ones work best together in the service of your non-technological interests.

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Web Apps That Don’t Seem to Work

While I do have lots of fun learning how to use new web tools, I also spend a lot of time frustrated with things that don’t work for me. But the beauty of that is that I can spend time learning the hard way, and turn around and tell my readers and clients what I’ve learned without them spending that time. So in such a spirit, I thought I’d write today about some things I’ve found that don’t seem to work.

Now I recognize that starting a new web service is hard, success can be a bandwidth problem and there’s so many factors to take into consideration. So no hard feelings, I just don’t want my clients and friends to have to spend as much time being frustrated with the services discussed below as I did. Maybe they will be improved soon and we’ll all fall in love with them. But for now, here are three new services that I have not been able to make work.

  • Pod-o-Matic a free service that will allow you to record, mix and host up to 250 MB worth of podcasts. Interesting concept for sure. With some minor trouble shooting I was able to record a one minute talk, chose from their 10 preselected intro-outro clips and posted it. Unfortunately: the sound quality was bad, long sections of the file were cut out and it doesn’t appear that you can edit the files. Bummer. Guess I’ll have to stay with the fat-client, desktop-apps for podcasting for now. Particularly Audacity. Also worth looking into is Castblaster.
  • Ning.com says it’s a “playground” you can use to build your own web applications. Powerful idea. Has major login problems that persisted for me after the company blog said they were fixed. You have to get an account and log in to use the applications other people have created (things like a different version of Craig’s List). But you have to have a “Beta developers’ account” in order to develop your own applications, and who knows how long it takes for one of those to arrive. So it’s unusable for me right now at least. That’s a shame, because I’d really like to try and find a way to build a good cross-platform tag search engine like TagCentral.net Update: I have a beta developer invite now, but haven’t had the time to figure out wether the php involved is over my head or not. So the invite took about 24 hours, just so you know.
  • Blinklist a social bookmarking system that I have been unable to use. The site in unclear as to what’s different here from del.icio.us or Furl.net or any other online service. I tried to import my archive from Del.icio.us and got an error mssg, though a company rep emailed me and said he wasn’t having any problems doing it. Once I finally got logged in this morning the site recognized I was using Safari, but neither bookmarklet to tag an item does anything. Yes I’ve got my pop-up blocker turned off, and yes my other javascript bookmarklets are working just fine. The User Interface is pretty, but I can’t use the thing at all. For now I’ll stick with social bookmarking services Furl.net, Spurl.net and Del.icio.us.

I hope this has been useful, perhaps as feedback to said companies, perhaps as a time saver for other users and perhaps as informative regarding the kinds of problems that new web applications sometimes have. In other words, if things don’t work for you it is quite possible that it’s not your fault. Few things work perfectly the first time, and I’m up for figuring out what a lot of problems are and how to solve them, but I think it’s time for me to move on from the above three services and dive back into the incredible stream of Web2.0 developments that just keep coming. Perhaps I’ll see these three again later when I can actually use them.

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