Today I received a spam-like email:

from {CrypticSN@gmail.com}
{CrypticSN} invited you to be their friend.

Click here to go to My Latest Piece where {CrypticSN} found you.

I looked at the URL for the link, and it did redirect to “mylatestpiece.com”. Being the cynical “don’t click links in email” person that I am, I typed in the address and checked it out.

Lo and behold, it’s one of the google friend connect examples I checked out a few weeks back! {CrypticSN} is listed there under my “new friend requests” in the little iframe.

I haven’t thought too much about google friend connect since the few posts I wrote about it. This generic email has me really surprised, for a few reasons.

1. It’s incredibly generic. Since it’s a friend request, I may or may not know {CrypticSN}. So sending an email from their email address may not prevent the request from a quick trip to the spam filter.
2. There is no mention of the community aspects of the site. Granted, it’s an example, but “My Latest Piece” doesn’t lend itself to being a destination I’ll be making friends at. That being said, if I were really a community member at My Latest Piece, I would probably recognize the site name and the fact that there is a notion of “friending” there.
3. Where do my friend requests go? This is the part that I think still is a major concern for GFC. If I friend {CrypticSN} here, where does that information live? Do I need to invite him to be a friend on other GFC sites, or on other networking sites? Indeed, can I?

The ability to find and request friends is clunky. There doesn’t appear to be an search functionality, so you have to navigate through “previous” and “next” links of current members to find the one you’re looking for. You may then look at their profile, including their friends, and request their friendship. There is no option for a personal note, just a confirmation asking if you’re sure you want to send a request.

I know this is a new service, but come on. The mode for managing contacts and sending messages to people has been done before. There are strategies and models that are tried and tested. What is the goal here, to find people you may know, or generically spam other people and foster a “friendship” in which you can’t even complement someone on their avatar when you “befriend” them.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I still fail to see the user benefits to this whole deal. While it may be great for My Latest Piece that I just returned to their site, as a user, this whole exchange has been less than satisfying.

I would explain to {CrypticSN} that it’s not him, it’s me, but I clicked “ignore” on the invite, which evidently means “hide this invite and give me no way to retrieve it.” You know, Ignore as in Delete…

As I mentioned, last week was the iCitizen client symposium, held by my employer, Resource Interactive. We had a social media cafe dedicated to showing attendees the power of social media and in particular, some of the most popular tools and services out there. We had an official live blogger and twitter stream, as well as a host of other delegates participating.
To showcase the power of twitter, we educated people on how to track a topic, and we kept Summize up on a few screens to show people how to monitor buzz. We were ecstatic to see that we reached the #1 trending topic at a few different times through the conference.

As the day wore on, we found we were having more trouble with twitter. Some of us who used the service regularly laughed it off, instructing people that “the first thing you need to learn about using twitter is that it isn’t always reliable.”

Yes, there was no reason for me to suspect this was anything different than any other twitter downtime. But then today I saw a link to what I recently saw referred to as the “twitter excuse blog“, where they shared a graph of the week up until Wednesday (iCitizen was Tuesday and Wednesday).

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A curious commenter noted the peaks:

It peaks in the evening time on the 19th, then in the morning on the 20th, then the entire evening again. On the 21st, it peaks in the - morning again? - nope, flat in the morning, peak at mid-afternoon, slammed in the evening again.

Now, I don’t know about the time zone for the graph, but I do find it interesting that the times were entered around our event. Goodness knows we had some hardcore twitterers sharing their thoughts.

Many of us had been tracking the term “icitizen”, and something I read earlier today mentioned that it was potentially this feature that caused some of the problems. I know we had some cases where people were overwhelmed with the volume of messages returned from tracking, and turned to tweetscan on their own:

icitizen tweets coming in too fast and furious to keep up! I’ve switched to tracking them here: http://snurl.com/29xfm #icitizen (from @getshust)

Now we’re all home and recovering from frantic tweeting, and while twitter is still struggling (most recently, suffering from a DB crash), I can’t help but wonder if in the true vein of iCitizenry, if we were all influential in taking twitter down?

On May 20 and 21st, I was working at the “lifestreaming/blogging” station at the social media cafe at the iCitizen conference. The conference itself had the standard speakers and panels, and the cafe was a supplementary opportunity for conference delegates to learn more about, well, social media. There were four stations: “lifestreaming/blogging”, “community conversations”, “new media entertainment”, and “mobile”. Resource Interactive employees manned each of the stations, showcasing some of these new and emerging sites and services.

Social Media Cafe

Originally uploaded by leigh_householder

For the lifestreaming station, we started with a targeted platform/service base of wordpress, tumblr, twitter, facebook, flickr, digsby and socialthing!. I mentioned in an earlier post that in preparation for this event, I was reflecting on my current online persona. This was because in order to cut down on some of the noise related to showcasing these tools, I wasn’t really myself during the conference. In order to show people how these tools worked, I was officially “iCitizen04″ for awhile. That is, I would show people how to use these different tools (and how they connected) using the moniker iCitizen04. As it was, there was PLENTY of online iCitizen buzz, and I didn’t want to inundate my regular followers with our test posts. (According to summize.com, we were actually the #1 trending topic on twitter for much of the day!)

#1 trending topic on twitter
Originally uploaded by icitizen04

Overall, it was really interesting to chat with individuals, trying to figure out what the buzz was all about. Some folks were already well-established twitterers, while others were just catching a glimmer of what this service could do for them.

In the true nature of lifestreaming, looking back at the output from the conference tells a bit of the story about the event itself. the icitizen04 tumblog pulls in tweets and photos, as well as other posts, pictures and videos I posted as I spoke to different participants at the event. We looked at the services themselves and I also liked mention Summize and Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com) to illustrate how brands could use twitter as a very simplified version of buzz metrics. Searching for a brand on flickr or youtube was a good way to see what sort of user-generated content was already out there, and in both cases, identify some of those potential brand advocates (or see what sort of risk mitigation needs to take place!).

I was always very happy to introduce folks to digsby, which is an Uber-IM Client. It supports instant messaging, multiple web mail services, facebook and twitter. You can send and receive updates right from your desktop. It was a great service to be able to illustrate the ease at content pushes and updates.

Overall, I was really excited by what we were able to pull off during the course of the event. I have some more thoughts on the event itself, but I just wanted to specifically call out the social media cafe aspect of it.

Oh, and I HAVE to share the video some of my co-workers pulled together:

iCitizen Video from Mark Hillman on Vimeo.

Doc Searls (co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto) is speaking at iCitizen about Open Source and Vendor Relationship Management. This is one of only a few sessions I’ve actually been able to attend, and it ended up being quite tech-heavy. Great for me! The idea is about how we can change our perspective on how to manage relationships. Doc (do we call him “The” Doc?) focussed on the role of technology in this matter. We extolled the virtues of open source technology to meet user needs.

He spoke of the VRM (vendor relationship management) work he has been doing at Harvard. The icon or symbol is the relbutton, which looks like two magnets attracted towards each other. The two negotiate a contract based on some as-yet-undefined terms. He mentioned Open Social a few times, and the idea that the user should be in charge of his own data. A good example: when we go to a doctor’s office, we are responsible to manually input our history. Each time we have to regurgitate information, we risk inaccuracies. He gave a statistic of how many people died of “misinformation” every year. So what if this was data we could carry with us?

I was interested in the language we would use to define these relationships - it made me think of established interfaces. There are two parties, how do we negotiate the languge we use to communicate? APIs are getting quite popular, but this is obviously on a much larger scale. He spoke frequently of Open Social, which I will admit I don’t know much about. My thoughts were moreso focused on microformats, the idea of describing our relationships with parties.

After the session I was talking to David Griner, and his thoughts on the matter seemed to be more related to the notion of privacy than openness. Indeed, this entire notion is called “Vendor management”, are we forgetting about the needs and expectations of the consumer? Doc mentioned that the individual was in charge of this data (the whole data portability notion that is de rigueur right now), and then there was also mention of the need for a 3rd party.

Doc is approaching this challenge from a tech standpoint, and I fear that this was a bit of a barrier to many of the folks in the room. It was a good presentation with regards to a potential challenge, but I think the need therefore isn’t entirely established as of yet. I think it’s also an interesting topic in the light of all the social networks data portability announcements that have occured in the past week. Who owns our data, do we really have the power to take it with us, and perhaps most importantly, what is that data? Some of us are experiencing social media fatigue, and I think there was some question from the user perspective if this required an additional level of “data management”. Do I need to define a profile to carry with me to specific sites, or do I establish an online persona that comes with me as I negotiate the web generically? How do we protect that information? Certain services like kaboodle offer us a place to aggregate products related to a certain user task (shopping). Perhaps this needs to be not about data, but about tasks..

I asked David if he had done much with OpenId. I think the model may be similar: there are certain issuers of the IDs, and others that will accept them. As long as we trust the issuers, we could determine our level of comfort with data sharing in other places. Once again, David’s real question was what the benefit was to the consumer. Can I not just go to a site and perform my desired task? Do I need to carry my history/preferences etc with me?

I can see both sides. In a later metrics track, we discussed how it can take several site visits before conversion occurs. Often people want to perform research, establish trust, etc. So I do believe there are merits in the site being aware of some level of the established relationship and history, at least on the site level. But does a system like a generic VSM need to manage that? Or can that stay within the site (as happens now, and as personalization systems like ATG advocate)? This is the same model we see in the brick and mortar stores: the folks at the starbucks start to recognize me, ask me how I’m doing, anticipate my preferences. I think people are comfortable with that level of recognition. It is when behaviour at the starbucks downtown influence how I’m treated at Crimson Cup that people start to be a little concerned.

Plenty of stores accept competitor’s coupons. That’s the level where this sort of universal ID seems to make sense. Let me bring in my deals or specials from someplace else, if I so choose. And perhaps that’s a user opt-in, just like if I choose I want my browser to store my login information. But even if the data lives elsewhere, the control thereof certainly needs to live with the consumer. Do I want to manually write out my health information at each doctor, or do I carry a card that has it all written out, and distribute it. The idea and the infrastructure to support it certainly makes sense, but I don’t know if there is overall value to the forced implementation thereof.

Remember beacon?

(from http://www.flickr.com/photos/81653099@N00/2508070193)
Marti, Kris and Joel

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be spending the next two days at the iCitizen Client Symposium in Columbus, OH. I’ll be manning a table at the social media cafe dedicated to lifestreaming and blogging. I’m pretty excited about the symposium on the whole, as well as my part in it. In preparation for the discussions we’ll be having, I’ve been forced to rethink my own online activities and personas, and consider the implications for individuals not yet entrenched in all that is “web”, as well as for brands looking to use this channel to forge and further establish relationships.

There will be some official live blogging, and I’m sure other posts will show up from attendees. Again, we have an official twitter stream and there’s already been plenty other buzz in the tweetosphere.

Naturally, I’ll do my best to post as I find time, although I anticipate it will be a busy few days! Love it!

In addition to this blog, I’ve maintained one related to running at http://runlikeagrrl.livejournal.com for several years (my oldest listed post is my review of my first marathon in October 2004). Livejournal was a great platform at the time - it incorporated a notion of friending that is still more robust than what most social networking sites currently offer. However, it also has its limitations. I was a paid member for awhile, so I am acutely aware of the features I currently don’t have access to. As well, many of the running blogs I read are not on the livejournal platform, so the privacy rules don’t really apply (not to mention, I don’t really have any need to set any posts to anything but “public”).

A few weeks back I had an email exchange with Melanie McBride, who also works in new media and is a runner. We were discussing what we posted to our twitter accounts, how we managed those two different aspects of our personalities and interests. At that time I was using my twitter account exclusively for work and technology purposes. More recently, however, in a bit of a social experiment for work, I’ve been looking at redefining myself online. My “new” (temporary) profile is a summary view, so it combines the different aspects of me. And I actually like it! My running journal posts themselves (with the exception of race reports) are generally shorter than those on this blog. They seem perhaps better suited to microblogging. As well, I’ve run into several limitations on livejournal in terms of not being able to add certain widgets (my logyourrun stats) to my sidebar. By hosting my own journal, I’ll be able to add and modify at will.
The final straw was a question I had this morning about multiple twitter accounts. I hadn’t really considered doing so, since I figured the ability to post to either would be challenging to manage (this is something I’m grappling with now with my work experiment). However, it appears that the twhirl AIR app already manages this, and a survey by Techcrunch France found that 53% of the folks surveyed had multiple accounts. A silly tipping point, but it is one nonetheless.

And so I introduce: Go the Distance, at www.afhill.com/gothedistance. I’ve ported over all my LJ posts (losing the tags in the process), and things are ready to go!