At least if you look at it from a search engine perspective, who should assume that every visitor isn’t a member of the site they are referencing in the search engine.

It should also be understood that both Facebook & Twitter are bursting at the seams with former Google engineers & execs – they can’t claim they were unaware of what Google is looking for from content owners on the web, webmaster guidelines etc.

Twitter

You can’t look at the Google cache and see exactly what Google sees, because they do some sneaky redirects which are very akin to cloaking.

I have written about this before.

Video Exclusive: Has Google Given Twitter a Cloaking Penalty?

This is what Google sees based upon the preview

The little piece of text at the top of the page is what amounts to your profile… you can’t count the background image if any because it can’t be read by Googlebot unless it works really hard using OCR, and certainly can’t be read by people with disabilities.
The links within the content of the page are mostly nofollow, and the links in the sidebar get blocked by robots.txt.
The link at the bottom of the page to access more content… which may be of interest to search is also blocked by robots.txt.

I am not the only one who has spent considerable time trying to get Twitter fixed. A great example is this post by Vanessa on Search Engine Land.
How Twitter’s Technical Infrastructure Issues Are Impacting Google Search Results

Facebook

Facebook is worse

There is nothing there of any real value… it isn’t the timeline a logged in user might see.

First Click Free

If you want to have some kind of membership wall for users, then Google have special arrangements where you are required to show content for the first click.

Cloaking

Google over the years have published lots of content about what they think of cloaking.

I can still think of a few cases where some kind of cloaking would be justified. As an example on uQast we serve RTMP video with flash and use javascript “cloaking” to provide mp4 for iPhone. We could even serve that video to Googlebot’s mobile crawler without breaking Google guidelines as “cloaking” to serve content to specific browsers is allowed. But we can’t serve Googlebot which crawls for the main search index something it understands, as the Google guidelines require you treat Google as a normal desktop user browsing from California in the USA.
So Googlebot is served flash based RTMP within the webmaster guidelines rather than something it might like to see which we would be quite happy to give it.

That doesn’t prevent Google sometimes (though rarely) indexing the mobile video by figuring out the javascript, but it would be so much easier to give them something they understand.

Google Isn’t Playing Fair

One area that Google isn’t necessarily playing fair is that I don’t seem to be able to view Google+ profile pages in their own cache, and they don’t give a preview of the page that Googlebot sees.

This is my Google+ Profile

You can normally search in Google for cache:https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/posts or any url to get a cached version of what the crawler sees.
It is possible for every site to tell Google and other search engines not to store a cached page, so Google are well within their rights not to do so… but it prevents comparrisons.

Compare
cache:andybeard.eu – brings up a cached result
cache:https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/posts – does not bring up a cached result, just a 404 error

FTC Complaint over Search Plus Your World

The blogoshere love a good witch hunt, but I can’t see that Google is treating Twitter or Facebook unfairly. Eric Schmidt was quite right about some of the nofollows, but there are bigger technical restrictions in place on crawling.

I actually quite like a Google profile as a default profile and identity on the web, but Google need to live up to the promise of salmon and make it a viable endpoint for all activity, or as an alternative use it for identity, and allow me to define my own default profile.. which if I choose might be Twitter or Facebook.
I can also understand why you wouldn’t undertake the complex engineering to make such flexibility possible for your first itteration, especially with partners who are unwilling to do something similar themselves.

Just ask Twitter how many content partners they now support on the new Twiter for embeds. (I wrote them a letter a year ago and never received a response)

This post ignores what a logged in and fully javascript supporting human might experience, but in many ways Google’s profiles whilst now having a social element for years have generously linked out to any other online destination of your choosing, and provided the necessary markup to claim them as being part of your personal social graph.

Update – Google Profiles Now Cached

Michael VanDeMar left a comment showing a way to get the cached page to show by including the https protocol at the beginning of the url to query.

However when I posted I had tried lots of different variations all resulting in a 404 error.

This unmodified link was previously bringing up a 404 error
cache:https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/posts

It now returns what appears to be a blank page – as Michael points out if you switch off the CSS in your browser you can see the complete cached landing page.

Click to view full size without CSS

This appears to be a recent change, though they still need to fix the canonical – the canonical changes as you navigate between tabs and between the first 2 urls on this list there is effectively a redirect loop with /posts claiming / is the canonical, but humans are redirected to /posts

https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/

https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/posts

https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/about

All the different URLs show all of the same content, so should set whichever canonical a human is redirected to which currently is /posts

Not Total Fix

It seems some other pages are still giving 404 errors – maybe due to all the funky redirects going in circles with the canonical on occasion (this query is with HTTPS)

If you have difficulty understanding the concept of canonical, it is just like Highlander… “There should be only one” page with the same content in Google’s index, especially on the same domain.

But one thing I haven’t read about anywhere are the technical implications of +1 and the way it deals with canonicalization of votes, which currently is significantly inferior to both Facebook and Twitter.

There are all kinds of reasons why a publisher or ecommerce store might want to include parameters in the URLs people bookmark.

• Various kinds of tracking data
• Geotargeting
• Dynamic landing pages based upon advertising campaign (even with Adwords)

A user lands on a page, and you want to ensure that whatever they bookmark or share with friends or family is the exact same content/offer that they saw themselves, or that the initial source for the traffic is correctly counted to evaluate advertising campaigns.
This is especially important with affiliate marketing if you are a vendor who wants to ensure that affiliates get attribution for the traffic/customers they send.

• You see people use multiple browsers on one PC, and cookies are not necessarily shared
• Then you get people who have multiple computers in their home
• Then you have tablet PCs… someone might find a product on their desktop PC, but when they want to share the product with a significant other before making a purchase, they might do so on their iPad, loading a page from shared bookmarks.
• As mobile browsers become more powerful, a phone could also be the device used for bookmarking.

I don’t think it is possible to get everything perfect, to get correctly attributed tracking, ensure bookmarks are handled correctly etc (especially when paramters that remain visible can affect conversion), but I personally feel it is important to do whatever you can to ensure valid tracking data and attribution.

Facebook & Twitter – 2 Different Methods

Both Facebook & Twitter allow you to define tracking parameters or links for their share buttons, but they do it different ways.

With Twitter it is defined within the Twitter button by defining the url and counturl parameters.

The URL is whatever link you want shared, and the most popular way to use it is probably a tracking service such as bit.ly, but at the same time adding additional Google Analytics tracking variables to the URL that is bookmarked within bit.ly.

This is what the Twitter code looks like

					<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
					<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fpage13312&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fintro%2F&text=How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet&count=horizontal&via=uQast&related=uqast%3AWebinar" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet</a>

And this is the result (this uses my affiliate link for uQast, but notice that the count shown is an aggregate canonical value because of the defined counturl

How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet

With Facebook it is a little different – within the button code you include the tracking link you want to share, and the “counturl” is actually grabbed from the Facebook Open Graph meta data on the destination page.
Facebook also pull in the thumbnail and descriptions from that meta data.

This is what the code looks like

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like ref="13312" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312" send="false" width="120" show_faces="false" layout="button_count" ></fb:like>

The result is an aggregate count even though every shared URL from the like button could be completely different.

Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana

As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.

This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.

http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312

This is how that button should be encoded

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>

With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.

If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>

At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time

This is how a +1 ends up on a Google profile (this is my primary Andy Beard profile)

Lets see how Google fairs with my +1 test

First of all my profile URL is

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy

But from a search result Google themselves redirect to

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about

And if I want to ensure the English version of a page is shown then I have to add an additional language parameter.

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about?hl=en

These redirects are a fact of life on the web and so are additional parameters for all kinds of things, but Google +1 doesn’t allow for it, even for a Google URL

Google +1 is broken even for Google’s own pages

In addition they really should take advantage of the thumbnail defined in the Facebook Open Graph, as they currently just scrape the first image on the page.

The Solution For Google +1

It is actually fairly simple for Google to fix this.

They are already looking at the destination page, and all they have to do is look for a canonical link tag in the header for which URL to count… anyone who cares about correct canonicalization for their pages who uses various tracking parameters is likely to already be using link canonical… after all it is stronly promoted by Google themselves as a way to get attribution for the correct link.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/" />

You would have thought issues like this would have been fixed during the initial beta period – when news of Google +1 first came about, there was a call for interested websites to sign up early maybe to give feedback… I signed up at that time but from the looks of things on the Google announcement post that was mainly as a PR exercise to get large publishers using Google +1.

Google +1 is really easy to set up, there are also some quite powerful features I haven’t explored yet for triggering various actions similar to a Facebook like button

However as currently implemented it is almost like a negative advert if you implement it with any kind of dynamic URLs showing effectively the same content.

Canonicalization is just as important in social media as search.

p.s I have given up trying to get a “+” to appear correctly with a retweet button with WordPress.

I went as far as trying to use the unicode version within the title but that ended up as the raw text, and then WordPress didn’t save the unicode anyway.

+1.... out

This could turn into something of epidemic proportions and is not the first barren period they have had to face, as evident by the supporting data from Feedburner.

The red lines signify days that Friendfeed hasn’t been collecting my RSS feed. There could be other days that they haven’t collected other feeds as a fair amount of my online activity should be appearing in Friendfeed.

The problem isn’t even just with Friendfeed which historically has been pretty reliable – I have seen this happen at times with Facebook as well with imported notes from my RSS feed often appearing days after a blog post is first published.

On Friendfeed I have 2856 “subscribers” – of those I regard maybe only 56 as being active humans using the service.

This also isn’t an isolated case.

As an example we have a user reporting an issue twice on the Feedburner Google Group… as you might expect without any answer.

For once this probably isn’t anything to do with Feedburner… it is almost certainly Friendfeed.. or now parent company Facebook not collecting content, and thus at the same time not preporting subscription numbers.

Facebook doesn’t report subscriber numbers that I am aware of, but that may be dependent on how you add RSS content to your profile or pages.

If this is a sign of a final death knell for Friendfeed, and with Bloglines already disappearing at the end of this month, very soon 80% of feed subscribers (of those actually reported) will be in Google Reader for this blog.
When Friendfeed was added to Feedburner reporting, it wasn’t universally accepted but in some ways it did reflect a swing in attention.
The direction of that swing is very much towards Twitter and Facebook now.

Google Buzz doesn’t seem to be aggregated into the Feedburner numbers yet.

Why Do Zombies Eat Brains? (Return of the Living Dead – probably NSFW)

Update: Within a few hours of this being posted, Friendfeed was suddenly up to date – I don’t know whether they missed anything.

Guess what Leo? It happens on both Buzz & Twitter – Facebook as well. They couldn’t scale and cope with millions of followers & friends without it.

Interactions

So Leo is missing the interactions he used to get when Buzz first started.

I think part of the problems is that everyone has added their Twitter, Friendfeed, refeed of Tweets via Friendfeed, Google Shares, refeed of Google shares from Friendfeed etc. You can also add extra laters and add in your Mybloglog feed of your Friendfeed for good measure.

At the same time most of those people have left Google Buzz – they left their litter behind but they are not there interacting, thus even a online media celebrity such as Leo gets drowned out.
And if he didn’t, he would probably drown out all other conversations like happened with many celebrities early in the life of Buzz.

Google has to get Salmon working with true canonicalization & threading of all these conversations fast – I would also suggest removing share totally, and just using a “like” equivalent for now. Encourage one canonical conversation.
You will still get some fragmentation due to Google Reader – but reader should never have had conversations anyway ;p

Memories

I am old… very old… 4 decades old. (that is just a decade short of half a centuary)

For me remembering things is important.

I am naturally reasonably good at remembering certain kinds of information. I remember conversations I have had on Twitter from a year ago, even 2 or 3 years ago.
Sometimes however the details are a little vague and I want to find them again… and I can’t.

They have disappeared into a black hole and I have no way to retreive them.

I described Twitter as having Alzheimers 6 months ago when I left Twitter

Friends keep on asking when I am coming back – the answer is when I can find my conversations, otherwise they are meaningless to me.

I can probably find syndicated copies of my Tweets on other services, but that isn’t the same as you lose context, plus those services are most likely on life support – who really expects Friendfeed to be around for another 12 months?

Whilst the number of interactions I have on buzz are significantly less, part of the reason is that I don’t push for interaction there.
I have seen friends like Chris Lang absolutely killing it on Buzz – he drives traffic to buzz from his email list, he pulls in experts to conversation by referencing them (which at the same times promotes these people to his audience) and he hasn’t seen a slow down in conversations because Google Buzz is his chosen battle ground or stomping ground and he is leveraging all its possibilities.

Everything you publish on Buzz still exists

You can search on it using is:buzz in Gmail and you will always be able to find it.
Finding conversations other people are having about your content on Buzz isn’t easy, and a huge negative with Buzz is that it takes forever to import an original post.
Often it takes 2-3 hours for a fresh blog post to appear on Buzz as an imported feed – that cripples Buzz.

To hell with whether the content you create is syndicated or not, or whether there were responses. Well responses are nice, but ultimately unless there is a long term record, what you wrote didn’t even happen.

Just like “Pictures or it didn’t happen” at least with Google Buzz the words are recorded.

Imagine in a few years you want to find something you said – on Twitter you won’t be able to because their search sucks, and they block Google with robots.txt – the import of backdated Tweets into Google just doesn’t seem to be happening and it is quite possible the tweets no longer exist.

Would failing to store tweets be the social media equivalent of burning books?

Facebook’s Achilles Heel

Without a doubt it is search – finding conversations on Facebook is just a pointless exercise which is why I can’t understand why it is popular for family interaction. I can understand it for students, but I still reference email exchanges with my family from 5 years ago.
I would never entrust those kinds of exchanges to Facebook.

Just Social Media Magic Roundabout?

People just hop from one platform to another like the seasons – hell I just submitted someone else’s content to Sphinn for the first time in 2 years and have no idea why I did it, other than lots of the people I communicate with daily are still there and the story was actually news (plus it linked to me :) ) – if you are a YouTube search optimization freak you might want to take a look.

Feel free to comment on Buzz as well and Chris has an active conversation with back story here.

I wonder when will be the first time a buzz conversation gets listed on Techmeme.

Thus they are most likely targeting me with the message using some kind of IP delivery – looking at which country or region my IP address originates in, and as I use a Polish ISP, they sometimes give me information in Polish.

After you switch display language, it looks a little like this

Facebook was translated using crowd sourcing – to be honest I am not sure it is the best option – it is certainly the cheap option, and gives users some additional sense of ownership which can encourage brand loyalty, but I am not convinced it is the best option.

I am not a native Pole, in fact my linguistic skills are a source of constant frustration for my Polish wife and her family.

Whilst Facebook clearly state the translations are for information purposes only, I shouldn’t be able to pick up glaring translation flaws in a matter of minutes, within headlines… just scanning pages.
Note:- whilst in the games industry one of the roles I performed was coordinating the localization of over 100 SKUs from English to Polish, and occasionally translation Polish > English but that was often more like rewriting the manuals

Here is an example from the terms and conditions

Hmm, definitions and constructions… referring to grammatical definitions and constructions

Unfortunately “Remonty” in Polish means “Renovation” and unlike other similar words, is never used for anything to do with grammar.

The following alternatives would be suitable.

Definicje i Konstrukcje
Definicje i Budowa (zdań)

Google Translate Does It Better

Plugging the same phrase into Google Translate, which recently added support for Polish gives much better results than were achieved using crowd sourcing.

Google Translate isn’t perfect by any means, it needs to expand the dictionary considerably, and probably include specific thematic dictionaries, but recently I have used it to translate from Polish to English for friends and family with reasonable success.

I expect such blunders from professionals translating from their native language into a foreign language, but from such a huge company using crowd sourcing on a large scale, with professional management, I expected much better.

There are other bugs, along with a sense that they didn’t include a solution to take into consideration gender.

Facebook isn’t an open source project with limited resources.

http://www.viraloptingenerator.com/index.php

This script is different to Optin Accelerator in a number of ways

• The script is hosted 100% on your server
• No subscription fee
• It doesn’t “send home” any date, so it is 100% your responsibility

In theory that makes it almost exactly the same as the scripts used by the big boys of Web2.0 though their servers are less likely to conk out the first time someone with 200 contacts in Gmail uses the script if you are on shared or even most reseller hosting. You would probably have problems on most virtual servers as well.
I don’t know if the service can be configured to use a 3rd party SMTP, whether it uses sendmail, phpmailer, or swiftmailer.

If you are a smart programmer, picking this up might give you a few ideas, but remember

• It is still against the published ToS of Aweber
• You are still encouraging people to do something that is unsafe if running an internet business
• Legal liability – it is you sending the emails – in some ways I would be worried about the claims on the sales letter that it doesn’t keep a record – if you are sending emails there is always a record somewhere, though you are best advised to keep a record of every email you send anywhere.
• The script needs to be maintained for updates – maybe it will be updated over time, but best to allow for programming time to keep it working.
• The Plaxo option is free, and maybe safer

I have thought a little more about the suggestion Aweber make about forwarding emails – that is actually unsafe for most email lists, because many readers will also forward unsubscription information. What happens if they forward it when you are price testing? Forwarding effectively encourages public posting.
Maybe it is better to mail the person sending when they use a standard TAF with a letter encouraging they forward that to friends and also the message that goes to their friends.

It is still TAF though, so check with your email service provider.

• It took a long time for internet marketers to copy the viral signup mechanisms used by many internet startups, including the more established Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace etc.
• It is a massive business security risk
• People are going to buy it and use it and their customers are going to face the risk
• Some of my subscribers might damage their business either by using it for one of their sites, or giving their account access away.

Now I hoped that as soon as people realised it was a bad idea despite having massive viral potential, the product would be pulled.

Currently it looks like the site has been closed – I have high regards for Reed Floren and Matt Haslem who launched it, so I am assuming it is off the market.

That being said, I have seen a few people using it still – if it is just limited circulation, some people need to be a little careful.

So where did they go wrong?

What Did Optin Accelerator Do?

Quite simply you hand over your login information to your primary email account, and it scrapes addresses so you can send an email to all your friends about a new service you have found, or product.
Yes… exactly the same process as is used by many Web2.0 sites, but you don’t have to worry about the technical details of how things work, because the script is on their servers, and calls home.

This means that your subscribers are sharing their personal login information to their email account with a 3rd party just to promote your product.
The big guys are generally using 1st party scripting, still risky but at least you know who has your data (I would never use it though)

Robert Plank has gone into that aspect of Optin Accelerator in some depth

Here is part of the comment I left on his blog post

Google has unified login, so does Yahoo and MSN.

By handing over login information, you are hading over not only your email (which could be full of important passwords for affiliate accounts) but also providing access to Adsense, Adwords, Google Analytics, Google AppEngine (if you are a geek)

It would also allow someone to reset every password you have which sends resent information to your emil, such as all your wordpress blogs, hosting etc.

Handing over this information is throwing your whole internet business into turmoil.

Would you want to encourage your own subscribers to do that?

Robert has actually gone through all the terms of service of each of the large online email services, and it seems handing over your account details is breaking their terms and conditions. How the hell do the big guys get away with such a security risk?

If that isn’t bad enough, it has been determined

• It is against Aweber’s terms of service (as are all tell-a-friend scripts) – that being said, I know people who use tell-a-friend scripts who primarily use Aweber – I have no idea how they get away with that.
  A guy in Robert’s comments (Craig) posted a response from Aweber

  Thank you very mush for bringing this to our attention. We have taken action to contact the owners of that product.

  Please understand that this was done without our consent, and will be fully addressed. We take many steps here to ensure your deliverability, including monitoring the use of customer accounts, so that even should someone use this type of program without our consent, we would remove them from the service.

  Thank you again for bringing this to light. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to let me know.

  Regards,
  Tracey Churray
  Director Of Customer Solutions

• Most hosting affiliates use would have problems handling the emails being sent, unless they are using SMTP through Gmail for instance
• If it is a really good product, shouldn’t you be promoting it as an affiliate?
• Melody from Women’s Net also mentioned the possibility of liability
• Plaxo provide fwidget for free that could be integrated to achieve effectively the same – that is slightly less risky (suggested by David L. Cross)
• Randolf Smith goes into the nature of email address books (all those friends and family) – how many are really interested in a specific product? Also as an affiliate, why would you promote something for free? At least Tell-A-Friend scripts often pass on your affiliate links, but that only works down one level – if it is really good, isn’t promoting to your list or blog readers better?

People You Know vs Sending Email

If you are going to use one of these scripts, it is much better to use the export and import contact list options often provided.
If there isn’t anything provided, you can also create a new email account just for importing contacts which has no private information.

I can see a real reason to find people you already know on a service – maybe services should be using the MyBlogLog API in a smart way.

If your service encourages every person who joins to send out 100s of emails, it becomes spam even if it technically isn’t if they are personal contacts, and you are doing it in a non-professional capacity.

There are lots of posts about how wonderful it is, or pointless but very few delving into some of the flaws or missing features. I know they have support and feedback on Google Groups… but I hate Google Groups, and the feedback from the groups isn’t necessarily making it out into the blogosphere.

I am going to keep this a little shorter than normal, I am working with Blogcatalog who have a couple of competing features (their dashboard and activity widget) thus it wouldn’t be fair to delve into this too much.

• It seems to take forever for FriendFeed to update StumbleUpon (8+ hrs) – that is forever in Social Bookmarking and news
• Stumbleupon reviews are not included with the listings, though for some reason Delicious bookmark descriptions are imported as comments
• Whilst the friend suggestion interface is great, reciprocating 40+ friendships of people who have just joined is just an impossible task – I need to see who hasn’t been friended yet, and some nice Ajax to reduce page loads to a minimum (Mixx has this similar terrible problem)
• How many people are actually following me? There doesn’t even seem to be an obvious total count.
• Not storing username and password just isn’t enough – I honestly hate any application that thinks it is ok to share Google account details – do you really want to give them access to your private email, Adsense and Adwords account? For ex-Googlers to think this is OK is extremely perplexing, or even worrying

However my biggest gripe with it, which some people seem to love is the way it takes away part of the conversation from the original source. Duncan highlighted this FriendFeed flaw very well today (warning strong language)

if I want to participate in a conversation about a blog post or similar content, I’ll leave a comment on that blog, not a third party app, because if someone writes something worthy of conversation, they should have first call on the conversation, unless of course the topic is one that requires a blog post in itself.

And going on to express this even stronger

Correct, I didn’t “like” anything because when I want to comment on an item, I’ll do it at the source, like the vast majority of people would. If it’s a Tweet I’ll reply on Twitter. If it’s a blog post, I’ll leave a comment. Why the f#$% would I want to use a third party service? Why the f#$% would I want to comment on a Tweet on FriendFeed? Or is it that I should just because he says so? Pass the bong…

I agree with Duncan

I am not sure how someone will achieve this, but what is needed if commenting is included in Lifestream services is a way to respond in the medium of choice or origin, and that includes responding to blog comments, but Lifestream applications are never going to be able to keep up with the speed of conversation on blogs, or Twitter.

You effectively create a comment echo chamber, and fragmented conversations often with people not even reading the original content.

For a content producer that causes major problems.

Fav.or.it may be the answer, in private beta -I generally don’t sign up for private betas in areas Blogcatalog could be potentially working on, even if I am not aware of it which is quite frequently.

Don’t Expect Me To Respond To Comments On FriendFeed

It might seem anti-social or against the ethos of social media, but as Brian Solis explained, my account on FriendFeed isn’t actually intended for me.

It’s not about you per se. It’s about those who enjoy following your activity online. And yes, there are many tools that do this, but at the end of the day, why not make it easier for people to connect with you using the tools that they’re most comfortable with.

New Social Neworks?

I haven’t looked at Social Thing yet, Read Write Web compares them both – honestly the only service that will get all my passwords is a desktop application, and even then it will be encrypted on my HD.

FriendFeed use a secure page (probably need account to view page) for providing your account data – they know it is sensitive – why would you share it with them?

Lumpy Porridge

When I was a kid I hated lumps in my porridge, I suppose that has never changed.

Whilst writing this post, FriendFeed finally caught up with my Stumbleupon submissions, but they are provided as “clumps” of posts and updates unless there has been specific FriendFeed activity on the item, such as a comment or someone “likes” and item.

I am aware that they are having difficulty with access restrictions to 1000s of feeds on the various services, and this will represent a scalability problem, especially with the new influx of users.

This occurs in every interface – online, Facebook, email daily broadcast, iGoogle – they are choosing what I should see at a glance

MyBlogLog API & Blogcatalog API & Social Graph API

When I visit any of these aggregation services, they don’t know who I am, and who my friends are. The best they can currently manage is to use Facebook, and in fact Facebook is currently the best way to add friends to FriendFeed.

MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog know who you are – using a combination of what you have defined within your profiles, and possibly using Google’s Social Graph API a lot more is possible, allowing you to collate friends from multiple services.

Note:Plaxo is meant to do something using the Social Graph API, so when creating an account I added my MyBlogLog Profile which provides tons of data, and to be honest with recursive use of the API it should be able to find a number of profiles, blogs etc.

Privacy advocates might think I am odd, but when I arrive at a new service, I just want it to have all my public data available, that can be reasonably obtained. I don’t want to have to provide private data such as passwords.

No one has quite got things right yet, more on Techmeme

I do benefit potentially from long term promotion of Blogcatalog and by giving their competitors equal coverage I also gain a benefit, because if for instance MyBlogLog becomes a massive success, the value of competitors as a viable business also increases.

Thus it is actually with a very heavy heart that I am going to write what might be my first ever critical review of MyBlogLog.

It is my hope the MBL guys take this as constructive criticism, which I haven’t honestly seen on any other blog over the last couple of days since the features were announced, other than what seemed to be a universal yawn.

What Is Wrong With The Activity Time Line?

MyBlogLog have so far added 42 services, and I am only looking at a few of them.

However based on a comment over at Brian Solis the LifeStream currently supports

- Bebo
- Deli.cio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- Jumpcut
- Last.FM
- MyBlogLog
- Netflix
- Stumbleupon
- Twitter
- Yahoo Answers
- Yelp
- YouTube
- Upcoming

Here are some quick annotated notes in a quick screenshot

Now I wouldn’t be so harsh if I hadn’t already read this comment by Eric on the Techcrunch writeup

Sadly, this feature has been ready to launch since June of 07, when it would have been a pioneer instead of a follower. Regardless, I’m psyched that the rest of the team had the temerity to stick it out at Yahoo in the belief that they would get to start launching killer features.

If this has been ready for 8 months and just needed pushing out of the door, you would expect a few refinements.

I have seen a few comments on the Techcrunch article suggesting that there is a lack of control of what you see in the timeline, either for privacy or information overload.
It is true that Blogcatalog have this side of the feature set more refined, but at the same time I am not a great fan of micro-management, and it is not needed with the current maximum of 40 people you follow… possibly because not enough people have added their services yet.

Tags

The way MyBlogLog has tagging implemented has always bugged me – all tags on the site still lead only to people and communities that have been tagged manually in the MyBlogLog system, rather than using the tags supplied within content with rel=”tag” or categories.

Here is an example

Those tags from Matt’s delicious feed lead to MyBlogLog’s internal tagging system, not where you would expect… either Matt’s or the global tags on Delicious. Very annoying.
It is equally annoying when you click similar tags below RSS items and again you are not presented with content.

No Mentions of Blogcatalog

Here are some reports on the MyBlogLog new features, but they ignore Blogcatalog

ReadWriteWeb
Techcrunch
Mashable
Louis Grey
Cnet
Brian Solis (Brian I am disappointed)
Webomatica
Download Squad

Best of all, Read Write Web did a round up of 35 Life Streaming sites, and for some reason Blogcatalog didn’t make that list either.

I know everyone is talking about FriendFeed which has some useful viral ideas to encourage everyone to sign up, and their Facebook integration really kicks butt.
I have a problem with FriendFeed – it is trying to grab the conversation from the various services with an internal comment system. I am not sure that is healthy.

MyBlogLog have added some kind of blog comment monitoring system, that is a good idea and something I have nudged the Blogcatalog guys about a few weeks ago, but moving the comments to FriendFeed? I am not happy with that.

If you want to compare, here is the current list of “LifeStream Supported” services on Blogcatalog

Amazon Wishlist, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Myspace Blog, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube

I believe there are 15 others on the way soon.

There are some inherent problems with all of these platforms… information overload and lack of specific topical areas or niches. Once you go beyond your core friends, the noise increases.

I really want to throw a wide net for information retrieval, but I only want some of it.

Update

For those unaware of some of the features introduced by Blogcatalog over the last 6 months here are some links to relevant articles.

For the programming geeks, you might be interested in the BlogCatalog API which was introduced August 2007

If you are looking to differentiate between MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog, I wrote this article back on July 2007 and it covers many of the differences which are still true today.

More recently, Blogcatalog partnered with SezWho to enable a comprehensive comment feedback system. At that time they also surpassed MBL on Alexa, though as everyone knows Alexa stats are not the most accurate to go by, and the unique differences between the services create a different usage profile.

To compare social graph features, I would suggest my article from when Blogcatalog introduced their dashboard 2 weeks ago. Of particular interest for many are the very specific controls available to protect your privacy, or to control which information you receive from different people.

p.s. I don’t class the problems previously with the messaging system as a negative review – I think that was more a general outburst from the whole blogosphere.

Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others

10 months ago I fired off a heated debate about RSS sharing, and how Google with it’s easy to share feeds could be killing the future of RSS.
Now I say I fired it off, but honestly it would have been a storm in a teacup without Robert Scoble taking part with one of his most controversial headlines.
I think I had about 30 subscribers at the time.

Today Robert is championing the Bill of Rights he signed up for, but unfortunately Google Reader and Google’s recently purchased Feedburner don’t support the level of control over your feeds to allow Robert, and his friends wishes to be fulfilled, and they really only have their selves to blame, for championing Google Reader without encouraging Google to allow for self determination of what happens with the data.

RSS Sharing – Path of Discovery

I already knew that RSS could be protected using RSS Authentication, and that was something Google doesn’t support, but Bloglines does, and they block your ability to share authenticated feeds. +1 Bloglines

Open Social Web is really about applications such as Facebook, and my voyage of discovery into content access control in Facebook actually started quite by accident about a week ago.

Facebook provides a way to get your notification by RSS

The URL looks like this

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=576942190&viewer=576942190&key=10characterkey&format=rss20

Google Reader allows you to add that feed, and share it

Shared item uses javascript, though I could easily also feed it to anywhere, such as a WordPress blog

I could have also shared it in a primary shared feed totally by accident.
Now there currently isn’t any really private information in there, other than allowing others to know who my friends are, and who I am communicating with, but then you wouldn’t want to share your email headers either…

Being allowed to share data doesn’t mean it should be as easy as hitting a hotkey when reading a “river of news”

I Appologise To My Facebook Friends

I will remove the sharing in 24 hours, but I feel it is important to use real data to demonstrate this point because for some reason 99% of the tech industry just didn’t understand it 10 months ago.

Facebook & Bloglines Understand it

Facebook point to their help information on notifications

Lets take a look at what Facebook think about sharing and privacy, and why they implemented specific security measures.

Does this mean that everyone can see all my notes now?

No. Each person that can see your notes on Facebook is given a different RSS or Atom feed URL that is unique for them. Only the notes that they are allowed to see will be syndicated via that URL. If you change your privacy settings or friend links, then all the feeds will be appropriately updated.

Unfortunately those people can share those links by accident

Won’t Bloglines and other similar services make my notes content searchable by the world if my friends enter the URL for my Notes feed into those services?

Atom and RSS feeds from Facebook include the Bloglines Feed Access Control extension , and we set the access parameter to “deny” for all of our feeds. We also indicate in our robots.txt that feeds should not be visited or indexed by bots. The major aggregators and search engines (Bloglines, Technorati, Google, Yahoo!) all appear to respect these directives. If you are very concerned about the possibility of someone seeing your notes that you don’t want him or her to see, we’ve added a privacy option that you can set on your notes privacy page which will prevent any of your Notes from being syndicated in any RSS or Atom feed.

The major search engines do support Robots.txt, though I am not sure robots.txt would be sufficient to stop someone hacking.

Bloglines Feed Access Control extension was introduced last August, and it seems no one in the Technology blogging world really took an interest.
Google Reader certainly doesn’t support it as I have proven above.

People can make all this content searchable by mistake, broadcast it on Twitter etc

Doesn’t providing different URLs to every person that views my notes create inefficiency because services that do aggregation will have to retrieve and store my Notes from multiple feeds?

Yes. This is the only way that we can maintain your privacy settings on a per-viewer basis.

Facebook (and Bloglines) seem to be very keen to support privacy and choice, but Google Reader by not supporting “access:restriction relationship” seems to think privacy (and copyright) is a waste of time.

access:restriction relationship=”deny”

Feedburner is now owned by Google and you would expect them to treat all services the same, and to support initiatives that give content owners a choice in what happens to their content.

They have an interface to allow introduction of sharing control within Feedburner, but for some reason only support the blocking of sharing with a service provided by a Google competitor, Yahoo Pipes.

This adds the following code to your feed, and I currently have on my feed, though I will probably switch back.

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /><meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noprocess" />

this means that it is not indexed, but all links are still followed (so links back to the feed still give me some juice), and is meant to prevent someone using your content in Yahoo Pipes.

Of course it doesn’t….

Once any content enters Google Reader, it can be tagged and filtered automatically, and Google Reader doesn’t include any of the access controls.

I have fed my protected feed into Google Reader, and then shared it
It took me 2 minutes to set that up and is realistically unblockable – any splogger using Google Reader cannot be prevented from taking your content and feeding their “Made for Adsense” sites.

Facebook Opening Up?

Actually they are already wide open, because the various feed readers other than Bloglines are not supporting their controls.
The announcement today of limited search ability doesn’t matter, someone could easily program an app that would allow people to share everything and have everything searchable, without seeking permission from those sharing.

Ownership and Control of RSS Content

10 months ago everyone seemed perfectly happy to slam me and tell me that I was wrong. The tech blogging fraternity thought at that time that once something is in RSS format, you should no longer have control of it, and have no legal right to complain about other people using it.

The more creatively and more personal RSS feeds become, the more control the owners of that content need for how that content is used, either on purpose, or by mistake.
It shouldn’t be possible to hit a hotkey and share Facebook content with 50,000 subscribers, but it is currently possible.

This is about choice, and privacy

This also isn’t the only problem with Feedburner as as I pointed out when Feedburner were purchased by Google.

Update

I have now switched to using a screenshot rather than a live Javascript feed to improve privacy a little