Toluu

Andy DeSoto

Internet and social media technologies for humans

FriendFeed to Disqus Sync Tool increases blogger cognitive dissonanceJanuary 6

Hot off the presses today, in part as announced by Mashable, is a new tool courtesy of Cubanlinks.org’s Carter Rabasa designed to sync your in-blog Disqus comments with input you’ve received via FriendFeed.  In a description of version 0.1, Rabasa writes,

I’ve completed an alpha version of my Friendfeed-to-Disqus Comment Sync.  It is a 100% Javascript client app, but you must download it to your computer in order to run (cross-domain scripting issues prevent hosting).  The app consists of an html file and a javascript library.  

Today, Rabasa has launched v.0.2 of the service, a hosted version located at https://ff2disqus.appspot.com that automatically syncs your comments every hour.

Needless to say, this plugin is causing a bit of confusi

My social media workflowJanuary 5

Now that Duncan Riley’s so-called “silly season” is over, it’s almost time to put the New Years Resolution-style posts away for the year.  Before I do that, though, I wanted to write a little bit about my social media consumption at the beginning of 2009 so that I can compare it retrospectively to wherever I might stand at this time next year.

I am particularly interested in hearing what you do that may be similar or different to my own routine.  Since social media consumption is one of those things that your friends normally don’t have a chance to witness, here’s your chance to share!

My social media habits can be basically broken down into three parts: a beginning of the day, catch-up phase, a midday working segment, and an evening entertainment portion.  Here’s how I do it.

Playing catch-up

As soon as I wake up (and admittedly often before I’m completely out of bed), I need to catch up with whatever news or conversation took off while I was catching my z’s.  My tool of choice for this is my iPhone as the web and application interfaces for the services I use

My perfect FriendFeed: a response to Paul BuchheitJanuary 4

Earlier today, FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit eloquently responded to some of the discussion regarding FriendFeed that’s been flowing through the blogosphere.  Reminding us that any successful web service (e.g., his own Gmail) takes time and effort to succeed, he lets us know that he and the rest of the FriendFeed team are listening:

If you’d like to contribute (and I hope you do), I’d love to read more of your visions of  ”the perfect FriendFeed.”  Describe what would make FriendFeed perfect for YOU, and post it on your blog.  Feel free to drop or change features in any way you like. Yes, technically you’re doing my work for me, but it’s mutually beneficial because we’ll do our best to create a product that you like, and even if we don’t, maybe someone else will (since the concepts are out there for everyone).

I thought about this offer and realized my dream for FriendFeed is simple, even if abstract: I want to be able to sum up w

Five things I want to see in social media in 2009January 2

Yesterday, I [somewhat] objectively made a set of 10 predictions I expect to see over 2009’s course.  However, what I expect and what I’d like to see are two very different things, so I thought I’d complement yesterday’s list with a wishlist of my own.  Here are five things I think would contribute to social media’s value for myself and others.

#1: More automation.

We’re getting there with devices like the Eye-Fi card and the upcoming Fitbit, but we can do even better: I want to see services and technology that limit the time I’m required to actively spend uploading, sharing, and tagging content.  I don’t ever want to see a Flickr upload screen again, choose tags for my online video, manually share my location on Brightkite, and so forth.  If it can be digitally “outsourced,” I want that option.  That’s why services like

Ten social media predictions for 2009January 1

All the cool kids are doing it (i.e., my three favorite blogs: ReadWriteWeb, the Inquisitr, and LouisGray.com), so I’m going to cast my own perspective on what we’ll see in the world of social media over the next twelve months.  I’ve never done a set of predictions before, so I’m eager to look back at this list at the beginning of 2010 and see how things evolved.  Here we go:

1. A high profile crime (or intended crime) will renew focus on social media’s privacy controls.  Most people that regularly run in social media circles are generally unafraid of sharing sensitive information with the Web.  Whether it’s family photos, geocoordinates of private locations, or something as simple as a telephone number, people are becoming more and more open each day (as opposed to the more private, anonymous stylings of the early 00’s).  I predict that