Hyperconnectivity: Long-term Effects?
Long-term effects of hyperconnectivity: Need for instant gratification? Impatience? http://eicker.at/Hyperconnectivity
Tagged: Speed Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Messages
Facebook starts integrating eMail, chat, SMS to its in–house Facebook Messages app; http://eicker.at/FacebookMessages
Gerrit Eicker
Wikia 2.0
Wales: The idea of Wikia 2.0 is to attract new people who thought wikis would be too complicated to use; http://eicker.at/Wikia
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Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “Where Wikipedia is encyclopaedia-like, neutral (despite the regular flame wars between disputing editors) factual information, Wikia is for fan communities and more expressive. Rolling out an overhauled version in the past few weeks, Wales claims the new Wikia is far more social with better sharing features, a simpler ‘WYSIWYG’ editing interface, theme designer and improved navigation. – ‘The idea is to move into new markets, attract new people – people who traditionally thought wikis would be too complicated to use,’ Wales told the Guardian. ‘Wikia 2.0 marries the traditional wiki tools that have been so successful with newer social and editing features.‘ – Behind all these improvements is the ambition of making Wikia stickier, encouraging people to keep nurturing their wiki after the initial burst of excitement. … ‘Wikipedia is a cultural institution – and still the number five site on the internet,’ said Wales. Given that Wikia was founded in 2004, and Wikipedia in 2001, Wales’s empire doesn’t seem ready to buckle just yet. ‘I should’ve started sooner. All the tech components needed to start these projects existed several years earlier – there was no reason I couldn’t have started Wikipedia in 1996.‘”
RWW: “The company said it has a number of features in store for its users: Integration of social tools to let users share their edits and contributions with friends. Highlighting of top editors so readers can see who created the content and learn more about them. Surfacing photos and videos more broadly on content pages and including images in search results. Radically improved content editing via a new, easy to use, visual editor. Fan activity modules such as real-time streams, polls, top 10 lists, and achievement badges. New opportunities for brands to get involved in the conversation with their fans.”
TNW: “However if his software could be licensed and used to build company intranets, extranets, and platforms for writing rich documentation, websites and collaboration tools – that would be something cool to see.”
Gerrit Eicker
Real Artists Ship
Mullenweg: 1.0 is the loneliest number. Usage is like oxygen for ideas. Jobs (1983): Real artists ship; http://eicker.at/10
Gerrit Eicker
Google Instant Previews
Google goes Instant Previews: graphic overviews of search results, highlighting relevant sections; http://eicker.at/Previews
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. … Quickly compare results … Pinpoint relevant content … Interact with the results page”
NYT: “Even though most people think searching on Google is fast, Google is obsessed with shaving more milliseconds off the time it takes people to search. … ‘We’re trying to avoid the case where you click on a result and you discover pretty much instantly that it’s not what you were looking for and you click back and click on a different result,’ said Raj Krishnan, a Google product manager who worked on Instant Previews. ‘That’s a bad experience.'”
SEL: “The new feature seems promising, another way to save time in the searching process, because there’s less need for people to ‘pogostick’ with their search results. … Google’s system seeks to marry the two: an image of the page as well as extracting text. Rather than a small thumbnail image, it shows a much larger picture of what the page looks like. The larger image, and one that’s not in a standard square shape, especially helped with people finding the previews useful in testing, Google told me. … The images previews cover up Google’s ads, when they appear. Is this a problem for advertisers? Google says largely no. … Ads, by the way, will also get an Instant Preview feature in the future, Google told me. There’s no set timeline for this, however. … The preview begin rolling out today worldwide and should be in place by tomorrow for everyone.”
pC: “It’s worth noting, however, that Microsoft’s Bing has had a similar preview feature since its debut in spring 2009. On Bing, users can click on an arrow adjacent to the results in order to see a pop-up that includes a preview of some text on that page to see if it’s a promising result.”
VB: “It’s impressive how much Google’s search results have changed in just the last couple of months, especially since there was a period a few years ago when search barely seemed to be changing at all. The Instant Previews feature seems particularly noteworthy since Google has been notoriously protective about its search results and has resisted adding anything that might clutter up the page. Whenever you ask about competition, company executives like to say that they’re more focused on improving their own products in response to user needs, but it’s probably no coincidence that Google’s making big improvements as it feels pressure from Microsoft’s Bing.”
Seligstein, Facebook: “Today I’m excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn’t have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message. – We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation. … Relatively soon, we’ll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren’t there yet, but the changes today are a small first step. – We’ll be launching Messages and email addresses gradually and making it available to everyone over the next few months. Once you receive an invitation, you’ll be able to get started and also invite your friends to join you.”
Facebook Messages: “Messages has always been the place for private exchanges on Facebook, and this won’t change. With the new Messages, now you have easy access to all your private conversations with your friends in one place. – The new Messages interface not only displays the Facebook messages you exchange with friends, but it also interweaves your chats, texts and emails (should you choose to create an @facebook.com address). It’s a central place to control all of your private communication, both on and off Facebook: faster interaction, integrated communication, smart filtering, revamped search, adding people to group conversations, forwarding, unsubscribing, or removing yourself from a conversation, sending attachments … Unlike traditional messaging systems, where you have no control over who can message you once someone has your contact information, Facebook Messages lets you decide how you connect with friends and the people around you. … By default, anyone on Facebook can send you a message, and if you set up a Facebook email address, anyone outside of Facebook can send you email. Email from friends and their friends goes directly to your main Messages folder, and everything else goes to the Other folder within your Messages.
IF: “Regardless of where the message is delivered, it will appear in the thread which notifications lead back to. Users can trigger through the interface whether they want the message to be sent to a specific medium of a friend, such as SMS to their phone. Otherwise, it will be routed automatically. For instance, if a user is online when they’re sent a message, they’ll receive it as a Chat. … As for security, instead of relying on a ‘security by obscurity’ method of inbox privacy, users will have control of who can send them messages. They can change their privacy settings to bounce back messages from those they don’t want to receive messages from. … CEO Mark Zuckerberg says this is not a Gmail killer, and that Facebook doesn’t expect people to immediately switch all their email to the product.”
TC: “Facebook has created three key things: Seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox. Essentially, they’ve created a way to communicate no matter what format you want to use: email, chat, SMS – they’re all included. ‘People should share however they want to share,’ engineer Andrew Bosworth said. – All of this messaging is kept in a single social inbox. And all of your conversation history with people is kept. … Right now, this system is merging four main things: SMS, IM, email, and Facebook messages. Zuckerberg said that they’d consider other tech, like VoIP in the future. But right now this is mainly about consolidating text-based messages.”
TNW: “Facebook is not calling this an email killer, it is ‘a messaging system that uses email.’ Facebook also does not anticipate people leaving their regular email accounts. However, the company does seem to anticipate that people over time will switch over more and more to Facebook messaging. Oh, and kids who get on Facebook before email? Who else wants to bet that they never get a normal webmail account?”
AF: “Zuckerberg: ‘All of this will enable simple, real-time messaging. We are also launching the ‘social inbox’. Since you have entered your friends lists and your friends have entered their friends lists, we can do some extremely effective filtering for you. While there are existing systems that filter out junk, there are various types of junk. Up until now, the primary way to handle messaging is through the development of white lists. At Facebook, you get that automatically. Not only do you get that, but you also can get messages filtered from people who are ‘friends of your friends’. The default experience is ‘high signal’ messages that are really personal to you, and then we can have another inbox which is for the lower signal content. … We want it to have IMAP support. It already speaks email protocol, however having it sync with other email systems is on the roadmap.‘”
RWW: “Zuckerberg tells an anecdote about his girlfriend’s sister – a high-schooler. Conversations with high-schoolers ‘make me feel old.’ High-schoolers say ‘we don’t use email. It’s too slow.’ … Will there be ads? The advertising will look the same as it does in the rest of Facebook. Zuckerberg says there’s a ‘huge difference’ between Facebook’s ad system and others. … Are you capturing the information about non-Facebook users? ‘Yes, in some way we do that,’ says Zuckerberg.”
TC: “Again, if you extrapolate that out, that means the end of email. It sounds as if Zuckerberg is just tip-toeing around calling for the death of a system that a lot of people currently use. Obviously, such a claim would cause a huge uproar (considering that there’s a huge uproar when Facebook changes a font size, the idea of Zuckerberg calling for the death of email is truly terrifying). – He also specifically talked about posts like ours calling this new system a ‘Gmail-killer’. ‘I think Gmail is a really good product,’ Zuckerberg said. But again, he’s essentially saying that it’s a good product that future generations are using less and less.”
TNW: “The fact of the matter is this, from where I’m looking: What Facebook did today could easily be done in Gmail with 3 Gmail Labs plugins. Oh, and then I don’t have to move over to Facebook. … Further, from the demonstration that we saw on stage, it’s simply real-time chat. That sounds suspiciously like a trimmed-down version of Google Wave, to us. Maybe Google was a bit too hasty in killing the Wave, after all? … In all, what Facebook announced today, again just appears to be a polished version of Google products… but with fewer options. If you’re already a heavy Facebook user, then maybe it’s a good thing for you. If you’re not, though, it’s likely a change that will be far too much of a pain in the tail to use… especially if you’re coming from Gmail.”