These little javascript programs can mean a lot to personal productivity and social media engagement. I came to this conclusion only recently, while I am using bookmarklets for years now.

The oldest I can remember of is the delicious bookmarklet. Honestly, without it my delicious account would be empty.  There is also a firefox add-on which, combined with the buttons does a lot more, but, hey, it is simplicity that we are after, aren’t we?

With the advent of Google Reader Notes, ‘Note in Reader’ became   kind of a regular but never really got off. I use it to share things in Reader occasionally, but most of the time I share things either in twitter or in friendfeed. Why? They show up much faster and the crowds in these two services are so much bigger than Google Reader. Google Reader is something like a library: you can’t make too much noise, so its perfect for reading systematically. But when you want some action this isn’t the place.

‘Press This‘ has been around for quite some time now. Maybe it is the second bookmarklet that I have come accross. Unless you want to blog about news, or respond to posts you have seen, it is not that useful. And adding pictures and media seemed hard. For some reason I had’t used it much. Until two days ago when I discovered, that much like posterous and friendfeed bookmarklets, it allows you to easily pick from the pictures of  page you want to blog about, and put them into you post. For thematic blogging it is superb. And deprives you of none of the wordpress blogging  amenities.

For twitter I do not use bookmalets to post, while there are quite a few out there. But I use one to shorten urls with urlborg. Then I manually copy and past the short urls in twitter. Why? Because I am using too many different clients and can’t have a unified solution.

The Friendfeed bookmarklet is a must, provided you are on Friendfeed, and you better be there. Makes it so easy to share a piece of content and spice it with an image or two, that it is irresistible.

Posterous was a late discovery of me. While  aimed at posting through email, does have a bookmarklet too, with editing capabilities  of the content shared, plus an extra area to add your own thoughts- comments. The combination speeds up casual blogging and, actually tempts you to blog more.

One thing I would like to see, is

One mark to rule them all, One mark to find them,

One mark to bring them all and in each browser bind them

to paraphrase J. R. R. Tolkien.

Yes, there are more. Much more. But the above are  the ones I care most. How about you?

Conventional twitter wisdom has it that being retweeted is a measure of value. This sounds very reasonable as

• being mentioned (=retweeted)  is a form of recognition and entails visibility as it, usually, includes the twitter name of the originator
• retweeting distributes a piece of information virally
• and, therefore, retweeting  is used as a measure of one’s twitter status by many twitter ranking services

But, let’s take a closer look :

There are two elements in every tweet (those retweeted included, of course): the who element and the what element.

The who element is the source or the channel  of the information compressed in the 140 characters.

The what element is either the tweet itself, or the content it points to. Usually it is the latter.

Retweeting tends to preserve the what but not the who. And even the what most likely will  propagate  changing form (=pointer) in the process.

After two or three retweets  (X retweets Y, who retweeted Z etc)  the very size of a twitter update makes it necessary  to drop some of the @ references: If Z is not in the social graph of X, but Y is, then X will most likely keep Y in the retweeting chain and not Z.

Also, if the retweeted message contains a short url, there is a high probability that some retweeting down the road, one will be tempted to use his favorite short url service and not the original. Let alone those that will drop the retweeting completely and present the information as their own discovery!

There are two cases of undeniable benefiting:

• If the tweet retweeted is someone’s statement and not a pointer, the retweeting process will most likely preserve the reference to the originator.
• In all pointer cases, the content pointed benefits from the incoming traffic, regardless which  short url service was used, if any. And this is great, because it makes twitter work like a social bookmarking service. Retweet equals Digg!

But where is the personal value derived from retweeting? And how much is it?

Being a reliable information source within your social graph is acknowledged by retweeting, but the opposite is not necessarily true: retweeting some random piece of info that one comes across does not yield value to the originator. At least significant one.

What I am trying to say here is this: worthy content will surface in Twitter and benefit from it. People will not benefit equally. So chose wisely where you put your investment in this service.

Screenshot by imjustcreative

Don’t know how many people have noticed this:  the feed of Webmonkey tutorials is gone mad. Most of the articles lead to empty pages while some of them are really weird stuff. Like the following:

which, if you click upon, leads to a page like this:

Is this a hijacked feed or what?

A basic one at least.

With the advent of the second gen twitter clients, which support, among other things, groups, users are confronted with higher barriers to entry and exit: In all clients, the painstakingly prepared groups are hardwired in the client. No easy way to get them out. When one desires  to switch to a new client, he has to recreate all these groups by handpicking users one by one.

The problem becomes apparent even in the case where one does not necessarily want to change twitter client, but he simply has to work on two different (or more) computers.

In my case, I had to recreate the Tweetdeck groups for my desktop and laptop computers. And I did it only for the two out of four computers I use and for two out of seven operating systems (3 windows, 1 mac, and 3 flavors of linux). I did not even manage to create them as exact copies.

Now, this call might sound like a luxury request, but given the path the twitter clients have taken (check Nambu or AlertThingy or Seesmic Desktop, to mention a few), you will notice that ‘groups’  is one of their prevalent characterists. So dealing with this feature effectively is essential for the success of the product.

And it is very simple really. A CSV or XML file would suffice. With bare minimum information. The name of the group, the twitter account it belongs to and the follower or friend ids that belong to it.

And even if the software vendors do not to go this way for fear of loosing users, there is something else they could do, to allow portability of groups for the same client but different computers: store this piece of info in the cloud. Create a simpe web app where each client will connect to and retrieve the group data.

Some people have  already hacked their way to group migration for Tweetdeck but this, clearly, is  not the way for the masses. Hence this call. But is anybody listening?

Google Reader has always been a difficult beast to tame. I never suspected it is actually THE beast!

:)

Some days ago I got glimpse in twitter of the Change the Web challenge. I took a look at it, to discover the underlying Social Action web site and its API. The Challenge was about using this API for a new innovative web application or widget. For some reason this appealed to me, although I generally do not participate to such contests. There was a money prize too, but that was not my  motive:  I would never agree to receive a monetary prize from a socially oriented initiative, only because it would be better spent if it were spent on its very cause.

The Change the Web Challenge
I have to admit that I was hasty in my decision on how to participate and what to build: I did not  look anything else apart from the API itself. I ended up paying in hard currency for this haste: lot of wasted time! Because, I, almost from the first moment, resolved in building a WordPress plugin with the Social Actions API.
I started coding and in a couple of days I was done only to find out that the Social Actions site already had such a plugin, a very well written one and definitively much better than mine.
Almost in panic, because the time was running out, I started thinking what could I build instead. I turned down the option of building a better plugin, because it was not only a matter of quality, but of originality too.
My mistake made me research better what was already in place and found that web site widgets were rather abundant. Except.. Except for wordpress.com where javascript, iframe and flash widgets are not allowed to run.

I remembered then the days I was trying to circumvent this limitation by employing Yahoo Pipes and the WordPress RSS widget. I did not find something similar revolving around the social actions API, and, despite this being a pretty simple solution (even though it took me a lot of hours to remember how pipes worked and catch up with the new features), I found it appealing since it would potentially be useful to the 7mio or so WordPress.com users. So I built a pipe which could be configured by users to retrieve actions theiy were interested in, in the form of an RSS feed (you can see it in action in the bottom of the sidebar of this blog) .

I  barely  had finished when I discovered that even this was not a good plan because Wordpess had committed to adopt the best plugin the challenge produced! This rendered my pipe obsolete and there was no time to go back in rebuilding my plugin. I did then what I should have done from the very beginning: looked at the ideas people had already posted in the relevant page and noticed that some kind of map would be a nice thing to produce.

With a few additions to the pipe and thanks to the Pipes Location Extractor, I managed finally to pull out something. Not much, but something.

Leasons learned

Thinking back my  experience, I realized that the whole thing looked pretty much as a  failed  startup.

I made the mistakes I wouldn’t have made if I was starting a business: I did not make a proper market research, I did  not check  what the users really desired, I ignored the opportunities and the threats… In sort, I got myself entangled in programming instead of building a product. How many such startup efforts had I scoffed in the past?

One step ahead.

From startups, my thought  jumped to social entrepreneurship only to realize the obvious: whatever you build,  the rules are the same. It is just the kind of returns that differ. In social entrepreneurship it’s not about making money. It’s about making a difference, aiding people and, ultimately, changing the world.

The new 80/20 rule

One more step ahead.

If social entrepreneurship mechanics are the same  with pro profit entrepreneurship why people who are experts in these mechanics do not do both? The easy answer is that entrepreneurs are mobilized by greed and not by human solidarity.

But I believe the truth is different. They just haven’t thought  about it!

I know many people that could do both and if they don’t, it is because they focus relentlessly on the success of their pro profit efforts and spend all their time there. And for some stages of entrepreneurship this is not only inevitable, but a prerequisite.

But then, there are so many other people that have tasted success, have turned into angel investors, have embarked on a second, or third or forth startup effort, while their bank account  has enough for the rest of their lives.

What if these people applied to themselves the famous 80/20 Google rule?

80% of their time and effort spent on their pro profit ventures and 20% on social entrepreneurship.

Think of the vast amount of talent, genious, power, skill and  resources that would go into this 20%. I am convinced that even a fraction of it would suffice to change the world.

I was working on a personal weekend project with Yahoo Pipes, when I took notice of this:

The most frequent feed source used with Yahoo Pipes is Adultfriendfinder. The tag ‘porn’  is not that much used though.

Clicking the link of the adulfriendfinder source leads to dozens of pipes, most of them of elementary functionality that simply  extract an element from the feed of the site.

To Yahoo’s credit, most of them are also inactive but, still, they show up in the listing. If you click on one, most likely you will get:

My first click was not so harmless though: it took me to a feed that displayed something like a youtube video player, which, when clicked, redirected to web site that Firefox notified me it was blocked.

What a pity that such a wonderful mashup engine cannot find its way into more prominent use…

The more time I spend online (as if it were possible), the more little things can make me change course completely. It’s all about adding up.

Take Ars Technica, for instance. This is a blog I really appreciate. I mean really, really: no crap content, in depth knowledge and coverage, important issues. What else to ask for?

Yet, lately I stopped reading it. The reason being  an old irritation that has become unbearable: Ars Technica does not publish a full feed. Although they have always a good excerpt, in order to read the article you have to click, open (yet) another tab, go to their page,  wait to load and …what did I went there for?  Ah, yes,  .. read.

Why don’t I stay in their blog then and scan the new posts from there?

I can’t.

I read from Google Reader because I want all the visual noise to go away. And I don’t mean only the ads by this. I do NOT see the ads, even if they are there. My eye is trained to skip them.

I mean all the other stuff: header, sidebars, banners, buttons, colors etc.

Google Reader does me a great service by eliminating all these elements that are put there, supposedly, to be more of use to me.

The almost black and white, high contrast pages of Google Reader, is the closest to a printed book I can get. And, for this reason, the easiest to read.

Apart from the visual distractions of the web site, there is another reason: time!  These  precious few extra seconds for the one post, add up for the next and the next, and the next, ad (almost) infinitum.

Were it  for a single post, and  it wouldn’t be worth to mention.

But I am an avid reader. I read lots and lots of posts daily. Having to take one more action (go to this other tab etc) is too much.

And there is a third factor: time again. But not the time spent on reading. The time one has been repeating this process, day after day, month after month, year after year. The lengthier the  habit,  the less inconvenience one desires in the way.

Please, blog  owners: do not allienate your most faithful readers. It is not from them that you get the ad money anyway.

I was trying to comment in Orli’s blog, when I saw this CAPTCHA: “Suroses” in greek means you “got drunk”. Apparently, Google’s CAPTCHA  does not appreciate my comments :)

I often observe little things while  web surfing, worthy to keep somewhere but not really worthy to make a fuss about. Today I decided to use this blog as a notebook for these little things.

It’s a lighter side of blogging…

Here is what I noticed trying to register in Streamy.