Technoprovement: The Blog of Sam Jones

Let’s talk about Facebook for a minute (I’ll ignore MySpace for now since it’s basically Facebook’s very ugly and very dumb little bastard brother). Let’s look at both the good and the really stupid. Facebook gives you a way to easily join, and search for friends, and do things with like look at you friend’s pictures and interact using the site. On top of that they build (and let others build) Facebook apps to increase what you can do there. They do it well, but it’s pretty much like every other social site. You join, you put up stuff, and you find your friends and their stuff. Same process over and over.

Continue reading ‘WordPress as Your Ultimate Social Network-Part 2′

It’s 2008. We are all now spewing information about ourselves in every which way. This is great for sharing our lives online and using the internet as a social medium. The only problem with this is that this system begins to break down more with each additional service that you use. And you have to use multiple services, since you have different friends and audiences on each. You have no choice in the matter. What’s worse, they don’t always often almost-ever play well together. It’s like they don’t even care about you.

Continue reading ‘WordPress as Your Ultimate Social Network-Part 1′

Twhirl, everyone’s favorite cross-platform Adobe AIR based client got a public update today with the release of version 0.8. Most notable new feature is added support for FriendFeed. Go download it here.

So first off, FriendFeed is a great service and kudos to all those that have worked hard on it. I’ve been using the service for a little while now and I’ve come to believe there are three features that it really needs to make it into a much more powerful app.

1) Personal Ranking of Users and Content Type

Facebook already has this. When you get your news feed of your friends activity, you can signal a thumbs up (or the equivalent of a thumbs down) and Facebook learns what type of friend activity you are actually interested in. FriendFeed should give you the ability to do this both on a user level (i.e. friends you care about more than others) and on a friend service or content type level (e.g. I like their tweets but not their flickr photos). When it learns what you like, FriendFeed should show those items more often and respectively other items less often or never.

Continue reading ‘The Three Things FriendFeed Needs’

Photo by Tracy Olson

I found some great videos today for startups and entrepreneurship. The two speakers don’t always agree on philosophy but both were interesting. Both videos took place at Startup School 08

Continue reading ‘Making Money Online’

I’ve decided that I’m going to change the format of the blog around. From now on I will be only syndicating links on the sidebar of the site. I want to focus on other content and actually do some writing instead of having all the focus for this site on just links that I find interesting. I’m also going to play around with friendfeed and see if that could simplify combining tweets and links and other content I publish to the various social networking sites I use. We’ll see how it goes.