Tag: twitter

Twitter Metrics: Let's Remain Scientific, Please! [en]

[fr] On ne peut pas prendre deux mesures au hasard, en faire un rapport, et espérer qu'il ait un sens. Un peu de rigueur scientifique, que diable!

10.02.2011: Seesmic recently took its video service down. I have the videos but need to put them back online. Thanks for your patience.

Video post prompted by Louis Gray’s Twitter Noise Ratio. I’m still somewhat handicapped and used up my typing quota this morning. corrections: measure time, measure distance (not “speed”) My graphs: Louis Gray's Twitter Noise Updates/Followers Ratio Zoom in to the beginning of the graph: Twitter Noise, extremes removed Attempt to spot trends: Twitter Noise Updates per Followers, annotated Not conclusive. See also: Stowe’s Twitterized Conversational Index — interestingly, Stowe became much more “chatty” on Twitter lately 😉 Update: The Problem With Metrics — a few thoughts on what metrics do to the way we behave with our tools. Confusing ends and means.

Flickr and Dopplr: the Right Way to Import GMail Contacts [en]

[fr] Il est maintenant possible d'importer des contacts depuis GMail (ou Hotmail) sans devoir divulguer son mot de passe, aussi bien chez Flickr que chez Dopplr. GĂ©nial!

A few days ago, I saw this tweet by Matt Biddulph soar by:

Impressed by passwordless import at http://www.flickr.com/impor… – does anyone know if that’s a public yahoo API they use? want!

I immediately went to investigate. You see, I have an interest in social network portability (also called “make holes in my buckets”) — I gave a talk on SPSNs from a user point of view at WebCamp SNP in Cork recently — and I am also concerned that in many cases, implementations in that direction make generous use of the password anti-pattern (ie, asking people for the password to their e-mail). It’s high time for design to encourage responsible behaviour instead. As the discussion at WebCamp shows, we all agree that solutions need to be found.

So, what Matt said sounded sweet, but I had to check for myself. (Oh, and Matt builds Dopplr, in case you weren’t sure who he was.) Let me share with you what I saw. It was nice.

Go to the Flickr contact import page if you want to follow live. First, I clicked on the GMail icon and got this message.

Flickr: Find your friends

I clicked OK.

Flickr and Google

This is a GMail page (note the logged in information upper right), asking me if Flickr can access my Google Contacts, just this one time. I say “yes, sure”.

Flickr: Finding my friends

Flickr goes through my GMail contacts, and presents me with a list:

Flickr: Found your friends

There is of course an “add all” option (don’t use it unless you have very few contacts), and as you can see, next to each contact there is a little drop down which I can use to add them.

Flickr: Contacts

When I’m done adding them, Flickr asks me if I want to send e-mail invites — which I don’t.

Neat, isn’t it?

Well, the best news about this is that Flickr isn’t alone. Dopplr (remember Matt?) does the same thing — and also for Windows Live Hotmail now.

DOPPLR: Passwordless GMail contact import

Note and question mark: I just saw Dopplr announced GMail password-free import back in March, before Matt’s tweet. Did Dopplr do it before Flickr? Then, what was the tweet about? Thoroughly chronologically confused. Anyway, passwordless import of GMail contacts rocks. Thanks, guys.

Update: Thanks for the chronology, Matt (see his comment below). So basically, Matt’s tweet was about the fact that though GMail and Hotmail allows services like Dopplr and Flickr to access contacts without requiring a password, Yahoo doesn’t. Flickr does it from your Yahoo account because they have special access. So, Yahoo, when do we get a public API for that?

Hashtags For My Followees [en]

[fr] En utilisant un diĂšze # devant un mot dans un message Twitter, on en fait un tag (un "hashtag", pour ĂȘtre prĂ©cis -- "hash" Ă©tant un nom du diĂšze). Le site hashtags.org indexe ces tags. Pour y retrouver vos tweets, suivez hashtags sur Twitter.

Hashtags.org popped up on my radar roughly a week ago, I’d say. I mentioned hashtags once already here. They’re a “user-generated” system for implementing tags into Twitter. (User-generated, here, does not mean the same as in the ugly “user-generated content (UCG)” everybody is talking about these days, but points to the fact that hashtags were initiated by users, not by the Twitter-makers — just like the @convention.)

So, what does hashtags.org do? Basically, it makes those hashtags visible. In September, Twitter introduced tracking, which I realise now I haven’t mentioned here yet. Tracking allows you to “subscribe” to keywords. I personally chose to track “stephtara” and “@stephtara” so that any @replies would arrive directly on my phone as texts. I had the bad idea to track “fowa” during the Future of Web Apps conference. By break time I had 300 text messages in my inbox. Oopsie!

Hashtags.org allows you to view tweets labeled with a hashtag on a web page. Look at #leweb3 for example, #twitter, or #wordpress.

A few remarks:

  • it’s not very populated yet, because you need to follow @hashtags for them to track your tags; as of writing, only 132 people are — so start following!
  • I’m getting 500 internal server errors when I try to look at a tag that doesn’t exist (#lausanne, as of writing)
  • once “everybody” starts using hashtags, it will be very useful to be able to narrow down a collection of tagged tweets to “my followees only”; imagine I’m at LeWeb3, and everybody is twittering about it: I’m not interested in getting the thousands of tweets, just those from the people I’m following
  • for a long time, I’ve been a proponent of stickemtogether multi-word tags; recently, I’ve revised my ideas about them and come to realise that multi-word tags really need spaces in them, for better indexing; at the moment, you need to use “+” instead of spaces, like “#san+francisco” (unfortunately these don’t get indexed correctly, another 500 error); Stowe suggests opening and closing hash as an alternative, which is a bit hashy though it has its charm (“#san francisco#”).

In any case, nice to see such an initiative up and running!

Twitter Advertisers and Friend Collectors [en]

[fr] Sur Twitter (voir mon guide si vous ĂȘtes perdus!), je laisse en principe qui le dĂ©sire me "suivre". Par contre, je bloque sans merci ceux qui n'ont rien captĂ© et qui utilisent Twitter pour envoyer des messages ressemblant Ă  du spam, et ceux qui collectionnent les gens Ă  suivre comme des trophĂ©es (Ă  moins que ce soit des gens de "mon monde" que je connais). Donc, oui -- non seulement je ne m'amuse pas Ă  suivre ces gens fonciĂšrement inintĂ©ressants, mais en plus, je ne dĂ©sire pas figurer dans leur tableau de chasse.

I’m approaching 500 followers on Twitter. That means that nearly 500 people have asked to be able to track my updates — and I haven’t blocked them.

I’ve blocked many people from following me, even though my updates are public, and anybody can read my tweets/twitters on the web.

Who do I block? Blatant advertisers and friend collectors.

When I get a notice that somebody is following me on twitter, I quickly go to check out their stream (sometimes a backlog builds up, but that doesn’t change much to the process).

If I know/recognize the person and I want to keep track of them, I’ll follow them back (I’m pretty loose about who I follow on Twitter, though I do stick to people I know in a way, people I’d like to know more, or people that seem very interesting in what they tweet).

If I don’t recognize the person, the first thing I do is check how many people they’re following. If they’re following 500+ or 1000+ people and their name doesn’t ring a bell (ie, they aren’t one of the 2.0 mass-networkers gravitating around my world), I block them. I see no interest in being part of their faceroll collection. None at all. So yeah, of course, I get less followers, like that (but I’m not in any race or anything).

If they don’t get busted because of my “friends limit”, I take a quick glance at their twitter stream. If it’s tweet after tweet of self-promotional crap or ad-linking, I block them too. Why anybody would use Twitter to try to convince people to follow their spam is beyond me — probably, they haven’t got a clue what Twitter is about, and are trying their same old spammy techniques there without realising they’re mostly useless. Anyway, I’m not interested in being associated with people like that, so I block them too.

Who is left? Well, normal human beings. If you’re reading this and you have a clue (ie, you don’t believe in spamming people or making collections of people/links/whatevers to win the contest), then you run very little chance of being blocked :-). Feel free to follow me on Twitter!

PS: Robert, LoĂŻc, Jeff, and other authentic super-networkers out there: you’re part of my world, I don’t mind being in your collection ;-).

Seesmic Doubts [en]

[fr] Le texte et la vidéo sont fondamentalement différents. Je ne pense pas qu'il soit possible de "recréer" un dynamique comme celle de Twitter avec du contenu vidéo.

So, now that I’ve discovered what LoĂŻc‘s startup, Seesmic, is about (thanks to Ben twittering his tests), here is my initial reaction to reading about it on Techcrunch.

I’m not certain a “video-based Twitter” is a viable concept: the huge difference between video and text is that the latter is scannable, and that’s precisely what allows the presence/flow dimension in Twitter. You can “keep an eye” on a stream of text, but can you “keep an eye” on a stream of videos? Also, it takes much less time to keep up with a stream of text than with a stream of videos.

Me, commenting on Techcrunch

Now, not to say that Seesmic is doomed (that would be a bit pretentious of me) — and I haven’t checked it out directly — but I do want to go on record saying that the dynamics created by Twitter and other flow/presence apps with text cannot simply be transferred to other media.

If it turns out I’m right, I’ll be able to say “I told you so” — and if I’m wrong, nobody will care. 🙂

Ethics and Privacy in the Digital Age [en]

[fr] MĂȘme si tout le contenu numĂ©rique que nous produisons court le risque de se retrouver un jour sur l'internet public, cela ne veut pas dire pour autant qu'il est acceptable de rendre public des informations qui ne le sont pas.

En l'occurrence, les réseaux sociaux comme Facebook permettent uniquement aux amis ou contacts d'un utilisateur d'avoir accÚs à leur profil. On n'y pense souvent pas, mais de plus en plus, ce qu'on peut voir sur le web dépend de qui nous sommes, et des relations (enregistrées) que l'on entretient avec d'autres utilisateurs.

Il convient donc d'ĂȘtre vigilant, sous peine de commettre des erreurs diplomatiques. Un ami Ă  moi a ainsi rendu public aux 10'000 lecteurs d'IBcom une partie de mon profil Facebook, en illustration d'un article qu'il a Ă©crit. Pas de gros dĂ©sastre heureusement, mais s'il m'avait demandĂ©, j'aurais tout de mĂȘme fait un peu le mĂ©nage avant qu'il fasse sa saisie d'Ă©cran.

Over the last year, I’ve repeatedly asked for finer privacy control in the social tools I’m using (see here, here, here, here and here).

To summarize, tools need to let users add structure to their social networks, which in turn will allow privacy management of data made available in or through the tool: “let people I tagged X see everything, let people I tagged Y see this and that, and let people I tagged Z see everything apart from that.”

If you think of how relationships and social networks function offline, this makes perfect sense: some people are part of your friends circle, some people are close friends, some people are co-workers, some people are acquaintances, others are business contacts, judo pals, people you meet up with to play cards. And you don’t say the same things about yourself to all those people.

Your “social network” is not homogeneous. It’s a collection of little sub-communities (which can be as small as one person), with fuzzy edges, overlapping, ever-changing. Why on earth an online social network should place all the people I’m connected to on one level (or even two, or three levels) is beyond me.

Were getting there (but way too slowly). Pownce and Viddler allow you to tag your contacts and use those tags to control privacy (though with interface issues). Facebook, Flickr, and probably various others don’t allow you to tag your contacts, but do provide a few (insufficient) levels of privacy. Twitter lets you choose if you want to protect your updates.

What I’m getting to is that in today’s web of social tools, what you get to see is more and more personalized. And the information you can access about other people is often the result of your relationship to those people, and what they decided to give you access to. Just like in offline relationships. This means that you, as the person with access to the data, have an ethical responsibility towards the person who made some of his/her personal information available to you.

Because you have access to it, does that mean you have the right to publish it in a more public space? Well, I’d say the answer is most obviously “no”. By doing that, you’re betraying the trust of the person who made the data available to you.

Now, of course, I’m the first to say that you cannot control digital stuff you create and should be aware that you run the risk of seeing your private digital data ending up on the public internet at some point. “Even if it’s in a private setting, anybody can copy it and make it public.” Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s right to do so.

So, why am I writing this? Somebody just brought to my attention that IB com published an article about Facebook in their latest issue. And to illustrate that article, a screenshot of my Facebook profile was used. The article was written by a friend of mine (“friendly-business-acquaintance” friend), who obviously had access to my “friends only” Facebook profile.

He didn’t ask me if it was OK to publish my Facebook profile in print. If he had, I might have said “no”, but I might also have simply sanitized my profile so that he could take a screenshot I would have felt comfortable showing to the public.

He didn’t realize that by publishing my Facebook profile or showing it to others outside my friends’ circle, he is making information I would like to keep somewhat private available to people I would not necessarily choose to give it to. In this case, it’s not disastrous, because I am pretty conservative about what I put online, even on my Facebook profile (and I’m more transparent then most, so there aren’t many things I keep private). But there are at times things there I would rather keep for people I know — not the 10’000 readers of IBcom.

Just like most bloggers do not consider everything said in a conversation over a glass of beer “fair game” for blogging (when in doubt, ask, unless you’re ready to jeopardize your relationships over this kind of stuff), not everything you access in social networks is fair game for publication.

As social networks get smarter about privacy, I think we’re going to bump into this kind of problem more. For the moment, it’s up to each of us to be vigilant about what we take of others’ content and make available elsewhere. And maybe we need tools that can help us keep track of privacy settings better, and warn us when we’re about to make such a “faux pas”.

Manuel de survie Twitter pour francophones [fr]

[en] A survival guide to Twitter in French. If you're an English-speaker, head over to the Twitter support site or fan wiki.

Mise Ă  jour 03.2010: Une grande partie de ces instructions (tout ce qui touche aux SMS, en particulier) n’est plus valable aujourd’hui. Par contre, les explications sur la nature de Twitter et son caractĂšre public restent valables.

Cela fait des mois que je veux Ă©crire ce « manuel de survie Twitter pour francophones ». Si vous dĂ©barquez (vous ĂȘtes pardonnables, ne vous en faites pas), filez vite lire Twitter, c’est quoi ? Explications… ou Ă©couter la Capsule de Pain consacrĂ©e Ă  Twitter. Si votre premiĂšre rĂ©action est de l’ordre de « c’est nul, ce truc ! », vous pouvez encore lire Pas captĂ© Twitter.


En trĂšs simple, Twitter est un service qui vous invite Ă  envoyer la rĂ©ponse Ă  la question “que faites-vous en ce moment?” Ă  vos amis — par internet ou par SMS.

Vous ĂȘtes encore lĂ  ? TrĂšs bien. Voici trois points importants Ă  retenir :

  • avec Twitter, on ne choisit pas Ă  qui on envoie ses messages ; ce sont les destinataires qui choisissent ce qu’ils veulent recevoir
  • Twitter permet de faire la jointure entre le Web et le tĂ©lĂ©phone mobile ; le service y fonctionne de façon quasi identique
  • Twitter ne devient vĂ©ritablement intĂ©ressant que lorsque l’on est connectĂ© Ă  plusieurs personnes. N’hĂ©sitez donc pas Ă  convaincre deux ou trois amis de s’inscrire en mĂȘme temps que vous.

En pratique, comment est-ce que ça se passe ? Je vais vous présenter deux façons de vous inscrire (sur le Web et par SMS). Ensuite, je vous apprendrai les quelques commandes importantes pour pouvoir utiliser cet outil de façon agréable.

Inscription par SMS

Si vous avez reçu un SMS d’invitation de la part de Twitter, c’est sans doute que l’un de vos amis, dĂ©jĂ  utilisateur du service, dĂ©sire que vous le rejoignez.

Si vous n’avez pas reçu d’invitation, rien n’est perdu! Il vous suffit d’envoyer un SMS au +447624801423 (le numĂ©ro de Twitter) avec votre premiĂšre mise Ă  jour. Twitter vous rĂ©pondra par un SMS demandant de choisir un nom.

RĂ©pondez au SMS de Twitter par un message contenant le nom d’utilisateur que vous aurez choisi. Vos amis utiliseront ce nom pour s’adresser Ă  vous ou vous envoyer des messages directs. Gardez-le simple ! Les messages que vous envoyez Ă  Twitter seront disponibles Ă  l’adresse http://twitter.com/VotreNomD'Utilisateur (voir plus bas, « C’est public ! »).

Ajoutez également le numéro de Twitter à vos contacts.

Attendez le SMS de confirmation de Twitter. (Si vous ĂȘtes trop pressĂ©s, comme il m’est arrivĂ©, votre deuxiĂšme message risque de dĂ©passer le premier, et vous vous retrouverez avec un nom d’utilisateur faisant 15 km de long. On peut le changer par la suite, mais c’est embĂȘtant.) Si le SMS n’arrive pas, je vous suggĂšre de passer directement Ă  l’Ă©tape d’inscription sur le Web, que vous devrez faire de toute façon.

Lorsque vous allez finaliser votre inscription sur le site Web et que vous utilisez dĂ©jĂ  Twitter, on vous invite Ă  spĂ©cifier d’entrĂ©e votre numĂ©ro de tĂ©lĂ©phone, qui sera ainsi automatiquement reliĂ© Ă  votre compte.

Twitter par SMS

Attention, utiliser le format international de votre numĂ©ro de tĂ©lĂ©phone ! (Pour la Suisse, il commencera avec +41…) La suite de la procĂ©dure d’inscription Ă  la mĂȘme que si vous n’aviez pas encore commencĂ© Ă  utiliser votre tĂ©lĂ©phone avec Twitter.

Inscription sur le Web

Si vous n’avez pas Ă©tĂ© invitĂ© par SMS, et que vous voulez faire tout ça sur le Web, il faut commencer ici.

Bon, c’est en anglais, mais ce n’est vraiment pas sorcier. Direction le formulaire d’inscription (si vous avez fait l’Ă©tape prĂ©cĂ©dente, vous y ĂȘtes dĂ©jĂ ) :

Twitter / Create an Account

Pas dur, non ? Vous pouvez maintenant vous lancer :

Twitter

Si le coeur vous en dit, ajoutez une photo pour vous représenter et quelques informations supplémentaires.

Activer les SMS

Attention, étape inutile si vous avez commencé à utiliser Twitter depuis votre téléphone mobile.

Pour que tout soit bien, il nous faut ajouter le tĂ©lĂ©phone mobile. N’ayez crainte, Twitter ne fonctionne pas aux SMS surtaxĂ©s. En Suisse en tout cas, recevoir des SMS ne vous coĂ»te rien, et envoyer un SMS Ă  Twitter, mĂȘme si le numĂ©ro de tĂ©lĂ©phone est anglais, coĂ»te la mĂȘme chose qu’envoyer un SMS en Suisse.

Twitter: ajouter téléphone

Twitter va vous demander de confirmer votre numĂ©ro de tĂ©lĂ©phone en envoyant un SMS avec un code. Cela Ă©vite que des personnes malintentionnĂ©es n’utilisent votre numĂ©ro de tĂ©lĂ©phone pour s’inscrire !

C’est public !

Prudence ! Rappelez-vous que les messages que vous envoyez avec Twitter apparaissent sur le Web : n’importe qui peut donc les lire. MĂȘme avec un pseudonyme, quelqu’un pourrait un jour vous reconnaĂźtre. Tenez-en donc compte.

Vous avez bien entendu la possibilitĂ© de protĂ©ger vos messages en cochant la case « Protect my updates » sur la page des rĂ©glages. Ils ne seront visibles qu’aux personnes qui dĂ©cident de vous suivre, ce que n’importe qui peut faire sans demander votre autorisation, mĂȘme si vous avez la possibilitĂ© de bloquer certaines personnes aprĂšs coup et Ă  qui vous aurez donnĂ© votre autorisation.

Cela ne rend pas vos messages privĂ©s, mais vous donne un peu de discrĂ©tion. Gardez Ă  l’esprit que vos mises Ă  jour vont apparaĂźtre sur les pages de ceux qui vous suivent, et qu’il est vite fait d’oublier que quelque chose est privĂ©. Une saisie d’Ă©cran, c’est si facile!

Comme toujours, donc, les choses « privĂ©es » que l’on ne dĂ©sire pas mettre sous les yeux de tout le monde (inconnus, mais surtout amis) ne devraient pas se mettre sur Internet, sauf dans un espace protĂ©gĂ© par un bon mot de passe (et encore…)

Inviter des amis

Plus on est de fous, plus on rit, et plus on est d’amis, plus Twitter montre sa valeur. Inviter donc quelques amis Ă  vous rejoindre, surtout s’ils se connaissent ! Envoyez-leur aussi l’adresse de ce guide de survie pour leur faciliter la tĂąche.

La formule magique, c’est « invite +417xxxxxxxx », sans les guillemets et en remplaçant le numĂ©ro de tĂ©lĂ©phone par celui de votre ami bien entendu, que vous pouvez envoyer par SMS Ă  Twitter ou bien directement par le Web.

Ils recevront donc un SMS d’invitation de la part de Twitter, auquel ils pourront rĂ©pondre comme dĂ©crit plus haut.

Suivre des personnes déjà inscrites

Si vous connaissez des personnes qui sont dĂ©jĂ  chez Twitter, demandez-leur leur nom d’utilisateur. Vous pouvez les ajouter soit en envoyant le message « on nomd’utilisateur » Ă  Twitter, soit en vous rendant sur leur page Twitter (http://twitter.com/nomd’utilisateur) et en cliquant sur le petit bouton « Follow » qui se trouve au-dessous de leur nom :

Twitter -- Follow

Ensuite, cliquer sur le bouton « on » pour activer la réception des messages de cette personne par SMS :

Twitter, SMS on

En cherchant, vous pourrez trouver les annonces officielles Twitter ainsi que les comptes de la joyeuse Ă©quipe qui fabrique ce merveilleux outil : biz, ev, jack, blaine, britt… Moi, je suis par ici…

Gérer ces satanés SMS

Suivant combien de personnes vous dĂ©cidez de suivre, vous courez le risque de vous retrouver assez rapidement inondĂ© de SMS — particuliĂšrement si vous comptez parmi vos amis des irrĂ©pressibles bavards comme moi. En plus, on a tous des seuils de tolĂ©rance aux SMS diffĂ©rents.

Heureusement, Twitter nous donne le moyen de gĂ©rer tout ça. Ce qu’il faut comprendre, c’est qu’il y a une diffĂ©rence entre les personnes auxquelles vous ĂȘtes abonnĂ©es et les personnes dont vous recevez les notifications.

  • Les messages des personnes auxquelles vous ĂȘtes abonnĂ©es apparaissent sur votre page d’accueil.
  • Les messages des personnes dont vous recevez les notifications arrivent sur votre tĂ©lĂ©phone portable.

Il est donc possible de « suivre » ou autrement dit, d’ĂȘtre abonnĂ© aux messages de nombreuses personnes, et de garder ainsi un oeil plus ou moins distrait sur leur quotidien ou leurs activitĂ©s, sans ĂȘtre pour autant noyĂ© sous les SMS. Il est possible de :

  • dĂ©sactiver les notifications par SMS : « off »
  • rĂ©activer les notifications par SMS : « on »
  • dĂ©sactiver les SMS de telle heure Ă  telle heure (pendant la nuit par exemple)

De plus, on peut choisir de ne recevoir des notifications que pour certaines personnes. Par exemple, je suis abonnĂ©e Ă  prĂšs de 200 personnes sur Twitter, mais je ne reçois sur mon tĂ©lĂ©phone portable que les notifications d’une toute petite dizaine de personnes proches.

On peut donc contrĂŽler, personne par personne, si on veut recevoir leurs notifications par SMS :

  • pour arrĂȘter de recevoir les notifications par SMS d’une certaine personne (par exemple quelqu’un qui parle trop !) : « off nomd’utilisateur »
  • pour commencer Ă  recevoir les notifications par SMS d’une personne (par exemple quelqu’un dont on a auparavant dĂ©sactivĂ© les notifications mais que l’on dĂ©sire de nouveau ajouter, au quelqu’un dont on ne reçoit pas habituellement les notifications mais qu’on veut recevoir sur son tĂ©lĂ©phone portable pour une raison ou pour une autre en ce moment) : « on nomd’utilisateur »

On peut aussi faire ses réglages depuis le Web :

Twitter : following detail

Un petit truc : si vous ĂȘtes en train de recevoir les notifications pour beaucoup de personnes, cela peut ĂȘtre fastidieux d’aller les dĂ©sactiver une Ă  une. La commande « leave all » permet de faire le nettoyage par le vide et de dĂ©sactiver les notifications de tout le monde. Vous pouvez ensuite ajouter manuellement les quelques personnes dont vous dĂ©sirez recevoir les notifications par SMS.

Si vous ne recevez pas les notifications d’une personne, mais que vous dĂ©sirez tout de mĂȘme recevoir par SMS le dernier message qu’elle a envoyĂ© Ă  Twitter : « get nomd’utilisateur ».

Web, SMS… Et quoi d’autre ?

Que vous utilisiez Mac ou Windows, il y a un petit programme trĂšs sympathique que vous pouvez installer (c’est gratuit !) et qui vous donnera directement accĂšs aux messages Twitter des gens auxquels vous ĂȘtes abonnĂ©s, sans que vous ayez Ă  vous embĂȘter Ă  aller sur leur site Web Ă  chaque fois. Il ressemble un peu aux programmes d’« instant messaging », comme MSN par exemple.

Et la messagerie instantanée ?

Oui… On peut aussi choisir de recevoir les messages Twitter par messagerie instantanĂ©e (Jabber, Google Talk). À mon avis, ce n’est intĂ©ressant que si vous recevez la messagerie instantanĂ©e sur votre tĂ©lĂ©phone portable, et si ça vous coĂ»te moins cher que des SMS. En Suisse, ce n’est pas encore vraiment le cas.

Sur l’ordinateur, je dirais que c’est plus dangereux qu’autre chose, surtout si les gens que vous suivez sur Twitter sont des gens avec qui vous chattez : vous risquez de ne pas rĂ©aliser que le message vient via Twitter, et d’y rĂ©pondre comme si vous chattiez (en privĂ© !) avec votre ami. Du coup, risque d’envoyer Ă  toutes les personnes qui sont abonnĂ©es Ă  vos messages Twitter un message que vous ne destiniez qu’Ă  une seule personne… Ça peut ĂȘtre embĂȘtant !

En plus, si votre client de messagerie instantanĂ©e est rĂ©glĂ© pour envoyer une auto-rĂ©ponse, ces auto-rĂ©ponses risquent d’ĂȘtre envoyĂ©es comme messages Twitter… Pas forcĂ©ment trĂšs embĂȘtant, mais ce n’est pas trĂšs classe !

Les messages directs

Vous pouvez envoyer Ă  une personne qui vous suit sur Twitter un message direct (privĂ©) : « d nomd’utilisateur texte de votre message ». Attention, vous ne savez pas si cette personne va recevoir votre message sur son tĂ©lĂ©phone portable ou non !

D’autres questions ?

D’autres questions, quelque chose qui n’est pas clair ? Laissez un mot dans les commentaires je me ferai un plaisir d’y rĂ©pondre.

Twitter Hashtags: A Quickie [en]

[fr] On commence à ajouter des tags aux messages Twitter. Comme la place est limitée, le tag est souvent incorporé au message. Attention donc à ne pas sortir les tags du message lors de l'implémentation de cette fonctionnalité dans vos outils.

Steven Hodson has questions about hashtags in Twitter (via Stowe). He also talks of possible support for these in TwitBox:

And yes I am asking this for some purely selfish reasons as I am thinking about adding experimental support for this idea to TwitBox so I would definitely be interested in some feedback on this.

Steven Hodson, A question for Twitter users out there

(For reference, hashtags is a proposal for Twitter tag channels by Chris Messina. It is still not the contact tagging I’ve been asking for — but I hear the Twitter boys are working on that.)

A quickie, that I’ve been thinking about: as space is limited in twitter messages, I’ve noticed a tendency to just insert a hash in the message in front of a relevant word, if the tag one wanted to use was already part of the message. Example:

Writing a message about using on .

In this case, I saved space by using the hash inside my sentence, and not repeating the tags “hashtags” and “twitter” alongside “tagging”.

So one important thing would be to not remove the tag from the message when putting it in a channel. Otherwise we could end up with things like this in the channel :

Writing a message about using on. (tags: hashtags, twitter, tagging)

See how bad this would be?

Incorporating metadata in the message “body” itself is nothing really new (microformats!) but here there is an extra incentive to do it: space is limited. Keep that in mind when implementing hashtags for Twitter or other presence tools.

Update: Old, but still relevant. Some thoughts about tagging, tags, and tag combinations written in 2005, just after Technorati started indexing tags.

We Need Structured Portable Social Networks (SPSN) [en]

[fr] Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux que l'on peut importer/exporter d'un outil/service à l'autre. Nous avons également besoin de pouvoir structurer ces réseaux sociaux qui contiennent souvent un nombre important de personnes. Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux portables structurés.

Christophe Ducamp s'est lancé dans une traduction de cet article. Allez donner un coup de main ou bien en profiter, selon vos compétences! Je n'ai pas lu cette traduction, mais je suis certaine qu'elle est utile. Merci Christophe!

Scrolling through my “trash” e-mail address to report spam, I spotted (quite by chance, I have to say) a nice e-mail from Barney, who works at Lijit. Barney asked me if I had any feedback, which I’ll give in my next post, because I need to digress a bit here.

Lijit is a really fun and smart search tool which allows to search through a person’s complete online presence, a remedy, in a way, to the increasing fragmentation of online identity that’s bothering me so much these days. Actually, it was already bothering me quite a few months ago, when I wrote Please Make Holes in My Buckets:

So, here’s a hole in the buckets that I really like: I’ve seen this in many services, but the first time I saw it was on Myspace. “Let us peek in your GMail contacts, and we’ll tell you who already has an account — and let you invite the others.” When I saw that, it scared me (”OMG! Myspace sticking its nose in my e-mail!”) but I also found it really exciting. Now, it would be even better if I could say “import friends and family from Flickr” or “let me choose amongst my IM buddies”, but it’s a good start. Yes, there’s a danger: no, I don’t want to spam invitations to your service to the 450 unknown adresses you found in my contacts, thankyouverymuch. Plaxo is a way to do this (I’ve seen it criticised but I can’t precisely remember why). Facebook does it, which means that within 2 minutes you can already have friends in the network. Twitter doesn’t, which means you have to painstakingly go through your friends of friends lists to get started. I think coComment and any “friend-powered” service should allow us to import contacts like that by now. And yes, sure, privacy issues.

One thing the 2.0 world needs urgently is a way to abstract (to some extent) the social network users create for themselves from the particular service it is linked to. We need portable social networks. More than that, actually, we need structured portable social networks (SPSNs). I’ve already written that being able to give one’s “contact list” a structure (through “contact groups” or “buddy groups”) is vital if we want to manage privacy efficiently (in my horrendously long but — from my point of view of course — really important post “Groups, Groupings, and Taming My Buddy List. And Twitter.“):

I personally think that it is also the key to managing many privacy issues intelligently. How do I organise the people in my world? Well, of course, it’s fuzzy, shifting, changing. But if I look at my IM buddy list, I might notice that I have classified the people on it to some point: I might have “close friends”, “co-workers”, “blog friends”, “offline friends”, “IRC friends”, “girlfriends”, “ex-clients”, “boring stalkers”, “other people”, “tech support”
 I might not want to make public which groups my buddies belong to, or worse, let them know (especially if I’ve put them in “boring stalkers” or “tech support” and suspect that they might have placed me in “best friends” or “love interests”
 yes, human relationships can be complicated
)

Flickr offers a half-baked version of this. […]

A more useful way to let a user organise his contacts is simply to let him tag them. Xing does that. Unfortunately, it does not allow one to do much with the contact groups thus defined, besides displaying contacts by tag […].

In fact, we need structured social networks not only to deal with privacy issues, but also (and it’s related, if you think of it) to deal with social network fatigue that seems to be hitting many of us. I actually have been holding off writing a rather detailed post in response to danah‘s post explaining that Facebook is loosing its context for her — something that, in my words, I would describe as “Facebook is becoming impossible to manage in a way that makes sense with my life and relationships.” Here’s what she says:

Le sigh. I lost control over my Facebook tonight. Or rather, the context got destroyed. For months, I’ve been ignoring most friend requests. Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a “friend”? Where’s the line? For Facebook, I had been only accepting friend requests from people that I went to school with and folks who have socialized at my house. But what about people that I enjoy talking with at conferences? What about people who so kindly read and comment on this blog? What about people I respect? What about people who appreciate my research but whom I have not yet met? I started feeling guilty as people poked me and emailed me to ask why I hadn’t accepted their friend request. My personal boundaries didn’t matter – my act of ignorance was deemed rude by those that didn’t share my social expectations.

danah boyd, loss of context for me on Facebook

I think that what danah is expressing here is one possible explanation to why people are first really excited about new social networking sites/services/tools/whatevers (YASNs) and then abandon them: at one point, or “contact list” becomes unmanageable. At the beginning, not everybody is on the YASN: just us geeky early adopters — and at the beginning, just a few of us. We have a dozen contacts or so. Then it grows: 30, 50, 60… We’re highly connected people. Like danah, many of us are somewhat public figures. From “friends of our heart”, we start getting requests from people who are part of our network but don’t fit in segment we want to reserve this YASN to. We start refusing requests, and then give in, and then a lot of the value the YASN could have for us is lost.

Unless YASNs offer us an easy way to structure our social network, this is going to happen over and over and over again. For the moment, Pownce and Viddler allow me to structure my social network. A lot of work still needs to be done in the interface department for this kind of feature. (Yes, Twitter, I’m looking at you. You said “soon”.)

So, to summarize, we need tools and services which make our social networks

  • portable: so that we can import and export our relationships to other people from one service to another
  • structured: so that we can manage the huge number of relationships, of varying and very personal degrees of intimacy, that highly connected online people have.

Update, an hour or so later: Kevin Marks points me to social network portability on the microformats wiki. Yeah, should have done my homework, but remember, this post started out as a quick reply to an e-mail. Anyway, this is good. There is hope.

Supernova Open Space: Presence [en]

[fr] Notes de conférence/discussion.

*Random, scattered notes. Not necessarily understandable. Might contain outright mistakes — I don’t always understand everything. No who-said-what either, sorry.*

Classicly, presence comes from IM. Now, more to do with context.

Systems try to define presence for us, but in a way completely broken (“Away”: often not true). Kids: using SMS — just send it, get (or not) a response. Something muddy in the waters, because doesn’t really tell us, from a communications point of view, what we want to know. Can I talk to you? Can we chat? Fragmenting presence (Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook).

Different types of interruptions. Buddy list groups.

*steph-note: damn, really incapable of participating AND taking notes. Really really spotty notes.*

Difference between “conversation” and “communication”.

Jaiku as stream of consciousness of your community. *steph-note: that’s why it feels different (finally nailed it!) — it’s more about thoughts and intellectual/media production than about actual presence. Twitter has a higher ratio of presence. It’s more focused (yes, even though it’s chatty/microbloggy).*

Social etiquette.