Drops in the Wave

@jurijlotman asked me to have a look at #googlewave (should have a look at microsyntax as well). So I had a look at the video. For the moment that is the only thing we have access to. It looks like a very interesting approach to communication and interaction. We are really talking realtime Internet here. Slowly the real time Internet is for me becoming the Web3.0 subject. But have a look at the video for yourself.

The question is however the relation between MicroContent (the drops) and Google Wave. And I am inclined to concluded that there is no relation at all. The most important aspect of MicroContent, the permalink, seems to be missing in Google Wave. Google Waves is all about creating, sharing, editing and extending waves. These waves seems to be very large documents, which can be distributed to multiple readers and authors. It was not clear from me whether I could use parts of a wave in another one. This would imply referencibility and an important MicroContent aspect.

The other aspect is structure. Out of the box there does not seem to be any, although one can add it later on (example with forms in the video). However a piece of text can be split and be edited by multiple persons, so each piece of text could be seen as a piece of MicroContent. One can also add links, images and videos to the text to create rich text. The editing by multiple persons reminds of a Wiki, which did not have much to do with MicroContent either.

The examples of Twitter integration show that #googlewave can support MicroContent and add new levels to create mashups and threading. In order to be a good MicroContent environment also importing and exporting should be supported, which seems to be already partially done through the api’s. So for a final assessment we have to wait. It looks very interesting and can give a new idea to documents and wiki’s.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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Mac Twitter Clients

Today a new Twitter client arrived on the Mac: Tweetie. So time to check out the state of Twitter clients.

Since a long time I am a user of Twitterific. It is a simple client that seemed a nice fit to Twitter. You get a small icon in the menu bar, which changes colour once a new tweet arrives. Clicking on that icon unhides a special window, with a sequential list of the latest tweets. Each tweet shows an icon, the name of the author and the tweet itself. Authors and url’s have a different colour and link to the Twitter-site. Each tweet can be acted upon, such as a reply tweet, etc. Twitterific also interacts with Growl, so that each new tweet is presented on the screen for a short time.

Twitterific is really a downsized MicroContent Client. The new Twitter clients however show that a real full-sized client for Twitter has its rightful place on the Mac.

The first Client is Tweetie. The first thing that stands out is the sidebar with four options. With this the user can select his timeline, reply, direct messages and search. Very nice if you want to zoom in. I think I will like the search option. C licking on a tag will create a new tab with a corresponding search. Thus the tabs will show your history. The same happens if you click on a @username. This client also supports multiple Twitter accounts. It is also very easy to post images.

And then there is Nambu, which brings Twitter in the real MicroContent Client age. This Client has a real sidebar (list view pane) with categories (Twitter, Links, Nambu, Search). The Links category shows all tweets with url’s that I have recieved and sent. The Nambu category seems to be related to a Nambu url shortener and picture uploader.

The search category has a standard list with the most used words in tweets (current/today/this week). I do not know how long ‘current’ is. But Susan Boyle is on top in all three trend periods. The most important category is naturally the Twitter category with standard subcategories: home, mentions, direct, sent, favorites, people and groups.

Tweets are shown in standard inverse time order with the user icon, twittername/full name, tweet time and the tweet itself. One can easily reply, retweet or private tweet. (and can I recognize other Nambu user tweets?). Nambu indicates which tweets are unread. As all tweets seemed too be stored locally, it is possible to delete all tweets, read tweets, set all as read, etc. It also easy to follow/unfollow. Very nice is the possibility to translate tweets easily. It did work well for japanes and korean tweets.

A tweet is parsed such that hashtags, links and users are found. Clicking on a hashtag creates a search list for that hashtag (sweet). Clicking on a username opens a new window with the tweets for that user. It is then easy to follow or block that user. Interestingly shortened urls are expanded, so that you can see where they point to.

The people category can show information of your social network (followers and following) on an image grid. Hovering over an icon shows the information on that person. Groups allows you to define a group of people from the ones you are following, so that you are no longer overwhelmed. This again shows feed. (I guess people should be moved to a separate category).

Nambu is a very interesting Twitter client. I will continue using it.

Nambu should work on its menu bar. That is now totally beyond logic. There is also a secondary tool bar. This tool bar is different for each list. I get however the impression that it could be part of the main toolbar.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • field • tag • type • blog
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Ultimate profile

While looking for persons on the web, I came across a new service profile aggregators. Examples of these are Retaggr and Profilactic. These service allow a user to combine all the profiles he has on the various services. So you will get a single place, where all your profiles on services such as twitter, facebook, last.fm, etc. are registered. These two services seems to compete on the number of services they support, profilactic has some 190 social sites.

This is a great service if you want to get rid of disambiguation. each service offers a profile page. This is basically a page with links to your profiles elsewhere. Each service also offers badges with this info. I prefer the Retaggr badges here, nicer styled.

Find my profile on Profilactic here. Now I have to signup and checkout all these services.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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Tags app

A new application for tagging on MacOSX is introduced: Tags by Gravity Apps. This allows a user to add tags to files, music, web-pages etc. Any application that supports AppleScript in the right way is supported (OmniWeb: fail, MarsEdit: fail). One can use Spotlight are the tags application to find tagged files. Tags has a simple tags browser (could be improved).

This is a very interesting application. I do not understand why they use the weird interface, let me at least select another, standard one.

I have a feeling that the standard way of finding files, the Finder, is slowly morphing into something else with all these addon’s and applications. Time for Apple to step forward here.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • field • tag
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People Search and SEO

A number of services try to capitalize on the people search problem that I discuss. These Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) help people to get a better placement on search engines. Usually this will cost you some 100 dollars per year. They claim to help your reputation, but have sometimes a questionably reputation themselves.

These services also call themselves identity aggregators, but I find them to fall short in this respect. By the way I am talking about Naymz and LookUpPage.

As a free service they do not offer much, one could better create a profile at LinkedIn or Xing.

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People Search first conclusions

There are many conclusions that can be drawn from the few sites that I looked at. The main conclusion is that we are not here yet, it could and should be much better. Especially the disambiguation should be solved. For the moment PeekYou has the lead here. The search scope of most services is still limited. Information from more social network sites should be included. A person should be able to claim his personal search result and should be able to annotate/edit the results and he should be able to add information. This information could be used to improve the search results.

But a user should also create a good presence on the web. The key in all these services is having a unique name. If you do not have a unique name, create on through a unique middle name for instance. Also use unique usernames across the various social networks. And when publishing something: use your unique name/username, so that it can be found.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search with Pipl

Pipl is a people search engine that is supposed to search the deep web.

A search for me gives the following results:

• Quick facts (5) - a list of sentences, such as ‘Arnaud Leene hasn’t yet added photos to his profile;
• Personal profiles (7) - from MySpace, Twitter, Flickr (twice), ICQ, Jaiku and Amazon.com (not very useful, they should look at Amazon.fr);
• Professional profiles (2) - from LinkedIn and ZoomInfo;
• Photos (17) - Flickr only. The images of me on the sidebar are very good;
• Publications (1) - could be better;
• Email address (3) - very good;
• Web pages (8 and more) - all correct;
• Blog Posts (8) - all correct;
• Documents (8) - all correct;

So all in all this service gives very good results. It is a bit geared towards the US. More social networks could be added.

Unfortunately if you search for someone who does not have a unique name, you are in trouble. There is no way to split the results into multiple persons.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search with Whozat

The whozat service seems to be newest service. It is still (partly) in beta. The service searches still(?) a limited number of social networks. They also can not find me on YouTube. Interestingly one can indicate whether a results is relevant, but I did not seen any effects. I will try with somebody else. Also this service seems to be a Intelius-frontend, but at least they add something new.

The service allows you to refine a query based on ages, locations and gender found. Refining by concepts found seemed to focus the web-results. But can we get rid of the irrelevant Intelius-results?

All in all, the service is just not good enough. It would like to see a more extended profile of a person. And I would be able to really zoom in and suppress erroneous results. It does not seem to work now.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search ad pushers

There are many other people search services out there, but most of them are just ad pushers, so I will not reveal their name. Be careful with them!

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search with WieOWie

Wieowie is a dutch people search service. Searching is done by supplying the first name and last name.

A search for a person leads to results in several categories:

• facts (10) - these seem to be sentence, which start with ‘Arnaud Leene is’.
• tags (106) - not really a tag-cloud with frequency indication. Results are a bit strange;
• email-addresses (9) - none is valid anymore and several are incorrect;
• phone numbers (3) - two out three correct, although one is no longer valid;
• pictures (20) - 4 out of 20 are of me, the other guys and girls I do not know;
• blogs (125) - is OK, but none is by me;
• Google (2050) - seem to be a good list and shows at least my stuff;
• Yahoo (577) - seems to be a good list;
• Documents (0) - they are really there!
• Hyves (0), Facebook (0), Netlog (0), Xing (0) - it is correct that I am not active on these services, but at least my profile should be found;
• Schoolbank (1) - correct;
• LinkedIn (1) - correct (I should change my location there!);
• YouTube (0) - there really is a video by me there;

The user can create an account on wieowie. This allows him to specify a social network like information profile. And this is shown in addition to the public search results. One can also add profile pages, which one might have on some social network sites. They could add more here, now it only supports linkin, schoolbank and hyves. There does not seem to any integration between search and profile. Seems a missed chance.

Also in this service there is no way to remove ambiguity for persons with a non-unique name.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search with 123People

The 123People search seems to be at least a bit more Europe oriented. The search interface is very simple: just indicate the full name and the search realm.

Search for myself does give good results. The pictures found are fairly correct, they are of me, published by me or my name appears on the web-page of the image (worst results). No email addresses of phone numbers of me or found, the service could improve here. There are on results from Amazon, which could be better as well (look in the books).

The weblinks are correct, although not always relevant. There should be a difference between profile pages and general web-pages. The blogs section is not very good. What is the difference with a generic web-page? And what is a biography-page? It does not give good results. I like the tag-cloud, although it could be better (the ‘tinyurl’ tag is now very large). A list of my profiles on social network is complete and shows some doubles. It should add other networks as well. No video’s can be found by me, nor my Twitter account. The list of documents found is correct

All in all this service could be smarter, it should use the usernames found on the web. I like the categorization of information found. Things however remain a black box. It is unclear where some information comes from, nor can one add other information sources. It should be an intelligent mix of information provided by me and found on the web.

A problem appears when you search for someone, who does not have a unique name. How should I zoom in?

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search with PeekYou

Peekyou is one of the new kind of people search services. It allows you to search people either by name (first and last) or username. One can indicate the search realm. It is also possible to add tags to a search query. The query result is presented either as a list, a grid or as a map. One can also refine the query by ###, age or location. I like this presentation a lot.

The results of a query are very US oriented, so it has limited appeal to me. Also here one finds integration with the Intelius-service.

Clicking on my name one can zoom in a bit further and see some (11) services, where I have registered. Also links to web-pages (6), where I am mentioned ar listed.

I tried to sign up for the service in order to correct some information, but never managed to get signed up. I gave up, a pity.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search Classic

The classic way to search for people is by using whitepages. This is a strictly local method for searching, i.e. each country has its own set of pages. Often the search possibilities are restricted. For instance one can only search by city and can not do a country wide search. The information obtained can be limited, for instance no first names.

The idea of whitepages has been pushed to include mobile phonenumbers and email-adresses. However it seems that this never caught on and the directories that used this remained limited.

In the US the idea of whitepages has been extended to include any public record. The Intelius service seems to have monopoly on this information, but much information is behind pay walls. The Intelius data is syndicated by many third parties and you see it on many sites. Interestingly each syndicator reveals something that others keep hidden.

Google also incorporates phonenumbers, but you have to use a keyword such as rphonebook:. And it only works for the US.

These are good solutions if one needs a phone number quickly, but remain a bit limited.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search Images

A natural thing to do is to search for images of oneself. For this one could do a search on Google. The results for my name are pretty good. The first 40 images are either of me or by me. But looking further on things go wrong. I start to see images that have nothing to do with me. And this is due to the algorithm that Google uses to associated images on a web-page to text on that web-page.

So there must be better methods / services to search for my face. MicroContent search should come to the rescue here.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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People Search by free text

The most obvious way to search for People is by using a standard search engine, such as Google or Yahoo. So let’s see how well the search engines are doing in finding my name. I judge the results by two things: completeness and relevancy.

For completeness I look at the position of my most important ramblings on Internet: my blog. For me my accounts on other services should follow, but I guess those are not important to everyone. I should add some obscure page and see where it appears.

For relevancy I just locate the first irrelevant result, i.e. a web-page where my name does not occur. There are many pages that do not offer interesting information on me, but I will not discuss those.

Google results:

• arnaud leene : about 38.400 results, first irrelevant result at #189, blog #2;
• leene arnaud : about 38.500 results, first irrelevant result is at #71, blog #2;
• “arnaud leene” : about 2.060 results, can’t go beyond #199, no irrelevant results, blog #2;
• “leene, arnaud” : about 146 results, no irrelevant results, blog not listed;

One can repeat this with other search engines, but it does not change the overall picture. The main lesson is that it works very good, but do use quotation marks to indicated the entire name. I am lucky that I got a worldwide unique name, so there are very few irrelevant results. Irrelevant results arrive from changed pages and from spam sites, that inject names into the Google index.

However is this good enough? In this way you do not find my images, the music I listen to, my email addresses, telephone numbers, etc. I guess one could add specific keywords to get this information, but there are better solutions.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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