David Herrold

Micro-connections and the speed of news

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Design, Social Networking, Technology

I think we’ve forgotten something recently.  I think we’ve forgotten how easily social networks allow us to connect with unbelievable speed and accuracy.

There was a time when connecting with old high school or college friends meant contacting your reunion coordinator.  Sending emails.  Phone calls.  Snail mail.  Or worse yet, actually attending a reunion (I’m joking…sort of).

Now, we are able to locate old friends with Facebook accounts in 5 minutes during a coffee break.  One friend leads you another – and down the rabbit hole you go to find dozens more by accident.

Well, not really by accident.  It seems like synchronicity when you stumble upon a friend through another friend’s Facebook account, but it’s not luck at all. It’s good design.

A new speed

So what if we could take this speed to the next level?  What if we could temporarily connect with individuals involved in specific events while they are actually happening?

Yes, we have the ability to peer into blogs, Twitter streams, Brightkite check-ins, Flickr photostreams, etc.  But there isn’t a mechanism to allow us to connect with hundreds or thousands of people at once.

I am talking about something like the Emergency Broadcast System, but using a temporary two-way communication instead of a one-way communication.  Since it would operate over the internet (and not the airwaves) targeting could incorporate very detailed geographic information.  It would need to operate across multiple social networks to incorporate as many users as possible.

Is this a crazy idea?  Probably.  Ok, absolutley,  but think of the amazing life-saving information it could facilitate.  Think of it as crowd-casting at the microscopic level with with gateways to networks opening and closing when needed.

What do you think?

(The photo above is race car driver Bob Burman, from the Library of Congress.  He drove in the inaugural Indianapolis 500 in 1911.)

Tags: Communication, crowd casting, crowd sourcing, emergency broadcast system, news, social networks

Decentralize me, please.

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Social Networking, Technology, Usability

Our content is becoming decentralized…and we love it.

Most bloggers I know are tangled up in multiple social networks, photo sharing sites, messaging services, networking sites, bookmarking platforms and a plethora of addictive attention-grabbing web services.

The concept of a “web presence” has changed so drastically over the last several years it’s become difficult to tell people “where” you are online. Blogs or personal home pages used to be our single point of existence online. These were the places we could refer colleagues, friends, family, etc if they wanted to see “our website.”

That’s not the case today.

Our lives are now split into dozens of different networks and spread across the internet like strategically placed digital confetti. We are on Facebook to connect with old friends and meet new ones. We are on LinkedIn to find jobs and stay connected to our business contacts. We are on Flickr to share our lives in photos. We are on Twitter because we have five spare seconds in line at the grocery store and saw something funny we need to share with the world. We are on Del.icio.us to keep track of all the amazing links we find and StumbleUpon to share them with the world.

Like a cheesy Zen proverb, we’re everywhere.

This is both frustrating and fantastic at the same time.

The fantastic part can be found in the amazing services we have access to for free. These services have connected old friends, gotten people out of foreign jails and made grandparents smile at newborn baby photos.

The frustrating part is trying to pull it all together. Some sites are friendly and speak to other sites; but most don’t. More often than not, our collection of platforms and services float like little islands unconnected in any meaningful way. We are forced to keep asking the same friends to connect with us on multiple services.

Some very smart people are working on pulling it all back together, but it still appears to be stuff of dreams at this point.

For now, many of us simply link all our networks, sites and services somewhere on our blog (as I’m doing in the right sidebar of this site). It’s not ideal, but until someone figures out how to bridge our isolated islands in a meaningful way, it’s what we’re forced to do.

What do you think? Will we end up with connected islands?

Photo by Harris Graber

Tags: Blogging, del.icio.us, facebook, flickr, linkedin, open social, openid, social networks

Getting Flocked

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blogging, Browsers, Software

I downloaded Flock over the weekend and plan on kicking the tires for a few weeks to see if I like it. Flock is a browser based on the Mozilla FireFox browser (that you all should be using by now because it contains vitamins and minerals and buttery goodness and it works on lots of operating systems out there).

Flock does something FireFox doesn’t. It connects people to their social networks out of the box. When you open Flock for the first time, you need to configure it to connect to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Delicious, etc. It then logs you into all of your accounts at once and opens up a sidebar that allows you to see all of your social networks in one nice package.

I’ve just started playing with the blogging functionality of the browser as well. It lets you post entries to any number of popular blog sites without ever leaving the webpage you are currently reading.

I hope Flock gets some more market share in the browser wars. At the very least, FireFox can get some great ideas from them for a more socially connected browser experience.

The one thing I wish Flock had…extensions. FireFox is a development dynamo with loads of extensions to help web developers. So far, Flock is very limited in that arena. My hope is that Flock will eventually allow a smooth integration with all FireFox extension.

If that happened, it wold probably make the switch much easier for the development community.

Flock covers all their bases and is currently offering versions in Windows, Mac and Linux.

I’ll let you know what I think in the coming weeks. My goal is to use it several times a week until the end of the year.

Tags: Browsers, FireFox, Flock, social networks, Software