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By TaiTran, January 31, 2009 2:08 pm

The recession is forcing some web services to start charging their customers. And surprise? Some power users are ready to pay. Today I received another email from MyOtherDrive on premium accounts.

I guess it’s time now to put it on the table how much I am willing to spend for web services and why.

My first list includes Facebook and a news aggregator.

My Facebook

My Facebook = less formal LinkedIn + FriendFeed with friends + Photobucket + Life events Reader + Address Book + Calendar + mini-CRM + mini-YouTube

I don’t know whether Facebook likes it or not (if you don’t like it just contact me, Facebook) but above is how I utilize my Facebook account.

1. My profile on Facebook can be used to include professional and academic information. It’s not entirely an online CV but rather an informal page with relevant info. What makes it more like my LinkedIn is that I have received a dozen of business opportunities via Facebook, thrice as much as from LinkedIn. Sidenote: I’ll give Caravat some time

2. Facebook is now my feed aggregator of non-personal updates. My blog entries here, my reading archive on Tumblr, bookmarked links on StumbleUpon, submitted news on Mixx flow to my Facebook newsfeed. What Facebook offers me that FriendFeed hasn’t is audience: I have much more connections on Facebook than on FriendFeed and some of them are my readers.

3. Another disclosure is that Facebook Photos was the first feature that kept me with the service. I don’t compare with Flickr because Flickr is more of a publishing service than a sharing service.

4. What Life events Reader? I receive updates on events and activities around my location on Facebook.

5. Even when Facebook profile doesn’t explicitly capitalize them, contacts can be stored in Facebook. At least, I have a connection with ones I know and when I can’t ping them via cellphones or instant messengers, I drop them a message on Facebook.

6. Calendar! Facebook doesn’t provide a full-pledged calendar but since I have been utilizing its birthday-reminder function, I want to use it as a calendar as well. This is achieved with built-in Events feature or some applications.

7. Mini-CRM. While I haven’t provided any services or sold any product on Facebook, I know a bit of how I will be able to do that.

8. Mini-YouTube. Facebook Videos handles my videos well enough for me, except for a few that I want to be publicly available.

Up to $5/month

Considering the impact, I would be ready to pay up to $5 per month for Facebook provided that I have some privileges:

What I want for premium Facebook account

1. Lift the photo size from 604px width to at least 800px width like that of Orkut
2. Lift the limit of 60 photos per album to unlimited
3. Increase the maximum number of networks from 6 to unlimited
4. Maximum number of friends to send messages to is increased from 20 to at least 100. I don’t sp.am, never.
5. My news are broadcast more often to my connections
6. Optionally increase the maximum number of groups from 200 to a bigger number
7. A feature to download contents from Facebook, including all my photos in original size, all videos, all contacts of my connections that they make available, all notes, all posted items

A business news and analysis aggregator

As discussed on LinkHay, I am ready to pay up to $200/year for a business news aggregator, provided that high quality analysis is included and news are valuable. 200 bucks is the price of Harvard Business Review subscription so I would expect something that level of quality.

Storage

What I haven’t included here is storage. I will update more on this need when I am sure what I want.

How about you? What kind of services would you pay for and how much?

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By TaiTran, January 26, 2009 4:00 pm

“Twitter is a stream. Facebook is both a stream and a stopping point (but mostly a stream). Your blog is a stopping point pretending to be a stream.”

Chris Brogan, Of Streams and Stopping Points

Flickr is a stopping point. Tumblr is a stream (Tumblr has become a visual publishing / bookmarking site of some sort ₍₁₎ ).

Forums are stopping points. “Latest posts” on forum headers are streams.

A news article is a stopping point. Twitter-powered news are streams. Mixx front page is a stream of stopping points.

A Facebook album is a stopping point. Facebook Live Feed is a stream.

A Google search result is a collection of introductions to stopping points. Amazon’s recommendation is a stream.

Future?

Streams of publications

Streams of news information

Streams of connections’ activities

Streams of sales

***

₍₁₎ by Duy Doan

Comments (2)

By TaiTran, December 7, 2008 1:17 am

Danah M. Boyd
& Nicole B. Ellison, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

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By TaiTran, February 9, 2008 1:24 am

What is Yahoo! Pipes?

Pipes is a new mashup from Yahoo! that provides a GUI for building applications that aggregate Web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based applications from various sources. At the end of the process, user can choose to publish those applications.

The site works by letting users “pipe” information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified.

Tai Tran on Yahoo! Pipes

taitran.com/pipes

How to use Yahoo! Pipes

There are a series of videos to look at.

Firstly, please see the basics of Yahoo! Pipes

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/7smc413Bu2Q"][/gv]

Other videos in the series:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Sorting, Filtering & Debugging
• Yahoo! Pipes: Yahoo! Search, Union & other people’s Pipes
• Yahoo! Pipes: Feedity
• Yahoo! Pipes: Yahoo! Buzz Through Flickr
• Yahoo! Pipes: Text Input & URL Builder
• Yahoo! Pipes: Custom module with For Each: Replace
• Location Input & String Concatenate

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By TaiTran, October 30, 2007 2:03 am

Source: Problogger, Why Twitter Isn’t a Waste of Time