Comments (1)

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?

Comments (0)

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 (6)

By TaiTran, September 2, 2008 11:57 pm

(to-be-read in reverse-chronicle order)

3 September 2008

Positive review: SaigonNezumi, Google Chrome – What a browser should be -> Simple

A nice coverage: Chip 2.0, Review after the first day launching Chrome

Not-so-positive review: Google Chrome, it’s not worth the Buzz

Why Google Chrome is not only a cost-saving basket

On Finance’s side: GOOG’s Chrome is all about Wall Street.

TaiTran’s comment: Chrome is only only a cost-saving basket, but a full house for wealth for Google.

1. OK, the money that Google is saving as depicted in Zdnet’s article is the kitchen.
2. Chrome knows all your web activities. Google will sell smarter ads and thus their revenue from ads will increase. This is the bedroom.
3. Chrome is the O/S for the web
   Recall: what’s the 2 most successful properties of Microsoft? Windows and Office
   Has Google got Office? Absolutely. Now Chrome is Google’s Operating System.
   This is the living room.
4. Chrome being open-source will attract the communities (many from Mozilla) who will work for Chrome (more accurately, GOOG) for credit rather than wages. This is the bath room.
5. Chrome will be the web platform on which many applications and SaaS will base on: free dependency is never a free lunch. This is the dining room.
6. Chrome being very light will integrate deeply with Android for penetrating into Mobile market. This is the garden.

In short, all about making money in the long run, given that Chrome will succeed. How successful do you think Chrome will be?

Testing Chrome

1. Is faster than FF3
2. Failed to import bookmarks from my FF3
3. Offers more free space by pushing the tab bar to the very top
4. Doesn’t destroy the layout when zoom in. This is both good and bad.
5. Doesn’t display XML correctly
6. Supports built-in 48 languages
7. Connects to Google services at full speed
8. Uses same web standard with Firefox
9. Provides context-sensitive status bar
10. No RSS auto-detectio
11. No support for Quick Time
12. AdBlock will be highly political
13. Smart start page: recently visited sites
14. Flickr “Web upload” does not work
15. The address bar is a search bar
    

Chrome About Pages

1 September 2008

Google’s official announcement: we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book

Tad was skeptical with 7 reasons why Chrome is a bad idea

Technologizer raised 10 questions

Agglom scanned the catoon

Google Blogoscoped threw the first bomb

Comments (0)

By TaiTran, August 28, 2008 11:43 pm

You have been the one who create contents for the web.

You have been the one who teaches the web semantic meanings by tagging and linking information.

How much can You involve in organizing the web? The next step is You can change the order of Google search results.

Google Search started off one decade ago in 1998 with their search algorithm, and it’s been the core of their success till now. As the time grows, Google grew to be #1 search engine but has been facing a lot of challenges. Not only including Yahoo! and Live and Ask, the list of competitors is crowded with Wikia search, Cuil, Visual Search and many more. From this list, Mahalo and Wikia involve users in where they can provide feedbacks to the search results.

So what’s next from Google? An experiment to allow Google user to re-rank the search results. You can see the arrows in the screenshot below:

This is, again, only their experiment. But ain’t it interesting to follow?

My wonder is: does this feature collaborative or simply personal? How will Google absorb this feedback channel – algorithmically or mass-manually?

What do you think of this feature from Google?

Read more on their experiments on Search

Comments (3)

By TaiTran, August 27, 2008 9:47 am

Following VnExpress & VTC, ThanhNien Online – currently ranking 12th in Vietnam on Alexa – has rolled out a new design.

This new portal is built on Microsoft SharePoint 2007. Media is built on Microsoft Silverlight.

Overall, the blue theme is more pleasant to the eyes than VnExpress is. Since content is right on the left, it is easier to zoom in than with VTC.

Technically, the biggest issues with SharePoint is performance and scalability. Do you think ThanhNien would encounter any problems with these?

What do you think of this design?

Comments (0)

By TaiTran, August 26, 2008 11:29 am

Update quicker, more conveniently and more centralizedly

First of all, you want to stay updated with your family, friends and other networks. Conventionally, you can use phones, emails, IMs or face-to-face to communicate.

But there are 2 issues with the conventional channels:

1. The updates are scattered through everywhere
2. You only update significant events. How about other every little stuffs you do that matter to your beloved and make you an interesting person?

One solution has come: Plurk

And here comes Plurk

What is Plurk?

Plurk is a FREE web service that allows you to update your activities, receive updates from your connections on a timeline graph.

What is timeline?

Plurk is not just text. There is the time flowing and the messages look like they float it is interesting and fun to follow.

For navigation, there are 4 ways to navigate through the timeline:

1. drag with mouse
2. scroll with mouse wheel
3. use the arrow button graphics at both the right/left end of the timeline
4. keyboard arrow keys <= =>

Updating your activities is one important way to increase your Karma.

What is Karma?

Karma is the point you receive when Plurking. You can see the short list of Karma in this picture:

For more details, you can go to the help page for Karma at http://www.plurk.com/Help/karmaHelp

Karma scores are calculated 3 times a day, 12:00 am, 8:00 am, and 4:00 pm Universal time.

What is Karma for?

With Karma, you can

1. Customize your profile and change your mascot
2. Use more emoticons
3. Maybe more in future

How to increase Karma

1. Plurk regularly, but not more than 30 plurks per day
2. Invite friends
3. Update your profile
4. Plurk interesting stuffs to get responses
5. Get more fans

Also, beware of actions that lower Karma

1. Losing fans
2. Friend request rejected
3. Spam
4. Inactivity

Other features

You can also share links on Plurk. Long URLs are shortened.

Clique is simply a group of friends. Maybe 5 of your friends play on the same soccer team, or maybe 3 of your friends work at the same company. Cliques help you manage your audience so that you can send plurks to only the friends who need to be notified.

Badges are included on your profile whenever you achieve certain milestones on Plurk like “Reached Plurk nirvana”, “Invited more than 10 users”, “Has more than 50 fans”, “Translator”…

You can view interesting Plurkers at http://www.plurk.com/browse

Why Plurk

So comes the big question: why do I have to use Plurk?

Firstly, it solves the problem: update and get updates. Plurk centralizes all your updates in one place. Plurk is quick. Plurk is fun. Plurk is real-time and is with an interesting interface.

Secondly, Plurk can be used as a micro-blog. Imagine you’re so busy to write a long blog post. With Plurk, you can note down quickly and easily.

Next, Plurk is a powerful tool to make announcements to your followers.

What’s more, Plurk is a place to make new friends who share the same interests as yours.

What are other reasons to use Plurk that I haven’t thought of?

Tools for Plurk

There are some handy tools that make Plurking more exciting.

1. Firefox Sidebar gives you a Twitter-like interface in a sidebar.
2. Ping.fm allows you send updates to Twitter and Plurk simultaneously as well as other social networking services like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster…
3. Karma Trends shows your karma accumulation progress.
4. Mobile Plurk is a version of Plurk on Mobiles.
5. FriendFeed Tab adds a Plurk tab to your FriendFeed page.

What are other things I can look at?

The press page: http://www.plurk.com/press

The blog of the team: http://blog.plurk.com/

The Plurk team: http://www.plurk.com/plurkteam . You can view amix, deniz, alvin, dima

So what’s next?

I won’t let you stop here wondering what to do. Just CLICK HERE and start Plurking with me.

Comments (4)

By TaiTran, August 22, 2008 9:43 am

Friend: “Hey Tai, what is wiki? Is it a software or a website?”

TaiTran: “Neither. Wiki is a concept. It refers to a content which everyone and anyone can edit.”

Friend: “What? You’re confusing me!”

***

OK, so let me go into details on Wiki.

“Wiki” is a concept

“A wiki” might be explained as a computer software or a website. “Wiki” is a concept.

What’s the difference?

You may want to notice this difference: “A Wiki is a software/website” and “Wiki (without ‘a’) is a concept”. “A wiki” refers to a specific instance of the concept “Wiki”.

To make it easier to understand. It’s like we talk about “a person” and “person”. “Person” is general, has body organs, has character and personalities – but doesn’t have specific character and personalities. “A person named X” is specific, has X’ body organs, has X” character and X”’ personality.

Back to Wiki. So I say “Wiki is a concept. It refers to contents which everyone and anyone can edit.”

Basing on this concept, people may build Wiki software that put this concept into practice. Wiki software allows users to create different wiki websites.

Wiki is powerful

1. Collaboration

The major power of Wiki lies in its open nature to collaboration.

Anyone can edit Wikis, and it’s quick to do so. We have the power of the mass where every contribution is counted. That’s how within a short amount of time, the community has grown Wikipedia to be the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Does this work?

To some, the idea of “anyone can edit” is crazy. But it works!

You want to know that the edition doesn’t go away easily. All modifications are tracked and they are discussed by the whole community. If person A puts in an inaccurate or biased information, person B will point it out and the discussion will determine how to deal with that information.

While I agree that we can never have perfectly unbiased information, this open nature allows the whole community to reach a consensus that would benefit all.

“I’m a genius. They don’t understand what I wrote in the wiki so they removed it!” – Well if this is the case, I’d suggest you revert to your blog or your Knol whether you have full authority

2. High Linkage

Wiki pages within a wiki website link to one another through keywords. Therefore, when you read a wiki page, you are presented with information to other worth-knowing concepts.

Wiki management models

Power of the Mass

“No editor”, or “everyone is an editor”.

This is the original concept of Wiki. However, you may want to know that this is an idealism and no wiki is perfectly wiki.

People participation varies, people commitment varies, and people behavior varies. There may exist certain bias in many wiki pages.

Because of this “open” nature, many question the validity and authority of information on wiki. Researchers may need to cite from other sources accepted as “more authorized”.

Power of Authority… plus the Mass

To deal with the issue of validity and authority of wiki, Larry Sanger, former Wikipedia co-founder, has initiated a new model for Citizendium.

“Authorized editors are selected to be editors of Citizendium. The site is still open for everyone to edit.”

This model harmonizes the credentials from editors while still utilize the power of the mass.

Wiki in enterprise

Wiki is useful to teams within an enterprise to centralize their knowledge. Of course, people can write separate documents, but it will be hard to avoid duplication, hard to maintain and hard to search. Wiki solves all these 3 issues.

In Sum

Wiki is a powerful concept on which people in the last decade have built centralized massive amount of information.

Bibliography

5 ways to build effective Wikis

Wiki Software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

List of Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

Comments (7)

By TaiTran, August 22, 2008 3:29 am

The blog craze started in 2004, MySpace came out in 2002. From then till now, Web 2.0 has penetrated deeply into our lives.

You may have heard the buzz: it’s all about communications, exchange information and expressing the ego.

Have you thought of utilizing all those things for learning?

Recently I’ve been very aggressive on the net to see how we can use the applications for learning, and here I am with my key findings:

The requirements

Let’s imagine a very familiar study scenario: you’re assigned into a group to do a research on topic X.

Traditionally, the group would rely on emails, phone calls and IM to communicate and collaborate. Have you found these media difficult to classify your information?

This is how I would use Web 2.0 for learning

1. Search for information with Search EngineS

Obviously, information searching starts with search engines.

I have some hints for this:

1. Don’t just use Google. Try Yahoo! search, Live search, Ask search and other engines. They give different results and thus, relevant information might be found from ones other than Google
2. Try Google on different region settings. google.com/ncr (international version) yields different results from google.com.vn
3. Try different keywords and keyword combination. Also, exploit the operators
4. Also search for images. At least Google, Yahoo! and Live support this. Images are useful for illustrating your ideas and, in some cases, give you additional information.

Watch a slide show on Google services:

2. Ask your questions

Use Q&A service such as LinkedIn Answers to ask questions and receive information from professionals.

Watch a video explaining LinkedIn

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/RXVcq7Xg6JU"][/gv]

3. Make information comes to you with RSS

Normally you go out for information. Think about making information come to you?

Use RSS for this.

Watch a video explaining RSS

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/AwtmOPdrEL8"][/gv]

For example, if I’m looking for “globalization”, I would take these steps

1. Go to wordpress.com/tags/globalization
2. Get the RSS of this tag
3. Subscribe the RSS into a feed reader like Google Reader

Then check with the feed reader everyday to see if relevant information comes in.

You can also use Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate the feeds. Click here to view videos on Yahoo! Pipes

Try exploring different sources of information you can use this trick.

4. Share links with bookmark-sharing sites

If I encounter useful webpages, I would want to share it with my group mates.

Using email would bury the link under heaps of other information. Sharing through IM stands the risk of losing the message when the program lags.

So I would bookmark the site using del.icio.us and use the function “links for friend” to share the link.

Watch a video explaining del.icio.us

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/r9s5hc3MJZo"][/gv]

5. Blog your group’s findings on group-blog powered platform

WordPress supports multiple-author. I would want our group members to blog our research everyday on our blog. This is not superficial. It helps us

1. Collect information, thoughts, findings, analysis and intermediate conclusions
2. Track each member’s progress
3. Present to the lecturer our growth

5b. Share micro details

This is optional though. Some information might be very detailed and we want quick sharing methods. I would connect my mobile phone to Twitter and quickly update my thoughts on the way.

Watch a video explaining Twitter

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/ctXq1mKL7tk"][/gv]

6. Schedule activities with Calendars

Schedule activities such as meetings, field trips with Google Calendar

7. Watch and learn

Go to Youtube, not to entertain, but to learn from podcasters on the topic.

For example, this video is useful to understand Web 2.0

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/5nN-U0sDZNc"][/gv]

8. Compose Collaboratively

Use Google Docs to compose the documents. This is very convenient in such that

1. No email chain flying around
2. Single repository of document
3. Better version control
4. Many collaborators do the job concurrently

Watch a video explaining Google Docs

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/eRqUE6IHTEA"][/gv]

9. Build wiki to store develop information knowledge

Wiki is great to understand new concepts and link the information to get the big picture.

Watch a video explaining Wiki

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/hczDZXPfYn8"][/gv]

10. Relationship building

Facebook is good to build relationship with your work mates.

11. Publish your research

Publish your research as presentations on slideshare or documents on scribd to share your knowledge engage in discussion on the topic.

12. Consolidate them all into one page

There are just so much!

How’re you gonna navigate around them all?

Well, one solution is to use a homepage service like netvibes to put all these services together.

Why all these?

Too complicated? Well here are the reasons why I would do it this way

1. Better organization of information. No email confusion
2. Exhaustive analysis. You write on the way so no information is missed
3. Better collaboration
4. Man, isn’t it fun?

I know it would be much easier for you just to email. But how much time have you spent searching for information later on? I’d rather spend the time to get things organized first, then make it easier later to focus more on creating contents.

And I’m pretty sure of one thing: just next year, this entry will be outdated because many new services will come out. Semantic web, mobile apps are just a few to predict.

It’s not a fashionable fad or a time-killer, it’s a shift in the way we can be more effective. Do you want to miss the train trend?

Digital Divide

But you know, all these will never happen if digital divide hasn’t been closed.

Technology proficiency and more importantly, community habit is a big gap. I want my team to do so, but other teams may not, so some of my team members may argue “why do we have to!”

With the internet connection speed in Vietnam, using Google Docs et al is insane.

Today, a world that is flat is till a romantic dream for me.

Resources

I’ve already tried out these services. Kindly see mine as example of how things may end up evolve: taitran.com/blog/resources

Comments (0)

By TaiTran, August 4, 2008 1:52 pm

“Hello my LinkedIn friend…

Have you got a MySpace profile? Yes? Good…

Have you got a Facebook profile? Yes? Good…

Some of your old friends are still using Xanga? Yes?…

Great! I’ve got you on Twitter now…”

And I just read your blog on Blogger and viewed your profile. It was inspiring…

By the way, I heard that you were planning to move to the office in EU, thus thinking about creating a Xing account…

Are you tired? I mean are you tired of managing all these profiles? When you need to update one detail, do you feel the pain to go to each and every site to update your profiles?

One solution has the potential to solve this issue: Social Graph.

Start by reading the next current wave of this here:

Brad Fitzpatrick, Social Grapth

Alex Iskold, Social Graph: Concepts and Issues

Jeremiah Owyang, Explaining what the “Social Graph” is to your Executives

Dan Farber, Facebook’s Zuckerberg uncorks the social graph

Comments (2)

By TaiTran, July 30, 2008 4:07 pm

What is your choice of media channel? Do you have dilemmas of choosing them?