Browzmi is the latest social networking plaything. And it’s a browser.
No, it’s not like Flock, the social browser that competes with IE and Firefox. It’s your browser in a browser tool, with built in social networking and sharing features.
Browzmi provides three panes to work in. The left is the My Stuff section. The center pane is the ‘browser’. The right pane is Explore More. Right and left sections are collapsable, with the center pane expanding to fill the screen space.
My Stuff contains four display choices: My Friends, Surf with Friends, My Favorites, and My Updates. Each of those selections pretty much shows what it’s titled. The Surf with Friends mode shows live updates as your friends navigate to new pages (i.e. friend updates stream).
Explore More also has several display modes: Where is Everyone, Related Photos, Related Videos, Updates on this Page. Where is Everyone displays a list by site of how many of your friends are on each site, and allows you to select that site and see just who is there. Related Photos provides related pictures from Flickr. This updates live as your browse to new pages. Likewise Related Videos does the same while drawing video results from YouTube.
Above the center pane is the little set of buttons shown above. These are fairly straightforward. Favorite however is where you are prompted to tag a web page. Clip allows you to clip out images. The thumbs up and down show the counts beside them, however I’m not sure how that affects things right now.
Want to jump in with some early players on Browzmi? Check out this Friendfeed thread with Browzmi links.
Please take the dive and give it a try. Registration takes seconds.
Plurk, it’s all the buzz. What have you heard? How it’s the cool new chat tool? How it’s got a neat creature? Or how Karma rules the roost? But have you heard about the chat parser?
Parser? Yes, it’s what runs over and processes the words you type in your plurk or comment. It turns your text into rich goodness, and you didn’t even know it. Let’s look at some of the obvious ones.
**this** becomes **this**
*this* becomes *this*
__this__ becomes this
Pretty nifty huh? Well there’s a few more tricks in there. The next two are nifty and less obvious.
In the chat window to create a plurk, there are several options, such as says, and wishes. There is also freestyle. The last allows you to type any text. What happens if you type says or wishes though? You get the plurk version just as if you’d selected it.
The next one is about linking someone’s name. If you want to link tojosan for example, simply putting an @ in front does the trick.
tojosan with an @ at front becomes tojosan. The @ disappears.
Did all of that overwhelm you? Well here’s a final trick for sharing URLs without having that overly long string in there. It’s another markup trick. Here we go.
The key is to type out the URL then a space, followed by a (, then the link text you want, then close with a ). Go ahead, try a few. It’s easy once you see it.
As a shortcut, this also works www.plurk.com (The Plurk) becomes The Plurk.
So there you have it, a bag of Plurk goodness to play with in your chats. Go forth and chat with gusto. Come back and share your tips and tricks with the rest of us.
Plurk is a made up word and a fantasy creature. Plurk is more; it’s the latest chat and conversation tool on the market, and plurky just about describes it.
Plurk takes a whole new spin on on chat though as you can see. Chat isn’t just streaming up the window as with Twitter, Pownce or IM. The flow is left to right. Like little boats of conversation floating down the river, the watchful eye of the plurk beast overseeing it.
Already you can imagine it takes a bit of getting used to, but now check out the chat popup.
Each conversation box opens up, and a complete thread can take place there. The whole of that conversation is contained inside that box. The neatest thing is it’s a live update box. As folks comment back in it, it updates while you watch.
This feature is especially interesting when the plurk message is a private one or to a clique. Then it’s not even visible except to those invited into it. The box becomes your own private chat room.
Karma! Just one of the interesting features of plurk is Karma. You, me, the guy with the rat fetish, we all earn karma. Let me just say, the karma wars are on.
Karma is earned through some obvious activities. Adding friends, inviting people, and posting messages all seem to have a positive affect on your karma. You can’t always tell though, as karma points are only updated about twice each day. The notes are fuzzy on when updates occur.
So what’s the point of karma? Well unlike regular social networks, such as Twitter, or Facebook, plurk doesn’t open all of its features to new members. As your karma increases, more features, really customizations, become available.
Customizations include changing your backgrounds, cool chat icons, including dancing bananas, picking out your version of the plurk creature, and naming your plurk page. Those are most of the things that get unlocked, and it seems obvious there are more to be found.
The whole unlocking thing, coupled with the ever moving stream of messages, give plurk a game like feel. At first this is fun and appealing to almost everyone it seems. The problem is that karma updates so slowly that for most folks, they are unable to unlock anything until their second day on plurk, and even then just one or two items.
The other downside to making it so game like is that the aggressive gaming of the system is already occurring. You’ll see folks with several hundred friends and thousands of messages sent. You’ll see threads of conversation going into the hundreds of follow on comments. People are hunting down karma like it was the next big thing. Remind you of WoW?
So the game like feel may not be for everyone, but overall plurk is an interesting take on conversation online. I find it is a lot more interactive than Twitter or Pownce, and with the built in chat features, more fun to actually use.
I’ll be putting a follow up post together just about the chat text and link features. Feel free to share your best and favorite ones here, as well as your take on using plurk. Please, jump in and share, and post your plurk me link.
Nope, I’m not talking about knitting! Twine is a new social aggregation site and now there’s a twine for St. Louis.
So what’s a twine exactly? A twine is a collection of items about something. Vague? Yeah. Once a twine is started on a subject, say St. Louis, Twine users can add things such as bookmarks, documents, notes, images and video under it. As time goes, the collection will grow.
Users become members of individual twines. Members can add more items to that subject’s twine as well as commenting on already added content. Members can also share items, such as bookmarks, with their contacts, or other twines.
Diversity in what can be shared on a subject sets this apart from a wiki. Instead of just links, actual descriptions and previews of those links are available, as well as member comments about those links. And it’s not just links. The ability to add documents and video contributes to that diversity.
Beyond diversity though is the ease of contribution. Members can contribute by adding a Twine bookmarklet, posting on the twine page, or sending an email in.
Twine content is enjoys another benefit. It’s able to be searched for the instant it’s entered. That’d be pretty interesting on its own, but Twine take it up a notch. They find key words in the content.
A great example is on the St. Louis Twine page. I added the Missouri Botanical Garden website to the twine. It not only picked up the tags from the entry, but also recognized that Henry Shaw is a relevant person. The Botanical Garden was actually founded by Henry Shaw. Amazing.
Will people really find this useful? I’m imagining that the more people have access and get involved, the better a twine will be. There are already twines with hundreds of members and even more links and items.
So now you’re ready to get involved but you need an invite. I can help you there. Just drop me line with your email address and mention Twine and I’ll send you one. Once you’re in, invite your friends. You receive plenty of invites to pass on.
Starting up a new blog is tough. You hear me saying that, but then you look and see I’ve started more than one. But it’s still true. Oh yeah, you can drop out three or four posts in short order but what happens next? The idea well runs dry. That or you lose interest. It’s tough. Been there.
Chris Garrett, pro blogger and more, shared a great idea with some of us to get through those days. It’s a brainstorming idea focused on using a Mindmap. Now some of you have never heard of a mind map before. Here’s an example of a real one I’m working on.
This map, titled Flickr, demonstrates the basic idea of a mind map well. Flickr is the main theme. Off of that are nodes or branches. In this case different topics of interest about Flickr. Each of those branches has its own branches as well. These further break down a topic or area of interest.
In the example above Groups is a specific topic about Flickr. Under that there are several sub topics, such as recommended groups, what moderated means, and the privacy of sharing in a group. You’ll notice that I didn’t use full sentences in the map. The key is to provide enough information to be able to recall that topic without writing a novel.
How does a map like this differ from an outline? The most obvious difference is the level of detail. Mind maps are often no deeper than the above, or perhaps having one or two deeper branches. Also, the organization of the map is more fluid, and topics may overlap. You can see that privacy is mentioned under How To as well as Groups. Notice also that sets is under Privacy and How To.
Your map is done and your ready for the next step. This hopefully is much easier now, and that’s picking your blog post topic. Using the mind map above I can see several potential blog posts already. As a matter of fact, I can picture a series of Flickr How To articles in my future.
Seeing the ideas laid out might tempt you to write them all at once. Here’s where another great idea from Chris comes in handy, a blogging planner. More on that in a future post.
What tools are you using? Mind maps? Outlines? Random post generator? Waiting on your Twitter pals for inspiration? Share!
I’ll not spoil the articles for you, but did want to talk to one or two from each article. First from the Why it won’t article, #8, “It pisses bloggers off because all their comments are moving onto FriendFeed rather than staying on their blogs.”
Scoble mentions that your blog post is likely to get more comments on Friendfeed than on your blog. Why? Because your friends and readers are no longer just following your blog. They are following your videos, all three of your blogs, and your Pownce and Flickr streams. They’ve found it easier to catch you in one place, Friendfeed, than checking all of those separately. The concern is that your visitors will go down. Truth here. All that Friendfeed shows is the link. Folks still have to click over to read the article. So maybe they aren’t commenting directly on the blog, but being on Friendfeed makes you a lot more visible.
Then there’s #6 on the why not list, about finding new friends. The argument being that it’s tough to find new friends there, unless you want to find Scoble, Dave Winer and some other uber geeks. I’d contend though, that with this service, as others, that folks aren’t coming without their friends. Oh, they might be the first in their peer group, but rarely are they the only. This is true for me. Early adopter but now a swarm of my contacts is using it. And believe it or not, finding my blog posts and stuff there instead of directly from my RSS.
Now about the will go mainstream side. #5 is one of two favorites from the list, “It is freaking fast and much more reliable than Twitter.” This is so true. I’m often seeing Friendfeed show tweets before I get them on the client I use. Reliable, even more so. Twitter seems to be offline or bugged a noticeable part of the time. Friendfeed is managing incoming data from a slew of sources and yet it seems to handle and keep up with them without error. However, I wonder how dense the user base is yet. Does it have the many thousands of users that Twitter has? How will it fair in six months?
Then my other favorite, #9, I’ll call it the all the cool folks are there item. It’s the fact that many interesting geek and non-geeks alike are on FriendFeed. Scoble mentions a few interesting ones, Barack Obama, and Gary Vaynerchuk. Hey, you’re there too right? This is a deal maker for me. I follow friends of course, but thought and discussion leaders are definitely folks I enjoy following as well. Are some of them just Internet rockstars? Sure. But some are well known in other arenas and just happen to be blogging, and making other social media.
Where do I stand? I’m in the will go mainstream camp. My reasons? It’s only going to get easier to use, and people will become aware of it from mainstream sites, such as Obama’s campaign page. Right now it doesn’t have the eyes of millions, but as it grows and changes, it’s user base will grow and mature as well. The feedback is just beginning to role in for them.
Where do you stand? User? Never heard of it? Following a slew of folks? Or just your real life friends? Bloggers? Politicians? Your neighbor?
Woopra is a real time web traffic monitoring tool. It collects live data from your blog, and allows you to view it in a desktop client. The coolest thing is the real time part.
What you see above is a shot, capture live, of an actual blog reader at The Broad Brush. This person as the 5th visitor that Woopra had recorded. What is blotted out above is the IP address of that visitor. As you can see, it captures all of the visitor data one could possibly want, from browser and system type, to location and screen resolution.
If you look closely you’ll see not only which pages were visited, but the length of the visit. Pages visited are listed in order of visit, and if a page is visited twice, it appears twice, in the proper order. Total visits for that user are noted as well as total page views.
This data is captured and viewable at the Analytics tab. There you can view the collected and aggregated data to date. The analytics include tabs for Visitors, Systems, Pages and Referrers. Each tab provides thorough collections of data, and supports viewing the data in various modes, bar chart, pie chart, and download to csv.
Woopra is not just another blog stats tool. It does more than allow real-time viewing of blog action. It allows direct interaction with the blog readers. Direct as in live chat.
As you can see in the capture above, I was chatting with Mousewords. During the chat, the readers information is displayed. The chat is very straightforward, and has no ‘features’ as you’d find in IM clients. You basically type in the box at the bottom and hit Enter/Return. When chat is initiated, the reader sees a small window in the corner of the browser. They must accept the chat before it is engaged.
Woopra is still in beta. Some or all of the features you’ve seen here might change before final release. From my perspective, this is a tool I see myself using. There is just one caveat though. The chat feature has the potential to surprise visitors.
The chat does pop up a small box/window in the bottom of the browser, but seeing it from the other side, I might be wary of clicking on it. If the reader is not familiar with it, they may think it’s an ad pop-up. Some education on the blog might be helpful, but I’m not sure how to go about that at this time. Your recommendations are welcome.
In summary, I’m giving it a try and think you should too. Let me know how it works out and your thoughts on it. Too creepy? Too cool?
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