AOL is revamping their message boards. I hope the link is an external one that is viewable to folks not logged into an aol.com account. At any rate, today is the big day for the renovation of some boards and the retirement of others. The AOL boards I've remained active on are very few and have been next to ghost towns in the last year or so, with no more than sporadic posting other than a Readers and Reading board that has remained active. The folks from that board have gotten fed up and many are moving to GoodReads. Since I already have a LibraryThing account, and no interest in joining another book site, I'm going to have to make my departure from that group of wonderful reading folks.
But aside from the blog entry about the changes to the message boards (and no clue as to which ones will survive the implosion), there is no mention on the message boards menu page. No message that the Boards are Not Currently Active. All you get are error messages when you click the links to the boards. Now, really, how difficult could it be to put up a banner across the top of the page that the boards are inaccessible for now and to check back later, maybe even post updates as to when they'll be available, if ever. But since AOL really doesn't seem to care about its subscribers anymore, other than to insure they can see all the ads they now plaster all over their pages, I didn't really expect that level of communication from them.
Ah, AOL message boards. I knew you well. I shall miss you.
~~~o0o~~~
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Can We Tweet?
Never one to waste a post, I'm copying this, with a minor adjustment, from my work blog. I wrote this in response to a comment about Twitter being for "16-year-olds and hipsters" that was made on another work blog about Twitter.
I’m not pushing Twitter on anyone, but I do think there are more uses for it than a lot of people realize. When I first encountered it, at the same time I found out about Tumblr, I didn’t get it and couldn’t see why anyone would use it. But I tried it, along with Tumblr, and while Tumblr, a no-frills blogging platform, was not for me, Twitter has been fun. It’s not something I depend on, but I enjoy it and I can see its benefits. The fact that so many people — and not just the young and hip — use it must mean there’s more to it than a mere fad. And while some people try it only to abandon it soon after, many people find themselves caught up in the possibilities of it. Of course, once new tech gets covered by the old media, as Twitter has been, that often signals the end is near. But I think Twitter has sticking power.
It can work like a more public, open version of Facebook’s status updates. Its uses are as varied as the people who use it, from The Library of Congress and LIS News to the State Department, from the first lines of books tweets from TwitterLit to where the WaffelTruck is today. Mars junkies can follow the exploits of Mars Phoenix. Blogger uses it to highlight its Blogs of Note as well as updates re: maintenance. Clearly, sites that go down can use Twitter to inform people of such problems when they have no way to do it through their own venue.
From Twitter’s site:
People seem to mostly tweet from mobile devices, and I know that I’m not likely to text a blog post from my cellphone. My blog posts are usually longer than 140 characters (like this one!) and are things I prefer to take more time composing. But the advantage of having quick bursts of info come to me is very nice.
I’ve read of people traveling who use Twitter to update their families about their location, where to pick them up, or just to make themselves available. With Twitter, it’s very easy to send the same burst of info to many people at once and only those people following.
Not all websites have feeds. Not all websites make it easy to get updates without visiting the site. Twitter is a way to pull in info from many places into one stream and more efficiently and accessibly than via a feed reader. I subscribe to hundreds of blogs, but only 90 Twitterers, and of those, only half are really active and of the active ones, approximately 2/3 are actual people. The rest are blog update alerts, the WaffelTruck, the State Department, LIS News, and a couple of other library related services. The WaffelTruck will tweet code words to use to get a free topping that day, a special for their Twitter followers. Other Twitterers hold contests.
Twitter updates in real time. Bloglines, my feed reader updates more frequently than it used to, but it still isn’t in real time. My Bloglines feeds include a lot of sites I want to look at at my leisure: blogs, flickr discussions and photos, news, sports, and so on. Twitter is more immediate, bursts of information and conversations.
Some of the people I follow are funny. Some provide a personal view of an interesting area, ie StandIn who is a stand in in Hollywood who tweets from the set of whatever TV show or movie he’s working on. I’ve read that the fire department in the Los Angeles area tweeted updates re: raging fires last year, including street closings. Tweets to mobile devices make that important information readily available to people not sitting at computers.
Celebrities tweet. My favorites are Wil Wheaton, Neil Gaiman (who is currently running a photo caption contest on Twitter), and David Hewlett (from Stargate: Atlantis).
Finally, you have some control. You can limit who sees you to followers only. You can block people. And I appreciate that the people behind Twitter seem determined to keep it simple, to stick to its basic premise and add only functionality that enhances the core service (ie adding how you can receive tweets), rather than add on bells and whistles.
To sum up, I tweeted about doing this blog entry and one of the people I follow and who follows me tweeted this (used with her permission), all during the time I worked on this post: “I am not sure that anyone “gets” Twitter. In the sense that everyone seems to think everyone else is doing it wrong. :)”
~~~o0o~~~
I’m not pushing Twitter on anyone, but I do think there are more uses for it than a lot of people realize. When I first encountered it, at the same time I found out about Tumblr, I didn’t get it and couldn’t see why anyone would use it. But I tried it, along with Tumblr, and while Tumblr, a no-frills blogging platform, was not for me, Twitter has been fun. It’s not something I depend on, but I enjoy it and I can see its benefits. The fact that so many people — and not just the young and hip — use it must mean there’s more to it than a mere fad. And while some people try it only to abandon it soon after, many people find themselves caught up in the possibilities of it. Of course, once new tech gets covered by the old media, as Twitter has been, that often signals the end is near. But I think Twitter has sticking power.
It can work like a more public, open version of Facebook’s status updates. Its uses are as varied as the people who use it, from The Library of Congress and LIS News to the State Department, from the first lines of books tweets from TwitterLit to where the WaffelTruck is today. Mars junkies can follow the exploits of Mars Phoenix. Blogger uses it to highlight its Blogs of Note as well as updates re: maintenance. Clearly, sites that go down can use Twitter to inform people of such problems when they have no way to do it through their own venue.
From Twitter’s site:
“Twitter solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication. At Twitter, we ask one question, “What are you doing?” The answers to this question are for the most part rhetorical. In other words, users do not expect a response when they send a message to Twitter. On the receiving end, Twitter is ambient–updates from your friends and relatives float to your phone, IM, or web site and you are only expected to pay as much or as little attention to them as you see fit.”Re: a question on how people follow tweets. You can follow someone’s tweets a few ways that I know of. If they have a public page, you can routinely check that, which is tedious. Ideally, you can follow them by clicking the “follow” link and have their tweets come to you, either on your Twitter page, in email, in instant messages, in text messages on your mobile device, or in a widget on another page, ie a gadget on iGoogle. In addition, many people, myself included, have added Twitter widgets to the sidebar of our blogs, and some people have their tweets show up as blog entries, so if you subscribe to their blogs, you’ll get their tweets, too.
People seem to mostly tweet from mobile devices, and I know that I’m not likely to text a blog post from my cellphone. My blog posts are usually longer than 140 characters (like this one!) and are things I prefer to take more time composing. But the advantage of having quick bursts of info come to me is very nice.
I’ve read of people traveling who use Twitter to update their families about their location, where to pick them up, or just to make themselves available. With Twitter, it’s very easy to send the same burst of info to many people at once and only those people following.
Not all websites have feeds. Not all websites make it easy to get updates without visiting the site. Twitter is a way to pull in info from many places into one stream and more efficiently and accessibly than via a feed reader. I subscribe to hundreds of blogs, but only 90 Twitterers, and of those, only half are really active and of the active ones, approximately 2/3 are actual people. The rest are blog update alerts, the WaffelTruck, the State Department, LIS News, and a couple of other library related services. The WaffelTruck will tweet code words to use to get a free topping that day, a special for their Twitter followers. Other Twitterers hold contests.
Twitter updates in real time. Bloglines, my feed reader updates more frequently than it used to, but it still isn’t in real time. My Bloglines feeds include a lot of sites I want to look at at my leisure: blogs, flickr discussions and photos, news, sports, and so on. Twitter is more immediate, bursts of information and conversations.
Some of the people I follow are funny. Some provide a personal view of an interesting area, ie StandIn who is a stand in in Hollywood who tweets from the set of whatever TV show or movie he’s working on. I’ve read that the fire department in the Los Angeles area tweeted updates re: raging fires last year, including street closings. Tweets to mobile devices make that important information readily available to people not sitting at computers.
Celebrities tweet. My favorites are Wil Wheaton, Neil Gaiman (who is currently running a photo caption contest on Twitter), and David Hewlett (from Stargate: Atlantis).
Finally, you have some control. You can limit who sees you to followers only. You can block people. And I appreciate that the people behind Twitter seem determined to keep it simple, to stick to its basic premise and add only functionality that enhances the core service (ie adding how you can receive tweets), rather than add on bells and whistles.
To sum up, I tweeted about doing this blog entry and one of the people I follow and who follows me tweeted this (used with her permission), all during the time I worked on this post: “I am not sure that anyone “gets” Twitter. In the sense that everyone seems to think everyone else is doing it wrong. :)”
~~~o0o~~~
Friday, March 13, 2009
Whine and No Cheese on Facebook
The more things change, the more they remain predictably the same. Facebook has redesigned its main pages, which mainly has pages matching individual profiles in layout and has people's home page match the wall and info pages, which makes for a more unified look. It also is for me, easier to read and better yet, the feed is in real time, which means, I hope, more consistency on the home page. I was getting rather tired of older updates showing up and the page content changing every time I refreshed. Finally, the home/feed update page makes sense.
However, while plenty of people are praising the changes, a contingent of disgruntled users have been very anti-change on FB and some have even been rude with their complaints. Pretty much the same as when LiveJournal has made changes. Even flickr's recent redesign resulted in an uproar. This happens every time a website updates its look and functionality.
Not all change is good. Some sites have taken functional navigation, glitzed the place up, and made it impossible to use, let alone look at, but this is not the case here. People are confused. Of course some things have been moved. But they're easily findable. Brick and mortar stores rearrange their stock all the time. Barnes and Noble and The Gap are notorious for that. I hate it, but I adapt. It takes a few visits to learn where everything I'm looking for is now located, and then, the confusion is gone. The same for these cosmetic changes online.
Sites that don't change, grow, improve will lose users to the next great thing or will be unable to attract new users due to competition offering more and better things. And along with adding functions and improving the back end of the operations, sometimes, adjustments are needed, and even desirable, for the site's layout.
So many people are creatures of habit and there's a tendency in many to react in a knee-jerk fashion. They see changes to their beloved site, and their reaction is to hate it and pan it. They don't give it and themselves a chance to learn about it, to explore it, and finally, to adapt to it. I suppose there's comfort in things staying the same, but stagnation is not usually a good thing. Change often means improvement and that is usually a good thing.
~~~o0o~~~
However, while plenty of people are praising the changes, a contingent of disgruntled users have been very anti-change on FB and some have even been rude with their complaints. Pretty much the same as when LiveJournal has made changes. Even flickr's recent redesign resulted in an uproar. This happens every time a website updates its look and functionality.
Not all change is good. Some sites have taken functional navigation, glitzed the place up, and made it impossible to use, let alone look at, but this is not the case here. People are confused. Of course some things have been moved. But they're easily findable. Brick and mortar stores rearrange their stock all the time. Barnes and Noble and The Gap are notorious for that. I hate it, but I adapt. It takes a few visits to learn where everything I'm looking for is now located, and then, the confusion is gone. The same for these cosmetic changes online.
Sites that don't change, grow, improve will lose users to the next great thing or will be unable to attract new users due to competition offering more and better things. And along with adding functions and improving the back end of the operations, sometimes, adjustments are needed, and even desirable, for the site's layout.
So many people are creatures of habit and there's a tendency in many to react in a knee-jerk fashion. They see changes to their beloved site, and their reaction is to hate it and pan it. They don't give it and themselves a chance to learn about it, to explore it, and finally, to adapt to it. I suppose there's comfort in things staying the same, but stagnation is not usually a good thing. Change often means improvement and that is usually a good thing.
~~~o0o~~~
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Stuff Worth Knowing
Blogger Buzz informs us about Plinky, a service to help bloggers overcome blogging block by providing prompts and making it easy to post to your blog, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting.
Zappos, the online shoe store (that also sells a whole lot of other stuff now, including bags and luggage, housewares, clothing), now takes Paypal. It will also let you notify people via Facebook and other services about your purchases if you'd like. I like the idea of services using Paypal because it means not needing to enter your information. I'm already a Zappos customer, so my info is saved with them, but if I weren't, I could simply click the Paypal link. My address would be there, the money would either come from my Paypal balance or my bank account, or charged to my credit card if I had the account set up that way. So convenient.
~~~o0o~~~
Zappos, the online shoe store (that also sells a whole lot of other stuff now, including bags and luggage, housewares, clothing), now takes Paypal. It will also let you notify people via Facebook and other services about your purchases if you'd like. I like the idea of services using Paypal because it means not needing to enter your information. I'm already a Zappos customer, so my info is saved with them, but if I weren't, I could simply click the Paypal link. My address would be there, the money would either come from my Paypal balance or my bank account, or charged to my credit card if I had the account set up that way. So convenient.
~~~o0o~~~
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