I am playing along with Read/Write Web and making this weeks posts about Facebook.

I just realized today that you can import your blog posts into your Facebook Notes. I am not sure why this fact has escaped me for so long. The more I scrape at the surface of Facebook the more I find I like. But wouldn’t it be better for Facebook if I just made Notes my preferred blogging tool?

Where are trackbacks? I find trackbacks an important feature for blogging conversations. The question is are they really necessary in Facebook? The answer is maybe, maybe not.

If everyone is on Facebook then they will automatically know when a new note is published. But this leaves anyone not on Facebook out of the conversation. Facebook plays down that Notes are blog posts, but I am not sure you can see them any other way. As I have mentioned before, this is one of the items that ruined a potentially wonderful social network, Yahoo! 360. Lets hope there will be some movement to further develop Notes into a full fledged blogging platform.

It is Facebook week on Read/Write Web.  With all the buzz about Facebook it should be a good series of posts.  I have been finding the further I dig into Facebook, the more I like it.  So if you haven’t taken the Facebook plunge this week is a good week to get up to speed.

If you ever needed an application that demonstrated the power of Facebook applications this is it.  I found this through Scobleizer and am excited at the potential.  The application is called Google Reader Shared Items.

The idea is you subscribe to all of your favorite RSS feeds in Google Reader. As you find items that you think are interesting you mark them as shared. The Facebook application lists your shared items and all your friends that are linked to you and have installed the application can see your shared items. You can also see all of your friends shared items.

Leveraging existing applications to stimulate conversation. Now take that one step forward and make sure that you subscribe to your friends blogs and via blog posts, trackbacks, and comments information relevant to you and those in your network flows well.

I have looked at dozens of PHP frameworks. They all have one thing in common…they lack the finesse of Ruby-On-Rails. But, since I am a PHP programmer and PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages, I need to find one that is going to work.

If you need a reason to use a framework, the best one I can come up with is consistency. The coding style is documented, the calls are standard and consistent. It automatically puts a group of programmers that come from disparate backgrounds together speaking a common language.

So which framework do I pick? There is really only one worth looking at, that is the Zend framework. Here’s my reasoning. It’s tightly coupled with PHP, hey it’s made by Zend. That is another reason…it’s made by the folks at Zend. This means it will be around for a while and someone is being paid to make it successful. And most, importantly, enterprises will adopt it because now they have someone to blame if something goes wrong.

Like it or not that gives the Zend Framework a leg up on the competition. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it shipping as a standard in upcoming releases of PHP much like the PEAR libraries are today.

But I don’t want to seem like I am closed minded about this. Feel free to comment on why some other framework is a better choice.

• Talking personal search with Spock
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• Using Spock to find information about people on the Web | ScobleShow: Videoblog about geeks, technology, and developers
  (tags: spock)
• Spock looks great…
  (tags: spock)

Spock is a search engine that incorporates traditional search algorithms and the idea of community interaction to become a people specific search vertical.

The idea behind this is great and a bit scary all at the same time. The example from the Scoble Show used the idea that we are searching for VC’s. So we enter venture capitalists and it returns a list of venture capitalists. You can do a number of things such as vote an entry up, tag, drill down. Very interesting. You can have favorites that are personal and from your address book. You can see the network that these individuals are associated with.

The scary part is that everyone will need to have their identity on the web and it will have to be defended meticulously.

Despite that I like the concept so it will be interesting to see where it goes. The innovative use of technology and wisdom of crowds is a nice combination I would like to see more often in applications.

Spock screen shots at flickr.

First Seen at: Link

Jeremiah Owyang, from the blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah, has a list of reasons why social media and the wisdom of crowds doesn’t work.

1. Opinions vs Facts and Analysis
2. Amateurs provide crappy content
3. Identity
4. Google rewards those that are popular and interesting
5. Crowds are not very wise
6. Socialism doesn’t work
7. Noise vs Signal

I don’t necessarily agree with all of these points. I think he doesn’t understand that the way the wisdom of crowds idea works is if you have a large number of independent individuals that are in general not aware of the results of any other individuals in the crowd. As soon as each individual in the crowd knows the outcome of everyone else in the crowd everything becomes skewed. A prime example of this is Digg. An article becomes popular because everyone I know is voting for it, not because it is accurate or I believe it is great information.

One item we do have in common is about search engines. Goggle’s search algorithm works on relevance and popularity. Unfortunately this becomes the Digg problem all over again. I think a better idea, if they can make it work, is human powered search engine called Mahalo. The idea is that you will get more relevant results from someone that has actually looked at the links and can provide some context.

This could all be changed by natural language search. So keep on the lookout.

When Yahoo! 360 started out I admit I was excited and had high hopes. But Yahoo! 360 never really lived up to it’s potential. I can think of three obvious issues that can be attributed to this failure.

1. It lacked real interactivity
2. It lacked a blog
3. It was full of abandoned accounts

Interactivity is key to social networking. Without it there is no real compelling reason for a person to return to the site. Yahoo! 360 was really great at allowing you to create lists. But once the list was created there just wasn’t a lot to do with it. People want to network together to share thoughts, ideas, photo’s and conversation. They want to know there are others out on the net just like them.

This transitions nicely into our second problem. Yahoo! 360 was missing a blog. Call it whatever you like, for instance facebook calls it Notes, a social site needs to provide a space that you can communicate. When Yahoo! 360 started out all they had were things called blasts (What the hell is a blast?). Later the Yahoo! 360 folks realized their mistake and added a “blog.” I used quotes around blog because it was only a blog in the strictest sense of the term. They limited everything. No Javascript, limited html set. What were they afraid of? And don’t let me get started on the url’s. Here is a good example of a blog url for an individual I am connected with on 360 http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-w6bqHC0ydKLXxL2.7wluWhSZcA–?cq=1. Is this really necessary in this day and age?

Finally we have the issue of abandoned accounts. Yahoo! has a big draw. Lots of people created accounts, generated the obligatory lists, connected to a few friends. Finally realizing there was nothing more to do they abandoned the site never to return. Let me give you an example of why this is an issue. I am a scifi fan. So I want to find other scifi fans to connect with. Yahoo! 360 gives you the ability to search for other people that list interests that match yours. A quick click on a topic from one of my lists provides me with hundreds of matches. The only problem is fewer than 1% have updated their space in months. A simply filter to order the results by last activity date would have resolved the issue. But nothing. Who would wade through hundreds of pages of results to find one or two active people? Certainly not me.

The single biggest item that caused Yahoo! 360 to fail is Yahoo! itself. Simple things could have made the site very worthwhile. I guess in this regard Yahoo! and Google are similar. They both have failed social networks. All is not lost though as you can read from this article, “” at TechCrunch.

Well almost!

Nielson will still track page views but will no longer formally rank them. Its a move in the right direction. Page views are a great way to quantify the ad inventory of a site but total time on site measures the content is compelling enough for an individual to stay. The longer an individual is on your site the longer he has to look at an ad, which in turn will increase clicks.

Page views have been going rapidly out of style lately as Ajax enabled pages and video content has increased. Total time on site will be a more accurate gauge of how a site is doing in light of wider spread embrace of these new technologies.

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