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Archive for the ‘social.networks’ Category

While privacy-savy users might think about ways to remove their data from social net­works like Face­book, the aver­age geek is much more wor­ried about los­ing such data against his will. Enter Social­Safe, a handy tool which backs up all your Face­book data on your local com­puter. Eas­ier said than done you might think — but the joint ven­ture beween British online experts iBun­dle and 1minus1 does a nice job for a very low price.

But why would you want to backup your Face­book data at all? There are many good rea­sons, the most impor­tant being that one day your account just might dis­abled. Hap­pens a lot these days, some­times because users vio­late the TOS, some­times because some algo­rithm trig­gers a false alarm. Social­Safe is an Adobe Air based client that stores Face­book data offline and tracks changes between sin­gle “snap­shots”. After the instal­la­tion and the ini­tial authen­ti­ca­tion the pro­gram gen­er­ates a snap­shot of one’s cur­rent con­tacts, wall, photo albums and pro­file infor­ma­tion. Social­Safe ain’t free, but it’s still one of the best things in social media life, and €2,48 for a two-computer license def­i­nitely is a steal. This video explains the basics (actu­ally, this cov­ers pretty much every­thing that can be said about this sim­ple yet help­full app):

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On Novem­ber 13th, A1 Telekom Aus­tria and datadirt, the proud and happy author of this hum­ble blog, invite inter­na­tional top blog­gers and Aus­trian social media geeks to join the first pro-blogging con­fer­ence in Vienna. The con­fer­ence focuses on the future of dig­i­tal media. We will dis­cuss the impact of the inter­net on var­i­ous aspects of our life in the next ten years: how will our jobs change? How will our per­sonal life change? What’s the next stage of social media? The offi­cial home­page wbf2010.at will soon be online soon. The event will take place at A1 TA head­quar­ters at Lasallestraße 9 in Vienna — we got a main hall plus var­i­ous smaller con­fer­ence rooms for break-out ses­sions, of course all equipped with sta­ble WLAN.

Aus­trian blog­gers and jour­nal­ists are warmly wel­come. There is no entrance fee; due to the capac­ity of the venue the spots are strictly lim­ited though. In the next weeks, we will invite our inter­na­tional guests and give away all tick­ets via weblogs and media part­ners. Secure your spot now and join us: the first ten spots are avail­able… NOW! Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Qual­man is the author of “Social­nomics: How Social Media Trans­forms the Way We Live and Do Busi­ness”. More than 2 mil­lion view­ers have seen his “Social Media Rev­o­lu­tion” video clip. In June 2010, Eric gave a keynote pre­sen­ta­tion at Meshed con­fer­ence in Vienna. After his pre­sen­ta­tion I sat down with Eric and we chat­ted about the changes of our media envi­ron­ment. Enjoy the new datadirt video podcast!

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Last weekend’s uncon­fer­ence at Microsoft in Vienna was the biggest Aus­trian Bar­camp so far — the social media scene is grow­ing, inter­est in social media plat­forms, new tech­nolo­gies and the par­a­digm shift in mar­ket­ing has increased immensely over the last cou­ple of months. This is not a big sur­prise: more and more peo­ple under­stand that the web 2.0 is not about a new gen­er­a­tion of buzz­words that pol­lute the same old pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tions, but about a fun­da­men­tal par­a­digm shift in the way com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cate with their customers:

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In the newest issue of my video-podcast MIT Pro­fes­sor Thomas W. Mal­one talks about his reasearch on col­lec­tive intel­li­gence and the chang­ing notion of pri­vacy. Pro­fes­sor Mal­one is the found­ing direc­tor of MIT’s Cen­ter for Col­lec­tive Intel­li­gence. In 2004, he pub­lished The Future of Work, a crit­i­cally acclaimed book about the impact of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion on man­age­ment, orga­ni­za­tions and busi­ness. Before he started teach­ing at MIT, Mr. Mal­one was a research sci­en­tist at the leg­endary Xerox Palo Alto Research Cen­ter. So enjoy the pod­cast which con­tains a short intro­duc­tion, the inter­view plus two exlu­sive bonus tracks

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Back in the 90ies, more than a dozen search engines fought for the user’s atten­tion. A cou­ple of years later (almost) only Google was left. Do we face a sim­i­lar devel­op­ment in the field of social net­work­ing? Tak­ing a look at the lat­est Face­book fig­ures, I’m inclined to answer this ques­tion with yes. Yet their ever-growing social graphs make more and more users ner­vous, and even though Face­book in my opin­ion is doing a good job giv­ing the user con­trol over his con­tent, Reclaimprivacy.org might come in handy. Read the rest of this entry »

Word­Press offers a fas­ci­nat­ingly wide range of options: thanks to the power and the cre­ativ­ity of the open source com­mu­nity, the world’s most pop­u­lar CMS has devel­oped from a “blog-only” prod­uct into a mul­ti­fac­eted plat­form. Hun­dreds of plu­g­ins are wait­ing to cater almost every web publisher’s needs. These days, two new plu­g­ins take Word­Press to the next level by inte­grated elab­o­rate social net­work fea­tures. Bud­dy­Press is now avail­able at ver­sion 1.2 which plays along well with stan­dard WP-installations; the pre­vi­ous ver­sion required WP multi­user edi­tion. And then there’s Min­gle, a new bril­liant exten­sion by Blair Williams, author of the (genius!) Pret­tyLink plugin.

Even though both plu­g­ins offer sim­i­lar func­tion­al­i­ties, they take a com­pletely dif­fer­ent approach at turn­ing Word­Press into a social net­work. While Bud­dy­Press aims at run­ning a stand-alone social net­work site, Min­gle extends the com­mu­nity capa­bil­i­ties of nay exist­ing blog. I installed it here on datadirt yes­ter­day. Curi­ous for a test-drive? Just click the new link Pro­file in the main menu! In the fol­low­ing post­ing I’ll explain why extend­ing a blog with social net­work fea­tures is gen­er­ally a smart idea. Read the rest of this entry »

I got 30 more invites left. Just drop me a note and I’ll send one to the e-mail address you pro­vided. But please don’t ask what to use your newly-won real­time com­fort for. Frankly speak­ing, I have got no idea yet. But I said the same thing about Twit­ter when I reg­is­tered my account there, so I’ll keep wait­ing for the wave frenzy to hap­pen. What’s your opin­ion? Are you already surf­ing the wave?

I admit: this equa­tion does indeed have more than one solu­tion — the result could just as well have been formsquare.com. But it wasn’t. And that’s why the max­i­mum mash-up for all geeks try­ing hard to keep up with the lat­est hype(s) enters the stage with a noisy, fright­en­ing BANG. There are many old say­ings per­fectly describ­ing this del­i­cate sit­u­a­tion: An RSS feed in the aggre­ga­tor is worth two in a web / A site and its RSS feed are soon parted & Bet­ter a big aggre­ga­tor on a lit­tle domain than a lit­tle con­tent on many sites. Can you smell where I’m get­ting at? Indeed: datadirt proudly presents: fourspring.me! Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare.com is get­ting gold: hype-searching geeks are mov­ing on, and these days their favorite URL is formspring.me: it’s a really sim­ple q-and-a plat­form — kind of like Twit­ter, but with­out the 140 char­ac­ter limit. The ser­vice lacks a lot fea­tures, it’s still in a pretty early stage, which didn’t keep me from reg­is­ter­ing though: formspring.me/datadirt.

The setup just takes a minute: like on Twit­ter, there’s the avatar pic, the home­page URL, a short descrip­tion and that’s it. When it comes to eye candy, formspring.me offers a cou­ple of tem­plates, but the more brand-aware user can also upload their own back­ground pic — now in 2 min­utes, because I’ve com­piled a Photoshop-template that speeds up the process of cre­at­ing a cus­tom form­spring tem­plate a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Jour­nal­ism stu­dents from the Dutsch uni­ver­sity of applied sci­ences in Utrecht are cur­rently con­duct­ing a sur­vey about the pop­u­lar­ity of social media — if you run a pop­u­lar blog, the ques­tion­naire prob­a­bly already arrived in your inbox. All inter­views with social media experts will be pub­lished on the cross­me­di­alab home­page — good ques­tions, I’m really curi­ous about the results of the study and my col­leagues’ answers, just mailed mine to Wolfgang.

How long have you been work­ing with online social media and what was your rea­son to get into this topic?

The ques­tion is: which online ser­vices do qual­ify as “social media”? I’ve started using the inter­net in 1994 – out of mere curios­ity. A cou­ple of years later I started work­ing as a web designer for APA (Aus­tria Press Agency). At the same time, 3 fel­low stu­dents from the depart­ment of sci­ence of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and me launched the plat­form medianexus.net – a com­mu­nity site for pub­lish­ing “grey” stu­dent lit­er­a­ture about media-related top­ics. The project doesn’t exist any­more, the site is archived in the Aus­trian National Library though. The com­ment func­tion was one our most impor­tant fea­tures back than – and even though ser­vices like Face­book and Twit­ter were lurk­ing in the far future, we used e-mail and mail­ing lists for dis­cus­sion and organ­i­sa­tion pur­poses.
To me, there is no clear-cut between “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0” – tech­nolo­gies have evolved, dynamic web appli­ca­tions did replaced sta­tic con­tent. So the new tools fuel the use of social media, but the basic prin­ci­ple of enabling dia­logue and con­nect­ing peo­ple has been one of the main strengths of the inter­net from the begin­ning. Read the rest of this entry »