Brij’s One More Idea

Blogging is time consuming. Folks who have interesting things to say are super busy. It's good to see more innovation in making blog posting more efficient and time saving.  I have talked about in the past why blogging tools have to evolve to make blog posting simple and distributed. In order to make blogging simple we added Reblogging feature for Google Reader users, added multiple email support so you can really push complex blog posts from any location,

There are many more ways to think about making post task easy. Today Zemanta introduced very interesting features in this category. I really like link discovery and image gallery. This validates the point that current blogging tools are not optimized for busy professionals. Increasingly everybody will feel the need for this kind of tool. Good work Zemanta.

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It's always refreshing to see  good discussion on the big picture. Fred Wilson started this thread sharing his social media vision.

This vision is brilliant in it's simplicity but it's a big shift in the grand scheme of human expression. I am sure there will be enough theories on how far reaching change this simple transformation will bring. We are in first inning here. We have seen the impact of social media on main stream media, we are yet to see that play out on other sectors such education, business (B2B or Enterprise 2.0?) and health.

Blogging 1.0 is almost complete and we are going through the birthing process of micro-blogging. Between these two spectrum, there are many forms and shapes of expression tools.

This vision is a long march but there are some interesting opportunities in near future. If you belong to entrepreneurial camp, then there are interesting problems to work on. Let me explain that by expanding on this social media pyramid shared by Don Dodge:

We keep hearing about this 1-10-100 ratio. This supply chain of content gets into action when that lone creator starts the thread. Since this ratio doesn't really translate into any actionable imagery I started calling this submit-to-scroll ratio. Submit-to-scroll ratio is really a contributer-to-lurker ratio. Reason I prefer this terminology as this helps in thinking more about Submit contexts. Slapping Submit sticker in every possible interface we can significantly increase number of creators.

By doing that we can expand Don's pyramid chart to this possibility:

By just focusing on creating more contexts for new users to hit submit button, we can expedite our march towards a fully participatory media.

Social media tools are still lacking when it comes to inviting new social media users. I don't have handy numbers but my guess is that lot of people who moved from Twitter were already familiar with blogging. Big opportunity lies in letting new users join social media way of expressing. When we started MessageDance, our vision was to focus on users who are very comfortable with email as an authoring tool. Extending email content into social networks, blogs and twitter is what we ended up doing. It feels good when users praise our effort for letting them use most well known Submit button!

If you want to add to social media revolution, think about contexts where we can invite new creators. New interfaces for allowing them to hit Submit button. It still amazes me to see many talented people not blogging due to all sorts of silly reasons. Behavior change will happen with the help of new interfaces.

This vision of social media where every online user is creating something is a major shift. We are lucky to be participating in this migration.

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Two weeks, three announcements and wild west world of social networking is all topsy turvy.  Following Myspace and Facebook announcement, Google today gave a preview announcement of FriendConnect. Goals of FriendConnect are:

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

I will see what more comes out of scheduled press conference. This is getting very interesting and options for developers are growing. In a true sense, walls are coming down and data is flowing across gardens :)  Now I need to go and dig into APIs and make MessageDance dance across these newly discovered openness.

Update: TechCrunch has more details on the story:

So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend’s list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them.

Friend Connect is geared at the Long Tail of small sites that don’t even have any user information. It allows them to tap into bigger sites and piggyback on their user sign-in and registration, list of friends, and interactions between those friends. It takes advantage of many existing standards, including Facebook’s (it is not an official partner, but it Google is taking advantage of its published APIs). Of the many standards emerging, Glazer thinks that OAuth is the way to do it right.

Glazer admits that Friend Connect is but one small step towards the larger goal of being able to connect to any friend on any application, on any site. But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.

So its a still in work in progress. I think iFrame level integration is a bummer. Oauth seems to be gaining traction so that’s good. Atleast developers will see their efforts protected around Oauth. Oauth is primarily used by service providers to allow user to give Server A permissions to use data residing on Server B. Like the way MessageDance user grant permission to MessageDance to go fetch Blogger credentials from Blogger service. (OpenID is different from OAuth in the sense that it’s more of a user browser context to server side communication. Users use openID to identify themselves and login to various web services. It’s not between services to services, which is what OAuth does).

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By now every serious social media industry participant must have read Clay Shirky's brilliant essay. Delivered at Web 2.0 conference in Stanford, he wonderfully articulated the new media world we live in -

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It’s a common complaint that if blogging was easier to do there will be more people doing it. Blog setup, blog posting, formatting, proof reading and post-post comment supervision, list of stuff to manage goes on and on. All that adds up to big drain on time. Its a hassle because it takes time. If we cut down time then we invite more people to do blogging.

One of my frustration is to see people who should be blogging not doing it because its still a hassle for them. These are people with great ideas and great projects. Question is what should we do to make these smart but time-challenged people get into the game. More time sharing great insights and less time gardening your blog.

We have been focusing a lot on these kind of people. Smart, time-challenged and not wiling to put up with lot of hassles. MessageDance email-based blog publishing model helps in that regard. Now email-to-blog model has been there for some time but it was implemented in a very kludgey way. Wasn’t optimized for mobile experience. You had to remember long email string and also had to keep it super secret. Remember the frustration when you want to blog some picture you saw on Flickr or video on YouTube. You are not going to remember that long email address at that time. Simple handle like blogs@messagedance.com solves that recall problem.

Best part of this approach is that it totally respects your current choice of tools - email, wordpress or blogger, or iPhone. Consider this announcement . Google News now supports iPhone. Now you can with just couple of iPhone clicks, link blog news article of your choice. Ease of publishing is extra-ordinary. MessageDance takes that link blog post one step further by showing snapshot in your blog and also leaving a twitter status update. Small bonus of “Reply on Twitter” comes with each link blog post. Give it a shot. You would be surprised with the ease of use.

I wish there was more innovation in the blog publishing tools category. Today Blogger rolled out future time stamped blog posts . For busy professionals, time to write blog is a real calendar challenge and now with this feature they can dump all their thoughtstream in one impulse phase and schedule the release. Thank you Blogger. I am sure wonderful team over at Wordpress will take this idea one step further.