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Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

Truth, Justice and the Pursuit of Excellent Software

A People-Centric Contact Management Experience in a Smart PhoneToday

From Palm Pre and Palm WebOS in-depth look we learn

The star of the show was the new Palm WebOS. It's not just a snazzy new touch interface. It's a useful system with some thoughtful ideas that we've been looking for. First of all, the Palm WebOS takes live, while-you-type searching to a new level. On a Windows Mobile phone, typing from the home screen initiates a search of the address book. On the Palm WebOS, typing starts a search of the entire phone, from contacts through applications and more. If the phone can't find what you need, it offers to search Google, Maps and Wikipedia. It's an example of Palm's goal to create a unified, seamless interface.

Other examples of this unified philosophy can be found in the calendar, contacts and e-mail features. The Palm Pre will gather all of your information from your Exchange account, your Gmail account and your Facebook account and display them in a single, unduplicated format. The contact listing for our friend Dave might draw his phone number from our Exchange account, his e-mail address from Gmail and Facebook, and instant messenger from Gtalk. All of these are combined in a single entry, with a status indicator to show if Dave is available for IM chats.

This is the holy grail of contact management experiences on a mobile phone. Today I use Exchange as the master for my contact records and then use tool

Is "Follow" A Core Web 2.0 Pattern?January 6

Last month James Governor of Redmonk had a blog post entitled Asymmetrical Follow: A Core Web 2.0 Pattern where he made the following claim

You’re sitting at the back of the room in a large auditorium. There is a guy up front, and he is having a conversation with the people in the front few rows. You can’t hear them quite so well, although it seems like you can tune into them if you listen carefully. But his voice is loud, clear and resonant. You have something to add to the conversation, and almost as soon as you think of it he looks right at you, and says thanks for the contribution… great idea. Then repeats it to the rest of the group.

That is Asymmetrical Follow.

When Twitter was first built it was intended for small groups of friends to communicate about going to the movies or the pub. It was never designed to cope with crazy popular people like Kevin Rose (@kevinrose 76,185 followers), Jason Calacanis (@jasoncalacanis 42,491), and Scobleizer (@scobleizer 41,916). Oh yeah, and some dude called BarackObama (@barackobama 141,862)
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If you’re building a social network platform its critical that you consider the technical and social implications o

Some Thoughts on Inline Comments in Activity FeedsDecember 5 2008

One feature that you will not find in Windows Live's What's New list, which shows a feed of a the activities from user's social network, is inline comments. A number of sites that provide users with activity feeds from their social network such as Facebook and Friendfeed allow comments to be made directly on news items in the feed. These comments end up showing up as part of the activity feed that are visible to anyone who can view the feed item.

When Rob and I were deciding upon the key functionality of the What's New feed for the current release of Windows Live, we voted against inline comments for two reasons.

The key reason is that we want the feed to be about what your people in your network are doing and not what people you don't know are doing or saying. However with the Facebook feed I often have lengthy threads from people I don't know in my feed taking up valuable space above the fold. For example,

 

In the above screenshot, I find it rather awkward that a huge chunk of my feed is being taken up

Why I Love TwitterDecember 1 2008

Over the weekend, Tim O'Reilly wrote a post Why I Love Twitter where he talks about some of the things he finds compelling about Twitter. Here's my list

1. Thanks to APIs, Everyone Experiences the Service Differently: Great social software fits itself into the lifestyle and personality of its users instead of the other way around. Whenever I talk to Twitter users I am surprised to learn how differently they use the service. For example, I primarily read and write to Twitter from a Vista sidebar gadget (Twadget) which to many of my coworkers seems weird. Every time I talk to a coworker, I seem to learn a new way of using Twitter from desktop clients like Twhirl and Twitterrific to consuming it on your mobile phone via SMS or a dedicated app like TinyTwitter. Then there are people whose main interface to Twitter is other Web sites either via widgets such as the Facebook Twitter application or aggregators like FriendFeed. And so on...

   The best experience is when yo

Facebook Connect: Does Issuing Passports Make Facebook A Country?December 1 2008

My RSS reader is buzzing with a lot hype around Facebook's Connect this morning. The lead story seems to be the New York Times article entitled Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web which announces that a number of popular sites are about to adopt the technology. The article is excerpted below

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.
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MySpace, Yahoo and