I’ve been lately very busy with several projects running at the same time. Result of this overload was, that I didn’t get the time to write any posts or even follow my subscriptions. When I opened my RSS Reader today, I had more than 500 articles waiting for me.

What I did to surpass this overload of information and work was to concentrate on specific services, blogs and aggregators. Sources, that I trust for the quality of information they provide.

Since social media have evolved in such a massive form of knowledge with no secure quality filter, information sources are mostly trusted individuals or niche social networks.

The return of the individual: FriendFeed & Toluu

One of the most popular services that puts the individual opinion at the center of attention is friendfeed.

A couple of days ago I joined a new invite-only service, which also concentrates on the power of the individual. Toluu lets you share your RSS feed with your friends. Instead of constantly reading the same blogs denying any diversity to your subscriptions (the RSS Curse) you can change once in a while by reading other feeds.

Although community plays an important role in Toluu, it is the role of the individual that gives the service meaning. You don’t need to have hundreds of friends, just some chosen few which you trust and share same interests.

In that sense, Toluu follows the basic principle behind FriendFeed.

For further information here are a couple of  interesting resources on Toluu:

• 10 Reasons why you are going to love Toluu

• An interview of the  Toluu founder

I still believe in the power of the collective intelligence. But correct aggregation of information is out of the question, when we are dealing with lack of diversity and biased opinions.

Lately it seems to me, that many social networks are in that position where information are chosen by the most connected and popular individuals.

Choosing your field of information: Get invited

As I noted above, I lately don’t have the time to scrouge through all these social networks, so I have decided to choose my battles.

I continue to be positively surprised by the quality of information in Twine. I’ve already given out more than 10 invitations, but magically the number of invitations at my hands increased.

So, if you’re interested in getting in Twine leave me a comment below and I’ll send you an invitation.

Toluu also provides to its members a limited number of invitations. I currently have only 3, so -again- if interested let me know.

And for those of you who scan the text and don’t actually read (which is fine by me) leave a comment if you want to:

• get invited in Twine (more than 10 invitations already given out)
• get invited in Toluu (3 invitations left)

What happens when your time span becomes so narrow, that you can’t fit a couple of hours of social media browsing?

Which social media would you visit to check and submit latest news?

The problem of popular social media

I’m an active member of mixx and stumbleupon. I usually spend quite some time daily in these aggregators to read the latest news, socialize and submit worthy material. But April has been a busy month, so I don’t have time to concentrate on these social media.

I also noticed, that I really don’t have much reasons to spend much time in the popular social networks. Why?

• News usually iterate in other social media sites.
• Popular stories are not what I call news. Most of the time they are lists of firefox plugins, interesting pictures, comparisons of social media (mixx vs Digg) and so on. I enjoy that kind of news too, but in time shortage I prefer more “serious” news.
• They are a race of self-promotion. Either by self-submission, getting the right friends, commenting on the right article or promoting the popular-to-be post, self-promotion is sometimes in the back of our heads. Nothing wrong with that; but sometimes I want 100% objectivity.

How to surpass social media overload

So how can you surpass this problem? What do you do, when you are fed up with all these popular social media?

• Locate niche social aggregators. The popular social media sites are becoming complicated, full of all kinds of content and sometimes even unfriendly. I daily read Slashdot news. They are objective, interesting, serious and with great discussions.
• Build and constantly work on your feed. Having a steady RSS Feed is not enough. Delete once in a while some feeds and add new ones. Don’t have all the hubs (techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc.) in your Feed, their news usually overlap.
• Get FriendFeed. It’s individual based, so you can follow only the people you really trust. I follow only 4 persons - and it is more than enough.
• Jump on new, promising social media. I got in Twine some days ago and the service is great. Few people, communicating with personalized messages and submitting quality content. Did I mention it is semantic? I still have some invitations left, for those interested.

I’m starting to believe, that the next generation of social media will be individual based and not collectively powered. what do you think? Are you also getting this social media overload?

Couple of days ago I finally got my invitation to twine. Twine is one of the first semantic applications, which tries to

[...] organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people.

Triplify (which I’m still trying to understand) and zemanta came along later.
At first sight twine looks like any other social network. You have your account, your connections (friends), your submissions, your groups and so on.
But actually twine is much more, something I noticed even during my short presence in the platform.
I’m not going to write an extensive review of twine, since most of you already know about the service.

I’ll just say, that the recommendations and tags used by twine are highly related with the user’s search and that the submissions are of very high quality and diversity.
If you don’t know about twine here are some extensive reviews:

The first Mainstream semantic app?

Twine launches a smarter way to organize your online life

Lately, there has been some criticism on twine also. I cannot say that I disagree with the points, but it seems to be a very promising and qualitative platform - at least in comparison to other social networks.

10 invitations

If you’re interested in subscribing to twine and giving it a try on your own, I have 10 invitations.

Contact me and I’ll invite you. Remember I only have 10 invitations, so the fastest ones will get invited.

One of the first steps every new blogger takes, is to submit her blog in Technorati. It is argued very often, that technorati can really boost the traffic of your blog.

Apart from the fact, that I have never seen any traffic coming from Technorati, I really don’t believe it is a service worth a blogger’s time.

I will not discuss its ugly design and slow interface but will concentrate on more actual reasons. Reasons, that deeply influence the user experience and also disregard fair blog ranking.

Usability issues

Anyone who has navigated in the Technorati page understands what I’m saying.

First of all the categories are not “synchronized”. As the image below shows, the entertainment roll-over category has subcategories such as “main”, “tv”, “Celebrity”, etc. while the entertainment category of the blogs has different subcategories.

Apart from that, administrating your account and blogs is a really hard issue. Lets say you want to ping your blog. The start page of technorati has a box of your blogs on the right giving the user the option to manage them and/or ping them.

But if the user is in his account, there is no ping or manage option - even when she clicks on the blog link itself. (see the above image and the two below) Shouldn’t these options be gathered in one place, or at least available in many?

I have my blog under a directory on my server. The main url (changemod.com) redirects to the directory of the blog (changemod.com/755). It’s something many bloggers do. Why can’t we just merge two domains?

Ranking issues

To be honest, I don’t find Technorati fair. It has a ranking system, based on authority (incoming links to a blog) and number of fans which does not take categories, topics or freshness into account. The authority ranking of Technorati:

• compares completely different blogs (e.g. gossip with technology). You cannot say, that icanhascheezburger is more popular than Smashing Magazine. They are completely different topics and it is like comparing apples with oranges.
• it promotes seniority and not freshness. Since authority and fans are the only ways to see popularity, it is logical that the most old blog will be the most popular. New blogs, do not get fairly promoted in Technorati, even if they increase in popularity faster than the major blogs.

Conclusion

I don’t say, that Technorati is absolutely worthless. It works great as a data source to monitor your reputation. But as a blog aggregator or a traffic-building tool is not our best bet.

This doesn’t mean, that Technorati collects bad information, it just doesn’t show them right. The relation between time investment required and information provided is not for the benefit of the user.

I really stay in awe, that this service remains so successful, without improving itself and I would really like to know why.

I’m really interested to know, what is your experience with Technorati. Do you get any traffic from it? Do you use it as an information aggregator among the other social networks?

A few days ago, StumbleUpon introduced a new feature, where the user can customize the thumbnails of your own blog.
Before this new option, next to a submission was the avatar of the first submitter. Now, next to a submission, users can see a thumbnail of the submitted content.

While stumbling, I noticed that this feature has a much more important role than I first thought. In fact it seems, that the substitution of the avatar icons with a thumbnail of the site increases the diversity and objectivity of StumbleUpon submissions.

How we scan StumbleUpon

It is a well known fact, that when we visit a website we don’t really read it but mostly scan it.

I’m an active stumbler for quite some time and this minor change made me aware how I actually scan the StumbleUpon site.
My tendency when looking at my “What’s New” tab, was to check first the title of the submission and then the avatar of the submitter. Then I would unconsciously filter the submission according to those two parameters: if the title was intriguing, I would click on it. If the title wasn’t intriguing but I knew and really liked the submitter, I would still click on the link.
So what I was actually doing is putting each submission through a biased filter; sometimes it wasn’t the submission that drew my interest but the person who submitted it.

This is of course a very well observed tendency in social networks; our preferences and choices are highly influenced by the people we know, trust and follow.

The thumbnail feature of StumbleUpon

This thumbnail is exactly in the same position, where the avatar previously was. Since this has drawn my attention so intensively, it should mean that looking at the avatar was really a fundamental aspect of reading the StumbleUpon site.

I believe, that this simple size decrease of the avatar’s icon plays an important role in the way we judge, click and follow stumbles.

This is of course my personal observation on the subject. I really wonder, if you have also noticed the same behavior when stumbling. Did you also scan the stumbleUpon pages according to the submitter?

I wrote an article at the PandemicBlog about StumbleUpon and the negatives of self-submission. Most articles see self-promotion under a moral or “narcissistic” perspective. These aspects are of no interest for me in the article.

Instead, I explain why self-promotion in StumbleUpon will not necessarily promote your work with great success. The reasons are:

• the StumbleUpon algorithm
• Clustering
• being social

If you’re interested read at the PandemicBlog why you shouldn’t stumble yourself.

As announced today in Technology Review the trend of social networks now applies in the fields of genetic science. A new service is currently online, where you can compare your DNA with that of family and friends.

We are witnessing a boom in the field of social networks, which now expands to medical fields, where privacy is of utmost importance. My concern is not if these services actually protect their customers, but if customers really realize where they are getting into.

23andMe

The service is called 23andMe and is

a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.

All they require from you is a sample of your spit and 999$. Then, they will gather all sorts of medical and genetical information and send you a thorough analysis. Purpose of this social network is not only to answer the question “where do I come from?” but also “how do I compare to other people?” Apart from that, as Technology Review notes

23andMe offers information about an individual’s disease risk. But it has also opted to emphasize more entertaining approaches to personal genomics, including using colorful visualization tools to look at a subject’s ancestry and compare it with that of celebrities from Jesse James to Benjamin Franklin and Bono. Now, to capitalize on the boom in social networking, the company will launch a genome-sharing tool that allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data.

It all sounds fun, but a person’s medical history is very thin ice and I wonder if potential users come to realize that.

23andMe’s Privacy Statement

The Privacy Statement of 23andMe is very clear and covers several issues to protect its users.

• they can choose if they want to share their information,
• the information collected are non-personal used for research and never released outside the company without the user’s consent
• users can delete their account anytime, which is also deleted from the company’s database.

It is obvious, that 23andMe takes privacy very seriously - and it should. Users are protected in multiple levels and given a variety of choices.

But one of the main reasons to join 23andMe is the community driven system. Users will likely want to compare information, they will want to see if they have the same genes as Gandhi; and that’s where the real privacy issues emerge.

Privacy in Social Networks; more important than ever

Until now, participators in most social networks were sharing information, of minimal importance: their favourite links, their hobbies, their bio or the number of their friends. Of course these are also subjects, that should be carefully shared, but no big harm can be done.

But with services like 23andMe, we are seeing a transformation in social networks and the privacy issues, that emerge.

Social networking is mostly fun and play, but when it comes to sharing information of your own DNA, things become much more serious. I’m not going to list the problems of publicly showing your medical history/future, these are obvious.

But users of social networks, should start thinking with extreme caution, which networks they should join. The fun and joy remains in social networking, but the hazards seem to increase.

Would you share information about your genealogical tree and your medical history with the wide public of the social web?