Digg takes a stand, and 86 people aren’t happy about it

September 19, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News · Comment 

Reports are bubbling up that Digg has permanently banned over 80 users for running scripts that help them automatically perform certain tasks on the site. This is called “cheating” in many circles, but on Digg it had become accepted practice. 

The mostly lengthy account has been published on the Get Smart Blog under the title The Grim Reaper has visited Digg. The post lists 86 usernames that were banned from the site without warning. The tone of the author and the comments, all apparently mostly ex-Digg users themselves, is rather grim and melodramatic: “So many brave and valiant Diggers…it is a tragedy of unspeakable proportions to see such wasted talent.” You’d think a team of dedicated scientists curing cancer were suddenly shut out of their labs and kicked into the street.

Among those banned was a user named Diggboss who developed and used a ‘GreaseMonkey’ script for checking up on friends to see whether they’ve dugg the items that you’ve submitted or shouted. The script used Digg’s own APIs and did not automatically digg stories, yet Digg’s rather vague terms of service prohibits “automated means to access the Site” and any “organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services.” I’m not sure this tool qualifies, but there you have it.

In an official message on their blog from last week, Jen Burton from Digg suggested that scripts were primarily forbidden because they “place additional load on Digg servers (slowing things down for everyone)”. It’s quite clear, however, that the real reasons is that Digg is concerned with using the system and abusing it by recruiting their friends. The Diggboss script may not have automatically submitted stories, but it did help users pursue a strategy of offering favors for homepage hits, something Digg has to prevent to keep the system running and worth the value of the service it offers. This perspective has merit, but try telling that to the displaced users.

Many users are defiant that Digg should dismiss long-time contributors on the grounds that they had run scripts. Like ’seniority’ allows them to violate the rules willy-nilly and be able to do what they want. Some may say, hey, it works on EBay (where, let’s face it, the larger Powersellers violate the spirit of EBay’s rules every day and get away with it).

IMHO, Digg did what they had to do: enforce the rules. Perhaps a stricter definition of what violates their rules might be in order, however, to keep the uprising from creating a user backlash and ultimately hurting the site in the long term.

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An Overview of Social Platforms and the OpenSocial Initiative

February 19, 2008 · Filed Under Technology · Comment 

It seems that everyone today webpage that ends up being their own persona to the world.  Be it a superstar athlete, a musician, an actress, or just some guy down the block, everyone seems to be connected and blogging on-line.  

And anyone who is anyone has a Myspace or Facebook page these days to connect with their fans, their friends, or even nobody in particular. (60 Million active facebook users vs. 110 Million for myspace)   

For the purposes of this article we’ll keep it simple and leave the discussion with the two giants in the industry. 

Facebook made waves last year by opening their API to allow for user created Social Networkfacebook apps.  This created a surge in popularity for Facebook, as well as a mini virtual market for small casual applications that run the gamut from trivia games to trivial time-wasters. 

Myspace is rumored to announce their own custom application system in the very near future.

These changes have transitioned both myspace an facebook into more of a platform then just websites.  The user base already existed in large (large) numbers, but now the content is much more engaging, customizable and dynamic.  The social platform tempts advertisers as the holy grail of marketing, and users were hooked before they even knew it. 

Of course Google couldn’t stand on the sidelines very long.  Google’s OpenSocial is just the latest attempt to join in the fray of the white-hot social platform development trend. Launched in November 2007, Google released a collection of API’s built to work together and to standard the core and method which websites and services work and speak together. 

You can think of Open Social as a similar initiative for social platforms as Open ID is for User IDS. While Facebook and MySpace got an initial headstart in launching the Social Networking revolution, Google has actually made large strides into the medium in just a few short months.   

Since the launch, OpenSocial has gathered support from the likes of LinkedIn, hi5, XING, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning, among others to create a huge conglomerate of social networking sites and applications that are all now linking together to form one community that uses one standard for all the software applications used across it.   

Facebook, with a reported 60 million users, doesn’t seem to be that worried yet since they believe their users are satisfied with the service and the applications and netware that run over it.   Sooner or later, however, as OpenSocial and the network it is creating across the internet continues to build and gain size, the two will almost inevitably be forced to join together or clash over user bases that will be huge. 

Google has already extended an olive branch according to some reports, and Microsoft, which owns Facebook, rebuffed their offer at a partnership.   

As the recent Open ID initiative demonstrated last year, there is strong movement in the internet community to bring barriers down and let users bring a distinct digital identity with them wherever they go electronically.  It remains to be seen if while users are beginning to enjoy seamlessly moving about the internet with one sole digital identity, if they will have any enthusiasm for a protracted trade war between two conglomerates determined to rule the internet social networking community. 

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Google Reader

January 28, 2008 · Filed Under Product Reviews, Technology · 1 Comment 

Google Reader has evolved into a powerful newsreader. Despite a plethora of competitors GReader stands out based on functionality and price (FREE). Newsgator recently opened their product up for free to consumers as well. Many consumer love the newsgator line but the stand-out difference is that GReader is a full online application (of course) whereas Newsgator is a standalone installable app.

Google Reader is easy to use. Browse to google.com/reader and login with your gmail account.

The easiest way to get started is to import an existing feed or collection of rss feeds. GReader can import any opml file under settings - import. In my case I had used a netvibes.com page for quite some time. Helpfully over at netvibes they allow adding pre-defined collections of feeds (tabs in their lingo) to your page which others have submitted. This is very easy to do and convenient. Since I already had 7 or 8 tabs added I exported those into an opml file - then imported directly into GReader.

Tabs from netvibes are imported as tags in GReader. Google continues the trend of using folders and tags interchangeably. Feeds can be subscribed to multiple tags. The interface is a snap to use - Folder list with feeds on the left, content pane on the right.

‘Add Subscription’ allow the user to type any blog/website name or the actual rss link. Feed will be added right away with no tag.

Click on any feed and ‘feed settings’ option allows for applying tags, subscribing and unsubscribing. As you scroll down the content pane of any feed GReader automatically marks that article as read. Unread articles show up in bold in the feed pane. Users can choose ‘mark all read’ in any feed to update all.

Anything with an RSS feed can be added to GReader. This can be deceivingly powerful and doesn’t just limit you to blogs. I’ve setup ebay listings, craiglist search results and even job searches to show up in my Reader based on the RSS feed available on each.

One of the most powerful (and untouted) features of Google Reader is that it saves the data for you. This means that you can add a whole slew of feeds, organize them at will - and then use the ever-available search to sift thru all of the data without needing to hit the live site(s).

This can be a great research tool - as well as an organization one. Since I’ve switched to GReader the time savings has been immense. Instead of flipping thru bookmarks, news sites and blogs I scan quickly thru the updated sites and can focus my time on the content that I truly need or am interested in. If I happen to miss something or don’t have time to catch up, it will be right there for me when I’m ready.

I’ve found that I don’t need to bookmark nearly as many sites as previously - they now wait for me in Reader.

Another of my favorite features - Google Reader Mobile. That’s correct - I can pull up google.com/reader on my phone and flip thru all of the same content. This makes my cumbersome phone browser suddenly useful. Instead of fighting to type in URLS and sites that do not fit on the mobile browser, the content is served up easily and organized just as I like.

Adding a bit of social flair google allows for all feeds and links to be shared publicly or with friends via ‘your shared items’. I am sure google will try to increase this functionality over time as it would position competitively with many other social bookmarking sites. Trends are also viewable and available (of course - this is Google) where you can see which feeds you spend time on, what you read, etc.

Thru the magic of Google Gears you can even take your Reader info offline with you. Install Gears and GReader allows you to sync the last 2000 articles offline - cached on your local system. In my mind this answers many of the original criticisms of the online Reader. When you connect again it syncs and marks the Read/Unread count as necessary.

All in all a terrific application. And for the price - how could you beat it. Google scores another win for usefulness and assuming they continue to upgrade and improve they’ve got a sure winner.

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