Guaka! - facebook

guaka: #great now that #facebook supports #hashtags my @composerio tags finally make sense. #composer @chmac

Guaka — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:13:57 +0000

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guaka: #great now that #facebook supports #hashtags my @composerio tags finally make sense. #composer @chmac

Post to multiple social networks with this great ping.fm alternative

Guaka — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:18:34 +0000

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I only met Callum briefly in Melbourne in 2007, right after I stopped volunteering for couchsurfing, right before he started volunteering for couchsurfing. A brief encounter with Callum was enough to know you're dealing with someone very smart and special. Later we started opencouchsurfing.org and regularly communicated online. I was happy to meet him again last summer in 2012. He wanted to start a new project and we brainstormed a bit about this. We were both avid users of ping.fm. I think Callum actually got me onto ping.fm at some point in 2007 or so.

Ping.fm: post to 20-something networks at once

Ping.fm was pretty good. There were some minor annoyances but overall it was a great way to post once and spread your message to tons of different networks. Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, but also Identi.ca, Plurk and many other fantasy named sites not used by many. But for an Identi.ca fan it was a great way to update your status on more than just identica. (For the uninitiated, Identica is an open source, slightly decentralized alternative to twitter.)

Then some day Seesmic, the slightly bigger social networking company with a nice looking product, took over Ping.fm. And quickly thereafter slashed the main feature that made Ping.fm stand out from the crowd. Since then there was no easy way for me anymore to post to Identi.ca, Twitter and FB at the same time.

Thus I was very happy Callum decided to build an alternative for ping.fm: Composer.io.

Composer.io: Post to multiple social networks

Now, half a year later Composer.io has become quite usable and you can post on multiple social networks simultaneously. It's actually a bit smarter than ping.fm as it will already allow you to post longer posts that will be automatically shortened for platforms like Twitter that only allow 140 characters.

Why post to more networks at once?

Personally, I have a bunch of followers of my twitter, quite a few friends on facebook. Identi.ca is not that active but unlike on twitter the links are dofollow links, so for seo I prefer to put links to projects I want to support with google juice on my identi.ca, but for social networking reasons twitter and facebook are much better. Like this I get the best of both.

Composer.io is a work in progress and your input is very welcome!

guaka: http://everwhe.re/ - your #facebook #friends #locations on a #map - where to take this next?

Guaka — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:02:12 +0000

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guaka: http://everwhe.re/ - your #facebook #friends #locations on a #map - where to take this next?

guaka: http://everwhe.re/ shows your #Facebook friends on a map, definitely buggy but #releaseearlyreleaseoften more later #meteor #coffeescript

Guaka — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 23:06:23 +0000

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guaka: http://everwhe.re/ shows your #Facebook friends on a map, definitely buggy but #releaseearlyreleaseoften more later #meteor #coffeescript

Flying is diving into the Wind

Guaka — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:00:58 +0000

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Millions of rain drops fell down while I've been playing with Drupal and Facebook apps the past days. It feels good to be able to completely plan my own time again. I'm very positive about all the opportunities arising in many places and in many different disciplines. The projects that are close to my heart are moving forward and because of my involvement in them I've gained so many insights and skills and I've met many people I now consider friends and with whom I want to keep on working. In the next 6 months I expect more of the same. I will probably spend al lot of time traveling. Now I'm just waiting for my new light-weight tool to arrive in stores in Europe.

Super Wall super messed up

Guaka — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:32:55 +0000

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Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven't seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting "applications". I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my "friends". Today I went through the usual "confirm requests" and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all. Out of gratitude Super Wall decided to send a postcard with "how to get a boyfriend: wear slutty clothes, laugh at his jokes, put out on the first date" in my name, to all my Facebook contacts. Great. ... Not. A partly solution for these annoyances is an optional blocking of applications and requests from certain friends. And I'm not sure how to fix the sheer abuse by the Super Wall application. Is there some kind of member feedback about applications to Facebook?

Civil engagement on social networks

Guaka — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 14:30:52 +0000

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Looking for some candidate blogs to add to Planet Hospitality I stumbled upon Spurring civic engagement on Facebook, Myspace and SixDegrees.org.

For the moment, while Facebook’s Causes and Myspace’s Impact seem a welcome change in allowing some use of these networks for more civic purposes, it seems as though they’ve hobbled their tools enough and created a weak-enough attachment that we’re skeptical that a lot of civic good (beyond some fundraising) will take place. We’ll hope that the next generation of tools is significantly more powerful.

I don't believe it's just a matter of adding powerful tools to so-called social networks. MySpace and Facebook are mostly about connecting people in the online world. To do good however, the real world needs to change. And collecting a bunch of money for a good cause might sometimes help. Even though there are some noteworthy exceptions, I've read, seen and experienced enough of the NGO World to know that this will never end serious issues like hunger and poverty. I think it becomes more interesting when the social network is the cause itself. I was made to believe that this was the case for CouchSurfing, and I worked my ass off, but unfortunately I was seriously misled. Though it won't be the solution to all the world's problems, I still think that real social networks have a chance of enacting serious change. My bets are on BeWelcome, more decentralized alternatives or even something radically new.