MattLisle.com A bit of everything

21Jan/090

Adults and Social Networks

iLibrarian links to a recent study that says the number of adults with online social networking profiles has quadrupled since 2005. This is relevant to a couple things I've noticed recently in my social networks:

  • Older family members (i.e. aunts, uncles, etc) are joining my networks. A year ago, I'd never have guess that I'd be reading my aunt Janice's Facebook status on a regular basis.
  • There's been a rash of old high school classmates joining Facebook recently. This has been good and bad. Good in that it's fun to see photos of everyone's kids. Bad in that... well... it got interesting during the Fall presidential campaign.

So, based on my own anecdotal evidence, I already knew that adults were increasingly using social networks. However, it seems that we won't really see big increases until it becomes easier to create and/or find niche social networks.

I'm sure my aunt would join a social network for her senior center where they could talk about zumba, upcoming trips, etc... But she needs to know how to create her own local network.

My father-in-law would love a retired pilots network... but he needs to know how to find an existing network.

My graduate program desperately needs to create a social network. They're still using an ooooooooooold school listserv as a tool for lifelong learning...

They could create new networks with Ning or Buddypress, or join existing networks. However, these tools don't have large audiences, so most adults aren't aware of them. Once adults learn to find or create their own social networks, these numbers will shoot through the roof.

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6Jan/090

Lifestreaming and Personal Web Sites

One of my goals for re-vamping my site was to include all the external content I post around the web: google reader items, flickr photos, twitter posts, etc. After all, the traditional personal site is dead.

I've made a good decent first stab at the goal here.... but it's still not quite right. I want you to be able to read my comments about shared Google Reader items, see who's commented on my flickr photos, and see my favorite youtube videos all from my site. Most importantly, I want people to be able to subscribe to one RSS feed that contains all of this 3rd party content.

Dave, at Mezzoblue, is in the process of accomplishing exactly what I want:

"I’m merging my traditional posts with links from Delicious and Google Reader (which is what I was up to when I wrote about the latter’s API), photos from Flickr, and Twitter posts (or tweets, if you prefer). The home page, archives, and primary Atom feed all work on this new system."

Perhaps I could install a Wordpress plugin called lifestream to get me started along this path... but as someone pointed out in the comments re: lifestream:

"...two things: 1) I’d like to keep the number of ready-made plugins down, and 2) since it’s just based on RSS feeds, there isn’t as much information to play around with, so it kinda limits the possibilities. For example, in Dave’s system, with every Flickr post, it shows how many comments that photo has at any given time."

Instead, I need to use these tools' APIs to accomplish what I want. We just did something similar at work (our tag cloud on the "For Undergraduates" page is now powered by the Delicious API). I just need another Christmas break from work so that I can do some more tinkering.

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