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An Open Letter On Best Practices And Principles

Over the past weeks, Eric Blantz, Khris Loux, Chris Saad and I have been discussing the ethics and best practices around social media and social tools, specifically with regard to the needs of a social tools vendor like JS-Kit. All of us are working with JS-Kit in some way or another, but the recent Facebook flap about their Terms of Service led us to consider addressing these issues in a larger forum.

As Eric said, 'the value of the activity is proportional to the involvement of a wider group of smart people.' We immediately thought of the Media 2.0 Workgroup as a good start for that wider group. As a result, JS-Kit authorized us to donate our draft materials to the workgroup for open sourcing to the community.

We have high aspirations, but we don't know exactly what form any results of the process might take. Perhaps we will be able to define a strong consensus on a number of topics that we will craft into a document or a website. Alternatively, we might fall into camps, arguing different sides of complex issues. Perhaps we would create a series of public conversations on the most difficult and important topics, and video those, with participation of others. We don't know.

We do know that the issues around the ethics of participation in the social web are enormous importance. The web is the most valuable human artifact ever created, and it is ours: there is no higher authority to ask 'how should we act?' We have to look to ourselves to find these answers, and the sooner the better.

The recent events around Facebook's Terms Of Service have brought the need for this discussion into high relief, and we are planning to bring together a diverse set of people to discuss these issues, and hopefully develop something that could guide others. The initial group includes the following: Chris Saad, Khris Loux (On Behalf of JS-Kit), Eric Blantz, Stowe Boyd, Micah Baldwin (On behalf of Lijit), Brian Solis, Ben Metcalfe, Marianne Richmond, Jeremiah Owyang, Daniela Barbosa, Peter Kim, Loïc Le Meur (on behalf of Seesmic/Twhirl), and Deborah Schultz.

We have a site (www.mediabestpractices.com) for interaction and collaboration, but it is very early days. After we have discussed this online and at meetings (SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo) we will likely have something more substantive to share.

Word Of The Moment: Plug Computing

Marvell: Plug Computing.

A plug computer is a small, powerful computer that connects to an existing network using Gigabit Ethernet.

Greasemonkey Script Nests Threaded Discussions In Twitter Pages

Pratham Kumar genned up a greasemonkey script, Nested Twitter Replies, that tries to nest Twitter discussions, and does so right in Twitter pages.

Twitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I tried using Tweetree for this functionality (see Tweetree: A Better UX For Twitter(, but it is annoying to have to use a completely different site for just one feature.

This script is so good that I find myself actually looking at my Twitter page again, instead of using Tweetdeck. Maybe Tweetdeck will do this someday?

SpeakerRate

Just learned about SpeakerRate, a new tool from the folks at Viget Labs/Pointless Corp.

[from the website]

SpeakerRate is a community site for event organizers, attendees, and speakers.

• Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they've given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they're organizing.
• Event attendees can provide constructive feedback to speakers, track the talks they've attended, and research upcoming talks that they might attend.
• Event speakers can get valuable constructive feedback directly from attendees and find out how they can improve their content and delivery for their next talk. They can also establish a SpeakerRating, which will help them earn future speaking opportunities.

SpeakerRate is a Pointless Corp. project. We built SpeakerRate because we are event organizers, attendees, and speakers ourselves, and we felt like a site like SpeakerRate would be useful for us and others. We hope others agree.

SpeakerRate, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Looks interesting. I will try it out in the future to see if it is as useful a feedback tool as it appears to be.

Twiphlo: Small Is Beautiful For Geolocation

Geolocation tools fall into two broad categories:

• Predictive location, generally oriented toward arranging to meet with other people when traveling to other places (like Dopplr and TripIt), or in your own town (like Mixin)
• Location streaming, generally oriented to keeping others informed of location (like Google Latitude, DodgeBall, Plazes, or Brightkite), either for arranging meetings, or to maintain a geolocational lifestream.

I have used tools in both categories, and written about my experiences with them.

Most recently, I have been using Dopplr for predictive purposes, and Brightkite for location streaming. But in recent weeks, I have found that Brightkite is too rich an experience, overlapping too much with what I am doing with other tools, particularly Twitter as my primary lifestream, and the various blogs I maintain on Tumblr. Perhaps it is also that I don't have a deep sense of community on Brightkite.

One thing in particular annoys me about Brightkite, and that is the Twitter integration. While they have provided a sophisticated template-based approach to posting tweets based on Brightkite location updates, the tool to support updating o Twitter location in the user profile is just broken. When I post '542 Brannan St, San Francisco CA 94107' the Twitter location gets set to '542 Brannan St' dropping the city, state, and zip code.

I was quite happy to stumble upon a small but beautiful location streaming tool the other day, called Twiphlo. It seems like the main window is designed for a mobile interface use, like iPhone. The basic idea is that you can post something, while at the same time updating your Twitter profile location.

Twiphlo, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Note that the creator of the app, Ben Clemens, added a new feature when I asked: the 'post location tweet only' checkbox. If you check the box and enter a location, the app will send a tweet like '#location 156 South Park, San Francisco CA' while also updating the profile location.

Clicking on the 'my map' brings up a map, with Twiphlo tweets superimposed, and the stream of tweets displayed in order at the bottom.

Twiphlo map, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

There are a few other features -- RSS and KMLfeeds and a way to clear the history and map -- but that's it. A tiny app, designed to do just one thing, completely integrated with Twitter.

I am very interested in these co-apps, like those offered by Twtapps, and I am giving Twttrip a try. But that's another post.