Puzzlepieces – tag ‘facebook’

so the problem of contact management is the opposite of new, and a lot has improved in recent years, but things still aren’t working for me

my contacts are split like so

primary list of contacts: Gmail. Auto-adding of addresses to the the list is usually good, but I wish it was easier to purge people with who I exchanged one email a long time ago (subject to manual confirmation).

secondary list of contacts: Pidgin. the great instant messaging software includes all my contacts on MSN/WL messenger (including my old account), Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ (admittedly virtually unused now). while most of these protocols store the contacts server-side, I have manually combined multiple accounts of the same people, and this is stored in a local XML file. I wrote an XSLT a year or two ago which converts the XML to CSV which can be imported into Gmail. Of course, it is imported manually, doesn’t really deal with Gmail-Pidgin duplicates, and of course lacks the avatars which aren’t stored in the Pidgin local file to begin with.

secondary list of contacts #2: Facebook. Facebook makes for pretty nice contact management, but it is largely a walled garden. For one thing, email is preferable for non-trivial conversation (email works well, isn’t closed, can be better archived and searched, etc.). Facebook makes the process for emailing someone as (1) find their profile (2) find their email in an image and retype (not copy-paste) it into my email application. Ugh. Facebook does have excellent metadata, and importantly, everyone manages and keeps up-to-date their own data. Today I tried FriendsCSV, a Facebook application that converts your friends list to a CSV file which is nice, although they don’t violate Facebook’s terms, meaning of course that email address aren’t included. And thus importing into Gmail creates a million duplicates. The metadata can include the URL to their Facebook profile, but Gmail contacts don’t even support URLs, so the URL is plain text.

tertiary list of contacts: Skype. As I have never yet had a cell phone, I use SkypeOut as my “phone” and so it contains actual phone numbers (in addition to some Skype contacts), a piece of metadata which is largely absent from my other contact lists, but also quite important. Apparently Skype’s own export function doesn’t include SkypeOut contacts, which makes things fairly useless.

There are also various contacts spread out in LinkedIn and many other websites, but few that aren’t also in the previously mentioned lists.

Of course, now that I have a mobile device (currently an iPod Touch, although I will probably be switching this for a cell phone by August), I want to get the data on there, especially phone numbers, since that is the data I will need when I don’t have Internet access. So my current workflow looks like this

1. periodically prune Gmail contacts
2. periodicially import (and then prune) contacts from Pidgin->XSLT->CSV and Facebook->FriendsCSV->CSV
3. periodically delete Windows contacts, and then readd them all by importing the contacts exported from Gmail
4. synch my iPod, fortunately done automatically when charging

Of course, the iPod Touch has a great visual interface, rendered useless by the fact that contacts imported from Gmail through CSV won’t include Gmail’s avatars (and certainly not ones that failed to get imported from Pidgin and Facebook).

One big problem with this is all the manual pruning that is necessary, and largely incomplete, thanks to all the duplicates created. And let’s not even get into the problem that I have many contacts that I don’t know about because they are people who I exchanged email with before Gmail, and will be useless until I import the old emails into Gmail that were on Outlook Express and are now in that format on an external hard drive…

Google now has a Contacts API and Microsoft has their Windows Live Contacts API, although the latter is decreasingly useful as people migrate off Hotmail/MSN to Gmail/Google. And I don’t want to write the apps using the APIs, I’m lazy and want other people to do it.

Plaxo is supposed to be my saviour, synching things across everywhere, keeping data up to date, deleting duplicates, etc. If I pay of course (what?? pay for software?). I wonder if it is worth it…

I want the future now, dammit.

Ask.com Unveils Search Privacy Tool: Users Control Their Search Data - Ask.com has been making smart moves, for the most part. Being in fourth place, the onus is on them to differentiate themselves and take risks.

Privacy specifically, I think has, just in the last few months, finally hit mainstream consciousness. More and more “normal” are telling me about their online privacy fears.

In a related vein, Facebook really screwed up, and I’m not sure they’re done screwing up. I praised them a lot in some recent blog posts… it never occurred to me that they could have possibly not learned any lessons from when they released newsfeeds and minifeeds.

so I think I have semi-solved my question of where to post things. now everything I tag with “forfb” on this blog will also show up as a note on Facebook. That way I can post things on one, the other, or both, without having to write them twice. Of course, there will still be comment splitting…

PHD Comics: Seminar Appeal - heh so true. I’m glad a friend got me on to PHD last year.

On a related topic, I had a hard time deciding where to blog this. I used to use my own blog for everything, but for the last while I use notes on Facebook for things that are more pertinent to my friends than to everyone else. This one is tricky though, as now none of my friends will see this, since few subscribe to my general blog…

frequent blog posts on the same topic? how odd of me

Anyhow since there’s an infinity now written about the Facebook advertising stuff that I talked about in my previous post, I need to of course correct all those misinformed people . As I said, Facebook is doing a great job with this new stuff. One lame thing that they did, which is something that I see happen with all these companies that start going big, is that they got a small number of big players (the short head, if you will) on board so that they can feel all special about it. So these lame companies go into this with lame ideas (if Coke’s plan isn’t the stupidest idea ever…). None of that matters. They might get smarter, or they might not (hardly possible). More importantly, the non-huge players (fine, fine, the long tail) are what will actually make this work. It may take a while to get there, but it will certainly happen.

Why Facebook Shouldn’t Fear OpenSocial - I’m supposed to be studying, so of course it’s a good time to do some blogging.

Anyhow, I agree with Josh that the idea that the competition now being Facebook vs OpenSocial is silly. Facebook is doing an absolutely amazingly fantastic job pleasing users, developers, being innovative, and soon, generating profit. Their upcoming “Beacon” plans seem as brilliant as their previous ones. The only bad thing I have to say about them (from a business perspective), is that they have been way to slow getting their advertising products out. In the long run, that may not make much difference.

OpenSocial is not competition in any sense of the word. It’s just a little specification to standardize some web services, which is a good thing. And assuming it gains the traction it is expected (the supporters actually follow through), then Facebook will just join it too, and they haven’t lost anything, really. In fact they’ll have gained additional developers and applications.

Facebook would have to be really stupid to act any other way, and from what I’ve seen, they are anything but. Except their HR, I’m not so in love with that.

Is it just me, or is MySpace sitting on their laurels? Just copying Facebook isn’t going to do it, and besides, they don’t seem to be copying them very well or quickly. I thought being the major player was supposed to count for something, like having resources.

One last comment on OpenSocial… while it is certainly good for developers that there will be a common API, let’s not forget that this simply means it will be easy to have an application run on multiple websites… separately. Having an application that seamlessly uses more than one social website simultaneously will still be an enormous headache. So there’s plenty more to be done there.

Update Nov 5. After reading a few things elsewhere, maybe myspace isn’t doing nothing, they just decided to let Google deal with all their advertising, and hope to make enough from that. But since that will likely be almost all of their revenue, might that not be a bad idea?

Facebook | Home - looks like they’ve added iCalendar exports of individual events and all of your events. Nice. This is new, unless I’m mistaken. Naturally, there’s no mention on the Facebook blog.

work seems to be keeping me rather busy

Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)

however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )

I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.

I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).

Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.

So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..