The first impression is that it is a half-assed Facebook/Friendfeed ripoff. If this service came out 2 years ago maybe I would have given it the time of day, but to me this seems a day late and a buck short on the part of Google. Google has failed at getting any slice of the social networking pie over the years, losing out badly to Facebook and Twitter. They tried launching a social network, called Orkut back in 2004, but did little to nothing with it. In 2007 they bought Twitter clone Jaiku, then did little to nothing with it.

The biggest issue with this product is that it requires building out yet another network of friends. I know myself I’m tired of it. I’ve used eMode/Tickle, Hi5, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and LinkedIn over the last 7 years and I’m all networked out. That doesn’t even mention the niche networks like Digg, MyBlogLog, thesixtyone and Last.fm that I have used, or the services I signed up to and never built out a full network on. Google is absolutely crazy to expect people like myself to use their service, and the reality is, if they don’t have a geek community evangelizing their product to others it will go nowhere.

The part that baffles me about this product is who they’re targeting with this product?  It doesn’t do micro blogging as well as Twitter.  It doesn’t do content sharing as well as FriendFeed or Facebook.  Are they targeting Gmail users too stupid to know any better?  Buzz features pretty much zero innovation and looks like one of Google’s many also ran products in the marketplace.  Google seems obsessed with having their thumb in every pie.  Aside from search where they are undisputed kings, Google seems to be getting a reputation of making me too products that don’t manage to innovate or if they do innovate, are so far behind the market leader that closing the gap is nearly impossible.

Google, I think I’ll pass.

After doing a little searching I discovered that Pretty Link for WordPress will do exactly what I was looking for. The plugin serves as a URL shortener, but also has a feature that enables you to create a framed version using the “Pretty Bar”. This functionality is pretty much identical to what Ow.ly is doing, only now you can now brand it with your own website.

Now if you install this plugin you’ll notice the the Pretty Bar function isn’t quite as nice as what I’ve got running on my site. That is because I modified the template to the plugin. Now I caution you at this point, if you modify the Pretty Bar template you will need to be careful upgrading to subsequent updates of the plugin, as odds are they will get overwritten. So be careful to backup your changes.

With that said, here is how you modify the template. The Pretty Bar template is located in the Pretty Link plugin folder, handily named prettybar.php. All the CSS and and HTML for the output is located there. I changed quite a bit of the layout and function of the display by messing with things in that file. If you’re handy with CSS/HTML you should be able to easily customize things to your liking.

If you’re not handy with template hacking, there are customization features available under Options > Pretty Bar Options that will allow you to change the colour scheme of the Pretty Bar to match your site.

Once you have it all styled you should be ready to start sharing things. One handy thing that Pretty Link allows you to do is add a javascript link to your quick bookmarks, allowing you to easily create a bookmark. To do this, go to the Pretty Link menu and select tools from within WordPress and follow the instructions. They even give you instructions on how to use Pretty Link from your iPhone, which is neat. Then when you are on a site you’d like to share, simply click the bookmarked link and Pretty Link will spit out a shortened URL like http://www.modsuperstar.ca/dja for you to use on Twitter.

I find when I share my links through Twitter I remove the “www.” from any link I’m sharing. That keeps my links below the 30 character limit Twitter has before it chops down the length of a URL. So far I’m happy with the results, though there are a couple of things I want to figure out going forward. Ideally I want to add links to my most recent posts into the Pretty Bar, but that’s a task for another day.

Edit 1: To get your links to show up with the Pretty Bar by default, under Options > Link Option Defaults change the Default Link Direction Type to Pretty Bar.

What Google is trying to do with this service is remedy some of the larger issues that are inherent with email.  Here’s a good explanation of the issues Google Wave solves.  This video also visualizes what they are trying to achieve as well.

The biggest problem I find is that Google Wave is pretty much an island onto its own at this point.  The only way I interact with Wave is by going to wave.google.com, which from my point of view sucks.  Pretty much every service I use on a daily basis has a way of breaking out its website constraints.  I have Twitter clients on pretty much every platform, I have notifications when a message is sent to my Gmail account.  I get notified if someone comments on a status update from Facebook.  Sure these things are probably coming to Google Wave through future API uses, but the fact they want people to start using this as a communication tool, yet there is no external way to interface with this service seems pretty silly.  The web these days is all about cross pollinating one service with another.

The whole thing with this service is that I can see where they are going with it, they just aren’t there yet.  I think in the ideal world this becomes Gmail instead of being its own separate service. Essentially this is Google trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s just going to take people a long time to get their heads around the concept, at least in its current iteration.

With all that said, who wants some Google Wave invites?  Leave a comment below or email at the address in the sidebar and I’ll hook you up.

Rogers On Demand beta service

Content
Rogers has built a website on the same platform on which Hulu was created, but that seems to be about where the similarities ends. Since this is a beta the content is limited pretty much to Rogers properties(CityTV, Sportsnet, G4), mixed with a smattering of Canwest Global(Slice, Food Network) and Corus Entertainment(YTV, Treehouse) channels mixed in as well. Aside from the stuff from CityTV, there really isn’t any big network shows available on the site. There are a smattering of full length movies as well.  I don’t want to bag on the content since the service just launched yesterday, but knowing how the Canadian content providers are at odds with each other, I’m not holding my breath on whether the channel selection will get better.

Tiered system online
Where things really go off the rails is when you try to access content from channels you don’t subscribe to. As a non-cable subscriber, I have access to very little of the content on the site. If I want to watch an episode of Slice’s Til Debt Do Us Part or any Sportnet content, I’m out of luck with RoD. I can go to the Slice.ca and watch every episode from season 1 – 8 for free, but I can’t watch the 3 old episodes available on RoD because I don’t subscribe to that channel. To me this is essentially Rogers attempting to create a tiered “cable television 2″ online.

As a person who has abandoned cable and satellite in lieu of paying for loads of crap I’ll never watch, you would figure Rogers would be trying to court people like myself to use their service.  Maybe their intent is to simply create a value added service for their cable customers, but if that’s the case, don’t compare the service to Hulu. Hulu is probably the one thing that the MPAA and television networks have done right when it comes to bringing their content to the world. Content providers actually working together to provide a valuable service to end users in an easy to use format.

What Rogers has built is essentially a platform meant to exclude satellite subscribers and those who don’t subscribe to either service. 6 months down the line we’ll probably have a similar website for Bell Expressvu, which will only compound the problem as Bell will keep all the CTV content and this will become the next frontier of the Rogers versus Bell battle in Canada.

To Canadians this has to be frustrating. Rogers seems to have a reasonable start with this website, built using a proven technology. The site is usable, aside from the horrible navigation. The video that is available is pretty good quality.  I have often heard the refrain of Canadian users about being envious of US only Hulu site and we’ve now waited over 2 years to get something similar.  Ideally Canadians deserve better.  Guess we’re back to waiting for hulu.ca.

CBC.ca (http://cbc.qwapi.ca/)
CBC’s mobile website probably has the most visual style of all the sites I’ve looked at. They pack the most content onto the page, though that comes at a price. A lot of the links are just on the cusp of being too small to comfortably read from a distance, especially on the content pages where the text isn’t bolded like the links of the same size. Adjusting from portrait to landscape on my iPhone does help the size, but I find reading the complete width left to right on the screen to strain my eyes a bit at that size.

Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/iphone/)
The Toronto Star’s mobile site strikes a good balance between being functional while having a little bit of visual flair. The design works well both portrait and landscape modes. Their start page offers 2 lead stories from each main topic, then a link to more stories.

National Post (http://www.nationalpost.com/m/)
I find the National Post’s offering seems to come off as the most pedestrian of all the sites. It’s not bad, but doesn’t seem to do anything with any flair. The only thing featured on the start page are the top stories, with all the links to the rest of the sections buried at the bottom.

Canada.com (http://www.canada.com/mobile)
Canada.com is the news portal associated with Canwest Global. This site is presented well and features some nice usability tweaks. There is menu dropdown at the top that allows you to quickly access the major sections. As well the footer has links to all the major sections, plus collapsible menus allowing you to quickly down into further subsections of content. The footer also has home and back to top buttons which are handy. I think these tweaks come as a trade-off too as the site seems a little slower then some of the other sites.

Canoe.ca (http://m.en.canoe.ca/)
Canoe is the news portal for Quebecor Media, which owns The Sun chain of newspapers. I would say their mobile site is easily the crappiest of all these media sites. There seems little to no effort put into styling the content for the page. The other beef I have is that they paginate the content. My iPhone can easily render more text on the page, making me load a new page every 6 paragraphs is annoying. They definitely have a long way to go to catch up.

Globe and Mail (http://m.theglobeandmail.com/)
The Globe and Mail’s mobile presentation isn’t the flashiest, but it features probably the nicest typography of all these sites.  The part I like about it is that it does load quickly and gives you plenty of links from the various sections.  It also allows you to sort by top stories and most recently posted.

On today, the fateful day that the grandest free host of them all, Geocities, closed, I wanted to look back on my memories of the service. I think like many people who grew up in the 90′s, my start in creating webpages was with Geocities. I remember a friend of mine in high school, Graham, who had started his own webpage. I was instantly interested, being the geek that I am, even though I didn’t actually have an internet enabled computer at the time. Graham gave me a simple piece of paper outlining how to format a link, how to embed an image, bold and italic text and how an html page was structured.

After getting that piece of paper I was off and running. Back then Geocities was organized into neighbourhoods that each had a theme. You just picked an area that matched the theme of your site and you were good to go. In my Star Wars obsessed teens I wanted to create the ultimate Star Wars site called Wedge’s Hangar Bay, so I picked the UFO themed Area51 to host my site. I really wish the site still existed, but from what I remember it pretty much looked like every other Geocities site from the 90′s. The background was a starry sky, as was mandatory for every Star Wars site at the time. The content was a hodgepodge of stuff that didn’t go together, but I didn’t know any better. The features I remember having was one called Wedge’s Ramblings, which I would probably call a precursor to this very blog. Back then it was a static page with some random rants, but it was definitely blogging before there was actually a term for blogging. And also on that site I started the site OasisCentral, which ended up being my fixation for years afterwards. After awhile I outgrew Geocities and moved on, but it still definitely holds a fond place in my heart after all these years.

For more on Geocities, check out ComedyCentral’s 7 Retro Things We’ll Miss Forever

Photo Taking
On DailyMugshot(DMS) the interface is pretty simple. The interface gives you 2 landmarks that allows you to align your eyes to everyday you take a photo, which is a handy feature. Once ready you are given a 3 second countdown before the picture is taken. You then can adjust how the photo is cropped, add a caption and save the file. Pretty straight forward.

DailyBooth(DB) handles things a little differently. There are no landmarks to align your photos from day to day, but it does something that DMS doesn’t which is flip the webcam image. This is a pretty key feature because if you are wearing a t-shirt, or have something readable in the frame it will appear correctly instead of backwards. There is also 2 options for how the item is shot, an instant snap and a 3 second countdown like DMS. After the photo is taken you can add a caption, then save. Both sites allow for local upload, so you’re not just constrained to your webcam.
Winner: DailyBooth; even though it had less features the flipped webcam image is the deal maker.

Viewing your snapshots
The whole point of DMS is creating your “mugshow”, which is a flash embed that shows your pictures in a rapidfire slideshow. Many people have created slideshows where they create animations and do some pretty clever stuff. Mine is essentially a hodgepodge of randomness. You can also view it in a simple gallery mode. The part I don’t like about the mugshow is how the speed of the playback can’t be configured, which is kind of a pain in the butt. Ideally being able to set the speed, as well as the size of the playback would be quite handy.

DB takes tries to employ the Twitter stream of updates as the way it displays your information. It’s pretty linear and is hard to get a broader view of all the photos someone has taken. This is probably part of the reason why there is no landmarks for pictures, as it’s just meant as a random picture of the day concept.
Winner: DailyMugshot; The mug show really makes the difference.

Community
DMS is a little rough around the edges with the community aspect. You can always see in the left sidebar who has taken the latest photo and view that persons mug show, as well as add that person as a favourite. Other then that there doesn’t seem to be a way to delve into the community and see a large cross section of the user base without just poking through user profiles and see who has that person favourited.

DB is built for community. As I mentioned previously, the site employs a Twitter like concept, right down to following users. You can view a live feed of the latest updates, a Google Maps mashup showing where the latest photos were posted geographically and a suggested user function to find people. A thing I like about DB is how there is actually a fair amount of community interaction, with people commenting on others photos, which simply doesn’t happen that much on DMS.
Winner: DailyBooth; it’s just so much easier to navigate and find interesting people

Sharing
This is where DMS really shines. The site allows you to share your most recent photos onto your Facebook profile, organizing them in monthly folders for easy browsing. You can also tweet your latest photos to your Twitter profile. The mug show flash slideshow can be embedded onto your website, as I have done in my sidebar. There is also RSS functionality, which allows people to subscribe to your latest photos.

From what I can tell DB allows you to tweet your latest photo and that’s about it.
Winner: DailyMugshot; it wins by a landslide in this category.

Miscellaneous functionality
DMS manages to cram a few more additional bonus functions too. There is an iPhone app that allows you to take a photo from your phone, then upload it to the site. There is also various reminder functions, one being a daily email, and the second being an application that pops up on your PC or Mac at a specific time to remind you to take your photo. Another cool thing the site offers is a flipbook of your mug show. For $8.99 you can get a custom book printed with all your photos, which seems like an interesting concept.

DB allows you to email photos to the site while on the go. It also has daily reminders, along with notifications for various events, like new comments or new followers.
Winner: DailyMugshot; just has much more additional functionality

Overall Winner: DailyMugshot

DailyMugshot just seems to be the more mature of the 2 applications. I know myself when I use a service I look for ways it can integrate into my online lifestream of information. I run a blog, use Facebook and Twitter and find that the service meshes pretty well with my needs. DailyBooth is a good service, but I the lack of external integration is the killer. I find after looking closely at how both these apps function they would almost be better if they somehow merged. Their strengths would actually be quite complimentary to each other.

What is Twitter?
This is the question I get asked most often about Twitter and also tends to be the most loaded question to answer. At its very simplest Twitter is similar to a Facebook status. 140 characters to to convey the answer to the question “What are you doing?”. Doesn’t sound very enlightening does it? It took me quite awhile to get my head around the concept before I even joined Twitter. I just didn’t get it, until I watched this video last year.

As a blogger the idea that Twitter fills in the gaps between blog posts appealed to me and got me interested. Sometimes you just have small thoughts or ideas that you’d like to broadcast to the world, yet they really aren’t full formed topics that you could make into a blog post. Hence where Twitter fits in. Twitter almost serves as broadcast instant messaging, where instead of chatting to one friend, you’re broadcasting to a whole array of followers.

Is Twitter just another social network like Facebook?
This is a question could go either way, but I’m going to go with no. What makes Facebook so popular is that it is a centralized website that allows you to keep up with friends past and present. It works as essentially a walled garden where fraternizing with people you don’t know is generally discouraged. Twitter is a different beast altogether. While there is a central website to congregate with others on, the power of Twitter lies in the various applications that support the Twitter API. Being able to send tweets from your iPhone or BlackBerry liberates you to share with the world 140 characters at a time, wherever you are. Sure you can use Facebook on the go, but you really aren’t able to actually get the full experience like you can on a regular PC. Twitter is much more bite-sized, so to speak, making the content a lot more consumable on the go.

How do I find interesting people to follow on Twitter?
There are a couple of ways to go about finding people on Twitter. When people ask me this question I typically point them to search.twitter.com and search for a topic of interest. There you’ll find lots of people talking about your topic of interest. Click to view a users profile and see if their tweets are of any interest to you. If so, just click the follow button and you’ll be able to keep up with their updates. There are also new directories services like wefollow.com that allows users to list themselves under topics of interest of their choosing, so you can find loads of people who share your same interests. As a Twitter user I tend to like finding people that are local to me, so directories like LoadedWeb.com help find users in my neighbourhood. Once you have some people to follow, start seeing who those people are conversing with and see about adding them. Odds are the people they follow might be of interest to you too.

How do I get people to follow me?
The best answer to this is to start Twittering. As I mentioned above, how you find people is by searching for users with similar interests. Once you join and start adding to the conversation, people will find you the same way, by searching. Talk about stuff that interests you and by extension people will find you. If you have something interesting to say or offer to the people you follow, they will probably follow you back. It’s all about being part of the conversation.

What are all these Twitter apps?
The world of Twitter really only starts with the website and it made whole by using other applications. Twitter by its very nature is very dynamic in that it is a constant free flow of information, whereas websites by their very nature are typically static. That’s why getting a standalone application to keep on top of Twitter is really handy. Be it on your PC or on your mobile device, you can keep tabs of what the people you follow are doing much easier then you can through the website. Here’s a pretty intensive list of twitter apps for Mac, PC, iPhone, BlackBerry and anything else out there.

That should get you started at very least in the world of Twitter. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. For a community based around 140 character messages there is a fair amount of depth to the whole experience. I find I learn new things everyday from those I follow, find great links, new restaurants and events going on in my area. I’ve met new friends and been able to share my experiences with others around the world 140 characters at a time. For those on the fence, all I can say is give it a month. You can’t really get a good feel for the service by using it for a day or two. If you’d like to follow my tweets, I can be found @modsuperstar

Well when the topic of my Mom’s best friend’s daughter and her boyfriend comes up and I offer up this random bit of information that I saw that she had apparently broken up with said boyfriend. This almost instantly throws my Mom into overdrive. Apparently said boyfriend is rather well liked by my Mom’s friend and would be devastated by the news that they had broken up. My Mom immediately wants to get on the phone and crank the rumour mill into top gear. My Sister and Dad put her off from getting onto the phone while I used my iPhone to make sure that my information was in fact correct. As it turns out she had changed her status on Monday, then on 6 days later, on Sunday changed her status from “single” to “in a relationship”. At this point we can peel my Mom off the ceiling and go on with the rest of our night. I’m sure either way my Mom’s friend will hear about this, then there will be an ensuing conversation about it with the daughter, all tracing back to me as the source. All because I innocently mentioned something I read on Facebook.

Moral of the story, sometimes a little information about something is too much information.