All posts by fozziewossie

Always thinking and challenging. Always looking for something new. Love travel and work which are the main influences for my work.
Social

Twitter: Like Facebook But You Choose Your Friends!

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It’s the age old question: If you could have any five people over for dinner, who would they be? For me the answer is:

  • My favourite philosopher (or interpreter of philosophy): Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)
  • My favourite porn star: Sophie Moone (@SophieMoone)
  • The president of The United States of America: Barack Obama (@BarackObama)
  • Universal man of controversy and sheikh of tweak: Shane Warne (@warne888), and
  • Lead singer from one of my favourite bands: Zack de la Rocha (Rage Against The Machine) (@ZackdelaRocha – this one is unconfirmed though as he’s never tweeted.)

That’s some list of people in my opinion. And you know what? I get to hear from most of them every day. The power of Twitter is that I can connect with some of the most prominent people in the world on the topics that I care about. What I left out above includes the subject matter experts from the technologies I work with (Enterprise Content Management and Android), my favourite journalists and people involved in defending Australia and the world from censorship.

I’m sorry real friends but you really need to pick your game up. We’re reaching our quarter life crisis and what have we got to show? A sports presenter, a PhD candidate scientist, content management specialist at the United Nations, and a model. I know this is harsh as many of you are world specialists in your chosen fields but I think we can do better!

So the real power of twitter is that it lets us connect straight to the people we are interested in. Facebook is sort of trialing this – you can like our favourite bands and brands but I don’t think it’s really the same. I don’t feel the same connection. Let’s face it, Facebook is for friends and should keep trying to improve on that market. It’s probably a pretty good market too as most people I’ve met have friends.

And Twitter? Is it going to take off because we can choose friends so much better than our own? Maybe not. Twitters big problem is that you can choose your friends, but not what they talk about. And most people talk a fair bit of garbage. I think Twitter might have a chance of fixing this though. I’d love to see a channel feature where you could just connect to the relevant material until you think you want to know more about a person. I know I already post a fair bit more to Twitter than I do to Facebook and if they can get some focus on relevancy they might become
a real power.

Either way happy communicating!

P.S. If any of the people on my dinner wish list can make dinner some time then just drop me a line. My calendar is always open.

Technology

The Rise of New Technologies and Expert Opinion

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The Conversation was recently launched. While it sounds a little too much like the circle in name the concept behind it is really great. It’s a site for people in the education industry (university and research predominately) to post expert media styled articles. Instead of listening to a journalist rehash some concept – why not take it directly from the experts. Generally expert opinions fall down why it comes to covering the complexities of the field. I’ve found that the writing so far has been highly accessible and topic to date though.

I actually hope the site can take the next step and start doing two things.

  1. Driving public opinion towards rational analysis of topics rather than the emotive approach that comes from the broadsheets and our politicians.
  2. That the articles can in effect become peer reviewed by having other experts in the field as the main people who are able to comment. They definitely need some way of differentiating between regular comments and other expert commentary.

The biggest problems I see with this form of new media is funding. At some point the general populace is going to catch on that you can just block adds. Without ads the marketing people are going to start to question the worth of paying money to have their blocked add shown. What we need is direct funding for what we like. And the solution could be flattr. Flattr is a micro-payment system. You choose a broad amount that you want to spend a month and flatter all the things that you’ve enjoyed that month. Those could be charities, musicians, blogs, media articles or tutorials. At the end of the month your money gets split up and a portion sent to each of your likes. The payment per like might end up being really small. But thats the idea – with the internet comes the ability to show your work to a much larger number of people. If 200 people read my blog and leave me 1c each I’ll at least make $2. That goes a lot further towards meeting the costs than the current model where I would make nothing.

So where do micro-payments need to go to make this truly viable.

  1. Critical mass. Everyone needs to have an account and everyone needs to start having this on their website. That’s the only way people will start feeling they have to give.
  2. A way of differentiating, even in a small way, of how much you liked something. For this I’m thinking a star solution. One star and you were informative. Five stars and five times the payment. When you’ve saved me four hours in a blog post that I would have had to nut out myself I’m very appreciative.

So good luck to both of these new services to the world and let’s hope they both succeed. Expect to see a flattr button appear on my site in the not to distant future.

Edit: might write something worth paying for first!

Posted by Michael at 8:55PM 31-Mar-2011

Technology

Comment Platforms Comparison

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When creating my website one of the key goals was to make it interactive so that it’s not just me sharing my thoughts but also my friends, colleagues and the world at large able to contribute. As per all things technical I didn’t want to have to create a comment system myself as there’s always someone that’s done it better. That’s where comment platforms come in. Comment platforms allow web developers to tap into existing services that offer comment functionality and storage by including a relatively small pieces of Javascript into your HTML.

For my site the main usage was going to be around opinion pieces and technical releases for the products that I tinker with. In short, my blog posts.

Thinking deeper into what I wanted I came up with a list of requirements that my preferred platform absolutely had to have. The two critical ones are that it is free and that I was able to integrate it into my site as is. I wasn’t going to be changing my site back end just to fit the solution – the solution had to come to me. There was also a list of other requirements that I considered important but that I could live without. These included being able to comment with logging in, getting extra features through logging into the service, nice threading of comments, some kind of moderation so that I can control the masses if necessary, the ability to detect and prevent spam in an automated way without looking at my site every hour, and that the time and complexity of adding the platform to my pages wasn’t onerous.

Through some research I discovered six main products that I wanted to look further into. These are Disqus, IntenseDebate, Facebook Comments, CoComment, JS-Kit ECHO, and Livefyre.

Given that I couldn’t find any succinct information on the differences between the platforms, here’s my summary based on the requirements I had for my site and my first impressions of experimenting with each of the platforms.

Requirement Disqus IntenseDebate Facebook CoComment JS-Kit ECHO Livefyre
System cost is free (Very Important) Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes
System can be used on custom websites (Very Important) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Users can enter comments without logging in (Important) Yes Yes No No
Users can login for extra features (Important) Yes   1 Yes   2 No Yes   3
Comments will be automatically threaded (Important) Yes Yes Yes Kind Of   4
Comments can be moderated (Important) Yes Yes Yes Yes
Spam comments will be automatically removed (Important) Akismet   5 Akismet   6 Unknown   7 No
Comments can be easily added for a page (Important) Yes Yes Yes Yes
Comments appear in real time Yes Yes Yes Yes
CSS No   8 No   9 Yes   10 No   11
Comments can be shared on Facebook Yes No Yes No
Comments can be shared on Twitter Yes   12 Yes   12 No No
Votes can be given to comments to raise their visibility Yes Yes Yes Yes
Comments can be tracked via RSS Yes Yes No No
Users can use their profile across multiple sites Yes Yes Yes Yes
Email notification on comment reply Yes Yes No No
Gravatar support Yes Yes No Unknown

1. Able to follow other users. Able to see all comments across multiple sites.
2. Allows you to follow peoples and maintain an account.
3. Allows you to track groups, friends and looks to build communities.
4. It uses the concept of quoting and doesn’t really thread.
5. Administrators will have to register with Akismet which is free for non-commercial purposes.
6. As per 5.
7. I believe that Facebook have their own spam detection and deletion as would be used on the site
itself. I wasn’t able to find any details on this though.
8. I’m not a CSS guru but I found it very trick to get it exactly as I wanted.
9. As per 8.
10. Minimal efforts to customise the CSS were completed. It didnt really seem necessary as the layout
was already the expected Facebook design.
11. I didn’t even want to start on the CSS for this. It seemed like a lot of work to get it to a
standard that is acceptable in the web world.
12. If logged in through Twitter. Can only share your own comment.

Disqus

Discus is my preferred solution of the comment platforms. It met all my basic requirements and narrowly edged out IntenseDebate. There was very little between them and the only thing it really came down to was the ease of setup to login through Facebook. (It also allows login semi-anonymously using your email or using the following accounts: Discus, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and Open ID) Based on the service that you are logged into you can also share your comment.

The layout of the comments is pretty nice if a little spacious. There’s probably come CSS tweaks I can do to fix this although I haven’t had a lot of fun trying to change items. On a looks side it imports your profile picture that you login with (this is not updated if you change your profile picture after the comment), allows likes and dislikes for the entire page, likes for the comments and allows users to include images in their comments. The threading was simple but was nicely
indented and the collapsing of threads and the sorting options (popular, best rating, newest first, and oldest first) give users a lot of control over long comment threads.

I also liked that you could subscribe by email or RSS without having to post a comment yourself.

In terms of market share Disqus seemed to be the most used service I could find around. This potentially means that you’ll have a few more users who already have an account and the benefits that have a Disqus account provides – not that there’s many of these that are that useful. I think most people are going to be logging in through the other services regardless.

My only dislike are that after exiting the settings the page resets to the top of the page (this happens in IntenseDebate as well) and that with my previous CSS design updating the CSS was a nightmare. That’s no longer a problem though.

All in all it’s a really great free service with the most comprehensive features and it’s my choice for this site.

IntenseDebate

This was probably my second favourite. I really like the layout of the posts and when you post something it has quite a cool effect. I probably could have made the comment text white as well and then it would have looked even better.

In terms of requirements ID met all my major ones. It’s free, was easy to install into my custom website, you can post anonymously using just an email address, allowed you to login to their own service, had great threading, access to spam prevention service Akismet and was
easily added to the webpage.

My main gripe was the integration with Facebook. Like Disqus they also provide the option but through Firefox and Internet Explorer I had issues logging in after the first time. This may be a clash between the Facebook comment platform and ID but it wasn’t a problem at all with Disqus. Login was possible using IntenseDebate, WordPress, Twitter, and OpenID but not Google. I also think that the base design of Disqus matched my sites design slightly better.

Other nice features were the both up and down voting on users comments, the sorting by date, rating (based on your up and down voting), and last activity and the extended list of RSS options. There was also the ability to collapse threads.

Similar to Disqus I found my initial trials with the CSS to be rather difficult.

It’s a very nice platform but I just felt it wasn’t as slick as Disqus.

Facebook

What you see is what you get with the Facebook comments platform. It’s really only designed to be used by Facebook users and because of that it failed a number of my key requirements. Despite that it is yet another good solution that was easy to setup, gave a number of configurable options and was easy to use. Not surprisingly it had the best integration with Facebook with a user being able to see replies in their Facebook notifications. Being part of Facebook I believe it will also tap into their spam detection and prevention which is a benefit over the configuration required in other services. For me though it just doesn’t offer the range of services that Disqus and IntenseDebate do.

CoComments

The main site has Copyright 2006-2008 information on it and it looks like it hasn’t been updated since then. The layout that it provided was pretty horrible to the point that I immediately wanted to dump it and it looks completely different between Firefox and Internet Explorer and Chrome. (The second two looked similar in not applying the see through effects from my site.) It had the most limited login options of the reviewed services and not having anonymous login and a reputation for being targeted by spam didn’t help either. Given how deficient it was I didn’t spend a lot of time playing with this service.

JS-Kit ECHO

The system cost for this package is not free and I believe it wasn’t even clearly available what the prices were. Given I’m a hobby website developer that put this platform completely out of reach.

Livefyre

Livefyre had integrations with a number of common blogging and website creation platforms but was unable to be integrated with custom sites. Given I’m a custom site that meant it was no
good to me. If this changes in the future let me know and I’ll re-evaluate.

Edit: I’ve removed all the javascript to display the post types. I gave up on including div’s in the wordpress format.