Lately I have noticed that with more and more people getting used to RSS, and more services allowing you to send content in and out of them, content is flowing in so many different directions and things haven’t settled into any kind of default situation. For example – I use Twitterfeed to send updates to my Twitter account whenever I update my Facebook status, write a blog post, or add images to Flickr. This saves me the bother of updating Twitter AND Facebook, and Facebook friends will get the same content as Twitter followers. I do it this way because I go on Facebook more often than Twitter, and sometimes I want to Twitter about geeky things that I don’t want to bore my normal friends with (yes Twitter friends, you know you are all geeks). Most people I know who are on Twitter seem to flow content in the opposite direction, sending their Twitter status to their Facebook, I’m assuming because they spend more time on Twitter. However, people who are Facebook friends AND Twitter friends, see the same content twice. Boring!

The duplication of content gets particularly annoying when you use feed aggregators to view stuff. There are two types of aggregators I’m familiar with:

1. The stalker feed aggregator: These make stalking your friends super-easy. You can stay on one page and see what’s going on with everybody on all of their sites. An example of this is Spokeo, which works really nicely because you can rename your friends who have various online names so you remember who they are, and you can merge profiles for the same friend on various services into one. You can also delete boring friends just on Spokeo, so you don’t hear about their rubbish life, and you still remain friends with them on whatever external site they use, so you don’t offend anybody. Although Spokeo’s UI is really easy to use, it looks terrible in my opinion (oh, I just logged back in for the first time in a while and they’ve had a redesign, and they’ve gotten rid of a whole farmyard of small furry animals from the site). Socialthing is another example, and looks nice and clean, but you can’t merge people’s identities at the moment, and you can’t view all the content from a single person like you can on Spokeo *see below. These would be fine if my friends didn’t port their content all over the place, resulting in something like:

‘John on Facebook: John is Twittering: John is at home’
‘John on Pownce: John is Twittering: John is at home’
‘John on Twitter: John is at home’
…etc

2. The ego feed aggregator: If you throw pieces of yourself all over the internets, and you want to make life easier for your fans, you could make a page that aggregates all the information about you and your life into one place, so people don’t have to check in on you on lots of different services, but can just read this one page. Lots of people do this semi-manually on their blogs, adding feeds and badges from their various profiles across the web. I’ve kind of done this here, but have missed a few out, like Twitter, and I’ve preferred to just list links to my various profiles. I’ve now tried out (but haven’t put on my blog yet) ShowYourself, a widget-creator thing that creates a list of links to your various profiles in a semi-automatic way. Using Twitterfeed or similar, results in this kind of aggregated ego.

Friendfeed does both of these things, with a ‘Me’ tab and a ‘Friends’ tab. The ‘Me’ tab can be seen by anyone (here’s mine). You can also view your own updates in the Friends tab if you want to. But there’s still the problem of duplicated content. I had a bad case of duplicated content for a while when I let the Facebook Friendfeed application post updates to my Facebook Mini-feed: Updating my Facebook status would automatically update my Twitter status and send an update to Friendfeed and my Facebook Mini-feed (Mini-feed update 1); then Friendfeed would tell my Facebook Mini-feed that I updated my Facebook status (Mini-feed update 2), Twitter would tell my Friendfeed that I updated my Twitter status, then Friendfeed would tell my Mini-feed that I updated my Twitter status (Mini-feed update 3). Phew! That must have been annoying for my friends – I was probably spamming their newsfeeds. Also, the Friends tab only shows people who are also on Friendfeed (as far as I can tell), unless you go through the process of creating an ‘imaginary friend’ for each of the friends you want to follow. I.e. it doesn’t automatically import all of your friends from each social network.

I think the next step for these aggregator sites is to scan for duplicated content and filter it out. *I just discovered that you can merge people’s various profiles into one on Socialthing, AND it removes duplicate content and still tells you the sites they updated:

Brilliant! Are any other sites doing this yet?

The last couple of weeks I’ve been using Flock (full review coming soon), which can function as a stalker feed aggregator if you set it up properly, and it’s been nice to have my friends’ updates in a side panel of my browser. Duplicated content is still a problem here though – I wonder if they are planning on doing the Socialthing thing and filtering duplicates and/or merging people’s identities when you view ‘All’ updates?

Related post: The Web Profile Aggregators (by Frank Gruber)

Disclaimer – there are likely to be mistakes in this, so please point them out! Here are my notes from my PHP for beginners course, which was excellent, and was run by Highlander. I know it’s better to use the PHP manual but it helps me to write these out so feel free to ignore these!

DAY 1

• boolean = true or false
• int = integer
• float = fraction
• string = text, in quotes
• resource = external (not native to PHP) resource
• $variablename

Associative arrays

• $myArray = array (“keyname1″=>”value1″, “keyname2″ =>”value2″);
• If no key name is provided, the default is 0, 1, 2… etc.
• [square brackets are used to ACCESS array contents]
• (normal brackets are used to SET UP functions and arrays)

HTML

<pre>
this will print on two
lines, even without a br tag
</pre>

Examples

$x = $x + 1;
//equals
x ++;

$n = 3;
echo $n * $n- -;
// (ignore spaces between minus symbols) equals
echo $n * ($n- -);

// two minus symbols after $n means run the line then apply (-1) to $n

$n = 3;
echo $n * – -$n;
// equals
– -$n;
echo $n*$n;

// two minus symbols before $n means apply (-1) to $n THEN run whole line.

(more…)

I have about ten fifteen things I want to write about asap on this blog, and it’s getting out of hand, so I’ve decided to list them all before I forget one. Also in the list are other web-related things I need to do.

1. I went to Barcamp Brighton 2 this weekend and there are lots of sessions I want to mention.

2. I went on a PHP for beginners course last week and I want to put my notes from that online. √

3. I need to delete my self-hosted (and dead) copy of this blog so that it stops coming up in Google in case people comment there by mistake. √

4. I haven’t even mentioned my work on the University of Sussex Second Life campus project, and it seems everyone else has been talking about it this week.

5. I need to re-organise this blog so it has a page for illustrations, contact details, print design work and web design work.

6. I need to get screen shots of all of the things I’ve built in Second Life so I can start building a portfolio from them.

7. I want to make a better hoodie for my SL avatar (who is currently wearing the result of my very first attempt at creating any clothing in SL), and then make lots of clothes and sell them. I haven’t really seen many stylish avatars going around, so I think I’ll just copy my own wardrobe, what with me being such a style icon

8. I just discovered a few really awesome links which I have tagged in del.icio.us, and I want to talk about them. I might even create a del.icio.us page on my blog or figure out some automatic posting of daily/weekly links as I’ve seen other people do.

9. Mostly on my mind is the issue of social friend aggregators and social profile aggregators, content portability between networks and content duplication issues. √

10. There’s some out of date examples of work I’ve done in the past floating around and I’m still linking to them. I need to get rid of those because they aren’t relevant any more, and I can do much better stuff now!

11. I’ve been using Flock for the last couple of weeks and I want to talk about that.

12. I have brown hair now and need to update my avatars all over the place. This should probably come last because it’s not that important but since I’m so vain I’ll probably do this first. √

13. In a game of blog-tag, I got tagged. So I need to do the post thing and tag other people.

14. Flock just got confused and told me that all my friends were called Tim Vernon.

15. My queer computer: Last week I witnessed the fantastic bug in Second Life where a bunch of male avatars develop breasts. Bearded ladies aplenty. I now know why, and I’d love to tell you.

I don’t know where to start!

In November 2007 I had my first bad ebay experience. I bought a power cable for my powerbook (the old one literally spontaneously combusted in front of my eyes), and the ebay advert said the item was in London, so it should have only taken a couple of days to arrive. I was doing some freelance work at that time so it was really important for me to get this cable ASAP. The seller had 98% positive rating, so I thought it would be fine.

Turns out, the item came from Hong Kong and took three weeks to arrive! This meant I couldn’t work for three weeks, as I had no access to my computer. OK, three weeks isn’t the end of the world, but the point is that it took that long because it came from Hong Kong, and the seller had LIED about its location. I wouldn’t have bought from them if I had known the truth.

Multiple complaints to the seller, ‘eworldsky‘, while I was waiting for the product, resulted in them offering to refund me (but when I said yes, not actually refunding me). When the product finally arrived, I left negative feedback for the seller, because s/he had lied about the item location. I would not have bought from them if I knew it was coming from Hong Kong, because I needed the item quickly. Eworldsky then asked me to remove the negative feedback in return for a £4 refund. This I see as blatant bribery, so I refused. For the good of the community, I thought people should know that this person is lying, so I didn’t take their bribe.

In response to this, Eworldsky left ME negative feedback in retaliation, and told me the only way to remove this feedback would be by mutual withdrawl. This is basically blackmail. I found that option to be unethical because Eworldsky deserves negative feedback whereas I do not. And all I get for being honest and ethical for the good of the community is that my 100% positive feedback is ruined forever.

Further research into that person’s profile shows that they have received 111 negative feedback responses so far in the last six months! They still have a 98% positive feedback rating though, because they sell thousands of items. There are many ‘mutually withdrawn’ feedbacks on their profile, no doubt as a result of them bribing / blackmailing people to remove negative feedback. Also, many of their negative comments are along the same lines as mine, saying that items are being sent from Hong Kong and taking weeks to arrive, after Eworldsky claimed they were in London.

I looked on the Ebay terms of service and they state that they will not remove feedback that is left in retaliation. OK, that’s annoying, but what about banning users for attempted bribery and blackmail? I’ve emailed Ebay a few times about this and so far they’ve just explained to me what I already knew, that they can’t remove un-true or retaliatory feedback (they did tell me how to respond to the negative comment I got from Eworldsky, but people might not see this unless they click through to see comments). I would like to know what action is going to be taken against a user lying about their location, and attempting to bribe and blackmail other users. Hopefully if they are banned from Ebay, their feedback would be removed from my Ebay profile too.

My plan is now to contact these 111 other people who have had a negative experience with Eworldsky, and get them to comment here with their experience, in order to collate evidence against Eworldsky, and ask them to email Ebay too. I’ve already started by contacting one user – who has also had their 100% rating ruined in exactly the same way.

Note – this all comes at an interesting time. Ebay have recently announced that they are going to remove the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers. At least, in the US anyway. I wonder – when they do this – will they apply the new rule in retrospect? Will all feedback ever left by sellers in the past be removed? I doubt it but I hope so!

Note 2 – The power cable which arrived in November 2007 broke a week ago, and I’ve bought another replacement via Ebay on Monday (from a different seller). This one arrived today! That’s more like it!

Note 3 – INFORMATION ON COMPLAINING ABOUT A USER TO EBAY – HOW TO CONTACT EBAY