Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NpTech Tag Summary: Learnings from FriendFeed Experiment

During the past few weeks, Twitter has been down or out due to stress.  To learn more about Twitter scaling issues read this interview by Jesse Stay.  When a service goes down, users will complain. And if happens a lot, they may move on. There was much speculation as to whether they mover to Jaiku (with its newly minted Google money), or Pownce, BrightKite, Tumblr, plurk or FriendFeed.

FriendFeed has been getting a lot of buzz lately.  FriendFeed is in a category called digital lifestyle aggregators that let you aggregate all your various feeds and share with your friends.  Want a fuller description of FriendFeed? (Read this).  Want to go even deeper? Follow the poweruser of FriendFeed, Louis Gray.  (And for expert level knowledge, read these blog posts about FriendFeed that Louis Gray has bookmarked.)

In the last few weeks, there has been posts about how conversations have shifted to FriendFeed.  Not everyone is thrilled with FriendFeed, some say it is just generates noise and is a parasite.  About two weeks ago, FriendFeed added a new feature: rooms.  This feature enables a group of people to join and share items they have discovered from their FriendFeeds (or elsewhere) and have micro-discussions.  It seems that a room helps with the noise levels because people have to consciously add info to a given room. It doesn't just take everything from a feed. So it's more selective.  It's unclear whether this advantage will withstand a larger number of people sharing more items or as more rooms are set up (already we have a nonprofit room, a nonprofit and web2.0 room, etc).

Jonathon D. Colman set up the nptech room on FriendFeed five days ago and 105 NpTechers have joined the NpTech Room.   Some participated in the formal experiment I designed which involved a quick knowledge sharing task.  In addition, a lot of ad hoc conversation and informal resource sharing unfolded.    There was also a bit of reflection to identify how to efficiently use FriendFeed and determine its value to nonprofit. 

The jury is still out - there is some value to the conversations and connections that FriendFeed generates, but it is difficult to efficiently scan and participate.

I like what Marnie Webb likes about FriendFeed Rooms.  As she says, it combines social bookmarking, feed reading, and the casual interactions of Twitter into something that works somewhat like mailing list, but doesn't add to your email overload.   Also, for the past year, I've been summarizing resources being shared through the NpTech Tag, I've felt frustrated that you didn't always know who had contributed the resource and while one could add brief annotations, there was not a space for conversation around those shared items. And as Marnie notes, the conversation in FriendFeed is valuable.

Marnie mentions one downside to FriendFeed - that she is unable to process the information as quickly or as seamlessly as she can with other tools that she is regularly using for social bookmarking, feed reading, and causal interactions.  In the comments of Marnie's post, Laura Whitehead points out that FriendFeed may offer ways to widen the conversation, but some of it depends on how we get our information, manage it, and connection.  Some people choose one site or method to connect with others, while others are "network weaving," jumping from one site to another.

Here's a summary of some of the topics and discussions that took place in the NpTech FriendFeed Room. 

Exploring FriendFeed

One of the first topics of discussion that came up was how to efficiently use FriendFeed.  What were some ways to filter the duplications?  What are some practical tips for using it?   

The formal experiment I designed involved asking people to pick a useful post from the list of FriendFeed bookmarks in del.icio.us identified by FriendFeed expert Louis Gray and say why the resource was useful.

Beth Dunn shared Social Media Club: Join Our FriendFeed Room and Kill A Mailing List

Beth Mazur shared Keep Your Eye on FriendFeed It May Be The Google of Social Networks

Roger Carr shared "Why You Should Use FriendFeed"

Ruby Sinreich shared "Making Real Friends Imaginary"

Chad Norman shared  "Let's get Serious About FriendFeed: The 1995 Message Board, The Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation."

Andrew Cohen shared "Three Reasons FriendFeed is Great.  Three Reasons to Fear It"

Q: What happens when you put a bunch of NpTechers in a room together?
A:  They talk about tools!

Well, not exclusively as you'll not below.  But there were a number of quick conversations mentioning new tools.

Blist
Hitwise (new features)
Iceberg
Wordframe
adocu (one word tweets)

NpTech Talk and News

A number of posts were shared and discussed that were not about tools. 

Philadelphia Wireless Fights To Stay Alive (posted by Holly Ross who knows a bit about this topic)

The Best and Worst Cities for Nonprofit Efficiency (posted by Sarah Conner Smith)


Social Media and Web Strategy and Marketing

Jonathon Coleman shared The (Lil) Green Patch Facebook app has donated $33,600 to The Nature Conservatory's Facebook Cause (I screenshotted and summarized the discussion thread here)

Causes Raised $2.5 Million in First Year of Operation Allan Benamer asks "What's the average for nonprofit websites and their e-mail lists?"  Perhaps you can learn that here.  More analysis from Steve MacLaughlin

Eric Johnson shared Text to Save Lives

Reed Stockman shared Is Social Networking/Causes the Next Big Thing?

Clay Newton shared What CEOs need to know about the social web?

Eric Johnson shared "Is Facebook Page a Complete Social Media Strategy?"  Covers the pros and cons of running your own branded social network or going with Facebook or Myspace.

Andrew Cohen shared How do you test our web site cheaply?

Jonathon Coleman asked "How do you know if your web content is strategic?"  Marnie Webb answered.

Some threads of conversation about the Case Foundation's Social Citizen paper - can be summarized as
"This paper is right on in identifying the current "situation on the ground". The question is, as always, how do you apply the information?"

Will Boyd has a question about non-profit marketing?  Can you answer it?

The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology.  Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.

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FriendFeed NpTech Learning Experiment: Some Practical Tips for Filtering

Beth's Flickr Stream

 

Jonathon Colman set up a FriendFeed Room for NpTech and I designed a quick experiment in sharing resources via FriendFeed about FriendFeed.  If you want to participate, here's how.  More than 40 folks have joined so far.

The above screenshot is one of the conversation threads that is happening in the NpTech Room about FriendFeed (there are some other conversations happening related to other resources being shared -I'll roundup at the end of the week.) I shared some screencasts by Andy Roberts that provide some practical tips and also explain why FriendFeed is useful (combines object sharing with friend of friend).   He demonstrated using a client called Twhirl, but Marnie and Ruby noted that they were having trouble with some dupes. I managed to stumble upon another video on YouTube (it showed up as a related video to Andy's) about how to filter in FriendFeed.

What have you learned about using Friendfeed efficiently?  I've you've popped into the FriendFeed NpTech Room, what has been your experience?  It is important to capture the experience of a newbie.

NpTech FriendFeed Room: NpTech Punk Experiment

Thanks to Jonathan Colman, we have a NpTech Room on FriendFeed - which is essentially a way for a group of people to share their feeds with one another.   (Need to catch up on what the heck FriendFeed is?  See my primer.)

Jonathan set this up on Sunday night and within 24 hours we have 27 nonprofit technology techies in there - quite the conversation cafe at the moment.

So, I've cooked up a little experiment that combines NpTech Punk with FriendFeed conversation and resource sharing between peers.  Ready to play?

Here's how to participate.

1.)  Get up to speed with FriendFeed (here's the quick what, how) (See Andy Robert's Screencasts too)

2.)  Join the NpTech FriendFeed Room (can't find it, leave a comment and I'll send you an invite)

3.)  Collaborate Task: 

Louis Gray is the poweruser of FriendFeed.  He has a del.icio.us account with a couple hundred bookmarks tagged Friend Feed.

Find a resource that resonates with you or helps you think about how FriendFeed might be useful to you personally or to your organization.

Share that link in the NpTech FriendFeed Room

Add a comment about why think it's useful

Participate in the comment discussion on other items

I will do a summary as part of this week's NpTech Tag Roundup ... okay, ready, go!

Twitter Backlash is Officially In Progress .... Dang .. need to update my slide show ..

Let the backlash begin. I've seen it before and it here it comes again ...  Twitter is having stress issues ... Learn more from this interview by Jesse Stay. What will the alternative to twitter Be?  Maybe it’s Jaiku (with its newly minted Google money), or perhaps Pownce, maybe its BrightKite, or FriendFeed, Tumblr, or any other number of alternatives. Oh yeah .. it's not about the tools, it is about strategy and outcomes ... but once those are in place, you have to explore the tools.

The Sentiment for @kanter on Twitter is good, but my sentiment for Twitter is probably less so ...

Hat tip Dr.Mani

With Twitter being down so much, I realized how much I'm into a daily check of my replies tab.  So, I did a search for @kanter on summize to check.  It also gives you a content analysis of the positive/negative.  I'm not so sure how they do it.  But I'm in the green zone.  I wish those squares would link to actual tweets.  But, guess it doesn't matter so much since micro conversations have shifted to FriendFeed...

I'm going back for a deep dive ..

 

FriendFeed: Any Nonprofit Staffers Using It? How? Why?

FriendFeed is in a category called digital lifestyle aggregators that let you aggregate all your various feeds and share with your friends.  (There's also  MyBlogLog's lifestream, Lifestream.fm and Facebook's primitive version lifestreaming, which involves integrating a handful of services into users' Mini-Feeds and News Feeds.

Need to understand FriendFeed?

• What is FriendFeed? (Read this)
• Why should you use it?  (Read this)
• Does it have any value for nonprofit folks?  (leave a comment)
• Who is the poweruser of Friend Feed?  (Louis Gray)
• What blog posts and information has Louis Gray read and digested on Friendfeed?  (Sniff is del.icio.us friendfeed tag and pluck something out and leave a note in the comments to point to it ..)

I set up my account back in February when it started to get buzz.  I admit I haven't done much with it except to use it on my Facebook profile to update my profile content versus having all these individual apps on Facebook do it for me. 

I'm not in the habit yet of scanning the combined feeds of my friends on friendfeed because my initial knee jerk reaction is too much content.  I haven't yet figured out filtering, either.   So, now I'm using the dip in approach or browse the bookstore approach ...  don't have to read everything - just scan for patterns and then drill down into something that might be useful, interesting, or connect with something I'm doing.

• How are you using Friendfeed?
• Does it have any value for those of us work for nonprofits?  Or is it early adopter geek stuff?
• It seems like it would be of value if you had large friend group and a way to filter or if you had a small rightly defined group or community of practice as your friends.  Has anyone experimented with filtering or using it for knowledge sharing?

 

 

Be Your Own Filter In the Global Brain

Photo by VaxZine

Almost ten years ago, I used to teach a workshop called "Digital Information Coping Skills" for  artists and arts organizations as part of a series of workshop on the theme of how to integrate the Internet into your (arts) organization's mission.  Think Web 1.0 strategies and tools from both an individual and organizational viewpoint.  I developed the information coping skills workshop after observing the "information overload" or "techno stress" reaction to the glut of electronic information coming into email boxes.  It was the first inkling of what David Shenk wrote in his book "Data Smog: Surviving the Information Age."

That book uses the metaphor of pollution to explain the cultural impact of too much information (from the Internet) on society.  He talks about the impact of too much information on the human brain and considers how the human brain may evolve over time as the Internet matures and the amount of digital information increases. The last chapter offers some practical advice, including the "Be Your Own Filter" and "Give A Hoot Don't Data Pollute."   The book was written in 1997, so the practical nitty gritty was talking mostly about dealing with waves of email and human systems/skills - NOT automated software programs.

Some neurons in my brain made me connect back to Shenk's book I attended NDN's New Audiences, New Tools Forum.   I think about the increasing connectedness that Peter Leyden described in his overview of networked politics (he used an incredible visually rich set  of powerpoint slides that kept us engaged and this visual.)  The panel "The Evolving Model Using New Tools" where Micah Sifry, Tracy Russo, and Jerry Michalski spoke also made me think back to that book again. (BTW, Dave Witzel did an awesome job of tweeting the key points)

Jerry Michalski use the metaphor of the global brain and mentioned that we were halfway through a transition process where we are renegotiating social contracts and connecting with people in a way that we haven't before.  Jerry talked one benefit of this connectedness and openness is innovation or Cantabridgian Creativity.  The idea that you can in a couple clicks go onto a site like Slideshare and see ideas on a topic from some of the best thinkers on that topic and recreate your own meaning of it.   I had joked with Jerry that one downside is the inability to remember our calendar - and that with this socialness will our friends eventually collaborately remind us of our appointments.  (It was funny at the time)

But the point is that knowledge is now externalized in our global brain of connections with our friends.

Maybe that's why Robert Scoble responded to a Twitter user asking if ever experienced information overload. He said no.  I asked him, on Twitter, if he thought his brain had evolved.  He said, "no my brain has not evolved, but my network has."

And, as our networks evolve and the tools to aggregate our friends activity streams - so does the amount of noise increase.    Are we know evolving to Web2.0 version of information overload?  Perhaps called "Networked Overload?"  In this recent post from Read/Write Web called Too Many Choices, Too Much Content describes approaches to filtering your content and reducing the noise.   The bottom line:

It's hard to say. Early adopters are not going to stop playing with every new service, but it's clear that we're getting to a point where tools that centralize, aggregate, but most importantly filter our content are going to be the ones that win out. There are only so many hours in the day, and, as it stands right now, every single one of them could be filled just consuming and interacting with content, social media, and web services. There's also this little thing called "going outside" that we would like to take part in, too. Hopefully we'll see the killer web app to filter the noise someday soon to help us do so, but it's definitely not here yet.

Given there isn't yet a killer app (or maybe there is) How are your filtering your networked content?  What human skills or existing tools are you using to help you avoid networked overload?  What are your best information coping tips and techniques in an age of social media and networked digital lifestyle feeds?