RickyCadden.com

Buffer Helps You Avoid The Flood

// December 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // blogging, Social Networks

I have over 250 feeds in my RSS reader, and I keep up with a TON of news that way. I also often find things that I want to share. Unfortunately, due to my schedule, I often plow through hundreds of news items in one sitting, and if I were to share everything I wanted to, I would flood my Facebook and Twitter timelines and all my friends would unfollow me. I had often wished there was a way to have these sort of trickle into my timeline periodically, to avoid the flood.

Enter Buffer. Buffer is an awesome service that does exactly what I was looking for. You can load your ‘buffer’ with up to 10 posts (you can pay a small monthly fee for more, if you need them) and then those posts will trickle out to either Facebook, Twitter, or both at various times throughout the day.

The times that Buffer publishes your posts can be chosen in two different ways. By default, Buffer will analyze your Twitter and Facebook timelines to determine the best times for your individual usage. You can also specify certain times, if you prefer.

There are two main reasons I love Buffer:

1. It’s a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ type service. Once I set everything up, I simply click a button to load content into my Buffer and that’s it – everything else is automated. I even get an email from Buffer when my queue is running low – a great reminder that I have room to add content, if I wish.

2. Multiple Posting Options. Buffer offers a handful of different ways to load content. You can use a Chrome plugin, a bookmarklet, integrate it into Google Reader’s ‘Send to’ option, or use email or the Android app. It’s genius, and it makes loading my Buffer completely easy no matter where I’m consuming content.

There are a few limits to Buffer, though. For starters, the free version only lets you load up 10 items at a time, and you can only have 1 Twitter and 1 Facebook account connected. If you want more of any of those, you’ll need to pony up $10/month for the ‘Pro’ service. The other downside is that Buffer auto-populates itself with the meta data of the page you’re looking at. Most of the time, this is NOT optimized for sharing via social networks, so I find myself having to tweak the post before I submit it to Buffer, which is somewhat annoying. It would be great if Buffer could automatically reformat its content to include just the headline of the post and the link, at least.

There are TONS of tools to help you be more productive and efficient with social media, and quite honestly, many of them are good, but many of them also require quite a bit of upkeep. Buffer solves this one problem for me, and it solves it really well. I would highly recommend Buffer if you’re a prolific sharer and want an easy way to spread that out a little bit.

Disclosure: I really honestly love Buffer. The links above are referral links – if you sign up through these links, I’ll get an extra post (and you start with an extra post, too!). Honestly, the free 10 posts are good enough for me.

Content Creation, Done Well

// August 29th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // blogging

I have many different hats that I wear in my current position as the Social Media Community Manager at RadioShack, but the biggest one is probably that of content creator. I’m responsible for the content that gets published via our social channels, including The Shack Blog, as well as our Twitter and Facebook accounts. With so many other brands/sites dominating the tech landscape, it’s vital that the content I create is unique and fresh, which is much more difficult than you would think.

That’s probably why this post from AndroidAndMe really stood out to me. It’s called ‘TouchPad mod: a wall-mounted Twitter stream. Come join us!. The HP TouchPad is a webOS-based tablet that suffered an unfortunately short life-span. HP essentially EOL’d it after a mere 6 weeks on the market. The price plummeted, and enterprising individuals began buying them as quickly as they could. There are a few projects to erase the webOS platform from the device, and instead get it to run Google’s Android platform.

None of that is really pertinent to this post, though. The impressive thing is that AndroidAndMe.com were able to take something that’s quite buzzworthy lately (the HP TouchPad) that has no connection to their core audience (it doesn’t run Android) and create a useful, entertaining post from it. I read the whole thing, and was really interested in how they accomplished this.

Even better, they integrated social media directly into the post. If you read the whole post, you’ll notice that there is a Tweet box in the middle with a pre-populated message allowing you to participate in the whole project (while tweeting all your friends about AndroidAndMe’s Twitter account, conveniently). It’s just plain brilliant.

They also integrated Ustream.tv to live-stream the whole thing, so you can participate on-the-fly and in the moment.

And all this around a discontinued product that’s not even directly related to their core readership. Brilliant. As you create content, the bar has been raised to take virtually any topic and make it interesting to your readership while also giving them plenty of ways to engage with and share your content with their friends.

Why Is Netflix So Anti-Social?

// June 21st, 2011 // 7 Comments » // annoying, Social Networks

I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since September of 2008 – that’s nearly 3 years – and I’m a heavy user of the service. I actually use the streaming feature more, but I do the DVDs occasionally, as well (I’m horrible at remembering to return them). Thus far, I’ve rated over 200 movies, and I’ve spent quite a while telling the service my preferences, using the handy (if not a bit limiting) ‘Never, Sometimes, Often’ rating scoring system. I really thoroughly enjoy testing Netflix’s ability to recommend movies that I’ll really enjoy, so I use that feature the most.

Unfortunately, there’s one thing that Netflix absolutely sucks at – being social. By that I mean that the service makes no attempt whatsoever to allow me to connect to my friends. There is some rudimentary Facebook support, but it’s only used (as best I could tell) to share my ratings. It’s not enough, and it limits the fun of the service, especially in bringing the community feeling back to movies.

How Could Netflix Be More Social?

For starters, Netflix could offer me the ability to find friends of mine who are also using Netflix. Many other online services make it easy for me to connect my Google, Twitter, or Facebook accounts to see if I’ve already connected with someone there, and then let me add that person as a contact on the service. This is a great feature that I often use to quickly build a contact list on a new service.

There are a handful of reasons I might want to connect with others on a movie service such as Netflix. For starters, I’d like to see what movies my friends are watching, as well as what rating they gave the movie. Clearly if 5 of my friends watched a movie and all rated it 2 stars, I’d rather avoid that film, even if it would otherwise match my preferences or viewing habits. Likewise, if several of my friends gave a movie a 5 star rating, but the movie didn’t really match my preferences or viewing habits, I might like to check it out, since so many of my friends liked it.

With an established buddy list in Netflix, I could also recommend movies to my friends individually – services like GetGlue and GoMiso already allow me to ‘check-in’ to various media – such as a movie – and a contact list in Netflix could offer me a similar experience. With Netflix’s Stream Instantly service, I could be offered the chance to share my movie selection to Facebook/Twitter/etc. either at the beginning of the movie or at the end with just a click of the remote.

As it stands, Netflix is a complete island. The movies that it recommends are solely based on me and my past history. While this often results in some good recommendations, it’s entirely limited.

Welcoming Microsoft Into Your Livingroom

// June 13th, 2011 // No Comments » // technology

I bought an Xbox 360 with Kinect a few months ago, and have done my best to fully embrace the idea and technology. The Kinect is definitely the future of how we interact with our in-home entertainment – gestures, voice command, facial recognition, it’s all there. Music and video content is readily available, too, with Netflix, Hulu Plus, Zune, and Last.FM (I don’t have a Zune account yet, to be honest). In fact, we were able to disconnect our TV service, saving nearly $70/month. The only time thus far that we’ve noticed is when there were bad storms around and we didn’t have reliable news – a problem that could be fixed with a $30-40 antenna from RadioShack.

At E3 last week, Microsoft revealed quite a bit of information about the future of Kinect – TV service is coming soon, as are additional video content providers. Microsoft also introduced a new feature, called Kinect Fun Labs. It’s an experimental area where you can simply play around with the Kinect sensor through a number of different random minigames. For one of these, you can create a bobblehead of yourself, adding some fun costumes, stances, and voice recordings. Once you’re through creating, the game gives you the option of uploading your creation to KinectShare.com, which I thought was rather interesting, so of course, I opted in.

KinectShare.com is themed similar to the Kinect part of Xbox, and seems to be a web-based storage area for your creations, as well as your photos/videos from other Kinect games, such as Kinect Adventures or Kinect Sports. Annoyingly (albeit unsurprisingly) the site is built on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which means I wasn’t able to use it from the iPad (yes, I have an iPad, more on that in a different post).

The first thing I wanted to do was share my bobblehead creation with my friends on Facebook and Twitter (because you know, I’m a social guy). Sadly, the only sharing button I saw was for Facebook, and it was a bit clunky to share. First, you have to use the KinectShare app – no use of the bookmarklet here. Obviously, I can really easily let the app make the post and then go through and remove the app from my approvals list (which I often do), but most consumers aren’t going to go through that hassle. Once it did post, you can see below that it wasn’t even optimized to really give good details:

I wanted to share my bobblehead with my friends because I’m still convinced that many more of my Facebook/Twitter friends have Xboxes, but somehow, I can’t seem to find a way to confirm that. I’ve posted my Xbox Live username several times on my stream and only gotten a few requests as a result, so my friends list is rather small, and therein lies my biggest problem with the Xbox thus far. I’ve owned it for months and have only played online twice, and only one of those times was with someone I actually knew (the other was a random online matchup).

I have a few friends, but to be honest, half of them I’m not sure precisely *who* they are. There doesn’t seem to be a way to find out someone’s *real* name through Xbox Live, so you have to either have them tell you their Xbox Live name (through some means other than Xbox Live), or you have to guess. My name is ‘rcadden‘, so I’m pretty easy to find, but I’ve noticed most people have completely random usernames that have nothing to do with the rest of their online presence.

If Microsoft is really going to take over the entertainment duties for my household, they’re going to have to do better than that. I have an HTC HD7, which is powered by Windows Phone, so why can’t I let the phone scan my contacts to see if there are any matches? Why can’t I tweet or update my Facebook status automatically when I unlock achievements? If I have a game that one of my Xbox friends starts playing, there should be an option to let me know that, either via email, SMS, or an in-game alert, so that I can decide if I want to invite him/her to play.

The Xbox with Kinect is easily one of the most fascinating, entertaining technology purchases I’ve made in a long while, but I’m disappointed to see that it’s so disjointed still. I can’t wait until Microsoft takes full advantage of the opportunity they’ve created and makes the experience more social and connected.

(Of course, as I request these social options, I should also make it clear that I also need granular access to toggle these settings. Let me be in control and you’ll find that I’m much more likely to share.)

Introducing Mobile Geeks of Fort Worth

// March 11th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Mobile, Mobile Geeks of Fort Worth

Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting up with my friend Stefan Constantinescu of IntoMobile at a Starbucks to just catch up and chat about mobile geekery. It was a great visit, rare since he lives in Finland (he was back in Texas just for a short visit) and I realized how much I missed the opportunity to have mobile-oriented conversations with like-minded folks who don’t feel shame in geeking out over such things.

I remembered my best friend I’ve never met, James Whatley, puts on a thing called Mobile Geeks of London that’s basically the same type meetup, and I pinged him about expanding into the Texan region, which he thought was an excellent idea. A bit of offline planning, and here we are, with the official announcement of Mobile Geeks of Fort Worth.

If you’re not familiar with it, you can check out the Mobile Geeks of London Facebook group, but basically, for the uninitiated among you, the MGoL does exactly what it says on the tin. Whether you work in the industry or not, if you like to get geeky when it comes to all things mobile then MGoL is the place for you. It’s an informal meetup – there’s no corporate sponsorship, sales pitches, or anything like that. It’s just a group of mobile-focused people getting together to geek out.

I haven’t quite sorted out when the first Mobile Geeks of Fort Worth will be – I’ll have more on that soon. However, if you want to keep up with the group and be the first to know when the first event is going to be (or help me plan the first meetup), you can join the Mobile Geeks of Fort Worth Facebook group here: http://bit.ly/mgofw. Also, if you’re in the Vancouver area, Tom Hall will also be launching MGoV (Mobile Geeks of Vancouver), so stay tuned to Tom’s twitter for that.

BirdBet Keeps Track Of Your Friends’ Lame Bets

// May 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // cool, Social Networks, technology

If you’re a guy (and possibly if you’re a girl), then there’s no denying that you’ve said the words, ‘I’ll bet you $XX…’ to your friends. The XX can be any number, typically lower than 10, whereas the sentence can be completed with any number of options. It could be the result of a sports game, whether or not one party is able to do something specific (finish that beer in 2 minutes, hit a barrel with a rock, etc.). The important thing to know about this phenomenon is that 1. it’s a small, informal bet on a concrete situation and 2. it’s tough to enforce.

BirdBet has just stepped in to reinforce the first problem, and help solve the second. BirdBet combines Twitter with Tipjoy to facilitate these small, yet serious bets among friends more easily. The system is simple. You login with your Twitter account (you don’t have to give BirdBet your login details – they do it all proper), and then send a tweet to your friend, dictating how much you want to bet, followed by what it is that you’re betting on.

A tweet is sent out through your account, calling out your soon-to-be-less-rich friend, so that they’re aware. There’s also a link included, so that each party can track the bet, including when it was made, who extended it, how much, and other extremely important details. Seeing as how several of my friends have….heated discussions…over long-past bets quite frequently, I can easily see how BirdBet is a good idea for them. Unfortunately, none of them are on Twitter, but that’s beside the point.

Micropayment services like Tipjoy are sure to become more and more popular and commonplace, and I’m excited to see new ways to use them, such as BirdBet. It’s a classic case of technology enriching and enabling our real lives, and I absolutely love it. I think it will be wildly popular, don’t you? Wanna bet on it?

What’s In A Name?

// April 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // communication, Social Networks

At one of the panels I attended at SXSWi this year, there was an actual discussion on whether or not we should use the term ‘blog’ to describe, well, sites like this one. Kid you not, there was time spent on this. Today, I was linked to this post, discussing how we shouldn’t be using the term ‘multimedia’ anymore. I’ve also witnessed a number of conversations on Twitter, discussing how we shouldn’t call ourselves ‘social media experts’ or whatever other term was popular last year.

The problem I have with all of this stems from William Shakespeare, who of course had no idea what any of this was. ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.‘ In other words, it doesn’t really matter what we call stuff, as it has no real bearing on the various characteristics of that thing.

While chatting with my friend Antoine of MobileMinistryMagazine about this earlier, he made the observation that ‘naming = control = fear+understanding’, to which I agreed. The idea of renaming things constantly is part of what sets the ‘elite’ out. By constantly changing the name of things, we create a barrier of entry, making others uncomfortable and unsure of the correct terminology.

This is especially highlighted with ‘social’ media, which by its definition is focused on connecting people with other people. If we consistently alienate people by making them unsure of how to interact in the community, then we are being decidedly anti-social. I believe the main desire to change these names has noble intentions – to better describe a given tool, strategy, or social object. This of course makes total sense. However, it’s not something to be taken lightly, specifically when the goal of said tools, strategies, or social objects is to build, maintain, and/or improve relationships with others.

Introducing Rejaw, Another Micro-blogging Service

// August 15th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // blogging, cool, Social Networks

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Ricky, dude, I’m already on Twitter/FriendFeed/Jaiku/whateverelse, why on *earth* would I want another one?” To be honest, it’s a great question. I’ve recently discovered Rejaw, and despite some initial skepticism (and a few notably lacking features), I’m really rather impressed overall. Here’s why…

First up, what is Rejaw? From their site: “Rejaw is a new way to communicate in real-time with friends, family, and co-workers. You can shout messages to your followers, or whisper to your friends. Monologue or dialogue, micro-blog or status update, soliloquy or dialectic – how you use Rejaw is up to you.”

So basically it’s a microblogging service without the feeds. It also has chat built-in, so that when you’re viewing a thread, if someone adds to it, that’s updated in real-time. This works *really* well, and is one of my favorite features already. There’s also a really great feature that automatically embeds any photo/video/music that you link to. Very slick.

Rejaw is obviously still pretty young, and as such, unfortunately, there’s only the website and an official Mac client. There is also a Firefox plugin, which should allow Linux and Windows users to get in on the fun, but it really only alerts you to new shouts/whispers, and doesn’t offer any additional functionality. Development is in place for a mobile-friendly version, as well, though not sure if that’s to be a client or simply mobile-friendly website.

You can check out more coverage at ReadWriteWeb and ArsTechnica, too.

Obviously I’m pretty firmly embedded in Jaiku, and have a great community built there, but it’s no secret that development seems to be at a complete standstill since the Google buy-out. If things keep moving along at Rejaw, you just may find me over there more.