by alec on April 24, 2007
Contrary to the bloggerati's chatter from a few weeks ago, Twitter's biggest competitor is not Jaiku. Rather, it's Facebook. With Facebook's new ability to update via SMS, Facebook is Twitter plus:
- aggregated feeds from outside sources
- significant personal / professional profile information available from members
- large networks of friends to draw from
- events, and groups to participate in
- conversation threads
- fine-grained privacy control
- a large audience already acquired
… and the list goes on. As others have noticed, it's a killer combination.
Yes, it's true that Facebook can't deliver updates to my IM client the way that Twitter can (or at least, I haven't found that feature yet), but I am personally about to turn that feature on Twitter off. While it's interesting to get a real time stream of tweets from my friend, it's also a disturbance during meetings, and actually interferes with getting real work done on the mobile phone.
by alec on April 24, 2007
Entrepreneur Brian McConnell and I have been trading mail for the last couple of months about his latest project — the WorldWide Lexicon. It’s a social network for translating web pages. Prettty simple idea, but perhaps also very compelling.
The way it works is as follows:
- You register your site with WWL (Saunderslog is already done)
- You encourage your readers to help translate your site into whatever languages they speak; direct them to demo.worldwidelexicon.org. (direct friendly URLs such as saunders.worldwidelexicon.org are coming this week)
- Bilingual readers contribute and edit translations; monolingual readers can view translations in any language that someone has posted translations for (when you go to demo.worldwidelexicon.org you’ll see a grid of two letter language codes beneath each site, all you need to do is click on the code for the language you speak and read the translations or add your own
- Translations are published on WWL as HTML, and also output as RSS loopback feeds, so you can loop them right back into your blog. Brian plans to be doing a lot to make republishing easy for publishers and for readers.
Many large sites are obviously candidates for full translations, and even selected elements of smaller sites make sense.
