Bwana.org » Web 2.0

Why Are You Still Following Me?

Bwana — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:15:33 +0000

It boggles the mind.

I use social networks to share what I like. Sometimes people like what they see or hear and they decide to keep up with me. I post news links, blog posts, video posts, podcast posts, general thoughts, rambles, LOL cats, tech deals, and even the newest shiny social network tool. By doing all this, people follow me. They follow me on Twitter, they follow me on FriendFeed, they follow my blogs, and they follow my shows.

Periodically, I’ll increase my output on a topic I like such as sports, video games, and that newest shiny social network tool. This is what I get in return:

“Bwana, why are you posting so much?”
“Bwana, do you realize, you’ve posted 6 links in the last hour?”
“Bwana, are you going to go on and on about the nfl/nba/ncaa again?”
“Bwana, please stop tweeting so much”
“Bwana, would you stop talking about football so much”
“Bwana, please stop flooding my stream”
“Bwana, enough with the ________ links, we get it already!”

If I post something that annoys, bothers, or irks you, then why in the world are you still following me? Why do you put up with it? Think about it. If I were walking down the street with you following me and I decide to fart continuously for 3 hours, wouldn’t you get out of the way? Farts stink man! Move! If you don’t leave, you’re choosing to inhale the wondrous foul fumes of my farts. I say farts because apparently it’s something you don’t want to be around.

There’s the door ——–>

This is my thinking with the uproar about the Spymaster craze on Twitter. The almighty Leo Laporte decided to call me out on This Week In Tech, basically fingering me as “one of those Spymaster spammers”. I replied on the on the TWiT FriendFeed thread “Don’t worry Leo, I toned down my tweet settings quite a bit” But then, I got to thinking: I’m not tweeting that much and even if I was, why won’t he just unfollow me?

Spymaster is a game.
It’s fun.
People like it.

It utilizes the social reach of Twitter to encourage game play amongst friends and strangers. I did a review on EatWillGrow for iPhone which allows you to Tweet your high score, and it’s an effective mechanism to challenge someone. It’s the same principle here. Gamers like to talk trash. Gamers like to share their experiences with friends and strangers. Gamers are not afraid to tell you about a game they love.

I’m a gamer. I game. I play games. I play games with other people. I want to share some spymaster experiences with people on Twitter. If that annoys you, please, by all means, UNFOLLOW ME! Get from behind me! Stop reading what I do! Please! You can choose to unfollow the Bwana Spymaster spammer and be free from the “spam”.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Leo for calling me out in front of his listeners. I respect his opinion on the matter. I actually hope he unfollowed me on Twitter (and hid me on FriendFeed) as a result of my “spam”. If he didn’t, then I got to wonder why he puts up with it.

In case you’re wondering,I’ve posted a total of 11 spymaster tweets over the span of 2 days. Twitter search: “from:Bwana #spymaster”

I know, it’s brutal. I also post my video game activity using Raptr and GamerDNA. Spymaster shouldn’t be a huge change. Don’t blame me because Twitter’s filtering sucks. You got two choices: 1. Put up with it 2. Unfollow.

If you want the short version of this blog post: I don’t care what you think. It does annoy me when you complain [loudly] about what you don’t want to hear. It makes me want to unfollow you so I don’t have to put up with the complaining. Why won’t you just leave?

It’s your opinion for a reason, not mine. I’m not going to change what I do because you don’t like it. Get over it. Get over yourselves and take action. Unfollow, block, do whatever you feel is needed and you won’t hurt my feelings one bit. Yes, I said it.

Now, it’s time to assassinate some of these wanna-be spies.

*** Update: You can opt-out of Spymaster invites if your “friends” are blasting you with them. (Again, why are you following them again?)

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7 Ways to Improve Alert Thingy

Bwana — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:21:24 +0000

The Adobe AIR client, Alert Thingy, for FriendFeed launched. While it shows great potential, and is very young at version 1.0, there are areas that it can definitely improve. I’ve been using it for about an hour now and while I like it, there are some frustrating points which I believe should be addressed.

Here are 7 reasons that I’ve already sent the author:

Finite control of transparency and colors. People are picky about this one. While I like the default color scheme, others might not. The default transparency could use a slider control as well.
Control of how many comments to show in the window. Maybe there’s a way to collapse comments similar to the way FriendFeed does. Just look at Bret Taylor’s post on FriendFeed as an example.
This may go to point 1, but I think we need an option to dress up the service icons a bit. If you introduce a theming system, maybe it could address this.
Please honor FriendFeed’s “hide” settings. I’m seeing things on Alert Thingy that are hidden on Friendfeed.com. This is a high priority one in my opinion.
I don’t know if this one is possible, but it would be nice to bring FriendFeed’s “hide” ability to the client.
The ability to show the “everyone” feed in the client
Search ability for the “everyone” feed

So there you have it. I’m sure these will be addressed in some form or fashion and I look forward to using Alert Thingy more and more.

FriendFeed Replaces Google Reader? Maybe

Bwana — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:34:11 +0000

Google Reader is green with envy.

Well, at least in my house it is. Why? I’ve been using FriendFeed as my primary source of news and information for the past two weeks. Google Reader used to dominate my information consumption until I found FriendFeed. I would scour my list of RSS feeds and “share” the ones that I found to be interesting. Periodically, I would also “star” a story in Google Reader to come back and read later.

I’ve since adapted to FriendFeed and have been using the data filtering combined with “likes” and comments. Since I have an RSS feed for my “likes”, I still can share with friends the interesting stories I find, but now I can also include from many different types of sources and not just blogs. I can share a funny Tweet I saw on Twitter, I can share a hilarious Flickr photo, I can share a great comment I saw from Disqus, and also share Google reader shared items from others! This is all done while maintaining a conversation within FriendFeed.

Now with all this, I did have a void. None of the people I follow on FriendFeed are avid gamers (if they are, they don’t share much information about it) so I needs my gaming news. To fill this void, I simply added “Imaginary friends” to FriendFeed for some of my favorite gaming websites. This video shows the process:

Now that this is done, I can now see my favorite gaming news alongside the thousands of great links that comes across various social networks including Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, del.icio.us, Google Reader shared items, etc. Now that FriendFeed has released an API for the world to use, I don’t know if my return to Google Reader will be anytime soon, if at all.

We shall see.