Web of Flow

On Sunday, Loïc Le Meur wrote on the centralization provided by services mybloglog, friendfeed, and socialthing. However, Le Meur would prefer it if the centralization occurred on his blog, rather than with a third party service.

Monday, Stowe Boyd responded to Le Meur’s lamentation to say, “conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others.” Boyd points out that Twitter and other similar applications are built upon “the web of flow,” in which information comes to people through their relationships, instead of through a series of clicks, scrolls and urls. Boyd suggests that this is an important new way to think about social media.

3-D Social Networking

An article in the New York Times Technology section reports on Vivaty’s concept for three-dimensional online social networking. Where Facebook and MySpace have static profiles that only allow users to post messages back and forth, Vivaty belongs to a ” new wave of Silicon Valley companies [that] is bringing live socializing back into a medium that has…grown overly asynchronous.” The venture is backed by Kleiner Perkins and will begin a private test period on Facebook this week.

Outlook + Gmail through MailShadow

Last week, Cemaphore Systems announced a new product that synchronizes e-mail, calendar and address books between Outlook and Gmail. MailShadow is intended as a backup to Outlook, but provides an interesting opportunity for IT in switching out a Microsoft Exchange back-end for Google, while retaining the Outlook interface. MailShadow also allows users to access their Gmail mail, calendar and contacts through Outlook. Though Gmail also allows Outlook users to read Gmail through Outlook, and provides a calendar synchronization, MailShadow is the first product that “automatically brings together synchronization for mail, calendars and address books between the two systems.”

Montparnas’ News Round-Up posts on Tuesdays.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under All User Experience Design, Interaction Design, News.