niiiiice

Ok, so it's been a few days since the last post, and I've been doing my best to infiltrate the online community to make my presence known. I don't know that friendfeed or socialthing seem to really help out the cause as much as I expected, but I'm still rolling along.

I love that socialthing automatically loads in your friends from other accounts and allows you to respond directly, rather than creating a new tier of communication, but I hate that as of right now it only supports 3 services I actually use. friendfeed on the other hand offers an amazing amount of accounts, but doesn't load anyone in automatically, so I'm looking at a whole night of loading my friends in. Not excited about that. I suppose the largest difference is that friendfeed offers you a chance to meet new people with similar interests, which is really what I was looking for in the first place, but it offers no GOOD way of digging through them...at least not that I've seen.

Anyway, I'm still enjoying me.dium, although I haven't really been able to convince my close friends of it's greatness just yet. However, I did watch the new video that me.dium put out, and noticed that 1) they seem to have a much more awesome facebook interface coming and 2) towards the end, you can see my blog's name on the friends map! check the video at about 2:06 and you'll see that someone was on my blog when the video was made! Thanks me.dium!

edit:
forgot i was going to embed the video...my bad.

One of the Many Uses for Me.dium from Peter Nocchiero on Vimeo.

the internet dilemma aka the conclusion of my nerderiffic trifecta

I think it was 1994 or 1995 when I really started getting addicted to the internet. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to have a family that embraced the concept of computers, although it seemed like I was the only one who really ever took the time to figure out how to use them, so at age 11 I convinced my mom that AOL was worth trying...after all, it had a free trial, might as well right?

Now, as I sit here at age 25, the "free trial" concept is not nearly as enticing, and the internet as I've known it is a completely different place. Those early days were filled with hours of time in pointless chat rooms, plenty of online video games, and of course a fascination with discovering new information. These days, I realize I have more abandoned profiles than ex-girlfriends, I'm a member of a billion different sites that each promise some unique feature that I can't live without, and most importantly, I feel like I have to work to find new things that interest me. If you're anything like me, by the time you finish visiting each of your different sites you get this suspicion inside you that maybe, just maybe something new has happened on one of them so you start the process again. Before you know it, you've spent a few hours to only discover a couple of interesting tidbits.

Hold on, I should probably grab the paper bag and start taking some deep breaths. If you don't realize by now, I'm having a mid-life social identity crisis.

It started with AOL, for me. I really bonded with my buddy list throughout my youth, and I used the "find a buddy" feature all the time to just find new people to talk to. After years of AOL use, I started seeing sites pop up that were designed to easily introduce you to new people. Whether it was rating the attractiveness of someone or shamelessly trying to get yourself laid, these sites were instantly addictive for me. I had a livejournal, a deadjournal, a blurty, I think even had one from some place with the word diary in the title, despite my hesitation to embrace the term "diary" as a guy.

In early 2004, myspace changed my life. For better or worse, it changed it in a big way. The term social networking developed, and I loved it. I went through the obsession stage, the self-obsession stage, the almost-delete-it-because-it's-ruining-my-life stage...I've seen it all.

I believe it was 2006 when facebook opened itself to my school. At first it didn't interest me nearly as much as myspace. I'm pretty sure the first couple of years I had a facebook, it was used mainly to find cute girls in my classes or in my own dorm. However, time (and intelligent development) has brought me now to a place where facebook is my go-to website, which presents an interesting situation for me.

Myspace for me was always for fun, whereas most of my facebook use was linking up with high school friends, classmates, etc. Myspace let me have visual control of my profile, so I've always felt that my myspace page showed my personality better than the stiff structure of a facebook profile, but now that I've seemingly "outgrown" myspace, I feel as though I'm in limbo. I really don't want to abandon either, but instead find a good way to streamline my online identity.

To try and accomplish this goal, I'll be trying a few new things over the next couple of weeks. I've already mentioned me.dium, and let me say as a follow up to that post, one of the best things about me.dium seems to be the people behind it. The morning after posting my review I was contacted by three different employees who were all very friendly. As a bit of a teaser, I have been assured that some new facebook related features are coming soon, and I can't wait to see what all that includes! Anyway, aside from me.dium, I am also trying Socialthing! and friendfeed. That is, in addition to making a true effort to utilize the networking features of sites I've been a member of for quite sometime.

If this doesn't work, I'll have to buy a red convertible and find some eye candy to take with me to all the social events I attend when I'm not busy writing long nerdy blog posts.

and thus, the separation from society deepens...

The good people over at me.dium are doing something that I am now absolutely fascinated with, and that is:

1.fluidly incorporating the awesomeness of social networking into your internet browser, rather than tying you down to a specific site.

2.furthering the concept of social networking as we know it by showing us new ways of pooling information between our friends.

and

3.giving me even less of a reason to go and "hit the bars"...and here's how.

I discovered me.dium tonight when I upgraded to the Firefox 3 RC 1 and began to look for which add-ons would still be functional. I had never heard of this specific service, but I had read recently that the concept of browser based social networking would be coming soon. As excited as I was...I really had no idea what it meant. Once I installed it and saw what it is capable of doing, I couldn't help but run over here to blab all about it.

The basic idea is that me.dium is an online social networking service, just like myspace or facebook, except this one runs in a fairly compact sidebar in your browser window. Rather than focusing on sharing personal media, me.dium plots you as a user on a figurative map of the internet. As your friends join up you will see them in an instant message style buddy list, as well as on your internet map. At this point people can see where you are at and vice versa. Don't worry...I know what you're thinking...maybe sometimes you don't WANT everyone to know what you're up to, and the folks at me.dium want you to know that's ok. A simple click can make you invisible or even log you out for those private internet browsing moments...you know...like...ordering an engagement ring? Yeah, we'll go with that.

Just those elements alone are incredible to me, but I haven't even revealed the ace in the hole. me.dium integrates your facebook friends list into that buddy list section, and links are provided for each one that allow you to directly message, suggest a link, or visit any of your friends. Your friends are not required to be a part of me.dium for you to be able to send them anything either, which makes this idea a slam dunk. Your facebook profile still contains pictures, videos, biographies with atrocious grammar and spelling, your wall isn't demolished...it's a beautiful thing. You will have to convince your friends to give the service a shot if you want to see where they're at on the internet and take advantage of me.dium's entire potential, but I think the popularity of social networking is strong enough to make plenty of people curious about this new concept.

So let me give you a brief rundown of pros and cons as I see them.

Pros - For one, the concept of sharing where you are at on the internet with your friends in real time just seems like a winner to me. The facebook integration is great, and the ability to quickly search through your facebook friends is wonderful.

Cons - I have a feeling most of my "cons" are things that will redeem themselves in the near future, as this tool is nowhere near completion, but I could stand a few changes. For one, the facebook buddy list is a bit big for my taste as there seems to be some wasted space if someone doesn't have a status set. The sidebar comes with 6 skins to choose from, and while they are decent, I would love to see customization as an option here. Oh, and one thing they try to sell as a feature is a "find similar pages" button which as of right now doesn't seem to offer the strongest suggestions. I don't know if this is compiled through the gathering of browsing history among users or what, but obviously the database needs to grow a bit.

Overall, I think this concept has some really awesome potential...imagine meeting a new friend because you were both on wikipedia at the same time, rather than bumping into someone new at the grocery store. As silly as it might sound, it's a true possibility.

So the real question is, how many nerds will find love on thottbot thanks to this? Only time will tell....only time will tell.

back to the nerdery.

So I've been doing some music reviews lately, (and there's plenty more to come) but my geeky heart went crazy today when I saw the following video. For over a year I have been excited about upcoming advances in multi-touch based computer environments. It's been awesome to watch Jeff Han's examples of what the future of multi-touch could be, and then today Digg gives me a look at the next step. It is apparent now that multi-touch concepts WILL be the future of computing, as now people are not only designing the basic workspace, we are now seeing fully functional applications that use multi-touch interaction to make massive amounts of information easily accessible. This is truly amazing...I cannot wait.