All the social services (Facebook, Twitter, etc) client apps I’ve seen (Gwibber on the desktop, Mauku on Maemo) fail in the same way, which is:
- They just show the latest “feed” of messages from the service, not allowing users to either keep some message for a while, or remove messages they are not interested in.
- They don’t integrate well with all the services (having a ‘@friend ….’ message in your Facebook profile doesn’t look well at all, which is what is done when you ‘reply’ to a message in Twitter) or just don’t integrate at all.
- Some of them, like the Facebook widget on Maemo, just display your home page in Facebook when you click on one item, instead of sending you to the entry for that message you’re clicking on!
The only “thing” that does it correctly, from what I’ve seen so far, is yoono, a Firefox extension, which shows all the messages from all the services you configure it with, allowing you to remove messages you’re not interested in or have already read, or keeping messages for future reference. Also, it gets you to the right page at Facebook when you click on one item, and also allows you to comment directly to the messages right from yoono itself.
It’s true though that it would be great to have it not tied to Firefox, as an independent application, so /me dreams about gwibber/mauku implementing something like yoono.
I do not think “social services” means what you think it does. 🙂
http://www.google.com/search?q=social+services
Well, Central Services is supposed to allow doing things the right way very easily. One thing I especially don’t like is the lack of notifications, and integration of other parts of the system into applications.
Most of the apps just show you the “feed” which isn’t really all that interesting in terms of social networking. I don’t really care that 500 people are getting harvests in FarmVille. I do care when someone replies to a thread on a discussion board that I am participating in. Another problem is that microblog type things have become more of an ad-hoc API for delivering notifications, than a good way of communicating in tiny messages. For example, there is a local traffic alert feed on Twitter, that lets people know of bridge openings, construction, and delays on the local highways. I want those notifications, but Twitter probably isn’t the best way for me to see them.
Dan: well, that’s what I hear people calling it, so yeah, might not be what I think it is 🙂 But I guess you understood, it’s app for ‘social networks’ (better this one, right?)
The title confused me for a tenth of a second, but yeah, I understood. I think “social network[ing] services” is the standard idiom. (And wikipedia agrees!)
Thanks Rodrigo for this appreciation of Yoono!
Rodney, with Yoono, you get notifications (at 0:12)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34G3R0TjDRw
And if you don’t want to see updates about Farmville, you can do it too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2yxRxsKL9E
Right, Dan, you convinced me to change the title 😀
Rodrigo – Yoono is also available as a standalone desktop app for windows and mac. You can get the desktop version at http://www.yoono.com. Check it out and see if it meets your needs.
Reivax, I understood that. But you must understand that Yoono is not an application. It’s yet another thing to make Firefox waste resources on my machine for no good reason (which it is already quite good at doing). What we want is to NOT use the web to do everything. If I wanted to run all my applications in a VM, I’d be running VMWare with Windows XP.
And yes, I know you can ignore applications on Facebook. I’ve done that already. I was making a point, not a direct complaint about Facebook.
Todd, I don’t use Windows nor Mac, so why there isn’t a Linux desktop version?
Rodrigo – fair enough. No reason we don’t have a Linux version except for time and resource constraints here at Yoono at the moment. Plan is to have one eventually.
Running a web page with Gears or Prism or whatever does not an integrated application make. I don’t want a special application to view social networking stuff. I want events in my calendar, friends in my contacts list, messages in my messaging app, and similar.
That’s an unique post, I really think that social networkingnetworking type of sites are going to be taking a huge leap in 2010. I really think that we are only in the introduction stages of social networking and we can see that with applications like 4Square, it’s only a matter of time until all things are working together at an even better level. I’m can’t wait and am excited for this year, it’s gonna be a big year in social networking. What are your thoughts?
I am totally addicted to Farmville at the moment I just can’t stop playing it! I wonder what will be the predecessor to it though? Has anyone began to play Fishville yet? Good post though thanks.