Making the web more social is really exciting to me, and something that I’ve wanted for many years, but having one company control all our identities?  I think that is a scary thought, and an unrealistic one.

To me, “one social graph to rule them all” is a silly concept.  There are lots of things I do socially online that I don’t necessarily want to inform my Facebook friend’s about (mainly because they don’t care, not that I am hiding something).  At one time I had my Twitter feed publishing to Facebook, but then I found out a lot of my friend’s muted my status!  I need a professional graph, a hobby graph, maybe even a “good friends” graph.

Could Facebook create options for creating your own special graphs?  I suppose so, but if they were, why haven’t they already?  And even if they did, I’d be worried of my world’s accidentally colliding (A George, divided against itself, cannot stand).

Another thing I have noticed: no one is using the Likes externally.  I know it’s early yet and I am just one account, but I have about 150 Facebook friends and… I haven’t seen 1 Like.  I’ve been watching closely and… not a one.  NHL.com was one of the early adopters of Facebook Likes.  How many people have Liked Sydney Crosby? 1,682 people.  That’s it?  Maybe people just haven’t gotten used into it yet, but until they do let’s stop the hysteria.

I was going to include my opinions on the potential of iGoogle being a competitor, but I’ll save that for another post.

EDIT: I saw my first “Like” on an external site, The Globe and Mail.  I liked the experience, but made me realize how polarizing it could be.  This particular “Like” was about an anti-abortion stance the Canadian government is right now fighting.  Could that start an unwanted argument back in Facebook world?  Also, “Like” is not a good word to use, I like CNN’s use of “share” much better.  I might not “Like” something, but want to share it.  Hopefully people will understand the use of “Like” might not actually be liked.

photo credit: elecnix

I recently read Matt Alder’s great post “The Job Cloud – Why Twitter is the future of Job Boards“, and had a few thoughts.  While it was very interesting to read that he was getting a lot of quality resumes by posting jobs on Twitter, should we take this as an early sign that Twitter jobs is the future?

Twitter is great for some things, but for searching for jobs?  I’m skeptical.  In fact, I think this is a really backward idea.

The proposed advantage, of course, is that companies can easily post their jobs online for free without paying job boards.  Great idea, I’ve long said paying expensive fees for postings jobs is archaic, but why Twitter?  Companies have had the opportunity to do this for years using simple RSS.   We also have “free” job search engines that can index these sites, like indeed.com and simplyhired.com.  So how does Twitter job search help us?

Another thing raises a large flag for me: how do you stop the spam?  If Twitter (and the internet in general) has taught us anything, spam will be a big issue.  It is easy to simply limit the accounts searched to those of companies, but what about the large percentage of companies which use external agencies?  Ok, let’s say we allow those agencies to be apart of the search.  Who are the gatekeepers here?  The only reason we have job boards today is because it already solved the spam issue, filtering the quality job postings from the spam.  How is this model different?

I have a big problem with ideas which see social networking sites and being a free ticket to success.  It takes a lot of time, and therefor money, to be successful using social media, and I don’t see Twitter job postings as being any exception.

As an early adapter, you might just have some quality candidates find your way, but as the use increases, so will the garbage.  Hopefully I’m proved wrong, maybe I’ve been reading too much Andrew Keen, but I’m just not sold on the idea.

photo credit: Benjamin Haines

People were pretty divided on whether or not Buzz should have been put into Gmail.  I really liked that I was able to check both email and Buzz on the same page.  I am now using Google reader a lot more because of the enhanced sharing functionalities.

I am now, however, experiencing serious multiple-update-checking-itis.  I have to check twitter, and Buzz, and Email, and Reader, and Facebook… it’s tiring me out.  I can’t keep up.  I don’t have the time.

So here is my plea: Google, give me a single stream.  Please Google, put Gmail, Buzz, and Reader all into a single stream.  Make it look exactly how gmail is right now, but add little icons so I can see from what service it came from.  I know it might be a lot of updates, but it’s ok, I can scroll.

Do not stop there Google.  I want to know when my shared documents were updated.  I’d also really like to know that’s it’s my friend’s birthday, or that I have a meeting in an hour.   My brother just added Flickr photos of my nephew.. give me the heads-up (pretty please).

Make an open protocol for it.  Let me add services.  Make it easy for me to share anything that comes into my stream.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Why is this? I think people are a. afraid of malicious comments, b. don’t think the value is worth the resources to monitor, or c. maybe haven’t thought of it.

I will lay out some advantages I see enabling comments:

1. Increased participation - I know when I was job searching I always had questions about the position I was reading about.  I’d phone for some, but generally I wouldn’t bother and move on.  If I could comment I might consider the position if some things are clarified.
2. Better job descriptions – I am just discussing comments, but really this is about crowdsourcing the quality of the job posting.  Getting feedback would make better description, and would generate more relevant applications.
3. Gain knowledge for employer – I was just reading an article from Harvard Business School who discusses similar thoughts on improving job postings.  They’ve gone one step further tho, and suggested crowdsourcing could better define what skills are needed for the role.  Sometimes people hiring don’t entirely know the skills involved with getting the job done: ask the experts!

My crusade is for better job seeking on the internet, and I think this is the kind of mentality shift the industry needs.

In a nutshell, Demand Media manages to churn out 4,000 content articles a day using algorithms, in combination with human labour.  The process of creating the articles is tactfully broken into several small jobs, each handled by various experts.   Creating a single article will touch around 9 or more hands before being finally approved.  (This process is also being repeated on informational videos as well.)

ReadWriteWeb just published an article questioning the quality of the content being published by Demands ‘assembly line’ styled publishing (in which they ironically had a few errors which seriously questioned the article’s quality, hah!).  I like ReadWriteWeb, but this article felt shallow, and really didn’t add anything to the conversation.  (ASIDE: To my surprise a few of Demand’s authors wrote in the comments vigorously defending Demand’s quality; I, maybe ignorantly, assumed a sweatshop styled labour was been wrongly taken advantage of!   But maybe not…)

In any case, were they right, and should we be wary of the cheap content, or should we expect great things like the Model-T?  Call me an optimist, but I think this is a good thing, and I want to see it making more than informational content.

Some advantages I’d like to point out:

• content being produced may never have been created because it was too expensive
• employees are global, and may reduce barriers for internalization
• skilled labour can be utilized (not just data entry jobs!)
• dramatically increasing scale could radically change business models

I cannot for an instant believe that Demand’s process is a one time fluke, and only applies to content creation.  No… no, I think every company should take a step back and take a look at this.  Can any part of my business processes be managed in this way? In my opinion many will.  Not all successfully, not all to our benefit, but I see this kind distributed labouring taking off in the not so near future.

If you haven’t seen the webcast (I highly suggest you do) let me sum up: Google wave is a new content model that allows fluid as-you-type conversation with the ability to historically view any changes in a “wave”.    It also lets you treat a wave as an object, so you can share the wave anywhere on the web.  It is also completely opensource so you can count on many developer modules.

Maybe I am falling into a “hype trap” here, but its my job to anticipate the web evolution, and I need to keep on my toes.  Other posts I’ve read talk about the Wave replacing email, but I think it goes much deeper than that.  What would a seamless, real-time, portable, extensible, content distribution model look like on the web?

I am forced to consider news and how its distributed, but I’m sure there are less obvious ways of using this service.  Have you ever gone to cnn.com and got the feeling you’re missing something?  What is happening right now?  Maybe its a newly acquired ADHD symptom (thanks Twitter!), but everything feels tired.  Ok say you have patients and that doesn’t matter to you (I think it does), have you ever read a story that may have happened an hour ago and felt like you’ve missed out?

We are so used to a newspaper giving us our printed content we expect an article on the web to reflect this, but we are missing out.  Why can’t we see a reporter type out a story as it happens?  Or why can’t additional images and video be added while we read?  As the story unfolds content is updated, and just like any other kind of content its completely mashable with other web services.  Ticker-stock added immediately, profiles of people, statistics for towns, Amazon book titles for authors, all can be automatically (with some assistance) to everything you type.

Its combining the best part of live TV jounalism with the best elements of the web.  We are no longer recording, we are telling a story.  And because a wave is so portible, these stories could be happening anywhere on the web (content sites take note: curation curation curation).

This might all seem a little chaotic, but I’m know its manageable.   Maybe its as easy and enabling/disabling live waves.

Now I will spend the next 2 days trying to figure out how this can be used with Government 2.0.  Anyone have any ideas on how we can use Google Wave?