Wavyx

Yeah I’m “Back to Blog” And after some (not so) light introspection, I finally defined my 2010 resolutions or objectives as you like.
To me 2010 is a really nice number in itself, kind of binary or at least it’s a nice pattern. (all this would have been better in 1010, or not…).

Anyway, for this year I’ve summarized my resolutions in 3 themas:

1. OPEN
2. SOCIAL
3. PASSION

First I was gonna details these bullets but now I think they are really clear and suffices to themselves.
So feel free to ask for details, if you’re unsure about what I mean. In the meantime, let’s be an open social passionate electron in the Web Gen !

I guess you’ve heard the negative buzz about Facebook and it’s new policy concerning your data (or their, who knows?). Marc Zuckerberg reacted to the “All your data are belong to us” rumor. You can read the original post here.

In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different

It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo…  BUT

• Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
• Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
• A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…

IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.

Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.

As we are Friday 13th 2009, I thought it would be nice to give 13 advices on how to use Twitter. So here are 13 DO’s and DON’Ts to get the best from Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll guess you already know Twitter (if not you can refer to Twitter for dummies). Initially, it is a social communication tool to answer the fundamental question: “What are you doing?”.  So you are not really convinced? I understand but there is actually a growing buzz about Twitter, its community and all the ecosystem or related tools. But let’s analyse the specifities of this new media.

A new media

When you read the homepage of Twitter.com, you may still wonder what so different about this communication tool. You can read more about “How Twitter was born“, but I’ll give here my vision of what is this media.

Let’s put it like that:  blog + instant messaging/sms + tribe = Twitter ! It sounds simple but Read the rest of this entry »

There is a question I keep asking myself: “are bookmarks useful?”
In this first part, I will try to describe my own experience with bookmarks but hopefully you could help me to find a decent answer by sharing your own habits…  In a second post, I will gather my thoughts on what (I think) the bookmarks are focused and which goal they pretend to achieve. Last, I’ll try to list which key features I look for as a web user willing to use better bookmarks.

At first, back around 1996, I discovered the web pre-1.0 and started to use my wonderful netscape browser to store bookmarks for every website that took me more than 2 minutes to find with altavista or yahoo. Yeah that sounds like some old tale for the web 2.0 generation, but anyway at this time there was no google (and life did go on) and sometimes it was really easier to save your almost unknown favourite website in some mozilla html file. Of course after a while, this wild storage needed some folders, subfolders, subsbufolders, … and there you go for bookmarks tree with so many entries and levels that the most trained gamer would be in real pain to click on the right link. But the worse was….I didn’t really go back to these bookmarks!

Why? When there are too many things to read, filter and sometimes analyze (due to lame bookmark’s titles), you just scan-read or skip and then go back and loose a great amount of time and effort to find something you knew before.  So I broke up with my bookmarks toolbar! I kept only a few links, didn’t update the others and eventually deleted all of them. Go back to square one :s

Here come the long period between 2000 – 2007, where I didn’t use any bookmarking tool. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did use time and scope limited lists of websites, e.g for my thesis. But I regularly deleted any obsolete bookmarks folder. It’s like a Bookmark Zero Principle. And guess what, that worked pretty well…because you basically remember the websites you need.

At this time, my theory could be summarized as: Bookmarks are like post-it… when you got you fridge totally covered, it defeats the purpose! Then the new 2.0 websites with the social theme printed all over in capital letters  “came to the rescue”. They added the wisdom of crowds effect to the already messy bookmark problem. The usual belied is that a collective approach can help to filter and auto-organize information through tagging, sharing and popularity. Now is the time of folksonomy applied to bookmarks and del.icio.us is probably one of the most dominant service.

So far, I’ve used del.icio.us as a replacement of my traditional bookmarks in firefox. And I got 3 phases:

1. First contact: I only saved a couple of new websites I discovered. At this time, I used as few tags as possible… in a way I was recreating a kind of taxonomy. I also never bookmarked my most popular websites since I was used to remember them.
2. Long distance lover: after the first day of passion, I merely used delicious for a couple of months. The old UI was also not the best argument to keep early adopters. But in the end, we didn’t broke up
3. Sharing everything: now I share almost every cool or new website I discover. I try to add more tags than before (but I often converge to the same keywords) to increase the “wisdom of crowds” aspect.

My current use habits are covering 2 main use cases:

1. Share and Store websites with services or  information about these main topics: development, finance , fun/entertainment content, startup, 2.0, …
2. Find and Discover new websites based on specific tags. (and sometimes I use a subscription or follow a specific user)

But I still have 2 issues with the bookmarking concept.

First, I regularly bookmark again a website I already saved in delicious. So what’s really the point of saving information, If you never use it back and/or cannot even remember you already read or see this website ?

Second, to find interesting websites, the social tagging of a large community is useful. But, is it really the popularity I’m looking for ? Let’s assume it is, delicious still do not offer a way to sort multiple tags search by popularity! The only way is some GreaseMonkey script that reorder the results.

That’s all for this firts post. Stay tuned for the next one

Working for Google is often considered as The ultimate dream job for geeks and technos. Great pay, 20% free time for your “own” projects, full services including baby care, doctors, social security, … I probably forgot a lot of good reasons why Google is generating so much buzz around working inside the most secret company around. Yeah Google is hype but let’s face it, so far you could only see what PR let you see. I mean the videos are controlled, we are showed clean or almost commercial videos about how much fun is…work. I bet some of you already know by heart the “do no evil” motto and the 10 company values.

But you’ve got to be honest one second, no company is absolutely perfect. And along with the exceptionnal growth of Google, maintaining such values is really an hard (if not impossible) task in any company whatsoever.  Not mentionning that Google is now in almost every single parcel of enterpreneurship. Every time you look around and try to build some new concept, you may face a huge Goliath (funny that starts with G too) already owning or launching a massive web application, that you can definitely not compete with in term of scalability or load or marketing resources. There is still a chance you can be David, but it’s becoming more slighter after each Google acquisition.

But with time and tough economic condition, it seems for the first time that some informations leaked out. I just read a couple of the answers to “Why Google Employees Quit“. This is really interesting, because IMHO it will help to figure out the real face of the G word. I even think that this more human presentation could really attract (more) people into working for Google, but this time for the right reasons and knowing what they are jumping into.  Another aspect, one should monitor is how Google will handle this recession period in term of communication about layoffs: 30 000, 24 000, 20 000, … ? who relly knows how many people work in these undergrounds of search (see 10 000 layoffs and 6000 layoffs). So time will tell, if the “do no evil” can hold against rough conditions.