Over the past ten years, the way that people identify themselves on the internet has changed drastically.  It’s not quite obvious because the change was very gradual and it has not totally affected every area of the internet.  Despite this, it definitely happened.  It’s almost like when your girlfriend asks you if you think she’s lost weight.  It happened so gradually you didn’t notice but when asked – you notice.  There was a time when someone could jump onto IRC and chat with their friends using a username that had varying value.  The username could be thrown away if its reputation faltered and it could be retained if it had meaning and significance to those that interacted with it.

And Then It Happened.

Social networks erupted onto the internet with a force more powerful than any of the trends we’ve seen in the past, on and off the internet.  MySpace.  Facebook.  LinkedIn.  Some forum and IRC elitests refuted the fact that these sites for people by people were extremely valuable and a great way to associate an online identity with yourself.  They claimed that these networks were for teenagers and emo kids.  They made fun of the pictures that people posted all the while, clinging onto their text based chat and personal blogs linked to a screen name.  In the end, the naysayers were defeated and social networks have become a very real force on the internet.  Now, a lot of those that were once against social networks probably have an account or two of their own.

Why Did It Happen?

It’s hard to pinpoint the cause, but one thing is for sure – people by nature are social.  A place to go and share you lives with your friends is immensely attractive to everyone, even if they deny it.  What’s more is, anyone could signup to a social network and begin building their online identity to mirror that of their real world identity.  The need to know HTML and have a geocities or angelfire account became nullified.  Some people still retained their text based identities on IRC channels and forums, but many people (especially those of the internet brats) had decided to get their own account on a social network.

There Was An Incentive Though, Right?

Absolutely.  The problem with screen names and text based communication is that it is nearly impossible to take credit for what has been accomplished.  With the widespread adoption of social networks came the opportunity to take advantage of your reputation to gain love, money, bragging rights, and just generally enhance your social circles.  Those who understand the concepts of branding themselves have been able to utilize social networks for gains across the board.

Hey But Like Anything, There Is A Risk.

This is true of social networking in a big way.  If one is not careful with what it is they associate themselves with on social networks, they can tarnish their reputation at “internet speed.”  A high ranking person in a Fortune 500 company who posts pictures of their half naked and drunk self will surely have repercussions in the work place.  Aside from maintaining some restraint in the content you post, it is also important to keep on top of where your identity is being used and insure that you are in control of it.  It is a real risk that someone might sign up on a social network as you in order to do and say things that ruin your brand or even exploit others using your good name.

Sort Of Like Social Network Identity Theft.

True but it is much easier to do and get away with.  One thing anyone should do, if you value their online reputation, is to run some searches for your name and make sure no one is using it badly.  You should also consider signing up on social networks that you think you might have an interest in at a later date to prevent someone from beating you to it and stealing your name.  These sorts of things don’t happen that frequently but they can happen and might also be a huge hassal to fix.  Your credit record is a bunch of numbers but your reputation is a complex web of people and stories.  Someone introducing poison to that web can be very difficult to repair.

The identity landscape is changing and we’re all participating in its evolution.  Gone are the days of your disposable screen names – now our online identities can be more valuable (and more difficult to repair) than our credit records.  Our next generation of hiring managers are going to be former internet brats and you can be certain that they will weigh your online reputation heavily when you’re looking for a job.  Protecting and enhancing that reputation should be much higher on everyone’s priority list than ever before.

The Dilemma

This brings me to the great dilemma one must face when carrying on with a blog – there is an inherent administrative burden by enabling people to post comments on your blog. The biggest problem comes where people spam the hell out of your comments with things like penis enlargers and sexual enhancement products – things that obviously have no business being splashed anywhere. The interruption in my daily routine to remove this rubbish from my blog is seemingly not worth it.

Opening My Eyes…

So I thought about it some more, and looked at things from the same perspective that I wrote the article about Mixx and Digg and I began to realize what a fool I was being for not allowing people to comment.  My focus is on social media and web development.  These are two things that rely on communities to provide input.  I took a step back, fell off my soap box, and realized the only way to fix this was to provide ready access to people for their commenting pleasure.

Bracing For Impact

In any case, I’ve enabled registrations (which I obviously encourage) but I’ve also granted access to not-logged-in comments. I don’t want to deter people from commenting due to a required registration.  I’ll just hope that this new ability is not abused to death by the darkness on the internet and is actually used for constructive feedback and discussion.  If it’s abused and ravaged by spammers then I’ll have to find a solution to that problem when it arrises.

Thank you father dearest.

If you Digg this then you Dugg this.

The typical workflow at Digg is that you go, submit an article, people digg or bury it and if it’s popular and makes it through their algorithm it makes it to the front page.  If you aren’t up for submitting something you can just read the articles, make comments, and digg or bury them.  The comment stream at Digg is really great.  Sure there is a lot of stupid stuff, but the user participation is fantastic.  It’s not uncommon to see a few hundred comments on an article.  Furthermore – you can actually digg or bury the comments.  If people are saying stupid stuff then they can be burried so no one has to look at them.  If you leave a good comment then it can be dugg up so you and everyone else can see what the community is thinking about things today.

More after the jump…

From a general media standpoint, this sort of behavior is extremely valuable.  Not only do you get to see what people care about but you can also see what the majority of people think about a given article.  Since there are so many people on Digg, you can see a huge demographic of people.  The blend of news one gets when they visit the front page ranges from humorous YouTube videos to very serious world news.  This variety means that if you stop by an hour from now there will be more stuff for you to consume, fueling this new found addiction to current “stuff.”  Digg is the drugg dealer and they do it well.

Ok.  Now Let’s Mixx it Up.

Mixx’s approach to the news is very similar to Digg’s.  You submit something, people can vote it up or down, and if it reaches a popularity point then it makes the front page and also appears in the popular section.  This is what people have come to expect from sites like reddit, Digg, and now Mixx.  That’s where the similarities stop though.

When submitting an article you can also fire it off to your followers to alert them that this is something you think they should read.  This is a great way to get tons of up front votes from people you think share your opinion.  To further add to this, there are Mixx communities too.  These communities are often aimed around specific topics, but there are also those like the Mixxing Bowl that provide a fairly even blend of news.  You can also fire off your new submissions to a group and while these people might not be your followers and may even hate your face, they did just get a notification that there is something that they might want to look at.

Mixx’s partnerships with other news outlets enable them to submit stuff to the site fairly rapidly.  This gives those news sites an eye into what people on Mixx care about that they are reporting on.  This sort of thing is pretty valuable but may not be as valuable as something like Digg’s comments… uh oh.  What did I just do?

Round One.  FIGHT!

Mixx and Digg are both plagued by one huge issue – blind voting.  Blind voting is when someone reads your little summary or maybe even just the headline and then votes.  They didn’t read the article – they just voted for some reason.  Maybe because they are dumb heads.  The difference between the communities is that on Digg, people actually write something in the comments about an article.  On Mixx, it’s not uncommon to see an article become popular that no one has even commented on.  Does that mean it just got lucky and received a lot of blind votes?  This sort of trend makes Mixx less valuable to everyone, including the blind voters and especially big media outlets that are trying to get a feel for the public response to their content.  Digg certainly has its fairshare of dumb comments but at least people say something.  This is one of those cases where it’s far better to say something stupid than to keep your mouth shut.  Despite the total lack of comments and gross blind voting, Mixx tends to sway towards a more community oriented site…

Digg Wins.

Round Two.  FIGHT!

In terms of the community aspect of things, Mixx gets it right.  Their communities can greatly enhance the coverage and attention articles get.  Digg has nothing like this short of their new (beta) suggestion system.  Mixx’s groups do a much better job of “suggesting” articles though because the suggestions are coming from the community instead of a random algorithm or a panel of edittors in the Digg offices (wherever they are coming from).  These communities add an extraoridinary amount of value to one’s overall user exerperience on the site though.  If you’re a Mixx user and you’re not in a community then you really should consider joining one.  Communities might be Mixx’s slingshot.  I’m obviously being somewhat extreme here as I don’t think a single feature is going to overthrow Digg.

Mixx Wins.

Round Three…

So people use Digg and Mixx for different reasons and that’s fine.  Mixx has so much potential that is being punched in the balls by the uncaring community that Mixx aims to please.  It’s a shame to see so much in terms of features wasted.  Maybe if Mixx implemented a voting system for comments it would be more attractive to leave a comment rather than simply blind voting.  It’s hard to say.  Digg on the other hand has been rather stale in developments lately and it will be very interesting to see how their new suggestion system plays out in the longer term.  Both sites seem to be aiming down different routes but they could definitely benefit from looking at each other in terms of the user base and features.

Looking Forward.

I do not think that Mixx is going to drag away all of Digg’s users in a single day, but if Digg continues to have problems with their content and begins having rebellions like they did earlier this year then there is a good chance people might stumble over to Mixx and find that they like the features better and just choose to stay there.

Hopefully we have a change in the overall mentality over at Mixx so that there is more participation around articles than simply blind voting.  Whether or not the staff can push through this change or the user base needs to just do it is up to debate.  Something like requiring a higher number of comments for an article to go popular might be a good idea.  Time will tell what direction these sites take though.

Recap

Digg’s user base needs to start using the features it has, comment the hell out of articles, and embrace the community-geared futures so that everyone can benefit.

Digg needs to keep doing what it’s doing and not screw up and piss off the mob.  They could also benefit from some more community-geared features of which they lack today.

Ok So Who Cares?

Well the concern amongst the community right now is that this acquisition went down and it instantly broke any old Summize API requests due to the new URL redirect.  No warning was given and it just kinda happened.  With things starting off in this way, it’s no wonder that the community was feeling a little burned, spewing comments such as “RIP Summize” and other similar statements.  Feeling the heat, Alex Payne asked those following him to @reply with any concerns about the API changes as a consequence of this acquisition (http://twitter.com/al3x/statuses/859262626).  The community eagerly awaits that blog post.

Any Real Reason for Concern?

Looking at things right now?  No.  Twitter has been improving and Summize functions just as it used to (except for the broken API requests and new theme).  There is a great potential for the two services to feed off one another since Summize improved upon Twitter and without Twitter there is no Summize.  There is the obvious concern that having Summize under Twitter control will somehow destroy the great up-time, speed, and reliability of the searching service, but at the same time it might be possible for Twitter to take in the technology used in Summize and adapt it to make the mother service even better.

As a developer that uses Twitter for a number of different things, I hope we see the API for Summize largely untouched and also see the API for twitter enhanced to utilize a lot of the Summize functionality.   This will make developing applications that use Twitter much simpler.  There is an inherent risk though – if this integration does not go smoothly it has the potentional to ruin Summize and also provide Twitter no gain for their $15 million.  Let’s all hope that it works out with a great deal of improvement for everyone.

Alex Payne’s Twitter: here
Search.Twitter Query for Summize: here
Twitter Blog Post on the Aquisition: here

The Problem – Why You Should Care

Other sites that you pull content from are not always going to be reliable.  They could be down, running slow, or some other possible problem.  If you are using something like twitter to display your status on your site but you have a lot of other content you want people to see then it would be wise to use client-side scripting to get the content.  You might be saying in your head “Oh but I have this sweet PHP script that does that for me.” but you should tell that voice in your head to shut up and just listen.

The Solution…

When you use server-side scripting then the server that is dishing out your website needs to go to the other (possibly) slow website.  If it’s waiting for this content then your user is waiting for your site to finish being generated server side and then sent to their browser.  This was a problem when twitter was doing its thing with the “fail whale” on a regular basis and was generally taking forever to display tweets.  This in turn was making my site very slow.  Realizing the problem, I took out the PHP widget that I had and replaced it with my own little creation that utilizes javascript and a tiny bit of PHP.

Let’s take a look at how to do that…

First thing you’re going to want to do is make a little div with some static text in it that gets killed when your stuff finishes loading.  You can make it kinda like this:

<div id=”twit_text”>
<ul id=”twitter_update_list”><li>Waiting for Twitter.com to reply.  Please hold.</li></ul>
</div>

The ul in there will be replaced by the script which actually sits right on twitter’s servers.  This is pretty simple and basic stuff.  It is advisable to put some static content in there so that users know that something else is going to happen and you don’t have a blank spot on the page.  There is one other piece of magic that actually uses a little bit of PHP but not for the same purpose the other scripts use it for…

<?
$currURL = currPageURL();

if (($currURL == “http://www.patricktulskie.com/”) || ($currURL == “http://patricktulskie.com/”))
{
echo “<script type=\”text/javascript\” src=\”http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js\”></script>”;
echo “<script type=\”text/javascript\” src=\”http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/PatrickTulskie.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=1\”></script>”;
}
?>

This goes in the footer of the page to only load the javascript if the page you’re looking at is the index page.  You can modify the PHP to load on different pages but for my purposes I only want you to see the status on the index.  You can’t easily do this with a plugin because plugins are loaded entirely as the page loads.  The PHP above is in the very footer of the page and it only kicks off the javascript IF we’re on the index of the site AND after everything else on the page has already loaded.

One Other Thing…

I use this function to get the URL of the page.  You can put it in your wordpress theme’s functions or you can put it wherever you need it on your site.  It’s fairly reusable too.

function currPageURL()
{
$pageURL = ‘http’;
if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == “on”) {$pageURL .= “s”;}
$pageURL .= “://”;
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != “80″)
{
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].”:”.$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
else
{
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
return $pageURL;
}

I Hate Twitter

Well thats fine.  I’m sure it doesn’t like you much either.  Regardless, this is a really basic usability concept that many people don’t seem to grasp or even think about when creating a website.  Say you want to pull news feeds from a Digg category using an RSS parser on your page.  You have other stuff on the page but this Digg box is in your sidebar.  If you don’t think about where the script is going to execute in relation to your page loading, then you’re going to have problems when Digg is running slow or is down.  For those of you who don’t want to get into a full blown ajax setup, or simply don’t know how to then this is a great work around that uses really minimal coding.