I'm a big fan of on-line communities. The ability to form a group of like-minded people who may never have met and who may live in different countries is a wonderful tool. I've joined loads of forums and social sites over the last few years. Most forums are fairly limited in their social functions. You may be able to mark certain people as friends and send them private messages, but the overall population will be limited to those interested in the topics discussed there.

I think that the first proper social site I joined was Multiply. I liked their focus on sharing stuff with friends and family rather than talking to the whole world. The way you can restrict access to any item is the best I've seen, but it hasn't taken off in a big way. I got a few people on there and it has proved useful. Much later I gave in to Facebook as there were lots of people I know there. There are just so many things I don't like about it, but I can see why those are part of why people find it attractive. It's a real walled garden that protects you from the wider internet. They do set very low thresholds for forming new communities (groups), but those I have joined do not seem to be used much. People join and then do nothing to contribute. Facebook Pages can act like RSS feeds to keep you updated on your favourite band or other organisation. I just prefer more open technologies that don't tie you to a single site.

I've also joined other networks like Twitter, identi.ca (the Free Twitter), Friendfeed and now Google's Buzz. They all offer the ability to communicate and have mostly been useful to me. I've been suffering from duplication due to people posting to multiple services to reach the largest audience and so have been cutting back on my connections. I've dropped those on Facebook who just posted their Twitter updates and those on Twitter who I had followed at some point, but did not converse with and who were not posting anything I really needed. I'm following a few extra people on Buzz as it doesn't demand immediate attention like the microblogs. Buzz needs more ways to filter and priorities updates. Being able to group people would be good. I do this with Google Reader so that I can read posts on a given topic.

A discussion elsewhere was inspired by a friend who doesn't like using social sites as he feels they expose too much personal information to potential or actual bots that could pull together all sorts of data about us and draw conclusions about our movements, relationships and activities. I'm not as paranoid as him, but I do limit the amount of personal data I release. I don't talk much about family and usually only mention friends who are active on-line anyway. Others are posting every little detail of their lives on Facebook and Twitter. Either they don't care about the risks or just don't consider them. I don't really know how real the risks of identity theft are that you hear about in the press. I've played with semantic technologies like FOAF that make it very simple to harvest personal details, but also limited details of names, locations and dates there. It would be great to be able to build your address book from publicly published data, but it's likely to be abused. That said, I know people who have put their personal telephone numbers on web sites and not suffered from abuse.

I wanted to write more about how I was rationalising my networks, but I still haven't worked out the details. I don't follow hundreds of people, but I'm trying to keep the flood of incoming updates to manageable levels. I don't want to spend all my time reading them. I've got other things I want to do, like making music. I've been doing a few experiments with my guitar and uploading them to SoundCloud.

The internets have been 'buzzing' (sorry) this week with talk about Google's latest product, Buzz. I seemed to get it straight away as it doesn't require invitations as Wave still does. It appears as an extra folder in Gmail. There you can post status messages that can include links and images. You can 'connect' various types of sites that you have in your Google Profile and then updates on those will also appear in your stream. People can then comment on them there and you can follow those people to see their updates.

As many people have been saying this is very like FriendFeed. That does almost exactly what I describe above, but has a few more features. You can opt out of certain parts of a person's feed, e.g. if you don't want to see their Youtube favourites. You can also create a 'virtual friend' in case someone you know doesn't join FriendFeed, but you still want to aggregate their various feeds. Plus you can create a group based around a set of people and allow others to subscribe to that group. FriendFeed does some removal of duplicates so you don't have to see when someone posts the same item to multiple sites.

I've used FriendFeed for a while and like it, but not many friends have joined. I can still use it to keep up with things and have it as a gadget on my iGoogle page. Facebook bought the site recently, but I've not seen any signs of integration yet.

Facebook is still the big player and is reaching a much wider audience than anything else. Smiles were raised at the ignorance of some Facebook users when they ended up on the wrong site and couldn't log in. Facebook aims to be usable by anyone and wants to be a safe walled garden for them so they don't have to go anywhere else. Features like Pages act like RSS so users can get all their news without leaving the garden. I use some of these features, but stay away from all the silly games and useless applications. I think Facebook lowers the barriers for non-technical people to build communities.

A common meme amongst all of the above is the Like button so show you enjoyed an item, whatever that may mean. I don't see a Dislike button. You can also comment using all of them, but some people, including my friend Wulf don't like the way this divides the comments across multiple sites. I'd also prefer comments on my blog posts to be on my site. Maybe we need a standard that allows comments on aggregating sites to feed back to the original post. Part of the reason I started using Disqus comments was to get more control over my comments and to track those I make on other sites, but it's not that widely used.

I'm reserving judgement on Buzz for now as it's very early days. I do like Google products and use a lot of them. If they can get the integration right and satisfy the various demands for privacy then it has potential. I don't know if this means that Wave is being dropped as it doesn't seem to have evolved much since the launch.

A post by Benjamin Ellis prompted me to think about how dependent I am on Google for my daily use of the internet.

These are the Google services I use and some possible replacements:

• Search - Google's flagship service and also the easiest to replace. I use it out of habit, but there are plenty of other search engines out there. It seems so long since I relied on Yahoo! or Alta Vista. Google have added lots of enhancements to their search over the years that make it even more useful. I don't know how well the others have kept up
• Gmail - I have Gmail set up to pick up emails from my own domain and to send as if it comes from there. This is convenient for picking up email at work or on my phone. I don't generally give anyone my Gmail address. I could use the Squirrelmail web interface on the server, but I have to log in each time and it's fairly limited. I used Mail2Web in the past, but not checked it out lately
• Reader - This is my main way of keeping up with news from dozens of sites. I first got into RSS via Newsisfree and then Bloglines, but moved to Reader once they overcame the initial performance issues. I could revert to the previous sites or run a local application. I like having my feeds on the web so I can keep up wherever I am
• Google talk - I don't use Gtalk much for chat, due to few contacts and not at all for voice calls, but the client is convenient for telling me when I have incoming email. I've used other Jabber/XMPP servers in the past and could revert to them and use other software, e.g. Psi on Windows, for IM. I use Kopete on Linux
• Calendar - Google's calendar is very neat. It's easy to set up repeating events and you can set up extra calendars to share with others. It also syncs nicely with my phone. I was using the Kontact calendar before, but synchronising that with anything else was tricky. I've not looked at other web calendars lately
• iGoogle - I use this as my home page to pull together the various Google services I use, along with some other news sources and gadgets for weather, comics and other stuff. Before this I used a Yahoo home page, but that was more limited. I could probably create my own version on my web server if necessary, but my HTML skills are not brilliant
• Wave - I've not got beyond playing with this. It's not essential yet. It's functions could be replaced by a combination of other tools such as email, IM and wiki, but nothing combines them like Wave
• Maps - Google Maps were a revelation after using less dynamic sites like Streetmap. It's so quick to navigate and handy for plotting a route. I'd like to use OpenStreetmap more, but it lacks detail in many areas. Some towns are very well mapped, but that is generally due to a keen mapper living there. I've added to my area and will continue to do so when I find time
• Youtube - This is hard to replace. There are other video sites, but this is the one most people use. It's full of useless crap, but has lots of gems. I've made much use of it to see musical performances and for guitar tutorials. Hard to avoid when so many sites embed videos from there. I've never posted a video there myself. Any I have are generally aimed at friends and family, so get posted on Multiply
• Profile - My Google Profile pulls together links to my many on-line personae. Much of its data was derived from FOAF and XFN data on my site, so they could replace it, but not as a way for people to find my via Google. It drives the recent social search feature that lets me search for content from people I know
• Analytics - I use this to check how many (few?) visits this site has had. It's aimed at those hosting Google advertising, so I only use a few of the many statistics. I also use Yahoo's MyBlogLog to do a similar same thing. Both rely on embedded Javascript in the pages and so will not detect those who have it disabled. I can access full statistics via the web server's logs, but that's a little less user friendly
• Picasa - This photo site is convenient for its tight integration with the software of the same name. I'm starting to use it a bit for pictures I want to link to from elsewhere, but those could be hosted here. Family pictures which I want to restrict access to go on Multiply as it has the best privacy controls I've found
• Documents - I have a couple of documents on here for logging things like car fuel economy just so I can update from wherever I am. These could fairly easily be replaced by other web services or I could just store them on my phone
• Sync - Just after I got my Windows Mobile phone Google added support for ActiveSync. This was very convenient for synchronising contacts and calendar. I hate having to enter such data manually into multiple devices. I'd prefer a Linux-based phone, but Google are taking over that niche too with Android
• Orkut - I toyed briefly with this social network, but you have to go where the crowd is. I managed to get a lot of people using Multiply and still like it, but Facebook has become the default for many. My issues with Facebook could take up a whole other post. For now I use it to keep up with what friends are doing. I'd prefer to use Friendfeed (owned by Facebook) or an open alternative
• Chrome - I've installed it on one PC, but not used it much. I'm pretty happy with Firefox and its add-ons

There are a few areas of my on-line life that are not dominated by Google. Microblogging is covered by identi.ca and Twitter, links by Delicious, but I might be tempted if Google offered alternatives with the same coverage if they integrated with their other services.

One of the reason I use so many Google services is the integration between them. It's still limited, but has great potential. It tends to work less well with services they have bought up rather than developing internally.

So could I give up Google, if only for a limited time? I think I could, but I would probably miss it. I'd love to see all the services I want offered as open source/protocol options. This would free us from having to use a single provider and even allow us to host them ourselves. I could host my own microblog (status.net), photos (Gallery), IM (Jabber) and others, but there would be little integration and there's a fairly high maintenance overhead.

This post was partially composed in a Gmail draft in my lunch hour so I could finish it at home.

Saw this over at Wulf's blog. Yet another meme to pass away the cold days. Put each letter of the alphabet into the Firefox 'Awesome bar' and see what comes up.

1. http://www.amazon.co.uk/
2. http://bagofspoons.net/blog/
3. http://www.thecarbonaccount.com/
4. http://del.icio.us/steevc
5. http://ebuyer.com/
6. http://www.facebook.com/
7. http://www.google.com/ig
8. http://herts.lug.org.uk/
9. http://identi.ca/steevc
10. http://www.jumpstation.co.uk/flog/flog.html
11. http://www.ebay.co.uk/
12. http://www.last.fm/user/steevc
13. http://steevc.multiply.com/
14. http://news.bbc.co.uk/
15. http://openstreetmap.org/
16. http://pfgm.org.uk/
17. http://disqus.com/
18. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab
19. http://www.sixstringbliss.com/
20. http://twitter.com/steevc
21. http://ubuntuforums.org/
22. http://www.myspace.com/okavanga09
23. http://wave.google.com/
24. http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/
25. http://www.youtube.com/
26. http://www.zenatode.org.uk/

I've excluded anything financial or work-related. And no, there weren't any porn sites.

I find the Firefox address bar a real boon for finding sites I've visited as you can type any part of a site URL or title and have a chance of finding it. I rarely bookmark sites in the browser these days. Sites I may revisit some time go on del.icio.us.

I heard about this 'unconference' from Steve Lawson. He didn't make it in the end due to pending baby. I don't normally get to technical conferences as they are generally too expensive for me to fund and my work don't send me to any. This one had the attractive price of £1.40, although the suggested fee was higher when it came to booking, but with profits going to charity. I thought it would be an interesting experience and so took a day off to go down to the Reuters office in Canary Wharf.

I have to say that Reuters looked after us very well with ample food and drink laid on. They have some nice looking offices with a large room that was used for the conference. I didn't really know many people there and so plonked myself at a random table. I was expecting to hear a series of talks, but the format consisted of someone introducing a topic (politics, news etc) and then we discussed it among those at our table and should post a tweet with our thoughts. At my first table were people from The Guardian, Reuters, the Open University and other organisations. We had some wide-ranging discussion around the topic. Later I met up with my former colleague @TiaAzulay and some new people, including @edent for a different discussion. For the final topic Tia and I were with @mattbuck_hack and @alexhughes of @drawnalism who were drawing the event. You can see the results here, including one of me.

I made my first appearance on Audioboo elaborating on a comment I made in the politics discussion.

The day ended with a panel of twitterati luminaries summing up the state of the twittersphere (not sure about the new language). Common themes from the day were that Twitter is not very representative of the general population and that there is more to journalism that just reporting what is happening. I think that the simplicity of Twitter and open alternatives like identi.ca means that they can be used in many ways. The 140 character limitation can be a pain. You can't explain complex topics and so conventional writing on blogs and elsewhere is still needed.

After the panel people milled around drinking and chatting. I didn't get the names of everyone I met, but I know I talked to these folk, @paulafeery, @misetak, @anniemole, @nchnone, @countculture. I left with my head buzzing from all the cool discussions I'd had. I have to plans to start any sort of internet or Twitter-based business, but I do want to play more with the technology. I just need to find the time.

I'll admit to being a fan of Google. I use several of their on-line tools including Gmail, Calendar, Reader and GTalk (mainly as a Jabber client). I keep an eye on their Labs for their latest developments. I heard about Wave when it was announced back in May. It sounded like a combination of email, IM and wiki. It wasn't open to the public at first. I registered an interest and eventually got an invitation a couple of weeks back. I thought at first it had come from a friend, but it looks like I was one of the lucky 100,000 who got added. That allowed me to nominate eight others for invitations. Those mostly went to on-line contacts who I thought could use them.

So far I've only played a little with Wave. A 'wave' is a bit like a persistent IM conversation that you can add people to or even make public. Anyone can edit any previous post/'blip'. I see this as useful for brainstorming sessions where a group of people want to produce an outline specification for a product. You can paste in various content such as images, videos (from Youtube) and maps as well as some special gadgets. Bots can be written to automate certain aspects. Simon introduced me to his bot that translates all updates into 'Swedish', but they could be useful to add links and standardise format.

Wave could be a useful tool in general if enough people use it. Email has been around for decades and there are hundreds of applications to use it. That's a lot of inertia to overcome. Personally I need to use it more in real situations to see how useful it can be.

I Installed Mozilla's Ubiquity ages ago, but hadn't made a habit of using it. At its simplest if gives you a command line in your browser that lets you perform operations like search and starting an email based on the page you are viewing or text within it without having to open more windows/tabs or copy/pasting information. A more intriguing use is to perform all sorts of changes on a web page such as translation or changing elements. There are various videos that show what it can do. I was inspired to try it again by this blog post. I had some problems with the latest version locking up my whole desktop, but the latest beta is working better. Like Wave it requires a change in mindset, but could make lots of jobs easier and quicker. This talk includes Ubiquity, along with some other cool stuff Mozilla is working on.

Like many people I am a bit lax about making backups. I've got loads of pictures, documents and other data on the PC that is not stored anywhere else. I've been lucky not to lose much in the past, but a hard drive can crash at any time or a PC be stolen. I've got some of it on CDs, but have not been rigorous in backing up the latest data. I have used rdiff-backup to back up to the web server I use, but that has some issues when the server and client software are on different versions.

Ubuntu introduced Ubuntu One on-line storage service recently. You can have 2GB for free or pay a monthly subscription for 50GB. The free account is enough to store my documents so I've been trying to get that working. I've installed the client and it worked at first, but has been getting confused when I added multiple folders. You have to copy data to a specific folder and cannot just use symbolic links. Currently I can't get it to stay connected to the server or synchronise any files. Perhaps I need to somehow reset the client and start again. Ubuntu are selling it more as a service for sharing files, but it has potential as an automatic back-up too. The next version of Ubuntu due out next week has it included as standard, so may work better.

Long-term readers (anyone?) would know what I've been interested in the possibilities of the Semantic Web as a way to make some of the data on the web more useful by giving it some context. I've written before about possible semantic social systems utilising the FOAF data model. This is a file format that can store details of a person and their relations to other people. It can link to FOAF files belonging to those other people to allow their net of connections to be explored. One advantage of this over sites like Facebook is that it allows each person to control their own set of data without relying on a third party and another is that the data can be processed by various software or web sites.

What I would like to see is a piece of software, either running on a PC (or other device) or web site that reads my FOAF file and then allows me to do things like viewing the latest updates that my friends have made to whatever sites they use, based on data in their FOAF files. This could be blog posts, music they have listened to, photos they have uploaded or anything else that can have an RSS/ATOM feed. I can do something like that with friendfeed, but that relies on people joining that particular site or me creating profiles for my friends.

FOAF has been around for a while now, but has not really become mainstream. I know that a number of sites can generate FOAF files based on the data they hold, e.g. the identi.ca microblogging service (my data).

I think one reason for the lack of adoption is that it requires a bit of technical experience to get started. There are various sites that can generate a file based on data entered into web forms, but then you have to upload the file to a web server you have some control over. My own file started with one generated by FOAF-a-matic and has since grown as I learnt about more possibilities. I tend to just use a text editor, but the RDF format is very strict about the data structure and mistakes make the file unreadable by software. I think there must be some tools out there by now that make it easier to update a file. What it needs is a button you can click on in your browser that extracts appropriate data from a site belonging to someone you know and inserts that data into your FOAF file.

Another issue with this sort of data sharing is that it does not provide a way for you to limit exposure of certain data to selected people. I don't include things like my date of birth, address and phone number in my file as they could be misused by some of the less desirable abusers of the internet. I have thought that I could have something on my server that allows friends to access certain data using their email address as a key. Email addresses can be stored in the file in hashed form to make it easy to check for a match without giving too much away. I realise that it may be fairly simple to guess an email address if you know a person's name and web site, but I don't know if the bad guys are doing that. In any case you could email a security key back to the given address to permit access. I don't have enough experience of web programming to know exactly how this would work.

Obviously many people do not have their own web server where they can upload arbitrary data, although many may have some web space provided by their ISP. Ideally we would all have our own domains to prevent issues with details changing when you move to a different provider.

I just felt the need to get this stuff down after thinking about it today. I know there are some projects out there that are working on stuff like this, but I'm not aware of any that past the alpha stage. I'll be happy to be told otherwise. I still harbour a desire to do some programming in this area myself, but have not found the time. Foaflib looks like the Python library I wanted when I looked into this a while back. I'll try to have a look at it. It may allow me to achieve my aim of generating the root page of this site from my FOAF file.

I like to think that Facebook is not the future of the web. Is there hope or has Tim Berners-Lee's vision been forgotten in the gold-rush?

I came fairly late to the wonders of RSS and Atom. I think I first used them in a limited way on NewsIsFree and then to full effect on Bloglines. That worked pretty well for me. I looked at Google Reader when it first appeared, but it was slow and awkward. Once they had got it working properly I imported my feeds and have not looked back.

I subscribe to over 100 feeds. Most of these update infrequently. I see that as the real value of the technology as you can keep up with certain sites without having to keep checking on them. I've stopped following some of the busier sites as I can just visit them when I have time to see what's new. I'm using Postrank on one feed to filter it a bit. It's supposed to just give me the most popular posts, but you pay a penalty in getting them a bit later. I can live with that.

One of the things I feel that I miss using this sort of application is the comments. If you see each post as it appears then there unlikely to be many comment then and Reader does not make it obvious when there are some. Some feeds do include a comment count, but I think that's just part of the original post. I do click through to the original site when I feel the need to post a comment, but otherwise I might not see the responses.

Some sites offer one of a couple of ways to follow the comments. You can either check a box to opt for emails as comments come in or subscribe to a further feed of the comments. The emails can be overwhelming on a busy site and having lots of extra feeds to manage is a pain. What I'd like to see is an extra button in Reader that allows subscribing to comments on a particular post, but as a sub-feed of the main one. I don't know if RSS or Atom have anything to support this directly, but it should be possible to automate if there is either a feed for each post's comments or for all comments on the site. So has this been implemented anywhere?

A case in point is Steve Lawson's post about Twitter. It has gained over 50 comments today. I'm getting emails, but at one per comments it's a bit too much of a good thing.

I suspect that some people will watch the comments on a post for a while and then unsubscribe from the email or feed. If anyone happens to come along months later and add something useful to the discussion then it's unlikely to be read by many. I'm sure I've read something by Jeff Atwood on this, but can't find the appropriate post.

On the subject of Twitter, I gave a talk at Herts LUG about microblogging. I tried to explain what it offers as I know very few members who use it. Rob did a counter-talk where he ran through some of the issues with Twitter. These included those of security and identity. I've probably already overexposed myself on-line. It's probably possible to pull together all sorts of information about me from my various on-line identities. I've not noticed any problems with this so far and am wary of exposing details of my family or certain personal information. Other are less wary. You only have to browse Facebook to see examples.

That's enough of my waffling. Time for some guitar practice. I'm always happy to see comments on this site, apart from spam, but I don't get many. As I only have a few readers according to Google and Bloglines that's not too surprising.

I've been considering recently whether I should use Gmail as my primary email application. I've used other web mail in the past, starting with Rocketmail that, I think, was taken over by Yahoo. I still have a Yahoo account, but only really use it for their Groups, especially Freecycle. I managed to get a Gmail invitation soon after it started via a site where people were passing on their spare invitations and was able to get my standard user name. The service was innovative when it started and has gained many features. I've not exploited all of them, but then I've been using it as a secondary account.

My main account is on this domain. I use Kontact to access it, but have used Thunderbird in the past. There is web access via SquirrelMail, but it's clunky compared to Gmail. I set up Gmail to access this account and it works quite well for that. I can make it use my mail address for outgoing email too, so my Gmail address is almost redundant. This is how I handle email when not at home. The down sides are that my outgoing emails are only on the originating system and there can be a delay before Gmail picks up new mail. There also might be issues with handling encrypted email on Gmail, whereas Kontact does GPG nicely. Not that I'm doing much encryption as few of my contacts use it.

Of course Gmail is not totally reliable. It was down for a couple of hours this week. That's not a big issue with my low volume of email and my own server has been down on occasion. Generally I would expect Google to maintain pretty high reliability. They can afford massive redundancy in hardware. They also do pretty good spam filtering.

When I got my new phone I was wondering how to synchronise my calendar and contacts with either my PC or Google. This was just as Google announced Activesync functionality. I've used that and it generally works. I had been using their calendar for a while so that I could see it from work.

So what reasons are there to not use Gmail and how do I make the most of it?

I try to use open source software and open standards as much as I can. I try to persuade others to do likewise, but I end up using various proprietary systems anyway. I think that nearly all of those are so that I can participate in social networks.

I use Skype to communicate with family and colleagues because it has become the default for VOIP. I know there are open VOIP platforms, but I don't have time to support family in setting them up and my work colleagues are unlikely to change.

Can we expect sites like last.fm to go open source? Others, such as Facebook, are even less likely to as it would enable others to compete on features.

This post was inspired by this article about using identi.ca rather than Twitter. The quote from ESR is choice. I'm on both because some people I want to follow are only on Twitter. identi.ca only has a small fraction of the Twitter user base. That doesn't stop me having some great discussions there. I'd love to drop Twitter, but don't want to lose that part of my social network. So practicality triumphs over principle again.