Why RSS Feeds and alternatives to Google Reader

When reading about Google Reader closing down on 1. July, I was in panic because to stay on top of the news (mostly IT specific news in my case), I was depending on Google Reader. I was depending on Google Reader because I am depending on RSS feeds.

Google writes (in the article linked above):

"While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader."

I would never have imagined a decline of use in RSS (and I assume that the decline of Google Reader usage also means a decline in using RSS in general because it is very hard to find good alternatives for Google Reader). And therefore before diving into the alternatives I want to - no, I need to - go into the advantages of using RSS feeds first. And although there are plenty of articles about Google Reader alternatives out there, it was very hard for me to find the proper substitute and this is the reason why I decided to write yet another article about this topic.

The reasons why I am depending on RSS:

• Knowledge is power
  Information overflow is a problem these days. Recently I was asked (again) why one should - in these days - foster information overflow even more by opening even more channels where the too much of information rushes in.
  Information (as long it is not misleading or wrong) can be a life changer. You want samples? Think of a company investing in technology that is about to be obsolete (like Adobe flash) loosing a lot of time and money investing into the wrong product, think of a friend who found his spouse over the internet, think of going on a cheap vacation not knowing about risk of war in the appropriate country. Oh and another example I have experienced already several times: I get informed by RSS feed about food that gets withdrawn from market because polluted or containing toxic bacteria and strangely I sometimes see them on sale in the supermarket the day after I've read the article. Who has the knowledge has the edge over the others!
  The problem is not the information, the challenge is the appropriate filtering of information! And RSS feeds help!
   
  
• Time and information
  I do not have the time to visit each single website or blog providing (probably) interesting information. Many sites and blogs do publish very important or very interesting information - from time to time.
   
• More efficient scrolling through articles
  Many sites do publish a lot of information, but I am interested only in a few articles, so searching through many articles to find one or two interesting ones is annoying. An RSS reader (be it through the web or a local application) allows more efficient scrolling through articles.
   
• Different user interfaces of websites and blogs
  Different sites have different GUI (graphical user interface) and different layout. Visiting the sites one by one also implies being familiar with many different user interface styles. Many of them are not very efficient or it is difficult to find the information.
   
• Ads, bulk and other time and space wasters
  Even if you use an ad blocker in your browser often big graphics already consume a third of your screen distracting from the core information. Not only because of big graphics, but also because of many third-party service-sites (like Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Adthis, Sharebar, ...) that are integrated on websites/blogs those sites take longer to load and having you to wait for the content that ... maybe then isn't so interesting today (while tomorrow may show a very interesting story that makes it worth waiting).

The reasons why I was using Google Reader (= the 5 core requirements of the substitute):

1. In-Sync-View on the Laptop/Web and on the mobile device (so what I've already seen on my mobile phone did not get presented when reading news on my laptop - one of the most important features for me).
2. List view option for feeds - I hate the hyped square interface. I want to read from top to bottom - that's it.
3. Simple and efficient user interface for dealing with the news fast.
4. Fast and reliable feed loading.
5. Nearly identical user interfaces on the web and on the mobile device - or at least not lacking core functionality. (Mobile device in my case is Android, Mac and iPhone users, when reading this article, Apple-only alternatives are left out here).

Reasons 1 and 2 are a must have  for me, but found that not having 3 and 4 can also drive me mad in minutes. So, now you are understanding the focus I had while choosing the alternative, here are my proposals:

• Feedly
  Feedly was the first alternative I got aware of and I observed it was the first alternative where the masses took refuge. However, I wondered if it will continue to work after Google Reader shutdown as it seemed to be just a front-end for Google Reader. Indeed they were (or are still while writing this) relying on Google Reader but developed a new backend on their own - see comments here. Not sure if the transition will work flawlessly and if the performance can be kept due to massive increase in amount of users. While I also find it one of the best alternatives, I am not as convinced as most of the others.
  Pros: Many features, mobile app (for Android, iOS, Kindle), similar GUI, laptop stays in sync with mobile app.
  Cons: Needs a plugin for Firefox (why the hack?), No mobile interface via browser only, even no https connection, Don't see how many articles still left to scroll through (no scrollbar) on mobile app. When I want to share an article link via K-9 mail (or other mail app than GMail) from within Feedly it does not transfer the article title as email-subject which is quite annoying. Further it restarts accidentally when returning from another app back to feedly (e.g. browser view - does not happen always) which is even more annoying.
   
• netvibes (= Bloglines - same GUI, same login)
  Pros: Clean, simple and compact web interface, additional widgets in addition to rss feeds. Also looks ok and is usable on mobile device in browser being very, very similar to Google Reader - but only with default browser and Dolphin (Firefox and Opera Mini displayed it totally different and it was total crap). Videos are displayed directly in the article detail view.
  Cons: No dedicated mobile client and using some browsers (in particular Firefox and Opera Mini) you get complete crap. Due to mobile app missing, it does not offer any enhanced features via menu button (normal browser menu displayed). Limited share options given (Mail, even multiple clients plus Twitter and Facebook).
   
• RSSly
  Seems to use Tiny-Tiny-RSS (which you can also install on your own server, if you have enough permissions there - see below).
  Pros: Many features, mobile app, similar GUI on laptop and mobile phone, laptop stays in sync with mobile app, display in browser on mobile device is also very good (Dolphin and Firefox - which is seldom - see below), many features including list of not responding feeds or feeds that seem abandoned as well as filter settings to filter out spam posts.
  Cons: It took me a good while to find out, how articles are marked as read on the mobile device. It does not work automatically, but when you do it manually it had unexpected effects until I found out, that doing it on the first page marks the first 30 entries as read and on the last page it marks the complete feed as read. On the mobile device I have cannot switch between show all articles or only unread of a feed. And RSSly seems to load feeds respond to article clicks a little slower than Feedly. I could also not get it to display article title only without abstract on mobile device.
   
• Fever°
  This is not free and no hosted service. You can buy it for about 30$/23€ and host it on your webserver. I took the risk and bought it. Installation was very easy. I only had to temporarily disable PHP securiy settings on admin interface on my hosters website for my page (for the time of installation and activation).
  Pros: This is then yours, no risk of the next RSS service closing down. Clean interface, some extra features (kindling and sparks) to make your RSS experience even more efficient.
  Cons: You need a web server with PHP support for it. If you don't have a web host with your domain then you cannot use this. Mobile client meltdown for Android still missing some features and available only for Android 4.0 and later. Refresh of feeds is not done in background (you can cron it but in my hosting case I can only cron it once in the night) and I experienced it also to be slow.
   
• The Old Reader
  Pros: HTTPS connection supported. Simple - no other clutter than plain RSS feeds. Few but clean settings, you will be familiar with it fast.
  Cons: No mobile client (yet). When importing my feeds it queued me up after 12 other users. This makes me worry if they have enough servers to have my feeds stay on top of the news. Although they say that their mobile web interface is good, I had already troubles logging in from my smaller phone (small screen) and categories were completely missing and similar issues here when using Firefox or Opera Mini (complete crap is the result).

What I also looked at but excluded from closer investigation and why:

• Pulse
  Pulse has a mobile client but no simple list view of the news feeds - they always use the squares or rectangulars and I am never sure about the direction into which to read. Also I could not find a button to set a feed to completely read. So this lacks a lot of important switches in my opinion.
   
• NewsBlur
  Free version has limits which I already exceed when importing my current feeds from Google Reader.
   
• Mocharoll (=former Blogroll)
  Failed importing my RSS feeds from Google Reader (took a very long time and I then gave up first. Looking back later it had imported my feeds but I had no chance to switch to list mode instead of the square view. And in general configuration options are not really existing. Also refreshing problems - so didn't look either how it behaves on the mobile device.
   
• Feederator
  Looked similar to netvibes or TheOldReader, but could not find a method for importing opml files or my Google Reader feeds.
   
• Good Noows
  Looked nice on my laptop, but mobile view again awful (does not wrap around text. On the laptop I also had problems getting a complete feed beeing set to read. At least it supports https connection (not all of the online services do).
   
• Tiny-Tiny-RSS
  As for Fever, TT-RSS is not a hosted server. It is free, but you have to install it on your own server. I could not test it because it said that it requires open_basedir turned on which seems to be disabled by my host.
   
• CommaFeed
  Looks simple but already on Dolphin sucks in display (too small but when you zoom into it, display gets mangeled.
   
• Flipboard
  Mobile app only - no sync-view between mobile app and laptop.
   
• Feed2Imap
  Self-hosted solution, so requires your own server and then forwards RSS news items as mails into an IMAP account. I am not sure, if my hoster supports ruby and I did not want to introduce another protocol (RSS->Mail) where again something can go wrong.
   
• feeder.co
  For what I need, I would need the variant that costs monthly fee.
   
• FeedBooster
  Online-Reader only with https capability but no specific mobile device/browser adapted display.
   
• Flud
  Seems to have a web plus mobile client but people reporting stability problems of the mobile app and pricing is not completely clear to me (maybe because this is not 100% RSS focused) so I refused testing this.
   
• news360
  Web and mobile app but no possiblity to add your own RSS feeds - just what you get from them.
   
• More alternatives here...
  I skipped everything in testing that obviously
  - syncs with Google Reader (and hence die with it)
  - does not have any sync option
  - does not have a mobile app or at least a useful mobile web stylesheet in use to show an adapted GUI for small screens
  - costs money on a monthly basis
  - does not have a list view for articles

So despite this long list of alternatives (Feed2Imap apart, I have listed only those I have also tested), in reality there are 4 which are fairly useful for me: Feedly, RSSly, netvibes and Fever. All the others had too many (for me important) flaws. I have Fever up and running and I feel good with it - as it is mine (nobody can shut down the RSS-service). However, best efficiency is given by Feedly and netvibes. Reading this (Feedly gets Unity webapp integration in Ubuntu) was one reason to go with Feedly for the next weeks. I still feel bad about it's desire to read my Google profile but I hope that will be gone when they synchronize with their own alternative but with Google Reader - currently Feedly still remains in sync with Google Reader. I can work around the mailing issue with the subject by first opening it in the external browser (there is an option for this in the advanced settings) and send the link from there. What I find more alarming: Feedly already thinks of asking money for the service. They already created a survey for that. Anyway, I have 3 other alternatives now I can immediately switch to and this gives me some feeling of safety.

Related post: Efficiently following web news with RSS.

Google Maps issues

A while ago I had problems using Google Maps - I had a slow loading issue which ran into an error.

I found a discussion about this problem where many people were angry at Google because they don't fix this problem.

I found out that the problem was due to my browser security plugins Adblock Plus and NoScript. At least one of those (I think it was NoScript) was blocking the site gstatic.com (and google.com of course or at least maps.google.com). No need to completely disable (which was mentioned also in the discussion), just whitelist relevant sites in those plugins (Check site media information to see loaded images for example).

Some other people mentioned different reasons causing the same problem like:

• Check your orther privacy or security plugins for blocking maps.google.com or gstatic.com
• Delete cookies for maps.google.com as well as all temporary internet files (clear cache).
• Skype extension for Firefox causing the problem.
• DNS problems (that usually temporarily - to separate this reason from others check availability of maps.google.com and gstatic.com using nslookup and check if it works using a different browser without any plugins - if both works then DNS is not the reason for your problem).
• if2k (if on Mac).
• Badly written router firewalls (try deactivating IPv6).
• Turn off inprivate filtering (if on Windows IE).
• Windows only: Uninstall Java and reinstall launching as Administrator (Win 7).
• Your mobile web service provider might have implemented an accelerator reducing image quality - check and turn off on the provider's website.

I am posting this because there were many responses to this and still some are posting without reading the earlier answers offering solutions and it seems that plenty of people experiencing problems with google maps.

Efficiently following web news with RSS

As my productive machines are all running Ubuntu 10.04 where Firefox 3 is still the standard browser. It is not automatically updated due to a policy like "never change a running system". However, you can add another repository from Mozilla to get the latest stable Firefox, which I did a few weeks ago.

So I am probably one of the last persons suddenly missing the RSS feed icon at the right side of the URL location bar.

If you don't know, what RSS is: It gives you the possibility to read new blog and news site entries of different sites all from one place with the ability to track what you already read and what not - more information here.

I found this blog post telling that it got removed with Firefox 4 because only 3 percent of users ever clicked on that icon! - That is crazy! Are there still people surfing manually from one interesting page to the next? - I simply can't believe that!

Although I have upgraded to the latest Firefox already a while ago, I only now noticed the missing RSS button. I think, it is because I already have a quite stable set of feeds I read which does not change a lot any more. Maybe this is a reason for the 3 % statistics mentioned above...

Without RSS feeds I wouldn't be able to follow recent news in my areas of interest. There is so much news published on the internet and there is so few time to read. Without RSS feeds I couldn't get over the massive amount and read just the most important (and really new) information.

With the rising amount of smart phones I find it even more important to have RSS feeds as surfing the web on the smart phone is just annoying.

For all others, missing the RSS feed icon: It's now under Bookmarks -> "Subscribe to this page". You can get back the button by adding it to the toolbar (right-click into a free area on a toolbar and choose "Customize..." - there you find the RSS button which you can drag somewhere onto your toolbars).

Here is my way how I keep up-to-date:

1. I select sites (Blogs, News-Sites, Forums etc) that publish good content in areas of my interests.
2. I subscribe to those sites via RSS (clicking the Feedly RSS button) - Feedly is my favorite RSS reader.
3. Then I categorize the feeds into Computer, Linux, Development, News, Science etc so that I can read news by category when I don't have time to go through all.
4. Since having an Android smart phone I usually go fast through the headlines by starting the Google Reader Android app Feedly app while on bus or tramway - or waiting somewhere. I star/mark those items I want to read more in detail later or where I want to do more searching on the net for the topic - or if I want to comment later on a particular blog post.
5. When back on one of my laptops or desktop I go to Google Reader site click the Feedly-button again and switch to starred/read-later items - as the feeds are synced with my smart phone and across different machines whatever has been set to read or marked with a star is the same status on all machines automatically. When I am done with what I wanted to do, I remove the star and done.

Even if you an artist, teacher, plumber or other profession - no matter, there are plenty of sites that might be worth watching. Don't waste time by continuesly surfing from one site to the next where you can't see immediately what you already read and what not!

Related post: Mobile phone situation, Firefox and RSS feeds in Google Reader, Why RSS Feeds and alternatives to Google Reader.

The Open Source idea

As open source software gets more and more popular, when talking to other people or reading about open source, I often notice that people seem to get things (partly) wrong. So I want to clear up a few major missinterpretations:

1. Open Source does not necessarily mean (completely) free (in the sense of money costs and legal permissions).
   There are a lot of writings about free as in beer or free as in freedom or things like that. I do not find that very clear.
   The point is:
   
   • Some software - when you buy it - comes along with the source code. Reason: Companies (especially since economic crisis or because of general fears) worry about their investment. What, if a company fails or goes up in flames? If the customer has the source code then there are at least two options if changes are needed: Have somebody in the company looking at the source code and implement the changes or hire somebody doing that work.
     
     
   • For some software the version that includes the source code is only very limited - either in functionality or from legal permissions.
     
     
   • And then of course there is real completely free and open source software that costs nothing and you can do with it what you want. The GPL and related licenses only have the limitation that derived work must be released under the same (or compatible license) - that way you get open source spread like a virus ;-) .
     
     
2. How can a company survive from the financial point of view when giving software away for free?
   This is the most asked question when it comes to open source in business. Some companies give away base products away for free hoping to make business with AddOns and enhancement requests. This business model sometimes is successful. Unfortunately in many cases the base products are quite useless without the additional plugins/addons and developing those on their own is often not an option for companies.
   
   But what is completely forgotten by people asking this question: You would never accept to pay your plumber license fees each year for just having tubes in your walls. - You pay the plumber when there is work needed (repair, put additional tubes etc)! You also would never accept to pay your haircutter a license fee (even if your haircutter declares officially he/she will use the money to improve haircutting skills). You pay the haircutter when actually hair cutting is needed.
   
   The same should apply for software: Money for work.
   And the idea of free and open source software is that you pay for the planning and implementation work. Once that is done, the good thing with software is, that it can be copied around. Other than eating, haircutting etc software does not go rotten or fades away.
   
   
3. Software as a service cannot be free in the long term.
   In the last years companies offering web services or web applications hosted by those have multiplied like rabbits. Most of them - at least initially - were free. Now I observe them becoming commercial one after the other. The point here is that for the customer using these services seems to be completely hassle free. Yes, no need to maintain server hardware (farms), watch and control server tasks to be up and running etc. - But that work is now outsourced to the provider of that web service. There are at least power costs and hardware that needs to be replaced (HDs, burnt motherboards etc) from time to time. There is actual maintenance work needed and that costs money. This is different from having software that does not need maintenance work by itself. Software maintenance work is usually only needed, when somebody else breaks major interfaces - which is maybe sometimes done even with the intention to create the need of maintenance work. However, this is not the idea of the open source movement. The idea of the open source movement is more to boost innovation. But: With big open source products there also comes big requirements of infrastructure and related services. For example: There are plenty of repository servers for the Linux kernel and all the software available. There is maintenance work required for all those. So how can that service be offered in the long term? Well, I assume, that many of those servers are maintained by people who see this as their contribution - instead of paying fees, they set up a server and contribute that way. Costs less that usual maintenance license fees - and nobody pays taxes for it. :-)

Related posts: Paying for free and Open Source, The Open Source movement, The license keys, Why Linux?, Going Linux, The small software vendors, The community, Popular Ubuntu desktop myths.

Pros and cons of cloud solutions

Whenever a new (IT) hype is getting attention, I am careful with jumping on the train. Often it is just old stuff in new clothes and often big disadvantages are involved doing things in a completely new way. What also always happens in such a hype case is that first definitions are refined and cleared up, but later on everybody claims to offer products that match the hype (yes, when DMS (Document Management Systems) were the hype, printer manufacturers claimed doing DMS - and they were somehow right ;-) ). For a description of what "the cloud" is, look up "Cloud computing" at Wikipedia.

I am using "cloud" solutions (or let's say web applications offered by external service providers) myself. I tested and tried many, when they are still free but nowadays the providers start to charge for those. I still use several Google services (Google search, GMail, Google Calender, Google Reader and Blogger of course), mite (not free any more for new users), Vyew (occasionally) and some social networking sites (XING, Facebook, LinkedIn). I have dumped many others because of several reasons.

The pros of cloud based solutions:

1. The application and data is available from everywhere (every machine you are using).
   Well, if you have a home network plus fix IP address (or using DynDNS or similar service), but:
   
2. You don't need to do maintenance work (apply security updates, ensure power-supply, repair broken hardware etc).
   OK, you can rent a server (space) somewhere with different levels of maintenance work to be done by you.
   
3. The applications scale well (usually those services run on infrastructure that allows scaling).
   OK, if only you are using the application (and maybe some family members and friends) you might not need any scaling, but if you are a company (maybe a startup that expects or hopes for fast growing) this might be a real advantage.
   
4. Costs
   If you or your company is quite big and/or using a lot of software there might be several servers required and maintaining a smaller or larger server farm can be costly (just think of ensuring power supply and keeping spare parts of used hardware pieces like hard disks and so on). Cloud service providers are specialized on providing computing power and with the mass they can do it cheaper. I think this is the real driver for the rise of cloud based solutions (what a finding, that most things are driven by money...). Especially when you have only peek times where increased computing power is needed (e.g. some batch jobs running at night), it might be costly to have many servers up-and-running doing nothing most of the time.

The cons of cloud based solutions:

1. Privacy
   You do not know what the service provider is doing with your data. At best I would think they are only running some statistics to see where you make your business, what are customers buying from you (in the meaning of what products and services are going best) and so on. I think that depending on the service you are using there are usually some interesting statistics to be made that could be sold for money to consulting companies. If the service provider is not trustworthy, I could even imagine that they could sell more detailed data.
   
2. Influence
   This disadvantage does not (fully) apply if you are using services like Google app engine or EC2 because there you have more influence on what you are running (more or less your application or entire virtual machine that is just running on their hardware). Using an in-house solution you usually have more influence on the system configuration and the software, you are using. I have instances of phpBB, Wordpress, vTiger and others running. You can apply plugins as you like and have access to the source code (to apply fixes or some really personal adaptions). You can make backups and snapshots as you like, directly manipulate the database and so on. And you can pay developers for implementing your own requirements - which can be very important because how do you expect offering outstanding services, if you just use what everybody else is using? Using a service provider, your possible influence is usually very limited and you have the same functionality that everybody else has, who is using the service.
   
3. Security
   This disadvantage again does not (fully) apply if you are using services like Google app engine or EC2. But within an externally hosted application you are often sharing resources or the whole the application with other users. Who does guarantee you, that there is no security issue that allows one user to see private data from another? This is an additional security issue category apart from those regarding security hacking from outside.
   
4. Dependency
   You can only hope that the price of the service is kept at a reasonable level and that the provider company is not going bankrupt or somehow else stopping the service (even big companies are closing down services from time to time because they do not make enough money with them).
   
5. Performance
   Why performance? You can get a lot of performance by just renting more computing power? - The truth is: The performance increase you can get is for external users of your services. Remember, that with the solution in the cloud also the relevant data also needs to be there (or at least transferred back and forth more often) - and for you the data is then far away (internet is very slow in comparison with local access). Or if you host just the data inhouse, you anyway may get a performance issue (this time the access from outside if you don't have a fast database running on fast and enough hardware).
   For example: We have outsourced our FTP server for software installation package downloads and now putting a new version online takes a lot longer than before.
   Apart from the network traffic, even my laptop is already a dual core (bought more than a year ago), friends already have quad-core laptops. And using web applications in the cloud, there is nearly nothing to do with that enormous computing power (with just the browser running to surf the internet).
   In many cases it is definitely more efficient to run the applications local and just send the data over the (inter)net where necessary. Implementing a web-application that offers - let's say Word/Excel/Powerpoint-like features, require much server power although that computing power is already available locally. And I can see already a tendency back from web applications to full clients. But this begins to get off-topic because this is rather a thick vs thin client comparison - we had that already. - Final word to the performance: If you really need much computing power, then the cloud can really help you.

Final words: For big SAAS (Software As A Service) providers cloud based solutions are THE way to go to fit variable usage, costs and scalability. BTW: In theory a big company could also maintain an own server-farm for use and sell computing power in a cloud-like fashion. For a small startup the cloud is attractive because you can get going without investing too much in your own IT environment. Although, when you use a little more services than just Salesforce for example then several services can sum up in costs and lack of integration between each other. For a lot of mid-sized companies I do not see that relevance of cloud based solutions. And last but not least: Plenty of companies see their business contacts and business data as crucial for their success so they want to keep it very private (or they might be even legally bound to keep things private) - or they simply want to be flexible and reduce dependencies or vendor lockin respectively.

Last but not least: Implementing a solution in a cloud-enabled way requires additional considerations and work due to the problems coming along with computing in the cloud, so developing an application enabled for the cloud is usually more expensive (although depending on what exactly you are going to transfer to the cloud - that is not necessarily always a whole application, it can be a single task/job also).

Related posts: Web vs Thick client, Your holy machine, Surveillance, privacy (NSA, PRISM, ...) and encryption.

About Dell

"Finally" I can tell a little about personal experience with DELL hardware and their service:

The issue: After about two months the motherboard of a DELL Latitude E5500 suddenly broke. That was quite clear after not getting any noise from the fan, HD and no BIOS message. Just the CAPS lock blinking. Called support hotline and explained what happened and what I already tried.

For the guy on the phone it took a longer while to identify my guess that it must be the motherboard, but anyway - better to be sure. The last thing to figure out was the particular main board type that was built in because there were two options. I didn't know in detail because it was DELL assembling the thing, not me.

To keep a short story short: "Next business day" to DELL really means "fix on next business day" - it's not just the first reaction on next business day. A guy from a partner company came to me / to the notebook with two spare boards and repaired the notebook. Other "local" support contracts expect that you bring in the thing to some shop in your more or less neighborhood.

It is really a pity, that the quality of computer hardware parts in general is not what it was 15 years ago. Unfortunately I see the reduced quality everywhere. Therefore a good service is essential nowadays.

Related post: The hardware, Going Linux, Ubuntu compatible hardware, The Dell Latitude 2110 and Ubuntu 10.04.1, The truth about hardware support.

Social networking sites

There were several events and discussions that caused me to test several social networking sites over time. Finally I got to some conclusions.

I tested the following sites:

• XING
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Orkut
• StudiVZ/MeinVZ
• Ning

More social networking sites can be found on Wikipedia.

My focus was on the following features:

• Keep the contact
  I have a lot of work and a family - both needs much attention. I don't have the time for regular meetings with my friends. I do know many people that I would like to have contact more often but usually I see my good friends only once in a few months. So one big challenge is to not completely get the people out of sight that I do see very seldom.
  
• Efficiency
  As I have no time and as I am a life hacker using GTD methods, efficiency is a major priority for me. If the application does not bring big benefit with a minimum effort I will not use it.
  
• Annoyances
  It is easy to nag me with additional necessary clicks or time used to search for a specific feature (e.g. password change, write to others wall etc.). I looked for the tool that minimizes those annoyances.
  
• Security
  A https-Access to the site at least for the login is a must. If the whole site can be used https then either better.
  
• Members from your network
  It is somewhat important how many of the people you know are already using the particular site. Although some people have their account on several social networking sites, they are barely really using them all. And if you can convince somebody to sign up for a different site it will not be clear if this person will continue to use the site. So it is better if your contacts are already actively using the site.

And my results are:

• XING (Business focus):
  Good:
  
  • Complete navigation can be done in https.
  • Many of my colleagues, partners and customers do have an account there (talking about Austria/Europe).
  • The available features can be used quite easily.
  Bad:
  
  • Very annoying that many features are only available to the one that pays. Status updates and so on are limited to a certain number of messages. So if you want to stay informed you have to look at XING at the very least once a day - very annoying.
• Facebook (Private focus):
  Good:
  
  • What I like most is the fact that you can easily stay in contact with your friends and feel still connected somehow even if you see them very seldom. You get notified, what they like most, what they are currently interested in and doing. You can discovered shared interests you didn't were aware of. Many of my friends are already there - many are not (but from those most can't be found either anywhere else).
  • If you use Facebook, you IMHO don't need Twitter - such a feature of micro-blogging is included by status updates.
  Bad:
  
  • Login not https if you do not manually type it into the address link. Can be solved by saving the appropriate link in your bookmarks.
  • What I hate most on Facebook is the spam. There is a lot of stuff like karma, snowballs, pets that gets thrown at you. Similar problem with those huge amount of unwanted applications - I have no other word than spam for this.
• LinkedIn (Business focus):
  Good:
  
  • Focus on finding the right business partners - appropriate features like recommendation of others.
  Bad:
  
  • Tries to avoid adding people you do not personally know (well, also can be an advantage).
  • Limited features for those who don't pay.
  • Recommendation features are basic and do not reflect uncommon situations (e.g. I have a friend who is also a business partner and he runs two separate businesses - both combinations are not supported).
• Orkut (Private focus):
  Good:
  
  • Tightly integrated with GMail/Google as part of Google applications collection.
  Bad:
  
  • Poor feature set.
  • Quite nobody of my friends/contacts is there.
• StudiVZ/MeinVZ (Private focus):
  Good:
  
  • Focus on main features to link contacts (so it has not the spam level known from Facebook).
  Bad:
  
  • Very annoying separation of StudiVZ and MeinVZ. What if I run a business and do study? How to change later when I first used StudiVZ and then finished studying? - Maybe a change is easy but I currently do not know if this is well supported. Then when searching a friend I have to consider whether to search StudiVZ, MeinVZ or both.
  • Needs certificate exception added to firefox to somehow get https to work.
    
• Ning (Different focus):Ning has a little bit a special status - it is not one common social networking site, instead it offers the possibility to create more specialized networks. For instance to get all the Star Trek fans together or to create a community for all vendors and customers of a certain product or even to create communities for a specific hobby.
  Good:
  
  • Completely different areas for different communities can be created.
  • Combines social networking, forum and blogging features.
  Bad:
  
  • If I have multiple networks I may need to write some common personal information twice.
  • The forum features are quite limited although I think that for more specialized communities the forum features are the most important.

Conclusion:
For staying connected with friends you either see only once a year or even less, Facebook is IMHO the best choice. When you meet you can focus on the most important or interesting topics to talk and you can save a lot of time by "just bringing your friend up to date about a lot of minor changes your life". Those things can be published on Facebook. I would only keep attention not to publish too private and personal details. One good thing is also the availability of a mobile app that is available for most mobile phones - so you can post at Facebook what you are doing while on the road (I use this because while on train or waiting somewhere is the best time for such activities - you don't loose other important productive time then).

For business it may depend on your location what is more relevant for you - it might be XING or LinkedIn - both have business focus features, so it makes sense to have one private and one business focused social networking site in use. However, all the business focused sites do offer only limited features without payment - logically (you want to make business using that site so they also want to get their part of it).

Regarding personal information posted into social networking sites:
This is an often discussed issue, therefore I want to give a short statement on this. People often warn about the use of social networking sites and post too much private information.
If one use drugs or is alcoholic (s)he won't publish such information anywhere - not on paper nor somewhere on the internet (exceptions given for people who want to show in public how to quit).

I also had a discussion regarding "bad-will" of others. There are always people who don't like you even if you wish love, peace and success to everybody. As you can't satisfy everybody, there will be people who don't like you. The more information they can get about you the easier it is for them to harm you. - However, if somebody really wants to harm or nag you, phone number and address is the most important information. Most social networking sites allow particular privacy settings. In Facebook for instance posted information is only published to those who you confirmed as friends. If somebody does not like you and wants to talk bad about you to your friends, it's not your friends if they believe it without at least asking you also for a statement to hear both sides.

On the other hand, you would like your old friends to re-find you, you want to keep in touch with friends you see only seldom because you have not much time and you also might want head hunters to find you for offering a good job. So being present on the web and on social networking sites has also a lot of advantages. But anyway, you decide whether and where to be present - just remember: A big part of success is "showing up".

Related posts: Why I don't need Twitter, The mobile device, Surveillance, privacy (NSA, PRISM, ...) and encryption.

Why I don't need Twitter

Lately I read a lot about how useful Twitter is. I can't see much sense in this web application and I have mentioned that earlier in "What is useful software" talking more generally.

Now I want to go a little into detail regarding particular use cases:

• The main reason why Twitter was started was - as far as I noticed - to answer the question "What are you doing?".
  There are plenty of other applications and services that can be used to do the same. I noticed that Facebook can be used to do quite the same. The advantage of Facebook is that it has more features and combines networking with chit-chat like Twitter without the need to go to a separate site. Even on Skype you can set a current message containing an information about what you are currently doing.
  
  
• Let others know what you think.
  I think, that blogs are much more important and useful to let others know about my opinions. Twitter messages are limited to a few characters - not enough to explain personal theories or philosophical opinions.
  
  
• Chat
  For real chat (with single persons or particular groups) there are also plenty of other applications, this is nothing new. And again the limited message length reminds me to old days when data transfer rates where veeeery slow. Those were the times abbrevations like ROTFL or ASFAIK were invented to make the text short (and surely also to save time and effort). This is such annoying as when you want to add data in a database field and you notice it is too short.

Related post: What is useful software?

What is useful software?

After continuously reading about Twitter I created an account and tried it. Even after reading "A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twitter Simply, Productively, and Funly" at Zenhabits, I cannot really see the benefit.

I was used to face a problem and then create a solution for it. Looking at IT developments of the last years I think that a lot of software is created and used many times without either knowing why. I have read comments from people trying hard to figure out the deeper sense of using Twitter. Instead of just letting go they spend hours trying to find a sense in using it. I find that strange.

Apart from the fact that there are particular special features in Twitter other than being a micro-blog with some character of an RSS feed, there is no particular focus and that's the worst. If I would seek out for new employees, would Twitter be a starting point where to seek? Nope. Would I look at Twitter to read peoples opinions? No, I would read an RSS feed of a blog where I know that one takes more time to write a blog article than chit-chatting on Twitter. Would I look for solutions to technical problems? Neither.

There are already Instant messengers, Wikis, Blogs, RSS feeds, forums and mailing lists. All those things have been created to solve particular problems and - sure - later have been used in a wider area also for other purposes.

Software is a tool, it should help me - or the user - to get something done, faster or better.

There are enough areas in IT where still big mess is happening - Backup & Restore, Privacy & Security, Information management and document management, customer relationship management just to mention a few. So there are enough opportunities to improve.

When creating software we should keep in mind that

• there are people who want to get their work done quickly and then go outdoors and have fun (those people are not willing to play with fancy features),
  
  
• there are people having difficulties using a computer (they are not very familiar with it and even not very interested to change this) and
  
  
• there are people - power users - who want to get the most out of the computer by trying to solve everything with the help of the computer - those are also focused on achieving a lot of particular goals.

Twitter is an application that does not serve any of those groups mentioned above. If I seek for particular information there are particular websites, wikis or forums where I can find that information because those places are focused on particular areas providing much information. Same applies for particular software.

Twitter is doing chit-chat to the world - whoever is listening (or not). As soon as something is going to be all and nothing the question for the purpose should be asked.

Related post: Why I don't need Twitter.

Sunlight at the end of the tunnel

In the last years I have developed more and more on myself instead of using 3rd party components. I have tried to minimize the use of 3rd party tools and components because I can't fix issues for myself in mostly closed-source components (in the realm of specific applications there is not much open source yet). I would have used more of those 3rd party components if I would have experienced good support.

Unfortunately many companies try to sell you a cardboard box with some nice stuff and they don't want to bother with you any more. This is also due to license based sales systems. Although there are some exceptions, especially very big companies with license based sales are not interested any more in serving you. Companies rely on big advertising and big marketing events instead of getting recommended by users due to good service.

Often there is a lot of color and a lot of gushing and self-adulation and I hate it. Even on trade fairs I could really find much value. For the last year I was completely avoiding any of such events.

Yesterday I have been the first time at a local event of Sun Microsystems. Before I have only been on events from Microsoft. And it was a completely different experience:

• There were only few people there (it was not one of those mega-events known from Microsoft) and the presentations were completely free of self-adulation focusing on the content.
  
  
• The technical strategies presented attracted me, everything seemed to be clear and well designed. I could feel the underlying experience.
  
  
• The sales model was explained in about 10 minutes (there are companies where you need a special course to understand the licensing models). And you can either get support for some related 3rd party products directly at Sun.
  
  
• The presenters had a detailed background and technical knowledge.
  
  
• I could get in touch with all relevant persons and they answered all my questions. They explained me where I missed some underlying basic know how. They were available for more than an hour after the event.
  
  
• I got the E-Mail addresses of all presenters for questions that come up later. Sales already got back to me with answers to other questions.
  

So I feel better and full of hope that there are still companies who are interested in providing good services. If Sun keeps what such events promise subscribing to their services is value for money.

Related post: The dawn after sunset.