SocialOyster Searches For Your Friends’ Online Life

There are many lifestreaming services trying to put our online social life together, such as FriendFeed, SocialThing! etc. Here comes another one called SocialOyster. Developed by Marcus Reimold from Cologne, SocialOyster is only two weeks old, at very early stage but it does bring something interesting.

Three services now can be found on SocialOyster:

1. The Oysterpass – here you can create an overview of your social activities. It currently supports around 20 popular online services such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube etc.

2. Social search engine – this is the feature I found quite interesting. You can simply input your friend’s username, then it can get his/her online activities at different platforms for you. It also offers a Place Search. The idea is that you can use it to find out who is using what service (e.g. twitter) around you.

3. The Oysterline – you can follow your friends live using Oysterline. Instead of aggregating all your friends’ activities into a simple feed. SocialOyster actually comes up with another approach to display the timeline of your friends’ activities. Your friends’ activities are organized into difference panes and each pane shows the activities from one service. By this way, friends’ lifestreams are visually categorized by services they are using. You can check the public Oysterline for example.

I am sure that more and more online services will be supported by SocialOyster soon and its user interface can be improved too. Lifestreaming service is indeed very useful and promising, but I believe for this type of service, Simple is the Best. Streaming all the activities into a Feed that I can subscribe to will be just enough for me to track all my friends’ online life.

August 22, 2008 · Filed Under Web 2.0

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A Lesson From BBC.com Chinese Media Sites Should Learn

Ashley Highfield, the BBC director of new media and technology, said all future BBC digital output and services will focus on three concepts - “share”, “find” and “play”.

New BBC.com was officially launched at 27 February, 2008. Guardian commented:

“…(BBC) plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com…”

Chinese Internet has been trying hard to catch up with the western industry, Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter etc have been studied and discussed since the first day when they went to public. It seems that people now have understood web2.0, and tens of video-sharing, image-sharing, micro-blogging and SNS can prove that. BBC.com was unblocked in March after years of strict access. It is a great news for those who complains about the censorship in China, but disappointedly there are very few of us has realized that there is much more we can talk about about the BBC.com.

More and more Chinese media sites now provides blog service, even offer video-sharing feature to attract more users and proclaim they are now into web2.0, which is really a good thing to hear. However, if we could spend some time on BBC.com, you must be amazed by what they are doing. Chinese Internet should learn from BBC.com: Read more

May 25, 2008 · Filed Under Media, Web 2.0