There’s hidden plumbing behind our online lives. As we link our online accounts to one another, it’s easy to lose track of what’s connected to what. Social sites make it easy to inadvertently share content with an audience you didn’t know you had. Social sites that want to quickly generate the appearance of traffic mine all our online accounts in search of things to include in status updates.

Which can have some awkward consequences.

Syndication is a land grab

Every online platform I use is desperate to pull in data from elsewhere. In the land grab for social media, each site wants to be the consolidator of my digital life. To do this, it needs content. So Facebook pulls in activity from all over the web; Linkedin, Friendfeed, and dozens of other sites all syndicate one another.

When I first enroll in a social platform, I link it to other sources of data. Initially, that system may be something personal; but online applications have a habit of changing, and something I once thought was just for me may one day become a shared system, dragging with it all of the links between systems that I once set up.

Inadvertent sharing

These forgotten social links show up in unexpected places. I was reminded of this–somewhat forcefully–when, a few months ago, I left myself logged into Flickr at a friend’s house. He thought it would be funny to upload something inappropriate (Really, really inappropriate. Don’t try to find this. Trust me.) to my account, not realizing it was linked to other social services: [Read more]

Have you ever found yourself using your computer and thinking “No! That’s not what I meant. Isn’t it obvious what I’m trying to do?”

Today you can use your computer for an ever-increasing number of activities – planning a holiday, reading the news, creating music, chatting, shopping, budgeting or just satisfying an idle curiosity.

But there is a problem; your computer is fundamentally stupid. You have to tell it exactly what you want. Often you have to enter information many times in different ways. The computer has no understanding of you as an individual, so it must ask for your address and billing information for every online purchase. It has no understanding of the context of your request, so it can’t know when you type “Java” into a search engine whether you are at that moment interested in the programming language, the island, or the coffee.

The only way for computers to get smarter at this is for them to learn more about you. Fortunately, a number of companies are now building software that shows that if you allow your computer to watch and learn from you, it can become far more helpful.

Social agents

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We’re headed to Israel for IGT09, and while we’re there, we’ll be meeting some of Israel’s startups. The folks at Israeli VC firm Gemini have set up a two-hour session entitled Crowdalytics and lean startup metrics on November 30, as well as one on cloud computing on the 1st.

The overall focus of the session? Startup acceleration and community monitoring. Startups need to learn fast from their mistakes, and they do this best when they have a complete perspective of their online presence. Today, that presence extends far beyond their own website, out into the communities and platforms of the web. We’ll look at analytics for lean startups and the emerging field of community monitoring, and discover how watching the web can help fledgling companies build the right business faster.

A bunch of local firms are going to be there, including EyeView, Mintigo, Collecta, Outbrain, TwitWit, Footbo, Ekoloko, Clicktale, and Confidela. Bitcurrent collaborator and Syntenic CTO Dan Koffler will also be joining us.

This week, many people have been given beta access to Twitter’s new Retweet feature. Unfortunately, rather than seizing the opportunity to pave the cowpaths by building a feature that reflects the way users are currently retweeting each other, Twitter have launched something which behaves quite differently.

You have to change your retweet behavior to use the new feature. This has angered many users, myself included, so I’d like to explain how I think the new feature should have been designed. To start with I’ll look at where retweeting came from, I’ll then explain some of the problems with the way it works currently, how Twitter are trying to address these problems with the new feature, and finally how I think the problems could be better addressed.

Why do we need a retweet feature anyway?

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This year, I attended O’Reilly’s Velocity conference in San Jose. I was there to present on web monitoring, and we’d just released Complete Web Monitoring, but conference organizer Jessie Robbins had a different idea. On short notice, he asked me to present something before the lunchtime break. I slapped together a presentation based on a Bitcurrent post written a while back.

Dr. Neil Gunther of Performance Dynamics, who was attending the event, approached me after the presentation. He had a number of questions about the math (or pseudo-math) in the slides, and offered to try to work out something less nonsensical than what I’d presented. Neil’s a rocket scientist (pretty much literally) and he’s been working in capacity and performance for decades, so he did a great job.

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Today, social networking was attacked. The two biggest networks, Twitter and Facebook, have been subjected to denial of service attacks, causing difficulty for millions of people around the world. Other sites including FriendFeed, LiveJournal, Posterous and su.pr have also experienced outages or slow response times. Social networking services have failed before, but never all at once.

While the precise causes have yet to be established, it’s clear is that today’s events have had a measurable effect on people across the globe, and the loss of multiple social networks at the same time has highlighted some serious issues and limitations

Disconnect, reconnect

One of the first things that happened is that people flooded to other mediums such as e-mail or instant messaging to discuss what was happening. [Read more]

Finally finished the last presentation of this trip, starting with clouds at Enterprise 2.0, then picking on Community Gardeners, then the cloud equation, and now a quick overview of what web operators can glean from the rest of the company.

I got to Velocity this morning, and Jesse asked me if I wanted to get on stage for five minutes to talk before lunch. Given that I’m doing a session in the afternoon called What The Rest Of Your Company Knows About Your Website, I figured I should make something new.

One of the things that’s abundantly clear — echoed in presentations from Shopzilla, Google, and many other excellent speakers — is that performance matters. It affects your conversion rates; it even changes your Search Engine Marketing ranking (which was news to me.)

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I’m at Velocity in San Jose. Just got in last night, and I wish I could have been here for the whole thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the biggest congregation of people who make the Internet work, in one place, for one subject. Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders, along with O’Reilly, get an amazing group of people together. Even the chat in the speaker room this morning was skimming the top of my forehead.

It actually feels like cloud computing and web monitoring are converging very quickly. It’s increasingly obvious that performance, user experience, and revenues are inextricably linked. Microsoft and Google covered this in a joint presentation yesterday, and by now, you’vep probably heard about the number of results Google shows. They tested the number of results that should be shown on the first results page, then tested them.

As Google’s VP of products Marissa Mayer points out, users wanted 30 results. But when they turned this on, they saw a 25% drop in searches on the site!

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Just finished a one-hour dash through web monitoring from a community manager’s point of view. The slides are available as a PDF; while this deck deals somewhat with the business of monitoring communities, it also looks at how to tie those communities back to business outcomes in analytics and how to take a more holistic approach.

Plus, it has my new favorite image of a community gardener in it. It’ll get me yelled at.  Here’s the deck.

We’ll have more stuff like this over at www.watchingwebsites.com.