Facebook and MySpace are the two leading platforms for the social Web. Increasingly, marketers are finding they need to be there because so many of us spend our free time there. We go there to get information about our friends, and so it follows that these platforms ought to make it easy for us to contribute. It's easy to update your status all day, and it's easy to upload photos. It's not so easy to wrote long, thoughtful pieces--what we might think of as the traditional blog post.

MySpace provides the more mature platform. Each account has something called a blog. Blog posts have titles, bodies and threaded comments. I guess they have some "advanced" interface for posting to your blog, but it doesn't run on Firefox 3 and/or Ubuntu. The plain text interface is fine, but there really isn't much excuse for not providing a full HTML editor. There are free libraries for providing this functionality. Wordpress and Drupal do this very well.

Asking for a posted time and date is dubious. I can see writing a post to be made live ahead of time. Writing a post for January 1, 2006 seems like nonsense. Categories are good. Giving me a closed set of categories is too limiting. Folksonomies work. MySpace should support them.

MySpace asks you to tell your readers what music you're listening to (yeah, I might listen to music while I write), what book you're reading, what DVD you're watching or what video game you're playing (I can't do any of these while writing a blog post). They also ask you to note your mood. This is the spot to hack a folksonomy, but none of this seems very well thought out.

Given that I blog here on Clear Night Sky and on my own site (www.leonatkinson.com), I would much rather have content flow from those sources into my MySpace page. There is no such option. There is an option for flowing posts outward. It's standard to include a tag in the HTML header to indicate to your browser that a feed of the posts exists. It's also customary to present a small, orange icon to the RSS feed. MySpace provides a textual link only. Regardless, you can subscribe to this link and get the public posts in yoru preferred feed reader. (Mine is Google Reader). There are a few MySpace bloggers that I follow. Output was sketchy for a while, but it's been fast and reliable for many months.

Allow me to qualify that last statement. It's reliable when reading in Reader. It's entirely unreliable when it comes to flowing into Facebook, which does support importing "notes" from an RSS feed. I can only conclude that between MySpace and Facebook, one or both of them has created this problem. Perhaps this is a way to make the other platform seem bad.

Facebook prefers to call their blogging platform "notes". There's a title and a body. You can attach photos. And you can list the people you mentioned in the note. There's no way to apply tags, or note your mood. Most importantly, the editor is plain text with the option to apply styles if you know HTML. 

I do like that Facebook allows me to import notes automatically from an RSS feed. I don't like that I can choose one--and only one--feed. Many of us blog in multiple places. There is technical solution to this. I could aggregate the feeds from my two blogs. Google Reader can do this for me, but I should not have to work around Facebook's limitation. It seems to be tied a decision to offer a set of import points (Digg, Flickr, Delicious) which treats "blog" as a parallel. I can only assume this is due to lack of imagination at Facebook.

It's common for a blog aiming to make someone money to truncate the posts in the feed, which forces readers to click through and look at ads to finish reading the post. I'm sure that's why MySpace mangles their feeds, too. It's a cheap trick they don't need to play. Facebook does not seem to offer a feed of notes, so the situation is even worse.

For anyone who wants to blog while also getting their thoughts into Facebook and MySpace where their friends will find them, I suggest creating a blog for free on Wordpress. Set the feed to import into Facebook. On MySpace, find the "RSS Reader" app. This creates a separate box on your profile page that lists your blog posts. If you want to take a step up, get a low end Web account ($5/month) and run a copy of Wordpress yourself. That will allow you to use the MySpace Crossposter plugin for Wordpress which sends your posts directly into MySpace.

The case of Julie Amero in New Jersey is a cautionary tale of the consequence of ignorance, technological and otherwise.

(via Taran Rampersad's Facebook link post)

It’s been a while since I’ve been as disappointed in a consumer electronics product as I am with my new Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray Disc Player.

The setup was smooth, and the picture is great – really great.

However: I have certain usability expectations in upgrading from an older standard DVD player, especially given that this is a second generation Blu-ray player. From the “Powered by Java” on the box and the 4 page GNU license in the manual, this is a computer in a DVD player enclosure and doesn’t do a whole lot to hide that fact.

It takes about 3 minutes to boot this particular computer when I hit the power-on, and then another minute or so before I can watch a movie. It also seems to power itself off after being in pause for a bit – helping to keep us green I guess. But it doesn’t remember where I was in the movie, so coming back in the room after a phone call, it takes another 4 minutes to reboot the “computer” and use chapter search (once I’m allowed to do that) to get to approximately where I left off.

Maybe I need to RTFM, but unfortunately, it really is a FM. It looks like it was written circa 1988, and it’s one of those manuals where you wonder why they left 2/3 of the relevant info out of the manual, and then 2/3 of what’s left can’t be found in the index. At least it’s replete with notes that say essentially, “This may not work”.

My guess is that the format wars caused everyone to be a bit too hasty in product development and rollout because it shows.

[updated in the comments - Nov 23, 2008]

Drupal 6.0 was released today. It has many new, appealing features. We use Drupal frequently for our own sites (such as Clear Night Sky itself) and work for our clients, such as Range Fuels. Obviously, many other big brands use Drupal, too.

This is one example of open source software firing on all cylinders. For certain uses, Drupal is the only serious choice.