Colin Charles Agenda

Today I turned the switch off for Google Friend Connect (something I turned on in February 2009). There is now no longer a social bar when you visit (though most of you read this site via RSS).

There are a myriad reasons as to why I disabled it, but it generally boiled down to the fact that I never figured out how to fully use it. I thought it might be useful for blog readers to connect with each other, but thats what the comments are really for.

Running YSlow or Page Speed, the thing that slowed my blog down the most, seemed to be the Friend Connect social bar. This is expected, but for not providing anything additional, I decided to zap it.

The Business Times still has their Friend Connect enabled, but its not the social bar – they’ve preferred going to using the members gadget. Currently, they have 1,327 folk who are members, while 7,051 people like their Facebook page more. I’m thinking more sites will find that a Facebook widget will benefit more in terms of user engagement.

I thought about utilizing Friend Connect to email newsletters to my “fans”. And while there is newsletter support, only about 10% of the people on my site have opted in to receive a newsletter (to be fair, I never did encourage anyone to signup for a newsletter – and this feature was not around before, as far as I remember). That’s a pretty poor conversion rate. There does not seem to be any other way to connect to members – no way to email them.

I also tried this on another website, a community for fashionistas in Malaysia. It was removed rather quickly, because chatboxes are still preferred, in comparison to Friend Connect!

And then there was the other thing… When I loaded up the blog on my iPad, the Friend Connect social bar would stick on the screen. Did not seem very UI friendly, and I had no intention of fixing it.

I’ve not seen Google put much effort behind Friend Connect any longer, and they seem to have other foci when it comes to being social on the Web. Even during their recent DevFest’s, the whole Friend Connect topic seems to have gone silent.

Thanks to all of you that joined the community, made comments, etc. Goodbye Google Friend Connect.

I was at the Google Maps Malaysia launch at No Black Tie yesterday. All round, the Google chaps did a great job at organising a fun-filled event, which basically meant I got to talk to a lot of friends (it was a combination of Barcamp, open source hackers, entrepreneurs and some new media folk – I think I spotted a smattering of bloggers too), and also meet a few new ones ;-)

• I guess the big deal about yesterday was the launch of http://maps.google.com.my. No longer will you be re-routed to the States, and have to specify, sometimes even up to postcode level. This kind of stuff has mostly been working for a while, but I guess its now official.
• When asked when Street View will come to Malaysia, there was no comment on the timeline.
• I saw KLue being mentioned, but there was no speaker from there. It seems like their event guide has been extracted via a mapplet, and placed on AppSpot, to give you a Events in Malaysia map “overlay”. Pretty cool, and can really be integrated well, into something else…
• VirtualMalaysia spoke at the event, showing how they did some copy/paste of the mapplets, and how they built somewhat of an app out of it. I think Yoon Kit tweets it best:
  

  Virtual Malaysia copy and pasted the javascript for Tourism Msia. @arzumy asks “How much did u charge for it?”. Its our money eh? #mymap

• Back to Mapplets: they’re mini-applications to run in Google Maps. You have data, it can be overlaid with Google Maps. This is worth playing with.
• Not maps related, but the AJAX API’s Playground is a useful learning tool. You can talk to all the Google APIs, and it becomes easy – copy/paste and things happen.
• When its finally time to write code, don’t redo, just reuse – check out gmaps-utility-library. Its all Apache licensed, so convenient to pop into your code.
• Its worth noting that searching for properties to rent/buy should be easier now, considering iProperty.com.my now is also powered by Google Maps.
• Are you a local business? Make sure you add yourself, in the local business centre.
• There were a bunch of international sites using Maps, but the only one that caught my eye was Travellr. I’d have remembered more sites, had the Internet been working…
• Highly amusing to see that there were people from the event management company, trying to show us how to use Google Maps Mobile. Poor girl had “fun” trying to demo this to Yoon Kit, Han, Ditesh, Kevin and I. Problem is, Yoon Kit, Han and I were already playing around with Maps on the mobile for a while, and had been sharing our locations with Latitude with each other for a while (for example, we knew that Han was on a highway about 16 minutes before he arrived for the event!)
• Naturally, no Google event is complete without a t-shirt. We’re all now proud owners of a blue t-shirt, which has a marker that says “I am here.”

Now a bit about the location (which in my opinion, was a little crappy):

• Kudos to Google for getting the valet service going at No Black Tie. I’ve never been there before, but my trusty GPS told me how to get there — and then I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if I had a device, with just Google Maps, and a 3G connection, and some intelligent caching (for when I hit network blindspots), and a GPS chip on board? I’d prefer that any day over Malsingmaps on my Garmin…
• WiFi was fail. Maxis Broadband 3G was fail. It seemed like Celcom was fail. The event location, near the stage, basically meant that you got no Internet. My phone (DiGi) still had EDGE though ;-)
• No Black Tie, doesn’t seem to have the best management. I personally would never hold an event there. Why? Because the management is quite liberal at trying to embarrass the event organisers. I was going to get a beer, when I was told that we were over the RM2,000 quota, and I can’t get a beer. He shows me his chit, saying how much over the tab we are — I don’t need to know this, and this is something you should never tell a customer. Take it up with the organisers, and solve it amicably. But what took the cake? Another bloke asked for two beers and he shouted at the top of his voice, that the tab was dry. I mean this is Google we’re talking about — they’re not exactly a company short on money, and they splurge on things, all the time. I don’t represent Google, but I felt bad for them. For what its worth, in under 3 minutes and 25 seconds Google had extended the tab ;-)

About a month ago, I decided to try Google Friend Connect and their Social Bar. I still haven’t figured out its use fully yet, but maybe its there for keeping my readers connected to each other?

A modest number of folk have joined, but today I noticed them becoming friends. Win?

Its good to see that Business Times in Malaysia has something similar. All this is the work of @kedai. Lots of members, but no conversation yet, so it proves that there’s not much great use of it yet. I notice that there is a “Like!” activity (look at this for example), which then gets shared in the stream (not a comment but it says “username liked article”). This is again something kedai wrote, which is a very simple activity.

He, like I, wants to know how else you can socialise a site?

Update: Robert Scoble speaks to Kevin Marks about this, and the video itself is pretty interesting. There’s also a little discussion happening on FriendFeed.

I was a little worried last week with regards to our Google Summer of Code status, but I’m glad to see that MySQL has been accepted, for a third year running, for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Mentors & students alike, check out the ideas page. You as a student can even submit ideas, and we’ll look for a mentor for you, naturally.

Things we’re looking for:

• Simple bug fixes
• Improvements in documentation of code
• Test suite improvements
• New features, but simple enough to implement in timeframe
• Pet projects
• Extending tools, creating new tools that support MySQL
• Wider ecosystem that is MySQL – this means I’m looking at you, Drizzle, even

Again, if you have any queries, drop me a line via email, as I’m the Program Administrator again :)

After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it means having someone to help you write features, you’ve been wanting — someone to spend a good fourty-hours per week, hacking on the feature you most want (and its do-able within 12 weeks or so). As usual, mentors, we have an ideas page up. Mentors, go forth and fill it up.

Students, should also feel free to discuss their ideas, either on the wiki, or via the mailing list. You don’t need to apply yet (in fact, you can’t till we get accepted into the program to begin with!).

Remember, this is the year to Make MySQL Contributor Friendly (MMCF). Check the interview with Masood Mortazavi for more. So much potential for server contributions abound.

If you have any other queries, please don’t hesitate to drop me a comment, or an email at colin@mysql.com. Now, on toward happy hacking!

I decided to experiment with Google Friend Connect today, after seeing the “Social bar” being used on the Open Source Bridge site. I had even set aside some time to start writing some code; to my surprise, Google did all the magic for me, and it didn’t even take me longer than five minutes to setup.

It was as simple as setting up a new site, uploading two files into ~/www/, then editing my WordPress theme’s footer.php and adding the auto-generated code before the </body> tag (I did it after the <?php wp_footer(); ?> call though).

I immediately joined my own site. At first, I setup a profile, but then realised that I could import my profile from my usual Google one. Heck, I could even import a profile from Twitter! One thing I found odd, was that to edit my profile, I had to do it from the social bar itself (from the far left column).

The social bar – click for a larger version

On the far left column, you can join the site, or edit your profile and settings. Next to that, you can see the activity stream throughout the site. Next to that, you’re given the option to add comments. And on the far right, you can see like-minded visitors who’ve joined, and even become friends with them.

What does the social bar do for me?

1. It allows members to join my blog and be part of my community. Do you remember MyBlogLog (a Yahoo! service)? Well, Friend Connect allows me to have MyBlogLog type features, with no problem whatsoever.
2. It allows comments from members. These can be fine grained comments – either for the particular page, or for the whole site. In my experimentation, I’m using it for the whole site naturally. On a blog, if you’re going to write a comment of substance, you’re going to do it with the commenting facility available on the blog – however, if you just want to write throwaway comments, one-liners, “me too” replies or have one of those “chatboxes” that blogs tend to have, you’ll find the Friend Connect Social Bar to be quite useful.

I’ll be the first to admit, that its probably not too useful for me, per se, but I can see its usefulness for sites that require a lot of collaboration.

Sites that I think can benefit from Friend Connect? Kenny Sia – the Chatterbox can be replaced with the comments in Friend Connect, and frankly all the one-liner comments will be better suited for the Social bar’s comments (maybe on a per-page basis?) – plus, he’ll get a “community” for free. LiewCF can also benefit – the “members” feature provided by MyBlogLog (he currently boasts 1,441 members) can probably grow with Friend Connect, and all those one-liner comments again, can go into the comments of the Social bar. Not picking on either site, but I think they can “socialise” their sites a lot better.

MyBlogLog is kind of a walled garden. You need to have an account there (on Yahoo!). Friend Connect tends to be a bit more useful – you can either use a Google, AIM, Yahoo! or OpenID account to login (a lot of bloggers will already realise they have OpenID for free – wordpress.com, livejournal, et al provide this). I think it can be a bit more useful if it supported logins from Windows Live/MSN accounts too – after all, a large proportion of my non-geek friends are MSN users.

And if I join another community, that information is cross-pollinated to my other communities. As a site owner, you can even see “reports” of how social your site is, over time – this whole idea of data mining (ok, analytics) is highly useful.

What if you decided to use comments on your blog, for just that – comments. But use the Social bar to enter “blog suggestions”. Smells like Skribit, to some extent. Do I see myself keeping the Friend Connect Social bar at the bottom of my blog for long? Who’s to say. Let’s see if a community builds up around it. I think this will be most useful for sites that really want conversations amongst readers, something like the foss.my site, or other social sites.

Are you using Google Friend Connect? How? What are your thoughts on it? Don’t hesitate to share them in the comments (or via the Friend Connect Social Bar!).