Friend Bookmarklets are something I’ve been playing with for awhile. WordPress users are no longer left out. With my new Friend Bookmarklets for WordPress plugin, users can generate a self-hosted friend bookmarklet to facilitate adding friends to the WordPress links system.

Part of the big buzz surrounding Web 2.0 has been pull alerts as opposed to push alerts.

Push alerts / messages –  I send you a message.  This is how email and IM work.  I choose when, where, and how the message is sent and largely control how you receive it.  I send an email, you get it in your inbox.

Pull alerts / messages – I send a message which may (or may not) be intended for you primarily.  You decide when, where, how, and IF you receive it.  This most common form of this is RSS/ATOM feeds.  I publish to my blog / Twitter / whatever and you subscribe to me if you want to.  You can receive alerts via email, IM, Xanga, Facebook, Google Reader, BoxtheWeb, Sage, or a myriad of other options.

Some have said that push alerts are dying.

This makes some sense.  When I post on a forum, I don’t want to have their system email me every time there is a reply (email/push).  What I really want is to have easy access to a list of posts replying to mine to look over (RSS/pull).

However, this can go a bit too far.  Pull IM does exist to some extent, but it defeats the purpose.  I want you to see something NOW, it’s URGENT, INSTANT.  Pull does not fit this.

Push alert systems, however, just refuse to die!  Facebook/Myspace messages/wall posts.  Blog comments.  New friend-group messaging systems like Pownce.  Push is extremely popular.

The masses are rarely right, but perhaps we shouldn’t brush off push alerting altogether at this point.

Now even more people can benefit from my Friend Bookmarklet concept.  Just head on over to the Generation Page.  If your service is not listed, you can customise the URL pattern manually!  Be sure to contact me with any new URL patterns, so that I can add them!

A notable addition is 2Fwww.blogrolling.com%2Fadd_links_pop.phtml%3Fu%3D%24%7Burl%7D%26t%3D%24%7Bname%7D">Blogrolling.com support.

This was too good not to blog.  The social networking/ratings-and-recommendations site Trusted Opinion is somehow prone to SPAMers!  Billed as a way for friends to rate and recommend things for each other, the service seems good on the surface.  I was never very impressed with the insides of the site, but now I’m turned off forever.

SPAM

I received today in a ‘Private Message’ on Trusted Opinion, SPAM.  Not just SPAM, but the kind one would expect in a poorly filtered email inbox.  It’s a Nigerian money laundering scam, and real money laundering or fake, it’s one of the oldest and most well known forms of SPAM.

Pretty pathetic, if you ask me.

Also known as Portable Social Networking, this is the concept of decentralising the social networking functionality of sites like Facebook so that one does not have to use every service to connect with everyone (previously covered here).

Videntity is a wonderful service for this movement, and one that I have been using as the hub of much of my efforts. Explode seems promising, but they’re down for upgrade.

So let’s talk about my list from last time:

1. hCards and Pingerati : For Blogger I have a wizard. Pingerati pings still manual.  For WordPress there is a widget.  Pings still manual.  For even more professional information (such as my resume) there is an hResume WordPress Plugin.  For other websites/services there is always the hCard Creator.  Of course, Videntity.org supports hCard by default.
2. XFN Friends lists : For Blogger I have a wizard.  This wizard will actually work on any web page or on any service where you can post (X)HTML (including MySpace or Xanga!)  For WordPress there is a nice plugin, although a widget version would be a bonus.  Videntity supports this by default.As far as finding/adding friends goes I have a bookmarklet for Videntity that allows one to add hCards, Facebook results, or Wink.com people results as friends/contacts.  Bookmarklets for other services would not be hard.  For Blogger we would need an actual blogroll-producing service beyond just a wizard to make this work.
3. Public/private profiles : Again, Videntity has this built right in (as long as you have the URL that the contact uses for OpenID on the friend list, it does not follow rel=me).  I am working on a solution for WordPress.  Would people be interested in a solution for Blogger/other websites?
4. Messaging : not sure where I stand on this.  Lots of nice contact options, and creating a ‘wall’-like interface on WordPress would be easy.  The question is : what is the goal of this?  If it is just the address book features then a way to integrate social networking contact lists with email clients / Gmail might be better.  If it is being able to communicate without revealing your email address a protocol/system for that might be easy enough.My brother (and avid Facebooker) says that it is about visibility.  The benefit of Facebook messaging, for him, is the unified notifications area that he KNOWS his friends all check.  He KNOWS that they will see his message.  He is not sure they check their email.

I still promote the idea of supporting rel=tag on hCards.  We need a better hCard search engine, one that takes Pingerati pings, crawls regularly (some of my pings from months ago were never indexed by the Technorati Kitchen hCard search), outputs results as hCards (to facilitate things like my bookmarklet), and recognizes rel=tag.

Perhaps a tagspace could do a rev=tag for members.  If an hCard URL has rel=tag to a page that has rev=tag to it that would give credibility to the category.

Notifications (think Facebook mini-feed) need to fit into this idea somehow.  Events are hCalendar.  Notes/posts/shares are hAtom/xFolk.  Status is something I’ve blogged about recently too.  Services like Twitter are heading in the right direction.