For the past few weeks I have been using Digsby, a smart Trillian-style multi-protocol IM client. I’ve tried such programs before — Trillian, Pidgin and Meebo — but for one reason or another they all annoyed me. For this reason, before Digsby I stuck to having MSN, Google Talk and Skype all open at once.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

Ever since Facebook Applications exploded onto the scene, there has been a problem. Well, I say it’s a problem, but in reality it is actually an amazing thing. It is only perceived to be a problem by old fashioned companies that just Don’t Get It.

For several months now the old Scrabulous saga has been playing out. Some smart guys thought it would be a great idea to be able to play Scrabble with your friends on Facebook. They were right. It became Facebook’s most popular application, and could even count Mark Zuckerberg among its users.

Unfortunately, the creators of Scrabulous didn’t own the intellectual property to the game. The people who do own the IP, Hasbro and Mattel, have gone on the assault. They are suing Scrabulous’s creators Rajat Agarwall and Jayant Agarwall. This is despite the fact that the brothers have undoubtedly done more than anyone else in recent years to raise the profile of Scrabble.

Do you think if Hasbro and / or Mattel had created a Facebook Application for Scrabble it would have been as successful as Scrabulous? I, for one, highly doubt it. Their reaction alone has demonstrated that they simply don’t “get” the internet. Just like the recorded music industry before them, board game companies, it seems, have woken up to find that the internet has eaten away at their old fashioned business model. They don’t know how to capitalise on the internet. It needn’t necessarily be a threat. But their head-in-the-sand behaviour ensures that it will be.

My personal pet theory is that old companies got far too cosy in the 20th century ways. With the intellectual property rights wrapped up, they have seen no need to innovate. They have rested on their laurels. As such, their products have stagnated. Remember, the optimal length of copyright is around 15 years. A similar length will apply to intellectual property. Scrabble can trace its history back to four times that length.

As was pointed out on the Freakonomics blog earlier this year, Mattel’s and Hasbro’s plans for the future of Scrabble are pretty lame to say the least.

The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

In the meantime, the best thing to happen to Scrabble in generations is being targeted by Hasbro and Mattel simply because they were not smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. They should have applauded and endorsed Scrabulous. That way, they would have ended up with a hell of a lot more respect and almost certainly more sales than under the current strategy of the companies.

In the latest stage of their assault, Mattel have finally launched their own ‘official’ Scrabble Facebook Application. But The Guardian reports that all is not well. And yet again, the problem can be laid at the door of intellectual property rights.

Seemingly, the new ‘official’ application is only endorsed by Mattel — not Hasbro. This means that you can not play Scrabble in the USA or Canada, where Hasbro own the rights. For this reason alone, the trust of Facebook’s users has been lost. If you can’t even play against your friends just because they happen to live in North America, why would you bother defecting from Scrabulous which currently has approximately 700,000 “daily active users”?

Today another Facebook Application has been hit by a similar corporate strangling. This time it is from a company that you would think would be able to cope with new technologies better.

Tetris Tournament was an early Facebook hit, and one of my favourite Facebook apps. It didn’t take long for its name to change to BlockStar, but it was still clearly derived from Tetris. The game itself was a bit clunky, but it did the job and was good fun.

Today it has become “Tetris Friends (formerly Block Star)“. Yes, it is now an official Tetris app. So, is this simply BlockStar with a shiny Tetris logo over the top? Far from it. The new game is utter, utter shit. Amazing when you consider that it is actually the official Tetris game. The original is a classic. This is a big pile of flaming hairy balls.

For one thing, the game now only lasts a maximum of two minutes. That’s right. No new levels. No game over as you reach the top. Just a high score after two minutes. It is ready to finish just when you get into the groove. Meanwhile, the graphics are cluttered and confusing. This game is intensely unsatisfying.

The reviews agree. The application’s wall has become a stream of obscenities while the reviews section has turned into a mere succession of one-star ratings.

In this respect, the users of Scrabulous have got off very lightly indeed. The best Tetris app on Facebook has been mauled out of all recognition.

I am usually a defender of Facebook. But this time I think they have overstepped the line and have introduced a ‘feature’ that makes me personally uncomfortable. From The Facebook Blog:

Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.

News Feed created a huge privacy concern when it was introduced last year. But I didn’t buy the complaints then. News Feed amounted to Facebook displaying things you did on Facebook. If you don’t want your Facebook friends to know something, perhaps you shouldn’t do the action on Facebook. Just a suggestion.

However, Project Beacon is on a completely new level. Now Facebook friends may know about things that I do on sites that aren’t Facebook. There is no way of knowing whether or not a website is going to report to Facebook what you are doing. As this blog post points out:

It’s a little bit creepy to know that if I visit the Internet Porn Emporium, this store might attempt to tell Facebook that I’m a patron.

And although you can select for the information not to appear on your News Feed, Facebook will apparently still have the data.

It just feels a little bit like it’s too much of my private information getting into the hands of too many people without me necessarily knowing. There is a brilliant comment at Mashable which makes another good point about this:

Letting my friends know that I ordered x, y, and z from Amazon doesn’t sound very appealing. Could also totally spoil the surprise of a birthday gift or something.

So I will be blocking Facebook Beacon.

Via Tom’s View of the World’s Delicious account.

So there I was on Monday night, lying in bed listening to Up All Night as I normally do. Then all of a sudden they began talking about me.

Once again it was the Pods and Blogs segment, and once again it was in the Britblog Roundup slot. The very same slot where I farted through my mouth precisely seven days earlier.

I was surprised by the attention that was attracted by my post about whether or not I should put my blogs on my CV. It was really intended as a warm-up post to the long list of skills that I have acquired as a blogger which was posted the following day. Compared to the “warm-up” post, the list bombed.

It just goes to show once again that I am terrible at working out which of my posts are better than others.

I have to admit, it was quite a strange experience lying in bed listening to Rhod Sharp mulling over my career prospects!

One thing though. I didn’t say that I was worried about my Facebook and MySpace accounts. My Facebook and MySpace accounts are impeccable (I hope)!

I don’t know if Matt Wardman will be providing the audio this week, but it is still available on the podcast — the relevant bit is around 27 minutes in.

Update: Matt Wardman has uploaded the audio here.

(Yes, every post I write about RSS must contain the hilarious “‘RSS’ sounds a little bit like ‘arse’” pun.)

I have a request for those people who publish RSS feeds. Make them full feeds!

I know there is a supposedly a debate about whether partial or full feeds work best. Well, that is not really the right way to put it. Everybody knows that full feeds work better than partial feeds. I mean, it is like saying that a sandwich is better than the crumbs. It’s just obvious.

But some website owners are, for some reason, sniffy about full feeds. Some people publish partial feeds for relatively superficial reasons, for instance because they can’t bear for any readers to be reading it in an environment other than their lovingly handcrafted web page design. Others have more serious suspicions: that full feeds rob them of page views and rob them of advertising revenue.

Earlier this year, the rather good Freakonomics blog moved to The New York Times website. At the same time, the full feeds were snatched away from the blog’s many readers. Apparently, it is NYTimes policy.

Immediately there was an angry reaction from readers. It (mostly) wasn’t from readers concerned about NYTimes itself or even due to the fact that the URLs had changed, that there was an entirely new navigation system to accustomise to, or anything like that. They were almost all from people who were angry that the full feed had overnight turned into a partial feed. Many readers even said they were unsubscribing.

The comments to the initial post were just the start of it. Several subsequent threads descended into similar “outraged of Bloglinesville” mobs, and it has become a recurring topic on the blog ever since. This is one plus side — at least the authors are open about the problems and the reasons why they can no longer offer a full feed.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to get angry, I would guess that I have read a lot less of the Freakonomics blog since the move. This is entirely down to the fact that it no longer offers a full feed.

I am aware that a lot of people simply cannot believe that (or understand why) full feeds generate as many clickthroughs as (or sometimes even more clickthroughs than) partial feeds do. It doesn’t seem to make sense, right? If people can read the entire content without leaving their RSS reader, why on earth would they visit the website?

But it doesn’t work like that. FeedBurner say so — and they would know. To me, it is just common sense. I have been reading RSS feeds for a few years now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of the reasons why partial feeds just do not work.

Think about why people use RSS feeds as opposed to visiting the different web sites all the time. It’s obvious: people who use RSS feeds do so because it makes it easier and quicker to read everything they want to read.

So immediately we have run into the problem with partial feeds — they do the precise opposite of what the reader wants. They make it more difficult and slower to read what you want to read. If you have begun reading and want to read the rest of the content, it involves clicking through and waiting for the (probably bloated) web page to load. It is a needless, unwanted, time wasting, inefficient hassle.

That explains why readers generally don’t like partial feeds. But what about the clickthrough rate? First of all, it is worth pointing out that page views are falling out of favour as a meaningful web metric thanks to the increasing use of Ajax and other kinds of magic. In a funny way, more page views usually means it’s a worse website. (Ask users of MySpace and Facebook about the navigation of those sites, and see which site has the happiest users.)

But let us say that page views (and certainly visits) are a good thing. So why should you use full feeds? Once again, for me it is down to convenience. I use RSS feeds because it allows me to squeeze more reading into a shorter space of time. Imagine sitting there in front Google Reader. You have a list of items waiting to be read. So you get on with it and start scrolling through, scanning for anything interesting.

By now, you may have realised why partial feeds do not automatically generate clickthroughs. It is because there is less of the content for me to scan-read and evaluate. Typically, a partial feed will contain the headline and the first couple of dozen words. This simply is not enough to give me as a reader an idea of how good the rest of the article is. Neither is it long enough for the author to sell the article.

There is one site that falls victim to this more than any other if you ask me. Tim Worstall, one of the most widely-respected British bloggers. His RSS feeds simply do not do his blog justice.

I will sit there with Google Reader and scroll through the many posts he has written that day, and all too often I find myself not being enticed by a single one of them. That is not because they are not interesting. It’s because his partial feeds simply do not give me any confidence that clicking through to read the rest of the post will be worth my time.

If Tim Worstall writes ten posts in a day (which is my conservative estimate of what he averages), he is asking me to read ten summaries, click ten times, wait for ten web pages to slowly load, then read ten full posts. What a waste of time!

This is especially annoying if the partial feed stops in the middle of a sentence, which is almost every time. When the partial feed stops at the end of a sentence, then there is the confusion over whether I had read the full post (just a really short one), or if it was just a fluke that the feed finished in a neat position.

If Tim Worstall provided full feeds in the first place, I could have just read them all there instead of going through all of that hassle. Who knows, I might even have clicked through and left a comment. I might have bookmarked one of his posts in Delicious, letting other people know how good the post is. I might even have blogged about it. I might even have clicked on an advert!

As it is, I just scroll through the summaries and ignore them all. I have, in the past, unsubscribed from his blog because of the frustration over this. I recently subscribed again, but can’t say I read a good deal more of his blog as a result.

Some other blogs provide “summaries” instead of partial feeds. This is where, instead of the first few words of the post, the author has instead specially written a summary designed for the feed. The problem with this is that sometimes it is made up of a random paragraph taken from the middle of the article. Even worse, it might give away the conclusion before I have even read what it was the conclusion for!

If I am enticed by such a summary, I will click through and find myself reading the post and thinking, “This isn’t what I thought I was reading.” Then I will come across that paragraph in the middle. Ah, and that introduction in the summary? I have found out that it was actually a conclusion. It is like forcing somebody to read the last page of the novel before reading the rest of it!

There is another more fundamental reason why people should offer full feeds. It is just plain rude not to. RSS subscribers are your most dedicated readers. They are people who have decided that your content is good enough to have it effectively delivered straight to them on a regular basis.

Yet, how are these dedicated readers paid back? By getting a mangled fraction of the content that they asked for. It is like subscribing to your favourite magazine only to find the publisher sending out cuttings rather than the whole magazine. What a way to treat your regular readers!

I can hear the howls already: “What about all of the beautiful adverts that I have lovingly placed on my blog / newspaper / whatever? If I offer full feeds, nobody will look at the adverts and I won’t make any money!” Again, there are several responses.

I have already explained why full feeds do not lead to a reduction in clickthroughs. So people will see your adverts just as much as they always did.

There is an even more obvious answer: what is stopping you putting adverts on your feed? Plenty of big websites already do this. It is perfectly possible. People who are refusing to offer full feeds because “they don’t contain my adverts” are simply shoving their heads in the sand.

Even if there was a legitimate concern about adverts, it has to be remembered that your regular readers (the sort who would subscribe to your RSS feed) are the very people who are the least likely to click on the adverts anyway.

Let us not forget also that a lot of adverts are not even designed for human eyes as much as they are designed for SEO. These kinds of adverts would not even mind not being seen (just as long as Googlebot sees it).

Maybe you are concerned about stats. Let’s face it, as bloggers we all are. We want to know how many people are reading. What would be the point if you had no way of knowing if people were reading or not. Gordon McLean (whose recent post on RSS is an interesting read) falls into this group.

Admittedly, this is one downside to RSS as it becomes impossible to find out precisely how many people are reading. Mind you, web stats are not generally the most reliable things anyway. Run four different stats counters and you are bound to get four different — sometimes wildly varying — figures. RSS further muddies the waters.

As it happens, I recently moved over to having this blog’s feeds provided by Feedburner (combined with the absolutely vital FeedSmith WordPress plugin), partly because it would give me some fairly accurate (but not precise) statistics. I was pleasantly surprised to find that around 140–150 people are subscribed to this blog. (Hello to you good people. I hope you are enjoying the full feed!)

Beforehand I had vague ideas of who was reading this blog’s webpages and why. But I had no idea of how many people were actually subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed. But now I do have some fairly interesting and meaningful stats about my RSS feed. So even the stats issue with RSS feeds is resolved to an extent.

All of this is not to say that partial feeds do not have their place. For instance, they are perfect for news websites. This is because of the way they work. We are used to just scanning through a front page containing only a headline and a (very) brief summary of each story. From here we choose which stories we want to read. This is how news websites work, and partial feeds can reflect this.

Blogs, however, do not work in this way. Very few blogs offer just a summary of each post on the front page. The blog format does not usually lend itself well to this approach. Rather, the vast majority of blogs’ front pages contain either the full content of the most recent posts, or at least a huge chunk of them.

As far as I can see, there is no reason why the vast majority of web sites should be forcing their most dedicated users to put up with shoddy, sub-standard partial feeds. For me, the fears that website owners have surrounding full feeds are mostly unfounded.