Normally I talk tech subjects, but today I remember I'm also into social media.

   

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It seems to be the week for new changes in online services to be rolled out.  It wasn't more than a few days ago Facebook was bringing out the change to users' Home layout.

Now Google is about to unveil a new module in Gmail.

As this technology article in the Wall Street Journal points out, we can look forward to social media style updates without having to move from our Gmail screen.

This should be quite interesting when you think of all the Google properties which roughly correspond to say, yFrog or Twitvid.   Google already have Google FriendConnect, Picasa, Youtube, just to name a few.  Throw in Google Maps natively there...

According to Techcrunch, what's going to be announced should also make it easier to view media in Gmail.

So will this new form of Google social updates be mainly for all the friends you have in the Googleverse?  Or will it tie into your existing social update sites?

We'll know by 10am U.S. Pacific Time on the 9th of February.  As Mashable points out, tech media have been invited to an event at Google HQ at that time for a big announcement or two.

Now if we could only get Google to announce they've sped up Wave considerably...

As I've said on my other site today, I got an Android-powered HTC Magic for my birthday.

However, I'll forgo the joke I told there about what the term is for jail-breaking an Android smartphone.

While the Google Android Market has a smaller amount of apps than Apple's App Store, you find some good programs occasionally.

Today's discovery is an app called Swift.

I'd call Swift a medium-level Twitter client for the Android platform.  You get a bit more than a simple updating client, but not quite as much as the Seesmic Twitter client.  You won't find lists in Swift.

What you do get is a clean interface, as you can see in the graphic above.

In the top-right corner we see the balloon for new tweets.  Below it, the timeline icons give you access to timeline, mentions, direct messages, search and profiles. When you press menu, you're given further options of new tweet, send saved tweets, change view, jump-to-now (refresh) and preferences.

Should you press on a particular user's tweet you get the reply and retweet buttons, along with an arrowed button for options to copy a tweet, copy a link to tweet, or save.

Admittedly, this app doesn't do as many tricks as, say, Twidroid or Seesmic.  Still, it's nice, clean, functional and effective.

Since I did bring up the topic of "rooting the android" (call it a jailbreak if you're Australian so you don't wet yourself laughing at that unintended euphemism), I should mention a great custom firmware which improves on a lot of original Android functions.

Cyanogen has been one of the best developers of custom roms for the Android devices.  His custom roms can be downloaded over-the-air through the CM Updater and themed.

If you look at the original Android desktop in the wikipedia entry on Android, you can see the need for a decent theme.  In this regard, non-official devs are probably doing Android a favor.

The tab for the apps drawer definitely benefits from some great theming.

Although Android is an open source system, there's still some debate on the topic of rooting the Android (and this is causing large amounts of laughter from Australians every time I use that term).  By the same token, some good custom roms are actually better than the mainstream ones.  They did NOT have the problem associated with Canada's Rogers G1s and HTC Magics where emergency 911 calls couldn't be made while using GPS.

It's up to you whether you want to leave your Android phone stock, or whether you want to use a custom rom.  If you're going to customize and gain root...make sure you read ALL the documentation and tutorials on it thoroughly.  Just do your homework right and your phone will be quite good afterwards.

If you do choose a custom rom, make sure also to choose one where all the things you need are working perfectly.  Devs make it clear which things do or don't work in each custom rom.

As long as one of the first things you put on a customized Android is the backup and restore recovery menu, you'll be fine.

Now I'm off to tweet some more with Swift...

This morning I found I was in the latest round of Twitter beta testing, for the new retweet functionality within the twitter.com page.

Last week wasn't my favorite time in social media.

Twitter had momentarily lost its gloss, what with DDoS problems, spammers and the usual problems of scaling.  Friendfeed, one of the best social media services, had been sold to Facebook.

It ended up being my quietest week, not just for Twitter, but also for any of my blogging.

On the other hand, like a few Friendfeed users, I spent the time looking at replacements for FF in the eventuality it was one day shuttered.

What I discovered were a batch of new tools which have made for a productive couple of days, even if they don't quite fulfil Friendfeed's esteemed role.

Google Reader is providing a whole heap of news items I can post to Twitter or Friendfeed.  Storytlr gives me a way to aggregate my whole social media lifestream. Streamy gives me some extra news items and a small amount of aggregation.  Finally, the up-and-coming Tumbler brings up a whole new set of options.  It's all got me doing something different from my tweets on Identica. And blogging is back on track with this being my second post in as many days.

So what seemed a bad week became a new opportunity to explore and find something of benefit.

I've noted that a few friends over on Friendfeed have been making similar discoveries.  Google Reader is attracting a few fans amongst the Friendfeeders.

Most of us are still hoping Friendfeed remains in some form or another, because it's still light-years ahead in a lot of ways.  We're prepared if it's not, but it's not like many are suddenly giving up on FF.  It's that good a service that it still provides some great features we're loathe to give up on.

However, only time will tell.

This week brought the news that Facebook had acquired the Friendfeed founders and their expertise, though it raised the possibility that FF itself would eventually be shuttered.

It's kind of sad, because Friendfeed as a service is a vast improvement on Twitter, done better, scalable and primed for growth.

On the other hand, it may make for some interesting improvments to Facebook itself.

Friendfeed users have been looking at alternatives, though in real terms Friendfeed has been light-years ahead of the rest.

Is Google Reader an alternative?  Well, you can add a lot of your Twitter feeds into it, those of your followers or those you youself follow, as well as any news feed.  On the other hand, it's not as if it comes with a readymade, strong network of friends.

It is still very good for aggregating what you want, then sending items to all your social media services.  It allows for custom "send to" links and even "save to PDF."  It doesn't really seem that good at building a network of friends and followers like Twitter and Friendfeed can.

Look to Google Reader mainly as a way of piping interesting news items to your other social media, but not for an easy way of networking.

Then there's Streamy.

This service was "blessed" early in the week as an alternative to Friendfeed, resulting in a major increase and load on its infrastructure.  The service was caught a bit by surprise with this.

It enables you to have a tabbed look at your various social media, as well as news items it has categorized.  Again, however, you have to bring a readymade network to it.

I consider it as having potential, but I can see it also having a few minor drawbacks as well.  I'd consider it still a stage or two away from being a true Friendfeed replacement.

In the past few hours I've heard of Storytlr, which is a nice little aggregator and lifestreaming service.  As yet I can't see how friends, followers or networks are made in it, but I do see it as enabling the archiving of your Twitter stream.

Stories in Storytlr are what I'm looking at and experimenting with at the moment.  My only complaint with the Story mode is that it burdens the user with an extra click and page, although it enables you to put together a series of tweets or other updates from elsewhere in a titled theme.  In addition, it still allows for standard posts, links, images, audio and video.

It's themable, too.

I'd have preferred Friendfeed being sold to someone who'd kept the site and its features intact, because it still works fantastically in its current form.  While these alternatives cover some of the features of FF, they don't really do all the things at once.

We'll have to see what happens over the next few months.  By then we'll also have a better idea of how these other alternatives rise to the challenge.

I'd still like to see Facebook keeping Friendfeed running, though I won't hold my breath on that.

Image courtesy of Ed Wheeler

A lot more is known after Thursday's DDoS attack on Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal.

It is now confirmed that the attack was directed against Georgian blogger Cyxymu.  He himself blames the Kremlin for the attack.  Russian officials were unavailable for comment on this.

Cyxmu himself apologized for what happened, even though he was a victim of all this.

Meantime, Twitter is still experiencing problems.  Attacks still continued into Friday, with the intensity and nature of attacks shifting.

In an LA Times interview, Twitter's service provider explained why Twitter was so vulnerable to the DDoS attacks.

Interestingly, the non-tweeting world thought it hilarious that Twitter users had nothing to do while the DDoS attack occcurred.

• Previous posts on this topic:  DDoS Attack Hits Various Social Media Services

Thursday US time, around midnight to 1:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and a few other services were hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack.

It's now 1:35pm on a Melbourne Friday and Twitter is still showing some signs of being affected.  Facebook, Blogger and a few others have running without as much trouble, but it's making social media difficult today.

It seems the attacks have been targetting one person, a pro-Georgian blogger, across every service he uses.

It's also led to a new symbol of Twitter downtime, the Dead Twitter Bluebird, instead of a Fail Whale (courtesy of iStockPhoto.com)

At the same time, there's also a wave of scam/spam adding to the confusion.

UPDATE 4:40pm AEST:  Some conflicting reports on whether to do with pro-Georgian or pro-Abkhazia activist, also some conflicting theories on what exactly the attack was from a technical point-of-view.

UPDATE 6:00pm AEST:  It is now confirmed that the attack was indeed targetting one man.  Facebook security chief explains.

Last weekend, Twitter did a cleanout of spammer accounts.

The most immediate effect was that most peoples' follower lists dropped a bit as the spammers following them were purged from the system.  For most, that was a good thing, giving them a more accurate representation of their real influence.  After all, it's the amount of real followers that tells you your true worth to your Twitter community, not spammers.

I would like to hope most people were glad to see the spambots gone.  But I'm sure there would have been one or two who thought that having a big list of followers, regardless of its real-to-spambot ratio, meant something.  I feel sorry for such people because a list with the majority of followers being spam really isn't any value at all.

Me?  I prefer a list where almost all the followers are real, where they converse with me, where they and I share jokes and funny news iterms.

Anyway, it wasn't totally effective.  New spammers seemed to still pop up in the days since, with some interesting things noted about this latest batch.

I've found, on my own follower list, that there's a discrepency between the numbers, depending on what client you're viewing the list through.  Then there's spammers showing up on a third-party client like Tweetie-for-iPhone, but not showing in the Twitter web version.

The other thing I've noticed this week is that the ratio of spammer new followers to real is getting out of hand.  I counted a small amount of new REAL followers.  The rest of my new followers, which made a clear majority, were spammers.

I'm now wondering if Twitter is reaching the point where its getting less and less new real people.

It's like what happened with Yahoo groups a few years back.  Groups were great as long as there were more real people there.  But eventually there got to be too many spammers, spambots and pornbots.  Before long, there were hardly any real people in most of the groups.

Twitter is still a good service, but its been hit by a few security issues this past year.  It needs to be a  bit tighter on security, verification and a couple of other  things.  If it gets that right, then everyone's experience will be that much better.  But if it doesn't take the security and spammer issue a bit more seriously, it runs the risk of being overtaken by services which solve the spammer issue.

While I'm being a bit critical, I've often pointed out that Twitter Search really needs to be able to show ALL one's tweets all the way back, not merely one month, and in one's ordinary account rather than having to access the API to go back further than a month.

Seriously, if you want to be considered a contender to Google, you have to be able to index as far back as possible.

That said, I'll kick myself off my soapbox.  Have a great weekend

I'm an experiential learner.

There's something about practicing something and getting the hang of it by experience that tends to lock in what you're learning that much better.  And there's also something about practicing to the point where things are in reflex memory as well.

So it's been an interesting six months getting involved more deeply in social media.

Readers might be surprised to know I've actually been using the net since 1996, when I started learning how to use it for a personal research project.  But this year, it's been the first time I've really put that much experience into practice in such a concentrated way.

Perhaps it had to do with the circumstances.  Six-and-a-bit months ago, in January, I'd finally changed from dialup to broadband.  My mobile phone contract had ended and the new one negotiated allowed me to get an iPhone and pay it off to the provider for the next two years.  And I'd started downloading a few apps like Twinkle.  It was also around that time I first looked at using Twitter.  The infrastructure was there.

Of course, the events of February and March meant I had one of those "thrown-in-at-the-deep-end" learning curves in social media, as the Victorian bushfires occurred and my niece was endangered by one of the major fires.  Twitter proved an incredibly good way to know what was happening in her area and even to give her some updates on the situation.  Then it proved a good way of helping my community.

In the months since then, it's been nice to be involved in the Tweetupmellers tweetup and do some work with photographing the tweetup and also conducting interviews of Melbourne's most talented and up-and-coming Twitter/social media people.

There's also been some experimenting with some new services, like Audioboo, Twitcam and a couple of others.

So far the greatest privilege was doing the videoing of the Sustainable Building Workshop at Kinglake West, a community event to help bushfire victims/survivors in the rebuilding phase.

So where from here?

I consider these first six months my basic craft-learning.  And there's been a lot learnt.

The next six months?  Time to do some advanced learning.  Start spreading my wings and learning to fly with it.

The experience continues.