Following on from (but unrelated to) my post last week about feed tools we have two posts, one from Deepak Singh, and one from Neil Saunders, both talking about â€˜friend feedsâ€™ or â€˜lifestreamsâ€™. The idea here is of aggregating all the content you are generating (or is being generated about you?) into one place. There are a couple of these about but the main ones seem to be Friendfeed and Profiliac.

Cameron Neylon

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Th\...](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/256px-friendfeed-svg2.png "This is icon for social networking website. Th..."){decoding="async"
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Friendfeed (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Public Domain
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> Following on from (but unrelated to) my [post last week about feed
> tools](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/give-me-the-feed-tools-and-i-can-rule-the-world/)
> we have two posts, [one from Deepak
> Singh](http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/mndoci/%7E3/248457779/), and
> [one from Neil
> Saunders](http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/lifestreaming/),
> both talking about â€˜friend feedsâ€™ or â€˜lifestreamsâ€™. The idea
> here is of aggregating all the content you are generating (or is being
> generated about you?) into one place. There are a couple of these
> about but the main ones seem to be
> [Friendfeed](http://friendfeed.com/) and
> [Profiliac](http://www.profilactic.com/). See [Deepaksâ€™s
> post](http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/mndoci/%7E3/248457779/) (or
> indeed [his Friendfeed](http://friendfeed.com/mndoci)) for details of
> the conversations that can come out of these type of things.
>
> [A (small) feeding
> frenzy](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-small-feeding-frenzy/) --
> Cameron Neylon, Science in the Open -- 10 March 2008

Half the links in that quote are dead. I wrote the post above seven
years ago today, and it very much marked a beginning. Friendfeed went on
to become the coffee house for a broad community of people interested in
Open Science and became the place where, for me at least, many of the
key discussions took place. Friendfeed was one of a number of examples
of "life feed" services. The original intent was as an aggregation point
for your online activity but the feed itself rapidly became the focus.
Facebook in particular owes a debt to the user experience of Friendfeed.
Facebook bought Friendfeed for the team in 2009 and rapidly started
incorporating its ideas.

Yesterday Facebook announced they were going to shutter the service that
they have to be fair kept going for many years now with no revenue
source and no doubt declining user numbers. Of course those communities
that remained are precisely the ones that most loved what the service
offered. The truly shocking thing is that although nothing has been done
to the interface or services that Friendfeed offers for five years it
still remains a best in class experience. [Louis Gray had some
thoughts](http://blog.louisgray.com/2015/03/friendfeeds-closure-another-painful.html)
on what was different about Friendfeed. It remains, in my view, the best
technical solution and user experience for enabling the kind of sharing
that researchers actually want to do.Â  I remember reading about [Robert
Scoble](https://profiles.google.com/scobleizer "Robert Scoble"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="homepage"} disliked the way that Friendfeed worked,
and thinking "all those things are a plus for researchers...". Twitter
is ok, Facebook really not up to the job, Figshare doesn't have the
social features and all the other "facebooks for science" simply don't
have critical mass. Of course, neither did Friendfeed once everyone left
either...but while there was a big community there we had a glimpse of
what might be possible.

It's also a reminder, as discussed in the [Principles for Scholarly
Infrastructures](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/)
that Geoff Bilder, Jennifer Lin and myself released a week or so back,
that relying on the largesse of third parties is not a reliable
foundation to build on. If we want to take care of our assets as a
community, we need to take responsibility for them as well. In my view
there is some important history buried in the records of Friendfeed and
I'm going to make some effort to build an archive. [This
script](https://github.com/claudioc/ffexp) appears to do a good job of
grabbing public feeds. It doesn't pull discussions (ie the comments on
other people's posts) unless you have the "remote key" for that account.
If anyone wants to send me their remote key (log in to friendfeed and
navigate to <http://friendfeed.com/remotekey>) I'll take a shot at
grabbing their discussions as well. Otherwise I'll just try and
prioritize the most important accounts from my perspective to archive.

Is it recent history or is it ancient? We lost [Jean-Claude
Bradley](http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/ "Jean-Claude Bradley"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="homepage"} last year, one of the original thinkers,
and perhaps more importantly do-ers, of many strands in Open Research.
Much of his thinking from 2008-2011 was on Friendfeed. For me, it was
the space in which the foundations for a lot of my current thinking was
laid. And where I met many of the people who helped me lay those
foundations. And a lot of my insights into how technology does and does
not help communities were formed by watching how much better Friendfeed
was than many other services. Frankly a lot of the half-baked crap out
there today could learn a lot by looking at how this nearly decade-old
website works. And still works for those communities that have stayed in
strength.

But that is the second lesson. It is the combination of functionality
and the community that makes the experience so rich. My community, the
Open Science group, left *en masse* after Facebook acquired Friendfeed.
That community no longer trusted that the service would stay around
(c.f. again [those
principles](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/)
on trust). The librarian community stayed and had an additional five
years of rich interactions. It's hardly new to say that you need both
community and technology working together to build a successful social
media experience. But it still makes me sad to see it play out like
this. And sad that the technology that demonstrably had the best user
experience for research and scholarship in small(ish) communities never
achieved the critical mass that it needed to succeed.

 


Friendfeed (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Public Domain  Half the links in that quote are dead. I wrote the post above seven years ago today, and it very much marked a beginning. Friendfeed went on to become the coffee house for a broad community of people interested in Open Science and became the place where, for me at least, many of the key discussions took place. Friendfeed was one of a number of examples of “life feed” services.

End of Feed

What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research.

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Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr
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What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of
doing scientific research. One partly inspired by the modular building
blocks approach of some of the best open source software projects but
also by a view that there were tremendous efficiency gains to be found
in enabling specialisation of researchers, groups, even institutes,
while encouraging a shared technical and social infrastructure that
would help people identify the right partners for the very specific
tasks that they needed doing today.

â€œ[Bursty work](http://twitter.com/#!/factoryjoe/statuses/479283692)â€?
is a term first used by [Chris
Messina](http://factoryjoe.com "Chris Messina"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"} but [introduced to the online community of
scientists](http://mndoci.com/2007/12/07/bursty-work/) by [Deepak
Singh](http://mndoci.com). At the time it seemed obvious that with
enough human and financial capital that a loose network of specialist
groups could do much better science, and arguably much more effective
exploitation of that science, than isolated groups perpetually
re-inventing the wheel.

The problem of course is that science funding is not configured that
way, a problem that is that bane of any core-facility managerâ€™s
existence. Maintaining a permanent expert staff via a hand to mouth
existence of short term grants is tough. Some succeed but more probably
fail, and there is very little glory in this approach. Once again it is
prestige that gets promotion, not effective and efficient use of
resources.

But the world is changing, a few weeks ago I got a query from a
commercial partner interested in whether I could solve a specific
problem. This is a small â€œvirtual companyâ€? that aims to target the
small scale, but potentially high value, innovations that larger players
donâ€™t have the flexibility to handle.Â  Everything is outsourced,
samples prepared and passed from contractor to contractor. Turns out I
think we can solve their problem and it will be exciting to see this
work applied. What is even more gratifying is that the company came
across this work in an Open Access journal which made it easier both to
assess how useful it was and whether to get in touch. In the words of my
contact:

> â€œThe fact that your work was in an open access journal certainly
> made it easier for me to access. I guess the same google search would
> have found it in a different journal, but it might have required a
> subscription for access. In that case I would have used the free info
> available (corresponding authors, university addresses etc) to try and
> get in touch based on the abstract.â€?

The same problems of course remain. How do I reasonably cost this work?
What is the value of being involved vs just being a contractor. And of
course, where will I find the time, or the pair of hands, to get the
work done. People with the right expertise donâ€™t grow on trees, and
itâ€™s virtually impossible to get people on short contracts at the
moment. Again, in the words of our collaborator:

> "Bursty work" sounds a little like how \[our company\] is trying to
> operate. One problem is moving from an investment environment where
> investors invest in companies to one where they invest in projects.
> Has any work been done to identify investors who like the idea of
> bursty work?

Nonetheless, its exciting to me that some elements of what was beginning
to seem like a pipe dream are coming to pass. It takes time for the
world to catch up, but where there is a demand for innovation, and an
effective market, the opportunities are there for the people who can
make them work.

*\[It won't escape anyone's notice that I've given no details of either
the project or the company. We are doing this under an NDA and as this
is someone else's project I'm not going to be difficult about it. We
make progress one small step at a time\]*

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Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr  What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research.

A return to â€œbursty workâ€

The [Research Information Network](http://www.rin.ac.uk/) has put out a
cal for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web
2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. The project will be funded
up to Â£90,000. Expressions of interest are due on Monday 3 November
(yes next week) and the projects are due to start in January. You can
see the [call in full
here](http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/24359/RIN_half_page_311.pdf) but in
outline RIN seeking evidence whether web 2.0 tools are:

â€¢ making data easier to share, verify and re-use, or otherwise

facilitating more open scientific practices;

â€¢ changing discovery techniques or enhancing the accessibility of

research information;

â€¢ changing researchersâ€™ publication and dissemination behaviour,

(for example, due to the ease of publishing work-in-progress and

grey literature);

â€¢ changing practices around communicating research findings (for

example through opportunities for iterative processes of feedback,

pre-publishing, or post-publication peer review).

Now we as a community know that there are cases where all of these are
occurring and have fairly extensively documented examples. The question
is obviously one of the degree of penetration. Again we know this is
small â€" Iâ€™m not exactly sure how you would quantify it.

My challenge to you is whether it would be possible to use the tools and
community we already have in place to carry out the project? In the past
weâ€™ve talked a lot about aggregating project teams and distributed
work but the problem has always been that people donâ€™t have the time
to spare. We would need to get some help from social scientists on
process and design of the investigation but with Â£90,000 there is
easily enough money to pay people properly for their time. Indeed I know
there are some people out there freelancing already who are in many ways
already working on these issues anyway. So my question is: Are people
interested in pursuing this? And if so, what do you think your hourly
rate is?


The Research Information Network has put out a cal for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web 2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. The project will be funded up to Â£90,000. Expressions of interest are due on Monday 3 November (yes next week) and the projects are due to start in January.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

End of Feed

A return to â€œbursty workâ€

Call for submissions for a project on The Use and Relevance of Web 2.0 Tools for Researchers

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

End of Feed

A return to â€œbursty workâ€

Call for submissions for a project on The Use and Relevance of Web 2.0 Tools for Researchers

A return to â€œbursty workâ€