The quality of a conversation depends on the medium, and the newest and most successful medium for conversations on the net is FriendFeed.
First, some background: a month ago, I introduced a new way of eavesdropping on doctors and medical students who use a service called Twitter. (To understand FriendFeed, you have to talk about Twitter — the reasons for this will soon be apparent.) In two years, Twitter — a combination of microblog, chatroom, and social networking phenomenon — has become the standard for rapid, informal communication on the internet. Even doctors — not early adopters of new communication technologies — have developed a presence on Twitter. (See here for the RSS feed summarizing the conversations of Doctors on Twitter.)
But Twitter has many problems. First, it's a victim of its own success — Twitter has become so overloaded with users that it's frequently offline. For a service that so many people depend upon daily, this is maddening. (And obviously, this also makes it unreliable for clinically important purposes.) Twitter also limits posts to text alone — no pictures, video, or other types of links allowed. Finally, it’s difficult to follow the decentralized conversations on Twitter. (You can appreciate how difficult this is by looking at the feed — all those @’s are users replying to one another.)
Enter FriendFeed, founded by a few ex-Google employees. The entire service is based on an obvious concept — that people you like can introduce you to information you’re likely to enjoy. (Strangely, although the concept is obvious, it’s difficult to wrap your brain around, and it took me months before I really understood it.) Briefly, FriendFeed allows you to create a stream (or feed) of your activities on the net — blog posts, pictures or videos you like, comments on Twitter, and data from over 40 other services that you may choose to share. Other people can then “subscribe” to you, see what you’re doing, and post comments on your feed.
Twitter currently has twice as many users, but FriendFeed is catching up fast. The advantages of FF are many, including stability, the ability to easily track conversations, and the ability to post items from different media. This post is not meant to be an exhaustive comparison of the two services, but I do want to highlight some important differences and introduce a new place for discussions related to medicine: the Doctor’s Room on FriendFeed.
“Rooms," which are discussion areas for communities centered on a particular topic, are a recent feature of FF. Anyone can create one, so as an experiment, I created one for doctors and medical students at www.friendfeed.com/rooms/doctors. Users can post items to the room or have their feeds — for example, blogs, posts on Flickr, Twitter postings — imported to the room. In the Doctor’s Room, I’ve imported all the conversations of doctors and medical students who use Twitter as well as the feeds from many popular, recently updated medical blogs.
The Doctors Room on FriendFeed is a potential alternative to at least two services: 1) the Doctors on Twitter feed — if you’d like, you can even reply to Twitter posts directly from FF; and 2) Medlogs.com, an aggregator of medical blogs — FF has the advantage of allowing you to comment on posts and mark those that you like.
Check it out. Comments and suggestions — either here or on FriendFeed itself — are welcome.
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Technical details and issues, for those interested:
1. The posts on Twitter are displayed on the main page without usernames. If you hover over the “Twitter” link, it shows you who posted it. Hopefully FF will correct this in the future.
2. Currently only administrators can add new feeds to the room. I’ve added many users I know as administrator. If you’re an administrator, feel free to add feeds (blogs and other doctors and medical students on twitter) to the room.
3. If you’re not an administrator, and you’d like me to add your medical blog or Twitter name to the FriendFeed room, please email efficientmd@gmail.com.
Let's take a step back. Regarding Twitter, chances are you've either
Heard of it
Use it
Loathe it
All of the above
Twitter is an instant messaging service, a microblog, a social networking phenomenon, a chatroom, the best crowdsourcing utility ever invented, or a colossal waste of time — depending on who you ask.
Regardless of how you feel about it, Twitter matters. Some argue that news is broken on Twitter faster than on any other medium. The conversations on Twitter are often hilarious, informal, and informative, all at once. And the number of people who can potentially see what you write — instantly — is staggering. Leo Laporte, the technology columnist, has 37,860 followers on Twitter. (Barack Obama, by comparison, has 33,597.)
Here's a brief explanatory video:
But is it efficient to use Twitter? It all depends how you read it. Many Twitter clients, like Twhirl and Tweetr, will happily pop up messages from your Twitter "friends" all day when you're trying to get work done. (This is why many people consider Twitter a distraction and a waste of time.) For this reason, I switched from using a client to subscribing to my Twitter feed — which contains all my friends' posts — through Google Reader. (See "Feed Reading, Three Ways" for more details on feeds.) This way, I can quickly scan through messages on Twitter when I have the time.
If you're interested in what doctors and medical students are saying on Twitter, but don't want to join and follow each person individually, consider subscribing to the Doctors on Twitter feed.
Wikis — collaborative websites to which anyone can contribute — are powerful tools for education. The most popular Wiki is Wikipedia.org, a public encyclopedia, which as of this writing has 2,377,813 English articles.
One potential problem with Wikipedia is that medical articles aren't peer reviewed by authorities with a medical background. (Some might argue that this is actually an important feature of Wikipedia, and allowing anyone to comment on any topic is essential to Wikipedia's egalitarian nature.) The best known medical wiki, Ask Dr. Wiki, solves this problem by requiring all contributors to prove they have a medical degree before they can contribute.
I recently decided to start a new medical wiki — The Efficient MD Wiki, focused on productivity tips for doctors — and I took this opportunity to review some of the available wiki platforms and hosting services. It was a daunting task. I'll share my experiences here for those interested in starting their own wiki.
(Please note these experiences are my own, and I encourage anyone to comment and argue for/against the various wiki platforms.)
I narrowed my choices down to four platforms/hosting services:
Wikia. This platform is a free hosting service for wikis based on the MediaWiki software package, which is also the foundation for Wikipedia. The familiar MediaWiki package, however, also had certain disadvantages. Chief among them was the likelihood that the nonintuitive wiki markup language would discourage users unfamiliar with it from contributing.
Google Sites. The newest entry to the world of wikis, Google Sites initially looked promising. After setting up a site and experimenting, however, it was clear that the Google Sites was too new and lacked too many features to be usable. For example, the invitation and signin process was cumbersome, and anonymous edits of the wiki weren't allowed. (Knowing Google, I expect later version to be more polished.)
PBWiki. PBwiki also initially looked promising. PBWiki 2.0 was released as I was creating a test wiki. The new version didn't allow anonymous editing, however, and I had some criticisms of the wiki's layout, so I eventually decided not to use it.
Wetpaint. Wetpaint was first suggested when I asked for wiki recommendations on Twitter. I hadn't heard of it before. The Wetpaint platform has numerous advantages. The services are free, the layout is readable, anonymous posting is allowed, and — most importantly — its social networking features are more developed than any other wiki I tested. A major disadvantage was the disruptive presence of Google ads in the sidebar, but the ads can be disabled for educational wikis (if you ask).
The Efficient MD wiki is at wiki.efficientmd.com. Thanks for your contributions, and please let me know what you think.
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Topics discussed in this article: Doctor’s Room on FriendFeed, FriendFeed, Twitter, Feed of Doctors on Twitter
