FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. The first, and most requested topic, is how to best use the "Hide" function. With any luck, you can expect a new "FriendFeed Friday" post for a few weeks, until the point of diminishing returns is reached.

FriendFeed lets its thousands of users stream live updates from more than 30 services, including Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Flickr and many others, aggregating them all into a single, busy, feed.

Making sense of those updates, and separating the signal from the noise is critical for a positive FriendFeed experience. Luckily, the FriendFeed team has built a number of ways for you to cope, all hidden behind a simple option: "Hide".


An example of a FriendFeed entry, with 4 options.
Today, each item contains four options, including "Comment", "Like", "Hide" and "More". But "Hide" has many options, as outlined below:

1. Use Hide to Hide Individual Entries

Sometimes, a popular item can get a lot of comments. Each time a new comment is added, the item gets "bumped" to the top of your FriendFeed, so you can see a single item again and again, with the new comments.


A recent popular FriendFeed entry.
But if you get tired of this, click "Hide", and the entry will go away. If you choose, you can "Undo" this action, or go to the bottom of the page to "Show hidden items" and reveal it again.


Click "Hide" and the entry will disappear.
2. Use Hide to Hide A Specific Service

Depending on your preference, you might feel one service has more value than another. For example, you might like seeing Blog updates, but you don't want to show Twitter updates. To hide these, again, you click "Hide" below an entry from the offending service.

When you click on "Hide", text displays, saying "See options for hiding other items like this". (See above)


It's this easy to block all Flickr entries.
Click "See options for hiding other items like this", and the "Hide Entries" dialog will pop up. To block the service, click the button that says "Hide everyone's Twitter entries" or "Hide everyone's Flickr entries", etc., depending on the service. To fully block all updates from this service, make sure you keep the "even if they have comments or likes" box checked, or you'll still see these items if another FriendFeed user takes an action to that item.

3. Use Hide to Hide a Specific User's Service

You might not want to block all of a service's updates, but you might want to block one person's in particular. (Example: "Hide all Louis Gray's Last.fm entries.")

Follow the same method seen in #2. When you click on "Hide", click the text, "See options for hiding other items like this".


It's this easy to block Paul Buchheit's Flickr entries.
This time, keep the first button selected, that says, in this example, "Hide all Paul Buchheit's Flickr entries" and keep "even if they have comments or likes" checked.

4. Use Hide to Hide "Friends of a Friend" Updates

FriendFeed, by default, shows you items that friends of your friends posted, if your friends took action on an item, either by clicking "Like" or making a comment. Over time, with the more friends you add, and the more active they are, this can get "noisy." Again, the "Hide" item comes to the rescue.


This Twitter entry was from a Friend of A Friend.
In this case, click "Hide" and click the text, "See options for hiding other items like this".

Now, in the new dialog, you have an array of options, from hiding the service from that person, to hiding all services from that person, to hiding items from a specific friend's friends, or hiding all items from all friends of friends. It sounds complicated, but it's not too much, once you start using it.


Hiding all friends of a friend via Susan Beebe.


Hiding all friends of a friend from all friends.
In the above example, the first option would block all Twitter entries from Jianjun Zhang.
The second entry would hide all entries from Jianjun Zhang.
The third entry would hide all items are shown to me because Susan Beebe liked or commented on her friends' items.
The fourth entry would hide all items shown to me from any friends' friends.
The last entry would again offer what we solved in #2, blocking Twitter altogether.

5. Use Hide to Only Show Activity With Likes or Comments

The FriendFeed firehose can be lessened by filtering out the items that haven't yet been acted on by other users. You can do this by aggressively hiding all services or all updates from specific individuals "unless they have comments or likes". If you take this step for all available services, you're essentially hoping the wisdom of crowds is a good filter (which it can be), and none of the items will hit your FriendFeed without somebody else having taken an action first.

In this case, click "Hide" on any entry and click the text, "See options for hiding other items like this".


This hides all Tweets from Yuvi, unless they have likes or comments.


This hides all Tweets from everyone, unless they have likes or comments.
When the dialog presents itself, click the second button "Hide everyone's Twitter entries" but be sure the accompanying box "even if they have comments or likes" is unchecked. This means you won't see any Twitter updates unless someone in the FriendFeed community has taken action.

Of course, the best way to reduce noise on FriendFeed is to only sign up to your friends and peers. Randomly following industry name brands is the best way to increase activity on the site, thanks to the high number of people they follow and their rate of activity, as well as their own friends. But with aggressive use of the "Hide" function, it's pretty easy to follow hundreds of individual FriendFeed users, and to participate. But if you don't use the "Hide" key well, it can get pretty overwhelming. It's also worth noting that FriendFeedMachine honors the "Hide" choices you've made, so if you use that service, you wouldn't be subjected to seeing updates you thought you had blocked.

Do you use FriendFeed? Is there something you'd like to see featured in round two of "FriendFeed Friday" tips? Let me know.

Duncan Riley's First Week at The Inquisitr Is Inspiring

When news first hit that Duncan Riley had left TechCrunch, I thought his departure might see him theoretically fading into something like the proverbial sunset, as one of the blogosphere's most notable characters could have declared "Enough", put down his keyboard and gone home. On the news, I publicly wished him well, and hoped he would keep "staying aggressive". (See my comment.)

Not only has Duncan Riley stayed absolutely relevant, but he's captured the "aggressive" piece as well. Now, arguably, I'm reading Duncan Riley's news with more interest than I had been when he was at TechCrunch, and a week in, his transition to The Inquisitr, his new home, seems perfectly natural. Just one week in, the new site is getting about ten times the page views as I am, and he reports subscribers have already eclipsed my number, rocketing upwards to the 2,000 mark (myself included). Not shabby at all.

Part of the intrigue posed by The Inquisitr is Duncan's mix of both tech news, which makes sense, and more spicy celebrity news, which can also be interesting, even to us jaded geeks. And the reduced stress through no longer posting at the grindstone of TechCrunch has clearly lightened Duncan's mood. Virtually gone are the f-bombs that would be a common sight on his Twitter feed, replaced instead with a plethora of smiley-face emoticons. And in the midst of his move, Duncan has even opened up to reconsider his stance on a few things where we had locked horns back in March.

To those unfamiliar, in mid-March, amidst unprecedented hype around FriendFeed, Duncan took a look at the service for TechCrunch, and came away unimpressed. Responding, I said, undiplomatically, that he had missed the point, and argued a response. As I wrote Duncan in an e-mail earlier this week, at the time, I had used his name in the headline to differentiate from TechCrunch, who has multiple authors, and had previously written some positive notes on the service, but my write-up hit him quite personally. Making matters worse, my response stayed atop Techmeme virtually all day that Friday, which I was monitoring from my sun-drenched seats at Spring Training in Arizona.

The unexpected exposure definitely had gotten under Duncan's craw, as the next morning, I awoke to a follow-on note from Duncan on his personal site, that bluntly questioned my goals and credibility. Uninterested in fanning the flames further, and gaining an enemy for life, I stayed quiet, but others made plenty of comments on my behalf.

Knowing this is a small industry, I hoped Duncan and I could reconcile the differences. After all, who knew when we would see each other at an event? What if we were on the same panel or even were asked to speak on the same podcast? But as the rift had been very public, I thought it unfortunately might not ever happen - until this week. Now at The Inquisitr, Duncan sent me an e-mail on Monday asking if I could help him understand why I supported FriendFeed. He said he was even open to reconsidering his stance and would listen to opposing viewpoints. So, not only did I send him a lengthy note with my answers, (See: The Inquisitr: Why You Should Use FriendFeed), but I also gave him more background on the March flare-up. I have always respected Duncan's efforts, and see him as a good writer, but if there was ever an example of getting off on the wrong foot... this had been it.

Monday night, I opened up the laptop, and saw that not only was the story published, but Duncan had re-signed up to FriendFeed, and was talking up his renewed relationship with the site via Twitter. It's a wonder what the combination of reduced stress, a little communication, and time can do. Now, you can find Duncan on FriendFeed, and he's doing more than using it as a broadcast medium, but he's engaged. He's commenting, and liking and giving tips to fellow users.

I'm liking the content I'm seeing from The Inquisitr. It's a fun read, and there's a good pace of new articles coming in through the RSS feed. But I'm more pleased (and relieved) the public rift with Duncan is over. As with the back and forth I had with Mashable back in January, there are definitely things I would change about the words I wrote, and the way things were portrayed, but in the end, we're stronger for it. I get along excellently with the team at Mashable, from Adam Ostrow to Mark Hopkins, and now, I feel I know Duncan better than I would have otherwise. Given the industry's size, it makes sense we try and avoid these battles that tear us down, and instead work to prop each other up. I'm glad Duncan's at a place where he can contribute to the tech blogosphere and stay stress-free. We're all better for it.

Shyftr Gets More Social, Showing Who Reads Feeds You Do

One of my positions I've long held from my RSS bully pulpit is that rather than viewing feeds alone, and sharing to a mystery audience, I'd like to know if my friends are subscribed to the same feeds I am, if they've read articles before I have, and if they liked them. This wisdom of crowds theory helps me discover not only new sources for news, but also new peers I may not have known I had.

Yesterday, Shyftr, a next-generation social RSS reader, took another important step toward fulfilling this vision, following in the footsteps of fellow innovators Toluu and Assetbar.

Now, while you read your feeds in Shyftr, a rectangular box at the top right of the feed shows up to twenty avatars of fellow users who also read the feed. If the feed is not popular, all avatars will be shown, while if the feed has more than twenty followers, a random sample will be selected.

Clicking on any of the avatars leads to the user's profile.

Shyftr's Matt Shaulis asked on Twitter yesterday, "Ever wonder who else was reading the same feeds as you?"

Now I know. In fact, as a gradual student of these avatars I've seen used everywhere from MyBlogLog to BlogCatalog, Twitter, FriendFeed and elsewhere, I'm eerily able to recognize avatars, even of people I've never met. Just this morning, after looking at the avatars in Shyftr, I learned that Chris Miller of IdoNotes reads ReadWriteWeb, as does LiveCrunch.

Additional good news for Shyftr comes from the aforementioned Toluu today. Caleb Elston helpfully added Shyftr as a feed reader option in the open OPML sharing and matching site, letting users of both services add feeds to Shyftr with one click through his custom bookmarklet. (See: Shyftr: Our latest feed reader option)


Toluu has integrated Shyftr as a feed reader option
There is definitely a market for social RSS feed readers that let users find what other peers are reading, sharing and commenting on. Shyftr is methodically hitting all the key points one by one, rather than overwhelming users with feature overkill. I know I'll be clicking through these new avatars to see if there are even more peers whom I should know.

Disqus and Seesmic Teaming Up for Video Comments

It's only been a few weeks since I integrated Disqus commenting with my blog, but I've already reached the point where it would be hard to consider what life was like before Disqus came along. Overnight, with the help of Daniel Ha's excellent customer service, I went from flat Blogger comments that were a hassle to simplified, threaded, personalized comments in Disqus, which integrate easily with other services I use, including FriendFeed.

Today, Disqus is looking to take things to another level, offering integration with Seesmic for video comments. Now, all bloggers using Disqus as their comments engine have the option to enable viewers to leave a video response, and not just a simple text comment.

While video comments haven't yet reached the mainstream, TechCrunch, whose Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic, deployed the feature not too long ago. By integrating with Disqus, this should provide Seesmic with a much wider base for distribution, especially among leading technology bloggers, who are rapidly making Disqus a standard.

I'm happy to report that as of this morning, this site is one of the first to integrate Seesmic video comments with Disqus. Soon, you just might even see me leaving midnight video rants around the blogosphere. If you're willing to take a risk, try out the new video commenting system, and let me know what you think!

Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here

Near the end of 2007, I first came across a service I had hoped would one day challenge Google Reader for the throne of coolest RSS feed reader, Assetbar. With social aspects including shared statistics and comments, it had the potential to become the future of where RSS feed readers were going. While that hasn't yet come to pass, it did mark the first time a service debuted on LouisGray.com.

In the ensuing 9 months or so, I've been lucky enough to either stumble upon, or get engaged with entrepreneurs early enough in the process, such that this site was where they first got started. Some of them have gone on to incredible visibility and success. One has already closed shop. Another looks dormant, and others, somewhere in between. I'll hold off on giving a rating, or "stars" assigned to their success, but believe me, it's tempting.

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Assetbar
Debut: September 17, 2007
Post: Assetbar Set to Launch With Google Reader Inspiration

The Goal: To deliver a next-generation RSS feed reader with integrated commenting, shared link lists, and the ability to see if friends had seen or liked an article.

Status: After gaining the attention of ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, as well as a few follow-up stories here, Assetbar gained several hundred users, but rather than rocketing upward in popularity, issues with the confusing user interface, and prioritizing features over speed had even early adopters not sticking around. The site's gone into something of hibernation and maintenance mode, while the developers consider where to take their participatory social media platform next.

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BlogRize
Debut: April 7, 2008
Post: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers

The Goal: Build a community around a blog, and find new interesting items.

Status: Recently profiled by ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez, who is everywhere, BlogRize has hundreds of users joining communities like ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and LouisGray.com to see what others like them are sharing and commenting on. Updates so far have been somewhat quiet, thanks to developer Jesse Spaulding's recent move to Seattle.

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LinkRiver
Debut: February 13, 2008
Post: LinkRiver Enters Life Streaming Fray, Focused on Link Blogs

The Goal: To let friends follow shared items activity from multiple people in one place.

Status: LinkRiver has a big fan in Corvida of SheGeeks (LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme), and with interesting wrinkles including Attention data, which tracks what you share most often, and the ability to tag items for later viewing, developer Adam Stiles has created a lightweight (in a good way), informative site to find the most popular items of the day, or to see what friends are sharing, without the noise of some other social aggregators.

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MergeLab
Debut: March 4, 2008
Post: Mergelab Emerges to Streamline Friends' Web Updates

The Goal: To follow friends' activity on the Web in a single location.

Status: Mergelab announced last Friday that the site would close down by the end of June. Without revenue, and with competition, the decision was made to exit the game early.

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Rating Burner
Debut: January 30, 2008
Post: Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats

The Goal: To show the most popular FeedBurner feeds, and daily changes.

Status: While not widely known, Rating Burner is quietly doing its job, adding more and more feeds to its library. The developer even added the option to display a Rating Burner badge on your blog so you can show your own ranking from the site.

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ReadBurner
Debut: January 7, 2008
Post: ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items

The Goal: Find the most common shared items in Google Reader.

Status: ReadBurner took off like a phoenix, but after gaining rave reviews from across the Web, the site's lead developer shut down the site, only to see a trio of entrepreneurs, including Mashable's Adam Ostrow, buy its technology and get it up and running again. ReadBurner 2.0 debuted on April 15th and has continued to innovate, issuing an iPhone version of the site, and today, adding support for shared items from NetVibes.

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RSSmeme
Debut: February 6, 2008
Post: RSSmeme Debuts as ReadBurner Clone

The Goal: Find the most common shared items in Google Reader

Status: RSSmeme took advantage of ReadBurner's downtime, and has more shared link blogs in play than anybody else on the Web. RSSmeme also debuted helpful integration for bloggers who want to show how often their items have been shared, and recently integrated notes from Google Reader.

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Shyftr
Debut: March 4, 2008
Post: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings

The Goal: Develop a RSS Feed Reader for friends to share favorite items and make comments.

Status: Shyftr recently added OPML importing, on the back of debuting shared link blogs, making it even more competitive with Google Reader, as Mark Hopkins of Mashable and the Download Squad noted. The service still has a way to go to get in the mainstream, and it will take some time for them to escape the dubious honor of getting Bitchmemed last month, but they continue to work hard.

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SocialMedian
Debut: April 8, 2008
Post: Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha

The Goal: A social news service, personalized based on your favorite topics.

Status: As mentioned Tuesday, SocialMedian is seeing strong growth, even in their alpha stage, growing to 2,599 alpha users, as of this post. The growth in the user base has resulted in a higher amount of interesting news, more clipped items, and the GUI has gotten much stronger in the last month.

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TheStatBot
Debut: May 1, 2008
Post: The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

The Goal: To analyze blog trends and statistics with insightful commentary.

Status: Yuvi Panda is now posting 2 to 3 new articles a week, starting with Scoble's Twitter feed, and now, dissecting Digg and the Techmeme Leaderboard. His latest post, from Tuesday, highlights those sites most likely to be in the "Discussion" section of TechMeme, not a featured item.

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Toluu
Debut: March 24, 2008
Post: Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones

The Goal: Share your OPML with friends and find new feeds.

Status: Growing like a weed, Caleb Elston's pet project has ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez enamored and just yesterday, Elston announced he continues to upgrade the site, deleting more than 60,000 duplicate feeds, the kind of attention to important detail that has people coming back again and again.

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Yokway
Debut: March 2, 2008
Post: YokWay! Weeks Away from Launching "Digg for Friends"-like Service

The Goal: Share items, videos, and pictures with friends and have conversations.

Status: According to Yokway insiders, traffic to the site is catching up to FriendFeed and beating out SocialMedian, but aside from my coverage, and that from the Last Podcast, they haven't had nearly the exposure of FriendFeed, so that would be a surprise to me. The site has a few hundred visitors, from what I can tell, most activity is still from a select few dozen. Over the last 24 hours, there were 25 items shared for discussion. While the user interface is interesting, as is the application, it hasn't yet gained a lot of public awareness.

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While this list is long, it's certainly a speck compared to that which blog powers like TechCrunch could debut. I've been lucky to play the role of early adopter, and there are a few more items out there cooking which should show up soon. But on the whole, I'm pretty pleased with the efforts made by just about every single one of the players above. ReadBurner and Toluu for starters, changed the game. Others are must-visit sites for me. But in this fast-moving industry, if you're not fast-moving, you might as well quit. I'm looking forward to keeping this going.

SocialMedian Is Growing Rapidly In First Month's Availability

One of the worst things for a Web 2.0 social community to do is debut, and then sit idly, hoping success will immediately follow, with users rushing in and accepting the site as-is. A stale site is the biggest sign that one service will fail while another will survive, and could be an early "tell" as to the developers' dedication. SocialMedian looks like it's in this race to stay.

In the month following my initial coverage of SocialMedian, the online social news site has undergone a wealth of tweaks, visual enhancements and new features, and it looks like user growth has been dramatic.


You can see the growth of popular networks on SocialMedian
In the first week of April, the top 5 most popular news networks on SocialMedian contained between 50 and 100 users. But now, to make this list, it takes more than 200 users, with 729 being part of the Web 2.0 network. In fact, growth over the last month has seen the site's tech users drive similar topics, including Tech News, Social Media Watch and Social Networking, ahead of the initial leader, Campaign 2008.


The news feed shows interesting stories and comments
On Friday, as announced in a blog post, SocialMedian added some new features likely to raise the site's popularity further, including the reduction of duplicates in "My News Feed", and making Clipped stories look like votes, with those stories gaining the most votes getting a higher level of attention, Digg style. The design of the site has also improved a great deal in just a short time.

(See the Product Development Blog)

As with other social media networks, you can add stories to your news feed by using an embedded bookmarklet, and you can make comments on friends' clipped items. Where other entrants have sputtered in the face of strong competition, it looks like SocialMedian is going to make a serious run at being increasingly visible and increasingly relevant.

If you haven't tried it out already, you can get in with the code of "London". (Sign up here)

MyBlogLog's Blog Stats Offer Good Insight to Readers' Destinations

Last year, after publicly wondering about the future of MyBlogLog, and saying I felt the Yahoo-owned friends tracker and blog community site should focus more on tracking blog details than personal details, I was offered a premium account, gaining me insight into daily statistics, and full reports, showing where visitors were coming from, what they were reviewing, and interestingly, where they were headed.

While MyBlogLog is best known for their "Recent Visitors" widget, and has made waves of late with their lifestreaming service, it's now the stats I find myself taking a look at, just about on par with my standard SiteMeter details.

Out of curiosity, yesterday, I ran a report that showed what louisgray.com viewers were most likely to click on, over the last seventeen months, all the way back to January 1st of 2007. While some of the most popular items are recurring links to my RSS feed, MyBlogLog and LinkedIn, it's clear that some of the most-prominent posts I made in the last few months have had significant impact, not the least of which was the Elite Bloggers joining FriendFeed post back in March.


An example of MyBlogLog's Out Clicks Report (Click for More)
It's also clear that unless most people are clicking to new destinations from my RSS feed, and not via the site, I don't have enough traffic to make or break anyone, despite premature talk of a "Louis Gray effect".

Below are the Top 25 "Out Clicks", according to MyBlogLog. I hand-scrubbed a few, as I don't want to further encourage the porn-seekers who think Google Video can get them a quick fix, or take people off-topic.

1. http://feeds.feedburner.com/LouisgraycomLive 1,491 Clicks.
2. http://friendfeed.com/louisgray 1,171 Clicks.
3. http://www.friendfeed.com/ 805 Clicks.
4. http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/louismg 674 Clicks.
5. http://www.readburner.com/ 417 Clicks.

6. http://www.assetbar.com/ 292 Clicks.
7. http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/03/company-profile.html 286 Clicks.
8. http://twitter.com/louisgray 274 Clicks.
9. http://www.linkedin.com/in/louisgray 274 Clicks.
10. http://www.ratingburner.com/ 251 Clicks.

11. http://anzman.blogspot.com/ 248 Clicks.
12. http://friendfeed.com/kevinrose 244 Clicks.
13. http://www.friendfeedmachine.com/ 244 Clicks.
14. http://www.rssmeme.com/ 238 Clicks.
15. http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=4420 237 Clicks.

16. http://www.google.com/reader/shared/05763917848110205585 211 Clicks.
17. http://friendfeed.com/adamostrow 205 Clicks.
18. http://www.techmeme.com/lb 201 Clicks.
19. http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer 194 Clicks.
20. http://www.shyftr.com/ 190 Clicks.

21. http://www.linkriver.com/ 182 Clicks.
22. http://www.mashable.com/ 182 Clicks.
23. http://bhc3.wordpress.com/ 182 Clicks.
24. http://friendfeed.com/techcrunch 181 Clicks.
25. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=589638695 175 Clicks.

There are a million blog stat engines out there, from SiteMeter to Google Analytics, SlimStat and more, but unlike SiteMeter, which limits even premium accounts to the last 4,000 visitors, MyBlogLog keeps all the data, making historical reports quite useful. While I've got quite a bit of traction checking the day to day changes, watching "Out Click" reports is very interesting, and I'll be sure to make up some new reports to see accumulative data.

Just Like High School: Your Blogging Clique Will Move

Most bloggers who have spent a good amount of time building their site and community end up with a small group of peers who share the same interests, discuss the same topics, and more often than not, frequently link to one another's blogs, or feature links to friends' sites in their blog roll. This cliquish behavior can result in something of a larger echo chamber where friends talk to friends, and it can be hard for someone new to break into the circle.

But just like in high school, cliques change. Maybe as a blogger, you've found the people you thought were your friends are now not paying attention to you. Maybe, they've stopped blogging altogether, and you now have to look around and find new friends to talk to, link to and discuss the same stories. Maybe they stopped talking about one thing, and now you don't have the same interests.

The resulting feeling as a blogger can be just like it was back then when acne was a major concern - one of loneliness, and questioning who you really are. Do you need to change who you are to fit in with a new crowd? Or is it possible you're just not interesting to anyone and you too should quit?

Just in the last 18 months or so, I've experienced this to some level with my site.

When I first started getting my footing back in early 2007, one of the major peers I looked up to and shared stories with was Tony Chung of GeekWhat.com. Tony and I both shared an interest in Apple and next generation technologies like wireless power. But Tony gained a degree, moved to Taiwan, started blogging less, and changed his focus to be more philosophical, or covering the arts.

Another Web peer with whom I could exchange ideas and argue (at times), is Kent Newsome of Newsome.org. Kent is a great writer, and would often burst onto Techmeme with thoughts on the Five Stages of Blogging or when he wrote a fantastic Declaration of Blogging Independence on the fourth of July. But seemingly just as he was rising to Web stardom, posting to his site almost disappeared. Now, his last note is from late March, and he's had three notes since February. Another peer, leaving the clique.

Sometimes, good news for one friend could mean bad news for you. MG Siegler of ParisLemon got a new gig at VentureBeat, and has seen the majority of his efforts turned that way. Our co-authored Techaiku site lies largely dormant, the two of us haven't been on the same Elite Tech News podcast to date, and when MG does get the chance to talk on his personal site, it hasn't been to join my conversations.

These are just a few examples of how my blogging clique has changed, and one of the reasons I dumped the blogroll in a site UI update a few months back. No sooner would I highlight one friend, but I'd have to go back and pull their site when they stopped updating or got otherwise distracted. Seeing my blog clique change makes it even more important to make sure I'm blogging with a purpose, to start conversations, announce news, or engage with new communities, rather than trying to be popular. I expect that in twelve months, the circle of friends in the blogosphere I have now will be wildly different.

That's part of why I started highlighting five new bloggers a month who are engaging and having great voices in the blogosphere... not so much to beg them to be my next BFF, but to ensure those who are adding value are recognized, and will get the satisfaction they need to keep going. After all, if this is something like high school, somebody has to play the role of the upperclassman showing the new freshmen around the place.

So what do you do? Has your blogging clique changed? Do you want to join my clique? It's not where the cool kids hang out, but it's not like we're sitting around playing Dungeons and Dragons either.

TweetStats Upgrades Twitter Timing Graphs

TweetStats is a great graphical way to see trends in how often you're sending notes on Twitter, which days you're most often hanging out in the Twitterverse, and what hours are most likely to see you active than others. On Thursday, TweetStats reloaded with an feature which combines daily "tweets" with hourly "tweets", giving new insight into whether you blog from the office during your 9-5, or if you're more of a Twitter weekend warrior.

Taking a look at my own statistics, at http://tweetstats.com/graphs/louisgray, a few trends are noticeable:


1) I am using Twitter on an increasing basis. While I only averaged about 2.5 Twitter updates a day in February, that number increased to over 3 in March, and more than 4 in April. After 10 days in May, I've reached 50, making that new ratio 5 a day.


2) There are a few gaps in my Twittering behavior. The first is a near-consistent hole from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. every day, with the exception of Sunday, when it looks like I just might have something to say around 3 a.m. on some nights. The other gap is a near-emptiness during the workweek between 9 and 5, with occasional activity.

3) I use Twitter @replies for just over a third of my updates, with Robert Scoble getting 12, almost twice that of Cyndy of Profy and Frederic of The Last Podcast, who follow with 7 and 6, respectively.

While TweetStats is not new, the new graph of "Aggregate Hourly Tweets" is new, and interesting, updated for the user's local time zone. As my Twitter activity accumulates, mindful of avoiding an increase in my Twitter Noise ratio, I wonder if the patterns will remain the same. If you're curious as to your TweetStats, go to www.tweetstats.com. You can even put in any Twitter ID you wish and pull their data.

Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail

E-mail used to be about connecting people, regardless of distance. With time, it developed new capabilities - sending attachments of ever greater size, acting as a marketing vehicle, both solicited and otherwise (see: Spam), displaying pictures and HTML, and of course, serving as a repository for status notifications for commerce, news, and social media. Now, there's no question for me that updates from online services greatly outnumber the amount of person to person communication I get each day in my personal e-mail. (Work e-mail, of course, is another story)

For me, e-mail is where I want to be updated for all things finance, be it bank statements, credit card invoices, stock trade transactions, or the electricity and cell phone bills. As I see it, every e-mail note there saves paper, and saves me digging through the mail to sign something off and send a check.

I also, despite getting them at an increasing rate over the last few months, still get notifications by e-mail when somebody chooses to follow me on FriendFeed, LinkRiver, Shyftr or Twitter, for starters. I also get notified if someone befriends me on other services, like Facebook and Digg. At times, especially when a particular topic is driving up conversation, I can hear the sounds of new e-mail hitting my computer every couple minutes, invariably drawing a sarcastic comment from my wife, who helpfully adds, "Well, aren't you popular?"


Twitter and FriendFeed follows come in pretty often these days...
While I could, of course, turn off these notifications, it helps to see if the person following is someone I'll be soon watching in turn, and it also alerts me to if I'm getting name-dropped somewhere. Usually, a quick visit to Summize or Google Blog Search can help with that.

Curious if others using Web services as I do were seeing a similar onslaught of Web notifications taking over their in box, I posted a question to Twitter, which also hit FriendFeed. So far, the response is certainly mixed.

Susan Beebe claimed 85% of her e-mail to be from "real people", but otherwise, the FriendFeed voting came out 16-2 in favor of services, while Twitter replies also came out with services ahead, 6 to 1. Bwana McCall wrote, "I get more Bacn than real email. It's sad.", while Hutch Carpenter said it simply, "Notifications by far."

While many people are fighting with the e-mail data deluge, striving for the proverbial "In Box Zero", handling online notifications is like any other system. You just need some good hierarchy. I've set up a folder called "Blog" in my e-mail for all correspondence related to the blog, from people pitching stories, to working with entrepreneurs and other bloggers. I have subfolders for some of the services where I've had the most updates, and of course, for real-world work, I have a "Commerce" folder, which surprisingly, has all my stock trade notifications from eTrade going back to the year 2000, and every Amazon.com order ever. Thank goodness for e-mail search, something Apple's Mail program does extremely well.

While robots may have taken over the inbound side of my e-mail, I still own the outbound side, and take every effort I can to keep up. But the mix has definitely changed.

Mergelab Comes to an Early Close, Shutting Down in Beta

Not every social aggregator is on the path to riches or fame and fortune. Even the best designed, thoroughly coordinated sites can find the push to grow a user base and generate community difficult, especially as the number of similar sites spirals ever higher, driving a need for differentiation and specialization.

With this background comes the news that Mergelab, who I helped first cover back in March, is shutting down completely by June 30, having never reached an open beta period.

Unlike other sites which operate with you as the anchor, asking you to set up the many Web services you use and then share your profile with friends, Mergelab asked instead for you to put in your contacts, and then, it would scour the Web and grab their updates, giving you their updates all in one place, much like Spokeo. Also unlike other sites, Mergelab had opted to not integrate comments or rating systems for shared content.

While the site's interface was clean and showed promise for some who would like a less-noisy area to keep updated on friends, Mergelab never got the chance to succeed on the public stage.

I talked with Alan Steele, one of Mergelab's three employees, by phone yesterday, and he helped paint a picture of how the team quickly learned that not only was the space crowded, but that venture capitalists were looking for more than a stand-alone site.


My Mergelab feed in actionAs he put it, VCs and investment bankers, upon hearing Mergelab's position, would quickly ask about two things: their Facebook application strategy, and how they would approach Open Social. He said, "There is so much investment in the social networking side of things. All the investors are pouring their energy and money in the space. Intellectually, I should have figured this out six months ago, but I didn't understand this all viscerally until recently."

It was just two months ago when Mergelab first became comfortable opening up and being covered on my blog. In the ensuing weeks, while focused on building a product, external pressures to gain revenue and pay employees grew too overbearing, and more profitable opportunities came up for two of Mergelab's team, making them reevaluate along the way.

"At every stage of building something like this, you have to ask where are we, what are our prospects, and should we keep doing this instead of other things," Steele said. "(Shutting down) was a rational decision on where we were and what our needs were."

Mergelab's strategy to scour the Web and find data on friends turned out to be a contributing factor to the stress of growing as well. With about 100 invitation-only beta users, Mergelab had seen tens of thousands of contacts imported, meaning the company's servers were tracking thousands of feeds, aggregating data, slicing it per user and presenting it in a simple way. As Steele said, "A small number of users can create large amounts of data. To scale up to an open beta, we would have to had fired up a significant farm of servers."

Looking at significant new expenditures ahead, combined with negligible revenue, and the prospect of other alternatives, Steele and team figured the right thing to do was to close early, rather than getting the site so far out ahead that more users would be affected. And despite the crowding in the space, with alternatives like SocialThing, FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Spokeo and others, Steele said even thinking about competition was the wrong step for the company, so early in its process.

"It's too early to think about destroying a competitor or going ahead of them. Instead, you have to focus on your differentiators and your business model," he said. "Competition wasn't a huge factor, because when you're at this stage, you can't spend too much time worrying about competition."

The official announcement of Mergelab's shutting down comes at noon today, with final closure on June 30th. The company's technology assets are now up for grabs to interested buyers.

Content Filters Proving Evasive for RSS, Social Media Sites

Whether it be RSS feeds, social networks, or one of the many social media aggregation sites, it's no surprise that even your closest peers are sharing data they care about that you just don't. But so far, despite many users calling for content-based filters, solutions to block keywords or topics are missing from the vast majority of information spigots. In fact, I can't think of a single one I use that's gotten the formula right.

Not to overly repeat myself, but one of the major hopes I had for Google Reader last year was that they would add what I called "Negative Keywords", which would let me block specific posts from people I had subscribed to, be they off-topic posts on politics, family and sports, arrays of links from del.icio.us, or their latest cause du jour.

As the 2008 election season is heating up, it's no surprise that even the most geeky of tech news sources are starting to give some coverage to Obama vs. Clinton or Obama vs. McCain, and it will only increase over time. If I so chose, why couldn't I ask Twitter or Google Reader or FriendFeed to preemptively hide updates that included keywords like "Clinton", "Obama" or "McCain"? Today, I can't do that in any of those services, so far as I know.

Taking things further, I've also at times been tantalized by the idea of a "nuclear option" for the Web, where if I so chose, I could eradicate the mentioning of a keyword of any kind from all activity.

On Wednesday, Robert Scoble said “I wish when you blocked someone on Twitter they disappeared from Google Talk too.” Makes sense. But what if you had a button that not only blocked the person, but also, any mention of the person, from all social media services, by using their own name as the negative keyword? What if they were even automatically filtered out of Google searches, blocked just like profanity and pornography are from decency filters?

Google Reader hasn't yet debuted negative keywords. So Mahalo fans still get updates on Jason Calacanis' bulldogs and "fatblogging" and followers of this blog will still get summaries of Oakland A's games I attend. While I can always unsubscribe from somebody, there's got to be a safer middle ground in the social media and RSS space that lets me get the content I'm looking for, and not the content I'm not. Do you know of a service that's got negative keywords nailed?

Think Apple Would Dare To Take On the Movie Theaters?

With the addition of movie rentals on iTunes, Apple has given my wife and me a new entertainment outlet, letting us essentially have video on demand from a wide library, for only 3 or 5 dollars, at any time we wish. Just recently, Apple made more headlines by signing a pact where new DVD releases would simultaneously debut on iTunes. But this still doesn't solve the issue that iTunes doesn't have new releases that are currently playing in the box office, and I think Apple should be strongly considering working with the movie studios to deliver movie rentals of films currently in the theater, at a premium price, if they aren't already.

While new movies and blockbusters hit the theaters each weekend, it's been a long time since we made the effort of going to the theater, paying $11 and up per ticket, stomaching high prices for food and drink, and even then not having first dibs on seating, lacking the ability to pause or rewind the film (like on TiVo or Apple TV), and being forced to sit through an incredible amount of previews and pre-feature ads.

Our living room TV and laptop are the new theater.

But this still means we're missing out on the experience of seeing a new movie in its opening weekend, and being part of the conversation with others who have caught up on the latest Hollywood mega hit. By the time these one-time hits have reached iTunes, and therefore, the Apple TV, months have likely passed by, and often, the interest I once had in seeing the film has passed, leaving me more likely to do something else.

The movie theater industry has already lost me as a customer, for the most part. But they can get some of my revenue back if they strike a deal with Apple, and make new releases available on iTunes the day they debut in the theater.

I propose the following pricing for a 24-hour new movie rental:

• $9.99 for viewing in the first two weeks.
• $7.99 for viewing in weeks three through six.
• $5.99 for viewing in weeks six through twelve.
• Standard iTunes pricing for all weeks afterward.

There's no question that getting this deal completed won't be easy. Theater owners would be rightly concerned as to losing customers and entertainment moguls aren't known for being flexible. Movie studios might even be concerned you'll rent from iTunes, and show a new feature on your huge flat-screen TV to a busload of your friends. And maybe you would. But if we see Apple's work so far, both with music, and later TV shows and now, feature-length films, it only makes sense that this day will soon come. As a consumer, I can't wait, and I hope I don't have to wait too long. My credit card is ready, and until these new releases show up on iTunes, I can find better things to spend my money on.

Previous Discussion:

March 22, 2007:
The Apple TV Debate Is Upside Down
April 11, 2007:
How Apple Could Crush Netflix Now
September 15, 2007:
Adding Movie Rentals to iTunes Would Save the Apple TV
October 29, 2007:
Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved

The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War

I've seen a lot of social media tools and aggregators. A good number of them are designed very well, and could be great tools, provided a swarm of early adopters, and then later, late adopters, showed up. Some of them trumpet just how many different services are supported, and use that as a rallying cry for why one site should be ditched for another. But it's the wrong approach. For while they may have been working on making fancier widgets and supporting yet another niche service, others have been building a foundation for community, making them the clear winners.

Examples of this are everywhere, but the most blatant examples that come to my mind are those of Twitter and FriendFeed. I could also make examples for LinkedIn and Facebook, but that's another post at another time.

Twitter has been roundly scorned for its occasional inaccessibility, costing users about 1 percent downtime over the last four months, according to Pingdom. While serviceable alternatives exist, in Pownce and Jaiku, for starters, those who have invested time in building up their Twitter community, including followers, those they follow, and an archive of "tweets" aren't going to leave, even if Jaiku and Pownce deliver 100% uptime, and manage to add features that Twitter simply doesn't match. Twitter has become more than a microblogging mechanism, but a serious community.

This was very clearly illustrated by Michael Arrington's piece on TechCrunch: "Twitter May Not Have To Care About Uptime Any Longer" last month, when he said, "after a three day weekend outage I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occured: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me."

The same could be said for the lifestreaming and aggregation space.

On the Elite Tech News podcast this last week, the conversation turned to FriendFeed, and whether or not it had a GUI that would be welcomed by non early adopters. After suggesting Kevin Fox had big plans to upgrade the service, I also said it would take a lot more than a shiny new interface on another aggregator to get me to move. And it would take a lot more than bells and whistles, because in the last seven months of FriendFeed being in service, the site has developed many different sub-communities which make engaging and participating both fun and informative.

In order for me to leave FriendFeed for another service, be it Profilactic, SocialThing, Iminta or Plaxo, it would take the entire community shifting at once.

But that doesn't stop some social media sites from arguing it's all about the features. Take a blog post from Profilactic that compares its service with that of FriendFeed. The author writes, "FriendFeed supports 28 social sites. Profilactic supports 155. Not much else to say there."

And while time has passed, and both services have added more supported external sites, the author's summary, reading, "Profilactic supports 127 more sites than FriendFeed. We allow you to filter out your friends' feeds that you don't want to see. We give you features that FriendFeed doesn't offer like Clippings. And we allow you to take it all with you with badges," just doesn't give enough of a compelling argument, especially when it pertains to communities.

The gap between FriendFeed and Twitter and other sites who haven't yet gotten off the ground is going to make it incredibly difficult for alternatives to make headway, even if they do end up having more features, a prettier UI, or greater uptime. This is in part why I first highlighted the many tech bloggers flocking to FriendFeed, and why FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit has on separate occasions said, “Great products are more than just a pile of features” and that “FriendFeed has personal communities”. FriendFeed gets that the site isn't about a pile of features, but it's about the users. Once a community is built, they will rally around a service, and become extremely loyal, even if another option is shinier or louder.

I Am a Google Reader Shared Links Ninja

On March 3rd of 2007, I made a list of 10 suggestions to the Google Reader team on how they could make the world's most popular feed reader even better. The tenth option was a simple one, which I titled as "Customization Everywhere", where I said "there's zero options to customize a shared link blog." As of today, only 14 months later, we now have the first user customizable options to make the shared items page a little more fancy. And today, I can profess myself a ninja.

Alongside the so far much-criticized announcement that you can append notes to Google Reader shared items, you can also choose from four artistic styles on the shared items page, including the Default, as boring as it sounds, Ice Cream, Sea, and ... Ninjas.

Seeing how episode 7 of the Elite Tech News podcast was titled "Explanatory Ninjas", it makes sense that at least for today, I would use the theme of "Ninja".

(See my Ninja-Themed Shared Items Blog)

By selecting Ninja, all that's really added is a cute banner at the top of my shared items page, showing four ninjas and their various weapons. It's not necessarily a status symbol, showing my link sharing prowess or skills with the black arts. The theme is cute, but of course, non-functional. I still can't change the color of the background, or the fonts, or go "all MySpace" with the page, so I guess that's good. But it's a start.

Of note: I was lucky enough to meet and talk with Chris Wetherell of the Google Reader team last Thursday for lunch. We didn't talk about this feature, but I remain very positive on the direction and focus the Google Reader team has going forward. It's a small team, but very dedicated.

Shyftr Adds OPML Support To Intriguing RSS Feed Reader

With RSS becoming ubiquitous now, it is not uncommon for Web power users to have hundreds or even thousands of individual RSS feed subcriptions, covering anything from sports to technology, news and blogs of friends and family. But adding these feeds one by one to a new feed reader is simply out of the question. It takes too long. That's why the majority of RSS feed readers, both online and off, have moved to support OPML, enabling the portability of both your feeds and your folders.

Today, Shyftr, an online feed reader that lets you share comments within the Shyftr community and learn what are the most popular feeds and items, added this crucial capability, making them a stronger competitor to other market leaders, such as Google Reader, BlogLines and NewsGator. (See the official post: OPML Support Is Here!)

Shyftr first caught my attention earlier this year, when I highlighted their integrated comments system and blog rankings. (See: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings) But at the time, I had no choice but to highlight their lack of OPML, a real sticking point for me. Later in March, Shyftr added pocket blogs, much like Google Reader's shared links blog.

You might also remember that last month, the Shyftr team was engaged in some controversy over their practice of displaying full feed items and comments away from the original blog, a position from which they later relented, following criticism. While I didn't have any issues at all with what they were doing, others did, and Shyftr was smart to quickly adjust.


Like with other RSS feed readers, adding OPML to Shyftr is very simple. Just export your OPML from your existing reader, and from your Shyftr Profile, click the "+" button under Feeds to add new items. Once you upload your OPML file, Shyftr will then keep you updated as to its progress, first by laying out the specified folder hierarchy, and second, showing how many feeds have been imported.


For somebody like me, this process can take several minutes. It's not the fastest OPML import I've ever seen, but it definitely works. Just make sure you don't close the browser window while it's operating.


What I liked best about Shyftr's implementation is that the system automatically recognized if I had already manually entered a feed. If I had, it would correctly move that feed, which was duplicated, into the folder specified by my OPML file. I was at first worried I would have to manually move each duplicated feed, but it took care of the hard work for me. (That also explains why in the above graphic, the total number of feeds imported is less than the number processed)

With the addition of OPML, Shyftr has many of the major checkboxes for next generation RSS feed readers nailed. They have online feed reading. They have user profiles. They have comments. They have popularity rankings. They have a personalized link blog. Just about the only thing that Google Reader and others have that they don't yet is keyboard navigation through feeds. If they can manage to get that nailed, Shyftr could be even more compelling than it already is today. It has been fun to watch the team go from pet project to serious RSS feed reader alternative in the space of a few months, and I expect that adding OPML is just the beginning.

FriendFeedMachine Enables FriendFeed's "Hide" Options

For those who find FriendFeed's firehose of updates overwhelming, rapidly finding the "hide" option, enabling users to block updates from any service (like Twitter) or updates from "Friends of a Friend" (FOAF), can mean the difference between enjoying and getting benefits from the service, or running away in the opposite direction. As such, integrating FriendFeed's flexible "hide" options is a must for any third party application interfacing with the service.

FriendFeedMachine's Scott Goldie, in his third update of the alternative Web UI for FriendFeed, made adding FriendFeed's "hide options" a priority for the latest release, as well as setting the option to block Twitter replies (via watching for the @ symbol), and a host of other filters, against services, users, and read items.

Not every FriendFeed user can handle the "noise" which can stem from following anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds or thousands of users. In fact, co-founder Sanjeev Singh's simple question: "Is FriendFeed too noisy for you?" has generated 60+ responses since he posted the query in February.

By tapping into FriendFeed's API and enabling FriendFeedMachine users to get the same kind of hiding preferences they do on the full service, Goldie's made it even more likely for users to consider migrating. Without these filters, even I wouldn't have stood a chance. For more information on the latest updates from FriendFeedMachine, check the official blog.