Dealing With Capacity Overload and "Laying Off" Features

If you take a step back and think about popular Web services, be they RSS feed readers, communications tools, social networks, link aggregators or lifestreams, their core deliverable is data. The way they are differentiating is through enabling that data to be accessed by more people, and manipulated in new ways. But as their popularity grows, with more users, more features, and richer media, be it photographs, music, or video, the data can spiral out of control, demanding larger databases, more servers, faster networks, better caching... you name it. And if they don't deal with it? Death. The services can slow down or crash, and users will move on.

Not every Web service has had the structure, the planning or the money of Google, so not every site can keep going with all features, saving all data, forever and ever.

Twitter's recent struggles keeping up with user growth and resulting issues have been extremely visible. To cope with the load, the microblogging service started whacking features one by one. At various points, Twitter turned off the @Replies tab, removed pagination, reduced the number of times that external services could access its API, and eliminated the use of instant messaging services. Limping along, Twitter has slowly returned to speed, as one by one, most of the pieces have been turned back on, but not everybody is happy about it.

But don't think Twitter's alone. Just yesterday, I logged into SocialThing, a lifestreaming service thought by many to have a better GUI for FriendFeed, and found that it had been forced to scale back its offering as users grew.

Rather than supporting many different services, SocialThing only lets me include Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, with LiveJournal, Pownce and Vimeo also being options. But the many other sites I use? Blocked. They write, "We have had to temporarily disable a few of our services, due to user growth. We hope to have them back up soon!"


At a time when FriendFeed is gaining notoriety for supporting rapid access to the streaming of 35 different services without slowdown, that kind of scaling down can't be good.

For Shyftr, a new RSS reader I've covered quite a bit here, they too are seeing the challenge of user growth. As we saw with Mergelab's closure, the act of tracking thousands of feeds and storing their data for an infinite amount of time can be very challenging. I've already seen Toluu upgrade their server farm, and Shyftr has done the same recently. But more changes are coming to handle the rising user base.

As founder Dave Stanley wrote in a blog post, Notice: System Changes and New Implementations, Shyftr will be removing "a substantial portion of backdated data" which should reduce recent issues with database performance, and let them turn on services that had been disabled thanks to site slow-downs, including search. As he said, "It's time we trim some fat while making the system leaner, more efficient, and better prepared for future growth."

If you have a Shyftr login, see the full post:
Notice: System Changes and New Implementations

I expect that the rules for small companies are different than the rules for big companies. Twitter has gotten such a bad response for its issues in part due to its popularity, and in part due to its criticality for some communications. For smaller sites like Shyftr and SocialThing, users are more likely to be accepting of temporary scale-backs or data removal. But if the big guys like Yahoo!, Google, Apple or Microsoft, took the route of deleting data and reducing features, it'd be likely that we'd see an uproar.

So how should they handle it? Do you, as a user, have an absolute right to all your archives, ever? Do you have the right to demand that once features are added, they never be removed? And do services have an obligation to scale up their hardware and infrastructure to keep you happy? Would you help fund their upgrades? Handling growth is critical, in my opinion, and those best prepared for scaling will leapfrog those who are forced to "lay off" their data. We're wishing Twitter luck, but there are a lot of smaller services struggling with similar issues.

Saturday Night News Briefs: May 31, 2008

More and more often, I'm running into items I want to share, but might not be detailed enough to generate a full post. So here are a few things that caught my eye over the last few days. If it makes sense, maybe I'll make this a recurring feature.

FF To Go Adds Rooms Support

About 10 days ago, Benjamin Golub offered the first bona fide mobile FriendFeed solution, delivering FF To Go. The next day, the FriendFeed team threw him for a loop with the addition of rooms, letting users break out into smaller groups to talk about specific items. Golub wasn't all that far behind, and has now enabled support for the new rooms, which you can see both when using the mobile interface and via the Web browser.

Some good ones to try:

Elite Tech News: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/l33t
LouisGrayish: http://www.fftogo.com/room/louisgrayish/
* Not my creation... but we'll use it. Why not?
Social Media: http://www.fftogo.com/room/social-media/

Daniel Ha of Disqus Proposes A Commenter's Rights

Although I thought we'd discussed this issue to death back in April, the last two weeks have seen flare-ups around who owns a comment, whether comments should be placed on the original blog or other aggregation services, and whether a publisher has the right to delete comments for any reason. Daniel, whose service is now gaining a great deal of prominence in the tech blogging community, suggests that commenters should have the ability to edit or delete comments and retain access, even if they've been deleted from the source blog. He also recommends portability of those comments to other blogs, including their own.

The post, in its entirety, can be found here:
Disqus Blog: A Commenter's Rights

SocialMedian Undergoes Redesign

Still flying somewhat under the radar, Jason Goldberg's news-focused social media and aggregation site, SocialMedian, got a serious make-over yesterday, enabling mini-profile pop-ups for other members (as FriendFeed recently did as well), offering a site toolbar with drop-downs for news networks, topics and people, and simplified ways to both "clip" and "snip". The service continues to expand its member base and grow increasingly interesting. The updated design is very clean and useful as well.

See: socialmedian Re-Design!


Click for larger version
In those times when I'm not getting to the blog as quick as possible, feel free to check out my Google Reader Shared Items feed or watch my FriendFeed profile, where everything is flowing these days.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #3: Take Advantage of Advanced Search

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, and the bookmarklet. Today, I thought I'd take a look at how to maximize the site's advanced search capabilities.

Considering almost ninety percent of the FriendFeed team has a Google pedigree, it's no surprise they made aspects most associated with Google, such as scalability and simplicity a priority. Also a big thing at Google? Search. FriendFeed's search function indexes in real-time, and can be diced every which way, including by service.

1. Where is Basic Search and What Does It Do?

Every FriendFeed page features the default search box in the top right corner of the page. By default, FriendFeed's search button searches through your activity and that of your friends. Searching a keyword will look not only at shared items, but also their comments, nicknames, and user names.

The upside of this activity is that you can find results extremely fast. But one downside is that if you try to search for any time you might be mentioned (called ego-searching), you still have to wade through all your own activity. So far, FriendFeed doesn't let you exclude a specific user's items, including yours.

2. Where is Advanced Search?

FriendFeed's advanced search is only available from the search results page itself, but you can find it at http://friendfeed.com/search/advanced.


The advanced search option, waiting for queries.
3. Advanced Search > By Service

The advanced search capability essentially lets you limit your search results, either by service, by person, or by group. For example, you can limit search results to be from Del.icio.us bookmarks, or from within Disqus comments, by using the pull-down option. Again, by default, you are searching your own friends, but can branch out to choose a specific user or show everyone.

4. Advanced Search > By User

Searching by user is especially good if you want to see everything on a specific topic that one user has done. Want to see how often Drew Olanoff mentions ReadBurner nowadays? Search for ReadBurner and where it says "one person", enter his nickname, drewolanoff. FriendFeed has amusingly given the nickname "scobleizer" as the example, as you can see in the above screenshot, but any name will do.


Searching "drewolanoff" for ReadBurner mentions.


"drewolanoff"'s ReadBurner content is displayed.
One downside to this search is that it can also returns comments from friends that mention the search term on their shared items, even if the specific person you're searching on didn't say it.

5. Advanced Search > By User > By Service

Now, combining #3 and #4, you can search a specific service by user for a keyword. Going back to "drewolanoff" and ReadBurner, I can select Twitter as a service, and only show the times that Drew mentioned ReadBurner on Twitter.


Searching "drewolanoff"'s Twitter entries for ReadBurner mentions.


"drewolanoff"'s Tweets on ReadBurner.
6. Some Fun Ways to Use Advanced Search

The most fun with advanced search is probably when using it to search FriendFeed's public feed, or "everyone". While FriendFeed is well known for its noise, you can cut through the noise of even the public feed with advanced search.

Want to find out how many other electronica fans like the music of Underworld? Search for the term "Underworld", select Last.fm or Pandora as services, make sure the "Everyone" option is checked, and hit search.


Looking for future concert buds...


Wow! Fellow Underworld listeners!
Want to see how many people are sharing YouTube videos of Bill O'Reilly? Search for Bill O'Reilly, select YouTube as a service, and again, choose everyone.


A popular topic on YouTube these days...


Once a clown, always a clown.
Like pictures of sunsets? Search for sunset on Flickr or SmugMug.


The world's best sunsets, one query away.
For many people just getting started with FriendFeed, using the advanced search tool could be a fast way to find peers.

7. Using Boolean Searches With Advanced Search

Given our expectations that all searches act like Google searches, I expected boolean searches to work. Searching for "Cat OR Dog" highlighted comments and shares with cats or dogs, while searching for "Cat AND Dog" only showed items where both appeared in the thread. Oddly, the words "and" and "or" were bolded in the results, which Google would ignore.

Searching for text in quotes also limits results to the specific phrase. Searching for "Monkey's uncle" with quotes would get one set of results, while searching for "Monkey's uncle" without quotes also returns a tweet, "At Uncle Billy's with monkey woman". Not very nice. :-)

Summary

Although FriendFeed's user base is still well behind that of the more widely-known services, the team has already gained a good reputation for indexing data quickly, and the search function is sharp, especially when you consider that the database has to index not only the many millions of updates across three dozen services, but also all the comments being left, in real time. The advanced search functionality can let you hone in on just what you're looking for, and cut through the noise.

Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget

Sometimes, in the race to declare one service better than another, to be among the first to say one product won't scale, or that one product will be killed or eclipsed by another, the rush of feeling declarative overlooks the fact that underneath every single one of these services we interact with each day lies people. In almost every case, especially when it comes to the nascent Web 2.0 market, the services are understaffed or sole-sourced by well-meaning developers with little more than hope, an idea, and reams of code.

One thing I have tried to do when writing about the many services I've grown to like or otherwise launch here is to mention the names behind the services. I will let you know that it's been Benjamin Golub behind FFToGo, Tweet2Tweet and RSSMeme. It was Alexander Marktl with ReadBurner, Caleb Elston with Toluu, Mario Romero with Feedheads, Yuvi Panda with TheStatBot and Dave Stanley and Matt Shaulis teaming up on Shyftr.

I say these names not because they'll eclipse their "brands", but because in almost all cases, I've forged a relationship with these entrepreneurs, even if it's just been e-mail, phone calls, late-night Google Chats, or Facebook messages. And while it's easy to crow that Twitter's down (again) or say one service is going the way of the dodo, you can be sure that the best, most aware, entrepreneurs are watching what you say. They've got their Google Searches, Technorati queries and Summize feeds set to alert them when their companies are mentioned, and the last thing they want to see is you getting a rush from being the first to say "Deadpool", a term popularized by tech blog giant TechCrunch, who has made something of a side business declaring startups dust.

On Tuesday, in a FriendFeed comment thread, I was reminded of this by a somewhat snarky note by Robert Seidman, who in response to an amusing piece that highlighted both me and Robert Scoble as finding new services in our own way, said a few sites I've covered here might as well close up shop now.

"The sad thing is, other than FriendFeed almost ALL of the services Louis touts will 'sleep with the fishes'. You could call deadpool on stuff like Social Median and Toluu right now. Functionality will be absorbed into other Google products."
-- Robert Seidman (Link)

This bothered me, not because he was suggesting I have a tendency to pick losers, but instead, because the eagerness to call "deadpool" didn't take into account the people behind the service, nor their goals. Not every Web service is expected to grow into a real company, and be sold off or enter the public markets through IPO. Many of these are hobbies. Others should be seen with the same light as shareware, in that most content is for free, and if they make a few bucks, that's just fine. Sometimes, a Web service will launch and help a developer pad the resume, or use it as a springboard to the next job. And whether it's one person behind a product or a hundred, there's no value in prematurely suggesting they wave the white flag.

Beyond this issue, I was also surprised to see the occasional visitor to my blog from searches done on Techmeme for its creator, Gabe Rivera. (See the search results) After a few of these searches had hit my referral log, I thought I'd check what was going on. Interestingly, despite the fact Techmeme is spoken of constantly, and the site comes up often in blogging circles, the last three stories to reach Techmeme that mentioned Gabe Rivera were mine, including a piece from each month in March, April and May. This tells me that people, when writing about Techmeme, don't mention Gabe, and have divorced the service from the individual.

As I wrote in April, when I asked "Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.", I have a tendency to shun negativity and be excited about new services. In parallel, I am supporting the developers who are taking a risk by shipping. I am supporting the people behind the services who are looking to help us consume more information, helping us build new social networks, or improve our communications. When I write about a service, I'll continue to do what I can to remember the developers and hopefully, let you get a glimpse into their world as well.

TweetSmart Offers Real-Time Twitter-Powered Group Link Blog

When Twitter users aren't sending 140-character updates for miniature conversations, or when they're not complaining about the service's lack of uptime, very often they're sharing links, be it items they've found interesting, or hyping their own blog posts.

A new service called TweetSmart is looking to harness these links, not in aggregate, in an attempt to rank popular items as ReadBurner, RSSMeme, AlphaTwitter, Feedheads and LinkRiver do, but instead, to act as a real-time link blog aimed to get an instant snapshot of the best content the Web has to offer.

TweetSmart is essentially an extension of Twitter's direct message service, or DMs, with some interesting wrinkles thrown in. TweetSmart users are encouraged to send links to the TweetSmart Twitter account, and to use one of 11 categories provided by the site, ranging from mortgage and real estate to Web, technology and social media. Depending on the category you choose, your link will be properly tagged, featuring the icon of the category you selected.

To use the service, all you need to do is follow the user "twsm" via Twitter, and alert the TweetSmart crew you want to participate. If they follow you back, you're given access to the site.


The TweetSmart Link Blog in Action
To send links to the shared TweetSmart feed, use the format:

"d twsm category type your message here"

If I were to share a link from ReadWriteWeb, I might type into my Twitter box:

"d twsm web Read Write Web asks: How Many Friends is Too Many?http://tinyurl.com/6e98dz"

So long as I stay in the 140-character window, and appropriately select one of the TweetSmart categories, my item will be included.

Unlike my Google Reader shared items link blog, which only displays those items I've personally liked, TweetSmart aggregates all links pushed through, in chronological order, from newest to oldest. Unsurprisingly, so far, the site has been overweighted with Social Media links, but that can change depending on the active users, of course.

There are three developers behind TweetSmart (See: About Us - TweetSmart), including Morgan Brown, Paulo and Steve. As with other social link sharing sites, I can see this being valuable for smaller communities, and less valuable as the service gets overcrowded. If TweetSmart wants to graduate from interesting novelty to actual service, it'd be best to create something of a friends feature, where you can follow specific users, or filters to only show specific categories. Without having their product roadmap in front of me, I can't tell you what they will or won't do, but it looks clear to me that those would be some first steps.

To check out TweetSmart, head to www.tweetsmart.com, and don't forget to add "twsm" on Twitter. The team's official blog can be found here.

Disqus' Partner Strategy: Is FriendFeed Integration Up Next?

Today's news on SezWho's acquisition of Tejit stirred up, appropriately, a number of conversations around the Web regarding blog commenting platforms, and comparisons between SezWho and Disqus were common. But while some tried to paint the two products as competition, Disqus founder Daniel Ha publicly looked to open talks with SezWho, while, elsewhere, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit confirmed that he's reached out to the Disqus team to make conversations on the popular social aggregation site two-way, which could mark yet another important name on Disqus' growing list of successful partnerships.

In fact, I didn't have to look far to spot Daniel's conversation with Jitendra Gupta, the CEO of SezWho, for it happened in the comments section of my coverage this morning.

See: SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy: Comments

Although in coverage of the announcement both here and elsewhere, Gupta had made comments about Disqus' removing blog comments from the original site, and centralizing them on their own, rather than declare war against SezWho, Daniel instead played peacemaker, writing, "Congrats on the acquisition. Sounds like you guys are doing something a bit different than us. We should talk about doing something about this fragmentation. Game?"

This led to Jitendra's offering to grab drinks with Daniel, and the two now look like they're indeed game to set up a conversation which could lead to a great deal of collaboration between the two players.

Meanwhile, as FriendFeed continues its rapid growth, gaining significant mindshare, in part due to excitement displayed by top bloggers like Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Fred Wilson, Loic LeMeur, Thomas Hawk and Steve Rubel, the fact that comments on FriendFeed aren't also migrating to the author's blog posts hasn't sat well with everyone. It's uncommon that a few days can go by without one blogger or another begging to have the comments on FriendFeed come back to their site, whether through a blog plug-in or some other way. While I believe a community should be able to hold parallel conversations, not all agree.

Buchheit, in response to a post from Wilson titled Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out, said that he had reached out to Disqus to solve this commenting silo.

"I've been in contact with the Disqus team, and I hope to add the option to copy comments though to Disqus in the not too distant future," Buchheit wrote, also adding, as I believe, "Many of my (FriendFeed) comments aren't relevant in the original context... In many cases, (FriendFeed) is enabling new types of comments that would not (or should not) have occurred in the past."

By forging a partnership with Disqus, FriendFeed users could comment on FriendFeed items, and have comments also post to the originating blog, just as other services, including Fav.or.it and Plaxo have implemented. Combined with the recent introduction of video comments from Seesmic, and the above conversation with SezWho, you can see Disqus' strategy develop, to be open to partnerships of all kinds, establishing their service as one of the most versatile, almost default, in the nascent comment replacement market. It's very smart, and one that will get them a lot of good will in a blogosphere ready to accept new, innovative, approaches to communication.

SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

This morning, SezWho, a content rating and reputation management service, announced the acquisition of Tejit, a small company providing semantic analysis of user generated content through its discovery engine. The purchase is intended for SezWho to deliver even more precise reputation scores for contributors in an online conversation, honed by analysis of their activity throughout the Web, be it through blogs, forums or other social media.

In advance of the announcement, I had the opportunity to talk with SezWho's CEO, Jitendra Gupta, in a call Monday night, outlining the goals of the service, and how the combined offering will differentiate itself from services like Disqus. In our conversation, Gupta touched on many of the hot elements of the Web today, including distributed conversations, search engine optimization, and FriendFeed.

"Conversations are getting distributed, and the user organization is key," Gupta said. "Not even the New York Times controls the conversation across different sites and different people. Because of the democratization of Web 2.0 from blogs to Wikis, there is no one platform that will be the single platform because of the variety of tools that is available."

SezWho's goal, made stronger with the Tejit purchase, is to find out where these conversations are happening, no matter where they are, and build a reputation score for those engaged in discussion, to help others get a good idea for who they're dealing with.

"What we have to do is offer user-centric organization to where all these conversations are happening," Gupta said. "We say conversations are happening everywhere, but how can we make those better? Everybody is creating content. Who is credible and who's not? What is good and what is not good?"

Some of the core tenets of SezWho's offering are centered around keeping the power, including search engine optimization (SEO), with the blogger. While Disqus is a strong commenting platform and offers its own rating systems, the service has at times been criticized for hosting the comment activity off the blog itself, and instead, on Disqus' servers. For those who care about such things, they don't necessarily get the SEO benefit of the comments, which they might if they used Blogger, TypePad or WordPress' native commenting systems, each of which is supported by SezWho.

"We think there should not be one central repository, but we can instead be a useful benefit to the other sites," Gupta said. "From a Google point of view or Techmeme point of view, it's not clear that the content is fresh, or being updated. You're not benefiting from the SEO value."

The combined offering hopes to help you find out more about the person you're conversing with online, thanks to SezWho's tracking their activity and building a reputation and profile, based on their interactions on the many different sites throughout the Web. Tejit's offering will greatly increase the ability to get context around the data, and show how the reputaiton of one piece of content relates to another.

"We show these profiles around the people participating to show what else has this person done," Gupta said. "You don't want just connections, but credible connections. Who is this guy, and what is his credibility? We have the best reputation engine for establishing who is credible and who is not, and we take into account all the interactions on all these sites. We can interact and provide feedback, which leads to credible content discovery."

SezWho, prior to today's news, had 11 people, including 9 full-time employees, 2 part-time staffers, and a team of 4 engineers in India, and has raised just over $1 million in funding. Tejit is a 3-person company, and in the short time since its discovery engine was in service, it has already crawled more than 5 million blogs for analysis.

TheStatBot Analyzes Top Tweeters, TechCrunch, Makes Techmeme

It's only Wednesday, but it's already been a very big week for Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot. After launching on May 1st with an analysis of Robert Scoble's Twitter activity, Yuvi has followed on with the most detailed analysis of Techmeme ever done (well beyond my surface attempts), and has now branched out to cover other large social media sites and blogs.

Yesterday, Yuvi published the definitive analysis of Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, picking apart the popular site's 7,000+ posts and nearly 2 million words. See: TechCrunch Statistics A-W. In the analysis, Yuvi discovered the site's posts per day has accelerated dramatically from less than 5 a day three years ago, to nearly 25 a day now, as TechCrunch has gone professional, with a stable of talented writers.


TechCrunch's Posting Frequency is Up and to the Right
That post, as with nearly every analytical post from TheStatBot, made Techmeme. This rate of achieving the popular tech news site has meant that TheStatBot has now achieved a ranking on the Techmeme Leaderboard, down at #99 overall, from the last 30 days. Given my downward trajectory, I'll likely fall of the board as he rises at this pace. (See his excitement here)

Today, Yuvi follows on with a detailed review of the Twitter Clients used by Twitter Power Users, finding that among the top 100 users of Twitter, the Web interface dominates, as it does with the rank and file, but that SMS text messages, Mobile Twitter and Twitterific are much more popular clients, while Twhirl is more popular among the common users. The Web interface, in fact, encapsulates almost 60% of all activity (and more than 90% of my own activity, though I'm not in the top 100 by a long shot).


A Breakdown of the Clients Used by the Twitter 100
As mentioned a few times here, I'm a big supporter of Yuvi's work on TheStatBot. I've informally helped him discuss topics, timing, and given the occasional tip on graphics or grammar, but the work is absolutely all his own, and he's doing great. Now, the 17-year-old is looking into college admissions, and hopes his work on TheStatBot as an extra-curricular activity will help him get further along in the education process. You can help either by linking his way, or ordering up a custom analysis of your site or any service. He would be more than happy to put his analysis to work for you, and obviously does an excellent job.

Toluu Expands Activity Threads, Rolls Out New RSS Options

Not eager to sit still, Toluu developer Caleb Elston is rolling out yet new features, just a week after making headlines with Twitter integration. This week, after seeing a great deal of usage of the newly redesigned activity page, Elston is expanding options to see new activity, now splicing the stream to show feed changes, contact updates, and favorites.

The increasingly popular OPML sharing and RSS feed matching site is still invite only (and I have many if you are interested), but in the two months since its debut, Toluu has become a flexible gateway to add new feeds, discover new content from friends, and find new peers.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing changes to Feeds.
Also new today, Toluu is dramatically expanding the number of RSS feeds available on the site. It's not just a one-way street for RSS for Toluu. Now, each filtering view (feeds, contacts and favorites) can generate a feed, just for you, for all your friends, or for the daring, for all Toluu users worldwide. Filling out that simple 3 by 3 grid means you have 9 new RSS options in aggregate.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing contact changes.
As Caleb wrote in an e-mail yesterday, the growing user base of Toluu means that if you're not constantly watching the site's activity stream, you could miss something. Hence, the need for splicing the feed.

"We wanted to make it easier to see a particular kind of activity," he wrote. "It is super interesting being able to see what feeds Toluu users have recently marked as favorites or see who your contacts are adding to their list of contacts."

Caleb has also made himself very much available to feedback from site users. There's even a new FriendFeed room for Toluu, where he has been quite active, taking comments and requests, as well as passing out the much-desired invites: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/toluu.

And don't expect Toluu development to slow any time soon, as Caleb's got even more plans in the works, especially when it comes to better honing in on the date you need quickly.

"Filtering, either explicit or implicit, will continue to gain importance as we live with more data than can be consumed comfortably," he said. "This is just one step towards helping Toluu users get more from their activity stream."

Still don't have access to Toluu? Leave me a note in the comments and I'll send you one via e-mail. You can find me on Toluu at http://www.toluu.com/louisgray.

FriendFeed and Google Reader Are One. Sort Of.

Not too long ago, ReadBurner upgraded, including a new tab that essentially added Google Reader in an iFrame, letting you check your RSS feeds without leaving the site. At the time, I openly speculated that I would love it if FriendFeed would do the same thing.

In my fevered brain, FriendFeed could tie in with Google Reader, and let me see if other friends of mine have already "liked" or shared an item. Imagine seeing a feed from TechCrunch, and a little icon on the right saying 5 friends "liked" the item and 6 had "shared" it and there were 3 comments in FriendFeed. So far, the closest solution to this had been Assetbar, but that data, so far is siloed, and the service didn't gain the traction I had hoped.

So... to my rescue came Matt Shaulis (FriendFeed page), who you know from his work on one of my favorite Google Reader alternatives, Shyftr. Matt spun up a quick bookmarklet, which, if you add it to your toolbar, lets you log in to Google Reader while logged into FriendFeed, defaulting to your friends' shared items. See the below screenshot:


(Click for the full screenshot)

Use FriendFeed? Use Google Reader? Want to make sure, unlike Loic Le Meur speculates, that both are here to stay? Use the below bookmarklet:

Drag Bookmarklet to Toolbar: FriendFeedReader

Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?

When Gabe Rivera opened up search on Techmeme recently, the three-year-old site's archives became an extremely interesting playground to see trends, strong sources for news, simple ego-searching, tracking how companies have been viewed over time, and even to see which blogs are the first to bring the news to the big stage. I did some quick searches on a number of company names, products and other terms to see which sites were the first to have the terms included either in the title or summary of the piece.

Techmeme search only searches main items that reached the front page of the tech news aggregator, and does not include the "Discussion" links. Of the terms I searched for, none debuted on Techmeme prior to September of 2005, so if a service was already well established (See: Yahoo!, Google, Digg, etc.), saying who mentioned it first and made Techmeme after the site debuted doesn't add a ton of value. In the terms I looked for, it was interesting to see such a wide variety of original sources.

Also of note: Popular items that had more than 1,000 total results, including iPhone, made it impossible to find out who got on Techmeme first, as results only go to 1,000, similar to Google and Yahoo!'s limitations.

To try out your own terms, head to http://www.techmeme.com/search/, put in your term of choice, and report the results here. This is merely the tip of the iceberg for sure.

Term: Alert Thingy
Source: TechCrunch
Date: April 16, 2008
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/look-out-twhirl-alert-thingy-adds-twitter-support/

Term: Apple TV
Source: MacDigest
Date: January 9, 2007
Link: http://techdigest.tv/2007/01/macworld_2007_l.html

(Note: Engadget first covered it when it was called "iTV", on Sept. 12, 2006, here: http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/apple-to-release-itv-video-streaming-box-in-2007/)

Term: Assetbar
Source: louisgray.com
Date: February 8, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/assetbar-proposes-solution-to-twitter.html

Term: Disqus
Source: VentureBeat
Date: August 8, 2007
Link: http://venturebeat.com/2007/08/08/disqus-to-launch-new-features/

Term: Drobo
Source: Michael Gartenberg
Date: June 5, 2007
Link: http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/2007/06/drobo_changes_t.html

Term: FriendFeed
Source: New York Times
Date: October 1, 2007
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01feed.html

Term: Google Reader
Source: Official Google Blog
Date: October 7, 2005
Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/feed-world.html

Term: Hillary Clinton
Source: CNET News.com
Date: November 1, 2005
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5924424.html

Term: iPhone
Issue: More than 1,000 results

Term: iPod Touch
Source: Engadget
Date: September 5, 2007
Link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/ipod-touch-gets-official/

Term: Jaiku
Source: Scobleizer
Date: April 8, 2007
Link: http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/06/leo-laporte-leaves-twitter-for-jaiku/

Term: LinkRiver
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Feb. 13, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/linkriver-enters-life-streaming-fray.html

Term: Megite
Source: TechCrunch
Date: Feb. 4, 2006
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/04/a-look-at-the-memeorandum-killers/

Term: Newsvine
Source: GigaOm (Formerly Om Malik's Broadband Blog)
Date: November 9, 2005
Link: http://gigaom.com/2005/11/09/introducing-newsvine/

Term: Obama
Source: Valleywag
Date: Dec. 28, 2006
Link: http://www.valleywag.com/tech/tail-wagging-dog/lagging-presidential-candidate-turns-to-robert-scoble-224623.php

Term: Porn
Source: Wired
Date: September 22, 2005
Link: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68934,00.html

Term: Profilactic
Source: Mashable
Date: April 23, 2008
Link: http://mashable.com/2008/04/23/onaswarm-lifestreaming/

Term: PSP
Source: Pro-G.Co.UK
Date: Sept. 16, 2005
Link: http://www.pro-g.co.uk/news/nid/1220/1474/

Term: ReadBurner
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Jan. 8, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/01/readburner-in-stealth-mode-looking-to.html

Term: RSSmeme
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Mar. 17, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/did-readburner-acquisition-cause.html

Term: Seesmic
Source: TechCrunch
Date: October 8, 2007
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/08/loic-le-meurs-new-startup-launches-seesmic/

Term: SocialThing
Source: TechCrunch
Date: March 10, 2008
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/watch-out-friendfeed-socialthing-is-even-easier-to-use/

Term: Summize
Source: ReadWriteWeb
Date: March 16, 2007
Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/summize_search_heatmaps.php

(Note: Summize pulled a 180 following this post. The first time they reached Techmeme in their new incarnation was when Paul Stamatiou covered them on May 10, 2008, here: http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/05/09/review-summize-twitter-search)

Term: Techmeme
Source: TechCrunch
Date: May 8, 2006
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/08/techmemeorandum-is-now-techmeme/

Term: Technorati
Source: The Blog Herald
Date: Sept. 14, 2005
Link: http://www.blogherald.com/2005/09/14/google-blog-search-reviewed/

Term: Tesla
Source: Gizmodo
Date: Aug. 26, 2006
Link: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/clips/lexus-self-parking-car-video-and-review-196551.php

Term: TiVo
Source: PVRblog
Date: Sept. 13, 2005
Link: http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2005/09/tivo_72_os_adds.html

Term: Toluu
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Mar. 24, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/toluu-offers-gateway-to-friends-rss.html

Term: Twitter
Source: Ben Metcalfe Blog
Date: Oct. 26, 2006
Link: http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2006/10/26/ev-williams-buys-back-odeo-and-twitter/

(Note: As Gabe Rivera notes in the comments, Twitter was originally called Twttr, and Biz Stone's announcement in July of 2006 brought the service to Techmeme.)

Term: Wii
Source: MTV.com
Date: Apr. 27, 2006
Link: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1529658/20060427/index.jhtml

Term: Yahoo! Buzz
Source: Valleywag
Date: February 15, 2008
Link: http://valleywag.com/357006/screenshots-of-yahoo-buzz-a-digg-competitor

Just a start. But Techmeme search gives a good glimpse into who's breaking the news in Tech, or who's got enough juice to be the first to reach the popular site with a new story. Can you find some more good examples? Does this data teach us anything at all?

Making My Blog Search Legit With Lijit

Blog widgets are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, but offering a strong search function on your Web site is a must, regardless of how cleanly you've laid out your archive pages, or how well you've implemented tags or labels. A little over a week ago, after seeing Lijit growing its presence on many other blogs I follow, I integrated the service into my site, letting users find older stories I've written on topics they find interesting, and opening up yet another box of stats for me to play with, including most frequently used search terms.


Looking back in my e-mail archives, it looks like I first signed up for Lijit back in June of 2007. If I remember correctly, I think I implemented it, but later, it got pulled in some blog redesign. This time, it's likely here to stay. On May 16, I undoubtedly polluted the Lijit user database, signing up again and getting a second account. Oops.

Acting as a front-end for Google Blog Search, Lijit places a simple search box on your blog, letting visitors search your archives, but also, it pre-populates if somebody arrives on your site from having completed a search elsewhere. For example, if I do a Google search for "FriendFeed Tips", and click on FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, Lijit helpfully asks, "Looking for more about friendfeed tips?" and gives what it would provide as the best links in my blog, as well as through content delivered from other services I use around the Web, such as MyBlogLog and Del.ico.us.

Search results from Lijit are displayed as a pop-in window in the Web browser, not asking you to leave the site, but instead, showing you the results, surrounded by Google AdSense. Of interest, Duncan Riley said on FriendFeed yesterday that not sharing the revenue with the bloggers themselves was "not cool", but I hadn't given that much thought before implementing.

The most visible benefit of using Lijit is showing site visitors what the most popular searches are, either on my blog, or used to find the blog. As of today, the top ten terms are: FriendFeed, Twitter, Blogger, Lijit, Techmeme, BlogRize, MyBlogLog, ReadBurner, FriendFeed to Watch and Duncan Riley.


Also very helpful is the ability to filter what is displayed. I've mentioned before that there's a core element of Web perverts who like some pages in my archives, so I get all sorts of odd traffic from dirty keywords, which I don't want shown, so I can hop into my Lijit page and add these unwanted terms to the filter.


Meanwhile, as Lijit is watching my site traffic for search activity, it's also monitoring standard blog tracking tools, including page views, how many visitors are coming, and where they are coming from. Combining the two facets of the service, from search to statistics, Lijit can tell me which countries search for what most frequently, what is the city that offers me the most visits (Mountain View, CA), and from what country did my most recent search terms originate. I can also see which pages proved most popular after search terms were entered.

So it works. Good stuff. And while I underplayed Lijit's integration with other services like MyBlogLog, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Disqus, Digg, YouTube, etc., this element may become more important in the future, as site visitors can do more than search just my blog, but they can search all across my network, essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web. I'll be watching this to grow over time, and hope to report back and say if site visitors are doing more than searching my blog, but searching my content as well. I've enabled a dozen different sites to pull from, so have at it.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. The first topic, covered how to best use the "Hide" function. Today, I wanted to introduce the underutilized, but quite versatile, bookmarklet.

In addition to supporting the import of several dozen services into your feed, FriendFeed lets you post directly to the site in two ways. The first is the straight-forward "Share Something" link at the top of the page, begging for a quick message and corresponding link. The second, and much more fun way, to share something is to use their bookmarklet, which lets you share any page you find interesting on the Web, including photos and even an excerpt, should you choose.

1. Where Can You Find the Bookmarklet?

FriendFeed hasn't yet made finding the Bookmarklet easy. A page describing its use, including a tutorial video, can be found here. The bookmarklet is essentially a smart snippet of JavaScript code that lives as a bookmark in your browser. To get started, drag the phrase "Share on FriendFeed" to your bookmark bar, as shown in the graphic below.


As I use a number of social media services, and several offer the ability to share directly to their site, I've even made a folder in my Safari bookmarks called "Sharing", with "add to FriendFeed" as one option. (See screenshot)

2. How Can You Use the Bookmarklet?

Once the FriendFeed Bookmarklet is saved in your browser, you can use it on just about any page on the Web. If you find an interesting article, click "Share on FriendFeed".


By clicking "Share on FriendFeed", the Bookmarklet will autopopulate with the title of the article, usually also containing the source. In this example, I have shared "When Good AdWords Ads Go Bad" from CenterNetworks.

Next to the "thought bubble", you can add any comments you wish to the article, and they, along with the title, will be added to your feed when you hit the "Share on FriendFeed" button.

The default location is "My feed", but now, with the addition of FriendFeed Rooms, you can even click the pull-down menu next to "Share to" and send it to just one of your rooms and not the main feed.

3. How Can You Quote Text in the Bookmarklet?

A common use of the Bookmarklet is to share a key piece from the story. This can be done by first, highlighting the text to share, and then clicking "Share on FriendFeed". In this case, again you see the title and source are provided, but now, the text you selected populates the comment area.


Again, you can send this to your feed by clicking "Share on FriendFeed".


4. What About Pictures?

One of the cooler things about the Bookmarklet is the ability to select pictures from the shared story, and add them as well. Once you have hit the "Share on FriendFeed" Bookmarklet, hover your mouse over any image on the page, and you will see a little rectangle pop up, saying "Share image on FriendFeed". Click once to get the picture added to your Bookmarklet in progress. Adding an image, or multiple images, if you choose, does not change the title or the comments being shared.


In this example, I picked one of the AdWords graphics Allen Stern of CenterNetworks used in his article.

5. How Do I Know It Worked?


When you've added a link by way of the Bookmarklet, and you're happy with its title, the comment and any graphics, you hit "Share on FriendFeed". To see it in action, just go back to FriendFeed.com and it'll likely be at the top of the feed, as the most recent item. If you don't check right away, just head back to your own personal feed, and you can find it there.


Just like with any other shared item in FriendFeed, you can click the "More" option, to link directly to it, reshare it somewhere else on FriendFeed, or delete it entirely.

6. What Can't I Do With the Bookmarklet?

One thing you can't do with a Bookmarklet is change its title, URL or graphics after something has been posted. You can edit your comment, or delete it, but the title can't be changed, so be sure it's solid before publishing. Also, it is possible to find sites where graphics that look shareable on the Bookmarklet actually aren't, either by being used in a non-standard way by the Web site author, or, in other cases, they are dynamically built and not actual graphics at all. I've also, at times, found that clicking on an image to share it may instead see me off to another site as the image is linked elsewhere. But that's more an issue with the shared site, and not the Bookmarklet itself.

With all the rage of late saying whether FriendFeed can replace Twitter or serve as a substitute, it's worth noting that you can do more than just post text and links to your feed, but graphics as well, and conversations that last more than 140 characters.

To see a long list of items I've shared on FriendFeed using the Bookmarklet, check here:
http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=internal. And don't forget to add the Bookmarklet yourself.

Next week's FriendFeed Friday Tip may or may not involve the new Rooms. You let me know what's needed.

Silicon Valley Is Smoking Right Now

That Northern California has the occasional blaze is not new. But a wildfire in Santa Cruz County has burned more than 3,000 acres, destroying 10 homes (as of this posting), and filled the entire Silicon Valley in a gloomy gray haze. (See Google News or KRON 4's coverage) While my Sunnyvale home is well away from the fire, it is definitely disconcerting to have our condo and all of the outdoors smell like a Memorial Day barbeque gone wrong.

While I'd heard the occasional news update yesterday about the Summit Fire, hearing it was a little over 10% contained by yesterday evening, it wasn't until late night when I started to feel the effects. The son of an asthma sufferer, I was lucky enough to be born with my lungs as an Achilles' Heel, as I dealt with my share of bouts with bronchitis as a kid, and can still wheeze after any good exercise. As my wife and I moved furniture around and cleaned out closets in preparation for the twins' near-term arrival, I found myself gasping for breath and coughing, as if I'd just completed a 5 kilometer run, and gotten winded. After weeks of seeing my wife, now nearly 32 weeks pregnant, put her arms akimbo and gasp for breath, the scene was comical, as we both were near images of each other. Given how out of shape I am, I swear we could even have done a belly bump.

This morning, I left our condo only to find the hallway wreaked of smoke. Taking the elevator down to the first floor, I encountered a woman leaving the front door ajar in hopes the first floor's smoke alarm would stop beeping, alerting us to non-existent danger.

And I wasn't the only one noticing the effects. Patrick Barry reported smoke filling downtown Mountain View, while others similarly said Stanford, Atherton and Los Altos were blanketed in the haze. The situation near work, on the border of San Jose and Milpitas, also smelled like a forest campout, only without marshmallows, S'mores and mosquitos.

This minor inconvenience to us is no doubt tiny compared to those directly impacted or fighting the fire. My younger sister, a police dispatcher for Scotts Valley PD, near Santa Cruz, put in a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift last night, helping direct officers who were engaged in the area. A state of emergency was declared and according to the Governator, the best people are on it.

Looking backward 15 years ago, to my sophomore year in high school in Chico, our family was more directly impacted by area fires. The seven of us (My parents, myself, 2 brothers and 2 sisters) had to pack up and evacuate our home two or three times in the space of week, as fires threatened to scale the nearby canyon walls, and take on the town of Paradise, which despite its name, is ridiculously positioned on a ridge between two fire-prone canyons with not much more than two ways downhill and out of town.

(See: Google News archive: "Arsonists who were "inspired" by the spectacular Old Gulch and Fountain fires in August have set dozens of fires, including 35 in Butte County alone" -- San Jose Mercury News)

With an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 senior citizens who drive just like you would expect, the prospect of getting in some massive conga line downhill was not all that inviting. But that didn't stop a firebug or two gaining inspiration from fires that were already burning, and starting more, one of which was set just outside the town limits, raining big flakes of ash on our home, our yard and our car, with CDF helicopters flying over our home, grabbing water from nearby ponds or lakes and dumping it on the flames in an attempt to save the city.

Already having our perceived valuables in the car from the last time we had evacuated, my mom put the rest of us kids in the station wagon, and we headed down to the Valley, not knowing if we would come back to a house or scorched earth. Luckily, the firefighters had done an amazing job, stopping the fire a mere 100 feet from where homes started, and from which there likely would have been no stopping the flames.

Weeks after the fires had died down, we headed to a point looking over the canyon and saw blackened trees in every direction. At my foot, I plucked a blackened rock from the dirt, seeing it divided in two, the top half, permanently charred by fire, and the lower half, protected underground. More than a souvenir, it served to remind us how close the fires had come. Hopefully, when the smoke clears from this week's blaze, we'll learn more stories of near-misses than of tragedy. It'll make all of us breathe a lot easier.

Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality

When you really want to concentrate, do you need a quiet room with no distractions, or does playing loud music help you focus? Can you hold a conversation while typing? Can you read blogs and write e-mail while watching TV? I do. And I must. For with all the information available these days, and my personal unwillingness to miss out on conversations or media consumption, I've done more than embrace what many call "continuous partial attention". Instead, I believe I have a goal of achieving "continuous parallel attention", whereby no single task is given primary focus, but instead, multiple tasks gain the same focus.

The common definition of continuous partial attention can be simplified to a person being focused on a single primary task but monitoring background tasks. This can be driving with the radio on, reading a book with a baby sleeping in the next room, or writing a proposal with Twitter on in the background.

Some do this well. Others don't.

Nearly 100% of the time I'm watching TV, I've got my laptop in my lap, with the TV screen's lower half ending just above the top of MacBook Pro screen. In contrast, if I try and talk to my wife when she's writing an e-mail, she probably won't hear me, and once I interrupt, she stops typing.

Last month, I talked about my social media consumption workflow, explaining how I started off my day, working essentially left to right to be sure I processed the information flow in the right way. This issue came up again this morning, when Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester revealed his own morning habits. In the ensuing FriendFeed discussion, I said I too try to knock out much of the activity at the beginning and end of the day, but also keep up what I call "continuous parallel attention" in between.

With continuous parallel attention, essentially multi-tasking, no single activity is getting priority over the other. I am writing e-mails at the same time I am listening to music, at the same time I am getting RSS feeds and seeing Twitter updates or seeing the FriendFeed page reload. Ask me the lyrics of the song, and I can tell you. Ask me what was said on Twitter, and I can probably tell you. Through continuous parallel attention, you're not giving one activity the short shrift due to time or priority, but instead, making sure every activity gets the right focus.

If you drive into the office, but you are thinking about the next blog post, or the next meeting, or even where to go for lunch, that's not mind wandering or being distracted. That's parallel attention. Your radio might be on and you're singing along. If a squirrel darts out in front of your car, you'll still hit the brakes. If a commercial comes on the radio, you still change the station. All in parallel. Your driving doesn't get worse. I'd argue I even drive better with loud music I know, where I'm pounding the steering wheel with every bass drum beat. I work better when I've got multiple things at once, in parallel.

The same is true for engaging with social media. Have you seen Robert Scoble's video from Media Bistro earlier this week? (See: Center Networks: Video: Robert Scoble on the "Worldwide Talk Show")

Robert doesn't linearly go one by one to consume his social media. He is running his RSS feeds, his Twitter feeds, and his video, all in parallel. The human brain is an amazing sponge, ready to take in new information, and if you practice, practice, practice, you can train it, like a muscle, to be ready for exercise. Achieving continuous parallel attention in social media means you don't have to stop one task to pick up the next. You just keep going. Yes, I saw that RSS feed. Yes, I read that e-mail. Yes, I saw your tweet and your FriendFeed post. But I also got all my work done, caught up on our TiVo shows, and picked up the groceries. It's not because I go without sleep (though I need less than most)... it's because of this parallel focus. You should try it.

Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

Just about every wish list for FriendFeed contains a request that the company's development team make a customized version for mobile phones. I know mine from December sure did. While FriendFeed plays nicely with the iPhone and iPod Touch's built-in Safari browser and others are turning to MojiPage to get their FriendFeed activity on the go, there hasn't yet been a focused effort to bring a mobile version of FriendFeed to cell phones, until now.

Fresh off his launch of Tweet2Tweet just this last Saturday, Benjamin Golub, also the author of RSSMeme, and formerly, a project called DearLazyWeb, has developed a site aimed to get FriendFeed out of the browser, and into your cell phone, letting you comment and like as you would at home. The site is called "FF to Go" and can be found at www.fftogo.com.


Over the last few days, I've been testing FF To Go, not just on my iPod Touch, but also, my BlackBerry, and at first blush, FF To Go enables all the core functionality offered by FriendFeed's standard interface, including making likes and comments, and importantly, honoring the "hide" options you've already selected over time. You can even post directly to FriendFeed by using the embedded "Share" feature, or undo likes and comments.


Making a comment in FF To Go
As the FriendFeed interface is spartan, so is FF To Go. But for most mobile phone users, this is expected. FF To Go shows three main tabs upon login, including "Friends", "Me" and "Everyone", and each option mirrors the same tabs on FriendFeed. Users can even navigate between each tabs by hitting 0, 1 or 2 on their cell phone after having logged in.

The FF To Go main screen displays the most recent 10 entries from FriendFeed, and you can take action on any of the items. Commenting on an item takes you to a quick interstitial screen with a comment box, where you make your comment, and then post to the site. It's not as smooth or Ajaxy as the real thing, but it certainly works.

Given the 10 entry limit per mobile phone screen, navigating between pages on FF To Go is also a must, using your phone's keypad. And Benjamin has made this quite simple as well, with 6 going forward a page, and 4 going back a page. Lacking the touch screen capability on the iPhone, keypad navigation is the only option, and in my experience, it works as anticipated.

Rapid development of FF To Go was made possible by the FriendFeed team's API program, enabling developers to harness data from the service to create new and interesting applications. Benjamin also explained the application was written in Django and using the Google App Engine. So why build FF To Go, instead of waiting for movement on FriendFeed's end to develop their own mobile version of the site? Benjamin says there were two major reasons:

1) There wasn't a good, existing solution that enabled active participation for most phones, instead of a static, passive view.
2) Seemingly everyone was begging for it.

As with other services that require the FriendFeed API, in order to get started, you will need to log in with your FriendFeed user name, and your remote key. Once you've logged in to the service, you've got FriendFeed, in your pocket, to go.

Google Reader, Why Dost Thou Taunt Me?

What if you got into your car and saw the fuel tank registered at full, but you ran out of gas after you exited the driveway? What if your laptop reported full battery, but the screen went black before your e-mail application even opened? What if you bought a dozen donuts, and opened up the box to find only crumbs?

It's this feeling of first hope, and then, emptiness, I'm getting tonight with my Google Reader. While Google Reader, despite significant competition of late, is still the best online feed reader out there, its occasional quirks are almost always worth highlighting - especially as the small team does such a great job the other 99.9% of the time.


So do I have 229 new items, or zero new items? Confusing!
Tonight, after only about 30 minutes away from the computer, I returned to my feeds and found more than 200 new items awaiting - an astounding number, even for the most prolific readers. But after reading a small handful of items, I was done. Amusingly, Google still said I had more than 200 new items, even though it also claimed I had no new items available. Clearly a minor error, but a misleading one, to say the least. As you can see from the two screenshots, it's as if Google Reader cached my "unread items" list at some point earlier in the day, and didn't clear them from my "to do" list, even as I methodically read each post.


Google even knows which feeds I need to get to!
What if this "number inflation" suddenly sweeps through all Google apps? Will I seem more popular on GMail even though nobody e-mails me there? Will miles be added on to every trip where I get directions from Google Maps? Will I see the number of search results dramatically increase, but only have one link per page? The possibilities are mind-boggling.

Alex Hammer: The Most Web 2.0 Savvy Politician?

In the 2008 presidential campaign, much has been made as to how the Obama camp and the Clinton camp have had differing approaches to using new Web 2.0 vehicles. Both Obama and Clinton have Twitter accounts, but Obama has gained many more followers, and the account follows people, while Clinton's does not. Obama's campaign even has a FriendFeed account, and both Obama and Clinton, as well as John McCain, have pages on LinkedIn with full resumes. But it's easy to see through this thin veneer of Web activity and realize it's not the actual individuals staffing the accounts. By and large, they are used as a vehicle for campaign's daily propaganda, promoting the issues of the day.

On this backdrop comes Maine resident Alex Hammer (See: Bio). Alex, 42 years old, with a background as the owner of HSC Media, an online media company based in New York, ran as an Independent candidate for governor in Maine during the 2006 campaign, is considering running again in 2010, and his name has even come up in some circles at the national level as a small number of supporters are urging him to take a run at the White House. (See: DC Political Report)

In the meantime, Alex is putting his efforts behind a vast network of 14 destination Web sites called Media 2.0 aimed to develop communities for engaging and discussing a wide array of topics, from Politics 2.0 and Financing 2.0, to a site dedicated to today's tech leaders at Tech Leaders 2.0. Alex's daily information consumption routine also extends well beyond the day's ink-stained papers and cable news networks, taking in Techmeme, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, BlogLines and Toluu, aiming to use these next generation tools to enable knowledge and empowerment.

Late Monday night, we had a phone call where he expressed his excitement for both technology and politics.

He told me, "It's about empowerment. I see politics and technology as a natural overlap and bridge. People look to politics and technology for change and for prosperity. Politics are supposed to benefit our lives if they are done right."

Alex mentioned a number of people who have successfully managed to maintain high profiles in both the world of politics and the Web, including Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum, as key influencers, as well as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington's interviews with various presidential candidates of both parties early in this election cycle.

Luckily for Alex, the state of Maine has a long history of supporting independent candidates. Maine had the first independent governor in the country, James Longley, who held the position from 1975 to 1979, and later, saw Angus King, another Independent, hold down the fort for two terms from 1995 to 2003. In 1996, during King's first term, Maine also passed the Maine Clean Election Act (MCEA), which established a program of full public financing of political campaigns for candidates running for Governor, State Senator or State Representative positions, making it easier for elections to be open to more participants. As with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, the MCEA was intended to "take big money influence out of politics" and "level the playing field", Alex said. This led to 17 candidates in the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which saw many raise in excess of $1 million apiece.

The pervasive integration of technology in a changing economy greatly impacted Alex's political platform. Issues surrounding Clean Technology have seen significant support from the Venture Capitalist community, gaining prominence at times even eclipsing that of Web companies. Alex believes that this trend plays right into the hands of the state of Maine.

"Maine has a lot of strengths," he said. "Maine is positioned to take advantage of these clean technology trends, including forestry, agricultural science, and being a leading state on renewable energy. We have a lot of these expertise for solving these environmental solutions. It's not well coordinated yet, but there are strengths that could be leveraged."

Making Maine a player on this stage could help stem some of the woes the state has seen in the job market over recent years, Alex argues.

"Maine is not a poor state, but it's not a rich state," he said. "It has lost a lot of jobs from manufacturing, and the services jobs don't pay as well comparatively. The state needs help transitioning to a 21st century economy, which is why I turned so much of my efforts to technology."

His efforts around Media 2.0 are aimed to create sticky destination sites that offer a customized knowledge base, as well as aggregated content from leading feeds. Alex claims that at this stage, a robust 18% of all visitors across the 14 active sites stay for an hour or more, and the network has a high volume of repeat traffic. But, so far, Alex is still the primary content generator, and hasn't gained a lot of outside help, which would come following a planned finance round, which currently has him engaged with VCs and angel investors.

The investment of time and community-building on the Web supports his overall belief that you need to be actively engaged, offering a win-win situation for you and your constituents, and to be flexible as change occurs.

"The reason I called it Media 2.0 is that this is about disruptive technology and processes," Alex said. "Now, with the debate of Blogging 1.0 and Blogging 2.0, we see the bloggers who themselves were once disruptive are themselves being disrupted by the way things are changing. We have to go where the action is, but I believe you always have to give more than you take. If you don't help anybody else, then nobody will help you."

By engaging in the blogosphere, and developing new relationships, Alex believes he is creating real value, and a competitive advantage.

"I focus on trying to tap into other people's knowledge," Alex says. "Before I got into politics, I read the biographies of all the recent presidents. Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it, and it's important to maximize the value of time and that's why I have tried to make processes more efficient. You don't have to go to 50 different sites with Media 2.0. I try to be a sponge, to pick people's brains as much as I can, to provide info and take info."

And for Alex, there's no telling where taking his traditional background in politics and getting seriously embedded in the world of Web 2.0 and the tech blogosphere could take him. But he says he's not running for president this year, and while he hasn't yet made a final decision, he's leaning toward Barack Obama in this year's campaign.

He believes the Independent voter hasn't been given its proper share of voice in this country, and that the two-party system isn't interested in making life easy for those with alternative messages, but the 2008 election has already proven that change is in the air, with Hillary Clinton getting further in the campaign process than any female candidate in American history, and with Barack Obama looking sure to take the Democratic nomination.

"In America, a lot more things are becoming possible," he said. "It's an exciting time in the world. There's a lot going on. Not only is there more change, but the rate of change is increasing. Even five years ago, on the Internet, you could take a day off and not miss anything. Now you take 20 minutes off, and you're #100 in the comments. Little differences become magnified. You might be 2% more efficient, but 100% more successful."

Alex will more than likely see a greater level of success in 2010 than he did in 2006, as his campaign was felled short after he was struck by a truck in a major traffic accident that put him in the hospital for a month, and forced him to wear crutches for a full year. He writes, "I am well known and highly regarded across Maine's political and additional leadership, for example, and well poised for a strong run in 2010, should I elect to do so," adding, "The Maine Clean Election Act gave some of my opponents $1 million+ to spend on their campaigns."

For an independent candidate who didn't garner 1% of the vote in a race for one of the smaller states in the country, Alex talks a strong game, anticipating that his focus and effort on the Web to enable conversations and give back to the new online constituency will help further his brand, showing him as engaged and ahead of the curve. He's already penned columns for America 2.0 and The Huffington Post, and is a regular contributor to the Magic City Morning Star, where you can see a February 2006 piece on why he believed himself to be the best gubernatorial candidate and later, discussing some of the struggles that can befall a challenging campaign.

When not taking calls from me, or working on his many sites under the Media 2.0 umbrella, Alex can be found on Twitter (AlexHammer) and on FriendFeed (alexhammer), as well as on Facebook.

Elite Tech News: Episode 8: Featuring Allen Stern

Yesterday was another Sunday evening, which meant another night spent filling the Web airwaves with geeky tech talk about blogging trends, where comments belong, and whether one service's success necessarily means that others will have to fail. But Sunday's agenda was aided by the addition of a blogger I've respected for a long time, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, who just hours earlier, had issued a great bit of self-parody with a hit bound for Web 2.0 history, "Twitter Come Back".

Joining Allen and me was the show's moderator, Mark Hopkins of Mashable, and the ever-cranky but always fun Steven Hodson of WinExtra.

Despite our having a smaller array of participants, in the absence of Frederic Lardinois, Jason Kaneshiro, Tony Hung and MG Siegler, tonight's episode did not run short on time, or on energy. Our focused foursome managed to discuss:

Comcast's acquisition of Plaxo
Disqus and Seesmic Partnering Up
Whether FriendFeed and Twitter Are Signal or Noise
If the Scoble Effect Is Stable or Decreasing
Duncan Riley's First Week at the Inquisitr
Does One Company Winning Mean That Somebody Else Has to Lose?
Web 1.0 Monetization, Blog Advertising and Competition

Our producer, Art Lindsey, gave this week's podcast the title of "I Can Haz FriendFeed?" Don't blame me. I'm just the messenger.

It was great talking live with Allen, having previously only engaged on e-mail, Twitter and through blog comments, and I look forward to our gaining the opportunity to have more guests over time.

See also: Elite Tech News Podcast Week 4 On Tap

Toluu Embraces Twitter With New Integration Option

Since its debut almost two months ago, Caleb Elston's Toluu has become the go-to site for seeing what RSS feeds your friends are subscribed to, and finding new sources. In the ensuing 50 days, Toluu has embraced activity feeds, letting people announce what new sites they'd discovered, and as of this morning, these announcements can extend to everybody's favorite microblogging tool, Twitter.

Also debuting today: The addition of a new feed called "Everyone", showing all activity on the Toluu service, and an enhanced "Activity" feed with greater clarity and larger user avatars, to show recent activity from you and your friends.


Toluu's Brand-New Everyone Feed In Action
The addition of Twitter notifications offers Toluu users yet another way to share activity with friends, which in turn, offers another route for greater awareness of Toluu, already growing quite well so far on its own. By enabling Twitter integration, you can ask Toluu to send a note if you add a new feed by way of the site, through the bookmark (which I use heavily) or through the import page, which accepts OPML of all flavors.

Despite still being in the stage of invite-only beta, Caleb reports the site has gained thousands of users, and Toluu is now tracking more than 100,000 individual feeds.

With this wealth of data, he's even considering showing the most popular subscribed feeds, or most favorited, should it add value. As he wrote me in an GMail Chat session yesterday, "I need to make sure there is a great deal of value to showing a leaderboard. Right now, Toluu is very tech focused, so it is more interesting than Technorati's Top 100 for tech users."

But that, of course, is for another day.

Toluu's Twitter integration is customizable, and absolutely an option for Toluu users, not being enabled by default. If you're looking to get your hands on Toluu, leave me a note in the comments with your e-mail address, and I'll get you one pronto.

See also:

CenterNetworks: Toluu Helps You Like What Your Friends Like
ReadWriteWeb: 10 Reasons Why You're Going to Love Toluu
louisgray.com: Toluu Looking Like a Real Winner
SheGeeks: Toluu Activities Includes Twitter Integration
Jeff Is a Geek: Toluu Adds Twitter And Strengthens Its Streams

Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers

Duncan Riley is on a roll. After a multitude of posts from around the Web this weekend once again debating whether comments away from the blog were a good thing, or if new Web services like Twitter and FriendFeed were useful or were instead creating too much noise, Duncan checked in from The Inquisitr and came to the conclusion I'd reached long ago but not said as eloquently: "It's All About the User".

Duncan, as I have, argues also that those bloggers who embrace changes will leap ahead of the competition, by being more visible in more places, and finding engagement where it has ended up, rather than trying to force it back the way it was.

See Also:
Coding Experiments: The Blogosphere’s Changing Opinions on FriendFeed
Hutch Carpenter: The Noise About FriendFeed Noise
ReadWriteWeb: Don't Be So Naive: Friendfeed Adds to the Noise
Scobleizer: Why Google News has no noise
Scobleizer: Why FriendFeed won’t go mainstream (Part I)
Scobleizer: Why FriendFeed will go mainstream (Part II)

Blogging 1.0 centered around who could:

* Amass the most page views
* Display the most ads
* Get the most comments
* Attract the most RSS subscribers

But then came along some inconvenient wrinkles to the mix:

* Full RSS feeds took page views away from the blog
* Readers installed ad filters, and didn't click
* Comments started to live elsewhere
* Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories

This change has caused serious strain for those living in Blogging 1.0, as they've seen their page views fluctuate, and as comments moved to third party sites, be they RSS readers, social networks, Twitter, FriendFeed and others. You can spot those living in Blogging 1.0 as they're the ones railing about keeping all their comments on their blog, and they're the ones saying that FriendFeed or Twitter have absolutely no value, and complaining about the noise.

Some bloggers, like Robert Scoble, have successfully made the transition to Blogging 2.0. Robert has embraced the new noise of Twitter and FriendFeed, and worries less about where the conversation is taking place, but more about whether it's taking place at all. I've similarly engaged the new places to hold conversations, including Shyftr and a new host of social media sites, like Assetbar, SocialMedian, BlogRize and Yokway.

Since adopting FriendFeed and Twitter, both sites have enabled the conversation to be in new places, and each site refers more activity to my blog. Others, including Charlie Anzman and Hutch Carpenter, have publicly said FriendFeed ranks among their top referrals. And now, Duncan Riley can be counted firmly in that camp. He writes:

"I’ve come to the conclusion that what is happening in blogging 2.0 is something that I can’t stop nor change, so it is something I’m going to fully embrace, for all the inherent risk part of me is telling me it represents. I accept that others will rally against this: it’s human nature to do so, but no amount of protest will change the evolving reality of blogging 2.0. My advice to others: embrace it, or miss out."

My position, repeated a number of times here, and elsewhere, including today's Elite Tech News podcast, is that the world of blogging has changed. Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it's hard to understand for those who've always accepted things for what they are.

LetsProve Debuts Open Two-Way Lifestream Platform, API

The lifestreaming market is a crowded one, with each new service differentiating itself through design, customizability, ability to enable conversations, or engage community. A new entrant to the space, called LetsProve, offers developers the ability to connect their own services to the site, and offers more than just a coagulation of friends activities, also enabling popular sites to update you within the feed, much like RSS.

LetsProve is founded by Peerapong Pulpipatnan, a 24 year-old from Bangkok, Thailand. Initially aimed at being a site for people to give visual updates on their location, similar to Twitter, Pulpipatnan expanded LetsProve to record all of a person's activity online, capturing updates from disparate Web services, like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google Reader shared items and blogs. Now, featuring the core elements seen on many lifestreaming apps out there, LetsProve is opening up to users, hoping they'll use the site to share their activities, to connect with friends, and join groups.


One LetsProve feed of activity, prior to adding friends.
(Note the updates from ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch)
There are a few interesting wrinkles to LetsProve on day one.

While it's not uncommon to offer updates to your feed from our own activity and that of your friends, some of the default applications you can add to your LetsProve feed are popular tech blogs, including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget and VentureBeat. In theory, by adding these applications, you could stay in LetsProve and have the news come to you, rather than jumping to an external RSS feed reader, or waiting for a friend to share it in their Google Reader shared items.

Also, LetsProve offers syndication with your Twitter account, so that updates to your LetsProve feed can be posted as Direct Messages (DMs) directly to you.


I can customize my LetsProve feed.
Unlike many other lifestreaming services, LetsProve also offers an extremely customizable user interface. Users can do more than just select an avatar. They can pick a background image for their feed, or edit background, link and font colors, making the LetsProve stream unique to each individual.

Beyond the basic lifestreaming capabilities, LetsProve is also thinking ahead. At launch, LetsProve offers a platform which the site says "enables anyone to build applications that can update your activites from exeternal services, and send notifications." Think there are users on the site who would like to tap into your content? LetsProve has already developed an API in beta to make this happen. (See the Developers Page)

Additionally, you can find other users of LetsProve by importing friends from your Webmail accounts, inviting users from the site, or even clicking on the "Maps" tab, letting you see if there are any users in your geographic area.

What LetsProve doesn't offer today is the kind of interactivity through comments and direct sharing to the feed common on other popular sites, but considering its early stage and humble beginnings, it could be quite interesting to watch. You can find my LetsProve blog at http://letsprove.com/louisgray.

Mint's Latest Additions Make It My One Stop Financial Hub

For years, I've manually edited a custom portfolio in Yahoo! Finance in an attempt to track all my financial details in a single place. That meant copying and pasting trade details from eTrade and checking in with Fidelity every two weeks to get an update from my 401k. But even then, it wouldn't have bank data from Wells Fargo, or credit card debts, so I haven't had a perfect picture on a single page - until now. With the addition of investment tracking capabilities at the end of April, Mint has now morphed from a simple curiosity to becoming my long sought after single point for financial details.

Mint came to my attention last year, like it did for many people, when it won the best presenting company award at the inaugural TechCrunch40 event.

While some have said storing financial login data on a 3rd party site makes them nervous, I've always erred on the side of trusting the Web, and I registered right away. But site slowness, and Mint's initially not offering support for my investment accounts at eTrade and Fidelity meant it wasn't all that useful for me. I wasn't interested in following their little tips on how to save a few bucks here and there by switching my bank or credit cards, so I largely left my account dormant.

But now, Mint shows me everything in one place. After synchronizing my Checking and Savings accounts, my investments and my credit cards, I now get a perfect picture of available funds. And Mint, having more than 200 days history of my activity since I first signed up, also has some educated guesses on where I spend my money most frequently, trends on whether I'm spending more than others in my geographic area, and even records of which vendors.

Now, according to Mint, I can see I've spent $155 on iTunes since October 1st of last year, in 16 different purchases, I've spent $798 at Safeway in 9 tracked purchases, and $332 at Chevron in the same number of visits. Of course, with more than 1/3 of my spending being marked as "No Category", I have some work to do to get the data even better, and there are some amusing bugs, like the one showing I've spent $6,891 at "Louis Shoe Shop", in four transactions. My guess is that's supposed to be where I've made credit card payments, and I have no idea why it's called "Louis Shoe Shop". Are they confusing me with Imelda Marcos?


One month's financial tracking within Mint.
Regardless of those rare oddities, the simple fact that Mint shows me all my activity in one place means that I don't have to go to each of the individual financial sites to get my data. On occasion in the past, I've gotten hit with late fees on my credit card just because I had forgotten to log in before the bills were due. Now, if I can just log in to Mint instead, I can not only see when money comes in, but when money needs to go out. And I'm done messing around with Yahoo! Finance, manually entering owned shares data and estimated per share costs. Now, Mint does all the hard work for me. It's the way Web finance tracking was supposed to be.

RSSMeme Creator Launches Tweet2Tweet to Watch Twitter Discussion

The rapid-fire element of Twitter can absolutely obliterate any resemblance of a tidy conversation, as updates from a wide array of disparate users will interrupt the discussion between one or more people, especially if the conversation takes place over a little bit of time, rather than seeing second by second updates common on IRC or other chat rooms.

Benjamin Golub, the developer behind the popular Google Reader shared links aggregator RSSMeme, debuted a solution called Tweet2Tweet today, which lets you search on any two Twitter user IDs, and pull up their discussion, even if the Tweets ended up only being one-way.


Tweet2Tweet's query interface
The data, powered by Summize, which is growing on me as a must-visit tool multiple times a day to query for specific terms I track, shows in a two-column format:

* Who initiated the conversation
* The full content of each Tweet.
* The timing of each Tweet, including a link.
* The in-line response from the second participant.

Now, instead of hitting the Twitter "Replies" tab to see what people have said in response to your notes, or hitting the "Conversation" tab in Summize to see just one exchange, you can now see all exchanges between two people, over the available period in Tweet2Tweet's database.

A few good examples:

Tweet2Tweet: @louisgray and @fourlittlebees
Tweet2Tweet: @loiclemeur and @centernetworks


A quick look at some of my conversations with @fourlittlebees
Having just launched today, Tweet2Tweet will undoubtedly see the same level of improvements that RSSMeme has enjoyed over the last several months. In my testing, I would occasionally see only one half of a conversation, or find empty results, especially when querying the most-active Twitter users. But it's a start, and a good one at that. Corvida of SheGeeks also looked at it earlier today and found it to be much like Facebook's Wall to Wall feature.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

The StatBot Debuts Series Analyzing Techmeme Sources

Last month, working only with Microsoft Excel and archived Techmeme pages, I took a look at how the top ten sites on Techmeme's leaderboard had changed over the first six months of Gabe Rivera offering the rankings. But I knew my minor effort would be no match for a statistically-oriented tech maven, like Yuvi Panda, who has kicked off what should be a very interesting series of posts examining the popular site and how it gets its news.

To date, Techmeme has been something of a black box. Leading bloggers love seeing the regularity of their posts being included. Meanwhile, less visible posters see complaining about Techmeme as something as a rite of passage. Some even claim impropriety and bias, while others still complain the site can be flooded with me-too news and copycats.

But that doesn't change the fact that Techmeme is tremendously relevant and a must-subscribe, either by RSS or by Twitter. To ignore Techmeme is the tech news equivalent of unsubscribing from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and hoping the local town daily can fill the gap.

In my initial look at Techmeme, I had observed that just over 30 percent of all stories came from the top 10 sites from the Techmeme leaderboard, and more than 40 percent came from sites ranked 11-100, leaving about 30 percent to "the field". Luckily for me, Yuvi's first pass at Techmeme arrives at similar results, saying "One third of Techmeme’s headlines come from the Long Tail".


A Graph from The StatBot's Techmeme Analysis
If you think The StatBot's efforts at this point are simply echoing my first pass, don't be fooled. Yuvi has a lot more tech savvy at his disposal, and as he promises in today's post, today's entry is the first in a series. You can expect to be something of a Techmeme expert by the time he's done.

We previously introduced The StatBot here: The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics. Yuvi also lent a hand analyzing my own site here: Analyzing LouisGray.com's Links, Topics, Timing and Comments.

Five Social Media Bloggers to Watch This May

In March, we highlighted 5 Blog Candidates for Tomorrow's Techmeme Leaderboard. In April, I suggested Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren't. Since then, a number of these lesser-known bloggers have seen their posts gain higher visibility, including hitting the aforementioned Techmeme, and gaining both RSS subscribers and repeat visitors. (See: SheGeeks Reaches New Heights and When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched... as good examples)

With the new month upon us, I'm thinking we could make posts of this sort a regular feature. Over the last 30 days, I continue to be impressed by the solid writings of many bloggers who, to date, have been below the radar. Here are five who cover the social media space who've I've enjoyed getting to see of late:

1) Colin Walker (colinwalker.me.uk)

Focus: Social Media, Blogging and the Internet
Recent Highlight: Why do we need social media role models?
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Regular Geek (regulargeek.com)

Focus: Programming, Social Media and the Internet
Recent Highlight: Comment Where You Want, Just Let Me Know About It
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Chris Miller / The Social Networker (thesocialnetworker.com)

Focus: Virtual Gratification Syndrome, Twitter, Data Portability
Recent Highlight: Tweeting In the Bathroom - the New Social Crime
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Julian Baldwin / Notes, Thoughts, Ideas and Responses (julianbaldwin.com)

Focus: Social Media, Twitter
Recent Highlight:
Killing Many Birds With One Boulder, How and When Social Media Can Go Mainstream
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Alexander van Elsas (vanelsas.wordpress.com)

Focus: New Media, Technology, Social Behavior
Recent Highlight: The Tech Elite Creates Its Own Web 2.0 Bubble
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

I'm always looking for more new bloggers and interesting voices to be added to my Google Reader feeds. You can get an early tip as to new bloggers I'm following and sharing by signing up for Toluu, following me on FriendFeed, or following my Google Reader shared links blog. If you think there are more I should check out, please leave them in the comments.

Our Family Gears Up for a Time of Transition

After more than a dozen solid years teaching social studies, as well as a number of other subjects here and there, at the junior high and high school level, my wife, for the first time, turned her back on the school year well prior to graduation, and we don't know when she'll go back. As of 5:00 p.m. this evening, she's officially on maternity leave, in theory, resting up until the big day when our twins are scheduled to launch in early beta.

Our home is by no means ready. We're still in the process of converting our odds & ends/junk room/guest room into something resembling a place for our kids to stay. For the most part, this has consisted of us carting box after box to Public Storage, and becoming ever more generous to Good Will. In the meantime, we've had good friends and colleagues donate clothes, diapers and all manner of toys for the as of yet unseen youngsters.

In the next few weeks, we still need to move out some furniture, bring in a crib, dresser, changing table, and rocker with matching ottoman. Some of these things have already been ordered from Babies R Us or Amazon. Others, we'll get from friends. But as the days go by, and my wife gets a tad bigger and a tad more fatigued, this is getting more and more real. After five years as a married couple, offering shelter to only ourselves and a cantankerous old beagle, who refuses to step down from her post, we're going have to learn how to go from two to four overnight, and how to take one income and make it do more than what our two once did.

We're absolutely looking forward to this challenge. I can't say I'm ready. I don't know that anybody I've ever met says they were 100% ready to transition from being without kids to with kids. I believe I have a great chance at being very prepared, and with patience, I just might be an adequate parent. My wife should be excellent as well, but we didn't exactly set ourselves up to have a trial run, going from no dependents to two immediately.

In the last few months, after revealing our big secret, the chorus has been overwhelming, as a good number of parents have said, often with smirks on their faces, that "life as you know it will end". It's been predicted that activity here on the blog will slow or altogether disappear. My priorities will be turned completely upside down. And... don't I know it! As much as I want to display bravado, and plan for a minimum level of disruption, inwardly, we're realistic. We know we're looking into the light ahead, and it just might be an oncoming train.

This coming Monday, I'll be the only one going back to work. And the week after that. And after that... and so on for a while. We've already agreed as a family that my wife will take the upcoming school year off, and depending how well-behaved our kids are, or how well we're doing financially, or if she's bored out of her mind, who knows what will come next... but I'll do my best to keep you posted, as best as we can. Because, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'll do all I can to keep the blog a priority, sleep be darned. We don't know when the twins will come, but the doctors are saying it could be mid-June to early July. Watch this space.

Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.

Some of the most confused buzzwords in Web 2.0 are those of aggregation and lifestreaming.

As evidenced by the many different sites that have debuted offering a single location for differing online activities, harnessing together RSS feeds from Web services and presenting them as one, delivering a base foundation for aggregation is not all that hard.

Plaxo did it. Profilactic did it. Iminta did it. Socialthing did it. FriendFeed did it. Facebook is starting to do it.

But simple aggregation is not enough. What FriendFeed got right very early on in the game is that it's one thing to get all the services in one page, and quite another to make them interactive, so friends can talk to friends and peers can show peers what they like. Back in November, I wrote, "I first became interested in FriendFeed as the service could aggregate friends' Web activity in a single place. But in recent weeks, it's grown to be much more."

FriendFeed became more because of two things: participation and discovery.

FriendFeed let me respond and interact with the services my friends were sharing. It also allowed me to discover new services, new friends and new sources for information. Through FriendFeed, I've found new blogs to read, found new online social circles, and engaged in real-time with people who are completely unreachable, even by e-mail or Twitter.

Now, as the early adopter crowd has found the FriendFeed religion, despite the occasional grumpy holdout, they're now finding that the real potential in FriendFeed, as with other Web services, comes through participation. It's one thing to passively aggregate your online activity in a single place, and quite another to thoughtfully add comments and like items you find interesting, and think your friends will. Robert Scoble, now as prominent a FriendFeed advocate as I ever have been, has highlighted this factor in The really interesting FriendFeed page to watch tonight, where he notes FriendFeed has set up separate "discussion" pages that aggregate comments and likes. (His | Mine)

Google Reader became the leading RSS feed reader for me not just because it was a strong, quick, offering, but because of the shared link items blog. Twitter is actually useful due to tracking of @Replies and the ability to see others streams intermingled. But to sign up to any of these services to broadcast, and not to participate, shortchanges the process.

There's a reason I've made more than 1,200 comments in FriendFeed since signing up in October, and why I've "Liked" almost 700 different items. It's not because I have a bot set up to do my dirty work. It's because it helps both those I follow, and those who follow me. Take away that participation, and FriendFeed becomes as quiet as a library, and just about as exciting.

So if you're not quite sure where to start with FriendFeed, with Google Reader, with Twitter or any other social network, get started and participate. That'll make all the difference.

The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

Yuvi Panda, a 17-year-old technology whiz kid from India, has been behind detailed analysis of many high-profile blogs, including Engadget, Robert Scoble, Raymond Chen, Techmeme, Digg, TechCrunch and Matt Cutts. Last month, we connected, and he did me the great favor of looking at louisgray.com, helping me gain more insight into my links, trends and topics.

Now, Yuvi is ready to take what's been a hobby and open it up as a service, for those looking to get custom analysis of their site or other social communities, including Twitter, Flickr, or FriendFeed. Today, "The StatBot" launches, promising a new, statistical look at Web communities including Slashdot, Fark, Engadget, Wikipedia and Firefox. As Yuvi promises on the StatBot site, "The list is endless. Wherever there is a community, I’ll measure it."

First to debut under The StatBot microscope is Robert Scoble's Twitter account.


TheStatBot shows Robert's Tweet Pace Is Increasing
Through April 27th of 2008, The StatBot looked at 10,598 tweets from http://twitter.com/scobleizer, spanning 523 days, and comprising 175,543 words, with more than a million characters.

The StatBot shows Robert has already posted almost 5,000 Tweets in 2008, double his historical average. And he's erratic - at times posting hundreds of individual messages a day, and then during lulls, posting less than 10. Robert uses @Replies from Twitter for nearly two out of every three messages, and has sent @replies to more than 2,200 Twitterers, lending more support for my hypothesis last week that a great deal of Scoble's activity was borne due to the high number of people he is following.

This type of fun and interesting analysis is now no longer at his whim, for us to wonder about how reports could look if we just had the time. With the launch of The StatBot, you can now work directly with Yuvi to have him analyze your blog, and your online activity, or to drop a note into his suggestion box.

And with today's note, Yuvi does more than pick apart the world's most well-known Tweeter. He hints at greater things to come. He expects to debut new reports every two days for the next few weeks, and adds a teaser at the end of his first post.

When Yuvi picked apart my site last month, Eric Berlin wrote, "What a great analysis. An automated service that produced this level of detail would go like hotcakes round the blogosphere." Well, it's here, and it has a name: The StatBot. Check out The StatBot at www.thestatbot.com or follow it on Twitter here: twitter.com/thestatbot.

State of the Blog: April 2008 Recap

April 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,304

Total stories published in April: 38
(About 1.3 per day, up from 1.2 in March)

Total stories in April with comments: 34
(89% of all stories, up from 29 and 76% in March)

Total comments on April posts: 364 (95 on Disqus)
(About 9.6 per post, 10.7 per commented post)


April statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 571 (up 200)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 1,637 subscribers (up 810)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 42 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 203 (up 110)

Twitter Followers: 801 (Up 488)
FriendFeed Followers: 990 (Up 472)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter): 1st overall, by 25%.

Top Five Most Visited April Stories (According to Analog)

1. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?
2. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
3. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
4. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
5. Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren't

Others receiving votes: TechMeme Leaderboard's Top Ten: Six Months In, My Social Media Consumption Workflow, Shyftr Responds to Critics, Alters RSS Commenting Strategy, Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close., FriendFeed's Increased Filtering Clears Deck of Unwanted Junk, and Alpha Twitter Ranks Most Popular Shared Links from Twitter...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves
2. Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones
3. LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel
4. Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag
5. ReadBurner Lights Up In Simmer Mode

While April again saw personal records fall for blog traffic, it's clear the real growth and engagement is found in Web services, external commenting and linking. Overall traffic grew 25% from March, measured in unique visitors, and individual days saw spikes that rivaled a month's traffic for me less than a year ago. Yet it's activity at FriendFeed, Twitter and Disqus that is really growing. Technorati and MyBlogLog rankings also spiked dramatically in April.

One word of caution, lest it be believed I've started this series to highlight the higher awareness achieved in recent months, be assured that's not the case. I started doing monthly summaries after August of 2007, when I had 103 RSS subscribers, and 40 comments in the month. Hopefully you find these interesting or useful.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on our shared link blog!