mioNews Brings New Foldered Interface to FriendFeed

Another day brings another interesting new application using FriendFeed's API, attempting to give a new way for active users to sort their stream. Today's entrant, called mioNews, instead of trying to mimic the spartan FriendFeed interface, as many others have, brings an approach more commonly seen in RSS readers like Google Reader, or even e-mail applications, like Microsoft Outlook. The new, professional, look also comes with some new features to help users indicate stories they both "like" and "hate", as well as the option to follow specific topics.


The mioNews Interface: Click for Large version
Since FriendFeed introduced their API in March, we've seen new interfaces developed for mobile phones, iPhones, and the Web, using Ajax. We've seen options to highlight individual stories or users you've said you like, and others that help block individual keywords.

mioNews, authored by Patrick Lightbody, lets you carve up and read the updates in your feed by:

* Selecting topics, which shows the # of stories, and, when clicked, shows the stories in the main pane.
* Grouping friends in specific folders, as you specify.

Like in Google Reader, where you can choose to read full feeds, or just the title, mioNews, lets you show just the titles, or a short summary. Double-clicking on any item takes you to the item itself, be it from Twitter, a blog post, or a share in Google Reader. But more interestingly, you can turn on the site's Reading Pane, and like in Outlook, you can view the entire item, as well as take action on that item, including the ability to share, comment, like, or in a new wrinkle, hate a post. You can even mark all items as read, a feature many on FriendFeed have asked for, so far in vain.


The goal of mioNews, like NoiseRiver and FriendFeedMachine before it, is to help reduce the "noise" problem through giving you more control over selecting what you like and what you don't like. As Patrick writes in the introductory post, "instead of rating people and topics that you like/hate, mioNews asks you to like/hate individual articles. Then, using some autotagging secret sauce, the topics and people are tuned behind the scenes."

Provided you select topics that your friends are talking about in FriendFeed, mioNews will find it. It's no surprise they're often talking about Google, Twitter and FriendFeed. But if you branch out to sports, politics and the day's news, you might find some good gems in that rough.

mioNews' approach to the FriendFeed noise is unique. It might almost get on more desks at corporate, given how closely it approaches the look and feel of standard business applications. And as Patrick says, like NoiseRiver, it too is in alpha and much more is planned. You can keep up on mioNews in their room on FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/mionews

On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Often, perception of a site or service's momentum can be self-fulfilling.

Even over the last two years of my writing on this blog, the companies I cover have changed, as what used to be relevant has become less so, and new hotshots have come to take their place. But while some niche services are on their way to becoming household names, others that could have done so are fading, when compared to their peaks of 1, 2 or even 5 years ago.

One tool showing the decline of brands relative to one another is Google Trends, which measures how frequently a keyword is searched for as a percentage of the total searches on the Web.

Using Google Trends, you can see the near-death of older Web 1.0 brands, like Netscape, Lycos and Alta Vista, the plateauing of early Web 2.0 brands, like MySpace, and the deflating balloon of weakened brands, such as Technorati, Digg and Microsoft.


Netscape's Downfall... In Graph Form.

And Lycos Follows Suit.
A little more than a week ago, Google Trends made news by introducing the ability to track data on Web sites, but the service's core element helps shed some light on the fact that the interest level in Technorati has been slashed in half in just the last 12 months, that MySpace peaked a year ago, as did Digg.


The Technorati Monster Is Starving.

And Digg Is In a Rut.

MySpace Is Floating in Space.
Meanwhile, as both Google and Yahoo! have continued an upward trajectory of world interest, Microsoft has seen steady decline every year, starting in 2004, when the data was first tracked.


The Only Thing More Depressing is MSFT Stock.
At one time, it was fun to point out that the Technorati monster had escaped, that Technorati wasn't up to challenging Google Blog Search, or to debate whether Digg's relevance was going to decrease with its move away from solely having a tech focus. But Google Trends lays out on the table the tougher news - nobody cares, and the number of people actively looking for news on Digg or Technorati is going down, while many, many other services are rapidly growing.

While the entire market of Web measurements is questionable, from Alexa to Compete.com and all sorts of competitors in between, it'd be interesting to see Google get even more aggressive with their trends, showing the velocity of a term's decline or ascension. Maybe that'd get the point across a little better for those saying their damaged brands aren't in trouble.

And lest you think Google Trends is all bad news, it's not. Take a look at hotter stories, like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook or Google itself to see what an up and to the right arrow looks like. But if these brands aren't careful, like some of those listed above, they too could stagnate and fall. And once you slow, you're really just preparing for the inevitable drop.

New NoiseRiver App Adds Interest Filters to FriendFeed Stream

For those looking for FriendFeed Friday Tips #6, consider this post in lieu of the series. Our visits to see Sarah in the hospital prevented Friday posting. I'll look to be back on track next Friday.

As FriendFeed has grown its user base, the number of people to follow and items they add to their personal streams is increasing. Some are finding the resulting noise to be too much in its native form. While I've aggressively approached this issue by using the "Hide" function, others are looking to new services to take the next step, highlighting, in advance, those items that are most likely to draw your attention. NoiseRiver, a new service released yesterday, updates your stream based on instructions you give, including your liked and hated keywords and individuals, helping draw your eye to the best stuff fast.

As the author writes, NoiseRiver is not intended to replace FriendFeed outright, but instead, like FriendFeedMachine, FFToGo and other innovative apps, looks to fill a gap, extending the product with new features.


How NoiseRiver Describes Itself
Upon logging into NoiseRiver, you'll see your plain vanilla FriendFeed stream. But where NoiseRiver excels is in learning from hints you provide, including your giving keywords that you're most interested in, and those you are not, in the "My Interests" section. In fact, if you never want to see specific terms, like "Obama", "McCain" or "Fail Whale" again, all you have to do is make them a keyword, pull the slider to the left as far as it will go, signifying you hate a keyword, and check the box that reads, "Hide entries with a very high hated rank? (-100%)".


I Pick Keywords I Want to See Using Sliders
But more than just acting as a smart filter to hide topics you could care less about, NoiseRiver also lets you select terms you like, be they "Google", "RSS", or the iPhone.

You can also set parallel filters for people. If you have friends whose updates you simply don't want to miss, go to "My Neighborhood", where you can add people's FriendFeed nicknames, and again, move the slider to show how much you care about their entries in FriendFeed.


I Can Choose People's Importance As Well
Having applied updates to both your interests and your neighborhood, the result from NoiseRiver is the same FriendFeed you know, but with a colored overlay which guesses how much you will take interest in an item. If I said I like "duncanriley" and "Twitter", the green bar will be well to the right. If I said I like "scobleizer" or "davewiner" a little less, the bar will only go part of the way. NoiseRiver combines both your interests and your neighborhood, rather than having to choose one over the other.


The End Result Highlights My Anticipated Interests
Back in May, I wrote that Content filters were proving evasive for social media sites. In the ensuing month-plus, both FriendFeedMachine and NoiseRiver have taken aim at the problem, by leveraging FriendFeed's flexible API.

As with both FriendFeedMachine and FFToGo, NoiseRiver is no passive experience. All three applications enable you to make comments and like items from their interface, just as you would in FriendFeed. Making comments via NoiseRiver even adds a tag of "via NoiseRiver" in FriendFeed, helping to advertise the new service, as do the others. So if you already like FriendFeed, but want to find a better way to draw your eye to those things you'll like best, and hide the rest, NoiseRiver is a strong option. It's only been out for about 24 hours, so it should be fun to see what other options come next.

Browzmi Lets You Share Browsing Experience With Friends

You name the online activity, and new services are emerging to find ways to let you share that experience with friends. There are new RSS readers with social aspects. There are any number of ways to answer the proverbial "what are you doing?" and keep friends updated, and seemingly, each day, a new site debuts to try and corral all your online updates. 

Browzmi, a small site that hasn't gotten much attention, has developed an interesting tool that lets you browse the Web together with friends, adding comments and marking favorites along the way. Unlike FriendFeed, which some aspects of Browzmi look much like, you're not adding your likes and comments to external activity, but instead to the browsed sites themselves. Further extending the social aspects of the site, Browzmi also integrates real-time XMPP-based chat, and provides each user with an RSS feed showing their activity, which can be sent to any RSS-enabled application.

Browzmi was founded in 2006 by Travis Parsons, and over time, working with a 5 person engineering team, based in Russia, Parsons has developed a service that lets friends surf the Web together. As the site's overview states, the goals are lofty:

"Browzmi is providing an environment where friends can explore, share and discover the entire web like they are there together. Browzmi is not attempting to replace your favorite websites - it wants to make your experience across your favorite websites more social by allowing you to go anywhere on the web with your friends."
-- Via Google Docs: Browzmi

There are three major parts to Browzmi. The first is "My Stuff", which includes your profile, your friends, your favorites and your updates. The second is the browser window itself. The third is an "Explore More" tool that shows you what sites your friends are viewing, and their history, while offering links to related items on Flickr and YouTube.


Browzmi shows updates from friends.
When signed into Browzmi, in any Web browser, the central portion is like a "browser within a browser". Put in a URL in the location bar of Browzmi, and it fills the center portion, while adding it to your updates and alerting friends of the new site you've found. Depending what you think of the site, you can give it a quick thumb up or thumb down,  make it a favorite, or add a comment. Browzmi de-duplicates by URL, so it's not uncommon for some sites to have dozens of up or down thumbs, and a good number of comments.


Browsing Techmeme in Browzmi's main window.
The "browser within a browser" functionality of Browzmi is surprisingly strong. It's not an emulator by any means, so any site that looks good in your standard browser looks good in Browzmi, including all plug-ins and Flash, as Browzmi leverages its environment well. You will, however, need to login to sites as cookies are not passed directly to Browzmi from your computer. Also, should you opt to keep all three sections of Browzmi open concurrently, be prepared to have a reduced-width browsing experience. Luckily, you can open or close any section at any time to get parts of your screen back.

By going to "Surf with friends", you are treated to seeing the most recent sites visited by friends on Browzmi, as well as your own activity. If they like or favorite an item, you'll see it. You can also visit Browzmi's main feed to see the most active sites, or most recent activity overall, and search by keywords for related items.

But Surfing with Friends is no passive activity. You don't just have to watch. Click on any friend's name and you can hit the "start chat" button, or view their profile. Starting a chat fires up a small window, similar to that found in Google Talk or in Facebook. This way you can, in real time, share the site you're browsing and talk about it with a friend.

There are nearly 300 users of Browzmi today, so the site is very small, but it absolutely works. If you want to do more than share what items you've liked in Google Reader, and you want to do more than show friends, via Toluu, what feeds you read, you can take things up a notch and browse the Web together using Browzmi. For a service that almost nobody has heard of, it works very well, providing a service where you no longer have to browse alone.

Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.

The combination of a rush to publish and a low barrier to entry for microblogging makes posting quick notes to Twitter extremely tempting for people who are trying to break news. In seconds, a rumor can be launched, whether true or not, and hit thousands. If those thousands then, in turn, repost your note, you've got a rapidly snowballing mess to deal with.

Today, that happened, in real time, when a few popular Twitter users, including Kevin Rose of Digg and Adam Ostrow of Mashable posted a link to a parody site, claiming the famous Jared Fogle from Subway's line of commercials had passed away. The "news", which had long been debunked as an urban legend by Snopes, spread like wildfire, catching otherwise well-respected folks like Dave Winer thinking it was true.


Kevin Rose's Tweet Kicked the Rumor In High Gear

Many, Many Others Followed Suit
(See also: FriendFeed: "I'm so gullible I believed it. Oy. - Dave Winer")

Many have claimed Twitter can break news faster than traditional news media. People were buzzing on Tim Russert's passing away on Twitter before it hit NBC, and Twitter has already proven itself a news source for natural disasters, like earthquakes. But the mainstream media largely likes to prove rumors true and get multiple sources before reporting, to this day. When Twitterers run amok and post any old yarn they've heard, there's no stopping it.

When Kevin Rose posted his Tweet, it had the potential to reach his more than 46,000 followers. The trickle-down effect hit Ostrow's 1,300 or so followers, and Summize showed the gullible Twitter crowd re-reporting the bad news multiple times a minute, reaching who knows how many people?


See: Summize: Search for Jared

See: Summize: Search for Subway

Whether you're writing a blog post or entering something on Twitter, it absolutely makes sense to take a cue from traditional media and check your facts. While the Subway Jared parody is more amusing than critical, it highlights a need for people to take a deep breath before repeating everything they hear. Twitter can be a tool for good, but for mischief as well. I would expect people like Kevin, Adam and others, proven to be intelligent in other areas, could act smart here as well.

We're Home, But One Baby Was Left Behind

This afternoon, my wife and our son Matthew were discharged from Lucille Packard Children's Hospital, four days after the arrival of our twins. And while we're excited to be home, in a comfortable environment, we have had the unenviable position of leaving Sarah, our second twin, behind. While she's expected to gain weight and strength to the point she can round out our home by the end of the week, the gap between what we had expected and what has happened is very real - leaving me feeling we're not going to be fully whole until everybody is home where they belong.

On Friday night, as I saw the pediatricians busily tending to our twins just moments after they were extracted via Caesarean section, they called out the weights of the babies. Matthew, born at 9:01, weighed in at 5 pounds even. It was less than I had hoped, but acceptable. When they called out Sarah's weight, at only four pounds, three ounces, my heart sank. She had come into the world more frail than we had hoped, and would need to work extra hard from day one.


Matthew Gray in the crib in his first night home.
I myself was a premature baby, more than 30 years ago, having been born two months ahead of schedule, and weighing in at four pounds, six ounces. A generation ago, such low birthweight was more life-threatening than it is in today's advanced medical world, and I struggled, to gain weight, to gain respiratory strength, and early on, it wasn't clear if I'd ever have full mental or physical capabilities. As my dad often jokes, "We were told you had a 50% chance of being disabled, and a 50% chance of being mentally challenged. We're still waiting to find out which one it is going to be."

When my wife and I found out we were going to have twins, we were ecstatic. Finding we were pregnant by the end of last year, and that we were having twins was amazing. We've been preparing for it as the months drew closer, as our home is fully prepped for pairs of everything - from outfits to swings, to booster chairs, and car seats. But while we knew twins would come before the full gestational period for a singleton, we certainly didn't think about having not just one, but two, lower birthweight, pre-term babies.


Google's calculator helps us know just how small Sarah is.
So far, while Matthew had met the threshold needed to stay with us since his debut, Sarah has not. While he was in the "Wellness Baby Clinic", Sarah lagged behind, in the "Special Care Nursery". Matthew stayed with us 24/7 each of the last few days, while we only could visit Sarah in 15 to 45-minute increments, to pass along milk, or to hold her and remind her she is as much a part of our family as her brother. She stayed behind, not just because of her low weight, but due to concerns she would be unable to keep her temperature regulated. And while she looks to be on the verge of being healthy enough to come home, it will be days yet. Now, we're here in Sunnyvale, and she, with the other children given a less than ideal start, is working hard at Stanford to get that chance.

It's well known that babies in their first week tend to lose as much as 10 percent of their original birthweight, before gaining it back and eventually, starting an upward trajectory, which for most Americans at least, never stops. But every night, we got an update on Sarah's weight. From 4 pounds, 3 ounces, it crept downward, to 4 pounds, 1 ounce, and eventually, to 3 pounds, 15 ounces, where it is today. Sarah has never, at her heaviest, been as big as I was when I was once considered dangerously small. And yet, we have had to put our trust in the doctors, who expect that she'll fight through the slow start and be with us soon.


Matthew only takes up half what the crib was meant to hold.
Nobody has expressed any great concerns about her humble beginnings, and the hospital is notoriously conservative. I also know that the 3 to 4 pound range isn't quite the drama it once was. But to be discharged today, and leave the hospital with just one baby instead of two makes me feel that in some way, we're already failing as parents. Our car ride home had one empty car seat. Our crib, divided for two, has only one occupant. And Sarah, who arguably needs the most help, is the only one we can't get to.

We're still very happy our twins are here, and despite their size, are healthy. I expect Sarah will be with us in just days, and that this part-time adjustment from zero kids to one to two in a week will seem like a small blip in short time, but while we've bonded with Matthew and know him well, we'll be starting almost from scratch with Sarah, and that just doesn't seem fair.

Crowdsource Software Payments to Reward Alert Developers

Not all software is free, and not all of it should be. Unless you are the type who can break out your C and Python manuals with ease, the time may come where you have an idea for a great application, and you're going to need someone else to do it. Why not leverage others who have the same need, and combine to provide a bounty, by which, if your solution is delivered to satisfaction, the developer or developers can reap the rewards directly from the end-users who will benefit from their product?

As a visible, active, FriendFeed user, I grew jealous by the success WordPress bloggers were having with Glenn Saven's nifty plug-in to show if items had received comments or "likes" from the popular social lifestreaming service. He had single-handedly developed a tool to unify conversations from disparate sources in an elegant way. But, for me, a long-time Blogger user, I was basically faced with a rock and a hard place. Migrate to WordPress, or keep my conversations separate.


This clearly wouldn't do. So, on May 25th, I said I needed a solution, writing:

Needed: FriendFeed Comments + Likes for Blogger (Old and New)

Thomas Hawk and I need your help. The WordPress bloggers are having way too much fun with getting FriendFeed likes and comments into their blog, and we using Blogger (both the old or new) can't yet do it. I am offering a $250 bounty to the developer of a solution good enough I can integrate into my blog. This would not replace Disqus, but go alongside it, as seen at the Inquisitr. Thomas and others, feel free to add to the bounty...

As much as the WordPress advocates wanted me to just switch blogging platforms (and I respect their views), I was looking for somebody to develop a solution that could help other FriendFeed users in the same predicament I was. After all, what was more likely? That you would see a lot of people make an exodus to a new platform for want of a widget, or that many people on Blogger would find the FriendFeed widget useful? I was willing to pay $250 to make this happen, and I wanted others to pay as well.

By June 16th, Pat Hawks had a solution worth paying money for, and Thomas Hawk agreed. He wrote, "I'm good for a match."


In the space of less than 30 days, I had helped spur an alert developer to create a fantastic solution which I have in place today, and one that continues to improve. Pat, for his efforts, not only gained at least the $500 from Thomas and me, but now has a great deal more awareness and respect across the FriendFeed community and the blogosphere at large. I bet that with platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter and others having direct, immediate, connections to people on the "demand" and "supply" side of the fence, this won't be the last time you see a crowdsourced method for getting software developed.


I am all too happy to give Pat $250, and I'm headed to PayPal now. In this age when you have developers trying to compete with free software and Web services, why not encourage them to build something that you would use, and offer them real cash? If you get enough friends together, you could end up with a serious code competition on your hands.

See also: WinExtra: Crowdsourcing a tech interview

Is Your Web Getting Filtered? What's Blocked or Unlocked?

Entering our third full day here at Lucille Packard Childrens' Hospital with our twins, I have to say I'm impressed with the easy access to high-speed wireless Web. For me, wireless high-speed access is a must, and I don't have much to complain about. Interestingly, the hospital's system, by default, has instituted filters, in theory to protect them legally, and maybe to conserve on bandwidth. This doesn't bother me too much, but as I surf, seemingly with one hand tied behind my back, I find that the sites they've opted to block, and those they've allowed to go through at times have me scratching my head.

I noticed I couldn't log into my Mac Mail via the desktop application right away, but Webmail was fine. I later noticed some sites were blocked when I tried to visit Athletics Nation and follow yesterday's A's game. Safari reported being unable to visit the site. I checked other Sports Blogs Nation sites. Those too, were all down.


A Sample of Approved Sites and Those Blocked

Then, after many on FriendFeed had demanded some early photos of Sarah and Matthew, I tried to take the pictures I had from the last two days and post them to Flickr, feeding the beast. But they were blocked. Then, I tried to log on to my FTP site and upload them to louisgray.com directly. No dice, again.


Sorry, can't upload via FTP!
Luckily, I did find a work-around. By sending the photos via the great Mail2FF program, as attachments, the photos themselves were saved on Amazon's Web Service and archived there. (It's the same way I "cheated" and got FriendFeed to host the graphics in this post for me)

After last night's post on my 10 beliefs in blogging and the Web, I saw someone had posted the story to Hacker News. But I couldn't see who, again, thanks to it being blocked.

IM Blocked: iChat and Google Talk don't get through.
The blocking seems well intended, but random. It makes sense that I shouldn't have access to Fleshbot or AdultFriendFinder (mind you, I just checked them to see if they were filtered), but it makes less sense to have sites like Sports Blogs Nation blocked, when ESPN.com is approved, or to have Hacker News blocked if Techmeme is given a pass.

I'm lucky that I usually don't encounter Web filters. I have free-flowing access at home and at work, and this weekend's experience has been outside the norm. If you are filtered, whether it be at work, at school, or at the library, what sites have you found blocked that you think are wrongly stopped? I'm curious to see if this setup is too aggressive, or in line with your own experience.

What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Sometimes, when I talk to people about why I blog, and what I set out to accomplish through covering what I do, and engaging where I do, I say that I am trying to help shape the Web, and blogging as a whole, to be what I want it to be - a better community with some strong standards for engagement, ownership, news gathering and innovation. Over time, as the number of posts here has racked up, you can see some of these core elements throughout the site. As an exercise, I thought I'd outline my beliefs, and I'm eager to hear your comments, whether these are shared or we disagree.

1. I Believe You Should Enjoy What You Do

Whether you are are the co-founder of a hot startup, an entry-level programmer at a technology monolith, a blogger, or simply a fan of social networking tools, you should be sure you're doing what you're doing because you enjoy it, and at its core, it brings you happiness. At times, I've seen people succumb to the stress of posting every day, of racing up or down the comparative measures out there, or slog day in and day out at companies because they're too unmotivated to seek an alternative. Even on those days when the work required seems overwhelming, it's worth stepping back and saying, "Are you having fun still?" As Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford University a few years ago, if the answer is no too many times in a row, it's time to think about doing something else.

When you're not having fun, it shows. Your work gets sloppier. Your posts get crankier. You start talking more about how much time it's taking, how much pressure you're feeling. And when that happens... take a deep breath, or take a break. Reevaluate why it is you're doing what you do.

2. I Believe In Supporting and Promoting Innovation

Without an entrepreneurial spirit, change in our technology landscape would be muted. Innovation can be sparked from a single idea, whether creating a new market, or simply improving a new one. When I see potential, I want to highlight it, and work as a partner with the team aiming to deliver a new experience, and fulfilling their dreams.

Often, a rush to call "foul" on a product, to give it a negative label, or call failure, is done more to grab attention than through benevolence. You're not doing the innovator a favor, or their potential users a favor, but seeing the glass half full.

3. I Believe In Trusting First, Looking for Holes Later

For the most part, people don't start businesses or create products with ill intent. New services crop up every day, and the overwhelming number are there to help you learn something new, find something more quickly, or reach peers in a new way. As it can be relatively inexpensive to launch new Web services, or to start blogs, there are, simply put, tons of them out there. Many do very similar things. But at their core, most are well-intended.

For every spammer or troll, content scraper or hacker, there are thousands of others working on the right side of the law. And sometimes, when it looks like a service might be on the border of what's "right" and what's "wrong", I tend to give the benefit of the doubt, so the entrepreneur can explain themselves. I also believe that every service out there, from those a day old, to the market monoliths of Google and Microsoft, has issues. It can be fun to focus on those issues, but unless they completely disrupt the user experience to the point the product is unusable, I feel the product owner is both aware of them, and is working behind the scenes to make the product more robust, faster, and more fully featured.

4. I Believe In Equal Access to Tools and Opportunity

I believe in the availability of free or inexpensive services that enable people to broadcast, share and collaborate. I believe that for-profit institutions should make efforts to spread the availability of the Internet, broadband and wireless access to bring this information spigot to people everywhere, regardless of their financial or geographical status.

5. I Believe In Portability Of Content and Clear Ownership

I believe that products should enable support for open standards, such that data can be simply exported and imported from one service to another. I believe that these open standards should be deployed such that content, be it blog posts, news, comments or other actionable items (be it up/down votes, likes, avatars, etc.) be easily transferred, while retaining clear ownership by the original individual performing the activity. This portability should be developed in such a way that the third-party service, the content creator, and the person reaction to said content, all have the option to approve or disapprove portability or modification.

In those cases where full portability is not yet available, I believe services have an obligation to state their intentions to move toward an API, an open standard, display best intentions, or publicly declare their position to keep data siloed, buyer beware.

6. I Believe In Giving Credit Where It Is Due

I believe in bloggers giving best effort to determining the original source of news, and providing linkage, especially when the alternative is to link internally. I believe in making it clear who the entrepreneurs are behind services, and displaying a human face to what could otherwise be a personless brand.

I believe in displaying clear attribution for the source of quotes, paraphrasing or other use of third-party content, even if it is from what's considered a competitor.

7. I Believe In Supporting The Little Guy, While Not Hating the Leader

I believe in giving a new service or a small company its unfair share of support and coverage, as they make a valid attempt to enter a market. I believe in helping the service clarify their message, their features and benefits to the point they achieve critical mass on par with other market leaders. I believe that this presumed bias can be shown without disparaging leading services, or holding ill will against those already having achieved success.

8. I Believe In Transparency and the Removal of Barriers

I believe that those services who make their intentions, their product plans, and their updates clear to users and partners will achieve a higher level of success and trust than those that do not. I believe that company representatives should be easily accessible through clear methods, and should give best efforts to rapidly respond to feature requests, downtime or other concerns.

I believe that activities or barriers which reduce transparency, reduce access to company representatives and create confusion will be extremely damaging, reducing trust and good will.

Similarly, bloggers should be extremely reachable and should display and pre-existing biases, monetary engagements or sponsorships, be there any.

9. I Believe In The Ability to Disagree Without Ill Will

I believe that it is absolutely possible for multiple people to look at the same data set or service and achieve completely-differing conclusions and perspectives, without meaning either person to be lacking in intellect or experience. In the event that disagreements do occur, I recommend open communication and statement of beliefs will be much more successful at proving a point than labels, one liners or personal attacks.

In parallel, services can expect that not every review will be one they want to print out and send home to mom. If the author's found to not have a conflict of interest, efforts should be made to expose that, but otherwise, it can be assumed there might be some valid points, even in the most vile of screeds.

10. I Believe In Finding New Ways To Find, Share, Manipulate Data

I believe that the creation of data and content is nearing commodity status. New blogs and services debut every minute and die almost as quickly. But each month brings new and exciting ways to manipulate, share or otherwise locate the best data, through the launch of new social networks, aggregators, search engines, or semantic tools. The services we all use today will almost with certainty be different than those we use next year at this time.

It is with these 10 tenets, and likely more, that I look to engage. Through my small voice here, I believe I have been lucky enough to play a role in discussing how blogs give attribution, how they prioritize external links vs. internal links, the growing issue of RSS repurposing and comment fragmentation. I've tried to support the little guys and highlight individuals doing innovation. I've made a small number of negative posts, in contrast to my more supportive posts, and avoided throwing the second stone at times when my views weren't universal. The Web, and our ability in the blogosphere to impact it and play a role, is ever changing and exciting to me.

The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah!

I'll hope you can excuse my not posting anything here yesterday. You see, yesterday we were somewhat busy. Shortly after 9 p.m. yesterday night, my wife, Kristine, and I welcomed two new arrivals into our home - Matthew David Gray and Sarah Elizabeth Gray. After about 35 1/2 weeks of gestation, the pair emerged somewhat early, and definitely on the small side, but all signs point to them both being healthy and strong, even if we start slow.

In what I believe was a Web first, I tried to chronicle the proceedings, as best as I was able, using FriendFeed and Twitter in combination. Robert Scoble famously covered son Milan's arrival via Twitter and others have followed suit. But with FriendFeed offering me the best community and conversational platform, combined with great WiFi here at Lucille Packard Childrens' Hospital, I wanted to take advantage.

Thursday at 10:40 p.m.

Thursday night, the process kicked off when my wife's water broke. Having passed the 32 week mark earlier, when we knew it was "safe" to have our kids, we knew the time was imminent. We had hoped for a July 1 arrival, around 37 weeks, but we were as ready as possible, if any parents are ever ready.

Dog-sitting in Palo Alto, I had to turn around to Sunnyvale, finish packing her hospital bag, grab some things and turn back around. Somehow I did this without breaking any speed limits or running red lights.

Meanwhile, Kristine had started contractions, and was measuring around 10 minutes apart.

Friday at 12:30 a.m.

After coming back to Palo Alto, Kristine and I headed to Lucille Packard Children's Hospital and checked in. She was monitored, and contractions were definitely present. June 20th was going to be the day the twins were coming.

Friday at 12:53 a.m.

I wrote a quick note, using TwitAbit, to Twitter, saying, "For those who are curious... today is going to be the day. The "Schwag Magnet" twins are coming. Don't expect minute by minute updates."

The twins had often been referred to as "Schwag Magnets" by Cyndy of Profy and others, thanks to my call for them to wear Web-branded apparel at the end of March. There's even a FriendFeed room dedicated to "Schwag Magnets" and parents of all types.

My quick Tweet set FriendFeed abuzz, as you can see here. I tried to post updates every once in a while, saying contractions were 4-5 mintues apart, and that we would be there for a while.

Robert Scoble bet the twins would be "here by noon", and reminded us to "Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!"

I later checked in and said contractions were down to 2-3 minutes apart. But as time went forward, and there wasn't too much progression, FriendFeed got antsy, and of course, so did we.

Friday at 1:30 p.m.

After 12+ hours of early labor, things were not progressing as quickly as we had hoped. I updated people on Twitter again, only jokingly saying, "Twins still not here well after @scobleizer's 12 noon expected deadline. www.blamescoble.com"

Fellow FriendFeeders also noticed I'd managed to work in my usual Web activity between contractions.

While Kristine kept pushing, and contractions kept getting measured, the labor wasn't progressing all that much. Every few hours, the nurses and doctor would come in, only to find dilation was extremely slow. What was expected to go at a pace of 1 cm per hour was more like 1 cm per 3 hours, and eventually, no progression at all.

Friday at 3 p.m.

Superstitiously, I got out of my A's shirt, which I'd been wearing all day, and put on a Disqus T-shirt I got from Daniel Ha in our last visit. Given their success, I was hoping something would rub off. (Again, I updated Twitter.)

Friday at 7 p.m.

Kristine and I soon came to the same conclusion the doctors had - trying to continue with a vaginal delivery wasn't going to work. 20 hours after the water had broken, and 19 hours into the labor, we had stalled. The kids were in great shape, showing healthy heartbeats, but it was time to consider having a C-Section. It was something we wanted to avoid, but to avoid infection, and be sure to see our kids well, we agreed to move forward.

This time, I updated FriendFeed only, and not Twitter, saying only: "C-Section Imminent. Won't be Long Now. (Wish us Luck!)"

Friday at 9:01 p.m.

Matthew David Gray arrived, weighing in at 5 pounds even, measuring 47 centimeters.

Friday at 9:03 p.m.

Sarah Elizabeth Gray arrived, weighing in at 4 pounds, 3 ounces, measuring 47 centimeters.

Friday at 11:00 p.m.

After checking Sarah into the NICU, and Matthew into the nursery, I returned to find Kristine in recovery. Getting her approval, I updated Twitter and FriendFeed, saying: "Baby Grays are here! The boy clocked in at 9:01 at 5 pounds, and the girl weighed in at 4 pounds, 3 oz at 9:02. Both healthy.” (Note I was off on the second time by a minute)

After a long day of waiting, FriendFeed erupted with congratulations, and so did Twitter. See the Summize stream!

Now

It's amazing to imagine how much people care, given our interactions are often so virtual, but I have to impress upon you how appreciative we are.

The twins' small size was expected, but not to such a degree. In fact, our latest ultrasound, 10 days prior, had expected Matthew to already be 5 pounds, 1 ounce, and Sarah at 4 pounds, 8 ounces. But we were near the margin of error. While the kids had all their fingers and toes, and responded to stimulation, Sarah's tiny size has guaranteed her a stay in the NICU. Matthew is in the nursery, and spent the night with Kristine and me, as we alternated holding him and catching some sleep.

I promise we will deliver pictures soon. We have only a few already. The twins' arrival was very visible, and we hope to keep you updated, between feedings, diapers and everything else. It's not like we're the first parents ever to have kids, but it's the first time we've ever done it. I'm glad to have been able to share the experience with you. More very soon.

RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares

The foundation of RSS is in its syndication (the second 'S'). A feed, published from one location, can be read in a different location, whether it be a feed reader, a blog widget, a lifestreaming application or any number of aggregation services. The simplicity in sharing has also led some to worry about where their content goes when they hit "Publish", as, often, they lose control over where it can go.

Today, RSSmeme's Benjamin Golub, who has developed a tracker for the most popular shared items on Google Reader, saw one unhappy publisher threaten him with legal action after she had found her feed included in the service.

The RSSmeme service utilizes Google Reader's shared link blogs as its underlying database. Those items that receive the most shares from Google Reader rise to the top, and Benjamin, over the last few months, has updated the service to sort by categories, by languages, and highlight the most active users and tags. But one thing he doesn't do is hand-select the content displayed. That's done by the thousands and thousands of people using Google Reader every day, and sharing new items. So when he received a takedown request by e-mail, he was a little surprised.

Talking with him by phone this afternoon, he said the complainant's feed had only been shared two times, by a single sharer. But she had essentially penned an e-mail saying to "remove all content, or I will send a lawyer."

Not eager to have legal trouble, Benjamin removed the offending shares, and recommended to the publisher that her feeds be set to broadcast as partial feeds, not full feeds, assuming she was concerned her content was being stolen, or used in a commercial way. Benjamin told me that he anticipated such a threat might happen once he posted ads on the RSSmeme site, but said with rising Web hosting costs, monetizing in some way soon became necessity.

"When I started RSSmeme, it only cost $20 a month, and (due to site growth), it doesn't cost that much any more," he told me. Since launch, costs have more than tripled, and the Google-sourced ads are used to offset any out of pocket expenses.

While Benjamin considers his options, at the time, he has globally altered settings on RSSmeme to show only the excerpts of feeds, removing the ability to read an entire blog post on the site, the same approach taken by Shyftr back in April when similar complaints arose.

The issue of how RSS-enabled content is monetized, where comments lie, and who has full control over blog entries isn't going away any time soon. Even if Benjamin never hears back from the woman threatening to take him to court, it's definitely got him rattled, and once again is stirring up discussion, as you can see on FriendFeed.

twitAbit Debuts as New Service to Escape Twitter Downtime

Many Twitter users have a love/hate relationship with the service. They love what it does, helping people communicate in real time, from the Web or their mobile phones, but they hate that it hasn't scaled to meet demand. In its place, a new crop of services is rising to work around the downtime. The latest, debuting today, is called twitAbit, which leverages store and forward capabilities to ensure that Twitter fail doesn't ensure your own fail.

The Twitter "fail whale" is well known and a great number of users are looking for a way out. Some have left Twitter. Some are just using it less. Others have moved on, to Plurk, to FriendFeed, or Pownce. But leaving Twitter comes at a high cost for those who have invested time in building relationships, and in some cases, thousands of followers. Even despite the many outages, the vast majority of Twitter's user base has largely stuck it out, hoping for better times.


But if those better times don't come right away, twitAbit is prepared. The service offers a simple form, asking for your user name and password, what you are doing, and a link. It appears to be a project of betaworks, and was announced on the switchAbit Web site, which RSS and blogging guru Dave Winer announced back in May.

At the time of posting, Winer promised Flickr to Twitter functionality, and a second Twitter application, most likely twitAbit, Although it's not 100% clear, he has spoken of a need for a decentralized Twitter, and this could be the first step.

Also: You can see Winer's first "tweet" from twitAbit back on June 13th.

ReadBurner Revamps Stats Pages, Expanding Shared Items Analysis

The ReadBurner team continues to make enhancements to the popular Web site dedicated to showing the most popular items shared on Google Reader and Netvibes. Tonight, in advance of their weekly podcast, featuring MG Siegler of ParisLemon and VentureBeat as a guest, they are rolling out upgrade statistics showing the most popular sources, displaying the average number of shares per story for a given author or source in the system.

In a change from the service's previous methodology, the new reports are intended to reward consistency, meaning that a site won't gain from one-time spikes around a popular story, and won't get more prominence due to a higher frequency of posting.


The new stats, seen at http://www.readburner.com/stats, come only a week after RSSmeme debuted new sidebar widgets that show the top tags and top users for the day, as well as widgets that can show who are the most frequent sharers of a specific blog. You can see the "Top Sharers" on the right side of this page to see who shares content from louisgray.com, as well as the tags I use the most to describe my posts.

Both sites are making strides to expand away from simply counting the data to helping analyze it. Both sites also gave a nod today to the morning's news that Chris Wetherell, the main architect behind the amazing Google Reader, will be leaving the company. Had it not been for his efforts, and Google Reader's growth, neither site would exist.

These, and other topics, will undoubtedly be part of the night's discussion with MG. You can tune in here.

Fav.or.it Opens Up, Reminds Us of Google News for Blogs

When I first learned of Fav.or.it, I thought the site was going to try and take on the powerhouse Google Reader, as a next-generation RSS reader with social features and integrated commenting back to the site. Not meeting those expectations, I didn't give my beta experience a very favorable review.

Now that Fav.or.it is finally here, the service has tried to make it more clear that it's about trying to reach "the masses" and not the odd early adopter (like me). The result, so far, is a portal-like service that looks a lot like Google News in terms of prioritization of stories and categorization, but utilizing blog content instead of mainstream media.


The top story on Fav.or.it on Wednesday morning
The change in strategy, or at least the change in my understanding the strategy, makes me both less interested in picking them apart, and less interested in making part of my daily consumption, so far. But I'm not exactly the target audience. For what it's worth, I don't read Google News either.

Fav.or.it's front page says it's "Bringing blogging to the masses." Note no mention of RSS or feeds. It has a top story, although it's unclear how that's determined, it features a section of recent posts, called "Brand Spanking New", and highlights many other facets of news and blog categorization you're used to, including "Tags", "Most Commented", and topics, such as Technology, News, Business, and Culture. Clicking through any of those topics leads you to the full copies of stories generated elsewhere, but integrated into Fav.or.it's look and feel.

Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr calls Fav.or.it's new approach "splogging", essentially repurposing other people's content and aiming to make a profit, potentially in violation of copyright. Nick Halstead, the site's creator, responds in the comments there that by blog authors implementing Creative Commons, having the option to feed comments back to the original source, and being able to opt in or opt out of the site, this should reduce any concerns.

I don't share Duncan's concerns in this case. I've always erred on the side of letting RSS readers and sites innovate in new ways to present my feed content, and I expect that as RSS enables full feeds to be displayed, there will be some new and interesting ways they are shown from one site to another. For every reader who sees my full content elsewhere and chooses not to visit my site, there's another who does come in and becomes a regular, so those sites can serve as free advertising.

What Fav.or.it does do well is deliver a clean-looking site, with a strong amount of underlying data, easily findable. There's clearly a robust underlying database of stories and metadata around tags and comments powering the site, but it does a much better job than other sites, like Technorati, who have tried to make blog posts a valid replacement for mainstream media. If, in fact, the common layperson chose to get their news from Fav.or.it instead of say, Google News, it would clearly expose them to a wealth of new sources for stories. It might also get them comfortable with the concepts of comments and tags, things we've long taken for granted.

In fact, Fav.or.it's efforts in the comment portability process should be lauded. At launch, the service claims to support many different commenting engines, meaning comments placed on Fav.or.it flow back to the original blog. They don't support threaded conversations, believing simple threads are preferred, but again, in theory, this might be less complicated for the blogging newbie. (See more in Nick's launch blog post: Bringing Blogging to the Masses)

Talking about Fav.or.it now, as TechCrunch has with their piece, Fav.or.it Finally Opens Beta To Take RSS And Commenting Mainstream, makes me feel wistful, like when you go to the graduation of a son or daughter leaving junior college when they once were offered a full-ride scholarship to an Ivy League school. Sure, you're proud of them, I guess, but it's tempting to wonder what might have been, and what they could have been if they'd just taken your advice or gone a different direction, they have so much talent.

Fav.or.it might have a hit on its hands with people who are nothing like me. There sure are a lot of them out there. But for now, it's a destination site displaying content I've either already seen in my RSS reader, or didn't care to see anyway. As a start page, it could work very well, and as a blogging ambassador it works well, and I'll probably just have to accept that maybe this is what they wanted to be when they grew up.

LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network

As I mentioned in yesterday's story on OneSpot, the quest to separate the wheat from the chaff in news and blogs through leveraging RSS and social tools is a vibrant market. Whether Web users are relying on Digg, Slashdot and Reddit to bring the hottest items to the top, or if they are instead turning to automated memetrackers like Techmeme to rank stories' popularity, a lot of people are asking to not read every single story, but instead, put their faith in the hands of others.

A new network debuting today, called LOUD3R, hopes to leverage this automation and social prioritization of stories, through a vast network of sites, including 25 at launch today, each one of them utilizing a semantic publishing engine, which finds, clusters and ranks content for a number of vertical topics, ranging from technology to sports, fashion to business.

Each one of the sites carries their trademark - 3R ending. For example, a site dedicated to Web 2.0 and community, isn't called Buzzer, but instead is translated as BUZZ3R, and can be found at www.buzz3r.com. Similarly, an auto site is called ROADST3R and can be found at www.roadst3r.com. I'll let you guess as to some of the others, including GLITT3R, WATCH3R, and FOUND3R.


A sampling of LOUD3R's 25 sites at launch
Like many other topical Digg-like sites, including Ballhype and Showhype, the LOUD3R network family promotes stories that have received attention from throughout the Web. But instead of getting voted up or down by users, the articles are driven by background rules, in Techmeme-like fashion, as Gabe Rivera has implemented on his own family of sites, including BallBug, Memorandum and WeSmirch. Users can make comments on the items, see related stories, or e-mail them.


A lead story on one of LOUD3R's sites.
The sites also use the same background semantic engine to highlight hot topics on each site. On PUTT3R, it's no surprise that Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate are hot topics. On WOOF3R, the topics instead turn to terriers and poodles.

Like Digg, you can see the "Most Popular" items, as well as "Newest", and the LOUD3R algorithm also tries to make a best guess as to what is most "Interesting".

Will LOUD3R's cute naming strategy and interesting use of semantics gain them significant traction? The company certainly hopes so. They have gobbled up more than 550 topically-oriented domain names with the "3R" brand, so today's launch is just the beginning. They hope that their semantic engine will help filter all the content on the Web and only bring visitors the "best available". And they definitely believe that through targeting topics that are historically underserved, they can get a leg up against competition.

With more than 500 sites planned for launch, not every single topic has to be a dramatic success for LOUD3R to make some coin, they hope. Their press release, also issued today, says each site has a low maintenance cost, and each will deliver advertising revenue. If the audience doesn't get QUIET3R, then LOUD3R should get BETT3R and BIGG3R.

OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple

News aggregation sites that can help highlight the freshest, most relevant or most popular news from around the Web are essential to separating the signal from the noise. But all too often, these memetrackers are siloed, without readers having all that much input into what's considered most relevant, or determining what content gets in and what does not.

The success of Gabe Rivera's Techmeme has had many thinking how they could create their own personal Techmeme, featuring the best of the Web, but only for those topics they're most interested in, or from those sources they choose. Gabe's product, despite some competition from BlogRunner and Megite, as well as others, has remained the most relevant and accepted leader in the space, but its algorithm has left some people wanting more.

Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr leverages FriendFeed, building what he called QMeme, displaying the most popular content on FriendFeed over the last 24 hours from those he follows. Corvida of SheGeeks once said LinkRiver was her own personal Techmeme. Rafe Needleman of WebWare once called ReadBurner a Techmeme for Google Reader. But none of these solutions, while interesting, offer the individual manageability of a new product that's now come available to the Web at large: OneSpot.

Already in place at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, as well as some more vertically-oriented sites, OneSpot enables anybody to leverage the service's more than 250,000 RSS feeds to design and configure a personal meme, simply by starting with a few "trusted" RSS feeds, and letting OneSpot do the hard work of finding similar feeds on the same topic, and then determining the most popular content.

The result is a highly customizable personal memetracker that can be displayed on a full Web page or as a widget, drawing from the criteria you set, and publishing as frequently as you would like.


The OneSpot Dashboard Lets Me Choose Topics and Schedules
In the last few weeks, I created three memetrackers using OneSpot. One used my blog as the center of the universe (as most bloggers would like). One focused on technology at large. A third, and so far, the most interesting to me, focuses solely on the creators and participants in social media, link aggregation and lifestreaming.

See:
LouisGray.com: Top Stories > OneSpot
LouisGray.com: Social Media Top Stories > OneSpot
LouisGray.com: Technology Top Stories > OneSpot

To configure my personal OneSpot publication, I entered a few "Trusted Feeds", and OneSpot then found thousands of "Related Feeds", allowing me to see the name of the feed, when it was last updated, and giving me two choices: to add the feed to my "Trusted" bucket, or to "Remove" it from the list of options.

I found OneSpot's recommendation engine to be very good. If I showed louisgray.com as a Trusted Feed, OneSpot recommended SheGeeks, The Last Podcast, the Official ReadBurner Blog, Benjamin Golub, Webomatica and a few others, no doubt leveraging my own previous linking behavior.


Trusted Feeds I Posted to my Social Media OneSpot

Related Feeds Suggested for my Social Media OneSpot
For the Social Media publication, I had added the main blogs for FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Toluu, Shyftr and others, and OneSpot recommended I also add blogs from Assetbar and Twitter. Very cool.

OneSpot is extremely flexible, letting me schedule updates as frequently as 60 minutes apart, letting me customize the memetracker's look and feel, or even to add up/down voting recommendations or comments. At a time when news organizations like the Associated Press are throwing up roadblocks in how you link to or highlight their content, why not use OneSpot to make your own memetracker using sources you trust?

Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS

In the last two years, there have been a number of attempts at taking what's been a solitary experience of reading one's RSS feeds in isolation, and adding new social elements, sharing feeds with friends, discovering new feeds, or adding comments and notes.

Following a lengthy incubation period, intended to get the product rock-solid with an army of features and a sharp interface, Feedly hits the Web today with their own take on the social start page - using your Google Reader subscriptions at its core, but layering on intelligence that learns from you, including your reading patterns, to personalize your information waterfall.


The Feedly Cover Page
Feedly was first known as Feeddo, but recently changed its name to eliminate confusion with other products on the market, and has been in private testing for several months. I first started talking with Edwin Khodabakchian back in mid-February, and even then, the project had been under scrutiny from more than 100 early testers for the better part of three months. The goal? To bring a new, graphical, view of feeds, via Google Reader, and add multiple social layers on top of what's already recognized as the world's most-popular online RSS engine.

Khodabakchian brings a strong resume to the project, once being a Chief Architect at Netscape, and later, the CTO of eCommerce at AOL, following that company's acquisition of Netscape, as well as four years as the co-founder and CEO of Collaxa, later acquired by Oracle. Khodabakchian also considers the team behind Yokway close friends and has been a visible early beta tester of that product.

The months and months of quiet effort appear to have paid off. If you have a FireFox browser, you'll want to see this new approach to taking in the day's news. In my own testing, I kept uncovering new features, and I'm sure I won't get them all here. But here are some of the main elements:

The Magazine Cover

Feedly looks at itself as a start page and magazine hybrid. The main cover page, noted by an icon that looks like a book, shows the latest new items from subscribed feeds, using your own learned reading activity, combined with your sharing history in Google Reader, to bring what's anticipated to be your most interesting stories to the very front. Feedly also, in the bottom right corner of the page, has an "Explore" option, where new stories from similar feeds you may not subscribe to, are available.

Like most feed readers, you can click on any of the articles' headlines, and view the full item. But Feedly isn't intended to be a passive experience. From the article, you can:

1. Save it for later reading.
2. Annotate it (more on this later)
3. Recommend it to friends
4. E-mail it.
5. Send a note about the article using your Twitter acount.
6. Preview it, giving a glimpse of how it looks from the source site.
7. Copy the link to your clipboard.

From that article, I can go back to the cover page, view other articles from that source, or make a new selection from my Feedly toolbar.

What's New

The What's New page combines the latest updates from your subscribed feeds with recommended articles from friends, and again, highlights those feeds and items you are most likely to read, based on your past behavior.


Due to Feedly's tight integration with Google Reader, the items in the What's New page are segmented by topic, gathered from your folders in Google Reader. Mine, for instance, include "Technology", "Web 2", "Apple News", "Mac Rumors" and "Misc" for all other blogs.

While viewing "What's New", I can not only see what the latest feed items are, but on the right, all sources of news are listed, with the number of available items at each source. If there's a new story from one site, it'll be bolded. If I've already read all the stories, they won't be.

As with the cover page, the lower right corner always offers me new feeds to add, should I find them interesting.

The Wall


The Wall can act as your social springboard to both shared items in Google Reader and Twitter updates. If you opt in to synching your Twitter account with Feedly, you can use the Feedly interface to get tweets from friends, as well as see items shared by friends within Google Reader.

This can become a two-way conversation as you annotate articles or send posts out to Twitter from Feedly.

Integrated Google Search

While some sites don't think about search until well after launch, Feedly has developed an extensive tie-in with Google Search and Google Reader on day one.

For example, if I search for the term "Caramilk", a word not often used, I not only found an article from Mark Evans called "What's the Caramilk Secret", but also related items, including WinExtra's Would you hammer a nail with a shovel? and Tris Hussey's response, FriendFeed explodes onto the scene, but it is still an information fire hose, both of which referenced Mark's article.


Feedly's Results for "Caramilk"
Searches for more frequent terms, like Apple and Yahoo!, had their expected 1000+ results, in reverse chronological order.

Annotation and Sharing

Similar to Google Reader shared notes, you can make notes on any item within Feedly and share it on "The Wall". But unlike Google Reader, you can highlight the portion you're commenting on, and make notes, as you are more accustomed to seeing in Microsoft Word's Track Changes option.

On any item, you can either click the "annotate" option, or select the desired text, and an option comes up to either "search related articles" or "highlight". If you chose to highlight, the selected text is in fact highlighted, and you can add a comment. As you can see in the below two examples, I was able to add comments next to articles from both Sarah Perez and Steven Hodson, and my own avatar was displayed next to each.


A Note on WinExtra's Item in Feedly

A Note on Sarah Perez' Item in Feedly
Tweeting an article is similarly easy. If I find an article I like, I just click "tweet" and a new box opens up with the headline, an automatically generated TinyURL, and a note on how many characters I have before running out of Twitter's 140 character limit.


Clicking e-mail opens another box with a simple "To:" field, and a "Note" field. As you start typing, Feedly automatically shows contacts you have in your GMail address book. Select one of those, or enter a new contact, and hit send.


Managing Feeds

Feedly is 100% synchronized with Google Reader. Add a subscription through Feedly, and it will show up in your Google Reader. Read an article in Feedly? It's marked read in Google Reader. Recommend it in Feedly? It's shared in Google Reader. Want to move a blog from one folder to another in Google Reader? You can do that through Feedly. Feedly essentially brings you all the aspects of Google Reader we've grown accustomed to, but displays them in a new, friendly, visual way, while extending the feed universe out to Twitter and e-mail, and adding social elements.



Feedly also takes things a step further, showing all your feeds in a single dashboard view, letting you toggle your favorites, or in a unique twist, offering what's called "Spring Cleaning", where, in theory, should you get bogged down with too many updates, feeds are flagged warm or cool based on your reading behavior and how often you mark them as favorites.

Other services, like Assetbar, got dinged for packing in too many features and not focusing on delivering a clean interface. Feedly has largely avoided this problem through strong segmentation between portions of the service, and through leveraging existing accounts, including your Google profile, existing friends in Google Reader and your GMail account.

If you're the type of RSS power user who wants to read hundreds of items through aggressive keyboard navigation, then Google Reader still can't be beat, but if you want to pick the very best from the many feeds you have, share items with friends and find new sources for news, Feedly is a compelling option. They've clearly done a lot of work to make their solution feature rich, with a flexible, clean, user interface, and options not found anywhere else.

Check out the new offering at www.feedly.com.

Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next

Tonight, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Daniel Ha, the CEO and co-founder of Disqus. One of the advantages of being in the Silicon Valley is that in many cases, I can actually engage with and meet the people who are moving the industry forward, and while I don't consider myself a big-league hob-nobber, the occasional social visit can be rewarding. I won't jeopardize future meetings by giving away the company store, but I definitely came away from the evening feeling even more committed to Disqus and the company's strategy than I was before.

As you already know, I first added Disqus to my blog with Daniel's help, after finding I was unable to integrate the service into my Blogger template. He went above and beyond the call of duty to get me up and running, doing such an excellent job that the effort was noted by Mashable.

This customers-first attitude shown on the Web was evident off-line as well. Daniel more than once apologized for the brief downtime Disqus suffered last Friday, saying that he had awakened to a swarm of e-mails from frustrated users, not to mention my post, and said that we were right to call them on it, as Disqus comments are now such an integral part of our blogs. He assured me the team knew the issues behind it and was working diligently to make sure another similar outage would never occur. Disqus' popular sidebar widget was to blame, putting a great deal of strain on the service, which has since been lessened.

Also, during the meal, Daniel asked me a question that he says he loves asking users, "How can we make Disqus work even better for you?"

Had I been properly prepared, I could have brought an index card along with responses at the ready. Duncan Riley, for instance, wants trackbacks and FriendFeed integration. I asked for better statistics and analytics, and had questions on how older posts were displayed on my Disqus dashboard. But the truth is that I'm already quite happy with Disqus, and have grown to expect to see it on other blogs, making myself less likely to comment on other sites that don't offer the centralized comments feature.

On a personal note, I was struck by how young Daniel was. At the old age of 31, I'm now reaching the point where just about every Major League Baseball player I like is younger than me. But the CEO of a company I think could have a big impact on the future of the Web being 22, and a UC Davis computer science graduate just this year? That's not fair, and I'm not used to it. Coincidentally, my youngest sister also graduated from Davis on Saturday, sharing Daniel's class year.

Daniel started Disqus in 2007 with friend Jason Yan while in Davis, and this month, doubled the team, adding two new coders, Andrew Badr and Devin Naquin. (See: The New Guy and Hello, world!)

Andrew's already busy letting people know about upcoming features, promising the addition of trackbacks "sometime in the next week.", on the Oracle AppsLab blog. He also answers many people's fears as to the portability of the data, saying, "Better options for import and export are in the works, and will be part of our next major release."

As I wrote at the end of May, Daniel has helped lead Disqus to the forefront of blog comment services in a short time, partly due to his aggressively pursuing relationships with partners. While some companies have targeted Disqus with competitive pot-shots, Daniel said that having others in the field helps to reassure him that it's a good market to pursue. If nobody else was interested in the space, he would undoubtedly be wondering just why.

Disqus is well-known to be funded by Fred Wilson with Union Square Ventures and Paul Graham with Y Combinator, among others, and while some VCs may try to demand immediate revenues or even profits from even the smallest of ventures, Disqus is not yet under such pressure. They've definitely had talks about how to monetize and start bringing in money, but if you thought they were about to start with advertising, you'd be wrong. Disqus will not always be a zero-revenue company, but Daniel says advertising's not in the plans.

For a service that's already got what I believe to the best solution with threaded conversations, a strong GUI and centralized activity, Disqus is continuing to work hard to maintain their lead. Andrew's comments point to near-term release of importing, exporting and trackbacks, and Daniel seems to have an extremely level perspective on what could be a challenging environment for anyone, let alone a 22 year-old entrepreneur. I believe we need a lot more people like Daniel focused on delivering a great customer experience with real benefits, who are less focused on the day to day fights between competitors than they are on getting the service perfected.

The Web Offers a Window Into Paradise's Burning

Three weeks ago, I told a story about how Northern California fires had once chased my family and me from our home, as evacuation orders had our family of seven packing our belongings and heading to the central valley floor, not knowing what we'd find when we returned. This weekend, the fires came back to Paradise, where I lived from 1994 to 1999, and where my family spent 10 years. But this time they weren't stopped at the town limits, and the fire has consumed more than 70 homes, so far scorching more than 23,000 acres.

Over the last 24 hours, I've turned to the Web to learn all I can about this tragedy, and through the various tools out there on the Web, from newspaper Web sites to user submitted photography, recorded video, and even a streaming broadcast of the county's public safety scanner, to learn what has happened. And the news is not good.


Firefighters Take to the Air to Fight the Blaze
While this blaze, dubbed the "Humboldt Fire", hasn't gained the national attention given the San Diego fires last year, or even the awareness we saw in the Bay Area for the fire last month in the Santa Cruz mountains, the effects are just as devastating. While I haven't called Paradise home for almost a decade, we've gotten word over the last day or so that friends' homes have been wiped clean from the earth, their life's dreams and possessions erased in a flaming fury.

The two main sources of news have been the area newspapers, including the Chico Enterprise Record, where I once wrote as a staff intern back in 1995 and 1996, and the smaller, hometown Paradise Post.


See KCRA Sacramento's Report on the Blaze from Friday
Photos from the Enterprise Record have been circulated through the Associated Press, and show stories of loss, heroic efforts from those fighting the blaze, and agony. The Enterprise Record also asked those effected by the fires to submit their own photos, and both collections feature hundreds of first-party accounts. At one point, nearly 10,000 of the town's 30,000 residents were asked to evacuate, and of the three roads out of town, only one was left open, with none who left being able to return.

A PDF map of those homes burned shows the flames came within a mile of where I spent my 8th grade to 12th grade years. And while the family who now lives in our home appears to have been safe, other friends were not so lucky.

My younger sister, writing on our family blog, posted last night:

"The Rogers and the Sterlings both lost their homes. The Greers are still not able to stay at their home and are in (Yuba City). The Halls are okay, as is Tiger Tail. All of Wayland is supposedly gone."

The Rogers family and The Sterling family were both friends and members of our church. Tiger Tail Lane, which my sister references, is where our home was, luckily escaping the flames again. Tonight, my mother added a new note:

"The Sterlings are apparently devastated -- it took them 20 years to build their home."

The Sterling's youngest son, Rob, is currently serving a two-year mission for the church, and it now becomes a trial for the family to see if they tell him, or when they can tell him, without distracting from what they consider extremely important work.

This kind of personal detail makes what otherwise would be yet another sad story full of statistics on homes burned and acres torched just that much more real. I can check the CDF's report and see that the blaze is now 45% contained, has cost $5 million so far, employing nearly 4,000 fire personnel. I can see stories that say it will be fully contained by Monday, and that the threat to Paradise has decreased, but clearly, for some it is already too late.

I'm watching on the Web, but I can't help but feel powerless.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #5: Bringing Comments Back to Your Blog

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, the bookmarklet, advanced search, and how to integrate with Google Talk. Today, I'm going to talk about how you can bring comments from FriendFeed to your blog, capturing the conversation.

While FriendFeed has gained considerable praise from many corners of the tech blogosphere, one place where they have been maligned is in how conversations that take place on the site aren't immediately ported back to the original blog. These "fragmented conversations" have flared up as major issues every couple of weeks, and while I've personally never had a problem with it, and have actually seen comments on my own site grow, even as I've used FriendFeed, many are hoping to keep control over the conversation and keep it on their site.

While FriendFeed hasn't yet introduced an initiative to defragment these conversations, in their place, independent developers have designed tools that will bring comments from FriendFeed back to blogs, including Wordpress, and as of today, Blogger, both the "new" and the "old" versions of Blogger. You can even see the brand-new tool for Blogger live on my site already.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your WordPress Blog

WordPress has gained a lot of traction in the blogosphere, in part due to its wide library of available third-party plug-ins. Only a day after FriendFeed released its API, the entrepreneurial Glenn Saven debuted announced a plug-in that pulls back comments and likes from FriendFeed and displays them on your site.

As he writes on the plug-in page:

"The plugin ads a template tag called , which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside "the loop" so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.
Unzip the plugin into your plugins folder & activate it. You’ll then need to go into the options (or settings if you’re running WP2.5) and click on FriendFeed. Put your FriendFeed nickname in & save and you’re done with the setup. All the other settings in there are optional. You then need to place on your template file(s)."

The result is a two-way box that shows how many comments and likes an item received, as well as the avatars of the poster, and has the option to add a comment yourself, back to FriendFeed, assuming you know your user name and API key. You can see it installed at my fellow B-List blogger, Steven Hodson's site, at WinExtra. The below screenshot is from his post Some thoughts on a Microsoft after Gates.



Not having installed WordPress myself and tested this, I'm no expert, but from what I've seen from Steven's site and Duncan Riley's work at The Inquisitr, it works very well.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your Blogger Blog

The argument could be made that Blogger's not the most robust platform out there. It certainly hasn't been the most reliable. And its lacking plug-in architecture has made it a less-preferred choice among the with-it digerati. And for the last three months, as WordPress users have enjoyed Glenn Slaven's solution, we Blogger users have been in the dark. Until now.

Pat Hawks posted code using Yahoo! Pipes, which delivers a lightweight JavaScript based solution, bringing FriendFeed comments back to the originating blog. See: FriendFeed Comments in Blogger.

Rather than copy the full code from Pat, I recommend you visit his page if this is important to you. Still being on the "old" Blogger, I saved my Blogger template (just in case), added the new code, just by adding the JavaScript code after where Blogger concludes comments, and before my already customized Disqus code. Now, when people (including me) comment on my FriendFeed items, I can see the comments here as well, as well as those from Disqus. It's now one great big conversation.



This, for me, is an exciting development. On May 25th, I offered a $250 bounty for the first solution good enough to integrate into my blog that shows both FriendFeed likes and comments. Now, Pat has delivered on comments. So... should I pay up now, or wait for likes to be supported as well? Either way, this is a great add.

On another solution? TypePad, for example?

I don't yet know of a way to get FriendFeed comments back to TypePad, the third leg of the blogging platform triumvirate. If somebody does have a solution, or is in the process, I'd love to hear about it.

So what comes next?

I expect this issue of comment fragmentation to fade away pretty quickly. It might not be long until there are solutions that support commenters, aggregators and publishers, all in one. But until then, these new ways to bring FriendFeed comments to your blog are a great solution. Leave a comment here (or on FriendFeed) if you've got one of these solutions running. I'd love to see it.

Giving a Service Wings By Pushing Them from the Nest

For those of us blogging who like to break the news by announcing new services, and using our site as their platform to debut, it can be tempting to pull an "old world" journalism mentality and claim that topic as "our turf", resenting anybody else who tries to step in and steal the thunder by posting the news first, or even feeling betrayed if the entrepreneur takes the news somewhere else. But I've seen that after what I consider an incubation period, the fastest-growing services do best when I can step back and let them take their first steps away from the nest, as they engage with other bloggers, gaining them a new audience and greater exposure.

In this analogy, it can be nerve-wracking to see the little ones as they leave the nest. I worry the new caregivers might not see them in the same way I do. The new influencer might be cruel or may not recognize their talents. But to try and protect them by keeping them in the nest could stunt their growth.

As mentioned in yesterday's popular post, the first stage of being an early adopter can at times be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing firm, as you try to make a product you like extremely visible. You've no doubt seen me do this, as I'll not just help by introducing a product, but keeping you posted on its updates, from Assetbar to ReadBurner, FriendFeedMachine, RSSmeme and Toluu.

But there comes a time when the right thing to do is let go, when the service has gained such momentum that I instead suggest the developer reach out to other sites to get a broader perspective and more exposure, so that their service is less tied in with me, and seen, instead as more of the broader landscape.

Don't get me wrong. I love exclusives, and part of my journalism background makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I know that someone who might be considered competition is writing about the same topic at the same time with the same deadline. But lately, for services that have gotten some traction, I've opted out of story opportunities and encouraged the developer to get some new voices talking instead.

A prime example of this was with Toluu yesterday. On Wednesday, Caleb Elston reached out to me with some great new service updates, including details on subscriptions within Toluu by feed, and story popularity, in part helped by AideRSS. I told Caleb that instead of waiting for me, to take his outreach to the next level, and it worked, without question. Yesterday ended up being a record-setting day for Toluu, after what Hutch Carpenter called a great example of social media marketing, by participating and reaching out to bloggers and following Toluu references on both FriendFeed and Twitter.

Similarly, RSSmeme announced options to find similar sharers of data to you, and integrated widgets on each page that show top tags and sharers for that blog or topic. See: Using RSSmeme To Find Similar Sharers: Louis Gray’s Example. Having just given RSSmeme a ton of credit last Saturday on being the authority on Google Reader sharing notes, I again waved the white flag, and told Benjamin to spread the word. He did, leveraging a custom room on FriendFeed for RSSmeme, to update followers, also adding RSSmeme as a user of the service, and today, leveraging the FriendFeed API to speed up the site.

You can see how other services have taken steps to leave the nest, as other sites, often much bigger than mine, take up the rallying cry:

ReadBurner:
The Inquisitr: ReadBurner Gets Digg Like Features

Shyftr:
Mashable: Shyftr Beats Google Reader with OPML Imports

LinkRiver:
SheGeeks: LinkRiver is My Personal Techmeme

Part of being a good partner to new services is knowing when to let go, and to see if the service has wings. A few weeks ago, I wrote to one pair of entrepreneurs, "Let me know if there's anything else I can do, but I do believe it's going to come down to you guys being more visible." With everything else that's going on, I can't possibly do it all myself. That's why, even though it can be bittersweet on occasion, the right thing to do is let them take a risk and let go. It gives others, like Corvida, the opportunity to do a social media roundup on service updates, and it's best for the community at large.

The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior

Early adopters serve an important role in the world of Web services and technology gadgetry. helping to act in a multi-pronged position that can blur the line between journalist, customer and partner.

The best early adopters not only help spread the word about a new product, but they can help argue its features, they are eager to offer feedback to its developers, and at times can be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing team. But with time, if not coddled, this crowd can often turn against the very service they helped champion, as they move on to the next new thing, sometimes taking an army of followers with them.

This relationship between service and early adopter is a healthy one, assuming the Web service has, in the interim, grown to the point they no longer need the initial proponent's efforts, having expanded to a more mainstream audience, or achieved sustainable organic growth. But if this doesn't happen, it's a very short trip from promotion to abandonment indeed.

With not too much research, you can see evidence for five major stages of early adopter behavior, as I've summarized below.


1. Discovery, QA and Spreading the Word

The first weeks and months of a service can be very exciting. The early adopter often works with the developer behind the scenes to learn as much as they can about a product, often posting a new story that introduces the site. If there are any bugs with the product, they are easily glossed over as ones which will undoubtedly soon be fixed. If the site doesn't seem all that useful without a multitude of users, this too can be ignored, as the early adopter hopes everyone will see the service's full potential, and will use it the way they expect to.

In this phase, the early adopter has what can be construed as a personal interest in the success of the product, as he or she has gone out on a limb to associate the name with the third party brand. The adopter will not only be a frequent user of the service, but will track other posts or comments about it everywhere, and repeat the agreed upon talking points. Should they actually find a major issue with the product, they will e-mail or call the developers directly, rather than making the issues public.

At times, everything on the Web can be seen through the lenses of just how this new product will be affected, or how it could change everything else. All of a sudden, what may have been a hammer is proclaimed to be a Swiss Army Knife.

2. Promotion and Collaboration

As the service gains momentum, the early adopter befriends the first users of the product, who may have nothing in common except that they share interest in that product. At times, the product may be used only to discuss the product itself.

The early adopter, as new voices discover the service, will push follow-up posts, giving public suggestions to the company, in an extremely positive way, on how they believe the service should change and grow, showing themselves, in front of the world, to be an integral part of the product's development. Should the product incorporate any of these suggestions, whether due to the adopter's input or not, the early adopter will either take credit, or follow up and show how they were "right".

Now using the product a great deal, at the exclusion of others, the early adopter will openly mock those people who haven't jumped aboard yet, pointing them out as being stuck in the past, or married to clearly inferior products.

3. Mainstream Use and Engagement

Having grown tired of the part-time job of delivering free PR for the service, at this point the early adopter no longer feels the need to architect every story and every product through the lens of the service. Instead, having felt vindicated that the masses are now seeing the potential he always knew the product had, he or she remains engaged, trying to act as a "model citizen" for the product, engaging with newer users, but keeping in mind the higher visibility and trying to act as an example.

At this point, follow-on users have now picked up the ball in terms of promoting the product, announcing each of its aspects in the same breath-taking manner the early adopter once did for the service itself. At this point, the early adopter already knows his or her readers and peers know they like the product, and the need to constantly remind people they are using it is no longer necessary.

4. Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use

At this point, often in part due to favorable feedback from the service's authors, the early adopter feels a sense of entitlement, that the product absolutely must be architected in the way they say so, even if to move in that direction wouldn't serve the larger installed base. Now, instead of suggesting quick ways the service could update, the calls are more like ultimatums, and if not quickly seeing a response, the early adopter can get extremely frustrated, at times, seeing this annoyance bubble up to the same degree their first comments on the product reeked of praise.

Now disgruntled, the early adopter can be seen using the product less frequently, with less enthusiasm, and will even take consecutive days off, hoping the remaining audience notices the change.

5. Migration to Something New, Call to Move Followers

Having come full circle, from the exciting discovery stage, where the adopter considered themselves a team player, helping a threadbare company grow on the back of continuous praise and promotion, to a high-profile user role, the individual can come crashing down, lashing out at the product, the company's leadership or the product direction. The adopter often finds a tangential service that now draws their eye, and is seen as a replacement for the original product.

The adopter will, at this point, start heaping lavish praise upon the new product, in a quest to assert their dominance, and prove that they can, again, make a service successful, and to prove that all their belly-aching in the preceding months was valid. The adopter will use their blog and both the new and old service to call followers to migrate as a group, both helping the new shiny toy, and in turn, damaging the old one, out of spite and frustration.

---

On the Web, this process can be extremely fast. One month's golden boy can be next month's afterthought. One week's addiction can be next week's memory. For a service to succeed, it needs to attract those early adopters who can help propel a strong population, but it needs to do all it can to keep those adopters feeling like partners and mainstream users, before letting neglect fire up their egos so much that they leave you altogether. Making a successful Web service is more than writing the best code. It's also about relationships. And while the early adopter crowd is notoriously fickle, they're not going away all that soon.

Take a tally in your head of some of the services you use each day. If you're an early adopter, what stage are you in? If you're not an early adopter, but you know someone who is, what products do they make themselves part of? And do you see these stages progress? I know I do.

Our Twins' Countdown Enters 20 Day Window

A month ago, I offered an update, saying our family was in a time of transition, as we prepared to go from a two-person household to four overnight, with the imminent arrival of our twin boy and girl. Last week, we saw another major change in our home as our 18-year-old beagle companion, Molly, passed on, much to our dismay. Today, following an array of doctor's visits, we're going full-speed ahead with more change, as the twins' debut date is no longer months away, but only weeks.

Here's an update.
(And if you're looking for tech or social media, you can skip this post)

This afternoon, Kristine went in for what's called a Fetal Non-Stress Test (NST), her third, where the babies' heart rates are measured, and she's monitored to check for contractions, be they Braxton Hicks, or the real thing. In both of the first two visits, contractions were definitely taking place, and as it's too early, even for twins, for these two to show up, she has been on medication in the last few weeks, popping pills every four hours, around the clock.

The NST test involved her laying still for about 30 minutes, hooked up to audible heart monitors, and a ticker tape showing their beats per minute, and any noted contractions. Both babies checked in around 135 BPM on average, spiking up to 150 or higher when disturbed. Despite the medicine, we still observed some contracting, but nothing major to be concerned about.

Following the NST test, we headed in for what might be our final ultrasound, in what's become an every two weeks visit at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

The RN and doctor observed both kids are in good shape, both are well-positioned, and don't have any clear abnormalities. At just over 34 weeks, the boy is tracking at 5 pounds and one ounce, at 39th percentile (when measured against a singleton birth), and the girl is tracking a bit smaller, at 4 pounds, eight ounces, at the 25th percentile. The doctors told us that her smaller size was nothing to be concerned over, but it's clear that, as with most men, the boy is already taking his unfair share.

Our last visit was with the OB/GYN, who sounded pleased with the progress, and said all is tracking extremely well. When we first learned of the twin pregnancy, we were told to be pleased with anything over 32 weeks, and that 36 or 37 weeks is considered "full term" for twins. Now halfway through the 35th week, we were told we should not plan on going beyond the 37th week, which puts us anywhere from a dozen to twenty days away from having our lives permanently changed - no doubt for the better, and for the worse different.

While we haven't publicly posted names, as we honestly don't have that part completed, the twins have already gained a nickname from Profy's Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, who has taken to calling them "schwag magnets", after my repeated calls for Web 2.0 themed logoed baby gear. Our home has been inundated with baby gear, to be sure, thanks to an array of giving friends and relatives, not to mention three separate showers, but we're not drowning in logoed apparel yet. The ones we've gained so far have been fun, and I can't wait for the kids to model them, but it's not as if they have a brand for every day of the week.

While I know the change will definitely impact my behavior here, the goal is to keep going, with the blog, and all various activities online, from sharing to participating. There have been doubters, but I'll be watching this case study, as will some of you for sure. We'll try and keep you posted.

Google Blogger FTP Publishing: Out for 12+ Hours

I hadn't planned on making my blog a sounding board for all products that have had significant downtime, but this one has certainly hit close to home.

Starting yesterday evening, around 8 p.m., I have been completely unable to add new posts to the site, making it appear that I am asleep at the wheel. The culprit? An issue with Google's Blogger service, which has blocked the ability to post via FTP.

This is not the first time Google's Blogger has had a outage of significant length here, and also, not the first time they have completely ignored a throe of user complaints and support requests on their site.

At a time when Wordpress and other platforms are gaining significant momentum, and can tout "5 minute" upgrades, the temptation to move, assuming the site structure and comments are retained, is extremely high.

I'd have thought Google's acquisition of Blogger via Pyra Labs would have provided the team with significant experience in growing a scalable, trouble-free infrastructure, but from conversations I've had with people close to the team, it seems that the most infrastructure-focused employees at Blogger had stars in their eyes around Google's other products, and Blogger has suffered from neglect.

Something is Broken indeed.

Update: Finally acknowledged on Blogger Status and FTP is starting to flow. But this is ... bad.

See Also:

Google Blogger: Something is Broken!
http://tinyurl.com/5sejhy

Thomas Hawk Cites Blogger Outage on FriendFeed
http://tinyurl.com/3p96y8

From August 9, 2007:
Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/08/google-ignores-users-during-major.html

Five Blogs For June on Your Summer Reading List

While some out there are looking to refresh their RSS feed subscriptions by starting from zero, I believe you can still get the benefit of new voices by selectively adding individual feeds, without getting overloaded.

In the vein of the last three months' offerings of new blogs you're likely not reading, (March | April | May), below are five more bloggers who I think are worth taking a chance on, whose writings have caught my eye of late, and who need a bigger stage.

1) Coding Experiments (http://codingexperiments.com/)

Focus: Technology, Development, Coding, Social Media
Recent Highlight:
How Many Features Can Be Cut from a Service without the Users Leaving?
RSS Feed: http://codingexperiments.com/feed

2) LiveCrunch (http://www.livecrunch.com/)

Focus: Social Networking, Plurk, Twitter
Recent Highlight: Things To Do Before WWDC 2008
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/livecrunch/technology

3) Broadcasting Brain (http://broadcasting-brain.com/)

Focus: Social Media, Podcasting, FriendFeed
Recent Highlight: Punching above your weight with social media
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BroadcastingBrain

4) Neoformix (http://www.neoformix.com/)

Focus: Statistics, Data, Twitter
Recent Highlight: Top Twitter Users StreamGraph
RSS Feed: http://www.neoformix.com/index.xml

5) Michael Fruchter (http://michaelfruchter.com)

Focus: RSS, FriendFeed, Social Media, Toluu
Recent Highlight:
Cleaning up my Google reader with the help of Toluu.
RSS Feed: http://michaelfruchter.com/blog/feed/

As mentioned last month, 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.

SiteMeter Stats Sputter to a Stop, With No Reason Given

It seems that outages are the new black.

After a weekend filled with stories on Amazon downtime, a brief Disqus blip, continued Twitter troubles, and many sites straining to take on increased crowds swelling to catch the latest from WWDC, I was surprised to see my blog statistics engine, SiteMeter, get in on the act. Since 11 this morning Pacific time, data has been almost completely stalled, not logging visits, and the company's blog doesn't give any reason for the slowness.

I'd like to blame Scoble, or blame Steve Jobs, but I don't think they're the cause.


SiteMeter is one of the most widely used statistics trackers in the blogosphere. And while I could put up with occasional outages from a free product (See: Mark Evans: The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining), I'm one of those who wanted to support the site's developers, paying $89 a year to gain a premium version of the service last year, which gave me expanded access to a wider array of reports.

I'd like to say I don't check with SiteMeter throughout the day out of curiosity, but I'd be lying to you for sure. I love stats. I even made a dashboard widget for Mac OS X that shows me the day's activity, letting me just drag my mouse to the bottom right corner to get caught up. Except, today, I was surprised to see I was extremely unpopular. Not only was the total visit count much lower than I had anticipated, but it said absolutely nobody had checked in in the last hour. And since this morning, I've seen no updates at all.

SiteMeter's seen issues like this in the past. They operate not from one mega-database, but instead, each of its individual servers runs on its own database. When one has a hiccup, only those users on that single server show issues. I expect that's likely what's going on here, and just maybe, with luck, the total statistics will catch up overnight.

Now, we'll see just how much my going dark for about 36 hours over the weekend will have hurt me. With the company's blog not giving any hints as to what's happening, hope is all I have. Maybe it's time to check in with my FTP server and download my logs.

louisgray.com Experiences 100% Uptime During WWDC Keynote

Today, many of the popular sites aimed to deliver minute-by-minute updates to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote, as well as some social networking sites extremely popular among the technology elite, slowed to a crawl under the rush of traffic from Mac and iPhone fans hoping to get a glimpse of Cupertino's latest products. Sites as diverse as TechCrunch to Twitter buckled under the pressure, while others, like MacRumors Live, Engadget and FriendFeed, maintained stability, gaining praise.

I am happy to report that louisgray.com enjoyed 100% uptime during this rush. Here's how we pulled off the enviable feat, all without removing services, reducing features, or requiring the offloading of some traffic to partners:

1. I Posted Absolutely Nothing At All

After much advance study, I realized that one of the major issues behind some of these sites who ran into trouble was in their offering of interesting content. Whether through rumors of new products in advance of the conference, live feeds during the conference, or reaction to the conference's announcements, each of the sites had attracted a population of users disproportionate to the norm, resulting in traffic spikes well above average, invariably causing slower access times or even downtime.

To avoid such a fate, not only did I not promise anything, but I didn't post anything, not just the morning of the keynote, but in the preceding 24 hours, essentially throwing potential visitors off the scent. I believe that this strategy, delivering an overall reduction, both day over day and week over week, in terms of total visitor traffic and page views, left the site with considerable headroom, and reduced chance of service interruptions.

2. I Made No Modifications to the Infrastructure

For several years now, louisgray.com has been hosted via FTP on Register.com hosted servers, powered by Google's Blogger engine. After considering many options available in advance of the WWDC keynote, it was determined the best course of action was again, nothing. Given the site's near 100% uptime over the last few years, despite significant year over year growth, the prevailing bias was to hold off on any significant software or hardware purchases which could cause complexity.

3. I Made No Advance Promises to Uptime

Murphy's Law dictates that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Many were surprised as to Twitter's advanced promise of significant uptime during the keynote, after such a recent spotty track record. By promising 100% uptime for louisgray.com, I knew that I would, in turn, be placing myself in the line of fire for overzealous hackers and an overcaffienated faction from the Mac army, ready to take my site down like so many others.

Conclusion

I think there's no other option except to congratulate myself for delivery of 100% uptime during a time of considerable stress for tech media giants. Where they zigged like moths to the flame, I zagged away from the noise, bravely hiding in the corner, cowering in fear. You can count on louisgray.com to deliver the 100% uptime during such mega-tech events, both now and in the future thanks to our unique strategy of reverse traffic optimization. I hope we can count on your support.

RSSMeme is the Authority on Google Reader Sharing Notes

One month after the Google Reader team added the capability to add personal notes to shared items from RSS feeds, it hasn't been entirely clear whether this feature has been a tremendous success, a dud, or somewhere in between. But Benjamin Golub, author of RSSmeme, a shared items tabulator and statistics tracker, has amassed a wealth of data on these notes, which puts RSSmeme to the forefront as far as a resource for measuring their use.

I personally may share a few dozen stories on my Google Reader shared items feed per day. But I have, so far, stayed away from adding notes to the items I share, preferring to let those who may follow my feed get the item, uncluttered by my own graffiti. In fact, I am less willing to reshare an item from another person's link blog whom I am subscribed to for that same reason, not wanting to pass their own notes to my readers.


But while I'm lagging in my early adopter responsibilities, Golub reports that nearly 30,000 shared items in Google Reader that flowed through RSSmeme were tagged with notes in the last month, just over 13% of all stories. (See: More Google Reader Notes Statistics) The average item with notes had 1.44 notes per story, meaning there is a 44% chance that once an item gets a note, it will get a second one also. These 42,000+ notes, Benjamin shows, were created by just over 4,200 users, at 10 notes apiece, or one per individual user every three days.

While I've not yet embraced the notes, I have embraced RSSmeme's showing me when people added a note to my own items. Through use of the product's FeedFlare, I can see not just how many shares an item has, but I can see if it has notes, and click through to see what somebody said about my post. Now, if I see "Shared 15 times with one note", I often click on the alert and am directed to RSSmeme's dedicated item page to see who said what. Rather than subscribe to a boatload of linkblogs, RSSmeme can act as the conduit between the blog author and the person sharing and noting.

Is RSSmeme's cool integration enough for me to start adding my notes to Google Reader shared items? Probably not. As Drew Olanoff of ReadBurner noted on our weekly podcast earlier, I am already pushing a lot of new items in and sharing every day. I don't think I need to add commentary to each one. But for those who like it, and aren't acting as a fountain of noise, RSSmeme's capabilities are very useful.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #4: How & Why to Add Google Talk Status

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, the bookmarklet. and its advanced search capabilities. Today, I thought I'd show you how to connect your Google Talk service to FriendFeed, using your status as a near-substitute for Twitter, only with centralized conversations, and fewer limitations.

Why Use Google Talk Status Updates

As far as FriendFeed is concerned, GMail/Google Talk is just one of nearly three dozen services configured to send updates to the site. While there is certainly some feeling of ownership, as Paul Buchheit (Wikipedia | Blog) is credited with founding GMail during his time at Google, updates from the service can be seen as equal to any other service, be it Del.icio.us, Disqus, Google Reader Shared items or any of the others. But updating the Google Talk status, for me, has been a great way to flexibly update my FriendFeed followers to a thought, spurring conversation, in more than 140 characters.



In fact, in the last few months, some of the best conversations I've had on FriendFeed have come through infrequent, focused, use of this feature:

Using FriendFeed's new "30 day summary" showing the most popular Google Talk items from me and my friends, I see the top five conversations as:

1. “You know, if Twitter replaced their "Something is wrong..." graphic with a page full of AdSense banners, they'd be gazillionaires!”
(69 likes and 22 comments)

2. “Are blog comments a "conversation" with the author, or just answering and responding to the author? Do you expect the author to respond to your comment?”
(24 likes and 33 comments)

3. "Dear Disqus... I trusted you. I let you host all my comments and run the show. Now that you're down, where is the transparency? What's the uptime ETA?”
(24 likes and 47 comments)

4. “Blogger is _so_ down right now, it's not even funny. Can't edit old posts. Can't edit the template. Can't see squat. Grr.”
(7 likes and 34 comments)

5. “33 weeks: Twins still baking. Crib? Check. Dresser? Check. Baby clothes? Check. Changing table? Check. Diapers? Check. Bassinet/playpen? Check. Wife? Resting."
(15 likes and 13 comments)

Synching my Google Talk status with FriendFeed is easy, and as you can see, it has been a great way to spur meaningful conversations, without having to share 3rd party content. As Twitter's downtime has made the service's use ever more questionable, I've found this to be an excellent substitute, one that's being underutilized by other FriendFeeders.

How To Sync Google Talk With Your FriendFeed

And as described in the introductory post from December of 2007, adding the functionality is very simple.

1) Go to your FriendFeed settings page.


2) Click "Edit/Add" to add GMail to your FriendFeed.


3) By adding GMail to your FriendFeed, you will receive a chat request from friendfeed@talk.friendfeed.com in your Google Chat interface.


4) Click "Yes" to accept them as a chat participant, and from then on, every Google Talk status update will be fed instantly.

To see a list of Google Talk status updates from the public feed, see here: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=googletalk. Mine can be found here.

Despite Paul and the team having done an excellent job on GMail, I never did leave my Mac.com e-mail address for the colorful pastures of Google, so you won't often see me lurking in Google Talk land, except for short bursts, to jump in, change my status, and disappear into the shadows. Now, you know why.

Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud

I am a happy Disqus customer. Implementing Disqus comments on this blog, enabling people to track their conversations around the Web, show personal custom avatars and thread conversations, has been among the better things I've done with the blog. Since installing Disqus, total comments have increased, I can get a better sense of my most frequent participants and they can connect one to one. My Disqus comments, and those of others, can even be shared on FriendFeed and other lifestreaming services.

My enthusiasm has not been unanimous across the blogosphere. Some have been concerned that Disqus' hosting the comments on their own site reduces the control a blogger has on this critical element of their site. Others say that Disqus effectively "steals" the SEO value of those comments, robbing you of the Google juice that's yours.

And to date, I've defended Disqus in every way. I'm not an SEO nut, so I can shrug my shoulders at these so-called issues. Until today.

Starting last night, I was surprised to find my e-mail empty of Disqus comments flowing to my in box. Checking the blog, I found many heartfelt comments on the passing of our dog yesterday. But Disqus wasn't sending me the updates. I logged in to the service, and ensured my preferences were set to notify me, and they were.

This morning, the situation is much worse. No comments are showing. The Disqus widget on the right side of the blog is missing. And every Disqus comment that every person posted on any Disqus-powered site is gone. This highlights the concern many have had on trusting the cloud and putting your data in the hands of others. It's always good to make a copy, especially if you don't know their infrastructure, or the company doesn't have a decades-long track record.

I trusted Disqus to host my comments, to run the show, to power my blog and to take on the challenging task of being my connection to my audience. Now, they're down hard. Their blog hasn't been updated to say what's going on, and the last update we got from Disqus' Daniel Ha is that he was playing poker 10 hours ago, via Twitter. I just hope he didn't bet the future of Disqus on a pair of 3's.

In this time where users are turning their data over to the cloud and trusting the underlying Web services, downtime can be a killer. The second half of responding to downtime? Transparency. And right now, Disqus is failing at both.

See also: FriendFeed discussion on Disqus downtime.

All Dogs Go To Heaven. For Molly, It Took 18+ Years.

At 3 o'clock this afternoon, Kristine and I entered the local veterinarian's office with our 18-plus year old beagle Molly, who has been a member of our family, and a constant companion to my wife for more than a dozen years. A little over an hour later, the two of us emerged, and Molly was gone. After three bouts with cancer, the loss of a toe, innumerable odd moles and tumors here and there, not to mention thousands upon thousands of meals, walks, and snuggling time, today was the day we had to say goodbye.

Molly lived a long, pampered life. Her debut in 1990 was so long ago when you think about it. Milli Vanilli had achieved a Grammy award for best new artist. It would be another year before Bill Clinton would announce his candidacy for the presidency. Later in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf War. As for me, I was in junior high school.

Little is known about Molly's early years. Kristine found Molly at a Beagle Rescue in San Jose in 1995, becoming her second dog, joining Digger, a thicker, older male beagle, who, according to my wife, wasn't always too fond of Molly. The two vied for attention until 2001, when Digger passed on, leaving Molly as the sole focus of Kristine's attention.

By 2002, Kristine and I were dating, and Molly took to me right away. As my wife says, the dog was more fond of me than she was at first. Molly had always liked men, and knowing herself to be more than an ordinary dog, she greatly preferred the company of humans to fellow canines.

But even back then, Molly's health was showing signs of fatigue. She was diagnosed with skin cancer and underwent radiation to stop its spread, having a nipple removed in the process, the result of too much lazy sun bathing on our deck. Yet, she recovered, and went back to being as aggressive as ever.


During the five years my wife and I have been married, Molly has been as much a part of the family as either of us. She has been there to greet us when we come home. She watches us during every meal, and was always on our bed next to us when we woke up, if we hadn't put her on the bed ourselves the night before. Being a scent hound, she was always ready to eat at a moment's notice, and every walk was full of new opportunities to sniff and find new places she hadn't smelled before.

But in 2006, she started hopping around again. Somehow, she gained an infection, due to cancer, again, this time in the nailbed which had her favoring her back right paw, at times making her fall over as she tried to avoid the pain. The vets said the right thing to do was remove the toe, and after a few days, Molly was again as good as new, running with a limp, tail wagging behind her.

As she got older and slower, we would see Molly sleeping more, running more slowly. She no longer stood up on her hind legs to ask for food, and at times wouldn't wake up even if we slammed the door shut. Later, her eyesight, hearing and sense of smell seemed to go away. While she once could find a single piece of kibble from across the room, I would have to place the kibble in front of her nose and then draw my hand back in fear of getting snapped as she couldn't exactly get her aim right.

In May of 2007, as you might remember, we suffered a scare when I came home to find Molly completely out of sorts, head bobbing to and fro, eyes, unsettled, and her not being able to find the dog door to relieve herself. It turned out she had what's known as old dog vestibular disease, which had knocked out her equilibrium, but after about 10 days of wondering if we should send her to the sanitarium, she came back, almost good as new.

In the ensuing year, we've seen odds and ends inflict this dog even as she pushed through and acted as our companion, a bridge between our first being married, and now, approaching the birth of our twins. Molly had her various ailments, including an infected eye, an infected ear, and too many moles and fatty tumors to mention. But as soon as we struck one issue down, another would come up. Most recently, Molly developed a tumor in her cheek that was again, likely cancer, and bled profusely wherever she would go. We covered our couch, our bed, and her bed with towels, only to find blood there, and on the carpet and our clothes, or wherever she had been. She was sensitive to the touch, but not in clear pain, so as her situation deteriorated, we hoped she would pull through, knowing that the time was coming for us to make a choice.

This weekend was especially hard. Molly wasn't herself, not waking up in the mornings to ask for food. We hadn't seen her tail wag in weeks, and she continued to bleed. Still coherent of us, she seemed to be as cuddly as ever, but she was communicating that it was time to be done. She was too tired, and had hung on for too long. Treatment to fix the lesion would be too invasive and too risky to try, especially on a dog the equivalent of a 100-year-old woman. While we dreamed of the five-person holiday cards this Christmas, with Molly alongside our new family of four, it wasn't going to happen, and today, we said goodbye.

Though I've been a mere add-on to the partnership she and my wife had, I loved that dog. She was the cutest, softest thing, ever. She was the best companion to sit alongside me whether I read, blogged or watched TV. She was always happy to go on a walk, even if it wasn't that far or she couldn't go that fast. She was quiet and didn't mind our silly hours, often stirring at 1 a.m. to be sure we were still up.

I wish we had the luxury of going to sleep one evening and waking up with Molly having passed quietly in the night, but with her situation getting worse by the day, it was time to take a deep breath, give her hugs and say goodbye. While we know its only weeks until we have plenty of noise here in our small condo, we've come home to quiet. Molly's left us to a place without arthritis, without lesions, where she's not at risk of cancer, and she can roam free to sniff all she wants. We'll miss her a great deal. I expect we will see some tears here now and again from those that knew her, but it was the right thing and a tough choice.

More stories about Molly, our 18-year-old beagle wonder-dog:

Impatient Pooch (January 14, 2006)
Molly the Beagle Sleeping on The Job (October 12, 2006)
Are the Beagle and the Roomba Conspiring? (November 10, 2006)
My Dog Ate the Blogosphere (February 28, 2007)
Our 17-Year-Old Beagle Is Slowing Down (May 24, 2007)
Our Dog, Molly, Seems to be Doing Much Better (June 3, 2007)
Our Beagle and Friends Get in the Holiday Spirit (December 9, 2007)

ReadBurner Podcast Talks Comments, Twitter, FeedBurner Ads

After a few months participating in the Elite Tech News podcast each Sunday evening, I was excited to be invited by Drew Olanoff and Adam Ostrow of ReadBurner to participate in their ReadBurner Weekly Live podcast this evening.

Although I already knew the two guys were sharp from my previous interactions with Drew and Adam via e-mail, Twitter and seeing their blogs, it was absolutely a pleasure to talk with them both about the big issues of the week. My only regret from the call was that Skype and TalkShoe didn't get along all that well, so when you listen, you'll hear me drop off the call four separate times. Frickin' Skype...

Topics included:

• Once again, the diversity of new places to make comments, away from the original blog.
  
• The integration of AdSense and Feedburner to post ads in RSS.
  
• How to bring RSS to the mainstream?
  
• Twitter's continued uptime issues.
  
• Continued improvements to ReadBurner, including chiclets and the addition of a "Breaking News" feature.
  
• What would Techmeme look like without content from the Techmeme leaderboard? (101+).

You can find the archive on the Official ReadBurner Blog or download the MP3 file directly here. It weighs in at 27 megabytes. Be sure you "fast forward" five minutes, as it appears the recording was turned on well too early.

Also, as for the Elite Tech News podcast, the team completed another successful call Sunday, with guest panelist Tamar Weinberg. You can find it on Mashable: Elite Tech News #10: Crickets.

FriendBinder Throws Hat In LifeStreaming Ring

Back in March, I bumped into rumors of FriendBinder, which, like other lifestreaming offerings including MyBlogLog, Plaxo Pulse, Profilactic, LetsProve and FriendFeed, claimed to offer a single destination to keep track of what your friends are doing on many different social networks. At the time, the author, Richard Cunningham, let me know the service was more than a year into development and would be coming soon. The service debuted in beta in the last week, and while it works, it reminds me more of Spokeo than the aforementioned apps, pulling contacts I have at different networks and displaying them in one unified stream.

Getting started with FriendBinder is relatively easy. The first step is to register which social networks you currently use, by entering your ID. Options supported at beta launch include YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.FM and the more generic News/Blog subscriptions, which asks for an RSS feed.

The second step is to add your friends into FriendBinder, by clicking the "Add All Friends" option next to each network. FriendBinder will then login to your external accounts, find your friends, and troll for updates.

When complete, you have what's called your "FriendStream", which, as anticipated, shows the latest updates in chronological order, the top item being the most recent.


As once was said about FriendFeed, if you don't make any changes to your preferences, FriendBinder is dominated by Twitter. The sheer volume of updates by friends in Twitter had me looking around to see just what other updates were contributing to the stream. I did find the occasional Digg or Del.icio.us update, but they were the exception rather than the rule.


Interestingly, one wrinkle offered by FriendBinder is the ability to rate the importance of one network's updates above another, from 1 star to 5, with 3 being the default. This is called the "interest level". I can also, by network, tag one friend's updates as more important than those from somebody else, by manually clicking the number of stars. (Frederic of The Last Podcast noted this in his review as well)


This lets you sort your best friends from lesser contacts by filtering your stream by 5 stars, 4 stars, and so on.

You can also parse the FriendBinder stream by service, showing only Del.icio.us updates, only Digg updates, etc. Given the overwhelming noise coming via Twitter, first clicking Networks and then picking a single service just might be the best way to cut through the noise.

FriendBinder does exactly what it promised to do - give one place to find all updates from friends. But that opens up more questions. Then what? The Web already has quite a few sites that serve to aggregate all friends' activities, and the ones that are gaining traction are those (read: FriendFeed) which enable a follow-on action. FriendBinder data streams are siloed, such that I won't ever interact with another FriendBinder user. I can't respond via Twitter from within the site. I can't add comments to Facebook or Flickr photos within the site. I can't post directly to the site, and wouldn't need to, considering nobody else will see it.

By registering with FriendBinder, and entering my network details, I know what I've done is set off yet another farm of servers to continue slaving away, and requesting my contacts' information, even if I never login again, just like when I registered for Iminta, Profilactic, Spokeo, Mergelab, Assetbar, Shyftr, Plaxo and any other site aiming to do the hard work for me when I'm away. As discussed last week, this strain on the infrastructure can eventually force sites to reduce features or even close, so I'm already feeling a bit guilty for making FriendBinder work on my behalf. Hopefully, FriendBinder can step up to demand, should it grow, and add new interactive features that would help it bridge the gap from being yet another lifestreaming site to one who can innovate and differentiate to make it a destination site.

TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.

Despite continued issues around the company's business model, TiVo fans are among the most loyal. As with Apple, I, and many others like me, believe that TiVo offers a superior user experience that has changed my life for the good. I can't imagine being forced to watch TV without a TiVo, finding myself tied down to the scheduling whims of network executives, and seeing commercial after commercial on products I'll never buy. But while some offline products have found a voice on the Web, TiVo is conspicuously absent.

With the right amount of focus, TiVo could leverage their fan base and deliver a TV-centric social network and social networking features, where you could compare season passes, engage with fellow TV watchers, display when you had added a show to your season pass, or one-time recording, and even show if you hadn't yet watched an episode, warning your friends not to spill the beans on a season finale, if you hadn't caught up.

Today, TiVo's Web site lets you manage your TiVo(s) online, letting you remotely add shows, should the need hit you. TiVo Central online also shows aggregate statistics, including Most-Recorded Shows, and WishList rankings for Directors and Actors. It's nice, but it's not nearly enough.

What I would like is:

1. To create a TiVo-centric social network that lets me synchronize my profile with my TiVo units and find similar users.

My profile would, by default, import all season passes and wishlists on my claimed TiVo units, but allow me to "hide" specific items from public view. (Not necessarily for content, mind you, but because my wife doesn't 100% share my interests)

Using technology TiVo already has, I would gain recommendations for new TV shows and actors, based on my selections. Not only would I be able to see previews of the TV shows from within the social network, but I would also be able to find a compatibility rating between my preferences and other TiVo social network users.

Given TiVo's popularity, I would be able to search the social network not just for TV show compatibility, but also by distance from me, or other characteristics, as broad or as narrow as the other profiles would be willing to share. Does this sound a little too much like a dating service? I'm sure there's a little less harm in getting together with a person of the opposite gender to catch a So You Think You Can Dance marathon than most things, so sure, have at it. But more usefully, the social network would also have:

Central bulletin boards for each network television show and the most popular cable channels, as well as, by default, the top 100 most popular actors or directors, with social network users having the option to create new topics.

During the "live" showings of each show, the bulletin boards would have a "live" chat room features as well, so if you were daring enough to watch the show live, you could communicate with other viewers in real time, from anywhere.

2. To create customizable Tivo-centric RSS feeds to populate other social media sites.

Today, I have the ability to show you when I add items to my Amazon.com Wish List. I even have the option to show you when I purchase items from Apple's iTunes Music Store (See: Webomatica). But I can't use RSS to tell you when I add a new show to my Season Pass, or find a new actor or director interesting. Today, that data is siloed.


How My Tivo RSS Feed Would Add to My Lifestream
For many people, what you watch on television is just as definitive for who you are as the Web sites you visit, the sports teams you root for, and the restaurants you like. If I like CSI and Law and Order: SVU, as do you, but I also happen to watch Bones, but you hadn't heard of it, maybe thanks to my watching it, you would check it out.

I want to add TiVo updates I make on the unit or via the Web available as an option to my FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, on Plaxo Pulse or other services. I want the ability to make the details as narrow or as broad as possible, showing either that I've added a show, or, for some, that I've watched a show.

3. To have the option to access and export all my statistics.

Some people may be up in arms about TiVo aggregating user data, but not me. I want to know if I'm watching more TV this year than I did last year. I want to know the percentage of shows I watch live or those I watch on the DVR. I want to know if I wait longer to watch some shows than others, or if I watch more TiVo recordings in aggregate on Thursday than I did on Tuesday. I want to see, in total, how much time I've saved by fast-forwarding through commercials. (I first wrote about this last February: Dear Tivo, Please Track and Report My Data)

What if you could show how many hours you spend per year watching shows that start with "Law and Order"? What if you could then use all these statistics to compare with friends within your social network (See: #1)? TiVo could, with the viewers' permission, make a "couch potato" leaderboard for those who watched the most TV, the most from a single network, the most comedies or the most episodes of a specific show. I could find out if I'm the most reliable viewer of ER in Sunnyvale, California, or within 50 miles from my house.

I should be able to export my statistics in aggregate, to my blog, or any site.

4. To have widgets to display on my blog.

Like those from Last.fm, I want to have a widget that shows the top shows I watched in the last 7 or 30 days. I want to have a widget that shows my status, including what I might be currently watching, or if my TiVo is idle, like widgets for AOL instant messenger do.

To date, TiVo has not leveraged the power of their brand or their community on the Web. While there are sites out there dedicated to TiVo, like TiVoCommunity.com, they are unofficial, and they don't use the immense amount of data that TiVo has at its remote control to connect viewers and fans. I am more than ready to connect my online activity with my TiVo activity, and it is astounding to me that TiVo hasn't made an attempt to take on the new world of the Web the way they once aggressively took on the old world of stuffy network TV executives.

With social networks being so easy to create, and with RSS and XML being extremely customizable, the talent behind the world's best DVR should be able to unpause and get this started.

ReadBurner Adds Widgets, Accelerating Shared Items Race

ReadBurner, the popular Google Reader shared items tracker, has recently undergone a series of enhancements making it a must-visit Web utility, enabling Web connoisseurs to find the most popular news items, see posts that are rising in awareness, and learn what sites or individuals are the most actively shared or most active link blog users.

Following the acquisition of ReadBurner from Alexander Marktl by Drew Olanoff, Thomas Connors and Adam Ostrow, the team has buckled down to introduce a new, flashy interface for the site, both on the Web and for iPhones (which works great on my iPod Touch), and on a near-weekly basis, has new updates worth noting.

In the last few weeks alone:
* ReadBurner added a page for "Breaking News"
* ReadBurner added a Breaking news feed on Twitter. (@ReadBurnerRSS)
* ReadBurner started a weekly podcast.
* ReadBurner added support for Netvibes.

Today, ReadBurner is adding a host of widgets, which will undoubtedly be popular in the blogging community, as you can now display how often your content has been shared, how often, as an author, your items are shared, or even how many total shares you've posted to your link blog and seen added to the service.


A ReadBurner widget for shares from louisgray.com.

A ReadBurner widget for all shares on my Google Shared items blog.

The new widgets can be found on any ReadBurner page for an author, a source, or a link blog. From any page, for example, for louisgray.com or "Louis Gray's Link Blog", you will now see a widget in the top right corner with a simple "Get This" button. Click the button, and you're taken to a dedicated page with a single line of JavaScript code, which can be embedded into your blog, just like the extremely popular FeedBurner statistics.


Grabbing the code for embedding into the blog is simple.

The widgets are an interesting salvo in the continued back and forth with Benjamin Golub's similarly popular RSSmeme, which, for now, has a leg up in showing share counts by specific items back to the blog. I for one, will be adding total ReadBurner shares to the blog and keeping the RSSmeme FeedFlare for the posts, until continued innovation from one site or another changes my mind.

Be sure you go get your own widgets at www.readburner.com.

Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?

One of the biggest worries I've seen in blogging over the first half of this year is that with the conversation shifting to social aggregation sites in addition to the originating blog, FriendFeed being the most notable, with Plaxo Pulse, Shyftr and other sites being part of the discussion, that comments on the originating site will disappear, or erode, as activity at the secondary site increases.

As one of the most visible and active participants on FriendFeed, I looked into my data over the month of May, and saw that on my 47 posts last month:

* There were 470 comments on the blog.
* There were 162 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 25 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.


May Comment Counts: Click for Much Larger View
On these 47 posts:

* On 3 occasions, no comments were on either site.
* On 1 occasion, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 6 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 37 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.

Source data:
* louisgray.com
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=blog
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=twitter

The data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,013 people following me on FriendFeed, and 1,969 RSS subscribers on louisgray.com, so in theory, with those two measurements being close, there is an equal opportunity for viewers to comment on either location, with there being some significant expected overlap.

I believe that as FriendFeed grows its user base I will see an increase in total comments on my FriendFeed activity, but it has also helped drive traffic and comments back here, in turn spurring the activity and discussion higher. So, has FriendFeed comment activity eclipsed conversations here? No. Not yet.

This serves as a good point in time capture for where we are today. I'll be watching this for sure.

Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?

The issue of comment fragmentation has been rearing up every other week or so since the initial discussion flared up in early April, but of late, I've been thinking about the purpose of comments in the first place. When you make a comment on a blog, is it to respond to the blog author and say they did a good job, especially if comments are currency, effectively making a longer version of a "thumbs up or thumbs down," are you looking to further the conversation with the blogger, or are you instead using it as a reply, without anticipating a response from the author?

This morning, I posted a question, using Google Talk, to FriendFeed, saying:

“Are blog comments a "conversation" with the author, or just answering and responding to the author? Do you expect the author to respond to your comment?"

For me personally, on those posts I do where there is a lot of conversation, I'm pulled in two opposing directions - the first, to reply to comments and engage with readers, and the second, to instead not reply and avoid dominating the comment thread. With Disqus tracking my every comment on the blog, I can make myself look like a fairly noisy egoist in no time. So, it is tempting to see the comments on posts as only replies, and fight the urge to respond. Typically, I end up replying to those comments that ask new questions, or spur the conversation forward, but of course, I read every single one.

When I post to other blogs, I don't usually expect a reply from the author. The bigger the blog, the less likely the response, and for small blogs, responses are almost a guarantee.

In response to my note on FriendFeed, the answers were strongly weighted toward conversations, rather than replies.

Brian Sullivan said, "The most successful bloggers it seems to me are conversational."

J.C. Hutchins said, "I always assume that author will read my comment, but rarely respond. Always feels validating when they do, though."

Susan Beebe said, "Blog Comments = Conversations with the world; AND yes, most importantly the author. I do not expect the author to respond to me; however, I am always really glad when they do!"

Of course, if every comment on every blog gained a reply from the original author, the most popular bloggers would spend just as much time responding to comments as they would creating new content. And if you take it one step further, if those replies also generated replies, in theory, the conversation would never end.

As Steven Hodson of WinExtra wrote in Comment Fragmentation isn’t the Blogger’s Fault earlier today, "In the end though we have absolutely no control over where the conversation; if there even is one, will take place." That works both in terms of the blog author not fully controlling where comments take place, and also from the commenter, who cannot force a conversation through leaving a reply. Now that comments are being bandied about like currency, both at the blog and through a myriad of RSS readers and social aggregators, maybe it's time to think about the whole structure of blogging and commenting in the first place.

State of the Blog: May 2008 Recap

May 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,351

Total stories published in May: 47
(About 1.5 per day, up from 1.3 in April)

Total stories in May with comments: 43
(91% of all stories, up from 34 and 89% in April)

Total comments on May posts: 456
(About 9.7 per post, 10.6 per commented post)


May statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 659 (up 88)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,031 subscribers (up 394)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 47 subscribers (up 5)
MyBlogLog Members: 246 (up 43)

Twitter Followers: 1,109 (Up 308)
FriendFeed Followers: 1,998 (Up 1,008)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
3rd overall, behind the last two months.

Top Five Most Visited May Stories (According to Analog)

1. Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers
2. The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War
3. FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function
4. Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.
5. Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

Others receiving votes: Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality, FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet, Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?, Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget, Five Social Media Bloggers to Watch This May, and Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
2. My Social Media Consumption Workflow
3. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
4. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
5. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

After a continued "up and to the right" graph over the last few months, May's overall visits fell about 24% compared with April, at levels 4% lower than even March, according to SiteMeter, while in all other aspects, the surrounding elements of the blog have grown. Part of the reason for the decline? To be direct, the answer is a lowered presence on Techmeme. In April, a number of my more controversial posts, especially around the weekend, drove a significant portion of traffic. In May, I consciously made the decision to not only not launch these controversies, but also to not participate once they had started. It had a negative impact on my simple visitor traffic, but I believe a more positive impact with the blog overall. I didn't exactly want to get the reputation of being a controversy-stirrer, when not necessary.

Now, partly due to not engaging in the more-visible Techmeme headlines, my position on the Techmeme leaderboard is in doubt. At peak in April, louisgray.com had been above position #40, drawing amusement from fellow bloggers like Robert Scoble, who needled me about the positioning on video earlier this month. But now, I'm lingering in the precipitous #98 to #100 position, seeing folks like Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot blow by me.

As mentioned last month, 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 the shared link blog!