Where You Get Your Tech News Shapes Your Tech Views

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed seems to be the source of most of my interesting conversations these days. Sometimes the benefit of FriendFeed is not even the conversation itself, but finding a link to a blog post that I normally would not read. This happened this week when Jesse Stay shared a post to a story on newspapergrl.com. I read a lot of what Jesse shares, but this site is one I had never read. I found the post interesting because it was about tech news and how slow things are:

I just got off the phone with my friend Chris and we talked about how we hardly blog anymore. Also about how nothing seems that exciting in tech lately. It's mostly about Google and the iPhone over and over. Are we just cynical or have things quieted down considerably?

I had no idea that this is what people thought. This was not written during the iPhone hype, this was written a few days ago. So, I decided to look and see what news was posted on Thursday, July 31st.

First, let us look at what TechCrunch had to offer.


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Out of 16 stories in our selection, 4 were tech financial news, 3 streaming video stories and the remainder (9) were about various sites and their features. For a technology news site, that seems very reasonable.

ReadWriteWeb tends to have more opinion and review posts than TechCrunch and their stories reflect that.


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You can not tell from all of the headlines, but of the 16 posts, 6 were opinions and reviews. 4 of the posts were about video, image or mobile devices. The remainder were about various sites and their features. Again this is a reasonable breadth of information.

The last "heavy" technical news site I want to look at is Mashable. They tend to be not as news-heavy as TechCrunch, and have more of a social application focus. So, what did they post?


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Out of Mashable's 16 posts, 5 were about video, audio or images and 10 were opinions or reviews of various sites. Lastly, there was 1 self-promotion post. Given the specific content focus, this is also reasonable. So, we have looked at the 3 popular tech sites that many early adopters read. In order to contrast what a mainstream user might read, I took a look at what stories Yahoo Tech News listed for the day.


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For Yahoo, we again sampled 16 stories. Of these stories, 5 were financially related, 2 were about cell phones, specifically controlling kids use and cancer risks. 3 of the stories were about server products (VMware, Microsoft "Midori", and SharePoint). 3 more stories were about video games, 2 of which were about WordScraper/Scrabulous. The last 3 stories were the Chinese internet censorship, a Blu-ray player for Netflix, and 6 Ways to Save on Groceries. A simple breakdown does not really show the difference, except for the groceries story. The 3 stories on server products were mostly business related. VMWare giving something away, another product trying to replace SharePoint, and what "Midori" could do for Microsoft.

Most of the stories on Yahoo contain little or no technical detail. You do not see anything about social networks or other social applications. There was no announcement for the SocialMedian release or the redesign of Delicious. So, why is this important? It is important because most people are not reading about the same things that an early adopter is reading. Obviously, there will always be some overlap, but the mainstream users care about very different things. Given the various discussions about passionate users, early adopters and mainstream users, maybe we need to take a step back and think about how we bridge that gap. If you do not agree, then find your most non-technical friend and explain why they need to use Twitter and FriendFeed. Do not be surprised if they ask whether they could find more than 6 ways to save on their groceries.

TweetStats Shows Impact of Instability on Top Tweeters' Activity

Much of the impact of Twitter's frequent downtime has been anecdotal. Amid some saying they're leaving the service for greener pastures, or developers pulling up their stakes in the Twitter community, statistics show that some of Twitter's most prominent and active users have dramatically reduced their activity on the site over the last two months.

The drop in total tweets by virtually every top user who was measured could be part technical - due to their simply being unable to login, or psychological, a result of lower activity and lower conversations which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. While none abandoned the site altogether, what could have been an "up and to the right" activity graph has largely stalled, and in many cases, reversed.


My own activity, rising month by month after I finally started using the service in January, stalled in June, and is still well below what it likely would have been had stability not been impacted.

Using TweetStats, a site which can show your total tweeting activity, who you most frequently message, and which hours and days you use the service, I polled ten top Tweeters to see how their June and July activity compared with April and May. Here's what I found:



Chris Brogan / @chrisbrogan
April and May Tweets: 2,896
June and July Tweets: 1,070
Change in Tweeting: Down 63%


Corvida Raven / @corvida
April and May Tweets: 2,669
June and July Tweets: 1,065
Change in Tweeting: Down 60%


Danny Sullivan / @dannysullivan
April and May Tweets: 1,281
June and July Tweets: 551
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


Dave Winer / @davewiner
April and May Tweets: 1,535
June and July Tweets: 527
Change in Tweeting: Down 66%


Drew Olanoff / @drewolanoff
April and May Tweets: 2,131
June and July Tweets: 909
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


GeekMommy / @geekmommy
April and May Tweets: 6,030
June and July Tweets: 1,419
Change in Tweeting: Down 76%


Jason Calacanis / @jasoncalacanis
April and May Tweets: 1,017
June and July Tweets: 562
Change in Tweeting: Down 45%


Leo Laporte / @leolaporte
April and May Tweets: 363
June and July Tweets: 237
Change in Tweeting: Down 35%


Robert Scoble / @scobleizer
April and May Tweets: 3,579
June and July Tweets: 746
Change in Tweeting: Down 79%


Michael Arrington / @techcrunch
April and May Tweets: 1,587
June and July Tweets: 1,079
Change in Tweeting: Down 32%

Across the board, Twitter's issues cut activity to the site by about half or more for some of the most visible users of the site. Others, like Kevin Rose of Digg (TweetStats) and Pete Cashmore of Mashable (TweetStats) saw only a less than 20 percent reduction in their Twittering activity between the two time periods. While there's no doubt many people, like Steve Rubel and Allen Stern, wish discussion of Twitter's problems would just go away, the impact it had on the site over the lsat few months has been very real, and we're just now able to take a step back and measure its impact.

SocialMedian Opens Up and Launches Beta

More than three months ago, this was the first blog to discuss SocialMedian, the social news service created by former Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg. In the last 100 days, the site has grown to encompass more than 4,000 users, who have themselves created more than 1,000 individual news networks, each tailored to sharing specific topics, driven by keywords, collaborative filters, and bookmarked items.

All this progress took place while the site was under invite-only alpha. As of tonight, the site opens up to all comers, in beta, which should set the service toward what will either be significant growth, or simply short-term curiosity.

SocialMedian is best described as an amalgamation of pieces from FriendFeed, Digg and Del.icio.us. Like in each service, you can bookmark external items, and share them with friends. Like with Digg, each item gets a total count for how many times it is "Clipped". You can see my own page to get an idea of what I've clipped over the last 100 days, who is following my updates, and who I'm following (like FriendFeed does).

SocialMedian's adherence to news topics so far separates it from FriendFeed. You can follow Web 2.0 or Politics or Venture Capital or one of the many news networks that have sprung up, and when you clip items, SocialMedian automatically assigns the item to one or multiple news networks.

But turning on the switch from alpha to beta wasn't just a matter of passing a date. In the last month, as SocialMedian readied for opening in beta, the service added mini-profiles, so you can learn about a person before following them, you can assign someone as a "newsmaker", the equivalent of a faux celebrity, and invite friends using your existing accounts on GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and other services. (Being frequently named as a "newsmaker" is what was behind my recent iPhone win)

When joining SocialMedian, if you choose to do so, it helps to register a nickname that matches your Twitter ID, if you have one. This triggers the service to autopopulate other sites, using the Google Social Graph API, and helps to automatically suggest to users who they should follow, based on those people they follow on Twitter and FriendFeed, and the popular friends of those users.

The site officially started development in February, and launched in alpha this April (when I first wrote about it). They've come a long way in just five months, and now that they've opened their doors, it will be interesting to see if they can get something resembling larger momentum. I've come across a lot of social news, aggregation and lifestreaming sites over the last few years, and SocialMedian is on my short list that frequently has me checking in. I'm eager to see how the site changes now that they are starting to get the attention of folks like TechCrunch and CNET.

See Previous Coverage:

• Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha
  
• SocialMedian Is Growing Rapidly In First Month's Availability
  
• It Appears I Won an iPhone 3G from Social Median!
  

Matthew's Story: From CenterNetworks' Future to Fired In A Month

Finding a writing position at a brand-name blog is hard to do, especially without having a significant resume, not to mention any references. So when Allen Stern of CenterNetworks offered my newborn son, Matthew, a position on his excellent blog, we of course struck at the deal. But in just a month, what at first seemed like a dream come true turned out to be a sordid tale of broken promises, unsafe working conditions and tears. A week after Stern publicly announced Matthew's firing, as a family, we've decided to tell our side of the story.

The fierce competition between East Coast and West Coast blogs these days is rivaling the old time feuds between East Coast and West Coast rappers. Based in New York, Stern has long been seeking the opportunity to open a Silicon Valley bureau, so this spring, when he learned we were expecting twins, he struck early, asking to sign up "whichever of the two kids was bigger". I naively accepted, not knowing that his request was due to the incredible stress that blogging and filing stories can be for a newborn.


Matthew Signed On to CenterNetworks In Days
Matthew and Sarah arrived on June 20th, he weighing a robust 5 pounds, and she, trailing at 4 pounds, 3 ounces. That made Matthew the candidate of record. The next four days were a whirlwind of deal-making, contracts being faxed from coast to coast, with little being given up on either side. Finally, the agreement completed, Matthew announced his signing, and was photographed with the world-famous CN sticker. The next day, Stern announced it to the world, and while he said "Of all the people I've hired over the years, this negotiation was the toughest," his listed demands were later proven to be a slap in the face.


Stern's Initial Set of Promises Included a New iPhone

But Stern Later Went Back On His Word

Over the next two weeks, Matthew made significant headway with CN, reaching out to Bay Area startups, reviewing alpha versions of Mac software and Web services, and even, somehow, transcribing quarterly conference calls. But while Stern publicly lauded his efforts in an update, the long hours, fatigue and strain were already becoming quite clear. As you can see from the follow-on post, Stern had openly reneged on the promised iPhone 3G, saying Matthew would get it "under no circumstances", despite it being promised in the initial agreement. Similarly, the promised crib with LCD panel and Wii Fit never materialized, which Stern attributed to "inventory shortages". Making matters worse, Stern would frequently call Matthew's home number at the start of East Coast business hours to talk strategy, despite it being only 5 a.m. Pacific.

The long hours and stress saw Matthew often falling asleep in front of his keyboard after filing a news story. He soon began to complain that he was unable to relax and casually visit his favorite sites, fearing an irate Stern would notice the gap in submissions and send yet another series of e-mails with even more assignments. And with every "like" or comment he placed on FriendFeed, Stern would just lose it - saying he was slacking off, or even worse, claiming he was manipulating activity on the site through creating hundreds of fake accounts. But it wasn't true, and try as Matthew would to explain he was just trying to catch up on the world outside of CenterNetworks, Stern wouldn't listen, ranting about how Mashable had scooped him on some new Facebook widget, or how ReadWriteWeb had gotten an exclusive look into a new AIR application that sent updates to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, on Matthew's watch. The once promising job with significant career potential had spiraled into despair of inter-office politics and accusations that left Matthew depressed and unwilling to spend time with his sister or peers.


Matthew's Long Hours At CN Took Their Toll
It all came crashing down early last week, on July 21st. The first sign was when Matthew's CenterNetworks e-mail stopped working, and the daily shipment of Barnum and Bailey animal crackers didn't arrive. Then, two of the stories Matthew had filed were printed under Stern's byline, without his being mentioned as a contributing reporter. But Stern wouldn't take phone calls and Matthew was left to fend for himself. The next day, we realized what had happened. Stern, in a public missive, fired Matthew, without contacting him or myself, and continuing his rant about how Matthew was slacking off and creating FriendFeed accounts, accusations later proven untrue by FriendFeed interns Dan Hsaio and Ross Miller, who looked into the the service's logs following the allegations.


Stern's Hallucinations Fueled the Firing
Over the last eight days, as a family we've had to do a lot of soul-searching. Matthew, for one, swears he's had it with the blogging business, though it's not clear what line of profession he intends to take next. And if that weren't enough, on Monday, the long-promised Barney poster finally arrived, a stark reminder of one of the many unfulfilled promises by Stern and his crew. What should have been a case of spotting talent early, and helping to guide a young prodigy through the ranks instead was one that smacked of servitude, double-speaking and unhappiness. While we know we have a legal case against Stern and CenterNetworks proper over the unfulfilled iPhone, lack of proper advance notice of contract termination, and unfair child labor practices, we're going to swallow our pride and move on as a family. It's been hard, but we felt the right thing was to leave with our heads held high, without dragging this out through the morass that is the American judicial system.

So Pete "Peanut" Carreira, Stern may be whispering sweet nothings to you now and calling you a serious Seesmic star, but watch your back and protect yourself before what happened to Matthew happens to you as well.

New Facebook Design Confuses Many, Obscures Features

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

(UPDATE: I wrote this post originally with the intent to show several missing features, which appeared to be missing to me over the last week or so. As you can read in the comments, I was very quickly corrected - either Facebook has recently re-added those features in place, or they are, as I mentioned in this post, just hard to find! I realized we had something bigger on our hands - If Facebook can confuse me, how many others will also be confused? I've modified this post to reflect that.)

With every new site redesign comes angry users ready to criticize the change. People just don't like change. I saw this first when I redesigned the site, SteepAndCheap.com (where I went by the nick, "SAC Hacker" in the forums). We saw every possible reaction to the new design on SteepAndCheap a few years ago, but in the end, people settled down, got used to it, and realized it was actually better for them in the long run. We're seeing this currently with Facebook's new design, even when only 5% of their users have actually switched to the new design! However, some of that outrage may be warranted, as you know (look in the comments), I originally wrote this thinking several features were missing, only to realize even I was confused at where to find them!

Facebook seems to have moved the Pages and Groups on users' profile pages. Now, to access Pages or Groups, one has to click one page deep from the main profile Page into the "Info" tab, and if you scroll down your Pages and Groups will be in the main section below. What's even more odd is that there is no way to drag those Groups or Pages around like there was before in order to put them higher up for users to see. Facebook evidently does not want users to see Pages and Groups as the first things users see when they visit your profile, as the company seems to be saving the business portions of Facebook for later. They seem have put low priority on them lately.

It's obvious that Applications have now moved to the "boxes" tab, and Facebook has made this clear in several announcements and blog posts recently. They did cut developers short however in the time frame they offered, and developers aren't happy either. For this reason you'll see most of your applications in that Boxes tab, rather than on your main Profile page, and applications like the FriendFeed app on Facebook no longer display detailed information in your news feed, but rather, "so and so has new activity in FriendFeed".

Lastly, up until just recently it appears (because there is an entire thread of people here that seemed to be missing it), a much needed and appreciated feature, the "ignore all" feature for applications was gone entirely. Facebook seems to be trying to remove spammy activity by applications, but somehow this was overlooked when they launched the new design it appears. It's a welcome sight to see that "ignore all" button back in your requests again.

As you can tell from the original revision of this post that I mentioned above, even I was confused by the new design (and I wrote two books about Facebook)! While I like how clean the new design is, getting to know where features are and aren't will take some time. This is going to confuse many of you, and there will be some backlash. My hope is, that with time, all this will work out for a better, cleaner, less spammy Facebook that we can all appreciate.

There are probably many more things that have moved or changed - please share them and your frustrations in the comments!

Facebook Still Banning Aliases to Avoid Becoming Fakebook

That Facebook has an itchy trigger finger when banning users or applications for assumed wrongs is not new or a mystery. People have been kicked off the site for adding friends too quickly, for using fake names, or trying to export data from the walled garden social network. And Facebook's adherence to this policy, especially when it comes to pseudonyms, puts them at odds with just about every other popular Web service out there. Just last night, a former colleague of mine, and now a Web friend, found himself on the outside looking in.

Vicky Chaudry (or Chau), whom I worked with at my current company from 2002 to 2005, is now the founder and CEO of StartupNewz, a Digg-like service focused on startup and technology news. To better highlight his immersion into Web 2.0 and social networking, Vicky took to calling himself Vic Podcaster, a name which has served him well, on LinkedIn, where he has more than 500 connections, on Twitter, where he is followed by more than 1,150, and on FriendFeed, where he follows almost 1,300. His pseudonym also didn't seem to stop his ability to get into the recent TechCrunch August Capital party (see pictures on Flickr) or the F8 afterparty for Facebook developers last week.


But eight months after opening a Facebook account under his name, Vic Podcaster, Vicky tried to log in to the service last night, to find his account had been disabled, "because the name it was registered under was a fake". Amusingly, this screen is surrounded by a note that "Everyone can join", and doesn't offer any kind of helpful link to challenge the ruling.


In the FriendFeed discussion that ensued after Vicky told everyone he had been banned, the once-banned Robert Scoble said, "Facebook sucks for just this reason.", while Jesse Stay suggested "One thing Facebook does still need to do, but I argue this is a minor thing, is make sure a human is reviewing disabled accounts before they get disabled."

Vicky's clearly not the only person using an alias on Facebook today. My high school acquaintance Bill Parnell is going by the name of Biznill Parnorell. There's even a user who friended me by the name of Daily Contempt. Surely that's not their given name?

I've been giving a lot of thought of late to the migration away from nicknames and more toward real names, especially as people are taking ownership of their blog posts, microupdates and comments across the Web. In most cases, users of apps like Facebook and FriendFeed are using their own given names, first and last, unless the user name is already taken. Facebook clearly didn't like Vic's changing his name to "Vic Podcaster", although LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed and GMail had no problems with it. But what constitutes fake? If Robert Scoble changed his login to Robert Scobleizer, would he be banned again? And while Michael Arrington uses his real name on Facebook, its the TechCrunch brand he's aligned with on Twitter. What if he went by Michael TechCrunch on Facebook? Grounds for banning?


Vic Podcaster Still Lives On LinkedIn
Aliases aren't the only reason you can get banned from Facebook, of course. Scoble was banned for using an early version of Plaxo software, and many have been banned for spam-like behavior. Alex Hammer, who I've written about before, e-mailed me three weeks ago, saying, "I'm working to get reinstated back into Facebook because I added too many friends too quickly." In their defense, he adds, he was warned.

So who's right here? Is Facebook wrong to stop people from using aliases, or are the other sites that have more permissive rules the ones who are making the mistake? Should Facebook have waited eight full months before banning Vicky? Couldn't they tell by his activity on the site that he's a real person with real connections? It seems to me at the very least, a human should have reached out to him and offered a way to change his last name to get it within guidelines.

The Gray Family Upgrades from Flickr to SmugMug

While SmugMug might not have the brand recognition of a Flickr, Shutterfly or Kodak's EasyShare Gallery, the photo and video sharing site has obtained a dedicated following of photographers who are serious about their work. The site has long received praise for its high-quality galleries, unlimited storage, security, and customization, and the company's small team of 30 employees has managed to be profitable since 2005, when many Web companies have been in the red, largely due to their not offering any free versions of their product. When Matthew and Sarah arrived on the scene, at first I was happy to upload the family photos to our free Flickr account, but the site's limitations, especially when it came to the total number of photos, and quality of those photos, made me think seriously about making the move to SmugMug.

Today, I'm happy to say we made the leap. The first batch of almost 150 photos, starting with my wife's very pregnant belly and taking us to the present day, including the first five weeks of Matthew and Sarah, can now be found at http://louisgray.smugmug.com/, where I plan to be maintaining our online photo presence from here on out.


Editing Images In SmugMug Is a Snap
While I still haven't made the leap to buying a professional camera (on the to-do list), I delved into my iPhoto, and exported the original photos taken since late June. All told, the 145 images totaled about 125 megabytes of space, no small chunk. But SmugMug's easy to use interface let me select the folder, and hit upload, and not too long after, I was seeing highest quality photography on the site.

With the photos on the site, I have a tremendous amount of flexibility for manipulating the images - far more than I could with the free version of Flickr. With Flickr, I could edit the title, the tags and the description of photos, but SmugMug lets me rotate the images, add captions, add a watermark, if I wanted, crop photos, and make color effects - for example, displaying the images in black and white, sepia tone or the negative, which can be flat out spooky. I found myself making a lot of bulk changes, rotating kids from laying on their side to facing straight up, and readying the pictures for display.



A Clip From a SmugMug Slideshow
Given I'm not the primary audience for these photographs, how friends and family can see our kids and their updates was key to the switch. First, you can do full-screen slideshows in SmugMug at very high quality, letting you pan right to left through the collection, starting with any photo, second, the thumbnails sent to FriendFeed are significantly better than those from Flickr, and thirdly, any of my relatives can select any number of photos to buy or print out in their preferred size. Now, instead of my relatives begging for prints, they can go off and make their own, assuming I have a good enough shot.


See How SmugMug Appears on FriendFeed
I've been watching SmugMug from the sidelines for the last few years. I've seen the company's great engagement with the blogging community. Don MacAskill has been a strong public face for the company, keeping friends appraised to service enhancements, community activities and any issues that may come up. The company has been very vocal about their support for "the cloud", and has even debuted a new application for the iPhone, called SmugShot. Once I finally get my iPhone, you know I'll be downloading it.

I don't plan to turn this site into a full-time mommyblog just yet, but if you want to see how Matthew and Sarah are progressing, be sure you check out the SmugMug site. There are even RSS feeds for recent photos and recent galleries. Pretty sharp.

Me-Too Software and Web Apps Often Find Their Own Niche

As the price to develop Web applications and communities has decreased, and investment in people is less-demanding, it's no surprise that we've seen a boom in sites with significant similarities - be they social networking, lifestreaming, status updaters, online file storage or virtual worlds. While the rule holds true in software as it does in Silicon Valley, that the vast majority of products may meet a less than optimal fate, the potential payout continues to draw development, with new brand names hitting our RSS feeds on a daily basis.

The seeming onslaught of new services had the omnipresent Chris Brogan asking frustratedly yesterday, "Who's writing all these me too software apps? Do they feel accomplished?" Brogan later gave the services Kwippy and Yokway as examples of two services that had recently come across his view, adding, "(I) just dont' see why we need yet another of something we have in spades. Where's the innovation?"

Sometimes, in this age of instant analysis, determining the differentiation and purpose of a new site can be hard, especially as the bloggers and technology reporters try and grasp the new site and place it in the context of existing applications that are more well-known. (See: Inquisitr: Yokway: Sort of FriendFeed Meets Del.icio.us for one example)

Whether it's in the name of differentiation or competition, it's rare that a developer or startup team will be aiming to make a carbon copy of an existing site. RSSmeme debuted, after ReadBurner, to show the most shared items in Google Reader, and progressed differently, offering a custom FeedFlare and featuring deeper index with more linkblogs than ReadBurner, while ReadBurner partnered with multiple RSS engines, including NewsGator and Netvibes. Facebook was like MySpace and Friendster before it, but initially just for the college set and later high school, before opening up, and later adding a development platform.

There is a long history of services and software that have striking similarities to one another. That a product exists doesn't mean that any potential competing product should walk away and cede the market, delivering a monopoly. As Disqus' CEO Daniel Ha told me back in June, the existence of competitors like SezWho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit help let him know he's in a worthwhile market to pursue, even if it's a rare blogger who has plans to implement multiple commenting engines. The existence of Digg didn't stop Mixx from debuting, and the existence of HotBot, Lycos and Excite didn't look like too much of a hurdle for Google to get going.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek, in the FriendFeed comment thread spawned by Brogan's question, said, "Until someone dominates the space you will see a lot of similar applications," while Clint Ecker wrote, "The market will bear out the niche products and the unsatisfactory ones will fade away and disappear until the community has selected the 'best' service."

But even the selection of a "best service" doesn't mean there won't be more developers trying to crack the market. Plurk and Identi.ca are two recent approaches to microblogging, taking on Twitter. And Cuil's entry into the search market came at a time when Google's enjoyed its largest market share ever. The likelihood of these challenger sites to replace the market behemoths is very small, both short term and longer term, but just about every site and service can develop a dedicated community who swears by it - arguably making the developers' efforts worthwhile. You recently saw this happen when the niche community sites of Ballhype and Showhype, arguably Digg clones, were acquired for $3 million.

From the outside looking in, developers don't see themselves as copycats. Instead, they likely see opportunity, finding weaknesses in a competitor's offering, or finding a new way to seemingly offer the best of both worlds. And just because they aren't enjoying a majority market share in a given metric by a certain time period doesn't mean their efforts were in vain. There's no hard and fast law saying you need to sign up for every lifestreaming service, every social network, every microblogging client and every RSS reader, but as more options and alternatives are out there, there will be a small group of people who prefers the new entrant, whether it be for its GUI, its compatibility with plug-ins, widgets or extensions, or implied productivity.

As an early adopter, I'll usually be checking out most of these services, and I welcome more. It's not about finding how much they're all the same, but determining the differences, and seeing what I can do that's new. I might, sometimes, never use a service again, if I don't find it to do what I had hoped. But often, when I check back in a few months later, I'll find a small community that's calling it home, or see the development didn't stop at day one, making it a richer experience. So, development community, keep it coming. Let's see those new apps, the new innovation, and the new services. It will never be enough.

Can Cuil, Built for the Long-Term, Win the "Instant Analysis" Battle?

Tonight's biggest technology story is the debut of new alternative search engine, Cuil (pronounced "cool"). In the shadow of the omnipresent Google, the search engine opened up to initial queries today, and so far, visitors don't seem that impressed. The site is already seeing some downtime, which they claim to be the result of "overwhelming interest", but even prior to the outage, its various limitations got the lion's share of attention, masking an otherwise interesting service. And this got me thinking, again, about how, often, blogs and users are keen to make a snap decision as to a product's worth, in the first minutes or hours of its debut. It can lead to a lot of people crying for "epic fail", and not waiting a few weeks, months, or even years, to see it develop, getting closer to its full potential.

More than two years ago, I wrote a post called, "Launching Products in the Age of Instant Analysis", which saw how initial response to Google Finance, Apple's Mac Mini and Microsoft's Origami UMPC platform was overwhelmingly negative, even before most people had ever had the opportunity to buy the latter two in stores. At the time, I noted how some bloggers had achieved their conclusion after only fifteen minutes of using a site, and even tonight, we're seeing the same conclusions reached, not just after fifteen minutes of using a product, but sometimes, even faster, after one failed vanity search or a set of keywords.

Out of curiosity, I of course tried Cuil myself, and came away less than impressed, but I don't have the feeling that this will be the last we'll hear from the Cuil team. While I'm not going completely off the wagon and claiming them to be the heir to the Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft Live Search throne, I'd expect they have plans to expand and tweak their database, invest in their infrastructure, and make their searches more relevant.

A search engine launch is not a one-night affair, and while tonight's debut has been sloppy at best, they might find a niche and gain traction. Don Dodge once famously reported that 1% of the search engine market is worth $1 billion, so finding a place to play and get share is serious business, even if it is against extremely formidable competition. Cuil looks like they lost the first night's chance at getting the "instant analysis" crowd to love their effort, but they've got attention, and maybe, with continued effort, we'll be seeing if the company, built for the long term, can overcome a few hours or days of distress.

Roll Your Own Blog Leaderboard With Google Reader Trends

Tech bloggers and readers are quite familiar with Techmeme and the site's accompanying leaderboard, which tracks the top 100 sources to the popular news-tracking site over the previous thirty days. Since the leaderboard was initiated, Michael Arrington's TechCrunch has held the top position, accounting for between 5 and 8 percent of all stories. As of Friday night, TechCrunch represented 7.03% of Techmeme's stories in the last 30 days. As a subscriber to the Techmeme Firehose feed in my Google Reader, I see 3,162 items reached Techmeme in the last 30 days, meaning TechCrunch's share was somewhere north of 200 items. But Google Reader does more than show me the items I've received, it also shows me the items I've shared, and the most often shared sources, in effect, giving me the option to record and display my own leaderboard of the top 40 sources that I've shared on my Google Reader shared items blog.

Anybody who uses Google Reader as their RSS feed reader of choice, and who shares items to a link blog can make their own personal leaderboard. While I won't be updating mine multiple times daily, as Gabe Rivera does on Techmeme, and I can only show 40 items, instead of 100, I will, starting tonight, be posting my own LG Leaderboard, for the previous 30 days, and will update this list every month, on the 26th of the month.


First, the dataset:

According to Google Reader, from my 336 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 16,386 items and shared 919 items.

Second: The leaders for July of 2008:

Like Techmeme, my #1 shared blog was TechCrunch, thanks to their frequent posting and high number of stories I believe those who follow my link blog would be interested in. Similarly, given my own bias, this blog is in the #2 position. I'd remove it from the leaderboard, but don't want to skew the statistics. Duncan Riley's The Inquisitr has made a strong showing at the #3 position, followed byRead/Write Web at #4 and Silicon Alley Insider at #5. All percentages shown are the result of taking the number of shares in the month per source, divided by the total number of shares. (In this case N/919)

Position	Blog	% of Shares
1.	TechCrunch	6.52%
2.	louisgray.com	4.46%
3.	The Inquisitr	4.14%
4.	Read/Write Web	3.59%
5.	Silicon Alley Insider	3.48%
6.	Profy.com	3.26%
7.	Mashable!	2.72%
8.	Scripting News	2.50%
9.	WinExtra	2.18%
10.	CenterNetworks	1.52%
11.	Why Does Everything Suck?	1.41%
12.	GigaOM	1.41%
13.	I'm Not Actually a Geek	1.41%
14.	Robert Scoble's Shared Link Blog	1.31%
15.	Scobleizer	1.31%
16.	Webware.com	1.20%
17.	Online Media Cultist	1.20%
18.	Stay N' Alive	1.20%
19.	CodingExperiments.com	1.09%
20.	MichaelFruchter.com	1.09%
21.	Sarah In Tampa	1.09%
22.	TechCrunchIT	1.09%
23.	PaidContent	1.09%
24.	Broadcasting Brain	0.98%
25.	Deep Jive Interests	0.98%
26.	Furrier.org	0.98%
27.	David Risley	0.98%
28.	/Message	0.87%
29.	Mathew Ingram	0.87%
30.	SheGeeks	0.87%
31.	Scribkin	0.87%
32.	BoomTown	0.87%
33.	Colin Walker	0.87%
34.	VentureFiles	0.87%
35.	A VC	0.76%
36.	Engadget	0.76%
37.	The Unofficial Apple Weblog	0.76%
38.	SEO and Tech Daily	0.76%
39.	Jeremy Toeman's LIVEdigitally	0.76%
40.	Regular Geek	0.65%

All told, these top 40 sources accounted for 595 of the 919 shares over the last 30 days, or 64.7% of the total, meaning the other 296 sources accounted for 324 total shares, or 35.3% of the total. Everybody's leaderboard will be vastly different, for sure. Contrasted with the Techmeme leaderboard, the flagship for measurements like this, I lack a number of more mainstream feeds, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Forbes, but in its place, you see a lot more individual bloggers who bring me the news I find interesting. I'll be posting these regularly, and if you would do the same, send me a link in the comments to your list. Could be a great way to find new blogs and news sources. Also, if you think you belong here, add your blog in the comments, and there's a chance you'll be on the leaderboard next month!

You can find my Google Reader shared items link blog here, or see them included in my FriendFeed.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #8: How To Post To FriendFeed Via E-mail

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, how to integrate with Google Talk, how you can incorporate comments, determine an item's original source and how to learn more about your fellow users.

Since FriendFeed debuted their API this spring, the number of third party applications authored for the fast-growing aggregation service has been rapidly increasing. There have been different Web-based services to give a new look to FriendFeed, from FriendFeedMachine, MioNews and NoiseRiver, a mobile version from FFToGo, and other add-ons, including GreaseMonkey scripts and blog comments integrators. But sometimes, it'd just be a lot easier to start out with the original social network - e-mail.

Gary Burd, a long-time Microsoft employee, and now a member of FriendFeed's small staff, introduced a service that lets you post directly to FriendFeed, using your e-mail, including the attachment of photos or graphics, called Mail2FF, back in late May. He debuted the service prior to joining the Mountain View-based company, and its arrival was well accepted by co-founder Paul Buchheit, who wrote, "Cool! Did you create this Gary? This has been on my "things I personally want" list for a long time."

Using Mail2FF is quite simple, as you can see from a Mail2FF tutorial produced by Ross Miller, an intern at the company for a summer.

Step 1: Write Your Message

Open your e-mail application and compose your message, just like you were sending a regular e-mail. The subject line of your e-mail will be the subject line, and the body of the message will be posted as a comment on your own item.


Step 2: Add Pictures

Attach any photos or graphics you would like to accompany the item. They will be placed as part of the item in their full resolution, hosted on Amazon Web services. Up to two images will be displayed on the item, with a blue arrow being displayed if more than two images are attached.


Step 3: Know Where To Send It

Mail2FF uses your own API remote key, which you can find here. To send the message to FriendFeed, you would send it to:

username+remotekey@mail2ff.com

For me, assuming my remote key is purple456monkey, I would send it to:

louisgray+purple456monkey@mail2ff.com

The end result would be displayed like this:


Step 4: Sending the Message to a Room

If you want to get creative, you can even send your message, and images, to a FriendFeed room, rather than the main feed. This is done by adding the room name ahead of your username and remote key.

For example, if the room name is "babyfeed", one I've been using lately, I would send it to:

babyfeed+louisgray+purple456monkey@mail2ff.com


The result would be just as it is in your own feed, complete with subject line, body content as the first comment and attached images, but sent to the room itself. (See above or the actual posting)

Mail2FF was so clearly a success, it was integrated with FriendFeed's native version for the iPhone released at the end of June. (See: VentureBeat) And when I was stuck at the hospital, finding many of the Web sites I used completely blocked, like Flickr and FTP, Mail2FF was the only way I could send the very first pictures of Matthew and Sarah the world had ever seen. (See: Matthew and Sarah: First Photos (More Coming))

When entries are posted to FriendFeed via Mail2FF, you will see a tag "via Mail2FF", and the items are shown as "internal" FriendFeed postings. You can see some that I've done here, here and here. To get started, head to www.mail2ff.com and give your e-mail a shot.

Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?

Guest Post By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Twitter has had a bad few days. After a few weeks of wonderful stability, we started to see some Fail Whales. Then people started losing followers and subscriptions. Because of this, even more people are moving to alternative micro-blogging services like Identi.ca. Of course there have been several requests for a Twitter friend importer. I think people are getting caught up in the problem and not thinking about the best solution. Previously, I mentioned that Twitter was at the crossroads. In that post I started thinking about a possible solution:

It is now late May and they are just admitting that they have infrastructure problems. Obviously, there are the redundancy and replication issues that can be solved with known techniques. The realtime API needs to be using a replicated database and not affect the main database. This is the part that is concerning me the most as it should have been obvious some time ago.

Another post appeared from Dave Winer where he mentioned that we are inching toward federation.

Right now, today I'm using an approximation to the ideal system. I try to enter my original post on FriendFeed, then I have an agent script running on one of my machines that routes it to Twitter and Identi.ca, with a pointer to the discussion thread on FriendFeed, shortened by bit.ly.

Obviously, this is not a good solution to the Twitter problem either. There are also multi-posting services like Ping.fm and Posty which allow a user to update each of their micro-blogging services with the same message. So, with one click you can update Twitter, Identi.ca, Pownce, Jaiku and Plurk. While that sounds really cool, they only provide one-way updates. Tools like Twhirl are starting to allow posting and retrieving of tweets and dents in one application. This gets a little better, but you still have multiple accounts to deal with.

Federated Microblogging

Federation is the real answer. What does federation do and why is it different from Twitter creating a distributed architecture? A distributed architecture means you have various pieces of the application sitting on different servers. Typically, several parts are replicated or redundant and there are various load balancing devices thrown in to complete the architecture. I am not going to go into tons of detail as books have been written about distributed architectures.

Federation is different from distributed in one simple sense. Federation requires a full copy of the entire system. Federation is the cooperation between various systems to act as one. Wikipedia has a good description of a federated database system.

A federated database system is a type of meta-database management system (DBMS) which transparently integrates multiple autonomous database systems into a single federated database. The constituent databases are interconnected via a computer network, and may be geographically decentralized. Since the constituent database systems remain autonomous, a federated database system is a contrastable alternative to the (sometimes daunting) task of merging together several disparate databases.

If you replace all of the database and database system terminology with microblogging and microblogging system you will understand a federated system. So, how does this help Twitter? It does not, at least not directly. By having a federated system, people can move to Identi.ca or the next clone that appears and not lose their followers. If you think about the concepts of email, you will understand how the federated system would work. My account in the federated system would be robdiana@identi.ca. A Twitter user could reply from within Twitter directly to me (robdiana@identi.ca) and I would receive it in whatever client application I had. I could also follow Twitter users, Pownce users or any other microblogging user. By enabling people to communicate across platforms would mean that the server load would be spread across various services, thus decreasing the amount of traffic on Twitter directly.

The one part of the federation that is missing is the routing between servers. This can be accomplished by following the DNS model. A local DNS server has a reference to its parent or master server. This allows new servers to be built and their location and IP address propagated to other servers. This is a very effective solution and it has worked for several years.

Because Twitter and Identi.ca follow the same API, they could act as the root servers in the system. The other option to the Twitter API is the XMPP protocol, which Twitter is using for their realtime API. The protocol choice is important because a federated system requires that all of the systems speak the same language. A federated system would also require a different client application than we have now. As I mentioned earlier, Twhirl fully supports Identi.ca and Twitter. However you are dealing with two different accounts. How cool would it be if you had one microblogging client to chat with people on any service?

The Hubris of the Twitterati and Twitterati Wannabes

Guest Post By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (E-mail / Twitter)

Twitter fails yet again. After a huge site outage, U.S. users woke up this morning to discover what other users already knew: the database was hosed, and subscriptions were a wreck. I appear to be one of the only people with a single concern, however: what happened to the people I was following? I don't remember all of them. I certainly didn't keep a list of the people I was subscribed to. Nor would I want to page through all of them to figure out who is missing if I did.

However, the majority of users are more upset with their follower count. Yes, that's right. People are up in arms over who was following THEM. In this increasingly ridiculous echo chamber, the loss of followers means that a number is lower; a potential audience gone missing.

The tech blogosphere isn't Hollywood, and even Hollywood is pathetic in its idolization of people who work at a particular craft. I don't mind missing followers; if someone finds my 140-characters-max blathering entertaining, then that person will find me again. I don't use Twitter for an audience. To whine about having a few people taken away that follow you is so depressing I can't even manage to put it into words properly.

The functionality of Twitter is useful to me only in how I use it to learn. The majority of my Tweets are conversation, often replies to questions others pose. But I'm depressed at the hubris of what seems to be a number of users, who find the loss of followers damaging to their egos. Social media is supposed to be about conversation. Not pumping up self-importance. I don't know how many followers I had. But I definitely know how many people I'm following are missing.

BallHype Crew Takes a Vote, and Launches BeltwayBlips

Last week, the increasingly popular Ballhype and Showhype sites were acquired by Future US for a cool $3 million, as the Digg-like sites, focused on sports and entertainment respectively, were seen growing as destination sites for fans of all flavors. Less than 10 days after that news, the Future US team is already seeing dividends from the acquisition, as the husband and wife team, Jason and Erin Gurney, turn their attention toward Washington and politics with the launch of BeltwayBlips.

In the tradition of Ballhype and Showhype, BeltwayBlips aims to bring the hottest political news to the front page by both auto-discovering hot blog conversations through the number of external links, but also adding on users' up or down votes, like Digg. Those hot items receiving many votes in a short amount of time rise to the top, and after some duration, will drop lower in rank.

Earlier this year, when meeting with the Gurneys at their home, they said they didn't want to get into more serious issues, like politics or technology, and the pair felt two sites was just about all they can handle. But following the acquisition, Future US has allowed the Gurneys to add to the team of developers, and given them the support to expand their site portfolio.

The addition of politics to the arsenal should make for some very "lively" discussion for sure, given the clear partisanship shown by both the right and the left in today's charged climate. I have concerns that McCain fans will always vote down positive Obama stories, and vice versa, or a few unsavory characters could make the environment unfriendly. While in sports, one can divide their attention between about 30 professional teams in each league, in Washington, you're usually either "with us" or "against us", as has been frequently said.


Headlines reaching the top of BeltwayBlips in the last few days have included the news of Robert Novak being involved in a hit and run accident, rumors of John Edwards fathering a child out of wedlock, and the two presidential candidates taking opposing positions on Iraq. Forget C-SPAN, this political hotbed isn't going to be a snoozefest by any means.

As with Ballhype and Showhype, the site offers the usual array of features, including comment threads, leaderboards for users and blog sources, embedded video links, and the ability to create groups. If you already have an account with one of the *Hype sites, you can log into BeltwayBlips today.

Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

Just when you thought it was safe to Tweet again, Twitter ran into yet another database problem, which not only resulted in sporadic "Fail Whale" sightings, but dramatically impacted the roster of those following one's updates, as well as those each of us were subscribed to. The latest snafu comes at a time when the growing number of microblogging addicts are seeking alternatives, moving to FriendFeed, Plurk, and increasingly, Identi.ca.

According to a post on the Twitter Status blog, the issue first showed a reduced number of followers on the service, and later, in order to solve the issue, Twitter went into a maintenance mode, warning of lower counts across the board. Amusingly, they claimed that some of the lower counts could be due to the removal of spammers, but in my experience, it's been more than 9 hours since the problem was first identified, and I've seen the number of people I'm following drastically cut, from more than 1,500, down to "only" 672, less than half.


On Monday, when I said "The Talk About Rules for Social Following Is Getting Out of Hand", I had taken a screenshot of my current Twitter ratio, at 1,534 to 1,441, after having worked for a good part of the previous week with Twitter Karma to get my ratio synchronized. Just a few days later, that data is carved to 672 and 1,236, prompting some to try and refollow me, and even more to flock to identi.ca.

Twitter's gotten a lot of abuse on this blog in the past few weeks, as we've gone over issues with developers, uptime and changes to the API, but every time I think they've captured the market on a single route to failure, they find another way.

The team's employees are talking a good game about getting this resolved, but seriously, Twitter, why should we believe you now?

See also:

Why Does Everything Suck: The Nightmare Twitter Scenario May Be Upon Us
Profy: So You Thought Nothing Could Be Worse Than Fail Whale? Now Get Your Followers Back

Dell's TinyURL Finds a Porn Star Guru: Fun With Redirects

Affiliates are the first beneficiaries of custom TinyURLs. Earlier this month, the link shortening service, TinyURL.com, added the capability to customize a URL, effectively letting you replace the usual nonsensical combination of letters and numbers with real words - a long overdue feature which had already been adopted by other services, including bit.ly. At the time, in my coverage of the news, I said it would help people trust URLs, rather than finding themselves sent to a malware site. But, as he commonly does, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks accurately picked apart my theory, correctly saying that despite the customization options, readers could still point any old URL to any old site. (See: TinyURL Adds Custom URLs; Is This Exciting or What?)

Despite my best intentions, Allen was right and I was wrong. So, eager to lead with my chin again, I thought I'd learn from Allen's guidance and see how well brands did in securing their own names, or if smart squatters grabbed hot brand names to hijack traffic. Here are a few I checked out.

TinyURL	Actual URL
http://www.tinyurl.com/amazon	http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=917
http://www.tinyurl.com/bestbuy	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=bestbuy (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/centernetworks	http://www.centernetworks.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/dell	http://www.pornstarguru.com/page.php? x=183137&m=1
http://www.tinyurl.com/digg	http://www.digg.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/facebook	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=facebook (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/friendfeed	http://friendfeed.com/jigarme
http://www.tinyurl.com/fujitsu	http://www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/Consumer.php (Custom referral by Affiliate)
http://www.tinyurl.com/google	http://www.google.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/hitachi	http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/ menuitem.8027a91c954924ae4bda9f30eac4f0a0/
http://www.tinyurl.com/ibm	http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2002 /jun/28varma.htm
http://www.tinyurl.com/iphone	http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/03/international-iphone-pricing-guide/
http://www.tinyurl.com/linkedin	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=linkedin (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/mashable	http://www.sedoparking.com/ wwwtext-link-ads.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/microsoft	http://www.microsoft.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/myspace	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=myspace (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/orkut	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=orkut (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/reddit	http://www.reddit.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/rediff	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=rediff (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/socialthing	http://www.friendfeed.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/stumbleupon	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=stumbleupon (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/techcrunch	http://www.techmeme.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/techmeme	http://www.bitgain.com/techmeme
http://www.tinyurl.com/valleywag	http://valleywag.com/5024969/viacom-unleashes-pr -thunder-on-san-franciscos-press-corps
http://www.tinyurl.com/yahoo	http://www.creators.com/comics_show.cfm?comicname=oc
http://www.tinyurl.com/youtube	http://www.youtube.com

As you can see, entrepreneurial Amazon.com affiliates grabbed the aliases for a number of tech sites, from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace to Best Buy. Clicking these undoubtedly gives the squatter a kick-back if you purchase any of the books from Amazon.com, so watch your cookies. Some other folks clearly thought it was funny to point the TechCrunch alias to Techmeme, and another from SocialThing to FriendFeed. Meanwhile, Jigar Mehta is the "lucky" recipient of the FriendFeed TinyURL himself.

Brands that did manage to get their own TinyURLs in time included Digg, Google and Microsoft, while interestingly, TinyURL didn't have any information on Apple, Blackberry or others, neither offering the ability to create a new URL with those aliases, or to preview them, so they appear to have been whacked from the database. I had naively hoped that by opening up custom TinyURLs, people could increase their trust of these Web shortcuts, and I've been using them myself to announce new posts, but for the typical cyber scammers out there, it just opened up a new field of opportunity for redirection and annoyance. It's no wonder that Edelman's Steve Rubel sent an internal note to the company telling the PR agency to warn clients and get them to snap up their own TinyURLs before it was too late.

Nine Ways to Enlarge the Social Media Audience

Guest post by Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Let's take a moment to pause from our normal pontifications about A-Lists, aggregators, egoism, elitism, monetization, commercialization, capitalization, and such and talk about something bigger. This is something that would ultimately benefit the overall audience that we all share today and something that would act like the fabled tide that lifts all boats.

Let's make the social media audience bigger. Let's get more readers, more engaged commentators, and more bloggers. Let's permeate into even more sectors of interest. Let's aim for every adult in the world to be an active reader of blogs.


You might think that I'm joking, but I'm not. I think it's in every blogger's interest to make the blogosphere, and its reading audience, bigger.

Why do we need to expand?

• Attrition - eventually we'll move on for one reason or another (yes, I'm thinking very long term here) and the blogosphere's audience will eventually be reduced to a smaller, weaker size
• Increase adoption and acceptance of blogging as a serious, valid form of content creation to a significant population that doesn't view it as being significant
• New blood and new ideas can help refresh us all and combat the echo chamber effect IF we are also prepared to accept the need to retread some old ground to educate the newcomers
• To introduce people to new creative outlets to give them the opportunities for personal development and self-actualization

If we believe that it's worthwhile to expand the size of the blogosphere, and social media in general, how can we make it happen? Here are some suggestions to welcome more people into the community (or communities):

1. Continue To Make Our Technology Easier and Simpler to Use

Blogging has come a long way, particularly with content management platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, and Moveable Type, but there's still a learning curve, particularly if you want to do more than type and format and include links. New developments continue (Profy looks like a step in the right direction) and will need to continue. If we compare the development of blogs to that of automobiles, I don't think we've quite hit the power steering era yet.

2. Look Outward, Not Inward

We need to look outside of our niches for new and useful ideas. Tech blogging, as an example, tends to be the stomping grounds of the earliest adopters of technologies and tools, but maybe the members of this niche aren't always the best at how to communicate and persuade. Maybe we don't think of the most creative ideas to combine images, text, audio, and video.

3. Partner With Complementary Skills to Achieve More

Maybe tech bloggers can help other niches with the tools and in turn can get coaching on the “softer” skills of blogging. This encourages movement and sharing between niches which could have other beneficial effects.

4. Sell the Benefits to the Unconverted, but in Practical Ways

How can we help real-life organizations and communities in need? Can we help them communicate better with each other? Can we help them disseminate accurate information? Can we help them learn and teach each other? In short, can we show them how to use technology to address some of their existing problems?

5. Encourage Listening and Participation

Hutch Carpenter proposed that bloggers become more social and better networked as their “careers” progress, but after a certain stage the audience of people that they listen to begins to shrink again. This is a natural phenomenon that occurs to anyone as their schedules load up with requests and “must do” items. In my opinion we must continually try to fight that urge, otherwise we develop tunnel vision and lose sight of what is happening around us.

6. Apprenticeship

What about volunteering to take new users under our wings and be a resource to them, but in a more proactive way? Maybe create a general “helper” community for new users, or to promote these things better to the entire world. I proposed the concept of a social media apprentice a number of months ago. Maybe we need to work it in large numbers.

7. Focus on Long Term Payback

The networking component of social media is sometimes overlooked and undervalued. It seems that a lot of people enter social media with the primary intent of earning income purely through their blog. Some people are clever with the use of copy and advertising (or gobbledygook and advertising) to make a quick buck. Most of those people will eventually alienate any possible audience that would come voluntarily, when in fact, the most valuable “win” in social media is the strength of the personal network that you build. This is why LinkedIn is quite possibly the ultimate social media application because it has a very practical, serious purpose that many other applications don't have.

8. Jettison Your Bratty Side

Let's be blunt: there's a lot of posturing and acting that occurs in certain segments of the social media communities. Yes, there's no doubt that people reap certain rewards by behaving in certain ways to please the crowd. Unfortunately, those rewards don't spread very far - they tend to reward the actor. Will that work in the long run? For some, it probably will (unfortunately). For most of us, it's not worth it to tarnish your character in such a manner. Civility, respect, and compassion will probably go a lot further, unless, of course, you're the type of person who enjoys being manipulated by MSM (main stream media) techniques.

9. Keep Exploring - There's Always a Cutting Edge Somewhere

The frontiers that we can explore are only limited by our creativity, determination, and resourcefulness. Other people will want to see where you are going and what you are doing.

Fairness is in the eye of the beholder

We can complain that the early settlers took all of the good land, staked the best claims, and have put a stranglehold on the riches so that no one else can do well. Perhaps it's true. But consider this:

• For every Wal-Mart, a K-Mart may suffer, but a Target and countless niche retailers can thrive
• For every IBM, there's a Microsoft that comes along and reinvents an industry by being nimble, clever, and focused
• For every Microsoft, there's an Apple, a Google, and a Yahoo that changes the world under their noses.

However, increasing the size of your market, and your audience, is a key ingredient in any growth strategy.

What do you think? Why not share your thoughts?

Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence

Guest post by Hutch Carpenter of I'm Not Actually a Geek (FriendFeed/Twitter).

I had an interesting discussion with Robert Seidman on FriendFeed about whether bloggers need to actually interact with their readers. Here are two comments Robert made on the subject:

Hutch: here's one for you to ponder. If Seth [Godin] is the smartest guy on the Internet (and I think he is), why isn't he on FriendFeed? : ) He also doesn't allow conversation on his blog posts!

Interactions aren't really ever needed when the content by itself is really valuable. But why do so many people make such a big deal about "the conversation" then? So on the one hand you want to say it is a big huge honking deal, but on the other hand not so much?

Robert is right about this. Interactions really aren't a requirement for bloggers. Think about the core essence of blogging: things that you care about. Whether you get anyone else caring is secondary.

But of course, it's really not that simple, is it? You blog because you feel like you've something of value to impart, be it telling the world about feeding your cats or nailing the next trend in technology. A point I made to Robert was that interactions are important for learning. Assuming you are a student of life, you will need interactions with others to test out ideas and to learn different facts and perspectives.

Interactions with readers, wherever they occur, are also an important part of maintaining "presence" on the Web. No beginning blogger should have the conceit that people will just show up to read his or her blog. You've got to establish yourself out there by making your blog posts, and thinking, visible to a wider audience.

But at some point, bloggers seem to move into a different point in their blogging career. They no longer need the interactions with readers so much. They've arrived. And in the case of Jason Calacanis, after arriving, they leave.

One observation to make is this: the level of interaction seems to vary by the blogger's level of established reputation. As a blogger gets more well-known on the Web, the level of interaction declines.

In fact, I'd wager that blogger interactions follow a predictable curve.

Bloggers' Interactions Vary by Blogging Stage

The chart below graphs the level of blogger interaction with different levels of being "established":


Four stages are depicted along the X axis. Left-to-right, the stages indicate increasing degrees of success in blogging. "Success" in this case being defined as establishing a voice that resonates with the audience you want.

And what are "interactions"?

• Allowing blog comments
• Responding to blog comments
• Commenting on FriendFeed about your blog
• Tweeting links to your blog posts
• Digging your blog
• Stumbling your blog
• Pimping your blog on others' blogs

With that, let's run through the four stages of the blogger.

1. Blogger n00b

When you start out blogging, you don't know much. Most likely, you're somewhat sheepish about your writing, but you press on because you know that's the only to get better. No one leaves comments on your blog. And you're too embarrassed to try or don't even know the different ways to raise awareness of your blog.

You're not interacting a lot. But that's a good thing. You need the time to get some seasoning.
2. Figuring Things Out

OK, you're through the n00b stage. People occasionally leave a comment on your blog. Someone actually linked to a blog post of yours. You've noticed those "digg this" buttons on blogs. You're gaining confidence. "Hey - I actually can put two sentences together!"And it appears at least some people care about what you write. This is the stage where interactions are ascendant. You're carving out your piece of the webscape, and finding fellow travelers. You're learning who the A-Listers are, and how Techmeme works.

In this stage, bloggers do a ton of interacting. It's a wonderful time. The trial and error of it is liberating. You post crazy stuff, and see how it plays. You'll find surprising success every so often, as some site picks up your blog posts. As you rise up the curve in this stage, you find success by being out there. The more you interact with readers everywhere, the more established you become.

It's in this stage where you really discover your blogging voice. Discussions with others, and seeing what plays out there really help you in this process.

3. Established Voice

When you hit this stage, congratulations. You are now a bona fide figure on the scene. And there's a change in posture when it comes to interactions. Stage 3 bloggers still interact with their readers. But you're not going to see them doing all the other types of interactions: tweeting blog posts, digging them, etc.

Fred Wilson strikes me as a blogger in this stage. He has certainly achieved a wide following with his blog A VC. And he replies to commenters on his blog. So he's maintaining a decent level of interaction. But do you think he's digging his posts? Leaving comments elsewhere with links to his blog?

Fred is a solid Stage 3 blogger. He knows his voice, he delivers quality content and he's become something of a household name among the digerati. He gains new readers based on those qualities, not his interactions. But he's also an ongoing student, trying out ideas to help make him a stronger venture capitalist.

Two characteristics of Stage 3 bloggers also emerge:

• The sheer volume of readers makes keeping up with all of them impossible.
• A new kind of reader shows up, people who exhibit troll-like behavior.

It's these two dynamics that cause some bloggers to head onto the next stage.

4. Industry Legend

Go to Seth Godin's blog and try to leave a comment. Or comment on Marc Andreessen's blog. Robert Seidman's comment at the top of this post mentioned that he thought Seth is the smartest guy on the Internet. I personally am very impressed with Marc Andreessen, both for his entrepreneurial accomplishments and his blogging.

In Stage 4, the blogger is less a student of life, and more a professor.

You're also going to come under fire for your lack of interaction. A lot of people question the lack of interaction by top bloggers. Duncan Riley wrote this comment on FriendFeed in response to Louis Gray's post about rules for social following:

Louis, I still think you're the exception to the rule, maybe Scoble to, because you interact with people even if you don't follow them. I still think though that many in the so-called A-List don't care about their followers aside from bragging rights, which is why reciprocity isn't unreasonable as a mark of respect.

The blogger really is playing a different game at Stage 4. At this point, you've become established in the market, you're busy with a lot of non-blogging endeavors, you've got too many readers to count, the trolls love to come at you and you've become expert in a field.

Not surprisingly, your interactions decline. Jason Calacanis folds up his blogging tent. Seth Godin and Marc Andreessen don't accept comments. Even Robert Scoble feels it.

Robert Scoble is a Stage 4 blogger who interacts more than anyone on earth. He is truly the exception that proves the rule. But the limits of his interaction have been tested as well. In a post entered this morning, he decries the types of comments he receives on his blog as those from people "with an axe to grind". Digg readers' comments "are simply disgusting cesspools."

In a post I wrote a couple months ago, How Do Solo Bloggers Break into the Techmeme 100?, I noted that stars in the non-blogging world would immediately have a huge following. Assuming any blogging skill, they would pretty quickly have a presence on the web. Their star power would carry into blogging.

I would expect them to immediately go to Stage 4 on the blogging cycle as well. If Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang decides to start blogging, don't expect him to have any "conversations" with his readers.

What Do You Think?

The blogger lifecycle is not a perfect description. Many bloggers don't ride the edge of the curve (or in the case of Robert Scoble, sit above it). But as general framework for considering when blogger interactions are more likely, I think it does the job.

As a Stage 2 blogger myself, I'd love to hear your thoughts! You can find me regularly posting at http://bhc3.wordpress.com/ and interacting on FriendFeed.

Techmeme and TechCrunch's Detractors Prove It's Hard to be On Top

One downside of being in a visible leadership position is that you often have a bulls-eye on your back. Sometimes it's from your competition. Sometimes it's from people who feel what you offer isn't benefitting themselves personally, and other times, it can arguably be your biggest fans, who want to change what it is you do to serve their whim of the day. In the tech blogosphere, there is no single blog more influential and visible than TechCrunch, and there is no single aggregator or news site more influential and visible than Techmeme. That the two's fortunes are at times seen as being closely linked only helps to fuel the flames of frustration by those eager to see change, be it through finding alternative sources for news, or, instead, asking for either site to change its tone, its breadth of coverage, or its methodology.

From a third party point of view, it seems the day in and day out potshots against both Techmeme and TechCrunch have taken their toll on the most visible representatives of each site. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera is well-known for his sarcastic, evasive, answers when his site's reputation is questioned, and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is often described as short-fused and sleep deprived. Recently rumors have circulated saying Arrington wants out of the blogging business, and is looking to sell, no doubt in part due to stress of the "always on" atmosphere and ruthless competition. Of course, rumors are simply rumors... but given most PR firms have gotten to the point where reaching out to TechCrunch is part of their standard shtick, it's likely not as fun fielding all the inquiries and sticking to others' schedules as openly writing once was. And TechCrunch has burned through its share of strong writers, with talents like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley leaving, one on good terms, and the other, not as well, as it turned out. (See: On Arrington, My Final Word)

The two sites' major detractors tend to rail on common topics. TechCrunch can be seen as egocentric, and Arrington is perceived to have a bee-line on exclusives. Techmeme similarly has been described as elitist by those who don't get included, navel-gazing by those who think it's too insular, biased by those who feel they have been overlooked, or a single person's playground, by those who feel Gabe's claims to automation are overblown. And some industry blog veterans who regularly appear on Techmeme have even taken to saying it's not as relevant and influential as it once was, replaced by other sources of news.

The complaints around either service became so commonplace that a new word, bitchmeme, was made, loosely defined as "bitching about Techmeme", usually on the weekend, when some tech bloggers had no news to write about. The phrase since took on a life of its own, meaning any silly conflict between blogs that took place on the weekend.

TechCrunch and Techmeme get as much grumpiness tossed their direction as they do because they each own a valuable niche in the blogosphere, and are expanding their lead, rather than relinquishing it. While you could say that TechCrunch competes with ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOM or others, they have cemented themselves as the go-to site for new services entering the market, and even their opinion pieces are widely read, with almost a million unique RSS subscribers taking note. Techmeme's best competition at this point is BlogRunner, with Hacker News, Dave Winer's TechJunk, Duncan Riley's QMeme and more organic sites like RSSmeme or ReadBurner coming up in conversation. But Techmeme's original perceived competition, like TailRank and Megite, are mere shadows of what they initially promised. Meanwhile, TechCrunch is bringing on new writers, and posting more stories than ever (See: The Statbot: TechCrunch Statistics A-W), and Techmeme is going more mainstream, with news sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times featuring more prominently than most individual bloggers.

And with this leadership position, the sites don't have the luxury of acting without criticism any longer. Gabe almost has a part-time position made for himself just to go from blog to blog and explaining that in fact, Techmeme is not evil, and that it is relevant, explaining that TechCrunch has built a reputation as a reputable source for tech news, and therefore, is adequately represented on his site and in the leaderboard. Seemingly every day, Gabe is having to answer questions on Twitter or FriendFeed from people like Robert Scoble (or me in one example, when I wondered why a hot topic wasn't getting airtime). Meanwhile, Arrington gets called nasty names, mocked by Valleywag, and yelled at on Twitter.

But if you take a step back, TechCrunch's goal is to be a technology blog focused on Web 2.0, and it's doing that. Techmeme's stated goal is to be like the front page of the memes that are happening in the tech blogosphere at any given time, and for the large part, it does do that. While there is some uncertainty as to all the criteria that makes up being part of Techmeme, or rising up and down the page, or when something makes the site, it typically takes discussion, not only on the original site, but through links from other blogs, on Twitter, and other sharing sites.

The argument could be made that you could possibly find your technology news faster in another way. Maybe you could find it on FriendFeed, and get a broader scope of sources. Maybe you prefer the democratic approach of ReadBurner and RSSmeme. Maybe you want to go through Google Reader yourself, or rely on others' shared link blogs. But there is no question in my mind that Techmeme is relevant, as is TechCrunch, and being mentioned on either site continues to drive traffic today.

I also believe that Techmeme does a very good job at being available to those bloggers who aren't elite household names. Just tonight, we saw a blog that was born only three days ago make the site, and Yuvi Panda's work on The Statbot shows one third of all Techmeme headlines come from the "Long Tail". Techmeme is accessible to bloggers who write quality content and spur discussion. While I'm absolutely active in places like FriendFeed and Twitter, I don't believe that discussions from FriendFeed belong on Techmeme any more than do popular Twitter posts or popular YouTube videos. Techmeme has specialized in bringing us top tech blogging news, and it's doing it.

The bottom line? If you don't like Techmeme and you don't like TechCrunch, stop reading, or go out and make your own. The best way to show they're no longer relevant is to take them down yourself through competition. But today, they are both standing strong whether you like it or not. I just hope Mike Arrington and Gabe Rivera are enjoying what they do as much as when they first started, and that the daily body blows haven't gotten them so jaded that they want out, for that would be a big loss.

Identi.ca Launches SMS Support, Sort Of.

Guest Post By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It seems, amongst all the identi.ca, Twhirl and Posty hoopla, today we seemed to have missed one important feature -- that identi.ca, at some point recently, launched SMS notifications via their settings interface.

Currently, if you log into identi.ca, then click on settings in the header, you'll notice a new tab in your settings called "SMS". If you click on the SMS tab it allows you to set up your cell phone among various carriers and notifications will be sent to you if you opt to do so.


The service doesn't seem to have full SMS support yet though, as they are apparently utilizing SMS via e-mail which according to my own sources in the industry, isn't the most reliable method of sending SMS. I tried it out, and while it seemed to work well by sending all my friends' updates to my cell phone (there is no ability yet that I'm aware to turn off notifications for individuals via SMS, which is a major problem), the messages I received were unorganized and hard to read.

Each one was also sent from a different number, making it hard to keep all the messages in one place. It also seems that you can't post messages back to identi.ca from your cell phone, another must have if it is going to be a true competitor with Twitter or Jaiku. You can see how bad it got after 10 messages or so on my iPhone.

Having SMS available as an option on identi.ca is a nice, and very welcome, addition. This shows they are truly in the game and have strong potential to be a mobile status and communication tool like Twitter. For me, I like to use SMS with Twitter to filter out the posts of the thousand or so I follow into a small segment I can pay attention to. SMS also enables me to easily message others via one interface, and post statuses from wherever I am located. Knowing this is on its way with identi.ca, along with Monday's launch of both Twhirl and Posty integration, makes them a strong consideration for me to begin using much more often now. However, I still think they have a long way to go before they fully match Twitter's feature-set and can compete head-on.

I'm excited to see where this all ends up. You can find me actively using identi.ca at http://identi.ca/jessestay. Louis can similarly be found at http://identi.ca/louisgray.

Posty's Single-Window Microblogging AIR App Adds Identi.ca Support

Adobe's AIR platform is seeing a rise in applications designed to bring Web activity to your desktop. From TweetDeck to Twhirl, Alert Thingy to Feedalizer, a host of new apps have debuted in the last few months, offering the ability to view or post to one or more services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Pownce, Jaiku and lately, Plurk or Identi.ca.

But not every AIR app gets all services, and those that support more than one service usually require more than one window to get the job done. A newer entrant to this space, Posty, authored by Cesare Rocchi, offers support, as of today, for six different Web update services, all in a single window, allowing those with accounts in multiple places to send simultaneous updates to more than one location.

Posty, from a single black square window, lets you post updates to six different services, including Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Friendfeed, and as of this morning, Identi.ca. And if you have logins at more than one of them, you can simply use the checkboxes to make sure your updates go to multiple destinations at once.

While the application is rather spartan in its ability to be configured, it simply gets the job done. At the top is a horizontal bar featuring each of the six individual services, a posting window, and a settings window, where you can add your login information.

Key to making the application useful is that for each service, be it Twitter, Identi.ca or FriendFeed, for example, you can view your own entries, entries from your friends, the public feed, see replies, or you can use integrated search.

As with other AIR apps, you can take appropriate actions per service. For FriendFeed, you can like or make comments. On Identi.ca, you can reply or go directly to the update. And on Twitter, you can reply, mark as a favorite, or open the note in your Web browser. This wasn't always available, as in the very first release of Posty earlier this month, you couldn't see your friends' updates, only your own and public timelines. After I traded e-mail with Cesare a couple weeks ago, he was quick to respond with a new version incorporating the update.

Unlike more well-known AIR applications, like Twhirl (which Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called a "killer app" today) Posty handles all these services in a single window, utilizing the icons. Instead of monopolizing screen space with multiple parallel windows, Posty takes an all in one strategy.

When I first reviewed TweetDeck, some people said they were "tired of black" when it came to AIR applications, so if you're not a big fan of black, Posty isn't really for you, as that's how it looks, period. There are options to change the text color from "Sunny" to "Snowy", "Icy" and in between, but it doesn't actually change the app.

Cosmetics aside, Posty has given us a strong single-window application to both consume and send updates to multiple microblogging services at once. Identi.ca is rising now, and gaining momentum thanks to Twitter's occasional issues, and its open source roots. With services like Posty making it an equal player early on, the new kid on the block gets another boost.

To download Posty for yourself, find it here: http://tinyurl.com/getposty.

Trimming the Fat On RSS Feeds - You Could Lose 99%!

Guest Post from (jeff)isageek (FriendFeed / Twitter)

Recently J. Phil of Scribkin and Corvida of SheGeeks decided to see if they could trim some of the fat off their RSS subscriptions to help control getting overwhelmed from it all. I thought this was a pretty cool idea and decided to take the plunge and purge everything! So with the click of some buttons I was at ZERO.

So now I had nothing coming in, and it was kind of a weird feeling, after having tons and tons of feeds shooting into Google Reader by the hour, feeding my RSS addiction. I was back to day one and back to where I was a few years ago... what do I do now? I had this feeling that I am missing stuff already!!! I needed to get the flow going again, but with a little cleaner look.

Here is my RSS reduction plan that I thought I would share with everyone so that you too can start new and maybe tweak the idea a little bit (or a lot even).


Shared Items From Friends - This was a given since I was using Google Reader anyways and I get such great content from the likes of Corvida, J. Phil, Billy Fairchild, Louis Gray, Drew Olanoff, Sarah Perez, etc. My friends help me in discovering new stories, services, and content, so they were a must.

Shared Items - This would be content from RSSmeme and ReadBurner. These of course would have Shared Items from my friends, but would also have top items my friends may have missed. With the great friends I have, they seem to pick up all the good stuff... but with the two services combined, they offer another great option to grab from.

So that pretty much it when it for me when it comes to Google Reader now... just wanting to grab Shared Items... crazy, huh? Before this, I had tons of feeds from services to personal blogs but now I was down to just stuff that was shared, which contains most of the stuff I was getting from the various RSS feeds, only now, reduced.


This is the new tool in my quest to find all the great posts and content out there on the interweb. FriendFeed is just plain awesome! It is a great way to aggregate all the information out there from Flickr pics my contacts are posting, blog posts they are talking about via Disqus, blog posts from their personal sites, YouTube videos, shared items, the list goes on and on.

The great thing about FriendFeed it is so easy with Greasemonkey scripts for FireFox to customize your experience allowing you to get the most when visiting and finding great content. I have scripts setup to clean up the interface, allow me to jump from Google Reader or ReadBurner right in the FriendFeed page, options to read things later, clean up the interface, filter by service, improve the profiles, and the list goes on and on.

A few new features recently added include rooms which allow you to break subjects down even more and contain them all togather to follow as well as embedded audio which can help you keep track and stay upto date with your podcasts you like.

Since using FriendFeed, I am discovering a lot of great stuff from people I would have never known about if it were not from the service and like I said the clean interface, scripting options, and options right in FriendFeed have helped make it happen.


The last piece of the puzzle is one everyone is familiar with, and that is Twitter. With the service I can get breaking news, alerts that someone I am following has a new blog post I can check out, get feedback on a service in real time, the list goes on and on.

These days, of course, it seems we hear more about Twitter being down and the issues that the service is faced with but when it is doing what it does best it can be a major player in helping us all take control of information overload.

So there you have it I took all my feeds and blasted them and brought back:

• Shared Items (from friends and from services like rssmeme and readburner)
  
• FriendFeed Aggregation of my friends (with help from scripts, rooms, and settings)
  
• Twitter (getting real time updates, advice, and information)

So what do you think? How are you working to control your RSS/information overload? Feel free to leave a comment or contact me at jeffisageek@gmail.com.

TweetMeme Returns Following Months-Long Twitter-Forced Outage

The on again off again cold war that Twitter has been having with its development community has been the subject of much discussion over the last few weeks, especially with the news of reduced unauthenticated API calls, and the new integration of Gnip. But even as Twitter is appearing to get its footing, significant damage has already been done to many services that relied on the microblogging service to survive. One of those was the popular link tracker, TweetMeme, which returned to the Web over the weekend, after months of the service being unavailable, not thanks to developers' neglect, but Twitter's restrictions.

TweetMeme launched in January, gaining significant coverage in the blogosphere, including an article in TechCrunch, who gushed, "The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme". But by May, Twitter, under incredible pressure, started disabling developers' access to Jabber and XMPP services, which knocked the service off the Web.

See: Tweetmeme Down Due to Twitter Jabber Problems

At the time, the downtime was expected to only last days, but it turned out to be months.

Service founder Nick Halstead, also the author of Fav.or.it, wrote in a comment on this blog Friday, "Our side project http://www.tweetmeme.com which was the first twitter URL tracker has now been down for months because we were offered the use of the XMPP feed and by the time we had implemented they pulled it. We will not bring it back up again or put development effort into it unless these kind of restrictions are a thing of the past."

The XMPP firehose has famously been limited to only four partners - FriendFeed, Zappos, TwitterVision and Summize, plus Gnip this last week. And Tweetmeme couldn't play on the uneven field, shutting down. But as of yesterday, Halstead reported his team had a work-around, essentially piggy-backing on the search capabilities of Summize itself, now owned by Twitter. (Confused yet?)



Tweetmeme is back in operation now, aiming to show the most popular shared links on Twitter, highlighting the biggest stories on their front page, like Techmeme does, and showing them in order of appearance on the Tweetmeme river, just as Techmeme's river does.

Now that Tweetmeme is back in action, the questions remain - will traffic return, remembering the site's out there, and can it deliver relevant results worth following, as Techmeme has proven it can? And will following Summize's lead be good enough, or will Twitter change the rules again? Hard to know, given the microblogging giant's inconsistencies. That's why many developers are bailing on Twitter altogether.

The Talk About Rules for Social Following Is Getting Out of Hand

As the world of online "friends" is getting increasingly blurred, and many of us are joining social network after social network, expanding our realm of friends to mean much more than just those we know in real life, artificial rules of etiquette are being created for when you follow someone or add them as a friend, and when you don't. And when two people have different, unequal rules, there is a potential for conflict, or hurt feelings, even when we have the option to step back and realize this is all very silly. No one hard and fast rule works for everybody, and I would expect that the "rules" are different for each network, given the impact "following" can mean.

This whole ruckus about "You didn't follow me! I'm going to unsubscribe!" led me to playfully suggest a new approach this evening:


(See the FriendFeed response to my Tweet here)

The issue of who to friend started well before social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace took hold, and before Twitter and FriendFeed changed the game in terms of how adding somebody as a friend could open a floodgate of information.

Early demands on who to add as a friend were problematic even in the early days of AOL Instant Messenger. Making my AIM address open to family and close friends was one thing, but soon, casual acquaintances would want my AIM address, and logging on to the service left me at their whim for contacting me, or seeing my status. Soon, I was hiding my service, pretending to be away from the desk, or blocking the very same people who still thought we were AIM friends.

With Friendster, the issue of "friending" again came up. Would I accept the friend request from a college roommate I really wasn't all that fond of? What about if there was a girl I had a crush on, who I wanted to follow, but I didn't want to "friend" in case she figured it out? (Complicated, I know)

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race - to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

There became issues with Facebook only accepting 5,000 friends. Twitter saw people set up rules to auto-follow anyone who followed them, even as it became common to follow thousands or tens of thousands. FriendFeed has seen many do the same, even though to follow a person there means not just Twitter updates, but blogs, photos, videos, and dozens more services, in addition to integrated comments.

Soon, the concept of auto-following, and gaining prominence over following a huge number, or being followed by a big name became the norm. While it might make sense for a Robert Scoble or a Duncan Riley to do it, for the rest of us, the firehose of data can be choking. And by opting out of the automatic following process, we can be called on the carpet for not acting the way others expect us to.

A few key examples:

Rahsheen Porter:
The A-List Doesn’t Care About Your FriendFeed
echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null
FriendFeed: Should I unsubscribe from people who don't follow me back ?
Pixel Bits:
Subscribing, unsubscribing, do you like me? Do you hate me?

This issue is highlighted by services which show you the disparity between those you follow, and who follows you. For Twitter, there are sites like Twitter Karma and Less Friends, and recently, one was developed for FriendFeed, called FriendVenn. Of note, I've used Twitter Karma to get my lists in sync, but haven't been able to use FriendVenn, as it's limited to 3,000 total connections so far, and I'm ahead of that mark, even if I didn't follow anybody on FriendFeed at all.

There's nothing wrong with seeing the disparity in bulk, rather than on a one by one basis, but it's more of a curiosity than a call to action in my mind.

On Twitter, I used to be quite selective about who I would follow. But over time, thanks to the improvement of Summize and Twitter's frequent downtimes, I'm not using the Web interface to watch Tweets, but only to send notes. Now, there's really zero impact to me to following a bazillion people. If it makes them feel good, then I have no problem adding them to my stream. But in reality, unless they say my name, or a search query I'm watching in TweetDeck, I'll probably never see their updates.

FriendFeed is a different story altogether. FriendFeed's best environment is the Web interface, where you see all updates. A FriendFeed follow is a lot "heavier" than a Twitter follow, as you get all the updates from all the disparate services. This means that while you can casually follow tens of thousands on Twitter, it can be a bit overwhelming to follow even a few hundred on FriendFeed, unless you're absolutely comfortable with missing out on some updates. As a result, I've been a little slower to follow people there, even as my in box on some days can be flooded with new followers.

The way I choose to follow people on FriendFeed was first, people I knew, or engaged with elsewhere, second, following people who engaged in my activity through comments and on the feeds of the others I followed, and third, friends that those I follow engaged with, and whom I shared interests.

This more tentative approach means I have only 300+ people I follow on FriendFeed instead of 3,100 or more. I believe that by adding more and more, the fun and engagement will surely be lost, just as it was on Twitter's Web interface when I added so many people, or in Facebook, where I get new friend requests daily from people I'll probably never meet. I expect there are probably some good 250 to 500 new people who I'll find interesting on FriendFeed who might be following me now, but I want to make that choice after seeing their activity, not just on automatic.

Am I really going to overweight my social networks with ladies? Probably not, as fun as that sounds. But am I going to overweight every network with every single follower I possibly can, again, probably not. The way I use Twitter and FriendFeed or Facebook or LinkedIn or any other service that relies so heavily on connections is the way that I do it, period. It's not necessarily the way you should do it, and no one right way is right for all people. But if there is a point where I'm not following you, and you are following me, it's probably not personal, and it shouldn't be made personal. To each their own.

It Appears I Won an iPhone 3G from Social Median!

Last night was not the kindest of schedules. I had the great opportunity to leave the house and see "The Dark Night" yesterday evening, but the film didn't start until 11:15 p.m. Allowing for previews, credits, and the two and a half hour runtime, it was 2 a.m. by the time the movie ended. Following a quick trip to Safeway, I didn't get home until after 2:30 a.m., finding Sarah stirring, but Matthew, luckily, asleep. That left me on feeding duty for Sarah, first, around 4 a.m., and Matthew, just after, finishing about 5 a.m. So, no, I didn't get much sleep. By the time I posted the great guest post from Rob Diana at 5:30 a.m., and made sure all was well, I saw a mysterious tweet from Jason Goldberg, CEO of Social Median, the online social news site, who I first covered back in April.

See below or on Twitter itself:


Having gotten virtually no sleep, and it being about six a.m., the sun rising, I was sure my mind was not in its proper working state. So I asked Jason what was up, and it turns out that Jason and the Social Median team were running a contest, where the service's users would follow "Newsmakers" on the site, and by midnight yesterday, the top two non Social Median employees with the most followers would be the lucky recipients of iPhones.

I knew Social Median had recently made updates, and I've seen quite a few notifications in my e-mail from people following my account there, but, being busy, I hadn't given Social Median enough attention this week, though I had planned to eventually, and I certainly wasn't aware of the give-away, or lobbying for it. So, silly me, I backed into the win. Very cool. Jason even added his own comments on FriendFeed, saying, "This brilliant part is that Louis didn't even try to be *popular* -- our users selected him as their newsmaker on their own."

So now, assuming availability, shipping and receipt, it looks like I'll soon have a brand-new iPhone 3G to play with, courtesy of one of the more interesting new entrants to the market this year in the social media and aggregation space. Now, given that my company pays for the cell phone service on my Blackberry, the question becomes:

1. Do I open an account with AT&T and pay that way for a new number on my own?
   
2. Port the BlackBerry # to the iPhone and hope work pays for it still?

Either way, it sounds like a good problem to have. After being an iPhone holdout for way too long, it looks like I can once again wear my Apple logo gear proudly and claim to be "with it". I'll let you know when it arrives.

Also: If anybody thinks that winning the iPhone is in return for favorable coverage to date, or will lead to future favorable coverage (like a bribe), I don't believe this changes anything. To date, I've written everything about Social|Median in a fair way, and without expectation of any payout. Winning this is a lot of fun, but I plan to keep watching them as I do many other startups in this field. Of course, let me know if you disagree.

Throttled By the Twitter API? Try Something New.

Guest Post By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Well, the microblogging API space sure got interesting in a hurry.

First, on Thursday, Louis Gray reported that Twitter was throttling unauthenticated API requests. This obviously would effect several applications in a very bad way. Later in the day, Dave Winer let everyone know that Identi.ca has implemented the Twitter API. And on Friday, in a surprising move, TechCrunch announced that Twitter is sending the XMPP firehose to new middle man Gnip.

So, what does this mean to you? Well, that is a good question. First, we know what the Twitter API looks like. Identi.ca replicating the API is good for interoperability as well. Yes, they copied the main Twitter API, but have yet to include the searching capabilities that Summize supplies. However, they do have RSS feeds for any search query which does suffice for basic searching. The other big players in the microblogging space, Jaiku and Pownce, also have APIs. But, what do they have to offer?

Jaiku's API contains the usual suspects, the public feed, a user's feed and a user's profile. It also allows for "presence" updates which is helpful for allowing applications like Ping.fm to post to multiple services. It also provides a method to get a user's current "presence", their last item in the "presence" stream and as well as a specific item in the "presence" stream.

Pownce's API is similar as well. There is a public "note" list, a user's note list (which can be filtered for replies, private messages and other coolness) and a user's profile. You can also retrieve a specific note, with replies included optionally, and the list of recipients for the note. For social graph fans, you can get the friends (mutual relationship) of a user, fans of the user and who the user is a fan of. For posting notes, there is the normal post method as well as separate post link, event, file and reply methods.

Interestingly, there is a method to determine the list of users a post can go to. There are some other minor goodies like feeds for the public list and a user as well as simple web post integration. Obviously, this is an API designed with developers in mind. They thought of several different ways to use the application and provided APIs accordingly. The only problem that I could see is that there is no search supported. Hopefully a third party service like Gnip will fill that void, like Summize did for Twitter.

Now that looks like a good foundation, but there are some fundamental problems. It is not obvious that Pownce and Jaiku support something like an XMPP feed, so, there may not be the ability to have the full public stream at all times. This type of thing is critical for interoperability. There is also inconsistent support for threaded messages and other post types (like the Pownce event and file posts). Why haven't we seen a real multi-microblog client? Ping.fm is doing multi-writes, but does not support multi-reads. In the instant messaging world, where the XMPP standard comes from, we do have multi-chat clients and few actually support XMPP! We are starting to see some standardization in this space as well with Identi.ca copying the Twitter API as well. If we consider the Twitter API a defacto standard and we have the XMPP standard for real time transfer, there should be little stopping developers from creating the ultimate micro-blogging client.

Now, the question is, are you willing to wait or do you want to crown someone king?

FriendFeed Friday Tips #7: Who Are These People, Anyway?

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, how to integrate with Google Talk, how you can incorporate comments and determine an item's original source. Today, figuring out who you're engaging with on the service.

So far, unlike most social networks out there, FriendFeed doesn't utilize a person's profile as the central nervous system around which the service is built. There's no way to post my location, my age, my job title, my birthday, my religion, or marital status. For some, this is surely a blessing. For others, it seems like a feature gap. Filling that gap, until FriendFeed does it in the future, is a GreaseMonkey script developed by Hao Chen. But for non-Firefox users or those who don't play with scripts, you can use FriendFeed's stream to get clues.

FriendFeed's stream consists of a collection of updates from disparate services around the Web, from you and your friends. The nomenclature, as discussed in last week's tip, consists of service icons, an active verb, and the service itself.

Clicking on any of these icons reduces the total stream to show only updates from a specific service. For example, I can click the orange RSS icon and see only blog entries from my friends. I can click the Twitter logo and see only Tweets. But if, over time, I've started following a number of people who are friends online but not in real life, as is common, the very best way to find out who they are is by showing only updates from LinkedIn. If your contacts are using LinkedIn, and have registered it with FriendFeed, there will be at least one entry, and if they update, you'll see if they changed jobs or got promoted.


The URL to show all LinkedIn updates from your friends is:
http://friendfeed.com/?service=linkedin.

The URL to show all LinkedIn updates from people throughout FriendFeed is:
http://friendfeed.com/public?service=linkedin.
(Have at it, recruiters!)

From this, I found that Alan Steele, formerly of Mergelab, is now the VP of Engineering at Identity.net, Drew Olanoff of ReadBurner is now the Community Manager and Evangelist at MyStrands and Atul Arora is the Director of Product Management at Vimo, for starters.



Yes, it turns out that most of the geeks who participate online are also geeks in real life. That's not a surprise. But rather than just knowing somebody from their blog or their tweets, or even their photos from Flickr, with a single click, you can browse all the titles on LinkedIn and see what these people do in the real world. And just like with any other FriendFeed entry, you can like a LinkedIn entry or make a comment. It's a great way to congratulate somebody on the social ladder as they move up the corporate ladder.

As for more MySpace/Facebook looking profiles, check out Hao Chen's scripts or... just wait. I bet FriendFeed will solve this soon enough.

Gnip CEO's Goal: Make Twitter's Data Flow Suck Less

Data publishers and data consumers can be both friends and enemies, when it comes to the seemingly infinite demand for and growth of real-time data from Web services. Services like Digg, Flickr, Del.icio.us and Twitter are happy to see their user bases expand, and to see developer communities be built around their products. But with each new application hitting their API, and each new user, comes new demand that can put strain on their infrastructure, even if the outside application is just checking for updates which aren't there. Gnip is looking to act as a go-between for data publishers and data consumers, delivering updates from the services to the applications, and reducing the queries that can drag popular sites to a crawl.

Today, Gnip made headlines with an announcement that Twitter notifications would be sent to the service via XMPP, letting outside developers tap into Gnip instead of adding more strain to the embattled microblogging giant. And while this won't solve all of Twitter's issues, it does offer developers an alternative, taking some of the power out of Twitter's hands. The announcement did not contain any money changing hands, done quid pro quo.

After the morning's hubbub, I talked with Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip, to better understand how adding Twitter to the team's growing array of partners would help users and developers, and whether this solved the growing concerns around Twitter's API limits that have seen application authors frustrated. And the answer so far, is that Gnip can solve some problems today, and is preparing to solve more issues soon. But it won't make Twitter's problems disappear.

"All these data protocols can be an exponentially scaling hassle. I like how people thought Gnip would single-handedly fix Twitter's problems, but that minimizes how big Twitter really is," Eric said. "Some developers don't just want the user stream, but the reply stream as well, and others want Track, which bangs against the Summize (now Twitter) API, to find if there is a new tweet that has a followed word. We might not ever solve that. It's a big scaling problem of reading the content, and it doesn't fix all of Twitter's problems."


Gnip's Data Flow Architecture
What Gnip is looking to do is help publishers looking to syndicate their data, and consumers, who are building businesses off user generated data, by simplifying the complex back-end work needed, and giving entrepreneurs more time to work on the front-end of their product, delivering tangible benefits.

"We're able to go to them and say, all of the effort you are doing to aggregate that data, stop now," Eric said. "Tell us what services you like, what protocol you like, and the data magically appears in real time."

While Twitter has been the most visible client so far, it's by no means the first for Gnip, which launched with two partners out of the gate, in Plaxo and MyBlogLog, where Eric was a co-founder. Since launch, Gnip has also penned partnerships with additional services, including Lijit and Iminta.


Gnip's Growing Partner Roster
Today, developers of applications are authoring products that query popular sites, like Twitter, Digg and Del.icio.us, and do so thousands of times a day, even if the overwhelming majority of the time, there are no updates. Where Gnip works well is for centralized services, like Plaxo, who can dramatically cut back on the amount of times they need to make requests. "It doesn't matter how many people are following an individual on Plaxo Pulse. They just have to ask once." Eric said.

But the way centralized services make queries to Twitter is different than the issues faced by the many apps that are struggling against the 100 API calls per hour per IP address limit discussed yesterday. For that, more work is needed.

"For the average user, 100 queries per hour is fine, as long as you're only querying the API when there is new data," Eric said. "But for, say Thwirl, where they each have their own user connections, they would have to query maybe 50 times, and that's half the load. We're looking for a simple way of creating anonymous buckets, so somebody like Twitter Karma can say 'we have 10,000 users with this collection', and we can centralize it. We're still a ways away from helping folks with distributed clients."

Gnip's initial efforts and partnerships have been completed on the first version of their product. In about a month (or two), the company expects to not just send service notifications to partners, but also, the full metadata, which will bring more rich information from its many supported services, including Del.icio.us and Disqus, Flickr and others. Maybe, at that point, you'll also see Twitter passing on reply streams as well, but that's not set in stone.

"Working with people like Twitter, we want to be sure we are serving their best interests and the developer community," Eric said. "It's a huge win for us."

Is There A Way Back From Free?

Guest Post By Colin Walker (Twitter/FriendFeed)

On Wednesday, Matthew Ingram posted a reaction to Mike Arrington's interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams with regards to the way Twitter is just handing their data to potential competitors for nothing.

It has seemed obvious to me for a while that an ideal aspect of a business plan for a social networking service such as Twitter would be to charge partners for premium access to the API, but once you have started down the free path, is it possible, or wise, to backtrack and start charging?

At the inception of a service, the desire is to gain popularity as quickly as possible - the API allowed Twitter to gain this popularity - the openness fuelled a separate ecosystem and Twitter usage spread far beyond what the service would have been able to generate on its own. At this stage charging for access would have stifled the creativity surrounding Twitter and the vast majority of third party apps would never have existed.

The question becomes: who would want to use the data from the Twitter API so badly that they would be willing to pay for it?

Let's look at the four companies allowed access to the full XMPP data:
(prior to this morning's announcement with GNIP)

• Summize would never have existed in its current format and would be pointless with only limited access to the API
• Twittervision is merely a mashup and the developer would, no doubt, have never gone this route if there was no free access
• FriendFeed itself also has no obvious business plan so where would the incentive be to spend money it doesn't have?

Perhaps the only company with full access that may consider paying would be Zappos but only because it is a "real" (if online) business rather than a social media startup. As Evan alludes to in the interview it is the distinction between commercial and non-commercial use that is the potential driving factor here.

The web can only exist on the handouts from VCs for so long before someone, somewhere starts demanding a return on their investment. Where is this going to come from?

So, is it possible to start charging for access?

The news that Twitter have limited unauthenticated calls to the API as well as authenticated calls could well be the first step on the road to pay-per-play but who should or shouldn't be paying and can Twitter now justify a shut out of this nature against the revenue it could potentially receive?

How many third party tools will wither and die? How many developers will quit before their project ever sees the light of day?

When I wrote about Twitter shutting off the Replies tab in favour of keeping the API open I queried if this was the most sensible route - why restrict your own application to protect those of others? The argument was that Twitter receives ten times more traffic via the API than it does from the web site so, as Duncan Riley commented, why "would you willingly block half your user base?" isn't that what restricting API access is effectively doing?

This information came from an interview with Biz Stone in September last year in which he also explained:

the API becomes not only crucial for us on a creativity level and something that we can offer to the developers so that they can build their own applications and experiences, but it also becomes a way for us to grow and a way for us to potentially - depending on what business model we choose - do well there, business-wise (my emphasis)

The constant denial that Twitter knows where they are heading with their business model seems at odds with the constant messages we get when we read between the lines. Even back in September it was viewed that the API could be a money spinner. The moves to restrict API access, in my opinion, are reinforcing that message even if Twitter themselves argue that they don't know where they're going.

As Bob Dylan said: The times thay are a-changin'.

Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air

Twitter's struggles with handling high user load have been well documented. To help the embattled site stay up between Fail Whales, they've at times reduced features to just try and keep afloat, blocking the replies tab, reducing pagination, and blocking Instant Messaging, for example.

They've also visibly tweaked the rate for authenticated API hits, first down from 70 to 20 and back up to 100. But until recently, unauthenticated API requests were unlimited, which all changed Wednesday night around 5 p.m. Pacific Time, when Twitter ratcheted them down to the same 100 per hour per IP address, effectively crushing many external services that relied on Twitter for their data. And this was done without public mention on the Twitter blog.

As you can see in this Google Groups thread, Alex Payne of Twitter told developers last Thursday:

"In our continued effort to keep things fast and prevent abuse we're planning on introducing rate-limiting by IP for unauthenticated API requests. We'll allow 100 unauthenticated requests per IP per hour, just as we currently do with authenticated requests. Please let us know if you foresee any ghastly issues with this change."

And while that sounds all nice and dandy, there were a number of developers who did see "ghastly issues", ranging from Kee Hinckley, CEO of Somewhere, Inc., Richard Cunningham of FriendBinder, and Joel Strellner of Twitturly, each of whom runs a product that depends strongly on unauthenticated API requests from the microblogging service.

But it didn't stop Twitter from making the change, even as Jodee Rich of PeopleBrowsr wrote, "this will blow us out of the water."

Since throttling down the unauthenticated API requests, services that rely on this data are a mere shadow of their former selves.


Twitturly says on status page: "Due to recent changes in Twitter's API, Twitturly is slowly dying."

Similarly, Twist's Twitter charts only show a fraction of the data they did at the beginning of the week. (See: "morning", "starbucks" and "computer".)


Twist's Twitter Search for "Morning"

Twist's Twitter Search for "Lunch vs. Dinner"
In response to the changes, FriendBinder's Cunningham said he will now be changing all API requests to Twitter to be authenticated, to work around the problem. He wrote me, in an e-mail, "There are also some parts of the API we cannot even attempt now. User authenticated requests limits are shared with other sites that the user has used - so we might not be able to get any updates for them if some other site hit the limit for them."

You can see this yourself by trying sites that aim to help you bulk follow those Twitter users who are following you. If you use a site like Twitter Karma, and then try to use Less Friends, you will get a nasty note that says you have exceeded your 100 requests per hour limit. And if you're like me, having fallen way behind on following folks, you might be revisiting one of these sites religiously every hour for the next few days until you're caught up.


Less Friends and Twitter Karma Get a Mere Fraction of the Updates
Last month, Jesse Stay wrote that developers were bailing on Twitter, thanks to outages and broken APIs. With changes like this, despite improved uptime of late, the end to Twitter's problems is nowhere in sight, and services that hoped to tap into their API this way are sore out of luck.

Note: These restrictions do not impact the four golden partners of Twitter's XMPP feature, including Zappos, Summize, FriendFeed and Twittervision.

To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question

Guest Post By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.

We see this with the recent fallout of Jason Calacanis - he just wasn't getting what he needed from blogging and decided to find another way to achieve what he wanted out of it. Louis Gray himself has mentioned on this blog about the change in traffic via links from A-list bloggers, and I have to say, I've seen it as well. The blogging landscape has changed significantly.

With the advent of Social Networking sites and tools providing outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, I think many bloggers are getting overwhelmed with all that is out there, and frankly, they have found other outlets to get what they were previously getting from their blog. I'd like to share some tips on when you should and shouldn't blog, in hopes that other bloggers don't feel overwhelmed or quit altogether:

Post only when it is something that educates, or brings original news to your readers

This is an important policy of mine, for the most part. Often, especially before I started seeing bloggers fall away in exhaustion, I noticed many people just blogging for the sake of blogging. There often was no real new content in their posts. I like to keep a little Mac Sticky Note on my Desktop with all the blog post ideas I come up with (this post was one of those), and I can then turn back to them when I hit a slump. The most breaking and original get first priority. I think you will find that the most original posts you can provide will be the ones most visited, and re-visited by your readers.

Avoid posting just to state an opinion about another person's post

I believe it is mostly no longer necessary to blog about the content of other bloggers. There is an occasion or two where you may want a little more exposure from other bloggers if you really want your opinion to be known, but for the most part you can comment on other posts in other ways. With the advent of sites like FriendFeed and Google Reader it is now very easy for you to gain an audience, or even port your blog audience to these sites, and write your opinion either as notes in Google Reader, or as comments in FriendFeed. Let's face it, especially for a beginning or mid-level blogger, FriendFeed and Google Reader get a lot more traffic than most blogs get, offering you the chance for much more exposure on your opinion. Hopefully you are encouraging your readers to utilize FriendFeed more and they too can comment on your opinion to these posts.

Disqus is another great way to state an opinion about a post. Any blogger that implements Disqus is empowering their users to eventually make their own posts about the content, and have others comment, in threaded fashion, to those posts. Bloggers that implement Disqus are giving their users power to own their own opinions.

You don't have to post multiple times a day, or even every day

It's actually okay to only post once or twice a week. What's important is that you try to stay at least semi-regular so your readers don't give up on you. Your readers will come back if they know you'll keep posting. Blogging is certainly not dead, and it can be a great way to build up a following for your personal, or professional brand - that has never gone away.

Don't blog if it's only for individual gain

If all you do is blog to try to gain attention for yourself or your business, maybe through some good SEO and Google juice you'll get some traffic, but you'll never gain the loyalty and trust that many of the largest bloggers on the internet have. The best bloggers gain traction because they are working to empower, help, and educate others, not build up their own identity. Your own identity will come from that as you try to help others - writing a blog is all about building community.

Have something quick to say? There are other options

Believe it or not, Twitter used to be called a "micro-blogging" site (yes, hard to believe that was just a few months ago!). Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, even FriendFeed, and the dreaded, "Identi.ca" can all be great places to post your random thoughts, comments, and short posts. Twitter has since become much larger than that as a communications platform, but the capability to use it in such manner is still there, and I argue, a great way to start a discussion when used in conjunction with sites like FriendFeed. Look to find ways to integrate this with your blog and ensure your readers can find you and talk to you on these sites. There are even Wordpress plugins which will show all your Tweets in a single day (although you may want to think twice about this if you tweet more than 10 times a day like I do!).

Blogs are still good for SEO, and building brand, just not as much any more

The fact of the matter is that in order to get recognized by Google, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get recognized by Technorati, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get even recognized by Techmeme, you have to have good, original content, and have a few larger bloggers link to you. While Google and Technorati may not be the traffic drivers they used to (although I have a friend blogger that still gets 1,000 visitors a day just for a single post he did on a theme he wrote, all from Google), they are still too important to ignore. The fact is Techmeme will still give you thousands of potential new readers to your blog, as will Digg, and others. If you hit this jackpot of sorts, it can help you way more than any of the Social Networks ever will.

However, to get to this point is often a slow process, and can be achieved in other ways now, and that is getting more and more so as these Social Networking tools take root. The fact is I still get more traffic from social networking sites than I do Google on my own blog, so balance is key.

Lastly, settle for "good enough"!

I know several bloggers that spend hours on a single blog post. I heard of one blogger that takes an entire day to post. While sometimes an hour or so may be necessary to do research and gather data, for the most part it shouldn't take that long. Louis Gray often writes his posts in under 20 minutes. My average post is under 30. The key is, you can't be perfect - "good enough" is all you have to be.

As you can see, while the many options can seem overwhelming, they are actually there to help reduce some of the burden and fluff previously seen by bloggers and readers of blogs just a year or two ago. I hope, if you're one of those overwhelmed these tips can guide you to figure out how much you should blog, and where your content should go. It's okay not to blog some times! Just figure out what your motives were when you did (or do) blog, and see if there are other places that could be better satisfied.

Social Media Experts are the New Webmasters

In the mid to late 1990s, perception had it there was no more exciting a career title than that of Webmaster. It seemed everybody wanted to be one, and some called it the "Job of the Future". As a Webmaster, your code manipulation could change the look and flow of a Web site with each publish, and make Web pages spring up overnight, complete with hyperlinks, animated GIFs and comment forms with basic JavaScript. As seemingly every company needed a Web presence, the demand for somebody who could write HTML and handle Web operations filled them with incredible power. But as years passed, the title fell by the wayside, and you're now no more likely to find somebody with Webmaster on their business card as you are to find cars that come with cassette decks standard.

In the ensuing decade or so, the Internet has become part of the landscape, not the mystery it once was. The Webmaster position similarly faded to the background, and many companies tend to have portions of IT and Marketing share the load, outsourcing the Web design function to an outside agency. Larger companies keep the Web expertise in house, but don't call their employees by the dreaded "W" word.

As the Internet has changed, so too have the buzzwords. As one friend recently noted, simply having a blog isn't the differentiator it was a few years ago. Now, just about everybody has one (or more), so making you a blogger isn't anything special unto itself. But where the new frontier lies is where I see people positioning themselves - in social media.

Social media is a loose term that largely relies on user generated content, whether it be social networking, forums, web logs, social news or bookmarking sites. Those of us who have embraced the blogging boom have no doubt leveraged these tools: Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and the like, for starters. But I'm constantly seeing people giving me invites on LinkedIn saying their title is as a social media expert or social media consultant, or running into profiles online where social media is featured prominently, and their numbers are increasing.

I'm afraid that for the most part, their efforts to rebrand as social media experts will be short-lived and futile. Saying one is an expert in utilizing social media sites is akin to brand one's self as a "Web browsing expert", an "e-mail expert", or a "telephone specialist". While some will capitalize on the technophobes and newbies who don't know the difference between MySpace and NASA, or Hotmail and Hot Pockets, I believe it makes more sense that social media is spread thinly across all aspects of activity, be it a company's marketing activities, human resources, communications, and business development. Pretty soon, with any luck, social media won't be any scarier than opening a Web browser or writing a simple blog post.

So what should these so-called social media experts do to find real work? Some of them might get lucky. Every big analyst firm should have a social media expert on hand to help train the slow adopters, at least until they get the point the analysts have to change titles again. But to me, saying you're a social media specialist or a social media expert doesn't amount to a whole lot. What else do you do? What do you do really? There's no money to be made Digging up stories, hitting the StumbleUpon button or refreshing FriendFeed or Twitter, after all. Social Media is simply part of the landscape, in the background. Social media offers tools for communications and information sharing, but it's a means to an end, not the end itself.

Like the surge in Webmasters rose and fell, similar will be the rise and fall of people who flash you a business card with the term "social media" on it. It's the 2008 version of the Aeron chair and Foosball table so common in the days of the Web 1.0 startup. If you've got social media on your card, think about what else you do. Are you a trainer or a marketer? Are you a PR person, or an IT expert? Don't lose those talents, and be sure you make social media part of the landscape, not part of the headline, as it's not the tools you use, it's how you do it and what you're looking to get accomplished.

BallHype Acquired by Future US In Attempt to Join Big Leagues

After 18 months of progressing beyond the rookie stages of product development, Ballhype, the sports story discovery, submission and voting site, announced this morning that they have been acquired by Future US, a San Francisco-based media company. The purchase, for an undisclosed amount, enables the company's properties, including BallHype and a sister site, ShowHype, focused on entertainment news and gossip, to continue, but with a partner to help increase their monetization as traffic and engagement grows.

As an early Ballhype user in the first half of 2007 (See: Hype It Up: Ballhype Is Here to Change the Game), the site quickly became a go-to for me in terms of finding the best sports news from around the blogosphere, without being married to the front page of ESPN. More than just a news discovery site, BallHype also offered community engagement through votes, comments, and contests, for game predictions and tournaments, like March Madness.

By October, the husband and wife team of Jason and Erin Gurney, saw the growth BallHype had delivered, and pointed their knowledge to Hollywood's glitz, with ShowHype (See: ShowHype Connects Hollywood With Silicon Valley Geekery)

When my wife and I met with Jason and Erin during a viewing of the NBA All-Star Game festivities at their home this last year, they told me despite its later start, ShowHype's traffic eventually eclipsed that of BallHype, soon becoming the primary driver of engagement, page views, and advertising. But the pair didn't want to reinvent the wheel again and again, making customized sites for the more mundane topics of technology, politics, or religion, choosing instead to keep focused on those things they themselves liked.

The purchase of BallHype by Future US shouldn't mean any dramatic changes for the pair of sites. They are still going to be running, and finding the best of the Web's news for sports and entertainment.

In an interview with AOL Sports' FanHouse, co-founder Jason Gurney said, "Our traffic had reached the point where it was substantial enough to prove the value of our model--but we weren't monetizing well, and didn't have enough resources to take advantage of some of the opportunities we saw."

The Gurneys built BallHype and ShowHype almost single-handedly, alongside some technical help, and partnership with other smart sports folks, including Tom Ziller of Sactown Royalty, as well as advice from Gabe Rivera of Techmeme. The pair reside in the Bay Area with their two young children, a boy and a girl.

You can learn more about the acquisition on the official BallHype blog or at AOL Sports' Fanhouse.

iPod Touch As An Apple TV Remote? Cooler Than I Thought.

When Apple's iTunes application store opened up last week, I, at first, skipped over the free Remote application that offered the option to manage iTunes or the Apple TV from your iPhone or iPod Touch. It just seemed stupid at worst, or a proof of concept at best. Why would I want to duplicate the Apple Remote's capabilities with a much more functional device, I thought? But after checking the application out the last few days, I can attest to the fact I've been pleasantly surprised, and am now taking my iPod Touch with me around the house, acting as a DJ on the move.

As the screenshots included in this post show, the Remote application on the iPod Touch or iPhone does more than just meet the same capabilities offered by Apple's miniscule white remote. Benefitting from the wide touchscreen, I can browse thousands of songs, albums and artists quickly, and see a mirror image of what's playing on my Apple TV, letting me change the song with a single tap of my finger, anywhere in range of the Airport wireless network that both my device and the Apple TV share.


In contrast, the white remote has always been painstakingly slow to browse large libraries, practically forcing an indent into my thumb as I held the down key just to pass the letter "M". Given my library has almost 6,000 songs on it, and 23.6 days worth of music, that can be a frequent problem.

Once the Remote application is synched up with your Apple TV, using it is very simple. Choose "Playlists", "Albums", "Artists", or search for a song or any band. Unlike the white remote, you can actually type on your iPod Touch or iPhone, making this very quick.


Now, instead of relying on my iTunes on the laptop, and just turning up the sound to full blast, or resigning myself to not listening to my music as I move around the house, I can leverage the sound system on my TV set, and play DJ from room to room. I can even go to the "More" tab and select what the Apple TV was always intended to do - play movies and TV shows. But overnight, this little would-be useless application has become a must-have. I'm not leaving my iPod Touch laying around any more.

TweetDeck Twitter Client Gains High Profile Amid High Expectations

On July 4th, I had the opportunity to help introduce TweetDeck to the blogosphere as a fully-featured Twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform, with Summize integration, and the option to show Tweets in multiple columns, including dedicated screen space for replies, and customizable grouping. While the Twitter client space has already seen good penetration by Twhirl, Feedalizer and others, TweetDeck has gained a strong following over the last ten days, with many testing, and a good number, including me, using it as our default interface to Twitter's microblogging platform.


Tweetip Shows the Boom in TweetDeck Use and Discussion
In fact, the blog Tweetip, which watches Twitter closely to capture inflection points of when one term or another rapidly changes on the service, captured the boom in TweetDeck commentary last week, showing how much more mindshare the application got following our first post. But just because a lot more people know about the service doesn't mean it has a free ticket to application stardom. I asked people on Twitter and FriendFeed yesterday if they had made the switch. (See the FriendFeed discussion)

For every "Yes, been using it since launch+1, and still using and loving it!" and "Yes... And yes. Like it a lot" I received, I also got a few responses like "No. uses too much real estate" or "Use tweetdeck but prefer twhirl because it gives me Friendfeed and multiple twitter user accounts at the same time."

While I like TweetDeck's ability to display in multiple columns as a full-screen application in the background, others prefer the single-column look of alternative applications. Also, over the last week-plus, I heard calls to separate Twitter replies from Twitter direct messages. And in both cases, developer Iain Dodsworth delivered. Both the single-window feature, as well as a single column for DMs are available in the latest beta.


TweetDeck Added Support for Direct Messages

TweetDeck Added Support for a Single Column View
With such a healthy debut, users are expecting TweetDeck to grow up and do even more, including incorporating FriendFeed streams, as Twhirl and other newcomers do. I don't know that Iain has these plans, but if he did, the crowd which uses both might find the service even more intriguing. I'm also curious to see if TweetDeck would make any sense in an interface like the iPhone. With Twitterific debuting on the iPhone and iPod Touch on day one, it will be hard for competitors to make headway, especially those that use the AIR platform.

TweetDeck is in public beta, and can be found here: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. Other reviews so far of TweetDeck include those from ReadWriteWeb, /Message and The Download Squad.

Apple's Own iPhone Apps Create Concerns for Small Developers

Apple takes great pride in the fact the company controls both the hardware and operating system for its Macintosh line of computers. In theory, this tight-fisted control can lead to higher product quality and an improved user experience. But as Cupertino expands its array of software titles from the desktop to the iPhone platform, independent developers are feeling the squeeze that comes when competing with the hometown team.

Yesterday night, just a weekend after Apple unveiled the AppStore for iPhone and iPod Touch, I got an e-mail from Kevin O'Neil of Candywriter.com, the creator of Imagine Poker, a Texas Hold 'Em game for the Macintosh. O'Neill wrote with excitement that the application had now also been released for the iPod Touch and iPhone platform for all of $4.99. But included in the good news was a foreboding note:

"When the App Store opened last week, it was revealed that Imagine Poker's rival Texas Hold 'Em game on the iPhone was actually created by Apple itself. We encourage you to check out their version of the game too (you can't miss it) but, as an independent developer, we hope you can come to appreciate the same solid game-play and sense of humor in Imagine Poker Touch that has made Imagine Poker Mac a success."

You can read between the lines and see the worry the small independent developer has with facing the Apple machine, just like Karelia Software saw when Apple introduced iWeb in parallel with their development of Sandvox, and of course, famously, when Apple embedded capabilities in Sherlock that closely mimicked their desktop search engine, Watson.

Microsoft got in all sorts of hot water when they embedded Internet Explorer in Windows, and forced third party hardware manufacturers to include the browser as part of their package, or face de-licensing. Apple, enjoying its minority position in just about all markets, has not always faced such scrutiny, even as they rolled out Apple Mail (eliminating the need for Eudora and Entourage), Safari (as IE languished), and an array of productivity offerings for free, including Preview (versus Adobe Acrobat), iCal and iPhoto. While the iPhone doesn't share the market position Windows does, it is taking an increasing share of the pie from Windows Mobile and Blackberry, and there could come a time when Apple's embedded apps or competitive apps gain more scrutiny than they do today.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Profy has discussed the seeming non-balance she's already seen at the AppStore in a pair of posts: iPhone App Store: Eliminating the Competition and Advantage App Store: Two Paths to iPhone User Adoption. As she writes, "People are generally lazy, and will opt for the easiest and most convenient choice." For Candywriter.com, the easiest choice for customers just might be to keep Apple's Texas Hold 'Em game, and not seek out Imagine Poker, and this just might be the tip of the iceberg. If a small developer believes Apple will crowd them out of the market, then why try?

As for me, I did buy Imagine Poker. It's been a fun game on the Mac, and I'm looking forward to wasting more time with it on my iPod Touch.

Do you know any other third-party application developers on the iPhone who are now feeling the heat from Apple?

Writing Once, Publishing Many Times, Makes Context Critical

Whether Web services leverage RSS, send e-mail confirmations or are indexed by keywords in specialized search engines, it's not too uncommon for any activity you make online to set off a series of actions. When taken out of context, something you said in one place won't make as much sense somewhere else. A sentence fragment or a response might be completely confusing to one audience or at a certain time. With this in mind, best practices would suggest writing in full sentences where possible, and offering context.

Two Examples:

Sending replies in Twitter

Often, I will be following "Person A" and they will be following "Person B", but I won't be. If Person A sends a note to Person B, Twitter may often catch that as a reply, and clicking through the "in reply to" link will give you Twitter's best guess as to what Person A was responding to. But this doesn't always work.

Here's how it often happens:

Tweet 1: Person B: "@persona, are you up for seeing Wall-E at the Metreon?"
Tweet 2: Person B: "AFK for 15 minutes, got to get dog food."
Tweet 3: Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go. See you at six."

To the Twitter user following Person A, clicking the "in reply to" would make it sound like the pair were off to consume some Kibbles 'N' Bits, as Twitter usually grabs the latest tweet from the person to whom the tweet was sent as the message.

What would have been better is if that 3rd Tweet had read:

Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go see Wall-E. The movie sounds great. I'll see you at six."

Now, if I'm following only half the conversation, I get the idea, even without having to click through, and I won't think you are a huge Alpo fan.

Also, Tweets are read in more places than just Twitter these days. If I had set up a Summize search for "Wall-E", I would have seen Person B's initial tweet, but not the second one, from Person A, unless they put Wall-E in the response. And if I were following Person A on FriendFeed, the tweet with details would make a lot more sense, when jumbled in the rest of their activity.

The idea of writing in full sentences or giving context is to understand the audience for your messages is larger than you realize, and you should write for the followers on the periphery.

Making comments using Disqus

When I make a comment in Disqus, at least five things can happen:

• A comment is added to the originating blog.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the blog owner saying a new comment has published.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the person I am replying to if I am in a thread.
  
• A copy of that Disqus comment is added to my personal Disqus page.
  
• The full copy of that comment goes to aggregators like FriendFeed, Profilactic and SocialThing.

Because the Disqus comments can go in so many places, it is especially important to try and highlight the name of the person I am responding to, give context to the reply and to write in full sentences. This way, the comment, wherever it may be seen, can make sense. When I make a comment in Disqus, I am thinking about the fact it's not just publishing to the blog author and commenter, but to those people who have not yet been part of the conversation. This you can see from my Disqus stream on FriendFeed or my profile on Disqus.

For a good idea of how the world uses Disqus, check FriendFeed's public stream of Disqus comments:

Here's one that has no context:

Svartling:"No sorry. But you can look here: Link"

Here's one that works well:

Svetlana Gladkova: "Very true Shey, I have seen it pretty often that a post from Profy receives, say, 30 likes on FriendFeed and a dozen of comments, and our server stats only shows a dozen of people actually visiting the post to read it and leave a comment on FF (if that is the place they prefer to leave comments). It is annoying when I realize that people only use FF to create some presence for themselves by liking and commenting titles instead of actually consuming the content they pretend to like - I think it is even worse than fragmentation of comments that FF initiates."

As aggregators play an increasing role in how we gather information on the Web, it's now possible for our comments on Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Reader shared items, as well as those from other services, to become part of our lifestream. In addition to Twitter and Disqus, two of the major examples, we should know that every time we say "LOL! I totally agree!" when we could have said, "Wow, thanks for sending me to this YouTube video of Conan O'Brien's Friday monologue. You're right, John McCain is old!", you're losing the opportunity for readers who find you in a different place to be part of the conversation.

Much of the time, one-sided conversations without context are called noise. You can actually reduce noise through carefully crafting the signal around the noise. It takes a little bit extra work, but it's well worth it.

Walking the SEO Balance Beam

Guest Post By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (E-mail / Twitter)

There's a battle brewing, and it's between SEO advocates and content creators who prefer a more organic growth to their sites. On the one side are the SEO abusers who litter poorly written content with an oversaturation of keywords, making content unreadable, and on the other are those who pay no attention to keywords, don't realize that you can add the Page Rank indicator to the Google Toolbar to check the rank of an individual page, and write whatever they want, with no thought to subject focus or search results at all.

There is, however, a fine balance that can be struck between the two sides, and that balance can be achieved with a focus on the reader rather than on the stats. If I had my way, I'd write whatever I wanted with no thought to the dreaded search engines, but if I did that, I probably wouldn't get paid for my work, so I try to keep a constant eye on that balance.

Much like advertising, overuse of SEO techniques is becoming an annoyance to readers, and if someone were to develop a plug-in like AdBlock Plus that could filter out content that was oversaturated with keywords and internal links, people would download it by the thousands, if not millions.

Still not sure what I'm talking about? Let's take a look at this Mahalo page for a spoof video. You'll notice that in a 68-word Guide Note, there are 13 internal links to other Mahalo pages. Some links are split across lines, making it look like even more. While it may look good to a search engine spider, it looks unreadable to the casual visitor. How many users will actually click those links to find more information? How many will instead click out of the page and move onto something more user-friendly?

Walking the balance beam when it comes to SEO involves a common sense approach: keeping the keyword in the URL, title, and text, but not beating the reader over the head with it just to make it more obvious to the search engine spiders. And sure, offer an internal link for something that the reader may want to see for additional information, but don't link to every single possible page on your site in an attempt to plump up your page rank and search engine appearance. Your readers will thank you, and hopefully, send others.

After Slow Start, My iPod Touch Is a Happy 2.0 Camper

As far as dedicated Apple fans go, I think I've had to turn in my "First Class" ID in exchange for a "Second Class" ID ever since the iPhone came out. The reason? I still don't have one, and no matter how many days in a row I wear my Apple logo watch or my Apple logo shirts, it won't make up for the fact the rest of the digerati have moved forward, and yet, I hold on to my two or three-generations old Blackberry.

But my so far steering clear of the iPhone doesn't mean I didn't get the chance to benefit from Apple's releases on Friday. While the reports from Apple Stores across the country poured in about long waits, activation delays and software bugs, I was at home trying to find some way to get my iPod Touch software updated, to benefit from the newly introduced iTunes Application Store. I had jumped the gun on Thursday, purchasing several of the apps, and yet, the 2.0 software package was playing hard to get.

Virtually all of Friday, the 2.0 upgrade for the iPod Touch was out of reach. Apple's Web site said it was a click away, but iTunes would continually fail, saying the upgrade was unavailable, putting me in a seeming infinite loop of futility. iTunes said I had an OS upgrade available, but it wouldn't even take me to the page where I could pay my nominal $9.95 and take my iPod Touch from trailing edge to leading edge.


Alright, I can Upgrade!

But Wait, This is Taking Too Long!

Ack! Failure Again!
But finally, after midnight last night, the trains started to run on time. I downloaded the more than 200 megabytes needed, over a half hour's time, and let my laptop and the iPod Touch spend some quality alone time, while data and settings were backed up and synchronized.

When all was completed, I not only had the 2.0 software, but several new applications for the iPod Touch, both free and premium, including:

• AOL Instant Messenger
  
• Baseball
  
• Facebook
  
• Google Mobile App
  
• MLB.com At Bat
  
• Salesforce Mobile
  
• Twitteriffic
  
• WeatherBug

I also added a handful of games, of course, from the basic SuperPong to Air Hockey, BlackJack, ZEN Pinball, and 300 Bowl.


The upgrade, despite the first day snafu, is absolutely a gem. Having push e-mail to the iPod Touch, and the addition of Twitterrific already has the iPod Touch playing a much more significant role as a communications device, and I'll be setting it up for full Exchange synchronization later today for sure. I'm also looking forward to working with the Salesforce.com tool, as Salesforce.com is one site I use constantly at the office to track leads, opportunities, reports and revenue.

And I can't overstate the geeky fun of the Baseball application. I was checking it out late last night, and what it delivers for any true sports nut is every statistic - ever - from the beginning of professional baseball through the 2007 season. You can browse by team, by year and by player to get all the data you'd need to win trivia games, or just to annoy your neighbors at the ballpark. Used in tandem with the MLB.com At Bat service, which lets you see game highlights on video throughout the contest, and after its completed, and you've got the potential to be a real seamhead as well as being a geek.

As for eventually crossing the chasm and finally getting that elusive iPhone? Trust me, it's tempting. The iPod Touch does a lot for me, but I would love to get it down to one device. But if your work paid for the BlackBerry service on Verizon, wouldn't you stick with that, instead of moving to AT&T and paying out of your own pocket?

Staying Loose Can Help Keep Your Ego In Check

A common complaint I run into in our little bubble of the tech blogosphere is that the most widely known bloggers are ego-driven, and will pull any shenanigan to keep themselves on top. Sometimes, they are accused of making themselves part of the story, if not the story itself, eschewing traditional journalism rules that separate the subject from its author.

While I have personal high expectations, I hope not to convey the same type of "it's about me" nonsense people have seen elsewhere. That's been helped of late by some very silly peers who took the time to mock my seeming omnipresence online with a pair of interesting endeavors - first, a parody site, and second, a room on FriendFeed that parallels the Internet meme of "Chuck Norris Facts".

Unlike other recent skirmishes online that have taken place around parody and satire, these haven't sprung up with ill intent, and I don't have any plans to stop either one, although I think it's best if I leave them be without being all that involved. After all, it's much more fun to watch the nonsense from the sidelines.

LoisGray.com: A Blog for Late Adopters

The satire site, started on Thursday, is called www.loisgray.com, featuring my inverse logo, and billing itself as a "Tennessee Valley Blog for late adopters, technophobes, RSS oblivious, and apple growers. (May also occasionally contain some TV, news, recipes, and politics...)"

Early posts on loisgray.com (which were quite funny) explained the difficult issues of getting online without AOL and using Google to search the Web. But as the article warns, "never click on the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button because that takes you to the internet porn that you hear so much about." Good advice.

Louis Gray Facts (A FriendFeed Room)

Developed out of a silly conversation with Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily, some enterprising FriendFeeders made a room dedicated to what they called "Real, true, verifiable facts about Louis Gray", promising the ability to surpass the commonplace.

Some of my favorites from "Louis Gray Facts"

• "Louis Gray doesn't have a Backspace button on his keyboard. It's humanly impossible for him to make a typo."
  
• “There's a reason Louis Gray isn't on TechMeme more often: it very rarely meets Louis Gray's strict standards.”
  
• “Louis Gray only uses Excel for the pretty charts, Louis Gray crunches all the stats in his head.”

The second I start believing this stuff, I'm in trouble. I'm clearly getting mocked. But I appreciate some good-natured amusement, and it certainly isn't expanding my ego any. That people care enough to take time to pull my chain is fun, but I know where I stand, and it's not at the top. Now go pressure LoisGray.com to post some more. (As if I didn't hear that Lois and Clark nonsense all through elementary school)

I Woke Up to My First Disqus Comment Spam Attack

In the two and a half years I've written on this blog, comment spam has been an occasional problem, but nothing alarming. When I was using Blogger comments with Haloscan, I could moderate and delete when needed. When I used Blogger's native comments, I had the occasional piece of spam, but it was unusual. Now that I'm using Disqus, it's still very rare. But this morning, when I checked my e-mail, and found 94 new messages, I knew something was wrong. I'm simply not that popular.

Sure enough, somebody had broken through.

In less than an hour's time, the poster had added more than 30 comments to Disqus, all on different blog posts, all very old -- a clear example of a blog comment spammer on autopilot.


My In Box this Morning (Click to Enlarge)
And like any good spam these days, its message made very little sense, with a note to "make money" and dozens of lines in Farsi (or Arabic, I'm not an expert).

The good news is that Disqus gives me a way to delete the garbage. Usually, the service will alert me that a comment is flagged as spam, giving me the option to e-mail my desire to "delete" or "approve" the note, but this gibberish made it through the filter entirely. So I had to go to my Disqus dashboard, and delete each entry one by one. There was no way to delete the whole group or delete all by a specific author, as far as I am aware.


I know Wordpress bloggers swear by Aksimet and other solutions. Some even eagerly trumpet the thousands of spam messages blocked. So far, I've never had the need. Are you seeing spam commenting pick up, and if you're using Disqus, how do you handle it?

FriendFeed Friday Tips #6: How To Determine Authorship

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, how to integrate with Google Talk, and how you can bring comments from FriendFeed to your blog. Today, a new wrinkle: determining an item's original source.

At its foundation, FriendFeed is an aggregator of Web activity, from you, and from your friends or peers. Activity on the Web that you aggregate can be of two types: data that you create yourself (blog posts, Tweets, Flickr photos, etc.) and data that you like which others have created (Google Reader shares, YouTube favorites, etc.). Typically, it's fairly easy to distinguish between those pieces you're sharing and those pieces you're creating, but in the last few weeks, there have been some notable errors made, so with more people flocking to the popular service, it's time we had some clarification.

Your FriendFeed stream typically consists of service icons, an active verb, and the service itself. The verbs themselves give away whether you were the author or simply, a fan.

Services Where I am the Content Creator

1. Louis Gray "posted" an entry on louisgray.com.
2. Louis Gray "posted" a message on Twitter.
3. Louis Gray "commented" on a blog post on Disqus.
4. Louis Gray "posted" a message on FriendFeed.
5. Louis Gray "published" photos on Flickr.
6. Louis Gray "updated" their job title on LinkedIn.
7. Louis Gray "had a new status message" on Gmail/Google Talk.

Services Where I am a Fan of the Content

1. Louis Gray "shared" an item on Google Reader.
2. Louis Gray "bookmarked" a page on Del.icio.us.
3. Louis Gray "dugg" a story on Digg.
4. Louis Gray "stumbled upon" a site on StumbleUpon.
5. Louis Gray "favorited" a video on YouTube.
6. Louis Gray "liked" a story on Reddit.
7. Louis Gray "loved" a song on Last.fm.

It seems pretty straight forward. In the first group, I'm posting, commenting, publishing and updating. In the second group, I'm bookmarking, sharing, liking, loving and favoriting. But in the last few weeks, there have been some notable incidents where the groups got confused.

1. Mark Hopkins Reports Sarah Perez Leaving ReadWriteWeb

On Wednesday night, Mashable's Mark Hopkins reported, on his personal blog, that the popular, prolific, Sarah Perez would be leaving blogging monolith ReadWriteWeb for SitePoint. (See the FriendFeed discussion here)


But it wasn't true. In fact, Sarah's former colleague Josh Catone was the one announcing the move to SitePoint. How did Mark get confused? It turned out that Sarah had subscribed to Josh's blog in Google Reader, and shared the item (see that share here on FriendFeed).

Clicking through to the shared item was arguably confusing. The post said it was time to announce where the author would be blogging after ReadWriteWeb, and the sparse Tumblr interface didn't have anyone's name on it. Mark, thinking he was onto a scoop, ran with it. Of course, he could have seen an earlier post where Josh linked to his farewell on RWW, but it didn't happen.


How could this have been avoided? First, it's unlikely Sarah would be sharing an item from her personal blog that wasn't registered with FriendFeed. The item clearly said "shared" not "posted", as outlined above. While many people, including me, will share items from their own blog to Google Reader, for it to show up first as shared before the actual blog item came through is unlikely.

2. Shel Israel Credits Me With Two Posts I Didn't Make

Shel Israel has weathered enough nonsense from the blogosphere over the last year, so this isn't any personal slight at all to bring this up. He's been very nice to me, saying in June that I was "consistently thoughtful, original and accurate". But of late, he's given me too much credit, where it's not due.

On July 5th, he wrote a post on the Google/Viacom decision, and drew largely from a post on Profy from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira. Throughout the first version of the post, he said "Louis went and read the decision several times...", and "thanks to Louis Gray, who took the time to do some digging." While the post has since been updated, it had given me all the credit.


His Tweet on July 5th remains up, as does his amendment.




But the very next day, it happened again.


Shel sent a tweet, saying: "Louis Gray (this time I'm sure it's him) says there are about 75K Friendfeed users http://tinyurl.com/GN000006."

But it wasn't me. Again, I had shared a link in Google Reader to a third-party blog, this time, from User21, written by Yuval Atzmon.

With many blog authors already worried about RSS scraping or not getting attribution for breaking posts, or losing comments to one service or another, it's important to be sure we give credit to where its due. I am not going to stop sharing RSS items to my Google Reader link blog, and I don't think Sarah Perez or the many of us who use these services will. I'm not going to stop favoriting items on YouTube, loving songs on Last.fm, bookmarking blog posts or Digging items. But I do hope the differences are clear. As much fun as it is to be recognized, I don't want to take credit for other people's work, and I'm sure Sarah doesn't want to take any more phone calls from interested blogs looking to hire her. So before you look to FriendFeed to determine who is the original source, look at the active verb, and then, if still not sure, click through to the item and see its origin. It shouldn't be too confusing.

Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

This afternoon, I caught a video broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net, where Corvida had the opportunity to share her story of asking Verizon to drop their relationship with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, in light of his controversial video parodying African American bloggers. While both carried on a strong conversation around the issues of race, bigotry and getting ahead through hard work, their efforts were dwarfed by some of the most hateful, shameful, racist speech I've been exposed to in a very long time.

It's common knowledge that anonymous commenters often fall to the lowest common denominator. The wider the audience, the less respectable the discussion, with YouTube being a perfect example.

Most of the time, the places I engage in social media (and real life) are civil. But as Corvida and Wayne talked about her family's efforts with Verizon, and how black tech bloggers are often stereotyped, with Feldman's video as an example, the Yahoo! Live chat screen filled with filth, with racist words, references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and watermelon, comments on Obama, and discussion of penis sizes.

Essentially, you name the negative stereotypes and hatred that could be spewed against the African American bloggers, and they were there.

I don't want to spread the filth that was said during the chat, but it's worth exposing these purveyors of hatred, to illustrate the nonsense. If only there were a way to break through their anonymity...

There's no question the work was done by a few anonymous malcontents, but it was eye opening to unfortunately be reminded those people are out there, and are willing to share their nonsense in an attempt to intimidate both Wayne and Corvida, in hopes of persuading them to stop. But it didn't work. As Wayne said the issue of Loren Feldman was "a wake-up call for African Americans", today's nonsense was an unfortunate wake-up call for me.

I'm glad both Wayne and Corvida maintained their professional integrity in the face of ridiculous nonsense that could have brought weaker people to tears, but there was absolutely no reason they should have had to put up with that horrible behavior, which, as it was undoubtedly intended to do, made me quite angry.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and with all the advancements we think we've made in Civil Rights, we still have to see this horrible, ridiculous, ignorant junk. I was appalled at what Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through, and I wish I never had to see it again. These people do exist, but they don't deserve a platform, and in this case, there should have been ways to either increase filters, block by IP address or reveal the real names of the trolls.

I am very sorry Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through that in what was otherwise a very engaging disucssion, and I hope this filth doesn't slow any person of any background down for a second.

How Silicon Valley Heavy Are Web 2.0 Consumers?

Last week, I used Google Trends to show that some Web services have largely fallen out of favor, leading to fewer searches over time. The same database also offers some hints as to where people are geographically when searching for these terms, and unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is disproportionally weighted for many technology terms and company names. It's sometimes said that in order to reach the mainstream, Web and software companies need to escape the Silicon Valley bubble, so, according to Google, which ones have jumped?


Click for full-size image.
Let's take a look at a sampling, by no means the superset of Web 2.0:

AOL:

#1 City: New York, NY
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

CNet:

#1 City: Singapore
#1 Bay Area: Pleasanton, CA at #2 overall

Digg:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

eBay:

#1 City: Birmingham, UK
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Facebook:

#1 City: Hailfax, Canada
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Feedburner:

#1 City: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

Firefox:

#1 City: Dortmund, Germany
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #5 overall

Flickr:

#1 City: Pleasanton, CA

FriendFeed:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

GigaOM:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

Google:

#1 City: Manchester, UK
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #8 overall

iTunes:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

LinkedIn :

#1 City: San Jose, CA

Mashable:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

Microsoft:

#1 City: Singapore
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #8 overall

MySpace:

#1 City: Irvine, CA
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Reddit:

#1 City: Austin, TX
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

Seesmic:

#1 City: Paris, France
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

Scoble:

#1 City: Redmond, WA
#1 Bay Area: Santa Clara, CA at #2 overall

Slashdot:

#1 City: Austin, TX
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #4 overall

StumbleUpon:

#1 City: Dublin, Ireland
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

TechCrunch:

#1 City: Santa Clara, CA

Techmeme:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

Technorati:

#1 City: Singapore
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #3 overall

Twitter:

#1 City: Meguro, Japan
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #3 overall

Yahoo!:

#1 City: Bogota, Colombia
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #9 overall

YouTube:

#1 City: Lima, Peru
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Zillow:

#1 City: Renton, WA
#1 Bay Area: Pleasanton, CA at #6 overall

For just about every Web or tech topic, the city of San Francisco, or the San Francisco Bay Area, is represented at a much higher level than any other region, when population is considered. As Google's FAQ states, "for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city." It's no surprise that people in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are looking for Web details more frequently than anywhere else.

What is also interesting is those companies or technologies that broke out of the Silicon Valley bubble. AOL, eBay, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! are not big surprises. In fact, the bigger the name, the more likely they are to get a higher share of searches from somewhere else. As many are eager to see what it takes for a product to break through to "the mainstream" and get out of the geek overload common here, Google Trends can give a little insight as to whether a service has done it.

I didn't name the hundreds and hundreds of Web 2.0 services and companies out there, but Google Trends data is open to all, so run the data yourself at http://google.com/trends and add to the list in the comments.

Related stories:

Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?
On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

FriendFeed's Changing Tapestry of Users, Nine Months In

Ever run into somebody who doesn't like the new crowd, and wishes they could turn back the clock to "the way it used to be" before all the new guys showed up? It's a theme I've seen repeatedly played out from Web forum to Web forum and social network to social network. As I touched on in May in Just Like High School: Your Blogging Clique Will Move, online relationships change amazingly fast, and the environment on a site can be dramatically different in a matter of months, better for some, less so for others. In the nine months I've used the service, I can easily say this is absolutely the case with FriendFeed.

FriendFeed burst on the scene in October of 2007, highlighted in the New York Times, and TechCrunch. I joined two weeks later, and by the end of the month, I had highlighted the service, saying "the site is currently in beta, and ramping up, having been started by a few notable ex-Googlers."

By November, the small team added services that extended it beyond its initial stage as an aggregator. I wrote, "I first became interested in Friendfeed as the service could aggregate friends' Web activity in a single place. But in recent weeks, it's grown to be much more." And by the following month, I made 10 suggestions for the site, more than half of which have already been implemented.

February saw a rollout of statistics that showed who I followed most frequently, and who followed my items. As you can see from the chart, at the time, there was a lot of overlap between who I followed closely and who followed me, largely due to FriendFeed's small base. (This overlap is no longer common)

Even then, the site was still primarily made of friends of the founders, all of whom hailed from Google. Participating with people there at FriendFeed's earliest stages meant often getting some great insight into how Google worked, the stresses and benefits of working at one of the most successful, most secretive companies, and hearing about how some prominent projects got started. Kevin Fox himself even called it "a small beta site filled with a small group of friends". But by mid-February, some of these conversations escaped FriendFeed and gained notice elsewhere, making some become less candid.

On February 25th FriendFeed opened up, and everything changed. The open doors meant new users by the tens of thousands, and not just geeks any more, let alone such a high mix of former Googlers. The exclusivity, closeness and camaraderie some of us early users felt had been eroded. While some retreated away from the new noise, others, like me, embraced it, and engaged with the new crowds. This choice made my feeds especially "noisy", and some of the people I had befriended in FriendFeed's early months quickly unsubscribed. For every Jess Lee, Lilly Irani and Paul Buchheit who remained connected, I saw others, like Dan Egnor and Adam Lasnik, turn away.

Personally, seeing the original users I had engaged with for months unsubscribe as my feeds got more busy was frustrating, but they were supplemented by louder advocates, like Steve Rubel, Thomas Hawk and Robert Scoble, who brought their own perspective into the community. In their wake came a new mix of people focused on blogging and social media. Now, instead of talking about the innards of Google, conversations became very social media-centric, debating FriendFeed's potential or moving away from Twitter. As FriendFeed's numbers began to swell, many became obsessed, as is common in all networks, with the tabulation of stats, gaining followers, and measuring activity. It's something many of us wanted, but something we also knew would have a downside, as the jockeying for position would at times distract from the original goal, of sharing information and activity on the Web with friends.

Now, instead of internal Googlers debating puff pieces on the company, a broader spectrum of bloggers and Web enthusiasts can be found talking trends, technology news, sports and business. Instead of a small clique of acquaintances referring to each other by first name and trading perspective on shared events, you have many people engaging in longer conversations with fellow users where FriendFeed was their first interaction. And while many believe the site, at this phase, is still too heavily overweighted with early adopters and geeks, we can already see change. In late May, a post I had on where people get their sports news got dozens of comments. The site has become a repository for baby announcements and pictures, and silly food concoctions. In effect, it's beginning to resemble the real world, one where people watch sports, eat and have families, outside of their jobs and their computers.

It might have been fun to keep the friend circle small, to talk shop about Google Maps, Google Reader, GMail and Google search strategies. I enjoyed getting to know some of the Googlers a little better at the end of 2007 and beginning of this year, but with them fading into the background and being less prominent, I've met a lot of new voices I never would have found, including the vast majority of "obscure" blogs I've highlighted over the last six months. While some continue to debate whether one service will kill another, or what it will take to bring a product into the mainstream, I can easily say as one of the most visible and active users, the population has changed, away from an eclectic group of uber-engineers to something more recognizable: peers of all backgrounds. It should be interesting to see just what the service looks like by the end of the year, or next June. Could be dramatically different again.

Late-Night Seesmic Desperation Yields Results

Guest Post By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (E-mail / Twitter)

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm not a huge fan of social media video sites. Videos take too much time to watch and slow me down in my daily consumption of the firehose. I'm still sitting on a 14-minute ode to copyright from Duncan Riley that I just can't bring myself to sacrifice 14 minutes of my already over-stuffed day to watch, yet I also can't bring myself to mark it as read.

That being said, when I was fiddling with Seesmic one day, my two-year-old became enthralled with the idea of people talking to her out of my laptop. She's been a long-time fan of iChat for that reason, and, against my usual parental judgment, let her record a video. She's now a bona fide Seesmic addict, begging to post a video nearly every day.

Last night, we put her to bed and were treated to non-stop screaming. At her age, it usually means she's overtired, but in this case, she was terrified after watching Pixar's Monsters Inc. earlier in the evening with her older siblings. To calm her down, I asked her if she wanted to "do a Seesmic" as she calls it, and we recorded a video talking about how she was scared of monsters.

Within a few minutes, she had a reply from Seesmic user robertp with a suggestion he's used with his own kids. She and I went on a video search through YouTube for a video that featured at least one of the voice actors from the movie, and hit the jackpot with a clip of John Goodman appearing on her very favorite show, Sesame Street. She was able to see that Sully was just an animated character voiced by a very friendly looking man who happens to like triangles, and she calmed right down. Of course, she loves getting replies, and had to post one as well, thanking Robert for replying to her "bidee-yo."


I have to take back my previous gripes about social video, however. It works better than anything I've ever tried to get a frightened toddler back to sleep. And after 10 PM, it sure was easier to get help from a virtual stranger than it would have been to phone one of my friends, who were surely already asleep.

The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

I am a strong believer in the power of linking between blogs, and I still go out of my way to link, especially to peers, to smaller blogs, and to developers of services I write about. At one time, I thought being linked to by the most prominent bloggers could have a significant impact on my traffic. And for a short time, it did. But now, I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I downloaded all my visitor logs going back to January of 2006, when I started regularly posting on the blog. While there's no question traffic overall is significantly higher now than it was one year ago or two years ago, the impact that even the biggest of blogs can deliver is lessened. I believe that this is due to a few things:

1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed and others.
   
2. People, especially those who read this site, are relying more on RSS readers, and many have subscribed to so many feeds that they are reading through stories in an effort to clear out their unread items, not clicking the embedded links.
   
3. People who actually read blogs on the site (outside of RSS) are clicking through to respond to the author with comments, rather than viewing links.

This year, thanks to covering some of the hottest topics in the tech blogosphere, I've been lucky enough to have been linked to from some of the most-prominent blogs in the market, including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Scobleizer, MicroPersuasion, Jeremiah Owyang, Mathew Ingram, The Inquisitr, Profy and others. I've also been actively engaged with those flying lower on the radar, including I'm Not Actually a Geek, SheGeeks, Regular Geek (see a theme?) and others.

But looking at my aggregate statistics from the last six months, not even the "big name" linkers drove a lot of traffic, relative to just about every other source. And in some cases, the top blogs that drove traffic were themselves relative unknowns who I've featured in my monthly obscure blog recommendations, themselves often being the beneficiaries of being on Digg or Techmeme.

Top Blog Referrals in First half of 2008:

1. I'm Not Actually a Geek: When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched
   
2. Scobleizer: Loving my FriendFeed
   
3. Regular Geek: Required Reading in Social Media
   
4. ValleyWag: Most bloggers don't deserve any ad revenue, the seven-word version
   
5. TechCrunch: More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Come The Politics. And Here Comes My Rant.
   
6. Micro Persuasion: Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice
   
7. Mathew Ingram: Duncan Riley: Lessons in diplomacy
   
8. WebWare: A Proposal for Twitter: Shut It Down
   
9. ReadWriteweb: Content Is Becoming a Commodity
   
10. Mark Evans: Who's Louis Gray?

Definitely a lot of bigger names here, mixed in with some others. But the most interesting thing is that the highest among these "only" delivered just shy of 500 visitors over the first six months of the year, and the lowest passed less than 100. That doesn't even come close to a single day's worth of Google traffic, or a single day of having a post on Techmeme or Hacker News, let alone Digg.

Instead of blogs driving traffic, we have some more mainstream names, as shown in the below graphic from Google Analytics, highlighting sources for the last 30 days:


In fact, it isn't until the #10 position overall over the last 30 days that you get a total number of visitors that is less than the #1 blog referral over the last 180 days. And in most cases, I've not seen any kind of meaningful traffic from mentions on Mashable or ReadWriteWeb. Back in January, I was a little less than happy that Mashable wasn't giving linkage a lot of prominence, but even now that they are, the impact is extremely small. I got 77 referrals from Mashable on their story around Twitter brand management, and 53 more from a story on my being an early adopter, very insignificant in the large scheme of things.

Now, I'm not saying that this data proves linking is dead. I know links power Google juice, and they enhance Technorati rankings, and if done well, people can find new sources of data, but the ability for even a so-called A-List blogger to deliver a windfall of visits is much less than I had ever expected. It is now more important to be part of the social media sites that drive strong traffic - the Twitters and Techmemes and FriendFeeds and Stumbleupons and Reddits, if traffic is your goal. Those sites, combined with RSS activity in Google Reader and other programs are what will drive traffic. So don't wait around begging for Scoble or Mashable to write you up. It might not have the effect you thought.

As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier

I don't know if my transition from being childless to being a father of two has contributed to my being more aware of my age, but as I get requests to be "friends" on a variety of social networks, from Facebook to Plurk, Identi.ca, Twitter and any other social site of the month, I'm finding myself a bit uneasy when it comes to "friending" young contacts.

On top of the occasional annoyance that youth anywhere from 10 to 15 years younger than me are engaging in the same networks I am, there's just something that has me hesitating every time I get an invitation from a 14 year old or a 20 year old who wants to follow my updates or be connected.

At my old age of 31, were I to be a "real world" friend of any 20 year old girl, people should be asking questions. If I were palling around with some 14 year-old boy geek, they would be asking other questions. Yet, the occasional eyebrow-raising invite hits my e-mail box, and makes me wonder if somebody just might get the wrong idea.

What if I were to take the next step and move beyond a simple friend acceptance on Facebook or Twitter and try to find out more about this person?

For example, take Mashable's Alana Taylor, age 20, or Read Write Web's Corvida Raven, age 20. I'm friends with both on Facebook, and I've had many conversations with Corvida on Google Talk, traded e-mail, and phone calls.

Alana I've never talked to, but going to her personal blog had me feeling like I was getting a bit too much information.

Similarly, a 14-year-old Josh Jenkins asked to follow my updates on Plurk, and I reciprocated. What do I have in common with Josh? And how I do I explain any interest I would have in his updates, or those from 18 year old Ivan B, 19 year old Eric Kerr and 19 year old Jared Eberle?

Thinking about it makes my head hurt a little bit. Alana's Facebook profile says she graduated from high school in 2006, eleven years after I did, and at a point where I'd been married for three years. Josh Jenkins wasn't even born until my junior year in high school. Assuming teenage dalliances, he could be my kid, for crying out loud.

Maybe I'm overthinking it a bit. I know online "friending" and "following" is growing like gangbusters for people in social networks everywhere across age groups. And I know that to many, maybe my age of 31 seems young. But isn't there something a bit creepy about all this?

TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service

The URL shortening service TinyURL was first useful for sending longer URLs to friends over e-mail to avoid line breaks that would often disable links in many e-mail programs.

With the advent and massive growth of SMS and microblogging services, like Twitter, TinyURL and other services like it have become omnipresent, an integral part of sharing blog posts, news, and other items.

In fact, Steve Gillmor of TechCrunch recently wrote, "Who controls TinyURL... controls the high ground in the battle for the Internet platform."

But until Friday, the URL was always a string of gibberish, a simple link to tinyurl.com followed by an indecipherable string of letters and numbers. You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren't being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site.


Now, TinyURL added a new wrinkle, the ability to make a custom alias for any shortened URL you make, making it just as easy for people to read as Web browsers. Now, instead of always showing links to my blog posts that read as http://tinyurl.com/55aml3 or http://tinyurl.com/6px3kc, I could in theory, make them read like: http://tinyurl.com/lg70508 or http://tinyurl.com/tweetdeck.


This might seem like a small update, and it is, but it could make the service more mainstream, especially in the enterprise where slower adopters are more comfortable sharing items that are branded, or in a consistent format. It could also be another step in helping TinyURL compete with smaller URL shortening sites, including Snurl. With the exception of automated TinyURLs generated from TwitterFeed, I'll be trying to make my own custom aliases to links I share via Twitter, E-mail, or FriendFeed.

AssetBar Launches Fanflow for Premium Messaging and Content

One of the major issues hindering the growth of many Web services today is that users are not willing to pay. We don't want to pay for using their service, we don't want to pay for content, and we usually don't want to see or click through ads. Yet, free services, like Twitter, Google Reader, or any other Web activity aggregator have a cost of creating an infrastructure to support user growth. The more popular the service, the more expensive it can be to develop and deploy the underlying technology. And if they don't get it right, outages and slowness are inevitable, as we've seen many times.

So, how can this be solved? Is it possible to try and make money from a Web microblogging and messaging service, when everyone else out there is giving away the store for free? AssetBar is working to find out.


AssetBar first reached my radar about nine months ago, when they were in the process of developing a next-generation RSS feed reader, with all the bells and whistles thought needed to compete with Google Reader. But in the months they worked to release their initial product, a rising number of external services became hooked into Google Reader shared link blogs, and other social aggregation sites, like FriendFeed, debuted, making their social RSS feed reading experience less differentiated and less appealing. Combined with some slowness and an unpolished GUI, the product didn't take off, despite early promise, and it was officially closed last week, even for the small handful of us who kept checking in.

But through this fast failure, the team learned a few things, including the need to build an infrastructure that could scale, and the need, especially, to monetize. And they think they've found a way to monetize content and microblogging, with a service called Fanflow.

Fanflow lets anybody who believes their content has value sell it directly to those who would like to subscribe. Fanflow lets people sell anything, from pictures, to messages, videos, or even MP3s and PDFs directly to paying users, while also maintaining access controls. In its first iteration, Fanflow is targeting those who have "fans", who are willing to pay a premium for content directly from the originator, be they celebrities, sports personalities, or musicians.


As they write in their launch post, The Profit Equation of Twitter-style Messages, today's Twitter users are focused on sending status updates, but their content has not yet been monetized, as Apple has done with iTunes. Fanflow is aiming to separate free messaging from premium messaging, and helping to create an opt-in "fan club" that brings fans together and lets them share and discuss the content with other fans.

Are they on to something? They certainly talk a big game, and they've already got paying customers. As their initial post says:

"Bringing payments and commerce to twitter-style messaging is too large to ignore. You just can’t have mobile + web this close together and ignore the great potent for fans and stars with lightweight commerce. There’s zero doubt that a secure commerce solution would enhance the value of Twitter and chart a path to profitability."

Their first test site is a comic strip called Achewood, which has been running on AssetBar's engine for more than a year.

As creator Israel LHeureux wrote me yesterday, there is a market for paid services over a Twitter-like engine. He writes:

"We started selling premium twitter-style messages a few hours ago, and our first customer literally signed up and paid for a 3 month subscription 2 minutes after we posted the banner... it feels SO FANTASTIC to be able to help fans and stars make some money, and help them connect in new ways."

Assetbar is looking to do more than become a micro-payments engine for Twitter-like services. They talked about being a proxy for Twitter back in February, and their initial attempt at a feed reader amassed 20 million unique assets from 100,000 publishers, but as they write, they're "bored of free", and want to turn the Web on its ear, from relying on cost centers, instead developing a way to leverage their infrastructure and make a digital sales system for anybody making content to make money. And they're not afraid. As they wrote, "It would be a shame to not take a shot at this beast and try for something better than free. I would rather try–and fail hard– than to not try."

We'll be watching.

TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize Integration, Groups

For many, given the up and down status of Twitter, the search functionality of Summize has become a must-have to find conversations, replies, and topics. A new AIR app, debuting today, called TweetDeck, features full integration with Summize, and lets you customize your Twitter experience, through dedicated columns for your feed, your replies, searches, and even the ability to create custom groups of those you follow on Twitter for a micro-feed.

Authored by Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck (available here), could give other AIR options, like Twhirl and Feedalizer some new competition. While I'm not typically a huge fan of AIR apps, I found TweetDeck to offer a great number of customizations that have me keeping it open and on the desktop around the clock.


The TweetDeck Interface (Click for Larger Image)
TweetDeck offers four major columns in which to organize Twitter data: "All Tweets", essentially your friends' timeline, "Replies", showing replies to you, the equivalent of Twitter's replies tab, "Search", which will keep a running search window open for a term you've selected, and "Group", which lets you make a sub-set of those you follow on Twitter, and make a miniature timeline.

Unlike some applications, whose preferred mode is single column, getting me only my Twitter stream, TweetDeck is actually very well built for being used in full-screen mode, of course, running in the background. Now, with one glance, I can see all updates, see all replies, and keep my eye out for keywords. And rather than force me to go out to Summize to search a keyword, TweetDeck has integrated Summize's search capability and also its ability to find replies, although, in version 0.15 beta, released just this morning, Twitter replies now have precedence, should there be duplicates.

You can also, of course, post your own Tweets from within the app, just by hitting the "Tweet" button at the top and entering what you want to say. TweetDeck counts down the number of characters to make sure you don't exceed 140.

The recent strain at Twitter has resulted in the service reducing the number of API calls developers can make to get Twitter updates, and there, TweetDeck has you covered as well, so you learn if there's any slowness, where to lay the blame.

In the bottom right corner, TweetDeck reports: "Twitter Status: Pretty much ok" or "Twitter Status: Rate limit exceeded" when there's a problem. It also provides a status as to when it was last updated, how many tweets were received, and when the next update is expected, polling every couple minutes.

In addition to the integrated search functionality, I was most impressed by the grouping function. I was able to create a group called "Lady Digerati", and could hand-pick which Tweeters would be followed, including @corvida, @sarahintampa, @veronica, @TheMacMommy, @NicoleSimon and others. You could, of course, make your own sub-groups to get a different subset.

While Jesse Stay and others have said Twitter's major issues have decimated the developer community's efforts around Twitter, there are still some looking to innovate, TweetDeck being a good example. Of course, given it's early status, there might be some issues, but it's worth taking a look, as the application has some great potential.

July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle

Near the beginning of each month, I try to highlight five bloggers who have recently caught my eye, who I think you should take a look at, who are offering good insight, especially into the world of tech or social media.

While there's no specific criteria for naming what's well known or what's obscure, each of the blogs mentioned don't get mentioned often alongside so-called A-List bloggers, and rarely, if ever, have made the rarified air of Techmeme. Prior editions can also be found for March, April, May and June.

1) Bob Warfield / SmoothSpan Blog (smoothspan.wordpress.com)

Focus: Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Enterprise
Recent Highlight: The Rule of 10’s Makes the Internet an Early Adopter Amplifier
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Jesse Stay / Stay N' Alive (www.jessestay.com)

Focus: Social Applications, Twitter, Networking
Recent Highlight: Developers Bailing on Twitter
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Franklin Pettit / FPettit.com (www.fpettit.com)

Focus: Microblogging, Firefox and Extensions, Web Applications
Recent Highlight: FriendFeed Temperature Taking
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Nathaniel Payne / NerdFlood (www.nerdflood.com)

Focus: Video Games, Social Media
Recent Highlight: What the hell is Toluu? And does it require a prescription?
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) David Risley / DavidRisley.com (www.davidrisley.com)

Focus: Social Media, Early Adopters, RSS
Recent Highlight: Scoble is Wrong About Blog Comments Being Dead
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Sarah Comes Home, Making Our Family Whole

After a seemingly long ten days of seeing Sarah, the smaller of our twins, in the special care nursery at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital, we had the good fortune to pick her up yesterday morning and take her home, meaning our family of four is now complete. The doctors' concerns as to Sarah's low weight, small appetite and inability to regulate her own temperature were largely alleviated, and we now have the great opportunity to set into a routine of feedings, changings and alternating between our two small children, at least until I head back to work.

I announced Sarah's coming home yesterday on Twitter and shared early photos on FriendFeed, but as I know my last message, saying Matthew had come home alone, had raised some worries by avid readers of this blog, I know the right thing to do is complete the story.


Sarah modeling from home this afternoon.
Both Sarah and Matthew remain quite small. Sarah is about 4 pounds. In fact, with her weight below two kilograms, she wasn't eligible to receive a Hepatitis B vaccination, which will have to wait. And Matthew has only gained one ounce, to 4 pounds, 11 ounces, since he came home a week ago. Together, my wife and I are working on over-feeding both these kids and plumping them up, both for their health, and of course, so that they finally fit in the myriad of cute outfits they've acquired. Surprisingly, even the newborn sizes are too large, as both Sarah and Matthew are practically swimming even in their smallest onesies and caps.

I won't be wholly turning the blog over to family updates in lieu of tech and other news, but I thought it important to let you know Sarah's home, and we're very excited. So far, the kids have been absolutely great. I know there'll be days in the future where I won't think so, but it's exactly what we were always hoping for.

Want to help out? Now that we're a bigger family, we're going to need a bigger car (or two). If you've got experience in this area, help add on to the great FriendFeed conversation on what to do next. There are also rooms there called Babyfeed and Schwag Magnets, where I'll be posting more baby items going forward.

FriendFeed Doubles Share of Comments in 2nd Month Tracking

Last month, in Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?, I reported that comments on blog posts and Twitter post notifications on FriendFeed represented about 40% of the total comments I received on the same number of posts, natively, on louisgray.com, for the month of May.

As June drew to a close, the issue of FriendFeed owning the comments flared up again, with Robert Scoble claiming "blog comments are dead". I can report they're not dead, but for the month, conversations on FriendFeed jumped to more than 78% of the comment activity here. This trend, if it tracks for just one more month, will see that FriendFeed has the majority of my comments.

All told:

* There were 493 comments on the blog.
* There were 254 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 133 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.

On the 38 posts:

* On 1 occasion, no comments were on either site.
* On 2 occasions, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 4 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 31 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.


June's Comment Counts for FriendFeed and LouisGray.com
(Click for Larger Image)

You'll note that the overwhelming majority of posts saw more activity here. So why the jump from May to June? Because, due to the more family-oriented updates, FriendFeed's very real community got engaged. While 14 of my more tech-oriented posts got absolutely no comments, I had 40 responses to my sad news of our dog passing away, 31 on a post saying our twins would be on their way in weeks, and 26 more when they finally showed up. For as much talk as there is at times about sites like this being circular in how they celebrate themselves and their underlying technology, when it comes to people and family, the community there is very real.

Also a change from May were a few discussions that struck around my Tweet updates, rather than waiting for the blog post to arrive. The mioNews story, which so far, has no comments here or my stream, has 22 comments on my Tweet, and there were 39 more around the same for Feedly's arrival.

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

As I noted last month, the data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,543 people following me on FriendFeed, and 2,336 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.

Will FriendFeed grow to the point that I should close down Disqus and rely solely on the service to get me the conversations? Absolutely not. But I've made extra effort to participate and engage, and the result has been a more diversified discussion, wherever it makes sense, without demanding it be here. I'm looking forward to seeing just what these numbers look like at the end of July.

State of the Blog: June 2008 Recap

June 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,389

Total stories published in June: 38
(About 1.3 per day, down from 1.5 in May)

Total stories in June with comments: 37
(97% of all stories, from 43 and 91% in May)

Total comments on June posts: 493, approx. 15 per post.
(From 456 or 9.7 per post and 10.6 per commented post in May)


June statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 788 (up 129)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,212 subscribers (up 181)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 56 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 280 (up 34)

Twitter Followers: 1,257 (Up 148)
FriendFeed Followers: 2,542 (Up 544)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
2nd overall, behind only April '08.

Month over month growth: 12.7%
Year over year growth: 1,074.5%

Top Five Most Visited June Stories (According to Analog)

1. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.
2. The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior
3. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next
4. Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS
5. What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Others receiving votes: Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?, The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah!, Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud, RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares, LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network, and OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah! (57 comments)
2. All Dogs Go To Heaven. For Molly, It Took 18+ Years. (41 comments)
3. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter. (37 comments)
4. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next (34 comments)
5. RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares (27 comments)

June of 2008 was a month I'll never forget, obviously - for reasons much bigger than this blog or any dumb statistics. The month started off sadly with our 18 year-old beagle's passing, and culminated in the arrival of our twins. While some thought the doubling of our family overnight would dramatically impact my ability to keep up on the blog and elsewhere, it hasn't yet happened. There are definitely more distractions, and there will be gaps in publishing, thanks to family obligations, but my goal is to keep going. Should be a fun ride.

In between all the changes to the family, it was a great month, where we saw the debut of Feedly, mioNews, NoiseRiver, twitAbit, Loud3r, OneSpot, and FriendBinder, to name a few. Some you will hear about a lot in the coming months, and some, maybe not so much, but they're all trying to make a name for themselves, and they shared part of their stories here.

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