You Don't Need To Know Where This Rant Was Written

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Location-based services are all the rage. Mobile computing allows people to work from anywhere. Now, with GMail's new location based signature labs feature, people will know where you were working. Wow! This is fantastic! Now, anyone I e-mail will know that I am working from home or even at the beach! If you can not read the sarcasm, then let me tell you that I just do not understand why we need this. Thankfully, I am not alone in this feeling.

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy worries because email one of the few places you can still hide from people.

"Of course you certainly don’t have to use this feature and since it is in Labs you should be pretty determined to share your location with anyone you send emails to in order to activate it. But experience shows that the ideas that are born at Google first will eventually turn into wildly popular and used applications that many people will rely on for whatever purposes they may and this will make it much more difficult to hide behind your e-mail address in the future."

Even ReadWriteWeb's coverage questions why people would want to use it.

"Why would you want to do this? Maybe you want to highlight your jetsetting lifestyle. Maybe you want to remind the recipient that you're in a different time zone. Or you might just want to use it as a mnemonic device for searching sent e-mail based on the location from where it was sent."

Google is obviously making a very big move into location-based services. They recently launched Latitude, their location sharing service. Their are other location sharing services as well. Brightkite and Loopt seem to be the most popular or at least the most hyped. The real question is why do people feel that sharing their location is helpful?

I can understand that people may want to know who is currently in their city or who lives in the same general location, but that information can typically be found through most social networks or the social event and travel sites like Upcoming and Dopplr.

So, why do we need to know who is near at every moment? Outside of the coolness factor, what problem do these services solve? I can understand that UPS may want to know where their trucks are, but that can be solved using basic GPS hardware and applications. What benefit do people really get by knowing where people in their network may be in their town? I just do not get it, but maybe I am just being too practical.

Image by onebutan-iphone
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

There's No Way Twitter Is Worth $250 Million Today

See Also: Twitter Is Worth A Lot More Than $250 Million

In the Web 2.0 space, it would be extremely difficult to find a more-successful, faster-growing service than Twitter, who has carved out a significant niche for itself in the microupdates space, as people from around the world tell you what they're doing, right now, even if you didn't ask. The service has an estimated 6 million active users, and recently surpassed the 1 billion "Tweet" mark, if you count all updates. But the company hasn't yet made a buck in traditional revenues. (Although I can't claim to be privy to their books, and they just might have recognized something somewhere) Word comes this weekend, via TechCrunch and others, that Twitter is embarking on a new funding round that could see the company valued at $250 million. And while I already made the case that Twitter will get its funding, and could end up being worth a lot more than that number in short order, it is pretty easy to also poke holes in that analysis.

Quite simply, now is a very difficult time to attain a high valuation. Venture funding is dropping dramatically, and positive exits for companies are rare. Practically nobody is talking about going public, so to make money, you would have to do it the old fashioned way, through profits. And Twitter has grown its user base rapidly, but has done so on the backs of users who are used to getting something for nothing. We've already seen users revolt when Magpie launched with the possibility of inserting ads in one's tweets, and you could expect to see the user base shudder when being asked to shoulder any of the revenue themselves - so you can practically forget about monthly fees. Given that scenario, site ads and ads inserted in third party applications, like TweetDeck, would have to be one option, but an unattractive one, as the ad market itself is tailing downward.

Additionally, what Twitter does is incredibly basic. It's sole functionality is one that it is easily replicated. You can provide status updates on Facebook, on GMail, on FriendFeed, and the whole process rolls back to AOL instant Messenger, when you would set an "Away" status to say you were "At Lunch" or "In a Meeting". So that's not hard.

A recent post by Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, called Communicating with Code, showcased a prototype offering of FriendFeed that borrowed heavily from the look and feel of Twitter. Given FriendFeed updates include those from Twitter, and then build on with additional services, it can be considered a superset, while Twitter is simply one service of many. So the barrier to entry to compete with Twitter is not that hard, leaving the company's major assets as the community and its developers.

But communities are incredibly fickle. None of Twitter's six million users were using the service five years ago, and maybe, five years from now, they will be doing something else. If people use Twitter for conversation, they can replace that with e-mail, with IM, with FriendFeed, Facebook or other social destinations. I've talked about the five stages of being an early adopter before. One of the final stages is when you grow tired of an environment, and leave, begging your followers to come along. It happens with news groups. It happens with e-mail lists, and it just might happen with social networking tools, including Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and others.

Today, Twitter is among the hottest, fastest-growing brands out there. But no matter how you multiply its current revenue to try and guess at a market capitalization, the answer is still zero. At a time when real brick and mortar businesses are seeing their own valuations decimated, how can a virtual company with a free user base and a low barrier to competition expect to be valued so richly? Whoever does invest should exercise extreme caution.

Is There a Get Out of MobileMe Free Card?

Like any good Apple fanboy, I was among the first to sign up and get a mac.com e-mail address way back in January of 2000. At the time, a person's e-mail address was determined largely by which ISP they were using. I was using @Home broadband, so my e-mail address was louisgray@home.com. Prior to that, I had used Earthlink, AOL, Prodigy, and of course, my Berkeley account when I was in college. While I had also signed up and gotten e-mail addresses with Yahoo!, Netscape and Excite, it was Apple's iTools offering that finally switched me over to a hosted service, and I've been using that address almost exclusively for personal mail, for nearly nine years.

But as we are approaching the annual ritual of renewal, I'm considering the effort needed to pull the plug and jump to GMail. It could be huge.

When Apple's iTools debuted, it was a free service. It was the same kind of e-mail offered by Yahoo! and others, but it, to me, meant something more. With every e-mail I sent, I was telling people my computer platform choice. And when my home.com e-mail disappeared with the evaporation of Excite@Home, I was more than happy to make louisgray@mac.com my permanent address of record.

Of course, as you know, much has changed since 2000.

By 2002, Apple changed its mind about free e-mail, ditching iTools for .Mac, and making users pay $99 for the privilege of keeping the address. I was frustrated, but was able to get in for only $49 as an existing user, and I hoped the iDisk, iCards, iSync and other tools would become valuable. They've pretty much been a dud.

By 2003, I even got my fiancee a .Mac e-mail address. I registered her new e-mail address with my last name as a geeky way to show I was serious. So both of us are @mac.com people. While we were paying for something that was free elsewhere, we knew it stood for more than the basic Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or what have you. Free e-mail usually represented the unwashed masses who would forward chain letters and were plagued with spam.

In 2004, Google set the e-mail world upside down when they launched GMail on April Fool's Day. GMail offered a difference - a free e-mail account that had something like credibility, scads more storage, filters, labels and all sorts of coolness. But even though I have a GMail account (and actually bought it on eBay when invites were scarce), I usually use it for e-mail lists and news monitoring, not much else - still using my Mac.com account for virtually everything.

In 2008, Apple revamped its .Mac service once again, to MobileMe. And the result has been disappointing across the board. I don't even want to touch the Webmail version of the site, which I've seen gobble up sent e-mails, send them multiple times, or even fail to load. The quality is far from what I've grown to expect from Apple, and it's really turned me off to the service. Combined with the availability of GMail and other free services, and I'm strongly considering making the move.

But here's what's stopping me:

Address Books - My e-mail address is in the address books of many people including friends and family and Web connections. I have friends who still call a cell phone number from two years ago and family members for whom just understanding e-mail is a big hurdle.

Services - It's no secret I'm registered on a bajillion networks, from the silly to the professional. I get my financial updates from Wells Fargo, credit cards and Mint.com to the Mac.com account. When Web sites want a e-mail and not a user name, it's the Mac.com account that I use. I don't even want to think about going to every single one of those sites and making a change.

Archives and Search - Virtually all the e-mails with friends, family, acquaintances and services are stored locally on my computer under the Mac account. In fact, Apple's Mail reports I have more than 35,000 messages that have louisgray@mac.com as the main recipient, and nearly 9,000 from me sitting in sent boxes or other folders. If I move to another e-mail service, can I still pipe it in to the same box and not lose a beat? Not sure.

It has gotten to the point that my e-mail address is more difficult to move than a phone number. I know there are better services out there, and Apple's changes in the last year have not installed confidence. I know my wife and I are paying when we don't necessarily have to, but barring some drop-dead simple migration tools, auto-forwarding and some real work across the Web to make changes, I won't be changing any time soon.

Where is my "Get Out of Email Jail Free" card?

Never Leave Your E-mail Again

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

A lot of bloggers are talking about the new GMail Tasks feature. I even had a mini rant on it as well. My opinion was that Google should have partnered or purchased a leader in the task management space, like Remember The Milk. However, comments in several forums have pointed out that RTM may be a bit heavy for people. In addition to that, the GMail Tasks feature is very simple. In my haste, I forgot about the power of simple.

In addition to simple, I overlooked something that could be big. I am not sure how I missed it, because it has even been a news item this week. Google has been preparing GMail to be your new home. Personalized homepages like iGoogle and MyYahoo are useful, but typically they are just another place that the user needs to go to. e-mail is something that people use all day and every day. We have seen the movement slowly with the integration of other frequently used items like GTalk and Google Calendar. The main reason I am shocked that I missed this is because Om Malik reported on this very same thing for Yahoo. In his report, he states that Yahoo is turning their mail application into a platform:

The program is expected to launch in beta relatively soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the Yahoo mail client (Evite is one of the services that is said to be building a nano-app for this new Yahoo Mail-as-a-platform). Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

Obviously, the GMail Tasks announcement was very timely given the earlier reporting of the Yahoo plans. However, both plans point to something bigger. GMail now has contacts, chat, calendar and task integration. Yahoo has had contacts, chat, calendar and task integration for a while as well. Both Yahoo and Google are planning to ensure that you never have to leave your e-mail client. The key to both platforms is that they allow widgets for additional functionality. So, if there is some favorite application that you are missing, there is the possibility for getting application integration without using something like a GreaseMonkey script. However, third party integration is not the real goal of either platform. The real goal is for each provider to easily integration whatever functionality they want as easily as possible.

So, can you spend your entire digital life in your e-mail client? What are the required applications needed for your constant attention?

• E-mail (duh)
• Contact management and extended profiles
• Integrated Calendar and scheduling
• Multi-provider chat client
• Task and To Do list integration
• RSS Reading or a good configurable news interface
• Extensible platform for third party applications like social networks

Obviously, your entire digital life would never fit into one interface without getting cluttered and overwhelming. I did not include applications like FriendFeed, socialmedian or Twitter. Other social media applications like Digg, Mixx and Reddit also do not fit very well. But everything else mentioned is already integrated into either GMail or Yahoo Mail.

So thinking about best of breed tools, what would this all-in-one application look like? First, the GMail interface for e-mail, including the filters and tagging. Neither GMail or Yahoo have good contact management capabilities, so we should look to something like Microsoft Outlooks contacts. All of the calendar offerings are reasonable enough but there does need to be a reliable way to get alarm notifications. For multi-provider chat functionality, just look to Meebo which is the best online service available. For tasks and to do list integration, I prefer Remember The Milk, though many people mentioned they would prefer something more lightweight. RTM does have a GMail widget which probably fits the "lightweight" concerns. Given my technical roots, I would prefer an RSS reader like GReader, while other more normal people may prefer an interface like MyYahoo with selectable news sources in a simple readable interface. The selection of RSS reading or a news interface should be configurable. Lastly, we should not have to depend on GreaseMonkey for extensions to the interface. A simple plugin architecture similar to what MyYahoo or NetVibes have done would suffice.

The real question is, would you actually use something like this? Many companies have been targeting your "one digital home", but nothing has really dominated the space. Do you think Google or Yahoo can pull this together?

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Gmail: Eight Articles With Useful How-Tos, Tips and Tricks

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


Even if I've had past issues with Gmail, I am still a huge Gmail junkie and advocate. I'm always on the hunt for any uselful tips, tricks, HOW-TOs for a better user experience.

I've listed 8 Gmail related articles compiled from the "Goodies Room" on FriendFeed. Even if you're a seasoned Gmail user, every article is filled with Gmail goodness and perhaps like me, you may learn something new. Enjoy!

1. "13 Gmail Extensions for Firefox 3"
2. "5 Gmail Labs Features Everyone Should Try"
3. "Tip: Read Your Mail Without Touching Your Mouse"
4. "Check if Your Gmail is Hacked with Activity Monitor"
5. "Import Your Hotmail Messages into Gmail"
6. "How to Make Your Gmail Contacts as Stand-alone"
7. "Three Solid Gmail Productivity Tips"
8. "Gmail Advanced IMAP Controls"

And as most of you know, Gmail now has auto-reply, dubbed "canned responses."

Do you have any tricks or tips I might have missed? If so, do share!

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Two Features Every Gmail User Must Utilize

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


Reading Search Engine Journal Loren Baker's Gmail horror story brought back my Gmail nightmare.

Way back in 2005, I tried logging into Gmail as usual. But Gmail kept redirecting me to this odd error screen with the message: "Sorry... account maintenance underway" and would not let me sign in. (Above image taken from my 2005 Japanese blog.)

After trying (and failing to log in) for two full days, I contacted gmail-maintenance@google.com, and even posted in Google Groups, but did not receive a resolution or even a response. I tried logging in twice a day, everyday, for four months, and finally my persistence paid off. Out of the blue my access had been restored and I haven't had problems since. But to this day, I still have no idea how or why my account was under maintenance -- for four months.

• Yes, I know GMail is free.
  
• Yes, I know GMail is still in beta.
• Yes, I am aware I should not be complaining... but it's... Google.

Even if it's free and in beta, Google isn't supposed to... break. As embarrassed as I am to admit this, I quickly got over the trauma, and continue to use Gmail. But when Google nightmare stories catch my eye, it brings me back to 2005, and the panic of when I couldn't access my e-mail, compelling me to go out of my way and remind my friends the same thing could happen to them.

Fortunately, Gmail has two great backup features that takes only a few seconds to set-up. My peers were extremely thankful I shared, so hopefully they'll help you too. :)

Two Features Every Gmail user should have enabled:

E-mail forwarding.

I created a backup e-mail account for my main e-mail, and have a copy of everything sent to my inbox to my backup. To set this up:

1. Create a back up e-mail (ie: mye-mailaddress.backup@gmail.com).
2. Settings
3. Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Forwarding -> Foward a copy of incoming mail to "mye-mailaddress.backup@gmail.com" -- or whatever your backup e-mail address is.

Gmail's "Send mail as:"

Gmail enables adding custom 'From' addresses for free. learn more here.
So in case my main e-mail is disabled for one reason or another, I can always send e-mail as my e-mail address from my backup. For free. Pretty neat.

With the above, I have some peace of mind, though I truly hope I will never ever get locked out of my account again. Bonus: check out techradar.com's "40 Brilliant Gmail hints, hacks, and secrets" it may have some more useful tips.

Have any of the nightmare Gmail stories happened to you? Is Gmail your primary e-mail address? Do you have any preventative tips or tricks I don't know?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

GMail and Apple's MobileMe Holding an Outage Contest

Apple's replacement for .Mac, MobileMe, has been roundly mocked for its spotty uptime since rollout last month, drawing the company's CEO, Steve Jobs to apologize for the lack of quality in an internal memo. But even following an internal reorganization and the public thrashing, users, including me, were unable to access their e-mail for a good portion of the afternoon - even as the company's MobileMe Status page shows no updates since the end of July.

Not to be outdone, the most popularly cited alternative to MobileMe, Google's GMail, has also suffered outages this afternoon, locking its many users out of their e-mail, again, including me.


At the beginning of the issues with MobileMe Mail, Apple famously said the outages were only impacting a small 1 percent of users, despite widespread complaints throughout the Web. Today's outage, which Apple reported lasted about a half hour, cited only that "MobileMe members were unable to access MobileMe mail", so that indicates a full outage.

GMail, on the other hand, says, "We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors," without going into detail as to how widespread the issues are. GMail even goes the extra mile to promise "your account data and messages are safe." A discussion sparked by Shey Smith on FriendFeed shows the outages don't appear to have hit everyone.


The 1-2 punch of the outages has made discussion of the downtime the top conversation starters on Twitter, even higher than the Beijing Olympics or the Russia/Georgia skirmish. People must really hate having their e-mail interrupted!

How One Would-be Web Friend Turned Into a Stalker In Months

In advance, my use of the word "stalker" is not intended to belittle any real-life stalking issues that are much more serious.

I tend to view the Web and the interactions I have with people online optimistically, trusting first and dismissing only after repeat offenses through odd comments or bad behavior. As Cyndy's article from Sunday mentioned, there are bad people out there who have troll-like behavior, whose aim it is to disrupt your life, add frustration and intimidate, but those can usually be tossed out like rubbish. But I've had the most odd experience with one individual this year, who would contact me almost every single day, by e-mail, by social networks and by phone, and couldn't be shooed away by any normal social standards. This individual, despite being told I had no interest in their venture, and that I was uncomfortable with their continued outreach, followed me from Facebook to FriendFeed to Twitter to GMail to my cell phone and back, and has been a bizarre thorn in my side for about four months. I thought I'd show you some of their handiwork without giving away who they are, and so you can see how my attempts to be civil gave the individual the wrong idea.

The individual's art of being a borderline Web stalker in this case was to at first appear friendly, and interested in me as an individual or as a future colleague. What started out as a respectful exchange then saw odd cracks in their mental togetherness as I would get one liners that dismissed me and then came crawling back in days, and each time I'd try to end the conversation, one more would come in its place.

This person first started making comments on my blog back in March, and added me as someone to follow on FriendFeed and Twitter soon after. Their comments, at the time, seemed upbeat and usually thoughtful. By May, they reached out on Facebook, trying to start a more direct relationship:

On May 13, I got a note:

"What is a good time for me to call you (or you call me)?"

No big deal, or so I thought. We talked, and they sent follow-on e-mails by Facebook on May 15, 16, 17 (twice). By the 19th, they were probably 80% of the total messages I got on Facebook, since I rarely use the service. The fact I'd given them any attention made them think I was clearly looking to join their team, leading to the following note:

"When we close the initial round of financing, I am interested in interviewing you, if you wish, for our Director of Websites Experience and Operations/SVP position. It pays well into six figures and includes stock options."

I communicated I was flattered, but not interested. On the 20th, I got four more e-mails via Facebook, and on the 21st, I got the same message again. Then, on May 22nd, as one of four more messages that day, a quick note: "I hope all is well."

This was typical, and while not negative, a ploy to get me engaged again.

As I was now in the habit of ignoring most of their Facebook notes, by May 30, I got a message: "Interview is cancelled due to lack of your response." and the next day, a spiteful barb: "I have high standards. I have tried to be helpful to you as well."

So I thought we were done. Guess not. Because the next day, June 1st, I got a note:

"Together we would be stronger."

Ooh. Just past the creep-o-meter. And the next day, regarding my not joining his team and staying solo:

"Do you feel that your go it alone tendency is holding you back (I do, but what you think is what matters)."

The next day:

"I want to work with you because I believe that you are very talented."

And by June 4:

"I hope that all is well. Sometimes I think that you are wrong, and sometimes I think that I am. I can be impatient and a little demanding."

Stupid me, trying to be nice, I responded and offered to help with a side project. My mistake. When I didn't follow up after another e-mail in 24 hours, as I was busy with my real-world job, I got another note...

"I changed my mind about including you."

At this point, I was elated. So I removed them as a friend in Facebook, hoping the email flow would stop. Wrong.

On June 10, they noticed.

"If you apparently, it seems, took me off as a Facebook friend. I only work with very successful people!"

And on the 17th, a cryptic:

"Louis - I was wrong before."

At this point, realizing they weren't going away, I wrote back:

"On what part? Wrong on reaching out, or wrong on turning away. You keep going back and forth, and this constant stream of Facebook items got to be too much. More than 80% of my Facebook e-mail is from you. :-) I want (and wanted) to be supportive for sure, but I wanted to reduce the every day pinging. I thought pulling your Friend status on Facebook would do that, but it didn't. What's happened is that this stopped being collaborative and started looking more like stalking."

A sampling of the Facebook notes from my Mail from this person.
This, in turn, led to more daily e-mails, almost all one-sided. Some were positive, congratulating us on the arrival of twins, or responding to blog posts. And at that point, at the end of June, things seemed to dry up, as they were kicked off Facebook, for adding too many friends. You'd think that'd be the end, but they they turned to GMail, and calling my cell phone (the one on this blog), again, every day.

On July 3 via GMail:

"Louis - We're close to our financing so I may be able to bring you on full time shortly."

On July 4:

"Louis - What will help you reach the next level of course you're doing well already."

And then later that day:

"Louis - I'm not interested in working together anymore."

I said, simply, "Alright - appreciate the update.", hoping that was the end of it.

But two weeks later:

"It was a lack of communication on your part that made me determine that we could not work together. Sometimes, as individuals, we feel that we do not wish to communicate. And there is a place for that. But we need to overcome that also, if you agree, to form higher and more successful connections."

You'd think the continued notes about being done and not working together would be the end, but I started getting phone calls every day.

My cell phone history shows calls on:

• July 23rd at 12:48 p.m.
  
• July 25th at 11:32 a.m.
  
• July 26th at 10:25 a.m.
  
• July 29th at 10:53 a.m.
  
• July 30th at 9:53 a.m.
  
• July 31st at 9:40 a.m.

In between the daily calls, on the 28th, I got a note on GMail again:

"Louis - I hope all is well. Busy, I am sure!"

And again, I said I was uncomfortable with the pursuit:

"Busy for sure. I get your daily phone calls. Appreciate the attention, but I'm still feeling stalked."

But then, Friday, August 1:

"Do you want to join us?"

Followed by another note later that day, from them, no less:

"Are you stalking me? Please do not contact me anymore."

Outstanding, I guess. In the space of about three months, this person sent at least 49 messages on Facebook, and about 20 more on GMail, and called several dozen times. Yet, somehow, despite all the clues that they were no longer interested in communicating, and the other comments complaining that I hadn't responded or responded quickly enough, that I somehow was the stalker and I was the one being asked not contact them any more. And while I could be optimistic and say that this last note means I'll never hear from them again, I have no confidence in that, as every other note saying they were done was followed by more nonsense. And if it hadn't already, I'm sure this post will fire them up again, lucky me.

I made a few mistakes in this process. First, I was open to talking, being friendly with a person who I barely knew. The world of online social networks makes this commonplace. Later, feeling bad for ignoring all their messages, and wanting to not sound like a jerk, I had offered to help on a side-project, when I should have just blocked them outright on Facebook. I should have tried to be less nice from the very beginning and made it clear that under no circumstances was I interested in their project, or joining them. But at this point, I tend to believe any rational decision I would have made would be overrun by their instability, which was made clear by the complete 180s you can see above from message to message. This wasn't an aggressive entrepreneur looking to get a strong staff. It was a individual with borderline obsessive behavior who for whatever reason thought I was a must-recruit.

I've been lucky enough that the overwhelming majority of communications and relationships I've built online have been positive, and I've met some great people. But this months-long incident and the potential for more like it have me hesitant about being too friendly too fast. I'm lucky that I haven't seen the hatred and negativity that some have encountered, and I've not been in fear of any physical harm, but this has gone on too long. Have you ever run into something like this, and how do you get out of it?

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

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, the bookmarklet. and its advanced search capabilities. Today, I thought I'd show you how to connect your Google Talk service to FriendFeed, using your status as a near-substitute for Twitter, only with centralized conversations, and fewer limitations.

Why Use Google Talk Status Updates

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Sync Google Talk With Your FriendFeed

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

1) Go to your FriendFeed settings page.


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


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


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

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

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