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.

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.

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.

Plaxo Pulse Making Strides, But to What End?

In the spirit of unifying comments from disparate services across the Web, Plaxo and Disqus made a strong announcement Tuesday, giving users the ability to have comments made within their lifestreaming service, Plaxo Pulse, to flow back to the original blog. The company's VP of Marketing, John McCrea, eagerly said the addition was a natural response to the discussion a few weeks ago around fractured comments and how many bloggers wanted to maintain a central repository for activity. And it is indeed a good addition, but I still need a big push before I'm on the Plaxo bandwagon.

There's no question Plaxo Pulse has been an interesting development within the service over the last year. But the company's origins, as a business contacts database, similar to LinkedIn, have led to it being seen as a business tool. For me, the contacts I have in Plaxo, thanks to many invites over the years, are largely colleagues, business contacts, or partners - in contrast to more social databases, including Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed, which are comprised of Web peers, casual acquaintances and friends.


Some shared items in the Plaxo Pulse feed

Due to this basic difference, while I have the willingness to share my Digg, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, Google Reader Shared items and other activity on some services, I'm much less likely to do so in Plaxo, and by extension, I would also be uncomfortable offering comments on Plaxo contacts' blog posts, etc.

What Plaxo is asking me to do, by asking me to start streaming my content in Pulse and interact with contacts, is to proverbially mix business with pleasure, in a way that will certainly muddy up how I'm interpreted, as contacts start to see me on a casual, personal level, and not through the usual, more professional routes of communication. While I'm certain the company is under intense pressure to leverage the contact databases they have on their site and become a full-fledged social network, like Facebook, I feel that making a shift of this kind runs contrary to their original intentions, making it extremely difficult to succeed.


Plaxo lets you distinguish between family, friends and work.
This isn't to say Plaxo hasn't considered the problem of making such a dramatic shift in the public eye without losing its existing customer base. No doubt with the issues I brought up in mind, Plaxo has enabled categories of contacts, from "Business" to "Friends" and "Family", making it possible that I could show my personal streaming data only to Friends and not Business contacts, for instance. That's a smart move, one I expect other lifestreaming services to borrow. But not even this granularity solves the basic problem of what the site is known for and what they're now trying to be. Putting wings on a car doesn't make it an airplane.

Just because a business network starts to add social functionality doesn't make it a social network who would be a willing audience for my other activity on the Web. And that goes for LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for showing connections to others, for doing research on companies, and keeping tabs on contacts who change companies. But I wouldn't want to take what is essentially an online resume being viewed by colleagues, recruiters and potential employers, and start to crowd that data with the songs I like, the posts I write, and the stories I Digg. Even if all my comments were kept in a single place, why would I want to start that conversation there anyway?

So the core question exists: Can Plaxo make a successful transition away from acting as a business contacts repository and into a social network with lifestreaming capabilities? It takes more than simple aggregation to become a destination site, and while I respect the efforts that have been made so far, and their optimistic direction, I'm quite tentative to take the plunge. Are we instead moving to one massive database with friends, family and business across all services, or is the delineation I still have in my head as to which site does what still valid?

LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel

How Select Tech Titans Stack Up (Click for larger image)

Last night, LinkedIn rolled out a major upgrade to the professionally-oriented social network and career/recruiting database, adding new company profiles, giving corporations the same kind of dedicated page to their background as their individual employees have had for roughly five years. (Here's mine.) While corporate profiles have been around forever, LinkedIn adds "special sauce" through its large user database, determining where employees come from and leave to, what other companies they are connected to, and who may recently have changed positions or joined the company. Good stuff.

The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out. (See: LinkedIn Is a Paradise for Smart Reporters)

Want the average age of an employee? A good estimate is on LinkedIn. Want to know if there is a high level of turnover, and people don't stay long? LinkedIn has that too. It also can provide hints as to whether a company is so strong that folks aren't leaving at all, or if they are leaving in exodus. And if you peer closely enough, you can see the Silicon Valley carousel, as employees move from company to company in search for the next big thing.

You can see employees move from PayPal to Google, Yahoo! or LinkedIn. You can see Friendster employees went to Yahoo! and Zazzle, or from Napster to Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. And if you think Google is getting all the good employees out there, there's no question they get their share, but so far, it looks like Facebook is getting a lot of new hires, and nobody's leaving - a boomtime for the social networking giant.

Interestingly, due to Apple's tenure, and the company's rising from the ashes with the return of Steve Jobs, you can see employees that once left the company have returned, having never lost the Mac religion. You can also see longer median tenures at the more established companies, like Microsoft and Intel, who also feature an older employee base.

Gender-wise, men dominate LinkedIn data for the tech industry, with between 60% and 70% of all employees at the companies I selected. Could that be the case, or is there an overweighting of men who use LinkedIn, compared to the true employee base? Maybe it's both?

LinkedIn opening up this data will keep company marketeers and PR on the alert to see how their data is being portrayed, just as they should be watching their coverage on Wikipedia, for in this case, it's their employees' collective data that is pushing the details, without a filter, and just maybe, the truth will reveal more than they had ever imagined. I know I'll be spending a lot more time poking around LinkedIn now myself.

How I Found or Started Using A Dozen Web Services

I was talking with a friend the other day about one of the Web services I use on a daily basis. When they asked about how I first learned of the site, I couldn't really remember. Did I get invited? Did I just log in? Did a friend tell me about it? No idea.

So, I thought I'd take a look backward and share how I found out about some things, or what the driving reason was to join others... and maybe you can tell me any interesting stories you have along the same lines.

(Presented in no particular order...)

1) MySpace (www.myspace.com)

I don't use MySpace, per se. I certainly don't have a MySpace page. But in 2005, when I was hosting the Oakland A's themed ANtics here (instead of on PhotoBucket), I saw a lot of traffic from random MySpace pages. Enough folks thought highly enough of the comics to post them in comments or their profile, so I got a dummy login and can now click through to see what people are saying about them. And this... I promise you... is the only way I ever use MySpace.

2) Facebook (www.facebook.com)

Like with MySpace, I avoided Facebook as long as I could. The social network seemed more appropriate for my younger sister, a college student, than it did for me. When Facebook opened up, I still resisted, but I couldn't help being lured in by all the talk of Mario Romero's Feedheads application, which tagged the most popular shared items in Google Reader. I got a Facebook account almost solely to use his application, and then ended up sticking around. I still don't consider myself a major Facebook user, but have gained a good number of "friends" on the site, and play Scrabulous with the family.

3) Feedheads (facebook.com/feedheads)

See #2, basically. Robert Scoble lusted after Mario Romero's excellent application, and his reviews were so glowing that I was willing to join a social network just to get it. The fact that this functionality hasn't yet been written into Google Reader directly still baffles me.

4) Twitter (www.twitter.com)

I first publicly swore I would never use Twitter, and then later, after asking the community's opinion, reversed my stance and joined the service. The honest #1 reason I joined? Because I felt in the wake of my highly visible argument with Mashable, that just maybe the entire event could have been minimized with a few well-placed "tweets" to Mark Hopkins. While we had tagged each other on e-mail, the responsiveness just wasn't as fast as it could have been with Twitter, and that helped me jump the shark, to avoid a recurrence, although admittedly the argument eventually made me a lot more friendly with Mark and the Mashable team than ever would have otherwise.

5) FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com)

It's funny, I can't tell you if I was ever invited to FriendFeed by anyone in particular during their closed beta period. But in a discussion on Robert Scoble's site about Feedheads being his favorite Facebook application, one commenter asked, "What do you think of Friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com), and their Facebook app ?", saying it did even more than Feedheads could. I went back to Facebook and saw the FriendFeed application did exactly as advertised. (Oddly, my Apple Mail tells me I got in on October 17th, the same day I first announced Feedheads getting its new name, while the comment's time stamp is October 18th.)

6) Spokeo (www.spokeo.com)

I had never heard of Spokeo until I met with their VP of Marketing at a Plug and Play tech conference last fall. The demo was enticing enough for me to sign up. (See my initial coverage here) The site's still interesting, and it's been fun to watch their development, but given the lack of interactivity, I've defaulted to FriendFeed for sure.

7) Reddit (www.reddit.com)

A few years ago, I was asked to be emcee for a local talent show. While there was no way I would have even thought of attending, let alone participating, the option to be in control was too much to pass up. I think the same thing happened with Reddit. I'd largely ignored the service, in favor of Digg, but when Reddit allowed for custom Reddits to be built, and MG Siegler of ParisLemon came calling with the idea for an elite Reddit, I jumped on board.

8) ReadBurner (www.readburner.com)

It's almost not fair to post this one, now that Alexander Marktl has taken it down, but I saw some oddities in my referral logs, coming from a server hosted on the Amazon Web service. I clicked through and it was amazing to find this incredible service without a domain name or any Google traction. (See the first story from January 7th here) For two months, ReadBurner shined like the Phoenix, but came crashing down to ash after the developer let real life get in the way.

9) LinkRiver (www.linkriver.com)

Another referral logs hero.

Adam Stiles had been using LinkRiver on his own site for some time, and I had largely ignored it, thinking it was one user's pet project. When overnight, it went from adamstiles.com to linkriver.com, I realized it was ready to hit the big time. A few e-mails later, and I was in touch with Adam to find the real story.

10) RSSMeme (www.rssmeme.com)

After ReadBurner debuted, other services came in the site's wake. None was more excitable than Benjamin Golub, who seemingly overnight crafted a link blog aggregation clone. Not hours after the site had debuted was Golub tweeting about it on Twitter and sending me Direct Message after Direct Message. Eventually, I said "enough" and checked it out. Despite initial rough edges, he's developed the site and grown its link blog base to the point that it is the unquestioned leader here.

11) Yokway! (www.yokway.com)

This was a fun one. Yokway! still isn't out, and won't be for a week or two. But I found a reference to the near-term appearance of Yokway! on one of the tech blogs I read. After I searched Google, and found the site was closed, I did another search on Google's Blog Search, finding one mention of Yokway!, in French, from February 1st. The author helpfully gave a backdoor access port, and a few clicks later I was in and checking out the service, which will be very cool when it debuts for real.

12) Athletics Nation (www.athleticsnation.com)

I include AN here as it's become a major part of my Web experience every spring and summer. I was visiting the Daily Kos Web site one day in early 2005 when Markos Moulitsas casually mentioned Sports Blogs Nation, and the Athletics Nation Web site. I clicked through and was dumbfounded... it was as if a light had been turned on and I openly asked where the site had been all my life. A single site... dedicated to A's baseball, full of knowledgeable fans. It was amazing. I've been an A's fan for 20 years now, and an AN fan for 3. Soon thereafter I became part of the site's editorial team and have contributed stories or comics since mid-2005.

There's no possible way I can dig deep into my e-mail or blog history and find everything. I do know that beyond these dozen services, I joined LinkedIn way back in 2003, on a colleague's recommendation. I was buying computers off eBay back in 1999, and was using PayPal back in 2000 to buy game tickets. Amazon shows me I ordered a set of books in 1999 using the same ID I have now, though I can see e-mails to my mother about the service dating back to 1997. There's also no perfect way to find out when I started using Google Reader or TechMeme, or the first time I ever started reading TechCrunch and Scoble... but sometimes it's worth looking backwards a bit to remember just how we started using these things, even if it now seems like we always have been.

NotchUp Sells You Out, but Nobody's Buying

I can see how a few overzealous marketeers dreamed up the concept of NotchUp, a new career site for casual job seekers who believe themselves to be so good that prospective employers would bid simply for the right to interview them. The thought... "What if we combine the utility of LinkedIn with viral marketing, using spam and a half-baked pyramid scheme? All we have to do is create a site and force companies to pay for interviews! We'll be rich!"

But the idea is ridiculous. After receiving way too many invites to NotchUp in my e-mail box, primarily from casual business acquaintances who I haven't worked with in years, I thought I'd sign in to see what the noise was about, while also pre-emptively blocking future invites. And what I found was absolutely silly.


Some of the NotchUp e-mail invites I hadn't deleted yet...
NotchUp essentially wants you to recreate your LinkedIn profile, even offering to import your LinkedIn contacts, and then set a price for how much you believe a company should pay for the privilege of meeting with your egotistical self. And, if you act fast, you can spam all of your buddies, thereby gaining 10% of their earnings from interviewing companies as a referral bonus for a full year.

But there are some major glaring holes here.

#1: No company that takes itself seriously will pay for your interview

If a company needs to pay you to interview, they probably aren't one you want to join, and if you're willing to interview for the sole purpose of being paid, with no intention of taking the job, they shouldn't want you.

#2: In order to make any money off the process, you'd have to interview a ton, and never take a job. And all that interviewing might cost you the job you already have.

Notchup encourages you to set a price for interviewing between $75 and $5,000. Assuming you set your price at $250, you would have to conduct 200 separate interviews to rake in a $50k salary. And if you interviewed twice a week at that rate, you would be making $2k a month. But.... you wouldn't ever see that kind of money anyway.

I'm special. Pay me big bucks to chat.

#3: The very best way for people to find new jobs these days is through networking.

LinkedIn is a success because of who you know, not how well you write your resume or how well you interview. LinkedIn shows the quickest route between individuals, and NotchUp doesn't even talk about that. Their entire selling point is about you getting rich, not off working, but pretending to be interested in work.

#4: Friends who spam me shouldn't make a red cent.

You think I'm really going to export my 360+ LinkedIn contacts, invite them all to NotchUp, and then sit back as the profits roll in? Hardly. I don't have stars in my eyes thinking all 360 of my contacts will interview once a month at $200 each, and make me a cool $7,200 a month. If you sent me a spam e-mail asking me to join this quasi-pyramid scheme of a program, I'd have to reconsider whether I'd ever hire you on my team in a future capacity.

#5: The economy isn't so red hot that companies are panicking in need for good employees.

With all the talk about market fluctuations and even a recession, it's not as if companies are dying to meet you. I don't know if they want to meet you for free. The best ones, like Google and Facebook, aren't hurting for talent. They get thousands of resumes a day, most of which won't even get a courtesy callback. Maybe this process would have some chance of success in a go-go time of market inefficiency where job applicants were in control, but not now, and not any time soon.

I'm all for checking out the latest and greatest Web services, but NotchUp is a joke looking for a punch line.

See Also:
Center Networks: There Are Great Ideas, There Are Poor Ideas, Then There's NotchUp
Danny Man: NotchUp? Not so much . . .
eWeek: What if Companies Paid to Interview You?

A Big Upgrade Day for Five Social Services

Sometimes, you can go weeks without news, and then seemingly, there's this spike of activity, when the industry snaps out of its temporary slumber and gets coding.

Today, in the space of a few hours, some of my favorite Web services all went into the shop for a tune-up and came out with some intriguing features. Of note, FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Spokeo, Shared Reader and LinkedIn have all made improvements worth highlighting.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn continues to add new features related to who is viewing your profile. I asked LinkedIn back in February to show how often your profile was visited, who did it, and who has similar profiles to yours, and the company is definitely moving in this direction, knocking off the first two in May, and today, interestingly letting you know what other profiles viewers of a specific individual also looked at. (The example on the right came when I viewed FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit.)

The company's official blog tonight hints at even more features of this sort coming, saying, "At LinkedIn, we believe in collective intelligence, and the team that brought you this feature ... is busy working on some even cooler stuff. Stay tuned."

We will, and we're looking forward to it. (My profile is here...)

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, also a good listener, added some great features that let you reduce some of the noise generated from verbose friends, through hiding specific services (like Twitter), muting comments on a specific entry, and, in a new twist, adding the ability to link to a specific item. While this feature was hinted at in a quick note from Paul Buchheit a few weeks ago, it's now been rolled out in style. (See: FriendFeed Options)

FriendFeed is doing a great job of upgrading through what's today still a spartan Google-like interface, managing to get a lot of data without a lot of clutter. The new features come up when you click the "Options" tag next to any item.

I had mentioned that one of my highest recommendations for FriendFeed in "10 Suggestions for FriendFeed" was to add the ability to block updates from specific services. As the blog post says, "does one of your friends Twitter way too often?" Well, the answer is yes. And rather than unsubscribe from that friend, I can just "untweet" them if I so choose.


The level of specificity in the "hiding options" is fantastic, determining that you can block specific services from specific users, and further delineate whether you want to block all such items, or just those without "Comments" or "Likes", which typically split the popular from the unpopular. (See above image)

Spokeo

Spokeo, the friend-focused feeds aggregator, well known for letting you find all the Web services your friends subscribe to and giving you a single point of access for their social network data, got some old media publicity, through Newsweek (See: Friends Under the Microscope), and in a blog post this evening, titled "What's Next?", Harrison hints and improved search features, and expanded privacy settings, which will honor private blog posts and photo albums.

ReadBurner

The day wouldn't be complete without a ReadBurner update. After my post this morning on how to share items to your Google Reader link blog without requiring subscriptions, Alexander Marktl was on the case immediately. As he posted in Share items directly through ReadBurner!, he saw the work-around as a great way to keep populating his fast-growing service.

Shared Reader

Meanwhile, in ReadBurner's wake, Shared Reader is back online and adding new features as well. Shared Reader is duplicating many of ReadBurner's efforts, aggregating the most-shared Google Reader items, but it's also added new pages for "Tags" (See the tag for "ReadBurner" or Twitter), and has added both Digg counts and Del.icio.us counts for every single shared feed item.

Of course, the most popular shared items are also from the same sources you commonly see dominating TechMeme or Digg, so what rises to the top... still rises to the top. Also, Shared Reader has been highlighting the most-active linkblogs, and sources for articles, on the site's front page. So far, Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins of Mashable is #1, and I'm trailing in the #2 position for active link blogging...

The Crunchies 2007: My Voting

According to TechCrunch, more than 82,000 nominations were given for companies and products that best deserve industry recognition for their effort in the past year. They were then whittled down to a final 100 in a wide variety of categories.

Here's how I am voting:

Category: Best technology innovation/achievement:
Vote: Move Networks

Category: Best Bootstrapped Start-up
Vote: FriendFeed

Category: Best New Gadget/Device
Vote: Wii

Category: Best Business Model
Vote: Zazzle

Category: Best Design
Vote: SmugMug

Category: Best Enterprise Start-up
Vote: Zoho

Category: Best Consumer Start-up
Vote: LinkedIn

Category: Best Mobile Start-up
Vote: Twitter

Category: Best International Start-up
Vote: Netvibes

Category: Best User-Generated Content Site
Vote: Facebook

Category: Best Video Site:
Vote: Joost

Category: Best Clean Tech Start-up:
Vote: Tesla Motors

Category: Best Use of Viral Marketing:
Vote: StumbleUpon

Category: Best Time Sink Site:
Vote: Pandora

Category: Most Likely to Make the World a Better Place:
Vote: Kiva

Category: Most Likely to Succeed:
Vote: Wordpress

Category: Best Start-up Founder:
Vote: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Category: Best Start-up CEO:
Vote: Dick Costolo (Feedburner)

Category: Best New Start-up of 2007:
Vote: Tumblr

Category: Best Overall:
Vote: Facebook

Robert Scoble also posted his Crunchies Votes. We agreed on only 7 of the 20 categories.

Sending Me Spam Makes Us Friends, Right?

I don't mind the occasional note from someone I don't know (or know well) asking me to be friends on Facebook, or to connect on LinkedIn. Over time, I've gotten used to people wanting to pad their network stats through finding my e-mail and expecting us to act as if we're the best of character references. After all, with the value of what a "friend" means online going down seemingly by the day, after a while we'll have to find a new name for the "real world" version, and I don't think "BFF" is going to be it.

But now, new social networking sites, or even warmed-over old ones, are starting to fill my e-mail with absolute junk, under the guise of "real world" friends reaching out and begging me to share our similarities - to compare books I like with their own preferences, exchange favorite movie listings, or see if we've traveled to the same countries. In fact, in some cases, these little features or would-be Facebook apps are sometimes masquerading as full networks on their own, when that guise is frivolous.

The first is Plaxo Pulse - who jumped on Google's Open Social bandwagon last week to gain membership in the "Everybody Except Facebook" club. Since the network's roll-out, I've gotten dozen of Plaxo Pulse invites that have me begging to hit "Return to Sender", if only e-mail worked that way. In my opinion, LinkedIn won the business networking challenge years ago, and Plaxo never got past its spammy beginnings, so we're not going to be making that move any time soon.

Now, even more mind-numbingly, I'm starting to get alerts from people joining Shelfari, hoping I can share book rating and reviews, or even join book clubs. News to all who sent me those invites today - no frickin' way. If I wanted to join a group of folks to review books, I'd already be doing it on Amazon.com. Even worse, it looks like the service isn't wired well enough to tell the difference between a small invite list and spamming the planet. As one person wrote me, when I declined his invitation to Shelfari, "This was really embarrassing. I accidentally sent this one to everyone in my address book!"

With so many social networks out there now, it's become a full-time job for some just to keep current, let alone adding more and more services as they debut. Hence the rise of services like FriendFeed and Spokeo. But each of these social networks are chasing a finite number of heavy Internet users, and there's no question you'll see invite fatigue and eventual saturation. Barring the impossible, I've made my preferred selections, and I'm done. So if you really want to be my friend, stop spamming me. If you want to compare books or movie preferences, pick up the telephone and call. My number's on the top right of the blog.

Sunday Evening News and Notes (11/04/2007)

It's been a while since we had one of these, but in the spirit of Jason Calacanis, there's been a number of things over the last few days that have caught my eye, worth noting.

First of all, the very best ways to watch what I'm viewing and liking online are first, to subscribe to my shared Google Reader link blog, and second, to add me as a friend on Friendfeed.com (E-mail me if you still need an invite). Getting linked on Facebook or LinkedIn doesn't hurt either.

If you noticed the cries of horror throughout the blogosphere, the sounds were due to Feedburner and Google's Feedfetcher missing each other again. Across the board, total subscriber counts were halved. I personally saw my readership plummet from 156 to 83. But, I didn't panic, as I knew it was a simple glitch. (Comments: Zoli's Blog, ProBlogger, and Mashable)

Ever stop to think about what our tech world will look like five years from now? Chris Brogan did. Just looking backwards, Blackberry, iPod, iPhone, Firefox, GMail, Facebook... you name it... weren't even around in 2001. In 2011 or 2012, what will that list be looking back to 2007?

More on LinkedIn... they continue to innovate. Fresh off announcing they would be part of Google's OpenSocial, it looks like they are on the verge of announcing a new platform for developers. In fact, earlier this week, Spokeo picked up a new post in their RSS feed called "Announcing the LinkedIn Platform", which doesn't go anywhere. Chris Webb noticed as well and Twittered about it. Mark that as a wait and see...

On another note... my Being Mac. Being Mormon. It's Quite Similar. post was more popular than I had anticipated. My good friends at MacSurfer added it to their list of links last night, and that's sent consistent traffic my way for the past 24 hours, getting hundreds of visits. As mentioned before, however, those readers are simple drive bys and don't often comment. They didn't today either.

LinkedIn Adds Useless "News" Feature

It's one thing to add features that aid users, and quite another for companies to add features that don't add any value, and can be found just about everywhere else. That's why the latest addition to the LinkedIn start page is baffling.

Some time over the last weeks or so, LinkedIn determined that a great addition to the front page would be the integration of news feeds via Google News about my company. Yet for some reason, despite the fact I can get company news from a myriad of other sources: Yahoo! News, Google News, RSS feeds and focused media, LinkedIn has forgotten just why we use the site in the first place - for business networking, not for news collection...

LinkedIn is never going to be my start page when I open my browser, and that extremely valuable front page real estate is absolutely wasted with the addition of company news. (See the right graphic for a blurred version)

In the face of potential competition from Facebook, LinkedIn may be feeling the pressure to continue to innovate, but I think this is absolutely the wrong direction. Leave the news and sports feeds to the portal sites, and stick to what you do best.

If you've really got a ton of engineering time out there to be utilized, please start here:

February 2007: How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
March 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn

UPDATE: It'd be hard to say LinkedIn doesn't listen. This morning, when I checked the site, the news feed was missing, and I haven't heard anybody say that it's still there on their site (and not just removed for me). I don't know if it's a permanent removal, temporary, or just shown to a percentage of visitors, but if it has been yanked, that's very impressive speed. I can confirm multiple visitors from LinkedIn's homebase have read my note.

LinkedIn Is a Paradise for Smart Reporters

Given how much personal information and business relationships are exposed on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, I'm continually surprised that I see so little activity from the news media utilizing the updates each of those services bring. If I were a reporter, I would want to "Link In" to as many potential news sources as I could to companies I found relevant, and I would watch their activity to gain early insight into partnerships, promotions, and comings and goings.

As the use of LinkedIn grows in a wide variety of markets, not just those in technology, one can also gauge company size and growth relative to its peers by the total number of employees using the service. While it's not scientific, as one company's LinkedIn penetration can vary widely from the next, it's a good rule of thumb.

Example:

Current Company = Facebook: 191 records
Current Company = MySpace: 403 records
Current Company = SmugMug: 12 records

If I were a reporter linked in to spokespeople, management or even the PR flacks at a company, I would watch for "Profile Updates" that showed changes in title or responsibility, or if they had left one firm for another. I could see if that person had added a new connection - possibly to a new hire, or signifying a new partnership or customer. I could even do a search to see how often companies showed up as having been where someone had previously worked, but no longer does. If more people formerly worked for a company than are still there, would that signal unrest or a layoff? A good reporter could put two and two together to get the answers.

ValleyWag shows a great example of this, where they found Facebook and Microsoft "making friends" before the companies' announced investment.

Just within my own LinkedIn network, I can get early alerts showing people's changing career path. I've seen people become friends with customers or partners before their announcements hit the press wire. Often, by the time the media gets it, the story has had weeks or months to bake.

Want to know what's going on at the latest company in "stealth mode"? Search for their name, and see who they're hiring. Where did they come from? How many employees do they have? LinkedIn just might have the answers.

In a world where more data is becoming transparent, LinkedIn is a killer resource to gain information on industries, companies and competition. Reporters who figure it out and use it to the best of their ability will be a step ahead of everybody else.

Tech Blog Link Power: Spiky Visitors or Sticky Visitors?

Download the Full-Size Image

While many tech bloggers live for the instant, drug-like satisfaction of hitting the Digg front page, or getting picked up by StumbleUpon or Slashdot, that rush of one-time visitors doesn't last long, and they won't come back again. A Digg visitor is usually one that won't comment, won't bookmark, and won't remember your URL.

Repeat visitors to tech blogs usually aren't forged by traffic spikes from well-known news hubs. Nor are they from search engines. It's a rare blog or Web site that can drive both high levels of both one-time visitors and repeat visitors. In fact, in my experience over the last two years of technology blogging, the very best sources for repeat, engaged visitors are:

1. Robert Scoble / Scobleizer
2. TechMeme
3. My own comments on similarly-focused blogs
4. Links from other B-List Bloggers
5. Shared Link Blogs (such as those from Scoble, Webomatica and others)

In fact, while I don't want to give Robert all the credit here, I have seen his hand in some of my highest-traffic posts. Often, his addition of my posts to his shared link blog or his own blog later leads to other bloggers linking, which pushes my post to TechMeme, in turn, leading to more follow-on posts and residual traffic.

But I can't just sit around and "write for Scoble", hoping he'll throw pixie dust my way. In order to engage with the crowd and encourage return visits, I need to link to others, make comments on other similar blogs, and make tools for engagement, like my RSS feed and MyBlogLog, easily accessible.

Thus, I've broken the Link Power Index into four sections:

1. High spikiness, low stickiness (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Megite, Slashdot)
2. Low spikiness, low stickiness (Google, Facebook, Technorati, Yahoo!)
3. Low spikiness, high stickiness (RSS, word of mouth, comments, LinkedIn, B-List linking)
4. High spikiness, high stickiness (Scobleizer, TechMeme, Shared Link Blogs, MacSurfer)

Last month, "BeachBum" asked, in regards to some of my less-desirable visitors from Google Images, "Do you find that the porn traffic converts or do they just come and go?". The answer is no. None of them convert. Unless I start writing about porn full-time, they're not coming back, and that's okay. While a one-time visitor may have found a keyword sequence on Google that had your blog listed #1 overall, it's unlikely they're your demographic.

In fact, surprisingly, links from B-List and A-List bloggers have been more useful to me than links from more mainstream media. While I was flattered to see coverage of one of September's posts on MSNBC.com and the Houston Chronicle, they didn't drive the traffic of a strong link aggregator, and their visitors, as far as I could tell, were one-offs.

If you want a one-time spike of traffic, go ahead and write to make the front page of Digg (Yuvi Panda's Round 2 analysis of Digg's front page shows how...) or get a group of friends to Stumble your content. But to cultivate readers and engage with the blogging community, you should comment often, share ideas with your peers, and hope somebody with real pull, like Scoble, or MacSurfer, notices your effort.

The above image is how I've interpreted sticky traffic vs. spiky traffic to louisgray.com in the last year-plus. Do you have any comments or insight? Am I off the mark, or have you seen similar behavior? Please let me know, and feel free to use the image yourself. Links back are always appreciated.

Also on this topic: Chris Brogan: Scoble Effect Better Than Digg and Search Engine Land: December 2006 Statistics Review

PlugandPlay Expo Highlight: Spokeo

As far as Web 2.0 companies are concerned, Spokeo isn't the newest one on the block. And the extra time they took to improve their product over the last several months certainly gave them a leg up on those who hadn't yet left the "idea" phase.

The company was profiled on TechCrunch way back in November of 2006, and hit ZDNet this January. But of the companies I talked to at the PlugandPlay Expo today, they were among the few I could see using right away - assuming a few tweaks.


Click to Enlarge Images

Spokeo aims to aggregate data from multiple social networks and blogs in one central location. Targeted at the hard-core Web 2.0 user who has accounts at more than one social network (like MySpace and Friendster), the site gives you a one-stop destination to follow what all your "friends" are saying from all your sites. You can also import your RSS feed subscriptions via OPML, as I did this evening, from Google Reader.

As the company's VP of Marketing, Mital Poddar, illustrated to me, if you have a friend who only updates their blog every 45 days, and then complains that nobody made any comments on their post, most likely because everybody gave up on them publishing, you can ask Spokeo to watch that blog, be notified when they do post, and be up and making comments in minutes. Also, instead of having to log in separately to MySpace, Friendster, Last.fm, Twitter and YouTube, you tell your Web browser to start on Spokeo, and get all the data in one place.

If I were a hard-core social net user, Spokeo would be a great place for me to keep tabs on all my Web friends in their disparate places. As I mentioned before, I recently made Google Reader my go to start page, and if Spokeo could add on top of it with valuable data, a move that way just might make sense. But there are still big gaps. For instance, Spokeo doesn't yet support two of the biggest networks I actually do use - including Facebook and LinkedIn. Mital and I talked about Facebook and LinkedIn at the conference today, so I can only hope those two services will also soon be supported.

And there's always the question of "How will they make money?" As mentioned in my last note, many of the companies, including Spokeo, are looking for advertisers. Mital talked about ad space being available below user profiles, or intermixing sponsored feed items and posts within Spokeo's presentation to users, just as Facebook does today in the News Feed. User growth, targeted ads, and linking context with advertisements would spur revenues beyond where they are today.

As Web 2.0 sites go, Spokeo is easy to use and has a clean interface, with nice Mac-like rounded corners, plenty of icons, and simplified addition of new friends to your "Buddy List", whether they be friends on a social network or a stand-alone Web site. The site enables you to customize the look and feel via multiple themes, and works well on both Safari and Firefox (a plus). However, you can't move sections of the site around, like you can with iGoogle or My Yahoo!, so there's still room to grow. I'll be keeping watch on Spokeo as they continue to enhance their service, and if I end up using it a lot, you'll be sure to hear about it.