FriendBinder Throws Hat In LifeStreaming Ring

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I would like is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

4. To have widgets to display on my blog.

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

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

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

Disqus' Partner Strategy: Is FriendFeed Integration Up Next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Shyftr Responds to Critics, Alters RSS Commenting Strategy

Friday night's discussion around the fragmenting of comments between blogs, FriendFeed and RSS readers grew well beyond what I had expected. While the issue of comments and where they should live, relative to the original blog, has come up before, new entrants to the market, like Shyftr, Plaxo and AssetBar made some uncomfortable about how their full feeds were being utilized. After a few days of some high-profile trashing, as well as some supporting posts from people like Robert Scoble and myself, Shyftr has capitulated, by pulling full feeds where discussions are taking place, while retaining full attribution, in hopes to quell fears about stealing the conversation away from bloggers.

In a post this morning (RSS Feeds, Community, Publishers, and Revisions), Shyftr's founder, Dave Stanley, reiterates the key goal of Shyftr, namely:

"Shyftr was developed to help people find and subscribe to publishers that they otherwise would have never found on their own, through the community and network of friends. Having a community where people can share and discuss the feeds they read helps to facilitate this goal."

But, as mentioned, not everyone liked Shyftr's plan to have full discussion on the full feed, so given some of the feedback, Shyftr has adjusted their approach. Stanley's post shows that for those feeds which enable discussion, Shyftr will no longer show full feeds. He writes:

"We have decided to revise the format around our discussions. We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease."

You can see how this has changed by looking at some of the commented posts within Shyftr, including one from Tony Hung (Fine, I'll Say It: Shyftr Crosses The Line), another from Mashable (Shyftr: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly) and mine from Friday. (Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

I made my opinion clear on Friday that I personally had no problem with what Shyftr was doing. Sarah Perez's initial coverage of Shyftr on ReadWriteWeb (Social Feed Reading With Shyftr) didn't bring up fractured comments as an issue, nor did my coverage back on March 4th. (Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings). Corvida of SheGeeks was the only one to bring up the issue prior to this weekend, that I can tell, in her review: Google Reader Trumps Shyftr.

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I've grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I expect that over time, the RSS community will band together and find a great way to cross-pollenate comments from Readers to bloggers, and all will be one. You can see Nick Halstead's post on the Fav.or.it blog (Fractured Commenting - Again) where he offers Shyftr use of the fav.or.it API to do just that. I don't think we're all that far away from getting this issue solved. Luckily, Shyftr is listening and already making change. The question is, will these changes be enough? If you had issues with Shyftr's approach, let me know what you think about their update.

You can also find me on Shyftr here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray