Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow

This Is How My Social Media Data Flows. I'll Explain.
If you're anything like me, you are constantly creating social data. From your blog posts and your tweets, your photos and videos, bookmarks and status updates, you are creating new information, big and small. You might do so in spurts, or you might be creating new content throughout the day. But with so many different social networks out there, and friends scattered here, there and everywhere, there's always the potential you're not sending the right data to the right place. But if you start by knowing where your data is flowing now, you can make minor adjustments along the way to get the recipe right.

On March 24th, I told Harry McCracken of Technologizer that if I were to provide any Twitter user one piece of advice, it would be: "Always know where your data flows, and participate where it lands."


That simple piece of advice is a major challenge to most people. Whether they don't want to step out of their comfort zone, or they believe they only have time for one social network where they participate, most choose one or two places, while neglecting others. Others simply use services like Ping.fm to send all updates to all places at once, a scattershot process to something that probably deserves fine tuning.

My approach to this problem is to always create content while knowing its impact downstream. Here is what I have chosen to do with my data I am creating.

1. Blog Posts

Blog Posts that I create here at louisgray.com are packaged up by RSS, using FeedBurner, and end up in RSS readers. They also are published in headline form or excerpted, on FriendFeed and Socialmedian. Every day, updates in the last 24 hours are bundled up by e-mail and sent to FeedBlitz.

2. Twitter Activity

My Tweets, when posted, be they notifications of new posts (which I do manually, not automatically) or other content, are posted to Twitter and echoed both to Facebook and to FriendFeed.

3. Native FriendFeed Posts

When I post a new item directly to FriendFeed, it echoes to Twitter, which in turn, updates Facebook. Knowing this, I often author the headline using Twitter language, such as @ signs and hashtags, keeping the headline short. I can then, in FriendFeed, edit the headline to use normal language, optimizing the data for where it is consumed.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

Bookmarks I make on Delicious are shared to FriendFeed, and bounced to Twitter and Facebook. I ensure the headline and the source of the article are displayed, and now truncate that to hit Twitter's character limits.

5. Google Reader shared items

Shares I make in my RSS reader not only stick to the link blog, but they impact FriendFeed, Socialmedian, and the shared item counters, like ReadBurner, RSSmeme and now InFeeds.

6. YouTube Videos and SmugMug Photos

The YouTube and SmugMug activity I do is largely family related, so when it gets imported to FriendFeed, using RSS, it is echoed to Twitter and Facebook (like in #3).

7. FaceBook Status Updates

They stay in Facebook, period, which is why I usually just update it using Twitter.

The reason I list each of these specifically is because each stream of data has a different intent and possibly a different audience. Given much of the content flows through Twitter and FriendFeed now, I make a conscious effort to optimize the data for both services. I also recognize that when I post to both services, I just might receive comments and likes on Facebook, which is happening at an increasing pace.

Thinking about the data flow has an impact on how I behave. It is because of FeedBlitz that I prefer to have more than one post in a 24-hour period. I also know that as I am bookmarking sites that cover articles from this blog that I am getting to reward others who write about the same things I do. I recognize that by tweeting too much I could muddy my Facebook and FriendFeed, and have negative repercussions as a result. I also know that I need to make sure the headlines on my SmugMug photos and YouTube videos make sense once they hit Twitter.

It may seem regimented, but once you think about where your data is flowing, you will find a process that works with you. The good news is that RSS is not dead, despite some beliefs otherwise. In fact, it plays a bigger role than ever in terms of shuttling updates to and from services. I have set up my publishing preferences in this way for me because it matches what I believe to be the right data with its right destinations, and when activity from the community participates, I try to be there as soon as I know it has happened, through close monitoring.

And considering this is essentially my social media creation workflow, you might also be interested in the post I wrote last Spring on my own social media consumption workflow. It hasn't changed much at all since.

RelaunchXing socialmedian

Guest blog post from Jason Goldberg, Chief Product Officer at XING & founder of socialmedian

Hi everyone! Remember me? It has been quite a while since Jason Goldberg or socialmedian graced the blog-o-louisgray ... been waiting until I actually had something interesting to say.

Last year was quite a ride for me and for socialmedian. What started off in January of 2008 as an idea around social-graph-filtered-news rapidly became a website (launched on louisgray.com) that gained a die-hard following amongst the social media early-adopters. socialmedian was also one of the first companies to embrace distributed social media, integrating with Facebook, Twitter, and pioneering news-streaming as a form of life-streaming. Election 2008 propelled socialmedian, growing traffic to the site by 300% thanks to partnerships with the likes of the Washington Post and The Guardian. As it became clearer that socialmedian might have a future as a compliment to a larger network, Louisgray.com predicted an early exit for socialmedian. IMO the coolest part of the socialmedian story in 2008 was building the site with our users, conducting a public dialogue with users on what we should do next, and then each week launching new features based on direct user input. “Tweet what you think we should do next” is the new way to build software.

And then, almost as quickly as we came onto the scene, socialmedian was acquired by XING, Europe's professional networking leader.

The XING acquisition was announced in December 2008 and then closed in February 2009. Since then, I have been working fulltime at XING as the company's Chief Product Officer. And while I’ve surely kept up on Twitter, I haven’t had much time for blogging and also haven’t spent much time pimping socialmedian in the blogosphere as we’ve been very focused on getting some new projects going with XING. XING is really committed to being a leader in the next phase of the evolution of social media and it's really fun to be part of that effort. It's also really cool for me to be working for XING in Hamburg, Germany, and for a brash American social media dude to be impacting and influencing the growth and globalization of a European internet leader.

So, what does all this mean for socialmedian? What happens when a little website like socialmedian gets gobbled up by a XING? Does socialmedian have a future with XING?

One of the key projects I have been working on since I got to XING has been implementing the open-social platform on XING. This will enable XING and its partners to rapidly launch rich applications which enrich the XING user experience by tapping into the social-graph of relationships on XING.

I'm thrilled to announce that 3 months after XING closed the deal to acquire socialmedian, we just went live with two socialmedian-built applications on XING. The first beta testers now have access to the apps, which will distribute virally on XING. One, XING News, is a social news service in German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. It is basically socialmedian on XING, enabling XING members to get news filtered by their XING contacts, share stories of interest, discuss/comment, etc. The second is ASK Xing, which enables XING members to ask questions and get answers from the XING network. Both were built on the open-social framework which we are also launching Monday. We are going to start with these two socialmedian-team-built apps, and then in the following weeks launch several partner applications, of which we have many in testing now.

Click for a Full Size Version of The New XING

Click for a Full Size Version of XING News
As noted, XING News is essentially socialmedian on XING. We've adapted the socialmedian application to the XING environment and enabled it to operate in the German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. In doing so, we've immediately gone from thousands of users for socialmedian per day to millions of users interacting with socialmedian, which is about as cool as it gets when you're in the business of building consumer web apps, like we are! XING News now enables XING members to get the news filtered by their XING contacts. Find out which stories your XING contacts find interesting. Comment and join in discussions...all the social media bells and whistles you would expect, with much more on the way. socialmedian will continue to operate as a standalone website but with XING News, we’ve now taken socialmedian to a whole new level.

Click for a Full Size Version of XING in German

Click for a Full Size Version of Ask XING
I know that most of the readers of LouisGray.com aren’t all that familiar with XING, but I hope you will respect that this Germany-based professional networking leader is making a big social media commitment and that a big pillar of that commitment is from a company that got started here at louisgray.com.

Peace, big love and Auf Wiedersehen!
- Jason Goldberg

Catch more from Jason Goldberg at The socialmedian blog or on Twitter.

TweetDeck's Funding Shows Good Ideas Can Still Attract Good Money

This morning's great news came from TweetDeck author Iain Dodsworth, who managed to start a round of funding that when completed could be as much as $500,000. The popular Twitter application, which has only been around for just six months' time, spent very little time in obscurity, jumping out of the gate and racing to the top of the charts, alongside Thwirl and Twitterific. While most of the headlines in the financial space of late have been filled with doom and gloom, Dodsworth's strike of fortune displays the best apps showing serious momentum can still attract forward-thinking investors.

The story was broken early this morning by Peter Kafka of All Things D. (See: Another Twitter App Funded: TweetDeck Raises an Angel Round. Next Up: A Business Plan) The report says TweetDeck has been downloaded a quarter million times, and hundreds of thousands of tweets are sent from the application each day.

TweetDeck has become practically the only way to logically consume the firehose of Twitter, slicing and dicing the incoming tweets from friends into logical groups, or keeping search terms, replies, and direct messages in their own columns. And TweetDeck's done some smart things since its launch, adding on support for other popular third party services, like TweetShrink, 12 Seconds, and more. As Iain, e-mailed me today, when I sent him a note of congratulations, "Lots in the pipeline now, extremely excited."

In my 2008 recap covering the top 10 new services of the year, I slugged TweetDeck as #4 overall, saying:

"If (Iain) can get enough people to donate or pay for the application, there's no question he could make a full-time living from the resulting revenue. The question is, will people who expect a free service to have 100% uptime spring for the app that gets them there?"

I personally would pay money for TweetDeck today. I am always happy to pay for good software, which is what TweetDeck is. I don't want to forecast what's next for the service, as I do have some insight there, and don't plan to break confidence, but I have personally enjoyed watching the service ramp up following its July debut, which we covered.

See also: The Deal Twitter organizer Tweetdeck scores seed round, where the reporter says:

"(Iain) sent the program to 10 friends for fun and then watched in astonishment as Tweetdeck became an overnight hit, thanks to a glowing review by influential tech blogger Louis Gray who stumbled on it in the word-of-mouth "viral" way of social media."

That's the kind of report I love. Just like our seeing Socialmedian go from debut to sale in less than a year, it's been fun to have a front-row seat to the success. Looking forward to more success for TweetDeck and more successes for innovative startups.

Can One's Subscription Trends Indicate Services' Momentum?

As I've mentioned several times before, I border on pack rat behavior when it comes to my e-mail. I very rarely tend to throw anything away - unless it's clearly spam or advertising from someone I don't know. For whatever reason, I save Twitter direct messages. I save responses to statuses on Facebook. I save receipts from iTunes purchases. And I definitely save e-mail confirmations from services that tell me when somebody has started to follow me online - whether that be on Facebook, Socialmedian, Twitter, FriendFeed, Strands, Disqus, or practically any one of the services I use with regularity. With an extremely active 2008 final and in the books, I thought I'd dust off my nerd-approved calculator and see what the trends looked like. If you're willing to say that a single data point indicates a trend, I found the results very interesting.

For the purpose of this navel inspection, I tracked four numbers, including new subscribers to my RSS feed, to Twitter, FriendFeed, and halfway through the year, Socialmedian. It was FriendFeed, Twitter and Socialmedian that saw the most activity for me in 2008, and cognitively, I thought I could sense when one service was spiking and another plateauing.

See the below graph:

RSS Data via BlogPerfume. Some dates to note: 1) I was a FriendFeed user prior to 2008. 2) I joined Twitter mid-way through January of 2008. 3) Socialmedian introduced the "Newsmaker" feature in mid-July of 2008.

At the end of 2007, I had approximately 200 RSS subscribers, and by the end of 2008, that number was approaching 4,000. Interestingly, the 4,000 to 5,000 number is close enough to the number of followers I ended up with on both Twitter and FriendFeed by the end of 2008, with an undoubted extremely high amount of overlap. But while the services are around the same number now, how they got there tells an interesting story.

Early 2008 was relatively quiet in social media. While MG Siegler and I had joined FriendFeed, and were cajoling others to join it, in beta, the service was lightly used prior to its opening to the public. At the same time, I was enjoying writing about newcomers to the Web, like Assetbar and ReadBurner, and, for the first time, gained notice from some strong Web junkies who helped the site gain visibility and RSS subscribers.

I joined Twitter somewhat reluctantly in January, and its growth was good,but relatively small when compared with FriendFeed's boom, especially from March to May as the service exploded onto the tech scene - including more than 1,000 subscribers in May alone. But as is common with many products, FriendFeed's initial spike settled down into a consistent level after the launch, dropping to a third of its peak, below 400 each month from August to October.

At the same time, Twitter's problems with uptime were reducing my use of the site, and others as well. I saw new followers of less than half April by June, before Twitter too settled in at a level almost equal that of FriendFeed.

In July, Socialmedian added a Newsmaker feature, which saw anywhere from 100 to 300 new followers through the end of the year, not quite the level of Twitter of FriendFeed, but respectable.

After a stable Fall, November and December saw a resurgence across all metrics, likely the result of more posts on louisgray.com, as I added additional writers and expanded the posts' reach. But while FriendFeed's climb was gradual, Twitter has exploded - delivering more than 1,300 new followers in December after almost 700 in November, and January 2009 is on track for even more.

Oh! And I barely mentioned RSS. While my aggregate number was much higher by the end of 2008 than the end of 2007, you can see much of the momentum I had was gained in the first half of this year. It could have been due to their being a limited number of tech geeks in the echo chamber. It could have been due to a higher profile on Techmeme, which decreased significantly in the second half. And it's always possible I overweighted social media versus the blog in the second half of the year once the twins were born. Not sure. But what I do know is that with the broader team in place, we are reaching new people, so if I couldn't get any bigger on my own, now I've got help.

So, navel gazing aside... does this show that FriendFeed's spike and then reduced profile is set to grow further again, as the trend from October shows? Is Twitter breaking into the mainstream, as November and December suggest? And will Socialmedian ever trump either of those two? Are you nuts enough to keep all this data like I have, and have you seen the same trends?

10 Ways to Maximize Your Google Reader Link Blog

I've been sharing articles I've read in Google Reader for the better part of two years. I don't know exactly when I started, but I'm fairly sure I'm nowhere near finished. And while I admittedly started sharing to a link blog without having a clear goal in mind, I'm finding that this massive shared items repository is becoming an incredibly versatile information hub that benefits me, the authors of articles I've shared, and the consumers, be they friends in Google Reader, or in many other locations.

I believe that while Google Reader has grown in visibility, arguably becoming the most popular RSS reader on the Web, the utility of shared link blogs is less known. Here are ten ways you can maximize your Google Reader link blog - most of which I'm doing, and probably didn't anticipate when I first started sharing items into the ether.

1. Act as a trusted information filter.

Regardless of how fast a reader you are, there is no possible way you can read every single news source and blog on the Web. Neither can anybody you know. And regardless of how closely your feed match percentage is on Toluu, there are feeds you read that your friends don't. By sharing the best items of what you read every day from Google Reader, you are hand-selecting the best of the Web and "endorsing" those items to your link blog subscribers.

Do so with some regularity, and you might be surprised as to how people come to rely on your manual intervention and news discovery. I first became cognizant of this in February when "SeekGround" reported "I discovered that I had shared more of louisgray's shared items than anyone else's in the last 30 days". In May, Duff's Device similarly wrote: "I saw another article that I received from Louis Gray'sGoogle Reader Shared Items again. Thanks for keeping on top of the world for me Louis. :-)"

As of tonight, ReadBurner reports I have nearly 8,500 articles shared on my Google Reader link blog. While there are others who have shared more total items, I know that I have shared those items I believe are most interesting to me, and others I believe are following along.

2. Share your items with Google Friends.

Though Google hasn't nailed the "what is a friend" issue, you can add friends through GMail and Google Talk. If they are also Google Reader users, and share items, you can opt in to seeing their Google Reader shares, and they can see yours. If they subscribe to your shared items, your shares are mixed in with all the other feeds on their list. Of course, if you don't want to see their lists, click "Hide" next to their name, or "Show" to bring them back.



3. Embed your Google Reader link blog to your own blog or Web site.

When I first started sharing to my link blog, I had this odd feeling I was sharing posts and nobody knew about it. After all, the link blog URL isn't the most intuitive on the planet. But you can embed a widget on your blog to display a subset of your recently shared items, and visitors to your blog can click out to items you've shared.

4. Add your Google Reader link blog to your Google profile

Your Google profile is a fairly blank slate, for you to add or delete as you please. While it's very common for people to add links to their Twitter page, their blog or their LinkedIn profile, I'd suggest it's just as important to add your link blog to the page. Mine is here.

5. Share items to Facebook, FriendFeed or Socialmedian.

2008 was the year of personal news aggregators, which took updates on your services from around the Web and put them all in one place. While this trends was best exemplified by FriendFeed, Facebook also offers the option to feature your Google Reader shared items, and Socialmedian will pull them in as news, going so far as to check the shares by topic to place them in the right categories.

You can see my Google Reader shares on FriendFeed here. And to avoid duplication of items, if I share items from louisgray.com, I manually delete them from FriendFeed. Takes seconds, and reduces the noise. (My Socialmedian page is here...)

6. Add your share count to ReadBurner, RSSmeme or Feedheads.

Feedheads, the pioneer in tabulating popular Google Reader share counts, was joined by ReadBurner and later RSSmeme, in early 2008. As some people are turning to ReadBurner and RSSmeme as a democratically sorted Digg or Techmeme, sharing items you like will add your vote to the list.

Be sure to add your feed to ReadBurner here.

7. Replace your bookmarks with Google Reader shared items.

At the end of the year, I said that RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks. As I thought about it more, it's my Google Reader Link blog that is essentially my rolling bookmark list, highlighting those items which are the best, and which I will want to return to. While Delicious is also a good Web-based bookmarking system, the link blog is a good way to find recent items of interest.

8. Expand the visibility of lesser-known sources.

Sometimes, I get in a routine of reading my RSS feeds and then sharing, without thinking about how the shares are effecting the downstream author. But I've gotten e-mails saying the shares have generated attention beyond what I expected. Last month, one blogger wrote, "When you pop an article on (the linkblog), I'll get 60-70 hits and get pumped to the first page, that is pretty averge for the support you give me." Earlier this week I got a similar e-mail from a second author, who wrote an e-mail titled "Thanks yet again", adding "Your Google Reader share really lit up that discussion."

In a tech blogging world where there are so many different sources of news, and so many people writing about the exact same thing, you can make a difference by choosing lesser-known sources of news, and highlighting the best content, not just the loudest. I've tried to share items from those who have done original reporting or are thinking differently than the echo chamber, and it in turn can deliver greater visibility.

9. Use your linkblog as your "to comment" list.

As part of my online new year's resolution, I said I would be making more time to comment on other blogs through the year. But as you know, my full-time job doesn't work all too well with browsing the Web and making comments throughout the day. Instead, I've found I'll go back to my own Google Reader linkblog, and open the items in a new tab, and go through to add comments one by one, left to right, so I've given the authors feedback and participated.

10. Create your own leaderboard of news sources.

Google Reader tracks statistics on what your most-shared news sources are over the last 30 days, which can report on who you've found most interesting in the last month. Given each person's individual tastes, the results can be very different than more public leaderboards which tend to feature those who are most popular and have a deeper subscription base. While my own link blog does tend to feature popular sites like TechCrunch, Scobleizer and ReadWriteWeb, I can see that I've also shared a high number from lesser-known sites, including TechWag, Regular Geek, The Future Buzz, Andy DeSoto and Chuqui 3.0. And if you're stat-oriented like I am, you can check in and see how this changes over time. (See my blog leaderboard from last July)

So... are you sharing your Google Reader items? I am. You can find mine here. For the betterment of the community, it'd be great to see your shared item links in the comments.

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DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner.

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2008 Internal Year In Review (Month by Month)

At the end of the year, it's a tradition for many sites and blogs to pick "best of" lists, offer predictions, show their best posts and the like. At louisgray.com, we're no different. In fact, we're probably worse than most when it comes to liking to sort, use statistics, find trends and display highlights. I thought it'd be fun (at least for me) to do a quick run through the year soon to be completed, looking at how things progressed - the good, bad, interesting, and not so much. Below is a quick summary, somewhat, of how each month went, including the top stories and new companies and people we encountered along the way.

Question is... what's the most common word in this wrap-up? My guess? The word "debuted." See why below.

January

In January, I said I didn't care much for the year's MacWorld Expo, discovered ReadBurner in stealth mode, which led to the introduction of Shared Reader... considered joining Twitter... got in a quick tiff with Mashable... actually joined Twitter... hit the Techmeme leaderboard for the first time (which was short lived)... noted the passing of church president Gordon B. Hinckley... saw the launch of AssetBar, and became part of the Elite Tech News Reddit. And at the end of the month, Rating Burner debuted.

February

February saw Microsoft and Yahoo! start their mating dance, as I admitted rooting for the underdog, but voted for Hillary anyway... saw RSSmeme debut to compete with ReadBurner, the introduction of LinkRiver... I introduced the LouisGray.com logo and revamped the site... and revealed my wife and I were expecting twins. I noted issues with FeedBurner, and saw FriendFeed open up to the public with Series A funding. At the end of the month, I met Chris Brogan, and wasn't so impressed with MyBlogLog's lifestream.

March

In March, we discovered Yokway! incubating in alpha before launch, saw the debut of Mergelab and Shyftr, but in the bad news camp, ReadBurner shut down (temporarily). To welcome new readers, I gave a history of the site... and started highlighting new blogs for the first time. Meanwhile FriendFeed started to take off, even if I said Duncan Riley didn't get it right away. I also managed to smash my laptop at Spring Training. Later in the month, Toluu debuted.

April

In April, we looked at changes on the Techmeme leaderboard... I was not impressed with Favorit... Yuvi put me under the microscope... BlogRize and Socialmedian debuted on back to back days... and we first discussed fractured conversations. Alphatwitter debuted... ReadBurner relaunched... and I made no friends in the blogosphere by ranting against ads. FriendFeedMachine was introduced... I went to Web 2.0 Expo... where I learned about the Profy platform... and then ticked everyone off on Twitter by making up a "Noise Ratio". I later added Disqus comments and discussed my social media consumption workflow.

May

In May, the StatBot launched, but Mergelab closed down while still in beta. I noted Socialmedian's early growth... and Duncan Riley's first week at the Inquisitr.... started the weekly FriendFeed Friday tip series... saw LetsProve start up... and the introduction of FFToGo, which took FriendFeed mobile. I also added Lijit to my blog... and noted who first brought stories to Techmeme. The end of the month saw TweetSmart launch.

June

In June, we talked a lot about comments. Were they conversations or replies... and was FriendFeed stealing them away... I slammed TiVo for having no social media presence... saw FriendBinder debut... our 18 year old beagle passed away... we discussed five stages of early adopter behavior... I praised Disqus... and saw the debuts of Feedly, OneSpot and Loud3r... Sarah and Matthew were born... and I told you my expectations... Browzmi launched... as did NoiseRiver and MioNews, as new interfaces to FriendFeed.

July

By July 1, Sarah came home from the hospital... TweetDeck was introduced... and AssetBar relaunched with FanFlows... we encountered blatant racism online... Ballhype was purchased... and I mocked the title of social media expert. Twitter started limiting API requests... as Gnip went live... Socialmedian gave me an iPhone... Identica rose as an alternative to Twitter as the site found new ways to fail... Cuil was a dud... I joined SmugMug... and Matthew lost his job at CenterNetworks.

August

In August, I told you about a creepy would-be online stalker... California banned driving without a hands-free cell phone... the twins started slowing me down online... Feedheads launched on the Web... I joined ReadBurner as an advisor... YooPlace launched... we discussed why the embargo process was broken... rumors flew the church would buy Facebook... Strands debuted, as did BackType.

September

September saw the introduction of Google Chrome... FriendFeed rolled out lists... i.TV came to the iPhone... the falling stock market started to hit my wallet... Sitemeter laid an egg... I went to BlogWorld Expo... and I thought Chi.mp was a waste of time...

October

In October, I noted Obama's widespread support at tech companies... saw Spokeo give up on Web 2.0... started e-mailing RSS items... forecast the future of social media... and saw FriendFeed launch real-time updates. Guest posts gained momentum... and my kids got embedded in social media early... Twine launched... we discussed Prop 8... as Socialmedian made an election news hub.

November

November brought us instant streaming films via Netflix... Strands went mobile... I started using Wakoopa... Twitter promised (and failed) to open the firehose by Thanksgiving... I said to be a "real friend" to social networking friends... saw the Twitterank controversy... participated in an emerging media panel... watched Glue launch... saw the MotrinMoms issue explode... SocialToo added surveys... I kept losing money... slept next to the iPhone for comfort... and enjoyed new apps for the device.

December

I started off December annoyed at TiVo and Amazon... but still loved the iPhone... talked about Secret Santas and Amazon Wish Lists... PeopleBrowsr debuted... as did Kallow... ESPN.com introduced a beta version... and my wife started a family-oriented blog... Netflix came to my TiVo... BlogRize returned... I picked my top ten 2008 debuts... Twitter kept growing like mad... but last year's predictions sucked... TwitOrFit launched... Steve Jobs bailed from MacWorld... Gawkk opened up... Embargoes flared up again... Socialmedian was acquired... I got a new TiVo XL... promised to get better... Scrapplet debuted as did TechFuga... I even retold the Christmas Story through Twitter...

And... that just about catches you up. So if you're just visiting the site for the first time, started late, or missed a few months, you probably have a pretty good idea of how the year went, what we wrote about, and where we went. All in all, it reminds me of a lot of stories of months past, and services that need a revisit. It also tells me we had a pretty busy year. Should be interesting to see if 2009 is more crazy, or if I burn out. My money is on... "more crazy" - the exception being I don't plan on having two more kids next year. So... did I leave anything out?

From Zero to Xing: Socialmedian's 2008 Drive to Acquisition

As has been widely reported, Socialmedian was acquired by Xing today for a purchase price of $7.5 million, an excellent return for the bootstrapped startup which had raised less than $1 million in funding. The success of Socialmedian has significant impact for me personally, as it is the first company to have debuted here on this blog, and see a successful exit. I see it as a real proofpoint for being invested in a story, rather than doing the typical "hit and run" announcement-fed, PR-driven stories typical on many other blogs who are driven by the day's news.

On April 8, 2008 (my birthday), we first told the story of Socialmedian: (Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha).

While other sites around the Web slowly picked up on the story, few were as invested as I was in not just reporting on the site, but using it in a big way. In a month's time, it was clear to me that the site was getting significant momentum, which I reported on May 13: (SocialMedian Is Growing Rapidly In First Month's Availability).

Later in the month, on May 29, in response to a comment from Robert Seidman, who said, "You could call deadpool on stuff like Social Median and Toluu right now," I said "Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget", and that we don't always know the full story behind a site, and their goals.

By the end of May Socialmedian underwent a redesign and got even more useful.

And as the site grew, for whatever reason, I maintained a higher than anticipated presence, trailing only the founder, Jason Goldberg, in terms of people following my updates. Surprisingly, Goldberg and team ran a contest that delivered a new iPhone to the two most popular non-employees on the site. Turns out I won, which I found out, as my bleary eyes checked out Twitter sometime around 5 a.m. during a kid's feeding when they were a month old. (See: It Appears I Won an iPhone 3G from Social Median!)

That was cool, but I was just as positive on the site as before - no more, no less, and I could see them continue to pound forward.

By the end of July, Socialmedian got out of invite mode, and opened in full beta. (See: SocialMedian Opens Up and Launches Beta). The expanded activity on the site had me noticing how many comments were taking place on the site, which I wrote up in early August: Hey Bloggers, We're Discussing Your Posts At Social Median!

And the company kept adding updates. On August 30th, I noted they Integrated With Google Reader for News Discovery, and by September 4, they expanded again, tagging on a feature they called "News Streaming".

The growth had guest poster Rob Diana say shortly afterward, that the Increased Activity Streams Boost Social Median's Chances.

On September 22, Socialmedian added the ability to alert users to times they were mentioned and extend to Twitter, with the launch of Replize. (Social Median Takes Guesswork Out of Online Mentions With Replize)

Not living in a bubble, Socialmedian surveyed its users to see their preferences, and on October 3rd, they delivered results that not only showed users' activity but where else they got their news. At the same time, the service was showing significant traffic growth across the board. (See: Social Median Surveys Early Adopters' News, Tech Preferences)

On October 7, Socialmedian introduced the ability to both like and dislike items.

On October 17, Jason pulled the covers back a bit and showed how they were able to continue to innovate while staying small: (Social Median Stares Downturn In the Face By Staying Small)

As a news site, Socialmedian, like all the rest, got sucked into the election in a big way. On October 29, a week before the vote, they launched a dedicated election news hub.

But while Socialmedian grew users and gained visibility, they didn't avoid controversy. Like other services, the breaking away of comments and original posts raised the ire of CenterNetworks' Allen Stern and others. We asked, in November, "Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?"

And just last week, in wrapping up what I believed were the top 10 new Web services that came to light in 2008, Socialmedian was way up on the list, at #2, behind only Twitter Search, formerly Summize. I knew Socialmedian was hot, and said I expected an acquisition by the first quarter of 2009. And it came very, very quickly, with this morning's news, further validating Socialmedian's model and differentiation from the many different services out there.

It has been exciting to have a front row seat to see Socialmedian develop all year long. Socialmedian is one of those sites this year that hit a sweet spot for me, both as a blogger and as a user, who found critical value in what Jason and his team were doing. That they have found success is fantastic, and something I hope will push the many other services we've worked with this year to keep going.

But as the above recap shows, they didn't get here by launching and waiting for millions of users. They worked hard and released early and often, and today's announcement is the result of their consistent efforts.

So who wants to launch on louisgray.com in 2009 and be part of a similar story? Let me know.

10 Top New Web Services of 2008 and Their 2009 Forecast

2008 has been both an exciting year and a very trying year for the world of Web innovation.

When the year kicked off, we were still in the middle of Web 2.0 fever. We were just two months removed from Microsoft having invested $240 million in Facebook at a stratospheric $15 billion. In the first week of January, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang made his first appearance at CES and promised the company was "ready and excited". By mid-month, Pownce launched to the public to offer an alternative to Twitter. And by the end of January, Twitter crashed hard - for the first time.

It turns out that Twitter's crash might have been the canary in the coal mine. Even looking at January 2008, and considering what has happened to Facebook's valuation, Jerry Yang's reign as CEO of Yahoo!, and the eventual extinguishing of Pownce in the ensuing months and it almost seems unbelievable. Of course, as you know, Twitter crashed again and again throughout the year, and in parallel, so did the fortunes of many Web companies, from the smallest startup looking to raise funds, to the monoliths, including Google and Yahoo!, who have had to rapidly make changes as the economy changes under their feet. Meanwhile, as business conditions deteriorated, the public markets were closed and valuations were decimated.

But before the doom and gloom hit, a good number of Web services pushed and shoved their way out the door in the first half of the year, and look to be here for at least the near term. Even as the second half of the year saw a drying up in new services and very little innovation, as we start to look toward 2009, there are new brands that many of us know were but a glimpse in an engineer's eye when 2007 finished and 2008 took over. And while no list is complete, here are some of the best that can claim 2008 as their birth date. I expect this will miss quite a few, so please make sure to nominate your favorites and tell me why I'm wrong!

1) Summize (Twitter Search)

Search is still king, and real-time search is having a huge impact on the way people find news, share ideas, and see trends. Summize built its business around being a search engine for Twitter, and soon became more stable, and theoretically, more useful, than Twitter itself. The Twitter team, in desperate need for more engineering help, acquired the company and absorbed into the microblogging service.

Expected Exit: Acquired - Already Complete

Twitter's acquisition of Summize was a smart move, considering how real-time search is becoming critical in times of breaking news. Many, including myself, are turning to Twitter search instead of Google, Yahoo! and the traditional news wires to hear reports from people on the ground, unfiltered.

2) Socialmedian

While many different sites have conquered the online activities aggregation space, Socialmedian went about the process in a different way than all the others, letting people not only follow friends and pipe in their shared content from a wide variety of 3rd party sites, but organized it in terms of categories. The category feature was so successful, CEO Jason Goldberg has been able to showcase specific events, including the 2008 election, and the financial crisis, and make Socialmedian a go to site to interact with "newsmakers". The site, starting from scratch in the Spring, has risen up to challenge FriendFeed, Digg and other sites for social news - and continues to grow at a rapid clip.

Expected Exit: Acquisition by First Quarter of 2009

With Goldberg and team having raised so little capital to get the product off the ground, and having kept costs very low, with the development team in India, the bootstrapped Socialmedian looks to be a ripe target for an acquisition, in my opinion. Without strong revenues and the public markets the way they are, Socialmedian would be smart to find a strong content or media partner, to join forces and enable the service to continue its growth.

3) BackType

Technorati and Google Blog Search, as well as many other directories and search engines have typically focused on the blog as the central nervous system for their offering. But as many would agree, it is the comments and conversation, no matter where they are, that have real meaning to blog authors and participants. While everyone was busy trying to see who could land on the Techmeme leaderboard or break new ceilings in Technorati Authority, BackType debuted a site that tracks comments by individual, lets you follow individual commenters across a wide variety of sites, be alerted when comments with keywords take place, and see charts that display keywords' momentum.

Expected Exit: Acquisition in Second Half of 2009

The BackType founders are working together on their second startup, having abandoned the first when it didn't gain traction. While BackType doesn't yet have an amazing market presence, they have forged a unique foothold that so far looks unchallenged. With any luck, I would expect the BackType team to deliver more enterprise-capable brand and identity management tools that would enable the service to gain revenue and exposure, letting the service to remain independent through the majority of 2009 before finding a place within WordPress, Six Apart, Google or Twitter.

4) TweetDeck

TweetDeck isn't a Web service, but this Adobe AIR application introduced new functions to Twitter usage that changed the game in terms of how people use the service. By introducing a multi-columned app that features groups, integrated search, direct messaging, and replies functionality, many are swearing by TweetDeck, and it looks like it may soon overtake Twhirl as the most popular Twitter application. Busy Twitter addicts including Guy Kawasaki swear by it.

Expected Exit: Remaining Independent through end of 2009

Iain Dodsworth is continuing to upgrade the product, and it's widely rumored he may soon integrate multi-account support, as well as integration with additional services, outside of Twitter. If he can get enough people to donate or pay for the application, there's no question he could make a full-time living from the resulting revenue. The question is, will people who expect a free service to have 100% uptime spring for the app that gets them there?

5) Strands

While FriendFeed, Profilactic and others were first out the gate in 2007 with their lifestreaming and social activity aggregation tools, Strands has worked on their own social news and lifestreaming site, in beta, since mid year. Focusing on delivering a clean interface for their Web, mobile and iPhone application versions, and keeping a strong emphasis on tracking musical preferences, Strands has developed a loyal following who find the site less noisy than some services and cleaner than others. Strands, instead of marketing to early adopters, like me, has given a great deal of focus to converting the more mainstream user, and acting as an evangelist for other third party applications, ranging from Pandora to Twitter.

Expected Exit: Remaining Independent through end of 2009.

Strands' history both bodes well and plays against them. Their VC funds offer them a strong balance sheet, but may also force the company's investors to seek a return that would be unavailable, given current market conditions. The company will need to find a better way to differentiate against FriendFeed and others, and hope that appealing to mainstream America works.

6) ReadBurner

A service that would tabulate the most frequently shared items from Google Reader was high on my list of sought-after sites in 2007. The catch is that I always thought Google would do it themselves. When ReadBurner debuted in January, it was a delight, and the simplicity of the service bred many clones, including RSSmeme. Later in 2008, its older cousin, Feedheads, broke out of the Facebook garden and entered the general Web. ReadBurner, and others like it, serve as having the potential to unseat less-democratic popular news hierarchies, such as Digg, assuming they execute well. As an advisor to the service, I'd like to say they are on the right track, or rate the service higher on this list, but development has been slow of late, and needs to get going again.

* Not Listing an Expected Exit Due to Assumed Bias *

7) Feedly

Like many other smaller services this year, especially those around the Google Reader and Twitter ecosystems, Feedly takes an existing popular product and makes it better - giving a news magazine feel to what previously had been a standard RSS reader. Feedly launched as a Firefox plugin in the middle of the year, highlighting recommended articles from friends, popular feeds, and integrating with Google Reader, so when you made changes to your Feedly, those changes tracked back to Reader.

Expected Exit: None

Feedly's founder recently noted his excitement over earning the service's first dollar, after a user Tweeted that she'd gotten distracted by an ad within Feedly and clicked through. Given most other RSS based apps haven't found any revenue yet, a single dollar is a lot more than zero, but Feedly doesn't look like it has any kind of mass that would push it to the mainstream, let alone turning into a viable business. For now, it's just an interesting twist on data consumption. The site will only go away if its developers get bored of it.

8) Gnip

With sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious and others getting pounded all day by third party services tapping into their API and sucking down their users' updates, Gnip recognized these external sites might soon see backlash from the data sources, as too much of their own infrastructure was being used to power other programs. In light of Twitter's up and down summer, Gnip debuted to act as the middleman, essentially making data portability easier, reducing one-offs between services.

Expected Exit: Acquisiton by end of 2009

It's hard in life to be the middleman, trying to play equal with every service. Should Gnip really start to become the Akamai of data portability, it's likely that one of the biggest data producers would want to snap up the service for themselves, and either limit competitors' access to it, or start charging fees. In a world when VC money is hard to come by, Gnip would be smart to take the offer.

9) Toluu

You'll note two major themes regarding hot services in 2008: RSS and friends. Finding out what your friends were reading and sharing were key facets of most of the new products that gained my attention this year. Toluu, developed by Caleb Elston, offers a site where you can upload the OPML file of feeds you read, mark your favorites, and see how compatible you are with other users of the site, helping find new feeds, and new people. Over time, the service enabled me to see new blogs my friends were subscribing to, and you could even notify Twitter if you had added a new blog to your reading list.

Expected Exit: None

Toluu is a geeky hobby for Caleb. He's recently also gotten behind Kallow.com, a gift recommendation service. Toluu hasn't been monetized in any way, and is unlikely to develop into an acquisition target, unless another service wants to use his recommendation engine.

10) SocialToo

Twitter and Facebook have become such a part of the blogging ecosystem, that new services have sprung up to make it more useful and intuitive. Among them is fellow louisgray.com author Jesse Stay's SocialToo. The service looks to act as a bridge between multiple social networks, including Twitter, Identica and Facebook, letting you automatically follow those users who follow you, offering a black list of people you never want to follow you, setting up an automatic message to those who choose to follow your account, and recently, the addition of surveys that can be distributed by Twitter and tabulated on the site, much like SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy.

Expected Exit: Remaining Independent through end of 2009.

SocialToo contains some advertising, and if I were to guess, it may offer premium features, as the survey functionality could be improved a great deal, possibly even going head to head with sites like SurveyMonkey. While Jesse is unlikely to get rich off SocialToo, it's smart in that it's not tied just to one service (Twitter), but has the flexibility to add on new networks as they rise in prominence.

Also on the list but outside of the Top 10:
12seconds.tv, BlogRize, Identica, LinkRiver, OneSpot, PeopleBrowsr, Plurk, Rejaw, RSSmeme, Shyftr, Yokway

Introducing Exchange Rates for Blog Comments and Interactions

Editor's Note: Allen Stern and CenterNetworks are not affiliated with this post or the exchange rates table -- yet. The CN logo has been helpfully borrowed.

In May, Mathew Ingram, Fred Wilson and others said that for non-professional bloggers, comments were how they got paid. The interaction and discussion that takes place on blogs, between the author and the consumer, is what most write for - the conversation. But recent tools that let people comment elsewhere, or interact on the original content in other ways has some saying users' actions simply aren't enough. As much of the conversation moves off the original blog, or people are sharing items in Google Reader or hitting "like" in FriendFeed, they are showing interest, but not engaging, causing some to wish for a simpler time when those services didn't allow users to show passive approval.

One of the more outspoken voices on this topic has been Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, who wrote on this blog earlier this month:

"early adopters are screwing early adopter blogs - period. Clicking share on google reader is not like leaving a comment on the source. Clicking like on ff or retweeting on twitter is not the same as leaving a comment on the source. I will have more on this soon as I think that lazyness has slowly ruined what was something beautiful."

And while he and I don't always line up with our beliefs on the same spot in the blog evolution chart, there is no question that some activities do more to encourage the original author and their content than do others.

In that spirit, here is the first attempt at an exchange rate for interacting with blogs. As Allen has been a chief proponent of giving original authors their due, I believe the unit of metric is best labeled as a "CN", in honor of CenterNetworks. It's also no coincidence you could call these "C Notes" or "Comment Notes".

To start, I argue that a comment on the original author's blog post should be counted as "1 CN", to establish a baseline.


Actions that are worth more than 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include:

• Making a comment on the original blog, then blogging about that discussion on your own blog. (10 CN)
  
• Writing a new blog post on the same topic and linking back to the original author as the source. (5 CN)
  
• Submitting the blog post to StumbleUpon with a strong description and good tagging. (3 CN)
  
• Submitting the blog post to Digg, Reddit, or Hacker News. (2 CN)

Actions that are worth between 1/2 CN and 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include:

• Retweeting the item on Twitter. (.8 CN)
  
• Digging an already submitted story. (.6 CN)
  
• Adding a vote on Reddit, Hacker News, or Mixx. (.5 CN)

Actions that are worth less than 1/2 CN, depending on one's network size or influence, include:

• Posting the item natively to FriendFeed. (.4 CN)
  
• Posting the item to Socialmedian or Strands. (.3 CN)
  
• Posting the item to Facebook. (.25 CN)
  
• Adding the item to your Tumblr blog. (.25 CN)
  
• Sharing the item in Google Reader. (.25 CN)
  
• Adding the item to your Delicious. (.2 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the original item on FriendFeed. (.2 CN)
  
• Liking the item on FriendFeed. (.1 CN)
  
• Adding a comment to a reshare of the item on FriendFeed. (.1 CN)
  
• Liking a reshare of the item on FriendFeed. (.05 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the item in Shyftr. (.05 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the item in Facebook. (.05 CN)

These exchange rates show current market valuations, and are subject to change, based on the increase and decrease in popularity of associated networks and the sway of conventional opinion. Rates quoted are valid as of November 23rd, 2008, and were determined by a non-scientific measure of effort, influence and reach of the aforementioned external sites and activities.

As your activity gets further and further away from the original blog post, and the blog post becomes less of the story, but the third-party service gets to be more of the story or the destination, it delivers less perceived value to the original author, be it psychological, social, or in some cases, actually financial. While some of us early adopters are all too happy to expand a blog post's reach through our various social networks, and enjoy the new communities that are built there, it's not surprising that those who are seeing less activity on the original source of their stories are feeling something's amiss. I know that as I've gotten busier, I've taken less time to comment on the many blog posts out there, even as I'm making comments on the various social media sites, and sharing like I always have through Google Reader.

So if you want to show your appreciation to the author of a blog you've found particularly insightful of late, or who has opened your eyes to a new topic, don't just take the easy way out and hit "share" as the item flows through your RSS reader, or hit "like" on your social site, but take the extra time to rise up the CN chart and put some food on that blogger's table by making a comment and engaging. Allen and many others will be happy you did.

Web Apps Should Keep It Simple For Success

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Most people have heard the KISS acronym (Keep It Simple, Stupid). There is a very good reason for this. If you keep something simple, it is hard to mess it up. Why do I bring this up today? Well, I recently wrote about a conversation with my brother where he asked about Twitter and the conversation moved to FriendFeed. He immediately saw some point to Twitter, but FriendFeed was hard for him to understand. Many people have written "what application XXX needs to go mainstream" posts as well. Kyle Lacy wrote a "What Twitter Needs" post on Tuesday, and I commented that Twitter is going mainstream whether the early adopters want it to or not. There was also a thread on SocialMedian regarding what sites were your internet addictions. A few comments mentioned that they did not "get" FriendFeed or they found it "confusing" or "hard".

This got me thinking about the differences between Twitter, FriendFeed and SocialMedian. Why is Twitter so popular? Because it is simple. Is there a learning curve? No, or at least nothing you could not figure out in about 10 minutes. Is it hard to use? No, just go to the website, type your update and click the update button. Because of their API, there are several client applications that make using and listening to Twitter even easier. The other benefit is that it is very similar to a widely accepted application, instant messaging. Many people know how to use instant messaging applications, so moving to Twitter is not a big stretch of the imagination.

SocialMedian is finding success for slightly different reasons. Parts of SocialMedian are not the easiest to use. The concepts of Noise/Volume, filters, relevance of topics and sources are definitely advanced features. However, when SocialMedian started importing blog feeds and Google Reader shares, they made it simple to contribute to the site. Unlike Digg, Reddit and Mixx, I do not have to go to the site to share information, it comes from my daily activities. I only need to go to SocialMedian if I want to read some other posts I have not seen, or to participate in some of the conversations. The other major "simple moment" were the networks and the widgets that the team is creating. If you wanted to follow the election, you could just use the election widget. They just created another widget for President-Elect Obama Transition news. These widgets grab posts related to these topics only. How easy is that!

FriendFeed is a different story entirely. Once you add your accounts and subscribe to various people, the site is fairly easy to use. However, many of the early adopters are used to subscribing to a blog using RSS and seeing every post. If they are subscribing to people's activity, they typically expect to see all of the posts for all of their subscriptions. If you subscribe to even just a few "active" people, you will miss a lot of posts. The important thing to remember is that you have to accept the fact that you will not see everything. Once you "let go" it is much easier to get used to. Generally, it is difficult for the average person to get used to the firehose of information that is fed to you.

Personally, I am an information addict and struggle trying to limit the amount of information I consume. FriendFeed is a very good service for information addicts like myself or even on a greater scale with the likes of Robert Scoble and Louis Gray. Am I saying that FriendFeed will never go mainstream? No, mainly because they are continually making things simpler. First, you could hide entries from a particular service. Then you could segment your subscriptions into lists. Recently, we received the ability to hide a specific feed for one user. With each iteration they are trying to make things simpler.

Why is simple so important? Because simple drives adoption in greater numbers. FriendFeed is gaining popularity already, but massive growth requires simple.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

This Spring, when the tech blogosphere discovered Shyftr, a next-generation RSS reader, had launched with comments on their service, alongside full feeds, you would have thought they'd barged into bloggers' homes in the dead of night, stealing their money, their laptops and punching them around besides. Despite comments from me and others who believed this to be a natural progression of RSS readers and aggregators, their missteps landed them on virtual page one, and they haven't really escaped the many bad things thrown their way since.

But since Shyftr's unfortunate early flub, we have seen sites that are centered around other people's contents continue to grow in popularity, and in many cases, they feature conversations that are native to the service, but don't flow back to the blog. Meanwhile, some are doing more than just featuring a headline, but have excerpts that can at times display the vast majority or the entirety of a blog post. Has the Web collectively grown numb to this, and have we accepted this as "fair use"?

One tech developer wrote me yesterday, highlighting the way many posts were being displayed on the growing news discovery site, socialmedian. He wrote, "I'm sitting here finding example after example of this on Social Median? Do you think people are giving them a pass? Do people not realize that this is happening? Or do they just not care anymore?"

As socialmedian displays upwards of 1,100 characters of any given story, shorter stories could be posted in their entirety, without the original author's permission. As socialmedian now lets its users pull in content from Google Reader shared items and other sources, the author doesn't have to explicitly provide approval for their content to make it to the site. And on that site, users can engage in conversations around the content, without that data being ported back to the originating blog.

Some examples of these short stories (plus conversations) on socialmedian are here:

• Original story on Twitterati: Twitter Revenue Just a Matter of Time
• socialmedian story: Twitter Revenue Just a Matter of Time
• Original story on GHacks.net: Is Windows 7 any different?
• socialmedian story: Is Windows 7 any different?

As Shyftr operated this Spring, before having the Techmeme crowd go after them with pitchforks and torches, socialmedian unifies each article shared to the site in one thread, showing the multiple people who "clipped" it, and unifies the comments in one siloed stream.

So how is this different than the mini-scandal that erupted just over six months ago?

I've been a vocal proponent of socialmedian, and have seen the site take off over the last several months. I have also seen that the site doesn't pull in full feeds, but instead clips longer items. I can't remember the last time I published a blog post that was less than 1,100 characters after all. So I asked Jason Goldberg, socialmedian CEO, to help explain their limits and thinking. He wrote:

"While crawling the sources, we fetch short summary and full content (if exists in feed). While displaying the story on different pages of socialmedian, we first check if we have short description and show it after truncating to a certain limit. If short description is not present for the story we truncate the full content and show it. On the story page we check if we have full content for the story and display it after truncating it to 1100 chars. If we don’t have full description, we show the truncated short description."

Goldberg's response shows the team has given the issue of "fairness" a lot of thought. Unlike Fav.or.it, who believes it has every right to show full feeds and pull in comments from the original blogs, socialmedian consciously clips the data after a certain length. And outside of the story itself, depending on the page, or whether it's in an e-mail alert, these limits are even smaller, between 130 and 325 characters.

So what's fair? We've largely accepted that aggregation and bookmark sites like FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News and others are allowed to post URLs and headlines and allow for conversation. We have largely accepted that it is bad behavior to keep the full content of a post and integrate comments. But in between is a gray area. Can I borrow one paragraph? Two? Can I show the first few graphics you use? At what point does it move from linking and enter the land of scraping?

I would venture a bet that as the social Web continues to evolve, we have gotten more accepting of sites centered around other people's content. I believe you can't undo the move to aggregation sites, and conversations will occur where people want them to, not necessarily on your blog. I believe that sites that offer attribution and a link back to the original source are providing their own sites as a distribution and reference medium, so I don't find fault with services like socialmedian. But it's likely that others aren't realizing their content is getting in the site, and it's not getting out. So what are the standards that one should follow? And do we care anymore?

You can find me on socialmedian here: www.socialmedian.com/louisgray

Social Median Launches Dedicated Election Coverage News Hub

Social Median, an online news site and social activities aggregator powered by your peers, is launching a special election site, in partnership with the Washington Post and other content providers to help users get even more ramped up in advance of next week's presidential election. The new site, found at http://election.socialmedian.com, aggregates election news from a wide variety of news sources, as well as social tools, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, hoping to provide a single social hub for what will prove to be a big day for either Barack Obama or John McCain next week.




As Twitter has done with its own Election 2008 site, Social Median is taking what so far has been a network with rich topic diversity and helping to add focus. Social Median, as with its core service, divides the Election page into four main sections:

• Hot Discussions: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=hot-discussions
• Popular: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=popular
• Recent: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=recent
• Rising Fast: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=rising-fast

Also new, as of Wednesday morning, is the introduction of a widget that users can post to their own blogs, taking the Election discussion with them. Already signing on to display the widget are The Washington Post and The Guardian, which will highlight user-submitted news and reports. (Get the code here)



In what's been a hotly-contested election that has seen partisan voters claim bias from both sides, and few trusting the media, why not get away from a single person choosing your news, or even a single paper? Social Median and Twitter are helping you find the election news with a little help from your friends.

Twine Untangles Beta, Launches Social Bookmarking on Steroids

Nova Spivack, creator and CEO of Twine, sees that networks based on its users' interests are at what he calls a "tipping point". In the last year, you've seen dramatic growth in this space, with the rise of FriendFeed, Strands, Social Median, Popego and others to name a few. And tonight, after much incubation, his own site has opened up to join the fray, delivering what he terms "Delicious on steroids."

Twine is not just a repository for you to capture interesting links from around the Web, but the service expands your content through the deployment of tags, including related people, places, etc., as Twine leverages semantic data around your content. It also pledges to discover related content to your own Twine, and help auto-discover new items, operating as a "learning machine" to help you find new items that match your interests.


My Twine Is Populated With Bookmarks From Around the Web
Twine is engineered to leverage the collective intelligence of the Twine community - much like Social Median. The pair's similarities are many, including groups by topic, the delivery of a single stream of items you have found interesting, and through the ability to follow other users who may share the same interests. But Spivack was quick to say Twine was around first.

With so many sites jumping into the "Interest Network" space, how does Twine try to differentiate itself? Spivack spells it out. "Facebook is about your relationships. Friendfeed is about your communication. LinkedIn is about your career. Twine is about your interests," he wrote in an e-mail.



Web 3.0 and the Financial Crisis are popular Twine networks.
Services like Twine and Social Median reflect the preferences and interests of their community. Top networks on Twine, include frivolity, like "Cool", geekery like "Web 3.0" and "Web Industry Trends", but also more mainstream discussions, from "Presidential Election 2008" to the "Financial Crisis". You can see the Top 100 Twines here.

If you are new to Twine, there are tools set up that will aid your starting off without an empty feed. You can import your bookmarks from Delicious, or even from your Web browser. And as with other interest networks, Twine is not aiming to be a silent repository. You can make comments on others' items, find other users who share similar items, or see recommended Twines.

As Spivack wrote me in an e-mail, Twine has only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to its semantic engine. "We've only started to expose some of that capability -- try bookmarking YouTube videos, Amazon books, CNN articles, Wikipedia pages, Flickr photos, and see what results in Twine. In Twine you get more than just a bookmark -- you get a data record that is customizable, linkable, and connected to other things," he wrote. "We'll be enabling these to be even more customizable in 2009."

Twine, on its debut out of beta, already is set to tangle with the leaders in this space, and I'm eager to see how intelligent their service is as it provides recommendations and connects people.

You can sign up to Twine at http://www.twine.com. You can find my profile here: http://www.twine.com/user/louisgray.

Social Median Stares Downturn In the Face By Staying Small

In a sliding economic time, the easy thing to do is to report on the failures of companies, the potential for layoffs, quarterly financial warnings and misses, and reduced valuations. Some entrepreneurs will see the potential for trials and get cold feet, choosing to postpone starting their business. Others might reduce expectations by slowing hires, extending product roadmaps or opting out by merging with a bigger firm. But having learned from the trials of the Web 1.0 boom and crash, Jason Goldberg of Social Median is looking to survive and grow his company through the financial crisis, as long as it takes.

In a post yesterday titled How One Small Scrappy Startup Is Surviving (And Growing) During The Financial Crisis, Jason said keys to survival are to be "(1) small, (2) fast, and (3) listen to users". The team developing Social Median started small and remains small, with software development performed in Pune, India, making them much less expensive than if they were based in the Silicon Valley. Having endured some very public and very visible trials during his time as CEO at Jobster, Goldberg knew, from the beginning, to stay lean and mean.

As we've chronicled here over the last six months, Social Median is growing and becoming an increasingly common source for Web users to find their news and participate with peers. And that's been without the benefit of traditional venture capital. As Jason writes, "One VC asked me a month ago what I would do with $2M. I said I'd take $500k of it, give you back $1.5M, and keep doing exactly what I'm doing."

So his plans going forward are really focused on a single mantra: "Keep it small and focus entirely on the product and delivering features which engage our users."

But, as with Twitter, FriendFeed and others, Social Median is still what companies these days are calling "pre-revenue". Jason even says that "priority #1 is product and users, not revenue." But we shouldn't expect that to be permanent. He says, "Every month -- while we spend very little -- we still are spending and not bringing in revenues to offset the costs..." adding, "If we build a great service that people love and want to use and recommend, revenues will come in time."

So while other companies grew quickly, and are now looking at ways to cut costs to reduce their burn rate as times turn dark, Social Median's plan is to keep churning along and do what they've always done. If they do crash and burn, it's not because they were throwing parties and hiring expensive PR firms or advertising. They're going to be heads-down, working to create a community which has already seen a doubling of page views week over week, and more new registered users in the last week than in the previous four combined. Jason and his team are not scared. Some might say they're foolhardy. But they're not going to be making headlines for cutting staff and scaling back any time soon.

See the full post here:
How One Small Scrappy Startup Is Surviving (And Growing) During The Financial Crisis

As always, you can find me, and my activity, on Social Median, here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray

Liking the Dislike: Social Networks Don't Force the Love

Newton's third law of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Many technologies have ratings features built in with equal and opposite choices these days, from the thumbs up and thumbs down on your TiVo remote control, to rating songs from zero to five stars in iTunes, and of course, deciding whether to Digg or Bury. But as social networking tools don't necessarily need to subscribe to Newton's laws, not all services offer diametrically opposed activity. You can't offer a negative share on Google Reader, canceling someone else's share out, for example, and FriendFeed limits you to "liking" items, making users oddly "like" things they hate, if only to draw attention to the item. Social Median, which is increasingly looking like FriendFeed, added the ability to "like" and "dislike" items on Monday, through what they call a "mood button", drawing more attention to the battle between love and hate. (See a discussion on FriendFeed about the new feature here)


Social Median gives articles mood, based on the like/dislike ratio
With so many people consuming as much content as we are these days, with more Web sites, RSS feeds and social networks to imbibe, services are making it ever easier to make our feelings known in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort. While a year or two ago we may have left a comment and engaged with the blog author, these days, we're just as likely to vote up the number of stars on their Outbrain widget, share the item in Google Reader, or just click "like" on FriendFeed, essentially "checking the box off" on what was required for me as a reader, taking the easy way out. Often, this is done even by reading just the headline, and not the full article. (Do you really think people are reading all the items they Digg?)

Social news sites like Reddit, Mixx and others tend to simply show the sum total of votes by its members, subtracting the down votes from the up votes to determine an item's popularity. As a moderator on the Elite Tech News Reddit, I recently found myself looking at what the community had selected as the best news items. Usually they will have anywhere from only 1 to 3 points, but by looking deeper, the actual up and down votes are more like 12 to 9, or 11 to 10. Negative voting is almost always approaching 50 percent.


Ballhype says, "Don't be a hater"
I'd always thought if I didn't like something, I should just skip it rather than calling out that I don't like it. I do bury some items on Digg, if I find them to be duplicates, from shady Web sites, or, punitively, if I see the authors relentlessly pimping for votes on Twitter, but those are exceptions, rather than the rule. So who are these people who are just as likely to vote items down as up? So far, typical social networking behavior has let you play the role of hit and run, disliking an item and taking off, if you have that option, letting you do so anonymously, even if the system knew it was you. In fact, Ballhype would put up an alert to "Stop being a hater" if you gave too many thumbs down in a row.

Social Median's new approach to "Mood" not only lets you "dislike" an item, and see the percentage of people who dislike it, but you can see just who voted it down, adding a level of accountability to your vote. I am curious to see if the community takes to "dislikes" as quickly as they took to likes on FriendFeed. It's always easy to be in a group of friends who like something, but if you say you dislike something, it begs a follow-up. Why did you dislike it? Was it the subject matter? Was it poorly written? But again, that takes you out of the realm of doing as little as possible, and actually needing to answer the questions. I bet the community would vote thumbs down on that idea!

Social Median Surveys Early Adopters' News, Tech Preferences

Despite only having been out of invitation-only alpha for a little over two months, the social news service Social Median has quickly gained a foothold among early adopters looking to get the latest on topics as diverse as technology news to the financial crisis and the 2008 presidential election. Though still small, the site saw traffic increase more than 90 percent from July to August, according to Compete.com, and is finding a niche, alongside other services, including Twitter, FriendFeed and Strands, for early adopters to find and share information.


Social Median's Numbers are Small, But Climbing
Founder Jason Goldberg, in an effort to learn more about the site's first users, sent an e-mail survey on September 30th to registered members, asking them what services they used on a daily basis, which Web sites they relied on for news, and, of course, which features would be most desired for later iterations to the product.


Twitter Is By Far the Most Popular Service by Social Median Users
With nearly 500 respondents, it's clear that those using the site are much more likely than the general population to own an iPhone, and more than four out of five are daily Twitter users. But the data did show, as could be expected, that Social Median users are more than seven times as likely to use Facebook as MySpace. Approximately half post to their blog each day, and use FriendFeed.

Social Median, unsurprisingly, fared well in its own survey, with 57% saying they use the site more than once a day, and just under 65% saying they visit it "regularly".


TechCrunch and the New York Times Follow Social Median In Use
Ranking just behind Social Median for news gathering was TechCrunch, with 52% of all users voting in the affirmative, and approximately 40% apiece selecting Digg, the New York Times and CNN. Others trailed further behind.

Interestingly, despite only 23 percent of Social Median's users saying they used an iPhone regularly, more than 28 percent said a dedicated iPhone application was a top priority. This, however, didn't rank as the top response, trailing the addition of likes for stories, news alerts, improved search, blog widgets and private news networks. Social Median may have already gained a significant role in the lives of those who responded to the survey, but they continue to have high expectations for the site - which just might not be undeserved. Goldberg told me by e-mail that the #1 request, the ability to "like" or "dislike" an item would go live as soon as Monday, bringing them even further into FriendFeed's neighborhood.

You can always find me on Social Median here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray

After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp

Personal feed aggregators with social elements have been one of the more popular services to gain traction in 2008. With services like FriendFeed, Social Median, Strands, SocialThing, Profilactic and others all finding a niche, some larger than others, it's clear that people are looking to consolidate their online activities, and share the results with friends. One of the more odd attempts is that of chi.mp, which lets you have your own .mp "domain", and helps you build a personal page, connect with friends and add services. While it can be fun to think of interesting names that end with .mp (du.mp, clu.mp, pi.mp, ru.mp, bu.mp, bli.mp, stu.mp, thu.mp, ca.mp, sta.mp, pu.mp and forrestgu.mp all come to mind), the end result isn't all that compelling. Unless we are being measured by the sheer quantity of online services we register for, and by how many places we can connect to the same people, I don't really see the point.

Chi.mp calls itself a content hub and identity management platform. While its site is clean and its marketing well-intended, offering a "dashboard for your digital life", the end result turns out to be much less. While its user profiles look like they borrowed a page from Facebook, and the idea of aggregating feeds sounds like FriendFeed, it ends up instead being a cartoony version of an online business card that calls out only the most basic social services.


Adding Services Via Chi.mp Is Easy, But Limited
From the chi.mp dashboard, you can add some of the standard services, but not a huge number. And just because you add a service doesn't mean it's pulling in your data. I added Twitter when I signed up, and despite posting a few tweets, my new chi.mp site, hiding at techpu.mp, hasn't figured that out.

Looking at the chi.mp sites built by others shows pictures from Flickr and Facebook, and headlines of their RSS feeds. But there's no question that the service isn't going to take on the larger players. The pages are static and don't enable discussion. And no matter how many friends you discover on the site, you don't get alerts if you visit their pages. So now, I find myself getting hit with invitation requests from folks to become contacts on the site. It's clear I don't know why I would do it, and just maybe, they don't know either.

No wonder CNET quoted one observer back in April as saying, ""I'll tell you what Chi.mp is. It's venture money getting set on fire." Now, I'm usually happy to give new Web services a chance and see potential, but unless there is a major overhaul here to chi.mp, which would deliver greater service support, faster RSS pulls, and real social interaction, there's just no point. Now I feel like a monkey for even signing up.

Social Median Takes Guesswork Out of Online Mentions With Replize

As part of the Sunday panel at Blog World Expo, a key piece of the discussion was around whether it made sense to track down every conversation around your content, and whether you could rely on search tools within the major social aggregators to find when your content had been referenced, or if people were having conversations around your data. While the major content discovery sites have done a great job of enabling conversation, less effort, so far, has been made to finding when you've come up in conversation. But Social Median has added a new wrinkle today with a feature they call "replize". Now, if anybody mentions your user name in a post or a comment, with an @ symbol ahead of it, you will be notified by e-mail, taking the guesswork out of tracking your identity online.

Today, FriendFeed is really lacking in their ability to do "vanity searches", essentially, searching your own user name and finding if you've come up. Instead, it will only find your own posted content. But with Social Median's new "replize" feature, you're notified automatically, assuming somebody uses the @ tag and your name.


In an example last night, Social Median founder Jason Goldberg, wrote simply, "@louisgray, what do you think?" responding to a story on the financial crisis on Wall Street. That note triggered an e-mail leading me back to the discussion thread on the site.


For people who want to track their mentions online, or to get alerted to conversations where they can engage, the new "replize" feature is a good addition, and Social Median members will likely rapidly adapt it. But if you want to reduce your e-mail message load, this solution probably won't be for you, especially if you're popular. Turning it off is a simple tweak in your Social Median settings.

My Blog Is Less a Destination Site than a Conduit

By now, we've all likely grown used to the fact that RSS readers don't often see a blog's redesign. For those who choose not to click through and leave comments, there's little reason at all to visit a blog directly any more, considering it's possible to power through dozens or hundreds of feeds in a feed reader, be it Google Reader, BlogLines or any other. With tangential services like Disqus enabling me to even engage with readers via e-mail, instead of through the blog, there's now even less reason for me to even visit my own site.

At this point, I probably, on most days, can't even tell you my daily RSS subscriber count, visible on the blog, or see the MyBlogLog widget's most recent visitors, as I'm using my blog as a way to project content outward - to RSS readers, to aggregators, like FriendFeed, Strands and Social Median, and to connect with readers via e-mail, using Disqus. It also, via RSS, powers popular sharing sites, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme. But none of those activities, with the exception of comments, require actual visits.

While it's still important to be sure the blog itself loads quickly, for those who view it for the first time, or for those who do click through RSS and choose to leave a comment, the look and feel of the blog is less important over time. I expect fewer people are typing in the louisgray.com URL and viewing pages directly, as they accumulate feeds and read more, and see the blog's UI more as a shell for content than a destination where a reader would spend a good amount of time. At this stage, the blog is simply a point in time for the content to begin its journey.

The life of a post, as always, for me anyway, starts out in e-mail, where it's authored. Then it's copy/pasted into Blogger. Then I visit the site, quickly, and ping FeedBurner. Subsequently, I refresh the blog feed in FriendFeed to keep it up to date, and send a TinyURL copy to Twitter. At that point, I really don't have to come back. Should someone opt to comment, I can reply via e-mail in Disqus, and even Delete unwanted spam or other messages.

The bulk of the activity around the blog is pretty much happening someplace else - making the number one purpose for the blog site itself to convert new visitors into signing up for the RSS feed. So if they bump into the content, via Techmeme, Digg, StumbleUpon, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, or anywhere else, they'll sign up and take in my content in the way they choose. But my blog is not the destination. It's a point in the journey. For those who are relying on ad revenue to come through via page views, this won't be good news, but that's what I see happening. For me, as I'm not trying to convert visitors into cash, this is the new reality, and we're fine with you just signing up, passing through and being part of the conversation as you choose.

Having a Development Platform Doesn't Mean You Stop Competing

When Google's Chrome browser debuted, I openly asked if we ever thought the application would see the light of day on Apple's iTunes App Store, or if Cupertino would keep the door closed, giving Safari a leg up in the new round of browser wars. This weekend, things got clearer, as Apple turned down a tool that could be seen as competing with iTunes. As I had expected, Apple is not going to let the iPhone's development program get in the way of their leading software applications. And you know what? While they could certainly do better to communicate this up front to the development community, they shouldn't have to give competition the keys to the kingdom.

With so much of the Web community's efforts going toward open source programs and open platforms, it's almost become expected that companies are going to stop acting like businesses and start acting like charities. But not all will.

Google's Chrome was launched with promises that its improvements would be given back to the open source community. The browser, which could have come embedded with a load of Google-centric items, actually offers multiple options for search engines, amid some's concern that Google's growing influence in the search and advertising space was making it a monopoly.

In another example, Twitter famously gives its XMPP feed to FriendFeed, a site which many thought could replace the microblogging service outright. They could have instead told FriendFeed to pound sand and get their updates the old-fashioned way, but they didn't, which played a big role in helping FriendFeed grow to the point where it is today.

But neither of these examples typically is how the world works in business. Businesses focused on revenue and profits (which Google Chrome and Twitter aren't yet) don't usually kowtow to the competition and make things easier for them in the name of openness.

While it could be argued that Apple has introduced competition to MobileMe by making it easy to add Yahoo! Mail, GMail and Outlook to the iPhone, we realize they're not fools, and as e-mail access is essential, being flexible has broadly opened the iPhone's opportunity in the business market and with consumers outside of the MobileMe customer list. But there's no real strong reason for Apple to continue this trend and open up to provide iPhone versions of FireFox, Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer, were Microsoft ever to have a change of plans regarding the Mac platform or the iPhone.

I also wouldn't expect Apple to make room on the iPhone for desktop photo applications that compete with iPhoto, or anything that offers an end-run around AT&T, so long as that business relationship is in place.

And Apple's not the only company to play this way. Jason Goldberg of SocialMedian has mentioned a number of times that he's made no headway in having that service's activity reflected in the aforementioned FriendFeed, which he assumes is due to them being perceived as competition. While I believe it's more likely due to SocialMedian being so new, and the FriendFeed team having other priorities, there's really no reason they should go out of their way to letting a rival service get hooks into its users.

Apple has got to do a better job, in advance, of letting developers know what the limits are for what they can build, and where they need to stop. But this isn't a not-for-profit game. This is business, and it shouldn't be expected that a company's providing developers with the ability to make an application is an open invitation to replace their crown jewels.

Increased Activity Streams Boost Social Median's Chances

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

The one problem I had been having with SocialMedian was the need to manually "clip" stories that I find interesting on the internet. Many social news sites, i.e. Digg, Mixx, etc., use this model with great results. SocialMedian has been trying to focus on getting relevant information in front of their users, while maintaining the voting and commenting mainstays of social news. By allowing users to create news networks, and making the follower/submitter model a little more influential, they tried to create automated content filters. With the early addition of user-configurable "volume for noise levels", they also tried to avoid the spamming of stories to several networks.

These were fantastic additions, but as anyone who has used social news sites, adding stories manually to a site is a lot of work. In this past week, SocialMedian dropped more barriers to using their service. They had a big week implementing blog and Google Reader automated integration into a user's clipped stories. This makes the service significantly easier for many people to use. The Google Reader integration will also take your shared notes and include them as a comment on a clipped story.

See Also:

• Social Median Integrates With Google Reader for News Discovery
• Social Median Revamps and Introduces "News Streaming"

To give you an idea of what this means for user adoption, I will give you an example. I used to visit the site every few days and browse around. When the announcements were made this past week, I again browsed around but my activity had not been imported yet. On the second day, I visited a few times to reply to comments and review new subscribers. The third day, I again visited a few times for comments and I started looking at the stories that other people had clipped in my news networks. I am now trying to work the site into my daily routine because the Google Reader shares and the blog importing has added to the quality and timeliness of the stories clipped on the site. These fairly simple ideas could be a major boon to SocialMedian.

This also got me thinking. SocialMedian allows you to link several services to your profile, like Twitter and FriendFeed. I believe more is coming as well in the form of FriendFeed and Digg integration. By doing this type of integration, they are not really just a social news site. It is a combination of social news and aggregation or lifestreaming. So, is SocialMedian trying to compete with FriendFeed? I do not think so as they are mostly complementary services at this point. However, by dabbling in lifestreaming and aggregation, the number of their competitors easily doubles.

This brings me to another point. John McCrea of Plaxo had a really interesting point on the lifestreaming and aggregation applications:

"Can the pure-play Social Web Aggregators grow fast and long enough to achieve escape velocity before the big former walled garden services, like Facebook and MySpace, re-invent themselves into true Social Web Aggregators?"

Facebook has their news feeds, but they seem minimally useful right now. FriendFeed has a very good lead on Facebook, but they are still an aggregration service. They really need to start adding functionality to stay ahead. The beta is excellent so far, but is it enough to keep Facebook far behind?

With SocialMedian adding various activity streams, they become a very interesting property. Social news sites do not import activity streams in any way. FriendFeed does not have the voting that social news sites use. SocialMedian has both and they have interesting filtering. I do not see Facebook overtaking FriendFeed any time soon, but there is that possibility. There is no chance that Facebook can move fast enough to catch SocialMedian within the next year.

In the past week, SocialMedian has changed the core of what they are and it is a good thing. Are they a prime target for a buyout, or will they be the next Web darling? I think they would be an interesting purchase for someone looking to get into the news and aggregation space, Google perhaps? I have no power to make them a Web darling, but they are making it hard for people to not notice them.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Social Median Revamps and Introduces "News Streaming"

On Saturday, I prematurely announced Social Median's integration of Google Reader shares into the social news discovery service. Turns out my account had been hard-wired as one of the initial users testing new features aimed to make the site ingest even more information and making it a more essential part of my daily activity. Today, Social Median filled in the rest of the puzzle, by adding support for data not just from Google Reader shares, but also Twitter, Digg, Delicious and FriendFeed. Additionally, Social Median rolled out tools for bloggers to highlight their activity on the site from their own blogs, and a number of ways to find the most popular and active content. The result? A more robust site, aimed to move beyond "lifestreaming" and more to "news streaming".

In speaking with CEO Jason Goldberg last night, he said there are already many sites, like FriendFeed, that do a great job of showing your activity on other sites, and enabling discussion. But Social Median is instead focused on determining which of those activities you have on other sites that are relevant as "news", based on keywords, and topics you have opted to follow. Social Median has to do the hard work of sharing the "news" updates with the right people and the right topical news networks on the site.

Like other aggregation sites, Social Median now features an "Add links and feeds from your sites" option, enabling you to add hooks to your third party services. Users can then specify if you want all your updates flowing through Social Median, just those with specific keywords, or if you specifically tag them as being for the site.


And as Social Median has offered since debuting in beta a month ago, you still have the option to follow individual users, known as "news makers". But you can now filter their updates to be relevant to your news networks, by selecting "only relevant updates" instead of "all updates". Jason playfully uses me as the example in this morning's announcement, saying "I may only want to follow Louis Gray when it comes to technology and politics, but not his interest in fathering."

Social Median's addition of a new widget for bloggers also lets them highlight their most popular items or recent items that have been "clipped" on the site, essentially promoting their best material, not just skimming Social Median for what's new.

And finally, Social Median has entered the "most popular today" arena, displaying stories that have been deemed popular over the last day, week, month, or are rising fast. This falls in line with tweaks made at FriendFeed to show the best of day or week, and the many other sites dedicated to finding hot content, from ReadBurner to Techmeme.


This is an aggressive upgrade for Social Median, which we've been publicly watching develop since April, and one that's intended to get the site a bit more attention before their participation at the TechCrunch50 conference next week. With the addition of more news ingestion sources, popularity tools, and blogging widgets, its clear Social Median is looking to get more visible, more useful, and more robust. You can find my news stream at http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner.

Social Median Integrates With Google Reader for News Discovery

Social Median, over the last few months, has taken a growing role in my tech news discovery process, falling in line alongside FriendFeed and Google Reader, offering up news submitted by other Social Median users on topics I've asked to follow, such as Apple, Blogging and Lifestreaming. Starting this last week, Social Median made it even easier for me to share news items with fellow site users, by integrating Google Reader shared links into the site, making me appear more active, and dramatically increasing the available news to followers.

Social Median's news sources have, to date, come through "Snips", which are user generated notes, a lot like Tweets on Twitter, and "Clips", which can be done from any page on the Web, through the bookmarklet, or through submitting news directly on the site. As with other social sites, you can "Clip" other users news items, essentially adding your vote and sharing it to those who follow you, or make comments on the story excerpts. Integrating with Google Reader's shared items reduces the effort needed to add news, and Social Median parses the shared content to determine if it is relevant to specific networks, based on keywords, automatically making the shared news available to those following individual topics.


A recent item shared via Google Reader to Social Median
Unlike sites dedicated to showing the most frequently shared items, including Feedheads, RSSMeme and ReadBurner (See Disclosure), SocialMedian doesn't display a leaderboard for stories, focusing instead on offering personalized news and information on the topics you have selected.

Integrating with Google Reader's shared links removes the need to proactively share news to Social Median, cutting out the middleman, and undoubtedly increasing the volume of stories that are on the site. I expect the move to be good in terms of making the site more of a go-to for topical news, but also that it may result in fewer comments and clips per story.

You can see what I've shared to Social Median here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray. Those from Google Reader are said as "Submitted by louisgray from Google Reader". My Google Reader shared links blog is here.

Hey Bloggers, We're Discussing Your Posts At Social Median!

Duncan Riley calls the new world of multi-locational blogging and aggregation Blogging 2.0. I call it being flexible and adjusting to how technology advances change how we communicate, collaborate and share, without being set in our ways. And like FriendFeed, Shyftr and other sites before it, Social Median, a new entrant to the social news space, is giving us yet another forum to add comments and discuss blog posts in a smaller social circle, away from the original source. And while Social Median doesn't commit the "cardinal sin" of copying over a full feed and enabling comments that got many in a ruckus over Shyftr last April, the site does provide a headline and an excerpt - good enough for us to get started.

Despite only being available in beta for less than a week, Social Median has been shoehorned into my online news consumption activity, lopped on to my staples of Google Reader and FriendFeed - and each site performs a different critical function.

Google Reader continues to be the lifeblood of my news consumption. It is where I get every single story from hundreds of feeds in rapid fire, and I get to share them to my shared link blog, and to FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is where I'm broadcasting all my online activity from multiple feeds, and engaging with peers about everything from Smugmug to YouTube to Last.fm.

But Social Median is focused. It is all about finding who is creating news, finding new news sources and discussing the topics of the day. Keeping my geek propeller hat on, I am signed up to follow topics like Apple, Blogging, Social Media Watch, Social Networking and Tech News. So far, I've found about 40 different "Newsmakers" in Social Median whom I trust to bring me the news through their submissions and clips.


A Recent Active ReadWriteWeb Story on Social Median
Keeping the topics focused and my peers as the sources makes a combination ready to talk tech. This means rather than passively hitting "share" in Google Reader in isolation, I can browse the 22 comments on ReadWriteWeb's story "Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage" on SocialMedian (see it here), while only 21 were on the original site. I can add to Social Median's 14 comments on Mashable's Checking Email in the Bathroom? You’re Far From Alone story, which got 18 comments on the original site. (See the Social Median copy) We're also talking about stories from TechCrunch, from ChrisBrogan.com, and even the New Yorker.


A Mashable Story On Social Median With Activity
Blogging 2.0 is about participating everywhere, and understanding that the comments can't be controlled just on your blog. They're moving to micro-communities where people are comfortable discussing your content with peers. In the last few months, we saw talented developers issue applications that let you embed FriendFeed conversations back into your blog (as I am running). Given SocialMedian's early success, it's possible we may see this happen again. I've seen a lot of interesting sites in the lifestreaming and social news space over the last few years, and Social Median is among the few I expect to be using every single day. If you're a blogger who wants to be part of the full conversation, and not just a partial view, make sure you're signed up to Social Median and monitoring or participating. You can find me here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray.

SocialMedian Opens Up and Launches Beta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Previous Coverage:

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

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

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

See below or on Twitter itself:


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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Night News Briefs: May 31, 2008

More and more often, I'm running into items I want to share, but might not be detailed enough to generate a full post. So here are a few things that caught my eye over the last few days. If it makes sense, maybe I'll make this a recurring feature.

FF To Go Adds Rooms Support

About 10 days ago, Benjamin Golub offered the first bona fide mobile FriendFeed solution, delivering FF To Go. The next day, the FriendFeed team threw him for a loop with the addition of rooms, letting users break out into smaller groups to talk about specific items. Golub wasn't all that far behind, and has now enabled support for the new rooms, which you can see both when using the mobile interface and via the Web browser.

Some good ones to try:

Elite Tech News: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/l33t
LouisGrayish: http://www.fftogo.com/room/louisgrayish/
* Not my creation... but we'll use it. Why not?
Social Media: http://www.fftogo.com/room/social-media/

Daniel Ha of Disqus Proposes A Commenter's Rights

Although I thought we'd discussed this issue to death back in April, the last two weeks have seen flare-ups around who owns a comment, whether comments should be placed on the original blog or other aggregation services, and whether a publisher has the right to delete comments for any reason. Daniel, whose service is now gaining a great deal of prominence in the tech blogging community, suggests that commenters should have the ability to edit or delete comments and retain access, even if they've been deleted from the source blog. He also recommends portability of those comments to other blogs, including their own.

The post, in its entirety, can be found here:
Disqus Blog: A Commenter's Rights

SocialMedian Undergoes Redesign

Still flying somewhat under the radar, Jason Goldberg's news-focused social media and aggregation site, SocialMedian, got a serious make-over yesterday, enabling mini-profile pop-ups for other members (as FriendFeed recently did as well), offering a site toolbar with drop-downs for news networks, topics and people, and simplified ways to both "clip" and "snip". The service continues to expand its member base and grow increasingly interesting. The updated design is very clean and useful as well.

See: socialmedian Re-Design!


Click for larger version
In those times when I'm not getting to the blog as quick as possible, feel free to check out my Google Reader Shared Items feed or watch my FriendFeed profile, where everything is flowing these days.

Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget

Sometimes, in the race to declare one service better than another, to be among the first to say one product won't scale, or that one product will be killed or eclipsed by another, the rush of feeling declarative overlooks the fact that underneath every single one of these services we interact with each day lies people. In almost every case, especially when it comes to the nascent Web 2.0 market, the services are understaffed or sole-sourced by well-meaning developers with little more than hope, an idea, and reams of code.

One thing I have tried to do when writing about the many services I've grown to like or otherwise launch here is to mention the names behind the services. I will let you know that it's been Benjamin Golub behind FFToGo, Tweet2Tweet and RSSMeme. It was Alexander Marktl with ReadBurner, Caleb Elston with Toluu, Mario Romero with Feedheads, Yuvi Panda with TheStatBot and Dave Stanley and Matt Shaulis teaming up on Shyftr.

I say these names not because they'll eclipse their "brands", but because in almost all cases, I've forged a relationship with these entrepreneurs, even if it's just been e-mail, phone calls, late-night Google Chats, or Facebook messages. And while it's easy to crow that Twitter's down (again) or say one service is going the way of the dodo, you can be sure that the best, most aware, entrepreneurs are watching what you say. They've got their Google Searches, Technorati queries and Summize feeds set to alert them when their companies are mentioned, and the last thing they want to see is you getting a rush from being the first to say "Deadpool", a term popularized by tech blog giant TechCrunch, who has made something of a side business declaring startups dust.

On Tuesday, in a FriendFeed comment thread, I was reminded of this by a somewhat snarky note by Robert Seidman, who in response to an amusing piece that highlighted both me and Robert Scoble as finding new services in our own way, said a few sites I've covered here might as well close up shop now.

"The sad thing is, other than FriendFeed almost ALL of the services Louis touts will 'sleep with the fishes'. You could call deadpool on stuff like Social Median and Toluu right now. Functionality will be absorbed into other Google products."
-- Robert Seidman (Link)

This bothered me, not because he was suggesting I have a tendency to pick losers, but instead, because the eagerness to call "deadpool" didn't take into account the people behind the service, nor their goals. Not every Web service is expected to grow into a real company, and be sold off or enter the public markets through IPO. Many of these are hobbies. Others should be seen with the same light as shareware, in that most content is for free, and if they make a few bucks, that's just fine. Sometimes, a Web service will launch and help a developer pad the resume, or use it as a springboard to the next job. And whether it's one person behind a product or a hundred, there's no value in prematurely suggesting they wave the white flag.

Beyond this issue, I was also surprised to see the occasional visitor to my blog from searches done on Techmeme for its creator, Gabe Rivera. (See the search results) After a few of these searches had hit my referral log, I thought I'd check what was going on. Interestingly, despite the fact Techmeme is spoken of constantly, and the site comes up often in blogging circles, the last three stories to reach Techmeme that mentioned Gabe Rivera were mine, including a piece from each month in March, April and May. This tells me that people, when writing about Techmeme, don't mention Gabe, and have divorced the service from the individual.

As I wrote in April, when I asked "Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.", I have a tendency to shun negativity and be excited about new services. In parallel, I am supporting the developers who are taking a risk by shipping. I am supporting the people behind the services who are looking to help us consume more information, helping us build new social networks, or improve our communications. When I write about a service, I'll continue to do what I can to remember the developers and hopefully, let you get a glimpse into their world as well.

Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here

Near the end of 2007, I first came across a service I had hoped would one day challenge Google Reader for the throne of coolest RSS feed reader, Assetbar. With social aspects including shared statistics and comments, it had the potential to become the future of where RSS feed readers were going. While that hasn't yet come to pass, it did mark the first time a service debuted on LouisGray.com.

In the ensuing 9 months or so, I've been lucky enough to either stumble upon, or get engaged with entrepreneurs early enough in the process, such that this site was where they first got started. Some of them have gone on to incredible visibility and success. One has already closed shop. Another looks dormant, and others, somewhere in between. I'll hold off on giving a rating, or "stars" assigned to their success, but believe me, it's tempting.

---

Assetbar
Debut: September 17, 2007
Post: Assetbar Set to Launch With Google Reader Inspiration

The Goal: To deliver a next-generation RSS feed reader with integrated commenting, shared link lists, and the ability to see if friends had seen or liked an article.

Status: After gaining the attention of ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, as well as a few follow-up stories here, Assetbar gained several hundred users, but rather than rocketing upward in popularity, issues with the confusing user interface, and prioritizing features over speed had even early adopters not sticking around. The site's gone into something of hibernation and maintenance mode, while the developers consider where to take their participatory social media platform next.

---

BlogRize
Debut: April 7, 2008
Post: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers

The Goal: Build a community around a blog, and find new interesting items.

Status: Recently profiled by ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez, who is everywhere, BlogRize has hundreds of users joining communities like ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and LouisGray.com to see what others like them are sharing and commenting on. Updates so far have been somewhat quiet, thanks to developer Jesse Spaulding's recent move to Seattle.

---

LinkRiver
Debut: February 13, 2008
Post: LinkRiver Enters Life Streaming Fray, Focused on Link Blogs

The Goal: To let friends follow shared items activity from multiple people in one place.

Status: LinkRiver has a big fan in Corvida of SheGeeks (LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme), and with interesting wrinkles including Attention data, which tracks what you share most often, and the ability to tag items for later viewing, developer Adam Stiles has created a lightweight (in a good way), informative site to find the most popular items of the day, or to see what friends are sharing, without the noise of some other social aggregators.

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MergeLab
Debut: March 4, 2008
Post: Mergelab Emerges to Streamline Friends' Web Updates

The Goal: To follow friends' activity on the Web in a single location.

Status: Mergelab announced last Friday that the site would close down by the end of June. Without revenue, and with competition, the decision was made to exit the game early.

---

Rating Burner
Debut: January 30, 2008
Post: Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats

The Goal: To show the most popular FeedBurner feeds, and daily changes.

Status: While not widely known, Rating Burner is quietly doing its job, adding more and more feeds to its library. The developer even added the option to display a Rating Burner badge on your blog so you can show your own ranking from the site.

---

ReadBurner
Debut: January 7, 2008
Post: ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items

The Goal: Find the most common shared items in Google Reader.

Status: ReadBurner took off like a phoenix, but after gaining rave reviews from across the Web, the site's lead developer shut down the site, only to see a trio of entrepreneurs, including Mashable's Adam Ostrow, buy its technology and get it up and running again. ReadBurner 2.0 debuted on April 15th and has continued to innovate, issuing an iPhone version of the site, and today, adding support for shared items from NetVibes.

---

RSSmeme
Debut: February 6, 2008
Post: RSSmeme Debuts as ReadBurner Clone

The Goal: Find the most common shared items in Google Reader

Status: RSSmeme took advantage of ReadBurner's downtime, and has more shared link blogs in play than anybody else on the Web. RSSmeme also debuted helpful integration for bloggers who want to show how often their items have been shared, and recently integrated notes from Google Reader.

---

Shyftr
Debut: March 4, 2008
Post: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings

The Goal: Develop a RSS Feed Reader for friends to share favorite items and make comments.

Status: Shyftr recently added OPML importing, on the back of debuting shared link blogs, making it even more competitive with Google Reader, as Mark Hopkins of Mashable and the Download Squad noted. The service still has a way to go to get in the mainstream, and it will take some time for them to escape the dubious honor of getting Bitchmemed last month, but they continue to work hard.

---

SocialMedian
Debut: April 8, 2008
Post: Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha

The Goal: A social news service, personalized based on your favorite topics.

Status: As mentioned Tuesday, SocialMedian is seeing strong growth, even in their alpha stage, growing to 2,599 alpha users, as of this post. The growth in the user base has resulted in a higher amount of interesting news, more clipped items, and the GUI has gotten much stronger in the last month.

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TheStatBot
Debut: May 1, 2008
Post: The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

The Goal: To analyze blog trends and statistics with insightful commentary.

Status: Yuvi Panda is now posting 2 to 3 new articles a week, starting with Scoble's Twitter feed, and now, dissecting Digg and the Techmeme Leaderboard. His latest post, from Tuesday, highlights those sites most likely to be in the "Discussion" section of TechMeme, not a featured item.

---

Toluu
Debut: March 24, 2008
Post: Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones

The Goal: Share your OPML with friends and find new feeds.

Status: Growing like a weed, Caleb Elston's pet project has ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez enamored and just yesterday, Elston announced he continues to upgrade the site, deleting more than 60,000 duplicate feeds, the kind of attention to important detail that has people coming back again and again.

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Yokway
Debut: March 2, 2008
Post: YokWay! Weeks Away from Launching "Digg for Friends"-like Service

The Goal: Share items, videos, and pictures with friends and have conversations.

Status: According to Yokway insiders, traffic to the site is catching up to FriendFeed and beating out SocialMedian, but aside from my coverage, and that from the Last Podcast, they haven't had nearly the exposure of FriendFeed, so that would be a surprise to me. The site has a few hundred visitors, from what I can tell, most activity is still from a select few dozen. Over the last 24 hours, there were 25 items shared for discussion. While the user interface is interesting, as is the application, it hasn't yet gained a lot of public awareness.

---

While this list is long, it's certainly a speck compared to that which blog powers like TechCrunch could debut. I've been lucky to play the role of early adopter, and there are a few more items out there cooking which should show up soon. But on the whole, I'm pretty pleased with the efforts made by just about every single one of the players above. ReadBurner and Toluu for starters, changed the game. Others are must-visit sites for me. But in this fast-moving industry, if you're not fast-moving, you might as well quit. I'm looking forward to keeping this going.

SocialMedian Is Growing Rapidly In First Month's Availability

One of the worst things for a Web 2.0 social community to do is debut, and then sit idly, hoping success will immediately follow, with users rushing in and accepting the site as-is. A stale site is the biggest sign that one service will fail while another will survive, and could be an early "tell" as to the developers' dedication. SocialMedian looks like it's in this race to stay.

In the month following my initial coverage of SocialMedian, the online social news site has undergone a wealth of tweaks, visual enhancements and new features, and it looks like user growth has been dramatic.


You can see the growth of popular networks on SocialMedian
In the first week of April, the top 5 most popular news networks on SocialMedian contained between 50 and 100 users. But now, to make this list, it takes more than 200 users, with 729 being part of the Web 2.0 network. In fact, growth over the last month has seen the site's tech users drive similar topics, including Tech News, Social Media Watch and Social Networking, ahead of the initial leader, Campaign 2008.


The news feed shows interesting stories and comments
On Friday, as announced in a blog post, SocialMedian added some new features likely to raise the site's popularity further, including the reduction of duplicates in "My News Feed", and making Clipped stories look like votes, with those stories gaining the most votes getting a higher level of attention, Digg style. The design of the site has also improved a great deal in just a short time.

(See the Product Development Blog)

As with other social media networks, you can add stories to your news feed by using an embedded bookmarklet, and you can make comments on friends' clipped items. Where other entrants have sputtered in the face of strong competition, it looks like SocialMedian is going to make a serious run at being increasingly visible and increasingly relevant.

If you haven't tried it out already, you can get in with the code of "London". (Sign up here)

Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal - and its opponents have gone so far as to call it "outrageous" or "theft".

While the discussion around where a blog's comments should reside has raised its head before, especially around services like FriendFeed, (See: Sarah Perez of Read Write Web: Blog Comments Still Matter) it flared up again this afternoon when I had (innocently, I thought) highlighted how one friend's blog post from earlier in the week was getting a lot of comments, and had become the most popular story on Shyftr, a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.

While I had hoped the author (Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist, who I highlighted on Monday and like quite a bit) would be pleased to see his post had gained traction, the reaction was not what I had expected. He said he was uneasy about seeing his posts generate activity and community for somebody else. Another FriendFeed user called it "content theft" and said "if they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice". (See the discussion here)

I can see how content creators can feel threatened or wary of services who leverage full RSS feeds, or might actually have a case if they have publicly asked for no repurposing of their content, via Creative Commons or other methods. But I also see that the whole idea of reading feeds in isolation, without engaging, is going to soon be something of the past. AssetBar, Social|Median and Shyftr have been among the first to add comments in their site. Fav.or.it, via Disqus, offers the ability to post comments to the originating blogs. FriendFeed, RSSMeme and many, many others offer links to the content but contents on their site. And that's not even touching on the social news sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc., where comments and community are generated, essentially through leveraging third party headlines.

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online.

Even the conversation about this issue has escaped the blogosphere. Eric, on FriendFeed writes, "It's slightly troubling that this conversation is taking place here instead of on one of our blogs," but it's not so much troubling in my mind, but instead requires a changing mindset.

The Web as a whole has clamored for full RSS feeds, not partial, so we don't have to return to the originating site. Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we're starting to see what it's like, maybe it's not what we had fully anticipated. But it's the way things are headed, and rather than label innovators like Matt Shaulis (Twitter | FriendFeed) and Dave Stanley of Shyftr (Twitter | FriendFeed) as outrageous or possibly illegitimate, we should engage and speak up about what we think is right. As for the developers who enable these services, there are definitely ways they can help raise the visibility of the practice - through e-mail alerts, trackbacks, or even giving the option to opt out. But we'll be seeing this more and more going forward. I promise you that.

Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha

At the end of 2007, Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, stepped down, leaving the online career site behind and taking on a new job of his own, founding a stealth mode online social news site, called Social|Median. Months after raising less than $1 million in seed money from a number of angel investors, the site has risen from "dog food" mode to alpha, on the backs of an offshore engineering team in India and Jason's own efforts, seeing more than 500 early adopter users join the site, aimed at creating topical news networks and sharing hot news with friends. (See their blog here)

While the site has been in closed alpha stage for several months, I managed to snag 200 invites to Social|Median, with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)


Social|Median Has a Feed Showing Updates In Your Networks
Despite its alpha stage and so-far underdeveloped user interface, the site has already shown a number of interesting features that put it in line with similar services, from BlogRize to Yokway and to a lesser extent, FriendFeed.

The site bills itself as "a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information".The site's main hubs are its "News Networks", which are user created, whether on tech topics, including Apple, Web 2.0, Tech News or Venture Capital, or other interests, from History to Team Building and Triathlons. Users can join any number of news networks, effectively subscribing to view posted news on topics they find interesting. Some of the networks are quiet, seeing only five stories a day, while those more broad topics can see hundreds of new items in a 24-hour period.

New additions to the site include the ability to find news networks by searching the site, as well as new location-based news networks, for example, "Seattle", "Silicon Alley" or "Incredible India".

Also a unique wrinkle to Social|Median is an intelligent way for new News Networks to automatically grab the best sources around the Web for those items. Want a network on cars? It's like Social|Median will offer up Car and Driver, or if you can't get enough dirt on Google, Google Blogoscoped or Google Operating System would emerge.


You Can See Most Popular and Newest News Networks

There are two ways to add content to Social|Median, the first being a Twitter-like "Snip", where you can post your thoughts on any topic, or a "Clip", where you can post a headline, a URL to the story and any comments you have. Interestingly, Social Median does the hard work of using its algorithm to determine what are the appropriate news networks for your story, based on the submitted content, and that story can be listed in more than one network at a time.

A Social|Median user's front page consists of what's called the "Hot List", featuring relevant activities from people who are in your news networks, whether they've created new networks, added new clips, or commented on posted items. Soon, the site will also feature more analytics, including "most popular" stories in a network, and whether you want to see more or less from individual users, a lot like Facebook's "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" feature which encourages more or less of a specific item.

As with other social news sites, Social|Median isn't forcing you to be on their site 24 by 7 to get all the latest news. Users can get e-mail alerts of the top 5 most popular stories across Social|Median as frequently as three times a day, or less often if you don't want to see your e-mail in box go entirely social.


More E-mail from Social|Median, Please...

Goldberg's team is entirely based in Pune, India for now, working hard at coding and developing the site prior to its public launch, expected later this summer. Like FriendFeed's "Changelog", which shows the latest additions to the code, Social|Median is striving for a similar level of transparency. You can see the team's latest updates and code revisions on the product development blog found here: social|median: Product Development. As the site says frequently, it is in early alpha, and should be for those willing to accept a less-defined GUI in search for a more social way to share news and find new topics.

If you want in to Social|Median, you can start with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)