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 employ