Podcast: Incidental Interview on #BlameDrewsCancer, More

Sheryl Breuker, who we recently featured in the 10 FriendFeeders to follow for May post, spoke with me yesterday for her Incidental Interviews series, and unlike many other podcasts I've done, she started off not by talking about every service we use, or about the latest tech gadgets.

Instead, she wanted to find out about some of our recent updates that have impacted us personally, and then we dived into geekery.

In the podcast, which I have embedded below, we discuss:

• Drew Olanoff and the #BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon
• My obtaining Robert Scoble's car
• How we use FriendFeed
• The Extended LouisGray.com team of writers
• How we find new tools as an early adopter
• Social media in business
• Conflicts of interest between work and blog?
• And more...

You can find Sheryl's site here: Stardust Global Ventures

Download the Recording Now or Subscribe in iTunes

How A Lone Nickel Almost Cost Me The Price of A New Mac

My MacBook Pro has been extremely reliable and loyal over the last two years, even after I foolishly chose to crush its monitor in a rented convertible at Spring Training in early 2008, forcing significant repair. But in April of 2009, I was sure I was going to have to take the laptop into the Apple Store, ostensibly to repair it at a steep cost of hundreds of dollars, or even be forced to upgrade, costing me a couple thousand dollars.

In addition to the occasional slowness one always perceives even with the fastest of last-generation computers, my laptop seemed to have loose parts in its housing. I was sure the CD-ROM mechanics were broken, as I couldn't insert discs and the machine would rattle when I picked it up to place in my computer bag, or moved from room to room. One knows it's never good to hear a rattling when they move their laptop around, and I was sure that the next time would be the last time I would start it up and it wouldn't crash for good. I even thought just maybe one of my memory sticks had broken away - which would be a perfect excuse for the perceived slowness.

Though I don't use CD-ROMs often, it became embarrassing to hand a CD to a friend (using Windows of course) at the office and ask them to put the disc's contents on the network for me to see it. What was wrong with my laptop, they asked... and I had no idea. But it was broken for sure.

I talked with my younger sister, who works in Apple Retail, what she thought I should do. She said to take it to a Mac genius. I would probably lose access to the computer for a few days, and the hardware repair would be in the high hundreds, assuming I wasn't covered by AppleCare. (Which I most likely am not.)

But on the night of April 24th, I looked down at my laptop to see the curve of a coin peeking from the CD-ROM drive. I deftly removed it, and it was a boring old nickel. (See my annoyance) Hopefully, I tilted the computer back and forth, and heard no rattling. It was a stupid nickel the whole time. And, as my twins are too young still to be up to such shenanigans, I knew the responsible party had to have been me. Somehow, I had a nickel loose in the laptop bag, and somehow, that nickel just so happened to get into the CD-ROM drive (as Apple doesn't have CD-ROM drive bay covers).

In the last month - no issues. CDs go in the drive just fine. The machine doesn't rattle. And I saved myself a good deal of potential embarrassment from having to go to the Apple Store and have them find out... it was a nickel.

So - am I the only one stupid enough to go through these things on a regular basis? I doubt it. Let me know if you've ever crossed the line from geek respectability to tech flunkie.

Tech Geek Nutrition: Introducing The Amazing Vitamin P

Editor's Note: It doesn't take a medical degree to know that many of us tech geeks whose lives circle around our computer aren't getting the best nutrition or exercise. With that in mind, I asked my father, an MD who works for the state of California's Department of Corrections, to provide a family favorite, his article on "Vitamin P". This article was previously printed in Stitches, a humor magazine for physicians in the November – December 1992 edition. -- Louis (PDF Available)

Guest Post By Richard N. Gray Jr. M.D.

What do you do when a patient comes to your office stating he doesn’t feel well because his ribosomes are hurting? Obviously, the traditional history is obtained and a physical exam performed. If, after consideration of all entities in the differential diagnosis, the problem turns out to be ribosomalosis, hypovitaminosis P should be suspected, as this is the most common etiology of ribosomalosis(1).


Vitamin P is an obscure, but definitely essential, fat-soluble compound found in such foods as peanuts, potato chips, pies, popcorn, pizza, pop (i.e. psoda pop), pickles, peanut brittle and other such foods. It binds reversibly with the (you guessed it) P-10 receptor protein of the ribosome, stabilizing the organelle, leading to improved protein synthesis. The critical importance of vitamin P is reflected in the fact that it’s measured not in RDA’s but in a recommended allowance weekly, generally called the RAW score. The RAW scores of a variety of foods(2) are listed in the accompanying table.


Before you become skeptical about this important nutrient, consider the research done by Dr. Francis(3), who showed that a large quantity of peanuts enhances the advantageous qualities of beer, a known ribosomal stimulant. Also consider the increased needs for vitamin P exhibited by adolescents, who consume huge amounts of foods containing this vital compound.

As with the other fat-soluble vitamins, there is a hypervitaminosis state, but it is rarely encountered unless parley is eaten. Parsley is to vitamin P what polar bear liver is to vitamin A. It simply needs to be avoided.

Also a contraindication to high vitamin P intake is the pregnant state, in which, according to recent research(4), the yin and yang forces are upset. If such a problem is suspected, the obstetrician should order serum yin and yang levels and treat accordingly.

Though much is known about vitamin P, research continues in an effort to expand our knowledge of its antidepressant properties, so it can be more appropriately utilized.

The major question remaining is: why is there so much vitamin P in ice cream?

FOOTNOTES

1. R Gray, M.D.; Gray’s Nutrition, 3rd Edition, pg. 1492, Laf and Fudgebetter, 1986, Philadelphia.
2. Unpublished data, Yuba Dietetic Association.
3. N. Francis, M.D.; “Shotgun Surgery,” Orthopedics & Obstetrics, vol. 6, no. 2, pg. 99; 1981.
4. I. Dick, M.D.; The Smoking Rabbi, Preface, Six-point Press, 1980, New York.

You can download a PDF copy of the original article introducing Vitamin P here.

Early Adopters and Finding "The Next Shiny Object"

About a year ago, I put forth a theory I called "The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior", chronicling how we, as self-proclaimed early adopters, like to find cutting edge products and services, but can go from the most vocal proponents to their most visible detractors in a short amount of time, sometimes putting something in its grave even before the rest of the mainstream has found it exists. A corollary to this theory is that once an acceptable service or product is found, eventually the early adopter group will slip into a comfortable malaise, looking around for the "next shiny object" that will take their attention away from what to them has already become old hat. And this quest, this desire to find what is next, is what drives many of us to sign up for everything under the sun, kick its tires, and debate its worth with our peers. But just because we look for something new doesn't mean everything we use today will eventually be discarded.


The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior (June 2008)
Back in June, I wrote:

"One month's golden boy can be next month's afterthought. One week's addiction can be next week's memory. For a service to succeed, it needs to attract those early adopters who can help propel a strong population, but it needs to do all it can to keep those adopters feeling like partners and mainstream users, before letting neglect fire up their egos so much that they leave you altogether."

You can sit on the sidelines and see this happening everywhere. In fact, much of the backlash against Twitter of late has been from the early adopter community who has been largely ignored, in favor of the celebrity of the week, making those who pushed the service initially feel like they are unwanted.

This lust for the next big thing, and the desire to be first to find it, is much of the reason you see online media write bigger and bolder headlines for products that are fairly incremental to activity, and not game-changers. Be it yet another search engine, a new location awareness tool, or a widget that combines multiple previous offerings, there are presumed "bonus points" for being the first to call it a "Killer".

Amidst this, the truth is that some of these products do take hold and become part of our everyday activity - including Google Reader, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, the iPhone and others for me, of course, and if they continue to please customers, they don't end up seeing even the most-aggressive users moving from what I called "Engagement" to "Entitlement" and eventually, "Migration". As FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit slyly asked of me last year, "I hope this doesn't mean you're moving on to stages 4 or 5 Louis...", prompting me to say that "some sites have the potential to be a permanent 3," referring to "Engagement".


Can Sites Be a "Permanent 3"? I say, Yes.
And yes, it can be tempting at times to stomp my foot and expect some of the apps I like and use the most to behave a way I want them to, but for the most part, I think I've held off, even as I continue testing any and all newcomers.

In a thread this week, perennial early adopter Robert Scoble jokingly told one commenter, after they asked what "the next shiny object will be", that "Louis Gray hasn't figured that out yet, so we have at least six months." As if I had that much power...


Looks Like It's Up to Me, Then?
As I see it, we have been lucky enough to find some shiny objects very early that have become active sites for a good number of people. We were the first to report on TweetDeck back in July of 2008, and TweetDeck is arguably the most popular desktop client for Twitter. Its success can even be seen in the development of competitors, such as Seesmic Desktop. We were also the first to report on Socialmedian, which was acquired by XING in December for a cool 7.5 million after seeing strong momentum. We were the first to really dive into the world of shared item aggregators, and were the first to report on ReadBurner, RSSmeme and other competitors. We were the first to highlight the launch of Toluu, a place to share your OPML and discover new feeds. We were the first to talk about Feedly, which is reshaping the way you organize and find data in your Google Reader stream. We were also the first to report on Twazzup, a new search engine for Twitter, as well as other tools.

So what am I saying with all this? Aren't these shiny objects? Didn't TweetDeck change the game? Aren't early adopters enjoying these services that haven't yet been absorbed by the mainstream and celebrities? They are.

Early adopters can do more than just discover new tools. Our job, as it were, is to help take something that's undocumented, and discover its potential and its use. What are we already doing that these new tools make better? What can I do that I couldn't do before? Does this new tool make anything I already do easier, or is it executed in a more clear way? It's not about finding new tools just for the sake of getting one more blog post on the chart. It's about hopefully rewarding developers for their efforts, rewarding early adopters and readers here by their getting early access to things that make a difference, and rewarding ourselves by building out the community in a new place. We are always on the look out for shiny objects. We find them all the time and are happy to share with you. But if I've found one that works for me, you can expect me to latch onto it like a barnacle.

Let's Stop Speaking Like Machines and Start Speaking Like People

The path from engineering to marketing is usually not a straight line. Often there can be many stops along the way, as a product goes from idea to a spec to prototype release build, through the quality assurance process, and eventually general availability to the marketplace. As the product develops, so does the way it gets named, branded and described - starting with what's typically a straight forward problem/solution issue from engineering, and morphing into a more refined, even if not always as accurate, pitch from marketing. But in the Valley, often we skip those steps, and it's our users who end up paying the price - by being taught to think and talk like machines.

Are you a big fan of hash tags? Or are you wild about boolean searches? Do you find yourself reverting back to "Run DOS Run" instead of just typing and talking like a human being often online? Despite billions of dollars of investment and a plethora of companies trying to develop natural language (especially in search), we still have a long way to go.


Twitter, the hot tech topic of the month and many others preceding it, largely relies on two specific machine language symbols to connect users. The first is the basic @ sign which signals a "reply". The second, a # mark, or "hashtag", tries to connect people talking about the same event, location or idea. But what we're doing by using these symbols is work the machines should do for us. Instead of posting a hashtag about our location or event, Twitter should pick that up based on our profile data or GPS from the phone, or even group people's topics based on the content contained in the tweet and those immediately preceding it.

Web search engines have similarly expected high levels of machine like language from all their users. For example, a search on Google that shows results that mention "dog" or "cat" or "fish" but don't have the word "bird" in them necessitates a search string of "dog OR cat OR fish -bird". If I wanted to demand it have both dog and cat in it, but not fish or bird, I'd be changing things up a bit, typing: "dog AND cat -bird -fish". We're talking like this because we're trying to make nice with a database who thinks this way.


Even in this morning's FriendFeed beta site do you see the same kind of expectation that pushes users away from being people and further along the path of being cyborgs. While the company has some helpful pull-down menus on its advanced search page, it doesn't let you search by specific services, such as YouTube or LinkedIn (while the old version did). Instead, you're expected to type in "service:youtube" in the search field. To search all my friends' posts from YouTube that contained the word pizza in the title, I'd have to set up the advanced search to look for pizza in the title from my friends, and then add "service:youtube" to the query.


I expect the FriendFeed team can fix that query fairly quick with the addition of a pulldown menu, but that will be knocking down one mole before another pops up somewhere else - and many other services are less responsive, expecting you to talk in a way a machine would. Jeremiah Owyang and Loic Le Meur exchanged tweets about a month ago, calling the Web "primitive". But the Web just turned 20 years old. If this is how far we've come in 20 years, do we have to wait another 20 before we can just type or speak in what we want to know and get the right result?

Serial Early Adopters Get It All Wrong

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Shakespeare I Ain't (E-mail / Twitter)

I've been on Facebook now for longer than I've had my current Gmail account, and yet I can honestly say I never saw much use for it before the last six months.

Part of writing about tech means that you are forever jumping on the latest social network, trying out the latest app, and trying your hardest to keep ahead of the curve. You leave a trail of login IDs in your wake, rarely revisiting the majority of things you sign up for. You are a serial early adopter.

Of course, the serial early adopters consider themselves elite, above the masses, and when the hoi polloi begin to join a social network, it becomes passé, signalling a time to move on to the next big thing. The problem is, however, two-fold with this approach to determining what's hot and what's not. Without the arrival of the masses, what hope does a company have for profitability? The early adopters are never numerous enough, nor loyal enough, to support a company beyond the intial uptake.


An Early Adopter Panics When the Mainstream Nears...
Even more importantly, though, is how useful an app or a social network is. No offense, but how many times am I supposed to interact with the same people on multiple social networks? My FriendFeed subscriptions look a lot like my Twitter follows, which are probably the same people I'm connected to on LinkedIn, and so on. Up until about six months ago, my Facebook friends list looked much the same.

Six months ago was when things started changing. That was when "the masses" began signing up, and suddenly, I was connected to my cousin in Florida I hadn't seen since she was less than a year old. I found a friend from first grade who now lives in Montenegro. I get to "talk" regularly with my best friend from college who's living in Mexico and my junior prom date who moved South.

I don't need to see the same updates on Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook from the same people every day. The redundancy of information eventually becomes tiring. Adding in the perspective of the "regular" people outside the tech sphere not only broadens a viewpoint of how things are perceived, but also what's important in the overall scheme of the world, not just the insular world of tech.

So the next time you remark that an app has "jumped the shark" because the unwashed masses have started showing up, think about whether you want all of your daily social interactions to be in the narrow world of tech or whether you should appreciate a wider horizon brought to you by those who aren't as "hip" and "in the know" as you are. I signed my dad up for Facebook myself.

Read more by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Shakespeare I Ain't. You can find her on Facebook here and Louis is hiding here.

Web Two Dot Oh DotCom Dot Cloud Colon Slash Slash

This afternoon I had the opportunity to attend a session presented by TechCrunch, hosted by Steve Gillmor, around cloud computing, featuring some of the Valley's thought leaders, from many of the biggest names in all of tech, ranging from Salesforce.com to Rackspace, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun, Ning, FriendFeed, Facebook, Amazon.com and a small handful of startups. Each of the participants discussed how their product leveraged the cloud, what it was about this new approach to harvesting data storage and computing that made their products execute the way they do, and how they approached new problems of bandwidth, capacity, licensing, security and scale.

The event, essentially a two parter, with early-stage start-ups presenting for five minutes apiece in front of an expert panel for the first half, and a roundtable of technology elite for the second half, saw a healthy dosage of skepticism mixed in with what was largely a genuine desire for these companies to try and deliver higher-quality services for their users by taking advantage of new protocols.

With everybody saying the word "cloud" to represent customer data or computing being stored independently of local physical disk or blade servers, the word itself grew to be mocked. One 'expert' said cloud was the new "dotcom". Another compared the cloud to rabbits as they kept multiplying, and a third called the cloud "Kool-Aid". With the move of terminology over the last decade from "Dotcom" to "Web 2.0" to "Cloud", you can see why people would be necessarily wary of jumping on the newest movement with two feet.

All names aside, there is as much fact as there was fad in the cloud. The cloud's benefits are clear as data can be stored independent of physical disks, and doesn't require dedicated storage and server administration. Code developers want anytime access to infinite bandwidth and storage, and consumers want instant response times. As the panel debated the genesis of enterprise apps absorbing consumer application features, it was clear that each was facing challenges impossible just a decade ago, and the cloud's availability changed everything.

Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed referred to the Internet as just one big computer, and said that instead of shipping software in a big cardboard box with floppies to introduce version 3.0, you could just ship new code three times a day. Mike Schroepfer of Facebook talked about how his team could handle 1 billion status messages of 100 characters each on a different level of storage than the 1 billion images, each a few megabytes apiece. And Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com won the prize for the best quote of the day, saying, "As an industry, we are always overestimating what we can do in a year and underestimating what we can do in a decade."

Benioff's quote is no doubt true. The next engineering team I meet that hits the initial proposed date with all the requested features is the first one I will meet. But a decade ago, we wouldn't have expected to stream full-length feature films without buffering, or do many of the things we do online, always having been limited by location, bandwidth, memory, storage, or even operating systems. Now, the operating system is even less a part of the discussion. While the panel was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley office, practically all presentations were done on Apple Macintosh, and featured FireFox, not Internet Explorer. Now, consumers and businesspeople expect to get all their applications and data from anywhere on any device. It was enough that Benioff even left his laptop behind on a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in favor of his BlackBerry Bold.

It is happening. Not too long ago, yet another meme went around the Web on what the Internet looked like in 1996 - a blink of an eye when you think about it. In 1996, I was hosting a personal home page, using WebStar, on my Apple Macintosh Performa 631 CD, with all of 8 megabytes of RAM. Now, my blog is hosted on the cloud. The images themselves are on the cloud. My participation in social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed... is done on the cloud. And I'm taking my iPhone everywhere. I used to despise the term cloud, and used to rail against it with my colleagues at 3Cube back in 1998 to 2000, but it looks like I lost that battle. Good thing all of us as consumers are winning.

Safari 4's Introduction A Clear Salvo In the New Chrome Wars

In today's Web-centric computing world, there is practically no more important software than that of the Web browser. While an argument could be made that one's e-mail is equally as important, the move to Web-hosted mail services, like GMail and Apple's Mobile Me means that the Web browser itself is where most of today's work gets done. The move from the operating system being the center of our world, and the prism by which we see everything, to that of the Web browser, was central to Netscape's annihilation by Microsoft, and has now practically come true, even as Navigator's time has now come and gone.

Almost 14 years after Netscape as a company went public, a new wave of browser wars is upon us. And while, yes, Internet Explorer, the standard on practically all Windows-based PCs, is still the market share leader, the innovation is not being perceived as coming from Redmond. Instead, it's products like Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari which are pushing the envelope and working to enhance our browsing experience. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's gotten to the point that even if they made a better product with all the possible bells and whistles, nobody outside of Dare Obasanjo would give them credit.

Yesterday, as practically every tech blog on the planet mentioned, Apple introduced a new 4.0 beta version of the Safari browser, including speed enhancements, and most notably, a Top Sites feature that mimics Chrome's most visited sites page. And while other usability enhancements were made, including to the toolbar, expanded browser history and further integration with Google's search bar, it was this addition of "Top Sites" that has everyone thinking about how Apple is taking on Google's Chrome even before the company comes out with its much-awaited official Mac version.


My Top Sites - After Editing Out All Work-Related Sites
And this is exactly the dialog that has long-been needed in the browser space but was lacking when IE finally reached the summit atop Netscape's corpse. Opera and OmniWeb and iCab all had their handful of users, but never gained the kind of mindshare and deployments possible from Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Now, it could be said that Microsoft is being hit from all sides after years of letting Explorer stagnate. (I first called it the Chrome Wars on FriendFeed yesterday)

Being hard wired both as an Apple fanboy and an early adopter, I downloaded Safari 4 beta as soon as I knew it was available. After finally updating the laptop with the latest security updates, we were good to go - and honestly, there will be no turning back. For whatever reason, over the last few weeks, I have had the worst time keeping Safari up and running. Every new tab welcomed a new opportunity to stall and require a force quit. But Safari 4, after a full day's aggressive use, hasn't fallen on its sword even once. And considering I spend practically all my waking hours in front of a browser, that's a good thing.

For me, it's the stability and the speed, and the support for standards, that will make using Safari on a daily basis a success. The Top Sites feature is interesting, a cute way to have 12 pages on hand to click through at all times, but it's not exactly going to save me a ton of time. With RSS, keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete, it's not like I was taking tons of time to enter URLs and go site to site. So yes, we like the new features, but we like it even more that it doesn't crash and will support new Web services that may be using bleeding-edge code.

And while I assume you already know, Safari is more than just a Web browser for Macs. It's also available for Windows, and forms the core browsing experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can get the new Safari 4 beta here: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/.

12 News Analysis Blips That Don't Warrant a Full Post

1. Real-time search (via Twitter, etc.) is complementary to Google search, not a replacement.
2. Facebook offering portable status updates is a feature, not a game-changer.
3. Alex Rodriguez is a cheater who is only sorry because he was caught, not because he used.
4. The Australian fires are horrific. So is seeing an ad prior to news covering the disaster.
5. Shocker: FriendFeed is not perfect. But it has more potential than people give it credit.
6. Apparently Micah Baldwin goes into strip clubs to study... economics.
7. Every piece of social software is jealous of TweetDeck.
8. Black History month or not, I'm a fan of Derrick, Corvida, Shey, Wayne Sutton & Bwana.
9. Mike Fruchter has extended his "Forty Elements of Social Media" post to a detailed slideshow.
10. Rumor has it that Google is laying off engineers. Matt Cutts is skeptical.
11. Step 1: Be named Fortune's best to work for. Step 2: cut 6 percent of staff.
12. Consensus on Mini-Microsoft revealing his face from under anonymity is that he shouldn't.

Of course, when I don't have enough time to cover it all, just follow along with my Google Reader Link Blog or see the updates on FriendFeed.

Could Sundance Do for Qik What SXSW Did for Twitter?

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

As a Salt Lake City, Utah resident, one of the most prevalent events of the year happens around the Sundance film festival. While not quite an event for Tech Geeks, the festival has become more and more techie as film geeks have begun to converge with computer geeks and find new ways to present the media they are creating. I visited Sundance last night and was amazed at the number of former film geeks trying to create their own web ventures as the economy slims for the film industry.

Just last Saturday, one example of this convergence of new media with old happened with a project founded by Kevin Rose, funder of Digg.com and Revision3, and Ashton Kutcher, famous celebrity actor, filmmaker, and director (and host of MTV's "Punk'd"). While I'm a bit disappointed no Utah bloggers were selected (considering it was in our state after-all), Rose and Kutcher selected 4 major bloggers, including Venturebeat's Matt Marshall from all across the nation to compete in a 24 hour competition, broadcast live on the service Qik.com. The bloggers were asked to perform such tasks as building an igloo and making a snow theater, or getting Mahalo's Jason Calacanis to say the words, "Mahalo", "Shitzu", and "Tesla". While entertaining to watch, the amazing story of this all were the statistics shared by Qik's founder Bhaskar Roy about the success of Qik during the competition.

In this behind-the-scenes video by Kevin Rose, Roy shares that, in just the less than 12 hours since the competition started, over 100 thousand video producers subscribed to the service. Roy was sitting at the headquarters of the competition, working to keep the site up and running as they broadcast the show out to what would appear to be near millions. While Roy wouldn't share page view statistics, with that many sign-ups one has to imagine page view statistics were through the roof, and that was made evident as I noticed Qik transferring some of the competition's videos over to YouTube during the event.

One of the biggest advents 2 years ago at South-by-Southwest 2007 was the prevalent use of Twitter and its strong growth, promotion, and use during the event. It was during that event that Twitter took off like wildfire, and became the explosive network we all know about today. It was later that year that I joined Twitter, and it has only kept growing since. Today it is estimated that Twitter has close to 4-5 million users and is growing exponentially. With numbers like Roy mentions, one can't help but speculate that Qik is not far behind those statistics.

I contacted Qik and they weren't willing to expand further on these results, but it will be interesting to see if Rose or Kutcher share more results of this competition and whether or not it was a success in and of itself. One thing we can say however is that regardless of the competition, Qik may have just had its South-by-Southwest moment here at the Sundance film festival.

The video in full is posted below - Roy's comments are right around 1:03.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

I Don't Care If You Call Me a Fanboy. Steve Jobs Should Be Immortal.

As today's news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be taking medical leave from the company through the summer rockets around the Web, many are speculating this will be the last we may ever see of Cupertino's hero. Following the initial news around Macworld Expo that Jobs was going to forego the keynote and had a hormonal imbalance, whispers grew to loud murmurs, saying that Apple needed a backup plan for CEO - and fast - but now that murmuring has become a roaring crescendo. And while I put myself at significant risk at being labeled a fanboy who kneels at the multi-colored altar, I have to express how losing Jobs for more than a few months will be a significant blow, not just to Apple and its customers, but to Silicon Valley and the world at large.

No doubt in part due to my recent birth, I practically grew up using Apple computers. And even while Windows grew in market share, I saw their interface as a shoddy misappropriation of Apple's intellectual property. As Apple swirled near the drain in the late 1990s, while some mocked the company and called it beleaguered, I huddled among the seeming few fanatics we had left and declared that we would never give up. It was us against the world.

Jobs' return to Apple was curious at first. It was supposed to have been temporary. He vowed he would never be the CEO at Apple Computer, and speculation as to a full-time holder of the role was widespread. But, luckily for us all, he pulled a Dick Cheney (think 2000 VP candidates) and appointed himself. And the rest, as they say is history. He made Apple not just an also-ran in the computer business, but a major force for innovation. He brought color to a drab world. He worked with very conservative businesses and found ways to launch the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and eventually, the iPhone.

With Jobs at the helm, Apple took the very boring world of MP3 players and cell phones and made them exciting again - and you only have to take a look at the Microsoft Zune, Sony's failed Walkman MP3 player line, and phones from Nokia to see what the industry has tried to do in Apple's wake.

As I wrote during the last round of speculation, I Will Teach My Children About Steve Jobs, I don't intend to tell them about Steve Jobs as you would a cultural icon of yesteryear, but instead because he helped to spur innovation and imagination. The idea of an Apple without Steve Jobs, or a computer industry without Steve Jobs is alarming. Yes, younger entrepreneurs like those running Google and Facebook have lapped Apple in some areas and are forging interesting new products, but there is only one Steve Jobs.

Apple has always taken significant pride in how it uses its vast mountain of cash and its R&D budget. The very best use of said funds would be to first, solve Jobs' medical issue, whatever it is, and later, move on to see if he can be made immortal. This isn't a shifty Bill Gates or a sweaty, rotund, Steve Ballmer we are talking about here. This is the one and only Steve Jobs, who has cared about creativity, education, and users above everything else. The idea of a computer industry without Apple and without Steve Jobs should mortify us all.

June cannot come soon enough. I hope that is truly as long as we will be waiting.

Armchair Quarterbacking and Why I Talk to Companies Using the Blog

Whether it's due to the fact it's another 'slow news' weekend, or due to the fact I was more bare in my recommendations for how FriendFeed, a service I am constantly using and like a lot, could improve in yesterday's post than I usually am, there was quite a bit of feedback from around the Web, which both echoed the comments I had made, and questioned the reason for my making them in the first place. Interestingly enough to me, despite a full year or so of being called a FriendFeed addict, apologist, or what have you for my consistent favoring of the service, several people tried to construe my direct suggestions as somehow interpreting the site would fail - which I don't believe I ever came close to saying. But what they missed was I have a history of offering suggestions to companies, both new and established. Sometimes, I can do this 1-1 with the developers, but often I use the blog.

A person's blog can be whatever they want it to be. It can be your brand. It can be a megaphone that allows you to speak to many at once. It can be a personal diary. I've chosen to make mine about services I find interesting, and to a lesser extent, about me. The posts I make are about services I encounter and usually care about. I tell you how I feel or what I saw, and make it personal. And when I give feedback about companies, it comes from my thoughts and usually is spat out top to bottom as I was thinking about it, with little organization - just raw.

And given the blog's relative obscurity in 2007 and 2006, it's likely few saw my original set of feedback I offered FriendFeed more than a year ago - and how it mirrored other occasions where I've done similar posts for other services.

For example:

• February 18, 2007:How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
• March 3, 2007: 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
• March 12, 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
• August 27, 2007: What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
• December 30, 2007: 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
  
• March 9, 2008: 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
• August 27, 2008: 10 Suggestions To Improve FriendFeed's Beta

And I haven't always been nice. See: Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close. and After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp, for example.

On August 29th of 2007, I wrote that you should Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies, and I've been doing that. I do it because as consumers we are often the silent party in the buyer and seller relationship. The company controls the product, the message, the delivery method, and tells you how you should use it. As a consumer, you can buy it, and you can be satisfied, or not. I tend to believe that as a consumer, I may have some ideas that the company either didn't think about, or didn't think were as important as other items. By using the blog, I can make my opinion clear, and also act as a sounding board for other people who might have shared the same opinions, but didn't know where to start, or thought they were alone.

Just look at some of the comments I saw on Twitter following yesterday's post:

@elizabethsosnow: "I am one of the stale accounts."
@spinko: "Louis Gray talks about friendfeed and how it's not intuitive for new users like myself. Amen, I still don't get FF."
@maryhodder: "just read the Louis Gray article myself.. agree. FF is overwrought and makes me feel like i'm drowning."
@jayrosen_nyu: '"Simply put, people aren't getting it." Louis Gray on FriendFeed's barriers to intuitive use. I'm one of those people.'

Sarah Lacy said she is one of those people I described in yesterday's post who pipes their data in and gets a lot of followers, but doesn't participate. For whatever reason, FriendFeed hasn't won her over, and she says the company didn't try to engage her inactive account (one of the suggestions I had yesterday).

I mention these not to pile on, but to show the post started a discussion of people who weren't thinking about the issue, and might possibly have extended the visibility of the issue to others who thought everything was "just fine". As Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr said, FriendFeed Isn’t Dying, and I never said it was.

What I chose to do with yesterday's post, and the many before it was to speak up where the above examples had chosen to be silent. Mark Trapp called it 'Armchair Entrepreneuring' and said I could collect more flies with honey than vinegar, adding, "Offering feedback is one thing: but the sheer hubris of tech bloggers that they know how to run a company better than the ones actually running it is entirely different." But I wasn't aiming for hubris, nor was I aiming for linkbait, as my cranky Canadian friend, Steven Hodson, suggested I might be. What I was doing was sharing my candid thoughts about a service I really like and one I want to get better and better.

I use the blog because it is public. It is searchable and others with similar issues can find it. I use the blog to talk to companies because very often, they listen. Many of the suggestions I've given to LinkedIn, to Google Reader, to FriendFeed and others have happened. I'm not naive enough to think it was because I recommended they would, but it tells me I occasionally am on the right track.

I will armchair quarterback and keep talking to companies, as Dave Winer says, to help them, not to hurt them, and to help others. And sometimes, companies really do value the feedback. That's part of why I'm working with ReadBurner, SocialToo and engaging with others informally. It's about pushing people who make products to make them even better than they are now, and potentially, being part of that process.

Scrapplet Sets Up Blank Canvas to Mash Up Web Activity

There are destination sites, and there are aggregation sites. There are enterprise-grade Web sites and then there are templates, easy to use for the average layperson. And then there is Scrapplet, a unique Web application that acts as a open slate for you to pull in data from around the Web, embedding images, RSS feeds, videos, and even complete Web sites, into a single page. The goal? Leverage the Web browser as the delivery vehicle, requiring no third party installations, and make your personalized site whatever you want it to be.

I spoke with Steve Repetti, CEO of Scrapplet, on Friday, and heard the story of how Scrapplet leverages "an efficient, pure JavaScript library that can do AJAX, windowing, messaging, data portability" and "integration with back-end components." The end result he said, is that "in the drag and drop world, the browser should do drag and drop."

If you sign up for Scrapplet, you are presented with a blank browser page, and have the option to pull in content from all around the Web, from social networks to Web sites, and can move it around, customize it and make it your own, packaged either as a single page, or you can set up many pages and build relationships between the pages so that it functions as a complete Web site.

Given the focus on data portability (Repetti sits on the board of DataPortability.org), you don't need to create yet another account to work with Scrapplet, but can login with OpenID, your FaceBook, AOL, Google or Yahoo! ID.

In our demo, it was clear the number of options available to users is tremendous - so much so it can be confusing to know where to start. But after Repetti showed me example after example of dragging thumbnails to Web sites, dragging and dropping content, and even copying over a full Web page, I tried it for myself, and with some trial and error, I managed to make a page that shows my social network profiles from around the Web, displays my FriendFeed realtime stream, the RSS feed for this side, has links to other pages around the Web, and even hot links to other friends' sites, displaying their profile images from Facebook.


Click Image to See it in full or go to:
http://scrapplet.com/louisgray
While the technology underlying Scrapplet is advanced, the requirements to use it are very simple. They claim the product works in all browsers and operating systems - with only a few exceptions. I was told for cross-domain drag and drop, you will want to use Internet Explorer or FireFox, and if you do use FireFox, there's a 4k plug-in.

As Repetti told me Friday, one of the biggest challenges Scrapplet has is that "it looks easy, and might not be," but he added, with confidence, "if you can conceive of it, I can instantly bring it to life."

In the last few days, I've seen this already to be true as Repetti has upgraded the service and helped squash the occasional bug. Given it's absolutely a beta product, you just might find some yourself.


You Can Display Many Different Object Types On Scrapplet
To get started with Scrapplet, go to: scrapplet.com and use the Promo code of "louisgray" (without quotes).

To see some other users of Scrapplet, check out:
Robert Scoble: http://www.scrapplet.com/scobleizer
Brian Solis: http://www.scrapplet.com/briansolis

Ten Tech Things I'm Thankful For

I don't know about you, but some of the technology we take for granted still seems exciting and mysterious to me. Ever stop in the middle of your laptop and say - wow... I'm seeing streaming video, live, wirelessly in high quality? Ever stop when on a cell phone and realize you're talking to someone thousands of miles away and hearing them respond in real time? It may seem like we take these things for granted, and only speak up when there are problems, but that's far from the truth. On this Thanksgiving holiday, I thought I'd highlight ten things I'm grateful for that impact us in a positive way.

1) I'm Thankful for a Competitive Culture of Curiosity

Without curiosity and aggressive competition, innovation would be at a near stand-still. Experimentation, testing and looking for new markets or way to improve existing markets or products enables new ideas to develop, and new approaches to be found for existing products and activity. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurialism is encouraged and celebrated, and it's actually okay to fail or work at a failed company multiple times in one's career, so long as you keep trying.

2) I'm Thankful for Expanding Bandwidth and Data Storage

Any of us can look backward at our first computers, and modems, and laugh at how many megabytes of RAM or hard disk space we had, or how we might have tried to get to the Internet at 4-digit baud speeds. Over the decades, you've seen a move on the network side from 10 megabit to 100 megabit, through 10 gigabit on the corporate side, and to high-speed broadband for consumers, not to mention 3G for iPhones and other wireless gadgets. Hard disks have grown from megabytes to gigabytes and now terabytes, enabling higher quality images, video, music and other data exchanges to take place quickly and be stored longer. The growth of bandwidth and data storage has essentially paved the way for the online software repositories, iTunes, YouTube and many other intensive Web apps that are powering today's digital economy.

3) I'm Thankful for The Removal of Geographic Barriers

We may have to get a passport to travel from country to country, but online, I'm talking and engaging with people from around the globe every day. While places like the Silicon Valley still maintain a lead in terms of available networking opportunities, the Web lets me connect with entrepreneurs in Europe, bloggers in Australia, India, and Canada, or around the world. In fact, just a few weeks ago I managed to reach Robert Scoble by cell phone when he was traveling in China, as I'd mistakenly thought he'd already come home. While it would take a day of travel to see him, I could get him live with a few taps on the iPhone. Also, I've befriended people from a wide variety of countries and places around the United States on the myriad of social networks.

4) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Publishing

The Web has dramatically increased the potential to publish in real-time over the last few years. For free, I can register to send short updates to Twitter, or full-length blog posts to Blogger, WordPress or TypePad. There is no application to fill out, or editorial board to approve content. The ease of publishing lets anyone with a voice or something to share get out there quickly to all interested to see.

5) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Discovery

There's a reason Google is thought of as the most successful company of our generation. They focused on the ease of searching and discovery of all the world's information - starting with the World Wide Web at large, and expanding to images, videos, books, news, and trying to ease discovery across different languages with translation tools. Google, and others, expanded to desktop search and discovery to let you find even your own documents. This ease of discovery speeds academia and business, and lets even the most obscure opinions or publications be found, assuming you're on topic and the searcher uses the right keywords.

6) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Data Mobility

Yesterday, I saw a road sign saying "5 1/4 miles" to our destination, and it reminded me of the old 5 1/4" floppy disks, which gave way to 3 1/2" floppy disks, Zip drives, USB keys, and of course, attachments by e-mail, which negated the need for much of the portable physical media. Now, I know that my data is accessible from the Web on essentially any computer or mobile device, no matter where I am. All my e-mail accounts flow to the iPhone. All my bookmarks are synched from my home computer to the iPhone, and I can log into any of my online accounts from any computer to pull down my data or get my personal experience.

7) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Access to People

The combination of the ease of publication and discovery makes it easier than ever to find ways to contact people, by phone, by e-mail, or through social networks where they are active. The old days of the Yellow Pages and White Pages and Blue Pages that you needed to thumb through to find local businesses or your neighborhood directory are gone, replaced by personal address books that stay on your computer and cell phone, and online directories that are searchable. Additionally, those who publish are often easily reachable, even if just through comment pages on their site, giving you a platform for conversation and exchange.

8) I'm Thankful for the Opportunity to Exchange Ideas

Nobody is an expert on everything, but just about everyone is an expert on something. Where I have weaknesses, or limited understanding, it is fairly easy now to find resources or individuals who have strength, and who are open to discussion. Combined with the ease of discovery and publication, rather than posting items here and waiting for people to answer, I can go to these sources and engage with them where they want to engage at their point of comfort - be it on their preferred social network, their blog, their user forum or bulletin board.

9) I'm Thankful for the Acceptance and Promotion of Standards

As technology consumers, we have our idiosyncrasies. I may prefer to use Mac OS X computers, and use the Safari Web browser. You may prefer Windows Vista, and like Internet Explorer or Firefox. But, in theory, our Web experience should be the same. While there was a time when Mac documents and PC documents or Mac formatted disks and PC formatted disks were wildly different and non-transferrable, both platforms have practically unified so documents and applications are largely equivalent on all platforms and an experience can be universal. The acceptance of standards for all things on the Web, from the GIF and JPEG standards to those for HTML, Java, CSS and PHP, ensure that Web sites and applications can increasingly behave appropriately and within guidelines, regardless of the consumer's setup and geography. While I know things could still improve, the community has made incredible strides in pursuing unity.

10) I'm Thankful for Never Accepting the Status Quo as Good Enough

Where much is given, much is expected. As Web bandwidths increase, as disk storage increases, as ease of access increases, and the number of people getting on the Web and using it for all aspects of commerce, friendship, and communication increases, the capability of each site and application gains the potential for improvement. And I've yet to meet a site or an application that simply stops working, saying they have stopped all bugs, and that the experience could not possibly get any better. Google is constantly improving and experimenting with their search index and results. Microsoft and Apple are constantly rolling out new iterations to their operating systems, their applications and their Web browsers. And startups are always coming and going, not just in an effort to make the people working there some money, but because they want to make a real difference through leveraging the cutting edge of technology.

As a consumer and as someone who for more than a decade has worked in Silicon Valley, looking to help develop and distribute differentiated products that aid customers, I know I will never accept what we have as good enough. But I appreciate the opportunity to exchange ideas, to reach new people, to discover new content and to publish where I can. That's part of what's enabled exchanges such as this. What are you thankful for in the world of technology and what do you believe I left out?

It's Not About the Technology, Stupid

This morning, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with the well-traveled and well-respected Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. The three of us, speaking to a group primarily comprised of PR and Marketing professionals looking to get a grasp on new media and emerging social tools, discussed how to better track your brand online, how to interact with prospects, and how the move toward the semantic Web, including tagging and group-derived suggestions, would pose both new opportunities and challenges.

While the conversation got technical at times, I felt the places where I connected best with the audience was when I talked to them in terms of e-mail, iTunes and spoke their language in terms of understanding how they had to answer to multiple clients, who each wanted to broadest visibility, in a time when media outlets are disappearing.

A few hours later, this afternoon, I was back on the phone talking social media to a group of PR people looking to, again, figure out just what the heck Twitter and FriendFeed are and why they would have any value to their own outreach campaigns. And I could tell, based on their responses, that to take on these new tools sounded daunting.

Frankly, we, as consumers and developers, for the most part, are not doing a very good job of explaining these tools and making them simple enough to comprehend to the average layperson, let alone adopt. In describing these services, we need to do a lot less about talking about 140 character limits, feeds and aggregation, and instead talk more about connections, sharing and community.

What we need to do is help translate these honestly geeky tools into something that makes sense to the mainstream. Instead of talking about how many people you're following, APIs and how you use TweetDeck to follow specific terms in Twitter, start by explaining that the service is essentially text messaging that gets recorded and can be sent to many people at once. As for FriendFeed, I always explain it by breaking up the service into its two pieces. The Feed captures all your activity online. The Friend lets you see what your friends are doing, find new ones and interact with each other's content. Don't talk about 40+ supported services and how you can redirect to Twitter or Facebook. Start with the basics.

At Blog World Expo this September, Chris Brogan famously teased Jesse Stay with a comment I posted to Twitter:

"Look, tech dork, software doesn't solve problems, humans solve problems."

But the mistake is an easy one, especially for people who don't have a background in PR, communications or marketing, because the technology itself can seem so exciting, and to be honest, it can at times be fun to sound more knowledgeable and "elite" above those who don't have the same understanding.

At times, I find myself clenching my teeth and wincing when I hear an engineer or elite technologist try to explain how something works. What users don't want to hear is the process of how things work, but instead what the results are, and how they can benefit. So let's be real clear - these new tools, no matter how many lines of code you have developed, have in most cases been made to offer a solution, so make the story about the user, not about you.

Help use their language and their own frames of reference to make the services less intimidating and overwhelming. Don't throw them into the deep end without a life jacket, but walk them down the steps holding their hand until they get used to the water.

With Facebook Connect, Google Has Unique Integration Opportunity

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)


In working with Google FriendConnect recently, I realized that Google has a unique opportunity that perhaps they did not have previously. In only the last few months, Facebook has opened up the opportunity for any 3rd party site to integrate with Facebook, all via a special login button and form Facebook provides. Such technology is enabled through a product Facebook calls Facebook Connect. In playing with Google's product, it enables one to authenticate through other services and allow porting of friend data and more through its FriendConnect interface. I believe Google now may just have the unique opportunity to finally integrate Facebook as they wanted to before.

Several months back, Google attempted to launch FriendConnect with Facebook as one of the launch partners. Facebook quickly pulled Google's app from the Facebook App Store because they claimed it breached the Facebook Terms of Service. Google denied they were doing such, but Facebook insisted, keeping Google from being able to integrate with Facebook. It's unclear what exactly Facebook was claiming Google had done wrong, but it appeared to be some sort of backdoor technique to obtain user information.

Enter Facebook Connect

Several months later, Facebook launched their somewhat competing product, Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect does not integrate with other sites, but does integrate with OpenID similar to the way Google FriendConnect does, and enables you to through simple javascript, allow others to login and integrate their Facebook friends right on their own website.

Because FriendConnect is specific to Facebook, Google could now have just the opportunity to integrate Facebook the way they wanted to. Now, Google simply, and legally, should be able to implement a simple Facebook Connect login button into their user settings interface, let the user log into Facebook, and automatically Google would now have full access to the Facebook API from a third party site as they were trying to do before. Google can now enter in through the front door.

Not only that, but Facebook now allows site owners to identify existing accounts with existing Facebook accounts that have the same e-mail address. If Google were to collect the user's Facebook e-mail, or use their existing assuming it's the same as their Gmail address, they could then identify existing Friends on Google that also have Facebook accounts, allow you to link into them, invite them to begin using your FriendConnect-enabled site, and more.

Why Google has not yet implemented this is beyond me. Perhaps they already have and we are just waiting for Facebook to fully lift the Sandbox they have in place for developers right now. Regardless, I am willing to bet that Facebook integration into Google FriendConnect is coming very soon because of these features. Expect it to come in the form of Facebook Connect.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.

Tech Employees' Political Contributions Dramatically Favor Obama

That the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounding Silicon Valley, is left-leaning is no surprise. With rare exceptions, including eBay's Meg Whitman and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, the majority of tech titans have traditionally leaned in favor of the Democratic Party. Recently, you also saw Google join the fray, joining Democrats in standing against Proposition 8, the California proposition that would restrict marriage to heterosexual couples. This comes despite Republicans' traditional strength in more affluent communities, which certainly describes parts of Silicon Valley. Looking a level deeper, by searching public political donation records, the gap between donations to Republican candidates and Democratic candidates from tech company employees in the 2008 campaign is massive.

Utilizing The Huffington Post's FundRace 2008 site, I looked at many household tech names, from traditional hardware companies like Apple and Cisco to newer online brands, including Facebook and LinkedIn. The list is by no means exhaustive, but provides a starting point, should you choose to do more research. Also, despite The Huffington Post's left-leaning foundation, I do not believe their editorial slant had any impact on the database. In fact, the site says, "All calculations are based on public records filed with the FEC of contributions by all individuals totaling more than $200 (and some totaling less than $200) to a single Republican or Democratic presidential campaign or national committee for the 2004 and 2008 election cycles."

Donations to the 2008 election cycle by prominent tech companies:

---

Employer: Adobe (Donations)
$10,649 was given by people who identified their employer as "Adobe".
$2,900 from 5 people to Republicans
$7,749 from 18 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Adobe: 72.7%

---

Employer: Amazon.com (Donations)
$123,703 was given by people who identified their employer as "Amazon.com".
$9,660 from 6 people to Republicans
$114,043 from 132 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Amazon.com: 92.2%

---

Employer: America Online OR AOL (Results Combined) (Donations)
$190,220 was given by people who identified their employer as "America Online" or "AOL".
$11,835 from 12 people to Republicans
$178,385 from 110 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from AOL: 93.8%

---

Employer: Apple (Donations)
$61,817 was given by people who identified their employer as "Apple".
$6,856 from 9 people to Republicans
$54,961 from 73 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Apple: 88.9%

---

Employer: Cisco (Donations)
$119,469 was given by people who identified their employer as "Cisco".
$28,975 from 24 people to Republicans
$90,494 from 103 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Cisco: 75.7%

---

Employer: Digg (Donations)
$750 was given by people who identified their employer as "Digg".
$0 to Republicans
$750 from 2 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Digg: 100%

---

Employer: eBay (Donations)
$68,942 was given by people who identified their employer as "eBay".
$7,565 from 9 people to Republicans
$61,377 from 67 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from eBay: 89%

---

Employer: Facebook (Donations)
$2,700 was given by people who identified their employer as "Facebook".
$250 from 1 person to Republicans
$2,450 from 4 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Facebook: 90.7%

---

Employer: Friendster (Donations)
$563 was given by people who identified their employer as "Friendster".
$0 to Republicans
$563 from 2 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Friendster: 100%

---

Employer: Google (Donations)
$474,863 was given by people who identified their employer as "Google".
$51,677 from 42 people to Republicans
$423,186 from 306 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Google: 89.1%

---

Employer: HP OR Hewlett Packard (Results Combined) (Donations)
$278,123 was given by people who identified their employer as "HP" or "Hewlett Packard").
$44,586 from 83 people to Republicans
$233,537 from 351 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from HP: 83.9%

---

Employer: LinkedIn (Donations)
$3,375 was given by people who identified their employer as "LinkedIn".
$0 to Republicans
$3,375 from 4 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from LinkedIn: 100%

---

Employer: Microsoft (Donations)
$1,195,146 was given by people who identified their employer as "Microsoft".
$247,090 from 180 people to Republicans
$948,056 from 854 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Microsoft: 79.3%

---

Employer: Mozilla (Donations)
$750 was given by people who identified their employer as "Mozilla".
$0 to Republicans
$750 from 2 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Mozilla: 100%

---

Employer: MySpace (Donations)
$3,989 was given by people who identified their employer as "MySpace".
$0 to Republicans
$3,989 from 5 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from MySpace: 100%

---

Employer: PayPal (Donations)
$4,502 was given by people who identified their employer as "PayPal".
$1,000 from 2 people to Republicans
$3,502 from 7 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from PayPal: 77.8%

---

Employer: Sun OR Sun Microsystems (Results Combined) (Donations)
$179,871 was given by people who identified their employer as "Sun".
$30,164 from 37 people to Republicans
$149,707 from 214 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Sun: 83.2%

---

Employer: Yahoo! (Donations)
$62,282 was given by people who identified their employer as "Yahoo".
$3,815 from 3 people to Republicans
$58,467 from 69 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from Yahoo!: 93.9%

---

Employer: YouTube (Donations)
older results
$5,135 was given by people who identified their employer as "YouTube".
$0 to Republicans
$5,135 from 5 people to Democrats

% of donations going to Democrats from YouTube: 100%

---

There's no question this is by no means an exhaustive list of tech companies, but this sample alone shows the overwhelming leanings the employees of these firms have, and where they have opted to put their money in this year's election campaign. Perusing the lists shows not just support for Barack Obama, but additional funds supporting Hillary Clinton's efforts during the primary season. On the Republican side, you also see some occasional support for Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, in addition to John McCain.

All told, of these 19 companies (including eBay's PayPal and Google's YouTube as separate entities), employees are listed as having donated $2,786,849 to the 2008 election cycle, more than $1 million of that coming from Microsoft. Of the nearly $2.8 million from these select companies, more than $2.3 million was donated to Democratic candidates, representing 84% of all donations.

Also of interest, searches for employees at many Web 2.0 companies didn't show any donations, including SmugMug, Twitter, or Technorati. Since I left so many out, feel free to head to the FundRace page and pass along the results you find.

Will Future Information Consumption Be In Nested GUIs?

As Web technologies evolve, new, innovative ways to absorb information via the Web browser are being created. Some, like Google Reader, and blogs on SportsBlogs Nation are utilizing keyboard navigation, letting you type letters to jump from one new item to the next, while others let you move between screens by using the arrow keys, instead of clicking the mouse. An enterprising developer, Michael Buchanan, is hoping that nested GUIs, which he calls "Microspaces", will be a new way to approach navigation - letting you view a page within a page, within a page, all without opening a new browser window.

While he's just getting started with Microspaces, an initial trial site, called StoryLinez, has been posted, that brings top news sources for business, entertainment, health, news, sports and tech in one place. While that in itself is not new, the way the site operates is.


StoryLinez.com Wants to be a Hub for News On All Topics
Instead of clicking on an item, and getting a pulldown menu with multiple options, the nested GUI technology is triggered via mouse-over. For example, having your mouse over the "Business" section opens up a smaller window within a window, with sites ranging from CNN to Fox News, Yahoo!, Forbes and BusinessWeek, surfacing.


The Nested GUIs Technology Shows a Site Within a Site
Rather than send links off to a new browser window, as most sites do, putting your mouse over these news sources, and their resulting headlines instead shows the story in a section within your same window. And when you're done reading, move your mouse back to the listed options and get more stories. The goal? As Michael wrote me, "One of the things I wanted to accomplish was the ability to navigate everything without clicking." (See the blog for more)


You Can Click Through to Articles but Not Leave the Site
We've gotten used to flooding our Web browsers with new windows and new tabs. New Web 2.0 technologies are helping us to see the Web as a foundation for applications, which will need new ways to approach data. Could nested GUIs be one of the future ways we'll consume media? The StoryLinez site is fairly raw, but it's an interesting experiment. Could you get your news this way in the future? Michael hopes you will.

(Also See: TechCrunch: Microspaces: Playing With Nested GUIs from August 19th)

Strands Targets the Mainstream by Going One On One

One of the most common themes in the blogosphere, and here at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, is questioning how Web applications many of us are using will ever reach the mainstream. Will people's parents, relatives and co-workers ever get Twitter the way they finally get e-mail? Will FriendFeed ever get the kind of name recognition that Facebook and MySpace have? Strands, a nascent lifestreaming and content discovery service, is launching a new initiative, starting today, to take the service mainstream, to the masses themselves in a project they call oOo: One on One, or Operation mainSTREAM.
(See their blog for more).

Drew Olanoff, community manager for Strands, says "A lot of what we create is meant to make our lives easier and more entertaining," and that "companies like Pandora deserve to be known outside of our circles," so what the team at Strands is looking to do is to give its users many invites, and will incentive them to invite non-geeks to the service. Those who recruit "nongeek friends" can win geeky prizes, including an Apple MacBook Air for you and your friend, an iPod Touch for you and your friend, or miniature Flip video cameras.


Strands: Operation mainSTREAM
But Strands isn't going to be sitting around, waiting for you to do all the hard work of recruiting by yourself. The team is going one one one (oOo), traveling state to state, to take the story of all these cool Web applications to the masses. As Drew writes, "I'm going to be visiting old folks homes, hanging out with some soccer moms, and hey...maybe some lawyers, to let them know why technology and your personal presence online is important."

Will this work? Will taking something that's considered an edge technology even for those of us in the Silicon Valley, and introducing it to technophobes in North Dakota and South Carolina give services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Twitter that push they need to get into the mainstream? Probably not all by itself. But as part of the micromedia panel I participated in yesterday, we discussed a new rule of marketing. You tell 10, who tell 100, who tell 1,000. If Drew and the Strands team can find the right 10 people in each of these locations around the country, they may be on to something. And just maybe, Web 2.0 applications have found their new evangelist.

DISCLOSURE: Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

Maximum Download Speeds Will Always Vary, Caps or Not

Over the last week, there was a lot of talk around Comcast instituting a 250 gigabyte cap on your downloads for a 30-day period. The Web's collective opinion has always tended to believe in unmetered, unlimited access to just about anything, without censorship, so the news of restrictions had many up in arms. But the truth is, you'd have to really go out of your way to reach the cap, and be downloading around the clock, all while maintaining consistently high bandwidth. And no matter what you're being sold on commercials, real-world download speeds are typically much less than the maximum advertised.

For me, it doesn't seem all that long ago that downloading a 4 megabyte application, like Netscape Navigator, was an intimidating process which could take hours, and download speeds of 9 to 10 kilobytes a second would border on exciting.

But consumers began to demand more from their Web, including more images, more streaming, higher resolution, more videos, and ever larger downloads, in parallel with ever-increasing network speeds, from the pokey 14.4, 28.8 and 33.6K modems, to broadband, either Cable or DSL, from speeds at 384 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps and 4.5 Mbps. As you would expect, consumers are led to believe they will get those advertised speeds, and, that higher numbers are, of course, better.

I don't typically download extremely large files. Most videos come in through Apple TV, or on the TiVo. If I am buying albums on iTunes, it's usually only one at a time, and my BitTorrent use is incredibly infrequent.

This afternoon, I had the rare opportunity to stress out my network by downloading a 3.8 Gigabyte recording of Saturday's college football game of Cal vs. Michigan State - which I had seen live yesterday, but wanted to revisit parts, not having recorded it on TiVo. When I first launched the file in BitTorrent, the speeds were outstanding - more than a full megabyte a second, and after several minutes of this, it looked like the video would be on my laptop in a little over an hour.


I Was Getting Screaming Download Speeds... And Then?
But just as quickly as I had noticed how fast it was going, the speed was decimated, and hasn't recovered - which smacks of Comcast throttling my throughput. What had been 1 Megabyte per second or more almost immediately dropped down to a more pedestrian range of 100 to 200 Kilobytes per second, and at times, much lower - in the 20 Kilobytes to 50 Kilobytes range, making what at first looked like a short download something that will probably be an all day process, assuming I leave the laptop on overnight.

Regardless of whether I've been intentionally throttled, or capped, or not, truth is that nobody ever really hits their advertised maximum network speed, thanks to issues at the remote servers, caching devices, storage, or due to shared pipes that mean your mileage is impacted by that of your neighbors' activity. And unlike a car, where you actually have a direct impact on whether you will reach the listed top speed, when you're on the Web, you're at the mercy of everyone else.

These issues mean you won't really ever know how long it will take to download something, until it's done, and just because you purchased a broadband connection that's "twice as fast" as the competition, you might not see your actual speeds doubling. With the near-monopolistic broadband providers having the option to throttle down your use at a whim, to cap your total usage at a level they deem appropriate, or with so many other factors impacting network speeds, you'll never see a flat-lined maximum, either on uploads or downloads. But if somebody ever gets that fixed... look out... I'd find all sorts of new ways to abuse that power.

The Even Geekier Approach to Fantasy Football

You would think with trying to keep the blog regular, working a full-time job, keeping active on all kinds of social networks, and raising two month old twins, I wouldn't need yet another time sink. But, clearly not knowing my own limits, I agreed to return to the world of Fantasy Football after taking a two-year hiatus, re-joining the league where I was active from 2001-2005, even though I haven't been paying attention to the NFL at all, and couldn't tell you the starters on just about any squad. So, why do I think I have a chance taking on a group of couch potatoes who have bye weeks and depth charts memorized? The answer: Because I'll be the biggest nerd in the room.

Here's what I do to keep myself challenging for the league title each year:
(I've won the 12-team league twice in five years and finished second once):

1. I don't pick favorite teams or favorite players.

When I was growing up, the San Francisco 49ers were the team of the decade. They won four Super Bowls, and Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig were superstars. But in the last decade or so, the team might as well have fallen into the Bay, and I don't really care. As a result, I'm not drafting them too highly or unfairly promoting my hatred of their rival.

2. I only bring a laptop to draft day, not a pile of magazines and highlighters.

While some guys show up with their dog-eared copies of ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated or Football Weekly, and six colored markers, as well as the year's bye week schedule and an up to the minute injury report, I just bring my laptop and have Microsoft Excel ready to go. While they shuffle papers around and debate how their home mock drafts differ from the real deal, I'm ready to sort and click between tabs to find my data.

3. I believe past performance is the best indicator of future performance.

I don't need to see teams play or practice to believe a quarterback and a wide receiver have "chemistry", or need to see if a guy has had a good off-season regimen. Instead, the most important data is how well they performed relative to their peers at the position in previous years, according to the rules of the league you are playing.


My 2004 Data Set With 2003 Results
That said, I use the tools that are available to get the data I want, and it all goes into Excel, including:

• A worksheet that shows the previous years' league results, sortable by position, name, team, total points, overall points ranking, and average points per week.
• A worksheet that shows the bye weeks
• A worksheet that shows the most recent injury report, by team
• One or more worksheet with the proposed draft order from ESPN or USA Today

I then create two net new tabs, including:

• A worksheet that will display the team I have drafted.
• A worksheet that tracks the entire league's draft for the season

Once all the data is in there, I'm ready to go to work, as soon as the draft starts. As picks are made by each other team, I quickly highlight those who are off the board in multiple places - on the tab showing last year's statistics, and on the mock draft boards from ESPN and USA Today. At this point, the draft isn't that much different in Excel as it is on paper, but as time progresses, and the all too typical first few rounds get chewed up by running backs, quarterbacks and the occasional wide receiver, my preparedness has an advantage.

If your fantasy football league was online last year, all you usually have to do is go to last season's end of year report, and do a copy/paste into Excel, which will recognize all the columns and set you up for sorting nirvana. If at first you don't succeed... keep trying until you do. Worst case, save the pages as HTML and you can bring them to the draft day on the laptop.


The 2004 Draft, A Down Year for Me
Where others are deciding whether to take a team defense or their third running back, I can go and use Excel's Sort option to its fullest. I can take the highest players available based on their points per game average from the previous season, or do the same to fill a position I need. I can know whether taking a good quarterback will mean all that much relative to the next highly rated option, or if I should keep filling the backfield.


My 2004 Roster, For Example
And the latest rounds are where I make a killing. At this point, especially as most drafts are on Saturday mornings, and guys are joking around about taking players who are injured, or complaining about how the guy just before them snaked Fred Taylor or Torry Holt, I can sneak in and find players that were rated highly last year or by the major sports publications, yet haven't been drafted.

In 2004, my 10th round pick ended up being Willis McGahee of the Bills. In 2005, I got Larry Johnson of the Chiefs in round 12, who ended up being excellent injury protection for Priest Holmes, scoring 17 touchdowns on 1,549 yards rushing. As the rest of the teams use all the allotted time, often accidentally drafting players that have already been taken, my turn comes around every 12th pick, and I look to my Excel sheets for the answer. Yes, they overlooked my secret weapon, and I'll be setting myself up for the win, again.

This year's draft time is 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, and I've made it a little more fun by getting Drew Olanoff of ReadBurner and Strands to be part of the festivities, as well as two friends from work, all of whom are joining the league for the first time. We'll see who wins the battle of Fantasy Football geeks.

Ten Ways Having Twins Has Changed My Tech and Online Life

The one thing that change always promises to bring is more change. And bringing twins into our household has definitely had an impact - changing how we manage our time, our sleep, our travels, and our activities. Now that Matthew and Sarah are seven weeks old, and with my being back at work for three full weeks, we have something resembling a routine. While I had always kidded that adding to newborns to the family would be "mildly disruptive", there has certainly been an impact to what I've been able to do with tech, both online and offline, since they arrived.

1. Whatever I'm Doing Has to Be Able to Stop At Any Time

So far, I haven't been able to teach Matthew or Sarah how to use an alarm clock, or how to make requests using a pad or paper, let alone e-mail. This means that their best way of requesting attention is crying, and I, or my wife, have to be on alert at all times. This means, for example, that I can't participate in any online gaming, even if it's as simple as hearts or cribbage, because I'd never know when I'd have to bail, and therefore, concede. Whatever I'm doing has to have the ability to be paused, or closed, without impacting somebody else.

2. I'm Not Getting Nearly As Much Online Activity Done In the Morning

Prior to having kids, I could spend a good hour answering e-mail, reading feeds, and getting caught up on the social networks before getting ready to head into the office. Now, that option is clearly gone, as I'm more likely to be awakened by someone who is hungry or needs attention than by my alarm clock. That activity now usually has to take place once they're taken care of and I've driven to the office, leaving my poor wife behind to fend for herself with a pair of ungrateful infants.

3. Scheduling Time for Evening Conference Calls Is A Lot Harder

As I don't typically wait around for press releases to hit my in box to write a story, most of my posts about new technology comes from engaging with developers early, trading e-mail, chatting on Google Talk, or taking a phone call. Now, while my intentions may be to take a call and get updated, it's absolutely likely that call will land in the middle of my feeding somebody, or our phone call could be interrupted by crying. So far, Sarah and Matthew have made their voices heard to Travis Parsons of Browzmi, Eric Marcoullier of Gnip and ReadBurner's Drew Olanoff, to name a few.

4. My iPod Touch Usage Has Gone Way Up

With the addition of the iPod Touch's 2.0 software, the product became much more useful - due to the push e-mail capability, Exchange integration, and of course, all the new applications. But the iPod Touch also has another advantage - stealth use, and one-handed browsing. It's not uncommon these days to be flat on my back with a kid resting on my chest, or sitting up and holding a bottle. This effectively eliminates my use of the laptop, but a WiFi-connected iPod Touch is a great backup plan to read e-mail, browse FriendFeed, access Safari bookmarks, and update Twitter. An added bonus? I can turn off the sound, so using the keyboard is completely silent - again, totally unachievable on the laptop.

5. Backing Up My Data Is Now More Important Than Ever

Despite having much of my life online, I've never been all that great at backing it up. I used to back up my mail and personal docs, or have an archive of company data, on a previous-generation iPod, and also used Apple's Backup program that came with .Mac. But my false sense of security went away a few years ago, when I stupidly left my iPod in the seat pocket on a plane between Chicago and Baltimore, never getting it back. So that wasn't good. Also, as my primary storage space (my laptop) has gone through its share of bumps and bruises, including getting crushed in a rented convertible this last Spring Training, I know that's not 100% reliable. Over time, as I've moved from machine to machine, I've lost very little, but it's been known to happen.

That said, I've moved our family photos to SmugMug, relying on the cloud as a backup to my own local storage, I've posted some early videos to YouTube, and I'm looking seriously at Apple's Time Capsule for home storage backup, because if I lose photos and videos of Matthew and Sarah at this stage, I'll never again get the chance to retake them.

6. My Online Activity Is More Purpose-Based Than Time Wasting

Jeremy Toeman once commented on FriendFeed that my activity on the service after having kids would never again approach the level it was prior to having kids. And while in the first few weeks after Matthew and Sarah came, I kept the same pace, if not increasing it, returning to the office and having that time eat into my schedule has probably made his prophecy true. While I'm still reading the same number of RSS feeds in Google Reader, still keep the blog updated, and still scan FriendFeed, Social Median and Twitter, I'm likely engaging in less idle chit chat and arbitrary "liking", which makes my statistics lower than before.

7. I've Dusted Off the Camera In a Big Way

I don't pepper the blog with photos of myself or my wife all that often, as I've never been much of a photographer, and quite honestly, I want the blog to be more about what I'm observing and thinking than my daily doings. I've also kept my wife's visibility low for her privacy. As a high school teacher, she doesn't exactly want her nosy students knowing her every move. That said, the twins are a lot more photogenic than either of us, and so far, friends online have really eaten up the pictures, so I'm rarely too far from our camera. And after seven weeks, I finally got Matthew and Sarah on video, and posted to YouTube. Videos of them should get more prominent going forward.

8. The Online Social Circle Is Seeing Change

Whereas previously, I would consider single guys or newlyweds my peers, I'm having a lot more opportunity to share stories and jokes with Web-savvy moms and dads who are similarly managing their time. I'm now talking a lot more with parent pals like Cyndy Aleo-Carreira and Carla Thompson or Jesse Stay and Jeremy Neal. Even uber-blogger Robert Scoble and I are probably talking as much about kids' weights and behaviors as we are debating social network behavior.

9. Blog Posts Often Get Interrupted

While I can still, on occasion, sit down and power through a post in 20 minutes or so, it's now just as likely that it will take two or three stops at the laptop to get some of the longer ones done, especially if screenshots or reviews are needed. This means a lot of saving, re-reading what I had started, and posting when I can, not exactly when I wanted to. I've even told people who want stories embargoed, when I do go that route, to get me the data well ahead of time so I can plan better.

10. No More Leaving the Cell Phone In the Other Room

If you have young kids, you know that the last thing you want to do is wake them up after some serious effort to get them to bed. That means better management of potential noise is required. Now, I can no longer casually put my cell phone down, with my keys and wallet, and walk away. Instead, I need to cart it, and the handset for our landline, with me whenever I've got the kids, or if they are sleeping, to avoid prolonged ringing and unnecessary wake-ups.

I knew having kids would be more than "mildly disruptive", and any disruptions so far have been far outweighed by the many benefits of being a father, for sure. But I know that having crossed that chasm means that how I used to operate online is never going to be exactly the same. It should be fun to keep watching as Matthew and Sarah get to 6 months, a year, 2 years and beyond, to find out what activities stay, and which go. Change always begets more change, and I know more change is coming.

Could UDO Be The Next Killer App?

By Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The iPhone and its similarly-gifted sibling, the iPod Touch, combine wireless Internet access and an innovative, flexible user interface to perform a number of functions from a single device. As Apple works to own the mobile phone market - as it has done with trendy personal computers, laptops, and digital music devices - many may be wondering what the next innovation will be.

I think I've found something that could be the next big thing, and a very practical thing at that: UDO, or universal device operation.

Put simply, UDO (pronounced "you do") would be a technology that would allow you to operate any electronic device that used certain control protocols and that were subject to certain security standards. You could use UDO technology, in theory, to:

• Lock and unlock objects (car doors, office buildings, etc.)
• Activate machines (car starter, home appliances, etc.)
• Command or use machines like a standard remote control

We have bits and pieces of this technology strewn about the world today, including:

• Remote controlled car locks and car starters, either by wireless remote or mobile phone
• Building access via RFID chips in security badges
• Dedicated remote controls (e.g. TV, home entertainment center, model airplanes)
• Wireless/RF scanning of barcodes to execute instructions

If we had a single technology or protocol, using wireless Internet or other communication channels, that we could use to program devices to follow certain commands, you'd have something more versatile and powerful than the Space:1999 comlock (a portable video communicator that could also lock or unlock certain kinds of doors using wireless technology).

The iPhone's interface and wireless capability would seem to be ideal for portability, touch sensitivity, and flexible interface.

There are some considerations:

This protocol would have to be built in to virtually every electronic device to be useful. This might include additional hardware and software for these devices.

Security would be key:

You might want to use biometrics to restrict access to your UDO control
It would have to be cost effective
It would have to be dead simple to use.

I think this would be a very practical use of Internet/Web technology which could be adopted by large numbers of users and would be a logical extension of the directions that the iPhone and Touch are heading in.

What are your thoughts on UDO, and where would you like to see this implemented?

New Facebook Design Confuses Many, Obscures Features

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

(UPDATE: I wrote this post originally with the intent to show several missing features, which appeared to be missing to me over the last week or so. As you can read in the comments, I was very quickly corrected - either Facebook has recently re-added those features in place, or they are, as I mentioned in this post, just hard to find! I realized we had something bigger on our hands - If Facebook can confuse me, how many others will also be confused? I've modified this post to reflect that.)

With every new site redesign comes angry users ready to criticize the change. People just don't like change. I saw this first when I redesigned the site, SteepAndCheap.com (where I went by the nick, "SAC Hacker" in the forums). We saw every possible reaction to the new design on SteepAndCheap a few years ago, but in the end, people settled down, got used to it, and realized it was actually better for them in the long run. We're seeing this currently with Facebook's new design, even when only 5% of their users have actually switched to the new design! However, some of that outrage may be warranted, as you know (look in the comments), I originally wrote this thinking several features were missing, only to realize even I was confused at where to find them!

Facebook seems to have moved the Pages and Groups on users' profile pages. Now, to access Pages or Groups, one has to click one page deep from the main profile Page into the "Info" tab, and if you scroll down your Pages and Groups will be in the main section below. What's even more odd is that there is no way to drag those Groups or Pages around like there was before in order to put them higher up for users to see. Facebook evidently does not want users to see Pages and Groups as the first things users see when they visit your profile, as the company seems to be saving the business portions of Facebook for later. They seem have put low priority on them lately.

It's obvious that Applications have now moved to the "boxes" tab, and Facebook has made this clear in several announcements and blog posts recently. They did cut developers short however in the time frame they offered, and developers aren't happy either. For this reason you'll see most of your applications in that Boxes tab, rather than on your main Profile page, and applications like the FriendFeed app on Facebook no longer display detailed information in your news feed, but rather, "so and so has new activity in FriendFeed".

Lastly, up until just recently it appears (because there is an entire thread of people here that seemed to be missing it), a much needed and appreciated feature, the "ignore all" feature for applications was gone entirely. Facebook seems to be trying to remove spammy activity by applications, but somehow this was overlooked when they launched the new design it appears. It's a welcome sight to see that "ignore all" button back in your requests again.

As you can tell from the original revision of this post that I mentioned above, even I was confused by the new design (and I wrote two books about Facebook)! While I like how clean the new design is, getting to know where features are and aren't will take some time. This is going to confuse many of you, and there will be some backlash. My hope is, that with time, all this will work out for a better, cleaner, less spammy Facebook that we can all appreciate.

There are probably many more things that have moved or changed - please share them and your frustrations in the comments!

Me-Too Software and Web Apps Often Find Their Own Niche

As the price to develop Web applications and communities has decreased, and investment in people is less-demanding, it's no surprise that we've seen a boom in sites with significant similarities - be they social networking, lifestreaming, status updaters, online file storage or virtual worlds. While the rule holds true in software as it does in Silicon Valley, that the vast majority of products may meet a less than optimal fate, the potential payout continues to draw development, with new brand names hitting our RSS feeds on a daily basis.

The seeming onslaught of new services had the omnipresent Chris Brogan asking frustratedly yesterday, "Who's writing all these me too software apps? Do they feel accomplished?" Brogan later gave the services Kwippy and Yokway as examples of two services that had recently come across his view, adding, "(I) just dont' see why we need yet another of something we have in spades. Where's the innovation?"

Sometimes, in this age of instant analysis, determining the differentiation and purpose of a new site can be hard, especially as the bloggers and technology reporters try and grasp the new site and place it in the context of existing applications that are more well-known. (See: Inquisitr: Yokway: Sort of FriendFeed Meets Del.icio.us for one example)

Whether it's in the name of differentiation or competition, it's rare that a developer or startup team will be aiming to make a carbon copy of an existing site. RSSmeme debuted, after ReadBurner, to show the most shared items in Google Reader, and progressed differently, offering a custom FeedFlare and featuring deeper index with more linkblogs than ReadBurner, while ReadBurner partnered with multiple RSS engines, including NewsGator and Netvibes. Facebook was like MySpace and Friendster before it, but initially just for the college set and later high school, before opening up, and later adding a development platform.

There is a long history of services and software that have striking similarities to one another. That a product exists doesn't mean that any potential competing product should walk away and cede the market, delivering a monopoly. As Disqus' CEO Daniel Ha told me back in June, the existence of competitors like SezWho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit help let him know he's in a worthwhile market to pursue, even if it's a rare blogger who has plans to implement multiple commenting engines. The existence of Digg didn't stop Mixx from debuting, and the existence of HotBot, Lycos and Excite didn't look like too much of a hurdle for Google to get going.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek, in the FriendFeed comment thread spawned by Brogan's question, said, "Until someone dominates the space you will see a lot of similar applications," while Clint Ecker wrote, "The market will bear out the niche products and the unsatisfactory ones will fade away and disappear until the community has selected the 'best' service."

But even the selection of a "best service" doesn't mean there won't be more developers trying to crack the market. Plurk and Identi.ca are two recent approaches to microblogging, taking on Twitter. And Cuil's entry into the search market came at a time when Google's enjoyed its largest market share ever. The likelihood of these challenger sites to replace the market behemoths is very small, both short term and longer term, but just about every site and service can develop a dedicated community who swears by it - arguably making the developers' efforts worthwhile. You recently saw this happen when the niche community sites of Ballhype and Showhype, arguably Digg clones, were acquired for $3 million.

From the outside looking in, developers don't see themselves as copycats. Instead, they likely see opportunity, finding weaknesses in a competitor's offering, or finding a new way to seemingly offer the best of both worlds. And just because they aren't enjoying a majority market share in a given metric by a certain time period doesn't mean their efforts were in vain. There's no hard and fast law saying you need to sign up for every lifestreaming service, every social network, every microblogging client and every RSS reader, but as more options and alternatives are out there, there will be a small group of people who prefers the new entrant, whether it be for its GUI, its compatibility with plug-ins, widgets or extensions, or implied productivity.

As an early adopter, I'll usually be checking out most of these services, and I welcome more. It's not about finding how much they're all the same, but determining the differences, and seeing what I can do that's new. I might, sometimes, never use a service again, if I don't find it to do what I had hoped. But often, when I check back in a few months later, I'll find a small community that's calling it home, or see the development didn't stop at day one, making it a richer experience. So, development community, keep it coming. Let's see those new apps, the new innovation, and the new services. It will never be enough.

Identi.ca Launches SMS Support, Sort Of.

Guest Post By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It seems, amongst all the identi.ca, Twhirl and Posty hoopla, today we seemed to have missed one important feature -- that identi.ca, at some point recently, launched SMS notifications via their settings interface.

Currently, if you log into identi.ca, then click on settings in the header, you'll notice a new tab in your settings called "SMS". If you click on the SMS tab it allows you to set up your cell phone among various carriers and notifications will be sent to you if you opt to do so.


The service doesn't seem to have full SMS support yet though, as they are apparently utilizing SMS via e-mail which according to my own sources in the industry, isn't the most reliable method of sending SMS. I tried it out, and while it seemed to work well by sending all my friends' updates to my cell phone (there is no ability yet that I'm aware to turn off notifications for individuals via SMS, which is a major problem), the messages I received were unorganized and hard to read.

Each one was also sent from a different number, making it hard to keep all the messages in one place. It also seems that you can't post messages back to identi.ca from your cell phone, another must have if it is going to be a true competitor with Twitter or Jaiku. You can see how bad it got after 10 messages or so on my iPhone.

Having SMS available as an option on identi.ca is a nice, and very welcome, addition. This shows they are truly in the game and have strong potential to be a mobile status and communication tool like Twitter. For me, I like to use SMS with Twitter to filter out the posts of the thousand or so I follow into a small segment I can pay attention to. SMS also enables me to easily message others via one interface, and post statuses from wherever I am located. Knowing this is on its way with identi.ca, along with Monday's launch of both Twhirl and Posty integration, makes them a strong consideration for me to begin using much more often now. However, I still think they have a long way to go before they fully match Twitter's feature-set and can compete head-on.

I'm excited to see where this all ends up. You can find me actively using identi.ca at http://identi.ca/jessestay. Louis can similarly be found at http://identi.ca/louisgray.

Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air

Twitter's struggles with handling high user load have been well documented. To help the embattled site stay up between Fail Whales, they've at times reduced features to just try and keep afloat, blocking the replies tab, reducing pagination, and blocking Instant Messaging, for example.

They've also visibly tweaked the rate for authenticated API hits, first down from 70 to 20 and back up to 100. But until recently, unauthenticated API requests were unlimited, which all changed Wednesday night around 5 p.m. Pacific Time, when Twitter ratcheted them down to the same 100 per hour per IP address, effectively crushing many external services that relied on Twitter for their data. And this was done without public mention on the Twitter blog.

As you can see in this Google Groups thread, Alex Payne of Twitter told developers last Thursday:

"In our continued effort to keep things fast and prevent abuse we're planning on introducing rate-limiting by IP for unauthenticated API requests. We'll allow 100 unauthenticated requests per IP per hour, just as we currently do with authenticated requests. Please let us know if you foresee any ghastly issues with this change."

And while that sounds all nice and dandy, there were a number of developers who did see "ghastly issues", ranging from Kee Hinckley, CEO of Somewhere, Inc., Richard Cunningham of FriendBinder, and Joel Strellner of Twitturly, each of whom runs a product that depends strongly on unauthenticated API requests from the microblogging service.

But it didn't stop Twitter from making the change, even as Jodee Rich of PeopleBrowsr wrote, "this will blow us out of the water."

Since throttling down the unauthenticated API requests, services that rely on this data are a mere shadow of their former selves.


Twitturly says on status page: "Due to recent changes in Twitter's API, Twitturly is slowly dying."

Similarly, Twist's Twitter charts only show a fraction of the data they did at the beginning of the week. (See: "morning", "starbucks" and "computer".)


Twist's Twitter Search for "Morning"

Twist's Twitter Search for "Lunch vs. Dinner"
In response to the changes, FriendBinder's Cunningham said he will now be changing all API requests to Twitter to be authenticated, to work around the problem. He wrote me, in an e-mail, "There are also some parts of the API we cannot even attempt now. User authenticated requests limits are shared with other sites that the user has used - so we might not be able to get any updates for them if some other site hit the limit for them."

You can see this yourself by trying sites that aim to help you bulk follow those Twitter users who are following you. If you use a site like Twitter Karma, and then try to use Less Friends, you will get a nasty note that says you have exceeded your 100 requests per hour limit. And if you're like me, having fallen way behind on following folks, you might be revisiting one of these sites religiously every hour for the next few days until you're caught up.


Less Friends and Twitter Karma Get a Mere Fraction of the Updates
Last month, Jesse Stay wrote that developers were bailing on Twitter, thanks to outages and broken APIs. With changes like this, despite improved uptime of late, the end to Twitter's problems is nowhere in sight, and services that hoped to tap into their API this way are sore out of luck.

Note: These restrictions do not impact the four golden partners of Twitter's XMPP feature, including Zappos, Summize, FriendFeed and Twittervision.

TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize Integration, Groups

For many, given the up and down status of Twitter, the search functionality of Summize has become a must-have to find conversations, replies, and topics. A new AIR app, debuting today, called TweetDeck, features full integration with Summize, and lets you customize your Twitter experience, through dedicated columns for your feed, your replies, searches, and even the ability to create custom groups of those you follow on Twitter for a micro-feed.

Authored by Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck (available here), could give other AIR options, like Twhirl and Feedalizer some new competition. While I'm not typically a huge fan of AIR apps, I found TweetDeck to offer a great number of customizations that have me keeping it open and on the desktop around the clock.


The TweetDeck Interface (Click for Larger Image)
TweetDeck offers four major columns in which to organize Twitter data: "All Tweets", essentially your friends' timeline, "Replies", showing replies to you, the equivalent of Twitter's replies tab, "Search", which will keep a running search window open for a term you've selected, and "Group", which lets you make a sub-set of those you follow on Twitter, and make a miniature timeline.

Unlike some applications, whose preferred mode is single column, getting me only my Twitter stream, TweetDeck is actually very well built for being used in full-screen mode, of course, running in the background. Now, with one glance, I can see all updates, see all replies, and keep my eye out for keywords. And rather than force me to go out to Summize to search a keyword, TweetDeck has integrated Summize's search capability and also its ability to find replies, although, in version 0.15 beta, released just this morning, Twitter replies now have precedence, should there be duplicates.

You can also, of course, post your own Tweets from within the app, just by hitting the "Tweet" button at the top and entering what you want to say. TweetDeck counts down the number of characters to make sure you don't exceed 140.

The recent strain at Twitter has resulted in the service reducing the number of API calls developers can make to get Twitter updates, and there, TweetDeck has you covered as well, so you learn if there's any slowness, where to lay the blame.

In the bottom right corner, TweetDeck reports: "Twitter Status: Pretty much ok" or "Twitter Status: Rate limit exceeded" when there's a problem. It also provides a status as to when it was last updated, how many tweets were received, and when the next update is expected, polling every couple minutes.

In addition to the integrated search functionality, I was most impressed by the grouping function. I was able to create a group called "Lady Digerati", and could hand-pick which Tweeters would be followed, including @corvida, @sarahintampa, @veronica, @TheMacMommy, @NicoleSimon and others. You could, of course, make your own sub-groups to get a different subset.

While Jesse Stay and others have said Twitter's major issues have decimated the developer community's efforts around Twitter, there are still some looking to innovate, TweetDeck being a good example. Of course, given it's early status, there might be some issues, but it's worth taking a look, as the application has some great potential.

Is Your Web Getting Filtered? What's Blocked or Unlocked?

Entering our third full day here at Lucille Packard Childrens' Hospital with our twins, I have to say I'm impressed with the easy access to high-speed wireless Web. For me, wireless high-speed access is a must, and I don't have much to complain about. Interestingly, the hospital's system, by default, has instituted filters, in theory to protect them legally, and maybe to conserve on bandwidth. This doesn't bother me too much, but as I surf, seemingly with one hand tied behind my back, I find that the sites they've opted to block, and those they've allowed to go through at times have me scratching my head.

I noticed I couldn't log into my Mac Mail via the desktop application right away, but Webmail was fine. I later noticed some sites were blocked when I tried to visit Athletics Nation and follow yesterday's A's game. Safari reported being unable to visit the site. I checked other Sports Blogs Nation sites. Those too, were all down.


A Sample of Approved Sites and Those Blocked

Then, after many on FriendFeed had demanded some early photos of Sarah and Matthew, I tried to take the pictures I had from the last two days and post them to Flickr, feeding the beast. But they were blocked. Then, I tried to log on to my FTP site and upload them to louisgray.com directly. No dice, again.


Sorry, can't upload via FTP!
Luckily, I did find a work-around. By sending the photos via the great Mail2FF program, as attachments, the photos themselves were saved on Amazon's Web Service and archived there. (It's the same way I "cheated" and got FriendFeed to host the graphics in this post for me)

After last night's post on my 10 beliefs in blogging and the Web, I saw someone had posted the story to Hacker News. But I couldn't see who, again, thanks to it being blocked.

IM Blocked: iChat and Google Talk don't get through.
The blocking seems well intended, but random. It makes sense that I shouldn't have access to Fleshbot or AdultFriendFinder (mind you, I just checked them to see if they were filtered), but it makes less sense to have sites like Sports Blogs Nation blocked, when ESPN.com is approved, or to have Hacker News blocked if Techmeme is given a pass.

I'm lucky that I usually don't encounter Web filters. I have free-flowing access at home and at work, and this weekend's experience has been outside the norm. If you are filtered, whether it be at work, at school, or at the library, what sites have you found blocked that you think are wrongly stopped? I'm curious to see if this setup is too aggressive, or in line with your own experience.

twitAbit Debuts as New Service to Escape Twitter Downtime

Many Twitter users have a love/hate relationship with the service. They love what it does, helping people communicate in real time, from the Web or their mobile phones, but they hate that it hasn't scaled to meet demand. In its place, a new crop of services is rising to work around the downtime. The latest, debuting today, is called twitAbit, which leverages store and forward capabilities to ensure that Twitter fail doesn't ensure your own fail.

The Twitter "fail whale" is well known and a great number of users are looking for a way out. Some have left Twitter. Some are just using it less. Others have moved on, to Plurk, to FriendFeed, or Pownce. But leaving Twitter comes at a high cost for those who have invested time in building relationships, and in some cases, thousands of followers. Even despite the many outages, the vast majority of Twitter's user base has largely stuck it out, hoping for better times.


But if those better times don't come right away, twitAbit is prepared. The service offers a simple form, asking for your user name and password, what you are doing, and a link. It appears to be a project of betaworks, and was announced on the switchAbit Web site, which RSS and blogging guru Dave Winer announced back in May.

At the time of posting, Winer promised Flickr to Twitter functionality, and a second Twitter application, most likely twitAbit, Although it's not 100% clear, he has spoken of a need for a decentralized Twitter, and this could be the first step.

Also: You can see Winer's first "tweet" from twitAbit back on June 13th.

OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple

News aggregation sites that can help highlight the freshest, most relevant or most popular news from around the Web are essential to separating the signal from the noise. But all too often, these memetrackers are siloed, without readers having all that much input into what's considered most relevant, or determining what content gets in and what does not.

The success of Gabe Rivera's Techmeme has had many thinking how they could create their own personal Techmeme, featuring the best of the Web, but only for those topics they're most interested in, or from those sources they choose. Gabe's product, despite some competition from BlogRunner and Megite, as well as others, has remained the most relevant and accepted leader in the space, but its algorithm has left some people wanting more.

Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr leverages FriendFeed, building what he called QMeme, displaying the most popular content on FriendFeed over the last 24 hours from those he follows. Corvida of SheGeeks once said LinkRiver was her own personal Techmeme. Rafe Needleman of WebWare once called ReadBurner a Techmeme for Google Reader. But none of these solutions, while interesting, offer the individual manageability of a new product that's now come available to the Web at large: OneSpot.

Already in place at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, as well as some more vertically-oriented sites, OneSpot enables anybody to leverage the service's more than 250,000 RSS feeds to design and configure a personal meme, simply by starting with a few "trusted" RSS feeds, and letting OneSpot do the hard work of finding similar feeds on the same topic, and then determining the most popular content.

The result is a highly customizable personal memetracker that can be displayed on a full Web page or as a widget, drawing from the criteria you set, and publishing as frequently as you would like.


The OneSpot Dashboard Lets Me Choose Topics and Schedules
In the last few weeks, I created three memetrackers using OneSpot. One used my blog as the center of the universe (as most bloggers would like). One focused on technology at large. A third, and so far, the most interesting to me, focuses solely on the creators and participants in social media, link aggregation and lifestreaming.

See:
LouisGray.com: Top Stories > OneSpot
LouisGray.com: Social Media Top Stories > OneSpot
LouisGray.com: Technology Top Stories > OneSpot

To configure my personal OneSpot publication, I entered a few "Trusted Feeds", and OneSpot then found thousands of "Related Feeds", allowing me to see the name of the feed, when it was last updated, and giving me two choices: to add the feed to my "Trusted" bucket, or to "Remove" it from the list of options.

I found OneSpot's recommendation engine to be very good. If I showed louisgray.com as a Trusted Feed, OneSpot recommended SheGeeks, The Last Podcast, the Official ReadBurner Blog, Benjamin Golub, Webomatica and a few others, no doubt leveraging my own previous linking behavior.


Trusted Feeds I Posted to my Social Media OneSpot

Related Feeds Suggested for my Social Media OneSpot
For the Social Media publication, I had added the main blogs for FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Toluu, Shyftr and others, and OneSpot recommended I also add blogs from Assetbar and Twitter. Very cool.

OneSpot is extremely flexible, letting me schedule updates as frequently as 60 minutes apart, letting me customize the memetracker's look and feel, or even to add up/down voting recommendations or comments. At a time when news organizations like the Associated Press are throwing up roadblocks in how you link to or highlight their content, why not use OneSpot to make your own memetracker using sources you trust?

Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS

In the last two years, there have been a number of attempts at taking what's been a solitary experience of reading one's RSS feeds in isolation, and adding new social elements, sharing feeds with friends, discovering new feeds, or adding comments and notes.

Following a lengthy incubation period, intended to get the product rock-solid with an army of features and a sharp interface, Feedly hits the Web today with their own take on the social start page - using your Google Reader subscriptions at its core, but layering on intelligence that learns from you, including your reading patterns, to personalize your information waterfall.


The Feedly Cover Page
Feedly was first known as Feeddo, but recently changed its name to eliminate confusion with other products on the market, and has been in private testing for several months. I first started talking with Edwin Khodabakchian back in mid-February, and even then, the project had been under scrutiny from more than 100 early testers for the better part of three months. The goal? To bring a new, graphical, view of feeds, via Google Reader, and add multiple social layers on top of what's already recognized as the world's most-popular online RSS engine.

Khodabakchian brings a strong resume to the project, once being a Chief Architect at Netscape, and later, the CTO of eCommerce at AOL, following that company's acquisition of Netscape, as well as four years as the co-founder and CEO of Collaxa, later acquired by Oracle. Khodabakchian also considers the team behind Yokway close friends and has been a visible early beta tester of that product.

The months and months of quiet effort appear to have paid off. If you have a FireFox browser, you'll want to see this new approach to taking in the day's news. In my own testing, I kept uncovering new features, and I'm sure I won't get them all here. But here are some of the main elements:

The Magazine Cover

Feedly looks at itself as a start page and magazine hybrid. The main cover page, noted by an icon that looks like a book, shows the latest new items from subscribed feeds, using your own learned reading activity, combined with your sharing history in Google Reader, to bring what's anticipated to be your most interesting stories to the very front. Feedly also, in the bottom right corner of the page, has an "Explore" option, where new stories from similar feeds you may not subscribe to, are available.

Like most feed readers, you can click on any of the articles' headlines, and view the full item. But Feedly isn't intended to be a passive experience. From the article, you can:

1. Save it for later reading.
2. Annotate it (more on this later)
3. Recommend it to friends
4. E-mail it.
5. Send a note about the article using your Twitter acount.
6. Preview it, giving a glimpse of how it looks from the source site.
7. Copy the link to your clipboard.

From that article, I can go back to the cover page, view other articles from that source, or make a new selection from my Feedly toolbar.

What's New

The What's New page combines the latest updates from your subscribed feeds with recommended articles from friends, and again, highlights those feeds and items you are most likely to read, based on your past behavior.


Due to Feedly's tight integration with Google Reader, the items in the What's New page are segmented by topic, gathered from your folders in Google Reader. Mine, for instance, include "Technology", "Web 2", "Apple News", "Mac Rumors" and "Misc" for all other blogs.

While viewing "What's New", I can not only see what the latest feed items are, but on the right, all sources of news are listed, with the number of available items at each source. If there's a new story from one site, it'll be bolded. If I've already read all the stories, they won't be.

As with the cover page, the lower right corner always offers me new feeds to add, should I find them interesting.

The Wall


The Wall can act as your social springboard to both shared items in Google Reader and Twitter updates. If you opt in to synching your Twitter account with Feedly, you can use the Feedly interface to get tweets from friends, as well as see items shared by friends within Google Reader.

This can become a two-way conversation as you annotate articles or send posts out to Twitter from Feedly.

Integrated Google Search

While some sites don't think about search until well after launch, Feedly has developed an extensive tie-in with Google Search and Google Reader on day one.

For example, if I search for the term "Caramilk", a word not often used, I not only found an article from Mark Evans called "What's the Caramilk Secret", but also related items, including WinExtra's Would you hammer a nail with a shovel? and Tris Hussey's response, FriendFeed explodes onto the scene, but it is still an information fire hose, both of which referenced Mark's article.


Feedly's Results for "Caramilk"
Searches for more frequent terms, like Apple and Yahoo!, had their expected 1000+ results, in reverse chronological order.

Annotation and Sharing

Similar to Google Reader shared notes, you can make notes on any item within Feedly and share it on "The Wall". But unlike Google Reader, you can highlight the portion you're commenting on, and make notes, as you are more accustomed to seeing in Microsoft Word's Track Changes option.

On any item, you can either click the "annotate" option, or select the desired text, and an option comes up to either "search related articles" or "highlight". If you chose to highlight, the selected text is in fact highlighted, and you can add a comment. As you can see in the below two examples, I was able to add comments next to articles from both Sarah Perez and Steven Hodson, and my own avatar was displayed next to each.


A Note on WinExtra's Item in Feedly

A Note on Sarah Perez' Item in Feedly
Tweeting an article is similarly easy. If I find an article I like, I just click "tweet" and a new box opens up with the headline, an automatically generated TinyURL, and a note on how many characters I have before running out of Twitter's 140 character limit.


Clicking e-mail opens another box with a simple "To:" field, and a "Note" field. As you start typing, Feedly automatically shows contacts you have in your GMail address book. Select one of those, or enter a new contact, and hit send.


Managing Feeds

Feedly is 100% synchronized with Google Reader. Add a subscription through Feedly, and it will show up in your Google Reader. Read an article in Feedly? It's marked read in Google Reader. Recommend it in Feedly? It's shared in Google Reader. Want to move a blog from one folder to another in Google Reader? You can do that through Feedly. Feedly essentially brings you all the aspects of Google Reader we've grown accustomed to, but displays them in a new, friendly, visual way, while extending the feed universe out to Twitter and e-mail, and adding social elements.



Feedly also takes things a step further, showing all your feeds in a single dashboard view, letting you toggle your favorites, or in a unique twist, offering what's called "Spring Cleaning", where, in theory, should you get bogged down with too many updates, feeds are flagged warm or cool based on your reading behavior and how often you mark them as favorites.

Other services, like Assetbar, got dinged for packing in too many features and not focusing on delivering a clean interface. Feedly has largely avoided this problem through strong segmentation between portions of the service, and through leveraging existing accounts, including your Google profile, existing friends in Google Reader and your GMail account.

If you're the type of RSS power user who wants to read hundreds of items through aggressive keyboard navigation, then Google Reader still can't be beat, but if you want to pick the very best from the many feeds you have, share items with friends and find new sources for news, Feedly is a compelling option. They've clearly done a lot of work to make their solution feature rich, with a flexible, clean, user interface, and options not found anywhere else.

Check out the new offering at www.feedly.com.

Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next

Tonight, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Daniel Ha, the CEO and co-founder of Disqus. One of the advantages of being in the Silicon Valley is that in many cases, I can actually engage with and meet the people who are moving the industry forward, and while I don't consider myself a big-league hob-nobber, the occasional social visit can be rewarding. I won't jeopardize future meetings by giving away the company store, but I definitely came away from the evening feeling even more committed to Disqus and the company's strategy than I was before.

As you already know, I first added Disqus to my blog with Daniel's help, after finding I was unable to integrate the service into my Blogger template. He went above and beyond the call of duty to get me up and running, doing such an excellent job that the effort was noted by Mashable.

This customers-first attitude shown on the Web was evident off-line as well. Daniel more than once apologized for the brief downtime Disqus suffered last Friday, saying that he had awakened to a swarm of e-mails from frustrated users, not to mention my post, and said that we were right to call them on it, as Disqus comments are now such an integral part of our blogs. He assured me the team knew the issues behind it and was working diligently to make sure another similar outage would never occur. Disqus' popular sidebar widget was to blame, putting a great deal of strain on the service, which has since been lessened.

Also, during the meal, Daniel asked me a question that he says he loves asking users, "How can we make Disqus work even better for you?"

Had I been properly prepared, I could have brought an index card along with responses at the ready. Duncan Riley, for instance, wants trackbacks and FriendFeed integration. I asked for better statistics and analytics, and had questions on how older posts were displayed on my Disqus dashboard. But the truth is that I'm already quite happy with Disqus, and have grown to expect to see it on other blogs, making myself less likely to comment on other sites that don't offer the centralized comments feature.

On a personal note, I was struck by how young Daniel was. At the old age of 31, I'm now reaching the point where just about every Major League Baseball player I like is younger than me. But the CEO of a company I think could have a big impact on the future of the Web being 22, and a UC Davis computer science graduate just this year? That's not fair, and I'm not used to it. Coincidentally, my youngest sister also graduated from Davis on Saturday, sharing Daniel's class year.

Daniel started Disqus in 2007 with friend Jason Yan while in Davis, and this month, doubled the team, adding two new coders, Andrew Badr and Devin Naquin. (See: The New Guy and Hello, world!)

Andrew's already busy letting people know about upcoming features, promising the addition of trackbacks "sometime in the next week.", on the Oracle AppsLab blog. He also answers many people's fears as to the portability of the data, saying, "Better options for import and export are in the works, and will be part of our next major release."

As I wrote at the end of May, Daniel has helped lead Disqus to the forefront of blog comment services in a short time, partly due to his aggressively pursuing relationships with partners. While some companies have targeted Disqus with competitive pot-shots, Daniel said that having others in the field helps to reassure him that it's a good market to pursue. If nobody else was interested in the space, he would undoubtedly be wondering just why.

Disqus is well-known to be funded by Fred Wilson with Union Square Ventures and Paul Graham with Y Combinator, among others, and while some VCs may try to demand immediate revenues or even profits from even the smallest of ventures, Disqus is not yet under such pressure. They've definitely had talks about how to monetize and start bringing in money, but if you thought they were about to start with advertising, you'd be wrong. Disqus will not always be a zero-revenue company, but Daniel says advertising's not in the plans.

For a service that's already got what I believe to the best solution with threaded conversations, a strong GUI and centralized activity, Disqus is continuing to work hard to maintain their lead. Andrew's comments point to near-term release of importing, exporting and trackbacks, and Daniel seems to have an extremely level perspective on what could be a challenging environment for anyone, let alone a 22 year-old entrepreneur. I believe we need a lot more people like Daniel focused on delivering a great customer experience with real benefits, who are less focused on the day to day fights between competitors than they are on getting the service perfected.

Giving a Service Wings By Pushing Them from the Nest

For those of us blogging who like to break the news by announcing new services, and using our site as their platform to debut, it can be tempting to pull an "old world" journalism mentality and claim that topic as "our turf", resenting anybody else who tries to step in and steal the thunder by posting the news first, or even feeling betrayed if the entrepreneur takes the news somewhere else. But I've seen that after what I consider an incubation period, the fastest-growing services do best when I can step back and let them take their first steps away from the nest, as they engage with other bloggers, gaining them a new audience and greater exposure.

In this analogy, it can be nerve-wracking to see the little ones as they leave the nest. I worry the new caregivers might not see them in the same way I do. The new influencer might be cruel or may not recognize their talents. But to try and protect them by keeping them in the nest could stunt their growth.

As mentioned in yesterday's popular post, the first stage of being an early adopter can at times be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing firm, as you try to make a product you like extremely visible. You've no doubt seen me do this, as I'll not just help by introducing a product, but keeping you posted on its updates, from Assetbar to ReadBurner, FriendFeedMachine, RSSmeme and Toluu.

But there comes a time when the right thing to do is let go, when the service has gained such momentum that I instead suggest the developer reach out to other sites to get a broader perspective and more exposure, so that their service is less tied in with me, and seen, instead as more of the broader landscape.

Don't get me wrong. I love exclusives, and part of my journalism background makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I know that someone who might be considered competition is writing about the same topic at the same time with the same deadline. But lately, for services that have gotten some traction, I've opted out of story opportunities and encouraged the developer to get some new voices talking instead.

A prime example of this was with Toluu yesterday. On Wednesday, Caleb Elston reached out to me with some great new service updates, including details on subscriptions within Toluu by feed, and story popularity, in part helped by AideRSS. I told Caleb that instead of waiting for me, to take his outreach to the next level, and it worked, without question. Yesterday ended up being a record-setting day for Toluu, after what Hutch Carpenter called a great example of social media marketing, by participating and reaching out to bloggers and following Toluu references on both FriendFeed and Twitter.

Similarly, RSSmeme announced options to find similar sharers of data to you, and integrated widgets on each page that show top tags and sharers for that blog or topic. See: Using RSSmeme To Find Similar Sharers: Louis Gray’s Example. Having just given RSSmeme a ton of credit last Saturday on being the authority on Google Reader sharing notes, I again waved the white flag, and told Benjamin to spread the word. He did, leveraging a custom room on FriendFeed for RSSmeme, to update followers, also adding RSSmeme as a user of the service, and today, leveraging the FriendFeed API to speed up the site.

You can see how other services have taken steps to leave the nest, as other sites, often much bigger than mine, take up the rallying cry:

ReadBurner:
The Inquisitr: ReadBurner Gets Digg Like Features

Shyftr:
Mashable: Shyftr Beats Google Reader with OPML Imports

LinkRiver:
SheGeeks: LinkRiver is My Personal Techmeme

Part of being a good partner to new services is knowing when to let go, and to see if the service has wings. A few weeks ago, I wrote to one pair of entrepreneurs, "Let me know if there's anything else I can do, but I do believe it's going to come down to you guys being more visible." With everything else that's going on, I can't possibly do it all myself. That's why, even though it can be bittersweet on occasion, the right thing to do is let them take a risk and let go. It gives others, like Corvida, the opportunity to do a social media roundup on service updates, and it's best for the community at large.

The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior

Early adopters serve an important role in the world of Web services and technology gadgetry. helping to act in a multi-pronged position that can blur the line between journalist, customer and partner.

The best early adopters not only help spread the word about a new product, but they can help argue its features, they are eager to offer feedback to its developers, and at times can be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing team. But with time, if not coddled, this crowd can often turn against the very service they helped champion, as they move on to the next new thing, sometimes taking an army of followers with them.

This relationship between service and early adopter is a healthy one, assuming the Web service has, in the interim, grown to the point they no longer need the initial proponent's efforts, having expanded to a more mainstream audience, or achieved sustainable organic growth. But if this doesn't happen, it's a very short trip from promotion to abandonment indeed.

With not too much research, you can see evidence for five major stages of early adopter behavior, as I've summarized below.


1. Discovery, QA and Spreading the Word

The first weeks and months of a service can be very exciting. The early adopter often works with the developer behind the scenes to learn as much as they can about a product, often posting a new story that introduces the site. If there are any bugs with the product, they are easily glossed over as ones which will undoubtedly soon be fixed. If the site doesn't seem all that useful without a multitude of users, this too can be ignored, as the early adopter hopes everyone will see the service's full potential, and will use it the way they expect to.

In this phase, the early adopter has what can be construed as a personal interest in the success of the product, as he or she has gone out on a limb to associate the name with the third party brand. The adopter will not only be a frequent user of the service, but will track other posts or comments about it everywhere, and repeat the agreed upon talking points. Should they actually find a major issue with the product, they will e-mail or call the developers directly, rather than making the issues public.

At times, everything on the Web can be seen through the lenses of just how this new product will be affected, or how it could change everything else. All of a sudden, what may have been a hammer is proclaimed to be a Swiss Army Knife.

2. Promotion and Collaboration

As the service gains momentum, the early adopter befriends the first users of the product, who may have nothing in common except that they share interest in that product. At times, the product may be used only to discuss the product itself.

The early adopter, as new voices discover the service, will push follow-up posts, giving public suggestions to the company, in an extremely positive way, on how they believe the service should change and grow, showing themselves, in front of the world, to be an integral part of the product's development. Should the product incorporate any of these suggestions, whether due to the adopter's input or not, the early adopter will either take credit, or follow up and show how they were "right".

Now using the product a great deal, at the exclusion of others, the early adopter will openly mock those people who haven't jumped aboard yet, pointing them out as being stuck in the past, or married to clearly inferior products.

3. Mainstream Use and Engagement

Having grown tired of the part-time job of delivering free PR for the service, at this point the early adopter no longer feels the need to architect every story and every product through the lens of the service. Instead, having felt vindicated that the masses are now seeing the potential he always knew the product had, he or she remains engaged, trying to act as a "model citizen" for the product, engaging with newer users, but keeping in mind the higher visibility and trying to act as an example.

At this point, follow-on users have now picked up the ball in terms of promoting the product, announcing each of its aspects in the same breath-taking manner the early adopter once did for the service itself. At this point, the early adopter already knows his or her readers and peers know they like the product, and the need to constantly remind people they are using it is no longer necessary.

4. Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use

At this point, often in part due to favorable feedback from the service's authors, the early adopter feels a sense of entitlement, that the product absolutely must be architected in the way they say so, even if to move in that direction wouldn't serve the larger installed base. Now, instead of suggesting quick ways the service could update, the calls are more like ultimatums, and if not quickly seeing a response, the early adopter can get extremely frustrated, at times, seeing this annoyance bubble up to the same degree their first comments on the product reeked of praise.

Now disgruntled, the early adopter can be seen using the product less frequently, with less enthusiasm, and will even take consecutive days off, hoping the remaining audience notices the change.

5. Migration to Something New, Call to Move Followers

Having come full circle, from the exciting discovery stage, where the adopter considered themselves a team player, helping a threadbare company grow on the back of continuous praise and promotion, to a high-profile user role, the individual can come crashing down, lashing out at the product, the company's leadership or the product direction. The adopter often finds a tangential service that now draws their eye, and is seen as a replacement for the original product.

The adopter will, at this point, start heaping lavish praise upon the new product, in a quest to assert their dominance, and prove that they can, again, make a service successful, and to prove that all their belly-aching in the preceding months was valid. The adopter will use their blog and both the new and old service to call followers to migrate as a group, both helping the new shiny toy, and in turn, damaging the old one, out of spite and frustration.

---

On the Web, this process can be extremely fast. One month's golden boy can be next month's afterthought. One week's addiction can be next week's memory. For a service to succeed, it needs to attract those early adopters who can help propel a strong population, but it needs to do all it can to keep those adopters feeling like partners and mainstream users, before letting neglect fire up their egos so much that they leave you altogether. Making a successful Web service is more than writing the best code. It's also about relationships. And while the early adopter crowd is notoriously fickle, they're not going away all that soon.

Take a tally in your head of some of the services you use each day. If you're an early adopter, what stage are you in? If you're not an early adopter, but you know someone who is, what products do they make themselves part of? And do you see these stages progress? I know I do.

Dealing With Capacity Overload and "Laying Off" Features

If you take a step back and think about popular Web services, be they RSS feed readers, communications tools, social networks, link aggregators or lifestreams, their core deliverable is data. The way they are differentiating is through enabling that data to be accessed by more people, and manipulated in new ways. But as their popularity grows, with more users, more features, and richer media, be it photographs, music, or video, the data can spiral out of control, demanding larger databases, more servers, faster networks, better caching... you name it. And if they don't deal with it? Death. The services can slow down or crash, and users will move on.

Not every Web service has had the structure, the planning or the money of Google, so not every site can keep going with all features, saving all data, forever and ever.

Twitter's recent struggles keeping up with user growth and resulting issues have been extremely visible. To cope with the load, the microblogging service started whacking features one by one. At various points, Twitter turned off the @Replies tab, removed pagination, reduced the number of times that external services could access its API, and eliminated the use of instant messaging services. Limping along, Twitter has slowly returned to speed, as one by one, most of the pieces have been turned back on, but not everybody is happy about it.

But don't think Twitter's alone. Just yesterday, I logged into SocialThing, a lifestreaming service thought by many to have a better GUI for FriendFeed, and found that it had been forced to scale back its offering as users grew.

Rather than supporting many different services, SocialThing only lets me include Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, with LiveJournal, Pownce and Vimeo also being options. But the many other sites I use? Blocked. They write, "We have had to temporarily disable a few of our services, due to user growth. We hope to have them back up soon!"


At a time when FriendFeed is gaining notoriety for supporting rapid access to the streaming of 35 different services without slowdown, that kind of scaling down can't be good.

For Shyftr, a new RSS reader I've covered quite a bit here, they too are seeing the challenge of user growth. As we saw with Mergelab's closure, the act of tracking thousands of feeds and storing their data for an infinite amount of time can be very challenging. I've already seen Toluu upgrade their server farm, and Shyftr has done the same recently. But more changes are coming to handle the rising user base.

As founder Dave Stanley wrote in a blog post, Notice: System Changes and New Implementations, Shyftr will be removing "a substantial portion of backdated data" which should reduce recent issues with database performance, and let them turn on services that had been disabled thanks to site slow-downs, including search. As he said, "It's time we trim some fat while making the system leaner, more efficient, and better prepared for future growth."

If you have a Shyftr login, see the full post:
Notice: System Changes and New Implementations

I expect that the rules for small companies are different than the rules for big companies. Twitter has gotten such a bad response for its issues in part due to its popularity, and in part due to its criticality for some communications. For smaller sites like Shyftr and SocialThing, users are more likely to be accepting of temporary scale-backs or data removal. But if the big guys like Yahoo!, Google, Apple or Microsoft, took the route of deleting data and reducing features, it'd be likely that we'd see an uproar.

So how should they handle it? Do you, as a user, have an absolute right to all your archives, ever? Do you have the right to demand that once features are added, they never be removed? And do services have an obligation to scale up their hardware and infrastructure to keep you happy? Would you help fund their upgrades? Handling growth is critical, in my opinion, and those best prepared for scaling will leapfrog those who are forced to "lay off" their data. We're wishing Twitter luck, but there are a lot of smaller services struggling with similar issues.

Toluu Expands Activity Threads, Rolls Out New RSS Options

Not eager to sit still, Toluu developer Caleb Elston is rolling out yet new features, just a week after making headlines with Twitter integration. This week, after seeing a great deal of usage of the newly redesigned activity page, Elston is expanding options to see new activity, now splicing the stream to show feed changes, contact updates, and favorites.

The increasingly popular OPML sharing and RSS feed matching site is still invite only (and I have many if you are interested), but in the two months since its debut, Toluu has become a flexible gateway to add new feeds, discover new content from friends, and find new peers.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing changes to Feeds.
Also new today, Toluu is dramatically expanding the number of RSS feeds available on the site. It's not just a one-way street for RSS for Toluu. Now, each filtering view (feeds, contacts and favorites) can generate a feed, just for you, for all your friends, or for the daring, for all Toluu users worldwide. Filling out that simple 3 by 3 grid means you have 9 new RSS options in aggregate.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing contact changes.
As Caleb wrote in an e-mail yesterday, the growing user base of Toluu means that if you're not constantly watching the site's activity stream, you could miss something. Hence, the need for splicing the feed.

"We wanted to make it easier to see a particular kind of activity," he wrote. "It is super interesting being able to see what feeds Toluu users have recently marked as favorites or see who your contacts are adding to their list of contacts."

Caleb has also made himself very much available to feedback from site users. There's even a new FriendFeed room for Toluu, where he has been quite active, taking comments and requests, as well as passing out the much-desired invites: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/toluu.

And don't expect Toluu development to slow any time soon, as Caleb's got even more plans in the works, especially when it comes to better honing in on the date you need quickly.

"Filtering, either explicit or implicit, will continue to gain importance as we live with more data than can be consumed comfortably," he said. "This is just one step towards helping Toluu users get more from their activity stream."

Still don't have access to Toluu? Leave me a note in the comments and I'll send you one via e-mail. You can find me on Toluu at http://www.toluu.com/louisgray.

Making My Blog Search Legit With Lijit

Blog widgets are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, but offering a strong search function on your Web site is a must, regardless of how cleanly you've laid out your archive pages, or how well you've implemented tags or labels. A little over a week ago, after seeing Lijit growing its presence on many other blogs I follow, I integrated the service into my site, letting users find older stories I've written on topics they find interesting, and opening up yet another box of stats for me to play with, including most frequently used search terms.


Looking back in my e-mail archives, it looks like I first signed up for Lijit back in June of 2007. If I remember correctly, I think I implemented it, but later, it got pulled in some blog redesign. This time, it's likely here to stay. On May 16, I undoubtedly polluted the Lijit user database, signing up again and getting a second account. Oops.

Acting as a front-end for Google Blog Search, Lijit places a simple search box on your blog, letting visitors search your archives, but also, it pre-populates if somebody arrives on your site from having completed a search elsewhere. For example, if I do a Google search for "FriendFeed Tips", and click on FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, Lijit helpfully asks, "Looking for more about friendfeed tips?" and gives what it would provide as the best links in my blog, as well as through content delivered from other services I use around the Web, such as MyBlogLog and Del.ico.us.

Search results from Lijit are displayed as a pop-in window in the Web browser, not asking you to leave the site, but instead, showing you the results, surrounded by Google AdSense. Of interest, Duncan Riley said on FriendFeed yesterday that not sharing the revenue with the bloggers themselves was "not cool", but I hadn't given that much thought before implementing.

The most visible benefit of using Lijit is showing site visitors what the most popular searches are, either on my blog, or used to find the blog. As of today, the top ten terms are: FriendFeed, Twitter, Blogger, Lijit, Techmeme, BlogRize, MyBlogLog, ReadBurner, FriendFeed to Watch and Duncan Riley.


Also very helpful is the ability to filter what is displayed. I've mentioned before that there's a core element of Web perverts who like some pages in my archives, so I get all sorts of odd traffic from dirty keywords, which I don't want shown, so I can hop into my Lijit page and add these unwanted terms to the filter.


Meanwhile, as Lijit is watching my site traffic for search activity, it's also monitoring standard blog tracking tools, including page views, how many visitors are coming, and where they are coming from. Combining the two facets of the service, from search to statistics, Lijit can tell me which countries search for what most frequently, what is the city that offers me the most visits (Mountain View, CA), and from what country did my most recent search terms originate. I can also see which pages proved most popular after search terms were entered.

So it works. Good stuff. And while I underplayed Lijit's integration with other services like MyBlogLog, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Disqus, Digg, YouTube, etc., this element may become more important in the future, as site visitors can do more than search just my blog, but they can search all across my network, essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web. I'll be watching this to grow over time, and hope to report back and say if site visitors are doing more than searching my blog, but searching my content as well. I've enabled a dozen different sites to pull from, so have at it.

Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality

When you really want to concentrate, do you need a quiet room with no distractions, or does playing loud music help you focus? Can you hold a conversation while typing? Can you read blogs and write e-mail while watching TV? I do. And I must. For with all the information available these days, and my personal unwillingness to miss out on conversations or media consumption, I've done more than embrace what many call "continuous partial attention". Instead, I believe I have a goal of achieving "continuous parallel attention", whereby no single task is given primary focus, but instead, multiple tasks gain the same focus.

The common definition of continuous partial attention can be simplified to a person being focused on a single primary task but monitoring background tasks. This can be driving with the radio on, reading a book with a baby sleeping in the next room, or writing a proposal with Twitter on in the background.

Some do this well. Others don't.

Nearly 100% of the time I'm watching TV, I've got my laptop in my lap, with the TV screen's lower half ending just above the top of MacBook Pro screen. In contrast, if I try and talk to my wife when she's writing an e-mail, she probably won't hear me, and once I interrupt, she stops typing.

Last month, I talked about my social media consumption workflow, explaining how I started off my day, working essentially left to right to be sure I processed the information flow in the right way. This issue came up again this morning, when Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester revealed his own morning habits. In the ensuing FriendFeed discussion, I said I too try to knock out much of the activity at the beginning and end of the day, but also keep up what I call "continuous parallel attention" in between.

With continuous parallel attention, essentially multi-tasking, no single activity is getting priority over the other. I am writing e-mails at the same time I am listening to music, at the same time I am getting RSS feeds and seeing Twitter updates or seeing the FriendFeed page reload. Ask me the lyrics of the song, and I can tell you. Ask me what was said on Twitter, and I can probably tell you. Through continuous parallel attention, you're not giving one activity the short shrift due to time or priority, but instead, making sure every activity gets the right focus.

If you drive into the office, but you are thinking about the next blog post, or the next meeting, or even where to go for lunch, that's not mind wandering or being distracted. That's parallel attention. Your radio might be on and you're singing along. If a squirrel darts out in front of your car, you'll still hit the brakes. If a commercial comes on the radio, you still change the station. All in parallel. Your driving doesn't get worse. I'd argue I even drive better with loud music I know, where I'm pounding the steering wheel with every bass drum beat. I work better when I've got multiple things at once, in parallel.

The same is true for engaging with social media. Have you seen Robert Scoble's video from Media Bistro earlier this week? (See: Center Networks: Video: Robert Scoble on the "Worldwide Talk Show")

Robert doesn't linearly go one by one to consume his social media. He is running his RSS feeds, his Twitter feeds, and his video, all in parallel. The human brain is an amazing sponge, ready to take in new information, and if you practice, practice, practice, you can train it, like a muscle, to be ready for exercise. Achieving continuous parallel attention in social media means you don't have to stop one task to pick up the next. You just keep going. Yes, I saw that RSS feed. Yes, I read that e-mail. Yes, I saw your tweet and your FriendFeed post. But I also got all my work done, caught up on our TiVo shows, and picked up the groceries. It's not because I go without sleep (though I need less than most)... it's because of this parallel focus. You should try it.

Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

Just about every wish list for FriendFeed contains a request that the company's development team make a customized version for mobile phones. I know mine from December sure did. While FriendFeed plays nicely with the iPhone and iPod Touch's built-in Safari browser and others are turning to MojiPage to get their FriendFeed activity on the go, there hasn't yet been a focused effort to bring a mobile version of FriendFeed to cell phones, until now.

Fresh off his launch of Tweet2Tweet just this last Saturday, Benjamin Golub, also the author of RSSMeme, and formerly, a project called DearLazyWeb, has developed a site aimed to get FriendFeed out of the browser, and into your cell phone, letting you comment and like as you would at home. The site is called "FF to Go" and can be found at www.fftogo.com.


Over the last few days, I've been testing FF To Go, not just on my iPod Touch, but also, my BlackBerry, and at first blush, FF To Go enables all the core functionality offered by FriendFeed's standard interface, including making likes and comments, and importantly, honoring the "hide" options you've already selected over time. You can even post directly to FriendFeed by using the embedded "Share" feature, or undo likes and comments.


Making a comment in FF To Go
As the FriendFeed interface is spartan, so is FF To Go. But for most mobile phone users, this is expected. FF To Go shows three main tabs upon login, including "Friends", "Me" and "Everyone", and each option mirrors the same tabs on FriendFeed. Users can even navigate between each tabs by hitting 0, 1 or 2 on their cell phone after having logged in.

The FF To Go main screen displays the most recent 10 entries from FriendFeed, and you can take action on any of the items. Commenting on an item takes you to a quick interstitial screen with a comment box, where you make your comment, and then post to the site. It's not as smooth or Ajaxy as the real thing, but it certainly works.

Given the 10 entry limit per mobile phone screen, navigating between pages on FF To Go is also a must, using your phone's keypad. And Benjamin has made this quite simple as well, with 6 going forward a page, and 4 going back a page. Lacking the touch screen capability on the iPhone, keypad navigation is the only option, and in my experience, it works as anticipated.

Rapid development of FF To Go was made possible by the FriendFeed team's API program, enabling developers to harness data from the service to create new and interesting applications. Benjamin also explained the application was written in Django and using the Google App Engine. So why build FF To Go, instead of waiting for movement on FriendFeed's end to develop their own mobile version of the site? Benjamin says there were two major reasons:

1) There wasn't a good, existing solution that enabled active participation for most phones, instead of a static, passive view.
2) Seemingly everyone was begging for it.

As with other services that require the FriendFeed API, in order to get started, you will need to log in with your FriendFeed user name, and your remote key. Once you've logged in to the service, you've got FriendFeed, in your pocket, to go.

Alex Hammer: The Most Web 2.0 Savvy Politician?

In the 2008 presidential campaign, much has been made as to how the Obama camp and the Clinton camp have had differing approaches to using new Web 2.0 vehicles. Both Obama and Clinton have Twitter accounts, but Obama has gained many more followers, and the account follows people, while Clinton's does not. Obama's campaign even has a FriendFeed account, and both Obama and Clinton, as well as John McCain, have pages on LinkedIn with full resumes. But it's easy to see through this thin veneer of Web activity and realize it's not the actual individuals staffing the accounts. By and large, they are used as a vehicle for campaign's daily propaganda, promoting the issues of the day.

On this backdrop comes Maine resident Alex Hammer (See: Bio). Alex, 42 years old, with a background as the owner of HSC Media, an online media company based in New York, ran as an Independent candidate for governor in Maine during the 2006 campaign, is considering running again in 2010, and his name has even come up in some circles at the national level as a small number of supporters are urging him to take a run at the White House. (See: DC Political Report)

In the meantime, Alex is putting his efforts behind a vast network of 14 destination Web sites called Media 2.0 aimed to develop communities for engaging and discussing a wide array of topics, from Politics 2.0 and Financing 2.0, to a site dedicated to today's tech leaders at Tech Leaders 2.0. Alex's daily information consumption routine also extends well beyond the day's ink-stained papers and cable news networks, taking in Techmeme, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, BlogLines and Toluu, aiming to use these next generation tools to enable knowledge and empowerment.

Late Monday night, we had a phone call where he expressed his excitement for both technology and politics.

He told me, "It's about empowerment. I see politics and technology as a natural overlap and bridge. People look to politics and technology for change and for prosperity. Politics are supposed to benefit our lives if they are done right."

Alex mentioned a number of people who have successfully managed to maintain high profiles in both the world of politics and the Web, including Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum, as key influencers, as well as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington's interviews with various presidential candidates of both parties early in this election cycle.

Luckily for Alex, the state of Maine has a long history of supporting independent candidates. Maine had the first independent governor in the country, James Longley, who held the position from 1975 to 1979, and later, saw Angus King, another Independent, hold down the fort for two terms from 1995 to 2003. In 1996, during King's first term, Maine also passed the Maine Clean Election Act (MCEA), which established a program of full public financing of political campaigns for candidates running for Governor, State Senator or State Representative positions, making it easier for elections to be open to more participants. As with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, the MCEA was intended to "take big money influence out of politics" and "level the playing field", Alex said. This led to 17 candidates in the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which saw many raise in excess of $1 million apiece.

The pervasive integration of technology in a changing economy greatly impacted Alex's political platform. Issues surrounding Clean Technology have seen significant support from the Venture Capitalist community, gaining prominence at times even eclipsing that of Web companies. Alex believes that this trend plays right into the hands of the state of Maine.

"Maine has a lot of strengths," he said. "Maine is positioned to take advantage of these clean technology trends, including forestry, agricultural science, and being a leading state on renewable energy. We have a lot of these expertise for solving these environmental solutions. It's not well coordinated yet, but there are strengths that could be leveraged."

Making Maine a player on this stage could help stem some of the woes the state has seen in the job market over recent years, Alex argues.

"Maine is not a poor state, but it's not a rich state," he said. "It has lost a lot of jobs from manufacturing, and the services jobs don't pay as well comparatively. The state needs help transitioning to a 21st century economy, which is why I turned so much of my efforts to technology."

His efforts around Media 2.0 are aimed to create sticky destination sites that offer a customized knowledge base, as well as aggregated content from leading feeds. Alex claims that at this stage, a robust 18% of all visitors across the 14 active sites stay for an hour or more, and the network has a high volume of repeat traffic. But, so far, Alex is still the primary content generator, and hasn't gained a lot of outside help, which would come following a planned finance round, which currently has him engaged with VCs and angel investors.

The investment of time and community-building on the Web supports his overall belief that you need to be actively engaged, offering a win-win situation for you and your constituents, and to be flexible as change occurs.

"The reason I called it Media 2.0 is that this is about disruptive technology and processes," Alex said. "Now, with the debate of Blogging 1.0 and Blogging 2.0, we see the bloggers who themselves were once disruptive are themselves being disrupted by the way things are changing. We have to go where the action is, but I believe you always have to give more than you take. If you don't help anybody else, then nobody will help you."

By engaging in the blogosphere, and developing new relationships, Alex believes he is creating real value, and a competitive advantage.

"I focus on trying to tap into other people's knowledge," Alex says. "Before I got into politics, I read the biographies of all the recent presidents. Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it, and it's important to maximize the value of time and that's why I have tried to make processes more efficient. You don't have to go to 50 different sites with Media 2.0. I try to be a sponge, to pick people's brains as much as I can, to provide info and take info."

And for Alex, there's no telling where taking his traditional background in politics and getting seriously embedded in the world of Web 2.0 and the tech blogosphere could take him. But he says he's not running for president this year, and while he hasn't yet made a final decision, he's leaning toward Barack Obama in this year's campaign.

He believes the Independent voter hasn't been given its proper share of voice in this country, and that the two-party system isn't interested in making life easy for those with alternative messages, but the 2008 election has already proven that change is in the air, with Hillary Clinton getting further in the campaign process than any female candidate in American history, and with Barack Obama looking sure to take the Democratic nomination.

"In America, a lot more things are becoming possible," he said. "It's an exciting time in the world. There's a lot going on. Not only is there more change, but the rate of change is increasing. Even five years ago, on the Internet, you could take a day off and not miss anything. Now you take 20 minutes off, and you're #100 in the comments. Little differences become magnified. You might be 2% more efficient, but 100% more successful."

Alex will more than likely see a greater level of success in 2010 than he did in 2006, as his campaign was felled short after he was struck by a truck in a major traffic accident that put him in the hospital for a month, and forced him to wear crutches for a full year. He writes, "I am well known and highly regarded across Maine's political and additional leadership, for example, and well poised for a strong run in 2010, should I elect to do so," adding, "The Maine Clean Election Act gave some of my opponents $1 million+ to spend on their campaigns."

For an independent candidate who didn't garner 1% of the vote in a race for one of the smaller states in the country, Alex talks a strong game, anticipating that his focus and effort on the Web to enable conversations and give back to the new online constituency will help further his brand, showing him as engaged and ahead of the curve. He's already penned columns for America 2.0 and The Huffington Post, and is a regular contributor to the Magic City Morning Star, where you can see a February 2006 piece on why he believed himself to be the best gubernatorial candidate and later, discussing some of the struggles that can befall a challenging campaign.

When not taking calls from me, or working on his many sites under the Media 2.0 umbrella, Alex can be found on Twitter (AlexHammer) and on FriendFeed (alexhammer), as well as on Facebook.

LetsProve Debuts Open Two-Way Lifestream Platform, API

The lifestreaming market is a crowded one, with each new service differentiating itself through design, customizability, ability to enable conversations, or engage community. A new entrant to the space, called LetsProve, offers developers the ability to connect their own services to the site, and offers more than just a coagulation of friends activities, also enabling popular sites to update you within the feed, much like RSS.

LetsProve is founded by Peerapong Pulpipatnan, a 24 year-old from Bangkok, Thailand. Initially aimed at being a site for people to give visual updates on their location, similar to Twitter, Pulpipatnan expanded LetsProve to record all of a person's activity online, capturing updates from disparate Web services, like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google Reader shared items and blogs. Now, featuring the core elements seen on many lifestreaming apps out there, LetsProve is opening up to users, hoping they'll use the site to share their activities, to connect with friends, and join groups.


One LetsProve feed of activity, prior to adding friends.
(Note the updates from ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch)
There are a few interesting wrinkles to LetsProve on day one.

While it's not uncommon to offer updates to your feed from our own activity and that of your friends, some of the default applications you can add to your LetsProve feed are popular tech blogs, including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget and VentureBeat. In theory, by adding these applications, you could stay in LetsProve and have the news come to you, rather than jumping to an external RSS feed reader, or waiting for a friend to share it in their Google Reader shared items.

Also, LetsProve offers syndication with your Twitter account, so that updates to your LetsProve feed can be posted as Direct Messages (DMs) directly to you.


I can customize my LetsProve feed.
Unlike many other lifestreaming services, LetsProve also offers an extremely customizable user interface. Users can do more than just select an avatar. They can pick a background image for their feed, or edit background, link and font colors, making the LetsProve stream unique to each individual.

Beyond the basic lifestreaming capabilities, LetsProve is also thinking ahead. At launch, LetsProve offers a platform which the site says "enables anyone to build applications that can update your activites from exeternal services, and send notifications." Think there are users on the site who would like to tap into your content? LetsProve has already developed an API in beta to make this happen. (See the Developers Page)

Additionally, you can find other users of LetsProve by importing friends from your Webmail accounts, inviting users from the site, or even clicking on the "Maps" tab, letting you see if there are any users in your geographic area.

What LetsProve doesn't offer today is the kind of interactivity through comments and direct sharing to the feed common on other popular sites, but considering its early stage and humble beginnings, it could be quite interesting to watch. You can find my LetsProve blog at http://letsprove.com/louisgray.

RSSMeme Creator Launches Tweet2Tweet to Watch Twitter Discussion

The rapid-fire element of Twitter can absolutely obliterate any resemblance of a tidy conversation, as updates from a wide array of disparate users will interrupt the discussion between one or more people, especially if the conversation takes place over a little bit of time, rather than seeing second by second updates common on IRC or other chat rooms.

Benjamin Golub, the developer behind the popular Google Reader shared links aggregator RSSMeme, debuted a solution called Tweet2Tweet today, which lets you search on any two Twitter user IDs, and pull up their discussion, even if the Tweets ended up only being one-way.


Tweet2Tweet's query interface
The data, powered by Summize, which is growing on me as a must-visit tool multiple times a day to query for specific terms I track, shows in a two-column format:

* Who initiated the conversation
* The full content of each Tweet.
* The timing of each Tweet, including a link.
* The in-line response from the second participant.

Now, instead of hitting the Twitter "Replies" tab to see what people have said in response to your notes, or hitting the "Conversation" tab in Summize to see just one exchange, you can now see all exchanges between two people, over the available period in Tweet2Tweet's database.

A few good examples:

Tweet2Tweet: @louisgray and @fourlittlebees
Tweet2Tweet: @loiclemeur and @centernetworks


A quick look at some of my conversations with @fourlittlebees
Having just launched today, Tweet2Tweet will undoubtedly see the same level of improvements that RSSMeme has enjoyed over the last several months. In my testing, I would occasionally see only one half of a conversation, or find empty results, especially when querying the most-active Twitter users. But it's a start, and a good one at that. Corvida of SheGeeks also looked at it earlier today and found it to be much like Facebook's Wall to Wall feature.

Disqus and Seesmic Teaming Up for Video Comments

It's only been a few weeks since I integrated Disqus commenting with my blog, but I've already reached the point where it would be hard to consider what life was like before Disqus came along. Overnight, with the help of Daniel Ha's excellent customer service, I went from flat Blogger comments that were a hassle to simplified, threaded, personalized comments in Disqus, which integrate easily with other services I use, including FriendFeed.

Today, Disqus is looking to take things to another level, offering integration with Seesmic for video comments. Now, all bloggers using Disqus as their comments engine have the option to enable viewers to leave a video response, and not just a simple text comment.

While video comments haven't yet reached the mainstream, TechCrunch, whose Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic, deployed the feature not too long ago. By integrating with Disqus, this should provide Seesmic with a much wider base for distribution, especially among leading technology bloggers, who are rapidly making Disqus a standard.

I'm happy to report that as of this morning, this site is one of the first to integrate Seesmic video comments with Disqus. Soon, you just might even see me leaving midnight video rants around the blogosphere. If you're willing to take a risk, try out the new video commenting system, and let me know what you think!

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)

Content Filters Proving Evasive for RSS, Social Media Sites

Whether it be RSS feeds, social networks, or one of the many social media aggregation sites, it's no surprise that even your closest peers are sharing data they care about that you just don't. But so far, despite many users calling for content-based filters, solutions to block keywords or topics are missing from the vast majority of information spigots. In fact, I can't think of a single one I use that's gotten the formula right.

Not to overly repeat myself, but one of the major hopes I had for Google Reader last year was that they would add what I called "Negative Keywords", which would let me block specific posts from people I had subscribed to, be they off-topic posts on politics, family and sports, arrays of links from del.icio.us, or their latest cause du jour.

As the 2008 election season is heating up, it's no surprise that even the most geeky of tech news sources are starting to give some coverage to Obama vs. Clinton or Obama vs. McCain, and it will only increase over time. If I so chose, why couldn't I ask Twitter or Google Reader or FriendFeed to preemptively hide updates that included keywords like "Clinton", "Obama" or "McCain"? Today, I can't do that in any of those services, so far as I know.

Taking things further, I've also at times been tantalized by the idea of a "nuclear option" for the Web, where if I so chose, I could eradicate the mentioning of a keyword of any kind from all activity.

On Wednesday, Robert Scoble said “I wish when you blocked someone on Twitter they disappeared from Google Talk too.” Makes sense. But what if you had a button that not only blocked the person, but also, any mention of the person, from all social media services, by using their own name as the negative keyword? What if they were even automatically filtered out of Google searches, blocked just like profanity and pornography are from decency filters?

Google Reader hasn't yet debuted negative keywords. So Mahalo fans still get updates on Jason Calacanis' bulldogs and "fatblogging" and followers of this blog will still get summaries of Oakland A's games I attend. While I can always unsubscribe from somebody, there's got to be a safer middle ground in the social media and RSS space that lets me get the content I'm looking for, and not the content I'm not. Do you know of a service that's got negative keywords nailed?

The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War

I've seen a lot of social media tools and aggregators. A good number of them are designed very well, and could be great tools, provided a swarm of early adopters, and then later, late adopters, showed up. Some of them trumpet just how many different services are supported, and use that as a rallying cry for why one site should be ditched for another. But it's the wrong approach. For while they may have been working on making fancier widgets and supporting yet another niche service, others have been building a foundation for community, making them the clear winners.

Examples of this are everywhere, but the most blatant examples that come to my mind are those of Twitter and FriendFeed. I could also make examples for LinkedIn and Facebook, but that's another post at another time.

Twitter has been roundly scorned for its occasional inaccessibility, costing users about 1 percent downtime over the last four months, according to Pingdom. While serviceable alternatives exist, in Pownce and Jaiku, for starters, those who have invested time in building up their Twitter community, including followers, those they follow, and an archive of "tweets" aren't going to leave, even if Jaiku and Pownce deliver 100% uptime, and manage to add features that Twitter simply doesn't match. Twitter has become more than a microblogging mechanism, but a serious community.

This was very clearly illustrated by Michael Arrington's piece on TechCrunch: "Twitter May Not Have To Care About Uptime Any Longer" last month, when he said, "after a three day weekend outage I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occured: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me."

The same could be said for the lifestreaming and aggregation space.

On the Elite Tech News podcast this last week, the conversation turned to FriendFeed, and whether or not it had a GUI that would be welcomed by non early adopters. After suggesting Kevin Fox had big plans to upgrade the service, I also said it would take a lot more than a shiny new interface on another aggregator to get me to move. And it would take a lot more than bells and whistles, because in the last seven months of FriendFeed being in service, the site has developed many different sub-communities which make engaging and participating both fun and informative.

In order for me to leave FriendFeed for another service, be it Profilactic, SocialThing, Iminta or Plaxo, it would take the entire community shifting at once.

But that doesn't stop some social media sites from arguing it's all about the features. Take a blog post from Profilactic that compares its service with that of FriendFeed. The author writes, "FriendFeed supports 28 social sites. Profilactic supports 155. Not much else to say there."

And while time has passed, and both services have added more supported external sites, the author's summary, reading, "Profilactic supports 127 more sites than FriendFeed. We allow you to filter out your friends' feeds that you don't want to see. We give you features that FriendFeed doesn't offer like Clippings. And we allow you to take it all with you with badges," just doesn't give enough of a compelling argument, especially when it pertains to communities.

The gap between FriendFeed and Twitter and other sites who haven't yet gotten off the ground is going to make it incredibly difficult for alternatives to make headway, even if they do end up having more features, a prettier UI, or greater uptime. This is in part why I first highlighted the many tech bloggers flocking to FriendFeed, and why FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit has on separate occasions said, “Great products are more than just a pile of features” and that “FriendFeed has personal communities”. FriendFeed gets that the site isn't about a pile of features, but it's about the users. Once a community is built, they will rally around a service, and become extremely loyal, even if another option is shinier or louder.

I Am a Google Reader Shared Links Ninja

On March 3rd of 2007, I made a list of 10 suggestions to the Google Reader team on how they could make the world's most popular feed reader even better. The tenth option was a simple one, which I titled as "Customization Everywhere", where I said "there's zero options to customize a shared link blog." As of today, only 14 months later, we now have the first user customizable options to make the shared items page a little more fancy. And today, I can profess myself a ninja.

Alongside the so far much-criticized announcement that you can append notes to Google Reader shared items, you can also choose from four artistic styles on the shared items page, including the Default, as boring as it sounds, Ice Cream, Sea, and ... Ninjas.

Seeing how episode 7 of the Elite Tech News podcast was titled "Explanatory Ninjas", it makes sense that at least for today, I would use the theme of "Ninja".

(See my Ninja-Themed Shared Items Blog)

By selecting Ninja, all that's really added is a cute banner at the top of my shared items page, showing four ninjas and their various weapons. It's not necessarily a status symbol, showing my link sharing prowess or skills with the black arts. The theme is cute, but of course, non-functional. I still can't change the color of the background, or the fonts, or go "all MySpace" with the page, so I guess that's good. But it's a start.

Of note: I was lucky enough to meet and talk with Chris Wetherell of the Google Reader team last Thursday for lunch. We didn't talk about this feature, but I remain very positive on the direction and focus the Google Reader team has going forward. It's a small team, but very dedicated.

Shyftr Adds OPML Support To Intriguing RSS Feed Reader

With RSS becoming ubiquitous now, it is not uncommon for Web power users to have hundreds or even thousands of individual RSS feed subcriptions, covering anything from sports to technology, news and blogs of friends and family. But adding these feeds one by one to a new feed reader is simply out of the question. It takes too long. That's why the majority of RSS feed readers, both online and off, have moved to support OPML, enabling the portability of both your feeds and your folders.

Today, Shyftr, an online feed reader that lets you share comments within the Shyftr community and learn what are the most popular feeds and items, added this crucial capability, making them a stronger competitor to other market leaders, such as Google Reader, BlogLines and NewsGator. (See the official post: OPML Support Is Here!)

Shyftr first caught my attention earlier this year, when I highlighted their integrated comments system and blog rankings. (See: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings) But at the time, I had no choice but to highlight their lack of OPML, a real sticking point for me. Later in March, Shyftr added pocket blogs, much like Google Reader's shared links blog.

You might also remember that last month, the Shyftr team was engaged in some controversy over their practice of displaying full feed items and comments away from the original blog, a position from which they later relented, following criticism. While I didn't have any issues at all with what they were doing, others did, and Shyftr was smart to quickly adjust.


Like with other RSS feed readers, adding OPML to Shyftr is very simple. Just export your OPML from your existing reader, and from your Shyftr Profile, click the "+" button under Feeds to add new items. Once you upload your OPML file, Shyftr will then keep you updated as to its progress, first by laying out the specified folder hierarchy, and second, showing how many feeds have been imported.


For somebody like me, this process can take several minutes. It's not the fastest OPML import I've ever seen, but it definitely works. Just make sure you don't close the browser window while it's operating.


What I liked best about Shyftr's implementation is that the system automatically recognized if I had already manually entered a feed. If I had, it would correctly move that feed, which was duplicated, into the folder specified by my OPML file. I was at first worried I would have to manually move each duplicated feed, but it took care of the hard work for me. (That also explains why in the above graphic, the total number of feeds imported is less than the number processed)

With the addition of OPML, Shyftr has many of the major checkboxes for next generation RSS feed readers nailed. They have online feed reading. They have user profiles. They have comments. They have popularity rankings. They have a personalized link blog. Just about the only thing that Google Reader and others have that they don't yet is keyboard navigation through feeds. If they can manage to get that nailed, Shyftr could be even more compelling than it already is today. It has been fun to watch the team go from pet project to serious RSS feed reader alternative in the space of a few months, and I expect that adding OPML is just the beginning.

FriendFeedMachine Enables FriendFeed's "Hide" Options

For those who find FriendFeed's firehose of updates overwhelming, rapidly finding the "hide" option, enabling users to block updates from any service (like Twitter) or updates from "Friends of a Friend" (FOAF), can mean the difference between enjoying and getting benefits from the service, or running away in the opposite direction. As such, integrating FriendFeed's flexible "hide" options is a must for any third party application interfacing with the service.

FriendFeedMachine's Scott Goldie, in his third update of the alternative Web UI for FriendFeed, made adding FriendFeed's "hide options" a priority for the latest release, as well as setting the option to block Twitter replies (via watching for the @ symbol), and a host of other filters, against services, users, and read items.

Not every FriendFeed user can handle the "noise" which can stem from following anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds or thousands of users. In fact, co-founder Sanjeev Singh's simple question: "Is FriendFeed too noisy for you?" has generated 60+ responses since he posted the query in February.

By tapping into FriendFeed's API and enabling FriendFeedMachine users to get the same kind of hiding preferences they do on the full service, Goldie's made it even more likely for users to consider migrating. Without these filters, even I wouldn't have stood a chance. For more information on the latest updates from FriendFeedMachine, check the official blog.

The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

Yuvi Panda, a 17-year-old technology whiz kid from India, has been behind detailed analysis of many high-profile blogs, including Engadget, Robert Scoble, Raymond Chen, Techmeme, Digg, TechCrunch and Matt Cutts. Last month, we connected, and he did me the great favor of looking at louisgray.com, helping me gain more insight into my links, trends and topics.

Now, Yuvi is ready to take what's been a hobby and open it up as a service, for those looking to get custom analysis of their site or other social communities, including Twitter, Flickr, or FriendFeed. Today, "The StatBot" launches, promising a new, statistical look at Web communities including Slashdot, Fark, Engadget, Wikipedia and Firefox. As Yuvi promises on the StatBot site, "The list is endless. Wherever there is a community, I’ll measure it."

First to debut under The StatBot microscope is Robert Scoble's Twitter account.


TheStatBot shows Robert's Tweet Pace Is Increasing
Through April 27th of 2008, The StatBot looked at 10,598 tweets from http://twitter.com/scobleizer, spanning 523 days, and comprising 175,543 words, with more than a million characters.

The StatBot shows Robert has already posted almost 5,000 Tweets in 2008, double his historical average. And he's erratic - at times posting hundreds of individual messages a day, and then during lulls, posting less than 10. Robert uses @Replies from Twitter for nearly two out of every three messages, and has sent @replies to more than 2,200 Twitterers, lending more support for my hypothesis last week that a great deal of Scoble's activity was borne due to the high number of people he is following.

This type of fun and interesting analysis is now no longer at his whim, for us to wonder about how reports could look if we just had the time. With the launch of The StatBot, you can now work directly with Yuvi to have him analyze your blog, and your online activity, or to drop a note into his suggestion box.

And with today's note, Yuvi does more than pick apart the world's most well-known Tweeter. He hints at greater things to come. He expects to debut new reports every two days for the next few weeks, and adds a teaser at the end of his first post.

When Yuvi picked apart my site last month, Eric Berlin wrote, "What a great analysis. An automated service that produced this level of detail would go like hotcakes round the blogosphere." Well, it's here, and it has a name: The StatBot. Check out The StatBot at www.thestatbot.com or follow it on Twitter here: twitter.com/thestatbot.

Broadband Put to Test With 410 MB of Apple Software Updates

It doesn't seem all that long ago when it could take upwards of an hour to download a 4 megabyte update to Netscape Navigator. And in 1996, I once maxed out my best friend's 1 megabyte e-mail cap by sending him an IRC client as an 800k attachment, forcing him to beg and steal space from the UCLA IT administrators, just to get his e-mail functioning again.

Times change. Tonight, having heard Apple released an update to its Java support in Mac OS X 10.5, I opened up my Software Update, and was astounded to see the number of requested system enhancements, and their size. All told, there were 14 different updates available, totaling 410.069 megabytes - an eyebrow-raising amount, considering that in junior high school, I was comfortable tooling with HyperCard on a Macintosh IIsi with a 20 Megabyte hard drive, with an 80 Megabyte LaCie external drive.


Tonight's Available Updates (Click for Full Size)
In a great example of how far we've come in terms of hard disk space and consumer broadband, Apple's casually requested me to download the equivalent of twenty times the capacity of that same Mac IIsi. And I'll do it. As some of the items require restart, I won't hit the button just this second, but I know my MacBook Pro, with 200 Gigabytes of hard disk space, ten thousand times larger than the old Mac IIsi, is capable of handling this workload.

In the era of terabyte hard drives, 160 gigabyte iPods, and downloadable movies, maybe I should stop being impressed, but every once in a while, it's worth looking backwards to see how far we've come. Now if you don't mind, I've got some Mac updates to install.

FriendFeedMachine Speeds Up, Cleans Up, and Adds Stream View

On Monday, we announced the arrival of Scott Goldie's new FriendFeedMachine, a Web interface to FriendFeed that lets you filter between all contacts and close friends, and offers to strip out the noise that can occur in a site where aggregation from many corners of the Web can be at times overwhelming.

A week into its release, FriendFeedMachine has made a number of improvements throughout the user interface, including dramatically speeding up its use, which could crawl under heavy load (such as looking up all my friends' activities), separating the friends from their activities, and most interestingly, adding a new "Stream" view, which delivers, as Goldie writes in a blog post announcing the update, a "constant stream of entries from your home feed, easily viewable and sortable."


In this example, I'm sorting the stream by most commented, and deduping.
Essentially, FriendFeedMachine has taken a new approach to FriendFeed's content and made it more easily manipulated, like a database, in that while FriendFeed defaults to highlighting most-recent items at the top of the page, including those items most recently "commented" on or "liked", FriendFeedMachine lets you sort your stream, not just by "Newest", but by "Oldest", by user, by service, by the number of comments, by those with the most "Likes", or the least.

Now, FriendFeed can be sorted every which way, like an Excel table.

Also, FriendFeedMachine claims to have solved the infamous "duplicates issue" that at times can have FriendFeed users in a tizzy. By checking "hide duplicates", items otherwise displayed multiple times will be shown only once in your stream.

On top of giving a better way to view FriendFeed, and sorting good friends from casual acquaintances, FriendFeedMachine still offers the ability to like and comment directly within the Web browser. And in trading e-mails with Scott, I know continued updates are coming. But the first week shows strong promise already.

Profy Rolls Out Combined RSS Reader, Blogging Platform

Profy wasn't satisfied by simply rolling out a brand-new online RSS feed reader to challenge the established leaders, including Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines. With one massive update, the new service, launched in beta yesterday, not only gives Web users a new option for RSS feed consumption, but also, a new blogging platform, with interesting features that integrate the two, as well as linking in to other Web services, including Blogger.

While the world isn't lacking for RSS readers, Profy's combined offering is very interesting. With some fine-tuning as the company moves out of the beta process, the service could be very compelling to both established bloggers and new ones looking for a simplified platform to get started.

There are a few facets to Profy to focus on, including the "Feed Reader", the "Blog", the "Dashboard" and their messaging system or "Inbox".

The Feed Reader operates much like others out there. I imported my 260 or so feeds from Google Reader, and Profy recognized the folder structure. The Feed Reader is laid out cleanly with multiple tabs, enabling me to select from "Posts", reading the available items, "Feeds", showing me the name of the feed, its URL, and giving me the option to make edits, and "Folders", matching those I had in my OPML file.

I can read posts in list view, showing the source, feed name and author, or I can select expanded view, showing the entire post in the reader. Those are the basics. And aside from adding keyboard shortcuts, like Google Reader and AssetBar, there's not too much to demand before the company hits 1.0.


In the Feed Reader, I can "Add Star" to highlight a post, E-mail it to a friend, add tags, or most interestingly, I can hit "Blog It!", which pre-populates a post in my complementing Profy blog, including the full text and links of the post. Profy essentially copies the full text and headline of the post in my own blog, with me as the author, leaving the deleting to me. It's a cool tool, but one I could see abused by spam bloggers, should they ever get into the system. In my testing, it was easy to use, and I could simply post a Facebook story as my own (See the below screenshot). Profy does give credit to the source in the bottom right corner of your own post, but I expect it'd be a bit better to tweak "Blog It!" to instead focus on the headline and URL.


The Feed Reader also offers some strong flexibility. I can search my feeds for keywords, and I can look at the "Subscribers" link on any feed to see if other Profy readers are subscribed to that same blog. From those results, I can even "Add to friends" to get connected to similar Profy users who like reading what I do.


The Blog operates like those in TypePad and Blogger. There are a wide array of blogging templates provided by Profy, and you're given a Profy URL, like TypePad, with your own username: (For example: louisgray.profy.com)


Once you've selected a blog template, you can edit the layout of your blog, make new posts, or further down the road, read or moderate comments on the site.


Posting to Profy is simple for any TypePad or Blogger user. There's the option to post in either WYSIWYG or HTML, and you can use helpful buttons for styling or for adding images and YouTube video.

But most interesting to me is the ability to cross-post to Blogger or other platforms from Profy. If I were to move to Profy as my RSS reader or blogging platform, I wouldn't have to change a thing on louisgray.com. I wouldn't have to move files from the FTP site, or tweak Blogger in any way, as Profy could cross-populate both the Profy.com hosted blog and my own, just by linking the two. In testing, it was transparent to me that both posts from my Profy blog hit the louisgray.com site. To be honest, I was hoping to make it less transparent, so I could "push" individual posts to louisgray.com or Techaiku, instead of it happening automatically, but I expect either I was missing a step, or they'll make that option in the future by the 1.0 release.

Once the Feed Reader and Blog are up and running, you can manage all activity via Profy's Dashboard. From the Dashboard, I can view blog posts, read feeds, see comments made on my blog, or exchange messages with other Profy users. And any friends I've found through Profy automatically populate my Network, which assuming service growth, would expand over time.


Click for larger Dashboard image
For a beta product, Profy has done a solid job in introducing a lot of good functionality not usually found even in some of the more established feed readers, or blogging platforms. The idea of linking the feed reader and blog, while not abandoning existing services, is a good one. Obstacles in their way, aside from the usual efforts of growing awareness, and keeping up with user expectations, would be to follow the lead of Fav.or.it or others to enable commenting from RSS feed readers to the original blog, integration of Disqus in either area, and the ultra-important area of keyboard feed navigation.

The question is, can Profy rise up, in 2008, to challenge the established leadership of TypePad, WordPress and Blogger? The big three hold a commanding mindshare and user base, which is formidable. But so long as Profy makes it transparent and easy to move data into their service from others, and continues on the path of innovating and linking their disparate services, they have as good a chance as any.

If you're interested in getting your hands on Profy, it is in limited invite-only beta. I believe I have five available, but with any luck, I can get more. Let me know if you're interested!

FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed

While not everyone agreed with my early, glowing, assessments of FriendFeed, there is now no question the social Web activities aggregation site is among the fastest-growing on the Internet, amassing not only some of the biggest names in the tech blogosphere as its most active members, but, with the addition of an API, becoming a new platform for development, much like Facebook was in 2007. The newest approach to handling the data flow from FriendFeed is a service called FriendFeedMachine, which lets helps you filter between your true "Close Friends" and those you just want to follow, and gives a new approach to making comments, open items within the Web page, and even marking items as previously read.

Designed by Scott Goldie in Melbourne, Australia (Web site | Twitter), FriendFeedMachine was inspired by the very real problem some FriendFeed users have found through the site's growth, as "real life" friends are being drowned out by the noisier, more active participants, including Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, and as some have let me know... me. Goldie also found that as the "real life" friends' activity would fall off his radar, items would go unread, and a new approach was needed.

"I wanted to see what my friends were doing by service (i.e. grouped by Twitter, Blog, etc.)," he wrote in an e-mail Saturday night. "I also wanted a way to view items without leaving the page where the feed info was."

While some on FriendFeed, Twitter and other communications mediums have opted to unsubscribe from the more active users, Goldie agrees with Scoble's assertation that "it's not who follows you but who you follow that's important." FriendFeedMachine is an attempt to organize the resulting noise and make it more useful.

You can login to FriendFeedMachine at www.friendfeedmachine.com, by entering your FriendFeed ID and your remote key. At first, you can see those individuals who are on your home feed, as you would with FriendFeed's main page, as well as the service they used to generate activity, be it Google Reader, Blog, Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us or any of the other few dozen FriendFeed supports.

Clicking on the "Friends" button at the top lists all your friends you are subscribed to and the services they use. Even my 266 that I follow came up, though I'd assume the more friends you have, the slower the browser interface will be. Unlike FriendFeed, which organizes activity chronologically, including items most recently commented on or liked at the top, FriendFeedMachine organizes by individual. I can click on Frederic Lardinois' Twitter entries and see them all at once. I can click on Kevin Fox's favorite YouTube videos, or select Dave Winer's blog posts, for instance. From this window, I can either read each item individually, mark them as read, or close and return to the "Friends" area.


This example shows Kevin Fox's FriendFeed posts
But the most interesting element to FriendFeedMachine is the concept of "Close Friends". By clicking on the profile picture of any friend within FriendFeedMachine, I have a checkbox to name them a "Good friend". When I do that, their data is now shown not just in the aggregate feed, but under the "Close Friends" button. And yes, Good = Close as far as FriendFeedMachine is concerned. Now, the issue of separating "Real life" friends and all FriendFeed contacts is solved. If I choose, I can whittle down my 266 followed contacts in FriendFeed and have a "Close Friends" list of 3, 10 or 30... whatever I like. And the "Close Friends" button activity is just as the "Friends" stream operates, showing me their services, and letting me view each of the activities my friends have made on their individual services.


Viewing an item in FriendFeedMachine.
(Click for larger screenshot)
And don't get the idea that FriendFeedMachine is passive, as it's not. Like other FriendFeed API services that have debuted in recent weeks, you can make comments or like items directly from within FriendFeedMachine, by hitting the green arrow to go to the item, where you see it in full, and have the option to hit "I like it!" or make a comment and hit "Post". FriendFeedMachine also displays whether or not the item already has likes or comments, so you're not left out of the conversation.

Unlike some of the recent entrants approaching FriendFeed from a new angle, FriendFeedMachine is not an AIR application, or a GreaseMonkey script. It's a new, unique, Web interface for viewing and interacting with the FriendFeed activity - all of it. But now, you don't risk missing updates from your real friends.

Banning by Computer, Repairing by Hand, Google KOs TechWag

For many blogs, Google traffic sends the overwhelming majority of visitors. TechWag, a technology blog authored by Dan Morrill, claims Google constitutes upwards of 80 percent of traffic. Or it did... because earlier this week, Google identified his site as harmful, and instead of sending people to his site, would-be visitors are instead warned that by visiting TechWag, their computer could be harmed (See why). As a result, traffic has, as you would expect, evaporated.

Dan walked through his site, contacted his hosting company, and resolved the issue, before April 16th. But by the 19th, the issues still have not been resolved. As he writes in a post today (We are not a Malware Site), "Google is going to take its own sweet time cleaning up the disaster in their index. It does not matter how fast you clean it up... what matters is how fast Google can clear an erroneous flag in their database."


Google Warns Visitors to TechWag.com
Dan estimates it took five hours for Google to block his site, and another five hours to resolve the initial issue. But Google's Webmaster tools claim resolving the block will take "several weeks", and they "unfortunately ... can't reply individually to each request."

Google's not being evil, and was well-intended to steer would-be victims from what could have been seen as untrusted code. But the disparity of time taken to block and that taken to fix is going to have a real toll on Dan and his site. And while I may not be the biggest fan of ads on blogs, Dan does have them, and if he was looking to get any kind of paycheck off this week's activity, he's going to be sorely disappointed.


After Clicking the Link in Google...
As he writes, "Come on Google, if you are going to kill off a web site, at least have the courtesy to respond at Internet speed. Taking two weeks to check to see if we are “ok” is absolutely unacceptable."

Why can I read his site? Because I trust him and TechWag. It's a great blog. (Also I use a Mac, so I'm not too worried...) Too bad most visitors from Google are likely going to be scared away. I dare you to take the risk. Go to www.techwag.com and sign up for his RSS feed. It won't hurt. I promise.

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)

BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers

There are two major trends converging in the blogosphere. The first is the growth of sites dedicated to tracking shared items, and the second is, as Allen Stern from CenterNetworks called it, "the year of the friend". In this perfect storm around finding what your friends are reading, and learning new sources for content comes a new entrant: BlogRize, a site developed by Jesse Spaulding, a 26 year-old from Vancouver, Canada, who has built a new platform for blogs to grow their community, through seeing what their readers also like reading and sharing.


The louisgray.com BlogRize community in action
As Jesse writes, "BlogRize is today's news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs." BlogRize tracks items from two sources - a person's blog, and their Google Reader shared items. The two, in combination, are displayed as a person's "Community News", and each shared item has a number of activity options, from adding comments, to marking as "Interesting", "Funny" and "Insightful", or from the other perspective, "Lame", "Disagree" or you can even flag a post as having the "Facts wrong". You can also save stories for later reading.


My BlogRize profile shows recent activity and who I'm following
When joining BlogRize, you can start using the service by joining an individual blog's community, such as louisgray.com, techcrunch.com, or readwriteweb.com. By joining the community, those posts you find interesting from around the Web are integrated into that site's community news, where they are tabulated based on the number of shares, how often they were found interesting, and you can even see which friends found the same items intriguing that you did. Comments can be left on any item, and are highlighted.


Clicking through to an item shows who shared it or took action.
Interestingly, unlike some sites which rely on a large mass of users to get rolling, BlogRize doesn't need the wisdom of big crowds. As Jesse wrote me in an e-mail back in February, during early development of the site:

"Imagine a site like Digg where the entire community is made up of readers and fans of louisgray.com. But this is not an isolated community. Nope, BlogRize is an integrated site of many separate but interconnected blog "channels". So, there is not going to be a problem of the content stagnating due to a certain channel having a small subscriber base. In fact, our system is able to generate a HOT page of highly relevant links within a channel - even if that channel has zero subscribers. It can do this because it knows what keywords and what other blogs are most relevant to louisgray.com."

Jesse also noted Dave Winer's blog post on The next step in Digg clones as one source of inspiration. BlogRize users can build a Digg-like community just with the readers of a single blog, big or small. We also saw another entrant in this market debut just last week, with Yokway, as more and more frequently, bloggers are looking to share items with people they know or their peers, rather than with strangers.

To get started with BlogRize and join the louisgray.com community, sign up with the embedded invite code. If you have your own blog, you can claim it and start a new BlogRize.com community just for you.

How You Handle the Information Overload Is Up to You

This morning, AideRSS introduced an interesting tool that lets you filter your RSS feeds in Google Reader, flagging only those which have been deemed most important, thanks to criteria you set. (Get your invite codes here and see Read/Write Web's coverage)

The concept behind a filter like this is to help you tackle information overload by showing a subset of your feeds, highlighting only those which have gained attention by others, through AideRSS' unique approach, tabulating total number of comments, del.icio.us links, Google links, Diggs, etc. (See our coverage from December) But to me, while I definitely like what AideRSS is trying to do, I don't necessarily want what I read to be determined by the actions of others. I want to be the one who decides, based on the content of an item, if it's something I want to have interest in, to read in full, to share, to comment, or link to. And I would assume that as AideRSS needs some time to populate the attention graph, it would only become most useful as the time after initial publication increases.

When it comes to RSS feeds, many dread the number of items they wake up to each day.

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins, a Mashable editor, in a comment on FriendFeed in response to one of my items, recently said, "Try waking up to about 700 unread inbox items and at least the same number of unread RSS items every morning (only after about 5 hours sleep)! Being an editor is tired work!"

And if it's not managed, it can be. Two weeks ago, I suggested a reader has 1-5 seconds to make a decision on an RSS item. But even if this is a challenge, I would rather be the one making the decision on a feed than letting software tell me what to read, or waiting for others to have already had their say before I get to news.

To me, automated filtering of content to show the most important items, such as that found in TechMeme, ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Feedheads and LinkRiver, is a great tool - because those algorithms are most frequently pointed at feeds I haven't subscribed to. Those robots can bring me new data from sources I don't hit every day. But when it comes to those feeds I've picked to read, you won't ever find me complaining about information overload. I love it. I look forward to new items in Google Reader. I look forward to seeing new items in FriendFeed and Twitter and new e-mail, both at home and at work.

You won't find me declaring RSS feed bankruptcy, or hitting "Mark all as read" in Google Reader. You won't find me complaining about having 100 or 1000 items to go through. As Robert Scoble has often said about Twitter, it's not who is followed the most, but who follows the most, and if I can choose to get the most amount of information in as quickly as possible, instead of waiting for others to tell me it's important, I've got an advantage. But if you are losing the battle against information overload, AideRSS and Google Reader have a strong tool. You can get yours here: http://gr.aiderss.com/?svblog

Yokway's Social Sharing Site Launches In Beta

At the beginning of the month, I profiled an early edition of Yokway!, an interesting Digg-like derivative for small social circles of friends interested in similar topics. Now, nearly a month later, the site is ready to open up for beta users, having upgraded their user interface, adding search functionality, and reorganizing the site to better help users find friends interested in similar topics. And while Yokway! doesn't yet have the kind of buzz behind it that FriendFeed has developed, it debuts with a number of handy items that the popular social aggregation site doesn't yet have nailed.

Yokway's central offering is a site that lets you view items shared from your friends. Unlike some other lifestreaming services, which pull data from RSS feeds via services around the Web, Yokway requires users to post items one at a time, like Digg, select a topic, and provide a comment. This is called "Yoking", to be used as in the phrase, "What's Yoking?", also translated as "What's Happening?"


The Yokway! stream in action with two shared items.

The "What's Yoking?" stream has three modes, much like FriendFeed does, offering a "my network" stream with updates from myself and all friends, one just for my activity, and a third, for "everyone", encompassing all Yokway users.

Running alongside the "What's Yoking?" stream is a "Recent Activity" board, which shows not just what's been posted recently, but who may have rated an item (from one to five stars), when they did it, and if they made comments or added new contacts.

In this early beta phase, the "Recent Activity" encompasses the last 12 hours, but undoubtedly, as users increase, it could provide a live, to the minute, feed.

Beyond the basics, what sets Yokway apart from FriendFeed is the use of topics, which Yokway calls "My Sharing Circles". Anybody can create a new "Sharing Circle", and I immediately joined a few that are likely no surprise to you, including "Web 2.0 Technologies", "Startups", "Faebook", and "Semantic Web". Clicking on any sharing circle shows all shares within the circle, as well as comments, the total number of views, and their rating.

Another pleasant feature from Yokway is the ability to state your relationship to a contact. While with many services, including Twitter and FriendFeed, you're either a "friend" or you're not, Yokway has an option to mark a contact as a friend, family or coworker. While I don't yet see how this is used at this stage, the groundwork is there to maybe share items with family or coworkers only, for example, or it could be to show other contacts how you know a contact they're not familiar with.

The service will have an uphill road to climb to take on sites like FriendFeed or Digg who have significant market traction, but its features are certainly interesting, and the team has done a lot of work in the last four weeks to upgrade the user interface. If you would like to start using Yokway, head to www.yokway.com and post your e-mail address to get a beta account. You can find me here: Yokway!: LouisGray.

RSSMeme Helps Bloggers Know What Their Readers Like

RSSMeme, now two months old, has carved out an interesting niche in the shared links aggregation market, first forged by Mario Romero's FeedHeads application on Facebook, and later seeing ReadBurner and RSSMeme crowd in for availability on the Internet as a whole.

One of RSSMeme's so-far unique options is for a blog author to drill down and see how frequently each of their own blog posts have been shared on Google Reader link blogs. For those authors who have a variety of topics, RSSMeme can help gain yet another level of insight into what readers are finding most interesting, as well as saying what topics should be avoided in the future. As RSSMeme has the largest easily accessible library of Google Reader shared link blogs, it provides a good sounding board for the many popular tech blogs users are subscribed to.

To be counted among the most popular shared items on RSSMeme, an item would need at least 50 shares to achieve the weekly leaderboard, and nearly 100 shares for the all-time leaderboard. But for small fry like me, I can tell that one of my own items can be considered "popular" when it has as many as a dozen shares, and most popular items occasionally cross the 20 threshold. (See my RSSMeme page here)

Looking at my dedicated RSSMeme page, of the 20 items listed there, I had a total of 232 shares (as of 5 p.m. Sunday), for an average of 11.6 shares per item. Of these 20 items, five had as many as 18 shares or more apiece, including "Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag (18)", "LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel (20)", "In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break (19)", "Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed (19)" and "ReadBurner to Return With New Ownership (21)". Each of these items had a technology/Web feel to it, as did those items which fell just behind.

On the other side of things, three posts only had one measly share. Of those three, two were stories I wrote about baseball, and one was about having to use my old PowerBook. As Yuvi Panda, the once and future stat king, wrote me not too long ago, "One thing that you seem to like writing about but people don’t really pay too much attention to is sports." Looks like he was right.

This level of disparity becomes even more pronounced with the more popular subscribed blogs.

TechCrunch's last 20 items range from 3 and 4 shares for a pair of stories on Yahoo! to 72 and 81 shares for a pair of stories on FriendFeed. (See: RSSMeme: TechCrunch)

ReadWriteWeb's last 20 items show one item on Microsoft's SilverLight gained only 2 shares, while a review of Toluu racked up 45 and Sarah Perez's comments on good UI design got 70. (See: RSSMeme: Read/Write Web)

And Robert Scoble bottoms out at 2 shares for highlighting a recent video with Mashable, but peaks at 86 for revealing the secret to Twitter. Other hot topics gaining about 40 shares each was a post saying FriendFeed would trump TechMeme or Google Reader, and saying TechCrunch's Michael Arrington had the wrong goals for assembling a "Dream Team". ( See: RSSMeme: Scobleizer.com)

RSSMeme has done more than just tally the most popular shared items on Google Reader, and display publicly available link blogs. You can now visit any shared blog's dedicated page, and get a visual approximation for how frequently the site's readers are hitting share in Google Reader, and what topics those who read RSS feeds like.

If you have a blog with an RSS feed, I encourage you to go to www.rssmeme.com, do a search for your name, and see what your readers like. It'll even tell you who shared what, and isn't that the kind of direct feedback you're looking for?

Air, Water, Food, RSS, Twitter, FriendFeed. Maybe Sleep.

Addictions are real. Whether it's the caffeine in your Starbucks or Diet Coke, the nicotine in your Marlboros or your recreational drug of choice, certain substances can be habit-forming. But it's becoming faddish to label those things we do every day, even multiple times a day, as addictions, rather than simply part of life's landscape. And with the Internet becoming more and more embedded into each facet of how we communicate, learn and do business, it's inevitable that the word "addiction" is being misused. You could say people are addicted to saying others are addicted.

There are some necessities in life that nobody can be without for too long - air, water, food, and sleep, for instance. Also, most would like to have something resembling shelter or companionship. But needing oxygen every minute of every day doesn't make me an addict to oxygen, does it? Thinking I need to eat at least once or twice a day doesn't make me sign up to "Eater's Anonymous". Using my car every day doesn't make me addicted to my car, and wearing pants doesn't make me a pants addict.

So why then the silliness around addictions in tech?

Over time, as I find new services and tools or gadgets, they become part of my life. I've been told I'm addicted to my BlackBerry or I'm addicted to reading RSS feeds, or addicted to FriendFeed. Others have said they're addicted to Twitter or Facebook.

But think about the difference between what happens when a true addict is separated from their drug of choice versus what happens when I'm away from what it is I find to be my best tools to learn and communicate. A drug addict can have a violent physical reaction. Vomiting. Headaches. Shakes. Fever. A nicotine addict might try to quit over and over again and never make it, even when they know they could get cancer.

While I'm certainly annoyed by outages, or curious what I'm missing when away from RSS, TechMeme or FriendFeed for a serious amount of time, I'll live, and I certainly won't get physically ill. I can go to a baseball game without a laptop. If Twitter or FriendFeed went down for days, I'd grumble, and then move on to something else. And if, God Forbid, we lost all Internet, eventually we could rediscover the Nintendo Wii, the television, the telephone or actual human contact.

There is no question that technology is part of our lives today. I often tell my wife to plan on having wireless Internet on trips just like you plan on eating on trips because the Web has become such an intertwined part of everything we do. That some services and sites have risen to the top for me doesn't mean I've acquired an addiction, but instead, a preference. Now, I'd prefer people stop calling their newfound digital lifestyle an addiction. It's silly.

See Also:
LouisGray.com: Measuring One's Technology Addictions
Deep Jive Interests: What “Techno Addiction” Really Means
YuviSense: Addicted to Twitter, and lovin it
ValleyWag: Drudge and Kos readers are addicted
ValleyWag: Now we're even more addicted to the Internet
Engadget: Compulsive e-mailing, texting could be classified as bona fide illness

Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones

While Google Reader, Shyftr, AssetBar and others have developed strong options for online RSS feed reading, it's still not easy to learn what feeds your friends read, and what feeds you're missing, which could be of interest to you. Now, a new entrant into the market, Toluu, aims to fit this niche, giving you a new resource to match your RSS OPML exploits against those of your contacts, or even find new people who share the same interests, or new feeds.

The concept behind Toluu is fairly simple. First, login. Second, upload an OPML file you've exported from your current feed reader. Third, mark which of your feeds are your favorites. Then, by clicking "matches", you can learn which other Toluu users share your interests, indicated by a %. You can browse those individuals' feeds, see which you are most likely to appreciate, those feeds you both share, and which you aren't viewing.


Toluu says Caleb and I are 79% compatible...
While you can choose to browse feeds in Toluu, it's not aiming to fully replace your feed reader of choice just yet. Its beginnings arose not with the intent of becoming a world power, but instead, to enable you and your friends to share and discover new feeds.


The Toluu feed reader in action on How to Split an Atom
"Toluu got started one day at work when some friends at the office sent me some posts from blogs I had never heard of before. It seemed remarkable that I read over 150 feeds in Google Reader and yet my friends had found blogs that I really enjoyed, but had never read before," lead developer Caleb Elston wrote in an e-mail. "I set out to create a site that was focused on sharing the feeds you read with friends and discovering new interesting feeds. I did not want to create another feed reader, there are many fantastic feed readers out there and new ones being launched and updated everyday."


My Toluu Profile, with Favorites...
Toluu is a lightweight utility that sits between the original source of the information, and your primary feed reader. Toluu even offers a simple solution enabling users to add a feed to both Toluu and their feed reader of choice, by adding a bookmarklet, which first adds the feed to Toluu, and then continues to your preferred solution. In the weeks I've been trying Toluu out, it's been remarkably easy to add feeds to both Toluu and Google Reader, rather than worrying my various OPML files were all getting out of sync.

Toluu also gets smarter as activity increases, thanks to collaborative filtering. Based on your reading habits, and those of your friends, individual feeds can be tagged as "favorites" or "fantastic", rising throughout the user community, also letting you find new recommended feeds you might not have known ever existed. And over time, Toluu is designed, not to find the blogs that are one-hit wonders, with the occasional interesting story, but instead, to find those you'll be returning to time and again - this time, with a little help from your friends.

Learn more about Toluu on the Toluu Blog, see my profile at http://www.toluu.com/louisgray, or request a beta invite. Of course, you can always leave a note in the comments with your e-mail, and we'll be sure to get you in the door. After all, for social services like Toluu, the more friends we have actively participating, the better the service will get.

Subtraction Through Addition Making Me Even More Digital

Living in the Bay Area, and not preemptively well off, my wife and I own a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo in Sunnyvale. It's not the largest of homes. It doesn't have a backyard and isn't in a plush neighborhood. The kitchen is small. The elevator between floors can be an adventure, and our dining room is barely more than a table's width long. But now, with two little ones on the way, we're staring directly at this lack of available space and making changes - ones that are dramatically impacting my own possessions and moving me further into the digital world.

In our home, our two bedrooms can be summed up simply by saying the first one is ours, and the second one has primarily been a dumping ground for anything we didn't want visible. It, the smaller of our two bedrooms, has been the repository for laptops beyond their time, for my bookshelf, my old baseball card and stamp collections, and decades worth of Stephen King paperbacks, not to mention a vast collection of CDs I'd accrued since college.

But with the twins looming in the next 100 days or so, change is in the air.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I opened up an account at Public Storage, and each Saturday, my wife and I have been going through our worldly possessions, deciding to "Keep, Toss, Goodwill or Put in Storage". And each Saturday, I've seen a good deal of those things I used to call my most prized items be reduced to rubble. The bookshelf? Dismantled and tossed for scrap. An old 27" CRT television? Off to goodwill. Boxes and boxes of books? Put in Public Storage, with some going to work. My stereo, with a 50-CD carousel, dual cassette and AM/FM? To a friend, complete with CDs inside. I even took two booklets containing hundreds of CDs and gave them to coworkers, hoping I still retain borrowing privileges. And yes, we've gone through our closets a few times to get rid of clothes I know will never fit again.

Quickly, I've seen what I own largely reduced down to what I can wear, what I can consume, and that which will help me download. Given I'd already imported the vast majority of CDs into iTunes, kissing them goodbye was less a feeling of loss, and more of a technology transition. Similarly, seeing dead-tree books put into boxes made me wonder if I could instead be seeing the iTunes/iPod equivalent of eBooks debut any time soon. I don't think the Kindle is the answer yet, but we're close. And the beauty of going digital? It doesn't take up nearly as much space. Now, our biggest issues in the near-term can consist of where to keep all the orphaned wires from gadgets gone by - at least, until our two permanent visitors make an appearance.

10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later

On March 3rd of last year, I posted one of the more active and popular posts in louisgray.com's history, offering my thoughts on where I hoped Google Reader would take the service. In a simple "10 suggestions" format, I listed some ideas that were small enhancements, and others, more broad. Now that we've had just over a year go by, I thought it'd be interesting to check back in with Google Reader and see what's changed. How many of the 10 did they hit, and if they didn't get it, who did?

In my opinion, you'll see that due to Google Reader's not filling all the gaps I laid out a year ago, a cottage industry of RSS readers and link aggregators has emerged - great for the Web, not always so great for Google.

1. "More Like This" Suggestions

I asked Google to recommend feeds based on those I subscribed to.

Google added a broad "Suggestions" feature, based on all my feeds in aggregate. They haven't implemented this feature on a feed by feed basis, as in my example: "Others who subscribed to Jeremy Zawodny also subscribed to Don Dodge or Robert Scoble.", but they do get partial credit here.

Who did implement something like this the way I asked? Nobody, really. AssetBar claimed to have solved this in their initial product description, but I haven't yet seen it. NewsGator, Shyftr, Fav.or.it, also don't do it, as far as I can tell. Neither does RSSMeme, although the service does try to find similar posts, and FriendFeed offers recommended user subscriptions.

(Of interest, I'm beta testing one solution that does exactly this. More on that soon.)

2. Eliminate Duplicate Feed Items

Nobody likes getting the same feed item over and over. Over the year, Google has done a lot of work here to have this fixed. There are still issues with seeing duplicate items if you have subscribed to a friend's shared items feed, or if you've subscribed to keywords via Google News, but largely, this is not as big an issue in 2008 as it was in 2007.

Who else fixed the duplicate items issue? Shyftr's implementation here is flawless. AssetBar also does a fantastic job showing just one item, though if I look at an item I've already viewed, through a friend's shared link list, it doesn't always know I've already seen it. The issue of duplicate items continues to be a major point of discussion on FriendFeed and elsewhere.

3. Add Negative Keywords

For some folks, I'd like the option to get almost all their posts, except when they talk about politics (Dave Winer), fatblogging (Jason Calacanis), or if they just post a series of del.icio.us links (Steve Rubel and Chris Brogan come to mind).

Google hasn't done anything here. But Ionut at Google Operating System highlighted a new Greasemonkey script that works in FireFox to approach this by highlighting posts with keywords you select and grays out those you would like to exclude (See the post: Filters for Google Reader).

Who does do this right? AssetBar again claimed to when introducing their product, but if it's integrated, I haven't seen it.

4. Share Items Without Subscriptions

I'd like to add items to my shared link items feed without subscribing.

While Google didn't do anything about this, I discussed a work-around back in January.

Who does this right? Just about all the link aggregators, including LinkRiver, AssetBar and FriendFeed let you share items without subscriptions. ReadBurner had implemented this as well before Alexander Marktl had to take the site down.

5. Aggregate Reader Statistics

I wanted to know the most frequently read blogs, and what were the most shared items that day.

Google Reader recently added a "Details" item, showing how many Google Reader users were subscribed to a specific blog, but they're nowhere on showing rankings or seeing the most popular shared items in a single day.

Who does this now? As discussed a ton here in 2008, the shared items space took off like a rocket. FeedHeads had done a fantastic job and pioneered this space, on FaceBook, while ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Shared Reader, and LinkRiver all offer details on most popular shared items. Amusingly, in an attempt to discover the most popular items by Google Reader, everybody from Scoble to TechCrunch was fighting to add the data they did have by hand.

6. Addition of Search

At the time, Google Reader was missing core Google functionality - search!

The Google Reader team solved this one in a big way back in September. Nice job.

Who else offers search through feeds? LinkRiver, AssetBar, RSSMeme, and Shyftr all do this very well. So far, Fav.or.it does not, and FriendFeed I'm sure will, but hasn't gotten there yet.

7. Create a Link Blogs Directory

I wanted to see a directory of Google Reader link blogs both ranked by name and by interest.

Google Reader, so far, has largely neglected the power and discovery of link blogs, so this is nowhere.

Who does do this? RSSMeme offers a directory of the most active link bloggers, based on total number of shared items, as did ReadBurner. AssetBar integrates shared link blogs and shows which ones are most read by individuals, but doesn't yet have aggregate data. Nobody has mastered a directory by name, by topic, or by subscriber count yet.

8. Further Integrate "Trends"

I wanted my trends data to be easily accessible from Google Reader.

Google Reader integrated Trends relatively quickly. It was an easy fix.

Who else does this? LinkRiver, as noted last night, features a page called "Attention" on who I share more often and what are the top keywords. FriendFeed offers a "Stats" page showing who I interact with the most, and who interacts with me. RSSMeme integrated global statistics, but not by user. And AssetBar shows all my stats on my profile, in aggregate.

9. Expand Individual Feed Statistics

I'd love to see stats by feed as to their schedule, and if things have changed.

Google Reader has shown basic statistics on how often a feed publishes. (i.e. loisgray.com publishes 10.7 stories per week) But beyond this, more data is missing.

Who else does this? RSSMeme offers the ability to see what the most popular shared items were, by source, which is very interesting, considering individual post popularity, but nobody that I'm aware of has tackled the expanded feed statistics set.

10. Customization Everywhere

Google Reader, unlike iGoogle or other portals, comes in one flavor. So does their link blog.

In the year since my initial post, Google added the ability to customize a small profile to include in my link blog, with links out to other sites, but with that exception, there remains no customization for my application interface or the shared items blog.

Who does do this? Not really anybody comes to mind. iGoogle, My Yahoo! and portal sites that have integrated RSS feeds enable a great deal of customization, but as far as the main application's interface is concerned, it's usually a take it or leave it strategy.

It can be seen that Google has made some strides toward my 10 suggestions. They integrated trends. They nailed Search. They added suggestions. They improved by reducing duplicates. But they dramatically fell short when it came to harnessing the power of link blogs, and this gap enabled more focused services to emerge to fill the hole - services which are now growing and becoming very interesting. The Reader team has also largely stayed quiet, making it uncertain as to whether we should look to them for innovation, or elsewhere. There's no question Google Reader is a fantastic application, one I use multiple times a day, and one I haven't yet seen eclipsed, even by the next generation readers, enough so to get me to switch. But if they get out-innovated, that time may eventually pass.

MyBlogLog LifeStream Is a Quiet Trickle

What? You thought because I wasn't the first to jump on MyBlogLog's new lifestreaming option, that somehow I had missed it? Wrong. Sometimes, life can get in the way. And the travel to and from Boston meant just about everybody's already done the usual, anticipated, immediate analysis, response and FriendFeed comparisons before me. And so far, MyBlogLog doesn't look like it's winning. By and large, most reports see it as an interesting update, but not one that puts it in a leadership position by any means. Unfortunately, I have to agree.

(See: WebWare, VentureBeat, Webomatica, bub.blicio.us, and TechCrunch)

Two weeks ago, we first got an e-mail titled "MyBlogLog Profiles Going Dynamic" from Ian Kennedy, Product Manager for MyBlogLog, who said the new feature, called "New with Me" would "aggregate your latest activity on sites such as Twitter, Last.fm, Digg and YouTube." The idea? "Transform your static profile into a dynamic one."

As one of the loudest, most well-recognized FriendFeed advocates out there, I had personally asked Ian in December to add FriendFeed as one of the supported services for the popular "About Me" MyBlogLog widget. (See: Will There be One Profile to Rule Them All?) While his first response, saying "So many social networks, so little time!" made the trivial seem difficult, on February 19th, he followed up to say FriendFeed was added, but events wouldn't be pulled from the feed, given clear issues with duplicate items. (See: Ian's comment)

It's clear MyBlogLog, whether inspired by FriendFeed or not, fell in love with the idea of making the site something more than a stale page, which it had been for some time. Interestingly, this move toward lifestreaming is just about 100% the opposite direction of what I had expected out of them from a post in September, when I asked, "What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?" In that post, I wrote, "MyBlogLog is exactly what its name implies - it is My Blog's Log, not My Personal Log." I already have sites that cater to following me around. What I want instead, is something that more directly follows my blog around - with increased statistics, linkage and visitor details. I wanted MyBlogLog to get more in touch with what made it interesting in the first place, its communities, and networking individuals, not showing me what they are doing somewhere else. This move only makes the data found else