Facebook Still Banning Aliases to Avoid Becoming Fakebook

That Facebook has an itchy trigger finger when banning users or applications for assumed wrongs is not new or a mystery. People have been kicked off the site for adding friends too quickly, for using fake names, or trying to export data from the walled garden social network. And Facebook's adherence to this policy, especially when it comes to pseudonyms, puts them at odds with just about every other popular Web service out there. Just last night, a former colleague of mine, and now a Web friend, found himself on the outside looking in.

Vicky Chaudry (or Chau), whom I worked with at my current company from 2002 to 2005, is now the founder and CEO of StartupNewz, a Digg-like service focused on startup and technology news. To better highlight his immersion into Web 2.0 and social networking, Vicky took to calling himself Vic Podcaster, a name which has served him well, on LinkedIn, where he has more than 500 connections, on Twitter, where he is followed by more than 1,150, and on FriendFeed, where he follows almost 1,300. His pseudonym also didn't seem to stop his ability to get into the recent TechCrunch August Capital party (see pictures on Flickr) or the F8 afterparty for Facebook developers last week.


But eight months after opening a Facebook account under his name, Vic Podcaster, Vicky tried to log in to the service last night, to find his account had been disabled, "because the name it was registered under was a fake". Amusingly, this screen is surrounded by a note that "Everyone can join", and doesn't offer any kind of helpful link to challenge the ruling.


In the FriendFeed discussion that ensued after Vicky told everyone he had been banned, the once-banned Robert Scoble said, "Facebook sucks for just this reason.", while Jesse Stay suggested "One thing Facebook does still need to do, but I argue this is a minor thing, is make sure a human is reviewing disabled accounts before they get disabled."

Vicky's clearly not the only person using an alias on Facebook today. My high school acquaintance Bill Parnell is going by the name of Biznill Parnorell. There's even a user who friended me by the name of Daily Contempt. Surely that's not their given name?

I've been giving a lot of thought of late to the migration away from nicknames and more toward real names, especially as people are taking ownership of their blog posts, microupdates and comments across the Web. In most cases, users of apps like Facebook and FriendFeed are using their own given names, first and last, unless the user name is already taken. Facebook clearly didn't like Vic's changing his name to "Vic Podcaster", although LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed and GMail had no problems with it. But what constitutes fake? If Robert Scoble changed his login to Robert Scobleizer, would he be banned again? And while Michael Arrington uses his real name on Facebook, its the TechCrunch brand he's aligned with on Twitter. What if he went by Michael TechCrunch on Facebook? Grounds for banning?


Vic Podcaster Still Lives On LinkedIn
Aliases aren't the only reason you can get banned from Facebook, of course. Scoble was banned for using an early version of Plaxo software, and many have been banned for spam-like behavior. Alex Hammer, who I've written about before, e-mailed me three weeks ago, saying, "I'm working to get reinstated back into Facebook because I added too many friends too quickly." In their defense, he adds, he was warned.

So who's right here? Is Facebook wrong to stop people from using aliases, or are the other sites that have more permissive rules the ones who are making the mistake? Should Facebook have waited eight full months before banning Vicky? Couldn't they tell by his activity on the site that he's a real person with real connections? It seems to me at the very least, a human should have reached out to him and offered a way to change his last name to get it within guidelines.

Walking the SEO Balance Beam

Guest Post By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (E-mail / Twitter)

There's a battle brewing, and it's between SEO advocates and content creators who prefer a more organic growth to their sites. On the one side are the SEO abusers who litter poorly written content with an oversaturation of keywords, making content unreadable, and on the other are those who pay no attention to keywords, don't realize that you can add the Page Rank indicator to the Google Toolbar to check the rank of an individual page, and write whatever they want, with no thought to subject focus or search results at all.

There is, however, a fine balance that can be struck between the two sides, and that balance can be achieved with a focus on the reader rather than on the stats. If I had my way, I'd write whatever I wanted with no thought to the dreaded search engines, but if I did that, I probably wouldn't get paid for my work, so I try to keep a constant eye on that balance.

Much like advertising, overuse of SEO techniques is becoming an annoyance to readers, and if someone were to develop a plug-in like AdBlock Plus that could filter out content that was oversaturated with keywords and internal links, people would download it by the thousands, if not millions.

Still not sure what I'm talking about? Let's take a look at this Mahalo page for a spoof video. You'll notice that in a 68-word Guide Note, there are 13 internal links to other Mahalo pages. Some links are split across lines, making it look like even more. While it may look good to a search engine spider, it looks unreadable to the casual visitor. How many users will actually click those links to find more information? How many will instead click out of the page and move onto something more user-friendly?

Walking the balance beam when it comes to SEO involves a common sense approach: keeping the keyword in the URL, title, and text, but not beating the reader over the head with it just to make it more obvious to the search engine spiders. And sure, offer an internal link for something that the reader may want to see for additional information, but don't link to every single possible page on your site in an attempt to plump up your page rank and search engine appearance. Your readers will thank you, and hopefully, send others.

Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

This afternoon, I caught a video broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net, where Corvida had the opportunity to share her story of asking Verizon to drop their relationship with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, in light of his controversial video parodying African American bloggers. While both carried on a strong conversation around the issues of race, bigotry and getting ahead through hard work, their efforts were dwarfed by some of the most hateful, shameful, racist speech I've been exposed to in a very long time.

It's common knowledge that anonymous commenters often fall to the lowest common denominator. The wider the audience, the less respectable the discussion, with YouTube being a perfect example.

Most of the time, the places I engage in social media (and real life) are civil. But as Corvida and Wayne talked about her family's efforts with Verizon, and how black tech bloggers are often stereotyped, with Feldman's video as an example, the Yahoo! Live chat screen filled with filth, with racist words, references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and watermelon, comments on Obama, and discussion of penis sizes.

Essentially, you name the negative stereotypes and hatred that could be spewed against the African American bloggers, and they were there.

I don't want to spread the filth that was said during the chat, but it's worth exposing these purveyors of hatred, to illustrate the nonsense. If only there were a way to break through their anonymity...

There's no question the work was done by a few anonymous malcontents, but it was eye opening to unfortunately be reminded those people are out there, and are willing to share their nonsense in an attempt to intimidate both Wayne and Corvida, in hopes of persuading them to stop. But it didn't work. As Wayne said the issue of Loren Feldman was "a wake-up call for African Americans", today's nonsense was an unfortunate wake-up call for me.

I'm glad both Wayne and Corvida maintained their professional integrity in the face of ridiculous nonsense that could have brought weaker people to tears, but there was absolutely no reason they should have had to put up with that horrible behavior, which, as it was undoubtedly intended to do, made me quite angry.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and with all the advancements we think we've made in Civil Rights, we still have to see this horrible, ridiculous, ignorant junk. I was appalled at what Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through, and I wish I never had to see it again. These people do exist, but they don't deserve a platform, and in this case, there should have been ways to either increase filters, block by IP address or reveal the real names of the trolls.

I am very sorry Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through that in what was otherwise a very engaging disucssion, and I hope this filth doesn't slow any person of any background down for a second.

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.

What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Sometimes, when I talk to people about why I blog, and what I set out to accomplish through covering what I do, and engaging where I do, I say that I am trying to help shape the Web, and blogging as a whole, to be what I want it to be - a better community with some strong standards for engagement, ownership, news gathering and innovation. Over time, as the number of posts here has racked up, you can see some of these core elements throughout the site. As an exercise, I thought I'd outline my beliefs, and I'm eager to hear your comments, whether these are shared or we disagree.

1. I Believe You Should Enjoy What You Do

Whether you are are the co-founder of a hot startup, an entry-level programmer at a technology monolith, a blogger, or simply a fan of social networking tools, you should be sure you're doing what you're doing because you enjoy it, and at its core, it brings you happiness. At times, I've seen people succumb to the stress of posting every day, of racing up or down the comparative measures out there, or slog day in and day out at companies because they're too unmotivated to seek an alternative. Even on those days when the work required seems overwhelming, it's worth stepping back and saying, "Are you having fun still?" As Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford University a few years ago, if the answer is no too many times in a row, it's time to think about doing something else.

When you're not having fun, it shows. Your work gets sloppier. Your posts get crankier. You start talking more about how much time it's taking, how much pressure you're feeling. And when that happens... take a deep breath, or take a break. Reevaluate why it is you're doing what you do.

2. I Believe In Supporting and Promoting Innovation

Without an entrepreneurial spirit, change in our technology landscape would be muted. Innovation can be sparked from a single idea, whether creating a new market, or simply improving a new one. When I see potential, I want to highlight it, and work as a partner with the team aiming to deliver a new experience, and fulfilling their dreams.

Often, a rush to call "foul" on a product, to give it a negative label, or call failure, is done more to grab attention than through benevolence. You're not doing the innovator a favor, or their potential users a favor, but seeing the glass half full.

3. I Believe In Trusting First, Looking for Holes Later

For the most part, people don't start businesses or create products with ill intent. New services crop up every day, and the overwhelming number are there to help you learn something new, find something more quickly, or reach peers in a new way. As it can be relatively inexpensive to launch new Web services, or to start blogs, there are, simply put, tons of them out there. Many do very similar things. But at their core, most are well-intended.

For every spammer or troll, content scraper or hacker, there are thousands of others working on the right side of the law. And sometimes, when it looks like a service might be on the border of what's "right" and what's "wrong", I tend to give the benefit of the doubt, so the entrepreneur can explain themselves. I also believe that every service out there, from those a day old, to the market monoliths of Google and Microsoft, has issues. It can be fun to focus on those issues, but unless they completely disrupt the user experience to the point the product is unusable, I feel the product owner is both aware of them, and is working behind the scenes to make the product more robust, faster, and more fully featured.

4. I Believe In Equal Access to Tools and Opportunity

I believe in the availability of free or inexpensive services that enable people to broadcast, share and collaborate. I believe that for-profit institutions should make efforts to spread the availability of the Internet, broadband and wireless access to bring this information spigot to people everywhere, regardless of their financial or geographical status.

5. I Believe In Portability Of Content and Clear Ownership

I believe that products should enable support for open standards, such that data can be simply exported and imported from one service to another. I believe that these open standards should be deployed such that content, be it blog posts, news, comments or other actionable items (be it up/down votes, likes, avatars, etc.) be easily transferred, while retaining clear ownership by the original individual performing the activity. This portability should be developed in such a way that the third-party service, the content creator, and the person reaction to said content, all have the option to approve or disapprove portability or modification.

In those cases where full portability is not yet available, I believe services have an obligation to state their intentions to move toward an API, an open standard, display best intentions, or publicly declare their position to keep data siloed, buyer beware.

6. I Believe In Giving Credit Where It Is Due

I believe in bloggers giving best effort to determining the original source of news, and providing linkage, especially when the alternative is to link internally. I believe in making it clear who the entrepreneurs are behind services, and displaying a human face to what could otherwise be a personless brand.

I believe in displaying clear attribution for the source of quotes, paraphrasing or other use of third-party content, even if it is from what's considered a competitor.

7. I Believe In Supporting The Little Guy, While Not Hating the Leader

I believe in giving a new service or a small company its unfair share of support and coverage, as they make a valid attempt to enter a market. I believe in helping the service clarify their message, their features and benefits to the point they achieve critical mass on par with other market leaders. I believe that this presumed bias can be shown without disparaging leading services, or holding ill will against those already having achieved success.

8. I Believe In Transparency and the Removal of Barriers

I believe that those services who make their intentions, their product plans, and their updates clear to users and partners will achieve a higher level of success and trust than those that do not. I believe that company representatives should be easily accessible through clear methods, and should give best efforts to rapidly respond to feature requests, downtime or other concerns.

I believe that activities or barriers which reduce transparency, reduce access to company representatives and create confusion will be extremely damaging, reducing trust and good will.

Similarly, bloggers should be extremely reachable and should display and pre-existing biases, monetary engagements or sponsorships, be there any.

9. I Believe In The Ability to Disagree Without Ill Will

I believe that it is absolutely possible for multiple people to look at the same data set or service and achieve completely-differing conclusions and perspectives, without meaning either person to be lacking in intellect or experience. In the event that disagreements do occur, I recommend open communication and statement of beliefs will be much more successful at proving a point than labels, one liners or personal attacks.

In parallel, services can expect that not every review will be one they want to print out and send home to mom. If the author's found to not have a conflict of interest, efforts should be made to expose that, but otherwise, it can be assumed there might be some valid points, even in the most vile of screeds.

10. I Believe In Finding New Ways To Find, Share, Manipulate Data

I believe that the creation of data and content is nearing commodity status. New blogs and services debut every minute and die almost as quickly. But each month brings new and exciting ways to manipulate, share or otherwise locate the best data, through the launch of new social networks, aggregators, search engines, or semantic tools. The services we all use today will almost with certainty be different than those we use next year at this time.

It is with these 10 tenets, and likely more, that I look to engage. Through my small voice here, I believe I have been lucky enough to play a role in discussing how blogs give attribution, how they prioritize external links vs. internal links, the growing issue of RSS repurposing and comment fragmentation. I've tried to support the little guys and highlight individuals doing innovation. I've made a small number of negative posts, in contrast to my more supportive posts, and avoided throwing the second stone at times when my views weren't universal. The Web, and our ability in the blogosphere to impact it and play a role, is ever changing and exciting to me.

LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network

As I mentioned in yesterday's story on OneSpot, the quest to separate the wheat from the chaff in news and blogs through leveraging RSS and social tools is a vibrant market. Whether Web users are relying on Digg, Slashdot and Reddit to bring the hottest items to the top, or if they are instead turning to automated memetrackers like Techmeme to rank stories' popularity, a lot of people are asking to not read every single story, but instead, put their faith in the hands of others.

A new network debuting today, called LOUD3R, hopes to leverage this automation and social prioritization of stories, through a vast network of sites, including 25 at launch today, each one of them utilizing a semantic publishing engine, which finds, clusters and ranks content for a number of vertical topics, ranging from technology to sports, fashion to business.

Each one of the sites carries their trademark - 3R ending. For example, a site dedicated to Web 2.0 and community, isn't called Buzzer, but instead is translated as BUZZ3R, and can be found at www.buzz3r.com. Similarly, an auto site is called ROADST3R and can be found at www.roadst3r.com. I'll let you guess as to some of the others, including GLITT3R, WATCH3R, and FOUND3R.


A sampling of LOUD3R's 25 sites at launch
Like many other topical Digg-like sites, including Ballhype and Showhype, the LOUD3R network family promotes stories that have received attention from throughout the Web. But instead of getting voted up or down by users, the articles are driven by background rules, in Techmeme-like fashion, as Gabe Rivera has implemented on his own family of sites, including BallBug, Memorandum and WeSmirch. Users can make comments on the items, see related stories, or e-mail them.


A lead story on one of LOUD3R's sites.
The sites also use the same background semantic engine to highlight hot topics on each site. On PUTT3R, it's no surprise that Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate are hot topics. On WOOF3R, the topics instead turn to terriers and poodles.

Like Digg, you can see the "Most Popular" items, as well as "Newest", and the LOUD3R algorithm also tries to make a best guess as to what is most "Interesting".

Will LOUD3R's cute naming strategy and interesting use of semantics gain them significant traction? The company certainly hopes so. They have gobbled up more than 550 topically-oriented domain names with the "3R" brand, so today's launch is just the beginning. They hope that their semantic engine will help filter all the content on the Web and only bring visitors the "best available". And they definitely believe that through targeting topics that are historically underserved, they can get a leg up against competition.

With more than 500 sites planned for launch, not every single topic has to be a dramatic success for LOUD3R to make some coin, they hope. Their press release, also issued today, says each site has a low maintenance cost, and each will deliver advertising revenue. If the audience doesn't get QUIET3R, then LOUD3R should get BETT3R and BIGG3R.

The Web Offers a Window Into Paradise's Burning

Three weeks ago, I told a story about how Northern California fires had once chased my family and me from our home, as evacuation orders had our family of seven packing our belongings and heading to the central valley floor, not knowing what we'd find when we returned. This weekend, the fires came back to Paradise, where I lived from 1994 to 1999, and where my family spent 10 years. But this time they weren't stopped at the town limits, and the fire has consumed more than 70 homes, so far scorching more than 23,000 acres.

Over the last 24 hours, I've turned to the Web to learn all I can about this tragedy, and through the various tools out there on the Web, from newspaper Web sites to user submitted photography, recorded video, and even a streaming broadcast of the county's public safety scanner, to learn what has happened. And the news is not good.


Firefighters Take to the Air to Fight the Blaze
While this blaze, dubbed the "Humboldt Fire", hasn't gained the national attention given the San Diego fires last year, or even the awareness we saw in the Bay Area for the fire last month in the Santa Cruz mountains, the effects are just as devastating. While I haven't called Paradise home for almost a decade, we've gotten word over the last day or so that friends' homes have been wiped clean from the earth, their life's dreams and possessions erased in a flaming fury.

The two main sources of news have been the area newspapers, including the Chico Enterprise Record, where I once wrote as a staff intern back in 1995 and 1996, and the smaller, hometown Paradise Post.


See KCRA Sacramento's Report on the Blaze from Friday
Photos from the Enterprise Record have been circulated through the Associated Press, and show stories of loss, heroic efforts from those fighting the blaze, and agony. The Enterprise Record also asked those effected by the fires to submit their own photos, and both collections feature hundreds of first-party accounts. At one point, nearly 10,000 of the town's 30,000 residents were asked to evacuate, and of the three roads out of town, only one was left open, with none who left being able to return.

A PDF map of those homes burned shows the flames came within a mile of where I spent my 8th grade to 12th grade years. And while the family who now lives in our home appears to have been safe, other friends were not so lucky.

My younger sister, writing on our family blog, posted last night:

"The Rogers and the Sterlings both lost their homes. The Greers are still not able to stay at their home and are in (Yuba City). The Halls are okay, as is Tiger Tail. All of Wayland is supposedly gone."

The Rogers family and The Sterling family were both friends and members of our church. Tiger Tail Lane, which my sister references, is where our home was, luckily escaping the flames again. Tonight, my mother added a new note:

"The Sterlings are apparently devastated -- it took them 20 years to build their home."

The Sterling's youngest son, Rob, is currently serving a two-year mission for the church, and it now becomes a trial for the family to see if they tell him, or when they can tell him, without distracting from what they consider extremely important work.

This kind of personal detail makes what otherwise would be yet another sad story full of statistics on homes burned and acres torched just that much more real. I can check the CDF's report and see that the blaze is now 45% contained, has cost $5 million so far, employing nearly 4,000 fire personnel. I can see stories that say it will be fully contained by Monday, and that the threat to Paradise has decreased, but clearly, for some it is already too late.

I'm watching on the Web, but I can't help but feel powerless.

Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail

E-mail used to be about connecting people, regardless of distance. With time, it developed new capabilities - sending attachments of ever greater size, acting as a marketing vehicle, both solicited and otherwise (see: Spam), displaying pictures and HTML, and of course, serving as a repository for status notifications for commerce, news, and social media. Now, there's no question for me that updates from online services greatly outnumber the amount of person to person communication I get each day in my personal e-mail. (Work e-mail, of course, is another story)

For me, e-mail is where I want to be updated for all things finance, be it bank statements, credit card invoices, stock trade transactions, or the electricity and cell phone bills. As I see it, every e-mail note there saves paper, and saves me digging through the mail to sign something off and send a check.

I also, despite getting them at an increasing rate over the last few months, still get notifications by e-mail when somebody chooses to follow me on FriendFeed, LinkRiver, Shyftr or Twitter, for starters. I also get notified if someone befriends me on other services, like Facebook and Digg. At times, especially when a particular topic is driving up conversation, I can hear the sounds of new e-mail hitting my computer every couple minutes, invariably drawing a sarcastic comment from my wife, who helpfully adds, "Well, aren't you popular?"


Twitter and FriendFeed follows come in pretty often these days...
While I could, of course, turn off these notifications, it helps to see if the person following is someone I'll be soon watching in turn, and it also alerts me to if I'm getting name-dropped somewhere. Usually, a quick visit to Summize or Google Blog Search can help with that.

Curious if others using Web services as I do were seeing a similar onslaught of Web notifications taking over their in box, I posted a question to Twitter, which also hit FriendFeed. So far, the response is certainly mixed.

Susan Beebe claimed 85% of her e-mail to be from "real people", but otherwise, the FriendFeed voting came out 16-2 in favor of services, while Twitter replies also came out with services ahead, 6 to 1. Bwana McCall wrote, "I get more Bacn than real email. It's sad.", while Hutch Carpenter said it simply, "Notifications by far."

While many people are fighting with the e-mail data deluge, striving for the proverbial "In Box Zero", handling online notifications is like any other system. You just need some good hierarchy. I've set up a folder called "Blog" in my e-mail for all correspondence related to the blog, from people pitching stories, to working with entrepreneurs and other bloggers. I have subfolders for some of the services where I've had the most updates, and of course, for real-world work, I have a "Commerce" folder, which surprisingly, has all my stock trade notifications from eTrade going back to the year 2000, and every Amazon.com order ever. Thank goodness for e-mail search, something Apple's Mail program does extremely well.

While robots may have taken over the inbound side of my e-mail, I still own the outbound side, and take every effort I can to keep up. But the mix has definitely changed.

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.

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)

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.

Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag

Now 23 weeks into our twin pregnancy, it's clear our son and daughter are already doomed. Although they don't even have names picked out, they are already unknowingly marching down the path to geekdom. Still a good few months before they debut, the pair are destined to be branded like the common race car, made corporate shills, through the donning of apparel featuring the logo of some of my favorite technology companies - and they could wear those of your favorites, if you feel generous.


Our Kids Want to Wear Logos. Here's a Starting Pack.
So far, we've managed to procure a pair of onesies featuring the Google, Apple and FriendFeed logos, as well as FriendFeed bibs and Google beanies, and we aren't done by any means. For while seemingly every mother wants her kids adorned in bunny rabbits, flowers and puppies, we'll have nothing to do with it. Similarly, we will push off any Disney and cartoon characters as long as we are able.

So here's the deal. I hereby promise that if you want to see one or both of our children sporting your company logo, whether it be on a onesie, a baby blanket, branded bottles, or any other baby gear, we agree to be sellouts, so long as you are in the technology space. We will not turn down any offers from hardware vendors, software vendors or Web sites. Want our children to mock me with their Windows Vista or MySpace t-shirts? Fine. We promise to dress them up and add their photos to our Flickr account for the world to see.

But rather than have our kids mocked for their poor judgment from the get-go, we already have some favorites in mind. I would love to go weeks without seeing the same logo twice. I want baby clothes from Digg, TechMeme, TiVo, Technorati, Ballhype, Facebook, ReadBurner, and Yahoo!. I'd love to see my kids bearing logos from TechCrunch, Twitter, Mashable, GigaOM and LinkedIn.

If you've got a favorite brand you want promoted, we're here for you. Send me an e-mail or call (my cell phone is on the right of the blog), and I'm more than happy to send contact information which puts my kids in the role of corporate babble-person.

Limelight Networks Searchme Spider Picking Up Speed

For the better part of this year, I've seen some odd traffic to my site from Limelight Networks, a content delivery network similar to the more well-known Akamai. Multiple times a day, I would see a visit, with no originating page, drop in on the site, look at a page or two, and then, just as quickly, it would leave. Later, this pace quickened, to the point that if I saw a visitor came in with no referrer, I assumed it was llnw.net. But, in the last few days, the rate has dramatically accelerated, to the point where this spider from llnw.net is more than 10 percent of my total traffic, and it rates as the number one domain accessing my site, ahead of even Comcast.

So what the heck is it doing?

Well, it's not 100% clear. The assumed spider drops in and advertises itself as Linux UNIX, running Mozilla 1.8.1.11, and displaying a monitor with the odd square resolution of 1300 x 1300. It generally looks at one page, takes off, and then comes back in a few minutes to get another one. No real rhyme or reason, and it's just as happy to suck down old pages as new ones.

So, is it caching my blog so that customers of Limelight Networks can access the pages faster? Is it taking a graphical snapshot, in the same way that www.archive.org has done to show how Web sites looked over time? I'm not exactly sure.

One theory, voiced in the forums at Webmaster World, titled "Unusual Traffic from Limelight Networks", says the activity is from a robot called "Searchme", a LLNW client. Going to www.searchme.com shows this as a possibility. Searchme, Inc. says, " Searchme delivers more meaningful and targeted search results to its users," and that its "intuitive category suggest technology provides users with a dynamic and rewarding search experience by delivering relevant results that are tailored specifically to their unique areas of interest."

But... alas, no search engine and no demo, yet.


LLNW.net keeps hitting the site, every few minutes.
While I'm sure my site and others get hammered all day long from Google and Yahoo! spiders, they don't trigger my Web statistics software to think they're actual people, as LLNW is doing. It could be because their spider acts so human-like that the JavaScript code I use to track accesses is fooled. But regardless, the activity is picking up steam, and at this pace, I wouldn't be surprised to see LLNW take in one of every five visits here, even if they are "junk" visits.


LLNW.net is grabbing 13% of my traffic, beating out even Comcast!
The question is, if it is Searchme who is pushing this spider, and if they are indeed planning to reveal their work at some point, will the world have the need for yet another search engine? I have no idea. But if these oddities are any indicator, something's going on worth watching.

For those of you who have blogs and Web sites that track this detail of activity, are you also seeing the LLNW traffic, and has it increased over time? Also, has anybody ever seen Searchme in action who can let us know what they're doing?

A Big Upgrade Day for Five Social Services

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

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

LinkedIn

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

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

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

FriendFeed

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

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

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


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

Spokeo

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

ReadBurner

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

Shared Reader

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

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

Is SiteHoppin Like StumbleUpon for Drunks?

How do you take on a company who has first-mover advantage, significant market share, and a positive customer experience? It's hard to do. If you want to beat an entrenched company like this, your service should either cost less (or be free), be easier to use, or have significant differentiation, with features that customers can't live without. Whether on the virtual or real world, taking on the big guys can be tough.

In recent weeks, I've seen the emergence of a service that takes users from site to site, like StumbleUpon does, called SiteHoppin'. SiteHoppin' describes itself as a "social networking/bookmarking wiki site that lets you find, bookmark or share interesting sites by hopping instead of typing."

SiteHoppin' doesn't mention StumbleUpon by name, but it performs essentially the same function as the wildly popular service, owned by eBay. What it lacks in visual design and market penetration, it makes up for in buzzwords and attitude. It not only claims "social networking", "bookmarking" and "wiki" in its title, but call itself Web 2.5. I've never even heard of Web 2.5, even while others are working over a definition of Web 3.0.

Stumblers er... SiteHoppers can rate sites by the number of beers (from one to five) they give a page, similar to StumbleUpon's thumbs up and thumbs down feature.

Where SiteHoppin' does come out ahead of StumbleUpon is the lacking need for a browser toolbar. As StumbleUpon has delivered toolbars for FireFox and Internet Explorer, they haven't yet gotten to us Safari users. SiteHoppin's user interface is so light, they claim to work well on iPhones, the Nokia E90 and other smartphones.

The site is just getting started, having reached 10,000 visitors on Friday, and features a most-popular sites listing, as well as a directory of users. So far, the most popular site is www.doodlage.com, which has 43 "Beers on the Wall" for an "Average Beers Rating" of 4.63. I don't know about you, but maybe there's something safer about browsing sober. We'll see how far SiteHoppin' gets against the StumbleUpon juggernaut.

Praying at the Tech Geek Altar

So far, I haven't yet tried to convert louisgray.com to any kind of real brand, despite my previous comments that your blog is your brand.

Many of the sites I frequent on a daily basis have done a good job to separate the brand of their blog from the individual behind it. MG Siegler converts to ParisLemon. Jason Kaneshiro turns into Webomatica. And Steven Hodson wears a cape reading WinExtra. But I haven't done it. I've had the domain name forever, and keep plodding ahead.

This gap in my self-branding has opened up the opportunity for others to try and define who I am and what the blog stands for. I saw a few great attempts in the last few days, from some influential blogs.

Mashable was very kind to me Monday night, in their ReadBurner coverage, when Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins said the site "is currently seeded with the linkblogs of several thought leaders in the tech blogging community, such as Louis Gray..."

OK ... Thought leader. I like that.

Then, today, VentureBeat had an outstanding write-up covering FriendFeed, and its growing momentum. The author gave a lot of credit for FriendFeed's rise to its initial users, saying: "It’s used by early Googlers and their many friends. The company was founded (and funded) by former Gmail team members Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh together with Google Maps engineers Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. It’s also getting championed by early-adopter bloggers like Louis Gray."

OK... Early-adopter blogger. That's good too.

And later this evening, Chris Brogan, writing on the challenges of Social Media, reported he often hits a firewall at work, restricting his access to some sites, including mine.

He says, "I’m blocked 3-7 times a day, and almost always with an incorrect blocking message by the firewall company. For example, Louis Gray was blocked as religion. Only if tech geeks are now a religion, and then, I’m praying."

Line up at the altar, Chris. We're right behind you.

So, way back in February of 2007, I was called a friendly neighborhood geek. It looks like the geek label hasn't changed, but now, we're also being acknowledged as an early adopter with a unique approach to the tech blogosphere.

While I haven't worked on enhancing my personal brand, others are setting it for me. Right now, that's okay, and I just might start borrowing their words. Your friendly neighborhood early-adopter tech geek blogger, signing off.

10 Ways We're Trying to Make the Web a Better Place

Recently talking with a good friend and consistent reader of this blog, he told me one of the reasons he likes reading louisgray.com is that he believes I'm not trying to follow somebody else's lead, that I'm not an echo chamber, and instead, I'm actually trying to promote things I believe in. I hope he's right. For while I might occasionally make comments on the news of the day, we're, in this political climate, the blogging candidate for change.

Here are a few examples of how we've tried to push change on the Web and make it a better place to take in new information, find new sources for news, accurately report statistics and influence, as well as ways we're trying to help popular services improve and help people find new tools:

1) The Internal Links vs. External Links Debate

We tried to squash the practice of using Internal Links when External Links would be better ways to bring visitors to the companies making the news. In the ensuing discussions, some major blogs said they would make changes, while others said I had it all wrong. Even if most did nothing, the issue was certainly made more visible.

Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control
More Comments On Inwardly Linking
Backlink Backlash Could Bring Forth Change
Link In. Link Out. Shake it All About.

2) The Elimination of Spam-Like Viral Link Tags for Statistics Manipulation

As it's well recognized Google and Technorati will give your site more perceived value based on the amount of unique links to your Web site, many have made a move to artificially inflate their numbers, incorrectly leading to high PageRanks and Technorati Authority, despite the fact Google can punish those found cheating.

Technorati Needs to Stamp Out Viral Tag Spam Now
Kent Newsome Calls My Comments "Fear and Loathing"
Is There an Antidote to the Link Tags Virus?

3) Correctly Learning What Is Original Reporting, and Who's Just Following Along

News aggregators can be both a blessing and a curse. Sites like TechMeme are outstanding for seeing th