With the blistering rise in customer and partner interest and development of new applications for the Android operating system, companies like HTC, Motorola and Samsung have emerged as the go-to device manufacturers for a wide array of compatible handsets and tablets. Without a single provider offering both the hardware and software, like with Apple and the iOS, the companies have gained greater visibility with consumers, and some have even branched out to offer branded application stores to improve their standing in the expanding ecosystem. Today, Samsung launched a new online hub for 'Samsung Developers' at http://developer.samsung.com, aimed to spur tighter integration with their products and make their devices smarter.

Looking around my home, Samsung is rapidly vying with Apple for top brand representation. In addition to my Samsung Epic 4G phone (on Sprint), I have the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and even the TV in my office bears the Samsung logo. Samsung had a huge presence at CES earlier this month, and is expected to make a solid impact at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC). Samsung's Galaxy S line of smartphones is tangling with iPhone for the top position in Japan and in other countries worldwide, and the Galaxy Tab has set the standard for Android Tablets taking on the iPad.


But Samsung does more than Android, also promoting Windows Mobile devices and its Bada platform for lower-end devices, selling millions of handsets outside the US. The combination of its Bada offerings with Android and Windows Phone esentially means Samsung's brand is found from the most feature-rich smartphones to basic mobile devices. Added to the tablets and Web-connected TVs, and you can see how Samsung has lumped its offerings into a bigger pool called "connected devices". The new developer portal courts application authors to target these connected devices to reach "an audience of millions".

The new Samsung Developers portal takes much of the guesswork out of creating an app for the Samsung platform, with included "how to" and "getting started" guides to build applications that can run on multiple platforms and devices, and specific primers for such varied topics as bluetooth, theme design, security, widgets and how to leverage the Galaxy Tab's screen real estate. It also introduces the concept of Samsung Apps (http://www.samsungapps.com), optimized for the platform, including featured apps, both free and paid.

If you are an app developer looking to break out of the crowded Android market, teaming up with Samsung could be a great way to get visible on some of the best and most popular hardware in the smartphone and tablet market. The developer portal should help give a solid boost. Find it at http://developer.samsung.com.

Since launching more than two and a half years ago with a new magazine-like start page built with a foundation of RSS, Feedly has grown a committed user base who has enjoyed the service's unique take on Google Reader and other feeds, including Twitter. After nearly 18 months of development, Feedly can finally be downloaded from the iTunes store, available for iPhone and iPod Touch, for $2.99, while development for Android continues.

Feedly's strengths on the Web have primarily been in the clean UI and simplified navigation of often-busy RSS streams, including easy hierarchies developed through your own Google Reader folders, and tight integration with more advanced Reader functionality, including shares (seen as likes within Feedly) and comments, which flow bidirectionally between the two services. On the iPhone, the approach is quite similar, though modified for a smaller handheld device. (I used the iPad at 2x zoom to use it and make the below screenshots)


   
Featured Subscriptions and the Feedly Start Menu

The app, modifying its horizontally-oriented appearance for the desktop to a more start menu-like vertical bar on the iPhone, highlights your digest (all articles), latest (newest articles), must reads (featured sources), popular items from the community and your own saved items.



    
Top Stories on Feedly and Archived Stories

The most recent story from each section is displayed on its own, while archived stories are displayed four to a page, with thumbnails, date of publishing, and how many times they were shared across the Feedly network. (From what I can see, double digit shares are exceptional)

Want to mark all items as read in Feedly on iPhone? Click the checkbox. Want to share a single article? You can tweet it, e-mail it, copy the article link, open it in Safari, or mysteriously "mobilize", which in theory takes non-optimized stories and makes them look good for the handset. Clicking the "thumbs up" sign likes an article on the mobile device, just as it does on Feedly's site.

Feedly founder Edwin Khodabakchian has been developing in public, with a release candidate for iPhone being displayed as long ago as October and the yet to debut Android equivalent shown in November. The service's fans no doubt will still be eager to get Feedly on the go for iOS (and eventually Android), and the $2.99 sticker shouldn't be much of a deterrent.


    
Liking an Item in Feedly on iOS and Other Options

Despite some other places arguing that RSS is dead, it's obviously not the case - not with innovation from companies like Feedly, Flipboard, Newsblur, Pulse, and yes, my6sense, thinking of new ways to take on RSS feeds and social streams. As an information consumer, I enjoy seeing new approaches and ideas on how to manage the information flow and I appreciate Edwin and his team's steadfast focus on delivering a high quality product, rather than trying to push something out the door quickly.

You can find Feedly on the iTunes store here: Feedly on iTunes.

Disclosures: I am VP of Marketing at my6sense, which could be considered either a competitor or a potential partner to Feedly, Flipboard, Newsblur, Pulse or Google Reader, due to both similarity and complementary features with our API and mobile applications on iOS and Android.

The second-most popular activity on the Internet (ego stroking) just got yet another site. Silicon Valley's latest flame, Quora, the increasingly popular question and answer site founded by a team of former Facebookers, deliciously displays every user's follower counts, as well as the number of times they are mentioned, on each profile. With such numbers flowing freely on the site, it was only a matter of time before a smart coder found a way to rank the top users and post a leaderboard. First to the game is QuoraTop, authored by Gri.pe's Matt Mastracci, which polls Quora daily for users' following counts and shows who's garnered the greatest following.

Spawned from the popular Quora thread "Which Quora users have the most followers?", which to date has been tweaked manually, often by the same people being included in the list, eager to climb the Q&A social ladder, QuoraTop shows few surprises among the top followed people - which often correlates more closely to their visibility from other networks and previous job history than their supposed activity within the network itself.


Top users, as shown by QuoraTop, have names well-known to the Silicon Valley digerati, from Robert Scoble, Ev Williams, Kevin Rose, Tim O'Reilly and Jason Calacanis to Mike Arrington, Leo Laporte, Loic LeMeur, Biz Stone, and Daring Fireball's John Gruber to round out the top ten, with just under 7,000 followers. Scoble tops the list tonight with 16,686 followers, about a 10% conversion rate from his follower count on Twitter. Quora cofounder Adam D'Angelo enters at position #20 with 4,433 users, just ahead of the first woman on the list, Laura Fitton, who hits the #21 position. Tara Hunt is #26 overall and Gina Trapani is #37, three women outnumbered by men more than 10 to 1.

Quora's top followed users include popular founder CEOs including Ev Williams, Loic Le Meur, and Dave Morin, fomer CEOs like Steve Case and Craig Newmark, and of course, VCs like Marc Andreessen and Dave McClure.

If you look closely, you can see the aftereffects of Twitter's suggested user list bringing many followers to less-active users of the site. It's widely assumed that once celebrities with their millions of fans on Twitter start to also use Quora, the digerati could be swamped by Hollywood, but it's early days.

Dare to stare at the numbers and see if you're on the Quora leaderboard, or if you've missed anyone? Check it out at http://www.quoratop.com/.

In the tug of war between privacy and personalization, there can sometimes be a visceral reaction to learning that a company to whom you may not have explicitly granted permission to learn details about you actually has that information - even if it's public. One doesn't need to look any further than the much-maligned Spokeo, who in becoming a next-generation people search engine, practically has to defend its business with every other blog post, even as traffic continues to balloon. Now, news that Google is offering a Chrome extension to opt out of advertisers' tracking services has put the issue of personalization and "Do Not Track" back on the front page. Unfortunately, many people are likely to download it, thinking the result will ensure greater privacy, when in actuality all it does is ensure off-target ads with a crappy experience.

In my view, almost all advertising online is very poor. There are two reasons I find most advertising bad. The first is that it is interruptive, and the second is that it is irrelevant.

1. Interruptive ads quite simply get in the way and can prevent you from seeing what it is you want to see, when you want to see it. I despise pre-load pages on news sites and pre-roll before videos, thinking, for example, that watching breaking news on CNN should not be preceded with ads for prescription drugs, or that I want to see a full-screen ad for a network switch provider when trying to read Network Computing. Almost without exception, I don't.

2. Irrelevant ads are all those who fill up your screen with offers you would never accept, products you would never buy, and sheer randomness. The click-throughs for all the non-targeted messages that surround and cram their way into your content have got to be pretty poor. That's why many studies have said an extremely small minority of users are the ones clicking on all those stupid ads. The rest of us have simply turned on ad blindness.

This isn't to say advertising is dead and ineffective. It's not. Great commercials and campaigns are memorable and can stop us in our tracks - be it Apple commercials that are dissected and analyzed fifty ways, or notices from your favorite band that their latest album has gone on sale. The issue is that most of the time, advertisers know very little about you, aside from the content of the page you are currently viewing, and even when demographic data is out there, it's either inaccessible, or only allowed to be used in aggregate.

For the most part, this aggregate data does not accurately reflect you as an individual. Facebook and other social profiles potentially have a wealth of data about you on their networks, but it is not yet being fully utilized at the ad level to bring targeted messages to you, and this has to change. What I am looking for, instead of more head-in-the-sand responses to information gathering is to work with advertisers and give them as much of a headstart in getting to know me as they possibly can. I want my social profiles to be leveraged everywhere, and I beg, plead for somebody to get personalization right when it comes to ads.

By opting out of ad tracking models, all we are guaranteeing is that advertisers will be randomly posting their offers in a hope that you're the one in a million customer they are looking for. But the true win becomes when they can deliver for you a personalized message at the right time in the right context for you as an individual. We should not be running from this type of innovation, but instead embracing it.

For almost two years now, I've been asking ad companies to leverage my social profiles online. I am tired of getting singles ads, or mortgage ads or used car ads or any type of ads that don't match me as an individual. I've complained about low-quality offensive ads on sites just out to make a buck, embraced Twitter advertisements, assuming relevancy, and did the reverse for the poor Facebook ad experience. So whether you're like CNN.com and want to make me the poster child for the seeming end of privacy or not, my stance on this has been consistent for some time. I would be more than eager to put more data into the system to make it a better system, including all the ads everywhere I go.

So instead of embracing these ad blockers and cookie strippers, let's find a way to make the quality of the ads more personal, more relevant, and simply better overall. Please.