Still No OS, But Google Takes Over My Desktop Anyway

The Google Mac team seemingly doesn't get to play with all the fun toys its Windows counterparts do. While the Windows team got to use Desktop long before we Mac users did, and thus far, holds a monopoly on the Chrome Web browser, it looks as if their hands weren't completely idle - as on Monday, they announced the release of a tool called Top Draw, which creates complex imagery and has the option to replace users' desktops. While an automatic background refresher isn't exactly innovative, as Apple has had this capability built into its system preferences for years, the new tool offers up compelling images that had me checking out my new desktop time and again.

Top Draw comes with integrated scripts with many preloaded image types, from Grid to Plasma to WavyGlow, for example.

The small viewer simply lets you select what Script type will run and how often it will refresh. For me, I have it running on randomly chosen scripts, every two minutes.

While not all the resulting images are postcard-perfect, a great deal of them surpass the bundled desktop patterns and pictures provided by Cupertino. A few examples are below:







It's one of those small products that piques the interest throughout the day. Also piquing the interest is wondering just what the Google Mac team is working on that would require this kind of engine, and if we'll soon get to see some serious Mac software and not just flashy toys that hearken back to decades-old screensavers.

This Financial Scenario Says There Are No Experts

The go-go days of the 1990s stock market, combined with the ease of online brokerages like eTrade, brought the world of Wall Street home for many people who previously saw it as a world outside their own, with high-priced brokers and a busy exchange floor. Along with the debut of CNBC, and the consumerization of financial news, including TheStreet.com and CBS Marketwatch, the potential world of day trading was brought home for millions. While the dotcom crash killed off many people's hopes at retiring rich from behind their computer monitors, most everyone has at least a passing understanding of the stock market, and many see themselves as experts - offering advice to any who will listen, even as we enter what looks like a scenario never seen before in our history, a time that will bring new challenges. Some "tried and true" solutions could work again in this trying time, and others will undoubtedly fail.

Today, after using the same methods I've used in the last seven years following the dotcom crash, I saw my personal portfolio take a hit of almost eight percent in one trading session. I've always typically invested in stocks where I feel I know the companies well, which typically sees me overweighted in the technology sector - Apple included. Of course, Apple took more than its fair share of the dive today, losing almost 20 percent of its value - which didn't help matters.

• To some, today's dive marks yet another milestone in a long, steep drop downward. The word "depression" is even being thrown around.
• To others, today's dive is a buying opportunity, giving you a chance to get stocks for cheap, down ten or twenty percent from where they were just a few short weeks ago.
• To some, buying stocks on the way down constitutes trying to "catch a falling knife", a move fraught with risk.
• To others, buying falling stocks allows them to "average down".

So now, we get advice from all sides. Buy stocks before Congress passes any version of the bailout bill, which is sure to raise stocks. Sell all your stocks and go to cash, as it's the only "safe" place. Get your cash out of the bank and into gold. You name a theory, and it's out there.

After being bitten by holding stocks long term around the beginning of the decade, I changed my methodology, holding stocks for days, or only weeks, tops. While others worried about taxes for short-term sales, I just tried to make a small portfolio larger. Often, this trading has worked, like it did when I bought AIG at $3.10 on September 16th and sold it for $4.84 on September 22nd, or when I bought Sirius Radio for 74 cents and sold it for 95 cents on those same dates. But, many other times, it hasn't, as the expected bump hasn't taken place. My bull-headedness typically sees me holding onto those losers for way too long, until those losses approach the accumulated gains from winning trades. So, despite my experience, I know I'm no expert. And the current market situation is unprecedented.

The fact that so many factors are coming into play at one time means that no single person has all the data. It's not clear who will be bailed out when, how much it will cost, how the presumed crisis will effect consumer or enterprise spending, and how it will change things in the short term or the long term. But it's not too uncommon for people to give advice without qualifications. You can see it when they say "buying on the way down will be profitable in the long run", or "get ready to buy, buy, buy" or that "smart investors (will) clean house and get ready for this amazing buying opportunity". I've seen every single one of these comments just on FriendFeed alone - which in theory wouldn't be where I'd head for investment advice.

The very tenets of what many of us have used to guide our buying and selling should always be in question. Even the concept of making a profit on every single trade is flawed, as it could make sense to sell one lot of shares at a loss to free up cash to make even more on another stock. And while I look at today's portfolio and see a bunch of red, it's not clear if tomorrow will be the beginning of a turn-around, or more of the same. With twins now, and my wife not working, at least this year, the idea would be to accumulate as much cash as I can, to prepare for tomorrow's expenses, but when I see an entire year's college tuition evaporate in a week, it's got me thinking I need to start making new approaches to guide my behavior in a time when nobody has the rule book. This could be a long learning process for all of us.

BackType Launches Widgets and Alerts to Extend Comments Tracker

At the end of August, BackType launched an interesting tool to track individuals' comments across the Web - no matter the commenting platform and no matter the blog, and letting you subscribe to other BackType users to see their comments, wherever they were. In the last few weeks, BackType launched alerts, letting you follow search terms, and today, they launched widgets which enable you to show the places you are commenting around the Web from a single place, most likely your own blog.

As the world of blogging is changing, tweets on Twitter and comments on blog posts are becoming nearly as important as dedicated posts themselves, and BackType has served as a way to find out what other blogs people you follow read and comment on, or to show who is more likely to launch a new story, yet not participate in the following discussion. The service also serves to show if bloggers tend to only participate in the comments on their own site, and not around the Web - something I myself have been guilty of in some weeks.


BackType's New Alerts and Widgets

Alerts

After logging in to BackType, go to http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to see how you can follow individual words or search terms, and have them deliver e-mail alerts each day, each week, or in real time. You can even choose to follow terms but keep them on your dashboard, without spawning an e-mail.

Widgets

Just about every service has widgets these days, and the new challenge as a blogger can be which ones to install at the expense of others. If you've got the real estate, BackType's new widget shows you comments you've made across the Web, with a favicon of the blog, and its recency - showing how fresh the comment is. Interestingly, clicking on the widget takes you to the actual comment within BackType, and from there, you can click through to the blog post in question.

In case that wasn't enough, Christopher Golda of BackType says more features are planned. BackType has been expanding their coverage through scouring more and more blogs, has been improving the service's search engine, and they're developing an API. Hot on the heels of Disqus' launch of their own public API. it should be interesting to see how innovation in the comments space is developing.

You can find me on BackType here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray

Five Creatively Obnoxious Things to Do With Social Media

We're all too familiar with trolls or people who spout nonsense to get a rise out of you. The art of trolling is one much-perfected by few, and typically, despised by all. But there are less "in your face" ways to have someone scratching their head, trying to figure you out. Some are undoubtedly amusing, and I've been tempted to do them myself, if I didn't unfortunately have an inner moral conscious crying out for me to stop. This list is by no means inclusive, but none would be all that difficult to pull off, if you're in an incendiary mood.

1. Respond to very old e-mail as if there were no issues.

We've heard many people espouse the idea of "in box zero", but for most of us, it's not realistic. I've got e-mails I never answered in my in box going back a good part of two years. Sometimes, I think it'd be fun to start at the top, and respond to the old e-mail, without apologizing for my lateness, and continue the conversation from where it left off. Imagine the hilarity!

2. Pick somebody random on Twitter who is fairly active. Follow them, and then block them immediately.

Most Twitter users will give a new "follow" at least a cursory glance, and many will reciprocally follow. They'll likely be scratching their heads when it turns out you've blocked them and it's impossible for them to follow you back.

3. Use Twitter or FriendFeed to shout out someone's name with no context.

I've seen this happen a few times, when people accidentally post a name instead of searching for it. (For example: here) If you saw somebody post your name to Twitter without any reason or follow-up, wouldn't it drive you a little nuts trying to figure out what they were thinking?

4. Put somebody on a custom FriendFeed list that contains profanity or an odd name.

Earlier this month, resident crank and good friend Steven Hodson of WinExtra noticed somebody had added his data to a custom feed called "curmudgeons". As you can set up any names you wish, and there are no known filters, you can let your imagination run wild with just what you can name the lists. Then put people you know obsess over their stats and click through like mad.

So far, I haven't thusly been abused. Some of the referrals I've seen have me in "gurus", "noisy", "personal", "thetechnologylife", "professional", "sm-bloggers", and "pay-attention". So far, so good, but there's no doubt this could change. I'm just trying to stay off Mark Hopkins' "irksome" list, myself. (See also: Hutch Carpenter: How to Mess with Bloggers’ Heads Using FriendFeed Lists)

5. Set up a custom e-mail account for Disqus with an auto-responder.

If you have a Disqus account, leave a comment on a blog, and get a reply, you should receive an e-mail notification saying the conversation has continued. If you create a new e-mail account just for this, say from OtherInBox, you could set up your e-mail to reply to all new messages, saying you're out of the office, or something akin to "I receive a lot of e-mail and will answer yours in the order it was received".

This response will itself be placed in the comment thread of said blog, and be the owner's responsibility to delete, or could even lead to them responding to your out of office and have it continue. Heck, if you make the auto-responder creative enough, they may think you actually typed it yourself!

These are of course just scratching the surface. What other annoyances have you seen, or done yourself, that can be pulled off without being too destructive in nature? Have you done any of the above, and will you start now?

Is Your iPhone Ready for Some Football?

For much of the United States, and increasingly, other countries, Sundays in the fall and winter months are dominated by one thing - football. And just because you happen to be of a geeky mentality doesn't mean you can't nurture your jock side through using your iPhone to get updated in near real-time to all the happenings in the NFL. One of my favorite free apps on the iTunes application store is "Pro Football Live", which provides score updates, play by play, current game situations, photos, news, and even the ability to talk back to other users through a feature called "Smack Talk".

Apple's most recent iPhone ads have highlighted the application store, and specifically, some of the games that have been developed for the nascent platform. But there's more to entertainment than video games and high scores.


You Can See Updated Scores from Around the League

With Pro Football Live, I don't need to go to ESPN.com or Yahoo! Sports to get all the scoring updates, and even if I'm away from the TV or radio, I can get the feeling of watching a game, by seeing the current game situation, including who has the ball, yard markers, downs and yardage.


You Can Talk Smack And Check Current Standings

And while I'm not getting streaming video, by using the Pro Football Live app, unlike TV, I have access to all the games at once, not just those being broadcast in my area. So if you're a fantasy football junkie, like me, you can toggle between today's Raiders/Chargers contest, and that of the Texans/Jaguars or Jets/Cardinals. You can, with a couple clicks of the phone, be on top of your game, and you can jump into "Smack Talk" to share your thoughts with other fans.


You Can View Recent Photos and News from the NFL

Pro Football Live also features "News" and "Photos" feeds from the leading sources, letting you get updated on which starters are expected to play or which players set personal records.

iPhone applications like Pro Football Live and MLB.com's At Bat have helped me be closer to all games when away from home, taking pro sports mobile. It's all part of how products like the iPhone can better reach across the digital divide and get into America's living rooms, or at least, entertain those who would rather be in their living rooms, instead of slogging along behind their significant other who won't let them watch the game.

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)

Disqus' API Launch Extends Commenting Possibilities

At Blog World Expo last week, I said that those services which "played well with others" would do better in a collaborative, cooperative Web 2.0 landscape over those that instead held tight to their walled gardens (See tweet from @drewolanoff.) It is through the launch of an API and extensive developer activity that services like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter have grown, often at the expense of those that didn't. Tonight, the popular Web commenting service Disqus joined the fray, launching a full public API.

The API (outlined here) lets services and tools write custom comment import and export tools, or to develop unique plug-ins for their platform. (see the announcement and coverage by The Inquisitr.)

Disqus comments are already among the most portable, enabling syndication through RSS, and into lifestreaming applications of all sorts. But what I found most interesting was the note on custom plugins for customer platforms. What's to stop developers from making a custom Disqus-enabled engine that is secure, and for the enterprise, essentially the comments equivalent of Yammer (versus Twitter)? What I see happening is that many of the social tools we may be using for community and entertainment in our world are now on the verge of making it to the enterprise. With an open development platform, and possibly, the idea to customize the comments engine for services that have enterprise capabilities, this could be one way to break on through to the other side, so to speak.

This week's big commenting news was Automattic buying up Intense Debate, something many thought would make Disqus' world a whole lot harder. Tonight's announcement shows they aren't sitting still and playing the part of victim. I'm eager to see the new services and tools that get developed as a result of being Disqus-powered.

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

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

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


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

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

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

Google at 10 - a Decade of Innovation - But Challenges Ahead

By Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Yesterday, Google posted a fascinating timeline of the past ten years.

For those of us that have been around since the days when Yahoo! dominated search (and Google wasn't 'here' yet), the timeline brings back a lot of memories, and also causes some pondering about the future.

Google's juice has always been their corporate culture. I've written about it before. A few weeks ago, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, commented that they try not to buy a lot of companies because it's easier to innovate from within, rather than to try and change the way a company does things. (Paraphrased).

Others are complaining about Google's stock price. A careful look at insider trading over two years showed many (current) employees cashing out in the 300's per share. Was 700+ in 2008 ever really in the cards? Did Wall Street expect a little too much?

Now we see Google literally firing on all cylinders. A new Web browser (Chrome), a significant upgrade to Picasa (and Picasaweb), and lots of other upgrades, APIs, additions and announcements made over the past two months.

There's little disputing the fact that Google (and the Internet) have literally created and/or eliminated exisiting business models (or significantly changed them). Not just Internet models but brick and mortar businesses as well. They've also created opportunity for those who continued to read, learn and took advantage of it.

Now, people don't Yahoo-it, or MSN-it (even though they do), the vernacular is Google-it ... and that alone is HUGE.

Interestingly, for you advertising buffs, Google has no tag line. There is no 'what we are' or 'what we do'. Obviously, someone recognized very early on, that the Internet (and the world) was changing so fast, it was difficult to predict exactly where Google's strengths would emerge. That continues to be the case.

I find I now have the same reaction to Google's success that I did to Microsoft's many years ago. Both serve as an example of how just a few people can create something BIG in just a few short years and set an example for those thinking about doing just that.

Like Microsoft, and many others, Google is a role model of sorts for entrepreneurs everywhere.

As they grow and mature, it will be difficult for Google to maintain their corporate culture, but not impossible. The perks of working at the Googleplex make complete and total sense. Help people forget about their mundane day-to-day worries so they can think, be creative, and work.

So …. Happy Birthday Google! One can only imagine (or better yet vision) what the next ten years will bring.

Read more by Charlie Anzman at SEO and Tech Daily.

Outbrain to Extend Blog Recommendations With Third Party Content

Outbrain is best known for its easy to install blog widget that allows readers to rate posts on a one to five star scale, from "Bad" to "Excellent". I've been running it myself the last few months, and have seen some consistent, if not overwhelming, activity on the widgets each day. Outbrain is looking to extend their service by adding stories they believe you may like in addition to the current post, both from the site you own and from third party sites who are fellow Outbrain users. The idea, in their mind, is to deliver a wider range of content to readers, no matter the source.


Outbrain recommends other posts you might like and lets you rate posts.
Today, those who install Outbrain's blog widget also see stories "You might like", but they are limited to the blog on which the widget is installed. The new extension will, in effect, act like the "Web rings" of old, by syndicating your content on similar sites and extending the potential audience. Outbrain also is a big fan of Scott Karp's recent article on Publishing 2.0, which showed that sites which have the highest reader loyalty also are heavy linkers outside their own blogs.

This change is expected to roll out in the next few weeks, Outbrain told publishers late Tuesday night.

While the most visible aspects of Outbrain are the stars on users' blogs, there is actually a good set of statistics being tracked on the back end today, including a record of all blog post ratings, including the score, the post and the rater's country, the ability to sort all posts by total number of ratings, average rating and total popularity score (tabulated by the number of votes and average rating), and how many page views you have gained from the Outbrain network at large.


The most recent ratings on Outbrain.

The most popular posts, by rating, on Outbrain.
Given I'm not a high-traffic destination site, I doubt I'm exactly lighting up the Outbrain leaderboard. Most of my posts get a couple votes, and the most popular posts have received from 12 to 15 votes apiece. This could be due to people's unfamiliarity with Outbrain, reluctance to use the widget, or my low visibility.


My most active post on Outbrain got 15 votes.
Tonight, I logged in to my Outbrain account, and turned on story recommendations, both from my own site, and from third party sites. Over time, we'll see if Outbrain can deliver customized, quality, suggested links, and if this will increase the reader experience. Keep me posted on your thoughts.

Identi.ca Users See Service as Choosing Cause Over Community

With Twitter having largely overcome its many issues that made it a long, hot summer for the leading microblogging service, traffic to smaller competitors has stalled, if not decreased, across the board, at Plurk, Rejaw and Identi.ca, which leverages the open source Laconi.ca microblogging software. But a hard core group of users clings to Identi.ca's mission as an open, developer-friendly alternative to Twitter, with many using both services in parallel. Yesterday, I asked the Identi.ca community to spell out why they were using the service. Some of their responses are below.

Candrews echoed many of those on Identi.ca around the frame of freedom, saying:

"I'm here for the Freedom. I want my data to be mine, to be able to leave when I chose, hack as I wish, and share all I want."

The issues of "freedom" and "openness" were cited much more than anything about community, which is what I would have expected to get if I polled Twitter.

Csarven wrote, similarly:

"Universality of the Web. For the collective good, information should be accessible to all."

John Metta wrote:

"Initially, I focused on Identi.ca because I've been an Open Source Software programmer for nearly 15 years. I appreciate the possibilities of an open, federated system- specifically when it comes to extending that system to work natively with other applications. For those applications to use Twitter, they would have to work around the closed nature of the system."

Jesse Stay, a frequent blogger here, and staunch Identi.ca supporter, wrote, "identi.ca is more of a cause than a community. We're all here to see that more open features are included in micro-service SW. OpenMicroblogging services like this are more about building a horizontal platform of meshed microblogs that all interoperate."

You can see that message echoed through the dozens of responses I received:

Metajack:

"I use #identica because I believe in the cause. Open trumps walled gardens every time."

danyork:

"I use Identi.ca mostly because I believe in the promise of a distributed, open source microblogging service and I want to see it."

hochmann:

"like others, I use #identica because it uses open technologies, and it's open like good net technology always is."

From what I could tell, most of the Identi.ca users hadn't flat-out abandoned Twitter, but instead, added Identica to their outlets. In fact, a good number of the responses I gained on Identi.ca also hit my replies tab in Twitter. This is due, in part, to Identica's enabling you to cross-post to Twitter from the site, but also due to the rise of products that let you post in multiple places at once, including Posty, which I use to hit Twitter and Identica in parallel myself.

As services start to cross-populate, more savvy users are even using Identica as a tool to reach people in a new way. Tibor Holoda of Slovakia wrote to say he planned to use it as his "native language (non-english) channel" that hooked into FriendFeed. As he wrote me, "It's easy for my english-speaking followers to just hide my identi.ca tweets and see everything else i'm posting," adding, "I'm trying to persuade and evangelize the use of microblogging in our country, as its not very common among folks in here yet (just a handful of geeks is using it as of now)."

Metta added, "In the long-term, as better bridges develop allowing more seamless cross-posting and aggregation, I really feel as though Identi.ca federation can excel, and am using the system as a fundamental building block to my next business endeavor's design both in anticipation and in support of that."

Twitter is winning the public microblogging battle because of its large installed base, and its built-up community that has largely forgiven them after months of trials. While the Identi.ca user community isn't the largest today, it is one that clearly believes in its underlying foundation of open source, friendliness with developers, and the hope that through open source and extensibility, that it can make inroads outside of the niche which is using it now, but possibly, be adopted in the enterprise. If you are a big fan of identi.ca, you can of course find me there, at http://identi.ca/louisgray.

iPhone Application Review: Mobile Fotos

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

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Author's Note: Louis and I share an interest in the iPhone / iPod Touch platform, and all the new applications being developed for it for release on the iTunes Store. Realizing this, I offered to write a series of 'mini-reviews' on applications I really like, and if applicable, their impact on the social media space. I'm going to start with Mobile Fotos, an application developed by Karl van Randow, a freelance New Zealand developer who has (according to his blog) been actively working on a 'web debugging proxy' called Charles.

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Mobile Fotos

Mobile Fotos, like several others in the iTunes store, specializes in connecting the iPhone and iPod Touch to Flickr, a popular photo-sharing web site. While I tried several others but I found Mobile Fotos to be the most feature-complete and easiest to use. The application costs $2.99, and there is no 'free version' available. However, I believe it is well worth this small price, considering its functionality.

Features

• Mobile Fotos Uses the Flickr API and supports authentication with the Flickr server.
• Flickr sets, groups, favorites, tags, contacts, photo search and explore by most recent and 'interestingness' are supported. Collections (groups of groups) and historical display are not supported.
• Uploading from the iPhone 'camera roll' archive and from a live picture are supported.
• Photos taken from within Mobile Fotos are also stored in the camera roll.
• Adding a title and description as well as adding a new photo to an existing set (or creating a new set) are supported at time of photo upload.
• Geotagging of photos after upload is supported, and controllable for each upload.
• With the 2.1 firmware update, uploading from the camera roll at full resolution (1200x1600) is supported.
• Easy-to-use interface follows a rigorous 'drill-down' methodology that, once learned, makes navigating through all the different browsing options very easy.
• Portrait and landscape modes.
• Searching for nearby photos using GPS is supported.

I should also mention some drawbacks I have encountered.

First, when browsing through photos at full size, the interface does not support 'sliding' a finger to navigate. You must click on a right or left arrow to move forward or back. Second, there is no batch upload feature. Photos can only be uploaded one at a time.

Usage

In practice, the one photo upload is not as much of a limitation as you might think. First, when you are out and about, you generally only need to take a photo, set a description and get it started. By the time you are ready to set up another shot, it is ready.

As for using the application as a mobile gateway to Flickr, the developer has gone to great pains to preserve the sort of free-form exploration that makes Flickr such fun to waste time in. You can search for a tag, for example, then bring up details on the photo, click on the photo's owner and then browse through their photostream, favorites or even their contact's photos. Each level you delve down is pushed on to a stack so that you can back up whenever you like.

Performance on both WiFi and 3G is very snappy. Uploading only takes a few seconds and pulling up photostreams and images is almost instant. If you use the app on the slower GSM network, be prepared to wait a while, especially for full-sized photo uploads.

Upshot

Mobile Fotos has become a valued tool for me when I only have my cell phone on-hand to take a picture and I want to get it on Flickr right away. Sure, there may be a few free apps will do this without geotagging. But, considering all the other features that are in this app, it is worth the three bucks.

Update: The latest version of Mobile Photos (version 1.3) adds support for 'swiping' through a photostream, as well as support for uploading from the full iPhone photo library. There also seems to be double the number of options that can be performed when viewing an image fullsize, and new even on a thumbnail, including assign to contact, open in Safari, email a link, and even Twitter support!

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

Is There a Long Tail to My iTunes Library? The Stats Tell All.

Having long ago passed the point where I could realistically listen to all my music on my iTunes library in a matter of days or weeks, I set up a number of smart playlists that help me to rediscover old music, sorted by the most recent time I played the song. (See: iTunes: Old Music Is New Again from March of 2006) By solely listening to this constantly re-generating playlist, I find myself avoiding repeated songs, and am constantly finding great music that's fallen by the wayside.

But as this playist has continued to expand, and I can't keep up, despite avoiding new purchases, for the most part, we now can further break down the list to see if there is a long tail to iTunes. Am I getting to every song, and what percentage of my songs have been listened to over specific time periods? Also, given I only have a finite amount of time, how many of the songs have been listened to only once?

Let's find out.

First: As of Midnight PDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008:
There are 5,773 items, representing 23.7 days and 35.42 GB.


My iTunes Library, Songs Sorted by Last Played
Of these nearly 6,000 songs, I've managed to get to over 1,000 of them in the last three months, and an additional 500 or so in the prior three months (with no overlaps). But that means more than 4,000 songs have not been touched in the last six months, representing more than two and a half weeks of solid music.

While I've tried to get to every song with some regularity, there's still almost a day's worth of music that hasn't been listened to in more than 10 months.


My iTunes Library, Songs Sorted by Play Count
Additionally, of the almost 6,000 songs in my iTunes library, about 1,000 songs have been listened to greater than 12 times each since iTunes started counting. This compares with about 3,200 songs that have been listened to between 5 and 12 times apiece, and more than 1,500 that have been listened to between 1 and 4 times.


Using a small utility called iTunes Timer, the accumulative play totals for the songs in my library suggest that I've listened to iTunes for more than 195 days and 2 hours. Surely, if I stay connected to the laptop or my iPhone with some good regularity, I can power through those songs I haven't heard in more than six months, or listen to those tracks that haven't gotten enough airplay. But realistically, I shouldn't be letting the statistics drive my listening habits. It's common for people to find their favorite songs and play them a whole lot more than those that don't quite strike their fancy. But with iTunes, and the power of Smart Playlists, I can actually dive in and find out. And to watch me try and catch up, check out my Last.fm page.

What do your iTunes stats show?

Social Median Takes Guesswork Out of Online Mentions With Replize

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

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


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


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

Just Wishing for Something to Go Mainstream Won't Make It So

After participating in two panels and seeing others in the three-day Blog World Expo this weekend, there were a number of repeating elements. First, Twitter has recovered from its near-fatal issues and is becoming a must-use tool for more attendees, who are using it for conversation and news discovery. Second, a concern that while we may be using services for microblogging, life streaming, videocasting and news aggregation, that we are the odd ones, and that the services we like are nowhere near the mainstream. But while I continued to hear this chorus of people saying Twitter was either not in the mainstream or just entering it, or declarations that FriendFeed and blog comment engines, like Disqus were not anywhere near the mainstream, I heard very few suggestions on how these products could cross the chasm. It's as if many thought you could, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, click our heels together three times, and find all to be well.

As I mentioned on Sunday afternoon's panel around distributed comments and fragmented conversations, we could very well have been having these same debates about whether other technologies would go mainstream just 10 or 15 years ago. Would AOL ever go mainstream? What about e-mail? Instant messaging? Texting by SMS? GPS? All of these are strong examples of products that may have seemed "out there" on the edge to many at first before becoming part of our every day lives. While Friendster didn't take the world by storm, MySpace did, with Facebook quick to follow. It's possible that the ubiquitous nature we see today with e-mail could be what we see with Twitter, or other similar services, in a few years.

There seems to be a general impatience among the early adopter and fast follower crowds to take the products we all like and use and expand their use to new groups. There's a desire to convert one's friends and colleagues to have the same kind of lust for gadgetry and Web applications as we have, and to adopt them with the same fervor. But we need to understand that with the vast majority of society, change is very hard. Adoption of the unknown is very hard, and it may take multiple incidents of exposure to have something that seems daunting seem comfortable, such that it's accepted and adopted.

On Friday, in my first panel, on micromedia, I was asked what it would take to "take Twitter mainstream", and I only half-jokingly said it would take a scandal involving a well-known celebrity which would lead to the service's exposure in a saturated media environment. Would the market that reads Perez Hilton, People and US Weekly discover Twitter or other similar services if somebody like Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake were using it? What if their tweets were splashed all over E! or Access Hollywood? I bet they would sign up.

In today's panel it was said that the theoretical gap between us "early adopters" and the mainstream isn't really all that much - we just choose to participate in different places. While some of us are Twittering, others are texting. While some of us are blogging, others are Facebooking. While some of us are sharing items and talking on FriendFeed, others are using forums on topics they follow. People have been using technology to form relationships and share news or conversations for years, but the tools to do so are ever-evolving.

I'd venture to say that it's no secret that not every technology we early adopters fall in love with will succeed in the way Google and MySpace have succeeded. But with exceptions made for company viability and competition, there's really no race or timetable to get services to cross the chasm from us on the edge to those later adopters. It takes time. It takes effort, and repeat viewings. Quick demos of products that would have us salivating may simply spark curiosity in those less likely to jump in with two feet.

On Friday, we discussed the dissemination of today's news was to tell 10 who tell 100 who tell 1,000. So it is with these services. If the 1,000 of us continue to tell this same 1,000 about the same items ad infinitum, we will never see growth and adoption outside our little world. The mainstream has proven they can grasp technology like e-mail and IM, texting and Web browsing. With time and ease of use, they can get these newer products as well, but it will take more than us just talking about it to get it done. We need to be patient, and act as guides when that time comes, rather than demanding change overnight and expecting someone else to do the work.

OpenMicroBlogger Shows Steady Growth in First Month

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

Last August, on Stay N' Alive, I wrote about a lesser-known open source microblogging tool called OpenMicroblogger. OpenMicroblogger has shown steady growth since my post, and I really think it could be a strong alternative to Laconi.ca in the terms of OpenSource, self-hosted Microblogging solutions.

The Stats

In just one month (August), in raw-traffic alone, it appears, according to Compete.com, that Laconi.ca has taken a sharp drop of almost 50% of their traffic (from near 30k visitors down to near 15k). At the same time, OpenMicroblogger.org, the location to download the OpenMicroblogger code, has seen a sharp increase, from near 0 visitors, to near 2,000 in just a month. While these numbers aren't huge, they show that OpenMicroblogger is quickly becoming a strong alternative, and justly so, to Laconi.ca. According to them, OpenMicroblogger has had near 1,000 downloads in just August alone, with little to no press or exposure.


Compete.com shows Laconi.ca's big drop in traffic month over month.
The working example of the OpenMicroblogger code-base, OpenMicroblogger.com (emphasis on the ".com"), has also shown impressive results in just the one month since launch. Identi.ca has seen an even sharper decline in traffic according to compete.com, losing near 53% of it's traffic, from over 140 thousand visitors down to just over 60 thousand visitors in just the last month. Twit Army, the Leo Laporte founded, laconi.ca-backed implementation, has remained quite steady, but saw a very slight increase since the last month. Leo's site went from near 40,000 to near 50,000 in the last month. Since it only recently started, that too is impressive, but it will be interesting to see if Leo can keep the momentum going. While not near the Identi.ca or Twit Army numbers (yet), OpenMicroblogger.com has gone from near 0 users to almost 2,500 users in just a month, and doesn't seem to be losing momentum - browing the public timeline shows steady, current, and regular use of the service. The recently announced Yammer, a closed, yet internal solution for organizations, has not published any statistics - I see these OpenSource alternatives as a serious competitor against the Laconi.ca and OpenMicroblogger code-base.

OpenMicroblogger as a Platform

The code for OpenMicroblogger is completely Open Source, and supports the OpenMicroblogging (OMB - Emphasis on the "ing") protocol, meaning the software can actually communicate with other OMB-supported software such as Laconi.ca (the software that powers the Twitter-competitor, Identi.ca). This basically means you can subscribe to anyone on an OMB-supported site such as Identi.ca or Twit Army (both Laconi.ca instances), while at the same time users from those sites can subscribe to you as a user of OpenMicroblogger - the horizontal structure of such a large network of "mini-microblogging networks" can be profound. Twitter does not support this, nor does FriendFeed, or even Facebook (but there's nothing stopping them).


Identi.ca similarly has dropped since its initial spike.
What's unique about OpenMicroblogger however is that it hits a mainstream audience of developers that would be implementing the software a little better than Laconi.ca. The code behind OpenMicroblogger understands much of the Wordpress API for plugins and themes, so many Wordpress developers can easily extend the software with little more knowledge than they already have about Wordpress development. In fact, OpenMicroblogger.com, the official working instance of the code runs on the Automattic-written Prologue theme with little to no enhancements.

OpenMicroblogger.com Working Instance

Brian Hendrickson, the developer behind OpenMicroblogger, as mentioned earlier has actually provided a working instance of the OpenMicroblogger code at OpenMicroblogger.com. As I mentioned, it shows continual, current usage, and even has some very interesting features that Identi.ca and even Twitter don't provide. Beyond simple Microblogging capabilities and OMB support, it appears you can also provide links, upload photos, and most impressive, provide tags with your posts. Each Tagged entry gets added in a list of posted tags on the right of OpenMicroblogger.com with the number of posts under that tag allowing you to see the most popular topics and categories of the time.

I have talked before about the power of having meta-tagging with Microblogging services such as Twitter or Identi.ca. Instead of poluting your existing 140 characters with hashtags, you should be able to post them via your client of choice alongside the message so they can easily be categorized. OpenMicroblogger.com actually seems to be the first service to provide this. The only additionaly thing they could add is ability to tag actual users within a post and it would hit what I was talking about exactly.

While still in its infancy having only been around for a month or two, it appears that OpenMicroblogger is becoming a serious contender in the OpenMicroblogging space. Having talked to their developer and knowing a bit about the future of OpenMicroblogger (which I will disclose later when some new features are launched), there is even much more to come. I'll look forward to trying to use the service, and look forward to other organizations trying to implement this innovative software.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

So, By "Overnight" You Mean Something Else Entirely?

It may seem trivial, but for me, the biggest disappointment of this year's Blog World Expo is that I didn't come fully prepared. Many of the peers I'm meeting for the first time are handing out fancy custom business cards with their blog URL, Twitter account, and other services, like LinkedIn or FriendFeed. Meanwhile, I'm left handing out my business cards from the office and having to explain the blog address or that my data can all be found online. And the blame squarely falls on my trusting an "overnight" prints service to do exactly what its name implied.

Early last week, knowing the event was coming, I made custom business cards from Moo.com, but quickly saw they weren't going to make it on time. So on the 17th, I went to OvernightPrints.com, and used a template I'd built several months ago. Their site said they would start printing as soon as 20 minutes after the order, and with overnight shipping, there'd be no doubt I'd have the cards by the 19th, when the show started, and when I had my first panel.

But... no. This is what "overnight" means to OvernightPrints.com.

September 17th: I make an order and get a confirmation.
September 18th: They print the business cards. (Allegedly)
September 19th: The cards ship from their headquarters.
September 20th: The cards arrive in Las Vegas.
September 21st: It's Sunday, so UPS is taking the day off.
September 22nd: The cards are expected to arrive.

That would be five days. Meanwhile, the Blog World Expo will have come and gone, ending today, and my cards will show up to the hotel, no doubt confusing the shipping and receiving department, as I'll be back in the Bay Area. And given the OvernightPrints.com cards are of lesser quality than those of Moo.com, I'll never need them, so they should just be destroyed. But it sure is frustrating.

You could argue that I should have been better prepared, and had them ready to go earlier, which is true, but I trusted what OvernightPrints.com said in that it would be "overnight" shipped on "next day air", and they would start almost immediately. Instead, I'm left talking around my cards that having nothing to do with the blog and my online presence. Silly, I know, but really annoying. If you're needing true overnight prints, I don't think I'd ever recommend this company.

Google Says Apple Owns the Letter "i", and Craigslist the "s"

Search engines work best when they have specific phrases to search for, or better yet, when they have parameters for when the Web page was posted. But if you get more abstract, going to single words or even letters, they typically don't know where to start in terms of finding what you want. Taking a look at Google's first answers for the letters of the Roman alphabet, it's interesting to see what the search index is guessing as the best answers. Google gives its own Gmail the letter "g", cedes Apple the letter "i", and Craigslist the "s", while kindly passing on the "Y" to Yahoo!, effectively dividing the alphabet as cleanly as the many nations who have laid claim to a slice of Antarctica.

For those not given to tech companies, the results weigh heavily with Wikipedia, as might be expected, with explanations of the letters, and periodic table elements. Also interesting, there are a pair of movies from IMDB that take the #1 spot, a pair of obscure scientific journals from the American Physical Society, and what looks like some great SEO by the Massachusetts Boston Transit Authority and Cirque du Soleil. The full list is below. All results were done with my own Google account signed out, so my Web history would not influence the rankings.

As of September 21, 2008:

a = Links in HTML documents from www.w3.org.
b = Physical Review B from aps.org.
c = C (programming language from wikipedia.org.
d = Physical Review D from aps.org.
e = E! Entertainment Online
f = Ford Motor Company Stock from Yahoo! Finance.
g = Gmail from Google.
h = Hydrogen from wikipedia.org.
i = Apple: iPod + iTunes from apple.com.
j = The Letter J from wikipedia.org.
k = The Letter K from wikipedia.org.
l = The LaTeX project from latex-project.org.
m = M (1931) from imdb.com.
n = Nitrogen from wikipedia.org.
o = Cirque du Soleil - O - Las Vegas from cirquedusoleil.com.
p = Phosphorus from wikipedia.org.
q = The Letter Q from wikipedia.org.
r = The R Project for Statistical Computing from r-project.org.
s = Craigslist.com.
t = Massachussetts Boston Transit Authority from mbta.com.
u = The Letter U from wikipedia.org.
v = V Magazine from vmagazine.com.
w = W. (2008) from imdb.com.
x = X.Org Wiki from x.org.
y = Yahoo.com.
z = The Letter Z from wikipedia.org.

In addition to these results, Google offers up stock quotes for Ford (F) and Qwest (Q) atop the other search results, and provides scientific details like the speed of lightfor "c", "e" as a mathematical constant and Planck's constant for "h".

While Google's search engine is ubiquitous, by some measure around 90% of all searching, it's clearly still got an extreme bent toward academia and science. Apple's capturing the letter "i" is a great feat of marketing, as is Yahoo!'s "y", but should Craigslist get the "s" and Gmail the "g"? Those are more curious.

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.

TweetBeep: Twitter Keyword Alerts to Your E-mail

On yesterday's micromedia panel here at the Blog World Expo, I said the way that companies can start using microblogging tools is to first be aware of them, and second to monitor them, before jumping in deep with both feet. The idea would be to understand the nature of the community, and to see how your business or industry is being perceived on the service before sending off tweet after tweet. As one of the best tools to follow your company's mentions online is to use Google's News Alerts or Google Blog Search and have them delivered by e-mail, TweetBeep intends to do the same thing - following terms you specify and sending them to your e-mail, either by the hour or by the day.

Using TweetBeep, as you would expect, is fairly simple. Sign up for an account with TweetBeep, and then add alerts, by hour or by day, register your e-mail address, and you will get notified by e-mail when your search terms come up.


Adding a new alert for #bwe (Blog World Expo)


My active TweetBeep alert list
You might be wondering why you would use TweetBeep instead of Twitter Search (formerly Summize), but relying on TweetBeep takes the manual intervention out of it. Instead of searching yourself, the alerts are automatically delivered. And for an enterprise corporate setting, e-mail is easily understood.


TweetBeep delivers results via e-mail
While TweetBeep isn't new, having launched back in May with Orli Yakuel on Go2Web20, there's no doubt this tool is being under-utilized, relative to other alert tools. So if you want to keep track of what's being said about you or your company in the Twitterverse, set up an account and get started. It just might be a tool you can use to get your boss to understand how the microblogging community is thinking about your product in real time.

Goosh: A Command-Line Google for Geeks

I bet there's a sliver of the population who thinks Google's already spartan interface is too bright and shiny, with too many colors. This group, who finds anything with a GUI as unnecessary and a waste of pixels, would prefer to run things in the Unix shell or DOS, and is repulsed by Web 2.0 flashiness. The good news is that there is an unofficial Google shell, called "Goosh", authored by Stefan Grothkopp, which behaves just like a Unix terminal, and returns results from the Google search engine.


Logging in to www.goosh.org...
Popular FriendFeeder Mona N has an extensive write-up on the new tool on her blog Pixel Bits: goosh.org: Google’s Un-official Unix Shell, so check that out.

As Mona points out, Goosh essentially puts the power of Google's search into your terminal, with the ability to make specific searches for blogs, feeds, video, wiki, images or the Web at large, just by using command terms, like you would in Unix. For example, you could search, via Goosh, for "apple" and return all results for the term apple via the Web, or search for "feeds louisgray" to see RSS feeds on the Web associated with my name.


Goosh.org results for Apple...


Goosh.org results for Feeds with my name...

All results are clickable, taking you to the desired page.

So if you thought Google was getting too mainstream, and using the once-exclusive search engine didn't give you enough geek cred, there is now a solution. Check out goosh.org, and enter "help" to get a list of commands. You can get your Google geek back. (Hat Tip: Mona on Pixel Bits)

Find Me at Blog World Expo This Weekend In Las Vegas

Even as the blog has gotten more visible through the last two years, I've largely stayed behind the scenes (or behind the monitor and keyboard). I haven't attended large industry events, or tried to make the story so much about me. I'd rather keep the highlights on the many services I enjoy and the people making the Web and technology better. But this weekend, the gravity pull from being requested to participate in two panels was too great, and you can now find me at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, from this afternoon through Sunday.

At the expo, I am participating on two panels, with esteemed peers, including Matt Dickman, Neil Vineberg, Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd, discussing changes in the blogosphere, and how microcommunities are impacting where we participate, share ideas, and communicate.

Panel One:
Micromedia: The Next Big, Small Thing:

Description: "This session shows marketers what the true power of services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Flickr and Facebook have on a micro level. Also known as "micro blogging", micromedia has exploded with the growth of mobile technology and lets us look into the future of platform-agnostic marketing. Don't be left behind."

Time: Friday, Sept. 19, 2008: 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM, 222

Panel Two:
Are Bloggers Losing Control? The New World of Distributed Conversations:

Description: "With content spanning across social networks, miro communities, and media aggregators, comments, conversations, and responses are taking place on and around the original blog post. This panel will explore distributed conversations, fragmented expertise, and also the challenge of being everywhere - and whether or not it's not only necessary, but also feasible."

Time: Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM, 229

Outside of these panels, my schedule is not 100 percent set by any means. I've already started to hear from many online friends who I will be seeing for the first time, and look forward to finding many more, through seeing presentations, walking the exhibits floor, and through getting abused by e-mail and cell phone. If you're going to be attending, it'd be great to see you at either of these panels, or any other time. Please do reach out by phone at 408 646-2759 or by e-mail at louisgray@mac.com.

My BlogWorld Expo bio can also be found here.

Seesmic to Release New Nokia Client, Sees New Video Every Minute

Yesterday evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur introduced the video conversation site as seeing significant growth and part of the real-time Web, utilizing video, for the first time, in an active way, rather than a passive way, as YouTube does. The result is a site that he says is used in more than 40 countries and sees a new video posted every minute, a number which has now reached more than half a million since May, from 30,000 different users. Also, he dropped hints to a new Seesmic client built for Nokia handsets that would enable full video conversations, including replies, to debut today.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Le Meur said Seesmic came to life due to a gap between today's text-based social software, including blogs and Facebook, and the more active nature of video. He said that while YouTube offers the ability to post comments and replies to videos, they don't happen all that often, and that through integration with tools like Disqus, Twitter and FriendFeed, Seesmic can power the video conversation.

As he told attendees, half of the service's traffic happens on the Seesmic Web site, and another half occurs through desktop clients, like Thwirl, which he acquired earlier this year. Seesmic is now also installed on 7,000 blogs, including this one, and TechCrunch, enabling visitors to leave video comments on stories, and embed the entire video thread.

Le Meur, who raised $12 million for Seesmic, said the actual costs of the site are relatively small, in the tens of thousands per month. Costs are largely kept low due to users' videos, on average being less than a minute, he said. But plans for revenue include a mix of advertising and pro accounts, which would have greater capability and customization. He also spoke highly of co-branded operations, citing a 20th Century Fox promotion that received 1,600 view replies, and said a new feature, called groups, would debut in coming weeks.

"We were very lucky that we raised $12 million, and we are very cautious," Le Meur said. "We can hold for years."

The goal of growing Seesmic isn't to flip the company and make a quick buck, Le Meur said yesterday, joking about his record of selling four different companies after saying that was a "bad goal to have". Instead, he wants to help power anytime communication by video from anywhere, getting as close to real life as possible, while continuing to learn from the user community as to what features should come next.

"I would like to pursue my vision of a worldwide talk show, where people talk together, no matter where they are, all on video," Le Meur said. "We are building something real different. We wouldn't have done video comments at the beginning, and now we are learning by the community. We have a very active community and get thousands of feature requests."

Le Meur, who has one of the most active, most-followed Twitter accounts in the world, said he saw the real-time nature of the service as incredibly compelling, and that the "instant Web" was changing everything. His goal would be to leverage the power of sites like Twitter and FriendFeed to reach more users and groups of users who find communities online, even if the video quality, so far, isn't the best ever - something that has surprisingly been a boom for online dating sites.

"The good news is that you actually look worse (on Seesmic) than you really are," he said, adding that Seesmic would be branching out to make even more people look worse than they really are, through the release of an updated Nokia client today, which will let Nokia users have a full conversation, including video replies, using only their handsets.

Bret Taylor on FriendFeed's Road to Monetization, Early Surprises

This evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor spoke about the popular aggregation and lifestreaming service's early months, explained what he and the team are trying to do through developing the site, and what we can expect from FriendFeed, as the company builds plans to monetize and further expand its growing user base. The panel, moderated by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, also saw participation by angel investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Leah Culver of Pownce, and Loic LeMeur of Seesmic.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Bret's presentation stated that FriendFeed, which currently supports 43 different Web services, and is now tracking greater than 100 million individual entries, is designed primarily to enable content discovery and social media consumption through a shared experience with friends and peers.

Growing Crazy Fast After a Slow Start

In front of an audience at the Stanford School of Business, Bret, in a quick presentation utilizing Apple's Keynote, recounted the team's reaction to the site's initial traffic spike following launch coverage in the New York Times and TechCrunch which evaporated in mere days. He said it took four months to return to the initial activity level, in between which the team went through varying stages of excitement, strategizing, realism and depression, while they openly questioned what they might have been doing wrong - having a history of successful product launches at Google. However, not too long later, traffic began to balloon in the beginning of 2008, reaching a hockey stick spike from March to June, during which the team's excitement turned to sheer panic, as they looked to scale their product and maintain speed and reliability amidst unprecedented demand.

Initial Development Missteps or Oversights

When FriendFeed added the ability to "like" items and make comments to a friend's feed, it opened up the opportunity for significant discussion among peers, and helped catapult the site from a simple aggregator to a destination site for many. But Bret admitted the team didn't anticipate the success these additions would have, and they didn't put as much development work into fleshing out those features.

As he said yesterday evening, "The discussion parts of our site have been almost the sole driver of our growth. It's been interesting to watch, and in retrospect, it was obvious. It was initially one of the underdeveloped parts of our site."

Also, while FriendFeed has been lauded for their highly-capable "hide" features, letting you block individual posts, posters, or services, there have been many requests for better ways to filter through the noise and find information that's most suited to your own likes and dislikes. But so far, the team is still playing catch-up. Bret added, "For the one year or so we have existed, we put less into relevancy and more into filtering tools. We are working on relevancy now. It's reflected in the different ways that people use a feed reader, as some see it as a new e-mail box and others ask to show the things that are interesting right now."

Handling Competition From All Sides

Swisher asked, as many do, if there are too many sites in the lifestreaming space, as there were too many calendaring sites in the Web 1.0 timeframe. She speculated that by the time the Web 2.0 shakeout occurs, that maybe three will survive and one, like Google with horizontal search, will end up with the lion's share.

Bret said that the lifestreaming space is a new category, and that it was "healthy" for many people to be working on "the content discovery problem". With the advent of syndication formats like RSS and social networking, he said subtle differences would be very important, and that on the Web, there is a history of natural fragmentation that enables niche sites to succeed. However, he did warn against sites adding so many features that they miss their core position. He said, "Every application grows until it has e-mail. Every Web site grows until it has all the features of a social network."

On Staying Independent

Every few weeks, somebody seemingly speculates that FriendFeed would make a great acquisition target for somebody, and the name that almost always comes up is Google, where the team's co-founders were last employed. But, as he and Paul Buchheit have consistently said, Bret again repeated the plan is not to sell the company, even if the road to business success isn't 100 percent clear.

"We're not interested in selling. We wanted to forge our own culture, to create a sustainable company," Bret said. "We have different perspectives on how to build a company of scale, and we want to build a company that scales."

Finding an Eventual, Sustainable, Business Model

Bret said the $5 million in seed funding FriendFeed raised this Spring was done anticipating the economic downturn, enabling the company to have a long runway before seeing the cash disappear. The team's hope, he said, was to find an advertising-based solution that delivers revenue without damaging the user experience. As he said, in response to questions from Kara Swisher, "there is a huge spectrum in the effectiveness of advertising," from ads that have high click-through rates, like those from Google AdWords, to the less-targeted AdSense, which delivers low conversion rates and "lots of accidental clicks." For FriendFeed, he speculated the site was "somewhere in the middle, but hopefully on the good end," where if links were mixed into the service that were sponsored, they would be done in line more with users' experience than image ads adorning the sides of the browser.

While Swisher coyly teased some of the panelists about their being "pre-revenue", Bret said one of the keys to launching a successful business model in the Web 2.0 atmosphere would be to not do so too early, and when they do, to do so in a way that is both quantifiable and analytical. "It makes no sense to try and monetize when you have only 2,000 users," Bret said. "It's too early and the early adopter audience does not reflect the behavior of mainstream users." He cited the early successes of Overture and Google AdWords as forging the quantifiable advertising market, but admitted they weren't yet sure how ads on FriendFeed would work. "We want to experiment enough to not run out of money before having to raise more, or we will have a sustainable business," he said.

What's Coming Next

Bret clearly hinted at a move to improve relevancy, and help users find signal in the noise. The team added "top" posts of the day not too long ago to help use the wisdom of crowds, and that feature could be improved. It's clear ads are coming, but maybe not immediately, as the company continues to try and scale in terms of users before worrying much about revenue. He also gave praise to the search engine that returns results just from your friends, but said it could be improved, as missing a result in FriendFeed would be much more impactful than a missing search result in Google. But he also spoke of "focus" and doing "one thing well", so it could be that those of us asking for messaging features aren't going to get our wish.

One thing you can expect FriendFeed not to do is to immediately give in to the demands from the early adopter tech geek set, who can at times be very demanding. While Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur said the "tech geeks and geek press would have you make products for the geeks," Kara Swisher helpfully added that group was pretty small to begin with. "It's 14 slightly-overweight white guys," she offered.

My Blog Is Less a Destination Site than a Conduit

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

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

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

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

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

Strands Upgrades to Highlight Friends' Updates, Content Sharing

Last month, I took a look at an early version of Strands, a social services aggregator and lifestreaming service, and said it was high on potential, but needed to make a number of changes, to better highlight its users' shared content, and encourage community, to bring it more in line with more established players, like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed. Today, the site rolled out a number of enhancements aimed to help bridge that gap.

First of all, over the last three weeks, the user base for Strands has grown significantly. For example, Drew Olanoff, the site's community manager, has seen the number of people he follows rise from 78 on August 23rd, to 193 today, an increase of almost 150%, following increased visibility. And the site's default "Strands" account shows 267 followers today, making it the most-followed account, though it's not clear what percentage of total users continue to follow it upon signing up. While that's not the tens of thousands said to use Twitter and FriendFeed, for example, it's a start, and the growth rate is good.



Also in August, I said Strands needed to better highlight the "Home" feed, which shows updates from those you follow. Today, they made this "strand", the center column, have a much higher level of visibility, making it the core of the site, as they should.


Additionally, in line with my suggestions, Strands cleaned up its interface by removing lightbox elements, and added a new "share something" box, to let you post content directly to the site.

Unlike the aforementioned Pulse and FriendFeed, Strands is much more music-centric than the other networks, thanks to its origins, which you can see on MyStrands. The result is that, at least for me, the flood of music updates from those I follow tends to drown out much of the other content there, much like Twitter did on FriendFeed prior to the introduction of the "Hide" function. This is especially true as user updates seem to come in chunks, for instance, saying that a friend may have listened to eight different tracks "less than a minute ago".


In contrast to FriendFeed's hide by service functionality, which works across the site, Strands handles the hiding of music updates on a user by user basis. You can click on any user's ID and uncheck the box that says "Include Just Played music posts." This is good, but means the task is repetitive if you've invested in following a good number of users. With this said, the service does offer the ability to browse a reduced feed, by a subset of who you follow, reduced categories, or by showing liked and commented items. Personally, I'd like the ability to click on "Events" and hide all Events or Books, for instance, so there is a little more work to be done.

While it hasn't yet gotten the buzz of some other social aggregators and lifestreaming projects, Strands is quietly going about making a product on par with the market leaders, letting the community find new content and people, and enabling micro-conversations. If you're interested in getting into Strands, and seeing their latest updates, you can find me here: http://www.strands.com/louisgray. If you're lacking an invite, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com, or leave your e-mail address in the comments so I can set you up.

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.

CodeWeavers Brings Chrome Experience to Mac OS X, Linux

While the Google Chrome browser team is hard at work making the browser run natively on non-Windows operating systems, the team at CodeWeavers has already delivered a port of Chromium, the open source browser project spun off from Google's efforts on Chrome, utilizing the WebKit engine, for both Mac OS X and Linux. Now, Mac and Linux aficionados can get the Chrome experience without having to boot up their emulation environments - giving them the same start page, top tab behavior and integrated "omnibar".

If you are a Mac or Linux user, you can find the CodeWeavers' CrossOver Chromium for Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva and Suse on the product's Web site here.

As with the Chrome install itself, it's a fairly light production. You just have to download the installation file, add the program to your applications folder, and open it like any other browser. The expanded file itself takes just over 130 megabytes of space, but loads very quickly and has no issues running alongside Safari.


Chromium, on Mac OS X, Tracks My Frequently-Visited Sites
The CrossOver Chromium is clearly a port, and not a native Mac OS X app, as the drop-down menus, shortcuts and fonts smack of a typical Windows application. But if you're dying to use Chrome instead of Safari or FireFox, you get all the functionality of Chrome today.


The Chromium Omnibar Suggests Sites Based on My Entry
In my quick testing of the port, it accurately tracked my most-visited sites, it automatically filled the "omnibar" with search results and suggested URLs, and retained the ability to make new tabs along the top, as well as tear them away to make their own windows - all features lauded in the initial Chrome release.

You can get the browser here: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/.

Google Grinds Out Gears for Safari

I'm still waiting for the day when every Web site and Web application behaves the same, intended, way on every Web browser and operating system. But despite it being more than 15 years since the launch of NCSA Mosaic, and 13 years since the introduction of Java, we're still not there. As a result, just like application developers often have to make the choice to code for Macintosh or Windows, we're seeing Web utilities make their way to Internet Explorer and Firefox before they get to Safari, despite the Mac's recent growth trajectory. Today, one of the laggards, Google Gears, released tools for the Safari browser, 16 months after debuting for other browsers.

At the time of Gears' launch in May of 2007, I frustratingly dismissed it as "Another Utility That Won't Work With Safari". Considering I've managed to go more than a year without Gears on Safari, to be honest, I almost forgot why I would want it in the first place. There's something about being a Mac/Safari user that makes us more hard-headed than the average Web consumer, and I'd already pretty much reached the point where I didn't remember what I could possibly be missing out on.

But with that said, today's announcement on the Google Mac Blog enables us to gain the full functionality of Gears-enabled sites, like Zoho, WordPress and Google Docs offline, in what's our preferred browser.


Google Reader: My First Google Gears/Safari-enabled App
With Google Gears installed, the first thing I've noticed is the new ability to take Google Reader offline. So, in the rare event that I'll be out of range of the Internet, but didn't get a chance to clear my Google Reader list first, I can take my favorite feeds with me. (See: Google Reader: Offline Reading)

Today's announcement also holds a hidden wrinkle - that the tool should be easily customized for any browser using WebKit. Without saying so, that certainly means Gears' integration in the Chrome browser is behind getting those of us using Safari will get some trickle-down help.

As Twitter Regains Footing, Competitors' Growth Stalls

Over the last few months, Twitter's challenges have been well documented, here and elsewhere. Between issues with uptime, occasional data loss, a reduced feature set, and a difficult relationship with its developer community, the microblogging service frustrated many users to the point they were seeking out alternatives - from Plurk, to Identi.ca, Rejaw and FriendFeed. But more recently, as the service has all but eliminated downtime, and put the "Fail Whale" on the Endangered Species list (See: Pingdom's Twitter analysis), it looks like competitive services are losing momentum, and some are bleeding visitors, if Web visit tracker statistics are to be believed.


Twitter.com's Growth Has Returned, According to Compete.com
According to Compete.com, Twitter saw more than 2.6 million visitors in the month of August, a 500% increase over its December 2007 number, representing a 17.7% increase month over month. The high level of growth since June for Twitter followed a two-month near plateau from April to June, when the service's struggles were at their peak.


Compete.com Shows Twitter's Competitors Have Stalled
In the same time period, from July to August:

• Identi.ca fell more than 58%, to 61 thousand visitors, down from more than 140 thousand the prior month.
• Plurk.com fell to less than 250 thousand visitors, down 7.5% month over month, and down 30 percent from the site's peak, in June.
• FriendFeed.com visits were flat from July to August, decreasing just under 1 percent, to more than 500 thousand visitors.

(All data from Compete.com)


Compete.com Velocity Shows Twitter Extending Its Lead
I can't claim I was an extremely "early" adopter of Twitter, and at times, I haven't been too fond of the service compared to other sites, but when it comes to status updates and "what you are doing", there really is only one game in town, one that's synonymous with the concept of microblogging - Twitter, thanks to it being first on the scene, first to amass a significant user base, and being tied in to other services, like Facebook and FriendFeed.. When Twitter had months of instability, outages, and a reduced feature set, its users didn't make the mass migration to other services that many had expected. And while they're still wrapping their arms around a business model, as services like Yammer claim to have gotten to the financial promised land first, Twitter has got the brand recognition and the massive user base that no other service can claim.

On Saturday, I wrote to Chris Baskind on FriendFeed, regarding Twitter.

"We have huge expectations and therefore, huge frustrations. The site has so much potential, and realistically, they have already won the microblogging battle, so we want them to be great!"

Twitter has the potential to be the conduit for the SMS and text messaging generation to social media. Twitter has already proven to be a great option for news updates, alerts to emergencies, and for using keywords to gauge the temperature of tens of thousands at once. And for anybody looking to the smaller services like Plurk, Rejaw, or Identi.ca, even if those services have incrementally better features or a stronger UI, they would have to expect a smaller user base, becoming an increasingly quiet echo chamber.

Barring disaster or bankruptcy, Twitter's leadership should continue. I've seen increasing examples of late where the site has become more mainstream. Those looking to alternative microblogging services may have had the time to hit at Twitter's weaknesses pass them by, as the site has nearly eliminated downtime, and started again on the growth curve, when others have stalled or seen user traffic decimated.

SiteMeter's Attempted Challenge to Google Analytics Falls Flat

SiteMeter, one of the most widely-used Web log statistics trackers, has seen itself fall well behind the long, dark, shadow of Google Analytics. And while I've been a happy SiteMeter user for almost three years, its statistical data has at times seemed fairly pedestrian compared to Google's advances, lacking the ability to segment the results by selected dates, to build advanced charts, or even to export the records to Excel or a comma separated value file. This weekend, after months of developing a new version of their product in beta, they finally took a leap forward to better compete, but the roll-out has, so far, been a big disappointment. In fact, on the same day they went live, they had to roll back the launch.

SiteMeter, to date, has featured a free version of its product, and a paid version, to premium subscribers, who, for $89 a year, get expanded insight into referral statistics, user behavior, and their Web browsing setup. Premium users get access to data covering the most recent 4,000 visitors, as well as aggregate data comparing the most recent month's traffic to that of prior months - as far back as you started using the service.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, shows you data from all visitors of your site ever tracked. And instead of being restricted to only one set of users (the last 4,000), you can show visit data from the last day, multiple days, or any date segment. The service also lets you carve up your visitors' history with multiple graph options.

SiteMeter must have been feeling the heat, because their newest version hit the major benefits of Google Analytics. It let you segment results from a date range. It let you export any graph's underlying data. And it definitely expanded the range of graphs available.


The New SiteMeter Tried to Pretty Up Its Visitor Graphs


User Visit Data In the New Site Meter: Basically Raw Code


The New SiteMeter Pulldown Menus: Form or Function?

But what SiteMeter didn't do with their new version was make the data look useful for humans. Instead of a friendly UI, its newest offering felt very raw, with unpolished typefaces, and gaps that showed not all the data was being tracked. It's the same type of feeling most Mac users get when entering Linux for the first time.

Meanwhile, old shortcuts that were familiar to existing users, like recent referrals, popular pages, and summary data, no longer worked, and clickable links were instead replaced with a series of pull-down menus. Essentially, form was chosen over function, and the form wasn't really all that good.


Coming Soon: A SiteMeter Scoreboard?
Should they get more comfortable with their new look and feel at any point in the near future, it's clear SiteMeter is also not only going after Google Analytics, but there was a new feature called "Sitemeter Scoreboard" that showed your site's ranking in terms of total visitors or page views, relative to the service's nearly 1 million installations. Maybe the idea is that we would start showing our SiteMeter ranking on our blogs as many do for Technorati or other services. But it looks like we're not going to know for a while. Today's botched roll-out is another black eye for a company that most recently gained headlines for blocking access to Web sites via Internet Explorer, and has had the occasional outage or two without company comment.

If this is the best SiteMeter had to offer against Google Analytics, Google's really in no trouble at all.

Having a Development Platform Doesn't Mean You Stop Competing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

It should be no surprise that being part of a site called TVbytheNumbers that I’m obsessed with statistics and this obsession extends to all the web site analytics and statistics that are available to us.

While I hear and read things often about how Feedburner’s stats stink and Google Analytics stats stink and none of them ever sync up well, that really hasn’t been my personal experience. Using either Feedburner or Google Analytics as an intraday tool is certainly problematic, and I have had a day or two here and there where Feedburner did lose data for an hour of five that it never recovered, but mostly both are just slow and do recover. Google Analytics typically tracks visits and visitors correctly intraday within reasonable timeframes, but lags behind in counting total pages for hours. Usually, by 8am Pacific time (but not often before then) all the page views for yesterday show up. And once they do, on a page view basis, Google Analytics, Feedburner and Quantcast all seem like they wind up syncing up within 2%-3%.

Given everything involved, I find the 2% difference very reasonable and it doesn’t bother us any. We wind up triangulating between Feedburner, Google Analytics and Quantcast and it’s less of a hassle than managing our Web logs.

Because of the problem cited above with Google Analytics being slow to capture all the page views, it does make intraday monitoring fairly worthless, aside from tracking visits and visitors. All the other stats – time on page, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. – are all wrong until all the page views are captured. But there’s little we’re doing that requires great analytics on an intraday basis. There are certainly times when it would come in handy, but even as it is, it works well enough intraday where we can at least figure out if we add something or move something around whether the desired result was achieved.

As a tool used after the fact, I find Google Analytics to be an extremely valuable tool, though I often don’t like what I see!

One thing we’ve thrown in the towel on is that referral traffic is almost always bad, no matter the source. There are some rare exceptions where linking produces good traffic (high time on site, number of pages per visit, etc), but that’s indeed rare. In fact, in almost every instance where a specific post is linked, the traffic is bad, with bounce rates often in excess of 80%. That’s whether Louis is linking to it, whether someone throws a link on Twitter, or even if Matt Drudge links to one of our stories. StumbleUpon and Digg show similar results.

Such traffic is great for jacking up visits and visitors, but bad for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. We’ve pretty much thrown our hands up in the air on that score and attributed it to web surfing behavior via links. As an aside, the stable link we have from Drudge to “TV Ratings” produces much better results, but if he links to specific story on our site and gives it any prominence on his site, the traffic has a very high bounce rate.

That seems largely out of our control, however there was still one stat that really bothered me. That was that if someone landed on our site via our home page, the bounce rates were still pretty high, approaching 50%. Better if someone came directly instead of via a referral, but still bothersome either way. Here's the landing page results for our site for August 1-31:

Recently, with that and a couple of other factors in mind – mainly wanting the ability to showcase more content on the home page – we redesigned the site. The bounce rate for traffic landing on our home page was around 47% for August. In the last week, post- redesign, that is now around 25%. The bounce rate for referral traffic to specific posts is still lousy, but again, we don’t feel like we can do much about that. Here are the landing page stats from September 6-12.

All of this has me wishing I’d gotten around to redesigning the site sooner. Who knows how much repeat traffic we may have lost as a result of design? I also feel silly because once upon a time I actually had responsibility for the web design/UI group at Charles Schwab. I recently had lunch with the VP who ran that group in my org and when I told her about the results she shook her head and laughed at me. My mentality had been this: our blog is a blog, pretty much like every other blog and designed pretty much like every other blog so spending a lot of energy on design tweaking didn’t seem like a worthwhile priority.

I definitely should’ve known better. I’m still not very happy about the bounce rates on referral traffic, but am quite happy about the reduction in bounce rates for people landing on our home page and would ascribe that improvement completely to redesigning.

By the way, for anyone interested, we went with the Live Wire theme from Woo Themes that we modified a little. So far I’d consider it the best $70 we ever spent. It’s not a perfect world, so the theme isn’t perfect, but setting the navigation structure (which we’ll certainly still need to tweak) and other modifications didn’t take much time. For $70 and time spent, cutting the bounce rate to our home page just about in half seems like time and money well spent.

Read more by Robert Seidman at TVByTheNumbers.com.

The Financial Markets' Downturn Hitting Home

When the raging bull markets of the late 90s and early part of this decade ended, they fell with a tremendous thud. With the Web 1.0 boom turning to bust, combined with heightened fears over terrorism and world instability, the idea that one's investments would forever increase was dashed almost overnight. In 2008, we have a situation that's arguably even worse. Housing prices and demand for homes has plummeted. Energy prices are sky high. Financial institutions, having made many bad bets, are declaring bankruptcy and getting government bailouts. And unfortunately, the only near-guaranteed part of trickle-down economics is that the individuals at the bottom always feel the pain - and few are immune, myself included.

I've been lucky enough to hold down the same job from before the first recession through today. I saw Silicon Valley freeways go from being a gridlocked mess to easy driving, and back to a mess again. I saw billboards go from being plastered with dotcom ads to being "Available", only to return with a wider variety of advertising. And I've seen personal investments go from guaranteed profits to nearly pulling it all into cash, and later, getting back in, but trying not to be too exposed.

This ebb and flow is reaching a low point again. The entrance into our complex of condos is littered with "For Sale" signs, and more than one has a note of "Reduced Price", signaling the owner's desperation to move out and move on. Popular area lunchtime restaurants that used to have long lines out the door can now be visited without too much concern for parking. And, yes, my stock portfolios are bleeding out, seemingly getting worse by the day.

I thought I learned from some big losses the last time around, to not be invested in companies I didn't feel I knew very well, and not to hold stocks for a long time. I've become much more of a "flipper" who holds stocks for days or weeks, looking for what could be momentum. And at times, this has worked great. I recently played TiVo stock for a few days, and made enough profit to buy a new fridge we needed. At times, I've played Apple stock around earnings, essentially keeping me in Cupertino gadgets for free. And earlier this year, I even invested in some of the energy stocks, making money on them as the price of gas continued to climb.


eTrade Shows the Q1 Losses Are Keeping Me in the Red
But, despite these wins, right now both my personal portfolio on eTrade and my 401k are pretty hosed. On my 401k, I've lost more than half the money I've added through donations this year. And on eTrade, I've accumulated enough losses in the stocks I'm holding now that the total deficit would essentially represent lost months of work.


The 401k Says My Rate of Return is In the Cellar
Now, we're not bankrupt. And we haven't made any big purchases of late (aside from that fridge). We don't have credit card debt, and we're paying our mortgage. So we're doing quite well, compared to others who have much greater problems.

But there seems to be an air of uncertainty and discontent that comes with having less money than you had just a few months ago, and knowing what you do have isn't going quite as far. It feels like people's fuses are shorter and they're more stressed. And at times like these, it's hard to think what's going to change things. Alternative fuels? A massive change of heart in the stock markets? Probably not. This just could mean we're in the beginning of needing to buckle down, hang on and be even more judicious about what we do with our money, before things get worse.

Google's Suggest And Search: Never Completely Private

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Recently, I have been thinking about a particular feature of Google Chrome. If you haven’t used Chrome or haven’t been following the news about it, it is a new Web browser from Google. The feature I've been mulling over is its almost-magical location bar. Google calls this the address bar, but it is also called the location bar or URL bar.

Apparently, a dedicated open-source Google project team called Chromium came up with this new address bar technology, and they call it the omnibox.

Omnibox

On its face, the omnibox is a great improvement over the more generic location bars of pretty much every other Web browser out there. It’s a URL input field combined with a Google (or user-defined) search engine front-end, and it throws in several other tricks to boot. In my opinion, the only thing that really comes close is Firefox 3’s optimistically-named awesome bar. This is different than the location bar in Firefox 3, which by default only looks through your bookmarks and history to find matching search results. Google actually uses its vast search database, using a technology called Google Suggest.

Google Suggest

However, it’s not just in Chrome. Firefox also employs Google Suggest in the search input field next to the address bar if your search is set to Google. You can also find it on Google’s classic home page (i.e. not iGoogle), and in Google’s mobile application and site (if javascript is supported). On the surface, Google Suggest is great. Just start typing whatever you are looking for, whether it be a Web site or keyword, and Suggest goes off and tries to predict what you are typing with increasing accuracy. This is especially useful on mobile devices where typing can potentially be annoying.

Privacy Concerns

The one big drawback of this technology is that your search terms are transmitted as you type them to Google’s server. They literally know everything you type, including half-finished search terms that you subsequently erase without submitting. And what if you accidentally had copied a lot of text into your cut-and-paste buffer and dropped that in the address bar? The whole buffer would be in Google’s hands immediately.You can see where this could lead to a potential problem. What if an executive of a giant company started to search for an insider-trading tip just prior to dumping a lot of stock? Could these partial search results be requested by subpoena in a resulting civil trial?

Google’s Promise

Earlier this month, Google did in fact consider this issue and updated what and how much they cache from Google Suggest. You can read the details from the official Google blog here. In summary, they promise:

• 98% of Google Suggest searches are not logged.
• 2% of these searches are logged with IP addresses.
• These 2% will have their logs will be ‘anonymized’ within 24 hours of search result, starting late this month or early next month.

Keep in mind that this promise is specifically for Google Suggest searches. If you actually submit your search query, Google’s standard privacy assurance goes into effect, which you can see explained very simply in this YouTube video. It seems reasonable to believe that Google is putting forth a good faith effort to protect your privacy while balancing the needs of their search business.

Another Dynamic to Consider

Google isn’t giving you the whole picture though. Sure, having a cutting edge search engine is what made them the first name in search. However, their business revenue comes from advertising, not search.How does this affect their high-wire balancing act? Well, it’s not completely clear. However, they didn’t become the first name in Web advertising by not involving search. In fact, search is key to the effectiveness of their advertising business.

The Google banner ads you see in your search result pages, and the Web pages with even more targeted advertising when you click on a link in that result page, this is how Google makes its money.You can safely assume that Google is always feeling pressure from their profit center to hand over as much information as possible on search results to help in making their advertising even more clairvoyant.

Traditionally, Google has been clever and has worked within the very simple dynamic of search terms, geographic locations, and statistical results in order to make this advertising highly targeted. However, their brain trust is gigantic. If you can think of something, anything they could possibly use to help their ad business, they probably are developing it in the lab, or are using it on their site. Local, national and international news at the time of the query. Related geographical searches. Platform search is performed on (Windows, Mac, mobile, etc.). Which query result is chosen. Time between search and click-through. Basically, everything.

Getting Back to Privacy

So how does this affect you? Well, the bottom line is, what you do on Google’s search engine will never be completely private. Like throwing a rock in a pond, the ripples are immediately noticeable and quickly die down, but the waves might not hit the opposite shore for a while. Tiny traces will always be left, and it is those traces Google uses to improve its search, and ultimately its search-based advertising.

The Bottom Line

You do have to make a decision if you want to participate in this giant information machine Google has built behind its sleek minimalist Web site. Some people think Google Suggest is going too far. Some may think that Google Chrome’s Incognito mode will keep them safely anonymous.The answer to both of these is: Not quite.

• Google Suggest does gather more statistical data (such as typing speed, number of corrections, etc) but anonymizes that information quickly.
• Incognito mode only works on the client side, that is to say, it keeps your audit trail off the books on your end. If you use Google to search for something with this mode turned on, they still get all the same info they would get if you weren’t using it.

The only real privacy solution, the only way to remain out of the grand Google experiment, is to not search online at all.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

The Tech Adopter's Lament

Forget Fast, I Want Instant. And I Want It Now.

My iPhone takes too long to back up.
My computer takes too long to reboot.
My applications take too long to load.
My FTP uploads take too long to transfer.
My blog host takes too long to post.
My folders take too long to open.
My e-mail takes too long to check.
My messages take too long to send.
My feeds take too long to hit Google Reader.
My Time Capsule takes too long to back up.
My updates take too long to hit FriendFeed.
My camera takes too long for iPhoto to recognize.
My downloads take too long to complete.
My Web sites take too long to refresh.
My URLs take too long to resolve.
My documents take too long to print.
My items take too long to display.
My videos take too long to buffer.
My comments take too long to be approved.
My services take too long to sync.

Time for an upgrade?

The Real Genius in iTunes 8? Apple Will Make More Money.

At times, it seems like the mainstream press hasn't yet figured out how to preview Apple events. That Apple periodically updates its iPods or iPhones or computers and software is really no surprise. The home runs are typically saved for MacWorld San Francisco, with big announcements sprinkled in at the company's WorldWide Developers' Conference (WWDC) and the occasional one-off event. But even when the company makes largely expected announcements, some go into severe hype in advance, and severe lows following. And like the illegal drug users who share the same spike and eventual crash, they're usually left looking for more. But behind the acid trip rainbow iPod Nanos and and upgraded iPod Touch, there was an element of real genius - as iTunes was upgraded with a new tool making it even easier to spend even more money on the popular online music store.


An iTunes Genius playlist, based on ATB's "Do You Love Me"

One of the major new features of iTunes 8 is called "Genius", which will leverage your own iTunes listening history, as well as that of other iTunes users, and try to create a playlist of songs similar to that which you are listening to. Like "Party Shuffle", it will get some mixes right, and some wrong, but it's following along the path of Pandora and Last.fm to use a crowd's information to provide recommendations and guess what other songs or artists you would like.

(See also: ReadWriteWeb: iTunes 8: The Genius in the Box and Mark Evans: Is Apple’s Genius Good or Evil?)

The breakthrough for Genius isn't so much that you can rediscover old music that you've neglected, although for some that is no doubt true. The real value is in the Genius sidebar, which is plastered with "Buy" buttons linking to the iTunes Music Store. In a time when so many Web services are hoping ad clicks will provide them with a way to the promised land, the simplicity of how Apple rolls out new services that enable a larger revenue stream is impressive.

For me, Apple iTunes long ago became my default source for new music. Even if I found a song on the radio or through Last.fm or another source, the first step is to head to iTunes to get it and download it. If iTunes doesn't have the song or album, it might as well no longer exist. I won't be heading to another service to find the song, but I may buy something else instead. That Apple has now made a mainline to my credit card every single time I fire up iTunes is a great way for me to continue making regular donations to my favorite for-profit Cupertino-based charity.

Of course, given I already have 4,342 songs totaling 18.3 days worth of music which hasn't been listened to in the last six months, according to my "Neglected" playlist, maybe I should be satisfied with what I have. Now that would be true genius.

i.TV Launching iPhone App for Local Movie, TV Listings

Apple Computer's Steve Jobs famously said, in 2004, that he felt "you watch television to turn your brain off" and use the computer "to turn your brain on". In the ensuing years, however, Apple has marched directly into your living room, with the Apple TV, and the company's digital devices are making the partnership between your computing side and your television-watching side better and stronger. A new iPhone application from i.TV debuts today, letting iPhone and iPod Touch users tap into the Web, and pull down local movie and TV listings, search by name, and see user-submitted reviews.

And interestingly, the application, though in its infancy, teases with options about scheduling shows for recording on your DVR, or even renting and buying selected media.


Click Images for Larger Size

Once you have downloaded the i.TV application to your iPhone or iPod Touch, its first query is to ask you your zipcode. Entering your zipcode references available TV service options for your area. When you've selected a TV service, such as Comcast, i.TV will take a few minutes to pull down your full channel listings and TV schedule.

From this point, you can browse channels by time, starting with the current time, and go forward and backward in time. Using Apple's touchscreen technology, you can select any TV show to see more detail, rate it from one to five stars, give a thumbs up, or see user reviews.


Click Images for Larger Size

You can also use i.TV's database to search TV listings. As you can see in the screenshots, I did quick searches for "Conan", looking for Conan O'Brien, and the term "Law &", to see how many Law & Order derivatives I could find. Obviously, quite a few.


Click Images for Larger Size

i.TV, which has offices in both Palo Alto and Park City, Utah, also offers the same level of detail for theater listings. Using the same zip code information I previously entered, I could browse local movie theaters, see which films were playing, and get a quick synopsis of the movie.


Click Images for Larger Size

But gathering data from i.TV is not a one-way passive operation. i.TV's developers promise the ability to send alerts to friends, write reviews and respond to reviews by other i.TV users, making a microcommunity around television and theater entertainment consumers who own iPhones or the iPod Touch. The i.TV application, added to the Apple iTunes Store today, can be found on their App Store, here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore. The company's Web site is here: www.i.tv.

Five Blogs to Take Back to School In September

Part Seven In a Monthly Series

Sometimes the best blogging is going on well away from the most visible places. Since March, I've taken the beginning of each month to showcase some bloggers that are writing some solid content in their corner of the blogosphere. They may not post as frequently as some of us do, and they certainly don't have the readership they deserve. Just maybe, with this little boost, it can give them the encouragement they need to keep going, and get more prolific.

Each of the bloggers highlighted in the last seven month has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July and August.

1) Matt Rhodes / Fresh Networks Blog (blog.freshnetworks.com)

Focus: Web 2.0, Online Communities
Recent Highlight: Social Networking for Spies
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Cyndy Aleo-Carreira / Shakespeare I Ain't (www.fourlittlebees.net)

Focus: Technology, Parenting, Journalism
Recent Highlight: On Being a Feminist Parent
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Andy DeSoto/ AndyDesoto.com (www.andydesoto.com)

Focus: Social Media, Technology
Recent Highlight: Blogging Is a Big Game
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Alex Payne / al3x.net (www.al3x.net)

Focus: Software Engineering, Software, Computing
Recent Highlight: al3x's Rules for Computing Happiness
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Elliott Hughes / elliotth’s Blog (elliotth.blogspot.com/)

Focus: Apple, Linux, Software Engineering
Recent Highlight: Desktop Linux Suckage: Introduction
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for October's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

Blogs' Never-Ending Battle of Page Views vs. Conversation

In a perfect blogging world, the very best writers with the very best content would get the most visitors, page views and subscribers. Every visitor would leave comments, send the links to friends, click through ads, and engage in thoughtful dialog with the author. And authors would be more than happy to pass along credit to other blogs for finding stories early, link to lesser-known voices, and admit when they got things wrong. But, alas, this theoretical utopia doesn't exist, and as a result, there's always a gap between what authors expect from readers and vice versa. And this gap can at times send even the best among us muttering to ourselves or launching into screeds when wronged.

The truth is, if you ask just about any blogger who has been active for a while, they could tell you some of their best posts withered into the dustbin of history, while a quick post that took no thought grabbed completely unexpected attention.

A couple examples on either side were visible this weekend:

On the up side: Adam Ostrow of Mashable posted to Twitter:

"looks like I posted one of my most successful (in terms of traffic ... thanks digg) posts ever on 2 hrs of sleep from Vegas hotel room."

On the down side: Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb also posted to Twitter:

"omg pageviews are SO low on both of the posts I've put up today. dreadful. must write a big one next. i try to do 1 fabulous thing each day"

Adam and Marshall are among the most visible authors to post to their very popular blogs. ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are professional blogs with a staff of reporters, that rely on ad revenue to make money - making the battle for page views much more important for them than for those of us who look at blogging as a hobby, or at least, not the prime source of income.

Whether they receive a small handful of visits, or thousands per day, it's a rare blogger who doesn't look at their statistics, or at least at broad trends that tell which posts were the most popular, and whether visits are trending up and down. For the better part of the last year, I even took to posting my statistics at the beginning of each month, only recently having chosen not to as some people misinterpreted my goals as being promotional, as the numbers increased over time.

But statistics aren't why I blog. (See: Why Do I Blog? An Introspective Look and What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations for more about that.) For me, I like engaging in conversations about technology, trends, and business, and providing commentary, while learning from smart folks around the Web. That's why it's less important to me whether comments take place here or on Friendfeed and other aggregation services, and that's why you don't typically see me begging for Digg votes.

In fact, the only time I ever made the Digg front page, back in April 2007, was when I noted that Google's Earth Day logo was an homage to global warming. It was a post that took maybe 15 minutes, and got a lot more attention than I ever had anticipated. Since then, the closest I ever got to the Digg front page was when in July, I announced the introduction of TweetDeck. It actually reached the precarious top position of "Upcoming" before dying on the vine.

Knowing one's statistics and caring about writing articles that find an audience aren't bad things at all. Seeing which articles are most-widely read, and which topics spur engagement are often key ways to let your readers guide what you should be covering. But when page views drive ad dollars, and income, the entire foundation of why people blog changes - as blogging moves away from conversations and more toward revenue creation.

Following Marshall's comments on Friday, there was a short discussion on FriendFeed that covered the push-pull of conversations versus page views. After I asked if it was "really about pageviews or about getting a good story and discussion", Marshall answered, "it is about good stories and discussion generally - but pageviews are also important. I do this for a living..." which had Svetlana Gladkova of Profy hoping for a long thread on "blogging for a living vs. blogging for passion", which she saw as core to the debate. The debate wasn't settled.

If all ads on all blogs disappeared tomorrow, cutting off the revenue air supply to professional bloggers, it would be interesting to see how many of them would keep going in their spare time. How many of them would change what they cover, or change the way they write headlines, or link to other peers, once money was removed from the equation, assuming they kept writing? Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, in a Monday article, quoted Gabe Rivera of Techmeme as saying that in today's competitive landscape where page views are king, that sites like "Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don't--they only link if they have to." Linking is part of the conversation, something we talked about at some length this time last year, when I said Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control.

It seems the only way to take page views out of the equation, and reduce the number of Shouts I get from Digg on a daily basis from authors trying to promote their own blogs' articles, would be to find ways to compensate writers that are not linked to advertising. But trends seem to be going in the opposite direction. Gawker Media has famously offered to pay reporters by the page view, a practice that came under fire from many corners of the Web, but continues, even as those who question the landscape are some of its biggest practitioners. In fact, back in 2006, ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, in an article called Page Views 2.0, wrote, "It's funny that this page views model is at its foundation almost identical to the Dot Com days (bubble 1.0). Drive as many users to your site as humanly possible."

We all know how the Dot Com days and bubble 1.0 ended. We've already debated whether ads and blogs are a good mix. But the idea that conversations and commentary can trump the importance of the almighty page view looks to be losing out. It's no wonder that blogs looking to keep their costs low in a time when users are clicking on ads a lot less than they had hoped are often hiring inexperienced, inexpensive, young journalists looking to take a bite out of old media.

I know I couldn't quit my day job and try to make money from blogging, and I wouldn't want to be a slave to the page view. But for those who lay awake at night designing Google AdWords copy and trying to think of the next big headline that will take Reddit, Digg and Yahoo! Buzz by storm, sending a swarm of readers that send page views through the roof, I wonder if they miss the simpler time when they could write more for themselves and engage with their readers to share a story and ideas, before feeling pushed to get their next article out the door in an assembly line of online copy or finding themselves redesigning the site to optimize for page views and increased ad displays. That's worth having a conversation about.

DISCLOSURE: In addition to his work at Mashable, Adam Ostrow is also the CEO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

Increased Activity Streams Boost Social Median's Chances

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

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

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

See Also:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

With FriendFeed Lists, I Start to Organize the Noise

When FriendFeed rolled out their new proposed interface in beta, I didn't rapidly adapt to using their most-visible new feature, lists. The list feature lets you essentially group friends you're following into smaller groups, with common examples being "Favorites", "Family", "Business", etc. The lists feature also allows you to remove people from your home feed, or all feeds, reducing their impact on your browsing experience, and should you be of the nefarious kind, letting you "fake follow" someone, so their feelings are satiated, even though you have no interest in seeing their data.

Since I started using the service almost a year ago, I've been one of the more visible proponents of absorbing the noise, and giving every other user equal footing. But as I took on more people I found interesting, I was losing touch with the original users I followed, missing key conversations, and a lot of the most-active subject matter was trending away from what I typically like to discuss.

This week, I realized I needed to do something about it, and lists is a great tool to start. Using lists correctly will let me follow even more people, and not lose track of those users or conversation where I want to be engaged. So, over the last two days, I've been spending as much time organizing people into lists as I have enjoying the content that's been flowing through FriendFeed. (See the example on the left for how I could organize Drew Olanoff's content in multiple lists.)


A list made just for the FriendFeed employees
At work and at home, I file all my e-mail. For example, I have top level folders for "Personal", "Family", "Commerce", and "Blog", and thinking of people on FriendFeed the same way isn't that much of a stretch.

So the game plan, essentially, was to:

1) Take every single person out of my home feed. Everybody.
(Think of this as the equivalent of "In Box Zero")
2) Put popular, brand-name users into a list called "A-List"
3) Put those of us on the next rung into a list called "B-List"
4) Make separate, specific lists for the FriendFeed team, and Guest Bloggers on this site.
5) Make a list of "Real World Friends".
6) Make a list of "Techies" who I engage with, whose work I respect, or whose tools I review here.
7) Put every other person not in 2-6 on something that for now, I'm calling the "Back Page".

Taking the A-List out of the main feed may let others breathe
The idea is that once I put 95% of those I follow on the "Back Page", I can selectively walk through that list, which has replaced my home feed, and pull people to a new list called "Front Page", which will include must-follow people I've met on the service over the last year.

With this in place, I now need to go the "A-List" feed to read everything from Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, Steve Rubel, Michael Arrington and others, whose feeds are often very active, and don't have them interspersed with folks who have less awareness, and usually, less interaction, essentially separating the lions from the lambs.

It also sets me up with multiple smaller feeds that are easier to consume. I also expect to set up more-specific lists, such as one for ReadBurner, for the team there, as I did for the FriendFeed employees. As I continue to update these lists, and move people from the "Back Page" to the "Front Page", I won't just have one massive FriendFeed, but many smaller ones with specific flavors and interests. And most importantly, now, with lists, I can be sure not to miss anything from Mona. Seriously, go check her feed out.

This move may be controversial, especially if people don't like the idea of being on the "Back Page", or start to see the "Back Page" list in their referral logs, but it will help me to feel like I can start adding people again, where before I was slowing down, and it might soon be as second nature as filing my e-mail as it comes in. One thing I won't be doing is hiding people entirely and doing a "fake follow".

I'm not the only one turning to FriendFeed's beta lists for help. See Mark Hopkins' approach here: Beta FriendFeed to the Rescue? If you're using the new FriendFeed, how are you using lists?

The iPhone App Store Should Let You Try Before You Buy

With only a few exceptions, it's been universally accepted that Apple's move to sell iPhone applications on its iTunes store is an unqualified success. In fact, it's widely believed that Microsoft will soon follow suit, offering a centralized place to acquire and download applications for Windows Mobile. But in speaking with other iPhone users, I've heard concerns voiced that there is no way to use an application on a trial basis. We know Apple has the capability to use DRM to limit the amount of time a customer can rent a movie, so why not use the same technology to let users try apps for days or weeks?

Software developers outside the world of the iPhone have a number of ways to try and gain compensation for their work. Some give it away via freeware. Others use what's called donationware, which essentially means the product is free, but they provide a way for you to donate money, should you want to. Even more popular is shareware, which has a listed price, but lets you download it for free, and pay later, often limited to a number of users, or through repeat annoyances that make you want to upgrade. And, of course, you have software that's only available at full price, or in retail packages.

But so far, Apple's iPhone App Store only offers two options - free, and paid. And if you've paid for a premium application, and it turns out you don't like it, tough luck.

Practically the only way an application developer can offer users a way to "try before they buy" is to offer a free "lite" version on the iTunes App Store in addition to a premium version. Customers who want the additional features of the paid application would try the lite version and then buy a second, parallel, application, and need to delete the old.

This inflexibility is unnecessary given Apple's experience with setting DRM to give users a limit to how many times they can burn playlists to CDs and how long they have to watch movies rented from iTunes. Given that a text description and small pictures displayed on the iTunes store isn't always a great representation of the user's experience with the software app, it makes sense for the company to work with developers to offer time or use-based limits to software, which would first be free and later prompt to be paid for. The ability to try applications before buying them wold reduce consumers' concerns and still offer developers a way to make a return on their investment. DRM doesn't always have to be bad - it can help both users and content creators.

Get the Google Chrome Comic Book, Support Two Great Charities

Earlier this week, Google launched their new Web browser, Chrome, in a unique way - explaining what's a very technical product in the most user friendly way they could, by using a comic book. While the Web version of this book has been linked to time and again, print copies of the book are very rare, distributed to those who Google determined were top press targets, both online and off. The Inquisitr's Duncan Riley received one, and rather than put the book on his mantle, he's auctioning off the potential collectors' item for charity, in what has to be seen as a win/win scenario.

You can bid on auction yourself via eBay, and Riley has offered the full proceeds to be split between Beth Kanter and Beyond Blue.


A frame from the Chrome comic
More details can be found on Riley's post on the subject, but he has said he'd be delighted if the two charities could split proceeds greater than $1,000. It's an interesting opportunity to get your hands on a piece of Web history and provide aid to those who need it. And if you're not interested enough to bid up the auction, maybe my own initial bid will stand up. You see... I'm not big enough for Google to have sent me one, so I'm headed to eBay for Duncan's copy. See if you can outbid me here: http://bit.ly/ebaychrome.

The iPhone's Missing Link: User Profiles

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

The iPhone has quickly become one of the most popular and sophisticated devices on Earth. With a very unique and natural interface, quality camera, GPS, tilt controls, and a full developers API and App marketplace, it's no wonder it's quickly approaching to be one of the most widely used phone platforms on the planet. With 3.3 billion people having a cell phone subscription, and cell phone coverage to cover over 90% of the earth by 2010, there's no arguing that we are approaching one of the most powerful platforms known to man.

The Need for a User Profile

I mentioned back in July that Facebook is missing some serious features to make it a serious platform itself, including privacy controls. It's clear that the iPhone has the potential to actually form one of the world's largest Social Networks, with GPS support, a contacts list (which are your real life friends), and applications that can access that data and communicate back and forth. With such a network monetization potential goes through the roof! However, there is one thing missing that I think would complete the mix - profiles.

Turning Customers Into People

Right now, Apple and AT&T know you have a phone. They know your name from your billing information and where you are from GPS information they gather as you talk on your phone. However, that's about all they know - to them, your phone is a phone, and you're just another customer.

What would turn each of their customers into actual people would be to build actual profiles, on the phone, for each person that owns the phone. This could be done either locally on the phone, or perhaps via account settings at either AT&T or Apple that sync with the phone. They could collect such information such as gender, marital status, religion, interests, favorite media, favorite books, education, work, and other information about you to identify who you actually are, in addition to your location. This information would follow the phone and be made available (with Privacy controls, of course) via an API, and then, any service that would like this information about the user could retrieve this information and bring actual people into their services.

The iPhone Could Prove Identity

Imagine the identity implications here. The iPhone follows you, where you go. In essence, it in many ways is a part of you, and your identity. What if Apple were to require identification to authenticate you as a real person, then store that information, encrypted, to share with others to prove who you are. I imagine some better authentication and security would be needed on the iPhone to keep this safe. However, with such identity possibilities, we could very well see our paper licenses and passports and identification be a thing of the past!

As a disclaimer, I've just started serving as the Chief Community Officer for a startup writing a new iPhone Entertainment application (we have a launch coming soon!), but I can tell you, if the iPhone were to already collect this information from the user for us, we'd have quite a useful app on our hands! Having a real identity to associate with each user, where they are at any moment is very powerful. Relationships are important, but before relationship can happen, each part of that relationship must have identity. That's why the iPhone needs to have a Profile.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Social Median Revamps and Introduces "News Streaming"

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner.

What Google Chrome Gets Right

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

There has already been a lot of coverage of Google’s new browser, Chrome, including on this site (See Here and Here). But I think that it is premature to judge and execute this new product so early in its life cycle, I think time will tell if it becomes a strong contender against Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Therefore, I am not going to dwell on some of Chrome’s more publicized shortcomings. I will instead highlight a few features that Chrome gets right.

Learn About Chrome

Let me begin by pointing out that, true to Google’s “less is better” ethic, their download page is structured simply, with the download link prominent. The only other link, if you feel hesitant about diving in head-first, leads you to more information about the product.

Personally, I like this philosophy behind product presentation. None of the links are redundant, and the path to learning more about the product feels natural. Also, kudos should be given for the Chrome team embracing another new Google product, YouTube, in their presentation of the browser’s features.

First Effort

I think we need to remember that Chrome is Google’s first effort at a browser. Sure, they leveraged the maturity of the WebKit browser engine to give the browsing experience a solid, useful core. But in terms of development time, Chrome is competing against products that have been through at least one major revision, and in the case of IE, seven.

The advantage here is that they could really pick and choose the aims and feature set for their browser. The disadvantage, of course, is that they have to enter the playing field at a really high level, and the feature set they implement has to feel really mature. Even Firefox didn’t have to live up to that sort of scrutiny, since it was snapped up by the Mozilla team and its ‘grassroots’ status gave it a lot of protection as the rough edges were filed away.

Features Worth Noting

When I installed Chrome, the first thing I did is go to the help link. I have to admit that I had seen a mention of a “tab browser” that I wanted to learn how to activate. However, once I was there I really got distracted learning about the other features. I’d like to highlight a few that I think really stand out and are a clear response to what Google believes people would like to have natively in a browser.

Stealth Mode

The first unique feature that caught my eye was something Chrome calls incognito. If you have ever used a ‘mobile’ version of Firefox or Opera, you will get this mode. Basically, when you open an incognito tab, Chrome will not permanently record any of your browsing activity or cookies that are created in that tab. Once the tab is closed, all the cookies and history cached in memory goes away without a trace on your hard drive.

I have long thought that this is a feature that should be a native part of a browser for a while now. Whether I am surfing for a gift (as the Google documentation suggests) or … ahem … other things, I will definitely find this mode useful.

Much has been written about Google only respecting privacy when it benefits them. But this feature proves that they are in fact thinking about our local privacy when using a web browser. And with the rise of browser-based applications in the past year, I think this will become even more important.

Sandbox and Memory Management

One of the features that the Chrome team has taken pains to highlight is the products ability to partition off the memory usage of separate tabs and windows. While not a really flashy or obvious feature, I believe this is a critically important one, again especially as we move more into the browser-as-an-application space.

How many times have you clicked on a link from your email tab or from a browsing session and the flash or java app on the destination page made your entire browser crash? This has happened to me quite a few times, and I know for some people, this sort of situation is a regular occurrence.

With the built-in partitioning Chrome brings to the table, in theory, we may still have issues with certain pages behaving badly, but now this does not necessarily mean all your built-up context in other tabs and windows has to go away. Now, you can simply kill off the misbehaving page and go on with your life.

Management of this feature is through the use of Chrome’s built in task manager, which looks very similar to Windows’ task manager and will give you memory and network bandwidth of all your sessions at-a-glance. You have the ability to kill any tab or window off at any time.

Even cooler, there is a “stats for nerds” link that takes you to about:memory, a browser-generated page that gives you detailed information about the memory usage in each tab or window. This is a great insight into which pages take up the most memory, as well as Chrome’s total memory usage.

Speed

The last detail I would like to note for now is Chrome’s speed. Again, this is not a very flashy feature, as it is something that can only really be experienced through using the product for a while. But this is something that Google designers have been focusing on from the beginning. Chrome opens quickly, tab management is fast and pages render lightning-quick.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. All freshly-installed browsers behave well and move quickly. However, over time they tend to either slow down, or eat up more and more memory. We’ll see if Chrome lives up to its promise of delivering a consistently speedy and nimble browsing experience.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

Toluu Takes On Tagging to Further Feed Finding

Toluu, the popular feed discovery engine and OPML sharing site, is making steps toward enhancing categorization and feed discovery with an update this morning, adding tags to feeds, and helping users find similar feeds by learning what other feeds carry the same tags, or seeing what tags other users' feeds share most frequently.

I spoke with Toluu developer Caleb Elston yesterday evening, and he told me "tagging has been the most requested feature" since Toluu launched back in March. By adding tagging to the vast majority of feeds, and letting users add new tags to feeds, he hopes this will improve users' ability to discover new content. So far, he told me, more than 35,000 tags have been added, even before it's reached the hands of the service's user base.


Beginning today, every feed in Toluu will feature a "tag tab", which will show existing tags for that feed, or let users add new ones. Smartly, the service remembers tags you have made in the past, and those will auto-populate, much like the behavior on Del.icio.us.


Also starting today, you can view any other Toluu user's list of tags most frequently subscribed to, in addition to their entire feed list, with a feature called "Profile Top Tags". Now, I can see if you commonly read up on Apple and Google, like startups or social media, and can traverse your tag cloud to see which feeds match those tags.


As the tagging engine hasn't hit the public market, it's clear there is more work to be done. Toluu leverages the categorization users place feeds in during OPML import, and while Caleb said Toluu scrubs for odd tags, I've seen a number of feeds with tags that look like they are the result of a single individual.

So far, Toluu hasn't made too many efforts to become a destination site. Instead, it's a utility that helps you find better RSS feeds, and learn what your friends are reading. But with the addition of tags, users may just be sticking around a little bit longer to fill out their RSS subscription to do list. If you still don't have a Toluu invite, which is nuts, you just need to ask me for one by leaving your e-mail address in the comments, or sending me a note to louisgray@mac.com. You can find my account here: http://www.toluu.com/louisgray/

Ben Golub of FFToGo and RSSMeme Joins FriendFeed Full-Time

In the world of online companies and overnight Web sites, things can move pretty quickly. What might take years in the world of the enterprise can happen in weeks or months - as successes are claimed and lost, friends are made and disposed of, and new relationships are forged.

Over the last seven months, I've been witness to seeing Ben Golub launch a number of interesting sites, including RSSmeme (post), a Google Reader shared items tracker, DearLazyWeb (post), a service to get answers via Twitter, Tweet2Tweet (post), a way to see Twitter conversations, and finally, FFToGo (post), a mobile version of FriendFeed.

Now, today, it can be finally said he's chosen to settle down, as FriendFeed has hired him on full time, following more than a month's worth of part-time consulting for the company, where he helped chase down bug fixes and provide support to the service's growing user and developer bases. As FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor wrote in an introductory blog post, Ben's efforts on FFToGo, RSSmeme and in the developer forum all combined to make him the team's latest hire, one of a rare breed who hadn't previously worked at Google, where much of the team hails from.

I first learned of Golub's direct work with the FriendFeed team when I gave him the courtesy call on August 13th to let him know I'd be helping to advise ReadBurner, an assumed competitor to RSSmeme. At the time, he'd asked me to keep it quiet, saying it was only in a contributory role.

But a week later, when FriendFeed published two months of changes in their ChangeLog blog, chronicling updates to the service, Ben's efforts could be seen, going back to July 16th. This of course led to questions, but when I sent him a note asking if it was time to announce his role, his quick e-mail back, said, "Nothing to see here. I'm just consulting, and sometimes that does mean committing code. As you can tell from the logs most of it has been fixing things up here and there."

It looks like that "nothing" soon became something of real value. Now, Ben is joining one of the more exciting companies in Silicon Valley, and FriendFeed has essentially roped in one of their most dedicated users, much like they did with Gary Burd, the author of Mail2FF. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb lauds the combination of Golub and FriendFeed, although I believe he incorrectly speculates that FriendFeed has acquired RSSmeme, as this was not mentioned in the announcement.

As I told Ben on the phone this evening, I'm glad to have helped bring visibility to some of his projects over the last few months, but my efforts were a small thing compared to the dedicated code-authoring Golub has put into each of his sites. FriendFeed has grown even stronger with this hire.

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

I Spent the Day On Windows, Just to Use Chrome

Some people might think the typical Mac user has a superiority complex, and you could be excused for thinking so, if the Mac vs. PC commercials were any indication. But every once in a while, a cool "must try out" app comes along that leaves us a little envious ourselves - making us feel like we're being considered lesser beings. Today, Google's debut of Chrome, their next generation Web browser, was for Windows only, not for Macs. But putting my better judgement aside, I was willing to fire up VMware Fusion and stay in Google Chrome for the day to give it a fair shake. While it wasn't light-years ahead of anything I've ever tried, I'm glad I spent the time to check it out, and it's going to be fun seeing it get developed and ready for my preferred platform.

I believe the world is moving away from an operating system-based model to that of the Web browser. More essential applications are moving to the browser, and with the exception of Microsoft Office apps and Adobe PhotoShop, I could spend virtually my entire day just in the browser or on e-mail. This does two contradictory things: #1, it makes it easier for people to switch between operating systems, like from PC to Mac, and #2, it makes the differentiation between Macs and PCs less important to begin with, making the tie-ins with Web properties and creative applications like iLife and MobileMe just that much more critical.

When Google finally opened up Chrome to the masses around mid-day today, I wasn't going to sit on the sidelines, so I fired up VMware Fusion, with a Windows XP environment, opened Internet Explorer, and downloaded Chrome. A few minutes later, I had one of the fastest, most minimal browsers out there. While I didn't import any bookmarks or my own user history, it wasn't long before I was using corporate e-mail, and opening new tabs to check all my usual sites, without any issues. Pages loaded quickly, and with the exception of needing to install a Flash plug-in, all the content worked.

Curious if Chrome would be allowed to visit more secure sites, I logged onto Wells Fargo Bank and eTrade and didn't get any issues of the bank not supporting the browser. Interestingly enough, my own SiteMeter account recognized the Chrome visit instead as a variant of Safari (thanks to the underlying WebKit foundation), which likely explained why it was so smooth.


Awwwww.... Snap!
I only encountered one failed tab, which responded with an "Aw, Snap!" with an accompanying unhappy face. But other than that small failure, browsing was quick, and not much different than any other browser. The main differences on the surface had to be seeing my most frequently-visited sites in grid form as I opened new tabs, and seeing the tabs themselves along the top of the browser.


My popular visits (scrubbed for work), seen in Chrome
Pretty much the only complaint I have so far is I don't know how to customize my most "favorite" pages, so I can remove some from the grid, like corporate Web mail or the Intranet. If there's a way, I haven't seen it yet, but it's not a showstopper.

Typically, using an application under Windows emulation on VMware is remarkably slower than its native equivalent. But I didn't feel bogged down by Chrome, as I mentioned on Twitter. It just worked. I even enabled the "Unity" setting so the Chrome browser window floated above all my other Mac apps, and it seemed just right.

Will it be enough to make users turn off Internet Explorer? So far, I'd say not yet. Nothing about the browser made it amazingly better for the unwashed masses who have grown used to accepting Microsoft's half-hearted attempts at software. But I can't see any good reason I'd ever use Firefox or Opera or Flock again. Chrome is going to be my alternative to Safari on Windows and I'm interested to see if they can sway me on the Mac side, hooks and all.

The New World of Browser Choices is All About the Hooks

In a perfect technology world, every Web site and every Web application would perform the same way across all Web browsers, operating systems and mobile devices. But we're not in a perfect world, and Web surfers' experiences are being increasingly determined by browser-specific plug-ins, third party applications and tie-ins with the host operating system. The result makes it less likely that one Web browser user can make a switch, after having invested in one specific application to get a tailored user experience.

Today's big news/rumor is that Google is preparing their own Web browser, called Chrome, which is based on WebKit, the same foundation underlying Apple's Safari browser. While the news hasn't been confirmed by Google outright, all indications make it appear to be true.

(Update: Google has now made it official)

There Are A Lot of Questions About Chrome

With news of Chrome, Web enthusiasts are already asking questions - will it support the GreaseMonkey scripts designed for FireFox? Will it be released for Mac OS X on the same day it's released for Linux and Windows? And, as it's so early, at least the latter question can't be answered. But assuming they are using WebKit, it's unlikely GreaseMonkey scripts could be used out of the box.

Today's Web Browsing Experience Comes Down To:

1. Speed
2. Reliability
3. Compatibility
4. Data Portability
5. Extensibility

It is no longer enough to load the fastest. The time when you could put Internet Explorer and Netscape or Safari and Firefox side by side and show me how quickly they loaded HTML pages or performed JavaScript renders is gone. People just expect the browsers to work. And if they crash even once a day, users are unhappy. So Speed and Reliability are assumed.

Compatibility, for the most part, is a small issue at this point. It's a rare site that says "Please Use Internet Explorer" or "Your Operating System is Not Yet Supported", although that does happen. That's why initial response to Internet Explorer 8, beta 2, was so tepid, as it really did fail the basic expectations. (See Steven Hodson's critique)

That leaves what I see as the most important points going forward: Data portability and extensibility, and the biggest trojan horse I see going forward to impact the browser marketplace is the iPhone.

If Google Announces Chrome, Does Apple Put it In the iTunes App Store?

Apple made a custom, light-weight, version of Safari for the iPhone, which makes their Web browser the default browsing experience for what's the world's most talked-about cell phone. Using Safari on the iPhone makes it more likely that you will use Safari on your Mac or your PC because it can synchronize your bookmarks, and unify your browsing experience. Changing bookmarks on your desktop means they are changed on the iPhone.

Today, there are no alternative Web browsers for the iPhone. No Firefox, no Opera, and definitely, no Internet Explorer. While Google and Apple appear to be friends, and Google makes applications for the iTunes Application Store, and therefore, the iPhone, can you see Apple opening up the option for users to browse in Chrome instead? And even if they did, the likelihood of Chrome's behavior being mirrored to the desktop, via iTunes, is slim.

Apple playing the role of gatekeeper to the iTunes Store will be a bigger deal as the iPhone increases in market share.

Could Mozilla/Firefox Apps Be Re-written for WebKit?

There are scads of great GreaseMonkey scripts designed for some of the social networks I use, including FriendFeed. In addition, the Google Reader overlay, Feedly, only works in Firefox, so as long as I stay in Safari, I don't use the product at all. To date, Safari has badly trailed Firefox and IE in terms of getting add-ons, like browser toolbars and plug-ins, but if Google were to enter the market with another WebKit-based browser, that could shake things up.

So What About the Hooks?

As a Mac user and a MobileMe customer, my e-mail, Web browser bookmarks, and address book are synchronized across my devices, both laptop and iPhone, and the data is available online from any computer, in the cloud. Because of these hooks, I'm not a good candidate to move away from Safari any time soon, and I'm more tied into Apple's infrastructure of E-mail, Address Book, and iCal than ever before.

For others, it's Google who has the hooks. From their Google Calendar to GMail and Picasa, they've trusted Google with their personal data. For these folks, Google will undoubtedly tailor Chrome to their interests, and it would be hard for competitors like Apple and Microsoft to make the interoperability any better. But this, of course, leaves out the iPhone scenario, which leads us to Android, Google's approach to make a next-generation phone operating system, distributed through multiple handset partners.

Now, instead of seeing that a browser is faster, or more pretty, or has more features, it's more important that we can move our data around between devices and that the applications don't hiccup. We may not have seen it at first, but as the major browser vendors start to tie in to the applications you use every day, they're getting more of a hook into you as a customer, and reducing your potential to use an alternative product. Even before we see Google's Chrome in action, I know it will take being lighter, faster, and as reliable, to start, plus featuring the type of hooks that Safari does today, on the iPhone, to make me consider it anything more than a hobby and as a primary browser alternative.

We've come a long way since Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer in the Windows operating system and was deemed a monopolist, but that won't stop the big players from playing favorites with their own applications and giving you reasons to stick around.

How Would the World React to a Powerful Silicon Valley Quake?

Today, the nation's attention is on the New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast area, as residents there ready themselves for what could be a major disaster in Hurricane Gustav, just three short years after the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf Coast, behind only the Southern tip of Florida and North Carolina, is the third-most likely spot in the United States to be hit by hurricane, and this inevitability has some wondering why residents would stay in such a disaster-prone area. This thinking had me wondering about how the world would react if Silicon Valley, its companies, and its sometimes well-to-do residents were impacted by a disaster they too are prone to - be it earthquake or fire.

Regardless where you live, it's likely you're at risk to some form of disaster. In Kansas, it's tornadoes. In Hawaii and parts of Washington or Alaska, it could be a volcanic eruption. In Minnesota, a blizzard, or an ice storm. In varying areas of California, it could be mudslides, forest fires, drought or earthquake.

And despite this knowledge, people continue to build, all while recognizing that each new home or bridge or highway overpass built near a fault line will, at some point, be stressed by an earthquake. While we have been lucky over the last two decades to not have faced a destructive quake, and significant efforts have been made to earthquake-proof structures throughout the region, there's no doubt potential is there for serious calamity. Meanwhile, over the twenty years following the Loma Prieta quake, Silicon Valley's impact on the world's commerce has only increased, as technology, and the Internet itself, have become essential.

While it's a rare person who will brazenly say that Gulf Coast victims should have known better than to return to New Orleans and the surrounding area, these internal monologues do occasionally bubble to the top. One FriendFeed user, Anthony Citrano, said on Sunday, “Is it terrible that I have a very hard time feeling sorry for people who have rebuilt in New Orleans, ten feet below sea level?”, kicking off a vibrant discussion.

Nearly every respondent in the thread sounded alarm at his question, but there were those who said, it "just seems like you are asking for trouble" to rebuild in the area that had been hit before. Others brought up the issue of the victims' income, and made it clear that while they might be sympathetic to poorer people who were impacted, that they would not be sympathetic to "millionaires" who built homes on the edges of cliffs, or on beachfront property, in time of disaster. And it's this latter part that has me thinking a bit on how Silicon Valley is perceived.

Thanks to the romanticism of the booming stock market in the last nineties and early 2000s, and the high visibility of Silicon Valley successes like Google, Yahoo!, Intel and others, as well as a preponderance of very real successful businesspeople with their BMWs, Audis, and million-dollar-plus homes, it's not likely that the same kind of sympathy could be expected for a $200k-salaried MBA as for a poverty-stricken family of five. It's unlikely that cracks in one of Oracle's famous blue towers or blown out windows and roofs at a warehouse-like building on Cisco or Google's sprawling campuses would elicit the same kind of gut reaction we saw from the tattered Louisiana Superdome in Katrina.

That the Bay Area saw tragic earthquakes in 1906 and 1989 didn't slow down the area's population growth, and it's unlikely the next big one, regardless of its size, will make people change their minds about living here. While many of the Valley's biggest and most visible tech companies have outsourced some aspects of their business, including production of their goods, internationally, and Web sites often have multiple, secure, hosting centers in disparate locations, there would undoubtedly be significant impact if the Valley were to be slowed for any period of time. But would people feel sorry for these Californians who "should have known better" than to build such a foundation on shaky ground, or would we hear the same kind of discussions posted by Mr. Citrano, that question our living in a land fraught with risk?

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.