10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech

Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech and the recent results: My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close.

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-time offer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

In the mid and late 1990s, there was a land rush for domain names, as every company jumped in and procured Web addresses and built out Web sites to establish their electronic home. Although many of these sites were rudimentary at best, they knew they needed to be there to participate. In 2009, it will be expected that brands and businesses will be similarly established on social media, using tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

While Steve Jobs is not likely in imminent danger, the continued unsettled rumors, as well as a good level of common sense will push Apple to present a succession plan for Jobs, which will not take place immediately, but over the space of a few years. One to three names of potential in-house replacements will be named, as well as a timeline, as Steve fades to the background, but continues to wield tremendous power over Apple's vision and deliverables.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Mike Arrington's tech blog continues to be the influence leader in its space. Both VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider have forged strong brands with a financial bent which would be good additions for the TechCrunch brand as Arrington and team look to extend their umbrella and wrap up what he considers to be the best blogs. SAI in particular would offer an East Coast/financial bent that the Silicon Valley-based TechCrunch is currently not known for.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

While commoditized PCs managed to put pressure on Macintosh and relegate Apple to a small market share percentage the Cupertino company is still trying to recover from back in the 1980s, history will not repeat itself, as Google's Android partners will be unable to knock the iPhone off its perch as the must-have smart phone for power Web consumers. BlackBerry will continue having a significant share in the enterprise, but it will continue to be iPhone eroding its share, not the Android, especially given the unmatched array of applications available for the iPhone which Android will not be able to match.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Google's mismanagement of FeedBurner has many people frustrated with how the feed service has been run since its acquisition last year, as the service continues to see slowness, outages, and recently went dark, shutting down their blog and being gobbled up by the AdSense team. Competitors will emerge, enabling bloggers to move their FeedBurner subscriber base and historical statistics to their new platform.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Despite Twitter's recent dance with Facebook, it will rely on its existing venture capital funding and find revenue that enables the company to stay afloat at least through the end of the year. FriendFeed, similarly, will not be acquired or merge with any other service prior to the end of 2009. The company, if necessary, will instead do a second round of funding, with its own internal sources providing much of the capital.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

The layoff parade in 2009 will not be limited to unprofitable companies, small companies or practically any category of companies. The doom and gloom that have hit the financial markets, advertising, real estate and almost every sector will continue through the first half of the year, before starting to see a rebound in the third quarter. You will see strong companies like Microsoft lay off thousands, and practically everyone will not be renewing contract positions that have concluded - even Google and Apple.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

America's political climate is extremely polarized, following the conclusion of two extremely divisive terms. As Barack Obama moves into the White House, the very features that make him a "first" will also make him and his administration the chief target for some incredibly angry and hate-filled groups. One will somehow manage to access the WhiteHouse.gov site and manipulate it this year.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype (I made the sale of StumbleUpon a prediction last year too). Digg, losing momentum, will sell cheap. Yahoo! will eventually be purchased by News Corporation, AOL, or even Google, assuming it passes regulatory approval, by the end of the year. Microsoft, still insulted, won't be back to the table.

RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks

People use Web browser bookmarks in vastly different ways. All of us have no doubt encountered people who bookmark just about everything, and don't organize them into folders, leaving the poor user to scroll through page after page to find the bookmark they are trying to find. Others don't bookmark anything and rely on Google to find the desired page, through the search engine. On the opposite spectrum, others have tidy folders, while a small percentage of them are so focused as to have their bookmarks sorted alphabetically in nested folders.

That last example would be me. Not only do I have all of my bookmarks sorted in folders, but each of the folders is alphabetically ordered in my Bookmarks toolbar in Safari. Many of the folders have subfolders, and believe it or not, the bookmarks are alphabetized in each of those folders. If only I were this organized everywhere else!


My Safari Bookmark List Just Got a Lot Smaller...
Best of all, these bookmarks are synchronized to my iPhone, meaning I have them with me on the go, practically anywhere.

But these days, it really doesn't matter how organized I am, because I so rarely encounter my bookmarks - and many have not been clicked in a very long time. In fact, this afternoon, I went and cleaned up my bookmarks for the first time in a while, going on a deletion spree.

Why the change? Because practically all the important sites I used to visit on a regular basis have transitioned to my Google Reader, thanks to RSS. There's no need to have TechCrunch and Scobleizer bookmarked. There's no need to check in on MacRumors and AppleInsider every day. Instead, they come to me. Even the dozens of saved search strings I had for work to scour Google and all the industry trade rags are no longer necessary because each of those can spit off an RSS feed into my reader.

At this point, practically the only bookmarks I need are the portals, such as iGoogle and My Yahoo!, which are themselves RSS-powered, sites where my own action is required to make them useful, from retail sites like Amazon.com, or transactional sites, such as Wells Fargo and eTrade, and the occasional sports-related site that has instant scores, like ESPN.com or Yahoo! Sports.

The old ways of visiting each site one by one, or even to open every bookmark in a folder at once, as Safari lets you do, are no longer necessary. With the inclusion of auto-complete features in practically every browser, the rapid growth of RSS and precision of Google search, browser bookmarks are an archaic breed. There even may come a time when I go back into my bookmarks and start removing entire folders.

What about you? You've likely got a start page. It's no secret mine is FriendFeed, as it has been all year. I am also a regular visitor to Google Reader and Twitter to round out my news gathering, but what next? Are there still sites that are so necessary to visit frequently that they warrant bookmarking?

I Didn't Hold an End of Year Stock Sale in 2008

In January, amid some scorn, I admitted one of my yearly traditions has been to zero out my stock holdings in eTrade at the end of the calendar year, primarily to simplify that April's tax returns. Not having to span investment holdings over multiple years makes tabulating my profits or loss the following year that much easier, and also gives me a chance come January to start over with stocks I believe are primed for a big year. (See: My Empty Stock Drawer)

But as has been mentioned here several times, and in every media you prefer to consume, 2008 has been very, very different, and I just couldn't stomach the idea of selling some of the stocks I own at their near-historic lows this time around. While I certainly could use the write-off, instead of clearing the deck as 2008 comes to a close, I am standing pat. Part of me says it's because I'm sure these stocks will eventually rebound, and another part admits it is pure numbness and potentially the equivalent of being in shock. Maybe instead it's post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Of course, holding on to stocks this low doesn't guarantee they won't go even lower. If you had asked me 30, 60 or 90 days ago about some stocks, I'd have remarked they couldn't possibly dip further. But nobody is an expert when it comes to what we are seeing in the financial markets today, and I don't claim to be one at all. I am even lowering my own expectations.

2008 broke a tradition of the financial markets practically making sense, and we're breaking our own tradition as well. We're either going to have a nice bounce in 2009, or we're going down with the ship.

I've Taken a New Advisory Role With SocialToo

One of the most fun and rewarding byproducts of operating this blog has been to connect with entrepreneurs looking to improve their product and gain early feedback. Sometimes, I can help by doing more than just spreading the word about services I like, but get the opportunity to take time to suggest new product features, point out what I consider to be flaws, and suggest how they can better adjust to address competitors. In the majority of cases, this takes place ad hoc via e-mail or phone. In rarer cases still, I find a working relationship with an individual and the product such that we both find our cooperation mutually beneficial and have taken the next step to make it formal.

As I discussed and disclosed back In August, one of those roles was when I became an advisor to ReadBurner. Tonight, I wanted to update you and let you know I have also taken a similar role with SocialToo, which Jesse Stay, a contributor to this site, and the service's CEO, calls "your companion to the Social Web."

Since first learning of SocialToo this summer, and using it for several months, I have become very interested not just in what the product does today - primarily helping to quietly manage your Twitter account in the background, and to deliver social surveys to friends on multiple social networks, but also in a few potential directions I saw as next steps for the product.

Without Jesse's prompting, in November, I sent him a detailed outline of a new product derivative of SocialToo, which I would believe will fulfill a still-unanswered gap in the social networking space. Jesse, having significant experience coding programs for not just Twitter, but Identica and Facebook as well, seemed like the logical partner for some of my ideas. Jesse and I have since talked many times in regards to how I think his service can take the leap from obscurity to being more robust and visible, as it grows in capability and users.

As with the ReadBurner relationship, I aim to continue being transparent with you and other developers who believe they might be competitors to or partners with SocialToo in some way. And while I may be more closely tied with Jesse and the service going forward, helping to impact and review the product's roadmap, I expect to be even more critical than before, sometimes behind the scenes, and sometimes publicly, as I have with ReadBurner. I will also update my about page to reflect the relationship.

As a side note, do I expect to quit my day job and fill my LinkedIn profile with scads of advisory roles, although some of you noted the addition of SocialToo to the list over the weekend? No. But when opportunities arise to help build new companies and services that will help the Web and sound like something I want in a big way, I am more than eager to make my time available. Additionally, the relationship with SocialToo should not have any impact on Jesse's postings here. Jesse for the better part of four months has covered those topics he finds interesting, and will continue to do so. And when it makes sense that he disclose his SocialToo position, he will do so.

To learn more about SocialToo as it stands today, go to www.socialtoo.com. Jesse Stay's personal blog can be found at: www.staynalive.com.

LinkedIn Recommendations Are Feel Good Business for a Recession!

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Nothing feels better than a pat on the back, and LinkedIn makes no exception to this rule!For those not familiar with LinkedIn, it is a professional social platform to share opportunities, ideas and information. According to LinkedIn, over 30 million professionals subscribe, and some might coin the service as Facebook for business professionals.

While I don’t know whether anyone has actually landed a job from using LinkedIn, it is a great way to stay connected with clients and business colleagues alike. In this fast-moving world, keeping up with changing e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and the who-knows-who game can be daunting. LinkedIn seeks to make that easier.While most everyone knows LinkedIn for its Bacon-esque Connections feature and it’s recent launch of groups and applications, I was surprised that many I talk with know very little about the recommendation feature – or worse – are intimidated to ask for a recommendation.

Recommetiquette:

Let’s look at some LinkedIn recommendation etiquette. Quite simply put, if you feel you are worth a recommendation, ask for it. Don’t wait for someone to think of it for you. Trust me, they are thinking about a million other things than you.

This doesn’t mean that a warm and friendly request by you won’t get read. Generally, people you are connected with respect you. So ask.The worst case is that you won’t get the recommendation, and the best case is you get a glowing review from a respecting colleague or client. Lastly, always change the generic message to something more personal (but not too familiar, mind you). More on this later.

Recommendations in a nutshell:

LinkedIn makes recommendations extremely simple once you make a connection. By simply clicking on Recommendations under the Profile heading, you are presented with the option to choose which job title for which you would like to seek recommendations.
As you can see in the example above, I have a few recommendations for two of my positions. The “thumbs-up” icon to the left indicates I have at least one recommendation, and I can choose to manage or ask to be endorsed.When asking to be endorsed, it is a simple 3 step process (see below).

1. Step 1 is confirming the position you wish to be recommended for.


2. In step 2, you must decide who you’ll ask.


3. To complete the process, simply create your message. You can choose to leave the default subject and body of the message intact, but I strongly recommend you make this more personal. (Tip: It’s always great to include something personal, e.g. “It was great to see you at the last lunch n’ learn.”).


4. (Optional): Wring your hands as you wait by your computer for a response.

What goes around comes around:

Once your colleague or client completes the recommendation, you will receive a message in your inbox inviting you to approve or decline the recommendation. This is a great way to ensure the recommendation meets with your high standards, right?Perhaps the best feature about this recommendation process, in my humble opinion, is the fact that LinkedIn really believes in returning the favor. As such, you are immediately taken to a screen that asks you to write up a recommendation, in kind.

For those of you who understand recruiting practices, this is genuinely the best opportunity you will ever have to ask for a flattering recommendation. So, if you receive a request for a recommendation – make sure you take a little time and pay it forward. You never know, the very next e-mail in your inbox might just be that recommendation you have been waiting for coming right back to you…… and there’s no better time than a recession to get that feel-good you get from a LinkedIn recommendation!

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Well, There Goes My 'Perfect' Driving Record!

One of the bullets in my theoretical real-world resume for the better part of the last two decades has been that my driving record is spotless. No tickets. No accidents. I've never hit anyone and they've never hit me. I'd practically felt invincible. For whatever reason, through 15 years of being a licensed motorist, I've never had any points added to my record. I've never had a moving violation, or attracted much more than a warning from a police officer.

That line is going to have to change, because last night, I got pulled over for speeding, and sure enough, I got a real citation which I doubt I'll be able to contest and get out of.

The incident put an ugly exclamation point on what otherwise was a solid and enjoyable week and a half off from the office, punctuated by visits with extended family, many of whom I hadn't seen for years. But lingering behind late yesterday, while needing to get into work early today, likely put extra pressure to get home quickly. Starting the two-hour drive back to the Bay Area last night around 10:30 at night, we had open freeway for the most part, and were soon cruising around 80 miles an hour, with traffic, occasionally going a bit higher.

It's that "a bit higher" which no doubt attracted the attention of the highway patrol. As has happened hundreds of times before, I saw the patrol car alongside the freeway, lights off, waiting for its next victim. But I probably saw it too late, or didn't slow enough to make the officer happy. As the patrol car fell into my rear view mirror, his lights came on, and though I changed lanes to let him go by (hopefully), he chose instead to follow me, and ask me to pull over. Matthew and Sarah, asleep in their car seats, didn't notice.

So after 11 p.m., when most people are in bed, or at least thinking about it, I was left telling this officer that yes, I had seen his car, and yes, I understood I had been going faster than the marked limit of 65. I said I had been doing 80, and he countered with 89. What can you do? He probably was right, at that moment in time. On a clear night with little traffic, the car is certainly capable. That I was driving the Toyota Rav-4, which doesn't look like an old clunker, like practically every other car I've ever owned, probably had something to do with my not sliding by this time as well.

So he wrote me up and I'm getting a citation. All my "Yes sir"s and "No sir"s in the world, and the lack of alcohol or anything else exciting weren't enough to get me out of it. So now, I have to live with the fact not that I'm a law-breaker... but that I finally got caught. Dang.

See Also:
louisgray.com:
California's New Sport: Balancing the Cell Phone Below the Dashboard
Web Robin:
Police: Was Louis Driving Drunk Friday?

Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009 On the Social Web

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I spent the weekend recovering from holiday activities. I did manage to do some housework, watched The Sopranos Season Five (a key component of the holiday loot), and consumed a deluge of "end of year" blog posts from around the Interwebs.

I love this kind of thing, and it was fun to try to get a Big Picture take on what some of my favorite writers and thinkers are writing and thinking on the eve of the new year.

Plans for 2009
Many one-person blogger operations did an end-of-year assessment of how things went in 2008 and looked at changes and upgrades for the year ahead. It was a chance too for personal writing styles to shine, such as was the case with the curmudgeonly yet loveable Steven Hodson:

While not the most important (that one will come in a minute or two) I want to thank Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr for being willing to hire a cranky old fart. While much of the tech blogosphere is centered around the warm and fuzzy goodness of things like Web 2.0 and social media Duncan gives me the freedom; and the rapidly growing platform, to poke as many holes in that hot air balloon as I like. Thanks Duncan.

Rob Diana reported that he plans on "bringing the geek back," or focusing more on technologies and APIs that drive the social web, while also committing to shorter posts. Jason Kaneshiro of webomatica, a blogger who writes about tech and pop culture, discusses how he will look to balance posts out between tech (Apple, iPhone apps, digital video), movies, and television (more Mad Men reviews, yes!) in '09.

Louis Gray brought his own unique perspective on this kind of post, turning in 10 Things I Wish I Would Do Better On the Web Come 2009. These include commenting more on his own site as well as others, becoming more active on Twitter, and spreading the love (read = attention and coverage) to more sites in the coming year.

And I turned in my own State of the Blog report, in which I talk about my desire to "chase quality" and "follow passion."

Predictions
Predictions were big, both reviewing how those made for 2008 panned out as well as prognosticating out on 2009. MG Siegler of ParisLemon graded himself highly on correctly predicting the rise of social network aggregation and that NBC would return to iTunes, but not so much on Digg getting acquired or Apple releasing "a new kind of mouse with multi-touch capabilities."

Meanwhile, Adam Ostrow of Mashable reports that his 2008 predictions both "rocked" and were "highly accurate," noting the growth in Hulu's popularity, Facebook's now mainstream status, and blogs becoming "hot acquisition targets" (Ars Technica, PaidContent). For 2009, Ostrow sees Google Chrome's market share increasing, a "big newspaper" going all digital, and Facebook and MySpace ramping up their own acquisition efforts:

As startup consolidation continues, look for the two biggest social networks to become aggressive acquirers. The reason? Both have ambitions as not only media companies (side bet: look for Facebook to buy or take a stake in a big music app), but as identity providers. One sure-fire way to gain market share as an identity provider is to buy up popular but profitless sites and make their own identity system the standard. This is exactly what Google and Yahoo have done with properties they’ve acquired through the years (see: Flickr, Del.icio.us, Blogger, FeedBurner, etc.).

Steve Rubel predicts that The Web 2.0 Blogs Will Be Fine in 09, pointing out that "these sites [will] diversify their revenue streams beyond advertising and events. Research is a good area and one that probably leaves other, older companies exposed on price." (Do any sites refer to themselves as "web 2.0 blogs" these days though?)

And Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr believes that 2009 Will Be The Year of the Uber Blog, noting that large web publications such as ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, and Gawker Media are moving toward an "uber blog model":

The reasoning behind the move is remarkably simple: it’s easy to sell ads on one blog vs many blogs, for a couple of reasons. The biggest is simply traffic: having one big blog means increased traffic to the core blog making the sales pitch more appealing. Second, advertisers will often want to target the one blog and not buy the subsidiary blogs; maybe not always, but none the less common in my experience. If you have one big blog with various streams you’ve got better odds of getting high value advertising against all the content.

ReadWriteWeb, for its part, takes the temperature on 2009's social media outlook from a number of well known figures, such as Chris Brogran, Dave Kellog, and Om Malik. Interesting tip from Malik (pulled from GigaOM) is on financial web community Tip'd: "If it can get itself embedded into the financial blog ecosystem the way Digg has plugged in the tech world, Tip'd could become a daily destination."

Staying with RWW, Richard MacManus clued me into a fun slideshow from TrendsSpotting highlighting social media influencers predictions for 2009 (embed not working unfortunately but check it out here).

The great debates ahead
Whatever happens, we know there's going to be no shortage of things to talk about, hash over, debate, and bitchmeme about in the year ahead. One of the most interesting topics I came across that in some ways combines all of the above involves Robert Scoble's post, called Did I harm my blog by FriendFeeding this year? Not only did it open up a flood of discussion on FriendFeed and elsewhere, but in my view is intriguing because it touches on a bunch of themes that bloggers, microbloggers, and social media superfans will be thinking about for some time, including:

• Social media balance – Which social media destinations will bring back the most value on time spent?
• Influence – Is it better to be a big fish on FriendFeed, a "think piecing" blogger competing against the bigs, or something in between?
• Monetization and ownership – Does it "pay" in all senses of the word to spend a great deal of time and passion on sites that you don't own?
• Distributed conversations – How do you best harness ideas and conversations in this new distributed age?

Just some food for thought as we enter the final bend on 2008.

And happy new year everyone!

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

2008 Internal Year In Review (Month by Month)

At the end of the year, it's a tradition for many sites and blogs to pick "best of" lists, offer predictions, show their best posts and the like. At louisgray.com, we're no different. In fact, we're probably worse than most when it comes to liking to sort, use statistics, find trends and display highlights. I thought it'd be fun (at least for me) to do a quick run through the year soon to be completed, looking at how things progressed - the good, bad, interesting, and not so much. Below is a quick summary, somewhat, of how each month went, including the top stories and new companies and people we encountered along the way.

Question is... what's the most common word in this wrap-up? My guess? The word "debuted." See why below.

January

In January, I said I didn't care much for the year's MacWorld Expo, discovered ReadBurner in stealth mode, which led to the introduction of Shared Reader... considered joining Twitter... got in a quick tiff with Mashable... actually joined Twitter... hit the Techmeme leaderboard for the first time (which was short lived)... noted the passing of church president Gordon B. Hinckley... saw the launch of AssetBar, and became part of the Elite Tech News Reddit. And at the end of the month, Rating Burner debuted.

February

February saw Microsoft and Yahoo! start their mating dance, as I admitted rooting for the underdog, but voted for Hillary anyway... saw RSSmeme debut to compete with ReadBurner, the introduction of LinkRiver... I introduced the LouisGray.com logo and revamped the site... and revealed my wife and I were expecting twins. I noted issues with FeedBurner, and saw FriendFeed open up to the public with Series A funding. At the end of the month, I met Chris Brogan, and wasn't so impressed with MyBlogLog's lifestream.

March

In March, we discovered Yokway! incubating in alpha before launch, saw the debut of Mergelab and Shyftr, but in the bad news camp, ReadBurner shut down (temporarily). To welcome new readers, I gave a history of the site... and started highlighting new blogs for the first time. Meanwhile FriendFeed started to take off, even if I said Duncan Riley didn't get it right away. I also managed to smash my laptop at Spring Training. Later in the month, Toluu debuted.

April

In April, we looked at changes on the Techmeme leaderboard... I was not impressed with Favorit... Yuvi put me under the microscope... BlogRize and Socialmedian debuted on back to back days... and we first discussed fractured conversations. Alphatwitter debuted... ReadBurner relaunched... and I made no friends in the blogosphere by ranting against ads. FriendFeedMachine was introduced... I went to Web 2.0 Expo... where I learned about the Profy platform... and then ticked everyone off on Twitter by making up a "Noise Ratio". I later added Disqus comments and discussed my social media consumption workflow.

May

In May, the StatBot launched, but Mergelab closed down while still in beta. I noted Socialmedian's early growth... and Duncan Riley's first week at the Inquisitr.... started the weekly FriendFeed Friday tip series... saw LetsProve start up... and the introduction of FFToGo, which took FriendFeed mobile. I also added Lijit to my blog... and noted who first brought stories to Techmeme. The end of the month saw TweetSmart launch.

June

In June, we talked a lot about comments. Were they conversations or replies... and was FriendFeed stealing them away... I slammed TiVo for having no social media presence... saw FriendBinder debut... our 18 year old beagle passed away... we discussed five stages of early adopter behavior... I praised Disqus... and saw the debuts of Feedly, OneSpot and Loud3r... Sarah and Matthew were born... and I told you my expectations... Browzmi launched... as did NoiseRiver and MioNews, as new interfaces to FriendFeed.

July

By July 1, Sarah came home from the hospital... TweetDeck was introduced... and AssetBar relaunched with FanFlows... we encountered blatant racism online... Ballhype was purchased... and I mocked the title of social media expert. Twitter started limiting API requests... as Gnip went live... Socialmedian gave me an iPhone... Identica rose as an alternative to Twitter as the site found new ways to fail... Cuil was a dud... I joined SmugMug... and Matthew lost his job at CenterNetworks.

August

In August, I told you about a creepy would-be online stalker... California banned driving without a hands-free cell phone... the twins started slowing me down online... Feedheads launched on the Web... I joined ReadBurner as an advisor... YooPlace launched... we discussed why the embargo process was broken... rumors flew the church would buy Facebook... Strands debuted, as did BackType.

September

September saw the introduction of Google Chrome... FriendFeed rolled out lists... i.TV came to the iPhone... the falling stock market started to hit my wallet... Sitemeter laid an egg... I went to BlogWorld Expo... and I thought Chi.mp was a waste of time...

October

In October, I noted Obama's widespread support at tech companies... saw Spokeo give up on Web 2.0... started e-mailing RSS items... forecast the future of social media... and saw FriendFeed launch real-time updates. Guest posts gained momentum... and my kids got embedded in social media early... Twine launched... we discussed Prop 8... as Socialmedian made an election news hub.

November

November brought us instant streaming films via Netflix... Strands went mobile... I started using Wakoopa... Twitter promised (and failed) to open the firehose by Thanksgiving... I said to be a "real friend" to social networking friends... saw the Twitterank controversy... participated in an emerging media panel... watched Glue launch... saw the MotrinMoms issue explode... SocialToo added surveys... I kept losing money... slept next to the iPhone for comfort... and enjoyed new apps for the device.

December

I started off December annoyed at TiVo and Amazon... but still loved the iPhone... talked about Secret Santas and Amazon Wish Lists... PeopleBrowsr debuted... as did Kallow... ESPN.com introduced a beta version... and my wife started a family-oriented blog... Netflix came to my TiVo... BlogRize returned... I picked my top ten 2008 debuts... Twitter kept growing like mad... but last year's predictions sucked... TwitOrFit launched... Steve Jobs bailed from MacWorld... Gawkk opened up... Embargoes flared up again... Socialmedian was acquired... I got a new TiVo XL... promised to get better... Scrapplet debuted as did TechFuga... I even retold the Christmas Story through Twitter...

And... that just about catches you up. So if you're just visiting the site for the first time, started late, or missed a few months, you probably have a pretty good idea of how the year went, what we wrote about, and where we went. All in all, it reminds me of a lot of stories of months past, and services that need a revisit. It also tells me we had a pretty busy year. Should be interesting to see if 2009 is more crazy, or if I burn out. My money is on... "more crazy" - the exception being I don't plan on having two more kids next year. So... did I leave anything out?

Bias, Bias and More Bias. I Haz It. So Do You.

A few weeks ago, the blogosphere's flareup of choice was around a handful of bloggers who had opted into a commercial program from KMart, where they wrote posts in exchange for gift cards to the retail chain. (See Chris Brogan's original post and the follow-up for a recap.) The controversy lay in whether participating in the campaign eroded the participants' credibility. Could their allegiance be bought for a few bucks? Would other posts be not so clearly labeled, but also paid for?

As somebody who has never posted a sponsored post, or been paid to say anything on this site, ever, I'm somewhat on the outside looking in for that specific discussion. But if you extend the idea of bias and influence a tad further, it's everywhere you look.

Longtime readers of the site know I play favorites. In February, I said I "don't play fair", favoring small companies over large ones. I promote services, people, blogs and ideas I like. I ignore conversations I don't care about. I choose products to not buy. I don't write about topics I don't find interesting. That's because the blog is personal, and I'm not an automaton.

My biases come from ten years of working in Silicon Valley, touching roles from product requirements to product deployment and evangelism, customer interaction and highlighting, public relations, business development, Web development, sales and advertising. My biases come from a decade and a half of being a near full-time Web consumer, finding services I've had good experiences with and those I've had bad ones, making and enforcing preferences.

If KMart came to me, offering $500 to do a giveaway, I'd almost certainly ignore it. Not because $500 is pocket change (it's not), but because I don't care for the KMart brand and going that direction isn't interesting to me. It sets a precedent and I would expect my readers to have the same questions they did for the others involved. But there are dozens of services who I have highlighted on the blog over the last three years, for whom I would be happy to highlight their latest updates, for free, because I find them interesting and I hope you do as well. I delight in finding new services and acting as an early adopter to find the good through the raw, and see potential.

I am biased. I am biased in favor of Apple and its products, as a long-time user. I am biased in favor of products I use and understand well, like FriendFeed, Socialmedian, Strands, Twitter, SocialToo, LinkedIn, Disqus, Lijit, Google Reader, SmugMug, BackType and many more you've heard me talk about. I am biased in favor of the entrepreneurs whom I have had early relationships with through e-mail, by phone, or in person. I am biased in favor of bloggers and other content producers who I believe write well on subjects that have my interest.

In August, I talked about this issue a bit, saying, "If You Look Hard Enough, Conflicts of Interest Are Everywhere". And in the case anything got official, as it did with ReadBurner, I told you all about it.

Even though I like these products, these people, and their ideas, the idea is to continue to be trusted. What liking a product doesn't do is force me to make up things that they don't do, or gloss over clear issues. If I were to say issues weren't there, you wouldn't trust a review. If I were to say a product did something it didn't, my credibility would disappear. But I'm not swayed to like a product because I've gotten paid, because I haven't been. Practically the only items I've ever received from these companies are T-shirts, and while I love logo'd T-shirts like any other Valley geek, it's not enough to flip me to the dark side.

I'm biased, but I'm transparent. I bet you're biased as well. We all are. You can see it everywhere.

8 Ways to Start a Conversation: Social Media Style!

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

The purpose of social media is to be social of course, right?

It helps social butterflies among us stretch across continents with the strokes of a few keys and allows the geeky introvert to have a voice. Starting a conversation has never been easier, has it? A friend of mine, Ken Allan, and I were having a conversation across blogs over the last few weeks. Both of us started our blogs for varying reasons, but primarily it is to reach others and extend the conversation.

But how do you extend the conversation if no one on the other end reciprocates? Blogging, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook all share one thing: You have to have followers to talk to in order to even have a chance of starting a conversation. This is often hard work, but to some it comes naturally – some few names have risen to the top as conversation starters. Whether by wit or will, these individuals stand out in my mind – exemplifying how you start a conversation, and even keep it going:

Mona Nomura (Pixel Bits / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- A picture is worth a thousand words!

Mona consistently posts interesting material on Friendfeed and Twitter. What sets Mona apart, though, is her avid use of images in her FriendFeed posts. This quickly draws your attention, and the images she chooses really make you want to laugh, cry, and most of all - comment.

Leo Babauta (ZenHabits / Twitter)
- The guy that you can relate to.

Leo comes in with almost 80,000 subscribers to his blog ZenHabits.net, and coins himself as just a regular guy. With over 250,000 estimated uniques, Leo offers advice and observations on things from productivity and frugality to parenting and happiness.

People love to read his blog because it makes sense in a hectic world.

Louis Gray (LouisGray.com / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Let me show you this new … !

Interested in new discoveries, including new technology, services, and content, Louis Gray is an animal – devouring content at more than a healthy rate. The name sake of this very post you are reading has been blogging for over 3 years. He has recently hit a dramatic upswing in popularity, and his blog has become the host for many up and coming bloggers. Chances are if you are a new technology or service, Louis will be using you, and chances are if you are new blogger, he will hunt you down.

Darren Rowse (ProBlogger / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Do what I say, and what I do. I even wrote a book about it!

We all know and love Darren as the founder and chief blogger at ProBlogger.net, Digital Photography School, and the new TwiTip. Nearing 70,000 RSS subscribers and an estimated 450,000 uniques on ProBlogger, Darren has carved out a niche as a blogger who makes money blogging, and even wrote a book on how you can too. Darren uses social media to actively engage his readership, and is a genuinely nice guy.

Jason Calacanis (Mahalo / FriendFeed / Twitter)
– I is what I is, and that’s what I is.

Founder of Mahalo, Calacanis officially gave up blogging back in July of this year, citing that e-mail was a more personal way to interact with 5 or 10 - thousand - of his friends. (He never replied back to me, I wonder why?). Many saw this as a media stunt, since Jason has quietly resumed his blogging after this announcement. Calling him a blogger or not seems irrelevant at this point. Maybe that’s a sign of arriving in itself?

Whether you are upset with Jason for pulling a fast one on his loyal readers or think of him as being a true trail blazer, none can deny he understands how to start a conversation.

Chris Brogan (ChrisBrogan.com / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Community and Social Media.

His tagline says it all. Chris is famous for being able to stir people into movement, and often showcases others as the hero. For instance, his Rockstars page showcases blogs of all shapes and sizes.

Chris understands that by scratching others' backs, they will return the favor - or at least pay it forward.

Mike Arrington (TechCrunch / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Evil Genius or Shrewd Entrepreneur.

Mike has been called an evil genius by some, but his website, techcrunch.com, has seen an estimated 1.4 million uniques. Obviously, Mike knows how to get eyeballs on the page regardless of where you stand.

Robert Scoble (Scobleizer / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Is there a difference between conversation and controversy?

Robert has been doing this for a long time. Now part of the talent at FastCompany.tv, the Scobleizer has a knack for starting both conversations and controversies. Robert is the kind of guy that loves to be in a noisy room of 30,000 geeks, and even tries to listen to all of them at once. Robert took time off from his blog this past year to jump feet first into Twitter and FriendFeed. He now has over 23,000 followers on FriendFeed and over 44,000 on Twitter, logging an estimated 2000 hours on these services alone in the last year. Between interviewing up and coming tech-execs, blogging, and participating heavily in social media, Robert’s name always comes to mind when thinking about social media conversations – and is perhaps THE name when thinking TECH in general.

Final Thoughts

So it has been a banner year for social media, and this list comprises some of the heavy hitters that you might look to when thinking about how you want to start – and continue –your conversations on the web. With conversations happening in more places than just your comment queue, seriously consider not only your message, but how you are going to broadcast it. By the way, this list is not exhaustive, and is solely my opinion.

I would love to hear from you! Who knows how to do it right – and why?

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Arrington? Le Meur? Scoble? Everybody's Right About "Authority".

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

This weekend's blog flareup on whether Twitter should track the "authority" of a user, based primarily on the number of followers, has a number of people up in arms. One side says it makes sense. After all, Technorati and Google have always tracked influence. Others say the following number can be easily manipulated, and has no weight. First of all, before we address the issues, why am I writing this on LouisGray.com and not my own blog, StayNAlive.com?  It largely comes down to numbers.  LouisGray.com has near 4,000 RSS subscribers, while my blog only has 500.  Aside from the fact that I enjoy the team of great writers I work with on this blog, I have a much louder, and because of that, more authoritative, voice here.  More people listen with a larger audience than those with a small audience.  And like it or not, all bloggers trying to compete play the numbers game - that's simple marketing.

Background

Recently Loic Le Meur wrote a post, suggesting that Twitter Search sort their results by most popular on Twitter.  So, for example, if Robert Scoble has more followers than Michael Arrington, Scoble's posts will appear higher than Arrington's in the search results.  Scoble responded with a blog post suggesting Lemeur was wrong, saying that the number of people you follow is more important than those who follow you.  Today, Arrington reignited the flames with another follow-on post, supporting Le Meur, effectively saying the controversy was much ado about little, that it wasn't a separation from the haves and have nots, but instead, a simple recommendation to add to Twitter search.

So we have two business men, trying to find more readers and users to build revenue for their businesses (Arrington runs a content business, TechCrunch.com, while Le Meur runs a Video publishing service, Seesmic).  At the same time we have a video blogger, Robert Scoble, trying to find new content, which in turn generates revenue for the business he works for by building unique content.  He's very good at that, but They're both right.

Of course Arrington and Le Meur want more followers, and preference placed on followers - they benefit by doing so.  Their experience, as businessmen trying to generate revenue for their business, shows that more followers can both directly and indirectly translate into revenue for the businesses they own and run.  Arrington, after today's article, will generate even more readers of his blog because of the discussion going on about this on Twitter and FriendFeed.  That converts to more followers, which in turn sends them back to TechCrunch.com.

If I launch a new feature for SocialToo.com (Disclosure - I am CEO and co-founder of SocialToo.com, a service that, among many other features, enables you to auto-follow those that follow you on Twitter and other networks.), I have 4,000 followers I can now announce that to.  A year ago, when I was only at a few hundred, that announcement would not have made anywhere near an impact.  Now, with a sound business model, I have the potential to convert many more users to drive both traffic and revenue to the service.  The same goes with Arrington and TechCrunch, and Le Meur and Seesmic.  They're smart businessmen.  Notice Guy Kawasaki, another smart businessman said the same thing.

At the same time, it makes complete sense that Scoble places his value on the people he follows. Scoble's value is in the information he learns.  It's a sound strategy for a journalist, a PR professional, or a blogger.  After all, I met Scoble through following him on Twitter and FriendFeed (in person even!).  I also met Guy Kawasaki by following him on Twitter, as did I Chris Pirillo, and following the Tweets of the two of them was the premise behind me starting SocialToo.com.  There is value in that as well.  Scoble, and others can be experts, because of the people they follow - that is powerful.  It should also be noted that Scoble has a lot of followers because of this strategy.  This really is a "Chicken or the Egg" argument!

Social Networking is About the Experience for the Individual

The power of Social Networking is that it allows each individual to develop their own personalized experience on the web.  By the people they follow, they get the content they want.  By the people that follow them, they are given a voice outside of that personal world.  Scoble is right - you are defined by the people you follow.  I've talked about that here before - relationships define the individual.

However, a relationship is a two-way connection.  In the end it's those that follow you that can vouch for who you are, and what type of person they perceive you as.  If anyone were to steal my identity, I now have 4,000 people that can vouch it's the real me.  Of course there are ways around this, but it's still a form of identity, and will solidify even more as technology evolves.

I am a smarter person because of the people I follow - I've mentioned before that I separate those I pay attention to from those I follow.  That's how I follow smart people.  At the same time, I can ask any question now, and get multiple answers to that question from my 4,000+ followers.  I couldn't do that when I had only a few hundred.  I'm also smarter because of the people the follow me!  The people that follow me are very valuable, and make me a more authoritative source, just as the people I follow do.

I really don't think there is any right or wrong answer here.  I think Scoble, Arrington, and Lemeur are all right - it's important to follow smart people, yet at the same time your followers are just as important.  I don't think either one is any more valuable than the other on a general level - it varies on a person-to-person experience, and that is why you see them arguing over it.  That's the amazing thing behind Social Networking - there is no right or wrong answer because each individual can define their own!

In a perfect world, Twitter Search would provide multiple filters, some based on followers, some based on people you follow, some based on the number of people you converse with directly in your network of friends and followers.  The more personalized that search becomes, the more valuable it becomes to the individual.  "Authority" is determined by the individual.  Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Quantcast Shows Which Services Rely Most on Their "Addicts"

If you're like me, you have a list of sites you visit just about every day, without fail, and some may even be visited multiple times a day. Whether you're a frequent visitor of Google News, CNN.com, Facebook or Twitter, site and service owners know they can count on some consistent traffic from their regular visitors, in addition to natural traffic from external links or search engines. Web traffic measurement company Quantcast tracks much of this data, and has even gone so far as to categorize the most frequent visitors to some sites as "addicts", defined as those who visit a site more than 30 times in a single month - the "hardcore segment of a site's audience". As it turns out, some popular Web services rely on these so-called "addicts" for more than a third of their total traffic, and at major social networks, that number is as high as two-thirds of all visits.


Quantcast Defines Addicts as 30 or More Visits a Month
While Quantcast isn't as well-known as its competitors, including Compete.com and Alexa, it is making an attempt to track site and service's traffic, giving significant demographic information for sites, and helping advertisers try and find a perfect match. While the service doesn't claim to have sufficient visitor detail for all sites, many of the largest are now being directly tracked, meaning the data is extremely accurate.

This means that Quantcast isn't simply returning a site's total visits in a given timeframe, as well as whether traffic is increasing or decreasing, but what its users look like, and if they're addicts, regulars, or just passing through.

Some notable data shows:


FriendFeed Trails Twitter In Less-Addicted Regular Users
Twitter.com: 1% of all users are addicts, who drive upwards of 34% of total site traffic. An additional 25% of users are regulars, who deliver 40% of site traffic, meaning that the remaining 26% of traffic comes from the 74% of users who are merely passing by.

FriendFeed.com: Less than 1% of all users are addicts, who deliver 25% of all total site traffic. An additional 4% of users are regulars, who deliver 8% of site traffic. Fully 96% of users are seen as just passing by, accounting for 67% of visits.

This data tells me that FriendFeed has a real problem in converting casual visitors and making them regulars. You are either one of the "addicted", or you're probably not using the site at all. There's practically no middle ground. Twitter also clearly has its addicts, but it also has a healthy middle base of users who check in less regularly.


Facebook and MySpace Primarily Cater to Their Addicted Base
Facebook.com: 11% of all users are addicts, who drive 62% of all site traffic. A robust 53% of users are regular visitors, who give 34% of visits, and the remaining 36% of passers-by only deliver 4% of traffic.

MySpace.com: 20% of the users are addicts, providing 74% of all site traffic. Another 58% are regulars, giving 24% of visits, while the 22% of passers-by are only giving 2% of traffic.

That "addicted" users of Facebook and MySpace provide greater than two-thirds of page views is no surprise. Instead of being engaged on the "real Internet", many users log in to their walled gardens and stay there for some time. And there's not much benefit to being a passer-by for either service, so that doesn't deliver much traffic at all.

Outside of the social networking and lifestreaming spaces, you can look up virtually any Web site and see how much they rely on addicts, provided Quantcast has the data. Quantcast says only 9% of eBay users are addicted, giving 61% of visits. 16% of DrudgeReport visitors are addicted, providing 78% of visits. 2% of LinkedIn users are addicted, giving 36% of visits.

There's practically a catch-22 in business when it comes to appeasing your addicts. Lose your most ardent users, and you could find them to be your most vocal detractors, as they feel looked over and spurned. But if you appeal too much to your most addicted users, you could overlook some major gaps in your product that prevent it crossing over to the mainstream. How can you convert those casual passers-by into regular users or even addicts? Therein lies the struggle of growth. Quantcast gives us a glimpse into how many sites are faring in this battle. The question is, can the data change behavior?

Never Say Never Online. We're Keeping Records, You Know.

Two integral characteristics to the Web are that it is first, constantly changing, and second, practically everything is saved. So if you, like me, and many others, have ever said you will "never" do something, or will "quit" doing something never to return, you're just setting yourself up to be wrong. And once you undo that promise, you can look pretty silly in the process. So, if you are wavering in whether or not you will use a product, or if you're thinking of walking away from one you have already tried, it probably makes sense to keep the dialog internal, instead of sharing with the masses.

First, let me point out how dumb I was for trying this.

In January of 2007, I said, Why I Stopped Using IM and Won't Use Twitter. I wrote:

"What is said over IM is very rarely business, and prevents people from getting work done. It's a significant time-waster, and a technology whose time has come and gone. The idea that I would take it up a notch and tell Twitter my every step is yet another task that would get in the way of my actually working, so we're not interested."

So... yeah, how did that go? Well, a full year later (a long time hold out for me), I announced I "jumped the shark" on Twitter, and started using it. Almost a year later, I've now updated my Twitter account more than 1,400 times, and am following or being followed by about 4,000 people each direction.

In March of 2007, I took things a step further, and thought I'd be smart about saying not just one but TEN services I would "never" use. In a post titled, "Ten Geeky Technologies Not Coming to Our House", I listed Skype, Twitter, Linux, Plaxo, MySpace, BeBo, Piczo, XBox, PS3, the Wii, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo! IM, GTalk, Delicous, Flickr and EV-DO as things that would never make it in our home. In case you were counting, yes, that's more than 10 items, but I had grouped the game consoles, IM clients and social networks, for example.

So where do we stand? I have a Skype account, which I've used maybe three times in total. I have a Plaxo Pulse account. I signed up with a MySpace account, just to search for times my content was being used or linked to, we are big fans of the Nintendo Wii in our home, I've used Google Talk several times from within GMail, and I bookmarked almost 2,000 different Web sites on my Delicious account this year alone. Add onto that the fact I use my Flickr account for some photos of the twins, though I prefer SmugMug, and I look like a complete fool. Clearly, the mistake was mine to even say I was going to ignore these products, because in the interim, not only did those products get better, but I found more than an edge case to use them.

The same rule applies for those who might be using a service, and then loudly say they are quitting, never to return. Why do that, unless you're either looking for attention, or hoping others will join your cause?

For example, Mark Hopkins (formerly of Mashable) quit FriendFeed back in October, during a very political time for the site. He is back, of course, after a two-month hiatus. Similarly, when directeur, the creator of NoiseRiver, said he was going to leave FriendFeed (which we covered in October as well), the vacation didn't last all that long. He was back and active on the site within days.

More visibly, Jason Calacanis claimed in November that he was retiring from blogging, preferring to use an e-mail list to get his word out. While the e-mail list is alive and kicking, and growing, he has started posting to his blog again, practically every day, even if just to post pictures, or add a copy of his newsletter. It happens.

In May of 2007, we covered a topic I called "blog fatigue", specifically pointing to a few folks who were taking a breather from their sites. Truth is, we could all use a breather sometimes, be it from the blogging, or any services, but rather than say we're never going back, or never going to use something, it makes more sense to both keep an open mind, and probably, a closed mouth. I've proven I can be a leading indicator of nonsense, so don't expect me to tell you what I'll never use. I just might change my mind later.

You Can Never Have Enough Bandwidth. Ever.

On most days, I don't consider myself a real bandwidth hog. Most of my online activity consists of e-mail, Web browsing and the occasional YouTube video. I'll use FTP to upload and download files to my Web site or the server at the office, but nothing too intensive. Practically the most-intense things I'll do would be uploading videos to YouTube or sending photos to SmugMug or Flickr. I can practically guarantee that Comcast doesn't blink an eye at my activity. But on the rare occasion I hit a wall on bandwidth, and see slowdowns, it reminds me I don't have infinite throughput - just like I don't have infinite storage capacity. (See: Terabytes and Terabytes of Data At Home. Petabytes Next.)

Tonight, as we were winding down from Christmas and putting the twins to bed, my wife and I realized we finally had some time to relax. After a holiday rush and full days, we surprisingly haven't had too many hours to take in entertainment. So I checked in on the TiVo, and headed back to Amazon Unbox to give the service another chance. We found one movie and set it up for download.

Not done, I hit "Input" on the TV, and checked the Apple TV, finding two films to download. One started to download immediately, and the other was queued up.

Meanwhile, the TiVo light glowed red to record a program at 8. The blue light signalling a download from Amazon stayed lit. As no program was done, I checked and found a Law and Order episode on one TiVo which I could transfer from the bedroom unit to the living room unit. We're watching that now as the films download.

If that wasn't enough, I opened up my laptop and... shock and surprise... none of my Web sites are loading. But that won't stop Apple's Time Machine from doing its regular backup to my Time Capsule in the other room.

So, in tally, my bandwidth is being hogged by:

• 1 movie download from TiVo/Amazon
• 1 standard definition television show download via TiVo
• 1 high definition movie download on Apple TV
• 1 standard definition TV show transfer between TiVos
• Backup from my laptop to Apple's Time Capsule

Even if I have top of the line broadband access here at home, it's no surprise we saw failures on the Web and inaccessible e-mail, as I had flooded my available pipe. Even though I'm not a P2P or BitTorrent junkie, I can still find a ceiling.

So, is the fault mine for hitting the "order" button too many times on the TV? Should I buy once at a time, in order, to do a favor to the cable company, or should I push the limits and always expect more?

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Gray Family

Happy Holidays! Download the 2008 Letter in PDF
It has been an incredible 2008 to say the least for our family. It's clear the #1 event for us was the arrival of Matthew and Sarah on June 20th. We had finally told the world the twins were coming, back in February, once we thought it was 'safe'.

And to be honest, while we were so excited and wanted to tell the world about our twins last year at this time, we were being quiet on the matter. That's why there was absolutely no Christmas letter in 2007! How to feign ignorance? So, retroactively, our apologies.

On top of the twins' arrival, we did manage to have some fun this year. Clearly, the blog gained a bit of visibility in 2008, its third full year, and we enjoyed meeting some amazing people and entrepreneurs as a result. In March, we also attended Oakland A's spring training in Arizona, for our third consecutive year, and hope to keep the tradition up, with twins in tow, in 2009.

And as with prior years, many other items stayed the same. Same home, same cars, same job. Kristine took a year off from teaching, and may take another, if we're lucky. We want Matthew and Sarah to get as much mom time as possible.

So, without further ado, download our 2008 holiday letter in PDF here. Also available? Our 2006 and 2005 letters of Christmas past.

Happy Holidays!

The Christmas Story, As Told Through Twitter

JosephOfGalilee: AFK for a bit w/@MaryofNazareth. Headed to Bethlehem. #caesartax

JosephOfGalilee: @MaryofNazareth says no baby tonight. But can't be long now.

MaryofNazareth: Off to Bethlehem! Hope we find a good inn. @JosephOfGalilee waited until last minute. #caesartax

MaryofNazareth: Bethlehem is a zoo. @JosephOfGalilee says @InnKeeper1 claimed "no room". Uh-oh.

JosephOfGalilee: No room at the inn. @InnKeeper1 and @InnKeeper2 both. Kill me now. @MaryofNazareth not looking happy.

MaryofNazareth: RT: @JosephOfGalilee No room at the inn. @InnKeeper1 and @InnKeeper2 both. Kill me now. **Anyone???** #caesartax

JosephOfGalilee: @InnKeeper3 says 'no room', but to go to a stable. Like animals. @MaryofNazareth beside herself.

MaryofNazareth: Now at a stable. Surrounded by animals. Baby is coming. If not for baby, I wouldn't even talk to @JosephOfGalilee right now.

JosephOfGalilee: Baby on its way!

JosephOfGalilee: Baby has arrived! @MaryofNazareth says its name is Jesus!

JosephOfGalilee: Jesus now wrapped in cloth, placed in manger. @MaryofNazareth very tired.

Sheepmaster: WHOA. Just got visit by an angel. Said baby was born in Bethlehem. Going to check this out with @ShepherdDude and @Flockof240.

Flockof240: RT: @Sheepmaster: WHOA. Just got visit by an angel. Said baby was born in Bethlehem. Going to check this out.

ShepherdDude: @Sheepmaster @Flock240 that was wild. And sheep slept right through it!!! LOL

WiseOne: Big star looks to have arrived. @WiseTwo and @WiseThree, the night we were waiting for is here! A new king! #bigstar

WiseThree: RT: @WiseOne: Big star looks to have arrived. The night we were waiting for! #bigstar

WiseTwo: On my way to meet up with @WiseOne and @WiseThree. Bringing myrrh. #bigstar

MaryofNazareth: Jesus has arrived! Tired.

MaryofNazareth: Shepherds coming to the stable? What now? @JosephOfGalilee going to see.

ShepherdDude: With @Flockof240 @Sheepmaster. On way to stable in Bethlehem after visit from an angel. Crazy!

Sheepmaster: Stable is in sight. Nervous.

JosephOfGalilee: Shepherds say they saw an angel and came to see baby Jesus. @Flockof240 seems nice.

WiseThree: Looking to meet new king. First will see @KingHerod with @WiseTwo and @WiseOne to see if star prophecy was right. #bigstar

WiseTwo: @WiseThree and @WiseOne are here. @WiseOne brought gold and @WiseThree has frankincense. Hope my myrrh is ok. #bigstar

WiseOne: Meeting with @KingHerod went okay. Doesn't know of new king but asked us to report back. Back on the trail with @WiseTwo and @WiseThree. #bigstar

WiseTwo: Star in the East is bigger than I have ever seen. @WiseOne @WiseThree #bigstar

JosephOfGalilee: More visitors on their way. Three this time. @Flockof240 @ShepherdDude and @Sheepmaster with @MaryofNazareth and Jesus.

JosephOfGalilee: This night is nuts. #caesartax

WiseThree: Met @JosephOfGalilee and @MaryofNazareth. Gave gifts to the baby king at stable. Leaving now.

Flockof240: Just saw three magi and the child who would be king. Long night. Headed back to pasture.

JosephOfGalilee: The visitors said they were magi. Brought incredible gifts. @MaryofNazareth and I finally calling it a day. What a day.

MaryofNazareth: @JosephOfGalilee says we have to go. Can't tell you more now. @FatherOfJoseph @MotherofMary

Spread Christmas Cheer With an Animated Twitter Avatar

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

While searching through various profiles on Twitter lately, I realized a select few had realized a small secret with Twitter. In browsing those profiles, Twitterati such as @ijustine and others I noticed had animated profile pictures, some even larger than the default 100x100 pixel standard profile avatar we're used to seeing. The animated profile pictures were a unique way to make their profiles stand out amongst the many other profiles I was reading amongst my friends list on Twitter. They were also a great way to spread the Christmas cheer.

I decided to try this on my own, and was unsuccessful on my first try. It appeared as though these profiles were either a fluke, taking advantage of a previous flaw in Twitter's profile image upload process that no longer worked, or they were clue on a secret I wasn't aware of. Then I came across this post on Twitter's GetSatisfaction page and I realized I was just not trying hard enough.

How to Create Your Own Winter Snowfall Profile Picture

Here's how I made mine. Creating the image takes a little PhotoShop knowledge, or you can just do a search and steal your own graphic from elsewhere on the Web. This is the best way I know how to do it - please share if you know better! Here's how to roll your own in PhotoShop - this was all done on a Mac in CS4:

1. Download the Snowfall PSD - I found these files of animated snowfall you can load right into PhotoShop. Decompress the file, then open one of them in PhotoShop, and now we need to get your profile picture behind the snow.
2. Click File->Open, and select your profile image to have in the background. It will open in a new tab or window within PhotoShop. Choose your little arrow selector (I'm not a PhotoShop expert - I'm not sure the "official" name for this), and drag, then drop your image into the main Snowfall PSD window you originally opened. It should create a new layer with your profile image in it (if not, create one, and re-apply the image to that layer). Now, resize your image to fit the existing canvas.
3. You should see a window with a list of frames for the animated graphic. If not you'll need to enable that window (we won't cover that here). With the new layer and your profile image, you'll need to delete the extra starting frame with that profile image. Once deleted, select the new first frame, then make sure the background image frame is shown (the little "eye" should be selected), and the first layer should be the only one displayed (again, with the little "eye").
4. Take your little magic wand selector, and click in the black background. The snowflakes should all be selected.
   Now hit your "delete" button. (Again, be sure the layer 1 is selected, or you'll get the wrong snowflakes selected) You should now see the first frame's snowflakes in front of your profile picture.
5. Now, select the second frame, and then ensure your profile image background, and second layer is showing, and the first layer is turned off. Repeat step 4, and you'll see the second frame with your profile image background and second frame snowflakes in front of it.
6. Repeat for the remaining frames and layers.
7. Now, click "File", and "Save for Web and Devices", choose to export as the preset "GIF 128 No Dither". Then, in the colors' dropdown select 256 (so we get the full spectrum). Click Save, and then save to a file you can remember. You've now got your animated gif!

Saving the File to Twitter

This is actually the tricky part. Unless Twitter fixes their upload process (which in that case perhaps it won't even be possible to do this, or else it will be much easier, depending on what they decide their policy to be), it won't work on your first try. For some, it could take up to 30 tries, so be patient, but your patience will be rewarded, I promise!

The first thing to do is go to http://twitter.com/account/picture, and delete your current profile picture by clicking "delete current". I found that even this takes several tries to get working, so if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Once deleted, you'll need to start the process of selecting the file from your computer (by clicking "browse"), then uploading the file to Twitter (by clicking "save"). You should see a "That's a nice picture!" message after you hit save and it is uploaded.

If successful, your new animated picture should display next to the browse box, and you need to do nothing else. However, you will probably not see that your first try, and even some times you'll get a "Twitter is over capacity" message. Ignore those, hit back, and restart the process of browsing to select your picture, then hitting save again, and again (again, it could take over 30 times!), until you see your animated gif appear.

Soon you'll have a beautiful animated Christmas gif like mine. You can check mine out on my profile - create your own and share it with us in the comments!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

This Christmas Eve, Go Internet Easter Egg Hunting

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

In lieu of repeatedly wishing everyone on the Internet a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays/Merry Kwanzaa, I have a special gift: Internet Easter Eggs. So Merry-Happy whatever you celebrate and enjoy!

makeuseof.com's Google's Top 10 Hidden Treasures


My favorite: Search Google for Once in Blue Moon
hehe2.net's 10 Cool Open Source Easter Eggs


My favorite: Ubuntu's ASCII cow
home.comecast's XP Secrets


My favorite: MS Paint's Image trails.
CNET News: "10 awesome Internet Easter eggs"


My favorite: Yahoo's Singing Yokel
TechRadar also has a massive post on Easter Eggs covering software, hardware, applications, and games here.

On a related note, FriendFeed is another great resource. Not Easter Eggs, but there are two very active rooms with heaps of useful information. The App Room is one of my favorites, where users share news, reviews, questions, and of course apps here. The Goodie Room has tips, tricks, shortcuts, hacks, and How-Tos. My favorites are Google / Gmail tricks here.

So whether you're single and have no family (like me), snowed in, avoiding the holiday crowds, agoraphobic, a Grinch, or you're just addicted to the Internet, these links should keep you preoccupied for the next few days.

Happy Holidays, everyone. :)

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Kakuteru - Roll Your Own FriendFeed On Your Own Site

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.

Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!

Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.

Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.

Okay, so what's so special about this?

• The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customization
• Semantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.com
• Related articles & tweets are shown for each entry.
• Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.

Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.

Oh, and did I mention it's open source?

Out of the box:


It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.



Extra integration:

Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.


Activity stats:

One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?

Final verdict:

I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.

Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

The Mobile Revolution Has Arrived

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Some people have been waiting for the mobile Web to arrive for years. The one mobile developer blog I have read over the years has been Russell Beattie.

Disappointingly, he gave up his dream of the mobile Web back in April of this year. This is disappointing for a few reasons. First, you always hate to see an entrepreneur quit. Second, Russell is a smart guy who has been hyping the mobile Web for years, but has just been too early for most people. Lastly, I think if he and his company were able to wait another year, there might have been hope.

Why would another year have made a difference? Well, it is the convergence of a few things. iPhone 3G was released with much hype this year. BlackBerry is finally making a move in the consumer space as well. The Curve has been a great device, but they are trying to compete directly with the iPhone with their new Storm. Google, Android and TMobile are also making an attempt to compete with the G1. All of these devices, but to a lesser extent with the Curve, are large screened, full browser, consumer oriented devices. Gone are the days of the "ooh, look how pretty the RAZR is".

Daniel Pritchett wrote on LouisGray.com about the changes that are coming as well:

The continued market growth of iPhones, Netbooks, Blackberries and other tools make mobile browser support more and more important. Here’s a quick thought experiment for you: If you’re running site analytics, look and see how many of your viewers run a resolution lower than 800x600. Nearly 6% of all visitors to this site are using these low-resolution devices. Most of them are using the 320x396 screen of the iPhone and iPod touch family.

In addition to the general usability of the new mobile browsers and screen size, the application stores put a centralized location to find new applications. This is a big change that was started by the iPhone, and it is a fantastic change. Blackberry and the Android based phones have also opened application stores in order to compete effectively. This has created a real economy for mobile applications, and is something that Mr. Beattie would have loved. Of course, the applications only fit on these phones because of the expanded memory. The iPhone 3G comes in 8GB and 16GB sizes. The Blackberry phones are typically shipped with 2GB, but accept removable storage in the form of microSD cards.

Of course, these advances in speed and memory allow us to use the phones as an mp3 player, or even to play streaming audio and video. This was not even remotely possible a few years ago. The network speeds were not available for streaming anything. Finally, the phones have dropped in price far enough that normal people can buy them. You no longer have to be a high ranking corporate employee to get a good Blackberry. Both the iPhone and the Blackberry phones have models at $200 with a service contract.

Why does all of this matter now? We could play music on our phones a few years ago. Blackberry has had email integration for several years as well. However, the convergence of all these things has only recently happened at a reasonable price point. Normal people, not just gadget geeks and early adopters, are finally getting comfortable with using their phone for more than phone calls. As an example, my wife inherited my Blackberry Curve. I just purchased it this summer, and a month later received a new Curve from my employer. So, my wife now has a Blackberry and is slowly getting addicted to it. She can now check email on a page that looks something like the internet version of her email. She loves the full keyboard for text messaging. She syncs the phone with Outlook every day to ensure that she has her contacts and calendar in both places. Could she do this with her 2 year old Motorola or Nokia phone? No, not really. Her old phone could barely play a ringtone that sounded like music.

That reminds me, I have to load her Curve with some music. She has been bugging me for days about that. Yep, you can do that now.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

TwitOrFit Says All You Blokes Are Ugly Twits, Worse than Dogs

Last Monday, TwitOrFit debuted as a HotOrNot clone for Twitter, letting you rate people's profile pictures on a scale from one to ten, low making them a "Twit" and high making them "Fit". Now that the first week's results are tabulated, it looks like the Twitter community is overwhelmed by less than average looking men, myself included. How bad is the situation? Well, according to TwitOrFit voting, only seven male profiles rate above average (average being 5.0), and every single man trails the @officedog.

As part of TwitOrFit's offering at launch, the site offered a "Top 10" list of "Fits" and "Twits". If possible, you'd prefer to be on the first list and not the second.


The Ladies Outpoll All in TwitOrFit. Men? Not So Much.
Unsurprisingly the top 10 "Fits" are rather attractive women, as determined by crowd vote. The highest score is a 6.85, owned by @popgloss, with @hansenism coming in at #10 with a tally of 6.57.

In comparison, the #1 "Fit" guy in the world, according to TwitOrFit is the rugged @bobbyllew, who snagged a 5.58 rating, two places ahead of Mashable's Pete Cashmore, who has a respectable 5.32 score.

Yet, they all trail @officedog, whose 6.37 score is 14% better than @bobbyllew, and who has held the #1 Guy position since launch.


I Can Now Assign a Numerical Score to My Ugliness
So what does this mean? Are all Twitter men a sad lot? Are the male TwitOrFit users uglier than the normal? Or are we deserving, as a whole, of our low scores? My profile picture, likely too serious, lags at a mere 2.77 on an average score from 38 users. Are the ladies this aggressive in marking guys down, or did other guys rate down their competition? Curious all around.

TweetDeck Readies New Release, Slimming Down & Adding Services

In TweetDeck's five months of public availability following the Adobe AIR Twitter client's debut in July, the product has seen significant usage growth, battling for market share against competition like Twhirl, and becoming the standard for power users of the microblogging service who want to see all their friends' updates as well as search terms, and have the ability to group followers at the same time. On Monday, PR 2.0's Brian Solis measured TweetDeck as having delivered a full 3.8% of all tweets, and I've personally seen this number as high as 6%, according to TweetStats.


The New TweetDeck: Click for Full Size
As with any service that gains in popularity, demands become greater on the product's developers, and TweetDeck is no exception. Author Iain Dodsworth is planning to release a new version of the product on December 24th (tomorrow), with a long list of new features, including:

• Adding sent direct messages to the direct message (DM) column.
• An added spell checker
• The addition of a "narrow columns" option
• Integration of TweetShrink
• The introduction of new TweetDeck Services

TweetDeck Will Display Narrower Columns
One of the few concerns I've seen voiced regarding TweetDeck is that it can be a screen real estate hog. Once you start with a column showing your friends' tweets, add a Replies column and Direct Messages, pretty soon you're giving up a good chunk of your monitor. With that in mind, Dodsworth has both updated the interface to make it slimmer, but also added the aforementioned "narrow columns" option. The addition of sent DMs in the DM column also makes sense, essentially showing the conversation in full, assuming you are both sending and receiving DMs with the same Twitter users.


The New TweetDeck Integrates Spell Check
The addition of TweetShrink to TweetDeck also helps to bail you out in the event you have something to say, but just can't seem to keep it down to a mere 140 characters.

For example, the note: "Will it reduce the number of characters in my message or tell me what to cut?" is shortened to "Will it reduce the number of characters in my msg or tell me what 2 cut?", saving me five characters. Who knows when that could come in handy? It also reduces common words like "and" to &, for example.

Also interesting is the addition of the first of what is expected to be many TweetDeck Services, that enables additional information from outside of TweetDeck to be displayed. In this version, there is an undocumented feature that injects your follower data in the top of the replies column as the application is started, powered by twittercounter.com. Dodsworth promises more will be integrated along the way.

TweetDeck has already become the go-to Twitter application for many of Twitter's most-active users, including Ross Mayfield, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Darren Rowse, Mark Krynsky and Guy Kawasaki. Dodsworth hopes the latest updates will gain even more conversions, and you can already see the buzz building around the new TweetDeck in Twitter:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TweetDeck

You can expect to see the newest version of TweetDeck hit the Web on Christmas Eve, December 24th.

Techfuga: If Techmeme and AllTop Had a Baby

Where do you get all the day's tech news? For many people, including me, it's Google Reader. For others, they look to Techmeme or other sites that aggregate the headlines from around the tech newswires and blogosphere. But as there are a seemingly infinite number of news sources and social news tools, from Digg to Reddit, Hacker News, ReadBurner and others, aggregation sites are getting a second look. A new site, launching this morning, called Techfuga, not only aggregates all the leading blogs, but also those social services as well - including FriendFeed. The result is a very busy site that has hundreds of links to the day's news, from a wide variety of sources.

Techfuga's mission, like many others before it is to provide "the ultimate top tech news from around the Web." On launch, the site has aggregated 40 different technology news aggregators. It then separates those aggregators into three types: "Human aggregated based on submission and voting/sharing", including Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Readburner and FriendFeed; "Solely based on algorithms", including Techmeme and Google News, and "Editorial human-aggregated", including TechCrunch and Ars Technica. As you might guess, the result is pretty busy. The data's there, but like with Guy Kawasaki's AllTop and PopURLs before it, you might spend as much time scrolling down to find the article you want to read as you eventually spend reading.



Like Alltop, Headlines from Across the Web Populate Techfuga.
Beyond the simple headlines, Techfuga groups related stories (as Techmeme does) and attempts to link to the discussion pages of items that are indexed. They also, like Techmeme, say they offer an algorithm that determines "Top Stories".


Techfuga Correctly Found Linkage Between Stories
After midnight on Tuesday, Techfuga correctly found that Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins' article "FriendFeed: Like Most Things, Good in Moderation [Scoble’s Intervention]" was related to a FriendFeed post by Robert Scoble, "Oh, oh, @techcrunch thinks I need a friendfeed intervention!". That in turn, led to related items at TechCrunch and Scoble's blog. So, in theory, the algorithm works. It's not the prettiest I've ever seen, but if you assume that Techfuga is the superset of data, incorporating Techmeme as one of its sources, it does have a ton of data to work with, and as many early versions of sites have shown, cleaning up the GUI can be easier than discovering the content initially.


You Can Search The Full Techfuga Archive for Keywords
Techfuga's value is also found in its search engine. Searching Techfuga also searches through its many different sources, so when I performed a vanity search to see if I ever came up, responses came through Propeller, BuzzTracker and ReadBurner, and did so quickly. Broader searches, even outside of tech, like one for "Baseball", showed similar diversity.

Techfuga opens its doors this morning, so find it here: http://techfuga.com/.

15 Things About Unlocking the 3G iPhone You May Be Afraid to Ask

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

A lot of us mobile geeks have been talking about the 3G iPhone unlocking software release, due out on New Year's Eve. Yesterday, the Dev-Team released a demo video of said software, 'yellowsn0w', working its magic by effortlessly switching the 3G iPhone from AT&T's network to T-mobile's, and actually made a call.

...well this information sounds great but it confused a lot of my friends that have iPhones. You see, most of my offline friends are non-geeks, but keep up with iPhone-related news. So when they heard about the unlocking, they sent inquiring IMs, SMSs, and e-mails. Even peers asked me privately via Twitter DMs, e-mail, and Facebook messages to explain in detail, and understandably so. There are times I am scared to openly ask questions, in fear of being ripped apart by someone who knows more than me. There are also jerks who are intentionally rude to others online. Those people make me think twice before asking questions aloud. Even if this is the Internet, it is offensive when people are outright mean.

So if you have no idea what this unlocking stuff is, don't worry. You are definitely not alone. As much as I keep up with mobile industry news, I still learn something new everyday. That said, instead of responding to every email, IM, DM, etc., etc., I consolidated the 15 most frequently asked questions here:

1. What is unlocking?
AT&T and Apple signed an agreement that Apple will only distribute the iPhone to AT&T in the US. So even if the iPhone uses a SIM card, it can only be used with AT&T's SIM, hence the phone is locked. Dev-Team's software, unlocks the phone and that is why the video shows the phone making a phone call on T-mobile's network.

2. Is the unlocking software offered by Apple?
Despite their misleading name, Dev-Team is not affiliated with Apple.

3. What do I need to do in order to unlock the iPhone?
After purchasing an iPhone, you will need to Jailbreak it. Jailbreaking = hacking.

4. I don't know anything about Jailbreaking, help?
MacRumor's user forums is a good place to start, and of course Google. (Don't worry, the link will take you to the search results, not Google's start page.)

5. Is it illegal?
I am not qualified to give definitive answer about legalities. I would contact a lawyer (if you are really concerned) and/or read the iPhone's EULA (End User License Agreement) online or download the PDF (Pay close attention to section two, "Permitted License Uses and Restrictions")

What I can say for sure is this.

Apple has the iPhone's firmware protected by the Copryight Right act and finding ways to get around using it (circumventing) is violating a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) code. However, the Copyright Office issues exemptions once every three years and for now, unlocking phones for the "sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network" is legal as long as you own the phone. Source 1, 2, 3, and 4. Whether Apple or AT&T decides to sue you or not is a different story. Also, keep in mind using Apple's apps without paying for them (Google Maps, Weather, for example) is piracy, therefore illegal.

6. Will I get in trouble with AT&T?
The 3G iPhone is $599 and $699, retail. The $199 and $299 is a discounted price with a two year AT&T contract. If you purchase the phone with the discounted pricing and Jailbreak it, you will violate AT&T's T&Cs.

7. Will I be arrested if I get caught violating AT&T's T&Cs?
Not that I know of. But you may be banned for an Apple store for life. But I can try putting you under citizen's arrest if you insist. (kidding)

8. Can I use it on Sprint, Verizon, Alltel, Nextel, et al.?
No. The iPhone works on GSM. The only two GSM (non prepaid) networks are AT&T and T-mobile.

9. Will this mess up my phone?
Apple and AT&T do not support Jailbroken/Unlocked phones. If you encounter an issue, they will not help you. It also voids the warranty. If you are comfortable with tweaking your phone and problem solving potential issues, then Jailbreak and unlock away!

10. So I am going to unlock my phone, now what?
After Jailbreaking, you need cell phone service. If you choose T-mobile, simple swap the SIM like Musclenerd did in the video.

11. Which plan do I choose?
I know a few people with Jailbroken iPhones on the T-mobile network. They have a voice plan with either a BlackBerry or Sidekick data plan. Again, this is at your own risk. Personally, I would go to a T-mobile store and ask a sales associate. For pricing, please go to T-mobile's site here.

12. I signed up for AT&T in July and only five months into my two year contract. What are my options?
If you want to use your phone on a different network, you would need to break your contract or keep paying your AT&T bill, while using another GSM provider.

13. Why would I want to Jailbreak my phone?
You would be freed from AT&T. If you travel internationally, you can use a prepaid SIM, instead of paying AT&T the outrageous roaming rates. Plus, you will have a Jailbroken phone, so you can install applications that aren't from the iTunes App Store.

14. Cons?
You are stuck with AT&T. You are no longer protected by Apple. Any help you need, would be from the Jailbreaking Community. And your phone will not work on T-mobile's 3G's network, since AT&T and T-mobile are on different frequencies. Meaning, you paid for a 3G iPhone that will not be running on a 3G network. That is, assuming they (Dev-Team) came up with a way to force the iPhone to change its frequency to 1700MHZ (T-mobile's frequency).

15. If I Jailbreak, do I have to leave AT&T?
You don't have to, but remember, if you have a problem with your phone do not bring it into the store because it is in violation of the T&Cs.

And there you have it. 15 of the most asked questions from my loved ones. I love them so much, instead of responding to the emails, texts, and IMs, I will direct them here.

So, are you going to Jailbreak and unlock your iPhone? Is yours Jailbroken? Looking forward to your feedback, inquiring minds want to know!
(image via here)

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Scrapplet Sets Up Blank Canvas to Mash Up Web Activity

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

10 Things I Wish I Would Do Better On the Web Come 2009

To most readers here, it's no secret I'm fairly active online. I try to keep up with the news by absorbing a strong amount of feeds in Google Reader, and then share the best of those with you on my shared links blog. I try to keep the blog consistently published with good insight, both from me and the rapidly-expanding team of contributors. I attempt to be visible and participate in a small array of social networks, from Facebook to Twitter to Friendfeed, Socialmedian and Strands. I try to answer e-mail as it comes in, and monitor or reply to comments. But I know I'm not doing a perfect job. If I only had more hours in the day, and made this my priority, here are some of the things I wish I would do better on the Web, and things I'll be paying more attention to as the calendar flips from 2008 to 2009:

1) Make More Comments on Original Blog Posts

Every day I come in contact with hundreds and hundreds of new stories. The vast majority of them I read in my RSS reader. I click through a small percentage, share a different percentage and e-mail others. I am also encountering many other new stories via FriendFeed and other social aggregators, exposing me to new ideas and news.

But while I already know I am not reading enough stories at their source, I'm certainly not participating and commenting enough. I need to make more time to do this in 2009.

2) Respond to More Comments on louisgray.com

Some days I do this well, and other days, not really well at all. A while ago, I talked about whether comments on blog posts were conversation, or just replies, and I find too often I lean toward the latter. Disqus makes it super-easy to blast through comments and respond via e-mail, so I should do a better job of being engaged with the best audience on the Web in 2009.

3) Be More Interactive On Twitter

There's no one right way to use Twitter, as we mentioned earlier today, but I'm pretty sure the way I use it isn't perfect. I signed up to Twitter in early 2008 after being, for me anyway, a longtime holdout. It's likely that more than half of my Twitter posts are simply announcing new blog posts here, and I could do a better job of listening and engaging than simply broadcasting in 2009.

4) Spend Less Time on a Few Sites, and More Time on Many Sites

Being visible and active on social networks that have similar capabilities, like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Strands, is hard. It's no secret that there is a tendency to pick one or two places to build up a community and leave the others dry, and in 2008, I overweighted FriendFeed for sure. It makes sense that maybe I should dial back a bit on FriendFeed and spend more time in far-flung places in 2009.

5) Have More Time for In-Depth Reviews

At the beginning of the year, I feel I did a fairly good job of having the time to invest in fully reviewing new sites and services, to explain their every feature. From Toluu to ReadBurner to Feedly and Assetbar, it was not uncommon to show you every nook and cranny of a new site, so you could join it as an expert. But in the second half of the year, especially after the arrival of Matthew and Sarah, this time comparatively evaporated, making my reviews less detailed. I still try to do a good overview of new sites and iPhone applications, for example, but it'd be good to feel sharp about these reviews again in 2009.

6) Follow Up On Sites and Services After Their Launch

I want to avoid being a "hit and run" blogger, as I put it the other day, announcing something and then only covering them again if they had something major. Doing that, I feel, makes you a tertiary part of the story, and certainly not an embedded expert. I'd like to look back on the many different services that have either debuted here or been covered, and see how they have progressed in 2009.

7) Attend More Industry Conferences and Panels

Given blogging and the social media space is not my full-time job, I can't exactly say attending all the different events in the space is something that makes sense for my career or pocketbook. But I did get to attend Web 2.0 Expo in the Spring, and BlogWorld Expo in the fall, and enjoyed meeting many of the people with whom I'd only engaged online. I would like to make more time to see the industry mingle and participate in 2009.

8) Participate More Visiblity on Conferences and Panels

I've been lucky to learn that a panel I'll be participating in was accepted for the South By Southwest conference (SXSW) this upcoming Spring. This follows the panel I participated in with Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski, and a pair of panels and BlogWorld Expo this fall. As the blog has gained visibility, opportunities are making themselves available, and I would like to be less of a wallflower and more active in 2009.

9) Be More Active on Podcasts, Videoconferencing

Having blogged on the site for three full years now, showing I can put a blog post together and cover a story, or participate in social media is not a surprise. I also had the opportunity to participate in the Elite Tech News podcast earlier this year when it was more regular, and the ReadBurner podcast through the year. I think it would be fun to get the opportunity to showcase new entrepreneurs, bloggers and services using audio and video in 2009.

10) Highlight More Bloggers and Entrepreneurs

In 2008, one of the major focuses I had was to bring to light new bloggers that had previously toiled in obscurity. By launching the series of five new blogs each month, by bringing on a stable of talented writers and keeping a focus on startups and the people behind those services, we played a role in making people more known by the end of the year than the beginning. I don't want to lose momentum on this, and keep bringing new people to the fore in 2009.

These ten items are on my list because I believe, in combination, they will help my understanding of technology, the industry, and the people better. It will help me have a more rounded tech experience without being too focused on niche topics and insulated. 2008 saw some strides in many of these areas, but I know I need to step up my game in 2009, and I look forward to the challenge.

TheChanner.com - TV for Your Windows Mobile Phone

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


In the digital age that we live in, we are consumers on the go. We depend on and use our mobile devices for everything. Gone are the days where phones were just used for calling someone. Thanks to the rapid changes in technology, our mobile devices have become computers in a sense. We use them to check e-mail, take pictures, play music, play games and so forth. There is not much you can't do on a mobile device nowadays. Though we are not at the point yet where mobile devices will replace the pc, give it another ten years and then lets have this conversation.

Like many of you, I rely on my smartphone for just about everything. I check my e-mail, browse the web, frequently watch YouTube videos, and stream music on my device, but I have never watched TV on my smartphone. Recently, I came across TheChanner, an application currently only available for Windows PCs and mobile devices, which my smartphone happens to be. It's a free, simple application currently in beta, that streams TV channels from across the world.

I particularly like this application because they put some thought into it, and added some social aspects to it which I will cover in this post. For testing purposes I used my smartphone which is an HTC Kaiser running on Windows Mobile 6.


Once you have TheChanner installed on your phone, getting started is relatively easy. You need either a Wifi or 3G-enabled phone for it to work. There is variety of channels to choose from, but beware a majority of them are international. There are a few decent US based TV stations to choose from such as the Combat channel, Baseball channel and Rock television pictured in the above screenshot. The quality of the streams varies from great to horrible. It's dependent on the feed servers and your connection. I had a much better success rate compared to 3G, connecting via Wifi.

The streams can be viewed in half size or full screen mode. The menu bar will allow you to search for stations, favor a station, control the volume, and screen size. Clicking the info button will give you information about the particular channel, and also any comments left by other TheChanner viewers.

There are an impressive 163 channels to choose from. Most are Internet TV channels, which explains why I have never heard of them. While I love the selection of channels, I found no more than about 30 or so that were US-based channels. They offer a channel from just about every country on the globe, so you will definitely find something interesting to watch, that's for sure.

Clicking through 33 pages of channels is time consuming. You can filter the streams you want to watch by categories, countries and languages. As the service grows and adds more channels, you will be able to filter more effectively.

The social aspects are an added touch. You can leave comments on any stream, which are viewable to anyone else who is watching the channel. You can also share a particular station with your friends. Sharing a station is done by sending an SMS message, email, or you can beam the station using bluetooth or IR.

Final verdict:

The application has potential and beats the socks off any Web site-based viewer that lets you watch TV channels, but it's still a little rough around the edges as with any beta. I want to see more channels added, specifically US based ones. CNN India is nice, if you happen to live in India, but what about CNN United States? The other thing I was not too thrilled about was adding a shortcut to start TheChanner on my phone's home screen. Unless that was an option I selected, which I'm almost positive I did not, don't force it to be an icon on my home screen, let me choose. All in all the application is worth checking out, if you are looking for free streaming tv on your Windows Mobile device give it a shot. You can also always install the application to a Windows desktop PC, if you don't have a Windows Mobile device.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Social Media Advertising: Crossing the Streams

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Can you hear it? That's the sound of social media companies scrambling, hustling, and scraping to find new revenue-generating models to beat back the hounds of this wacky economy.

Most recently, we're starting to see talk of experimenting with the insertion of advertisements into what users normally expect to be ad-free content streams. In movie metaphor terms, it's time to look to Ghostbusters for inspiration.

As we all know, Dr. Peter Venkman (played by the amazing Bill Murray) advised that the streams of the ghostbusting team's Proton Packs were not to be crossed… right up until the end of the movie, when they had run out of ideas in defeating the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was a classic "it's so crazy it just might work" movie moment.

Are some social media companies reaching a similar "crossing the streams" decision point? For instance, Techmeme, the well-known technology news aggregator, has actually employed the practice of inserting "sponsored posts" into its stream of algorithmically generated story and blog post clusters for some time.


Techmeme Interweaves Sponsors' Posts With News
With a clear label of "sponsored post" and a different colored background on what is essentially an "advertorial" ad unit, Techmeme is leading out a new form of online advertising that other social media companies might be looking to adapt.

A story on TechCrunch this week called Digg's Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product was illuminating in a number of ways.

Key takeaway:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.

So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

I think allowing users to vote on ads that they like and have them "bubble up" to the top, social news-style, might be a rather clever addition to the Digg platform. That said, we can imagine that some of Digg's famously rowdy commenters would be incensed at the prospect of any advertising inserted into an area previously set aside for user generated story submissions.

How incensed is hard to say, but we can look at the reception that ad network Magpie received on Twitter to get an indication. To be fair, Magpie is an independent service - it has no formal affiliation with Twitter - that offers to sell "tweets" on Twitter user profiles. So its revenue model aims to cut microbloggers in on revenue, and not Twitter itself. The reaction thus far from the Twitter community has been pretty negative, and indeed signs are that Magpie is gaining very little traction.

That said, it's perhaps doubly interesting that Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams would mention inserting ads into Twitter streams as a potential revenue option during a recent interview. However, he noted that they are "looking into other options." Maybe it'll come down to a "don't cross the streams" decision?

It's worth considering if Internet audiences will be generally more accepting of seeing "sponsored posts" on Techmeme – or indeed inserted into the "blog stream" on well known tech blogs such as Mashable – versus user generated content-driven platforms like Digg and Twitter.

In any event, social media companies are going to be looking for new ways to keep the lights on and servers humming, and that will likely mean seeing more forays into previously ad free content zones.

What's your opinion on crossing the streams?

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

Will Twitter Go Mainstream? The Debate.

As is common on early adopter circles, much of the discussion Twitter is about Twitter, and much of the talk on blogs is about blogging. As many of us find value in these services we interact with every day, part of us is rooting for them to exit our little niche and go big. In 2008, one of the services that threatened to break through and tickle the edges of the mainstream was Twitter. (At least when it was up)

Given the expanded roster of writers on louisgray.com, we polled the team and asked for opinions on the pros and cons of whether Twitter would ever cross that chasm. As Rob Diana summarized, Twitter, at times, looks to be on its way to mainstream acceptance, but it still has a way to go:

	Pro	Con
Louis Gray	Popular people are on it and it's very similar to text messaging, which is understood.	It needs a lot of filtering and searching, and can get too busy. People post a lot of junk.
Rob Diana	Twitter is simple to use. It is just like IM so there is not much of a change for most users, and CNN (and others) are talking about it already.	Generally, there is too much noise for most people. The other issue is that most people don't want everything to be public.
Jesse Stay	It will not go mainstream and there are no pros, unless you consider its current state mainstream. For it to go mainstream it needs direction. Are they trying to hit a professional audience or a personal audience? For it to go mainstream in either (i.e. rival LinkedIn or Facebook in numbers) it needs to decide what it is.	They are not making money. It is too public, and it only fits a small niche of the population.
Mona Nomura	Twitter is already established, so much so that major publications are picking it up. You KNOW a service has made it, when an "Internet job" lists the service as a required skill. Also, the ease of publishing will make it easier for adoption.	Generally, it is unintuitive and 3rd party publishing tools are required. Some people may just not 'get it'.
Phil Glockner	Twitter, or a service very much like it, will go mainstream. When it does, we will see the downfall of SMS and ridiculous SMS charges (currently pricier than printer ink)	Twitter will not go mainstream until another service appears that *MAKES* Twitter a cellphone SMS gateway. In other words, you use your cell phone the same way to send a text, but instead of costing money and being sent directly, it goes through Twitter. There will likely be a small monthly fee.
Daniel Pritchett	Discovering interesting new people to follow is natural and easy. Your friends communicate with each other via @messages. This means it can keep growing and growing as long as new people are turned on to the service. If you join to follow @ricksanchezcnn you'll soon find yourself following 50 other people that you picked up in conversation.	The inability to scale an individual's attention kills twitter once you get past a certain number of subscriptions. Some people do not like the service if they can not keep up with every single tweet that their subs send. Until these problems are better solved many people will be wary.
Mike Fruchter	It has gotten a lot of exposure from CNN, and various mainstream press. There are thousands of applications built around it, and more being built. It has brought citizen journalism to new levels.	CNN exposure is nice, but I feel it's simply not enough to take it to the next level of mainstream. It is still a tool that is primary used by geeky/tech crowd. The few celebs who use Twitter are the exception. I still can not see my mother, father, or sister using Twitter, at least not yet. It still lacks the features needed to go mainstream, video, images etc. It also needs more exposure to go mainstream. If Google or Facebook bought them it might be a different story.
Eric Berlin	It is intuitive enough that "civilians" can hit the homepage, register, post their first post and add a few friends within a minute. They can also quickly "get it" and see benefits. It is on the fringes of mainstream exposure with CNN, mentions on the Daily Show, Barack Obama and other non-web celebrities.	The combination of other services (Facebook, FriendFeed, Yammer, and new ones not quite on radar yet) will steal Twitter's remarkable thunder and leave it behind.

As you can see, there are many different opinions on Twitter. It is somewhat familiar to mainstream users, as it is similar to instant messaging and text messaging. It may be easy to use, but there are some concerns that people will not "get it". You may need to use a third party client to efficiently use Twitter, but there are also many applications built on top of Twitter's API.

Everyone seems to agree that Twitter can be more than a little noisy. In order to counter that problem, Twitter needs more features like groups, filtering and more integrated searching. However, it needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Does it want to target personal users, and add features like including images, video or other files? Or does it want to make a play for professional users?

It's fun to speculate, and looking at Twitter opened a few thoughts in terms of how each of us interact with the service differently. There's no one right way to use Twitter, or any service. But we're seeing it change under our feet as it grows and gains in popularity. The question is, will it collapse under its own weight, or remain too geeky for it to ever belong in the real world?

i.TV Hooks Up With TiVo for iPhone DVR Scheduling

i.TV, the online TV and movie schedule application for the iPhone, which we covered during its launch and subsequent addition to the iTunes store, has added the ability for users to not just see what's on, but to add those items to their TiVo, anywhere they are. Combined with the company's recent addition of synching with Netflix, and another announcement today that you can buy movie tickets, i.TV has become an on the go digital hub connecting you with your entertainment, wherever it may be.

If you're unfamiliar, i.TV is essentially a live guide to your TV schedule, browsable on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Let the application know where you live, and your cable set up, and you can see the current schedule, or choose a future time and see what's coming. You can rate items, or even add a review of a show, directly from the phone, or see other reviews.


i.TV Hooks Up Your iPhone with Netflix and TiVo
Now, the service has added support for Netflix and TiVo in your settings. Link to your TiVo account, and you can add items to the TiVo DVRs you have registered with TiVo.com.


i.TV Links to Your TiVo Account and Registered DVRs
Upon registering, every single show you browse has a little TiVo icon. Click the icon, and you get the option to "Record" the show, and can even add padding before or after the show, if you want to be sure to catch the ending or account for any timing shenanigans with the network.


Adding a Show to TiVo Via i.TV, With Confirmation
Once you've registered a recording, an e-mail can be sent to your account and let you know it has been confirmed, just like remote scheduling of your TiVo through TiVo's online site. The addition of TiVo services, given my recent TiVo HD XL purchase, and continued fanboyism of the Alviso company, puts i.TV back in the lead over What's On TV?, who we also covered at the end of November.

The full press release from i.TV can be found here: i.TV Adds DVR Remote Record, Streaming Video and Movie Ticket Purchasing. You can find the i.TV application for free on the iTunes store here.

Terabytes and Terabytes of Data At Home. Petabytes Next.

Depending how old you are, or how early in your life you started using a computer, you can no doubt remember using floppy disks that save data in the kilobytes, hard drives in the megabytes, and squeezing every last byte out of your RAM. With file sizes increasing, and people wanting to store more and more data, not just at the office, but at home, it's not uncommon for people to be amassing hundreds of gigabytes, or even terabytes of data in their homes, for photos, music, television and all their electronic data. With some recent purchases in our home, I'm fairly impressed how much data space we have at our availability - and can't help but wonder what these increasing capacities could mean for the future.

The MacBook Pro I am typing this post on has 200 GB of hard disk space. My wife's MacBook has 80 GB of space, and we have an older MacBook hiding somewhere with its own 30 GB hard drive - assuming it still works. So that gets us to 310 GB right there.

When I purchased my iPhone I also got the Apple Time Capsule, a 500 GB model, racking us up to 810 GB. And in the living room, we have a TiVo HD, with 160 GB hard disk capacity, bringing us to 970 Gigabytes in total.

As of this week, we also just upgraded our old Series 1 TiVo to the new TiVo HD XL, which by XL means a whopping terabyte of disk space, good enough for 150 hours of HD programming, and bringing our running total to 1.97 Terabytes (so far).

Add on to those 1.97 terabytes an older 60 Gigabyte iPod, a 10 Gigabyte iPod, a 16 Gigabyte iPhone, and about 4 iPod Shuffles with a Gigabyte of space each lying around, plus a few digital cameras, and you're easily above 2 terabytes, even when taking into account the fact you'll need 2,048 gigabytes to get there.

The available disk space will absolutely effect my behavior. I won't see any reason to stop taking photos of Matthew and Sarah as they grow older. I don't have any real reason to delete shows from the TiVo I would consider watching again. And I can rest assured knowing that even if I delete a file from my laptop, or that of my wife, that it is backed up on the Time Capsule for later retrieval.

But if I were to take things even further - why not save every voice mail that ever is left on our home phones? Why not make all my calls on Voice Over IP and save every single one for later retrieval? Why not set up video recording so we can watch the kids' every move and just double click to pull up the video in high definition? Why not make a digital copy of every web page, video, and picture I see on the Internet - ever? We're getting to the point that disk space and massive amounts of it are dirt cheap.

Working at a storage company (in the real world), I find myself talking in terabytes and petabytes all the time. Check my about page for more on that. We are living in a world where data and what you do with that data can differentiate your business, and your speed of access to that data, its manipulation and retrieval can set you apart from your rivals. But the terabyte and petabyte advancements have trickled home. I wonder if having massive amounts of storage space can make us better parents, friends and neighbors. It's possible.

Posty Author's Guide to Unfollow Uninteresting Twitterers

Guest Post by Cesare Rocchi of Posty

There are many suggestions on who to follow on Twitter, enabled also by tools like Twubble and Twitdir.

But as far as I know there are much fewer posts about un-following. Here is my take.

Recently I started "cleaning up" my Twitter account. I remember my initial enthusiasm which ended in following more than 1,500 people with no criteria. The only criterion I remember was: "the more, the better." After a while I asked myself: what am I using Twitter for? To stay in touch with people. About what? About my interests.

What are my interests? Adobe Flex/Air programming, Apple, iphone, music, geekness. In the past, when I added people I checked whether her tweets were about one of these topics. Recently I started to watch with more attention the tweets appearing in my home. Posty helped me in this process. Here is a list of questions which helped me filtering Twitterers by looking at their tweets.

What language is this?
When I stumbled upon a tweet with "strange" characters or words I opened that profile and then asked: does she regularly post in this language? If yes then unfollow. Moral: how can I be interested in what is expressed in a language that I don't understand?

Is she active?
I usually remember pictures, even if they are small like stamps, like those of Twitter. I started opening less "popular" avatars appearing in my home to check whether a Twitter was active or not. To check "activness" I asked: how frequently does she post? I ended up with unfollow unfrequent Twitteres, those who did not update the profile in one week, those who posted once in the last month, etc. Moral: follow those who are present and active.

Does she reply?
You might be in front of a very frequent Twitterer but ... does she post, post, post without replying? Try to figure out some replies/post ratio. If it tends to zero you are in front of somebody who just wants to "tell", "be there on the internet", "promote her service", etc.

Moral: try to follow thos who are "interactive". Isn't Twitter a social service? Then it is a matter of relationship, sometimes you say, sometimes you listen and reply. If you always say, sorry but you are not for me.

Is her content interesting?
If the posts of a Twitterer are mainly about knitting and you hate knitting why are you following that Twitterer? (no offense to all the lovers of knitting :). In this case the profile of the Twitterer can help. If she is a html/css programmer it is likely she will post something about that sometimes. To find it out, again, check the last tweet.

Are the graphics the default ones?
If a user does not personalize at least a bit of the layout this might be a symptom of the behavior: "I have Twitter though I do not use it".

Following / Followers ratio
This can be a delicate topic. Without getting into math formulas, it is intuitive that if a user has 23,000 followers, she is famous. If, at the same time, she follows 10 people, this might indicate that she does not care much of following back her audience, or have a look at a fresh home each time she checks in Twitter. It is also likely that she just publishes tweets and replies very rarely.

A more balanced ratio signals a more equilibrated participation to the "life in Twitter".

If, on the contrary, you follow more than you are followed (e.g. follow = 10 and followers = 1), this can be the result of the attitude: "If I follow I get followed". To some extent this is true: there are people who tend to follow back by default. But if you start an account from scratch and follow 2,000 people I bet you get followed back by 200 at most.

How many updates? How frequent?
There are companies out there with a really inactive Twitter account. I think it was created to follow the boom of Twitter, to say "I am there", but with idea in mind probably. If you see that the last update is from six months ago you probably do not want to follow this user unless you know him personally and you are aware she is in a long busy period.

These guidelines have been elaborated with the goal of raising up the Twitter grade of my Twitter accounts. The tools I have found useful are friendorfollow and Posty.

Posty 1.7 was released today, and you can find it here: http://spreadingfunkyness.com/posty/

Booty Blocks: Addictive Underwater Columns-Like iPhone Game

Games like Bejeweled, Columns and Tetris are mainstays for any small-time video game addict. Over the last year, with the advent of the iTunes application store, the iPhone has developed into a force to be reckoned with in the world of handheld gaming, taking on both Sony and Nintendo. And with that growth comes the introduction of new, innovative games that build on the well-known titles and take advantage of the unique features of the iPhone, including multi-touch and the accelerometer. Among the more fun games I've enjoyed is the new Booty Blocks - which landed on the store just yesterday.


Booty Blocks: Lining Up Same-Colored Boxes
Booty Blocks, developed by Planet Moon, starts out as the latest of the traditional falling block games, dropping individual colored boxes, or "pirate booty" from the top of the screen. When five like colors are connected, you double-tap on the phone to have the boxes explode, and free up even more space. But you'd be remiss thinking that this was just "yet another" game like this. Unlike just about every other game I've seen, which locks the blocks in place once they've fallen, you can move the boxes left and right, up and down, with the push of your finger. And you can even tilt the iPhone left or right to shift the full set of blocks at once.


Booty Blocks: Setting Combos and Blowing Stuff Up
When I first started playing Booty Blocks, I thought the game might almost be too easy. Connect the boxes, blow them up. Repeat. But of course, the game got harder. Not only did the boxes start to fall more and more quickly, but there were new wrinkles tossed in to make my job harder. New metal boxes would show up and impede the boxes during their descent. Two-square blocks would fall and leave gaps. New colors. And other boxes would require being blown up more than once to clear them from the screen. Then, kegs of dynamite would fall, which, when blown up, could hit the boxes sky-high.


Booty Blocks: Seeing the Crates Pile Higher
Before I knew it, I was having fun, and learning I could propel my score ever higher, as I cleared multiple combinations on the same screen, sweeping rows of blocks one way, and others another, all while more boxes fell. And while I did rack up more than half a million points, I have a feeling I'll do much better my second time around.

Booty Blocks, available for $1.99 from the iTunes store, is a great example of a new breed of iPhone applications that bring new interactivity, and show you don't need a keypad or many buttons to have a real video game experience.

To see a video of the game in action for yourself, check out Drew Olanoff's blog here: Booty Blocks for the iPhone and iPod Touch is out!

You Can't Afford to Lose Mobile Readers

By Daniel J. Pritchett of Sharing at Work (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The continued market growth of iPhones, Netbooks, Blackberries and other tools make mobile browser support more and more important.  Here’s a quick thought experiment for you: If you’re running site analytics, look and see how many of your viewers run a resolution lower than 800x600.  Nearly 6% of all visitors to this site are using these low-resolution devices.  Most of them are using the 320x396 screen of the iPhone and iPod touch family.

Respected publisher and all-around media thinker Tim O’Reilly insists that the tipping point has come:  “… if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on.”  Google blogger Matt Cutts succinctly demonstrates the worst-case scenario in mobile browsing:  If you’ve got a flash-only site, those iPhone users are just going to surf around you without a second thought.  Can you afford to lose them?  Not for long.How your site could be frustrating mobile usersGreat, so you’re now committed to making your site as mobile friendly as possible!  You’ll need to understand some common frustrations mobile users encounter when viewing sites and how to deal with them.  I’ll list the ones I’ve picked up in my years of browsing on handheld devices:

Load time:  Many contemporary blogs include third-party (such as this site and my own) include sidebar widgets, third party commenting systems, animated subscriber counts, and plenty of other things that load off-site.  You’re also likely to see an image or three in every post because images are known to increase user interest in reading posts.

Readability: Pile all of the widgets into a layout that’s designed to be read at 1024x768 or higher and you’ll find that you’re seriously taxing the bandwidth and processing power of the average mobile phone.

Navigation: Each mobile device has its own sacrifices in terms of navigation.  The iPhone’s multitouch screen makes zooming and resizing easy but iPhone users sorely miss a real live tactile keyboard.  You won’t find many iPhone/iPod users willing to type out more than a few lines at a time.  Other phones like the T-Mobile G1 have real keyboards but no multitouch.  The lowest common denominator of phones (that are going to be browsing at all) is probably something like my Motorola RAZR.  The RAZR lets me flip through lo-fi pages using the equivalent of a five-key keyboard: up, down, left, right, enter.Start making your blog mobile friendly today!If you’re here to learn how to make your blog more mobile friendly, you’re in luck.  The relatively simple format of most blogs – one post at a time in chronological order – lends itself well to the task of adding a mobile layout.  Here are a few of the more common blogging platforms and tips on how to “mobile-ize” them:

• WordPress has a series of plugins that will ease the process for you.  I use MobilePress and WPTouch.  Beware that you’ll have trouble integrating WPTouch alongside the popular WP Super Cache plugin. 

• Blogger doesn’t have the plugin architecture WordPress does, so you’ll have to either work a lot harder or settle for less in terms of mobile supoport.  Intersquash will “iPhoneize” any site that has an RSS feed at no charge.  Here’s the Intersquashed iPhone-friendly version of LouisGray.com:  You’ll notice that Intersquash shows only the latest items on a feed.  This won’t help a mobile reader who comes to your site looking for an older article. 

• TypePad doesn’t seem to have built-in mobile browsing support but there are some tips on providing your own mobile-friendly stylesheets at TypePad support.  This knowledge base article is from early 2007 so there may be some updated information on this front. 

• Tumblr has a dead-simple “mobile” feature – access it by adding “/mobile” to the end of your tumblog’s URL.  Check out the mobile view on Fred Wilson’s tumblog for a nice example.  The only complaint I have about Tumblr’s mobile support is that it strips out any customization you’ve done, such as adding the ability to comment on your posts via DISQUS or IntenseDebate.

Where should we go next? Now that we’ve started on the road towards making our sites more mobile friendly, let’s plan out our next steps.  At my blog I’ve noticed that the MobilePress and WPTouch themes put a great face on my posts, but they ignore a lot of my favorite user convenience features.  My “Share this” widget and the “related posts you might enjoy” plug-in don’t appear for mobile browsers.  It would be great to get more of these features supported by the mobile “face” of our sites.  Maybe I can track down the authors of some of these plug-ins and see what we can do!

Perhaps more important is the question of providing accessibility to the disabled.  How easily will blind or deaf visitors be able to read your content and navigate your site?  They’ll likely come armed with a few tools of their own to aid them in reading your posts but they surely deserve at least as much of your time and consideration as do iPhone users.  I personally have not yet looked into this on my blog, but I feel I ought to make it my next task.  The World Wide Web consortium has a Web Accessibility Initiative to point us in the right direction.  Good luck, and thanks for reading!

Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work

From Zero to Xing: Socialmedian's 2008 Drive to Acquisition

As has been widely reported, Socialmedian was acquired by Xing today for a purchase price of $7.5 million, an excellent return for the bootstrapped startup which had raised less than $1 million in funding. The success of Socialmedian has significant impact for me personally, as it is the first company to have debuted here on this blog, and see a successful exit. I see it as a real proofpoint for being invested in a story, rather than doing the typical "hit and run" announcement-fed, PR-driven stories typical on many other blogs who are driven by the day's news.

On April 8, 2008 (my birthday), we first told the story of Socialmedian: (Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha).

While other sites around the Web slowly picked up on the story, few were as invested as I was in not just reporting on the site, but using it in a big way. In a month's time, it was clear to me that the site was getting significant momentum, which I reported on May 13: (SocialMedian Is Growing Rapidly In First Month's Availability).

Later in the month, on May 29, in response to a comment from Robert Seidman, who said, "You could call deadpool on stuff like Social Median and Toluu right now," I said "Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget", and that we don't always know the full story behind a site, and their goals.

By the end of May Socialmedian underwent a redesign and got even more useful.

And as the site grew, for whatever reason, I maintained a higher than anticipated presence, trailing only the founder, Jason Goldberg, in terms of people following my updates. Surprisingly, Goldberg and team ran a contest that delivered a new iPhone to the two most popular non-employees on the site. Turns out I won, which I found out, as my bleary eyes checked out Twitter sometime around 5 a.m. during a kid's feeding when they were a month old. (See: It Appears I Won an iPhone 3G from Social Median!)

That was cool, but I was just as positive on the site as before - no more, no less, and I could see them continue to pound forward.

By the end of July, Socialmedian got out of invite mode, and opened in full beta. (See: SocialMedian Opens Up and Launches Beta). The expanded activity on the site had me noticing how many comments were taking place on the site, which I wrote up in early August: Hey Bloggers, We're Discussing Your Posts At Social Median!

And the company kept adding updates. On August 30th, I noted they Integrated With Google Reader for News Discovery, and by September 4, they expanded again, tagging on a feature they called "News Streaming".

The growth had guest poster Rob Diana say shortly afterward, that the Increased Activity Streams Boost Social Median's Chances.

On September 22, Socialmedian added the ability to alert users to times they were mentioned and extend to Twitter, with the launch of Replize. (Social Median Takes Guesswork Out of Online Mentions With Replize)

Not living in a bubble, Socialmedian surveyed its users to see their preferences, and on October 3rd, they delivered results that not only showed users' activity but where else they got their news. At the same time, the service was showing significant traffic growth across the board. (See: Social Median Surveys Early Adopters' News, Tech Preferences)

On October 7, Socialmedian introduced the ability to both like and dislike items.

On October 17, Jason pulled the covers back a bit and showed how they were able to continue to innovate while staying small: (Social Median Stares Downturn In the Face By Staying Small)

As a news site, Socialmedian, like all the rest, got sucked into the election in a big way. On October 29, a week before the vote, they launched a dedicated election news hub.

But while Socialmedian grew users and gained visibility, they didn't avoid controversy. Like other services, the breaking away of comments and original posts raised the ire of CenterNetworks' Allen Stern and others. We asked, in November, "Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?"

And just last week, in wrapping up what I believed were the top 10 new Web services that came to light in 2008, Socialmedian was way up on the list, at #2, behind only Twitter Search, formerly Summize. I knew Socialmedian was hot, and said I expected an acquisition by the first quarter of 2009. And it came very, very quickly, with this morning's news, further validating Socialmedian's model and differentiation from the many different services out there.

It has been exciting to have a front row seat to see Socialmedian develop all year long. Socialmedian is one of those sites this year that hit a sweet spot for me, both as a blogger and as a user, who found critical value in what Jason and his team were doing. That they have found success is fantastic, and something I hope will push the many other services we've worked with this year to keep going.

But as the above recap shows, they didn't get here by launching and waiting for millions of users. They worked hard and released early and often, and today's announcement is the result of their consistent efforts.

So who wants to launch on louisgray.com in 2009 and be part of a similar story? Let me know.

A Reformed Early Adopter Addresses the 3G iPhone Undecideds

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I used to be an early adopter, especially with all things mobile. I had to have everything first. From the Treo family (300, 600, 650), Hitachi's monster PocketPC, Samsung's compact Palm, MotoQ, I was addicted to all multi-tasking (mainly CDMA) phones and wasted invested a lot. I blame my Japanese genes, since in Japan, we go through electronics like new parents go through diapers. (That analogy was for you, LG)

Then, I grew-up. I was the cautious consumer for a few years, waiting for feedback before actually purchasing. I controlled urges. The only "new" technology I jumped on was MMS (multi media messaging) and stuck with the same handset for three years. A complete geek faux-paux. Finally, I was no longer an early adopter.

Until 2007.

If you remember, last year was a mobile junkie's dream and worst nightmare. The industry stepped up their phone games launching products and services targeted beyond business users. And it worked. 2007 changed the American mobile industry.

It was almost as though handset makers, carriers, software corporations and various sites and services sat around a round table to strategize a universal goal: convincing the American public, invest in a smart phone. NOW.

And that I did.

On Black Friday, in 2007, I reverted from a reformed early adopter, to the irresponsible consumer sheep enthusiast. I purchased and activated my Triage (at the time): Verizon's Voyager, AT&T's 1st gen iPhone, and T-mobile's BlackBerry Curve 8320. Yes, you read that correctly. I activated three phones, on three networks, and ended up with three bills. Verdict: all three were smarter, but not yet smart. T-Mobile's BlackBerry Curve and the iPhone were my winners and I had two handsets for a while. (Details here). After a few pointless months of wasting money, I came to my senses, de-activated my iPhone and stuck with the Curve. It was the better choice for me but I beat myself up for wasting money and re-reformed.

Please do not judge me. At least I recognize my addiction and can admit: I have a problem. That said, I wasn't interested in the new(er) BlackBerries, the G1 lacked something (something = hardware related, not platform), and sure as heck wasn't going to go back to the iPhone, since the first time around, I didn't have the best experience. With so much product announcements, I was planning to wait a little more before jumping on to the next wave of mobile goodness.

Then, I lost my phone.

I was forced to make a decision - and quick. Holding out was no longer an option. Since I am interested in mobile, I am familiar with the technologies, carrier pricing and differences, to handset features, functions, pro/cons. I have participated in many discussions (offline and online) about user experiences with tech and non tech people.

But one voice in particular was my main deciding factor. This individual and I have debated on the "iPhone vs rest" topic a few times -- with me on team "rest" and him on team "iPhone". He has looked me straight in my eyes and adamantly stated: "The iPhone is the only way to go." but as a "rest" advocate, I would find something, anything, to counter his statements. Though I would never tell him this (he already has millions of fans - literally, as in 2-3 million unique readers, and doesn't need more ego stroking) I especially hold his opinion in high regard. So his statement stuck. Combined with his and Louis' "There Are Two Phones In this World: iPhone and Not iPhone", I did it. I caved. I now own an iPhone.

And I am utterly blown away.

The improvement from the 1st and 2nd generations floored me. All the raves are true. And though it is not perfect, I can admit to myself and to him: "I was wrong. The iPhone is the only way to go." I am so completely enamored by the ease of use, applications, performance... the entire user experience, even when he rubbed it in my face on my Facebook with:


I've got nothing to say in return.
So if you are still undecided, it is ok. I completely understand. You are not alone. But do it. Make the switch. It will completely change your life.

Now say it with me: "iPhone or no phone."

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Fidelity Puts Lipstick On My Investment Pigs

Given the stock market's nonsense, it's a rare person who is happy with their 401k's performance, and I'm no exception. While my return has increased a good 10 percent or so from hitting bottom about a month ago, every dollar put into my Fidelity fund through the year has essentially been turned into sixty cents. With Americans feeling the pinch and looking to preserve cash and stay conservative, Fidelity e-mailed today to say they're changing the name of some of the funds I've been part of. The main change? Removing the word "Aggressive".

As the screenshot below shows, Fidelity is changing the "Fidelity Aggressive International Fund" to "Fidelity International Capital Appreciation Fund" and the "Fidelity Aggressive Growth Fund" to "Fidelity Growth Strategies Fund".


The reason, they write in an e-mail is to "create more consistency across the equity fund product line" although no changes are expected in the funds' objectives, strategy or management, an odd note, considering the Aggressive Growth Fund is down 43.85% this year, and the Aggressive International Fund is down a similar amount.

So... should I feel my money is safer, now that the word "Aggressive" has been replaced with "Capital Appreciation" and "Strategies"? I'm just hoping this isn't the first step, leading from "Aggressive" to "Capital Appreciation" to "Maintaining" to "Losing Slightly" to "Bankruptcy Quickening".

Thanks Fidelity! Good to know my money, or what's left of it, is safe and secure.

The Best Solution to Embargo Angst? Write Something Else.

As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. Today's flare-up, kicked off by one of the best discussion starters on the Web, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, isn't the first time embargoes have been slammed, and it certainly won't be the last time. Back in August, I discussed why I believed the embargo process was both broken, but necessary, and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb followed on with a great take of his own.

I think the bigger issue is not that embargoes are being broken - which they are by blogs both big and small - but instead, that there are a large number of sites who act like they are the only game in town, and that they must cover every single story.

To those guys, please stop. Seriously.

In the tech blogging sphere, there is a serious echo chamber. While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it's clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

Given the ease of news distribution, let's now write with the assumption that everybody reading your site is reading a few others as well. If you see a story broken by TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb or Mashable or VentureBeat or CenterNetworks, there's no need to pile on and become story number 18 on the topic. Let it go and write about something else - unless you have unique insight, unique quotes or access.

In my day job, I work with press releases and embargoes and reporters on a frequent basis. There is a need to be sure announcements go out when the products and partners are ready, or the customer is ready to take press calls. But Arrington is no doubt right that, as king of the hill, which TechCrunch is, some companies and PR teams are making coverage on the site practically mandatory, and near harassment of him and his team is no doubt occurring.

When trying to get coverage elsewhere, memorably one time in 2006 in Computerworld, I know I aggressively called the feature reporter every few hours until they finally picked up. After berating them for covering a competitor, and not our story, I got hung up on (no doubt deservedly so). I can only imagine being a TechCrunch reporter getting hit over and over by desperate firms, begging for coverage and honoring of their embargo.

A suggestion to those PR teams, please stop. Seriously.

Take your story somewhere else, to one of the many other tech blogs who write well, and will give your company or service its due. There are many new writers who have posts to file, and they want your story - and they will honor your requested embargo.

On this site, when I was running the whole thing myself, and now, with the great team of writers we have here, no embargo has ever been broken. On one occasion, I prematurely posted the Seesmic/Disqus integration news, having forgotten the day it was due, but I promptly deleted and reposted the next day. But one of the major reasons I haven't broken an embargo is because I strive, and ask my cohorts the same, to write things that are new. Cover new stories and new angles and be unique. If it has been covered somewhere else, let it go. We're not TechCrunch, and we're not trying to be.

TechCrunch doesn't have time for stories like Gawkk.com, which we covered last night. They probably aren't interested in stories like the one today on Resume Donkey, or Monday's announcement of Twit Or Fit. TechCrunch also doesn't have the leisure anymore of introducing great new blogs, as we do every month, or highlighting how to better use FriendFeed and Twitter, as we can. That's because they have taken on a new role, as a very real media company, and with their focus on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and other big companies, there's room down at the bottom for us small fry to find the stories that are in the cracks.

It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn't require a PR firm's input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don't think today's missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.

Proof Social Networks Are Not Useless - Especially FriendFeed

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Yesterday, AppScout reported that the recently-released Mac OS X 10.5.6 Update is crashing users' systems. As an OS X user, I was concerned. Long ago (well, during my Windows years), I picked up the habit to wait before updating anything computer-related, and that's worked out well for me. And frankly, since switching to a Mac, I can happily report I've had no issues. Needless to say, the combinaton of "Mac + OS X + Update + Crash" in one sentence got me more than a little worried.

After reading the article, I applied the one useful thing I learned from school: question everything. So instead of looking through the comments of that piece written by people I do not know, then double checking that consensus by Googling for even more sources and view points, I asked the question on the social networking sites, specifically FriendFeed, since it is the most intuitive and easiest place to hold discussions. (for me)

I was floored by the feedback. From the mountain of responses (thanks, everyone!) two I learned something new from:

"Three systems so far. all updated fine. I used the [huge] combo updater and did Repair Permissions before and after the install" - Glenn Batuyong

"I always recommend people use Apple's Combo Updates for Mac OS X upgrades. If you own a jailbroken or unlocked iPhone I would not recommend upgrading http://tr.im/2dc1" - Vinko

Read the entire exchange here.

The best thing about the responses is this: Feedback from real people I know. Because I interact with several or all of the people who left comments on a close to daily basis, we have a rapport; a level of trust, and confidence I do not have with sites and services found via Googling.

That OS X question is not an isolated case. My social networking peers have helped me out on numerous occasions. We've discussed:

• Etiquette (What is the cut off age where it is not atrocious bad manners to get baby sexes mixed up?)
• Software (Contemplating installing TweetDeck)
• Cooking (Chocolate Cake in Five Minutes and recommendations for organic peanut butter)
• Fun facts (How fast do you read?)
• Entertainment: (What movie makes you cry no matter how many times you watch them?)
• Economical issues: (Should Costco accept Food Stamps? and the financial crisis)
• Exterminating (Operation Get rid of ginormous spider)
• Love: (Cheating and more)
• ... and of course tech goodness.

From Apple, Steve Jobs, iPhone, Windows and here, OpenID, Google, Android... and the list goes on and on.

I don't know about you, but signing up for and actively participating in social networks has been one of the best decisions I have ever made. Where else can I learn this much and amicably discuss topics beneficial to real life situations?

Now if only I can figure out how to monetize my feed...

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Resume Donkey: Don't Donkey Around With Your Resume

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

We are living in dire economic times right now. The economy has been crushed, the housing market has tanked and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed. In November alone US employers axed more than 500,000 payroll jobs, the most in 34 years. No job sector is immune, Yahoo recently laid off close to 2,000 people last week. AT&T is cutting 12,000 positions. Sony is planning on laying off 16,000 workers in the oncoming weeks. The picture is not pretty, and surely is expected to get worse. Let's not talk about the big three US automakers, their fate is yet to be determined.

There is no denying it, we are in a recession. While it's going to be that much harder to find a new job in the current market, jobs are scarce but available. Having a polished and professional resume is crucial now more than ever. You are now competing against a much larger applicant pool than ever before. You may have the skills that can pay the bills, but if you have a poorly formatted resume, or it's missing the crucial components that employers are looking for, your chances of getting your foot in the door for an interview are slim at best. Now is not the time to be gambling with your resume. If you are not getting any callbacks, your resume is probably the culprit. It's imperative that it grabs the attention of the person making the hire.

Resume Donkey, an online resume review service that launched today, wants to help you stand out from the crowd. Despite the funny name, they are serious in helping you perfect and get your resume in top notch shape for potential employers. The concept is very simple and straight forward. Resume Donkey provides a thorough and detailed review of your resume, using a team of professional HR representatives, publicists and copywriters to ensure that your employment history is reflected on in an engaging, effective, compelling, and accurate manner.

The difference between a good resume and a great one is making your personal objectives stand out, clearly highlighting your accomplishments, using attention-grabbing phrases, keywords, and actions words, and of course spelling accuracy. This is what Resume Donkey does once they receive your resume. They re-craft your resume by making recommendations, revising the phrasing, revising the wording of your objective/mission/skills etc, and all of the other critical components of your resume. Resume Donkey does not write resumes from scratch, they enhance them and provide the crucial feedback that is needed to get your foot in the front door for an interview.

The reason that I like the service and would use them is simple. I'm currently looking for a new job, and my resume is far from polished. I'm tired of constantly tweaking it and hoping it will work. For someone like me, who recently became unemployed, I cant afford for my resume not to work. I have looked at and compared other resume review services, but they are costly compared to Resume Donkey. Their pricing is very reasonable, especially for someone like me now, who is trying to watch every dollar spent more closely then I ever did.

They charge half what the competition charges, $39.95 for a standard resume review with turnaround in one business week. They also offer an express resume review for $59.95, with turnaround in 48 hours. If you are not happy with the feedback, they will work with you until you are satisfied. If that's not good enough they will refund you back your money. Seriously folks, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Try them out and let us know what you think.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

What Happened to Facebook Connect for the iPhone?

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

Back in July, I predicted we would see a mobile platform for Facebook announced, enabling developers to integrate Facebook into their own mobile applications.  The match makes sense.  Imagine the ability to combine the users of any app with the rich power of the Facebook platform, their friends, their friends' profiles, events, photos, and more, all from the power of your phone, and the rich capabilities of platforms such as the iPhone - GPS, contacts, portable computing all in one device.  The concept is powerful, and the natural evolution of an already powerful platform that seems to have revolutionized social app development.

Facebook confirmed, and clarified my theory at their F8 conference this year, when Benjamin Ling announced that Facebook would be releasing a framework on top of the iPhone which would enable Facebook Connect for the iPhone itself.  According to Ling (who is no longer at Facebook), the framework would be Cocoa-based, and had a projected release date for this fall.  When talking with Ling in person during the press conference at F8, Ling further confirmed these claims.

Since F8 and Ling's departure at Facebook, along with the recent Facebook Connect launch, we have yet to see any details regarding Facebook Connect on the iPhone.  Facebook has made no mention of it, nor have they hinted of future plans to integrate.  Is Connect for the iPhone still in the works?

Such news would be very welcome in light of a recent presentation organized by Jesse Pickard and Razorfish (which I also contributed to), which made the rounds recently.  The presentation gives examples of potential real-life applications of Facebook Connect.

Such potential examples included Amazon.com, iTunes, and some amazing potential examples on the iPhone.  The iPhone examples included screenshots of what it would be like if games included Facebook profiles within the games.  For instance, you could play Cro-Mag Rally with your Facebook friends online if the game were to integrate the framework.  Imagine the data that applications could post to Facebook in addition to retrieving the already rich platform Facebook provides.  Now, a true location-aware social network could really be possible, because most of the apps you use could potentially share that location with Facebook (we won't go into how scary that sounds - I'll save that for another article).

Of all the announcements from back in July, I certainly hope this one hasn't been nixed.  Facebook Connect and the iPhone are two powerful technologies, that in combination, could form one powerful partnership.  Of all predictions for 2009, Facebook Connect and the iPhone are one powerful relationship I am sure will happen.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Gawkk Delivers Video Discovery Engine With a Social Center

It doesn't take a scholar to recognize the commentary around most YouTube videos appeals to the lowest common denominator. As is common with many Web services that have gained mass popularity, the discussion on YouTube more closely resembles a junior high locker room than an exchange between friends and family. At times, the nonsense spewed underneath the most popular videos is practically enough to make a person avoid the site altogether.

In contrast to the banal free-for-all at YouTube, where the inmates are in control of the asylum, we have seen the rise of more personal, friend-centric services to exchange links, images and video through social media in the last few years, including sites like FriendFeed, Twitter, Ballhype and Socialmedian. A new name to be included as part of that conversation is Gawkk, a social video discovery and sharing site, which pulls in the most popular videos across the Web from services including YouTube, Hulu, Break.com and others, and sets up a platform to see what videos your friends have shared or commented on.


A Gawkk Video from Hulu, With My Comment
The service, created by former Direct Hit co-founder, Gary Culliss, lets you subscribe to channels as diverse as CNN and the History Channel to The Simpsons Channel, Law & Order, and even Budweiser Commercials. You can also browse the site's many different categories, see the most popular videos of the day, or simply follow the channels your friends have subscribed to.


Some Popular Videos Found on Gawkk, via MSNBC and Hulu
As a Gawkk member, you create your own personal channel, and can add videos to your channel by hitting "Save" underneath any video. You also can create an activity stream by voting videos up or down (like with Digg) or through your comments.

For example, my channel can be found here: http://www.gawkk.com/louisgray/channel and my activity feed can be found here: http://www.gawkk.com/louisgray/activity.


My Gawkk Activity Stream
Unlike YouTube and Hulu, Gawkk does not actually store the video media on its site. Instead, it acts as way for users to share video they have found from anywhere on the Web and share it on the site (using a bookmarklet, found here). Videos are brought to Gawkk both by users themselves, or imported from the many external sites, which are then organized into thousands of public channels, chronologically, by topic, from TV shows to actors. As a member, you can subscribe to any number of channels, and even have the option, at signup, to rate each channel from one to five stars to signal your interest, and also indicate what other channels you might like.


Rating Each Gawkk Channel, Choosing to Subscribe


My Gawkk Channel Subscriptions
Videos that receive the most "up" votes are promoted to the home page for the entire community to see, just like the most popular items on Digg, Ballhype, Reddit and other social voting sites. The hope is that by breaking out of the muck that is YouTube, you can enjoy sharing video with friends and finding common interests.

You can find me on Gawkk with the ID of louisgray (as with most other services). And if you want more friends than just me, find who else is already on Gawkk by checking your online mail address book.

I Will Teach My Children About Steve Jobs

Teach Your Children the Way of The Apple Early
(Picture of Sarah Getting to Sleep Tonight)
If I ever had a chance to hear John F Kennedy give a speech, I would go. If I could see Michael Jordan in his prime, I would go to that game. If I ever had a chance to see Henry Ford at his assembly line building Model T's, I would go. If I could have seen the first moon landing on television, I would watch. And if I could see Michaelangelo sculpt, I would pull up a chair.

But I have seen Steve Jobs do a MacWorld Keynote. And it, like the others mentioned, was delivered by a person unequaled in his craft, who, like the others, will one day be a part of the past, echoed only through our media records, and through tales passed one to another. For whether you are a Mac addict, a tech geek, or finance nerd or even a luddite, you know Steve Jobs has the ability to deliver product introductions and change the technology industry like nobody else. Not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison or Scott McNealy, Eric Schmidt or John Chambers, could play the equal to Steve Jobs on stage when the spotlight was on. And I saw one.

I saw my first (and only) Steve Jobs keynote at the 2001 MacWorld Expo. After an early morning spent taking the CalTrain north from the Peninsula, I saw the debut of the company's Titanium PowerBooks, iTunes and iDVD, as part of a large audience who "ooed and aahed" at the demo of Alias Wavefront's Maya software, and sat through our share of brainwashing around "The Megahertz Myth". My e-mail home to my dad from January 10, 2001 reminds me of our reaction:

"The Maya demo was excellent and had the entire auditorium oohing and aahing. Not seeing Maya previously, I found it amazingly solid and breath-taking, as much as any 3rd-party presentation I've seen at a similar show.

The announcements of iTunes and iDVD were enjoyed thoroughly by all. The iTunes demo was well displayed, although Steve seemed a bit enamored of the B-52's LoveShack too much for his own good. Also, the iTunes visuals smacked of SoundJam, and I was surprised not to hear any mention of any acquisition."

Outside of the MacWorld Expo, I actually have met Steve Jobs on one other occasion, when I bumped into him at the Apple Store in Palo Alto. Amusingly, I remember asking him a support question about the first generation iPod, and him getting it right.

While Steve Jobs is not only still alive and kicking, maintaining his CEO role at Apple, today's well-reported announcement that he will not be participating in MacWorld 2009, or any future MacWorld, has many thinking about the past, and what this means for his future, as well as that of the Cupertino company. I had given serious thought to attending MacWorld myself this year, in fact, but upon this news, will now most certainly pass.

But I know one thing - I once had the opportunity to see somebody on the top of their craft do what they do best, and I will be able to tell my kids (and theirs): "I saw Steve Jobs do a MacWorld Expo Keynote". And when they ask for the details, I'll tell the story again and again.

Adobe AIR: Deleting Locally Stored Encrypted Data

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The main advantage to Windows for me, is that I am familiar with maintenance. I go straight into registry files, poke, shift, and delete stuff - confident my actions will not interfere with my PC's innards. I know Windows. OS X is a whoooole different story. Everything is so simple, but that's what scares me. The simplicity.

Call me paranoid, but because of my past experiences with Windows, 3rd party native apps freak me out, since I'm don't know what's going into where... and the biggest problem? I am an OS X moron.

So looking into 3rd party publishing tools for Twitter was confusing. All of the apps I use (personal and professionally) are web based. I do not have a need for Silverlight or Adobe Air, so I had to learn about those app before deciding on a Twitter app, since most Twitter apps require AIR or Silverlight. See? Confusing.

Long story short, I decided on Twhirl, since it came so highly recommended, installed AIR and Twhirl, then uninstalled immediately after running them for 30minutes. I am one of those that keeps separate windows to a minimum and accustomed to only a few windows: my browsers (Firefox, Safari, nightly build), documents, and Adium. Plus it slowed down my computer and it was just too busy. (for me).

So when it came to uninstalling Twhirl and AIR, I wondered if there were any files both apps plugged or hid locally. Especially since the data is encrypted and uses KeyChain to store data from the application to user. Digging through my hard drive did nothing for me, not to mention all the questions: Dragging and dropping apps don't really make all the files... disappear. Do they? Can it truly be that simple? It seems too good to be true; and the questions go on and on. (Hmmm, note to self: learn OS X.)

So I did the next best thing. Googled.

Well lo and behold, turns out I was correct. Adobe Air doesn't automatically delete files.

From their site:

Click for larger image

"The encrypted local store may perform more slowly if the stored data exceeds 10MB.

When you uninstall an AIR application, the uninstaller does not delete data stored in the encrypted local store.

Encrypted local store data is put in a subdirectory of the user’s application data directory; the subdirectory path is Adobe/AIR/ELS/ followed by the application ID." via Adobe's site

And there you have it, folks.

Do any of you use Adobe Air? Am I missing out on good apps? Do you use Twhirl or another client?

*Originally posted on PixelBits, I thought to repost here from a TweetDeck/Adobe Air discussion stemmed from FriendFeed.

Chris Pirillo was kind enough to leave tips in the comments:

"For OS X, it’s: /Users/Username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ - although I can’t confirm the specific path for either Windows XP or Windows Vista, though it’s likely to be somewhere either in “C:\Documents and Settings\Username\” or “C:\Users\Username\” depending on which version of Windows."

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Blog in the Dark Much?

Just before 7:30 this evening, as we were putting the twins down to sleep, the lights fluttered and went out. They whirred to life again, twice, but soon dropped again, and we've pretty much been in the dark for the better part of two hours. No TV. No WiFi. Not even the background noises of the refrigerator and heater. With temperatures in the low 40s outside, our home is cooling, and we've unpacked the flashlights and candles we could find.

Did you know you can combine a C battery and a D battery in a flashlight, and it will still work? By necessity, I found out tonight that it does.

Preferring to be constantly connected, my iPhone 3G is keeping me sane. The laptops are fairly useless, but not my ubergadget. It still lets me post updates to Twitter and FriendFeed, browse bookmarks, and read e-mail. Nobody told it to shut down, after all.

Losing power is really no big deal, for the short term. Everyone is safe, and if this goes longer, we could pluck our twins from the cooling crib, and warm them up ourselves. But it's got me thinking about being better prepared for something bigger. It's now clear we need more batteries. And the whole hubbub about Twitter being a good news hub during emergencies doesn't hold too well if you lack power. And it doesn't translate well to the small screen. If a neighbor has discovered the source or reach of this outage, I haven't seen it. My network is too diverse and too noisy to get data on local happenings.

So for now, we're a little disconnected. It's dark. It's getting colder. And we don't have answers. I'm lucky to have the iPhone 3G around, but that aside, the infrastructure holding our power and Web together looks pretty flaky - even in Sunnyvale, smack dab in Silicon Valley proper.

Update: Power was restored shortly after 10 p.m., having been out for just under three hours. No cause has yet been determined.

Social Media Marketing - Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


If you are an individual or small business who is looking to get started with social media marketing, you have your work cut out for you. You must first examine the landscape to see if marketing, using social media is even a viable solution. If your current or potential customers are engaging online, odds are you need to be as well. Before you get started, have you asked the right questions? Done all your homework? Using the five W's, and the occasional H, I decided to put that into the context of social media marketing.

1) Who:

The keyword here is demographics. Who exactly are you trying to market to, single women, generation X'ers, parents etc? What are their household incomes, and can they afford your product? By knowing as much as you can about your customer's profile, you can target your marketing efforts more efficiently, and minimize wasted costs. This is more true with a niche product than anything else.

Advertising budgets are tightening today more then ever. You need to spend that money more wisely and effectively. Consider buying advertising on blogs, as opposed to a traditional and rather costly PPC campaign. First and foremost, search engine traffic is still king, but you can not rely on it solely as your pot of gold. Staying consistent with your marketing efforts in social media by default increases your visibility in search. Play your cards right and you can eventually start to lower the cost ofPPC spending, and in time totally eliminate it.

Don't get me wrong, social media is not the viable and end-all solution for every business. Search engine traffic, whether it's organic or paid always needs to be a top area of focus and never overlooked. The fact of the matter is, when people are looking for something, they resort to search engines first. How will you fare in the search results? Social media is an excellent link building tool, learn some of the SEO basics and be consistent, and you will achieve better search results.

The other part of the who, is who are the influencers? In social media we refer to influencers such as Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan,and Louis Gray. Build relationships and target the specific thought-leaders that are related to your industry. Influencers in their own respect have broad reach and influence over potential buyers. Influential marketing is a gateway, seed it small, and it will grow fast. Remember the name of the game with this is time, forming relationships meaningful at that, takes plenty of it. In addition to influencers, target and focus efforts on the "New Influencers ". These are power social media consumers. These are the prominent bloggers, people who upload the most videos to YouTube, the power diggers and stumblers. They are the most vocal and active on their social networks and so forth. They have to some extent a loyal and large following, and with that comes a certain degree of power and influence. YOU might even be a new influencer, and you don't even know it.

2) What:

What are the tools, mechanisms and channels that you will use? A grassroots marketing campaign will require pulling out all the stops. Starting a blog is mandatory, choosing the platform is next, WordPress or Blogger, self hosted or service hosted? What social networking sites/communities should my business be participating on, Facebook, MySpace, or both? Which is better targeted for my product? Do we need to set up a Twitter account? What will the Twitter account be used for,conversing or broadcasting? Explore and try new channels, podcasting, and creating original video are some examples. Something I touched upon in the beginning was search engine traffic. What is more effective cost wise, time invested in pay per click campaigns, or time invested with human social media efforts, or both? What channels, if any should we spend marketing dollars on, banner/text links on blogs, ads on Youtube, on Facebook, branded audio spots on podcasts ? I'm sure I'm leaving plenty out, but you see where I'm headed on this one. Find use and learn the essential tools that you will require for publishing, promoting and listening.

Consider what amount of time you are willing to commit to your marketing efforts. What are your objectives, a hard sell, creating brand awareness, buzz, or recognition? What markets am I going after? Should I focus on international, domestic or both?

3) When:

The time is now. A majority of smaller and medium sized businesses are not engaging in social media. Are you one of them? Don't hesitate any longer. Your competitors are using it and there is no reason why you shouldn't be too. The traditional and costly marketing methods such as print are becoming less and less effective. Consumers have adapted with the times, so don't get left behind. You can achieve better results with a social media advertising campaign for a fraction of the costs, compared to old school traditional ways of marketing.

4) Where:

Where is the conversation taking place? Where should you respond and engage on, Twitter, your blog, Facebook? Where should you create outposts? Go where the existing and potential user-base is and establish a presence, it's that simple. Never spread yourself too thin, but don't go overboard either, otherwise you end up creating more work than really needs to be done.

5) Why:

The question should read more like why not? Your customers are using it. With the current economic crisis, a recession, and no sign of things getting better, marketing budgets are being slashed. What are your alternatives? I have already talked about some of the positives, such as it's cheaper and more effective than the old school traditional ways of marketing. Social media, because of it's medium, brings globalization to your company's front door. It's easy and anyone can do it, just as long as they are willing to invest their time into it by learning, and participating. Your competitors, especially the ones in the know, are already are using social media. Have you noticed? Social media is about conversation. You want people talking about your product, spreading the word, and creating brand awareness in the process.

6) How:

Social media is not a rush job. It's not about creating a website, Twitter or Facebook account and calling it a day. Don't be fooled or mislead by the hype, the tools are only the facilitators of the message. Yes they are important, but without a basic understanding of how to use them, they are in effect rendered useless and become nothing more than a one way megaphone, with no one listening at the other end.

I will end with a little more food for thought:

• How are we going to participate?
• How are we going to create openness?
• How are we going to create, find and react to the conversation?
• How do we find and create community around our product?

If I gave you the answers to all of these questions, I would have nothing else to write about:)

Image by Leo Reynolds under Creative Commons license.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Twit Or Fit? Hot or Not for Twitter Users Launches

There's no question that some of the most popular Web ventures are centered around finding that perfect someone, or at least centered around looking at perfect pictures. The popular "Hot Or Not" model that has you rate a person's photo and give it a numerical rating has been emulated time and again, evolving (or devolving) from individuals to their body parts. (Don't make me link there. Just trust me.)

Nick Halstead, the creator of Favorit and TweetMeme, is looking to capitalize on the simplicity of such an engine, but this time, has targeted the focus on one of the fastest-growing social networks out there... Twitter.

The new TwitOrFit shows a random user's image, along with their most recent Tweet, and gives you the option to either follow their account, or give them a numerical rating, from a 1 (Twit) to a 10 (Fit). As with the "Hot or Not" model, you can select a pull-down menu that says "Show Guys Only", "Show Girls Only" or "Show Both".


How Do You Rate This Twit Or Fit User, 1 to 10?
And as with many of these sites, you can't just jump in and start voting people up or down, without taking a bit of a risk yourself. Halstead wrote in an e-mail last week:

Some facts about how the site works:

1. you can only vote if you sign up yourself - and therefore put yourself forward to be voted upon
2. The picture comes from your twitter profile (which can be any size)
3. If you change your profile picture we let people re-vote on you
4. The system optionally (opt-out) sends a tweet when you sign up to tell your friends to come vote for you
5. A badge system allows you to display your current score (out of 10) on your own blog/site

Unsurprisingly, TwitOrFit displays a "Top 10" leaderboard for Fits, but oddly, it also shows a Top 10 for Twits, so if you think your Twitter profile is not the most flattering, this might not be the place for you. (For example, as of this posting, @robashton was considered the biggest Twit with a real photo, and @huddlesuz, a member of the TwitOrFit team was considered the most Fit.)


The TwitOrFit Leaderboard (Top 10)

TwitOrFit is a joint collaboration between Favorit and Huddle.net, Halstead says, pointing back to a Twitter conversation from early November - which also signals that this site was designed and made live in about a month's time.

Twit Or Fit is officially launching today at Twinterval in London. If you want to brave the Twitter masses and put your own profile picture up for a vote, head over to TwitOrFit. You just might find that special someone is a "follow" away.

My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close

It's a year-end tradition for many media, blogs and individuals, to predict what will happen over the next year. Some prefer to make their guesses fairly straight-forward in an effort to be right (Example: Apple will release new notebooks with a faster processor at MacWorld) and others will make their guesses seemingly outlandish, so that if they're right, they're seen as virtual psychics. Others, somewhere in between. At the conclusion of 2007, I made ten predictions that I thought would be fun, and as we're coming on the one year anniversary of that post, it's a good thing you didn't bet your home mortgage on my list. (What? You say there are other issues with your mortgage? Oh.)

See: 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

In the spirit of reducing my ego, here are how those ten predictions in the world of tech stand:

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Wrong. I expected that Google would start to tabulate its shared items and most popular feeds via Google Reader, and that using this data, Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme, or at least pull Feedheads outside of Facebook. Instead of Google doing this however, it was ReadBurner, followed by RSSMeme and others, including Feedheads, who started a site at www.feedheads.com. Later in the year, Google Blog Search did introduce the option to show hot topics in tech, but it's largely been a stale effort. At this point, Techmeme is still more important than Google in this regard, and Google Reader has declined to show most popular feeds or shared items.

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to ReadBurner and took the position in August.)

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

Wrong. I thought Facebook would use its expensive stock and buy up some smaller companies. Digg continually sounded like it was shopping itself, but it never sold, and the company's CEO often denied talks were occuring with anyone. Also, given the stock market crash, Facebook is no doubt valued much lower these days, making a stock transaction less likely.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

Wrong. So Far. In September, TechCrunch and others reported that eBay planned to sell StumbleUpon, but no sale has taken place yet. At this point, also, with Yahoo! crumbling, they are less likely to take on the service.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Wrong. Twitter focused on growing and not crashing this year. Still just text.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Wrong. I hardly hear anything about Boot Camp these days, likely because VMWare Fusion and Parallels have become entrenched, and nobody cared about Apple's "restart" alternative. My comment that Apple would "slowly take over the market" in this space also looks quite dumb, as did the expectation that Windows applications could boot alongside Mac apps. The question is, why not?

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

Wrong. And it's too bad! Sure would change things a bit if somebody could figure out how to check a box and have graphical ads or text ads disappear.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Wrong and Right. AssetBar, in its attempt to replace Google Reader, failed fast. FriendFeed, however, did much better than I could have guessed at the time I wrote the post. Obviously, I played a small role in evangelizing FriendFeed through it coming out of beta in early 2008, but it got bigger than even I expected. My comment saying that "neither would be acquired by the end of 2008" did manage to be true.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Right. While there are some bloggers who prefer video and are using it, from Robert Scoble at FastCompany TV to Loic LeMeur at Seesmic, it hasn't become as second-nature as standard blogging or mciroblogging. And so far as I know, nobody is making money on this in a consistent way.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

Mostly Wrong. Netflix didn't blink against iTunes' charge. They instead branched out with their "watch instantly" feature and partnered up with TiVo and others. Blockbuster is still a disaster, and I certainly am not going to the box office thanks to so many alternatives. But iTunes video rentals cannot be said to have hit Netflix and others all that much.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

Wrong, So Far. Robert joined FastCompany at the beginning of the year, and is putting up some interesting content. That said, FastCompany has seen changes in focus and leadership, and I am curious to see how his show evolves in 2009. Scoble continues to be a mainstay on the social Web and at industry events of course, so even if 2009 sees him somewhere else, it won't be far from the limelight.

So wasn't that fun? Now you see you can largely ignore my predictions, or maybe, I should try harder to be right. Maybe, if I'm good, I can put a 2009 prediction list up by the end of the year...

Is There a Get Out of MobileMe Free Card?

Like any good Apple fanboy, I was among the first to sign up and get a mac.com e-mail address way back in January of 2000. At the time, a person's e-mail address was determined largely by which ISP they were using. I was using @Home broadband, so my e-mail address was louisgray@home.com. Prior to that, I had used Earthlink, AOL, Prodigy, and of course, my Berkeley account when I was in college. While I had also signed up and gotten e-mail addresses with Yahoo!, Netscape and Excite, it was Apple's iTools offering that finally switched me over to a hosted service, and I've been using that address almost exclusively for personal mail, for nearly nine years.

But as we are approaching the annual ritual of renewal, I'm considering the effort needed to pull the plug and jump to GMail. It could be huge.

When Apple's iTools debuted, it was a free service. It was the same kind of e-mail offered by Yahoo! and others, but it, to me, meant something more. With every e-mail I sent, I was telling people my computer platform choice. And when my home.com e-mail disappeared with the evaporation of Excite@Home, I was more than happy to make louisgray@mac.com my permanent address of record.

Of course, as you know, much has changed since 2000.

By 2002, Apple changed its mind about free e-mail, ditching iTools for .Mac, and making users pay $99 for the privilege of keeping the address. I was frustrated, but was able to get in for only $49 as an existing user, and I hoped the iDisk, iCards, iSync and other tools would become valuable. They've pretty much been a dud.

By 2003, I even got my fiancee a .Mac e-mail address. I registered her new e-mail address with my last name as a geeky way to show I was serious. So both of us are @mac.com people. While we were paying for something that was free elsewhere, we knew it stood for more than the basic Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or what have you. Free e-mail usually represented the unwashed masses who would forward chain letters and were plagued with spam.

In 2004, Google set the e-mail world upside down when they launched GMail on April Fool's Day. GMail offered a difference - a free e-mail account that had something like credibility, scads more storage, filters, labels and all sorts of coolness. But even though I have a GMail account (and actually bought it on eBay when invites were scarce), I usually use it for e-mail lists and news monitoring, not much else - still using my Mac.com account for virtually everything.

In 2008, Apple revamped its .Mac service once again, to MobileMe. And the result has been disappointing across the board. I don't even want to touch the Webmail version of the site, which I've seen gobble up sent e-mails, send them multiple times, or even fail to load. The quality is far from what I've grown to expect from Apple, and it's really turned me off to the service. Combined with the availability of GMail and other free services, and I'm strongly considering making the move.

But here's what's stopping me:

Address Books - My e-mail address is in the address books of many people including friends and family and Web connections. I have friends who still call a cell phone number from two years ago and family members for whom just understanding e-mail is a big hurdle.

Services - It's no secret I'm registered on a bajillion networks, from the silly to the professional. I get my financial updates from Wells Fargo, credit cards and Mint.com to the Mac.com account. When Web sites want a e-mail and not a user name, it's the Mac.com account that I use. I don't even want to think about going to every single one of those sites and making a change.

Archives and Search - Virtually all the e-mails with friends, family, acquaintances and services are stored locally on my computer under the Mac account. In fact, Apple's Mail reports I have more than 35,000 messages that have louisgray@mac.com as the main recipient, and nearly 9,000 from me sitting in sent boxes or other folders. If I move to another e-mail service, can I still pipe it in to the same box and not lose a beat? Not sure.

It has gotten to the point that my e-mail address is more difficult to move than a phone number. I know there are better services out there, and Apple's changes in the last year have not installed confidence. I know my wife and I are paying when we don't necessarily have to, but barring some drop-dead simple migration tools, auto-forwarding and some real work across the Web to make changes, I won't be changing any time soon.

Where is my "Get Out of Email Jail Free" card?

Social Media and Your Friends: Oil and Water?

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I have to admit to being 'in the closet'. But my closet is huge. In fact, it may be bigger than my whole house!

How is that possible? Well, in real life, not many of my friends and associates know that I am addicted to social media and social networks. And therefore, there are many more of you here in my closet, with me, than there are people out there.

Oil and Water

So here is my dichotomy. I'm an introvert. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test pegs me as an ISTP: Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving. What this translates to, realistically, is me being an IT guy that has a small circle of friends and a moderate number of acquaintances that I am always forgetting to mail birthday cards to.

On the flip side, I am part of a large and exciting social network society via blogs like this one, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and the like. I definitely spend more time with my online friends, but less time actually building individual relationships.

And in fact, that is part of the problem.

In essence I have close friends who may not be that impressed or interested in social networks and social media. But, I also have a lot of acquaintances all over the country that I enjoy interacting with, but it's up in the air if any of them will become a good friend of mine.

Should They Mix?

Of course, the easiest path is to allow the oil and water to keep what they are doing, which is to say, not mixing. After all, is there any compelling reasons why they should meet? I think that may actually be the more interesting question. After much thought, I think (at least for me) that the answer is yes, there are compelling reasons. Let me lay them out for you.

Starting The Mixture

Literally and figuratively, there are solutions you can use to 'solve' these issues. You would most likely start with your immediate circle of friends. Think about why they would care about your interest in social networks. If they had an academic interest, they probably would have broached the subject with you already, asked you questions about it. If they haven't its probably because they either don't know or they have already decided they aren't interested.

However, nobody is ever uninterested in a better job, or more income. Use this as your way of ringing the front door. Ask your friends, have they ever gotten a better job through a job hunting service like Monster or HotJobs? Probably not. You usually have to have a perfect resume and superlative phone interview skills to even occasionally get a job that way. Differentiate social networks from job listing services.. one deals with job openings, the other with people who work at companies and businesses.

In the long run, social networks are actually better at landing a job, and its easy to say why: People get people hired. If you know someone, have a working relationship or a shared background with them, they feel confident recommending you for a job. A listing service only tells you what jobs a company has had trouble filling. It doesn't say anything about the people you are going to be working with, or how great the company is to work for.

In fact you can think of monster.com as a roadmap, giving you an indication of where a new job may be the most promising, but the real work should be done on LinkedIn, Facebook or Plaxo and other social networks. These services give you access to the people. The people on these services can answer questions, open doors, drop your name.

Apply Tweet .. I Mean Heat

Ok, so now you have your friends' interest. There's something in it for them. LinkedIn and Plaxo are sold.. but what about Twitter? Here's an easy way to present Twitter: It is the 21st century word-of-mouth. It's water cooler taken to a whole new level. Is it essential to building a brand or conducting business? No, in my opinion, no.. at least not yet. But the potential upside is great: It is a huge, globe-spanning even playing field where people can see how you work, and you can easily keep people up-to-date on any aspect of your work or personal life you feel is important to communicate.

Most likely your life isn't going to change by using Twitter or FriendFeed. If you are a realtor, you aren't going to be selling houses directly off these services. However, if you are looking for a realtor and you like two people (all else being equal), one who is nice and another one who is also plus gives great advice about house-hunting and hot properties on their Twitter, who are you going to choose? I know I'd pick the guy on Twitter.

Distill

At this point your friends have a personal interest, and they can see the potential for long-term interest. But if you want to bring home why using a social network all the time isn't necessarily a bad thing, you can present this argument:

Spending all day using FriendFeed and Twitter could be seen as a colossal waste of time. To most people, it makes about as much business sense as playing video games. However, I don't view social media (or even video games) that way. I see it as undergoing a constant process of self-education on powerful social tools that have a lot of potential to be very important to business and marketing in the future.

Actually, video games are a very good example to present this alternative point of view. The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood. It's not only not rare, but not even particularly uncommon to hear that someone who spent years immersed with video games getting a lucrative job in the industry as a writer, designer or producer. In other words, social media is not a 'waste of time.' Sure, if you view it as a learning course, it would definitely be self-paced. But the skills learned are ultimately beneficial.

Make It Personal

So, you have said your schtick. Your friends see you in a new light. At this point, you can't go back to treating them the way you did before, in the dark until you talk to them on the phone or in person. Now, you need to show them that you have mastered using these tools to improve or at least maintain your business relationships. Here are some things you can do to get them drawn in to the social media framework:

• Send them interesting news clippings via e-mail from Google Reader or BlogLines. Or use another tool that lets you e-mail web pages, like Diigo.
• Bookmark good Twitter or FriendFeed conversations and e-mail those with your thoughts.
• In person, always be thinking of ways you can point people to solutions using social media. Like the realtor suggestion above.
• Make sure you have a lifestream page. Try to pare down the nonessentials so that it just shows the highlights of your work during the day, and some linked pages where they can go to get more information.

There is one more step you can do to make this process personal: You can involve your social media friends into your life. Think of meetup ideas (for Twitter folks, use 'tweetup'): Sunday breakfast. Thursday evening coffee. Get local.. find twitterers in your city. Find or plan get-togethers with locals who are also social media savvy and compare notes. Bring a friend along.

The bottom line is that people are people. They like to be introduced to each other, usually, but they find it hard to make these connections themselves. Become a connector. Social media is all about making you the connector, and you will reap the benefits.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

5 Questions and Answers to Better Understand Blu-ray

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I am the odd ball. The nerdy go-to person for my friends' and family's geeky needs. This Black Friday, before Christmas, et al sale holiday season, the most frequently asked question is: Should I buy a Blu-ray player? Since half of my guy friends are non-techies and my girl friends? PLEASE do not get me started. Their tech cred is limited to owning beauty gadgets and high end mobile phones. It is a challenge (and pressure) to simply explain what Blu-ray is and if it is truly a right choice for them; especially since they know where I live.

This is the list of FAQs I e-mail to them (I am too impatient to verbally explain). If any of you (the readers) are considering Blu-ray, hopefully it will be helpful to you, too. Oh - but please do not tell anyone this version of the list is way more thorough with technical explanations.

1. Do you have an HDTV?

Short answer: If no, don't bother.

Long answer: HDTV is not a requirement, but to fully enjoy what you are paying for; the quality and widescreen effect, a Hi-Def TV is highly recommended. As for the resolutions, Blu-ray players connect to a TV by an HDMI cable and sends HD signals to 720p, 1080i, and 1080p HDTVs, respectively, so formats is not a concern. But, if you do not have an HDTV and not planning to purchase one, check the outputs of your current set, since some older televisions are not Blu-ray compatible.

2. Do you have surround sound speakers?

Short answer: No? Are you sure you want to pay more for Blu-ray discs? Part of the pricing is for enhanced sounds.

Long answer: A single layer DVD holds 10 gigs. Both ROM and RW Blu-ray discs nearly double DVD's capacities - which basically means Blu-ray discs holds more data. Aside from bonus DVD features (commentaries, deleted scenes, etc., etc.), the extra storage capacities enable enhanced sound formats (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio) and up to seven speaker channels and a sub - depending on your audio set up. Blu-ray discs are pricey, because we (the consumers) are paying for the production of the technology which enables Blu-ray to be Blu-ray, and sound is included in the package.

3. Can you really tell the difference between Blu-ray and regular DVDs?

Short answer: Just like a fast food burger and restaurant burger, you really do get what you pay for.

Long answer: Blu-ray discs holds double the video, and up to six times the resolution of DVDs. A picture with 1,080 lines consisting of 1,920 pixels redrawn progressively across the screen will clearly be different from a regular DVD's. Distinguishing 720p and 1080p may be a little difficult (screen size 40" + is ideal, viewing distance, etc.) but you better believe you will see the difference.

4. Do I need to repurchase my DVD library?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Blu-ray players play regular DVDs and some will even boost resolution.

5. So why not HD downloads?

Short answer: Do you really want to wait two hours?

Long answer: I am going to quote Bill Hunt from thedigitalbits.com who said it best: "Blu-ray is going to give you to the best-looking high-definition video quality you'll see anywhere — better than video-on-demand or downloading, or HD cable, or even HD satellite," He also says: "Blu-ray simply offers the best video and audio quality available, with the most advanced bonus features."

Since Blu-ray discs have more data = more room to pack enhanced features aside from bonus features = better picture and sound. That said, if you're willing to pay extra for HD downloads, why not pay a little more for Blu-ray. It's worth it.

That, and Dark Knight on Blu-ray is totally worth the investment. Kidding, folks!

Sources: Engadget, CNET, and Blu-ray's site.

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Twitter Followers Spiking As Service Increases Momentum

This holiday season, there's a little something in just about everyone's stockings, it seems. A buttload of Twitter followers. Whether it's due to the microblogging service's increasing visibility, its adoption by some famous users, or new utilities like Mr. Tweet that recommend new followers, it looks like users are seeing an ever-increasing number of followers per day - in the hundreds per day for the most visible accounts, and rates approximately 3-10 times the average growth for many smaller accounts, as tracked by Twitter statistics site, TwitterCounter.

TwitterCounter is a simple service that tabulates your number of followers, and shows how that number has changed over the last 7 days, but more revealing is the site's details box, which shows how many followers the user had when first tracked, their average growth, and how many they had in the last 24 hours. In almost every single case, of those I checked, from household name A-listers to random followers I see on the site, statistics are up, way up. And the rate has only been increasing over the last seven days.

Steve Rubel, a week or so ago, noticed the spike, saying, “Twitter is on fire. I am adding 200 followers per day.” A member of TwitterCounter for almost six months, Rubel has added about 33 followers per day, but has seen activity on his feed accelerate. According to his stats page, he has added nearly 500 followers in the last week, including almost 100 yesterday. And his growth is not alone.

For example, my own data had about 13 followers per day opting in to my feed, according to the last six months worth of information at TwitterCounter. But in the last week, I too have spiked up, adding more than 300, including almost 80 yesterday, and 70 the previous day, well ahead of normal. It's made the confirmations that fill up my e-mail each morning to be pretty close to overwhelming.

In May, I wrote that Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail. But with a continued explosion of services, and so many of them getting even greater adoption rates, the percentage of automated notes is driving ever higher - Twitter being the most notable. So while I get my daily updates from FriendFeed, BlogRize, Strands, Socialmedian, Facebook and all the other networks, it's Twitter that is booming and driving the highest aggregate activity.


Take a look at how some others are seeing similar spikes in Twitter following activity:

Duncan Riley: Average Growth: 7 Yesterday: 43 Weekly: 99


Robert Scoble: Average Growth: 97 Yesterday: 224 Weekly: 1,339


Gabe Rivera: Average Growth: 7 Yesterday: 77 Weekly: 250


Jesse Stay: Average Growth: 16 Yesterday: 78 Weekly: 519


Guy Kawasaki: Average Growth: 127 Yesterday: 353 Weekly: 2,593


Steve Rubel: Average Growth: 33 Yesterday: 94 Weekly: 452


All statistics and images are via TwitterCounter.com
As mentioned, this rise could be due to many things. Maybe people are growing increasingly comfortable with following a higher number of Twitter users. Maybe this is due to automation and matching utilities. Could be a combination of all these things. But I would be willing to bet that Twitter is stepping on the gas in terms of going viral. With the service's troubling summer and downtime issues largely behind it, users are finding it's safe again and inviting others to come join the real-time blabberfest.

Are you seeing a spike in your in box as well or is this a false positive? What do you think is driving the surge?

The Zune Phone Is Not Pink

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The Zune phone is not pink, and I am not talking about the actual color.

"Pink" is the code name of Microsoft's latest secret project that has everyone buzzing. There is speculation "Pink" is the new Zune phone. Or is it simply software? Only Microsoft knows the answer, and the rest of us can only guess.

I am a Zune phone nay-sayer, especially at this time. Back in October, I expressed how a Zune phone would not make sense for two major reasons:

Licensees

It would make a lot of WinMo hardware partners unhappy if a Zune phone was launched in January - unless WinMo 7 is ready to launch January 7th (CES). Which means there should already be WinMo 7 mock-ups and demo phones. If so, where are the rumors and leaks?

PlayReady (DRM)

Microsoft has yet to move its own DRM system PlayReady into the Zune. Can Microsoft's mobile team...

1. Implement PlayReady
2. Integrate the PlayReady Zune prototype into a phone
3. Successfully integrate the Danger OS and the Zune
4. Launch WinMo 7 simultaneously as the Zune phone

... in less than a month?

Perhaps I am completely off the mark and Microsoft: is simply going to forget PlayReady existed (PlayReady has been hibernating since its announcement in 2007), is planning to disregard licensees, roll-out WinMo 7, all for a... phone.

Yeah, sure. And Steve Ballmer is monkey dancing, live, three feet away from me.

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Five Ways OpenID Can Be Embraced

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Attempting to learn OpenID for the upteenth time, I ended right where I started: Confused. So I reached out to the community for help and received tremendous feedback that helped me better understand what OpenID is about. People left thoughtful, thorough comments on how to actually use OpenID and someone even left step by step directions. That made me realize: OpenID is still irrelevant for the average user.

However, the discussions held on FriendFeed and my personal blog opened an avenue to great (rational) exchanges of ideas, which got me thinking about how OpenID can be relevant to us.

• Verifying needs to be simpler
  Technicalities aside, verifying, signing up, claiming, or whatever the "correct" term is, one thing is clear: The steps need to be simpler. Right now, the process is a nightmare requiring many steps. Users should be able to go to OpenID provider sites, and with one step - two at the most, be able to verify.

• Email providers need to get involved
  With password storage managers the norm, URL log-ons should not be a burden - in theory. And that is the problem: in theory. Realistically, non-technical users are intimidated by using something other than their usernames, e-mails, or handles (nicknames) to log on. Since usernames and handles, without the URL, would be difficult to use as an OpenID log-on, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo et al joining the movement makes perfect sense.

• Partner with consumer sites
  One word: incentive. Imagine if OpenID were to be accepted by Amazon, eBay, PayPal and financial institutions. Why wouldn't everyone use OpenID?

• Update the site and Wiki with clearer instructions. I did not know that being logged into a provider site omits the verification process and log-on using OpenID without verification is possible - did you? That information is not readily available on the OpenID site, why? Or why isn't that on their Wiki? Almost every person with Internet access can go in an edit a Wiki. Will someone go in an update OpenID's Wiki page, please?

• Create a Need
  Either I am missing something or it is still unclear why OpenID is so important - and most of it is due to all the technical jargon that is on the site. OpenID / OAuth, privacy, owning information, decentralizing, centralizing, user-centric, SSL, profiling, identity, and other stuff (for a lack of a better term) - it would be helpful if it were re-written in English anyone can understand.

If OpenID were to implement at least three of the above five, even my mother would be able to understand and use OpenID. Are you a part of the movement? If not, what would make you use OpenID? Or do you even care about OpenID?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Never Leave Your E-mail Again

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

A lot of bloggers are talking about the new GMail Tasks feature. I even had a mini rant on it as well. My opinion was that Google should have partnered or purchased a leader in the task management space, like Remember The Milk. However, comments in several forums have pointed out that RTM may be a bit heavy for people. In addition to that, the GMail Tasks feature is very simple. In my haste, I forgot about the power of simple.

In addition to simple, I overlooked something that could be big. I am not sure how I missed it, because it has even been a news item this week. Google has been preparing GMail to be your new home. Personalized homepages like iGoogle and MyYahoo are useful, but typically they are just another place that the user needs to go to. e-mail is something that people use all day and every day. We have seen the movement slowly with the integration of other frequently used items like GTalk and Google Calendar. The main reason I am shocked that I missed this is because Om Malik reported on this very same thing for Yahoo. In his report, he states that Yahoo is turning their mail application into a platform:

The program is expected to launch in beta relatively soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the Yahoo mail client (Evite is one of the services that is said to be building a nano-app for this new Yahoo Mail-as-a-platform). Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

Obviously, the GMail Tasks announcement was very timely given the earlier reporting of the Yahoo plans. However, both plans point to something bigger. GMail now has contacts, chat, calendar and task integration. Yahoo has had contacts, chat, calendar and task integration for a while as well. Both Yahoo and Google are planning to ensure that you never have to leave your e-mail client. The key to both platforms is that they allow widgets for additional functionality. So, if there is some favorite application that you are missing, there is the possibility for getting application integration without using something like a GreaseMonkey script. However, third party integration is not the real goal of either platform. The real goal is for each provider to easily integration whatever functionality they want as easily as possible.

So, can you spend your entire digital life in your e-mail client? What are the required applications needed for your constant attention?

• E-mail (duh)
• Contact management and extended profiles
• Integrated Calendar and scheduling
• Multi-provider chat client
• Task and To Do list integration
• RSS Reading or a good configurable news interface
• Extensible platform for third party applications like social networks

Obviously, your entire digital life would never fit into one interface without getting cluttered and overwhelming. I did not include applications like FriendFeed, socialmedian or Twitter. Other social media applications like Digg, Mixx and Reddit also do not fit very well. But everything else mentioned is already integrated into either GMail or Yahoo Mail.

So thinking about best of breed tools, what would this all-in-one application look like? First, the GMail interface for e-mail, including the filters and tagging. Neither GMail or Yahoo have good contact management capabilities, so we should look to something like Microsoft Outlooks contacts. All of the calendar offerings are reasonable enough but there does need to be a reliable way to get alarm notifications. For multi-provider chat functionality, just look to Meebo which is the best online service available. For tasks and to do list integration, I prefer Remember The Milk, though many people mentioned they would prefer something more lightweight. RTM does have a GMail widget which probably fits the "lightweight" concerns. Given my technical roots, I would prefer an RSS reader like GReader, while other more normal people may prefer an interface like MyYahoo with selectable news sources in a simple readable interface. The selection of RSS reading or a news interface should be configurable. Lastly, we should not have to depend on GreaseMonkey for extensions to the interface. A simple plugin architecture similar to what MyYahoo or NetVibes have done would suffice.

The real question is, would you actually use something like this? Many companies have been targeting your "one digital home", but nothing has really dominated the space. Do you think Google or Yahoo can pull this together?

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Sarah Palin Dominates Google's Year-End Zeitgeist

Google's annual year-end zeitgeist gives us a picture of what the United States, and the world at large, was searching for in the past 12 months. This year, Google, in a first for the global search engine, broke out their search results among 30 separate countries, but here at home, there was one individual who clearly had people looking for more: McCain's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Palin's plucking from relative obscurity and continued oddities throughout the campaign following the Republican National Convention kept her atop Google's lists in almost every category. Even her being an attractive woman, to many, kept her atop the image search zeitgeist, a claim that none of her counterparts could manage.

The 2008 results (found here) show "palin" as the #7 overall fastest rising term in the US, "Sarah palin" as the #1 fastest rising term in Google News domestically, and also #1 fastest rising in Image Search. You would think that with all that searching, the GOP would have vetted her a bit more before the election, but that of course is a different story.


In fact, in a year when we had the 2008 Beijing olympics, the election of Barack Obama, a financial crisis, and a stock market meltdown, Mrs. Palin was the fastest rising in all the world. (See the global results)

Following Palin's selection as VP candidate just prior to the Republican convention, searches for her outweighted those for Obama, her running mate, McCain, and Joe Biden, the opposing VP candidate. In fact, it wasn't until October when the eventual presidential pick overtook her on the site. (See the politics page)

Outside of politics, Google shows also that Facebook outpulled MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and LinkedIn in terms of social networking interest, and that hybrid car interest peaked when gas was $4 a gallon, and fell by fall as prices dropped by half. (See: Trendsetters)

The full report is here.

WebNotes Makes Annotating the Web Easy

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

In the digital age that we live in, information overload and keeping organized is often a daunting, and at times overwhelming task. Hundreds of emails, RSS feeds, bookmarks, tweets, you name it, and that's only the start for some of us. I have recently begun to look at the ways I use these tools, and what purposes I use these tools for. This is an effort to become more productive and efficient with my time, especially the time spent involved with research and collaborating with colleagues on projects.

Email is still key for exchanges of long text. Twitter is just as important for quick, short micro bursts of information. However when trying to locate and reference a micro blurb, paragraph or sentence of text, I often find myself spending more time looking for it in multiple places and services, thus wasting valuable time in the process. My unorganized methods of storing and locating useful bits of information for later use consists of referring to bookmarks, email, Google Notes, Twitter, and the list goes on.

When time is of the essence, this process weighs me down considerably. In trying to work smarter and not harder, I stumbled upon and started to use a new annotation service called WebNotes. Webnotes has been in private beta, and is officially launching today via public invite-only. WebNotes was gracious enough to supply us with 100 invites, so be sure to check the end of the post for a link to sign up and try their service.

What exactly is WebNotes?

It's a simple and extremely useful productivity tool for creating sticky notes on webpages, highlighting and clipping bits of text, organizing, and lastly sharing it. It's targeted for businesses and researchers, but it's simplicity makes it so anyone can use it.

Getting started:

Getting started with the service requires either installing the WebNotes toolbar, or if you prefer something more lightweight, you can also use their bookmarklet.


Annotating information is easy:

Highlighting and clipping text is done by activating the highlighter icon on the toolbar, and then simply selecting the text you wish to clip. The selected text will be highlighted yellow, and then saved. The other useful feature is the ability to leave sticky notes on webpages . If your colleagues are visiting and using the same sites for research, this could be used to leave informative notes of interest pertaining to the subject matter. It's great for leaving visual reminders, and It compliments annotating rather nicely.



Organizing your data:

WebNotes makes it easy to organize your data. You can do this in two ways. One is by clicking "Organizer" on the toolbar. This brings up an explorer sidebar on your browser. This makes it so you never have to leave the current page you are on. The other way of accessing your data is by going to your "MyWebNotes" page. What I really like is the functionality at which you can organize your data. You can create a hierarchical folder tree for your annotations. Drag, drop and rearrange data just as you would on a windows desktop.

Sharing and publishing data:


The sharing function is accessed from the toolbar. It will allow you to email a viewable public link of your annotations. The link will take the person directly to the position on the webpage with the highlighted text. You can also share your annotations by generating a permalink. You can see an example of the permalink in action here. Publishing and printing your data can be done in two ways, via an html page or downloadable PDF file.


Register here for a beta invite to test drive the service.

Closing thoughts:

There are currently a few annotation services on the market such as Fleck and i-Lighter. It's a crowded space that WebNotes is entering. If they can stand out and differentiate themselves, I think they have the components of a successful, solid application. I would like to see more collaborative features, and the option to share data via RSS. Other than that, I dont have many other requests. For what it was built for, this application works extremely well. Invites are limited to 100 only. Use this link to register for a beta invite.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

10 Top New Web Services of 2008 and Their 2009 Forecast

2008 has been both an exciting year and a very trying year for the world of Web innovation.

When the year kicked off, we were still in the middle of Web 2.0 fever. We were just two months removed from Microsoft having invested $240 million in Facebook at a stratospheric $15 billion. In the first week of January, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang made his first appearance at CES and promised the company was "ready and excited". By mid-month, Pownce launched to the public to offer an alternative to Twitter. And by the end of January, Twitter crashed hard - for the first time.

It turns out that Twitter's crash might have been the canary in the coal mine. Even looking at January 2008, and considering what has happened to Facebook's valuation, Jerry Yang's reign as CEO of Yahoo!, and the eventual extinguishing of Pownce in the ensuing months and it almost seems unbelievable. Of course, as you know, Twitter crashed again and again throughout the year, and in parallel, so did the fortunes of many Web companies, from the smallest startup looking to raise funds, to the monoliths, including Google and Yahoo!, who have had to rapidly make changes as the economy changes under their feet. Meanwhile, as business conditions deteriorated, the public markets were closed and valuations were decimated.

But before the doom and gloom hit, a good number of Web services pushed and shoved their way out the door in the first half of the year, and look to be here for at least the near term. Even as the second half of the year saw a drying up in new services and very little innovation, as we start to look toward 2009, there are new brands that many of us know were but a glimpse in an engineer's eye when 2007 finished and 2008 took over. And while no list is complete, here are some of the best that can claim 2008 as their birth date. I expect this will miss quite a few, so please make sure to nominate your favorites and tell me why I'm wrong!

1) Summize (Twitter Search)

Search is still king, and real-time search is having a huge impact on the way people find news, share ideas, and see trends. Summize built its business around being a search engine for Twitter, and soon became more stable, and theoretically, more useful, than Twitter itself. The Twitter team, in desperate need for more engineering help, acquired the company and absorbed into the microblogging service.

Expected Exit: Acquired - Already Complete

Twitter's acquisition of Summize was a smart move, considering how real-time search is becoming critical in times of breaking news. Many, including myself, are turning to Twitter search instead of Google, Yahoo! and the traditional news wires to hear reports from people on the ground, unfiltered.

2) Socialmedian

While many different sites have conquered the online activities aggregation space, Socialmedian went about the process in a different way than all the others, letting people not only follow friends and pipe in their shared content from a wide variety of 3rd party sites, but organized it in terms of categories. The category feature was so successful, CEO Jason Goldberg has been able to showcase specific events, including the 2008 election, and the financial crisis, and make Socialmedian a go to site to interact with "newsmakers". The site, starting from scratch in the Spring, has risen up to challenge FriendFeed, Digg and other sites for social news - and continues to grow at a rapid clip.

Expected Exit: Acquisition by First Quarter of 2009

With Goldberg and team having raised so little capital to get the product off the ground, and having kept costs very low, with the development team in India, the bootstrapped Socialmedian looks to be a ripe target for an acquisition, in my opinion. Without strong revenues and the public markets the way they are, Socialmedian would be smart to find a strong content or media partner, to join forces and enable the service to continue its growth.

3) BackType

Technorati and Google Blog Search, as well as many other directories and search engines have typically focused on the blog as the central nervous system for their offering. But as many would agree, it is the comments and conversation, no matter where they are, that have real meaning to blog authors and participants. While everyone was busy trying to see who could land on the Techmeme leaderboard or break new ceilings in Technorati Authority, BackType debuted a site that tracks comments by individual, lets you follow individual commenters across a wide variety of sites, be alerted when comments with keywords take place, and see charts that display keywords' momentum.

Expected Exit: Acquisition in Second Half of 2009

The BackType founders are working together on their second startup, having abandoned the first when it didn't gain traction. While BackType doesn't yet have an amazing market presence, they have forged a unique foothold that so far looks unchallenged. With any luck, I would expect the BackType team to deliver more enterprise-capable brand and identity management tools that would enable the service to gain revenue and exposure, letting the service to remain independent through the majority of 2009 before finding a place within WordPress, Six Apart, Google or Twitter.

4) TweetDeck

TweetDeck isn't a Web service, but this Adobe AIR application introduced new functions to Twitter usage that changed the game in terms of how people use the service. By introducing a multi-columned app that features groups, integrated search, direct messaging, and replies functionality, many are swearing by TweetDeck, and it looks like it may soon overtake Twhirl as the most popular Twitter application. Busy Twitter addicts including Guy Kawasaki swear by it.

Expected Exit: Remaining Independent through end of 2009

Iain Dodsworth is continuing to upgrade the product, and it's widely rumored he may soon integrate multi-account support, as well as integration with additional services, outside of Twitter. If he can get enough people to donate or pay for the application, there's no question he could make a full-time living from the resulting revenue. The question is, will people who expect a free service to have 100% uptime spring for the app that gets them there?

5) Strands

While FriendFeed, Profilactic and others were first out the gate in 2007 with their lifestreaming and social activity aggregation tools, Strands has worked on their own social news and lifestreaming site, in beta, since mid year. Focusing on delivering a clean interface for their Web, mobile and iPhone application versions, and keeping a strong emphasis on tracking musical preferences, Strands has developed a loyal following who find the site less noisy than some services and cleaner than others. Strands, instead of marketing to early adopters, like me, has given a great deal of focus to converting the more mainstream user, and acting as an evangelist for other third party applications, ranging from Pandora to Twitter.

Expected Exit: Remaining Independent through end of 2009.

Strands' history both bodes well and plays against them. Their VC funds offer them a strong balance sheet, but may also force the company's investors to seek a return that would be unavailable, given current market conditions. The company will need to find a better way to differentiate against FriendFeed and others, and hope that appealing to mainstream America works.

6) ReadBurner

A service that would tabulate the most frequently shared items from Google Reader was high on my list of sought-after sites in 2007. The catch is that I always thought Google would do it themselves. When ReadBurner debuted in January, it was a delight, and the simplicity of the service bred many clones, including RSSmeme. Later in 2008, its older cousin, Feedheads, broke out of the Facebook garden and entered the general Web. ReadBurner, and others like it, serve as having the potential to unseat less-democratic popular news hierarchies, such as Digg, assuming they execute well. As an advisor to the service, I'd like to say they are on the right track, or rate the service higher on this list, but development has been slow of late, and needs to get going again.

* Not Listing an Expected Exit Due to Assumed Bias *

7) Feedly

Like many other smaller services this year, especially those around the Google Reader and Twitter ecosystems, Feedly takes an existing popular product and makes it better - giving a news magazine feel to what previously had been a standard RSS reader. Feedly launched as a Firefox plugin in the middle of the year, highlighting recommended articles from friends, popular feeds, and integrating with Google Reader, so when you made changes to your Feedly, those changes tracked back to Reader.

Expected Exit: None

Feedly's founder recently noted his excitement over earning the service's first dollar, after a user Tweeted that she'd gotten distracted by an ad within Feedly and clicked through. Given most other RSS based apps haven't found any revenue yet, a single dollar is a lot more than zero, but Feedly doesn't look like it has any kind of mass that would push it to the mainstream, let alone turning into a viable business. For now, it's just an interesting twist on data consumption. The site will only go away if its developers get bored of it.

8) Gnip

With sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious and others getting pounded all day by third party services tapping into their API and sucking down their users' updates, Gnip recognized these external sites might soon see backlash from the data sources, as too much of their own infrastructure was being used to power other programs. In light of Twitter's up and down summer, Gnip debuted to act as the middleman, essentially making data portability easier, reducing one-offs between services.

Expected Exit: Acquisiton by end of 2009

It's hard in life to be the middleman, trying to play equal with every service. Should Gnip really start to become the Akamai of data portability, it's likely that one of the biggest data producers would want to snap up the service for themselves, and either limit competitors' access to it, or start charging fees. In a world when VC money is hard to come by, Gnip would be smart to take the offer.

9) Toluu

You'll note two major themes regarding hot services in 2008: RSS and friends. Finding out what your friends were reading and sharing were key facets of most of the new products that gained my attention this year. Toluu, developed by Caleb Elston, offers a site where you can upload the OPML file of feeds you read, mark your favorites, and see how compatible you are with other users of the site, helping find new feeds, and new people. Over time, the service enabled me to see new blogs my friends were subscribing to, and you could even notify Twitter if you had added a new blog to your reading list.

Expected Exit: None

Toluu is a geeky hobby for Caleb. He's recently also gotten behind Kallow.com, a gift recommendation service. Toluu hasn't been monetized in any way, and is unlikely to develop into an acquisition target, unless another service wants to use his recommendation engine.

10) SocialToo

Twitter and Facebook have become such a part of the blogging ecosystem, that new services have sprung up to make it more useful and intuitive. Among them is fellow louisgray.com author Jesse Stay's SocialToo. The service looks to act as a bridge between multiple social networks, including Twitter, Identica and Facebook, letting you automatically follow those users who follow you, offering a black list of people you never want to follow you, setting up an automatic message to those who choose to follow your account, and recently, the addition of surveys that can be distributed by Twitter and tabulated on the site, much like SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy.

Expected Exit: Remaining Independent through end of 2009.

SocialToo contains some advertising, and if I were to guess, it may offer premium features, as the survey functionality could be improved a great deal, possibly even going head to head with sites like SurveyMonkey. While Jesse is unlikely to get rich off SocialToo, it's smart in that it's not tied just to one service (Twitter), but has the flexibility to add on new networks as they rise in prominence.

Also on the list but outside of the Top 10:
12seconds.tv, BlogRize, Identica, LinkRiver, OneSpot, PeopleBrowsr, Plurk, Rejaw, RSSmeme, Shyftr, Yokway

Facebook and Its Partners - What Are They Up To?

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

If the Internet is like high school, Facebook is like the new kid embraced by the in crowd - just by existing. Despite no monetization track record and a no clear revenue model, Microsoft believes in them - to the tune of 240 million dollars worth of trust. They are also partnered with one of the silent giants, Salesforce.com, the CRM database software corporation behind a lot of sites we use.

Facebook has overcome controversial privacy issues, and keeps growing, despite continued complaints about annoying application invitations, an unintuitive redesign, and is still embraced by the public, even with spam issues. Most recently, Facebook made a bold move, penetrating the single log-on realm with Facebook Connect, which initiated a push for the OpenID movement (again).

So... who is Facebook? What makes them so extraordinary? And why are they so loved?

Beyond their popularity, it's the partnerships that concern me most.

Microsoft is one of Facebook's biggest investors. Salesforce and Facebook recently held a conference presenting their future plans. Just yesterday, Salesforce and Google announced they are furthering their partnership. Now I am not anal about privacy - at all. But it is no secret, Facebook is looking to venture into enterprise and I can not help but wonder: What does all this mean to us, the users? Will the partnerships effect us? If so, how?

I attempted researching to find answers, but largely came up empty. In a way, technology news (specifically Social Networking) is like American politics. Unless you know where to look, most of the information is spun, like political rhetoric. Perhaps I am not looking hard enough, but most of my questions remain unanswered.

So I am turning to you, the readers, to help answer these questions. What do you think these various partnerships mean? How do you think it effects us? When it comes to Facebook and its partners, should we be concerned about privacy issues? Or does it even matter?

Please, enlighten me.

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Old Media Out Of Touch in the New World

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

In this era of high-speed Internet connections, satellites, wireless connections, cell phones, and computers, our world is increasingly becoming connected. Currently, there are enough cell phone connections to cover half the world's population, and they reach places traditional internet connections never ever could. I think it's partly this, and the massive network, that makes Twitter so popular, and an increasingly useful tool for finding news, where it happens, from the source. Nevermind Twitter though - you have Facebook, where friends and family find out news, again from the source, where it happens. You have YouTube, where people are recording and uploading video, which spreads to their friends. You now have live-streaming video, through services such as Qik and Kyte, all bringing news to you, from the source, un-edited, as it happens, in a very visual format.

I was on a panel Friday here in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I was the blogger amongst two traditional media reporters. One was Paul Foy, an AP news reporter, and the other was Fields Mosley, a broadcast journalist and anchorman of the local TV news station, KUTV.  It's no wonder, with the increasingly connected world we have, that both Fields and Paul were seemingly afraid that their jobs could very well be gone in the near future. (I can't even find a page for Fields on Google)

As the blogger of the group, I was obviously the least experienced in the field of journalism. I actually felt quite awkward at times feeling they thought I was out of place, and was that "guy who sits in his pajamas in his parents' basement". (I actually brought that up, mentioning only half of it was true - I'm actually at Jiffy Lube as I write this, awaiting my car to receive its safety and emissions certification.  And yes - I'm dressed.) However, in reality, in a room of PR and marketing professionals in the tech field, they were actually the ones out of place, and I think that became evidently clear as one of the audience members asked who in the audience had published some sort of content about the event we were in during the event. Almost all of the audience, including me, rose their hands. The traditional news reporters were the only ones without their hands raised, further showing the sad state of our news media today.

We seem to be getting to the point where most news reporters simply aren't needed these days!

The panel argued that many bloggers and online journalists are getting their news out faster because they don't edit and don't spend much time on the content they publish. That's very true, and side-by-side (for the most part), these guys' writing or reporting would be much better than ours.  I believe the two in this panel were both very respectful, smart, and reputable journalists. However, these guys seemingly don't get where media is moving. The point they're missing is that bloggers are getting the news out faster, plain and simple. People forgive the editing when they know they're getting it, as it happens, from the source. Rumors may spread quickly in social media, but the thing is - so do facts to correct those rumors. It's easy to tell what's true and what's false in social media because the majority always rules, and one or two of those majority are always the source.

The other argument they were making, which also to me reflects on why traditional journalists will be gone in a matter of years, is that they actually thought that we bloggers get our news from them. One of them hinted at the fact that we sit there watching TV, writing about the content they post. When in reality we're the ones getting the news first, before they even know about it, and because they don't look online, they never know it was reporter here first.  Not only that but we're not always reporting it - you see, we don't need to.  We can sit, and discuss with those experiencing the news first-hand, because everyone else is too.  For the first time, reporters and traditional news media seem to be the ones missing out.  

I can get news, from Twitter, as it happens, before any breaking reports come on my cell phone. I don't have a cable subscription, similar to many bloggers, and my news comes faster because of this. No longer do you need the reporter - most people can get the news, from those that are experiencing it, on their own! No intermediary is needed any more.

I've said many times before we're in an era where we all live in a small village.  We know what's happening in our village, talk about it, and get the news from those experiencing it due to many of these Social Media tools.  We don't need reporters to represent that news for us any more.  I find out about earthquakes before anyone else.  I find out about terrorist attacks before anyone else.  I find out about fires before anyone else.  That's how I'm able to report tech news, before anyone else, right here on LouisGray.com.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.