It's Not Too Late to Spring Into Reading 5 New Blogs

Fourteenth Edition Of a Monthly Series

The new tradition to our monthly highlighting of five less visible blogs appears to be delivering it at the very end of the month, rather than the beginning. Just because it's posted at the end of April doesn't make these selections any less relevant or important than any other month. This is a feature I look forward to every month, and it's always fun to make the selections.

If you are new to louisgray.com, we have been trying to extend the blogging ecosystem, finding what Tac Anderson calls "the good long tail blogs". We know many of you get tired of the the echochamber, so we are more than happy to bring you some new voices. To get on this list, bloggers need to post regularly, cover something resembling technology, and have less than 1,000 subscribers or so.

With that intro, here are this month's selections...

1) The AppsLab (theappslab.com)

Focus: Oracle, Web 2.0, Technology
Three Recent Posts:

• In Defense of Anonymous Commenting?
• Musings on Relationship Symmetry in the Enterprise
• When Are You Most Productive?

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Rick Klau's weblog (tins.rklau.com)

Focus: Blogger, Google, Twitter
Three Recent Posts:

• The Stand, Playing Out on Twitter
• Eight Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter
• Music Rights Are Killing Good TV Shows

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) The Programmer's Paradox (theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com)

Focus: Software, Development
Three Recent Posts:

• The End of Coding as We Know It
• My PC Crashed Again
• About, Next and Garbage

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) New Comm Biz (newcombizz.com)

Focus: Technology, Blogging, Social Networking
Three Recent Posts:

• Where Are All the Good Long Tail Blogs?
• Do Social Media Professionals Work Harder Than Their Peers?
• The Only Thing You Should Be Doing

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Guruvan (guruvan.gurus.net)

Focus: Social Networking, Marketing
Three Recent Posts:

• The Mine Is Caving In On Twitter's Gold
• Sphere of Influence Or Marketing Pool? How Do you use your Social Networks?
• FriendFeed vs. Twitter OR Remember the Tortoise and the Hare?

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Want to be on this list? You can catch my eye by posting great information in the field of technology, social media, blogging and the Web. I'll be more likely to highlight you if you blog almost every day, and bring new stories to the table that don't repeat discussions launched elsewhere. And if you have more than 1,000 subscribers, you're probably too big for this.

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

10 People To Follow On FriendFeed For The Month Of April

FriendFeed made a big move yesterday, replacing their standard interface with a beta version which had been publicly incubating for a month. And while that announcement made headlines, what makes the site a must-visit for many active players in social media is the people who use the site, and the content they provide. For the past several months, my tag team partner, Mike Fruchter and I have been highlighting ten well-deserving FriendFeed users who bring consistently interesting items and discussion to the community.

Previous FriendFeed members to follow lists, largely driven by Mike, can be found for the 2008 months of, July, September, November and December. The 2009 lists can be found for January, February and March.

As always, the list is not 100% inclusive, which is why we do these regularly, so if you believe we are missing some key people, please do bring them to our attention!

1) Meryn Stol

Short Bio: A Netherlands-based software developer, currently coding on the Ushahidi platform, aimed to crowdsource crisis information, Meryn helped build the foundation for the Dutch Open Directory Project, and is a strong proponent of leveraging open source and open standards to promote positive environmental and social change.

What they find interesting: Software, social media, global causes

FriendFeed: Subscribe

2) Anna Billstrom

Short Bio: Anna Billstrom is a technical database marketing consultant, who has worked with top brands including Kodak EasyShare Gallery, American Express and the Walt Disney Internet Group, implementing enterprise customer relationship management systems. A graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Anna is an e-mail marketing guru, and a locally-renowned champion of the Scramble game on Facebok, where she is on her way to defeating me for the second straight time handily.

What they find interesting: Marketing, Technology

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

3) Rob Nelson

Short Bio: Rob Nelson is a network engineer and systems architecture guru located in New York. He is an active participant in the Linux and Open Source communities, and proclaims to have built several dialup providers and worked for Flycast Communications, an ad-serving network. In addition to his geek side, Rob is an expert dog trainer, helping to teach dog owners how to better communicate with their pets. He also is a devout musician

What they find interesting: Software, social networking

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

4) AJ Kohn

Short Bio: AJ is the vice president of online marketing at Caring.com, with a long career of managing direct marketing programs for both consumer and enterprise products. In parallel, he is a consultant at a self-owned company called Blind Five Year Old, where teaches clients about search engine marketing, search engine optimization and social media.

What they find interesting: Web analytics, SEO, marketing

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

5) Laura Norvig

Short Bio: Laura is a coordinator at the National Service Resource Center, managing content and metadata for the library's Web site. She is an expert on organizing information, mother to a three year old, and as she says, dabbles in social media.

What they find interesting: Information, Libraries, Non-Profits

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

6) Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Short Bio: Brian Eisenberg is a senior systems engineer at Software AG, helping to support sales reps and systems engineers with customized VMware demonstrations, business process management and human workflow applications. Formerly a senior product manager at webMethods and a program manager at Microsoft, you probably didn't know that Brian has a 250 gallon marine fish tank which requires him to step on his tiptoes just to feed the little creatures. (video here)

What they find interesting: Technology, Microsoft, Landscaping

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

7) Joni Moilanen

Short Bio: Joni, known as "Jemm" on FriendFeed, is an IT consultant at CodeBakers Oy in Finland, working as a software architect, specializing in .NET and SQL server. On his blog, he covers Web, Windows and distributed applications, including coding and architecture. He and his wife Nina live in Espoo, and have two cats.

What they find interesting: Software, Development, Humor

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

8) Johnny Worthington

Short Bio: Johnny Worthington, who lends his Australian accent to the popular "FFundercats" podcast, is the International Trade and Marketing Manager for Australian Agricultural Chemicals, a liquid fertiliser company specialising in turf, agricultural and horticultural nutrition. He has a young daughter and lives in Brisbane.

What they find interesting: Humor, Family, Technology

FriendFeed: Subscribe

9) Jesse Newhart

Short Bio: Jesse Newhart is a multimedia artist and freelance journalist, based in Port St. Lucie, Florida. He has two sons, and is one of the more influential people on Twitter, in terms of gaining attention from his followers. His blog frequently discusses the latest in social networking, discussing reTweets to a potential mass exodus of users from the microblogging service to FriendFeed.

What they find interesting: Social networking, Technology, Media

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

10) Jason Toney

Short Bio: Jason Toney is the senior producer of online creative services at Walt Disney's Internet Group. An Emmy-award winning Web site producer, project manager and content producer, Jason has worked with networks including MTV, NBC and Fox, and has a deep knowledge for Web media development. He is based in Los Angeles.

What they find interesting: Pop culture, Media, Music

FriendFeed: Subscribe | Blog: Subscribe

Twitter Admin Screenshot Leaks Reveal Internal Data

Zee of TheNextWeb relayed a hacker's posting of screenshots ostensibly taken from Twitter's administration interface, available only to select employees within the company. The handful of screenshots display some interesting details in terms of Twitter's internally set limits, the controversial "featured users" lists, and yes, details from some celebrity accounts, including who is blocking who.

The screenshots, which can all be found in the article, Screenshots of Twitter’s Admin. Take a look a look behind the scenes, reveal what user accounts look like from an administration perspective, including a log of dates passwords were changed, when accounts were opened, last used IP, and yes, details on updates, API limits, followers, and direct messages.

Looking at the data shows limits beyond the much-reported 1,000 new users to follow per day, including:

• A 126 update per day limit
• A 250 direct messages per day limit
• A 1,000 favorites per day limit

I question the update per day limit, as I would guess some people do run into that number, but it was consistently labeled across accounts, including those from @britneyspears and @aplusk.

The leaked screenshots also reveal there are, as of the time of publishing, 187 featured users of Twitter, that not only includes celebrities like Shaquille O'Neal and MC Hammer, bloggers Pete Cashmore and Michael Arrington, but Twitter employees, and "Jason Scott's Cat", who can be found at @sockington, with 424,000 subscribers.

Really. A cat has 424,000 subscribers, but you can't follow more than 2,000 if fewer than 1,800 or so are following you. Got it.

On the individual level, the leak shows that the @BarackObama account is blocking nearly 100 users, while Lily Allen and Ashton Kutcher both block Perez Hilton. In contrast, Britney Spears doesn't block anyone, but is blocked by 3,855 Twitter users. Amusing.

Go check out the article at The NextWeb to see all the screen captures.

Inbound Marketing Summit Preso: There Is No Information Overload

There Is No Information Overload: Finding a Signal In the Noise

View more presentations from louisgray.

At 4:25 today in San Francisco, I will be presenting at the Inbound Marketing Summit on tackling the perception of information overload. How can those of us in Marketing, tasked at discovering and participating in microcommunities where our prospects, partners and customers, reside, get a handle on all the data, and find the most relevant bits?

With only 20 minutes, we'll see what we can do. There's no time limit for you to flip through these slides, of course. Go to it.

Nombray Aims to Be Your Personal Brand's Central Web Presence

Many aggregation services take your personal content from the wide variety of social services where you are active, and put them all on their Web site - such as Socialmedian, FriendFeed and most recently, Facebook. Nombray, taking a different approach, looks to take all your data from those sites, and aggregate them on yours, essentially combining your blog, your resume, your LinkedIn, Twitter and other services in one location. And if you don't already have a Web site, they let you buy a new domain and get started. The result is a one-stop destination that features your content in tabs.

Upon signing up for Nombray, you are asked to import data from the major social Web sites. The service comes pre-loaded with Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, for starters. And should you want to highlight a different site, just enter the URL, such as that to your blog, your Delicious bookmarks, your FriendFeed profile, etc. and it too can be added.


Adding different services through Nombray
The service is very flexible. Though I am not sure I want to replace my louisgray.com brand with something "Powered by Nombray", I liked the fact I could point these new tabs to the RSS feed from the service, or to the public page itself, offering visitors a clean look. And yes, you can of course select one of the many themes that are provided, to give your Nombray page a personal spin.


My Nombray Page - In the Blog Tab

My Nombray Page - In the FriendFeed Tab

My Nombray Page - In the Flickr Tab
Upon visiting the new Nombray site, you can navigate the different profile pages by clicking each tab, and Nombray promises the new site is extremely tailored for strong search engine optimization (SEO), helping you raise your presence in Google and other engines with the details you would like to show.

You can find my personal Nombray here: http://www.nombray.com/users/305

Lunch.com Opens Up, Connecting Similar People Through Reviews

Outside of Facebook and MySpace, a growing number of Web fanatics are getting social and sharing their likes and dislikes in a number of new networks - including Likaholix, which launched earlier this year, and the new Lunch.com, which emerged from beta this evening. Based on information you provide the network, Lunch.com connects users with similar interests, hoping you can find good content through peers - focusing primarily on rich reviews and a collection of facts, essentially taking the best of Yelp.com and Wikipedia.

When you open an account on Lunch.com, the site asks you for your spheres of interest (like Technology, TV and Music), and then prompts you to suggest favorites in each category, including TV shows, bands, albums and the like. Based on these entries, you then further refine your profile by rating suggested items on a -5 to +5 scale (higher being better). The more data you select, the more likely it is that you will find other Lunch.com users like you and therefore possibly discover content and helpful reviews.


Entering My Profile Data to Lunch.com

Saying What I Like More or Like Less
The site takes some elements of Delicious or MyBlogLog, letting you browse popular tags, and drill down into the rich content pushed into the service. Click through to Books and you will find popularly rated and reviewed items, as wella s related tags, like Nonfiction, Politics and Biography. Choose Electronics instead and you get the option to review popular items such as the iPhone 3G, MacBook Pro or Bose(R) Headphones.


Top Tags on Lunch.com
As you rack up activity on Lunch.com, you accumulate an ever-higher number of reviews and other users can rate your review as "Helpful", "Thought Provoking", "Fun to read" or "Well Organized". (See this iPhone review for one popular article.)


Lunch.com Updates Activity In Real Time
And like with most sites, you can connect and "follow" other users, which will become relevant as you determine how high your similarity score is. A higher similarity score, like on Toluu and other comparative products, is determined by the level of overlap you have. Interestingly, Lunch.com also not only shows top contributors by total activity, but also a "Recent Activity" feed that in real-time is updated as reviews flow in. One of the fastest-flowing items in the site is a feature called "ExhilaRATE", which lets you further refine your profile by rating items up or down, like the "Top Movies of 2008" or "Favorite Sportscasters.


One of My Reviews on Lunch.com
As usual, you can find my profile at the "louisgray" ID, here: http://www.lunch.com/louisgray. Maybe you'll even like my review of the BabyBjorn Infant Carrier." I said it was a must if you want to be mobile and carry your baby.

Creating Social Media Outposts

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


Roll-Your-Own Social Media Campaign: Outposts

I recently started a new job at a software company. One of my responsiblites is creating and launching an effective organic SEO & social media strategy for our customers. Our customer base deals primarily with the auto industry, not the keenest when it comes to marketing on the Internet, much less social web. The majority of our customers spend their advertising dollars on print, TV and radio ads. This strategy for the most part works well, as it's locally targeted to a geographical region.

My main objective with this task is primarily for search engine purposes only. Creating back links and outposts. Brand monitoring is also another objective. This is a roll-your-own strategy tailored for the three objectives I mentioned only. Educational training on social media comes later. These type of clients are salesmen who are on the sales floor all day long trying to move product, and often these clients will have an employee assigned to the Internet division, but that employee usually does not know the first thing about Internet marketing. Their sole task is updating online inventory and responding to Internet requests. These are the employees who will require ongoing training about Internet marketing and more specifically social media marketing, engagement and interaction. More on that on a future post, but lets get started.

Think of outposts as a sort of toll booth. This is the analogy I'm making here. It's pretty much the same in real life. On the Internet there are many toll booths for many destinations. You need to own and operate that toll booth, instead of your competitors.

1. Reserving and creating the brands name online, aka vanity urls.

The first step is creating accounts on the major social networking sites. All I'm concerned with at this point is Twitter , Facebook , MySpace , YouTube and blogging. Blogging for this objective will be using Blogger.com, eventually leading to in house blogs as well as hosted on the brands website using WordPress. I need to reserve the brand's name on these networks for search engine traffic, but equally important is to keep them out of the hands of name squatters and potential competitors. I'm not concerned about the smaller social networks, they can come at a later point if needed.

Why choose Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and YouTube?

Blogger:

• The ability to create dozens of blogs utilizing targeted keywords.
• Easy to use with no learning curve.
• Vanity URLs
• Google juice
• Marketing
• Branded outpost

Self hosted WordPress blogs will eventually be the main informational hub for consumers

Twitter:

• Real time search capabilities.
• An API we can hook into to pull and post data.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Broadcasting inventory, specials, etc.
• Vanity URL & tweets are indexable by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Branded outpost

Facebook:

• The ability to create a public branded fan page & vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines. Google being the prime target.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Rich multimedia environment.
• Branded outpost

MySpace:

• Vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Multimedia environment, primarily will be used for video/photo purposes only.
• Branded outpost

YouTube:

• Vanity URL
• Distribution hub for videos created in house.
• Ability to create a custom channel.
• Embeddable share options for videos and soc nets.
• Indexable by search engines, great for Google juice.
• Branded outpost

2. Creating consistent brandable outposts.
Now that all these accounts are created, it's time to turn them into outposts. Remember an outpost is used for driving traffic back to your central hub. The hub in this case is the brands website.

• Outposts need to be streamlined and most importantly consistent across the board.
• Corporate contact information, banners, logos and URL name should all be the same.
• Outposts always link back to the central hub.
• Always use targeted keywords in profile information.
• Goal is to achieve uniform omnipresence on all outposts.
• When information is changed on the central hub, it needs to be reflected on the outpost.
• Link back to all your outposts. Always remember main emphasis is on the central hub.
• Encourage following and fans on your outposts and always follow back.
• Keep the outpost fresh with content as often as possible, this is key for search engines.

That's part 1 of this roll-your-own strategy. Outposts are relatively easy to set up and maintain, and are key for organic search traffic. Part 2 will cover maintenance of the outposts and will also dive into brand monitoring.
Image by thetruthabout under Flickr CC

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

EatWillGrow iPhone App Lets You Tweet Your High Score

One Proud EatWillGrow User Tells Us His Achievement
For better or for worse, Twitter is seemingly being integrated into everything. That's both the pleasure and pain of making a service which does one thing well, and pretty much only that one thing. A new iPhone game called EatWillGrow has taken an interesting step of not only displaying global high scores, but letting you broadcast your score to Twitter, and see how other players are doing. The high scores list even features their Twitter nicknames and avatars, making the microblogging service the central database for the game!

The game itself is fairly simple. On your iPhone or iPod Touch, you guide "Blob" through a perilous space, plagued with deadly mines. You gain points by eating food, which makes you larger, and therefore, a bigger target for said mines. There are power ups that make you go faster or slower, making food eating harder or easier, as you flick your finger left or right on the iPhone's surface, navigating the gauntlet.


Playing EatWilGrow Shows Your Rank vs. Other Twitter Users
As you rack up points, a system at the bottom of the screen tells you your overall position in the scoreboard, or alternatively how many points you need to get to position #100. When you lose, and you will no doubt lose, you are informed of your position, and given the option to tweet your score via Twitter, after you have entered your user name and password.

(You can see score reports from Twitter users here.)

To prevent users from cheating and claiming ridiculous scores, EatWillGrow only counts reports from the game itself, which registers as a unique Twitter client, and even posts a screenshot of your score to TwitPic on your behalf. You can learn more about EatWillGrow on the official Web site. The author, @kode80, can of course be found on Twitter when he's not playing the game. Just don't expect to see me tweeting my score. I'm not that good.

EatWillGrow is on the iTunes Store for $.99.

Pet Shop Boys Trump Depeche Mode in New Music Nostalgia Week

After two months of anticipation, thanks in part to an iTunes Pass to the band's 'Sounds of the Universe' album, Depeche Mode opened up the vault, issuing the remaining tracks this week, helping fill my iTunes library. But surprisingly, only a few days later, it's not this album from this 1980s megaband that's getting all the playing time on my iPhone. Instead, it's the much quieter release from The Pet Shop Boys called 'Yes' which has me hitting Shuffle and then Repeat.

Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys occupy a special place in my permanent nostalgia file, reckoning back to high school and the years just before and after, joining Information Society, New Order and others. That they continue to put out great music is something of a miracle, but being a loyal listener, I buy every new song and album they release.

Given the hype and wait for 'Sounds of the Universe', I expected something amazing. And yes, while it's good, there was no hype for the Pet Shop Boys' 'Yes', and I simply can't stop playing it over and over. It was my airplane companion as I flew from Las Vegas to San Jose this evening, and the background when we arrived home and entertained the twins, who hadn't seen me in five days.

While Depeche Mode made headlines for their iTunes creativity, gaining me access to remixes and videos weeks in advance, the biggest surprise has been a special bonus track on the 'Yes' album, which contains audio commentary from the Pet Shop Boys, explaining how they arrived at lyrics, music, and how songs stayed off the cutting room floor. It's highly entertaining, just like the producer commentary on many of today's DVDs. And the album is classic Pet Shop Boys. From "Love Etc." to "Vulnerable" and "Pandemonium", many of the tracks exceed even the best from Depeche Mode's 'Sounds of the Universe'.

Depeche Mode may have far and away the most artist plays in my Last.fm library in all-time rankings, but at least for this week, in what should have been their return to glory, they're going to take a back seat. You can find both albums on iTunes, of course.

You Have Entered a No Retweeting Zone, Please Proceed

As we've said many times over the last few years, there is no one right way to use social media and blogging tools. Different people use Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, and every Web service in their own way in a style the benefits them - be it for conversation, information discovery, news consumption, or broadcasting.

Within each of these sites there lies a certain amount of peer pressure... sign up for this... link to that... forward this... comment there. One of the more visible trends/fads I've tried to avoid is the phenomenon of retweeting. Even though retweeting has become so much a practice that widgets exist to show how often a blog post has been redistributed and people are begging to "Please RT", we're saying no. We don't expect you to retweet our articles, and we won't be retweeting yours.

Given much of my own activity on Twitter is to distribute links to this site, or to highlight others' work, with the occasional comments replying to other Twitter users, we have a high level of linking over conversation. It's enough that some services, like Twanalyst, even call us "spammy", given our high link to retweet ratio.


Twanalyst says I am spammy and don't retweet
But in my opinion, begging for retweets, and retweeting is simply lazy, just like live tweeting a conference panel is lazy blogging. It's the equivalent of forwarding e-mail, or copying and pasting someone else's blog post to your site and adding a short link. If Twitter is truly conversational, as many argue, then repeating what someone else has said doesn't do much to add to the conversation. Want to highlight their work? Write up a blog post and add your comments. Share their items in Google Reader. But do it in your words, not somebody else's.

Twitter is a land where 140 characters is all you've got to express yourself. If you think you don't have enough interesting data to share 140 characters of your own, but instead need to piggyback on someone else's tweet, then maybe you should rethink why you're using the service.

Conquer Information Overload at the Inbound Marketing Summit

Earlier this week, I mentioned I am scheduled to speak at the Inbound Marketing Summit, featuring Chris Brogan, Tim O'Reilly, Tim Ferris, John Battelle, Loic Le Meur, Brian Solis, Charlene Li, and others. But it turned out that O'Reilly and I actually were on so close a wavelength that we practically submitted the same speaking topics. Aiming to be flexible, and let O'Reilly close strong, I thought we would revisit one of our favorite topics - how to avoid proverbial information overload, and find the right data at the right time, no matter where it is.

On Wednesday at 4:25 p.m. in San Francisco, just before O'Reilly finishes up, I'll be speaking on the topic, "There Is No Information Overload. Finding a Signal in the Noise".

The topic description leaves you with a little tip on what's coming:

"With a nearly constant stream of information related to you, your product and company from all corners, it can at times seem overwhelming. How can you break through the noise and find out all you need to, without being overwhelmed with a data tsunami? Don't just look to a chief information officer. Look to be a chief signal officer, by selectively finding where to listen, when to listen, how to listen, and if you should engage."

I've talked before about tackling information overload, and I'm looking forward to participating at the conference.

I do have a pair of VIP tickets available if you want to go, so send me an e-mail if you're interested.

Google Reader Limits Your RSS Article Spam Potential

As Google Reader is my main jumping off point to gather all the news of the day, it's no secret the RSS reader also plays a major role in how I help distribute the news, be it through hitting share to add items to my link blog, or by e-mailing articles out to others. In October I mentioned how e-mailing RSS pieces can help to evangelize the service, and I've continued to make it something I do, for friends or for colleagues. But of late, I've found more restrictions being added that make it seem people have maliciously mass distributed articles out of Reader, so more safeguards have been added to slow me down.


Captcha me if you can
The first and most noticeable addition is that of a captcha, which requires you to fill it out each time you e-mail an article out of Google Reader. The minor annoyance didn't use to be there until recently, and presents the opportunity to test how well you read words that are slanted and blurred every which way.


Thou shalt not e-mail your entire address book this article
The second addition, which I just ran into today, is a cap to the number of people you can send an article to. While at the office it's no rarity to forward news to a dozen or more people, Google Reader now stops you once you pass ten recipients. This means that I will have to be more selective for whom I choose to send updates, and just maybe those left off will feel left out.

Having said limits in Google Reader won't dramatically change the way I use the service, with the exception of being more picky about my recipient lists, but I have to wonder who was violating protocol so much that this became a necessity. What robots do you think were mass e-mailing articles to all of their cyber buddies?

Facebook Getting Ready to Charge for Vanity Nicknames?

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

My friend, Jason McGowan, sent me a screenshot that, if it is what it appears to be, suggests Facebook may be getting ready to add a new strategy to its business plan. It appears that select users are seeing polls in Facebook, asking if they would pay to be able to have their own vanity nickname on the network.

The vanity id is currently in beta for a select group of users such as TechCrunch, Loic Lemuer, AllFacebook, and others, and allows you to have http://facebook.com/yournick point to your Facebook Page. In addition, from their mobile phones, users can send "fan nickname" to Facebook and become

fans of your Page from wherever they are. This would be useful, for instance, in a Baseball or Football stadium during a game to enter people into a contest or become fans of the team. It would appear with these polls that Facebook also intends to allow this to point to individual user profiles as well.

Currently services like my own SocialToo and others provide short, easy-to-remember URLs that redirect to your Facebook profile. Having such a vanity URL would enable users to have an even easier to rememb

er URL, based on the Facebook.com domain that you could pass out to your friends. I personally would pay for this - it's worth both the brand recognition, and SEO it would give any brand.

The vanity URLs also come with even more pressure from Google, who just recently launched their own short URL and user profile system. Google's user profiles are 100% free, and rely on your Google account username by default. (See mine here)

Having asked Facebook for entrance into the vanity URL program for both myself and SocialToo and received no response (hint, hint), I would assume Facebook is just waiting for the right time to launch this to all. I'm excited to see this program come forth and hope Facebook can soon allow many more into the program.

You can add yourself as a Fan to my Page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jesse-Stay/12327140265

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Teens In Tech Takes On 32-Year-Old Advisor

Yesterday, I said I was going to try and say yes to everything, in an effort to get more involved with entrepreneurs, startups and other smart folks around the Web. One of the most direct ways I have been able to work with aggressive players is in an advisory role, helping to push the founders of BuzzGain, ReadBurner and SocialToo to roll out new features, raise awareness and deliver high quality products.

Today, I am happy to announce that I will also be working with Daniel Brusilovsky and the Teens In Tech team, joining their highly qualified advisory board, which also includes Daniel Ha of Disqus, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and others.

Daniel announced my addition to the board of advisors in a blog post yesterday, and I am looking forward to seeing how a 30-something married guy with kids and a resume with more than 10 years experience can try and give guidance to a bunch of teenagers without my coming off sounding like a fuddy-duddy. In my e-mail, phone and in person conversations with Daniel over the last few months, I have been very impressed with his intensity for tech, business, and a wisdom that is without a doubt beyond his years and look forward to helping him develop a successful platform for the next generation of Web addicts.

Founded in 2008, Teens In Tech is a media platform and community for teens. The company acquired the Youth Bloggers Network in March, and in January held the first Teens In Tech Conference. Expect to hear more about Daniel's plans soon.

Are LinkedIn Groups Tuckered Out?

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Is LinkedIn making the leap beyond an online resume service into a socially-rich, community-driven platform? Last year LinkedIn announced its new application platform in an effort to stimulate the interactivity of its members, and also announced enhanced groups as part of this bold initiative to seed itself as the proverbial Facebook for professionals.

Many of you enjoy LinkedIn as an online holster for your professional accolades as well for keeping in touch with your professional network. One often used mechanism is that of groups. Perhaps you participate in some groups based upon your geography, your personal and professional interests, or maybe you simply want to network.

I began experimenting with a group to share more industry specific content with my network in the hopes of generating some interesting conversations. I took my time to pipe in several industry specific news feeds to keep content fresh, sent personal notes to each group member as they joined, and even posted regular discussion topics hoping to elicit opinions.

I watched the daily e-mail updates roll through, and was disappointed in the results of my social experiment; Discussion topics and news items alike consistently showed "0 comments", denoting the simple fact the discussions simply weren't happening. I quickly realized it was time to take a step back and taken inventory of the situation.

I started paying attention more closely to how I interacted with the default, daily e-mail digests I would receive from other industry-groups I had joined. Below are some samples of what I began to consistently see:

While the first group has over 5,100 members and the second has almost 900 members (after forming just a few months ago), amazingly, day after day I would see little to no activity outside of the posted discussions or news items themselves.

While my little social experiment is hardly comprehensive, discussions with other professionals in my network have offered much of the same qualitative analysis: Only a small percentage of groups see any significant conversation threads. So it would seem that in the minds of many I network with, LinkedIn groups are on the outs.

What are your experiences with LinkedIn groups? Are they helping you extend the conversation and do they yield benefits you would care to express?

---

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. He is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.

---

Twitter Caps Following Limits, Denting Auto-Follow Services

Another day, another Twitter limit that impacts its developers. Following on to Twitter's statement last month about auto-following practices being "disingenuous", the company is back at it again, telling users that "it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts", and limiting the number of accounts that a single person can follow in a day to 1,000. While that may sound reasoned in practice, it's going to impact the way highly visible accounts can use the service, and again, throw a monkey wrench into entrepreneurs who are looking to fill gaps in Twitter's service.

In the last few weeks, Web and print media have been awash in discussion of some of the largest accounts on Twitter reaching the 1 million follower mark. Assuming Ashton Kutcher and others were to follow Twitter's rule to only follow 1,000 new accounts a day, it would take Ashton 3 years to follow all that follow him, assuming no more new users found his account interesting. It seems Twitter would prefer that these celebrity accounts only follow, say... 93 as Ashton does, rather than the nearly 400,000 Britney Spears follows, which I would guess would be even higher if it weren't for Twitter's API troubles.

I speak to this point not so much as a standard Twitter user, but also as an advisor to SocialToo, which Jesse Stay has worked on to help Twitter users like Guy Kawasaki, myself and many much more visible accounts to stay even on their following and followers, as well as many other features. One of the premium options SocialToo has offered has been a "catch up" option, where users could catch up and follow all those who they were not previously following. Now, SocialToo could only add a maximum of 1,000 a day, making the service good for smaller users, but not for the rapidly-expanding numbers we see on many accounts.

Lest you think I'm just trying to cover for SocialToo here, take a look at how other Twitter developers in the last week by slowness and caps that Twitter is placing on their ability to get data to feed their services. Mr. Tweet has been reporting service disruptions and apologizing to users and Tweet Later reports problems getting data from Twitter. TweetLater even notes from earlier this evening, "At the time of writing there were 1.7 million unprocessed API calls on the processing queue, and the queue is still growing every second."

It's likely Twitter is issuing this newest limit to try and stop spammers and go after the worms that have recently impacted the system. But the ecosystem that has helped the service grow to such high visibility is getting impacted. Hopefully there can soon be a resolution that lets Twitter be secure the right people with the right tools are doing the right things, and that the bad guys are being appropriately stopped in their tracks.

IT Trade Show Attendance Down Sharply. Is Quality Improved?

During the last recession, especially in 2002 and 2003, our experience showed that attendance at technology trade shows was very poor, to say the least. If vendors weren't canceling their sponsorships outright, or dramatically reducing booth space, the scarcity of end-users saw marketers desperate to hit target lead counts, even if it meant randomly scanning those who just wanted the give-away of the day. But in this go around, having attended a fair number of events so far this year, while I see attendance is once again down significantly, the quality of those end users who remain might actually be better overall.

As mentioned yesterday, I am spending the week at the NAB conference here in Las Vegas. This show, expected to draw tens of thousands of attendees, if not a hundred thousand, as once estimated, clearly doesn't have as many exhibitors as in previous years. The hallways are less jam-packed, and wait times for services like taxis, shuttles and the monorail are greatly lessened, compared to other times I've attended.

Any trade show veteran knows that the first and second days of a show typically drive the lion's share of activity. Often, a 3-5 day show can be like molasses as all the exhibitors pace upon their well-carpeted square booths, and watch the clock by the end of the week. So getting a big number on day one can be critical. While today's activity was very busy through the first portion of the day, by the second half of the eight-plus hour shift, I could have sworn it was Wednesday already - and I know we were not the only ones with serious gaps in visitors.

But interestingly, despite the relative quiet, as I also experienced at Storage Networking World in Orlando at the beginning of the month during parts of that show, those attendees who are making the visit and the inquiries are those who we should be talking to. It could be that companies who lived through the last recession have learned to save money by not sending more than the critically necessary attendees to said events, effectively aiding them and the vendors who see them by improving the signal while lessening the noise.

If you are a technology marketer deciding whether or not to spend your money on trade shows this year, I wouldn't recommend outright pulling the plug. If you reduce your presence, end users will understand your desire to save money. But if your competitors go and you don't, they've got a beeline to deals that should be yours. And if you're a technology purchaser wondering if you should go to a show, ask around the office, and see if somebody with better focus can go on your behalf. It will make sense for your budget and for the vendor ecosystem as well. I hope that what I'm seeing so far this year displays this is already happening.

Please Stretch Me Thinner: I'm Saying Yes to Everything

Yes we can. That may have been the rallying cry for 2008's victorious presidential candidate, but sometimes, I swear it's mine too, because every time I hear somebody say I can't do something, I want to make sure I do it, and do so well. Any time I hear somebody say I can't possibly keep up a certain pace, have to drop something, or that something is going to slow me down, I want to prove them wrong. Here's the truth - despite having a full-time job, a pair of active twins under a year old, and a fairly active online lifestyle that includes this blog, some social media activity, and three advisory board positions with early-stage start-ups, we're not done, and I want you to stretch me further. Do it.

So, as best as I can, I am saying yes to everything I can - and want to keep it up.

When at the SXSW conference last month, I participated in one panel, as was the rule of the show, but I wish I could have done one each day. I blogged every session I was in, and the videos you've seen thus far from Kipp Bodnar, from Wayne Sutton and Morgan Brown are only half the story, as was the coverage from the Times of London and The Guardian.

Last week, as I mentioned, I participated in the FFundercats podcast, and Josh and Johnny know they have an open invitation should they want me again.

Looking forward, on April 29th, I am signed up to speak at the Inbound Marketing Summit, put on by Chris Brogan and CrossTech Media, in San Francisco. I'll be speaking just ahead of Tim O'Reilly, who closes the show, and discussing how the promotion of others, including customers and competition, can help your brand (see the agenda). Hopefully you can attend.

And yes, I'm acting as an advisor for BuzzGain, ReadBurner and SocialToo, talking strategy with the entrepreneurs of each service, providing feedback on features and roadmaps and introducing them to new contacts. You should hear about a fourth advisory role in the next few days, and I haven't yet hit the saturation point. I also managed to sneak out to Boulder to see Lijit earlier this year, even if it wasn't in an official role, and that was a great experience.

I've also got a big trip planned this September to see Thomas Power and Ecademy in London - which I have to embarrassingly admit will be my first time out of North America, ever. Hopefully, it's just a start, and I look forward to offering more details on that soon.

So why mention all this? Because I want more. Feed me more. At recent business events, there is a dramatic need for those I run into to get an extra push to get and grasp blogging, to understand what's happening in social media, who's winning and losing, and best practices. And right now, I don't think my 5 minute answers are enough. I am starting to get inquiries from people to help them more formally, and yes, I will. I will also be signing up for more speaking opportunities, more panels, more podcasts, and more advisory roles if they think I can help. This is going to be fun, so abuse me. You know where to find me.

We Were So Wrong About Twitter

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It feels like ages ago, but it was only four months ago when the extended louisgray.com team debated whether Twitter would go mainstream. Did we underestimate Twitter and its team? No. We did not foresee who would be using it. What did we think was needed for Twitter to hit the mainstream? Here are some examples of what we were thinking:

• It needs a lot of filtering and searching.
• There is too much noise for most people.
• It is too public, and it only fits a small niche of the population.
• Some people may just not 'get it'.
• Twitter will not go mainstream until another service appears that makes Twitter a cellphone SMS gateway.
• It still lacks the features needed to go mainstream, video, images etc.
• The combination of other services (Facebook, FriendFeed, Yammer, etc.) will steal Twitter's thunder and leave it behind.

Why were we so wrong? Basically, we are a bunch of early adopters who were thinking that people would be using it in the same manner as we were. We thought people would be searching for information, or would want to be more mobile or share pictures.

We totally missed the power of celebrity. At the time that the debate post was written, only a few celebrities were using Twitter and they were using it for conversations and finding information. Ashton Kutcher recently joined Twitter and exploded. Britney Spears joined Twitter a little while ago and is growing quickly as well. Why are they growing, taking over Twitter and introducing it to the mainstream with the help of Oprah?

People are fascinated by celebrities. I am not one of those people, but the amount of traffic that celebrity gossip sites like Perez Hilton received proves that point well enough. With Twitter, the celebrities are able to interact directly with their fans, and those fans can send notes to their favorite stars. This is the same reason that people like Robert Scoble and various Web celebrities are popular on Twitter. That direct interaction and the continuous updates make people feel closer to these stars. I am not sure how we missed it, but I think most of the early adopters missed the call on Twitter. Hopefully we are wrong about their ability to make money as well.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

FFundercats Podcast Episode 25: Dropping Science

With ReadBurner Weekly Live still on hiatus and the Elite Tech News series on a quasi-permanent hold, it's been too long of a break between getting the opportunity to participate in a regular podcast. On Friday, I was lucky enough to be invited to partake in FFundercats, a project undertaken by Josh Haley and Johnny Worthington, who have teamed up to create a fun weekly show centered around all things FriendFeed. After 24 episodes were in the bag, I finally got to join, and as you can tell, should you take the time to listen, we really had a good time.

Over the last several months, Josh and Johnny have helped bridge the geeky tech Web Silicon Valley world I tend to live in with a more entertaining and social part of the site. And while I have to admit they give me way too much credit throughout the podcast and are far too gracious, I always enjoy a good challenge in terms of them firing questions and my trying to come up with reasonable answers that aren't too cheeky.


Friday's podcast, which covered our introduction to FriendFeed, speculation around monetization, and new features, including filters and direct messages, was held in parallel with what turned out to be the most active comment thread - ever - on the site, launching more than 1,600 entries. (See the amazing thread here)

Clearly there is a very active community on this site who knows how to have a good time and not take themselves too seriously. You can check out the podcast on the FFundercats site, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. And when you're done, click this crazy link.

The Destination Is In The Conversation

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Rob Diana, a friend, Grand Effect Network member, and fellow author on louisgray.com, recently discussed: With All This Openness Where Is The Destination?

Rob picks up where Alexander Van Elsas left off a few weeks ago with Questions. To summarize both articles, they both push out key questions that pertain to the evolution of not only social media, but the Web as a community.

One of the questions that Alexander posed was: "If everything becomes open and connected, what will happen to the big destinations?"

Rob's Response:

For the Web 2.0 and social media crowd, the current destinations are not really destinations. Destination may also be an old term for what is currently happening. Destinations were the keys to the castle in the old Web, but the new Web is more about communication and conversations that are happening now.

Most Web sites are still thinking in terms of the destination.

The Destination Exists In Your Connections
I have to say that in this case, the Web sites aren't the only ones thinking in terms of the destination. Mainstream users do too and they only want their destination to be one stop away. Now, what's one stop away from your real destination? A connection maybe? Let's say so for arguments sake.

First, let me state that I think early adopters may be the only people pondering this question. The big destination sites will always exist, because they're the biggest, the most popular, and most of people's connections already exist there. All they need to do is find them. That process is simplified by the following theory: find one, find them all! If I find one person I know on Facebook or MySpace, I'm bound to find a few more mutual friends too.

Whatever, So Where's The Real Destination?

So what will happen to the big destinations later on down the line? I'm betting that they'll adapt to the landscape and integrate what needs to be integrated. Facebook is already doing this with Digg and StumbleUpon integration.

They aren't alone.

I'd bet you $100 that just about every site you've signed up for in the past month had some type of integration with another site that is connected to your connections and conversations.

Not to argue with Rob's opinion, but I think that the Web has always been about communication, conversations, and where they're happening. Those are reasons why I signed up for AOL IM and not Yahoo IM during my middle school years. Those are reasons why Yahoo was my first search engine and not Google (or even AOL for that matter). I stuck with where the conversations were happening and that's where my friends were too. The real destination is in the conversation.

People aren't just trying to get to these sites, they're trying to get to the conversations as easily as possible. If they could eliminate the site, they probably would. Why do you think instant messaging is so popular? The conversation is where all the good stuff is.

As The Web Evolves
Improved? Yes. New? Hell no. The Web has become more interesting, more glamorous, and more entertaining (personally), with all these new ways to connect with people. However, the destination has always been somewhere in the conversation. You know what that means? There isn't just one destination and never will be in all of this open and well connected space!

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

This Week's Destination: Las Vegas, Nevada

Another week, another trip. The Spring event season has us racking up frequent flier miles again, as following recent trips to Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona and Orlando, Florida, we're away from home once more - this time for a full five days in Las Vegas, Nevada. As I told folks following the Orlando trip, "it sounds more fun than it really is". We're going to be attending and participating in the National Association of Broadcasters' Conference for the full week, with my work hat on.

The trip marks my third jaunt to Vegas in the last 7 months, following BlogWorld Expo last Fall, and company sales kickoff in February.

If you're a Las Vegas native, or your schedule and location just so happen to match mine, you know how to reach me. I'm powering up the iPhone now.

How to Send Direct Messages to Multiple People, With Photos

For as much hype and press Twitter got all this week with the games celebrities play, you would think the service had single-handedly solved the economic recession and cured malaria besides. But even as the microblogging service managed to not fail under what had to have been a heavy load, it's remarkable how Twitter continues to be defined by its limitations, and how the core aspects of the service have changed very little over the last two years.

If you use the product, you know the limits I'm talking about. 140 characters only. No pictures. No video. Direct messages can only be sent to a single person. No grouping. No lists. I could go on.


Sending a Direct Message In Twitter


Previously Sent Direct Messages In Twitter
But after taking a look at a ton of different third-party applications out there, I finally found a solution that lets you send direct messages to multiple people at once, attach photos, and even collect all the comments from the recipients in one place.

It's called FriendFeed.

The new FriendFeed beta lets you send direct messages to as many people you like who are friends with you, and you can add up to four photos per message. Like with Twitter, if they respond to your DM, you can get notified within the service, and just recently, you also gained the ability to get notifications by e-mail.


Sending a Direct Message In FriendFeed With a Photo


A Conversation On a DM With Multiple People In FriendFeed
While Twitter may have all the daytime television viewers reaching for their mobile phones and Windows XP Home powered PCs (just after they log on using AOL), FriendFeed keeps its head down and is innovating. So while they're still figuring out how to send a limited number of characters to a single person using only text, I'll be sending photos and links and long messages to as many people as I like on FriendFeed.

You can join us here: http://beta.friendfeed.com/louisgray.

Tweetie Desktop for Mac Is Clean, Simple and Robust

Sending messages to and monitoring Twitter on your Mac usually requires running a RAM-intensive Adobe AIR application or dropping into Twitter's standard Web interface. And with Twitter continuing its skyrocketing usage trajectory, more and more utilities are being developed to handle the load - from TweetDeck to Seesmic Desktop, PeopleBrowsr and Tweetie, which on Monday, will debut to the masses its desktop application for the Mac, following on the success of its popular iPhone application, which I've used as my default for the last month or so.

Written in Cocoa for Mac OS X rather than Adobe's AIR platform, Tweetie looks and feels like a Mac OS X application. And like its iPhone cousin, it lets you use all of Twitter's main features, from sending updates to monitoring replies (now mentions) and direct messages. Tweetie, unlike other desktop apps, even lets you log in with multiple accounts concurrently, enabling you to toggle back and forth should you choose to.


Logging in to Tweetie Desktop
Unlike TweetDeck, arguably the most popular Twitter desktop application out there, Tweetie doesn't look like it wants to take over your entire screen. Instead, activity occurs in a single column. To gain access to replies, direct messages, and integrated search, just click on the corresponding icons in the application's left margin.


Checking Twitter Mentions In Tweetie


Seeing Who I DM Using Tweetie


Leveraging Twitter Search In Tweetie
Like any good Mac app, Tweetie even follows Apple's typical keyboard shortcuts. Command-N makes a new Tweet. Command-R refreshes your window and gets you the latest updates. And like with Safari, you can hit Command 1, 2, 3 or 4 to toggle through the available windows. (In this case, the Twitter timeline, mentions, messages and search)


Sending a New Tweet From Tweetie
I switched from TwitterFon to Tweetie on my iPhone thanks to multiple account support, and it's great to see Tweetie hasn't neglected that when looking at working on my desktop as well.

Atebits, the company behind Tweetie Desktop for Mac, has provided a video to show more about the new product, which should hold you over the weekend. Of course, they can be found on Twitter at @atebits and @tweetie.

Once You Start, You Can Never Stop

Ever run into friends who tell you they want to start a blog, or are thinking of signing up for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or some other network, and you just know it's doomed to failure, because they won't commit to it? Starting is easy, but maintaining a pace can be hard. Whether for business or for pleasure, the number one thing I tell people about blogging is that once you start, you can never stop. Blogging is not something you do on a whim, or start and then abandon for the search engines of tomorrow. You must find a pace and always keep going - so if you start, be sure you've got a topic or ideas that are sustainable.

This week, thanks to work, family and other items hitting my schedule, I went a little light, not just here on the blog but on most of the networks - after a strong Monday. And while previously, I've told bloggers to "relax" as "nobody is keeping score", once you have established a pace, absence gets noticed. Today, while still at the office, I got a call from Robert Scoble, just checking in to see if all was well. And yes, it is. Just working and making sure everything is done before being out of the area all next week thanks to an upcoming tradeshow.

That Robert noticed shows how in tune he is on all the networks. I hadn't gone completely silent, but I did slow down my pace for a few days, and he caught me.

But while this was a mere blip in my usually regular posting schedule, it's one that happened well into my fourth year of blogging on this site, after nearly 2,000 posts, added on to tens of thousands of actions on FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else. I'm not stopping. I'm not anywhere near done. But if you know folks who you think would walk away, see if you can stop them before they start, especially if how they present themselves has a chance to impact how your company or your project are perceived.

100 Interviews Posts Video on Aggregation, Info Overload from SXSW

Though SXSW might seem like last month's news, some of the videos and interviews we completed at the event are still rolling in. One of the more fun discussions was with Morgan Brown of 100 Interviews, immediately following the "Beyond Aggregation" panel I participated in at the conference. During the five minute interview, you can see some of our thoughts on how to find content, how to overcome the commonly-discussed "information overload", and what tools I use.

If you don't mind seeing what it looks like when I nod my head approvingly at a Flip handheld video camera, check out my comments from last month in the below video:



Of course, if you've been reading this site for some time, consider this review...

Twazzup Takes On Twitter Search to Make Sense of Real-Time Web

Twitter's acquisition of Summize in 2008 gained the red-hot status update service arguably the most impactful new entrant into the Web 2.0 space last year, as the company looked to harness the millions of daily tweets flowing through its system and make sense of it all. Now rebranded as Twitter Search, the former Summize product is being relied upon for breaking news, trends, and acting as the pulse of the always-connected community, staying well ahead of Google and other traditional search leaders. Today, a new entrant, Twazzup, is looking to extend the Twitter Search platform, by not only providing real-time updates to the search results, but also highlighting popular users, links and tweets relevant to searched keywords.


The New Twazzup: for Searching Twitter
If you're familiar with the Twitter Search interface, it's well defined by its highlighting of hot topics that are rising on Twitter, being discussed by the masses, as well as its tendency to pile up queued tweets that have not been displayed. To get the new tweets, you need to refresh. But not with Twazzup, who rolls in the new results in real time, much like FriendFeed's new beta interface. Also similar to that interface, Twazzup features a user-friendly pause button in the top right to slow things down a bit.


Twazzup Results for Obama

Twazzup Results for Baseball
Today, Twitter Search is all about getting you the results, period. Its options are very spartan. For example, if you search for Facebook, you see the results and can either reply to the author, or view the specific tweet. But there's no data about the authors or the topics.

On Twazzup, the same query for Facebook shows search results, and a helpful kind of subset of results that displays related topics. For Facebook, I could also click the word social, and see when both Facebook and Social are in the same tweet. (that result is here) Other topics, like networks, linkedin and strategy also pop up when both Facebook and social are combined.

But beyond combining search terms, Twazzup's right side column does more than just show hot topics, like Twitter Search does. It also shows a popular tweet that contained the search terms, top "trendmakers", who talk about those terms and drive retweets or click-throughs, and popular links that are spawned from those keywords on Twitter.


Twazzup Trendmakers and Popular Tweets for Obama
For me, searching Twitter is practically as useful as messaging via Twitter, as it offers a lens into not just what people "are doing", but what they are thinking, observing or talking about. Given Twitter's driving an ever-closer integration with its acquired Summize product, I expect more users to flock toward the standard Twitter Search than to new products that arrive, like Twazzup, but as Twitter thus far has done very little to expand the Summize product beyond its initial feature set, there is significant room for third party services to improve the status quo.

Twazzup can be found at http://www.twazzup.com, and on Twitter, of course, at http://twitter.com/twazzup. The company's CEO and Co-Founder is Cyril Moutran, who launched Yokway last year. (See our initial coverage)

Likaholix Rewards Early Active Users With Kindles, Adds Moderators

About a month ago, Likaholix debuted as a site to share interests with friends, similar to aspects of both Facebook and FriendFeed. As part of their strategy to promote activity among early users, the site's developers debuted a promotion that rewarded five beta users with Amazon Kindles, provided they were among the top 30 users in terms of activity, being rated as "most interesting" or "popular". Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed and Jason Shellen of Plinky assisted in the selections, which were revealed today.

The five winners include:

• Mindy
• Justine Ezarik
• Chris Pirillo
• Chris Bellevie
• Katrina Schmidt

iJustine and Chris you probably know. The other three are more obscure, and rose to the top of Likaholix' lists due to their participation. Chris Bellevie was listed as the most active user, the 3rd highest in finding items first, and 8th most popular, while Katrina was the 4th most active, the 2nd highest in terms of finding new items to "like" on the service, and 9th most popular. Mindy is listed as the 8th most active, 7th fastest to find new items, and 10th most popular on the site. (For comparative ego purposes, I was 17th most popular...)

While the giveaway is fun, Likaholix isn't just bribing its users to stick around. The service is now launching a new Wikipedia-like moderation service that asks active users to take a more active role in the community, being able to add, edit or delete topics on other users' activity, and helping to "police the topic pages", according to Bindu Reddy, the company's founder.

Likaholix is also starting a new promotion pushing friends to get more users to the site - so if you find Likaholix likeable, you can spread the news and maybe even get rewarded. Check this link for more.

You can see my account at: http://likaholix.com/louisgray and can sign up here.

Look Out, Ken Jennings, I Can Play Jeopardy On My iPhone

The trivia game show Jeopardy isn't just a household name, it's an institution, having been on the air 25 years. The arguably antiquated answer and question show that pre-dates how most people answer trivia these days (with the Web and Google) has managed to stay interesting and relevant for decades, captivating the nation's attention when good old boy Ken Jennings reeled off a ridiculous amount of wins just a few years ago and getting himself named king trivia geek for life. Now, at least for a few minutes each day, at least, I can feel like Ken Jennings, as I dominate opponents on my iPhone.


The Jeopardy Game, Complete With My Signature
The new Jeopardy game for the iPhone, just released to the iTunes Store, lets you select two modes of gameplay - solo, where you answer every single question, and the more familiar multi-player mode, where you face off against two opponents who have wandered into the studio. You can select the strength of difficulty (from easy, medium and hard), and all the facets of game play you know from the show are there on your phone - from Daily Doubles to Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy.


One Right Question...

Another Correct Guess...

Betting It All on a Daily Double...
As with any good iPhone game, there are plenty of statistics as well. The Jeopardy game displays to you how well you did for each round of an individual game, and it adds up your total results, including how many questions you got right, how many Daily Doubles you nailed, and how often you got the Final Jeopardy question correct.


Rolling Up the Stats...
Of course, playing Jeopardy on the iPhone is much easier than real life. Instead of needing to form the answer and key it in on your iPhone, it's multiple choice, and you select one of three options, as the lights count down your remaining time. Choosing one correct choice of three means I'll get a lot more right than if I was at Studio City in Los Angeles, but winning still feels good.


One Jeopardy Question. Do You Know the Answer?
You can grab Jeopardy off the iTunes store for $4.99.

Twitteronia vs. Status.net: The Battle for Hosted Microblogging Begins

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

It's no secret that I'm a huge proponent of self-hosted Microblogging. I've written numerous times on LouisGray.com and my own blog about the benefits business can see by "rolling their own" microblog with their own brand, look and feel. Not sold on this idea? Read what I wrote earlier about the implications of ESPN running their own sports network, or even the company I advise for, TodaysMama.com and their recently-launched network for Moms, TodaysMama Connect (which has quite a community going now!).

There is something to be said for a brand being able to have full control over the relationships and community they build. Self-hosting is the only way to achieve this full control. This is why I was excited to see the developers of both Laconi.ca (which hosts TodaysMama Connect, Identi.ca, and Leo Laport's Twit Army), and OpenMicroblogger (which we also wrote about before) both come out with their own way to easily set up your own, hosted microblogging environment without the need to even run your own servers. The two services, Status.net, and Twitteronia, I guess you could say are the "Wordpress.com" of the "Wordpress.org-like" self-installed microblog platforms. They provide the complete set up for anyone to have their own branded microblog with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Status.net

Evan Prodromou has been busy since we last heard about Identi.ca and Laconi.ca. As we heard several months back, his company, Control Yourself received funding, and it would appear they're using the money well. They have multiple people working for them now, and in a different scenario than perhaps their biggest competitor, Twitter (that would assume that Twitter even releases their source code like Laconi.ca or communicates with other OMB instances), they have an actual business model.

When I chatted with Rachael Herrscher, CEO of TodaysMama, she told me Evan had given them several hours each month that they were paying for, to help them out with the install of their Laconi.ca instance. Evan and Laconi.ca are working with multiple similar clients to do the same - it's a business model that works because those brands that need some support and can have that guaranteed through payment will pay for the support and extra hand-holding.

It would appear that they are pursuing another business model however with a recent blog post by Evan (and Rob Diana also wrote about it on RegularGeek).

"I’ve been telling people for a few months that one of our plans for commercializing the Identica software and getting more people on the OpenMicroBlogging network is to have a hosted service for new microblogging communities. I wanted to get out some information about the upcoming service — I’m really excited about the prospective launch."

Status.net, according to Evan, will provide for both small and larger communities to have a branded environment to host on. It will be a for-pay service, and those with fewer users will pay less. "yoursitename.status.net" will point to your instance, although it wouldn't be that hard to point a CNAME domain record to redirect to that as an alias. All microblog instances set up under Status.net, just like any Laconi.ca instance, will be able to communicate with each other via the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) protocol, meaning you'll be able to subscribe to a user's updates on another OMB-supported site without ever having to visit that site.

Evan seems to know his users are businesses. He hinted at integration with LDAP in the future, meaning you, as a business, will be able to seamlessly allow your company's employees and your existing company database to easily integrate into the system. Perhaps this means they plan to also go head-to-head with internal communities such as Yammer. I think this has a very strong external benefit as well though, and could give any company the edge to build a community around their brand, both internal and external.

Also hinted-at was the potential to integrate with other 3rd-party aggregation services. Perhaps such integrations will be sites such as FriendFeed, which already integrates Laconi.ca as an option. Such services will also most likely work under other Laconi.ca-supporting clients such as Twhirl. Evan is certainly creating the Wordpress.com for Microblogging platforms.

Twitteronia

Alongside Status.net, Brian Hendrickson, the developer behind OpenMicroBlogger, another open-source microblogging platform that also supports the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) protocol, also has announced a similar hosted microblogging site. His is live currently, in private beta, and enables a very simple registration by just providing your Twitter OAuth credentials (however I'm a little unsure what would happen if one were ever to leave Twitter). OpenID is also a work in progress which will be supported shortly.

A site based on Shaq's own term for Twitter, Twitteronia calls each instance a "Twitter". Whether that's just a code-name for now (I can see Twitter's lawyers getting hungry over Trademark dispute, although I'm not sure "Twitter" is even a registered Trademark at the moment) or something they'll keep for the future is yet to be determined, but the terminology is interesting. Essentially, any user can create their own "Twitter", using their Twitter credentials, with just the click of a button.

Several sample "themes" are given for the site administrator to choose from in order to customize your implementation. I imagine many more will be added, as Brian Hendrickson's OpenMicroBlogger platform previously supported Wordpress themes natively. I am guessing this will eventually do the same, so maybe you'll even be able to create your own in a very familiar fashion to what any Wordpress developer could create.

In addition, with the ability to upload photos to each "Twitter" instance, you can also provide an Amazon S3 key which will enable those photos to go to your Amazon S3 storage. The site also supports Zeep Mobile 2-Way SMS integration.

The OpenMicroBlogging Revolution

The move to more open platforms is starting. I predicted this at the beginning of the year, stating that we would see more open source platforms delve into microblogging, and this is just the start. Status.net and Twitteronia are both sites with great potential to be leaders in this space. How large will they become before Facebook or FriendFeed, or Twitter follow suite? Will it even matter at that point, if companies can then pick and choose the platform of their choice where all platforms can talk back and forth with each other? It will certainly be interesting to watch - I certainly hope the major players are watching, as this will be where brands turn to as they need stronger control over their community.

You can check out my Stay N' Alive Twitteronia instance at http://twitteronia.com/twitter/staynalive - leave me a message and let me know what you think!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Emend Lets You Play Copy Editor for the Entire Web

This evening, I got an odd alert from Twitter saying I had made an error with yesterday's story about optimizing headlines. Amusingly, in that story about headlines, I had made a simple copy mistake, confusing "you" with "your". The alert came from an application called "Emend", which, since its start in November of last year, has suggested almost 70 edits Web-wide, regardless of their source.

The service, which is hosted on Google's App Engine, lets you log in with your Google credentials, and report copy mistakes for any Web site or blog out there, from mine, as was the case today, to Wired, FiveThirtyEight.com, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, the New York Times, or practically anything.

The process is fairly straight forward.

Once logged in, to make "a new edit", just enter the offending URL, show the original copy that needs to be changed, and offer a proposal. When you hit submit, the proposed edit is added to the service's open items list and sent to their Twitter stream.

You can't post edits to Emend anonymously, which is good, and you can see your own list of submitted items (see mine here). From this list, you can choose an open edit and Tweet it from your own account, declare it "fixed", or if you're more daring, you can send a Trackback or pingback to the page - which would be more "in your face."


Anybody who has been on the Web for a good amount of time knows there is a secret army of grammarians waiting for you to slip up, mixing there and their or it's and its. Now, with Emend, you can make the process official and glory in your grasp of the language (or just openly mock those who don't get it right). A list of most edited sites is kept, including the status on proposed changes.

For fun, and just to see if I could tweak my cranky Canadian friend Steven Hodson, I suggested an its vs. it's problem from his own blog, using Emend, and blasting the edit out via Twitter. (see here)

If he doesn't change this post, I'll leave it open, but if he finds the time to make an edit, I'll declare it closed. It's essentially quality assurance for the Web. And if you tweet a proposed edit using Emend, I'll see it and do the best I can to fix things.



See if you can annoy your favorite blogger or journalist today at http://emend.appspot.com.

Do Not Blame Google, Newspapers Have Not Evolved

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I have tried to avoid the newspaper crisis, and the AP's comments for as long as possible. Today, a TechCrunch post got me thinking a little more about what is happening. There have been complaints that Google is killing newspapers and all other sorts of silliness. However, the biggest online driver of news traffic is Yahoo!.

According to comScore, Google News attracted 16.2 million unique visitors in the U.S. in February, compared to 42.3 million for Yahoo News and 46.2 million for the sites operated by New York Times Digital.

This means that the whole "Google as middleman is killing newspapers" idea is misguided and Yahoo may be the true culprit. Of course, this is if you believe that an Internet property is to blame. Google as a search entity does not steal traffic from anyone because it is only indexing the content on the Web so that it is easily found. Obviously, this cannot be the reason that people would blame Google.

If Google is not to blame, and you are not buying the Yahoo News idea, then who is to blame for newpapers demise? The newspapers themselves. A long time ago, television came along, but did not kill newspapers. You had a handful of channels that would show some news and some other programming. Then cable came alive, and we got specialized channels for sports, music, movies and more. So far, newspapers had not seemed to be affected, but they had not changed anything. On the TV side, we got more 24-hour news channels, and they did not kill newspapers either. Is the internet killing CNN or MSNBC? No. If anything, they are stronger because they are leveraging the internet.

So, why are newspapers dying? If you followed the TV analogy, you will see that TV has continuously evolved. Newspapers just got bigger, but did not change much. Many newspapers have Web sites, but they are just the online version of the newspaper. Where is the evolution into something better?

The Internet as a whole has been slowly killing newspapers because they are not taking advantage of what people are doing. We are in a fast-paced fast-food culture now, and newspapers are definitely best when slowly consumed. If newspapers were smart they would join forces to become a major internet player. For most newspapers, much of the content is sourced from wire services like the AP and Reuters. So why don't the newspapers use this to their advantage to become specialists. The Wall Street Journal has been a business and finance specialist for as long as it has existed.

However, I do not think that newspapers want to adapt because change is scary. The only thing you hear is that they are looking for ways to find revenue streams online. That is a band-aid that will only help for a short time. Like many companies that go into bankruptcy, they need to reinvent themselves. The problem is that they think they are fine.

Image courtesy of Jacob Whittaker

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

BurnURL Clarifies Focus In Light of DiggBar Controversy

Digg's new DiggBar is gaining a great deal of negative feedback as many see the URL shortener as reducing publishers' impact on Google and other search engines, giving Digg.com the credit as the new shortened URL is discovered. The debate has been lighting up Techmeme and John Gruber of Daring Fireball has pratically turned over his entire site to link after link decrying the new product. (See also: Ted Dziuba, Danny Sullivan and 3DogMedia)

With this backdrop, ReadBurner's new URL shortner, BurnURL, which similarly to the DiggBar, frames the original articles with a "share bar", explains how they have tried to help both readers and publishers. As author Michael Davis writes:

"One of the changes we recently put live was to remove the Sharebar when we detected the user-agents of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (these four account for the largest portions of search traffic). These crawlers don’t need to see the Sharebar (as they’re not going to interact wtih it), so we don’t need to serve it to them. Instead we feed them a 301 redirect. This tells them the URL that was burned is the original content owner and it should be listed in the index on that topic. Our shortened URL effectively gets ignored."

While I am an advisor to the ReadBurner team, they didn't check in with me on this update (or ask me to write about it), but I'm glad to see they are keeping their eyes open and trying to create a service that benefits users and content sources.

See the full blog post here: FRAMED!: What BurnURL is doing to help out Readers AND Publishers

Are You Writing Your Headlines for Google or for Twitter?

While RSS still plays a very important role for practically all online publications to get their news out to subscribers, and Google plays a critical role for the stories to get picked up by casual visitors, Twitter is playing a middleman role and growing in the minds of many publishers, who see the microblogging service as a significant traffic driver. Now, instead of using the catchy headlines we once saw in print, or keyword-laden headlines that make Google giddy, we're now seeing headlines truncated to less than 140 characters, or even as low as 125 characters as the standard, assuming a short URL follows.

For me, practically the only driver for the length of a headline is whether it easily fits in one deck for somebody using standard fonts in a browser. I don't tend to think about SEO benefits down the road and don't consider if the headline will "play well" on Twitter or other social networks, but do recognize that a good headline can be "make or break" for those seeing the story downstream, be it through RSS, or on aggregation sites, from FriendFeed to Techmeme or even Digg. (See my post from last year on this topic)

Given that practically every blog is publishing to Twitter in parallel with their RSS feed, the drive to keep headlines short is very real. In my short visit to TechCrunch headquarters on Friday, their tech team said they are very much making sure the headlines play well with Twitter. Their Twitter account now not only shows a headline and a bit.ly URL (for stat tracking) but also the author's Twitter handle, similar to how I've called out posts from other writers on this site with their own IDs.

As Twitter's impact on immediate traffic expands, it should be interesting to see how many blogs change their approach to headlines, and to see if they are in any way reducing longer-term traffic benefits from SEO for instant returns.

Greasemonkey Script Quiets FriendFeed Beta Discussions

Sometimes, too much of a good thing can simply be too much. For some Webheads, the information firehose that is the new FriendFeed beta can be too much data coming too quickly - a constantly updating roller coaster. In my follow-up post, I suggested one way to help turn off the avalanche would be a simple toggle switch to not display comments and likes, showing only new entries. It's a position Robert Scoble also mentioned when he and I talked about the beta the day before it officially launched.

Now, thanks to a Greasemonkey script authored by Matt Shaulis, you can take on the real-time feeds without being constantly updated with a barrage of updates as other FriendFeed users participate with comments and likes on the feed.

So if you're a FireFox user, and a FriendFeed user, and run Greasemonkey, you can make the new beta a little quieter and a little more palatable, if the constant stream isn't quite your thing.

To get started, start FireFox and head to:

http://www.mattshaulis.com/gm/fflite.user.js

Make sure your Greasemonkey is enabled.


One Typical Entry With Likes and Comments

The Same Entry With the Greasemonkey Script Installed
The next time you start up the FriendFeed beta, you'll see a busy feed has been significantly silenced. And of course, if you ever want to get back the core elements of FriendFeed that make it social, just turn it off.

Super Geek Spotted at TechCrunch HQ On a Segway

With today being a day off from the office, I had scheduled to meet up with Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens In Tech for a breakfast meeting in Palo Alto. Despite his 16 year tenure on this planet, I'd heard great things about his aggressiveness and entrepreneurial spirit, and was looking forward to finally connecting.

Not knowing if he would recognize me, I donned a self-promotional louisgray.com shirt, putting fashion aside for the moment.

But as fate would have it, while awaiting Daniel's arrival, I bumped into Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in Palo Alto, who was finishing breakfast at the place Daniel and I had scheduled. Arrington kindly offered us both an invite to see the uber-blog's new office, just a few blocks away, which we accepted.

Unbeknownst to us, the casual invite turned into meet and greet mania. In addition to Arrington's team, including Jason Kincaid, Sarah Lacy, Henry Work, Asad Akbar and CEO Heather Harde, both Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis stopped by - making the room high on geeks, even if low on furniture (they're still building it out).

As the team is low on furniture, there's plenty of open space - perfect for the new Segway, which arrived this morning. After Daniel managed to break its kickstand in about five minutes, Arrington let me take it for a spin. Surprisingly, it was very easy to run - so if you don't mind seeing what a geek looks like while being geeky at a geek haven... there you go.



Oh... and any rumors that I was there on official business are false. But feel free to spread them.

Shyftr Introduces Extremely Versatile RSS Filtering Engine

A year into the service's head to head fight with Google Reader and others to make an advanced RSS reader, the Shyftr team has essentially thrown in the towel on their first plan, changing course to let you filter your own content and receive specific news you want to see, with less of that you don't. Their new RSS filter tool, which debuted today, lets you create any number of filters, by author, by title, or by keywords, from a wide number of preselected blogs, or those you add yourself, and roll your own RSS feeds.

Today, when you subscribe to an RSS feed, it's essentially an all or nothing bet. By subscribing to my site, for instance, you are going to get every article I write about Apple even if you love Windows. You are going to get additional posts by the other writers on the site. And you can't dodge posts on Twitter and FriendFeed, even if you're sick of hearing about them.

Shyftr is looking to help, and even comes loaded with some example filters to get you started, including: LouisGray.com Posts from Louis Gray: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/sux0ju/

Browsers (Chrome + IE + Safari + Firefox): http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/gycxxn/

TechCrunch Posts from Michael Arrington: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/4x545a/

iPhone Titled Posts: http://alpha.shyftr.com/i3qzmd

But the fun comes when you start to make your filters, such as:

Posts from Mashable and VentureBeat Without Twitter In the Title: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/qiroqp/

Posts on LouisGray.com That Were Not By Me: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/bjzbpo/

Posts that Start with "Porn": http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/al35fd/

Posts by Om Malik on GigaOM: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/dp2drb/

Posts that mention "Robert Scoble": http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/fq8dgb/


Setting Up a Filter that Avoids Twitter and Facebook
Over the last few months, Shyftr has been making significant changes, ditching the reader, and building a customized newspaper (like MeeHive), powered by your favorite topics and sources. But the new RSS filter takes personalization to a new level. You can find the new approach at http://alpha.shyftr.com and you can find the filter tool here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter/


Shyftr-Powered RSS Filters for LouisGray.com
And the fun doesn't stop there. The company has set up new "Publisher" accounts, targeted at multi-author and multi-site blogs, to help authors distribute personalized feeds, by author, by topic and by site. I can see mega-blog sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and CenterNetworks looking into this option, as I will be, and I've been supplied with a handful of invites from those who are intrigued.

You can check out the new Shyftr at http://alpha.shyftr.com. Start your own filters here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter. You can also start with a set of pre-loaded tech blogs here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter/popular/

Weblogs Inc's iPhone Ads Show Focused Content Delivery

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

The AOL-owned blog network Weblogs, Inc. is running ads on their properties that are tailored to viewers with iPhones.  Poke around on WoW Insider's iPhone portal at i.wowinsider.com and you'll likely be greeted with an ad pointed straight into the App Store.  Look at Engadget's i.engadget.com and you might see an ad for Land Rovers or other luxury goods.

This is the first time I've seen an ad that specifically identifies me as an iPhone-browsing consumer and supplies ads relevant to that context.  There are plenty of demographic iPhones (or in my case, an iPod touch) on a site about gadgets using an iPhone.  WoW Insider's preponderance of streaming video links make the Babelgum video app a good bet for direct-to-iPhone advertising.  

The integrated nature of the App store means that any iPhone user who clicks through on the ad pictured at left is likely to be able to buy the ad with one click more thanks to Apple's foresight in saving credit card information to iTunes accounts.  This is a dead-simple impulse purchase lined up and ready for consumers to pull the trigger.  

What else can we do with targeted mobile advertising?
We've previously seen the release of iPhone-specific ads in the form of entertaining apps like this Dockers app depicting a man who dances when the iPhone is shaken.  A recently released ad trading network facilitates the creation of a "webring"-style collection of affiliated apps that advertise for one another.  One thing I've noticed about these neat Weblogs, Inc. ads is that they aren't automatically pushed to iPhone users.  When I surf to WoW Insider on my iPhone I'm not immediately redirected to the mobile site.  I didn't even realize the iPhone site existed for quite a long time.

Maybe Weblogs is simply testing this particular advertising channel without wanting to roll it out to all mobile users yet?  It seems prudent to connect these targeted mobile ads with every possible mobile user that comes through their virtual doors.  Simple blog plugins like MobilePress already demonstrate the ease with which mobile-optimized sites can be used without requiring users to find a separate URL.  Why not auto-detect all mobile viewers and give them links to the App Store or whatever other e-commerce engine is most applicable to their handset?  I'm going to keep an eye on these integrated iPhone / App Store ads - it should be very interesting to see if they can live up to the standards for targeted advertising Louis hoped for in his recent post "I Wish Ad Companies Would Truly Leverage Social Profiles".

Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work .

I Wish Ad Companies Would Truly Leverage Social Profiles

This evening, while reading early feedback on the brand new baseball season over on ESPN.com, I saw yet another ad for a singles dating service, promising me access to available ladies waiting to hear from me. My first thought wasn't to turn on Private Browsing in Safari and do some clicking around, but instead, a desire that ESPN and its ad partners would just leverage my Facebook profile, know I'm married (and not looking), and stop showing me ads that made no sense. It would help my experience, and dramatically help their click through rates and success.

Given advertising seems to be a necessary evil to make the Web go round, there really needs to be a concerted effort for companies to take the wealth of social information that is embedded in all these networks, and get the targeting ever better and closer to being truly personalized. The opportunity seems too great to pass up, and all the ingredients are there - even if the occasional privacy proponent claims concern.

Facebook and other networks like it, including LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Google, are amassing piles of information about me. They know what I like. They know my family situation and my career path. They know where I graduated from high school and college. They know what music I listen to, what sports I watch, and my favorite teams. They know where I used to work and who I still keep in contact with. But as previously discussed, even Facebook's guesses as to what ads are relevant to me are pure failure - which I only somewhat jokingly said we should help combat by marking them all as "offensive".

Forget about wondering how much money Facebook is going to make through selling ads on its own site, or selling credits and game points. I think the real money is in Facebook offering to team up with all the major advertisers on the Web (Google/Doubleclick included) and letting said advertisers tap into our personal profiles, giving them a cut of the downstream revenue. Facebook has proven they know us, even as their ad team does not. Turn over the right data to ad people who do know what they're doing, and maybe I'll stop being annoyed by ads that have nothing to do with me.

10 Suggestions For the FriendFeed Real-Time Beta

As has been widely reported by now, the popular social sharing site, FriendFeed, revamped with a laser focus on realtime discussions and information discovery. As it, and the social Web in general, continues to evolve, there is always room for improvement, even when innovative companies like FriendFeed are pushing the envelope. As I did in August of 2008 when FriendFeed first retooled their interface, I thought it would be a good time to offer ways I believe the service could expand to offer greater flexibility for its users.

Of note, from the August list of suggestions, FriendFeed has implemented five of the ten suggestions, including the introduction of small user profiles, aggregation of duplicate items, the addition of direct messages, expanded advanced search, and negative keywords in the search engine. This shows the company is listening - not necessarily to me, but the community, who had asked for the same.

1. Expand the Ability to Direct Message Anyone on the Site

Just because Twitter only lets you send direct messages to those who follow you doesn't necessarily make it the one right way to go. While I understand people are concerned about the potential for spam, my contact info should be available to anyone, just like it is with e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Also, as you likely have found, sometimes you just need to reach somebody who isn't following you, and a direct message is simply a tool to get that done.

2. Provide Easier Ways to Manage Users and Groups

As with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites, it can get pretty easy to follow hundreds or even thousands of fellow users on FriendFeed. I've done a lot of work to put the thousands I follow into different lists, based on the frequency I'll expect to interact with their updates, or how often they are posting relevant information to me. But what would be very interesting to me is determining if people are participating as well. What if I could set up a rule such that any friends who have not made a native FriendFeed comment in the last 60 days be moved out of my main feed and into a folder called "Archive" or "Ghosts"? For as much as folks complained on Twitter about some "ghost tweets", what's worse are accounts that were set up and abandoned by people who chose not to interact.

Rather than needing to select users' avatars one by one or page by page, I should be able to set up information about those people and have them automatically filtered. Talk about baseball more than 10 times a week, and I'll put you in my Sports folder, for instance.

3. There Should be a Simple or "Light" Option

The new real-time focus of FriendFeed beta means that updates are coming and going constantly. There should be a version (or a toggle) that hides all comments or likes, letting users get the new content quickly without being forced into discussions. My previous suggestions on a "lite" FriendFeed that only contains some very popular services and not others looks less likely to happen, but to quiet the noise would be a much-used feature.

4. Direct Messages Should Get Out of My Home Feed

The new interface enables you to send and receive direct messages, but they are always in your home feed, even if you've already seen them. On the right side is a direct messages indicator which shows how many new messages you have, but unlike Twitter and unlike your e-mail, it's not staying there. I would like my home feed to instead show updates from myself and friends, putting direct messages in their own position, where they belong.

5. You Should Be Able to Customize Realtime and Filters

If you are following a lot of people, the realtime updates and rapid flow of information can be intimidating. Trying to read one article while five more come in can pretty much ensure that you see nothing. It makes sense to customize your lists and filters so that some lists are defaulted to the realtime function and others (usually those with more friends) are defaulted to be "paused" or have the realtime turned off.

6. Make "Best of Day" a real "Best Of"

The "Best of Day" feature almost didn't make the cut in the beta version. As of Thursday it wasn't there, but by this morning, it was. Billed as showing "the most popular entries among your friends in the past day", the feature shows active entries, usually with many comments or likes. But it doesn't show absolute "bests", such as "most commented" items or "most liked" items in the last 24 hours. Instead, something that has 6 likes and 2 comments might rank higher than an item with 10 likes and 20 comments. It would also be very interesting if I could find the "best of day" from specific services, for instance showing the most popular YouTube videos or Delicious bookmarks of the day.

7. Make It Easier to View By Service

The new look de-emphasized services and increased focus on the individual, when compared with the current standard. While that may make it more friendly, that again pushes me to machine language instead of usual behavior. For example, if I want to see my previous SmugMug items, I need to enter "service:smugmug from:louisgray" instead of just clicking on the SmugMug icon, as you would now.

Prior to the beta site, the common nomenclature was "?service=smugmug". For example, I would post http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=smugmug and get the data. Now I need to store a query, or need to search on every one of my friends' feeds by service.

8. Bring Back Weekly Statistics

While it is true that some users will likely manipulate their usual behavior to achieve specific activity goals, seeing a person's weekly comment and like totals is a good indicator of their newness, business or velocity. On the current site, you can mouse over a user's ID and see how many comments and likes they have made in that week, but in the beta version, that data is no longer available - not on the mouse over or on the user's profile.

9. Introduce a Way to Send Direct Messages By E-mail

Considering FriendFeed's co-founder Paul Buchheit started GMail, and employee Gary Burd wrote a program called Mail2FF that sent e-mailed entries to FriendFeed, the team has significant experience in mastering e-mail clients and rules. Why not add the ability to send direct messages to FriendFeed users from your e-mail through a standard address? (For example: louisgray@users.friendfeed.com)

Like with Mail2FF and standard entries, you could add photos and have them be part of the direct message. Add more than one user to the recipient list, and they too would be part of the direct message thread.

10. Bring Back the Ability to Share Links from the Main Feed

Having used the FriendFeed beta over the weekend, I was very surprised to see the option to share a link to the main feed had been eliminated. While in the old site, you are encouraged to post photos and links, on the new beta, only photos are an option. Back in August, I actually suggested FriendFeed go the other way, offering videos and documents in addition to photos or links, so this seems like a step backward.

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

FriendFeed Reloads With Real-Time At Its Core

FriendFeed's rise through 2008 was one of the bigger successes in the Silicon Valley startup space in what was a difficult year for practically every one else not named Twitter or Facebook (and both those companies had their challenges). But even while a growing number of enthusiastic users flocked to the site, it too had growing pains. Many people, including me, cited the interface as too complicated for average users, and remain concerned about how it can cement itself a central role in the extremely competitive social networking and information discovery sphere.

Today, the site relaunched with a goal of simplifying the aggregation and sharing service and focusing on the real-time Web. The new interface constantly loads in new updates from your feeds and those from all those you follow, much like TweetDeck for Twitter - becoming an information firehose.


The New FriendFeed Interface - In Beta


The Same Information - In the Old Version
In a presentation held at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California on Thursday evening, company co-founder Bret Taylor explained that the product, introduced in October of 2007, had seen growth akin to "starting a one bedroom house and adding a bunch of wings, rather than a real nice house," following the addition of a robust search engine, and an array of features and customization. The result was something that many existing users adored, but others found intimidating. So the small company went back to the drawing board - watching how customers used the product and looking to enhance the site to become a better vehicle for discussions with friends.


My New FriendFeed Profile
The result is a brand new, revamped site, in beta, that defaults to real-time updates in every part of the interface - with some long-awaited key additions, including the launch of direct messages, similar to those on Twitter, short user profiles for every account, and significant customization and filters that can help visitors find the content they're looking for more easily. Users can also hide that which they don't want to see - including the ability to block specific users, or save keyword searches (including vanity searches).

FriendFeed's direct messages share some similarities with those on Twitter, in that you can only send notes to those who are following you, but they differ in that you can send direct messages to more than one user at a time, and can even include photos. But once you've started a thread via direct message, you can't add another person to the thread.

While direct messages and profiles were much-requested from users over the last 18 months, they are merely window dressing on top of the core architectural changes that are introduced in this morning's release. Bret and Paul Buchheit said on Thursday that there is a major move toward real time communication and sharing, and that FriendFeed expected to coexist alongside other players, like Twitter and Facebook, who have gained the lions' share of visibility in the social networking space of late.

"When something is this new, it can be hard to explain," Paul said. "Like blogging or anything else, there will be multiple services, and that's where this medium will be headed. We will be one of the more significant providers."

The company, which continues to be focused on building a great product, rather than be "distracted" by monetization talks (their word, not mine), also saw the service's user interface completely retooled, replacing a spartan grey text on white background UI seen on the site to date with more color, calling out lists of friends and subscriptions in dedicated floating boxes on the right side of the page. And while that may seem a small change, no interface edits are taken lightly, we were told Thursday.

"Everyone here (At FriendFeed) really cares about UI," said Bret. "We are aware of the shortcomings of the old interface, and it's fun to rethink the product around the usage patterns. That's how we feel now, and we are ready to launch it."

In the new UI, gone is the focus on the dozens of service icons that littered the screen, highlighting the Google Readers and SmugMugs and YouTubes of the world. In their place, instead there is more emphasis on who shared it, as the users' avatars are prominently featured (like on Twitter), with the accompanying update. You can see the service still, but it becomes less of the story. And of course, that's absolutely intentional.

"Service icons have been replaced with profile pictures, to make it simpler," Bret said. "People would see thousands of icons they hadn't seen before. Lost would be the detail of what friends had shared the item."


Subscribing to Duncan Riley's Comments on FriendFeed

The new FriendFeed beta comes with many other smaller changes under the hood. Instead of relying on FFHolic for user statistics, FriendFeed, like Twitter, now shows the number of people who you follow, as well as the number who follow you. Also showing are the total number of likes and comments you have made on the service since you signed up. And if you look at any other user's profile, you can click on their comments and choose to "follow" their comments, just like any other user. Should you be crazy, like me, you could add comments from some of your friends into a dedicated "filter" or list. I call my collection "Top Comments". And your own discussion threads are also tracked in their own feed, called "My discussions".


Tracking My Own Discussions on FriendFeed
The Subscriptions section also watches your own activity and selects those users with whom you most frequently engage. If you are a frequent visitor of Mona Nomura's feed, she might be listed there, or if you comment with Robert or Alex Scoble, they will be there. And if you think that's not who you want displayed, click Edit next to Subscriptions and select others who you follow.

But if you follow a ton of folks, be prepared for an onslaught of information. If people thought FriendFeed delivered a ton of information before, just wait until you see the beta. The realtime flow means an item might move lower in the page while you're still reading it. You might click like on the wrong item. And you probably aren't going to get the chance to read everything. That's why there is a pause button at the top. You might find yourself hitting pause just to catch a breath. But if you're an information junkie, there's really no better source.

As FeedBurner Flails and Fails, Feedblitz Fights

A week and a half ago, FeedBlitz announced it would be taking Google head on, offering a much-needed alternative to FeedBurner in the RSS automation space. (See our initial post) At the time, they said they would "rapidly evolve", and they weren't kidding. In the ensuing ten days, amidst what seems to be yet another Web-wide statistics failure on the part of FeedBurner, the company has written how to guides on leaving FeedBurner behind, how to merge multiple feeds into one, how to keep your own domain associated with your feed, and how to migrate away from FeedBurner once and for all.

For the large part, the blogosphere has grown accustomed to FeedBurner flaking every now and again. We've grown weary of long lag times between posts hitting RSS readers after they were written, and in seeing inconsistencies in reader counts, often proudly worn as a badge on users' sites. But what we've also grown accustomed to is FeedBurner's basic nature - it sends your blog out, period.

FeedBlitz is recognizing the world has changed since FeedBurner's debut. They even offer the option to display the most recent updates from social sites, such as FriendFeed and Twitter, along side your feed. At this point, for many, their microblogging is just as full-throttle as their full-length blogging, so that makes sense.

As they have expanded their offerings, FeedBurner and Google seem to not be on speaking terms once again. It happens so often now, nobody blogs about it but not too long ago, such a miss would be ripe for the gnashing of teeth. But said miss has dropped my counts from the 4700 or so range to 1400 and 1800. Who knows why, but the number is pretty random. Even my wife's family-oriented blog dumped from almost 50 subscribers to less than 20. Ouch.

So if you're sick of FeedBurner burning you, I strongly suggest giving FeedBlitz a try. I'm working my way over to switching myself. You can see my FeedBlitzed feed here: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/lg

BurnURL Unveils ShareBar 2 With Moods, E-mail and Social Sharing

The world of URL shorteners is being hotly debated this week, and seeing tremendous change, with bit.ly making news by raising a new round of venture funding, and the release of DiggBar. In this wake, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asks openly, "which URL shortening service should you use?". Joshua Schachter says they add a layer of indirection to an "already creaky system", and Jason Kottke adds on, saying they "suck" in general.

But as the use of Twitter explodes, so does the use of shorteners, as many are debating the number of characters they have left for tweets, or what one service gains them over another, as Twitter's built-in limitations make their use a necessity.


The New BurnURL ShareBar 2.0
Amid this backdrop, I have been closely watching the development of a URL shortener which does things differently - not requiring any software download or login, and not being married to any one social service - and working to determine the intent of the sharer, and mood of those who read the destination content. Round 2 of BurnURL, a URL shortener and share bar from the team at ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, is aimed to not only help information distributors pass links to friends on Twitter and other services, but to help information publishers gain feedback on their content.


Burning a link on the BurnURL site


Getting a "Burned" URL to share
The new BurnURL ShareBar, released this morning, is retroactive with the more than 20,000 BurnURLs that have been issued since its initial launch, and adds on some features which I believe will make it extremely competitive with some of the more well-known products out there, including:

Integrated Sharing to Many Social Services

Every BurnURL ShareBar shows a "share" button letting visitors of the page further distribute the content, to social sites including StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed, Digg, Facebook and Twitter.


Sharing to Social Services via BurnURL


Sharing by E-mail via BurnURL
E-mail Sharing

From the new ShareBar, you can now e-mail the content of any Web page to any number of friends, just by clicking Share, and selecting the e-mail tab. You can send it to multiple friends, and add a custom message.

A Tweets Button that Shows Mentions of the BurnURL

By clicking Tweets in the ShareBar, you can see all mentions on Twitter of that specific BurnURL. For example, see how widely my highlighting of TechCrunch's post rumoring Google was in late stages to buy Twitter was disseminated by clicking this saved search.


The new ShareBar integrates Twitter search results for the "burned" URL
Mood Mining Ratings

Rather than a simple up or down vote, Digg or bury, like or dislike, BurnURL is looking to get the mood or emotional feedback from readers by using emoticons. Now, instead of voting a story down as "bad" because you disagree with its premise, you can tag the link as funny, interesting, boring, sad, or even exciting.

Statistics

Information distributors and publishers are also likely interested to see how far and wide their shares have gone. For example, my share of that TechCrunch article has already gained more than 400 unique impressions. The new ShareBar now shares both unique views of that link and the total number of views. And as the post on the ReadBurner blog reads, you can expect more statistics to be developed in the future.


BurnURL shows more than 400 visitors from my shared link
A former TinyURL advocate, I have been using BurnURL exclusively since its initial launch - not because of my relationship with ReadBurner, but because I like the product's flexibility and promise. Techies can argue all day about whether URL shorteners are a good idea or if there are some better than others, but I believe BurnURL is taking a different approach that is social and informative, in a world when shortening is still necessary.

You can try out BurnURL yourself by starting out at http://www.burnurl.com. If you have more questions, there is an FAQ available.

Stop Telling Me How to Use Your Products

In recent weeks, there have been a number of incidents where high profile online services have gotten into something of a battle with their users. Be it the on again off again user interface debate between Facebook and its user base, or Twitter's deciding just what is the right way or the wrong way to use their service, both products have ended up telling their own customers that they know best, and you should just suck it up. During these debates, some have said the best way to drive a product forward was to never compromise and listen to your users, while others celebrated the users getting a voice at the table.

But we're missing a major issue that I want to address. I'm fine with companies making changes to their interface, or adding features, or even deciding to prioritize some issues over others. That's business. But don't tell me how to use your products. Don't tell me what is the right way or the wrong way to use a product, when you've given us tools.

Take for example the hubris from Biz Stone at Twitter in his note to individual customers who were relying on their providing autofollow capabilities. Most specifically, he said:

"We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous."

Oh really? What a bunch of junk this is. What's next? Google Reader telling us that there should be a limit to the number of RSS feeds we subscribe to, or that Yahoo!, Hotmail and GMail will limit the number of new e-mails we can receive in a day? After all, couldn't they write that "nobody can actually read e-mails from thousands of people which makes this activity disingenuous"?

Here's the reality - people are going to use products the way they want to, especially if you build a product that is flexible. And they will often use them in ways you never expected, or had even considered when you were first designing. And as you continue to build your service out, the solution is not to tell users there is "one right way", but instead to consider how you can make your product even better to an increasing number of people.

What I have seen from companies like Twitter and Facebook is a belief that you should only be connected to people you know in real life, and that you should only have a small number of people to be connected with. Yes, Facebook's dismissing the 5,000 limit, and yes, they're opening up to companies and fan pages, but they still require you to enter your true first and last name, and demand a synchronous follow.

Twitter's limits are even worse. What's so bizarre about this most recent volley about users being "disingenuous" by using auto-follow is how it impacts their most popular users. Where's the outrage that Barack Obama clearly uses auto-following software? Do you think Twitter is going to tell Obama that he can't actually follow 586,000 users? Do you think they are going to tell Robert Scoble that it is "disingenuous" to follow 85,000 people?

I also use a third party auto-following service from SocialToo (where I'm also an advisor). I use it because Twitter, thanks to other limitations in their product, will let me send direct messages only to those who follow me, and I want to let them contact me directly.

What Twitter and Facebook are doing by trying to tell their users that they know the right way to use their products is putting themselves above the users, and acting in an authoritative, but naive, manner. I think Biz' comment that it was "disingenuous" to follow thousands of accounts is covering the fact that Twitter's infrastructure wasn't meant to support such activity.

At risk of echoing Thomas Hawk's comment that I'm "Mr. FriendFeed", it's worth noting again that FriendFeed doesn't tell me how to or how not to use their products, and they aren't setting limits. They put out a service, and let the users have at it. That's impressive, and a major reason of why I'm bullish on what they do. For the rest of you developers who keep setting limits and claiming it's not your fault, but your users, you're wrong.

CoTweet Brings CRM to Twitter

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

Today my friend, Brian Watkins, who is in charge of Omniture's Social Media strategy, asked on Twitter, "the more employees you get on Twitter, the harder it is to avoid stepping on toes when responding to customer questions. ideas?" Omniture's a big company, with a growing roster of employees on Twitter, ranging from Brian himself, to Ben Gaines, aka @OmnitureCare, to their official @Omniture account, and the many other employees all with a presence on Twitter. I ran into this same problem when I managed Social Media strategy at i.TV - there simply wasn't a very good way to manage all the different Tweets being said about our company, ensure they weren't being covered more than once by employees, and at the same time manage where each response was coming from.

I was following some tweets from Guy Kawasaki one evening, where he was talking about his frustration with various Twitter clients and how not any single client really met his needs as a user. He did come across one though which caught my eye, and he seemed very impressed with it. That particular client is still in closed beta, but I was able to give it a try - it's called CoTweet.

What is CoTweet?

CoTweet is basically a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool built for Twitter. It's a typical Twitter Client, but instead of reading all your friends' updates and focusing on the general day-to-day content, it focuses on the elements a business would be most focused on, such as replies, DMs, and search. It will change the way you do business on Twitter.

CoTweet is designed for businesses and individuals with lots of followers, which perhaps can't follow and pay attention to every single one of those followers. It's also designed for businesses that need to track a lot of information about their brand and have multiple employees/staff to respond and track that information. I've found as I get more followers there is less and less of a way I can track all of their updates. I have resolved this by setting up search groups of important people and various search terms in TweetDeck, as well as being fairly religious about my replies and DMs on Twitter, but even that becomes difficult to track using the typical available Twitter clients.

CoTweet fixes this problem by only focusing on the replies and DMs in Twitter. With CoTweet, you can track multiple Twitter accounts under one login, and all replies and DMs for all of your accounts appear in one, continuous stream so you can bring it all into one place. In addition, CoTweet provides CRM-like functions that allow you to, for each reply or DM you receive, apply notes, and even re-assign to other individuals in your organization to handle. Assigned Tweets appear in a separate line item on the left that you can pick up any time later and mark complete when the desired purpose is fulfilled.

Notify Who's Tweeting

In my interview with Britney Spears' Social Media Director, Lauren Kozak, she was openly willing to admit that their team responds on behalf of Britney many times. At the same time, they are careful to be sure you know who is doing the Tweeting, whether Britney herself, or Lauren or a member of Britney's Entourage. Several other businesses and brands are doing this now in order to display full transparency in the spirit of Social Media. Guy Kawasaki, you may have noticed has recently started doing this.

CoTweet makes this process easy, through technology they call "CoTags". In your settings, you can give each user access to your brand's Twitter accounts, and each user can get a "CoTag". When the CoTag is set up for a user, when they respond via CoTweet, all their Tweets under your Twitter accounts will be appended with the CoTag for that user (so, ~Brit, or ~Jesse, or ~Louis, or ~Guy, for instance). Now anyone can know who is actually posting from your branded account.

Search, With a CRM Twist

In addition to replies and DMs, you can search on anything as you would normally be able to do through traditional Twitter search channels. However, what makes CoTweet's search interesting is that with each search result you can also assign the Tweet, add notes, or even e-mail the Tweet to others in your organization. This ensures you don't miss any important Tweet about you or your organization's brand. The only thing that would make this better is if they could allow you to just incorporate specific search results into the stream with your DMs and replies.

Multiple Accounts and Email

CoTweet currently allows management of up to 4 accounts under one single CoTweet user account. All accounts appear under your single stream of replies and DMs, but you can always turn any of the accounts off and choose not to see posts from that account. Each Tweet in your stream from all your accounts you can choose to archive (which sends the message to your "archive" folder), or e-mail to others.

With each account, you can also invite others, via e-mail, within your organization to manage and also send Tweets on behalf of your organization. Such invitation allows your organization to split up the burden to more than one person, without that individual having to know the Twitter username and password of your organization's Twitter account. This should make you feel comfortable without worry of irate employees taking over your Company's Twitter account down the road. Then, for any Tweet in your stream, you can assign to those individuals in your organization.

Each individual can also choose to receive e-mail when they are "on duty" and a DM or reply is received for your Twitter accounts. This enables employees to get a push-notification, either at their desktop or on a cellphone if you don't want your employees sitting around just waiting for new Tweets on their desktop.

Scheduling

One of the most fit pieces for CoTweet is what it offers for posting of new updates to your Company's account. In addition to the CoTags, you can also post to one or multiple company accounts at the same time. What's even more powerful is that you can schedule those posts to go out at a later time. So, for instance, if I have a scheduled update going out later and I want to be sure people are notified I can just schedule it, and it will go out without me having to worry. It's amazing that all this is in one place!

Social CRM

CoTweet is introducing a new concept amongst Twitter client tools. The concept is that of "Social CRM" - the ability to view, manage, and organize an organizations contacts and communications amongst multiple people to ensure none of the communication gets lost. CoTweet has a "medium" drop-down field that currently just has Twitter, but I fully expect other services to be integrated in the future when they are able, so hopefully soon you'll be able to manage your entire Social presence with one tool.

CoTweet is in private beta right now to protect growth, but they've provided me with 12 beta invite codes. Since I can't give one out to all of you, if you, on your honor, subscribe to both the LouisGray.com blog, and my personal blog, StayNAlive.com, then in the comments (I trust you!), say you subscribed to both and want an invite, at the end of today I'll randomly pick users to get invites. As I get more I'll randomly pick more. Today I'll be giving away 6 on this blog, and 6 on my personal blog shortly. I'll announce the winners in the comments of both blogs.

It's tools like CoTweet that make me really think Twitter is here to stay - let us know what you think!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Income Down, Refund Up - Refreshing All the Way to the Bank

I don't like anything to take too much longer than it has to. I tend to write blog posts from beginning to end in one sitting. I don't like to stop TV shows and watch the second half later. And I really don't want to have to make doing my taxes an ordeal. That's why for the last several years, I've jumped onto TurboTax Online and powered my way through the year's data. Last night, the entire process took me less than two hours, including my wife and my W-2s, deductions for our various donations to charities and the church, by way of tithing, and synchronizing the results of my gains and losses (mostly losses) in investments through eTrade over the last year.

I've mentioned my using TurboTax a few times previously on this blog, including writeups after 2005 and 2006 taxes. But given the readership of the blog is ever-changing, and given the significant changes we're all seeing in terms of the economy, I thought I would share our experience again.

As an existing TurboTax user, all the year's previous data is saved for me. Rather than have to tell them every year where I work and where my wife works, it simply asks me if that data has not changed, and can automatically import the correct information. The automatic import of data from my brokerage account is also a dramatic timesaver compared to printing all my records out and hoping I get the data right.

As you know, 2008 changed a lot of things in our family. For one, we added two new dependents, with Matthew and Sarah joining us in the year. Also, as my wife stopped working in the middle of the year, her income decreased quite a bit. Lastly, and most importantly, as far as Uncle Sam was concerned, the gains I had seen in previous years on the stock market turned into losses, as they did for everybody else.


TurboTax Helpfully Shows Results vs. The Previous Year
The result? As expected, our household income went down by a good margin, but not so much that we're in dire straights. Yes, we're lower on cash than we'd like, but we have avoided debt, and I still have my job. And after last night's two-hour effort, this year's refund should help things quite a bit, especially as I have to strongly consider replacing my car, on its last legs, thanks to trouble with the transmission. (See FriendFeed thread here)

As it turns out, thanks to the drop in income, our new family status, and our being good citizens and tax payers, our refund grew by about 50 percent compared to last year. Even though it won't make up for the losses in the market, and our reduced income, it's something, and it's been great to just be able to log on to TurboTax and take care of the whole process in one evening. Now, I just have to check in with my bank every morning and see if the government has given us our share back. After all, three years ago, it only took ten days.