Audio: SXSW 2009 Panel on Beyond Aggregation

Although it has been a few months since SXSW 2009 came and went, rich media from the event is continuing to trickle forth. The major reason I even attended the annual tech shindig was to participate on a panel discussing the issue of going "Beyond Aggregation", sitting alongside other folks you might know, including Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who moderated, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Melanie Baker of PostRank and Micah Baldwin of Lijit.

Melle helpfully found an MP3 Podcast file from the panel, and posted it to her site today. Still no video, but at this pace, it could be another six months or so for that to leak out, although 100 interviews posted a short video piece with me just after the panel had concluded, and it got written up by Phil Glockner that day.

Our discussion ranged from how to discover new data, to whether communities are growing outside the world of tech, and whether you can measure influence. You can download the 1 hour long audio clip and listen at your leisure here:

Download MP3 File (20 MB)

10 People To Follow On FriendFeed For May 2009

Ninth Edition Of a Monthly Series (combined with Mike Fruchter's efforts)

FriendFeed would simply be a quiet network featuring a mess of links and no interaction if it were not for the "Friend" portion of the service's name. With hundreds of thousands of known users, it can be hard for some to break through and become visible, beyond bringing a brand name from previous activity. But, with participation, many do, and we are more than eager to highlight them in this monthly feature, our ninth. As always, we strive to not miss anyone, so if you believe you or others should be included, you know how to reach us - in the comments, via e-mail, and of course, on FriendFeed.

May 2009's featured FriendFeeders are:

1) Mark Evans

Short Bio: Mark Evans is Managing Principal at Bancroft Research Group, where he develops competitive intelligence products and services for startups and Fortune 500 companies. He is also the President-elect of the American Marketing Association's San Francisco chapter. Mark is also father of four-year-old triplets, two girls and a boy.

What they find interesting: Marketing, Technology, Productivity

FriendFeed: Subscribe

2) Sheryl Breuker

Short Bio: Sheryl, along with her husband Ken Camp, runs Stardust Global Ventures, a business venture focused on mobile technology, casual computing, social media and how technologies are being integrated both at the office and at home.

What they find interesting: Podcasting, Social Media, Entertainment

FriendFeed: Subscribe

3) Thomas Power

Short Bio: Thomas Power is the Chairman of Ecademy, a business-focused social network, based in the UK. He is a professional speaker, has authored six books and was previously an advisor to BT and Microsoft.

What they find interesting: Google, social networking, startups

FriendFeed: Subscribe

4) Rochelle

Short Bio: Rochelle is the wife of Akiva Moskovitz (who we featured last month), a new mother to Audrey, and a self-proclaimed FriendFeed "superstar". She is an avid photographer.

What they find interesting: Family, News, Photography

FriendFeed: Subscribe

5) Biill Romanos

Short Bio: Bill Romanos is General Counsel at Florida Turbine Technologies, an Aerospace & Defense company. He has experience in corporate and securities law, and is an expert on intellectual property, corporate and securities law.

What they find interesting: Defense, Intelligence, Technology, Security

FriendFeed: Subscribe

6) Anika Malone

Short Bio: Anika calls herself an "opinionated mama". Mother to a young boy and girl, Anika operates in the cross-section of politics, family and technology, one day debating party affiliations, and the next, discussing food or getting rid of baby gear, assuming the family is complete. Anika lives in Southern California, and is married to Adrian Culici.

What they find interesting: Politics, Culture, Family

FriendFeed: Subscribe

7) Rick Bucich

Short Bio: Rick Bucich helps manage the marketing and social media activity for Tiny Prints, a photo card and stationary company based in Mountain View. He is a photography expert, and father to a young boy, JR.

What they find interesting: Photography, Social Media, Marketing

FriendFeed: Subscribe

8) Anne Bouey

Short Bio: If it wasn't for Anne Bouey, it's possible FriendFeed wouldn't exist. Why? Because she is mother to one of the site's cofounders, Jim Norris. Interestingly, it's very possible she uses the product even more than he does.

What they find interesting: News, Politics, Entertainment

FriendFeed: Subscribe

9) John E. Bredehoft

Short Bio: John Bredehoft, based in Ontario, California, is a product marketing consultant for MorphoTrak, having recently joined the company after nine years as a product manager for Motorola, where he was focused on fingerprint identification systems. John runs a blog network called Empoprises, a series of vertical sites with distinct focus.

What they find interesting: Technology, Business, Transportation

FriendFeed: Subscribe

10) Rachel Fox

Short Bio: Rachel Fox is a media consultant for non profits, a hobbyist photographer and a foster mom for kittens in need. Rachel is also married to Kevin Fox, a FriendFeed employee. Rachel's feed, swimming amidst a world of techies, is always entertaining.

What they find interesting: Animals, Photography

FriendFeed: Subscribe

Five Blogs Under the Radar: May 2009 Edition

Fifteenth Edition Of a Monthly Series

One of the more fun things I get to do on this blog is highlight other voices from around the world who crave tech or have insight into the Web we're all weaving. I recognize others made sure to give me airtime on their own sites, and the right thing to do is to return the favor. For the last year-plus, we have hand-selected five new blogs for you to review and, hopefully, subscribe. By following these new voices, you can get additional viewpoints outside the common echo chamber. And who knows, maybe some of these people will eventually become household names?

To get on this list, bloggers need to post regularly, cover something resembling technology, and have less than 1,000 subscribers or so. We are more than happy to take nominations as well, either here, by e-mail, FriendFeed or Twitter.

The May 2009 blogs are:

1) Almighty Link (almightylink.ksablan.com)

Focus: Social networks, hyperlinking, media, search
Three Recent Posts:

• Topsy finds Twitter users who share links related to your beat
• When a quake shakes a Sunday night newsroom
• Your content is social, even if you aren’t

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Advocate's Studio (advocatesstudio.wordpress.com)

Focus: Legal, Blogging, Technology
Three Recent Posts:

• Honor Among Bloggers
• Find a Search Engine to Match Your Visual Learning Style
• Focus on Outcome, Not Income

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Blind Five Year Old (blindfiveyearold.com)

Focus: Google, RSS, Technology
Three Recent Posts:

• Google Synonyms
• How To Deal With Email Mistakes
• Five Reasons Why Paid Search Is Down

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Techgeist (techgeist.net)

Focus: Google, Web Browsers, Search
Three Recent Posts:

• Friendfeed Has Spoiled Me - I Demand Real Time Now
• Something Has To Give
• Chrome On Linux - Displays Google.com, Does Little Else

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Deliberate Ambiguity (deliberateambiguity.typepad.com)

Focus: Search, Microsoft, Technology
Three Recent Posts:

• Bing: An Insider's Perspective
• Wolfram Alpha: A Marketer's 2 Cents
• How *not* to rate a search engine

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

It's amazing how more than a year after starting this process, I am still impressed by the high quality writing by some of these lesser-known blogs. Some of those highlighted this month are among the best I've seen in a long time. 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.

Latest Twitter Bug Hides the Use of Third Party Clients

Following Twitter's mid-day downtime and "fatal software error" they reported on their blog Saturday, it looks like the site is no longer displaying what applications its users are leveraging to post updates. Regardless of whether you are using TweetDeck, Tweetie, PeopleBrowsr, Seesmic Desktop, or simply redirecting updates from FriendFeed, Twitter is reporting all updates are from their Web interface.

While a minor issue, tweets from third party clients help to advertise their use. For example, it's a bit disconcerting to check the official TweetDeck account, and see they are updating "from Web", ostensibly not using their own product.



Users Clamoring About Twitter's Missing Info
I first noticed the bug on my own feed, as it said that items I had redirected from FriendFeed, using the FriendFeed URL shortener, ff.im, had originated from the Web. I also couldn't see any use of the desktop application Tweetie, when I know I have been using it. Surprisingly, Twitter showed "from Web" as the only service I had used at all.


This Tweet Originated on FriendFeed, not on Twitter's Web site

TweetDeck Users On Twitter Asking About the Bug
And yes, in a world of 140 characters, even the little things get noticed. Though not the bonfire of recent missteps, this issue has seen many asking over the last five hours why their clients aren't accurately being displayed. (See: Twitter Search "from TweetDeck" for example)

I don't see this being a longtime bug. Twitter will likely figure out the issue, which might have been introduced as a result of their recovering from unplanned downtime on Saturday. But for diehard Twitter client fans, and believe me, they're out there, the disconnect is yet another head-scratcher from a service that's playing a bigger role for an increasing number of people.

PR Pitches Promise to Trade Diggs for Coverage

As the blog has gained in visibility, so to have the inbound pitches. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they are horrible - and some are just downright off-topic, and get deleted. But one the more recent trends I've seen is a promise by the PR rep to push the story to Digg "if the review is great". Twice this month, I have received near-identical pitches, ostensibly from two different people at two different PR agencies, ending with the following two lines, after having introduced their new iPhone apps:

"Let me know - I can send promo code right away. If the review is great we will digg it as hell."

Never mind the cookie cutter wrap-up and the substandard English, or even that the pitches have been for less than interesting iPhone applications. Call me snooty or idealistic, but I have a very real problem with the idea that if my review is deemed "great", that the PR team will try and reward me with traffic by manipulating Digg - even if I think they don't have the Digg juice to do it.


An excerpt from one such pitch in early May
I'm not going to stand on a pedestal and make a rant about paid posts, or how bloggers are allowed to curry favor or get bias, but this is a stupid practice I could really live without. Because I'm a nice guy, I won't be outing which agencies, individuals or which products are pitched this way, but I bet some of you reading this have gotten the same template garbage.

Do you really think you're earning bonus points with me because you're Web 2.0 savvy enough to know what Digg is?

If you want to entice me into writing about your product, don't do it with a promise of Diggs. Show me that you know what I usually cover, and that your offer is something my audience wants to know. And please don't send me a link from a top tech blog as evidence that your stuff is awesome, because if somebody else already debuted your story, it's already old. Digg it?

Video Snacking 10 Seconds at a Time, On 20 Screens, via Twitter

Combine the elements of your short attention span with the world's hottest little network, in Twitter, and the viral aspects of YouTube, and you've got a fun little site called Veetweet, which as my friend Drew Olanoff wrote me is like "giving a 3 year old a quadruple latte and the TV remote."


Veetweet Randomly Selects the Latest YouTube Videos Shared in Twitter
The premise seems simple. Veetweet finds the latest YouTube videos posted to Twitter, lays them out in a grid on your browser window, and plays them out in an endless stream of 10 second video clips. Should you find any of them interesting, you can click on the history playlist and see where they came from, or open the current video on YouTube.

It's a lot of like channel surfing an infinite number of channels, selected by somebody else. Find something you like? Open a new window. Not finding anything? Keep watching, and maybe something will come along. In my viewing of Veetweet, I went from guitar solos to Mexican stand-up comedy, to an excerpt of Fox News denouncing Mr. Rogers.


My Veetweet History Is Saved If I Want To Find a Video
Your Web browser is all set to play 20 channels at once, but you don't know in which order. As one ends, another expands and starts playing, as the one just watched is replaced by something new, constantly filled by the latest tweets that link out to YouTube.

The project is a showcase for 9astronauts.com, a team of developers marketing their Javascript, Ruby on Rails and iPhone coding skills. (See their other projects here)

Google's Blogger Challenge: Win the Marathon and Don't Bonk.

Sometimes I feel like I am a rarity in the tech blogging world, considering I haven't moved away from the Blogger platform and onto the more frequently celebrated, higher geek cred option, WordPress. In fact, I'm such an oddity that I am not even on the newest version of Blogger. I still cling to the "Old" Blogger and post my stories using FTP, as it's something that has worked for me for the better part of three and a half years. But while I haven't made the switch, many have - falling in love with WordPress' wide array of extensions and open source mentality. I've even had offers for people to help me move off Blogger to WordPress, and have, so far, resisted.

With this going on, there's no question Google's Blogger platform has a perception problem. While it is on record as the largest blogging platform on the Web today, ahead of Six Apart's TypePad, LiveJournal and WordPress, it is largely seen as not leading the innovation curve - even if mommybloggers (like my wife) use it and love it.

Some aspects of Blogger feel like they haven't changed in maybe five years, and surprisingly, that perception is actually true. Today I had lunch at Google Headquarters with Rick Klau, who is a Product Manager on the Blogger team at Google, and we talked at length about the current state of the platform, as well as what is planned in upcoming releases to help the product become even more on par, and in some cases, ahead of the competition. He said that for the most part, Google has just "kept the product alive" in maintenance mode, not adding too many features. Meanwhile a good number of the features being tested in the product's "Draft" area, similar to Google Labs, are unknown to the majority of the product's users.

But even in keeping the product going, there's been a tremendous amount of effort from people Rick said were "working their butts off". He wrote me in an e-mail after our lunch, saying, "There's been a ton of largely invisible innovation over the last few years - things that don't get seen because they just work, but enable the massive scale at which Blogger operates."

Klau joined Google as part of the company's acquisition of FeedBurner in mid 2007, and since that purchase, neither FeedBurner nor Blogger have been spared the arrows from critics who recognize the value of their services, but expect more, myself included. Klau agreed with my comments this afternoon saying that users see Google as having the combination of tremendous brain power and seemingly infinite technical infrastructure resources, making any hiccups practically inexcusable. I've always said I favor the little guy over a large monolith like Google, and users are easily tweaked when products produce incorrect results or have outages that last hours - both of which I've highlighted before in darker days.

But Klau also noted the platform is under a constant around-the-clock battle with spammers and other hackers attempting distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and working to find ways to blast spam into comments on the millions of blogs on the Blogger platform worldwide. In fact, the Blogger team has three people in three continents around the world dedicated to keeping the sites up and the riffraff out.

To fully appreciate life as a Blogger user, Klau did the opposite of what many have done of late, moving from WordPress to the Blogger platform with his own blog. He now gets the privilege to see both the good and the bad of his product from the perspective of the company's large user base - and despite the competitive state, he sounded eager at what the future will bring, and the opportunities available, with top resources available from the Mountain View search giant, including potential integration with newly announced products elsewhere within the company.

"I feel like we're in a marathon, and I am beginning with a 10 mile headstart," Klau said. And while it may have been true that in recent years, Blogger had been sitting idly, or jogging in place to hold their position, it is clearly no longer the case now, as I learned during my talk with Klau today. The team is running again.

Today's Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem "Too Slow"

Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to attend one of the semi-regular open houses held at FriendFeed headquarters in Mountain View. (See pictures from Brian Solis, who also attended) While on other occasions, I may have taken the chance to pick the brains of the small team, yesterday I ended up spending the bulk of the time talking to others in the industry, including Edelman's Steve Rubel and TechCrunch IT's Steve Gillmor on what they thought the future of communication, information discovery and blogging would be, amidst the dramatic expansion of microblogging and real-time updates and alerts. And while we all had our own viewpoints on the future of RSS, we agreed that what has been status quo for the last five to ten years is changing underneath us, moving toward a world that is faster, driven as much by what will be our preset queries and searches, rather than through subscriptions and static pages.

Gillmor famously argued earlier this month that RSS should "rest in peace". Gillmor's summary started off by saying, "It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore," and continuing onward, making a case that the immediacy of Twitter made it the source for news discovery, not tools like Google Reader, which I use to find all the data from my sources on a daily basis. As he told Steve Rubel and me yesterday evening, the post "went global" faster than anything he had ever written before, and judging by the more than 500 comments received on TechCrunch, as well as the many follow-on pieces I've seen, it stirred up a great deal of controversy - which is to be expected when making such a black and white claim.

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed "slow", when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit 'J' in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone's house, making them immediately take action.

Gillmor's unique writing style no doubt stemmed much of the confusion around his "Rest in Peace, RSS" story, which I fundamentally disagreed with the first time around and ignored. But in yesterday's discussion, it became more clear what he was trying to propose - not so much a full-fledged abandonment of RSS readers for Twitter, but instead, pushing for a reader-like tool that would follow microblogging services, decode shortened URLs on the fly, and then deliver the option to read full text of a piece.

In essence, rather than waiting the 20 to 60 minutes it can sometimes take RSS to propagate, thanks to latency from FeedBurner, for the most part, Gillmor's approach would take seconds - where a blog publisher or news distributor could post an update to Twitter or FriendFeed and have the same type of result, only a lot faster. This comes at a time when Gillmor and others are saying that referrals to blog posts are decreasing from RSS readers and increasing from microblogging sites, as readers do their link discovery outside of the reader.

Although Gillmor said we should just "switch to Twitter", he isn't even waiting for Twitter to bring back his much-beloved 'Track' to monitor keywords. Instead, he expects that FriendFeed will more quickly arrive at a tool that delivers realtime alerts to e-mail or instant messaging tools than Twitter - which makes sense as the aggregator has already set up e-mail and IM tools for lists and has delivered saved searches, two of the three components needed to make 'Track' a reality - and not just across Twitter, but across the more than 50 social sites FriendFeed supports.

As Gillmor told us both, he sees posts from louisgray.com "immediately" when I add them to FriendFeed, even if it takes much more time for them to enter Google Reader. And yes, that's because I, as a publisher, follow a specific process when posting, to author it and immediately afterward send it to Twitter and then pull it into FriendFeed, all before I manually ping FeedBurner. It's a conscious decision on my part, but one that helps his case.

RSS is not dead. Far from it. We're all using RSS every day, powering our Web portals, and helping to distribute blog and news content everywhere. But if it is about getting things discovered most quickly, and getting a response from readers very quickly, there's a reason you see people looking elsewhere, just like there's a reason I use a tool that pulls comments from FriendFeed into louisgray.com on my blog posts. I know some people will get to my content somewhere else faster. And if an enterprising software developer, like Nick Bradbury, can make a tool that turns links on Twitter into the same type of tool we see in RSS readers, maybe we'll be onto something new.

RakedIn Takes On Portals With Focused Finance Site

Today, a good amount of the news we get about businesses and the individuals at these companies comes from horizontal portals and news organizations that have other priorities - be it search at Yahoo! and Google, or politics and entertainment, like at CNN. Meanwhile, social sites like LinkedIn and business tools like Jigsaw and Hoovers are accruing personal details about many companies. A new site, debuting today, called RakedIn, has launched, trying to interweave the personalities behind the businesses you watch with up to date stock and financial information, as well as company overviews, with key leaders and board members.

RakedIn, launched by Mike Yavonditte, the former CEO of Quigo, who left AOL following that company's $340 million acquisition at the end of 2007, says it now has a collection of more than 200,000 companies and half a million people covered on its site, on day one, a number it anticipates to continue growing over time.


RakedIn's Search Engine Finds Data On LinkedIn


RakedIn's Profile of Twitter, the Company
The site's front page displays featured headlines and an update on the day's stock markets, headlines from across a wide range of industries, and the day's biggest losers or gainers. Aiming to have the most up to date information available, you can dice the information by industry, or even by press releases, company filings, or other news. The site even helpfully tells you if there are more headlines that have loaded as you read the current news - saying they have "raked in" new updates.


A Sample from RakedIn's Financial Data Headlines


RakedIn Also Shows Detail On Individuals Across Companies
Like Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance, you can dive down into any specific company, such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! or any of the Dow components. A company page, assuming it is public, will highlight the latest news, insider trades, employee compensation and other personnel highlights - as well as where the company ranks versus its peers. (For example, Microsoft has the highest earnings in Washington State and is the 88th largest employer overall tracked)


RakedIn's Profile of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer
One of the biggest aspects of RakedIn is the benefits of near real-time. During market hours, you can see stocks rise and fall, and headlines slot their way in to company pages. And the site even tracks your most recently viewed pages, giving you fast access should you want to return.


My Recent Activity on RakedIn Is Tracked
And for the largest companies, you can see how their extended families operate. For example, for EMC Corporation, you can see its related businesses, including VMware, Iomega and Documentum, as well as their estimated revenues, profits and employee counts.

RakedIn has a wealth of information, especially for a inaugural debut. And their focus might give people a very real alternative to the portals who are simply aggregating data from everywhere. Check it out at www.rakedin.com.

Omnipresent Omniture Makes Facebook Apps Omnipotent

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

The Facebook Platform just got a whole lot more interesting today as the all-powerful Analytics company, Omniture, Inc. released a new suite of analytics libraries for developers writing for the Facebook Platform. The analytics aim to improve, in heavy detail how Facebook developers' apps are being used on the Facebook Platform. What's interesting about the launch though is, in the rumored upcoming introduction of a Facebook Payments platform, the potential implications for e-commerce on Facebook that this brings.

Omniture, a company with probably most of the major online retailers on its client roster, provides Analytics tools for companies such as BackCountry.com (my former employer) and others to be able to track users of their websites. Earlier this year they announced an iPhone Analytics suite, enabling iPhone app developers to track the use of their iPhone applications. E-Commerce and retailers can use the software to track conversions from click to actual purchase within links and ads. At their Omniture Summit conference earlier this year they even showed a demo of being able to track someone who visits an e-commerce site, and then ends up at a physical store location to actually purchase the item. The cross-pollenation of their various stats products to enable companies to know almost everything about their customers is quite honestly, a little scary. That's what makes Omniture so useful and powerful to their clients - it's the breadth of what they offer and the ability to see a customer across multiple products that makes them one-of-a-kind.

This Facebook announcement just made the customers that they track all the more real. With this tracking, Omniture is now able to identify purchasers on the websites they frequent by age, sex, location, network, interests, the demographics of their friends, the number of their friends, and much, much more. It's this user segmentation that will make companies like Amazon and Apple and Wal-Mart want to create Facebook applications to drive users to buy things on Facebook. All of the sudden, Facebook Apps just became very interactive advertisements.

One strategy many Facebook app developers employ is the creation of multiple niche communities under the umbrella of a much larger app company. Such a strategy encourages more wall posts by users from the app and a much more targeted experience within each application the developer launches. In addition to driving and tracking conversion, Omniture has made it very easy, using their SiteCatalyst product, to track and manage multiple Facebook applications at one time. For instance, an example they used was 3 TV Show apps, and the ability to track the number of times images were viewed within the apps vs. times videos were played or stories read. Such a strategy could enable a similar media company to compare various campaigns and determine what was most successful.

The Facebook App Analytics market is ripe with competition right now. With analytics companies such as Sometrics and Kontagent which both have free products at the moment, Omniture may not hit the smaller, core app developers which make up some of the top applications on Facebook. However, with the breadth of information Omniture provides and ability to truly track user engagement and conversion across multiple products, those developers could now seriously have some competition on their hands by much bigger players in the industry that can afford to pay for it. I am told that already at least one major media company has begun to use the product. At the same time, Omniture also provides smaller packages more affordable to the small and medium-sized business, so the smaller developers are not out of luck entirely.

This is a big move for both Omniture and Facebook, and will hopefully bring out some interesting new applications from many of the online retailers which are already using their software to track performance and conversion in their increasingly offsite online presence. In the wake of a coming payments platform for Facebook, Omniture could bring some interesting things to the network. It will be very interesting to watch and see how companies begin to use this and what information comes from the wealth of information Omniture provides.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

PeopleBrowsr Opens Up In Public Beta, Unifying Social Activity

In December of last year, we highlighted the introduction of PeopleBrowsr, a Web-based utility to help you follow all your friends across their various social networks in one place, ranging from LinkedIn to YouTube, FriendFeed and Twitter. The product, while very robust in terms of its offerings, also seemed complex, with usability tradeoffs seemingly made for feature introductions. With several months of incubation, the site has now opened up in public beta, hoping to supplant TweetDeck and other multi-column tools, like Seesmic Desktop.

The service, which you can find at www.peoplebrowsr.com, bills itself as a "one-stop solution for managing online activity," and there's no doubt that's exactly what it does. You can add what are called "stacks" or columns from 14 different networks, and have the option to push updates to each from the single browser window.


Click Here for A Larger Image of PeopleBrowsr In Action
PeopleBrowsr's goal, like other aggregation services, is to help you tame the content stream and avoid missing important posts. The service also hopes to make itself the center for conversations by letting you manage multiple user names, and follow anonymously, without the public friending that takes place on practically every network.

As we also have discussed with our recent posts on search, finding your data can be even more important than seeing it as it appears, and PeopleBrowsr has approached that as well, by offering search filtering, and the saving of searches for future use.

Like TweetDeck, the temptation to keep adding "stacks" or columns is tempting. I can follow all friends' updates on FriendFeed and Twitter with PeopleBrowsr, while watching out for updates on LinkedIn, YouTube or even RSS. Really, the only limit to the product now is the width of your screen.

Topsy's Social Search Will Benefit Big Blogs, Influential Tweeters

Combining the world of search and the world of microblogging, including Twitter, is a popular thing to do these days. With Twitter Search having its hiccups, entrants like Twazzup, OneRiot and TweetMeme have all joined the game of trying to find the best content on Twitter, or finding the most influential users. In the last few days, Topsy, which bills itself as a "new kind of search engine" powered by the social Web, has gotten a good amount of visibility, especially due in part to an aggressive recommendation from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch - who is a big fan.

Topsy is interesting in that rather than finding the best result due to external hyperlinks or having "one right answer", as Google and most other search engines do, Topsy instead relies largely on the number of times a URL is shared (or tweeted) around that specific keyword.

For example, while searching Apple on Google sends you to Apple.com, Searching for Apple on Topsy instead sends you to watch Apple's TV Ads for the "Get a Mac" campaign. You can guess that when the new ads debut, they are frequently sent around Twitter, pushing that link to #1.

Similarly, Topsy is influenced by recency, which explains why a similar search for Microsoft has articles on their Bing search product competing with Google rather than the vanilla Microsoft homepage you would get with Google.

But, as with Google, not all things are equal in the world of microblogging. If you have an account with hundreds of thousands of followers, thanks to a position on the site's Suggested Users List, you will no doubt have much more influence on how many times items are retweeted, and therefore, a much higher impact on Topsy. That means then that accounts like TechCrunch and Mashable, who are in the SUL, are highly featured, and other competitors, like VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb, do not fare as well.

The impact of a big account can be seen both on individuals and topics.

Stories on TechCrunch.com are #1 on Topsy when searching for individuals like Eric Schmidt, Dave Sifry and Reid Hoffman, each a leader in tech, covered by the network. In parallel, Mashable holds the #1 overall position for individuals including Mark Zuckerberg., while ReadWriteWeb finishes #1 for Paul Buchheit.


Top Topsy Results for Eric Schmidt


Top Topsy Results for Mark Zuckerberg


Top Topsy Results for Reid Hoffman


Top Topsy Results for Dave Sifry
Essentially, Topsy is the delivery of "authority-based search" that Loic Le Meur was asking for at the end of 2008, but done so in a way that doesn't explicitly say so.


Top Topsy Results for Tesla Motors
On topics, you can see TechCrunch holds the top position on Topsy for Tesla Motors, as well as the #1 position for LinkedIn, #2 for Socialmedian and Google News as well as #3 for FriendFeed, with Mashable finishing #4 on that search. In each case the coverage of the company trumps the company's site or official comments.


Top Topsy Results for Apple's iPhone
In turn, Mashable holds the #1 Topsy result for iPhone, and the #3 spot for MySpace.

That's not to say there is anything inherently "wrong" with these results, but they are definitely different, and if Topsy should take off, the influence of larger blog networks and the Suggested User List on Twitter will expand further. Should search results lead you to the one true answer that delivers you a bland corporate page, or should they instead lead you to social news impacted by a large community?

Qajack Presents Fun Videocentric Social Q&A Service

Advice and answer sites like Yahoo! Answers, and the long-since defunct pioneers such as ExpertCity and EXP.com have served the Web by providing a hub to ask challenging questions and getting answers from the registered community. But they haven't really found a great way to make the process social, with friends you know. Trying to capture that element, and splashing on the fun requirement of video, as well as credits on the service, a new product called Qajack looks like a lot of fun - and might even be useful.

Video plays a crucial role at Qajack. Not only do the questions get presented using your webcam, but so do the answers!


I Post a New Video Question on Qajack
If you have a question you want answered, post where it says, "What do you want to know?" and hit return. Once you've posted your question, you make a short video of less than a minute, summarize it in 140 characters or less, and add tags.

Since you want good answers, and not just any answer, you can post a "prize" of JK dollars to be won by the answer that's most appropriate. And it even costs a fraction of those dollars to answer a question, so you won't get any junk.

For example, I asked: "What are the advantages to living in Britain over the US? If I were to leave the US, why would I go there?"


Top Qajackers (as of today's standings)
You can see the first response from two of the site's three cofounders below it. Since I am offering 25 JK$, it cost him 6.25 JK$ to post his response. If he wins? Good deal, a 4 to 1 return. But if I get 5 responses, I'll actually have made a profit off my question. That in itself makes it fun, and of course, there is even a leaderboard on the site for what it calls "Top Qajackers".


Top Questions on Qajack
Qajack is very, very new, and only has 11 total users (myself included), but it has already seen comments on politics, technology, and even advice for what to do if you're only getting five hours of sleep a night, and need to focus on work. (I dared to answer that one)


My Updated Activity On Qajack
As always, you can find me at my ID of "louisgray". As cofounder Adam Martin said, "If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance." Looking forward to seeing you answer some of my questions, and don't you worry about how you look on video. I promise not to wear makeup.

MicroBlink Releases Feedstats.info for FriendFeed Stat Fanatics

In technology, if you can measure an activity and compare it with that of other users, it's likely somebody is working on a service to crunch the numbers. Twitter has TweetStats and following counts. FeedBurner shows RSS subscribers. LinkedIn displays the number of connections. And FriendFeed displays following counts, as well as likes and comments activity, on your profile. But the service, in its latest upgrade, removed the ability to analyze your own feed and see which friends were most active on your thread. Into that void walks a new service from the team at Microblink, called Feedstats.info.

Feedstats.info essentially provides the same information that previously was available to all FriendFeed users, but not just for your own account - opening up the ability to analyze anybody's activity, so long as you know their user name.


Entering the ID into Feedstats.info

The data says I use Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed most often.
If you enter a FriendFeed user's ID into Feedstats.info, you can see how often they post per day (in the last 1,000 items), what services contributed to that feed (both in bar chart and pie chart form). You can see what days and what times of day the user most frequently uses FriendFeed, and also, who provides the most likes and comments on their items.


FeedStats Shows I Use FriendFeed Least On Weekends, and from 1 to 7 a.m.

FeedStats Also Shows Who Has Activity On My Items
Using this service, you can see which users log in to FriendFeed at specific intervals during the day, and those who are pretty much on the service around the clock, stopping only to sleep (I assume). You can also, if you check enough accounts, get a good idea as to who the most prolific people are in terms of "liking" activity, especially if they lead many different accounts.


FeedStats Takes A Look at Rochelle

Hutch Carpenter Under the Microscope
As with most stat sites, it's easy to start playing with the charts, and equally as easy to ask, "what's the point?" At what point does knowing the data is there start to impact user behavior? Should Rob Diana stop sharing so frequently on Google Reader if he finds out that it's nearly 90 percent of his feed? Should I be using Twitter more or FriendFeed less? Or the other way around?


Rob Diana: Google Reader Expert

Jesse Stay Uses Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed.
One of the assumed corollaries offered by Feedstats.info is a guess that those who like your items have a high compatibility with you, making them most "like" you. But what I found is that there is a small subset of users with a tremendous number of likes and comments, far outstripping mine, and they may lead my account as well as others, making our correlation a false one. But other than that, it's still an interesting set of data to play with. You can sign in with your FriendFeed API key, and can check any account, as I have.

Amplifeeder to Soon Release Open Source Lifestream Platform

A Screen Capture from My Amplifeeder
Lifestreaming fans over the last few years have found newer and more fully-featured options to aggregate all their online activity. In addition to social networks like Facebook, FriendFeed and other external sites, there are products that let you pull the data into your blog, and there are others that let you host the application on your own server with your own domain name. And each has its own wrinkle - be it a larger array of supported data sources, the ability to post comments, or colorful templates to make the result more inviting.

A new entrant called Amplifeeder is currently available for testing, but won't be available to the general public until it is added to Microsoft's new application store (some time next month). The product is an open source solution that runs on Microsoft's IIS server and requires SQL, but delivers a flexible solution with many preinstalled templates, a wide number of supported social sites, and yes, the opportunity for comments.

While many lifestreaming solutions essentially post all your updates, in chronological order in one section, no matter the source, Amplifeeder's templates can break out the information into different sections, such as "videos" from YouTube, "photos" from Flickr, "favorites" from Digg and Delicious, "writings" from Google Reader shares, and the core "lifestream" of Last.fm updates, Twitter postings and the blog.


Different Channels Pulled Into Amplifeeder
The author, Jon Paul Davies, enabled me to have an account, which you can find at http://louis.amplifeeder.com/.

If you're one of those people who has signed up to many of these similar sites, you probably do get tired of entering your profile information each time. Amplifeeder actually made the process very easy. In fact, if you provide a FriendFeed user name, Amplifeeder will check your profile and match up the services, making the process automatic. You can also make posts directly to your Amplifeeder through what it calls its own "Microblog".

You Can Post Directly To Amplifeeder


Post your FriendFeed profile and pull it into Amplifeeder
There are 14 different templates that come with the Amplifeeder platform, all named after Joy Division songs, from "Disorder" to "Irresistible" and "Transmission". Some are the basic white background with links, and others offer more color.


You Can Choose What to Show or Not Show in Amplifeeder
In addition to setting up your Amplifeeder, the product lets you check each specific update and remove posts you might not want displayed, or even view stats to see what sites are most frequently updated. The result is a preconfigured lifestream you can host on your own site and modify to meet your expectations.


Amplifeeder Shows Statistics In What You Pull to the Lifestream
Once Amplifeeder is out early next month, it should be a good option for those people who want to take all their activity and put it in one place, without sending visitors somewhere else. In addition to my own Amplifeeder, you can check out their demos on the Web site: http://www.amplifeeder.com/demo.html

How A Lone Nickel Almost Cost Me The Price of A New Mac

My MacBook Pro has been extremely reliable and loyal over the last two years, even after I foolishly chose to crush its monitor in a rented convertible at Spring Training in early 2008, forcing significant repair. But in April of 2009, I was sure I was going to have to take the laptop into the Apple Store, ostensibly to repair it at a steep cost of hundreds of dollars, or even be forced to upgrade, costing me a couple thousand dollars.

In addition to the occasional slowness one always perceives even with the fastest of last-generation computers, my laptop seemed to have loose parts in its housing. I was sure the CD-ROM mechanics were broken, as I couldn't insert discs and the machine would rattle when I picked it up to place in my computer bag, or moved from room to room. One knows it's never good to hear a rattling when they move their laptop around, and I was sure that the next time would be the last time I would start it up and it wouldn't crash for good. I even thought just maybe one of my memory sticks had broken away - which would be a perfect excuse for the perceived slowness.

Though I don't use CD-ROMs often, it became embarrassing to hand a CD to a friend (using Windows of course) at the office and ask them to put the disc's contents on the network for me to see it. What was wrong with my laptop, they asked... and I had no idea. But it was broken for sure.

I talked with my younger sister, who works in Apple Retail, what she thought I should do. She said to take it to a Mac genius. I would probably lose access to the computer for a few days, and the hardware repair would be in the high hundreds, assuming I wasn't covered by AppleCare. (Which I most likely am not.)

But on the night of April 24th, I looked down at my laptop to see the curve of a coin peeking from the CD-ROM drive. I deftly removed it, and it was a boring old nickel. (See my annoyance) Hopefully, I tilted the computer back and forth, and heard no rattling. It was a stupid nickel the whole time. And, as my twins are too young still to be up to such shenanigans, I knew the responsible party had to have been me. Somehow, I had a nickel loose in the laptop bag, and somehow, that nickel just so happened to get into the CD-ROM drive (as Apple doesn't have CD-ROM drive bay covers).

In the last month - no issues. CDs go in the drive just fine. The machine doesn't rattle. And I saved myself a good deal of potential embarrassment from having to go to the Apple Store and have them find out... it was a nickel.

So - am I the only one stupid enough to go through these things on a regular basis? I doubt it. Let me know if you've ever crossed the line from geek respectability to tech flunkie.

Twitter's Real-Time Search Hits Pause. Six Hours And Counting.

Darn it Twitter. How can a company with so much potential and so much perceived momentum seem like they just are asleep at the switch? After this week's visible discussion where we clearly outlined how your real-time search database is so broken that it barely has any value past the last 48 hours, you had to go ahead and break the real-time aspect of it as well - doing so on a long Memorial Day weekend when it seems nobody is around to hit the big shiny red button to turn the blasted thing back on.

Yes, your base product is working. I can Tweet. It can get to people. But your Twitter Search product is completely on pause - and has been all evening. Forget about using Twitter during an emergency or an earthquake, or even to see other people's top trending hashtags. The ones you have listed now are themselves six hours old. The Lakers' NBA game is still in the second quarter, according to you, even though ESPN tells me they won hours ago.


Go Lakers! No, wait. You're saying the game already ended?
It's getting to the point I even feel guilty pointing it out - considering how often you get hit for database inconsistencies, odd behavior and downtime. But all that goodwill that had built up as you were at the tip of the spear of a phenomenon many are calling the real-time Web is just wasting away - even as you take down your partner infrastructure, like TweetBeep, TweetDeck and Twazzup down with you.


So, is the Twitter Search team on holiday?
It's like I asked you at 11 tonight, @ev, @biz and @al3x, "if there is a box I can reboot, just tell me where to go." On behalf of your growing, and in theory, loyal, user base, I will do this, because it's the right thing to do. I just wish you guys were more on top of it, and could at least tell us what is going on - and how much more fail we should expect.

I don't want to care this much. I want your product to just work the way it is supposed to work so we can benefit from it and so you can find a way to make money. But right now, you're making real time look like a joke.

Chart Your Favorite Films of All Time With Flickchart

What movie did you like better - Forrest Gump or Pulp Fiction? What about Pulp Fiction or Star Wars? Star Wars or Rocky? Rocky or Schindlers' List? Toy Story or Field of Dreams?

Before you start to tell me that you can't compare the films because they're "totally different", know that deep down, you really do like one more than the other, and if forced, you could make a choice. Flickchart, a fun crowdsourced site focused on the film industry, will have you making decisions like that over and over again, helping you find and rank your favorite films of all time, and seeing how your choices compare to those of your friends, and the community at large.

Given it's a Memorial Day weekend, and movies have always been a tradition for this holiday, Flickchart is opening up in limited release to readers of this site if you use this link to get in - getting you a headstart of a few weeks to the general population.


Pick one. Which do you like better?
The premise of Flickchart is fairly simple, to start. Once you have registered, Flickchart presents you with two posters representing two films. If you have seen both films, and have a preference as to which was better, click the poster of the one you like more. If you haven't seen one, click below to say you haven't seen it, or click "Haven't seen either" to dismiss both.


Flickchart thinks it knows my favorite films.
As you choose films over one another, they start to file themselves in your all time favorites. Simply put, if you rate a movie ahead of one you had previously at #8 overall, the new film will take #8's spot, bumping it down to #9. It's survival of the fittest. This becomes especially important when you are faced with a quandary such as rating your #5 overall film against a cult classic. You may want to pick the cult classic, knowing you enjoyed it, but you will have to live with the potentially false consequence of the film living in your #4 slot for all the world to see.


Dang. Hoosiers, or Field of Dreams? I'm going with the baseball.
Flickchart lets you do more than just select from all time favorites. You can choose from one of the movie industry's many sub-genres, including Horror, Comedy and Drama to pit similar films against one another. You can even rate movies from specific decades or even a single year - helping find your personal favorites for the 1980s, or even the year 1997. (Here's mine for the 1980s and 1990s)


Global Flickchart data for The Shawshank Redemption
As you go, Flickchart remembers how many times a specific movie has "Won" in your rankings, as well as how often all Flickchart users have had that movie win. For example, Star Wars, one of the most popular movies, has been ranked nearly 2,100 times by Flickchart users, of whom 93% report having seen it, and the film wins almost 76% of all matchups.

But if I feel that Star Wars, or any other movie, is too high or too low in my list, I can go directly to that film and force Flickchart to help me rank it - going head to head with three more films in a row. (Here's that link for Star Wars and the same for American Pie)


Force ranking Titanic against three other films in Flickchart.
All the accumulated data is sorted into charts that reflect the Flickchart community's preferences - selecting "The Best Movies of All Time" down to "The Worst Movies of All Time". You can also see the community's feedback by year or decade. (See: 2009 or 1997 for years and 1990s or 1970s for decades.)


The world's best films, according to Flickchart users.
It's likely also no surprise that the site keeps tabs on users who are most active, or have gained the most popularity through friend connections, like any good social network. Some of the most active users have made thousands of movie selections.

Flickchart is more than just a Hot or Not for movies. It's a fun way to tap your brain and see if you really know just what type of films you like, and how that sets you apart from the world at large. It will have you making the hard decisions - did you like Good Will Hunting or A Few Good Men? Good Morning Vietnam or Goodfellas?

Get started with this exclusive link. Find me at: http://flickchart.com/louisgray. And should you find any bugs, remember it's a new service and they are very responsive to those I've found.

Personal Heresy: What OS You Use Is No Longer Critical

Last September, when Google's Chrome Web browser was first introduced, I told you how I spent the day on Windows, just to use it. While Google is making headway in bringing their Web browser to the Mac platform, or so I've been told, it just hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Apple introduced Safari 4 Beta with many of Chrome's much-awaited features, and Safari has remained my browser of choice, as I tend to find Firefox too slow and too bloated, especially as extensions are added.

Today, I came across an article by Rick Klau, who works at Blogger for Google, saying how he was using Chrome on his Mac, also through VMware, but most importantly to me, as a result of Microsoft's new Windows 7 evaluation program, which lets you gain access to the operating system for free for a year. With my nose in the air, I've watched from my Mac laptop the struggle Microsoft has had with Vista, and how users are begging for Windows 7 to arrive. I've seen Steven Hodson and others talk excitedly about what's planned from Redmond, and largely, I haven't cared. I didn't think it applied to me.

But think of what Rick told us. Any Mac OS X user who has VMware Fusion (or Parallels, I assume), can get access to Windows 7 today, just by downloading the 32-bit version of the .ISO file from Microsoft and getting started. No CDs. No hassles. Just an evaluation key, and letting VMware do the work. The geek in me overruled my Mac bigotry today, so guess what? I'm writing this post in Chrome on Windows 7 in VMware on Mac OS X. It just works.


What? Windows 7 installing on my Mac?

Windows 7? Mac OS X? Does It Matter Any More?

So - back to the focus of the post. For the better part of two decades, I have ranted and raved that Macs are superior, whether it be for the hardware or the OS. The Mac vs. PC commercials on TV are very amusing and help cement the belief I've got a better product. I can largely ignore malware, and know I can get a consistent experience from Mac to Mac for the most part.


Logged Into Windows 7 And Checking the Computer

Sharing My Desktop Between Both Mac and Windows

But I'm starting to think more and more that it really doesn't matter any more. I won't be ranting about the cloud and saying all software is dead, but within an hour, I've got my Web browser set up to all the bookmarks and social services I constantly use. I have iTunes in VMware on Windows 7 seeing all my music from the Mac. I have an FTP client I can use to post to the blog. Practically all I really need the Mac for is the Adobe Photoshop family, Microsoft Office and the comfort of knowing my e-mail is saved locally as well as through MobileMe.


A Typical, Active Web Session, But On Chrome and Windows 7
(Click for a larger image)
I don't feel I need to go feature by feature of Windows 7 and see if it has all the bells and whistles that Mac OS X does. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But with very few exceptions, I could switch to Windows in this environment, and not lose too much sleep - something that would be made even more possible were I to push all my mail to GMail and take my word processing to Google Docs, for example.

Also in September of 2008, I speculated that the new world of browser choices is all about the hooks, especially from each company's mobile platform. The iPhone loves Safari, as you know. But Safari is also available on Windows, and the iPhone can be synced on iTunes on my Windows 7 partition. Hmm.

The line between what is an Operating System, and what is a Web browser, is getting increasingly blurry. And the traditional benefits of the Mac that always had me red in the face and starving of oxygen when trying to convert non-believers are going away. Maybe that's why I stopped caring about Apple rumors, as I told you last week.

If I do run into somebody willing to listen about what operating system they should choose, I can without hesitation say the Mac, because it's still what I know best, and I have had such a good track record with Apple. But Windows 7, so far, is good enough for most people, provided they can avoid bugs, malware and other irregularities.

So you tell me, am I out of my mind, or finally seeing the light?

Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Given all the rumors about Google possibly talking to Twitter about search, or the Mountain View giant taking on the world of real-time, you would think that Twitter's dramatic growth and user adoption would see the microblogging company sitting on a gold mine of a database, as it amasses tweets from around the world and makes them searchable through the search.twitter.com product (formerly Summize). But it appears that the considerable expansion of the company's user base has led to strain on its index, rendering practically anything beyond realtime analysis completely useless, fraught with missing data and error pages.

The promise of Twitter's advanced search capability is tremendous - letting you dice your queries by the sender and recipient, and even limiting the date range for said tweets, the location, hashtags or even emoticons. And at one time, it was a valuable resource. Now, depending on which account you're viewing, the data set could be as small as a week, or oddly, in some cases, not available at all.

For example, if I search Twitter to find out how many times Erin Vest (@queenofspain) has mentioned the word "Obama", it would show me five total results spanning the last four days. Modifying the same search to start with May 1, 2009 or January 1 and continue to today completely fails, saying I probably "mistyped the address".


Searching Twitter for Erin's Mentions of Obama


Twitter Says Erin Has Said Obama Five Times


Modifying the Date to the Start of January


The Familiar Fail Page From Twitter Search

Out of curiosity, I performed the same search for "Obama" from Erin's Twitter account on FriendFeed, finding nearly 500 results, going back to March of 2008.


FriendFeed Shows Erin's Tweets Referencing Obama
Similarly, Twitter's advanced search says that I have never sent a tweet referencing Adam Ostrow (@adamostrow), yet FriendFeed confirms that I have.


Twitter Says I Have Never Sent a Note to Adam Ostrow


FriendFeed Shows My Tweets to Adam Ostrow
And lest you think Twitter had left behind us early adopters, archiving only tweets from the celebrities, I was surprised to find that you can't find Oprah's famous first tweet. I searched for the phrase "FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY" from Oprah and found no results.


Where Is Oprah's First Tweet, Twitter?


I Know The Tweet Exists, Right?

In fact, searching for any tweets from Oprah at all showed no results. Oddly, in parallel, I could see 8 days worth of tweets from Ashton Kutcher and at least a few weeks' worth for my account.


Sorry, Oprah, Twitter Stopped Indexing Your Account
Back in February, I said that Twitter was best suited for following topics and listening to its search engine, and less for following people, and I do use Twitter search every day. But if they are to truly reach their potential, the company has got to find a way to find all the data that today, is missing and hard to find. If it's a scalability issue, Twitter has practically become a utility, like e-mail, and a solution is necessary, even if it means teaming up with a company that knows how to grow and scale. Be the suitor Microsoft, Google, Apple or anybody at that level, each offers a better alternative to the rapid dissolution of features and data integrity we are seeing today.

Of note, we did peruse the open API issues page in regards to search for Twitter, as well as reviewing the Get Satisfaction community for Twitter's Search product, but no comments have been made public about this data being unavailable that I can yet find.

We've seen Twitter go up, come down, remove features and add them back. Is this a temporary blip, or should we never again expect search to work the way it's advertised? I hope it comes back soon, and that Twitter becomes a reliable site to exchange messages, knowing they will be preserved, but their track record makes me very nervous that it may never happen.

SlideShow: How To Optimize Your Social Data Flow for All Networks

Following on to this weekend's post on knowing and mastering your social media data flow, I updated the information and have created a presentation for download, for easier portability.

How To Optimize Your Social Media Data Flow for All Networks

View more presentations from Louis Gray.

This is also the first time I have had the option to use my brand-new presentation template, so please do let me know what you think!

Google Reader Extends Statistics On Friends' Sharing Habits

Sharing items I find interesting in Google Reader is a major part of my social activity, as I help promote discovery of quality information to those who choose to subscribe, in a way, acting as a pro bono information filter on behalf of geeks everywhere. With streams from my Google Reader shares flowing into Socialmedian, FriendFeed, Facebook and the shared item tabulators, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme, I recognize the impact a simple mouse-click can do.

Sharing these feeds means I'm not reading my news in isolation. Friends I've connected with can make comments to my items, and should I choose, I can follow others' shared link blogs as well.


My Friends' Sharing Statistics In Google Reader
Today, the Google Reader team introduced a minor update that lets you now see just how frequently you're getting items from friends, and interestingly, you can now, for the first time in my knowledge, see how many other people are subscribed to their feed (and your own). For example, I learned today that 562 people have subscribed to my Google Reader link blog. That's still more than 5,000 behind Robert Scoble, a longtime evangelist of the practice, but only three others who I follow sport more than 100 connections.

And in case I was worried I was sharing too often, with approximately 18 shares a day, one of my connections, our friend Rob Diana, from Regular Geek, is sharing a cool 51.2 items every 24 hours, while two others are closer to me, with more than 10 shares a day.

It's almost tempting to start playing with the math to see what the downstream impact is of the shares.

If Robert Diana shares 51.2 items a day to 72 people, is that about 3,686 total views added?
If Robert Scoble shares .4 items a day to 5,889 people, does that hit 2,352 total views a day?

You get the idea.

Google Reader is trying to become more social and make the RSS reader a destination, rather than a pass-through. And I like their attempts, but it's clear more could be done. I'd like to be able to view just those feeds I subscribe to, and have the option to view friends' shares later, rather than have them combined in the same feed. I'd like to have e-mail alerts available if somebody commented on my shared items feed. I'd still like to know the most popular shared items, and most popular feeds.

But they are making good headway. Which reminds me... Didn't somebody say RSS was dead?

Tech Geek Nutrition: Introducing The Amazing Vitamin P

Editor's Note: It doesn't take a medical degree to know that many of us tech geeks whose lives circle around our computer aren't getting the best nutrition or exercise. With that in mind, I asked my father, an MD who works for the state of California's Department of Corrections, to provide a family favorite, his article on "Vitamin P". This article was previously printed in Stitches, a humor magazine for physicians in the November – December 1992 edition. -- Louis (PDF Available)

Guest Post By Richard N. Gray Jr. M.D.

What do you do when a patient comes to your office stating he doesn’t feel well because his ribosomes are hurting? Obviously, the traditional history is obtained and a physical exam performed. If, after consideration of all entities in the differential diagnosis, the problem turns out to be ribosomalosis, hypovitaminosis P should be suspected, as this is the most common etiology of ribosomalosis(1).


Vitamin P is an obscure, but definitely essential, fat-soluble compound found in such foods as peanuts, potato chips, pies, popcorn, pizza, pop (i.e. psoda pop), pickles, peanut brittle and other such foods. It binds reversibly with the (you guessed it) P-10 receptor protein of the ribosome, stabilizing the organelle, leading to improved protein synthesis. The critical importance of vitamin P is reflected in the fact that it’s measured not in RDA’s but in a recommended allowance weekly, generally called the RAW score. The RAW scores of a variety of foods(2) are listed in the accompanying table.


Before you become skeptical about this important nutrient, consider the research done by Dr. Francis(3), who showed that a large quantity of peanuts enhances the advantageous qualities of beer, a known ribosomal stimulant. Also consider the increased needs for vitamin P exhibited by adolescents, who consume huge amounts of foods containing this vital compound.

As with the other fat-soluble vitamins, there is a hypervitaminosis state, but it is rarely encountered unless parley is eaten. Parsley is to vitamin P what polar bear liver is to vitamin A. It simply needs to be avoided.

Also a contraindication to high vitamin P intake is the pregnant state, in which, according to recent research(4), the yin and yang forces are upset. If such a problem is suspected, the obstetrician should order serum yin and yang levels and treat accordingly.

Though much is known about vitamin P, research continues in an effort to expand our knowledge of its antidepressant properties, so it can be more appropriately utilized.

The major question remaining is: why is there so much vitamin P in ice cream?

FOOTNOTES

1. R Gray, M.D.; Gray’s Nutrition, 3rd Edition, pg. 1492, Laf and Fudgebetter, 1986, Philadelphia.
2. Unpublished data, Yuba Dietetic Association.
3. N. Francis, M.D.; “Shotgun Surgery,” Orthopedics & Obstetrics, vol. 6, no. 2, pg. 99; 1981.
4. I. Dick, M.D.; The Smoking Rabbi, Preface, Six-point Press, 1980, New York.

You can download a PDF copy of the original article introducing Vitamin P here.

eSocialWeb Wants You to Share Sites and Services With Friends

One of the fastest-growing niches in social networks these days is the ability to review products and services and share comments with friends, helping to discover new things and new people. We saw this trend with the debut of Lunch.com last month, and Likaholix in March. Also launching in that timeframe was a smaller site, focusing only on Web sites and Web applications, called eSocialWeb.

eSocialWeb breaks down Web sites into a set of familiar categories, from Entertainment and Lifestyle to Shoping, News, Technology and Business. Like with Digg, you can submit new entries if they don't already exist in the system, vote up ones that already are on the site, bury them, or add a comment. And like Digg and other services, you can link up with friends and get recommendations based on your own submissions.


Recommendations from within eSocialWeb

Submitting Apple to eScocialWeb's Index
Today, the top sites on the service include Mint.com, the online finance software tool, Hulu, and XKCD, among others. And I found submitting new sites, like Apple, to eSocialWeb very simple, just like with Likaholix. You can also see the most recent activity across the site or by individual.


Recent Activity on eSocialWeb
Does the Web need another social site for friends to trade links? Maybe not. But this is one site that's trying to win a small niche with focus. Check it out at http://www.esocialweb.com. You can find me at louisgray, as always.

Alright, When I Say Go, Hit the Spam Twitter Button With All Accounts

When a product becomes ubiquitous, it means you get the good with the bad, the well-meaning with the nefarious, the intellectual with the sloppy. As we saw with e-mail being overtaken with aggressive marketers, spam and eventually, viruses, the same activity has propogated to every social network with momentum - including the 419 scam on Facebook we discussed in January, and the many different reports of spam on Twitter. (See: TechCrunch's coverage of similar nonsense earlier today: A Bunch Of Hot Spammers Had The Day Off Of Work LOL.)

Like any good egotist, I regularly check references back to the site, be they on Google, in my referral stats, and the two T's - Technorati and Twitter. Today, I was amused to find that simultaneously, nearly two dozen different accounts referenced an article this I wrote this last weekend. Never mind that their link didn't work. Never mind that they all used the same exact way to write it, including the exact same description or tags. Even more interesting was the fact that all of the accounts (be they robots or real people) used the exact same Twitter client, HootSuite, and the automated messages look like they were executed in alphabetical order, starting with the account labeled "18tweets" and finishing with "Tweetingale".


The last time we talked about Twitter spam, it was with the issue of repeated following. In that example, theories suggested the repeated followers were to gain visibility and more real followers from duped Twitter accounts. So what are the purposes of this type of nonsense this time? Is it thought that those people searching for these keywords would find these accounts and sign up? It's not as if they pushed any traffic to my story, thanks to their not providing HTTP code.

Yet another "stupid human trick" executed on an increasingly sketchy network.

Early Adopters and Finding "The Next Shiny Object"

About a year ago, I put forth a theory I called "The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior", chronicling how we, as self-proclaimed early adopters, like to find cutting edge products and services, but can go from the most vocal proponents to their most visible detractors in a short amount of time, sometimes putting something in its grave even before the rest of the mainstream has found it exists. A corollary to this theory is that once an acceptable service or product is found, eventually the early adopter group will slip into a comfortable malaise, looking around for the "next shiny object" that will take their attention away from what to them has already become old hat. And this quest, this desire to find what is next, is what drives many of us to sign up for everything under the sun, kick its tires, and debate its worth with our peers. But just because we look for something new doesn't mean everything we use today will eventually be discarded.


The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior (June 2008)
Back in June, I wrote:

"One month's golden boy can be next month's afterthought. One week's addiction can be next week's memory. For a service to succeed, it needs to attract those early adopters who can help propel a strong population, but it needs to do all it can to keep those adopters feeling like partners and mainstream users, before letting neglect fire up their egos so much that they leave you altogether."

You can sit on the sidelines and see this happening everywhere. In fact, much of the backlash against Twitter of late has been from the early adopter community who has been largely ignored, in favor of the celebrity of the week, making those who pushed the service initially feel like they are unwanted.

This lust for the next big thing, and the desire to be first to find it, is much of the reason you see online media write bigger and bolder headlines for products that are fairly incremental to activity, and not game-changers. Be it yet another search engine, a new location awareness tool, or a widget that combines multiple previous offerings, there are presumed "bonus points" for being the first to call it a "Killer".

Amidst this, the truth is that some of these products do take hold and become part of our everyday activity - including Google Reader, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, the iPhone and others for me, of course, and if they continue to please customers, they don't end up seeing even the most-aggressive users moving from what I called "Engagement" to "Entitlement" and eventually, "Migration". As FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit slyly asked of me last year, "I hope this doesn't mean you're moving on to stages 4 or 5 Louis...", prompting me to say that "some sites have the potential to be a permanent 3," referring to "Engagement".


Can Sites Be a "Permanent 3"? I say, Yes.
And yes, it can be tempting at times to stomp my foot and expect some of the apps I like and use the most to behave a way I want them to, but for the most part, I think I've held off, even as I continue testing any and all newcomers.

In a thread this week, perennial early adopter Robert Scoble jokingly told one commenter, after they asked what "the next shiny object will be", that "Louis Gray hasn't figured that out yet, so we have at least six months." As if I had that much power...


Looks Like It's Up to Me, Then?
As I see it, we have been lucky enough to find some shiny objects very early that have become active sites for a good number of people. We were the first to report on TweetDeck back in July of 2008, and TweetDeck is arguably the most popular desktop client for Twitter. Its success can even be seen in the development of competitors, such as Seesmic Desktop. We were also the first to report on Socialmedian, which was acquired by XING in December for a cool 7.5 million after seeing strong momentum. We were the first to really dive into the world of shared item aggregators, and were the first to report on ReadBurner, RSSmeme and other competitors. We were the first to highlight the launch of Toluu, a place to share your OPML and discover new feeds. We were the first to talk about Feedly, which is reshaping the way you organize and find data in your Google Reader stream. We were also the first to report on Twazzup, a new search engine for Twitter, as well as other tools.

So what am I saying with all this? Aren't these shiny objects? Didn't TweetDeck change the game? Aren't early adopters enjoying these services that haven't yet been absorbed by the mainstream and celebrities? They are.

Early adopters can do more than just discover new tools. Our job, as it were, is to help take something that's undocumented, and discover its potential and its use. What are we already doing that these new tools make better? What can I do that I couldn't do before? Does this new tool make anything I already do easier, or is it executed in a more clear way? It's not about finding new tools just for the sake of getting one more blog post on the chart. It's about hopefully rewarding developers for their efforts, rewarding early adopters and readers here by their getting early access to things that make a difference, and rewarding ourselves by building out the community in a new place. We are always on the look out for shiny objects. We find them all the time and are happy to share with you. But if I've found one that works for me, you can expect me to latch onto it like a barnacle.

Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow

This Is How My Social Media Data Flows. I'll Explain.
If you're anything like me, you are constantly creating social data. From your blog posts and your tweets, your photos and videos, bookmarks and status updates, you are creating new information, big and small. You might do so in spurts, or you might be creating new content throughout the day. But with so many different social networks out there, and friends scattered here, there and everywhere, there's always the potential you're not sending the right data to the right place. But if you start by knowing where your data is flowing now, you can make minor adjustments along the way to get the recipe right.

On March 24th, I told Harry McCracken of Technologizer that if I were to provide any Twitter user one piece of advice, it would be: "Always know where your data flows, and participate where it lands."


That simple piece of advice is a major challenge to most people. Whether they don't want to step out of their comfort zone, or they believe they only have time for one social network where they participate, most choose one or two places, while neglecting others. Others simply use services like Ping.fm to send all updates to all places at once, a scattershot process to something that probably deserves fine tuning.

My approach to this problem is to always create content while knowing its impact downstream. Here is what I have chosen to do with my data I am creating.

1. Blog Posts

Blog Posts that I create here at louisgray.com are packaged up by RSS, using FeedBurner, and end up in RSS readers. They also are published in headline form or excerpted, on FriendFeed and Socialmedian. Every day, updates in the last 24 hours are bundled up by e-mail and sent to FeedBlitz.

2. Twitter Activity

My Tweets, when posted, be they notifications of new posts (which I do manually, not automatically) or other content, are posted to Twitter and echoed both to Facebook and to FriendFeed.

3. Native FriendFeed Posts

When I post a new item directly to FriendFeed, it echoes to Twitter, which in turn, updates Facebook. Knowing this, I often author the headline using Twitter language, such as @ signs and hashtags, keeping the headline short. I can then, in FriendFeed, edit the headline to use normal language, optimizing the data for where it is consumed.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

Bookmarks I make on Delicious are shared to FriendFeed, and bounced to Twitter and Facebook. I ensure the headline and the source of the article are displayed, and now truncate that to hit Twitter's character limits.

5. Google Reader shared items

Shares I make in my RSS reader not only stick to the link blog, but they impact FriendFeed, Socialmedian, and the shared item counters, like ReadBurner, RSSmeme and now InFeeds.

6. YouTube Videos and SmugMug Photos

The YouTube and SmugMug activity I do is largely family related, so when it gets imported to FriendFeed, using RSS, it is echoed to Twitter and Facebook (like in #3).

7. FaceBook Status Updates

They stay in Facebook, period, which is why I usually just update it using Twitter.

The reason I list each of these specifically is because each stream of data has a different intent and possibly a different audience. Given much of the content flows through Twitter and FriendFeed now, I make a conscious effort to optimize the data for both services. I also recognize that when I post to both services, I just might receive comments and likes on Facebook, which is happening at an increasing pace.

Thinking about the data flow has an impact on how I behave. It is because of FeedBlitz that I prefer to have more than one post in a 24-hour period. I also know that as I am bookmarking sites that cover articles from this blog that I am getting to reward others who write about the same things I do. I recognize that by tweeting too much I could muddy my Facebook and FriendFeed, and have negative repercussions as a result. I also know that I need to make sure the headlines on my SmugMug photos and YouTube videos make sense once they hit Twitter.

It may seem regimented, but once you think about where your data is flowing, you will find a process that works with you. The good news is that RSS is not dead, despite some beliefs otherwise. In fact, it plays a bigger role than ever in terms of shuttling updates to and from services. I have set up my publishing preferences in this way for me because it matches what I believe to be the right data with its right destinations, and when activity from the community participates, I try to be there as soon as I know it has happened, through close monitoring.

And considering this is essentially my social media creation workflow, you might also be interested in the post I wrote last Spring on my own social media consumption workflow. It hasn't changed much at all since.

How I Learned to Stop Chasing and Caring About Apple Rumors

In college, during a time when Apple's potential demise ran from probable to "extremely likely", my obsession around the Mac was all-consuming. In the early days for customizable Web browsers, my entire browser bar was littered with Macintosh-related bookmarks, from MacCentral and Macintouch to MacWeek, Apple Recon, Apple Insider, ThinkSecret, As the Apple Turns and the big kahuna, MacSurfer, which had practically every Apple-related update from the day's news known to man. Add on to that my constantly participating on Apple stock related chat boards, from Yahoo! Finance to Raging Bull and Investors Hub, to the ultimate in insider Applery, a real-time chat room for discussing Apple stock, called AAPL Talk, and you could see that Cupertino was a major hub of my daily universe.

As I made it my personal mission to help convert PC users to the Mac, and debated the benefits of OpenDoc and CyberDog, constantly reloading VersionTracker to get the up to the minute updates to Mac software, I also was an occasional participant in the darker underworld of Mac rumors, reading the anonymous bulletin boards across the Web which often featured unreleased specs of yet to be issued products, sometimes full quarters in advance. Sometimes they were wrong, but very often they were right. MacWorld Expos would be anticipated, and then arrive, as we saw exactly what we had already predicted on display, and remained decidedly underwhelmed with everything else - unhelpfully dubbing each the weakest MacWorld to date.


Two Rumors that Never Came Close to Making It
The froth around what Apple would or would not do was so palpable that fans would breathlessly demand Cupertino release products that fulfilled their every wish - fantastical items that would never see the light of day. Strawberry iBooks. A Mac Palm Pilot to replace the Newton. An Apple Tablet. The G6. Apple-branded projectors. It all got to be pretty silly - as "sources" often turned out to be any teenage kid with access to Photoshop or a handheld that made blurry video.

Over time, a few things happened. First, most of Apple's updates stopped having relevance for me. I'm not updating my computer all that often, so the month by month specifications race meant very little, and not being a movie or graphics pro, anything in that realm was a waste for me. Second, our small community of rumormongers started to blur in with the rest of the tech media, themselves eager to get a sniff of Steve Jobs' plans days ahead of their unveiling. Third, Apple started to succeed and become one of the more trusted, if not stable, companies, making my mission a much less important one. Now, practically anyone can see the benefits of the platform over the alternative, even as we move more of our activity to the Web, making some of the issues moot.

Harry McCracken of Technologizer recently had a solid post discussing how Apple's long history of acquisition rumors are almost entirely without truth. So too are the many finger to the wind prognostications from those would-be tech journalists and bloggers eager to get a scoop. Apple has done a fantastic job, in most cases, of locking down the rumor flow from the sieve of the old days. That there will be an eventual update to the iPhone is no secret. That the newest Mac Mini had one extra USB port was hardly news. I've even committed something resembling heresy - I've stopped watching the video taped updates from WWDC and other Special Events. Considering the first blog post I ever made on louisgray.com was in anticipation of MacWorld Expo in January of 2006, you can see things have changed.

The net change over the last few years is this: First, there are fewer leaks and news items sneaking out of Cupertino. Second, there are more people looking for them than ever. As a result, there is a ton of noise, and most of it is completely useless. So I've turned off the noise. I don't go to these sites, and I skip over most Apple rumor news when it hits my RSS reader, because it's devoid of truth, largely guesses, fumes and hyperbole. I just wish some of you could have experienced some of the very real excitement and glee the rest of us dedicated fans felt back in the late 90s when we scored early graphics of the next iMac, or heard about the iPod the day before Steve showed it to the world, before the Mac went mainstream, and those of us who were "the crazy ones" started to look normal to the rest of the world.

Don't Tempt the Online Mob. They Come Bearing Pitchforks.

There's no need for me to recap Twitter's two-day flub as you've already seen it 40 different places. What's most interesting to me about the entire situation is the rapidity of how the user community turned on the service and its founders in response to what was a relatively minor change that was confusingly and sloppily addressed. The response, which loudly came from all corners, mirrored that of previous blowups, which have also included Facebook and Digg as victims - the first around its terms of service and Beacon, and the second, around its blocking of illegal series of numbers that could unlock DVD region codes. Even Google Reader faced a backlash last year from users who expected a different interpretation of what friends were and who could see what.

See also:

• May 2, 2007: Unpopular Opinion: Digg Revolt Is a Bad Precedent
• December 26, 2007: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

Every single case dealt with a Web 2.0 service driven largely by user generated or selected content, where the mob was reacting to changes handed down unilaterally from a seeming all-knowing company, without first communicating potential changes, or accurately foreseeing downstream effects. And in most of the examples (Google Reader being practically the only exception), the service had already chipped into its balance of goodwill, leading to a strained relationship with a vocal minority of users, setting the stage for the much larger backlash that was to come.

Did the services that made mistakes and got roundly slammed deserve the punishment? If you ask the users, the answer is yes. In today's world, the online communities that have been built around these popular products have a sense of entitlement, not just to specific features, but that they will be made a part of the process, spoken with and not just spoken to. And if they feel they have been wronged or lied to, all hell can rain down on the company or the individual bearing the broken message.

To me personally, the change in @replies for Twitter was frustrating and annoying, but what ticked me off was more the way in which it was delivered. As with the company's previous comments about following many users being "disingenuous", this week's move seemed like they were once again telling us of a right way and a wrong way to use their product. That their blog post was backtracked upon and respun as a product issue and then a technical issue made us feel lied to, and the team, despite having what by all means is a very successful product, disappointed us again.

Here's the thing: Before I get slammed (again) for being a FriendFeed apologist and/or Twitter hater... the truth is not so black and white. I think Twitter is great for what it is supposed to do - send short messages and help broadcast information quickly. It is now a utility, like e-mail, and we're all assumed to be there. But I, and many others, continue to get frustrated when we see the system and its people fall short of what is an amazing potential. You can have hundreds of millions of users, but the experience itself is diminishing, and the management seems disconnected, in a way that makes them look like they are in love with the latest celebrities to sign up and less enamored with us rank and file who evangelized their product the last few years, pointing out both the good and the bad as it came.

Similar too are the stories of those previously stabbed by the mob. The Digg fanatics believe strongly in their ability to push favorite items forward, and potentially upset the balance of the new world media. Facebook, once deemed a safe place for friends and family to congregate online, found itself on the wrong side of privacy choices and business. Google Reader wrongly hoped that those you e-mailed in GMail would be fine to share your RSS favorites with. In each case, the users believed in the product, wanted it to succeed, but disagreed strongly with the latest moves, and they would not give up until their voices had been heard and made impact.

Designing new products and services, and adding new features to existing ones, is very difficult to do in public, especially when you are trying to walk the fine line of placating existing users while attracting new ones. Twitter, in a flash point of popularity, is especially vulnerable due to the fact their own product, as also are Digg and Facebook, could be used by users to fight back. Did Twitter or Facebook or Digg lose users permanently due to such heated battles? Probably not for long, but the scars do linger, and the trust factor that might once have been there is gone, or at least damaged enough that the mob will keep their torches at the ready, waiting for the next time they're needed.

The world of product development, on the backs of user content, is changing the way people expect to participate. And when they aren't treated as equals, or they are talked down to, people are taking it very seriously, and there are more platforms for conversation than ever, with more people to reach than ever, so any service who is in this space who expects to make even "small settings updates" should strongly think of their potential impact and be ready in case things start to go wrong - fast.

Would You Night Owls Pay a Premium for 24-Hour Commerce?

If you have a 9-5 job, and any responsibilities at home, be they family, digital, or anything else, you might find the world closed down around you by the time you're ready to go out. In most cities, practically the only things open past 9 or 10 are gas stations, 7-Eleven and possibly a grocery store. Want to pick up something from the electronics store, some new power tools, or even a new pair of slacks? You'll have to wait until tomorrow, but yes, the same hours apply, which means you're pretty much screwed until the weekend, unless you can sneak out on your lunch hour or roll into work late.

I've been a night owl since high school, at least - including a 1:30 to 9:30 a.m. graveyard shift during the summers, and working on the school paper in college starting at midnight. Even now, after putting the twins to bed after a full day, and catching up on all online activity, it's a rare night that we shut down before one - hours after the surrounding city has called it quits.

While I have moved as much of my commerce online as possible, there always remains the elusive item that would be much easier to get in the real world. What would be great is if there were something open for those of us who actually function very well between ten at night and eight the following morning. Whether there is one mega-complex open overnight that hits all the basics - from clothes to food to electronics and house supplies, or a mall in each metro area that does the same, I believe there would be a subset of the population that would flock to it - one that wouldn't mind paying a little bit more for the convenience.

I wouldn't even mind if the store charged one price at 7 p.m. and 20 percent more at 11, so long as they were open when I went. But I hate feeling like a prisoner to somebody else's schedule.

InFeeds the Latest Service to Calculate "Top Shared Items" Online

For more than two years, we've been talking about services that could democratically tabulate the most popular shared items on the Web, using Google Reader link blogs (like mine) as their data set. In early 2008, there was a practical explosion of such services, started by Feedheads, and rapidly followed on by ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Shared Reader and others. And while it's the earliest of days for a new service called InFeeds, developers continue to see this as a project worth tackling.


The service started gobbling up popular shared item blogs this morning (as you can see on Twitter), bills itself as a "shared items feed aggregator" and asks, "what's interesting in your feeds?"

Like the aforementioned competitors, InFeeds looks like it is going to show you items that have received the most shares from registered link blogs, sorting by 2 or more shares and 5 or more shares, for example.

If you look at its spartan "Upcoming" page, you can see that individual shared items are displayed with the original headline and author, who shared the item, and a number of tags, such as "Facebook", "iPhone" or "Google".


One Item I Shared Via InFeeds, Displaying Tags
With RSSmeme founder Ben Golub working at FriendFeed, and the ReadBurner site currently being down for repairs, there could be an opportunity for somebody like InFeeds to sneak in and be interesting. So while I may advise the ReadBurner team, I think it makes sense to hop over to InFeeds and provide your Google Reader shared links URL to give this developer a little push.

You can submit your URL here: http://infeeds.com/

Meta: LouisGray.com Passes 2,000 Post Mark

As I stopped providing monthly updates early last year into traffic activities and other statistics on the blog, I have not been paying as much close attention to achieving what some would call milestones. But on Saturday, with the blog post Good People, Bad Companies: The Intersection of Skill and Luck, I hit the mark of 2,000 posts on louisgray.com, since early 2006, covering a period of 3 1/3 years, essentially. Since then, we've posted 8 more times (including this one), so I am a tad tardy in marking the achievement.

Back when I did watch these things more closely, on October 11, 2007, I marked hitting the 1,000 post number, and at the time highlighted what were then my top ten things I blogged about, including: 1) Apple, iPod and iTunes, 2) Blogs, Links and RSS, 3) Google, 4) TiVo and TV, 5) The Oakland A's, 6) The Cal Bears, 7) The Sacramento Kings, 8) Nintendo Wii and Games, 9) Statistics and 10) Technology Innovators and Startups.

Amazing to think of how much things have changed (in my opinion) in just 18 months, over which I, with the help of some strong guest authors, knocked out the next 1,000 posts.

Of the 10 blogging topics I noted back in October 2007, I would say that Apple, Blogs and RSS, Google, and Technology Innovators and Startups are still core focuses, with early startups rising incredibly. But I don't talk as much about Apple and TiVo as I once did, I reduced statistics discussion, and practically eliminated sports altogether.

Now, and you tell me if I'm wrong, I believe I blog about: 1) New Web Services and Startups, 2) Social Media Tools, including Twitter and FriendFeed, 3) Blogs and RSS, 4) Online Best Practices, 5) Google and Search Competitors, 6) Apple and iTunes, 7) Business and Finance, 8) IPhone Apps and Games, 9) Information Discovery and Overload, and 10) Personal Updates.

I wish there were an easy way to point out what were posts 50, 100, 250 and 500, but for now, it's always good enough just to point out post #1 from January 9th, 2006: Macworld Expo Eve 2006. If only I knew then what was to be a little hobby would turn out to be an obsession.

TweetMeme Launches Real-Time Search, Digging Retweets and Links

TweetMeme, the aggregator of popular microupdates that have been sent around the Twitterverse, launched a major update today, adding the ability to search more than 15 million links, including not just the tweets themselves, but also the text from the Web pages, blog posts, videos and images, delivered in real time. The new search capabilities greatly enhance the index, which tracks "the hottest stories on Twitter", and goes head to head with today's announcements from OneRiot, and planned updates from Twitter itself, due soon.

You can find the new TweetMeme search engine here: http://search.tweetmeme.com/


Searching TweetMeme for Popular Facebook Tweets

Updating the Same Search for "Best Match"
The search engine indexes new stories as they are found in Twitter, and offers a great deal of filtering and customization. You can sort results by "Best Match", "Age" and "Retweet Count", showing the most popular forwarded tweets. Meanwhile, the results display categories for each update, and you can even filter by the media type, including news, images or videos.


You Can Filter Results In a Number of Ways on TweetMeme
Like any good search engine for monitoring the new world of real-time updates, TweetMeme even lets you sign up to get search results by RSS.


Searching TweetMeme for louisgray.com Shows Most Popular Posts on Twitter
For site owners, like me, the ability to search TweetMeme for your own name or domain name, and sort results by category or popularity in retweets is a great improvement, letting you determine what stories were deemed most popular on Twitter, and you can dive down to see who is getting to the data first and has the most influence, or ability to get their updates redistributed through their network.

TweetMeme is a product built by the team behind fav.or.it, headed by Nick Halstead. You can, of course, also follow TweetMeme on Twitter.

Inbound Marketing Summit Video: There Is No Information Overload

Think you are getting crushed by Information Overload? Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at the Inbound Marketing Summit, talking about how to find signal in the noise. Video is below.


Found courtesy of Justin Levy:
There Is No Information Overload - Louis Gray - Inbound Marketing Summit

Also, get the presentation from SlideShare:
There Is No Information Overload

Skype Hates Me. Maybe That's Because I Treat It Like Net2Phone?

When I worked at 3Cube nearly ten years ago, we helped design one of the most feature-rich and well-designed online conference calling and Web meeting products out there, with a service we called PhoneCube. You could, from your Web browser, initiate a conference call to up to 32 participants, and manage the entire conference, including putting people on mute or hold, from your Web browser. You could also invite them, on the fly, to a Web meeting, and share a presentation or your desktop. But as a small startup, we ran into two major issues. The first was that WebEx had raised scads of money and was spending tens of millions on marketing, including a Super Bowl ad featuring RuPaul. The second was that pricing the product, no matter how we did it, seemed expensive, as users were not comparing our 15 or 25 cents per minute per line rates with that of traditional conference call services, but instead, with the pennies on the dollar VoIP alternative, Net2Phone.


The old PhoneCube.com Web site, Circa 2000 (via archive.org)
Rising in the era of Napster and Web browser bars, like AllAdvantage, that promised to pay you money just for surfing the Web, Net2Phone's dirt cheap, but awful quality, got significant use, especially for those folks making international calls - many of whom thought we should drop our rates to basement levels found only online or on gift cards picked up from 7-11. And thus were my feelings cemented about what this cheap PC to landline connection represented. So you can imagine my hesitancy when it comes to Skype.

After finally giving in and getting a Skype account last year, to participate in the occasional podcasts, I have dealt with frequent bugs that have me wondering if the Skype application has a personal grudge against me thanks to our history. Whether I have participated on the ReadBurner Weekly podcast, the FFundercats podcast, or yesterday, when I was a guest on This Week In Tech with Leo Laporte, I always get dropped, without warning, around 20 minutes into the call, like clockwork.

And I hate looking like a tech fool. My Mac is up to date in just about every respect. I have the latest version of Skype downloaded. I have a headset which works. But regardless of what time of day or who I'm talking to, I know that I should keep my calls to 15 minutes, or you can expect me to have to dial in about 3 to 4 times an hour. (See yesterday's TWIT, episode 194 for a great example)

So, community of Skypers... you tell me. Should I relegate Skype into the same bucket of ugly 1999 quality Net2Phone, or should I give it another try? Is it my fault? Is it Comcast (my ISP)? Or is it Skype? Reasonable responses and suggestions will be tried.

Remind Yourself Who You Hate With Twitter's New Blocking API

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

A little while back Louis shared the importance of not holding a grudge, encouraging the LouisGray.com readers to try to maintain relationships regardless of any blips that may occur during that relationship. Twitter just released an API which, if you're one to hold grudges, could rub it in a little further through applications which choose to use it.

The Twitter Blocking API enables Twitter Platform developers to retrieve a list of all the users any authenticating user has blocked, enabling them to help you manage the past blocks you may have forgotten about. Fortunately, developers can only retrieve lists of users authenticated users have blocked and not just any user. This means you can only see those you blocked, and your friends can't see that list. The methods released only allow developers to retrieve a list of users blocked, or if a specific block has occurred between the authenticating user and another Twitter user.

A couple weeks ago Louis shared some interesting statistics found from screenshots of the Twitter administrative interface, taken by a hacker that found a way to get into their system. Some of those statistics included the numbers Britney Spears and Barack Obama had blocked. While users won't be able to tell this information with the new API, Britney herself could keep track of that information herself through tools such as Tweetie or TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.

It will be interesting to see how developers find ways to use this new API, and which apps choose to utilize the new information. It should be noted that not even the Twitter UI has this information currently.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

RelaunchXing socialmedian

Guest blog post from Jason Goldberg, Chief Product Officer at XING & founder of socialmedian

Hi everyone! Remember me? It has been quite a while since Jason Goldberg or socialmedian graced the blog-o-louisgray ... been waiting until I actually had something interesting to say.

Last year was quite a ride for me and for socialmedian. What started off in January of 2008 as an idea around social-graph-filtered-news rapidly became a website (launched on louisgray.com) that gained a die-hard following amongst the social media early-adopters. socialmedian was also one of the first companies to embrace distributed social media, integrating with Facebook, Twitter, and pioneering news-streaming as a form of life-streaming. Election 2008 propelled socialmedian, growing traffic to the site by 300% thanks to partnerships with the likes of the Washington Post and The Guardian. As it became clearer that socialmedian might have a future as a compliment to a larger network, Louisgray.com predicted an early exit for socialmedian. IMO the coolest part of the socialmedian story in 2008 was building the site with our users, conducting a public dialogue with users on what we should do next, and then each week launching new features based on direct user input. “Tweet what you think we should do next” is the new way to build software.

And then, almost as quickly as we came onto the scene, socialmedian was acquired by XING, Europe's professional networking leader.

The XING acquisition was announced in December 2008 and then closed in February 2009. Since then, I have been working fulltime at XING as the company's Chief Product Officer. And while I’ve surely kept up on Twitter, I haven’t had much time for blogging and also haven’t spent much time pimping socialmedian in the blogosphere as we’ve been very focused on getting some new projects going with XING. XING is really committed to being a leader in the next phase of the evolution of social media and it's really fun to be part of that effort. It's also really cool for me to be working for XING in Hamburg, Germany, and for a brash American social media dude to be impacting and influencing the growth and globalization of a European internet leader.

So, what does all this mean for socialmedian? What happens when a little website like socialmedian gets gobbled up by a XING? Does socialmedian have a future with XING?

One of the key projects I have been working on since I got to XING has been implementing the open-social platform on XING. This will enable XING and its partners to rapidly launch rich applications which enrich the XING user experience by tapping into the social-graph of relationships on XING.

I'm thrilled to announce that 3 months after XING closed the deal to acquire socialmedian, we just went live with two socialmedian-built applications on XING. The first beta testers now have access to the apps, which will distribute virally on XING. One, XING News, is a social news service in German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. It is basically socialmedian on XING, enabling XING members to get news filtered by their XING contacts, share stories of interest, discuss/comment, etc. The second is ASK Xing, which enables XING members to ask questions and get answers from the XING network. Both were built on the open-social framework which we are also launching Monday. We are going to start with these two socialmedian-team-built apps, and then in the following weeks launch several partner applications, of which we have many in testing now.

Click for a Full Size Version of The New XING

Click for a Full Size Version of XING News
As noted, XING News is essentially socialmedian on XING. We've adapted the socialmedian application to the XING environment and enabled it to operate in the German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. In doing so, we've immediately gone from thousands of users for socialmedian per day to millions of users interacting with socialmedian, which is about as cool as it gets when you're in the business of building consumer web apps, like we are! XING News now enables XING members to get the news filtered by their XING contacts. Find out which stories your XING contacts find interesting. Comment and join in discussions...all the social media bells and whistles you would expect, with much more on the way. socialmedian will continue to operate as a standalone website but with XING News, we’ve now taken socialmedian to a whole new level.

Click for a Full Size Version of XING in German

Click for a Full Size Version of Ask XING
I know that most of the readers of LouisGray.com aren’t all that familiar with XING, but I hope you will respect that this Germany-based professional networking leader is making a big social media commitment and that a big pillar of that commitment is from a company that got started here at louisgray.com.

Peace, big love and Auf Wiedersehen!
- Jason Goldberg

Catch more from Jason Goldberg at The socialmedian blog or on Twitter.

Topify Stays Ahead of Twitter by Tweaking Notification Alerts

Last week, whether it was big news or not, depending who you ask, Twitter finally got around to improving the notifications it sends users when they gain new followers. Rather than a basic text note linking to the person's profile, the update displayed HTML content and included background on the individual, including their follower and following counts as well as updates. It was largely seen as being in response to third party services that have been doing similar functions for months, including Topify, which I use and discussed in March.


Topify's older notifications have simplified subject lines.

The new Topify updates contain follower statistics.
Topify, who seemed pleased that Twitter is starting to follow their functionality, stealthily added a tweak to their own notifications today, changing the subject line to show not just the user's name, but also their Twitter handle and followers/following counts. For those people who might be getting a ton of notifications, or who don't want to click through each e-mail to get the pertinent data, this might be a time saver. Alternatively, it could be a simple update for update's sake. Either way, it still keeps Topify ahead of Twitter's native offering.

Also keeping Topify ahead of Twitter's standard (though improved) e-mails is that you can perform actions directly from the message. You can hit reply to automatically follow back, or on direct message alerts, you can hit reply to send the user a DM yourself. You can even forward the message to block@topify.com if you just want the user to disappear. In contrast, Twitter instead only offers the ability to click through to a profile.

The ecosystem being built around Twitter is an interesting one, and each little tweak helps.

10 Rules for Today's Consumers In the New World of Real-Time

The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today's real-time world.

1. We Want Access to Your Product As Quickly As Possible

We have become an "instant gratification" society. Our short attention spans are being rewarded with ubiquitous access to fast food, the rollout of ever-faster download speeds, near elimination of commercials, thanks to DVRs, and the ability to replace activities that were once limited to venues outside the home with in-home equivalents, including on-demand programming and simulated bowling on our Wiis.

When we order your products, or sign up for your service, we want access to them immediately. We don't want to wait for an approval period, and if the product is physical, we want it shipped quickly at the first possible convenience.

2. We Expect the Product to Work On Any Platform In Any Location

Many of us spend more time in the Web browser and our e-mail than we do in our Operating System software these days. We rapidly grow frustrated with any Web sites or applications that operate differently if you utilize different operating systems or Web browsers, and we expect to have access to your product, or a mobile equivalent, when we are away from our desktops.

3. We Want to See That You Allow for Feedback, Positive and Negative

The time of a siloed product experience is gone. We want to see that you provide a forum or link to a third party site that discusses your business and your products, and connects us with peers, where we can learn from one another in a venue that reaches you as well. And if you do provide a forum or bulletin for us to provide feedback, we will not look kindly on your deleting threads or comments of substance.

4. We Expect That You Respond to Your Customers, Quickly

Customers are talking about your products on their blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook and other aggregation sites. They may send you e-mail or post in public forums. While we can't expect CEOs of the largest companies to respond to every mention, we do expect company representatives to be listening, and for the smallest companies, we do expect founders and entrepreneurs to be accessible.

5. We Expect That You Join and Lead the Conversation

In the absence of communication from you, rumors and negative feedback can snowball. And while you might be coached in handling crisis PR in case something gets out of hand on blogs or Twitter, the best way to get ahead of potential issues is to have a presence in these social areas before problems occur, so that your customers have a place to engage you, and you them, helping to redirect the conversation and react. Additionally, you can use your communication outlets to show thought leadership and teach us better ways to use your product in ways we may not have considered.

6. We Want to See That You Continually Improve Your Product

Thanks to the now assumed two-way conversation with your customers, we expect you will be making incremental updates and improvements that both meet your corporate objectives and satisfy user expectations - beyond fixing bugs. Not only do we now expect instant access and near real-time responses, but we hope for rapid iterations that add to our satisfaction. A stale product will lead to cranky users, and breed disloyalty, as we may migrate to alternatives that appear to be updating more frequently with more agility.

7. We Expect You to Use Your Product and Be Visible

One of the greatest endorsements of your own product is that you use it and make it a part of your own visible activity - making you appear as a peer with a shared experience in parallel to that of your customers. For the smallest companies, including startups with 1-10 employees, we expect to likely see your CEO and founders visibly consuming their own dog food, both exulting in its benefits and suffering through its disappointments. And if you do put up a central example of your employees or founder using your products, don't do it once and never update again, because we'll know about it, and it will a stark reminder of your pandering.

8. We Expect That You Will Embrace or Lead Standards

As we are helping you create a business by selecting your product instead of that of the competition, we expect you will help us, and the ecosystem as a whole, by either embracing existing standards that are agreed upon, or by forging new standards and releasing them to the community for the benefit of all. We reject proprietary methods that don't deliver significant differentiation, or aren't forced by antiquated legalities.

9. We Expect You Are Driven By More than Money Alone

As consumers, we are eager to be seen as your partner, and to contribute to improving the next iteration of your product, or in helping to grow the information base around it, through consistent feedback, formation of user groups, or in creating content related to your product. As such, we do not expect to be seen as blank checks, there to support your bottom line when quarters draw thin. Instead, we want to see that you share a passion for your products and your market, and know that you, as we are, are driven by the potential of what your product can enable us to accomplish. We want to know the story of what you are trying to solve, and how it can help the community, more than we want to hear about your margins and your EPS.

10. We Want You To Treat Us As Informed Consumers and Partners

We have real-time access to news and many of us are rabid information sponges who are experts about you and your product. We don't want to be talked down to, and often have significant history with your organization. We despise the tendency to architect service, support and marketing to the lowest common denominator, and greatly appreciate your expecting that we have a baseline of understanding that includes recent headlines on you and the industry.

---

While books including the Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations have chronicled the move by consumers and businesses to e-commerce and a new world of online communications, continued advancements toward real-time news and exchanges of ideas lay the platform for a revamped approach to consumer relations with business. We are finding out more about you than you ever believed possible, and we are more than willing to share it just as quickly - both the good and the bad. Embrace the change and embrace us as partners and we can be your greatest ally. Be truthful, transparent and trusted, and you can help us cross the chasm from customers to fans.

Good People, Bad Companies: The Intersection of Skill and Luck

If you have worked at a company that went public or changed the world, you might be given an unfair share of accolades for your part in its success, even if you were actually a pedestrian employee. Similarly, if you happen to have put blood, sweat and tears into an unsuccessful venture, you might be seen as having contributed to that's company's lack of success, or worse, its downfall, giving your resume a black mark. Despite one's best intentions, there is always a strong element of luck in terms of what companies succeed, what products gain share in the market, and, often, if you were hired at the right place at the right time.

In Silicon Valley, the measurement of success and failure can be extremely visible. "Oh. He worked at Google..." says one person in hushed tones to a friend. "And that guy? Let's just say he's on his fourth startup in six years."

But the company name, and the headlines that covered that company's activity over the years, never tell the full story. You don't always know if the person was liked and trusted by their employees. You don't know if they put in 14 hour days or 6 hour days. And you don't know if there was anything they could have done in their role that could have changed the outcome. It's no secret that companies big and small have elite employees, pedestrian employees, and laggards, be they those on the Fortune 500 or ones you've never even heard of.

In a time when the economy is in decline and unemployment is rampant, here and elsewhere, these rapid judgment calls are no doubt having profound effects. How do you explain your way around product failures, hostile takeovers and missed sales quarters? Should the guy whose company chose to go public three months before the market crashed, when yours didn't, giving them $100 million in the bank, and him a nice Mercedes, be considered a better talent than you? Should every former Google employee have a leg up on every former Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves employee, for example?

Watching some industries very closely, it can become clear that people, no matter their role in the organization, will claim the success of their company as their own handiwork. Paraphrasing from a recent release, many of which you've likely seen, a company crowed last month upon getting a new Sales VP, "Prior to joining, (this individual) previously served as a Senior Vice President at (company), where he was responsible for growing sales revenue from $hundreds of millions to $billions." But in the last twelve months, I had actually seen others of this company's alumni report that it was they who had been the driver for the same growth - generating the same similar press release.

Should they all take credit for the same thing, even if one person led worldwide sales, another was a regional area manager, and another oversaw channel efforts in a single territory?

There is something to be said about having been part of a shared experience of success or failure, and learning what to do next, should the opportunity present itself again. In Silicon Valley, where it's well known the vast majority of startups will eventually fail, most of us have two or three companies under our belt that didn't make it. An elite few managed to jump from success to success and not miss a beat. Still others have alternated success with failure, with a healthy mix of effort sprinkled with luck through the process.

It's this knowledge that doesn't get me starry-eyed when I bump into people who played central roles at companies that are household names today - not any more than I look askance at those whose history may be more checkered. All we can do as individuals is deliver our best effort and work to help the company we are at succeed to the level of our abilities. And should that not work, we should take a deep breath, look around, and do it again. Risk is not something to be feared, and with risk always comes the chance that you won't succeed - and it might not always be because of you.

Adobe Responds to Service Flub, Promises More Coaching

Earlier this week, I recounted a less then ideal conversation with support representatives from Adobe around my attempting to buy the downloadable version of the company's Creative Suite product. One support rep urged me to buy the physical copy, and another called it a "very big order", despite it just being a single version of a single product. Later in the day, after another amusing live chat with an online support rep, I managed to get Creative Suite after all, about 24 hours after my initial purchase attempt.

To complete the story, today, I got a call from an Adobe representative, apologizing for what she called "inadequate information" I had received, and she added "we will see that the Agent is coached appropriately."

While I felt somewhat sheepish for airing out my grievances for the exchange on the blog, I said I tend to be transparent for both good and bad experiences, and she took the feedback well. Despite Adobe's being lamented on some social sites for not being very active, she wrote me in an e-mail:

"The feedback you provided is excellent, and we welcome any opportunity to be able to coach our staff, improve upon current processes, and understand a customer’s opinion of our services. You are welcome to continue to send comments our way."

While, yes, this could be a corporate spokesperson doing their best to reduce the temperature of a frustrated customer, it was a solid response, one that shows they are listening in a world where the customers also get a turn at the microphone.

The back and forth with Adobe at the beginning of the week can now pretty much be seen as a blip. I have the software. It works, and I was only charged once. And now, I know they can hear me.

Every Piece of the Infrastructure Carries Potential to Fail

Though it may end up being a temporary blip, at this moment FriendFeed is down, following a scheduled outage at Twitter this afternoon. And while that's not really news, it comes on the heels of many discussing the potential for failure that third-party URL shorteners bring to the Web. For every fan of TinyURL or bit.ly, there are others who say relying on another service to be a go-between between the user and the intended data is just begging for trouble. But the truth is that in a network, when there are multiple items with potential to fail between the user and the data, any one of those pieces in many cases can bring the entire system down to its knees.

• Storage can fail.
• Servers can fail.
• Networks can fail.
• Routers can fail.
• Lines can be cut.
• Services can close down.
• Users can delete images or pages.

It happens, and until we control all aspects of the system, there will be outages.

On Wednesday, in the middle of testing a third-party Twitter service, I linked to the Guardian using a URL shortener called tr.im, required to get the service to work. Later that night, tr.im failed, and it broke all links that were being used.


The conversation (in Google cache)
In response, Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed, with a long history at Google, Microsoft and Intel prior to his latest efforts, referenced the break, calling it "another reason why url shorteners are annoying."

But FriendFeed itself has a URL shortener, called ff.im, which it uses when sending updates to Twitter. Paul added in the thread, "Except ff.im of course :)"

But guess what? Because FriendFeed is down (for now), also down are the ff.im links, making them as likely to fail as any other third party shortener. I could rant up and down saying that FriendFeed and ff.im should be served from different data centers, or offer better redundancy, but I won't. Nobody loves downtime, and FriendFeed by and large has had a fantastic track record of staying up. But as they become a more integrated part of the ecosystem, they too will get more opportunities to fail and need to take the same safeguards to protect the infrastructure as do all the other players.

Things will fail. We will live, but we know that there is no such thing as a fully redundant failsafe machine. Every hop delivers the potential to turn into a skip, and not in a good way.

How Microsoft Views Holes In Today's Search Process

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I attended an update from Microsoft's Powerset team in San Francisco, to gain insight into how the Redmond machine was viewing what's considered to be a mature search market - seeing just what opportunity they believed they had in a space where Google is the king and Microsoft's offerings, whatever they are called these days, usually are viewed in a role similar to court jester, fairly or not. And while the team aimed not to drown us in a well-known ritual called "Death By PowerPoint", they offered us a background presentation to take home on USB keys, chock full of statistics. We were sworn not to distribute the slides, but permitted to use any and all data from within. Maybe it's a style thing.

After looking at the provided materials a few ways, it's clear that the Powerset team at Microsoft is looking at massive amounts of data, citing that search engine users report high levels of satisfaction with their current search provider, but waste an incredible amount of time honing search queries to find the perfect result. Amidst a digital content information explosion rich with links and an ever-growing number of Web sites, Microsoft believes that better tools are needed to help users find their answers more quickly and get on with their solution.

Their statistics, which cited Pew Internet, Comscore and Harris, among others, state:

• 49% of people perform Web searches each day
• Users are searching 23% more frequently per person, year over year from 2008 to 2009
• Satisfaction with search is at approximately 65%

So yes, search is critical, but the data speaks to a somewhat frustrated universe of users, who are spending upwards of 10 minutes on average per Web search, making anywhere from 4 to 6 search queries apiece before coming to a decision. Interestingly, Microsoft's presentation differentiates between standard searches and those that are used simply for navigation (such as finding a Web site domain), as those need only one or two queries per session to complete.

Assuming the data is correct, and Web searchers are taking multiple queries to find an acceptable action, Microsoft found that even after users come to a decision, ostensibly by clicking a search result, almost half the time the user will end up searching for the query again, with 19% performing the exact query, and an additional 30% being a partial repeat of that query, signifying they weren't satisfied with the link they had selected.

The end result, as Microsoft lays out, is that despite users saying they are happy with their search engine experience, about half say they do not expect their queries to be successful. They cited success expectations ranging from 53% to 57% in the categories of Product Purchase, Local Activity, Specific Facts and Finding Information. While more than two thirds of users say search is frequently part of their decision making process, half they time they anticipate being disappointed.

As with any Marketing-driven presentation, Microsoft tries to summarize their to do list with three buckets:

• Opportunity: Better Results
• Opportunity: Organized Experience
• Opportunity: Powerful Decision Tools

Taken in aggregate, the opportunity is as it always has been - help users find their data in a simple way that delivers a successful action, in a cleanly delivered fashion.

Searching through the deck doesn't mention Kumo, or Live Search, or Powerset or MSN, or any of the many names Microsoft has tossed around. It simply says there are issues to be solved, and suggests the opportunity is out there to create something better that helps customers and delivers a higher level of satisfaction. From the discussion on Tuesday, it seemed the Powerset guys believed they had a more relevant approach to delivering better results, and possibly in a better organized way. The struggles, of course, will be in how they can search out new customers who will find a better experience with their product against well-respected competition. Can they better optimize their results to reduce the number of times you execute a query?

I would believe that much of the blame lies not with the search engines, but the links themselves downstream. Until Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! or anybody else can be held accountable for the whole content of the Web, at the end of the day, they are passing you off to a third party, who may or may not have the answer you are looking for. It's possible to continue tweaking the algorithms to and fro, and making the search experience easier, but there will always be room for error, with the exception of fact-based searches (which may explain why Powerset started with Wikipedia as its data set).

Additionally, every search engine is working with a set of users that could be improved. While it's a faux pas to blame the user, there is a very high chance, in my opinion, that users are not really sure what it is they are looking for, and their own search methodologies could be improved. It's likely the Web has reached a stage where "good enough" is "good enough", and multiple queries or keyword tweaking will be the norm for some time.

Social Media Outposts: Maintenance

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

This is a continuation of last week's post regarding creating social media outposts. The first part was creating outposts or as I refer to them, tollbooths. The core objective is for organic search engine traffic, and reserving the brand's identity on the given social networks I have chosen. It's no secret anymore that social media optimization works and it works well with regards to search engines. In the previous post, I outlined my reasons for choosing the social media platforms, today I will delve into maintenance, which is basically updating the outposts.

Maintenance starts with automation:

Automation is key to making this work. My outpost task is for commercial use, so it's not a viable option for me to manually update all of these outposts. Some of the outposts will have to be manually updated, but the majority of them will be automated. I will be covering some of the tools and features for automation that I use in this post.

Blogger:

Since I will be using multiple Blogger.com accounts for this task, and updating the majority of these blogs at the same time, the solution is post by email. This works because the blogs I will be updating are going to be receiving the same content. This also works with Wordpress blogs.

I simply create a mail list with all the distribution blogs post to email addresses. Using Outlook or Gmail, I compose the blog content. The subject of your email letters will be the titles of your posts, and the body of the emails will be the posts themselves. To include an image in your post, you can attach an image to your email. You can also use plain text or HTML when composing your posts via email.

Twitter:

To send status updates to Twitter, I will be using TweetDeck. I prefer TweetDeck because of the ability to group my followers, and because nothing comes close to it, at least for a Windows client. TweetDeck also allows you to post status updates to Facebook. There is one drawback though, presently you can not use multiple Twitter accounts on TweetDeck. This is a major hurdle as I will need to be updating multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. Seesmic would be better off for this task because it supports multiple Twitter accounts and grouping. Both of these are desktop AIR apps and are memory hogs, so there are plenty of other solutions for posting to Twitter. Eventually the clients will be taking over these Twitter accounts and will have their own preferences on how to post to Twitter. Most of these clients are not too tech savvy, and in speaking with them, the majority of them are used to using a browser for everything. Using Twitter.com to post will probably be the road they take.

Facebook:

For updating the Facebook fan pages I will be using a few of the built in options as well as using a few applications. For my objectives, I'm only concerned with automation for videos, status updates and notes. There are a ton of Facebook applications you can use for customizing your Facebook fan pages. Read this Mashable post for a good starting point. Spend some time browsing the application directory for a full sampling of all the current Facebook applications.

Status updates:

There are a few Facebook applications that will do this using your Twitter account's RSS feed. One that I have been testing out is RSS Connect. You can also use ping.fm to update your fan pages too. There are a few other tricks to do this, but either one that I mentioned should be suffice.

Notes:

This will be done by using RSS. Simply add your blog's RSS feed, set it and forget it.

Importing video:

Videos for the fan page will be imported in from our YouTube channel. You can either upload them manually to your page or use YouTube Video Box or YouTube Box for automation.

Importing photos:

I do this manually, as I want to be selective on what photos I add to the fan page. I suspect there is probably an application for this. I also allow on the the fan pages for tagging and adding of photos by fans.

Create custom boxes:

With basic HTML knowledge you can use Static FBML to create custom boxes to cater to your fan page needs.

MySpace:

This outpost will be pretty much bare-bones. Its only purpose will be for branding and vanity url purposes. I will customize the layout, upload a few target videos, link back to my central hub, fill in some profile data and that's all. The application gallery is very weak. While there is an option to export blog postings made on Myspace, I did not find an application to import RSS feeds into Myspace. MySpace is the weakest link in my outpost strategy, again only being used as a branded outpost and that's all. Set this one and forget it.

YouTube:

YouTube will be used for the main video hub. All videos are uploaded to YouTube through YouTube.com first, then distributed to all the outposts. There are tools to create videos and upload them to YouTube directly, I prefer using their website to do this. With our YouTube channels, the first thing we did was customize our channels.

1. Log into your YouTube account. Click the yellow "Edit Channel" button.
2. Set up your channel information - website URL, profile picture (88x88) and description.
3. Within Channel Design scroll down to "Advanced Design Customization". Set background, link and border colors.

If you are looking to automate the YouTube upload process, a good site to use for this is TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul will allow you to send videos to YouTube as well as Viddler, Vimeo , and a whole slew of other video sites.

One tool that does it all is ping.fm:

You can use ping.fm to pretty much update all of your social networks. Ping.fm supports over 40 social networking platforms. I have tried it out in the past and it works pretty well. One word of advice is not to cross your streams. The last thing you want to do is have double or triple updates of the same message broadcasted across your social networks.

That's pretty much the tools of the trade that I recommend and or use for updating my outposts. I'm still pretty much old fashioned and prefer manually updating the majority of my content, but when it comes to bulk and that's what this project is, these tools, once set up, save a lot of time and effort. In the end, it's all about working smarter not harder.

The next post, part three, is not necessarily about outposts, but more on brand monitoring and a big part of that is monitoring the social media networks for brand mentions. Stay tuned...

Image by Rejar under Flickr CC

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Twitter Launches Enhanced New Follower E-mails

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

It would appear that Twitter has launched a brand new format for their new follower notification E-mails they send out to users opting to be alerted to new followers. The e-mails are now in a prettier HTML format and include the new follower's name, Twitter username, and picture. They also include the number of updates, number of people they follow, and number of followers they have. While users aren't given the option to follow straight from the e-mail, you can block the user by clicking on a link in the e-mail.

It would appear as though Twitter is now competing head-to-head to the recently sold business, Twimailer and another popular e-mail service, Topify.  Both services provide similar data, and, in addition, show recent Tweets and other related data to the user to help in deciding whether one should follow or not.  These service also do the same with DMs a user receives through Twitter.  It will be interesting to see if Twitter decides to venture further into this area or if these other services will still be able to thrive.

The New Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications

With the current lack of API for new follows on Twitter (besides these e-mails), it will remain hard for any service to scale to mass proportions for free and afford to add new servers to meet Twitter's API limit demands and simple load for communicating with the API.  This will become even harder as advertisers cut back more and more on spending for these types of applications.

The Old Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications

It was for this same reason that (full disclosure), my own service, SocialToo recently launched a new prioritized e-mail service that you can receive bulk updates of your new followers, as well as unfollowers, along with information about each one. We just announced a new pricing model that you can purchase these daily e-mails for a one-time $20 fee.  Such a model was necessary to pay for a scalable architecture, and you can likely expect the same from many other Twitter apps in the near future.

As Twitter grows, with no known roadmap or business model, developers and businesses should use caution that their businesses can scale and adapt as Twitter, or Facebook, or any other social network or API they are building on top of has the threat to venture into their territory.  There is no word from Twitter yet on these new changes.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Microsoft Live Search Employee Says Search Engine Analysis Flawed

On Tuesday evening, I attended a get-together with some of the minds behind Powerset, the $100 million natural language search engine acquisition slowly being integrated into Microsoft's Live Search engine. The goal? To keep the San Francisco startup natives feeling still connected to their roots, and not detached as part of the Redmond software monolith, while also giving interested tech reporters and bloggers an opportunity to see why Microsoft has any chance in the search market against its primary foe, Google. While I'll talk later about some of the statistics they offered, there was a conveyed perception that traditional reviews of search engines are flawed in their simplicity, in their context, and are not in depth enough to gain a clear knowledge of what's complex subject matter.

Discussed in detail on Senior Program Manager Mark Johnson's blog, Deliberate Ambiguity (See: "How *not* to rate a search engine"), the feeling is that reviewers commonly perform three queries before rating an engine "good" or "bad" - their own name, a hot topic of the day, and then something completely random. If the engine being tested doesn't match expectations, then it's off to the woodshed. (See: Cuil, Searchme, and other engines that have not been embraced for such examples)


Is Live Search Feeling Lucky? They Say Try It for a Week.
Instead of a simple Live Search vs. Google three query test, Mark recommended users try out Live Search for a full week, arguing that their own experiences would trump any simple demo. And as we discussed yesterday, one person's experience could be wildly different from another's, people primarily focus on the first search result, ignoring the bulk of the iceberg, and that it can be extremely difficult to infer intent and importance of results.

For example, as we discussed yesterday, assuming the working set of a search engine is Wikipedia, as Powerset's search engine prototype was, the web crawler will incorrectly determine that years associated with entries are of incredible importance, given how often they are referenced. As a result, rather than World War Two events rising to the top in importance, computers are more likely to trust results labeled '1944' or '1942' - so how do you teach computers to think like humans and correctly rate influence and importance? He adds, concluding his post, "this is rocket science."

At the quick meetup, questions around Microsoft's potential to dethrone Google were plentiful. We talked about how the once-mighty Alta Vista had once had a significant lead, and even after Google's debut, it held a corner in image search and language translation, before those too were eroded. Could Microsoft find a position that Google just doesn't do well? Could Microsoft start to be good enough such that if people tried to use Live Search for a full week, that Google would seem 'less good'? I even overheard a comment at the event that said in user groups, those surveyed preferred results that displayed a Google logo, even if the results shown were from Live Search.

The Google brand just means trusted search for many people, and even the Microsoft monolith is finding competition to be incredibly difficult. Google managed to find a market space that didn't need Microsoft, and could compete on its own revenue terms, without being frozen out by a competitor who could offer a parallel offer for free, a la Netscape. Even if Microsoft has built a better mousetrap, it is going to need to find a way to communicate that to users and deliver them a compelling reason to make a switch - and if Mark's words are to be believed, users and press aren't doing the needed research to help communicate their progress.

FriendFeed Simplifies Joining Process from Twitter, Enhances Syncing

Twitter's rapid growth alongside increased adoption by public figures, celebrities and practically anyone who wants their message heard has not come in a vacuum. Many of the millions of tweets being sent each week are flowing downstream to various social networks, including Facebook and FriendFeed - both of which offer a more diverse content sharing set, including photos and video. But despite the expanded options by both networks, including the ability to "like" items and participate in threaded conversations, some Twitter users have balked - citing complexity. On Tuesday, FriendFeed took a major step to simplify the joining process for Twitter users, giving them a much-needed kick-start into what many people, including me, are using as their central nervous system for social activity.

Twitter users who are don't yet have FriendFeed accounts can head to www.friendfeed.com, and by leveraging Twitter's new adoption of OAuth to let third party applications connect with users while not demanding they turn over their password, can join FriendFeed almost instantly by clicking the Twitter icon. Once granted access, FriendFeed will automatically find all your Twitter contacts already using FriendFeed, and will import your Twitter profile and avatar - essentially replicating the personal elements of your Twitter account, but in a new place with more flexibility.


The New Joining Page Features a Twitter Icon

OAuth Connects Your Twitter to FriendFeed

Just Say Yes to Get Connected
Meanwhile, for existing FriendFeed users, their remains the option to find friends who are connected on other services, from Facebook, as has been in place since FriendFeed's debut, Twitter, Yahoo!, Hotmail and GMail, by using the "Find Your Friends" option.

A few months ago, when the company first introduced synchronization capabilities with Twitter, I had added more than 2,000 new contacts. But as both services have grown, I found more than 1,000 more of my new Twitter followers were already using FriendFeed, and I synched up again this evening, adding them to a group I call "Twitter Clone".


See Those Friends of Yours From Twitter on FriendFeed
As of this evening, of my 8,932 Twitter followers, 3,974 are using FriendFeed - good for about 45% of the total. I somewhat jokingly told the other nearly 5,000 that they are either bots or too stubborn to get on a site that has become a major hub for information discovery, sharing and discussion.


I Get All Synched Up
While it's fun to talk about who is going to buy who, or which service is going to kill the other, the fewer barriers that are there to help novice users transition between the two sites, the greater the adoption will be. FriendFeed is not naive enough to fight Twitter head on, but they are doing a solid effort to capitalize on the total growth of social media - of which they are playing an increasing role.

See also Zee's earlier coverage of the announcement on TheNextWeb:
With 1 click Friendfeed introduces the art of conversation to Twitter

Online Transparency Leads to New World of Group Dating

Guest Post By Micah Baldwin of Learn To Duck (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Like most everything, even dating has been changed by social media.

Before the explosion of the Internet, a man (or woman) had to find a woman (or man) that they were interested in spending more time with, then ask them out on a first date. The two of them would spend the time over dinner and maybe drinks learning about each other and figuring out whether there was enough interest to continue dating.

It was such a time-honored tradition, that books were written about the practice, and even movies were produced around the subject. Entire professions were created to help people overcome the difficulties of a first date.

Then the Internet came around.

Dating sites such as Match.com, eHarmony and others helped people get to know one other through online interaction prior to meeting. For many people, this was an amazing step forward. No longer were the first dates awkward. Now each party knew a lot about the other from all their interactions online. Pictures were exchanged; stories were shared; and likes and dislikes were enumerated. The first date became almost the triumphant conclusion of the online courtship.

Match.com (15 million users), eHarmony (17 million users) and PlentyofFish (30 million users) thrived in the pre-social network / pre-recession Internet. Even younger users (40% of Match.com, 40% of eHarmony and 35% of of PlentyofFish users are under 35 years old).

Enter social networks.

Now we have entered a world of "hyper-transparency." Most everyone between the ages of 25-35 has a Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and a million different social network profiles. Not to mention Google itself. With a simple name search so much information on an individual can be surfaced, that the awkwardness of first dates has returned. "What do they know about me? Did they see that picture from college?" often runs through people's minds. "How did you know that? Oh, you saw that blog post."

While many stories have been written about folks who have lost jobs or potential jobs (see: Cisco Fatty - www.ciscofatty.com) because of tweets or Facebook photos, how many relationships have been ruined by out-of-context tweets or photos?

As an example, the game "Shots in the Dark," where kids get together and drink shots in a darkened closet to ensure that no photos exist of their hijinks, has become common place in today's high schools and colleges.

As transparency becomes a required part of interaction, especially among people under the age of 35, paid dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony are finding it difficult to hang on to their users, especially those under 35. Jupiter Research indicates that only about 10% of the online population uses paid dating sites, which is a decrease of 6% since 2006. Match.com's largest growing segment is users over 50, seeing a 300% increase since 2000.

Spark Networks, owner of sites such as JDate.com, has seen annual sales drop to $14mm from $15.8mm a year ago. Free sites such as OkCupid, which appeal to the under 35 crowd, have seen new user signups increase 60 percent since September, from 110,000 per month to 180,000 per month.

Younger Internet users demand greater transparency among their online (and offline) interactions. "As a recent grad, it's expected that I will know more about the people I hang out with, " said Grace Boyle, 23. "With all the social media tools available, why would I use something like Match.com?"

Now dating sites such as Ignighter, TeamDating and Mixtt have created the concept of "group dating," where groups meet each other eliminating the pressure of the first date. Now there is no focus on the one-on-one interaction of dating sites, but rather on finding compatibility among groups.

Ignighter, the largest among the group dating sites (They were a Techstars company and recently announced $1.2 million in funding), believes that the group dynamic removes the stigma of having to perform on the first date. On Ignighter small groups create profiles and match to other small groups based on geography and interest area. Mixtt, who launched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, has a similar format to Ignighter, with the group profile and matching concept. (Mixtt has received no funding to date, and their last blog post was in October. http://mixtt.wordpress.com).

Jacqueline Malan, 25, remarked "It's much easier to go out with a group of friends, since it removes all the pressures of the first date. Of course, if there is someone interesting, we certainly can connect on Facebook and Twitter. Erica Prather, 24, added, "and if there isn't anyone interesting, it removes the awkwardness of the goodbye."

The hyper-transparency of today's social network remove the fear of not knowing most of a person's "dirty little secrets."

For the traditional dating sites, it will be imperative for them to allow users to interact outside of their walled gardens in ways that could potentially reduce the amount of time spent on the sites.

Since everything is out in the open, it increases the difficulty of the first date and the strangeness of matching to someone online and building a rapport that can end up being misleading. Group dating is clearly the 2.0 answer to online dating. By allowing people to see potential relationships interact in the real world and among their friends, there is additional insight into real personalities.

Online dating has to evolve into a collaborative, transparent activity, much like most online interactions have become, to make the fake phone call from a dying mother obsolete, and the drink in the face a relic of yesteryear.

Resources:

• Maneater: Singles turn to online dating as recession empties wallets, hearts
• Dating Sites Reviews: Current Online Dating and Dating Services Facts & Statistics
• AllFacebook: Facebook Demographic Statistics
• Match.com: 10 surprising statistics you’ll be glad to know, including the odds that you’ll find an amour at this age.

Read more by Micah Baldwin at LearnToDuck.com.

The Great Debate: Is College the Right Path to Succeed?

In my family, college wasn't so much an option, but an expectation. That was no surprise, given my dad had an M.D. and my mother got her doctorate in educational technology, alongside more than a decade's teaching experience at primary and secondary levels. In fact, my own decision, thus far, to not attend graduate school or get an MBA has been a greater source of internal debate. So when I saw at the end of last week that Daniel Brusilovsky, a 16-year-old friend of mine who operates the Teens In Tech service, which I advise for, was thinking of not going to college altogether, I considered him out of his mind.

Of course, mine was not the only opinion. With the very public examples of tech leaders such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and others who have not completed their degrees, it can be tempting for an aggressive entrepreneur to point their way for leadership. And yes, some college courses, like high school, seem to have almost no value for whatever you may eventually choose as your career. I personally know I derived as much benefit from working at the college newspaper as I believe I ever did from my college courses at UC Berkeley. But if I had tried to jump straight from high school to Silicon Valley, I would have been dead on arrival.

Rob Diana touched on some of these points this morning in his article on the reputation economy, but even if you're not a huge fan of FriendFeed, you should see the debate that has been raging the last few days, embedded here. Enjoy, and participate here or there. Up to you.

Adobe: Our Products Are Expensive - And Don't Buy the Downloads

Last night I told you that Adobe failed my expectations for an instant download experience of their Creative Suite, looking like the company preferred to review every single software download manually. Now more than 15 hours later, I'm no closer to having access to the product I purchased, and if their support infrastructure is any indication, it might be some time before this gets resolved.

Along the way, I learned the company still has a long way to go before embracing true e-commerce and satisfying savvy customers.

Support Experience #1

Having seen my order still labeled as "Pending" in the Adobe Online Store, I called their "Purchase by Phone" toll-free number listed on the site, to see if I could push the order forward. After exchanging pleasantries with the support personnel on the line, I explained this morning...

Me: "I ordered the download version of Creative Suite last night, and the order shows as Pending. Can you see if it can be fulfilled or canceled, or what I have to do to get it moving forward?"

Them: "Has it been more than 2 hours?"

Me: "Yes. I ordered it last night, and it still shows pending."

Them: "Then the order is dead. I've seen that a few times today."

Me: "Dead? So what do you recommend?"

Them: "Well, first I would recommend never buying the download version. Always get the disks. You get an authentication code, can install on two computers, and can uninstall from the disk. I would never get the download."

Me: "But the disks and the box take up a lot of space."

Them: "No they don't."

Me: "Well, I would prefer the download version. What should I do?"

Them: "I don't deal with the online store. Let me transfer you."

Support Experience #2

I get transferred to a main customer service line. The quality of the call noticeably decreases, and a man named "Jerry", with a clear Indian accent, picks up.

Me: "I made an order on the Adobe Online Store last night, and it is showing as pending. I can give you the order number."

Them: (takes number... puts me on hold)

Them: "Your bank probably stopped the order. It was a big order - more than $1,000."

Me: "That's what your products cost. And I don't think it's the bank. I used my credit card."

Them: "Let me check while it is still pending." (puts me on hold again)

(Hold music warbles in with more static than notes)

Them: "Sir, it is your bank. We have released it. You should call your bank."

Me: "That doesn't make any sense."

Them: "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Me: "No."

According to Adobe Online, my order is still pending. In theory, it could resolve this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week. I can't cancel it. I can't move it forward. I can maybe call the credit card company, but I expect to get nowhere. But what I have learned (again) is that big companies that let bureaucracy get in the way of their customers will never win the customer service game.

Hey Adobe, I have the money. If you think this order is too big, lower your prices. If you think I shouldn't download your product, don't offer it. And if your phone sales team can't see the online side, you should find a way to get them talking.

Welcome To The Reputation Economy

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Everyone knows a good reputation is a valuable thing. With all of the activity on social media Web sites, your reputation can now come from a number of sources. You could be a well known blogger or entrepreneur, or even what some people call a social media whale, describing those people heavily active on social media sites. Because of the amount of public dialog that people now participate in, your reputation is even more valuable.

Where Does Reputation Start?

There is a fantastic conversation on FriendFeed regarding whether some of today's bright teens should go to college. I was late to the conversation and decided against participating because I had a larger topic in mind - this blog post. The reason I bring this conversation up is that for most people, their reputation building is started in college. Not only do they build reputation by what they do, but they start building something the moment they attend the school. For example, if you attend a fine university like Berkeley, people immediately assume certain things about you. The same can be said for any of the Ivy League universities, high tech universities like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, and other top schools. By having a degree from one of these schools, you have stated that you can survive a difficult and competitive environment, and for someone interested in joining or building a startup, this is excellent experience.

Obviously, after or alongside schooling, you are continuously refining your reputation through your work experience and other activities like blogging or social media use.

What Does Reputation Get You?

Technically, reputation is one of those "investment" items that does not have a direct return. However, your reputation may get you that interview you wanted. It may not get you the job directly, but it may get your foot in the door. If you get into the freelancing business, much of your initial contacts will likely be due to your reputation as well. Similar to your education though, it is something that needs "care and feeding". It does not go on autopilot, it is something that needs to be steered through various obstacles. How you handle these obstacles in your career directly affects your reputation, as well as your success.

Is Reputation More Important Than It Used To Be?

Reputation has always been important, however the area of importance is changing. Before the Internet, reputation may have been critical to getting the sale or a new job. Now, your reputation can be seen and tested every day by your social media activity and your blogging. The management of your reputation is now of critical importance. You just need to look at the various situations that "went viral" or took on a life of their own. People being fired for comments on Facebook is not an uncommon thing anymore. An advertising campaign can fail so badly (i.e. MotrinMoms) that it incurs that wrath of moms all over the Internet.

Welcome To The Reputation Economy

Reputation is now worth almost as much as revenue. FriendFeed is the perfect example of this. The reputation of the team is stellar. Because Paul Buchheit has a fantastic resume and has had great success, when he says real-time conversation is the next big thing, people are listening. Because he works for FriendFeed, people are watching FriendFeed closely. To compare the effect of reputation, look at me. I have a decent reputation in social media circles, but if I said that real-time conversation was the next big thing (without Paul saying it of course), I might get a link from another blog or two. That could even be the end of the conversation. So, never underestimate the power of reputation because it may be as important as actual currency.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Dinosaur Adobe Manually Reviews Download Purchases

After years of working on outdated desktop software, I was all set to bite the bullet tonight, and upgrade to the latest Creative Suite family from Adobe. Not interested in cluttering our already-cluttered home with boxes of software and CDs, I was pleased to see I could order a download version of the suite, and potentially have it tonight, installed and running while the twins slept. But for some bizarre reason, probably having to due with an overwrought insecure obsession with piracy, Adobe says it will review the order manually, in the next business day, and then, assuming I pass, I'll get permission to download what I bought.

Crazy. Dumb. Antiquated.


Seriously, Adobe? You're Reviewing a Download?
It's one thing to order a physical item from Amazon.com, the Apple Store, or Zappos, and expect it to ship in a few business days. But downloads? Instant or not at all. This is part of why iTunes has been so successful. Click to purchase, and you are downloading immediately. Same goes for Netflix's "Watch Instantly", and practically every other legitimate software download service.

What if I absolutely needed Adobe's software tonight? What if I were in a creative agency on deadline working the weekend? Could I tell a client that no, I would be unable to open their project in the latest version of InDesign or PhotoShop because Adobe was going to review my order the next day? It's almost enough to make me check out BitTorrent.

There's a reason Web services are replacing the old dinosaur software companies. They are more agile and more forward thinking. Maybe I'll get approved and get the software I paid for by tomorrow. But this is completely ridiculous. The world is moving to a real-time Web, and this is anything but.

Forgive, But Remember - It Never Pays To Hold a Grudge

The saying is to "forgive and forget", but people aren't built that way. Once you feel you have been wronged, whether in a critical manner or one that is relatively trivial, it is practically impossible to erase the memory. But that doesn't mean you need to hold on to it - because for the most part, time does heal wounds, and the truth is, you never know the full story from the other person's perspective. Often, there will come a time when you will cross paths with that person again, and the next time, it just might be different.

Last month, I was asked by a well-known blogger if two of the public flare-ups we had on this site (with Mashable and Duncan Riley) had been for show, ostensibly for short-term traffic. I said that they were not contrived, but that we had come to terms quickly. Since the flare-ups, Mashable altered their editorial focuses, I've gotten to know some of the authors better, and others have moved on. Meanwhile, Duncan is a sharp guy who I often see on social networks, and bounce e-mails off of when we have ideas.

I was thinking of this again when I learned the news of Valleywag's changing of the guard today. As Owen Thomas departs, the void is set to be filled by Ryan Tate, previously the night editor at Gawker.

Eighteen months ago, I highlighted Ryan's launching of a new blog, called "The Hack", and at the time, I mentioned we had "occasionally clashed politically" more than a decade ago when we were both staff members at the Daily Californian student newspaper at UC Berkeley. He and I started working together back in 1996, both on the news authoring side, and the online publishing side. By the 1997-98 year, he was Editor In Chief at the newspaper, and by the 1998-99 year, I had moved on to work in the Silicon Valley (where I've been since).

Ryan and I had a lot of positive overlaps, as we collaborated on breaking news stories, longer investigate pieces, special sections and the online site's layout and focus. But of course, we bumped heads too. At the time, our clashes seemed critical, and now, they seem trivial. We both let those wounds heal and fade into the history, which is exactly what it was. And now, I am excited to see Ryan promoted to his new post, seeing it as another peer who emerged intact from the crucible which was the daily paper, where journalists and future bloggers were forged. One of these days, I should chase down all the names who were there when he and I shared spots on the editorial board, but they dot some of the top news media sources in the world.

I could have stayed ticked at Ryan, and he me. I could have turned my back on Duncan and Mashable too, but that's not fun, and it's not healthy. It's a small industry, and we're all working toward shared goals - to find interesting news quickly, and post with quality. Now, when the tendency is to get ticked, take things personally and go off on some rant, I know to hold my breath and pause. It's less exciting, and it doesn't get tons of traffic, but you won't see rants here, and I'm not carrying a grudge. You never know when you'll need these people again.

Congratulations, Ryan. I wish you well at your new post. But remember, if you come after me, I have 14 years of e-mail backed up. :)