Five Blogs Under the Radar: July 2009 Edition

Seventeenth Edition Of a Monthly Series

As we wrap up July, it comes time again to highlight some enterprising bloggers who are practicing their craft with little attention - or at least a lot less than some of the brand names we frequently run up against. This month's edition, like the others, brings new voices into the sphere who you may want to start reading and follow. Each month, I try to find five new ones that you may not have heard, who are working hard in obscurity. Most are interested in a lot of the same things I am - including technology, information gathering, gadgetry and social networking.

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

The July 2009 blogs are:

1) In the Mind of Damond Nollan (damondnollan.com)

Focus: IT Management, Education, Software, Internet Services
Three Recent Posts:

• First Look at Google Voice
• Small Discovery Makes Lazyfeed Exceedingly Cool
• How to Share Interesting Stuff from the Web Using Google Reader and Friendfeed

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Victus Spiritus by Mark Essel ( victusspiritus,com)

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

• Crowd Sourced Venture Capitalism
• Open Social Media of the People, by the People, for the People
• Motivation for Behavior Change, Cognitive Dissonance

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Adam Sherk (www.adamsherk.com)

Focus: Publishing, SEO, Public Relations
Three Recent Posts:

• Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
• Do People Search for “Breaking News”?
• Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Ropes

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4) TrendsSpotting (trendsspotting.com)
(This violates my rule of 1,000 or fewer subscribers, but I bet it's new to many of you)

Focus: Statistics, Trends, Social Media
Three Recent Posts:

• Facebook’s Naked Reality: Social Networks Research Insights
• Taking A Stock Of Real Time Search Hype
• Apple is Risking its Brand Image

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Social Squared by Jess Sloss (socialsquared.com)

Focus: Social Media, Marketing, Lifestreaming
Three Recent Posts:

• The Everyday Evangelist
• Want 500,000 Clicks? Try Giving Away 10 Macbook Pros
  
• Find Twitter Followers and Build An Audience With These Helpful Applications

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

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

This September, I'm Headed to London to Speak With Ecademy

If you promise not to tell anyone, I'll let you in on a little secret. I've never been outside North America. Despite having lived three years in Guadalajara, Mexico at a very young age, the rest of my life has been spent locked up in the United States. I've never even been to Canada. I haven't gone to Europe, to Asia, Africa, Australia... you name it. Traveling has never been my thing. But this year, at least one of those will be crossed off the list, for I'm headed to London in September to talk to a room full of professionals looking to learn more about blogging, social media, and how to take on the new world or real-time information flow. A guest of Ecademy, and its founder, Thomas Power and his wife, Penny, a full day's agenda is set to take place on September 17th, which I am really looking forward to - even more so than flying East over the Atlantic Ocean.

In the last few years, I've gotten to know Thomas a bit through seeing him on the social networks, primarily including FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook, in that order. But in parallel, Thomas has developed his own business-oriented social network, called Ecademy, which, if his own connections are any indication, is more than 50,000 strong.


Thomas Power and the "Law of Big Numbers"
Thomas, who recently put up an interesting video on YouTube showing why he chooses Quantity over Quality, has made some choices when it comes to Ecademy. There are a tremendous amount of options for connections, messaging, direct blog posting to the site, but yes, it's not the most polished and doesn't have a glitzy Web 2.0 look. But the network is full of fervor, of people who are eager to learn - as I have especially found once he introduced me, and I gained more than 8,000 contacts in the space of two weeks.


My Ecademy Profile: Connected, But Raw
A small subset of these connections are going to meet with me on September 17th to start with the basics and then race through what should be a jam-packed day. If you are in London and would like to attend, you can find the event here:

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=meeting&mid=28677
(Disclaimer: Thomas' description of me is very positive - and I didn't write my bio)

The full agenda for September 17th (GMT) is below.

9.30am Registration and Networking

10.00am - 12.00pm Morning Program

• Harnessing the new world of real-time
• How to use RSS Feeds, Google Reader, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and Socialmedian

12.00 - 2.00pm Lunch and Networking

2.00pm - 5.00pm Afternoon Program

• Participating and Broadcasting
• Blogging
• Microblogging
• Social Aggregation
• Best Practices
• Tips and Tricks
• Using these tools for business
• Keeping your business and personal identities separate
• What is oversharing?
• Quality over quantity

I am looking forward to the opportunity. If you are interested in my speaking on these topics, or any close to it, for your group, you know how to reach me. If the opportunity is incredible enough, like Ecademy, I'll travel the world to be there.

My6sense: An iPhone App for Feeds, With Digital Intuition Built-in

The concept of information overload has been much-debated. Practically everyone, with myself being a rare exception, says they are overwhelmed by the amount of data that is flowing their way. Decisions need to be made in terms of what to read, where to read, how to respond, and how to interact with the growing data tsunami. And while I have suggested that you control your own destiny, and that any info overload is actually your fault and responsibility, one company, My6sense, has come up with a new approach to finding the most "important" and "relevant" items in your information trough, based on your own interaction. And this company is focused not so much on the deskbound information connoisseur, but for the new world of those on the go. The company has, after significant investment of time, debuted an iPhone application, soon to hit the iTunes store, which follows your own input, and based on your activity, finds what content is most relevant.

While the company awaits Apple's permission to be included in the Store, I have had the opportunity to get to know My6sense, and it aims to know me.


To start with My6sense, you can choose to import streams from services such as Google Reader, or you can add from predefined bundles, called My6sense picks. In addition, you can opt to follow a number of your social streams, or add a single feed, by URL.


Once you have imported feeds, you are presented with these entries, similar to how they are displayed in your RSS reader. On the first time you visit My6sense, it may not know you well, but as you scroll through your items and choose individual ones to read, its Digital Intuition meter scales further to the right until it is an expert on what you like and what you don't.


The idea? See if the best content will float to the top and deliver you the highest quality information, on the go.


Unsurprisingly, if your data set of activity is small, the potential for error is high, so it makes sense to train the application and get to know it well. For example, if you, like I did, happen to click one or two Valleywag and Mashable stories upon first loading the application, it may guess you like those sources, and make them have the lion's share of "top spots", until you scroll further down, and find more interesting items to read.


Like with Google Reader, My6sense presents you with the opportunity to share the best of what you find with your social networks. One feature, called your "stream", includes all those items you have hand-selected for sharing. And if you choose, you can send items from this stream, automatically, to networks including Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, upon entering your credentials. It's a lot like having your Google Reader link blog editable at your fingertips on your iPhone.

Now, before you remind me that, yes, Google Reader has a mobile version, and it works, even populating my link blog, keep in mind that My6sense is trying to do much more than just get you your feeds. It wants to correctly anticipate those you would like the most, and those which you're likely to skip. Following my initial few clicks, My6sense got to learning, and started to surface more pertinent stories, either based on topic, or the feed source itself. Once the product gets bounced into the iTunes Store, it could be a compelling option for those data-driven but data drunk folks who are asking for help.

Note also previous coverage from earlier today on CNet and ReadWriteWeb. The company's site, a great place to watch if you want to see when the app gets added, is at www.my6sense.com.

Locking Customers to Your Product? It’s Probably Not Good Then.

Although the world of business development partnerships can be complex, rife with epic contracts with tie-ins and promises, expirations and penalties for all parties, when relationships are struck that reduce customer choice, it is a telltale sign that the product or service being provided is well below acceptable standards. You see, customers aren’t stupid. They will be your product and company’s loudest advocates, more than willing to spread the word on your behalf, if you have a game-changing offering. But if you have to rely on bundling and exclusive contracts just to rope customers in, you probably don’t have something they want all that much anyway.

The recent flare-up of seething and complaining about the quality of AT&T, and the gnashing of teeth for Apple to shed itself of its telecom overlord partner handcuffs is only the latest example of business development contracts and exclusive rights being offered at the harm of customer choice. And any time you are forced to restrict choice, there’s obviously a reason you would – a very real threat that the alternative, your competition, is good enough to take your business away if it were to be played on an even field.

The dichotomy between how Apple’s products are much sought after and AT&T’s services are much loathed could not be more clear. Although I have yet to find a consistent voice of people who enjoy their long distance provider, AT&T’s failings are well-documented, from its frequent shoddy service, to its bungling of feature rollouts, failure to provision for peak loads, and general malfeasance. Meanwhile, in contrast, Apple’s product introductions may have fans sleeping outside their retail stores for days on end, just to say they did.

There’s a reason it’s called lock-in. Because customers are trapped. And being trapped is never a good thing.

Remember the brouhaha only a decade or so ago about how Microsoft manipulated its monopoly position, forcing OEM partners to carry its Internet Explorer browser as the default, over the largely-deemed superior Netscape Navigator? At a time when very few would have selected IE as the technology leader or feature leader, it became the market leader through brute force, trickery and customer handcuffs.

When businesses have a high-quality product, they don’t fear competition the way the mediocre guys do, but instead, compete on their merits. But when threatened, that’s when you can expect the ridiculous contracts to fly – from automated renewals and multi-year contracts, to early exit penalties. And when exclusivity is not threatened, but is instead encouraged, that is when you see a relaxed approach to improvements, and of course, a scale in prices. It’s the very reason there are anti-trust laws and precedents set to stop monopolies in their tracks.

It is one thing to compete through innovation, and quite another to compete through bundling and exclusivity. And even though Apple largely is seen as the better of the two players here, recent developments in Cupertino have us wondering if they too are becoming protective of their accrued market position. One only has to look so far as their recent quashing of Google Voice, their forcing of Google Latitude to be a broken-down Web application, and rumors are now flying that the Spotify application will also face a steep task to make it onto the iPhone, as it potentially competes against iTunes.

I don’t want to sound like a hippy-dippy free markets advocate. But if customers don’t like your product, the last thing you really want them doing is sticking around and bad-mouthing you to everyone they know. If you want to compete in the market, you should not be afraid to let your products win on their merits, on their price, and on their differentiation. If you have to instead do a backroom deal that makes you the default, and there are no other options, maybe you’ve got a lot more work to do in the R&D space instead of in BD.

CrunchPad or Apple Tablet? Why I’m Leaning CrunchPad…

Something odd must be in Silicon Valley’s drinking water these days. Not only did I tell you two months ago that I didn’t care what operating system you used, and not only am I typing this on the work-issued Dell laptop, but when thinking about the potential release of Apple’s long-rumored iTouch tablet, I’m not yet saving up my greenbacks and lining up at my nearest Apple Store. In fact, despite the almost equal lack of information, I just might be more likely to buy a CrunchPad, despite its not having Steve Jobs’ official seal of approval.

First of all, in order to purchase a tablet PC (or tablet Mac), I would need to find a use case for it. At times, in fact, the entire tablet market at times seems more of a solution in pursuit of a problem. With my iPhone being such an amazing device, getting me my phone calls, e-mail and mobile Web on the go, and my laptop running all my needed apps, making room for a third “in between” device seems a bit over the top.

That Apple has finally turned the corner on getting its tablet out the door, having met the demanding eye of Jobs, is very interesting. I can see benefits of going with an Apple machine immediately of having the standard Apple look and feel, industrial design, and synchronization of my data, including with the iPhone and iTunes. That’s all good stuff. But I also believe that it would be more expensive than the CrunchPad, which is rumored to be about $200-$300 less per unit, and the early concepts making it look like a giant iPod Touch make it seem as fragile as a china plate. If you thought you got scratches on your iPhone now, or you thought there was an uproar when the G4 Cube got cracks, just wait until your iTouch Grande gets split like a windshield nailed with a rock on the freeway.

So what of the CrunchPad? First of all, its industrial design mockups are equal to, if not better, than the ones I have seen allegedly from Apple so far. The CrunchPad also promises to be lower cost, and forces a new paradigm of being 100% a Web device. Yes, that sounds odd, to praise a machine for effectively limiting what I can do with it. But through those limitations, it makes us think differently (like Apple did) about how we use our electronics gadgets and consume the Web. And it has a side benefit of being from somebody I consider a peer, who is stepping outside of his comfort zone and taking a risk.

Betting on the CrunchPad is a bet for the small upstart challenger, in the same way that betting on Apple once was against Microsoft. And the CrunchPad doesn’t look like it’s going to shatter on impact.

If it’s very simple to use, I could see this low-cost Web-only device (or at least its third version) quite possibly being the first computer for my twins, who may not ever need the suites from Adobe and Microsoft like I have my entire computer-using tenure. A bet on the CrunchPad rewards the idea that bloggers can grow from simply reporting on the news to making the news. Yes, I recognize that Mike Arrington and TechCrunch are already among the most well-known blog networks out there, and have to be considered a success on their own as is, not suffering for dollars, but can you imagine bumping into the guy at a meetup in the Valley, holding the tablet from Apple when his CrunchPad offers the same specs for half the price?

While much has yet to be revealed about both devices, we just might be on the verge of seeing a market-changing event, where there are multiple serious alternatives both arriving at the same time, ostensibly for different buyers. It is quite possible that even if the CrunchPad is a superior, less expensive device, that Apple’s marketing could eat it alive. It’s also quite possible that both could fall short of expectations, or that by choosing one or the other, I could be left with a short-termed albatross. But if I can find a great reason to get a tablet, and both deliver to the specs I’ve seen today, we’re going to be saving a few hundred bucks and buying a CrunchPad. Let my iPhone be my phone and my Mac be my real computer experience, but for this new space, I’m looking for something really new.

Appsfire Wants to Make Sharing Your iPhone Apps Social

With tens of thousands of different iPhone applications out there, it's doubtful that many iPhones have the same array of programs. Each time I see a friend page through their loaded iPhone apps, I discover new ones I had never heard of, and they too find surprises from what I have loaded. Appsfire, a new service from Ouriel Ohayon, creator of Topify, lets you share your favorite iPhone apps on the Web, making the iTunes App Store more social.

The service, currently available for Mac OS X clients, with a Windows version planned to debut soon, scans your iTunes library for installed applications, presents them on the Web in a faux iPhone interface, and encourages you to share your library with friends by way of social networks, including Twitter and Facebook.

The purpose? Helping solve the discovery of relevant applications - a process Ouriel says is "ignoring".

The service is in closed alpha now, but we have 50 invites available, first come, first serve to Mac OS X users. http://bit.ly/appsfireLG

You can see some example Appsfire libraries here:

• Ouriel Ohayon's Appsfire: http://bit.ly/ourieltopapps
• Louis Gray's Appsfire: bit.ly/lgiphoneapps

Each icon from the virtual iPhone is clickable to the iTunes application store. Lest you think this is a solely charitable effort, you can safely assume that Ouriel will be gaining a piece of any potential purchases, through affiliate links. If this takes off, it could be a great way to not only share new apps with friends, but a good way to send Ouriel a little bit of cash.

Also part of Appsfire? A new link shortener for iPhone developers and bloggers, who all know the usual links to the iTunes Store are a complete pain. You can find that here.


An intro to the service can also be found on YouTube.

10 People To Follow On FriendFeed For The Month Of July 2009

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

This is the eleventh edition of the monthly FriendFeed to follow member list. Louis Gray has done a superb job covering for me for the past three months, and has kept the tradition alive. That's one of the reasons I naturally invited Louis to partner with me on it many months ago, and to keep the list going on his blog instead of mine. While I have been a FriendFeed evangelist since the day I joined, Louis is an even a bigger one. This list is intended for new members of FriendFeed as well as veterans, as a guideline to follow unique and contributing members of the FriendFeed community. It's these people and the ones previously highlighted that you can find below who truly make FriendFeed what it is, a vibrant social community.

Previous FriendFeed members to follow lists can be found for the 2008 months of, July, September, November and December. You can find the 2009 follow lists for the months of, January, February, March, April, May, June.

1) Amani

Short Bio: Amani is currently the Director of Sales & Marketing at Marina del Rey Marriott in Marina del Rey, California. With over 12 years of hands on experience and industry expertise in hospitality, sales, marketing, e-commerce, web 2.0, blogging, micro-blogging, technology and social media, he can propel any company to the next level. He is currently seeking a Director of Social Media/Online Community Manager role, any companies hiring?
FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

2) Bruce Lewis

Short Bio: Bruce is a Boston resident and software developer. He has been playing with code since his MIT days going back to 1997, possible earlier, but thats all I could track down in research. He is also the creator of the hybrid blogging/photo-sharing site OurDoings.com, a site I gave a glowing review to back in January. Bruce will be speaking about OurDoings at the upcoming Boston Lisp Meeting on July 27, 2009.

FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

3) Jason Pollock

Short Bio: Jason is a filmmaker, writer, and activist who currently lives in my old hometown of Brooklyn, NY. I first came across Jason on Twitter or FriendFeed, and shortly thereafter discovered his story. Jason is the definition of grass roots marketing, he is using Twitter to spread awareness about his current film The Youngest Candidate with the hopes of getting the film picked up and distributed, something I'm confident will happen any day now. He is a key influencer on Twitter with close to 60,000 followers. He also adds a significant amount of value on Twitter by re-tweeting informative and resourceful links. Jason extends himself to quite a few social platforms, but always makes time for Friendfeed.

FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

4) Jeff Douglass

Short Bio: Jeff is a Washington DC resident, who I believe spends quite a bit of time in Japan for work. I assume ths based on his feed. Jeff is a unique FriendFeeder, although a mysterious one as I could not locate hardly any bio info on him. Jeff would make a great double agent, he could already be working for the CIA and we just don't know it. All kidding aside, I have been following Jeff on FriendFeed I believe since I have been a member. He always shares interesting and useful content. I particularliy like the photos of the Japanese food he takes when in Japan. Who doesn't love Sushi?

FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog (NA)

5) Jeff Henderson

Short Bio: Jeff is a Sr. Mechanical Engineer at KLA-Tencor who resides in San Jose, California. Jeff is also a semi-professional photographer. His feed is one that never gets boring. Where else on FriendFeed could you find a Matchstick Oil Rig? Jeff has some fantastic photographs on his blog linked below, but I would like to start seeing them shared more on FriendFeed!

FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

6) Michael Hocter

Short Bio: Michael is VP of Application Development at Countrywide Financial Corp in Los Angeles, California. I have been following Michael ever since I joined FriendFeed. Just like Jeff mentioned above, Michael is an avid photographer, he takes black and white photography to a new level. I think that if he could make money from it, it would be his first profession. Michael and his wife are also expecting a baby boy in November, congrats! We cant wait to start seeing baby pics on FriendFeed.

FriendFeed:Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

7) Owen Greaves

Short Bio: Owen runs his own company, Owen Greaves Consulting. He resides in British Columbia, Canada. Owen has a passion for technology and uses it to his advantage when consulting with clients. With over 15 years in management and technology consulting, Mr. Greaves is an I.T. professional who is a jack of all trades. He blogs about technology and social media and its impact on businesses. He is passionate about what he does, something I admire and respect.

FriendFeed:Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

8) LAG

Short Bio: LAG aka Lawrence ("Larry") Green is the Corporate Web Director at Landor Associates in San Francisco, California. LAG is a web developer and writer, he is also a jack of all trades when it comes to web development and web marketing. Creativity is LAG's middle name, the clients at Landor are privileged to have this guy working on their creative and digital strategies.

FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

9) Madhav Tripathi

Short Bio: Madhav is a college student residing in Ahmedabad, India. He also blogs about technology and social media at techshali.com. I don't know that Madhav ever sleeps, because as soon as I share content into FriendFeed, he is usually the first to like it. He has become a great filter to finding informative content on Friendfeed. He hasn't been blogging long, but he is consistent, and has the drive to blog every day, that's to be respected. I expect him for him to be a top tech blogger in India someday, keep with it!

FriendFeed: Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

10) Wayne Sutton

Short Bio: Wayne is a social media rock star. The definition of social media in the dictionary is Wayne Sutton. Wayne is an active blogger, podcaster, and overall technology evangelist. Wayne has a respected following on all the social media networks, including Twitter with close to 27,000 followers. Wayne spends a tremendous amount of time involved with social media and community building. He attends numerous Tweet-ups and he blogs daily about new social media applications, and hosts a weekly podcast show with his partner in crime Kipp Bodnar. If you are not following Wayne, you are missing a lot, that I can guarantee.

FriendFeed:Subscribe | What they like | What they comment on | Blog

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Podcast: TheSocialGeeks: Stop Being Lazy, and Filter

In the latest edition of The Social Geeks, Chris Miller, Wayne Sutton, Jeff(isageek) and I talk about new introductions on Lazyfeed, Google Reader, and how to interact with multiple communities on differing social networks. Meanwhile, have we reached the saturation point where we no longer have to look for more sources of news? I say no, but stress that filters can play a big role in getting the best data. You can also find the original copy on Mevio.com.

Join Mozilla, FriendFeed and Kosmix for Lunch 2.0 on August 6th

On Thursday, August 6th, from 12:00PM - 2:00PM, I have the opportunity to sit down with Anand Rajaraman, Co-Founder of Kosmix, Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of Friendfeed and Chris Beard, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer, for a lunchtime panel on how these three innovative companies are working to drive change online.

The panel discussion, titled "Postcards From the Edge: Shaking Up Markets, Mindsets and Media", will be held at 444 Castro Street, Suite 109 in Mountain View, and you can RSVP to get one of 150 registrations on Upcoming.org.

Disclosure: Kosmix.com is a client of Paladin Advisors Group.

Video Demo: How to Use Lazyfeed for Real-time RSS Feeds By Topic

Ever since Lazyfeed's debut two weeks ago, I have been a frequent user of one of the more innovative tools to hit the worlds of realtime Web and information discovery - two of my favorite topics. Many people, getting acquainted with the service, have asked me how I use the product. So, this evening, I put together a quick demo. Still don't have access to Lazyfeed? Let me know in the comments here, and together, we'll make sure you get access.

Also: I'm pretty new at this video demo thing, so please do provide feedback as to whether you would like to see more of these, or if I should leave the training to real professionals.

Guzzle It: The RSS-Powered Personalized Site With A Unique Name

The Web has moved away from one built around stale Web sites that treat you like any other visitor. Now, practically every leading site features personalization, giving you customized news sources, social aspects, and increasingly, the option to choose specific topics to keep you updated on. Just two weeks ago we introduced you to Lazyfeed, a cool Web project based on real-time topic discovery, and tonight, we've been looking at another customizable site that is focused on topics you select, called Guzzle It, complete with the .it extension, awkward name and logo.

Jolie O'Dell, who wrote about the service for ReadWriteWeb a week ago, called it "one of the cleanest, coolest, most intuitive, most customizable news dashboards we've seen". And yeah, it's cool. It has a solid user interface, and as I liked with Lazyfeed, it doesn't ask you to come packing OPML. It just asks for topics you like and builds out your page.


Getting Set Up On Guzzle It
To start "guzzling", just enter topics you want to follow, arrange them on a grid for how you would like them displayed, and say you're done. Guzzle It will look through its preselected news sources and spit out the answers, arranged as you want, and then give you the option to display it in article (text) mode, or with images. Clicking on any image or story brings you to the original source.


Setting Up Headlines for Google, Apple and Twitter
Like with most strong news sources, Guzzle It highlights the most-recent article chronologically, with older items fading to the bottom part of the feed. But instead of following up on specific news sources and blogs, I could choose to follow cool topics I like, from "Silicon Valley" and "Google" to "Venture Capital" or even "Oakland A's". If I had to complain, I'd say Guzzle didn't gulp down enough sources for me, relying mainly on the most prominent sources for news.

It's clear the world is getting more customizable. And topics are aiming to fight social as the big differentiator. Guzzle It is a cute easily laid out alternative, but I'll probably stick with Lazyfeed, thanks to its much broader array of sources, and its real-time capability. If you want to start guzzling, go to http://www.guzzle.it.

Proxifeed Delivers Automated Tweets and Ads Based on Keywords

Whether you think Twitter is about conversation or about broadcasting, there is no doubt many people use it to help distribute links to share with their followers. Marketers, PR people and spammers alike have also found the social network a strong place to congregate, as they track for mentions of their name, their competition or potential buyers. (See also Travis Murdock's Marketing In the Feed post)

Proxifeed, a new tool released by Stéphane Osmont, who you might remember from his work on YokWay, automates much of the process, creating a Twitter feed built on links related to keywords you feed, including some for revenue - should you be interested.


The Proxifeed Process: A Proxy For Human Input
Upon logging into Proxifeed with your Twitter credentials, the service asks you to provide some keywords for automated postings. The more specific the keywords, the more unique your content could be. You also have the option to present three types of feeds: Content only, advertising, or a mix. You can also add one or more RSS feeds to the mix, be they blogs or from any source.

To complete the feed, choose an update frequency, and Proxifeed will then do the work on the back end to keep your automated Twitter feed going around the clock, whether you publish once an hour or less often.


Three Potential Twitter Feeds From Me Based On My Keyword Choices
Curious what would happen if I turned over my Twitter posting to a machine filled with keywords, I tested Proxifeed with technology terms and sports terms, to see what would happen. Not surprisingly, Proxifeed searched through its bank of RSS feeds and selected specific items to go along my natural activity. By putting in the keyword "Facebook", I had an ad for a dress with the name Facebook. By putting in "Oakland A's", I got an Oakland A's lollipop.


Proxifeed Would Offer My Followers This Lollipop

Proxifeed Also Found a Facebook Dress for Sale
Proxifeed says its offering can create "exciting and engaging" Twitter streams that will get people with similar interests to follow and make your "follower base grow", so I can see how this might be enticing to a spray and pray marketer, or somebody who opts to turn off ads and then becomes a master aggregator on a specific topic. But for people who want to remain personal on Twitter, the most likely option would be to possibly use Proxifeed instead of TwitterFeed to distribute blog posts automatically. Otherwise, the clear non-authenticity of the updates and implied personal endorsement would be quickly exposed.

If you think creating an automated Twitter feed based on keywords and a few RSS feeds is right for you, Proxifeed absolutely fits the bill. But if you want your Twitter to be updated by a human (hopefully you), you can pass.

Google Reader "Likes" Find the More Shy Blog Readers

Since Google Reader introduced new social aspects to their popular RSS reader last Wednesday, there have been a number of reactions to the additions - most specifically around their introduction of a "like" feature, enabling readers to essentially give a "thumbs up" to an article, as they can on FriendFeed, Facebook, Socialmedian and other networks. But those people who are claiming the exposed likes are cluttering the interface are missing the point completely. The likes functionality not only is a lightweight way to flag a story of interest, but it's a tremendous way to help blog authors and readers find others who may have been keeping a lower profile - those who don't also blog and link your way, and those who don't visit the site to leave comments.

Every single blog post that flows through Google Reader now has the option to be shared or liked. And if a post is liked by somebody, Google Reader shows how many people have liked it across the network. Clicking on the number, such as "4 people liked this" exposes who liked it and a quick mouse over any of the names presents you with a short summary from their Google Profile. So not only can I take pleasure in the fact that people I already know are reading and liking some of the same articles I am, but I am finding new people who share similar interests, and finally cracking the mystery of who actually reads my blog.

I didn't know Hannah read my blog!

Jeff's a local guy - sounds cool...

And Kris knows Digital Syndication and RSS! Awesome.
It's well known that a small percentage of content consumers take action on the content, aside from passively reading it. And as the social Web has evolved, the options to respond to posts have diversified. In the last few years specifically, we have seen a reduction in linking from blogs to other blogs, and a move away from comments on the initial site and more to aggregation services like FriendFeed and Facebook, or even away from comments altogether, instead to ReTweeting - essentially the act of forwarding links to your social connections on Twitter.


Google Reader Is Seeing a Boom In Connections Over the Last Week
The comment has also evolved to include sharing and liking. I act as an information filter to the hundreds of people who read my shared items blog and in turn hundreds of people's shared items blog come my way. And following FriendFeed's lead, as Rob Diana pointed out, the advent of likes makes flagging an article as simple as clicking the "like" option, a move Google Reader has now followed. This lightweight option means that the quiet multitude of readers who to date has not chosen to leave me a comment on the blog just might find a like more palatable - helping me learn who they are, and, assuming their Google Profile is complete, find out where else they are active.

If the argument against likes is simply an issue with the user interface, that's fine. UI is relatively "easy" to alter and improve. But if the argument is to eliminate this new way of interacting with content, then that is certainly a losing battle. You cannot force readers to do what you want them to on your terms, and the more flexible programs are in terms of letting content consumers take action, the more likely it is that more of them will. I am enjoying checking out the likes on my Google Reader items and finding new people I really should know better - even if they are shy.

My AllTop On My iPhone: A New Way to Consume RSS?

In March, when Guy Kawasaki's AllTop service introduced the ability to customize pages to include personalized feeds, I finally dove in and checked it out after years of ignoring the product. This weekend, Guy followed up and let me know that the team had made "major" changes to the iPhone version of the customized pages, going so far as to say, "I think this is the best way to manage RSS on an iPhone." And while I'm still partial to Google Reader for mobile and desktop, it is indeed a new way.

While my customized AllTop is clearly configured for laptops and desktops, the new iPhone-optimized version does away with the three column layout, returning individual blog feeds in a single column format, with your first ones at the top and so on.


My AllTop on My iPhone
Each feed, like on the personal AllTop, lists the last five stories, and every story is clickable, opening Safari (on the iPhone) to its original source.


Checking Out Additional Feeds
In contrast, Google Reader lists each story in the chronological order it was received in the main Reader pane, not necessarily in the order you decided - just like its big screen counterpart.

The new look and feel for My AllTop on the iPhone is not revolutionary, and won't have me switching, but if you like a handful of feeds and want your favorite or most important to be at the top of your screen always, bookmarking your own customized AllTop on the iPhone could be a good alternative. To get there, just go to the URL you have set up on AllTop using your iPhone.

How I Stopped Worrying About Powering Up My iPhone 3G

3G rules. But 3G sucks too. It sucks power. So if you're an iPhone 3G user, you know that with every downloaded Web page, application or e-mail at the higher rate, your battery is taking a beating. It's enough of an energy sucker that I often found myself switching between 3G and the dramatically inferior Edge, not because of network connectivity, but strictly because I was going to be out of juice. But now I hardly even think about it because my iPhone is almost always pegged out at max power.

The reason is simple, and unfortunately, has nothing to do with magic.

A good friend of mine has recently been raving about the Mophie Juice Pack, which claims to double the battery life of the iPhone 3G, adding an extended 6 hours of talk time, but more importantly, letting you watch back to back movies on a coast to coast plane ride without any noticeable impact.

As a hardcore iPhone user, this sounded like a must-have. Even despite the fact I've never gotten a backup battery for my laptop, a powered off battery for the iPhone is something I've seen all too often.

So I went to the Mophie Web site, searched for where they were sold, and found I could be served at the Valley Fair Apple Store in San Jose. So off we went! But when I arrived at the Apple Store, I could not find any Mophie, and no sales rep I talked to knew where they were.


The InCase Power Slider acts as a case, and a Power Extender
But I was not out of luck, as I spotted the Incase Power Slider, which not only also doubled the iPhone's battery life, but doubles as a comfortable, if not too bulky, case. After I got home, I powered up the case, powered up the iPhone, connected the two, and ever since, I've been practically worry-free when it came to power.

Instead of hooking up my iPhone to power every day (if not multiple times a day), I charge both devices every few days, and I haven't run out of power a single time.

Some of the reviews on Amazon say the case reduced their cell phone reception, but I haven't seen that at all. The only complaint I would even think to raise is that the added bulk to the iPhone means I can't put it in my beltclip, therefore, not having a case within a case. But if you're a power user of the iPhone, and you've learned to juggle your 3G access just to keep the device on, I would absolutely recommend looking into either the InCase product or that of Mophie. Doubling your power is a great thing.

Of course, this would all be moot if we just could get wireless power adapters... like I've been talking about for a long time.

TweetMeme Rolls Out RSS and E-mail Buttons, Statistics

As promised earlier this month, TweetMeme, the leading site tracking the most popular shared links on Twitter, has introduced a number of new tools that help publishers and bloggers encourage readers to distribute their stories through the popular microblogging network, all while tracking their statistics. The new tools include a FeedBurner-like chicklet that tabulates the total number of shares in the last week, and new buttons that can be embedded in your RSS feed or E-mail.


TweetMeme's New Retweet Chicklet Counter
Earlier this year, I added TweetMeme's standard "Retweet" button to posts, recognizing visitors often may want to share content they have just read with their friends on Twitter. But running standard Javascript doesn't work on RSS and E-mail, so many of my downstream readers didn't see I had done a thing. The new version operates as a standard clickable image, making this retweet functionality available to people visiting sites natively, or through Google Reader, Feedblitz or any other similar solution.


TweetMeme Tabulating Statistics By Domain On Their Site


The Four Ways You Can Integrate TweetMeme Into Your Content
TweetMeme also continues to offer a WordPress plugin for those blog authors on the platform.

In parallel with today's introductions, TweetMeme is aggressively making sure they don't undercount your sharing numbers. With today's introduction, they have added support for 11 different URL shorteners, aggregating all of these shortened URLs back to the original source and giving the author credit for the share.

TweetMeme is seeing incredible growth, having jumped on the back of the fast-accelerating Twitter at the right time, and today's introductions will no doubt further cement their role in the sharing and counting ecosystem. You can see the new chicklet in the right side of my blog, next to FeedBurner stats.

PubSubHubbub: Real-Time Feeds and Real-Time Feedback Too?

Getting data from one place to another can never be too fast. Just a year or two ago, the speed of RSS was considered excellent, but now, with latency of RSS feeds getting to destinations such as Google Reader or other networks ranging from minutes to hours, combined with issues related to repeated polling at source sites, teams of talented engineers have taken on these problems, with programs such as FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and the new PubSubHubbub taking the most-visible route.

PubSubHubbub, an protocol designed as an extension to Atom, is designed to reduce the time for updates to flow from one network to the next to almost zero, and practically eliminates the need for downstream services to constantly ask for the data.

Recently, we learned that a few major players in the feed distribution system had signed on to the PubSubHubbub train. First, last Friday, FeedBurner announced initial support for the service, making it built in for all publishers who had feeds enabled with the PingShot option (myself included). Second, Google Reader integration was demoed at the TechCrunch Realtime Crunchup, if only in prototype form. And third, FriendFeed announced support almost immediately, meaning that if I publish a post here, it should hit both FriendFeed and Google Reader practically in an instant, without any manual updates on my part.

An avid user of both services, the announcements were excellent, but in the last week, I hadn't really seen any difference. Posts made on the blog didn't hit FriendFeed right away and I didn't see updates in Google Reader any more quickly. So I did a test post Wednesday night at 11:11 p.m., titled "PubSubHubbub Test: 11:11 p.m." and nothing happened. Minutes later, I deleted it. But it didn't go unnoticed. After 1 a.m. I got an e-mail from Brett Slatkin, one of the engineers behind the protocol, asking if it had worked. That's right. After 1 a.m., one Google engineer behind this very cool tool cared enough to send me a personal e-mail and make sure all was well.

I said that I hadn't seen it work, and asked if it was, as usual, user error. But I was assured that "Nope you did everything right!" and that as things matured, they would "get the kinks worked out."

This kind of friendly, helpful outreach is the type of very real and personal service that one doesn't expect from big companies like Google, yet it happened, and it was very much appreciated. As I've stated time and again for years here on this blog, anything that can be done to help distribute data further and more quickly I am a big fan of. That I am a big fan of RSS, Google Reader and FriendFeed is no surprise to any of you, and PubSubHubbub looks like it is going to be a major boost to the entire ecosystem.

Just take a look at the test I did again tonight. At 1:08 a.m., a post from a dev server took less than 4 seconds to get from the blog to FriendFeed. (see here) In fact, it was probably faster, but it had already landed before I changed browser windows. Brett may not be "4 seconds" fast, but he's doing a fabulous job engaging with the growing PubSubHubbub community, as you can see from his comments on FriendFeed. This is the way tech and Silicon Valley should be.

Prowl Pushes Growl Notifications to Your iPhone for Instant Alerts

For desktop applications, Growl serves to alert you when important events occur, unintrusively notifying you with a quick message on your screen. Now, with Apple's iPhone 3.0 software supporting application's ability to push updates to you in real-time, a new application called Prowl has bridged the two, bringing Growl updates, which you set on your desktop, to your iPhone, wherever you are.

There is an extensive list of applications that support Growl on the Growl team Web site, ranging from Web Browsers and E-mail to Games, Twitter Clients and Yahoo! Widgets. And if they can push Growl notifications to your Mac or PC, they can push the same notifications to your iPhone, using Prowl.


Setting Up Prowl to Alert Me On the iPhone
To get started, you need to download the Prowl application from the iTunes App Store for $2.99, and set up an account. Then after you add the Prowl plug-in to your computer, you can set up each individual Growl-enabled application to use Prowl, as you prefer. For example, you can set up Tweetie to send a note to your iPhone if you get mentioned on Twitter, or you can set up Reader Notifier to send you an update if you have new unread RSS items.


Many Applications on My Mac Support Growl

I Can Configure Prowl from My Desktop

Setting Up One Application to Alert Me Using Prowl

Notifications from Prowl on the iPhone can be as transparent or as invasive as you prefer, including sounds, alerts or badges, grabbing your attention as news comes to the foreground. Meanwhile, Prowl keeps a record of each notification in the application's history, showing you how often it was activated.


One Prowl Alert, and a History of Updates
Drew Olanoff, who highlighted Prowl on Tuesday, alerting me to the product says "the possibilities are endless". Whether or not that's true remains to be seen, but I found it very cool to get an instant update on my Google Reader share items even when I was in the car or otherwise separated from my laptop today. For all the buzz around what applications were going to leverage Push on the iPhone, Prowl just made an amazing shortcut for all the developers who already had made their applications Growl-compatible.

Google Reader Improves Link Blog Discovery, Security, Adds Likes

Google Reader, for more than two years, has played a central role both in terms of how I discover information and how I distribute information. It is through Google Reader that I get updated from hundreds of blogs and news sources, and through a shared link blog that I can parse out what I believe to be the best content, sharing it to friends I am connected to on the service, and off to third party social sites including Socialmedian, ReadBurner, FriendFeed and RSSmeme. But so far it's been difficult to find somebody's shares, obscured by a hard-to-figure-out URL. Today, Google Reader has made steps to enable faster discovery of people and topics, all within Reader.

The news, which hit this afternoon, is that you can now search within Google Reader for people who have public shared items and subscribe to their shares with a single click. The new search feature, powered by Google Profiles, lets you browse by name, location or topic.


Searching for the name "Clinton" to find new link blogs
But, if you don't want to have your shared items broadcast to the world at large, you can still keep your shares private, or even share items to a specific group of contacts. These contact groups are the same you manage in your GMail, so changes on either service will be synchronized.


Selectively Share Between Groups
As link blogs have risen in importance, alongside your other social activity, from your blog to microblogging, etc., Google Reader has made it even more simple to highlight your link blog on your Google Profile, with a simple check box. So if you hadn't already added your items to your Profile manually, this will take care of it.


Adding shared items to the Google Profile with a checkbox
Similar to Facebook's recent move with vanity URLs, you can now also have your shared link blog feature your own Google user name, which can be enabled in your profile. So now, instead of a number like "05763917848110205585" which I have always had, mine can just say "louisgray".


You can now "Like" Shared Items In Link Blogs
And don't think Google Reader isn't watching what is happening on other networks. The team has added on to the ability for friends to make comments on your shared items, enabling a "Like" feature, found not just on Facebook, but on FriendFeed and Socialmedian as well. So now, if you see a friend's shared item, and you like it, just click like, or hit the "L" key. So if you're a keyboard maven, you hit J to go forward, K to go back, and L to like. More work for your right ring finger. Interestingly, all "likes" are public, while comments on shared items are still only shared with friends. So if you like something, others reading the shared link blog can find out you are a fan as well.

I have long been a fan of shared link blogs, and have even encouraged companies to get into the act to show they are listening to the news and opinions in the industry. My Google Reader shared link blog is a major reason of why I've never left Google Reader for an alternative, and making the feeds discoverable should be a helpful boost to visibility. You can find my shared link blog here.

Venture Capitalists, But In Text Form

On Monday night, during a blogger briefing, I struck up a conversation with Dave McClure (he being the Master of 500 Hats) around the process of blogging, and participating in those social networks where we have put our energy. And during this exchange I said something that I have long held as a driver for me, but hadn't yet quite articulated in this way - that as a blogger and technology enthusiast, be it for hardware gadgets, software or Web services, I sometimes take on the role of a venture capitalist, investing not my own money, as I have little, but instead, my focus, my words, and my time.

Venture capitalists are wooed constantly by companies looking to get off the ground, or to gain a push to the next level, be it greater visibility, higher market share, or profitability. And the VCs have to make a choice. Not having unlimited funds, they need to determine which companies, markets and individuals can get access to those dollars. The VCs, based on their own expertise, their analysis of the products' future, the potential market and the products' uniqueness, invest a percentage of their available portfolio, and then push to help make those investments a success - often helping to connect the founders with partners, customers, or providing guidance through board positions and personnel.

Similarly, whether as bloggers, social media participants or technology acquirers, we too are bombarded with choices. With limited funds ourselves, and limited hours in each day, and limited opportunity for attention, we have to make choices as to which products we will buy, which social networks we will embrace, and which companies' services we will use or cover. And while many bloggers aim to be as impartial as possible, keeping a journalistic line to avoid 'favorites', we all have a bias. And some of us wear our hearts on our sleeve, clearly choosing this route, as I told Dave, of being "venture capitalists in text form".

On Monday, Dave and I talked about the array of social networks vying for our time, and he told me that he had once tried to evenly split his time between a handful, but eventually focused on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. While not shutting off his data flow to other networks, he simply stopped using them, picking up his chips and moving elsewhere. Meanwhile, in my role more as an angel investor (in text form) than a late-stage investor, I am more willing to make more aggressive investments in a wider array of smaller services just getting off the ground. And I will make those investments of my time, not always because I think they are going to be the most popular products of all time, but because I see they have the potential to be the best - even if I know that this potential means my bet is of higher risk, for my chosen solutions have a higher chance of closing and washing my investment away.

If you have read this blog for long, you will know that there are some services I really believe in - ones that I have selected based on their merits, and ones that I choose to invest my own time in to use personally, and to cover often. And should they 'pop' and become successful, leaving my little realm and moving on to the larger stages, like we saw with Socialmedian and TweetDeck last year, I won't get rewarded monetarily in any way, but am rewarded to know that I had some impact, and that I saw a real return on the investment to see people and products I invested time in have their success come to fruition. It's likely the same reason that Mike Arrington, at TechCrunch's 4th birthday party, which I attended, highlighted the fact that many in the room had gone on to make a lot of money since debuting on his blog, more than he focused on his own success. Even if he didn't gain monetarily directly from their success, as a VC (in text form), he had a member of the family graduate.

Not every investment will be a winner. Some of the products I've really liked (on paper anyway) have already closed. Some have flatlined or not gained the momentum I had hoped they would. But just like in the world of VCs, it only takes a few home runs to make the whole thing profitable. I'll keep writing and you watch where I invest my time and my words.

We Have Invites! Five Stages of Beta and Battling to Get Access

When launching a new service, entrepreneurs have a myriad of things that make them nervous. Maybe the product won't be seen as having value. Maybe competitive offerings are good enough. Maybe there are bugs that nobody has discovered yet. And sometimes, the rush of new users who arrive to kick the tires is enough to break the system, as the infrastructure is not ready. To help reduce such public outages, many products start out with a small audience, and there are many ways to grow slowly, each with their own pitfalls.

1. The Closed Private Beta

Often sites will have a private beta period, open only to a known set of users, typically starting with the company's inner-most friends and supporters. In order to get onto the list, you have to know somebody at the company, or be so influential to gain early access.

The upside for a private beta to the developers means that typically the product is in safe hands of people who understand what you are doing, and are willing to forgive rough edges and mistakes. Also, the small load means you can fix bugs leisurely without the threat of public exposure.

The downside for the private beta is that the site itself still isn't really being tested by a more natural audience, either in terms of how they plan to use the service, or in terms of scale. What might work during a closed private beta might not be good enough when the doors open.

2. The Private Beta With Open Invitations

Sometimes, a site will start with a private beta period, but users can invite their friends - often a limited number. You saw this with GMail back in 2004, when early users could invite others, but only a few at a time. Similarly, FriendFeed did the same in 2007, as did Toluu in 2008, closing their early sites off to the mainstream, but letting you in if you knew somebody who had already gotten through.

The upside for this process is much like the closed beta in that the audience is going to be relatively forgiving and small. Also, the influx of less-known people can give a more realistic expectation of what features are needed and which need to be improved.

The downside for this process is that there may be people who could help try the product who don't have an in, so their interest is muted. Also, the small group tends to be insular and will use the product differently than an open audience.

3. The Numerically Limited Invitation Beta

After internal testing, some products will release a known quantity of invites, either through their Web site, or the media, in an effort to expand the testing, and give early users a flavor of the site. The invites, often tied to specific sources for tracking purposes, can range from few dozen to hundreds or even thousands, depending on how robust a test, and how deep the infrastructure. We've recently seen this approach with the site Lazyfeed, which gave out a few hundred invites in the last week by way of TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and from me, both on FriendFeed and Twitter.

The upside in this case is that this wave of users best simulates actual usage of a product, to see what is working and what is not working, while stressing the system's back-end only to a predetermined level.

The downside is that users who don't get to the invites quickly can get discouraged, and often, the very first people to get in aren't necessarily the ones who will most deeply investigate your product, but instead, happen to be those who were fastest at getting to the news and signing up.

4. The Open Beta

For some services who don't want to limit the testing, they might open up a site to all who wish to register, but do so under the guise of a "beta" tag, explaining that some features might be missing and others might break. While anybody can enter, they should not assume full functionality. You could see this with GMail for years, even after the product went away from strict invites.

For developers, the upside here is that they have a perpetual excuse for problems. But it's beta! Also, any user who wants in can get in, without having to get on a list or know someone. It also can often give the ability to stress-test a product under the impact of a large audience.

Downside is more limited, but can be seen if users are more wary of beta products, preferring to wait until they are more stable for use.

5. No Beta

Some products might skip the beta process altogether. They are just open for business, period. This removes the guise of the testing period and lets the entire audience at them at once. I call this the "Open. Fail. Scale." method, because often there are bumps along the way that come with growing a product, and one can never anticipate them all. Twitter would be a fantastic example of this, although both its fail and scale have gone on more than anticipated.

So how do you choose, if you are an entrepreneur, how to get your product out the door? You can see, for instance, that Brizzly, by Thing Labs, is still in Private Beta. (And I want in) Lazy Feed is opening up more, and you can get an invite here. They each may have their own reasons. In the example of Brizzly, it's probably not ready yet. For Lazyfeed, maybe they aren't ready for a million support questions and they want to start slow.

I tend to believe you should open as big as you possibly can without breaking. If users want to get in to your service, don't stop them in their tracks. Just set expectations and work with them as partners to continue to improve. Don't insult them by using beta as an excuse, but instead as a stepping stone. And yes, get me in as early as possible. I promise I won't break anything.

Will Mainstream Adoption of GPS Reduce the Need for Google Maps?

Last week, for the first time in a while, I finally went gadget shopping. On my short list of things I wanted to possibly get was a GPS unit for my car. With my traveling more frequently to various meetups in the evening, combined with my notorious penchant for getting lost, having a GPS unit on hand has practically become a necessity. And unfortunately for me, Robert Scoble's having been an early adopter didn't mean that one came with his hand-me-down car. So when I spotted a Garmin Nuvi 265 unit in a gadget vending machine for a reasonable price at the local mall, I pounced.

And now, with handy directions on my dashboard to practically anywhere I need to go, I know I'm going to stop going to Google Maps. So gone are the days of my having piles of papers printed out from Google Maps from trips since past.

Like most Web consumers, I slowly made the move from Mapquest to Yahoo! Maps and eventually to Google Maps. Google continues to expand their geo-team with Google Earth and Google StreetView, but for me, this little unit from Garmin means I don't really care all that much. So what will happen next, assuming that all vehicles going forward, and eventually all smartphones, will have this data? I understand that Google data could power each of these devices, but the actual process of going to Google Maps, putting in a starting location and an ending destination, as we have done for years, is decimated. It's just not going to happen for me.

Today, I'm solving my need to find out where to go, step by step, with a dedicated unit - an interim step before GPS is an embedded, standard feature in my car. It's part of a natural progression, one I don't see reversing. If you have a GPS unit, are you using Google Maps any more?

What Is This Real-Time Thing, And Where Is It Going?

The final panel at Friday's CrunchUp focused on the phenomenon of real-time, featuring a high-profile panel complete with representatives from Google, Microsoft, TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Seesmic, FriendFeed, Stanford University and a pair of venture capitalists. The discussion ranged from the opinion that real time was simply yet another feature, or a revolution in terms of application and Web service development, while the panelists discussed revenue opportunity or how large companies would try and control the data from being shared with competition.

Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck said that his own experiences using his Twitter application had a dramatic impact on how he was using the Web. "I was using TweetDeck more than anything else," he said. "I wasn't using e-mail or RSS and this to me was a massively big deal. I wasn't going to Web pages any more. I was going to stream data and that was what I was consuming now."

And while Dodsworth and many of us early adopters may have gotten to this stage before a more mainstream audience, the trend seemed to be recognized across the board. Google and Microsoft representatives talked about how they were working to best harness the real-time phenomenon, with the advent of Google Wave, and in Microsoft's case, trying to find ways to improve the user experience for hundreds of millions simultaneously, all while maintaining a stable infrastructure.

David Hornik of August Capital Venture Partners said he believed the advent of real time was "an important piece of the evolution", harkening back to what he called the "dark days of RSS" where that was considered real-time. He said that the problems faced in the early days of RSS, around sorting and filtering, had only escalated since, saying "we have that problem in spades".

A relative newcomer in the shadows of monoliths like Google and Microsoft, FriendFeed has helped push the envelope on the world of real-time as much as practically any other service, spurring on social networks like Facebook to do the same. Representing the company, co-founder Bret Taylor said real-time was no longer becoming an oddity, but instead a core aspect of the Web experience.

"Real time is an important feature of every site. It can now be said that every product evolves until it has e-mail, a social network and real time. It is something that all products will incorporate," Bret said, adding that one of the biggest challenges in this new realm was how to display the stream of data. "There is a tension between the simplicity of chronology and the need for filtering and ranking. You don't want to lose the feeling that you know something when it comes out. You need a mix of things that recently happened with things you need to see, and get a sense of both. If something is missing, users get an uncomfortable, anxious feeling."

And it is the user experience that will likely make or break services, in terms of how they can master the flow. Kevin Marks, who recently left Google, and announced that he will be joining British Telecom to work on standards, said it is about finding value in the data.

"It is about the flow and sense of flow," said Marks. "Real-time is one piece of that dimension and preserving history, so it can be found again and discovered later. This is something that FriendFeed is doing better than Twitter. Those things that used to be real time are now stored."

And storing the data for later consumption is getting increasingly difficult as the total volume continues to skyrocket. Andreas Weigend of Stanford noted the total volume of data had increased an order of magnitude just in the last five years.

"The real-time aspect is one way to incentivize people to make actions with their data," Weigend said. "It is not just about the data, but what question you ask, and the experience. It is how fast it is for me to get a question answered. The real-time aspect is the timescale of innovation being an order of magnitude faster."

But while everyone on the panel clearly recognized that real-time was being integrated into many services, and users were looking to make sense of the data explosion, there were clearly concerns about interoperability, and having services communicate well with others. Often, the current situation was compared to the wars that once were rife in the Instant Messaging world, where different providers simply did not communicate - such as from AOL to Yahoo! or MSN. Not surprisingly, much of that debate was on the two largest providers - Twitter and Facebook.

Bret Taylor hoped that the battle would be different this time around, pointing specifically to the work Kevin Marks and others have pursued around standards.

"Users will demand interoperability," Bret said. "If your friend uses Twitter for broadcasting shared links and if you use Facebook, it is reasonable to be frustrated about that. If (somebody like) Yahoo! wanted to compete, they wouldn't need to compete, they would have to set up ad hoc or formal standards and it would just work."

Daniel Lewin of Microsoft agreed, saying, "As long as you adhere to core standards, which we are committing to, there is an evolution of use cases. People experiment, interesting things will happen, and as time rises, there will be capabilities where end-users will program what they want."

In many cases, the move to real-time came as developers and users grew tired with slowness elsewhere. As we have discussed a few times, in terms of the speed of RSS versus that of Twitter, FriendFeed and other networks, there can be a gulf between what was previously acceptable and what is expected now. It's a major reason why, for instance, Nick Halstead and the team at TweetMeme started to focus on their current product more, and less on their original site, Favorit.

"Real time is about collecting news in real time," Nick said. "The slowness of Feedburner is quite well known and we didn't realize it until we ran TweetMeme and we would see it two seconds later. We would go fetch it and find it 20 minutes later on Google. The important thing is instant. You press the button and it goes back to Twitter. It is fun for me to watch FriendFeed. I push retweet and it shows up on seconds in FriendFeed. The trends we see appear and something might get retweeted 50-60 times in 20 seconds and we can bubble it up in front of users interested in those things, get the content in front of people who want to see it."

And it's not just Twitter that's pushing the gas pedal. Loic Le Meur of Seesmic said the company is pushing more than 4 million API calls to Facebook per day. Just yesterday, Loic added the number of active users on Facebook had doubled in a single week.

Loic added, "It's not about the tool. It's about the people, realizing they have communities around themselves. It will go from tool to tool. In a few years, it might be our tools, and it might not. What matters is how it transfers to real life."

The conclusions? We are at the very beginning, still, of determining how to best harness the firehose of real time data. Tools like Twitter Search, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Seesmic, TweetMeme and others are working to parse the signal from the noise. It's suggested that real-time will become a major part of many applications going forward, and users are still going to be in the experimentation phase of how they imbibe the data, or in terms of what kind of interfaces they will use to be best satisfied. There remain concerns about openness and how companies will play well with each other, especially if they are in a leadership position. And it's very likely that in five years, many of the names we consider household names today may be gone, replaced with others. It's all going to play out in real-time in front of our eyes.

Seesmic's Web Offering Is the Best Twitter Browser Interface Yet

Since reversing the company's strategy away from short video clips and more toward the world of status updates, Loic Le Meur and the Seesmic team have forged ahead in working to deliver a strong alternative to TweetDeck, letting Twitter and Facebook users update their status, view friends' updates and manage their social networking accounts from their desktop - complete with multiple account support, multiple columns, and all the standard features you would expect, from profile viewing to direct messages and search. Yesterday, at the TechCrunch CrunchUp event, Loic demonstrated not just a new version of Seesmic Desktop, but also a Web version that operates completely in the browser. And guess what? It's good - easily the best Web interface I've seen for Twitter yet.


The new Seesmic Web interface (Click for full version)
For those Web-addicted souls who spend a good deal of their day buried in Twitter, seeing their friends updates and exchanging conversations, most software options have required the installation of Adobe AIR software, which to date has whirred your CPU to life, turning on laptop fans, and chewing through memory. The work to throttle down load on RAM and CPU is a constant battle, which both Loic's team and Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck have been working on since their products debuted.

In contrast, logging into the new Web version of Seesmic doesn't feel like you've sacrificed your computer power to get your Twitter fix, and you don't give up features either.

To get started, go to http://seesmic.com/app/ and connect to Twitter, using OAuth.


Two Columns Displayed In Seesmic Web
Like the standard Twitter interface, Seesmic displays the "Timeline" of your friends updates, but it offers multiple columns, customized as you wish. And since you have logged in to Twitter, you even get the saved searches you may have added to the site, but displayed on Seesmic. Like with TweetDeck, you can add multiple columns to display in parallel, and can add as many as you like. As you add more, you will need to scroll to see them all. On my standard 1440 pixel width setting on my 15-inch MacBook Pro, I was able to see almost three full columns - usually sticking with the public timeline, Mentions (the new name for replies) and a saved search.


Collapsing Updates in Seesmic Web
Seesmic has done more than just clone its Desktop version in the browser. The new service has a new feature that collapses updates into a single line, looking like the headline-only version of Gmail or Google Reader, essentially letting you see more updates than ever before in one place. Also, clicking on Direct Messages brings all the DMs to the fore, so you won't get confused and think one conversation is public while another is private. In fact, there is a toggle at the top left of the screen between "Home" and "Messages", with Messages getting you to your DMs. Like with Tweetie, the DMs are organized by individual and you can see how many messages are in each conversation.

Interestingly, in talking with Loic about the introduction yesterday, he said many people believe a download version of the product is more "robust" than a Web version, and there has needed to be some evangelizing for this new introduction to be accepted. As he said, they ask, "Where is the download?". But there's no download needed for this one. You could get the AIR app, which was also upgraded yesterday, but it's the Web one that I'm going to keep using. After getting used to my computer overheating any time I tried to run Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck, the simple, clean and quiet interface of Seesmic on the Web makes it a strong contender for my Twitter usage going forward. I know a great deal of my Twitter activity comes from FriendFeed, but for when I want to dabble in the 140 character world, the new offering is very solid.

Real-time Search: What's Most Important Now, Not Most Accurate

This afternoon, at TechCrunch's Real-Time Crunchup event, representatives from many of the innovators in the real-time search space had a quick round table aimed at furthering the discussion, framed by a question by moderator Erick Schonfeld, who said that some on the panel may believe real-time search is defined by Twitter Search, while others believe it is "everything on the Internet, but with a freshness or recency component". And while many different companies, including the standard-bearers, like Google and Microsoft, are looking to take on this new challenge, how they are doing it differs greatly.

Danny Sullivan, author of Search Engine Land, said, "We need better definitions of what it is, so as consumers and users, we understand what we are interacting with. Through Twitter and a few other services, you have the option to publish in a few seconds. Maybe you call it social sharing search." (He also posted a summary of the players last night)

Some of the participants could be defined by how large a percentage of their data was initiated through Twitter, and how they worked with the data, including filtering.

"I would define it as what are people saying in real time about my topic," said Gerry Campbell of Collecta. "It's not what is most important, but it's what is in real time now."

This bifurcation of the "one right answer", often championed by the existing search leaders, versus what's most right "now" is helping to separate the old school search engines from this new breed. But don't think that the more-established companies are taking this lying down.

Google's Matt Cutts, who has been at the company since 2000, said "we have always talked about freshness of content." He relayed a history of his time at Google, saying they once had a "war room" of how they could refresh their search index as frequently as a month. By 2003, the company had moved from monthly updates to daily updates, and a few years later, in 2007, integrated the company's Blog Search product into its main search results. "We have rearchitected our system to be as recent as possible," Cutts said.

As updates flow in at an ever-increasing pace from all corners of the Web, search engines have the daunting task of getting accurate responses out there, while ignoring off-topic or harmful data, such as spam. And those who manage to get the formula right will have a serious leg up over those who don't filter well, making their results more noise than signal.

"Drinking from the firehose is a ticking time bomb," said Kimbal Musk of OneRiot. "Even by filtering 90 percent of what is going on with the Iran election, you're still only going to get a tiny slice, and a good portion of that is spam. If you don't filter content, you are going to get more and more spam." He later added, "If you stick to Twitter alone, you will have a spam-filled and biased data set."

With Twitter's API getting to a point where more and more companies are relying on it as their engine and data source, each is working of a common data set, and how they interact with the information will make the difference. And yes, Microsoft or Google may give you one result that is most accurate, but not for this moment, and not with any kind of impact from your friends or in terms of how that data is being interacted with in real time.

Sean Stutcher of Microsoft clearly stated this information is becoming more relevant, saying, "The sentiment around a link could be changing, and that might become very relevant to a user."

In an isolated search world, where an index is an index and the right answer is the right answer, that might not matter. But in real-time, it could matter immensely. As each of these companies works through their user interfaces, their data sets, and improves filters and social aspects, it should be very interesting to see how they separate from the pack and help define their goal.

FriendFeed Plans Features to Stem Conversation Flare-Ups

After a testy exchange with Leo Laporte during a taping of the Gillmor Gang last month, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch saw a boom of negative reactions across the Web, from pointed YouTube mashups, comments on TechCrunch, and a flurry of conversations on FriendFeed, where the live conversation for the Gillmor Gang was scheduled to take place. In the aftermath of the blow-up, Arrington closed his FriendFeed account, later blaming what he called "mobs" for having congregated and piling on. During a panel today at TechCrunch's real-time CrunchUp, Mike talked with FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor and Robert Scoble about the situation, and Bret promised changes were being worked on at the service, which would help stem future flare-ups from happening.

While Arrington aggressively tried to position FriendFeed as encouraging mob mentality, Bret touched on an interesting point that helped explain the scenario. Essentially, most conversations are decentralized across social networks. But on FriendFeed, conversations are centralized. While not threaded, all of the site's users have the ability to make comments on any open public conversation - meaning those people with extremely popular accounts can have a high amount of comments, and as comments come in, these items are pushed to the top, making them visible again.

Bret said that new tweaks are going to soon come available on FriendFeed that would enable users to stop comments on particular entries, or on the person's entire feed itself. This means that if Arrington were to re-enable his account, as he said he would do today, he could opt to mute threads that got out of control, or simply post his feed and make it unavailable for interaction. Interestingly, Bret said that the conversations on those accounts that had either a small amount of followers or a large amount were of the lowest quality.

Scoble, the most-popular person on FriendFeed, who had trouble getting his audio into the conference from London, actually agreed with some of Mike's assertions, saying "there is a mob mentality, and we caused it". He added. "We brought a huge crowd... and people are going to get in the bleacher seats and throw rotten tomatoes every once in a while."

Bret did not give a timeline for the new features, but if FriendFeed's speed of feature improvements thus far is any indication, they won't be too far away.

You can also see a timeline of this panel here: Mike Arrington, Bret Taylor and Robert Scoble starting the "Online Mobs" discussion.

JS-Kit Declares the Death of Comments, Launches New Echo Platform

There is no question that as activity on social networks has broadened, conversations have become decentralized and distributed. Only a short few years ago, bloggers could anticipate their posts would rile up deep conversations on their blogs, through comments below each post. But for many people, the trends have been for conversations to happen elsewhere - on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook or practically anywhere people wish them to be.

As a result, new tools have cropped up to monitor the conversations, or to unify them, regardless of their source. Among the most visible has been BackType, which offers comment search, as well as a tool called BackType Connect, which centralizes reactions for Wordpress-powered blogs.

Today, one of the most popular comment engines, JS-Kit, says they too are moving to this model, and not just halfway. Their old platform is dead. Period. Starting today, users will be presented with a new platform called Echo that integrates reactions from around the Web, including those from these diversified, decentralized conversations, alongside standard comments. Existing users of JS-Kit will be upgraded to the Echo platform.

"We are here to announce the death of comments," said Khris Loux. "What's interesting about these new forms of communication is that they are parallel channels away from your blog. We are discontinuing JS-Kit comments because it no longer reflects the conversation around the blog."

Echo is a drop-in comment replacement platfom. Now, they say, references to your original content will be automatically displayed in real-time.

"Echo-enabled content is now the richest source of the conversation. They can go to your blog and see the entire live stream," Loux said.

Loux and Chris Saad, also of JS-Kit, said that bloggers who are using alternative platforms, like Disqus, could use the tool for future conversations, and they could import and export comments from platforms like Blogger.

Lazyfeed Poised to Debut Real-time Personalized Blog Search

The overwhelming majority of attention and innovation in the world of real-time search in the last year has been paid to microblogging, with Twitter and FriendFeed making most of the headlines. But a new tool, set to debut in the next two days, called Lazyfeed, is ready to unveil a service that aims the real-search firehose at full-fledged blogs, but has done so in a clean, personalized way, based on your own activity around the Web, and the topics you hand-select as interesting.

The world of RSS readers has been slowly upgrading over the last few years. Google Reader has become the de facto standard, thanks to its simplicity and the social nature of its shared link blogs. The basic elements remain true - you subscribe to a set of blogs, and those items fill your reader, making you responsible to read them one by one, or give up and "mark all as read". Lazyfeed, true to its name, tries to bring the best news to you, by topic, rather than by source, or by friends, as other social networks do. And the result is an extremely compelling way to find new stories that are relevant to your personal interests.


Hot Topics On Lazyfeed


Entering my data into Lazyfeed. Look familiar?
Setting up one's Lazyfeed begins as many different social services do these days - through the addition of your personal network information. I added my blog, my Twitter account, and my Delicious bookmarks. Lazyfeed then checks out your sources, finds tags, and starts to present relevant information. If you write about Google and GMail, like I did in the last two days, Google and GMail may be added as tags and relevant blog posts start to flow in, on the left side of the screen. I can click on the tag to read the posts, and as I do so, new posts that match my relevant tags take the top spot - in real time. The "topics" with new posts take the top spots, while the one with oldest data sinks to the bottom.

Helpfully, Lazyfeed makes it very easy to build out your list of relevant tags. If, for example, you selected Twitter as a topic, it will offer up relevant topics, such as Facebook, Socialmedia, Socialnetworking and Web 2.0. Clicking on any of these relevant topics feeds you, yes, relevant posts on those topics, and you can add any of these topics to the list in your account.


Personalized Topics Just for Me From Lazyfeed

Lazyfeed Takes a Look at Apple as a Tag
Lazyfeed's innovation makes the old-school blog directory, Technorati, look like chicken feed in comparison. And instead of being forced to read every single post from blogs that I subscribe to, Lazyfeed presents me with only topics that I am clearly interested in, and ends up being a fantastic discovery tool for new blogs that I may not have known. While I have personally relied on social networks like FriendFeed and word of mouth to find new sources for blogs, Lazyfeed looks like a great way for me to find blogs that publish often, which are targeted to my interests.


Lazyfeed Shows Social Networking and Status Search
When I met with Lazyfeed last month, I thought the company's service had incredible potential, not just for when you are logged in, but even for the casual, not logged in user. The company knows, in real time, what popular tags are filling up feed readers. It also knows the timing of posts, and could theoretically, dynamically, present to you the trending topics of the blogosphere, or make it simple to use a directory-like format to drill down and find blog posts on topics (like Yahoo! or Open Directory). With time they could get there, but they already have taken a big step forward, by introducing what are called "Hot Topics", much like Twitter Search's trending topics - which brings common conversations around mass media trends, from "Michael Jackson" to "Swine Flu", etc.

Lazyfeed is the most innovative approach to the real-time blog search world that I have seen, period. It's interesting enough to make me want to make this a very big part of my Web experience, in addition to Google Reader, FriendFeed and the rest. You can find Lazyfeed at http://www.lazyfeed.com.

Gmail Should be the Hub of Your Company's Social Media Strategy

Back in March, I talked about how you can cleanly separate personal and work social media personalities, and suggested a list of tools that I use to make sure I don't blur the two. But as I talk with companies getting started in the big world of social media, one thing that keeps becoming clear to me is that they need to be using Gmail as the communication hub for their strategy. By using Gmail, companies can centralize all social media-related communication, make it available to third-party vendors who may be participating, and easily integrate with other Google tools.

One of the major hurdles in most companies looking to take on social media for the first time is their need to relax and reduce the amount of control they have over their message and who is engaging. Similarly, for some, the concept of having company-operated data, in the form of e-mail messages, on a third party site, can be daunting. But realities are that often, multiple hands are part of the strategy, and multiple people, including potentially the PR firm, need to be able to log in, making GMail a logical choice.


GMail Helps Manage the Data Onslaught
Additionally, having a Google Account is a requirement for multiple essential parts of one's social media strategy, including access to Google Reader, the creation of a link blog using Google Reader, and to set up FeedBurner for distributing your blog through RSS and tracking statistics.

By logging into the company's Gmail account, you gain immediate access to Google Reader, FeedBurner and Google Analytics, if you are watching your blog statistics closely.

What I recommend companies do is secure an official company Gmail ID and use that as the hub of their social networking activity. Their Twitter and FriendFeed accounts should use that same e-mail, as should YouTube, SlideShare, and other networks. New connection notifications and direct messages should flow through GMail, as should statistical updates, like those from SocialToo (where I am an advisor). Whether you structure the e-mail address as companyinc@gmail.com or companycorp@gmail.com doesn't matter, so long as it's clearly official, and the "From" data is a company name, not that of an individual.

And yes, from there, you can set up labels that automatically push e-mails from specific sources to the equivalent of folders, bypassing the in box. And with GMail, you never need to throw away any e-mail, finding your conversations threaded, and easily searchable.

Of course, Gmail can't solve every account. You still need someone to have a Facebook ID to start a fan page, and Facebook messages reside on Facebook. Similarly, you likely need a Yahoo! ID to use Flickr (if you go that route instead of Picasa). But starting with GMail as your hub makes it that much quicker to log into Google Reader and start sharing links, or click over to your FeedBurner and add new FeedFlares. To not use Gmail would mean either starting a unique account at the office dedicated to social media, or polluting the company address you already have. So if you care about streamlining your process and doing it right, point everything at Gmail.

Google Says Yes to Launching An OS (Based on Chrome)

That sound you just heard was the very big "other shoe" of Google being dropped. Late Tuesday night, the company announced on its official blog that it is going to soon be releasing what it calls the Google Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system, initially targeted at netbooks, but aggressively said to be their "attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."

This highly anticipated move is an extension to the company's Web browser initiative, launched just a short nine months ago, and puts Google in direct competition, once again, with tech titans Microsoft and Apple.

Though the blog post does not feature all the eye candy one typically looks for in a new operating system announcement, the author does spell out a few things. First, it will run on both x86 and ARM chips, and is considered a different project than that of Android - which many others had speculated would be Google's first foray into the world of operating systems. The post differentiates between the two by saying, "Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web."

The focus on those people who spend most of their time on the Web sounds like it would be in very close proximity with the CrunchPad I covered over the weekend, but funded by a company with thousands of employees, not a few dozen.

The new push from Google also will no doubt further complicate the relationship the company's CEO, Eric Schmidt, has as a board member at Apple. Already forced to recuse himself during discussions of the iPhone, thanks to the Android platform, Schmidt may find himself recused from discussions of Apple's OS, and any future tablet or tablet OS. With this kind of momentum, just maybe he won't play an official role on the board at all?

I wouldn't anticipate seeing builds of the new operating system any time soon. Google says they have a lot of work to do, and will be relying heavily on the open source community to push the project forward. They hint to stay tuned for more updates this fall. No doubt, many will be on the edge of their seat.

For My Latest USB Storage Solution, the Form Factor Is Key

At the end of May, I was able to meet with Edelman's Steve Rubel during a quick visit of his to the Bay Area. And while I already told you about one of the conversations I had with him and Steve Gillmor, Rubel was more than happy to also show off a pair of his most recent gadget related acquisitions. The first was a small iPhone stand from Seskimo that fits in your wallet. The second was a USB key that literally looked like a key, and sat on his keychain, next to the house keys and the car keys. Its simplicity and utility, at least to me, made it a must-have.

My USB key is seen here plugged into my laptop.
Needless to say, I followed up with Steve, and yes, bought both the iPhone stand and the USB key, from Lacie, called simply "iamaKey". In fact, I actually got two of these keys, and gave one to my wife, so we both can move files from laptop to laptop and location to location, no longer needing to dig through computer bags, or comb through our electronics basket to find out just where the flash drive disappeared to.

While the iamaKey from Lacie is not brand new, having been reviewed as far back as March by jkOnTheRun, it's new to me, and I haven't been eagerly awaiting any shipment from Amazon.com this eagerly since my parents sent me Mario Kart for the Wii this April. So when I got home from work this evening and learned the Lacie keys had arrived, I wasted little time in getting mine opened up, on the keychain, and pushed into service.

Weighing in at 8 gigabytes, the iamaKey isn't going to exactly replace my main hard drive, but its available size is significant enough for any project I plan moving around, from Office documents to photos, or video. For my first project, I plugged in the key to the Dell laptop from work, pushed over some PowerPoint presentations, and then plugged back into my Mac and copied the data over nice and quick. Amusingly, even the USB drive's icon looked exactly like a key - a nice touch.

With the iamaKey on my keychain now, I know I won't ever have to wonder how I can get my data to and fro, as it's always going to be there. Of course, if I lose my keys, that's a different issue altogether, so I'll try and avoid that. You can buy the drives from Lacie in both 4 gigabyte and 8 gigabyte versions here.

Status Search: Updates from Your Social Graph on Facebook, Twitter

Status Search: http://www.statussearch.net/
We used to value a search engine by its sheer size. How many pages did Google or Yahoo! know about in their crawling of the Web, assuming that the engine with the largest number wins, offering a greater percentage of the Web's content in their database? But there is room for small too - helping you to find data from much more close-knit groups, like your connections on social networks. A new search engine called Status Search, in early beta, returns only results from friends' updates on Facebook and Twitter - the idea being, of course, that you are finding information from trusted sources, and therefore, potentially higher relevancy.

Status Search, created by Elad Meidar and Lior Levin, is not looking to be yet another real-time search engine in the ballpark of Twitter Search, OneRiot or Twazzup. Instead, it is just focused on friends' status updates. And this means that every single answer you get on their engine is from a connection you have made.

The initial product supports both Facebook and Twitter, but support for LinkedIn and MySpace connections, for starters, is also planned.


Status Search Results for "Movies" In My Networks

Status Search Results for "Sleep" In My Networks
Instead of leveraging the "real time" buzzword, Status Search hits another one - the "social graph". As is common with sites that are using social graphs at their center, the product helpfully suggests you look for things such as where to eat, what movies to see, what books to read, or even if there are parties.

Unsurprisingly, when I searched my connections, I didn't find too much on eating and drinking. I did get a few positive hits on movies that had just been watched, and I always found responses when looking for more techie items, like Google or Twitter.


Status Search Results for "Google" In My Networks
The results with Status Search are accurate, and personal. But as the site is just getting started, I found queries to be slow, and found responses from Twitter typically overwhelmed those from Facebook. It also isn't clear how often the updates are polled, or how far back their database goes, as I was surprised when some queries found no results or many fewer than I had anticipated.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that FriendFeed also lets me search my social graph, seeing more than just status updates, but also shares, blog posts and video, from just my friends. But Status Search isn't trying to pull in anything else but status updates, so they are laser focused. You can also set up alerts, so you get e-mailed every time a keyword is mentioned in your social graph. Alerts can be sent immediately, or daily, much like BackType, TweetBeep, and Google News Alerts.

To search what the world is saying on Twitter, Twitter Search is the right product. If you want to search what just your friends are saying over multiple social networks, Status Search could be a clearer, quieter, alternative.

TweetDeck Marks One Year Anniversary: The Journey and What's Next

Editor's Note: On July 4, 2008, TweetDeck, a new Adobe AIR application for Twitter, was introduced to the world, on this blog. Twelve months later, it is unquestionably one of the most popular microblogging clients in the world. I had the opportunity to trade e-mails with its developer, Iain Dodsworth, to learn more about his journey, and what's next. -- Louis

Louis: Iain, first, thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about TweetDeck on the one year anniversary of the product's unveiling to the public. I was happy to play a small role in its debut, and having gotten the opportunity to watch as its visibility and influence has grown dramatically, not only becoming arguably the most popular third party Twitter application, but becoming the gold standard by which all competitive offerings are compared, and setting a new bar for Adobe AIR as a development platform.

Now twelve months into TweetDeck's life, your world has to have changed significantly. First, Twitter has exploded - from a time waster and communications tool for early adopter tech snobs to a household buzzword being featured on television and media practically around the clock. Second, you've grown up as a business, having taken on venture funding, and employing a team of developers to improve your product - having recently introduced an iPhone application. Meanwhile, Seesmic Desktop has emerged as a real competitor, PeopleBrowsr has managed to take the top space for most chaotic Web experience, and Tweetie has a popular niche on both Mac and iPhone.

When I first stumbled upon TweetDeck in July of 2008, I was curious, finding what could be a great product, but nobody had heard of it before. Going back to the e-mail archives, I remember your saying, "I am furiously coding away getting the next version out there," and adding, "Since you are the highest profile person who has seen TweetDeck it would be great to capitalize on your visibility."

I don't usually consider myself high profile, and there are many elite names out there with well known brands who could have made a bigger splash with TweetDeck than I did. When you were ready to launch the product, did you do any outreach to other sites? Did they respond or offer to test it? And if you did not reach out to other sites, how did you expect to spread the word? Did you think the product was strong enough that users would tell friends and it would go viral?

Iain: It's important to note that I originally built TweetDeck to solve my problem of being overwhelmed with Twitter. I gave it out to a few friends and was pleasantly surprised by the response. I then set up a private beta and became inundated with requests from complete strangers. It was because of this virality I didn't reach out to anyone to push it out further and then I received your email. The blog post you wrote on July 4th and the resulting mayhem essentially forced the private beta wide open and TweetDeck went public.

Iain: BTW do you remember how you first came across TweetDeck?

Louis: I stumbled upon TweetDeck practically by accident. I happened to look at my Twitter stream and I saw "from TweetDeck" in an update. I then clicked through, and searched the Web to see if I had found something new.

---

Louis: What made you decide to develop TweetDeck? You certainly went a different way with your product than others did, using the multi-column format, integrating Summize, groups, etc? What drove its initial feature set and had you choose the AIR platform?

Iain: In March 2008 I revisited Twitter having found little value on it a year or so earlier. Now there were so many more people using it there was real value for me but I quickly become a bit overwhelmed after following around 50 people. Most importantly I started to miss when certain less-chatty real life friends tweeted and I realised if I segmented the stream I would be able to concentrate on these valuable parts of the stream and dip in and out of the rest. The dominant apps at the time (twitter.com, twitterrific, twhirl) were, and still are, superb at what they did but they did not help me with segmentation so I decided to write my own client.

Segmenting my friends out to a separate area was the catalyst for the creation of groups (a first for twitter applications afaik) and required a new approach to the UI. I wanted to see my twitter stream alongside numerous groups and searches updating in real-time (hence the multi column approach - another first) and this would never fit efficiently into an unobtrusive single column interface so I took great delight in building a large obtrusive interface which really demanded the users full attention - not unlike the financial dashboards I'd been involved in building and evolving before TweetDeck.

AIR was an easy decision at the time - I had already been developing applications in Flex for financial institutions in London and there was no quicker way for a one man team to develop an application cross-platform.

---

Louis: What was your initial reaction to how quickly word spread around TweetDeck? Did you feel prepared for the amount of traffic, support requests, or feature enhancements users were looking for?

Iain: Quite honestly my initial reaction was one of shock and extreme excitement. I was in no way prepared for the response TweetDeck got and then the subsequent demands the userbase, quite rightly, put upon me to keep improving it. Whilst I was unprepared I like to think I did show I have the ability to be very agile and step up to the challenge which the following months presented i.e. working 16+ hours a day, 7 days a week and knowing which elements of functionality to integrate to provide most value for the users.

---

Louis: By September of 2008, you sent me an e-mail titled "TweetDeck - the future". You said, "with the integration of numerous other social messages services we have the form factor, momentum and enthusiasm to make TweetDeck something quite spectacular." But you added you needed revenue or money to get there, leaving you with the options to attract angel investment, or make a pro version.

At the time, I remember saying it might be easier to go pro than to get funding, unless you had other products lined up. But as often happens, I was wrong, because in January, you closed a round with Betaworks for seed funding. Did you initially think of making a pro version of TweetDeck, and what changed your mind, if anything? How did you find Betaworks, and was that fundraising process intimidating or easy? What kind of requirements did they put on you in order to be funded?

Iain: A TweetDeck Pro version was certainly on the cards a few months after the initial launch but more as a response to the need to generate some revenue to enable me to continue working on it full time rather than fulfilling a specific vision or demand from the userbase. When Betaworks approached me with the proposal of leading a seed round it made perfect sense to use the funding to fund my continued full time development and work towards a real vision (which by this time had already fully crystallised) rather than fragmenting the product just to generate revenue.

I wouldn't say the fund raising process was particularly intimidating - although I'm very aware I had the distinct advantage of Betaworks leading the round and introducing me to potential investors along with legal representation which made the somewhat complex process of setting up TweetDeck Inc and closing the round rather smooth.

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Louis: Betaworks has some very visible investments in other Twitter-related properties, including bit.ly and Twitter itself. Some are saying the firm is helping each of these small companies get connected, and asserting itself in their development. How has Betaworks' enthusiasm for Twitter helped? How involved are they in your product's continued development?

Iain: Betaworks' enthusiasm for twitter, TweetDeck and the concept of real-time data streams has been invaluable to TweetDeck and to me personally. I talk with John and Andy practically every day and consider them part of the core team rather than just as investors. The same goes for Saul and Robin Klein (TAG) who I work very closely with "on the ground" in London. Each of the investors in TweetDeck bring a distinct level of expertise and experience to TweetDeck and I have been leveraging this as much as possible.

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Louis: Recently, one visible move for TweetDeck has been the customization of the application, first by Blink 182, and now you can see dedicated installs for popular blogs including TechCrunch and Mashable. While this is clearly one way to start monetization, it cannot be the only plan, especially as you have taken on additional developers and the funding from Betaworks won't last forever. As Twitter has also not publicly announced its plans for monetization, does operating in a field where many users demand free software have you worried? How do you think you can create premium value? And in the converse, you opted to make the recent TweetDeck iPhone application free, but I know some users, including me, would have been more than happy to pay. Can you share the thought process there?

Iain: Co-branded TweetDecks could be a viable revenue stream in the future and are definitely not the only monetisation plan. Essentially with the size of our user base we are able to test a number of small revenue streams in an effort to see which ones can scale with the user base. I am extremely comfortable with offering free software but this does not mean that every subsequent value-add service and element of functionality have to also be free.

The decision to make the iPhone application free was not a desperately easy one but, fundamentally, the potential future value of having a larger userbase far outweighs the short term spike we'd get in iPhone revenue.

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Louis: TweetDeck, while popular, has also highlighted issues on Twitter's end, especially around the service's API limits. Also, the product has been a notorious memory hog and can take a good share of processing power. How are you working to reduce the demands taken on power users' desktops, and how have you found working with Twitter and their API team, as they recently upped the API accesses users could hit per hour from 100 to 150?

Iain: I have worked very closely with Adobe to make improvements to the TweetDeck codebase and to work around various AIR/Flex issues. CPU & memory usage is an ongoing area for improvement and can sometimes be a bit of an art-form but we are getting there and the current version is a marked improvement over previous versions.

To be fair we haven't had a huge amount of involvement with twitter or it's API team. The API is very simple to work with and there hasn't been the need to be in continual dialogue with twitter. It's also worth pointing out (to those that have accused TweetDeck in the past) the twitter developer ecosystem is, from our experience, a very level playing field and being the number one method of twittering outside twitter.com has afforded us no special attention or API abilities.

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Louis: There is a natural inclination for users to want TweetDeck to be the catch-all for Twitter-related services. As you have added on services like 12 Seconds, StockTwits and others, there is no doubt a list a mile long, of everything from short URL services to survey tools that are begging to be included. How do you choose what gets in and what doesn't? Is it a factor of money now, where those who play have to pay?

Iain: Yes the list of potential services that could be integrated into TweetDeck is very long but there's no way we would want to integrate them all - obviously this would result in TweetDeck becoming a complete mess. In deciding whether to include a service we primarily look at how it fits in with the overall vision for TweetDeck (the browser for the real-time web) and what value it offers the userbase. Executing the TweetDeck vision and providing first-class functionality is everything and comes before charging companies for inclusion. As has been reported elsewhere, we have charged for inclusion in a few instances, where appropriate, and I see nothing wrong with that.

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Louis: During Twitter's darkest times last year, you saw the rise of other microblogging services, like Identica, Plurk, Rejaw and others, who tried to provide a fallback for users tired of fail whales. Did you at any point wonder what the future held for your product, built on Twitter's fragile backbone? And did you feel pressured to find ways to publish to these other networks, much like Ping.fm and Posty have done?

Iain: Absolutely I wondered what the future would hold. The fragility of being a layer on top of twitter back then was a real concern but I also knew the flip side of this was the potential to ride the twitter wave of momentum and get TweetDeck a much bigger push than was previously possible. It is this momentum, listening to our userbase and continued execution and improvement of TweetDeck that has put us and kept us in our current position.

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Louis: Based in the UK, you're stationed quite far from Silicon Valley. Can you give us an understanding of how being remote from this tech center has either helped you or hurt you? Did it impact your ability to reach press and influencers, to raise capital, or hire talented employees?

Iain: Being based outside Silicon Valley has not specifically hurt in terms of funding (we've raised capital) or hiring talented employees (we now have a fantastic 5 strong core team). It's difficult to quantify but I'd imagine our ability to reach press and influencers has been somewhat hindered by not being in the eye of the twitter storm and, it's with this in mind, I will be embarking on a "tour of silicon valley" this summer to really get to know the area and it's inhabitants and to get a presence on the ground. (So to anyone reading this - please do get in touch if you want to meetup in the valley over the summer twitter:http://twitter.com/iaindodsworth or email:bizdev@tweetdeck.com)

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Louis: TweetDeck's rise to popularity was stunning for me to watch, and exciting to be a part of, even if just cheering from the sidelines. What kind of advice can you give developers who want to put their product on the map in terms of finding a way to reach users and create a memorable experience?

Iain: Even though the twitter ecosystem has grown considerably over the past year, I think there is plenty of scope and success for applications and services which really fill a gap. Developing something that is revolutionary rather than evolutionary will get you attention and lots of it. There are an incredible number of blogs and individuals looking to shine a light on innovative products in the now crowded twitter/facebook/real-time space - if your product is more than just an upgrade on an existing idea then this is a great time to grab some of that attention. Obviously that's only half the battle, you'll then have to continually improve, execute and listen to your userbase to keep pace - something we're trying to get better and better at.

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One year can go quickly on the Web, and in the last twelve months, TweetDeck has gone from zero to a leadership position today. If you haven't yet downloaded, you can find the application at http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. I appreciate Iain taking time from his busy coding schedule to answer my litany of questions. I personally found it valuable and hope it provides value to you as a TweetDeck user, technology fan, or fellow developer.

As Retweeting Rises, Linking Continues to Decline

Operating a blog focused on early adopters means being willing to adapt as technology and the world around us evolves. One of the more-recent additions to the blog was my embedding of buttons from TweetMeme, to show how often my posts were being linked to on Twitter, and making it easier for others to retweet these items, even thought I've already gone on record as not being a big fan of retweeting myself.

I made the change not because of a change in my own practices, but due to recognition that many people are turning to Twitter to share links and find new links from peers. While most of my posts only get a few dozen tweets, some have numbered over a hundred. And as this occurs, in parallel, the total number of links back to the Web site from other blogs is decreasing.

Not too long ago, one of the most common items to see featured on a blog was one's Technorati Authority, showing the number of unique blogs that linked back to you in the previous six months. Looking back at some of my "State of the Blog" entries I used to post monthly, I can see that approximately one year ago, that number stood at nearly 1,000. (See: here) Now, that same measure is only slightly above 500, a decrease of nearly half, despite my posting schedule being fairly regular, and the site's visibility rising over the same period.


Just Over a Year Ago, Technorati Had More Traffic Than Twitter...
Discussion of Technorati Authority used to be a big topic on this blog as recently as 2007. (See: Why My Technorati Ranking Is Slip-Sliding Away, Technorati Needs to Stamp Out Viral Tag Spam Now, Is Technorati Going After Spam Blogs?, and My Technorati Link Stats Make No Sense) But now, not only is Technorati largely overlooked, but so is linking, for the most part. It's easier to send a link via Twitter, or to share a post on Google Reader or FriendFeed.

This change is why in July of 2008 I said The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining, and why Steve Rubel is now saying his stats reflect the way the Web is changing. Not only are people turning to social sites instead of blogs to share links, but often, many blogs do a lot more linking to themselves than they do in linking to other sources, whether set by editorial policies, inertia, or just simplicity. Not surprisingly, we talked about that back in 2007 as well. (Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control)

TweetMeme, which started out as a secondary project by Nick Halstead and his team at Favorit, now looks like a real winner, having gained significant visibility after rebooting last July after Twitter API issues had killed the service following initial launch. The company just announced new ways to display statistics by domain, and it will now enable the ability to retweet items no matter where they are found, including on RSS feeds. Once that gets posted, you can be sure I will find a way to get that button in my RSS feed, and if done well, I will post the chicklet of domain activity alongside my FeedBurner number in the blog's sidebar.

I may still prefer to write long blog posts and link out, but I can't force everyone else to swim upstream. Retweet away.

Arrington Betting Big On the CrunchPad Mobile Device

While many things have been written and said about TechCrunch's Michael Arrington since he debuted his technology blog network four years ago, he is without a doubt a risk taker. The pending launch of the eagerly awaited CrunchPad device could possibly do more to define his legacy than almost any other challenge he has taken on. Not content to having one of the most visible and influential technology sites on the Web, Arrington looks to be charging head-first into an extremely competitive field of consumer electronics, an area that will cost considerable investment of both time and money. If the CrunchPad is a success, the way we consume the Internet on the go could be forever changed. And if it is not, the device will join the ranks of many that have charged up the hill before it and fallen short.

Arrington's trait of a risk taker is one that has helped make him very successful, pushing his blog to near mainstream acceptance, competing against publications with history marked in centuries. And now, the story of the CrunchPad, so far, is one of his trying to develop a product that was a solution to a problem no consumer electronics hardware developer has yet done well - introducing a device whose sole purpose is to help browse the Web on the go. No hard drive. No phone calls. No keyboard. As he told the New York Times yesterday, the device's focus will help it avoid the slowness of other netbooks that are often impacted by other applications. And he doesn't see the device being eclipsed by the long-rumored tablet that Apple may or may not ever introduce.


An Early Prototype Image of the CrunchPad (via TechCrunch.com)
Early photos and short video clips of CrunchPad prototypes have not only made the device look real, but extremely inviting. On my first visit to TechCrunch's new headquarters in Palo Alto in April (See: Super Geek Spotted at TechCrunch HQ On a Segway), I saw the CrunchPad being worked on, but at Mike's request, did not take pictures of it or blog about it myself. As he was host, I obliged, of course.

But my interaction with the CrunchPad prototype was strictly visual. I didn't pick it up. I didn't turn it on. And I certainly didn't get to compare it to my laptop or my iPhone to see how it fared. And therein lies the real question of whether the CrunchPad has a home in my fast-growing gadget pile. I love the idea, but wonder just when would I need to have a CrunchPad along with me, either instead of the laptop or instead of the iPhone. The MacBook Pro is clearly my workhorse, and the iPhone is great for browsing quick clips on the go. The CrunchPad, a 3rd device, sits in between - a great looking device that I might pick up when I don't need to use any Office applications, but to instead just take in the Web.

The pricing of the CrunchPad, at a rumored $300, is about the same for an iPod or iPhone, and at the low end for some of today's underfeatured, ugly, netbooks. $300 is an aggressive price point that would make it practically impossible for me to make good excuses not to buy one, even if just to hit those "in between" scenarios where my laptop or iPhone would not fit the bill.

Coverage of the CrunchPad's continued development states that news will arrive by the beginning of August, and that the tablet will soon be available for purchase, giving Mike back the hours he would otherwise be spending blogging, as he looks to turn over day to day management of the product.

FriendFeed Debuts Real-Time Search Spanning 50+ Social Sites

More than a simple aggregation tool and social network, FriendFeed has grown to be one of the deepest social databases on the Web, taking in information from more than 50 different social sites, including blogs, status updates, photos, presentations and video, and making it searchable. The service moved its core product to real-time a few months ago, and has now taken a big leap forward in also making its search results real-time, letting you see how people from around the Web are engaging and talking about topics, covering much more than "just Twitter", which so far has been the go-to destination for real-time response.

Best of all, the service isn't asking you to change the way you do searches, and all saved searches on FriendFeed work, but they now execute in real-time and continue live updating as new entries are added to the service.

For example, I could now embed a vanity search in my blog and see it in real time, thanks to FriendFeed.



As you can no doubt guess, popular discussions that have dominated Trending Topics on Twitter would also see rapid updates on Friendfeed - as FriendFeed acts as the superset for social activity. See for instance: Obama, TweetDeck or Michael Jackson.

FriendFeed's user base is still smaller than the most popular Web services, including Twitter and Facebook, but they are executing on making a feature-rich alternative. Moves like today's addition will continue to separate the innovative team from others who are still putting their full efforts into maintaining stability.