Finding Value Even If I Were the Last FriendFeeder...

Since the site's acquisition by Facebook this summer, I have not talked much about my thoughts on the future of FriendFeed, aside from the initial response saying it was not "dead". There hasn't been a major compelling event to do so, but it keeps coming up, so I thought I would share my thoughts, in light of what we've seen since August.

On Friday, I mentioned there are three cores to a successful social service - namely technology, relevancy and community. How one perceives community can be very different depending on one's perspective, and the network's community is a fluid one, depending on little things like the time of day, the day of the week, or the stage of evolution - particularly noticeable by services that first are overrun with geeky early adopters, only to see the mainstream eventually find footing. In light of my heavy use of FriendFeed for the last 2+ years, and the last few months of insecurity on the site in terms of its future, which has seen significantly reduced traffic and use, I have thought a lot about how much time I should invest in a site that, in theory, is seeing some parts of its community reduced.

After much thought, I can see myself deriving real value from the site, even if every single other person I communicate with there regularly were to disappear. For while it's incomparable fun to trade discussions and debates with the tight community there, and to rack up comments and likes, or to contribute my own, like scattershot, through my feeds, there are many different reasons I have been making FriendFeed my social media nervous system, which have nothing to do with the "Community" aspect - and try as I might to reset my browser home page to another address, I keep going back to the old standby, because FriendFeed works so well.

1. It's Still The Best Aggregator In Town

While there have been many attempts at aggregation services over the last few years, FriendFeed made the most robust and easy to consume aggregation service out there. FriendFeed can provide a single page to view all of my activity, just as it originally set out to do in late 2007.

2. It Still Has All My Friends' Content In One Place

Even if people stop using a site, their content continues to flow through FriendFeed - with the small exception being the handful of users, who for whatever reason, deleted their accounts outright. This means that, in addition to Google Reader, Twitter Lists or other services I am using, I can click out and find interesting news.

3. It Still Acts As A Fantastic Distribution Engine

FriendFeed lets you send specific services' updates to Twitter automatically, based on your preferences. This means that, if I choose to, bookmarks I make on Delicious automatically can flow, through FriendFeed, to Twitter. So too can my updates on SmugMug, while I try not to drown my Twitter followers with Google Reader shares. Having this take place automatically is still much easier than using the "Send to" feature in Delicious for every single item.

4. It Still Has The Deepest Social Media Search Online

Twitter's search utility still only goes back a few days. New partnerships with Google and Bing, as well as many different third party search engines are trying to make things better, but they don't compare with FriendFeed, which lets you search all FriendFeed users' updates, going back to the beginning of the site. Using the site's advanced search functionality, you can search specific services, specific people, or even find specific posts that had comments from a single individual.

5. It Had Saved Searches and Lists Long Before it Was Cool

Before Twitter introduced lists, FriendFeed had already enabled me to set up lists of folks I follow, so I could reduce my entire social stream to specialized groups. It also provided the option to save searches, including advanced searches, in my sidebar. So rather than invent the wheel somewhere else, and redo effort, my customized experience is already set to help me find data fast.

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So What Is the "Future" of FriendFeed?

At Friday's Real-Time CrunchUp, hosted by TechCrunch, Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed, now working at Facebook, said the site was not destined to go away any time soon - even if working on it hasn't been front and center for him or for his colleagues, who are said to be working on infrastructure projects within Facebook, hopefully making that social network even more special.

That the FriendFeed blog has not updated since August, added on to the news that two of the team's small developer base have already left for alternative non-Facebook pastures (Ben Darnell and Gary Burd are the known exits) hasn't helped the community feel reassured that all is well for the future of the site. In interviews, it sounds like work on the site has fallen into elective "20% time", familiar to Google watchers, and many regulars who participated on the site in the last year have chosen to leave.

No matter how you try to massage popular sites, like Twitter and Facebook, they do not equal the product that FriendFeed produced, from a technology standpoint. Now that the community is changing, and some are resigned to a different world, there are pressures on some to consider alternatives, but until I can find tools that solve for each of my issues, as outlined above, there are tons of reasons I will continue to use the product - even if it's assumed I'm looking denial straight in the face.

Cadmus Filters Real Time Streams to Reduce Clutter

The more people and blogs you follow on social networks and through RSS, the more likely it is that you are going to see duplicate data, be it via retweets, forwards, or through many of your friends sending the latest viral videos or images. A new product under development, called Cadmus, looks to filter your real time streams to group similar posts in your feeds to reduce the noise. The service currently works on your Twitter account, your FriendFeed account, or on any number of blogs you add. You can also add many RSS feeds at once via OPML.


Adding Supported Services to Cadmus
In my testing of Cadmus, I found it correctly detected retweets, replies from others to the original sender, copies of tweets sent to FriendFeed, and other topically-related items, even if they did not share keywords. Cadmus was even able to find similar updates that were hours or days apart.


The Results: A Quieter Feed By About 10 Percent
On average, each refresh of Cadmus filtered around 10 percent of my updates. For runs that included 3,000 or so updates, 300 individual items would be grouped or filtered - and testing of a smaller account in the low hundreds also showed a similar 10 percent filter rate. In fact, the more updates I filtered, the higher the percentage filtering would be found. In a run comprising more than 8,000 items, almost 1,000 were "related".


Cadmus Knew Both Micah and Chris Were Watching a Show

Cadmus Saw Guy Talking About an Article TechCrunch Mentioned

Cadmus Linked Thomas Power's Like of Loic's Share
The authors, Anomaly Innovations, who are chronicling Cadmus' development on their blog, show even higher filtering rates, of almost 30 percent, if you looked at an entire week's worth of updates. And while most of the filtered items only had one or two related posts, you can see an extreme version from the last week here.

To use Cadmus, you need to log in at http://thecadmus.com/, using OAuth, to your Twitter account, and you can add as many supported services as you like to the system. Once you have scanned your stream, click the reload button in the top right to get a newly filtered stream. If you're tired of seeing duplicates, want a stream with less noise, or just want to lump similar items, it is an interesting development - one I expect to get better as they continue to update.

Gary Burd Exits Facebook Two Months After FriendFeed Acquisition

Following the August acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook, the site's loyal users are still waiting for news about whether the social network and aggregator has a future, or barring that, when elements of the site will start populating Facebook. But for the most part, there has been little news, and some are pointing to reduced traffic and engagement there as signs the product will just fade away - even as I hear rumors that's not the case. But this week, we learned of the first high-profile defection from the FriendFeed ranks at Facebook, as highly-respected engineer Gary Burd, who also counts Google and Microsoft on his resume, quit the social networking giant this Wednesday.


Burd, who helped develop the Trident HTML rendering engine, a main ingredient in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4, during his seven years at the Redmond monolith, and also contributed to Google projects including Google Talk during his four-year stint in Mountain View, joined FriendFeed in June of 2008 after he had independently developed a service that let users update the site via e-mail, called Mail2FF. Following his hire, the company rebranded it as "FriendFeed by e-mail" and made it an official feature of the service.

After seeing a tweet by Gary that said simply, "Last day.", Gary wrote me to confirm he had left Facebook, because he does not enjoy telecommuting. He lives in the Seattle, Washington area, and will be looking for projects locally, after telecommuting with FriendFeed for nearly a year and a half. Not coincidentally, Gary also posted a tweet that read "Last Day!" when leaving Google in March of 2008. (By the way, don't read too much into his tweet mentioning a new MySpace profile, assuming he'll go there next.)

During his time at FriendFeed, Gary worked on projects including the service's real-time API, a dedicated IM client, the Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and most notably, real-time search by topic, a fix for the much-desired Twitter tool, Track.

Gary's track record should no doubt make him an extremely valuable recruit for companies in the Seattle area, and his leaving is absolutely Facebook's loss. While not as visible a defection as if any of FriendFeed's cofounders opted out of Facebook, it does tend to raise more questions in a time when many people are still looking for answers.

Find Similar People and Interests With Simler's Microblogging Platform

One of the most challenging issues with today's social networks is rapidly finding people who share the same interests. As you migrate from network to network, you can find commonalities between platforms, but the most likely route taken to gain a base of connections is an import of your friends from a different network, forcefully pulling them with you - even if they are not interested in the same things you are. A new invite-only network called Simler is trying to solve that issue by connecting people with the same interests - resulting in a fast-moving stream containing conversations on topics you like and enabling you to find people you may soon like, with many features you've grown accustomed to on other networks, from FriendFeed and Twitter to Google Groups and old-school discussion boards.


Simler Connects You Based On Your Tags to Conversations
At the core of Simler is the service's reliance on tags, which help to organize discussions. For example, you can start conversations on basics, such as Apple, "Spotify" and "Baseball", or branch out to other popular topics, including "Grammar Nazis" or discussions around TV shows like "Mad Men" or "Arrested Development".


As You Add Friends, Simler Recommends New Possible Connections
Posting new entries to Simler is a lot like starting a new tweet in Twitter or a native entry in FriendFeed. It doesn't contain photos, but also doesn't stop you at a mere 140 characters. The entry, like in FriendFeed, can be responded to in line, and active conversations pop to the top of your Simler. It's likely that those active in the conversation will be similar "or Simler" to you, and you can see, by clicking through their profile, if you share the same tags of interest. The more shared tags, the more likely you are to find value and get connected.


One Active Conversation on Simler With Multiple Comments
You can make comments on any Simler conversation, even if you haven't selected that topic as one of your tags. You can browse the tag directory alphabetically, or find the most popular discussions, and get started. And once you make a comment or make a new post, you will get notified on the site, or by e-mail, letting you know if anybody else added a comment and extended the thread.


Two Simler Posts In the "Apple" Forum

Some of the More Active Tags In Simler
Simler, featuring much talent from Portland, Oregon, was just recently discovered (and covered) by Silicon Florist's Rick Turoczy, also found Simler moved the needle forward, making the site more about the subjects of the conversations than on the people themselves. He says, jokingly, I hope, "I mean, if we didn’t want interactions, we’d all just start blogs."


Notices From Simler Come In Through the Site Or On E-mail
Talking about things with friends is fun. Talking about topics you are interested in is more fun. SImler hopes that its network can enable you to discover new friends via shared interests. It will take some time for the site to grow en mass for this to happen, but it is extremely easy to use, and just makes sense. It has some good polish, and despite some slowness, the site works as advertised.

As for getting in yourself, each new Simler account comes with 10 invitations. Half mine are gone already, so I have five left. It would be fantastic if you would openly share your own invites in the comments here and get people into the site. Once you do, you can find me here: http://simler.com/user/louisgray/

FriendFeed's Not Dead. While Not Clear, Its Future Could Be Very Big.

Monday's news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed for an undisclosed sum took many people by surprise, not the least of whom were the site's most-active users, many of whom have made the social sharing and aggregation platform their central nervous system for online activity and community. Initial reactions to the announcement had many people asking questions, extremely concerned that the site - as we know it - was doomed to close, and a lack of immediate denials from the company's leadership was seen by many as an implicit acceptance that yes, the end was near. But in the days following, from what I've seen and heard, it is clear to me that FriendFeed is not going away, that the company's being part of Facebook isn't the end of the world, and that after nearly two years of going it alone, the time had come to make a change.

Since the site launched in beta in October of 2007, and opened up in February of 2008 to the world, FriendFeed has become known for many things. The company's sharp engineers have promoted the site to be at the forefront of innovation on the real-time Web, showcasing advanced search functionality, information discovery and an active, loyal, community. But with the site's wide array of features came a not to be unexpected downside - complexity, which had many wondering how it could attract a user base on the scale of less sophisticated but more popular competitors, like Twitter and Facebook. While even as recently as January, we saw the company's leadership advising us that growth "takes time", this week's move was a clear recognition that in order for FriendFeed to achieve its vision, it needed to team up with a bigger partner - one that had been courting them for years - and it was Facebook who filled the dance card.

FriendFeed Was Always Pursued

Not too long after FriendFeed launched, Facebook called, as did many other companies over time. And while Facebook is known by many as a closed walled garden, where you find yourself reconnecting to people long since forgotten, in sharp contrast with FriendFeed's open nature where you connect to people you've just met, the two companies, through conversations over the last two years, found that they shared a common vision and direction. While the company's dozen or so employees could have kept saying no, stubbornly going it alone, they came to realize that teaming with Facebook made the most sense - giving them an opportunity to take the vision they had and push it within a company that had users in the hundreds of millions, not the hundreds of thousands, which would have been practically impossible given their slow growth rates and other companies' encroaching on their feature set.

More Than Just a Talent Grab

Following news of the acquisition, some have labeled the buy as a "talent grab", with Facebook looking to gain a dozen or so respected engineers. But it was not a talent grab just for the sake of getting good people, but instead, getting good people who were focused on the exact things Facebook needed - including real-time search, aggregation, community, and social messaging. And while it's not exactly clear what the two companies have in mind over the next six, twelve or twenty-four months, as a combined team, the first steps don't involve blowing up the existing community, which should come as a relief to many who thought that was imminent. FriendFeed's leadership has expressed the desire to not only keep the site open and active, but to preserve all the data that has been posted. In fact, just in the last few days, FriendFeed saw the addition of new features, including customizable backgrounds, and small UI enhancements around comments.

Some of the reticence for FriendFeed to loudly proclaim the site and its users' data is safe has come down to the fact that in a sale like this, the acquired company won't always have full say over the future roadmap. Just take a look at any number of recent acquisitions by Yahoo! and Google to see how that has evolved. But the company will soon start to talk about the future of the site, and these announcements will hopefully assuage some of the concerns and fears voiced by many FriendFeed users, who either despise the idea of Facebook, or just expect to be deleted.

So What Happens Next?

The truth is that not even the FriendFeed team has a perfect roadmap in front of them, saying what is next, as part of Facebook. And that has got them nervous too, of course. It took a long time for them talking with Facebook to become comfortable with the idea of an acquisition, and the same gut-level reaction many FriendFeed users had to the news, myself included, was shared at the company's Mountain View headquarters, and their families, or at least it was until they moved out by the end of the week. Their long-discussed plans of developing a unique engineering team and environment at FriendFeed, and about "not being for sale", as we often heard when they were asked, were up-ended, as reality set in, with them turning off their computers, packing up boxes and moving into Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.

Incredibly, even as many declared the site dead, or swore they were leaving FriendFeed forever, on the news, this past week has seen a renewed spike in terms of new signups and user activity. As the Facebook and FriendFeed news flowed through the Web and got mentioned on the radio or TV broadcasts, user mailboxes have been pummeled with a wave of new connections. And it practically goes without saying that the people who have left FriendFeed due to the announcement are not any more than the number that would have left had FriendFeed needed to dramatically change its focus to finally get that hockey-stick user growth seen by networks like Twitter and Facebook, just like there was a wave of people who left the network when they revamped their user interface this spring to make real-time the default view.

In February 2008, in an e-mail exchange I had with Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, two of FriendFeed's cofounders and the public faces of the network, I was eager to let them know a high-profile user had signed up. Paul responded, simply: "One down, 6,652,865,239 to go :)" keeping with his belief that FriendFeed was for everyone, not just the relatively small number of users who made the site their home on the Web. As many of the employees at FriendFeed hail from Google, it's not unlikely they see Facebook's current position as they did Google at an earlier age - having both significant momentum and share, but also much more room for growth, letting them bring FriendFeed a lot closer to that elusive 6,652,865,239 user number.

As the Dust Settles...

In the last two years, I have optimized my online activity for FriendFeed. I have used FriendFeed as my information filter and distribution channel, as it both takes in my activity around the Web, but spits out a subset to Twitter and Facebook. While I don't know if all this information will be on friendfeed.com per se for the rest of eternity, I am confident in saying that all my existing links, data, photos, and files are secure. I believe that the vast majority of things that have attracted FriendFeed's users to participating on the community will start to show up in Facebook as well - if not taking over the site, but being shown in different areas of the network. And while over the years, Facebook has gained a not-so-spotless reputation on the Web for being closed (among other things) partnering with FriendFeed could have a major impact on the company's ability to adjust on the fly and keep growing.

For those people who are very concerned about their data and preserving what they have invested into the site, activity on FriendFeed, like Twitter, is centralized, and therefore, there is not yet a perfect solution to extracting the data and moving it elsewhere. But a new project called CloneFeed is looking to help, and FriendFeed's founders have always trended toward standards and openness. Meanwhile, if you expected them to stop using the site, they haven't. After a few busy days following a practically sleepless weekend prior to the deal's completion, the founders have started posting again. They're not going away, and neither are we. Hopefully, they will talk a lot more about what the acquisition means - as much as they are able - soon. But for now, I'm going to keep using FriendFeed, while also expanding my use of Facebook (just in case), and would welcome that you do also - for now, the little company that could just got some tremendous financial backing and a huge endorsement from one of the leaders on the Web who is growing faster than anyone else.

As always, you can find me at http://www.friendfeed.com/louisgray, or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/louisgray.

Podcast: TheSocialGeeks: FaceFriend or FriendBook?

In the latest edition of The Social Geeks, Chris Miller, Wayne Sutton, Jeff(isageek), Sarah Perez, Corvida Raven and I talk about the big news from yesterday of Facebook acquiring FriendFeed, and what impact this could have the community and your data. You can also find the original copy on Mevio.com.

Steven Hodson and I Talk FacebookFeed: Our Initial Reactions

In my small little world, the news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed has been the equivalent of a social news tsunami. No sooner did the news break then did I get a swarm of phone calls looking for my response - with people asking if their data would be safe, if I would delete my account, if I could handle acting the same way on Facebook as I have done on FriendFeed for almost two years.

You saw my initial thoughts, as I compared Facebook to the sweaty lunkhead who somehow attracted the perfect girl, which were part tongue in cheek, but fun to write. In parallel, I've seen posts fly from many people around the Web, some deeply invested in FriendFeed, and others, not so much. One of the guys who I respect, and have traded ideas with for the better part of four years, is Steven Hodson, the often-cranky author of Shooting At Bubbles and writer at The Inquisitr.

He and I connected this evening and talked about the deal. He thinks the selling of FriendFeed was inevitable, and I'm not so sure.

With the goal of keeping the call crisp, it times in at less than 20 minutes. Hopefully, it will be the first of many. Enjoy.

Hi Facebook, It's Me, FriendFeed. This Relationship? It's Complicated.

Alright Facebook. I didn't want it to be like this, so let me tell you in a way that you'll understand. You know how you started out as a program for nerdy college boys to rate the best ladies, find which ones were available, and see if there was a way to hook up? You know how you've grown up to now be much more than that - maturing into a platform that routinely sends me Mafia Wars invitations, and wants to poke me every so often to make sure I'm around? Well congratulations. Because just like in high school, sometimes the sweaty jock who doesn't wash his hands after using the john still gets the best girl - while those of us who carried her books and wrote her poetic love letters and timed our walking to go by her locker at just the right time find ourselves on the outside looking in again.

Yeah. I get it. I get how I could BS and say "I'm happy for you." "I only want what's best for you." "Take good care of her." But look. I know your reputation. You're not trusted. I know about the other girls. I know they change - and not in a good way - after you've been with them. So yeah.

Today, you announced you were buying FriendFeed - in what looks like it might have just been a two-year-long job interview for a dozen of Google's brightest minds (courtesy of Drew Olanoff, who called immediately after news broke). It's not like we didn't really know something was up, after all - you could see in the way the FriendFeed team rolled in all giddy this morning at a time well before when they usually rise, waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could see in the way they collectively had a heart attack when I walked into their offices last week unannounced and caught them in what was called "a company meeting" - which practically needed bouncers out the door for how quickly I left.

Here's the thing. FriendFeed is the good girl. FriendFeed is the one that has a 4.0 GPA and had big dreams of an Ivy League diploma. And yet, she ends up with you - the Silicon Valley equivalent of your local state school. When you come rolling in with your heavy car, big wheels and pumping bass, we don't care how much money you say you're worth - we still don't trust your grin when you open the door and say "hop in".

So what's happening to this Valley? Is it as dire a situation as it sometimes seems? Are we really going to end up with four mega-companies: FaceBook, Google, Microsoft and Apple? Because if Google or Microsoft can weasel their way into acquiring Twitter, that's sure how it will seem. If the IPO market continues to be closed, and innovative companies can only knock on doors 1 through 4, that's not a good thing.

I don't claim to have any inside scoop on how big the rock was on that ring you got FriendFeed. I don't know whether you want to keep her a good girl, or lock her away in your closed dungeon. But all I know is that her friends are very scared for her - and we're watching you.

Lunch 2.0 Highlights Video: Mozilla, FriendFeed and Kosmix

Lunch 2.0 with Kosmix, Mozilla and FriendFeed

As mentioned yesterday, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel featuring representatives from three forward-looking Web companies looking to push change and compete with established market leaders. You can watch the full hour-plus long video recording on UStream, or catch five minutes of highlights above. It was a pleasure to participate, as it was my first time moderating, and I hope I get the chance to do so again. Thanks to the 200 plus people who attended, the panelists, and for Kosmix, putting it together.

Lunch 2.0 Panel With Mozilla, FriendFeed, Kosmix on UStream Today

Around 12:30 p.m. this afternoon, I will be sitting down with Anand Rajaraman, Co-Founder of Kosmix, Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of Friendfeed and Chris Beard, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer to talk about how these three small companies are driving change online. If you can't be one of the more than 150 expected to attend in person today, I hope you will get a chance to follow along on the live Ustream coverage.

To join us, start here around noon: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lunch-2-0-with-kosmix-mozilla-and-friendfeed

More information on the panel was included in my post: Join Mozilla, FriendFeed and Kosmix for Lunch 2.0 on August 6th

Disclosure: Kosmix.com is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am General Manager of New Media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

10 People To Follow On FriendFeed For June 2009

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

New registrants of any social network can no doubt find the quest to find interesting people and friends a challenge. That's why Twitter built a manually-selected Suggested User List, and why FriendFeed prompts new signups with avatars showing the most subscribed people from across the network. But as we know, popularity doesn't always reflect quality, and often, some intriguing users are much less visible. That's part of why my tag team partner Mike Fruchter and I have taken the effort to highlight ten FriendFeed accounts every month. Even in month ten, I know the well's not dry, so if you believe you or others should be included, you know how to reach me - in the comments, via e-mail, and of course, on FriendFeed.

June 2009's featured FriendFeeders are:

1) Layne Heiney (LPH and His Dog P)

Short Bio: Layne Heiney has one foot in the world of education and another in the world of technology. Holding teaching credentials in both biology and chemistry, this high school teacher also started developing Web sites almost 15 years ago, expanding his "Tux Reports Network" to more than 100 domains. Layne claims to share the his FriendFeed account with his dog, Pascal, a three year old mutt, who does not like baths.

What they find interesting: Technology, Education, Politics

FriendFeed: Subscribe

2) Alex Scoble

Short Bio: Alex Scoble is an IT security professional, video gamer and home theater enthusiast. Though not as visible as his brother Robert, Alex is just as devoted to FriendFeed, and on some days, is much more active. He is more than happy to debate with your your choices of television, and to be honest, will debate practically anything with a smile on his face.

What they find interesting: Finance, Technology, Entertainment

FriendFeed: Subscribe

3) Trish Robinson

Short Bio: Trish, a Houston, Texas native, works in the legal profession, and is mother to her 10 year-old son, Kyle. Trish has a sharp sense of humor, and always seems to manage to find interesting news in the world of families, entertainment, and tech.

What they find interesting: Culture, Family, Politics

FriendFeed: Subscribe

4) Paul Buchheit

Short Bio: Paul is a co-founder of FriendFeed, and was an early employee at Google, coming up with the company's unofficial slogan "Don't be evil", and also making a small Web-based e-mail application, called Gmail and companion ad platform called AdSense. He also is an angel investor through YCombinator and recently started an initiative called Collaborative Charity, aiming to crowdsource donations to worthwhile causes. Paul is father of two children, Camilla and Thomas, the latter of whom celebrated his first birthday last week. His wife, April, was featured in this series in January.

What they find interesting: Entrepreneurship, VC, Programming

FriendFeed: Subscribe

5) Shey Smith

Short Bio: Shey is a Jamaican Web designer living in Toronto, Canada. Shey works for SweetSop Design, which creates Web sites, presentations, magazines, brochures and eBay storefronts. Shey has a degree in IT management from Ryerson University.

What they find interesting: Web design, Sports, Technology

FriendFeed: Subscribe

6) Adam Helweh

Short Bio: Adam is the founder of the online marketing and branding firm, Secret Sushi Creative. Adam helps clients develop online marketing and social media strategies, Web design and development.

What they find interesting: Web technology, Food

FriendFeed: Subscribe

7) Mary Ann Chick Whiteside

Short Bio: Mary Ann is a multimedia journalist with three decades experience, including a 13-plus year stint at the Flint Journal as an interactive media manager, as part of 30 years at the paper, starting in 1978. Since finishing her activities there in 2008, Mary Ann has been freelancing on multiple projects, including Web sites and ghost blogging. She is passionate about the news business, and helping her daughter in her fight against breast cancer.

What they find interesting: Journalism, New media, Health Care

FriendFeed: Subscribe

8) Bwana McCall

Short Bio: Bwana McCall is a quality management technical lead at Hewlett Packard, in Jacksonville, Florida. An avid podcaster and YouTube maven, Bwana stays on top of the world of video gaming and consumer electronics as well as practically anyone.

What they find interesting: Software, Consumer Electronics, Podcasting

FriendFeed: Subscribe

9) Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Short Bio: Rob is a professional musician who leads the instrumental Jazz group, Atmos Trio. He has a private teaching practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also works as a freelance writer for music magazines.

What they find interesting: Music, Technology, Blogging

FriendFeed: Subscribe

10) Rahsheen Porter

Short Bio: A Customer Account Executive for Comcast High Speed Internet, Rasheen is a graduate of Georgia Tech University, and a part time blogger, hip hop fan and rapper. A technology enthusiast, Rahsheen is a blogger for Black Web 2.0 and is among the more physically fit members of the community, considering most of us spend more time in front of the computer than at a gym.

What they find interesting: Entertainment, Culture, Technology

FriendFeed: Subscribe