The Chrome OS Release Is Not About Now, It's About Next.

Yesterday, as most tech outlets noted, Google previewed their much-awaited Chrome Operating System - and in parallel released the code for the operating system to the open source community. By the end of the day, sites like Gdgt had compiled virtual machine capable installs of the early alpha system, and geeks, including me, were tinkering with the system. Unsurprisingly, there were near-immediate reviews, and some calling the news a disappointment. But for me, the news was not so much about Chrome OS being ready to go, but instead Google delivering on a promise, and showing its cards, before they had to, to let us know what's progressing in Mountain View.

Google's success and growth over the last decade has not been without its detractors. The company, which could once simply be described as a search engine, now has its reach in a dramatic number of Web applications and services. I tend to be rosy on the company's expansion, and even asked last month if it was at this point possible for somebody to use Google software exclusively and not lose functionality.

Google's preview of the Chrome OS was more than a product release. It was a milestone in a vision of a Web-centric world, one in which we are increasingly living. For the vast majority of my own activity, I am online, not using software. I intentionally use some applications, like Microsoft's Office suite or Adobe Photoshop, quickly, and then close them just as quickly, as to not slow down my computer's performance. Google's Chrome OS is the latest development in a vision that says our activity will be online, our data will be stored in the cloud, and applications that have traditionally been desktop software will make their way online.

Under no uncertain terms, I agree with their vision. This is happening and it is happening fast.

When I booted up VMware Fusion last night, and turned on the Google Chrome OS for the first time, it didn't come with an instruction manual, asking me only for my login and password - which corresponded with my GMail account. Logging in took me to the now-familiar Chrome browser, the starting point for the next generation of computing. While today, the experience is not dramatic, thanks to us already being familiar with their browser on Macs and PCs, it was a checkpoint that this was real and happening. There was no way to move the browser off screen and get to the equivalent of a desktop, for it didn't exist. There was no C: drive or System folder. Just the browser and an infinite Web that is capable of taking me anywhere.

So with due respect to my good friend Jason Kaneshiro, who writes: Google Chrome OS: I Don’t Get It and ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez, who asks Was Chrome OS a Disappointment?, the main concerns I have seen voiced around limitations on what the OS can or cannot do are much like the concerns people had when the first-generation iMac shipped without a floppy disk drive and ditched Apple's proprietary cables for the new Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard.

Google promised us a new operating system built on the Chrome Web browser. They delivered. They gave us more information yesterday showing that they were working on it. They immediately gave back to the open source community and gave us a way to start tinkering. This is not a situation of ditching the Mac or a Windows 7 machine today, but instead, about pushing us forward to a new reality. If we choose to stay in one place clinging to our old ideas, we will only get further behind.

Social Networks' Traffic Stabilizes, Facebook Nears Yahoo!

Facebook Up Slightly, MySpace and Twitter Flat to Down
Despite November being nearly half over, the monthly traffic statistics from October have just been released by Compete.com, and it looks like there are no major surprises in the social networking arena. Despite the recent improvements and continued hype, traffic to Twitter.com decreased slightly, by 2 percent, month over month, tracking at the level it saw in June of this year, and lower than the previous three months. Facebook, the #3 site overall worldwide, behind only Yahoo! and Google, climbed more than 3 percent, to almost 129 million, while MySpace stayed steady around 50 million unique visitors (15th overall).


FriendFeed and Posterous Decline - While Twine Plunges
Where one saw more movement was in the lower tiers, as FriendFeed continued its descent following the Facebook acquisition, shedding nearly 7 percent of visitors, dropping below the 700k mark, from a one-time peak above 1 million, and Posterous dropped more than 12 percent, showing just under 1.2 million visitors. Twine, which once peaked above 2 million, is now just over 120,000.


Yahoo!'s Slow Decline Comes as Facebook Rises Toward the #2 Spot
Facebook's slow but steady growth actually has them looking less in the rear view mirror, toward companies like Twitter (who scored 23 million uniques vs. Facebook's 129 million) and more at the big gun right ahead of them - Yahoo!, which continued its slow descent, dropping just over 1 percent, to 135 million unique visitors. In fact, one more month with the same trajectory would have both networks tied at about 133 million visitors, so we could see a change in placement come November.


Google's Position at #1 Remains Unchallenged (Shown With YouTube)
Unsurprisingly, Google reported in at #1, again, counting almost 150 million unique visitors in the month, according to Compete (which in my opinion is probably low). In addition, the company's YouTube subsidiary tracked just under 85 million unique visitors, good enough for the #5 position worldwide on its own. GMail continued its climb to another 9.3 million visitors, up 98% from this point last year.

Surprisingly, GMail's position is more than 3 times higher than that of Hotmail.com, which has even been surpassed by Apple's Me.com MobileMe e-mail offering. Me.com sported 3.5 million visitors, growing 98% year over year, contrasted with Hotmail's 2.5 million, which decreased 7 percent, according to Compete.


LinkedIn Stays Hot - See Versus Twitter
Interestingly, during the recession, with high unemployment, LinkedIn.com traffic increased 3.3 percent in the month to 15.5 million unique visitors, up 89% on the year. Monster.com, the massive job site, tracked in with 41.5 million unique visitors, good for #20 in the world, up 47% on the year.

Some other sites of note:

• Apple.com traffic tracked at 21.4 million, compared to 15.5 million for hp.com and 13.4 million for Dell.com.
  
• Digg.com traffic decreased less than 1 percent, up 57% on the year, good for 43 million uniques.
  
• Technorati.com traffic was flat, with only 2.8 million unique visitors.

Disclaimer: Compete statistics are known to be imperfect, but they are always interesting.

The Story of Google's Closure: Advanced JavaScript Tools

On Thursday, Google caught the eyes of Web developers around the world with the company's move to open source its Closure JavaScript compiler, library and template system to the Web community - the very same tools that power popular applications, including GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Reader, and no doubt many others. The Closure tools optimize Web code to be compact and high-performance, essentially reducing page load and redraw times while also enabling uncompromising capabilities. Around the Web, you could see the release elated geeks both inside and outside Google, many of whom previously worked with the tools while working for the Mountain View tech giant.

To better understand these tools, and get a real-world perspective on Closure, I reached out to Mihai Parparita, an engineer on the Google Reader team, to hear of his experience. He was gracious enough to extend a very thorough overview, explaining the tools' origin and use case, by e-mail, much of which is summarized below.

The Closure compiler dates back to GMail's launch in April of 2004. Paul Buchheit, now of Facebook, via FriendFeed and previously Google, largely credited for the founding of GMail, highlighted the announcement this week on his FriendFeed, calling it the "Gmail JavaScript compiler". The library and template system were initiated a few years following.

As Google Reader development started in early 2005, with Mihai, Jason Shellen, Chris Wetherell (the latter pair now are at Thing Labs working on Brizzly, which also uses Closure) and others working to make a top-notch Web-based RSS reader, the team leveraged Closure immediately after the initial prototypes. At the time, the team was less focused on download size than they are today, but the compiler's aggressive function checking improved error detection.

Mihai writes:

"Until the last month or so leading up to the Reader launch in October 2005, the size benefits of the compiler were less important, since we were less focused on download time (and performance in general) and more on getting basic functionality up and running. Instead, the extra checks that the compiler does (e.g. if a function is called with the wrong number of parameters, typos in variable names) made it easier to catch errors much earlier. We have set up our development mode for Reader so that when the browser is refreshed, the JavaScript is recompiled on the server and is used with the page when it is reloaded. This results in a tight development loop that makes it possible to catch JavaScript errors as early as possible."

As the library and template systems did not arrive until approximately 2006, Reader utilized homegrown code in their place that provided similar functionality, including handing different browser versions and quirks, Mihai said. But as soon as they were available, Reader used the new tools for new code, and later, to replace old shared libraries and homegrown code. Mihai said he performed an audit to detect usage of the old code, and find their Closure equivalents, so work could be distributed among the team during so-called "fixit" periods, when attention was given to code quality instead of new functionality.

With Closure implemented, benefits to Google Reader users are clear. Mihai estimates that without Closure, Reader's JavaScript code would be a massive 2 megabytes, which reduces to 513 kilobytes with Closure, and all the way down to 184 kilobytes using gzip, supported by nearly all browsers. Additional benefits include the near-elimination of concerns around browser differentiation, and an extremely manageable large JavaScript codebase "that doesn''t get out of control as it ages and accumulates features", he said. (Note download time was given as the main reason Robert Scoble has moved away from Reader and that the team recently made a push to even further optimize the code)

Closure's role at Reader, initially utilized in low level code, has "moved up the UI stack" to to the point where it is leveraged for UI widgets. Mihai says "this means that it's not a lot of work to do auto-complete widgets, menus, buttons, dialogs, drag-and-drop, etc. in Reader."

The excitement around Closure's release was palpable from developers through Silicon Valley and beyond as you could see from blog posts by Erik Arvidsson, a co-creator along with Dan Pupius, and a series of posts at bolinfest.com. Other excited Tweets came from Mike Knapp, the aforementioned Chris Wetherell and Kushal Dave.

As Mihai says, "You can tell that there's something special about this when you look at the ex-Googlers cheering about its release. If it had been some proprietary antiquated system that they had all been forced to use, they wouldn't have been so excited that it was out in the open now."

Like many other projects at Google, Closure's compiler, library and templates were derived solely as 20% projects and are largely still dependent on work done in so-called 20% time at Google. Mihai says that if one project needs a feature from the compiler or the library, they are encouraged to contribute to it as well.

"To give a specific example, Reader had some home-grown code for locating elements by class name and tag name (a much more rigid and simplified version of the flexible CSS selector-based queries that you can do with jQuery or with the Dojo-based goog.dom.query)," Mihai said. "As part of the process of "porting" to the Closure library, we realized that though there was an equivalent library function, goog.dom.getElementsByTagNameAndClass, it didn't use some of the more recent browser APIs that could it make it much faster (e.g.getElementsByClassName and the W3C Selector API). Therefore we not only switched Reader's code to use the Closure version, but we also incorporated those new API calls in it. This ended up making all other apps faster; it was very nice to get a message from Dan Pupius saying that the change had shaved off a noticeable amount of time in a common Gmail operation."

Now clearly I'm no developer beyond simple HTML and JavaScript, but I know good Web apps when I see them, and Google's Web apps (as well as Brizzly) are among the best in the world. They have managed to take what used to require massive software installs and make them relatively lightweight Web instances with similar functionality between services. With the release of Closure, sharp Web developers will be looking to leverage these JavaScript libraries and tools to make their own products best of breed - something that will benefit the Web as a whole. I appreciate Mihai's openness, and his willingness to share the story behind the story.

Why I Wouldn't Accept $25k To Stop Using Google Reader

Cross-Posted on my Ecademy Blog and Shared Here

Information is power - and the ability to take in more information more quickly than anybody else, all in one place, is an incredible power. The Web has been built to enable all of us to share and distribute information quickly, through new posts and links.

Tools like RSS (Real Simple Syndication) let us pass information from one site to another, letting you get updates in a single location - be it to your favorite blog posts, your favorite news and sport sites, or simply updates from friends' videos on YouTube and updates on Flickr. RSS Readers capture updates from all these RSS feeds in one application or on one Web site. In my opinion, the very best RSS reader is Google Reader. It has become such a mainstay of my online activity that I've determined its value to me is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.

I thought I would let you know why I would be so crazy as to proclaim that if somebody offered me $25,000 to stop using Google Reader for a year, that I would refuse.

A little background:

1. I Have Relied on RSS to Send Me Updates For Years.

A 2006 post showed screenshots from my use of NetNewsWire to track updates on sports, tech news and politics. At the time, I called it "A Demanding Mistress", because if I subscribed to a lot of high quantity feeds, I would be constantly receiving updates.

2. In late 2006, I switched to Google Reader as my RSS reader of choice.

In November of 2006, while the product was in Google Labs, I called it a formidable RSS option. Benefits to the new Web-based Reader were mainly:

• I could subscribe to the same feeds on multiple computers and avoid duplicates
• I could share my favorite items to a dedicated link blog

3. In early 2007, I suggested 10 ways Google Reader could improve.

I loved the service, but thought I would provide feedback in a public way. Surprisingly, a member of the Google Reader engineering team responded in the comments:

"Funnily enough, the Reader team just had a big all-day brainstorming session about where to go next, and ideas similar to many of your suggestions were discussed."

This was a huge deal for me, as I had the first experience of talking to companies and getting a response.

4. Google Reader Continued to Add Functions Over the Last Two Years

In addition to reading and sharing, Google Reader added the ability to "like" entries, and to add comments to shared items that you were subscribed to. The service also introduced the ability to "bundle" your favorite feeds and point people to them to subscribe in bulk, as well as integrating better tools for discovery of feeds, and trends data, showing how often you read and what your favorite feeds are.

Over time, more than 1,000 people have subscribed to my shared items feed, and these people can have conversations with me. Sometimes, as I noted in this post, there are more comments on Google Reader than there are on the original blog posts itself. Despite Google Reader's protests to the contrary, it is becoming a social network.

5. Google Reader Feeds Everything I Do Downstream

Data comes in and data comes out. I now read more than 700 feeds, comprising between 900 and 1,000 items per day. I hand select about 25 to 30 of those items each day to share to the link blog. This link blog then populates downstream social networks, including FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Facebook. Additionally, I set up my feed so that it populates Twitter. You can see that dedicated account for my shared items here: http://www.twitter.com/lgshareditems.


See What I am Reading in Google Reader

See What I am Sharing in Google Reader

See My Friends' Statistics in Google Reader

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You can see Google Reader plays an incredible role for me in terms of information discovery and sharing. There is no single service that lets me get all this information so quickly, so completely and so centralized. Yet, naysayers argue that blogging is declining or that Twitter is becoming their place to find news, and it's simply not complete. Twitter consists of headlines and links, while Google Reader consists of content in its entirety. And with RSS being a standard, you can bring in RSS from other services, including Twitter, into your Google Reader, should you be so interested.

And if you don't want to read so many feeds, as I do, Google recently introduced a feature called "Magic", which brings those articles you are most likely to enjoy to the top of your feed. Maybe, assuming it is coded well for you, you can read a much smaller percentage of your stories and get all you need.

The more I thought about the recent debate on Google Reader, the more I realized that there can be no substitute. There are other RSS readers, to be sure. Some are very good. But to migrate away from Google Reader would lose my personal history and preferences. It would eliminate the social connections that have been cultivated for years. It would also very likely be much slower and lack the feature set that Reader does. I determined that if somebody approached me with a check for $25,000 US to give up using Reader for 12 months, I would decline. $25,000 is a lot of money, no doubt, but to lose access to this product would be debilitating to me. You can expect to also see new ways for me to leverage the work I have done within this Google Reader platform before the end of the year that will further explain the financial elements involved.

When I first made such a crazy statement, somebody in the Google Reader comments jokingly said, "I think it would be fascinating to read a business plan that involves paying Louis Gray $100,000 to stop using Google Reader." But they understand. You cannot replace the best, an engine that pushes everything forward.

Are there other services you use where you couldn't be paid to stop? Or what's your price?

-- Find more about me at www.louisgray.com

It Just Might Be the Droid You Are Looking For

If you are a long-time user of any product, be it a computer, a TV, a cell phone, or even power tools to help you with landscaping, you get comfortable and accustomed to those products' capabilities. As you become a product expert, you know what these products can do and cannot do, and unconsciously work your way around their limitations. Sometimes, you can try and highlight these limitations as not being relevant, or even say that their lack of a feature is to their benefit - when, in fact, that's not really true. That's how I felt earlier this week when I first came in contact with Motorola's Droid, the new iPhone competitor that has everybody's tongues wagging.

Whether it ends up taking share from Cupertino or not, it's no doubt a high quality device that you should be watching closely - just like all the other reviews you have no doubt seen online have said. While I have not been a big fan of their annoying ad campaign, it is the first Android-based phone that has caught my attention and had me looking just a little bit more of what the world is like outside an iPhone universe, when I remove my Apple-shaded sunglasses.

In December of last year, I said there were essentially two types of phones in the world: "iPhone and Not iPhone". The iPhone's vast array of applications, its touch-screen capabilities and unequalled Web browsing functionality essentially put BlackBerry and all other quasi-smartphones in the rear view mirror. Since then, Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS with video recording and speed improvements, but it is essentially the same device it was last year. What has changed is the world surrounding the iPhone. While Apple has been fighting with AT&T over getting acceptable coverage and things like Push or MMS going, Google's Android team has been pushing beyond their middling first-generation device and making something very competitive indeed.

One of the stones thrown at Apple's iPhone has been its lack of multitasking. (I mentioned this in my list from June: 10 Ways Apple's iPhone Leaves Me Wanting More) Earlier this week, Google announced free turn by turn GPS on their platform. My natural inclination was to not care, as I already have a standalone GPS unit, and I wouldn't want to force my iPhone into playing the role of GPS when it could be playing Sirius Radio. But this week, while driving with a Droid owner, not only were we hearing the turn by turn GPS on the Droid, but Pandora Radio was streaming via bluetooth audio to the car stereo.

It wasn't until shortly after that I put two and two together. While I was teasing about the GPS turn by turn being quiet, I was missing the point that the phone was multi-tasking, and on top of that, it had bluetooth audio out, which the iPhone does not. Because I have been a full-time iPhone user for more than a year, I had framed my understanding in terms of the iPhone, not in terms of what I really thought a phone could do.

At the risk of sounding like a big hypocrite given my pushing of the iPhone and its ecosystem for the last year, the Android platform is compelling - and even if it is a few tens of thousands of applications behind Cupertino in the application store, every iPhone developer I talk to is looking at Android in a way they have never truly considered the Palm. Android has e-mail and text messaging and Web browsing and contacts, just like the iPhone. It has the opportunity for simple games, just like the iPhone. I found myself playing a Boggle-like game on the Droid and it worked, as expected, of course.

But beyond the basics, the Droid is a very interesting hardware product. The Droid's camera puts the iPhone to shame - not only having more megapixels with better clarity, but auto-zooming on the object of note. It has an easily accessible full keyboard, which the iPhone obviously doesn't. It doesn't suffer from the oddities of the first Google offering, but is something you wouldn't be embarrassed to show off amidst your peers. The Verizon coverage certainly doesn't hurt either.

My use of the Droid this week was a major influence in my thinking of an Apple fan potentially "Going Google". If I assume that Android 2.0 is very good, and that Google is making major upgrades to their ecosystem at a faster rate than Apple is right now, then 3.0 and beyond will be extremely interesting. I don't think this will be the last phone that will catch our eye running Android over the next few months, and Apple's already said their holiday lineup is set in stone. So why not just take a look at the Droid and see if Google deserves your dollars?

Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?

As a Mac fan in the 1990s, it was a lot easier to understand who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Apple was very good. Intel was bad. Adobe was usually good. Microsoft was bad. Very bad. Evil. But over time as we have morphed into the latter part of this decade, Intel switched teams and became good. Meanwhile, Adobe looked less like a close friend and more like a despised ex, as Microsoft went from hated bully and thief to playing the role of crazy uncle who nobody really likes but puts up with because he's not going to disappear. The hardest to label? Google, a younger cousin who everybody really likes, but just might be too smooth to be trusted, even as it gets too popular. Now the stage is set for an awkward family reunion - as Google and Apple are so overlapped, tech fans have the option to choose between the two for practically their entire digital life, and the loyalty once sent Cupertino's way, exclusively, is getting some serious competition.

Over the last few years, if one can look beyond the striking hardware and arguable operating system differentiation between Mac OS X and Windows PCs, Apple has unquestionably led the way in terms of seamless integration between applications and devices. The company's iLife package ensures that media is treated in a similar way across multiple applications, and its user interface guidelines protect the users from odd menu behaviors that change between each program. Meanwhile, the company's iTunes/iPod/iPhone juggernaut has made managing media easier than ever before, especially when one considers the addition of the fast-growing App Store and the good, even if not given much respect, Apple TV, which brings the core of the store to the core of the home.

But while we Mac fans may have been resting comfortably as the Mac vs. PC commercials made us giggle with egotistical self-pride, and the company's balance sheet has grown ever stronger with quarter after very profitable quarter, Google has been changing its spots - morphing from search engine and advertising powerhouse to a Web services monolith that can go head to head with almost every single Apple product out there. As the company integrates its many different products, they too may offer the integration we have always come to expect from Apple, but in an open, Web-focused way. And with every single new announcement, Apple fans have to start thinking if their future is one that is Google as much as it ever was Mac - and if "Going Google" would be that bad anyway.

If Mac OS X is the platform on which all Apple software starts, so too will be Google's Chrome OS. We know it's coming, and some sharp engineers are slaving away in Mountain View to capture the flexibility of the Web and make the cloud the equivalent of your hard disk.

Apple's Safari browser, the built-in Web browser for Mac and for iPhones, is equally matched by the Chrome browser on all major operating systems and on Android as well.

The iPhone and its 80,000 to 100,000 applications in the iTunes Store are being challenged by Android's new fleet of phones, led by the Droid from Motorola, and its rumored 10,000+ apps.

Apple's Mail? Easily matched by GMail. iCal? See Google Calendar. iChat? Google Chat. iMovie and iDVD? Well, it's not the same thing, but you would be hard-pressed to say YouTube doesn't win that battle. iWeb? Really? See Blogger.

On the professional side, Apple's iWork sports Keynote, Pages and Numbers. One has to wonder why they even released these apps, as they're not exactly keeping Microsoft at bay, and I don't know anybody who uses the last two. I use Pages once a year to do our Holiday letters home, and that's it! You better believe that Google's online office suite of Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations is the real deal. Beyond that, do you expect Apple's iDisk to trump GDrive? Will Mac OS X Server beat out the Google File System (GFS) or can you expect XServes to replace Google's commodity rack servers in their datacenters around the globe? Not likely.

This isn't a rant stating that Apple is doomed. Far from it. After all, Google doesn't "yet" make excellent laptops. But I've tried the Motorola Droid with Android 2.0 and it's good enough that if iPhone were not an option, it would be an easy second choice. I find that I am using my Apple OS and my Apple Web browser to go Google, not just for the search engine, but all the downstream Google services. (10 of which I highlighted last month)

Google spokesperson and king of anti-spam Matt Cutts said his October goal was to avoid Microsoft software, a task made easier than ever now with Google providing an alternative just about everywhere. But I wonder if it's possible to do something very different - use ONLY Google software for a month. That would mean using the company's Web browser exclusively, and their office suite exclusively, and their mobile phone OS exclusively. That would mean using GMail and Google Talk and Google Wave and Google Calendar and Google Reader instead of Outlook or Mac Mail. I bet we're very close to this happening.

On Wednesday, Google also announced some of their first forays into Music search. This is an area where Apple still has the clear advantage - with iTunes. But Google offers Pandora on the Android platform, so iTunes isn't needed. Maybe I could push them to buy Spotify, and set up a killer alternative to iTunes with the Google logo? That would be something indeed.

I am a Mac guy. Maybe I'm less of a Mac guy than I once was, but I still trust Cupertino. That said, Google is growing on me in a big way, and they are the real alternative - something Microsoft never really was. Maybe soon I'll also be going Google in a way I never expected.

Google Reader's Magic Finds Personalized Highlights In Feeds

If you're a normal carbon-based life form and not an always-on robot like me, you probably don't want to spend the entirety of your day dialed in to the Web, reading every single article in the fear that you might miss something. It might make more sense instead that you get the best of the Web, tailored just for you, sent your way - be that through the use of human filters, or through software that can determine what you like, either through explicit or implicit actions. Following the lead of My6sense, which debuted earlier this year, Google Reader introduced a new feature today, called "Magic" that finds the best offerings in your subscriptions and brings them to the surface. And it works! The service also increased the visibility of recommended feeds, and showed the most popular stories from around the Web - all part of making the RSS reader more personal.

(Note I also asked for these features way back in March of 2007.)

As Google Reader outlined in a blog post this afternoon, "The goal of personalization at Google remains the same as ever: to help you find the best content on the web."


When Sorted by "Magic", You Can See I Share Those Items Most


When Sorted by "New", The Items Are Less Relevant
Many people are intimidated by Reader's potential to get full. Complaints about seeing (1000+) atop the stream are everywhere - and while there are ways to sort by time or by individual source, it has not always been easy to find the stories that are most relevant to you - until today. With the addition of "sort by magic", Reader presents articles atop your to do list that most match your interests, no doubt gauged by your previous viewing history, and explicit actions, such as sharing.

As mentioned often here, I share about 30 items a day from the near 900 I go through. With "magic" enabled, I found myself sharing not just 3% of the first few articles but nearly half of them - and after having read through the offerings, displaying my activity in list mode showed that to be the case. No doubt as I continue to use the product, it too should get better.

In parallel, while away from the Web browser experience, I have been using My6sense on the iPhone to deliver a similar effect, presenting me with the most relevant and interesting items atop my feed. But the company's approach is not due to "explicit" actions, such as "likes" and "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", which many services use for personalization. Instead, the company uses "implicit" actions, including what I read, how long I spend reading it, whether I scroll to the end of the article, or whether I share it, to help improve my data.

Both approaches are looking to tackle the information overload mentality, making the feeds not so much "magic", but intelligent - which will become even more important as each of us subscribe to more streams of data.


Popular Items that Are Most Often Liked In Google Reader
You might also see some similarities between Google Reader's "most popular" section to that of services I've pushed on this site since the beginning of 2008, including the dormant ReadBurner (where I am an advisor) and RSSmeme. One Google Reader employee back in 2008 said this function would be "less interesting" as it just highlighted popular sources (including Engadget, the FAIL Blog and others), and so far, it looks to be the case - even if there may be an occasional pop from a lesser-known source.

I've recently begun an engagement with My6sense as part of the day job, and the more I talk with the company's founder and chairman, Barak Hachamov, the more the two of us believe that while there is a time for the wisdom of crowds, you can never overstate the importance of the individual. Both My6sense and Google Reader, especially with today's announcements, are working to do that.


So Was This The Item That Made My Head Explode? :)

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FTC Disclosures: My6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Director of New Media. I am also an advisor to ReadBurner, and have met with the Google Reader team multiple times at their campus, where on at least two occasions, lunch was served. :)

The Blog's Place In A World of Microblogging: Not Dead Yet!

Even as the microblogging space seems to be white hot these days, the world of longer-form blogging is still seeing impressive growth, with all major blogging platforms showing greater than 20 to 40 percent growth year over year, and record users, blogs and total readers, according to Compete.com data and a presentation from Google's Rick Klau, product manager for Blogger, who spoke at Blog World Expo this afternoon. Rick reported that his platform, Blogger, which I use, is now seeing nearly 300,000 words per minute, scaling to 417 million words per month, from more than 10 million content creators.

Yet, despite this high usage, many have challenged the platform, saying "blogging is dead". There are more than 360,000 results on Google saying that "blogging is dead", with many high profile articles saying that disparate social networks like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter should be where people's attention are. But Rick said that the rise of microblogging didn't necessarily come at the expense of traditional blogging. In fact, he said these third party sites actually served to drive even more attention and traffic to the core blog content.

"Microblogs are complementary, not competitive," Rick said. "It is a driver of attention and engagement back to the blog."

For Rick, who has run his own personal blog (at tins.rklau.com) and has been active since 2001, he reported that Twitter has become the highest traffic generator for his site outside of search, and in that list, so also are Facebook and FriendFeed. He suggested rather than trying to fight against the flow on microblogging, to embrace it, and make sure your content is available to these disparate networks, while remembering to engage where it lands.

"The blog tends to be visited by people interested in what you are saying, and the people on Twitter and Facebook are interested in you, and by proxy, what you are saying," he said. "I happen to believe that based on what I have seen with my blog for eight years, people are comfortable communicating in the environment they have chosen. If I force the conversation back to the blog, I will lose the audience who have the eagerness to engage, comfortable where they live."

Rick suggested that if you are a Facebook user, to pull your blog content into Facebook, making it available to this new audience, who may leave comments much different than those which are native to your site. He also recommended that you utilize tools like bit.ly to track statistics and click-throughs to your site from those links you send through Twitter, to help you understand how much the microblogs are impacting your own blog.

Given his background at Google, Rick made it clear that the company's data-driven nature forced decisions, and the company continues to see serious growth in traditional blogs.

"There are very few questions that get asked at Google when I don't have the data to back up an answer," Rick said. "You don't get many opportunities to say "I feel" or "it seems" at Google."

But in his experience, Rick suggested that bloggers not get locked into writing posts for specific statistics, including page views. He said that as you are a multi-faceted person, you should be confident writing about more than just one thing, so one should feel comfortable covering more than just the single topic.

"Don't become a slave to the focus of your blog at the expense of having fun.You can be passionate about a wide variety of subjects," he added.

Blogging and micro-blogging are not a zero-sum game, but can be complimentary. Sending blog content to downstream networks makes that content available to those connections who are more comfortable in their own environment. As I have mentioned many times, your blog is your brand - which Rick echoed by saying that on your blog, you control every pixel, and therefore, the end user experience.

Bloggers need to adapt to the new world, but aren't antiquated in this new world. It makes sense to participate wherever the content lands and wherever your readers are, without pushing to centralize the conversation on your site, but there is no substitute for long-form conversations and being passionate. Rick communicated a simple formula: "Content + Passion + Engagement". And that will make the blog go, even in a world of change.

The Era of the Faceless Giant Corporation Is Over

It wasn't all that long ago when the names of companies were more likely to make me think of unfeeling skyscrapers reaching toward the heavens with their steel and glass than I was to think of the people inside who made the brand stand for something, and architected the products to make them do what they do. But the last decade's increased potential for transparency and public visibility of company employees and leadership, culminating in some's active use of social media has made many of these previously faceless giants - Google, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Amazon... human. And this transformation adds a clear expansion of loyalty between these previously untrusted, unseen companies, and their customers - as those who see the companies as a collection of humans not so much as cogs in a massive machine, but instead as peers.

While many a blog post or Twitter stream has sounded out a screed against a company or a product, I am now more cautious than ever to avoid emotional critical rants against companies and brands I feel may have done me wrong. Some of this is due to the increased transparency of said companies - and no doubt a good amount of it has been my lucky position to gain access to some of the most respected brands in the business, to meet the people who make the decisions and see each day as a challenge with aims to shared goals, just like we do.

In March of 2006, I wrote a post titled "Giving Microsoft a Human Face", highlighting the work of the secretive "Mini-Microsoft", saying the blog helped provide "a clear view into the struggles and triumphs and wishes that are true in any corporation", be it Microsoft or a small business. I was similarly impressed with Robert Scoble's work while he was at Microsoft, and blogs from tech leaders like Jonathan Schwartz at Sun. Two years later, I admitted to you that I have a bias in favor of small companies, and am less likely to give the big ones a pass. But as time passes, I am seeing even the biggest companies as a collection of small units. And the more engaged they are in the blogosphere, or on Twitter, the easier it is to reach them for product feedback and customer service, the more the image of the skyscraper melts away.

In the 2008 post, I used the example of Google as a company big enough that I could still shake my fist in the event of bumps. I said, "The big guys are held to higher standards, and always will be. It comes with the territory." But even in the last eighteen or so months, Google to me has changed. Through interactions with many on the Google Reader team, discussions with Matt Cutts, and getting to know Rick Klau on the Blogger team, Google seems just as accessible as any other corporation, despite its large size.

On Friday, I spent three hours at Google headquarters in Mountain View, working face to face with Rick and a pair of skilled Google engineers, working on making changes to my blog. Though the front end should not have changed in appearance, you can see that posts now display as coming from blog.louisgray.com instead of www.louisgray.com/live as they did before. While the URLs have changed, so too has the hosting. I've been hosted on FTP for four years, and made the big move yesterday, while aiming to avoid any issues. Rick, seeing me as a good test case for an established blog with more than 2,000 posts, wanted to see if we could find any hiccups that could possibly befall other Blogger users in the same scenario. And despite the fact I was in one of the world's most tech-savvy corporations, we definitely ran into issues. Some were possibly my fault. Others were probably due to my old Web host, Register.com. But we worked as a team, and finally got it all figured out, a little behind schedule.

Google (and Rick specifically) didn't owe me any special hands-on effort. In the old way of customer service, companies tend to just post guidelines on the Web, and should you not have all running perfectly, it's either your fault outright, or you need to be hand held with customer support. But the new era of customer service, marketing and sales is transparent and personal - and this should go for every company, big and small.

Before I get any comments saying that Google reached out to me because I'm "A-List" (I'm not) or anything of that note, trust me, I know I was lucky, and I let Rick and his team know I appreciated their elite intervention. I try to provide Google and all other services I work with a good amount of customer feedback, and yesterday was as much about that as it was them providing me aid.

I look at the technology space, and for the most part, companies have made that transition from closed to open, from inert to living. I believe that many other industries could serve to improve and open up. After all, who is the public face of a company like GE? Fisher Price? McDonalds? These companies that would probably sit immobile in the face of a hate-filled rant still look like buildings to me. And I believe that they too will open up. The era of being dark and hidden and untrusted is over.

FTC Disclosure: Google let me eat lunch at their place for free yesterday. It was yummy.

Why And Where We Share: Distributing Quality With Impact, Intent

Regardless of whether you first came in contact with my content here, or through other streams, you know that the vast majority of my online life has to do with the creation, filtering and distribution of information. In addition to authoring new stories here on the blog, I try to be an active and avid consumer of RSS feeds, and updates from social networks including FriendFeed, Ecademy, Socialmedian, Twitter and Facebook. In turn, I make a very serious attempt to redistribute the best content of all that I see back out to these same networks. Even if the volume of data I am taking in and pushing back out is high, it is certainly not random. Every time I hit a "share" button, or I hit "post", it is calculated. I thought it might be a good idea to discuss this a bit more.

First, some statistics.


20,000 Items Isn't That Many If Divided In Smaller Chunks

In the last 30 days, according to Google Reader, from the 703 subscriptions I follow, I read 20,090 items and shared 766 items. This means that on an average day, I am taking in 700 to 900 items (less on weekends) and sharing about 25 to 30 items.

This data, for the last 30 days, shows 3.8% of all items get shared, or just under 1 in every 25 posts. And while it may seem that 703 subscriptions is a lot, it is, in my opinion, a very healthy segment of the tech Web. If subscriptions that I follow go too long without relevant data worth sharing, I do remove them from my feeds, while also always being on the lookout for new sources. So you can consider my shares to be the top 4 percent of what I think is the top 20 percent of tech news, making the result greater still.

Second, the flow.

When I hit "share" in Google Reader, a few things happen.

1. The item is added to my shared link blog.
   
2. The item is available for comments within Google Reader for approved contacts.
   
3. The items are shared on my FriendFeed, Facebook and Socialmedian.
   
4. The items are sent to the @lgshareditems account on Twitter.

One button hits as many as five networks - so yes, there is impact. I am cognizant that if I share too many items overall, or share too many off-topic items, it will harm the quality of my downstream feeds, and people will either stop engaging or unsubscribe.

 On Twitter, Brett Kelly Noticed A Bump in Engagement
But there's more to sharing than Google Reader, as you know. Sharing can also be done through comments and likes on FriendFeed, which bump a story back to the top of the feed, and expose it to other people. The greater your following, the greater the potential for downstream impact, meaning if you have an active account, then it's possible to look back on your activity and see others taking action on those items - much like the wake of a speedboat on a lake, as your zipping along leaves ripples behind. The retweeting phenomenon on Twitter has been well documented. Also, I share the bookmarks I make on Delicious to the same social networks - FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter. One save hits four places. I wouldn't take so much effort to get the flow right if I didn't know that it had impact. One of the pleasing byproducts of being consistent and focused is that content creators say they get a traffic or visibility boost from my shares. My goal is to reward good writing, reporting and quality, and to also reward those who have opted into the streams, that they receive quality content.

   Holden Page Saw His RSS Numbers Spike

So how do I decide?

1) I Share Items On Topics Relevant to the Downstream Audience

The first filter on whether a story gets shared is if it is on a topic I assume my readers would find interesting. Even if I may be interested in baseball, humor, politics or food entries, they don't get shared into the downstream feeds because the readers are looking for news on technology. Most specifically, coverage of new startups, Silicon Valley companies, social media and networking tools, RSS, business and statistics data.


2) I Share Originating Sources Where Possible, Not the Echo

If a company like Apple, Google, Digg, Facebook, or Twitter makes a new entry, it is no doubt going to be respun by dozens of downstream tech writers. If I see this happening, I will find the original unfiltered post and share that to bring their message directly.


3) I Share Items That Are the First to Report News Or Have A Unique Angle

In the tech blogosphere, it is not too uncommon for many different sites to talk about the same story - especially if it is about one of the most-popular companies. In the event of massive duplication, I try to share the first of the respected sites that gets the story right and done well. Because of this "echo chamber", I am extra focused on finding new stories from people who are going against the grain - covering new companies that don't usually get a lot of ink, or are thinking about the day's news in a different way. I also am happy to reward sites that get unique Q&As or interviews with tech leaders, or are the first to pull down data from the SEC around funding or M&A activity - passing on true journalism rather than opinion.


4) I Share Items That Targeted Quality Over Speed

It is easy to tell when a blog post was quickly slapped together to be first out the door, or just to hit a post quota (a common issue at multi-author sites that are ad-driven). As soon as I can ascertain that a post is on topic, has an interesting angle and has been thoroughly researched, it is a pleasure to send it downstream. This is even more true when a more obscure blog acts in a mature way and deserves to be highlighted.


5) I Avoid Sharing Items That Are Built for Controversy

As I have tried to do here, I aim to keep my downstream feeds argument and rhetoric free, wherever possible. If headlines and photos and angles on stories are overwrought for the sake of driving debate, controversy or nonsense, they are skipped. I do not want to reward bad behavior.

In Conclusion:

I talk a lot about sharing and data flow on this blog, because I recognize the new world of blogging goes beyond these pages. Today's best bloggers are participating in the downstream networks, both as content creators and as information filters. It takes effort to be in the first wave of filtering, to try and separate the wheat from the chaff, and drive quality to other networks, but it is very rewarding to know it provides value. Over time, I look forward to finding even better ways to filter, organize and display third party content that has passed through me first.

It's Twitter's World: The Second, Parallel, Internet

It's Twitter's world. We all just live in it. I just looked out the window from my home north toward San Francisco and saw the sky tinged with a teal blue that spanned the horizon. While at this time last year, you could only see the faintest blue with a telescope, over the last several months, the blue light has grown ever brighter - almost blinding, to the point I can't even see Moffett Field from my condo in Sunnyvale. I've heard that SFO has even had to divert flights from landing on its North-facing runway after sundown thanks to this radioactive-like glow emanating from Twitter headquarters, as it has proven distracting to pilots who more than once have fallen into a trance-like stare, unblinkingly gasping in 140 characters or less. And I fear even with these precautions, it's only a matter of time before something bad happens. You can retweet that.

Try as I might to not be in this Silicon Valley bubble, I can't practically go anywhere or talk to anyone without hearing the word Twitter. "I've got to Tweet that!", one person exclaims. "Overheard!" cries another. "Hold on - let me check into Foursquare," says another guest at dinner, with the white artificial light glowing from his iPhone to his chest, tucked away behind the dinner menu. A phone call comes... "Did you see my tweet? Isn't that cool?" Even my iPhone apps, which I invited into my home, want me to tweet my high scores.

Sigh.

And if that weren't bad enough, many people practically expect that I have reserved Twitter user names for my 15 month-old twins. They can't yet talk, and their excitement around a laptop is practically limited to smashing the keys and being fascinated by the green light on the Caps Lock, but I am supposed to have secured their Tweeting future. Negatory on that geek rite of passage.

To be honest, it's not as if I am a hundred percent opposed to this change. If my life is to be "live tweeted" for the rest of my days, and future marital contracts will include a clause on whether one's twitter handles will change on the day of matrimony, so be it. I can accept the fact that this product, bluer than Viagra, which makes you type out messages as if you were stoned on marijuana at the speed of a crack addict, is habit forming. It's infrastructure - the new e-mail. It's the social networking glue that connects my phone and my RSS to various downstream networks. It is home to a community of people who have made their own "tweetspeak", who engage in "tweetups" and read books made "for dummies" to use Twitter - since clearly, it's so hard.

Regardless of whether you think Twitter is worth a billion dollars or a bazillion dollars, or think it's just Monopoly money, I can't help but think Twitter is running an end-around play on Google. While Google has the broadest horizontal index of pages, and is busy scouring an amazing mountain of sites to get their every word, Twitter, in a vertical approach, is getting the world's updates, and a similarly overwhelming number of links being shared. While I don't have the numbers behind me now, it would not surprise me if at some point soon, the absolute number of links (including duplicate links) shared via Twitter exceeds the net new URLs discovered by Google each day. And you can forget about linking instead of retweeting. That's the old way for Web 1.0 dinosaurs.

Twitter is practically becoming a parallel Internet. It may live on HTTP, but don't let that fool you. Over time, most folks may tell you the T's in HTTP stand for "Tweet Tweet".

In February, I said Facebook's success made it the social media prism, through which other activity would be referenced and measured. But the sheer volume of updates from Twitter is drowning all the downstream networks. If you have an aggregation service, be it the Facebook news feed, FriendFeed (now part of Facebook) or Ecademy's NetNews, you almost have to seek out posts that are NOT Twitter to find the diamonds in the rough.

Twitter is a firehose, not just for those who have glued their eyelids open, working hard not to miss a single update in TweetDeck or Seesmic, Tweetie, Brizzly, Hootsuite or a million other apps, but in terms of its sheer mass being able to render competing networks irrelevant. Facebook may be bigger today by a large margin, but it is Twitter that has the buzz. It is Twitter that is forcing the change in language, and making our LOLspeak the new standard.

Twitter was supposed to be simple. Update me what you are doing. But the community saw beyond that, helping make this product, best defined by its limitations, something else entirely. Products like TwitPic were made which helped users easily share images and videos. Users found ways to use hashtags to rally around events and causes, introduced retweeting to forward interesting items, and @replies to talk directly with one another. Directories like WeFollow were set up, without Twitter's help, to more easily discover like-minded users, and sites like Tweetmeme debuted to show the most popular links out there.

Like it or not, Twitter has become the standard for short communication. For the many of us who liked our own favorite service which we believed did more and had more flexibility or options, we were vastly outnumbered by the masses who are drinking the bright blue Kool-aid. Even as I, and others, may drag our feet reluctantly, we know we don't have a choice. Businesses who scoff at the usefulness of "The Big T" now recognize it is just another marketplace, and everybody is selling something - be it a real product, or a personal brand. Spammers love it. And that's a sure sign that you're on to something big.

To question if Twitter is going to crash and burn now under its newfound publicity and ridiculous expectations is like saying Bing's decision engine is going to make Google go bankrupt. You might as well rail against e-mail and hope it dies a quick death. Twitter owns you. Just check their recently updated terms of service. It's in there. And I promise you that you are a nobody until you've been selected to join the Suggested Users List. That's where all the cool people are. It's Twitter's world.

Google Wave Hits Shore. Flash Flood Warning In Effect.

As you already know, Google released a waterfall of 100,000 invites to the Google Wave preview over the last day or so, giving bleeding-edge early adopter and information addicts a new playground to exchange conversations in real time. After months of hibernation and anticipation, Wave's arrival has everyone's tongues wagging, as we all get an early look into Google's plans to redefine messaging, delivering a real-time platform that includes rich media and extensibility through gadgets.

Since Wave's introduction earlier this year, I have seen a number of differing ways the product has been described. From a new development platform to a suite for business collaboration or an (insert popular social service name here) killer, the guesses have ranged far and wide. Interestingly, however, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lars Rasmussen defined Wave as "a modern version of e-mail", adding that e-mail is "an old-fashioned technology". So it makes the most sense, at this point, to look at the Google Wave preview as a potential replacement or enhancement to today's e-mail systems, notably GMail.

Having received an invite to Google Wave via Denton Gentry, a Google employee who is also a frequent commenter here on this blog, I jumped into the Wave fray late last night, and found the system to be extremely stable and much faster than anticipated. For a "preview" release, Wave is very good, especially considering the complexity that is involved.


My first "wave" seemed simple enough.
Google Wave takes on traditional e-mail systems and incorporates chat-like or instant messaging technology all in one. Instead of a typical "I send you a message, you receive it and you reply" type of exchange, Wave encapsulates conversations between people and shows real-time responses in line, more like threaded comments than individual messages. If you and I are having a conversation in Wave, you see me type out my responses, typos and all, as I pound out a reply. To respond to my note, just click below the last message and extend the thread.


Almost immediately, my Wave filled up with conversation.
(Click for full-size image)
As this specific "wave" (lower case) is being updated, new waves can pop into our in boxes from anyone. Like traditional e-mail, if anybody has your address, you can be copied on a note. But Wave enables anyone to add contacts from their address book to any thread at any time. So while you may initiate one conversation, you could be dragged into another one that already has 60 entries. The good news is that Wave has a "Playback" button which enables you to watch the conversation occur, in the order it was entered, but the bad news is if you are in enough active threads, the act of watching each one can be time consuming.

Like most early discussions around new services, the vast majority of conversations are actually about the service. Just like FriendFeed-related items get liked more item on FriendFeed, and Twitter-related tweets get retweeted, last night's Wave swarm was full of conversations all about Wave. Does it work? Where are the gadgets? Who doesn't have invites, but needs them?


One active wave shows participants and nested comments.
Because of the real-time nature of Wave, I quickly found that if I engaged in one wave (lower case) and gained replies in another, the other contact might feel that I had "left" that thread. Since I can't yet be in two places at once, the real-time aspect was more like when you have multiple chat windows open in Google Chat or Facebook Chat than if you had more than one e-mail message. So staying on top of all active waves can be a tremendous challenge - one that practically promises to keep you embedded in the application until every single message is muted and all your contacts go do something else (which may never happen).

The instantaneous nature of Wave immediately makes other assumed "fast" programs seem slow. For example, adding comments to FriendFeed for a live conversation now seems slow, as it requires the entire message to be completed before being posted. In comparison, in Wave, I see you type it immediately, and can actually formulate a response as you're writing.

Google Wave, as should be no surprise, is integrated with Search. You can insert videos discovered on YouTube and photos from Picasa or other services into Wave, and make them part of any conversations. You can play back YouTube videos below text, or post new videos to those you're talking to.

But yes, as you are watching a video, more waves are crashing into your in box. While you may not get the feeling that you have hundreds of unread messages, as you do with traditional e-mail, every single wave conversation shows how many new entries have been made since you last viewed the thread. Every single wave can have dozens of new entries, depending on the number of contacts and conversation that is there.


A typical Wave "In Box" after a night's activity.
(Click for full-size image)
Meanwhile, until Google Wave is integrated into GMail or other Google services, checking your Wave becomes yet another place to go so you're not missing conversations directed your way. So for somebody like me, who has a personal e-mail address, a work e-mail address, a GMail address, and e-mail addresses for company clients, Wave is yet another inbox and place to go to check in. And the new address (louisgray@googlewave.com) is another place for people to send me things.

I can see how small teams may use Wave for real-time collaboration. Its nature offers an opportunity to further eliminate distance and improve information exchanges. The ability to add people on the fly to conversations is very interesting, as is the ability to ping somebody and have a 1-1 conversation in the middle of any wave, or in a dedicated side exchange. I expect the company is set to debut more widgets to further extend the platform, both bringing content into Wave and content out from Wave. For example, last night, Jesse Stay and I had an exchange where he added a Twitter gadget, but thanks to something I would consider a security bug, I was able to send a tweet on his behalf because I was engaged in the thread. (See the tweet I made here)

Wave, like many Google products, also supports keyboard shortcuts to aid in navigation. I hopefully hit J to go down and K to go back (like I do constantly in Google Reader), but found it is the space bar that you hit to go step by step. Wave is an extremely interesting platform, and I would bet that after the initial surge of curiosity, normal conversations and information exchange will eventually take over, so this initial spike may be an exception rather than the new rule. But if you're diving into this new technology, expect do be exerting a lot of energy to stay on top of it, because messaging just got accelerated.

Also see: Scobleizer: Google Wave Crashes on Beach of Overhype

Google Translate Widget Takes Sites and Blogs Global

According to my Google Analytics statistics, about 25 percent or more of the visitors to my blog over the last 30 days prefer a language other than English. Given I tend to use more words than pictures, it would be assumed readers would either be multilingual, or that they would take the URL and throw it into a translation service - be it Google Translator or Babel Fish. But today, Google made it even easier for site owners to bring their data to readers in the language of their choice, with the introduction of a new translation widget that, on the fly, without requiring visitors to install anything, displays the content in their preferred tongue.


The New Google Translate Widget In Action
In February, I wrote a post that encouraged people to participate with those discussing your content around the Web in the language of their choice. (See: Don't Speak the Language? You Can Still Participate.) I firmly believe a core tenet of being active in distributed conversations is to have the conversation with the person where they want to. If you can take that up a notch and have that conversation in their native language, then you win. While some may hem and haw about the accuracy of Google Translate, I recognize it's not perfect, but it's very good and improving. Why not make the best effort and get close rather than shying away.


My Blog Following One Pass by Google Translate

The Same Post, This Time In French
To get started as a content owner, just go to Google's Translate gadget, grab the code, and put it anywhere on the page you believe makes sense. Now, if visitors want to see your content in Swahili or Catalan or any of the approximately 50 languages supported, all they need to do is choose the language from the pull-down menu, and it happens on the fly.

It's all part of bringing more of the world's information to more people, while removing barriers. You can see this gadget on the upper right of this blog on every page, and I hope to see it on many pages going forward.

Framed: Should Microsoft, and Would Apple... Fight Back vs. Google?

Wednesday's announcement from Google that they were releasing a Web browser plugin called Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer gave IE users many of the same core elements they would receive by surfing with the native Chrome browser - namely support for HTML 5, and massively improved JavaScript performance. Google's goal has largely been seen as setting the stage for Google Wave, working to get Web surfers off older, outdated browsers, like Internet Explorer 6, and providing them a richer experience. But this process, as noble as it may be, has me wondering if its competition, Microsoft, won't be finding a way to shut it down. After all, I am pretty sure Apple would if given the same choice.

Many across the tech Web are lauding the move as easier for Web consumers to perform than a rip and replace strategy to ditch IE and turn to Chrome, despite its clear benefits. After all, it's said users are comfortable with plugins like Adobe Flash, and Chrome Frame would just be a simple plugin. But isn't this a lot more like what Palm did in faking us all out by pretending its Pre mobile phone was really an iPod, in order to gain access to iTunes?

While Google didn't make any noise about looking to similarly decapitate Safari, and put Chrome in Apple's browser, there are definitely times when I find my preferred browser lagging behind the most-popular surfing options. Even Google's Toolbar, which includes the new SideWiki we discussed on Wednesday, does not have a native version for Safari, but maybe, if Google found a way to push Chrome in Safari, it would.

Matt Mastracci, co-founder of DotSpots and a sharp Web developer, reminded me this evening that Safari "isn't built to be extensible", making Toolbar integration or Chrome Framing a real challenge, but even if they could somehow pull it off, I don't see Steve Jobs and Cupertino sitting idly by. No doubt the next system update, or Safari point release, would knock it out of the sky, the same way they have updated iTunes in the past to stop jailbreaking of iPhones, or the way Microsoft posts Windows Updates to stop malicious code from hitting their user base.

Microsoft is already whining and saying that running Chrome Frame as a plug-in increases the potential for bad code and malicious scripts to hit customers. (See: Microsoft: Google Chrome Frame Makes IE Less Secure) It is not my tendency to jump on Redmond's side, and I certainly don't believe their scare tactics, but they have to be hotly debating their next move. It would not surprise me if the opportunity to disable Chrome Frame was being thought about as part of the next "Critical" Windows Service Pack update, executing a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between Microsoft and Google, and potentially the Justice Department - who didn't ever get its wish of splitting Microsoft up after its monopoly games with Netscape.

Apple's recent ploys to knock Palm Pre out of iTunes, and its controversial blockage of Google Voice make it clear they have every intent to control their users operating system and iPhone experience. In fact, as they have not really been taken to task in the way Microsoft has for anti-competitiveness, I would see Cupertino more likely to be proactive in trying to fight Google here. The only question is, will they ever get the chance to do battle?

I Don't Want To Hear About Distributed Conversations Any More

This morning, Google introduced a feature called SideWiki for Google Toolbar users that lets people add comments and annotations to Web sites. This is not a new approach, and it has been tried with varying lacks of success in the past, as most people without an agenda don't want to spend time marking up third party Web pages. But as predictable as rain, we again see people railing that there is potential for this service to take even more control away from bloggers and site administrators in terms of how their content is positioned, or where the conversations should take place.

Led by Jeff Jarvis, who simply said "Danger" and echoed by others, including Steven Hodson of the Inquisitr, who called it "a bad idea - very bad", the same stories I thought we had beaten into the ground almost 18 months ago in the Shyftr debacle are coming back - even after more than a year of a greater level of distributed conversations, as comments are now strewn all over the Web - not centralized on the originating blog.

Jarvis says: "Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it," and adds "It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value."

In parallel, Hodson says: " Sidewiki is nothing short of an attempt by Google to take control of the conversations that happen on blogs... It takes away one of the most important parts of a blog – the conversation – and locks it on the Google."

Here we go again.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. The battle for control over conversations and the silo of discussions is done. Any blogger who believes that they can control the conversations and prevent discussions in far-flung social networks is deluding themselves. And yet, every few months, a new innovation, be it comments in Google Reader, or something like this, freaks the old guard out.

Jeff and Steven's comments are mirrored by Josh Schnell, who in a guest post for Tamar Weinberg on Techipedia cries out that Content Aggregators are Killing Content Creators.

Here's the reality: Conversations have moved to where the reader wants them to be - and the best content creators shouldn't care if they get to have conversations on their content in any of these networks. The best content creators and the best Web brands shouldn't care about what people may say on their SideWiki, any more than they should panic over reviews that happen on Amazon's Marketplace or in the iTunes store. People are entitled to their opinions and their commentary, and any further efforts to try and force people to have these conversations in a single place should be extinguished.

In April of 2008, I once asked, "Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?" and apparently, some people continue to be ticked. But we need to evolve. That's why there are new services like Echo, who famously declared the death of comments and the new version of Disqus, which also aims to pull in reactions in real-time.

Mark Hopkins of the SiliconAngle sees beyond the scare tactics and recognizes that SideWiki is much more and not just about "stealing conversations". He says:

"The fact is that in the golden age of the social web, conversations will spring up more and more places outside your silo, with or without you. You can work to leverage them or you can get upset."

Congratulations, Mark, I'm proud of you. Now, it would be fantastic if more people would evolve and move forward instead of crying foul about the way it used to be.

My Top Ten Favorite Google Products

As Google has grown as a company, its reach has extended well beyond its initial foundation as a massive search index. The company now represents many things - including a mobile handset platform, a Web browser, Web-based e-mail, a social network, and a wide variety of software programs. Like Microsoft in the 1990s, it is often hard to see a viable business where the company does not play a role - and a significant one at that.

With Danny Sullivan revealing Google CEO Eric Shmidt's favorite product is the Chrome browser, I began thinking about my own preferences, and thought I would share - inviting you to do the same.

1. Google Reader

Google Reader is my starting point for finding the day's news quickly. The RSS reader is the very best way that I know of to get all the blogs and news sources I read in one place, and it provides me with simple keyboard shortcuts to read through them rapidly, choosing to share them on my link blog to downstream social networks, including FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook and Socialmedian.

As Google Reader has expanded its social capabilities, I have also recently enjoyed a near-explosion in active conversations on my shared feeds, and find I am spending even more time inside this product than in months past.

Though it may sound crazy, I believe the quality lead Google Reader has over its competition exceeds even that of Google Search's quality lead over its relative competition. I would rather have Reader and be forced to use Yahoo!/Bing than use Google Search and use some other RSS reader.

2. Blogger

The Blogger platform, now 10, doesn't get enough respect. The simple blog publishing and hosting product makes it easy for me to add new posts, categorize them, and update my templates, multiple times a day. Having moved well beyond its initial reputation of being something like a spam blogs haven, Google has put real effort into clamping down on bad behavior. Meanwhile, outages that used to impact the service have practically been eliminated.

Blogger is the platform of choice not just for my blog, but for my wife as well, giving us one place to log in to update either site.

3. FeedBurner

While the product hasn't seen a ton of updates since its acquisition a few years back, FeedBurner hasn't received much challenge (with the exception of FeedBlitz) when it comes to distributing RSS feeds from millions of blogs, mine included. On top of making sure that my posts get distributed, FeedBurner also keeps tabs on statistics in terms of total subscribers, click throughs and site visits, and enables the ability to customize each blog post with feedflares, adding additional interactivity.

4. Google Search and Google Blog Search

Google Search just does its job, period. Even as the Web has grown dramatically, Google's ability to return the "one right answer" solution when guessing what I am looking for is unmatched. It may lack the real-time capability of other sites, but imagining an alternative Web without Google search is daunting.

Similarly, Google Blog Search has largely replaced Technorati for most and is the default engine for finding new content on blogs around the Web.

5. GMail

While I have been using .Mac e-mail since well before GMail ever launched, the product changed the game in terms of what online e-mail represented. GMail, at its debut, offered storage space 20 times higher than the competition, integrated search and other features, such as labels and automatic filtering that make it both light and flexible. While other free e-mail products have gained a poor reputation online, seeing a GMail address doesn't make me turn away in scorn. I recommend that any business starting an online media strategy obtain a GMail account to centralize related e-mail.

6. YouTube

Though, like FeedBurner, not born at Google, YouTube is one of the most recognizable brands on the Web. Like Google Search, it has become the default service on the Web for what it does - enabling people to share videos and view videos, from silly family pictures to professionally designed music videos or corporate interviews. It is through YouTube where my wife and I share home recordings of our twins, and embed them on our sites. The ease at which we can port YouTube content to Facebook, FriendFeed and blogs is a big reason we use them above any other competitor.

7. Google Maps

Ever since I acquired a GPS unit for my car, my reliance on Google Maps has plummeted. But if in a pinch, if in another car, or needing to look up a route quickly on my iPhone, there is no substitute. While I once used Mapquest to find my frequently-lost self around town, Google Maps is now the trusted standard. As TechCrunch recently noted, only Google was sharp enough to recognize the recent closure of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, alerting potential travelers accurately.

8. Google Chrome

A decade following the peak of the initial browser wars, between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, we have an interesting tussle for browser market share once again, this time involving Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Apple. (With Opera still not dead yet) The debut of Chrome, first for Windows and Linux PCs, with stable Chromium builds for Mac here as well, introduced more stable browsing, simplified favorite pages, and speedy load times. Let not the low ranking fool you - compared to Schmidt's #1 position. For me, it's a good product, but not the market leader in the way its brethren Google Reader, FeedBurner and Search are.

9. Google Desktop

Google Desktop brings the power of Google Search to your desktop files - helping to find everything from text files and e-mails to rich media content embedded in office documents. While in years past, much of its functionality could be found in Apple's Spotlight, or the Mac's integrated search in Finder, the latter is just too slow and unreliable, with Google Desktop gives you the familiar and trusted approach you know from the Web. Its ability to crawl through previous dates to see when documents were created is especially useful.

10. Google Analytics

Few self-respecting bloggers go too far away from their Web traffic statistics, and many have two, three or more packages going simultaneously, to ensure they have enough datapoints to consider themselves experts. For no cost, Google Analytics provides detailed stastics, not just for the last 4,000 visitors (as Sitemeter does), but for all visitors, letting you compare time periods, dive deep into demographics of visitors, and see trends in your publishing and content.

Close but not included: AppSpot, iGoogle, Google AdWords, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Finance, Google Groups, Google News

What are your top ten Google Applications? Did I miss your favorite?

Ev and Biz Discuss Early Days of Blogger After 10th Anniversary

Today, the Web is lit up with reports of vulnerabilities in the geeky Web blogging platform, WordPress. Meanwhile, quietly, its predecessor, sporting 300 million active readers (measured on a 30-day basis), with nearly 400 million words added per day, Blogger, the platform I use, continues to chug away. Often seen as a blogging platform for the less technical Web user, Blogger, recently achieved its 10th anniversary, and invited its founders back to the fold to commemorate the milestone - including Evan Williams and Biz Stone, now better known for their work on Twitter, which has introduced a new form of Web communication to the world, commonly known as microblogging.

On a panel held this Tuesday at the San Francisco office of Google, who owns Blogger after its 2003 acquisition from Pyra Labs, the pair, along with a pair of Blogger representatives, and a few power users of the platform (myself included), looked back on the previous decade and how the world has changed over the years.

When Pyra Labs launched Blogger as a side-project, it was widely perceived that bloggers were "crazy", Ev said. "Who are you to think anybody cares about what you have to say?" he recounted. "It was blasphemy in a lot of ways, and now it is an accepted thing. All that has happened and created freedom of speech in areas and countries that never had them. What now?"

Not surprisingly, the same comments about "who cares" are now often thrown at those pushing their status updates through Twitter and Facebook multiple times a day. While others had doubts, Ev, Biz and others saw opportunity.

"It is just a realization of the potential of the Web - democratized media where everybody has a voice," Ev said Tuesday. "Like most mediums, it takes a while to figure out what to do with them. For years, technically anybody could put things on the Web, but we didn't know what the form was."

Ev's idea is something that is standard practice now, but broke the mold of publishing that had preceded it by decades, if not centuries. "The newest stuff goes to the top, and it doesn't need to fill a page," he recounted. "Now, we work at Twitter, and it is an extension of the same thing. It is very complementary to Blogger and the Web in general."

According to stats released by Blogger this week, the number of active contributors, numbering in the millions, has more than doubled in the last two years, and about a quarter trillion words have been written on Blogger since it launched in 1999. This move is a fulfillment of the vision seen by Ev, and Biz, who worked with Xanga and Pyra Labs before co-founding Twitter.

Biz, taking a longer-term view said, "Over the last ten years, it's like we have been watching a shift in how people communicate. They are moving into new realms, and Blogger was at the beginning of this." He added, "What we are all doing is experimenting. We are finding new ways to add nuance. I have an optimistic view of it, in that we are trying something new. If a user pisses off enough people, it's not going to work."

While Biz and Ev may have been ahead of the game in creating and promoting Blogger (and now Twitter), they don't consider themselves visionaries, only that they were able to capitalize on a new medium, seizing trends and making them easier to achieve.

"A year or two in (to working at Pyra Labs), we said blogging was going to be a big deal," said Ev. "People could publish to the Web whenever they wanted."

Ten years in, the team at Google sees that Blogger is more than just a publishing platform, but also, a great way for them to expand the visibility and evangelize the ever-increasing family of Google products. Rick Klau, product manager for Blogger, who arrived at Google following the FeedBurner acquisition, explained:

"We are a big distribution platform for a lot of other Google products," Rick said. "The minute something is launched for Blogger, you can scale to millions of users and hundreds of millions of interactions, per day. If you think narrowly of Blogger as a publishing platform for individuals, how can we make it easier to fix the other pieces of the puzzle?"

The early days of Blogger ran into some of the same perception issues many people have around Twitter, particularly when it comes to the level of spam on the service. But the Google team has been working to dramatically lower the amount of junk blogs (or 'splogs') on Blogger.

"If you dial back the clock two to three years, Blogspot had a lot of spam," Rick said. "That could have limited adoption, or contributed to people moving. We talk every week at our team meetings, what percentage of page views do we believe to spam in the last seven days. That's in the low single digits now, and has consistently gone down."

Amusingly, prior to Google's acquisition of Blogger, Biz and Ev pioneered the integration of AdSense on all blogs on the service, but on Tuesday, they admitted they actually made more money from customers paying to opt out of ads than they ever did from ad revenue. Now, of course, Blogger has introduced a "Monetize" tab, so users can easily integrate AdSense and make money for Google, which Rick Klau said led to adoption that wasn't just "hockey stick" growth, but like "a cliff".

With time, blogs became less about egos, or even in driving ad dollars, but instead, play a role much like journalism, where many are taken very seriously, Ev observed.

"The tone changed from this being drivel from egocentric people, to something being powerful to share their voice with the world," Ev said. Everything would have been surprising to view it from the 1999-2000 perspective. We started Blogger as a side project, which we wanted to draw attention to our real product. It took me a year to shake that notion and kill the other product. The idea that it would shape the lives of millions of people was out of the realm of possibility. There were more people able to publish more things more quickly, which was very powerful."

This empowerment of the user led to a number of small changes at Blogger, including one where Biz said they altered buttons to say "I Power Blogger" from the previous "Powered By Blogger".

"We realized that it's not your technology making this happen, but everyone using it and the decisions you are making. It's doing its own thing now," Biz said.

As I have said a few times, as much as we may enjoy the technology required to get our conversations and observations online, it is more about what is delivered than how it happens. Twitter, Blogger and all these tools are infrastructure, and often, the community can help drive a product as much as the product can drive the community. Ev and Biz look to have struck gold twice, and ten years in, despite fierce competition from Wordpress, TypePad and other services, Blogger continues to grow.

Blogger Quietly Turns Ten, Plans Slew of Feature Upgrades

Sunday, August 23rd came and went without a peep from Google's Blogger Team, despite the service celebrating its tenth anniversary from its initial founding at Pyra Labs. Cynically, you might construe this silence as Google's not making the product a top priority, or maybe, you could even think that Blogger is ceding the visibility game to other challengers, such as WordPress. But that's far from the case. While WordPress might have a higher level of geek cred, Blogger has many more users, and the company has prepared a slew of updates that should roll out in the next few weeks - which will be welcomed. Don't expect a mass revamp on the level of a "2.0" moniker, but instead, many smaller iterations, either catching up to the competition, or taking advantage of the service's large installed base.

Interestingly, Blogger mentioned their upcoming 10-year mark back on June 18th, and again, this last week, on August 17th, when they said: "we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features..."

In a given day, I get the opportunity to publish to WordPress, TypePad and Blogger, assuming I update blogs here, at work, or make an addition to my mom's site - still going strong since 2004. Each has its unique differences and challenges. I know that by sticking with Blogger, I've gained some benefits with ease of publishing, and some downsides as advanced widgets make their way to other platforms first. But if I thought the platform were standing still, I'd have jumped, and I know it's not. I'm looking forward to the new releases, as they happen, and congratulate the team on their hitting the big 1-0. Expect more news soon.

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

Conversations on Google Reader Shared Items Are Booming

For the world's leading RSS reader, integrating social functions hasn't always been drop-dead simple and easy. With each new addition, be it the recent "Send To" features, the addition of "likes", or the ability to selectively enable friends to make comments on your shared items, the service needs to scale in a way that has brought many other Web-based feed readers to its knees - compounded by Google Reader's accelerating user base. And while the company works to make sharing and engaging simpler, I am already seeing a rapid rise in conversations within Google Reader, both on my own posts, and on those from others I share. Recently, the total number of comments on some posts has even eclipsed those natively here on my site, or on FriendFeed, Facebook or anywhere else.


Almost 600 people can comment on my Reader shares.
Since starting my shared items link blog in Google Reader a few years ago, I've passed along almost 10,000 links (a point I may pass by the end of the month). I recognize my pace of sharing between 20 and 30 items a day is on the high end, but these selections represent the top 4 to 5% of all articles I see online, with the intent of passing on only the best to those who consume the shares downstream. I've even had some people say they have unsubscribed from reading feeds directly, trusting me to be a human filter. That's a little daunting, but a task I can take.

You might remember that back in March, Google turned on comments on these shared items. Though activity was initially slow, I have seen increased velocity, especially after reorganizing my contacts.

As Google Reader does not have public comments on shared items that are visible to everyone, they have taken the middle road - showing these comments to those who are also subscribed to the shares, and only enabling those people to comment who have been added to a specific group by the sharer. After several hundred people had signed up to follow my shares, and I was seeing only a little activity, I realized the problem was mine, so I took some time to organize all my contacts, and enable everyone who follows with the ability to comment, just like in FriendFeed or Facebook. This part is critical, so if you do have a lot of people following your shares, go to your sharing settings in reader, and make sure that they are in a folder that has access.


Each of My Friends Is In a Group that Has Access to Commenting


This Article On Lazyfeed saw Dozens of Comments In Google Reader
With that change, people who may previously have been watching the shares go by, but couldn't comment, now can - and the results have been very interesting. Some of the more popular threads on shares from me have seen on the order of dozens of comments, even when the original post may only have shown a handful on the original blog.


Another Popular Topic of Discussion Within the Reader Shares
While a few years ago, this could have been considered the end of the world by some bloggers, the social Web has grown to understand that distributed conversations are taking place. By Google Reader enabling conversations to happen through their application, readers can act on the news immediately, without having to open a new window and participate there. It's also had me rethinking whether I should be self-sharing, in effect sharing my own posts when they get into Reader. I've personally tried to share only a subset of what I consider the best, but now that I have seen people engage right from within the app, it makes me think I should just share them all and enable the comments to take place where my readers are comfortable.

Now, every time I log into Google Reader, not only do I see new feed items to read, but I see new follower requests looking to see the shared link blog - and also, in bold, a "Comment View" which takes me to see all the comments, not just on items that I have shared, but on items shared by people whose shares that I follow. Google Reader, in a matter of months, has become a very serious part of the conversation. In light of the uncertainty around FriendFeed and how that company will integrate with Facebook, I am betting that some people are looking back at their RSS reader for information consumption and now, social discussion.

So go ahead, comment on my items in Google Reader. I don't need all the comments here. To find my shared items, head to: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/louisgray, and let's get connected.

Google Alerts Gets PubSubHubbub, Real-Time Programmable Hooks

The Web is speeding up, and Google is playing a big role in making how we get our information faster - no matter its type. Recently, a pair of the company's engineers, Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick, have teamed up to roll out a new protocol, PubSubHubbub, to accelerate just about every major part of the Google sphere in which I play - from Google Reader shared items to FeedBurner, Blogger and today, Google Alerts.

If you thought Google Alerts was fast before, it's like Google went out and gave it an entirely new engine. Now, if I Google comes across a term I am tracking, I can expect to get near-instant updates saying it has been found. In a blog post today, Slatkin says its more than just about getting these terms faster and quicker, but also to help developers create tools and write Web applications that take advantage of this functionality. He writes, "Think of it as an AJAX search API that tells *you* when it finds new results. Acting upon these notifications your app could update your website, email friends, send an SMS -- the possibilities are endless."

Thus far, I've never really considered Google Alerts as a potential development platform, but as Slatkin suggests, the opportunity is now there to create an entire family of applications pointed at Alerts, much like others have pointed to the company's Maps product to make interesting mashups.

Anything that can help the Web get quicker, aid discovery, and enable even sharper apps is exciting, and I've been watching the developments with PubSubHubbub very closely. If I were a developer making a news discovery product based on topics (like Technorati or Lazyfeed, for example), I would check and see how I could tap into this real-time firehose for Google Alerts.

Google has been dinged, relative to Twitter and others, for not owning the real-time search race. But as the PubSubHubbub religion gets propagated, I think it is pretty clear where this is all headed. Not only will Google get this real-time space and lead again, but they are helping developers by enabling access to quality code and the best data faster than ever before.