Communicating in the Age of Streams: Ubiquity, Multiplicity, Visibility

The rate at which information is being produced shows no sign of slowing down, and humans are adapting to the onslaught of this so-called firehose by having shorter attention spans and filtering out information they aren't much interested in, so that it fades into the background as noise. In parallel, information is getting ever decentralized, and conversations are taking place in an infinite number of places, which makes the task of participating in every relevant conversation a practical impossibility. As this has happened, the model of dedicated Web sites, and even blogs, can look extremely outdated - aiming to act as centralized destinations in a world of streams. Edelman vice president Steve Rubel, who recently moved his blog to a lifestreaming format, based on Posterous, explained at Blog World Expo how he takes on the stream and helps his clients gain visibility in the fast-moving world.

Rubel, who created the highly popular MicroPersuasion blog back in 2004 and updated it multiple times a day before moving to the lifestream earlier this year, said "we are reaching a critical breaking point" when it comes to the information firehose, adding, "information is going to continue to scale, but human attention doesn't scale, so we have to think about how each of us manages it."

You no doubt have seen some of the more aggressive ways to tackle information overload including "In Box Zero", "Mark All as Read Day" or even "E-mail bankruptcy" - all essentially differing forms of throwing in the towel and admitting failure. Steve quoted recent studies showing that the average person in the US visits 111 different domains in a month, and approximately 2,500 Web pages a month, as people are making choices in terms of where they spend their time, and what pieces of information they choose to respond to. And one of those places that usually isn't getting a lot of their attention? Company Web sites and old-fashioned blogs.

Steve suggested that one of the major reasons that Twitter exploded was because it centralized all these diverse conversations and put them in one place, also leaning on short forms of communication, adding that on average, people only read about 20 percent of the Web page before moving on. Much of the reason for their shorter attention spans? More data, coming ever more quickly.

"Everything is moving faster now, whether you like it or not," he said. "It's like a sushi duck moving past at 100 miles an hour with 1,000 different options. How do you make sure you get selected and stand out?"

Instead of fighting against the stream and forcing people to come back to the originating hub, Steve started to think that maybe his blog "didn't matter as much any more", and appeared "archaic". Now, he is posting content, via Posterous, to his lifestream and also each of the spokes (like Flickr, Delicious, etc.) and participating where that content gainst traction - essentially creating a very customizable hub and spoke model that has his own personal brand and the flexibility to put the right content in the right place.

For companies and businesses looking to take on the streams, Steve highlighted three major imperatives to not only just broadcast, but to ensure quality engagement - including ubiquity, multiplicity and diversity of message, and finally, discovery and visibility. The new lifestream-powered Web sites would enable companies and brands to be "everywhere stakeholders are spending time", and enable the opportunity for different stories in different venues in different formats, avoiding a one size fits all approach.

The stream is real. Whether you call it the flow, as Stowe Boyd has, or the River of News, as Dave Winer has, the firehose is pushing more data our way faster than ever. IT could be that the lifestream is an answer.

For more on lifestreaming, make sure to check out Mark Krynsky's Lifestreamblog.com.

FriendBinder's Social Aggregation Console Open for All

More than a year ago, we first talked about FriendBinder, which was one of many services offering lifestreaming capabilities, aggregating your information from different social networks, and letting you follow friends from each network in one place. It didn't have the polish of other sites, like FriendFeed, the high visibility of networks like Facebook, or the dollars behind it like Plaxo and MyBlogLog. But what it did offer was the ability to "tier" friends in terms of how interested you were in their updates, and to act as a console. But it wasn't open to everybody, until earlier this week, when developer Richard Cunningham finally opened the doors.


FriendBinder Pulls Updates from Around the Web (Interest Level: 5)
In the wake of FriendFeed's buyout from Facebook, and the siren's call that is Twitter, social networking users are no doubt reticent to invest time into "yet another network" or "yet another aggregator", especially as many of the aggregation functions that were once enough to launch a separate site are now being incorporated by the giants (see: Facebook). But FriendBinder has some interesting features worth taking a look at.


Comments and Likes from Facebook Are Streamed to FriendBinder
Since its initial release, FriendBinder has benefited from enhancements by some of the larger sites. By pulling in data from Facebook friends in FriendBinder, I can see comments and likes from within the site, and can even make comments to Facebook from within FriendBinder. In addition, Twitter replies and direct messages are displayed on the left side, in their own stream, letting me respond from within FriendBinder.


I Can Update My Twitter and Facebook Status from FriendBinder
Also, in parallel with Facebook and SocialToo both announcing ways for you to update your Facebook and Twitter followers simultaneously, this is something FriendBinder does as well.

FriendBinder's goal is not to be a social network. It doesn't have any native content owned by the service, nor does it have likes and comments or distinct connections on the service that make others social. But it does find all your friends' updates in one place, without requiring them to join. You can import your profiles from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Last.FM.

To check out FriendBinder, go to http://www.friendbinder.com.

Blogging Is Still the Foundation In A World of Streams

Last week, Edelman's Steve Rubel made an aggressive jump - away from traditional blogging, turning over his site to a lifestream, which captures all of his activity from around the Web. His move, he reported, was due to a feeling that blogging "feels old" and that the new reality is about the flow of information. This followed on to a conversation he, Steve Gillmor and I had a month or so ago, which led to my post saying that RSS felt slow. But while I see some of the same issues Steve has, I haven't made a full move away from the blog, don't ever plan to do so, and for any company I give advice to, I tell them to do so would be a mistake.

The blog is the foundation and center for who you are - either as an individual, or a brand. While I believe the best bloggers in the world are participating outside of their blog, on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and everywhere else, to only participate in those areas leaves a gaping hole. The world of lifestreaming and real-time is fun, but it can be as deep as a soap opera in a world that still demands insightful documentaries and news reporting.

In August of 2007, I said there was a new reality and that "Your Blog Is Your Brand". Most of you weren't reading me back then, but it holds as true now as it did two years ago.

Fellow blogger Jeremiah Owyang added his thoughts on the issue last week, asking, Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams? Interestingly, he noticed that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, who were the authors of Naked Conversations, were now more focused on micromedia (FriendFeed and Twitter) than they were on their own blogs. It's a big reason why Mike Arrington told Robert he needed an intervention at the end of 2008. (Amusingly, Robert is going 'blog only' this week...)



In the last two years, the rise of microblogging tools and lifestreaming services has given blogging a less-prominent role on everyone's tongues, but it, in my opinion, is as important as ever. One just needs to make a conscious decision as to what type of data is most appropriate where. Longer, more thoughtful pieces with graphics and type style should go on blogs. Maybe a few photos and text go to FriendFeed or Facebook, and short status updates go to Twitter. The addition of more options shouldn't mean the elimination of the original.


The Blog Is Still the Foundation
In a presentation I gave to one company this week, I stated the same - I said the corporate blog is the foundation of your entire social media strategy. It may make sense to have secondary and tertiary blogs, but if you tried to just use Twitter and other services and neglect the blog, you would a failure from the beginning.

Blogging is not for everyone or every company. Blasphemy, I know. But it is work, and it can never be stopped. Once you start, there is no finish line, until you drop and become a 24 hour trending topic on Twitter. But blogs are your public whiteboard - extending your voice to your peers, your family, friends, or in the business world, your customers, prospects, partners, competition, press and analysts, and of course, your own employees. 140 characters just isn't enough.

Amplifeeder to Soon Release Open Source Lifestream Platform

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

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

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


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

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

You Can Post Directly To Amplifeeder


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


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


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

Kakuteru - Roll Your Own FriendFeed On Your Own Site

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

Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.

Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!

Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.

Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.

Okay, so what's so special about this?

• The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customization
• Semantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.com
• Related articles & tweets are shown for each entry.
• Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.

Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.

Oh, and did I mention it's open source?

Out of the box:


It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.



Extra integration:

Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.


Activity stats:

One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?

Final verdict:

I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.

Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Strands Goes Mobile With New iPhone Interface

Last month, I said I believed there were three major trends in the future of social media: Unified accounts, transparency with connections to the real world, and adaptation to the mobile Web. As more consumers, including me, are seeing an increasing amount of their Web activity taking place on mobile devices, the need to create customized interfaces for all those iPhones, Android-capable handsets and Blackberries is getting ever more important, and those that don't do a good job of it will find their growth stunted.

Today, Strands, the social content discovery service which at times has drawn comparisons to FriendFeed and Plaxo, took a major step forward with the introduction of their new iPhone-optimized mobile site, found at http://m.strands.com.


Strands Mobile, In Action, On My iPhone
Back in August, when I first discussed the lifestreaming site's beta offering, I found myself fairly critical of its user interface, saying it minimized some of the best features, including the actual feeds from your friends' activity. In the last few months, thanks to feedback from its growing user base, the team has doubled down efforts to simplify the UI, and they managed to do well enough that the site works well, even in my 3.5" wide iPhone.


Features Like "Hot Posts" and "Discovery" Are Available On Mobile Strands
As one would expect, the mobile Strands offering operates the same way as its online companion does. You can see most recent updates from those you follow, see "Hot Posts", "Discover" new people who you might not be following, view your list of friends, and even read your in box, which can fill up with people taking action on your items, be it to make a comment, or simply flagging a "like" using their thumbs up. And you can participate by clicking the thumbs up or making comments yourself, right on the phone.


You Can Also Check Your Inbox Or Followers Via Mobile
Diehard Strands aficionados will no doubt appreciate the new introduction, taking the burgeoning social network on the go. If you are an iPhone addict, like me, make sure you bookmark their new site, and send feedback if you find issues. You can also check out an introductory video on their blog, here.

FriendFeed Offers Twitter A Chance to Play Lifestream

When FriendFeed first gained significant traction early this spring, coming at the same time as Twitter was struggling with uptime issues and a reduced feature set, bloggers were abuzz with the idea that FriendFeed could replace Twitter outright. The excitement around the social aggregation site at times was so white hot, it was thought the team would soon render popular tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader unnecessary. Rather than eliminate other services in the ecosystem, FriendFeed has instead, over the last several months, added support for many more services, and introduced upgrades that have made it even further integrated with those same sites, Facebook and Twitter.

Today, FriendFeed introduced a set of features that lets users update Twitter with all their FriendFeed activity, based on their own preferences - be it with native FriendFeed entries, or shares from popular sites, be they Disqus, Last.fm, YouTube, Flickr and many more.

The result essentially turns the lifestreaming functionality on its head. Rather than just have Twitter play a major role in inputting entries in user's feeds, FriendFeed now gives Twitter the chance to do more than operate as a microblogging tool, taking your personal FriendFeed, and mirroring it back Twitter's direction.


I've set up a number of services on FriendFeed to reflect back to Twitter.
Despite having served as one of the more vocal proponents of FriendFeed, I don't see that everything I do on the site needs to fill my Twitter stream. I won't be adding my FriendFeed comments to Twitter, nor will I be adding the vast majority of my social activity around the Web, including Google Reader shares, Delicious bookmarks, or comments, be they on FriendFeed, Disqus or BackType. After a certain point, the ensuing waterfall of updates would be certain to leave my in box full of Qwitter notifications.


A native post I made to FriendFeed was bounced to Twitter as well.
What I will be doing is notifying Twitter on native FriendFeed shared items, including all the iPhone pictures I take of the twins and send in via e-mail, as well as new blog posts, SmugMug shares and YouTube postings. This will effectively eliminate my need to use TinyURL for new blog posts, and probably will erode my use of Posty, TweetDeck or other Twitter applications. But as the integration is with Twitter only, Identi.ca and other microblogging services don't get any of the love.

Will Twitter's new role as a mainstream erode FriendFeed's differentiation? I don't believe so. The site is still all about following friends' feeds, and not just aggregating your updates. It's also become a strong platform for discussion and engagement. As links back to FriendFeed begin to increasingly populate Twitter, it should drive even more traffic their way, as both services aid one another, padding their lead in their respective markets.

Is Lifestreaming a Catalyst for What's Coming After Web 2.0?

By Mark Krynsky of Lifestream Blog (FriendFeed/Twitter)

There has been lots of rumbling lately about what the successor to web 2.0 will look like. Along with that, even more attention has been spent trying to determine what to name it. My post isn't to discuss semantics (pun intended) but more to provide some of my thoughts based on what I've been observing.

I feel lifestreaming, which I evangelize and cover incessantly, has become a catalyst for much of what's coming next. I feel we will see some of the core elements of lifestreaming penetrate other areas and watch many benefits become realized.

Companies are slowly starting to understand social media. They should also start thinking about how to improve communication internally for a well informed workforce. Creating rich workstreams by aggregating real-time data on an internal network can help achieve this. I see a resurgence of rich intranets like this starting to happen soon.

Data aggregation continues to re-invent itself in other useful ways. I was excited when I first started using Mint.com as I saw it as essentially a vertical lifestream. In this case it was aggregating all my financial accounts to provide a real-time "financestream". But that's not all that Mint.com does. It's a very special service and it actually provides the bridge to two areas where I see the web going next, recommendation engines and moving apps to the cloud.

Many services are getting really good at collecting the data and providing ways for us to interact with it. But that will only take us so far. The next phase will be creating intelligence based on the data. The first step to that will be recommendation engines. Strands provides several services including lifestreaming and has recently put up a prize to help them improve this technology. Mint.com provides recommendations on how to save money based on the data. I'm sure we will continue to see these engines applied to many new areas and perfected as they become mature.

By having more and more of my data living online it becomes increasingly difficult for certain apps to be effectively maintained on my local computer, which brings me back to Mint. I was a heavy duty Quicken user, but now it's become cumbersome having to pull in all my data. Add to that how powerful mobile phones are becoming, the pain involved with trying to sync data across multiple devices we own, and the answer seems clear. Many users will start the migration path of moving their apps to the cloud. Tying back to work again, my primary tool for managing website production is the Clocking IT service. So here I have an app hosted in the cloud accessible anywhere on multiple devices that also offers a real-time stream to co-workers.

What have you been observing? What do you think is going to start taking off?

Read more by Mark Krynsky at Lifestream Blog.

After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp

Personal feed aggregators with social elements have been one of the more popular services to gain traction in 2008. With services like FriendFeed, Social Median, Strands, SocialThing, Profilactic and others all finding a niche, some larger than others, it's clear that people are looking to consolidate their online activities, and share the results with friends. One of the more odd attempts is that of chi.mp, which lets you have your own .mp "domain", and helps you build a personal page, connect with friends and add services. While it can be fun to think of interesting names that end with .mp (du.mp, clu.mp, pi.mp, ru.mp, bu.mp, bli.mp, stu.mp, thu.mp, ca.mp, sta.mp, pu.mp and forrestgu.mp all come to mind), the end result isn't all that compelling. Unless we are being measured by the sheer quantity of online services we register for, and by how many places we can connect to the same people, I don't really see the point.

Chi.mp calls itself a content hub and identity management platform. While its site is clean and its marketing well-intended, offering a "dashboard for your digital life", the end result turns out to be much less. While its user profiles look like they borrowed a page from Facebook, and the idea of aggregating feeds sounds like FriendFeed, it ends up instead being a cartoony version of an online business card that calls out only the most basic social services.


Adding Services Via Chi.mp Is Easy, But Limited
From the chi.mp dashboard, you can add some of the standard services, but not a huge number. And just because you add a service doesn't mean it's pulling in your data. I added Twitter when I signed up, and despite posting a few tweets, my new chi.mp site, hiding at techpu.mp, hasn't figured that out.

Looking at the chi.mp sites built by others shows pictures from Flickr and Facebook, and headlines of their RSS feeds. But there's no question that the service isn't going to take on the larger players. The pages are static and don't enable discussion. And no matter how many friends you discover on the site, you don't get alerts if you visit their pages. So now, I find myself getting hit with invitation requests from folks to become contacts on the site. It's clear I don't know why I would do it, and just maybe, they don't know either.

No wonder CNET quoted one observer back in April as saying, ""I'll tell you what Chi.mp is. It's venture money getting set on fire." Now, I'm usually happy to give new Web services a chance and see potential, but unless there is a major overhaul here to chi.mp, which would deliver greater service support, faster RSS pulls, and real social interaction, there's just no point. Now I feel like a monkey for even signing up.

Just Wishing for Something to Go Mainstream Won't Make It So

After participating in two panels and seeing others in the three-day Blog World Expo this weekend, there were a number of repeating elements. First, Twitter has recovered from its near-fatal issues and is becoming a must-use tool for more attendees, who are using it for conversation and news discovery. Second, a concern that while we may be using services for microblogging, life streaming, videocasting and news aggregation, that we are the odd ones, and that the services we like are nowhere near the mainstream. But while I continued to hear this chorus of people saying Twitter was either not in the mainstream or just entering it, or declarations that FriendFeed and blog comment engines, like Disqus were not anywhere near the mainstream, I heard very few suggestions on how these products could cross the chasm. It's as if many thought you could, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, click our heels together three times, and find all to be well.

As I mentioned on Sunday afternoon's panel around distributed comments and fragmented conversations, we could very well have been having these same debates about whether other technologies would go mainstream just 10 or 15 years ago. Would AOL ever go mainstream? What about e-mail? Instant messaging? Texting by SMS? GPS? All of these are strong examples of products that may have seemed "out there" on the edge to many at first before becoming part of our every day lives. While Friendster didn't take the world by storm, MySpace did, with Facebook quick to follow. It's possible that the ubiquitous nature we see today with e-mail could be what we see with Twitter, or other similar services, in a few years.

There seems to be a general impatience among the early adopter and fast follower crowds to take the products we all like and use and expand their use to new groups. There's a desire to convert one's friends and colleagues to have the same kind of lust for gadgetry and Web applications as we have, and to adopt them with the same fervor. But we need to understand that with the vast majority of society, change is very hard. Adoption of the unknown is very hard, and it may take multiple incidents of exposure to have something that seems daunting seem comfortable, such that it's accepted and adopted.

On Friday, in my first panel, on micromedia, I was asked what it would take to "take Twitter mainstream", and I only half-jokingly said it would take a scandal involving a well-known celebrity which would lead to the service's exposure in a saturated media environment. Would the market that reads Perez Hilton, People and US Weekly discover Twitter or other similar services if somebody like Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake were using it? What if their tweets were splashed all over E! or Access Hollywood? I bet they would sign up.

In today's panel it was said that the theoretical gap between us "early adopters" and the mainstream isn't really all that much - we just choose to participate in different places. While some of us are Twittering, others are texting. While some of us are blogging, others are Facebooking. While some of us are sharing items and talking on FriendFeed, others are using forums on topics they follow. People have been using technology to form relationships and share news or conversations for years, but the tools to do so are ever-evolving.

I'd venture to say that it's no secret that not every technology we early adopters fall in love with will succeed in the way Google and MySpace have succeeded. But with exceptions made for company viability and competition, there's really no race or timetable to get services to cross the chasm from us on the edge to those later adopters. It takes time. It takes effort, and repeat viewings. Quick demos of products that would have us salivating may simply spark curiosity in those less likely to jump in with two feet.

On Friday, we discussed the dissemination of today's news was to tell 10 who tell 100 who tell 1,000. So it is with these services. If the 1,000 of us continue to tell this same 1,000 about the same items ad infinitum, we will never see growth and adoption outside our little world. The mainstream has proven they can grasp technology like e-mail and IM, texting and Web browsing. With time and ease of use, they can get these newer products as well, but it will take more than us just talking about it to get it done. We need to be patient, and act as guides when that time comes, rather than demanding change overnight and expecting someone else to do the work.

Bret Taylor on FriendFeed's Road to Monetization, Early Surprises

This evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor spoke about the popular aggregation and lifestreaming service's early months, explained what he and the team are trying to do through developing the site, and what we can expect from FriendFeed, as the company builds plans to monetize and further expand its growing user base. The panel, moderated by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, also saw participation by angel investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Leah Culver of Pownce, and Loic LeMeur of Seesmic.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Bret's presentation stated that FriendFeed, which currently supports 43 different Web services, and is now tracking greater than 100 million individual entries, is designed primarily to enable content discovery and social media consumption through a shared experience with friends and peers.

Growing Crazy Fast After a Slow Start

In front of an audience at the Stanford School of Business, Bret, in a quick presentation utilizing Apple's Keynote, recounted the team's reaction to the site's initial traffic spike following launch coverage in the New York Times and TechCrunch which evaporated in mere days. He said it took four months to return to the initial activity level, in between which the team went through varying stages of excitement, strategizing, realism and depression, while they openly questioned what they might have been doing wrong - having a history of successful product launches at Google. However, not too long later, traffic began to balloon in the beginning of 2008, reaching a hockey stick spike from March to June, during which the team's excitement turned to sheer panic, as they looked to scale their product and maintain speed and reliability amidst unprecedented demand.

Initial Development Missteps or Oversights

When FriendFeed added the ability to "like" items and make comments to a friend's feed, it opened up the opportunity for significant discussion among peers, and helped catapult the site from a simple aggregator to a destination site for many. But Bret admitted the team didn't anticipate the success these additions would have, and they didn't put as much development work into fleshing out those features.

As he said yesterday evening, "The discussion parts of our site have been almost the sole driver of our growth. It's been interesting to watch, and in retrospect, it was obvious. It was initially one of the underdeveloped parts of our site."

Also, while FriendFeed has been lauded for their highly-capable "hide" features, letting you block individual posts, posters, or services, there have been many requests for better ways to filter through the noise and find information that's most suited to your own likes and dislikes. But so far, the team is still playing catch-up. Bret added, "For the one year or so we have existed, we put less into relevancy and more into filtering tools. We are working on relevancy now. It's reflected in the different ways that people use a feed reader, as some see it as a new e-mail box and others ask to show the things that are interesting right now."

Handling Competition From All Sides

Swisher asked, as many do, if there are too many sites in the lifestreaming space, as there were too many calendaring sites in the Web 1.0 timeframe. She speculated that by the time the Web 2.0 shakeout occurs, that maybe three will survive and one, like Google with horizontal search, will end up with the lion's share.

Bret said that the lifestreaming space is a new category, and that it was "healthy" for many people to be working on "the content discovery problem". With the advent of syndication formats like RSS and social networking, he said subtle differences would be very important, and that on the Web, there is a history of natural fragmentation that enables niche sites to succeed. However, he did warn against sites adding so many features that they miss their core position. He said, "Every application grows until it has e-mail. Every Web site grows until it has all the features of a social network."

On Staying Independent

Every few weeks, somebody seemingly speculates that FriendFeed would make a great acquisition target for somebody, and the name that almost always comes up is Google, where the team's co-founders were last employed. But, as he and Paul Buchheit have consistently said, Bret again repeated the plan is not to sell the company, even if the road to business success isn't 100 percent clear.

"We're not interested in selling. We wanted to forge our own culture, to create a sustainable company," Bret said. "We have different perspectives on how to build a company of scale, and we want to build a company that scales."

Finding an Eventual, Sustainable, Business Model

Bret said the $5 million in seed funding FriendFeed raised this Spring was done anticipating the economic downturn, enabling the company to have a long runway before seeing the cash disappear. The team's hope, he said, was to find an advertising-based solution that delivers revenue without damaging the user experience. As he said, in response to questions from Kara Swisher, "there is a huge spectrum in the effectiveness of advertising," from ads that have high click-through rates, like those from Google AdWords, to the less-targeted AdSense, which delivers low conversion rates and "lots of accidental clicks." For FriendFeed, he speculated the site was "somewhere in the middle, but hopefully on the good end," where if links were mixed into the service that were sponsored, they would be done in line more with users' experience than image ads adorning the sides of the browser.

While Swisher coyly teased some of the panelists about their being "pre-revenue", Bret said one of the keys to launching a successful business model in the Web 2.0 atmosphere would be to not do so too early, and when they do, to do so in a way that is both quantifiable and analytical. "It makes no sense to try and monetize when you have only 2,000 users," Bret said. "It's too early and the early adopter audience does not reflect the behavior of mainstream users." He cited the early successes of Overture and Google AdWords as forging the quantifiable advertising market, but admitted they weren't yet sure how ads on FriendFeed would work. "We want to experiment enough to not run out of money before having to raise more, or we will have a sustainable business," he said.

What's Coming Next

Bret clearly hinted at a move to improve relevancy, and help users find signal in the noise. The team added "top" posts of the day not too long ago to help use the wisdom of crowds, and that feature could be improved. It's clear ads are coming, but maybe not immediately, as the company continues to try and scale in terms of users before worrying much about revenue. He also gave praise to the search engine that returns results just from your friends, but said it could be improved, as missing a result in FriendFeed would be much more impactful than a missing search result in Google. But he also spoke of "focus" and doing "one thing well", so it could be that those of us asking for messaging features aren't going to get our wish.

One thing you can expect FriendFeed not to do is to immediately give in to the demands from the early adopter tech geek set, who can at times be very demanding. While Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur said the "tech geeks and geek press would have you make products for the geeks," Kara Swisher helpfully added that group was pretty small to begin with. "It's 14 slightly-overweight white guys," she offered.

Strands Upgrades to Highlight Friends' Updates, Content Sharing

Last month, I took a look at an early version of Strands, a social services aggregator and lifestreaming service, and said it was high on potential, but needed to make a number of changes, to better highlight its users' shared content, and encourage community, to bring it more in line with more established players, like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed. Today, the site rolled out a number of enhancements aimed to help bridge that gap.

First of all, over the last three weeks, the user base for Strands has grown significantly. For example, Drew Olanoff, the site's community manager, has seen the number of people he follows rise from 78 on August 23rd, to 193 today, an increase of almost 150%, following increased visibility. And the site's default "Strands" account shows 267 followers today, making it the most-followed account, though it's not clear what percentage of total users continue to follow it upon signing up. While that's not the tens of thousands said to use Twitter and FriendFeed, for example, it's a start, and the growth rate is good.



Also in August, I said Strands needed to better highlight the "Home" feed, which shows updates from those you follow. Today, they made this "strand", the center column, have a much higher level of visibility, making it the core of the site, as they should.


Additionally, in line with my suggestions, Strands cleaned up its interface by removing lightbox elements, and added a new "share something" box, to let you post content directly to the site.

Unlike the aforementioned Pulse and FriendFeed, Strands is much more music-centric than the other networks, thanks to its origins, which you can see on MyStrands. The result is that, at least for me, the flood of music updates from those I follow tends to drown out much of the other content there, much like Twitter did on FriendFeed prior to the introduction of the "Hide" function. This is especially true as user updates seem to come in chunks, for instance, saying that a friend may have listened to eight different tracks "less than a minute ago".


In contrast to FriendFeed's hide by service functionality, which works across the site, Strands handles the hiding of music updates on a user by user basis. You can click on any user's ID and uncheck the box that says "Include Just Played music posts." This is good, but means the task is repetitive if you've invested in following a good number of users. With this said, the service does offer the ability to browse a reduced feed, by a subset of who you follow, reduced categories, or by showing liked and commented items. Personally, I'd like the ability to click on "Events" and hide all Events or Books, for instance, so there is a little more work to be done.

While it hasn't yet gotten the buzz of some other social aggregators and lifestreaming projects, Strands is quietly going about making a product on par with the market leaders, letting the community find new content and people, and enabling micro-conversations. If you're interested in getting into Strands, and seeing their latest updates, you can find me here: http://www.strands.com/louisgray. If you're lacking an invite, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com, or leave your e-mail address in the comments so I can set you up.

DISCLOSURE: Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

There is No Social Media Overload

Every day, there are more and more great services to investigate in the world of social media. Each one breaks new ground in terms of features, focus or user interface. There are many different sites that target general social networking, some are for business, some are for dating, some are for microblogging, and others for service aggregation. And there will be many more. While some are calling for a pause in the innovation, somewhat fatigued by the implied redundancy or overwhelmed by chasing down comments and conversations in new places, it's worth noting there's time in the day to manage a good number of sites, and not all the winners have yet been crowned.

To have a full deck of social media tools, you essentially need the following:

• 1 or more blogs that you manage.
• 1 or more accounts on an RSS feed reader.
• 1 or more microblogging identities.
• 1 or more accounts on a business networking tool.
• 1 or more accounts on a social network.
• 1 or more accounts on a service aggregator or lifestream.
  

(Also helpful: A social bookmarking site, online photo site, music recommendation service, etc.)

For me, this means I blog here, use Google Reader, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and FriendFeed as my core applications for each category. But below these headliners are others.

For RSS, I also use Shyftr and liked AssetBar before it went away. I've tried Bloglines, FeedEachOther and NewsGator as well. There are also tools that interact with RSS, like Toluu, which helps you find feeds your friends like and integrates with Google Reader, and the sites dedicated to finding the most shared items in Google Reader, like ReadBurner, RSSMeme and Feedheads. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to ReadBurner)

For microblogging, beyond Twitter, you have Identi.ca, Plurk, and now, Rejaw. I'm signed up at each, but use Twitter primarily, copying posts to Identi.ca, via Posty. I need to check out Rejaw more, but am no expert.

For business networking, there's also Plaxo, which has morphed into a lifestreaming application.

For social networking, many still use MySpace, or Friendster, but Facebook has the momentum and the development on its side. Orkut never got the traction expected.

As for lifestreaming and aggregation, I am absolutely overweighted here, and I enjoy it. Justin Korn referred to it as "Super Kickass Social Network Following Power", but if you're interested, it's fairly easy to be engaged on sites like FriendFeed, Social Median and Strands all at once, like I'm trying to do.

I like FriendFeed because it easily pulls in my activity from around the Web and has a sharp community with good conversations and hiding. I like Social Median because it lets me just see news and posts on topics I pick or from people I follow. I like Strands because it has similar elements to FriendFeed, but more filtering and some good potential. I also know it can continue to improve because it’s early. Just in the last 36 hours, I've gone from being a nothing on Strands to having more than 100 people whom I can interact with.

Below this crust of leaders, you also have smaller sites like Yokway and LetsProve, where I'm registered, but haven't done much of late. FriendBinder doesn't seem to have taken off either, and BlogRize, though interesting, got quiet fast, and seems to have gone away, as did Mergelab. The truth is that we don't know which sites are going to win, and it makes sense to be registered everywhere and active on those places where you find the best community and the best content.

Of course, just because I sign up for something, or find something, doesn't mean that you're obligated to try it out. Not all sites are for everyone. But I'm far from being overloaded with Social Media. You just have to find balance, time, and keep remembering there is no quota and you don't have to read everything. Contrary to some belief, I'm not constantly on each site. I just read quickly, decide quickly and respond quickly. None of these sites is a real big time sink, unless you force yourself to read everything. It's easier to let your friends decide the best pieces, and for you to rely on search tools to get the rest, whether it be through Twitter Search, or pre-determined Google blog searches.

The only way you get social media overload is if you don't manage it well, just like you can get RSS overload or e-mail overload, or so I've heard. Even as there are more services to engage with, the number of hours you have to work with them is still the same. So do check out as many as you think have potential, and stick with the ones that offer you the community you're looking for, the engagement you need, and the best feature set. You'll find your niche.

See Also:

• Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There's No Quota.
• My Social Media Consumption Workflow
• Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality

Strands Lifestreaming Beta High On Potential and Filters

There's no question the lifestreaming space has just exploded over the last year, with services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed leading the way, accompanied by MyBlogLog, SocialThing, Profilactic and others. Practically all services aggregate your social activity across networks and let you display it in one area, with the option to follow friends and interact with their activity. One of the newest in this space is Strands, which bills itself as a destination site for people to discover new recommended items around the Web from friends. The service, currently in private beta, has some very interesting features, but also has a lot of room to go to supplant one of the bigger names.


As with the many other alternatives out there, you start your activity on Strands by adding your many services around the Web, starting with the most well-known services, like Twitter, Google Reader and Delicious, but the service also supports several other sites not commonly found elsewhere, including Webshots, BlockBuster, Hype Machine and Meneame.


When you add these services, as with other competitors, Strands creates a feed for you, which can then be subscribed to by other users.

As you currently can only get into Strands by being invited, you will start out with at least one friend, but you can find more users by seeing who your friends follow, or by clicking the people button at the top of the page. Strands, as far as I know, has the best array of ways to discover new followers, showing you who is the most followed, who's new to the site, or who is the top by a specific category, like Blogs, Images, Music or Bookmarks. Each person's profile is displayed with their avatar, gender, age and location. You can also search by name or e-mail.

Once you have subscribed to a few people, you can see their activity on Strands' Home screen, which displays, chronologically, the item posted, who added it, the service it originated from. You can then take action on those items with a simple Like or Dislike, indicated by thumbs up or thumbs down, you can comment on the item, click a pushpin to indicate an item is saved, or click an arrow to forward the item to those who follow you. (The equivalent of resharing on FriendFeed)

The interface for Strands if both cluttered and spartan at the same time, if that makes any sense.

Unlike FriendFeed, which offers a clean white background, soft gray text for comments, but little else, except a top navigation bar, Strands offers a wide array of ways to sift through the noise and find specific items. You can filter your feed by people who just follow you, you can show your own feed, or show subgroups of your friends. For example, I started a group called "Digerati", that includes Chris Brogan, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Corvida and others on the site.

You can also filter by category, including Blogs & Notes, Images, Music, Movies & TV, Bookmarks and others. FriendFeed offers this functionality by service by clicking on the service icon, but it's not spelled out, nor does it group similar services (like Delicious and Magnolia for instance). On top of filters, you also have "Hot Posts" which show items popular with your friends, marked by likes and comments, and the ability to have granularity, so you don't share all services with all people. For example, you may want to share some items with friends, but not family or coworkers.

The many different options on Strands make it useful to find things fast, but it also shoehorns the Home feed into a small center position. Arguably, this is the most important part of the site, so its power is greatly diminished. Strands also doesn't auto-refresh, asking you to click a refresh icon on the page, or in your browser. This gives the site more of a static feeling than other sites which do autorefresh, where it seems new data is constantly coming in.

Also, like most good services today, Strands offers a desktop alternative to the Web site with an Adobe AIR application, which keeps you updated on your friends' activity and watches your iTunes to capture what you're listening to, as well as a bookmarklet.

Does the world need another lifestreaming service? With so many on the market, it's interesting to see what aspects one site will get right or what they'll miss. Strands doesn't have the feeling of community today that FriendFeed does, given its newness and obscurity. And like many engineering-driven services, it can be seen at times to have sacrificed the user experience for more features. I've said previously that "the feature war is the wrong war" for social media, which needs to find new ways to connect people, their likes and their activity. Strands does a good job letting me drill down into specific areas, or in helping find new folks, but I'm hoping they can reduce some of the site clutter, and make the site really come to life.

As the service is in private beta, I have a very small number of invites, so leave your e-mail in the comments if you are interested, and I'll see what I can do.

DISCLOSURE: I was introduced to Strands by Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, who started there in July. Drew is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position. While Drew gave me an account to test Strands, he did not request an article, nor review this in any way.