There Is No "Osborne Effect" In Web Services

In the world of technology, practically no story of warning is better known than that of Adam Osborne's ill-fated promise of his next generation of computer models outperforming the current offerings. The story states that the result of his premature leaking was a dramatic decline in sales that led to the company's death. (Even if truth later proved the story somewhat incorrect) This, in combination with competitive pressures in practically all markets, has led to a culture of secrecy, undisclosed roadmaps and obfuscation in the industry, aimed to prevent a similar fate. But as I look at many of the products we use today, including Web services, which can be updated in line, and don't require a specific point purchase, this mentality is overblown - especially when it comes to the market leaders, for whom users' switching to an alternative is unlikely.

In May of 2008, I said that I believed a simple feature war between sites was "the wrong war." Users of products including top Web services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others absolutely benefit from the features offered, but they stick around thanks to their data being on each service, and the many connections they have cultivated - whether you define that as a community, or instead, as an audience.

If you are a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, Dell, EMC or Cisco, it makes a ton of sense to only discuss future products with potential customers who are not going to purchase in the current buying cycle, and do so under non-disclosure agreements, to prevent their whisperings from impacting your sales. But I think users of the many different Web services out there would benefit from gaining greater visibility into these companies' plans and priorities - which would serve as an early platform for feedback, provide guidance into how they could expect the community to evolve, and at the very least, show that they were continuing to improve the platform.

As you no doubt saw at the end of the last week, and from coverage this weekend, Facebook introduced a new look for their news feed. Some people love it, some people no doubt dislike it, and many are in between. But the hardest part for some is the element of surprise. Often when a site has a massive overhaul, they leave up a link to the previous version for those not yet ready to make a move - even if it is clearly outdated.

But if you think about it, are people going to switch from Facebook to MySpace or Friendster because of a UI change? Probably not. Are they going to use the site less often? Maybe, but not in a dramatic way. So Facebook can be pretty secure in knowing that their users are going to stick around.

In contrast to the secrecy, I have been impressed of late as to the transparency seen from Twitter in terms of the company's rolling out feature enhancements, and telling users in advance what is to come. The company has talked openly about their new ReTweet API, and also talked about the addition of Lists. Twitter has learned from its previous mistakes that abruptly made changes, impacting users and creating something like a mob.

Twitter, despite incredible competition for mindshare from Facebook and others, is confident enough that their tipping their hand isn't going to create a competitive problem - and easing users into new features makes it seem much more collaborative. But not everybody believes in this model. During the hubbub around Facebook's future plans for FriendFeed, co-founder Paul Buchheit said "we don't pre-announce things, so for now all I can say is that there's good stuff on the way." His update to the FriendFeed community was both reassuring and not reassuring at the same time - showing they were not asleep at the switch, but giving no clarity at a time when many are looking for some. Would his telling us a few features on their plate for Facebook have upset the apple cart any?

As noted before, Feedly, the next generation start page powered by RSS, has a public roadmap. (Here is their 2009 offering) Feedly is confident enough to show you what they are working on months in advance, even if there is potential slippage, and even if there are competitors who might integrate similar features into their own plans. But there is no potential for an Osborne Effect here. You either use Feedly or you don't. It's very unlikely that you will look at their future plans and walk away because you don't like the product direction - and it's less likely that you will write down their itinerary and make a competing offering.

If I am Apple, I would keep secrets. But if I were running a Web service, and was confident I could deliver on my promises, I would be sure to open up to the users and let them know what my priorities were early, rather than hiding under a cloak of mystery. Users need guidance and confidence that they are part of something that is continuing to improve, and won't be abandoned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Incidental Interview on #BlameDrewsCancer, More

Sheryl Breuker, who we recently featured in the 10 FriendFeeders to follow for May post, spoke with me yesterday for her Incidental Interviews series, and unlike many other podcasts I've done, she started off not by talking about every service we use, or about the latest tech gadgets.

Instead, she wanted to find out about some of our recent updates that have impacted us personally, and then we dived into geekery.

In the podcast, which I have embedded below, we discuss:

• Drew Olanoff and the #BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon
• My obtaining Robert Scoble's car
• How we use FriendFeed
• The Extended LouisGray.com team of writers
• How we find new tools as an early adopter
• Social media in business
• Conflicts of interest between work and blog?
• And more...

You can find Sheryl's site here: Stardust Global Ventures

Download the Recording Now or Subscribe in iTunes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech Geek Nutrition: Introducing The Amazing Vitamin P

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES

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

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

Early Adopters and Finding "The Next Shiny Object"

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

Let's Stop Speaking Like Machines and Start Speaking Like People

The path from engineering to marketing is usually not a straight line. Often there can be many stops along the way, as a product goes from idea to a spec to prototype release build, through the quality assurance process, and eventually general availability to the marketplace. As the product develops, so does the way it gets named, branded and described - starting with what's typically a straight forward problem/solution issue from engineering, and morphing into a more refined, even if not always as accurate, pitch from marketing. But in the Valley, often we skip those steps, and it's our users who end up paying the price - by being taught to think and talk like machines.

Are you a big fan of hash tags? Or are you wild about boolean searches? Do you find yourself reverting back to "Run DOS Run" instead of just typing and talking like a human being often online? Despite billions of dollars of investment and a plethora of companies trying to develop natural language (especially in search), we still have a long way to go.


Twitter, the hot tech topic of the month and many others preceding it, largely relies on two specific machine language symbols to connect users. The first is the basic @ sign which signals a "reply". The second, a # mark, or "hashtag", tries to connect people talking about the same event, location or idea. But what we're doing by using these symbols is work the machines should do for us. Instead of posting a hashtag about our location or event, Twitter should pick that up based on our profile data or GPS from the phone, or even group people's topics based on the content contained in the tweet and those immediately preceding it.

Web search engines have similarly expected high levels of machine like language from all their users. For example, a search on Google that shows results that mention "dog" or "cat" or "fish" but don't have the word "bird" in them necessitates a search string of "dog OR cat OR fish -bird". If I wanted to demand it have both dog and cat in it, but not fish or bird, I'd be changing things up a bit, typing: "dog AND cat -bird -fish". We're talking like this because we're trying to make nice with a database who thinks this way.


Even in this morning's FriendFeed beta site do you see the same kind of expectation that pushes users away from being people and further along the path of being cyborgs. While the company has some helpful pull-down menus on its advanced search page, it doesn't let you search by specific services, such as YouTube or LinkedIn (while the old version did). Instead, you're expected to type in "service:youtube" in the search field. To search all my friends' posts from YouTube that contained the word pizza in the title, I'd have to set up the advanced search to look for pizza in the title from my friends, and then add "service:youtube" to the query.


I expect the FriendFeed team can fix that query fairly quick with the addition of a pulldown menu, but that will be knocking down one mole before another pops up somewhere else - and many other services are less responsive, expecting you to talk in a way a machine would. Jeremiah Owyang and Loic Le Meur exchanged tweets about a month ago, calling the Web "primitive". But the Web just turned 20 years old. If this is how far we've come in 20 years, do we have to wait another 20 before we can just type or speak in what we want to know and get the right result?

Serial Early Adopters Get It All Wrong

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Shakespeare I Ain't (E-mail / Twitter)

I've been on Facebook now for longer than I've had my current Gmail account, and yet I can honestly say I never saw much use for it before the last six months.

Part of writing about tech means that you are forever jumping on the latest social network, trying out the latest app, and trying your hardest to keep ahead of the curve. You leave a trail of login IDs in your wake, rarely revisiting the majority of things you sign up for. You are a serial early adopter.

Of course, the serial early adopters consider themselves elite, above the masses, and when the hoi polloi begin to join a social network, it becomes passé, signalling a time to move on to the next big thing. The problem is, however, two-fold with this approach to determining what's hot and what's not. Without the arrival of the masses, what hope does a company have for profitability? The early adopters are never numerous enough, nor loyal enough, to support a company beyond the intial uptake.


An Early Adopter Panics When the Mainstream Nears...
Even more importantly, though, is how useful an app or a social network is. No offense, but how many times am I supposed to interact with the same people on multiple social networks? My FriendFeed subscriptions look a lot like my Twitter follows, which are probably the same people I'm connected to on LinkedIn, and so on. Up until about six months ago, my Facebook friends list looked much the same.

Six months ago was when things started changing. That was when "the masses" began signing up, and suddenly, I was connected to my cousin in Florida I hadn't seen since she was less than a year old. I found a friend from first grade who now lives in Montenegro. I get to "talk" regularly with my best friend from college who's living in Mexico and my junior prom date who moved South.

I don't need to see the same updates on Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook from the same people every day. The redundancy of information eventually becomes tiring. Adding in the perspective of the "regular" people outside the tech sphere not only broadens a viewpoint of how things are perceived, but also what's important in the overall scheme of the world, not just the insular world of tech.

So the next time you remark that an app has "jumped the shark" because the unwashed masses have started showing up, think about whether you want all of your daily social interactions to be in the narrow world of tech or whether you should appreciate a wider horizon brought to you by those who aren't as "hip" and "in the know" as you are. I signed my dad up for Facebook myself.

Read more by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Shakespeare I Ain't. You can find her on Facebook here and Louis is hiding here.

Web Two Dot Oh DotCom Dot Cloud Colon Slash Slash

This afternoon I had the opportunity to attend a session presented by TechCrunch, hosted by Steve Gillmor, around cloud computing, featuring some of the Valley's thought leaders, from many of the biggest names in all of tech, ranging from Salesforce.com to Rackspace, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun, Ning, FriendFeed, Facebook, Amazon.com and a small handful of startups. Each of the participants discussed how their product leveraged the cloud, what it was about this new approach to harvesting data storage and computing that made their products execute the way they do, and how they approached new problems of bandwidth, capacity, licensing, security and scale.

The event, essentially a two parter, with early-stage start-ups presenting for five minutes apiece in front of an expert panel for the first half, and a roundtable of technology elite for the second half, saw a healthy dosage of skepticism mixed in with what was largely a genuine desire for these companies to try and deliver higher-quality services for their users by taking advantage of new protocols.

With everybody saying the word "cloud" to represent customer data or computing being stored independently of local physical disk or blade servers, the word itself grew to be mocked. One 'expert' said cloud was the new "dotcom". Another compared the cloud to rabbits as they kept multiplying, and a third called the cloud "Kool-Aid". With the move of terminology over the last decade from "Dotcom" to "Web 2.0" to "Cloud", you can see why people would be necessarily wary of jumping on the newest movement with two feet.

All names aside, there is as much fact as there was fad in the cloud. The cloud's benefits are clear as data can be stored independent of physical disks, and doesn't require dedicated storage and server administration. Code developers want anytime access to infinite bandwidth and storage, and consumers want instant response times. As the panel debated the genesis of enterprise apps absorbing consumer application features, it was clear that each was facing challenges impossible just a decade ago, and the cloud's availability changed everything.

Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed referred to the Internet as just one big computer, and said that instead of shipping software in a big cardboard box with floppies to introduce version 3.0, you could just ship new code three times a day. Mike Schroepfer of Facebook talked about how his team could handle 1 billion status messages of 100 characters each on a different level of storage than the 1 billion images, each a few megabytes apiece. And Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com won the prize for the best quote of the day, saying, "As an industry, we are always overestimating what we can do in a year and underestimating what we can do in a decade."

Benioff's quote is no doubt true. The next engineering team I meet that hits the initial proposed date with all the requested features is the first one I will meet. But a decade ago, we wouldn't have expected to stream full-length feature films without buffering, or do many of the things we do online, always having been limited by location, bandwidth, memory, storage, or even operating systems. Now, the operating system is even less a part of the discussion. While the panel was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley office, practically all presentations were done on Apple Macintosh, and featured FireFox, not Internet Explorer. Now, consumers and businesspeople expect to get all their applications and data from anywhere on any device. It was enough that Benioff even left his laptop behind on a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in favor of his BlackBerry Bold.

It is happening. Not too long ago, yet another meme went around the Web on what the Internet looked like in 1996 - a blink of an eye when you think about it. In 1996, I was hosting a personal home page, using WebStar, on my Apple Macintosh Performa 631 CD, with all of 8 megabytes of RAM. Now, my blog is hosted on the cloud. The images themselves are on the cloud. My participation in social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed... is done on the cloud. And I'm taking my iPhone everywhere. I used to despise the term cloud, and used to rail against it with my colleagues at 3Cube back in 1998 to 2000, but it looks like I lost that battle. Good thing all of us as consumers are winning.

Safari 4's Introduction A Clear Salvo In the New Chrome Wars

In today's Web-centric computing world, there is practically no more important software than that of the Web browser. While an argument could be made that one's e-mail is equally as important, the move to Web-hosted mail services, like GMail and Apple's Mobile Me means that the Web browser itself is where most of today's work gets done. The move from the operating system being the center of our world, and the prism by which we see everything, to that of the Web browser, was central to Netscape's annihilation by Microsoft, and has now practically come true, even as Navigator's time has now come and gone.

Almost 14 years after Netscape as a company went public, a new wave of browser wars is upon us. And while, yes, Internet Explorer, the standard on practically all Windows-based PCs, is still the market share leader, the innovation is not being perceived as coming from Redmond. Instead, it's products like Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari which are pushing the envelope and working to enhance our browsing experience. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's gotten to the point that even if they made a better product with all the possible bells and whistles, nobody outside of Dare Obasanjo would give them credit.

Yesterday, as practically every tech blog on the planet mentioned, Apple introduced a new 4.0 beta version of the Safari browser, including speed enhancements, and most notably, a Top Sites feature that mimics Chrome's most visited sites page. And while other usability enhancements were made, including to the toolbar, expanded browser history and further integration with Google's search bar, it was this addition of "Top Sites" that has everyone thinking about how Apple is taking on Google's Chrome even before the company comes out with its much-awaited official Mac version.


My Top Sites - After Editing Out All Work-Related Sites
And this is exactly the dialog that has long-been needed in the browser space but was lacking when IE finally reached the summit atop Netscape's corpse. Opera and OmniWeb and iCab all had their handful of users, but never gained the kind of mindshare and deployments possible from Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Now, it could be said that Microsoft is being hit from all sides after years of letting Explorer stagnate. (I first called it the Chrome Wars on FriendFeed yesterday)

Being hard wired both as an Apple fanboy and an early adopter, I downloaded Safari 4 beta as soon as I knew it was available. After finally updating the laptop with the latest security updates, we were good to go - and honestly, there will be no turning back. For whatever reason, over the last few weeks, I have had the worst time keeping Safari up and running. Every new tab welcomed a new opportunity to stall and require a force quit. But Safari 4, after a full day's aggressive use, hasn't fallen on its sword even once. And considering I spend practically all my waking hours in front of a browser, that's a good thing.

For me, it's the stability and the speed, and the support for standards, that will make using Safari on a daily basis a success. The Top Sites feature is interesting, a cute way to have 12 pages on hand to click through at all times, but it's not exactly going to save me a ton of time. With RSS, keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete, it's not like I was taking tons of time to enter URLs and go site to site. So yes, we like the new features, but we like it even more that it doesn't crash and will support new Web services that may be using bleeding-edge code.

And while I assume you already know, Safari is more than just a Web browser for Macs. It's also available for Windows, and forms the core browsing experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can get the new Safari 4 beta here: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/.

12 News Analysis Blips That Don't Warrant a Full Post

1. Real-time search (via Twitter, etc.) is complementary to Google search, not a replacement.
2. Facebook offering portable status updates is a feature, not a game-changer.
3. Alex Rodriguez is a cheater who is only sorry because he was caught, not because he used.
4. The Australian fires are horrific. So is seeing an ad prior to news covering the disaster.
5. Shocker: FriendFeed is not perfect. But it has more potential than people give it credit.
6. Apparently Micah Baldwin goes into strip clubs to study... economics.
7. Every piece of social software is jealous of TweetDeck.
8. Black History month or not, I'm a fan of Derrick, Corvida, Shey, Wayne Sutton & Bwana.
9. Mike Fruchter has extended his "Forty Elements of Social Media" post to a detailed slideshow.
10. Rumor has it that Google is laying off engineers. Matt Cutts is skeptical.
11. Step 1: Be named Fortune's best to work for. Step 2: cut 6 percent of staff.
12. Consensus on Mini-Microsoft revealing his face from under anonymity is that he shouldn't.

Of course, when I don't have enough time to cover it all, just follow along with my Google Reader Link Blog or see the updates on FriendFeed.

Could Sundance Do for Qik What SXSW Did for Twitter?

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

As a Salt Lake City, Utah resident, one of the most prevalent events of the year happens around the Sundance film festival. While not quite an event for Tech Geeks, the festival has become more and more techie as film geeks have begun to converge with computer geeks and find new ways to present the media they are creating. I visited Sundance last night and was amazed at the number of former film geeks trying to create their own web ventures as the economy slims for the film industry.

Just last Saturday, one example of this convergence of new media with old happened with a project founded by Kevin Rose, funder of Digg.com and Revision3, and Ashton Kutcher, famous celebrity actor, filmmaker, and director (and host of MTV's "Punk'd"). While I'm a bit disappointed no Utah bloggers were selected (considering it was in our state after-all), Rose and Kutcher selected 4 major bloggers, including Venturebeat's Matt Marshall from all across the nation to compete in a 24 hour competition, broadcast live on the service Qik.com. The bloggers were asked to perform such tasks as building an igloo and making a snow theater, or getting Mahalo's Jason Calacanis to say the words, "Mahalo", "Shitzu", and "Tesla". While entertaining to watch, the amazing story of this all were the statistics shared by Qik's founder Bhaskar Roy about the success of Qik during the competition.

In this behind-the-scenes video by Kevin Rose, Roy shares that, in just the less than 12 hours since the competition started, over 100 thousand video producers subscribed to the service. Roy was sitting at the headquarters of the competition, working to keep the site up and running as they broadcast the show out to what would appear to be near millions. While Roy wouldn't share page view statistics, with that many sign-ups one has to imagine page view statistics were through the roof, and that was made evident as I noticed Qik transferring some of the competition's videos over to YouTube during the event.

One of the biggest advents 2 years ago at South-by-Southwest 2007 was the prevalent use of Twitter and its strong growth, promotion, and use during the event. It was during that event that Twitter took off like wildfire, and became the explosive network we all know about today. It was later that year that I joined Twitter, and it has only kept growing since. Today it is estimated that Twitter has close to 4-5 million users and is growing exponentially. With numbers like Roy mentions, one can't help but speculate that Qik is not far behind those statistics.

I contacted Qik and they weren't willing to expand further on these results, but it will be interesting to see if Rose or Kutcher share more results of this competition and whether or not it was a success in and of itself. One thing we can say however is that regardless of the competition, Qik may have just had its South-by-Southwest moment here at the Sundance film festival.

The video in full is posted below - Roy's comments are right around 1:03.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

I Don't Care If You Call Me a Fanboy. Steve Jobs Should Be Immortal.

As today's news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be taking medical leave from the company through the summer rockets around the Web, many are speculating this will be the last we may ever see of Cupertino's hero. Following the initial news around Macworld Expo that Jobs was going to forego the keynote and had a hormonal imbalance, whispers grew to loud murmurs, saying that Apple needed a backup plan for CEO - and fast - but now that murmuring has become a roaring crescendo. And while I put myself at significant risk at being labeled a fanboy who kneels at the multi-colored altar, I have to express how losing Jobs for more than a few months will be a significant blow, not just to Apple and its customers, but to Silicon Valley and the world at large.

No doubt in part due to my recent birth, I practically grew up using Apple computers. And even while Windows grew in market share, I saw their interface as a shoddy misappropriation of Apple's intellectual property. As Apple swirled near the drain in the late 1990s, while some mocked the company and called it beleaguered, I huddled among the seeming few fanatics we had left and declared that we would never give up. It was us against the world.

Jobs' return to Apple was curious at first. It was supposed to have been temporary. He vowed he would never be the CEO at Apple Computer, and speculation as to a full-time holder of the role was widespread. But, luckily for us all, he pulled a Dick Cheney (think 2000 VP candidates) and appointed himself. And the rest, as they say is history. He made Apple not just an also-ran in the computer business, but a major force for innovation. He brought color to a drab world. He worked with very conservative businesses and found ways to launch the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and eventually, the iPhone.

With Jobs at the helm, Apple took the very boring world of MP3 players and cell phones and made them exciting again - and you only have to take a look at the Microsoft Zune, Sony's failed Walkman MP3 player line, and phones from Nokia to see what the industry has tried to do in Apple's wake.

As I wrote during the last round of speculation, I Will Teach My Children About Steve Jobs, I don't intend to tell them about Steve Jobs as you would a cultural icon of yesteryear, but instead because he helped to spur innovation and imagination. The idea of an Apple without Steve Jobs, or a computer industry without Steve Jobs is alarming. Yes, younger entrepreneurs like those running Google and Facebook have lapped Apple in some areas and are forging interesting new products, but there is only one Steve Jobs.

Apple has always taken significant pride in how it uses its vast mountain of cash and its R&D budget. The very best use of said funds would be to first, solve Jobs' medical issue, whatever it is, and later, move on to see if he can be made immortal. This isn't a shifty Bill Gates or a sweaty, rotund, Steve Ballmer we are talking about here. This is the one and only Steve Jobs, who has cared about creativity, education, and users above everything else. The idea of a computer industry without Apple and without Steve Jobs should mortify us all.

June cannot come soon enough. I hope that is truly as long as we will be waiting.

Armchair Quarterbacking and Why I Talk to Companies Using the Blog

Whether it's due to the fact it's another 'slow news' weekend, or due to the fact I was more bare in my recommendations for how FriendFeed, a service I am constantly using and like a lot, could improve in yesterday's post than I usually am, there was quite a bit of feedback from around the Web, which both echoed the comments I had made, and questioned the reason for my making them in the first place. Interestingly enough to me, despite a full year or so of being called a FriendFeed addict, apologist, or what have you for my consistent favoring of the service, several people tried to construe my direct suggestions as somehow interpreting the site would fail - which I don't believe I ever came close to saying. But what they missed was I have a history of offering suggestions to companies, both new and established. Sometimes, I can do this 1-1 with the developers, but often I use the blog.

A person's blog can be whatever they want it to be. It can be your brand. It can be a megaphone that allows you to speak to many at once. It can be a personal diary. I've chosen to make mine about services I find interesting, and to a lesser extent, about me. The posts I make are about services I encounter and usually care about. I tell you how I feel or what I saw, and make it personal. And when I give feedback about companies, it comes from my thoughts and usually is spat out top to bottom as I was thinking about it, with little organization - just raw.

And given the blog's relative obscurity in 2007 and 2006, it's likely few saw my original set of feedback I offered FriendFeed more than a year ago - and how it mirrored other occasions where I've done similar posts for other services.

For example:

• February 18, 2007:How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
• March 3, 2007: 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
• March 12, 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
• August 27, 2007: What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
• December 30, 2007: 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
  
• March 9, 2008: 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
• August 27, 2008: 10 Suggestions To Improve FriendFeed's Beta

And I haven't always been nice. See: Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close. and After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp, for example.

On August 29th of 2007, I wrote that you should Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies, and I've been doing that. I do it because as consumers we are often the silent party in the buyer and seller relationship. The company controls the product, the message, the delivery method, and tells you how you should use it. As a consumer, you can buy it, and you can be satisfied, or not. I tend to believe that as a consumer, I may have some ideas that the company either didn't think about, or didn't think were as important as other items. By using the blog, I can make my opinion clear, and also act as a sounding board for other people who might have shared the same opinions, but didn't know where to start, or thought they were alone.

Just look at some of the comments I saw on Twitter following yesterday's post:

@elizabethsosnow: "I am one of the stale accounts."
@spinko: "Louis Gray talks about friendfeed and how it's not intuitive for new users like myself. Amen, I still don't get FF."
@maryhodder: "just read the Louis Gray article myself.. agree. FF is overwrought and makes me feel like i'm drowning."
@jayrosen_nyu: '"Simply put, people aren't getting it." Louis Gray on FriendFeed's barriers to intuitive use. I'm one of those people.'

Sarah Lacy said she is one of those people I described in yesterday's post who pipes their data in and gets a lot of followers, but doesn't participate. For whatever reason, FriendFeed hasn't won her over, and she says the company didn't try to engage her inactive account (one of the suggestions I had yesterday).

I mention these not to pile on, but to show the post started a discussion of people who weren't thinking about the issue, and might possibly have extended the visibility of the issue to others who thought everything was "just fine". As Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr said, FriendFeed Isn’t Dying, and I never said it was.

What I chose to do with yesterday's post, and the many before it was to speak up where the above examples had chosen to be silent. Mark Trapp called it 'Armchair Entrepreneuring' and said I could collect more flies with honey than vinegar, adding, "Offering feedback is one thing: but the sheer hubris of tech bloggers that they know how to run a company better than the ones actually running it is entirely different." But I wasn't aiming for hubris, nor was I aiming for linkbait, as my cranky Canadian friend, Steven Hodson, suggested I might be. What I was doing was sharing my candid thoughts about a service I really like and one I want to get better and better.

I use the blog because it is public. It is searchable and others with similar issues can find it. I use the blog to talk to companies because very often, they listen. Many of the suggestions I've given to LinkedIn, to Google Reader, to FriendFeed and others have happened. I'm not naive enough to think it was because I recommended they would, but it tells me I occasionally am on the right track.

I will armchair quarterback and keep talking to companies, as Dave Winer says, to help them, not to hurt them, and to help others. And sometimes, companies really do value the feedback. That's part of why I'm working with ReadBurner, SocialToo and engaging with others informally. It's about pushing people who make products to make them even better than they are now, and potentially, being part of that process.

Scrapplet Sets Up Blank Canvas to Mash Up Web Activity

There are destination sites, and there are aggregation sites. There are enterprise-grade Web sites and then there are templates, easy to use for the average layperson. And then there is Scrapplet, a unique Web application that acts as a open slate for you to pull in data from around the Web, embedding images, RSS feeds, videos, and even complete Web sites, into a single page. The goal? Leverage the Web browser as the delivery vehicle, requiring no third party installations, and make your personalized site whatever you want it to be.

I spoke with Steve Repetti, CEO of Scrapplet, on Friday, and heard the story of how Scrapplet leverages "an efficient, pure JavaScript library that can do AJAX, windowing, messaging, data portability" and "integration with back-end components." The end result he said, is that "in the drag and drop world, the browser should do drag and drop."

If you sign up for Scrapplet, you are presented with a blank browser page, and have the option to pull in content from all around the Web, from social networks to Web sites, and can move it around, customize it and make it your own, packaged either as a single page, or you can set up many pages and build relationships between the pages so that it functions as a complete Web site.

Given the focus on data portability (Repetti sits on the board of DataPortability.org), you don't need to create yet another account to work with Scrapplet, but can login with OpenID, your FaceBook, AOL, Google or Yahoo! ID.

In our demo, it was clear the number of options available to users is tremendous - so much so it can be confusing to know where to start. But after Repetti showed me example after example of dragging thumbnails to Web sites, dragging and dropping content, and even copying over a full Web page, I tried it for myself, and with some trial and error, I managed to make a page that shows my social network profiles from around the Web, displays my FriendFeed realtime stream, the RSS feed for this side, has links to other pages around the Web, and even hot links to other friends' sites, displaying their profile images from Facebook.


Click Image to See it in full or go to:
http://scrapplet.com/louisgray
While the technology underlying Scrapplet is advanced, the requirements to use it are very simple. They claim the product works in all browsers and operating systems - with only a few exceptions. I was told for cross-domain drag and drop, you will want to use Internet Explorer or FireFox, and if you do use FireFox, there's a 4k plug-in.

As Repetti told me Friday, one of the biggest challenges Scrapplet has is that "it looks easy, and might not be," but he added, with confidence, "if you can conceive of it, I can instantly bring it to life."

In the last few days, I've seen this already to be true as Repetti has upgraded the service and helped squash the occasional bug. Given it's absolutely a beta product, you just might find some yourself.


You Can Display Many Different Object Types On Scrapplet
To get started with Scrapplet, go to: scrapplet.com and use the Promo code of "louisgray" (without quotes).

To see some other users of Scrapplet, check out:
Robert Scoble: http://www.scrapplet.com/scobleizer
Brian Solis: http://www.scrapplet.com/briansolis

Ten Tech Things I'm Thankful For

I don't know about you, but some of the technology we take for granted still seems exciting and mysterious to me. Ever stop in the middle of your laptop and say - wow... I'm seeing streaming video, live, wirelessly in high quality? Ever stop when on a cell phone and realize you're talking to someone thousands of miles away and hearing them respond in real time? It may seem like we take these things for granted, and only speak up when there are problems, but that's far from the truth. On this Thanksgiving holiday, I thought I'd highlight ten things I'm grateful for that impact us in a positive way.

1) I'm Thankful for a Competitive Culture of Curiosity

Without curiosity and aggressive competition, innovation would be at a near stand-still. Experimentation, testing and looking for new markets or way to improve existing markets or products enables new ideas to develop, and new approaches to be found for existing products and activity. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurialism is encouraged and celebrated, and it's actually okay to fail or work at a failed company multiple times in one's career, so long as you keep trying.

2) I'm Thankful for Expanding Bandwidth and Data Storage

Any of us can look backward at our first computers, and modems, and laugh at how many megabytes of RAM or hard disk space we had, or how we might have tried to get to the Internet at 4-digit baud speeds. Over the decades, you've seen a move on the network side from 10 megabit to 100 megabit, through 10 gigabit on the corporate side, and to high-speed broadband for consumers, not to mention 3G for iPhones and other wireless gadgets. Hard disks have grown from megabytes to gigabytes and now terabytes, enabling higher quality images, video, music and other data exchanges to take place quickly and be stored longer. The growth of bandwidth and data storage has essentially paved the way for the online software repositories, iTunes, YouTube and many other intensive Web apps that are powering today's digital economy.

3) I'm Thankful for The Removal of Geographic Barriers

We may have to get a passport to travel from country to country, but online, I'm talking and engaging with people from around the globe every day. While places like the Silicon Valley still maintain a lead in terms of available networking opportunities, the Web lets me connect with entrepreneurs in Europe, bloggers in Australia, India, and Canada, or around the world. In fact, just a few weeks ago I managed to reach Robert Scoble by cell phone when he was traveling in China, as I'd mistakenly thought he'd already come home. While it would take a day of travel to see him, I could get him live with a few taps on the iPhone. Also, I've befriended people from a wide variety of countries and places around the United States on the myriad of social networks.

4) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Publishing

The Web has dramatically increased the potential to publish in real-time over the last few years. For free, I can register to send short updates to Twitter, or full-length blog posts to Blogger, WordPress or TypePad. There is no application to fill out, or editorial board to approve content. The ease of publishing lets anyone with a voice or something to share get out there quickly to all interested to see.

5) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Discovery

There's a reason Google is thought of as the most successful company of our generation. They focused on the ease of searching and discovery of all the world's information - starting with the World Wide Web at large, and expanding to images, videos, books, news, and trying to ease discovery across different languages with translation tools. Google, and others, expanded to desktop search and discovery to let you find even your own documents. This ease of discovery speeds academia and business, and lets even the most obscure opinions or publications be found, assuming you're on topic and the searcher uses the right keywords.

6) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Data Mobility

Yesterday, I saw a road sign saying "5 1/4 miles" to our destination, and it reminded me of the old 5 1/4" floppy disks, which gave way to 3 1/2" floppy disks, Zip drives, USB keys, and of course, attachments by e-mail, which negated the need for much of the portable physical media. Now, I know that my data is accessible from the Web on essentially any computer or mobile device, no matter where I am. All my e-mail accounts flow to the iPhone. All my bookmarks are synched from my home computer to the iPhone, and I can log into any of my online accounts from any computer to pull down my data or get my personal experience.

7) I'm Thankful for the Ease of Access to People

The combination of the ease of publication and discovery makes it easier than ever to find ways to contact people, by phone, by e-mail, or through social networks where they are active. The old days of the Yellow Pages and White Pages and Blue Pages that you needed to thumb through to find local businesses or your neighborhood directory are gone, replaced by personal address books that stay on your computer and cell phone, and online directories that are searchable. Additionally, those who publish are often easily reachable, even if just through comment pages on their site, giving you a platform for conversation and exchange.

8) I'm Thankful for the Opportunity to Exchange Ideas

Nobody is an expert on everything, but just about everyone is an expert on something. Where I have weaknesses, or limited understanding, it is fairly easy now to find resources or individuals who have strength, and who are open to discussion. Combined with the ease of discovery and publication, rather than posting items here and waiting for people to answer, I can go to these sources and engage with them where they want to engage at their point of comfort - be it on their preferred social network, their blog, their user forum or bulletin board.

9) I'm Thankful for the Acceptance and Promotion of Standards

As technology consumers, we have our idiosyncrasies. I may prefer to use Mac OS X computers, and use the Safari Web browser. You may prefer Windows Vista, and like Internet Explorer or Firefox. But, in theory, our Web experience should be the same. While there was a time when Mac documents and PC documents or Mac formatted disks and PC formatted disks were wildly different and non-transferrable, both platforms have practically unified so documents and applications are largely equivalent on all platforms and an experience can be universal. The acceptance of standards for all things on the Web, from the GIF and JPEG standards to those for HTML, Java, CSS and PHP, ensure that Web sites and applications can increasingly behave appropriately and within guidelines, regardless of the consumer's setup and geography. While I know things could still improve, the community has made incredible strides in pursuing unity.

10) I'm Thankful for Never Accepting the Status Quo as Good Enough

Where much is given, much is expected. As Web bandwidths increase, as disk storage increases, as ease of access increases, and the number of people getting on the Web and using it for all aspects of commerce, friendship, and communication increases, the capability of each site and application gains the potential for improvement. And I've yet to meet a site or an application that simply stops working, saying they have stopped all bugs, and that the experience could not possibly get any better. Google is constantly improving and experimenting with their search index and results. Microsoft and Apple are constantly rolling out new iterations to their operating systems, their applications and their Web browsers. And startups are always coming and going, not just in an effort to make the people working there some money, but because they want to make a real difference through leveraging the cutting edge of technology.

As a consumer and as someone who for more than a decade has worked in Silicon Valley, looking to help develop and distribute differentiated products that aid customers, I know I will never accept what we have as good enough. But I appreciate the opportunity to exchange ideas, to reach new people, to discover new content and to publish where I can. That's part of what's enabled exchanges such as this. What are you thankful for in the world of technology and what do you believe I left out?

It's Not About the Technology, Stupid

This morning, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with the well-traveled and well-respected Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. The three of us, speaking to a group primarily comprised of PR and Marketing professionals looking to get a grasp on new media and emerging social tools, discussed how to better track your brand online, how to interact with prospects, and how the move toward the semantic Web, including tagging and group-derived suggestions, would pose both new opportunities and challenges.

While the conversation got technical at times, I felt the places where I connected best with the audience was when I talked to them in terms of e-mail, iTunes and spoke their language in terms of understanding how they had to answer to multiple clients, who each wanted to broadest visibility, in a time when media outlets are disappearing.

A few hours later, this afternoon, I was back on the phone talking social media to a group of PR people looking to, again, figure out just what the heck Twitter and FriendFeed are and why they would have any value to their own outreach campaigns. And I could tell, based on their responses, that to take on these new tools sounded daunting.

Frankly, we, as consumers and developers, for the most part, are not doing a very good job of explaining these tools and making them simple enough to comprehend to the average layperson, let alone adopt. In describing these services, we need to do a lot less about talking about 140 character limits, feeds and aggregation, and instead talk more about connections, sharing and community.

What we need to do is help translate these honestly geeky tools into something that makes sense to the mainstream. Instead of talking about how many people you're following, APIs and how you use TweetDeck to follow specific terms in Twitter, start by explaining that the service is essentially text messaging that gets recorded and can be sent to many people at once. As for FriendFeed, I always explain it by breaking up the service into its two pieces. The Feed captures all your activity online. The Friend lets you see what your friends are doing, find new ones and interact with each other's content. Don't talk about 40+ supported services and how you can redirect to Twitter or Facebook. Start with the basics.

At Blog World Expo this September, Chris Brogan famously teased Jesse Stay with a comment I posted to Twitter:

"Look, tech dork, software doesn't solve problems, humans solve problems."

But the mistake is an easy one, especially for people who don't have a background in PR, communications or marketing, because the technology itself can seem so exciting, and to be honest, it can at times be fun to sound more knowledgeable and "elite" above those who don't have the same understanding.

At times, I find myself clenching my teeth and wincing when I hear an engineer or elite technologist try to explain how something works. What users don't want to hear is the process of how things work, but instead what the results are, and how they can benefit. So let's be real clear - these new tools, no matter how many lines of code you have developed, have in most cases been made to offer a solution, so make the story about the user, not about you.

Help use their language and their own frames of reference to make the services less intimidating and overwhelming. Don't throw them into the deep end without a life jacket, but walk them down the steps holding their hand until they get used to the water.

With Facebook Connect, Google Has Unique Integration Opportunity

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)


In working with Google FriendConnect recently, I realized that Google has a unique opportunity that perhaps they did not have previously. In only the last few months, Facebook has opened up the opportunity for any 3rd party site to integrate with Facebook, all via a special login button and form Facebook provides. Such technology is enabled through a product Facebook calls Facebook Connect. In playing with Google's product, it enables one to authenticate through other services and allow porting of friend data and more through its FriendConnect interface. I believe Google now may just have the unique opportunity to finally integrate Facebook as they wanted to before.

Several months back, Google attempted to launch FriendConnect with Facebook as one of the launch partners. Facebook quickly pulled Google's app from the Facebook App Store because they claimed it breached the Facebook Terms of Service. Google denied they were doing such, but Facebook insisted, keeping Google from being able to integrate with Facebook. It's unclear what exactly Facebook was claiming Google had done wrong, but it appeared to be some sort of backdoor technique to obtain user information.

Enter Facebook Connect

Several months later, Facebook launched their somewhat competing product, Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect does not integrate with other sites, but does integrate with OpenID similar to the way Google FriendConnect does, and enables you to through simple javascript, allow others to login and integrate their Facebook friends right on their own website.

Because FriendConnect is specific to Facebook, Google could now have just the opportunity to integrate Facebook the way they wanted to. Now, Google simply, and legally, should be able to implement a simple Facebook Connect login button into their user settings interface, let the user log into Facebook, and automatically Google would now have full access to the Facebook API from a third party site as they were trying to do before. Google can now enter in through the front door.

Not only that, but Facebook now allows site owners to identify existing accounts with existing Facebook accounts that have the same e-mail address. If Google were to collect the user's Facebook e-mail, or use their existing assuming it's the same as their Gmail address, they could then identify existing Friends on Google that also have Facebook accounts, allow you to link into them, invite them to begin using your FriendConnect-enabled site, and more.

Why Google has not yet implemented this is beyond me. Perhaps they already have and we are just waiting for Facebook to fully lift the Sandbox they have in place for developers right now. Regardless, I am willing to bet that Facebook integration into Google FriendConnect is coming very soon because of these features. Expect it to come in the form of Facebook Connect.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.