Embrace Our Twitter Ad Overlords, Assuming Relevancy

Those of you who have some history with the blog know that I am not a huge fan of advertising. I skip commercials on my TiVo. I don't click on banner ads online. I switch stations when listening to the radio, assuming I am not listening to my ad-free iTunes library or ad-free Sirius XM radio app. I once said, to some controversy, that most bloggers don't deserve any ad revenue at all, and also took considerable effort to report many Facebook advertisements as being offensive. But despite all this, with official word from Twitter COO Dick Costolo coming that the service will indeed include advertising in the very near future, I am fine - pending any future annoyances. Why? Because I am not anti-advertising. I am pro relevancy.

In my rant against bloggers who don't add clear value trying to get a piece of revenue, I aggressively said "services offer real value, bloggers don't", adding, "Web services are adding real value to the Web by changing the way we interact and communicate. Bloggers, myself included, are not. We are more like consumers than producers in this case, and the last time I checked, consumers pay, they don't get paid, no matter how excited we might be about a product."

After much debate, Twitter, a service which provides value to millions, is looking to bring ads to the table in what they promise will be a unique way. With the growing talent base at the company, there's no doubt they see what has happened to traditional advertising models, and they don't likely want to see a race to the bottom in terms of quality. In order not to damage the trust they have accumulated with users, they will need to provide a new and differentiated approach to this model that derives real value - for the company, for the advertiser and for the viewer. I don't want to see yet another copy of AdSense. I want to see something very new.

Overwhelmingly, most of us in the Tech Web want Twitter to succeed. Despite the many concerns we have had about the service and its occasional hiccups, we recognize its growing role in the world of communication, and see it as a growing player in infrastructure, taking share from e-mail, and my personal favorite, RSS. That the company would have to grow from a revenue-free model to one that has a revenue stream was clear, barring an early buyout from a stable tech leader.

Much of the problems with today's ads, which have seen lower rates for advertising across the board, has been tied to a lack of relevancy. I asked that ad companies would leverage my social profile and give me accurate ads downstream, through utilizing my content-rich Facebook profile or some other site. Twitter has a unique opportunity to know not just what my social profile looks like, but they know what I talk about, what I share, they will know, through geolocation, potentially where I am, and how I am characterized, thanks to lists.

I do not hate advertising. I hate bad, wasteful, untargeted advertising. If advertising is accurately targeted and provides value, it is much like finding a new blog post on a topic I like, or finding a product I really do want to buy. I have seen page after page after service after service that has taken the easy way out and slapped up advertising just because, but if somebody can get the formula right, it can only be good for the Web in general. Good services deserve revenue, and good customers deserve good, relevant, ads. I will hold my breath and hope that Twitter gets this formula right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology, Community, Relevancy: The 3 Social Pillars

Why do some social sites thrive while others fail? Why do you find some networks have you dedicating hours every day to participate, while others couldn't get you to raise an eyebrow? And why don't your friends see with you eye to eye on what the best services are, even after you've told them about your favorites time and again? The more I am exposed to new sites and social services, it becomes clear to me that there are three core elements that need to be solved to deliver a killer social service - and falling short in just one can mean rapid closure. Meanwhile, even if all three of these core elements are solved for one person doesn't mean they are solved for everyone.

These three core elements? Technology, community and relevancy.
(Though not always in that order)

Technology

Social service users want to have a flexible array of features that let them accomplish the task at hand quickly, without the user interface getting in the way. Members of social sites want the reassurance that they are working with a leading network that provides high quality tools, keeping pace with industry developments, and not growing stale with age.

If sites do not utilize current technology, not even the most ardent fans can expect to keep loyal, especially as they are reminded of alternative functionality through their ventures on the Web. In this case, solving for a strong community, even with good relevancy, is not enough.

Community

Community can be measured in terms of both quantity and perceived quality. Only the rarest of early adopters wants to participate in a social network that doesn't have any members. Without debating what came first, the chicken or the egg, successful social networks require an active community that will deliver a regular stream of updates - keeping the service fresh and vibrant. On other occasions, visitors to a social site will find the existing community does not meet their needs, as they may have little in common.

Even the most targeted sites with top technology can fail without an evangelizing community to keep it alive. And one man's perfect community is another man's "mob", so just because it works for you doesn't guarantee runaway success.

Relevancy

While most of the talk around social services focuses either on technology or how to grow communities and customers, simple relevancy cannot be overlooked. The most "sticky" communities are those that center around a specific topic or group, no matter how esoteric. From the mommyblogger movement to sports or automobile discussions, being on topic is a must for growing a network.

Without the site's content or community being relevant to potential new users, they would not be likely to want to engage, barring the often misguided belief that the individual could "drag" along a critical mass of friends or followers to have serious impact on the topics being discussed.

---

When sites hit a two out of the three pillars, it is little better than only focusing on one of the pillars. There are precious few social services that can gain significant traction for the masses, without needing to target specific communities or derive a specific niche relevancy. And we have seen way too many sites have an interesting group of engaged people, only for the technology to look near abandonment, taking the form of a 90s-era social bulletin board or forum.

While Facebook and Twitter have much of the minds' eyes out there right now, there are many other social networks that are seeing strong engagement, tucked away due to their niche focuses. From the team of blogs at SportsBlogsNation and their resulting communities to small business sites like Ecademy, communities are building with relevancy, and some strong technology - helping them to be survivors in a world littered with failures.

I am looking at a lot of social networks these days. I am seeing frantic e-mails from slowing and dying communities asking what is next. There are some new ones I am quite fond of - but they are usually ones that solve for 2 of these 3 issues, requiring some serious help to take them to the next level. If you are manufacturing a social site, or even if you are just a frequent user, think about these three pillars: Technology, Community, Relevancy. Is the site meeting those needs, or is it falling short?

Open Web Foundation Speeds Protocols' Legal Contracts

On Tuesday, the Open Web Foundation released an agreement aimed to speed new specifications' ability to be adopted by downstream users, with the intent of spreading open tools throughout the Web. Though occupying the always-complicated intersection of both the legal world and the tech world, the agreement is very interesting. The non-profit organization, featuring leading geeks from many of Silicon Valley's best known and most-respected companies, is hoping to promote data portability and open Web standards, no matter their source. Tuesday's agreement makes it easier for others to implement specifications without requiring lengthy bureaucratic legalities, and already features 10 major protocols and services as having signed up.

Among the services that have committed to using the new agreement include Yahoo!'s Media RSS standard, OAuth, Microsoft's WebSlice, and my often mentioned personal favorites, the PubSubHubbub and Salmon Protocols, being promoted by employees from Google.

As explained on the Yahoo! blog, on Facebook's Developers' blog and at Standards Law, services such as OpenID and OpenSocial were both forced to spend a great deal of effort working on legalities, taking their sharp engineering resources away from doing what they do best - code. The hope is that by setting a standard for approvals and access, much of these headaches can be eliminated.

The agreement itself is lightweight, compared to many legal tomes, and essentially mirrors standards set by Apache and Creative Commons, both of which have much history in the Web community. It covers how to handle attribution, that users can be trusted to leverage the work without fear of patent lawsuits, and that downstream users will not lay claims to others' efforts.

It could be yet another important step in making sure the Web is open, and that users can expect similar behavior and access capabilities from site to site and service to service. See also:
The Blurry Picture of Open APIs, Standards, Data Ownership from October 29th.

How Facebook's News Feed Failed Me (And My Family)

As more and more people are turning to social networks to share their information, practically all of us are connecting to an ever-increasing number of people, and for the most part, we are updating more frequently, and sharing content from different sources in multiple places. The resulting increase in velocity, often termed noise, has led to practically all tools to try and assist us to find the "most relevant" data, or the "best" information, based either on activity from others in our social graph, or through our own past activity. Sometimes, this works very well, helping to make signal out of the noise. And on other occasions, it can dramatically miss the stated goal, and actually make things worse. This week, Facebook's latest enhancements appear to have had a serious negative impact on me (and my family).

As you likely already know, Facebook has been working on a slew of changes to its "news feed", the main column on the site that alerts you to friends' activity. The social network implemented "real time" updates to show you when new entries were posted, and very recently divided the feed into two parts - a "Live Feed" for all updates as they occurred, with the newest on top, and a "News Feed", ostensibly from those who I engage with most often, or for "hot" content - presumably measured through interaction. This is a similar approach taken to FriendFeed's "best of day", PostRank's work on RSS feeds, and Google Reader's new feature, "Magic".

This weekend was a busy one for me, one where I was less connected to the computer than usual. As a result, I checked in to Facebook only a handful of times. Glancing at the News Feed on Saturday, nothing particularly stood out. The same held true on Sunday. I was greeted with updates from friends like Jason Goldberg and Chris Saad, both solid tech entrepreneurs. I also saw notes from Robert Scoble and a handful of connections that originated on FriendFeed. Still, nothing amazing to report.



But after 11 p.m. Sunday night, I saw a friend from high school make a mundane update, saying he had a good weekend, one he would cap off with a round of "Anno 1404." Turns out that's a city-building game, like Sim City. No big deal. I clicked through to his wall to see if he hinted at the good weekend. At the top of his wall, I saw something truly interesting. A simple update, his wall said, "Don likes Malinda Gray's photo." Malinda is my 23-year-old sister. Why would he be looking at her photos? And what photo?

I clicked through, and to my surprise found out that my other sister, 28, had given birth to a new baby boy, her first, making me an uncle. Wow! After more investigation, I found that my sister, as well as my mom, and also the mother of the child, had made posts on Facebook throughout the day Sunday on the progress of the labor, and how things had gone. I also found out that my sister had actually gone into labor and started that process around noon on Saturday - the previous day, and that I had absolutely no clue.

How could I have missed it, considering they had been updating Facebook regularly, and amassing a good share of comments and likes with each update? Well, apparently, Facebook didn't figure out that this update stream was relevant to me. It didn't realize and start sending - with alarm bells - that Louis's sister was having a baby. It didn't realize that photos from my sister, both of them, of a new baby, and the hospital just prior, were more important, than a random "OH" via Twitter from Chris.

Facebook's filter failed me. While, yes, I could have clicked on each of my individual family members' profiles at any point over the prior 24 hours, or yes, I should maybe make a Family-only list and make sure to visit it regularly, I've so far trusted the network to do a good job at gauging relevancy. Yes, it's true that I interact more often with Jason Goldberg or Johnny Worthington on Facebook than I do with my own family, but in this case, the News Feed hid the only truly relevant thing that was going on this weekend, and we missed it.

I explain further in the below video:

Inefficiency of Interaction Driving Need for Social Leverage

"It is a complete joke how we interact with people on the computer right now," believes Brad Feld of the Foundry Group. With multiple devices and scads of Web services needed to consume information and engage with others on the Web effectively, Feld and other venture capitalists are looking for ways to fund the next generation of companies and products designed to leverage social connections, reducing information overload and enabling simpler collaboration in the enterprise. In a keynote panel at the Defrag conference last week, five venture capitalists explained how they thought they could help companies take advantage of social experiences that are being forged, which, if successful, could supplant the way we discover information today.

Today's Web is one that is largely search driven, leading to Google's position as both king and king maker. But Union Square Ventures VC and principal Fred Wilson said that much of the information we discover and the links we click on are coming through social experiences, instead of from search or navigation. Taking advantage of this activity woul be a logical extension for companies, and therefore, for VCs looking to enable it to happen.

Roger Ehrenberg of IA Capital Partners, whose fund is behind BlogTalkRadio, Mashery, TweetDeck, Bit.ly and many other services, said that despite advances, the Web continues to have a problem of finding relevant information, and identifying people who would be potential connections. Social leverage should enable you to tap into the knowledge of your peers to bring the information to you, at your own pace.

"It's an opt-in world, and you can let people in as they deliver information," Ehrenberg said. "When you look at all this information you are receiving, you need to build in filtering."

As I have often stated, I believe "there is no information overload", or at least, there can't be without your explicit permissions. Feld argued that the perception of information overload is due to individuals' approach to how they consume data, more so than an increase in total data.

"We are stuck with a rigid set of distribution models," Feld said. "You can be rigid or disciplined about one type of information, or you can let whatever comes at you come at you. The computer has to get a lot smarter about what to do with all that stuff, and it needs more adaptability. We are in an era over the next decade where there will be a fundamental shift."

Over the last 20 years, Fred Wilson has said he has already seen two major shifts in communication. In the 1980s, as he started in the venture capital business, events would lead to business cards, which led to hours on the phone chasing deals. The 90s brought e-mail and the ability to hit an estimated 10 times as many people. Blogging then let him reach more than 10,000 people a day, which he called "a different interaction model."

"I still see the deals I want to see and I can see better deals because of it," he said. "E-mail is a heavy interaction model, which is a lot of work, but a blog post is easy for me... I don't even use the phone any more."

Feld and Wilson have found ways to adapt to the changing dynamic to continue their efforts in business, but with so many others feeling an information onslaught, lacking proper filters to reduce the noise, this too sets up the potential for new solutions and new services.

"The biggest opportunity is the opportunity in the enterprise for social leverage," said Jim Tybur of Trinity Ventures, "There are tons of opportunities for that to permeate throughout business. There is a place where e-mail and social streams can coexist effectively."

Streams May Impact E-mail, But Won't Kill It Any Time Soon

As trendy as it can be at times to say that the new social "activity streams" are set to be the future of our communications, including most social networks and the nascent Google Wave, it is clear that e-mail has some serious life ahead of it. While many can complain about the growth of e-mail messages, the replacement of actual messages from people with simple notifications by robots, and a march toward "In Box Zero", this form of transmission is not going to be deleted for the foreseeable future, even if it morphs to adopt more social functionality. In an intriguing discussion at last week's Defrag conference, it was suggested e-mail could tap into the social networks, and that the most adept e-mail users would have advantages over those less savvy, but nobody called for its death. In an attention-grabbing blogosphere, that's a rare thing indeed.

Tim Young of Socialcast, reflecting on the move to activity streams in many of those networks we inhabit, echoed a belief of mine, saying that as information consumers, access to more data is key to our continued growth and adaptation to a changing world. He even took a second step to say that our ability to adapt quickly will promote the best discovery artists to the head of the pack.

"Information foraging is core to our human psychology," Young said. "It is the energy source for our minds. We hunt and gather for information to understand and adapt to our world. Natural selection favors organisms with the best food foraging strategies. In the future, natural selection will favor people and enterprises with the best information foraging strategies."

For the last two decades, one of the most frequent methods for finding information and distributing outward has been e-mail. E-mail, like blogging, is well known for offering the function of rich communications and longer-length missives, not restricted by the limits often found through mobile phone usage, Twitter and other sites. Unsurprisingly, a good number of e-mails are made to be sent to multiple recipients as well.

Alexander Moore of Baydin reported in a study of more than 250,000 e-mail messages (via Enron) and nearly half a million tweets, that 42 percent of e-mails are multi-recipient, contrasted with only 6 percent of tweets being for multiple recipients, but he did say our immersion in the social Web had shown signs of affecting the way we send messages.

"We are conditioned from using Web 2.0 services," he said. "E-mail is moving toward shorter messages due to the rise of mobile phones. E-mail is going to be around for a while, but there are things we can learn form Twitter, Facebook and social media."

The conference's panelists largely agreed that e-mail needed improvements, much like an evolution instead of a revolution. Michael Cerda of cc:Betty said "E-mail is on its last leg, but that leg is going to be for a long time," adding he preferred an e-mail box full of grouped conversations instead of individual messages. In parallel, Matt Brezina of Xobni, said he thought e-mail could be made more social through exposing relationships that live in e-mail, possibly even sharing attachments and e-mails with an extended social graph.

Brezina said that Xobni was formed as a plug-in to Outlook instead of an Outlook replacement as "people hate changing their workflows," saying his product "generates more e-mail happiness" and increased worker productivity. Similarly, Cerda asked to "waken up the data and bring it to life". One way to do this, as Moore recommended, was to make feedback on e-mail more public. Why not add a "like" button to e-mail as there is in Facebook, to give the sender credit, when most feedback on e-mail today is private?

The day's panelists looked to a future that keeps e-mail around, but starts to see the integration of more social activity, borrowing from the world of social. The medium is not limited in the same way that many social networks are, but its sheer age and its occasional overwhelming nature has people asking what's next. One of the major reasons it hasn't gone away? As Moore said, it is "rich in content, rich in conversation and rich in control". Nearly 9 of every 10 e-mails is 140 characters or more.

Leveraging Social Marketing for Business, Sales and Startups

Following on to the post last month on leveraging social networks to build Web traffic, courtesy of YourBusinessChannel, filmed while in the UK with Ecademy, three more short videos have surfaced from our extended interview on the impact that social media tracking and activity can have for companies big and small on the Web - be it through connecting with potential customers, or simply expanding their brand. The three videos are embedded below - proving to me that I sound as tired as I felt, having just completed a five-hour presentation following the San Francisco to London Trip the day before.


Social Marketing Strategies a Boon for Business

Sales Advice for the Social Web


What Can Social Marketing Do for Startups?

Paladin Advisors Group: My Own "Stealth" Startup

Over the last four years on this blog, you have seen me talk a lot about hundreds of different startups and dozens of large enterprise companies. I have tried to share with you how I consume information and disseminate it outward to the many social networks. I let you know my thoughts on gadgets and hardware, and we have had open conversations about the culture of Silicon Valley, the future of blogging and social media, and we have discussed best practices and trends. But what we haven't talked about much is my job - because for the most part, this blog is as much about you as it is me. But over the last five to six months, I have been working on my own "stealth" startup, gaining clients - and it is soon coming time to tell you all about it. (Especially as Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned it last night)


Marshall's Tweet from Last Night Deserved Answers
Paladin Advisors Group is a strategic advisory firm for startups and enterprise companies who are looking for guidance in their marketing, public relations, sales processes, customer influence, Web and social media. For the firm, which is a handful of partners large, I am the Managing Director of New Media.


Follow Us On Twitter at @PaladinAG
Over the last few months, I have been working with enterprise companies including Emulex Corporation, and startups, including Kosmix.com and My6sense. For startups, as I have done informally for years, I have been working with them on product feedback and focus, quality assurance and visibility. For enterprise companies, my focus has been on integrating social media and blogging into their strategies, aligning on messaging with PR, marketing and customer service.

As with the advisory roles I have gained with SocialToo, BuzzGain, ReadBurner and others, I will always provide transparency to you and full disclosure on any relationships - and I hope that over the last few years with my activity here and on the downstream social networks, I have gained your trust to provide clarity.

Why do I call this new venture "stealth"? Because it is new, and I haven't made a lot of noise about it. In fact, our Web site is under development. But you can follow us on Twitter to be notified as soon as we have more announcements. (http://twitter.com/paladinag)

And... if you think our services might be a fit for your business, e-mail me at lgray@paladinag.com.

Social Networks' Traffic Stabilizes, Facebook Nears Yahoo!

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


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


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


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

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


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

Some other sites of note:

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

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

Attacking the Web's Beverly Hills and Schenectady Problem

Not too long ago, every new site you joined on the Web forced you to provide a daunting array of details about you in order to join. Full pages of pull-down menus asking about your date of birth, your marital status, your home address and other information was standard. But over the last few years, with advents such as OpenID, OpenSocial, Facebook Connect, and more recently, Twitter OAuth, personal identities are becoming portable - letting you sign in with a dedicated login to a new site, and reducing your need to store yet another password.

Kevin Marks, vice president of Web services at BT, formerly of Google and Technorati, relayed at the Defrag Conference this afternoon that under the old way, companies, after accumulating a high number of users, would often find they had an extremely high number of users responding they lived in either Beverly Hills or Schenectady, New York. Why? Because they were saying their zip codes were either 90210 or 12345. They were lying - sick of answering page after page of personal data for yet another Web site.

In the years since, thanks to efforts like OpenSocial, we have seen the rise of Web standards that interoperate, letting you pass along your personal information and credentials to new sites without having to create yet another user name and password.

"Over the last two years, we worked out the sanitization of protocols, so it could fetch things from one site to another," Marks said. "In that time, OpenSocial is up to 1 billion users. There are sites all over the world who are using this."

Marks broke down the solution to the real identity problem into four pieces:

• Me
  
• My Friends
  
• What We Do
  
• The Flow

Tools like OpenID and WebFinger solve for "Me", Portable contacts, through the unification of the Vcard specification, solve for "My Friends", activity streams solve for "What We Do", and new protocols like AtomPub, PubSubHubbub and Salmon are solving the "Flow". As you know, I have been a big proponent of tools like PubSubHubbub, Salmon and tools like Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth, as they not only pass along data between sites, but also make data pass between sites more quickly. And while they are causing what could be considered a revolution, it is happening through the simple evolution of activity that is already happening.

"All these standards are empirical standards," Marks said. "We first did this with microformats. We asked what people are doing already, and agreed we would do the same thing."

Now, if you do tell companies you live in Beverly HIlls or Schenectady, New York, there's a greater chance that you really do, and maybe we'll believe you.

Search: Less Useful Due to Massive Info Growth, the Flow?

In a forward-looking presentation at the Defrag Conference this morning, Stowe Boyd pushed attendees to think about how the Web would look by the year 2019, with the aid of seeing the massive amounts of change that has taken place over the previous decade. One of Boyd's most-aggressive comments stated that the world of search is falling apart, as the problems it initially aimed to solve have been eroded thanks to the information explosion and the corresponding ease of access to social connections in a world of real time. Without saying that social networks would render the established search giants, irrelevant, he suggested, as he has on his blog frequently in the last few years, that the "flow" will replace the world of Web pages - and change the game on search entirely.

Boyd essentially argued that social tools are in the process of changing the culture. He said people were incentivized to discover breaking news from social friends through networks like Twitter and Facebook, which makes the new "real-time Web" interesting. He further suggested that how one interprets this news to define "meaning" is what will replace search.

One of the biggest reasons he thinks meaning will replace search is that the initial argument for search engines was trying to find the few documents on the Web that were relevant to your query, and now, practically any search can deliver millions of results.

"Search is starting to fail because scarcity has been replaced by infinity," Boyd said. "We are heading toward a world where all the critical information is available publicly, and breaking news is a few seconds away - at the most. We will switch to instead relying on finding things through our social connections - engines of meaning, and the source of what is important."

Assuming social elements are going to trump algorithms and crawlers that power today's engines, Boyd said he believes that the most important dimension is now time, not space - and that for the most part, this dimension is shared.

"We are not sharing space online, we are sharing time," he said. "Our time is increasingly not our own. A shared thread of time will be the norm, and how we will get work done."

This new shared thread of time, or "flow", as Stowe referred to it, is poised to become the replacement for today's static Web pages, a new element in today's social Web, which he pontificated could be "the most defining moment of our civilization."

Skepticism Over Current State of Social Web at Defrag

At the Defrag conference in Denver this morning, there was an acknowledgement that social elements are infiltrating practically every aspect of businesses and interpersonal engagement online, but unlike other events, which have seen a practical hugfest over the latest apps or services, the morning's speakers expressed a great deal of frustration over trying to find real benefits and utility to all the activity that is happening online. Speakers suggested today's tools have a stark lack of context, that businesses are too obsessed with having a complete data set and aren't focused enough on the actability on that data, and that many developers are focused on designing apps that simply don't drive benefits.

Eric Marcoullier, CEO of GNIP, was most direct in his comments, saying that "the business world doesn't give a (crap) about your lifestream app," saying that designing yet another application that sorts all your content online is essentially a list of lists - a list of "my stuff" or "my friends' stuff", which is cute, but not necessarily valuable in decision making.

GNIP is best known for offering managing data collection as a service. The company has seen some ups and downs over the last 18 months, culminating in a significant layoff in September that saw the company reduce staff - cutting seven heads from the dozen on their roster. But since the move, Marcoullier said the last few weeks have been "stellar" in terms of productivity, even as his clients aren't necessarily looking for the answers to data - just more data.

He asked, "Is there an opportunity to drive business decisions and revenue for your company?", saying "Data is useless without effort. When you get data, it is a lot of work to do something useful with it, yet market research companies are obsessed with completeness of data."

Similarly, T.A. McCann, CTO of Gist, said that leading social services, like LinkedIn, have curated millions of nodes, tracking millions of relationships. But for most, it hasn't yet been clear how these connections can be leveraged to drive real daily utility - beyond suggesting new connections and companies that should be known due to shared interests.

Much of these shared interests have been displayed in social streams including Twitter and Facebook, which despite their meteoric rise in visibility, are still struggling to provide more than a simple flow of updates and links.

Tim Young of SocialCast complained, "What I find on Twitter is link vomit, or link carpet bombing and swarming about events. During the day, I get all these links, and the issue is I click the link and there isn't a lot of context. Why did they share this and how did it get here?"

Tim called for a new solution to be built that would save traces and paths of content to help communicate new findings to derive value - something made ever more difficult when the most common real time search repository, Twitter search, is now hosting a database that can track as few as only two days.

And despite many people's claims that finding this data ever more quickly is going to make us more productive as a species, Stowe Boyd dumped on that, saying "the myth of increased productivity is a failed world view," adding, "people will trade personal productivity for connectedness, and they will accept an interrupt to help somebody in their social connections."

That's not to say all is dark. Eric of GNIP promised he was still a huge fan of social media, and Stowe pontificated that the rise of the social Web may already be "the most valuable artifact ever created". But from a raft of useless lifestreaming applications and a gap between link visibility and link utility, the speakers seem to agree that we have a long way to go from today's promises to tomorrow's solutions.

Twitter Plucks Data Management Guru from Yahoo!

That Twitter is dealing with massive amounts of data flowing through its servers these days would be an understatement, as the service sees strong growth and significant mindshare. With the company having passed what looks to have been its rockiest struggles over the last twelve months, Twitter is now getting to focus on rolling out some significant new features, from Lists to geolocation, trend definitions and retweets. But the microblogging giant looks like it is taking extra steps to harness the power of its rapidly-expanding data set.

If the company's own team list is to be believed, they just picked up Utkarsh Srivastava, a highly respected senior research scientist at Yahoo!, who is best known for his work on building large-scale distributed systems, specifically his efforts with Hadoop.

Hadoop, similar to the Google File System, is a framework that enables applications to work over distributed server nodes and significant data sets - potentially ranging in the petabytes. Yahoo!, Google's off and on competitor, has been the company most associated with Hadoop. While at Yahoo!, Srivastava was one of the original designers of "Pig", an Apache project for analyzing large data sets, which leveraged Hadoop. (See also the research paper: Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing)

Srivastava, a PhD graduate from Stanford University in Computer Science, has been working at Yahoo! Research since 2006. (See his home page and LinkedIn profile)

Not knowing what aspects of Twitter Srivastava may be working on, it's premature to assume whether his efforts will be primarily focused on new initiatives, or simply helping the company scale its growth. I can dream and hope that he can be the missing piece that brings Twitter's high potential search engine fully online, but that is no doubt a big project indeed.

Update: This hire has been confirmed by Srivastava and also covered by TechCrunch.

The Story of Google's Closure: Advanced JavaScript Tools

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

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

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

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

Mihai writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cadmus Filters Real Time Streams to Reduce Clutter

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


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


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


Cadmus Knew Both Micah and Chris Were Watching a Show

Cadmus Saw Guy Talking About an Article TechCrunch Mentioned

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

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

TweetMeme to Soon Offer Individual Channels for Top Links

TweetMeme, the popular site that highlights the hottest links distributed on Twitter, is working on a new feature that will soon be opened up to all users - a dedicated channel that shows the links you have posted to your Twitter account, how often they have been retweeted, who the original sender was, and the most popular items you've sent out over the last 24 hours or seven days. Essentially, the service follows your updates, crawls your links, and produces a single page just for your activity. While the service is not yet live for everyone, it has gone into limited testing.

My Dedicated TweetMeme Channel (click for larger image)

To date, TweetMeme has divided top links by categories, including comedy, horror, climate change or tech topics including Google and Firefox. The new roll-out treats each user like their own category, so you could expect to see pages with user names instead.


Top Links from My TweetMeme Channel in the Last Week
An early example of such a dedicated page, for my activity, can be found here: http://tweets.louisgray.com/. In the future, TweetMeme hopes to make it easy enough to "skin" the page to look like your Web site, and will even offer widgets to highlight your most retweeted tweets. To make mine listed on "louisgray.com" instead of on "tweetmeme.com", I set up a change in my blog's CNAME record.

Should you want to, you can subscribe, via RSS, to all links distributed from these dedicated channels, or you can subscribe to a subset of the items.

For example:

• This RSS feed provides all links from @louisgray.
• This RSS feed shows all links from @louisgray that have the term Google.
• This RSS feed shows all links from @louisgray that have the term Twitter.

Top items from the last seven days can be found here, while those from the last 24 hours are on this page.

The page is a preview, but will be made available to the world soon enough. TweetMeme has a lot of news planned over the next month, and will be presenting at TechCrunch's Crunchup on November 20th, so watch their blog for more on this and other new features.

TweetDeck iPhone Update Fail Makes the Day "Manic".

Earlier this morning, Iain Dodsworth, creator of TweetDeck, posted that the day could potentially be "manic". While he cautioned the day's updates would not be list-related, as many updates from his competitors have been over the last week, it was hinted it would not be desktop related either. That left the iPhone, as TweetDeck doesn't yet have a Web option. But the iPhone release was found buggy, was later pulled, and now the service, and its devoted followers, are once again in a holding pattern with Apple - which makes them the undesired middleman. And yes, that means the day is officially "manic".

While I doubt few would want Apple's role as moderator to completely disappear, there should be some way to quickly post point releases or bug fixes for products that have previously been approved.


The Morning Started Off Well...

But Too Many Crash Reports Prompted a Pull...

And After Resubmission, All Wait for Apple.

For whatever reason, TweetDeck's quality assurance process did not catch that the new version of the application would crash as frequently as was reported, but once it was in the wild, it proved too much to accept. The next step was to pull the update from the store, resulting in false positives from would-be downloaders, myself included, who were told it was available, but that the item had been removed.

Now, after the team thinks they scrambled the troops and got a working version ready and submitted a few hours later, they have to wait for Cupertino to agree. The new version reportedly added Facebook support, which had previously been limited to the desktop application, as well as video uploading, integrated with 12seconds.tv, a new Landscape compose mode, trending topics support, a "Nearby" option that showed when Twitter friends were close, thanks to the iPhone's built-in GPS, and the option to open new links in Safari.

But we'll still have to wait, at least until Apple agrees their bug-free version is good enough. Until then, all we have is a video of the promised new updates (See below).



So what's the solution? Is this Apple's fault for forcing a wait, or TweetDeck's for bad code?

Brizzly and Seesmic Web Get Into Twitter Lists Game

At this point, it's almost getting easier to see which popular Twitter clients have not yet added Twitter Lists support than it is to track those that have enabled support, as in the last 12 hours, both Brizzly, a product from Thing Labs, and Seesmic Web, Seesmic Desktop's sexier counterpart, have weighed in with their support for the increasingly utilized Twitter Lists functionality. Assuming TweetDeck wraps up their support shortly, as they have promised, and we hear something from Tweetie, all the majors will have reported for duty.


Brizzly Highlights Integrated Lists Support
Brizzly, having supported Web grouping from the day it was introduced, had the simpler job of converting its existing groups that you had made into Twitter lists, tapping Twitter's API. If you had existing groups, as I did, they would display both in Brizzly and Twitter's Web interface as private lists, and you could opt to update them, or delete them from either app. Like with Twitter's interface, clicking on the list shows you the updates from people you have grouped, and no more.


Seesmic Web Now Supports Lists (Click for Larger Image)
For Seesmic Web, the introduction of lists is the first time such grouping functionality has made it to their app. The company has supported groups on Seesmic Desktop for some time, and added list support on Monday, but the Web version had been lacking. Twitter's List API made the move much simpler, so this morning, Loic LeMeur's Web service turned on the functionality, showing lists you have made or subscribed to in your sidebar, below your direct messages, and above searches.

Also added to Seesmic Web is a simple Trending Topics list that echoes the top items trending on Twitter.

With the adds, both services are essentially offering users a full package when it comes to Twitter's functionality, and the decision as to which to use comes as much down to the user interface as a feature war. Should be interesting to see both what TweetDeck and Tweetie will do, as well as what Twitter has planned next to kick off another round of updates.

Listiti Watches Twitter Lists for Keywords and Alerts

Regardless of where you sit in the RSS vs. Twitter debate for information discovery, you know the power of finding out when people are discussing topics of your interest, wherever they do so - be it on blogs, blog comments, social networks or anywhere else. With the advent of new Twitter lists, smart folks are manually curating lists of fellow Twitter users who to them provide value. And if done well, the lists should be spam-free, delivering only quality. A new service called Listiti debuted today, to help monitor lists which you hand select for keywords of your choosing.

Today, I use TweetBeep to get alerted to mentions on Twitter, be it for vanity searches or for topics I find interesting. But TweetBeep scours all of Twitter, not differentiating between what is a good hit and what is a less valuable one. Listiti can, in contrast, search only a specific subset of Twitter users to find relevant data, and send it to your e-mail.


Setting up an Alert in Listiti
For example, I have set up a pair of Twitter lists that are interesting to me. One is "myfavoritegeeks" for real-world techies I've grown to know well, and the second is "toptechbloggers" which is a hand-selected list of people whose content I trust. I can use Listiti to watch this list for any time they mention pet projects I am interested in, such as "Pubsubhubbub", and get an e-mail immediately.


Acknowledging the Alert Has Been Set Up
So far, the alerts are not yet "real time", but they are set up to run hourly, so you will get an update containing all positive hits in the last hour. They promise digest modes are coming. This makes another great use for Twitter lists as a trusted source, whether you set up the list yourself or go to a friend of yours with good taste.

TweetMeme Goes Mobile for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry

TweetMeme has rapidly become the most popular and practical default engine for content authors to enable their Web sites and blogs to be forwarded on to Twitter (in the form of a Retweet). The company is now serving more than 100 million Retweet buttons across the Web each day, and is aggregating the statistics of most popular items on its Web site. Today, the company jumped forward, introducing a new capability that lets users retweet from their favorite Twitter apps - as many people, including me, do not use Twitter's standard Web interface when unchained from the laptop.

The new functionality essentially tracks if you are viewing a site through your mobile phone, be it iPhone, Android or BlackBerry, and then prompts you to select your preferred application - including those from Tweetie, Echofon and others. And if you don't yet have a mobile application on your handset, TweetMeme will provide some suggestions.

I spoke with Nick Halstead, creator of TweetMeme, this morning, and he said the new mobile functionality is yet another reason the product has stayed ahead of competition and copycats. "We want to respond by being as far ahead as we are, and creating more functionality," he said. "Not many people use mobile Twitter. When you hit the retweet button, it opens the application you have selected and it will do the retweet from there."

The new functionality will be available very soon. You can see their official post on the TweetMeme blog: Mobile Retweeting

Stalqer: A Location Sharing App for Real Friends

I have always felt my life was not interesting enough to broadcast every small update. That's a major reason why I was initially slow to embrace Twitter, and why, thus far, I have shunned application broadcasting services like BrightKite and the extremely popular at the moment Foursquare. But a new application, set to hit the Apple iTunes Store any day now, called Stalqer, has a permanent position on my iPhone, because instead of being focused on badges and contests, its aim is to connect real friends, and it can work in the background - enabling me to have it run passively as I go about my business.


Stalqer Shows Connections on a Map And I Can Message Them
Mick Johnson, creator of Stalqer, and I met a few weeks ago, and he said he felt the focus for designing such an app was not to start up contests about how often somebody could check in to a specific location, and he didn't want people to create yet another user account for his app. In fact, he felt services like FourSquare created the badges mentality to force people to "check in", as the application would not automatically do so.


My Stalqer News Feed and an Update from Mick
In contrast, Stalqer utilizes Facebook Connect to have you log in, and it can present you the last-known location of your friends on Facebook. If they are using Stalqer, these friends' locations will start to populate your News Feed and you can send them messages from within the application itself, assuming you have their e-mail addresses registered with Facebook. Stalqer also makes updating your location very simple, as you can tell it to update in the background, every time you check your e-mail. If you are in WiFi range or connected to 3G, Stalqer can update your location throughout the day, without your even having to open the app.


Background Preferences and Connections in Stalqer
Stalqer shares some similarities to Google Latitude as much as it does the more-hyped FourSquare, in that your friends' avatars display on a map. You can zoom out as much as you like, to see how your Facebook connections are strung across the globe. But it's those nearest to you that are of course the most interesting. If you peek at the screenshot in this post, you'll see fellow tech blogger Steve Gillmor at the nearby Starbucks, and Robert Scoble visiting the Cupertino Apple Campus - both close enough for a quick drive. Using Stalqer, I could send either a message and meet up.

Depending on your preferences, you can get updated via Push alerts on the iPhone if friends manually check in to a location, or if they get within a certain number of miles. And if you wanted to, Stalqer has a "Places" function, which selects from the nearest registered and known places for you to announce you have arrived. If a place doesn't exist, you can add it yourself.


Choose Registered Places In Stalqer Or Who Has Checked In
If you do utilize the "Places" functionality in Stalqer, you can see which other Facebook Friends are checked into the same place. For example, when Mick Johnson checked in to the Googleplex in Mountain View last week, I could click through and see who else was there. In fact, if I wanted, I could even check in there myself and announce I had arrived, even if that wasn't true. You decide whether that's a feature or a bug...

Don't get thrown off by the "Stalqer" name, as the app is no more invasive than many others we already use today. I wouldn't ask Stalqer to change the name. The biggest bug so far tends to be its speed. With 1,300 Facebook connections, it can be slow to get avatars and updates. I'll be very interested to see how the service holds up once it hits the iTunes Store.

Seesmic Desktop: First Major Twitter Client With Lists

With Twitter lists becoming the biggest release for the microblogging service in almost a year, the many Twitter clients out there who have significant user bases are rushing to support the new feature. On Friday, I quickly mentioned that TweetDeck has promised list support. While they continue to work on bring the feature to their client, today Seesmic Desktop has already delivered. And the columned desktop application is no doubt the best way I have seen, so far, to consume lists, both of those you have created, and any others you might be following.

The new Seesmic Desktop, which will be distributed by e-mail early this week to users registered at http://seesmic.com/team.html, and soon after, be made available through auto-update, automatically discovers lists on Twitter that you have subscribed to, and displays them as options in your sidebar, between Facebook pages and saved searches.


The New Seesmic Desktop (Click to Enlarge)
Those user lists that you are following are displayed with the username and then the name of the list. Those from other Twitter users are shown with a gray Twitter logo, while those you have made are in blue. But whether they are yours or not, they still display the same, in the familiar column format seen on Seesmic Desktop and Web, as well as TweetDeck. On my 15-inch MacBook Pro, I could comfortably fit three lists, while those of you with more impressive displays can no doubt fit many more.

The Twitter Lists feature works just as it does on Twitter Web, letting you add any Twitter user to any list you have. Also announced in today's news was that Seesmic Desktop has surpassed three million individual downloads. You can also expect that Seesmic Web, one favorite of mine, will support the lists feature very soon.

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

Cross-Posted on my Ecademy Blog and Shared Here

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

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

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

A little background:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Google Reader Feeds Everything I Do Downstream

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


See What I am Reading in Google Reader

See What I am Sharing in Google Reader

See My Friends' Statistics in Google Reader

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Just Might Be the Droid You Are Looking For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TweetDeck Promises to Add Twitter Lists Support Soon

In July of 2008, when TweetDeck launched, it was the first Twitter client to support the ability to group those you follow - so you could see like-minded folks in a single column and ensure you didn't miss their updates. Now that Twitter is rapidly rolling out their own Lists functionality, many have been curious as to how TweetDeck would adapt to the change. In a blog post issued today, the company promised that support for Lists will be coming soon, "at the heart of the application".

The post didn't say just exactly how list support would be rolled out, or if you could export the groups you had already created into these new lists, but it is easy enough to assume they are working on it. In fact, the post says, "we're not just planning any old run-of-the mill integration...oh no. We think you'll find that what we have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights."

So if you are a TweetDeck user, worried about making more groups or starting your own lists, it sounds like Iain and team have you covered.

Update: Shortly after this was posted, Loic LeMeur of Seesmic said that his desktop program would also be soon supporting lists, in a tweet, saying: "OF COURSE Seesmic will have user lists very soon. I have them on my Seesmic Desktop already testing."

The Blurry Picture of Open APIs, Standards, Data Ownership

Look beyond "real-time" and "social", and you'll easily find another pair of tech buzzwords that everybody wants attached to their product or service - "open" and "standards". Companies are practically falling over one another to show they have embraced developers or users, letting data stream in and out of their products, while avoiding words like "proprietary" and "closed", which are PR death. But as you might imagine, the very definition of "open" can vary depending on who you talk to, what the service's goals are, and how they may leverage existing standards on the Web. Following the much-discussed news of Facebook debuting its "Open Graph API" on Wednesday, I traded a few e-mails with a few respected tech-minded developers, and found, unsurprisingly, that not everyone believes Facebook is fully "open". In fact, it's believed some companies are playing fast and loose with terms that should be better understood.

To quickly summarize the discussion, there are essentially three major ways to bucket "open" APIs, agreed those I contacted.

• The first, "open access", means that anybody can use the API, but all the data in or out of the services is owned or controlled by the company whose service you are using. The Facebook Open Graph API "is open insofar as you do not violate their ToS", one developer wrote. "Here, 'open' is superfluous -- no (question) you're giving people open access to it, how else would they use it?"

• The second type is that of an API that leverages open standards, including those such as XML, HTTP, and others. But that doesn't mean APIs that leverage those standards are open by definition. For example, Twitter's API is proprietary, even though it is built on open standards. The developer adds, "Here 'open' is just saying they've tried to incorporate best practices from other engineers -- it would be stupid if they didn't."

• The third type is the most "open", including open standard APIs like OpenSocial, OpenID, PubSubHubbub, AtomPub and others. These APIs have a clear definition that can be utilized by multiple providers in a way that is interoperable, decoupling providers and consumers.

In short, you have "open but we control the process", "standing on the backs of open" and "truly open", if this opinion is accepted. The developer adds, "In short, the first two mean nothing, the last one actually fits the dictionary definition. The Web is built on open standard APIs and protocols."

Chris Saad, VP of Product and Community Strategy at JS-Kit, well known for his efforts in the data portability space, concurred, writing over e-mail:

"Facebook in particular has made a concerted effort to dilute the word open and use it in reference to a human/cultural thing when talking about the platform and their products."

He added, "In reality there is a VERY big difference between having an 'Open API', an 'Open Standards API' and an 'API'. An API is just a thing you poke and you get data back. When you get FaceBookPropietaryXMLData using FacebookPropietaryAuthMethod and you can only cache the data for 24 hours - that is NOT an open API - it is an API."

So who cares? Historically, services like Facebook and AOL have been characterized as walled gardens, meaning their information is sealed within, beyond the reach of the standard Web. Other services are known as "data roach motels", where data gets in, but never gets out. As the first developer said, the Web is built on open standard APIs and protocols, so sites can work well with each other, and activities operate in a similar manner, regardless of service.

Jesse Stay, a friend of mine, fellow blogger, and well-versed developer for both the Facebook and Twitter platforms, agreed that there is a tremendous amount of confusion around the definition of "open". In fact, just last month he wrote a post on his site, "The Open Web – Is it Really What We Think it is?"

Today he said Facebook's move gave full access to "users' walls, comments, likes and social graph... accessible from any Web site, desktop application or mobile application, using open API access protocols." Meanwhile, Facebook users can now opt into letting their status updates indexed by search engines, and the company is open sourcing architecture like the Tornado Web server (acquired as part of the FriendFeed buy) so other developers can make new platforms.

Jesse is more optimistic about Facebook's goals than was Chris. He said that the site lets users decide how open they want to be with their data, and that they are "working to give users full power" in that regard. But he also states frustration with the company's restricted access to search, and a lack of access to the entire network in aggregate, with the exception of their fan page directory. And he didn't address the core issue with Facebook in terms of them owning your data bidirectionally, and yes, them having the option to block your access if they felt you had violated the terms of service. (Remember this one? Scobleizer: Facebook Disabled My Account)

Web standards are very well known and we usually recognize them by their acronyms. JSON. HTTP. XML. POP3. Atom. Open means that developers can tap into the standard and use it as they wish, both procuring data and pushing it elsewhere. When we start to blur the lines about open and associate them with specific companies, like Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! or others, you can usually guess that the solution is slightly less open. Somebody has the option to change their proprietary code and block you from having full access.

As stated more than a few times here, I have chosen to trust companies with my data. I put a lot of data into the Web and move it around. I expect standards to work the same way across sites, and I hope that those services that I use treat developers as well as they do their users. I recognize I am not as technical as folks like the developers I pinged today, and thus I need to trust their comments at times once my expertise is surpassed. But we need to be more knowledgeable about what is "open" and what is "sorta', kinda' open". Maybe Facebook can help us all understand their level of openness as time progresses.

Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cinch Puts Simple Podcasts In Your Pocket

In August, I suggested that Apple should find a way to record phone calls on the iPhone, leveraging its Voice Memo product, to make it drop-dead simple to create podcasts at any time. While the company hasn't achieved such a goal, an offering from BlogTalk Radio, called Cinch, has delivered on an extremely easy to use product that lets you record audio clips and post them to your social networks, including Facebook or Twitter. I've been using it the last few weeks, and while I try and discard a huge number of different technologies, this is one I know I will be returning to often - as it meets a need not currently served by other providers.

The idea behind Cinch is to provide short-form audio updates much like Twitter is for text, and 12seconds.tv is for video. Twitter's ease of use has come largely due to its short-form definition, keeping us all in 140 character soundbites, and CinchCast makes it just as easy to provide short updates, in audio form.


The Cinch Interface on the iPhone - Record and Publish
A free iPhone application, Cinch provides you with the option to record using the iPhone's built in microphone - good for solo updates, or one to one quick interviews - perfect for "people on the street" situations or for events. Once recorded, you can hit play to preview the Cinchcast, or hit Publish to send it off to destinations you have selected, including Twitter or Facebook. You can also add a photo to help tell the story, and can provide, yes, a 140 character update explaining what the Cinchcast is all about.

Should you want to, you can also search the service to find other CinchCasts or click Radio to see BlogTalkRadio's on-air schedule.


Cinch Shows My Published Updates and Those from Others on the Service
I never got into 12seconds.tv given its brevity and my lack of need for quick video shorts. But I can already see getting into regular updates on Cinch to augment my other blogging and social networking activity. As you can see on my Cinch page, I used the product to have a quick interview with Ethan Gahng of Lazyfeed last week, and earlier today, made some comments on the new report that once again, people are blaming social media for employees' lost productivity.

Now, whenever I want to speak directly to people on all the social networks, and have a follow-on discussion in the comments on Cinch, all I need to do is take out my iPhone and speak into the microphone. I will be looking forward to posting many more. You can find Cinch at http://www.cinchcast.com/.

See Also: Webtop Mania: Cinch: better than Twitter, better than Evernote.

Twitter Snags Platform Manager Josh Elman From Facebook

Twitter has made yet another high profile acquisition to its executive ranks, as tomorrow, Josh Elman joins the microblogging powerhouse after nearly two years as Facebook's Platform Program Manager, gaining a role as one of Twitter's small team of product managers. The move is a big win for Twitter, who has been working to improve the company's interaction with its development community after running lean for the last year-plus.

Prior to joining Facebook in March of 2008, Elman headed product management at Zazzle for three years. He also has history at LinkedIn and RealNetworks dating back to 1997.

Pulling off the LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter trifecta is a rare one, but the Valley is dotted with tech geeks who can count their current homes as Twitter or Facebook, but also sport both Google and Yahoo! on their resume.


Twitter Welcomes Josh to the Team Via a List
Rumors about Elman's joining Twitter had been bubbling in the tech backchannels in recent days, and while he has not yet made announcement of the move, thanks to Twitter's new list feature, you could see his account added to the company's official Twitter team late tonight. That Twitter "Team" list now sports 113 members, including part-time contractors.


Word of the News Has Been Out on the Street for A While
Elman was first reported to have left Facebook in a story on Inside Facebook that posted in mid-September. The article said he and Facebook left on positive terms.

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.

Google Reader's Magic Finds Personalized Highlights In Feeds

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

---

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

Video: Trends and the Future of Social Networks (With TurnHere)

Morgan Brown of TurnHere and I sit down to chat about social networks, business and trends. All three videos were recorded earlier this summer.

Video: Leveraging Social Networks to Build Web Traffic

Courtesy of YourBusinessChannel, filmed while in the UK with Ecademy, some of my comments on how being active in social networking can aid business and Web sites' search engine visibility. (Apologies for looking and sounding tired. I was.)

Twitter Gives Bing Access to the Firehose, Promises More to Come

As previewed in a scoop by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, Twitter has enabled Microsoft's Bing search engine to have access to the full firehose of all public tweets, adding these real-time elements to the company's data pool. In a post confirming the partnership, Twitter called the onslaught of updates an "overwhelming deluge", hoping that Bing could help you find those that make sense for your search query "right now".

Solving search and discovery for Twitter Search has been extremely challenging for the San Francisco-based startup, and the company's incomplete database has led to a swarm of competition, notably that of Searchtastic most recently, who gave top billing to the fact their index dived deeper than Twitter.

This obviously is no free transaction, so it is safe to say Twitter clearly has revenue today. And more will come as the company promises the development of meaningful relationships with companies that share their vision of creating value for users - be they big companies or small ones. More on the announcement can be seen on the Bing blog.

Update: (I just received this via e-mail from a Bing PR rep)

Hi Louis,

This morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division is announcing a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter’s real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.

More specifically, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:

A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.

Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.

Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.

You can try out the new Bing Twitter search beta here momentarily or learn more about it at the Bing blog. Please note that this is a U.S. only feature at this time.

Facebook Partnership

As part of his on-stage discussion at the summit, Dr. Lu is also announcing a global partnership with Facebook that will bring public Facebook status updates to Bing search results. The experience will be available at a later date.

Simler, the Interest-Based Microblog Network, Open to the Public

Simler, a fledgling interest-based social network, which I covered in early September (See: Find Similar People and Interests With Simler's Microblogging Platform) is now open to the public and no longer requires invites. You can find my account at: http://simler.com/user/louisgray/.

Simler lets you set up new discussons around tags, and like other real-time services, discussions on specific topics bump them to the top. Check it out if you don't already have a login.

Can Twitter Replace RSS for Sharing the Best of the Web?

On Monday, early adopter and Web provocateur Robert Scoble suggested that my use of Google Reader to share the best of the tech Web each day was antiquated. In fact, he called Reader "a dead product" compared to Twitter, which he believes will grow in importance for information discovery, especially as the lists feature is released more widely into the network. I respect Robert a great deal and we're good friends, so this kind of discussion doesn't bug me at all. As usual, it got me to thinking about why I do what I do, and whether it should change.

As discussed many times here, I share the best RSS items that enter my Google Reader in box per day. Lately, I have been sharing upwards of 30 items each day, up from the previous 20 to 25. These hand-selected items are then available on my link blog, in Google Reader for comments to other connections on that service, and downstream on other networks, including FriendFeed, Facebook and Socialmedian.

Last month, I noted the introduction of a new PubSubHubbub-enabled application called Reader2Twitter, that made it easier to share these items directly to Twitter as well. I even created a new Twitter ID for this, called @lgshareditems.

In parallel, Robert has been trying to do something similar, using not RSS, but Twitter, to share the best of the technology Web as it streams on his screen. While I have chosen to read 716 different feeds, Robert has chosen to follow more than 8,000 individual Twitter users. Similarly, his favorite Tweets are sent to an account called @scoblefaves, via FavStar.fm.



My Approach on the Left, Scoble's On the Right
In theory, both of us have the same goal. Both of us want to act as aggressive information filters, passing along the very best data to those downstream. But we are using different tools. My tools haven't changed much in the last two years, and Robert thinks that he is on to something. I like that he is being innovative, and once again, taking a chance by using a familiar tool in a new way, but there are more than a few reasons I won't be giving up the link blog in exchange for a Twitter favorites list any time soon. Not the first of which is that I have typically used my Twitter favorites to highlight positive mentions, similar to how I run my Delicious account, not to highlight news of the day.



See How Self-Centered I Am?



In Contrast, Robert Is Acting As a News Filter
In the discussion Monday, Robert said that Google Reader was "slower and lamer than Twitter is". That's been a common refrain from people who have said RSS "is dead". He also mentioned that Twitter doesn't have full text. So let's compare the two.

Advantages: Twitter Favorites

1. Speed.

Assuming that Robert is following the same people I am, but on Twitter instead of in Google Reader, Robert is correct that many people post their blog items to Twitter faster than they make it to Google Reader. This assumes that there could be a delay for RSS readers to get new posts of about 20 minutes. Many pieces in the ecosystem are PubSubHubbub-enabled, but not every leg, and therefore, there can be delays.

2. Ease of Resharing.

If Robert favorites a Tweet and that goes to his @scoblefaves account, it can be easily retweeted downstream, further into the network.

3. Some Native Content Is Not Link-Based

There are some interesting observations or comments on Twitter that are not links to a third-party site.

Advantages: Google Reader Link Blog

1. Sharing of the Original Source

A shared Google Reader item is one click away from the full source data. A favorited tweet is essentially a share of a share, as the original content is somewhere else.

2. Full Content Beyond 140 Characters 

Google Reader items contain as much data as presented in the RSS feed, going beyond the headline, but also including the body text, layout, etc. 

3. Rich Media 

Twitter today is still text. Pictures and video from third party services are displayed as URLs, not as the content itself, with one key exception being the Brizzly Twitter client. 

4. Integrated Comments On Each Item

Each shared item in Google Reader offers connections the option to have a parallel discussion away from the blog post - something impossible with Twitter, which would instead require a series of replies or retweets.

5. Not All Blog Content Gets Sent To Twitter

I cannot safely assume that every blogger I follow also posts their content as links to Twitter. I cannot also believe that I am following them all, or that I see their every update. Therefore, RSS cannot be replaced.

I am a big believer in RSS and in blogging. I believe Twitter is infrastructure, and that it has many uses. I believe that even if it is possible to find links to some content as much as a half-hour before, that it is worth seeing the full content from its original source, and sharing the content in its entirety. I also have two years' worth of inertia into the Google Reader link blog, which is powering my social graph everywhere else. Lastly, I believe that the speed discrepancy we see today is going to improve with greater adoption of tools like PubSubHubbub.

With the potential for FriendFeed to disappear, I fully understand Robert moving away from his "likes" initiative he had on the service, hoping that moving to Twitter favorites would fill that need. It's a noble approach. Maybe in time others will do the same, much like I followed him to cultivating an active link blog two years ago, and continue today. But we are far from the point where I am going to trade out my current process for something that not only seems less useful, but would certainly be less fun. As long as Web sites still publish and bloggers still blog, there will be room for RSS and room for a great reader and room for sharing. Until that ends, I'll keep going.

Blog World Expo Presentation: Technology and the Real-Time Web

View more documents from Louis Gray.

At 5:04 P.M. On October 17, 1989, The Earth Moved

20 years ago today, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area, taking 63 lives, postponing the World Series featuring the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's, and putting the entire region into disarray. Over time, the community rebuilt itself, and the entire Bay Area continued to produce world-leading technology in Silicon Valley and training top students at Stanford, UC Berkeley and other area schools, helping to accelerate the digital age we live in now.

Nobody knows when the next big earthquake will happen, but practically everyone believes that we're due. Last year, I wondered aloud how the world might react to an earthquake that hit the Valley, perceived to be full of upper-class egocentric folks, not the more sympathetic low-income victims hit by natural disasters around the world. But there's no doubt that if there were a disaster to hit the Bay Area, again the region would need help.

Everybody in the area has their own story. "Where were you when the earthquake hit?"

At the time of the earthquake, I was only 12 years old, and on my way to soccer practice. I lived in Northern California, but far away from the damage of the quake. An A's fan, I had looked forward to seeing the 3rd game of the World Series, but soccer practice had been on the calendar, so off I went.

On the way to practice, the only bumps and shakes we felt were the result of the coach's rickety van going down the semi-paved roads. We didn't know about the quake, and practice was set to start at 5.

Midway through the practice, as we were scrimmaging, one of the other kid's moms pulled up and said there had been a massive earthquake in San Francisco, saying that anybody who had family or friends in San Francisco could come with her, and she would take them home. The rest of the scrimmage, as we listlessly kicked the ball, our thoughts were somewhere else.

At the end of the practice, we went home and watched the news roll in on the TV, and we learned more over the next hours and days. The Bay Bridge had collapsed. The Marina was on fire. The World Series was being postponed. Everything had stopped. The ensuing days were full of statistics and stories of individual heroism. The community rallied together and rebuilt.

Eventually, the A's came back and won the World Series. They swept. It's the last time they won, so it's been 20 years for that too. And even though it has been twenty years, I always remember the day of the big quake. October 17th, 1989. I remember the time. 5:04 p.m. If you were in the Bay Area, what was your story? What do you remember?

Gary Burd Exits Facebook Two Months After FriendFeed Acquisition

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


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

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

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

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

Proposed Salmon Protocol Aims To Unify Conversations on the Web

As comments on the Web become fragmented, conversations that occur on downstream aggregation sites often are taking place in a silo, disjointed from parallel discussions on the originating Web site. Over the last two years, many people have found this evolution controversial, hoping to unify the conversations in a central location - and some services, including JS-Kit's Echo and Disqus, have taken the first step by pulling external discussions to the source. But a brand new proposal, authored by John Panzer of Blogger, called the Salmon Protocol, is looking to take advantage of Pubsubhubbub to unify the conversations in all places, both upstream and downstream. And yes... the name of Salmon comes because those fish manage to swim upstream, just like the comments.


An Initial Presentation on the Salmon Protocol
As discussed in Friday's panel at Blog World Expo on technology and the real-time Web, Pubsubhubbub essentially works as a middle-man conduit, taking information from a data's source passing along changed data to downstream destination sites. The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites.

In conjunction with Pubsubhubbub, the Salmon Protocol leverages the newest iteration of webfinger, enabling publishers to receive comments and verify subscribers - as a form of true identity recognition, similar to how both Disqus and JS-Kit have you register for individual accounts with either service. An additional side benefit to leveraging Webfinger would be to dramatically reduce the potential for spam, assuming each individual has a unique ID.

The debate over fractured conversations has risen and fallen over the last two years. In September, I essentially said I was done listening to people complain about the issue after hearing complaints regarding Google SideWiki - as I believe people will want to have conversations where they are comfortable, and that they shouldn't be forced to come back to a single source. This is a point I have been hammering since the first major flareup back in April of 2008. (See: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

Many people believe that transporting comments from one site to another and making the conversations one could cause confusion, or even make potential commenters uncomfortable. With this in mind, John has suggested that users "be made aware of the publishing scope of the comments they leave," adding "For some aggregators, this may be implied (all data is public), for others a warning or a checkbox may be necessary." (See: Salmon Protocol (Draft) Protocol Summary)


A Test Comment from the Aggregator Via Salmon

The Resulting Comment Back On the Blog Via Salmon
There is a test playground for the Salmon Protocol, and I can verify that it already works. If you want to test it, one option is to take a testbed Blogger account and point the Salmon Protocol your way. It occurs automatically, and comments that happen on the downstream aggregator will make it back to the blog immediately, thanks to Pubsubhubbub. Now, the quest becomes to turn this brand-new protocol into a new standard - one that could pose a serious challenge to services like JS-Kit Echo and Disqus, even including threaded replies. If done well, the long debate over unified conversations could soon be over.

Learn more at: http://www.salmon-protocol.org/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheezburger Network Scales Company By Focusing On Happy

The Web simply can't get enough funny cat pictures. Or dog pictures. Or sleeping cat pictures. Or pictures of people failing. Or creative approaches to fix things. The Cheezburger Network has grown dramatically, racing to the point where they are seeing a billion page views every four months, after it took nearly two years to reach the first billion. Growing the company on rapid scale is no accident, as the network has focused its business objectives on its customers, aiming to remove distractions and obstacles that could hinder potential growth.

Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, said the company focused not on how many features they could push into the network, but instead on simplicity - letting the users dictate how the business would grow. And the company is realistic about what it aims to do. They aren't out to make a billion dollars in profit, or to change the world.

"Our mission statement is to make people happy for five minutes a day," Ben said today at Blog World Expo. "We kept hearing from our audience members, 'You make us happy,'. When you allow your users to dictate how your business will operate, and can develop a thick skin, that is how you grow."

If you have spent any amount of time on social networks, or received any e-mail outside of your office, you probably have encountered work from Cheezburger Network. From I Can Haz Cheezburger and I Has a Hotdog to the FAIL Blog, GraphJam, There, I Fixed It, E-mails from Crazy People and It Made My Day, the company is trying to reach a broad audience through more sites and more content, based on user feedback. In fact, today they announced a new site featuring sleeping animals, called Daily Squee, which is reminiscent of the also popular and off network Cute Overload.

The sites' mantras are pretty simple. Post funny pictures with custom captions. Ben said that human nature has a tendency to admire complexity, but rewards simplicity, and that through introducing complexity, it has an inverse effect on your business' ability to scale. Instead of investing in expensive custom software and hardware, Cheezburger utilizes standard products including WordPress, JS-Kit, YouTube, Google Apps, cloud storage and open source applications, keeping costs low.

While some of the network's sites may seem fanciful, they are thoughtfully planned out and new proposals are theorized frequently, and target those who may not yet be avid fans of the network. Ben theorized that half the company's traffic was non-critical and transient, while 30 percent of traffic constituted the regulars, another 15 percent were fans, and an elite 5 percent were people who show up every day, multiple times a day. He suggested that businesses focus on the greatest population that could migrate to higher devoted level (in this case the 30 percent), as that will increase the total number of fans, and discourage targeting the site by scaling to the power users, who are typically edge cases.

Beyond keeping its audience happy for 5 minutes at a time, Ben said the company frequently thinks in small time allotments, saying, "If I had wanted to work four hours a week, what would I have to do?" and asking, "If my users had forty seconds on the site, what would they want to do?" Key to satisfying these short term visitors? Eliminating distractions and removing barriers.

The goal is to keep the company in touch with what the users wanted, and purging common mistakes that come from within, including ego, pride, assumptions, sacred cows, secrets, coverups, and individual reputation. The result is one big fat happy network.

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.

How To Rally Your Community, Leveraging Social Media

Social media is a tool. Last month I said social media is infrastructure, and I have compared Twitter to the new e-mail or a parallel Internet. Because of this, enterprising folks are finding ways to leverage these new tools for practically every facet of business, not just for social media marketing, or daily minutiae, but for rallying the community to support charity. I've talked a lot about the #BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon, featuring my good friend Drew Olanoff, but as we learned today at the Blog World Expo this morning, he is not alone in his efforts to leverage social media communities to take on cancer and other causes. The panelists all agreed it takes effort, persistence and consistency, making an abstract illness personal, real and tangible.

Drew has been relatively lucky in his challenge with cancer. His battle with stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma is very possibly nearing its conclusion, with 10 chemo treatments out of 12 behind him, and positive feedback from his doctors. But not everybody has a happy ending. Jay Scott, father of Alex from "Alex's Lemonade Stand", told us about how his daughter passed away at the tender age of 8 1/2 after fighting with cancer her whole life, and devoting her efforts to raise money the only way she knew how - selling lemonade on the family's front lawn. Jay and his team have rallied to continue her cause and make it into a movement that has inspired hundreds of thousands.

The tools that Jay, Drew and others have used to punch cancer in the mouth are the same tools we all use. Drew said, "It's not rocket science, it's word of mouth. If you have a passion, be passionate about it and use the tools in front of you." But he added it takes a ton of effort. He said, "It's not Field of Dreams here. You have to go after people and be aggressive. Whatever got your attention, I don't care what it is, I got your attention. All these tools are is platforms for people."

Meaghan Edelstein, who battled cervical cancer and won, said the main push from social networks is in the name itself: social. She said, "You have to get people excited. People are on social networks because they want to do something, so give them something to do."

But as you can imagine, fighting a faceless killer and rallying people to a cause is not as simple as setting up a Twitter account and Facebook page and watching the activity roll in. It takes serious work that is genuine and personal.

Meaghan said to "be authentic" and be a real person with real messages, and recognize that the smallest blog or least-followed Twitter account is just as important to embrace as the household names. "You are not too good for anybody else, and you have to remember that," she said. "You have to thank them and participate. That's what makes things authentic and social. If you don't have these things, you have to get out of the arena."

But all the effort in the world won't make a difference if the story doesn't sell.

Jay said "you have to have a good message, and if it is powerful, people will tell their friends about it," adding, "I can't believe how powerful retweets are. It helps if people have a million followers, but it also helps from those people who have ten followers."

When cancer took on Alex Scott, and took her away from the world much too soon, it may have been a short-term win for cancer at huge expense to her family and us all, but it turned out to be a massive mistake on cancer's part, because the cause has lived on and Alex has become a symbol for rallying for a good cause. Each of the day's panelists made it clear that their battle with cancer had gotten personal and their community has come to their aid.

Find out more about the causes:

• alexslemonade.org or @alexslemonade
  
• blamedrewscancer.com or @drew
  
• spiritjump.org or @spiritjump

Do You Trust Small Companies With Your Data More, Or Big Ones?

A few of this summer's acquisitions featured a scrappy upstart much beloved by the Web masses getting absorbed by a larger, more-established acquirer - with two of the more prominent examples being Intuit's buy of Mint.com and Facebook's takeover of FriendFeed. And amidst the ensuing responses, I saw two truly oppositional reactions - the first from people who swore they would never use the larger company or service because they hated it or didn't trust it, and the second, from people who now thought it was "safe" to use the smaller service as it finally had some parental supervision.

I recognize that some people have a greater tendency to accept risk in their lives, including risk to their data, than do others. Some lines of business and people operating those businesses are as a rule conservative - not venturing to buy one company's goods until they have done a full background check on the firm's financial stability, or have seen a flurry of similar use cases from peers. Others flock toward a series of early adoptions, where a personal relationship with a site's founders or employees is possible, thanks to the product's newness. And no doubt, the two sides rarely agree on a set strategy.

What are the underlying concerns both parties may have?

For Those Who Favor Big Companies Over the Upstarts

• A small company may not have taken all necessary precautions to protect their data, making it vulnerable.
  
• A small company may not have longevity, and if it expires, so too could your data.
  
• A small company may grow desperate for funds and could sell your personal information.

For Those Who Favor Small Companies Over the Giants

• A large company is more likely driven by sheer dollars than by customer service.
  
• A large company may have a history that contains questionable moves.
  
• A large company may act unilaterally in terms of how your data is used.

In parallel with the two acquisitions I had mentioned, there have been a few isolated cases of the smaller company putting itself up for auction, essentially turning its user base into a marketing list for sale to the highest bidder, whether or not that may contain personally identifiable information, or possibly passwords. But in parallel, you can see people who strongly dislike Google, don't trust Microsoft, or think that Facebook is evil. I even saw a post go up yesterday saying that Cisco was evil. The bigger they are, the bigger a target they are.

I tend to trust companies rather than distrust them. I am an optimist. I think there is a possible point where personal relationships with the founders trumps a robust multi-tier support system or flashier GUI. But it's not for everyone. What are your thoughts, and do mega mergers change the way you perceive your data being protected?

Hey Bloggers, Step Away from the Twitter for a Second... and Blog

There are a few shiny things here in Vegas that have bloggers' attention. No question about it. There are shows and clothes, lookers and hookers, drinks and winks. But it could be a shiny blue bird, and the light of mobile phones that has many bloggers' attention this year, even if they are in Vegas instead of wherever they may call home. Blog World Expo, a conference dedicated to blogging, about blogging, featuring bloggers and discussing all things blogging, should see a whole lot of blogging. Right? But there's a high possibility that many will forgo full-size blogging, in exchange for everyone's favorite microblogging application, favoring hashtags over Technorati tags.


Chris Pirillo, lifecasting maven and tech geek to the masses, asked what many of us have been observing ourselves, this evening, when he said, "How many bloggers does it take to blog about Blog World Expo? None. They're all tweeting about it, instead." Now I will give bloggers the benefit of the doubt a bit for tonight only, given the show hasn't really kicked off. But as I noted at South By Southwest in the Spring, and at Blog World Expo last fall, there has come a tendency for those attending events to "live tweet" the event, 140 characters at a time, and not do the wrap-up report of what sessions they attended, ideas they encountered and people they met. And I wish this were not the case.

I don't want to be putting down any quasi-moral ultimatums about how the event is about the sessions and not about the parties, even if that's how I feel most days. I don't think it's my place to tell people to stop having so much fun and focus. But I do hope that those of us who have the privilege of calling ourselves bloggers actually blog.

Over the next few days, I will be seeing many of my peers and respected tech leaders talking shop and I look forward to learning a lot. I will be blogging as much as I can where it makes sense, following the model I discussed in March of this year, when I showed how to blog live events and publish with lightning speed. While at South by Southwest this March, I was aggressive enough to add 14 separate posts in the four day period. I can't promise the same amount this week, but I will do my best to bring the event to you.

With great tools like Lazyfeed available to help you follow blogs on specific topics, it is now easier than ever to see your posts on the week's event. As much fun as it will be to check in on Foursquare at whatever pub you are drinking at, or to quote tech luminaries with the #bwe09 hashtag all over Twitter, I am hoping I will see some great posts - lots of them - from all the bloggers who are here. I did say It's Twitter's World... but there is a big role for blogs in an age of microblogging, and I want to see all of us try to do both.

BlogWorld Expo 2009: The State of Technology & the Real Time Web

For the third time this year, I am back in Las Vegas. And per usual, I'm not here for anything resembling a vacation, as it's conference time. But instead of attending an event on behalf of a specific company, as I have done many different times, I am going on behalf of the blog, and making many of the connections I have forged online since 2006 onward more concrete - through participating in Blog World Expo. This is my second year participating after going last year, and for 2009, I have the challenging, yet exciting, opportunity to talk about what has to be one of the biggest stories in technology this year - the real-time Web.

On Friday, the second day of the conference, at 11:30 a.m., I will be speaking solo - trying to discuss the impact the Web is seeing as real-time becomes further embedded in many of our daily online activities.

The subject of the real-time Web is near and dear to me. As an information consumer and producer, anything I can do to get my data out to more places faster than ever, or the easier I can get to more data, faster than ever, reducing latency is huge. That's part of why I made the real-time Web central to my #1 prediction for the world of tech in 2009 back on New Year's Eve.

Excerpting from my post back on December 31:

"Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-timeoffer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options."

I've been well known for getting my predictions wrong, but every once in a while, I feel like I am on to something, so this is gratifying.

If you are here for BlogWorld Expo, you can expect to hear a lot more about things like PubSubHubbub, Lazyfeed, Reader2Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter Search, and more at 11:30 on Friday. Just make sure you add the session to your own custom schedule. It will all go down in real time. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Roars Back To Life After Self-Imposed Slumber

There are a select few Web 2.0 companies who have suffered such a roller coaster of peaks and valleys the way Technorati has. Once a clear industry leader for blog search, statistics, and individual site "authority", Technorati's influence withered away thanks to an aggressive push by Google into the blog search arena, statistical gaming by number-crazed bloggers, management changes, odd product launches, and inconsistent uptime. But with a major relaunch tonight, the company has tried to throw off the shackles of the old and rise again, armed with more cash in the bank, a talented editorial staff, and a new look. All of a sudden, the site looks relevant again.

Back in early 2007, Technorati was among one of the favorite topics on this blog. You could see the tumult at the company, as then-CEO David Sifry wrote on a Tuesday in a comment here that he was "very very happy at Technorati", only to announce he was looking for a new CEO that Friday, three days later. You could see debate that summer over people trying to game the then much-watched "Authority", which counted up external links to your site in a six month period. But by early 2008, we were using phrases to discuss the company that included "totally toast", and the new Twitter generation, less than two years removed from Technorati's heyday, scarcely remembers the once respected innovator.


Rising and Falling Blogs On Technorati
But as of tonight, they are back in the game. They ditched the old metrics for attributing authority, as it was considered too static, and now will aim to reward authors for posting frequency, context and linking behavior. Interestingly, they have also introduced authority by topics, meaning that technology blogs can be compared to others in their sector, as can sports blogs, music blogs, and so on. This means that aside from the overall Top 100, sites like TechCrunch don't have to measured head to head against Huffington Post, and we smaller blogs can get a better idea of who our peers are. (See:
A Totally New Technorati.com & Technorati Media Rising)


It's Nice to Be Considered a Top 100 Tech Blog
This new ranking system is looking to be more dynamic - changing along with the real-time nature of the Web. Blogs will rise and fall, and be noted on the site. Blogs and individual posts will be featured, and "hot blogosphere items" of all topics can make the front page.


An Individual Blog's Technorati Profile
Occasional louisgray.com contributor and friend to the site, Eric Berlin, is the blogging channel editor, so we wish him well and look forward to hearing more about that role. Additionally, JS-Kit's Echo will enable comments to be placed underneath all blog listings and tags, possibly adding conversation to the data.

Technorati may not be the big giant we once thought they would be, and they will need to have some consistent successes to become a blogosphere darling again, but they are back in the conversation and worth watching.

See Also:
VentureBeat: Big changes coming at Technorati — the CEO’s perspective
TechCrunch: The New Technorati

Designing the Perfect Twitter Client Is Impossible. Tweetie Is Close.

Given Twitter's prominence, it comes as no surprise that there are many different clients out there. Some are designed to give you a single place to update multiple social networks at once. Others are designed to give you easy access to multiple accounts you may have. A few are optimized for your own personal groups or subsets of followers. And depending on which client you have selected, they may display images or rich media in line, may support retweeting (or not), or they could provide advanced functionality for direct messages. But good luck finding a single application that does everything best - one you can use on your desktop, through the Web browser, and on your iPhone too, because, guess what? It doesn't exist.

The flexibility of the Twitter platform and the wide variation, even among the most popular Twitter clients, has led to most users choosing a favorite, but still having multiple clients installed. It's rare for a single user's Tweet stream to go a few days without showing more than one client used - thanks to some clients being best at one utility or another.

This week has seen a great deal of interest in version 2 of Tweetie's iPhone application. Rebooted and reloaded with a boatload of new features and enhancements, Loren Brichter's offering is being lauded as the best on the iPhone, period. But even as I may agree that it's great, the discussion has actually led me to revisit the Mac desktop client of Tweetie, and I have been using it almost exclusively (with the exception of posts that flow from FriendFeed) for the last few weeks.


My Tweetie Desktop In Action (Showing the @Mentions Window)
On September 25th, I posted a note illustrating my then-current view of the Twitter client race, saying: "TweetDeck: Best at Groups. Tweetie: Best on iPhone. Seesmic: Best at DMs. Brizzly: Best at Retweets and Images."

I stand by that comment, because I believe that each of the different applications has forged a space for itself to be best at something. TweetDeck introduced the concept of groups to Twitter (See Review), and while others, like Seesmic, have adopted it, it has maintained a usability lead. Tweetie's latest iteration on the iPhone has extended their lead over the stale Twitterific and the very busy TweetDeck. For direct messages, I have long found Seesmic's Web app to offer the best option for grouping conversations and seeing previous messages between accounts (See Review), and Brizzly makes retweeting a lot easier than Twitter's native client has.

But one major piece I left out from that comment was the use of multiple accounts. And when you think about multiple accounts, it's my opinion that two products support this capability extremely well. The first is Brizzly, which lets you operate under either account by clicking on the avatar, correctly moving over saved searches and all other relevant data. The second is Tweetie, for both the desktop (on the Mac) and the iPhone.

As I've now inherited multiple Twitter accounts for clients, and have also added my @lgshareditems account, as well as a new @privatelg account that I am using primarily for a quieter Twitter experience, a better multiple accounts client was sorely needed, and this is what has pushed Tweetie over the top for me, not just on the iPhone, where everybody is talking about it, but on the Mac too.


Browsing Updates In Tweetie on My @privatelg Account
In April, when Tweetie for Mac debuted, I called it "Clean, Simple and Robust". That's all still true, but now that I am actively managing multiple accounts, and using the product's built in capacity for retweeting, while enjoying the threaded direct message conversations I used to only enjoy in Seesmic Web, it has practically taken over my Twitter stream. I remain quite fond of Brizzly and Seesmic Web through the browser, but don't mind running Tweetie in the background, not feeling the RAM glut that some other AIR-based clients have on my computing power.

At the end of last month, Lifehacker posted a list of what it called its "Five Best Twitter Clients", including TweetDeck, Brizzly, Seesmic, Tweetie and DestroyTwitter. I haven't used DestroyTwitter and don't use Echofon or others, but know that there are some good quality products in addition to the five I chose to focus on (including the first four and the native Twitter Web interface).


No Leading Twitter App Is On Every Platform
Of the five, no single client supports the desktop, the Web and the iPhone. None! TweetDeck and Tweetie lack Web versions, while Brizzly is Web-only, Seesmic doesn't yet have an iPhone app, and Twitter has no official desktop or iPhone application. So there's clear background for the splintering.


I Believe Each Twitter App Excels Somewhere
While each application has its bells and whistles, there are really four major elements I considered when looking at the top clients: Retweets, Direct Messages, Groups and Multi-User Support.

Retweets: Brizzly (reviewed here) has a handy "retweet" option next to every single tweet. Click "retweet" and it sets up a new message from you prefaced by RT. Couldn't be simpler. Tweetie lets you "Repost" a message as well, with the same functionality. TweetDeck and Seesmic also support retweeting, but I don't perceive them as leading in this functionality.

Direct Messages: Seesmic Web does a great job of sorting conversations by author, including how many messages, in a dedicated pane. If I am on the Web and want to respond to a DM, I will do so through Seesmic. But Tweetie's grouped direct messages are visually pleasing and are easily accessible. TweetDeck lumps all direct messages in an "In box" type of column, as does Twitter's native client and Brizzly, although Brizzly can show conversations in line if the activity is live.

Groups: Twitter promises that lists are coming soon, but TweetDeck has made a name for itself with groups, so much so that people wish you could export predefined groups for importing into other services. Brizzly and Seesmic also support groups, and Brizzly promises to integrate with Twitter's Lists option when it shows up. So far, Tweetie isn't doing any groups of any kind that I know of.

Multiple Accounts: As mentioned earlier, Tweetie and Brizzly make multiple account support simple. Seesmic Desktop's mutiple account support is very good, but it hasn't yet migrated to the Web equivalent. TweetDeck's support of multiple accounts is functional, but I have seen many a slipup from people using TweetDeck who have posted to the wrong account, so it could be much more intuitive. Twitter's Web client would just ask you to log out and log in again.

Ignoring extraneous functions like the rich media and real-time definitions of trending topics (where Brizzly excels), the biggest missing aspect to Tweetie, in my opinion, is access to saved searches in the desktop app. They are already highlighted in the iPhone app, so bringing them into the Mac client would be a big benefit indeed.

Selecting your favorite Twitter client is a personal issue at this point. To each their own. There is clearly room for many players given the different permutations of each app. But Tweetie is making things real tough for anybody on the iPhone, and for those who don't need access to groups, it should have the Mac desktop space to itself. This doesn't mean I like Brizzly or Seesmic Web or even TweetDeck any less than any other time I talked about those apps, but today, my stream is full of "from Tweetie" and for good reason.