As promised in a note a little over two weeks ago on controlling Buzzed items entering your in box, the Google Buzz team is now explaining why posts are making their way into your Gmail. For people watching the new social service closely, this is a welcome, albeit small, help, especially as seeing the same items appear repeatedly - following new updates - could get tiresome.

While some are debating the perceived success (or lack thereof) of Buzz, and whether it is seeing engagement, it's no surprise that like most social networks, active people are rewarded with more activity. Engage, and others will engage with you - just like on Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter or anywhere else. But the more I (and others) would participate, the more posts would be delivered to my in box from Buzz. Now, I can just peek at the latest, and see the most recent comment that bumped it to my attention, rather than scrolling all the way to the bottom to get caught up, as was the previous way.


In the same note, posted March 11th, the Google Buzz team promised settings to control what items hit your in box (which are live in GMail now), the aforementioned explanations, and a "mute" link to stop further comments from getting to your in box. The mute button's not there yet, so far as I can tell, but we can expect that is coming soon - given the appearance of the other promised features.


On another note, I have already seen people publicly comment on the perceived slowness of innovation from the Buzz team relative to expectations. Without making excuses for them, making change at the scale of Google is proving to be hard. As the team wrote in their March 11th post, they need to make sure these features work across all 50+ Gmail languages, and as I was told at SXSW, "Gmail code is sacrosanct" and nobody wants to increase latency or worse... downtime. With Buzz and GMail being intertwined for now, we can expect movement forward to be with caution.

You can, of course, find me on Buzz here: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray

A little over two years ago, I shared with you the news that my wife and I were expecting twins, a boy and a girl, to add to our family. At the time, I referred to this as an expansion plan with 2 new hires. On June 20th of 2008, the twins, Matthew and Sarah, arrived and doubled our family overnight, from two to four. They turned a year old in June of last year, and are rapidly approaching their two-year mark. Now, while the family doesn't have yet another set of multiples to announce, I can let you in on the well-kept secret that we're adding one more to the brood this fall, and it's going to be a boy.

Should all go well, we anticipate adding the thus-far unnamed youngster to the family in the middle or latter half of September 2010, which sets us up with the unenviable position of two two-year-olds and a newborn causing havoc in our home by the end of the year. Pile that on top of all our other activities, and I think we're up for another round of exciting challenges.

When I first told people we were pregnant with Matthew and Sarah, a lot of folks thought you would see dramatic change here, that I couldn't keep pace on the blog and all other social media. But we made the twins part of the story, and have tried not to let our additional duties as parents get in the way of everything else. But the addition of a third child will most definitely bring change. The biggest change? Well, I don't see how we're all going to fit in our two bedroom, two bathroom condo. So that means the family will have to move up and out, and somehow get the opportunity to try and sell this place while finding a bigger home for our growing brood. Many have come before us and managed, so we have no doubt that we will also.




As Kristine, my wife, has successfully maneuvered her way through the first trimester, and all tests thus far have come back safe, it's time to share with you, and we look forward to more updates as the date draws closer. (This gives you six months to get on the schwag bandwagon...)

And yes, since we're geeks, we know "there's an app for that" too. We've been tracking this pregnancy with the iPregnancy app on the iPhone. It's been fun to see the days count up, and run through potential names. We have our favorites - and aren't closed to suggestions. So fire them up in the comments. What do you think? Twitter Gray? Does that work?

It's Monday, which must of course mean it's Twitter new employee day (TM). The company, which is continuing its expansion practically every week with new hires, onboarded three more today, including the lead Web developer for Yahoo! Messenger, focused on scalable Web technology, a senior database admin from Bebo (who also had history at Yahoo! and Apple), and a software developer who hails from the unlikely source of the Indianapolis Star, with background as an airplane pilot.

Twitter's growth brings the company's "Team" list to 176 total members, including contractors and other contributors to the company.


Adrien Cahen, formerly a senior front-end engineer at Yahoo!, was the lead Web developer for Yahoo! messenger, until announcing his resignation after 3 1/2 years at the Sunnyvale company on March 15th. In the resignation announcement on his blog, Cahen said Yahoo! had a great company culture with cutting edge technologies under development, and said his efforts on highly used products was a "very humbling experience."

One of the products he most recently contributed to was the launch of Yahoo! Messenger 10, and its inclusion of insider pages, mini versions of the Yahoo! homepage built on YQL (Yahoo! Query Language). He can be found at @gaarf.


David Bravant, the DBA joining Twitter by way of Bebo and Yahoo! spent nearly six years at Apple from 1999 to 2005, and doesn't have a long history of using Twitter, having possibly just opened up his Twitter account today, with no activity yet. (See: @clarethammer)

Dana Contreras, the pilot hailing from Indiana, most recently of the Indianapolis Star, describers herself as a software developer with a wide array of platform experience, and lists her new job as software engineer on Twitter's platform. Dana is also the developer behind JLex.org, a Japanese language reference and learning tool, with integrated kanji search. She can be found at @danadanger.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a post on ReadWriteWeb this morning, the Salmon Protocol project we first introduced back in October of 2009 looks like it is progressing beyond the planning stages, as it has been integrated in two small, but influential, social networking sites, Status.net and Cliqset - both of whom are strong open standards advocates laboring away in the shadows of larger communities.

The Salmon Protocol, which aims to define a standard protocol for comments and gestures (such as likes) to swim upstream to the originating blog, hopes to unify conversations across diverse locations. It's planned for adoption by Google Buzz (See: Designing Buzz for a Google-Free World) and solves the problem that first blew up back in 2008 around fractured conversations.

While many people, including myself, have adapted to a new world whereby conversations take place in a wide array of communities, it would be nice for the content originator to have one centralized location to see all downstream activity.

Evan Prodromou of StatusNet mentions integration of Salmon's digital signatures in a blog post from Sunday, where he also notes support for Activity Streams encoded in RSS 2.0 and Atom. The move, paralleled by deployment at Cliqset, should be what I hope is the start of a lot more announcements, from small and big companies alike, to make Salmon a reality. The next big target, which I am biased in favor of, obviously, would be for Disqus to integrate with Salmon and pull comments upstream to this blog.

I managed to find time to talk with Darren Bounds of Cliqset at SXSW earlier this month. In our quick discussion, recorded on CinchCast, you can find his comments on their support of open standards, and that network's direction - which could hint at why they're an early adopter of Salmon.