I didn't make any blog posts on Thursday, after a full Wednesday which included a visit to Google headquarters to meet with the Google Reader team. And even though I made a few posts on Friday, the first day of the SXSW conference, many people still think I'm on a temporary hiatus, thanks to a tag-team failure between FeedBurner and Blogger, who have significantly impacted many users by zeroing out their feeds, stopping their posts from getting out of their domain. It looks like I should have spent more time in Mountain View after chatting up the Reader team, to see just what the heck is going on elsewhere on campus.

As the resurgent Kent Newsome of Newsome.org noted today, in his post, "FeedBurner & Blogger Conspire to Assassinate My Joy", the XML file that Blogger generates to distribute RSS feeds was completely wiped out - and I have been impacted as well. No matter if I had 20 or 2,000 posts historically, the file reports it has zero kilobytes, and no amount of trouble-shooting thus far has been of any help.

In this world of RSS-enabled services, a failure of this level means that my posts aren't getting out to the previously-mentioned Google Reader. They aren't populating social networking sites like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Facebook. And that will no doubt cripple visits for those affected.

As always, I at first considered the issue was my fault. I noticed FriendFeed this morning wasn't picking up my posts, and tried to delete and add my blog six ways from Sunday, but with no success to speak of. While Kent recounts his searches for real tech support, I was in the air during much of the day, and came back to find I was not the only one hearing the silence from Google, as others assumed silence from me.

Complaints are wide-spread in Blogger's help forums - from RSS Feeds are EMPTY today when publishing via FTP. to atom.xml is empty and simply empty feeds.

I'm concerned on quite a few levels here. FeedBurner and Blogger are among the most mocked Google products because of their presumed neglect. Yet they are two of the major foundations for my blog. Also, I am concerned because we are seeing this issue as a weekend starts and a major tech conference is starting up. There's a huge chance this issue won't be resolved if Google is asleep at the wheel. There's nothing I can do except accelerate my move to Wordpress. This doesn't make me feel all that lovey-dovey with Blogger at the moment.

When I set up my trip to the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, I assumed Friday would just be a travel day. Heading to Austin from San Jose, I thought maybe I would get in and find a badge, but would more likely just get unpacked and get ready for the weekend's efforts. It turns out I was wrong.

In the hours I've been in Austin, I managed to squeeze in a dinner with two bloggers who have contributed to the site this year, as well as one of the entrepreneurs I've grown to consider a close friend. Additionally, I managed to meet several bloggers I've known primarily through social networks for the past few years, and not to be outdone, we participated in a live UStream video interview. And all that has happened before attending any panels - though a full deck is planned starting plenty early tomorrow.

Phil Glockner of Scribkin.com and ReadWriteWeb, also a contributor to this site, is acting as my tag-team partner for the weekend. He generously picked me up, and we're crashed out at his place, far away from the noise of the parties, but close enough to the convention, and at a much cheaper rate than the nose-bleed prices I was seeing just before making plans final.

After getting our badges, he and I met up with Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed and Google fame, and Eric Berlin of the Online Media Cultist and Web Worker Daily. (Eric, as you know, also contributes to the site) Following our dinner, I met Allen Stern of CenterNetworks for the first time, and later saw Drew Olanoff and Sean Percival while we were en route to the UStream Studio.

The video interview on UStream, with Michael Sean Wright of Nice Fish Films, focused on "Are We Human or Are We Bloggers?", a clever way to discuss how we can remain personal and transparent, and leverage the blogging medium to make change and express ourselves. In the 45 minutes or so we had, we discussed how we started blogging, our interests, products we like, and how we use new technology. We also managed to talk about the strategy behind featuring additional voices on the site, and how we use Twitter and FriendFeed. I appreciated getting the time to talk with Michael, and he said way too many nice things about me - some of which I would have a very hard time backing up.

I've posted my SXSW schedule here: http://sxsw2009.sched.org/louisgray. If you are at SXSW and want to meet up, please do. I'm looking forward to it. Reach me by e-mail, by phone, or any network of your choosing.

In time for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive event, the popular information sharing and aggregation service, FriendFeed, has introduced a desktop application based on Adobe's AIR platform, letting you see updates on any of your friend lists directly on your desktop - essentially bringing the service's real-time feature out of the Web and ever closer to your core.

The notifier is fairly lightweight upon introduction, letting you select to receive updates from any list you choose, choose how long they will display, and where on your desktop they will show. And that's it! So it's not exactly trying to take away your attention from more robust AIR applications, like TweetDeck for Twitter.


If you don't mind the constant notification updates from FriendFeed, you can choose any of the lists you have preset, and individual notifications will pop up. Click on the notification, and you can be taken to the item, or click comment to start commenting on it.



A Pair of Notifications from the New FriendFeed App
The utility is likely best positioned for highly-targeted lists, say of close friends, family, or work. Otherwise, you've got yet another way to drink from a firehose. You can find the notifier here: http://friendfeed.com/settings/notifier. The company's official post is here: Get FriendFeed notifications on your desktop.

Last week, we talked about one of the latest annoyances on Twitter being refollow spam - the act of a user leveraging a script to regularly follow you repeatedly, on a schedule. Since that post, Twitter has seemed to crack down on users of the practice, suspending those accounts. Now that it's safe to look at following notifications again, I checked in to a new service called Topify, which doesn't just send the text notifications that are Twitter's standard, but instead, detailed reports that show a user's avatar, their twitter statistics, and most recent tweets. The result is a more complete picture of the individual, from within your e-mail, without forcing you to go to the Twitter Web site to learn more.

As you can see in the below example, when a new user follows your account, you are notified as to whether you are already following them, their followers and following data, bio link, and recent updates.


If you want to message the user, just reply to the follow e-mail. This, in theory, could enable you to set up Auto-DMs from your e-mail, should you set up a rule. (But I wouldn't encourage it)

Topify is in closed invite-only beta right now, and is the brainchild of Ouriel Ohayon and @arikfr. You can get access to Topify with the following link for louisgray.com readers: http://snurl.com/doige.

You can find out more about Topify on their blog.