(jeffisageek) readling list

Backtype releases a Tweetmeme Retweet Button Competitor

Zee — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:21:00 PDT

To those frequent visitors of TheNextWeb, you may have noticed a slightly different ‘retweet’ button on our posts. The original is designed and developed by retweeting fanatics, Tweetmeme.com. This new button is in fact from another awesome team, the guys & gals at comment tracking service and YCombinator graduate, Backtype.

In a slightly unexpected move, Backtype has created its own version of the button with a number of options that are likely to catch your attention.

The button’s primary advantages over Tweetmeme’s include customizable color options, no requirement to include a (via @backtype or via @tweetmeme) (now Tweetmeme can do the same), integration with awe.sm so you can technically use your own custom domains, and any site can have their own domain included at the start, i.e. RT @yourdomain.

The big question is, is it worth shifting alliance and dropping the Tweetmeme button for Backtype’s, If I had to give a quick response, I’d probably say no. However it really does depend on how important color customization and Backtype’s more ‘open’ agenda, is to you. In my discussions with Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme’s founder, the plan is to incorporate all the above and more in the very short term.

The major advantage of Tweetmeme’s integration is its ability to retweet posts without having to leave the post itself (if you’re logged in to Tweetmeme). For publishers, this is a pretty big deal as it means keeping visitors on the site longer. Tweetmeme also has big plans for integrating analytics into the app, making it possible to track when and who made your post so popular. Backtype has similar plans although nothing concrete has been set just yet. Tweetmeme is also launching a number of badges/buttons for your site, similar to feedburner or twitter, they show the number of retweets your site has had within a certain period.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a matter of person choice. For many, the idea of in depth analytics and retweeting without leaving the page itself, just aren’t a big enough grab. For us, and many other professional blogs out there, they are. The decision, as they say, is yours…

If you’re a wordpress user you can download the plugin from here, if not, this is what you are looking for.

Gotta love competition.

Twitter Suspending Accounts in Droves

Jesse Stay — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:58:03 PDT

Twitter seems to be on a roll lately. It would seem, either by bug, or some new policy just implemented, Twitter has just suspended hundreds to thousands of Twitter accounts with little to no reason. You can see all the action, semi-real-time here.

I just received a tip from a good friend, a very strong Twitter user and definitely not a spammer, who was one of those people suspended without cause. She stated she submitted a ticket to Twitter support and the ticket was immediately closed with no reason. Looking over Twitter search, she’s not the only one, and many very valid accounts are complaining of having their Twitter accounts suspended out of the blue. Reasons for suspension are often following people and unfollowing people frequently, following people too fast, blatent spammy behavior, among other things, but based on the users I know were suspended none of these activities were happening.

There is no word from Twitter on this matter - I’ll update the post when I hear more. You can watch the suspensions and the horror occur in real-time (thanks to FriendFeed, ironically) below:

UPDATE: Twitter has responded via their Status blog: “Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts. We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.”

Other major accounts suspended: @marismith, @denisewakeman, @loubortone, @tweetlater, @deniseoberry, @radionational - if your account was affected please leave a comment!

FriendFeed Groups – the Fast Track to Content & Community

Tsudohnimh — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:00:00 PDT

Want to hear a secret? How would you like a major shortcut to finding information that you are interested in as well as connecting with others that might like to subscribe to within Friendfeed?

Welcome to Friendfeed Groups.

Groups in their simplest form are a feed generated by contributions from multiple users. “Think of it as a mini FriendFeed for a particular subject or group of people. Everyone in the group can share stuff with each other and leave comments that others in the group can see.” (see FriendFeed’s Help Page on Groups).

Groups are commonly formed around a particular topic or common interest so they are a great place for you to begin discovering within FriendFeed. To get started visit the Find Groups page and you’ll find a list of popular groups as well as a search box. Try searching for whatever interests you. Here are a few groups you might consider

All Things Google – Google news, apps, features, and Easter eggs. Everything related to Google (the company and its products)
Apps – Share news, reviews, questions & updates about your favorite desktop, phone & web apps.
The Bloggers Discussions – all about blogging
Funny Pics and Videos
iPhone – Got an iPhone? Join, discuss, and share the latest tips, tricks, and news.
Twitter – Great room to discover apps, discuss features, and catch related news

You can also create your own groups (these used to be called rooms so you will hear both terms, they mean the same thing). Click the “Create a Group” link in the top right hand corner of the FriendFeed Groups page. Groups can be Private (only the people you invite can view and post), Standard (you post, anyone can comment), or Public (anyone can post or comment). Give your group a name, choose the type, and presto you are now a group admin.

Groups are really flexible so beyond topical rooms here are a couple of ideas to get you thinking:

Created a Branded Group – Create a group for your website or organization. Then import your RSS feed, Twitter feed, and then share items manually as well. It’s a great way to communicate to a target community
Created a Vanity/Brand Monitoring Group – Create a group that helps you monitor your brand or name across the internet. Import a Twitter Search RSS feed, setup a Backtype account with an alert and import the alert RSS, setup a Google Alert and import the RSS feed. Voila now you have a single container to monitor mentions across the internet.
Create a Room for Live Blogging – Are you covering a live event or conference? Rooms work better than multiple blog posts or even Twitter. Create a Group for the Event and then you can embed the Group directly to your blog. This is probably the best live blogging solution I’ve seen and it allows people to interact real time.
Create a room to accompany your broadcast, podcast, or LiveStream – Create a room so viewers/listeners can ask questions and leave comments. Great for real time interaction as well as comments and info when you are off-air. (Credit Leo Laporte with popularizing this method. Go to live.twit.tv and you’ll find a link to his TWiT Conversations Room)
Create a “I’m Going to Blog this later” Room – If you are a blogger this is a MUST. Create a private room and when you find something that you are going to write about simply share it to your private room. It works better than bookmarks because you can add images and personal notes as comments. If you collaborate with others this is even more essential because it allows you to discuss upcoming posts and submit ideas and editing remarks.

Finally, Groups are a great way to find people. When you find a room start subscribing to people who shared interesting content and if you want to find more just click the “# subscribers” link in the top right hand corner.

Groups really take FriendFeed to the next level so get involved by joining and creating your own Groups.

KnowtheNetwork.com is your resource to learn about emerging technologies, social media, productivity tech tips, software reviews, and tons of links to free guides and free software. We want to make your life better through stable secure technology. I'm all about building community so please interact with me on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Twitter Memes

Micah — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:58:22 PDT

Because of the success (or failure, depending on who you ask) of #followfriday, I field a lot of email, tweets and (even an interview or two) about Twitter memes.

People want to know how to start their own. People want to know what it takes to make their spanking new meme as big as #followfriday. Usually, I answer the same way: “I dont know.”

After all, lets a moment to reflect on the beginnings of #followfriday. I sent a tweet, I asked a couple of friends to send a similar tweet. I went to work. Tens of thousands of people began to send tweets with #followfriday in them.

Between the going to work and tens of thousands of people sending #followfriday tweets, I did NOTHING. I didnt register the @followfriday username, didnt really care about the FollowFriday.com domain. I just went to Lijit and sat in a few meetings and sent an email or two (and perhaps, given it was Friday, wrote a blog post).

Thats it.

So a better question becomes, why do I THINK #followfriday became so big, and such a vital part of the Twitter landscape?

There are three pieces to the pie:

1) it was easy.

2) it allowed people to show off the cool people they follow.

3) it made people feel good about themselves.

Thats it.

Oh, and by the way, the name “followfriday”? It wasnt mine. It was a suggestion. A great suggestion.

Why was it followFRIDAY? Because it happened to be Friday when I sent the first tweet.

Now since January, when #followfriday started, there have been dozens and dozens of attempts to start day-based twitter memes. None have really taken off in the same way. Is it because #followfriday is so amazing? While I wish I could claim that, in truth, #followfriday made any other day-based meme appear to be a copy. Which took some of the steam out of the sails of that attempted meme.

Would it be possible to have another day-based meme? Probably. #musicmonday seems to be taking off. (although I dont know why this hasnt migrated to Blip.fm so I can actually listen to the recommended music)

Which is interesting. It seems that recommendation is really the key to a sustained Twitter meme.

Lets add that as a fourth component. Now, its:

1) it was easy.

2) it allowed people to show off the cool people they follow.

3) it made people feel good about themselves.

4) RECOMMENDATION

Twitter, as a short form of communication, and as a thought dump, doesnt allow for recommendation. I cant on my twitter page highlight users that I would recommend to others. We all know that the Twitter suggest list is a bullshit potential monetized list of people, who individually add little or no overall value.

So why hasnt twitter come up with a recommendation system for users? Well, its really hard. I could recommend the same person to a dozen people, and eleven of those people might not like my recommendation.

Recommendation is a highly personalized activity. My influence and track record affect how my recommendations are accepted for a short time, but if I continually make bad recommendations, that cache is lost.

Its why there is a movement to make #followfriday what it was: one or two recommendations with reasons.

Of course, recommendation only fits into a sustained twitter meme. The event driven twitter memes (#MJdied) are driven by the events themselves. The humor memes (#3wordsaftersex) are driven by the humor, which tends to fizzle in the short attention-span world of twitter.

Why is recommendation so important for sustained Twitter memes? Is it because there are no other vehicles for recommendation within twitter? Is it because we as an internet generation just love the ability to recommend? Or is it our desire to show/share what we know/like? (There is a great opportunity to go on a Facebook/FriendFeed “like” discussion here…but I wont.)

I dont know.

But I do know, that I take intense pleasure in sharing/recommending/liking my friends and the great things they do.

Which makes me glad there is a #followfriday.

And, makes me want to start a #sundayshout where I share blog posts/pictures/videos/etc that my friends have made, or I have found online, every sunday morning. It reminds me of reading the Sunday paper with my parents and sharing things we are reading from the various sections of the paper.

Will it work?

I have no idea.

Why No Calendar UI for Lifestreams?

Mark Krynsky — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:36:31 PDT

One of the features I’ve always wanted from a Lifestream is a calendar feature. What I’d like to see would be a standard calendar UI to be able to navigate and drill down through a Lifestream. This would offer the ability to easily find dates and ranges that I’d want to look for. This would be good for finding trips, birthdays, or to see what we documented for other milestones that occur in our lives.

So I decided to do a quick mockup of what this feature might look like if it was built for FriendFeed. I borrowed the Google calendar and then just dropped in some ways that you could navigate through it. I chose the full month view which would primarily offer text links, but perhaps the weekly view could offer some nice thumbnail visualizations of data.

My mockup of a possible FriendFeed Calendar UI

Sure there are great timeline based Lifestreaming services such as Dipity, Lifeblob, Allofme, but they don’t offer the standard UI I’m looking for. Now defunct service Swurl had a somewhat nice Calendar view but I’d want more from one than they offered. My custom Lifestream built using Life2front offers another interesting timeline view, but once again not a standard calendar UI. Hopefully this feature will be either added by FriendFeed or another service soon as I think many would really appreciate the calendar metaphor for navigation.

TweetDeck Marks One Year Anniversary: The Journey and What's Next

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:14:23 PDT

Editor's Note: On July 4, 2008, TweetDeck, a new Adobe AIR application for Twitter, was introduced to the world, on this blog. Twelve months later, it is unquestionably one of the most popular microblogging clients in the world. I had the opportunity to trade e-mails with its developer, Iain Dodsworth, to learn more about his journey, and what's next. -- Louis

Louis: Iain, first, thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about TweetDeck on the one year anniversary of the product's unveiling to the public. I was happy to play a small role in its debut, and having gotten the opportunity to watch as its visibility and influence has grown dramatically, not only becoming arguably the most popular third party Twitter application, but becoming the gold standard by which all competitive offerings are compared, and setting a new bar for Adobe AIR as a development platform.

Now twelve months into TweetDeck's life, your world has to have changed significantly. First, Twitter has exploded - from a time waster and communications tool for early adopter tech snobs to a household buzzword being featured on television and media practically around the clock. Second, you've grown up as a business, having taken on venture funding, and employing a team of developers to improve your product - having recently introduced an iPhone application. Meanwhile, Seesmic Desktop has emerged as a real competitor, PeopleBrowsr has managed to take the top space for most chaotic Web experience, and Tweetie has a popular niche on both Mac and iPhone.

When I first stumbled upon TweetDeck in July of 2008, I was curious, finding what could be a great product, but nobody had heard of it before. Going back to the e-mail archives, I remember your saying, "I am furiously coding away getting the next version out there," and adding, "Since you are the highest profile person who has seen TweetDeck it would be great to capitalize on your visibility."

I don't usually consider myself high profile, and there are many elite names out there with well known brands who could have made a bigger splash with TweetDeck than I did. When you were ready to launch the product, did you do any outreach to other sites? Did they respond or offer to test it? And if you did not reach out to other sites, how did you expect to spread the word? Did you think the product was strong enough that users would tell friends and it would go viral?

Iain: It's important to note that I originally built TweetDeck to solve my problem of being overwhelmed with Twitter. I gave it out to a few friends and was pleasantly surprised by the response. I then set up a private beta and became inundated with requests from complete strangers. It was because of this virality I didn't reach out to anyone to push it out further and then I received your email. The blog post you wrote on July 4th and the resulting mayhem essentially forced the private beta wide open and TweetDeck went public.

Iain: BTW do you remember how you first came across TweetDeck?

Louis: I stumbled upon TweetDeck practically by accident. I happened to look at my Twitter stream and I saw "from TweetDeck" in an update. I then clicked through, and searched the Web to see if I had found something new.

Louis: What made you decide to develop TweetDeck? You certainly went a different way with your product than others did, using the multi-column format, integrating Summize, groups, etc? What drove its initial feature set and had you choose the AIR platform?

Iain: In March 2008 I revisited Twitter having found little value on it a year or so earlier. Now there were so many more people using it there was real value for me but I quickly become a bit overwhelmed after following around 50 people. Most importantly I started to miss when certain less-chatty real life friends tweeted and I realised if I segmented the stream I would be able to concentrate on these valuable parts of the stream and dip in and out of the rest. The dominant apps at the time (twitter.com, twitterrific, twhirl) were, and still are, superb at what they did but they did not help me with segmentation so I decided to write my own client.

Segmenting my friends out to a separate area was the catalyst for the creation of groups (a first for twitter applications afaik) and required a new approach to the UI. I wanted to see my twitter stream alongside numerous groups and searches updating in real-time (hence the multi column approach - another first) and this would never fit efficiently into an unobtrusive single column interface so I took great delight in building a large obtrusive interface which really demanded the users full attention - not unlike the financial dashboards I'd been involved in building and evolving before TweetDeck.

AIR was an easy decision at the time - I had already been developing applications in Flex for financial institutions in London and there was no quicker way for a one man team to develop an application cross-platform.

Louis: What was your initial reaction to how quickly word spread around TweetDeck? Did you feel prepared for the amount of traffic, support requests, or feature enhancements users were looking for?

Iain: Quite honestly my initial reaction was one of shock and extreme excitement. I was in no way prepared for the response TweetDeck got and then the subsequent demands the userbase, quite rightly, put upon me to keep improving it. Whilst I was unprepared I like to think I did show I have the ability to be very agile and step up to the challenge which the following months presented i.e. working 16+ hours a day, 7 days a week and knowing which elements of functionality to integrate to provide most value for the users.

Louis: By September of 2008, you sent me an e-mail titled "TweetDeck - the future". You said, "with the integration of numerous other social messages services we have the form factor, momentum and enthusiasm to make TweetDeck something quite spectacular." But you added you needed revenue or money to get there, leaving you with the options to attract angel investment, or make a pro version.

At the time, I remember saying it might be easier to go pro than to get funding, unless you had other products lined up. But as often happens, I was wrong, because in January, you closed a round with Betaworks for seed funding. Did you initially think of making a pro version of TweetDeck, and what changed your mind, if anything? How did you find Betaworks, and was that fundraising process intimidating or easy? What kind of requirements did they put on you in order to be funded?

Iain: A TweetDeck Pro version was certainly on the cards a few months after the initial launch but more as a response to the need to generate some revenue to enable me to continue working on it full time rather than fulfilling a specific vision or demand from the userbase. When Betaworks approached me with the proposal of leading a seed round it made perfect sense to use the funding to fund my continued full time development and work towards a real vision (which by this time had already fully crystallised) rather than fragmenting the product just to generate revenue.

I wouldn't say the fund raising process was particularly intimidating - although I'm very aware I had the distinct advantage of Betaworks leading the round and introducing me to potential investors along with legal representation which made the somewhat complex process of setting up TweetDeck Inc and closing the round rather smooth.

Louis: Betaworks has some very visible investments in other Twitter-related properties, including bit.ly and Twitter itself. Some are saying the firm is helping each of these small companies get connected, and asserting itself in their development. How has Betaworks' enthusiasm for Twitter helped? How involved are they in your product's continued development?

Iain: Betaworks' enthusiasm for twitter, TweetDeck and the concept of real-time data streams has been invaluable to TweetDeck and to me personally. I talk with John and Andy practically every day and consider them part of the core team rather than just as investors. The same goes for Saul and Robin Klein (TAG) who I work very closely with "on the ground" in London. Each of the investors in TweetDeck bring a distinct level of expertise and experience to TweetDeck and I have been leveraging this as much as possible.

Louis: Recently, one visible move for TweetDeck has been the customization of the application, first by Blink 182, and now you can see dedicated installs for popular blogs including TechCrunch and Mashable. While this is clearly one way to start monetization, it cannot be the only plan, especially as you have taken on additional developers and the funding from Betaworks won't last forever. As Twitter has also not publicly announced its plans for monetization, does operating in a field where many users demand free software have you worried? How do you think you can create premium value? And in the converse, you opted to make the recent TweetDeck iPhone application free, but I know some users, including me, would have been more than happy to pay. Can you share the thought process there?

Iain: Co-branded TweetDecks could be a viable revenue stream in the future and are definitely not the only monetisation plan. Essentially with the size of our user base we are able to test a number of small revenue streams in an effort to see which ones can scale with the user base. I am extremely comfortable with offering free software but this does not mean that every subsequent value-add service and element of functionality have to also be free.

The decision to make the iPhone application free was not a desperately easy one but, fundamentally, the potential future value of having a larger userbase far outweighs the short term spike we'd get in iPhone revenue.

Louis: TweetDeck, while popular, has also highlighted issues on Twitter's end, especially around the service's API limits. Also, the product has been a notorious memory hog and can take a good share of processing power. How are you working to reduce the demands taken on power users' desktops, and how have you found working with Twitter and their API team, as they recently upped the API accesses users could hit per hour from 100 to 150?

Iain: I have worked very closely with Adobe to make improvements to the TweetDeck codebase and to work around various AIR/Flex issues. CPU & memory usage is an ongoing area for improvement and can sometimes be a bit of an art-form but we are getting there and the current version is a marked improvement over previous versions.

To be fair we haven't had a huge amount of involvement with twitter or it's API team. The API is very simple to work with and there hasn't been the need to be in continual dialogue with twitter. It's also worth pointing out (to those that have accused TweetDeck in the past) the twitter developer ecosystem is, from our experience, a very level playing field and being the number one method of twittering outside twitter.com has afforded us no special attention or API abilities.

Louis: There is a natural inclination for users to want TweetDeck to be the catch-all for Twitter-related services. As you have added on services like 12 Seconds, StockTwits and others, there is no doubt a list a mile long, of everything from short URL services to survey tools that are begging to be included. How do you choose what gets in and what doesn't? Is it a factor of money now, where those who play have to pay?

Iain: Yes the list of potential services that could be integrated into TweetDeck is very long but there's no way we would want to integrate them all - obviously this would result in TweetDeck becoming a complete mess. In deciding whether to include a service we primarily look at how it fits in with the overall vision for TweetDeck (the browser for the real-time web) and what value it offers the userbase. Executing the TweetDeck vision and providing first-class functionality is everything and comes before charging companies for inclusion. As has been reported elsewhere, we have charged for inclusion in a few instances, where appropriate, and I see nothing wrong with that.

Louis: During Twitter's darkest times last year, you saw the rise of other microblogging services, like Identica, Plurk, Rejaw and others, who tried to provide a fallback for users tired of fail whales. Did you at any point wonder what the future held for your product, built on Twitter's fragile backbone? And did you feel pressured to find ways to publish to these other networks, much like Ping.fm and Posty have done?

Iain: Absolutely I wondered what the future would hold. The fragility of being a layer on top of twitter back then was a real concern but I also knew the flip side of this was the potential to ride the twitter wave of momentum and get TweetDeck a much bigger push than was previously possible. It is this momentum, listening to our userbase and continued execution and improvement of TweetDeck that has put us and kept us in our current position.

Louis: Based in the UK, you're stationed quite far from Silicon Valley. Can you give us an understanding of how being remote from this tech center has either helped you or hurt you? Did it impact your ability to reach press and influencers, to raise capital, or hire talented employees?

Iain: Being based outside Silicon Valley has not specifically hurt in terms of funding (we've raised capital) or hiring talented employees (we now have a fantastic 5 strong core team). It's difficult to quantify but I'd imagine our ability to reach press and influencers has been somewhat hindered by not being in the eye of the twitter storm and, it's with this in mind, I will be embarking on a "tour of silicon valley" this summer to really get to know the area and it's inhabitants and to get a presence on the ground. (So to anyone reading this - please do get in touch if you want to meetup in the valley over the summer twitter:http://twitter.com/iaindodsworth or email:bizdev@tweetdeck.com)

Louis: TweetDeck's rise to popularity was stunning for me to watch, and exciting to be a part of, even if just cheering from the sidelines. What kind of advice can you give developers who want to put their product on the map in terms of finding a way to reach users and create a memorable experience?

Iain: Even though the twitter ecosystem has grown considerably over the past year, I think there is plenty of scope and success for applications and services which really fill a gap. Developing something that is revolutionary rather than evolutionary will get you attention and lots of it. There are an incredible number of blogs and individuals looking to shine a light on innovative products in the now crowded twitter/facebook/real-time space - if your product is more than just an upgrade on an existing idea then this is a great time to grab some of that attention. Obviously that's only half the battle, you'll then have to continually improve, execute and listen to your userbase to keep pace - something we're trying to get better and better at.

One year can go quickly on the Web, and in the last twelve months, TweetDeck has gone from zero to a leadership position today. If you haven't yet downloaded, you can find the application at http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. I appreciate Iain taking time from his busy coding schedule to answer my litany of questions. I personally found it valuable and hope it provides value to you as a TweetDeck user, technology fan, or fellow developer.

More: louisgray.com | RSS | FriendFeed | E-mail | Cell: 408 646.2759

AOL shuts CompuServe. In related news, CompuServe was still alive

Duncan Riley — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:30:34 PDT

AOL has shut CompuServe, the first major commercial online service in the United States.

The company had its origins in 1969 and started offering limited dial-in services in the mid-1970’s. The year it first offered “online services” was 1979, and by the by the mid-1980s CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies in existence, and it was the largest consumer information service in the world.

CompuServe remained popular as a stand alone service until the mid-1990’s, when the rise of the World Wide Web and widespread internet access slowly killed its core business. An attempt in 1995 to offer users internet access along with CompuServe services failed by 1997, despite the company being the first to offer fixed rate monthly access for the service. Having been owned by H&R Block since the early 80’s, Compuserve changed hands several times until eventually ending up at AOL by the end of the 1990’s.

At AOL, CompuServe became nothing more than a not well loved subsidiary (AOL having been CompuServe’s biggest competitor for many years), until finally all but fading away.

Basex notes that CompuServe users will be able to use their existing CompuServe Classic (as the service was renamed) addresses at no charge via a new e-mail system, but the software that the service was built on, along with all the features supported by that software has been shut down.

Friendfeed Brings "Best of Day" to Lists, Helps You Spot Trends from Friends

(author unknown) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:16:00 PDT

See and download the full gallery on posterous

One of my favorite Friendfeed features is called "Best of Day." I use it all the time to hone in on the most liked/commented conversations. If you're logged into Friendfeed, you can hit this link to see the most interesting conversations from your friends over the last 24 hours or this one for the past seven days. The problem with the feature, however, is that it only worked across all of your friends. This can be problematic if you follow hundreds of people, as I do.

Last night, however, Friendfeed quietly added a killer feature that brings "Best of Day" to lists - groupings of friends you categorize. Now you can more easily spot trends from friends. The screen grab below shows you the most interesting items over the last month just within my "favorites" list. This smart filtering of content plus the recent addition of real-time search on Friendfeed is exactly what those of us who participate in the social web need.

This incremental innovation gives me just another reason to be excited about Friendfeed. It's also why I love Gmail, Posterous and Evernote. They constantly keep innovating all the time even through the tough times.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Posterous supports YouTube HD embeds. Also new: Auto-expansion of screencast.com and thedailyshow.com videos

(author unknown) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:50:00 PDT

YouTube has announced HD embeds, which is great because HD is so breathtakingly good. We just added support for these HD embeds and detect if it's possible. So now if you have an HD video, just paste the URL into email or a post editor page, or use our bookmarklet, and we'll auto-expand to the HD embed, and you don't even have to lift a finger (or check a checkbox, as it were).

What's more, we just added auto-embed functionality for the fine screenshot / screencast hosting site, screencast.com, and the much-loved Daily Show online video site. Paste a URL, and go to town, we'll drop in the embed.

Got a site that doesn't work yet for you? Fire us an email or leave a comment below, and we'll get to it as soon as we can.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

How FriendFeed Could Become the Ultimate Social Media Tracking Service

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:25:30 PDT

FriendFeed, the multi-network activity aggregator co-founded by Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, announced today that it has entered the crowded field of real time search. FriendFeed was already the best way to learn what early adopter social media users were saying about any topic across blogs, Twitter, delicious and other diverse social media sites. If FriendFeed wants to step it up to the next level and challenge business-class conversation trackers, we believe there are four steps the company needs to take.

We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.

Sponsor

We already use FriendFeed to keep track of who quietly touches our blog posts out around the web. For example, our recent post Google Updates Blog Search - Where's The Innovation hasn't gotten any comments yet - but FriendFeed shows us that leading marketing blogger Andy Beal shared it with his network on Google Reader. That's good to know.

We think FriendFeed could offer some of the most sophisticated social media conversation tracking on the web, if it just took a few steps in particular.

Broaden the Index Beyond Opt-In

Right now FriendFeed tracks what users say and do across more than 40 different social media sites and any RSS feeds (like blog feeds) that users input as part of their profiles. It's a great way to track people and topics on networks you yourself don't participate in.

Because FriendFeed is such a high-profile startup, many people have set up accounts just to try it and have their activities pulled into the site automatically even though they no longer use FriendFeed itself. That adds to the richness of the site's search function.

If FriendFeed wants to offer full-service conversation tracking, though, it is going to need to go beyond the early-adopter crowd that has opted in to having their activities imported into the site. FriendFeed is going to need to proactively discover and import feeds from users of Twitter, Delicious, SlideShare, BrightKite, etc., and bloggers who have not set up FriendFeed accounts. This will increase the usefulness of the site's search function by an order of magnitude.

That's no small task! Many startups have tried to do social-media-wide search in the past but few can achieve the scale and speed needed to pull it off well. Two things make us think FriendFeed can do it. First, who better than the creator of Gmail to achieve new heights in rapid, scalable information delivery? Buchheit isn't the only former Googler on the team, either. Second, FriendFeed has been engineered from the start to import massive amounts of data. A number of the streams FriendFeed pulls in aren't even from RSS feeds as you'd expect; the company's co-founders told ReadWriteWeb in an early interview that they import from a wide variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) beyond RSS.

Spam Control

Right now there's a fair amount of spam on FriendFeed and we imagine it's only going to get worse. There's also a lot of people who use the service as their RSS reader - so blog posts and search results show up in your search results even though no one has touched them.

This wouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. FriendFeed is just a few steps away already from allowing searchers to query all sources other than manually imported RSS feeds except when a feed item has one or more comments or "likes" added by a user.

Apply Business Savvy

There are all kinds of ways that FriendFeed could become more business savvy. One way we would suggest is through making more use of LinkedIn.

FriendFeed users have been able to associate their LinkedIn profiles with their FriendFeed accounts since the start of the service, and job changes used to be displayed right along with Tweets and other online activity. It was great. Unfortunately, LinkedIn knows what a pot of gold it sits on and took the noxious step of cutting off these kinds of importing functions by obscuring the HTML on its profile pages. FriendFeed was scraping those pages for changes and it was a great service for everyone. It was pure folly by LinkedIn; it wasn't specifically targeting FriendFeed, but as a result FriendFeed users no longer see when their friends change jobs and so no longer click through to LinkedIn to learn more.

Fortunately FriendFeed hasn't removed LinkedIn as a field that can be viewed by users; it just doesn't update anymore. When you see that someone has said something in your search stream, you can often click through to their LinkedIn profile to see what they do for a living and what their job title is. FriendFeed could display job titles by default on a business version of FriendFeed if LinkedIn was more agreeable, or FriendFeed could look to the much friendlier and social media-savvy Google Profiles instead.

Knowing the job titles of people who have bookmarked your web page in Delicious or shared it in Google Reader would be really valuable.

Some other business-oriented rules, like alerts when certain discussion thresholds have been reached, would go a long way too.

Bring Back Aggregate Analysis

When FriendFeed launched, it offered some great data visualization, showing you the users whose content you "liked" the most and who "liked" your content the most. It showed in a pie chart which services most of your content came in through.

Unfortunately, in a recent redesign aimed to make the service more mainstream-user friendly, those visualizations were eliminated.

Bring that and more back and you've got a viable competitor for services that businesses pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for. Add some sentiment analysis, made easier by FriendFeed's "like" feedback function, and you've got a really desirable product.

Will FriendFeed take these steps though? That depends on whether it continues its Quixotic quest to capture more everyday consumer users for a cross-network, real-time conversation aggregator (!) or finds audiences that appreciate its value and starts building out features that they will pay for.

Discuss

Where Did the Missing Palm Pre App Go?

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:29:48 PDT

Like I do every day, I hit up the App Catalog on my Palm Pre this morning. Instead of cruising around the store by category, it’s easier to just hit the Recent tag since there’s only 30 apps. Or is it 29? There were 30 titles for the past several weeks, but apparently one went missing and I’m not sure which one it was. Nor do I know why it’s gone. Luckily, it wasn’t one of the few I’m using since they’re all still there.

I know that the SDK won’t be widely distributed until the “end of summer” since that’s what Jon Rubinstein said on the investor call last week. But he also said that hundreds to thousands of developers would get their hands on it within the next few weeks, so I keep hoping to see a new app or two pop up and surprise me. While I still like the device and the webOS UI, I’m feeling very limited with what I can do right now. I keep turning back to my iPhone because of key apps I use several times per day when away from the computer. Without apps, the handset loses some of its shine and appeal after you get through all of the native software.

Last week on GigaOm, I said that Palm only has half of the pieces to the business plan puzzle in place. Maturing the SDK, distributing it and then building the App Catalog from its current beta status are a must. But perhaps I’m trying too hard to compare Palm’s potential success with that of Apple and Research in Motion, both of which have been gobbling up chunks of market share. Rubinstein did say that he feels there’s room in the market for four or five major smartphone platforms. He doesn’t feel Palm needs to be number one to win.

Henry Blodget feels the total opposite is true. At Silicon Alley Insider, he says that even though Palm my have sold 400,000 handsets, it’s still bombing. I tend not to agree with that point of view just yet. Palm is taking a slow and methodical approach by design. And I certainly don’t agree with Henry’s contrarian view on the number of mobile platforms the market can bear:

“The world doesn’t need FOUR major handset platforms. It probably doesn’t even need two or three. So, long-term, we still think the Pre will bomb.”

Oh Henry. If we all took that view, we’d probably be running MS-DOS version 17 on IBM-clone computers these days! I don’t want to see the handset market fragmented by multitudes of platforms, but the competitors have raised the bar by offering strong alternatives to each other. Consumers have only benefited as a result.

How are you other Palm Pre owners feeling right now about your handset? Are you too craving apps or you OK with the current situation? How long are you willing to wait for more software titles?

Mobile is moving fast: Keep up with GigaOM Pro’s expert research analysis and predictions on the tech and trends shaping the market. Learn more »

FriendFeed real-time search. We have it. It's here.

Jim Norris — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:27:15 PDT

One of the coolest things about FriendFeed is how you can see everything that's happening on the site in real-time. Starting today, this is even more true with real-time search.

Just enter a search query as you always have, and see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time. No need to constantly click refresh. It's an extremely useful (not to mention mesmerizing) way to immediately see what people are saying about a particular topic. You can search across just your friends or all of FriendFeed, including imported services like blogs and Twitter accounts.

So try it for yourself. See what people are talking about today. Or what they have to say about Obama. While we were testing this internally, we could barely keep up with the non-stop activity regarding Michael Jackson. (That's when we knew we needed a pause button.)

Searches using advanced search options and saved searches are also in real-time. And now you can embed a real-time search in your blog or web page, like this:

We're also working on allowing you to subscribe to saved searches, add them to your friend lists, and even get notifications based on search keywords. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, we hope this will make your searching experience feel a lot more like the rest of FriendFeed. As always, let us know your thoughts in FriendFeed Feedback.

Behind The Numbers – A Week On Posterous

Andy Brudtkuhl — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:54:10 PDT

The traffic for my personal blog – (or lifestream as they seem to be calling it) – is up 1,666.67% over the first week since the move from WordPress to Posterous.

This is traffic I wasn’t getting before when the site was on WordPress… This has nothing to do with SEO benefits of Posterous – but its natural ability to generate traffic using your existing social networks combined with the ease of publishing content.

Here’s Steve Rubel’s workflow, which illustrates my point…

Let’s dive in to the numbers and figure out why traffic is up on my personal blog. I never posted to the WordPress version site because I simply did not have time while managing this blog, the internet business podcast blog, my web strategy blog – among all the other projects I am actively working on.

However I do have time to upload pictures to Flickr, update Twitter, push ideas to Evernote – from my iPhone. Half of the genius behind Posterous is the absolute ease in posting anything – all through email.

The other half are the push notifications to your social networks. There are no extra steps to post your content to Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. These content outposts are driving ALL of the traffic to the site – through Posterous’ push notification system.

It takes me 30 seconds to write an email, post to Posterous, and let the traffic come in. Oh – and comments work by email as well (much like Disqus). So if someone comments on a post, it gets emailed to me, and I reply to that email and it gets posted to the site. Brilliant.

So what does all this mean? Well not much aside from an extension of my personal brand that otherwise didn’t exist while using WordPress. The traffic isn’t important – I’m not converting on it – but it’s traffic that otherwise didn’t exist.

Featuring: Weekly Digest Subscribe to GetANewBrowser.com email updates featuring exclusive content.

5 Reasons I Moved My Personal Blog To Posterous 5 Reasons
Twittad Launched This Week – Monetizing Twitter Earlier th
6 WordPress Plugins to Increase Reader Engagement One of the

FriendFeed Debuts Real-Time Search Spanning 50+ Social Sites

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:17:34 PDT

More than a simple aggregation tool and social network, FriendFeed has grown to be one of the deepest social databases on the Web, taking in information from more than 50 different social sites, including blogs, status updates, photos, presentations and video, and making it searchable. The service moved its core product to real-time a few months ago, and has now taken a big leap forward in also making its search results real-time, letting you see how people from around the Web are engaging and talking about topics, covering much more than "just Twitter", which so far has been the go-to destination for real-time response.

Best of all, the service isn't asking you to change the way you do searches, and all saved searches on FriendFeed work, but they now execute in real-time and continue live updating as new entries are added to the service.

For example, I could now embed a vanity search in my blog and see it in real time, thanks to FriendFeed.

As you can no doubt guess, popular discussions that have dominated Trending Topics on Twitter would also see rapid updates on Friendfeed - as FriendFeed acts as the superset for social activity. See for instance: Obama, TweetDeck or Michael Jackson.

FriendFeed's user base is still smaller than the most popular Web services, including Twitter and Facebook, but they are executing on making a feature-rich alternative. Moves like today's addition will continue to separate the innovative team from others who are still putting their full efforts into maintaining stability.

More: louisgray.com | RSS | FriendFeed | E-mail | Cell: 408 646.2759

Reason #552 to Be on FriendFeed: Real-Time Search

Jesse Stay — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:24:30 PDT

I’ve talked in the past about how I read your blogs. I rarely subscribe through Google Reader any more - I read all of your blogs through FriendFeed. Therefore if you want me to read your blog, I strongly suggest taking the first step of importing it into FriendFeed. Well, if that weren’t reason enough, FriendFeed just gave you even one more reason to import your blog and other social data into their site: real-time search.

If you’ll look down in the lower-right sidebar of this blog, you’ll see an example of it in action - every mention of “realtime”, “real time”, “social”, “friendfeed”, “twitter”, “facebook”, or “Jesse Stay” anywhere on the web, at any time that has been imported into FriendFeed now appears real-time, as it’s happening. Go ahead - change the search parameters to something like “earthquake”, or “iran”, or “michael jackson”. You’ll quickly see the value of having such real-time, on-demand search at your fingertips.

FriendFeed is said to be getting ready to also release notifications, probably in the same way they do your other friend lists and feeds via e-mail and IM for the various search terms you’re trying to find. As the terms come in real-time, you’ll receive them. This is powerful stuff!

Over a year ago Twitter had a similar feature - they called it “track”, which they’ve recently re-introduced to developers via their API. It was the main reason I joined and stuck with Twitter. As soon as their competition was dead they removed it. It looks as though FriendFeed has one-upped Twitter once again with this feature.

So if you haven’t already, go to FriendFeed, get an account, import all your Twitter and Facebook friends already on the service (you’ll find most of your active friends probably already are!), and start adding your blogs, Twitter feeds, facebook feeds, photos, videos, and more into your stream so they too can be indexed by this powerful search. The web just got a whole lot more real-time, and FriendFeed just got a whole lot more powerful.

FriendFeed Brings The Real To Real-Time Search

(jeff)isageek — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:59:56 PDT

Below is the story posted on FriendFeed about real time search being added as well as an example of it in action and embedded right in my blog post! how kool is that!

Here is an example of the real-time search in action showing everything coming up with the term “FriendFeed”

gdgt Tracks Discussions Around Your Gadgets [Webapps]

Kevin Purdy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:30:00 PDT

New data-geeky gadget site gdgt (pronounced either G-D-G-T or just "gadget") doesn't deliver giant pictures with the latest news on brand-new devices. It tracks what gadgets you had, have, and want, and filters tips, gripes, and discussions around them.

After signing up, you'll want to dig around the gadget finder or text search for the computers, digital cameras, gaming systems, cellphones, and other devices that you own. Hit "Add to list" below the main gadget pic, say whether you had, have, or want it, then read on to find general discussions, tips and hacks for using it, and see price comparisons if you're looking to buy or sell.

You might end up with a profile stuffed with gadgets, depending on how far you go in registering your gear. Don't see your gadget listed? Add it yourself and submit for review. There are, of course, plenty of social opportunities for sharing, embedding, discussing, and otherwise geeking out about the stuff you love (or secretly hate). Veronica Belmont details signing up and using the site in the video below:

The site was founded by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, alumni of gadget sites Gizmodo and Engadget, and they claim that many more features are on their way. Though it launched yesterday, gdgt spent most of the daylight hours struggling under a traffic crunch, but looks to be moving smoothly this morning. Tracking gadgets and contributing requires a free account sign-up.

gdgt

Zombie short film festival call for entries

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:49:03 PDT

Robbo sez, "Talented Toronto writers & filmmakers, Jim Taylor & Cory Laffin, have announced the first Zombie Short Film Festival and are calling for submissions. The festival will be held in Toronto, at the glorious Revue Cinema (in my friendly neighbourhood Parkdale) on October 30th. The criteria for submissions is pretty straight forward: 1) It must be a short film with a maximum running time of 20 minutes; and 2) It must involve zombies. Further details can be found on their web site."

Zombie Short Film Festival: Call For Submissions (Thanks, Robbo!)

(Image: Toothless Zombie, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Ateo Fiel's Flickr stream

GDGT Launches For Non Stop Gadget Action

Michael Arrington — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:50:52 PDT

Last summer we broke the news that Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block would team with former editor-in-chief Peter Rojas to create a new gadget startup. Today that new startup, GDGT, launches. Gadget lovers rejoice - this is a social site where you can obsess over those tiny bundles of tech joy among others just as geeky as you.

GDGT (pronounced “g-d-g-t,” but I like to just say “gadget”) is a highly structured wiki that centers on tech gadgets. Like our own Crunchbase, anyone can edit any information on the site, but everything is structured which allows for lots of slicing and dicing of the data.

The site includes intensely detailed specs on each product and groups products into logical categories. There are over a dozen categories and thousands of products in GDGT now, and users will quickly add more. All that structured data also allows for an incredibly useful Gadget finder tool as well.

Users select gadgets that they own, used to own, or want, and can add reviews and ratings. Blog reviews are threaded into the discussion as well:

GDGT also has a forum feature where users can discuss relevant gadget related topics. Here’s a thread, for example, where people fretting over the decision to buy an iPhone 3Gs can use each other as a sort of support group. Each user has a profile page with their gadgets and contributions to the community.

GDGT isn’t saying much about funding, although we’ve heard they raised around half a million dollars in an angel round led by True Ventures and Betaworks, plus a number of angel investors.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

How to Create and Install Favicons

growmap — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:49:26 PDT

Favicons are those tiny images (16×16) shown in your browser tabs:

Favicons visible in FireFox Browser

In the screen capture above you can see our new Favicon followed by one for Adam Singer’s blog The Future Buzz and Andy Beard’s blog AndyBeard.eu. Favicons can be created from almost any image file type (.jpg .gif .png .bmp) and are saved as the .ico file type.

Every Web site should seriously consider having a distinctive Favicon created that matches their Avatar and Logo. You can use one of the Favicon generation tools below to create one from an existing image and the Favicon WordPress plugins to install it on your site. The process is similar for installing Favicons in Non-WordPress sites.

FREE FAVICON GENERATORS:

Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator - create a Favicon from an existing image [input images: gif, jpg, png, and bmp]
FaviconGenerator - create a Favicon from an existing image [simple - no options - square images only]
Favicon-Generator - create a Favicon from an existing image [input images: gif, jpg, png - few options]
ProDraw Favicon Generator - create a Favicon from an existing image [Supports JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIF file formats for uploading. Output size from 16x16 pixels (favicon.ico icon size), 32x32 (desktop icon), 48x48 (large XP icon) up to 128x128 pixels (Windows Vista icon size) in the *.ICO icon format.]
Favicon CC - create Favicons in a paint type program

WORDPRESS FAVICON PLUGINS:

Shockingly Simple Favicon - plugin to add a Favicon to a WP site without editing Theme files
Plugin to Add Favicons to Blogrolls in WordPress