There was a time when your comment form for a post asked for name, email and website link as a way to establish the identity of an individual. Times have changed. Spam has become more prevalent in comments and we also have a multitude of new ways to register identity on the web. Gravatar, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect and others allow people to port their identity to different websites as long as those websites support the various identity services. The key phrase in that last sentence is “as long as…” If website owners want to continue to offer the richest experience to their visitors they they need to keep up with the latest services that offer web identities. They also need to know which services are popular enough to warrant integration in their websites. And finally there needs to be a reasonably simple way for site owners to integrate with their chosen platform. It’s a lot to stay informed about.

The way content, and the conversation about content, spreads has changed as well. There was a time when people wrote their own post and linked back to the original post (trackbacks) or they saved a link to their account on Delicious. Now people link to and discuss content in a wide variety of places. Links find their way to Digg, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader and other popular web destinations. Conversation also occurs in those places as well. If you started the conversation it might be nice to know that it’s happening and share it with the other visitors to your site. There’s also the issue of content and influence as currency. If you publish content that attracts many people you probably want others who are interested in you to know how much discussion occurs around your content. And perhaps the level of discussion you generate will help to make someone more interested in what you’re publishing.

Given this new reality of conversation around web content, JS-Kit is offering a simpler solution for website owners with their Echo plaftorm. Echo allows users who are commenting to register their identity using a variety of the most popular services. Beyond registering their identity this feature also allows the visitor to simultaneously share their contribution on those other services as well. That’s a feature that can help expose the discussion (for better or worse) to a new group of people.

Echo also offers a pretty simple way for visitors to continue to follow the conversation via email and RSS.

Those features make Echo very good and provide functionality that is similar to other custom comment solutions such as IntenseDebate and Disqus. Other promised features that make this service sound exciting are the real-time updates and capture from different sources around the web. Echo promises to update the comment portion of your content as new feedback rolls in. This turns the comments into something like a chat room. There’s also the promise of aggregation. Echo will capture discussion and links from various places on the web and bring it back into the comment stream on your site.

On the first glance the Echo service by JS-Kit appears to be able to solve some real problems for people who want robust conversation around their web content. It also solves an identity problem. I don’t want people to have to sign up for my websites to comment. But I would like to know who they are and give them the convenience of using the service that they like the most. The platform looks promising but the devil is in the details. Solid performance is key. It’s a disaster when you add something like this to your website and it fails to perform. It can slow the loading of your site and kill the conversation that it aimed to enhance. If JS-Kit does come through with solid performance then Echo could change the way that website owner manage their comments and community.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

I just recently bought a Dell netbook with the Ubuntu OS. Ubuntu has a netbook remix which looks like a very promising interface for this type of computer. I’ll let you know more once I take delivery and try it out. In any case the Chrome OS will be competing with the netbook remix as well as Windows.

There’s also a new OS for netbooks called Jolicloud that looks very promising and recently announced funding. Jolicloud may be unknown right now but they have more than a year to get the word out before Google delivers the Chrome OS.

Finally there’s the soon to be released Windows 7 which they say will be optimized for netbooks. I’ve seen universally positive reviews of Windows 7 from the early beta testers. It appears that Microsoft learned their lesson after the Vista debacle. So it’s certainly not a given that Google will crush Microsoft in this space.

There you have it. Google has three strong competitors with a good head start on them. Plus there’s the confusion related to where Google Android fits into the mix. For those reasons I think that the Google Chrome OS is far from a sure thing.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

As it stands now you can get the rich media content you capture on the iPhone 3Gs to the web. Videos can be automatically uploaded to YouTube. Audio captured on the device can be uploaded to services such as AudioBoo. Services like these offer the benefit of easy integration with the iPhone plus format conversion, flash players and RSS feeds. Serious content producers will want to go one step further than just uploading their media to a 3rd party service. They’ll want to upload the media, get the value added features I just mentioned and have the end result published on their own website, with their own RSS feed url that also connects to an iTunes podcast directory listing. The same serious media producers will also probably want to have the original media file downloadable from the web which is something that iTunes and AudioBoo don’t offer.

The traditional role of the media host in recent years has been to provide a storage space accessible via FTP, permanent download link and some analytics. Libsyn was one of the first companies that changed the normal way of doing business in the space by offering media hosting connected to website publishing and iTunes compatible RSS feeds. Podcasting was born! Unfortunately the Libsyn web publishing interface did not progress much and most people I know still use them just for file storage and statistics. Services like WordPress.com have tackled the media publishing problem by starting with a rich web publishing tool while adding audio and video hosting as an add on.

Both WordPress.com and LibSyn have their shortcomings as tools for publishing rich media. LibSyn has the iTunes support and good statistics. WordPress.com has the nice web presence covered and flash video encoding. Both fall very short when it comes to mobile media publishing via the iPhone.

There’s a large gap in the media hosting space that doesn’t address the needs of mobile power users. An FTP interface should be a standard basic feature but there should be other options as well. Integration with the iPhone should be mandatory. Cross publishing, at the very least, a title, description and the file download link to the blog of my choice should be another. Conversion of video to the web friendly flash format should be offered as well. There’s a need for integrated flash audio players too. And of course I should have analytics that provide all the details on how my media is being consumed. There are plenty of services that offer one or more of the pieces of the puzzle but none offers all of them.

Here’s my explicit vision so there’s no confusion. I shoot a video (or record audio) on the iPhone. I do whatever I need to do editing wise then add a title, description, then upload all of it to my next generation media hosting service. The service then publishes the title, description, direct download link and flash player to the blog of my choice. The blog handles the RSS feed. So now I’ve published content in a completely mobile fashion and the media is published on my branded website without my audience having to get involved with a 3rd party website.

I think that kind of a workflow adds real value to publishers who want to really go mobile. I don’t know for sure but I think that there are a lot of them. I’m one of them. So I’ll be waiting and watching to see who steps up to serve the needs of mobile content producers who want real time, white label media publishing capabilities.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

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All of these services have a certain level of importance to me but I know that eventually some of them will be gone. The short answer as to why they will be gone is “money.” None of these services has any appreciable revenue streams relative to the costs to run them. As far as I know only Facebook (via advertising) and Twitter (via a small amount of advertising) have any sources of revenue. Seesmic Desktop, FriendFeed and Google Reader seem to exist on the power of previous investments alone.

The ability to earn revenue from customers is only one factor in the survival equation. Access to capital is another factor. As a part of Google, Google Reader has no capital worries. You could even argue that Google Reader does have a revenue stream because it allows the presentation of Adsense in RSS feeds which Google earns revenue from. Facebook also has access to substantial capital due to the sheer size and growth potential of their service. Even so I think that there’s about a 10% chance that Facebook fails at some time during the next five years. Even as the growth of Facebook makes the service more valuable the cost of running the service grows as well.

Twitter, FriendFeed and Seesmic are in a much less enviable position. Much has been made of Twitter’s growth in recent months. It’s true that Twitter’s traffic numbers have exploded but who really knows what traffic and registered users are worth these days? Traffic and users are certainly not worth what they were two years ago when cash was flowing freely into the Web 2.0 space. Given the buzz around Twitter I think that they could be able to raise more capital if they needed to. Then again, each time Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) raises capital they dilute earlier investors and shareholders. That can’t sit well with employees who are banking on a big payday at the end of the rainbow. Heavy users of the service are the ones who need to be concerned though. A lot of social marketing campaigns and 3rd party application developers are counting on the success of Twitter. Twitters lack of revenue after two plus years in the marketplace should worry these folks. I think there’s a 25% chance that Twitter fails during the next five years.

FriendFeed and Seesmic are in the most trouble. FriendFeed is a service that is useful for heavy web publishers and the people who follow them. But how many people are heavy web publishers? It’s a very small slice of the web publishing market. For every Scobleizer there are thousands of casual publishers who can make do with the functionality offered by Facebook. I also think that followers on FriendFeed are more likely to be “friends” in that special web 2.0 category as opposed to real friends and family that people are connected to on Facebook. So while FriendFeed has value that value exists in a deep niche of web users. I don’t think advertising will work well with the users on FriendFeed. So FriendFeed will either have to start charging for something (an iPhone app maybe?) or be sold to someone with deeper pockets in order to make the service work in the long run. As such I feel that there’s at least a 50% chance that FriendFeed fails within the next two years.

Seesmic has the toughest road ahead. The core Seesmic video conversation service had a lot of early buzz but that buzz has since died down. The fact is that most people are not prolific publishers with video. And it’s also a fact that video is expensive to store and stream. So at some point you either have to charge for the video service or you need to integrate large amounts of advertising. Seesmic has done neither. Seesmic is also the only startup service in this list that has done layoffs. The Seesmic Desktop application has increased interest in the company. How does Seesmic capitalize on a free desktop application? The only two methods are advertisements and charging for the software. It’s hard to charge when competitors (such as TweetDeck) exist and would probably continue to offer their application for free. There’s no loyalty in Web 2.0 land. Most people would defect to a new tool rather than pay. Advertising might bring in some revenue but would probably cause people to switch services if the other comparable service is not inserting ads into the stream. It’s a tough situation. So unless Seesmic gets bought out I think there’s a 75% chance that they fail within the next two years.

The possibility of the failure of a web service where I publish or store information is something that I consider when determining how much time to invest on that service. Of all the services on this list the one that poses the most risk to myself is Facebook. FriendFeed is mostly an aggregator of things I publish elsewhere. Twitter is a place where I publish links and short messages but I don’t consider the content I post there to be particularly important. Seesmic desktop is a tool that helps me watch activity and can be easily replaced. I use Google Reader to share and comment on news and blog posts but I also think that there’s no chance that Reader is going away anytime soon.

I take steps to mitigate my personal risk by not putting too much effort into any one service. I have the most exposure to a Facebook failure but I also limit the amount of things that I publish there. I don’t rely on any single service to promote the myself, build my network or socialize. I’ve got my own domains running my own versions of web applications that act as the cornerstone of my presence on the internet. I see many people (and even businesses now) that increasingly rely on some of the services mentioned in this post (and others with similar risks) to build and maintain their presence on the internet. To them I say beware. Some of these services are doomed and if you rely on them too much you stand to lose a lot when they fail.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

Show Topics

• Breaking down the seven game win streak
• Reasons why the Mets started slow
• The struggles of Oliver Perez
• The masterful Johan Santana
• Discuss some of the Citi Field controversies
• K-Rod’s numbers so far
• Manny Ramirez (I was wrong)
• Luis Castillo (I was wrong)

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You may remember that one time Google turned their home page black in order to help people conserve energy. The only problem with the approach was the fact that computer monitors use the same amount of energy to render a pixel regardless of the color. Google even admits that a black page background, “saves no energy.”

Google’s latest energy saving scheme is just as dubious. They have enlisted a herd of goats to handle the mowing of weeds and brush at Google headquarters. Google calls the goat initiative, “a low-carbon approach” to meeting their needs. Is it really a low-carbon approach?

Consider the fact that the goats need to be transported from their home ranch to Google and back. Our guess is that the truck transporting the goats to and fro runs on diesel fuel. How much fuels is used and how many harmful emissions are created will depend greatly on the travel distance between the home of the goats and Google HQ. At best we think it’s fair to say that it would end up being a wash.

Instead of enlisting goats that will also require care and feeding while onsite, Google should consider investing in the Hustler Zeon which is billed as, “The World’s First All-Electric Zero Turn Riding Mower.”

While this initiative appears to contain more noise than signal Google has made some laudable investments into alternative energy via Google.org with their RechargeIT and Power Meter programs.

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