The Last Podcast

I have been thinking a bit more about the chances for the recent crop of Web 2.0 social media darlings like FriendFeed and Twitter to go mainstream and especially why FriendFeed has gone from zero to being the default social media aggregator for most folks in the tech blogosphere within just a few months while staying pretty much unknown outside of the early adopter tech world. In doing so, I kept wondering if the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t expanding more and more and what that means for services that cater mostly to early adopters.

Corvida from SheGeeks also has some thoughts about the mainstreaming of FriendFeed, Twitter and RSS and at the end, she concludes:

Maybe the masses aren’t ready for these platforms. Still, these are early adopter tools, regardless of the growth that one may be seeing. They all have the potential to go mainstream, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re still in our own bubble. Or are we?

I think we are indeed in our own bubble and in some ways, FriendFeed is the natural result of living in that bubble.

Let me backtrack for a moment here:

For any web app (or any product for that matter) to become successful with mainstream, non über-techie users, it first and foremost has to solve a problem. FriendFeed doesn’t really solve a problem for most mainstream users. It’s great for us geeks who have friends scattered all over the Internet, all of whom use Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, blogs, reddit, delicious, last.fm etc.

Just have a look at the ‘everyone‘ stream on FriendFeed and you quickly get a feeling for who the current users are. Hint: it’s not people sharing photos with their grandparents.

It’s the same reason a lot of people don’t see too much use in using an RSS Reader – you don’t need one if you only browse to five different sites everyday for your news.

I have a feeling that the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t getting any smaller, but rather expanding. A lot of the new services cater mostly towards early adopters, but don’t really solve a problem for mainstream web users.

Maybe if there is a bubble that’s going to pop one of these days it’s going to be VCs realizing that they are better off investing in companies that are serving more mainstream problems (like Mint does for managing finances) and start shying away from more edgy, cutting edge early adopter oriented services

I thought that Flickr adding video wasn’t a great idea – there is a 90 second maximum and you need a pro account ($25 a year) to even upload videos.

Flickr‘s users, however are the ones that really didn’t like this new service, especially that Flickr put their money towards developing a video service. Wired calls it a mutiny and The Register a revolt.

What got the Flickr community going apparently was that they were never asked if they wanted video.

I think this is an interesting case study. Any user who is invested in using a service feels a certain sense of ownership over that service – but paid users take this to a completely different level. Paying $25 a year (or $5 a year for that matter) changes the psychology of how users regard a service drastically.  Flickr’s mistake was not to take this into account. At least they could have engaged their most loyal users in a dialogue over this.

I agree that video and flickr don’t seem to match very well – still photography and video are very different beasts. But then I would also have to give kudos to Yahoo! for trying to move Flickr forward. Too often, large companies let acquired products lingering in the darkness of a maintenance mode, but without adding new features (yes, I’m looking at you, Google!).

Usually I would say those users need to get over themselves and stop being so elitist about their photography and embrace the future – but in this case, I understand why these flickr users are so irate.

Jesse Spauling, the developer of Blogrize send me an invite to try out his new service yesterday. Blogrize is still in a private beta. Louis Gray had some invites yesterday, but they seem to be all gone at this point there are still some left, so hurry to Louis’ site and grab one.

Blogrize describes itself as “today’s news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.”

At its most basic, Blogrize creates a community around shared RSS feeds. You can think of it as Linkriver, but with a stronger emphasis on community building, plus a digg/reddit like voting system.

The design of Blogrize is overall very functional and elegant. Very few tasks take more than a click to perform, yet the interface doesn’t seem cluttered.

To populate the reddit-like “hot” list, Blogrize also looks beyond the Shared Feeds of the specific community by doing a semantic analysis of the shared items and populates the list with other content that it deems relevant.

There is also a more Linkriver like option to just see only items posted by your friends. As far as I can see, this list is also ordered by a mix of “hotness” and recency.

In the screen shot to the left,you can see the view of Blogrize from the Louis Gray community. Once you hover over a link, you get the opportunity to vote on this item. Unlike Friendfeed, where you can only like a post, Blogrize gives you a plethora of options: “Interesting,” “Funny,” and “Insightful” on the positive side, and “Lame,” “Disagree,” and “Facts Wrong” on the negative side. This seems like a bit of overkill right now, as most users I see in the system really only use the “Interesting” function.

Of course, you can also comment on every item as well – where you can vote on every post as well, using the same taxonomy as above. The commenting system uses threats, so even long discussions remain quite readable.

One nice touch is that the user profiles are a bit more in-depth than those at other similar services, which stresses the social networking aspect of Blogrize. Linkriver does a good job giving its users an idea who the users are. Blogrize goes even further and can, as more users come into the system, break down the community by geography as well.

The individual user profiles are also very interesting, as every user’s recent comments and votes are archived there. To me, this is an easy way to see whether it is worth following somebody.

Overall, I think Blogrize is a very interesting service. I was actually surprised I liked it, as I have seen my fair share of Shared Feeds based products in the last few months and couldn’t really see what Blogrize would do that would set it apart that from the competition. Yet, Blogrize really surprised me and I think the addition of the voting features and the emphasis on social networks represents the next step in the evolution of the Shared Feeds based web apps.

Technorati tags: blogrize, rss, shared feeds, louis gray, linkriver, friendfeed

Remember Second Life? Faintly? Spend five minutes checking it out because of all the hype and then left never to return? You’re not alone.

The virtual world that had all the hype and no real use has found a steady partner in IBM. I though there was a problem with Techmeme indexing old stories when I saw this, but I checked the date and it really seems to be from today.

IBM bought it’s own secure, private island in Second Life and here is what IBM is planning to do with it according to VentureBeat:

With the added security, businesses can enable employees to login into Second Life for corporate training purposes. (Yeah, they’re not going to use their avatars to have virtual sex or pretend to be a member of the opposite sex).  Spohrer said that businesses can rent areas known as “islands” in Second Life and run dress rehearsals for everything from a fire drill to a hospital emergency.

What better way to prepare for a disaster than by having your employees train for it in Second Life, where half of them are probably barely able to move their avatars around. How about just ringing the fire alarm in your building and making sure everybody just walks outside?

And why have meetings in Second Life if IBM itself sells fancy electronic whiteboards and enterprise web conferencing software solutions? How about picking up the phone and just calling somebody?

And let me leave you with a moment of Zen, courtesy of the SFGate.com’s Tech Chronicles:

When in the IBM-built area, employees will be able to engage in various communication modes using their virtual avatars. You could see far-flung employees coming together in Second Life to collaborate and jointly develop projects or products.

In case you can’t get enough of this, check out this video about avatars getting effective healthcare courtesy of IBM (I kid you not!) – if the fire drills in SL are as realistic as this, I fear for the people working in those virtual buildings:

Ed Bott uses last weekend’s ruckus over Apple ‘forcing’ Windows users to install Safari on their machines to launch into an interesting rant about the echochamber effect on Techmeme:

Techmeme is the Short Attention Span Theater of the blogosphere. It’s an echo chamber. It encourages reactive, uncritical thinking. The blogswarm gets outraged by whatever they see on Techmeme, they write down whatever pops into their heads (without checking any facts and in most cases without even following the links), and then moves on to the next topic. A “discussion” lasts 24 hours.

Techmeme is a template for a gazillion me-too bloggers who manage to write a dozen posts a day without ever expressing an original thought. That, depressingly, appears to be a successful business model, at least for now.

Ed, who according to the article has the amazing amount of 100 RSS feeds on his reading list (how can he handle that much news?), says he only looks at Techmeme once or twice a month – and then only to remind himself what a waste of time it is.

I’m the first to agree with Ed that there is little more annoying on Techmeme than the me-too blogs that only repeat a news story without any attempt at critical thinking or furthering the conversation.

However, me-too blogging isn’t much of a business model. If you are trying to built a business on Techmeme me-too posts, you will be sorely disappointed. Very few Techmeme readers will actually come to your blog from bylines on Techmeme and a me-too blog posts will only very infrequently become a ‘real headline’ (where about 100 times as many readers will follow the link to your blog).

At the end of the day, Techmeme is still the watering hole of the tech blog community – for better or worse. If enough people deem a story worth writing about, which is what Techmeme really reflects, then I consider it a story worth checking out (and who knows, maybe commenting about). The echo chamber effect comes with that, but most readers seem to be able to tune it out.

Also, me-too bloggers will never be really successful in the blogosphere. The success of every new blogger who broke into the Techmeme Leaderboard and had Techmeme headlines came from writing original stories or from at least offering a very distinct point of view.

In the end, it’s a self-regulating system where the me-too bloggers will always slowly fade back into the background because me-too blogging is not a business model.

(of course, part of the irony of writing this is that there is a good chance this post will become a byline on Techmeme under Ed’s post – so be it – I hope I at least added something to the conversation)

According to a number of reports today, Google’s latest beta of the Google Toolbar hijacks 404 pages and reroutes them to a Google 404 page with ‘Suggestions,’ including some hints for what to do next and, of course, an option to search on Google.

The reality though is different: Google isn’t taking customized 404 pages and then inserts itself. It only inserts its own page when there is no customized 404 page available.

Mostly, the story here is about shoddy reporting of a rumor…

Duncan Riley points out on TechCrunch that there is still some doubt as to when this Google 404 page actually shows (but then he does little to clear this up):

It’s not clear from the reports as to whether this occurs only when no customized 404 page is available on a specific site, or with every 404 page. I also can’t test the theory, least the only beta version of Google Toolbar I could find was for Internet Explorer.

Now, you would think that an editor on TechCrunch would actually check this out before posting about it – but apparently that’s now how TechCrunch rolls.

So I went ahead and installed the Google Toolbar under Internet Explorer on Vista to see what really happens:

Here is a screenshot of a 404 page on LastPodcast.net – courtesy of WordPress. As you can see – nothing happens. Neither did it on TechCrunch, Yahoo, HP, Google’s own pages,

But here is a 404 page on Techmeme, which doesn’t have a mechanism to handle them:

Clearly, Google has inserted itself here.

So the answer is simple: Google doesn’t hijack your 404 pages, but it does hijack the standard html server pages.

Now the question is, whether this is a bad thing or not. I guess one could argue that Google provides the better user experience here, as it at least gives the user some option.

On the other hand, webmasters like to be in total control and the fact that the search bar is pretty prominent on the hijacked page might lead a lot of users to search for something and never come back to your site again. But then, isn’t that the webmaster’s fault for not having a better 404 page available?

My take: Google is doing a good thing for consumers and webmasters who complain about this need to implement better ways of handling their 404 pages (and somebody give Duncan Riley a Windows machine so he doesn’t have to report rumors and can actually do some fact checking, please!)

(Oh, and by the way, Google itself explained this last December…)

Congrats to the guys and gals over at VentureBeat, a blog that focuses on technology VC news and is run by former Jose Mercury News journalist Matt Marshall. According to Matt, they have just raised $320.000 cash from a number of angel investors:

VentureBeat has grown steadily since launching more than a year ago. We’ve been hiring writers and we have record traffic. I’ve bootstrapped the company thus far, and while it’s been rewarding, there’s just so much more we’d like to do. We’ve been pretty much in the black since I launched, and I’ve hired writers as cash afforded. Now that we’ve got our feet on the ground, its time to get to the next phase.

Back in the dark days of the blogosphere, there used to be one blog that was the goto place for startup news and reviews. At least in my view, there are at least two other online publications that are slowly but surely nibbling away readers from this one blog, and VentureBeat is one of them.

I had never heard of TellDodo until I noticed that somebody from there was leaving comments about the service on every blog post that mentioned the barcodes Google is putting in newspaper ads. Here is the post explaining Tell Dodo as it appeared on my site:

Think of it as a verbal equivalent of tinyurl. Google search returns 1000s of hits for any search term. Telldodo let’s you associate a unique key-phrase made of simple keywords with your URL. When you see a telldodo key-phrase in print, or on a billboard, or hear it on the radio, it’s a lot easier to remember than a complicated URL, at least until you get to your computer.

Another application: tag your photo web-site with a unique tag (example: our caribean cruise pics). Then you can tell your family and friends the key-phrase over the phone and they can retrieve the URL at telldodo.com

Cheers
Dodo

This, of course, is just a throwback to the old Netscape keywords, with the added annoyance of having to go to a web site to enter the “simple keywords.”

Sounds easy, right? Surely its easier than remembering a tinyurl. But it isn’t. The free service doesn’t allow you to pick a keyword. Instead, for lastpodcast.net, you have to remember “reality replica rice.” I kid you not. By the time you memorized that, you can memorize three URLs.

Also, by the time you have given somebody the URL for telldodo.com and the keywords, the poor recipient of this information is already at the verge of a breakdown, begging you to just give him the URL and tell him where to click.

Tell Dodo – dumbest web service, ever.

As I wrote and read about Friendfeed and other services that pull together our output on different web services, I started thinking about how this, in some way, is a one-way street.

What got me thinking about this was how people started commenting on items I posted in Friendfeed instead of on the original blog or commented on a Twitter item instead of getting back to the original author.

Basically, I guess I am wondering about how we can not only pull the information together, but then also disseminate the actions we take on the aggregation site back to the original item.

As other aggregation services, like AssetBar, start adding comment functions, this might become more and more of a question.

I guess much of this really hinges upon the question of ‘identity’ on the net. Maybe with the adoption of OpenID, it might become trivial to pull all this info together and then disseminate it again. Maybe some OpenID providers could add this as their value add as well.

Of course I have no answers for this right now, but that never stopped me from asking. Any thought?

Dave Winer today asked for advice for Twitter newbies. I’m not sure I have a lot of advice for newbies (given that Twitter is still a young product, aren’t we all newbies and figuring out how to use it anyway?). However, I can write about how I use it.

1. I never use the website. I use Snitter as my exclusive Twitter client. It’s far easier to reply to somebody; you get notfied of new tweets; and it plays a little piece of music when you post a 140 character tweet.
2. I follow about 80 100 people or so. I have a pretty simple mechanism for who to follow: I either read the person’s blog or I hear repeatedly from others that this would be an interesting person to follow.
3. If you follow me, I will follow you. If I’m not interested in what you write, I unsubscribe.
4. I always have it running in the background.
5. I use it as a chat-room.
6. I use it to keep a pulse on what is going on among the people who are my ‘virtual’ friends.
7. I do announce new blog posts on Twitter.
8. I barely ever say what I am doing.
9. I try to ask questions and provide answers.

I don’t see a lot of value in following 1000 or more people. You can’t keep up with what’s going on among such a big group anyway. If I see somebody who follows 2000 people but only has two followers, that’s probably a spammer.

For me Twitter is a communications tools. I always call it a backchannel to blogging, where ideas get passed around in real time, new posts announced, and where you have a direct, unmediated channel to other bloggers, no matter whether they are A-listers or Z-listers.

The most important things about Twitter, though (and what in the end has made it so useful), is that Twitter can be whatever you want it to be. How you use it greatly depends on the people you communicate with.

Oh, and if you want to follow me, you can find my Twitter feed here.

Reddit announced some new features today. Most importantly, they will soon give you the opportunity to run your own reddit:

You will be able to make three kinds of reddits: public, restricted, and private. A public reddit is just like the current reddits: anyone can view and submit to them. A restricted reddit allows anyone to view the content, but only invited members may submit, comment, or vote. A private reddit is like a restricted reddit, but with the additional restriction that only members can view the content as well. Moderators of a reddit will be able to remove posts and ban users from their reddits.

As MG Siegler points out, that’s exactly what Dave Winter was talking about a while back: everybody can run his/her own digg/reddit/social news site.

Right now. the new features are in closed beta, but will open up in about a week.

This is potentially a big thing, but it also comes with some issues.

When Dave Winer floated the idea originally, I was skeptical, because it seems that for a Digg/reddit like site to work, you do need a certain amount of active participants. By starting a new site under the umbrella of reddit or Digg, that might become a non-issue, depending on how it is realized.

Also, while running your own reddit/Digg might sound cool at first, it might also just become a bookmarking site without much user-interaction pretty quickly.

As for now, I am a ReadBurner convert and not really looking for yet another new social news site (besides Steve Gillmor’s NewsGang project, which has gotten little attention, but is actually quite interesting)

Pownce, a Twitter-like web app and the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, will be coming out of beta tonight.

They also added a few new features, most importantly, an easy way to import friends from other services like Digg and Twitter:

Users can now bypass the tedious process of adding new friends to yet-another-social-network. The new version allows users to import friend lists from any/all of Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. More services will be added regularly, Culver says.

If Pownce has one secret weapon, its the easy ability to import your Twitter contacts (thanks to Twitter’s APIs), but otherwise, no matter what its developers say, it is pretty much a Twitter clone.

Mathew Ingram say Pownce and Twitter should merge. He might have a point. Pownce is a bit late to the party and everybody and their dog is already using twitter, which doesn’t allow for file transfers like Pownce does, but otherwise is a very similar service. I actually never missed the ability to transfer files in Twitter – that’s what I use email for anyway. Mathew says that the two should merge and that he is reconsidering using Pownce.

As for myself. I don’t see much use in Pownce right now (and, as MG Siegler points out, not too many people use it right now anyway). Unless everybody suddenly switches over from Twitter the services decided to work with each other, I am sticking with Twitter.

By the way, it seems like there are more and more Web 2.0 services that could benefit so much from not just having APIs but actually interacting with each other. All those messaging services, office suites, social networks would be so much more useful if they were based on a common protocol and interacted with each other. Instead, the oh so open Web 2.0 movement seems to be breeding more closed of silos than ever before.

Update: Andrew Watson put together a nice comparison chart that nicely illustrates the different offerings of the big blog hosts. 

Here is another nice example of complete non-news making a splash in the blogosphere. WordPress has announced that it will now offer 3 GB of space to its bloggers.

Really! 3 GB. Can you imagine any blogger who can actually fill that amount of space? That’s a hell of a lot of bibles you would have to write to get to 3 GB. However, apparently Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch thinks this is a big deal (he does say so, after all):

This is a big deal. Free storage is the new arms race in online services. Blogger and TypePad will have to respond to remain competitive. It also goes to show how Web-scale infrastructure can benefit consumers directly.

This doesn’t make sense to me. I would also bet that WordPress doesn’t want to get into the business of serving up big video or audio files – the only way a person could ever use this amount of space. Today, we all use YouTube to embed videos; we get our pictures from flickr etc.

3 GB is a lot more space than Blogger, LiveJournal or any other blogging platform currently offers, but when was the last time you heard somebody complain that they ran out of space on Blogger? Also, wouldn’t any blogger who actually needed that amount of space host it on a real domain?

On second thought, those guys at WordPress are smart and maybe they are up to something more. WordPress photo hosting maybe? Or maybe it’s just a lot of hot marketing air. Unused space is free after all…

Louis Gray wrote what I think is an important post today (sadly, it’s diving down the list on Techmeme rapidly) about the fact that some bigger “A-list” blogs tend to be rather stingy with their attributions to news that broke on “B-list” blogs (I’m just waiting for Calacanis to jump out of the woodwork to tell us that there is no A, B or C list):

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been at times shaking my head as I’ve seen the site’s reporters deliver an absolute minimum of original reporting, underdeliver on giving credit to those finding the news first, and in one blatant example, stealing quotes from a story I had written, without giving attribution, and not making edits when notified.

Louis points out Mashable as the main culprit here. I have no ax to grind with Mashable (I don’t break news, after all), but if Louis’ attack is correct, then Mashable should definitely do something about this and from the comments on his blog, it seems they are.

The problem however, I think, goes deeper than individual blogs and attribution, though. I wonder if the problem isn’t a bit of an oversaturation of tech news blogs in the blogosphere. There is, after all, only so much news to report and writing a quick news report is a lot easier than writing a review or to deliver commentary. There seems to be a lot more emphasis on breaking news today than delivering any sort of critical reflection about the news (and I am not saying that my reflections are very groundbreaking either!). In the end, it comes down to money, as usual. Big blogs need to keep driving visitors to their sites (I know, that an unpopular way of saying this, but in the end, that’s what it comes down to – editors and writers need to be paid after all).

Just looks at how everybody is citing the bogus numbers of growth for Podshow today.