My Cameo Appearance on Louis Gray’s Blog

July 22, 2008 by 4 Comments

I had a chance to do a cameo blog post over on Louis Gray’s blog. You can see it right now, Bloggers’ Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence.The gist of the post is this:

One observation to make is this: the level of interaction seems to vary by the blogger’s level of established reputation. As a blogger gets more well-known on the Web, the level of interaction declines.

This was my first-ever guest blog post. I’ve seen others do it. Pretty neat, ain’t it? Here are some things that occurred to me as a I wrote it.

Louis’s blog is a lot bigger than mine. Per Technorati, Louis is a Top 5,000 blogger. A much bigger audience than mine. He’s a regular on Techmeme. I always want to put my best content here, but I have some coverage if a post doesn’t get much traction. People who read this blog know me, and have a sense of what I’ll write n the future.  Over on Louis’s blog, there’s a much bigger audience. They’ve come to expect a certain quality. Louis’s expectations became my expectations.

The chart below is the one I used in the guest post on Louis’s blog:

Louis is a Stage 3 blogger. With that, some of the crazy experimentation I like to do (such as my stick man representation of social media interactions) is not appropriate on his blog. I was cognizant of that.

I picked a subject that is consistent with Louis’s overall blog. The role of bloggers, and their interactions is the kind of subject that Louis regularly covers. I wanted a post that fit his “brand”. So I didn’t write one of my Enterprise 2.0 pieces, because that’s not something he covers.

I took forever to write it. Weirdly, it just took me longer to finish up this post than it usually does. Probably for the two reasons listed above.

A lot of fun, and I thank Louis for letting me rent his blog for a day. Go check out my post on his blog:

http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/07/bloggers-interactions-with-readers.html

UPDATE: My guest blog post made it onto Techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080722/p142#a080722p142

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Should I Buy the Apple 3G iPhone or Nokia N95?

July 21, 2008 by 29 Comments

I’m in the market for a new phone. And I’m pretty damn easy.

Apple has now released the next version of its phone, the 3G iPhone. With all the buzz around it, it’s hard not to consider buying one. But before taking the plunge, I wanted to understand what I’m getting myself into. I also wanted to consider what many people claim is a superior phone on the market, the Nokia N95.

But first, about my being pretty damn easy…

I’m a Mobile Phone Luddite

When I bought my current mobile phone, I really didn’t want all the fancy stuff. Just the ability to talk to someone. And that’s just what I got with my Nokia Sprint phone, pictured below:

Not much “smart” about that phone. Just cheap and functional. Any phone that does the things I list in the picture above will be a quantum leap forward for me. Obviously, I’m no early adopter.

Hence, I’m easy when it comes to smart phones.

Apple iPhone vs. Nokia N95

The crux of the argument seems to boil down to this:

  • 3G iPhone offers a superior web browsing experience
  • N95 offers superior camera and actually has video

Oh, there are other things…

Apps for the iPhone are supposed to be really cool. But I’m really not interested in Tap Tap Revenge. One thing I learned from Facebook is that most of these little apps grow boring quite quickly. However, there’s always the possibility that some interesting app will be developed.

There’s also Apple’s closed platform and restrictive DRM, which means all development requires approval of Apple. But considering that I’ve been using a phone without anything that would cause such concern, I’m mostly unconcerned about this as well.

The Knocks Against the iPhone

Here are the the biggest knocks I’ve seen on the iPhone. Gotta know what could ruin my day if I buy one.

Short battery life. This consistently comes up as a negative for the iPhone. It sounds awful, especially in comparison to my current lowly Nokia phone. The battery on that phone can last for days. But it sounds like any 3G smart phone may suffer a similar battery life issue. Here’s what GigaOm said about the Nokia N95:

The battery on this device [Nokia N95] simply sucks. It doesn’t even last the whole day, and that is when you are using it in GSM mode, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS turned off.

Apple does provide tips for preserving battery life. In addition, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that a simple change to one feature – push email – can dramatically improve battery life.

Crappy camera, no video. There’s no getting around this one. The iPhone’s 2 mega pixel camera is woeful compared to the N95’s 5 mega pixel. Here’s a picture that Fred Wilson took with the N95:

Look at that quality! And with two young children, I think great pictures would be nice. Not to mention the ability to do easy video.

Forced to go with AT&T. This is a big one for many folks. They don’t like AT&T for whatever reason. AT&T appears to have good 3G coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area. But outside the region, coverage gets dicey. As Robert Scoble tweeted about his drive from southern California back to the Bay Area:

Out of the past 7.5 hours of driving we have had 3G for less than an hour. AT&T needs to do a much better job at coverage.

My Sprint phone actually has pretty bad coverage inside my house. So I’m not sure AT&T can get much worse, unless I was unable to get any signal. I did ask about what happens when 3G isn’t available on FriendFeed (comment on Scoble’s tweet). Here’s what Zach Flauaus said:

The iPhone’s priority is 3G, then EDGE, then GPRS. Aka: Fast, ehh… And “Oh hell no!”

So even if I can’t surf the web, I get a phone signal. OK…I probably can live with that.

The new apps crash the iPhone. Let me repeat that: NEW APPS CRASH THE iPHONE! Tim O’Reilly describes the laments of iPhone users and their crashing phones. He includes a Summize Twitter search for iPhone crash. The search reults are frightening:

  • “so it seems writing mobile applications is not such a trivial task. On the iPhone they crash like crazy”
  • “first iPhone crash since I restored it 4 days ago, I guess my strategy has worked, and coincidently it crashed on a newly installed app”
  • “Experienced my first iPhone app crash tonight. Screen turned black. After a few tries the phone came back to life but I deleted the app.”
  • “Just had my first iPhone app crash. Facebook!”

Sounds like it’s best to avoid putting apps on the iPhone for the time being. But I am hopeful about  downloading some good apps down the road.

No copy and paste. Honestly, this one doesn’t bother me so much…yet. The iPhone doesn’t support a clip board to copy things you find. My initial reaction is “so what?”. But I”ll probably want that. One example: wordpress.com’s new iPhone interface. You can post blog entries from the iPhone. As you can see in this post, I’m a huge fan of copy-n-paste. Not having this feature could chafe.

The Nokia N95 Knock: Web Surfing Is Bad

The N95 does include web surfing and email. But this is what I’ve been reading about that experience:

  • “@Jonathan – does Nokia have a decent web browser?” – Yolanda
    “@Yolanda, no, it’s crap. But there’s Opera mini (http://operamini.com) which is somewhat decent.” – Guillermo Esteves (link)
  • Question: “If you could only take one device to a tropical island would it be a smartphone or a laptop?”
    Robert Scoble: “Assuming I am going on vacation to get away from it all? My Nokia N95. Good camera to take pics and videos of me drinking MaiTais. GPS so I can get around. But hard to use for Web and Email so I am not too tempted.”
  • “After seeing, feeling & experiencing the Web on the iPhone, I Know I need one, even though I have an N95 (hate it for browsing)” (link)
  • “Yes, I borrowed a friends N95for a day and they had my Blackberry. Phone quality is important to me with a hearing aid. The web browsing sux on the N95, phone was ok. The camera and video were way cool though, nice but not necessary toys.” (link)

iPhone Gets Some Real Love Though

I’m impressed by the number of people expressing their affection for the iPhone, despite its limitations.

Ryan Spoon blogged: Confessions of a Blackberry Addict – I’ve Moved to the iPhone 3G

Yahoo EVP Jeff Weiner was raving to Tim O’Reilly about his new iPhone, urging him to write something that explains why the iPhone is such a paradigm-shifting device.

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker wrote this in a generally negative piece on the iPhone: “But Mobile Safari’s tabbed browsing convinced me to trade in my principles for convenience. This job requires me to be online everywhere I go, and as far as I could see, the iPhone was the best way to do that.”

And here’s the Twitter search for “love my iPhone“. Look at all that love!

What About You?

So I’m close to making a decision. My use case is more web browsing than picture/video taking. But there are definitely issues with the iPhone.

If you’ve got thoughts about the 3G iPhone or the Nokia N95, I’d love to hear ’em.

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb covers the Apple vs. Nokia issue this morning as well here.

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See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Should+I+Buy+the+Apple+3G+iPhone+or+Nokia+N95%3F%22&public=1

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Weekly Recap 071808: Define ‘Frienderati’

July 18, 2008 by 6 Comments

Literati means intelligentsia…

Intelligentsia means…a social class of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them

Guy Kawasaki’s at it again…he rolled out his latest list of the “Top” in a medium, this time FriendFeed…his Frienderati lists ~100 people on FriendFeed and their 5 most recent entries…I actually follow a number of the people on his list…

But something’s not quite right with his list…Frienderati is a derivative of the term literati…look at that definition above…Frienderati should have a hand in the “development and dissemination” of culture on FriendFeed…

But many of them don’t…Shey Smith wrote Frienderati: Making it Easy to Find Popular Inactives in which he questioned the “-ati” credentials of Guy’s list…his title hits the nail on the head, inactives…

There’s Amber Mac, listed as a “new media journalist”…her FriendFeed stream is all Twitter, and she has 3 comments and 1 Like all time…Paul Kedrosky, “investor, writer, entrepreneur”…he streams his tweets and blog posts…2 comments, 1 like all time…Rebecca Briggs, “helping the world heal from the inside out”…tweets and blog…has never commented or Liked anything in FriendFeed…

The best has to be Guy Kawasaki putting himself on the list…nearly all twitter, which he only added on July 4th…2 comments all time…and there are others with similar levels of inactivity…

In what universe are these people the ones that develop and disseminate the culture of FriendFeed? They barely know it!…Two things at play here…

  1. Guy wants to make sure there are known personalities on his list, because you can’t just have a list with us regular folk who actually are part of the culture
  2. The lifestream aggregator part of FriendFeed is still important. Frienderati looks at FriendFeed as a simple aggregation of the streams of Important People, not as a place of interaction.

The nice thing is that FriendFeed makes it easy for n00bs to find interesting people…friend-of-friend and comments can help users get beyond the Important People…

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I’ve never said meh…

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Mattel, maker of Barbie, won its lawsuit against MGA, maker of Bratz. Mattel alleged that Carter Bryant, a designer at Mattel, created the Bratz concept while under contract for Mattel. Two  pieces of evidence…

  • He used a discarded Barbie body and Ken boots to mock up a concept of Bratz (via LAT)
  • He used a Mattel notebook to write about the Bratz concept (via WSJ – subscription)

I don’t disagree that employees are obligated to provide value to their companies…but the actions of Carter Bryant are probably similar to those that a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have done…imagine if all the big companies came down on ex-employees for taking ideas they started while employed and building their own companies…

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Noticing increased use of pictures in FriendFeed direct posts…they really make a post clickable and interesting…I did a quick survey of 100 FriendFeed direct posts in my ‘Friends’ stream…46 of the 100 direct posts had pictures…

And the pictures really work…they tend to dominate the poor text-only links…however, a bunch of comments on a text-only link still is the #1 draw for me…

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Interesting comment by Wai Seto regarding the iPhone’s too-short battery life and AT&T…

On the power issue, I have learned that handset receive and transmit power is actually set by the network over the air. The base station can tell the handset to tune down or up real time. The rumor is because AT&T coverage is not very good (not enough base stations?), so they set this setting very high and drain most of their 3G devices pretty quick. The power setting at AT&T is believe to be higher then European operators.

I looked at Wai’s LinkedIn profile, he’s a software architect at Nokia…so I’m thinking he knows what he’s talking about…

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Possibly the cutest baby picture ever…

Uploaded to Flickr on July 16…by July 18, it already has 10,732 views…

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+071808%3A+Define+%27Frienderati%22&public=1

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Hey Toluu Heads! Check Out the New Hover Boxes!

July 16, 2008 by 1 Comment

Toluu, everyone’s favorite blog discovery app, released a cool feature Wednesday morning. Hover boxes that show the last five posts for a blog:

Just put your cursor over any link to a blog, and the hover box appears. Anytime a blog is displayed in these places:

  • Profile
  • Matches
  • Feed Lists
  • Subscribers View

Discovery of interesting blogs just got that much easier. No need to click on the blog name and land on Toluu’s page for that blog. With a quick scan, you can determine your interest in the blog by reading the last five blog post titles. Founder Caleb Elston explains why this feature was rolled out:

We decided to build in this functionality when we found ourselves passing by feeds because we didn’t want to wait for the page to load or have to hit the back button if the feed wasn’t so interesting. Since we weren’t always willing to take a risk on a feed to see if it might be cool, we knew other users wouldn’t either.

And…the five blog posts listed are all hyperlinks that will take you directly to each individual blog post. My suggestion for Caleb – set the links to default as ‘open in new window’. I’d like to keep my Toluu window open so I can return to it.

Also, I think I see some FriendFeed inspiration for the new hover boxes…

As usual Caleb, really nice work on this feature. Both useful and usable.

If you haven’t tried Toluu, here are a couple posts that describe it:

If you need an invite, just leave your email in the comments below. I’ll shoot one out to you. And you can check out my Toluu page here.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Hey+Toluu+Heads!+Check+Out+the+New+Hover+Boxes!%22&public=1

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Weekly Recap 071108: iPhone’s Big Gulp of Humility

July 11, 2008 by 4 Comments

Today was Apple’s big day, the release of its new 3G iPhone…geeks lined up days beforehand…stores were full of new iPhones…money was burning holes in pockets…the doors opened…customers rushed in to be the first ones to have the shiny new gadget…they claim their iPhones and go to activate in-store, an Apple requirement…and…the activation FAILS…

Damn, that sucked…

Apple is a company that has been on a hot streak for a while…here’s a quote about them from a recent Fortune article:

Apple requires a special kind of workforce. The place is divided by product but also by function along what COO Tim Cook calls “very faint lines.” Collaboration is key. So is a degree of perfectionism. Apple hires people who are never satisfied.

Today’s activation flub has got to be eating them up sumthin’ fierce…Apple has worked hard to achieve and maintain its air of excellence and coolness…

Fake Steve Jobs recently retired from his blogging…but surely this is too delicious to not write one more post…

All that said, Robert Scoble gives the new iPhone a thumbs up…

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Loren Feldman is currently following only 3 people on his Twitter account…he unsubscribed from everyone he was following…wow…he does say that he will be on FriendFeed going forward…

I’m not comfortable damning this guy, as I’ve never heard of him outside of recent events…he seems pretty tightly wound and people describe him as funny…he messed up with TechNigga…I’m willing to watch what he does going forward…and was this really Wayne Sutton commenting on Loren’s blog?

Thanks for the official statement, continue to create videos and I hope everyone from this situation has learned something and does not stop the future of sponsorship from other national outlets with the online video blogging community. I’m looking forward to your next project.

If that’s Wayne, wow…

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I’ve never said meatspace….

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Lots of discussions this week about the fast growth of subscribers for big name people on FriendFeed…Allen Stern does a nice job of breaking it down in this video…the issue is that same people tend to show up in two key places on FriendFeed…(1) the first 12 subscriptions listed on users’ Me page…and (2) the same 9 people are often displayed on the recommended page…shaking things up on those listings would be nice…

For my part, I was really surprised at the number of subscriptions (~100) that occurred because of Mike Fruchter’s post about ten people to follow on FriendFeed…thanks for the shout-out Mike…

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Two young women keeping it real out there on FriendFeed…Mona N and Michelle Miller…

Mona is a geeky gal who also attracts attention from the fellas…Hao Chen declared:

Ahh…Mona just overtook Robert Scoble as my #1 person you find interesting.

Michelle is irreverent, keeping folks entertained with updates about her dates with The UPS Guy…her blog post describing their first date was What Brown Did for Me…

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On Twitter, there are two ways to broadcast a blog post:

  1. Tweet a link to your own blog post, usually including something like “blog post” so people have a heads up its your own post.
  2. Tweet the word “reading” and the name of the blog post with a URL. This lets people know that you’re reading someone else’s blog post, and you like it enough to tell others about it.

Jason Calacanis tweets “reading” for his own blog posts. Huh? Reading? He wrote it! Here’s one example:

Reading: “Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging.” (http://tinyurl.com/5zae7s)

Don’t hate the playa, hate the game, I guess…

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Digg founder Kevin Rose provided a great example of changing the name of blog post during its submission to Digg…

Here’s Allen Stern’s post, referenced earlier, about the ways in which A-listers quickly accumulate followers:

  • “FriendFeed Follower Patterns Exposed: How Jason, Mike, Loic & Robert Get So Many Followers So Quickly (video)”

Here’s how Kevin Rose submitted Allen’s post to Digg:

  • “The politics of Friend Feed”

Call it social media attention optimization….

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See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+071108%3A+iPhone%E2%80%99s+Big+Gulp+of+Humility%22&public=1

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Corvida’s Tremendous Perspective on Racist Rants

July 10, 2008 by 4 Comments

Corvida posted a response to the racist rants seen recently on a livestream hosted by Wayne Sutton. Is she actually only 20? Her response is tremendous.

Racists have been among us for years, they will be among us for years. Change will come, but it will take a number of generations to get there. We’re only a couple generations removed from the 1960s, when the U.S. civil rights movement changed the landscape.

So what to do in the meantime? I personally don’t like to bring it up a lot. It gives these morons too much of a spotlight. There are times when highlighting racism helps: Jim Crow laws, apartheid or businesses practicing racism. But those are institutions that could be changed by pressure. These are racist cowards living in anonymity, practicing free speech. Our decrying their antics won’t change their minds, or their habits. They will live on to post another day. They always do.

Here’s what Corvida writes:

I grew up in an impoverished neighborhood and I’ve seen racism and discrimination in many forms. I’m black, a female, and also a lesbian. That’s 3 ways to discriminate against me and I’ve experienced all three forms before I hit high school and 2 of them before I hit middle school. I’ve seen family members and friends harassed and killed by racist cops in my neighborhood. What happened in the chatroom is better than most of what I’ve experienced.

That’s the perspective of someone who was the target of these rants. Corvida’s age doesn’t speak to her maturity.

I think moderated comments are the best solution, something Louis Gray advocates. You can’t change the racists’ minds, but you can take away their platforms to spew hate.

But I like to hear from Corvida, Shey and other black bloggers as to what they think will help.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Corvida%E2%80%99s+Tremendous+Perspective+on+Racist+Rants%22&public=1

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What Interactions Do You Want from Social Media?

July 7, 2008 by 14 Comments

Mapping the different social media interactions to human anatomy:

Now…where to go to get those interactions? An incomplete list follows.

Ideas, opinion, information:

  • FriendFeed
  • Twitter

Share photos, videos

  • Flickr
  • SmugMug
  • Zoomr
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed

Music you like:

  • Last.fm

Chit chat

  • Twitter

What are you feeling?

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

What are you doing?

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed
  • Upcoming

What are you eating?

  • Twitter

Where are you?

  • Brightkite
  • Twitter

Personally, my interest is in ideas, opinions and information. But some photos and chit chat are also nice.

How about you?

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter.

 

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Weekly Recap 070408: Identi.ca Nearly Identical

July 4, 2008 by 4 Comments

Plenty of buzz about the new microblogging service Identi.ca. Send out public messages of up to 140 characters, and subscribe to others to make sure you see their messages…

Twitter…

Well, a lot like Twitter, but apparently needs some other stuff…@replies seems to be a big one for Twitter phreaks…also Direct Messaging…Corvida’s post seems to lay things out pretty well…

Meanwhile, check out this post by Russell Beatie that predicts scalability issues for Identi.ca given its current architecture…

Finally, check out Erick Schonfeld’s post, The Problem with Identi.ca Is That It Is Not Twitter…money quote…

The bigger problem with Identi.ca is simply that it is not Twitter. However annoying Twitter’s erratic outages may be, it still has the advantage of having many more users than any other competing service.

Another case of Twitter’s Je Ne Sais Quoi…

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I’ve never said w00t, FTW or pwned…

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True statement?…

geek > nerd > dork > dweeb > goober

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Some interesting discussions around the future of email…Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb kicked things off with a post asking if email is in danger…Zoli Erdos said no…Corvida said no…

I see the role of email changing…we’ll communicate with others on the various social media platforms, and get notifications of new messages and replies via email….

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Zemanta suggestions come through as pingback links…comment #7 in this blog post is a pingback from the site “all-digital-moves”…turns out the link love is thanks to Zemanta, the recommendation widget bloggers can add to their sites…

So the pingback wasn’t something the blogger did, it was an automated recommendation…probably not in keeping with the philosophy of the pingback, but good to know where your blog posts are recommended out there…

Duncan Riley has a nice write-up of Zemanta…

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My son’s summer camp teacher just quit the San Francisco JCC to go work in Google’s child development for its employees’ kids…I imagine the comp is better, especially after seeing this New York Times article about the rates for Google day care going up…

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Good question: “Why is Gmail still in beta? A friend of mine quipped that ‘Google Beta’ was like a spinoff company.”…

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See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+070408%3A+Identi.ca+Nearly+Identical%22&public=1

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Darwin and FriendFeed’s “Bounce to the Top” Algorithm

July 3, 2008 by 5 Comments

I really enjoy seeing the flow of new content come through FriendFeed. And the best feature is that people’s interactions make content resurface at the top of your FriendFeed page. Human filtering to make the most interesting stuff bounce to the top.

We all enjoy the Likes and Comments that make the most interesting content in our social networks pop back up to the top. And it seems to be pretty simple, right?

{Like} or {Comment} = Content Bounces to the Top

Well, it’s actually a bit more complex than that. The FriendFeed “bounce to the top” algorithm has some interesting behind-the-scenes rules. There is a certain amount of Darwinism to it.

Having noticed that the “bounce to the top” function is not as straightforward as simple Likes and Comments, I posted this comment on FriendFeed:

Sometimes I don’t understand the FriendFeed “bounce to the top” logic. I just added my Like to Corvida’s blog post about email (http://friendfeed.com/e/68e566…), but I didn’t see it pop back up to the top of my FriendFeed screen. What drives the logic?

In typical FriendFeed fashion, there was a really interesting conversation that followed. Mark Trapp, who has really impressed me with knowing stuff, had this to say:

I’ve been tracking the bump logic for a month or so now, and this is what I’ve found out: likes will stop bumping a story after a certain amount of time, and comments will always bump to the top if either a) it’s your story, b) it’s someone you’re subscribed to’s story, or c) it’s a FoaF AND a friend of yours comments on the story AND it’s the first time your friend commented on the story. Everyone else’s comments won’t bump it. For scenario c, Paul had mentioned to me that a fix for it was in the works.

From Mark’s response, one can see a few design principles behind FriendFeed.

1. Comments Are More Valuable than Likes

Comments always bounce something back to the top. Likes stop doing that after a period of time. This makes sense. Likes are easy. They are quite valuable as signals for the “interestingness” of content.

But Comments are King in the FriendFeed system. Comments mean someone has taken the trouble to express themselves. And that engagement draws the content creator and others into the conversation.

As reviewed in an earlier post here, Comments don’t necessarily mean the content has information that’s good to know. Some bloggers are just really good at stirring things up.

But the supremacy of Comments in the “bounce to the top” algorithm clues you in to the FriendFeed founders’ orientation. Conversations are ranked higher than good content discovery.

I Like that.

2. The Value of Likes Decreases with Time

In my comment, I referenced that my Like of Corvida’s blog post failed to bounce her entry back up to the top of my FriendFeed. I believe the FriendFeed entry of her blog post was only an hour old at the time.

My initial thought for this is…why? Doesn’t a Like mean others should check out the content, even if it is older?

Good content doesn’t have an expiration date.

But there are other ways content resurfaces in the FriendFeed system. Google Reader shares. Tweets. Direct posts. Bookmarks. Unlike comments, which only become visible when the entry to which they’re attached bounces to the top again.

So the multiple ways content can resurface reduces the need for Liked content to bounce to the top again after a while.

Wonder how long Likes have an effect on the “bounce to the top” algorithm?

3. Comments = More Reputational Skin in the Game

This is the conclusion I draw. Likes are easy, and have multiple purposes, as described by Mike Fruchter. If someone were to call you out for an errant Like, you could always say, “I was just using the Like to bookmark the entry to my personal feed.”

But comments are more visible, and you are much more accountable for them. When people post comments, they are adding to or withdrawing from their reputation account. And in social networks, reputation is huge.

So the emphasis on comments makes sense. The threshold for adding those is higher, and its effect should be greater.

Survival of the Fittest

Only the strongest content seems to survive in the FriendFeed Galapagos Islands. An initial rush of Likes puts the content into the stream of many, many users. Strong content will get this initial rush.

Then the content has to evolve. If it’s going to get that ongoing attention, Likes are no longer going to cut it. The content has to attract Comments. These Comments sustain the content in a sea of new, competing content.

Of course, just like Darwin’s animals, eventually even the well-adapted content will perish. Fossils for our future searches.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Darwin+and+FriendFeed%E2%80%99s+Bounce+to+the+Top+Algorithm%22&public=1

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Made the Switch: FriendFeed Now My Homepage

July 2, 2008 by Leave a comment

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed my behavior has changed when I fire up the PC in the morning. My Yahoo has been my home page forever. I love the portal approach, with everything I like easily visible and accessible with a click.

But as soon as My Yahoo loaded, I quickly clicked over to FriendFeed. I really didn’t read much of what was displayed on My Yahoo.

I can be pretty loyal to apps and companies I like. I was doing this with Yahoo, despite the change in my behavior. Finally though, I realized that staying loyal and delivering a page view to Yahoo wasn’t really getting me anything.

I switched to FriendFeed.

My Top 5 Reasons for Making the Switch:

  1. Content that is filtered by my network on FriendFeed has more value to me than what I see on My Yahoo
  2. My interest in all the content I see on My Yahoo is only fleeting, but a portal demands that it’s always there (e.g. stock quotes)
  3. Hitting Refresh on My Yahoo only brings up the same stories. FriendFeed has the most amazing river of new stuff.
  4. My Yahoo doesn’t provide some of the content I find most interesting = tweets, blog posts, articles directly posted, comments, Flickr Favorites by people I trust (note the Flickr irony…)
  5. My Yahoo takes too long to load

I know I can control the portal experience by adding/deleting content. But that’s a pretty heavy process to me. And it doesn’t really come close to the constant stream of interesting new content that FriendFeed delivers.

I don’t mind the ads so much, but that big fat Classmates.com ad sure does take up a lot of real estate. I expect when Friendfeed includes ads, they’ll be more subtle like Google AdWords.

Biggest concern? I’ll fail to check my Yahoo Mail without the link I have on the My Yahoo page. A number of people still use that email to stay in touch.

If Yahoo can get clever and revive itself, I might make it my home page again. But for now, it’s FriendFeed.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Made+the+Switch%3A+FriendFeed+Now+My+Homepage%22&public=1

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What does this mean? “Organize the world’s energy”

July 1, 2008 by 1 Comment

Through a Fred Wilson post, I decided to check out Umair Haque’s call for the development of technologies that will help a number of the world’s problems:

Organize the world’s hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world’s health.
Organize the world’s freedom.
Organize the world’s finance.
Organize the world’s education.

The piece lays out some strong indictments of capitalism and the focus of web 2.0. To be honest, that’s pretty damn offputting for me. Socialistic urges don’t interest me.

But Fred Wilson is a smart guy, so I decided to read through Umair’s post and all the comments. I really wanted to know what he meant by “organize the world’s” problems.

As I read the comments to Umair’s post, I saw a recurring theme. Businesses and providers of capital just don’t get it, just don’t have the right incentives for this. No one really had a good answer for changing these dynamics. But the post made for some good venting, such as this comment by Platypus:

Bloggers are the online equivalent of “ladies who lunch”–a bunch of rich people chattering amongst themselves about how they’re going to spend their afternoons.

In the post itself, Umair provides an analogy that really helped me understand what he’s thinking. And it’s less socialistic than his preamble sounded:

Google utilized a market – AdWords – to utterly eviscerate a stale, broken media value chain. Here’s a more visceral example. Muhammad Yunus revolutionized finance – not by collecting more money to lend, but by using communities to fundamentally alter the value equation of lending to the poor. The result was industry transformation.

See the similarity? Two vastly different industries – finance and media – were both revolutionized by new DNA. It was new ways to organize and manage that exploded the boundaries of value creation.

The new DNA to which Umair refers is the web 2.0 ethos – people’s contributions and ideas create new value in hidebound industries. Also note that in both cases there was an organizer for people’s contributions. Google for web pages, Muhammed Yunus for the solicitation of capital. Here’s a graphical depiction of what he’s talking about:

Yes, that looks like most social media sites. Hence the web 2.0 angle.

But it’s hard to apply this model to heavier, capital goods sectors. Google applies the above model to digital information. Microcredits apply the above model to digital currency transactions (until the “last mile” where someone actually needs cash).

Capital goods aren’t as easy as transferring digital information. Moving water is capital intensive. Energy production and transfer is capital intensive. Agriculture is capital intensive. These don’t lend themselves well to the disruptive flows that digital information does.

With oil and gas prices through the roof, I want to stay on that problem. There are two ways to read the New DNA when it comes to energy.

  1. Web 2.0 allows more people to find out about energy production, usage and alternatives
  2. People will create their own sources of energy, the way they might create their own blogs

In #1, people could provide information of value to the organizing entity. Paul Kedrosky asks about something like this in a tweet:

why is there no Mint/Wesabe for home energy use? i want a tool that integrates all my energy/water/etc into a single web dashboard

Not bad, it puts conservation at the forefront. And you could compare your usage to that of others.

In #2, people would actually provide power to the organizing entity. Well, that becomes more capital intensive. Honey, we’ve left the web.

But there are probably some good possibilities out there. Solar panels for every home sounds plausible. And in Fred Wilson’s post, there’s this idea from one of the comments:

The friend I refer to in my comments on HN: he’s a grad student who has built a small-scale digestor that can convert any type of waste — human/animal/food — into usable energy. He is not a guy for hype, but he says it could technically replace every septic tank in America. That’s huge.

I don’t how real that idea is. Sounds promising. How much energy would it really produce? My dinner scraps probably won’t power much. In that comment though, I do see that there are people much more learned in the field of energy than me. So I won’t discount the possibility that individuals could create new sources of energy. But it does seem like a stretch, just based on my physics courses where we learned about the law of conservation of energy. I don’t where the untapped energy sources are around my house.

So we’ll see what Fred comes up with over the next year or two in relation to Umair’s post. Was Umair’s manifesto more feel good exhortation or the start of innovation desperately needed in a number of areas?

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22What+does+this+mean%3F+Organize+the+world%E2%80%99s+energy%22&public=1

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Why Bloggers Should Want Comments on FriendFeed

June 30, 2008 by 17 Comments

Blog comments aren’t dead, but FriendFeed comments have emerged as equally valuable. Robert Scoble has a post up now in which he states:

My Tesla post gathered two comments here.

13 comments and 12 “Likes” over on FriendFeed.

Let’s just stick a fork in it. Comments are dead.

I don’t think they’re dead, but I do think he raises a good point. The interaction that occurs on FriendFeed is so much easier and freewheeling than it is on blogs.

Blogs that don’t have a lot of comments can feel like museums (“look, but don’t touch”). It feels like it takes an extra effort to put a comment there, because you can’t really feed off others’ participation.

FriendFeed’s got four things that make it really, really good for commenting:

  1. Wide open nature – anyone can jump in
  2. More lively subscription base – RSS subscribers are great for views, but not for comments. FriendFeed’s interaction nature stokes conversations in a much better way
  3. The barrier to commenting is lower – I commented on Robert’s post about this, and got a message saying my comment was “awaiting moderation”. Not on FriendFeed – where I just typed and clicked “Post”.
  4. FriendFeed’s viral attention features – Likes/Comments cause content to bounce to the top of the screen and friend-of-friend interactions cause people outside your subscription base to see your blog post, generating more views and comments

Keep the blog comments coming, but I’m quite happy to have you comment on FriendFeed too.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Why+Bloggers+Should+Want+Comments+on+FriendFeed%22&public=1

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