Funneling The Web's Firehose of Data Through a Thin Pipe

For the past several years, much like many of you, the fastest Internet speeds I have enjoyed have been at home. Very often, corporate networks, be they those at headquarters or client sites or shared networks at events and public settings, lag well behind my own home experience. For me, considering my devotion to being always-on, fast Internet is practically as important, if not more so, than good food or other more traditional human comforts, and any interruption of said flow is personally trying.

That would explain why when moving the family to our new house last Friday, getting access to high speed Internet again as soon as possible was a major priority, and finding a stopgap for the interim was just as critical. Luckily, Comcast took care of us Wednesday, bringing fast WiFi to our new home at great speeds, and for the five days previous, the HTC Evo did the very best it could, making the extra $30 a month I pay for its Hotspot capability, powered by Sprint, worth every penny.

In contrast to AT&T's sloth when it has come to empowering tethering and letting my previous smartphone reach its full potential, Sprint has been leading the charge in letting phones be as much about data as they are about voice. In the same month that AT&T eliminated their unlimited data plan and set their highest end plan at 2 GB, I not only flew past that point, but 3 GB as well. This is because, as I mentioned at the end of last month, I am using the wireless hotspot often - at client sites, at cafes, restaurants, shopping centers, and yes, in the last week, as the sole provider for Internet at our home. It might not have been the fastest Web ever, but it sure got the basics going.

If you have experienced full-speed always on Internet, only to have that taken away for a longer period, the available narrowband becomes much like a triage situation. YouTube viewing has to go away (much to my own kids' consternation and much iPad banging). Streaming music services (like Spotify) are a non-starter. Downloading movies or apps from iTunes was a pipe dream, and as great as the Hotspot is, only two computers can share at one time, so we found ourselves disabling one iPad to let another device - be it laptop or tablet - onto the Web. Survival of the fittest.


As someone who refuses to be out of the loop on information, despite such data hurdles, I found myself making time to get the most critical data and skipping out on more frivolous activities. I still powered through Google Reader, gnashing my teeth at photo-laden entries, and browsed Twitter mostly by phone, but activity on social networks was reduced - especially on Google Buzz, where the prospect of waiting for Gmail to load before getting to the network itself was too much to consider.

The good news is that Comcast not only turned on our Web access Wednesday, but the speeds are fantastic. After about 5 days of strained narrowband, we were more than happy to turn over our iPads to the twins and have them back to surfing YouTube - and it only took seconds for me to pull down the 40+ megabyte download for Safari 5.01 yesterday. In fact, SpeedTest.net shows 20 Mbps around the clock, so our broadband is back and kicking. I'm glad we have the HTC Evo ready for a backup, but it's not going to replace the full-speed stream any time soon. I love my broadband.

iPad Development Paying Off for Friendly App Creator

On Saturday, I highlighted the recent release of Friendly, an iPad-optimized application for Facebook that enhances the world's most popular social network to take advantage of the iPad's screen and touch interface. One of the co-founders on Friendly and Twazzup, its sister product, Cyril Moutran (@mocy), met with me for lunch today and discussed how developing for the iPad presents new opportunities to make a splash in a less-crowded field, and gain real revenue. He also said he believes the launch of more touch-centric interfaces could be as revolutionary as the mouse and hyperlink did with the first generation of the Web.


Since its launch late last week, it would be safe to say that Friendly is seeing initial success. Despite its $4.99 price, the Friendly app has bumped into the list of the top ten paid iPad applications on the iTunes store, and sits at the #13 position overall right now, and is the #15 most grossing application across all of iTunes' iPad apps, going up against Apple's office productivity apps, and even beating out MLB's At Bat application for the iPad, which is in the #25 position. Just yesterday, Moutran said the application was purchased in 60 different countries around the world. And yes, the app sits in the #1 spot for paid social networking apps for the iPad, as many of the apps are free.


Moutran, who also counts time at Netscape, Schlumberger and Vignette on his resume, believes part of the reason for Friendly's success, as well as that from other iPad apps that have sold well, is their development of a unique experience that takes full advantage of the product's touch-based characteristics. Rather than expand a game to the full screen by doubling pixels, or hoping a more standard interface of small links and pixel-perfect clicks are going to be good enough, he suggests smart developers need to recreate their products for this new experience, and when there is a gap that needs to be filled, as there was with Facebook not having a dedicated iPad application yet, smart entrepreneurs will fill it.

I managed to get Moutran to do a quick interview, which is embedded below. Hope you listen.

Hey Foursquare, Let's Discuss a Check-in Exchange Program

Dear Foursquare,

Whether it's a fad, or a trend, or the next generation of the world's currency, location based services are much-discussed these days, and there is no argument that you are in the driver's seat. Barring massive disaster resulting from failure to scale, or the introduction of much-hated new features, the current competitors are not going to shake you from your perch, and the big guys (you know who) don't look like they want to go "niche" but treat LBS as a feature. So you're in a good spot. But... hey. Let's talk.

Here's the issue. I've been "playing" with your service for the last few months, checking it at places both interesting and mundane. I've racked up my unfair share of mayorships of mediocre venues - from Grewalz Liquor & Groceries and Susan's Donuts to Carl's Jr. and the A&D Food Mart. In addition to these crowned venues, I've also racked up stops at businesses from gas stations to post offices, banks and restaurants on the Peninsula. But now we have a problem.

This Friday, I moved. I didn't go too far. Just about 2.3 miles, if Google Maps is to be believed. But this, in terms of Foursquare, might as well have been 230 miles, because now, the old Safeway, where I had 18 check-ins, has been replaced with one where I've only visited a single time. The same issue rings true at the world's favorite mini-mart, 7-11, where I had six check-ins and now have to start over from scratch.

You might have seen CardStar's news of integrating with you. Heck, what am I talking about? Of course you know. Well, they're doing this tie-in with loyalty cards, and as far as these "new" venues see it, I've never been there before. I might as well be some tourist who stumbled over from the airport in a compact Ford Focus that smells like vanilla.

Here's what I want. I want credit for time served. I want to migrate my check-ins from one 7-11 to the other. I want my check-ins from Safeway in Sunnyvale to move to the um... other Safeway in Sunnyvale. I want to move my check-ins from one Burger King to another and from one Wells Fargo to another. I'm even willing to take a hit in the conversion. Maybe my 10 checkins are now worth 6 or something. Put Siobhan Quinn on the case - I know she's smart and the math isn't too rough. I'll even send over an Excel doc if it speeds things up.

It's not that I am a Foursquare addict. Surely I'm not. There's no way. I mean, yes, I did speak at last week's Geo-Loco conference, but that was just a favor for a friend, right?

So pass along a "He's Moved!" badge and let's get this conversion going. Don't make me look like a N00b.

Thanks,
- Louis Gray (@lgloco)

Supertrackr Tracks "Anything" on the Web, Instantly

Thanks to advances in the Web's real-time infrastructure over the last few years, our acceptance of latency or delay in discovery has practically been eliminated. We don't want to wait minutes or hours or days for news and information, and the freshness of content is essential. Often, when people want a near-instant reaction to world events, they're not looking to a filtered editorially driven source, such as CNN or Yahoo! News, but instead, they are looking to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and often blogs, to get the very latest.

This drive to be completely up to date has led to the development of tools that drive instant notification of "matches" to saved queries. Early in Twitter's infancy, one had the option to "track" a word and get instant notification of its being tweeted. But due to Twitter's rapid growth and some infrastructure holes, the feature has long since been dead. In its place has risen third-party tools and products that tap into Pubsubhubbub, a real-time notification protocol powering most of the world's blogs today, and many different content sites.

Among the most aggressive promoters of Pubsubhubbub and real-time notifications has been Julien Genestoux of Superfeedr, an infrastructure for real-time parsing of feeds in the cloud. Superfeedr recently launched a "Track" tool to instantly find Atom-based entries that match keywords pushed to a developer's application.


One of the simpler and more interesting applications of this tool that I have seen is called Supertrackr. Developed by @Harper, Supertrackr operates within any Jabber-based IM client (or Google Talk), and lets you follow or remove keywords, via something of a command line, and get updates instantly. The app taps into Google's App Engine and Superfeedr to drive results into your chat window as new entries.


For practical purposes, you probably don't want to "track" popular terms like "twitter" or "android" or "e-mail" because your chat window from Supertrackr would get flooded and you would have new entries before you even acknowledged the last ones. I tried, and it works, as advertised. Operating Supertracker is as easy typing "/track word" to follow a term and "/remove word" to stop. So if you are in a Jabber-based IM client or use Google Talk often, you could be leveraging Supertracker to find all URLs discussing hot topics, or following your company or brand.

Twitter may not have brought Track back, despite Steve Gillmor's insistence they do, but other developers are filling the gap to get us closer to that monitoring utopia of instant notifications on anything from any source anywhere. Check out Supertrackr at http://www.supertrackr.com/ or Superfeedr at http://superfeedr.com.

Blippy Reviews are Crowdsourced Product Feedback Engine

Some of the original feedback on Blippy, the purchase sharing service that tracks your linked spending, said the service was about as exciting as reading old receipts. But as the service matures and gains new features, we are seeing the content expand, making the network a potentially vast repository for first-person reviews of brands, products or customer service. Just as Foursquare has learned, the simple act of a status update displaying one's location or item purchase is not enough to build a community or a company. Instead, it takes personality and emotionally-tinged feedback around that experience. For Foursquare, this content comes in through tips you can leave when you check in to a venue. For Blippy, this comes when you add a purchase and can describe what you bought, and whether you would recommend it to a friend. And if you see these reviews on Blippy, you can let the reviewer know what you thought of their update.


Longer-term Blippy users have no doubt seen the frequent of a new mascot (a man in a unicorn costume) nagging them to review purchases. By heading to http://blippy.com/review/, one is prompted to "tell your story" quickly and move to your next purchase. From here, as with Foursquare, we can learn whether you loved that burger you chowed down, or whether you think you got ripped off by your cell phone provider. And you can see where this is going - massive user-driven feedback, accumulated by individual brands or products, to provide brands with subjective value, and to provide potential consumers with the same, either in aggregate, or from individual friends whose opinions you trust.


As co-founder Philip Kaplan wrote me in an e-mail tonight after I pinged him regarding the updates, "The idea is to make it both easier for people to interact with each other, and have better "structured" data around which reviews are great, and why (funny/informative/weird/etc). We haven't used the data yet to make the site better, but it should be kind of awesome when we do."

This direction becomes even more clear when you see any specific brand's page within the entirety of the Blippy network. For example, when viewing the Best Buy page, you can "nudge" the 875 people who have entered updates from Best Buy on Blippy to write reviews of their experience. You can also nudge the more than 2,400 who downloaded the Foursquare app or the nearly 300 AT&T Mobile customers to do the same. Not unsurprisingly, companies like AT&T don't fare nearly as well as others, but when an entire community is pointing out issues with similar purchases, it can be used as a warning to future buyers within the network.


Also new to Blippy of late is an amusing way to provide feedback to reviews. Rather than the "thumbs up/thumbs down" or +1 approach seen from many black and white feedback services, Blippy has stayed true to Kaplan's history and kept a humorous edge. One can click under any review to mark it as "awesome", "funny", "informative", "omgwtf", or simply ask to "tell me more". The simple action of clicking any of these options sends an e-mail to the reviewer to show somebody has interacted with their content, and bumps the review to the top of the network's reviewed items list, giving it another shot at people's eyeballs.

The move to highlight reviews is such a big deal for Blippy that only shared purchases with reviews show up on the service's home page. No longer will you see a stream of non-active updates (as is often the problem of real-time services like FriendFeed or Cliqset), but instead, your entire feed will be made from updates where users have taken the time to tell you more.

"We just launched this new design yesterday and expect to continually tweak the algorithm to show the best stuff on the homepage." Kaplan said. "Right now it's pretty simple -- the last review to be "acted upon" (commented, awesome'd, etc) shows up on top -- kinda like a message board where the thread with the most recent comment shows up first. But we may move to a more Digg-like feed, where the "most interesting" items show up first."

Whether it be due to the highly-visible security bug that hit a small number of accounts a few months ago, one met with rapid response, or due to "Yet Another Social Network" fatigue, talk amongst industry watchers says the site has had less traction than originally anticipated, considering its market leadership and feature set, but Kaplan correctly says that a "ton" of purchases have been shared, and "the numbers look great".

Site-wide data is now accumulated not just for brands, but users as well. For example, my Blippy profile highlights how often other users have tagged my reviews as "awesome" or "funny", and shows my engagement with the site, as the number of updates I've posted with reviews is shown alongside those without. No doubt the most engaged users who update their reviews more frequently with value can gain the visibility of the community and grow in stature.

So too can Blippy grow in stature if the site's newest features are adopted by users, driving promote greater utility, engagement and community. For me, the combination of Foursquare check-ins, followed by Blippy updates, and now reviews, gives people a full circle view into where I am going, where I am spending my money, and why I am making those choices. If Foursquare is the first step to say you have arrived, then Blippy is the next step to show what you did there. Blippy may be the less understood of the pair, but the latest additions bring it ever closer to a powerhouse of real responses to real actions. It's not just that I "like" something, but that I paid for it. Now I am even more likely to tell you why.

You can find me on Blippy at http://www.blippy.com/louisgray.

Friendly: The Best Facebook Experience for iPad

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. The iPad is probably the hottest gadget in the world. It makes sense that the two products are on a collision course, as an increasing number of mobile Web users experience Facebook through their tablets and touch screens. But so far, Facebook has not yet debuted an iPad-optimized experience, relying on its solid iPhone application and its mobile Web site to make do. In this vacuum comes Friendly, from the team that brought you Twazzup, the innovative Twitter Web client, and the results, as you should expect, are very good. The experience is optimized for touch, and takes full advantage of the iPad's screen real estate. If the app were available free from the iTunes store, I would encourage everyone to switch immediately. As it is, its $4.99 pricetag is still alluring for those tired of compromise when it comes to Facebook and the iPad.


Cyril Moutran, cofounder and CEO of Twazzup, and previously the founder of Yokway, said in an e-mail yesterday that over the last few months the company has shifted its development efforts to the tablet format, and Friendly is the first major launch bearing the fruits of that labor.

As you can expect, thanks to the nature of the product, Friendly brings all the major elements of Facebook directly to the iPad, including browsing the news feed, full of updates from your friends, and enabling you to take actions on those items, or update your own status. The application is delivered in a very clean way, with tabs for "Live Feed", "Events" and outstanding "Requests".


This tabbed model trumps the button selections on today's Facebook for iPhone offering. In those cases, selecting a section (like Photos) siloed your activity, while Friendly keeps you one click away from all major parts of the site. Atop the application are quick links to "Home", "Profile", "Friends" and your Facebook in box. As you navigate the product, you can hit any of these options, or click the back arrow to return to the previous page - just like a real browser, which is how the product is described.


Like a real browser, Friendly does not compromise in its capabilities either. Clicking a YouTube ,video displays it in full glory on the iPad's screen, and you also gain the opportunity to edit Facebook fan pages, if you are an administrator, an increasingly important position for the network as activity morphs from being completely casual to more professional.


There are some who may balk at putting down five bucks for a network which itself is free, but it seems the company has delivered a premium app for a premium product in the iPad. The product is built from day one for he touch-driven experience, and is certainly worth looking into. You can find Friendly on the iTunes store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/friendly-facebook-browser/id382011064?mt=8

textPlus Boosts Popular Texting App With Communities

textPlus, the popular application for iDevices and Android that lets you text or group text for free, launched version 2.5 of their app on Thursday with a major new enhancement that delivers a pinch of nostalgia, thanks to the debut of communities based on topics that are reminiscent of the Web gone by - harking back to early AOL and Compuserve forums when "A/S/L?" meant a lot more than DSL. The searchable communities database brings with it the potential to connect people of similar interests across the Web - to chat, via text, in real time.

Just like the AOL chatrooms of old, practically any sensical term searched already has results, initiated by textPlus users fanatical about any topic - be it to discuss television shows American Idol and Glee, to adore cute little puppies in the Dogs room, or the mainstays of public forums, sports, technology, and yes... porn (although I assume text porn is pretty tame).


textPlus has gained a significant following for its free alternative to carrier-based texting, and the option to carry on conversations with a group of friends through the app - something US telcos have not yet solved, even as international carriers have. The company's move to create topic-based discussions, no matter the source, helps transform the product to a portable community for any Apple or Android mobile device.


Since I first tiptoed into textPlus last year, the product has added several new features that provide serious polish. You can opt out of its add-supported model for a full 12 months by paying $2.99 (which I did), and you can even scan your local address book (at least on the iPad version) to find which of your friends are already using the app, making them very easy to send texts to. The iPad app is especially sharp, bringing text chats into both portrait and landscape modes in full screen.


If you find communities in textPlus that strike your fancy, click "become a member" and you will be following that community's updates. You can also leave any community by swiping left to right and choosing "Leave". The product's simplicity was welcome, and might even be too easy to join or start communities, as many rooms feature just the initial creator, while others, like one on "Dogs" was at its limit of 100 registrants. I would be intrigued by textPlus opening the option to more than 100 active users for hot topics, and seeing the conversation blossom.


You can find more about textPlus' new app and its free texting communities at http://www.textplus.com/ or on iTunes and the Android Marketplace. textPlus is a product of Gogii, a Kleiner Perkins-funded startup based in Southern California.

Video: Five Myths About LinkedIn You Need to Get Over

After last week's post showing how many people use LinkedIn as a stale resume repository and are not tapping into the business network's many benefits, a follow-up video has surfaced from YourBusinessChannel highlighting common myths about the network.

Have you run into the issue where you think you have enough connections on LinkedIn and don't need any more? Ask yourself a follow-up question - does your business have so much revenue you could not possibly need another dollar?

Mark Perl, a renowned LinkedIn expert, and I talk about the value of the network, contrasted with other sites, including Google and Facebook, and how you can take your static profile and make it an active one with new connections and recommendations.

Flipboard Unveils Social Magazine for iPad, Buys Ellerdale

The iPad played a major role in today's record-setting earnings from Apple, and strong sales of the device are helping developers find new ways to leverage the product's screen and form factor, at the intersection of the portability of the mobile Web and the power of a desktop. Tonight, a new company called Flipboard debuts with an iPad app that brings your social streams into a completely new light - no longer the world of chronologically ordered status updates and one-liners, but instead, rich graphical pages, which can be flipped, like a magazine from one screen to the next as you go further back in time. The result is a highly compelling way to consume the news your friends share, and it immediately trumps all other RSS-based solutions for the iPad in terms of user experience.

Flipboard emerges tonight after lifting the shroud of secrecy on the project. The company has raised millions from VC firms including Kleiner Perkins, and the company has already made an acquisition, that of the Ellerdale Project. The Ellerdale team will be leaving their Menlo Park offices and joining Flipboard in Palo Alto at the combined companies' new headquarters, as they work on the new app. As I met with the team today, they described the fit as a perfect combination of Flipboard having an amazing front-end with Ellerdale providing strong back-end data. Ellerdale, if you may recall, was among the first partners to gain full access to Twitter's firehose of data.



Upon downloading Flipboard to the iPad, users are prompted to follow a number of curated collections of news sources, supplied by the app, or to connect their social streams, starting with Twitter and Facebook, to one of 9 squares, aligned in a 3x3 grid. You can even add Twitter lists you have made, to see a subset of those you follow in a new way.

Future versions of the app are expected to offer more than nine tiles, and will also see support for new networks, likely including Google Buzz.

After years of getting used to paging from the top down to see one-liner updates with a URL that launches a Web browser, Flipboard brings us back to the more traditional days of a cover page and flipping casually left to right to get to later pages of a magazine. Rich media from Twitter, Facebook or any other feed is displayed in line, including photos and video, and Web links are displayed with a preview excerpt of the story - while clicking out takes you to Safari on the iPad.


In the past few years, we have seen the debate rage of whether Twitter has surpassed RSS readers in terms of finding the best content on the Web quickly. Flipboard helps make services like Twitter and Facebook much closer to RSS readers, with a much friendlier UI that makes sense even to the most casual non-geek.

  Browsing Facebook on Flipboard is Actually Enjoyable

As the company described a meeting I had with them earlier today, this is the first "social magazine" for the iPad. The first page shows the most recent items from your stream, diving into the links shared from all those you follow, and as you flip the page left to right, you go back in time. Every person using the application has a different set of content and a personalized experience, based on their own social network.


While the application itself is downloadable for free, Flipboard is already thinking about rich ways to receive revenue. They explained their plans for full-page high quality ads, much like those in print magazines, and used similar language to that of Apple and iAds. But they didn't talk about a way to reward original content creators, or their downstream sharers, for their work. Theoretically, as third-party ads against RSS feeds have raised concern, this move may as well, unless it is assumed that third-party ads against excerpted articles is within the gray area.


In addition to browsing the articles themselves, you can see downstream conversation around the original content - be that comments on Facebook, or tweets from your friends that contain the specific URL. You can engage in that conversation from Flipboard by replying to Twitter shares or adding your own comments to Facebook, but it isn't aiming to be yet another Twitter client, so a TweetDeck or Seesmic killer this is not.

With Flipboard's unveiling, this closes the door on Ellerdale outright. Their site is expected to be made end of life as soon as tomorrow.

Twitter Ramps Up Sales Team, Hiring from Yelp, YouTube

With sponsored trending topics and tweets becoming more accepted and mainstream within the popular microblogging service, it's no surprise Twitter is expanding its sales ranks to drive more business. After years of users and armchair quarterbacks questioning how the popular service could ever make money, the company certainly looks to be graduating from the realm of venture capital bringing in the dollars and more to one targeting true income. A few of this week's newest hires demonstrate growth in the sales department, with titles that point to structure similar to established firms - much like others that have hit the 200+ person plateau as they have.

Twitter's closely-watched Employee List has now grown to 239 people. It's assumed nearly all are employees of the company, with some contract employees. Ten more were added to the company rolls on Monday, including former employees of Ning, Yelp and Google, with total hires in 2010 approaching or just passing 100 on the year.

In past months, the plurality of new hires at the company have seemingly been engineers focused on helping the company expand its offerings or scale with continued growth, intermixed with the occasional UI expert or HR person. While those hires continue (see: Scott Smith, former Sys Admin for Ning @ohlolohlol and Alan Liang, formerly of Yahoo! @mixmasteralan), the more interesting new employees are those focused on revenue, including Amanda Levy (@amandalevy) and Josh Grau (@grauface).

Amanda was most recently director of sales at Yelp, after 4 years at the company, where she started as an account executive. Her LinkedIn profile claims her new title is Director of Sales, West at Twitter. Having a Director of Sales, West indicates similar positions at other regions, as the team builds. Josh was previously the head of business development of branded entertainment at Google's YouTube, and now bills himself as Program Sales & Marketing at Twitter. Not the only YouTuber to join team Twitter of late, Josh is joined by Sara Mustin (@saramustin), previously a partner technology manager at YouTube.

In addition to the publicly expanding sales staff and YouTube alumni, also joining Twitter this week are Terra Craig (@terrabirdy), Dan Coughlin (@DanTCoughlin), Justin Chen (@leftparen), Shane Connor (@shanecon123) and Pat Chan (@patc888). Given the low tweet numbers for some of the new hires, it's likely these are not primary accounts or are work friendly and not their personal streams.

KickPost Predicts Popular Posts for Top Tech News

As technology news sites have proliferated in the last few years, so too have technology news aggregators looking to find the best of the Web and surface it quickly - either through social voting mechanisms, insightful editorial picks, or complicated algorithms. In addition to the Diggs and Slashdots of the world, one finds Hacker News and Techmeme as the gold standards offering the front page of today's tech news. Now, there is a new site that has entered the fray - though minimalist for now - armed with what the founder calls a predictive algorithm which just might find top stories faster than anybody else.

The site is called KickPost (http://www.kickpost.com) and it comes from the hand of Caleb Elston @calebelston, the vice president of products at Justin.TV, who is also known to frequent blog readers here as the man behind Toluu, the RSS discovery site, and the gift recommendation site, Kallow.


In a discussion on Hacker News about the launch of KickPost, Elston describes the site as a "new tech news aggregator that uses a predictive algorithm based on historically popular stories to predict which stories will be popular in realtime." He adds, "We are about 20min faster at predicting hot stories than Techmeme."


The site displays the headlines of predicted top stories, as well as a short excerpt, the author's name and the post source - with the headline linking to the original story and the source to the blog's main page. Stories are ordered chronologically, with the most recent at the top, and older ones below, with a time stamp showing how recently the posts entered KickPost's index, and the page automatically refreshes when new stories enter the index.

From a quick perusal of the site, it's clear that top tech stories are making it into the index - and they are being found fast. But the site sources are very common to so-called A-List blogs that dominate many other sites, including VentureBeat, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and Lifehacker. Where more editorially-driven sites, including Techmeme, have an advantage is through manual discovery - something a purely algorithm-driven site like KickPost can't catch. The one-off top stories from new sources will have a tough time making the index, from what I can tell, even after scrolling back 2 days into past KickPost content.

Given Caleb's history for parsing RSS feeds and finding how your own likes intersect with those from the community, I would anticipate where KickPost would really gain value over the competition is through personalization and building the top stories in near real-time based on individual's preferences, not just through beating Techmeme and others by a handful of minutes with headlines from top blogs. But it's a site we'll be watching.

Find KickPost at http://www.kickpost.com/ and on Twitter at @kickpost.

Could You Replace Facebook.com With a Desktop Client?

Even as many desktop applications are migrating to the Web in the form of Web services and Web apps, some popular Web services are going the opposite way, as desktop clients are created for popular social networks, or to bring alerts to changes on the Web outside of your browser. From the seemingly-ancient desktop RSS readers to the more mainstream Twitter clients, we have seen the migration is bidirectional. But what about Facebook? The site considered to be the second-largest by some measures and the largest overall by others on the entire Web, jousting with Google, doesn't seem to have the groundswell of development focused on bringing updates from the site to the PC as Twitter does, but there are options.

The easiest route to getting Facebook to the desktop for the most connected social media users is through existing Twitter clients which also support Facebook. TweetDeck and Seesmic let you add your Facebook account as a supported account, as does Brizzly for the Web. In the cases of Seesmic and TweetDeck, Facebook updates scroll down in a single column alongside other services you have connected - from Twitter, of course, to recent adds, including Foursquare, Google Buzz or LinkedIn.

But in addition to these Twitter clients who give Facebook a passing nod, there are a few dedicated Facebook desktop apps that leverage Adobe AIR, bringing the network to you.


Similar to the Twitter clients, the simply titled "Facebook for Adobe AIR" shows all news feed activity in a single column stream, and lets you comment or like from within the app, while any links take you the Web browser. It's basic, but does what you would expect. As you have to visit the app to see updates, the benefit to running the client on its own is minimal over the Web experience, unless you just don't want your browser to be on constantly.


In contrast, a much newer app, called "Facebook Desktop", which has the somewhat enviable URL of www.facebookdesktop.com, eschews the column and stream format, simply showing you alerts, which if they gain your attention, are a click away. This is much like the FriendFeed Desktop Notifier, introduced before SXSW back in 2009. While it is an AIR app, like the others, it doesn't have that heavy feel on your laptop, and doesn't demand any screen real estate.


Once you open Facebook Desktop, you get instant updates to messages you have waiting, whether you have events pending, or even if you have been poked. As new entries on your friends' feeds are added, they pop up to the foreground and melt away if they don't draw your interest. You might find yourself looking around for the app window, but the minimalist approach doesn't have a central node at all. As ephemeral as some social updates can be, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. So you can be working on whatever other app you want on your desktop and still have Facebook notifications float to you.

Clients for Twitter have often been at the foreground of innovation for the service's platform. In this case, that fact has not been true for Facebook. Maybe their Web site is good enough. But if you want something else, there are alternatives.

Ecademy Co-Brands my6sense App for Business Network

my6sense, the company focused on digital intuition and hyperpersonalization of streams, including RSS and social streams such as Facebook and Twitter, has added a new partner in Ecademy, the UK-based social business network. Today, leveraging the company's API for content relevance and filtering, the two companies introduced a co-branded application in Apple's iTunes store that prompts Ecademy users to connect the network as an addition stream, bringing the individual personalization and relevancy filters my6sense is known for to a new community - much like they did when first tackling Twitter and Facebook after starting with RSS feeds at its core.


   My New My6sense Stream With the Addition of Ecademy

The co-branded application behaves and looks much like the standard my6sense application, highlighting the feeds you pull into the program, and sorting them in order of assumed priority based on your own implicit activity. Over time, thanks to what articles you read or skip, among many other factors, the program continues to modify its algorithms to match you, bringing the assumed "most important" and most relevant content to the top - no matter their source. The Ecademy my6sense application, available here on the iTunes store for free, adds blogs from other Ecademy users to the mix, giving them an equal shot at your attention to streams from any other source.


   Top Blogs Float to the Top of the Ecademy-My6sense App

In my testing of the new product, my6sense recognized my personalized profile from their database, and once linked to Ecademy, it was clear that the same process which has cleaned up my feed reading on the mobile phone works on this new source. Intriguing blog posts on technology companies I follow closely, like Google, Apple and social networks, rose to the top, and those that were less targeted were well below the fold.

The co-branded application is a good test case for my6sense's promise of filtering any streams on the Web that can be sorted by relevancy based on user behavior. Ecademy's broad base of users with wildly varying interests will probably find the product a welcome introduction that brings relevant posts their way, while reducing the visibility of the rest.

Disclosures: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am managing director of new media. I have done previous speaking work and other paid activity with Ecademy, including a social media retreat in February. I did not gain early access to this product, nor did representatives from either company see copy prior to posting.

Seesmic for Android Adds Support for Google Buzz

My personal switch from iPhone to Android (much more visible than I ever had anticipated) was made easy due to the existence of high quality applications I already was familiar with from the iPhone platform, enabling me to simply migrate and not lose a step. Among the best applications, one I rely on daily, is Seesmic, which, in contrast to the native Twitter application for Android, comes with multiple account support, and the goal of supporting multiple networks.

Today, the great news comes that Seesmic is adding integration of another one of my most-frequent destinations on the Web - Google Buzz.


The new Seesmic, available on the Android Market, adds Google Buzz support, inline preview of images and links for Buzz and photos for Twitter, and also adds OAuth support - the login standard for Twitter.


    The Google Buzz Timeline In Seesmic for Android

The launch of Google Buzz's API resulted in multiple applications tapping into the growing network, and making Google's current social offering as easy to access as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other top communities. We saw the debut of Buzz support in TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, and Seesmic is the first major Twitter client to bring Buzz support to mobile Android platform - a perfect fit for geeks who are leveraging the Google platform as much as I am.

To aid the onboarding of its newest customers, it makes sense for Twitter to keep its core applications to be single-network centric, but for the rest of us who participate in multiple places, the option to do so in one app, like Seesmic, is welcome.

As for Google Buzz, you know you can find me here: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray.

Podcast: Do Early Adopters Have Advantage in Social Media?

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to participate in a podcast with Frank Angelone of the Social Tech Zone to talk about the always-intriguing topic of how early adopters gain influence and the role social media plays in personal and business life. Frank, who did a very professional job teeing up questions and drawing out stories behind the development of this blog and how I interact with entrepreneurs today, highlights in his summary of the discussion that there is no true "right way" or "wrong way" to participate in social media, and that works for one person may not work for another. We discussed how louisgray.com got started, whether one should obsess over statistics, and how important comments and engagement are to bloggers.

I hope you find the conversation interesting. As always, the full content is below:

Video: LinkedIn Remains Underused, as a Stale Resume

With so much hype around casual social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, the world's largest business-oriented network, LinkedIn, gets less press, and less is discussed around properly using the site, in contrast to others. But practically everyone recognizes the utility of the service. They may use it to post their online resume, and connect to current or former colleagues, but for most, activity on LinkedIn is done infrequently, and many of the service's features, including Answers, Groups and Recommendations, are given short attention.

From the February social media retreat that Ecademy Chairman Thomas Power and I participated in, you can see some of our thoughts on the state of LinkedIn below. It is a companion piece to YourBusinessChannel's work, including The Connected Decade.

My6sense Boosts Personalized Streams With Serendipity

my6sense, the iPhone application and API focused on hyperpersonalization and digital intuition - aimed to simulate your own sixth sense and surface relevant content, issued a new update to their app this week which goes beyond your selected RSS feeds or social streams and recommends items from the extended community that are very likely relevant to you. The idea? That as the application grows to know you and your personal preferences better over time, that it knows of content out there you may find very interesting, but didn't already have in your subscriptions list. It's essentially the same personalization that has separated the product from competition, but with a new wrinkle - the element of surprise.

As I've highlighted a number of times since I first was introduced to the app, and as I have grown to know the team and the technology through working with them at Paladin Advisors Group, my6sense's core function is to implicitly watch your behavior and learn through your own activity what content you like and don't like, what sources you like and those you don't, essentially curbing the growing issue of information overload, reducing the time you need to find the best content tailored for your interests from hours to minutes.


But even the most aggressive content consumers, like myself, can't subscribe to everything and find every article. As the number of people using my6sense has grown, the company has more data on what users have the most similar digital intuition profiles to you, and can surface relevant pieces of content that would score highly in your own streams, but don't require you to be subscribed.


These items, which are sifted into your "Relevance feed" in the app, are highlighted as recommended items. Should you want to subscribe to the source, you can just click the "+Subscribe" button and add that feed to your library.

Other feed and stream readers have also tried to surface content to which you are not subscribed, mostly by relying on what your social circle has liked. Google Buzz surfaces content of people you don't follow thanks to friends' activity, while Google Reader shows recommended feeds or posts that have proven popular. But the move is a small change in direction for my6sense, who to date has built their streams solely on the content you bring to the table.

The new update, available on the iTunes Store, is free, and is an automatic upgrade for existing users.

Disclosure: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Even If You Love It, Facebook Won't Let You Like It

Facebook's streams, serving its approximately 500 million users, are a little quieter tonight, as for whatever reason, it seems people are unable to "like" any items, and trying to do so results in a database error. One is prompted to contact customer support, but no contact information is given. It's a little bug, but a prominent one on a site that is not only one of the biggest on the Web, but easily the most active social hub for families, friends and casual acquaintances.

The "Like" functionality made its way to Facebook after FriendFeed had added the feature back in 2007, and now this simple gesture has migrated to other services, and even to Facebook's comments itself - except tonight, there is no liking on Facebook, meaning you will have to leave an actual comment on friends' threads or photos to indicate you actually did... like... the content.


With no failwhale to show for itself, it is unclear if this bug is simply a hiccup or an issue of scale. Facebook has managed much better uptime records than other services, including Twitter, but there is no doubt unprecedented technical challenges can arise from the smallest nuances when spread across a global network.


If you must "Like" items, you can still go to FriendFeed, or give a "like" to Google Reader items and Google Buzz. Those databases are doing just fine.

Why I Turned In My iPhone and Went Android

For such a long-time Apple believer and Mac/iPhone customer, the idea of turning my back on Steve Jobs and crew, stopping my app store and media buying preferences almost entirely and choosing a divergent path is not one taken lightly. In the two months following Google I/O, I've talked about my looking at Android and how I think the mobile operating system is a real challenger to the iPhone's place on the pedestal in the world of smartphones, but I didn't make a lot of noise about my taking the final step and switching to Android. It turns out that on the very day the iPhone 4 hit Apple Stores and AT&T Stores around the country, I was trading mine in and converting the family (including my wife) to Google's OS. Given many of the comments I have seen around the Web comparing the two platforms, I thought I would explain my choice - especially as news articles are hitting seemingly every day that back up my hypotheses.

For me, more than the over-used phrase of "open", the promise of true multitasking, and the platform's integration with Google Apps, was one word - "Choice". Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be "Momentum". I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move. And yes, third is "Cloud" - the idea that I don't need to be tied to my desktop computer to manage data on the phone, but instead, the phone is built to tap into data stored on the Web. Fourth is "Capability". The Android platform, as the Droid commercials offer, simply does more. The power of the mobile hotspot cannot be understated, and the iPhone is a zero there.

Unfortunately, I am pretty sure I hadn't previously made that decision process clear. Most, thanks to my derogatory comments against AT&T (rightly deserved, I may add), thought I switched from my AT&T-fed iPhone to my Sprint contract on the HTC EVO and new HTC Hero because of the many frequent issues with the carrier. This is not true. Yes, AT&T has been dramatically underdelivering in terms of quality and functionality, but this did not drive me away from Apple as much as the lack of choice did. Not even the announcement of an imminent offering of a Verizon iPhone could have kept me on Apple.

I have been publicly and openly thinking about moving off iPhone for more than six months. At the time of the December post, none of us knew what the iPhone 4 would look like. We didn't know if Apple would open up to new carriers. We didn't know what the Nexus One would offer. We didn't know about the HTC EVO or the HTC Hero or the HTC Aria or the Droid Incredible. But the writing was on the wall that change was afoot, and we would have to be in wait and see mode. I waited, and what I saw told me that the speed at which Android has improved and the speed at which new models are developed and released is far outpacing Apple. In my personal experience of using the HTC EVO after receiving a free unit from Google I/O, the gaps in the platform were very few, and were more than outweighed by the device's capabilities. I kept running into ways to use my EVO where my previous generation iPhone could not keep up, and even my handling of the new iPhone 4 was not enough to make me feel I had chosen wrong.

This isn't to say that it's impossible the iPhone 4 is the best mobile phone in the world. Maybe it is. Apple's sense of design and integration is impeccable. They do fantastic work and I do not think they have an equal in hardware. I would never say the HTC EVO is a better hardware device than the iPhone 4, so that discussion is moot. But it is a fantastically capable, flexible device, and I had the choice - yes that word again - to get my wife a different model with a different physical appearance and a different set of capabilities, in the Hero. With Apple, my choice (if you can call it that) is to buy this year's model or last year's model, and black versus white (assuming white ever ships).

I also will never tell you that Android is perfect - in software or in hardware. I have seen bugs on the EVO that have impacted button sensitivity, which at times are baffling and directly impact my ability to use the device for minutes at a time. There are background app crashes, and yes, you do have to be smart about how you use apps to avoid draining the battery faster than would be optimal. But I don't feel that any of these bugs are permanent, nor are they reason to switch back and call it a public loss. It's certainly not as if I have been blind to iPhones traded in or sent back to the Genius Bar on the other side of the aisle. In my view, I feel that Android is today equally capable to Apple in almost all ways, is more capable in several ways, and is less capable or polished in others.

When I first discussed my thoughts on Android, I made comments saying that if I were a software developer looking to deploy a mobile app, I would look to code for Android first and iPhone and iPad second, to gain highly visible mindshare in a fast growing marketplace. In a piece in the San Jose Mercury News last week, that theory was validated by developers who said the once small pond was turning into an ocean. The article said "early bets on Android and Google are paying off."

On Thursday, news from ComScore said Android gained market share while Apple, BlackBerry and pretty much everybody else lost share. On Saturday, Barron's also reported on the growth, saying Android "could eat Apple's lunch." This momentum is real on the market share side, no doubt driven by a swath of partners pushing Android-capable devices, while Apple, a personal favorite mind you, is practically going it alone.

Earlier on Saturday, news broke that HTC was not going to "jump into the tablet market" any time soon, as the company looked for a compelling form factor and use case. We've seen how Apple launched the iPad and has done tremendously well by it, but the great thing about the Android ecosystem is that HTC's saying no is not a deathknell for the platform or its customers (including me). If HTC won't make it, then somebody else will. As we saw with the iPad, rumors of tablets stirred for years until Apple finally launched one. That's what can happen when only one manufacturer has access to a system. Seeing HTC is not doing a tablet now caused me to shrug, not to writhe in pain. But if they had an exclusive agreement with Google, that would be another story altogether.

The momentum is clear and the option of multiple choices is clear. If I like Android and hate my new carrier, Sprint, I can switch to Verizon and get the Incredible. If I have an aneurysm and love AT&T, I can get the Aria. If I want a small screen, I can do that. If I want a physical keyboard, I can find a device that does that. But for iPhone, I simply would have to take whatever Apple offers and believe that their choices are right for me. I've chosen Apple many times and will again in the future, but I don't think I should buy into a system that restricts my choices when another one is out there that enables my choices.

I switched to Android because I am extending my move away from the desktop and more to the cloud. iTunes does not deserve to be the core of my device any more, as it is simply a utility to rent films and get new apps for the iPad. I do believe the Web to be my future hub, and Google is preparing for that world, while Apple is not. Their devices do great work to get to the Web easily, but once there, I have almost always been pointed to other providers, so now, with Android, for the most part, I can just go to the source.

A bet on iPhone 4 today may be a vote for the best phone of today. But a bet on Android is a bet on the future. I am betting on an ecosystem and an application environment that encourages best of breed developers to move their product to a growing population of smartphones, and I expect to reap the benefits. I have the utmost respect for Steve Jobs, Apple and all the work Cupertino has done to make my family's lives better, but I think the baton has been passed. I won't be hanging around hoping they will get reinvigorated, to win on their own against a flotilla of partners on the opposing side. Our family is on the side that is going to win the next five years of mobile.

The Role of a Company Advisor, and How to Spot Bad Ones

Parallel to my public activity on the blog and in various social networks, piled on top of my real-world work with Paladin Advisors Group and the home life of raising twins, I have added a number of advisory roles to startups in the last two years. The first to come my way was BuzzGain (since sold to the Meltwater Group), and current positions include, in order of chronology, SocialToo, TeensInTech, MyLikes and QwoteBook. I've been approached for other roles, but for various reasons opted out. My activity with these companies, their founders, engineers and others, as well as seeing other activities from fellow advisors, has put me in a position to recognize the good and the bad, so I thought I would share.

First things first, an advisor to a company, especially a startup that is pre-revenue or in the early stages of revenue recognition, is not lucrative in any way. Most companies tag four or so advisors, offering 1-2% of the company, and in some cases much less, for their work, and no money changes hands. It's not an official position in the company, like an employee, and there is no fiduciary responsibility, as would be the case with board of director seats in a public company.

The role of an active and engaged advisor is to provide guidance and assistance to the company, using all their resources available, and to find opportunities for the company to find new partnerships, users or visibility where appropriate. This can mean sitting in conference calls with engineers where the service's roadmap is discussed, and offering feedback on direction or lobbing suggestions yourself. This can mean acting as an early adopter and finding holes in the product, sending them by e-mail and offering an alternative. It can mean introducing people at the company to people within your own network, who may be interested in the product themselves, or can bring the product more awareness. It can even mean sitting down with PowerPoint and cranking out a VC deck if fundraising is in the cards.

But in almost all cases, advisors don't write a single line of code, and the capabilities and direction of the company still comes from the CEO/founder and the engineers themselves who are turning ideas into reality. No matter of advice and enthusiasm can help when milestones are missed or priorities of the individuals impacting the company go astray.

What an advisor is absolutely not is an unabashed fanboy and overly enthusiastic booster of the product. Any time it is clear that an advisor has slipped from a partner of a company to an aggressive spammer who can't fail to mention the company or its products all over the Web, a line has been crossed. But it can be helpful for the person to have the company in mind when opportunities arise throughout the extended network, and to occasionally message on their behalf - with tact.

I initially worked with BuzzGain because I believed PR companies were doing a very poor job of targeting the blogosphere. That turned out to be true and I think still is. I teamed up with ReadBurner because I believe strongly in the act of highlighting popular shared items on the Web and enabling discovery. Unfortunately, that project didn't meet all my hopes and was closed at the end of last year. I worked with SocialToo because Jesse Stay had introduced some top tools to manage Twitter streams and followers, and to block spam. Twitter continues to evolve as does his product, and it is essential for me. I added my name to TeensInTech because I want to help the next generation of geeks to have a central place to communicate and share ideas. This project is still ongoing. I joined up to MyLikes because I detest unfocused advertising and want to see people benefit from trusted recommendations. And most recently, I am working with Qwotebook to help bring a permanent repository for the amazing things so many people are saying which are often floating into the ether.

I have seen some of my peers sign on as advisors to companies even if they privately don't like the product, simply because they think they might make money in the end. This is not an advisor you want. I have attended advisory board meetings only to have the same people not show up who didn't show up last time. They are not advisors you want. And I know you don't want advisors who are unwilling to risk their own "personal brand" to do work on your behalf.

Two months ago, one company approached me with an option to be on their advisory board. I said no. Not because I didn't like them or because I was too busy or because I didn't think they had a future. It was because I just wasn't familiar enough with their product and didn't want to be disingenuous. Since that time, I have started using their product and think it's great. And in that time, an announcement already went out with their new advisory board, without my name on it. Do I consider that a missed opportunity? Not really. Even if I miss out on some great engagement and a few dollars some day, it was not the right time, and my intentions would have been wrong.

Entrepreneurs are already stretched with their resources and their time. It is critical that when the time comes to find partners who are going to have blood and sweat equity with you, who can help build your product and find you new outlets, that you pick the right people who are entrepreneurial themselves, who are willing to take calls at odd hours, and who truly care about helping you achieve your vision. If you choose wrong, all you have done is given up equity to people who are along for the ride, and you may have to work even harder to chase them down. So do choose well.

I told you before, I am not a fanboy, not even to the companies I am working with where I do get deep insight into their plans. But I do care, and I will keep fighting on behalf of users from the inside, and then fighting for them when the time is right.

Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to SocialToo, TeensInTech, MyLikes and Qwotebook.

Kosmix Extends Real-Time Tweets to All Web Pages

As Twitter usage has essentially become pervasive, from the digerati to celebrities and politicians, the site has moved to bring Twitter content and functionality downstream, bringing the world of @replies and 140 characters to new Web sites and clients. One of the major introductions from the company was a tool called @Anywhere, which when used, lets you follow people from third party sites, all with a few lines of JavaScript code. Now, Kosmix, the lesser-known, but innovative, Mountain View search company, has taken this functionality a step further by automatically detecting names and IDs of Twitter users around the Web, and displaying their recent updates from Twitter, with no work needed on behalf of the Web site owner.

The way Kosmix makes this happen is through a lightweight Web browser plugin called Tweetbeat Firsthand, available for both Mozilla FireFox and Google's Chrome browser. Upon installation, you will start to see small blue Twitter icons next to names as you surf the Web. Hovering over the blue icons shows their Tweet stream, and encourages you to learn more about the person from Kosmix's rich topic summaries.


For example, a standard Yahoo! Sports article on Lance Armstrong's Tour de France effort also contains an update from actor Ben Stiller. The blue Twitter icon next to Stiller gives his real-time updates on the Tour, and links out to his Kosmix page, here: http://www.kosmix.com/topic/Ben%20Stiller.

Surfing the Web with the "Tweetbeat Firsthand" extension adds a new layer of real-time to all pages. If you install the plugin and visit my blog, for instance, you can see names like Paul Buchheit and Jason Shellen sporting the blue T's, while brands similarly are highlighted, including Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook.

The Tweetbeat Firsthand extension follows on to Kosmix's highly visible World Cup efforts during the last month, which also carries the Tweetbeat name. You can grab the extension here: http://www.kosmix.com/labs/firsthand/.

Disclosure: Kosmix.com has previously done business as a client of Paladin Advisors Group.

Who Cares About LeBron? Drew Is Cancer Free!

Tonight, as former Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James was making his announcement on ESPN that he was headed to play hoops for the Miami Heat, I like many other people, had the TV on to see what he would say. But I had the set on mute, as I was on the phone with my good friend Drew Olanoff, who got better news today than any Miami Heat fan. After a serious scare that had his friends and family worried he was setting up for a second round to fight cancer, he got a call today giving him the all clear, meaning instead of months of chemo, nausea, fatigue and worry, he gained a reprieve.

This is pretty much the best news of the year for me. (With the potential exception of our announcing baby #3 of course)

While I may at times seem detached and automated, and focused on tech, and while many people aren't seeing the real, true, social connections that can happen from the more virtual concepts of networks, "friends" and connections, I can verify they are real, with Drew being among the most clear connections I have gained from this Web experience. Despite our differences, Drew makes sense to me, and he is a close friend of my entire family, and hopefully, I am to his.

I've talked to you about his challenge with Hodgkin's Lymphoma that consumed much of his 2009. I told you about his starting a new phenomenon called BlameDrew'sCancer, which later morphed to BlameCancer, when he first kicked cancer to the curb. And in recent weeks, we morbidly talked about having to start a new domain name of blamedrewscanceragain.com and preparing for a much tougher fight. I had mentally resigned myself to the expectation that cancer was going to challenge him again, and that a fight was inevitable. I know he did too.

But today, on top of all the other news out there, from global issues, to jury verdicts and choices of well-paid basketball icons, there was really only one piece of news that mattered. A friend of mine and to the tech community at large is going to be with us, at full strength. The Web needs Drew, and so does my family. So cancer, please go away and don't come back. We're done with you.

False Positives? I Blame Reverse Scientific Method.

I guess one of the best times to make a public mistake on the blog is at 2 a.m. on a 3-day weekend. Or, in theory, given the absence of hard news, it could instead be one of the worst times, guaranteeing the blunder will fill the vacuum. I got to test the theory this Monday, when I pieced together a number of theoretically unrelated updates and manufactured speculation that two of my favorite and most-watched Web companies, Foursquare and Brizzly, were hooking up.

By morning, both companies denied it outright, but other news outlets wrote it up as a clear miss - which was their right, considering how high profile it could have been if I had been correct.

Fellow blogger Denton Gentry saw my new age sleuthing as registering a false positive, as I made something out of nothing. I've got a history of watching corners of the Web and referral logs for story ideas or new applications, so this route wasn't too much of a change - even if the outcome left much to be desired.

As I see it, the fault for this story had as much to do with reverse scientific method as anything. If you remember scientific method from your grade school science fair projects, the right way to prove a theory is to set up a hypothesis, collect data, analyze it and interpret the results, forming a conclusion. But many a time, once a hypothesis is made, one can see clues everywhere, in fact self-selecting the data. Once I had a buzz in my brain about Brizzly and Foursquare being more than "just friends", I kept digging until I found enough clues to tip it from theoretical to probable.

The combination of @VCMike's update about one startup receiving an offer and that of @cw signing legal papers tipped me over the edge - as at 2 a.m. I was looking for the "one more thing" that could morph a fever dream into a serious scoop. And we still don't know what Mike was referring to - or Chris for that matter, though it could be leftover work from the Plinky sale to Auttomatic.

I tend not to post speculation here. Most of the time, you see my analysis of what I am using and hearing, product news or observations. But to explain the motives behind this, for those who aren't part-time geek tech bloggers, you need only look back at how the news that FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook snuck up on us. I had had my own inklings something major was up when co-founder Paul Buchheit rolled in happy after a late night. Instead of the site's loyalists getting a fair shake at the news, the story debuted on a blog that had been very negative to the site in the past. Similarly, news of Brizzly's own Picnics feature (which I like a lot) had muted response, thanks to what I saw as a half-hearted outreach plan.

Those two contributing pieces, in addition to my unanswered hypotheses (at the time) thrown to @shellen and @cw, made me feel I could take the risk of getting ahead of a story even if I didn't have all the data signed and sealed. I've seen worse conjecture with fewer clues on other sites before, and had anecdotal data from third parties that helped me feel I had the story right - late at night when most people were turning in after an evening of fireworks.

So, yes, I got the story wrong - and many people couldn't see how I thought the two teams might leverage one another. I could see it ... with a new Web and iPhone client dedicated to Foursquare... a tie-in of Foursquare tips to the Brizzly guide, and somehow... Picnics to talk about venues. It could happen. I've seen worse fits. So for this round, I was wrong, but I'm not totally repentant. I don't mind being wrong every once in a while, having tried and missed, than having not tried at all.

See some of the ensuing fallout:
The Next Web: Could Foursquare be looking to acquire Brizzly? [Updated: No]
VentureBeat:  Thing Labs CEO: No Brizzly buy for Foursquare
Business Insider: Brizzly CEO Shoots Down Foursquare Acq-Hire Speculation
GigaOM: No! Foursquare Isn’t Buying Brizzly

Updated: Foursquare and Brizzly "Just Friends" For Now

Update: Following last night's post, Jason Shellen of Thing Labs, as well as Alex Rainert of Foursquare both said there was more smoke than fire to this and that the two companies are merely friends. I still think it'd be great if they tied the knot, so consider this a trial run.



Around noon on Sunday, Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners tweeted that it was "truly ironic" a startup would receive a buyout offer on "Independence Day". But what startup, what offer, and from where? Reading the tea leaves and looking at various updates, I am cautiously speculating there could be a bid for Thing Labs, the makers of Brizzly, from the red-hot geolocation startup, Foursquare.


Hirshland is a backer of Thing Labs, as is SoftTech VC's Jeff Clavier and Michael Jones, an angel investor. Polaris is also invested in a number of other tech firms, including Formspring, but a recent trip to Manhattan to Foursquare HQ by Thing Labs' founders Chris Wetherell (@CW) and Jason Shellen (@Shellen) suggests where there is smoke there is fire.


This trip, which could have been as little as a social visit or a deeper partnership to integrate Foursquare data into Brizzly's client, was followed up by a tweet from Chris on the 4th, who said his Independence day was "filled with legalese and lawyers." While yes, this could be for anything, business or personal, one can connect the rumor dots and reach a tentative conclusion that something is afoot at Thing Labs, who recently launched Picnics, and has looked to differentiate itself from other Twitter clients, especially following Twitter's acquisition of Tweetie and parallel launch of a dedicated Android client, which sent aftershocks into the developer community.

Jason and Chris flew to New York on June 28th to meet with Foursquare on the 29th, and returned on the 30th, if their updates on Twitter are any indication. The visit on the 29th just so happened to coincide with the day Foursquare announced their raise of $20 million in a series B investment, giving them plenty of cash (or stock equivalent at a new valuation) to pick up Thing Labs. The company most recently picked up $600k in funding in November of 2009 bringing total funding to just over $2 million.


The talent behind Brizzly, without question, is world class. Jason and Chris specifically have years of experience ranging from Blogger to Google Reader, and they sport a supporting staff with a pedigree including more ex-Googlers, including Ben Darnell, who briefly spent time at FriendFeed and later, Facebook. The idea of pointing that talent at Foursquare and its mountain of check-in data, assuming my speculation has any merit, is intriguing, and could lead to new clients and new ways to rank the world of real-time geo-location.

A Day to Call for Data Independence

I Want My Data Independent of Companies and Services
We don't live in a data democracy. Every day, we give over more of our data to people we don't know, whose motives we may not fully understand, and the possibility of our getting it back is very slim. Unlike in a democracy, we don't get to vote in the leaders of companies who build the programs and sites that harness and manipulate our data. We don't get to set term limits on CEOs or throw the bums out of corporate offices if our data is used in ways that are unsavory. And just like our tax dollars, we keep creating more and don't always know where our data is going to end up.

In today's world, as much of the data we create transitions from offline to online, and from our personal computer hard drives to the cloud, we are being forced to make choices in terms of what companies we trust, what services we believe will have a future, and what applications or Web sites can do what with our data. If we choose wrongly, we stand in danger of losing data, losing access to that data, losing historical data or metadata. Our data could be compromised by ill-meaning people, or simply cannot be moved, written once and made to lack true portability.

As I said in January, I think the time has come to deliver personal clouds with OS and application-neutral data. I don't want to be forced to accurately guess the right programs and providers, and I want anytime instant access to my own personal data, including contacts, relationships, rich media, e-mail, documents and more from any device.

We have not yet scratched the surface of data interoperability and portability between services and devices. While work on standards continues, there remain significant challenges, and often, as they do in government today, politics play a big role, between and often inside companies. Is what is in your best interest also in the best interest of those storing your content? And should they be one and the same?

I am calling for:

• The ability to export one's social profile from network to network.
• The ability to export one's shares and postings from network to network.
• The ability to change blog software back-ends quickly, without losing content.
• The ability to change blog comment providers quickly, without losing data.
• The ability to change e-mail providers without long and tricky transfers.
• The ability to purchase applications once even if you change operating systems on mobile or desktop.
• The ability to access one's purchased media from any device if you provide your identity.
• The ability to access one's bookmarks and history from any browser if you provide your identity.
• The ability to access one's contacts and messages from any browser or e-mail client.
• The ability to export one's social graph and reconnect it in a new place.
• The ability to purchase media once even if you change media sources.
• The ability to switch carriers without penalty.
• The ability to collaborate with people across geographies, OS and Web browsers.
• The ability to add actions to entries (such as likes or comments) and have them flow to all entry points.
• The ability to migrate from one RSS reader or shared link blog and not lose subscribers.
• The ability to download all videos and images in one's network rapidly.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, and the list could no doubt grow dozens long with your input and more hours spent trying to learn just where our data goes when we hit publish or submit. I am trusting an increasing amount of my data to the cloud with every post I write, every status update, every photo I upload, or every video I add to YouTube. With more than a decade and a half of activity on the Web, the legacy of my choices often impacts what I can do in the future, or the speed at which I can make change. I have had to walk away from created data before, and I have had to make compromises on choice or accept things as less than ideal much more often.

There are people out there working on very real standards to let our data move from place to place without hiccups - such as those hammering away on the DataPortability Project. Some of these issues are being solved in front of our eyes, while others are getting much worse. On a day when one nation is celebrating with big words like Freedom and Independence, it's worth knowing just who owns our data now, and striving to one day see a time when it can truly be moveable and independent - not beholden to any company, service, software or environment.

That would be a day worth celebrating.