Búbosvöcsök

Warning, RSSoterica and kottke.org sausage-making to follow. Matt Wood has a post up on 43Folders about how he groups his RSS feeds in Google Reader for easier reading. I use pretty much the same system as Matt, but with a few more folders. I have several folders for reading long-form blogs:

Always
Often
Sometimes
Pending
Food and Drink
Frippery
Infoglut

Always, Often, and Sometimes are self-explanatory. The Pending folder is for blogs that I'm trying out, Frippery is stuff that is non-kottke.org-related to be read during non-work hours (ha!), and the Infoglut folder contains a bunch of blogs that have a low signal-to-noise ratio and are too high volume to keep up with unless everything else is read (any multi-author pro blogs that I read (not many) are in here). For organizing non-long-form blogs, I use these folders:

Links
Yummy
Photos
Tumble

Links contains link blogs, Yummy has a bunch of stuff from del.icio.us, Photos are photoblogs, and Tumble contains tumblelogs, FFFFOUND!, and other Randomly Curated Other People's Images White Background Sites. And then for news, I have an NY Times folder, a Sci/Tech News folder, and a Keywords folder for Google News keyword searches.

All this folder business might seem overcomplicated, but I find that grouping feeds by mode helps greatly. And by mode, I mean when I'm reading link blogs, that's a different style than reading/skimming long-form blogs in the Always folder. Posts from link blogs usually take a few seconds to read/evaluate/discard while the Always folder posts take longer. If they were all lumped together, I couldn't get through them as quickly and thoroughly as I can separately. A juggling analogy will help -- Wait! Don't leave, I'm almost done! -- it's easier to juggle balls or clubs or knives than it is to juggle balls, knives, and clubs at the same time...same thing with different kinds of blog posts.

If you haven't seen them yet (and chances are you have), Jessica Hagy's index cards are little marvels of wit and wisdom. They've also netted her world-wide acclaim and a book deal with Penguin. Her book, Indexed, comes out next year. While she's not the first blogger with a book deal, I love her cards so much I asked her to chat with me about how she started blogging--as well as how her blog got her a book deal and more. But first, here's one of my all-time favorite Jessica Hagy index cards:

JT: So, you're sitting around at work one day saying, "Yeah, I am like Roz Chast--but only her if maybe she worked as a McKinsey consultant, and, yes, I am going to start a blog posting my index cards, dammit!" Or did it start out a little differently?

JH: I read somewhere that 'every writer needs a blog' but I didn't want to do one of those "Here's what I had for breakfast. Here's what I did at school" blogs. I'd had a few really lame advertising jobs, and was going back to school, and I felt like I had to do something--anything--that was remotely creative so my head wouldn't explode. I never thought anyone would find the thing, actually. It was just my little, goofy project.

JT: Your cards are a run-away hit on the blogosphere, including their regular feature in the Freakonomics blog: did it take a while to build up? What other opportunities have grown out of your blog? Are you a full-time 3x5-er now?

JH: About a week after I posted the first batch last August, somebody linked the blog to Metafilter. Whoever you are, thank you! That's how my agent (it's still strange to me that I have an honest-to-god agent) found me, and from there, it just sort of took off.

I'm working on the full-timing. The Indexed book comes out on Feb 28th (one day before leap day). Indexed was a Webby honoree and is on a bunch of "best blogs' lists. Right now, the cards are on Freakonomics and run in Plenty Magazine. They ran in GOOD magazine, on the BBC Magazine Online, and JibJab commissioned a bunch of them. Current TV is going to film me drawing about a dozen of them and turn that into TV interstitials.

I've had a few offers to sell the whole thing, but none seemed to be great fits. Syndication is the next thing we're going after.

I'm super, super, super lucky.

JT: It's blog-2-book madness these days--how did your book come about?

JH: My incredibly cool editor at Pengiun emailed me about turning the blog into a book in February. I forwarded his email to my agent. They talked to each other. I talked to them. And off we went. I love the Internet.

JT: I can't wait for your book--but in the meantime, I hope whoever you get as a publicist uses this video of your work. How did that come about?

JH: That was an email from Clemens Kogler, an Austrian filmmaker, just saying he liked the stuff and could he use it in a film. That sounded fun to me, and the result was Le Grand Content. It was featured on the front page of YouTube on Superbowl Sunday, and having worked in advertising for years and never gotten a decent TV spot produced, that felt like a creative victory of sorts, to have that show up there when it did.

JT: Finally, care to leave us with a card about blogs?

JH:

OK, comments are turned on: be interesting or nice or both.

(Comment on this)

I’ve been reading recently that a number of social networking sites are rushing to launch [or re-launch] a widgets platform given the success of the Facebook platform. There have been announcements about a MySpace platform which claim that

it will essentially be a set of APIs and a new markup language that will allow third party developers to create applications that run within MySpace. Developers will be able to include Flash applets, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets in their applications, and access most of the core MySpace resources (profile information, friend list, activity history, etc.). Unlike existing widgets on MySpace, developers will be able to access deep profile and other information about users and bake it into the applications.

Advertising can be included on the application pages (called control pages) and developers will keep 100% of the revenue. Ads may not be placed within widgets that appear on MySpace pages, however.

There have been similar announcements from LinkedIn and Google. The problem is that every one of these widget platforms being proposed by the various social networking sites are incompatible. This means that Web developers has to build a separate application for each of these sites using proprietary technologies (e.g. FBML) and proprietary APIs (e.g. FQL). Since very few Web developers or Web companies will be able to support significant applications on every one of these platforms, the question then becomes “Which platform should you bet on?” and “How do you make the decision to bet on a platform.”

Right now the gold standard in widget platforms for social networking sites is the Facebook platform. There are several reasons for this and competitors planning to build similar platforms need to meet the following criteria.

1. Monetization: Facebook encourages developers to monetize their widgets by placing ads in their widgets. Although Facebook has not actively helped developers by providing an ad platform, there is now a healthy marketplace of Facebook ad networks that developers can choose from. It has even been rumored that Google will be getting in the Facebook ad provider game. +1 to Facebook.

2. Distribution and Reach: A big problem you’ll face when you’ve built a great product is that it is a lot harder than you expect for people to actually find out about and try your product. This means any avenue that increases the potential reach and distribution of your product is bringing money in your pocket. Not only does Facebook have several million active and engaged users, the Facebook platform also provides several mechanisms that encourage the viral spread of applications which developers consistently rave about. No other social networking site’s widget platform even comes close. +1 to Facebook.

3. Access to User Data: Social networking sites are all about connecting people to the people they care about and their interests. This means that applications built on these platforms should be able to determine a user’s friends and interests to be able to give an optimal experience. The Facebook platform is unprecedented in the arena of widget platforms when it comes to the amount of user information it exposes to applications with methods like friends.get, users.getInfo, photos.get and even marketplace.getListings. +1 to Facebook.

4. Ability to Build an Integrated and Immersive Experience: One place where the Facebook platform really changed the game is that widgets weren’t just relegated to a tiny box on the user’s profile like they are on other social networking sites but instead developers could build full blown applications that integrated fully into the Facebook experience. It’s a lot easier to keep users engaged and build non-intrusive advertising into your application if your entire application doesn’t have to fit in some 4” X 4” box on the user’s profile. +1 to Facebook.

5. Applications Shielded from the “Winner’s Curse” of Web Development: The more successful your application becomes on the Web, the more money you have to spend on server related resources. Everyone knows the story of iLike scrambling to borrow money and servers because their Facebook application was more successful than they anticipated. Since a lot of widget developers are not richly funded startups or big companies, they may not be able to bear the costs of actually building a successful Web application without help from the platform vendor. A number of platform vendors provides hosting for static files and data storage APIs although none go as far as full blown application hosting...yet.  +0.5 to Facebook.

From my perspective, if a social networking site’s widget platform doesn’t meet all criteria, then it can’t be considered a real competitor to Facebook’s platform. And as a developer if I had to choose between that platform and Facebook’s, there would be no choice to make.

Now if you can afford multiple development efforts building widgets/applications for several disparate social networking site platforms, the list above is a good starting point for prioritizing the which social networking site’s to build widgets/applications for first.   

Now playing: T.I. - U Don't Know Me

Mary Jo Foley has a delightful post entitled Are all ‘open’ Web platforms created equal? where she wonders why there is more hype around the Facebook platform, Google’s muched hyped attempt to counter it on November 5th and other efforts that Anil Dash has accurately described as the new Blackbird as opposed to open API efforts from Microsoft. She posits two theories which are excerpted below

Who isn’t mentioned in any of these conversations? Microsoft. Is it because Microsoft hasn’t opened up its various Windows Live APIs to other developers? Nope. Microsoft announced in late April its plans for opening up and providing licensing terms for several of its key Windows Live APIs, including Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces Photo Control and Windows Live Data Protocols.

So why is Microsoft seemingly irrelevant to the conversation, when it comes to opening up its Web platform? There are a few different theories.

“I think the excitement about the Facebook platform stems from the fact that it addresses the problem of building publicity and distribution for a new application. Any developer can create an application for Facebook, and the social network will help propagate that application, exposing it to new users,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.

…

Microsoft, for its part, believes it is offering Web platform APIs the way that developers want, making them available under different business terms and permitting third parties to customize them inside their own sites, according to George Moore, General Manager of Windows Live. But Moore also acknowledges Microsoft has a different outlook in terms of which data it exposes via its APIs.

“Facebook gives you access to your social-graph (social-networking) data. We don’t do that. We have a gallery that allows users to extend Live Spaces,” Moore said.

Moore declined to comment on when or if Microsoft planned to allow developers to tap directly into user’s social-graph data like Facebook has done.

I see GeorgeM all the time, so I doubt he’ll mind if I clarify his statement above since it gives the wrong impression of our efforts given the context in which it was placed. If we go back to the definition of a social graph it’s clear that what is important is that it is a graph of user relationships not one that is tied to a particular site or service. From that perspective the Windows Live Contacts API which provides a RESTful interface to the contents of a user’s Windows Live address book complete with the list of tags/relationship types the user has applied to these contacts (e.g. “Family”, “Friends”, “Coworkers”, etc) as well as which of these contacts are the user’s buddies in Windows Live Messenger is a social graph API. 

On the other hand, this API does not give you access to the user’s Spaces friends list.  My assumption is that Mary Jo’s questions were specific to social networking sites which is why George gave that misleading answer. In addition, Yaron is fond of pointing out to me that the API is in alpha so there is still a lot that can change from now until we stamp it as v1. Until then, I’ll also decline to comment on any future plans.

As for the claim made by Matt Rosoff, I tend to agree with his assertion that the viral propagation of applications via the Facebook’s social graph is attractive to developers. However this attractiveness comes with the price of both the users and developers being locked in Facebook’s trunk.

I personally believe that the Web is the platform and this philosophy shines through in the API efforts at Microsoft. It may be that this is not as attractive to developers today as it should be but eventually the Web will win. Everyone who has fought the Web has lost. Facebook will not be an exception.

Now playing: Tony Yayo - I Know You Dont Love Me (feat. G-Unit)

I scored an invite to FriendFeed and after trying out the service, I have to say it is both disappointing and encouraging at the same time. It is disappointing because one would expect folks like Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit who helped launch Google Maps, Gmail and AdSense while at Google to come up with something more innovative than a knock-off of Plaxo Pulse and Google’s SocialStream which are themselves knock-offs of the Facebook News feed.

On the other hand, this is encouraging because it is another example of how the digital lifestyle aggregator is no longer just a far out idea being tossed around on Marc Canter’s blog but instead has become a legitimate product category.  

So what exactly is FriendFeed? The site enables users to associate themselves with the various user generated content (UGC) sites which they use regularly that publish RSS feeds or provide open APIs and then this is turned into the equivalent of a Facebook Mini Feed for the user. You can get a good idea of it by viewing my page at http://friendfeed.com/carnage4life which aggregates the recent activities from my profiles on reddit, digg, and youtube.

The “innovation” with FriendFeed is that instead of asking you to provide the URLs of your RSS feeds, the site figures out your RSS feed from your username on the target service. See the screenshot below for this in action

Of course, this same “innovation” exists in Plaxo Pulse so this isn’t mindblowing. If anything, FriendFeed is currently a less feature rich version of Plaxo Pulse.

I personally doubt that this site will catch on because it suffers from the same chicken and egg problem that face all social networking sites that depend on network effects. And if it does catch on, given that there is zero barrier to entry in the feature-set they provide, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook and a host of other services roll this into their feature set. I expect that News Feed style pages will eventually show up in a majority of social sites, in much the same way that practically every website these days has a friend’s list and encourages user generated content. It’s just going to be another feature when it comes to making a website, kinda like using tabs for navigation.

I’m sure Marc Canter finds this validation of his vision quite amusing.

Now playing: Puddle of Mudd - Control

I read this post by Steve Rubel several times and I still don’t quite get the logic as to why portals will win in the social networking war.
Google and Yahoo (in particular) have a lot of the components mentioned in these posts (IM, email, address books, etc) and it hasn’t translated into success in the social networking space. One thing worth keeping in mind is that right now all of the social networking spaces need to leverage existing repositories of information (email streams, IM, address books, etc) to bootstrap their way into having a sense for my social network. But once it’s been captured, there’s a very real chance that I, as a user, will choose a new place to keep up-to-date. So if users feel like it’s more important to keep their information up to date on Facebook than in Gmail or IM, those services will lose context about my relationships even though they continue to have a rich store of my information. In a dynamic world, it’s not just about storing the information - it’s also about staying current about this information as it grows and changes.

For many users, social networks are becoming the new home pages. This is just a simple assertion that I’ve made before in previous posts. As social networks become the places where users go to start their days and consume information, social networks will have a lot more power. Not convinced? If Facebook were to auction off the right to provide embedded search in their service, I know there would be a very attractive bidding war to win that placement.

The more assets you have, the less likely it is that your users are making use of all of them. Finally, the argument I always hear is that “company X has all of these great assets - IM, address book, etc. If they could just integrate them all, it would be a killer application.” But think about it. When Google just had search, anyone who used Google search was consuming 100% of the services offered. Add Gmail and you lose some folks. Ditto on Gtalk. Same is true of Google News. You get the point - the more services a portal offers, the smaller the share of users who actually consume all of the apps. If that’s the case, the value of having a super-integrated offering from Yahoo or Google is not that high. If you look at all of the things under the “More” tab on Google or all of Yahoo’s services, how many of them do you use? More importantly, how many of them do you not use because you have found something else that better meets your needs?

At the end of the day, I think Steve is right - portals will win the social networking wars. But this will happen because the winning social networks will look a lot like portals today.

Every time I make a prediction, there's a better than 90% chance I am going to be wrong. But this one, you can take to the bank. The portals - AOL, Yahoo, Google, Windows Live, all of them - will be big winners in the social networking wars.

"What," you say? "How can that be? I already spend all my time on Myfaceborkutspace. My life is there. My friends are there. I lose an hour each time I even log into Myfaceborkutspace. Portals are so Web 1.0. I am all about Web 3.14159265."

I can't rebut this argument. Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win. This is particularly going to be true as social networking evolves from a destination into a feature of every web site.

So what does this have to do with the portals? Actually, a lot. They will be big winners, no matter which social networks dominate over the long haul.

The portals own the glue that keeps many of us connected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones - e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net.

No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central. And who dominates those? Yup. The portals - all of them. They have a pretty good lock in, especially as they give you all the storage you need.

This is not going to change. The big blurring of work and home technologies is allowing people to achieve greater flexibility in thieir lives. Webmail and IM are big drivers here. We're hooked but good because we use these four tools to also manage our interactions on social nets. I expect the portals will eventually build in new features that make this even all the more efficient.

Further, a lot of interactions you have within a portal site are monetized. So more social networking translates into more bacn, emails and IMs from contacts you want to follow, RSS feeds, voicemails, etc. This cascades into more ad clicks, searches and banner/rich media ad views. The result? Free money for the portals. Thank you Uncle Myfaceborkutspace! Even better, they didn't have to build a competitor. They just sit back and simply cash in.

Google exposed the number of Google Reader / iGoogle subscribers to a feed in the crawler's user-agent and in the Webmaster Console, but that's only useful for your own feed. What if you want to see how many subscribers Google Operating System has?

Now you can see the number of subscribers by searching for the feed in Google Reader: click on "Add subscription", enter the name of a blog or some parts of your feed's URL and you'll see the number of subscribers next to each (hopefully relevant) result. This number includes everyone who subscribed to a feed using Google, but the subscribers aren't necessarily active.

It's not very clear whether Google Reader shows the subscribers from all Google properties (iGoogle, orkut) or only Google Reader subscribers. FeedBurner's stats show higher numbers of Google subscribers than Google Reader.

Google Reader:

FeedBurner:

Update: Mihai Parparita confirms that "these numbers include subscribers across all Google services". There's a difference between FeedBurner's numbers and Google Reader's numbers because FeedBurner counts the subscribers to all of the feeds that redirect to the FeedBurner feed.

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments - with his permission we’ve published it below.

This isn’t perfect because you have to think of the blog and then do a search for the stats; so some blogs may be left off. Also, some of these stats are aggregate numbers from different feeds for the same blog.

If you see errors or blogs that should be added, please point them out and we’ll correct them. It would also be good to round this out to a top 100 list and compare it to Technorati and TechMeme Leaderboard. Hopefully, Google will just publish this data themselves at some point.

The blog or other news site is listed on the left. Total Google Reader subscribers is listed in the second column.

 

Update: Robert Scoble posts subscriber numbers based on the TechMeme Leaderboard rankings. Someone should aggregate all of this data into a single Top 100 list.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

On Friday, Google Operating System noticed that Google Reader will tell you Google Reader subscriber numbers for a blog when you search to add a new feed. It didn’t take long for different folks to start collecting subscriber numbers for different blogs. I haven’t asked the Reader team about this, but it looks like this is just the counts for Google Reader subscribers. Before charging off to compute a bunch of stats, you should know a few things:

1. A blog can have multiple feeds, and you may want to add up the subscribers for the most important feeds.

For example, here are subscriber numbers for my blog:

I got that data by going to Google Reader, clicking on “Add subscription” and then searching for the string “mattcutts”. If you have a unique string in your domain name, that’s a good way to see the top feeds for your site.

I’ve used orange letters to highlight that I have a feed at FeedBurner, a MyBrand feed (served by FeedBurner, but with a CNAME from my domain so I control the feed with DNS), an Atom Feed, and an RSS feed. If you add all those up together, you get 9980 subscribers. So I’m 20 readers short of ten thousand Google Reader subscribers. By the way, I think that MyBrand is one of the least-used but greatest features from FeedBurner (which was acquired by Google earlier this year). With MyBrand, your feed is served by FeedBurner, but you keep the control of the feed url in case you decide to leave FeedBurner some day. The best write-up on MyBrand that I’ve seen is this tutorial by Danny Sullivan.

2. You may have more users than your top few feeds suggest.

Modern blogging software such as WordPress can generate lots of different feeds. For example, for any post on my blog, you can subscribe to a separate feed for the comments on that post. All those little feeds can add up, so you might have a lot more subscribers than even the top few feeds on your site suggest. Which leads me right to:

3. FeedBurner can aggregate all your different Google Reader subscribers into one number.

If you just want a nice summary number, or to see the breakdown of feed readers, I recommend FeedBurner. It’s free and gives you useful stats for any day you want. Here’s a recent Monday’s stats for my blog:

Of course, FeedBurner will only give you stats for your own site. That’s why everyone is having a good time looking at the Google Reader subscriber counts. Just remember that Google Reader subscriber stats will skew toward Google users. That’s probably why some Google-focused blogs do better in Google Reader’s stats when compared to some other metrics.

Just as an aside, how cool is it that on Firefox with the Google search box, if you start typing in math, the auto-suggest will give you the running answer as a suggestion — without even hitting return? Here’s what it looks like:

Nice.

Anyway, if you want to lift my Google Reader subscribers above 10,000, just add my RSS feed or my Atom feed. I’m in a multi-week blogging lull as I work on a non-webspam project at the Googleplex, but I’ll be blogging more in 3-4 weeks.

On Friday, Google Operating System noticed that Google Reader will tell you Google Reader subscriber numbers for a blog when you search to add a new feed. It didn’t take long for different folks to start collecting subscriber numbers for different blogs. I haven’t asked the Reader team about this, but it looks like this is just the counts for Google Reader subscribers. Before charging off to compute a bunch of stats, you should know a few things:

1. A blog can have multiple feeds, and you may want to add up the subscribers for the most important feeds.

For example, here are subscriber numbers for my blog:

I got that data by going to Google Reader, clicking on “Add subscription” and then searching for the string “mattcutts”. If you have a unique string in your domain name, that’s a good way to see the top feeds for your site.

I’ve used orange letters to highlight that I have a feed at FeedBurner, a MyBrand feed (served by FeedBurner, but with a CNAME from my domain so I control the feed with DNS), an Atom Feed, and an RSS feed. If you add all those up together, you get 9980 subscribers. So I’m 20 readers short of ten thousand Google Reader subscribers. By the way, I think that MyBrand is one of the least-used but greatest features from FeedBurner (which was acquired by Google earlier this year). With MyBrand, your feed is served by FeedBurner, but you keep the control of the feed url in case you decide to leave FeedBurner some day. The best write-up on MyBrand that I’ve seen is this tutorial by Danny Sullivan.

2. You may have more users than your top few feeds suggest.

Modern blogging software such as WordPress can generate lots of different feeds. For example, for any post on my blog, you can subscribe to a separate feed for the comments on that post. All those little feeds can add up, so you might have a lot more subscribers than even the top few feeds on your site suggest. Which leads me right to:

3. FeedBurner can aggregate all your different Google Reader subscribers into one number.

If you just want a nice summary number, or to see the breakdown of feed readers, I recommend FeedBurner. It’s free and gives you useful stats for any day you want. Here’s a recent Monday’s stats for my blog:

Of course, FeedBurner will only give you stats for your own site. That’s why everyone is having a good time looking at the Google Reader subscriber counts. Just remember that Google Reader subscriber stats will skew toward Google users. That’s probably why some Google-focused blogs do better in Google Reader’s stats when compared to some other metrics.

Just as an aside, how cool is it that on Firefox with the Google search box, if you start typing in math, the auto-suggest will give you the running answer as a suggestion — without even hitting return? Here’s what it looks like:

Nice.

Anyway, if you want to lift my Google Reader subscribers above 10,000, just add my RSS feed or my Atom feed. I’m in a multi-week blogging lull as I work on a non-webspam project at the Googleplex, but I’ll be blogging more in 3-4 weeks.

MySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks, according to sources speaking to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. If what Arrington is reporting is true (and it almost always is) then things are really changing at the industry leading social network. By this time next year you'll be getting spam from MySpace applications and be running to shut off your account altogether. If you feel embarrassed perusing the Facebook apps directory ("yes mom, these are my peers, this is the new frontier - let's send some 'booze mail!'"), you'll feel nauseas when you see the MySpace apps directory.

It was just one year ago last month that News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors that "if you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application...almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace." Chernin's statement was a hostile one, said in the context of the company blocking access to some third party widgets and shutting off outbound links that were key to viral spread of all widgets, for purported security purposes.

The company aimed instead to drive users towards its own photo, video and audio services. Those services are remarkably good compared to the 3rd party alternatives, and yet the debate raged on.

Tech bloggers, and TechCrunch in particular, kept a running tally of third party developers whose companies were shut down by threats from MySpace.

MySpace engaged in a huge battle with Photobucket over running ads on MySpace pages, ending in a large acquisition of Photobucket.

Now Arrington reports that rumor has it MySpace platform developers will be allowed to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.

What's This All About?

Does MySpace see the writing on the wall? If so, what does it say? I have said before and I'll say again that the rise of Facebook has been in spite of the opening of the Facebook platform, if anything. It's a result of the maturing demographics of social networking services, a backlash against the wretched user experience of the poorly designed and spam ridden MySpace and the power of syndication represented by the Facebook wall.

That wall functionality will be the most significant development that other companies take from Facebook. The open development platform may very well make a difference at Google, it could move the needle at LinkedIn (in a year when that platform launches) but it's very unlikely that it will be important at MySpace or anywhere else. As Kara Swisher wrote today, the vast majority of apps developed for the much-vaunted Facebook platform - including the most successful ones, are vapid wastes of time.

It's the newsfeed, clean site and well designed user experience of Facebook that really matters - and perhaps privacy. These platforms will just be the bush leagues for the real companies to watch features be developed before building the same things - as features, and they'll be ad networks for a handful of lowest-common-denominator, dust-weight apps. Arrington says the MySpace platform will require that apps built on it are hosted on the MySpace platform!

In other words, I don't expect a MySpace platform to account for a whole lot. If the "open platform on huge monolith's terms" meme ever has any meat on it, I don't expect it will be in the long-hostile quarters of MySpace.

TechMeme is brilliant.

It takes conversations that are buzzing around in private and surfaces them for everyone to participate in. Is it perfect? No, of course not. However, TechMeme's imperfection is just a magnifacantion of our own imperfections.

In the real world some folks get too much attention relative to their ideas, while others with great ideas sometimes get marginalized. The marginalization could be based on them not being popular, their inability to communicate, or any number of reasons--fair and unfair.

At a party you might have a large group of folks around someone listening to their stories for any number of reasons. Perhaps the person is great story teller or really intelligent. Perhaps they're rich or powerful, or maybe they're really good looking.

Is this fair to the ugly duckling in the corner of the room who has a good story to share that they are ignored? Of course not, but TechMeme releases so many of those biases that exist in the real world! Many of the folks on TechMeme have never meet each other.... in fact, many of the folks I know in the industry I found because of TechMeme.

On TechMeme anyone with a great idea can take the top of the homepage. What the haters don't realize (or like to forget for their own self-serving, self-loathing reasons) is that before Techmeme the only folks with a voice in technology were those with a print publication for the most part.

Smart cats like Walt Mossberg, John Markoff, John Battelle, Jason Pontin, and Steven Levy all had print publications that helped them set the agenda and tone for the entire industry. Great guys and friends of mine all, but they were part of small group of folks with a voice. I know, because I had one too in Silicon Alley Reporter (and I used it!).

TechMeme has leveled that playing field, and truth be told you don't find most of those names leading the conversations any more. How often does Markoff, Mossberg, or ANY long-term print journalist take over TechMeme? Hardly ever. In fact, no one really "takes over" TechMeme... it just keep chugging along, giving everyone their 15 minutes of fame (maybe six hours if something really catches heat).

In others words, TechMeme has given everyone a chance at the microphone when just ten years ago a dozen folks controlled it. Now, some folks take that chance and others don't. But to be sure, it's there for everyone to take.

How anyone could hate on a open system like TechMeme is beyond me. Does the leaderboard change the dynamic? Sure... it's not a good thing to get folks obsessed with moving up the list, and if the leaderboard does that Gabe should probably play it down. Maybe he could release it once a month (as opposed to in real time).

However, that's a small issue and Gabe is a smart and fair guy... in fact, he's kinda brilliant. He just keeps making Techmeme better and better while keeping it spam free. While Technorati and Blogger got clogged with spammers, TechMeme has none... that says a lot.

Now, the fact that I've had a top story *twice* in two weeks with my tiny little 10,000 person a day blog speaks volumes for the power of TechMeme. The fact that folks who you've never heard of before TechMeme get the top slot 10x more than I do is EVEN MORE TELLING.

So, next time you want to hate on TechMeme think about two things:

1. What life was like before we had TechMeme's meritocracy arrived.
   
2. How you could be on TechMeme at any point in the next 24 hours *IF* you have something intelligent to say.
   

To the haters of TechMeme I say: nothing. *





[ Note: If you're hater there is nothing anyone can say to make you stop being a hater. Haters are born and then haters die--but they don't change. It's in their DNA to hate and be bitter. It's their lot in life to be miserable. Their inner hate is, in fact, their self-imposed punishment. There is no reason for us add to it. ]

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

I'm at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose for the next two days. I'll be covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews on Read/WriteTalk. This morning Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & CEO of SocialMedia.com, gave a presentation etitled Appvertising: The Future of Social Advertising. I also sat down with Seth after his presentation and recorded a quick interview for Read/WriteTalk.

Seth Goldstein is a serial entrepreneur, who has been in the Internet business since 1995 - when he created SiteSpecific, one of the early Internet advertising agencies. Seth was also a Co-Founder of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit group that explores and explains many of the issues around the attention economy. (For more information on the Attention Economy, check out our coverage here). He also helped start a company called Root Markets, that focused on commercializing many of the Attention Trust themes.

Seth's slides are available on SlideShare and embedded at the end of this post. The issue I want to focus on in this post is his vision for SocialMedia.com, which Seth described as an 'app network'. The slide below explains:

At this level, it is tempting to describe SocialMedia as 'Yet Another Facebook Ad Network'. After all, this is a very risky business due to the rumors that Facebook will create their own ad network. Seth had a great response to those concerns, drawing an analogy to FeedBurner - who he said is a "hero" for him. FeedBurner remember started up with no proprietary advantage or secret sauce to compete with Yahoo! and Google. Despite that, Goldstein credits Dick Costello with having a "clear vision for what he wanted to do with FeedBurner." The Feedburner team kept innovating and understanding their customers better than the big companies; ultimately creating something very creative and valuable.

Next Step in Attention Economy?

So what is Seth's creative vision as an analog to Dick's vision for FeedBurner? I think it ties back to his Attention Trust work. So in my interview, I asked Seth how SocialMedia related to his past work with Attention Trust. He responded:

"Attention Trust is a non-profit, so there is really no connection between commercial things that I or anyone else might pursue. At the same time, I'm one person I'm one person ... I think what ties a lot of my recent experience together is the way in which consumer data is seen as something expressive not something passive. And so the takeaway here is when you click on something, search for something, fill out a form, leave a trail of websites that you have visited. All of that in one regard is a passive residue of your historical behavior. But increasingly, web technologies and tools are enabling publishers and I hope increasingly individuals themselves to turn that data back into real end-user benefit. Whether that be personalized recommendations, better targeting things like that that really benefit and leverage that historical data. That is really where the attention data hits the pavement and we get some really good traction. Where I have been focused recently in terms of SocialMedia is trying to capture all of this user generated content and user generated response to create forms of advertising and other engagement tools to create better and more sustainable applications on the social media architecture."

Conclusion

I don't know if SocialMedia will ultimately be successful or not. It's early and this space is very crowded with players like VideoEgg, RockYou and App Fuel. Plus, as we already mentioned, Facebook is rumored to be creating their own ad network. I find the analogy to FeedBurner compelling - but it remains to be seen if Seth's vision will be enough to drive market innovation (as FeedBurner did).

Here are all of Seth's slides from his presentation today:

Note: Seth Goldstein photo credit B D Solis Flickr

TechCrunch has the scoop on a big new feature launching tomorrow evening at the tech-blog meme aggregator Techmeme (minus buzz words, it's a news tracking site). The new Techmeme leaderboard will list the top 100 blogs that have appeared as headline links on Techmeme over the past 30 days. The page will be at http://techmeme.com/lb, which is currently password protected. In a preview image, posted below, TechCrunch was the top blog on Techmeme last month and Read/WriteWeb was #6.

We're in great company on that list, and it looks better than the Technorati 100, where we're now at #22 - but this Techmeme leaderboard will face some criticism as well. I love Techmeme, I've checked it multiple times an hour since it launched in 2005, but below are my thoughts on this leaderboard.

Who's on Techmeme?

Many people wrongly believe that the blogs that appear on Techmeme are hand picked by site creator Gabe Rivera. In fact, after an initial seeding of the index when the site launched in 2005, Rivera only touches the content on the site to fix problems that arise. Blogs are added to the Techmeme index, more or less, by being linked-to by other blogs that are already indexed by Techmeme. It's not a perfect system, but it's not nearly as closed as many critics allege.

That said, it is a black box. No one knows for sure how the stories are selected and ranked on Techmeme. That's both a strength and a weakness. No black box ranking system will ever serve all ranking needs in any industry.

Techmeme vs. Technorati

Michael Arrington said tonight that the new leaderboard means that blog search engine Technorati no longer has a leg to stand on, because the Technorati 100 was the company's last important differentiating feature.

I disagree. This Techmeme leaderboard cannot replace Technorati. Even if the Technorati 100, the list of the most linked-to blogs on the web, does suffer from spam as Michael Arrington asserts - the solution is simple. Just as Ask.com displays blogsearch results only from blogs that have a certain number of subscribers in the company's feed reader, Bloglines, so too Technorati can find a simple way to vet the quality of the links it's counting.

More importantly, Technorati offers a topical blog index that's useful outside of the limited subject matter covered by Techmeme and its off-shoots Memeorandum, WeSmirch and BallBug. Want to know who the most linked-to blogs about real estate are? About knitting? Technorati offers a valuable, if very imperfect, answer to questions like that. Just visit a URL like http://www.technorati.com/blogs/knitting

Techmeme and industry leadership

An appearance on Techmeme will drive many bloggers' traffic through the roof. For a big news blog, though, showing up on Techmeme isn't about traffic. Read/WriteWeb gets more traffic than Techmeme, for example, but not nearly as much as Digg. Digg is a traffic driver. Techmeme is about link-respect from blogging peers.

That's a fine thing to measure in 30 day increments, but it's also important to acknowledge that not all blogs are equal in Techmeme. It is a black box, but it certainly appears that some big blogs carry a whole lot more weight than others. If my personal blog links to some one else's blog post, that post will not be shot onto Techmeme. If TechCrunch, Engadget or Read/WriteWeb link to some one's blog post, the journey for that blog post to make it to Techmeme is going to be a whole lot shorter.

The threshold for some blogs to make it onto Techmeme is much lower than it is for most others. That means that this metric of headline leadership over 30 days may be a self-perpetuating matter. You were on Techmeme a lot because you're on Techmeme a lot. Arrington says the list will change frequently because of the 30 day intervals - but we'll see. The Technorati 100 only counts inbound links from the past 6 months, but when the top of the top changes on that list it's big, big news. That list doesn't change very much and I'll be interested to see how much the Techmeme leaderboard changes.

What about the rest of the world?

Other questions that should be asked include the following:

What does this mean for the rest of the world outside of the US? Techmeme is barely a global phenomenon; it crawls to near halt outside of the blogging hours of the United States. The Technorati 100, on the other hand, includes scores of blogs that aren't even written in English - but have massive readership.

A list based on reciprocal links isn't a complete list. Gender and other biases, different blogging subcultures and any number of other factors make a Techmeme-type leaderboard inevitably limited in its scope. I think Gabe Rivera acknowledges that. When I asked him just what he aimed to do with the leaderboard, he said:

"Well, it's designed primarily to identify Techmeme's most frequent sources, a much-requested feature. Techmeme focuses on the tech industry, so indeed, you won't be able to pit GigaOM vs. Perez Hilton using the Techmeme leaderboard. I betting that's OK with Techmeme readers."

I also asked him how the leaderboard could compete with Mahalo and he admitted that there was no stopping Mahalo, but that's another story.

That's just fine, there's not too much harm in the limits of the site's scope - though another standard of leadership that's dominated by white men in the US is not really what the world needs, in my opinion. We'll still aim to climb higher and higher on the Techmeme leaderboard - but there's plenty of room for other standards of measurement in leadership, in as much as that's even necessary.

There are big changes underway over at MSN Video, some of which represent a real look forward for the industry. It's hard to believe, and it isn't pretty, but this is a site you've got to check out. The site's design, full screen player and advertising model are big.

Time on Site

The big news at MSN Video is that the site has embraced a "Time on Site" traffic metric that's sure to represent the future of advertising. Neilsen announced this summer that they are replacing page views with time on site as the primary web traffic metric. It's widely acknowledged that AJAX and online video are making pageviews less and less relevant all the time. While other sites (like YouTube and MySpace) keep pumping out the pageviews and trying to figure out how to best run ads - this new MSN Video site has hit on a formula that will likely represent the video portal of the future: AJAX powered video playlists, including recommended videos, that do not require new pageloads and are monetized by time-based advertising. You could spend hours watching a playlist of videos from a variety of sources on MSN Video without ever loading a new page.

There's a really nice multi-video full-screen player, too. Viewers can even edit their playlists from inside the full-screen view. As an interesting aside, reader Mike Kowalchik notes in comments here that the video is all in Adobe's Flash, not Microsoft's new SilverLight format.

How the Ads Work

Visitors to MSN Video now see a pre-roll ad before their playlist of videos and then are shown another ad at most once every 3 minutes, regardless of the number of videos they have watched. It's much better than standard pre-rolls and sure to be more effective than post-roll ads.

The fact that the pre-rolls are unskippable needs to change, and 3 minutes still seems awfully frequent for ads - but the point is that this is advertising no longer tied to pageviews. You can't currently embed live players off-site, the site's aesthetics are MSN-ugly, and MSN itself is supposed to be a deprecated brand in favor of Live.com . Regardless of all that, check out the new MSN Video. It represents the future of these increasingly important types of sites.