Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

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Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS  is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use Wordpress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

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NY Times writes that teens don’t dominate the Twitter-sphere, thus proving that kids don’t always drive innovation.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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I’ve long been an anti-fanboy of online video, for some reasons that I already mentioned. As such, I did not expect a strong response on my recent request for collaborative video recording ideas. Similarly, other efforts at discussing online video production, a topic that I personally find interesting, on Friendfeed and with friends, have been met with little enthusiasm.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ‘08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

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In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What is the problem? How about: finding the inspiration, not getting (m)any comments, balancing it with your actual job, etc. etc. Also, the baby eventually grows up, you eventually return from your trip, and there’s only so much to say about self-help (in my opinion).

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned.  Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

• The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
• The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits  of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
• The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
• The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
• The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
• The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

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On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

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I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

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OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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After reading this Techcrunch intro, I just joined Blellow today. While I’m not much of a bandwagon guy, as far as social networks are concerned, there are a couple of reasons, which I vocalised on this blog, why I dig the idea of this social network.

A short history of my adoption of social networks

When I started coming on Twitter, I was excited about creating a Hive Mind. What attracts me about the internet, blogging on Tech IT Easy, and social networking, is that it can be similar to forming neural connections between smart nodes, much like in your head. Twitter didn’t deliver much on that promise so far, however, because, even though there are a heck of a lot of smart people on the service, it’s very difficult to manage that data, let alone make it useful.

Friendfeed is another service I use and have written about. Two things that attract me about it: Friendlists, which allow me to segment my interests and social circles. For instance, I have a Tech IT Easy friendlist where I just see all the Tech IT Easy bloggers and their twitter-updates—many of you probably didn’t know that—allowing me to keep up to date, at a glance, on what these smart guys are up to in their lives.

What I also like about FriendFeed is their rooms, which allow me to focus on specific content like apps, and ask questions to an audience interested in that same content. The downside: there is no real working index for rooms, you just have to do a dedicated site-search on Google , I guess.

Let’s get to Blellow!

The service isn’t on the same maturity level as Twitter of Friendfeed yet, which is also partially why I’m asking you to join me. For instance, I cannot yet search for friends whose email-address I have (and I also hope they add searching for Twitter-contacts, like FriendFeed has). Following is a short commercial, which you will have also have seen on Techcrunch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTV6fCo92xI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

What Bellow does is the following:

• Instead of joining a stream of content, which grows exponentially with more users, you can just focus on groups that specialise on content like SXSW 2009, Apple, B2B marketing, Photoshop, etc., etc., you get the idea.
• You can create private streams between a select group of people, sort of a private IRC channel, if you will.
• When you create your profile, you have to add a lot of info about yourself, hypothetically allowing people to search for keywords and finding a kindred soul. The video shows a freelance flash developer searching for other developers on Bellow and getting the advice she needs.
• Other things it also allows, but which are underdeveloped, is search for jobs and projects. Sort of like e-lance, with the added benefit that you get to see what people say before you hire them.
• Meetups are another feature, but are, as usual, focussed on the US only, leaving us “old-country” Europeans in the dark.

That’s it! A short review of the first 30 min., I spent there. But hopefully I get to see some familiar faces soon!

Vincent

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I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my Mac.

The list:

• Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
• FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
• Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
• Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
• Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
• Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
• Wordpress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
• Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
• Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
• Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
• I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

• Last.fm and favtape.com for music
• Tinyurl for rickrollling people
• Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
• Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
• Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
• Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
• Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
• Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

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Looked at two new (for me) search-engines this week, Cuil (pronounced cool) and Keyboardr. Keyboardr is a geek-project and, like Mac’s Quicksilver, is all about navigating via a keyboard. Cuil, which I had heard of before, I was made re-aware of by a recent Stanford entrepreneurial thought leaders podcast, in which its creation and the theory behind it was discussed. I liked the idea of approaching search as a visual placement problem, as that is how humans (in my opinion) often judge information. Still, I didn’t think that Cuil was particularly innovative, from a GUI perspective. Even so, all interesting projects, as is Mahalo—human powered search.

What remains clear is Google will continue to be the thought-leader in this field, not because it is a better search, but because it is so integrated with the web.

What I’m thinking about is how search can be improved to become useful for human beings, rather than search-engine optimised websites, and the key to that seems to me to be presenting information in the right way for the right person.

Take Java tutorials, which I was looking for last week and where my priority was to find a. the right tutorial for my beginner-level and b. be taught by a good teacher. Two elements that matter here are level and quality, of which the first is easy to search for—just insert ‘beginner’—but the latter is currently being solved by Google as follows: the more it is linked too, the better it must be, which also makes sense. But it does ignore an element, discussed in the Stanford podcast, which is that unknown teachers can both be bad, but also exceptionally good.

Education online is different from education offline. The latter, if good, will be very popular, but interested people will run into a physical constraint—only so many students fit in that building. Online education, if good, will also be very popular but not have the same physical constraints, though possibly imposed price-based ones. But since we are talking good old open source Java, let us assume that price is not a factor. If everyone picks the most linked tutorial, which is also of good quality, it means that everyone potentially ends up with the same knowledge. The commoditisation of code.

But how do you produce exceptional Java-coders? These are arguably all people that walked the extra mile, either through inner potential and/or through environmental factors, such as an exceptional teacher. There’s another factor, which is that diversity can also breed innovation, by exposing people to a wide variety of ideas and perspectives, again made possibly by people working with a wide variety of tutors. Still talking Java here, but it could be applied to anything.

Search, in other words, promotes mediocrity, by leading people to pick the most common denominator, the top-result, rather than across the wideband of possible results, made possibly by the widely hyped up “long-tailed” nature of the internet.

And that is one problem that search is currently facing. How this is solved, is possibly a GUI solution, by presenting results in the right way and right variety. It could also be a human solution, such the one used by Mahalo. It could be a user-generated solution, using social-based variables through sites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, now LinkedIN, and something that Google is also implementing (badly, I hear). It could be a technological solution, something Cuil is also working on… etc. etc.

One thing is certain, that Keyboardr, no matter how geeky and cool, won’t exactly solve this problem

Vincent

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Zee (no last name) from WeDoCreative has set up some of of the most interesting (and popular) rooms on FriendFeed, including The Apple Room, Startup Success, and Apps. I think you should subscribe to all of them, but I recently started browsing Apps and am happily surprised at the constant inflow of cool apps.

I’ve written about Rooms before on Tech IT Easy, I think it’s a great way to focus on specific areas that you are interested in, and it works great in areas like Software, as new apps and updates are constantly being released. The App-room is living proof! So, don’t wait and check it out!

Vincent

P.S. Listening to www.favtapes.com, while writing this, which I discovered through Apps.

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Some time ago, I promised to stop writing about social networking, except if there is some tangible data involved. Well, I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now, FriendFeed for a few months, and a new service, called Qwitter, for a few weeks. Qwitter’s raison d’être is the topic of the day today.

What Qwitter does is tell you when people stop following you on Twitter. I fear that many people won’t be interested in using it, as there is a natural bias towards the positive. And Qwitter’s core-business is providing you with negative news.

Still, I saw my follower-numbers (currently at ca. 120) going up and down regularly, and I was curious about why this is happening. And the answer is pretty simple:

What Qwitter does is send you a mail-message with the name of the person “qwitting” you, as well as the message that may (or may not) have been the instigator. So far, I received 8 of these, with one person unsubscribing from me three times (!), and one celebrity unsubscribing from me, Guy Kawasaki.

The one that “got away”

Why do I say that people unfollow me, because I don’t follow them? I think the data says a lot.

• Subject 1, let’s call him J., follows 2,447 and is followed by 2,393. He unsubscribed from me, when I said: “@ksilvennoinen welcome back to the internet!“
• Subject 2, let’s call him G. (has been trying to subscribe to my LinkedIN and Facebook as well, btw. He follows 1,868 and is followed by 1,132. The Twitter-message: “P.S. to my blogpost: 2nd Antarctic explorer turned public speaker that I’ve heard. Superb motivational speakers. Living life 2 Xtreme rocks!”
• Subject 3, let’s call him R., follows 2,225 and is followed by 2,106. The Twitter-message: same as above.
• Subject 4, let’s call him J3. (the guy who unsubscribed 3 times), follows 219 and is followed by 331. The Twitter message: “sipping Bacardi and writing a presentation for tomorrow.“
• Subject 5, let’s call him M., follows 1,611 and is followed by 1,482. The Twitter message: “Today, German shepherds with machine guns on their backs killed me 34 times. Guess what game I played?“
• And, the cream of the crop, the Alltop-guy, Guy Kawasaki……… follows 24,104 and is followed by 24,058. The Twitter-message: “I long for the day where the letters PeeCee stand for P**sEasy (no joke).“

Now, you may notice three things. One, that my Twitter-messages are pretty entertaining… Two, that most of these guys follow a lot of people. And three, that there is nearly perfect parity between their followers and who they follow.

What is your problem?

“What is your problem?” you might ask. “Following back is only polite.” I agree to an extent, and I appreciate if people follow me back. But I don’t expect it! For one, why do I use Twitter? To keep track of things, like my friends and news-items. Some pretty interesting links come across my screen every once in a while. If I need to talk to people, I’ll say stuff, but those people I want to talk to, I have their email-address. Talking on Twitter is not my motivation.

The other side of the coin is that if someone follows 24,000 people and you are 24,001, you get a very tiny portion of the attention that you deserve as an individual. It’s nearly the same as saying as “I don’t really follow you at all.” Imagine what that person’s screen must look like? 3-4-10 messages per second? So, I don’t, on principle, follow anyone that is following more than let’s say 200 people… Unless they actually say something meaningful as well.

Many people who follow 1000s though are a. in social media/marketing, which automatically makes them less interesting to me (because there are just so many of them), and b. respond to so many people that I find it very hard to judge the quality of their “original thinking” by looking at their Twitter-feed.

Why do I write this post?

Because I want to make people aware that if you do follow me, please don’t expect me to follow back automatically. And if you want to get my attention, a good start is to *talk to me,* you know, use the @-symbol!? And third, if possible, make the content original. There’s so many social media marketeers out there, it’s not even funny. Be original, be fun, talk to me, I’ll be there.

The irony of it is, do I really expect someone that treats their Twitter-follows & followers with so little respect to read my blogpost?

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I only have a second to write this. Recently ReadWriteWeb asked about what Twitter’s business-model is. More recently, a rumour came about that Twitter will start monetizing in 2009, shortly after the company saw a CEO-change.

In a discussion about the RRW-article on FriendFeed, I wrote the following:

The real value of Twitter for companies and their customers is that they get instant feedback on their products and vice versa. I just have to say one bad thing about a brand, and I get a rep talking to me about it (from Skype to 37signals). It’s like Getsatisfaction, except distributed. Ironically, twitter-search made that happen.

Could this be a key-factor in how Twitter will try to make money? And, if so, are there comparable metrics that could give an indication as to the company’s value? I’m thinking that with Twitter’s reliance on search-results, perhaps a comparison could be made with Google’s early business-model?

What do you think?

Vincent

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Just tried the FriendFeed beta, which was released to the public last night. It introduces some nice features, the main one being that you can now categorise your “friends” into lists. The thing is that the more both FriendFeed and Facebook evolve, the less I can tell them apart anymore.

Some differences are the app-ecosystem on Facebook and the amount of feeds you can feed to FriendFeed (though I think some apps take care of that). And maybe FriendFeed will eventually integrate apps as well, who knows?

The thing is that I don’t mind. FriendFeed is my way of staying in touch with the countless people that have something to say online. It’s unrestricted. Facebook is about the people that I want to have strong ties with, and I purposely don’t add people that I don’t know. So both can definitely co-exist as far as I’m concerned.

But that doesn’t take away that we essentially have a clone on our hands, and it’s a good thing that patents on the internet are apparently not worth squat anymore.

Vincent

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