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Google's Open Tools and APIs Make Buzz Hum

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:35:03 PST

The debut of Google's new social venture, Buzz, came with all the subtlety of a freight train. Like a freight train, you could hear the rumbling of Buzz as its launch approached, fueled by the vast array of open social tools that the company has been championing over the last few years, and a number of key hires that show Mountain View's commitment to making users' data portable and non-siloed, in visible contrast to alternative networks, most notably Facebook, who has made it notoriously difficult to export data in its six year history.

Though clearly a 1.0 version product today, Buzz is primed for significant improvement in the next several months, which will be driven by data measured within Google, gathering users' feedback - as they no doubt will be demanding the ability to share updates to downstream services, the introduction of an enterprise version, limited by domain, and other enhancements. But from the beginning, Buzz is built to be open.

"We are committed to open standards, and we want to build a non-siloed product at every turn," said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at Google on Monday. "You will see us take all these open standards, like Pubsubhubbub, Webfinger, Salmon, and use this as a vehicle to demonstrate to the world what it means to use them."

Buzz also fits in nicely with the Social Graph API being worked on by data portability pusher Brad Fitzpatrick, which also powers your Google Social Circle. While the social circle learns how many direct contacts you have in Google chat, and finds other connections through registered links, Buzz tracks your most frequent connections by e-mail and chat within Gmail, taking a step further and surfacing active "friend of a friend" content, should it be deemed relevant.

"Social media today is a fiefdom of friends," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google on Monday. "We believe your updates will go where you want them to. We are going to work hard to enable that."

Of note, despite the highly visible business development relationship forged by Google with Twitter to power the company's real-time search, Buzz simply taps Twitter's standard API to gain access to users' updates, and it is expected this access will be sufficient.

Google Buzz Mobile Moves Beyond Latitude/Longitude

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:00:01 PST

In addition to the morning's news that Google had launched Buzz as a major social push for Gmail, the company, in parallel, announced a new Web application for mobile devices, supporting both Android and iPhone platforms, that not only brings Buzz to the mobile phone, but also adds Buzz to the company's existing Maps application, showing Buzz from activity in your specific location. Leveraging the years of investments in Google Earth, Google Maps, Google StreetView and other location-based services, Google Buzz immediately ships with an advantage - determining the true identity of a location, beyond simple longitude and latitude coordinates.

As the much-hyped Foursquare and Gowalla applications have shown us over the last year, an individual's location is often as relevant as whatever activity is taking place. Google Buzz for mobile taps into the vast Earth, Maps and Street View database the company has been building over the last half-decade, and lets you post to Buzz with your update attached to the place where you are located, not just with a latitude/longitude coordinate, or even worse, an IP address.

"In the digital world, few have gotten this right," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google on Monday. "We don't want latitude/longitude, we want the colloquial term. We have solved this problem, of a conversation in a world of places, and mobile phones make it possible."

As Gundotra demoed to me at Google headquarters Monday on his Android-powered Google Nexus One handset, speaking into the phone made an automatic transcription, which could be posted to his Buzz, attached to the location he had selected. Tapping into Google's deep archives about places, establishments feature images of the location, details about that location, and relevant data, such as restaurant reviews, if applicable.

By selecting the "Nearby" option in his Buzz-enabled Maps application, Gundotra could also see what people were Buzzing about in the surrounding area.

The move to add geolocation is one trend that is growing for mobile applications and Twitter clients, although not many Twitter users have enabled such data sharing. If they do, and they pull their Tweets into Buzz, the product doesn't yet pull in that information to Mobile Maps, but it soon will, Gundotra promised.

Google's Newest Mission: Organizing the Social Experience

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:30:00 PST

With today's introduction of Google Buzz, you are going to see a lot of reactions and news stories that say Google is trying to "kill" competition, including Twitter and Facebook. Given the company's hit and miss track record on introducing or cultivating products with social elements, it is no surprise that Google's introduction of Buzz can be viewed by some with a level of skepticism, or distrust, as the Mountain View company extends its reach on the Web. But in discussions I had with members of Google's team behind the new venture on Monday, it wasn't the squelching of competition they were looking for by debuting Buzz, but instead, extending the company's core mission: discovering and organizing the world's information - one that now includes social.

As Bradley Horowitz, one of Google's vice presidents of product management, recounted to me Monday, the history of Web search evolved from Yahoo!'s hand-driven approach to algorithmic search, powered by the likes of AltaVista, Lycos, Excite and others, until Google changed the game with a new approach, a "better" experience, helping propel them to the position they are in today, far and away the market share leader in search.

The company, largely on the outside looking in to much of the world's social content creation and sharing over the last few years, seeing smaller startups dominate the spotlight, determined they needed to approach the problem of social in a similar way as they had search, "embracing this new vector and phenomena of people sharing" into search and many of their products. Some of the reasons behind the move mirrored the same reasons that drove Google's inception - including complexity and a lack of tools that help determine relevancy.

"In the same way manual search broke down, social has broken down," Horowitz said. "When I had fifty friends, I could mine the stream, but as I have 500 or 5,000 friends, that breaks down, and the concept of who is a 'friend' has expanded by several orders of magnitude. It's a mishmash of information and it's no longer fun to dip into that. It has become a Google scale problem."

As anybody following a few thousand connections on Twitter or other networks can attest, updates can range from the sublime to the ridiculous, with each update being provided equal weight, and chronology typically being the only measure. To a data-driven company like Google, this "mismash" provides an opportunity to determine relevancy and bring the same clarity the company once brought to search to the world of social.

Buzz is Google's first major step to start ranking relevance, surfacing the data most important to you as an individual. A preview of Buzz's functionality was also teased in Google Reader's "Magic" capability, which debuted in October of last year, as well as the program's recommendations feature, also part of Buzz.

So how can Google determine relevancy with Buzz and start making sense of the social? Starting with GMail gives the company a major headstart, as they already know which contacts you trade e-mail with most often. They know how often you read e-mail from specific people, who you chat with most frequently by using the integrated GTalk feature, and they will often have data from you that provides your location, helping to tap that metric as well.

"A big part of what makes information relevant and useful is viewing the lens through personal relationships," Horowitz added.

You can see the steps Google is taking to start categorizing the social experience, with your personal profiles, your social circles, social search and now Buzz. It might be assumed they are playing catch up, but the company is, as it has in its history, with the additions of images, video, books and many other focuses for search and information, is extending its reach to become even more human, and to better understand just who you know, what you like and what you share.

How Google Buzz Validates but Marginalizes FriendFeed

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:34:59 PST

When FriendFeed debuted on the scene in late 2007, it was one of the simplest ways to aggregate all of my updates from the social outposts I have all over the Web, see friends' updates and have a discussion around their shared items. Now part of Facebook, the product continues to have an extremely loyal, albeit relatively small, community, who embraced the technology and made it a platform for social interaction. The site, which was among the pioneers of real-time streams and the surfacing of popular items, has seen its technology mimicked and imitated by many, but its complexity helped to reduce its total impact, contrasted with single-purpose sites like Twitter. Today's Buzz announcement from Google brings many of the things that made FriendFeed great to a new, more mainstream, audience.

At the beginning of 2009, I wrote a provocative list of things I hoped FriendFeed could do to grow and keep new users. Chief among these hopes was the first point: "FriendFeed Must Have a Lite Version for New Users". While FriendFeed's support of fifty-plus social services was great for a power user like me, the sheer noise on the service, exacerbated by constant updates from likes and comments, could be a serious challenge. At the time, I suggested this "Lite" version should feature "blog postings, Flickr photos, and native FriendFeed entries", with additional services being opt-in, not opt out. It didn't happen.

Fast forward a year, and you see Google launching Buzz, in combination with Gmail and other services, with integrated support for a few services, namely: Flickr, Picasa, Twitter and Google Reader. You can share YouTube videos and direct links as well, but gone is the wide array of one-off services. And the immediacy of sharing in Buzz couldn't be more simple, with integrated high quality photos and video in line. Buzz, in effect, is what I hoped FriendFeed Lite would have been to a large degree, even if it means using that service will require my rebuilding the social network in a new place.

In this new world, as I mentioned when I talked about how aggregation sites are not becoming the traffic leaders, contrasted with single-use social networks, the need for a dedicated aggregation site, like a FriendFeed, Cliqset or Arktan, is largely being eroded by the adoption of similar functionality by companies including Facebook and Google.

While I may have turned to a site like FriendFeed previously to aggregate all my data in one place, and find updates from others, Google Buzz brings the same benefits to a centralized location where people are already engaging - their GMail, on Google.com, and in their mobile handsets.

As I was more than happy to share frequently through this blog and on other networks, FriendFeed made sense to me and continues to be among the most polished and versatile networks on the Web. I have even said I would use the site if I were the last one to do so. But I believe people are looking to consolidate the number of properties in which they engage online with friends, and they may flock to Google Buzz in the same way they have flocked to other sites like Facebook and Twitter.

If FriendFeed were to debut in a world where Google Buzz and Facebook already existed in their current incarnations, there would not have been much hope or need. FriendFeed, alongside other products, helped pioneer many of the features that you see today in Buzz, including the aggregation of content from social sites, and integrated likes and comments. There is no question the Google team had a high level of respect for what FriendFeed was doing, and Google employees, current and former, were among the most visible, active, users. Now, they have brought the best elements of FriendFeed into Google, validating the promise of what FriendFeed was and could be, but further reducing the need for a site like FriendFeed.com.

In April of 2009, MG Siegler of TechCrunch said that you would be using FriendFeed in the future, only it might be called Facebook. Now, in 2010, it again is true. You could be using FriendFeed in the future, but it will be called Buzz.

Google's Buzz Brings Social Sharing, Aggregation to GMail

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:11:13 PST

Google's growth from its roots as a spartan, but highly effective, search engine has been as transformative as the changes the Web itself has seen over the last decade-plus. As the Web has evolved to include more rich media and social connectors, so too has Google evolved, as the company now operates not just the most popular data discovery engine but also some of the Web's most popular data creation and sharing engines, including Gmail and YouTube. But the company, so far, has struggled a bit in connecting its wide array of properties and making them feel personal and social. Today, with the launch of Google Buzz, the company aims to change that, making Gmail, and its sister sites, including Google.com and Google Maps, new places to share information of all types, with your friends.

Google Buzz is more than just another status updater. The world has seen plenty of those already. What Buzz aims to do is help Gmail users share content with connected friends, extending the popular messaging platform further from its roots, to a high quality multi-media social experience. And lest anybody fear that Buzz has Twitter in its sights, Twitter is supported from day one, so your updates can feed into Buzz and be part of the conversation.

Google Buzz Connects You to Friends and Followers

Starting today, all Gmail users can see the Buzz icon just below their Inbox. Clicking the Buzz icon places you in a familiar-looking aggregator, where you are immediately connected to those people you e-mail and chat with the most frequently in Gmail, giving you an instant start to a new social network. Within Buzz, you can share text, or more importantly, videos, photos and links - taking the product beyond Twitter and into FriendFeed territory. (Now also Facebook territory)

Add Social Services to Buzz

For veteran FriendFeeders, the look and feel of Buzz is an extremely familiar one. Every Buzz entry features the option to comment or like it, and shared items can be toggled from public to private, meaning Google can start indexing the shares into its search engine, or ignore them outright.

At launch, Buzz supports a few major services, including Google Reader, Flickr, Picasa and Twitter. Unlike many other aggregators we have covered in the last few years, Buzz isn't looking to pull in all links from dozens of different social sites, but instead, aims to make the act of sharing more commonplace for the mainstream.

Photos Shared On Buzz With Likes, Comments

Some of Buzz's main attributes include the product's attention to detail. Photos shared in Buzz are very high quality and can be viewed quickly. YouTube video shares play in line, and interestingly, links that are shared as status updates give the option to share any images from the page, much like FriendFeed's bookmarklet - only without the need for the user to install any JavaScript code on the browser.

Recommended Content from Buzz From a Friend of a Friend

Additionally, thanks to Buzz being partnered with Gmail, the e-mail in box is hardly the second cousin to the social experience, as it is with many other networks. Rather than simply being a repository for follower notifications and daily summaries, Buzz messages in your in box are live conversations, which are updated in real time with comments from friends as they flow in. You can get notifications to your in box when there are comments on your items, when others comment in conversations where you have been active, and when people send conversations to you through an @Reply feature, which autocompletes in Gmail.

In a conversation I had with the team behind Buzz on Monday at Google's headquarters, the developers said they focused on five major elements of Buzz:

1. Auto following, which prevents you from starting a network by scratch.
2. A rich and fast sharing experience.
3. Public and private sharing to mark individual posts or global settings.
4. Inbox integration.
5. Just the good stuff.

So what is the good stuff? Google wants to avoid the problems that have befallen other networks, which can be overrun with irrelevant, nonsensical updates, often from people you don't know. Buzz looks to surface content from those best connected to you, and will lower the visibility of inactive items. More active items, receiving comments, will bump to the top while others sink.

Embedded YouTube In Google Buzz Plays In Line

At the end of 2009, I aired my thoughts about how aggregation has thus far failed to set the world ablaze, with sites like FriendFeed, Cliqset, Arktan and others yielding comparatively lower user numbers than more simplified offerings. One of the major reasons for this, in my opinion, has been the need for a dedicated, or new, social network to follow. An advantage Buzz has in this case is that many millions of people are already using Gmail for their e-mail and many more use the company's contacts, maps, RSS reader and search software.

Buzz is a first major step in making Google more social, and setting up ways for users to share their external content with friends. It's not looking to kill other services, but to make these services available in a new place.

FriendFeed Updates for 2010-02-08

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

EdgeTheory: The Battle for Real-Time Reporting, Curation

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:56:41 PST

The issue of real-time news reporting and curation is becoming increasingly visible and important as news breaks on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties. Tonight, Chris Saad and I talked about how the mainstream media can adapt to involve content curation in addition to their content creation, and how it still makes sense to have some investigative reporting in addition to real-time reactions.

The discussion weaved from curation tools like Cascaad and my6sense to the recent news of Teens In Tech Networks CEO Daniel Brusilovsky leaving TechCrunch, and how the news was interpreted.

Original Post Here: ET Conversations

Listen in below:

Disclosures: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. In addition, I am an advisor to Teens In Tech Networks.

FriendFeed Updates for 2010-02-07

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Tweets for 2010-02-07

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Cascaad Taps Social Graph for Tailored News

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:22:26 PST

In the world of custom news applications that look to provide you personalized content, there are a growing number of contenders using different methods to filter the "best" from the "rest". Some, like Techmeme, utilize editorial directive in picking the top stories to present. Others, such as Tweetmeme and Digg, use popularity as that method. my6sense watches your own activity and customizes it for you. Meehive, Regator and others show content based on topics you have selected. Cascaad, a new entrant, takes a different approach, leveraging your personal social graph, suggesting to you the stories your friends have found valuable. It also shows you news by category, both on your iPhone and on their Web site.

Like many other social applications, Cascaad asks you to connect using Twitter OAuth or Facebook Connect. Cascaad then pulls in recent links shared by friends, and aims to find popular items that are gaining conversation (tracked by Twitter replies, for instance), or groups them by keyword.

One Popular Cascaad Item and Related Conversation

Items flow in from the top, like a cascading waterfall, similar to Lazyfeed's new approach, and leading to Cascaad's name. You can click any item and make a response, or "like" the item with a simple thumbs up. You can also share the messages by e-mail or on Twitter and Facebook.

Cascaad Channels and News In Focus

Cascaad's power, aside from bringing shared links from friends, is in the channels section, coming preinstalled with a number of topical channels, while also letting you create your own. Cascaad bundles channels from top topics like News, Business, Tech, Sports and Entertainment. With the addition of a few keywords, such as "Apple iPad" or "Super Bowl", you can make your own personalized channel that taps your social streams to show you related links, and who originated those links. You can also search the real time stream and show shared links on Cascaad.

Cascaad Custom Channels and Search

Cascaad says you can train the application to improve filters, based on those items you like, much as my6sense's digital intuition creates a tailored stream. Thus far, I haven't seen a dramatic personalization from the product, as I did with my6sense, but it may come with more use. Cascaad's benefits largely lie in the ability to see conversations from Twitter, connecting initial links with nested replies, and in being able to filter the real-time conversations by topic.

You can try Cascaad on the Web at http://cascaad.com/, or on the iPhone by downloading free from the iTunes store. I have also embedded a video from Robert Scoble interviewing Cascaad founder Erik Lumer below:

Disclosures: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. In addition, I have previously done work for Kosmix.com, creator of MeeHive. My comments on the companies' products are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Twitter Trip-up Triples Tweet Tallies

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:46:20 PST

Over the last ten days, many Twitter users have found the total counts listed by their profile off by as much as three times. While the focus of the popular microblogging service is around the conversations and links, statistics and numbers continue to draw attention, so such a massive change has people asking questions. Meanwhile, the company's help forum shows the bug was initially a low priority issue, anticipated to only impact a few users, since found to be much more widespread.

The team is working on it, and expects it to be resolved "relatively soon", with the latest update posted Friday, February 5th.

Orli Yakuel Was Hit By the Latest Bug

The issue does not impact anyone's ability to send updates or see updates from others. It also does not mean that tweets were previously sent in triplicate, nor does it mean their are ghost tweeters updating on your behalf, so the bug is a minor one, albeit annoying for those who like to keep their data clean.

EMC-er Christopher Kusek Questioned His Proclivity

The known issue, titled as "inflated tweet count" was posted to the help forum on January 25th, and users affected were asked to identify themselves, while showing what the anticipated disparity was between actual usage and reported usage. By February 2nd, Twitter's team said it was "a low priority issue" and said they "did not expect to have this issue fixed in the immediate future for this reason". But by Friday, the tone had changed. An update said, "This problem is now important and have engineers currently working on resolving the improper tweet counts."

Jesse Stay Wondered If The Numbers Were Cache Related

Like the examples I am including here, my own stats have been tripled, from what is likely in the range of 4,300 updates to more than 12,000. Not a big deal to me, but others are asking in public, and I thought it made sense to show Twitter is working on it. Like other occasional stats-related bumps on the service in the past, I would assume this to be reversed relatively quickly. And if it's not, there's always TweetStats.

Blippy Surfacing Popular Purchases to Increase Engagement

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:35:01 PST

A few weeks ago, when I first started using Blippy, the site that tracks my purchases offline and online, I said it simply proved how boring I am. Aiming to not itself become boring, as exciting as reading old receipts as popular funnyman Stephen Colbert recently called it, the site recently introduced two new features that will highlight user activity and popular purchased items, bringing discussions to the top.

For fellow FriendFeed veterans, Blippy's move is much like increasing the visibility of active discussions on the site through "best of day". It also mirrors the recent move by Facebook to highlight popular entries from you and your friends in the newsfeed.

Lively Chatter in My Blippy Stream Surfaces Active Purchases

While previously, activity on your Blippy stream would move chronologically out of the main view as you made more purchases, active threads can now be found in a section Blippy calls "Lively Chatter". Also, you can check "Popular Purchases" from everyone on the site, leveraging the increasingly popular standard of "likes" and comments.

One Active Discussion on Blippy

The more people you follow on Blippy, the more likely it is that you will see comments and likes in your stream. These are highlighted in "Recent Activities". Clicking on "Lively Chatter" shows items that have gained comments (including comments from yourself), letting you see conversations about the movies and music and apps that you are buying.

Another Active Discussion on Blippy about Siri

For now, Philip Kaplan (aka Pud), creator of the site, is the most frequent commentor in my feed, which comes as no surprise, but this may change as people grow more accustomed to making the site more of a two-way platform, instead of just simply importing.

While some look at Blippy as a perfect example of oversharing or our own willingness to put personal data on the Web, I see it as a logical extension to our recommending and telling people what we "like". Pud, curious about the series "Breaking Bad", which popped up in Mike Arrington's stream, even had the show gifted to him due to his curiousity. I expect to see many more similar actions driven directly from activity on the site.

Siri Brings Artificial Intelligence to the iPhone

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:28:35 PST

For decades, many have dreamed of having a virtual assistant to answer our questions and do our bidding. Through advances in artificial intelligence, speech recognition and a seemingly endless array of search engines and directories, we are getting ever closer to this fantasy becoming a reality. A new application, Siri, billed as a virtual personal assistant, debuts today on the iTunes store, and promises to be a new way to interact with the mobile Web. The application takes queries from natural speaking, and does its best not just to find the right answer, but the right action as well.

Fueled by SRI International and powered by Nuance's voice recognition capability, Siri comes loaded with hooks to dozens of partners to help bring whatever you have in your mind to your phone.

Siri Sets Up Dinner and Gets You A Meal
While many of us have grown accustomed to making voice searches on Google's mobile application with the iPhone, this functionality, so far, has been limited, acting as a regular text search from the Web or any Internet-connected device. Siri doesn't just search on the terms you enter, but looks to find the correct answer, and put you in position to make a decision based on that answer.

Siri's dashboard makes it clear how to get started. It asks "what can I help you with?", and shows options including restaurants, movies, events, local businesses, taxis and weather. But rather than just having a solid directory, whereby you could click through and find options, you can just talk to the phone. Click the "Say It" button, and ask the phone anything.

Siri Presents Answers If You Ask Just Right
For example, if you ask why the sky is blue, or how old president Obama is, Siri will tap into the Web and find the answers, to the best of its ability.

Also, you can ask for a gourmet French restaurant near you, and it will translate what you have asked to words it can use, such as "expensive", and translate near you to restaurants in a nearby geographical area.

Directions and a Taxi to Pick You Up
Ask Siri what movies nearby are showing Avatar, and it will tell you. Tell it to get you a pair of tickets to the 5:30 showing, and it will start that process.

Siri didn't try to reinvent the Web by setting up dedicated services for each of its functions, connecting to a vast network of partners to bring their content to the iPhone. In tests, I could find schedules of events at popular sporting arenas, could call a cab to pick me up at a specific location, or see how far away I was from locations on a Google map.

Movie Tickets and Sporting Events on Siri
Siri works best with fast phones and fast Web connections, as you can guess, given it needs to tap into the cloud to get the data, and present it back to you in natural language. The product is optimized for the iPhone 3GS, and works best over WiFi or 3G. You can get it to work on Edge of course, just expect some latency.

Check it out at http://www.siri.com/ or on the iTunes store.

SlideShare Debuts Custom Channels for Business Users

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:17:26 PST

SlideShare, one of the best places on the Web to host your content online and embed it downstream, introduced custom branded microsites this morning, aimed to provide businesses with branded channels that are measurable, showcasing content from presentations, white papers and Web seminars. Combined with the company's AdShare and LeadShare products for targeted promotion and lead capture, and you can see SlideShare setting the stage for serious demand generation from marketers.

New branded channels on SlideShare now can feature customized headers and summaries, presented with the host's logos and appearance, rather than the generic SlideShare interface. You can see this in place on my custom louisgray.com SlideShare channel, or those from other early practitioners, such as ReadWriteWeb or Frost & Sullivan.

Some Recently-Updated SlideShare Channels

In the Company's Directory

A directory of branded channels can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/channels.

Think I Won't Pay for Quality Web Content? Think Again.

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:59:11 PST

Yesterday, Dave McClure got the tech blogosphere talking, once again, about the debate between free products, largely built on advertising, and subscription models with consistent recurring revenues. His post, summed up as "Subscriptions are the New Black" frustratingly said an entire decade of Web focus has been on inefficient revenue models, and that the successful exits for "free" services were dwarfed by the deaths and ugliness from many more. While I believe that there are certain parts of the Web that should come for free, without a paywall, I have been happily paying premium dollars for many different services, and would hope that there are many more like me, willing to reward services and developers with real money for a positive experience.

Despite the rage and gnashing of teeth over the New York Times' recent move to put more content for subscribers only, and other news showing that Newsday's revenue from subscribers was practically invisible, for-pay content has thrived online, if the content is differentiated and valuable. For years, I have happily paid for a premium subscription to ESPN.com to get "insider only" access to premium columns and features. For almost a decade, I have paid, on an annual basis, for online access to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, in parallel, I am, of course, paying for content from companies like Netflix, TiVo and Sirius Radio, as well as the many, many purchases I make from Apple through the iTunes store, for both music and video.

I am more than happy to pay for quality at a good price. As I have mentioned many different times on this blog, I am not a fan of untargeted advertising, either as a consumer or as an advisor to companies looking to make revenue dollars. I believe that if you can find a premium version of a product that delivers value, and can be promised a professional experience, then you should pay. I did not blink at the $2.99 price for Tweetie 2 on the iPhone, despite free alternatives, and I have paid for my MobileMe account, forking over $99 a year to Apple, for several years, for the privilege of keeping my Mac.com e-mail address, and access to their other online products.

As my own Blippy.com activity will show you, I pay about $10 a month to have my blog content converted to e-mail distribution and sent out through Feedblitz. I have paid for TypePad access. I even recently paid money to try out RowFeeder, and paid for premium versions of TwitterCounter and UnTweeps, to test out and use those Twitter-related ecosystem products. Every year, I pay TurboTax online to send my taxes to Uncle Sam and the State of California.

I pay because I receive value. Value is why Ecademy has members paying $40 a month for premium membership in its social business network, why SmugMug's members are happy with their annual costs and why many users are paying SocialToo for daily e-mail updates or other premium features. I've paid for higher bit rates on streaming radio stations online. I've paid Slashdot money in the past to remove advertising. I have paid to make donations to sites that might otherwise have gone out of business.

Major sticking points with many parts of the Web in terms of monetization come from differentiation, or the lack thereof. I have paid for many of these services because they offer something that nobody else does. If free alternatives exist, then paying for a full subscription is harder to command. It becomes a challenge to change something to a paid model if it has once been free, and you could rightly anticipate massive screaming if popular sites that are free today, including most social media sites, were to start charging for access we get free today. But if the reason sites are just posting up simple ads in lieu of subscriptions is due to the belief I wouldn't pay, they are wrong. I believe many others like me want to get the opportunity to find high quality products, and they wouldn't shy away from paying a fair price.

Disclosures: I am an advisor to SocialToo and have done premium work with Ecademy.

Apple's Chip Team a "Giant Sucking Sound" In the Valley

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:37:20 PST

The Apple iPad may have been characterized as simply a larger iPod Touch, but at its core was something unique for Apple's product line, the first product from Cupertino to debut with its A4 chip, derived from the company's much-discussed 2008 P.A. Semi acquisition. After years of trying to work with partners that fit, from Motorola to IBM and finally to Intel, Apple, now a $50 billion company, has set off on a path to create its own silicon, starting with this product, and according to a valley industry insider I talked with over the weekend, the company's fast-growing team is not going unnoticed in the chip design community.

As you can see, among the many job postings on Apple's Web site are descriptions for roles including "Senior Chip Design Engineer" and "Sr. ASIC Design Engineer". The first is for the Mobile Silicon group, and the second is described more generically for the design and development of ASICs for Apple products.

As was characterized to me in the discussion, the team has grown significantly since the P.A. Semi acquisition nearly two years ago, and many talented engineers who found themselves on the short end of company reductions or closures through the recent recession are finding their way to Cupertino, with only one other company yielding a significant alternative.

"There are two giant sucking sounds in the Valley chip design space right now," they said. "Apple is one of them, and NVIDIA is the other."

Given Apple's interesting position, why would potential applicants turn away from Cupertino and instead to NVIDIA or other alternatives? As I heard it described, at companies like NVIDIA, chip design is celebrated, and that's the company's focus. At Apple, the chip design, like the A4, is made transparent, with the real focus on user experience instead. As much as we know about the A4, we also have a lot of questions. All Apple wants us to know is that it's fast. It sounds like the chip design team is also growing fast, and we should no doubt see more machines, beyond the iPad that will come with "Apple Inside" as the roadmap progresses.

See Also: NY Times: A Little Chip Designed by Apple Itself

Twitter Expands UI Design Team, Adds Twaud.io Founder

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:43:49 PST

Twitter continues to expand its corporate ranks, and it's become something of a regularity that the company can be seen welcoming a small handful of people virtually every Monday thus far in the new year. This week's hires include Mark Otto, a user experience designer and Dan Webb, the developer behind Twaud.io, billed as "TwitPic for Audio". The pair were added to Twitter's team list this morning, bringing the total accounts associated with the company to 158, which may also include contractors.

Mark Otto (http://www.markdotto.com/) is part of the expanding user interface team at Twitter, having recently worked at ZURB, an interaction design firm based in Campbell, by San Jose. Among the listed clients of ZURB where Mark contributed effort were TinyPic, the free image hosting service, and CC: Betty, the e-mail organizer.

Dan Webb (http://www.danwebb.net/) describes himself as a Web developer from London interested in DOM scripting and Ruby on Rails. He is also the creator of Twaud.io, a lightly used service aimed to bring audio to Twitter via MP3, through direct uploads or simple recording. (See also: @twaudio)

Twitter's Web and mobile interfaces have been relatively spartan to date, when contrasted with more media-rich clients, including Brizzly and Twazzup, which have moved to display video and images in line. I wouldn't make the leap that Webb's hire indicates Twitter would soon start supporting in-line play of audio, but his experience certainly can't hurt.

Are Early Adopters Leading Move from Firefox to Chrome?

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:51:20 PST

With the first month of 2010 in the books, Web statistics tracker Net Applications made headlines showing Google Chrome's browser market share exceeding five percent usage, taking tenths of a percentage point away from the top two most popular browsers on the Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. But in our little niche, Internet Explorer has never had that huge a market share in terms of visitors to my site. Most of my peers utilize Firefox or Chrome, or if they are Macheads like myself, they trend toward Safari. After crunching the numbers, looking at my Google Analytics data from the last 13 months, to get solid year over year data for the month just completed, the trend is clear: cutting edge Web users are trading in their Firefox browsers and trying Google Chrome.

Over the last year-plus, the top four Web browsers to louisgray.com have been unchanged: Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome. Yet in four of the last six months, Safari visitors have outpaced Explorer visits. Meanwhile, in October of 2009, Chrome visits passed up IE users, and by December, Chrome visitors had passed up Safari visitors, good enough for the second-highest browser share overall. This ranking repeated in January.

As Chrome Share Has Increased, Firefox Is Fading

(Source: Google Analytics for LouisGray.com)

Just how rapidly has Chrome taken market share in terms of visits to the blog? In January of 2009, Chrome represented 6.53% of all visitors, a mark that held mostly steady through March of 2009. In the month just concluded, Chrome represented 17.46% of all visitors, an increase of 267%, nearly tripling.

At the same time, Firefox use dropped from nearly 51% of all visits to just over 41% of all visits, after peaking in March of last year with almost 55% of all visitors. The 10% of visitors who stopped using Firefox almost exclusively switched to Chrome, for IE visits declined only slightly from 20% to 16.5% of all visits, while Safari has held rather steady, at about 17% of all visits both in January 2009 and January 2010.

At the risk of making mountains out from small sample sizes, the trendlines cover almost a million pageviews over 13 months, and in each of the 3-month blocks following January of 2009, you could see a steady increase in Chrome visitors, from 6% in Spring of 2009, to 8% in the Summer, 10% by Fall and more than 14% by Winter. If the trend lines hold, I would not be surprised to see Chrome eclipse 20% of visits here by summer, and see Firefox fall to 35%, with continued declines in Internet Explorer visits that keep it below 15%. Pivot tables in Google Analytics also show that most of my Internet Explorer visits are from Google searches and other non-direct visits. Most referred visits from social networks, like FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook, prefer Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Low Quality Offensive Ads Degrade the Web Experience

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:18:54 PST

An ever-increasing percentage of the world's population is creating and consuming content from the Web and social networks. Surrounding much of the content on these networks is advertising, be it banner advertising, keyword advertising, behaviorally targeted ads, CPM ads, CPC ads, interstitials... they're out there, in an effort to bring the host site some revenue.

Despite the fact the Web offers an unprecedented amount of targeting to tailor the right message to the right people, I find we continue to be bombarded by off-topic, low quality garbage that certainly is degrading the reputation of the networks running the ads in the first place. Today's most recent jaw-dropper? An advertisement for car insurance on Facebook that featured the bearded visage of America's least favorite terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.

Now just whose bright idea was it that came up with the idea that Osama Bin Laden's stare was going to get me to change my insurance?

Never mind trying to find out if the advertiser tracked down Osama and found out where he lives in order to send him royalty checks for using his image... one simply needs common sense to know that this ad is offensive, and yet it's pretty much par for the course on the Web. Combined with rump-shaking mortgage advertisers, Obama grins in medical scrubs and the like, and it's hard to believe we've made much progress from the dancing bananas, or punching the monkey, as we did in Web 1.0.

Do you think Obama approved the use of his image here?

Put bluntly, the low-quality advertising directly damages my perception of Facebook and other networks where I see these ads. While the outlets may claim they did not personally approve every ad's content, it is part of the user experience I see when viewing their pages, and they definitely impact my experience.

I have been asking companies like Facebook and others on the Web to leverage my social profile online and present me ads that are interesting. I once got so tired of Facebook's low-quality banners that I went on a rant and marked them all as offensive. But it seems like that hasn't had any effect, or the companies displaying the ads just don't care.

Amusingly, I did a search on Google for the word "Targeted", and the first response, based on my login credentials, was that of a page on Facebook advertising. So what was particularly targeted about the Bin Laden ad? The advertiser said that 32 year-old males can get a specific rate on car insurance. Well, congratulations on figuring out my age and gender. But did I also sign up to be a "Fan of Osama Bin Laden" on Facebook? No. Nor did I put myself as a candidate for male breast reduction surgery over the weekend, or tell Facebook that I wanted to hook up with any hot single ladies looking for an "overnight match".

In November, after hearing Twitter's promises that they would eventually debut an advertising system that we would love, I said I would embrace that approach. I am not anti-ads (despite my occasional complaints), but I am pro-relevancy.

My #1 Result In Google for "Targeted". Right...

Before anybody says that beer commercials on TV and in magazines are offensive, and this type of approach is just making its way to new media, consider the likelihood of Geico or other auto insurance promoters pushing a photo of Bin Laden in a 30-second spot during Jeopardy or the Today show. It wouldn't happen. Why? Because it's wrong, they are professionals, and they know better. So why, when we have more opportunity to better target our ads, and we have customers willing to buy things online, do we get surrounded with such complete dreck? This is not acceptable, and I challenge companies that are enabling this train wreck to shape up.

The Burning Drive to Never Settle: Refuse to Compromise

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:12:59 PST

One of the classic books on many shelves in the Silicon Valley in the mid to late 1990s was Douglas Copeland's Microserfs, a story of former Microsoft programmers slaving away at their own startup, working ridiculous hours, and putting quality of code ahead of quality of hygiene. I often think about one of the main character's musings, saying that you could tell which companies were going to thrive by the hours the cars stayed in the parking lots, and if you could find a company whose lot was full on a Sunday, it could be an incredible investment opportunity.

My initial career experience in the late 1990s came at a time of Web 1.0, amidst the dot-com frenzy. It was a badge of honor to work late, and even after leaving the office, it was assumed you were on call to respond to product ideas, releases or customer issues. With the potential opportunity being so high, the challenge was to see if you could deliver the best possible products and experience, despite having a lean staff, and there was a constant question of whether you were doing all you could. This drive, whether shared by all colleagues, or whether exhibited by keeping near-nocturnal hours or simply outproducing everyone else, is one that I have had a hard time shaking, as I know at times, I can find myself being hyper-competitive. On the occasional times I've talked to jobhunters and recruiters in past years, I've easily handed that over as a weakness, that while I've been "always on", when others are not as committed, it bugs me, and I question their desire and drive to achieve.

I hate losing. I hate not seeing a result be as good as it possibly could be. I hate turning in a project or a product that is not to the best it could be. I believe in executing quickly, but not if it means sacrificing personal responsibility or standards. And I know I am just as competitive out of the office or off the Web, making sure I win at cards or board games, or beat my friends at bowling. If I don't, then I'll know where I screwed up, and remember it the next time I get a chance to redeem myself.

The best companies and people in business and technology refuse to compromise, even in the face of incredible challenges. The ones that are revered do not concede the battle for product quality, scale, reach or speed.

Take for example Don Dodge's solid and transparent description of how Google sets goals and measures success. A recent transfer from Microsoft, Dodge recounts how he submitted quarterly objectives, which he thought were "aggressive yet achievable", and they were rejected. Why? Because his manager said they "needed to set stretch goals that seemed impossible to fully achieve." He adds, "you can’t achieve amazing results by setting modest targets. We want amazing results. We want to tackle the impossible."

I got a picture of a similar discussion this week when I visited FamilyLink.com in Utah for a single-day visit. Without revealing the details of the conversation, one engineer was challenged to raise the target for a key feature's adoption curve beyond his initial estimate. As with Google, the push to meet this high goal would be set to find a way to achieve the impossible. It's no doubt part of why the company was ranked by comScore as the fastest-growing Web site for December of 2009. The high target was not set to guarantee failure, but instead, to enable success - and the culture was configured to help the team members achieve their full potential, not to reach a lower number, and accept mediocrity.

In a week dominated by iPad news out of Cupertino, we gained a window of insight into one of the most driven people on the planet, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who reportedly characterized software developer Adobe as "lazy", adding, "They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it." Steve Jobs, and his team are notorious for perfecting their products down to the pixel and down to the millimeter and doing things over and over again to get them "right", not just "acceptable". One can imagine the fun and excitement that would take place if he were to get the opportunity to run Adobe for 100 days, cutting the fat and finding people to focus in a way where they are not today.

Part of what keeps me excited about Silicon Valley, and what attracts me to finding out more about the entrepreneurs driving the next generation of startups, or exchanging ideas with fellow writers and curators on the Web, is seeing this drive for greatness and refusal to compromise. It can be pretty easy to tell when some people have the drive, and also easy to tell when others don't. Those that slip deadlines, or ship mediocre products, or don't respond to support issues, or leave the office at 5 o'clock to get home in time for primetime TV are easily exposed.

I'm not 22 years old any more, like I was in 1999, when there was little keeping me from being 100 percent dedicated to the job. Now, staying a few extra hours at the office, or embedded in my laptop at home, takes time away from my wife and the twins. While I wouldn't exchange them for anything, I do sometimes get jealous at the opportunity some Valley leaders have to feed the fire in their belly to achieve and achieve. I dream of finding a team that wants to put sleeping bags under the desks, like Jerry Yang of Yahoo! was always said to have done, and finding a team that is just as excited about talking shop on a Sunday as they are on a Tuesday. (If you've ever seen the reverse, it too can be draining)

It's part of why I often say, "Sleep is a waste of time. And unproductive."

Now that there are so many outlets on the social Web for us to see what people are doing, and sharing, and writing and thinking, we have more and more ways to find out how people are using their work time and their leisure time. There's a good reason that Steve Jobs and his direct reports aren't posting their every nuance to microblogging sites. There's a reason Sergey Brin and Larry Page only surface on rare occasions at corporate events. These guys, and many many others like them, have a drive to succeed and never accept second best or treat failure as an inevitability. It is a lifelong race that has no finish line, and they can never stop. I may not be scoring patents and writing the best code on the planet, but I do not want to be second-best. I want to win on virtue of being consistent, driving quality, thinking in a way that is differentiated, and being active in a beneficial way in as many places as I can to distribute value. If you can achieve, never accept the opportunity to not do your best, and expect the same from everyone.

Fabulis Scores $625k In Funding for Gay Community Site

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:25:11 PST

Jason Goldberg's new startup, Fabulis, a new service targeting the lucrative, but potentially underserved, gay male market, announced the raise of $625,000 in seed funding today, the majority of which will be used to "build product". Fabulis' launch comes on the heels of Goldberg's success in building and selling Socialmedian to XING in 2008, which itself followed his work at Jobster, one of the more visible jobs and recruiting sites on the Web. The first round of funding came from the same supporters who invested in Socialmedian, clearly happy with their returns from the 2008 deal.

Following success with Socialmedian and Jobster, Goldberg sees Fabulis as a personal venture, about him and his friends. As he wrote me in an e-mail today, "If we can't get this right, we should just hang it up."

Fabulis' goal, in Goldberg's words, is to establish the site as the "definitive service that gay men around the world rely on to help them connect with amazing experiences." The company is planning to launch its Web site and mobile applications, for iPhone and other platforms, in the Spring, which will help site members to get tailored suggestions on "where to go, what to do and who to meet".

As has been well covered in demographic studies, gay men have a disproportionate amount of disposable income and discretionary time when contrasted to the general population. Goldberg and team look to tap into the $400 billion spent annually in the US alone by this group, and leverage the high amount of activity the demographic participates in for travel, online commerce, and early adoption. Goldberg's stats said that gay men are more than twice as likely to own an iPhone as their straight equivalents, and were also more likely to own laptops or digital video recorders.

Despite all this, Fabulis doesn't believe that there are adequate solutions online that help this market. Traditional travel sites do not target the gay male demographic, nor do restaurant listings, or other marketplaces, making the gay community rely more on word of mouth than any centralized directory.

Fabulis' focus may seem somewhat exclusionary to straight visitors or same sex female couples, but Goldberg thinks this focus will really give the site an advantage.

"Fabulis is intended for gay men and their friends. We are very focused on our target market," Goldberg said. That's not to be exclusionary, rather just to make sure that the site appeals well to our target user. This site is unapologetically for gay men," he added.

With such a massive growth in niche social networking sites focused on specific tasks, be that for credit card sharing, calendar broadcasting or location checkins, the opportunity to focus all the major social elements into a recommendation service for a lucrative demographic looks extremely promising, if it is done well. And unlike many Web services, Fabulis appears to already have a business model in mind that will make money - one that is "not just a straight ad model (pun intended)", Goldberg said.

After the successful launch to sale of Socialmedian, Goldberg is also doubling down on seeing how social relationships form and evolve in a community. He wrote me, explaining one aspect to the social graph that differs between gay men and the rest of the population:

"One really interesting aspect of gay male relationships that we're also spending a lot of time on is how the gay male social graph functions differently than that of the typical straight person," Goldberg said. "For instance, for most straight people, the social graph of who you know is enough. Facebook is really good at helping you share and discover things with your friends. But with gay men, it is often as useful to know what friends-of-friends are doing or recommending or where they are going. And, for gay men, even just knowing what everyone in your city is doing or gravitating towards is very interesting. So, that's an interesting problem to solve, how to make the big gay world seem a whole lot smaller."

And if you think the name is "Fabulis", you can tell the company is looking to have a good time building a "fabulis" product. You can get a "Fabulis shirt" just by explaining how you are Fabulis. The Fabulis blog explains.

Google's Mac Mail Uploader Taunts Would-Be GMailers

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:11:48 PST

Tonight, I thought I saw the final missing piece fall into place that would let me take my gigabytes and gigabytes of e-mail off my hard drive and put them in the cloud, setting the stage for a long-discussed, but never fully implemented, move from my decade-old Mac.com e-mail address to a more Web savvy GMail account. An update on Google's Mac Blog introduced a new software option that promises to take all your Mail files from your personal computer, and take them to Google Apps. A free utility, the quick download looked like it was going to get me one step closer to a Web-centric experience, moving to the cloud. But it looks like I am still on the outside looking in, even though the product's release is extremely promising for an eventual solution.

More than two years ago, I talked about the potential attraction of GMail to corporate users who have long been tethered to the world of Microsoft. I said that Importing PST Files, or e-mail archives common to Microsoft Outlook, could be GMail's secret weapon. In the ensuing years, tools have been made to help upload e-mail from Windows, and to migrate Web mail to Google e-mail accounts. But tonight's announcement was the first for Mac users, who, despite the many synergies between Apple and Google, often find themselves last served, behind Windows and Linux users, by the Mountain View company.

101,000 messages to upload over 28 hours. Do it!

So, of course, I downloaded the application immediately. Without any configuration on my end, it found my Mail.app e-mail and the correct hierarchy, looking to move more than 100,000 messages I've been hoarding since the mid 1990s to the cloud, with appropriate labeling. The expected move time for these 100,000 messages? Almost 30 hours. But at least it was something.

Unfortunately, as many good things tend to have, there was a catch. The e-mail uploader "currently can upload only to Google Apps email accounts, and not to gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts", so the planned migration, once again, seems to be on hold.

Curses! No upload to GMail! Can I hack this?

Given the wording of the post, the author, Greg Robbins, seems highly aware of the issue, having called it out, and the word "currently" is promising that a solution may soon arrive. But until that time, I will continue to keep using my Mac.com e-mail and storing my data locally. For me, the archives are almost as important, and in some cases, more important, than my most recent data. If I could upload my 100,000+ e-mail messages, with appropriate labeling, to GMail and have the search functionality and all other great items offered in GMail, I would have started the process tonight, but the restriction to Google Apps keeps us on the outside looking in, still.

The promise of the move is tempting enough to open up a new Google Apps account, but I'm not interested in further forking my e-mail experience with more and more accounts to check. It's already a challenge to get work e-mail with multiple clients, and my various online accounts. I have been wanting a real Mac-friendly E-mail uploader to GMail since shortly after its debut, and almost six years after GMail shocked the world with its invention, I still don't have it. So Greg, I know you want what I want, so how can we make this happen?

iPad Wins On Casual Computing, Content Consumption

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:27:30 PST

Despite my reputation as an Apple fanboy, through the months of rumors and hype around Apple's tablet, I remained relatively quiet. While it may have reduced my page views potential, I've made a cognitive choice not to be the fifteenth person jumping into a dogpile just to say I did it. If you wanted rumors and guesses, they were out there. If you wanted speculation and mockups, you knew where to find it. And when the big day came yesterday, instead of calling in sick and watching Steve Jobs wow the faithful in San Francisco, I was working, taking part in a full day consulting engagement with a new client working on some very interesting things.

But with 24 hours plus after the iPad has moved from rumor to reality, I am as unimpressed with the swarm of armchair quarterbacking that is going on from many corners of the Web pointing out its shortfalls when contrasted to their own dream machines, or trying to find out why feature X made it but feature Y did not as I was with their thin rumors. I've seen people claiming that the debut of the iPad is a big bucket of iFail, that it's a dud, that it's "not for you", or in the reverse, that it means the death of TV, the death of banner ads online, the death of Flash, the death of... yeah, you get it.

Without shooting myself in the foot, this is part of why the blogosphere can at times get a bad name. This is why Apple can afford to keep its eyes closed to the rumors and speculation and suggestions by committee, for if the iPad had been developed by the many who have designed its tombstone over the last 24 hours, it would be too expensive, late to market, too heavy, or simply defy the laws of physics.

To question Apple's decisions at this point, after the success of the iPhone, and the iTunes Store and the iPod before them, on the heels of the iMac, and Mac OS X and the top-quality MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines, is pretty silly. Put toe to toe with any other hardware and software company on the planet, I think I am going to pick the Apple team every time, because they simply know how to focus and execute.

Today, I finally took the time to watch Steve Jobs introduce the iPad. While some may have derided the iPad as simply a larger iPod Touch, I believe the most important part of what Jobs focused on was the reason for such a device, sitting between an iPod and a laptop. The need for such a product would be obviated if it could not do certain tasks better than an iPod or better than a laptop. Steve said it needed to browse the Web better, to play videos and iTunes better, and to look at photos better. It is also as important to focus on what he did not say it was intended to do. It was not built to "create" content better. Even though it does have e-mail, and iWork is to be soon available also, this device is built to be an amazing content consumption device.

The iPad is not a Photoshop machine. It is not designed to create PowerPoint slides. But it is designed for how many of us are using our computers today - to consume content. We read Web sites and blogs. We watch videos. We look at photos. We update our social networks. What the iPad is is the stepping stone from the laptop to the virtual "cloud machine", with no hard disk at all, which we may all see some day, the true network computer which has been promised for a decade-plus.

The iPad is designed for casual computing. The presentation yesterday did not focus on speeds and feeds. There was not megahertz bake-off with the A4 chip against Intel processors. Instead, we saw Scott Forstall snowboarding from the couch, and checking his Facebook wall. Steve Jobs looked at photos from vacation trips, sent a single-sentence e-mail and chilled to Bob Dylan.

The price of the iPad, starting at only $499 for an entry level unit, is about the same as the first iPods were in 2001 ($399), and they only did one thing - music. But instead of being limited to just one task, the iPad does about 90% of what you have come to expect from a traditional $1,000 to $2,000 laptop. For all the derision of the iPad in the world of business, it could be a fantastic tool for business meetings around round tables, and at home, it could be a fantastic Web tablet for people of all generations. Forget about finding a niche for me to use it, in addition to my iPhone and MacBook Air. Why shouldn't an iPad, version one or version two, become the first computing device for my kids? At its low price, large enough screen for their small hands, and instant access to iTunes apps, that could end up what happens in the next few years.

While the iPad does not run a derivative of Mac OS X, what instant integration with the iTunes App Store has done is turned the old adage of Macs not having enough software titles completely on its head. While more and more of our activity today comes through Web services, the iPad starts with tens of thousands of potential apps, on day one. Contrast this with what will no doubt be a future alternative to the iPad, with Google's Chrome OS, which may be a winner in browsing the Web and having a cheap price point, but won't likely come close to offering such a massive library of apps.

At the beginning of the year, I said that 2010 computing was going to be four things: Lighter, Faster, Mobile and Connected. The iPad is lighter, mobile and connected, three of the four, and it looks faster than the iPhone in terms of loading and processing apps. Reading the tea leaves that showed the MacBook Air line was not going to be updated this week, accurately, I did pick up my MacBook Air refurbished a few weeks ago, and it is already acting as my own cloud machine. Despite getting the 128 gigabyte hard drive, I still have more than 100 gigabytes available, as I continue to work toward a cloud experience. The iPad is another step in that direction, as it doesn't look open to third party software installs, and like the Air, does not have a removable media drive.

The iPad simply makes sense. I don't need to hold one to know how it will work, because I have become so familiar with the iPhone experience. I don't have to carry it from room to room while using the Web as I know I would, or read books or other content on it, instead of the Kindle, as I know it's better from day one, with more functionality, a better screen and real color. I do not care about all the whining that is going on about it missing a camera, or whether it supports Flash, or whether it needs a USB port or two to fit in. This is the first generation, and like the iPod and iPhone before it, the first generation is going to get updated and antiquated in about a year's time, as we continue to see the product evolve. The iPad, despite not being perfect, is the best product on the market at this pricepoint, period. It can make casual computing comfortable, and continue to erode the complexity so long associated with PCs from any source.

Have I purchased one yet? No. Having just purchased the Air, I am plenty happy with it. But I know an iPad, either this version or the next, will make it into my home. And if the twins have their druthers, we'll probably end up with two. So it's time to stop complaining about dream machines and misplaced expectations, and time to start trusting Steve. No other company, Google and Microsoft included, could have pulled off what Apple did yesterday. They are going to sell a ton of these machines, and you'll see them in places you never expected. Casual computing and content consumption are going to drive it.

Can You Filter for Quality News Amidst Instant Analysis?

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:42:10 PST

With real-time news and distribution increasingly becoming the norm for many product launches and events, the interpreters of the news who pass their findings your way don't often have additional information that was gleaned as exclusive. As events are live streamed directly to the public, or presentations are mass broadcast to large groups simultaneously, those headlining the news are armed not with inside sources and first person quotes, but instead with immediate analysis of the events to try and put their own unique spin on history, separating themselves from their peers.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post titled Launching Products in the Age of Instant Analysis, highlighting the tech media's instantaneous interpretation of products like Google Finance and semi-regular introductions from Apple. You could later see tech bloggers swarm around Cuil and Microsoft's Origami platform, declaring each of them as failures, fairly accurately.

In the ensuing time, news has gotten even more rapid, and even more participants are helping to broadcast events, not just through their blogs and publications, but on Facebook, Twitter and many other social media properties. Those that attend live gatherings get an edge over their competition through speed of publishing, speed of transmission of photos and videos, higher quality videos, a better angle, or through an innovative use of a new Web service. We saw this with the recent Nexus One announcement from Google, and will inarguably see it again this Wednesday, when Steve Jobs entertains a hungry press corp looking for the latest from Apple.

Wednesday's entertainment will be much like many similar events before it, no doubt. Scads of gadget bloggers and Macintosh faithful will be there, flanked by general tech reporters, and the mainstream press. There may be a QuickTime stream, and if not, the absence of said stream will be made fairly irrelevant thanks to near-immediate live blogging, best exemplified by the work at Engadget or MacRumors Live in years past. Other sites will try to do the same, but to choose their work over the seasoned pros should only be done out of compassion by family members or significant others of the writers themselves.

Essentially, as Steve Jobs and his team flip through each successive Keynote slide, or walk through each carefully rehearsed product demo, those waiting and watching will all find out at the same time. The news you see or read through your computer screen will not be substantively less accurate or less speedily discovered than by those who were actually there. The press corp, in an effort to drive home their own relevancy and highlight their value through a key thing called "access", will drive home their recaps of the proceedings. Those driven by the quantity of posts will give each major product or feature its own story. Quotes off the cuff may be spun as insight themselves, and others will simultaneously post how each introduction will place in history, or judge its success or failure relative to the meteoric expectations they drove themselves. Subsequent stories will fawn over the first views of the product at stores, we will see glorious unboxing videos, disassembly of the parts, and estimates to total costs and product margins. Speculation will ensue as to whether the company built too many machines or not enough, if it's taking too long to reach customers, or if they priced the product too high. (They never complain that it's too cheap, after all)

All these angles and all this spin from all these places... While in the past, media properties were judged by their ability to get access to individuals and find things out that were not known by anyone else, or before they were supposed to be aired, the flattening of the media and the measurement of what some would say are the wrong metrics (be it page views, retweets or whatever your favorite statistic of the day is), have delivered a scenario by which there is more noise than ever, and as consumers, we must filter like mad.

Robert Scoble, a peer, and fellow geek and curator, said that he will be skipping out on Wednesday's news, and watching the news ink feeding frenzy as it seeps through our computer screens. His goal won't be necessarily to report on the news, which will be common knowledge as soon as he starts typing, but to find the best interpretations of the news from his favorite sources. He publicly will be doing something we all must learn to do - separating the news discovery artists from the news spin artists. With tools like Twitter and other networks making it ever easier to hit the publish button, our ability to screen, filter and decide what information is good for us is going to be increasingly tested.

Twitter Expands Technical Ops Team for Capacity Growth

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:33:27 PST

If the company's recent hiring practices are any indication, fail whales may soon fade into the Web's memory bank, as Twitter continues to expand its team focused on data center and hosting solutions, or technical operations, hoping to scale the company's capabilities in line with and in advance of future growth. Today's newest hire is Lisa Phillips, who leaves Six Apart, no stranger to the high scale and high activity Web services arena.

As outlined on Lisa's LiveJournal page from earlier this month, Lisa is starting her position as Capacity Planning Manager today, and will be based in Seattle, visiting Twitter headquarters in San Francisco often to work with the technical ops team.

No stranger to spills and crashes, Lisa is also an avid roller derby participant with Bay Area Derby Girls.

EdgeTheory: Apple’s Closed Approach in an Open World

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:46:57 PST

In advance of all the fun and fury that will be sent Apple's way this week, as many are expecting new hardware from Cupertino on Wednesday, EdgeTheory conversationalist Chris Saad and I talked about how Apple can be so successful with its closed, proprietary, approach when we tend to promote and hope for openness from companies we do business with on the Web. In addition to discussing Apple, we talk about Microsoft not getting enough credit for its own innovation, and trip ourselves up on what exactly came first... USB or FireWire.

Listen in below:

Archive:
January 21st: EdgeTheory Conversations: Twitter's New Suggestions

RowFeeder Tracks Twitter Terms In Real-Time Database

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:20:59 PST

Two weeks ago, I introduced Searchtastic's ability to search Twitter, and enable the export of any search results to a Microsoft Excel file. While Searchtastic does a good job enabling export of any search on the fly, it doesn't go deep enough for more popular terms, only offering the last few dozen. RowFeeder, one of the many offerings from Damon Cortesi, creator of TweetStats and other programs, is the first volley to launch from the mysterious Untitled Startup, and it too tries to convert Twitter search results to an actionable database. It does so through utilizing Google Docs, and already has a business model, powered by Laura Fitton's OneForty.com.

For $2.49, you can ask RowFeeder to track a Twitter search term and back up all positive hits in the next 48 hours to a Google spreadsheet. Should you need more time, such as for a 3 or 5 day conference, you can send a note to RowFeeder and ask for the time to be extended.

Setting up RowFeeder is really quite easy. You enter the term you want tracked, see if RowFeeder can do it, (The more general or popular the term, the less likely it is to work) and pay your $2.49. Upon payment, RowFeeder sends you a unique Google Docs spreadsheet link for your tracked term, and you have access.

Once this has been enabled, your spreadsheet starts filling up with tweets that match your criteria, with the username, the tweet itself, data on the sender, and time on the tweet. You can export the results, or even push the results to a live Web page, viewable by anyone.

I thought checking out RowFeeder was worth about five bucks, so I did two queries, the first being an obvious vanity search to track mentions online and see who was distributing my content, and the second, a more broad test, was to track mentions of TiVo, my favorite DVR.

Here are the results for TiVo and here are the results for my vanity search.

The ability to make the spreadsheets public is a big bonus, and as you can see, the trend is to mine Twitter and other social media networks for Marketing or brand tracking potential. RowFeeder offers a solid solution for not a lot of money. It's not free, and doesn't enable databases for every term, like Searchtastic does, but its results are more complete, and are completely automated for future results, not just past results. You can find RowFeeder at http://www.rowfeeder.com.

Hard But Smart Decisions: Blogger Tackles The .5% Problem

louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:57:16 PST

One of the most difficult decisions a product manager can make is one that could possibly negatively effect a loyal, but very small, population of users. Whether it be the reaching of a crossroads around supporting a legacy product or feature, or finding far too many engineering resources are spent with little or no return, it can be tempting to refuse compromise and continue foolhardily ahead, trying to be all things to all people. But sometimes, it is smarter to draw a line in the sand, and make a decision. With a proper amount of foresight and communication, the impact can be reduced, and for the most part, the potential tsunami can be reduced to a mere trickle.

Quietly, on Friday afternoon, Google's Blogger division pre-announced the group's plan to phase out support for FTP publishing to the service. The company explained that FTP publishing in Blogger will be unsupported after March 26th, and the service is working in the interim to provide a simplified migration tool for impacted users, as well as a dedicated blog and help documentation, extending beyond what promises to be an "all hands on deck" approach from the team's members.

Blogger, widely considered to be the largest blogging network in the world, has at times been seen to trail competitors in capability and features, even as the service has more recently introduced a comparative barrage of new options in the last few months, coinciding with its ten year anniversary. As product manager Rick Klau communicated, the team has seen a drain on resources which has impacted the ability to improve Blogger beyond its current state, and much of that drain has been from a .5% share of users who have relied on FTP.

Without going too much into detail on the technical side, it is clear that among Google's strengths in its array of services is the ability to scale and have no bottlenecking, including dynamic access to content from an array of servers. As a recently converted FTP Blogger user, I know the experience I had on the FTP site was less robust and less dynamic than the Google experience I've long been used to. Switching, though a non-trivial process last fall, which also saw me migrate from www.louisgray.com to blog.louisgray.com, has been nothing but good news for me since, with greater access to all the new Blogger features, and near-instant publishing without outages that used to plague the FTP service. (See: Google Blogger FTP Publishing: Out for 12+ Hours from June of 2008)

Having worked for the past decade plus with technology companies who have seen significant upgrades from product generation to product generation, there come times when you have to announce the end of life for a first generation product, or make it clear that a specific software release is code complete, and won't move forward with the rest of the family. This can seem like the end of the world as an individual, especially at first, but, as part of the bigger picture, it is almost always the right idea, or else you suffer from a never-ending engineering drain and endless testing for compatibility ahead of feature leadership. A good example of this that most can remember was when Apple announced work on Mac OS 9 was complete, and the rest of the world moved to Mac OS X, laggers be darned.

Klau's post promises "a number of big releases planned in 2010", many of which would no doubt be available only to those users not using FTP. In order for Blogger to move forward, they know they need focus and they are starting the process by talking to a vocal, non-trivial minority of folks who should be learning in the next few weeks how they can make the change and what that means for their future. While some may say they are fed up with Blogger and find themselves staring at a new WordPress install, Blogger is doing the right thing by taking a hard choice and looking ahead to the future. (See also: Rick Klau: Turning Off Blogger FTP)

I hope to be talking a bit more on this with the Blogger team and look forward to seeing their new announcements. If you are a Blogger user on FTP now and see this news as the end of the world, let's talk about it. I survived, and it looks like it should be even easier for you.