louisgray.com

Strands Targets the Mainstream by Going One On One

2008-09-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

One of the most common themes in the blogosphere, and here at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, is questioning how Web applications many of us are using will ever reach the mainstream. Will people's parents, relatives and co-workers ever get Twitter the way they finally get e-mail? Will FriendFeed ever get the kind of name recognition that Facebook and MySpace have? Strands, a nascent lifestreaming and content discovery service, is launching a new initiative, starting today, to take the service mainstream, to the masses themselves in a project they call oOo: One on One, or Operation mainSTREAM.
(See their blog for more).

Drew Olanoff, community manager for Strands, says "A lot of what we create is meant to make our lives easier and more entertaining," and that "companies like Pandora deserve to be known outside of our circles," so what the team at Strands is looking to do is to give its users many invites, and will incentive them to invite non-geeks to the service. Those who recruit "nongeek friends" can win geeky prizes, including an Apple MacBook Air for you and your friend, an iPod Touch for you and your friend, or miniature Flip video cameras.

Strands: Operation mainSTREAM
But Strands isn't going to be sitting around, waiting for you to do all the hard work of recruiting by yourself. The team is going one one one (oOo), traveling state to state, to take the story of all these cool Web applications to the masses. As Drew writes, "I'm going to be visiting old folks homes, hanging out with some soccer moms, and hey...maybe some lawyers, to let them know why technology and your personal presence online is important."

Will this work? Will taking something that's considered an edge technology even for those of us in the Silicon Valley, and introducing it to technophobes in North Dakota and South Carolina give services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Twitter that push they need to get into the mainstream? Probably not all by itself. But as part of the micromedia panel I participated in yesterday, we discussed a new rule of marketing. You tell 10, who tell 100, who tell 1,000. If Drew and the Strands team can find the right 10 people in each of these locations around the country, they may be on to something. And just maybe, Web 2.0 applications have found their new evangelist.

DISCLOSURE: Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

TweetBeep: Twitter Keyword Alerts to Your E-mail

2008-09-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

On yesterday's micromedia panel here at the Blog World Expo, I said the way that companies can start using microblogging tools is to first be aware of them, and second to monitor them, before jumping in deep with both feet. The idea would be to understand the nature of the community, and to see how your business or industry is being perceived on the service before sending off tweet after tweet. As one of the best tools to follow your company's mentions online is to use Google's News Alerts or Google Blog Search and have them delivered by e-mail, TweetBeep intends to do the same thing - following terms you specify and sending them to your e-mail, either by the hour or by the day.

Using TweetBeep, as you would expect, is fairly simple. Sign up for an account with TweetBeep, and then add alerts, by hour or by day, register your e-mail address, and you will get notified by e-mail when your search terms come up.

Adding a new alert for #bwe (Blog World Expo)

My active TweetBeep alert list
You might be wondering why you would use TweetBeep instead of Twitter Search (formerly Summize), but relying on TweetBeep takes the manual intervention out of it. Instead of searching yourself, the alerts are automatically delivered. And for an enterprise corporate setting, e-mail is easily understood.

TweetBeep delivers results via e-mail
While TweetBeep isn't new, having launched back in May with Orli Yakuel on Go2Web20, there's no doubt this tool is being under-utilized, relative to other alert tools. So if you want to keep track of what's being said about you or your company in the Twitterverse, set up an account and get started. It just might be a tool you can use to get your boss to understand how the microblogging community is thinking about your product in real time.

Goosh: A Command-Line Google for Geeks

2008-09-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

I bet there's a sliver of the population who thinks Google's already spartan interface is too bright and shiny, with too many colors. This group, who finds anything with a GUI as unnecessary and a waste of pixels, would prefer to run things in the Unix shell or DOS, and is repulsed by Web 2.0 flashiness. The good news is that there is an unofficial Google shell, called "Goosh", authored by Stefan Grothkopp, which behaves just like a Unix terminal, and returns results from the Google search engine.

Logging in to www.goosh.org...
Popular FriendFeeder Mona N has an extensive write-up on the new tool on her blog Pixel Bits: goosh.org: Google’s Un-official Unix Shell, so check that out.

As Mona points out, Goosh essentially puts the power of Google's search into your terminal, with the ability to make specific searches for blogs, feeds, video, wiki, images or the Web at large, just by using command terms, like you would in Unix. For example, you could search, via Goosh, for "apple" and return all results for the term apple via the Web, or search for "feeds louisgray" to see RSS feeds on the Web associated with my name.

Goosh.org results for Apple...

Goosh.org results for Feeds with my name...

All results are clickable, taking you to the desired page.

So if you thought Google was getting too mainstream, and using the once-exclusive search engine didn't give you enough geek cred, there is now a solution. Check out goosh.org, and enter "help" to get a list of commands. You can get your Google geek back. (Hat Tip: Mona on Pixel Bits)

Find Me at Blog World Expo This Weekend In Las Vegas

2008-09-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Even as the blog has gotten more visible through the last two years, I've largely stayed behind the scenes (or behind the monitor and keyboard). I haven't attended large industry events, or tried to make the story so much about me. I'd rather keep the highlights on the many services I enjoy and the people making the Web and technology better. But this weekend, the gravity pull from being requested to participate in two panels was too great, and you can now find me at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, from this afternoon through Sunday.

At the expo, I am participating on two panels, with esteemed peers, including Matt Dickman, Neil Vineberg, Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd, discussing changes in the blogosphere, and how microcommunities are impacting where we participate, share ideas, and communicate.

Panel One:
Micromedia: The Next Big, Small Thing:

Description: "This session shows marketers what the true power of services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Flickr and Facebook have on a micro level. Also known as "micro blogging", micromedia has exploded with the growth of mobile technology and lets us look into the future of platform-agnostic marketing. Don't be left behind."

Time: Friday, Sept. 19, 2008: 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM, 222

Panel Two:
Are Bloggers Losing Control? The New World of Distributed Conversations:

Description: "With content spanning across social networks, miro communities, and media aggregators, comments, conversations, and responses are taking place on and around the original blog post. This panel will explore distributed conversations, fragmented expertise, and also the challenge of being everywhere - and whether or not it's not only necessary, but also feasible."

Time: Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM, 229

Outside of these panels, my schedule is not 100 percent set by any means. I've already started to hear from many online friends who I will be seeing for the first time, and look forward to finding many more, through seeing presentations, walking the exhibits floor, and through getting abused by e-mail and cell phone. If you're going to be attending, it'd be great to see you at either of these panels, or any other time. Please do reach out by phone at 408 646-2759 or by e-mail at louisgray@mac.com.

My BlogWorld Expo bio can also be found here.

Seesmic to Release New Nokia Client, Sees New Video Every Minute

2008-09-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur introduced the video conversation site as seeing significant growth and part of the real-time Web, utilizing video, for the first time, in an active way, rather than a passive way, as YouTube does. The result is a site that he says is used in more than 40 countries and sees a new video posted every minute, a number which has now reached more than half a million since May, from 30,000 different users. Also, he dropped hints to a new Seesmic client built for Nokia handsets that would enable full video conversations, including replies, to debut today.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Le Meur said Seesmic came to life due to a gap between today's text-based social software, including blogs and Facebook, and the more active nature of video. He said that while YouTube offers the ability to post comments and replies to videos, they don't happen all that often, and that through integration with tools like Disqus, Twitter and FriendFeed, Seesmic can power the video conversation.

As he told attendees, half of the service's traffic happens on the Seesmic Web site, and another half occurs through desktop clients, like Thwirl, which he acquired earlier this year. Seesmic is now also installed on 7,000 blogs, including this one, and TechCrunch, enabling visitors to leave video comments on stories, and embed the entire video thread.

Le Meur, who raised $12 million for Seesmic, said the actual costs of the site are relatively small, in the tens of thousands per month. Costs are largely kept low due to users' videos, on average being less than a minute, he said. But plans for revenue include a mix of advertising and pro accounts, which would have greater capability and customization. He also spoke highly of co-branded operations, citing a 20th Century Fox promotion that received 1,600 view replies, and said a new feature, called groups, would debut in coming weeks.

"We were very lucky that we raised $12 million, and we are very cautious," Le Meur said. "We can hold for years."

The goal of growing Seesmic isn't to flip the company and make a quick buck, Le Meur said yesterday, joking about his record of selling four different companies after saying that was a "bad goal to have". Instead, he wants to help power anytime communication by video from anywhere, getting as close to real life as possible, while continuing to learn from the user community as to what features should come next.

"I would like to pursue my vision of a worldwide talk show, where people talk together, no matter where they are, all on video," Le Meur said. "We are building something real different. We wouldn't have done video comments at the beginning, and now we are learning by the community. We have a very active community and get thousands of feature requests."

Le Meur, who has one of the most active, most-followed Twitter accounts in the world, said he saw the real-time nature of the service as incredibly compelling, and that the "instant Web" was changing everything. His goal would be to leverage the power of sites like Twitter and FriendFeed to reach more users and groups of users who find communities online, even if the video quality, so far, isn't the best ever - something that has surprisingly been a boom for online dating sites.

"The good news is that you actually look worse (on Seesmic) than you really are," he said, adding that Seesmic would be branching out to make even more people look worse than they really are, through the release of an updated Nokia client today, which will let Nokia users have a full conversation, including video replies, using only their handsets.

Bret Taylor on FriendFeed's Road to Monetization, Early Surprises

2008-09-17T00:55:00.000-07:00

This evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor spoke about the popular aggregation and lifestreaming service's early months, explained what he and the team are trying to do through developing the site, and what we can expect from FriendFeed, as the company builds plans to monetize and further expand its growing user base. The panel, moderated by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, also saw participation by angel investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Leah Culver of Pownce, and Loic LeMeur of Seesmic.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Bret's presentation stated that FriendFeed, which currently supports 43 different Web services, and is now tracking greater than 100 million individual entries, is designed primarily to enable content discovery and social media consumption through a shared experience with friends and peers.

Growing Crazy Fast After a Slow Start

In front of an audience at the Stanford School of Business, Bret, in a quick presentation utilizing Apple's Keynote, recounted the team's reaction to the site's initial traffic spike following launch coverage in the New York Times and TechCrunch which evaporated in mere days. He said it took four months to return to the initial activity level, in between which the team went through varying stages of excitement, strategizing, realism and depression, while they openly questioned what they might have been doing wrong - having a history of successful product launches at Google. However, not too long later, traffic began to balloon in the beginning of 2008, reaching a hockey stick spike from March to June, during which the team's excitement turned to sheer panic, as they looked to scale their product and maintain speed and reliability amidst unprecedented demand.

Initial Development Missteps or Oversights

When FriendFeed added the ability to "like" items and make comments to a friend's feed, it opened up the opportunity for significant discussion among peers, and helped catapult the site from a simple aggregator to a destination site for many. But Bret admitted the team didn't anticipate the success these additions would have, and they didn't put as much development work into fleshing out those features.

As he said yesterday evening, "The discussion parts of our site have been almost the sole driver of our growth. It's been interesting to watch, and in retrospect, it was obvious. It was initially one of the underdeveloped parts of our site."

Also, while FriendFeed has been lauded for their highly-capable "hide" features, letting you block individual posts, posters, or services, there have been many requests for better ways to filter through the noise and find information that's most suited to your own likes and dislikes. But so far, the team is still playing catch-up. Bret added, "For the one year or so we have existed, we put less into relevancy and more into filtering tools. We are working on relevancy now. It's reflected in the different ways that people use a feed reader, as some see it as a new e-mail box and others ask to show the things that are interesting right now."

Handling Competition From All Sides

Swisher asked, as many do, if there are too many sites in the lifestreaming space, as there were too many calendaring sites in the Web 1.0 timeframe. She speculated that by the time the Web 2.0 shakeout occurs, that maybe three will survive and one, like Google with horizontal search, will end up with the lion's share.

Bret said that the lifestreaming space is a new category, and that it was "healthy" for many people to be working on "the content discovery problem". With the advent of syndication formats like RSS and social networking, he said subtle differences would be very important, and that on the Web, there is a history of natural fragmentation that enables niche sites to succeed. However, he did warn against sites adding so many features that they miss their core position. He said, "Every application grows until it has e-mail. Every Web site grows until it has all the features of a social network."

On Staying Independent

Every few weeks, somebody seemingly speculates that FriendFeed would make a great acquisition target for somebody, and the name that almost always comes up is Google, where the team's co-founders were last employed. But, as he and Paul Buchheit have consistently said, Bret again repeated the plan is not to sell the company, even if the road to business success isn't 100 percent clear.

"We're not interested in selling. We wanted to forge our own culture, to create a sustainable company," Bret said. "We have different perspectives on how to build a company of scale, and we want to build a company that scales."

Finding an Eventual, Sustainable, Business Model

Bret said the $5 million in seed funding FriendFeed raised this Spring was done anticipating the economic downturn, enabling the company to have a long runway before seeing the cash disappear. The team's hope, he said, was to find an advertising-based solution that delivers revenue without damaging the user experience. As he said, in response to questions from Kara Swisher, "there is a huge spectrum in the effectiveness of advertising," from ads that have high click-through rates, like those from Google AdWords, to the less-targeted AdSense, which delivers low conversion rates and "lots of accidental clicks." For FriendFeed, he speculated the site was "somewhere in the middle, but hopefully on the good end," where if links were mixed into the service that were sponsored, they would be done in line more with users' experience than image ads adorning the sides of the browser.

While Swisher coyly teased some of the panelists about their being "pre-revenue", Bret said one of the keys to launching a successful business model in the Web 2.0 atmosphere would be to not do so too early, and when they do, to do so in a way that is both quantifiable and analytical. "It makes no sense to try and monetize when you have only 2,000 users," Bret said. "It's too early and the early adopter audience does not reflect the behavior of mainstream users." He cited the early successes of Overture and Google AdWords as forging the quantifiable advertising market, but admitted they weren't yet sure how ads on FriendFeed would work. "We want to experiment enough to not run out of money before having to raise more, or we will have a sustainable business," he said.

What's Coming Next

Bret clearly hinted at a move to improve relevancy, and help users find signal in the noise. The team added "top" posts of the day not too long ago to help use the wisdom of crowds, and that feature could be improved. It's clear ads are coming, but maybe not immediately, as the company continues to try and scale in terms of users before worrying much about revenue. He also gave praise to the search engine that returns results just from your friends, but said it could be improved, as missing a result in FriendFeed would be much more impactful than a missing search result in Google. But he also spoke of "focus" and doing "one thing well", so it could be that those of us asking for messaging features aren't going to get our wish.

One thing you can expect FriendFeed not to do is to immediately give in to the demands from the early adopter tech geek set, who can at times be very demanding. While Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur said the "tech geeks and geek press would have you make products for the geeks," Kara Swisher helpfully added that group was pretty small to begin with. "It's 14 slightly-overweight white guys," she offered.

My Blog Is Less a Destination Site than a Conduit

2008-09-16T17:50:00.000-07:00

By now, we've all likely grown used to the fact that RSS readers don't often see a blog's redesign. For those who choose not to click through and leave comments, there's little reason at all to visit a blog directly any more, considering it's possible to power through dozens or hundreds of feeds in a feed reader, be it Google Reader, BlogLines or any other. With tangential services like Disqus enabling me to even engage with readers via e-mail, instead of through the blog, there's now even less reason for me to even visit my own site.

At this point, I probably, on most days, can't even tell you my daily RSS subscriber count, visible on the blog, or see the MyBlogLog widget's most recent visitors, as I'm using my blog as a way to project content outward - to RSS readers, to aggregators, like FriendFeed, Strands and Social Median, and to connect with readers via e-mail, using Disqus. It also, via RSS, powers popular sharing sites, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme. But none of those activities, with the exception of comments, require actual visits.

While it's still important to be sure the blog itself loads quickly, for those who view it for the first time, or for those who do click through RSS and choose to leave a comment, the look and feel of the blog is less important over time. I expect fewer people are typing in the louisgray.com URL and viewing pages directly, as they accumulate feeds and read more, and see the blog's UI more as a shell for content than a destination where a reader would spend a good amount of time. At this stage, the blog is simply a point in time for the content to begin its journey.

The life of a post, as always, for me anyway, starts out in e-mail, where it's authored. Then it's copy/pasted into Blogger. Then I visit the site, quickly, and ping FeedBurner. Subsequently, I refresh the blog feed in FriendFeed to keep it up to date, and send a TinyURL copy to Twitter. At that point, I really don't have to come back. Should someone opt to comment, I can reply via e-mail in Disqus, and even Delete unwanted spam or other messages.

The bulk of the activity around the blog is pretty much happening someplace else - making the number one purpose for the blog site itself to convert new visitors into signing up for the RSS feed. So if they bump into the content, via Techmeme, Digg, StumbleUpon, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, or anywhere else, they'll sign up and take in my content in the way they choose. But my blog is not the destination. It's a point in the journey. For those who are relying on ad revenue to come through via page views, this won't be good news, but that's what I see happening. For me, as I'm not trying to convert visitors into cash, this is the new reality, and we're fine with you just signing up, passing through and being part of the conversation as you choose.

Strands Upgrades to Highlight Friends' Updates, Content Sharing

2008-09-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

Last month, I took a look at an early version of Strands, a social services aggregator and lifestreaming service, and said it was high on potential, but needed to make a number of changes, to better highlight its users' shared content, and encourage community, to bring it more in line with more established players, like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed. Today, the site rolled out a number of enhancements aimed to help bridge that gap.

First of all, over the last three weeks, the user base for Strands has grown significantly. For example, Drew Olanoff, the site's community manager, has seen the number of people he follows rise from 78 on August 23rd, to 193 today, an increase of almost 150%, following increased visibility. And the site's default "Strands" account shows 267 followers today, making it the most-followed account, though it's not clear what percentage of total users continue to follow it upon signing up. While that's not the tens of thousands said to use Twitter and FriendFeed, for example, it's a start, and the growth rate is good.

Also in August, I said Strands needed to better highlight the "Home" feed, which shows updates from those you follow. Today, they made this "strand", the center column, have a much higher level of visibility, making it the core of the site, as they should.

Additionally, in line with my suggestions, Strands cleaned up its interface by removing lightbox elements, and added a new "share something" box, to let you post content directly to the site.

Unlike the aforementioned Pulse and FriendFeed, Strands is much more music-centric than the other networks, thanks to its origins, which you can see on MyStrands. The result is that, at least for me, the flood of music updates from those I follow tends to drown out much of the other content there, much like Twitter did on FriendFeed prior to the introduction of the "Hide" function. This is especially true as user updates seem to come in chunks, for instance, saying that a friend may have listened to eight different tracks "less than a minute ago".

In contrast to FriendFeed's hide by service functionality, which works across the site, Strands handles the hiding of music updates on a user by user basis. You can click on any user's ID and uncheck the box that says "Include Just Played music posts." This is good, but means the task is repetitive if you've invested in following a good number of users. With this said, the service does offer the ability to browse a reduced feed, by a subset of who you follow, reduced categories, or by showing liked and commented items. Personally, I'd like the ability to click on "Events" and hide all Events or Books, for instance, so there is a little more work to be done.

While it hasn't yet gotten the buzz of some other social aggregators and lifestreaming projects, Strands is quietly going about making a product on par with the market leaders, letting the community find new content and people, and enabling micro-conversations. If you're interested in getting into Strands, and seeing their latest updates, you can find me here: http://www.strands.com/louisgray. If you're lacking an invite, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com, or leave your e-mail address in the comments so I can set you up.

DISCLOSURE: Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

CodeWeavers Brings Chrome Experience to Mac OS X, Linux

2008-09-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

While the Google Chrome browser team is hard at work making the browser run natively on non-Windows operating systems, the team at CodeWeavers has already delivered a port of Chromium, the open source browser project spun off from Google's efforts on Chrome, utilizing the WebKit engine, for both Mac OS X and Linux. Now, Mac and Linux aficionados can get the Chrome experience without having to boot up their emulation environments - giving them the same start page, top tab behavior and integrated "omnibar".

If you are a Mac or Linux user, you can find the CodeWeavers' CrossOver Chromium for Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva and Suse on the product's Web site here.

As with the Chrome install itself, it's a fairly light production. You just have to download the installation file, add the program to your applications folder, and open it like any other browser. The expanded file itself takes just over 130 megabytes of space, but loads very quickly and has no issues running alongside Safari.

Chromium, on Mac OS X, Tracks My Frequently-Visited Sites
The CrossOver Chromium is clearly a port, and not a native Mac OS X app, as the drop-down menus, shortcuts and fonts smack of a typical Windows application. But if you're dying to use Chrome instead of Safari or FireFox, you get all the functionality of Chrome today.

The Chromium Omnibar Suggests Sites Based on My Entry
In my quick testing of the port, it accurately tracked my most-visited sites, it automatically filled the "omnibar" with search results and suggested URLs, and retained the ability to make new tabs along the top, as well as tear them away to make their own windows - all features lauded in the initial Chrome release.

You can get the browser here: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/.

Google Grinds Out Gears for Safari

2008-09-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

I'm still waiting for the day when every Web site and Web application behaves the same, intended, way on every Web browser and operating system. But despite it being more than 15 years since the launch of NCSA Mosaic, and 13 years since the introduction of Java, we're still not there. As a result, just like application developers often have to make the choice to code for Macintosh or Windows, we're seeing Web utilities make their way to Internet Explorer and Firefox before they get to Safari, despite the Mac's recent growth trajectory. Today, one of the laggards, Google Gears, released tools for the Safari browser, 16 months after debuting for other browsers.

At the time of Gears' launch in May of 2007, I frustratingly dismissed it as "Another Utility That Won't Work With Safari". Considering I've managed to go more than a year without Gears on Safari, to be honest, I almost forgot why I would want it in the first place. There's something about being a Mac/Safari user that makes us more hard-headed than the average Web consumer, and I'd already pretty much reached the point where I didn't remember what I could possibly be missing out on.

But with that said, today's announcement on the Google Mac Blog enables us to gain the full functionality of Gears-enabled sites, like Zoho, WordPress and Google Docs offline, in what's our preferred browser.

Google Reader: My First Google Gears/Safari-enabled App
With Google Gears installed, the first thing I've noticed is the new ability to take Google Reader offline. So, in the rare event that I'll be out of range of the Internet, but didn't get a chance to clear my Google Reader list first, I can take my favorite feeds with me. (See: Google Reader: Offline Reading)

Today's announcement also holds a hidden wrinkle - that the tool should be easily customized for any browser using WebKit. Without saying so, that certainly means Gears' integration in the Chrome browser is behind getting those of us using Safari will get some trickle-down help.

As Twitter Regains Footing, Competitors' Growth Stalls

2008-09-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

Over the last few months, Twitter's challenges have been well documented, here and elsewhere. Between issues with uptime, occasional data loss, a reduced feature set, and a difficult relationship with its developer community, the microblogging service frustrated many users to the point they were seeking out alternatives - from Plurk, to Identi.ca, Rejaw and FriendFeed. But more recently, as the service has all but eliminated downtime, and put the "Fail Whale" on the Endangered Species list (See: Pingdom's Twitter analysis), it looks like competitive services are losing momentum, and some are bleeding visitors, if Web visit tracker statistics are to be believed.

Twitter.com's Growth Has Returned, According to Compete.com
According to Compete.com, Twitter saw more than 2.6 million visitors in the month of August, a 500% increase over its December 2007 number, representing a 17.7% increase month over month. The high level of growth since June for Twitter followed a two-month near plateau from April to June, when the service's struggles were at their peak.

Compete.com Shows Twitter's Competitors Have Stalled
In the same time period, from July to August:

Identi.ca fell more than 58%, to 61 thousand visitors, down from more than 140 thousand the prior month.
Plurk.com fell to less than 250 thousand visitors, down 7.5% month over month, and down 30 percent from the site's peak, in June.
FriendFeed.com visits were flat from July to August, decreasing just under 1 percent, to more than 500 thousand visitors.

(All data from Compete.com)

Compete.com Velocity Shows Twitter Extending Its Lead
I can't claim I was an extremely "early" adopter of Twitter, and at times, I haven't been too fond of the service compared to other sites, but when it comes to status updates and "what you are doing", there really is only one game in town, one that's synonymous with the concept of microblogging - Twitter, thanks to it being first on the scene, first to amass a significant user base, and being tied in to other services, like Facebook and FriendFeed.. When Twitter had months of instability, outages, and a reduced feature set, its users didn't make the mass migration to other services that many had expected. And while they're still wrapping their arms around a business model, as services like Yammer claim to have gotten to the financial promised land first, Twitter has got the brand recognition and the massive user base that no other service can claim.

On Saturday, I wrote to Chris Baskind on FriendFeed, regarding Twitter.

"We have huge expectations and therefore, huge frustrations. The site has so much potential, and realistically, they have already won the microblogging battle, so we want them to be great!"

Twitter has the potential to be the conduit for the SMS and text messaging generation to social media. Twitter has already proven to be a great option for news updates, alerts to emergencies, and for using keywords to gauge the temperature of tens of thousands at once. And for anybody looking to the smaller services like Plurk, Rejaw, or Identi.ca, even if those services have incrementally better features or a stronger UI, they would have to expect a smaller user base, becoming an increasingly quiet echo chamber.

Barring disaster or bankruptcy, Twitter's leadership should continue. I've seen increasing examples of late where the site has become more mainstream. Those looking to alternative microblogging services may have had the time to hit at Twitter's weaknesses pass them by, as the site has nearly eliminated downtime, and started again on the growth curve, when others have stalled or seen user traffic decimated.

SiteMeter's Attempted Challenge to Google Analytics Falls Flat

2008-09-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

SiteMeter, one of the most widely-used Web log statistics trackers, has seen itself fall well behind the long, dark, shadow of Google Analytics. And while I've been a happy SiteMeter user for almost three years, its statistical data has at times seemed fairly pedestrian compared to Google's advances, lacking the ability to segment the results by selected dates, to build advanced charts, or even to export the records to Excel or a comma separated value file. This weekend, after months of developing a new version of their product in beta, they finally took a leap forward to better compete, but the roll-out has, so far, been a big disappointment. In fact, on the same day they went live, they had to roll back the launch.

SiteMeter, to date, has featured a free version of its product, and a paid version, to premium subscribers, who, for $89 a year, get expanded insight into referral statistics, user behavior, and their Web browsing setup. Premium users get access to data covering the most recent 4,000 visitors, as well as aggregate data comparing the most recent month's traffic to that of prior months - as far back as you started using the service.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, shows you data from all visitors of your site ever tracked. And instead of being restricted to only one set of users (the last 4,000), you can show visit data from the last day, multiple days, or any date segment. The service also lets you carve up your visitors' history with multiple graph options.

SiteMeter must have been feeling the heat, because their newest version hit the major benefits of Google Analytics. It let you segment results from a date range. It let you export any graph's underlying data. And it definitely expanded the range of graphs available.

The New SiteMeter Tried to Pretty Up Its Visitor Graphs

User Visit Data In the New Site Meter: Basically Raw Code

The New SiteMeter Pulldown Menus: Form or Function?

But what SiteMeter didn't do with their new version was make the data look useful for humans. Instead of a friendly UI, its newest offering felt very raw, with unpolished typefaces, and gaps that showed not all the data was being tracked. It's the same type of feeling most Mac users get when entering Linux for the first time.

Meanwhile, old shortcuts that were familiar to existing users, like recent referrals, popular pages, and summary data, no longer worked, and clickable links were instead replaced with a series of pull-down menus. Essentially, form was chosen over function, and the form wasn't really all that good.

Coming Soon: A SiteMeter Scoreboard?
Should they get more comfortable with their new look and feel at any point in the near future, it's clear SiteMeter is also not only going after Google Analytics, but there was a new feature called "Sitemeter Scoreboard" that showed your site's ranking in terms of total visitors or page views, relative to the service's nearly 1 million installations. Maybe the idea is that we would start showing our SiteMeter ranking on our blogs as many do for Technorati or other services. But it looks like we're not going to know for a while. Today's botched roll-out is another black eye for a company that most recently gained headlines for blocking access to Web sites via Internet Explorer, and has had the occasional outage or two without company comment.

If this is the best SiteMeter had to offer against Google Analytics, Google's really in no trouble at all.

Having a Development Platform Doesn't Mean You Stop Competing

2008-09-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

When Google's Chrome browser debuted, I openly asked if we ever thought the application would see the light of day on Apple's iTunes App Store, or if Cupertino would keep the door closed, giving Safari a leg up in the new round of browser wars. This weekend, things got clearer, as Apple turned down a tool that could be seen as competing with iTunes. As I had expected, Apple is not going to let the iPhone's development program get in the way of their leading software applications. And you know what? While they could certainly do better to communicate this up front to the development community, they shouldn't have to give competition the keys to the kingdom.

With so much of the Web community's efforts going toward open source programs and open platforms, it's almost become expected that companies are going to stop acting like businesses and start acting like charities. But not all will.

Google's Chrome was launched with promises that its improvements would be given back to the open source community. The browser, which could have come embedded with a load of Google-centric items, actually offers multiple options for search engines, amid some's concern that Google's growing influence in the search and advertising space was making it a monopoly.

In another example, Twitter famously gives its XMPP feed to FriendFeed, a site which many thought could replace the microblogging service outright. They could have instead told FriendFeed to pound sand and get their updates the old-fashioned way, but they didn't, which played a big role in helping FriendFeed grow to the point where it is today.

But neither of these examples typically is how the world works in business. Businesses focused on revenue and profits (which Google Chrome and Twitter aren't yet) don't usually kowtow to the competition and make things easier for them in the name of openness.

While it could be argued that Apple has introduced competition to MobileMe by making it easy to add Yahoo! Mail, GMail and Outlook to the iPhone, we realize they're not fools, and as e-mail access is essential, being flexible has broadly opened the iPhone's opportunity in the business market and with consumers outside of the MobileMe customer list. But there's no real strong reason for Apple to continue this trend and open up to provide iPhone versions of FireFox, Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer, were Microsoft ever to have a change of plans regarding the Mac platform or the iPhone.

I also wouldn't expect Apple to make room on the iPhone for desktop photo applications that compete with iPhoto, or anything that offers an end-run around AT&T, so long as that business relationship is in place.

And Apple's not the only company to play this way. Jason Goldberg of SocialMedian has mentioned a number of times that he's made no headway in having that service's activity reflected in the aforementioned FriendFeed, which he assumes is due to them being perceived as competition. While I believe it's more likely due to SocialMedian being so new, and the FriendFeed team having other priorities, there's really no reason they should go out of their way to letting a rival service get hooks into its users.

Apple has got to do a better job, in advance, of letting developers know what the limits are for what they can build, and where they need to stop. But this isn't a not-for-profit game. This is business, and it shouldn't be expected that a company's providing developers with the ability to make an application is an open invitation to replace their crown jewels.

Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

2008-09-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

It should be no surprise that being part of a site called TVbytheNumbers that I’m obsessed with statistics and this obsession extends to all the web site analytics and statistics that are available to us.

While I hear and read things often about how Feedburner’s stats stink and Google Analytics stats stink and none of them ever sync up well, that really hasn’t been my personal experience. Using either Feedburner or Google Analytics as an intraday tool is certainly problematic, and I have had a day or two here and there where Feedburner did lose data for an hour of five that it never recovered, but mostly both are just slow and do recover. Google Analytics typically tracks visits and visitors correctly intraday within reasonable timeframes, but lags behind in counting total pages for hours. Usually, by 8am Pacific time (but not often before then) all the page views for yesterday show up. And once they do, on a page view basis, Google Analytics, Feedburner and Quantcast all seem like they wind up syncing up within 2%-3%.

Given everything involved, I find the 2% difference very reasonable and it doesn’t bother us any. We wind up triangulating between Feedburner, Google Analytics and Quantcast and it’s less of a hassle than managing our Web logs.

Because of the problem cited above with Google Analytics being slow to capture all the page views, it does make intraday monitoring fairly worthless, aside from tracking visits and visitors. All the other stats – time on page, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. – are all wrong until all the page views are captured. But there’s little we’re doing that requires great analytics on an intraday basis. There are certainly times when it would come in handy, but even as it is, it works well enough intraday where we can at least figure out if we add something or move something around whether the desired result was achieved.

As a tool used after the fact, I find Google Analytics to be an extremely valuable tool, though I often don’t like what I see!

One thing we’ve thrown in the towel on is that referral traffic is almost always bad, no matter the source. There are some rare exceptions where linking produces good traffic (high time on site, number of pages per visit, etc), but that’s indeed rare. In fact, in almost every instance where a specific post is linked, the traffic is bad, with bounce rates often in excess of 80%. That’s whether Louis is linking to it, whether someone throws a link on Twitter, or even if Matt Drudge links to one of our stories. StumbleUpon and Digg show similar results.

Such traffic is great for jacking up visits and visitors, but bad for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. We’ve pretty much thrown our hands up in the air on that score and attributed it to web surfing behavior via links. As an aside, the stable link we have from Drudge to “TV Ratings” produces much better results, but if he links to specific story on our site and gives it any prominence on his site, the traffic has a very high bounce rate.

That seems largely out of our control, however there was still one stat that really bothered me. That was that if someone landed on our site via our home page, the bounce rates were still pretty high, approaching 50%. Better if someone came directly instead of via a referral, but still bothersome either way. Here's the landing page results for our site for August 1-31:

Recently, with that and a couple of other factors in mind – mainly wanting the ability to showcase more content on the home page – we redesigned the site. The bounce rate for traffic landing on our home page was around 47% for August. In the last week, post- redesign, that is now around 25%. The bounce rate for referral traffic to specific posts is still lousy, but again, we don’t feel like we can do much about that. Here are the landing page stats from September 6-12.

All of this has me wishing I’d gotten around to redesigning the site sooner. Who knows how much repeat traffic we may have lost as a result of design? I also feel silly because once upon a time I actually had responsibility for the web design/UI group at Charles Schwab. I recently had lunch with the VP who ran that group in my org and when I told her about the results she shook her head and laughed at me. My mentality had been this: our blog is a blog, pretty much like every other blog and designed pretty much like every other blog so spending a lot of energy on design tweaking didn’t seem like a worthwhile priority.

I definitely should’ve known better. I’m still not very happy about the bounce rates on referral traffic, but am quite happy about the reduction in bounce rates for people landing on our home page and would ascribe that improvement completely to redesigning.

By the way, for anyone interested, we went with the Live Wire theme from Woo Themes that we modified a little. So far I’d consider it the best $70 we ever spent. It’s not a perfect world, so the theme isn’t perfect, but setting the navigation structure (which we’ll certainly still need to tweak) and other modifications didn’t take much time. For $70 and time spent, cutting the bounce rate to our home page just about in half seems like time and money well spent.

Read more by Robert Seidman at TVByTheNumbers.com.

The Financial Markets' Downturn Hitting Home

2008-09-12T21:35:00.000-07:00

When the raging bull markets of the late 90s and early part of this decade ended, they fell with a tremendous thud. With the Web 1.0 boom turning to bust, combined with heightened fears over terrorism and world instability, the idea that one's investments would forever increase was dashed almost overnight. In 2008, we have a situation that's arguably even worse. Housing prices and demand for homes has plummeted. Energy prices are sky high. Financial institutions, having made many bad bets, are declaring bankruptcy and getting government bailouts. And unfortunately, the only near-guaranteed part of trickle-down economics is that the individuals at the bottom always feel the pain - and few are immune, myself included.

I've been lucky enough to hold down the same job from before the first recession through today. I saw Silicon Valley freeways go from being a gridlocked mess to easy driving, and back to a mess again. I saw billboards go from being plastered with dotcom ads to being "Available", only to return with a wider variety of advertising. And I've seen personal investments go from guaranteed profits to nearly pulling it all into cash, and later, getting back in, but trying not to be too exposed.

This ebb and flow is reaching a low point again. The entrance into our complex of condos is littered with "For Sale" signs, and more than one has a note of "Reduced Price", signaling the owner's desperation to move out and move on. Popular area lunchtime restaurants that used to have long lines out the door can now be visited without too much concern for parking. And, yes, my stock portfolios are bleeding out, seemingly getting worse by the day.

I thought I learned from some big losses the last time around, to not be invested in companies I didn't feel I knew very well, and not to hold stocks for a long time. I've become much more of a "flipper" who holds stocks for days or weeks, looking for what could be momentum. And at times, this has worked great. I recently played TiVo stock for a few days, and made enough profit to buy a new fridge we needed. At times, I've played Apple stock around earnings, essentially keeping me in Cupertino gadgets for free. And earlier this year, I even invested in some of the energy stocks, making money on them as the price of gas continued to climb.

eTrade Shows the Q1 Losses Are Keeping Me in the Red
But, despite these wins, right now both my personal portfolio on eTrade and my 401k are pretty hosed. On my 401k, I've lost more than half the money I've added through donations this year. And on eTrade, I've accumulated enough losses in the stocks I'm holding now that the total deficit would essentially represent lost months of work.

The 401k Says My Rate of Return is In the Cellar
Now, we're not bankrupt. And we haven't made any big purchases of late (aside from that fridge). We don't have credit card debt, and we're paying our mortgage. So we're doing quite well, compared to others who have much greater problems.

But there seems to be an air of uncertainty and discontent that comes with having less money than you had just a few months ago, and knowing what you do have isn't going quite as far. It feels like people's fuses are shorter and they're more stressed. And at times like these, it's hard to think what's going to change things. Alternative fuels? A massive change of heart in the stock markets? Probably not. This just could mean we're in the beginning of needing to buckle down, hang on and be even more judicious about what we do with our money, before things get worse.

Google's Suggest And Search: Never Completely Private

2008-09-11T23:35:00.000-07:00

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Recently, I have been thinking about a particular feature of Google Chrome. If you haven’t used Chrome or haven’t been following the news about it, it is a new Web browser from Google. The feature I've been mulling over is its almost-magical location bar. Google calls this the address bar, but it is also called the location bar or URL bar.

Apparently, a dedicated open-source Google project team called Chromium came up with this new address bar technology, and they call it the omnibox.

Omnibox

On its face, the omnibox is a great improvement over the more generic location bars of pretty much every other Web browser out there. It’s a URL input field combined with a Google (or user-defined) search engine front-end, and it throws in several other tricks to boot. In my opinion, the only thing that really comes close is Firefox 3’s optimistically-named awesome bar. This is different than the location bar in Firefox 3, which by default only looks through your bookmarks and history to find matching search results. Google actually uses its vast search database, using a technology called Google Suggest.

Google Suggest

However, it’s not just in Chrome. Firefox also employs Google Suggest in the search input field next to the address bar if your search is set to Google. You can also find it on Google’s classic home page (i.e. not iGoogle), and in Google’s mobile application and site (if javascript is supported). On the surface, Google Suggest is great. Just start typing whatever you are looking for, whether it be a Web site or keyword, and Suggest goes off and tries to predict what you are typing with increasing accuracy. This is especially useful on mobile devices where typing can potentially be annoying.

Privacy Concerns

The one big drawback of this technology is that your search terms are transmitted as you type them to Google’s server. They literally know everything you type, including half-finished search terms that you subsequently erase without submitting. And what if you accidentally had copied a lot of text into your cut-and-paste buffer and dropped that in the address bar? The whole buffer would be in Google’s hands immediately.You can see where this could lead to a potential problem. What if an executive of a giant company started to search for an insider-trading tip just prior to dumping a lot of stock? Could these partial search results be requested by subpoena in a resulting civil trial?

Google’s Promise

Earlier this month, Google did in fact consider this issue and updated what and how much they cache from Google Suggest. You can read the details from the official Google blog here. In summary, they promise:

98% of Google Suggest searches are not logged.
2% of these searches are logged with IP addresses.
These 2% will have their logs will be ‘anonymized’ within 24 hours of search result, starting late this month or early next month.

Keep in mind that this promise is specifically for Google Suggest searches. If you actually submit your search query, Google’s standard privacy assurance goes into effect, which you can see explained very simply in this YouTube video. It seems reasonable to believe that Google is putting forth a good faith effort to protect your privacy while balancing the needs of their search business.

Another Dynamic to Consider

Google isn’t giving you the whole picture though. Sure, having a cutting edge search engine is what made them the first name in search. However, their business revenue comes from advertising, not search.How does this affect their high-wire balancing act? Well, it’s not completely clear. However, they didn’t become the first name in Web advertising by not involving search. In fact, search is key to the effectiveness of their advertising business.

The Google banner ads you see in your search result pages, and the Web pages with even more targeted advertising when you click on a link in that result page, this is how Google makes its money.You can safely assume that Google is always feeling pressure from their profit center to hand over as much information as possible on search results to help in making their advertising even more clairvoyant.

Traditionally, Google has been clever and has worked within the very simple dynamic of search terms, geographic locations, and statistical results in order to make this advertising highly targeted. However, their brain trust is gigantic. If you can think of something, anything they could possibly use to help their ad business, they probably are developing it in the lab, or are using it on their site. Local, national and international news at the time of the query. Related geographical searches. Platform search is performed on (Windows, Mac, mobile, etc.). Which query result is chosen. Time between search and click-through. Basically, everything.

Getting Back to Privacy

So how does this affect you? Well, the bottom line is, what you do on Google’s search engine will never be completely private. Like throwing a rock in a pond, the ripples are immediately noticeable and quickly die down, but the waves might not hit the opposite shore for a while. Tiny traces will always be left, and it is those traces Google uses to improve its search, and ultimately its search-based advertising.

The Bottom Line

You do have to make a decision if you want to participate in this giant information machine Google has built behind its sleek minimalist Web site. Some people think Google Suggest is going too far. Some may think that Google Chrome’s Incognito mode will keep them safely anonymous.The answer to both of these is: Not quite.

Google Suggest does gather more statistical data (such as typing speed, number of corrections, etc) but anonymizes that information quickly.
Incognito mode only works on the client side, that is to say, it keeps your audit trail off the books on your end. If you use Google to search for something with this mode turned on, they still get all the same info they would get if you weren’t using it.

The only real privacy solution, the only way to remain out of the grand Google experiment, is to not search online at all.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

The Tech Adopter's Lament

2008-09-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

Forget Fast, I Want Instant. And I Want It Now.

My iPhone takes too long to back up.
My computer takes too long to reboot.
My applications take too long to load.
My FTP uploads take too long to transfer.
My blog host takes too long to post.
My folders take too long to open.
My e-mail takes too long to check.
My messages take too long to send.
My feeds take too long to hit Google Reader.
My Time Capsule takes too long to back up.
My updates take too long to hit FriendFeed.
My camera takes too long for iPhoto to recognize.
My downloads take too long to complete.
My Web sites take too long to refresh.
My URLs take too long to resolve.
My documents take too long to print.
My items take too long to display.
My videos take too long to buffer.
My comments take too long to be approved.
My services take too long to sync.

Time for an upgrade?

The Real Genius in iTunes 8? Apple Will Make More Money.

2008-09-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

At times, it seems like the mainstream press hasn't yet figured out how to preview Apple events. That Apple periodically updates its iPods or iPhones or computers and software is really no surprise. The home runs are typically saved for MacWorld San Francisco, with big announcements sprinkled in at the company's WorldWide Developers' Conference (WWDC) and the occasional one-off event. But even when the company makes largely expected announcements, some go into severe hype in advance, and severe lows following. And like the illegal drug users who share the same spike and eventual crash, they're usually left looking for more. But behind the acid trip rainbow iPod Nanos and and upgraded iPod Touch, there was an element of real genius - as iTunes was upgraded with a new tool making it even easier to spend even more money on the popular online music store.

An iTunes Genius playlist, based on ATB's "Do You Love Me"

One of the major new features of iTunes 8 is called "Genius", which will leverage your own iTunes listening history, as well as that of other iTunes users, and try to create a playlist of songs similar to that which you are listening to. Like "Party Shuffle", it will get some mixes right, and some wrong, but it's following along the path of Pandora and Last.fm to use a crowd's information to provide recommendations and guess what other songs or artists you would like.

(See also: ReadWriteWeb: iTunes 8: The Genius in the Box and Mark Evans: Is Apple’s Genius Good or Evil?)

The breakthrough for Genius isn't so much that you can rediscover old music that you've neglected, although for some that is no doubt true. The real value is in the Genius sidebar, which is plastered with "Buy" buttons linking to the iTunes Music Store. In a time when so many Web services are hoping ad clicks will provide them with a way to the promised land, the simplicity of how Apple rolls out new services that enable a larger revenue stream is impressive.

For me, Apple iTunes long ago became my default source for new music. Even if I found a song on the radio or through Last.fm or another source, the first step is to head to iTunes to get it and download it. If iTunes doesn't have the song or album, it might as well no longer exist. I won't be heading to another service to find the song, but I may buy something else instead. That Apple has now made a mainline to my credit card every single time I fire up iTunes is a great way for me to continue making regular donations to my favorite for-profit Cupertino-based charity.

Of course, given I already have 4,342 songs totaling 18.3 days worth of music which hasn't been listened to in the last six months, according to my "Neglected" playlist, maybe I should be satisfied with what I have. Now that would be true genius.

i.TV Launching iPhone App for Local Movie, TV Listings

2008-09-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

Apple Computer's Steve Jobs famously said, in 2004, that he felt "you watch television to turn your brain off" and use the computer "to turn your brain on". In the ensuing years, however, Apple has marched directly into your living room, with the Apple TV, and the company's digital devices are making the partnership between your computing side and your television-watching side better and stronger. A new iPhone application from i.TV debuts today, letting iPhone and iPod Touch users tap into the Web, and pull down local movie and TV listings, search by name, and see user-submitted reviews.

And interestingly, the application, though in its infancy, teases with options about scheduling shows for recording on your DVR, or even renting and buying selected media.

Click Images for Larger Size

Once you have downloaded the i.TV application to your iPhone or iPod Touch, its first query is to ask you your zipcode. Entering your zipcode references available TV service options for your area. When you've selected a TV service, such as Comcast, i.TV will take a few minutes to pull down your full channel listings and TV schedule.

From this point, you can browse channels by time, starting with the current time, and go forward and backward in time. Using Apple's touchscreen technology, you can select any TV show to see more detail, rate it from one to five stars, give a thumbs up, or see user reviews.

Click Images for Larger Size

You can also use i.TV's database to search TV listings. As you can see in the screenshots, I did quick searches for "Conan", looking for Conan O'Brien, and the term "Law &", to see how many Law & Order derivatives I could find. Obviously, quite a few.

Click Images for Larger Size

i.TV, which has offices in both Palo Alto and Park City, Utah, also offers the same level of detail for theater listings. Using the same zip code information I previously entered, I could browse local movie theaters, see which films were playing, and get a quick synopsis of the movie.

Click Images for Larger Size

But gathering data from i.TV is not a one-way passive operation. i.TV's developers promise the ability to send alerts to friends, write reviews and respond to reviews by other i.TV users, making a microcommunity around television and theater entertainment consumers who own iPhones or the iPod Touch. The i.TV application, added to the Apple iTunes Store today, can be found on their App Store, here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore. The company's Web site is here: www.i.tv.

Five Blogs to Take Back to School In September

2008-09-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

Part Seven In a Monthly Series

Sometimes the best blogging is going on well away from the most visible places. Since March, I've taken the beginning of each month to showcase some bloggers that are writing some solid content in their corner of the blogosphere. They may not post as frequently as some of us do, and they certainly don't have the readership they deserve. Just maybe, with this little boost, it can give them the encouragement they need to keep going, and get more prolific.

Each of the bloggers highlighted in the last seven month has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July and August.

1) Matt Rhodes / Fresh Networks Blog (blog.freshnetworks.com)

Focus: Web 2.0, Online Communities
Recent Highlight: Social Networking for Spies
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Cyndy Aleo-Carreira / Shakespeare I Ain't (www.fourlittlebees.net)

Focus: Technology, Parenting, Journalism
Recent Highlight: On Being a Feminist Parent
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Andy DeSoto/ AndyDesoto.com (www.andydesoto.com)

Focus: Social Media, Technology
Recent Highlight: Blogging Is a Big Game
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Alex Payne / al3x.net (www.al3x.net)

Focus: Software Engineering, Software, Computing
Recent Highlight: al3x's Rules for Computing Happiness
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Elliott Hughes / elliotth’s Blog (elliotth.blogspot.com/)

Focus: Apple, Linux, Software Engineering
Recent Highlight: Desktop Linux Suckage: Introduction
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for October's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.