FriendFeed: I'm Still Not Using It

FriendFeed is marching towards a million users per month, and if they didn't get it last month because of February's brevity, then they'll probably get it this month. I have no doubt that it will continue to win over the growing number of hardcore social media people. With so many friends and places being updated with new content, people want to find an easy way to bring it all into one page. I can see how FriendFeed helps focus the madness, but at the same time, it kind of enhances it too.

So Many Feeds, So Little Time
When you start out, having only a few friends to follow on Friendfeed does help pull all this social media activity together. The user interface doesn't really amaze me, but it's functional. If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that a functional interface matters more than looks. Personally, I wouldn't mind a little more effort in design, but nonetheless, it does a good job of bringing Mixx submissions, Digg submissions, tweets, stumbles, blog posts, and other content under one roof. But then you start to get going and you've got tons of friends and tons of scrolling to do to check everything out. Or you get that one power user who's got your feeds so full that you don't see anyone else. Now what?

Time for a New List
So now, you've got more organizing to do. I don't know about you, but I'm not a huge fan of organizing. I want technology to do it for me whenever possible. Friendfeed gives you the option to create new lists. Which is great. So now I've got power users over there to fight with each other for space, and since they're updating everything on an hourly basis, they'll balance each other out a little. But I'm still adding friends because that's what you do in social media. It's a very active Internet social life, so pretty soon, I need lists for college friends, co-workers, industry professionals, and so on. And I'm thinking isn't there a way that the technology can start to group some of these updates for me.

I Want What I Want and Not All This Other Crap
It's probably time for FriendFeed to start working on a recommendation engine of their own. While I'm not enthusiastic about Digg's recommendation engine from what I've seen so far, the need to help users figure out what they want to look at is growing. For some people, this is a little creepy to think that some machine or algorithm is now determing a lot of what you see. However, in FriendFeed's case, because it can pull together so much information, I think a recommendation engine absolutely needs to be in the works (if there is one and I've missed it, please leave a note in the comments).

Where Are All My Friends?
I'm not a huge fan of dumping out my email address book into Web sites. I understand why sites want me to do that, but I don't like doing it. I do like the option FriendFeed has for you to import Twitter friends. Really, I'm hoping that more sites make it easier to transfer friends across social sites so I don't have to hunt everyone down again. I think the genius of Facebook is it's ability to help you connect through old friends via past schools. If FriendFeed has that functionality somewhere (please leave a comment if you've seen it), then that would be great.

Information Overload or Opportunity?
However, I'm still waiting for a lot of my friends to buy into this site, and I really don't think that they will. This to me seems like a social media professional's Web site, and not something that the masses necessarily care about. If FriendFeed could morph itself into some kind of tracking and analytics tool for social media, they could suddenly find themselves in a position to be very profitable. They're probably collecting all kinds of data already that would be very interesting to know, although I'm sure there are privacy laws with disseminating some of it. The point being is that we're all still waiting for a social media analytics tool to help make sense of outreach and the general madness. While I think FriendFeed still needs to find ways to make culling through all the information that comes through it easier, I wonder if they're now positioned to make sense of the madness and turn an interesting tool into a profitable social media analytics business.

All A-Twitter: Why Does Everyone Love This Site?

At first glance, it's hard to be very amazed at Twitter. You get a dialogue box, scarcely any space for a profile, and away you go. You can follow people, and they can follow you. You can send small direct messages, which are like mini-emails. Oh, you can put up a little picture for your profile too. Wow. How amazingly underwhelming.

But the adoption rate for Twitter right now is incredible. Just click through this link to Alexa to see just how the use of the site is skyrocketing in recent months. Compete.com's numbers peg last January at almost 6 million users. What's going on? Why are so many people into this?

The Politics of the Internet
Right now, I'm leaning towards politics as being the reason for the latest explosion. More specifically, I'm pointing my finger towards Barack Obama, whose 2008 election campaign just laid out a successful template for employing social media in politics. Perhaps other politicians are now hurrying to jump on the political bandwagon to fame and notoriety. Charles Cooper at CNET News recently talked about Twitter becoming the rage in D.C. circles in his "Suddenly, Twitter's the Rage with D.C. Politicos." With politicians being essentially the material world equivalent to social media's "influencers," they are liable to bring in a lot more people into social media who want to stay in touch with their public servants, and a whole new dynamic to Twitter may just be growing up.

Twitter: It's "Stupeasy!"
Part of the success for Twitter comes under a new business term that I've just coined: "Stupeasy" meaing stupid easy. This isn't necessarily an insult (although I can't say that it's a huge compliment). The concept of writing "What are you doing right now?" in a dialogue box is excrutiatingly easy. Plus, the 140 character limit means you don't have to really form complete sentences. Shorthand and misspellings are expected, so there's no pressure for being correct in writing, unlike with a blog where a certain amount of thought and structure are expected.

Following people is relatively simple too, and replying doesn't take a whole lot of brainpower either. It means that Twitter has few barriers to entry. The sign up is free and not extensive at all. They just get people started and going with very little Internet red tape. In terms of it's stupeasiness, it reminds me of another Internet property: Google. Perhaps, you've heard of them.

Google's main page is incredibly straightforward. You enter a search term in the dialogue box. There's not a whole lot of other things to do, and the dialogue box gives you a pretty good direction as to what you should be doing on the site. The intuitive straightforward nature of the site has been a key piece to their success in my mind, and similarly, I think Twitter's done a similar thing with its interface and design.

Now For A Real Word: Connectivity
The bigger trend beyond politics and stupeasiness is connectivity. Because of the expansion of the Internet, people have found it increasingly easy to be in touch with each other. Whatever you may think about how isolated and alienated people have become at times in the world, the Internet dissolves a lot of those walls to staying in touch and connecting with others. Sure there are creeps on the Web, but that's life.

Twitter's integration with cell phones also allows people to stay up-to-date while they're on-the-go, which adds another avenue for engagement with the site. Given the brevity of the messages, that's made it a perfect companion to the cell phone medium.

Combined with the simplicity and the passion of a lot of techie types, connectivity has become a key trend that has driven Twitter to new heights (and when February traffic reports come out, possibly even higher traffic numbers). I can't say that you'll always find out the greatest information in the world, but you may be surprised at the interesting links that get passed around and the little nuggets of knowledge that you'll glean about some of your friends and associates.

If you want to connect with me on Twitter, click through this link. Happy twittering everyone!

SlideShare: Finally A Social Place For Businesses

Perhaps, this title is a little bit of a slight to LinkedIn, but there seems like there's so much more opportunity for B2B interactions and information sharing on SlideShare.net. While LinkedIn lets you put up your resume and talk to other people professionally in some of the groups, SlideShare has the opportunity to really drive forward business conversations and interactions through the sharing of presentations. I know it's not very exciting initially; you're like, "Yay, another way that I can stare at a powerpoint." But I think this site offers a new possibility for product marketers to effective get their messages out in social media and for businesses to research different products in a potentially easier and more engaging way then searching through google and hunting down whitepapers.

The Business Research MarketPlace
I'm just delving into this site, but I think it could become a great information marketplace. Let's go for a long-term view. Okay, we're totally in the visionary business world, so this has no basis in fact other than this afternoon I started brainstorming. A big assumption here is that SlideShare hits a critical mass in traffic to make a lot of this possible. If you get an area set up for businesses where they're all uploading their presentations about their products, it's like having a big expo where everyone is getting a booth. Some placements give you better visibility in real life and on the Web. SlideShare can start to charge for that and other extras. An extra could be attaching a white paper or having audio included with their presentations. There could be ways to make branded areas, add in lead capture forms, or even have an online instant messenger integrated to have a live person talk someone through a presentation of a product. Am I getting too far out there? I hope not. There's a lot of potential here.

For the Busy Business Professional
Because everyone is starting to know about this place, it becomes a new way for people to do their research on companies and services. Instead of stumbling through Google and scrolling around for whitepapers, now there's this on-going business exposition that's on 24-7, so busy business executives can research new services to help their businesses any time day or night. Plus, all the smart businesses are putting their products there. So if you're trying to make a decision about a cloud computing service, all the players are there with their presentations. You don't have to skip through multiple sites. There's an element of convenience that would be very enticing. Because as great as having so much information available through the Internet is, there's still no full-proof way to search through it all (Sorry Google. I love you, but I need something more). SlideShare has the opportunity to be that something more for these professionals looking for a business solution and for product marketers trying to get their word out in a social media landscape that is hooked on fifteen word status updates.

Growing Traffic Numbers for SlideShare
Of course there are more than just business, social media, and technology presentations up on SlideShare, and who knows which will really hit big to make SlideShare pop. All kinds of powerpoints and other presentations from spirituality to humor to saving the koalas are on the site, which is steadily marching towards 1 million monthly visitors according to Compete.com. So there are interesting opportunities for people to have fun sharing little presentations (Anything to do with pets tends to have ridiculous upsides in Web traffic, I've noticed. Seriously. People love their cats and dogs).

A Viable Business or Acquisition in the Making
Nonetheless, I think the real gravy and where a viable business model may lie is in the B2B marketplace. It remains to be seen if SlideShare is looking to be a big acquisition (Dear LinkedIn, buy them; it makes too much sense), or if they want to carve out a permanent piece of Internet real estate as the one-stop shop for businesses to make their most important decisions.

Web Browser Wars: Who Will Win?

Once upon a time, there were only a few browsers. You had AOL, Netscape, and Internet Explorer in some order of existence in the 90's. I'd imagine that those were easier times on Web developers when they didn't have to check their coding against nine different browsers. But with the way people surf and and interact with the Web changing, the demands being placed on browsers has changed too.

Consider that no one was checking their email on their phone in 1996. Now, the rapid expansion of smartphones like the Blackberry and the iPhone more recently is heightening the importance of having browsers that mesh with that space. Opera Mini is one of a number of solutions that companies are putting up to answer the growing demand for browsers that function quickly and efficiently on that platform. Never heard of Opera? That's okay. According to a Wikipedia usage chart, their main browser (not the Opera Mini browser for the phone) only has about .7% of the market place.

Social Browsing
Everyone pretty much knows who the big dog in the Web browsing world is: Internet Explorer. Despite the amazing number of naysayers and detractors, IE is still used by 67.6% of Internet users. As a long time fan of Firefox, I'm encouraged by their 21.5% of Internet users, but after that, it's a pretty precipitous drop off. Safari (8.3%), Google Chrome (1.1%), Opera (.7%), and Netscape Navigator (.6%) follow behind the first two. However, as far as I've seen, none of them have really gotten into the social media management aspects of browsing, which is why I've recently become an afficianado of Flock.

Lots of us now have fifteen different social media accounts to keep track of. That's a lot of logging in and Web browsing during the day, and while some of us are way too big of Internet junkies and don't mind this, even we'd like easier ways to navigate our Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, and other accounts. Built off of Mozilla's Firefox, Flock isn't the end all of answers, but a handy little sidebar gives me an easy way to keep track of stuff going on in some of the bigger communities like Twitter, Digg, MySpace, and Facebook. I also really like their RSS feed aggregator. So far it's been one of the easiest ways I've found to integrate a feed into my daily browsing. I've used iGoogle, but really, I just need something easy to glance at to see if there's something new to check out.

The Big Web Browser Winner
I can't see one big winner emerging as the Internet fragments. I think there's going to be a major winner in the mobile industry that will partially be determined by some kind of business partnership. You know how Internet Explorer is usually the pre-loaded browser on a lot of computers? I think one of the browsers may end up as the preloaded browser. I think that's why Google's Android could position Chrome or some latest variation designed for the mobile phone to be a big winner. Sure that T-Mobile partnership doesn't look like much now, but down the road, it could be genious with the combination that they're setting up.

I think Internet Explorer will still be the main Web browser as things shake out. I think they'll do the same thing to social browsing as they did to tabbed browsing. They'll wait around and see what works, and then they'll add that feature in. Personally, I'd like to see Flock really gain ground through viral dissemination by all of us social media types (really the only bad thing that I have to say about it is that it chokes up with too many digg pages opened). But if it doesn't catch on too much, I hope Mozilla takes a look over their shoulder to add some of these features in. Because the Web is only getting more social and interactive, and I've got around a thousand friends, followers, and fans that I need help staying in touch with. Social browsing is where the Web is going; now it's time for all the browsers to catch up.

The Digg Bannings: Why They Were Inevitable

In the world of social media, you'd have to have been hiding under a rock to have not heard all the furor over the digg bannings that have gone on. The headliner of them all was the banning of Zaibatsu, for which I haven't heard much of an explanation from Digg (if something has come out about this let me know). I've heard Reg's side of things, and I can imagine that he'd be more than a little pissed. I don't blame him. He and many of the other top diggers who legitimately contribute to the community (no scripts and what not) spent hours each day contributing, digging, and so forth. For the big three (Zaibatsu, Mr. Baby Man, and MSaleem), I remember hearing on a podcast that they can spend up to 6 hours a day on Digg. Just do the math and figure out how huge of a time committment that is during the year.

And Here's the Door...
So to suddenly get canned by the site that you've dedicated so much time to is definitely grounds for being angry, but I think there's an unfortunate reality that Digg had to deal with. Check this out from their "about us:"

"We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing."

And that statement just isn't true. Every piece of content is not equal. I've been around digg for awhile, and I'm not a power user. But I can work up a piece of content into the 200 digg range with my friends list and sharing shouts. The newby user who submits the same piece of content has almost no shot at that unless s/he gets lucky and the topic just hits a cord with a couple of the right people who shout it around.

Dealing with the Digg Oligarchy
This isn't news to anyone, but what had happened was that a kind of digg oligarchy had formed up. And they were submitting the same types of technology and political news submissions. They in some ways were limiting the opportunities of Digg to expand past the 18-34 yr old, Web geek, Obama supporting, Nasa loving, and environmentalist user that had really forged the site. Because what was getting popular continued to appeal to the same types of users. And new users really didn't have a great chance of getting popular. It kept feeding the cycle. So digg decided to start levelling the playing field: the digg bannings.

Is this biting Digg in the butt? Maybe. But compete.com shows digg with traffic above 26 million, which is its biggest number over the last year. The bannings have momentarily opened up some access to get into the friends lists of other power users still on digg. Perhaps this will open the door for a greater breadth of topics to make it to the popular page and start drawing the attention of new user segments. If it doesn't, other than knocking out the script use that was going on, I'm thinking that it'll give them a short-term boost from all the talk about the site and people wanting to check it out. But will this really help break up the oligarchy or will it just form again? I'd guess the latter until Digg can figure out a way to better connect relevant content with each individual user. I know they're working on it with the recommendation engine, but I'm not won over it by that tool yet.

And from another view, I think that they've opened the door wider for competition to engage with their power users in a better way.

Standing in the Wings: Mixx.com
I've written about mixx before, and the digg bannings have created a small exodus of key individuals from digg to mixx. Mixx has a lot of ingenuity and cool stuff going on there, and now they've got a few big named ex-diggers (Zaibatsu) to drive it forward. I heard a rumor about a site re-design in the works, but they've already got tons of cool functionality. Their traffic keeps skyrocketing according to compete.com, but what I wonder is how they'll treat their power users as things progress so that they don't end up in digg's predicament one day.

As for the losers in all of this, I think it's pretty clear that the power users have really taken it in the keister. That stinks. Really. It does. I think digg owes them a little more than that. Could you imagine Wikipedia suddenly canning its top content editors? Good bye! Too bad, so sad. But I won't belabor this point. I think learning how to engage with power users is always a tricky thing in social media, and this time, Digg got caught in a bind between their goals for a content democracy and loyalty to some of the people that have made it what it is. We'll just have to wait and see what this means and if other sites out there, can learn and do better.

Who's The Boss? Yahoo!'s Move Into Social Search

At some point last night, my Twitter account blew up with links to ReadWriteWeb's story about Yahoo!'s move into the social search space with their B.O.S.S. (Build Your Own Search Service) application. This really is exciting news, as it marks a move into a space that's ripe for expansion. The problem that so many others in the social search space have faced has been a scalability issue. They need more traffic to hit that critical mass where their tools can reach their full potential. Until they hit that point, those search tools don't seem as good (and some of them aren't as good until they get enough usage).

But Yahoo! has got the traffic. For June, Compete.com reports that Yahoo! had nearly 133 million unique visits. Granted not all of those or probably even half of those people will be the developer type to create their own search engines, but enough will be that the BOSS tools should get a good amount of dissemination. With dissemination, more people will come in contact with the concept of social search and being able to influence results as opposed to the predominant what-you-see-is-what-you-get search methodology. This also can position Yahoo! for a much firmer foothold for the future of search.

I've long said and will continue to say that the future of the Internet is in niche topics. Lots of people call it the long-tail of the Internet, although that term is more specific to SEO stuff. When I say niche, I mean that when people want to know about dog-grooming, they want to find dog-grooming topics for their specific dogs. A chihuahua needs something different than a sheep dog. Google may bring up a lot of relevant topics around dog grooming, but oftentimes, a social search engine can be trained and honed more easily to get to a specific granularity.

Of course, enough people have to be using the social search engine to train it this way. I'm making a number of assumptions here, and I'm not entirely sure how Yahoo!'s BOSS application will work. The developers will play big roles in deciding how "social" their search engines will be. So it remains to be seen how exactly this move manifests and how great the adoption rate is. But from a strategic point of view, it's a heck of a move. And after all the furor over Microsoft, perhaps Yahoo! has shown that it still has a few tricks in the bag to turn the search tide to its favor.