donloeb.com

while on a *boring* conference call on friday, i finally took the time to upload my address book to facebook. out of my 5800 contacts (some of these must be inactive - i don’t know that many people!), 374 were already using facebook. i proceeded to invite 150 or so and within minutes, yes minutes, half of them had accepted my friend request. over the course of the next few days, most had replied…that’s fast…

not only that, but most of these folks are active users…as a result, my facebook experience is a bit like linkedin…except it’s alive…:)

the service is simple, clean, and snappy…and, of course, it’s open…it’s a very effective way to communicate - via rss aggregation and twitter-like broadcasts. email will always be around, but it’s clear that myspace and facebook are going to control a bunch of digital communication…look out for falling pageviews and a reduction in time spent across the webmail providers (yes, i know this has been happening for a couple of years, but i think it’s going to accelerate)…

ps - when building web apps, never underestimate the need for speed (loading time that is!). yahoo did and it has hurt them time and time again…

well, maybe not my mom…but still, it’s a pretty great video…thanks to commoncraft…

Click To Play

i rarely get sick, but when i do…i’m usually down for a while. seems like my health is matching our dreary weather this wknd. i was going to write about the web2expo (aka, “web2 for the rest of us”), but i can barely manage to type this note…

btw, iraq in fragments should have won best docmentary this year…simply amazing…

ps - i’ll put up my slides from web2 later this week…

today, we’re very proud to announce that SFGate is using FeedBurner and is now part of our ad network. they join a bunch of other new FeedBurner customers - AOL, bizjournals, thestreet.com, npr, circuitcity, etc…

so, subscribe. i’m particularly fond of the following feeds: the daily dish, politics blog, tech chronicles blog, mick lasalle - movies, food & dining, green, tom stienstra - outdoors, sfgiants, and of course, cal football podcast…

just found this video via stumbleupon - my new favorite time waster :)

AOL and the rest of Time Warner, welcome to FeedBurner!

we’ve been working closely with the AOL team for quite a while, and today we’re pleased to announce a wide ranging partnership with AOL / Time Warner. we’re providing a suite of feed-related services designed to help AOL et al. manage, track, and optimize their rss feeds (text & multimedia) as they are consumed in aggregators and personal homepages, via widgets across the web, and of course, devices of all kinds. the folks at AOL realize that to take full advantage of this brave new world of distributed media, they must accurately measure influence wherever and however their content is consumed.

thanks to jen, thomas, rachel, and fj for getting this done…

yesterday we relaunched our feedfoundry product and announced a couple of great new customers, circuit city and npr. with foundry, the feature that is most interesting (to me) is the ability to splice feeds together just by assigning labels. so, we can help publishers do some cms/IT independent things by applying arbitrary labels to feeds and then getting new feeds in the process. for example, bizjournals can label all of their city feeds with the state they are in and voila, they have a california feed or a regional feed, etc. plus, they then get all of the widgets and other tools to help them promote the new feed. pretty cool…

also, last week we upgraded our beloved headline animator product. we essentially did three things: (1) turned on click tracking, (2) enabled publishers to have multiple creatives per feed, and (3) embedded a “grab this” sharing function…

all three pieces are critical, but my favorite is the ability to have multiple creatives. as such, pubs can have email signatures, IAB ad banners, and odd-sized widgets that fit in myspace pages, etc. for instance, while IAB ad units are really important (to create live feed-powered ads), sometimes you just want a little graphic…

couple of great announcements re thestreet.com and a slew of new york centric publishers - congrats rick, eric, and jake! these follow last week’s bizjournals release…when it rains it pours…