donloeb.com

first off…i love friendfeed…it’s become my rss reader, content discovery engine / daily 5 minute break, and primary way to track friends :)

i’ve been meaning to post a list of things i’d like to see friendfeed do…well, fred beat me to it. i agree with him completely and had a number of his on my list…here are a few more that fred didn’t mention, most of which focus on data (think flickr…everyone wants stats!):

1) display all my items that have activity (not just what i’ve commented on) in reverse chron order and listed by most commented and liked

2) allow me to get a daily email update of the activity - even if i’ve logged in recently :)

3) items should be deduped and global stats for each item should be front and center…explore putting it in the UI next to each item (# times this item was shared, # comments, # likes, # clicks, etc.). if it’s too cluttered, at least make “stats” a tab…

4) let me see the most popular items (shares, comments, likes, clicks, movers and shakers (”interestingness”)) over different time periods across my items, my friends’ items, and all of ff…and, turn those into rss feeds :)

5) allow me to share/rebroadcast any item directly from within ff

6) search should be full-text - ff should index the landing pages of all shared links

7) please create a smaller logo :)

re fred’s list, i especially want the ability to display thumbnails of images from blog feeds ala flickr, explode blog posts, and post comments back to flickr ala twitter…

i’ve tried all sorts of things with feedburner and yahoo pipes to create a good feed of me, and i settled on using pipes to splice flickr into my wp source feed with feedburner on the front-end (this works better than the flickr splicer in feedburner as each photo can have flare). that seems to work for my readers (i.,e not too much content), but if you want my complete exhaust, use this feed as it’s a true feed of me…

happy friday….

- why journalists should blog…and, scott karp’s new social network / news aggregation company targeted at journalists and consumers - very interesting…

- david berlind’s take on twitter…i agree…

- new local page from topix? looks like a real newspaper…and, nice article about charlie from google…sign me up…

- facebook monetization and metrics from seth goldstein, etc.

- CDN pricing…a nice detailed view into that world…

congrats to frank, jen, and the rest of the folks on the aol personalization team…today, aol launched a beta version of their new my aol page. what i like is that it’s actually not just a new version of my aol….which frankly wouldn’t be that interesting. instead, they’ve also included a full-text rss reader with integrated bookmarking and a very visual content recommendation service called magnet.

so, in this version, they’ve combined a dashboard-like “my” page with a full-content experience and then layered on sharing tools and a discovery engine…they have some work to do, but you can definitely see where they are headed…

btw, they were smart to launch a completely separate recommendation service and make it visual and entertaining. it’s very stumbleupon-like…that’s good as they need to introduce the concept and work out the kinks before they alter the main user experience…

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…

i know everyone’s already written about this, but i’m allowed as i used to work on “my” :)

the new my yahoo has finally been released…i won’t comment on all of the changes right now (some i agree with and others i don’t), but i will say this…it’s quite a product. very beautiful, easy, and most importantly for rss fans…it’s full-text!

it’s going to be interesting to see how consumer behavior changes as this gets rolled out to the tens of MMs of my yahoo users. will they like the new full-text rss reader or will they turn it off and keep the dashboard experience?

btw, this is actually a nice hybrid product that allows users to put headline style content on a dashboard (cnn, bbc, nyt, etc.) while also allowing users to efficiently read full-text blogs. this approach isn’t new (google IG does this with the reader module), but it’s the first real mainstream implementation as it just “works.” this should dramatically impact time spent on my yahoo…

anyways, congrats to david, tapan, james, joseph, shanan, and everyone in eng and design…

dave is right…my netscape was the first major service to include RSS (back in ‘99). they did it to compete with my yahoo. netscape wanted to provide a differentiated experience, and didn’t want to play content BD catchup. but, at the time, folks weren’t used to the whole linking out experience and there wasn’t much content available in RSS. since then, blogging, search, and broadband happened…and, every major media company adopted rss in one form or another…thanks to dave and others for pushing this early on..

anyways, congrats to netscape…it’s nice to witness the product’s rebirth…

ps - here’s the obligatory link to the netscape fish cam and a picture i took when i visited AOL back in may. and yes…this wonderful/quirky part of internet history is still there…

this morning google announced that they are now reporting subscription numbers for google reader and google IG (personalized homepage). we’ve been working with them for a while to make this happen - thanks to nick, and the team! can’t wait to see the numbers :)

ps - here’s a related post on google’s adsense blog, and a nice little FAQ about feeds and google reader…

appears that yahoo was just granted another patent for serving dynamic custom pages, i.,e my yahoo…need to dig in and read more about the patent. it’s from ash patel’s work in the mid-90s.

wonder what they are going to do with it…

frank (somewhat frank) pointed me to aol’s latest myaol release. they’ve started to add features to their beta aggregator and it appears that content recommendations made the first cut…

this is great..while i love rss, we’re all going to need effective filters and discovery tools…

i wrote a post back in june that talked about rss usage…the gist was that rss is just plumbing and so, of course people don’t know what it is. it’s like saying - do you use http? or smtp?

as i pointed out, yahoo did a study (pdf) a year ago (october 2005) on rss adoption / awareness, etc. the conclusion was that while 4% of the US internet population knew what rss was, 31% actually used it…

well, niall just pointed to a study (pdf) that nielsen released yesterday that talks a bit about RSS (from a UK perspective)…the analysts came to the same conclusion…

With the rate of technological change there is a lot of confusion amongst consumers of what is referring to what. For example, 69% of Britons online has never heard of Really Simple Syndication, 67% has never heard of RSS yet 40% say they receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop – which is the service those terms refer to!

at feedburner, we’re seeing massive growth in rss usage…and, we expect this to accelerate over the next 6 months. microsoft, google, yahoo, aol, fox, and others are putting a lot of emphasis on aggregation…the key for these companies is to focus on the benefits first and foremost…and, then…to make it really easy :)