Topic: technology

In a response to my article here, DeWitt Clinton of Google defined what he deemed the definition of “open” to be.  According to DeWitt, “the first is licensing of the protocols themselves, with respect to who can legally implement them and/or who can legally fork them.”  I argue if this were the case, then why didn’t Google clone and standardize what Facebook is doing, where many, many more developers are already integrating and writing code for?  Facebook itself is part of the Open Web Foundation, and applies the same principles as Google to allowing others to clone the APIs they provide to developers.

DeWitt’s second definition of “open” revolves around, according to DeWitt, “the license by which the data itself is made available. (The Terms and Conditions, so to speak.) The formal definitions are less well established here (thus far!), but it ultimately has to do with who owns the data and what proprietary rights over it are asserted.”  Even Facebook makes clear in its terms that you own your data, and they’re even working to build protocols to enable website owners to host and access this data on their own sites.  Why did Google have to write their own Social Graph API or access lesser-used protocols (such as FOAF or OpenID) when they could, in reality, be standardizing what millions (or more?) of other developers are already utilizing with Facebook Connect and the Facebook APIs to access friend data?  Google could easily duplicate the APIs Facebook has authored (even using the open source libraries Facebook provides for it), and have a full-fledged, “open” social network built from these APIs many developers are already building upon.  I would argue there are/were many more developers writing for Facebook than were developing under the open protocols and standards Google chose to adapt.  I’d like to see some stats if that is not the case.  Granted, even Facebook is giving way to Google to adopt some of these other “open” standards so developers have choice in this matter, even if they were one of the few adopting the other standards.

I still think Google is adopting these standards because it benefits Google, not the user or developer.  If Google wanted to benefit the majority of the audience of developers they would have cloned the already “open” Facebook APIs rather than adopt the much lesser-adopted other protocols they have chosen to go by.  This is a matter of competition, being the “hero”, and a brilliant marketing strategy.  Is Google evil for doing this?  Of course not.  Do I hate Google for this?  Only for the reason that I have to now adapt all the apps I write in Facebook to new “open” APIs Google is choosing to adopt.

IMO, if Google wanted to truly benefit the developer they would have chosen to clone the existing “open” APIs developers were already writing for.  This is a marketing play, plain and simple.  It may have started with geeks not wanting to get into the Facebook worlds, but management agreed because in the end, it benefits Google, not their competitors.  If you don’t think so, you should ask Dave Winer why Google is not implementing RSS or rssCloud instead of Atom and PSHB (I’m completely baffled by that one, too).

Image courtesy http://northerndoctor.com/2009/04/17/re-inventing-the-wheel/

“So it can benefit everyone.”

That’s what a Google employee said today as he tried to explain Google’s recent push to have websites use the ‘rel=”me”‘ meta HTML tags to identify pages a user owns on the web.  It’s not a bad strategy – index the entire web, know every single website out there, and when they change, and now the web is your network.  The thing is, since the “open” web hasn’t had a natural way of identifying websites owned by users, Google, the current controller of this network, needed a way to do it.  Why not make people identify their websites to Google’s SocialGraph network, and call it “open” so it benefits everyone?  I’m sorry, but the “open” web that we all grew up in is dead now that 2 or 3 entities have indexed it all.  This is now their network.

Let’s contrast that to Facebook, the “Walled Garden”, criticized for being closed due to tight privacy controls and not willing to open up to the outside web.  Of course, all that is a myth – Facebook too has provided ways for website owners to identify themselves to Facebook on the “open” web, making Facebook itself the controller of that social graph data, thereby giving Facebook a new role in who “owns” the “open” web.  Facebook has even made known in its developer roadmap its intention to build an “OpenGraph API”, making every website owner’s site a Facebook Fan Page in the Facebook network.  Don’t kid yourself that Facebook wants a role in this as well.  They’re a major threat to Google, too because of this.

Then there’s Twitter, just starting to realize how to play in this game, now starting to collect user data for search in their own network.  Don’t count them out just yet, as they too will soon be trying to find ways to get you to identify your website on their network.

So we’ll soon have 3 ways of identifying our websites on the “open” web.  I can identify my site through Facebook, as you see by the Facebook Connect login buttons scattered around.  I can identify myself in the Google SocialGraph APIs, which, if you view the source of this site you’ll see a ‘rel=”me”‘ meta tag identifying my site so Google can search it.  Who knows what Twitter will provide to bring my site into its network.  Each network is providing its easiest ways of identifying your site within their own Social Graph, and calling it “open” so other developers can bring their stuff into their networks easily, without rewriting code.

I think it’s time we stop tricking ourselves into thinking the web is open at all.  Google is in control of the web – they have it all indexed.  Now that we are seeing that he who owns the Social Graph has a new way of controlling and indexing the web, which we are seeing by Facebook’s massive growth (400+ million users!), I think Google feels threatened.  They’ll play every “open” term in the book to gain that control back.  Of course the new meta tags are beneficial – is it really beneficial to “everybody” though?  I argue the one entity it benefits most is Google.  Yeah, it benefits developers if we can get everyone to agree on what “open” is, but that will never happen.  I think it’s time we accept that now that the web is controlled and indexed by only a few large corporations, it is far from “open”.  ”Open” is nothing more than a marketing term, and I think we can thank Google for that.  No, that’s not a bad thing – it’s just reality.

Do these technologies really “benefit everyone” when no other search startup has a remote chance of competing with owning the “open web” network?

Further note:

How do we solve this?  I truly believe the only solution to giving the user control of the web again is via client-side, truly user-controlled technologies like what Kynetx offers.  Action Cards, Information Cards, Selectors, and browser-side technologies that bring context back in the user’s hands are the only way we’re going to make the web “open” again.  The future will be the battle for the client – I hope the user wins that battle.

Image courtesy Leo Reynolds

UPDATE: DeWitt Clinton of Google, who wrote the quote above this post is in response to, issued his own response here.  The comments there are interesting, albeit a lot of current and former Google employees trying to defend their case.  I still hold that no matter what Google does now, due to the size of their index, any promotion of the “open web” is still to their benefit.  I don’t think Google should be denying that.

UPDATE 2: My response to DeWitt’s response is here – why didn’t Google just clone Facebook’s APIs if their intention was to benefit the developer and end-user?

Today, PodCampSLC is excited to announce to new additions. Here are the new things happening with the event:

• New web site. Thanks to CrowdVine, we now have a new website for PodCampSLC. This site incorporates many of the social networking features you have grown to appreciate.
• New sponsors on board: PressDev, Mozy.com, eBay, Neumont University and SLUG Magazine. Please take some time to visit these companies, and we really appreciate the support.
• The schedule is really starting to come together. We are covering everything from audio and video recording, live streaming, social media, and a lot more.
• Phil Windley has agreed to hold the March CTO breakfast just before PodCamp.

Again, I really want to thank Tony and team at CrowdVine for the new site. We are working very closely with them to resolve any problems that may come up, so please be patient.

Please visit the new site and register today.

2 years ago I shared about a blogger and follower/friend of mine, Ali Akbar, who purchased the domain, googleappsengine.com (he still owns it) in order to create an AppEngine-related blog (since Google apparently forgot to purchase the domain).  Ali received a threatening Cease-and-Desist from Google shortly after asking him to immediately discontinue use of the domain and “Take immediate steps to transfer the Domain Name to Google”.  It would appear that Google needs to take a dose of its own medicine though.  To my surprise, I’ve realized recently that my articles from StayNAlive.com and other blogs are being shared, in their full text, on Buzz and having my ads stripped from them, without my permission.

For those unaware, there’s a “subscribe” button when you visit this blog that allows anyone to obtain the RSS of this blog and plug it into a Reader.  For those of you reading this in a Reader, thank you, and you’re already aware of this.  One thing I have done with those feeds if you haven’t noticed is at the bottom of each post in the RSS, I’ve added Google Adsense to my feeds so I can at least cover my costs of running this blog and make at least a few cents a day trying to re-coup costs of hosting and time spent writing posts.  If you visit http://staynalive.com/feed in a browser like Chrome, you can look at the raw feed and see the ads at the bottom of each post.  Or, if you’re reading this post in a traditional feed reader, look down at the bottom of this post and you’ll see the ad.

However, there’s a feature on Buzz that enables anyone reading my shared posts to expand the summarized content and view the entire post, right in Buzz.  For one, I didn’t give Buzz permission to do this on shared posts, and second, Buzz is stripping out my ads, depriving me of that potential revenue rather than either displaying those ads, or redirecting the user back to my site where I can monetize that in some other form.  This is blatant copyright infringement if you ask me!  Now, if you expand my posts, since it’s integrated into Gmail, look over to the right – see those ads?  Yup, I’m not getting a penny of that.

Google is now monetizing my content, and neglecting to ask for my permission in doing so, while removing what I had put in place to monetize my content.  Starting today, I’m removing my blog from my Google Profile, as well as my Google Reader shares so that I don’t help further the copyright infringement on other blogs I share.  The problem that still exists is that anyone who shares my content from Google Reader will also have my content available on Buzz in full format, and my ads stripped.  There’s no way to stop it, and Google is encouraging this wrong practice.

To be clear, I’m fine with them either displaying the ads that I put there (and allowing me to monetize off the other ads that are on the page), or just summarizing the article and encouraging users to click through to my site.  I’m not okay with Google scraping my content, stripping my ads, altering my content, and pushing it out for them to get 100% of the revenues off of something I spent time and money making.

Google, how is this not evil?  Maybe I should use Google’s own Cease and Desist letter to get them to stop this practice.  Or would that itself be copyright infringement?

Image courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment – “The Ant Bully”

UPDATE: The Google Buzz Team did contact me on Buzz (Ironically, considering the content of this post), and they say they’re going to have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week.

By the time I hit publish on this 5 other bigger blogs will have probably already covered this, but this deserves some praise.  One reason I love the Facebook Platform is because they really seem to care about API developers.  They do things the “right” way.  For instance, they have a beta site where they always release new bug fixes and features before they go live on the site.  They always release new API features in “sandbox mode” before going live with them.  No other platform releases new features and updates in this manner!  Just today they upped their game even more, giving developers full control over this process by letting developers decide when new API features go live.

The service gives developers a new “Migrations” option in their application settings, enabling them to choose when things go live.  The first one of these they launched has to do with a bug they’ve fixed which formats empty JSON strings correctly.  To enable the feature you just go to your “Migrations” section for your app, and select “on”, and now all empty JSON strings will be formatted in the correct manner.  The power of all of this is that you get to decide when these features go live, but you can start trying them immediately!

Of course, all features will eventually go live, but what this shows is that Facebook is willing to keep developers aware of changes before they go live.  Facebook won’t be launching features into the wild out of the blue like many of their competitors do quite regularly.  Previously, changes would go live, and while they would often show on the beta site, developers had little notice and little time to test them before putting them into production.  These changes would break many apps the minute they went into production.

IMO, this small feature changes the game for many other app platforms.  NO OTHER major app platform does anything like this.  Kudos to the Facebook platform team for continuing to change the game in regards to API development.  Since the Facebook platform launched, they have always been ahead in changes like this.  I can only hope other API platforms can follow suite in giving developers more control like this.  No one likes their applications to break because of simple API changes.

I don’t do speculative posts like this too often, except around Facebook’s F8 developer events for the most part.  The last one I predicted was that Facebook would announce a Mobile Platform at F8 - the announcement did occur along with Facebook Connect.  The first F8 was the announcement of the Facebook API, which revolutionized Social Development and has left players like Google scrambling to play catch up since.  Now, 2 years since the last F8, the next F8 has been announced, and we are all wondering what the next big announcement will be.  If it is to be in line with the last 2, and, considering they waited 2 years to have another one, they have to be announcing something game-changing.  I predict it directly involves some of the FriendFeed team and it’s directly related to real-time.

First of all, let me preface this with the fact that I am not receiving this data from any inside contacts at Facebook, nor have I been told anything the rest of the world doesn’t already know.  This is pure speculation – I hope it’s taken as such.  I am also certainly not a psychic.  I think if you look at some of the hints though, you can see the potential for something big, perhaps FriendFeed 3.0-like (remember, FriendFeed 2.0 was the advent of their real-time stream you see now) about to happen at Facebook.  Here are my reasons for thinking such:

What is Paul Buchheit Working on?

Paul Buchheit, one of the founders of FriendFeed, creator of Gmail, and now working at Facebook after FriendFeed was acquired, hasn’t yet made it evident exactly what he’s working on.  We know Bret Taylor, also a founder, is now Director of Product for Facebook, and working heavily with the Facebook APIs and the new Roadmap Facebook has laid out for developers.  We know Kevin Fox, pretty much the man behind all the design of FriendFeed, has been working on the new Games and Apps dashboard that Facebook just launched (that you can see on the left-hand side of Facebook).

But what is Paul Buchheit working on?  He recently commented stating he is definitely not working on Facebook’s new e-mail product that they have been rumored to be working on to replace their current inbox structure.  I’m not sure anyone has specifically stated exactly whether he’s working on the Facebook developer platform now or not.  He seems to be doing something big, and he’s certainly been studying Google Buzz recently if you look over his FriendFeed stream lately.

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

Then there’s that “Butterfly” post.  Paul Buchheit specifically stated when Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor, and others were all pressuring Facebook to make a statement on what they were going to do with FriendFeed that “the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world.”  He then continued, “Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge”.

The mystery in all this is that Facebook has not yet released anything even remotely similar to what Paul described yet.  Paul’s a really smart guy.  He’s not just going to work on something mediocre for Facebook – whatever it is, it has to be game changing.  I really believe that whatever it is will blow our minds away when it happens.  The FriendFeed team doesn’t just innovate.  They revolutionize.  I don’t believe they would still be at Facebook if they didn’t have that opportunity.

Facebook’s Needs

Then there’s the lack of any real-time APIs or architecture at Facebook.  I have to click on the page to have it refresh.  Frankly, I think that fits their current audience of 400 million+ “average Joes” well.  It doesn’t tap into the news-seeking, data-mining, and publishing audiences very well though.  That’s what Twitter does well.  It’s what FriendFeed and Buzz also do well.  All of these come with real-time APIs and real-time searches (or “track”).

Facebook needs a real-time interface for developers still.  It needs search.  It needs search to be real-time.  It needs a public view into all of that, supported by the powerful privacy controls Facebook already has in place.  Facebook has already built out the building blocks to launch this with their recent emphasis on encouraging users to open up their posts more and at the same time enabling them to have granularity in who sees those posts.  The next natural step is to finally open up those public posts to developers, and provide a real-time interface to it all.  With a 400 million user audience, that would be game-changing in the realm of real-time data.  We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

The Lack of any Really Big Known Announcements at F8

Lastly, we know everything else Facebook could announce at F8.  Facebook has already started rolling out credits to developers, so a payment system wouldn’t be much of a “game changer” per se.  I’m sure they’ll talk a lot about it at the conference though.  Facebook has already started rolling out its Ads API to developers.  They’ve already announced the desire to open up websites as virtual 3rd-party “Pages” on the web.  They’ve let us know just about everything in their roadmap, except the fate of FriendFeed.

Doesn’t this seem strange to you that Facebook and the FriendFeed team have been so mute on this in general for almost a year now?  What’s going on behind the scenes?  Even when asking the FriendFeed team about plans to integrate better into Facebook they have remained mute.  How cool would it be if, while everyone is ranting and raving about Google Buzz and calling FriendFeed dead, the FriendFeed team along with the incredible talent that Facebook adds to the mix have all been working on FriendFeed 3.0 behind the scenes?  What if Facebook caught wind Google was working on Buzz and bought FriendFeed in response to that rumor?  Will the “Butterfly” emerge at F8?  The chrysalis stage takes patience – I’m not giving up on FriendFeed yet.

Louis Gray just reported a new way Google is trying to control the problem of mine and Louis’s and Robert Scoble and Mashable, and more of the more active feeds and streams on Google Buzz taking over the streams of our followers.  The problem that was occuring is that for those with a lot of followers, their posts would continue to dominate the streams of those following them because every time someone commented or liked the post, it would go right back to the top of your feed.  While I understand the problem, and agree there needs to be a fix, I argue Google is trying to fix this the wrong way.

The way Google decided to fix it is now they decide, based on some sort of algorithm, how often my feeds get thrown up to the top of your stream.  This ensures no active user will ever fully dominate your stream.  However, what if we want to consume this data?  The problem is Google is the one making that choice for you, not giving you the power to make that choice yourself, and I think that’s a very wrong approach.

Rather than Google making that choice for us, they need to focus on lists, the way FriendFeed and Facebook do it, and the way over 400 million people are familiar with.  This is the natural flow – if someone is too noisy, you take them out of one list and put them in another.  Let us choose which list is the default.  Give us an easy way to assign people we follow into different lists.  This isn’t that difficult a solution for someone Google’s size, and gives the users absolute, full control, rather than taking it away from them to make the decision on how active their feeds are.  This needs to be their 100% focus right now to keep my attention.

The way Google is approaching this is wrong.  I really hope they change their focus to lists, open up the flood wall, but give us filters, privacy controls, and put the control back in the users’ hands.  Don’t take our power away from us Google.

Image courtesy http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2008/03/let-me-out.html

Google’s big push recently has been on enabling open, real-time technologies to publish, read, and interact with its new service Buzz.  Reader, its RSS subscription and website reading service, is one of the biggest tools to integrate with the service.  So much that my Reader contacts are now my Buzz contacts.  Until now, Google Reader, while when it would share your posts, it would send updates to subscribing services via Pubsub Hubbub (PSHB), it did not support the reading end of it for supported blogs that publish via PSHB.

Just after my last post on Google ironically, I noticed immediately after publishing people were sharing my post, something very unusual for the service, which usually takes up to an hour for my posts to show up on the site.  Going into Reader, I noticed it had immediately recognized my post.  I quickly queried a friend of mine at Google, who stated, “They can neither confirm nor deny my suspicion” (that it was launched), but I was “observant”.  Sounds like they just launched Pubsub Hubbub support.

Wordpress-enabled Blogs that want to be seen immediately after publishing in Google Reader just need to install Josh Fraser’s Pubsub Hubbub plugin for Wordpress.  After hitting publish, your post should appear immediately afterwards in PSHB-supported clients, which, if I am correct, now includes Google Reader’s massive user base.

If this is true, you should see this post immediately after I hit publish in Google Reader.  Assuming I’m right (which it seems so), Robert Scoble’s concern of it taking too long to get news (#5) just went out the door today – he can now get this just as fast, if not faster than any service such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or Buzz, and this way, he gets to read the full content of the article.  When I hit publish on this post you will see it immediately.  You are subscribed to my feeds, right?

UPDATE: Just after hitting publish it appeared immediately in Google Reader on this post as well.  I’m 99.9% sure now that PSHB was launched on Google Reader today.

Image courtesy http://www.scotduke.com/getting-a-drink-out-of-a-fire-hose/

I’ve been openly critical about Google’s lack of privacy in their launch of Buzz (and I argue other things as well), and its’ opt-in attitude towards opening up contacts and settings people previously thought were private.  That doesn’t change.  However, I’d like to spend some time here playing devil’s advocate and share how perhaps, Google starting with an open approach may be a good thing for Google in the long term.  Let me explain:

There’s no doubt that Google opening up all our data at the launch of Buzz is making people think more about Privacy.  I’ve had a post in the back of my head for quite awhile now that I was going to write on how I think Facebook could have made a mistake starting with a focus on privacy, as now people just assume that everything they put online is private, when in all actuality there is no way that will ever happen 100%.  Because of Facebook, people are getting more comfortable with posting their lives online, and while, even if Facebook remains a private environment for those people (in many cases it isn’t), they are now becoming more comfortable posting that information elsewhere, assuming it will remain private in those places as well.

I think Facebook could have done their users a disservice by giving them that comfort.  What if, instead of starting out private as Facebook did, they instead opened up everyone’s profile by default, and enabled them to choose what elements they want private after that?  Make people completely aware their information is 100% public, and then it is up to those people to decide what they share online, and what they would prefer stays private.  I think there would be a lot more education amongst users this way, and people would think twice before sharing things online.  Of course, Facebook wants people to share in easier ways and in a more comfortable environment to make sharing as easy as possible, so this isn’t going to happen, but it may have been even more in the right by defaulting to public on more things.  Ironically, these types of moves are what is getting Facebook a lot of flack as is, regardless of whether there are privacy controls in place that users can still turn on.

So perhaps Google is doing a good thing here.  Even the optimistic Louis Gray says we’re all wearing tin foil hats by criticizing their lack of privacy.  By starting public (while I still argue turning what was previously private into a completely open environment is completely wrong, and it seems they’re backtracking to try and fix this), Google is encouraging each and every one of its hundreds of millions of users to think twice before sharing anything online.  Google is taking a risk here by making people think twice, since it makes money off of the content you share.

I fully predict Google will be adding more and more privacy controls as they move forward.  I agree, maybe they launched too soon before having these privacy controls in place.  One thing they may have done right though is that they are making us think twice about sharing.  They’re making each of us think about what goes online, and what stays off, and how comfortable we are with what we want public.  I think that’s a good thing, and more companies should be defaulting public, rather than private, until the general internet audience gets used to this type of environment where we know everything we share could very well be made public for the whole world to see.

I encourage you to step back and think about this – I agree, privacy is a good thing, but could the default to public be even better?  Are users being educated with this move?  It’s an interesting move by Google – let’s just hope they can get more privacy controls in place for users to choose from as they do it.

Man, just typing the title of this post makes me cringe with boredom.

However, I have used this technique many times over my career, and just recently the issue came up from a JibberJobber user who imported his Contacts.

His problem was that the first name and last name were in the same column, but we want that broken out when you do the import.

Fixing this is actually really simple. In my user webinars I talk about opening a csv file in Excel, so you can see the pretty columns and rows… but for this little exercise I recommend you open it up in Notepad.

I know, I know: opening it in Notepad will make it really, really ugly.  Almost unreadable.  Especially files that have a lot of “columns.”  Just remember, csv stands for “comma separated values,” which means that each “field” is separated by a comma.  The comma tells Excel to put the next thing in a new column.  For example, this csv content:

First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Phone Number
Jason, Alba, Jason@Jason.com, 801.800.8123

Will look like this when opened in Excel:

What if your file is formatted like this, instead? Notice the name is ONE column (not broken out)?

Name, Email Address, Phone Number
Jason Alba, Jason@Jason.com, 801.800.8123
John Doe, John@Doe.com, 555.555.1234
Sally Jesse, Sally@Jesse.com, 800.123.4567

Right now we aren’t parsing this for you – the best and easiest thing to do is to fix it in the file.  Again, go to Notepad, open the CSV file, and then make these very simple changes:

1. In the first row, which is the header row, change Name to First Name, Last Name.  This will make TWO columns instead of ONE (make sure to put the comma between the column names).
2. In all the other rows, simply put a comma between the first and last name.

That’s it – it is very simple. I’m guessing if I had a file with 100 records (names) I could put the comma inbetween the first and last name in about 4 or 5 minutes, or less…

This might seem like a pain, and when we redo the import we might accommodate for one name field, but for now this is really quite easy.  And YOU are empowered with the knowledge to manipulate your csv files!

Now when you import it will import the name values into the right fields (first, last).

It’s no secret Twitter has a desire to have a stronger search presence.  With business models that thrive on content publishing and organization, a strong search product is necessary to provide the most revenue down the road.  Just today, while announcing its 140th employee and celebrating to the music of BT, Twitter hired Michael (Michi) Busch, search indexing expert and committer to the Open Source Lucene search project to its team as a “Search Engineer”, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Busch brings with him not only strong experience in his contributions to Lucene, but also a firm background at IBM working on IBM’s eDiscovery Analyzer product, focusing on indexing and search technologies there as well.  Busch is a regular presenter at various ApacheCon conferences, so I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of him while working for Twitter.

Just after Twitter’s announcement today of its focus on Open Source standards, the hiring of Busch just solidifies that there will continue to be a focus on open technologies at Twitter.  Lucene, perhaps one of the most widely used open source search indexing products in the world, we can now wonder if it will play a part in that process.  With one of its committers working for Twitter, we can hopefully expect real-world cases of search indexing technology integrated into the open source product in the future.

Twitter continues to expand its team of smart talent, and it seems almost weekly continues to add to its pool of geniuses from the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and IBM.  As I said before, it’s this talent pool that continues to excite me about Twitter and have a strong belief in its future.  With Busch now working on the search product, there’s no doubt that Twitter has an interest in good technology, and helping the community as it grows.  I can’t wait to see what Busch can bring to Twitter.

There’s a new Buzzword in town that’s “Buzz” lately and as I mentioned earlier, some are already calling things “dead” because of it.  Most of this is due to the size of Google, the masses it can reach, and the overall usefulness of the service.  Personally, I think all the “dead” articles are all a ruse to build the numbers of those praising the service and feeling a need to abandon others, as well as gain favor with the Google team as they see strong potential in the service.  While there’s no argument there’s potential in the service (and I’m even spending more time over there and strongly hope for its success), it is far from a “Facebook killer”.  While I mentioned why before, I feel qualified, and I’d like to spend some time sharing some things it needs to get on level grounds to Facebook.

Buzz Needs a Central Place for all Social Activity

I’ve said this before – Google needs a central place for everything “Social”.  Facebook has grown so well because it has this organization.  I’m still unclear if Google is trying to make Buzz this place, or if Orkut, or another product should be that.  Contacts are not that place – Contacts should be the source of social graph data, but are not social connections.  Social connections can come from much more than just contact data – people search, other peoples’ buzzes, as well as other Social Networks can all be sources for Social Contacts between Buzz (see the need for Facebook import later).

Buzz Needs a Stronger API

One of the reasons Buzz has such strong potential is because of its foundation on open architectures.  There is so much more that can be done however – I’m sure they’re working on some of these, but I’d like to share my thoughts, in hope that if they haven’t been thought of, they can be added.  For instance, currently there is no way for any 3rd party app to gain access to the cool comments architecture Buzz posts get in Gmail.  What if I could get FriendFeed, or even SocialToo e-mails in the same format?  Buzz or Gmail could open an interface to this, perhaps built on top of SMTP (an SMTP header would denote it’s a formatted e-mail), Salmon, and OpenSocial standards, to give developers access to this UI.  The great thing about it – if Buzz sends new Buzz updates in an SMTP-supported format, other e-mail clients could adapt these standards as well.  It would no longer be limited to just Gmail to see these formats.

I think it goes without saying that we need better ways to read, analyze, and discover the data, as well as social graph connections on Buzz.  I’d like to be able to track who’s posting about what, how many likes or how many comments there are for specific posts mentioning specific keywords or links.  I’d like to be able to track who has followed an individual and who has stopped following an individual on Buzz.  I’d like to be able to embed Buzzes on 3rd party sites.  I’d like an FBML-like interface to integrate and customize content right in the Buzz environment.  I’d like RSS for every search I do, along with the ability to share searches and get notifications on new items from those searches (I believe Steve Gillmor calls this “Track”).

Buzz Needs Groups and Events, Deep Integration Into Those Events and Groups

To say just a social stream service is comparable to Facebook would be like saying Notepad is comparable to Windows 7.  It’s just not a fair comparison.  One is a feature of the other.  If Buzz really wants to compete (and I’m not saying they do), they need deep integration into Groups, Events, business Pages, and more.  They need the ability for groups of people to all collaborate around a single event, Buzz around it, share it with their friends via Buzz, RSVP via Buzz and Gmail, etc.  Google Calendar just doesn’t do this yet.

Groups are another key component.  E-mail is too private.  They need to enable “Groups” in Buzz that do more than just Buzz.  They need to enable sharing of photos, events related to that Group, and encourage communication amongst Group members.  They need to put that into a people search enabling you to find old High School friends and acquaintances through them.  Google already has some of the basics for this, but I argue they aren’t yet integrated across Google services yet, and are a bit more private an environment than what Facebook encourages.  The challenge Google will have is maintaining the “public feel” that Facebook groups and events provide, while maintaining the “silo’d feel” Facebook provides at the same time giving people a sense of security.  This will be no easy challenge, and may take a silo’d environment like Orkut to do completely successful.

Buzz Needs Better Privacy Controls

At the heart of most Buzz controversy currently lies their relaxed privacy controls.  Originally they automatically followed people for you, giving others potential access to your private list of contacts.  Your Google contacts were also all visible on your Google profile just by enabling Buzz.  Google has since enabled you to disable this, and has turned the “auto-follow” into more of an “auto-suggest”, but there is still so much more that I can get from Facebook that Google is lacking in regards to Privacy.

For instance, on Facebook, I get to decide how much of my own profile is visible to certain friends.  I get to decide if it’s visible to friends of friends.  I can even go to the extent of selecting specific lists I want to be visible to, and certain other lists of friends (or individual friends) I don’t want it to be visible to.  I can specify specific components of my profile I want visible to those lists.  I can set profile-wide settings that remain protected by the privacy settings I set, as well as specific targeted profile elements that remain protected by these privacy settings.  Facebook gives me complete control over what my friends see and don’t see.  With Google Buzz, not only is it all out in the open, but you’re revealing much more than your social contacts – you’re revealing e-mail addresses and Google account information.  It’s wrong the way Google approached this from the beginning, and I argue, even a little bit evil, whether intended or not.

Buzz Needs Lists

Which brings me to my next point – lists.  Lists have much further ramifications than just privacy settings.  On Facebook, I can click on the “Friends” link on the left-navigation and immediately have access to lists I have organized of my friends.  I can view the posts of just my close family members, or just the posts of the news makers and use it like a news reader.  Or I can look at just the latest comments of all my friends, or even a summarized view of the top posts for the day.  Buzz really needs this to be even remotely useful.  On FriendFeed, I have a list of “Favorites”, which I use most of the time to get the most relevant content from those I actually know, and then I can skim the rest of those I follow occasionally.

On every Social Network I belong, it should not be about giving, but how you receive content.  Each and every Social Network has the responsibility to empower its users to receive content in the way they want to.  Facebook has mastered this (although I argue FriendFeed has done, to an extent, even more than Facebook in this area).  No one should feel the need to unfollow me because I post too much, or post one or two things they don’t like.  They should be able to read the content in the manner they like, and filter out what they don’t like, without the ugly unfollow.  Lists are just one component of this.

Buzz Needs Better Filters

The other part of being able to receive content the way you like is via filters.  Each and every application that interfaces with Facebook has to identify itself.  This enables users to filter based on application if they choose to.  If I don’t want to receive Farmville posts, I just hide everything from Farmville, and I’ll never see another field plowed or beet grown again.  People argue they’re worried integration with Facebook will enable the Farmvilles to gain access, but the thing is, without filters, the Farmvilles will use Buzz regardless, but without Filters you will have no way to stop them.  Facebook has completely mastered this, and I can’t do this on any other service.

In addition to application hiding, I should be able to filter by feed type.  If I don’t want to see someone’s Twitter feed, I should be able to hide just their Twitter feed.  If I want to block all Twitter posts from showing, I should be able to do that.  If I want to hide a user but not unfollow them, I should be able to do that.  I shouldn’t have to worry about making anyone feel bad by unfollowing or blocking them.  I should be able to just control my feed in the way I want, just like I do on Facebook (and to an extent, FriendFeed).

Buzz Needs the Ability to Import my Facebook Contacts

Lastly, in order to compete with Facebook, Buzz needs my Facebook friends.  They’re not going to get those through my Gmail contacts.  Most of my Facebook friends are not in my Gmail Contacts.  The only way they’re going to gain access to my Facebook friends is via the Facebook API.  It’s time for Google to suck it up, work with Facebook, and find ways of integrating my friend list from Facebook into the Google environment.  We’ve waited too long for this with Google Friend Connect, and surely there’s a win-win option for both companies to allow this and work together.  Win-win for them is win-win for the user.

Let’s look at Aardvark (recently purchased by Google), for instance.  If you log into Aardvark with your Facebook login, it will immediately detect who in your Facebook contacts are also on Aardvark, and immediately add them as friends on Aardvark.  The site, Digg.com also does this well – all my Facebook friends are automatically added as Digg friends as they log into Digg through Facebook.  There should be no problem with Buzz following Facebook’s developer terms of service and integrating this into their own environment.  Facebook provides hooks into its APIs for doing this exact thing.

Assuming it agrees with the Facebook developer terms of service, Google could even submit each user’s contacts to Facebook and immediately prompt each user in your contacts list to connect on Facebook.  This would be win-win for both companies, as it would encourage the users of both services to build contacts in each and grow each service.  Considering Youtube and Aardvark have both integrated the Facebook API (Youtube could do much better), I don’t anticipate any issues with them doing this.  I will interpret any lack of Facebook integration as a failure on Google’s part, and Google itself playing politics, not Facebook.  So long as you play by their rules, I’ve never heard of Facebook deny a developer.

I really hope the Buzz team reads this.  I have a lot of experience in the Facebook environment.  I know intimately how Facebook works as an author of 2 books on the subject and writer of a plethora of documentation about Facebook on various sites around the web, as well as a developer of numerous apps on the Facebook API and consultant to many others.  Frankly, as a user and developer, I want to see both companies succeed.  The more Buzz succeeds, the more Facebook will compete and provide a better service.  The more Facebook competes, the more Buzz will compete and provide a better service.  Users win in both scenarios.

If Buzz is really trying to compete with Facebook, these are the things they need to implement to get my attention.

I’ve worked for various companies over my career.  Some of those very small (including my current startup), and some very large, international and public corporations.  I currently work with similar clients of various sizes and types.  Each and every one of them shared characteristics that come with the turf in managing a large or a small company.  In a small company, you’re dealing with issues like how to grow, how do you start to deal with a growing employee base, and how do you handle all the workload in front of you on such a limited budget.  Yet you have much more flexibility to get things done and build for the whole of the company.  With large corporations you’re dealing with politics, and budgets, and individual departments all fighting for control.  It’s common amongst every single organization I have come in contact with, and I believe that is starting to include Google, which we’re seeing evident in many of their new Social products.

Let me preface with the fact that I love the concept of Buzz.  As an avid FriendFeed user and Social Media addict, Buzz hits many points that are just sweet in my eyes.  I love that they’re embracing open technologies to build it, and working hard to empower individuals and even (soon) developers to have control over their own experiences on the platform.  With the size of Google, this will bring much more attention to these types of technologies, so what they are doing is a good thing.  I don’t think they needed to reinvent the wheel to do it though, and I think the reason they did it may be in part due to the size and politics of the company.

Enter Google Reader.  I’ve complained many times that I don’t think Reader needed to focus on Social.  I don’t think it needed to re-build your Social Graph all over again.  Now, with Buzz in the mix they are trying to cross-integrate the two, and I think it’s really the wrong approach.

What I think is happening is departments at Google aren’t working close enough together to make things work properly.  For instance, Orkut already has the strength of building social connections.  Its strength is in building Social Graphs and empowering users to share with their close friends and family.  They already have the tools to do it, and, in some countries this has proved to be quite successful.  I think the Orkut team knows that.

In the case of Reader, what I think is happening is in the product development cycle they realized they needed social features.  The Orkut team wasn’t available, or one of the two teams didn’t have the budget to cross-integrate, or perhaps politics got in the way, so Reader reinvented the wheel to do Social in the Reader environment.  They could have rather done something similar to Facebook Connect, and enabled users to connect to their Orkut Social Graph and brought in shares via that means.  Then Orkut continues to own the Social Graph, social interactions continue to happen through Orkut, and people can continue to build connections with Orkut as the main hub for Social interactivity.  My guess is that the Orkut team was too booked to create such a tool just for the Reader team.  Someone up the line said no to it, so the Reader team built their own tools to accomplish the task.

I think we’re seeing the same with Buzz, and many more tools like Friend Connect and OpenSocial and others at Google.  Sergey most likely assigned a team at Google with the task of building a FriendFeed or Twitter-like product that enabled people to communicate better.  Orkut does not yet have such functionality, and it made sense to do it as a separate product.  They decided to integrate it into Gmail, where your contacts are.  Rather than utilize the strengths of Orkut for organizing these contacts, it was probably easier due to the size of Google to utilize Gmail’s contact manager to do so, which Google Reader just so happens to also use.  The cross-integration with Reader just happened naturally, but thanks to the lack of expertise in Social Graph management, it was done poorly, now making it extremely hard for Google Reader users to manage their stream.

In large companies it’s very hard to cross-integrate.  I think had Google from the get-go started to find ways to build a Facebook Connect-like interface for Orkut, they could have very well created more activity in Orkut itself, while cross-integrating all their other products into the Social Graphs built on Orkut.  Now Google is stuck with an unorganized mush of multiple social graphs, multiple streams, and messaging and content going all over the place within those streams with little regard to privacy.

It may be too late, but if I were Google, I would look at taking a step back, focusing on Orkut, and building out from there before continuing further on any Social Graph-based products.  These social products Google is building should all be relying on Orkut for that social data and then they would have a true Social Network to build from.  They shouldn’t be reinventing the Social Graph every time they build a new service.  This is why Facebook has had such success in the social space – they’ve focused on the one product as the source for all their Social releases.  Google really needs to do the same, and they can still do it with open standards, but this time starting from the Orkut environment and building out.

There’s a lot of “Buzz” going around lately about Google Buzz being a Facebook or Myspace killer.  Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder and lover of Tesla, goes to the extent of saying with Buzz, Facebook lost half its value.  Thomas Hawk, an amazing photographer and avid FriendFeed user, stated on FriendFeed that Google Buzz is going to “Kick MySpace’s A**”.  While I don’t doubt that Myspace is already having difficulties, I really don’t see Buzz being competition at all for the Facebooks or Myspaces or even Orkuts of this world.  It’s a matter of apples and oranges, or metaphorically speaking, just dust in an elephant’s trunk.

There’s a term I like to apply to the Twitter, Buzz, and FriendFeed phenomenas when compared to Facebook and Myspace and Orkut that I call, “Horton’s Megaphone”.  We all live in a personal world of friends, family, teachers, doctors, and pets.  That’s our reality.  We live in it from day to day and it is what we are most familiar with.  Yet, there’s another reality we all want to be a part of.  Without being heard we’re at risk of missing out on career opportunities, growing our businesses, or maybe even fame or fortune.  There’s a need beyond this current reality to get word about ourselves out to other realities beyond our inner circle of friends and family.  It’s a competition for discovery about who we are.

This is where Horton comes in.  In the Dr. Seuss book, “Horton Hears a Who!”, we see a completely different reality from our own, the “Whos”, whose entire reality exists in just a small speck of dust within our own.  They have mayors and doctors and family and friends and neighbors, and live a grand life.  But when tragedy strikes they are stuck trying to get an alternate reality to hear them.  Their final survival ends up relying on their voices, a megaphone, and an elephant named Horton who had the heart to listen.  ”We are here! We are here! We are here!” they shouted in desperation through that megaphone, trying to get the attention of reality.  Sounds familiar.

Buzz is simply that megaphone used to create contact with the real world.  It’s a way we can get word out to alternate realities beyond our own to ensure our own survival as individuals, businesses, and organizations on the internet.  Buzz, Twitter, and FriendFeed are where your own realities get to speak with other realities you would have never come in contact with before they existed.

There is no way Facebook should feel even a little bit threatened by Buzz (unless they’re trying to grow FriendFeed).  They are two entirely different communication mediums.  On Facebook I don’t need a megaphone to communicate with my close friends and family, which it was designed for.  On Buzz I can’t find old friends from High School or even Elementary School, or old clubs or groups I used to belong to like I can on Facebook.  I don’t have groups or shared events or life photos of all those close friends and family.  Facebook is where real life happens.  It’s the Elephant, the real world, reality.  Some call it a “walled garden”.  I call it reality, where everybody knows your name.

Buzz is (and Twitter and FriendFeed are) just an entity of individuals, most which do not know each other and each having their own realities, all trying to compete for the attention of real life.  It’s a different type of communication.  On these platforms it’s a competition for attention (which is why everyone wants to compete for the highest number of followers).  On Facebook (and Myspace and Orkut to an extent) that competition is already won.

Facebook has the holy grail of networks right now – real life connections and relationships that are all able to connect and share with one another.  It is where each and everyone on Buzz wants to be.  The real value is in those real-life connections.  Otherwise we are all just specs of dust in an elephants trunk.

“We are here! We are here! We are here!”

I’ve been following the Buzz about Buzz today (click on the link – get it?), and, wanting to try it (since I’m not of the privileged few bloggers given access at launch), I started browsing on my iPhone where I heard it was available.  Immediately I was presented with a list of people following me that I was not following back, so I went in and clicked follow on about 300 or so people that it said I was not following yet.  Big Mistake.

Later in the day I went to check Google Reader, which until today was my RSS Reader of choice, and lo and behold I had over 400 items from just the last hour sitting in my unread items box.  It turns out when you follow someone on Buzz, it also follows them on Reader, and who knows what else on the various Google properties.  Now, the only way to bring my volume of repeat RSS shares from friends down on Google Reader is to go into each and every one, mark hide, and manually move each into their own separate folders.  All this on an already slow Google Reader interface.  I’m not looking forward to that.

I have been critical ever since the Reader team introduced social features into Google Reader.  Now, rather than being a place where I can just go to ensure I’m getting the latest news from the blogs I want to subscribe to, as a traditional RSS Reader should be, I’m now stuck in a world with hundreds to thousands of shared items from friends, many of those repeat items, getting fed to me over and over again, even when I don’t want them!  Add to that all the likes, comments, ability to post “status updates”, and more, it occurred to me today that Google Reader is no longer an RSS Reader – it is now a Social Network!

I wish Google Reader would just stick to what it’s good at – being an RSS Reader.  I now need a place I can go just to get the news I want and don’t want to miss.  Some say those days are gone, but it’s still a need for me.  Today with the introduction of Buzz, Google Reader became useless to me.  If I want to skim the news I can go to Buzz and get all the features of a social network.  I don’t need Google Reader to do that for me.  But when I just want to read the news I want, Google Reader has lost its use for me.  Maybe some of this is the reason Google Reader’s former team lead just switched to the Youtube team?

I’m first to admit RSS is far from dead, though I think it’s time to find another RSS Reader.  Should I just switch to Mail.app?  Where can one go to get the news these days?

Every time I switch to jQuery, Yahoo’s YUI libraries seem to keep luring me back.  Just yesterday, Yahoo added one more tool to its arsenal of YQL libraries that actually makes the Twitter API intuitive, giving me another reason yet to switch back to yui, or at least consider using Yahoo a little more as I develop tools for the Social Web.  The new YQL set of tables for Twitter enables any developer to use simple SQL-like queries to retrieve and post Twitter data.

For simple user queries, getting a user’s twitter profile data is as simple as something like “SELECT * FROM twitter.status WHERE id=’8036408424′;“.  To insert data, you simply need to provide the oauth consumer key and secret, along with the user’s oauth tokens and you can do things like post new status updates for the user, all in Javascript!  A subsequent call to post a user’s status would look like:

“INSERT INTO twitter.status (status, oauth_consumer_key, oauth_consumer_secret, oauth_token, oauth_token_secret)
VALUES (‘tweeting from yql!’, ‘@your_consumer_key’, ‘@your_consumer_secret’, ‘@your_access_token’, ‘@your_access_secret’);“

The cool thing about Yahoo’s YQL Twitter interface is I can also choose to only pull specific information out for the user.  I’m not quite sure the benefit this gives you considering Yahoo is probably still retrieving the entire subset of data from Twitter (you can’t pull specific pieces of data out of specific objects in the Twitter API), but at least it’s possible, something I’ve been craving from the Twitter API for quite awhile.  It is unclear if Yahoo is caching this data, and if so, it could provide some significant performance benefits, with Yahoo doing most of the work on their own backend.

Yahoo’s YQL puts them one level above Facebook’s own FQL query language for accessing Facebook data by enabling developers to not only access data like this for Twitter, but also other environments like Facebook as well.  Yahoo has an entire database of “community tables”, where, if specific APIs aren’t provided, the community can create their own tables to that interface and give developers immediate access to those APIs via a simple, standardized SQL interface to those platforms.

This type of API is exactly what I was looking for from the likes of Google’s Friend Connect APIs (and Google has still failed to provide) – a standardized platform where one single API gives me access to all the different APIs out there.  Now with standardized SQL I can access almost any API, and if that API doesn’t exist yet I can create my own interfaces into each API that, once created will also have access via that SQL interface.

Yahoo now has my attention with this launch.  The API has a web interface, where a call as simple HTTP GET to http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?[query_params] returns an entire structure of XML data my application can access.  They provide a YUI Javascript interface into the table structure so you don’t need a backend if you don’t want one, and I get all this for all the APIs I interface with.

I will now be looking into the Yahoo APIs as I look to interface the limitless APIs available out there thanks to Yahoo’s focus on cross-platform integration of their YQL interface.  I like that Yahoo isn’t being selfish with this.  With YQL, Yahoo has finally created a glue that lets me access all the APIs I need to access as a Building Block Web brick builder.

A common complaint amongst Twitter developers has been that Twitter’s OAuth, the authentication process you see when you click the Twitter login button on a 3rd party website and go to a Twitter-looking page with a “Allow” or “Deny” button, is too complicated.  Mainly, from a user experience perspective, users are required to leave the 3rd party site completely in order to log into Twitter, then get redirected back to the 3rd party site again.  If anything breaks along the way, the user is left wondering what to do, and valuable logins, purchases, or registrations could be lost.  Facebook has solved this by enabling users to do all the login process via Javascript they provide that produces a popup.  Users can log into Facebook without ever leaving the 3rd party site.  It appears, based on a thread on the Twitter developers list, that Twitter is planning to one-up Facebook by allowing users to log in to 3rd party sites without ever even needing a popup or any type of redirect, and they’re already testing it with select partners.

The topic came up when other developers noticed that the site, TwitPic.com, was allowing direct Twitter logins right on their own website and somehow posts from TwitPic were showing up with the TwitPic name and link next to the post on Twitter.  This normally isn’t possible without enabling OAuth login because Twitter has disabled the functionality for any non-OAuth produced Tweet.  In fact they have said in June of 2010 they will be completely removing the ability to login through Twitter on 3rd party sites via plain-text authentication.  So how is TwitPic doing it?

According to Raffi, an Engineer on the Twitter API platform team, Twitter is currently working on a new “OAuth Delegation” standard that will allow applications to allow users to log in via Twitter on their own sites, while still maintaining the control over Apps that OAuth gives providers and users.  So, on TwitPic, for instance, you can log in to TwitPic.com with your own Twitter username and password right on the TwitPic site itself, yet you’ll still have full control on Twitter.com to revoke access to TwitPic at any time you want to.  In addition, Twitter, at any time, can remove TwitPic’s ability to publish or access the Twitter API since they still have to use OAuth to make Twitter API calls.

If the hints in the developers list thread prove true, developers will be able to take the plaintext username and password, still store them somewhere, but in order to make calls through the Twitter API they’ll have to somehow send an OAuth key with their requests to Twitter along with some way of identifying the user.  My guess is, in essence, the app will send a one-time login on behalf of the user to Twitter (most likely via a secure SSL encryption channel or similar), and Twitter will return to the app an OAuth token to make API requests with on behalf of that user in the future.  In my opinion, this is still no different than storing an OAuth Token in a database that would give apps the same access as their Twitter username and password.

Security Concerns

While storage may be no different, I’m sure there will still be those concerned about this approach.  For instance, what happens when users get used to entering their Twitter usernames and passwords on 3rd party websites and decide to do so on a malicious website?  We’ve seen how used to entering Twitter credentials people get with websites that look like Twitter itself with the rampant phishing attacks recently.

Maybe Twitter is feeling comfortable enough that they can be proactive about such misuses and password collection.  The risk is still there though and hopefully the OAuth Delegation Twitter is getting ready to launch will cover this problem.

Partners

Thus far, it seems TwitPic is one of the partners testing this new delegation standard Twitter is working on.  Several others were mentioned in the developer discussions about this as well.  For instance, Seesmic Look is also taking similar credentials without any OAuth redirect, yet still shows the “Look” source in Tweets generated with the app.  One developer pointed out the information that could be retrieved from the new requests, and the security of it all is a little concerning.

Whatever it ends up being, the winners will be desktop and mobile client developers.  Right now developing a mobile or desktop app involves deep integration into the browser in order to legally get the user logged into the app.  It is why we see so few native desktop clients and so many AIR apps.  AIR is a browser-based solution.

I’m very interested to see what happens.  The Twitter team is supposed to announce more details very soon and I’d like to find out more about what this means for developers, how secure it is, and how much recoding I’ll have to do to enable it in my app.  Whatever it is, you can bet it will be one step simpler than the currently more-simple solution which Facebook provides.  This is getting very interesting!  Let the API wars begin…

Recently here in Salt Lake City we had the opportunity to have Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google visit. While I didn’t have the chance to see it, reading about it, he seemed to talk about a common worry I hear throughout this State. Here in Salt Lake City and around the area we have a lot of successful businesses! From my Uncle’s Freeservers.com, to Omniture, to Mozy, to Novell, Wordperfect, and many others, there’s no shortage of success in this area. It’s a hotbed of talent and technology the world doesn’t give enough credit for. The problem is that we have no Yahoos or Googles or Facebooks or Microsofts to give us credit for that success. We have no home-grown success story that didn’t eventually sell out for big bucks to one of the big West Coast companies.  I think this is a common problem for many areas.  Why is this?

Eric Schmidt tried to come up with his own reasons in response to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who (Hatch) stated, “We get a corporation going and it has some tremendous ideas and all of the sudden someone comes up from Silicon Valley and buys it and takes it back there.” Schmidt responded, saying, “I don’t know whether [improving the situation means] globalizing the business. I don’t know whether we need more venture capitalist presence in Utah or maybe just more experience building the businesses from the startup. It’s not that businesses aren’t getting started, it’s that once started they aren’t growing the businesses fast enough.” So what is it that keeps the Googles or Microsofts from staying in Utah (and other states) rather than staying here and growing to compete with the big guys?

I’ve suggested the PR problem before. That’s just one problem Utah has – a lack of enough tech bloggers to get the word out to Silicon Valley. One other common problem I see in Utah is we get greedy. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing. Too many Utah startups are focused on the money rather than an underlying cause that motivates their revenue stream. That’s part of the reason Utah businesses have been successful – we have some of the smartest business people in the world right here. Even Eric Schmidt confirmed that, stating that “Utah is one of the best places to do business.” We know how to make money! Unfortunately that’s what differentiates us from the West Coast companies like Google however.

I argue it all revolves around cause. Let’s look at Eric Schmidt’s company itself, Google. Everything they do centers around one central cause, “Do no evil”. It doesn’t even matter if they have purpose. Everything they do must be done “the right way”, even if they lose money from it. Some even argue this has become a PR pitch for them as well. Google is willing to lose money for their cause, yet they are also making money because of it. It’s an amazing strategy.

Facebook also does this well. I’ve done a lot of work with Facebook with 2 books on the company and several apps written around their platform. When you interact with them and their employees, you get a common theme from them: They are doing all they can to enable people to share in bigger and better ways. Their vision is to help you share without risking privacy. Everything they do revolves around that – their revenue model is built around their cause.

Twitter is building “the pulse of the internet”.  They want to enable better communication between anyone in the world. They’ve forgone revenue to ensure that takes place (yet they’ve been able to raise a ton of capital, I realize, but I argue that’s part due to their cause).

I see the same thing from company to company in the Bay Area and even up in tech hotbeds like Seattle (home of Amazon, Microsoft). These guys all drive revenue based on purpose! While there are currently a few exceptions, I don’t quite see this in Utah and other states, especially amongst the larger startups. It’s all business.

Eric Schmidt also stated that “It’s not an attitude problem, it’s an availability problem. To me, it’s recruiting new talent into the state and growing new talent. It’s really people and expertise and that’s the way to make it happen.” Guess what drives and keeps talent? Motivation. If people have cause to work for they come, and they stay, and they work hard at it.  I remember at BackCountry.com (a Utah company), our mantra was “We use the gear we sell”.  Employees loved that because all kinds of incentives were given to get employees using their cool gear, and the employees loved that!

80% of Utah’s population is in the Salt Lake City area. Schmidt suggested this was an incredible opportunity for people to connect. I think we just need motivation to encourage that connectedness. Motivation is what makes the Googles and Facebooks and Microsofts of the world.

If you’re a startup, anywhere, what are you building on top of? Where are your foundations? Are you building for money or for purpose? I know as I build my business I’m going to be thinking much, much more about changing the world and less about the money I make as a result of that. The money will come naturally. That is how you build Google, and keep it there.

What’s your cause? What businesses do you think do this well? Please share in the comments.

EDITORS NOTE: 2 Companies in Utah that I think are doing really well at this are Phil Windley’s Kynetx and Paul Allen’s FamilyLink.  When you interact with them you can sense their cause.  It bleeds through the company.  People are sacrificing time and money just to be sure their cause is getting through.  As a result, Paul Allen’s company was recently ranked one of the fastest growing companies on COMScore, and recently, according to Compete.com, surpassed his old company, Ancestry.com in traffic.  Cause eventually pays off!  I encourage you to learn what they do – they won’t be going away any time soon.

Source of Eric Schmidt Comments: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13630231

I just got an email from Google stating that starting March 1st, their web applications will no longer support older browsers, instead, pushing the new HTML5 standard. Here is what they said;

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser

I applaud this. As a web developer, trying to create sites that work with a dozen web browsers is nearly impossible. I hope more companies take this stance, and help push new technology along. Google has a strong enough presence with their own applications (i.e. GMail and Docs), that they can control what browsers they will support and which they won’t. Here’s hoping others will follow.

Marketers seem to never learn.  Time and time again they have tried to sacrifice loyal relationships with customers in order to take the easy road in hopes to get the small percentage out of millions that might convert into one-time sales.  Affiliate marketing is ripe with these people hoping to “get rich quick”, without regard to how it is done.  I some times wonder if these people would sacrifice their own souls in order to gain a quick buck.  It would certainly seem so as we have been inundated with junk mail and e-mail spam, viruses, worms, porn, and other tools intended to spread what they’re selling to mass audiences in as fast a manner as possible.

Technology has sought hard to stop such problems.  We have anti-virus solutions that stop the malware, but evidently it’s not good enough, because viruses and worms and malware still spread.  Google’s Gmail has excellent spam filtering software for e-mail, as do other services such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.  Yet, I still get spam e-mail.  There are even services which try to stop the amount of junk mail you receive, yet even that isn’t fool proof.  It seems no matter how much technology we throw at it, the spammers will always find a way to circumvent the process.

Government is doing all they can do as well.  Here in the United States, CAN SPAM act makes it easy for government to prosecute against spammers.  The act was meant to thwart the problem in the early 00’s where e-mail spam was running rampant.  The marketers all complained, claiming it would reduce the amount of money they could make, worries of economic crisis ensued.  But after the act went into place, marketers began to realize they were actually seeing more money than before because they were actually focusing on people that were interested in their product, rather than people that weren’t.  I admit a lot of my spam went down at that time.

Enter 2010.  Twitter is almost a standard.  Facebook is almost a standard.  We are seeing the era of micro-messaging take form, and it doesn’t seem this era is going away any time soon.  As with any new communications technology, so come the spammers that come along with it.  As I can attest from my own company, the spammers are now out of control on Facebook and Twitter and almost any other service that enables micro-messaging, and they’re fighting their best to stay on top of it all.  I admit they’re probably doing all they can, too.

On SocialToo in just the last month, we have already automatically marked near 3,500 DM messages as spam out of a total of 3,500 users that utilize the service. Since we implemented the service just a few months ago we’ve marked near 8,500 DM messages as spam. And that’s just DMs on Twitter! Considering there are in the 10s of millions on the service and DMs aren’t the only means of spam, you can see the problem Twitter and Facebook are facing.

It was this reason I added these spam filtering services on top of SocialToo.  I too want to do what I can to help kill these problems.  I’ve seen it all – even people abusing my own service to increase their numbers and in return spam those followers with things their followers never intended to receive.  It was this reason we complied with Twitter’s request to remove automatic unfollow of those who unfollow you recently, and frankly I agree with Twitter on the move – they’re doing the best they can to thwart spammers, and I want to support them in that process.  Look at this video I found on Youtube recently – in it, a man is demoing software that uses a combination of your desktop and outsourced workers in India (likely through services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to quickly create accounts, send a few tweets each to increase, gain, and grow followers, and spam those followers with affiliate links. It’s appalling the way he says this is a “secret” only a “select few” marketers know about – the fact is I already knew about it – it’s no secret:

Source: http://www.boblallyblog.net/?p=776 (http://twitter.com/boblally and http://twitter.com/successtoolme)

This guy’s software is just one of many, and I argue it does this the hard way.  Now we have the ability for applications to sit on top of the browser and completely control  the context which a user views the web.  Applications like GreaseMonkey, extensions and plugins, and even Kynetx, while they can be used for good, could all be used in this way with just simple HTML and Javascript to create accounts and spam with them.  There’s not much Twitter or Facebook or even the makers of GreaseMonkey, Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Kynetx can do about them (although Kynetx at least has a controlled user directory through which they can at monitor these things).  There are already tools like Hummingbird out there that do this for relatively cheap, and there will be more.

It’s time Government step in and put an end to this.  CAN-SPAM was written for long-form communications, but it needs to be modified to allow for the short-form. It specifically mentions e-mail and cell phone communications, not micro-messaging services.  Recipients should still have the opportunity to opt-out of the messages they receive. Perhaps the enablers of such communication such as Facebook and Twitter need to provide a means for message senders to provide an opt-out location that attaches to their messages.  That’s just one idea – I’m sure there are many other ways of doing this.

CAN-SPAM needs a provision which specifically targets the micro-messaging space.  It needs communication which specifically says what marketers can do on these services, and how people can opt out.  As I know very well, this will not stop all messages, but it will cut off a large majority of messages, which I know are being used by legit Lawyers and Doctors and business owners everywhere in the US to cost Twitter thousands of dollars and waste the time of countless people.

We need to do all we can to stop this nonsense. I want to see these micro-messaging spammers prosecuted.  It won’t happen unless the US Government modifies CAN-SPAM.  How can we do this effectively in the micro-messaging space?

Here we go, please take a ride with me as I search out the ultimate mobile developer machine. Why mobile? Because I hate being tied to a desk. I have desk top machines, but I want something with equal power I can take with me. Here is what I am looking for:

Nothing larger than a 15 inch screen. Yes, 15 inches. Any bigger and it’s like lugging around a desktop.
At least 8GB of memory. I would love to have the ability to upgrade to 16GB or even 24GB. Memory is a developers best friend. Next to CPU speed, it’s the key to all goodness.
A hard drive fast enough to keep up with the RAM. I really like what is happening in solid state drives (SSD).
A CPU, well, let’s look at 4, that will allow me to compile in a split second, let me stream video, rip a DVD, all at the same time.
I would love to have built in 3G connectivity, but the more I think about it, the more I would hate to be tied to a specific carrier. So maybe just a USB card will work.
Ability to read just about any memory card. At least 4 super fast USB ports.
Lightweight. This is a mobile machine, remember?

Honestly, that’s about it. Nothing spectacular. The real trick here will be to find one that doesn’t weight as much as your Mothers Cadilac, and doesn’t cost as much as my last Child.

There are really two flavors, an Apple Mac, like a Mac Book Pro, or a PC which can run Windows or Linux. Since I do a lot of Windows development, Linux probably isn’t a viable option. And I don’t want to own a MBP just so I can run Windows on it. You think the simple choice is to go with a PC. But there is more too it than that. I have to make some additional choices, to make the right choice.

First, will I choose to stop developing Windows applications. Honestly, that’s the key question. I can develop everything but Windows applications on a Mac. I know, I know, running Parallels or VMWare Fusion gives me a Windows machine on the Mac, but I don’t want to do that. It doesn’t work all that well on my iMac, and I know it doesn’t do any better on a MBP.

Throw my hat in a ring, and stay there for a while. Honestly, I’m not sure 100% which ring the hat will fall in today. OK, enough of that, off to find The Ultimate Mobile Developer Machine.

What would you recommend?

I wanted to let you know that I’m only backing away from the premium subscription for a little while.  I start a new job tomorrow, one that I was able to land in no small part because of your JibberJobber career management software.  I was able to track several submissions I’d made to this particular employer, giving me a valuable history of my interactions with them.  That history allowed me to connect a few dots and that gave me an advantage I needed during the interview process.

This is the response he gave me when he downgraded from Premium to Regular.  I love it – last week I’ve had three JibberJobber users change their status from unemployed to I FOUND MY DREAM JOB!

That really thrills me.

JC ended his message to me with this:

[JibberJobber is] a great tool that I’d be proud to help plug for.

Thanks for sharing JC, and best wishes at your new gig!

Not on JibberJobber yet?  Sign up here.  Get on our next user webinar tomorrow morning (register here).

Twitter has been initiating a crackdown of sorts on sites that offer “automated unfollow” services such as my own SocialToo.com.  Since we announced we were removing it on SocialToo, at least 3 other services have also been asked to remove the functionality, which enables people to automatically unfollow others that unfollow them on Twitter.  I have also noticed Twitter is now cracking down on Twitter accounts that perform this practice.  When chatting with Twitter, their reasoning is that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts”.  Assuming that this is the real reasoning behind the request, I’d like to suggest a more effective means of killing that idea: kill services that allow proactive follow in the first place and follower churn will go away.

Let me first explain what proactive follow is.  There are many services out there right now that enable you to find new followers based on keywords.  You specify search terms, perhaps based on your brand, and these services then go out and find people Tweeting with these keywords, and the service follows those people.  Some will even send a public @mention or DM if they meet your search criteria.  The entire hope is that those people will follow back (note that not everyone does this automatically), increasing your follower count and potential reach.

The problem with this method is that Twitter has limits in place.  As people unfollow you as you are increasing your numbers in this way, soon you will be following way more people than are following you back.  Twitter has a limit right now, in which if you’re following around 10% more of the people that are following you on Twitter, you will not be able to follow any more.  So what happens is these people using these “get more follower” services then use legit services like my SocialToo to unfollow all of the people that have stopped following them, bringing their ratio back in check.  It’s a direct rebellion against Twitter’s rules and regulations, and I don’t blame Twitter for being concerned about it.  In fact, I refuse to allow proactive follow on SocialToo just for this reason – we are not a “get more followers fast” site.  We’re a utility that enables you to manage your Twitter stream better and easier.

So Twitter has come up with the best solution they can come up with – “let’s kill the sites that are providing automatic unfollow and the follower churn will go away”.  The idea being if users can’t unfollow those users that have unfollowed them after they proactively went out and followed everyone, it’s a lot harder to game the system and break Twitter’s rules.  Based on my experience with what users are telling me on SocialToo, this breaks Twitter for many big brands using the service in a legit manner though.  Let me share a few use-cases people are telling me about after we removed it on SocialToo:

Legit Use-Cases for Auto-Unfollow

Some Brands Just Have Big Numbers — On SocialToo we service some really big brands.  Let’s face it: these brands have a lot of followers.  Following those followers back gives their followers a sense that the brand is listening to them.  It’s a PR move, as well as a customer service move because their followers can now DM them.  For instance, I followed @PCSki the other day, hoping to be able to get a spot in for my wife’s and my Ski Vacation to Park City Utah.  Because they followed me back, I was able to keep our conversation private.  This reciprocal follow is an important piece for Brands looking to communicate better with their followers and customers.  @PCSki got a sale (and future blog post) out of me because of that relationship.

Now, assuming we’re dealing with millions of followers, or hundreds of thousands of followers, or even thousands of followers it is absolutely impossible to continue following back the people that follow you based on Twitter’s 10% ratio limit.  If I want to follow everyone back, the fact is about 1/3 to 1/2 of those people I follow back will unfollow me at some point, and my ratio breaks.  I’m then stuck waiting until more people follow me before I can follow back more.  This is bad for brands, especially those with bigger numbers.  If you think numbers aren’t important for a brand, you’re flat out wrong.

Auto Unfollow Kills the Churners — The main reason I created automatic unfollow on SocialToo was because it’s another effective technique at combating spammers if you do auto follow (see above for some good reasons to auto follow as a brand ).  For a good auto follow service to occur, it’s the natural thing to do to offer auto unfollow services as well in order to keep out the spammers you might follow unintentionally.  This is also the reason we offer DM filters and other filtering services on SocialToo.  For those gaming the system, the minute they unfollow me to hope their numbers stay up, I immediately unfollow them as well, and their numbers don’t increase at all.

Auto Unfollow Enables Steady Growth, Despite Friends Unfollowing — if auto unfollow were not available, a typical brand or person wanting to enable auto follow on their account would go as follows: Number of friends increase. Number of friends stay stagnant until ratio is met.  Number of friends increase again.  Steady growth is not attainable with Twitter’s current ratio limit and the lack of auto unfollow.

The Solution

So what can Twitter do?  I understand they’re between a rock and a hard place here.  They could remove the ratio limits, but then the churners (or gamers) would take over again.  They could kill automated unfollow services, but other services will still take over – I can already think of  a good way to create a browser extension that does it on a user-by-user basis if we wanted to.  Also, killing automated unfollow removes the ability for users to defend themselves against the churners.  Twitter could just let the churning happen, but then jealousy happens and people complain (not sure that’s a bad thing as I think people can see through the fakes, but I understand their viewpoint).  Twitter could remove the numbers, only enabling them in private for each individual, but that would remove some of the fun and competition of Twitter.

The only decent solution is to kill the services that are enabling proactive follow.  Disable those enabling the ability to search by keyword and follow based on that keyword.  This is a pure API-based service that Twitter can shut off at the source pretty easily.  Once these are gone, churning, and the “Twitter Game” will be over for those abusing the system.

The Fact is Twitter is About Numbers

While I don’t think Twitter wants people gaming the system to create more numbers, I think Twitter knows that the only way to grow the service is to enable people to increase their number of followers and grow an audience.  If you don’t think that, you’re lying to yourself.  Everyone wants more followers, especially if you’re a brand or business.

Twitter prominently displays follower counts on each user’s page, along with a list of who’s following them, the number of lists they’re on, the number of lists they’ve created, and the list goes on.  Twitter has a Suggested User List  - the entire goal being to give people a larger number of people those people can follow and find interesting things from.  Users get higher prominence in Google if their numbers are higher on Twitter.  Numbers are everything to Twitter, let’s not kid ourselves.

Twitter Needs to Kill the Proactive Follow

The only way Twitter is going to fix the problem they see at hand is to kill services enabling users and brands to go out and proactively find new followers.  Killing the unfollow isn’t going to fix this.  Killing the proactive follow will.  My hope is that, assuming this is the real reason Twitter wants to kill it, Twitter will realize this and give freedom back to their users to continue maintaining their accounts.

As I said on the SocialToo blog – in the meantime, we’re in Twitter’s world and we’re subject to their rules, so until then I’ll do what they tell me.  Let’s hope they’re listening though.  SocialToo provides many more services than just this though, so I’m not worried – I am worried about our users however.

Are there use-cases I’m missing?  How were you using auto-unfollow?

I didn’t expect this move from Amazon until the Kindle had a color screen and a touchscreen. Apparently, they’re going to open kindle up for developers. I’ve been hoping this kind of move will help developers to implement some more powerful education tools into the Kindle.

I’m starting a new series on this blog. I occasionally travel places that I really like, and others I don’t. As a Geek I’m a bit picky on the places I visit – whether that be they have sketchy internet, plugs in the wrong places, or just plain, normal annoyances a geek might have, I decided these things needed to be shared. This thought came to me last week as I stayed at Circus Circus during CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, so I thought I’d begin sharing these adventures as a travelling geek with you, hopefully either inspiring you to visit, or warning you in the event you are visiting and you need to know where to stay. Consider this my first post in the series. We’ll see how this goes.

Circus Circus, Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas is filled with places to stay.  This time of year, many of those places are actually quite cheap.  But when staying during an event such as the Consumer Electronics Show, finding an affordable hotel, especially at the last minute, can be quite an adventure!

Circus Circus saved my day at CES.  Starting at a price tag of around $29 minimum per night, and $45 maximum per night, I was able to find an affordable place to stay on the strip within just a week from the start of CES.  Other hotels on the strip were selling for around $400/night!

The place I stayed was in their newly renovated West Tower building.  Previous visits to the hotel landed me and my family in an old, musty hotel room, leaving us wanting.  Not this time!  My hotel room was brand new almost everything, had a big screen, flat LCD TV, a great view of Las Vegas, comfortable, clean beds.  It was an entirely new experience for me at the hotel!

Atmosphere

The atmosphere of the hotel you can tell is targeted towards families.  The interior is the same old interior you’re used to if you have been at the hotel before, and I admit could probably use a bit of renovation itself.  You see the Casino right near the entrance, but if you have kids you can mostly avoid the Casino, ride the roller coaster rides at the AdventureDome, go shopping, and more, all without exposing kids to too much gambling or alcohol or cigarette smoke.  If you opt to take them around the Casino, you can also take them up to the second floor where they can play Midway games and win stuffed animals or see the Circus acts and clowns.  Even going by myself without the family, this always ends up being much more rewarding than the Casino hall down below, and I get stuff to take home to the kids when I’m done!  There’s even a McDonalds on the second floor.

Proximity

The best part about Circus Circus is its proximity to the Las Vegas Convention Center.  If you wanted, you could walk there.  As a geek, since often a lot of events happen at the Wynn, you can also walk over to the Wynn, and I found myself doing that a few times.  If walking is too much, the monorail also stops somewhere near the Circus Circus (I admit I have not been), so you can always take that as well.

Of course, Circus Circus is still at the end of the strip, meaning if you want to go to the Bellagio or Paris or any of the more traditional hotels further down the strip it’s probably going to be a Taxi or shuttle ride over, or maybe even a Monorail trip.  I was driving my own car though so it didn’t matter.  One thing to note if you do bring your own car – Valet parking at all the hotels is free, and the expected tip is usually between $1-2, unless you’re feeling generous.

The Internet

One important part of staying at any hotel for me, as a geek, is the internet, how fast it is, how easy it is to get set up, and how expensive it costs.  I plan to include this in each of my future Geek Travel reviews.  At Circus Circus, the internet is all wireless.  Therefore, if you want to set up more than one computer, it’s going to be around $10 per night, per computer (MAC Address).  Unless you have a router that can bridge pretty easily, you’re probably going to be paying if you’re sharing the room with another person.  Speed for the internet was acceptable, although not fast enough for my tastes.  I was however able to upload about 5 3-5 minute HD videos to Youtube overnight.

The Plug Test

One annoyance of mine at hotels is the proximity of the plugs to the bed, where I often do my work.  There were a couple of plugs on the desk, which is fine when I need to sit at the desk. (one on the lamp, and another on the wall)  To get a plug for the bed, I had to disconnect the alarm clock to have a place to plug in my laptop.  While it works, I think it’s a hack.  I don’t understand why hotels don’t just put more plugs on the nightstand!

The Website and Twitter Test

From what I can tell, Circus Circus has no Twitter account.  Communicating with them should you have an issue or question during an event will require a (gasp!) phone call or in-person visit.  They do have a website at http://www.circuscircus.com, but visiting the site without “www” returns an error.  It seems they don’t put much focus in their marketing on the web, which is a bit of a bummer.

Conclusion

Overall, due to the new room, I was quite impressed with Circus Circus!   It had all the amenities I needed (Circus Circus, unlike most hotels on the strip, even has vending machines on each floor! ($2 for a Coke)).  The rooms were clean.  Internet was pretty acceptable.  The low prices make it appealing.  The proximity to the Convention Center sealed the deal.

If you’re on a trip for a convention in Vegas this year, I highly recommend trying out Circus Circus – bring the wife and kids if you feel like it, but even as a geek on your own I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  I’ll be considering it for my next stay.

This weekend I’m visiting the Wasatch Back in Utah with my wife, swimming in Geothermal craters, Cross Country skiing, visiting 2002 Winter Olympics sites, and more – the next few articles I write in this series I hope to share some of the wonders that are in Utah where I live should you consider visiting here in the future.

When I write articles I often look for media – videos, audio, etc. to support the content I write.  The additional content provides some entertainment value, while still driving the point home for others to remember.  I’ve seen this similar technique used by other bloggers such as MG Siegler, Chris Messina, and others.  While at CES last week, I had the opportunity to meet with the founders of MovieClips, a company that makes it easy to share these little quotes in video form in a nice, legal, and searchable format.  Check out what they do in their Intro video below:

MovieClips has partnered with almost every major label to provide users with a database of 12,000+ short clips from movies which you can share with your friends.  Have a scene from a movie you just love?  Simply type in a phrase in their search box, and chances are that clip will appear.  You can then share that clip with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, and even your blog with just a few clicks.

MovieClips is founded by a dream team of Movie fanatics and Web geeks.  CEO, Zach James, is a former investment Banker, as well as brother of Omniture founder Josh James, and co-founder, Rich Raddon, is former Director of the LA Film Festival.  Its Advisory board includes members such as Josh James himself, Wordperfect’s Clayton M. Christensen, Sony Music’s Ryan Wright, and former Marvel Studios President, Michael Helfant.  There’s no doubt they’re going somewhere.

I had the chance to interview James and Raddon at CES with my brother, Luke Stay (Tripod Productions) behind the camera.  They showed me how easy and unique it was to include their clips with my blog posts.  I was so excited I immediately included one in my Steve Ballmer post.  Here’s our interview:

MovieClips is such an easy service to find any clip you like and share it with friends.  The most significant use for me though is the ability to add a little “Pizazz” to my blog posts.  I can’t wait to start diving in as I write future blog posts to add a little “spice” with entertainment using their service.

Of note, the reason I was holding my iPhone was because I was recording the interview on CinchCast.com to upload immediately after the interview.  It turned out to be a great way to get an additional, high quality MP3 of the interview, as well as a close-to-live upload of the interview shortly after it occured.

Disclosure: I have consulted for MovieClips in the past

From Nick O’Neill’s “‘I’m With CoCo’ Spreads Like Wildfire on Facebook” article, I noticed this ad by Woot.com in my Google Reader today:

Smart move by Woot.com to hit an audience that loves humor.

In an unprecedented move, Laura Fitton’s OneForty.com launched their own app store for Twitter today, enabling Twitter developers to finally have a platform to sell and promote their apps in a single location, to a large audience.  The company, with apps that you can purchase for Twitter, will become like iTunes or even Amazon, in enabling developers to sell, and Twitter app seekers to find and purchase, in a virtual Twitter marketplace.  My startup, SocialToo, is proud to be one of the companies launching with OneForty in this effort.

We know with the launch of the iTunes app store that bringing developers to a single location that others can search, find, and purchase apps, has proven to be a lucrative business for developers.  This launch will make Twitter itself a similar breeding ground for new entrepreneurial ideas and business opportunities that were previously not thought of.  The completion of an app store is the icing on the already baking Twitter ecosystem cake that should seal the deal for many entrepreneurs and developers in why they should write Twitter apps.

What can you purchase from SocialToo?

Until now you have already been able to purchase several features on the SocialToo website – those include the ability to unfollow everyone you’ve followed on Twitter at once, catching up those who followed you before joining SocialToo that you want to follow back, along with a powerful daily e-mail that includes stats as to who followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  In fact, we just announced an affiliate program which enables anyone with a Twitter account to gain a cut of the revenues just by sharing with their friends on Twitter!

With today’s launch with OneForty, we are starting by allowing users to purchase our daily stats e-mail that sends you a digest of who followed you and who stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  Because our current services are one-time for life, it gives us a unique opportunity to offer one-time purchases like this on 3rd party sites like OneForty.  The specific stats e-mail we’re offering on OneForty sells for just $20, and you get it for life.  In fact, because you’ve already given your e-mail address to OneForty, once you’ve purchased, you don’t even have to ever visit SocialToo.com (although we always appreciate the visit!) – you’ll start receiving stats e-mails the very next day.

I’m excited for this new development.  OneForty has already proven to be one of the best ways to find apps in the Twitter ecosystem.  It can only get better now as developers are able to now start monetizing their offerings through the directory.

So if you get a chance, go on over to OneForty and try out the SocialToo stats e-mail.  Be sure to leave us a review!  This is an incredible opportunity I’m proud to be a part of.

I find myself regularly pointing people to three of my most favorite features in JibberJobber.  In this post I want to share how JibberJobber interfaces with five outside tools:

1. LinkedIn – in various places in the JibberJobber experience you can tap into your LinkedIn network.  You can do a quick search on LinkedIn for companies or names, or you can see who is in your LinkedIn network by company.  I want to do LOTS MORE with LinkedIn, but their terms of service is too restrictive (sorry, talk to them about it). Need LinkedIn help?  Check out my LinkedIn DVD.
2. Twitter – I mentioned in that things I love post about how you can quickly add a contact by putting their Twitter handle in.  There is MORE coming… super cool stuff!
3. Skype – I use Skype for my business phone… when I’m in JibberJobber I can easily click an icon and initiate a phone call through my headset.  It’s one-click easy.  I can also click an icon and initiate a chat message through skype.
4. Google – just like I can do a quick search on LinkedIn, I can also do a quick search on Google. I thought this was just a cute “we did it because we could” feature, but I have used it more than I thought I would recently!
5. Anagram - people continually thank me for this feature – you can copy-and-paste contact information into a box, click a button, and then the information (names, phone #’s, etc.) is parsed into the correct boxes on the form.  It’s really quite brilliant (you can buy it for your PC, if you want, but you don’t have to have that to use the feature built into JibberJobber).

We would love to do more interfacing with other systems – send me a message and let me know what you’d like to see us interface with (and how the interface would work).

Overall the Consumer Electronic Show of 2010, while amazing and overwhelming and definitely worth my time, has been a disappointment when it comes to innovation. The big things of the show have been 3D, new consumer video devices, and, well, that’s about it. So I’m at a bit of a conundrum as to who or what my favorite technology at the show is. If I were to pick one though, it would have to be the demo by TCL (The Creative Life) of their 3D TV Technology that doesn’t require glasses.

Passing by the booth you can’t miss it – they’ve surrounded 4 TVs by mirrors (no relation to the technology), and when you look at the TVs, you do a double-take. You’re seeing 3D, just as you would in traditional 3D glasses, but without the glasses! I never knew this was possible!

The technology revolves around basically mimicking the 3D glasses technology right on the TV screen itself. That, and an optical illusion of just the right flicker with the speed your eyes process information, and they’re tricking your brain to thinking there’s full 3D objects inside those monitors!

I saw a lot of 3D technology at CES. Some are special 3D TVs that you have to buy the TV to get the full 3D experience, but they require glasses. Others are adapters you hook up to your Sony PS3 and you can play games in 3D (due EOY 2010 Sony told me – I’m actually excited for that one and may buy a PS3 because of it). I talked to a guy in the elevator at my hotel that works with devices you put right up to your eyes like glasses to get the experience.

However, no one wants to buy a new TV right now. I just can’t see consumers buying a TV just so they can put on glasses and watch TV through those glasses. These new 3D TVs without the glasses enable you to do that, no glasses required, and I think they make much more sense.

While the TVs aren’t available for probably at least another year, there are still a few issues though. For one, you can only watch 3D on the TVs. They’ve either got to make a dual mode so you can watch either/or, or consumers will have to get used to watching nothing but 3D television, something not everyone in the industry is sure consumers will want. Also, the videos they were showing had to be custom-made for the TVs. They don’t yet work with traditional 3D movies and I think that will be required.

What I liked about this technology though is that they were showing what could be. They’re thinking to the future. That’s what I wanted to see at CES this year. Everyone else is looking to the present and past from what I’ve seen so far. Kudos to TCL for making me think forward this CES.

Here’s some video I shot – of course you can’t see the 3D in the video, but at least it gives you an idea. You can follow all my raw, unedited footage on my personal Youtube channel.

Anyone who knows me realizes how excited I am about reflective displays for computers, laptops, ereaders, phones, etc. I bought a Kindle and a Motorola F3 just because they use eInk.

I love the Marisol screen technology that I read about a month ago but rediscovered in the CES news this week.

Apparently, it reflects much better than the Pixel Qi screen.

The only problem with this demo is how bad it makes me want one of these screens.

I found a competitor,  to the Pixel Qi screen before Mary Lou Jepsen was able to get a product out the door. It’s called Liquavista.

I have yet to see a product that is launching soon with any of these technologies, but I’m considering the Entourage Edge as a useful alternative. It provides an eink display and a color display in a book form factor.

This week I am at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada to see what’s happening with the latest in consumer gadgets.  The show kicked off on Wednesday, where I was just barely able to make it to the Steve Ballmer keynote, where he talked about what was supposed to be the “future” of Microsoft.  The problem was, as compared to the Bill Gates Keynotes of the past, there was little “future” about it.  Ballmer focused on previous products, some that have been out for years now, making the Keynote, as I said earlier on Twitter, well, boring.  Based on his Keynote, with all the launches Google and Apple are doing lately, I think Microsoft may really be in trouble!

A very large portion of what Ballmer talked about was focused on Windows Media Center, showing the capabilities it has in the Home Media Center.  This is something I have said before that Microsoft has long had a strength in and I wished they would focus on more.  I am thinking they’re finally realizing this and trying to get more eyes on it.  The problem is, there was no innovation in this area, making the demo a bunch of technology that I’ve been using already for 3 years now!  Perhaps I’m the only one, making this “new” to most people.

The rest of the keynote was spent demoing the already-launched Windows 7 and the various types of PCs that run it.  There were no real announcements other than the fact that Natal will be launched the end of this year (even though they had no Demo), and that there would be a new version of Halo.  Beyond that, nothing.

The Future for Microsoft

Based on the content of Ballmer’s keynote, I have to worry about the health of the software giant for the future.  Will they be able to keep up with their competitors, who are already releasing some extremely innovative technology?  Microsoft has a lot of potential – I just wonder if they’re behind on getting to that potential.

For example, one of the things they did cover in the Keynote was the capability to download Zune and Media Room videos and play them anywhere – on your TV, on your computer, or even on your phone.  I think the full experience is something Microsoft can leverage.  Being able to play this stuff anywhere (and I would argue that anywhere should also be my iPhone), is a powerful point for Microsoft!  Let’s hope they push this further – from the tablet PCs to the TVs to even the Cars with Sync and other Microsoft technologies I should be able to pass this content around (and preferably in an open manner).

What Will We See From Microsoft?

After this keynote, if I were a Microsoft investor, I would be a little worried right now.  There was very little innovation announced the other night!  Let’s hope, alongside Natal (Microsoft’s controller-less body-controlled gaming experience) and Halo, that Microsoft can fully integrate their technologies across the board into many parts of each user’s life.  Microsoft needs to start embracing their Zune brand more (which, the hardware wasn’t even mentioned during the keynote).  They need a brand new, Microsoft-branded phone that they have control over similar to the Xbox.  They need a completely brand new interface that integrates Bing, Zune Marketplace, Windows Media Center, Sync, and many other Microsoft technologies that works on Mobile.

If Microsoft can do this successfully (which they were close, but were unsuccessful at portraying during the Keynote), they would have a pretty serious product on their hand.  However, I don’t know what Ballmer was thinking during this Keynote.  Based on the content, you would think that Microsoft the company was just like the power at the beginning of the keynote – dead.

Do you like designing on whiteboards?  I do.   Colorful markers against a clean, white surface inspire all kinds of creativity and fun.

Recently David Crossett of Ready Receipts gave me a great tip.  He told me that instead of going to your local OfficeBOX superstore and paying $200 for a 4×8 whiteboard, just hit HomeDepot instead and get a $12 piece of showerboard.  It works just as good and if you need a smaller size they will cut it for you on site for no additional charge!  At that price, you can line your walls with thinking space.  Power to the Consumer–thanks David!

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

In this post I’m asking you to take a few minutes to recommend JibberJobber to the U.S. Department of Labor.

This is like “voting” for JibberJobber, but it’s not for a web award, or to be listed on a blog… I’m guessing the implecations of this recommendation will be that JibberJobber will be recognized by the government and broadcast as a job seeker resource to many workforce service departments.

In short, I think this can be the think that legitimizes JibberJobber to the US Government, which will be a big win not only for us but for the people who need something like JibberJobber.

I’ve had many talks with government people, but the problem always comes back to one thing: since there is an OPTION to upgrade, they say they can’t recommend it.  I think this is either a super-lame policy, or a misunderstanding of policy.  Nonetheless, many government people I talk to say something like (I really heard this):

I LOVE this!  I’m going to tell my daughter, who is just graduating from college, to get on and use JibberJobber.  But I can’t mention it at my office because there is a fee (NO, there is an OPTIONAL fee).  And we can’t endorse anything that is for-profit.

Oh. My. Gosh.  Choke me now.

Guess what… LinkedIn has an optional upgrade.  Monster has optional upgrades (or levels).

A major disappointment when I first started JibberJobber was seeing a great divide between the government trying to create their own stuff, and not promoting anything else, and private industry creating really strong, powerful tools.

Guess who lost? Anyone who went to a workforce services office who wasn’t told about what they really should have been using as a resource.

Okay, didn’t mean for this to be a rant… let me get back on track.

I think, I hope, that if JibberJobber gets enough recommendations then we’ll finally get that quasi-endorsement from the government that will help hundreds thousands millions know about this very useful tool.

Here’s a quote from a comment from yesterday’s post – I found this to be really powerful:

I just “stumbled” across JJ today. After 9 months in the job search, talking with “career coaches” and recruiters as well as other job seekers and this is the first I’ve heard of it. This should be the first place a job seeker is led to.

Thank you, Gary Donnelly, for sharing that (see his entire comment here). It is a damned shame (says Steve Gallison) that he had not been pointed to it earlier.

We have tens of thousands of signups, but with last year’s economy we should have had millions.

Please recommend JibberJobber to the DOL and hopefully we’ll get the respect we deserve, and job seekers won’t have to waffle around for almost a year before they “stumble upon” this very helpful resource.

To recommend JibberJobber simply:

1. Click on this link (or any link on this page, they all go to the same place)
2. Click on the Recommend Tool Image on the DOL page
3. Click Signup on the top of the popup window
4. Apparently you have to click the Recommend image again (thanks @ecaron for the heads up on this fourth step)

Follow the process from there. I’m guessing it will take you all of three minutes.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

A recent blog post by Anil Dash has everyone talking about what I thought was a long-assumed fact that just because someone is on the Twitter Suggested User List (or SUL) and has a million followers doesn’t necessarily mean they actually have all of those followers listening to them.  Dash, who recently had the opportunity to be on the Suggested User List himself, cited examples of various other Twitter accounts put on the list that saw absolutely no additional response after being added to the list.

I’d like to take this a bit further though and suggest something that, because of its open nature as compared to Twitter, just hasn’t been talked about much. That is the fact that, just like Twitter followers, a blog’s subscribers is also subject to this phenomena.  I’d like to suggest that despite that number in the upper-right-hand corner, it means absolutely nothing in the sense of how many people are actually reading that content.  It’s just a number.

Speaking From Experience

Let me start with this blog, since I vowed to be more transparent.  If you read the Feedburner number in the upper-right section of this blog it says I have over 7,500 subscribers.  Let’s start right off with the fact that 6,030 of those are because FriendFeed includes its subscription counts in with my Feedburner stats.  I have 6,030 subscribers on FriendFeed, and those are part of that 7,500 you see above.  If you subscribe to me on FriendFeed, that increases the number.  Still, that 6,030 still has potential of seeing my content.  It’s still just a number though.

Now, let’s assume those FriendFeed numbers don’t count.  That leaves about 1,500 subscribers  that assumedly subscribe to this blog through some sort of Feed Reader (Google Reader, Newsvine, etc).  I don’t believe that number at all.  I’d bet that at most, half of those actually read the articles I publish, as I usually average between 2 and 5 comments on each blog post I write.  As for traffic, any time I post I get around 200-500 additional visitors per post.  On a really good day that could be in the thousands.  The thing is that most of those come from Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, as well as other blogs that provide commentary. Those numbers aren’t even reflected in my subscriber count!

The Big Guys

If that’s my experience, I can only imagine the accuracy of those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers.  I know their numbers can’t be accurate, not only based on my experience on this blog, but also after being linked numerous times by them.  I must admit that, directly, I usually average 100-300 visitors from the millions of subscribers on each of these blogs.  I’m very grateful for this traffic, and that they’re talking about me – the fact that they’re writing about me has much more impact and influence than just traffic (as I’ll show later).  However, the fact that only 100 out of over a million subscribers are clicking seems to imply a very similar truth to what Dash is implying with Twitter subscribers and what I’m seeing on my blog: while a few hundred thousand may be reading each and every article, the rest are simply casual bystanders skimming headlines if anything at all.

Let’s add to that how many of these blogs are on FriendFeed’s default list and other services, adding to their numbers there, along with how many are the default on the Kindle, or many RSS Readers out there.  Many users just get subscribed to these blogs by default.  Sure, some casually discover the blogs and start reading, but there is a strong possibility that many of those subscribed to these blogs never even read them, some perhaps not even aware that they’re subscribed!

Yet, Numbers Still Do Matter

As Dash implies with Twitter, the number still has an effect.  He mentioned the possibility of brand managers getting raises because their bosses see the number of new subscribers they were able to get for their brand.  From my own personal experience, I’ve seen this on both Twitter and my blog.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been introduced as “influential” because I’m one of “the most followed Twitter users in Utah”, or “he has over 7,000 subscribers to his blog!”  Like it or not, many opportunities have opened up because of this.  All that and I don’t even have a million subscribers!

Let’s add to that the fact that I can sell it for money too.  On my blog I can sell ads for more because of this.  People are more likely to subscribe and tell their friends because beyond just content, they see that number as “influential”.  I’ve been introduced to many consulting opportunities because of this.  Of course I insist on proving myself beyond the numbers (I sincerely hope no one would hire me or anyone else based on numbers alone!), but numbers do matter!  For instance, if you have more subscribers than anyone else you get to say you are the top blog on the internet – that’s a powerful statement!  You bet it works.

Numbers also lead to better content.  As I consult for others I can’t tell you the number of people that want to pitch to blog X or blog Y because they have more subscribers than the others.  Having more people pitch to you means you get the scoop on more and better content, and you’re given more control.  The articles written may not bring much traffic, but the fact that “a big blog wrote about you” also means you can feature this in Press Releases, on your company blog, or more, giving the entrepreneur more attention from VCs, big businesses deals, and potential acquisitions down the road.  But if you’re looking for traffic some times it’s better to pitch to numerous smaller blogs than one or two big blogs.  If you want influence pitch to the bigger blogs.

Organic vs. Inorganic

There are many bloggers like Scoble, Chris Brogan, Louis Gray, and others that have built their audiences by working to build relationships with their readers, one-by-one.  Yet, others that have built their entire business model around blogging do it by creating business relationships, signing contracts, and then interacting with their readers as they have time.  I think both types of bloggers have similar trust with their readers.  Producing lots and lots of good content vs. building relationships with content are both good strategies, and both can produce similar results in how they affect those that read their content, as well as individual opportunities for the bloggers.

I think in the end it comes down to which is most rewarding.  I’m not going to say which one that is as that’s a matter of opinion – can a pure focus on numbers and subscriber counts vs. building relationships and organically building your audience be more or just as rewarding?  In the end we know one thing – that little number up there doesn’t mean what you think it says.

Or does it?

I love reading updates from my peers, particularly in Utah where I live, as well as other States and Nations that have great blogs. I subscribe to them, in part because I enjoy receiving their updates and what they’re up to, but also because I love to see them post new things and I want to support that practice. I love to see people write, especially amongst my peers because that is how the world can learn about them. A blog, as opposed to a Facebook update or Twitter, gives me the opportunity to see much more of who they are, what they are up to, as well as learn more about their expertise in the areas they like to share.

I see a trend amongst my tech peers here in Utah as well as other places though that I think may be limiting their potential. Many of them are writing for their local state’s or area’s audience, or perhaps even their family and friends, rather than seeing the potential that others outside of their inner circles could be reading their blog.  I admit I am guilty of this.

I went through this early on with this blog if you read over the history. There was awhile I wasn’t quite sure of who my audience was. I wrote my blog as more of a way to get my thoughts recorded for myself, rather than consider that others could be reading this down the road. Some times I would write very techie stuff documenting my progress on a few projects I was working on. Some times I would write stuff about my close family, or maybe even local events that a national or worldwide audience may not be quite as interested in. Occasionally I would delve into religious topics. All this is okay, so long as I recognize that those are the audiences I’m targeting. I’m not sure at the time I did.

It wasn’t until I started recognizing that this blog was more than just a local blog for me and my close friends that this blog began to start getting traffic and taking off.  Once I began seriously researching and writing topics, acting as though it were a blog for a national or worldwide audience, people started to listen.  Sure, it was and still is and will always be my personal blog, but I have changed my perception of who my audience is, and who it could be.   I treated it as how it could become.  Because of that I’m achieving my original purposes of sharing things I learn with even greater impact than ever before.

When you’re writing, you should consider who you’re writing for:

If you’re writing for your close friends and family, that is who will read it…  If you’re writing for just people in your local city or state, that is who will read it…  If you’re writing for your religion or faith, that is who will read it…  If you write for a national or worldwide audience, that is who will read it… If you write for TechCrunch or Mashable or Scoble or Louis Gray or Guy Kawasaki, that is who will read it…

Do you want more eyes on your content?  Which of the above audiences will bring the most eyes?  What are your purposes for your blog?  Look long and hard and spend some time determining this.  Which one will have the biggest impact on achieving your goals in the long-run?  After you do so, look at the above audiences, and then determine which one you need to start writing for.

Most importantly, start writing!  Something is always better than nothing.

In my Google Alerts I found a link to a blog that mentioned JibberJobber (titled: What’s Wrong?).  In fact, the blogger wrote “newfangled jibberjobber”… hm, now my curiousity is piqued!

The blog post is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time… the blogger talks about all of the widgets and gadgets and tools that are supposed to make our lives easier, but in fact, don’t.  I think we all have at least one thing we’ve purchased that was supposed to make our lives easier, but just sat around unused?

The blog author talks about stuff from infomercials, kitchen utensils, phone accessories, etc.

And they threw JibberJobber into the conversation with this question:

“After all whats wrong with the OLD way of doing whatever the newfangled jibberjobber is supposed to replace?”

Let’s talk about that…

The OLD way of doing a job search is, well, old.  It’s outdated.  It doesn’t necessarily work.

Remember, the OLD way of doing a job search was in a different environment.  Back in the olden days (a few years ago) you could use job boards, apply to jobs, and it was a numbers game (how many resumes could you send in?  Someone was BOUND to hire you if you sent enough resumes).

The NEW way is, well, new.  It’s not so much a numbers game.  It might just be more about managing relationships.  And managing relationships is HARD.  Keeping track of relationships you manage is HARD, also, especially the more you network.

Try tracking hundreds of companies you are looking at.  Hundreds of resumes that you use to apply to hundreds of jobs.  And hundreds of people you network into (online and offline).

What OLD way would really help you manage that information?  3×5 cards not good enough?  Well, buy 4×6 cards then :p  Or wait, how about a spreadsheet?  Been there, done that, didn’t do the job after a while because there was TOO MUCH data to manage.

There are only so many tools that will really, really cut an onion the right way.  And usually my favorite cutting tool is the knife. I can’t image a tool that will replace my set of Cutco knives.  They are the best tools in my kitchen.

In a job search, there never really was a knife (that super tool).  There still isn’t … finding a job and managing your career is more complex than cutting an onion.  So you might need multiple tools.  But if your OLD tools were paper-based, or a spreadsheet, and you are getting ready for a new job search, I’d suggest you seriously check out some newfangled tools… like JibberJobber.com and LinkedIn.  These are the closest knife-like tools you’ll find for your job search.

Twitter is … weird.  Yeah, weird.  I currently have 11,409 followers, and I wonder how many of those followers are spam and fake accounts. I rarely look at the home page to see what people are writing about (I used to, all the time) because it’s so NOISY.  Too much crap to wade through.

Having said that, I’ve gotten immense value out of Twitter. I put up a LinkedIn Question a few weeks ago asking: Twitter in the job search? I say: not yet. What do you think? I got some passionate replies telling me that YES, Twitter is all that, and other replies saying no way, pick up the phone instead.  Terrific responses.

The irony, for those so passionate about how Twitter is the best things since sliced bread, is that I’m not a Twitter hater… I even did an awesome video on Twitter in the job search. I think it’s a terrific tool for job seekers…

Let me share one of the coolest stories I’ve heard in a long time on how people are getting value out of Twitter (this isn’t a job search story, but it is a networking story).  It’s a terrific story about two ladies who really want to meet celebrity author Keith Ferrazzi in Guatemala… you can read the entire story here, on Keith’s blog.  Here’s the short of it:

Keith was in Guatemala to look at some charity opportunities (read more about Keith Ferrazzi’s charity work here) and let his readers/audience/fans know (Keith’s Twitter account). Sara and Suzette found out and were using Keith’s tweets to try and figure out where he was, hoping to run into him.  Finally, Susette tweeted to Keith asking if she could buy him a drink.

Keith saw that, replied, and the rest is history!  (read his post to see how cool the dinner was)

This worked because Keith was (a) on Twitter, (b) using Twitter, and (c) comfortable with Twitter.  There’s something about communicating with someone through a channel that they are comfortable with.

What’s interesting is that neither Susette nor Sara have done “all the right things,” as far as what others are saying you have to do.  They don’t have many followers, they don’t have bios or websites or links so you can learn more about them… they haven’t tweeted that much.  But they still hit grand slams… just by using the tool.

Not all of your target contacts are on, or use, Twitter.  However, I would check to see if they are.  I’ve communicated with other untouchables through Twitter and gotten further than if I would have just sent an email.

Don’t discount Twitter as a networking tool.  I don’t suggest you go crazy with it (my video shows you how to get value out of it – whether you have a Twitter account or not), but use it like all of the other networking tools you have access to.

I’ve been searching for a replacement for my lost Kindle.  I’ve honed in on one display technology, the Pixel Qi screen, and I’m watching the outcome of the following devices:

1. Plastic Logic Que
2. Microsoft Currier (this one currently sounds like it most fits my life, but I’m worried it has back-light screen)
3. Notion Ink Tablet
4. Apple Tablet

My requirements are:

1. Non-emitting light screen (I like Pixel Qi because it supports video and text editing so I could do all my work on it)
2. Web browser
3. Wi-Fi
4. Text-editing/file system
5. Kindle reader program (this may be optional depending on the availability of a digital library on the device)
6. Full-text search of both books and my personal notes
7. Pen or written input

We’ll see how the different systems stack up.  I would appreciate any insights into new options to fulfill my requirements.

Here it is, Christmas Eve, almost time to celebrate Christmas in all the traditions it brings in our household.  We usually go visit my wife’s family, and then follow it up with telling the Christmas story out of the Bible and then we sing Christmas songs and each of us opens one present from another sibling or family member.  In our household, Christmas is all about spending time with family.  It’s all about home.  It’s all about spending personal time with those you’re closest with and maintaining the traditions you hold private and dear.

Thinking about home and family and Christmas, I realized today there’s a disconnect on the open web right now.  The privacy I mention is available in forms on the web such as Facebook, Gmail (to an extent), and in various forms amongst other web services throughout the web.  However when it comes to real life, there is a missing link when it comes to maintaining the privacy of where you are physically, and sharing that on the web so only your close friends and family know where that exact location is.

For instance, let’s say I want to have a Christmas party for just my immediate family, and maybe some close friends that I know follow me on Twitter or Facebook.  Right now the only way to do that is to either e-mail them each individually and reveal my exact location to each one, or blast it out publicly, potentially compromising the intimate experience we were trying to create.  At the same time I would be putting my family at risk by allowing unknown people to know where they are.

Another example is mail.  Let’s say this Christmas I want to arrange an easier way for my friends to send me gifts.  I publish some of the things I want for Christmas (I’m of course not that greedy to actually do that), and then I need a way to have you send me those gifts.  Or let’s take a more humble approach – perhaps I want to arrange sending money to a friend in need.  Or let’s say it’s my wedding and I want all my friends to know where they can send wedding gifts.  Right now there is absolutely no way you can blast that out publicly without compromising your physical location in some way.

Paul Carr of TechCrunch wrote about this exact issue several weeks ago.  He cited examples of people coming to his apartment for parties or get-togethers (on Halloween in this instance), and all checking in on FourSquare.  Immediately the exact coordinates of Paul could be made available to the world, all without Paul’s permission.  This is dangerous, especially to a writer of a publication whose employees and writers have been known to get constant threats and even death threats on a regular basis!  There has to be a solution.  Let’s move on to a few technologies I think could solve this.

DNS – the Router for the Web

DNS is the technology that pretty much powers the web from you, the user’s perspective.  I mentioned earlier that we are about to see a “war” at the same level as the browser wars of the late 90s and early 2000’s where companies like Google and Microsoft and others are all going to be fighting for a piece of the DNS pie.  Here’s how DNS works: with DNS, you type in a domain name, and that domain name gets translated through a sequence of various “name servers” throughout the web that eventually tell your browser the IP, or location of that content on the web.  Once your browser knows the location, it knows where to retrieve the content it needs to render to you.

The advantage of DNS to you as a user is that you do not need to know where each server is located.  You simply have to know an easy-to-remember name that the web “just knows” how to translate into an actual location (or IP).  You type in staynalive.com and it just knows how to find the servers that are producing the page you are reading this on.  In fact, many domains actually map to multiple locations, so having a single name to remember is advantageous, and provides a routing layer that can easily be changed.  I actually do this with my e-mail address.  jesse@staynalive.com points right now to my Gmail account.  Because I own the domain, staynalive.com, I can easily point that to just about any e-mail provider I like, and I completely control where my mail gets routed.  You the user only have to know the e-mail address though – it doesn’t matter where it ends up.  The web takes care of that based on how I set it to work.

There’s one problem with DNS though – it’s too anonymous.  Right now it’s all or nothing.  If you put something on the web, anyone can find out your location on the web, and in return, anyone can gain access to your content.  At the same time, there’s no way with DNS alone to identify actual people.  Your website just maps to a location, and anyone can see that location without any other measures in place.  Right now if you want to prevent a certain user from accessing your site, you’re stuck guessing just their IP, which they can technically change if they like.  It’s not a real person visiting your site – it’s just an IP – it’s just a location mapping back to your site.

Solving the Identity Problem Through OpenID

To solve the anonymity problem there had to be another layer added.  A protocol called OpenID was invented, which you, the website owner, could “identify” your website with a specific identity provider using just your DNS identifier (or Domain).  With your website linked to an identity provider, you can now use that specific domain (which remember, maps to a location or IP), to actually identify you as a real person.  By simply typing in your domain on participating OpenID-supported websites, they can automatically verify with your identity provider that it is in fact you logging in as the owner of that website.  Now, every website can also be associated with an actual individual, perhaps even more than a location.  Now you know with close certainty that the content my location is producing is actually coming from me.

There’s still a problem with this though.  You can know the content is coming from me.  However, there’s no way for me to control who’s seeing my content.  Sure, with OpenID I could in theory identify each and every person that visits my website as an actual person (assuming I provide the means to do so), but how do I filter that traffic so only those I want seeing my content are seeing it?

This goes back to the exact same problem I was mentioning with real-life locations – privacy.

The Future of the Open Web is Open Privacy Standards

The web still needs better ways to protect user privacy in an open, standardized way.  Facebook has built this into their API but they haven’t standardized it so others can integrate it into the traditional web experience.  You have to be a Facebook user to get full privacy from Facebook.

Currently there are several open standards in the works that are trying to attack this head on.  One of OAuth’s successors, WRAP, which Facebook is very involved in at the moment, strives to do this.  It is also in the vision for OAuth 2.0 (if I understand correctly), another successor to OAuth.  The success of the future Open Web, ironically, lies in privacy.  It lies in customized roles and authorization.  Ironically we’re going right back to the same problems Novell was trying to solve with the Enterprise market back in the 90s, but this time on a much larger, global scale.

Ubiquity

Now, I’d like to take a step back to my little Christmas story, and where especially around the Holiday season, I’d like to maintain a little privacy.  It’s time we stop thinking about just the web itself, and now start looking towards the future where the web, and our real lives are all going to be meshed into one.  Privacy is critical in this not-so-distant future of a world.

For the Open Web to succeed, it needs to be ubiquitous.  It needs to stretch far beyond just the browser and into our every day real lives.  When I was visiting the Kynetx offices last week Craig Burton shared a vision he has, where he sees people being able to go from room-to-room in a house, and having each room identify who the individual is.  Once identified the room can provide a contextual experience in the room itself for that user (adjust the lights, turn on the favorite TV channel, adjust the chair comfort, etc., etc.).  This is another reason I like what the Kynetx team is working on – open technologies must stretch far beyond just the browser!  You will see this in the next 5 years or less, by the way.

My hope is that we can keep in mind privacy, in not just a browser context, but real-life context as the Open Web is growing and being discussed and architected.  I want to be able to give the Post Office my OpenID on an envelope and have them immediately be able to verify my identity and know where to route my mail.  I want to be able to, on a whim, change where that mail is routed without changing the OpenID I give the Post Office.  I want to give certain close friends and family permissions (which I could revoke at any time) to look up my physical location, based on my OpenID if I choose.  I want to only provide my OpenID to apps like FourSquare and have them also respect that OpenID and not reveal my physical location to people I choose not to share it with.  OpenID and at the forefront, DNS, should be the routers, and at the same time, protectors of our physical locations and our real-life experiences.

This Christmas I want a web that thinks beyond its borders. I want a ubiquitous web that travels with me and gives me full power, not just on the web, but in my real life regarding the context I choose to receive.  I want the limits of DNS to go far beyond IP and into the walls of my own home.  Most of all I want all this to happen with open standards.  I want a web that protects my family.

My hope this Christmas is that you can be inspired.  May you spend a little more time thinking about how you can contribute to this effort.  How can you understand these technologies a little more?  How can you sacrifice a little to make the world a little more open?

May you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday Season.  Hopefully in 5 years I’ll be able to even tell you where I’ll be and where you can spend it with me and not worry about it getting in the hands of the wrong people..  Even in an Open Web, it’s all about Location, Location, Location!