Cinch Mobile Podcasts Now Available In Android Flavor

Since switching to Android from iPhone in an extended trial, there have been few applications that I've sorely missed on the new platform. Topping the list of app vacancies has been Cinch, from BlogTalkRadio. On multiple occasions since the switch, I've found opportunities where I wish I could just fire up the app and do an on the spot interview, only to be left wanting. And my opinion is not the only one. At a recent dinner, I asked Robert Scoble what app he missed most on Android, and he too answered, "Cinch". Luckily for us both, and for the many people who like Cinch and Android, that gap was filled today, as the simple podcast recorder and directory entered the Android Marketplace.



   Connecting the New Cinch App for Android to My Account

Just like its iPhone app sibling, Cinch for Android lets you record podcasts simply by opening the app, pressing the record button, and when done, publishing. You can customize the podcast with a title (under the magically familiar 140 character limit), a photo, and can simultaneously update the CinchCast site as well as Twitter and Facebook, should you so choose.



   Browsing Cinch Content from Friends and My Account
The Cinch app is free in the Android marketplace. While the debate can still rage over what OS is better, or what handsets are the greatest, having top-quality apps on both sides of the aisle is beneficial to all. Now, I just have to hope Redfin, eTrade and my6sense show up soon to make my phone complete.

You can find me on Cinch at http://www.cinchcast.com/louisgray.

See Also: RWW: From Your Mouth to a Thousand Ears, New Apps Make Mobile Podcasting Easy

A Fabulis Launch: Social Network Aims to Find "Gay Take"

After raising $625k in seed funding this January to pave the way for a unique social network targeting gay men and their friends, Jason Goldberg, formerly of Socialmedian and Jobster, opened the doors to his new site, Fabulis, today, appropriately, on his birthday. Looking to go beyond the skin-deep hookup-obsessed competition for gay male visitors, Jason and his team are hoping to forge a central place for this affluent demographic to "celebrate life" and provide a "gay take" on the world.

After knowing Jason primarily through the Web, phone and e-mail since early 2008, I finally met the man in person today, in Palo Alto, in the middle of what was surely an incredibly full schedule. Over lunch, we talked about how this launch, unlike those of Socialmedian and Jobster before it, is a very personal one for him. While I teased Jason that I was a little disappointed that I couldn't be as active a user for his new site as I was with his last one, the passion he has for the latest venture is real, and a for good reason.

As Jason and I discussed, finding good venues and products for gay men is more than finding gay-friendly businesses, but instead, finding ones with a good "gay vibe", ones that are trendy. The data all points to the opportunity being a very good one, with gay men earning more, on average, than their straight counterparts, being more likely to hold a college degree, going on vacation and generally traveling much more, while also displaying significant consumer loyalty. A review on sites like Yelp from midwestern grandmothers is much less relevant to the Fabulis target audience than one from their own background.

Jason by no means is on a plan to take out leading social networks, like Facebook. He recognizes that network's leading role, but thinks there is a very real opportunity to get the experience right for this important market - and their friends. He promised me the site would have value not just for gay men, but their friends. Of course, I am registered, which, according to the site, makes me Fabulis. You can check out Fabulis at http://www.fabulis.com.

For more on the launch, listen to the CinchCast Jason and I recorded from this afternoon. You can hear from his mouth directly the site's focus and goals. Wishing his new network the best of success.

Google's Blogger PM Rick Klau Moves to Google Profiles

Prior to their integration with Google Buzz, individual Google Profiles have not had a high level of visibility, falling fairly low on the social ecosystem ladder when contrasted with more siloed services, including Twitter and Facebook. Yet, as Google looks to further integrate social elements into their platform, it appears that Profiles will play an ever-greater role in how both individuals and companies represent themselves online. Today, Profiles snagged a notable convert, adding Rick Klau, a product manager for Google's Blogger platform, to the team.

Klau, who joined the Blogger team in 2008 following Google's acquisition of FeedBurner the previous year, has largely been the service's public face - playing a visible role in the company's feature roll-outs around Blogger's 10th anniversary, which took place in late 2009, and more recently, tackling the challenge of migrating a large installed base of users off FTP-hosted blogs - which proved to be taxing, even for a company with the resources of Google. Klau served as one of now three Blogger product managers, accompanied by Siobhan Quinn, a 7-year Google veteran, and Chang Kim, based in Seoul, Korea, who joined the team after Google acquired his company, TNC, in September of 2008.

Rick's New Home At Google Profiles

In a conversation I had with Rick this afternoon, day one of his time on the Profiles team, he said the move was the result of a "confluence of need and opportunity". Assuming increased importance for Profiles over time, this role may mean direct impact on a swelling number of Google users, not just those who blog, and appears to be another step in Google's march to becoming a more social company.

"With the Buzz launch, and an increased focus of getting social right, this was a huge opportunity where we weren't doing as much as we could," Rick said.

Rick said that even prior to the Buzz integration with Profiles, the product gained more prominence thanks to Google Profiles results being displayed in core Google search results. This makes the content on your own profile increasingly more important, whether Buzz succeeds or falls flat. And similar to the work on Blogger, he saw an opportunity to let users be more creative in terms of how they were represented, but in a new place.

"How you express yourself online is a lot more than just a blog," Rick said. "We want to give people an option for how they are presented in that context."

To spread more light on the transition, and what this means for Google's properties, both Blogger and Profiles, I interviewed Rick this afternoon using CinchCast. He was gracious enough to participate, and the conversation is embedded below.





You can find all my CinchCast recordings, including this one, at http://www.cinchcast.com/louisgray. Also, Rick has now posted on the news on his blog: New role - Google Profiles

Cliqset, Status.net Support Salmon for Comments Migration

As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a post on ReadWriteWeb this morning, the Salmon Protocol project we first introduced back in October of 2009 looks like it is progressing beyond the planning stages, as it has been integrated in two small, but influential, social networking sites, Status.net and Cliqset - both of whom are strong open standards advocates laboring away in the shadows of larger communities.

The Salmon Protocol, which aims to define a standard protocol for comments and gestures (such as likes) to swim upstream to the originating blog, hopes to unify conversations across diverse locations. It's planned for adoption by Google Buzz (See: Designing Buzz for a Google-Free World) and solves the problem that first blew up back in 2008 around fractured conversations.

While many people, including myself, have adapted to a new world whereby conversations take place in a wide array of communities, it would be nice for the content originator to have one centralized location to see all downstream activity.

Evan Prodromou of StatusNet mentions integration of Salmon's digital signatures in a blog post from Sunday, where he also notes support for Activity Streams encoded in RSS 2.0 and Atom. The move, paralleled by deployment at Cliqset, should be what I hope is the start of a lot more announcements, from small and big companies alike, to make Salmon a reality. The next big target, which I am biased in favor of, obviously, would be for Disqus to integrate with Salmon and pull comments upstream to this blog.

I managed to find time to talk with Darren Bounds of Cliqset at SXSW earlier this month. In our quick discussion, recorded on CinchCast, you can find his comments on their support of open standards, and that network's direction - which could hint at why they're an early adopter of Salmon.

TheCadmus Hits Bay Area for Y Combinator, Twitter Boost

Since November, I've been talking to you about TheCadmus, a new tool that taps into your social streams to remove duplicates, find relevant topics and group discussions - one of many different services that is looking to improve the ability to find signal in today's noisy networks. TheCadmus is looking to make a name for itself in reducing clutter, and personalizing trending topics, including drill-down by lists. Now, the company is looking to take its personalization engine even further with a trip to Silicon Valley to talk with Y Combinator, the much-respected angel investment group, and a presentation later this week at Twitter headquarters to showcase what they have accomplished with the service's API.

The very acts of meeting with Y Combinator and Twitter are of course no direct correlation with success. TheCadmus is but one of 80 companies looking to impress the YC team with their story this week. A poor showing could send the two-person team back to Toronto empty-handed, with nothing but the experience to show for it.

I had the opportunity to meet with the company's two founders, Jay Air and Frank Wang, this evening, as we discussed the product's direction and its place in an online world where most of us are encountering too much noise. They told me the product's first direction, simply to group similar social updates and remove duplicates, led directly to more and more efforts around personalization. They told me that yes, it is a problem that many services are targeting now, but they believe they are approaching the problems in a new way.

Today, TheCadmus lets you consume updates from your social graph, but not communicate from them. For example, they're not a Twitter client. It's not outside the realms of thought that TheCadmus' API could be part of other Twitter clients looking to add new forms of personalization. I got the chance to take a few minutes with Jay Air to record a CinchCast explaining the company's plans for their short trip in Silicon Valley and what they would do with any potential funds gained from a Y Combinator investment. The discussion is embedded below:

Ecademy Chairman Says Limited Networks are "Flawed"

This week, Ecademy chairman Thomas Power and I presented to a roomful of executives in various influential positions in Silicon Valley companies on leveraging social media and taking advantage of new networks or technologies to find information faster and make the right decisions at the right time. (See the presentation on 'connectedness' here)

Before he flew back to the UK, I took some time to ask him about his approach to social networks and what he thinks about connections.

Thomas, connected to more than 30,000 on LinkedIn, and endorsed by more than 700, more than double the world's second-highest profile on the site, believes strongly that any kind of limits online, from Facebook's limit of 5,000 friends (which he hit long ago) or Twitter's limiting you to 1,000 follows a day, is short-sighted and damaging to potential growth of one's network. Thomas' profile on his own network, started in 1998, without many of the limits of other companies, highlights his own connections to more than 56,000.

My own e-mail in box proves Thomas to be an incredible communicator, who tries to maintain relationships well beyond Dunbar's number. You can hear some of his thoughts below, which I recorded via CinchCast.

Disclosure: I spoke to Ecademy last year in a paid engagement and just completed another engagement with Thomas this week. It's quite possible he and I may work on many more opportunities going forward. Simply put, I like the guy.

The New 2010 Social Media Data Flow, With Buzz

I Can Explain... Just Read Below

Two of the more annoying, yet almost inevitable, results of being active on multiple social media services are entry duplication, and repetitiveness for people who may follow you in multiple places. With the introduction of Google's Buzz platform earlier this week, I am seeing even more concerns as people face a challenge of where to put their activity, and how to move data from one service to another. It's something I give a lot of thought to, and continue to refine, to the best of my ability. As many have asked, I thought I would share my current strategy.

First, I wanted to highlight my discussion of this from back in May of 2009, when I said you should Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow. I even posted a SlideShare presentation on how to optimize this flow for all networks (see it here)

But as things change, networks come and go, with some disappearing (like Socialmedian) and others taking their place (Buzz).

As my comments stated in May, the ease of data creation and distribution can set up conflicts, as one tries to decide how to best send updates from one network to another. Often, people give up trying and resort to services like Ping.fm to send the same thing everywhere. With all deference to that service, now owned by Seesmic, it seems like a copout.

My goal, as it was then, is to create the content once, and have it land once, in the right places, as determined by the potential audience. As I see it, there are two categories of outlets, the content creation sites, and the content collectors. For me, my major content collectors are FriendFeed, Google Buzz, and to a lesser extent, Facebook, which I do not optimize well for, admittedly. For me, the content creation sites can be this blog, my Google Reader shares, Delicious bookmarks, Cinchast recordings, or photos from Smugmug and Flickr. Twitter works both as a creator of content and a distributor of content. Friendfeed also does an amazing job at redistributing content.

Don't Give Up Kevin! You Can Do It!

Content Creation

1. Blog Posts

Blog Posts from LouisGray.com are sent by e-mail, using FeedBlitz, to about 200 readers by e-mail. The posts are also sent, via RSS to a few thousand recipients. FeedBurner tells me there are 21,000 subscribers, but that includes FriendFeed, and is well known for overcounting. In addition, these posts go directly to Google Buzz. This is not an issue unless I share the item in Google Reader and introduce duplicates. When I do this, I almost always delete the duplicate on FriendFeed, for cleanliness sake.

2. Twitter Activity

My Twitter activity populates both Google Buzz and FriendFeed, as well as Twitter itself.

3. Google Reader Shared Items

Shares from Google Reader, almost 30 a day now, go to FriendFeed and Buzz, as well as a new Twitter account for this, called @lgstream. I wouldn't want to overpollute my main Twitter stream.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

I track all blog linkage on Delicious and flow those items through FriendFeed to Twitter. Lately, I have been editing the saved boomarks to include /by or /via language including the person's Twitter handle. (Example: here) These bookmarks also populate @lgstream on Twitter.

5. CinchCast Audio Recordings

Cinch podcasts let me post directly to Twitter and Facebook from the iPhone app, a major win for the product. Often, I choose just to send to Twitter. I also pull in the RSS feed of my CinchCasts to FriendFeed, and have the option, later, to embed recordings here on this blog.

6. Miscellaneous Status Updates

Updates posted natively to FriendFeed go to Facebook, and some go to Twitter, depending on my choice. Updates to Facebook status stay in Facebook. Updates directly on Buzz stay in Buzz, but also populate the @lgstream account.

7. YouTube Videos and Photos

All rich media I make goes to FriendFeed. YouTube and Flickr are registered with Buzz, but I have not used them yet. YouTube updates automatically populate my Twitter account.

What Feeds My Buzz

Content Collectors

1. FriendFeed

FriendFeed's goal has always been to act as an aggregator of all my services. That's why FriendFeed gets more content than any other site. It also works best to repurpose as my stream into Facebook, and as a filter, to send some choice items to Twitter (as many as I would like). I am not sending FriendFeed to Google Buzz, and avoid duplicates this way.

2. Google Buzz

Buzz is largely a platform for my Google Reader shares and blog posts. It gets Twitter as well, but not immediately. As I worked for the last few years to cultivate a strong conversational community in my Google Reader shares, the conversations continue to flow and are very active.

3. Facebook

I am not optimizing much for Facebook today. It has never been a huge generator of conversation or traffic for me, though I could do a better job. I pull in my FriendFeed updates for my tech connections there, and know some friends or family have muted my noisy feed - always a risk when you mix different social circles.

Conclusion

Due to my fairly active stream and engagement in many places, it can seem busy. If people choose to follow more than one of my content collectors (for example, FriendFeed or Buzz), they can see duplication and get discouraged. But I cannot assume that they are the same audience, and I need to make the most content available in each place. What I do not want to do is share multiple instances of the same item, and annoy the crowd who has opted in to see me just once.

When you look at where your data is going, make sure you aren't sending everything to all places and annoying everyone who knows you aren't optimizing. Don't pipe one content collector into another. If you can make a second account that is for content only, as I have, go for it. And as always, if there is activity in your feed downstream, listen to the responses, and act on it.

You can find me on Google Buzz here, or on FriendFeed, Facebook or Twitter.

The Web's Impact and Looking to the Future: Web 2030?

It seems a bit redundant to talk about how much the Web has impacted my life and the way we communicate on a blog, but with the advent of the World Wide Web's recent 20th anniversary, I took some time last week to speak with Stu Miniman of EMC about how the Web has broken down barriers that were traditionally limited by geography or class, and how we as a society are increasingly turning to the Web first for news, business and entertainment. It can be tempting to pull out a crystal ball and project our own desires as to what the Web will look like 20 years from now, in 2030, but I know that any specifics I give would just be wrong, as they were for most guesses back in 1990.

What I do believe will happen is that as the components of the Web improve, from processors to networking and storage, so to will the Web's potential continue to grow. We will see further crumbling of barriers, and gain the ability to have shared experiences that may involve more senses than just sight and sound, which are predominant today.

Stu posted the discussions, as a correlation to ON Magazine, EMC's thought leadership magazine, on his blog earlier today, and you can find that, as well as comments from Hutch Carpenter, here: Celebrating the Web at 20. I have included the CinchCast of our call below, and you can read the full transcription on this page: The Web 2030:

Technorati, Once Near Death, Focuses On Quality

When Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra joined the company near the end of 2007, he found the blog search engine in "a lot of trouble". Technorati was bleeding cash, with an expensive infrastructure based on "incredibly complicated technologies", and was losing the war on fighting spammers, who were threatening to render the company's deep index and authority measurements completely useless. In parallel, the struggles came at a time when expanded competition from formidable players, including Google, made staying on top almost impossible, even as the company's formidable task to index the fast-growing live Web expanded.

"Please Put On Your Oxygen Mask First..."

The situation looked dire, one Jalichandra compared to when the oxygen masks fall from a depressurized airplane, saying you can't save the passenger next to you, until you save yourself.

"The first thing I had to make sure of was that we didn't go out of business," Jalichandra said in an interview Monday at the company's San Francisco headquarters. "In the fall of 2007, it all came to a head, and we knew we had to do something or there wouldn't be anything left."

Since 2003, Technorati was among the first leaders of the Web 2.0 wave, recognizing the imminent growth of the live Web, encompassing blogs and other social media activities. Not just comfortable with blog search, Technorati also enabled site owners to claim blogs, track backlinks to their content, measure authority, ranked by unique site backlinks over time, to ping the site with new updates, chart changes in content distribution on the Web, and present Technorati widgets on their blogs. Add on a few fun features, including popular pages, and the always quizzical "Where's the Fire", best known as "WTF?", and Technorati had its focuses widely diversified.

Near Death By a Thousand Cuts...

The 2007 crisis forced the company to revisit everything and make some very painful decisions, cutting costs, headcount and features - many of which had been treasured by the blogosphere.

"(Previous CEO David) Sifry came up withe great idea of boiling the ocean of the live Web and it grew like crazy," Jalichandra said. "But there are a couple of problems with boiling the ocean when people are looking for a cup of coffee."

Technorati, once known as the go-to site for data on the blogosphere, had soon found itself eclipsed by more nimble competitors, such as Google Blog Search, and while many bloggers, including myself, grew frustrated with the site's rapidly killing features we liked, and the not too unfamiliar appearance of site downtime, which would happen multiple times a week, for several hours at a time, the site came incredibly close to going away altogether without drastic change.

"The first six months (of my term as CEO) was all about stabilizing the company," Jalichandra said. "At some point you have to keep the lights on, particularly the kind of company that is venture funded. It has to get revenue, and has to make a profit. We had to write the plan for growth, a two-pronged plan, to grow the site and launch the ad network. We are still dedicated and committed to growing Technorati.com."

One Must Have Revenue to Invest Back In the Company

The company's focus on the advertising network seems like a dramatic change in course for what was instead seen as a technology service company, but it was a move aimed to leverage the existing database in the site, while also driving revenue into the company. It was suggested that, as revenue grew, it could be reinvested back into Technorati's site, quite possibly to start replacing some of the lost or deprecated services much beloved by the blogosphere.

In October of 2009, Technorati revamped its Web site, and while gone were many of the dedicated pages for topics and individual blog posts, which I had liked, in its place was a detailed directory with top blogs ranked by category, with a new ranking of authority, and a higher focus on relevancy. While the old Technorati would highlight the most recent updates as they flowed in, the new Technorati tries to deliver recent updates from the most authoritative sources - a move that's not without its controversy, of course.

"Search is not a democracy," said Jalichandra. "There is always an editorial choice in search. It may be an algorithmic choice, but it's a choice."

Look Mom, No Spam and No Downtime!

The new site relaunch led not just to new content and a new look, but the elimination of downtime, as the company says they have not experienced any appearances of the Technorati Monster having escaped since the introduction, adding it is believed the the issue of spam is practically non-existant. Despite so many headaches and a popular perception that the site is irrelevant or archaic, the company's leadership thinks the two years needed to bring the site back to the point where innovation can occur has been both necessary and worth it.

David White, vice president of publishing, says that working for Technorati has been a "really interesting challenge", but one that has changed as the mainstream is not just aware of blogs, but is embracing the live Web in their daily lives, as Technorati plays less of a role as evangelist for the blogosphere, but instead one that focuses on finding quality content.

"Technorati started by indexing all the blogs," White said. "Our job is different now, and that is to find the quality. Technorati is an important site, and it has made an impact on how we interact with the blogosphere, which has had a huge impact on media as a whole."

Will It Be Enough? Can I Have My Widgets Back Now?

As the move to quality infiltrates the company's blog directory, Technorati promises many of the tools that have gone away are coming back. The company fixed blog claiming last week, and promised Monday to bring back authority over time charts, as well as introducing new widgets, which had long since obsoleted.

Many bloggers, including the visible futurist Stowe Boyd, have already given up on Technorati, after seeing the company's early promise seem to crash and burn, through a confusing product strategy, spam-filled results, poor uptime, and bad news followed by no news. It seems the darkest times are behind them, and the company will have to make good on its promises before many bloggers learn to trust them again. But in my meeting with them Monday, they clearly said they're not done fighting.

To hear Jalichandra in his own words, listen to the 8 minute clip I recorded on Cinch:

iPhone Owners Looking Next or Nexus Are In Paralysis

Last week, I said one would be nuts to buy a new iPhone at this point in time, given what we have been hearing from Android and from Apple's roadmap. Today, with the confirmation of the long-rumored Nexus One from Google, an upgraded HTC unit running the latest edition of Android, we saw the platform take another step further in become the true alternative to Apple, in a way that Blackberry and the Palm Pre and anything Microsoft powered have been unable to do.

For iPhone owners who are happy with their platform, and think it's amazing, the news of the increased competition may mean very little. They still have access to the most robust application store in the world. They still have excellent integration with their desktop machines, especially their Macs. And they can be confident knowing that the product will continue to be upgraded.

But if you're an iPhone owner who is either tired of the limited carrier choices, or if you're simply curious about Android, or if you prefer Google's applications and approach moreso than you do the Steve Jobs way, today's announcement has to give you immediate pause. Not because it instantly vaporizes the iPhone's lead, but because of the same reason we all should be watching the creep of the Chrome OS - because it's not just about now. It's about next.

Switching smartphones (no superphones for me, thank you) is not as easy as it used to be when one dropped a Nokia for a Sony Erricson or a Motorola with little thought. Now, you're as married to a platform as you are to your operating system. Now, because of the application store, and all those hooks that I warned about in September of 2008, you are going to be giving up a lot more than one unit for another, but literally throwing away tens to hundreds of dollars of applications you may have purchased, which will either have to be purchased again on the new platform, or may have no equivalent at all.

With the cost of data plans and voice plans and hardware and applications, the true cost of a smartphone over the lifetime of the product rivals that of top of the line laptops, so the same kind of thought and shopping around once reserved for a day to day computer is the same kind of thinking now necessary for the unit you're going to clip on your belt and call your parents with.

In December of 2008, I said there are two phones in this world, those that are iPhone and those that are not. That's clearly no longer the case. You either have an iPhone or an Android, or an also-ran, and I believe that BlackBerry's position is niched in businesses, away from the consumer, with Apple and Google in the driver's seat for the foreseeable future. But even if you've run the specs and like the iPhone better, or you have an iPhone and think it's still the best, when it comes time to buy again, you just might take serious pause, and have to go through analysis paralysis.

I talked more about this very real issue this afternoon on a CinchCast, embedded below:

Talking With TweetDeck and Tweetmeme at LeWeb

At LeWeb 2009 here in Paris, France, I participated in a panel on Twitter applications and the Twitter platform, featuring TweetDeck, Seesmic, TwitterFeed, OneForty.com, my6sense, Ping.fm and Microsoft. Following the panel, I sat down with Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck and Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme, getting the opportunity to talk with each of them about the origins of their product, how they are working with Twitter, and what's next. In these free-form podcasts, we also talked about competition, business models, and their approach to innovation.


Talking With Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead


Talking with TweetDeck's Iain Dodsworth

Both podcasts were recorded using CinchCast on the iPhone from BlogTalk Radio.

Cinch Enables Embedding of Simple Podcasts

About five weeks ago, I told you about CinchCast, an iPhone application that lets you record audio and post it directly to social networks. As I have used the application a number of times since, my most-awaited feature has been the ability to embed these podcasts, so I can later make them available to you here on the blog. Today, they made the move, meaning I can, as with YouTube videos and other media, simply post the code and have it display in any posts.

Now, any CinchCast that you make, or those you see on CinchCast.com, can be embedded.

Here are a few recent ones from me:

Nov. 30th: The news that TechCrunch's CrunchPad is dead is quite disappointing.Nov. 12th: Apple should have provided clarity and priority support to FaceBook's iPhone app.Oct. 27th: Being a journalist is about using all your resources to get the story right - not about being uncaring.Oct. 26th: Is social media wasting companies both time and money?
Although I use Cinch via the iPhone, you can also call in your podcasts by using their 800 number. But that would be more boring. I like this new feature a lot.

Cinch Puts Simple Podcasts In Your Pocket

In August, I suggested that Apple should find a way to record phone calls on the iPhone, leveraging its Voice Memo product, to make it drop-dead simple to create podcasts at any time. While the company hasn't achieved such a goal, an offering from BlogTalk Radio, called Cinch, has delivered on an extremely easy to use product that lets you record audio clips and post them to your social networks, including Facebook or Twitter. I've been using it the last few weeks, and while I try and discard a huge number of different technologies, this is one I know I will be returning to often - as it meets a need not currently served by other providers.

The idea behind Cinch is to provide short-form audio updates much like Twitter is for text, and 12seconds.tv is for video. Twitter's ease of use has come largely due to its short-form definition, keeping us all in 140 character soundbites, and CinchCast makes it just as easy to provide short updates, in audio form.


The Cinch Interface on the iPhone - Record and Publish
A free iPhone application, Cinch provides you with the option to record using the iPhone's built in microphone - good for solo updates, or one to one quick interviews - perfect for "people on the street" situations or for events. Once recorded, you can hit play to preview the Cinchcast, or hit Publish to send it off to destinations you have selected, including Twitter or Facebook. You can also add a photo to help tell the story, and can provide, yes, a 140 character update explaining what the Cinchcast is all about.

Should you want to, you can also search the service to find other CinchCasts or click Radio to see BlogTalkRadio's on-air schedule.


Cinch Shows My Published Updates and Those from Others on the Service
I never got into 12seconds.tv given its brevity and my lack of need for quick video shorts. But I can already see getting into regular updates on Cinch to augment my other blogging and social networking activity. As you can see on my Cinch page, I used the product to have a quick interview with Ethan Gahng of Lazyfeed last week, and earlier today, made some comments on the new report that once again, people are blaming social media for employees' lost productivity.

Now, whenever I want to speak directly to people on all the social networks, and have a follow-on discussion in the comments on Cinch, all I need to do is take out my iPhone and speak into the microphone. I will be looking forward to posting many more. You can find Cinch at http://www.cinchcast.com/.

See Also: Webtop Mania: Cinch: better than Twitter, better than Evernote.