My Top Ten Favorite Google Products (2011)

Google makes a ton of products. Almost two years ago, thinking about it, I posted my top ten Google products at the time. Google Reader was #1, Blogger was #2 and FeedBurner was #3. Since then, G+ has come into play, I switched to Android and Chrome is on fire. It's time for a rewrite.

The Original Post from Sept. 2009: My Top Ten Favorite Google Products

Here's what I would list now. Eager to hear your own top 3, 5, or even 10.

1. Google+ (Obviously, this is my start page, I am here constantly)
2. Android (The mobile OS runs my favorite tablets and phones)
3. Google ChromeOS (Living in the cloud is a game changer)
4. Blogger (The easiest, most flexible and stable blogging platform)
5. Google Reader (Still the best place to follow hundreds of sites in one place)
6. Google Search (The gold standard for finding anything)
7. Gmail (Finally my default email, and archive. Buzz is a plus.)
8. FeedBurner (Takes my blog to the rest of the Web, powered by Pubsubhubbub)
9. Google Voice (Syncs my phone to the Web with auto-blocking of spam calls)
10. YouTube (If it happened and is worth watching, it's here. Now with movies too!)

Things have obviously changed in just two years. Android, ChromeOS, Google Voice and Google+ were not on my radar much only a short time ago, and now they're essential. Curious to your own insight and what major services (Analytics, Maps, Earth, etc.) I missed.

/via my Google+ Profile.

My 2009 Tech Predictions: Mixed, But Nailed Real-Time

Another yearly tradition here on louisgray.com. Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech (and its 2008 predecessor), it makes sense to review how we fared. Recall my 2008 predictions were a complete mess. Unlike some other bloggers, who opt to pick non-controversial items and guess at obvious developments, I like to have fun each year and stretch. That's why I'll never go ten for ten. Besides, that's no fun.

As of Christmas Day 2009, here are how those ten predictions in the world of tech stand:

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Right. Critical is a subjective word, but real-time ended up being the word of the year in 2009. It was in real-time that the world shared their reactions to the Obama inauguration, and shared feedback to the Iranian elections. It was in real-time that we saw the aircraft land in the Hudson River, with a picture posted to TwitPic alongside. While it is true that Twitter and other real-time mechanisms lack the fact-checking and robustness of more traditional media, there were many many cases that had CNN and others following real-time's lead. Real-time later became such a big deal it was integrated into Google Search and Bing, so this was a clear win.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

Right. In 2009, the majority of businesses woke up to social media. While there are no doubt many holdouts, and even a bigger number doing a poor job, 2009 was the year that companies realized you could get business done on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. There is still much work to be done, but with tens of thousands of self-proclaimed social media experts out there, and some real help, others will make the leap.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

Wrong. And it's too bad! While Steve Jobs was out due to liver surgery, his position was well covered by Tim Cook, Apple's COO. Cook did such a great job running the company during his absence, the company's stock is at all-time highs, and its cash hoard is multiples greater than it was at the beginning of the year, even during a global recession. It could be assumed that had Steve Jobs passed away in 2009, Cook would have maintained control - and it would make sense that Apple have an internal plan for how Steve would fade to the limelight.

That said, I would still love it even more if Steve Jobs were proven immortal.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Wrong. In 2009, TechCrunch instead acquired only one writer, MG Siegler, from VentureBeat, and MG has gone on to be one of the most recognizable faces for the site. In parallel, Silicon Alley Insider went to more of a copy and paste model, and carries many of TechCrunch's articles in excerpt form, making the whole thing more confusing. But TechCrunch didn't find any need to acquire either site and continues in its highly visible position.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

Right. (Unless somebody can prove differently) Despite a surge in Android news and new handset introductions in the latter half of the year, including new models from HTC and Motorola, Apple's iPhone still outsold Android in a big way through the year. Though figures are difficult to get for the newest models, and the trend shows Android gaining in market share, it does not appear that their combination managed to pass 20% of the volume of iPhones in the year. 2010 will no doubt be a different story.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Right and Wrong. FeedBurner finally got its act together with Google this year, adopting Pubsubhubbub, and rebranding under the corporate name. In parallel, FeedBlitz launched a serious competitor to FeedBurner which could replace the service outright. It hasn't been a "major" alternative, but absolutely works if you prefer it.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Wrong. FriendFeed's sale to Facebook took many of its hard-core users by surprise, and its no doubt that many are still reeling, unsure what will happen to the popular aggregator and social network. That I linked FriendFeed and Twitter together in my prediction is unfortunate, as Twitter not only remained independent, but flourished, raising more than $100 million, and ensuring profitability, by some reports, thanks to deals with Google and Microsoft. The company's $1 billion valuation makes it a difficult target for acquisition indeed by any potential suitors.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

Right. While recent months have seen isolated good news, especially in some parts of Silicon Valley, for the most part, companies have kept their belts tight, and unemployment remains high. While the dramatic job cutting that took place from late 2008 to mid 2009 has slowed, the recovery is not yet in perfect view.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

Wrong. Luckily, I was wrong about this. I don't believe that some groups out there would like to make this happen, but thus far, the White House Web Site has made it through the year unscathed. Of course, that's more than we can say for our good friends at Twitter, who just a week ago were defaced by an Iranian Cyber group.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Wrong. (But A Little Right) Again, I failed by linking all these companies at once. eTrade and Digg stayed independent, and Yahoo! managed to keep its name despite giving up on search to Microsoft. Skype was sold, and StumbleUpon similarly was sold, back to its private investors. In my prediction last year, I said, "eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype" and yes, that happened, but we did not see the list of companies change hands as I had expected.

My 2008 predictions, made in late 2007, saw a massive 1 1/2 answers correct out of 10. Contrasted with that year, I did a little better in this calendar year, especially when it came to the expectations around the economy, real-time, and social media. But I still scored below 50%, with 4 1/2 right. We'll see how I do for 2010 when that post rolls around.

For All the Gloom Around RSS, Readers Continue to Climb

Skimming many of the leading technology outlets, you would think RSS had given up its ghost, making way for new services, like Twitter. Just this week, ReadWriteWeb claimed the RSS reader market was in "disarray" and continued a "decline". This came after a summer in which TechCrunch IT's Steve Gillmor declared RSS dead and suggested that it "rest in peace" and others ditched RSS for microblogging lists. With the world watching Twitter's top names and their Suggested User List-boosted following counts cross well into seven digits, data from FeedBurner and other sources shows RSS counts climbing - in some cases dramatically - for nearly all blogs, and a number of them also sport reader counts in the millions. While the independent market for RSS readers may be in bad shape, having ceded ground to Google Reader, RSS as a utility is actually growing. It's not going down, not by a long shot.

Prior to ReadWriteWeb's alarmist article, back in August, I arrived at similar conclusions, when I said "stand-alone feed readers are collapsing", highlighting the fact that Google Reader, and followers on FriendFeed, dominated my personal statistics.

That Google Reader and iGoogle have reached a dominant position in the market does by no means indicate the technology's death, but instead its maturity - something that, beyond aggregate reader counts, does not take in to account the fact that RSS is the mechanism for getting data between sites practically everywhere, even if it is not called out as such.

In January of 2008, I highlighted the debut of a new service called Rating Burner, which aims to display the most subscribed to blogs that utilize FeedBurner. The site shows not only a leaderboard, but also the change in subscriber data from day to day.

Data from Rating Burner shows green, positive growth across the board for feeds. And while total counts can always be debated as to their accuracy, sites including TechCrunch (with 4 million subscribers), the YouTube blog (with 2.4 million), Smashing Apps (with 1.5 million) and Simply Recipes (1.5 million) are into seven digits. This parallels the top Twitter accounts, who crest in the 4 million range, crowned by screen celebs Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres.

Yes, statistics are statistics. The high numbers for these well-known personalities is suspect, thanks to their inclusion on Twitter's Suggested User List, and it is also expected that some top blogs here are bundled and not read every day - adding to their counts. Also true is the fact that not every blog uses FeedBurner, and thus cannot be tracked as well. Many sites point instead to a raw XML file, keeping control. That said, regardless of the data's perfection, the growth in 2009 for RSS subscribers cannot be questioned.

Using BlogPerfume's Feed Analysis tool, I took many top blogs and plugged in their statistics, to see how they grew in 2009. Running their query for the last 12 months provided 11 months worth of data. (Not perfect, but good enough)

For the charts below, I used three data points to show blogs' subscriber trends:

• January 22, 2009
• June 22, 2009
• December 22, 2009

(Yes, the gap between January and June is 5 months, and the gap between June and December is 6, but you get the idea.)

To run the numbers yourself, simply plug in any FeedBurner enabled feed. (Examples: TechCrunch, Mashable, louisgray.com and I Can Has Cheezburger)


ProBlogger Nearly Double Subscribers in 2009 to ~140k



LOLCats Added 100,000 Readers to 200k+



TechCrunch Doubled from 2 million to 4 million



My Own Stats, Aided by FriendFeed, Quintupled



ReadWriteWeb added 40k from June (Jan. data flawed)



Google's Mac Blog Added 30k Subs to Top 70k.



Mashable Added Almost 150k Subs to Near 350k.

Also - keep in mind that my own personal numbers are inflated thanks to FriendFeed, but most non-personal blogs are not.

So what is the point? The point is that while some services (read: Twitter and Facebook) may be getting many people's attention, and while it is also true that Google Reader has the lion's share of the RSS reader market, the current discussion around RSS being less useful, or less important, than in years past, is flawed, period.

Lest this early adopter sound too much like a curmudgeon, just because something is newer does not automatically make it better, nor does it mean that there will be a rapid mass exodus from the previous technology. Just like Twitter can drive good traffic to a Web site, so too can RSS. Just like Twitter can pass along top content, so too can RSS. Just like top followed accounts can get million-plus audiences, so too can RSS. And both are growing in terms of connections, with no reversal in sight. Both are tools to be used well, and both are being used more than ever. The only "disarray" is in the current thinking.

My Top Ten Favorite Google Products

As Google has grown as a company, its reach has extended well beyond its initial foundation as a massive search index. The company now represents many things - including a mobile handset platform, a Web browser, Web-based e-mail, a social network, and a wide variety of software programs. Like Microsoft in the 1990s, it is often hard to see a viable business where the company does not play a role - and a significant one at that.

With Danny Sullivan revealing Google CEO Eric Shmidt's favorite product is the Chrome browser, I began thinking about my own preferences, and thought I would share - inviting you to do the same.

1. Google Reader

Google Reader is my starting point for finding the day's news quickly. The RSS reader is the very best way that I know of to get all the blogs and news sources I read in one place, and it provides me with simple keyboard shortcuts to read through them rapidly, choosing to share them on my link blog to downstream social networks, including FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook and Socialmedian.

As Google Reader has expanded its social capabilities, I have also recently enjoyed a near-explosion in active conversations on my shared feeds, and find I am spending even more time inside this product than in months past.

Though it may sound crazy, I believe the quality lead Google Reader has over its competition exceeds even that of Google Search's quality lead over its relative competition. I would rather have Reader and be forced to use Yahoo!/Bing than use Google Search and use some other RSS reader.

2. Blogger

The Blogger platform, now 10, doesn't get enough respect. The simple blog publishing and hosting product makes it easy for me to add new posts, categorize them, and update my templates, multiple times a day. Having moved well beyond its initial reputation of being something like a spam blogs haven, Google has put real effort into clamping down on bad behavior. Meanwhile, outages that used to impact the service have practically been eliminated.

Blogger is the platform of choice not just for my blog, but for my wife as well, giving us one place to log in to update either site.

3. FeedBurner

While the product hasn't seen a ton of updates since its acquisition a few years back, FeedBurner hasn't received much challenge (with the exception of FeedBlitz) when it comes to distributing RSS feeds from millions of blogs, mine included. On top of making sure that my posts get distributed, FeedBurner also keeps tabs on statistics in terms of total subscribers, click throughs and site visits, and enables the ability to customize each blog post with feedflares, adding additional interactivity.

4. Google Search and Google Blog Search

Google Search just does its job, period. Even as the Web has grown dramatically, Google's ability to return the "one right answer" solution when guessing what I am looking for is unmatched. It may lack the real-time capability of other sites, but imagining an alternative Web without Google search is daunting.

Similarly, Google Blog Search has largely replaced Technorati for most and is the default engine for finding new content on blogs around the Web.

5. GMail

While I have been using .Mac e-mail since well before GMail ever launched, the product changed the game in terms of what online e-mail represented. GMail, at its debut, offered storage space 20 times higher than the competition, integrated search and other features, such as labels and automatic filtering that make it both light and flexible. While other free e-mail products have gained a poor reputation online, seeing a GMail address doesn't make me turn away in scorn. I recommend that any business starting an online media strategy obtain a GMail account to centralize related e-mail.

6. YouTube

Though, like FeedBurner, not born at Google, YouTube is one of the most recognizable brands on the Web. Like Google Search, it has become the default service on the Web for what it does - enabling people to share videos and view videos, from silly family pictures to professionally designed music videos or corporate interviews. It is through YouTube where my wife and I share home recordings of our twins, and embed them on our sites. The ease at which we can port YouTube content to Facebook, FriendFeed and blogs is a big reason we use them above any other competitor.

7. Google Maps

Ever since I acquired a GPS unit for my car, my reliance on Google Maps has plummeted. But if in a pinch, if in another car, or needing to look up a route quickly on my iPhone, there is no substitute. While I once used Mapquest to find my frequently-lost self around town, Google Maps is now the trusted standard. As TechCrunch recently noted, only Google was sharp enough to recognize the recent closure of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, alerting potential travelers accurately.

8. Google Chrome

A decade following the peak of the initial browser wars, between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, we have an interesting tussle for browser market share once again, this time involving Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Apple. (With Opera still not dead yet) The debut of Chrome, first for Windows and Linux PCs, with stable Chromium builds for Mac here as well, introduced more stable browsing, simplified favorite pages, and speedy load times. Let not the low ranking fool you - compared to Schmidt's #1 position. For me, it's a good product, but not the market leader in the way its brethren Google Reader, FeedBurner and Search are.

9. Google Desktop

Google Desktop brings the power of Google Search to your desktop files - helping to find everything from text files and e-mails to rich media content embedded in office documents. While in years past, much of its functionality could be found in Apple's Spotlight, or the Mac's integrated search in Finder, the latter is just too slow and unreliable, with Google Desktop gives you the familiar and trusted approach you know from the Web. Its ability to crawl through previous dates to see when documents were created is especially useful.

10. Google Analytics

Few self-respecting bloggers go too far away from their Web traffic statistics, and many have two, three or more packages going simultaneously, to ensure they have enough datapoints to consider themselves experts. For no cost, Google Analytics provides detailed stastics, not just for the last 4,000 visitors (as Sitemeter does), but for all visitors, letting you compare time periods, dive deep into demographics of visitors, and see trends in your publishing and content.

Close but not included: AppSpot, iGoogle, Google AdWords, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Finance, Google Groups, Google News

What are your top ten Google Applications? Did I miss your favorite?

RSS Is Doing Great, But Stand-Alone Feed Readers Are Collapsing

Three years in technology can be an eternity. I marvel that just over three years ago, I was telling you that "RSS Is a Demanding Mistress", showing off a screen capture of my NetNewswire application, powered by Newsgator. At the time, as I complained about having nearly 100 articles to read, I didn't anticipate the impact Google's entering the market with Google Reader would be, and my screenshot now seems quaint. By 2007, I had switched to Google Reader, and despite multiple assaults on Reader in the ensuing two years, you can tell most challengers apart by their epitaph.

In the past few years, I've helped champion more than a few new approaches to the RSS feed reader market, each with its own approach to making the stand-alone process more social. First there was Assetbar, who had tremendous technology, but a clunky interface, and never really got off the ground. Not too long afterward, we saw Shyftr debut, but following a highly visible controversy over shared comments on full feeds, the company eventually shut down their interesting product as well, moving instead to RSS filters. Even last week we saw NewsGator turn off their synching functionality, pointing customers to Google Reader. Yes, NetNewsWire is still around, and now points to Google Reader, but it's pretty much a legacy app at this point. (In my opinion, of course)


Isn't this cute? (From back in 2006 on NetNewsWire)
While some are debating RSS' role in a new world of real-time information discovery, there is no question that Google Reader has won this specific battle. If I exclude FriendFeed data from my own FeedBurner statistics, the combination of Google Reader and iGoogle accounts for 84 percent of all my RSS readers. In contrast, NewsGator is below 4 percent, and BlogLines checks in at just above 2 percent, with PostRank and Netvibes coming in at just over 1 percent each. Mice nuts.


My FeedBurner Stats Show Google Reader and FriendFeed Dominate
That's not to mean the RSS ecosystem is in anything resembling a freefall. The recent launches of My6sense for the iPhone, looking to find the most relevant content, and Lazyfeed for real-time blog search by topic, show me that not only is innovation alive and well, but blogs and RSS are key components in creating new products. And while Caleb Elston has been quiet of late, I am still using Toluu every day to share my OPML, and keep track of new blogs I am adding to Reader. Also, Feedly, which builds upon Google Reader with some very interesting social options, continues to plug away, gaining loyal fans.

But just think of what's happened over the last three years.

In 2006, folks like Jeremy Zawodny reported Bloglines' share at between 30 and 50 percent. Steve Rubel cited a Pheedo report showing Bloglines "slipping" from 37 percent to 30. Go back far enough, and you can see it even had the majority of the market way back in 2004, according to ReadwriteWeb.

By early 2007, Hitwise said that Bloglines had three times the market share of its nearest competitor, which was Rojo. Interestingly, that report mentioned Google Reader in passing, saying "as of the week ending 1/13/07, it had only 1/13 of the market share of visits of Bloglines." That's right. One thirteenth the share of Bloglines. I should mention that not everybody saw the gulf that wide, as others, including Bob Lee reported the two were in a practical dead heat the next month.

The last two years have been all about Google Reader, as the search leader and RSS distribution leader, through the acquisition of FeedBurner, also became the RSS consumption leader. Rojo disappeared in July of 2008, and Bloglines' own stumbles made it that much easier to switch, forcing Marshall Kirpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to say, "Do you really want Google to nail down complete dominance over the world of RSS? We sure don't."

The onetime debate about whether Google Reader is number one or not is pretty much gone, and Newsgator's turning off their online synching essentially throws in the towel. The once promising Feedeachother.com has turned off its lights. Shyftr and Assetbar aren't coming back. A new entrant called Fever is interesting, but looks more like My6sense than a traditional client. RSS is powering aggregation sites like FriendFeed, which in theory, provides 30 to 40 percent of my feed reader count, but when it comes to stand alone, all must stand in awe of Google Reader, for to do battle is futile.

PubSubHubbub: Real-Time Feeds and Real-Time Feedback Too?

Getting data from one place to another can never be too fast. Just a year or two ago, the speed of RSS was considered excellent, but now, with latency of RSS feeds getting to destinations such as Google Reader or other networks ranging from minutes to hours, combined with issues related to repeated polling at source sites, teams of talented engineers have taken on these problems, with programs such as FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and the new PubSubHubbub taking the most-visible route.

PubSubHubbub, an protocol designed as an extension to Atom, is designed to reduce the time for updates to flow from one network to the next to almost zero, and practically eliminates the need for downstream services to constantly ask for the data.

Recently, we learned that a few major players in the feed distribution system had signed on to the PubSubHubbub train. First, last Friday, FeedBurner announced initial support for the service, making it built in for all publishers who had feeds enabled with the PingShot option (myself included). Second, Google Reader integration was demoed at the TechCrunch Realtime Crunchup, if only in prototype form. And third, FriendFeed announced support almost immediately, meaning that if I publish a post here, it should hit both FriendFeed and Google Reader practically in an instant, without any manual updates on my part.

An avid user of both services, the announcements were excellent, but in the last week, I hadn't really seen any difference. Posts made on the blog didn't hit FriendFeed right away and I didn't see updates in Google Reader any more quickly. So I did a test post Wednesday night at 11:11 p.m., titled "PubSubHubbub Test: 11:11 p.m." and nothing happened. Minutes later, I deleted it. But it didn't go unnoticed. After 1 a.m. I got an e-mail from Brett Slatkin, one of the engineers behind the protocol, asking if it had worked. That's right. After 1 a.m., one Google engineer behind this very cool tool cared enough to send me a personal e-mail and make sure all was well.

I said that I hadn't seen it work, and asked if it was, as usual, user error. But I was assured that "Nope you did everything right!" and that as things matured, they would "get the kinks worked out."

This kind of friendly, helpful outreach is the type of very real and personal service that one doesn't expect from big companies like Google, yet it happened, and it was very much appreciated. As I've stated time and again for years here on this blog, anything that can be done to help distribute data further and more quickly I am a big fan of. That I am a big fan of RSS, Google Reader and FriendFeed is no surprise to any of you, and PubSubHubbub looks like it is going to be a major boost to the entire ecosystem.

Just take a look at the test I did again tonight. At 1:08 a.m., a post from a dev server took less than 4 seconds to get from the blog to FriendFeed. (see here) In fact, it was probably faster, but it had already landed before I changed browser windows. Brett may not be "4 seconds" fast, but he's doing a fabulous job engaging with the growing PubSubHubbub community, as you can see from his comments on FriendFeed. This is the way tech and Silicon Valley should be.

The Changing Subscriber Definition Points to Potential Over Actual

The dust has not yet fully settled on yesterday's news that RSS feed circulation numbers around the Web spiked, thanks to a new tie-up between FeedBurner and FriendFeed that essentially counted social networking subscriptions as equal to those who signed up for your RSS feed directly. But while more and more people find their statistics up by thousands, and in some cases, orders of magnitude, the discussion has led away from what is "right" or "wrong", but instead, investigating what a real subscriber was anyway, and if we should stop thinking the way we always did.

The worlds of blogging and social networking are numbers-obsessed, and the statistics are so full of holes, most aren't even worth repeating. I may be "following" 10,000+ people on Twitter, but I rely largely on the search tool, or browse individuals' updates in Friendfeed. On FriendFeed, the story is much the same. I heavily utilize lists to categorize people I follow and make sure I don't miss the best content, but I absolutely see a small fraction of items. And don't even get me started on Facebook. Given I practically only go there to accept friend requests, play games against my family, or respond to wall comments, I certainly didn't see the photos you just posted.

The "fake follow" is absolutely in effect - even with best efforts.

But in parallel, I've treated RSS (and e-mail) differently. I believe Google Reader is the gold standard for finding information, and the link blog I produce through sharing the best items is essential for me to highlight what I find best, and for those who follow it, relying on me as a human filter. As such, while I may read quickly, and skim often, I always, always, read every story from every feed, to the tune of 100%. Similarly, I always have read every e-mail, even if I haven't made the time to respond.

But not everybody treats RSS and RSS subscriber counts with such velvet gloves as I do - which means two major things. First, total RSS subscriber counts usually far exceed total page views on most blogs, as RSS items pile up in readers around the world and go unread. Second, the religious adherence to a subscription number in RSS that I tried to have, in the face of bundling and statistics that led me astray, is easily shouted down by reason.

I used to look at subscriber counts as a good benchmark for how much influence a blog might have. A blog with 2,000 subscribers typically reaches more people than one with 200, and less than 20,000. With the addition of more horizontal social networking "followers" or "friends" in the mix, I have to look at the number as potential. For example, the new number of about 14,000 listed on my blog (up from 8,000 earlier this week and 5,000 in April) represents the maximum potential people who would see my content if everybody who subscribed to my content on RSS or FriendFeed actually kept their subscription going and active.

And it is this "potential" that is the new reality, more so than a hard and fast number you can set your watch to. But it's also a slippery slope. If we all start signing up to RSS feeds but we don't read the blogs, and we all fake follow on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and every other network out there, there's not really a whole lot of social going on - just blasting out data, friending and hoping that you're the exception rather than the rule.

To accept my new statistics, and those on other blogs impacted, the new reality requires a changed mindset. It's not saying one way is right and another is wrong, but instead, seeing the new data through the prism of our new world, where with so many information streams out there, we are all hoping that our data will catch someone's eye, not that it always will.

FriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button

It's tempting to go back the age-old line of there being lies, damn lies, and statistics. On the Web, where practically everything is measured and big numbers are almost always better, counting up one's followers, friends, subscribers or authority is practically a pasttime. But with each metric comes a question of validity - how did they approach that data, and is that process consistent with the world view of what is factual?

Today, for reasons known only to their team, FriendFeed started to display subscriber counts to those FriendFeed users who are importing blog posts alongside all other subscribers, displayed in FeedBurner or any other blog analytics tool. With this change, popular FriendFeed users have seen a dramatic jump in their feed subscriber counts, even if actual traffic or readership to their sites has not changed.


BlogPerfume Shows My Stats Spiked Today
A clear beneficiary of this move, my own statistics ballooned from a possibly accurate count of just over 8,000 subscribers on this blog to more than 13,000. And in parallel, thanks to my importing my posts on my wife's blog, her count catapulted from just over 50 to more than 9,000. (For a site that gets only dozens of visits a day)


My Wife's Blog Stats Are Through the Roof
Coincidentally, my RSS subscribers had already been jumping, starting in late April, for reasons largely unbeknownst to me. In the last two months, I organically saw the subscriber counts pass the 5,000 barrier and crest to the more than 8,000, as I poked through the stats and tried to find out why - considering both Google Reader bundles and possibly a part-time inclusion on the Techmeme leaderboard as factors. But now, pointing to that growth seems silly, given FriendFeed flipped the switch and gave me a big, albeit likely false, foundation.


FriendFeed's Impact Rivals that of Google On This Site
The company's comments on this change state that "you are putting your words in front of a lot more people", so theoretically, they should be counted. But I believe it is less-intensive to follow someone on FriendFeed than it is through standard RSS, and I have no idea how this handles duplicates, though I can guess it's somewhat controlled, given my own stats jumped by a mere 5,000 when my wife went up by more than 9,000.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek clearly made his comments understood, when he said, "Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing".

Since you don't have admin access to my FeedBurner stats, you can see the jump by taking a look at Blog Perfume's Feed Analysis tool here.

So the question is - why? Did the FriendFeed team just want to extend the visibility of how much impact their service has with bloggers? This move makes them a clear rival to Google in my own statistics. Or did they really think this was a way to show, accurately, how many people you were exposed to? Either way, as I said on a thread in the site, what's done really can't be undone. I hate upward spikes as much as I hate downward spikes, as we've seen when FeedBurner and Google FeedFetcher miss each other in the night. But it's not accurate, especially when it comes to small blogs hiding on big accounts (like with my wife's blog on my ID). I just hope Twitter, Facebook and other sites don't choose to do the same thing, or we can call the whole tracking bit a wash.

Google's Blogger Challenge: Win the Marathon and Don't Bonk.

Sometimes I feel like I am a rarity in the tech blogging world, considering I haven't moved away from the Blogger platform and onto the more frequently celebrated, higher geek cred option, WordPress. In fact, I'm such an oddity that I am not even on the newest version of Blogger. I still cling to the "Old" Blogger and post my stories using FTP, as it's something that has worked for me for the better part of three and a half years. But while I haven't made the switch, many have - falling in love with WordPress' wide array of extensions and open source mentality. I've even had offers for people to help me move off Blogger to WordPress, and have, so far, resisted.

With this going on, there's no question Google's Blogger platform has a perception problem. While it is on record as the largest blogging platform on the Web today, ahead of Six Apart's TypePad, LiveJournal and WordPress, it is largely seen as not leading the innovation curve - even if mommybloggers (like my wife) use it and love it.

Some aspects of Blogger feel like they haven't changed in maybe five years, and surprisingly, that perception is actually true. Today I had lunch at Google Headquarters with Rick Klau, who is a Product Manager on the Blogger team at Google, and we talked at length about the current state of the platform, as well as what is planned in upcoming releases to help the product become even more on par, and in some cases, ahead of the competition. He said that for the most part, Google has just "kept the product alive" in maintenance mode, not adding too many features. Meanwhile a good number of the features being tested in the product's "Draft" area, similar to Google Labs, are unknown to the majority of the product's users.

But even in keeping the product going, there's been a tremendous amount of effort from people Rick said were "working their butts off". He wrote me in an e-mail after our lunch, saying, "There's been a ton of largely invisible innovation over the last few years - things that don't get seen because they just work, but enable the massive scale at which Blogger operates."

Klau joined Google as part of the company's acquisition of FeedBurner in mid 2007, and since that purchase, neither FeedBurner nor Blogger have been spared the arrows from critics who recognize the value of their services, but expect more, myself included. Klau agreed with my comments this afternoon saying that users see Google as having the combination of tremendous brain power and seemingly infinite technical infrastructure resources, making any hiccups practically inexcusable. I've always said I favor the little guy over a large monolith like Google, and users are easily tweaked when products produce incorrect results or have outages that last hours - both of which I've highlighted before in darker days.

But Klau also noted the platform is under a constant around-the-clock battle with spammers and other hackers attempting distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and working to find ways to blast spam into comments on the millions of blogs on the Blogger platform worldwide. In fact, the Blogger team has three people in three continents around the world dedicated to keeping the sites up and the riffraff out.

To fully appreciate life as a Blogger user, Klau did the opposite of what many have done of late, moving from WordPress to the Blogger platform with his own blog. He now gets the privilege to see both the good and the bad of his product from the perspective of the company's large user base - and despite the competitive state, he sounded eager at what the future will bring, and the opportunities available, with top resources available from the Mountain View search giant, including potential integration with newly announced products elsewhere within the company.

"I feel like we're in a marathon, and I am beginning with a 10 mile headstart," Klau said. And while it may have been true that in recent years, Blogger had been sitting idly, or jogging in place to hold their position, it is clearly no longer the case now, as I learned during my talk with Klau today. The team is running again.

Today's Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem "Too Slow"

Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to attend one of the semi-regular open houses held at FriendFeed headquarters in Mountain View. (See pictures from Brian Solis, who also attended) While on other occasions, I may have taken the chance to pick the brains of the small team, yesterday I ended up spending the bulk of the time talking to others in the industry, including Edelman's Steve Rubel and TechCrunch IT's Steve Gillmor on what they thought the future of communication, information discovery and blogging would be, amidst the dramatic expansion of microblogging and real-time updates and alerts. And while we all had our own viewpoints on the future of RSS, we agreed that what has been status quo for the last five to ten years is changing underneath us, moving toward a world that is faster, driven as much by what will be our preset queries and searches, rather than through subscriptions and static pages.

Gillmor famously argued earlier this month that RSS should "rest in peace". Gillmor's summary started off by saying, "It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore," and continuing onward, making a case that the immediacy of Twitter made it the source for news discovery, not tools like Google Reader, which I use to find all the data from my sources on a daily basis. As he told Steve Rubel and me yesterday evening, the post "went global" faster than anything he had ever written before, and judging by the more than 500 comments received on TechCrunch, as well as the many follow-on pieces I've seen, it stirred up a great deal of controversy - which is to be expected when making such a black and white claim.

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed "slow", when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit 'J' in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone's house, making them immediately take action.

Gillmor's unique writing style no doubt stemmed much of the confusion around his "Rest in Peace, RSS" story, which I fundamentally disagreed with the first time around and ignored. But in yesterday's discussion, it became more clear what he was trying to propose - not so much a full-fledged abandonment of RSS readers for Twitter, but instead, pushing for a reader-like tool that would follow microblogging services, decode shortened URLs on the fly, and then deliver the option to read full text of a piece.

In essence, rather than waiting the 20 to 60 minutes it can sometimes take RSS to propagate, thanks to latency from FeedBurner, for the most part, Gillmor's approach would take seconds - where a blog publisher or news distributor could post an update to Twitter or FriendFeed and have the same type of result, only a lot faster. This comes at a time when Gillmor and others are saying that referrals to blog posts are decreasing from RSS readers and increasing from microblogging sites, as readers do their link discovery outside of the reader.

Although Gillmor said we should just "switch to Twitter", he isn't even waiting for Twitter to bring back his much-beloved 'Track' to monitor keywords. Instead, he expects that FriendFeed will more quickly arrive at a tool that delivers realtime alerts to e-mail or instant messaging tools than Twitter - which makes sense as the aggregator has already set up e-mail and IM tools for lists and has delivered saved searches, two of the three components needed to make 'Track' a reality - and not just across Twitter, but across the more than 50 social sites FriendFeed supports.

As Gillmor told us both, he sees posts from louisgray.com "immediately" when I add them to FriendFeed, even if it takes much more time for them to enter Google Reader. And yes, that's because I, as a publisher, follow a specific process when posting, to author it and immediately afterward send it to Twitter and then pull it into FriendFeed, all before I manually ping FeedBurner. It's a conscious decision on my part, but one that helps his case.

RSS is not dead. Far from it. We're all using RSS every day, powering our Web portals, and helping to distribute blog and news content everywhere. But if it is about getting things discovered most quickly, and getting a response from readers very quickly, there's a reason you see people looking elsewhere, just like there's a reason I use a tool that pulls comments from FriendFeed into louisgray.com on my blog posts. I know some people will get to my content somewhere else faster. And if an enterprising software developer, like Nick Bradbury, can make a tool that turns links on Twitter into the same type of tool we see in RSS readers, maybe we'll be onto something new.

As FeedBurner Flails and Fails, Feedblitz Fights

A week and a half ago, FeedBlitz announced it would be taking Google head on, offering a much-needed alternative to FeedBurner in the RSS automation space. (See our initial post) At the time, they said they would "rapidly evolve", and they weren't kidding. In the ensuing ten days, amidst what seems to be yet another Web-wide statistics failure on the part of FeedBurner, the company has written how to guides on leaving FeedBurner behind, how to merge multiple feeds into one, how to keep your own domain associated with your feed, and how to migrate away from FeedBurner once and for all.

For the large part, the blogosphere has grown accustomed to FeedBurner flaking every now and again. We've grown weary of long lag times between posts hitting RSS readers after they were written, and in seeing inconsistencies in reader counts, often proudly worn as a badge on users' sites. But what we've also grown accustomed to is FeedBurner's basic nature - it sends your blog out, period.

FeedBlitz is recognizing the world has changed since FeedBurner's debut. They even offer the option to display the most recent updates from social sites, such as FriendFeed and Twitter, along side your feed. At this point, for many, their microblogging is just as full-throttle as their full-length blogging, so that makes sense.

As they have expanded their offerings, FeedBurner and Google seem to not be on speaking terms once again. It happens so often now, nobody blogs about it but not too long ago, such a miss would be ripe for the gnashing of teeth. But said miss has dropped my counts from the 4700 or so range to 1400 and 1800. Who knows why, but the number is pretty random. Even my wife's family-oriented blog dumped from almost 50 subscribers to less than 20. Ouch.

So if you're sick of FeedBurner burning you, I strongly suggest giving FeedBlitz a try. I'm working my way over to switching myself. You can see my FeedBlitzed feed here: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/lg

New FeedFlare Displays FriendFeed Likes and Comment Counts

Bloggers who are tied into social media sites have long used FeedBurner's FeedFlare functionality to help promote their blog posts, from pushing visitors to Digg or Stumble posts, add them to Delicious, or e-mail them to friends. But increasingly, information from external social networks is being fed back to the blog itself - from the number of retweets a post may have received to the number of Google Reader users who shared the item, for example. A new custom feedflare, designed by Kevin Fox, the lead designer of FriendFeed, and the artist behind popular sites such as GMail and Google Reader, is now available to display the likes and comments your post might have gotten on FriendFeed. It's already running on this site, and can be seen on his RSS feed as well.


FriendFeed Activity Displayed on My Site
The FeedFlare can be displayed on your site, on your RSS feed, or both - and clicking on the comments and likes statistics takes you to where your blog post is shared on FriendFeed, bridging visitors of your site to the conversation there.

Setting up the FeedFlare for FriendFeed likes and comments is not a one-click process, so if you are interested, here's how you do it:

1. Download this compressed .zip file. It contains the three documents you need, and an "About" file. Unzip the file and you will see a folder titled "friendfeedflare".
2. Open the file "flare.php". Next to where it says USERNAME, replace "notlouisgray" with your FriendFeed user name.
3. Open the file "friendflare.xml" and replace the pathname of "http://www.yourdomain.com/directory/flare.php" with where you will host the flare.php file. For example, I host mine at http://www.louisgray.com/feed/flare.php.
4. Upload the files "flare.php", "friendflare.xml" and "friendfeed.php" to a directory on your site which matches the path you provided in step 3.
5. Log in to your FeedBurner account, and go to the "FeedFlare" section in the "Optimize" tab.
6. At the bottom of the page, where you have the option to add a "Personal FeedFlare", paste in the URL of your XML file. (e.g. http://www.louisgray.com/feed/friendflare.xml)
7. Hit "Add New Flare" and then "Save".

The FeedFlare Displayed In FeedBurner
At this point, the likes and comment counts on your items will be displayed on your blog or RSS feed. They will continue to accrue until you have 30 newer items in your blog feed.

A year or so ago, the blogosphere lit up around how social sites were stealing the conversation away from blogs, and operating in silos. With tools like this, and Disqus and BackType's integration of FriendFeed comments, the disparate conversations are becoming ever more unified.

If you like this FeedFlare, be sure to check out Kevin Fox's FriendFeed here, or his personal blog at fury.com. And if you get it up and running, it'd be great to see it on your site, so post your blog URL in the comments.

FeedBlitz Launches FeedBurner Alternative for RSS Automation

Since Google's acquisition of FeedBurner in mid-2007, the complaints have come hard and fast, as FeedBurner's integration saw frequent disconnects between the acquiring company and its new prize, slowness in updating feeds, and a complete lack of innovation, all amidst silence from Mountain View that had many wondering if the service would go the way of DodgeBall and other services into Google's black hole. At the end of 2008, I predicted an alternative would rise up to give bloggers an option to switch. Today, FeedBlitz, which has powered my e-mail distribution for nearly three years, has offered to do just that.

The new RSS management service, announced in a blog post, says it will offer publishers, marketers and bloggers improved branding, integrated search engine optimization, and some interesting additions, including social media marketing and metrics.

If you are already using the company's e-mail marketing services, the RSS addition is free. For all others, you can start using FeedBlitz to run your RSS feeds for as low as $1.49 a month.

Before moving my feed away from FeedBurner, which at times is tempting, I'll have to be sure existing subscribers wouldn't see any hiccups. FeedBlitz says they are eating their own dogfood, routing to the new self-hosted URL through FeedBurner itself. You can see how their "Blitzed" Feed looks here: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz

With this long-awaited alternative, it will be interesting to see if the many complaintants are willing to make a move. It's often been said that the most-popular feature of FeedBurner has been the little chiclets that show up to date subscription counts, so FeedBlitz wil have to match this capability. Given they've displayed my e-mailed RSS count since 2006, I think they will be up to the task.

So Google, you've got some competition in town - and FeedBlitz says it's not done, promising it will "rapidly evolve". That's something FeedBurner is definitely not doing.

Nobody Can Hear You Scream If Your RSS Feed Is Dead

I didn't make any blog posts on Thursday, after a full Wednesday which included a visit to Google headquarters to meet with the Google Reader team. And even though I made a few posts on Friday, the first day of the SXSW conference, many people still think I'm on a temporary hiatus, thanks to a tag-team failure between FeedBurner and Blogger, who have significantly impacted many users by zeroing out their feeds, stopping their posts from getting out of their domain. It looks like I should have spent more time in Mountain View after chatting up the Reader team, to see just what the heck is going on elsewhere on campus.

As the resurgent Kent Newsome of Newsome.org noted today, in his post, "FeedBurner & Blogger Conspire to Assassinate My Joy", the XML file that Blogger generates to distribute RSS feeds was completely wiped out - and I have been impacted as well. No matter if I had 20 or 2,000 posts historically, the file reports it has zero kilobytes, and no amount of trouble-shooting thus far has been of any help.

In this world of RSS-enabled services, a failure of this level means that my posts aren't getting out to the previously-mentioned Google Reader. They aren't populating social networking sites like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Facebook. And that will no doubt cripple visits for those affected.

As always, I at first considered the issue was my fault. I noticed FriendFeed this morning wasn't picking up my posts, and tried to delete and add my blog six ways from Sunday, but with no success to speak of. While Kent recounts his searches for real tech support, I was in the air during much of the day, and came back to find I was not the only one hearing the silence from Google, as others assumed silence from me.

Complaints are wide-spread in Blogger's help forums - from RSS Feeds are EMPTY today when publishing via FTP. to atom.xml is empty and simply empty feeds.

I'm concerned on quite a few levels here. FeedBurner and Blogger are among the most mocked Google products because of their presumed neglect. Yet they are two of the major foundations for my blog. Also, I am concerned because we are seeing this issue as a weekend starts and a major tech conference is starting up. There's a huge chance this issue won't be resolved if Google is asleep at the wheel. There's nothing I can do except accelerate my move to Wordpress. This doesn't make me feel all that lovey-dovey with Blogger at the moment.

The Time is Right to Kill Google (If They Don’t Kill Themselves First)

Guest Post By Matt Dickman of Techno//Marketer (FriendFeed/Twitter)


In your opinion, what is Google’s differentiator as a company? Can you remember when you switched from Yahoo! to the new, fresh upstart Google? For me, it was seamless. One day I woke up and was just using it. I do, however, remember why I started using it. Google put users at the center of their business. They added value to the search experience by cleaning up the interface and presenting information in a clean, concise manner. They learned early that search was a replacement for the directory-based engine that Yahoo (still) hangs on to, not a supplement.

For the past two years I have written a blog post about the ways that Google attaches itself to my life on a daily basis (here is last year’s version). I’ve welcomed this life-integration with the company because I felt they were adding value. They weren’t doing any evil.

Lately, however I’ve felt a disturbance in the force. I still use all of the same Google products that I mentioned in the post, but something had changed. The company that innovated search by focusing on the user has lost its focus on the user. Here are two examples that you may, or may not, have noticed and I welcome your feedback.

First, Friend Connect. *sigh* This really was my tipping point with Google. (You’ll notice there are common threads between this example and the next one.) Back in mid-December I came across a blog post on this new Google platform extension. On the surface, I liked the idea. Everyone with a Google profile (most of us) could join the site and engage with each other through what Google calls “social gadgets”. My plan was to add ratings at the end of each post, however I ran (and continue to run) into a problem.

The initial set up was cake. I added the community widget to the side of my blog and waited for people to join.

My initial experience with that module was poor. The invite function wouldn’t let me add new users. Actually, I just checked and it still won’t. Worse yet when I tried to invite my friends and the page gave me the error, something weird happened. All of my Gmail chat contacts disappeared. My Google reader contacts as well. Not cool. I’ve been rebuilding this over time, but some people I have been permanently severed from. To add fuel to the fire, when I try to add the social widget to the post, I get the image below where the widget should be. I have everything set up right, it just doesn’t work.

You would think that, upon launching a new platform extension, Google would be all over the support site. Not the case. From when I submitted my post to the next Google rep to answer any questions was about three weeks (and they didn’t answer my question).

Scenario #2, FeedBurner. I think the entire blogosphere has a love/hate relationship with this service. From the time Google acquired the Chicago company until now it has been a rollercoaster. FeedBurner started out with a narrow focus and they executed well. Google acquired them to extend their advertising/analytics offering. However, subscriber stats would often fluctuate wildly, dropping to zero on some days, bouncing back if you were lucky. Google always claimed that they were “working on it”, but I didn’t believe it until a while back when I saw that they were transitioning to the Google platform.

In theory, this is a good thing. More scale, more stability, more happy people. Wrong. The transition was not explained well and I saw a wave of panic slowly crushing the blogosphere. A couple of us took the plunge and made the move (I even recorded a video to help people understand the process). In the process, my subscribers dropped by half. No explanation. Hundreds of posts to the support forum and no replies from Google. My stats did bounce back, but the service’s reputation is shaky now. People use this as a key metric, companies track it and people get paid based on it. Sadly there is no alternative (yet).

Google has lost sight of the user. They have neglected us for too long, concentrating instead on advertising. I get that it is their lifeblood, but what good is an ad that nobody sees because you alienate your community. I think that a company that attacks with the right mission and focus on users could make a dent in Google’s armor. Killer customer service powered by social platforms could allow a new set of players to emerge.

I would love to get your take on this. Have you seen the same trend? What would you do if you were Google to stand up and put your foot down?

Read more by Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer.

I'm Getting So Tired Of The Non-Instant Web

Tap... Tap... Is this thing on? (Reloads)

At the end of 2008, my #1 prediction for 2009 in the world of tech was that the real-time Web was going to grow in awareness and importance - and that a growing number of early adopters and fast followers were going to turn to sites that delivered instant updates, without waiting for filtered analysis. But there are other aspects of the Web that seemingly should be instant, and are nothing but. Brick and mortar institutions that have moved to the Web still have the delays common with their offline institutions. Pure online plays can't manage to update their data as months and years change. And the result is frustrating. As I find some services doing a fantastic job of updating instantly, it's those that lag that drive me absolutely nuts.

Back in 2006, when this blog had maybe three total readers, myself being counted twice, I encountered an issue where eTrade took seemingly ages to send from my account to a third party bank. As the two posts on the matter, from August 20, 2006 and August 24, 2006, show, a simple process of selling stock, converting it to cash and shipping it to Bank of America, that should have happened practically immediately, took about a week. While at the time I was mostly just annoyed, near the end of the year, in what looked like an instant replay, I actually bounced checks for this very reason.

As I've written about a few times on the blog, I opened up a checking account with eTrade near the end of 2007. Given the crisis at many financial institutions in 2008, it seemed a good move to have some of my cash at Wells Fargo and some at eTrade, in case one had issues. But at the end of 2007, I had to write a check that exceeded the amount of my holdings at either bank, but was less than the total amount between the two. So, planning ahead, or so I thought, I transfered money from Wells Fargo to eTrade. Days later, I wrote the check, knowing I had enough cash to cover it. But days later, I got notification my check had bounced, and eTrade did me the favor of charging me a $25 overdraft fee.

Meanwhile, I substituted the old check with a new one for the same amount, and resubmitted, as the deposit made its way through. But instead of the second one going through, and the first begin canceled, eTrade billed me a second overdraft charge, saying now that the first check had passed through, and the second had bounced. Freakin' brilliant.

So... we're dealing with that. Meanwhile, with my eTrade bank account in a thinned-state, the mortgage came due, automatically debiting from my wife's B of A account (we're working on closing that out). I wrote her a check to cover the amount, while at the same time, selling stock on eTrade's brokerage side to transfer to the checking side to give the appropriate cushion. That was done at the end of last week, but only just tonight did I get the chance to transfer the funds to the right place. Annoying. The last thing I wanted to do was bounce, yes, a third check, and then have my wife bounce her own account and have us in trouble with the mortgage company, when in fact, we did have the money, but just didn't have access to it.

I know financial institutions have these old-fashioned rules that allow a certain number of business days to make funds available, and that things aren't as easy as simply dragging and dropping money from one account to another, but given the seeming simplicity of the Web, I've got to believe there is a better way. Why should I have had to check in with eTrade first thing every morning, multiple times during the day and again at night to see if their system would let me have access to my own money? The Web should remove the restrictions not just of physical limitations, but of time as well. Just get it done.

Which gets me to my next item...

It's January 7th, right? So why, oh why, is there any reason that Compete.com's data still stops at November of 2008? Are they still waiting for those year-end reports to trickle in from December? It makes absolutely no sense. At 12:01 a.m. on January 1st, I could have given you the exact statistics for this site. Sitemeter just checks in with real-time data, and it keeps going. But Compete.com, the Web's easy way out when it comes to getting comparative traffic stats, is asleep. Call Alexa all the names you want, but at least they show December and the first part of January. Ridiculous.

But those services aren't alone...

Web digerati from Steve Gillmor to Gabe Rivera have been slamming FeedBurner's slow pickup of news and translation to RSS. RSS is practically the lifebood of today's connected, always updated, mobile content world, and the Google-owned property has put innovation on hold by hitting the snooze button.

I've seen this many times myself, as I go through Google Reader, seeing posts that took place hours and hours ago. I used to blame Google Reader for the issue... (See: Warning: Google Reader Congestion of Up to Five Hours) but now it's clear the offender is FeedBurner. If FeedBurner is destroying the capability of the real-time Web, there needs to be an alternative. There's really no good reason with so much technology at Google, and on the Web in general, that we can't find a real real-time solution.

I could keep going... but I am going to reward those services and companies that get the real-time instant Web right. There's no reason I should have to wait for my money, my data, my feeds, or any of that. I'm done with waiting.

10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech

Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech and the recent results: My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close.

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-time offer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

In the mid and late 1990s, there was a land rush for domain names, as every company jumped in and procured Web addresses and built out Web sites to establish their electronic home. Although many of these sites were rudimentary at best, they knew they needed to be there to participate. In 2009, it will be expected that brands and businesses will be similarly established on social media, using tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

While Steve Jobs is not likely in imminent danger, the continued unsettled rumors, as well as a good level of common sense will push Apple to present a succession plan for Jobs, which will not take place immediately, but over the space of a few years. One to three names of potential in-house replacements will be named, as well as a timeline, as Steve fades to the background, but continues to wield tremendous power over Apple's vision and deliverables.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Mike Arrington's tech blog continues to be the influence leader in its space. Both VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider have forged strong brands with a financial bent which would be good additions for the TechCrunch brand as Arrington and team look to extend their umbrella and wrap up what he considers to be the best blogs. SAI in particular would offer an East Coast/financial bent that the Silicon Valley-based TechCrunch is currently not known for.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

While commoditized PCs managed to put pressure on Macintosh and relegate Apple to a small market share percentage the Cupertino company is still trying to recover from back in the 1980s, history will not repeat itself, as Google's Android partners will be unable to knock the iPhone off its perch as the must-have smart phone for power Web consumers. BlackBerry will continue having a significant share in the enterprise, but it will continue to be iPhone eroding its share, not the Android, especially given the unmatched array of applications available for the iPhone which Android will not be able to match.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Google's mismanagement of FeedBurner has many people frustrated with how the feed service has been run since its acquisition last year, as the service continues to see slowness, outages, and recently went dark, shutting down their blog and being gobbled up by the AdSense team. Competitors will emerge, enabling bloggers to move their FeedBurner subscriber base and historical statistics to their new platform.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Despite Twitter's recent dance with Facebook, it will rely on its existing venture capital funding and find revenue that enables the company to stay afloat at least through the end of the year. FriendFeed, similarly, will not be acquired or merge with any other service prior to the end of 2009. The company, if necessary, will instead do a second round of funding, with its own internal sources providing much of the capital.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

The layoff parade in 2009 will not be limited to unprofitable companies, small companies or practically any category of companies. The doom and gloom that have hit the financial markets, advertising, real estate and almost every sector will continue through the first half of the year, before starting to see a rebound in the third quarter. You will see strong companies like Microsoft lay off thousands, and practically everyone will not be renewing contract positions that have concluded - even Google and Apple.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

America's political climate is extremely polarized, following the conclusion of two extremely divisive terms. As Barack Obama moves into the White House, the very features that make him a "first" will also make him and his administration the chief target for some incredibly angry and hate-filled groups. One will somehow manage to access the WhiteHouse.gov site and manipulate it this year.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype (I made the sale of StumbleUpon a prediction last year too). Digg, losing momentum, will sell cheap. Yahoo! will eventually be purchased by News Corporation, AOL, or even Google, assuming it passes regulatory approval, by the end of the year. Microsoft, still insulted, won't be back to the table.

Hey FeedBurner, Wake Up. You And Google Didn't Talk Last Night.

You would think that as FeedBurner has been further incorporated into the Google monolith, recently incorporating with Google's feedproxy, that its service would be finer tuned and could be trusted to sync up with the Web giant's other products, including iGoogle and Google Reader. On most days, they seem to do a fairly good job, getting feeds out to the various RSS readers, and reporting statistics accurately. But today, like many other days before, the two seemed to walk by one another in the hallway and not make eye contact, because we are once again seeing a decimation of feed counts across the blogosphere, chopping away thousands of subscribers from popular blogs, and for the little guys, taking them down to zero.


My subscriber count plummeted by two-thirds (at least for today)


Coalminersgd wonders if all her subscribers went away.
This miss, one in a series of misses over the last few years, also comes at a time when many are openly voicing concern that FeedBurner is asleep at the wheel, having moved its ping server without telling anyone, and adding delays between people add posts to their site and when they actually hit the RSS feed. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera and ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick have been among their most vocal detractors. Gabe said yesterday that "Feedburner lameness continues", and at the end of last month, Marshall said that FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings.


DearRobot is clearly not happy.
In Marshall's story at the end of September, Steve Olechowski of FeedBurner said "we hear all your pings" and that "both ping servers still work", but that hasn't been the experience for everyone. Gabe said "It's inexcusable," adding "At this point, Feedburner is infrastructure" to the Web, something virtually all bloggers, myself included, use to have their content distributed. In fact, Gabe's response to Steve was quite direct, saying, "you guys broke the blogosphere, and your above verbiage reads like a bunch of evasive hooey."


TimBrownson is frustrated to the point of physical violence.
Whatever the problems are at FeedBurner, they aren't seeming to get any better with time, no matter how many times people like Gabe, Marshall and I bring it up. The company's blog hasn't been updated since May 30th, even though they've been called out for being silent before. (See: FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats from February). It's alarming for some that a product that has become infrastructure and is expected to have 100% uptime continues to have such gaps and flaws. Losing one's statistics for a day is essentially meaningless, but it really makes you wonder what's going on over there.

See previous coverage of FeedBurner/Google mismatches:

• June 19, 2007: Bloggers Panic as Google Stops Reporting RSS Stats
• February 21, 2008: Google FeedFetcher and FeedBurner Miss Each Other Again

My Blog Is Less a Destination Site than a Conduit

By now, we've all likely grown used to the fact that RSS readers don't often see a blog's redesign. For those who choose not to click through and leave comments, there's little reason at all to visit a blog directly any more, considering it's possible to power through dozens or hundreds of feeds in a feed reader, be it Google Reader, BlogLines or any other. With tangential services like Disqus enabling me to even engage with readers via e-mail, instead of through the blog, there's now even less reason for me to even visit my own site.

At this point, I probably, on most days, can't even tell you my daily RSS subscriber count, visible on the blog, or see the MyBlogLog widget's most recent visitors, as I'm using my blog as a way to project content outward - to RSS readers, to aggregators, like FriendFeed, Strands and Social Median, and to connect with readers via e-mail, using Disqus. It also, via RSS, powers popular sharing sites, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme. But none of those activities, with the exception of comments, require actual visits.

While it's still important to be sure the blog itself loads quickly, for those who view it for the first time, or for those who do click through RSS and choose to leave a comment, the look and feel of the blog is less important over time. I expect fewer people are typing in the louisgray.com URL and viewing pages directly, as they accumulate feeds and read more, and see the blog's UI more as a shell for content than a destination where a reader would spend a good amount of time. At this stage, the blog is simply a point in time for the content to begin its journey.

The life of a post, as always, for me anyway, starts out in e-mail, where it's authored. Then it's copy/pasted into Blogger. Then I visit the site, quickly, and ping FeedBurner. Subsequently, I refresh the blog feed in FriendFeed to keep it up to date, and send a TinyURL copy to Twitter. At that point, I really don't have to come back. Should someone opt to comment, I can reply via e-mail in Disqus, and even Delete unwanted spam or other messages.

The bulk of the activity around the blog is pretty much happening someplace else - making the number one purpose for the blog site itself to convert new visitors into signing up for the RSS feed. So if they bump into the content, via Techmeme, Digg, StumbleUpon, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, or anywhere else, they'll sign up and take in my content in the way they choose. But my blog is not the destination. It's a point in the journey. For those who are relying on ad revenue to come through via page views, this won't be good news, but that's what I see happening. For me, as I'm not trying to convert visitors into cash, this is the new reality, and we're fine with you just signing up, passing through and being part of the conversation as you choose.

Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

It should be no surprise that being part of a site called TVbytheNumbers that I’m obsessed with statistics and this obsession extends to all the web site analytics and statistics that are available to us.

While I hear and read things often about how Feedburner’s stats stink and Google Analytics stats stink and none of them ever sync up well, that really hasn’t been my personal experience. Using either Feedburner or Google Analytics as an intraday tool is certainly problematic, and I have had a day or two here and there where Feedburner did lose data for an hour of five that it never recovered, but mostly both are just slow and do recover. Google Analytics typically tracks visits and visitors correctly intraday within reasonable timeframes, but lags behind in counting total pages for hours. Usually, by 8am Pacific time (but not often before then) all the page views for yesterday show up. And once they do, on a page view basis, Google Analytics, Feedburner and Quantcast all seem like they wind up syncing up within 2%-3%.

Given everything involved, I find the 2% difference very reasonable and it doesn’t bother us any. We wind up triangulating between Feedburner, Google Analytics and Quantcast and it’s less of a hassle than managing our Web logs.

Because of the problem cited above with Google Analytics being slow to capture all the page views, it does make intraday monitoring fairly worthless, aside from tracking visits and visitors. All the other stats – time on page, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. – are all wrong until all the page views are captured. But there’s little we’re doing that requires great analytics on an intraday basis. There are certainly times when it would come in handy, but even as it is, it works well enough intraday where we can at least figure out if we add something or move something around whether the desired result was achieved.

As a tool used after the fact, I find Google Analytics to be an extremely valuable tool, though I often don’t like what I see!

One thing we’ve thrown in the towel on is that referral traffic is almost always bad, no matter the source. There are some rare exceptions where linking produces good traffic (high time on site, number of pages per visit, etc), but that’s indeed rare. In fact, in almost every instance where a specific post is linked, the traffic is bad, with bounce rates often in excess of 80%. That’s whether Louis is linking to it, whether someone throws a link on Twitter, or even if Matt Drudge links to one of our stories. StumbleUpon and Digg show similar results.

Such traffic is great for jacking up visits and visitors, but bad for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. We’ve pretty much thrown our hands up in the air on that score and attributed it to web surfing behavior via links. As an aside, the stable link we have from Drudge to “TV Ratings” produces much better results, but if he links to specific story on our site and gives it any prominence on his site, the traffic has a very high bounce rate.

That seems largely out of our control, however there was still one stat that really bothered me. That was that if someone landed on our site via our home page, the bounce rates were still pretty high, approaching 50%. Better if someone came directly instead of via a referral, but still bothersome either way. Here's the landing page results for our site for August 1-31:

Recently, with that and a couple of other factors in mind – mainly wanting the ability to showcase more content on the home page – we redesigned the site. The bounce rate for traffic landing on our home page was around 47% for August. In the last week, post- redesign, that is now around 25%. The bounce rate for referral traffic to specific posts is still lousy, but again, we don’t feel like we can do much about that. Here are the landing page stats from September 6-12.

All of this has me wishing I’d gotten around to redesigning the site sooner. Who knows how much repeat traffic we may have lost as a result of design? I also feel silly because once upon a time I actually had responsibility for the web design/UI group at Charles Schwab. I recently had lunch with the VP who ran that group in my org and when I told her about the results she shook her head and laughed at me. My mentality had been this: our blog is a blog, pretty much like every other blog and designed pretty much like every other blog so spending a lot of energy on design tweaking didn’t seem like a worthwhile priority.

I definitely should’ve known better. I’m still not very happy about the bounce rates on referral traffic, but am quite happy about the reduction in bounce rates for people landing on our home page and would ascribe that improvement completely to redesigning.

By the way, for anyone interested, we went with the Live Wire theme from Woo Themes that we modified a little. So far I’d consider it the best $70 we ever spent. It’s not a perfect world, so the theme isn’t perfect, but setting the navigation structure (which we’ll certainly still need to tweak) and other modifications didn’t take much time. For $70 and time spent, cutting the bounce rate to our home page just about in half seems like time and money well spent.

Read more by Robert Seidman at TVByTheNumbers.com.