Automatic and Fitbit Data Show My Car Use Down 50% as Steps Are Up 33%

It seems fairly logical that if you walk everywhere, you're probably driving less. But even as I've been on something of a Fitbit kick since early 2012, I've reached even higher highs in the last month-plus, and increased my daily goal to 15,000 steps (from 12,000), thanks to one simple change - opting to leave my car at home each workday and benefit from one of Google's most visible perks, taking the company shuttle.

Looking at the data from Automatic, my dashboard shows I'm on pace to have set a new low for both miles driven and money spent on gas, this month, a full fifty percent below previous months. And even without the aggressive late evening walks I was orginally doing when losing my extra weight at the end of 2012, my step counts are up more than 30 percent from just a few months ago. You might think that's not worthy of a blog post, but the available data, and correlation from this simple life change is easy to document.

A new low for driving costs in September (via Automatic)

Prior to taking the shuttle, my routine was fairly simple. I'd walk the twins to school, drive to work, walk a bit to lunch and do usual scurrying from meeting to meeting, and get home well short of 10,000 steps. To hit my target of 12,000, I'd still have to head out at night and get the steps in. But now, after walking the twins to school, I head back home to get the laptop, and walk the mile plus to the nearest shuttle stop instead. I work on the shuttle until reaching campus, and by the time I'm at my desk, I've racked up 5,000 to 6,000 steps. I can easily hit 10,000 after walking to and from lunch, and by the time I head home, I'm close to 15,000 steps - good enough for reaching my higher goal. And if I want to head out, be it to walk our dogs or play with the kids or anything else, I'm just padding on, getting closer to 20,000 without too much effort.

Hitting 20k on Fitbit isn't an ordeal with a new shuttle routine.

Meanwhile, my poor car is sitting neglected. Instead of driving into work and doing battle with other Bay Area commuters, the shuttle driver is escorting me (and my colleagues) while I catch up on email, keep our social channels updated, and generally get my first 20-30 minutes of work in - while I'd probably just be listening to the radio and stuck in traffic on the old routine.

When I first got the Automatic dongle back in April, I was intrigued by it catching me going too quickly or doing other bad behaviors while on the road that might cut into my gas mileage. But with few exceptions, the occasional chirp hasn't really impacted me. If I'm on 280, I'm going to drive over 70. It's what the road was made for. And if I'm driving to an A's game in Oakland, there's no question I'll have to hit the brakes occasionally, to avoid making traffic worse. But having the accumulative dashboard is even more valuable. I'm not at the point where I'd consider getting rid of the car, and sharing my wife's minivan, but there are some weeks where I might not even start the car. Google Shopping Express handles almost all our shopping, and we can walk almost everywhere else.

Earlier this month, I hit 60k steps, a new record. Some day I'll get 100k.

Meanwhile, in Fitbit land, thanks to being pretty consistent about promoting this socially connected pedometer for the last two-plus years, I'm continuing to enjoy the daily and weekly competitions, literally around the world. +Thomas Power in London is now tweeting his daily step counts, and harrassing me if I fall behind. In something of a response, a few weeks back I made walking an all day thing, and hit a new personal best of 60,000+ steps. It just took walking on the treadmill while watching TV, and then a stroll to Mountain View after the kids were in bed. It was to prove I could do it, and put the rest of my competition in their place. No car was needed. The new goal? Some day I'll hit 100,000. I just need to get a free day from my wife, and walk around the clock.

So if you're looking for me, I won't be in the car. Find me on Fitbit instead.

Blogs Still Trump Streams for Longform Content With a Long Shelf Life

Five or so years ago, the idea that one of the most visible bloggers would walk away from their website and completely move their presence to a third party network would have been a step short of scandalous. In fact, when top bloggers even took a month or two off before rejuvenating, that in itself was news. (See from 2007: Are Leading Bloggers Getting Blog Fatigue? and Robert Scoble's response) When the well-read and highly networked Jason Calacanis exited the blogging game in 2008, we all talked about it. When PR lead Steve Rubel deleted his blog in 2011, I was not happy.

For many, the allure of instant feedback on social networks, and simple quantifiable levels of engagement are enough to call in quits on longer form content. When a much labored blog post can only score a handful of comments (if any), and a fun tweet gets dozens of retweets and favorites in minutes, or a Google+ or Facebook post has a deep conversation, the return on investment can have you wondering if blogging is even worth the effort.

Last month +Robert Scoble finally abandoned his blog, which, like mine, used to be a lot more active and engaged than it is now. Yet few people noticed. His choice is to primarily engage on Facebook, and continue a presence on Twitter and Google+. And it's no longer controversial. In parallel, ten years into +Charlene Li's blogging, she writes, "You just can’t beat the engagement that social media platforms provide, something that blogs on their own can’t do."

It's not as if this is a sudden change, obviously. Blogging was (after bulletin boards and newsgroups) the first deep channel one could have to report news, talk to peers and engage with brands on the Web. But when Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so many other social streams emerged, people learned to communicate in real time. By the time blog posts were published, and traveled via RSS to your attention, you might already have seen the news somewhere else. In effect, social media decimated blogging in the same way that the Internet decimated newspapers. Speed wins practically every time.

Just a few years ago, it'd be easy to say "Your blog is your brand (2007)", or, later adjusting, that "Blogging is the foundation in a world of streams (2009)". I still believe deeply in the second part, that all those tweets and social streams have to point somewhere, and if it's not an ad, then it's back to your blog. The rest is just real time noise that is interesting one minute and gone the next. The blog is the place where you can exchange deeper discussions, and the posts live on forever.

Blog posts I made years ago still get thousands of visits a month.

So what of the perceived decline in readers to blogs that once saw incredible attention? Like in the TV world, where one now has hundreds of specialized channels catering to every interest, which has dramatically impacted traditional network market share, the Internet has many more content outlets to choose from, for practically anything you want. You name a topic, you can find a community for it. And entertainment and soft content are winning, just like they do on TV. People love to be entertained, so even the purported news networks like Business Insider, Mashable and Buzzfeed take a tabloid approach and cater to the lowest viewer - tantalizing and teasing their way through your day.

My good friend and colleague on the +Google Analytics team, +Adam Singer, recently took on the disappearing blogs topic in a column for ClickZ, responding to a Marketing Land post on declining blog use for the first time in seven years. His takeaway echoes what I will constantly report: The best analysis is done for your own domain, you don't have to fight with social networking algorithms on whether your content will make it to viewers, and you own your space - the way it looks, your template, and your message.

In 2011, when Google+ just started, some high profile people said they were walking away from their own self-hosted domains and just redirecting to their Google+ profile, which was flying with comments and +1s. I warned against this move, saying "I Gave Away My Web Identity. All I Got Was a T-Shirt." Even when the product you're pointing to is high quality, it's very unlikely a stream-oriented product can match the quality and depth of longer form content that belongs to you.

Having a choice in destinations for your content is important. But it's not just enough to engage in other places. You have to tailor your message for each media, and the blog is still your best container to own your brand and your content for the long term. I regularly end up citing stories I wrote 6-8 years ago, and they still hold up. But good luck trying to find a tweet of yours or another social post from 4+ years ago and saying it has the same solid validity. So while I respect +Robert Scoble and others for adapting to a new world and making a tough call, I think we've lost a lot of good voices and deep thought for a quick fix.

Disclosures (per usual): I work at Google, who is behind the Blogger platform (which I use), Google+ and Google Analytics. I do have active profiles on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, of course.

Two Paragraphs, a Link, and a Cloud of Dust

Our platforms, and their limitations, are changing the way we communicate. Rather than accommodating the many ways we as humans like to share and engage with others, most of the online services we use have limits in how much we can share, how items can be staged, and how easily others can discover or respond.

While Twitter's 140 character platform is only the most well-known of these hard limits, there is an easily observable trend away from long-form content, analysis and conversation, and more toward a brief moment with an ephemeral interaction. Blogs are one of the last outlets we have where the container, like liquid, expands to contain all into it which is poured, while most other outlets are often trying to make us something we're not - be it photographers, clever headline writers or meme artists.

We've moved away from thousand-plus word screeds and dozens of debatable comments over a single item, with a permalink discoverable through search, instead to a moment in a stream that is significantly less relevant tomorrow or next week than it is today. We're valuing our content not in real activity, but in microactivities - be it +1s, Likes, Retweets or Favorites. We're trading points and counterpoints for vague notions of follower counts and popularity.

While it can be a challenge to regularly upkeep an outlet like a blog or a news magazine, consider the permanence and discoverability of this content. One can, with a little effort, read an author's life as it changes, by poring through the archives. Authors can link to previous points and positions to make a deeper case for an idea, and show consistency or evolution of thought. And permalinks can serve as the point of engagement for us to talk something into the ground, or its natural conclusion - whatever comes first.

Consider, if you would, the last really important Tweet or Facebook post or LinkedIn update that you either made or saw. Where would that Tweet stand in the halls of history? While real-time is an amazing tool for the right now, it's not usually a great tool for the later or forever. There's no other solution out there for diving into the world's collective thoughts around television, sports and shared experiences, but it lacks for completeness.

Yet that's where practically all our effort is going.

The most visible entrants and quickly adopted mediums in the social sphere over the last few years are not centered around long-form content. Instagram, for the most part, is a photo sharing site with social interaction. Tumblr, despite the option for longer-form content, is usually a collection of photos or short excerpts -- links to links with the content on the other side. WhatsApp and Snapchat are different beasts altogether, focused on the right now, with the content never intended to have any true longevity.

So our thoughts and our communications are being forced into these neatly approved buckets, wrapping around the presentation of the medium. If you know your network looks best with a headline, a few hashtags, and a sentence, that's all you'll do. If you know it's a beautiful photo with three words at the top, that's what you'll do. Maybe you can make an infographic or a meme out of it and be the most shared image of the moment, only to fade into oblivion the next day.

That's why I'm optimistic about the plans for Ev Williams' work on Medium, as outlined in a dedicated piece for TechCrunch two weeks ago. We've also seen interesting attempts from Dustin Curtis' Svbtle network - a very well designed platform with hand-selected authors. I don't yet have accounts with either, as I'm quite loyal to my +Blogger platform and integrated Google+ comments, but both services seem to be fighting against the stream, so to speak, helping people with longer thoughts share in a better looking way.

I believe as social participants, we can and should do better than a picture with a few words, a tweet that summarizes a link, or a post with a headline and a paragraph. It may satisfy the right now, short attention span theater, but if that's all we have, then what do we tell history that we've done? Do we suggest that those in the future looking back on this age download our archived social stream to best understand who we were? Should they grok our automatically filtered photos and understand our taste for art, or see how many likes a post got to determine its impact?

I would hope we're not letting the containers impact our ability to share the entirety of the message. That's why even while I've got plenty of other work to do, the blog continues to be my foundation in a world of streams, which I first wrote more than four years ago and stand by. So if your favorite social outlet starts to reduce the number of ways you can express yourself, take it somewhere else. Don't cut yourself short, and become dust in the wind.

Usual boring disclosures: I work at Google on Developer Relations. Most of my work is on YouTube videos, short and long. This blog runs on Blogger and integrates Google+ comments. The post is not intended as a post in favor of or against our products or competitors' products. I also like writing long disclosures.

FriendFeed Turns 5. The One-Time Pioneer Is Still Here.

Five years ago today, a small aggregation startup called FriendFeed opened its doors, in beta, to intrigued early adopters who wanted to bring all the updates from different services they used into one place and follow friends. As was evident from initial coverage of the site from outlets such as the New York Times and TechCrunch, what grabbed attention as much as the product itself was its founders - a group of four former Googlers who had made their name on products like Gmail and Google Maps.

After an admitted slow start, the product gained incredible attention from the Silicon Valley digerati through 2008 as the team expanded and features rolled out with regularity, including the launch of the "Like" button, which became the hallmark action at Facebook, the company's eventual acquirer, a pioneering approach to real-time, and many other aspects which have shown challenging for other startups, including photo display, topical rooms, participation by email and more. By August 2009, less than two years after its initial launch, FriendFeed was gobbled up by Facebook, and work on the site essentially stopped. Now in 2012, two thirds of FriendFeed's initial 12 employees have left Facebook, and yet somehow, the site is still up - despite the occasional outage.

Now that we have the benefit of looking backward, with FriendFeed being part of Facebook much longer than its lifespan as an independent company, it is worth reviewing why the company was significant, relative to many other startups at the time, and why people would keep using the service, even as alternatives to take one's time on the web sprout constantly. Also -- keep in mind I am speaking as an individual, not as a Googler, and this is no reflection on any of Google's products...

Good old FriendFeed, with Lists, Rooms, Likes, Comments, Photos and Search

FriendFeed Took On Challenging Problems -- Here are 10.

1. Rapid Aggregation

The first challenge for FriendFeed to approach was the retrieval of near real-time aggregation from the Web's many services, constantly looking for updates on sites like Flickr for photos, blogs for posts, Twitter for Tweets, and YouTube for your shared videos. The assumption was that when you made an activity elsewhere, it would appear on your feed practically instantaneously. Initiatives that helped this included their own Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and Pubsubhubbub.

2. Interaction - Presenting the Like

The second challenge was converting from a site that highlighted activity elsewhere to a thriving community of its own. A feed of all your friend's activities could be hollow without your ability to interact. That was solved with three steps - the first being a bookmarklet that let you share content from other sites directly to FriendFeed, the second being the introduction of commenting and liking articles shared by your friends, and the third, the ability to add a status update directly to the site - which converted from just a catch-all for content started elsewhere to a starting point for new conversations.

Nowadays, the like button is so closely associated with Facebook that it's assumed to have been born there. Yet, it was FriendFeed, in a trend that took place regularly, who initiated it only to be mimicked quickly.

3. Search With Brains

The third challenge was delivering intelligent search. With backgrounds at Google, it was assumed when FriendFeed would deliver search, it would be done well, and they didn't disappoint. Their advanced search lets users find comments and posts from specific people, all friends, or from everyone. It lets you search on the type of content or any combination. With Twitter remaining unable to produce a search engine with any history, FriendFeed's search archive remains valuable for anything published on the social sphere beyond the last month.

4. Organizing Your Friends

The fourth challenge was helping users organize friends into lists. As is seen with Google+ circles and Facebook lists, sorting people into smaller groups is important and challenging. FriendFeed introduced lists in August of 2008, which let people not only put people in the right buckets, but take especially noisy people off their main stream -- extremely helpful. This also delivered what TechCrunch called a "fake follow".

5. Real time at the Core

The fifth challenge? Moving away from a load and refresh model to one of real time. The concept of new content flowing in from the top of the page, and conversations bumping comments back to the top of the page made FriendFeed have real time at its core. Combine that with advanced search, and realt-time search on FriendFeed became the place to gather for breaking news events, like Apple keynotes.

6. Topical Rooms

Challenge number six... delivering topical rooms that let people with shared interests participate, with granular sharing models, so rooms could be public, private, or moderated. This could be as simple as a room for intranet-like discussions, organizing the week's poker tournament, or to debate politics endlessly with friends and foes.

7. Smart Display of Photos, Video and Audio

Text is easy. Getting photos and other rich media is hard. Twitter took years to graduate from a text-only site (with links) to one with embedded images. Even then, they are a click away. FriendFeed made it easy to share multiple photos, or even embed Mp3s so your friends could listen on the site. Shares from YouTube and other services, like Vimeo, could be easily viewed and detected by the service.

8. Selective Viewing of Shares

Not every post from everyone is gold. This is not a surprise. FriendFeed made it so you could hide all updates from specific services, or people, or any combination. If your buddy who writes a great blog tweets too much, FriendFeed had a solution for you. This remains a challenge in most places.

9. Posting from Email or Mobile

Thanks in part to outside developer Gary Burd, later hired, users could post to FriendFeed by sending updates to an email address. Attached photos were attached to the post itself. Very clean. The site also had an iOS-friendly version at http://www.friendfeed.com/iphone which worked very well on a sub 4 inch screen.

10. Embedding On Other Sites

Though not used a ton, you could embed FriendFeed conversations and feeds on external blogs or websites. Have the conversation in one place and want to showcase it elsewhere? FriendFeed let you do that. Most social services have widgets, but can be as limited as links back to the original source. FriendFeed was much more portable.

These innovations, in addition to a growing loyal community, had us hoping FriendFeed could cross the chasm and reach a wide audience beyond those of us who were tech-centric. Interestingly, many of the conversations evolved as users of the platform talked less about startups and platforms, and made the site a place for pictures of kids, silly memes, and glorious food pics.

And it Stayed Up When Others Didn't

At a time when Twitter was as known for its fail whale as anything else, FriendFeed refused to crash. The team had learned how to scale the product so that even under periods of peak load, sluggish behavior was practically absent. Only in the seemingly annual event of datacenter failures, and eventual site rot due to abandonment for practically three years, has seen the product unavailable. In fact, as the legend tells it, one of the caveats for signing off on the 2009 acquisition was one of the cofounder's wives making the request that FriendFeed stay alive as an independent service indefinitely - which has happened.

So Now What?

The initial gut-wrenching response to the acquisition by those of us participating FriendFeed regulars was one of distrust and pessimism, that the pace of innovation and open behavior the small startup had was going to become opaque post-acquisition. It was assumed the relationships built in the community would disappear. Not too long after the purchase did you start to see news that one engineer after another would turn away from Facebook to start something else or simply take time off.

There is no question the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook was a lucrative one for its employees, and particular its cofounders and earliest hires. While the initial price didn't set records, the acceleration of Facebook's value, recent events notwithstanding, made the purchase an impressive one. Split among a dozen employees and a minor investment from Benchmark, and you can see they did well. Features initially in FriendFeed later made their way to Facebook, for the most part, and the team dispersed to various corners of the social monolith.

Of the 12 employees at time of acquisition, 4 are still employed at Facebook, including Ben Golub, Casey Mueller, Sanjeev Singh and Tudor Bosman. Ana Yang Mueller left last week, following the arrival of her first child. Former Facebook CTO and FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor recently left to launch another startup. Jim Norris, another cofounder, is at AeroFS. Dan Hsaio left. Ben Darnell, at Facebook for about half a second, is at DropBox, following Thing Labs and later AOL. Kevin Fox is at Electric Imp. Paul Buchheit is at Y Combinator. Gary Burd left 2 months after the acquisition, preferring not to telecommute from Seattle.

Given the array of places these folks have gone after Facebook, it's obvious top talent finds top roles. The FriendFeed team was ahead of its time in a number of ways in developing what it did at the pace it did - even offering up a changelog to show checkins to the site, which updated rapidly. The site turned out a community which I've watched stay fairly solid, despite the neglect, and one that's moved from network to network. At the end of 2009, I even said I would find value from FriendFeed if I were the only one left on the site. Keep in mind Google+ debuted two years later, and that's where many similar interactions take place today, but at the time, it was true.

In the thousands of blog posts I've added to this site, I've covered hundreds and hundreds of unique services. There are the rare ones which are so clearly innovative and inspire real community that demand loyalty as FriendFeed did. For those who opted out of the FriendFeed experience, you missed out. For those still hanging on, it's maybe time for a group hug. The small team accomplished incredible stuff, and surprisingly... it's still here. I wonder if it will stay on another five years.

Full Disclosures: I work at Google and work with the Google+ team through Developer Relations. I am good friends with multiple former FriendFeed employees on the list. We're buds, essentially.

Activity Streams Aim to Be DNA of the Future Web

When the well-respected open source advocate Chris Messina announced he was joining Google in January, many folks were concerned that his being absorbed in to the big company Borg would mean a cessation or redirection of some of his projects targeting the next generation Web, possibly in exchange of proprietary efforts to promote the company's products. Today, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas, he spoke on how he and others in the community, both at Google and outside of it, are working to bring more meaning to our social networks, activity, and feeds, through extending today's data portability standards to include more information and more relevance. Messina walked through a history of the Web's publishing, from static portals of a decade ago, to today's RSS and Atom-powered sites, and suggested a future with even more information, based on streams, that tells a story.

Messina, after expressing his excitement about working with a team he believed was leading the industry in things he cares about, including the Data Liberation Front, letting data move from one site to another, said he was focused on what he called "generative structures" that were the underpinnings and DNA of how information is shared, updated and transmitted.

As he recounted, in 1999, portals ruled the Web, and people, myself included, would put their data in sites like My Netscape and My Excite, customizing these sites with headlines from third party services, primarily tapping RSS, which offered the headline of a story, a link and its description. In an era when publishers wanted to not give away their data, it was "the best we could do", he said. By 2005, a new extension of RSS was promoted, called Atom, which was still the essential concept of syndicating data from one Web site to another, but also adding an author and an identifier for the atomic bit of information.

Now in 2010, little has changed. Most news feeds of today, be they on Facebook, on customized portals, or the headline and link model that dominates Twitter, are fairly simple, and they don't indicate intent. As Messina said, "It's not all that different from the last 10 years, and that gets kind of depressing".

But what has changed is the increase of sharing rich media in these places, on platforms designed for "dead tree media". He said we should be able to show what we did, who with and why we were doing it, and that needs to happen through new richer formats for the social Web.

Activity Streams, an extension to the Atom Feed format, is looking to accomplish this by extending Atom and RSS with new aspects, including a verb and an object type. The world of FriendFeed, which supported a unified feed of 58 different services, where people could have one single stream that represented their identity online helped guide much of ActivityStreams' framework. As entries flowed to FriendFeed, they largely represented actions of posts, shares, bookmarks, reviews, from different sites. But ActivityStreams is aiming to do more than just syndicate data from one home page to another, as RSS and Atom have done for a decade, but also display intent and meaning.

"If your goal is to help people produce meaning, knowledge and culture, you have the basics for a pretty compelling social application and can motivate people to act," Messina said.

But with more streaming of information from many different sites, it can exacerbate the assumed problem of information overload - and tools need to be further developed to help us consume the data.

"We snack on information. It may feel like overload, but the tools haven't caught up," Messina said. "The solution to data overload is more metadata and we are at that point where can start generating that. We take the basic construct from 1999 and weave in some additional information - data about data."

As I outlined in my summary of DeWitt Clinton's talk on Google Buzz at the beginning of the month, Activity Streams are playing a big role in this new network, and these streams are intended to be open, not just for a company like Google, but other social networks that are tracking individual's activity and intent. The goal is to make discovery of intent data ubiquitous and transitive between sites, in the same way that RSS and Atom focused on publishing of data from one site to another.

Messina called the work on Activity Streams as iterative "baby steps", but ones that focus on getting today's rich media activity a home with a rich experience, and to make this process easy for service providers.

"If you have a Web site that has people doing things on it, and they have a feed they are taking with them, it is fairly trivial to add ActivityStreams information," he said. "Essentially we have the verbs and object types represented."

You can find out more on the continued development of ActivityStreams at http://activitystrea.ms.

Like Convergence, Aggregation Is Better In Theory

There always seems to be a tug of war in technology between those who want a converged, multi-purpose device that does everything, or those who want a dedicated device that does one thing (or just a few things) extremely well. For every successful hulking converged printer/copier/scanner/fax machine device, there are utilities like toasters or microwaves that just do one specific function. The truth is that when differing technologies converge, it usually leads to a single unsatisfying experience where none of the functions are high quality. More common is the practice of product diversification, where one device turns into a family of devices, with differing features for differing price points.

On the Internet, many of us are creating a ton of content in a ton of different places, and in most cases, this content differs by the site. I may use Flickr or Smugmug for photos, and use Twitter or Identica for microupdates. I may use last.fm or Pandora for music streaming, and Blogger or Wordpress for more lengthy pieces. The solution, which I've long championed, has been the development of an aggregator, which takes all this disparate activity and presents it in a single place. This aggregation is what is at the heart of sites like FriendFeed, and more recently, Cliqset, Arktan and, increasingly, Facebook. In parallel, there has been this development of personal lifestreams, which can capture all our content in one place, and be hosted on our site or on a third party URL.

It sounds great. But despite my excitement and evangelism around such tools, for the most part, they have not flourished. It seems that, instead, people want to enjoy the content in its native environment, or keep things simple. I look at the developments behind Arktan and Cliqset, and wonder, does the world need to develop a perfect aggregator, again?

It's possible that the disappointing answer is no. It's possible that while an aggregator is among the fastest ways to get caught up on individuals' activity from around the Web in once place, that getting the downstream data at the aggregator instead of at the source somehow reduces the quality or impact of that message, in the same way that the iPhone isn't the best cell phone on the planet, or the best Web browser, thanks to it being a converged device and not a specialized device.

Hardware specialization enables products to be refined and refined until they cannot be completely virtualized or emulated by software. A good example of this is the DVD player. The DVD player on your computer, and its associated software, is good, but it's not as good as the dedicated device in your entertainment center. And that convergence of your media player and your TV hasn't really been a success either. The VCR/TV combos were never a good idea, and WebTV wasn't exactly considered the quality leader. Convergence always sounds wonderful, but ends up coming up short.

For the past two years plus, I have been among the loudest proponents of aggregation. For me, an odd person at one end of a data consumption curve, it solves a need that I have to concentrate my activity and discover my friends' updates from around the Web. But for the more common user, they just want a few things to work well. They have chosen Facebook as their social network. They have chosen Twitter as their micromessaging platform. They have chosen LinkedIn for their business platform. Even those who have chosen all three aren't crawling the Web looking for a single site solution the way some of us early adopters have.

In his 2009 wrap-up post, Lifestreaming advocate Mark Krynsky confirmed that he "didn’t see many things this year that took Lifestreaming to the next level," adding "Lifestreaming was pretty stagnant." 2007 and 2008 saw a lot of new services come to the fore, and 2008 was the year that FriendFeed looked like it could change the game, threatening sites like Twitter and Facebook. But as polished and professional as the site was, it just wasn't capable of converting those away from the original, refined, source of the data.

I have to believe that aggregation tools are interesting, and useful to a small minority of people. Lifestreaming tools are fun for individuals to highlight their activity. Sites are out there that do a good job, and more are coming, but I am thinking that "aggregation" is the new "convergence". It looks great on paper, and some people will carry a Swiss Army Knife with them everywhere, but most won't.

Communicating in the Age of Streams: Ubiquity, Multiplicity, Visibility

The rate at which information is being produced shows no sign of slowing down, and humans are adapting to the onslaught of this so-called firehose by having shorter attention spans and filtering out information they aren't much interested in, so that it fades into the background as noise. In parallel, information is getting ever decentralized, and conversations are taking place in an infinite number of places, which makes the task of participating in every relevant conversation a practical impossibility. As this has happened, the model of dedicated Web sites, and even blogs, can look extremely outdated - aiming to act as centralized destinations in a world of streams. Edelman vice president Steve Rubel, who recently moved his blog to a lifestreaming format, based on Posterous, explained at Blog World Expo how he takes on the stream and helps his clients gain visibility in the fast-moving world.

Rubel, who created the highly popular MicroPersuasion blog back in 2004 and updated it multiple times a day before moving to the lifestream earlier this year, said "we are reaching a critical breaking point" when it comes to the information firehose, adding, "information is going to continue to scale, but human attention doesn't scale, so we have to think about how each of us manages it."

You no doubt have seen some of the more aggressive ways to tackle information overload including "In Box Zero", "Mark All as Read Day" or even "E-mail bankruptcy" - all essentially differing forms of throwing in the towel and admitting failure. Steve quoted recent studies showing that the average person in the US visits 111 different domains in a month, and approximately 2,500 Web pages a month, as people are making choices in terms of where they spend their time, and what pieces of information they choose to respond to. And one of those places that usually isn't getting a lot of their attention? Company Web sites and old-fashioned blogs.

Steve suggested that one of the major reasons that Twitter exploded was because it centralized all these diverse conversations and put them in one place, also leaning on short forms of communication, adding that on average, people only read about 20 percent of the Web page before moving on. Much of the reason for their shorter attention spans? More data, coming ever more quickly.

"Everything is moving faster now, whether you like it or not," he said. "It's like a sushi duck moving past at 100 miles an hour with 1,000 different options. How do you make sure you get selected and stand out?"

Instead of fighting against the stream and forcing people to come back to the originating hub, Steve started to think that maybe his blog "didn't matter as much any more", and appeared "archaic". Now, he is posting content, via Posterous, to his lifestream and also each of the spokes (like Flickr, Delicious, etc.) and participating where that content gainst traction - essentially creating a very customizable hub and spoke model that has his own personal brand and the flexibility to put the right content in the right place.

For companies and businesses looking to take on the streams, Steve highlighted three major imperatives to not only just broadcast, but to ensure quality engagement - including ubiquity, multiplicity and diversity of message, and finally, discovery and visibility. The new lifestream-powered Web sites would enable companies and brands to be "everywhere stakeholders are spending time", and enable the opportunity for different stories in different venues in different formats, avoiding a one size fits all approach.

The stream is real. Whether you call it the flow, as Stowe Boyd has, or the River of News, as Dave Winer has, the firehose is pushing more data our way faster than ever. IT could be that the lifestream is an answer.

For more on lifestreaming, make sure to check out Mark Krynsky's Lifestreamblog.com.

FriendBinder's Social Aggregation Console Open for All

More than a year ago, we first talked about FriendBinder, which was one of many services offering lifestreaming capabilities, aggregating your information from different social networks, and letting you follow friends from each network in one place. It didn't have the polish of other sites, like FriendFeed, the high visibility of networks like Facebook, or the dollars behind it like Plaxo and MyBlogLog. But what it did offer was the ability to "tier" friends in terms of how interested you were in their updates, and to act as a console. But it wasn't open to everybody, until earlier this week, when developer Richard Cunningham finally opened the doors.


FriendBinder Pulls Updates from Around the Web (Interest Level: 5)
In the wake of FriendFeed's buyout from Facebook, and the siren's call that is Twitter, social networking users are no doubt reticent to invest time into "yet another network" or "yet another aggregator", especially as many of the aggregation functions that were once enough to launch a separate site are now being incorporated by the giants (see: Facebook). But FriendBinder has some interesting features worth taking a look at.


Comments and Likes from Facebook Are Streamed to FriendBinder
Since its initial release, FriendBinder has benefited from enhancements by some of the larger sites. By pulling in data from Facebook friends in FriendBinder, I can see comments and likes from within the site, and can even make comments to Facebook from within FriendBinder. In addition, Twitter replies and direct messages are displayed on the left side, in their own stream, letting me respond from within FriendBinder.


I Can Update My Twitter and Facebook Status from FriendBinder
Also, in parallel with Facebook and SocialToo both announcing ways for you to update your Facebook and Twitter followers simultaneously, this is something FriendBinder does as well.

FriendBinder's goal is not to be a social network. It doesn't have any native content owned by the service, nor does it have likes and comments or distinct connections on the service that make others social. But it does find all your friends' updates in one place, without requiring them to join. You can import your profiles from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Last.FM.

To check out FriendBinder, go to http://www.friendbinder.com.

Blogging Is Still the Foundation In A World of Streams

Last week, Edelman's Steve Rubel made an aggressive jump - away from traditional blogging, turning over his site to a lifestream, which captures all of his activity from around the Web. His move, he reported, was due to a feeling that blogging "feels old" and that the new reality is about the flow of information. This followed on to a conversation he, Steve Gillmor and I had a month or so ago, which led to my post saying that RSS felt slow. But while I see some of the same issues Steve has, I haven't made a full move away from the blog, don't ever plan to do so, and for any company I give advice to, I tell them to do so would be a mistake.

The blog is the foundation and center for who you are - either as an individual, or a brand. While I believe the best bloggers in the world are participating outside of their blog, on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and everywhere else, to only participate in those areas leaves a gaping hole. The world of lifestreaming and real-time is fun, but it can be as deep as a soap opera in a world that still demands insightful documentaries and news reporting.

In August of 2007, I said there was a new reality and that "Your Blog Is Your Brand". Most of you weren't reading me back then, but it holds as true now as it did two years ago.

Fellow blogger Jeremiah Owyang added his thoughts on the issue last week, asking, Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams? Interestingly, he noticed that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, who were the authors of Naked Conversations, were now more focused on micromedia (FriendFeed and Twitter) than they were on their own blogs. It's a big reason why Mike Arrington told Robert he needed an intervention at the end of 2008. (Amusingly, Robert is going 'blog only' this week...)



In the last two years, the rise of microblogging tools and lifestreaming services has given blogging a less-prominent role on everyone's tongues, but it, in my opinion, is as important as ever. One just needs to make a conscious decision as to what type of data is most appropriate where. Longer, more thoughtful pieces with graphics and type style should go on blogs. Maybe a few photos and text go to FriendFeed or Facebook, and short status updates go to Twitter. The addition of more options shouldn't mean the elimination of the original.


The Blog Is Still the Foundation
In a presentation I gave to one company this week, I stated the same - I said the corporate blog is the foundation of your entire social media strategy. It may make sense to have secondary and tertiary blogs, but if you tried to just use Twitter and other services and neglect the blog, you would a failure from the beginning.

Blogging is not for everyone or every company. Blasphemy, I know. But it is work, and it can never be stopped. Once you start, there is no finish line, until you drop and become a 24 hour trending topic on Twitter. But blogs are your public whiteboard - extending your voice to your peers, your family, friends, or in the business world, your customers, prospects, partners, competition, press and analysts, and of course, your own employees. 140 characters just isn't enough.

Amplifeeder to Soon Release Open Source Lifestream Platform

A Screen Capture from My Amplifeeder
Lifestreaming fans over the last few years have found newer and more fully-featured options to aggregate all their online activity. In addition to social networks like Facebook, FriendFeed and other external sites, there are products that let you pull the data into your blog, and there are others that let you host the application on your own server with your own domain name. And each has its own wrinkle - be it a larger array of supported data sources, the ability to post comments, or colorful templates to make the result more inviting.

A new entrant called Amplifeeder is currently available for testing, but won't be available to the general public until it is added to Microsoft's new application store (some time next month). The product is an open source solution that runs on Microsoft's IIS server and requires SQL, but delivers a flexible solution with many preinstalled templates, a wide number of supported social sites, and yes, the opportunity for comments.

While many lifestreaming solutions essentially post all your updates, in chronological order in one section, no matter the source, Amplifeeder's templates can break out the information into different sections, such as "videos" from YouTube, "photos" from Flickr, "favorites" from Digg and Delicious, "writings" from Google Reader shares, and the core "lifestream" of Last.fm updates, Twitter postings and the blog.


Different Channels Pulled Into Amplifeeder
The author, Jon Paul Davies, enabled me to have an account, which you can find at http://louis.amplifeeder.com/.

If you're one of those people who has signed up to many of these similar sites, you probably do get tired of entering your profile information each time. Amplifeeder actually made the process very easy. In fact, if you provide a FriendFeed user name, Amplifeeder will check your profile and match up the services, making the process automatic. You can also make posts directly to your Amplifeeder through what it calls its own "Microblog".

You Can Post Directly To Amplifeeder


Post your FriendFeed profile and pull it into Amplifeeder
There are 14 different templates that come with the Amplifeeder platform, all named after Joy Division songs, from "Disorder" to "Irresistible" and "Transmission". Some are the basic white background with links, and others offer more color.


You Can Choose What to Show or Not Show in Amplifeeder
In addition to setting up your Amplifeeder, the product lets you check each specific update and remove posts you might not want displayed, or even view stats to see what sites are most frequently updated. The result is a preconfigured lifestream you can host on your own site and modify to meet your expectations.


Amplifeeder Shows Statistics In What You Pull to the Lifestream
Once Amplifeeder is out early next month, it should be a good option for those people who want to take all their activity and put it in one place, without sending visitors somewhere else. In addition to my own Amplifeeder, you can check out their demos on the Web site: http://www.amplifeeder.com/demo.html

Kakuteru - Roll Your Own FriendFeed On Your Own Site

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.

Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!

Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.

Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.

Okay, so what's so special about this?

• The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customization
• Semantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.com
• Related articles & tweets are shown for each entry.
• Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.

Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.

Oh, and did I mention it's open source?

Out of the box:


It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.



Extra integration:

Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.


Activity stats:

One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?

Final verdict:

I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.

Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Strands Goes Mobile With New iPhone Interface

Last month, I said I believed there were three major trends in the future of social media: Unified accounts, transparency with connections to the real world, and adaptation to the mobile Web. As more consumers, including me, are seeing an increasing amount of their Web activity taking place on mobile devices, the need to create customized interfaces for all those iPhones, Android-capable handsets and Blackberries is getting ever more important, and those that don't do a good job of it will find their growth stunted.

Today, Strands, the social content discovery service which at times has drawn comparisons to FriendFeed and Plaxo, took a major step forward with the introduction of their new iPhone-optimized mobile site, found at http://m.strands.com.


Strands Mobile, In Action, On My iPhone
Back in August, when I first discussed the lifestreaming site's beta offering, I found myself fairly critical of its user interface, saying it minimized some of the best features, including the actual feeds from your friends' activity. In the last few months, thanks to feedback from its growing user base, the team has doubled down efforts to simplify the UI, and they managed to do well enough that the site works well, even in my 3.5" wide iPhone.


Features Like "Hot Posts" and "Discovery" Are Available On Mobile Strands
As one would expect, the mobile Strands offering operates the same way as its online companion does. You can see most recent updates from those you follow, see "Hot Posts", "Discover" new people who you might not be following, view your list of friends, and even read your in box, which can fill up with people taking action on your items, be it to make a comment, or simply flagging a "like" using their thumbs up. And you can participate by clicking the thumbs up or making comments yourself, right on the phone.


You Can Also Check Your Inbox Or Followers Via Mobile
Diehard Strands aficionados will no doubt appreciate the new introduction, taking the burgeoning social network on the go. If you are an iPhone addict, like me, make sure you bookmark their new site, and send feedback if you find issues. You can also check out an introductory video on their blog, here.

FriendFeed Offers Twitter A Chance to Play Lifestream

When FriendFeed first gained significant traction early this spring, coming at the same time as Twitter was struggling with uptime issues and a reduced feature set, bloggers were abuzz with the idea that FriendFeed could replace Twitter outright. The excitement around the social aggregation site at times was so white hot, it was thought the team would soon render popular tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader unnecessary. Rather than eliminate other services in the ecosystem, FriendFeed has instead, over the last several months, added support for many more services, and introduced upgrades that have made it even further integrated with those same sites, Facebook and Twitter.

Today, FriendFeed introduced a set of features that lets users update Twitter with all their FriendFeed activity, based on their own preferences - be it with native FriendFeed entries, or shares from popular sites, be they Disqus, Last.fm, YouTube, Flickr and many more.

The result essentially turns the lifestreaming functionality on its head. Rather than just have Twitter play a major role in inputting entries in user's feeds, FriendFeed now gives Twitter the chance to do more than operate as a microblogging tool, taking your personal FriendFeed, and mirroring it back Twitter's direction.


I've set up a number of services on FriendFeed to reflect back to Twitter.
Despite having served as one of the more vocal proponents of FriendFeed, I don't see that everything I do on the site needs to fill my Twitter stream. I won't be adding my FriendFeed comments to Twitter, nor will I be adding the vast majority of my social activity around the Web, including Google Reader shares, Delicious bookmarks, or comments, be they on FriendFeed, Disqus or BackType. After a certain point, the ensuing waterfall of updates would be certain to leave my in box full of Qwitter notifications.


A native post I made to FriendFeed was bounced to Twitter as well.
What I will be doing is notifying Twitter on native FriendFeed shared items, including all the iPhone pictures I take of the twins and send in via e-mail, as well as new blog posts, SmugMug shares and YouTube postings. This will effectively eliminate my need to use TinyURL for new blog posts, and probably will erode my use of Posty, TweetDeck or other Twitter applications. But as the integration is with Twitter only, Identi.ca and other microblogging services don't get any of the love.

Will Twitter's new role as a mainstream erode FriendFeed's differentiation? I don't believe so. The site is still all about following friends' feeds, and not just aggregating your updates. It's also become a strong platform for discussion and engagement. As links back to FriendFeed begin to increasingly populate Twitter, it should drive even more traffic their way, as both services aid one another, padding their lead in their respective markets.

Is Lifestreaming a Catalyst for What's Coming After Web 2.0?

By Mark Krynsky of Lifestream Blog (FriendFeed/Twitter)

There has been lots of rumbling lately about what the successor to web 2.0 will look like. Along with that, even more attention has been spent trying to determine what to name it. My post isn't to discuss semantics (pun intended) but more to provide some of my thoughts based on what I've been observing.

I feel lifestreaming, which I evangelize and cover incessantly, has become a catalyst for much of what's coming next. I feel we will see some of the core elements of lifestreaming penetrate other areas and watch many benefits become realized.

Companies are slowly starting to understand social media. They should also start thinking about how to improve communication internally for a well informed workforce. Creating rich workstreams by aggregating real-time data on an internal network can help achieve this. I see a resurgence of rich intranets like this starting to happen soon.

Data aggregation continues to re-invent itself in other useful ways. I was excited when I first started using Mint.com as I saw it as essentially a vertical lifestream. In this case it was aggregating all my financial accounts to provide a real-time "financestream". But that's not all that Mint.com does. It's a very special service and it actually provides the bridge to two areas where I see the web going next, recommendation engines and moving apps to the cloud.

Many services are getting really good at collecting the data and providing ways for us to interact with it. But that will only take us so far. The next phase will be creating intelligence based on the data. The first step to that will be recommendation engines. Strands provides several services including lifestreaming and has recently put up a prize to help them improve this technology. Mint.com provides recommendations on how to save money based on the data. I'm sure we will continue to see these engines applied to many new areas and perfected as they become mature.

By having more and more of my data living online it becomes increasingly difficult for certain apps to be effectively maintained on my local computer, which brings me back to Mint. I was a heavy duty Quicken user, but now it's become cumbersome having to pull in all my data. Add to that how powerful mobile phones are becoming, the pain involved with trying to sync data across multiple devices we own, and the answer seems clear. Many users will start the migration path of moving their apps to the cloud. Tying back to work again, my primary tool for managing website production is the Clocking IT service. So here I have an app hosted in the cloud accessible anywhere on multiple devices that also offers a real-time stream to co-workers.

What have you been observing? What do you think is going to start taking off?

Read more by Mark Krynsky at Lifestream Blog.

After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp

Personal feed aggregators with social elements have been one of the more popular services to gain traction in 2008. With services like FriendFeed, Social Median, Strands, SocialThing, Profilactic and others all finding a niche, some larger than others, it's clear that people are looking to consolidate their online activities, and share the results with friends. One of the more odd attempts is that of chi.mp, which lets you have your own .mp "domain", and helps you build a personal page, connect with friends and add services. While it can be fun to think of interesting names that end with .mp (du.mp, clu.mp, pi.mp, ru.mp, bu.mp, bli.mp, stu.mp, thu.mp, ca.mp, sta.mp, pu.mp and forrestgu.mp all come to mind), the end result isn't all that compelling. Unless we are being measured by the sheer quantity of online services we register for, and by how many places we can connect to the same people, I don't really see the point.

Chi.mp calls itself a content hub and identity management platform. While its site is clean and its marketing well-intended, offering a "dashboard for your digital life", the end result turns out to be much less. While its user profiles look like they borrowed a page from Facebook, and the idea of aggregating feeds sounds like FriendFeed, it ends up instead being a cartoony version of an online business card that calls out only the most basic social services.


Adding Services Via Chi.mp Is Easy, But Limited
From the chi.mp dashboard, you can add some of the standard services, but not a huge number. And just because you add a service doesn't mean it's pulling in your data. I added Twitter when I signed up, and despite posting a few tweets, my new chi.mp site, hiding at techpu.mp, hasn't figured that out.

Looking at the chi.mp sites built by others shows pictures from Flickr and Facebook, and headlines of their RSS feeds. But there's no question that the service isn't going to take on the larger players. The pages are static and don't enable discussion. And no matter how many friends you discover on the site, you don't get alerts if you visit their pages. So now, I find myself getting hit with invitation requests from folks to become contacts on the site. It's clear I don't know why I would do it, and just maybe, they don't know either.

No wonder CNET quoted one observer back in April as saying, ""I'll tell you what Chi.mp is. It's venture money getting set on fire." Now, I'm usually happy to give new Web services a chance and see potential, but unless there is a major overhaul here to chi.mp, which would deliver greater service support, faster RSS pulls, and real social interaction, there's just no point. Now I feel like a monkey for even signing up.

Just Wishing for Something to Go Mainstream Won't Make It So

After participating in two panels and seeing others in the three-day Blog World Expo this weekend, there were a number of repeating elements. First, Twitter has recovered from its near-fatal issues and is becoming a must-use tool for more attendees, who are using it for conversation and news discovery. Second, a concern that while we may be using services for microblogging, life streaming, videocasting and news aggregation, that we are the odd ones, and that the services we like are nowhere near the mainstream. But while I continued to hear this chorus of people saying Twitter was either not in the mainstream or just entering it, or declarations that FriendFeed and blog comment engines, like Disqus were not anywhere near the mainstream, I heard very few suggestions on how these products could cross the chasm. It's as if many thought you could, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, click our heels together three times, and find all to be well.

As I mentioned on Sunday afternoon's panel around distributed comments and fragmented conversations, we could very well have been having these same debates about whether other technologies would go mainstream just 10 or 15 years ago. Would AOL ever go mainstream? What about e-mail? Instant messaging? Texting by SMS? GPS? All of these are strong examples of products that may have seemed "out there" on the edge to many at first before becoming part of our every day lives. While Friendster didn't take the world by storm, MySpace did, with Facebook quick to follow. It's possible that the ubiquitous nature we see today with e-mail could be what we see with Twitter, or other similar services, in a few years.

There seems to be a general impatience among the early adopter and fast follower crowds to take the products we all like and use and expand their use to new groups. There's a desire to convert one's friends and colleagues to have the same kind of lust for gadgetry and Web applications as we have, and to adopt them with the same fervor. But we need to understand that with the vast majority of society, change is very hard. Adoption of the unknown is very hard, and it may take multiple incidents of exposure to have something that seems daunting seem comfortable, such that it's accepted and adopted.

On Friday, in my first panel, on micromedia, I was asked what it would take to "take Twitter mainstream", and I only half-jokingly said it would take a scandal involving a well-known celebrity which would lead to the service's exposure in a saturated media environment. Would the market that reads Perez Hilton, People and US Weekly discover Twitter or other similar services if somebody like Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake were using it? What if their tweets were splashed all over E! or Access Hollywood? I bet they would sign up.

In today's panel it was said that the theoretical gap between us "early adopters" and the mainstream isn't really all that much - we just choose to participate in different places. While some of us are Twittering, others are texting. While some of us are blogging, others are Facebooking. While some of us are sharing items and talking on FriendFeed, others are using forums on topics they follow. People have been using technology to form relationships and share news or conversations for years, but the tools to do so are ever-evolving.

I'd venture to say that it's no secret that not every technology we early adopters fall in love with will succeed in the way Google and MySpace have succeeded. But with exceptions made for company viability and competition, there's really no race or timetable to get services to cross the chasm from us on the edge to those later adopters. It takes time. It takes effort, and repeat viewings. Quick demos of products that would have us salivating may simply spark curiosity in those less likely to jump in with two feet.

On Friday, we discussed the dissemination of today's news was to tell 10 who tell 100 who tell 1,000. So it is with these services. If the 1,000 of us continue to tell this same 1,000 about the same items ad infinitum, we will never see growth and adoption outside our little world. The mainstream has proven they can grasp technology like e-mail and IM, texting and Web browsing. With time and ease of use, they can get these newer products as well, but it will take more than us just talking about it to get it done. We need to be patient, and act as guides when that time comes, rather than demanding change overnight and expecting someone else to do the work.