OneTrueFan Unveils Fan Engagement Analytics for Blogs

Even if you run the most sophisticated visitor analytics software, connecting impersonal IP address data and browsing history to real people can be a challenge. Only through external activity on social networks, or through blog comments can you get a real picture of the people who take in your content. OneTrueFan, which I've happily sported on this blog practically since the product's launch, continues to try and eliminate the mystery, helping content providers connect with their community, and for the visitors, find others with similar interests across the Web. In that vein, OneTrueFan has introduced detailed fan engagement analytics that go a step beyond traditional visit statistics, helping you get an idea of which of your regular readers' took in a specific story, or shared it downstream. In time, you can get a great picture of what stories resonate with which readers, making the impersonal personal.

OneTrueFan Fan Analytics for ReadWriteWeb

On launch of the new fan engagement analytics, OneTrueFan has also unveiled a list of the top 25 tech sites as measured by fan engagement - giving you a look into these site's live statistics, day over day changes, and a live scrolling of all the content being shared downstream.

Top Pages Visited by LouisGray.com Fans In the Last Day

The stats, which you can preview for these top 25 properties, highlight the most popular pages in the last 24 hours, along with avatars of these top fans who engaged with the content, and shows which sites are popular with that site's fans. Unsurprisingly, especially in the world of tech, you can see many people are fans of multiple sources. For those running the OneTrueFan bar, you can dive deeper into the data, seeing impressions, fan reach, new users, shares and even data on how the bar is being used or hidden.

Sites Popular With LouisGray.com Readers and Top Pages

OneTrueFan is a lot more than a simple bar that shows you the top ten fans of the site. I make the bar a must install on all my browsers on all my computers to help me share content downstream and track my browsing history. There's value to the viewer, and now, increasing value to the content provider who gets a real live look in to what their most engaged fans are doing with site content.

For months, I've gotten questions about why I've given OneTrueFan such prominent space on this site, all free of charge. I've done it not just because I like the team, who brought MyBlogLog to the world seemingly ages ago, but because I like seeing real faces and encouraging sharing of my content. The world may be built on ones and zeros, but it doesn't have to look like it.

If you have a blog, I would encourage you to add their bar and start getting real fan analytics. If you browse the Web, check out the browser extension, and find out what people like you have been sharing. It's a thinly spread social network for the entire Internet. OneTrueFan, as always, is here: http://www.onetruefan.com/

OneTrueFan Shifts Horizontal Network to Horizontal Bar

I've long extolled the virtues of OneTrueFan, the logical successor to the soon-to-be deceased MyBlogLog, spawned by the latter's founders, racking up one's visits around the Web, duking out top positions like Foursquare mayorships. I eagerly added code to my blog as one of the few active widgets I run to get a better sense of the frequent visitors and encourage community. Meanwhile, as I experiment, the network is growing up a bit and making changes. You can see one of those changes with the house ads running on my site, which you can trust I get no pennies for, and a refocus that takes the activity within the OneTrueFan network and makes it live completely within the bottom bar - an extension to most popular browsers, instead of on the company's Web site.

Unsurprisingly, initial feedback on OneTrueFan made the casual comparisons to Foursquare, along with some questions around security - where one had to trade off a third party watching what sites you visit and how frequently for a few badges and informal competitions with friends and strangers. I enjoy seeing people post they've taken the OneTrueFan badge of one Web site or another to Twitter, and the occasional emails I receive saying someone or another has kicked me off the top spot of one of my former top hangouts. But OneTrueFan isn't toying with being a silly gimmick for a sliver of early adopter Web centrists. It's very possibly creating a horizontal social network across the Web for disparate sites to understand their loyal visitors, and for those visitors to learn what stories people like them find intriguing through share history.

OTF Leaderboards from Across the Web

As you can see from the browser bar below, or if you have the extension installed yourself (and I wish you would), OneTrueFan has provided more transparency in how the service assigns points. The site speaks to wanting to encourage sharing of good content to other social networks, and that absolutely comes into play - meaning a popular Twitter or Facebook user who gets a lot of clicks can pass by a regular, but more reserved, visitor who regularly stops by each day.

The OTF Bar Encourages Sharing and Shows Community

OneTrueFan spells out the point system as follows:

• Daily Site Visits are 10 points apiece, per domain or subdomain
• Each page view adds 1 point.
• Each page share adds 5 points per network.
• Each clickthrough on a share gets 1 more point.

Simply stated, if I visit a Web site today, share a story and get 10 click throughs, I could get a possible 25 points, good enough to start creeping up the leaderboard. For small sites that don't get much traffic from early adopters, this could be a top position, but for more addicting and popular networks, it could take hundreds to appear in the top visitors chart. For example, one needs 221 points to be atop ESPN.com, and 260 to lead CNN, but the top LinkedIn score has tallied more than 1,100. Good luck being top dog there.

The OTF Bar on Hacker News and Checking Chris Yeh's Share History

I spoke with company cofounder Eric Marcoullier last week about the move to push more content into the bar and away from the destination site, and he said it was a move to encourage publishers to implement the bar themselves, as I have. Rather than push users to their site, the activity remains on the active domain. As the world knows, we have more than enough destination sites masquerading as niche social networks, and OneTrueFan (or OTF as we often call it), is trying to do something different, which brings value to bloggers, publishers and the occasional visitors alike.

The OneTrueFan site Still Shows Player History

Winning the OTF badge from a site doesn't yet create the prestige that racking up badges and mayorships does on everyone's favorite location based services, but it could, especially as more people get comfortable with sharing their browsing behavior. After all, you can easily tell the bar to stop tracking your visits to specific domains, and all known adult sites are automatically hidden. I've taken to putting the OTF bar on all browsers I use on all machines, and it's one of the few extensions I've embraced. In a world where a lot of activity can be siloed, or where we rely on teh sharing buttons that come from the publisher to get the best content downstream, it's nice to take the OTF with me and get credit for sharing the best stuff to my networks. You can get your bar at http://www.onetruefan.com.

OneTrueFan Reaches Second Base With New Site & Badges

My favorite and most useful browser extension in the world is OneTrueFan. The Web history tracker and sharing tool which launched at the end of September has been a must-install for me on any browser that I use (including Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Rockmelt) - letting me gauge my own Web usage history against my peers, share interesting stories to downstream social sites, and in a fun way, discover what sites my friends frequent that I don't, while also learning which sites we have a mutual affinity for. The site just revamped with a major refresh of its offering, helping to quickly surface user statistics, history, fanned sites, and like many services, earned badges.

OneTrueFan's data on my Web browsing history is exhaustive. Just as Blippy tracks my expenditures, and Foursquare tracks my check-ins from place to place, OneTrueFan shows the sites I visit, rewarding me with little alerts saying I've reached the "Level 2" patch on one site, or "earned the Second Base" patch on another. And as my own statistics are increasing, so to is the data on the sites themselves. OneTrueFan's latest Web revamp now clearly displays site leaderboards and activity streams for specific domains (Examples: Twitter and Google).

Three Individuals' OneTrueFan Statistics

While people once acted surprised at tracking people's habits in spending and traveling with the other services, it might seem curious why other friends' Web activity would be of interest to me. But I've been intrigued to see how much other people rely on tech and business publications more than I would have anticipated, or find lesser-known interests, as I find friends who view sports sites, play fantasy football, or share hobbies foreign to me.

One Of My Fanned Sites, Google, With My Stats

As a site owner (see this blog's OTF page), I can now see who else is a fan of the site, having accrued 20 points or more, and who is sharing content from the site. The resulting leaderboard is reminiscent of MyBlogLog, and it should be, as it shares a similar pedigree.

My Pied Piper Patches on OneTrueFan

Like Foursquare, some of the Patches earnable on OneTrueFan are not entirely clear as to their origin, but they will no doubt be in high demand from active users. I've somehow managed 23 "Pied Piper" patches, presumably from leading people back to a site, and 7 "Commitment" patches, which come from visiting a site for 30 consecutive days, or so I'm told. And I've gotten to Second Base with 89 separate domains. Cool, I think.

If you're not using OneTrueFan, I recommend in the strongest terms that you do. And if you're worried about privacy, just remember you can hide any activity you want at any time. Besides, there's always Incognito Mode. Find the new OneTrueFan at http://www.onetruefan.com.

I Am Your Web site's One True Fan (And I Can Prove It)

Although it's only been a little more than three years since Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog, the company behind the once-popular visitor tracker for blogs and Web sites, on the Web, it's practically an eternity. It's well known that internal politics and bad management of the acquisition pretty much squeezed the life out of the product and the company's founders quickly scattered to bigger and better things. But the desire to bring visitors and blogs together never left the mind of Eric Marcoullier, who learned from the MyBlogLog flameout, and today, unveiled a new visitor tracking service - with some fun gaming elements, called OneTrueFan. I've been using it for weeks, and as you can imagine, like any other conquest that involves competition and hours of sitting in front of a computer monitor, I'm hooked, and in many cases, I'm "winning"... proving myself to be the One True Fan of a Web site (or at least the one who has clicked through more pages than anybody else).

The idea of OneTrueFan is pretty simple. To participate, you install a browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox or Safari) and a browser bar will track your Web visits. Each time you go to a new domain or subdomain, you get 10 points. For each visit to a subsequent new page, you get an additional point. So, for example, if you visit six different pages, you have 15 total points. Once you reach 20 points on a domain, you are a fan. If you have more points than any other fan, you are the One True Fan.

My OneTrueFan Page With History, Connections, Badges

Being the OneTrueFan (or OTF) of an obscure domain isn't anything to brag about, for sure. But there's no question, in my mind, that popular Web properties that see regular daily visits are going to see serious competition between people who are visiting frequently and sharing content from those pages. Sharing content from One True Fan to Facebook, Twitter, Delicious or other properties is an additional 5 points. Already, in the alpha period, I have seen people battle daily at owning the title of OTF for specific Web sites - and if you want, you can get an e-mail notification if you either take the title from somebody, or lose it yourself. And each time you start a new browser session, the OneTrueFan bar will alert you that a transfer has taken place.

I am now the OneTrueFan of GigaOm!

As with Foursquare and other social gaming services, the immediate benefits of a product like OneTrueFan are not perfectly clear. I don't get any monetary reward for being the OTF of both Twitter and Facebook at the same time (as I have it now), and all sites are equal, so you don't get any more points for being OTF of Google than you do by being OTF of my blog (sorry, I've got that one too). But OTF starts immediately with badges and leaderboards, showing the top visitors to any domain, the history of any user, including sites won and lost, their top friends (by total points), how many sites they are fans of, and how many OTF titles they hold.

Sites I am OTF of, and top Friends' Scores

For people permanently on the Web, like myself or Brad Feld, one can capture multiple site titles a day, and lifetime scores are already well above 20,000. That may be an unfair advantage to those who browse more casually, or use RSS readers to pull content from different sites.

So you might be wondering about privacy? Will OneTrueFan give away your addiction to fantasy football, anime, or pornography? That's up to you. You can hide any particular visit, or block any domain from OneTrueFan, and the bar will no longer track your visits to that site. And if you're worried that OneTrueFan is tracking your Web site history in the first place, well, that's just what it does, so if you don't like it, don't use it.

One good thing about OneTrueFan, in addition to the amusing gameplay, and learning what other people visit the same sites you do, is that you don't need yet another login and you don't have to recreate your social graph. OTF taps into your Twitter account and connects you automatically to your friends on that network - saving you a tedious chore of finding people as much as you are finding new content.

I have been using the site for several weeks, and admit I check in on the stats to see how people are doing and what they are sharing and viewing. They unveiled officially today at TC Disrupt, predictably being compared to Foursquare. But this is one location based app that you can use without ever having to leave your house.

You can find OneTrueFan at http://www.onetruefan.com.

Getting Started With Google Friend Connect

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


Back in May, Google announced their plans to launch Friend Connect. Friend Connect allows website owners to incorporate social aspects and elements onto their sites. It's powered by OpenSocial, which was developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. In a nutshell, OpenSocial is basically a set of common APIs used for building and distributing social applications and their data across many websites. This data includes profile information, friends information, activities and so forth. You can find more about the OpenSocial platform here.

This post is a brief tutorial on the features and the implementation of Friend Connect.

Getting started:


Installation is very easy, and takes less then 5 minutes. First head over to the Google's Friend Connect website. Click the "Set up a new site" link to begin.

Give Google some basic info:

The next step is pretty much self explanatory. Input your site name, and the url of your website.

FTP two files to your server:

This step involves downloading two html files to your desktop. FTP those two files to your web server, and make sure they are placed in the root folder of your domain. This is important if you are going to use Friend Connect on a sub directory of your site, I.E /blog.

Test your setup:

This will test to see if you uploaded the html files correctly. Now that you are almost finished, it's time to add and customize your gadgets.

Now for the social part, adding gadgets to your site:

The code you generate for the gadgets are html. It's a simple copy and paste process. There are two types of widgets available, social and members.

Members gadget: This allows visitors to join your site, sign in and out, see other members, and invite other people to join your site. A screen shot of the members gadget is shown below. You can also see and interact with the gadget live on the sidebar of my blog.

The other option is a sign in gadget pictured below. This is a lighter version of the members gadget without images. It's meant for small spaces and allows visitors to join your site, sign in and out, and invite others to become members.

Clicking a member's profile image on the member gadget will display their Google service profile. You can also add that person as a friend, and once they accept the request, you will able to see each other across all Friend Connect sites. You also have the option of blocking users.

Clicking the invite link brings up the email sharing aspect of the gadget. You can share a website with your Gmail contacts by clicking the Google tab. It's not limited to Gmail contacts, any email address will work. You can also add a quick, personalized note with the share.

The share tab takes it a step further up the social ladder by allowing you to post the website to Facebook, Myspace or Del.icio.us. You can also submit the site to Digg, Fark, Mixx, Live Spaces and StumbleUpon. In its current state it needs more social networks and services to plug into. Integrating other services, should be a top priority for Google. There are currently a dozen or so other free social sharing type services on the market that offer more of a selection than Friend Connect in its current state.

Social gadgets: This area is kind of sparse at the moment. There are only two worthy gadgets that are of any real social use and benefit. One is a wall gadget and the other is a review/rate gadget.Bwana, from bwana.org has all of these gadgets integrated live on his blog. Head over to his site to see them in action. The screen shots below were captured from his blog.

Wall gadget:This allows people to post comments, and also links to (YouTube) videos on your site. It's customizable and makes for a great shout out box.



Review/Rate gadget: This gadget can be used in a variety of ways. It lets people rate your content via a simple starring system. You can use this gadget to rate any type of content, videos, photos, etc. Comments can also be posted on it. This can also be used numerous times on a single page, or on separate pages of your site. I believe this will become widely used by bloggers, once they catch onto it. This is something I will be experimenting with on future blog postings.

Games? No just lame!

Being that the service just officially launched, it would of been nice for them to include at least a variety of already developed widgets other than the two mentioned above. All we get for now is the Lame Game. Hey, they named it that, not me, but what else could you really call it? Its only purpose is to allow your friends to go click crazy. This is done by clicking as often as they can which leads to trying to increase their score vs. their friends and other site members.

Lets touch on the admin area:

There is not a lot of back end features to report. I expected to see some type of url referral reporting function, similar to that offered by MyBlogLog. Where members came from, what they viewed, what they clicked, this is what I want to see. Google are you listening?

Clicking the reports link will show you two simple graphs. The first displays total membership over time, and the second displays new members over time.

Clicking the moderate posts will allow you to delete any obscenities. You can also choose to have all posts be approved before they are posted. Wall posts are immediately visible to anyone by default.

Clicking the manage members link allows you to do the normal friending functions. View members Google service profiles, add members, block members, and you can also view their friends as well. You also have the ability to grant administrative privileges to specific members.

Wrapping it all up, and some additional thoughts:

In regards to it being a MyBlogLog killer. I would seriously consider totally removing the MyBlogLog widget off my blog in favor of Friend Connect. Of course that's under two circumstances. The first is to show me the most recent visitors to my site, as does the MyBlogLog widget. The second is to give me url referral reporting and additional stats on where readers came from, what they viewed and so forth. For now, both of these widgets compliment each other fine, and although similar in function, in some aspects are two totally different beasts.

The product is still rough around the edges, as to be expected with any beta. It's a step in the right direction for data portability, and that's a plus in my book. I'm fascinated with the direction and possibility that this could lead to in helping us better connect with members in our social graph and abroad. The fact that Google is behind it, could be a blessing or a curse. Now of course getting the other players in the space, such as Facebook, to play nice, is a whole different ball game.

Will Google's Friend Connect and Facebook Connect initiatives be a progressive step toward evolving social networking or will it be just another passing fad? I believe the former, not the latter.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Strands Lifestreaming Beta High On Potential and Filters

There's no question the lifestreaming space has just exploded over the last year, with services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed leading the way, accompanied by MyBlogLog, SocialThing, Profilactic and others. Practically all services aggregate your social activity across networks and let you display it in one area, with the option to follow friends and interact with their activity. One of the newest in this space is Strands, which bills itself as a destination site for people to discover new recommended items around the Web from friends. The service, currently in private beta, has some very interesting features, but also has a lot of room to go to supplant one of the bigger names.


As with the many other alternatives out there, you start your activity on Strands by adding your many services around the Web, starting with the most well-known services, like Twitter, Google Reader and Delicious, but the service also supports several other sites not commonly found elsewhere, including Webshots, BlockBuster, Hype Machine and Meneame.


When you add these services, as with other competitors, Strands creates a feed for you, which can then be subscribed to by other users.

As you currently can only get into Strands by being invited, you will start out with at least one friend, but you can find more users by seeing who your friends follow, or by clicking the people button at the top of the page. Strands, as far as I know, has the best array of ways to discover new followers, showing you who is the most followed, who's new to the site, or who is the top by a specific category, like Blogs, Images, Music or Bookmarks. Each person's profile is displayed with their avatar, gender, age and location. You can also search by name or e-mail.

Once you have subscribed to a few people, you can see their activity on Strands' Home screen, which displays, chronologically, the item posted, who added it, the service it originated from. You can then take action on those items with a simple Like or Dislike, indicated by thumbs up or thumbs down, you can comment on the item, click a pushpin to indicate an item is saved, or click an arrow to forward the item to those who follow you. (The equivalent of resharing on FriendFeed)

The interface for Strands if both cluttered and spartan at the same time, if that makes any sense.

Unlike FriendFeed, which offers a clean white background, soft gray text for comments, but little else, except a top navigation bar, Strands offers a wide array of ways to sift through the noise and find specific items. You can filter your feed by people who just follow you, you can show your own feed, or show subgroups of your friends. For example, I started a group called "Digerati", that includes Chris Brogan, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Corvida and others on the site.

You can also filter by category, including Blogs & Notes, Images, Music, Movies & TV, Bookmarks and others. FriendFeed offers this functionality by service by clicking on the service icon, but it's not spelled out, nor does it group similar services (like Delicious and Magnolia for instance). On top of filters, you also have "Hot Posts" which show items popular with your friends, marked by likes and comments, and the ability to have granularity, so you don't share all services with all people. For example, you may want to share some items with friends, but not family or coworkers.

The many different options on Strands make it useful to find things fast, but it also shoehorns the Home feed into a small center position. Arguably, this is the most important part of the site, so its power is greatly diminished. Strands also doesn't auto-refresh, asking you to click a refresh icon on the page, or in your browser. This gives the site more of a static feeling than other sites which do autorefresh, where it seems new data is constantly coming in.

Also, like most good services today, Strands offers a desktop alternative to the Web site with an Adobe AIR application, which keeps you updated on your friends' activity and watches your iTunes to capture what you're listening to, as well as a bookmarklet.

Does the world need another lifestreaming service? With so many on the market, it's interesting to see what aspects one site will get right or what they'll miss. Strands doesn't have the feeling of community today that FriendFeed does, given its newness and obscurity. And like many engineering-driven services, it can be seen at times to have sacrificed the user experience for more features. I've said previously that "the feature war is the wrong war" for social media, which needs to find new ways to connect people, their likes and their activity. Strands does a good job letting me drill down into specific areas, or in helping find new folks, but I'm hoping they can reduce some of the site clutter, and make the site really come to life.

As the service is in private beta, I have a very small number of invites, so leave your e-mail in the comments if you are interested, and I'll see what I can do.

DISCLOSURE: I was introduced to Strands by Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, who started there in July. Drew is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position. While Drew gave me an account to test Strands, he did not request an article, nor review this in any way.

MyBlogLog/FriendFeed Integration Fouling Up Google Vanity Searches

Practically every blogger performs regular "vanity searches" to see if they were mentioned on the Web. Some use Technorati, others, Google Blog Search, or Twitter Search. And Google has made it very easy to get alerted via e-mail if your name has been mentioned out in the blogosphere. But recent efforts by MyBlogLog's "New With Me" feature, integrated with FriendFeed, have resulted in an overflow of useless updates, whether you're searching for yourself, or anybody else active on both sites, adding a flood of noise to what used to be actionable search results.


My pre-saved Google Blog Search watches the Web for me.
In February, MyBlogLog made a big move into the lifestreaming space, by doing more than tabulating fans of your content and tagging your blog with keywords, but letting you see your friends' activity around the Web, including their participation on Twitter, Last.fm, Digg and other social sites.

In May, no doubt in response to users' requests, MyBlogLog added the ability to show FriendFeed comments and likes in their lifestream, adding the popular social aggregator as a supported service.

That sounded good on the surface. Now, by going to my MyBlogLog page, I can see activity from my "friends" on FriendFeed, as well as the other previously-supported services.


My Google Blog Search Alerts Stopped Being Useful
But then, Google Blog Search started indexing MyBlogLog's updates as equal to actual individual blog entries. This meant I started to get results in vanity searches, and those sent by e-mail for things as mundane as "Louis Gray commented" or "Louis Gray listened to a track". And it wasn't just my activity, but others. Every few hours, I would get e-mail reporting, "Spullara commented", or "Corvida shared an item", for example. If they were commenting on my items or sharing my items on FriendFeed, MyBlogLog heard about it, and told Google, who then told me.


MyBlogLog Delivers FriendFeed Activity to Google Blog Search.
Clearly, this isn't the end of the world. But it's messy, and it's taken what used to be a fairly rock-solid service, in Google Blog Search and Alerts and made it a lot less useable. While I have no doubts that I'm overweighted with this problem, thanks to being more active and visible on FriendFeed, others I tested showed the same issues, including the aforementioned Corvida, Chris Pirillo, Duncan Riley, and Sarah Perez, for example.

Some people have openly expressed concern about how services are auto-populating and aggregating outside activity, creating an echo effect. This is one of the clearest examples of unintended consequences. So what should happen? Should Google Blog Search remove MyBlogLog results, or should MyBlogLog remove FriendFeed entries? Which service should make the first move if any move is needed?

Hitting Last.fm's 'Love' Button Is Getting Me Back In Tune

I'm an unrepentant music-ophile. Through a combination of CD purchases and burns and iTunes downloads, my music library is a swollen 35 Gigabytes, featuring almost 6,000 songs, which would take more than three weeks to listen to straight through. As a result, it's no surprise there are a ton of great tunes that I haven't gotten to in a while, as I'm not constantly listening, as unfortunate as that is. But recently, I've been using Last.fm a lot more frequently, letting me broadcast my playlist to friends who follow me, and letting them know what I'm listening to, making it a more social, and fun, experience.


A Pet Shop Boys discussion from Thursday on FriendFeed
I have been a longtime Last.fm user, having first sent my data to the service back in 2005. Prior to that, I was also a happy user of MusicMobs, starting in 2004, which merged into Last.fm in November of last year. Both sites collectively offered a great way for me to catalog my listening history, find out which artists and songs I hit up most frequently, and discover new, similar, artists.


Another discussion on FriendFeed re: DJ Tiesto
But as fun as statistics are, it's just a new form of navel gazing, and I never really delved into finding "friends" and seeing who my "neighbors" were on the site. But now that Last.fm is integrated into the various lifestreaming applications out there, like MyBlogLog, and especially FriendFeed, I'm having a good time going through artists I've neglected, and hitting the "Love" button on Last.fm's desktop application, which tells people which songs I'm particularly enjoying.

What I've found is that you never know just who might share the same interests. For some reason, I've had people say they're surprised I listen to such electronic music and techno as DJ Tiesto, Underworld, Depeche Mode, Paul Van Dyk and Armin Van Buuren. I've also taken people back a decade or two by listening to classics from the Pet Shop Boys, and Information Society.


Last.fm tells me my top artists
Through Last.fm, I've found that Jeremiah Owyang is a Tiesto fan, that Steven Hodson has fantastic musical tastes, introducing me to Mind In a Box, which led me to Edge of Dawn, and that Kevin Fox likes Pet Shop Boys. Although I have to admit that in the last few months, I haven't had the laptop pumping out iTunes as much as it used to, largely due to not wanting to unnecessarily wake up the twins, sharing my tastes via Last.fm is getting me back into the music in a big way.

You can find me on Last.fm here:
http://www.last.fm/user/louismg

You can see my "Loved" tracks on FriendFeed here:
http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=lastfm

FriendBinder Throws Hat In LifeStreaming Ring

Back in March, I bumped into rumors of FriendBinder, which, like other lifestreaming offerings including MyBlogLog, Plaxo Pulse, Profilactic, LetsProve and FriendFeed, claimed to offer a single destination to keep track of what your friends are doing on many different social networks. At the time, the author, Richard Cunningham, let me know the service was more than a year into development and would be coming soon. The service debuted in beta in the last week, and while it works, it reminds me more of Spokeo than the aforementioned apps, pulling contacts I have at different networks and displaying them in one unified stream.

Getting started with FriendBinder is relatively easy. The first step is to register which social networks you currently use, by entering your ID. Options supported at beta launch include YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.FM and the more generic News/Blog subscriptions, which asks for an RSS feed.

The second step is to add your friends into FriendBinder, by clicking the "Add All Friends" option next to each network. FriendBinder will then login to your external accounts, find your friends, and troll for updates.

When complete, you have what's called your "FriendStream", which, as anticipated, shows the latest updates in chronological order, the top item being the most recent.


As once was said about FriendFeed, if you don't make any changes to your preferences, FriendBinder is dominated by Twitter. The sheer volume of updates by friends in Twitter had me looking around to see just what other updates were contributing to the stream. I did find the occasional Digg or Del.icio.us update, but they were the exception rather than the rule.


Interestingly, one wrinkle offered by FriendBinder is the ability to rate the importance of one network's updates above another, from 1 star to 5, with 3 being the default. This is called the "interest level". I can also, by network, tag one friend's updates as more important than those from somebody else, by manually clicking the number of stars. (Frederic of The Last Podcast noted this in his review as well)


This lets you sort your best friends from lesser contacts by filtering your stream by 5 stars, 4 stars, and so on.

You can also parse the FriendBinder stream by service, showing only Del.icio.us updates, only Digg updates, etc. Given the overwhelming noise coming via Twitter, first clicking Networks and then picking a single service just might be the best way to cut through the noise.

FriendBinder does exactly what it promised to do - give one place to find all updates from friends. But that opens up more questions. Then what? The Web already has quite a few sites that serve to aggregate all friends' activities, and the ones that are gaining traction are those (read: FriendFeed) which enable a follow-on action. FriendBinder data streams are siloed, such that I won't ever interact with another FriendBinder user. I can't respond via Twitter from within the site. I can't add comments to Facebook or Flickr photos within the site. I can't post directly to the site, and wouldn't need to, considering nobody else will see it.

By registering with FriendBinder, and entering my network details, I know what I've done is set off yet another farm of servers to continue slaving away, and requesting my contacts' information, even if I never login again, just like when I registered for Iminta, Profilactic, Spokeo, Mergelab, Assetbar, Shyftr, Plaxo and any other site aiming to do the hard work for me when I'm away. As discussed last week, this strain on the infrastructure can eventually force sites to reduce features or even close, so I'm already feeling a bit guilty for making FriendBinder work on my behalf. Hopefully, FriendBinder can step up to demand, should it grow, and add new interactive features that would help it bridge the gap from being yet another lifestreaming site to one who can innovate and differentiate to make it a destination site.

TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.

Despite continued issues around the company's business model, TiVo fans are among the most loyal. As with Apple, I, and many others like me, believe that TiVo offers a superior user experience that has changed my life for the good. I can't imagine being forced to watch TV without a TiVo, finding myself tied down to the scheduling whims of network executives, and seeing commercial after commercial on products I'll never buy. But while some offline products have found a voice on the Web, TiVo is conspicuously absent.

With the right amount of focus, TiVo could leverage their fan base and deliver a TV-centric social network and social networking features, where you could compare season passes, engage with fellow TV watchers, display when you had added a show to your season pass, or one-time recording, and even show if you hadn't yet watched an episode, warning your friends not to spill the beans on a season finale, if you hadn't caught up.

Today, TiVo's Web site lets you manage your TiVo(s) online, letting you remotely add shows, should the need hit you. TiVo Central online also shows aggregate statistics, including Most-Recorded Shows, and WishList rankings for Directors and Actors. It's nice, but it's not nearly enough.

What I would like is:

1. To create a TiVo-centric social network that lets me synchronize my profile with my TiVo units and find similar users.

My profile would, by default, import all season passes and wishlists on my claimed TiVo units, but allow me to "hide" specific items from public view. (Not necessarily for content, mind you, but because my wife doesn't 100% share my interests)

Using technology TiVo already has, I would gain recommendations for new TV shows and actors, based on my selections. Not only would I be able to see previews of the TV shows from within the social network, but I would also be able to find a compatibility rating between my preferences and other TiVo social network users.

Given TiVo's popularity, I would be able to search the social network not just for TV show compatibility, but also by distance from me, or other characteristics, as broad or as narrow as the other profiles would be willing to share. Does this sound a little too much like a dating service? I'm sure there's a little less harm in getting together with a person of the opposite gender to catch a So You Think You Can Dance marathon than most things, so sure, have at it. But more usefully, the social network would also have:

Central bulletin boards for each network television show and the most popular cable channels, as well as, by default, the top 100 most popular actors or directors, with social network users having the option to create new topics.

During the "live" showings of each show, the bulletin boards would have a "live" chat room features as well, so if you were daring enough to watch the show live, you could communicate with other viewers in real time, from anywhere.

2. To create customizable Tivo-centric RSS feeds to populate other social media sites.

Today, I have the ability to show you when I add items to my Amazon.com Wish List. I even have the option to show you when I purchase items from Apple's iTunes Music Store (See: Webomatica). But I can't use RSS to tell you when I add a new show to my Season Pass, or find a new actor or director interesting. Today, that data is siloed.


How My Tivo RSS Feed Would Add to My Lifestream
For many people, what you watch on television is just as definitive for who you are as the Web sites you visit, the sports teams you root for, and the restaurants you like. If I like CSI and Law and Order: SVU, as do you, but I also happen to watch Bones, but you hadn't heard of it, maybe thanks to my watching it, you would check it out.

I want to add TiVo updates I make on the unit or via the Web available as an option to my FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, on Plaxo Pulse or other services. I want the ability to make the details as narrow or as broad as possible, showing either that I've added a show, or, for some, that I've watched a show.

3. To have the option to access and export all my statistics.

Some people may be up in arms about TiVo aggregating user data, but not me. I want to know if I'm watching more TV this year than I did last year. I want to know the percentage of shows I watch live or those I watch on the DVR. I want to know if I wait longer to watch some shows than others, or if I watch more TiVo recordings in aggregate on Thursday than I did on Tuesday. I want to see, in total, how much time I've saved by fast-forwarding through commercials. (I first wrote about this last February: Dear Tivo, Please Track and Report My Data)

What if you could show how many hours you spend per year watching shows that start with "Law and Order"? What if you could then use all these statistics to compare with friends within your social network (See: #1)? TiVo could, with the viewers' permission, make a "couch potato" leaderboard for those who watched the most TV, the most from a single network, the most comedies or the most episodes of a specific show. I could find out if I'm the most reliable viewer of ER in Sunnyvale, California, or within 50 miles from my house.

I should be able to export my statistics in aggregate, to my blog, or any site.

4. To have widgets to display on my blog.

Like those from Last.fm, I want to have a widget that shows the top shows I watched in the last 7 or 30 days. I want to have a widget that shows my status, including what I might be currently watching, or if my TiVo is idle, like widgets for AOL instant messenger do.

To date, TiVo has not leveraged the power of their brand or their community on the Web. While there are sites out there dedicated to TiVo, like TiVoCommunity.com, they are unofficial, and they don't use the immense amount of data that TiVo has at its remote control to connect viewers and fans. I am more than ready to connect my online activity with my TiVo activity, and it is astounding to me that TiVo hasn't made an attempt to take on the new world of the Web the way they once aggressively took on the old world of stuffy network TV executives.

With social networks being so easy to create, and with RSS and XML being extremely customizable, the talent behind the world's best DVR should be able to unpause and get this started.