Please Track Me and Personalize My Ads

In the tug of war between privacy and personalization, there can sometimes be a visceral reaction to learning that a company to whom you may not have explicitly granted permission to learn details about you actually has that information - even if it's public. One doesn't need to look any further than the much-maligned Spokeo, who in becoming a next-generation people search engine, practically has to defend its business with every other blog post, even as traffic continues to balloon. Now, news that Google is offering a Chrome extension to opt out of advertisers' tracking services has put the issue of personalization and "Do Not Track" back on the front page. Unfortunately, many people are likely to download it, thinking the result will ensure greater privacy, when in actuality all it does is ensure off-target ads with a crappy experience.

In my view, almost all advertising online is very poor. There are two reasons I find most advertising bad. The first is that it is interruptive, and the second is that it is irrelevant.

1. Interruptive ads quite simply get in the way and can prevent you from seeing what it is you want to see, when you want to see it. I despise pre-load pages on news sites and pre-roll before videos, thinking, for example, that watching breaking news on CNN should not be preceded with ads for prescription drugs, or that I want to see a full-screen ad for a network switch provider when trying to read Network Computing. Almost without exception, I don't.

2. Irrelevant ads are all those who fill up your screen with offers you would never accept, products you would never buy, and sheer randomness. The click-throughs for all the non-targeted messages that surround and cram their way into your content have got to be pretty poor. That's why many studies have said an extremely small minority of users are the ones clicking on all those stupid ads. The rest of us have simply turned on ad blindness.

This isn't to say advertising is dead and ineffective. It's not. Great commercials and campaigns are memorable and can stop us in our tracks - be it Apple commercials that are dissected and analyzed fifty ways, or notices from your favorite band that their latest album has gone on sale. The issue is that most of the time, advertisers know very little about you, aside from the content of the page you are currently viewing, and even when demographic data is out there, it's either inaccessible, or only allowed to be used in aggregate.

For the most part, this aggregate data does not accurately reflect you as an individual. Facebook and other social profiles potentially have a wealth of data about you on their networks, but it is not yet being fully utilized at the ad level to bring targeted messages to you, and this has to change. What I am looking for, instead of more head-in-the-sand responses to information gathering is to work with advertisers and give them as much of a headstart in getting to know me as they possibly can. I want my social profiles to be leveraged everywhere, and I beg, plead for somebody to get personalization right when it comes to ads.

By opting out of ad tracking models, all we are guaranteeing is that advertisers will be randomly posting their offers in a hope that you're the one in a million customer they are looking for. But the true win becomes when they can deliver for you a personalized message at the right time in the right context for you as an individual. We should not be running from this type of innovation, but instead embracing it.

For almost two years now, I've been asking ad companies to leverage my social profiles online. I am tired of getting singles ads, or mortgage ads or used car ads or any type of ads that don't match me as an individual. I've complained about low-quality offensive ads on sites just out to make a buck, embraced Twitter advertisements, assuming relevancy, and did the reverse for the poor Facebook ad experience. So whether you're like CNN.com and want to make me the poster child for the seeming end of privacy or not, my stance on this has been consistent for some time. I would be more than eager to put more data into the system to make it a better system, including all the ads everywhere I go.

So instead of embracing these ad blockers and cookie strippers, let's find a way to make the quality of the ads more personal, more relevant, and simply better overall. Please.

Spokeo Yanks Street Address Searches Over Privacy

As the debate over Facebook's recent moves around privacy (or lack thereof) continues to rage, one social search engine that has always lived on the edge of the rules is backing off a bit in one specific way that it lets people discover you based on your real world data. Spokeo, which I have been watching since 2007 and which has seen tremendous growth of late (which I highlighted last month), said today in a quick blog post that they are removing the ability to search within its database by street address.

One can easily see why the company's users found this particular feature a little unsettling, even if Spokeo is tapping into public records for all the data they have in store. Want to know more about your neighbor, or want to find the social network data of everyone on your street? Spokeo just made it a little harder.

With Spokeo's traffic continuing to boom, reaching more than a million unique visitors in March alone, according to Compete.com, awareness of the site is increasing. I even got a question about Spokeo today at the office - and as is typical, the question was one of unsettled concern, which won't be put at ease much with today's minor tweak.

Following last month's article, Harrison Tang, co-founder of Spokeo, sent me a note saying the company is "committed to build the best people search engine there is," adding, "We truly believe that the definition of a 'new technology' means breaking the norm. We understand that some people will love it, and others will not. All we can do is to try the best we can to accommodate everyone's needs, while remembering that we are on a mission to do something different."

Spokeo certainly is different. While Facebook is changing the way it approaches user data and is trending toward public, Spokeo has never been apologetic about its approach. If you are interested in removing your data from Spokeo, you can start on their privacy page - but as they state, "Spokeo does not originate data or publish user-generated content" and that data is already out there somewhere else.

Spokeo's E-mail and People Search Sees Skyrocket

Nearly a year after the company's shift away from aggregation into a full-fledged social mining tool and personal details engine, Spokeo has seen traffic and awareness dramatically spike in the last 30 days, following the release of Spokeo 4.0, which expanded the company's digital identities search to include name search, phone search, e-mail search and friends search. As people find their own listings in Spokeo, and are routinely surprised to learn how much data the site has on them - some of which they may not have known was public - word is spreading, leaving the small team "dazed" and "overwhelmed" at the traffic spike, which has made the site among the top 1,000 visited by U.S. Internet surfers, and has frequently seen the term "spokeo" among the top 100 search terms in Google in the last few weeks.

Spokeo, an eight-person strong team based in Pasadena, California, first gained my attention in the fall of 2007 as one of the very first to aggregate data from multiple social networks, with RSS feeds to boot, all in one place. But in the face of strong competition, as well as a general distaste with the world of Web 2.0, the company switched gears a year later, leading to the service they have become now, an occasionally controversial database with tons of personal data - much of it right, and some of it wrong.


In March, Spokeo quietly introduced version 4.0. Only two weeks later, as word of the new service spread virally, the company had to reiterate their promise to keep information private, after what had to be an assault from skeptical Web visitors. They explained how they were aggregating public information, and decried the often-used but not often described approach many have taken, called "privacy by obscurity".

Much of my Spokeo Profile is Correct, and Some Is Wrong

In a blog post on March 18th, they said:

"Many people believe in a concept called "privacy by obscurity", which argues that public information is private if you don’t know how to find it. This concept is flawed, however, because the fact you, yourself don’t know how to find such information does not mean that other people are equally clueless. What Spokeo does is something that many marketing and investigative firms have done for years and years, so this information has been available for quite some time, just without your knowledge!"

In the post, they committed to becoming "the best people search engine ever", and to continue making adjustments based on user feedback.

In my own tests of Spokeo, it absolutely proves solid in terms of discovering people, relationships, online profiles, and even locations, phone numbers and e-mails, if available. It correctly found my wife's maiden name, her place of residence and her brother and mother. It also correctly stated her age and zodiac sign. For me, Spokeo listed an old address, including apartment number, where I lived a decade ago, but otherwise, gained the data from Facebook and other sites to complete a fairly accurate profile. It also works extremely well for tracking down ex-girlfriends' current residences, marital status, and even their families. I'll just ask you to trust me, instead of providing you links on those...

So if you were in the people discovery business officially, or the stalking business informally, Spokeo absolutely has value. While the service had been kicking around for a year in its newest focus, it took version 4.0 to bring a tipping point. Seeing the spike in traffic for search terms related to Spokeo in my own blog traffic, and my younger sister bringing up the service on Facebook, I reached out to co-founder Harrison Tang to get an update. He confirmed tremendous growth and infrastructure expansion to take on the new load.

"I am not sure if our business is booming, but our traffic has definitely shot up in the past month," Harrison wrote me in an e-mail. "It's a pretty crazy experience, especially for a young 8-people team. We are overwhelmed by the response, and honestly, for the first 10 days after this traffic surge happened, we were just sitting there and looked dazed. We've now gathered ourselves, and we are trying our best to tackle each problem one-by-one."

Quantcast Shows Spokeo Spike Amid 4.0's Release

Regardless of what traffic stats engine you prefer, the data shows Spokeo jumping up and to the right. Alexa showed Spokeo outside the top 20,000 Web sites in mid-February, spiking to 746th overall in the United States as of yesterday. Meanwhile, even before the spike, Compete.com showed Spokeo at more than 600,000 unique visitors in February, up from about 100,000 the year before - and Quantcast data shows about 1.2 million visitors over the same period, tripling from January's numbers.

Alexa Also Shows Jump in Spokeo Traffic

The spikes have made the site unresponsive at times (See: Traffic Surge and Spokeo - the 60th Most Popular Search on Google from the Spokeo blog), and the company reported being inundated with e-mails and phone calls about the service late last month. They seem to be fending off all the inquiries from people excited and alarmed about just how much data is available online. (See also: The Truths vs. Myths about Spokeo)

"We (are) taking our time to add in new features to improve the site usability," Harrison said. "The first week was uneventful, and then all of the sudden, our traffic shot up to today's level. The only reason why we couldn't get more traffic is because we limit the number of connections to our servers to make sure they don't crash."

Having first reached the public eye in 2006, Spokeo is a little long in the tooth in terms of how some Web technologies are viewed. But they have shown the ability to adapt their business model to walk away from failure and find something that clearly has gotten incredible attention. They may not be the Valley darling that you see written about with regularity, but they look like they are on the verge of crossing the chasm. They even have a business model. Advanced searches and data discovery are available for monthly or annual fees. The 12-month account I purchased last June is still in effect, so I am looking into you guys.

What do you think I will find? Check it out at http://www.spokeo.com.

Spokeo Debuts Social Mining Tool Based on E-mail Addresses

Spokeo, having long since given up its initial plans to aggregate all your friends' activity alongside RSS feeds, in what could have been an interesting mashup of FriendFeed and Google Reader, has meandered ever closer to the darker side of Web, positioning itself as a tool to uncover details about people, most likely without their knowledge, and certainly without their implicit permission. The company took another step forward with this plan today, unveiling an "email research tool" that lets you search and find all the online activity associated with that address - crawling more than 40 networks.

If you remember your Spokeo history, back in October of 2008, the service declared Web 2.0 "over" and ditched its initial plans of posting trusted friends' updates with ads everywhere. So of course, this new research tool is not free.

To save you the trouble, I ponied up $35.40, the equivalent of $2.95 a month for 12 months (which automatically renews), to see what damage I could do by querying a few friends e-mail addresses. Luckily, I haven't had to pay per address, but can query as many as I like, to find what secrets they might be hiding.


Looking up one friend using Spokeo's research tool...

Results! Spokeo turns up Rob's activity around the Web.
For those friends I already follow on other aggregation services, the results were hardly eye-opening. The data was accurate for me, gathering results from every network from Friendster to Flickr, LinkedIn and a ton of stops in between. Spokeo also was able to dredge up the personal details of folks like Wayne Sutton, who was spotted on 16 different social networks.



Wayne, unsurprisingly, was found everywhere.
For friends not quite as active online, the service was not always as accurate. One friend of mine was falsely reported as a Hector Hernandez in one case, and in another case as Holly Hensley. Neither was the right profile. But for another, it found a Facebook profile I didn't know existed.


Spokeo found my blog posts, tweets and links to me.

Spokeo also found my registrations across networks.
Unlike some Web 2.0 companies who have either clung to broken or missing business models, or instead, closed their doors, Spokeo is trying to make a go of it, leveraging the technology that once looked up your friends, and now, for a fee, will look up anyone you like. They won't even know. After all - isn't it their own fault for putting that data out there?

Spokeo: Ad-based Service Was a Failure, Declares Web 2.0 "Over"

A year ago, Spokeo entered my view as a service that would let you follow all your friends' updates across multiple social networks. At the time, the idea that you could see all their updates, from MySpace to Friendster, as well as follow all your RSS feeds in one place, was quite compelling. But even then, I said, "there's always the question of "How will they make money?" Not surprisingly, their approach of building a large user base, and slapping ads all over the place, gathering the pennies where they fell, simply didn't scale.

Their timing was also impeccably poor, as just two weeks after my initial post, FriendFeed debuted, ushering in a new level of expectations for social following and engagement.

Tonight, in a blog post by Harrison Tang, the company's founder, he writes that "as most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over", recounting that the company "ran ads for 3 months in the beginning of 2008, and we quickly realized that even if we grow the traffic by 100 times, we still couldn’t cover our basic costs."

In what's a complete 180 from their initial free model open to all who grabbed beta invites, Spokeo has revamped, making itself a premium play, and has flipped the data on its head, being less about tracking friends, and instead, tailoring it toward HR professionals who want to do some detective work on potential hires. (See: www.spokeo.com/hr)

This new model actually falls further into what people often called "Spook-eo", as the service can dredge up items you might have thought had been long since tucked away in the Web's archives. But Spokeo, after having launched with big expectations, has clearly scaled back, and is facing a new reality head on, trying to salvage something. As Harrison wrote, "Advertisers aren’t dumb, and they won’t pay for ads that don’t work forever." I've been outspoken in my distaste for display ads on Web sites, and think they're not the solution to all that ails the Web. Even services and blog networks more mature than that of Spokeo are going to struggle as ad budgets dry up, and differentiation decreases.


An example of an update within Spokeo's new interface

If anything, Spokeo has never been one to shy away from questionable publicity. You might recall in the wake of Google's auto-friending debacle last December, Spokeo made no changes and held their ground. But I don't know that I was waiting for them to declare Web 2.0 "over". Maybe the "ads + free" model is on thin ice, but Web 2.0 is and was about more than that. Should be interesting to see if Spokeo can turn the corner with their new approach, and if HR professionals will come their way instead of relying solely on LinkedIn. I think they'll find this new road a struggle as well.

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.

Mergelab Comes to an Early Close, Shutting Down in Beta

Not every social aggregator is on the path to riches or fame and fortune. Even the best designed, thoroughly coordinated sites can find the push to grow a user base and generate community difficult, especially as the number of similar sites spirals ever higher, driving a need for differentiation and specialization.

With this background comes the news that Mergelab, who I helped first cover back in March, is shutting down completely by June 30, having never reached an open beta period.

Unlike other sites which operate with you as the anchor, asking you to set up the many Web services you use and then share your profile with friends, Mergelab asked instead for you to put in your contacts, and then, it would scour the Web and grab their updates, giving you their updates all in one place, much like Spokeo. Also unlike other sites, Mergelab had opted to not integrate comments or rating systems for shared content.

While the site's interface was clean and showed promise for some who would like a less-noisy area to keep updated on friends, Mergelab never got the chance to succeed on the public stage.

I talked with Alan Steele, one of Mergelab's three employees, by phone yesterday, and he helped paint a picture of how the team quickly learned that not only was the space crowded, but that venture capitalists were looking for more than a stand-alone site.


My Mergelab feed in actionAs he put it, VCs and investment bankers, upon hearing Mergelab's position, would quickly ask about two things: their Facebook application strategy, and how they would approach Open Social. He said, "There is so much investment in the social networking side of things. All the investors are pouring their energy and money in the space. Intellectually, I should have figured this out six months ago, but I didn't understand this all viscerally until recently."

It was just two months ago when Mergelab first became comfortable opening up and being covered on my blog. In the ensuing weeks, while focused on building a product, external pressures to gain revenue and pay employees grew too overbearing, and more profitable opportunities came up for two of Mergelab's team, making them reevaluate along the way.

"At every stage of building something like this, you have to ask where are we, what are our prospects, and should we keep doing this instead of other things," Steele said. "(Shutting down) was a rational decision on where we were and what our needs were."

Mergelab's strategy to scour the Web and find data on friends turned out to be a contributing factor to the stress of growing as well. With about 100 invitation-only beta users, Mergelab had seen tens of thousands of contacts imported, meaning the company's servers were tracking thousands of feeds, aggregating data, slicing it per user and presenting it in a simple way. As Steele said, "A small number of users can create large amounts of data. To scale up to an open beta, we would have to had fired up a significant farm of servers."

Looking at significant new expenditures ahead, combined with negligible revenue, and the prospect of other alternatives, Steele and team figured the right thing to do was to close early, rather than getting the site so far out ahead that more users would be affected. And despite the crowding in the space, with alternatives like SocialThing, FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Spokeo and others, Steele said even thinking about competition was the wrong step for the company, so early in its process.

"It's too early to think about destroying a competitor or going ahead of them. Instead, you have to focus on your differentiators and your business model," he said. "Competition wasn't a huge factor, because when you're at this stage, you can't spend too much time worrying about competition."

The official announcement of Mergelab's shutting down comes at noon today, with final closure on June 30th. The company's technology assets are now up for grabs to interested buyers.

Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed

Yesterday, it could be said that FriendFeed "tipped", as TechMeme's Gabe Rivera put it. Dozens of visible FriendFeed users reported getting an unprecedented swarm of subscriptions by new friends, and the site gained incredible exposure via comments on a number of high profile blogs, including a highly prominent role on TechMeme for virtually the entire day. In the wake of its dramatic rise, TechCrunch's Duncan Riley checked in with a quasi-analytic comment this morning, saying after a day's use, he doesn't get the service's value versus Spokeo or a host of others who "do exactly the same thing."

And to put it bluntly, he missed the entire point. TechCrunch is right a lot of the time, but not today. FriendFeed is not the exact same thing as any service out there, and there's no way that Duncan could have given the service its full due in his limited exposure to it.

FriendFeed has been described by different folks as a social Web lifestream, by others a Web services aggregator, or as a conversational platform. But it's not just one of these things - it's all of these things. There are a definitely a wide number of sites out there that let you share all your activity in one place, or to track friends' activity, but FriendFeed is the only one that lets you share items directly to the feed, elevate discussions through comments and show "likes" to highlight individual posts.

See my FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/louisgray

Like Twitter, FriendFeed enables users to sift from the best of the blogosphere to find their friends and peers. No two individuals' FriendFeed is exactly alike. And while I once questioned why anybody who wasn't a Web services junkie and RSS maven would join, I've seen users who want to be consumers of information instead of producers of information enjoy the service, solely for communicating with friends. And while the term "friend" can vary from service to service, FriendFeed has got the formula right. I can see quickly who likes the same items I do, who contributes to FriendFeed conversations that I do, and if in need of new friends, I can use FriendFeed's recommendation engine to suggest people my friends find interesting.

Looking at Duncan's stream on FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/duncanriley), I can see he imported his service and added friends, but he didn't participate. He didn't comment on other items. He didn't respond to others' comments. He didn't "Like" anything. He took a very passive approach and it's the interactivity of FriendFeed that sets the service apart.

Luckily, others besides Duncan get the FriendFeed story. Muhammad Saleem writes Where is the value? Connections or Conversations?, where he says conversations are more important - a big win for FriendFeed. Adam Ostrow of Mashable said yesterday that FriendFeed Crossed the Chasm, Frederic Lardinois of Last Podcast noted FriendFeed's Big Day, Dave Winer said FriendFeed Gets Interesting, Robert Scoble loves the service, and both Corvida of SheGeeks and Mark Evans gave me some of the credit or blame for yesterday's spikes. (See: Louis Gray Is The Culprit and What’s the Caramilk Secret?).

FriendFeed is winning not because it has smart folks behind it (though it does) or because it has more services supported than most competitors (which it does) or because it has a strong evangelist (though it does). FriendFeed is winning because it is interactive, it is architected intelligently, and the company listens to its users. Maybe Duncan will listen to this one.

Mergelab Emerges to Streamline Friends' Web Updates

In the second half of 2007, Jobster, a popular online recruiting and career site, was hit with news that a number of their executives, including the former CTO, Phillip Bogle, and Alan Steele, the company's fomer VP of Engineering, had left the company to forge their own secretive startup. The pair, joined by Mark Aiken, the company's chief architect, are now ready to unveil their site, Mergelab, which offers a new approach to the increasingly competitive world of Web activity aggregation. (See: Mergelab Company Blog: About Us)

Featuring one of the cleanest interfaces I've seen in this space (and I've seen my share), Mergelab automatically discovers photos (from Flickr and other sources), status updates (i.e. Twitter), blog posts and Amazon.com wishlists from individuals you add to your friend base. To pull down your data, it doesn't require friends to also be Mergelab users, and Mergelab makes it incredibly simple to drill down by user or by specific service, all while giving you a stream populated with friends' recent updates.


Mergelab, after getting one or more data points, gets the rest.
You can add friends to your Mergelab feed one by one, by entering a name and its associated e-mail or Web site address, or you can auto-discover links and news for contacts you have in popular e-mail accounts, including GMail, Yahoo! or Hotmail, similar to other services in the market. However, unlike Spokeo, Mergelab isn't targeted at condensing multiple social networks into one, and unlike FriendFeed, Mergelab isn't yet focused on enabling conversation through comments within a person's updates. Also, in contrast to LinkRiver, Mergelab is more about a person's direct activity, not so much about the items they choose to share.


In this example, I add Chris Brogan's blog and e-mail address to start.


Or, I can import my contacts from an e-mail account.

Now that we've gotten what Mergelab is not out of the way, it's worth highlighting how easily and cleanly the service proactively retrieves updates and adds them to your personal feed. I was able to add friends like Chris Brogan, Jason Kaneshiro, Steven Hodson and Tony Hung, simply by posting their e-mail address. Mergelab went out to do the hard work, and found their blogs, Twitter accounts and associated Amazon wish lists. This is a step beyond FriendFeed's "Imaginary Friend" feature, as Mergelab made the process automatic, not requiring me to post each of their individual IDs for each service.

The resulting Mergelab news feed has some interesting characteristics relative to other sites in this space.



First, as best displayed on co-founder Alan Steele's feed, you can see what type of services a user's friends most frequently use. In addition to Flickr, Twitter, blogs and Amazon, Alan's feed shows friends using LinkedIn, FaceBook, Jobster, iLike, YouTube, Shelfari and many others. Essentially, if it has a feed that's identifiable to an individual, it looks like Mergelab can pick it up.

Second, if consecutive updates are from a single individual, regardless of the service, it groups them under that individual's name. For example, if I enter a blog post, and then send a note to Twitter about it, both are shown under "Louis Gray". with a thin line separating my updates from others. In contrast, most other aggregators would break the activities apart, either by specific action or service, for example saying "Louis Gray posted a blog entry." and then "Louis Gray sent a message to Twitter."

Third, and very interesting in terms of keeping visitors on the site, you can choose any blog post from your friends, and read it within the Mergelab news feed, just by clicking [more]. When done reading, just click back on the blog headline and it collapses, returning you to the feed. It's still the RSS version from your selected feed, so you can't comment directly to the original site, but it's a good feature, nonetheless. (See the announcement here)

Fourth, you can choose how your feed is displayed, choosing to block Twitters from day one, or even to opt in to showing Google AdSense. But it's a little hard to figure out why one would opt in to Google ads, as they are disabled by default, unless you felt maybe you were doing Mergelab a favor in return for the service.

And fifth, Mergelab separates activity by calendar, putting an interesting real-world delimiter as you scroll through old updates, from "Today" to "Yesterday", "Sunday", etc. No other site I've seen of this nature even knows there is a clock at all aside from relative information (i.e. "11 minutes ago", "2 hours ago", etc.)

While Mergelab is just getting started, open by invitation only, it offers the opportunity to elegantly aggregate friends' updates without the noise of comments, liking and voting common with most social participation sites. It's also easy to add new subscribers from other users' feeds. If they have a friend you find interesting, all you need to do is subscribe to their news with a single click. Over time, as the service opens up, I could see myself adding my friends' friends into my feed, and being as interested in their minute by minute updates as I have been on FriendFeed, only in a quieter way.

Get your own sneak preview or request an invitation at www.mergelab.com.

LinkRiver Enters Life Streaming Fray, Focused on Link Blogs

If 2007 was all about Facebook and Twitter, 2008 is shaping up to be all about link blogs, and sharing what you're consuming on the Web with friends. The newest service to enter the picture is an intriguing entry, LinkRiver, which harnesses your RSS streams from multiple services, including Google Reader shared items, Twitter, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Bookmarks and others, and posts them to a single "Stream". As your friends join the service, or you choose to subscribed to other LinkRiver users, these small streams become a "River" of shared links, hence the name.

Seeded with a number of high profile "who's who" members of the blogosphere, from Marc Andreessen, Mathew Ingram and Robert Scoble to Andrew Chen, Nick Bradbury and Jeremy Zawodny, the site's early beta stage gives an excellent window into a simplified river of links from you and your peers. And as the service is all about sharing what you're doing and what you're interested in, you can "share" any item that flows through your river, or even use a handy Javascript tool to share any page on the Web directly to your own stream.

The brains behind the new service is Adam Stiles, who first gained a following on the Web due to his work on NetCaptor from 1999 to 2004, where among many other innovations, he developed an alternative, tabbed, browser interface for Internet Explorer, well before Microsoft adopted them. Since then, Adam developed an anti-phishing solution, licensed to AOL, and sold to MarkMonitor in 2006, where he remains today.

The focus for LinkRiver, as he wrote me in an e-mail on Tuesday, is "to be laser-focused on links and link blogs, breaking down the many silos (del.icio.us, Google Reader, Ma.gnolia) to let anyone share anything with anyone regardless of which services they use."

LinkRiver users, after being granted beta access (sign up here), can add any number of services to their stream, so long as the services support RSS. In my trying out the service, I added my Google Reader shared items, my Del.icio.us bookmarks, the blog's RSS feed, StumbleUpon activity and Twitter. While LinkRiver so far doesn't offer the ease of adding differing services as FriendFeed does today, copying and pasting a URL from any feed you generate really isn't all that difficult.


Not only can you generate your own stream, but LinkRiver enables you to follow anybody you want to, like Twitter for link blogs. Your river will get more busy with the more active people you follow, just like it does if you add more friends to your FriendFeed. In my last few weeks of trying out LinkRiver, not only have I added on Silicon Valley notables like Steve Rubel, Jason Calacanis, and FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, but fellow B-Listers MG Siegler and Frederic Lardinois. In fact, Adam was all too happy to show off the flexibility of his service by developing a "L33T Tech News River", highlighting all the shares from those authoring the "Elite Tech News" Reddit, which just crossed the 400 subscriber mark.

LinkRiver, at first glance, offers a clean, simple interface to sharing all relevant items in one place, and getting connected or following friends. The ability to "share" other shared items and calculate the total number of shares is unique to LinkRiver among life streaming sites, borrowing a page from other intriguing new services like ReadBurner. Also, with the ability to follow friends in this simple, river-like format, it trumps the folder-driven concept of Spokeo.


LinkRiver is launching without a vast array of interactive features, as FriendFeed has developed in its months of availability, but we can expect the service to continue to innovate. Comments to shared items are expected to be rolled out, dependent on user feedback, and you can already see the most popular items shared in the last day, week, month, or all-time.

If you would like to gain early access to LinkRiver, sign up to their beta program. If you were one of the link bloggers Adam first started with, you'll no doubt get near-instant access. If you would like to see my stream, you can start here: http://linkriver.com/louis.

Warning: Google Reader Congestion of Up to Five Hours

Recently, Google's gained a lot of good feeling in the blogosphere for how rapidly they are indexing blog posts as part of their universal search. But while their search side is getting quicker and quicker, it can sometimes be several hours before some posts make their way from being published to hitting Google Reader, with no apparent cause.

It's enough to make me think we need heavy traffic advisories, or warnings that show when a specific hub is congested, the way we now can with airports or freeways.

Not too long ago, Google Reader added a seemingly-small feature that showed when an item was published, and also when it hit Google Reader. Maybe they thought they were showing off how quickly they were indexed. But without a doubt, it'll likely only serve to highlight the times when they aren't getting there fast at all.


Wow - That Timestamp Gave You Away, Google
Today, my post on AssetBar coming to Twitter's aid took more than five and a half hours to reach Google Reader. In the meantime, I saw the post indexed by FriendFeed and AssetBar, added to Spokeo, and listed under my blog on Technorati. In parallel, a response post at The Last Podcast hit Google Reader several hours earlier, but my original post was nowhere to be found.

Finally, despite being posted at 11:21 a.m., Google Reader didn't post the piece until 4:53 p.m., a virtual eternity in the rapid fire blog world. In those five-plus hours, 37 different posts were added to TechMeme's river. In those five hours, I received 149 tweets on Twitter. In those five hours, my story went from what could consider to be "breaking" to "tired".

At times, it's been obvious to me that while Google Reader leads in offering a simplified user interface and ease of use, it lags other services badly in how quickly they fetch items. I often see stories hit the feed, and click through only to find out they already have dozens of comments - making me late to the conversation. Today, that gap was huge. Google didn't just show up late, they showed up last.

A Big Upgrade Day for Five Social Services

Sometimes, you can go weeks without news, and then seemingly, there's this spike of activity, when the industry snaps out of its temporary slumber and gets coding.

Today, in the space of a few hours, some of my favorite Web services all went into the shop for a tune-up and came out with some intriguing features. Of note, FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Spokeo, Shared Reader and LinkedIn have all made improvements worth highlighting.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn continues to add new features related to who is viewing your profile. I asked LinkedIn back in February to show how often your profile was visited, who did it, and who has similar profiles to yours, and the company is definitely moving in this direction, knocking off the first two in May, and today, interestingly letting you know what other profiles viewers of a specific individual also looked at. (The example on the right came when I viewed FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit.)

The company's official blog tonight hints at even more features of this sort coming, saying, "At LinkedIn, we believe in collective intelligence, and the team that brought you this feature ... is busy working on some even cooler stuff. Stay tuned."

We will, and we're looking forward to it. (My profile is here...)

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, also a good listener, added some great features that let you reduce some of the noise generated from verbose friends, through hiding specific services (like Twitter), muting comments on a specific entry, and, in a new twist, adding the ability to link to a specific item. While this feature was hinted at in a quick note from Paul Buchheit a few weeks ago, it's now been rolled out in style. (See: FriendFeed Options)

FriendFeed is doing a great job of upgrading through what's today still a spartan Google-like interface, managing to get a lot of data without a lot of clutter. The new features come up when you click the "Options" tag next to any item.

I had mentioned that one of my highest recommendations for FriendFeed in "10 Suggestions for FriendFeed" was to add the ability to block updates from specific services. As the blog post says, "does one of your friends Twitter way too often?" Well, the answer is yes. And rather than unsubscribe from that friend, I can just "untweet" them if I so choose.


The level of specificity in the "hiding options" is fantastic, determining that you can block specific services from specific users, and further delineate whether you want to block all such items, or just those without "Comments" or "Likes", which typically split the popular from the unpopular. (See above image)

Spokeo

Spokeo, the friend-focused feeds aggregator, well known for letting you find all the Web services your friends subscribe to and giving you a single point of access for their social network data, got some old media publicity, through Newsweek (See: Friends Under the Microscope), and in a blog post this evening, titled "What's Next?", Harrison hints and improved search features, and expanded privacy settings, which will honor private blog posts and photo albums.

ReadBurner

The day wouldn't be complete without a ReadBurner update. After my post this morning on how to share items to your Google Reader link blog without requiring subscriptions, Alexander Marktl was on the case immediately. As he posted in Share items directly through ReadBurner!, he saw the work-around as a great way to keep populating his fast-growing service.

Shared Reader

Meanwhile, in ReadBurner's wake, Shared Reader is back online and adding new features as well. Shared Reader is duplicating many of ReadBurner's efforts, aggregating the most-shared Google Reader items, but it's also added new pages for "Tags" (See the tag for "ReadBurner" or Twitter), and has added both Digg counts and Del.icio.us counts for every single shared feed item.

Of course, the most popular shared items are also from the same sources you commonly see dominating TechMeme or Digg, so what rises to the top... still rises to the top. Also, Shared Reader has been highlighting the most-active linkblogs, and sources for articles, on the site's front page. So far, Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins of Mashable is #1, and I'm trailing in the #2 position for active link blogging...

ReadBurner's Unplanned Big First Day Shows Real Promise

As I mentioned in this morning's post, "ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items", I was lucky enough to stumble upon a new service that seemingly had no named developer, and had no records of existing, as far as Google was concerned. It didn't even have a domain name! Yet, despite its relative obscurity, ReadBurner took its first 24 hours in the public eye and made the most of it. I'm excited to see where this could go, and now, we have more to the story.

The site's developer is Alexander Marktl, who hails from Vienna, Austria. (See his profile on Facebook, LinkedIn or FriendFeed)

While his day job is as a user experience designer for Qoove, an invoicing software service for small companies, Alexander had made ReadBurner his hobby, and it wasn't supposed to go live as quickly as it did, but as he writes in the site's new "About" page, "In the Internet you cannot hide anything that's leaked, so be it."

I can't help but feel partially responsible.


Today's most popular shared items, with sharers...

But while the morning's coverage was a surprise, he's taken the early launch as an opportunity to get serious. Today, ReadBurner got the domain name it truly deserves, at www.readburner.com. Alexander also quickly started a blog for the site at readburner.wordpress.com, and in the space of a few hours, did some amazing work, tidying up the Web site, removing feed item duplicates, and showing which people had shared specific items. Keep in mind Google Reader is just now figuring out how to do the last two, and this should be their sweet spot!

Make no mistake about it. The site is still in alpha. As it's just Alexander building the site, he admits he still has work to do to find a better way to present the content. But I think he's doing a pretty darn good job for one day's efforts. We're excited to see this, and are astounded that one guy, with one day's effort, from Vienna, Austria, can do what a few thousand engineers in Mountain View haven't done yet. It's got to be because Google doesn't want to do it.

Until Google gets their act together, we're delighted ReadBurner is here. With ReadBurner, AssetBar, FriendFeed and Spokeo out there, it's a real sign that innovation in this market is alive and well.

The Data Ownership Wars Are Heating Up

You would have to have been in a cave or without Web access today to have missed Robert Scoble's one-day forced exit from Facebook, initiated after he utilized some pre-release software from Plaxo to pull down his friends' contact data. Without wanting to pile on that already fatigued story, it's an interesting salvo in what will be a heated, prolonged, battle between all the service providers, and their users, over who should gain access to what data, who owns it, and what they should be allowed to do with it.

Facebook's reasoning was that his efforts violated the company's terms of service. It's all well and good to bring your data into the site, but don't you dare try and get it out. FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit, doing some TOS sleuthing of his own, asks in response, Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook? After all, Facebook users are all giving the site access to the same type of user information deemed so valuable, and just as in violation of the terms of services as Robert's stunt was.

And Facebook isn't alone in this yearning to import contacts from other services. LinkedIn does the same thing. So does Spokeo. You can synch up your Webmail contacts, or import a .vcf card from any application, like Microsoft Outlook or Apple's Address Book. But isn't this data yours? Shouldn't it be just as easy to get the data out as it was to get it in there in the first place?

This is bound to get even more intense in the coming year and beyond. Just look at what happened when the Google Reader team got a tad over-aggressive in deciding for you how you might want your shared link items distributed. There were calls from all corners of the Web for privacy and for Google to renounce the practice. With data being so easy to generate, and so portable, for different services and devices, and with so many companies' intellectual property effectively being from user generated content, they have a vested interest in keeping you and your data in, and the ability to export out.

With that being true, it's remarkable when some companies approach the issue in a much more transparent and beneficial way. Take Assetbar, for instance. In the company's product description, they write, "Don't worry, your data is yours. You can always delete everything and even export it as a .csv or XML file!" Assetbar knows that the data you brought in and you commented on, the data you shared and the private messages you created are yours.

I believe that users aren't going to stand for companies deciding just how they should be allowed to interact with their friends and their information. They are going to demand portability. They are going to demand transparency, and they are going to demand a rapid response when things go awry. That Facebook eventually got back to Robert today and restored his account is fine, but if he wasn't one of the highest-profile bloggers on the planet, there's no way it would have happened that quickly. This time, Facebook just may have done enough to save face. But there will be a next time, and a next, and a next, unless the policies change.

On the same wavelength, Scott Karp writes about:
The Coming War Over Data On The Web

10 Suggestions for FriendFeed

Over the last two months, I've become a FriendFeed addict. The innovative service essentially aggregates my activity from a diverse set of Web communities and presents it in one place. That defines the "feed". The "friend" half of their name refers to the fact I can subscribe to my friends, or other interesting people, and follow them as well. Needless to say, as the service gains in popularity, it has become increasingly useful, and I would love to see the following things happen for the site to get to the next level.

1) Add a small bio or profile to each person's individual feed page

As noted the other day, FriendFeed gives every user their own page, but doesn't have any background information - in effect, acting like the "anti-Facebook". I believe the service would have a lot to gain if I could optionally put in my company, my interests, my university, etc. While this would be yes, yet another profile, it would be tremendous to have the option to subscribe to all employees from a specific company or to subscribe to other alumni, for example.

2) Add the option to not see updates from particular services

By opting in to follow a FriendFeed user (like me), by default I see all of their updates, from their blog, from Twitter, Last.fm, when they add items to their Amazon Wish List, etc. But sometimes, finding out a person has posted 46 items to their Twitter just doesn't have value for me. I would like to be able to block any service I choose.

3) Given the above, add the option to not see specific updates from specific users

If I gained the option to block a service, I'd like to do it on a granular level, for instance blocking one person's Twitter feed, but opting in to another. For those people where I'd like to see their blog activity, and del.icio.us bookmarks, that doesn't necessarily mean I want to also learn what songs they like.

4) Add the option to follow a specific user's comments

FriendFeed recently added the option to make comments to specific updates, or to "Like" them. Often, I see comments from others I've subscribed to on those items. But I bet they're also likely making comments on feeds I'm not watching. I assume from the user's personalized feed page, I should have the option to "See this user's comments".

5) Add the option to make comments directly to the FriendFeed

Last week, FriendFeed had a special "Festivus" feature that let you air grievances directly onto the feed. A few of my grievances? "There's just not enough Festivus for the rest of us", "Paul Buchheit's blog should have a line at the top, saying, 'Dude, I invented friggin' GMail. Have you heard of it?' " and "Facebook applications involving vampires, winking, and throwing crap are completely useless."

But with the close of the holiday, this option disappeared. Obviously, FriendFeed has the capability to bring this back at any time, and those of us who saw its utility would like to see it return.

6) Add the option to share a private message for specific friends

Assetbar has the option to share specific URLs or messages to a subset of users by checking a "Private" box, and then selecting the recipients. Today, FriendFeed shares all activity with all users, without granularity. I would like the option to either send a specific comment to some people, or to specifically highlight an item from my feed to a subset of people.

7) Add a FriendFeed leaderboard

As silly as it seems, geeks like being measured and competing. It would be interesting for me to learn who the most commonly subscribed FriendFeed users are. It's likely there are some insightful people that I'm not familiar with, and this would be a good way to find them. While I could troll my own Subscriptions to see who they're subscribed to, one by one, or I could watch the Public Feed, a leaderboard would go a long way. Taking this a step further, the site could probably show us who shares the most total items, who Twitters the most, who shares the most items from Google Reader, etc.

8) Develop a Mobile Version of FriendFeed

I'm now occasionally sneaking peeks at FriendFeed using my Blackberry or my brand-new iPod Touch when I'm away from the laptop (as rare as that is), and while FriendFeed has an RSS feed, a Facebook app, and the ability to embed the application in iGoogle or my blog, there's no slimmed down version for my mobile phone for quick reading. With more and more people utilizing the mobile Web and surfing on their iPhones, the addition of this will be essential.

9) Customization of the Feed Page.

As with Google Reader's bare shared items page, the default feed on FriendFeed is simply text on a white background. While not every social network service has the option to "skin" a page, offering different looks for text or background colors, it's certainly nice to have. Spokeo offers this ability, offering users a range of colors, from red to orange, green, blue, purple and gray.

10) The Ability for Users to Suggest New Services

As I mentioned a few days ago, only Google allows customers to add an infinite number of services. With both FriendFeed and MyBlogLog, I simply select from a list they've already pre-determined. As there is undoubtedly a certain level of engineering required, I recognize it's not automatic, but I'd like to add my profile for Ballhype (e.g. Louis hyped 3 stories and made 42 game picks at Ballhype) and likely will find other services of note that have a common URL and user name path.

It can be hard to find fault with a service I already like as much as this one, and that's not how this post is intended. I just happen to want the service to be tremendously successful, and think you should be part of it.

If you're not already a FriendFeed user, you're certainly missing out. You can start with my feed here, or if you need a login, send me an e-mail, and I'll be happy to invite you.

For other suggestions on how to improve other popular products, see:

10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved

As Google Relents, Spokeo Holds Tight to Auto-Friending

While Google Reader noisily backed off yesterday, stemming the tide of privacy complaints, other services, like Spokeo, are not changing their policies of automatically linking friends' data from one service to another.

In a post called, "Why we don’t require friend requests", Harrison, an occasional commenter on this blog, says that while some are uncomfortable with the idea their activities on one site will be shared with friends on another site, the service is simply utilizing public content, and as you don't need to ask permission to subscribe to somebody's RSS feed reader, you shouldn't have to ask permission to view their public Flickr photos, view their public Amazon Wish List, or view their public ratings of songs on Pandora, for example.

(See earlier coverage: Spokeo Upgrades RSS and Friend Tracker, Invites Available and PlugandPlay Expo Highlight: Spokeo)

New services like Spokeo thrive on transparency. If I have a friend on MySpace or Friendster, Spokeo will crawl popular services and find if I can get updates from their blogs or other activity. This can be done without the knowledge of the person being crawled, which is why I've heard other people refer to the company as "Spook-eo", remarking how spooky it is they can dredge up things you thought you had hidden away.

But Harrison brings up another great point, saying "We don't want to bother your friends."

I've complained ad nauseum about the stupid requests we get every day from applications my friends install on Facebook, or the countless e-mails from services I won't use, like Plaxo and Shelfari. If Spokeo sent out an e-mail to each friend to ask for permission to access each service, it'd be a nightmare.

It all comes back to the same issue, essentially, which we covered yesterday. If you have activity on the Web which is tied back to a single e-mail address or identity, it is public. That can range from posts on message boards years ago, to Google Reader shared items, to your del.icio.us bookmarks. There's no question I've probably said some silly things out there in the past I'd like erased, but we will live by transparency and die by it. I'm glad Spokeo isn't wussing out and changing its policy.

Sending Me Spam Makes Us Friends, Right?

I don't mind the occasional note from someone I don't know (or know well) asking me to be friends on Facebook, or to connect on LinkedIn. Over time, I've gotten used to people wanting to pad their network stats through finding my e-mail and expecting us to act as if we're the best of character references. After all, with the value of what a "friend" means online going down seemingly by the day, after a while we'll have to find a new name for the "real world" version, and I don't think "BFF" is going to be it.

But now, new social networking sites, or even warmed-over old ones, are starting to fill my e-mail with absolute junk, under the guise of "real world" friends reaching out and begging me to share our similarities - to compare books I like with their own preferences, exchange favorite movie listings, or see if we've traveled to the same countries. In fact, in some cases, these little features or would-be Facebook apps are sometimes masquerading as full networks on their own, when that guise is frivolous.

The first is Plaxo Pulse - who jumped on Google's Open Social bandwagon last week to gain membership in the "Everybody Except Facebook" club. Since the network's roll-out, I've gotten dozen of Plaxo Pulse invites that have me begging to hit "Return to Sender", if only e-mail worked that way. In my opinion, LinkedIn won the business networking challenge years ago, and Plaxo never got past its spammy beginnings, so we're not going to be making that move any time soon.

Now, even more mind-numbingly, I'm starting to get alerts from people joining Shelfari, hoping I can share book rating and reviews, or even join book clubs. News to all who sent me those invites today - no frickin' way. If I wanted to join a group of folks to review books, I'd already be doing it on Amazon.com. Even worse, it looks like the service isn't wired well enough to tell the difference between a small invite list and spamming the planet. As one person wrote me, when I declined his invitation to Shelfari, "This was really embarrassing. I accidentally sent this one to everyone in my address book!"

With so many social networks out there now, it's become a full-time job for some just to keep current, let alone adding more and more services as they debut. Hence the rise of services like FriendFeed and Spokeo. But each of these social networks are chasing a finite number of heavy Internet users, and there's no question you'll see invite fatigue and eventual saturation. Barring the impossible, I've made my preferred selections, and I'm done. So if you really want to be my friend, stop spamming me. If you want to compare books or movie preferences, pick up the telephone and call. My number's on the top right of the blog.