50 Top Startups from 2010: Acquired, Pivoted or Still Going?

Editor's Note:

This is one of the longest posts I've made - in length and duration. It's said that one year in the life of a startup is the equivalent of dog years when compared to more established companies. So looking back to a post I made just over four years ago is the equivalent of a generation of startups, and a quick glance at each shows what you'd expect from a generation of change - with some names graduating to the big time, others running in place, and yet a good chunk who've disappeared altogether.

My goal with this June 2010 post was not to highlight the top private companies, as I withheld inclusion of many of the bigger companies, like Facebook and Twitter and Tesla. Instead, it was to show 50 I was following that had promise, leveraging a tool from Symbaloo. I highlighted 50 top startups on the Web. I was reminded of this effort when, at the conclusion of my kids' kindergarten year, many teachers featured computers with Symbaloo organizing their Web.

So let's go back to the list of fifty, and see what's happened. How many are on the verge of hitting the big time, how many are out of business, and how many got acquired?

Walking Down Fifty Top Startups of 2010

#1: Foursquare	Status: Independent
At the time of the post, there was no buzzier company than Foursquare. It was the undisputed leader of the checkin. It beat back competition from Facebook Places, and its places database became the backend of even more third party apps. But its Swarm app has seemed to fall flat among users, and nobody's quite sure where the company's headed.

#2: Spotify	Status: Independent
At the time of my post, Spotify hadn't even made it to the US. Now it has 1,000+ employees and is the clear market leader in streaming music, with Apple's Beats and others chasing. The company is looking to finish the music business revolution started by Napster more than a decade ago, and remains one of my favorites.

#3: Automattic	Status: Independent
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, isn't going anywhere. They've got about 250 employees, and have been acquiring small services like Intense Debate, instead of getting gobbled themselves. They haven't had a big exit like Tumblr, or become a small part of a big company, like Blogger at Google, but they're a lead option for publishing, from blogs to full-featured sites.

#4: Posterous	Status: Acquired by Twitter
Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and while they initially promised their Spaces service for private blogging would remain live, it was quickly killed, becoming yet another acquihire. They'd raised $10 million overall.

#5: Blippy

Status: Pivoted beyond recognition

The Blippy I liked didn't turn out how I had hoped. Its initial privacy bump with credit cards being revealed online came at an inconvenient time, right as they raised funding and were poised to come out of the gate strong. That, combined, with an audience skeptical of their focus on oversharing, meant they had to do the dreaded pivot. Phil Kaplan, cofounder of Blippy, left with momentum flagging. Now they're an app for animated GIFs.

#6: SlideShare	Status: Acquired by LinkedIn
In 2012, Slideshare was acquired by LinkedIn for a rumored $119 million. That'd probably be around $300 million in today's inflated market.

#7: Tumblr	Status: Acquired by Yahoo.
Following incredible traffic growth, Tumblr became the biggest acquisition made by Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, who has a tough task to transform a Web pioneer. The $1.1 billion deal in May of 2013 was huge in many ways.

#8 TweetDeck	Status: Acquired by Twitter.
The social networking client (which debuted here in 2008) was won by Twitter in a bid above $40 million, after a rumored buy from Ubermedia. TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth has since left Twitter, and is working in stealth on Gathers.

#9: Square	Status: Independent
The company, headed by Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter, made a stake for itself in an incredibly challenging market, and you can see their payment readers in small businesses or cabs. You could argue they got too big too fast, or margins are tight, but they've neither crashed nor graduated since the first report.

#10: Quora

Status: Independent

Quora is an odd duck. They were a Web darling at the end of 2010, founded by early Facebookers, and attracting engagement from a who's who of Silicon Valley. With one founder jetissoned, and the company now being a fifth wheel at Y Combinator, it's not sure whether they're the next Wikipedia or Yahoo! Answers. Nobody really questions the quality of the discussions, but everything else is questioned.

#11: CinchCast	Status: Pivoted beyond recognition
The audio Web publishing service I really liked, and used regularly, is vaporized, as was my published content. The shadows of that plan show a site focused on cloud-based conference calls and Web seminars. Meh.

#12: Sports Blog Nation

Status: Independent

If you don't remember the name Sports Blog Nation, I'll bet you've seen their content. This one time sports publishing empire expanded to what's now Vox Media, taking on smart writing for tech and much more. I've been lucky enough to see this happen in front of us over the last decade, and consider the founder of SB Nation, Tyler Bleszinski, a fellow A's fan, a good friend. If there are any questions about Vox Media, it's whether the content business can be valued in a world where it's so easy to make it for free.

#13: Bit.ly	Status: Independent.
Once Twitter switched to its own t.co URL shortener, bit.ly's perceived value for short link and analytics dropped dramatically. The company refocused on performance tracking and engagement, and is still plugging away, even if you don't hear about them daily, as you used to.

#14: my6sense	Status: Independent.
Months after my initial post, I expanded my time helping my6sense from consulting to something closer to full time as VP of Marketing. We launched a lot of cool tools, but there wasn't a big enough market (or funding) to make that dream a reality. So I left to Google, and the team refocused on mobile advertising. Founder Barak Hachamov is now working on Samba.me, a reactive video messaging play.

#15: Thing Labs	Status: Acquired by AOL.
Thing Labs, and the Brizzly team, were acquired by AOL after getting an offer in July of 2010, which I had incorrectly hypothesized was from Foursquare. Soon after, Brizzly was shut down, and the team splintered inside of AOL, to take up roost at Avocado, Dropbox and other places.

#16: Plancast	Status: Pivoted beyond recognition
Plancast was given a funeral and the post-mortem was written in early 2012. The social events sharing company just didn't take off. The site still exists, focused on planning and event management.

#17: Seesmic	Status: Acquired by Hootsuite.
After a bazillion pivots, and clear buddying up with Salesforce and Microsoft, the remnants of Seesmic were sold to Hootsuite in 2012. Founder Loic LeMeur seems to have retrenched into his annual conference, LeWeb.

#18: Lunch.com	Status: Independent.
Lunch.com, a community around relevant news and opinion, has been very quiet - but seems to have its diehard users, as many of these sites get. I'd bet it doesn't cost much to run, so there's no urgency to shut it down, but it's hard to predict a rebound.

#19: Gowalla	Status: Acquired by Facebook.
After years of chasing Foursquare's fumes, Gowalla's team waved the white flag, and was acquired by Facebook in December 2011.

#20: DropBox	Status: Independent.
DropBox is a consumer cloud giant, and has managed a significant position, even when faced with industry competition from practically all the big names: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce to name a few. The world awaits what will happen once DropBox goes public.

#21: Lazyfeed	Status: Dead
The lead developer made many intesting apps, including a Twitter and RSS mashup LazyScope, and Joint.im, but users haven't always followed. So Lazyfeed is gone.

#22: Hunch	Status: Acquired by eBay.
The consumer-focused personalization company pivoted to providing services for businesses, and looks like a good fit for the online auction giant.

#23: Ecademy	Status: Acquired by Sunzu
Ecademy was acquired by Sunzu in July of 2012, and the open business networking community's content was later vaporized. Most the original Ecademy team is now working on social media tactics with Scredible.

#24: Xobni	Status: Acquired by Yahoo!
Initially rumored to join Microsoft in 2008, the address book apps and plugins group was acquired by Yahoo! as part of Marissa Mayer's buying binge in the summer of 2013.

#25: Tweetmeme	Status: Dead.
Nik Halstead's smart consumer facing link site that pulled content from Twitter was sunset in 2012 in favor of analytics and more professional work, a move that made sense when Twitter reduced opportunities for consumer-facing developers.

#26: Feedly	Status: Independent.
Even if Google Reader is dead (a moment of silence, please), RSS isn't. Feedly was among the most obvious to benefit from the feed reader giant's closure. Nobody really asks how Feedly makes money or what its future plans are… just that it keep working and doing well. It does. As they debuted here, I'm always happy to hear good news from team Feedly.

#27: Klout	Status: Acquired by Lithium Technologies
I despise the idea of Klout. Independent arbiters giving you a score is distasteful. But that didn't stop the company from being famous (or infamous) and at least one other company deciding that their stockpile of data and faux reputation was worth paying for. So that happened. Congrats to the team.

#28: Justin.tv	Status: Independent
Justin.TV is still around, while most of the team(including Justin himself) now is working on Twitch.tv, a games streaming platform. Justin.TV recently told customers that videos will no longer be archived, since nobody was watching anyway. I have to assume most people at this point are watching YouTube.

#29: Amplify	Status: Dead
The Amplify we once knew, which encouraged you to build and share something between a tweet and a blog post, is gone - shutting down in February of 2012. Ironically, they pointed users to web clipping service Clipboard, which itself was shut down after being acquired by Salesforce.com a year or so later.

#30: OneRiot	Status: Acquired by Walmart Labs
After pivoting from the unfriendly world of real time search to the world of ad networks, OneRiot was picked up by the active, if not lofty, palace of Walmart Labs in September 2011.

#31: Lijit	Status: Acquired by Federated Media
Lijit has had its share of bumps over the last four years. The company was picked up by Federated Media in October 2011, and in early 2014, spun out when Federated Media sold off its content business in the beginning of this year. Now, Lijit claims they're back, under a new name. Lost? Me too.

#32: Echo	Status: Independent
Echo may first have been known as a comments competitor to Disqus and others, and was among the first to capture reactions from the real-time stream. They successfully moved to aid enterprise companies with adding social platforms and engagement with their platform. They're quietly executing - even if an endgame isn't obvious.

#33: MyLikes	Status: Independent
MyLikes bills itself as the largest content and advertising platform in the world and has a top-notch board. The social advertising platform raised just under $6 million in 2010, and isn't noisy about trumpeting its success. Side note: Robert Scoble and I were introduced as advisors in early 2010 when they raised seed funding, but things are quiet on that front.

#34: Outbrain	Status: Independent
Outbrain, like it or hate it, is most well know for its “more like this” or “you might also like this” type of content ads spread across the web. Their goal is more engagement on content, and they do a great job at it. They've raised nearly $100 million, with the last round being in 2013.

#35: DailyBooth	Status: Acquired by AirBnB
In a “you didn't see that coming” deal, the photo sharing site team behind DailyBooth ended up as an acquihire for dodgy rental service AirBnB in the summer of 2012. Meanwhile, DailyBooth is dead.

#36: Gist	Status: Acquired by Blackberry (RIM)
Gist, the one-time contacts manager, was acquired by Blackberry in early 2011. A little more than a year later, news came that Blackberry would shut down the original site. Oh well.

#37: Soluto	Status: Acquired by Asurion
The cloud service for remotely managing devices was acquired for more than $100 million by insurer Asurion in late 2013. Maybe not an exciting ending, but the checks still clear the bank - a good turn for $18 million funding by VCs.

#38: Tungle.me	Status: Acquired by Blackberry (RIM)
As with Gist, social calendaring app Tungle was acquired in early 2011 by Blackberry to improve their software suite.

#39: Qwotebook	Status: Dead
A fun idea for a quote repository and database, started by my good friend Drew Olanoff (and listing me as an advisor) didn't really get off the ground. Next time.

#40: Regator	Status: Independent
Blog and content directory Regator is still tracking blog trends and aggregating news from the Web. But I haven't heard a word from them in some time, and they're not talking.

#41: Untitled Startup	Status: Independent (with a new name)
Damon Cortesi's untitled startup ended up being Simply Measured. The social media analytics company now sports 159 employees and says it's used by more than ⅓ of the top 100 global brands. Hats off to you, Damon. I knew this was one to watch.

#42: Twazzup	Status: Independent (but mostly dead)
Twitter's battles with developers over web clients and search made some promising ventures less so over time. Founder Cyril Moutran lists his time at Twazzup as ending in 2011 on his LinkedIn profile, spending more time on his role with Feedly.

#43: The Cadmus	Status: Dead
The Cadmus is no longer being maintained, but the team behind the Twitter analysis tool is working on a host of new products under the name Anomaly Innovations in San Francisco.

#44: Branchr	Status: Dead
The one time text and image-based pay per click advertising company, who once claimed hundreds of millions of ads on tens of thousands of sites, seemingly vaporized. Web site? Gone. Twitter account? Dead. Huh.

#45: Graphic.ly	Status: Acquired by Blurb
Graphic.ly, the comic book enthusiasts platform, was integrated into Blurb earlier this year, having raised about $10 million in funding.

#46: BlockChalk	Status: Acquired by Klout
BlockChalk, a Twitter-centric community bulletin board, renamed itself BlockBoard, and was later turned into an acquihire by Klout (see above) in February 2012.

#47: FitBit

Status: Independent

FitBit, in my view, lit the fire of the wearable gadget revolution. They're the default fitness tracker, competing with Nike, Jawbone and others, and I've been a devout user for the better part of two years - even if I wasn't at time of this post in 2010. So far, they've managed to keep independent. I'd see them being picked up by a big company before seeing them go public, but if they did, I'd invest.

#48: RockMelt	Status: Acquired by Yahoo!
Yahoo acquired Rockmelt in 2013 and the products were shut down shortly afterward, despite rock star visibility at launch, and the support of Marc Andreesen.

#49: Live Intent	Status: Independent
LiveIntent is focused on email advertising and engagement. They've been at it since 2009. And they're hiring. But if I had to do this list again, they're probably not top of mind.

#50: Fabulis

Status: Pivoted beyond recognition

I loved Jason Goldberg's Socialmedian, and launched it here. Fabulis was his next attempt, a social network for gay men. I liked the idea, but wasn't the target market. When Fabulis pivoted into Fab.com, and had a meteoric rise for flash sales and other online commerce, I was again cheering on Jason from the sidelines, and root him on through the subsequent downturn. We'll see what happens with Fab, but Fabulis is most certainly dead.

Summary

I never claimed I was ranking these fifty startups as the most likely to succeed, or ranking them in order, although it's easy to see the first ten named were stronger than the last ten in my list. But when the list was posted and people questioned the longevity of these companies, I knew it would take time to bear it out. With four-plus year hindsight, we have those results.

Of the fifty companies named, 21 are independent, 19 were acquired, four pivoted, and six are dead. I expected more to be dead, outright, but it shows me many companies in search of an out found a willing corporate partner - be it another startup, or a large company, be it Blackberry, LinkedIn, Yahoo! or eBay. Tumblr sold for more than a billion, and Spotify is valued at much more. Others, no doubt, went for nothing except a handshake. Interestingly, none of these 50 were acquired by Google.

If I were to do this again, with hindsight, there'd be less focus on Twitter tools, but in 2010, one thought Twitter's platform was not just an interesting testbed, but potentially a big business. And I didn't even mention Uber.

Meanwhile, Symbaloo, who hosted my original list of fifty… they're still around - and found a niche.

Google's Blogger Introduces Mobile Templates In Beta

In the seemingly never-ending battle between Google's Blogger and Wordpress for the supreme full-featured blogging platform, Wordpress has long had a big lead in terms of presenting a high quality experience on mobile devices. While Blogger simply laid out the site's standard layout on your small screen, expecting you to pinch to zoom or read extremely tiny text, WordPress blog owners could smugly serve up simplified versions of their blog for readers on the go. Today, that gap is gone, as Blogger has introduced, in beta, the first mobile templates for the platform, which are drop dead simple to start using immediately.

Available in the Blogger In Draft version of the platform, users are prompted to "make your blog look great" on mobile devices. If you choose to optimize your feed for mobile, instead of showing the standard layout, simply turn them on and click "Yes." A handy QR code sits next to the decision if you would like to preview just how your site now looks on the mobile platform.

You Can Now Optimize Blogger for Mobile Devices

Just Click Yes, and You're Optimized. That's It!

As you can assume, with millions and millions of Android and iPhone devices out there, as well as scads of feature phones, mobile browsing of the Web is becoming an increasingly important and relevant part of a publisher's experience, so there is tremendous value to optimizing for the small screens as well as the big ones, and now Blogger users, myself included, are no longer on the outside looking in.



   
The Blogger Experience On Mobile Devices

Once enabled, visiting the blog URL lays out the recent stories in a simple vertical stack, where clicking the right arrow opens up a single post in the mobile view. At the footer of each post, you see applied labels, with the option to return "Home" to the main screen or go to an "Older Post". And should the reader prefer, they can click "View Web version" to see the original.

A Common Question to Non-Optimized Blogger Users

This update, much anticipated, much awaited, is absolutely welcome. Now I won't get grumpy users asking why I haven't optimized my site for mobile instead of RSS.

Blogger Intros Highly Customizable Template Designer

In what the company called Blogger's biggest announcement in several years, Google introduced a versatile template designer this morning that opens up a wide array of creative high-quality designs to the millions of users on the platform. The launch comes in the wake of Blogger's 10th anniversary, and raises the bar in terms of both appearance and ease of customization, guiding Blogger users to leverage new professionally designed themes with thousands of background images, and customization on layout and color themes. The combined package could mean the end of flat-looking Blogger templates, and gives potential WordPress users or switchers a serious alternative.

The new Blogger Template Designer, which launched on Blogger In Draft, features 15 new professional templates at introduction, with more to come, including anticipated user submissions, customized layouts with up to three columns, hundreds of background images via a partnership with iStockphoto, and the ability to change colors and fonts across the site. The package, which I will definitely be messing around with shortly, is an effort to give everyone their own personal look and feel that doesn't appear to be "cookie cutter".

Blogger's New Template Designer In Action

"How people look on the Web is really important, especially if it comes to publishing or blogging," said Siobhan Quinn, a product manager of Blogger at Google yesterday. "We wanted to empower people to create their own unique design, with tools that are extremely simple and powerful at the same time. We believe the blog is your blog, and you should be able to do anything you want with it."

Prior to this morning's launch, the vast majority of existing Blogger templates were created by or impacted by Google's then visual design lead Doug Bowman in 2005. With Doug now at Twitter for a year, and the templates looking somewhat stale, not to mention difficult to parse in HTML (trust me), it is high time for new designs.

Blogger Template Designer's Image Picker

Blogger Template Designer's Layout Tab

The introduction of a few dozen templates for Blogger wouldn't be that much of a big deal, except for the fact the company has leveraged the engineering talent at Google, and applied that to its new design options. As was explained yesterday, every template can be applied to every available site layout, and if users opt to tilt their blog toward one specific color theme or another, care is taken to make sure the text and images are not only readable, but look good.

Blogger Template Designer's Advanced Tab Options

This customization leverages a new concept of a "main color theme" which as Quinn explained, "lets you shift from one complementary set to another, with an infinite number of palettes in the color spectrum."

Blogger users who tap into these new designs will get the option to modify the existing templates through a Layout tab that lets them apply any template to any layout, including 8 body layouts and 3 footer layouts. You can even adjust the width of any column to get customization down to the pixel. As the sidebars are edited, they present different "drop regions" for Gadgets you may have installed. And if you want to get into the code, there is always the option to muck with the HTML to make it yours. Should you want to add a customized CSS file, you can add that as well, and even remove it later without seeing your blog fall apart, as Blogger uses your code to override their own, not deleting it outright.

With tens of millions of Blogger blogs out there, even if Google offered hundreds of pre-made templates, they would still be recognizable as Blogger hosted. Now, if Blogger users do revamp their blogs with the new Blogger Template Designer, they can take on the author's personality in a new way. Watch this space, as I may be leveraging them myself shortly.

Blogger Quietly Turns Ten, Plans Slew of Feature Upgrades

Sunday, August 23rd came and went without a peep from Google's Blogger Team, despite the service celebrating its tenth anniversary from its initial founding at Pyra Labs. Cynically, you might construe this silence as Google's not making the product a top priority, or maybe, you could even think that Blogger is ceding the visibility game to other challengers, such as WordPress. But that's far from the case. While WordPress might have a higher level of geek cred, Blogger has many more users, and the company has prepared a slew of updates that should roll out in the next few weeks - which will be welcomed. Don't expect a mass revamp on the level of a "2.0" moniker, but instead, many smaller iterations, either catching up to the competition, or taking advantage of the service's large installed base.

Interestingly, Blogger mentioned their upcoming 10-year mark back on June 18th, and again, this last week, on August 17th, when they said: "we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features..."

In a given day, I get the opportunity to publish to WordPress, TypePad and Blogger, assuming I update blogs here, at work, or make an addition to my mom's site - still going strong since 2004. Each has its unique differences and challenges. I know that by sticking with Blogger, I've gained some benefits with ease of publishing, and some downsides as advanced widgets make their way to other platforms first. But if I thought the platform were standing still, I'd have jumped, and I know it's not. I'm looking forward to the new releases, as they happen, and congratulate the team on their hitting the big 1-0. Expect more news soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialtwist's Widget Puts New Twist On Social Content Sharing

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

When reading a blog post, it's not uncommon that you will see a "Share This!" button at the bottom that you allows you to do such things as share it with friends or to publish it on your own blog or social media profile. A new Tell-a-Friend widget, produced by SocialTwist, aims to expand on that idea by enabling distribution to such communications platforms as instant messaging services and by allowing easy selection of contacts through e-mail and social networking address books. Here's how they describe it:

Unlike other sharing utilities, Tell-a-Friend stands unique to give you a single button which enables both one-to-one personal recommendations and social broadcasting. Tell-a-Friend is the only sharing widget to support Instant Messengers (chat) and personal messages to friends on social networks. That's clearly the best of word of mouth marketing rolled in one.

The idea is that the widget is easily installable, highly customizable, supports more than 80 services, and comes packed with analytics so that you can monitor your "viral campaigns." With support for all major instant messenger services and social media services spanning from Bebo to Yardbarker, it's hard to think of a place that you can't use Tell-a-Friend to send to. And the fact that Tell-a-Friend displays as a pop-up within the Web page that you're visiting makes for a seamless and easy user experience. I also really like the tabbed interface that allows you to easily select that type of service you'd like to use to distribute the content.


It's a pretty cool and timely service as it builds upon already available services and aims to please publishers who are always eager to enable the distribution of their content. And the ability to track the metrics of that distribution is potentially important in quantifying the ever elusive notion of "influence."

So if everything about the Tell-a-Friend widget makes sense and is looking good, I think the challenge will be to make it as easy as possible for publishers to understand and install. The Web site showcases a really cute and well produced explainer video:


But I was left wondering, "Where's the Tell-a-Friend widget?" I realized that I didn't know what it looked like! To be fair, a sample version of it is sitting in the middle of the homepage, but it took me some time to track it down.


And so if that leaves room for argument that I'm slow on the uptake, keep that in mind while I explain that I had some trouble getting the widget installed and running. I began by trying to install Tell-a-Friend on a Blogger site, figuring that would be the easiest way to test it out.

However, I couldn't get the widget to publish. I followed the step-by-step instructions that were provided, but could not get the widget to appear.


Even though there were several screenshots given to help me, there was no final screenshot showing the widget displayed on a "live website" so that publishers can see what the widget is supposed to look like on a published webpage. Translated, I did not see any written or visual instruction that tips the audience off that Tell-a-Friend is supposed to appear directly beneath the bottom of each article.

After trying to "hack" the Blogger template in a few different ways, I gave up and moved onto a WordPress site. That one proved to be successful, though it does take a little bit of technical knowhow to get it running: You have to download a .zip file with the widget code, FTP it to your WordPress plug-ins folder, and then go into your WP management tools to activate it.

Overall, I believe that there's a market for widgets that are truly useful to both publishers and Web site visitors, and Tell-a-Friend is certainly a part of that conversation.

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

You Can't Afford to Lose Mobile Readers

By Daniel J. Pritchett of Sharing at Work (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The continued market growth of iPhones, Netbooks, Blackberries and other tools make mobile browser support more and more important.  Here’s a quick thought experiment for you: If you’re running site analytics, look and see how many of your viewers run a resolution lower than 800x600.  Nearly 6% of all visitors to this site are using these low-resolution devices.  Most of them are using the 320x396 screen of the iPhone and iPod touch family.

Respected publisher and all-around media thinker Tim O’Reilly insists that the tipping point has come:  “… if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on.”  Google blogger Matt Cutts succinctly demonstrates the worst-case scenario in mobile browsing:  If you’ve got a flash-only site, those iPhone users are just going to surf around you without a second thought.  Can you afford to lose them?  Not for long.How your site could be frustrating mobile usersGreat, so you’re now committed to making your site as mobile friendly as possible!  You’ll need to understand some common frustrations mobile users encounter when viewing sites and how to deal with them.  I’ll list the ones I’ve picked up in my years of browsing on handheld devices:

Load time:  Many contemporary blogs include third-party (such as this site and my own) include sidebar widgets, third party commenting systems, animated subscriber counts, and plenty of other things that load off-site.  You’re also likely to see an image or three in every post because images are known to increase user interest in reading posts.

Readability: Pile all of the widgets into a layout that’s designed to be read at 1024x768 or higher and you’ll find that you’re seriously taxing the bandwidth and processing power of the average mobile phone.

Navigation: Each mobile device has its own sacrifices in terms of navigation.  The iPhone’s multitouch screen makes zooming and resizing easy but iPhone users sorely miss a real live tactile keyboard.  You won’t find many iPhone/iPod users willing to type out more than a few lines at a time.  Other phones like the T-Mobile G1 have real keyboards but no multitouch.  The lowest common denominator of phones (that are going to be browsing at all) is probably something like my Motorola RAZR.  The RAZR lets me flip through lo-fi pages using the equivalent of a five-key keyboard: up, down, left, right, enter.Start making your blog mobile friendly today!If you’re here to learn how to make your blog more mobile friendly, you’re in luck.  The relatively simple format of most blogs – one post at a time in chronological order – lends itself well to the task of adding a mobile layout.  Here are a few of the more common blogging platforms and tips on how to “mobile-ize” them:

• WordPress has a series of plugins that will ease the process for you.  I use MobilePress and WPTouch.  Beware that you’ll have trouble integrating WPTouch alongside the popular WP Super Cache plugin. 

• Blogger doesn’t have the plugin architecture WordPress does, so you’ll have to either work a lot harder or settle for less in terms of mobile supoport.  Intersquash will “iPhoneize” any site that has an RSS feed at no charge.  Here’s the Intersquashed iPhone-friendly version of LouisGray.com:  You’ll notice that Intersquash shows only the latest items on a feed.  This won’t help a mobile reader who comes to your site looking for an older article. 

• TypePad doesn’t seem to have built-in mobile browsing support but there are some tips on providing your own mobile-friendly stylesheets at TypePad support.  This knowledge base article is from early 2007 so there may be some updated information on this front. 

• Tumblr has a dead-simple “mobile” feature – access it by adding “/mobile” to the end of your tumblog’s URL.  Check out the mobile view on Fred Wilson’s tumblog for a nice example.  The only complaint I have about Tumblr’s mobile support is that it strips out any customization you’ve done, such as adding the ability to comment on your posts via DISQUS or IntenseDebate.

Where should we go next? Now that we’ve started on the road towards making our sites more mobile friendly, let’s plan out our next steps.  At my blog I’ve noticed that the MobilePress and WPTouch themes put a great face on my posts, but they ignore a lot of my favorite user convenience features.  My “Share this” widget and the “related posts you might enjoy” plug-in don’t appear for mobile browsers.  It would be great to get more of these features supported by the mobile “face” of our sites.  Maybe I can track down the authors of some of these plug-ins and see what we can do!

Perhaps more important is the question of providing accessibility to the disabled.  How easily will blind or deaf visitors be able to read your content and navigate your site?  They’ll likely come armed with a few tools of their own to aid them in reading your posts but they surely deserve at least as much of your time and consideration as do iPhone users.  I personally have not yet looked into this on my blog, but I feel I ought to make it my next task.  The World Wide Web consortium has a Web Accessibility Initiative to point us in the right direction.  Good luck, and thanks for reading!

Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work

Blogging's Future Is Both Consolidating and Expanding

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)


In the microblogging space, there are several players. Twitter is currently king and looks to dominate for quite some time. There are other Twitter-like sites around as well, like Plurk, Identi.ca, Rejaw and others. Identi.ca has not grown significantly since their initial push, but Plurk has shown some interesting growth lately. Then there are some tools that are more than just Twitter-like. Tools like Pownce, Jaiku and Tumblr allow users to share files and other media as well as short bursts of text. Tumblr has seen some very good growth over the past year, but the same cannot be said for Pownce or Jaiku, and of course, Pownce, following its acquisition by Six Apart earlier this week, is on its way to being shut down.

Does this mean there is no future for microblogging besides Twitter? Definitely not. Plurk has shown that a simple differentiating feature (the timeline) could entice people, albeit a smaller audience, to use one service over another. Other services, like Yammer and Presently, are taking a chance on the corporate microblogging audience. Open standards could change the playing field as well. If people can reply to people on another service, then there is more room for smaller services to grow.

So what about the blog platforms? Blogger, WordPress and TypePad seem to be doing well. TypePad released a new comment system and WordPress purchased one in IntenseDebate. In addition, TypePad parent SixApart just bought Pownce and its developers. We all know that microblogging is not going to kill blogging any time soon, but things are definitely changing. It looks like the blogging platforms are looking to integrate more social features and more simple sharing of information similar to Twitter or Tumblr. Long form blogging is not dead, but there is room for shorter form information sharing. The blog platforms are making moves to make this process simpler.

The acquisitions of the recent weeks are just the beginning.

I have a feeling that we will quickly see Pownce features in TypePad or other SixApart platforms. It is also likely that some of the features of I Want Sandy end up as part of Twitter, or even a subscription based feature. SixApart could do that as well with the various media sharing capabilities of Pownce. We will be seeing more sites and founders being acquired for the talent or even just a set of features. There will be a lot of consolidation over the coming year, and that is a good thing. Choices and competition are good, but too many choices gets confusing.

More importantly, the features that are getting added could likely change the way we look at these services. What if Twitter had a subscription service that included features from I Want Sandy and even tighter integration with Remember The Milk? That would absolutely be something that people would pay for. If you have a blog, would you pay money for group management and file sharing capabilities? Granted, you can cobble together the same type of service with a few blog plugins or even various third party Twitter applications, but would you pay $5 per month for the simple and integrated features? I have a feeling that many people would, enough to fund monthly costs at the minimum.

We currently have the base services and platforms that the future will be built on. So start thinking about what you could build on top of Twitter the platform. Start thinking about the features that could be integrated into your blog platform to really make it into a community. What value can be provided on top of the basic services we have now?

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Disqus' API Launch Extends Commenting Possibilities

At Blog World Expo last week, I said that those services which "played well with others" would do better in a collaborative, cooperative Web 2.0 landscape over those that instead held tight to their walled gardens (See tweet from @drewolanoff.) It is through the launch of an API and extensive developer activity that services like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter have grown, often at the expense of those that didn't. Tonight, the popular Web commenting service Disqus joined the fray, launching a full public API.

The API (outlined here) lets services and tools write custom comment import and export tools, or to develop unique plug-ins for their platform. (see the announcement and coverage by The Inquisitr.)

Disqus comments are already among the most portable, enabling syndication through RSS, and into lifestreaming applications of all sorts. But what I found most interesting was the note on custom plugins for customer platforms. What's to stop developers from making a custom Disqus-enabled engine that is secure, and for the enterprise, essentially the comments equivalent of Yammer (versus Twitter)? What I see happening is that many of the social tools we may be using for community and entertainment in our world are now on the verge of making it to the enterprise. With an open development platform, and possibly, the idea to customize the comments engine for services that have enterprise capabilities, this could be one way to break on through to the other side, so to speak.

This week's big commenting news was Automattic buying up Intense Debate, something many thought would make Disqus' world a whole lot harder. Tonight's announcement shows they aren't sitting still and playing the part of victim. I'm eager to see the new services and tools that get developed as a result of being Disqus-powered.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #5: Bringing Comments Back to Your Blog

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, the bookmarklet, advanced search, and how to integrate with Google Talk. Today, I'm going to talk about how you can bring comments from FriendFeed to your blog, capturing the conversation.

While FriendFeed has gained considerable praise from many corners of the tech blogosphere, one place where they have been maligned is in how conversations that take place on the site aren't immediately ported back to the original blog. These "fragmented conversations" have flared up as major issues every couple of weeks, and while I've personally never had a problem with it, and have actually seen comments on my own site grow, even as I've used FriendFeed, many are hoping to keep control over the conversation and keep it on their site.

While FriendFeed hasn't yet introduced an initiative to defragment these conversations, in their place, independent developers have designed tools that will bring comments from FriendFeed back to blogs, including Wordpress, and as of today, Blogger, both the "new" and the "old" versions of Blogger. You can even see the brand-new tool for Blogger live on my site already.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your WordPress Blog

WordPress has gained a lot of traction in the blogosphere, in part due to its wide library of available third-party plug-ins. Only a day after FriendFeed released its API, the entrepreneurial Glenn Saven debuted announced a plug-in that pulls back comments and likes from FriendFeed and displays them on your site.

As he writes on the plug-in page:

"The plugin ads a template tag called , which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside "the loop" so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.
Unzip the plugin into your plugins folder & activate it. You’ll then need to go into the options (or settings if you’re running WP2.5) and click on FriendFeed. Put your FriendFeed nickname in & save and you’re done with the setup. All the other settings in there are optional. You then need to place on your template file(s)."

The result is a two-way box that shows how many comments and likes an item received, as well as the avatars of the poster, and has the option to add a comment yourself, back to FriendFeed, assuming you know your user name and API key. You can see it installed at my fellow B-List blogger, Steven Hodson's site, at WinExtra. The below screenshot is from his post Some thoughts on a Microsoft after Gates.



Not having installed WordPress myself and tested this, I'm no expert, but from what I've seen from Steven's site and Duncan Riley's work at The Inquisitr, it works very well.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your Blogger Blog

The argument could be made that Blogger's not the most robust platform out there. It certainly hasn't been the most reliable. And its lacking plug-in architecture has made it a less-preferred choice among the with-it digerati. And for the last three months, as WordPress users have enjoyed Glenn Slaven's solution, we Blogger users have been in the dark. Until now.

Pat Hawks posted code using Yahoo! Pipes, which delivers a lightweight JavaScript based solution, bringing FriendFeed comments back to the originating blog. See: FriendFeed Comments in Blogger.

Rather than copy the full code from Pat, I recommend you visit his page if this is important to you. Still being on the "old" Blogger, I saved my Blogger template (just in case), added the new code, just by adding the JavaScript code after where Blogger concludes comments, and before my already customized Disqus code. Now, when people (including me) comment on my FriendFeed items, I can see the comments here as well, as well as those from Disqus. It's now one great big conversation.



This, for me, is an exciting development. On May 25th, I offered a $250 bounty for the first solution good enough to integrate into my blog that shows both FriendFeed likes and comments. Now, Pat has delivered on comments. So... should I pay up now, or wait for likes to be supported as well? Either way, this is a great add.

On another solution? TypePad, for example?

I don't yet know of a way to get FriendFeed comments back to TypePad, the third leg of the blogging platform triumvirate. If somebody does have a solution, or is in the process, I'd love to hear about it.

So what comes next?

I expect this issue of comment fragmentation to fade away pretty quickly. It might not be long until there are solutions that support commenters, aggregators and publishers, all in one. But until then, these new ways to bring FriendFeed comments to your blog are a great solution. Leave a comment here (or on FriendFeed) if you've got one of these solutions running. I'd love to see it.