New FriendFeed Fans Group Started on Facebook

With FriendFeed rapidly gaining momentum, there's no question the service is accruing its share of fans, myself included. With that in mind, I created a new group on Facebook to provide a platform for FriendFeed Fans to get together, share links, suggestions and help promote this next generation distributed broadcast medium.

You can find the new group here: Facebook: FriendFeed Fans

In case you thought I was just about the only one enamored with FriendFeed, check out the following links:

Alex Gawley:
I Love FriendFeed
Charles Hudson:
FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse - FriendFeed Is My Preference and it Reminds Me of Twitter
ParisLemon:
You Should Probably Be Using FriendFeed

If you're not on FriendFeed yet, you should be. See my feed and sign up.
If you're not on Facebook, more power to you. But if you are, then join FriendFeed Fans today.

Why Can't Del.icio.us Show Most Popular Bookmarks by URL?

I'm something of a late or reluctant adopter of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking tool absorbed into Yahoo! at the end of 2005. While I've had an account for years, I didn't really find any use for the service, keeping my bookmarks to myself.

But now, with the ability to post items into my FriendFeed by adding a bookmark to del.icio.us, combined with the ability to track the number of times my own posts have been bookmarked, thanks to FeedBurner, I've been using the service a bit more. By adding items to del.icio.us, I'm not just saving a bookmark for me, but for all those who follow me on FriendFeed.

Also, I occasionally add some of my more popular posts to del.icio.us, not out of narcissism, but out of curiosity, to learn who else has done the same. After all, for some reason, I can't do a search by URL within del.icio.us, but can only find this data by self-bookmarking, and clicking the "saved by 1 other person" link, revealing the fan and how they tagged the item.

And this... is broken.

Del.icio.us is very much a repository based on tagging. It's easy to search the entire site for specific tags, like friendfeed, facebook, or techcrunch, but it's evasively difficult to search on a specific URL and find out the most popular posts from a specific blog or Web site.


A screen capture of some bookmarked posts from louisgray.com
When I search for the phrase "louisgray.com" in del.icio.us, I get some clues, but that's only if the person who bookmarked included the URL in the title of the bookmark itself. For example, I can see 19 saved the story 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader, while 12 saved Facebook Google Reader App Rebrands As Feedheads, and 16 bookmarked Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control. And five people have bookmarked louisgray.com itself. But if I referred to the posts by their headlines without louisgray.com, my search results would be useless.

I'm curious to see what Del.icio.us has planned for site improvements in 2008, as the service hasn't changed much of late. Back on September 6th, the company said:

"Fresh news from deep within Tag Mountain: we just launched an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign we’ve been working on for the past few months. We’ve refreshed the UI, built an entirely new (and faster) search engine, and added numerous improvements based on your feedback."

Since then, the silence has been deafening. The company's blog hasn't been updated in more than three months, and at the turn of the calendar year, one del.icio.us representative wrote in the comments, "Probably a couple months or so, give or take a few weeks…ish. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re working hard."

So... who knows. Maybe it'll be Spring. Maybe not. And it's not clear if the updated search engine will solve this issue of finding bookmarks by URL, or offering the ability to rank by most popular, most recent, or finding out which users most often like your posts. All of these would be useful tools for bloggers out there who want to see where their content fits in the social scheme of things.

Friday Night Notes for January 4, 2008

* The Bay Area storms that have made headlines had very little impact here on the Peninsula. We had power all day, didn't see much wind, and the rain was not remarkable. As I write this, things outside are absolutely still.

* I added a quick static page on louisgray.com to highlight what I'm doing online, from the various services I use. Friendfeed.com does an excellent job of this, but I wanted to mirror the activity here as well. (See: louisgray.com: Friendfeed)

* Assetbar is quietly upgrading its services. I checked in on those guys this evening and was delighted to see they've gotten their new Participatory Media Platform (PMP) to work in Safari. There are a lot of "under the hood" items I've seen updated as well, as they prepare for public launch soon.

* I keep finding great new blogs and adding them to Google Reader. We're up to more than 250 individual feeds, even as I've trimmed down a number of search-related feeds that were mere filler. Some of the best recent adds include Charles Hudson, High Scalability and Andrew Chen.

* Site traffic continues to be well ahead of anything I've seen to date. To put things in perspective, just four days into January, I've already eclipsed my total visitors count from all of June 2007, and have posted three times the number from last January. Also, since posting last Friday that I'd reached the milestone of 200 RSS feed subscribers, we've already blown past 225. With any luck, we'll be showing 250 and 300 very soon.

* We also gained some prominent link-love from Mashable and Mathew Ingram overnight, with Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins calling us an Iowa caucus expert in his post Huckabama Wins, a Few Observations, and Ingram noting our comments on data ownership in his wrap-up piece, The Scoble mess and data portability.

Of course, it's on us to stay relevant and topical, so we'll try and keep focused. More thorough posts over the weekend, for sure.

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