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Category Archives: Web/Internet

FriendFeed's Real Opportunity: Reassembling the Internet

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I’m a fan of FriendFeed, the Internet service aggregator self-described as:

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

For an example of it in action, you can see my profile here.  Basically the site pulls from a variety of sources, such as Digg, YouTube, Flickr, my blog, etc, and presents all the content in one view.  As you can see to the right of this screen, I use a widget to show my latest content from FriendFeed here on the blog.

While FriendFeed (FF) is a neat way to follow someone, it gets much more interesting when you use it as a new type of discussion forum.  If you click here, you’ll see everything I’ve commented on.  Again, from a “watcher’s” perspective, it’s still only moderately interesting (at best), and if you don’t see the point right now, I totally understand.  Personally, I like the ability to rapidly share content and interact with others in fun (or serious) debate and discussion.  I still believe it’s a niche play right now, but I think they have an interesting opportunity to get much much bigger.

At present, if you comment on one of my blog posts, that comment is stuck, it’s isolated to my blog (though it is retrievable over RSS, for those who really want it).  I could use a service such as Disqus or CoComment, which allow my comments to get aggregated with other blogs’ comments, but I don’t really see how that benefits either me, my reader, or those who leave comments here.  That said, those services are also integrated back into FF, which means a Disqus user’s comment on a blog post ALSO appears as a new content entry in FF.  This is only the beginning of the mess, which compounds as users can comment on a Disqus comment INSIDE FF, but that comment doesn’t make it OUTSIDE back to Disqus.

If I’ve lost you, don’t be alarmed – this doesn’t impact more than a few thousand people (at best) so far.  But when you look across many of the social networking sites (like Facebook, etc) and content sharing sites (like YouTube, Flickr, etc), the common abilities are to comment, favorite, and re-share content you find.  FriendFeed does a great job pulling in all that content, but I think the ability to push the content OUT is where the real opportunity to succeed exists.

I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled.  I have my LinkedIN contacts and my Facebook friends, and some overlap.  I have my photos on Flickr, my lengthy videos on YouTube, and my short videos on 12seconds.tv.  I have people who read my Tweets and follow me on FriendFeed, but don’t subscribe to my blog.  In every single site I just mentioned, users can comment and share content, but what they cannot do is have their experience contributed back to the source material universally.  In other words, if someone comments on my blog here, my FriendFeed followers do not see it, and my blog readers here are unaware of FriendFeed users’ comments.

My belief is there is a big opportunity to fix this problem of content fragmentation.  FriendFeed (or virtually anyone else, but they’ve built a good chunk of it already) can take their platform, and create an API that allows for bidirectional content delivery.  At present, they are great at pulling in content, just don’t share it out well (and RSS isn’t good enough), and as we all know, anyone can take reservations, you gotta hold the reservation!  If FriendFeed could build the de facto content aggregation and distribution platform that integrated across all content sharing and social networking services, it would become an instant acquisition target.

Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge.  As people continue to sign up for more new services, our content and experiences become harder to share and find.  The silos of content and, more importantly, content discussion, are frustrating and annoying to all but the earliest of tech adopters and “a-listers” (who seem quite willing to put up with anything just to try new stuff).  For the majority of people out there, a certain degree of “registration fatigue” is setting in, and whether it’s FriendFeed or Facebook, or someone else entirely, there’s a big opportunity sitting out there, waiting for someone to jump in.

The 20 Commandments of Social Media

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  1. Thou Shalt Avoidest Using the Term Social Media, Except When Specifically Discussing Social Media
  2. Thou Shalt Not Use Thine Blog or Twitter Purely to Show Off About all the Cool People Thou Know, nor the Secrets Thou Art Entrusted With
  3. Thou Shalt Not Use Twitter in Conjunction With a Service Which Updates Itself Automatically and Frequently
  4. Thou Shalt Not Complain When Thine Family Professes Ignorance of the Contents of Thine Blog
  5. Thou Shalt Not Put Embarrassing Photos of Thine Self on Thine Facebook Page, for They Shalt Be Easily Found in the Future
  6. Thou Shalt Not Be a Bad Commentor, Nor Shalt Thou Be a Sycophantic Fool
  7. Thou Shalt Not Exclaim With False Surprise at Quantity of Thine Followers
  8. Thou Shalt Not Assume That all Humans use FriendFeed
  9. Thou Shalt Not Poke, Bite, Nor Throweth Sheep, Yet Thou Mayest Be a Pirate
  10. Thou Shalt Not Forward Urban Myths. Ever
  11. Thou Shalt Not Create Video Podcasts of Thineself With a Duration Countable in Minutes
  12. Thou Shalt Not Befriend all People Thou Hast Ever Encountered, No Matter How Briefly
  13. Thou Shalt Not Describe New Startups as the Blank of Blank, Nor the Killer of Blank, Nor the Social Blank, nor the Blank 2.0
  14. Thou Shalt Not Spend Thine Day Reading Blogs, Leaving Comments, Writing Tweets, Updating Facebook Statuses, and then Complain About Thine Busy Schedule
  15. Thou Shalt Not Assume That All Content Received in Email or Read on Web Pages is Factually Accurate
  16. Thou Shalt Not Asketh a Question on Twitter When a Simple Google Search Wouldst Suffice
  17. Thou Shalt Not Confuse Transparency With Invasion of Privacy
  18. Thou Shalt Not Transform Bloggers’ Names Into Verbs, Such as Scoble-ized or Louis Gray-ed
  19. Thou Shalt Enjoy Thine Internet Fame (if Bestowed), for it is Surely Fleeting
  20. Thou Must Never, Ever, Whine About the Sacred TechMeme. It is All-Seeing and All-Powerful and Must Not Be Questioned

Should We Pay for Broadband by the Byte?

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Man on computerBy announcing that it would cap residential broadband users to 250 GB in downloads per month, Comcast last week made a tacit admission that it can charge users $0.17 per gigabyte ($43/month for the service), cover its operating costs, and still make a profit. If Comcast is happy to charge these rates to its heaviest users, the people who put the biggest strain on its residential broadband infrastructure, why shouldn’t the regular users enjoy the same benefit?

Buffet. Just like broadband, but tastier. The answer is that US broadband service is akin to a Chinese Buffet – the heavier users, who scarf down everything they can, are subsidized by lighter users, who pay more in exchange for consuming orders of magnitude less. The restaurant owners (and broadband providers), who scream “you eat like killer whale!” while a miniscule percentage of their users exceed some arbitrary limit, continue to pull in the same amount from everyone, making a killing on those who don’t eat very much, or only use their broadband to email, surf the web, watch a couple of YouTube videos every day, and download a few big files every month.

For a buffet, which is generally an infrequent indulgence, the system works. But for a recurring service like broadband, there’s no sense in charging customers a fixed rate when there is such a large disparity in consumption.

So here’s my modest proposal for Comcast, and other broadband providers: make broadband equal for all users. Set a monthly account maintenance/access fee (tier it to overall connection speed, if that’s your thing), and then charge everyone for the bits they actually use. The benefit to consumers is clear: if you’re paying for what you use, most users will pay less. The benefits for providers? With the battle for broadband users heating up, and 40% of the country still using dial-up services, the cable companies and telcos have a huge opportunity to attract vast swaths of new customers to not only their broadband services, but also their TV and phone services. Played right, the revenue increase from new sign-ups (if you were a new broadband customer, what kind of pricing would you choose?) could easily offset the initial decrease in broadband income.

There’s no reason for arbitrary caps if you charge for every bit. There’s no need to drive the people who use your service more than anyone else into the arms of a competitor (if, of course, there is one). Charge people for what they use, and customers will flock. Or, keep playing these ridiculous cat and mouse games that only upset your top users, and cause you reams of bad press with all the others. It’s not that hard a choice, broadband providers. Do the right thing.

Blippr tackles micro reviews – micro keeps getting bigger

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On a scale of 1 to 10, I think Blippr is pretty cool.

Blippr is a review service; you write short-form reviews of all kinds of things (books, movies, etc.)  In an oxymoronic set of circumstances that only the Internet can enable, “micro” services are becoming huge.  Twitter started a couple of years ago, and has become a popular (in the Valley, not in Kansas) “micro-blogging” service.  In 140 characters or less you give your followers a status update.  Some people use this for life-casting (i.e. I’m going to get a burrito) and others for starting conversations (i.e. what are the chances that Vista will stop sucking?).  In my opinion, the latter is a much more interesting use for the service.

Twitter is about “micro-blogging” because they have a strict limitation on your content – all posts must be 140 characters or less.  That’s as opposed to say WordPress, which is unlimited blogging (gurgitate to your heart’s content).   12seconds (which we’re involved in directly and which we posted about last month) also imposes a user constraint (twelve seconds, in case that wasn’t obvious.)  Blippr follows suit with a constraint of their own, 160 characters or less.

Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch wrote an article about Blippr a couple of weeks ago, which offers a fine summary of the product.  I just signed up for an account myself – want to be friends?  So far I’ve reviewed a couple of movies, Dark Knight and 300.  Blippr encourages reviews for all kinds of products, including movies, music, games, books, and more.  The restraints force you to be choosy with your words and even your characters.  (Might want to start liking the ampersand.)

I see lots of opportunities in this product to link out to other products and services, whether amazon book and music purchases, netflix movie rentals, booksfree book rentals, social networks likes Shelfari, Facebook, and more… the list is more or less never-ending.  Some of those deals could include affiliate deals that might even generate revenue, which is always a nice little bonus in an internet company.

I like the UI in Blippr.  When you type out a review, a blue bar below the text window indicates how much space you have left.  Where Twitter uses a numeric counter (which turns red and features a minus sign when you pass 140), I think the visualization of the blue bar is effective and more interesting to watch.

Blippr’s also done a great job of integrating other services; it’s quite easy to link your blips to your Twitter stream, to your FriendFeed, and to a myriad of other services.

There are a number of things I think BLippr could improve upon – doubtless they’ve considered these already, but I’ll voice them anyway.  I think it would be cool if you could embed blips, make a widget out of all my blips, specific genres of blips, etc.  It’d be nice to have the option to embed them directly on my blog, on a profile page, etc.

Also, SMS integration makes a lot of sense.  According to tehir Get Satisfaction page, that’s coming soon.  I can see a great deal of utility to that feature, especially in regards to a spontaneous interaction with something or other (i.e. I just walked out of Indiana Jones 4, and I’m so offended by the refrigerator scene that I want to tell the world RIGHT NOW!)  I get it, they don’t have the money / resources / infrastructure / developers etc.  yet.  But they need to add SMS soon.

I also think this is an appropriate complement to Yelp, and other restaurant / business review services.  I’d like to see them expand their focus (or create a sister service) that is dedicated to that market.   And lastly, outside access seems really important to me.  How can I dip into the Blippr-o-sphere on my mobile handset when I’m in line at the movie theater and the movie I wanted to see is sold out?  Or I am at Green Apple Books (Clement and 6th in San Francisco, check ’em out) and I want someone’s opinion on a book.  A short, to-the-point opinion.

Overall, I think this service shows more promise than most “web 2.0” (god I hate that term) companies.  I’m interested to see where it goes.  To the right I’ve embedded a screenshot of my (considerably) shorter review of Blippr, using Blippr.  Neat.

This is also posted at 1to10reviews.

Words the Internet Killed

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Language is a state-based system. By that I mean the language in use by a culture tends to reflect the current needs of society, and shifts along with those needs. Much like our appendix, spleen, and tailbone, words also trail, so they may still be in use long after their need is over. This is natural, okay, and good. In our interesting “information era” society and culture are shifting faster and moving in many different directions. Walk down the streets of a city like San Francisco or New York, and it only takes a few blocks feet to realize that you live in an extremely complex and multicultural world.

Now I’m personally of the opinion that the pace of high-tech development and new products are far ahead of society’s ability to adapt and cope. The concept of the “generation gap” where a generation’s exposure to media and technology created difficulty in relating to the next generation is no longer a 20- or even 10-year cycle, but is at no more than 5 years (and dropping). Those “kids today” are exposed to technologies that I am scantly aware of, and it’s shaping a big part of the way our society is evolving.

We are currently in the midst of a transformation, caused in a large part by the evolution of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc. These networks are clearly here to stay, and will evolve on their own to introduce new features and services as well as adapt to the changing needs of their users. In the mean-time, I’m noticing that a few very common words are losing their meaning, specifically due to their various implementations online (warning: much sarcasm and cynical writing follows, don’t take it too seriously if you are easily offended)…

Word Old meaning New Meaning
Friend Someone you knew, had a personal relationship with, occasionally spoke to, and frequently drank beers with. Someone who found your email address and typed it into Facebook and/or LinkedIN. You may have met said person at a conference once, and possibly even conversed with for 5 or more minutes.
Like Quite a few meanings, but the most common one being a word to describe a person, place, or thing you have a positive feeling about. Two meanings: one is a word used three times per sentence for no apparent reason, the other is an item you (might have) read on FriendFeed and want to let others know they should read it as well. A very cynical variant on the latter is when the item is being liked because you want the author to know you read their content.
Rumor Something overheard and/or speculated, but not substantiated. Fact until absolutely proven incorrect.
Openness/
Transparency		 The concept that an individual or company generally discloses information with little veil, spin, or secrecy. The requirement than an individual or company must disclose every piece of detailed information, regardless of context, personal privacy, or relevance.
Startup A company with a novel idea, service, product, or technology, and a vision on how to build that company into a successful, profitable entity. A college graduate and three friends who have an incremental idea, service, product, or technology, and a vision on how to build that company such that it gets acquired by Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo (in that order), preferably within 18 months for at least 9 figures.
Read To ingest all the contents of a document. To scan a headline for interesting words.
Popular To have many people who like you, albeit not necessarily to you having an outstanding personality. If in high school, gives you the power to make other peoples’ lives miserable for your entertainment. To have many people read your writing, 140 characters at a time, albeit not necessarily to you having an outstanding personality. Transfers no other known benefits.
Social Various meanings, all circulating around various aspects of society. Nothing.
Poke Two possible meanings, one having to do with jabbing a finger in a shoulder, the other NSFW (and generally required being more than just friends). An extremely bored “friend” of yours notices your profile on Facebook and decides to pester you. Often related to them being in need of information/services you may provide that they wish to ask you for, but want to “ease into” an otherwise awkward request.
Gadget An electronic device, typically hand-held, often providing novelty for several hours or even days at a time. iPhone

There you have it, words being killed by the Internet. Please note this list should be current for the next few weeks, but will then require revision.

Stop Trusting the Internet!

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I’m going to summarize this entire blog post in 12 seconds for the attention-span-deprived members of my audience:

The Internet is full of tubes, not facts on 12seconds.tv

As is too-often repeated but still ever so appropriate, “with great power comes great responsibility” (it comes from Spiderman). The Internet, but more specifically user-generated content such as blogs, tweets, and vlogs, allows anyone to become a content source. The more one has followers/readers/viewers, the more ‘power’ one has. When I blogged a few months ago that Macbooks would take a 50% share of all laptops, I had a variety of comments show up here (most of which completely missed the point I was trying to make, but that’s a different story). I have a handful of readers, so this didn’t really go anywhere – but had an a-list blogger written the same story, who knows where it’d end up.

Example #1: an earthquake occurred in Los Angeles today. The news spread quickly by both “official channels” and individuals using blogs and twitter. A story went up over at VentureBeat which included a reference to a video posted on 12seconds.tv entitled “5.8 LA Earthquake Recreation 36th Floor.” I added the bolded “recreation” myself for emphasis here because many people took the video as fact. Despite it not looking very “earthquake-ish” and despite it posting 30 minutes after the quake was over. Now the VB article’s been updated, but it has since spawned a post decrying the video as “fake”.

I’m pointing this out because not only did the VB author miss the title of the video (which is understandable), but the follow-up blogger did as well, despite the fact that he was clearly trying to determine whether or not it’s a fake. The power of the original article was so strong that even the title of the video wasn’t enough to make someone researching the topic realize it was baloney.

Example #2: Urban legends. How on earth do these still circulate??? My wife is on a mailing list with thousands of mothers in the Bay Area, they recently got sent an email talking about McDonald’s play pens and hypodermic needles. A simple google search for “McDonald’s Ball Pit” reveals link after link decrying the story as fake. Yet it continues to circulate to and from intelligent people all over the place. Need a better example? How about one tweet to instantly convince 50,000 people that Jared Fogle (Subway Jared) is dead (he’s not). One word here: snopes.

Example #3: Today I saw the following headline on FriendFeed: “20% of Primetime Television Now Watched Online” with a link to this article. Now I don’t read SearchEngineWatch, so I have no idea why they’re covering such a topic, but that’s not quite the topic du jour. The person sharing the article has now propagated the story, and his followers (and the followers of whomever then reshares it) will all be wandering around on- and off-line sharing the fact that 20% of TV is being watched online. Only one problem: it’s not. I did one more google search for the firm quoted in the article (Integrated Media Measurement Inc.) and one click later found this finding: “IMMI finds more than 20 percent of panel members watch some prime time programming online” (again, emphasis for effect). While this is still an important statistics, it is a far cry different from the headline being shared (one which is, in my opinion, quite hard to believe anyway, but that’s another matter). Updated: it’s sad to say, but Reuters now has the “20%” story, and yes, they have it wrong.

I know it’s a lot of fun to be on the cutting edge of information. It’s also fun to learn a new fact and rapidly share it along to your friends and family. But whatever happened to double-checking a source? Let’s face it, the news is more about entertainment and ad revenue than it is about reporting facts and accuracy. Just because it happened online doesn’t make it real. As they say, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Hasbro Made the Right Business Decision

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It’s probably not a fun thing to do, telling a half million people that they cannot play a game they love, especially when it’s your game.  Only it wasn’t Hasbro’s game they were playing, exactly, it was a copy of Hasbro’s game.  Hasbro actually purchased the US/Canadian rights to the Scrabble brand many years ago, and for that reason alone is 100%, undoubtably justified in their decision to kill Scrabulous.  But, as Mathew Ingram asked, is it right?  I say yes (and I’m not alone).

First, they were protecting their brand.  While this is a highly-scrutinized activity by the public and media, if you own a brand/trademark you must protect it.  This isn’t just about “a cool homage to their game” it’s about the long-term strength of the name Scrabble (TM).  Had Scrabulous been allowed to continue, this would have set a precedent whereby other companies could also mimic the name and board design and gameplay rules. Like it or not, Hasbro has paid money for these assets, has worked hard to promote these assets, and deserves to have them.

Further on this point, Scrabulous has directly shown that derivative works can become popular.  This makes the threat to the Scrabble brand even more visible.  It’s one thing to have the janky “San-Fran-opoly” games sold in Fisherman’s Wharf where the gameplay is not quite the same as Monopoly, and as a result, nowhere nearly as good in quality (if you don’t believe me and actually own one of these knockoffs, go take a look at the dust on it relative to the real Monopoly/variant set you own).  So Scrabulous showed hands-down just how dangerous a good knockoff can be!

Don Reisinger wrote a good article on the topic, but I disagree with this point:

Instead of embracing the past and clinging to its faulty hope that Scrabble will somehow beat Scrabulous, Hasbro should have realized that the latter has over 500,000 active users at any given time – far more than those playing the board game – and could quite easily monetize that game and enjoy an even greater Return on Investment than it will by shutting it down.

I think it’s safe to say that while a few of the Scrabulous users won’t come back to play Scrabble, the majority won’t give a damn about who did what to who.  The people who were addicted to playing will still be addicted to playing.  Further, anyone coming to Facebook who searches “Scrabble” will naturally find it.  I’m not a big believer that the bulk of current users are as concerned about “the community” as other bloggers make it sound.

This all may sound a little funny coming from me, as both a “community guy” as well as a discordant voice when it comes to copyright issues.  But this isn’t about copyright per se, and I just don’t think the Scrabulous guys (whose product I do appreciate) exactly “deserve” anything here, regardless of their attempts to talk to Hasbro etc.  There are plenty of opportunities to go create games, people do it every day (and I hope that those talented programmers take their skills to build something new and exciting).

Just as we must protect individuals and consumers from large corporations throwing muscle around (big media, oil, insurance, healthcare, food production, etc), companies too deserve the right to protect their assets when threatened.  There’s obviously a fine and delicate line to watch here, but I believe in this case Hasbro is on the right side of that line.

12seconds.tv launches in alpha

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Let me disclaim in no uncertain terms that this site was started by some very close friends, and I am personally involved as well.  I mean for this post to be informational.  I want both of my readers to know about 12seconds.

As you will see from their blog post, 12seconds.tv is launching their public alpha today.

12seconds is the brainchild of some friends in Santa Cruz who love the web, love technology, love twitter, love their iPhones, and can’t help but start company after company.  This is serial entrepreneurship at its best.  The basic idea behind 12seconds is video status, being able to record and share little moments from your life.  Use a webcam or cell phone you can record videos up to twelve seconds long.  That’s it.

You can link your videos to your Twitter account, so anyone who follows you there can receive will receive videos through your Twitter feed.  Friends can also visit your 12seconds page directly, or subscribe to your 12secondsRSS feed. You do NOT have to be a member of the site in order to watch other people’s videos. Request an invitation to join the site here.

This idea is a cool one, especially if you have a cell phone that records video. It’s easy to imagine being out at a bar with friends, out on the street where you see something funny, or at a Bar Mitzvah during the Haftorah service and wanting to publish the moment and share it with friends. What if you’re on vacation at the grand canyon and standing over that crazy skywalk platform? What a cool moment to share with friends and loved ones.  Here’s a link to my 12seconds channel.  Here’s Jeremy’s channel.

This is also posted at: http://1to10reviews.com

How-to: Automatic URL Shortening with Bit.ly and TextExpander

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Hi, my name is jonathanpberger and I’ll be covering all sorts of nerdy topics here on LiveDigitally. Got comments? Questions? Rants? You can drop me a line at jpb@livedigitally.com or see what else I’m up to on my Twitter feed, my homepage, or my tumbleblog.

One of my can’t-live-without-it time-and-keystroke-saving apps (TextExpander) got bumped to version 2.3 today. It’s a minor update: a few bug-fixes and a new snippet group for Accented Words (like “rosé”, “olé”, “sauté”, or “jalapeño”). But I got to playing around, and saw a cool video demonstrating how to use TextExpander for another time-and-keystroke-saver: URL-Shortening.

URL-Shortening may not seem like a big deal, but it comes in handy when you’re dealing with space restrictions (like Twitter’s 140 character-limit), you want to tidy up some messy links, or you’re trying to RickRoll someone. It’s one of those possibly-extraneous activities that makes life a tiny little bit easier, but only when it’s effortless to employ. Enter TextExpander.

Jack-Daniyel Strong has a great tip for shortening URLs using TinyURL, TextExpander, and Applescript. After setting it up, you can shorten URLs by

1) copying the URL to the clipboard, and 2) typing a preset abbreviation. It’s that easy.

I’ve adapted his technique for the new kid on the URL-shortening block, Bit.ly (which everyone is gushing over), and which provides a host of neat features like History, Click/Referrer tracking, thumbnails, mirroring, and best of all, a robust API. Continue reading →

The FriendFeed Drinking Game

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If you aren’t on FriendFeed yet, it’s understandable, as it really is for a niche (as it stands today – who knows where it goes in the future).  Here’s a link to my profile if you want to check it out.  If you have no interest whatsoever, you should probable skip along to the next article.  BUT, for those of us drinking the yummy FriendFeed kool-aid, here’s a fun little “drinking game” (now my 2nd attempt at one) to coincide nicely with time spent on the site.

Every time…

  • a discussion about FriendFeed has more than 10 comments, take a drink!
  • a discussion about Twitter has more than 10 comments, take a drink!
  • a discussion about FriendFeed vs Twitter has more than 2 comments, take 2 drinks!
  • Louis Gray brings an additional 100 users to FriendFeed, take a drink!
  • you see the same article shared by more than 5 people, take a drink!
  • you refresh your FriendFeed page and see no changes, take 2 drinks!
  • you comment on or like something without reading it, take a drink!
  • pictures of babies make the “best of the day” list, take a drink!
  • you hide an entire service, take 2 drinks!
  • you block someone, take a drink!
  • you use FriendFeed to ask other FriendFeed users about a FriendFeed feature, take a drink!
  • you like something, but the content is something you really don’t “like”, take a drink!
  • you follow someone, comment on something, or like something just so the person notices you, take a drink!
  • you follow someone who you don’t know or have any direct connection to in the non-FriendFeed world, take a drink!
  • you add another service to your FriendFeed profile, take 2 drinks!
  • your FriendFeed home page is 90% content from Scoble, TechCrunch, Loic, Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis or Scoble (worth saying twice), chug it!
  • you share something TO FriendFeed from multiple services (blog, greader, delicious, etc), chug it!
  • you discover a new feature in FriendFeed that’s really cool but hard to find in the murky UI, take a drink!
  • you see someone link to or refer to a FriendFeed thread as “the conversation”, take 2 drinks!
  • you realize you actually are getting a lot less work done due to spending time on FriendFeed, finish the bottle!

Any other suggestions?  Add them as comments.  If you add them on the inevitable FriendFeed thread instead, take a drink.

Okay, it's lifecasting that's silly, not Twitter

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As many people know, I was a rampant “twitter is stupid” person for well over a year.  In my eyes it just seemed like a silly waste of time for the few lucky people with enough time on their hands to use it frequently, something for an extreme minority.  Then I noticed many of my friends and colleagues were getting into it, people who I didn’t associate with the lifecasting crowd, nor people with absurd amounts of free time.  So finally, I succumbed, created a profile, and started following a bunch of people I knew (as in people I really knew, not just heard about from someone else).

Within days I had written numerous “tweets” and my list of followers and followees both grew to include the unknown.  I read, joined, and started conversations (asynchronous and short-form, but conversations nonetheless).  Since that time, I’ve apparently twittered almost 300 times, though I’ve attempted to avoid (as much as possible) the inevitable “I’m doing something kinda mundane, but felt the need to share“.  They happen, but I try to keep the tweets to the conversation, be it about marketing, gadgets, technology, or other topics which are close to home (yup, that includes some hockey).

As I scan tweets and follow conversations on FriendFeed, it’s become quite clear to me that these formats are quite viable for many uses.  Good way to get opinions on a topic, great way to get quick advice or problem-solving.  Interesting way to engage with press and bloggers.  Decent way to interact with people I don’t know well on topics we have in common.  But every time I read about someone getting a coffee, catching a bus, waiting in a line, or getting an oh-so-annoying “I’m at 1st & Main” update, I get the same reaction as when offers for Viagra, University Diplomas, Mortgage Rates, or Nigerian Uncles’ Fortunes hit my inbox.

I believe the main reason for Twitter’s growth over the past 12-18 months is specifically due to the lack of lifecasting.  I was pleasantly surprised to see “the conversations” happening, and the relatively low quantity of “debating between ham&cheese or grilled veggies on rye.”  We are seeing an interesting phenomena right now surrounding social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, with people sharing what I would label “over the top” personal details.  Personally I believe this is directly tied to a lack of understanding of consequences.  We have yet to see the “Digital Natives” get burned by their actions.

Regardless of your feelings on GW Bush as president, the rumors are pretty rampant that he was a big partier back in college.  I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that if he’d had a permanent digital record of all his youthful exuberances, the election process might’ve been a bit trickier.  I’ve blogged about what I called “crime 2.0” in the past (which even elicited some fairly snarky comments), and I maintain the position of: mark my words, there will be bad times ahead.  And frankly, that’ll end up being a good thing for our civilization’s digital future.

Fair Deal: UMG Profiteering off my YouTube Video

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I received the following email from YouTube earlier today:

Dear YouTube Member:

UMG has claimed some or all audio content in your video Pussycat Dolls @ Microsoft CES Party – basic Muvee w/U2. This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program.

Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.

Claim Details:

Copyright owner: UMG
Content claimed: Some or all of the audio content
Policy: Allow this content to remain on YouTube.

  • Place advertisements on this video’s watch page.

Applies to these locations:
Everywhere

UMG claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with UMG and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between YouTube owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

At first, I was outraged. But at second, I really wasn’t. Why? Well, I *did* choose to use U2’s Beautiful Day for the background music, and I certainly didn’t ask for permission to do so. It would be their right to ask me to stop playing the video with that music in it. Instead, they’re taking ad revenue rights. Considering I wasn’t putting the video up for profit, I really don’t care, and if this allows me to continue using their music in such a way, I call it fair.

I believe this is the right kind of example content companies should set. Suing end-users is just a lose-lose proposition. Becoming ridiculously tightfisted about content use is also a dead-end. But here I’m basically being encouraged by a copyright owner to use their content for my purposes (fun) and yet meet their basic business needs as well (profit).

Here’s the video in question: