Anyway, a couple noteworthy Google announcements recently caught my attention. So, I figured I share them and collect your thoughts.

Google Flu Trends
Google.org announced Google Flu Trends recently, which tracks aggregated search data to estimate flu activity in the US (and by state). So your search for any number of flu-related keywords alerts Google Flu Search to the possibility of an influenza rise in your state.

Pretty Orwellian, but cool. At first blush, the logic here sounded weak to me. After all, lots of Internet doctors exist out there (my wife is one), and this approach puts a fair amount of faith into a person’s ability to diagnose symptoms effectively.

Not to mention the fact that the usage of Google state-by-state may not represent a large enough sample to make these assumptions. So, interested, but skeptical, I dug more deeply.

Turns out this theory was tested last year, and it closely mirrors data collected by the CDC. Even more surprising to me is that the data generated by Google Flu Trends estimate with good accuracy the spread of flu, one to two weeks ahead of the CDC models.

Surprising to me and yet another example of what Google knows about us all.

Google Hosts Images from Life
Google announced (by way of Lifehacker) this week that they are hosting newly digitized images from the LIFE magazine photo archive, available for search on Google Image Search.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

This is very cool to me. There are loads of great shots that have never been published by famous photographers of events and times long past. It’s a very interesting way to look back into history.

This is a good move by LIFE too, but what’s missing for me is the usage licenses for these images. I’ve mentioned Flickr as a great source for Creative Commons licensed work to use in presentations and blogs.

I suspect the licensing for these digitized images is highly difficult to sort out, considering that each photographer could have had a different agreement with LIFE, but still there’s not a single clue as to whether I can use them or not and why.

I hope they sort that out and publish it soon so these fantastic photos can spread around the ‘tubes.

Shizzow has been open to Portlanders only until this week, but Tuesday they added the Bay Area. And now today, Seattle is also supported.

Full disclosure: I know all the principles that make up the little Shizzow operation. They’re all working on Shizzow as a side-project (read in addition to regular jobs), and they’re bootstrapping rather than taking outside money, a good call considering the current economy.

Oh yeah, what is Shizzow? It’s (another) geo-location social network. Its purpose is simplicity, born out of necessity. Portland has a huge nomadic geek population, bouncing around the many wi-fi coffeehouse and mobile working locations around town.

Shizzow’s goal is to make ad-hoc meetups and gatherings happen more easily. Rather than broadcasting the address of your current (or soon-to-be) location, Shizzow has a collection of human-understandable locations from which you can “shout”, e.g. if I’m at CubeSpace and I want to grab some lunch, I can shout my location as CubeSpace, rather than 622 SE Grand.

This makes it easier for my friends to know where I am. Shizzow has several ways to shout, web page (natch), IM, SMS, Google Gadget. Oddly, there is no Twitter integration. I’ve asked about that several times. The Shizzow web page interface supports Mozilla Geoge, which is nice when Geode has a clue about where you are.

If you’re wondering, yes, it sounds like Brightkite and Loopt and “insert geo-aware social network name here”. Dawn Foster, Shizzow’s community manager, differentiates for us:

We developed Shizzow to solve a specific need: the desire to find our friends and hang out with them. The other services had so much clutter that we weren’t able to effectively solve our need using any of the existing location-based applications. We aren’t out to convert our competitors’ users over to Shizzow; plenty of people find value in these other location-based services. However, if you are focused on connecting with your friends in the real world, and like us, you need a better way to find your friends, we hope you will give Shizzow a try.

I find Shizzow suffers from the same gap that all the other do; I can never remember to update it when I go somewhere. Maybe I don’t move around enough. That’s why I’ve been asking for a Twitter bot from the beginning; I’m on Twitter frequently. I sometimes remember to tweet when I’m on the go. Therefore, a Twitter bot would be the best way to get me to shout my location.

This was what I really liked about Firebot, the Twitter bot for Fire Eagle, which has since gone dark, a casualty of the loss of XMPP/IM integration.

Anyway, with a small development crew (three?) who all have day jobs, Shizzow has managed to do quite a lot. So, if you live in Portland, Seattle or the Bay Area, or have a bunch of friends in those regions and visit there a lot, drop a comment for an invite to Shizzow, or hit up @shizzow on Twitter.

Like everything, it’s a beta service, but of course, they’re looking for feedback. So, if you’re interested check it out and send your thoughts to them (or put them in comments here).

Although, based on the comments (or lack thereof) on the geo-related posts I’ve done here, I’m guessing not many of you will care very much.

Prove me wrong.

These feeds function a lot like Twitter for me, i.e. the items in there are sometimes interesting and tend to tell me a bit about each person. For example, Paul shares a lot of gadget stuff from Gizmodo and Engadget, but mainly the vehicles, cameras, and AV stuff. This makes him my gadget filter for those items.

Rich shares mostly Rails posts (surprise) and some theory of development stuff. The Ontario Emperor shares a lot of political stuff. It’s an interesting way to learn about a person’s interests and to cross-pollinate them with your own.

Plus the recent addition of the notes feature to shared items lets you add specific thoughts to each item. Hmm, sounds a lot like blogging (or micro-blogging, to turn a phrase). I’ve not tested this, but I wonder if I share an item with comments that was shared with me if the comments also propagate. This would be equivalent to blog comments.

Case in point, two people shared this item about the Infinity Bookcase, which is a sweet design. I wonder how you physically get to the books inside each loop though.

I love design, form and function. So, now I’ve got a new resource (Make), and I know a bit more about these two Intertubes friends. Very cool stuff, classic network effects in action.

Compared to Twitter, it’s a nice alternative to Tiny URLs on Twitter that lead to Rickrolls; at least I can see what is shared before clicking through on it. Incidentally, Rickrolling my phone is only funny once, and no I won’t link to how it’s done.

Ironically, as I wrote this, I saw an item in the Ontario Emperor’s shared items feed by Sarah Perez of RWW, called “Am I A Google Reader Over-Sharer? Are You?” I may be an over-sharer. This is moot though, since just as with Twitter, you’re not required to follow me. Reader is asynchronous too, since you can subscribe to the feed and remove people from “Friends’ shared items”. So, I can follow your shared items without requiring you to follow mine.

Yeah, it’s a lot like FriendFeed, but I’m getting more out of Google Reader Shared Items than I do out of FriendFeed because I use it everyday anyway.

Your thoughts belong in the comments. Comments get lonely too.

Most (actually, all) of his talk was devoted to the consumer web.  My head is almost always focused on how to take the good stuff coming from the consumer web back into the enterprise web.  Bill’s ideas made me realize how little we (as enterprise web app developers) pay attention to the minute details that go into producing web apps that customers love.  Bill is currently the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix.  If you’re a Netflix customerfan, you’ll know that Netflix.com is a superb site.  Netflix’ business depends entirely on the success of its site.  Very small incremental changes could drastically affect their business.  All of the changes they make to the site go through rigorous testing with real users and are carefully measured.

With the enterprise products I’ve been a part of building, we’ve spent some time on usability tests.  However, they’re usually done before the product is even passed over to development.  They’re usually done during the visual design phase.  Once the UX teams have finalized their product designs, they’re approved and passed over to the developers to start building.  However, most of the time, the product doesn’t end up matching what was designed by UX.

This process wasn’t always this way.  I remember back in the PeopleSoft client-server days, most products didn’t go through any usability tests.  I suppose the reasoning is that back then, most of the “ERP” apps were focused on back-end users who were trained to use the software so usability wasn’t that big of an issue.  Today’s focus is in building apps that anyone can use without training. Aside from testing usability, I don’t know if we focus enough on learnability.  In order for software to be easy enough for anyone to use, it needs to provide enough queues for users to be able to learn how to use it.  Bill provides a lot of examples in his presentation above of how to do this.

The problem with the the visual design process in the enterprise today (as I see it) is that it doesn’t follow good software development practices like agile.  Once a visual design is finalized, it’s passed on and never really iterated for improvements.  Some enterprise software development cycles could take over a year or two from concept to design to build to release.  Over that time, new UI patterns could have emerged as well as totally new ways to solve the same problem that the software originally sought out to solve.  This is the reason why agile methodologies exists.

What Bill described as his overall process for building good looking web sites that work can be reduced down to an agile process for visual design.  It doesn’t make sense to design once then move on.  The process needs to be iterative.  Feedback from real users with real data need to be used as a way of testing ideas and measuring success rates iteratively.  I’m no expert with UX, but this process makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyone out there in Oracle UX land care to comment?  Are you guys already doing this?  If so, how’s it working?

BTW, Bill’s got a book coming out on this topic… added to my wishlist.

Fake Calls
Thanks to Floyd for this tip. I started out to review three fake call apps, but quickly realized there are a lot more than three. Eleven apps matched the keyword search “fake caller” in the App Store, and only one didn’t fit the search.

So, if you ever felt the need to fake a phone call to get out of a personal interaction (conversation, meeting, date, movie, etc.), you have ten iPhone apps to choose from:

• Fake-a-Call (free)
• Fake Calls ($0.99)
• Fake Caller Free
• Fake Call ($0.99)
• Fake Caller Premium ($0.99)
• GottaDash ($0.99)
• GottaGo ($0.99)
• exitstrategy ($0.99)
• HottrixPhone PRO ($2.99)
• Phony ($1.99)

This is really funny to me; until today, I had never thought of this as an app, and I can’t even recall using a fake phone call excuse to get out of a situation.

But now my eyes are open, and from now on, I’ll be suspicious when someone with an iPhone gets a call and bails on a meeting or a conversation with me. The end of innocence I guess.

The question is do these fake call apps make the iPhone more “for business”?

Teaser: Rich has been tinkering with iPhone development. Stay tuned for more on what he’s doing.

The issue in question is whether your LinkedIn contacts could be considered the property of your employer, should you decide to part ways.

This is an intriguing question, considering:

• LinkedIn’s self-described purpose as a “professional network”.
• People use LinkedIn to keep track of their business contacts, sometimes from work computers.
• Most networks on LinkedIn include a hodge-podge of contacts, friends and acquaintances made at various points during a person’s career both at the current employer and at prior employers.

I did some digging, and it seems there has already been some precedent established, at least in the UK. That case seemed to hinge on the timing and usage of the contacts, i.e. they were made near the end of the employee’s tenure, which ended on his accord, and they were subsequently used to start up his own competing business.

So, this points to a clear intent to use contacts against the former employer, but I’m sure future cases won’t be as clear cut. I tried to find some cases that handled the use of Rolodexes by former employees, since that would seem to point to a precedent.

There seems to be a big gray area here though. When hiring certain types of positions, e.g. sales, employers frequently judge candidates based heavily on their contacts. And how do you really categorize a business versus a personal contact.

Take a look at your LinkedIn/Facebook/MySpace contacts, your address book or business card Rolodex, and try to segment them into business and personal. There’s bound to be some overlap. Now, try to segment all the business contacts into job buckets. Again, it’s not that easy.

I tend to agree that the legal precedent will evolve around this issue rapidly over the next five years, much as the law has coalesced around how to handle corporate email. It’s only a matter of time before there is a high profile case to set the standard.

So, what do you think? I’m guessing pretty much everyone thinks their address book is personal, which is how I feel. Still I’m interested to get your thoughts and ideas on how this will play out in the future.

Find the comments.

I have said often that Tivo is the best invention of the last 20 years, in my life it is equal to the remote control and far surpasses things like wireless networking and digital cameras (which I love).

At its basest form, blogging is about opinion, i.e. your own and maybe some others for “balance”. Meg brings up an interesting point, not only about how much TiVo rocks, but also about comparison.

Is it fair to compare TiVo with wireless networking and digital cameras? So, for giggles, let’s have an good old town hall around this topic.

What is the best invention of the last 20 years? Bonus points for why. If you’re wondering, here are a few arbitrary ground rules.

There aren’t any, aside from the last 20 years bit. I tried to come up with some guidelines, but I’m pretty sure the fun (if any is to be had) of this exercise lies in an open field. I’m interested to hear thoughts.

Here are a few I like, obviously focused on stuff I use every day, not picking a favorite:

• Digital Video Recorder, i.e. TiVo
• The cellular telephone
• The World Wide Web, i.e. consumer version of ARPANET
• The digital camera
• Satellite and cable television

This is food for thought. Find the comments and share your thoughts.

Like pretty much anyone who currently has a DVR, I was interested, but skeptical before I had one. Skeptical not so much about the value-add from a DVR, but because of the rabid fan-ism exhibited by those who owned them.

Now, I’m happily one of those rabid fans. I’ve had TiVo for many years, long enough to have a Series 2 box with lifetime service that I will never surrender. When I bought my second Series 2 box, I was surprised (and saddened) that lifetime service wasn’t an option anymore.

I like TV, and according to research, unhappy people like TV. Oddly, and this is one people who don’t have a DVR don’t get, I watch less TV now than I did before TiVo. So, maybe a DVR is for happy people who want to schedule TV around their happy lives and spend more time on other things.

Anyway, I look at TiVo as the only way to watch TV. To me, not having a DVR is like getting TV out of the air on an antenna. Why would you do that?

I also happen to be a TiVo diehard. I’ve always liked their interface, and they continue to add incremental features that make the DVR more useful, e.g. they just rolled out a feature to allow online ordering from Domino’s through a broadband-connected Series 2/3/HD TiVo.

In and of itself, this feature doesn’t add an enormous amount of value to me, but it is yet another way that my TiVo provides value to me. The more online content I can order from my TiVo, the better.

For example, I was an early adopter of Amazon Unbox on TiVo, and I’m hoping the recently announced partnership with Netflix expands to include Series 2 DVRs.

To me, TiVo represents the way a set-top box should evolve and how it should function. Start with a must-have feature for the TV, make it so awesome that I can’t ever live without it and then layer on value-added features. I may not use them all, but it’s definitely a plus to give me additional features when I’ve already paid for the service.

Dating back to the days of the TV as the window to the Intertubes, set-tops have been hit and miss.

Even now, as Apple, Blockbuster and startups develop movie rental set-top boxes, I wonder why they don’t bundle other services, like DVR or gaming. Or better yet, why strike out on your own when you could partner with a DVR manufacturer, cable provider or gaming console?

This seems logical; look at the XBox-Netflix partnership. As an aside, I like what Netflix is doing (by partnering), but I’m not sure why they’re also building their own box.

Think about your TV area. How many boxes do you really want cluttering up the living room or where ever you have a TV? Used to be that video inputs were the constraining factor, but now that TVs include a minimum of three inputs, it seems like clutter is the overwhelming argument for consolidation.

Or at least that’s what my wife would tell you.

What do you think? Do you want a single set-top box to rule them all? Is clutter an issue? Or do you prefer single-purposed boxes that do one thing really well?

Sound off in comments.

Oracle Business Approvals for Managers
Steven Chan put me on to this one, which looks like an iPhone app that surfaces a lot of the worklist notifications EBS users (managers, in this case) typically see in email and in self-service.

Since I’m no longer a manager (by choice), I fear this app would be useless to me, but someone like Paul would find it totally useful, e.g. to approve my expense reports faster. From the release:

Oracle Business Approvals for Managers is a task-focused mobile solution that enables managers and executives to view and transact pending actions related to expenses, purchase requisitions, as well as HR vacancies and job offers, conveniently and securely on the iPhone.

And in case you were wondering, it’s free (as in beer) to users.

Google Mobile App
Not a new app, but an update to the existing (and pretty sweet) Google Mobile App surfaced today: speak and search.

I can’t seem to find this update on the App Store, but it looks great, assuming it’s reasonably accurate.

Check out the demo video and stay tuned for my review, or check it out yourself.

Update: The app didn’t make it to the App Store on Friday, as promised. It didn’t make it over the weekend either, causing speculation. Consensus seems to be that it will be out there sometime on Monday. We’ll see.

Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, much.

I’ve just installed Panels, which is a newly launched beta service, on this blog. Panels adds, well, panels to your blog links. From their blog:

With the addition of panels to your site/blog your readers are given all the information about a business or organization that they need before clicking on a link.  Inspired by nutritional panels, our panels are not something that will be looked at every time, but people will be thankful when they look.

Full disclosure: Panels is a Portland startup, and Kevin Fox, a friend of mine, works there. I agreed to give it whirl on this blog. So now, those little panels are out there for you to use or not. The goal here is to let me (and the Panels guys) know what you think. As a startup, they need this type of early feedback.

So, sound off in the comments, or wait a bit, test it out and then sound off in the comments. FYI, the addition of Panels to this blog doesn’t constitute any endorsement of them or their company. All the standard my opinion != my employer’s stuff applies here. I’m just testing out their service.

When you hover over the little red icon to the right of a link, you’ll get content about that link or more precisely about the company or blog behind the link, based on the domain name, e.g. if I add a link about my Reader feed, Panels scrapes content about Google, like so:

Once the panel is open, you can browse information about the company or blog, in this case Google. I think the Panels team has their own aggregated store of information, which doesn’t yet include Oracle, AppsLab or other common (turns out Microsoft is included)  links you might want to know about. Their store of information seems very spare now, but they’re a small startup so it’s a problem of scale for now.

There’s a demo movie on their home page, if you’re interested in learning more.

Installing Panels is easy. Once you register and tailor your desired look and feel a bit, you get a Javascript snippet that goes into your Wordpress or Typepad blog with ease. No fuss, no mess.

So, what do you think? If you like Panels, sign up and use it on your own blog. If you don’t, find the comments and let me know why. Productive feedback is encouraged because, like I said, they’re an early stage startup, and now is the time to influence the service.

Sounds similar to Delicious, but targeted at managing stuff to read, rather than storing scads of bookmarks with a network wrapped around them.

What caught my eye was that the new RIL version integrated with Google Reader, my feed reader of choice. So, with the new RIL add-on, I can see the little checkmark to add any feed item to the RIL list. Very useful for me.

I frequently open feed items from Reader into new tabs and leave them open to read later. Sometimes they’ll stay open for days; sometimes Firefox eats up too much memory, forcing a restart. Sometimes I remember to note all the open links, sometimes I don’t.

So, this little add-on sounded like a good way to keep track of my reading list. I promptly installed the Firefox add-on and decided to wait and see how it worked for me before blogging it.

This falls into the “blog it later” bucket.

Well, after a few weeks, it’s turned out to be useful. As I remember to use it more, it’s getting more useful, e.g. today I found several posts that I wanted to read in detail, just not right away. So, I used the little checkmark in Reader to add them to my reading list.

The sync feature is very nice too, so I can keep my reading list on two laptops. Sure, there’s a web site too, but I doubt I’ll use it much, if at all. Here’s a demo video, if you’re interested.

Anyway, if you read a lot of stuff online, or more accurately, if you want to keep track of stuff you want to read, Read It Later works really well. There’s even IE support of some kind, not that I care, but you might.

Do you use Read It Later or something similar? Sound off in the comments.

I installed two new iPhone apps today.

I Can Has Cheezburger
As I probably mentioned in the past, I tend to install apps, test them for a while, then remove them. Very few stick with me for very long.

Today, I found at least one that will, the official I Can Has Cheezburger iPhone app. If you’ve read here long, you’ve probably caught an LOLcat reference or several. Dan mentioned my predilection for cute cats + captions; they make me lulz. I remain unapologetic.

Beyond LOLcats, the ICHC guys have expanded to several other “properties”, including the FAIL Blog (a favorite of Paul’s, just check his Google Reader Shared Items feed). Each blog follows the same winning (or failing, depending on your perspective) formula: collect user-submitted pictures and captions, sell ads, print money.

I’m not kidding. According to Business Week back in July, they make $5,600 each month, and estimates range higher. Beyond bringing me my daily lulz, these sites represent what I love about the ‘tubes. You just never know what will make money, and you probably can’t copy all the successful “business models”.

Anyway, the ICHC iPhone app is basically a photo viewer for each post, which makes sense. You can switch between the various properties, in case LOLcats don’t do it for you. Win.

One feature I miss already is YouTube integration; the FAIL Blog has loads of video clips, but they aren’t included in the iPhone app, which is a downer. Anyway, the app is simple and does its job well. I suspect other content owners (e.g. blogs) will follow this strategy, since it makes consuming the content easier than in Safari on the iPhone.

Loopt
I also decided to try Loopt, another location-based social network. I think Loopt was one of the first apps in the App Store, and it was featured in one of the iPhone TV ads. According to TechCrunch, Loopt is the 20th most popular app download, passing Facebook and MySpace (their iPhone apps), over an unspecified time period.

At first blush, it seems pretty functional, but the biggest problem very few people are using it. Loopt found about half a dozen people in my iPhone address box, which it helpfully texted asking to be my friend on Loopt.

However, there isn’t any other way to discover people already using Loopt (e.g. Facebook or Twitter). Sure, I can invite people, but since I’m just testing it out, I don’t want to invite people yet. Plus, invites seem to be through mobile number only, and I don’t know that for most of the people I “know” on the ‘tubes.

David (didn’t he used to blog?) is the reason I tried out Loopt, but as with any social network, it’s useless without the network.

So, now I have Matt, Eddie, David and Dan in my Loopt network, but since only Eddie is in the same state as I am every day, it’s not feeling very useful right now. I guess the jury is still out on Loopt.

Your thoughts on iPhone apps, mobile, LOLcats, whatever? Find the comments.

Mix

Seems like it’s been around forever, at least to me, but you’ll recall we launched it to very little fanfare at the beginning of OpenWorld 2007.

Mix didn’t really get much promotion at all until Marketing decided to solicit session ideas from the community for OpenWorld 2008 back in May. Over the Summer, Marketing extended Mix quite a bit, and it quickly outgrew our bandwidth for support and operations.

Heading into OpenWorld 2008, Mix made its primetime debut as the front end for the Oracle Participate campaign, and looking ahead, Marketing has big plans for Mix. Stay tuned.

Here are some statistics on Mix through (roughly) its first year:

• 142,220 pageviews a month
• 15,525 visits a month
• 4.92 average connections per user
• 0.45 average sharing activity per user per month

FYI, these stats are also in Paul’s Defrag 08 presentation.

This success belongs to the Oracle community. Without a dedicated collection of Oracle enthusiasts, Mix would have gone nowhere. So, thanks to all of you. Keep on mixing it up and look forward to more cool features from Mix, delivered by Marketing and ENTP.

As previously documented here, we like what Get Satisfaction does, and even though ads usually put me right into a coma, my curiosity about how ads could be “smart” (from Paul’s note in Reader) overcame me.

Turns out it is a pretty interesting way to do ads. From the announcement:

Here’s the way our new ads work: If you’re logged in to Get Satisfaction, you won’t see them. If you’re curious, they are text ads, of the familiar Google-based type. Contextual. Low-key. Simple.

Who will see them? People who come to us from a Google search. People who don’t have a Get Satisfaction account. People who are, as they say, “just browsing”.

This sounds like a good idea. I’m accustomed to ignoring ads, but I know people pay attention to them because: a) loads of people say they’re annoying and b) they don’t go away, which means someone is clicking on them.

Google famously uses its algorithm to show ads that are related to your keyword searches (in search) or mail (in GMail). For the most part, it seems pretty successful, but in some cases, it fails. Miserably. I know that one’s not Google, but you get the picture. I know a woman who quit using GMail because Google served her ads about hunting. True story.

So, what do you think about Get Satisfaction’s ad strategy? I wonder if they plan to entice people to register to make the ads disappear.

I’m a fan of FriendFeed, but it’s very hard to control the noise level. Typically, each person you subscribe to has several streams of information, e.g. a blog, Twitter, Google Reader, etc., making the amount of noise significantly higher.

I have nine services in my feed, but I’ve seen people with way more than that. An unscientific guess tells me the average number of services per person is probably between four and eight. Depending on who you subscribe to and frequency, your FriendFeed can be very noisy.

This is one reason I’ve never liked the Adobe Air clients for FriendFeed, like AlertThingy or Twhirl, too damned noisy. I simply don’t have the brainpower to follow all those items.

Unfortunately, I can’t subscribe to individual streams of a person’s feed, e.g. subscribe to my blog feed, but not my Twitter feed. This would be very helpful to control the noise, but it’s essentially a fancy RSS reader with live commentary.

The FriendFeed team has been very good about listening to user feedback and implementing popular and useful features, e.g. the recently launched live version of FriendFeed.

And now IM. The addition of IM allows another point of consumption for FriendFeed content which is nice. Unlike RSS, which can’t keep the comments and likes accurate, you can see comments live in IM (not likes though), and you can interact with the feed using commands.

The use of an intelligent IM bot and simple commands shows a great understanding of how people want to use IM and FriendFeed. IM is common and ubiquitous and unlike email, it’s immediate. Perfect for browsing a stream of information and commenting

Twitter’s IM integration was at one point its second most popular interface, behind twitter.com. But IM was one of the casualties of Twitter’s bad old days; remember when it was down pretty much all the time? Even though the service rose from the dead, IM didn’t make it back to life.

About a month ago, Evan Williams conceeded that IM had moved from broken feature list to the features to build list. In other words, IM was hosed up pretty badly so they wanted to rebuild it rather than fix it, sadly pushing it onto the enhancements list.

Enter FriendFeed IM. Intetionally or not, their IM surfaces a lot of tweets. One common complaint about FriendFeed is that its content is too much Twitter, e.g. some say more than 50% of FriendFeed content is tweeting.

My theory here was that FriendFeed IM could replace Twitter IM. After all, you can identify tweets pretty easily in your feed and comment on them using the commands. Alas, the comments cannot also be pushed to Twitter, as they can be from FriendFeed, but I wonder if this will someday soon be possible.

Anyway, I’m impressed with the integration, but it quickly got to be too much. Luckily, the IM feature includes settings to control how much or little IM you receive.

I briefly tried the full feed, but that quickly drove me mad. So, I’ve set mine to comments only, which will be low volume, but very helpful to keep me informed about my feed. Too bad IM doesn’t track likes yet.

I really want to use FriendFeed more, but it’s too noisy. Noise is a huge problem for me, which is why I tend to bounce in and out of Twitter, rather than using it all the time. Features like IM and APIs show that FriendFeed is sensitive to this and willing to build the right features to get people to use their service.

I’m just not sure how I would use it more, even if I could change it.

What do you think? Do you use FriendFeed? If so, what do you dis/like about it? Find the comments and let use knonw.

Tuesday
Tuesday was shorter for both Paul and me, as we had planes to catch.

After coffee with Jay Simons and another Atlassian, (what do you call someone who works for Atlassian?), I ran into Daniel Ha founder of Disqus. Ambush might be a bit more accurate. Suffice to say, I like Disqus, and Daniel has been helpful with the few issues we’ve encountered. He did seem a bit taken aback, but I have that effect on people.

Between sessions, Paul and I got a demo of Gist from T.A. McCann, who apparently taught Larry to sail. No joke, that’s what he said.

Anyway, Gist does some very cool things mining data from your inbox and combining it with data from the ‘tubes, similar to what Xoopit does. I’ve abandoned my stance that the inbox is dead; now, I want to make it better and more useful, collecting and analyzing the unused data that live in there. We convinced T.A. to give us beta access, so as I play with Gist, I’ll keep you informed.

Unfortunately, we were so rapt in the demo that we missed a call with Floyd. Sorry dude. You’re smart; I’m dumb. You’re pretty; I’m ugly. You’re successful. I’m a putz. I’ll make it up to you.

Right before lunch, Jonathan Yarmis from AMR made the most interesting observation I heard on Tuesday in his session “Stream Computing: What to do when our ability to create data overwhelms our ability to store and analyze data”.

His advice to anyone pondering what to study in college was simple: study math and lots of it. The reason? There are so much data in the world now that the ability to create and test models on the fly will be a highly desirable skill. Sound advice.

Between sessions, I ran into Susan Scrupski, whom I have never met IRL. She reiterated the comments I’ve heard from a lot of people about the OpenWorld blogger program. I hope the team running that program reaches out to Susan and other bloggers for feedback; she has some good ideas. I think she was taking pictures of stickered laptops, but alas, mine was far away having lunch without me.

Speaking of which, my Macbook acquired several new stickers at Defrag, Flickr, Upcoming, Fire Eagle and Atlassian. I added a few other Portland-related ones recently too; it’s getting full. I’ll need to start on the bottom soon. Susan, if you want a shot of my glorious Macbook, let me know.

Friend of the ‘Lab Jeff Nolan moderated an interesting panel in the afternoon called “Fixing Foundational Information Channels: Email, Calendars, RSS, etc.” Some very smart people on the panel, plus several in audience raised a lot of good points, but alas, no fixing came out of it. Tough nut to crack.

I finished my Defrag experience with the guys from Get Satisfaction, Lane Becker and Thor Muller. How can you not be interested to hear what these dudes have to say? Their company’s tagline is “Customer service doesn’t have to suck.” Rich and I are fans of their service and what they’re doing.

Anyway, I couldn’t find their slides in the usual places, but this presentation has a lot of the same content, if not all of it.

That was all. Overall, I’d definitely go again next year. Thanks to Eric Norlin and his team for putting on a sweet event.

Thoughts? Find the comments.

So, Paul and I were at Defrag Monday and Tuesday, as was Bob, who has done a good job of recapping in near real time.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference, and as is frequently the case for me, the ad hoc hallway conversations were more valuable than the sessions. That’s not to say the session and panel content wasn’t good or interesting; it was both.

Anyway, here goes my recap of noteworthy observations that I can remember from Monday. Read on if you’re interested, and yes, I have enough to separate Tuesday into another post. Just wait and see.

Monday
The conference’s first keynote was from William Duggan, whose book “Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement” was in the conference swag bag. I liked his premise, i.e. that great ideas come from the combination of disparate sources and that great innovators steal. This was a great way to kick off a conference whose tagline is “accelerating the aha moment”.

Paul and I spent a lot of time roaming the smallish exhibit hall. Because the conference wasn’t huge, we didn’t have to stand in line to chat with the exhibitors, which was nice. We bumped into an old friend, Jay Simons, ex-BEA, current Atlassian, who was manning a booth.

Another ex-BEA guy was working the Connectbeam booth; he apparently reads here. They had an interesting demo, complete with a slider that Paul really liked. He’s a sucker for sliders. I ran into a few people who read here, and as I usually do, I felt underwhelming in person. I need to work on making my IRL persona live up to this one.

I spent the most time chatting with Yahoo, who had a small army of people there. OK, maybe six or so, but still quite a few considering the size of the hall and the conference. Paul and I chatted them up about their open strategy, which I like. I think Yahoo has some great assets (Delicious, Flickr, Upcoming, Pipes) and huge number of users. Seems like a success waiting to happen.

Yahoo is OpenSocial-enabling My Yahoo and the Yahoo home page too, set to pop in 2009 sometime. This was announced last week. Yahoo is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, so this makes perfect sense and will be awesome for both OS and Yahoo. Oddly, they’re not OS-enabling Flickr or Delicious or Upcoming though. They view it as content, not network, an assertion with which I completely disagree.

Flickr especially has a rabid network of users who don’t cross over to the Yahoo side. Note the outcry when Microsoft made its failed bid for Yahoo (and its properties including Flickr). I hope they revisit this decision.

Paul’s session was on Monday as well. He covered the metrics of social networks beyond the pageviews, visits and membership. This is an interesting area to us, especially since we have both an internal and external network for comparison. Plus, as more companies investigate social networks, there are no really good ways to calculate ROI.

Anyway, check out his slides. We’ll be building on these concepts and refining this message. Paul’s session was called “Sponsor Challenge”, which set the bar pretty low. Still, he got a great turnout and a very positive response. Here are some of the comments from Twitter.

We did get some interesting commentary from Lawrence Liu of Telligent, whose product unbeknownst to us does a lot of what we did by hand. Turned out to be a bit of mistaken identity; he thought the Mix and Connect communitities were built on Jive (that’s OTN Forums, FYI). If you read here, you’ll know they’re JRuby on the big red stack.

We got an ad hoc demo from Larry after the session, and what I saw looked good. The MSFT stack is a bit problematic for us, though.

Later in the afternoon, I met Laura Fitton who recently completed an “Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison” including Noel’s pet project, OraTweet.

Monday wrapped up with a nice cocktail reception, after which I watched football.

Curious about what I did Tuesday? I know you are. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, sound off in the comments.

I presented the above at Defrag 08′ in Denver yesterday.  The idea was to take some
known concepts around understanding networks and apply them to how we manage a
community.  This is new ground for us at the lab, but based on the reaction from the
crowd, the direction seems right.  We are working on doing some deeper analysis on
both Mix and Connect in the coming months and will certainly post that content to the
blog as we draw our conclusions.  Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts and ideas with me after the presentation.  Keep em coming.

I’d also like to thank Valdis Krebs at Orgnet.com for helping me to solidify some of my
early thoughts and for running the initial data on our social networks.  I encourage
anyone interested in this area to check out his writings and his software.

-Paul

I’m talking about conferences. Paul and I are at Defrag in Denver Monday and Tuesday. Paul is giving a session this afternoon, and though I haven’t seen the slides yet, it’s going to be something new and different. I’m planning to upload the slides to SlideShare and embed.

The Defrag lineup looks solid. Stay tuned for updates.

Then Paul heads to the invite-only, Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I think each of us in the ‘Lab got an invite, as did Marius and I think a few others in Marketing. Attending this conference costs you nearly $4,000.

Needless to say, we don’t have the budget to send the whole team. So, Paul will be representing the ‘Lab, rubbing elbows with the likes of Al Gore, who famously invented the Intertubes, Lance Armstrong, Shai Agassi, along with other luminaries.

And yes, I’m a bit jealous I can’t go.

But anyway, this is the last hurrah of this year’s conference calendar. Oddly for me, it began (at Collaborate in March) and will end in Denver. I’ll try to blog anything interesting from Defrag.

In lieu of flowers the family has set up a Memorial Fund in behalf of Carl’s daughter, Destany. Donations to Carl’s Memorial Fund can be by domestic or international wire transfer or by sending a check.

Please drop a comment if you’d like the details.

Please share this information with anyone who might be interested in reaching out to Carl’s family.

Update: I decided against including the information here because it includes personal information, and I would hate to see it used for nefarious purposes.