Techcrunch subscriber stats - This post can wait until Wednesday

We have all seen this post 'A peek inside Techcrunch's 100k' which shows Michael Arrington's meteoric rise from fledgling blog to blogging superstar.

It's old news.

But something struck me as I was looking at our own subscriber history today. We have the same up and down pattern every week that Techcrunch does. And we are nowhere near as cool as them.

The reason is obvious. Most people turn off their work PCs during the weekend causing the subscriber count to drop and most people turn on their feed reader on Wednesday - literally hump day for feed subscribers - when they are bored and feel like catching up.

So what does that mean? It means that feed reading is (at least for a noticeably large group of people) a 'sometimes' activity. It's an activity that we dedicate time to. It's like we go off to read a newspaper - we dedicate a block of time to 'reading the news'. And there are times when we stop reading the news and turn off the PC or the feed reader - or at the very least minimize it away and stop paying attention.

So what about those other times when something happens that we need to know. An event in a new fangled web-based app...

• You have a reminder from Google Calendar - wake up!
• Come and pick up that file in that workspace your working on in sharepoint
• You have a friend request from MySpace
• Your industry just had a major shakeup
• Your employer just filed for bankruptcy
• Your competitor just changed the game on you
• A customer just said something negative about your company
• Your daughter just posted a picture of her new child on Flickr.

These are important "right now" events.

We need a feed reader that can stay 'on' without being 'in the way'. Reading feeds does not need to be like reading a newspaper - it can be a filtered and managed experience so you can stay informed while you're being productive.

That's the dream of Touchstone.

Follow up: 08 Conversations continued...

Marian Richmond has made a fantastic post on the subject of the 08 Campaign Conversation on the new blog Campaign08Blog.com (a must read for political junkies and social media observers).

In the post 'Conversation according to Hillary and Barack' she quotes a number of bloggers (including me) questioning the authenticity of the call for conversation citing a number of (false) actions that are speaking louder than the words.

Here's a quote:

"They are not talking to us in the sense that the words that come out of their mouths are written and produced by third parties. They the candidates are not we the people as it relates to social media conversation… which means that the we, those having the conversations on blogs and other social media, are people talking directly to other people. Personal pronouns, we, they, us, are stand -ins for people."

Read the full post here.

Let's start a conversation for 08

Hillary Clinton launches a White House bid declaring 'I'm In'. Watching her video though (as well as a number of videos from Barack and Edwards - thanks to Scoble), I am struck by something that seems to be a recurring theme.

They seem to be focused on the idea of a 'conversation'. Are they speaking to us? You and me? The participants of the social media? Of course they are. They are announcing things online and trying to use the right lingo.

This is an amazing time to be a part of all this. I would, however, like to highlight a problem.

While they are announcing online and talking about conversations (giving the illusion of transparency) they are not actually being transparent. Each of them have been coy about their bid to run for President right up to the last minute. Hillary, even as of a few days ago, was still playing it cool.

Yes I know that's the way it's been done for years - but that's no excuse. Is this a transparent, online conversation or is it not. Stop being coy. Stop pretending like we don't already know the answer. Stop treating us like fools. We are not dumb.

Maybe it's asking a bit much for all of this to happen immediately. They need to learn how this transparency thing works. Maybe it will improve over time and they will actually open up comments, trackbacks and even make direct responses to the blog-o-sphere (feel free to comment here Senators) and maybe as a result... just maybe... they will begin representing the interest of their citizens more fully.

Until then I guess I will just be happy that they are trying to use the right lingo. That must mean they recognize the power of what is lurking here.

It strikes me that perhaps the latest round of Democratizing Information will once again force political democracy (in name) to be democratic (in form and function).

Maybe, eventually, it will create world peace. Just joking.

Sunday morning snippets

A few snippets for the day - then I am off to spend the day on a boat while Ashley and the team slave away cutting code for the next Touchstone build *evil laugh*.

Revising Press Releases
An Anonymous commenter pointed out for me that my mention of Stowe's post about PR people missing the point on Press Releases left out the other side of the discussion. I didn't know there was another side at the time but Chris Heuer has a post on the issue highlighting Stowe's oversights. I like Chris - he bought me a drink while I was in SF.

Chris' point is that while real conversational engagement with your participants is the ideal, Press Releases are still a necessary way to make (and clearly mark) landmark announcements in clear, concise ways. His point (rightly I believe) is that while purists would argue that a 1st person conversation is better than a fake 3rd person declaration, a Press Release is still an important hold-over for mainstream media to get the complete picture in a bite sized chunk

Stowe argues that declaring anything a 'Press Release' is missing the point. That Press (at least press who treat their readers like eyeballs) should die and that we should all be equal participants in the social media ecosystem. By the way I like Stowe too - he also bought me a drink!

My opinion on the matter is this. I think that anyone who takes the time to invent something, lobby for it and contribute to the community is doing the right thing. That's the definition of social.

The issue, however, is larger than this one point. When considering people's opinions we must take into account their bias and their agenda. My agenda is personalized aggregation. My life and my work is based on the premise that people should find what their looking because of their Attention Profile - a fingerprint that represents their interests.

If hRelease (the reason the issue of a Social Media Press Release is being discussed at all) helps Touchstone identify important headlines for journalists, then so be it. Ideally though, the connection of people with content they find relevant should be a transparent and automated process based on merit rather than any corporate press declarations. That might mean they find negative commentary before they find polished/fake/controlled press releases from a company.

I think both can co-exist though - and the community (and some smart algorithm) will decide which they pay attention to most.

Social Media is Dead
I also pointed to the 'Social Media is No Mo' post by Steve Rubel. Some people didn't realize I was being sarcastic when I 'agreed' with him. Brian Solis commented to point me to this post.

This is amazing... YouTube music production

This was amazing... A girl releases an original song, A drummer adds a drum line and a basis adds a base line. And they don't even know each other.

Follow up: Social Media is dead... or not

Looks like social media is not dead after all - but only just being born.

Stowe Boyd posts about his painful experience with a group of PR people as they talk about how to make 'Social Media Press Releases' - apparently they totally missed the point.

Brian Oberkirch also posts along similar lines talking about the fear felt in PR firms when trying to craft new forms of press releases and start blogs.

He hits the nail on the head:

"Blogs aren’t killing traditional media — attention scarcity and the decay of their business models is. Craigslist and other efficient attention allocators are draining media revenues, not East Chumuckla Joe and his online opinions about the Iraq war. Likewise, social media aren’t a replacement or extension of your traditional marketing tools. The question isn’t whether an online press release format should replace a traditional one. It’s much more gamechanging than that. Given the erosion of the traditional media system and the extension of a much more connected, distributed information ecosystem, how should companies communicate with those who matter to their business?"

Who invented RSS?

Dave Winer says RSS wasn't invented.

He says:

"It wasn't invented. Something else happened, something harder than invention, imho -- an activity that we don't have a word for in the English language."

I wonder what that word could be...

Maybe it evolved. Maybe the universe gifted it to us. Maybe the people at the right time and at the right place knew in their bones that something like it was necessary and decided that making it work was more important than owning it.

I particularly like this paragraph:

"RSS, unlike other XML inventions, has made a difference. If you want to understand what made RSS happen, it's the innovation, evangelism and commitment that was behind it, not the invention, because I said before, and as everyone seems to agree, it wasn't invented. But we lack a good word for the other stuff, so sheez, what's the big deal if they substitute "invention" for all that? I've looked the other way. But to say I was the "self-proclaimed" inventor is just wrong, I just nod my head when others say it, because I'm tired of arguing."

These sorts of things happen (on scale) rarely. But when they do great things happen.

As a result of his post, I also did a little re-reading on the Wikipedia entry for RSS.

Told ya so... Myspace bans widgets

MySpace banned (and then unbanned) all external widgets from its site. Even though they are now unofficially saying the banning was just an error), I think this was a test balloon to gauge public/industry reaction. I hope the reaction was loud and clear and has changed their thinking - but I fear it won’t hold off the inevitable for long.

Sorry to say it, but I told ya so.

As I've said before, mySpace is not Web 2.0 - it is a more flexible social network. It's SixDegrees.com re-invented with some very clever marketing/tactics in a time where ads can now pay the bills and costs are low.

Social Media is Dead!

Steve Rubel from Persuasion says Social Media is Dead.

His claim is based on the fact that most mainstream media now has comments and forums and blogs etc... so there is no longer a difference between 'unsocial' and 'social' media - therefore it is now all just media.

What do you think? Is the mainstream media a product of social interactions or a highly controlled editorial process?

Maybe we are can call it Media 2.0

Interesting...

Research on Feed Reader behaviour from Microsoft

It's so nice of Microsoft to publish their research.

They really are far more transparent than Google these days. It's funny that more people don't recognize them for that.

Check out this great little paper about Feed Reading Behavior.

Via Touchstone

Best of Breed Future

As Richard mentions on Read/Write Web today - John Milan wrote an excellent two-part article for R/WW earlier in the week, about the future of software. However - I have not yet had a chance to read it. It was too dense and long and I have not had the time to dedicate.

But Richard, being the excellent site editor and blogger that he is, recognized the possible problem and posted a summary today.

He summarizes it like this:

In Part 1 John argued that data should become open and accessible, just like the code in Open Source software. Code is often re-written and re-factored, but systems only work if they agree on the data.

Part 2 contends that people will demand more access to their data and more integration with their apps. This will result in the single minded, all-encompassing applications of today dying off - in favor of multi-celled, specialized solutions. So the future will be combinations of best of breed technology, rather than monolithic software.

John's conclusion was thus:

"And what trait will the eventual winners in this brave new world share? The solutions that can hone their data requirements, move results from system to system, use the best form factor for the job and still keep it on a human level."

Richard compares this to the new Firefox and I think he's right. But I would also like to compare it to Touchstone (surprise, surprise).

With Touchstone's input and output/hub and spoke model, it effectively moves data from one system to another and at each point making a decision about the best form factor. The example we use most is 'the more important the info the bigger the alert'.

This is probably not what John meant - but I think it still holds true.

Thanks to RSS as the universal syndication format and Microformats as growing standards, users can pick and choose the best apps to use together. We hope that Touchstone will be the best notification platform in that mix.

Via Touchstone

Note: I will start to say 'Via Touchstone' on posts when my post is based on something that I found from Touchstone. I have found that Touchstone has started to become one of my main information sources as it evolves into a complete solution and more and more of my posts are based on info it alerts me to.

A touching tale of Recommendation

This is a sweet story of love between a woman and her Amazon Recommendation Engine on The Onion.

"Pamela Meyers was delighted to receive yet another thoughtful CD recommendation from Amazon.com Friday, confirming that the online retail giant has a more thorough, individualized, and nuanced understanding of Meyers' taste than the man who occasionally claims to love her, husband Dean Meyers.

While the powerful algorithms that power Amazon's recommendations generator do not have the advantage of being able to observe Meyers' body language, verbal intonation, or current personal possessions, they have nonetheless proven more effective than Dean, who bases his gift-giving choices primarily on what is needed around the house, what he would like to own, and, most notably, what objects are nearby.

I don't know how Amazon picked up on my growing interest in world music so quickly, but I absolutely love this traditional Celtic CD," Meyers said. "I like it so much more than that Keith Urban thing Dean got me. I'm really not sure what made him think I like country music

It was nice to know that on my birthday, someone or something was out there thinking about me, and what boxed sets I wanted,"

This is a sweet story (in a strange, Amazon loves me more than my husband sorta way). Now imagine this sort of power across your entire Attention Profile.

Remember though... Touchstone is NOT a Recommendation Engine.

Via The Long Tail.

Disagree with me!

I like people who disagree with me. They force me to better refine my arguments and reconsider my assumptions.

Scot Karp's last two posts directly disagree with me so I thought I'd note them here with some of my own thoughts.

First he thinks that news is a shared, social experience. He claims that 'Technology' is as personal as we need to get. Any further personalization takes the 'water cool effect' out of the equation and makes news not very fun. He claims that's why Findory failed.

I would argue there are two types of news. Popular news and Personally Relevant news. Popular news and serendipity is found on Techmeme and Digg, Personally Relevant news is found... well... in Touchstone.

Findory did not fail because it was anti-social - it failed because it had some major gaps (a topic for another post).

Second Scott talks about the iPhone as a platform issue. My post on the iPhone issue expressed my feelings that PDA style phones are platforms and that Apple is missing the point by trying to build an expensive CE device instead of a rich mobile platform. Scott believes that Apple bets on user experience over platforms and it's success with iPod is proof that it works.

I'd argue that the iPod is a cheap CE device. PDA Phones are not.

Let the debate roll on...

The Touchstone Theme Song?

One of our fantastic alpha testers made a theme song for Touchstone. Get it while it's hot.

Thanks for that Marcello! Make way Brett Lee...

Touchstone declared "Closest to being an Attention Management System"

The Burton Group recently released a report in their series on "Collaboration and Content Strategies".

Specifically this report covered "Techniques to Address Attention Fatigue and Info-Stress in the Too-Much-Information Age" which compares approaches, products and services for Attention Management in the enterprise.

Touchstone was reviewed as part of the vendor lineup. Here are some excerpts.

"[...] The concept of a hub-and-spoke architecture for processing messages and applying attention rules can be found in Touchstone (currently in alpha release) [...] Touchstone is the product on the market that is closest to being an attention management system [...] Touchstone is a useful example of how to specifically target the attention management problem and we look forward to following its development. The company expects to ship the product in early 2007."

I won't give away the ending for them - but suffice to say Information Overload is a significant and growing problem.

I'd like to thank Craig Roth and his team for their hard work in compiling this report to raise awareness of the growing Information Overload problem. We look forward to evolving Touchstone to maintain its position as the platform of choice for the Attention Management issues he outlined in his report and supporting APML for cross-vendor/application compatibility.

You can purchase the report from the Burton Group.

Update: There is a great podcast from Craig about the report and Attention Management themes in general. No mention of Touchstone here but he does describe the problem in simple to understand way.

Book: The Paradox of Choice

I'm starting to sound like a broken record now - but here is yet another quote about hyperchoice from a lengthy interview with Barry Schwartz, the author of 'The Paradox of Choice'.

“The problem used to be, ‘how do we get information out to people?’ That problem has now been solved in spades. Now the problem is, ‘how do we filter the information so that people can actually use it?’”

He is concerned that filtering technologies may not be up to the task of helping us deal with the overabundance of choice and information we seem to find ourselves having at the moment.

We'll see what we can do.

Thanks to Marjolein of CleverCogs for this!

Betting on Windows - iPhone a closed platform?

I've stayed quiet on the iPhone announcement because I figured that it was getting more than enough coverage from everyone else - I certainly had nothing original to say. It looks like a very nice device - although the name is in some dispute!

This quote, however, got my attention.

From this post on Michael Gartenburg's Jupiter Research blog, in regard to the iPhone being a closed system (as opposed to an open platform for 3rd party developers), Steve Jobs said:

"You don't want your phone to be an open platform", meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

Hah.

We have received a bit of heat for choosing .NET (and by extension - favoring windows) for the first version of Touchstone. The early adopters among us (probably most people reading this blog) seem to have a cult like 'appreciation' for all things Apple and some refuse to accept that perhaps a small startup should target the platform with the most users first (i.e. Windows).

Putting the 'Crossing the Chasm' arguments aside - and I will get a lot of flak for this - one of the reasons I actually like Windows and will typically bet on Microsoft every time is because they understand that ultimately while overall user experience and style are becoming more important (and to me they are VERY important) - better tools and platforms will win every time.

What does that mean?

With the XBOX 360 they understood that it was not about building the most powerful hardware mix, but rather building the best overall entertainment solution. A solution that had a known platform and comprehensive development tools.

With Windows Mobile, they understood (before Palm did) that they should separate the software from the hardware and make the development tools easy.

With Windows Embedded and Windows Media Center they are doing the same thing and will therefore outplay Apple TV and Tivo etc.

And each time they do what they do best. They leverage Windows (in this case the many, many windows programmers - both amateur and pro) to create broad developer adoption for devices based on their OS.

By building a great software platform and the tools, they empower developers to more quickly (and therefore cheaply) target the device. The result - more content/software for your device and more extensibility.

User choice.

All that being said though, I thought the iPhone is based on OSX? So why can't developers write apps for it?

Update: Read/Write Web has some coverage of this too.

Me too me too!

Oh come on... I have posted before about how sick I am of 'me too' services and derivative 'new' ideas but this is just crazy.

It gets worse, check out the origional story for more comparison screenshots and commentary as well as a post on Techcrunch about it.

I think this also feeds into Stowe's post about the changing landscape and the tendency for investors to cluster around certain problem/solution domains rather than taking risks. Sort of like network television making 100 thousand cop shows.

Morphing Media - Signposts of Media 2.0

Meredith Obendorfer writes a post called 'Investigating the Case of the Morphing Media' over on 'Echo Base' where she predicts the rise of Media 2.0.

She explains a set of recent circumstances that are signposts of a failing Media 1.0 world and the rise of... something else.

At the end of the post she suggests that perhaps it's time to call it Media 2.0.

At a time when VC investment in new media is surging, the question remains, will traditional media be able to keep up? And at what cost will it learn that it needs to morph with the rest of ‘em? Overused dot-oh or not, it’s clearly time for media 2.0.

I have been talking about Media 2.0 for quite some time and as I explained, I think that Attention and Aggregation will play a key part.

Watch this space Meredith!

Follow up: More talk of bubbles

Following up from my last post about bubbles, this time from people who know what they're talking about - VCs (hah) - are joining in the discussion.

Check out the Wall Street Journal's discussion between VCs.

Here's a quote from Todd Dagres about why he thinks we are indeed in a bubble.

Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons: 1) There is far too much money chasing Web 2.0 deals. Too much money means too many companies getting funded at higher valuations. 2) There are virtually no barriers to entry in Web 2.0 and therefore the ability to develop a unique solution and sustain a competitive advantage is virtually nil. Therefore, it's difficult for Web 2.0 companies to build long term value. 3) There is very little liquidity in the market for Web 2.0 companies.

There are some great arguments for and against. In the end though, as I said previously. If you have a business plan and are solving a real pain then you can worry... less.