SOMEWHAT FRANK

FeedBurner Goes Free With Pro Services

FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feed management startup that was recently acquired by Google, has decided to offer its Pro services for free. Users can now get all the Pro stats and services for free. FeedBurner's official announcement was posted earlier this morning calling itself "FreeBurner."

I assume the shift to free Pro services was made because Google doesn't really need the $5 per year that FeedBurner was charging for Pro services. In addition, Google probably is better suited to handle beefing up the servers and bandwidth if they get an influx of Pro users. Whatever the reason, thank you FeedBurner & Google - be sure to activate these new features as soon as you can to make sure you are maximizing your FeedBurner benefits.

Google Buys FeedBurner -- It's Official!

Congrats to Chicago-based feed management and advertising company FeedBurner for getting acquired by Google. The rumor that started  a few weeks ago has been confirmed by FeedBurner today (June 1, 2007). There are more details on Google/FeedBurner deal here. In addition, they are just a great group of people.

Being from Chicago, and I have the opportunity to get to know FeedBurner and just about all of their 30+ employees through either work or play in the last few years. FeedBurner was a big supporter of TECH cocktail, as Eric Olson works at FeedBurner and co-founded the event with me in 2006. They have been an innovator in both the feed management/metrics and advertising space.

Congrats to all parties involved. Keep those feeds burning - oh and please let me know if the Somewhat Frank feed traffic melts any of Google's servers! :)

Facebook Opens Up, Google Buys FeedBurner, CBS Buys WallStrip, The Blog Search Engine King & What is Web 3.0?

Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by James Yu at Pier 38 in San Francisco on Thursday night (May 24, 2007) as part of the NewTeeVee and MetaCafe Pier Screenings.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.27.07

Facebook Moving to An Open Platform Strategy
Facebook has announced a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its site, moving beyond its basic social networking service. Facebook is taking the total opposite approach than its competitor MySpace by making itself an open platform. Will this give personalized homepages a run for the money?

Bebo, Wall Strip, Feedburner - who is getting bought out?
Early in the week Om Malik was wondering which of the three rumored deals - CBS-WallStrip, Bebo-Yahoo or Google-FeedBurner - will come true? By weeks end two out of the three (CBS-WallStrip & Google-FeedBurner) are said to be done deals.

What is Web 3.0?
Dave Winer weighs in on what he believes is web 3.0.

Google Reader vs. NewsGator Online vs. Bloglines
Judi Sohn takes a look at the most popular applications for keeping up with all those RSS feeds in a browser window: Bloglines, NewsGator Online and Google Reader.

RSS in Firefox: A Complete Guide
If reading RSS feeds in Firefox is your thing, check out some of your options in this article.

The Rise of the Nontrepreneur
A new breed of visionaries who are not In It for the money. They want to change the world. This line of thinking reminds me of a little tech mixer event I started with Eric Olson called TECH cocktail - I guess you could say we are nontrepreneurs.

TV Guide Online Video Search
TV Guide now offers an online video guide that distinguishes itself from other online video search by focusing on professionally produced video content such as, movie trailers, TV shows, news clips, previews and programs across all genres and networks.

Every good domain is taken. Here's why.
Have you tried to lock a domain recently? It is not as easy as it might seem. Kevin Ham built a $300 million web company in Vancouver you've probably never heard of collecting domains and selling them for top dollar.

Blog Search is Dead and Google Killed It
A few years ago blog search was an important aspect to every bloggers routine and I always wondered where blog search would go and when Google would come in and become king. Steve Rubel thinks that day has come.

Pageflakes Announces 100,000 Pagecasts
Personalized start page service Pageflakes announced that their "Pagecasts" feature, which allows users to share their Pageflakes pages with the public or a specific group of users, has been used to push out 100,000 Pagecasts.

Google Coop Embeds Gadgets in Search Results
Google Coop has quietly expanded and now can embed data from gadgets (i.e. widgets) as subscribed links.

Movie Review & Start-up Commentary: e-dreams
Eric Olson highlights some movies that document the startup life.

Google Talks Personalization, Tech Is On Fire, Newsvine Relaunches, Ajax Offline, Filter Automates Playlists & Digg API Fun

Photo of the Week: Keyboard infestation could happen to anyone of us. Thanks to bhollar for capturing the moment on film.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.29.07

Newsvine Relaunches... Announcing Evergreen
Mike Davidson proudly announced the first major overhaul of Newsvine since launching a little more than a year ago. It is now a personalized news page that you can customize to your liking.

The Tech Industry Is On Fire
Nick O'Neill explains how tech companies are banking these days, as one company after another have come out with record breaking profits.

Q&A With Google Personalization Gurus Sep Kamvar & Marissa Mayer
Search Engine Land offers up some interesting Q&A about personalization at Google.

Podcast: Taking Ajax offline
Offline web applications are a hot topic, but often misunderstood. Dojo offers an offline toolkit among others...this podcast talks through these developments.

Warm Up To a Protected Advertising Climate
FeedBurner announced AdClimate, a new feature of the formidable FeedBurner ad server for blogs and RSS feeds. AdClimate gives marketers and advertisers the power to suppress their ads from being served into content they might deem questionable.

Firefox Extension: Smart Digg Button
The Smart Digg Button extension for Firefox places a button in your status bar. It uses the newly released Digg API to determine if the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg.

(Text) Size is Everything When It Comes To Startpages
Kent Newsome give some interesting perspective on the problems he sees with text size controls on personalized startpage products. He believes these applications need to give users a way to permanently set the text size, preferably at the module level. He understands that you can change text size at the browser level, but that makes every other page look too big.

GreenDimes Reduces Snail Mail Spam
Everyone hates junk mail. Even though you tend to get more male enhancement solicitings in your spam email, real junk mail is actually harmful to the environment and keeps your counter-tops wonderfully messy. To keep it out of your mailbox, GreenDimes ($36 per year) will help reduce the amount if snail mail spam that comes your way.

DoMyStuff.com - Find People to Complete Your Chores
DoMyStuff.com is the solution to all of the chores you need to get done, but can never seem to find the time to do them. You post what you need to get done, and others post bids on how much they’re willing to do the job for.

Adobe Takes Flex Open Source
Adobe Systems announced this week that they will be open sourcing their Adobe Flex framework so developers can access their source code to enhance its ability to create Rich Internet applications.

The Filter Automates Playlists
606Tech examines The Filter, a service that automatically creates playlists for you to put on your computer, iPod or Nokia mobile phone. This recommendation system works similar to Pandora, FineTune and MyStrands.

RSS That Anyone Can Understand

Though many leverage syndication everyday, feed reading is not an activity done by everyone. Many people don't even know what the initials RSS stand for. Common Craft recognized this disconnect and decided to try and start educating the masses with a video titled, RSS in Plain English (shown below).

                                                            

Click To Play

                                       

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

(via donloeb.com)

AOL Feeds Now Powered by FeedBurner

Since I was pretty tied up with TECH cocktail 4 the past couple of days, I did not get a chance to weigh in on the fact that FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feed management company, had announced the signing of a deal to manage the feeds for the AOL Network. In talking with FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo at TECH cocktail 4, he was very pleased about the deal and mentioned the announcement forthcoming (the following morning).

Aside from my Chicago connection, I have been working with FeedBurner since coming on to work for AOL so I am happy to have the deal finalized - they have a great team and offer publishers services. AOL will now be able to leverage all of FeedBurner's metrics and FeedFlare to tie into social media services like Netscape, Digg and Facebook and feed advertising. Congrats to FeedBurner on continuing to grow an impressive publisher network from their home-base in "Sweet Home Chicago."

Death to DRM, Future of RSS, AOL'Sphere It Widget, Zillow Relaunches, Blog Search Wars, Google My Maps & P2P Loans

Photo of the week: robobunny by Courtney Brooke. Happy Easter.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.08.07

DRM-Free Music
EMI announced DRM-free music earlier in the week and now Microsoft is hinting at doing the same. Is this the death of DRM?

500 million+!!! AOL'Sphere Goes Live
AOL and Sphere quietly turned on Sphere It in their AOL News, Sports and Entertainment articles. The Sphere It widget is great - I have one too on all my posts as it offers users the ability to find related content. Love it. If you would like one for your site be sure to check out the Sphere tools.

Google Personalizes Maps
Google Maps launched a new feature to its maps product this week (April 5, 2007) called My Maps with offers users the ability to personalize a Google Map. My Maps enables anyone to draw, plot or color a Google Map without having to know an ounce of coding knowledge thus bringing simplified personal mapping to the masses.

Yahoo Testing Alpha (Beta) Multi Search
Search Engine Land covers Yahoo's launch of Alpha a new search experience. Alpha is really more of a multi-search tool that submits your query to multiple sources. It really reminds me of AOL FullView Search.

10 Things You Can Do With Mixed Media RSS
Marshall Kirkpatrick, of SplashCast Media, presents a list of ways to leverage mixed media feeds produced by SplashCast.  He provides big-picture use-cases and explains how you can use other products I have previously reviewed like Tumblr, FeedBurner, ZapTxt and Rasasa to create some interesting feed mashups.

The Future of RSS
Read/Write Web looks at RSS today and asks if RSS is evolving into a tool for delivering complex, semantically rich information. A great article for anyone looking for information on RSS.

Technorati and the blog search wars
Mathew Ingram dissects Technorati's recent state of the blogosphere. It is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad.

Financing Web Work with Prosper.com
Prosper.com enables peer-to-peer loans for startups and anyone looking to do their own thing. If you are looking for funding you may want to check it out.

Zillow Relaunch - Adds Its Own Q&A Service
Every home in the Zillow database has its own dedicated page. Any user can now also add photos and information about any home and its neighborhood to the site. Users can also indicate if a home is for sale, and the asking price, as well as additional info.

Weblin’s Avatars Surf the Web with You
Kristen Nicole reviews the recent launch of Weblin, a program that lets you create a web avatar that travels with you on your web journey. According to the article when you come across a site where there are other Weblins, you’ll be able to see them and strike up a conversation. Chatting avatars on the web - interesting!

iminlikewithyou, an interesting new look at online flirting
iminlikewithyou is all about flirting, well, the art of flirting. Users sign up for the service and answer a few basic questions about themselves. Photos can be added as well as other personal information to be rewarded with valuable flirting points.

Widgets Arrive for the iPod
The iPod is still largely a closed development platform, but that's not stopping some folks from creating widgets that run on it. Steve Rubel points to two products from Kooloroo that bring handy information to the iPod.

The Attention Economy, Widget Universality, Digg vs. Wired, Google Maps Traffic & Help Locating Starbucks

Photo of the Week: It was a rather crazy peculiar week so I went searching for answers in photographs and found this photo titled very strange moon tonight by Ordinary Guy. It captures the lunar eclipse that occurred on March 3, 2007.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.04.07

The Attention Economy: An Overview
Read/Write Web offers a wonderful overview of the Attention Economy. I think the most notable sentence is the following:

"Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim."

The rapid explosion in content has caused a scarcity in attention. Do you read or skim?

Universality of the web widget
Niall Kennedy gets down to the nitty-gitty of explaining some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher's point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments.

Digg Should Sue Wired
Mike Arrington thinks Digg has grounds to sue Wired and explains why in this article. He points to the fact that Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit and how they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.

Quintura Relaunches With New Interface
Quintura, a Moscow-based company I have highlighted previously has relaunched with a new interface.

Adobe Photoshop Online: It’s Real
Adobe will move Photoshop online as part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market.

TouchGraph - Discover the Relationships Contained in Popular Information Sources
Orli Yakuel showcases an interesting search tool that produces a cluster map based off the links to a particular URL. Just remember to get the Java 1.5 toolkit before attempting to run it on your machine. The TouchGraph for Somewhat Frank can be found here.

Google Maps Tailgates Yahoo, Microsoft With Real-Time Traffic Info
Google Maps has caught up with Yahoo and Microsoft in adding live traffic reporting for the United States to their online mapping service.

Data Shows English Blogosphere Has Peaked
Has the English blogosphere peaked in its growth? A new University of Maryland County report seems to think so. What do you think?

Blog Archive SMS-based Starbucks locator, a double shot
Coffee drinkers can now rejoice in the fact you can now send a text message to find out the closest Starbucks. I prefer Dunkin Donuts but either way, I think it is pretty sweet.

Flickr Turns 3
That's right, Flickr, the online photo sharing community owned by Yahoo, has turned three years old and had a big bash to celebrate. Photos can be found here.

Somewhat FeedBurner
Apparently, I have started to receive snail mail at the FeedBurner HQ in Chicago. I guess people think I work for FeedBurner instead of AOL. Either way, I cannot argue with the idea of dual incomes. :)

Google vs. Microsoft, Hollywood Disrupted, OpenID Explained, BitTorrent Video Store and the Feed Reader Market

Photo of the week: With the 79th Academy Awards tonight I felt this photo title Over Hollywood Sign by Jorge Mir offered a good point of perspective.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.25.07

Hollywood Disrupted By Social Media?
An opinion piece in the LA Times, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the "barometers of the American psyche". Personally, social media has definitely pulled me away from more and more television and movies the last couple of years.

BitTorrent.com Launches Video Store
BitTorrent Inc, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing software, has released the final details of their long awaited video store. The store itself will go live this Monday, and will offer movie rentals at $2.99 - $3.99, and “download to own” TV shows.

It’s G-Day: Google Launches Apps Premier
Google has Microsoft squarely in its cross-hairs as it launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft. It does not surprise me. Interestingly, this past week I also heard a radio advertisement for "Breakfast with Google," an event setup to showcase Google @ Work for government organizations.

How does OpenID work?
Good question, this video post offers some perspective on just how OpenID works as explained by Simon Willison. Also Digg announced this past week that they are going OpenID.

How Many Founders Does A Startup Need?
Brad Feld looked at number of founders in successful Internet businesses. The average is 2.09 founders and Brad discusses this number and gives his input.

Netvibes2Go, Pretty Good Actually
GigaOm takes a look at Netvibes mobile experience and reports back on it. Basically, Netvibes setup is easy: create a tab in Netvibes called “Mobile,” and drop in some of these modules.

The State of the Web-based RSS Reader Market
FeedBurner released a great look into the feed market and Read/Write Web took it a step-further by examining the web-based feed reader market. The article also pulls in some numbers from another feed-based business called Pheedo.

Next Net: 25 startups to watch
Business 2.0 has once again listed 25 startups to watch in 2007. Here are last years 25 hottest startups.

The Feed Market View From FeedBurner

FeedBurner released a feed market analysis report yesterday (February 22, 2007) which offers an unprecedented look into the syndication industry. This is the most comprehensive feed report of its kind to date. According to the report, Google, MyYahoo and Bloglines currently offer the most popular web-based feed aggregator products. It appears Google has the most feed reading users. A number of publications have already dissected the report but here are the highlights:

• MyYahoo reports the most click-throughs via feeds which makes sense since it only offers links
• Google (combo of Google Reader & Google Personalized Homepage) reports the highest number of read items
• Google also pulls in the most FeedBurner feeds

I found the web-based aggregator reporting information to be the most interesting as it shows the differentiation between reporting methods of top web-based feed aggregators (see diagram below). It brings to light the fact that not all products are reporting metrics in the same fashion which could affect the metrics FeedBurner is able to report. For example, Google reports item views on visible items while Bloglines reports all items on a page when it loads. If both Google and Bloglines load the Somewhat Frank feed, Google will report views only on items that are visible to a user via the scroll bar while Bloglines will report views on a page when it is loaded. Scrolling down to make two items visible in the Google Reader two views will be reported to FeedBurner while making two items visible in Bloglines will report still on all items on the page when it was loaded as viewed. In the same respect, there also could still be products that are missing from FeedBurners metrics as Google did not report subscriber information until just last week and there could be other companies still excluded.

For additional perspectives on FeedBurner's latest report check out articles on Olson's Observations, TechCrunch and /Message.

Yahoo's New Patent, Google Reports On Feeds, Web 3.0 Explained, Mobile Examined, Dash & EggDrop Fun

Photo of the week: Create a 2 gigabyte ChapStick as explained by The Machinist.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.18.07

Patent Monkey: Yahoo Ready to Smash Up the Mash Ups
Yahoo was recently granted a patent that could cause a bit of a shake-up to other web portal companies if acted on. The patent covers the ability to give users control over customized templates that are saved and stored on a host server and the idea that real-time information is  stored on the host server and delivered to the user in the template.

Google Is Now Reporting Feed Subscribers
Google has started reporting subscriber counts for Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage. What does this mean? This is one more data point to help you understand how many people have asked to receive your feed (aka "subscribers"). The number that Google is reporting is the total number of Google users who've subscribed to your feed in Reader or with Personalized Homepage. Somewhat Frank has seen a huge spike in subscribers via FeedBurner as Google products were previously not part of FeedBurner subscription counts. TechCrunch's subscriber count spike is even more glaring as it went from about 178K to 261K overnight. Thank you Google!

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
Read/Write Web predicts the formula for the next web (web 3.0) will be as follows: 3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search. Do you agree?

Xdrive Shows and Autocopy Beta Tests
Xdrive Shows is a new web-based application available on Xdrive that allows you to combine pictures and music into multimedia slide shows.  Watch a Xdrive Shows demo here. Autocopy, a new feature in the latest version of the Xdrive desktop client software, enables automatic uploads of music and photos directly from your PC to your Xdrive account. Give Xdrive Shows and Autocopy a whirl here.

Mobile Search Not That Hot?
Andy Beal looks closely at a recent UK survey of mobile phone users which suggests that there may be no where near the amount of people using their cell phones for search as previously thought. Do you search the web on your mobile device?

Building Social Applications at Climb to the Stars
Stowe Boyd presented this past week at Lift on the topic of Building Social Applications. He has put his presentation slides out on the web for your viewing pleasure.

Dash fills coffers for Web-connected car navigation
VentureBeat reports on a new GPS device that will be connected to the Internet too. That is pretty sweet if you ask me. The device is expected to be priced within the $500 to $800 range, along with the existing leading GPS devices.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 Goes Gamma
Yahoo launched a new gamma version of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, after the new service initially launched in beta just a month ago. The gamma version enables users to search directly from maps and share oneSearch results, news articles and the service directly with friends.

RSS Reader Triggers Airport Security
Josh Hallett recently found out the hard way that is you are using the paid wifi in the terminal and you open up a desktop-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, the network assumes your flurry of RSS-grabbing activity is a suspicious event.

Bored? Organize An EggDrop
Make Magazine just created a handy .pdf and video explaining how to perform your very own EggDrop. I haven't heard about an EggDrop in years, it brings back memories of middle school.  So if you are bored or wants to do something different give an EggDrop a try.

FeedBurner Opens Door To Site Stats

FeedBurner, a Chicago-based feed management company, has announced the roll-out of a site metrics offering. The product is an integration of BlogBeat, a product they acquired in July 2006. FeedBurner site metrics will track:

• Page Views and estimated unique visitors
  
• Detailed 'by visitor' statistics
  
• Incoming links including search query referrals and site link referrals
  
• Outbound links and counts
  
• City Cloud map of visitors (but alas, no Cloud City)

This means that a site owner can add one piece of code to their site to track metrics on the site level. The code also can produce FeedFlare and serve ads. Below is a screen-shot which I pulled from the FeedBurner blog of what the site metrics dashboard offered by FeedBurner.

I will be interested in testing it out to see if this new site code will at all slow the site load times. Regardless, it gives the ability to see the entire metrics picture through both solid FeedBurner feed metrics and now site metrics. Brilliant!

UPDATE: Orli Yakuel offers more perspective here.

Current Feed Reading Habits Examined

The way that people read their content has been evolving as online syndication has spawned a number of different content reading approaches. Firefox introduced live browser bookmarks and IE7 recently added the feature to integrate feed reading into the web browser. A number of online and desktop-based feed readers round have been duking it out. While personal homepages have also grown very popular as users can customize a page with widgets to fit their routine interests and needs.

I recently encountered an article by Stuart Brown that examines a snapshot of current feed reader habits by taking a look at the FeedBurner feed subscription metrics of his site Modern Life Is Rubbish. Stuart gives his opinion on the various reader options that are used by his subscribers. A similar report was done by FeedBurner a few months back as they analyzed TechCrunch's feed subscription metrics. In comparing my own feed subscription method metrics to both of these reports I think it is worth noting that Somewhat Frank offers similar trends in readership (see pie chart below) but also has subscribers using additional other unmentioned services which further amplifies the segmentation in the feed reader marketplace.

Six Apart Business Blogging Event In DC

Yesterday (October 19, 2006) I had the opportunity to represent AOL at the Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar in Washington, DC. The event was a half day seminar focusing on politics and advocacy. It was supposed to be lead by Six Apart's Anil Dash but unfortunately, Anil was ill so he could not make the engagement. It was unfortunate but Marissa Levinson and the rest of the Six Apart team did a good job filling in. Joe Loong one of the major bloggers also was in attendance. Jake Parrillo spoke on behalf of FeedBurner about leveraging feeds for politics and advocacy. Jake is a politician himself so speaking at this seminar was a great fit for him.

The event spoke to all levels on blogging and feeds. I have written several posts on Somewhat Frank (a Six Apart Typepad hosted blog) about business blogging, feeds and how to get started with blogging, so I thought it might be helpful to point some of the most popular:

• Naked Conversations: Blog Success Tips
• 8 Tips To Promoting Your Blog
• BusinessWeek Talks Business Blogging
• Technology Evangelist 'The Innovators' Series Visits Somewhat Frank

While all the speakers did a wonderful job presenting, I definitely was more interested in the questions the audience had to ask since it offers some insight into the understanding of blogs and feeds outside the tech community. Photos from the event can be found here.

IceRocket Resurfaces with Blogger Stats

IceRocket, a blog search engine that gets mentioned less and less in the blog search discussions, has begun to offer a new blog metrics feature which might attract bloggers back. Similar to BlogBeat, which was acquired by FeedBurner, IceRocket is offering blog metrics.

Offering bloggers metrics might help IceRocket to reverse the downward decline in traffic over the past year (shown below). I recall almost two years ago IceRocket was a rising star along side Technorati in a very open blog search race. Technorati has continued to grow and companies like Sphere have been created and stolen some of the spotlight. I remember getting lots of referals from people finding my content via IceRocket blog search and have mentioned IceRocket a number of times on Somewhat Frank. What happened to IceRocket?

It will be interesting to see if IceRocket can use the metrics feature to delieve blogosphere reporting on the state of the IceRocket tracked blogosphere. Or is too late to stop IceRocket's downward traffic spiral?