This year my New Year's resolution is to be bold and what better way to do that than to start the year off by leaving the solid paycheck, benefits and comfort of a job at Aol. Today is my last day as an Aol employee as I have decided to move on to pursue some of my own entrepreneurial endeavors. It has been just over 3 years since I joined Aol to help bring some "Web 2.0 & social media" perspective and expertise to the Aol team. In Internet years that is about 10 years. My first task was to join the product development team responsible for the myAOL triple threat including a personalized homepage, a feed reader with bookmarking and an innovate recommendation engine. We then went on to launch it in 28+ countries before it turned one. More recently with the launch of AIM Lifestream I saw about 18 months of planning and strategy come to fruition which included work on AIM buddyupdates and the acquisition of SocialThing. I have racked up a lot of airline miles bouncing between DC and the West Coast. It has been a good run and a great learning experience working in a large organization and I have met so many great people along the way. I am proud of our accomplishments at Aol. As anyone who has ever worked at a large company can attest, it is not easy to launch a product in a big organization and I did it a few times in just three years.
Since joining AOL in 2006, I have worked on the product direction and strategy of two AOL products. The first of these was the myAOL personalized start page, which I covered previously when it launched in 2007 and was rolled out to 78 countries. The other product I have worked on is AIM.
AIM has been around a very long time - launched in the 1990’s it assembled the first viable social graph with the AOL buddy list. So I was excited to jump on board with a team of internal AOL thought-leaders in January 2008 to map out the future of myAOL and determine how it could interact with AIM to offer users a streamlined social utility. During this process we identified that real-time data or the “lifestream”, is a necessity to any social experience on the Web. AIM had a similar "lifestream" concept since 2005 called AIM Buddy Updates which I covered previously, as we relaunched it on the Web in the summer 2008. We concluded our work and learnings from the project and proposed a direction and then went on to acquire SocialThing, which I connected with AOL via TECH cocktail Boulder 1 to join the AIM team and contributed to the effort. Being involved from its original ideation till now, I am pleased to see the new AIM with lifestream come to fruition.
How important is influence on the Web? My friend Micah Baldwin recently called Influence the New Hotness. I agree, Influence is hot and it is nothing new though the currency has changed. Just a few years back the most important currency was incoming links to your website, now it is real-time re-tweets via Twitter or "likes" on Facebook's news feed. The social tools today are enabling people to influence the Web via real-time communications.
With Twitter being a hot tool that is empowering people to influence others, I was curious to see just how influential I am on Twitter. Thanks to Filtrbox you can now answer that very question by simply entering your Twitter username and clicking submit. Filtrbox just launched the Twitter Influence Checker today and I got chance to give it a try. It turns out my Twitter account @frankgruber has a Twitter Influence score of 8 out for 10.
Have you recently updated your Twitter or Facebook status, posted a photo on Flickr or posted a video on YouTube or Vimeo? I have. This kind of lifestreaming online behavior has become mainstream as the Web 2.0 movement empowered anyone to become an online content creator, trading privacy for a little taste of online fame and a connection with people.
While I was down in Austin, Texas for South By Southwest (SXSW), I got a chance to see the film screening of WE LIVE IN PUBLIC which took home the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The film focuses on the adventures of early dot-comer Josh Harris as he experiments to predict the effects of the Web on society. Ondi Timoner directed the film which documents what happens when the Web takes a stronger hold of our everyday life. The movie takes place mostly in New York and includes appearances by Jason Calacanis, Julia Allison and Meghan Asha (who appears on SOMEWHAT FRANK videos here and here). WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is a must see as we all become more tied to our devices and the Web.
Check out episode 73 on SOMEWHAT FRANK adventures in personal technology as I recorded a couple of short clips from the Q&A session with Director Ondi
Timoner after the film and even got to meet her afterward. Also be sure to see the film WE LIVE IN PUBLIC when it is released as it really makes you think how we all live our lives and share so much online. Oh and you can follow Director Ondi Timoner on Twitter too.
Photo of Director Ondi Timoner and I by Jen Consalvo.
A few weeks ago Mike Arrington gave me a call asking me if, my employer, AOL, had acquired SocialThing. Though it struck very close to home, I had to bite my tongue since the deal had not yet closed and did not comment on the matter. Now that is has been officially released, I can. It is true, AOL has entered into an agreement to acquire SocialThing, the Boulder, Colorado based social aggregating lifestream startup. The terms are not disclosed and the acquisition is still subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions.
I met founders Matt "indiekid" Galligan, Ben Brightwell and the team as they demo'ed at TECH cocktail Boulder on March 6th. Matt is originally from Illinois, like I am, and moved to Boulder to create SocialThing as part of the TechStars incubator program. I got a preview of the SocialThing private beta at TECH cocktail (shown in the video below) which was a few days before they launched at SXSW Interactive and were written up favorably on TechCrunch as being easier to use than FriendFeed. I was impressed by what this startup had created as it offered a wrapper for all your social activities making it easy to post to multiple networks at once. SocialThing is integrated with 13 social media properties including Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Flickr and is currently still in private beta.
For the last month or so I have been working on a little project at AOL as part of the AIM group called the BuddyUpdates. BuddyUpdates, offers a way for AIM users to share their actions with the rest of their buddy list. This product has been available since 2005 within the AIM client. Note this was well before the Facebook news feed was unveiled and Twitter or number of other lifestreaming services existed. The web-based BuddyUpdates interface launched publicly on July 9th and we have been sharing it with a small group as we continue to update it.
So if you use AIM you can pull in all you favorite services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Viddler, Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and so on and share them with the rest of the folks that have you on your buddy list. If you are on the AIM client you will see a little orange icon next to a buddy screen name that has BuddyUpdates. Upon clicking the orange icon you can view their updates. BuddyUpdates offers a Web interface for setting up and viewing these updates.
Swurl, a San Diego-based startup, offers a very smart aggregation of all your favorite services that makeup your social footprint online. Swurl is a place to bring all the things you do online together to share in a blog-like format.
SocialThing, a Boulder, Colorado TechStars startup that aggregates all your online social updates into one slick lifestream, launched into private beta this past March in Austin, Texas at the South By Southwest Interactive event. I got a chance to get a preview of the product the week before as SocialThing showed off its stuff at TECH cocktail Boulder. I was impressed and have been using it online and via the iPhone version ever since.
Just a few weeks ago, SocialThing rolled out version 2.0 of the product. The previous version was pretty but version 2.0 looks even better than before. It offers users more control of the presentation via the settings. For example users can now sort by friends or by time. Users can also allow others to link directly to a public profile with controls on what appears in the feed. SocialThing has reworked the way they retrieve updates from all your favorite services so that updates are not pulled back in a constant flow but are batched. This allows SocialThing to indicate when there are additional updates that you might want to refresh your page to receive. Additionally, they have rolled out a new iPhone application that allows for on-the-go posting of status and trolling of your lifestream. It is pretty slick.
Last week, I looked at Plurk, a new lifestreaming startup based in Toronto, Canada. Aside from its creative name, Plurk leverages concepts from Twitter to offer an unique timeline based lifestreaming product worth taking a look at.
Plurk takes on status messaging with a little more structure than Twitter by offering up a set of verbs to construct a status message. It also enables users to share videos and photos from a host of popular video and image hosting sites from YouTube to Flickr. Plurk status messages can also include emoticons for some added flair.
Mobile social networks have come a long way since Google acquired Dodgeball back in 2005 as both mobile devices and online product offerings have improved. Twitter and other mobile enabled lifestreaming and communication products have taken off as users have grown more accustom to text messaging. That said, I finally got around to give, the Colorado-based startup Brightkite a try and was impressed by it.
Photo of the Week: This is a photo of the TECH cocktail RACING Pine Wood Derby car which took 6th place out of 41 at this years Threadless.com Threadle Manss this past weekend.
Lifestream.fm
recently launched into beta, so far I have to
say, this is the best “life streaming” service I have found. However,
it has tough competition with FriendFeed, SocialThing,
and others. Lifestream.fm offers users the ability to aggregate
numerous services such as Del.icio.us, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo,
Pownce, Tumblr, and many others. It also allows you to aggregate
numerous RSS feeds.
With CES taking place in Las Vegas this week and the unfortunate fact that I am unable to attend I am going to take full advantage of my friends lifestreaming videos to get a feel of the conference. Qik is an alpha product that has sprung onto the scene to enable users to stream live video directly from their mobile phone making the barriers of entry into lifestreaming a step closer to the everyday mobile phone user.
So if you use AIM you can pull in all you favorite services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Viddler, Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and so on and share them with the rest of the folks that have you on your buddy list. If you are on the AIM client you will see a little orange icon next to a buddy screen name that has BuddyUpdates. Upon clicking the orange icon you can view their updates. BuddyUpdates offers a Web interface for setting up and viewing these updates. 
