SOMEWHAT FRANK

Video: Email is Broken & AwayFind Could Help

Is email broken? I have been struggling to manage email for a long time as I attempted to liberate my inbox back in 2005 only to once again stare email bankruptcy in the eyes. Email is such a double-edged sword since I need email to communicate but get so much of it becomes difficult to use effectively. I am not alone, I have heard the same things from a number of colleagues and recently TechCrunch editor and founder Mike Arrington even called the communication crisis produced by email a opportunity for an entrepreneur.  

I recently met Jared Goralnick who is a bit of a productivity guru. Jared joined me on quick SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode number 17 (below). He recently founded AwayFind.com. AwayFind, a DC-based startup, is looking to help ease some of the email burden so you can focus on your day-to-day tasks without constant interruptions. With AwayFind, which is currently in private beta, users can setup a page (like this one I created) to include in auto-response messages to anyone that emails them. The auto-response offers a little explanation as to when you might get to the mail and a form which can contact the user directly via SMS text messaging and email if the item being sent needs to be handled immediately. You can sign-up for the AwayFind beta here and you can follow them on twitter here.

Microsoft Backs DataPortability, Facebook Translates, Digg Tweaks, YouTube Mobile, Widget Kings, Mahalo Examined & Davos

Photo of the Week: The weather in California has been a bit moist this past week as this photo by Michael Risenhoover shows.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 01.27.2008

Video: Forbes Top 25 Web Celebs

The video I decided to highlight this week happens to showcase a friend of mine, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington as he appeared on the San Francisco Bay area local Fox affiliate discussing being named one of the Forbes top 25 web celebs. Other notables include Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis,  Jason Calacanis, Steve Rubel, Pete Cashmore, Kevin Rose, Ryan Block, Seth Godin and "Giga" Om Malik.

Google Apps Future, Mobile Phone Novelists, Edgeio Shut Down, Zuckerberg's $40m In Stock, MyStrands Funded & 100% Biodiesel Jet

Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Joey Wan while she visited Laguna Beach recently. It had me California dreaming!

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 12.09.07

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Video Chat

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, sat down with TechCrunch co-editor Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch40 conference for a fireside chat. Mark talks about opening up the Facebook platform and announced the FBFUND is a $10 million grant fund from Facebook aimed at helping application developers. The grants range from $25K to $250K and Facebook takes no equity or debt.

iPhone Chat Apps, Social Networking Exhaustion, Personalization Search, PodTech Marketing, Attention Toolbar Launches, Feed Truncation & Suits Suck

Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of bub.blicio.us at the TechCrunch event in Menlo Park, California on Friday evening (Suits Suck tee shirt photo explained in first story below).

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.29.07

TechCrunch 9 & A Funny "Suit"?
I was in attendance for the event on Friday evening at August Capital in Menlo Park and had a great time. There were loads of interesting web 2.0-fabulous guests in attendance. Thanks to Mike Arrington, Heather Harde and the rest of the TechCrunch crew for a wonderful evening. The guest (who I won't name publicly) wearing the "Suits Suck" tee shirt (shown above) said he was a Google employee in the marketing department and made me laugh. As I sipped on some Stormhoek white wine, he asked me and Nick Gonzalez, also a TechCrunch contributor, "what Mike Arrington looks like?" because he was looking to connect with him at the party. After both Nick and I took our best cracks at explaining what Mike Arrington looks like he left us to continue on his mission. So let me re-cap, the guy shows up wearing a colorful "Suits Suck" tee, works at Google in the marketing department, attends the TechCrunch party looking to connect with Mike Arrington but doesn't know what he looks like. Doh! Solid strategy, I wonder if he is a "suit" himself in disguise? You be the judge. ;)

Fichey: New Web Discovery Player
Fichey is a little player that float on top of the page and lets you navigate and discover new sites and links from the Web. Display search results from : Del.icio.us, Digg, Downfly, Reddit and StumbleUpon.

The many paths of personalization
Greg Linden explains at some point, the only way to further improve the quality of search results will be to show different people different search results based on what they think is relevant. At that point, we have personalized search. Showing different results to different people based on what you know of their interests is personalized search.

Social Network Exhaustion (or Facebook Bankruptcy Redux)
Jason Calacanis gives up on Facebook and tries to rationalize by saying: "Facebook is a multilevel marketing platform where you agree to pay attention to people's gestures in the hopes that those people will pay-attention to your gestures in the future. It's a gesture bank."

Video Review: Mini Moo Cards
CenterNetworks offers a video review of MOO and its print 2.0 ways.

Dear Podtech: I’m Not Your VP Marketing
Mike Arrington explains that Podtech is on the right track by focusing on aggregating third party content under its Flash player and advertising network and moving away from the highly-competitive content creation game.

The new Particls Sidebar
The new Particls Sidebar launched to offer a personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online.

First Look: AideRSS Feed Filtering
AideRSS, which launches today, is a new type of RSS filtering service that uses a proprietary system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog.

iRazoo Latest to Launch Human-Powered Search Engine
A new social search engine that is looking to promote human-powered recommendations the foundation of its service.

Truncated RSS Feeds Kill Conversations and Long Term Traffic
Ed Kohler of Technology Evangelist explains why truncated feeds offer a pretty terrible user experience thus killing conversations and long term traffic.

Top 5 Chat/IM Apps for the iPhone
Before the iPhone, swarms of Blackberry and Windows Mobile users accessed instant messengers through a variety of different downloadable clients and websites. The iPhone, however, forces developers to create something that’s usable in the browser. Rev2.org takes a look at the options.

Company Could Win $50K At TechCrunch20

TechCrunch20, the TechCrunch conference coming up in September, is offering a platform for newly launching companies to present for free in front of an audience of hundreds of press, bloggers venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and potentially win a $50,000 prize. TechCrunch has been assembling an impressive and assorted list of judges which are listed here. Should be a good conference as the winning company/product will walk away a big winner! In addition, there will be other prize announcements and giveaways from conference sponsors. 

Stay tuned to additional updates on the TechCrunch20 blog.

New myAOL Startpage Is Coming Soon

So you want to organize all your stuff on the web in one place? A new myAOL is coming soon. The current myAOL is solely a feed reader that offers some recommendations. The new myAOL offers a personalized homepage experience with some additional bells and whistles.

Aside from an Ajax customizable homepage with drag and drop widgets to give quick click and go access to content and applications, myAOL also offers a few additional pages as part of the first time experience. The additional pages are called Mgnet (pronounced Magnet) and Favorites. myAOL Mgnet is an image driven content discovery and recommendations engine which offers a fun new way to find new videos, images and stories on the web. myAOL Favorites, recently highlighted by TechCrunch, offers feed reader integrated with a solid bookmarking product making it easy to manage and share all your favorite feed updates and places on the Web.

I am the product manager for myAOL and I just posted the video (shown above) on the new myAOL Blog. It provides a sneak peek at the product. Check out what Mike Arrington from TechCrunch has to say about the new myAOL.

Car Research By Photo & Lifestyle

I have been driving the same ole' four door sedan for awhile now and it is just about time for a change.  I am definitely due for a new ride. Something a little more fun to drive would make my hour plus commute a little more enjoyable. So the question is...what do I get? Time to do some research!

Obviously, there are a number of factors that go into making a decision on what your next vehicle will be. To start I used a new feature on Cars.com called Vehicle Photo Compare. It offers side-by-side photo feature for determining how vehicles stack up next to each other. Each car offers some links to additional research about the specific make or model. Unfortunately, not every vehicle is yet available and the page does not offer up a permalink to embed or a way to share comparisons with friends. I have taken a screen-shot (shown below). Additionally, I gave this Car Search by Lifestyle a try and found it somewhat helpful though many it seems a little light on options.

Once I decide on the make and model of my next vehicle, I will need to decide on the way I would like to purchase it. I recall Mike Arrington outlined his experience with CarsDirect to purchase his latest set of wheels, a very nice Honda Pilot. I am not sure if I am going to go that route yet. I will be sure to write a follow-up if I do end up using something like CarsDirect to buy my next car.

TechCrunch20 Conference Details

Looking for a fall conference to attend? Mike Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, has just announced the details of the TechCrunch20 conference at the VC 2.0 session he moderated at the Web 2.0 Expo. The conference is being co-organized by Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington and sponsored by Sequoia Capital with the idea of highlighting 20 of the hottest startups at the event. GigaOm offers more details.The event will be held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco September 17 thru€“ 18, 2007 with tickets ranging between $1,995 and $2,495 depending upon ticket purchase date. You can register now.

GigaOm offers some additional perspective on TechCrunch20.

If you are looking for other conferences to attend you might want to check out this roundup of 2007 conferences.

JibJab Video Includes Bloggers

JibJab, the online video site which came to fame during the 2004 U.S. presidential election with videos like "The Land," has created a new video series called the "The News" and has decided to include some bloggers. Bloggers Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo were featured around the 1:20 mark of the video below. If you squint while watching, you might catch a glimpse of my face in the crowd of people.

Watch & Learn With Twitter

Twitter has been the talk of the blogosphere and tech community for the last few weeks. Twitter has taken a simple idea and technology to create an easy to use and somewhat addictive product thus turning it into a growing phenomenon.

I finally gave in and reviewed Twitter two weeks ago along with a number of other bloggers. Robert Scoble even convinced Mike Arrington of  TechCrunch to start using Twitter today. Upon setting up Twitter I opted to not get Twitter updates on my mobile phone. This week while in Silicon Valley, I decided to configure my profile to turn mobile updates on thinking I would stay better connected and to see just how disruptive it might be. Since turning them on, I have received hundreds of messages from all my Twitter friends.

A few things that I learned while using Twitter:

1.) Twitter can be a great connector - Twitter can be an excellent connector as I now feel I have more personal insight into all of my Twitter friend's as they offer short, usually personal, stream of conscience updates.

2.) Twitter can cause information overload - Twitter can produce lots of messages! It can be a slight distraction if you find yourself compelled to read every message that comes your way.

3.) Twitter could cost you - Twitter's SMS/text messaging update options could cost you on your mobile bill so be sure to check you mobile plan to make sure you can handle a lot more incoming text messages.

4.) Twitter is great for events - SXSW Interactive and the more recent VON conference are great examples of events that Twitter can enhance the experience as Twitter members can all Twitter the event.

5.) Twitter could be used as an alarm clock - If you have the Twitter mobile updates on you can configure some sleep hours where mobile updates are not sent. I found that doing this was a good idea. Interestingly, the time you set to resume mobile updates doubles as a wake-up call as the updates start flowing in.

6.) You can watch Twitter - Steve Rubel pointed out Twittervision which plots Twitter updates from around the globe on a map (as shown below). It could suck you in for a large chunk of time - so proceed with caution if you are short on time. Twittervision makes it easy to "people watch" and potentially meet new Twitter friends. 

What has Twitter taught you?

Photo Attribution: Ed Kohler via Flickr.

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. :)

Widgets, Modules & Marketing, Breakthrough Ideas of 2007, Google Attention Tracking & Web 2.0 Mainstream

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.04.07

First things first, today is Super Bowl XLI and I am from Chicago which means I will be rooting on the Bears today. The photo above shows the Merchandise Mart in Chicago supporting the team by shining the team's orange and blue colors. Go Bears!

Desktop Modules Help To Personalize Data, Cut Through Clutter
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal dissects the various personalized start page options. He is a Netvibes user but critiques all the other options as well and even hints at a new version of My Yahoo coming soon.

Widget Marketing
Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog explains how widgets are a great way to help market your site or blog. He even shows off his recent Widgetbox creation.

Desktop Widgets 101
Mike Arrington takes a moment to point out the differences between desktop and web widgets. Widgets are sexy in 2007 and so I would highly recommend you know what they are.

The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007
Harvard Business Review's annual survey of emerging ideas considers how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why, in an age that practically enshrines accountability, we need to beware of “accountabalism.”

del.icio.us: overdue new year's resolutions
del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, has grown to 1.5 million users. This article hints at upcoming integration with Yahoo, its parent company, and user interface updates.

Is Google building the Attention Economy?
Vecosys expresses view on the attention movement and explains Google's recent launch of new products (i.e. Google Reader Trends and Google Bookmark and Search History) that have been leveraging and surfacing attention data.

Mainstream Media Usage of Web 2.0 Services is Increasing
Has mainstream media recognized 'web 2.0'? This article by Read/Write Web takes a closer look at mainstream media adoption of 'web 2.0.'

News Search + Personalization + Social Media = Wikio
Wikio blends news search and personalization in a Digg-like layout. It also offers search and customization options to make it easy to get to items you might like.

Geeks love * tshirts for Sale
I love tee shirts that offer a cool design and this one was created by Cindy Li which fits the bill.

An Inventive Video Journey To Web 2.0

What is web 2.0? Time Magazine recently tagged it "You 2.0" with its mirrored magazine cover naming "You" the person of the year. However, the question has been pondered and explained in a number of video attempts including one by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington which I highlighted previously on Somewhat Frank. A new video recently emerged to take viewers on an extremely creative journey from the beginning of the web to what we are now calling "web 2.0."

The video titled, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" was created by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. All I can say is, Michael Wesch thank you for producing this video, I found viewing it extremely enjoyable - well done!