For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

It is now nearly 10-months later. How is Google+ doing? Not so well from my chair. They haven’t figured out a way, besides Circles, to differentiate themselves from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks that clearly have carved out their niche.

I think Google+ is a great product. It does a lot of things and does them fairly well (although their iPhone application is pretty unusable). If it was launched in February 2004 at the same moment Facebook was launched it would have given the now 900 million user network a run for its money.

So what’s the problem? Again, me, nearly 10 months ago:

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

[...]

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

At the time I thought this approach would have a positive effect for Google+. I thought that nearly anyone could find a way to make Google+ useful. But it seems like it has been the opposite. Perhaps this lack of focus has made it so that Google+ doesn’t identify with very many people.

The only types of people that I see using Google+ on a regular basis are early adopter tech geeks, social media experts, and people that work at Google. Perhaps someday they’ll separate themselves from the pack somehow but until then it doesn’t seem like Google+ has caught on with any particular crowd in any meaningful way.

Places on the web for sharing content and ideas often remind me of real life interactions. Facebook is the everlasting high school reunion. Twitter, which I love, is maybe half cocktail party, half party-line. Flickr & Instagram can be the best way to send a postcard, while LinkedIn is the best way to send a fax To me, there’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ‘round the breakfast table. It’s personal— you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting.

Twitter, for me is slightly more familial, professional, and often news breaking but otherwise I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment. If you have a blog you should feel it is your home online – everywhere else are places you go out to.

The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

I use PHP. Which makes sense because man do I love scrapple.

Assuming you didn’t already share your Instagram photos to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter and also assuming that you deleted all of the photos off of your iPhone without backing them up first – you could export your photos from Instagram using instaport.me.

I’m in no hurry to leave Instagram. But we’ll see what the next year or so means for the service.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.

In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.

Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.

Meg Hourihan on ownership:

But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.

While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.

And that’s where Anil nails it.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?

Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.

I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.

So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.

The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.

I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?

Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.

One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.

Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.

Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.

I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.

So, to recap, you can now subscribe to cdevroe.com in the following ways; RSS feed, @cdevroecom on Twitter, Facebook page, Google+ page, and carrier pigeon (coming soon).

Oh, I’ve got a personal account on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ too.

How would paying for a service ensure it won’t sell out? Maciej suggests that free services are more likely to shut down “Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt.” No doubt that is true but when is a big payday easy to resist? If I had been paying Gowalla a few bucks a month would they have turned Facebook down? I don’t know. But if they still decided to sell the company (or, more accurately liquidate the product and move the team) to Facebook I would have been both disappointed and out a few bucks.

In other words, paying for a service doesn’t ensure its longevity or that it will never change.

What about Twitter? I saw many people linking to Maciej’s post as being good advice and some even had shown how they added the ability to pay for their free services based on this thinking. However, no one has mentioned that all of us are using and advocating a free service that fits Maciej’s scheme just perfectly — Twitter is a rapidly growing free service.

Yes, Twitter shows us ads from time-to-time in the form of Promoted tweets, trends, and accounts. But unless you use the Twitter.com site you’ll rarely see these ads. And, I’m sure, they’re making money behind-the-scenes by giving businesses access to their “firehose” and more controls and analytics than traditional accounts get. But it is still free for the public to use.

What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service? I’d wager many would pay up. Many would leave. And their growth would slow. However, none of that would ensure that Twitter wouldn’t sell out to a company sometime in the future. Revenue makes Twitter look even more appealing to potential buyers than if they weren’t making money. Revenue, it could be said, makes a company even more likely to sell.

This leads to Maciej’s next suggestion. Build it yourself. Obviously not everyone can do that (or should do that). But that seems to be the best suggestion he made in his post. The only way to ensure a service will be around and not change is to build and maintain it yourself. But, what if it becomes popular and someone with deep pockets makes you an offer? Then where are you? Back at the beginning.

Here is something I wrote just after to the latest version of Gowalla went public.

“A check in is a very “thin” experience. There isn’t much to a check in besides; I’m here and so are these people. Everything else on these services revolves around the check in. Gowalla is trying to do something different and enhance that experience to make it more enjoyable and perhaps fun. That’s great. However, I think this is where Gowalla might lose me. I use Foursquare to check in because it is very quick to do so. I switched from Gowalla to Foursquare for this exact reason. And now with “stories” Gowalla seems to be trying to slow this process down even more. So they must be going after a very specific individual that wants to share their experiences with people in certain places, and who are willing to take the time to do that, rather than simply sharing their current location. I’m OK with this but it may not be for me. We’ll see.”

The part of Gowalla that made me switch could actually be the part of Facebook that keeps its users on the pages even longer than they are now.

I may have to let this sit a little longer. But I assume this will be good for the Gowalla and I’m happy they’ve seen something for their hard work.

In short; I never missed a post.

In some ways, those days are going away and now I’m at the mercy of the realtime web and an algorithm. And so far I don’t think I like it.

On Twitter, from what I can tell, I have access to about 7 days worth of tweets in their official clients; web, mobile, and apps on the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter client for iPhone, only pulls in the latest 50 messages in my Timeline and also on Lists that I’ve created. If I haven’t checked Twitter via Tweetbot in more than 50 tweets I simply miss those tweets.

Some people do use Twitter just to see, as Twitter puts it, “What’s happening now”. And, of course, that is extremely valuable. The pulse of the planet. But I use Twitter to keep up with family, friends, a few interesting people, a couple of companies, and yes – even a few celebrities. But I want to see every tweet. Not just the most recent few.

On Facebook the News Feed is run by some algorithm (which I shall now refer to as “secret sauce”). This secret sauce is both pretty bad and pretty nebulous. It is pretty bad because I’m routinely missing posts that I probably would have cared about. Case in point, my brother asked me the other day if I had seen a video he put on Facebook. “Nope, never saw it.”, I replied. I have my brother marked as a family member on Facebook. Surely Facebook’s secret sauce would deem a post by him as something I would like to show up in my News Feed? Apparently it didn’t. It is pretty nebulous because apart from some controls on the News Feed about the types of items I would rather not see, there really aren’t many controls for this secret sauce recipe thingy.

I realize I’m probably in the minority but I prefer to have access to every single update from the blogs that I subscribe to, Twitter accounts that I follow, or people on Facebook that I friend. I wouldn’t have decided to make those connections if I didn’t care to see them all. I’m going to miss the good old days.

There are services that fit in between the size of Flickr and Facebook (such as Photobucket) but it is an interesting way to look at things.

A good read and a discussion I’ll be sure to follow.

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

However, something else about this information seems to be changing too. Its size. Seemingly it is being chopped up into smaller and smaller bits until what is left is but a few sentences. An entire story told in 140 characters.

This too is good in that this information can be easily distributed, consumed, and used in ways we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of. However, I think it is the way that we’re consuming information that might end up hurting us. I think that those of us that consume this stream of information on a day-to-day basis are actually training our brains to become bored easier.

It is a proven fact that one way humans can fight boredom is through variety. By switching tasks throughout a day you can avoid becoming bored with any one thing. Wake up, make breakfast, read some news, do some work, listen to some music, draw a picture, go for a walk, talk to some friends, watch some TV, read some email, go to bed. Most of us would look at this list and think “not a bad day”. However, a sure fire way to feed boredom is to grow accustomed to being able to switch tasks without completing the last one. If the next task is always available and easy to move to – what stops you from moving from one task to the other aimlessly – never accomplishing anything?

This is what the consumption of information is beginning to become. Not for everyone, mind you, but for a growing number of people connected to the Internet or their cellphones. Think about how many times you change topics in a given day based on how you consume information. You open your email and you have 20 unread messages from friends, family, and coworkers. Each of them has their own topic. You skim through them, replying to some, simply reading others. There is 20 topics in the span of only a few minutes. You open your favorite news website and scan through those topics. My last count on the CNN homepage was a few hundred different topics. Again, you could choose just one or two but the length of these articles is dramatically shorter than they used to be so you’re able to go from one to another in just a few moments. Now, you move over to your social network of choice – or maybe you’re part of more than one? – and you scan down through that stream. Your friend just ate some lovely sushi, your brother is golfing, your neighbor mentioned something you have no idea about so you follow that link to Wikipedia and spend 5 minutes figuring that out, your mother put up a photo, and – of course – you have to update with the type of coffee you’re drinking. Oh, and you just got an Instant Message from your cousin who wants to come visit and an audio chat request from your coworker for that meeting you had scheduled. This continues throughout the day.

Again, none of these are bad things on their own but by jamming them all together in just a few minutes of time we’re really training ourselves to be bored with whatever our current task is.

Not sure if this is effecting you? How many times do you check your phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, or __________ through out the day? When was the last time you read more than 40 pages in a book? Listened to an entire album without skipping or shuffling and doing nothing else but enjoying the music? Watched TV or a full movie without your laptop, iPad, or iPhone next to you? (For what its worth, Google TV-like devices are going to bring this “stream” to your TV making it even easier to be distracted and – ultimately – bored.) In fact, when was the last time you spent more than an hour on anything at all without being distracted by something else?

I’m willing to bet that many of you reading this notice this trend too. Most of you are probably OK with it. You feel more connected to the world around you than ever before, more informed than you’ve ever been, and more capable of spreading the word then the local news station. But chances are none of those are really true. What is going on at your local market? How is your family doing? What single topic are you most interested in at the moment? Are you learning anything new well enough to teach others?

Maybe it is time we all slow down a bit and pick just a few things to care about and focus on them instead of training ourselves to become easily bored. We need to start training ourselves to be focused, productive and interesting.

• The RSS feed. – This gives you everything. Notes, links, photos, videos, etc. I suggest Google Reader.
• @cdevroecom on Twitter. A simple link to every single post immediately as it is published.
• CDEVROE.com Facebook page – Syndicates the @cdevroecom tweet stream.

If you follow my personal Twitter account, @cdevroe, you will only get linked to mobile photos and posts that I feel are worthy of tweeting about. Oh, and my smooth wit and charm too.

Adding these features to one’s website is now easier than ever but that doesn’t mean you should add it to your website. The entire Web needn’t be social. The way I see it the Web is a shopping mall not a day-long concert.

At a concert, or music festival, the venue does not change – the band does. The experience does not change for the viewer no matter what band gets on stage. The audience can interact, move throughout the crowd, look to their right and tell their friend how awesome the music is, etc. The environment is the same regardless of the content. (Though I will say that some bands can completely change the feel of the place if they ‘re great but it doesn’t change the tools available to the audience.)

At a shopping mall each store is a unique experience confined in relatively the same-sized space for each store. Wholly different experiences can sit side-by-side – an Apple store next to a Hot Topic next to a Victoria’s Secret next to a JC Penny. JC Penny does not make the atmosphere inside it’s store match that of Hot Topic or vice versa. Why? Because they’ve both chosen the experience they want to offer their shoppers.

And so should you. Just because it is easy to add Facebook, Twitter or any other host of social features to your site does not mean that you should. It simply means you have the choice. Don’t get caught up in hype. But don’t ignore it either. Now you have to sit back and think about the environment you want to create for your audience and decide if social is right for you. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – Ian Malcom – Jurassic Park.

So, you’re new to Facebook. Welcome! You’ve just joined a website with over 400,000,000 members and climbing. Needle, meet haystack. Before you update your status, “install” an application, or like that photo of that person you haven’t seen since High School – here are a few rules from Colin & Eliza Devroe – the Facebook experts that brought you The misguided Twitter guide for the new tweeter.

• Play 6 hours of Farmville, Mafia Wars or Treasure Isle every day. At work.
• There is no dislike button, so, just add “*dislike*” in the comments. Maybe Facebook will add one if you keep doing it.
• Become a fan of (oops, I mean “Like”) all of your idiosyncrasies (e.g. “Hating when corn on the cobb gets stuck in your teeth.”)
• Send at least one heart a day to every one of your friends. And be sure to say “thanks” for the hearts you receive.
• POKE EVERYONE. Twice. It tickles.
• When you install an application suggest it to all of your friends before you even use it.
• Answer questions about your friends in an application that they have to install to see the answers.
• You need to know what character you are from your favorite movie and so does everyone else.
• Busy people love getting Pieces of Flair. Send them a lot of flair.
• Tag photos with your friend’s names even if they aren’t in the photo.
• If someone ignores your friend request just send it again. And again. And again.
• LIKE EVERYTHING.
• Comment on your friend’s friend’s posts (you know, the people you don’t really know) and be judgmental.
• REPOST THIS TO YOUR STATUS: Even if you aren’t a mom.

Sticking close to this guide will make you stand out among the absolutely enormous Facebook population.

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

• On Viddler I save videos that I like, that I want Derek (our Community Leader) to see, or that I want to promote to the front page.
• On Flickr I save photos that I like, would like to paint or draw, or want to find again easily.
• On Twitter I save tweets that I like, would like to read later, or that I think are notable in some way.
• On Tumblr (no permalink?) I save posts for the same reason I do tweets. Reading later.
• On Google Reader I star things I want to read later.
• On Facebook I like things that I agree with but have no comment on.

And that is about all of the services that I use on a regular basis or that I favorite things on. With my recent addiction to Instapaper I like less Tumblr and Google Reader items but I still do occasionally.

What about you?

“Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.

Those days are gone, and a new batch have arrived, where if I write that I’m eating a strawberry pie on Facebook, it’ll get more replies than if I dig up a super-rare interview with George Lucas and write about it on my blog… What’s a man to do?”

Michael and I share these feelings. I really do miss the old days of blogging. I do like Twitter and Facebook, but it doesn’t distract me from reading and participating on blogs. Although it seems to do just that to the majority of ‘the blogosphere’.

A few examples of this in action, if I may.

The other day I wrote a link about Gmail labels and asked a question at the end of the post about how people currently use labels. That question got zero replies. Back when I was one of the authors of the now defunct TheUberGeeks.net that question could have garnered 10-20 replies before the sun set. Even here on my personal blog I’d get a few replies to a question like that – back in the old days. After a day or so of not getting any replies I Twittered a link to the post. That managed to get three replies. As irony would have it, Michael was the very first person to respond.

Here is another example. And one that fits in well with Michael’s comment about strawberries and Facebook. Yesterday I was eating a banana. So I Twittered nothing other than the word banana. I got at least 8 replies on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and other services. Wow. Fruit is still popular.

Well Michael, my friend, the old days of blogging are long gone. They will more than likely never return. As you say you may be able to adapt and overcome – but I like to think that we’ll just have to live with it like old men that wish for ‘the old days’ again.

iphone.facebook.com

One of the very first web apps for the iPhone and one that Apple has promoted during it’s Keynote addresses – Facebook had a good start in providing a great experience for iPhone users. The only problem is that they haven’t updated it in forever. This interface is lacking so much I’ll simply have one wish. Update it please!

The Facebook iPhone application

Without a doubt the Facebook iPhone application is one of the best designed iPhone applications available. It was also one of the first. Overall it is a fantastic way to access Facebook on the iPhone. However, here are my suggested additions:

1. Likes and comment notifications should link to the appropriate item. As it stands the app let’s you know that someone commented or liked something you’ve shared – but it doesn’t tell you which thing they like or commented on. Annoying.
2. Facebook’s “like” feature needs to be accessible from the app.
3. Support for Pages, Groups, and Events would be nice.

Facebook proper

While I’m jotting down my demands, I might as well put these few things in:

1. Referencing people on Facebook is simply not possible. I suggest that Facebook add the ability to add your Twitter username to your preferences. That way @cdevroe would actually be linked to my Facebook profile on Facebook and my Twitter profile on Twitter.
2. An obvious future feature is search. Not just people, event, group, and app search (that is already there), but searching through public status updates, wall posts, links, etc.

You have to wonder if Facebook was a more open platform, like Twitter is, from the beginning would some of this work have been done for them?

(Yes I typed this entire post on my iPhone.)

Random 60: Stop complaining! | Favorite on Viddler.

In the world of social media everyone has a voice. If you only have 1 follower on Twitter (I’m cdevroe, btw) or the only friends you have on Facebook (I’m on there too) are your relatives – it doesn’t matter – you have a way to spread “your message” easier than ever. Why not make it a positive one?

It seems that people are spurred on to talk about the bad more than they are about the good. If your cable goes out, your car won’t start, or your cell phone loses coverage — you complain. This is understandable. I do it too. But all that does is spread that negativity. Lets stop spreading as much negativity and try to be positive now and then. Lets be real (don’t be fake-positive) but lets try to keep it balanced at the very least.

How? If you use Twitter or Facebook copy and paste this:

REPLACE THIS WITH A POSITIVE MSG – #r60 http://bit.ly/19r0Vm

Note: You do not have to do a video. A Twitter message, Facebook status, Flickr photo, or blog post will more than suffice.

If you have a blog, you can probably figure out how to tag your post with r60. We can watch the results on Twitter here.

The most notable take-away from this first weekend of my using third-party applications on my iPhone is how very different the applications I’ve downloaded from the store feel from the applications I’ve been using for over a year.  It is something I didn’t think about as I was anticipating the release of this update.  Nearly all of the iPhone applications that are currently available are, in my opinion, beta-level 1.0 applications.  Add to it that they’ve not been built by Apple, and we’re talking about a lot of poorly designed applications.

This isn’t to say that the applications that were release on day-one aren’t valuable, good applications to have, worth the money they’re asking for, or even that they’re bad applications in any sense.  It is just that they don’t feel nearly as refined as the applications that Apple has released themselves.

Some of the most glaring examples of this are Facebook’s application, Connected Flow’s Exposure, and the Mobile AIM (this is an iTunes link) client by AOL.

First, Facebook’s iPhone application, while built natively for the iPhone – is not nearly as refined or aesthetically pleasing as their Web application for the iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great application, and I think it works well.  But at the moment I prefer their Web app.

Exposure.

Second, Connected Flow’s Exposure application, the one I linked to the other day, is a pretty good way to browse through Flickr.  If I had to guess at the UI of this application prior to launch I would have been dead wrong.  The application feels very much like the Contact app on the iPhone.  Click a menu item, slide to the right, see that information, then slide back.  But, clicking on the photo and clicking on the arrow give you two different information panes.  One is the photo, full-screen, another is the photo’s metadata (ie. number of views, comments, tags, etc.).  I think all of this information should be on the same panel, inline, and the ability to leave a comment on a photo should not be 3 or 4 clicks into the application.  I think this application should look like the iPhone’s built-in photo browser, with added metadata on touch.  But it isn’t.  It went a completely different direction than I would have assumed. It isn’t all bad, Exposure is free!

Mobile AIM

Last, at least in this post, is the Mobile AIM client. This application feels like someone built it that never built for the Macintosh before – but they tried really hard and nearly pulled it off.  Some of the UIs largest faults is that there is no way to sign out from the application unless you go into your iPhone’s settings panel first, there is no way to close an IM “tab” without first clicking edit on the active IMs list and then clicking the minus button, and that Mobile AIM does not use your iPhone’s contacts.  There are many, many things wrong with this application but the fact that it works and you can be on AIM anywhere in the world makes this one a must-have-installed application.

Let me be clear, I’ve chosen these applications not because they are the worst user interfaces, but because they are among some of the better ones.  These are some of the applications that I think are going to dramatically improve over time.  I think most iPhone application UIs will improve overtime, just as some of our favorite applications on the Macintosh have.  I think more applications will be released that are better than these and as they do, everyone will benefit from the competition.

Kudos to all of the developers that locked themselves in their closets and tried their best to provide good, stable applications for the launch of the App Store.  And I’m looking forward to the future versions of your applications.

Now, if I could just find time to go through the hundreds of applications in the App Store.

Kyle Slattery, Viddler’s Lead Social Developer, recently released a nice little PHP-snippet for Facebook application developers:

“While building the Viddler Facebook application, I needed to create a pagination tool that worked just like Facebook’s. After looking at their HTML and their logic of what pages to display, I came up with one, which I’m releasing for anyone to use.”

Simple. Straight forward.

Shortly after that I signed up to Facebook and did just about the same thing. I logged in from time-to-time to catch up on friend requests, see if I liked any of the new applications, and then logged back out.

I’m not even sure when I opened my LinkedIn account but I’ve never taken full advantage of what it has to offer. Many of my “connections” on LinkedIn were not really work related and so I felt my profile on LinkedIn lacked the legitimacy that LinkedIn was trying to build. I’ve asked LinkedIn to cancel my account, via email since that is the only option at this point, so we’ll see how long that takes.

Here is what I said regarding my intial experience with MySpace:

“But once you force yourself to get beyond that, there is a “valuable” service underlying in there somewhere. In amongst the error-ridden web site is a service that actually helps you to connect with people you wouldn’t have otherwise.”

I still stand by the above statement today. If you are having trouble finding the people you went to High School with look no further than using MySpace, and/or Facebook, because it seems that just about everyone on the planet with access to the Internet has signed up to either of these two services at some point.

My main reason for closing both my MySpace and Facebook accounts is because I believe that the value in these services is equal to the effort you are willing to put into them. As with any social network – you get what you put in. Unfortunately for me I’ve been unable to find the value in either of these services beyond the initial contact I’ve been able to make with those I haven’t been able to otherwise.

Side note: MySpace and Facebook have similar methods of deleting your account. I like MySpace’s method because they ask you for a reason, and I like Facebook’s method because they try to educate you on features they have based on your reason(s) for leaving. Pretty slick. LinkedIn, like Viddler, asks that you email them for deleting the account. As long as the response is fairly prompt, I think this method is fine too.

I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, but I’ve been wanting to take this plunge since mid-summer and I’m relieved I’ve finally done it. There are a few other social networks that I am on the fence about, but they typically do something that other social networks simply do not do (or I use them a bunch) so I’m holding onto those accounts for a while longer. Have you ever thought about closing any of your social networking accounts?

The Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo Floor

The expo floor was filled with companies of all types ranging from large companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to smaller more fun companies like Viddler, Zimki, and Piczo. Some people were being very professional and demonstrating some very high-level enterprise applications (which are typically found behind-the-scenes of more social software. ie. Analytics and monitoring systems for server grids). Others were demonstrating their next-generation web service that can take care of all your development needs from coding, to versioning, to deployment all in a social and collaborative way. Each had their pitch, each had something very interesting to offer, and each were trying to make their product/service stand out from the pack.

The sessions that I got to see (which weren’t many since I didn’t have a session pass so I had to sneak into any of the rooms by tossing Hershey Kisses on the floor in front of the badge-checker on the way in) were much more “professional” than the panels I got to see when I was at South by Southwest this year. This isn’t to say that those panels at SXSW were not done in a professional manner, but that the sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo were much less interactive and more a demonstration of some products/services/companies that stood out as doing good work in their various fields.

Web 2Open

The Web2Open Mashroom

Running adjacent to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes and sessions was Web2Open which is a *Camp style event that run in the main corridors on the second floor. Various presentations and discussions given by people that attended and participated in Web2Open were very good. “Minutes” were taken by various people and left on the walls so that if you came late to a particular discussion, you were able to quickly catch up and be part of the conversation. If you didn’t like where the discussion was going you were able to change the topic yourself by suggesting a topic, or – you could literally get up and go into another room where maybe the topic suited you a little better.

The idea of doing Open conferences like this is still very much in beta – and the process is being refined by the attendees each and every time one of these events goes on – but they are definitely much more attractive than any other event that I’ve been to. Simply being able to steer the conversation by simply raising your hand and asking a question lends itself very well to building value for those that attend.

The Viddler team and version 2.0

Viddler had a massive push to finish Q&A and testing on the its latest version of the site and player and managed to fit in many hours of development in order to release version 2.0. There are still a few bugs being worked out as soon as the developers and managers get back home from this trip – but overall the release was a big success and was fairly well received. The roadmap for Viddler is still quite exciting and the entire team is looking forward to the next step. I’ll have some more information about this and will be asking for everyone’s feedback on some of our ideas shortly.

Viddler 2.0 Cake

We celebrated version 2.0 a little bit early with some champagne and cake. The entire team was staying in Saratoga at our President’s relative’s house. We were so well taken care of that none of us wanted to leave (freshly squeezed orange juice right off the tree every morning makes a man wanna stick around).

Meeting the entire team for the first time was awesome. Working remotely with our team is really great and is actually conducive to getting very good work accomplished without the added expense and overhead of having everyone move to one location and setting up the proper digs for such an effort. However, it was nice to finally spend some time together to get to know each other even better and fit a real personality to the people that I have the privilege of working with everyday.

Harry and I got to work on our commercial together, which has caused a little bit of a stir with some members – which is always good to know that our users are reading our terms of use. We’re looking forward to updating our terms of use to fit more inline with what we really want to be able to do — promote really good video content and display it in an interactive and valuable way.

The Web 2 Party

The moment I got a feel for who was going to be at the Web 2 Expo; namely my friends from Citizen Agency, Ma.gnolia, etc. – I decided I really wanted to have a party with a few companies to help fit the bill to really pull off something nice. I mentioned this to Larry Halff and Chris Messina and I must say – they really took the ball and ran with it especially considering my inexperience in putting something like this together combined with the fact that I’m on the east coast far away from finding out about all of the venues that were available.

Tara (unknown last name) (aka Tara 2.0) came through in a very big way and secured our venue and setup everything we needed go pull off a successful event. Having an “event planner” is really key when you are trying to do one of these events with multiple companies and tons of logistics involved. If you are thinking of doing something like we did – I definitely recommend assigning one experienced person to get everything setup properly.

The party attendees

The party, in my opinion, was a huge success and it seemed like everyone had a really great time. People were lined up outside to get in, we were “at capacity” for the entire duration of the party, and people had to be escorted out of the gallery when the place closed. I had been to a few events at South by Southwest where people leaved early, the bar tab ran out quickly, or where generally not many people showed up. Such was not the scene for the Web 2 Party and we had a great time meeting everyone who came, shooting some video, and had some great discussions.

We’ve been talking about doing something in New York in the Fall so be sure to keep your ear to the ground. We don’t want to let all the west coast peeps have all the fun!

I know I’m speaking for the entire Viddler team when I say that we’d like to thank Citizen Agency for helping to coordinate the entire event, and thanks to Ma.gnolia, Scrapblog, JanRain, faberNovel, Facebook, Plasq, and WineLibraryTVfor helping us in throwing the best party during the Web 2.0 Expo. We hope you had as much fun as we all did.

The photos

Here is just a small collection of photos that I took over the course of the week. I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot many photos as I always seemed to be busy recording video, talking at our booth, chatting with friends or just generally preoccupied with other things. I recommend you look at the Viddler Group on Flickr for more photos (oh, if you have photos please put them in the Viddler group) and also watch the Viddler tag on Viddler to see any video that may pop up over the next few days from the Expo.

Oranges from Saratoga

Breakfast meeting

Chris Tingom

Viddler Palace

Lucasz and Kasper

Version 2.0 development

Viddler booth

Blake Burris

Crazy Keith

“Naked” Dustin

Joyful Jina

The gang

Firecracker Harry

Photos taken while in California

Again I wish that I had more time to take more photos than I did but I’m thankful that friends like Chris Tingom were able to take a bunch of photos during our trip.

So the next time you hear that Viddler is coming to your town or throwing a party in your neighborhood – be sure to give us a shout and come out and drink some of our beerz…

[tags]web2expo, viddler, ma.gnolia, citizen agency, chris messina, tara hunt, larry halff, scrapblog, party, event, version2, california, saratoga, san francisco, santa clara, photos, flickr, google, yahoo, microsoft, d. keith robinson, dustin diaz, jina bolton, harry snodgrass, chris tingom, food, oranges, faberlove, facebook, scrapblog, hatomic, microformats, zimki[/tags]
[slug]webexpo-experience[/slug]