Daily Archives: February 11, 2009

Recommendations for the Twitter crowd: GoodRec

Quick, you’re at an awesome restaurant, want to tell everyone about it, but only have a mobile phone and don’t want to bang out a long review. How do you a quick review? GoodRec has the answer. They designed its service for the people who are used to telling the world everything in 140 characters on Twitter.

Here Goodrec’s CEO, Mihir Shah, gives me a demo of its just-released iPhone app and demonstrates why his recommendation service is better for lots of things than competitors like Yelp or Amazon’s reviews.

New Feedly combines Google Reader, friendfeed, Twitter in great way for social network addicts

Edwin Khodabakchian founder of Feedly yesterday showed me why Feedly is cool (I recorded him telling me about what makes Feedly special and demoing these new features): it combines inputs from Google Reader, friendfeed, twitter, and elsewhere to make an interesting news display, but now it also — as you surf around the web — shows you if there’s a conversation about that blog post on friendfeed. You can read more about Feedly’s new features on its blog.

What is Feedly? It’s an addon to the Firefox browser that aggregates your sharing behavior together into a page and then adds a little bar to the bottom of pages that gives you more sharing and comparing features about that page.

It also is like a little StumbleUpon — if you keep clicking “next” in the little toolbar it’ll take you to another cool site your friends have recommended to you.

This is all crack to someone like me who lives on social networking sites all the time and wants to keep up to date on the conversation that is happening over on friendfeed about items.

But that’s also its downfall. How many people are like me? Not many. Do many people, when they are visiting a web page, wonder what the conversation about that page is? Nah.

And, if you see my Feedly page you’ll see it really is awesome. A good, quick, summary of today’s latest news. I think it’s better than Techmeme or TechFuga because it’s based on my friends and the feeds I’ve subscribed to on Google Reader.

See in Google Reader I have almost 1,000 people who are scouring the Internet for interesting new stuff and are sharing it with me. That is like having 1,000 editors working for you. It makes for a news page that’s quite interesting and amazing.

The problem? How many people have 1,000 friends in Google Reader? Not many.

Two strikes.

That’s why I say Feedly is ahead of its time. At least with friendfeed you can see what someone else’s experience is like, even if you don’t have any friends. I hope Feedly will move in that direction so everyone can see what Louis Gray’s friends are bringing him, for instance.

But, in the meantime, Feedly is very interesting to me and it has been added to my morning news reading.

Read/Write Web has a good article on the new features as well.

Chris Pirillo is wrong about best pocket video cameras

So, back when I got a Flip Mino HD video camera Chris Pirillo gave me a bunch of heck and said I bought the wrong camera. He reviewed the Flip against the Kodak Zi6 and the Creative Vado HD. He said the Creative Vado HD is the best. His videos sure seem to prove that, don’t they.

But after using all three for a week I totally disagree.

First, the Creative Vado HD videos won’t play on my Mac and can’t be edited by my new iMovie 09. HUGE problem. That alone disqualifies it from being “best.” But it also has a goofy USB dongle that just doesn’t feel well designed and a protuding lens that just doesn’t feel nice in your pocket. Now, I do agree that the Vado has the best video quality of the three but in talking to many people about the three cameras it isn’t enough better to make it worth dealing with, especially since these kinds of gadgets will appeal to a Mac-centric audience.

And how about the Kodak? I like this camera, but I’m a professional who does a LOT of video. Why do I like it? It takes regular AA batteries (it comes with rechargeable ones) but sometimes I do three or four interviews in a day and it’s nice to know I can just pop in some extra batteries if I run out of juice. The other cameras can’t do that.

The Kodak also has a closeup lens that has already gotten some use in my hands and the audio on the Kodak is slightly better than the Flip. Finally, it’s bigger than the other two cameras so is a bit easier to hold steady. Which gets me to why I like the Flip the best:

The Flip is the best because it is the best designed and smallest. It is — in talking with my friends — the most likely to end up in their pocket. A camera carried is a camera that is used and a camera that is used, even if it has slightly lower quality that some other camera, is one that’s better.

The Flip Mino HD is the best of the bunch for most people and you can now ignore Chris Pirillo.

What are the best headphones for use with Skype?

Tonight I was invited onto Peter Himmelman’s very cool Tuesday night jam session. He calls it his “Furious World.” He’s a musician and damn that show is fun. Anyway, my old headset didn’t work anymore and since I’m on so many podcasts I went to the local computer shop to get a new headset. I wasn’t prepared for the dozens of choices. Logitech. Plantronics. Sennheiser.

I needed one desperately so got the nicest looking set I could find, the Sennheiser PC 166. I paid about $95, list price is $150 (there are plenty of good headsets for far less than that, but I wanted a nice set for playing games and music while everyone else watches TV too).

Anyway, since I was forced into buying quickly, I wonder what your favorite headsets are?

Oh, and next Tuesday night you should check out what Peter’s doing with his friends. It’s the most innovative live video I’ve watched so far online (he mixes in geek talk in between jamming and fooling around with his friends/band/music).

This blog is dead! ORLY?

I see a few people are talking about the death of A-list blogging. Including my blog in that as evidence.

Actually you’ll see me blogging more and social networking less. Why? Cause I’m starting to have longer thoughts again. Might have something to do with not being able to drink Diet Coke anymore due to my kidney disease.

I can’t wait for Dan Lyons to predict the death of Facebook or Twitter because I’m blogging again.

Anyway, I think Twitter is blogging. When I go back and look at my blog back in 2004, for instance, it looks a whole lot like Twitter. Short item with a link. So some of that content behavior has moved elsewhere. Big whoop.

But now that I’ve done 18,000 tweets I find I’m getting bored there and want to play around with longer blog posts again. Mostly because I find I’m having something to say.

Welcome back to the dead. :-)