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

February 11, 2009 By

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.

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Chris Pirillo is wrong about best pocket video cameras

February 11, 2009 By

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.

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What are the best headphones for use with Skype?

February 11, 2009 By

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).

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This blog is dead! ORLY?

February 11, 2009 By

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. :-)

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Keeping kids online safe

February 10, 2009 By

Yesterday I met with a few Symantec executives. They’ll have some cool stuff out over the next few weeks that we can talk about. But yesterday I spent a bunch of time with Jody Gibney who is responsible for the Norton Internet Security product line talking about how to prepare and educate kids about how to safely behave online. It’s nice to see companies are finally moving away from just being a spy on your kids. Parents who assume they can keep their kids from seeing “bad” stuff online are totally uninformed. Now that kids are bringing iPhones to school that era is over. Get over it. Your kids WILL probably see porn or other sites you’d rather they not visit.

The new way to keep kids safe isn’t to try to block them from going to nasty sites: it’s all about educating them about what is good behavior and is bad. Anyway, Jody told me that educators are now seeing the real threats are the kids own friends. They are brutal, she told me, and are doing all sorts of nasty stuff online that could harm reputations for years. Remember, Google sees all but it is selective about what it sees. Ten kids can group together, create a fake online page with your sons name on it, and do a lot of harm. It’s a world I never even considered. I always thought that the threats would be porn or some weird old dude trying to exploit my son.

It gets worse, though, because tonight MSN reported that 51% of kids surf online unsupervised and that 29% had been bullied.

So, how do you protect your kids about that? You talk with them, Jody told me. She and Symantec are developing tools after talking with both kids and parents to try to help them do just that — talk about what’s good behavior online.

So, let’s start. What kind of threats to today’s kids are you seeing? How are you handling it at home?

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Twitter Client War: Twhirl vs. TweetDeck

February 10, 2009 By

Last night Loic Le Meur released a new version of Twhirl.

How does it compare to TweetDeck?

“Scoble, you’re using some weird language here.”

Yeah, if you aren’t a Twitter addict you can skip this post.

So, why compare just TweetDeck to Twhirl? Especially when there are dozens of tools to use with Twitter?

Because I listen to the people who I am following and these are the two I see getting discussed all the time. If you want me to review another tool well, get more people to talk about it!

So, anyway, now that we’ve covered my gatekeeping function, why choose one tool over another?

TweetDeck appeals to those who have to watch Twitter all day long. Journalists. Customer support people who’ve been tasked with making sure that everyone on Twitter is happy. And addicts like me.

TweetDeck is a dominant mode app. It takes over your entire screen. I have it running on an old MacBookPro that is toward the end of its life (had the crud beat out of it) and that’s all that machine does: run TweetDeck. It has several columns. The first on my screen shows all my friends that I’m following. The second shows me replies from people who put “@scobleizer” into their Tweets. The third has direct messages that are sent specifically to me. The fourth has a search for “Scoble.” Fifth has a search for “Scobleizer.” Hey, I’m an egotistical baaahhhhssssttttaaarrrrdddd, so sue me. But then the next few columns are things that are interesting to me “Cloud Computing.” “Google.” “TechCrunch.” “Ted.”

You can see how that would be useful for, say, someone who worked at a big company and needed to track everything said about her company, her competitors, and the space her company works in.

I’ve got to admit, I use TweetDeck more often because I like the layout of columns and the fact that it takes over my whole screen.

So, now we come to Twhirl. First, you should know that Twhirl was purchased by Seesmic, which is a video conversation tool. So that’s one thing you’ll notice right away about Twhirl: it’s the best way to do Seesmic videos.

Twhirl also has more features than Tweetdeck. It sends messages to ping.fm, for instance, which will redistribute your Tweets onto other services like friendfeed and facebook.

Lots of people will like the fact that Twhirl looks more like an IM client window and does NOT take over your whole desktop.

So, which one do you like the best?

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