Things I’ve learned by clicking “like” 15,301 times

January 22, 2009 By

Mike Arrington is right. I am addicted to friendfeed and it’s very difficult to pry myself away from it and do a more serious blog. I now have 15,300 reasons why I am so addicted.

It is called “Like.” But clicking “Like” doesn’t mean I actually like that item. It means I want YOU to see it.

People ask me why so many people follow me. (26,000 on friendfeed, 50,000 on Twitter, 5,000 on Facebook).

This is why: I shine my flashlight on other people. So far in the past 11 months I’ve done it 15,300 times.

Most other A list bloggers that you know never even try to link out and tell their readers about other people doing great work this way.

Some things I’ve learned?

1. I’m more likely to share items from people I’ve met face-to-face. Why? There’s a social reciprocity aspect to it. If I’ve met you at a conference I know you a little more reliably than other people I haven’t met.
2. There is some overlap with TechMeme because I have similar interests but my likes tend to be far smaller stories than will ever get onto TechMeme. Things that will make you smarter, but aren’t big news items that’ll attract a lot of links. Things like Tim Ferriss’ post about how to learn any language in three months.
3. More “independent” voices make it onto my list than onto TechMeme.
4. I like racing TechMeme. Often I can beat it with a like by half an hour or more. But lots of times it beats me. Which, brings me to #5.
5. I don’t get nervous anymore about missing things. Why? Because I am following 13,000 people on friendfeed and they will keep bringing back important things. Plus, important things get onto TechFuga and TechMeme. I call my behavior “media snacking.” If I have time I’ll snack on different stuff from around the Internet.
6. After I like something I can see how other people respond to it, so I can refactor my likes. If people hate a like, or tell me I messed up, I will use that info in future likes.
7. Likes are searchable. If I search for someone’s name on the Everyone tab anything they’ve liked will come up in the search. Which brings me to the next item.
8. Likes are metadata that improves the original item. How? Well, for instance, in friendfeed I can hide all Tweets that don’t have a like. That makes finding interesting tweets DRAMATICALLY easier.
9. By having all my 26,000 followers on friendfeed see the items I like (it puts them into their view) I find that I am getting to know my followers in a much more intimate way than if we just tweeted at each other. On a separate page you can see all the items I’ve commented on, to see this in action.
10. Likes can overwhelm people. I am liking about 700 things a week. Many people just can’t deal with that flow (and it gets far worse the more people you follow on friendfeed). That’s why I say on friendfeed it is hugely important to be very careful who you follow. I recommend putting noisy likers like me into a separate list, which will help you get more value out of us.

What do you think? Does this behavior help you? Or do you think it’s lame?

Filed Under: technology industry Tagged With: , ,

Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age

January 14, 2009 By

UPDATE: yes, I’m insensitive, but this post isn’t an editorial opinion about Steve Jobs, just a note about how his news spread and how his announcement brought into focus the real-time web. Tragedies and bad news tend to focus our attention and bring into relief how our world has changed. I remember how 9/11 did that for blogs. Today the bad news surrounding Apple’s CEO and co-founder brought a new development into our focus: the real-time web.

As I said in my earlier post, I wish Steve and his family all the best.

+++

I’m sure that Steve Jobs didn’t want his announcement to be one of the seminal events that ushers in the real-time web age, but what just happened today will be remembered for years to come.

What happened? While CNBC was reporting it on TV the real-time-web was going nuts. Passing along little tidbits. Stories. Links. Rumors. And all that. It was interesting, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

There were 40 Tweets coming in every three or four seconds on Twitter search. And it stayed up!

Friendfeed was going nuts (that’s where I saw the news first).

While I wrote this post, which only took about a minute or two, 191 new Tweets came in.

But this points to some dangers and problems:

1. If you aren’t online there’s no “warning” system that something is happening. I wish I could tell Twitter to SMS me whenever a “high flow” event is underway.

2. It’s hard to separate out the real facts, from the fiction. I have a better filter than most people. I know who is credible based on past experience with them. Quick, who is more credible, Allen Stern or Ralph Sanders. I am following both and know who Allen is. Ralph? Not so much and I’ve never seen him involved in a breaking news story.

3. Our mechanisms for tracking stories and important tweets are really lame. Right now, hours after the news has broken, there are TONS of tweets coming through the system. Hundreds every few minutes. But, in that stream of “noise” is there any “news?” Yes. I’ve been clicking “like” on the best ones that I see, but I can’t see them all, so we need an even better system that lets the crowd expose the best tweets and friendfeed messages. I like friendfeed a lot more because it shows blogs and photos and youtube videos and other things instead of just tweets. All of those will play a major part in many news stories (like, say, a big fire or an earthquake).

Anyway, thank you to Steve Jobs for demonstrating to lots of people that real-time news is indeed important and that blogs are not the only way to go. Now you understand why I invested so much time in friendfeed and twitter last year.

Filed Under: technology industry Tagged With: , ,

Win a Seagate FreeAgent|Theater HD on Twitter and friendfeed

January 7, 2009 By

Want to be one of the first to try out the Seagate FreeAgent|Theater HD media player device? It comes out in March, but you can win one today. Here’s the first way to win:

How: Be one of the first 10 people to meet me at the Seagate meeting room on Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 1 p.m. PT. Bring a business card or contact info so we know where to ship your prize. You must be a member of Twitter or friendfeed.
What do I win?: You’ll be the first to get a new FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player when the product ships in March. It’s your chance to enjoy digital media on your TV with a cool product that won a CES 2009 Innovations Award.
Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, South Hall 4, Room S215-S216

“But, Scoble, I can’t go to CES.”

Well, there’s a second way to win:

Be the one to tell the winner about the contest. “Huh?” Well, if you retweet my Twitter message and the person who shows up tomorrow says that they learned about the contest from you, you win the device too.

We did this earlier in the year where we gave away a bunch of hard drives. One of the winners lived in India. So, this is a world-wide contest. Just retweet this blog post around. See you tomorrow!

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Got a real-time ego problem? Get a room!

January 1, 2009 By

Oh, be honest. You’ve searched for yourself on Google, right?

That’s an ego search. Here’s mine.

But doing ego searches today is far more complex than it was back in 1998 when I did my first Google ego search.

Today you have to look at what people are saying about you on Twitter, I use Twitter Search for that. On blogs (I use Google’s blog search for that). On friendfeed (you can search on stuff there). On Facebook. If you’re in the news you’ll want to track what’s said about you on Google News. And in other places.

What’s the best place to do that? Well, you might try a friendfeed room. Here’s my ego room. You can watch what people around the world are saying about me — in real time.

But, seriously, let’s stop talking about me for a while. My ego is big enough. Let’s talk about what you might do with a room like this that collects RSS and other real-time feeds.

1. You could create a room to track an event, or a tag on Twitter for an event. That’s what I just did with my Consumer Electronic room.
2. Want to get a group of people together who talk about certain topics? Here’s a room that is collecting tweets and blogs from doctors and health care professionals.
3. Got a blogging network and want to have a place to discuss it? Here’s the room for the Read/Write Web team.
4. Are you a company that’s trying to support your users in real time? Here’s Evernote’s room.

You can see all the rooms I’m following by visiting my friendfeed account and clicking on my rooms on the bottom right side of the page.

Anyway, sign in, and you can get your own ego-feeding real-time room. :-)

Let us know what you’re doing with your room, leave the URL in the comments here.

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20 ways to being a bigger friendfeed monster than Guy Kawasaki

December 28, 2008 By

Guy Kawasaki is on friendfeed but you can be a lot better at it than he is.

Just watch this video where I show you the 20 key features of friendfeed and how to use them to be an aggregating social media monster!

Oh, and how do I know you can beat Guy? Because he has no likes and only has made four comments on friendfeed total. I know Guy and he will start using friendfeed by mid-year 2009 because he’ll start seeing the power then (he got on Twitter late, too, which he admitted to me in an interview we did with him). You have a chance to get into it before Guy learns all the tricks and becomes an unmatchable friendfeeding monster.

Sorry it’s a little blurry, I was using my flipcam. Maybe we’ll do this with our good cameras later in the week.

Here’s the list of 20 things we cover:

1. Why friendfeed?
2. Get inbound content with the aggregator.
3. Get inbound content via friends.
4. How friend-of-a-friend feature brings more inbound content.
5. Using the everyone tab to get more inbound content.
6. Using rooms to find inbound content.
7. Using “best of” feature to find more inbound content.
8. Using the “me” and “home” pages.
9. Using lists to do friend management.
10. Creating media in friendfeed.
11. Sharing media found on the web.
12. Creating media with email.
13. Deciding between Twitter and friendfeed.
14. Your outbound content, likes.
15. Your outbound content, comments.
16. Your outbound content, send to Twitter.
17. Your outbound content, your stuff.
18. Your outbound content, using rooms.
19. Using search.
20 Using real-time features.

Of course we’re talking about this video over on friendfeed. In two places, actually.

Filed Under: technology industry Tagged With:

Did I harm my blog by FriendFeeding this year?

December 22, 2008 By

Since I’ve been blogging eight years this month I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my blog and how I want to do things differently in 2009.

I told Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, that I wonder if I’ve made smart time investments in 2008 by spending so much time on Twitter and friendfeed. Yeah, I knew about the Chinese earthquake before pretty much anyone, and 45 minutes before CNN reported it, but doing that required being online with Twitter open late at night after most of you had gone to sleep or were watching some TV.

He just posted that I need a friendfeed intervention, which is why I’m writing this post.

About a month ago I asked people over on FriendFeed and the comments came in hot and heavy. Of course most of them thought I did a good thing by spending so much time on FriendFeed this year.

How much time? I told Arrington tonight that I bet it’s seven hours a day or more. I started in late February. So, that’s around 2,000 hours. What did I get for my 2,000 hour investment this year?

22,997 followers.
6,841 comments. (These are blogs and items I had something to say about, so I left a comment on them).
13,078 likes. (These are blogs and items made by other people that I wanted to share with you).
I manually followed 5,405 people. (You can see all the content they generate in real time here).

Anyway, what did I give up by spending time on Twitter and friendfeed?

  1. A few of my friends think I am not as good a thought leader anymore because they don’t get as many long posts as I used to do.
  2. If you check Compete.com you’ll see my overall traffic went down about 14% this year while FriendFeed’s traffic went up 4,056%.
  3. I don’t get any money from friendfeed, while on my blog I do sell ads now.
  4. I’m not breaking as many stories anymore so I’m showing up on TechMeme less and less.
  5. Arrington himself told me he is reading me less on my blog, although lots of the “A list” crowd have been showing up on friendfeed now that it has hit a certain audience size and is starting to show up on their referral logs.

What did I gain by being on friendfeed and Twitter?

  1. I now get a much wider-range of news and am available to a wider range of people.
  2. My words now get indexed by the two most popular “real-time web” search engines: Twitter Search and friendfeed search. I know people who get their news by visiting Twitter search and looking at what news is “trending,” or becoming more popular.
  3. I am now part of the conversation in a way that I’d never be if I were just blogging. Seth Godin, for instance, only blogs and he rarely gets discussed on Twitter or friendfeed. If he were active he’d be discussed 25x more.
  4. I’ve made a lot of friends that are just reading me on twitter, I’ve met many people at Tweetups and the like that I’d never have met if I weren’t so active.
  5. By being active I’ve been quoted in countless articles about Twitter or friendfeed, which helps me too.
  6. Because I listen to the conversation I am getting better video interviews. Compete.com shows that FastCompany.TV is growing nicely this year and has taken up the slack for my blog. Add that into all my new readers on Twitter and friendfeed and I’m happy about my total readership. Seagate deserves a lot of thanks there for sponsoring FastCompany.TV back when there were no viewers.
  7. I now have a new news source that other bloggers won’t have: a crowd of 5,400 people who are bringing me the best news from around the web in real time. Already I’m seeing stuff there that will turn into blog posts and insights that other people aren’t seeing. Because I’ve build relationships with many of these people over the past year they call me and warn me about important news before they call other people. This “funnel” of news could be a sizeable advantage for someone trying to compete in a very competitive space.
  8. I now have a list of 23,000 people on friendfeed and 44,692 on Twitter that I can show potential sponsors. Before all I could say is my monthly uniques.
  9. In friendfeed Mike Arrington has 15,108 followers and I have 22,999. Mike has a LOT more blog readers than I have, so he should have dramatically more followers than I have on friendfeed. But by participating in these services I have collected more subscribers. Do they offset the same number of blog readers I’d have if I spent so much time blogging instead of hanging out on friendfeed? That’s the question that got Mike and I to talk.

Why does this all matter? Well, if you are going to do this as a business you’ve got to prove how many readers you have and demonstrate both audience size as well as influence.

The other thing that advertisers are asking me for is quantitative data about who is reading me. Some companies now don’t want to reach geeks, for instance. So, they are looking at your social networks to see what kind of audience you’ve attracted.

So, what do you think? Do I need a friendfeed intervention? Looking forward to having a good conversation. Of COURSE we are talking about this on friendfeed. In fact, in multiple places. :-)

Filed Under: technology industry Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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