Friendfeed

Reporters' Roundtable: Buzz vs. privacy (podcast)

Last week, Google launched Buzz, a status update tool that has elements of Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. Google launched it inside the Gmail app, giving it an instant installed base of millions of people. More importantly, Google gave Buzz access to your Gmail contacts.

When the app first launched, it's fair to say that the Buzz app was a little too eager to use and share the details of users' personal networks. Furthermore, privacy controls for Buzz were spread over multiple configuration screens. Some necessary controls, like the off switch, were just flat-out missing.

To Google's credit, within days, the company corrected the major privacy failings of Buzz. More than once, in fact: Google tweaks Buzz privacy settings Google changes Buzz privacy settings--again

But the question remains: what was Google thinking? How did this giant search company, with more lawyers than most Web companies have engineers, get itself into a situation that required it to revise the product almost immediately after it launched? And what does the Buzz experience say about social networks and privacy on the larger scale?

That's what we're going to discuss today, and we have two great guests to do it. First, we have a taped interview with Mike Yang, senior product counsel for Google. I taped this interview earlier. Then I have a discussion with Jared Kaprove, a fellow at EPIC, The Electronic Privacy Information Center.

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Show notes and talking points… Read more

Buzz features compared: Just the important stuff

When Google unveiled Buzz earlier this week, one of the first things that jumped into many people's minds (including ours) was "haven't we seen this before?" The answer is yes.

Buzz is, in many ways, highly derivative of existing, and quite popular services. The three biggest ones that come to mind are Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, with the latter two being the same company. Though to Google's credit, it has done something none of these companies has managed to do in integrating it deeply into a popular e-mail service.

While there are too many differences to make an apples to apples comparison here, there are a lot of key features the four services share. Read on to find out which of these features each service is the best at. … Read more

Sneak peek at Strings: A social tracker with a twist

This week we got a sneak peek at a new social tracking site that's launching a little later this year. Called Strings, it's made up of tools that let you passively share your various on- and offline activities with others online, all in the hopes of both getting and giving recommendations from its online community.

In many ways Strings feels a lot like FriendFeed. For example, just like FriendFeed you're able to tie Strings into to various services you're using like Amazon, Netflix, and social-bookmarking tools so that it can implicitly share information about what you're doing on each of those services with others. And like FriendFeed, this information can be tracked and filtered depending on what type of content it is, and what group of friends it's coming from.

Where it differs though, is that this data feed begins with complete anonymity; nobody ever has to know it's you who is feeding the site. If and when you decide you want to start identifying data as your own, Strings has a very deep set of privacy controls to protect what other people can see. … Read more

Brands in Public: the end of the conversation?

It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction … Read more

Facebook wastes no time putting FriendFeed to work

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook has unleashed a Tornado, and it's hoping that some eager engineers will go catch it.

Earlier this month, Facebook released the open-source Web server framework called Tornado, which powers the real-time streaming behind its latest toy, social feed aggregator FriendFeed. And on Wednesday evening at the office that most recently housed the FBFund incubator program, senior open programs manager David Recordon and director of products Bret Taylor held a "tech talk" to pitch Tornado to a crowd of several dozen interested members of the Web development community.

"We had actually been planning … Read more

Nomee combines AIR with social information

Adobe AIR applications are typically well designed. They feature a sleek look and relatively fast response times. TweetDeck (Windows | Mac), a popular Adobe AIR app, has put the platform on the map. It has caused some developers to view AIR as a viable alternative platform to building a Web site.

Nomee (Windows|Mac), a company that helps users see what celebrities, prominent figures, or their friends are up to online, is one such app.

The basics Nomee is based on "cards." When you first sign up for the site (you can use OpenID if you don't want to create unique Nomee credentials), you'll be presented with celebrities and prominent figures who currently have cards on the site. But before you start thinking that there are scores of celebs on Nomee, think again: for the most part, those cards were created by Nomee users, not the celebrities themselves.

When you view a card, it displays an image of the person, followed by several sites or services that are related to them. When you click on one of those services, you'll be brought to its respective Web page. For example, if you click on the Twitter logo on my card, you can view my Twitter page.

If you like what you see, you can "add" the card to your Nomee Dashboard. From there, Nomee will track all the card updates. It will alert you when there's something new for you to check out.

Nomee's Newstream lets you view all the updates from every card you follow. Thanks to such a nice design and some filtering options, you shouldn't have any trouble finding exactly what you're looking for. It's arguably Nomee's best feature.

Card creation Of course, Nomee isn't just a place where you can see what your favorite celebrities are up to. You can also create your own card to share with friends. Those same friends can create cards and share their social profiles and links with you.… Read more

Facebook open-sources real-time FriendFeed facet

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has open-sourced recently acquired FriendFeed's real-time technology. Dubbed Tornado, the company's real-time, nonblocking framework is written in Python.

"Tornado is...designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services," Facebook's David Recordon wrote in a blog post. "While Tornado is similar to existing Web frameworks in Python (Django, Google's Webapp, Webpy), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic."

FriendFeed co-founder and new Facebook Director of Products Bret Taylor said in a blog post of his own that … Read more

BOL 1040: i4i wants tooth for tooth from Microsoft

The i4i Chairman Loudon Owen joins us to talk about why his company is suing Microsoft to prevent selling Word as it is currently. Sounds like i4i wouldn't mind cash. Also Tr.im is back. And Molly takes them to task for being babies. And Vance gets a Corvette for $14 a month. Or would. If GM honored it's bad math.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1040

i4i Chairman Loudon Owen http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2009/12/c4382.html

Judge: Microsoft can’t … Read more

Facebook launching Twitter-like 'Lite' site?

Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."

The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.

"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have … Read more