Potential Items for the Google Activity Stream

Google properties:

• Google Talk status updates
• Google Reader shared items
• Google Calendar events (added, invited, updated?)
• Google Documents (recent changes, new, updated)
• Picasa (new photos from friends)
• Google Video / YouTube (new videos from friends)
• Blogger posts
• Orkut updates (whatever those consist of)
• Gadgets added to home page, aka “iGoogle”
• Google Shared Stuff (or whatever it’s called) added

External properties:

• Anything with an RSS feed basically… including stuff like…
• Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku, Tumblr
• Blogs not on Blogger (like: Facebook Notes, LiveJournal, VOX, Xanga, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress)
• Photos not on Picasa (aka Flickr, Webshots, Smugmug)
• Bookmarked items not on Google Shared Stuff (aka del.icio.us, ma.gnol.ia, etc.)
• Last.fm, Pandora (any other social music with RSS feeds?)
• Digg posts, votes feeds
• Upcoming (Yahoo Events)
• Apps built on social APIs (think Werewolves and Vampires), though these may come in the form of Gadgets

What I’m wondering - well there’s several things, but I think the highest on my list of wondering - is where the Activity Stream will be displayed. An answer to that may solve the second thing on my list, which is, how is Google going to decide who my friends are and which updates I want to see on the Activity Stream?

They have the new contact manager that they’re rolling out with the update to Gmail, but I have 220 Gmail contacts, and I certainly don’t want to see all their updates from all their Google (and other) activities… And I’m guessing most of them don’t want me to see all that stuff either. So… Google will have to do two things (most likely): 1) Have some way of determining who is allowed to see what (privacy level settings), and 2) create an algorithm like Facebook to decide what is most important to show.

I don’t like Facebook’s algorithm, but I feel like Google could come up with a much better one. I also think, though, that Google could create an interface (like the one on Socialstream) that would allow for a much larger number of items to be displayed and still make it fairly easy for users to understand.

I’m waiting for the November 8th (or so) announcement, but I’m pretty sure it will be a release of the API glue, which will seem underwhelming until Google (or developers) starting using the glue to stick things together.

Orkut preparing to take on Facebook

Orkut taking on Facebook is like David v. Goliath 2.0, but in the 2.0 version, David’s family has a ton of money with which to purchase him state of the art weapons.

Business Week has a long 2-pager on the future of Orkut talking about the opening of the Orkut platform a la Facebook (via TechCrunch. Here’s the part that I was most interested in, though:

Orkut itself could conceivably become a hub for accessing multiple social networks in one place, a concept demonstrated by another Google-funded Carnegie Mellon group last year in a project called Socialstream. “We don’t know what they will use,” cautions Brad Myers, project adviser and a professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon.

But there are signs Google sees wisdom in a concept like Socialstream. In September, Orkut introduced an array of new features, some similar to those offered by other social networks. One addition was Updates from Your Friends, a box that alerts users to new photos or links to YouTube videos their friends have posted. Another was Feeds, which enables Orkut’s pages to display information posted on other sites—such as a blog from Google’s Blogger or Six Apart’s LiveJournal, or photos from Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s (YHOO) Flickr.

If Google can integrate Orkut with it’s other services (like add a status update that synchs with your GoogleTalk status, or allows you to microblog from GoogleTalk), then it will certainly become more compelling. They certainly have some of the right ideas. And they have best-in-class office/productivity apps for just about everything except To Do lists. But will their push for sociality be to build Orkut into Socialstream, which would be a best-in-class social network app?

It’s funny cause I started this post in the morning, and by afternoon… More social networking developments for Google. Jaiku has been bought out by Google. Now, we all know that I am a fan of Jaiku despite only having 2 friends who use the service. But, once again, here’s the interesting part for me:

we’re eager to go beyond what’s there today, and build something completely new for you to enjoy. Take this as an invitation to join us on a journey to reinvent how you communicate and stay in touch with the people you care about.

The most obvious way that I see to read that is that they’re going to build a Jaiku app for the gPhone operating system. The second most obvious choice is they’re going to work on building Jaiku into Orkut to serve as Orkut’s News Feed. If it is the latter, then hopefully they’ll find a way to limit feed items by groups (as Facebook will be doing sometime soon). But first, Orkut will have to add the concept of groups to their current privacy areas of “friends,” “friends of friends,” and “everyone.” Perhaps the Communities play some part in the privacy settings, but I’m not familiar enough with Orkut to know.

The funniest part of the acquisition, though, is all the people on Twitter who are now fighting a Twitter v. Jaiku war via Tweets. Clearly a lot of people don’t know enough about Jaiku to realize that they can just throw their Twitter RSS feed into it and only have to update in one place. I’m sure that’s part of the decision process that led Google to buy Jaiku instead of Twitter. A very small part of the process, but part of it nonetheless.

Updating the RSS Reader Wars

When I said yesterday a month ago that Twitter vs. Jaiku is shaping up to be another VHS vs. Betamax (yeah, I write here a lot… I promise), I was aware that the bigger battle is obviously Bloglines vs. Google Reader. Oh, I mean HD-DVD vs. BluRay. Sorry.

Anyway, now that Read/WriteWeb has a post about the war between the two biggest Web RSS Readers, I’ll throw in my 2 pennies.

Bloglines = still better.

I’ll admit, I used Reader for a while, and got used to it, and probably would have stayed with it if Bloglines hadn’t launched their new beta. For me, it’s basically the same as the old Bloglines with two extra keyboard shortcuts. That is to say, I use it in essentially the same way as I did before, but instead of going feed-by-feed using the “s” key, I now use the “f” key to go from folder-to-folder. It’s only a slight increase in efficiency over the old Bloglines, but it’s definitely better than the Shift+J -> Shift+O required for Google’s Reader.

The other big improvement (aka: new keyboard shortcut #2) for Bloglines comes with the addition of the “o” key. This is new for them, but the same as Reader’s “v” key. So, it’s not a win for Bloglines, but it does make the Beta better than the original, and helps to push the whole-of-the-parts ahead of Google.

There’s a bunch of other new features in the beta Bloglines, but after trying some out (like the 3-pane view), I chose to stick with the basic default set up (which, as I said, is pretty much the same as before). And still better.

Is SocialStream coming November 5?

If SocialStream is what Google plans to release on Nov. 5, then it will be the best birthday present that Google has ever given me. It will also be the only birthday present that Google has ever given me, and they won’t really just be giving it to just me…

I’m not too hyped up though, because it’s really just going to be some sort of API that everyone will have to sort of adopt before Google decides to make SocialStream a reality. Or else they’re going to wait until a bunch of people build “open” social networks using the APIs and then buy whoever makes the best one.

Two things I’ve been investigating (probably too) heavily in the past few weeks are (1) ways to aggregate all the social stuff I have, and (2) create a personal/private blog that I can limit access to, but still actually make accessible without requiring a lot of effort on the part of the people with whom I want to share the blog.

Facebook does a decent job with both of these, but my Facebook Notes are stuck in Facebook once they’re posted there. I created a private blog here on wordpress.com to see if WordPress’ Facebook application would import those posts, but I’m afraid it’s not happening (unless it’s just taking a long time to update). SocialStream would take care of the aggregation as well the ability to post with different levels of privacy, so it would actually solve real world problems for me. (If you can really call them problems, of course)

Plaxo’s Pulse also does a pretty good job with the aggregation, but it’s just another network that I’d have to get people to sign up for in order to make it worth anything. And I don’t think it has the ability to pull in my private WordPress blog posts either. Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll find something that actually does that.

Bloglines is still better for Power Users

Unless I’m not a Power User. But I do have 293 feeds to which I’m subscribed. I would think that’s enough to put me in the Power User category.

Maybe I just read my feeds wrong or something. Is there a disconnect between the way I like to go through my feeds and a way that would be more “efficient”? Well, technically yes. More efficient would probably involve me using the so-called River of News view, and just going through all the feeds in the order of either newest or oldest posts. I don’t really like doing that. There are feeds that are of a higher priority to me, and I like to read those before I get to other things that can wait. And I don’t like the idea of “starring” things and coming back to them. That’s never worked for me. I tried it with Gmail, and I end up just forgetting about/ignoring things.

Speaking of newest vs. oldest, am I missing something here too? I like to read the news in the order it’s printed. If there are rumors about KG being traded, I’d at least like to see those before I see the news of an actual trade. I like having that history. It also helps for reading blogs that like to refer to their earlier posts. If I’ve seen the earlier post, then I know what they’re referring to, and that would seem to be more “efficient” than having to open up the old post, scan it, and then go back to the original post, only to come across the old post later in the feed.

I can see how Newest First makes sense for bloggers who need to be on the latest tip (mostly tech and entertainment bloggers, no?) so they can write about a news item as soon as possible after it’s published. So, maybe those guys (and/or gals) are the real Power Users, and I’m just a sucker with 293 feeds.

All that aside, if Google Reader would add one little thing, it would be the best and fastest RSS Reader. I already prefer their method of opening news items* to Bloglines method**. But if you don’t want River of News, you have to use Shift+J, and then Shift+O to get to the next folder of feeds. In Bloglines, you just press “s” to get to the next subscription in the folder, and if the folder is empty it goes to the next one. Can you see where this is going?

(* Pressing “v” to open in a new background tab - I think that probably only works for Firefox, though)
(** Middle-click to open in a new background tab)

If Reader would just go to the next folder when the current one is empty, everything would be SWELL. Can’t I just “j” my way through all of my feeds? How hard would that be? It would certainly be A LOT easier for me. It’s been suggested via the Google Reader Google Group more than once.

Nothing to Download

I’ve actually been sitting on this post for about 6 months - which is about how often I manage to post here, so you can kind of see how the process goes.

It wasn’t a revelation in the sense that it led to some insight or allowed me access to new knowledge, but I’m not sure how else to describe it…

something like this…

My wife: You can email me, or I’ll be on Gchat when I’m in my email.

Her friend: Yeah, it’s nice that you don’t have to download anything.

That’s it. Simple as that. Nothing to download.

Now, my wife and her friend (and her friends in general) are technologically savvy, but aren’t the techie type nor usually early adopters. I guess this is part of the genius of Google. It was a lot more obvious when they rewrote pretty much every rule that existed with the release of Gmail. And while the addition of GChat [ed: and now chat in Yahoo Mail] is certainly less revolutionary, it’s another indication of where this all is headed.

Of course, as far as I can tell right now, the advantage of GChat over chat in Yahoo Mail is that GChat saves all your chats for you. It even does that when you chat using the downloaded version of the client. Yahoo Messenger saves your chat history on your hard drive. Now that you can chat in Yahoo Mail, it would certainly make sense to update that. [ed: they might have done that already, but I haven't opened up the thick client for YMessenger in a while - it's all about Trilian as the thinnest thick client there is]

The addition of Yahoo Web Messenger adds another level of importance to the need for syncing that history. YWM will save your history to the web, so I’m not sure if YMail also does that now as well. I could probably test it, but I’m lazy.

Since I’m writing this post now and not 6 months ago, I do feel that it warrants a mention that YWM is done in Flash/Flex. Not Silverlight. Yes, Silverlight just hit beta this week. But with what those Metaliq guys have done with it already, it would seem that Yahoo could have done Web Messenger that way if they wanted.

And since I’m inviting fanatics from both sides just by putting the words in the post, I might as well link to one of my favorite posts ever from Eric Dolecki.

Someone forgot to tell Gmail

… that Google Spreadsheets is now called Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

And Picasa is online now as well under Photos.

Of course, this will all be old news as soon as I hit the publish button. Actually considering it’s 9:34 am and I haven’t opened my RSS Reader (aka Google Reader), it probably already is old news. Mmmmmmm! Stale!