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This New Trend in Facebook Apps Looks Ugly

Posted on September 21, 2009 by jessestay

I was tipped today onto Hulu’s new Facebook app, which seems to be aiming to bring the Hulu website into Facebook by including videos and a stream in the app itself. The thing is, it’s hardly an app – it’s just the Hulu website in an HTML tag with an embeded stream widget inside. (Not sure what that is? Click the link to learn more about stream widgets) It’s something anyone (I would even argue you don’t even have to be a developer to do what they did) could do inside or outside Facebook, but they could do much better. They took the easy way out, and it better have cost them just 2 hours of their developers’ time to implement or they just got ripped off.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this trend of Facebook app design. I first saw it when a friend showed me the Hurley Pro Facebook app, also just a normal website, with a Facebook fan stream widget embedded inside, something that really barely even utilizes the Facebook API and the reasons you would integrate with Facebook in the first place. I’m sure Facebook isn’t complaining – in the end it does bring more traffic to Facebook and helps to spread the Facebook brand, but for the brands in question, I just can’t see how this is helping them at all!

Here’s what they’re missing out on by not having deeper integration:

Deep tracking – they have the potential to know the exact demographics of everyone visiting their app or site by digging a little deeper

Notifications, Invites, and Requests – without some FBML and API integration (see my book to learn more about that) there is no way for users to spread word of the app. The only way currently to do that via the means they’re doing it is to use the stream widget, which hardly does much to spread word of the app.

User tracking and customization – by using the Facebook API they could be knowing exactly who is visiting their app and customizing the experience to that user

Friend sharing – the most powerful feature of the Facebook API, there is no way currently to view what your friends are doing within the app. Hulu, for instance, could be showing the videos your friends are watching and favoriting and subscribing to. They can’t do that the way they’re doing it right now.

If I were Hulu, I would be looking for ways to utilize Facebook Connect to bring Facebook to their own brand. Look to integrate (see the “3 steps – that’s all!” part of this doc on the Facebook developers wiki) a simple one-click user login and registration button for Facebook on your site. Use the API to get the user’s friends and share what their other friends on Facebook using Hulu are doing. You can do all this on your own website.

Then allow your users to take action – share what your users are doing on Hulu with their friends on Facebook. Their friends on Facebook will see the interaction on Hulu and want to interact with your site as well. Hulu, you’re really missing out here, and it won’t be much work to just integrate a little more Facebook into your own brand. It’s time we start creating farms on our own turf and stop going out to do the fishing ourselves.

Hulu, contact me if you want some help in this.

"Fish Where the Fish Are" No Longer Applies

Posted on September 19, 2009 by jessestay

My good friend, Jeremiah Owyang had a great quote he liked to share in his presentations, stating that the days of old-style marketing, forcing your customers to your site, no longer applied. He stated that we must “Fish Where the Fish Are“, and right he was. With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, etc. it was now possible for companies to get into the conversations of their customers, where they were conversing rather than trying to get them back to their own site to encourage that. I’d like to suggest that even that philosophy’s evolving though, and like with the previous philosophy, Facebook’s leading the way. Now, instead of “Fishing where the Fish are”, you can bring the entire lake to your website and again, those conversations are again all happening under your own brand. Now you get to fish in your own backyard.

Last year Facebook introduced Facebook Connect to developers to enable developers to integrate the Facebook Platform right on their own websites. I’m not sure developers or businesses fully knew what was coming at the time, but it sounded good. Mark Zuckerberg talked about expanding the ability to share on Facebook to the web, and keeping the fine-grained privacy controls Facebook is known for along with that. I believe a new way of marketing may have begun with that launch.

If you get a chance, go sign into HuffingtonPost.com through your Facebook login. Look – all your friends from Facebook just automatically got imported onto HuffingtonPost.com with just one click! And you never left the site. Huffington Post gets this concept – their readers’ conversations on Facebook are all happening through their own website, and they’re enabling new conversations from that! Their users never have to go back to Facebook to converse the news they’re reading with their friends.

Another great example is Digg.com. If you log in through Facebook there you’ll notice with no effort your friends all get imported as friends on Digg. Now, every new friend that logs into Digg via those means also gets added, automatically, as a friend on the site. Digg has brought Facebook back to their own brand.

Soon you’ll start to see the same for microblogging. Whether it happens via Facebook, or via open source platforms such as Laconi.ca or WordPress, brands will begin to bring ways for you to bring short-form conversations to their sites as well, enabling you to post out to Twitter, Facebook, and others and bring those conversations back into the site. This is the way it all started, and now we’re able to merge the old marketing and new marketing into a more complete solution that brings the brand back into the equation.

There are many tools available now, and many being developed right now that are bringing that “sea of fish” back onto your own property. Tools like Facebook Connect are teaching you how to fish in that backyard pond so you can feed a multitude. Now you can swim with the best of them in your own swimming pool!

LazyFeed Becomes First Real-Time Web Aggregator for rssCloud

Posted on September 18, 2009 by jessestay

Today Lazyfeed announced they had officially launched rssCloud and Pub/sub Hubbub (PSHB) support into their real-time RSS aggregator, making them the first major aggregator for rssCloud outside of Dave Winer’s own River2 client, and the first client of its type for the Web (Dave Winer’s client is written for the desktop OS). What does this mean? It means now you have a way to get the most relevant information you are looking for real-time, as it happens.

Lazyfeed is a new aggregation service that aims to provide real-time news updates on specific topics you want to know about. You give it the keywords you’re interested in, and it comes back, as the news happens, with the news written about those keywords. It goes further though and provides additional suggestions for other keywords you might be interested in as they happen, and you can add those to your list as well. See Louis Gray’s demo here for a great view of how it works.

Now, with rssCloud and PSHB support for real-time news aggregation, they are now one of the most real-time aggregators on the web. On their blog they mentioned some of the hurdles they had to jump to get through the implementation, and ironically, Feedburner seemed to have the biggest issues with set up (through PSHB) since the Atom protocol wasn’t built natively with any sort of real-time support. No problems were mentioned about rssCloud, showing promise for the protocol developed by Dave Winer. Lazyfeed seemed to think Feedburner wasn’t even real time, based on their experience, showing a delay of a few minutes on each feed published.

Problems aside, seeing aggregators like Lazyfeed implement these technologies is promising, showing we are on the cusp of the 2010 web and real-time news and updates being at our fingertips. I’ve talked to several other companies also getting ready to embrace these technologies and I’m pretty sure by the end of 2010 it will be an entirely new web and opportunity for entrepreneurs and developers alike.

UPDATE: Brett Slakin, one of the originators of the PSHB protocol, has clarified some of the PSHB and Feedburner issues here: http://blog.lazyfeed.com/2009/09/lazyfeed-rsscloud-pubsubhubbub-real.html#comment-16898143

The Sony Xplod MEX-BT5700U, a Radio That Complements the Web

Posted on September 18, 2009 by jessestay

Earlier this year one of my goals was to try and make a transition on this blog and start to review consumer electronics a little more. I’ve had a few posts in mind, but none of them seemed to make sense or fit with the flow of this blog. Recently I received an offer from Sony to try out their new top-of-the-line MEX-BT5700U car stereo unit from their Xplod line. I happened to be looking for a car stereo at the time, had just bought a new one for my wife’s car, so figured I’d give it a try and take them up on their offer, planning to post a review in return. Little did I know that it may have just given me a new category of posts that I will include on this blog. I discovered, that in combination with an iPhone that my Truck could quickly become a fully-connected machine powered by the Social web. I’m going to call these devices “Social Electronics”, and hopefully I can review more of these for you in the future (I already have several in my home). I’ll explain.

The SocialMobile

Meet my baby truck. I call it the “SocialMobile”. I think you can see why. It’s a 2000 Ford F-150, and I love it – I may even sell my first-born child for it, just maybe (not really honey!). I bought it a) because I always wanted a truck growing up in Texas, and b) because I needed something to get me through the steep slopes in the middle of the winter of Parley’s Canyon near here when I would drive up to work at BackCountry.com in Park City, Utah. But now it’s just a fun car to drive.

While I can decorate it all I want with stickers, license plates, and more, there has always been one thing lacking, an actual “Social” experience, to live up to its name. When I got the truck, I bought a Monster iCruze which enabled me to control my iPod from the dash of my factory default Ford stereo system. It was one of my favorite gadgets, and had magnificent sound when connected to the iPod! However, when I got an iPhone, I could no longer use the iCruz. I kept the old iPod and used it as a CD changer of sorts for awhile, but it just didn’t give me what my iPhone was capable of doing. So I was craving something to give me the full experience, in the car, which my iPhone could give me.

Enter my parents’ car. My parents have several new Ford cars, one of those is in the hands of my little sisters at the moment. One of the coolest features in their Fords was a technology, powered by Microsoft, called “Sync”, which enabled you to seamlessly connect your phone or iPod or any wireless or USB device, and tell it what to do via voice commands or the in-dash controls of the car. I craved this technology. My car didn’t have it, and I would probably not be able to get it until I bought a brand new car, something I just can’t afford right now. The tough thing was until recently you couldn’t really buy anything that fully duplicated that experience outside of the factory, in-dash stereos that came with new cars. I was jealous!

The Sony XPlod MEX-BT5700U

At CES this year, Sony rolled out a new line of stereos aimed at solving this problem. The MEX-BT5700U is the top of their line of these stereos, and thus far has covered everything I craved for from the in-dash factory models that you could only get with a new car. The advantage here is that anyone can get that technology now, and install it in their own car!

The Features

I’m by far a radio expert, so I’ll just share my personal experience. These are all my own opinions, and not meant as a comparison to any other model out there. I encourage you, after reading this, to go out and read the other stereos that are out there and make your own comparisons. The one thing I do know is that for the most part, this stereo seems to solve all my problems.

To start, let’s share some of the highlights of what you get with the unit:

USB Port: In the front of the unit is a USB port that allows you to attach an iPod or other USB device. It also works with the iPhone and will charge your iPhone.

BlueTooth handsfree support with external and internal microphones: There is both an internal and external microphone that comes with the unit. The external microphone can fit anywhere that makes sense in the car, and if you have a good installer can stay out of sight. To answer a call, you just push the dial knob, and do the same to hang up. It also supports voice controls if your device supports it, and will download your address book so you can choose who you want to call from your radio all without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket. It is also built to support all 3.x operating systems for the iPhone, something I needed.

HD-Ready Stereo: Why these devices don’t come with HD pre-installed, I don’t understand, but this is standard. The stereo has decent quality and typical memory channel presets. It also is Satellite radio ready.

CD Player: The device has a Flip-down front that reveals the CD player. It will also connect to an optional CD changer if you want. It supports MP3/WMA/AAC formats as well as traditional CDs. The cool thing I noticed is that for normal CDs it even detects the song names some how and displays them as they’re playing. You can also navigate through a submenu of songs on the CD and pick them out individually that way.

“Zappin” Jump Mode Technology: If you can’t take your eyes off the road but you want to pick out a certain song, you just click the “ZAP” button, and it will automatically play each song for the device you’re using (CD, iPod, iPhone, etc) in 6, 9, or 30-second clips. Press the tuner dial knob and it will play the song you’re previewing.

A Remote!: I never even knew I needed it! But having a remote is extremely handy if you can’t afford to take your hands off the wheel, for instance. Or, if you have others in the back of the car you can give the control to them to handle the music. I think that’s pretty handy.

Things I Liked

Let’s just get this out of the way. I love this radio! As an iPhone freak it complements my driving completely. I step into the car, and it recognizes my phone immediately. Set up was easy – just go into the bluetooth menu (there’s a “bluetooth” button on the face), select your device, and pair as you would any other bluetooth device with your phone. Now, when someone calls you, you push the dial knob and it answers. If you want to call someone else, just select the number via the dials and it calls them. If your phone supports it you can even use voice dial.

I noticed some of the reviews saying the display was too dim for middle of the day driving. I don’t know if they fixed that, but the display is easy to read in the brightest of lights, provides multiple animations and backgrounds you can choose from on the display, and even lets you change the colors of the keys, allowing you to fully customize the experience. My speakers aren’t anything special, but if you have a system that can support it, it supports up to 52 watts of peak power to all 4 speakers, giving almost a more powerful sound experience than even my home theater can provide!

Another frustration I’ve had with other systems has been that they lock your iPod or iPhone when they’re connected. Not so with this device. By default it locks, but by clicking and holding down “Mode”, it exits that lock-down and enters “Passenger Mode”, so your passengers can now have control over the listening experience. If you have an iPhone, nothing is locked down and it uses the bluetooth stereo audio from the iPhone to play sound direct from the iPhone. This was useful so I could play other apps on my iPhone. I’ll go over that in the “Social Technology” section below though.

Things I Didn’t Like

As I mentioned, as an overall system, this system is almost perfect for my needs. It would not be a fair review however if I didn’t not mention some of my frustrations. Here they are:

No RDS – as far as I can tell, there’s no RDS support with this radio. RDS is the extra part of the FM wavespace that enables the carrier to carry an additional data signal that tells just a little bit about the song that is playing over the air. This was a big part of my factory radio, and it will be missed.

Phonebook – the in-dash phone book downloader on this thing is great, but I did have issues with the way it imported data from my iPhone. Most of the entries showed up as “Unknown”, making it very hard to find the names I wanted to find. In addition, they seemed to be sorted by first name, yet were a bit out of order even in that manner. It would be nice if it could catch the names from my iPhone, and only display the entries that have real phone numbers and real names attached to them. Otherwise it’s just not useful.

Voice Dial – I have yet to upgrade to iPhone 3.1, and I know bluetooth integration with voice dial is supposed to be one of the features. I’m hoping that I just need to upgrade to get this. However, the pre-3.1 firmware on the iPhone does not work with the integrated voice dial. I wish it did, but again that may be a phone limitation. They say right in the docs that the voice dial is only supposed to work with supported devices. I’m hoping my iPhone upgrade fixes that.

Call Quality – My first call with my wife on the device was great – she could hear me fine and I could hear her great. However, once I got going in the truck, with the loud sounds of the truck the receiving end of the call that I was talking to was having a hard time hearing me. I was told it sounded like I was on a speaker phone. You’re supposed to be able to adjust the noise cancellation settings, and I just updated that today so we’ll see how that improves the sound. I imagine this is a common problem with any car hands free system though, so it’s minor.

“Social” Technology, and Taking That on the Go

As I mentioned earlier, what makes me love this unit the most is that it enables me to truly build a social experience in my own car. The marketing and promo material for the unit all emphasize the compatibility with modern devices such as the iPhone 3GS. This is very appealing to me.

Here are some examples:

The first time I connected it, I immediately went over to my Last.fm app on my iPhone. Despite some embarrassing cases of my kids’ Disney songs coming up in my recommendations, I was immediately playing my Last.fm songs, on my car stereo, in full stereo sound! Not just that, but I could favorite any one of those I liked right there in my car without taking my eyes off the road. Those favorites go to FriendFeed, and my friends all see them and can comment on them, or try them out themselves.

I immediately downloaded the Sirius XM app and gave it the 7 day free trial they offer at Louis Gray’s recommendation. In no time I was listening to CNN Radio, right on my car radio, no satellite radio install necessary! All of it over my AT&T 3G connection. My wife was very pleased to learn she could listen to Suze Orman on the car radio as well.

The iPhone Shazam app tells me what is playing on the radio

My favorite – I can open up the Ustream app and have live streams right in my car. Of course, I don’t watch them – my passengers can, but most streams, like TechCrunch 50 for instance, I can afford to listen to and not miss much. I did this the other day in fact – I was watching it at home, had to go pick up my son from school, and immediately turned it on my iPhone via the Ustream app. The Sony Xplod immediately picked up the bluetooth audio as I entered the truck, and I was listening to the stream right in my truck. If I needed to, I could stop the truck and leave something in the chat even.

Conclusion

To sum up, I’m extremely pleased I gave this radio a try. This is now my new favorite truck gadget, and fits perfectly with my online and social experience. The iPhone integration is amazing and seamless too. The phone retails for $299, and should be available in most stores.

You can buy it on Amazon right now for $284.95.

Photos:

Videos:

http://www.facebook.com/v/277887330112

http://www.facebook.com/v/277876395112

Facebook Photo Tagging Apps: Intelligent Design or Plain Old Spam?

Posted on September 14, 2009 by jessestay

The photo tagging apps in Facebook have taken over my stream! Check out the screen shot to the right. Out of the 12 highlights, only half are legitimate posts. The other 6 are apps that have seemingly figured out how to abuse the system and take over my highlights section (either intended or not), giving the apps even more exposure on Facebook. If you ask me, this method of app promotion, while legal and probably even a smart move by the app developers, needs to stop!

Fan Check, Friend Character, PickupFriends, TouchGraph, and others are nothing more than spam with their current techniques of app promotion. From my experience most people using them have not even opted to tag their friends in these photos, and I hope Facebook can put an end to this. The developers behind these apps (probably many who have read my book) are smart people – can’t they find another way other than deceiving their users to promote their applications? Or perhaps Facebook can give me a way to filter these so they don’t take up my Highlights any more and I don’t appear as tagged.

I’m hoping “Natural Selection” for these apps sides in my direction. Let’s hope these types of spammy apps go away or change their behavior.

Twitter Starts the Chatter on API Guidelines

Posted on September 10, 2009 by jessestay

On the Twitter development mailing list today Twitter began discussion on rules developers should abide by when writing applications for the Twitter API. Such terms come on the heels of a much broader Terms of Service launched for the general Twitter user today. I’ve long discussed the need for such guidelines, as many developers are embarking on an unknown adventure when writing apps for the platform, unable to tell when something they are doing is breaking rules for Twitter platform usage. We’ve seen this get out of hand with the launch of many “get-rich-quick” applications, along with applications that Tweet on your behalf either in public or DM form without your knowledge.

Twitter’s initial platform guidelines include the following, stating that developers of Twitter applications must:

Identify the user that authored or provided the Tweet, unless you are providing Tweets in an aggregate form or in anonymous form in those exceptional cases where concerns over user security and anonymity are involved.

Maintain the integrity of Tweets and not edit or revise them. Tweets may be abbreviated for display purposes and as necessary due to technical limitations or requirements of any networks, devices, services or media.

Get each user’s consent before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating with your application does not constitute consent to send a message.

Get permission from the user that created the Tweet if you want to make their Tweet into a commercial good or product, like using a Tweet on a t-shirt or a poster or making a book based on someone’s Tweets.

The most significant of the 4 items is that apps will no longer be able to send Tweets on a user’s behalf without their permission, although this is unclear if this includes automated DMs, and if this permission must be on a “Tweet-by-Tweet” basis or not. In addition, users can feel secure that their Tweets will not be used without their permission in a commercial endeavor, although I’m pretty sure Copyright law will protect this.

This is a great move by Twitter, and one I strongly welcome. Even if it prevents some developers from building applications, it sets the record straight so they know what they can, and can’t be doing. Keep in mind that this is only a proposal at the moment, and nothing is set in stone. You can contribute to the discussion on the developers mailing list.

Wishlist Wednesday – Facebook Connect for Retailers

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

I think we may be onto a tradition today. In celebration of @jesse mccartney’s birthday (see my last post for background), I’ve got one more wish. This one is for Retailers and how they can better integrate Facebook Connect. Specifically those with physical store locations – I think this one’s pretty cool, and would be really simple to implement! The idea is the ability to truly identify individuals visiting your store.

Here’s how it would work:

Customers download a custom app for their cell phone (this would probably be most effective on an Android or Palm Pre phone). This app connects them through Facebook Connect and logs them in to your store.

On your servers you identify the individual’s Facebook account (by simply storing their Facebook ID with their customer account) – you now know exactly who they are – their name, their location, their interests, and more.

When the customer visits one of your stores, their cell phone recognizes they are at that location (assuming they’ve given it permission to do so), and you’re able to identify the customer is now at one of your stores. Now, imagine the implications:
- The customer needs help – they push a little “I need help!” button on their cell phone. Immediately a CSR is notified, and they can send someone, to their exact location within the store, to help or answer questions. They can even greet the individual by name!
- The customer visits the cash register. The cash register realizes this and immediately brings up the customer’s name so the sales rep can greet them by name and even know a little of their past history with the company so they can help further.
- Your company could keep a list of influential bloggers. When they visit your store, you are immediately notified, and you can ensure they are getting the best experience necessary.
- More importantly, you now have a record of exactly how many people are visiting your store, who they are, various demographics about those people, and what they’re purchasing, if they’re purchasing anything.

Let’s take this a little further now. Imagine if your customers could track their friends that are also shopping at the store. They could organize shopping trips, see what others amongst their friends are buying, view the most popular purchased items amongst their friends, and more. Or perhaps you could release a coupon to individuals and only allow them to share it with 5 of their Facebook friends. There are so many possibilities when you think about actually being able to identify individuals, and their friends who physically shop at your stores.

When thinking Facebook Connect don’t just think virtual! I would use something like the above, and I know many others will too, especially in a privacy-controlled environment like Facebook. What other ideas can you think of, mixing GPS with Facebook Connect?

My Facebook Connect Wishlist (for WordPress)

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

Today everyone seems to be wishing me a Happy Birthday – it’s not really, but it is @jessemccartney’s birthday on Twitter, so I get all the “ZOMG Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” Tweets from uber-excited fans. Some times I throw them a bone and tell them how much I love them as well. It’s fun to celebrate your birthday twice a year, so hey, why not? So I thought I’d celebrate @jesse mccartney’s birthday on Twitter with a wishlist of my own. Take it as you may, but my hope is that maybe it inspires you just a little bit to go out and create something, especially if you’re a Facebook developer. And if you don’t do it, I will. Eventually.

Here’s my wishlist. All of these are ways I can see Wordpess could be used to integrate Facebook, but no one has written a plugin yet to do what I want – please check out the documentation at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect for an overview on what you can do (it’s actually quite easy!):

1. A single, standalone “Connect with Facebook” button plugin – so many Facebook plugins for WordPress try to do too many things in one plugin. I want to be able to build my own Facebook integration. Add a little component here. Add a little component there. Nothing more. So, do do this, I need, at the very basic level a “Connect with Facebook” button that shows up somewhere on my blog just by installing a WordPress plugin.

You could take this further though. What if you also provided a script that reads the e-mail addresses of commenters and automatically registered them with Facebook so that if I ever wanted to do a to encourage my readers to invite their friends, they could very easily? The button could appear as an overlay that appears once for each user, and if they opt not to log in, never appears again. When the user logs in via Facebook you automatically register them with a Facebook ID.

That’s all the plugin will do. Its focus is simply login and registration and loading the basic Facebook Connect libraries, nothing more. If you want it to do more, use another plugin that builds on top of it.

2. TweetMeme for Facebook plugin – if you haven’t had the chance yet, go look at Mashable.com, now. See their Facebook share button underneath the retweet button? That’s what I want, but I want more. Here’s how I see it:

A reader reads an article. They want to share it with their Facebook friends, so they click on the share button.

WordPress, via a plugin, calls the stream.publish() to enable the reader to publish the article to their own stream.

Your plugin tracks the ID of that particular share, maybe even prompting the user for read permissions, and adds it to an array of shared IDs in an options storage in WordPress.

On every load of that particular article, each share’s likes are read, counted, and updated in another stored variable in WordPress.

The sum of all those likes is displayed in the share button, and other readers can also share to their friends and contribute to the number of likes for that article.

Of course, this would rely on the blog owner installing the Facebook authentication plugin above in #1

3. A “publish to Facebook” plugin that works – there are already lots of publish to Facebook plugins for WordPress. None of them fully utilize Facebook Connect though, especially the stream methods. What if I could publish a blog post, have it automatically also post into my Facebook stream, and at the same time, track every comment and like of that specific post and then post comments to the share button above, while listing comments of the particular post down below my blog post comments? Or, let’s take that further. If one of my friends on Facebook comments on the blog post itself, I also want that friend’s same comment to show up under the published stream item on Facebook as well. I think that would be incredibly useful.

4. A “leave a comment” plugin that works – I think the same could happen with comments. TechCrunch is doing this somewhat. A user that comments should have the option of publishing that comment to Facebook in the user’s stream. What also should happen though is that comment ought to be tracked. Now, when any of a user’s friends that are also previous commenters on that blog comment on Facebook, they also appear threaded underneath that specific blog comment on the blog. Or vice-versa.

5. A standalone friends widget – I want a friends widget just like the Google FriendConnect widget you see over to the right. It ought to come with a “subscribe” button, or “join my community”. When a reader subscribes, they automatically (unless they opt-out) get new blog posts for your blog added to their stream on publish, real-time. This would also work great if you develop RSS reader software, as you could also automatically subscribe the user to the blog in your reader. Again, it should be standalone though – people should be able to mix-and-match, and this would also rely on #1 above being installed.

6. An activity streams plugin – I would put this top on my list if I could (even though it’s at the bottom, because it’s the most code to develop). If you haven’t had the chance to yet, regardless of your political preference, go check out what HuffingtonPost.com has done with Facebook Connect. Log in with Facebook Connect there and you’ll see one of the coolest implementations of Facebook Connect I’ve ever seen. I wish they would release that to the open source community as a Facebook plugin for WordPress.

All the activity streams plugin needs to do is track activity of readers on a blog. A new view of the blog would appear, showing all of your friends who are also readers of the blog, and a historical news feed or timeline of what they’ve just read, what they’re commenting on, along with any other cool activity that may be pertinent. The idea is to help a blog’s readers discover new content on your blog. This plugin could track the most popular blog items, most commented, etc. and display those on the side for readers to discover. Each stream would be custom to that reader and their Facebook friends that read the blog. It could also have options to invite friends to come check out the blog.

This specific plugin could also integrate with #5 above and enable a reader to click on one of their friends, and see only the activity of that specific friend. Or, when inviting their Facebook friends to check out the blog, it could provide a way for each of those friends to subscribe and automatically receive new blog updates for the blog in Facebook.

The possibilities are endless, but I think you catch my drift. You can even package all the above into a single plugin, but I also want separate plugins. This stuff, to my knowledge, has not been developed yet, but it should. I want you to go out and build it before I’m forced to – these are free ideas and a great way to show your talent, get some free exposure here (I’ll write about each one that does this effectively), and a great amount of traffic from both Facebook’s plugin directory and WordPress’s plugin directory when you’re finished.

Let me know if you’ve written one of these – either let me know in the comments, e-mail me, send me a “Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” or whatever. I hope I’ve started your brain juices flowing – I’m salivating at the thought! (mmm…brain juices)

Dave Winer to Bring Realtime RSS to Millions via WordPress.com?

Posted on September 7, 2009 by jessestay

Today in a very inconspicuous post by Dave Winer, he demonstrated that his new real-time RSS protocol, rssCloud, could very soon be available to the millions of blogs, real-time on WordPress.com. Dave Winer, who played perhaps the most significant role in defining the RSS standard and the subsequent RSS 2.0 standard through which most blogs are read today, is taking the long-known extension to the RSS protocol to the masses with some sort of relationship he has built with Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com.

rssCloud vs. PubSub Hubbub

rssCloud was defined in its early form in 2001 as a solution to provide a “next step” for RSS to get instantaneous updates from blogs or websites wishing to push information immediately to readers. The readers weren’t quite ready for the standard at the time (see the Guitar Scene in Back to the Future), so it sat stale until this year when real-time updates again came to front and center for getting and retrieving massive amounts of information as they happen through sites like Twitter. Dave Winer says he adapted it in order to provide a better, more open microblogging solution that works outside and independent of Twitter.

Here’s how Winer explains it works:

1. The Writer gets an idea.

2. He or she enters it into the authoring tool, saves, it goes to a file, a feed.

3. The authoring software sends an Update ping to the Cloud (which is just a bit of software running on EC2).

4. The Cloud checks to see if anyone is subscribing to the Writer, and finds that indeed the Aggregator is.

5. He updated! says the Cloud to the Aggregator.

6. The aggregator then reads the feed, finds the new stuff and informs the Reader.

After less than a second the Aggregator has the update and the user is reading the content, real-time.

Pubsub Hubbub works similar. With this protocol, you have a “hub”, rather than the cloud, and the content provider pings the “hub” for every new post. The reader can then request to be notified by the hub (or hubs) if there is any new data. Google has taken the initiative on this particular protocol and is utilizing FeedBurner as their initial hub. The protocol is also designed for mostly blogs, rather than microblogs, which seems to be the space which Winer is targeting with rssCloud.

What’s the difference? Quite honestly I’m trying to figure that out myself. It would seem that the major differences are that a) with rssCloud, feeds expire after 24 hours, so aggregators need to make at least one call a day to notify the Cloud that they want to be notified. This has the advantage in that the Cloud doesn’t have to continue pinging even when aggregators aren’t there, but also increases the number of calls an aggregator must make.

The other difference is that Dave Winer is an individual developer while Google is a big company. If you ask me that doesn’t matter much due to the fact that these are both open protocols and both seek to decentralize the control of our data. Google’s response is disconcerting though where they seem to try and discredit Winer’s protocol. The more of these protocols the better (also see the OpenMicroblogging protocol). However, it is very appealing to see an individual developer, the inventor of RSS, so-to-say, take a protocol that has been around much longer and adapt it to work with modern standards. I want to see Dave succeed, but I hope they all work together. This is a space everyone benefits, despite the competition. Keep in mind that Dave isn’t the only guy behind this protocol either – there is an entire governing board that manages this standard.
Competition for Twitter?

So with this potential development, what does this mean for WordPress? First, millions of blogs will now instantly be real-time in the same way Twitter is real-time. Second, where Dave Winer wants rssCloud to be targeted towards the micro blogging space this could very well mean WordPress could be looking at something in that area to compete with Twitter. I predicted this at the beginning of this year, remember?

Here’s what I see happening: Automattic will utilize its BuddyPress and P2 platforms to create a decentralized microblogging platform that utilizes rssCloud to provide real-time updates. Wordpress.com will be extended to enable “mini-blogs” which accompany your existing blog and provide real time status updates anyone can subscribe to. Clients like Seesmic, TweetDeck, and PeopleBrowsr will utilize the rssCloud protocol as Aggregators and allow you to view all this data in one place in ways you could never do before.

Dave Winer’s demonstration today is HUGE news for the blogging world and decentralized micro-blogging. I can’t wait to see what happens.

UPDATE: You can download the WordPress plugin for rssCloud here. StayNAlive.com is now officially one of the first rssCloud-enabled blogs on the internet.