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TechCrunch No Longer the #1 Tech Blog

Posted on November 6, 2008 by jessestay

It would appear that in the last 2 days, TechCrunch has again gone down a spot in the Technorati top 100 from #2 to #3. This would put Gizmodo in the #2 spot, making Gizmodo now the #1 Tech Blog on the internet. The #1 spot on Technorati is still held by the Huffington post, a politics blog, and it’s unclear if it will remain that way now that the elections are over.

Technorati results are calculated by number of links in a short time frame, which means that fewer people are linking to TechCrunch these days. Is the internet revolting? FeedBurner shows their reader count still going up (I had to do an archive.org search, and the FeedBurner widget comes up there showing their current count – it’s interesting that they removed that count from their live site however). They hit 1 million readers back in September, and since then they seemed to have gained 300,000 more. Gizmodo has not published their subscriber numbers.

So it goes to show that links, and Technorati results really don’t matter in the end – it’s Readers that count. It’s still interesting however the trends of linking we’re seeing lately. There’s no doubt TechCrunch is still a force to be reckoned with.

Announcing Follower Messaging and Follow Statistics for SocialToo.com

Posted on October 30, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been throwing hints on Twitter over the last week or two that I’ve been working on this, and with a little extra time I finally got it together. Today I’d like to announce that, as of this moment, we have some really cool new features for Twitter users on SocialToo.com, all in one place!

SocialToo, which is trying to be “Your Companion to the Social Web”, is seeking to build the tools and utilities that compliment your experience on the social networks you belong to. Up until now, anyone could sign up and automatically get the ability to have it follow all those on Twitter that follow you. The script ran once a day, and would do all the work for you, while also enabling you to blacklist users you don’t want it to follow. This enables you to automate, while making exceptions, making management of your friends on Twitter much easier. In addition, by providing Facebook credentials it would redirect “yourusername.socialtoo.com” to your Facebook profile.

Today, I’d like to announce some new features:

First of all, for those with less than 2,000 followers (this is due to a Twitter limit), we’re now updating your followers up to the hour – as Twitter improves their API I’ll update this to work even more realtime. We’re working with Twitter on getting their API improved to handle this. If you have 2,000 followers or more instead of just once a day, we’re now updating every 6 hours, so even your followers will update faster than before.

Today, we’re adding the ability to add a message that we’ll send to all your new followers via direct message. This can be a great opportunity to thank your followers, or, as a business account, tell them about a unique promotion you are running. However, if you’re just signing up and aren’t already following those who follow you, we recommend waiting until your account syncs up before turning this on, or all those we follow will get dm’d, even if they’re not new followers. This should only be applicable to new accounts – if you have an existing account, check your preferences and be sure to turn this feature on!

In addition, if you have a bunch of people who followed you, you followed back, and then they stopped following you (this is the case for many Twitter spammers), we’ve added the ability to turn on a feature that unfollows those that are not following you back. I think it’s who you follow that matters, so my recommendation is to use this feature sparingly, and turn it off when your account is back in sync. You can use it however you want though.

We’ve got a fresh new design! – okay, I admit, we’re not perfect yet, and were this the golden days I’d say we’re still technically in “beta” (I hate that excuse though), but we got a superstar designer to offer some help on the design for this – thanks so much to our designer!! You know who you are. The new design will come into play much more in the next round of features.

My favorite feature: follower statistics. Not only are we now tracking those that follow you, but we’re also tracking those that stopped following you. You’ll now get an e-mail every night telling you the followers that stopped following you, and who your new followers are (and consequently who you followed). This is turned off for all existing users – go into your preferences to turn this on and find out details about those you’re following and those who may have unfollowed you (and we’ll soon provide other statistics to help you find out why).

As planned, I think we’re changing the game in making your social experience better all in one place with these tools. You may be familiar with other sites that do similar things out there, but you will quickly find that SocialToo.com is easier to set up, more automated, more accurate, and much less hassle than some of the other services out there.

Oh, and there’s one more really big thing. You’ll have to wait a few weeks to hear our next announcement though. Much more on the way!

You can sign up at http://socialtoo.com (that’s T-O-O, like “tool”, or “also”). Follow us on Twitter at @socialtoo for more updates!

What’s On Removed From the iTunes App Store

Posted on October 24, 2008 by jessestay

whats-on-8791762 Zdnet is reporting that apparently, i.TV‘s competition, What’s On, has been removed from the Apple iTunes App store. Searching for the iPhone App returns a listing, but clicking on the listing returns an error saying the App couldn’t be found. There is no word from What’s On, and it’s unclear the reason for the dead links.

This news of What’s On, having recently pushed their 1.5 version to the iTunes App store, comes on the Heels of the number one Free App in the iTunes App store, i.TV. Both applications provide TV Listings and customizable TV lists for users, i.TV with much more content. i.TV also provides a movie listings and Theater search service which What’s On does not provide.

i.TV is a client of mine, so I have to admit I have a bias, but I’m very curious to know what’s “going” on here. I have no inside knowledge on this one unfortunately. I can only wonder if Apple discovered something that was in disagreement with their Terms of Use policies.

LDS Church Ranks Top Among Churches on Alexa

Posted on October 21, 2008 by jessestay

An article on the website, LDSMediaTalk, pointed me to an interesting statistic today. It appears that the official website for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, LDS.org, ranks at the top of all organizational Church websites on the internet. In fact, at #3,095 and having peaked at near 2,500 at the beginning of October, it is one of the most visited websites on the Internet.

Looking at the rank, and the current membership of near 13 million members worldwide, one would wonder if it’s not just members visiting the site. Could it be mere curiosity about the Church, activity of members themselves, or does the Church itself have a more technical background than others? As a practicing member of the Faith, I have to admit these numbers were surprising to me, and I don’t have an answer to those questions. It isn’t too surprising though, in that the Church has pioneered many technologies around Family History and recently has encouraged its members to blog and use the internet for good. The church has also created a Youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/LDSPublicAffairs.

Amazingly, the church’s other main websites, FamilySearch.org (a website for Genealogy enthusiasts), and Mormon.org, at 11,342 and 63,314 respectively, also rank fairly high when compared to other religious websites. Here are the Alexa rankings of other large Religious organizational websites:

Catholic.org – 25,990

NOI.org (Nation of Islam) – 576,153

SBC.net (Southern Baptist Convention) – 204,346

Watchtower.org (Jehovas Witnesses) – 19,072

Venganza.org (The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – just for the non-believers) – 70,560

Being not as centrally organized, I had a difficult time finding a single source for Hinduism, Buddhism, or Judaism. I also realize that Nation of Islam is only one sect of beliefs within the Islamic faith – I would be interested to see any other major Church websites out there you may be familiar with. It would be nice to see a greater presence on more Church websites like this. What other Churches rank high in Internet visibility and traffic?

Could Pandora be Leaking User E-mail Addresses to 3rd Parties?

Posted on October 12, 2008 by jessestay

UPDATE: See the comments below. Pandora’s CTO responded with the following explanation – while I haven’t shared much, I can see it being a spyware issue of someone I’ve shared having spyware on their computer – he has a good point.

“Hi there, I’m the CTO over at Pandora. Saw a link to this post on Twitter. I can tell you with absolute certainty that we never have and never will sell, give away, trade or disseminate in any way our listeners email addresses. We also do routine security audits; your email address absolutely is not available anywhere on public systems.

We do however hear of cases like this a couple of times a year and I’ve worked other places where similar complaints would come in. In my experience the cause is almost always spyware on a machine that at one time received an email from the address in question. For example, if you’ve ever used Pandora to share a station with a friend, or invite someone else to use the service, your pandora email address would be on the email we sent to your friend. If that friend has a machine infected with Spyware it’s likely that your email address made it into some spammers directory. Of course we also send you a welcome email, if there’s spyware on your machine that’s another possibility. The final (and least likely) possibility is a simple dictionary attack — since the email address you’re using is pandora@stayinalive.com it’s possible that some spammer was just iterating on dictionary words against your mail system.

It’s a terrible situation that we live in an environment where it’s nearly impossible to keep our personal email addressses out of the hands of spammers.

Feel free to write any time, with any concern. Predictably I’m tom-at-pandora.

Could Pandora be giving out or selling their users’ e-mails? They say they don’t, but I got a disturbing e-mail yesterday that I’m still trying to figure out. When I sign up for services, I usually sign up with the e-mail address, servicename@staynalive.com so that I can detect where my spam is coming from. Yesterday, I received a weird piece of spam from “news21.tv” in what I believe to be French. The subject states, “News21.tv des vidéos pour les Expatriés, DRH, Exportateurs… A découvrir”. What caught my attention though, is that it was sent to “pandora@staynalive.com”.

There’s only one site I ever gave that e-mail address to, and that’s Pandora. Could Pandora be selling e-mail addresses to spammers? Could there be a leak at Pandora, where my e-mail address somehow accidentally got out to spammers? Or is this just a fluke where some spammer decided to randomly send e-mail to pandora@domainname.com where domainname.com is all wildcard e-mail addresses they’re aware of? I can’t tell, but it’s troubling – I’ve never had a spammer actually use an e-mail address for a service I actually belong to. This makes me wonder if it actually is an issue at Pandora.

I mentioned this on FriendFeed, and a Pandora rep actually did respond (Does your company track FriendFeed?). Here was the thread:

Me: “wtf??? I’m getting Spam and it’s to my Pandora address. Did Pandora sell my e-mail address? NOT HAPPY”
Pandora Radio: “Hi Jesse – We *definitely* never sell or give away listeners’ email addresses. Feel free to email support@pandora.com if you’d like. – Lucia, from Pandora”

I want to believe Pandora. They seem like a pretty ethical company, and have supported some good causes in the past. It makes me wonder however if somehow, some e-mail addresses got out of their system that they weren’t aware of. Perhaps my e-mail address is on a public profile somewhere on Pandora’s website? Has anyone else experienced this, and do you have any ideas how this could be happening? The text of the e-mail can be found here.

i.TV Launches Live in the Apple App Store

Posted on October 7, 2008 by jessestay

I’m proud to announce that our previously announced Entertainment, TV, and Movies application for the iPhone, i.TV is now available for all to download in the Apple App store. We’re proud to say that we’ve been able to even add in a few social components since we last announced it.

Our slogan at i.TV is “Media. My way.” We truly intend to change the way you watch television by truly socializing the experience, making it personalized to the individual. We’re starting that with a personalized TV and Movies guide on your iPhone. From our CEO, Brad Pelo, “i.TV makes it easy to discover television and movie programming options, share entertainment information with friends, and access media anywhere you can take an iPhone or iPod touch.”

With our Guide you can see what’s on, where you are, review the shows you are watching, see what others think of the shows you watch, search for what you want, or even filter by Genre, sort by most popular, and even more. In addition, you can add parental controls, send yourself a reminder by e-mail when a show is on, preview movies right on your iPhone, or share your favorite shows with a friend! Not just that but you can see theaters in your area, and preview the movies at those theaters before you watch them. If you’re a TV or Movie buff like me you’ll really like this app.

I covered this before when we thought we were close to going live, and you can see screenshots there – stay tuned for some even more impressive features to come. Again, I mentioned earlier my position is Chief Community Officer. I’m in charge of building community into our products – stay tuned to the i.TV blog later on today and I’ll share with you some of the efforts we’re starting out with to make it a more social experience.

You can download the App here. Also, you can read more about it on our blog, and Louis Gray and TUAW both have great posts.

TechCrunch Loses #1 Spot on Technorati

Posted on October 4, 2008 by jessestay

Picture 3.png It appears TechCrunch isn’t the number one blog on the block any more, at least during election season. As I was researching a recent post it became evident that TechCrunch recently has been surpassed by Huffington Post in Technorati rankings.

Huffington Post is known for continually having front page stories on sites such as Digg.com, which could explain why the increase in rankings. With recent layoff announcements at Valleywag, another top 100 site, this can’t be a comforting thing for a site as large and dominant as TechCrunch. Let’s hope the drop to second place is simply a drop due to the elections and not an ongoing thing for the site.

LDS Church Switches to MoveNetworks in Time for Annual Conference

Posted on October 4, 2008 by jessestay

Just in time for its Semi-Annual General Conference, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently switched all of its video for the conference to MoveNetworks. The Church will be streaming the conference live throughout the weekend using the service, and has started its broadcast with a stream of the Annual General Relief Society conference, a worldwide meeting for women of the Church (the Church houses the worlds largest volunteer womens organization, called “The Relief Society”). MoveNetworks powers video for popular sites such as CW, Fox, and ABC.

The move to MoveNetworks continues a long legacy of technology improvements, giving the church high-quality, live video over the internet to its membership of 12 million plus people worldwide. Each talk, prayer, and musical number (the world-renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir performs at each conference) will be clipped and available in segments via the MoveNetworks player.

The LDS (or Mormon, as it is called) Church is well known for its technology efforts, in particular in the areas of Family History, and has websites at LDS.org, Mormon.org, and FamilySearch.org. It has recently built a presence on Facebook, its CIO is on Twitter and FriendFeed, and you can now even chat with missionaries via their site online. Looking at their news site (which you can subscribe to via RSS), they even have links to Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Reddit, Stumble, and more. The Church is the largest centrally-US based church founded in the United States and continues to be one of the fastest growing churches worldwide.

You can watch the conference live online via their website in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and American Sign Language. You can also watch it in select areas on Cable and Satellite television, all starting tomorrow morning at 10:00 am Mountain Standard Time. Sessions will be recorded and available on the site afterwards.

Disclaimer: I am a practicing, believing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and ascribe to its teachings. Although I avoid preaching on this blog, as I would any other church or organization, I enjoy sharing technology related stories about large organizations such as this.

I’m Changing Gears

Posted on September 2, 2008 by jessestay

I mentioned earlier I was going to announce a big change this week. I’m “on the move“, as Jeremiah Owyang would put it. Today was my first day working full time at a new Silicon Valley startup with offices here in Utah, where I will be leading their Social Product strategy moving forward. I am phasing off my regular consulting, and moving to this new Entrepreneurial effort in helping them grow.

At the moment, I can’t reveal much more, other than the fact that we’re building the next era in Interactive Entertainment on the iPhone. The company I’m working with right now started out as a client of mine, and I liked their product so much I decided it would be worth helping them out full time. I believe fully that we are going to change much of the way you watch TV today. We will be launching most likely next week, and you can follow the Twitter account @MediaMyWay to catch our launch announcement and follow our updates (I’ll also point you there from my Twitter account when we launch – we’ll announce it there first!). Other Twitter accounts you can follow for updates and “clues” are @JustintheWhitt, @Romay, and our CEO, @BradPelo.

How will this affect the other stuff I do? In reality, not much is changing, other than what I do full time. I have received permission to keep SocialToo.com going part-time, as it has, unless it takes off. Expect some very cool things to come from SocialToo in the near future – we’re working on a completely new design and a really cool new feature that will be released in the next couple weeks.

As far as my blogging and book-writing is concerned, I see nothing changing, and I intend fully to continue blogging regular, unbiased articles that I feel inspire and educate. I will disclose where necessary if I feel my current employment has any influence in what I am writing. I still hope to continue writing in other capacities as well, as long as speak as I’m asked to do (I’m speaking in Dallas next week to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, in fact – come see me speak!).

So, keep watching the @MediaMyWay Twitter account, and you can also follow this blog and I’ll be sure you’re aware of the latest of our happenings (we’ll have a company blog here shortly, which I’ll let you know about). In the meantime I’ll keep posting regular, educational, and original content as I always have and always will. “Stay” Tuned!

Identi.ca Will Succeed Because Its Technology is Viral

Posted on August 14, 2008 by jessestay

Yesterday I guest-posted on LouisGray.com about how the technology behind Identi.ca, Laconi.ca, could pose as the launching platform to brand many smaller microblogging services. Today I’d like to share one more power of the service – its working API. Identi.ca/Laconi.ca seem to have introduced a new ideology to Web 2.0 with this code, viral software.

Now, when I mention “viral software”, I’m not necessarily mentioning software that can make things viral. I’m instead meaning software in which the underlying code itself is viral. This could change the face of the way developers write code in the future, and open source is only part of it.

Today I noticed (through Steve Gillmor on identi.ca) another new interesting thing that I knew was coming – Brad Williams (@williamsba) wrote a bridge that essentially allows you to post on identi.ca and have it automatically post to Twitter, prepended by “identi.ca:”. Interestingly enough, “Hippy Steve” (@exador23) pointed out now one of the top trends on Twitter as of today, according to http://search.twitter.com is “identi”. Now, many of the posts you see on Twitter are going to become posts prepended by “identi.ca:”, and many more are going to feel pressured to join identi.ca where they are seeing all their other friends post from. I guess you could consider it competitive micro-advertising, created and distributed on purpose by the users themselves (as Charlene and Josh would put it, we’re seeing a “Groundswell“).

It should be noted that you can remove the “Identi.ca:” from being prepended, but as long as you’re on identi.ca and want those on Twitter to know you’re posting from there and not Twitter, why remove it? You are posting from the competing team, after all. Would anyone want to pretend they’re not posting from Twitter? I’d like to know where my friends are posting from.

Now, onto the viral part. Why did Brad Williams implement this bridge? I’m sure there are preferential issues of trying to get his network onto identi.ca, but the fact of the matter is, from a development standpoint these applications like Brad William’s bridge are simply easier to write for Identi.ca. The lack of limits and plan to keep off those limits on Identi.ca are just one more thing that make the software behind Identi.ca viral. Developers want to develop for Identi.ca. With an API that also supports Twitter (I mean literally, it is simply a change in the hostname for your Twitter code), developing for Identi.ca is just too easy! Again, developers jumping ship could very well mean the demise for Twitter.

I can only hope that developers of the future learn from this experience – in a social era such as today, even your software has to remain viral and easily shareable and distributable. Laconi.ca is the prime example of this – completely open source, based on open protocols, and your software should be able to talk to other instances of itself in some way, preferably using standard protocols. In addition to that, a completely open API is a must – the minute you start closing your API you begin to lose your code’s virality. Brad William’s bridge is only the start of apps that make the transition to Identi.ca much easier. I imagine you’ll see many more of these things in the coming days and weeks.

Looking to learn more on how to make the jump to identi.ca? Check out my friend, Marina Martin‘s site, ohidentica.com for some great howtos and tips all in one place. You can find me at http://identi.ca/jessestay.