scobleizer’s posterous

I used to be the biggest user of Google Reader. At one point the Google Reader team told me I shared more items than anyone else. But lately it's a rare month I've checked into it and Twitter is in the process of adding a new feature -- lists -- that is getting me off of Google Reader altogether.

Why?

Several reasons:

1. Google Reader is FREAKING SLOW. It sometimes takes longer than a minute to open it up. "But my Google Reader account is super fast," I can hear you saying. Yeah, but you don't have any friends and you don't have many things you are subscribed to. Compare to Twitter lists or Twitter itself. I'm following 10,000+ people. More than 100,000 are following me. Yet Twitter opens instantly.

2. Google Reader's UI is too confusing. Yeah, I know how to use it, but really, do we need "like" and "share" and "share with note?"

3. It makes me feel guilty. I have 1,000 unread items. Twitter doesn't tell me that. 

4. The social network features suck. Managing friends in Google Reader is slow, and hard to do. Not that Twitter or Facebook is perfect but they are a LOT better than Google Reader. I am following more than 10,000 people, brands, objects etc in Twitter. THERE IS NO WAY I could do that efficiently in Google Reader.

5. I see most news faster on Twitter than in Google Reader. Where did Marissa Mayer announce Google's deal with Twitter? On Twitter. It didn't show up on my Google Reader until later after everyone had written blog posts.

6. Headline scanning is easier, and more interesting for some reason in Twitter than even in Google Reader's list view.

7. Did I mention it's many times faster to open Twitter than Google Reader?

8. iPhone apps are much more robust and better for sharing, retweeting, etc. Google Reader apps (and I have five on my iPhone) don't make it easy to share and reading on them isn't as nice as it is on, say, Tweetie.

Add it up and I just don't look forward to opening Google Reader the way I once did.

So, want some examples?

Well, here's some lists (you'll need to have the new lists feature -- unfortunately only about 25% of Twitter users have that so far, if you can't view these you'll need to wait a few more days until Twitter turns on your account):

1. Tech News Brands. These are brands like TechCrunch, New York Times, Mashable, Venture Beat, and many others. 331 news brands included here, but no people. This list is awesome and contains NO NOISE of the "I had a tuna salad sandwich for lunch." This kind of list is going to prove revolutionary for Twitter users.

2. Tech News People. These are the journalists and bloggers who report the tech news. So far I've gotten 177 people on this list (expect all my lists to grow over next few weeks as I go through my Twitter account).

3. Venture Capitalists. This list has a TON of venture capitalists. More than 300 when I wrote this post.

4. My favorite Twitterers. For the past two months I've clicked "Favorite" on Tweets more than 7,000 times. These are the 500 people I faved the most. (I would have added more people to this list, but 500 is the maximum that can be placed on one list).

On my Twitter account you'll find many other lists too that I'm working on, but these four are the most built out ones.

What lists would you like to see me build?

Do you agree or disagree that Google Reader is becoming less and less useful now that Twitter and Facebook are hyper popular? If you disagree, why?

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First off, I +love+ the new list feature that's coming to Twitter. Last week more than 1,000 people were randomly added to a beta of the new feature. What does it do? It does a few things (TechCrunch wrote an article about the new feature and has screen shots which show what it looks like):

1. It lets you put the people you are following into lists. (I have several lists, for instance, one for photographers, another for tech executives, another for my most favorited Twitterers, and another for programmers).
2. It lets you see a feed for each list. The feed is made up of only the people on that list.
3. If you are the person who made the list you can delete or add people to the list.
4. You can block the user of any list.
5. You can subscribe to any list, which will add it to your home page and other places.
6. You can later delete any list.
7. You can later rename any list (that's pretty cool, although renaming does change the URL of the list).

UPDATE: If you have an account that is "list enabled" you can check out my lists on my Twitter account. They are going to need a lot more work, but already you can see the direction I'm heading in with them.

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Where do I spend my attention? That's all I have. Unlike many others in the tech community I don't have a lot of money to invest in companies. I also don't have coding skills, so can't build stuff, so the only way I can build stuff is to spend my time judiciously and focus attention through my video camera's lens and my blogging. So, here we go about FriendFeed and why I've cut back on using it and what might be in its future:

Tonight TechCrunch's MG Siegler pointed out FriendFeed is dead. I can't disagree. I've been spending a lot less time there. I've noticed that even Louis Gray's feed has less engagement than it used to have.

There are a few reasons for that.

First, the FriendFeed team and Facebook has made a significant PR mistake. They have NOT talked about any future for FriendFeed. That has signaled to most of us that FriendFeed is the Facebook equivilent of DodgeBall or Jaiku. Dead, not because the service won't stay up, but dead because no one is working on it anymore.

Second, in this Twitter age you can't hide things from us anymore. See in the 1990s you could PR your way out of this problem by saying something is important. Today? We know too many people deep inside the company and they Twitter what they are working on and where they are moving. Last week Gary Burd said he's leaving FriendFeed/Facebook. That speaks volumes. I'm also hearing that the team has been split up and is working 100% on Facebook issues. I've said that publicly and no one from Facebook or FriendFeed has called me to tell me I'm wrong. 

Third, the fact that Facebook didn't lock up the whole team for at least a year or two is totally amazing to me. Gary leaving says volumes. WTF? How much stock did he have? If I had bought FriendFeed I would have made sure that everyone on the team, particularly a star like Gary (he started the Google Talk team) would have TONS of reasons to stay. Yes, he probably would have left eventually anyway (I expect everyone involved to leave over the next six years as their stock vests) but the fact that Gary only stayed a couple of months is just not good.

Fourth, Twitter is in the process of adding all the features that FriendFeed has and more. The first one, lists, has already been turned on for me and is coming "within days" for everyone else. That was a major reason I used FriendFeed (so I could split up my Twitter friends into different lists). Twitter's version is even better than FriendFeed's.

Fifth, the world has spoken. Everywhere I go people tell me Twitter is where they are going to be and that they are totally ignoring FriendFeed.

Sixth, FriendFeed has lost most of its developer momentum. The one exception is Apture, which just last week released a FriendFeed feature. I appreciate that a lot, but they are one of the only exceptions. Most of the developers I talk with tell me they've cancelled any FriendFeed projects they are working on.

OK, so what future does FriendFeed have?

First of all, the engine is open source. So we might see some other service take it on and implement its features. I doubt it, though, because no investor will go for it and Twitter has already implemented its best features in the lab (except for Real-Time Search, and I hear that Twitter is working feverishly on that).

Second of all, when I look at the home feed I don't see geeks, but I do see SOME activity. Mostly from people who aren't involved in tech at all. It has become a cult favorite.

Third. It does have SOME unique uses that I don't see Twitter or Facebook matching for some time. It's a great place to have a chat room. Yes, Google Wave will potentially take that away, but they stuck it in such a complex UI that many many people have told me they will never use it. Jason Pollack, film director, for instance, uses it once in a while to have live conversations that are quite active and cool.

Fourth, it still has the best real-time search out there. Until someone matches that I will go back there to find old Tweets and old posts.

Fifth, its servers are cheap to operate (the infrastructure FriendFeed was built on was designed very efficiently) and if growth remains flat the costs will stay cheap, so Facebook has no financial reason they need to shut down the servers. 

So, why did I name this blog "the Second Life of FriendFeed?" Because bloggers like me hyped up Second Life and then when businesses figured out that Second Life didn't work for them (you could only get about 100 people onto an island) we left in droves and stopped writing about it. The thing is a new audience showed up for Second Life and today it's a thriving and profitable business.

Will FriendFeed turn out to be like Second Life? I think it could. There will always be some people who want to be on some service other than the popular ones. There ARE people out there who hate Twitter and Facebook and want to hang out on a tool that more fits their personality. FriendFeed DOES have a future there. 

But it isn't a future for me, and that's just OK. Second Life doesn't care that I'm not on it anymore either. 

I am interested to know if you think there's a Second Life for FriendFeed, though.

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I've been playing all day with the new Threadsy, the new Seesmic desktop, the unreleased Brizzly, the new TweetDeck desktop, and the new PeopleBrowsr.

It is very hard to tell these apart. That tells me there's a shakeout coming.

Or, there's a billion-dollar opportunity none of them are seeing yet.

Here's the opportunity: curation.

"Oh, Scoble, you are being stupid again," I can just hear some of you saying. But hear me out. This isn't just the demented discussion of someone who has gotten way too little sleep due to the birth of his new son a few days ago.

No, this is the demented discussion of someone who has an itch to scratch that isn't being scratched.

Here, let's look at the real time landscape. On one side (the microblog reading side) we have Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed. On the other side (the heavy-duty content creation side) we have Tumblr, Wordpress, and Posterous. Oh, yes, we have readers like Google Reader, LazyFeed, and Feedly.

First, Twitter did us all a HUGE favor by limiting us to 140 characters. It let us read HUGE numbers of people's opinions. Just today, for instance, I've read thousands of Tweets and shared out the best hundred or so. I can't do this with any other service as efficiently and as publicly. Even FriendFeed, which has a "like" feature that is actually better thought out overall, I can't just include the post. On FriendFeed and Facebook you get all the other comments from all the other people whether you like those or not.

Second, Tumblr, Wordpress.com, and Posterous have done us a HUGE favor by making long-form blogging and sharing of photos and other media cool again.

But why haven't those joined? And why is that a billion-dollar opportunity?

Well, after having my son this weekend, I see I have a ton of places to share photos, videos, pictures, and little Tweets. But I don't have anyplace I can really put those all together with a nice blog post. Yeah, I can do that here, but the UI sucks. I have to copy and paste URLs and that's assuming I can find them anymore (it's really difficult -- go find my first baby photo on FriendFeed from Saturday night. I found it, but it took some work and if I wasn't a geek who knew how to use search engines I might have just given up).

Here's a test. Take a tweet of mine in your favorite reader like Seesmic or TweetDeck, click a single button on your iPhone (that's how I favorite them, which shares them instantly with all of you) and then type or leave some audio right underneath that Tweet and click another button to post it). Hint: you can't. That, to me, is opportunity.

So, to have a great curation system, what do we need?

1. A good reader. Seesmic, TweetDeck, Threadsy, Brizzly, or PeopleBrowsr all would do fine, but I'd like to mix Tweets and Facebook items in with email (Threadsy does that) and RSS items (Google Reader or Feedly does that). So, there's still some innovation needed in the reader/aggregator department. Oh, and since I've moved about 60% of my reading time onto my iPhone, it better work on the iPhone too. So far on the iPhone I like SimplyTweet the best, but would probably switch to a system that had a good curation/publishing tool. Already I've loaded Posterous' app onto my iPhone.

2. A curation component. Must be easy to use. Just click to curate. Curation should be possible with text, audio, video, or photos.

3. A publishing system. Something that matches Posterous or Tumblr for ease of use and great design/reading. It would be even better if, in addition to an RSS feed, it also would spit out a Twitter feed so that other people can import my curation into their Twitter tool and go through the whole process again.

Extra points if all three pieces are available as open source components that we can load on our own servers, the way Wordpress is.

So, why would such a curation system be a billion dollar opportunity?

Well, first of all, it would open up a new kind of CMS. That alone would be worth some money, but not a billion.

Second of all, it would open up a new kind of community. One that goes beyond Twitter and Facebook, but uses both of those. Every time I talk about this tool with other publishing professionals they agree there's a need. Many of them are already trying to use CoTweet or TweetRiver to watch tweet streams and push them into buckets for further discussion. Even sites like Mashable and TechCrunch are watching Tweets all day long and are regularly building blog posts out of those Tweets (but they are doing them by hand).

Third, I look at potential market sizes. Blogging got to a few hundred million people. Twitter and Facebook are going to hit far larger numbers, why? Because the potential market for microblogs is bigger than blogging was. Think about it. Lots of people can write a status message. Not as many people can put together a good blog post.

Even more people will be able to curate. They already are doing just that in YouTube comments, Blog comments, or Facebook communities, among other places.

Plus, we want to curate our lives and now that more and more of you will be pouring your lives into Twitter and Facebook you'll want to save some of those moments in a more permanent, and curated, way.

It's a billion dollar opportunity just sitting out there. Anyone working on this?

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I love Chris Brogan's blog. He goes into how businesses can improve their use of Internet-based media, among other techniques they can use to improve their standing in the community and our trust in them. His book "Trust Agents" goes into how companies are doing just that.

Here we have a new trust agent to study. His name is Steve Kovak and he runs the teams at Ford that build safety features into their cars like radar systems and airbags and the like.

Of course, what did I do? I told him quickly I bought a Toyota Prius, a car I really love.

Now with some company representatives that would have gotten a snide remark. Look at how Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, publicly berated an employee for using an iPhone at this week's company meeting.

In fact, that's what I sort of expected from a Ford employee. Except you should look at how he did react. 

What did he do? He admitted he bought one too. Then he promptly praised it. Then he explained how his product was different. He also made sure to mention his company's advantages (that they've been doing this longer). All three got me to trust him. Well, as much as I'd trust anyone pitching a product.

But in the first video you get why he did that: he thinks these features are important, no matter what car you buy next. He's passionate and he has the data to show that these features will save lives.

It's why I talk with so many people who use other hosting companies and why I keep up to date on what they are doing better than Rackspace, who I work for. This is how you win trust and you turn people from Toyota fans into Ford fans.

I wonder what Chris Brogan thinks about how Steve Kovak handled himself?

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I've had my 2010 Prius for two months now and have already put about 5,000 miles on it and my favorite feature is the assisted cruise control. Basically what this means is my car partially drives itself. If the cars ahead of me slam on their brakes, so does my car. It warns me when a car is getting too close.

How does it do that? Well, my car has radar in the front of it. But I didn't really know how it worked, so when Ford invited me to meet its Chief Safety Engineer, Steve Kozak, on a press tour they were doing this week in San Francisco, I thought this would be a great way for me to learn more.

He calls these technologies "a game changer" for safety.

There's so much behind these technologies that I did two videos. The first we spend at the front of the car talking about the sensors, how far they can see, what limitations they have. The second video we spend in the car and behind the car, where we learn about how the technology actually works and see some of the cool features that this let them build into the 2010 Ford Taurus.

What do you think? Will you look for a car with these kinds of features that will let your car see ahead and warn you when a collision is possible? 

I wonder when cars will go the next step and will fully drive themselves?

Anyway, this interview will let you see inside how geeks are changing how we drive.

The first video is embedded here. The second video you'll have to click to watch, but I'll embed it here after it's converted to Flash.

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Eight years ago at this moment I was talking with Dave Winer. We could not believe what we were seeing on CNN. 

The World Trade Center coming down was a metaphor for my own life coming down. Over the next few months I got in a car wreck that totalled my car and left me thinking "that could have been it." That led to ending my marriage. Starting a new relationship and getting engaged to Maryam. We shipped a new product at work (Radio UserLand, which took a lot of long hours). I was running the books at UserLand and knew we were running out of money quickly and that soon I'd be jobless. In March, six months after 9/11, I laid myself off. Oh, and my grandma died there and I'm sure some other things went wrong too. It seemed my entire world was crashing down.

But those six months were transformative.

First, I said to myself "well, if life is going to whack me, I'm going to have fun!"

Second, I made every day better than yesterday.

It made life very simple and when I've failed I go back again to these two thoughts. Make the world better (that's how you make tomorrow better than today) and remember that someday we all end up in a box anyway so might as well take some risks and have some fun now cause this story doesn't end well.

But today I'm looking back at the last eight years and all that's gone on. The interesting people I've interviewed (more than 1,500). The book I wrote with Shel Israel. All the blog posts. The time spent on Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook. The technology I've seen change (I'm working on a video of how cars are changing due to technology right now).

My new son, who now is two years old, and a new one on the way. I look with pride at Patrick, who now is 15. He was six back then and I wanted him to watch all the events unfolding on CNN so he would know why he had to wait in long lines at the airport and would know why his life had other problems that I never faced earlier in my life. He still is scared of flying on planes. I hope he gets over that.

Maryam and I have had an extraordinary amount of fun and we've been around the world lots of times (Milan, now two, has been to Europe four times).

The past eight years have been extraordinary in my life. But it all started with that morning eight years ago when life reminded me that we're not in control and that all we have is now.

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For the past three weeks I've been reading thousands of Tweets so you don't have to. I click "favorite" on the best ones. That's more than 2,000 different faves in the past few weeks: almost all of them geeky in some way.

I'm following about 2,500 Twitter accounts now, which include most of the most interesting technology industry executives, influentials, bloggers, and evangelists. Thanks to Favstar.fm, a service that tracks Twitter favorites, I now can see which people I have faved the most.

Let's look at the top few:

#1. TechCrunch, with 44 faves.

#2. Dave Winer, with 32 faves.

#3. Jason Pollock, with 22 faves.

#4. Mike Arrington's personal Twitter account (founder of TechCrunch), with 22 faves.

#5. Hackernewsbot, with 21 faves.

#6. NewsYCombinator, with 20 faves.

#7. Guy Kawasaki, with 19 faves.

#8. Brett, with 18 faves.

#9. Louis Gray, with 18 faves.

#10. Steve Rubel, with 17 faves.

#11. Dan Schwabel, with 17 faves.

#12. Tim O'Reilly with 15 faves.

#13. CNET, with 15 faves.

#14. Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable, with 15 faves.

#15. Jesse Stay, with 13 faves.

#16. Ben Parr, editor of Mashable, with 13 faves.

#17. Marshall Kirkpatrick, editor of ReadWriteWeb, with 13 faves.

#18. TheRealPR Man, with 13 faves.

#19. Smashing Magazine, with 13 faves. 

#20. George Dearing, with 13 faves.

But there are about 1,000 others listed on my faves list, so you can click through them all and you'll find some awesome geeky twitterers this way if you're looking for new people to follow.

Am I missing any?

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TechCrunch just published an interview Mike Arrington did with Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and one quote there caught my eye:

We don't want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people.

Ahh, that seals it, Google is the new Microsoft. See, when I worked at Microsoft I heard this kind of horsepucky all the time too. The executives there would only really get behind things that looked like they were billion dollar businesses and let me know it early and often. I remember talking with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, about this too. He wanted HP and Atari to market his newfangled personal computer. They told him to pound sand, which is a good thing because otherwise we wouldn't have Apple today.

The thing is, innovations usually come about when it doesn't seem like anyone is interested. Let's go back to 2006 when Twitter was first released. I remember showing it to other people. They thought it was the lamest thing they'd ever seen. See, no one was sitting around and saying "I have a problem, I need a way to blog but I want to be limited to only 140 characters."

Another way to look at this? Henry Ford's quote:

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse.'"

See, things like Twitter are like avalanches. Big companies love to create an avalanche. After all, that's how you get on the front page of Wall Street Journal and find new ways to grow, etc.

The thing is to create an avalanche you've gotta make it snow one snowflake at a time. Big companies don't get that part of the equation. Why? Creating snowflakes is SMALL and isn't interesting to multi-billion-dollar companies.

It's why I travel the world. I'm looking for who is making snowflakes. I'll leave the avalanche business for the big boys.

Got a snowflake? Let me know.

Oh, and Eric, have fun looking for the big problems. I bet that some kid in a garage in Israel or Colorado will get there first.

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