DISQUS

Robert - getting there on discussing the business impact of social software. See today's post: "Enterprise 2.0 and the Trough of Disillusionment" http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/enterprise...

Great to hear about your new gig Robert. I like that you're going to be applying your prolific listening and interacting abilities to a business. And cloud computing is a sector that will benefit from the Scobleizer energy and perspective. Looking forward to what lies ahead.

Robert - you exemplify the commingling of the personal and the professional. You've got a ton of us as fans (friends?) and we'll be there when you land at your next gig. Looking forward to what's next.

Sticking with my earlier prediction of $1 billion: http://bit.ly/cVcw

"Your blog is your resume. You need one and it needs to have 100 posts on it about what you want to be known for." Exactly my thoughts Robert. Professionals, who are smart and have points of view about their field, can really do a great job demonstrating their knowledge via a blog. Don't worry about page views. Worry about what analysis and perspective you're providing on the issues and news of your industry.

Hi Rich -

Glad you liked the post regarding why professionals should continue to blog. I'm not a part of the virtualization world, but I like this post. It's great to see non-social media, non-marketing folks benefiting from using Twitter. I've seen examples in politics and accounting. Now I know about virtualization as well. Cool.

Hutch

These are some great ideas about how Twitter will integrate into the blogging experience. One thing I hope we don't see though: Tweets mixed with regular blog posts. I have to admit I'd likely unsubscribe from a blog that crowded my RSS Reader with tweets.

Now can I get this as a pop-out window like FriendFeed's real-time?

The thought is interesting, the adoption would probably be poor. A lot for millions of users to remember. Groups functionality will go a long way toward addressing these concerns. There are the heavy thinker tweeters and the fun sociable types. Groups let you sort 'em.

Rahsheen - great write-up about BackType. I like your perspective, "Backtype is more geared to those of us that read and comment on blogs. Most tools in this space are for actual bloggers, so this is a welcome change." I'm really interested in what BackType is doing, and find myself checking it every so often. I'm also digging the Alerts.

Robert - one thing email does that other apps traditionally haven't is ensure you're getting something in front of other people's eyes. In many apps, it can feel like you put something up on a page, but then you're not sure anyone will notice.

The problem then becomes that email is the natural app that people turn to, and it gets used for all sorts of things that go beyond simple directed communication.

The new generation of apps are getting better at directing attention to messages and content in which you're interested. Message/reply notifications, edit notifications, key word RSS, and other attention hooks are addressing the need to ensure that others will see things.

Eventually, email will become a notification service for content and conversations that are saved and searchable. Company information and conversations move out onto wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, microblogging, whatever.

Steven - the current incarnation of FriendFeed is centered around feeds form other services. As those services grow, so too will FriendFeed.

But I really think the future of FriendFeed will based on the "direct posts" into FriendFeed. They come in two forms:

(1) Tweet-like conversational nuggets
(2) Links to sites and pictures

Those direct posts are much more accessible to mainstream users. And they let your friends dive in to comment away on stuff. Be it social media, quilting, futbol, energy alternatives or the presidential race.

You know how a lot of websites have those buttons to "digg this"? Wouldn't surprise me if down the road we see "Add to FriendFeed" buttons.

Aw shucks...and I didn't know about Mitchell's child prodigy-ness. He was Doogie Howser? Thanks Mike!

paul - I disagree re: FriendFeed. To participate in a conversation there, you need to click over to see the blog. As soon as a reader has done that, FriendFeed has actually helped the blogger.

Chris - a small example of this occurred this week with a company called Toluu. Toluu founder Caleb Elston is active with bloggers, on Twitter and on FriendFeed. When it came time to release new features this week, he was able to tap his established connections in social media to get great exposure for them. The result? He had a record week in terms of new members. Full story here: http://tinyurl.com/6o8v87

Funny you wrote this, I was just thinking about applying the semantic web to FriendFeed as well. Two use cases: noise control and better search. Published a blog post about the noise control aspect earlier today: http://tinyurl.com/3t9ds6

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Twitter is conversations centered around someone else, FriendFeed is conversations centered around content. I think the two services overlap a fair amount, but the differences in experience seem to based a lot on your personality type. More here: http://tinyurl.com/59rzyk

Chris - this is a subject I've been thinking about a bit. Not just blogging either, but your entire social media identity. For some people, such as yourself, your "professional" social identity IS your "personal" social identity. For others, they're completely separate.

What drives the divergence between the two identities? I write about it here: http://tinyurl.com/6fuy9j

Mark - aside from the whole early adopter/mainstream debate, I've been wondering about the fundamental nature of the Twitter and FriendFeed. Corvida's post about her day off from Twitter and FriendFeed got me wondering about those two services, and their differences. Sure, both are social media, heavy on participation. But the type of participation is different for the two services. Here's one way to look at it:

Twitter is conversations with people
FriendFeed is conversations with content

I think delving a bit more deeply into why early adopters are using the two services may uncover some thoughts about their mainstream adoption. Dustin's comment above about FriendFeed and Facebook speaks volumes about the need to understand these services better.

I blog today about that, here: http://tinyurl.com/59rzyk

Nick - you raise a good point there about Scoble potentially making things a trend. There's a Malcolm Gladwell trendsetter aspect to that. But FriendFeed will ultimately need to demonstrate its own value. The fact that three other prominent bloggers have a similar feeling about FriendFeed does say something about that latter point.

Love the poll. I'll be interested to see how that turns out.

Hutch

Reminds me of Slide's recent $50mm fund raise, at a $500mm valuation.

Nice post on Twitter! I use Twitter for research - I want to see when people tweet certain search terms. I was using Terraminds for this. But Terraminds isn't working these days! So I switched to Tweetscan.

I use FriendFeed for research as well. You can catch tweets, Jaikus, pownces, blog posts and comments.

Robert Scoble, the 5,000 friend whale, tweeted a couple days ago that he'd grown tired of Facebook. "Haven't been into FB for months".

I think that tweet, and your post here highlight something that's been rattling around in mind brain. You need to pick the right social network for what you want to accomplish. For a lot people, Facebook serves that purpose quite well. Others get what they want from MySpace, or LinkedIn. I'd say it's less about what's better or worse absolutely, but more about what's better or worse for YOU.

For Scoble, I'd argue his use case is really much more FriendFeed oriented. I explain why here: http://tinyurl.com/4uwfzt

Ah...nice post Chris. I like the process you go through to pick a topic, and then figure out the best marketing approach (picture, title, best stuff first). I think the picture aspect is a good tip. My own posts tend to be long form with text. A picture would be good. One of my most popular posts has a picture of a baby with peanut butter smeared all over him (relates to the Yahoo Peanut Butter Manifesto, BTW).

Also - good tip from Sonia Simone above above about making the first sentence of the post impactful.

How about a little more thought on short posts versus long form posts?

Finally, I just published my own thoughts as a fairly new blogger, The First 20 Blog Posts Are the Easiest: http://tinyurl.com/ynkzgh

How about the impact of businesses adopting Web 2.0 inside the firewall, aka Enterprise 2.0? There's a lot of value that Web 2.0 has brought to the wide open Web. A lot of businesses, and software companies, see the potential to apply these technologies to improve productivity and collaboration.

Well once these technologies are rolled out to employees, many will be exposed to them for the first time: social networks, tagging, RSS, blogging, etc. A good question to ask: will this exposure increase the adoption of Web 2.0 by the mainstream consumer market?

More thoughts here: http://tinyurl.com/2uuzpm