PubSubHubbub: Cool, but Hard to Say

PubSubHubbub, a 20% time project of two Google engineers, Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin, launched a few weeks ago. In addition to being a tongue-twister, PubSubHubbub is: A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS). Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks)… Read More

Facebook Buys FriendFeed

So, I take a couple days off and Facebook buys FriendFeed. A bit ironic considering there hasn’t been much to discuss lately. Chet cordially invited me to comment on the acquisition, and even though I planned to anyway, let’s just give him credit for being the tipster. There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of coverage… Read More

Why Don’t People Update Software?

This question applies to personal software more so than IT-supported software. I understand the complexities involved with taking updates to software that IT is on the hook to support. What I don’t get is why people aren’t more vigilant with their own software, specifically browsers and O/S. Over the years, updates have become more in-your-face,… Read More

Everything is a Journey

The year I started with Oracle (1996) was the year the Network Computer (NC) was announced. The NC was about a decade ahead of its time due to a number of factors, and it’s funny to me that netbooks are the latest rage. The promise of netbooks is essentially the promise of the NC, i.e.… Read More

Measuring Influence and Reputation

The debate about whether FeedBurner’s inclusion of FriendFeed subscribers is a good or bad thing has me thinking how to determine a person’s reputation and influence. As I keep saying, trust is the key component to New Web. Without trust, it’s difficult to build a community around anything. Reputation and influence are the next big… Read More

Google I/O Sessions Live

Some of the sessions from Google I/O have been posted, including the Wave breakout sessions. I know one of these conflicted with Rich’s panel session, “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”. Rich was both bummed he had to miss it and worried that after the morning’s rousing keynote, no one would show up for his session. Although… Read More

My Thoughts on Wave

Rich dumped his impressions and thoughts on Google Wave yesterday. Now it’s my turn. In a weird coincidence, I heard Soundgarden’s “My Wave” earlier today and immediately thought of Friend of the ‘Lab Floyd‘s penchant for beginning his posts with song lyrics. Not sure why he’s stopped doing that, it’s a great little calling card… Read More

See Rich at Google I/O

A quick note, Rich will be presenting at Google I/O this Thursday on a panel called “OpenSocial in the Enterprise“. He’ll be sharing our experiences with OpenSocial and Connect. Although we haven’t yet released our OpenSocial container, Rich and Anthony have been tinkering with it for over a year and have a sandbox environment we’ve… Read More

Ask Google?

Remember when Ask Jeeves launched? The premise was simple. Instead of munging your search into keywords and hoping for the right result set, all you had to do was ask Jeeves a real question. If you remember that, you’ll also remember that it didn’t work very well. Google just announced they have indexed public data… Read More

Google Does Geolocation

I like geolocation. At first, it seemed pretty creepy, but now, there’s a lot of potential for geo-based features that are both and good for you. I write about geo-services quite a bit, and I’m a fan of services like Fire Eagle and Shizzow and BrightKite and all the others. They all have one problem… Read More

Feeling Lucky?

I always find it noteworthy when a handful of stories about a single company or service pop up within a day or so. Usually, none of them alone is all that interesting, but as a collection, they sometimes form a story that I find blogworthy. This time it’s Google’s Web Search. Totally weird to see… Read More

Freely Available Utilities

The title comes from a phrase that stood out for me in this post from RWW. That post highlights some really sweet data pr0n (TwitterThoughts and World Twitter Map) built by Yvo Schaap that uses the Twitter API for data, Yahoo Pipes for parsing and the Google Visualization API for producing the eye candy. All… Read More

Bummer 2.0

I have a few friends that were avid users of Ma.gnolia, which was a social bookmarking tool, similar to Delicious. I had an account there, but never really used the service much. I say similar to Delicious and use the past tense because Ma.gnolia’s database crashed on January 30. They recently announced that all user… Read More

More on Social Search

So, yesterday I started making the case for social search as an excellent way to find information locked away within an enterprise, and the ability to get good information from social search pays for investments in social networks. I didn’t cover much detail though. So, that’s the focus of today’s post. Social search in my… Read More

Social Search Wins

When you start talking to an enterprise crowd about social networking, inevitably someone asks for real business benefits, a.k.a. ROI. I know, hard to believe. When we first started the ‘Lab, Paul used to ask how many people have a Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn account. Usually less than half the room would raise hands, and that number went… Read More

Like the Social Bar?

Back in December, we added the Google Friend Connect widgets. Since then, our little blog social network has grown to over 100 members. It’s still not entirely clear to me what you’d want to do with Google Friend Connect, other than affiliate yourself with a blog or website. I guess it’s also a way to… Read More