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With FriendFeed Out of the Way, Google Reader Has a Golden Opportunity

by Jorge Escobar on August 10, 2009

This day has had a whirlwind of activity in many fronts. For the first time in the history of this blog I’m going to post twice in the same day.

But the news that Facebook acquired FriendFeed is really a shock for a lot of people.

You will be reading in the next couple of days a lot of information of what happened, why it happened, and what’s part of the deal.

I will summarize it in three short points and one possible once in a lifetime opportunity for Google Reader.

First: FriendFeed will disappear. It doesn’t matter as much when a product disappears, but it does matter if the community that built itself around it disappears. And no matter how much we exchange emails, Twitter accounts, etc., the fact of the matter is that the community will be sharded like a MySQL index.

Second: Facebook purchased FriendFeed to kill an opponent and inject itself with new ideas. They don’t care about the FriendFeed community, traffic or content, and will have no problem shutting it down.

Third: FriendFeed founders sell because this was their intention all along. The work for Facebook for six months and then they move on to the next exciting project.

Google Reader can capitalize on this acquisition immensely. Why? Because it almost has everything FriendFeed was offering.

If you have been following their recent improvements, Google Reader has introduced the ability to follow people, they have implemented realtime capabilities and they have a commenting system in place.

All they have to do is upgrade their web based interface and they’ll be good to go.

Opportunities like this don’t come often, and Google, having passed the opportunity to purchase something good (and with Wave still not completely out of the door), is in a unique place to finally put Google Profiles to good use, and convert a bunch of angry FriendFeed users to their platform.

I for one have been impressed with Google Reader’s improvements and have found myself using it more and more.

So, what do you think Jenna? Are you up for a good challenge?

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Using Google Event Tracking to Know When You Get New Subscribers

July 10, 2009
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One of the most annoying things about RSS is the lack of information we get about subscribers (something I’ve talked about in the past):

RSS is, in internet years, an old technology that was never meant to be measured. Feedburner and all other RSS measuring tools, compile data from the HTTP hits to your feed URL, and then manipulate this data to come up with an approximation of an audicence.

I’m always thinking how I could implement something that allows me to measure if new people are subscribing to my blog. Aside from fancy PHP programming to parse HTTP requests (if you don’t understand that, don’t worry) I thought if there was an easy way to use a mainstream tool to track this.

Google Analytics is one of those tools that are used by many blogs. There are easy to use plugins for all blogging platforms and if not, it’s pretty easy to setup on your own.

Analytics has a subset of very useful tools to track what users do on your site. Event tracking is one of those.

Basically event tracking allows you to send a “ping” to Analytics when users interact with a piece of your page. In this article I’ll show how to implement it.

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Push Technology is the Core of the Real Time Web

July 7, 2009
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Push technology is a term that is used often but rarely explained. Although we take it for granted, push technology hasn’t been around for long, and it had a false start at the very inception of the world wide web.

A client is usually your computer or your cellphone. A server is a service you use, like E-mail or Twitter. The event is usually a new piece of content, like a new Tweet or a new E-mail.

What’s the opposite of Push technology? Yes, you guessed it, it’s called “Pull Technology” and its been the most common way of transferring content on the web. In a ‘Pull’ scenario, the computer or cellphone asks the server every so often if there’s any new content, and the server then tells the computer or cellphone if it does or if it doesn’t.

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If You’re a FriendFeed Addict, You Must Use Feedly

July 6, 2009
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Just when I thought I was closer to giving up on Firefox, a new application, in the form of a plugin, has become a major addiction for me (and a saviour for the spiraling browser). I’m talking, of course, about Feedly.

Feedly was brought to my attention (as many other applications have) by the omnipresent Robert Scoble. He posted on FriendFeed:

I love http://www.feedly.com — it is how I read my Google Reader feeds now. Requires Firefox, but if you have it very nice headline display

I thought, Firefox plugin? No thanks. But something about the UI bit my curiosity and I decided to install it.

The truth is, it’s much more than an RSS reader. It’s an extension to FriendFeed, to a point where I’m wondering why FriendFeed hasn’t purchased them yet.

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An Audience is an Audience, Be it on FriendFeed or Anywhere Else

June 20, 2009
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I almost had a heart attack on Thursday night when I went to check my Feedburner Stats. I had been hovering around 60 subscribers with one or two added every week. But that day Feedburner announced that suddenly I had 354 subscribers.

What had happened? Did my blog get recommended on some influential blogger’s list? Had my blog been mentioned on the New York Times?

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The Cloud Area Network

February 19, 2009
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It’s been only a little over a decade since its inception, but we already live in a world where the Internet is something we can’t live without. We communicate, share media, influence people and research every possible topic with the click of a mouse.

But the web is an ever evolving, almost live organism. There’s a change, an undercurrent, that has been forming in the past two years. It is still invisible to most people, but an army of developers and futurists are tapping into it. It will revolutionize, once again, the biggest network of all.

I call it the Cloud Area Network.

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