If you run into this error when trying to access your feeddo, please 1) go to http://www.google.com, 2) sign out from Google and 3) restart your browser. Sorry for the inconvenience.
The Google Reader team just released a new version of Google Reader for the iphone. Very nice!
Had the chance to meet with Benjamin Mestrallet who is the founder of the Exo Platform over the week end. Exo is at the intersection of a portal, a webtop and a mashup platform - of Java and Ajax - and benefits from being open source and 100% bootstrapped. It is very ambitious but if they continue to work hard and find the right focus, they have the assets and opportunity of defining what enterprise portal should look like in 2-4 years from now. They are in hiring mode so if you are in France, it might be an interesting opportunity.
Here is a link to the first public demo of Oracle SOA Suite 11g (codename fabric).
Brings back some great memories, including:
(That is the part of the work I miss the most! Kudos to the entire team for getting closer to the ship!)
We pushed out as part of 1.0b1.r14 some plumbing changes regarding recommendations and access control. We apologize in advance for any regression. Thanks!
Google Reader introduced yesterday a feature allowing users to add a snippet of text to articles with are being shared in Google Reader (or outside of Google Reader when using a bookmarklet). This feature is very similar to our concept of annotations so we took a little bit of time and integrated into feeddo.
As shown in the above example, the notes added in Google Reader are displayed in the Cafe page.
To be continued.
Jeff Nolan posted an interesting article on the future of RSS
I think one of the reasons why Techmeme has proven to be a consistent favorite is that this next generation model is partly how Gabe built the system. Through using Techmeme I am essentially outsourcing feed discovery to the service and consuming content not based on subscriptions but topics. As a users, ordinary or power, I would like to have a personal Techmeme that delivers content based on my consumption habits, or put another way, my attention streams.
To further develop this model, I would like to see a social dimension develop that pushes up/down content based on a collaborative filter that takes into account my social graph and what they are consuming and rating, explicitly or otherwise. The problem with rating that we need to overcome is that a very small percentage of people will actually score content, so that’s why the attention streams become valuable, through activities they are effectively scoring content.
Very close to what we have been working on over the last 18 months and very much inline with that users tests have shown: the solution needs a mix of personal reading pattern, various level of social filtering and a dice of topic based discovery.
The only thing that I would add is that I also think that we need a way to better compensate bloggers and companies who publish their content through RSS.
We are currently focusing on 4 things: 1) usability test, 2) performance optimization, 3) name change and 4) getting blessing from Google.
On the usability test front, overall, the result are much more positive then the tests we did 6 weeks ago but there is some consistency regarding the “getting started” process being weak. So we are going to take a new look at that. There is also some consistency regarding the need to be able to provide more feedback regarding recommendations (I will write a longer post on that).
On the performance optimization front, M and K have done some magic on the 10,000 users test case both in terms of performance and scalability (ie partitioning). They will be transitioning to 100K and 1M users mocks. We are slowly and painfully migrating the client to take advantage of the more decentralized work processing.
On the name change, we decided to rename feeddo to avoid any conflict with Pheedo. We are working on trying to acquire a new domain (domain names are so expensive these days!!!).
On the Google front, we want to make sure Google is OK with feeddo using some of the sparsly documented Google Reader API.
We are going to continue to push on both 4 areas to try to get 1.0b1 out as soon as possible. The good news is that usage pattern among existing user has increased over the last 6 weeks so we are really looking forward to seeing if the pattern holds when we let more people in.
(Special thanks to Cyril, Steph, MB, Clemens, Elisa and Jason for their detailed feedback and suggestions!)
And here is a fun recommendation to star the week on a positive note:
Yokway is introducing video reviews this week. When you are posting a review or commenting on one, you can now leave a short video clip. I am usually a little skeptical about video because of how hard it is to scan but it works really well in the context of “circle of friends”. Here is an example.
(Kudos to the Yokway team for iterating fast. The more I use Yokway and the more I am convinced that the the concept of shorter reviews targeted at a circle of friends has a lot of legs and could be a great extension to yelp).
This video is interesting both in terms of how it is done/designed and what it is trying to say.
I needed a break from coding this afternoon so I went to a conference organized by the Stanford d.school around infectious engagement. 4 speakers brought 4 different perspectives on what it takes to influence people and promote change of behavior. There was a couple of cameras in the room so you should be able to see the entire content online soon.
Here are my top 3 take-aways:
1) Stories are what capture peoples attention and spread. To go viral, you need a good story.
2) The anatomy of a good story is a hot cause and a cool solution.
3) Change is more likely to happen when you approach the problem from multiple angles (value, skills/education, social pressure, rewards, emotions, etc.)
It was a very good break!
Jason is in the process of incubating a very interesting idea. He is looking for a couple of good developers (with php/memcached/mysql background). The initial office will be located in the Berkeley area. My experience working with Jason has been very positive: he is smart, direct and detailed-oriented/analytical. It you are interested, send me an email to edwink AT devhd.com and I will broker an introduction.
Annotations have now support for searching related articles (powered by Google). So if you are reading an article and find an interesting keyword, you can simply highlight the keyword and click on “search related articles” in the annotation pop-up.
This has also the added benefit that the people who follow you will benefit from the annotation in the Cafe and see related articles in the article summary:
To be continued…
With 1.0b1, we started to introduce a new tab called “the cafe”. The purpose of this tab is to allow you to see the recommendations and most importantly annotations of all the people you are following.
Here is what the Cafe looks like:
If you want to, you can change your preferences to include you twitter and/or seesmic timeline in the cafe:
(The jury is still out on whether this type of mixing is a good or bad thing - this is why it is off by default. Check the preference page to change the default configuration).
Thank you to all the preview users who provided feedback and helped shape this feature.
Note: If you want to experience the Cafe but are currently not following anyone, you can click here and click on the +follow to follow me. This should give you access to both my annotations and recommendations but also to all the annotations and recommendations of the people I follow.
I hope that everyone had a good week end. We just pushed out 0.9.100. We are going to let some of the earlier adapters kick the tires and if everything is fine by tomorrow night, we will promote it to 1.0b1.rc1
0.9.100 includes 27 bug fixes, including the sporadic “feeddo thinks that you are offline when you come back from sleep mode”. To fully benefit from the automatic reconnect, you will need to re-install feeddo so you can either manually re-install 0.9.100 or you can wait for us to push out 1.0b1 and let Firefox walk you through the upgrade process.
The focus for the next 2 weeks remains 1) performance optimization on the back end and 2) bug fixes on the UI side. So please continue to be super vocal if you bump into any bugs.
Update Monday April 21st at 10:00pm: 1.0b1.rc1 is out. You should get a notification from firefox asking you to upgrade. You can also proactively trigger the update through Firefox>Tools>Add-ons>Find Updates.
FYI. Keyboard navigation is broken in the 0.9.8x + builds. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are working on it. We will try to make sure that it is fixed in the 1.0b1 RC1 we will push out on Monday. Have a great week end!
(Thank you to Anshu for reporting the problem)
Update 04/20/08 2:10pm: version 0.9.97 should address all the keyboard navigation issues you might have run into during the last 2-3 days. Please keep us posted if you see any additional problem. Thanks!
Two more weeks before 1.0b1 goes out. Time to celebrate at this evening’s team meeting: Schaub’s Prime Freds, Limoncello, Chartreuse, Creme a la Fraise de Bois and italian sausage! Rule#2 of startups: celebrate everytime you can! Happy Birthday Merlin!
Three more weeks to go. We are almost there feature-wise. The focus now is shifting to bug fixes and performance tests. We have one favor to ask you: if in the next 3 weeks, you run into any errors or “the feeddo service is not avaible”, please send us an brief email to edwink@devhd.com. Thank you!
Feeddo is going to be in maintenance mode during the next couple of hours. Upgrading to a new linux kernel and running a couple of stress test experiments. Sorry for the inconvenience. It should be back online before noon PST.
Update: ok. the service is back.
We just pushed out 0.9.80. It includes the first iteration of the lounge concept. We hope that this will be an extra incentive for people to annotate the most interesting articles. (To annotate, drill down into the article page, highlight a snippet of text and select annotate).
More to come over the week end.
Productive team meeting on Friday night. Finalizing “the cafe” concept and preparing for the 1.0b1 landing later this month.
Here is a first iteration of what the content of the cafe tab might look like (the goal is to showcase better the annotation capabilities of feeddo and the interactions between the users).
There are still a few snakes to kill but you would expect the cafe to surface into your feeddo in the next 2 weeks. This is one of the last concepts we want to finalize before 1.0b1 goes out.
Thank you to Olivier, Elisa, Brian and Cyril for their input and influence during the design of this feature!
Sorry for the low volume of post but we are heads down trying to get everything inline for 1.0b1 at the end of this months and it is difficult to find time during the long days to write/recommend things. We are shooting for a 1.0b1 release candidate by April 15th and hopefully things will get a little less hectic right after that. To be continued.
I just created an account for feeddo at GetSatisfaction.com so that people have a place to complain about things and help us make feeddo a better place. Looking forward to listening to your feedback.
03/03/2008 - Ongoing rumors say that the French government is soon
going to announce the creation of a major actor in the world of software
development that will group together the main French Open-Source companies.*
Nicolas Sarkozy will personally announce in a few days the creation of a
brand new great public entity that will encapsulates the strength of the
French Industry in the field of Open-Source software.
The project - named “Opération Lafayette” - is thought to include Marc
Fleury (previously CEO of JBoss) as its brand new CEO. People close to
the source believe the initial list of companies will include : XWIKI
(collaboration solutions), TALEND (Open Data Solutions), NUXEO (ECM),
MANDRIVA (Operating System), EXOPLATFORM (portal & WebOS), EBM
WEBSOURCING (enterprise service bus) and BULL (IT services).
*The French government is increasingly convinced that a public entity
can become a dominant player under public tutelage and believes that
public found can be soundly used to work towards the development of
these dynamic, fast-growing companies.*
Even more ambitious, the new entity is rumored to be preparing an IPO on
RED HAT with the help of BOUYGUES, BOLLORÉ, LAGARDÈRE and DASSAULT
SYSTÈMES in the context of a public-private partnership that will
provide financing up to $5 billion. This initiative will at last give a
French company the ability to play a leading role on the enterprise
software market. The French government is keen to offer other countries
and their people free alternatives to the dominant offerings of
convicted monopolists MICROSOFT & ORACLE.
Says a Gartner analyst we contacted to get his views on the story :
“This might make sense, Red Hat has 2 great brands, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux & JBoss. Unlocking the potential of the RedHat / JBoss combination
could probably benefit from the support of resources from the French
government and its European allies.”
Go Yokway!
Updated: Here is an updated review from Louis Gray.
Updated 2: You can connect with me on Yokway at: http://www.yokway.com/user/edwink
Updated 3: Here is another yokway review. This time from Frederic at The Last Podcast.
Great team meeting on Friday evening!
Time to try to give a big push and get feeddo out!
Note: the date on the board is April 30th because the April 15th date might move to April 30th to avoid any conflict with Mr Tax, we will finalize that at the end of this week.
If you are running version 0.9.62 or higher, you should be able to see (on wordpress powered blogs) an early view of what we are thinking regarding comments integration. We also fixed the smart update bug in firefox 3 and finished the migration to the new coloc service provider and servers so there should be a lot let turbulence during the next 18 days.
Got the opportunity to have diner last night with the founders of WatZatSong and DreamShake. The demo of WatZatSong was really interesting: you mimic a song and post it on WatZatZong and within a few minutes you have people guessing what the song is. A lot of interesting potential both for search and for fun group activities…and as importantly an idea that people will find fun and worth spreading. I am going to have to look into DreamShake in more detail. Kudos and good luck to both of them!
Please restart your browsers to upgrade to 0.9.56 and be redirected to the new feeddo back ends services. Thank you!
The next phase for the feeddo experience is to announce a more formal beta program to try to get more people in and listen to their feedback and see how we stack up, learn and continue to iterate. We are currently shooting for April 15th. April 30th, 21 (+15) days from now. Between now and then, we are going to continue to aggressively integrate as much as the feedback we have collected in the last four weeks and organize the beta program announcement. To keep this process as open and transparent as possible, we will report on our progress every couple of days.
March 24th, 2008
Migrated the back end to our new “aston” server (aka s4.feeddo.com). We should have 3x the capacity that we currently have on “porsche”.
Ability to sync with FriendFeed
Automatic sync of feeddo people and Google Reader friends
Started performance test based on the Robert Scoble use case (700 feeds, 250 follows)
Infrastructure for detecting 302 redirect in Firefox when using XMLHTTPRequest
Fixed 7 bugs.
Ringside Networks is launching tomorrow. I think that they are on something big with two interesting differentiators: 1) open source and 2) the ability for the resulting app to run both on websites and in facebook. Kudos to Bob Bickel, Jason Kinner and the rest of their team.
Quick heads up: We are trying to address all the bugs and suggestions you have reported in the last fours weeks and transition to a more open beta program by April 15th. Some of the changes are significant and there are a lot of moving parts so if you see some turbulence in the next 2-3 weeks please bare with us: things might get worse but they will get better. Finally if you have things that you would like to see addressed and haven’t sent us an email or an IM, this is a good time to be vocal.
Thank you for your patience/support!
1. Useful: focus on people - their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Fast: every millisecond counts.
3. Simple: simplicity is powerful.
4. Engaging: engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Innovative: dare to be innovative.
6. Universal: design for the world.
7. Profitable: plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Beautiful: delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Trustworthy: be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Personable: add a human touch.
(more)
An interesting attempt at making the RSS reading experience more social. Here are two reviews: one from Louis Gray and the other from SheGeeks. Some interesting lessons to be learnt.
<video src=”ace.mov” controls=”true”>
That is it. That is all you need to embed a video in an HTML page in Safari 3.1. Simple but also scriptable and CSS aware. One less reason to look at flash and silverlight.
(Thanks Michal)
Interesting conversation with Jeremiah Owyang. Covers:
1) the shift of marketing from “control messages” to “participate to conversations and communities”
2) twitter: update vs conversations
3) should companies create their own social network or leverage facebook
4) suggestions on how to pitch Jeremiah
It took me a while but I am starting to finally get twitter. Here is how I use it: A couple times a day, I connect and get a snapshot of what some of the people I know/follow are doing. It gives you the feeling of entering a crowded bar for a few minutes where I can overhear conversations and share things. The @myfriend is a good way to shout over the table and a great way to discover and connect with new people.
I think that I did not get it at first because I was focusing on the act of publishing a status (who the hell cares that I am doing X, Y and Z) and not at how all theses statuses orchestrated together create a fun and social environment.
Tools wise, I use the web interface and twhirl (see screenshot of twhirl below) to access twitter.
The result: you are going to start to see a lot more integration between twitter and feeddo…a good way to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Stay tuned.
If you have a twitter account, you can follow me here and follow feeddo here.
Integrate body motion as input to your applications. This is going to obviously transform gaming and entertainment but it could also have a huge impact on how smaller kids receive physical therapy.
A neuroanatomist has a stroke and so eloquently expresses her revelations on the energy and matter of being human.
Ran into Dapper today. Their service has come a very long way. Here is a link to their intro demo. Very cool. It would be very nice to have an extraction tool like this right into Google Spreadsheets.
If you are running 0.9.35 and are a technologist/geek/start up person, here is a list of people you might be interested in following in feeddo - to leverage their reading and recommendation power:
Adam Ostrow / Mashable - follow
Andrew Chen / Futuristic Play - follow
Chris Brogan / ChrisBrogan.com - follow
Corvida / SheGeeks - follow
EngTech / Internet Duct Tape - follow
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch - follow
Fred Wilson / A VC - follow
Frederic Lardinois / The Last Podcast - follow
Ionut / Google Operating System - follow
Jason Kaneshiro / Webomatica - follow
Loic LeMeur / LoicLemeur.com - follow
Louis Gray / LouisGray.com - follow
Mark Hopkins / Mashable - follow
Mathew Ingram / Mathew Ingram.com - follow
MG Siegler / ParisLemon - follow
Pete Cashmore / Mashable - follow
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer.com - follow
Scott Beale / The Laughing Squid - follow
Steve Rubel / MicroPersuasion - follow
Stephanie Booth / Climb to The Stars - follow
Tom Foremski / Silicon Valley Watcher - follow
Today Youtube announces a new set of APIs to allow third parties to save, tag and search for videos. This is going to dramatically lower the barrier for the creation of video-enabled applications. Here are a couple of interesting links:
It is going to be interesting to see how Seesmic reacts to that because this announcement slices them right in the middle: they have to determine if they continue to invest in their server side technology or cut their losses early and focus on re-building Seesmic on top of YouTube. Not a trivial decision!
Kudos to the Google Reader team for adding ARIA support. Very nicely implemented and thoughtful!
It has been interesting to think about the last 10 days about the role and integration points between twitter and blogging. Here are a couple of interesting murmurs/data points.
First, here is a interesting description of twitter (found on ev’s website):
Second here is a tweet from Loic Lemeur, someone who understands very well old media, new media, conversation and video:
It seems that we are evolving towards a world in which blogs is about producing content and hosting conversations and twitter is about enhancing connectedness, giving us the feeling that we are surrounded when we are online.
Alex Iskold has an interesting post on the new iPhone SDK. I think that I disagree with Alex’s conclusion:
In a lot of ways, web applications have been playing catch up with Desktop apps. Now, a handheld device has lept forward, years ahead of what is available inside any modern browser. The sheer power of Apple’s graphics, motion and sound APIs just opened the door for things that have not been possible before on the web.
I am not sure I buy that. I think that Mike McCue/Tellme’s vision of ask with voice and receive a simple response will be much more ubiquitous than fancy navigation, sound and graphics. Look at all the applications you are using every day - except for games - very few of them are fancy, mainly because users prefer simplicity.
That said, I think that Apple is wedging their bets: iPhone SDK for games and Webkit Safari for the rest.
Guy Kawasaki at his best. He makes it look so easy! There is a lot to learn from this regarding the art of the interview. Steve Balmer is also doing a great job: realist and a *huge* amount of energy and drive.
Related: Here is also a good podcast between Guy Kawasaki and David Winer.
Hello. My name is Edwin Khodabakchian. I am a software developer and entrepreneur living in the San Francisco Bay area. You can learn more about me through my LinkedIn profile and my twitter.
