WebProNews » Robert Scoble

Is the Future Getting Brighter for Google Buzz?

Chris Crum — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:21:22 +0000

As I talked about a couple weeks ago, Google has been making some moves that could greatly increase Google Buzz’s shot at more widespread adoption. This includes the addition of some features, and perhaps more importantly, the release of the Buzz API (announced at Google I/O).

Recent feature additions include a reshare button (basically the Buzz version of the retweet), the release of an XHTML version of Buzz (which can be accessed from many mobile devices like those running Android pre-2.0, BlackBerry, Nokia S60, and Windows Mobile), greater email integration, and the official Buzz Buttons (which can go a long way for the strategic branding of Buzz across content sites all over the web).

Do you think Google is improving Buzz? Tell us what you think.

The API should lead to a much richer ecosystem around Buzz, with third-party apps finding new ways for users to get involved with the service – much like third-party apps have done for Twitter.

Famous tech blogger Robert Scoble appears to think Buzz may be ready for a comeback (it did release to much hype, but that has since fizzled out for the most part). He wrote an interesting post highlighting 9 reasons why such a comeback could be possible. Among these are superior mobile features (compared to other social networks), the addition of features in general (he says its getting "close to matching FriendFeed", a service Facebook found significant enough to acquire itself), a good search tool, and possible SEO opportunities to name a few.

He also lists some "significant negatives", which include a lack of noise control, lists, clients, and brands. Read his entire analysis here.

Google’s own Matt Cutts weighed in as well, saying, "Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really "get" Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting."

Again the API could go a long way in this regard for a lot of people. Scoble’s point about brands is a very strong one though. I would include celebrities in that category. Remember stars like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher did for Twitter? You just don’t hear that with Buzz.

Gmail might be considered both an advantage and a disadvantage for Buzz. Being a feature of Gmail, it automatically gets in front of Gmail users (though certainly not all actually use it). At the same time, Buzz being a feature of Gmail may be keeping others away from it. Scoble notes that it’s not available as a service that’s separate from Gmail and that it’s "a real bummer."

Buzz just may find its niche in the social web though, if it hasn’t already. It was never presented as a replacement for Twitter or Facebook (at least by Google). In fact, the company has tried hard to distance Buzz from such services, and has repeatedly referred to Buzz as simply a node, and a node that promotes an open web at that.

Some are probably still turned off by the initial privacy fiasco that Buzz launched with, but as Facebook continues to show, privacy concerns don’t necessarily impede growth.

Do you think Buzz has a bright future? Share your thoughts.

Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Social Media

Doug Caverly — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:47:14 +0000

To some people, social media’s a shiny, happy, ball o’ fun. Or at least an invaluable marketing tool. There are dangers, however, and during a session at BlogWorld titled "Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly," four experts outlined six of them.

(Coverage of the BlogWorld conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

The first is the unforgiving nature of the loud minority. Wayne Sutton, who runs the blog SocialWayne and is a partner at OurHashtag, recommended addressing it by thinking about the long term when you post online. Amber Naslund, Radian6‘s director of community, also advised doing your own research and being careful before reacting.

Robert Scoble, who founded Building43 not too long ago, then added that you should think about your brand and what you want it to be known for.

The second dangerous trend of social media is, according to the speakers, the mob mentality. Naslund echoed Scoble’s tip about representing your brand, and pointed out that we must be responsible and accountable if we demand respect.

Next, be wary of unreasonable time expectations. Patrick O’Keefe, the founder and owner of the iFroggy Network, said it’s important to remember that everyone has time constraints. Naslund suggested being humble and honest. And Scoble took that a step further by recommending that you not assume everyone knows who you are.

The fourth dangerous trend then relates to self-entitlement. The fifth is forcing everyone to use all tools and communities in the same way. Finally, the sixth is all about sock puppets. O’Keefe stressed that social media users need to build trust, with Sutton explicitly saying that you should disclose things and be open with the community.

WebProNews Video reporter/anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

Blog Comments Going Real Time?

Chris Crum — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:34:00 +0000

Comments on blogs posts and articles have in the past generally been a good measurement of how people have engaged with content, but as the web becomes more social and "real-time," the conversation is going all over the place, and there are other ways that people are engaging in conversation about content (this is why shareability is so important by the way).

You see it on Twitter and on Facebook. You see it On Digg, on FriendFeed, etc. People are still commenting on blogs, but they’re not always choosing the blog comments section as their venue for furthering the discussion. This is why you see other buttons on content sites like the Digg button displaying the number of Diggs a story has, or the Tweetmeme button displaying the number of retweets.

These types of things offer just a bit more of an idea of how much a story is being discussed, but they’re not perfect. Nothing is. It’s hard to bring all of the engagement that stems from a piece of content back to the home base of that content itself.

Now we’re starting to see things like real-time commenting. Robert Scoble talks about this and how it could piss off blogggers…at first. Disqus has such a feature, and it essentially lets users comment and "chat" without having to reload the page, as Scoble points out. This means less page views, which could translate into less advertisers for publishers/bloggers.

There is potential for increased engagement though, which means more time spent on the site. "Overall we’ve seen the time spent on page increase about 3x," Scoble says of his Building 43 site.

"Which shows we need a new way to get paid for advertising," he continues. "No longer is refreshing the page important. That’s the old way of paying for advertising. The new way? How much engagement you have on the page."

I would suggest that we might see trends catering to a mixture of both page views and engagement levels. Engagement is very much a significant part of the equation these days, and a growing part at that. I wouldn’t shoot down the relevancy of a page view, however. Some people still like to read without talking.

FriendFeed Acquired By Facebook

Andy Beal — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:10:19 +0000

This is one of those posts that we’d rather bring to you quickly and fill in the blanks later–Facebook has just announced that it has agreed to acquire social network aggregator FriendFeed.

Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

The full release is here.

It’s interesting that Facebook has intentions to become an aggregator of the social web. It’s already testing the integration of Twitter feeds, and this acquisition confirms its intentions. The big question for me is how will FriendFeed’s loyal users react? Many of them–Robert Scoble included–flocked to FriendFeed’s apparent bipartisan approach to social networking. Will that disappear now that it’s part of Facebook?

What are your thoughts on the deal?

Comments

What’s Robert Scoble Building in Building43?

Chris Crum — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:03:44 +0000

Back in March, popular blogger and technical evangelist Robert Scoble announced that he was leaving Fast Company. Now he works at Rackspace and is building what is being called a "community for people fanatical about the Internet." This is called Building43.

In a post on his Scobleizer blog, Robert says, "Building43 a Web site. It’s a T-shirt. It’s a Twitter account. It is a video channel on Blip.tv. It’s a friendfeed group. It’s a sticker. It’s a team. It’s a Facebook Page. It’s a database (or really a few of them). And more."

Everybody will get to find out what it really is at 5pm PT today, when the site is scheduled to go live at Building43.com. Technically, you might be able to get a better feel for it starting an hour before that if you go to this Kyte.tv channel, where Scoble and company will be streaming live from Palo Alto.

What you find upon launch will not begin to cover what you can expect from Building43 by the sound of it. "It is just the start," explains Scoble. "To the trained eye it looks like a WordPress blog and a friendfeed group (and soon a Facebook page and a Twitter account). But we just needed to ship. And ship fast without a dedicated technology team."

"…the promise of Building43 is bigger than just being a WordPress blog with a friendfeed group or a Facebook page. The promise is we can help other people and businesses get excited about the Web we love," he adds.

Early on in Building43′s existence, users can expect to see interviews with Four Seasons, Zappos, Facebook, and Google. They’ve got a number of interviews in the pipes already, and surely there will be many, many more in the future. Scoble says that you can expect at least a couple a week at first, but eventually they will try to do one a day.

People can submit videos, blogs, and more to Building43. They can tag other people’s videos with "building43" on YouTube, include the #building43 hashtag in Tweets etc. Scoble gives more details in his announcement, and certainly more will emerge as the community goes live.

Anything like this that Scoble is involved with is sure to draw plenty of followers and interest from the technology industry. It’s going to be interesting to see just how big Building43 becomes.

Facebook CFO Waves Goodbye To Company

Frank Reed — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:05:22 +0000

In the latest episode of “How the Facebook Turns” CFO Gideon Yu has been sent packing. The report at All Things Digital says the move appears to be in preparation of an initial public offering (IPO). There are other rumblings that the Good Ship Zuckerberg has a captain that isn’t afraid to make someone walk the plank if there is enough push back on the captain’s orders.

This apparent friction that exists in Facebook keeps coming up in story after story concerning the company and its latest actions. Some, like Robert Scoble, seem to be firmly in Zuckerberg’s corner as he continues to push against conventional wisdom and pressure to do things other than his way. For others this type of behavior raises concerns about what is actually going on at Facebook and if any of the other approximately 799 employees will be little more than Zuckerberg “yes-people” in order to keep their positions. Dissenters being shown the door is certainly becoming a pattern so it may be more likely that folks will “fall in line” because this economy is not exactly overflowing with opportunities.

“At Facebook, you’re either with Mark or you’re not,” said one source at the 800-person company, located in Palo Alto, Calif., and founded five years ago. “And, if you’re not, you leave.”

With Yu’s exit the questions continue about the financial condition of Facebook. All is speculation at this point but some insiders have told that internally the financial news is rosy with revenues up 70% this year and projected cash flow positive status in 2010.

Facebook is now approaching 200 million users which certainly is amazing. What’s on everyone’s mind though including potential advertisers is when the path to true monetization will be revealed and eventually unleashed.

Everyone will have detractors when you get this big so Zuckerberg’s situation is not unusual. While it may not be the most popular thing to say, one has to suspect that his age and lack of experience combined with what appears to be a pretty healthy ego could be giving some the jitters. The parade of high profile ex-Facebookers is growing as reported by the WSJ.

In the past year, two of Facebook’s co-founders, Dustin Moskovitz, its one-time head engineer, and Adam d’Angelo, the company’s chief technology officer, have left the company. Matt Cohler, an early employee who was a senior executive, also left last year.

Mr. Yu himself was a high profile replacement of CFO Mike Sheridan in 2007.

So what’s it all mean for Facebook? As with anything that being reported about a private company it all needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is hard to deny, however, the pattern that is developing and accelerating at the social media monster. Whether it’s redesign issues, terms of service concerns or a high profile executive merry go round, Facebook has the opportunity to either end up as one the greatest success stories of all time or endless material for Dilbert cartoons. Which way do you see it going?

Comments

Robert Scoble Parting Ways With FastCompany.tv

Chris Crum — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:46:20 +0000

Popular blogger and WebProNews blog partner Robert Scoble is leaving Fast Company after about a year of video work at FastCompany.tv. But what’s in the cards next for Scoble?

"I am visiting as many companies as I can as quickly as I can (yesterday I saw two more, today I’m visiting another three) so that I can get a good bead on what I should build next and also to get some ideas of where to take my blog," he says.

Scoble tells TechCrunch he’s almost ready to unveil a new project he’s working on, but on his blog he says he can’t talk about what he’s doing next because it’s not completely decided. He does say he wants to announce something at the SXSW conference.

"Scoble continues to be on the cutting edge of new Internet technologies, sometimes taking things to an extreme," says Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, who spoke with him. "He was once briefly banned from Facebook for violating their terms of use, and we’ve (only half jokingly) called for an intervention over his excessive use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed."

Scoble will still be writing a column for Fast Company, and I assume his blog Scobleizer will continue to keep the world informed of all things Scoble.

Blogging Hits Crossroads: A-Listers Giving Up

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:00:43 +0000

An old colleague of mine used to joke he was one of millions whose job it was to “feed the internet.” This past November, an alumnus of a prestigious writing program in Louisville, Ky. told soon-to-be-alumni his blogging career was short-lived because, like a bad girlfriend, his blog constantly needed him.

Those heralded A-listers we all looked to over the past few years? Many of them are hanging it up. Mike Arrington: handed over the TechCrunch reins to hired staff. Jason Calacanis: moved to email. Their chief complaints: fame. Too many haters, too much spit in the face.

Dan Lyons

This week’s quitter is Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer who rocketed to blogsopheric recognition because of his satirical blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, now soured on "another high-tech fairy tale." His reason: there’s no money in blogging. The day the New York Times blew his Fake Steve Jobs cover, Lyons says, “more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.”

Every tech blogger’s Silicon Valley heyday nemesis—which has reduced staff to exactly one blogger—Valleywag was quick to note Lyons scored a book deal out of his little experiment with popular anonymity. And it was well deserved. The Fake Steve Jobs idea was a well-played stroke of genius.

This crop of A-listers aren’t the first to have blog-related meltdowns. They may be, though, the first to really go and stay gone. Self-proclaimed original blogger Dave Winer is known for periodic threats to stop blogging. Yet, he still blogs. Robert Scoble, chief among the famous-for-blogging-and-I-wrote-the-book-on-blogging elite, is prone to emotional denouncements of the craft and self-imposed mental health hiatuses. Yet, he still blogs, though to a lesser degree.

Some people just can’t help it. They have to blog. Like it’s a sickness. Some are victims of their own success. Fame isn’t, by nature, for everyone, even if fifteen minutes has been edited down to five public-commentary-abusive ones. And still yet others are disillusioned victims of hype and zeitgeists.

This list of types could go on and on. There are as many reasons to blog, or not to blog, as there are people. One thing is for certain: we seem to be at a blogging crossroads. Sadly (but perhaps naturally), pivotal, transformational (and sometimes bloody) moments are often misconstrued as deadly ones. Blogging has reached a crucial moment in its evolution, one where competition for money, credibility, and attention has never been fiercer. The weak, those whose prime devotion is getting rich, getting famous, getting laid, or getting approval will be culled. In the end, as in the beginning, it’s about purity and (some type of) artistic integrity.

When I was in the fifth grade I joined the basketball team along with 40 of my friends. I was a chubby ten year old counted among the first who would give up when faced with laps and suicide sprints and leg lifts, pushups, and sit-ups as the coaches sought to weed out the weak and uncommitted (and produce a more manageable basketball team). And, after a week, I nearly ran home to enjoy Grandma’s gravy and biscuits in my-body-doesn’t-hurt peace. My mother, though, reminded me of my commitment, and by the middle of the season—when the coach had become fed up with his starting fast little waifs—I earned my starting forward position and never felt better about myself.

Blogging, I think, is at a similar moment in its development, a moment all writers (and other content producers) must struggle through until they form a key component of their wills that says never give up.

I find it interesting that as soon as negativity about the economy set in, especially among those tech bloggers who thrive on bubbles and print journalists suddenly out of a decent-paying job who are forced to turn to blogging or dry cleaning, the negativity surrounding blogging also set in. Not enough money. Too many haters. A waste of time and energy. All hype no delivery. A cause of undue stress, obesity, and myocardial infarction. These were the same people, back when that bubble was still good and cozy, once so jazzed about The Secret, this century’s remake of Norman Vincent Peele’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

True, the average blogger pulls in a mere $5,000-$6,000 per year, and that average is obscenely skewed by the top one percent of bloggers pulling more than $200,000. True, there are more abandoned blogs than active ones. True, content in a world that values cheap, short, and easy has been reduced to embarrassing values (I saw one ad on craigslist offering $1.50 per “article”). True, there is worldwide competition for diffused and dwindling ad dollars. True, there has been a deluge of marketers, spammers, and professional bloggers (a.k.a. writers) and “mainstream” media types pushing out the wild and wooly (and unreliable and piggybacking and libelous) amateur, citizen journalists. True, viewers, readers, and fans can be nasty.

Welcome to the media business.

The good stuff lasts, the chaff separates from the wheat, the cream rises to the top, all that. The earliest bloggers and the self-sustained content producers may not like the idea that the blogosphere is changing and will require an old law of media: Content is king, but the king answers to his god, the network.

Save for a few shining stars (think, using radio as an example, Howard Stern an Rush Limbaugh and their hundreds of millions) and stellar independent publications, the network is what will save the blogosphere and content producers. It’s always been tough for individuals to make it in media without a network behind them, paying them good (even great) wages to produce, while the network aggregates and sells content and collective audiences to advertisers.

Like it or not, the corporation is going to have to enter the blogosphere, and by irony, will ruin it in order to save it. Luckily, unlike the past, there will be wider avenues via user-generated media for quality content producers, so long as they have the passion and will to walk those avenues. Besides, writers write, bloggers blog, regardless.

BlogWorld Expo: Microjournalism

Chris Crum — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 +0000

WebPronews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson was present for the "Microjournalism: Breaking news in 140 words or less" session at BlogWorld on Saturday. This one featured Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, and Laura Fitton.

(WebProNews spent the weekend in Vegas at the BlogWorld Expo and chatted up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to WebProNews and WebProNews Video for updates.)

For a little background, Robert Scoble is most famous for his blog Scobleizer, and is also currently a video blogger for Fast Company. Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and one of the world’s best-known bloggers. Laura Fitton is the CEO of Pistachio Consulting Inc., the first social media agency dedicated to business use of microblogging.

Scoble discussed Twitter as a news-stream. Mobile devices make it possible to have news anywhere, as he noted, but this doesn’t mean that Twitter should be the news. It just shows the impact, he says. Fitton says that some traditional media outlets are starting to "get it."

"Your friends are your content on theses sites," she says. "RSS micro widgets are going to dramatically change how the news is going to be delivered." Searls then discussed the static web vs. the live web (sites like Twitter).

Fitton believes that "citizen journalism" is not defined properly, and that it should be more like "citizen observation" or something. Of course, Searls and Scoble disagree with this notion because they believe journalists misrepresent interviews anyway. For example, they might represent a two-hour interview with a 10 second clip. A Q&A session took place next, but this was mostly just people asking Scoble if he would put them on his site.

One final note came from Fitton, who says that a society that has been based on control and privacy is going to have to change. It’s hard to disagree with that has everything seems to become more transparent by the day.

WebProNews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson contributed to this article.

The (One-Sided) Anatomy Of A Startup Failure

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:35:32 +0000

PodTech.net had a lot of buzz around it primarily because blogger Robert Scoble left the sturdy walls of Microsoft to be a part of it. There were others with nice pedigrees, too, and $7.5 million in VC funding spelled sure success.

It must not have spelled it in English, though. This week, PodTech sold to ViewPartner, a company that doesn’t even seem to have a website, for under $500,000, or enough to purchase a one-bedroom condo in San Francisco.

Robert Scoble

How does that happen? you want to know. Everybody wants to know, which is why this FriendFeed thread has been highly viewed. Scoble’s been on hand giving lots of nonspecific insight as the rest await former PodTech CEO John Furrier to blog his side of things. One thing’s clear from Scoble’s posting: he definitely thinks it’s the leadership’s fault.

But that’s an easy bet, right?

There had been definite signs of trouble for PodTech over the past year. Transparency has its benefits, but sometimes that window into the company is actually a hole in a leaky boat. Besides few people being really clear about what, exactly, PodTech was about—video, it appears, long form, and technology, and Scoble’s there, making videos too long to watch right now. . .—a strange tweet in the steam of August 2007 rang alarm bells loud enough to be temporarily noticeable.

It could be, the blogosphere took it the wrong way. Chuck Olsen’s now blogospherically infamous tweet read this way:

Just got off the phone with Furrier – it’s a shitbag salad over there… Scoble’s out

For a solid weekend, bloggers dined on that, erm, shitbag salad, digesting it as Scoble’s termination or resignation, both of which he denied, before taking a small blogging hiatus. Then Furrier was forced out by the board, Scoble really did leave four months later, and so had everybody else anybody’d ever heard of.

Eventually, you just stopped hearing of PodTech altogether. That salad Olsen mentioned now appears to have had more ingredients than Furrier and Scoble. According to Scoble, there were lots of problems, including revenue, collective vision, and utilizing talent.

Scoble, from FriendFeed:

". . .almost all of the talent left. What’s left now is not much that’s worth much. The revenues came because of our social media leadership. That’s what Furrier really had in his hands. Owyang. Me. Cunningham. Jones. Gillmor. The rest of the stuff was a pipe dream that didn’t lead anywhere, which is really why the company burned through $7 million (plus several million in revenues)."

Other revealing comments suggest Scoble didn’t see eye-to-eye with (other) leadership, perhaps even with Furrier, though he refuses to give specifics and burn his bridges (probably a smart move). In a nutshell, he advised any startup-minded person watching this saga to have certain ducks in a row (paraphrased below), we’ll call them the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Startups:

Revenue is pretty important. (For any old-schooler, that might seem obvious, but success stories like YouTube and Facebook have belied this age-old business tenet.)
The ones who bring in the money, should be the ones in charge.
Have a vision. Make sure everybody in the company shares that vision.
When it comes to firing idiots, there’s no time like the present.
You need good metrics/measurements to improve.
Listen to your star players.
Don’t fire a CEO without having a good replacement.

Furrier weighed in on the FriendFeed thread with a promise to blog more about what exactly happened with PodTech, and also took the time to note Scoble’s assessment may not match his own.

"There are many lessons," said Furrier. "Scoble’s view is from his perspective but there is a big picture that goes way beyond Scoble’s view and that has to do with building a company from a zero stage. I’ve moved on from a year ago after I was forced out by the board. We made some mistakes but directionally correct. Sure if I had a mulligan things might be different but a business strategy, financing strategy, and team strategy are part of the story."

And now, we wait to find out more. Sometimes there are better lessons in failure than in success.