Don’t you like information that’s simple, effective and that you can put to use right away? I thought so. Me too.
Here’s one: Put your contact information clearly on the front page of your blog.
Notice how Guy Kawasaki notes that most bloggers don’t! I said, “What?” And then I realized, although I have a “Contact” page, mine wasn’t either. But now it is.
Listen to Louis Gray talk about here in this video. It’s about a minute in.
This a contrarian view, and if I were betting on it I would put my chips in Dave Winer’s corner. That Facebook just bought FriendFeed for its genius, ex-Google Engineers, namely Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, and that the site will eventually die. Also he feels the users, and that’s an appropriate word, especially guys like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray who evangelized and put so much time and energy into the service, who really made the service, were used to build the audience and then sold down the river for 50 million, leaving many months of energy and data wasted. I get that. I would probably bet that’s what will in fact, take place.
But let’s pause for a moment. I’ve been noticing in the past couple of days after the acquisition that more people have suddenly started following me on FriendFeed. Now that may be anecdotal, but I was thinking that maybe we got this thing wrong. The facts are, as great of a service FriendFeed is, and I believe that it is the best Social Media experience on the web, they simply weren’t getting traction. They weren’t growing. Now I would argue that they should have just given it more time, but I’m not as smart as Paul Bucheit or Michael Arrington, and as I believe was mentioned in the ClueTrain Manifesto, the “build it and they will come” philosophy simply doesn’t work anymore. It takes many more dimensions now a days, especially that of timing. Perhaps if FriendFeed would have been build two years ago, it would have been the “Twitter” of now. Look at Bing. It’s supposed to be as good of a mouse trap as Google, but it’s too late. So now Microsoft has done a Yahoo deal to get more exposure.
The FriendFeed team are engineers, perhaps some of the best software engineers in the World, but perhaps they don’t have the skills of how to build a big, network effect audience. But now they’ve married the people who knew how to build the biggest audience in the world. Also, besides Gmail, Paul innovated and built some of Google’s advertising products. So he may also be an expert in search monetization, and perhaps the most qualified person in the world to figure out how to monetize Real Time Search. That’s just what Facebook is struggling with. They have the audience, and now they need a genius to figure out how to monetize it. This could be a perfect marriage, and the result could be not only a fantastically successful Facebook, but a better product and so better for the “users.”
Will FriendFeed continue as a stand alone site? Probably not. But there are strong paradigms in its favor. First, it is the best Social Media product in the market. It doesn’t have an audience or at least a big enough one. But now it’s getting exposure to 300 million other users. It doesn’t take a big percentage of those folks signing up for the service to make it viable in its own right. Also, as mentioned in the book “Free” by Chris Anderson, the costs of running such a website is halving each year. You combine those two synergistic principles and you may have a site that not only continues to run, but actually still be innovative and perhaps as much of a household name as Twitter is becoming.
*Update 10/30/09 I'm changing my mind here. With Disqus's latest update I believe it is just as good or maybe even better. For one thing Disqus is more widespread which makes it by default more social. Also, Disqus has a webpage where all your comments are aggregated so that you can easily access them and which can be indexed. Most feed aggregators use Disqus, so that all of your comments will be automatically sucked into them, if you so choose. This gives your comments a bigger footprint. I used FriendFeed, and I don't think they accept JS-Kit yet. I assume the other aggregators are similar. Now with JS-Kit you can manually choose to send your comments to various social networks, but since its not automatic, its tiresome to individually select and choose each one. So usually you don't, and your comment remains in a "silo." Now, the advantage to JS-Kit is that it's smoother and real-time, and I assume they will add all the features that Disqus has in the future. But it all depends on how popular the engine gets for it to be a default for the feed aggregators, which may or may not happen. So as of this moment I would suggest that you go with Disqus, or at the very least, if you don't add it to your blog, get an account, so that you can use it to comment on other blogs, most of which use it, if they use anything at all.
It's a real-time commenting engine for your blog or website that also gives you the power to propagate your comments across your entire social graph. It turns a static, "block-like" commenting section into something that is more alive like a river. It keeps the discussion of a blog post, or other content, on the content page itself. And when the comment section comes alive more value is added to the original content itself. It also benefits all of the social networks because comments become additional content that's added to their site. Also, it encourages commenting because they are more recognized, responded to in real time and propagated, if you want, to all or some, whatever you choose, of your various other social graphs. The company, JS-Kit, totally rocks. I love their attitude. It's about innovation. This new system, "Echo", will be coming out in a couple weeks, but if you want it, be sure and go to their site and sign up now, because they will be sending out invitations, or opportunities to install it, on a first come, first serve basis, to those who send out a special tweet.
I got this idea when I first saw Scoble's website and his subsequent Building43 site where in each case the FriendFeed widget is much cooler than the one they give you at FriendFeed (even the Java one) in the sense that it behaves just like the site does, inline videos play within the widget, comments stream in real time to the widget and can be made inside the widget. With the generic widget they give you at FriendFeed, it is static. In other words you have to refresh the page to get the updated content, and when you click content, be it a comment or a video, it takes you away from your blog or page and to the FriendFeed page. No Fun. This is Fun. This is interactive and "breathes" "pulsates" which is one of the main themes we are hitting on for Web 2010. No matter what business you are in, you want a site that encourages people to not only be there but to interact with you. Basically it comes down to this: They've got the same stuff down the street. The customer has 4 or 5 choices. The business that is more FUN, the nicest, that Woos and Schmoozes is usually, all things being equal, going to get a greater share of the business. Is a more interactive, "cooler" FriendFeed widget woooing and schmoozing? Not really. But its better than thte static one. It shows that you are trying. And customers can sense that, and sense that you are "into" what you are doing, and will tend to gravitate towards you.
<iframe src="http://friendfeed.com/stephenpickering/embed?css=http://stephenpickering.com/wp-content/themes/ocean-mist-2_0/friendfeed-styles.css%3fv=17" frameborder="0" height="1400" width="310" style="border:1px solid #aaa"></iframe>
Obviously change the credentials to your own (these are mine showing), and if you are a WordPress user don't forget to add the specific CSS theme you are using so it will look right. And obviously the size to fit your sidebar or whatever.
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