ambient

I signed up for social aggregation service FriendFeed the other day. Definitely not blown away by the UI or the performance, but I think today was the day that it clicked for me.

Facebook has become a useful way for me to stay in touch with people since we moved to Japan a month ago. I added the FriendFeed application to my Facebook profile and when I logged into Facebook today - wham! - all of my stuff was right there.

I’ve always been pretty transparent on the web. It’s easy to find me, but I have maintained certain barriers between my various accounts. For example, I use Vimeo to share videos with my family only. But I did link it to my FriendFeed account, so, pop, now my videos show up in FriendFeed and Facebook. As do my Twitters, another account that I have not integrated into Facebook.

It took me by surprise. The jury is still out - for me - on whether I like this or not.

Well, we’re here. It was a long flight but we’re well rested now. I’m already extremely busy at work on my new company. Based on the connections I’ve been fortunate to make so far, this is going to be an interesting year indeed.

Picked up some great reading in the last few days:

Avenue A Razorfish’s 2008 Digital Outlook Report (hat tip to Guy)

Dave Winer’s excellent piece on the “fear bombs of 2008“

China’s largest search engine, Baidu, is going to launch a Japanese version. This is potentially very big, as Japan is one of the companies where Google is not a player. More to follow.

I enjoyed this post from Gord today: Human Hardware and our Operating System. Why ask why?

I heard a commentary on NPR a few months ago and I happened to agree. The commentator - I don’t remember who it was - said that while Facebook and the social network as a standalone entity was interesting in 2007, eventually (it’s happening already) social networks would turn into social networking features, as part of other applications.

Amazon added a very nice feature set to their own applications called Your Media Library. The concept is simple: it’s what you’ve always wanted from Amazon. An easy way to share what you’re reading / watching / listening to with your friends.

The guys over at aideRSS (one of the more interesting new RSS services to come out in the last year, IMO) are kindly making AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) available in order to allow people to quickly test Jake Luciani’s Thrudb project.

Thrudb is an open source competitor to Amazon’s recently announced SimpleDB (see earlier post) built on Facebook’s Thrift platform and it comes at a very welcome time as we are building out the backend services to Boompaste to include much more intelligent aggregation services.

The computing world is getting very interesting, yet again, indeed.

Scott Berg, the Worldwide Media Director at HP, writes about the work that his group is doing with SEMDirector (my company) to change the way they do search marketing.

I don’t link much to other blogs these days, but Seth’s Labor Day post today was so good that it’s worth it:

Richard Branson doesn’t work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells — and helped the company trounce Kmart — probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.

Bullshit:

Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika said the 10 will soon be charged with the Oct. 7 killing of Politkovskaya, who revealed human rights abuses in war-scarred Chechnya, and he suggested her murder was plotted outside Russia to discredit its leadership.