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Posts Tagged ‘steve-gillmor’

It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.

If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was.

But now Buchheit is telling our own Steve Gillmor that several days ago the two sides reached an oral agreement on the new stream. And today, he confirmed over Twitter that it is in place. Specifically, they are using the new “Birddog” stream API, Buchheit says. You can learn more about it here. “I hope to have it down to 1 sec sometime next month,” Buchheit says of the delay.

This is great news. I personally had all but stopped using FriendFeed because of this delay. While the service remains one of the best ways to filter and search tweets and other content in realtime, the delay rendered all that moot. Now it’s back, and so I’ll go back to using it. Hopefully others will follow.

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We’re here at the second TechCrunch RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco, where we’ll be taking a deeper dive into realtime technology and where the streams are taking us. Kicking off the event is a conversation with Twitter COO Dick Costolo. And we’ll have much more real-time goodness coming your way throughout the day (see the agenda below). Watch the live stream of the event, powered by Ustream, here!

CRUNCHUP AGENDA

9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo
moderators: Michael Arrington, Steve Gillmor

9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise.
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Steve Gillmor

Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox
Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal
Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur
Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal
CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss
Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng
Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor
MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn
Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen
OneRiot, CEO Kimbal Musk
Angel Investor Ron Conway

11:00 – 11:15 AM Break

11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
moderators: Steve Gillmor, Erick Schonfeld

11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)
introductions by Erick Schonfeld, Jason Kincaid

Hot Potato, Justin Shaffer
Seesmic, Loic Le Meur
Qwisk, Zachary Garbow
Knx.to, Rohit Khare, Salim Ismail
StatusNet, Evan Prodromou
Mozzler, Chris Were
Realtime Pitch From The Audience*

12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)
introductions by Jason Kincaid, Leena Rao

Plymedia, Matt Knopf
Tweetmeme, Nick Halstead
VideoLobby, Peter Urban
Rippol, Aaron Crayford
Bazaar Labs, Somrat Niyogi
Realtime Pitch From the Audience*

2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles?
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Paul Carr

DailyBooth, co-founder Ryan Amos
Ad.ly, CEO Sean Rad
CoTweet, CEO Jesse Engle
Hollywood agent, Robin Bechtel (digital strategist for Britney Spears, Warner Bros. Records)
more
NewTek, SVP strategic development Philip Nelson

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, MG Siegler

Foursquare, VP business development Tristan Walker
Twitter, director of platform Ryan Sarver
Google, Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
SimpleGeo, founder Matt Galligan
Hot Potato, founder Justin Shaffer
Mixer Labs, CEO Elad Gil

4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Steve Gillmor

A discussion with Paul Buchheit (Facebook/Friendfeed/Gmail) and Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy

5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In?
moderators: Erick Schonfeld, Steve Gillmor

Angel investor, Ron Conway
Microsoft, corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Dan’l Lewin
Charles River Ventures, VC George Zachary
Accel Partners, VC Andrew Braccia
Foundes Fund, VC Brian Singerman
Facebook/Friendfeed, Paul Buchheit

5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party and StartUp Demos

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It is the end. Jason “The Animal” Calacanis is thinking about maybe quitting using Apple products, reporting that the company has gone all corporate and mainstream and that Steve has lost his hippie, dippy LSD edge. Look at this language, people:

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement

For folks in the tech industry, this is not a new discussion. Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple’s draconian iTunes updates led smart people to *downgrade* their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms–is this a William Gibson novel?

Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.

This is not the thought process of a well man. Perhaps Jason spent too much time next to his Tesla roadster or maybe the stress of running Mahalo has finally gotten to him but someone needs to send Jason an iPod Shuffle STAT. Intra-cardial insertion of the Shuffle, much like the needle in Pulp Fiction, has been known to snap anti-Apple zealots out of their madness.

Google unveiled its new communication tool, Wave, this morning with a bang at Google I/O. The blogosphere is a buzz with talk of the new product, which blends email, instant messaging, collaboration and real time functionality into one platform. And Wave will open up its API soon to developers and will eventually be an open source product, letting the developer community take an active part in shaping the platform. We spoke to Wave’s creators yesterday, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon. One question that’s is on everyone’s minds is whether Gmail and Google Apps become obsolete with the emergence of such powerful platform?

TechCrunch IT Editor Steve Gillmor caught up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who he also talked to about Chrome yesterday) after a Q&A session with Wave’s creators, and asked him about the future of Google Apps and more.

Brin says that Google has been using Wave internally for a couple of months and remained mum about how and when Gmail and Google Apps will be integrated. Brin points out, however; that developers of Chrome have been collaborating with Wave developers to make the platform extra speedy on the browser. Wave has also been working with the Google Web Toolkit, says Brin.

It’s apparent from the video that Brin is enthusiastic about Wave and its potential. Brin, who only works on a handful of Google’s products, handpicked Wave as a compelling project on which to focus his efforts.

Brin also says in the video that he didn’t know that Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, launched today but he did say that he has played around with Wolfram Alpha and is interested in exploring that search engine a little bit more (fun fact: Brin spent a summer interning for Stephen Wolfram).

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This has been quite a week for Google, especially with the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference. Not to be ignored, Google Earth has been quietly rolling out some nifty features, including business listings. Today, Google Earth has added 3D tours of buildings, bridges, baseball stadiums and more.

The tours are self-running views into buildings, bridges, museums, skyscrapers, stadiums and castles from around the world, most of which were built Google SketchUp users who model buildings for Google Earth.

To play a tour, you need to activate the “3d Buildings” layer in Google Earth. Then you can click the “Start tour here” link in the “Places” panel in Google Earth (make sure you have download the latest version of Google Earth).

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Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry to using a feed reader for most people is building up a collection of good feeds. Sure, you can import someone else’s OPML file, but most people have no idea what that means, let alone how to do it. The “Browse for stuff” area of Google Reader is a better solution, as it offers a front-end way to subscribe to some suggested feed. But up until now those have been suggested by Google. Starting today, you and your friends on Google Reader can make your own bundles and share them.

And creating these bundles couldn’t be easier. You simply click on the “Create a bundle” button in the same “Browse for stuff” area, and you are given an area on the page in which you can simply drag and drop the feeds you wish to add into this bundle. You then name the bundle and give it a description, and you’re all set. If you choose to add the bundle to your shared items, you friends on Google Reader will see them.

This is a very good idea by Google. Quite often I get asked by non-tech friends what feeds they should subscribe to for various news. Usually that involves me hunting down the RSS links for each site I want to recommend. But now I can simply share a whole bunch of feeds, all packaged together with a few clicks. I’m still not sold on Google Reader’s overall social philosophy, and I think TechCrunchIT’s Steve Gillmor has a lot of good points about the viability of a straight-up feed reader like Google Reader against something like Twitter going forward — for mainstream usage. But I’ll give credit where it’s due. Even if browsing “your friends’ bundles,” sounds a bit dirty.

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While Twitter is busy removing features, or half removing them, or whatever — FriendFeed continues its relentless pace at adding new ones. The latest one today is small, but potentially very, very useful. Basically, you can now get emails/IMs/pop-up notifications from any group or individual user on FriendFeed.

While it may not be so obvious at first, this is useful because you can custom tailor FriendFeed to use even when you’re not on the site. The way I’ve been using it for several months now is to create groups for people/things I’m particularly interested in. But that would still require that I go to FriendFeed to check those groups. Now I can just get pinged over IM every time something I’m looking for comes up.

My colleague Steve Gillmor should love this, because this allows you to basically track something without being actively engaged in the service. It doesn’t yet work for saved searches on FriendFeed — which would allow you to track any keyword, but you can imagine that will come soon as well. Track is a feature that Twitter used to have to ping people when a keyword was said. It had to discontinue the service when Twitter kept crashing last year as it grew it size. It’s still supposedly coming back one day, but it would seem FriendFeed, once again, may beat them to it.

And while tracking keywords is interesting, I’m actually more interested in people track — which is what this is. And since FriendFeed of course imports Twitter messages, this basically is a track of people on Twitter too. And if you really want to get fancy, you can just track when a user likes something on FriendFeed and have it ping you, or a number of other options.

And this doesn’t have to just be over IM. You can get these notifications over email or using FriendFeed’s AIR-based popup notifier. Slick.

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