Let’s get the simple stuff out of the way right off the bat.

Did Google screw up when; or rather in the way it launched Buzz? Yes it did.

Is it the end of the world and yet another failure in Google’s social media attempts? No it isn’t.

Will Google recover and still smell like a bed of roses when all is said and done? Probably. Most likely.

What hasn’t changed though is the irrationality from both sides of the pointless discussion that has been going on for the last ten; or more, days. It is an irrationality though that stems from a very basic error the team at Google made and it all has to do with how the very concept of how we think of our email addresses has changed.

Built-in email triage

There was a time when we considered our email addresses to be something of varying value that depending on the situation and circumstance which in turn dictated what email address we used or gave out. Back when I was doing more tech oriented work and consulting one of the first things I always did with clients was examine their use of email.

This was a time when the principal method of malware and spam distribution was done via email. It is still done that way today, but the overall field of attack for this kind of thing is much broader and things like the social networks make it much easier to find suckers than email. So while email might still be used it isn’t to the degree it once was.

So one of the first things I would do with clients would be to set them up with a starting point of three email addresses to use. The first one would be a throw-away address that would get replaced with a new one every few months. This was the address used to sign up for stuff on the web whether it be email lists of site memberships. Using a throw-away address provides a buffer against the inevitable onslaught of grab mail that always ensues on the web.

The second email address would be a more general public address. This would be the address you would give trusted websites, companies you did business with, as well as your wider circle of general friends. Since this sat behind the buffer of a throw-away email address you would know that any email coming into this inbox had a certain amount of implied trust associated with it.

Then finally there would be the last address. This was your private address – a private line so to speak – that you only gave out to those who you knew very well and as a result email from them had the highest level of trust associated with it.

This type of setup also provided the user with a built-in way to manage their email. The throw-away address email was safe to ignore for the most part. To deal with when there was absolutely nothing else to do. The second email address would let you know that this mail was more important but you could deal with it at your leisure. It was only the last email address, the private one, that was dealt with as the emails arrived.

Webmail and Gmail

When webmail, and especially Gmail, came along the idea of using a single email address started to gain a foothold. In the beginning with Gmail because of its by invite only way of gaining new users that first Gmail address was like a badge of honor. It almost became a symbol signifying that we had arrived on the tech scene and were cool.

The idea of having multiple email addresses became in a way almost uncool, archaic even. Soon our Gmail address became our online identity and the one way we were able to sign on to a whole slew of new, cool, services. It became our private email address, public email address and throw-away address all rolled up into one.

Our Gmail email addresses were our key into a world of free services all courtesy of Google. It became a part of our online identity which is one of the reasons why Facebook is wanting to have its own webmail service. It wants all the free advertising that comes every time we see an email address with the @facebook.com in it.

Sure as all these new forms of communication came along many people jumped on the email is dead bandwagon even though it was obvious with even notification email from some service that email wasn’t; and isn’t going anywhere. What did happen though is that as we began rolling all our previous email addresses up into one that email address became your public access point – you no longer had that private telephone line.

Email and Social Media

Even as services like Twitter and Facebook grew and became the face of what social media and social networks were, as well as how they should operate there were some who thought that our email inbox and contact lists were a much better example of what a social network should be based on. After all these were supposedly people you knew and to a large degree trusted.

Well at one point prior to the mass adoption of a single email address system such as Gmail this might have been the case. The problem is was that we had replaced that prior contact list of sorted trust levels with a single dump zone of email addresses. We could have addresses that belonged to every email newslist that we belonged to mixed in with one time correspondence that was also mixed in with addresses of people we would trust with our lives.

Rather than a finely tuned contact list to build a social network around we ended up with Buzz having to use something resemble a pot of stew.

You see I believe Google had the right idea of building Buzz around our email but the execution of that plan was done all wrong. Now whether or not this was intentional is something that only Google knows for sure but there is no denying that they blew it on this one.

They blew it because as much as Google might have thought we had reached that point where our single email address was our public face to the world a very large percentage of people consider it to still be a personal procession and that their contact lists are sacred territory. This wasn’t as some have tried framing just about our privacy being breached but even more importantly it felt to some that their personal property had been taken and pawned.

They feel that Google might as well have broken into their homes and taken the family cutlery and jewels.

Calling CSI to the scene of the crime

Louis Gray in a surprising post, well surprising for him anyway, tore a strip off of everyone who he feels is responsible for the possible neutering of Google Buzz.

And now, after ten days of being thrown under the bus by head in the sand privacy-shrieking luddites, Google has had to backtrack again, repeatedly apologizing and now, letting you extract Buzz from your GMail like shrapnel from the field of battle.

He also adds

In comparison, the real potential problems with Buzz’s gaining attraction, including assumed noise, and lacking of perfect integration into all networks on Day One, have been outshouted by the same people who squirm every time Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team move more toward public sharing and search discovery, and away from walled gardens. But again, the shrill minority has taken its pound of flesh, as Google’s momentum with Buzz has taken body blow after body blow, primarily from an older generation of tech bloggers and business journalists unwilling or undesiring to embrace today’s world of active sharing and aggregation.

If you know Louis at all you know that these are some pretty harsh criticisms being leveled but as passionate as he may be for a new world of sharing and communication he forgets that there are still a lot of people who consider their email to be sacrosanct. As I said this goes beyond just a typical privacy issue and becomes one of ownership.

This is something that Thomas Hawk also seems to forget as he writes

Similarly a very small, but vocal, group of individuals are shrieking from the mountain top about the fact that Google Buzz might have allowed people to see who you email alot. Big deal. The story came out quickly. Those privacy zealots could quickly correct this by making their contact list private if they wanted to, while the vast majority of us don’t really care that Buzz lets people know who we follow. Want to know who I follow? It’s right here for the whole world to see, go for it. The whining about these privacy issues (which have now been fixed by the way) is getting old.

The thing is Thomas people should not have to think about this because for the vast majority users email is a private matter just as their contact lists are a private matter. They shouldn’t have to go looking for setting when they never have had to before.  Just because you and people like Louis are more than willing to share everything about yourselves on the web that doesn’t mean everyone else has to nor should they be forced to now find ways to restore balance to their online/offline lives.

When Google turned on Buzz they didn’t take this into account, or if they did they didn’t think the outrage would be a wide spread or as deep as it has turned out to be. The fact is that as we move forward people are beginning to feel that there is nothing private anymore and when their last bastion of their private lives suddenly becomes an open book they are going to react.

There is no denying that the launch of Buzz was a massive screw up which considering that this is Google it caught a lot of people by surprise. However just because they screwed up does this mean that the idea of what they are trying to do is wrong? No, I don’t think so but I do believe that they are going to have to do a lot of work in a very short period of time in order to rectify a bad situation.

Even dumb moves can have smart outcomes

I am not a Google fan. I have a lot of questions about the things they do and what the future holds for us as Google consumers and the company as a whole. That said I believe that if they can get their act together Google has a lot of potential locked up in Buzz.

Of course since its launch there has been the inevitable comparison between Buzz and its two supposed competitors. Personally I don’t even see any reason to think of there being any kind of competition between Google and Twitter so it’s not worth wasting time or breath in any hyperbole on t hat end of the subject.

This of course leave Facebook. Big bad Facebook against big  bad Google. The fight of the titans for social networking dominance.

Except there is nothing to fight over.

Look Facebook, with its walled garden history, is an attempt to frame social media within a structure of its making. It has a vision of how it wants the web and social media to look and behave which as it turns out is just fine for a whole lot of people – some 400 million of them.

Google on the other hand looks upon the web as something much more fluid. Maybe that is because of its roots as a search engine I don’t know but I do think that Google looks upon social media and its networks as the largest and greatest flow of human knowledge and information we have ever seen. Google also realizes, I think, that by its very fluid nature you can’t place place it within any specific structure.

What I like about how Google is trying to do this is that they are going to the root of all networks – the people. I think they really clicked onto the idea that rather than make people have to hunt out others to join with in a network the wise option was to let us utilize the network we have already created – naturally.

Yes they definitely screwed up with the original implementation and yes they really need to do a lot of improvements but that is to be expected. With Buzz, Google is trying to help us utilize that all important network that we have created over the years into something that is richer, potentially much deeper and based on real friendships not faux follower types of crap.

As much as I might not be a fan of Google I hope they do manage to pull this off because if they don’t we will be left with the structured visions of companies like Facebook. Personally I like the fluid, organic, natural flow of what potentially is available with Buzz. That doesn’t mean that I still don’t have concerns about privacy issues or what Google’s ulterior motives might be – other than the expected push to advertise against it.

I do believe though, like Mathew Ingram, that in light of how badly they did screw up the launch of Buzz that Eric Schmidt should stay as far away as possible from having anything to say about Buzz. Regardless of what Louis, Thomas or Schmidt might believe privacy is still a big, and getting bigger, issue for people and saying that it is just something that they need to get over or than nothing really bad happened is ridiculing people’s strongly held feelings – and we all know how well that kind of attitude will work out.

The love and hate of Google Buzz and no Louis Gray, I’m not a luddite is a post from: The Inquisitr

Louis Gray, one of the smartest guys in Silicon Valley is leaving the corporate teet and is launching his own startup. (Note, the headline is tongue in cheek.)

Louis has joined with a group of unnamed others to form Paladin Advisors Group, “a strategic advisory firm for startups and enterprise companies who are looking for guidance in their marketing, public relations, sales processes, customer influence, Web and social media.”

Louis has taken the role of Managing Director of New Media, a role for which he is eminently qualified.

Louis refers to Paladin as a stealth startup, which is probably fair given their home page is currently offering an ad for “seeking Filipino Women?” He will be extending what he has already done on the side in helping and advising new startups on the finer points of not failing.

Louis and I didn’t get off to the best of starts when he broke into the Silicon Valley scene a couple of years back, but I’ve since come to appreciate him as being one of the most switched on, clever guys working in the space. If I had to say I’m disappointed, it’s only because I would have loved to have seen him doing a full blown tech startup, but none the less this position ideally suits his skills, and I have no doubt that it will do exceptionally well.

Image via Steven Hodson

Louis Gray Grows Some Balls and Starts His Own Startup is a post from: The Inquisitr

Knowing that Louis and his lovely wife are the proud parents of a set of twins is kind of helpful in setting up this piece of news. As well anyone who knows Louis also knows he is a die hard Apple fan so when I saw this product announcement he was the first person I thought of. You see over on ThinkGeek that they have a new product listing for something called a Combi IPod Bouncer which as you can tell from the picture involves a pretty fancy child seat.

It turns out that this nifty seat can bounce to the music supplied by your plugged in IPod; which given Louis proclivity for techno music would make any child’s time spent in the chair resemble something of a carnival ride. Now if you have a young child and think this might be just the coolest geek accessory then here are the rest of the specs for it

• For Ages 6 months and up
• Weight capacity 25 lbs.
• Removable toy bar with three wooden toys
• Removable and adjustable canopy to help control light exposure
• Rear storage pouch for canopy and other necessities to keep with you
• 3 point padded harness
• Hammock style seat design with 2 position recline
• lockable bounce feature
• Unique bouncing leg design uses child’s movement or parents input for comforting bouncing motion
• MP3 input for customized musical experience
• Built in sound and vibration unit
• Electronic controls accessible in the back so child is not disturbed when making adjustments
• This product can be used with a 5 lb (newborn) in the fully reclined position. With a child weighing less than 5lbs. (preemie) the caregiver should consult their pediatrician.
• Dimensions: 7.5" tall x 9" wide x 5" deep
• Weight: 5.8 lbs

Not bad though for $80.00 since you can look cool at all those geek get together and let your child think their are on some cool new ride at the same time.

[hat tip to Random Good Stuffhttp://www.random-good-stuff.com/2009/02/04/ipod-baby-bouncer/]

Psstt.. don’t let Louis Gray hear about this .. kthxbai is a post from: The Inquisitr

Now I’m not one to judge Sarah Palin’s choice in names for her children, but others have called trailer on her selection. The question for me is how some of new media’s leading names fare in the service.

Without much ado, here’s a few new media/ web 2.0 names added to the Sarah Palin baby name generator.

Louis Gray: Duct Idaho Palin
Chris Brogan: Hose Hotrod Palin
Darren Rowse: Khaki Salmon Palin
Brian Solis: Molten Contra Palin
Chris Pirillo: Barrel McRaven Palin
Joel Comm: Hump Gizzards Palin
Michael Gray: Tarp Lazer Palin
Matt Cutts: Bullpen Cola Palin
Michael Arrington: Blowhard Conflicted Palin*
Pete Cashmore: Gamebird Kelp Palin
Om Malik: Drink Hack Palin
Mona Nomura (aka Mona N): Knife Pile Palin
Gabe Rivera: Suckhole Groupie Palin*
Zee: Snowshoe Man Palin
Loic LeMeur: Blitz Harden Palin
Kyle “night krew” Lacy: Shoulder Frontier Palin
Dave Winer: Icepick Motor Palin
Robert Scoble: Hen Waffle Palin
Loren Feldman: Beans Harpoon Palin
Steve Gillmor: Nutty Mumbles Palin*
Owen Thomas: Thump Hummer Palin

Just for the record, I’ve got the same Sarah Palin name as Pete Cashmore: Gamebird Kelp Palin, so I’m in good company.

* actual results may vary

Sarah Palin baby name generator meets new media is a post from: The Inquisitr

Some of the cool features include Twitter and blog integration (although I couldn’t get Twitter to work, but I presume it appears as a tab/ choice), the ability to like and hate posts, and a semantic engine that takes that data and filters content based on your choices. You can even set up general keyword tabs that deliver data based on the term, creating a monitoring service as well.

I’m grown particularly fond on the standard FriendFeed layout, but that doesn’t mean that others won’t like this. When I hacked together the FriendFeed Greasemonkey scripts a month back, part of the goal was to integrate others services within the FriendFeed experience via tabs. Mionews does this as well by the external service integration, although they are attempting to do it properly, not just a browser based work around. Only earlier today I was noting on my new Posterous blog that the noise level is getting to the stage again that it’s difficult to keep up with all the various services, Mionews looks like it might be heading in the integrated multi-platform direction, and that’s a very good space to be moving into.

Whether you like Mionews or not, there is one certain thing it does demonstrate: API’s are a must for new services. Here’s a service that will deliver new people to FriendFeed, so FriendFeed wins, and no doubt with a centralized portal role with its own internal sharing (I didn’t mention that previously, but it is offered) the developer(s) of Mionews win as well. For users, we get innovative, new tools that offer exciting and different ways to use our existing services, or as gateways into services we use in the future. Pownce learned the hard way that companies without an API from very early on fail, the growing number of interesting FriendFeed apps shows that FF has a strong future….hopefully though without the failings of the first huge API driven success story, Twitter.

Update: I should have clarified this in the post, Twitter not working in Mionews was an API issue with Twitter, not Mionews’ doing. It should work for others…at the time I tried to set it up, Twhirl wouldn’t connect to Twitter either.

Mionews proves why API’s are a must is a post from: The Inquisitr

Stories on Protagonize start with one author writing a story, and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where anyone can participate.

Registered members get their own author profile page, can write new stories, branches and chapters, add page markers, subscribe to their favorite authors, add comments, rate stories, keep track of update
notifications, follow conversations between authors, and more.

I’ve seen attempts a collaborative writing projects before, more recently with Cameron Reilly’s Twittories project. Protagonize takes the collaborative path more seriously by offering better accessibility that increases participation.

A service is only as good as how its parts work in action, so I’ve seeded a story titled “FriendFeed Fan” in my best attempt of chic-lit meets technophilia. It’s the story of Melissa, a Twitter refugee who ends up at FriendFeed. The branch suggestions include Scoble, Louis Gray or simply finding love. More here and feel free to build on the story, it may be the first time FriendFeed has been used in modern literature

Protagonize Is A Good Read, Help Write “FriendFeed Fan” is a post from: The Inquisitr

FriendFeed has an amazingly loyal user base, and chief among the cheer squad has been Louis Gray. Louis and I have some history, but I thought I might ask him to convince me why I should use FriendFeed through a series of questions. Louis graciously responded with an argument on why you should use FriendFeed

Why do you use FriendFeed?

If you get Twitter, and you get RSS feeds, especially Google Reader, you will get FriendFeed. FriendFeed brings both the immediacy and conversation element of Twitter, but the sharing aspect of Google Reader shared items, without the limits that have held each service back, such as total number of characters, adding comments beyond Google Reader Notes, etc.

FriendFeed, essentially, is a single place to both aggregate your own activity, and follow friends and peers’ activity. But more than just aggregating activity, which many different sites do, it enables you to make comments, and show you “like” an item. This may seem small, but it’s this participation that has enabled the FriendFeed community to grow, as users engage and have conversations, longer than 140 characters.

I use FriendFeed to find new sources for information, to discuss items shared by friends, or see what others have said about items I share. FriendFeed has opened my eyes to some very talented tech bloggers, and helped me get answers to questions in real time from a group, rather than using Twitter, and counting @Replies.

What do you get from using FriendFeed?

With FriendFeed, I get a social platform for communication and participation on the day’s news and interesting items, and this platform can be as broad or as narrow as I would like it to be.

As with Twitter, on FriendFeed, I can choose to follow 1 person, 100 people, or 1,000 people. Also, thanks to advanced options that FriendFeed offers, I can choose to hide specific services (like Twitter, YouTube, Seesmic, or Disqus), I can choose to hide specific services from specific people (like hiding all of Robert Scoble’s Tweets), or I can get even more granular, by hiding items shared by Friends of a Friend, or saying I only want to view items that have already received comments or likes, letting only the best links hit my screen.

As you can guess, the service is only as good as the community. During FriendFeed’s private beta stage, it was an excellent way to talk to current and former Googlers, who dominated the early users. Now, as the doors have opened, a flood of new users are now regulars on the site. I’ve tried to stay focused on those engaging with tech blogs, or those who enjoy tech, but anybody’s community can be different.

Why should others use FriendFeed?

Your friends could be using many different services online. They could be updating their blogs. They could be posting photos to Flickr. They could be choosing YouTube favorites, or sending notes to Twitter. FriendFeed lets them put all of their online activity in one place, and lets you subscribe to their activity there, rather than following them around the Web.

FriendFeed lets you not only see what your friends are doing, but act on it. Also, as your friends find more people to follow on FriendFeed, you can be exposed to the best from their friends, getting you to find new people and new interesting items.

What’s your thoughts on FriendFeed being another layer in the over-noise problem

Because FriendFeed aggregates activity from many places, it definitely has the potential to be noisy. But the team at FriendFeed has thought ahead about this, and delivered some extremely flexible filters to reduce the noise and have strong signal:

Using their “Hide” function, you can hide:
* Individual items and conversations
* Entire services (Like Twitter, YouTube, Disqus, etc.)
* Services from specific individuals (Like Flickr from Thomas Hawk or Twitter from Robert Scoble)
* Friends of a Friend globally
* Friends of a Friend per individual (Don’t show me Robert Scoble’s Friends’ items)
* All items or specific services or services by user that don’t have comments or likes.

With all those options, you can really make FriendFeed as noisy or as quiet as you want to. What FriendFeed needs to do to make the noise that remains a little less so is to:

* Address issues with duplicate items shared by multiple friends.
* Address issues with a single user doing multiple things with an item (Posting to a blog, adding to Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc.)
* Possibly introduce groups, so you could categorize your friends and see subsets of the stream.

If you pull a Robert Scoble, and follow thousands of people, of course it will be noisy. What I recommend is starting with a core group of people who you know or already follow on Twitter, RSS, etc., and then add as you see others making comments on FriendFeed. You can put your mouse over any name and see their profile, how active they are, and what they share.

Louis Gray is a Marketing and public relations professional in the Silicon Valley with ten years experience for both Internet and hardware companies. His blog, louisgray.com, covers the world of social media, RSS readers, link aggregation and statistics.

Why You Should Use FriendFeed is a post from: The Inquisitr