Thought Friendfeed Was Dead? Welcome to Google Buzz
Last November I wrote that Twitter was slowly becoming Friendfeed. And in October, the Friendfeed team said the service wasn’t going away. They were right!
Well today we learned that another company wants to be Friendfeed. I’d like to welcome you to Google Buzz.
You can read Google Buzz reviews from Alex Wilhelm of NextWeb and Louis Gray.
I’ve been watching the live stream of the Google Buzz event and it looks and functions exactly like Friendfeed except that it’s inside Gmail versus a stand-alone Web application like Friendfeed was/is.
I can only hope that Google Buzz works as smoothly as Friendfeed does and I also hope that Google Buzz pushes out as much as they pull in.
Update: There’s an excellent Google Buzz discussion thread started by Robert Scoble on Friendfeed.
Update 2: During the Q&A session, someone asked about the comparison to Friendfeed and the Google employee (sorry don’t know the name) replied with, ”we dont look at competitors, we just build what our users want”.
Update 3: Many on the Friendfeed chat and several of the questions noted that Google Buzz looks and acts just like Facebook.
WordPress Builds Posterous Importer
For Edelman VP Steve Rubel, Posterous is the hottest thing out there today. Last summer Rubel talked about how Posterous changed how he looks at blogging.
Posterous is a simple way to create a blog by using email to create online content and store it for easy viewing and sharing. You send your photos, videos and text to Posterous and they make the posts on-the-fly for you. Your posts can then be shared on the social services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Your readers can also subscribe to content on your Posterous blog using RSS or email. Posterous co-founder Gary Tan was recently interviewed on the This Week in Startups show hosted by Jason Calacanis.
Yesterday WordPress announced that they have created a “Posterous Importer” for hosted customers. Similar to their other importer tools, this new one takes the content on a Posterous blog and imports it into a wordpress.com hosted blog. The Posterous importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.
WordPress developer Brian Colinger also noted in the post that Wordpress can handle “post via email” which is the core functionality of Posterous.
Compete shows Posterous at 1 million unique U.S. visitors in January and WordPress at 27 million for the same demographics and time period. Last week WordPress added a new email subscription option to hosted blogs.
Welcome to AOL 2.0! Can You Guess Which Company It Is?
Let’s start this journey by taking a ride back in time. Some of you are too young to remember the Internet of the early 90s. Back then one of the most popular ways to get “online” was to use AOL. This was the popular online service that came via disks you received in the mail. Prodigy and Compuserve were on their way out and this new service AOL was the darling of the time. I went to college in a small town in upstate New York which had no local number for AOL. I had to call to Albany to access AOL. And boy did I access AOL. One of my first months I received a phone bill for over $500 in long-distance charges (where was Vonage back then?!?) and that didn’t even include the AOL access fees. I still use the same username on AOL today that I originally registered way back then.
AOL was exciting – you could read news, send and receive email, play games, IM chat with friends, go into chat rooms based around topics, search for content, listen to music, send eCards, customize the home page to suit your preferences and a variety of other online tasks. In later versions of the AOL desktop, a Web browser was included and other “partners” were added to allow for additional content and, what I will call, applications.

It sure does seem that the more we try to move the Internet forward, the more things seem to copy the old. So with that said, allow me to introduce you to the next version of AOL… AOL 2.0… otherwise known as Facebook.
Did Techcrunch Become a WordPress VIP?
A couple of weeks ago, technology blog Techcrunch was hacked. At the time of the hacking they were using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service as their hosting provider.
Today I noticed that everything on Techcrunch is now pointing to Wordpress.com. If you run a traceroute of the techcrunch.com domain, it points to Wordpress. Images and static files (e.g. s3.wordpress.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch) are also hosted by Wordpress. Most likely this means that Techcrunch has moved off of the Rackspace Cloud Service and has become a VIP customer. GigaOm is another popular blog that is also hosted on the WordPress VIP service.
Assuming I am right and Techcrunch has moved to Wordpress.com for hosting, it’s interesting how short of a time they were hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. I have pinged a couple of Rackspace employees and will update this story once I get any further details.
Update: I can now confirm that Techcrunch has moved to WordPress VIP hosting as noted in their footer. Rackspace employee Robert Scoble has also confirmed the move in the comments. It will be interesting to see if they continue to run the Rackspace advertisement going forward. It does appear the other sites in the Techcrunch family are still hosted on Rackspace – they could be in the process of moving.
CenterNetworks is currently hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service (we pay full price, actually lately we’ve paid a lot more than the base rate). I’ve never posted a full accounting of all of the good and bad of using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. Alison Gianotto posted an open letter to Rackspace management last month. In January Rackspace raised their Cloud Sites base pricing by 50% for new customers.
Startup Jobs – February 8
The Saints won the SuperBowl which shows anything is possible! Below are some of the latest jobs posted on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.
Featured Jobs:
- Graphic Designer at Dow Jones
- Associate Project Manager, CBSNews.com at CBS Interactive
- Ad Operations Campaign Manager at About.com
More Jobs:
- Principal Web UI Engineer – Art.com at Art.com
- New York City Editor at Citysearch
- Regional Manager at LetMeGo
- Ruby on Rails Developer at ekoVenture at ekoVenture
- Design Technologist at New York Times
Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today – only $10!
Suite Arrival Makes Sure You Never Forget Your Toothbrush
Many of the startups I speak with do a good bit of traveling around the country and the world showing off their services. I am always forgetting some toiletry item when I travel. Typically I forget a fingernail clipper – I have so many of them at home I could open a store selling clippers. A new startup wants to make sure we never forget to pack a toothbrush, toothpaste or in my case, a clipper.
Suite Arrival allows you to order a pack of travel toiletries and have them delivered to your hotel on the day you arrive. You select whether you want a kit for a man or woman along with the length of the trip and Suite Arrival provides a customized toiletry kit for you. The kits are available for overnight, short trips, week-long trips and a “road warrior” pack which is for trips of more than 7 days.
The toiletry kit includes: shampoo, conditioner, soap, body wash, deodorant, mouthwash, razor, shaving cream, hairspray and moistureizers. You can also add some medications including aspirin, stomach aids, allergy and even sunblock lotion.
Pricing ranges from $14-28 and shipping on the first order is included in the price. The product categories can be customized (or upgraded) for $0.50-$2.00.
I’d like to see more options available in the kit. For example, let me order some cookies or candy. What about local maps? I think Suite Arrival could become the best welcome kit for a person arriving at a hotel.
Suite Arrival and, travel planning service, TripIt were made for each other. Both services are aiming to make traveling easier and the demographic on TripIt are probably those who would buy a package on Suite Arrival. Suite Arrival could also partner with travel agents and provide a commission when the travel agent sells a kit.
What do you forget when you travel?

Weekend Entrepreneurial Reading
The weatherman lied – there is no snow. The big game aka Superbowl is this weekend. Why not read up on some great Entrepreneurial posts?
- Hiring the First 5 Engineers: What Sort of People Do You Want on Your Team? – Elad Gil
- Bootstrap or Die – Lessons Learned From a Web Startup’s Murder/Suicide – Bootstrappy
- How to Pitch an Angel (or VC) – Rose Tech Ventures
- The “Gut Wrenching” Setbacks Webmail.us Overcame Before They Triumphed And Sold To Rackspace – Mixergy
- Entrepreneurs Don’t “Noodle” They Do – Mark Suster
- EventVue post-mortem - Eventvue
Feel free to add the links you think are awesome in the comments.



