Robert Scoble Archive

Have you considered a career working with Robert Scoble? Are you having sleepless nights wondering what it would be like to work at Fast Company TV with the master of FriendFeed Robert Scoble? Well then, have I got the job for you! Here are the job details from Director of Social Media Lynne Johnson:

Looking for a senior or executive level editor passionate about the intersection of social media and journalism.

The ideal candidate will be able to jump start conversations in our community. The person will work closely with the president of Mansueto Digital Edward Sussman, Lynne D. Johnson (FC Director of Social Media), Robert Scoble, our managing director of FastCompany.TV, and the print team of Fast Company magazine.

The job is fun and high profile and right on the edge of what’s happening in publishing. We are looking for someone who can spit out loads of story ideas about innovation, the web, social media, sustainability, and other core FC topics — and then make them a reality.

Contact email: lynne@fastcompany.com

To be honest, it looks like a pretty strong social media opportunity. Their office has one of the best views of lower Manhattan out there!

Last month we wrote about the "FriendFeed 9" which were the 9 defaults that FriendFeed offers to each new account. FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit says that only a few people actually see this default list because most new accounts are referred from someone else which eliminates this default list all together. I am not sure I agree with that – when the early adopter blogs posted about the new beta last week, how many new signups did FriendFeed see via direct links – I will bet that it’s most of them. In fact, the number must be great to the default list because default user Scoble noted yesterday that he can tell when FriendFeed is doing well in terms of user growth simply by how many new subs he gets via the default option.

With the launch of the new beta this week, I thought it was a perfect time to take a look and see where the FriendFeed 9 are now and whether they made any changes to the structure. The FriendFeed 9 is now the FriendFeed 24 – that’s the only change that has been made. The list is completely popularity based, not activity/usage based. This type of popularity list means that the 24 selected individuals will always appear on the list.

This is a very poor way to pimp people – it shows that FriendFeed doesn’t give two knishes about their loyal and active users. This is pretty clear because the most active FriendFeed user Mona (her blog) isn’t even on the list.

Here’s my video on the subject:

Robert Scoble says he wants off the list and in Louis Gray’s post today about the new FriendFeed he discusses this popularity list. He notes, "22 of those users were men, 22 were white and there were two Asian (one male, one female)".

All these popularity lists do is keep the top on top (without any quality backing) and never allow for any user/content discovery. I hope that FriendFeed will look into changing their default policy in the near future. I wrote this post and video because I think every startup should consider the lessons learned here for their own projects.

Over the past 24 hours, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and Michael Arrington have all asked essentially the same question. They are all wondering how they got so many followers on FriendFeed so quickly.

Here at the CenterNetworks Investigation Bureau, we have been investigating this topic since we first reported on it a month ago. Seriously. After the last month of investigation, we are now prepared to share our findings. Please view the video below for the analysis as to why these four people are getting so many followers so quickly. The answer might just surprise you.

So as you can see, FriendFeed has created "defaults" and the four people above are part of the nine-person default set. What this means is that when anyone signs up for a new account on FriendFeed, they are presented with the same nine people every single time. Twitter has no defaults, hence a slower signup rate.

I presented my research to a couple of other top bloggers last week who aren’t included in the default list and their initial response was that Jason and Mike weren’t even participating in FF (they are now which is great). Mack also misses the point when he tries to explain the follower numbers.

Update: two people have emailed me noting that Jason isn’t actively participating, just sharing Mahalo links. They make a good point, he’s only sharing links via the bookmarklet, not actually participating in the conversation (yet I hope).

Defaults don’t just mean more followers, they mean more traffic to the supporting content sites.

When I asked Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit about this, he said, "you are correct however that we should tweak the algorithm to increase diversity when browsing popular feeds such as Scoble’s — FriendFeed has grown by a few orders of magnitude since the algorithm was originally created and so it probably requires some updating." When I spoke with Paul, I hadn’t yet realized that there was this also default nine-person set.

My hope is that FriendFeed will expedite the algorithm change and create more diversity and discovery with their platform. Shouldn’t everyone who uses FriendFeed get a chance to be discovered instead of pushing the same nine people for all of eternity?

There are times when "going live" is great. When there’s an earthquake or other catastrophy, it’s great. When you want to show gramma how your baby crawls on the floor while speaking with her on the phone, great. Other times, it’s not needed and can become more of an annoyance than anything.

Yesterday I sat in on a panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Conference in NYC. The panel was moderated by Esther Dyson and included the CEOs from CoverItLive, Qik, Mogulus and also Robert Scoble. Side note, if anyone would like me to post the full session video, I can. I didn’t find the session to be as strong as the talk Robert gave at MediaBistro last month.

Here’s a photo from the event. I’ve left out Esther who really didn’t say much for the entire panel except something at the end about oil prices and how Barack is going to fix the world. From the left: the CoverItLive CEO had no electronics on the stage and seemed to be the most involved in the discussion. Next to him is the Mogulus CEO who had a Macbook with a webcam apparently live and he moved the laptop all around during the panel. Next to him is the Qik CEO who had out his Nokia N95 and for most of the panel held up this camera so he could allow all of the Qik folks access to watch the panel. Last we have Robert Scoble who also had a Nokia N95 hooked up to Qik and his massive battery pack. In addition he had a Macbook Pro attached to the projector.

Every 2-3 seconds Robert was clicking on something and I found it to be very distracting. Speaking with a few other attendees, they said the same thing. Is it really necessary to watch Twitter, FriendFeed, Summize, Qik, Twittervision over and over every few seconds? If attendees want to monitor the activities, they can do it on their own devices.

This panel is only one example of this type of behavior. I’ve been seeing more and more of this and it’s disturbing. There’s absolutely no reason this panel had to be broadcast live. In fact, most conferences don’t need to be broadcast live. The sessions should absolutely be recorded but don’t need to be broadcast live.

In yesterday’s case, moderator Esther Dyson mentioned that attendees could text their questions in through Twitter. Great idea, but poor execution. Instead of having one of the panelists (scoble) monitoring for questions, let him actually be part of the panel and find an intern to monitor the backchannel for questions. It just takes away from the overall panel.

Another question regarding live conference broadcasting is: when will the conference organizers put a stop to the live broadcasts? If I can sit in my office and watch the conference, why spend the $2,000 to attend? Will DEMO and Techcrunch50 allow live broadcasting? What I can see is a PPV option where the conference provides the live streaming and charges a fee for it.

When I spend thousands of dollars and my time to attend a conference, I am really not interested in watching the Qik CEO broadcast the session live to everyone without paying attention to what’s going on in the moment. I also really don’t give a rats ass what people outside the conference think of what’s going on inside the room. I want to have the speaker’s full attention. I didn’t have that today – not by a longshot. And again, I am using this session as an example but the issue is much more widespread.

Let’s get back to why we go to conferences… the networking and the education. If you can’t be there for some reason, watch the sessions later on. Just because it’s cutsie and hip to go live all the time, doesn’t mean we need to.

Out today is a new network of sites that use a scoring model and a social network. The name of the network is Loud3r (I guess pronounced Louder?) and is a collection of sites (currently 25 with a goal to launch over 500) including sites about dogs, cats, Web 2.0, celebrities, cars, etc. Each content type has its own "3R" site. For example, Found3r = venture capital, News3r = tech news, Putt3r = golf. It’s important to note that this Loud3r network is a content aggregation network and not a user-generated content network.

The sites have a half-completed design and feel very unpolished. If you are going to compete with Original Signal, Alltop and popURLs, you best be bringing the big guns. Another issue I notice is that the site doesn’t share cookies – so each site in the network I visit, I have to login. They really need to fix that – getting users to hop from one 3R to another 3R is crucial for discovery and potentially long-term success. They do have a nice batch of widgets.

One really positive thing is that they are bringing this type of scored content to new verticals. I am glad they stayed away from voting. If you are looking for a new place to find content about topics you are interested in, the the Loud3r network might be for you. I think for the site to really takeoff, they will need to make sure their social network has enough people to get users to come back. If people just take their feeds, the sites won’t work financially.

Louis Gray has an indepth and very positive review of the network. Kristin Nicole calls the network a popURLs competitor, I don’t see that – if anything it’s an Original Signal competitor.

They did do one thing right – they signed on bigtime blogger Robert Scoble – his 3R site is located at Scobleiz3r. It’s stories all about Robert. I did notice that the share button has no FriendFeed option – how could Robert approve this?!?! It does look like the majority of content on Scobleiz3r is coming from FriendFeed and/or Twitter.

I am also guessing that other ego-driven sites will be coming soon and should help the overall network to gain popularity.

Blogger Robert Scoble noted in a conversation with me on FriendFeed this afternoon the following, "Allen even if I were paid by Page Views I would be totally supporting FF. My traffic to my blog has gone way up since I have been active here. I am way higher on TechMeme’s leader board too. – Robert Scoble"

In the picture on the left, you can see Robert is looking for something. My guess is that he’s looking for the reason why his traffic has gone up since he has become active on FriendFeed. I’ve created a short video to explain the most likely reason why his traffic is up based on FriendFeed.

Earlier this week, Jason Calacanis pimped Loic’s LeWeb conference. Loic was then required to "re-pimp" within 48 hours – he chose Techcrunch50 by asking Jason about why he wants to kill Demo and why Techcrunch50 is a better model.

Robert Scoble has decided that not only will he jump on the "kill Demo" bandwagon but now he is going to kill Techcrunch50 as well. This move came out of left field!

Scoble says that startups should come to him on FastCompany.tv for no cost and that you can watch for no cost. Both conferences charge several thousand dollars to attend. He believes FastCompany.tv beats them both by providing more viewers and also a longer interview and discussion time (both Demo and TC50 offer ~6 minutes on stage).

What Scoble misses is that it’s not about the two/three-day infomercials, it’s about the networking, the hallway discussions and the business card swaps. I am not sure his TV station can provide this. But he does make one point well – startups should try to get as much coverage as they can.

Update #1 – Scoble says via a Techcrunch post that he doesn’t want to kill TC50 (never mentions demo), only to say, “I know the truth: that we’re both laughing all the way to the bank.”.

Update #2 – per the FriendFeed contract, there’s now a thread regarding the below video on FF

Here’s Scoble’s pitch: