Most of the people I’ve had discussions with regarding buzz all seem to agree that Google placed Buzz inside of Gmail for the “instant userbase”. One of the reasons that Google Wave has seemed to not grab users interest is that it’s on a separate website which creates a need for Google to market the service to users. By jamming it directly inside of one of the most popular email services, Gmail, they instantly have the userbase that Friendfeed never was able to achieve. Even though many of us have talked about a social network inside of email for years, it still seems a bit odd. Perhaps it will become more familiar over time. Sadly now I need to use Gmail even though I very much prefer Yahoo Mail (except when they don’t deliver my mail for hours or days).

<begin crazy theory mode>

Back in November, Adam Ostrow from Mashable and Caroline McCarthy from Cnet wrote about a partnership between Twitter and Google which would allow Google access to the content on Twitter. McCarthy noted, “Google and Twitter have cut a deal where Google is essentially licensing a data feed from Twitter to get that information in search results.”

It appears that Google is paying several million dollars for this data feed. Now that Google has launched Buzz and you can add your public Twitter datastream into Buzz, is there a need for Google to pay for the data feed?

Naturally it’s easy to say that not every Gmail user will use Buzz and those that do may not include their Twitter feeds. But with Gmail having a larger installed userbase than Twitter and with (my speculation) a near 1:1 overlap in users, might the Buzz Twitter stream get Google pretty close to the data feed? In addition, by using the Google Buzz Twitter stream, it gives Google a better way to rank tweets in search results rather than just a person’s Twitter follower counts and simple usage patterns.

In addition, it would allow Google to basically push the search results into Buzz instead of to Twitter.

<end crazy theory mode>

So am I crazy or not?

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.

Read the above paragraph that begins with “AOL was exciting” and replace AOL with Facebook. Seem similar? Seem to be identical?

Facebook has news, buddies, chat/IM, games, video, photos and when you include their developer network you get pretty dang close to what AOL offered. I’m not going to run down every single feature in both services but if you were to create a matrix, the checkmarks would overlap pretty closely. One difference is the aggregated “feed” that Facebook offers which allows you to see what your friends (or marketing contacts) are up to.

Update: Doc Searls said the same thing about Facebook and AOL last month. You should read his post and comments as he discusses trying to keep up with all the content that is pushed his way.

Sure Facebook allows us to connect at higher speeds than an overclocked 28.8 baud modem, but if you look closely, I can see the little yellow running man inside the Facebook logo. I’d argue that if AOL had the connection speeds and coverage that Facebook benefits from today, AOL would have been much larger.

I’ve wondered if Facebook will eventually launch a branded phone similar to Google’s launch of the Nexus One smartphone. And there is a lot of chatter about the potential of Facebook to create a web browser. AOL had a web browser as well.

Facebook likes to say that they are open but I guess by their definition AOL was just as open in the mid-90s. One difference between the companies is in the way they generated revenue. AOL charged a service fee and Facebook is using ads and Facebook also told me tonight that Heinz Ketchup wants me to share my Ketchup stories (I never use Ketchup) and that two of my Facebook friends are “Fans” of Heinz Ketchup.

Let’s look at some recent posts from around the Web – just replace Facebook as you read the posts with AOL and replace any mentions of Obama with Clinton.

• Steve Rubel says that Facebook will centralize the social web. Isn’t that exactly what AOL did in the early-to-mid 90s?
• Facebook is the largest newsreader says Hitwise. Wasn’t AOL the largest online newsreader?
• Facebook is working on an internal email service says Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington. Along with many others, I said this would be coming. And lookie here, AOL had an email service as well. So now people will tell you to email blueriver149@facebook instead of blueriver149@aol.

So is Facebook really just a refurbished version of the old AOL?

TweetMeme

TweetMeme creator Nick Halstead posted several messages on Twitter – the last one coming 12 hours ago. He has three posts related to the outage:

• we are having a problem with our DNS for TweetMeme – we are trying to get it fixed ASAP
• .@Fasthosts your going to have some SERIOUS bad press soon unless you sort out problems out
• anyone know people at internic? we need help with a DNS issue ASAP

Twitter users are also posting about the TweetMeme outage. Apparently there is a full TweetMeme site that shows off the most popular stories based on who clicks the button the most. While the API didn’t load yesterday, for most of the day the main site did load as I noticed a couple of tech blogs up on the home page. As of the time of this posting, the main site was unaccessible as well. It appears that the main TweetMeme twitter account is working although the stream seems slow.

TweetMeme was in the news last week with the launch of “retweetable ads”.

You might use this down time to start to plan your Black Friday shopping. I wonder if this is affecting traffic to the Twitter-heavy blogs.

Update 10AM Eastern: The TweetMeme site is back – it appears you can now find all of the techcrunch and mashable stories on their home page once again.

You can join the discussion here and Paul noted, “First, FriendFeed is _not_ going away. (in fact, we’re working on switching it to new servers) Second, I know everyone wants to know what the team is working on, but we don’t pre-announce things, so for now all I can say is that there’s good stuff on the way. Re:”

I am glad to learn that they are moving to new severs – hopefully the service will be back to pre-acquisition speeds. Paul tells me in the thread that the slowness is due to growth of the userbase and the data storage.

I am also glad to learn that the service will not be disappearing. Johnny Worthington wrote a good letter to the Friendfeed team today.

While we don’t know what will eventually happen with FF, it would be smart for Facebook to keep it running smoothly as it’s a great way to introduce new Facebook features to the early adopters that live in Friendfeed.

Update: Many on the FF thread have been asking about the platform and whether development will continue. Paul responded with the following, “Jim, there may be a few new things, but as I said, the team is mainly working on fb platform and openness, so it’s unlikely that there will be any big new features of ff (except maybe one that I’ve been thinking about for a while…). – Paul Buchheit”

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

Over the past few days, many of the coupon forums and sites have listed a promotion for a free Chick-fil-A 2010 calendar. It’s on Spoofee (deleted), Fatwallet (deleted), Coupon Saving Game and over 120 comments on SlickDeals. The calendar promotion is also listed on moms sites including KnoxMoms. There’s just one problem…the promotion is fake – was sent by someone outside Chick-fil-A.

When you click on the link to order the calendar, you are greeted with the image below and the following text, “Incorrect information has been circulating on the internet regarding the 2010 Chick-fil-A® Cow Calendar.  Chick-fil-A is not authorized to distribute free calendars nor to register those who log on to www.shopchick-fil-a.com.  Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.”

While Chick-fil-A had nothing to do with the fake promotion, they lost an amazing opportunity to turn a negative experience into an amazing moo-ving experience. From my perspective, the message they provided above was fine – it’s the truth. But why not offer the users something? A simple coupon off their next purchase or a free ice-dream with a combo…something! At an absolute minimum, offer the customer an option to signup for future (real) offers and savings. I can only imagine the influx of traffic that the calendar webpage received over the past 24 hours – and instead of capturing and getting more customers in the store, they let the deal hunter go away empty-handed.

Chick-fil-A does such a great job normally with promotions and coupons. Their coupons never expire and you can use them anytime.

The reason I am sharing this story is because it could happen to you and your startup one day. Make sure you never let a potential customer, and more importantly a spokesperson for your company, walk away with nothing.

It’s not too late Chick-fil-A…the links will be out there forever so offer something to the customers and create a positive social media and customer experience.

Carolyn Duffy Marsan at NetworkWorld has an in-depth post about the acquisition. Carolyn notes that GovDelivery is often referred to as “Facebook for Feds” and that the founders of both services met at Government 2.0 Camp back in March.

From the announcement, “GovDelivery’s reach has grown exponentially in the past two years. Currently, between 10,000 and 100,000 new people signup to receive updates to government information each day via the GovDelivery platform.” It looks like the two companies were made to work together as the email delivery can point recipients to the social networking platform. The companies believe that together they can help spread social media throughout the U.S. government.

Gautham Nagesh from NextGov notes that GovLoop was a pet project for Ressler.

Another interesting feature of Producteev is the ability to collect responses to a question using any of the social services. You post your question or need on Producteev and then push it out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and your followers/friends can click a link and leave a comment on your task or question. This feature is called “crowdsource your tasks”. The best part about this feature is that the responses are grouped together and removes the need to gather responses on each individual network.

The company is angel-funded, has 5 full-time employees and 1 intern and is based in the Chelsea area of Manhattan.

Lil’grams pushes the grams to the network in the way the people in the network wish to receive them. I spoke with co-founder Gregarious Narain who explained that some people might want email notifications, others may want messages on Facebook and (gasp) some might even want Twitter direct messages.

There are a variety of grams including:

• media gram – for a photo or video
• food gram – “hey look little billy kept his cheerios down”
• word gram – “mom check it out billy said his first word – twitter!”
• story gram – “billy went for a walk today in the park and ate a hot dog”

We’ve covered a bunch of baby services including Kidmondo, Baveo, babyZbook and TotSpot. Lil’Grams is offering only paid plans with no free option. Most of the other services offer a free option and monetize with advertising, affiliate revenue or by partnering with other services that charge a fee. As I mentioned to Gregarious, it will be interesting to see if the other baby services follow suit with paid plans. Just like in other industries, someone always has to be first and then the others typically follow along.

Pricing starts at $29/year for 1 kid and goes up to $49/year for 4 kids and some additional options. I guess the Octomom would need 4 of the 4 kid accounts.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.

The service is perfect for brands and agencies that need to monitor remarks across the web. The service also offers a reports feature which can send on-demand and scheduled reports via email that include the content generated by the archive feature over a specific time period.

As a side note, no matter what tool you use for monitoring, if you have a product or service you must monitor all press so you can respond if needed. If you are working with an agency they better be providing you with reports – if not, find a new agency.

The Positive Press service starts at $99/month. Iterasi’s free service will remain and will be rebranded as Iterasi Personal. Check out additional views on Positive Press from Josh Lowensohn of CNET and Charles Hamilton of WWD.

Here’s an overview of how the service works:

In my new role I see a lot of websites that are clunkers. Many of the sites haven’t been touched in a decade, are broken, are out-of-date, missing any current functionality or aren’t indexed in Google. How many dollars of revenue are these businesses losing out on because their website is a clunker?

I am not even talking about any sort of social networking or social media optimization. Just simple updates so that the sites are usable and, more importantly, findable. By investing in creating better small business websites, the local economy will benefit which in turn will provide more jobs and strengthen local businesses for the long term. Some of the concept overlaps with Robert Scoble’s 2010 web concept.

With that I’d like to introduce the concept of the “Cash for Clunkers Website Edition”. I’ve posted my initial thoughts on the concept and program in my Information Week column. Have a look at the concept and let me know your thoughts!

Alterian reported a 73% increase in revenue for the last fiscal year. Here’s an interesting tactic…to get Alterian’s current customers to test out the Techrigy service, they are offering a free trial which can then be converted into a premium account should the customer wish to continue use.

David Eldridge, Chief Executive Officer of Alterian said, “By combining Alterian’s platform with Techrigy’s SM2 technology, marketers now have a complete, easy and practical solution to understand the complete view of their customers and take action to use this to build brand equity and generate opportunity.”

As social media reporting becomes more important for companies, we will see more acquisitions in this space by larger agencies wanting to provide the tools for their clients in-house.

The following tips are provided for educational purposes only. My hope is that the Friendfeed team can close a bunch of the holes so that the environment remains pure and doesn’t become a spammer’s paradise like Twitter is apparently moving towards.

Tactic #1 – the comment

Once your item is injected into your feed, it’s gone from the stream in minutes. One way to get it back to the top is to leave a comment. You can’t “like” your own items so the only option is to comment. The key is to make sure you comment at the right time. This means you shouldn’t comment immediately…instead give it some time and then leave a comment – blamo the item is back to the top of your feed and can be seen by a new group of followers who may have missed it the first time around.

Tactic #2 – the social share

This one is another great way to get your item back to the top. Make sure before you attempt this strategy that you have added your social sites into your Friendfeed account. This includes Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. Once you are ready, head over to Digg or Stumbleupon and vote/like your story. This will immediately send a hit to Friendfeed which will once again push a new entry at the top of your feed for your content. You could actually use this tactic multiple times.

Tactic #3 – the offsite comment

On my feed, Fred Wilson is a great example of this tactic. I know Fred isn’t doing it for gaming purposes and he might not even know it’s happening. Basically what happens here is that every time that Fred replies to a comment on his blog (not on FF) it sends a hit to Friendfeed which pushes his story back up top on my feed. Fred does a great job of replying to comments on his blog so there are times that nearly my whole feed is Fred’s comments! Apparently this is due to the way Disqus (the commenting service Fred uses on his blog) sends info to Friendfeed.

Tactic #4 – the multiple blogger

This one doesn’t work for a blog like CN because I am the only writer. But on the larger blogs that have multiple writers, it can work really well. I am not going to name any specific blogs or bloggers who use this tactic. Here’s how this tactic works — all bloggers on a specific blog post the full RSS feed to Friendfeed. Then each time a new blog post is written by anyone on that blog, the link is fed into their feed and is viewable by all. I know many bloggers at multiple-author blogs actually only post their stories into their feed which is awesome but some use the full feed for maximimum opportunity. 

Tactic #5 – the Twitter tweet

This one is simple but effective. If you have your RSS feed tied into Friendfeed, then you will get a hit for each piece of content you post. But your followers on Twitter won’t see it because it’s on FF. So you post a link on Twitter to your piece of content – some big blogs only use their Twitter account for these type of links – and you get some hits from the link. But what’s really great about this Twitter posting is that it also posts to FF and gives you yet another top hit to your feed.

Again, these tactics are only provided for educational purposes and shouldn’t be used in real life. I am hoping that there might be ways to slow or completely remove these tactics before they get more widely adopted. If you have other gaming tactics, leave them in the comments so FF staff can have a look.

Here are five of the tips Comcast recommends for parents who are planning to speak with their kids:

• Choose your pictures wisely
• Don’t talk to strangers and use privacy settings
• Keep your personal information personal
• Don’t be a cyberbully
• Go outside and stay active

These tips sure seem like 1995 to me – with so many new networks and ways for teens to interact online, parents really need a full education.

Comcast does recommend that parents learn about the new online networks so they can speak intelligently about them. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity there – people who teach parents about the current state of online networks and keep them up-to-date moving forward. In fact these people could even be there to “moderate” discussions between teens and parents so the teens can’t get over on the parents.

If I post a message on Twitter, it is instantly copied to my Friendfeed account. If I delete that twit message, it is not removed from Friendfeed. I selected to have Friendfeed read and aggregate my Twitter account so the behavior makes sense on the display side. Since Friendfeed can read and write to Twitter, can’t they just read the current status of messages?

I’ve also noticed more blogs sucking in content from Twitter and Friendfeed. It’s a smart move for the blogs because it makes for more monetizable content and can also make a blog appear more active. Some blogs appear to be scraping the content on their own, some are using comment aggregation services like Disqus. I asked Disqus about their social comment aggregation and was told that they store the aggregated comments on Disqus’ servers. Unlike Friendfeed where I specifically told them to aggregate my content, I didn’t authorize my comments to be aggregated on other blogs, etc. And with regards to Disqus, when I make a comment on Twitter or Friendfeed that is scraped back to the Disqus database, I don’t believe that it’s placed into my Disqus account. This makes it even harder for me to manage. Of course I have practically zero recourse for the blogs that scrape friendfeed/twitter directly.

My take is that it’s fine to display content from other social services but it should be a display only — not/never a store and retain. This way if the content creator decides to delete or edit the content, the updated version will be the one displayed across the Web.

Perhaps this is a data portability topic?

As more social aggregation services pop up and blogs look for more content to monetize, I believe this issue will become a hot topic this year.