Holy Crap, Friendfeed is taking over!

This may be a little bit of an overstatement, but from the talk of nearly EVERYONE over the last two weeks, Friendfeed is the next big thing. So far I’ve noticed Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, and Techcrunch comment on it, and I’m sure I’ve missed or dismissed many other bloggers commenting on Friendfeed.

What my understanding of Friendfeed is, is a one stop shop for all of your information needs. Tired of having to check out your Twitter, RSS reader, delicious, etc. accounts to get all of the latest news? Now all you have to do is join friendfeed, which amalgamates all of your friends twitter/blog/everything else together so you can get updated on everything they are doing, but in the same spot.

Besides the incredible benefits and A-lister recommendations, why is Friendfeed so good? For many reasons really. One of which, is their commitment to the user. Fred Wilson had a little bit of beef with a few aspects on Friendfeed, and so created a list of things they would like changed. Shortly after he received an email from one of the founders of Friendfeed saying he had passed the list around to the employees of the company, and they liked them and immediately began working on them. Now that is customer service.

Also, Dave Winer has been very impressed with the fact that Friendfeed has done a lot of work, and relatively quickly, dealing with Twitter users on Friendfeed. Although Twitter may be an acquired taste, people who use Twitter demand that it works well on Friendfeed. Friendfeed has worked very hard in making this possible.

Thats all for now I guess.

Cheers,

David McKenna

Is Yahoo!’s onePlace, the Right Place?

In class, we have briefly discussed topics concerning how to organize your web content through the use of bookmark sites (Del.icio.us) and RSS feeders. Competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft have taken content management to a new level by answering the need for management of mobile content. Yahoo! announced today its mobile-content management solution, onePlace. The tool’s objective is to create a better system to organize web information, similarly to RSS and bookmarks tools.

onePlace’s main objective is to strive for simplicity; the tool operates using a system similar to tagging and grouping, which allows users to create a category folder and link all relating information to that folder. The example Yahoo! is promoting is for traveling. Say you were traveling to Europe, you begin by creating a Euro-Trip folder. Then you can link to all the travel sites (ie recommended places to visit), related music, video clips, photos, search queries, etc. It’s like having your Del.ici.ous account only with more features, all available on your mobile phone. onePlace facilitates content portability even more, because now if you want to add useful information to your trip folder, and a computer is not close, you can just use your cellphone tool to add to the folder. Being that the phone is connected to the internet, onePlace also keeps information updated. So if your flight time was altered, onePlace would make an automatic update. Here’s a link to the press release, it includes all of onePlace’s anticipated features. Below is an idea of what the screen will look like.

Let’s Start Using del.icio.us

I see a few of you have signed up with del.icio.us out of curiosity. This is great.

Let’s make it official and see what we discover. I would like everyone to go to del.icio.us and sign up for an account. From then on, start posting to del.icio.us anything you think would be of interest to the class. Tag them in whatever way you see fit, but at a minimum add the tag “bus442.”

To make posting to del.icio.us easier, I suggest you install the bookmarklet in your browser.

So that everyone can see what people are bookmarking, please add the RSS feed for del.icio.us posts tagged “bus442” please add the following feed to your RSS subscriptions: feed://del.icio.us/rss/tag/bus442

Finally, if you scroll down the sidebar on our site, you’ll see a section that highlights the “bus442” bookmarks.

Delicious, errr Del.icio.us Websites

After commenting on Dave M’s comment from Thomas’ post, I thought Dave’s comment was a good idea and shouldn’t get lost under the comment section. It could become a mini post by itself.

So here’s the question (under the assumption that everyone will eventually have to open a Del.icio.us account, very easy to do):

Any suggestions for favorite websites?

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is a VC with Union Square Ventures, based in New York City. Fred and his company have been behind a number of successful and impactful Web 2.0 companies, including del.icio.us and FeedBurner. They are currently backing other important startups like Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy. 

Fred is a prolific blogger and a great tester of many of the technologies we’ll be discussing. Depending on your tastes, he’s also a great source for tips on new music.Fred’s blog is my first read every day.