I understand the whole premise of network building for these people. Build a big network and hope down the line you’ll find some valuable contacts along the way. But network building on last.fm? Shilling loans on a music social network doesn’t make much sense to me. Sure there are forums and whatnot, but the site is essentially for cross pollinating your music tastes with others and being able to find new music. It’s probably a little smarter if this person wants to integrate into the community they avoid using such an obviously spammy username and actually listen to some music to build up their account a bit. I mean, far be it for me to tell someone how to spam, as that really isn’t my forte, but this really seems like they might be barking up the wrong tree. Safe to say I clicked ignore.

I came to a realization this week. RSS is really dead to me. If you asked me a year or 2 ago I would have probably told you that RSS was a technology that would be an internet building block going forward into the future. But in the last year I’ve found using the combination of Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Stumble Upon, Facebook and friends in the office over messenger has pretty much changed that. I used to love using Netvibes. I had multiple themed tabs, loaded with various feeds, all of which were from sites I liked. But then I realized I had a problem. Too many feeds. I no longer even wanted to open up Netvibes, since it took awhile to load up all these different feeds.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that I need all my content aggregated. Be it by the masses, friends on Twitter, Facebook or over an MSN conversation, I like that someone has certified this content as worthwhile to check out, be it on a wisdom of crowds level or a personal level. Therein lies the problem with RSS. The stuff that appears in my reader is unfiltered, directly from the source. Aside from my original stamp of approval that lead me to add the feed to Netvibes, there is no way of telling whether the content that is published is of any value to me. Sure there are feeds that supply 100% must read content, but what about those that only about 25% of what is published is of interest to me? To me this is a fatal flaw to the whole system. With no way filtering the stuff of interest for me, it really becomes useless. As we all know the web is just a never ending onslaught of content, so being able to distill what is of interest to me is definitely key. Is RSS dead? I guess only time will tell.

This is a topic I’ve refrained from talking about for awhile, but I think probably many people can relate to this problem. Friends who don’t use Facebook. This last weekend Corina and I hosted our annual Halloween party. We had a full house show up and everyone had a blast, yet still the most common refrain from friends were inquiries about people who don’t use Facebook and whether they had been invited. In most cases my response was no. Sure, I feel bad about not inviting some of my friends, but having to chase them down via phone, email or MSN has just become too much of a hassle, especially when compared to the ease of use the site allows me when organizing an event. In most cases its not just one person that I need to contact, but many. The problem multiplies exponentially the more people you need to contact. It just becomes a vicious cycle or telephone tag, emails for people who essentially want special treatment because they have chosen to be out of the loop. Generally people who don’t use Facebook just complicate my life by adding multiple additional steps to organizing any type of social gathering anymore.


I find that most people that I know who don’t use Facebook do so with the mindset that they are somehow bucking the trends and avoiding the herd mentality of others around them. I can relate, I resisted the lure of Facebook for quite awhile before giving in. Since then I’ve come to realize that Facebook is less a social network and more of a phase in the next generation of communication. Smoke signals, morse code, carrier pigeon, telephone, email, instant messenger. They are all means with which we’ve used to communicate between people. To me, Facebook has become the way to communicate with my friends that I don’t see on a regular basis, and I know it has for many others out there. It has become such a crucial tool that those who choose to ignore it essentially becomes recluse in my life. Facebook is so commonplace now that it seems about as stupid as raging against the telephone. It just doesn’t make any sense.

For those who don’t use Facebook, I’m not telling you that you need to join and add your 3rd grade girlfriend as a friend, I’m just saying sign-up, add the people you would consider friends, turn up the profile security, turn off all the notifications aside from events and your inbox. You don’t have to share every gory detail of your life just because you sign-up. Just enable people you know to be able to contact you and include you in what is going on in their lives. To me this doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

I recently installed a new website analytics tool that was just recently released to the public, BLVD Status. After using it for the last couple days I can say it pretty much rocks the socks off anything else I’ve been using to track traffic. I currently use Clicky, Ice Rocket, Feedburner and MyBlogLog to gather information on traffic for my sites. They all typically did a couple things well, but always had some aspect of that they didn’t do that would necessitate another tool to gather that data. This service has pretty much made all of them obsolete.

BLVD Status put the whole stat tracking package together. You can track all the stuff you would expect, like recent visitors, referrers, search keywords and outgoing links. Where it goes above and beyond is with the ability to track your RSS feeds, tell you how many subscribers you have and how many people are currently on your site. The search keywords is what really blew me away. It tells you where in the Google ranking your result is, which is pretty awesome.

There is an in-depth mode that allows you to delve deeper into the stats, finding where a particular user is from and how long they spent on the site in their visit. You’ll notice there at the bottom they even include tips to tell you how this data relates to the overall picture of your site. For a stats junky like myself this website is amazing.

Update Jul 18/08 This article got Stumble Upon-ed yesterday, so hi to any Stumblers finding the site for the first time. I wanted to update this article a bit to address something that only really became apparent to me after seeing a traffic influx from SU. There is no big picture outlook with BLVD Status. It took me a bit of looking at the stats before I noticed I had received a spike in my traffic. This was always something I liked about IceRocket. When you hit the first page of stats it shows you a graph of the previous week for hits and visits. Looking at that it’s pretty plain to see a traffic influx as there is a big spike in the graph. The foot traffic tab shows this info, but I’d prefer to have the option to see it in graph form. I’ll see about mentioning this to the developers.

I discovered this new site(well at least to me) which I thought was quite cool. It’s called The Daily Plate and it’s a site aimed at helping you eat smarter. I find myself I would like to be a little more health conscious, make some better food decisions and possibly lose some weight in the process. I find the biggest problem I have is that I have no idea how good or bad the food I’m eating might be, or how that relates to other things I might eat in a given day. This site is very handy because it allows you to look up pretty much anything. If you ate a 3 piece chicken strips from Wendy’s or a poppy seed bagel with Jif peanut butter, it’s in their database with all the nutritional information. You can even build preset meals, so if you eat the same breakfast from a local restaurant frequently, you can just add it as a meal instead of searching for each individual item every time. You can also keep track of activities, even the most minute stuff. I walk 5 minutes from and to my car every day, so I log 10 minutes of brisk walking, as well as a couple of minutes of stair walking once inside our building. I think I saw you could even log hand washing if you want to be that anal about it.
I changed the start page on my browser to open TDP as my homepage, so it reminds me to use the site everyday. I just take a few minutes out of my day and update it as I might eat things during the day. Though I did kinda turn a blind eye to it on the weekend. I went to an Epicurious party on Friday night and had no clue how to even log a bunch of sampling and snacking. Then on Sunday we had a Chinese Buffet lunch for Mother’s Day, so I didn’t even want to know how many calories that would have been. For those who are really into the site, they even have a mobile site. Unfortunately you can’t login and track your food unless you are a gold member of the site through their WAP interface. But you can search for the nutritional info on the site, you just can’t log it. Either way it’s still handy if you have WAP capabilities. Since I use my iPod all the time for its Wi-Fi capabilities these days, I just had to check that out.