Toluu

louisgray.com

Early adopter. Thought leader. Silicon Valley tech geek blogger.

There Are Two Phones In this World: iPhone and Not iPhoneDecember 2

Forgive me Steve, for I once had sinned, and I come to you in confession to admit I had wronged you. For more than a year after iPhone was available to the public, I held off on buying one. I made all these excuses - that my BlackBerry was "good enough", that work was paying my monthly bills, that I was concerned about lackluster Exchange support, or switching to AT&T. I now know that I was naive, for my time as an iPhone owner has convinced me that there is no need for any other phones to be on this market. Be they Blackberry, Android, Nokia or any other, they simply aren't the iPhone, and they never will be.

The world can't pull the wool over your eyes the way they once did, can they, Steve? You once trusted others to work with you to expand your market share, and deliver a top-notch customer experience, but they stole from you and later, tried to kill you. And when you made the rare mistakes, to not find friends, your market share was eaten alive.

You won't make that mistake again, now, will you, Steve. You have learned that you can never stop making sure your product is the best. You have learned that it takes creating an ecosyste

10 People to Follow On FriendFeed for the Month of DecemberDecember 2

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It's that time again. The beginning of a new month, and also the time to highlight some unique, new and veteran members to follow on FriendFeed. In being true to one of my core values and practices of "promoting others more then I promote myself ", I like to give back any way possible, and I couldn't think of a more satisfying way of doing it. This time around, thanks to Louis Gray, who is one of FriendFeed's most influential evangelists, I have been given a bigger platform to shine the spotlight onto others.

Previous lists of top FriendFeeders to follow can be found for July, September and November

Pull Your Blog Into FriendFeed and Increase ExposureDecember 1

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I've been following several people on FriendFeed that I'm a big fan of and are fairly active Twitter users. Until recently, I would like their Tweets and share them with my followers regularly. However, I'm realizing a trend amongst new FriendFeed users, including some of these Twitter users I follow, in which they pick one or two services and neglect to share the other places they belong to. Perhaps the most important of those is their own blog. I'd like to suggest this is a mistake - and I think it's mostly a misunderstanding of what FriendFeed can actually do for your blog.

Let's start with a simple diagram. Let's say you're Bob, and you set up FriendFeed to import you blog automatically. You write a blog post, perhaps similar to this one, which in turn gets imported into FriendFeed.

Now, let's assume you're John in the diagram. You're following Bob, so automatically, Bob's blog

BigTweet Sends Tweets from Any Web Page (Up to 280 Characters)November 29

In one of my "couldn't be more wrong" predictions for the world of tech in 2008, I predicted that Twitter would move away from just offering text updates on its microblogging site, and would instead expand to possibly let users add pictures or even video, giving a better answer to "what are you doing?". Instead 2008 has been more about the site's native growth, the acquisiton of Summize, and just keeping the service up. Luckily, third party developers are finding new ways to leverage the site. Among them is a new bookmarklet-based site called BigTweet, that lets you share Web pages you find around the Internet and send them to your Twitter account. BigTweet even tries to double down on Twitter by letting you send upwards of 280 characters, should you want to. (Updates over 140 characters are broken into separate Tweets)

Sending a tweet from BigTweet's bookmarklet, to 280 characters

The concept of a bookmarklet is something that has grown increasingly familiar to

Not Everyone Reads Your Tweets, and That's Okay!November 26

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

As founder of SocialToo, a startup that has a Twitter auto-follow feature, I've heard my share of comments on why automatically following those that follow you on Twitter or elsewhere is or isn't a bad thing. Some people feel it is less genuine if you use a script to follow those that follow you, while others think that as your network grows it is hard to manually pick and choose those that should or shouldn't be followed.

A script makes this easier, and while it has the potential to introduce more spammers into those you follow, services like my own SocialToo.com provide tools to prevent that through manual and intelligent blacklisting of individuals you don't want it to follow. The "genuine" relationship issue is a concern that makes sense though, and it begs the question on whether following absolutely everyone can actually reduce the strength of relationships you have with those you follow. I think with that issue people are missing the point.

It's About Relationships

Twitter, FriendFeed, Fa