Month: January 2009

Not sure if it’s Google Reader or FeedBurner, but this is not cool:

Skitch.com > samharrelson > GoogReaderFail

Six hours of latency. Six.

Track will kill the RSS star.

Earlier this week, I lamented on Google’s poor handling of FeedBurner since acquiring the service.

Instead of capitalizing on FeedBurner’s large amount of inertia and kind feelings towards the service from the influence-sphere of bloggers, Google has relegated FeedBurner to the back shelf of its growing collection of dolls and toys.

In a post about the coming possibilities of a “ping economy” (attention economy?), Steve Gillmor points out the growing latency (ie impotency) of FeedBurner and how Google has mis-handled RSS notifications within Google Reader in general:

The Realtime Ping Server: “Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.”

Such a shame. FeedBurner could have taken blogging and pinging to the 2.0 level with more instantaneous notifications of updates. Instead, Google placed more “relevant” ads on our feeds and moved on.

Nothing to see there (except the ads, of course).

It had to happen sooner than later:

Phishing Scam Spreading on Twitter | Chris Pirillo: “A few minutes ago, I received a direct message from one of my twitter followers:

“hey! check out this funny blog about you… jannawalitax . blogspot . com”

DO NOT VISIT the URL in question. It will redirect you immediately to a suspicious domain
: twitter . access-logins . com – notice the subdomain? “

Twitter needs to deploy a trusted login system for 3rd party apps instead of relying on users to always input their usernames/passwords. Soon.

Oh, and don’t open DM links from people you don’t know. Why in the world would someone do that?? Did we not all learn our lesson from email? Sigh.

Maybe this will cause more people to slash-and-burn the people they are following to actual people they know and/or trust (like I did last month) rather than binging on thousands of follows.

[Updated: This comment on Chris’ post is the voice of reason in the Twitter wilderness:

Best way to avoid these kind of situation is to not ‘follow’ everyone! Its just pointless as there is no way you can ‘really follow’ every single one of them..It just causes an information overload and makes this ‘useful service’ not so useful anymore..

If you are not following that person, he shouldn’t be able to send you a DM….Right? So if you follow people carefully, you can actually control how much ’spam’ you get.

Following everyone is like ..giving away your home address to everyone you meet so that they can send you Junk.

Preach it, Saad Kamal.]