The Steve Rubel Lifestream

Do you My Yahoo? I still do, occasionally, though I iGoogle more these days. I have been using My Yahoo for over 10 years, but what's great is that they haven't stayed still. Now My Yahoo is getting more social.

Yahoo today added a new social feature that lets you poll your friends right from the personalized page. You can grab it here. Unfortunately, this experience only integrates  with friends within the Yahoo network. You can, however, share a link to your polls. It would be great to see this more seamlessly integrate with Twitter and/or Facebook Connect since that's where people are spending time these days.

This is something I have been thinking about lately: as smart phones (pick one, any one) get more sophisticated, can one get away traveling for business sans laptop? For me the answer to date has been: sort of. Basically, if the trip is less than two nights and I know I won't need PowerPoint, I take the risk. Still, my laptops remain indispensible.

For more, see/comment on this post from Zee on Friendfeed. What's your view? As netbooks get thinner, lighter and cheaper this may all be a moot point.

   

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Friendfeed_Brings_Best_of_Day_.zip (756 KB)

One of my favorite Friendfeed features is called "Best of Day." I use it all the time to hone in on the most liked/commented conversations. If you're logged into Friendfeed, you can hit this link to see the most interesting conversations from your friends over the last 24 hours or this one for the past seven days. The problem with the feature, however, is that it only worked across all of your friends. This can be problematic if you follow hundreds of people, as I do.

Last night, however, Friendfeed quietly added a killer feature that brings "Best of Day" to lists - groupings of friends you categorize. Now you can more easily spot trends from friends. The screen grab below shows you the most interesting items over the last month just within my "favorites" list. This smart filtering of content plus the recent addition of real-time search on Friendfeed is exactly what those of us who participate in the social web need.

This incremental innovation gives me just another reason to be excited about Friendfeed. It's also why I love Gmail, Posterous and Evernote. They constantly keep innovating all the time even through the tough times.

Here's a fun little find for a Friday. If you have a Google Profile and you're logged in to your Google account, search for the word me. Your profile will come up as the top result. This is great if you get amnesia.

I took a quick trip uptown today to learn more about Tumblr and meet with their team. (I will have a video interview next week up with Tumblr's co-founder, David Karp.)

While I was there I shot this five-minute interview with Marco Arment, who developed Instapaper as a side project. (Follow him on Twitter @MarcoArment)

If you haven't tried the fantastic Instapaper service, be sure to check it out. Instapaper, which works on many mobile devices, is really for active web readers. It makes it a snap to save articles for future reading. Though we don't have it on video, Marco showed me some of the forthcoming features in Instapaper 2.1 for the iPhone. The new version, which should be out in a few weeks, has stronger integration with Twitter and Tumblr.

   

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My_Stats_Reflect_How_the_Web_I.zip (709 KB)

Robert Scoble is back to blogging, investing more time and attention this week there as opposed to Twitter and Friendfeed. He linked to me this week, which sparked my curiosity and encouraged me to dig into my Google Analytics archives to see a) how my traffic drivers have changed and b) what, if any, broader trends can be discerned.

For the purpose of this experiment I looked at two times when one of the web's most influential voices - then and now - linked to me: his post from earlier this week and another from December 27, 2006. While not entirely scientific, what they have in common is that a) Robert put the link at the top of the post and that b) both came during holiday weeks when web traffic typically slows. (In theory, to really test this I should track referrals from Scoble's Friendfeed/Twitter accounts - I suspect that they drive tons of traffic. However, that's hard to do given the way the sites are structured. Perhaps we can use Bitly stats to run a test)

Here's are my three takeaways from this little experiment (I am discounting the links from my old blog to this new one. It's an anomaly since I just switched) ...

I promised you when the site lanched that we would use it as a place to experiment with new formats and concepts in co-created content. Here's one. Maybe it will fail miserably, we'll see.

If you click on the box below, powered by Google Voice, you can leave me a voicemail message. I will curate the best of these and post them to the site in a follow-up as MP3s. I am open on topics, but specifically would like to hear your thoughts on where you see social media going in the next year.

I got the idea from Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek. Note that phone numbers won't be shared (you can keep it private if you want) and not all comments will make it on to the site - only the more interesting or, dare I say, entertaining ones. Also, please keep these brief if you can. Ideally, 60 seconds or less in length is best. Finally, note that by leaving a message you are giving me permission to pubish it here.

I keep a massive list on my computer called "Discovery." These are products and services I am evaluating both for potential Edelman use as well as to satisfy my own personal insatiable curiosity for new technology. I thought I would use the lifestream to open this up a bit.

Here's what I am checking out this week: Google Wave Preview, Slinkset, feedly, Evernote (particularly their new sharing features), Remember the Milk, Trendr, Chartbeat and an early beta of Mindmeister for the iPhone.

I am most intrigued by Google Wave (for more, see Gina's preview). I received an invite last night. However, I don't see anyway in the sandbox to invite others. Are any of you in the the sandbox? Maybe we can connect to each other to experiment.

What else is cool that I should be checking out? My "Discovery" gallery for this week follows.

       

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Google_Wave_Is_On_My_Radar_tag.zip (1338 KB)