Mobile, social photo sharing is in vogue these days. Startups in this marketspace include Instagr.am and picplz. However, Path offers a different social networking experience. It takes a different approach from established social networks – Facebook with mutual following (you follow someone, the other person must Accept it) and on Twitter, you ‘pull’ others’ status updates to your stream (you can Follow anyone with public profile). But, on Path, you Share (or ‘push’) your photos (or moments) to your friends. But, your friends can easily stop your moments from appearing on their Paths.

Path is certainly eye candy for anyone. Capture any photo on your iPhone, tag them as people, place or things and share it with your chosen friends (see image below). Stream consists of snippets of photo; images nicely ‘cut out’ into rectangle boxes. Tap to view the full image and to find out who have seen the photo. You can also log into Path website to see your photostream and edit account settings. On Path, you can only share your moments with 50 people. It’s like having only 50 invites to your personal social network. Why 50? Co-founder Dave Morin wrote:

We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time. Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.”

Path is a nifty service. Expectations are high, and rightly so because of its impressive roster of well-known founders and investors. Can the company sustain its viability over time? What will be its business model? Will it suffer the unfortunate fate of the almost-similar startup radar? Or is Path an idea whose time has come? These and dozens of other questions (similarly faced by other startups) will be answered in the Path ahead.

UPDATE: According to Co-founder Dave Morin, Path is expected to be available in the Asian region through iTunes today.

The Path less travelled: Making your social network a little more personal originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 16, 2010.

You can start using Snip.ly service (still in alpha stage) without creating an account. To share your snips, you login to your Facebook and/or Twitter account. Enter address of a web page into the URL bar and click Next to start snipping. A Snip box will pop-up and highlight the text you want to share on your Twitter and/or Facebook streams (see below image). You can accompany the text with an image from the webpage (this makes your snip on Facebook Wall more visually appealing) and also add comments to your snips. Besides the website, you can use its bookmarklet to snip. Others can view and subscribe to your snipstream (your snip updates) on Snip.ly website.

Snip.ly is a simple service and a useful companion for web browsing, particularly to share your serendipitous discovery on Facebook and Twitter. It reminded me of Snipd.com (launched in 2008 and apparently inaccessible now), which allows you to capture text, images and videos on web pages. So, how is Snip.ly different from Snipd? Co-founder and CEO Zal Bilimoria wrote this on Quora:

Snip.ly is a simple way to consume and share what matters to you. We are designing the site to make it look and feel like a “web app” interface where you can more efficiently view your various feeds (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, etc.) directly on Snip.ly by checking out the snips — digestible chunks of info — associated with those links. We have also integrated a bookmarklet experience, similar to Snipd.com, for those users who wish to snip as they browse the web.

There are some shortcomings with Snip.ly, considering it is still in the alpha. Some wishlist items for its beta version:

• Better interface design for snipstream, to enhance browsing and navigation experience.
• Easier to re-share others’ snips on my Facebook and Twitter
• Vanity URL for user profile
• Ability to publish snips on Facebook Page.

Image credits: Edward Scissorhands – 20th Century Fox

Social sharing made easy with Snip.ly originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 11, 2010.

The 1st Generation Tweet consists of status update, date/time and source of tweet:

The introduction of Twitter Places (and soon-to-release multiple-author function) leads to the 2nd Generation Tweet, which consists of status update, date/time, source of tweet, geotag, and possibly, who wrote the tweet.

Twitter increasing information payload of tweets originally appeared on GreyReview.com on June 15, 2010.

By the way, in case you don’t know what Posterous is, it is a dead simple blogging service (and it seems Michael Arrington is a fan). Since its launch in June 2008, Posterous has mastered the art of incremental improvements and each feature release resulted in even greater simplification of blogging. Some of the fabulous features of Posterous are autopost everywhere, post tagging via email, group blogging, group blog doubled as email list and Posteorus iPhone app.

Now, back to the guessing game. According to the United Nations, the Earth population is expected to reach 7 billion by 2013. I assume there’s more than 100,000 Posterous users, judging from its increasing popularity. Now, with a current total of, say, 125,000 users and a stubbornly consistent 25% month-on-month growth for 49 straight months, Posterous’ user base will exceed the 7 billion mark by September 2013 (see here for the crude calculation). BUT, as Garry Tan indicated in his tweet, it’s an optimistic projection. Not to imply that there won’t be a groundswell of Posterous users, but the projection is sure bursting and brimming with wild flashes of optimism!

Current Posterous population at 125,000 with 25% month-on-month growth, how close to the actuals, Messrs Agarwal and Tan?

UPDATE: I’ve requested Garry Tan for feedback on the estimation, but he can’t comment.

Posterous to Surpass Earth Population by 2013 IF Only.. originally appeared on GreyReview.com on September 2, 2009.

In the beginning, Twitter is “a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. Over times, with its through-the-roof population growth rate, Twitter is becoming useful for discovering ‘what’s happening right now’ and ‘what people are saying about…’ With even larger user base of say, 1 billion users, it will becomes the ‘Pulse of the Planet.’ In short, Twitter is now a web utility to share information and also, search what people are talking about and sense what’s happening right now.

Users can search Twitter conversation streams on the Twitter homepage and this makes search.twitter.com redundant. The new interface also offers at-a-glance view the latest Trending topics, by minutes, day, week. Some Trending topics come with brief descriptions (see below).

The makeover revitalizes Twitter website. Before, its homepage is used for people to login and create accounts. With the search utility, the site now becomes functional to both Twitter members and non-members (anyone can use the search utility without registering a Twitter account). Twitter may add more features to enhance the appeal of twitter.com and possibly, turn it into a destination search platform, combining user-generated content and search utility. A precursor to contextualized ads rollout a’la Google Ads?

Twitter New Homepage Becoming A Destination Portal? originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 29, 2009.

Foldees @ddress: Email Goes Postal

Card sender enters the intended recipient’s email address during card customization process. If the email is not listed in the @ddress Directory, Foldees will request the recipient to enter mailing address at Foldees website. Once the email is in the @ddress Directory, anyone can send her a Foldees card (of course, as long as he knows her email address).

Email addresses in the Directory are searchable but users can set the display name and choose whether to reveal city /state details or not. Full mailing addresses are always hidden.

In addition to email, Foldees should extend @ddress to social networking services. It is probably easier to ask someone for her email address or social network IDs compared to postal addresses. @ddress may be an interesting service to send printed greeting cards to friends on Facebook, Twitter, Senatus, LinkedIn, et al.

Send Printed Greeting Card Without Postal Details with Foldees @ddress originally appeared on GreyReview.com on May 18, 2009.

Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there’s an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.

Enter Twitter Analytics, or simply just Analytwits (in the tradition of Twitter slang). These analytics tools are growing in numbers; even Twitter is developing them.

Besides Twitter Search, the following 8 Analytwits are some of the more useful web applications to analyze Twitter streams. Each of these tools serve specific purpose. They crawl and sift through Twitter streams; also, aggregate, rank and slice-and-dice data to deliver some insights on Twitter activities and trends. There’s no single best analytic tool available but use in combination, they can extract interesting insights from Twitter streams.

8 Great Tools for Social (Twit)telligence

TWITALYZER provides activities analysis of any Twitter user, based on social media success yardsticks. Its metrics include (a) Influence score, which is basically your popularity score on Twitter (b) signal-to-noise ratio (c) one’s propensity to ‘retweet’ or pass along others’ tweets (d) velocity – the rate one’s updates on Twitter and (e) clout – based on how many times one is cited in tweets. Its Time-based Analysis of Twitter Usage produces graphical representation of progression on various measures. Using Twitalyzer is a easy; just enter your Twitter ID and that’s it! It doesn’t require any password to use its service. Speed of analysis is depending on the size of your Followed and Followers lists.

MICROPLAZA offers an interesting way to make sense of your Twitter streams. Called itself “your personal micro-news agency,” it aggregates and organizes links shared by those you follow on Twitter and display them as newstream. Status updates that contain similar web links are aggregated into ’tiles.’ Within a tile, you can see updates from those you follow and also those you don’t. Another interesting feature is ‘Being Someone’, which you can peek into someone’s world and see their ’tiles’; designed to facilitate information discovery. You can also organize those you follow into groups or ‘tribes’. You can create, for example, a knitting ‘tribe’ to easily what URLs your knitting friends are tweeting. In addition, you can bookmark ’tiles’ for future reference. Its yet-to-be-released feature, Mosaic, allows users to group together the bookmarked ’tiles’ and turn them into social objects – for sharing and discussion. At the time of this posting, MicroPlaza is still in private beta.

TWIST offers trends of keywords or product name, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph. Select an area on the graph to zoom into trend for specific time range. Click on any point on the graph to see all tweets posted during a specific time. One can also see the latest tweets on the topic. Twist also allows you do a trend comparison of two (or more) keywords. Its graphs are embeddable on any website. A simple but effective tool for trending, similar to what Google Trends is doing for search queries.

TWITTURLY tracks popular URLs tracker on Twitter. With Digg-style interface, it displays 100 most popular URLs shared on Twitter over the last 24 hours. On Digg, people vote for a particular web content, whereas on Twitterurly, each time a user share a link, it is counted as 1 vote. This is a good tool to see what people are ‘talking’ about in Twitterville and see total tweets that carry the links. Its URL stats provides information on number of tweets in last 24 hrs, last 1 week and last 1 month. It also calculates total estimated reach of the tweets. Another interesting site is Tweetmeme, which can filter popular URLs into blogs, images, videos and audios.

TWEETSTATS is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter (TweetStats showed Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, started tweeting since March 2006; 80 tweets during that month). Twitterholic can also show when a person joined Twitter but not in graphical format. Other metrics include (a) Aggregate Daily Tweets – total tweets, by day (c) Aggregate Hourly Tweets – total tweets, by hour (d) Tweet Density: hourly Twitter activities over 7 days period (e) Replies to: top 10 persons you’ve replied and (f) Interfaces Used: top 10 clients used to access Twitter. In addition, its Tweet Cloud allows you to see the popular words you used in your tweets.

TWITTERFRIENDS focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users’ behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links. Its TwitGraph displays six metrics – Twitter rank, CQ, LQ, Retweet Quotient, Follow cost, Fans and @replies. Its interactive graph (using Google Visualization API) can displays relationships between two variables. In addition, you can search for conversations between two Twitter users. This app seems to slice-and-dice data in more ways compared to other applications listed here.

THUMMIT QUICKRATE offers sentiments analysis, based on conversations on Twitter. This web application identifies latest buzzwords, actors, movies, brands, products, etc. (called ‘topics’) and combines them with conversations from Twitter. It does sentiment analysis to determine whether each Twitter update is Thumms up (positive), neutral or Thumms down (negative). Click on any topic to display opinions on the topic found on Twitter. In addition, it allows people to vote on topics via its website or mobile phones. The idea behind this app is good but still has some kinks to work out.

TWEETEFFECT matches your tweets timeline with your gain/lose followers timeline to determine which tweet makes you lost or gain followers. It analyze the latest 200 tweets and highlights tweets that coincides with you losing or gaining two (or more) followers in less than 5 minutes. This application simplistically assumed that your tweet is the sole factor affecting your gain/lose followers pattern. But, in reality, there are many other factors involved. Nevertheless, TweetEffect is still a fun tool to use; just don’t take the results too seriously.

Let’s Continue the Discourse on Twitter

Which of the abovementioned Twitter analytics you like the most? How can these tools generate revenue? Have you discovered any other interesting Twitter analytics? Share your thoughts on Twitter; find me @zhiQ

8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams originally appeared on GreyReview.com on March 3, 2009.

The Return of Twitter’s Fail Whale originally appeared on GreyReview.com on February 11, 2009.

SearchMash is the experimental search engine, developed by Google. It was released for public in October last year. The search engine has been my choice of search engine since January 2008, as it offered a much more pleasant user experience, in terms of speed and uncluttered interface (imagine Google minus Google AdWords). And, not to mention its dashboard-style of displaying different categories of search results, namely images, blogs, video, wikipedia.

Unfortunately, Google has consigned SearchMash to “way of the dinosaur”. Since yesterday, the search engine became inaccessible. Maybe Google is planning a rebirth of SearchMash, maybe not. Google launched SearchMash with little fanfare in 2007 and now, the experimental search engine went out with a whimper (no coverage on TechCrunch) (see coverage on TechCrunch).

A look of its traffic pattern for the past three months, SearchMash traffic is noticeably constant, non-growth. The graph below shows the traffic patterns of SearchMash and Microsoft-owned search engine, Powerset.

Traffic Patterns of SearchMash and Powerset

A sad day for me. Reluctantly, I’ve to set my default search engine back to Google.

It was nice using you, SearchMash!

Google Shut Down its Experimental SearchMash originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 21, 2008.

Google Chrome is probably the first browser designed for the Age of Web Computing (George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, called Executable Internet). It is created from the ground up to accommodate the demands and challenges of modern interactive web applications.

Introducing Google Chrome

The following section highlights what’s new with Google Chrome:

User Interface
Layout Structure	Tabs-on-Top Tabs are located on top of navigation bar. More browser real-estate “File, Edit, View” menu bar not available. Options and controls are accessible via these two icons, located on the right-hand side of the browser. This translates to bigger ‘browser real-estate’ without sacrificing easy accessibility to functions and controls. Agile Tabs ,which can be moved from window to window (and the tabs retain its state). The example below shows “Technology Review” tab being dragged. Drag by holding down your mouse left button and once released, the tab will open in a new window. Integrated URL and search bar. Google called it omnibox. In addition to URLs of visited sites, omnibox can handles search, sites recommendations, etc. If you have used a search engine at a website, say CNN.com. The next time you type the URL, you can press TAB to directly search CNN from the omnibox. Full text search over browsing history. Window for App This window shows no browser UI; displays just the app. Below is a screenshot of Gmail app window. Download status at the bottom of browser window, similar to what Download Status extension can do on Firefox. The downloaded file can be drag-and-drop anywhere.
Tab Page	Display nine favorite sites, search ‘history’ box, recent bookmarked sites and recently closed tabs.
Security
Sandboxing	Stripped browser processes all its right; can compute but can’t write files or access sensitive areas in your computer. Isolated “sandbox” involves confinement of browser of processes; the confined perimeter can be defined based on permissions – low, medium, high. Closed browser tab to terminate rogue processes. “Incognito” mode for more private browsing; similar to Safari’s Private Browsing and IE In-Private mode.
Stability
Multi-processes	With its Multi-process design, each tab is a separate process. Each process is isolated with its own memory and global data structure. A tab with rogue process won’t crash the whole browser. Can restore crashed tab to state before crash.
Memory management	When a tab is closed, the process is destroyed and the browser gets to reclaim back the memory. Memory leak can be easily contained by just closing tab with ‘rogue’ process. Built-in Task Manager to see which sites are hogging memory. Moving from Site A to Site B are treated as two distinct processes. So, browsing with Google Chrome is a constant creation and obliteration of processes.
Speed
JavaScript Engine	Google Chrome’s new V8 JavaScript engine enables dynamic code generation. It converts JavaScript source codes directly to machine codes, which in turn, interact with your CPU. This turbo-charged execution. Also, its Hidden Class Transitions, in which objects with similar properties will share the same hidden class, enables dynamic optimization.

Source: Google Chrome Comic

When Google signed a marketing deal with Mozilla back in 2006, many thought Google will use Firefox to enter the browser market. Last week, the Internet search giant extended the deal to 2011.

However, building a browser from ground up makes more sense for Google because this approach is without path-dependent legacy, development assumptions, designs and other coded constraints. With a clean slate, Google can fully exert its creativity and authenticity when developing the new browser. This resulted in the development of multi-process architecture and V8 JavaScript engine. A quote by Albert Einstein aptly apply in this case:

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

In Search for Web Supremacy

“Google lives on the Internet,” said Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager (in Google Chrome comic). Google’s business is tightly-weaved to the Web and already has arrays of web-centric services, namely search, email, photo organizer, chat, map, online video sharing and interactive maps.

Currently, Google is spearheading two major industry initiatives – open source mobile platform, Android and open Web API for social networking sites, OpenSocial. With Chrome open source project, the search giant aims to influence the technological direction in the browser market and further catalyze the adoption growth of web-centric applications.

Better browser leads to improved Web applications performance and better user experience. This, in turn, catalyzes greater diversity, novelty and variety of applications / services to generate vibrancy in the Web ecosystem. A vibrant, bustling Web is, indeed, good business for Google.

Verdicts: Google Chrome offers a new kind of user-browser interfacing experience. I admire its ‘fluid’, agile and dynamic tabs, something other browsers don’t have. Google also rethink and remodel the way we interact with bookmark. Of course, last but not least, the integrated search-URL is smart and much more awesome than Firefox’s Awesome Bar. In a nutshell, Google Chrome is fresh, snappy and so much fun to use.

Google Chrome is available for download here (Windows only; Mac and Linux versions will be available soon).

Google Chrome Tailor-Made for Web Computing originally appeared on GreyReview.com on September 3, 2008.

FriendFeed launches its beta look. Here are some highlights of the new interface:

• Post, where users can easily post message, link or photo and select which feed to post it to.

FriendFeed Post

• All-in-One Sidebar. FriendFeed is shifting the tabs from the top to the side.

FriendFeed Sidebar

• Friends Categorization Now you can categorize your Friends into various categories. The Friend Settings page is less cluttered.

FriendFeed Friend Categories

FriendFeed Friend Settings

• Organized Display of Feeds In My Feeds section, feeds are organized into three tabs – ‘Feeds’, ‘Comments + Feeds’ and “You + Friends”. All streams added to FriendFeed are neatly organize below the tabs and acts as Filter. If you click, say Twitter icon, your Twitter entries will be displayed.

FriendFeed My Feeds

Overall, FriendFeed is making its functionalities more accessible from its ‘landing’ page and streamlined the organization of its contents. It is also making posting of contents easier, with its new Post bar. It’s almost like Twitter-ization of FriendFeed. Facebook made the similar move with its repositioned Status Update bar (see here).

Rather than “parasiting” on other social services for activity streams or contents, FriendFeed wants its users to generate more contents from within FriendFeed. It is the next logical move for FriendFeed.

New FriendFeed Interface Design

FriendFeed with New Look and Strategy originally appeared on GreyReview.com on August 26, 2008.