Buzz Revived Friendconnect

The specificity of Google Buzz right now is that the early-adopting community barely talks about anything else but Google Buzz and how it works. We can literally observe how the collective intelligence of the community uses self-education to build a secure living environment for itself.

One way we can observe the significant growth of the community is through Google Reader. Many of you have probably noticed that your followers' count on Google Reader grew equally to the number of new followers that you generated on Buzz:



What we are seeing here is Friendconnect finally emerging as a practical social graph provider, enabling millions to share with the entire Google community from within their email inbox. Grand!

Send Google Docs Directly In Email

I am an heavy user of Google Docs, always on the look out on how I can boost my productivity with this cloud-based word/sheet editor. I have found some glitches between gmail and gdocs that sometimes make the Google experience incoherent. I noticed five minutes ago a new feature in the gdocs that will be very handy:



If you don't use Google Docs a lot, you might not know what I'm talking about. "Paste the item itself into the email". That's super convenient to directly send a text to someone when that was the initial intention, instead of sending the person a link to a document...

I like new features!

Delete Your Buzz Account!

Well privacy concerns that hubbubs around Google Buzz are being dealt with. This morning, I saw this new option in my Google profile:



All of a sudden, Google made it more flexible to just leave the network and close the door behind if we want, unlike Facebook who's blocked The Suicide Machine because it made it too easy to leave Facebook.

Pana.ma, the iPhone Twitter-like Voice App

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Twitter-like voice applications, so I would like to contribute by mentioning Pana.ma, a twitter-like kind of voice messenger. Pana.ma is available on the iPhone and the Android app is under development. The video below is in French, so if you don't speak our very dear language, just skip the video to see where I'm going with this:



Remi Vespa, the Business development director is my dad. The company he works for, Pana.ma, just launched the iPhone app and things are going pretty well so far. I've been following his company since he started working there, and I have to admit that they've been moving mountains around just to get this app out. While doing my time in the Valley, I studied a lot of tech startups: They all try to change our habits one way or the other, to add another piece of technology in our daily lives. Pana.ma offers to change our communications habits in a radical, yet more intuitive way: By being a voice soliloquist and a hubbub listener. So if you have an iPhone, just try it out!

Friendfeed Inflates Feedburner's Subscribers' Count

I recently discovered that your Frienfeed subscribers' counter has a direct impact on your Feedburner's subcribers' counter. As you can see below, I have linked a fresh new blog to my friendfeed account, and created a Feedburner URL for the blog's feed. The results are pretty conclusive: The blog suddenly got a a surge of subscribers (compare to its 0 average), and the feedcount is almost equal to my number of subscribers on Friendfeed:



Why does this saddens me? The Feedburner subscribers' count gives a fairly good clue on the influence one blog has. Knowing that you can pump up your RSS subscribers' count by following a ton-load of people on Friendfeed for follow-backs makes it flaky.

When I mentioned it to someone I collaborate with, his reaction was: "That's stupid, it's like counting Twitter followers as RSS subscribers!"

I'm not sure if I agree or disagree actually. Is an official RSS reader subscribers more valuable than a Twitter subscribers? Quite frankly, I'd like to see numbers to be convinced. What do you think? Could Buzz also influence the Feedburner subscribers' counter?

Facebook Fan Page Widget Bug

I like this Facebook Fan page widget bug. It shows 9594 fans instead of 94. This actually happens when my blog doesn't load properly, and seems to not be rendering scripts.



Obviously, the '94' in 9594 is my fans' count. But how about the '95'? Does Facebook preloads a +1 fan option every time the widget is called? Maybe, but from the looks of it, this info is totally useless anyway...

Contributing to @rwwfr

Today, the big news for me was my first post in ReadWriteWeb France. It's not the most amazing piece of content I have ever written, but I know that writing for this blog is good karma (how else can you explain the logo :)

Seriously, I always considered ReadWriteWeb as being an excellent resource for the smart geek, so becoming a part of the contributing team is deeply rewarding.

Naked People Through iPhone Augmented Reality App

Via a French Blog Agency's newsletter (XPrime ID), I landed on this Youtube video, and it put a smile on my face. It's all in French, but quite frankly, you don't even need subtitles to understand what goes on here. The developer who is introducing us to the Nomao app on the iPhone shows a secret feature that undresses everybody through augmented reality. Take a look, it's knee-slapping and mind-boggling at the same time.

Finally, augmented reality does more than just showing tweets and restaurant reviews...

For the story, Nomao is a French geolocalization search engine. They made this video (and this feature?) to promote the new augmented reality feature they added to their iPhone app.

De-Constructing Facebook's Walled Garden

The news about replying to Facebook comments directly from your email inbox is a warmly welcomed one. This feature will most definitely generate more social activity through Facebook's platform, which will in turn generate more crawlable, indexable and sellable public content. This intent is obvious because the new feature does not include inmails, even though the technology behind replying to inmails via email would be far less complicated then the one behind replying to comments via email.

By enabling email discussions, Facebook is de-constructing its own walled garden by taking away the link that was taking users on its site over and over again. On one hand, discussions will probably explode. On the other, Facebook might experience a slight loss of traffic velocity (because of email's remote activity). However, since data generation will increase, Facebook will become more competitive on Twitter's grounds, and we all know by now how dear this is to Facebook (and there's nothing wrong with that).

Hopefully, this feature will be enabled on Fan Page Comments as well. This will help all those Fan Page owners who are struggling to create interactions around their products.

As a side note, I wonder how much of the Friendfeed intelligence was involved in this new feature...

The Minitel, A Web's Ancestor

This, my good friends, is the Minitel, the ancestor to the Web. We French folks, have had that baby in our homes since the 80s. Hey have become really rare today, but when I visited my grand-parents during the holidays season, I found one in their living-room, so I thought I would share it with you.

For more info about the Minitel, read Wikipedia.