Robert Scoble is a one of the thought leaders and innovators on the web today.  He is a smart, engaging guy who gets around to listen and exchange ideas with many of the other web leaders. Scoble’s a great favorite of mine and when he speaks, I listen.  And so do a lot of other people.

On his blog today ,Scobleizer — Exploring the 2010 Web Scoble talks about going back to basics and refocusing on his blog. He talks about what some have called his obsession with Twitter and Facebook, where he has, in fact, been a major player. Scoble explains this by saying “All my fun experiments were over on Twitter, Facebook, or friendfeed. You could see that. Mike Arrington even tried to do a friendfeed intervention last December.”  So now, Scoble is trying to bring that sense of fun, experimentation and real time zest into his newly re-invented blog.  He is also trying to show the rest of us now to do the same, in real time.

(About a week ago I posted From The Mouth of A Guru: Why You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet which has many of the same caveats about the value of focusing your work on your own blog and letting Twitter be your outpost.)

In that vein Scoble lays out what he thinks the future of the web will look like:

“1. It’s real time. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are all moving toward architectures and displays that refresh in real time, or let you see what’s happening right now. We are at the extreme beginnings of that trend. You really should watch the video of the panel discussion I moderated on the state of real time search to get a sense of where this is going. That panel discussion will be remembered for years as a key point. One of the panel members runs Facebook search team. Yes, Facebook is working on real time search. (That video is in two parts since the meeting ran almost two hours long. I really do recommend watching it. Part I is here. Part II is here.).
2. It’s mobile. You’ll see this more next week when the Where 2.0 conference rolls into town, but if 40,000 iPhone apps hasn’t convinced you yet, nothing will. On Monday I’m meeting with Nokia to find out the latest.
3. It’s decentralized. Look at my behaviors. I’m all over the place. Six years ago I did only one thing: blog. Now I Flickr. YouTube. Seesmic. Friendfeed. Facebook. Twitter. And many more. Go to Retaggr and see all the places I’m at.
4. Pages now built out of premade blocks. You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages. See the friendfeed block to the right of my words? I added that by copying and pasting from the friendfeed widget page. If you know where to look a TON of cool pre-built blocks like this are available for you to put on your website or blog.
5. It’s social. This seems obvious to anyone on Twitter or Facebook, but how many businesses add their customers to their pages? Not many. Silicon Valley has done a horrible job so far of explaining why adding people to your websites matters.
6. It’s smart. We’re seeing more and more smarts added to the web every day. Tonight Wolfram’s new search engine turned on. Have you played with it? That’s the 2010 web and check out what you can do with it.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. When I visited 12seconds.tv in Santa Cruz they told me they were using a hybrid approach: they own a rack of servers but they also use Amazon’s S3 to “cloud burst” or take up the slack for files that are popular…

PR People: I even made a place you can pitch me on 2010 web ideas. It’s interesting that a bunch of people are subscribed to that room — probably lots of tech bloggers looking for ideas.”

I put in that last link so those of you who are bloggers could go fishing there for ideas.

I’m certainly going to watching the evolution of Scobles newlly updated blog and trying some of the same tools and strategies myself.  Are you?  If you do, please leave a comment and tell us what works for you and what doesn’t.  We all in this giant web conversation together, now that Web 3.o and the interconnections of social media and dynamic linking have arrived

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t put out a blog, manage several websites, keep up with the social media and work with clients if I didn’t have lots of help from fast, efficient online tools and services which speed up the process and make it more effective.  One of my favorite services which I use every day, is Zemanta which is co-pilot of my blog, offering relevant links, suggesting keywords, providing related articles in case I want to poke around the blogosphere a bit, and, usually, providing a pretty good graphic I can append to give a little pop to the story.  There are many more excellent, time saving services out there.

Orli Yakuel,  who maintains GO2WEB20 Blog and Go2web20.net, the largest online directory for Web 2.0 applications worldwide, says she enjoys keeping herself on the forefront of the ever-evolving Web 2.0 industry; her take on these services is in  10 Services with Realtime Functionality:

It seems like “Real-time” is a term that’s getting a lot of usage lately and seeing a rise in terms of trends. Services that have some kind of real-time functionality surely receive more attention from users. The reason it gets so much attention is not just because it’s trendy, in most cases it can simplify online work. The rise of it also derives from the need to do everything faster and more efficiently, after all, it’s part of the web evolution. Now, of course not every service should have this ability, but for many services this real-time function can offer a huge added value to the people who use them. Here are some good examples: EtherPad is a realtime collaborative text editing service. As you edit the document area, your changes are seen live by everyone else. You can create your own pad and share with up to 8 people. There’s no account required. This makes it easy to use the product, but also means you can’t keep track of a list of your pads online. SkyGrid streams filtered content in realtime. The service gathers up millions of articles online – including top mainstream business news sites, blogs, news releases, and other information. Then SkyGrid filters the articles to find which ones are from trusted sources. chartbeat shows you real-time traffic to your website and allows you to set alerts for any downtime or spikes in traffic. In addition, chartbeat lets you track arbitrary search terms in twitter. Monitor your website name, URL, or anything else you’d like. Friendfeed (beta) streams you & your friends updates in realtime. You’ll see your friends’ photos and messages stream in as they’re shared. Comments and likes also get displayed as they happen. Still missing the speed control feature. Delicious Spy allows you to see in realtime what people are saving to their delicious accounts right now. You can share links directly to Delicious, Digg or Reddit network from within this app, and you can also save links for later (something that Friendfeed should embrace) Twitzap is a realtime Twitter monitoring app. You can create channels, and track the stuff that matters you the most. On top of that, TwitZap users can tweet each other in realtime using the Twitter accelerator technology even while Twitter is down. I wrote about Twazzup few days ago. It’s a realtime search engine for Twitter updates, with lots of useful features. I switched from the regular twitter-search and never looked back… This one is absolutely a treasure. It’s an image search powered by twitter & twitpic that shows realtime saved pictures. TwiPICK lets you to search by keywords and also show you the number of Retweets ontop of the picture itself. You can stop the madness in anytime. Monitter is a personal twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying about stuff that matters to you. If you haven’t tried Zemanta go download it now, or at least try their interactive Demo! So far I tried this on my blog platform (Blogger) and my Gmail – Overall, it searches relevant links & photos while you’re typing your blog post or email. Amazing little plugin with an excellent usability. Update: I don’t know how it slipped my mind but Blip.fm is also a fine service that enables you to see your friends published music in realtime. Get instant blip updates from the entire community. And listen to free streaming music from a global community of internet DJs. Labels: real-time, twitter

Explore the various sections of Nambu for OS X here, and click on the sections you are interested in learning more about.

Move between different possible views: single column, accounts with messages, or multiple columns.

Manually get new messages, or let Nambu adjust to grab them as quickly as possible.

Send a new message anytime without wasting space on a open window.

Extensive Twitter support: Mentions, Direct Messages, Favourites and more.

Separate people into special groups for distinct, more timely following.

Start a persistent Twitter search to track what people are saying.

Enter a live keyord filter to find that set of tweets you are looking for.

Act on any message with the operations menu: retweet, reply, and a lot more.

See actual website names for shared links to know where you will go.

Monitor your persistent searches for new entries or keep up the latest trends.

There are all kinds of apps popping up to help you keep in touch with co-workers, friends and, of course, your favorite social sites at a glance. Niche connection sites like Yammer and Socialcast let you connect with people in your organization. Blellow is a new and promising communication and collaboration tool for communities of interest, like entrepreneurs or web developers. It’s getting plenty of buzz at the moment. Guy Kawasaki even Tweeted today about having his own Twitter at http://laconi.ca/trac/; best I could tell, kind of a bare bones, do-it-yourself Twitter. But the epicenter of connection right now is for social sites, apps enabling the second by second buzz or real time news, trendy happenings, mainly on the web, gossip and daily trivia, like, as Guy Kawasaki puts it “my cat rolled over” or, more interestingly, and conveying that you are definitely in the loop, “I’m on the plane from Barcelona.” Duct Tape Marketing, today, even explained how you could set up your own social media dashboard.

The One Page Social Media Dashboard

I looked at it, and, although doable it seemed like a bit of a project.  I’m leaning more towards Jennifer Van Grove‘s preferred screen Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites.  Here’s how she sees it:

“You’ve got Facebook friends, Twitter followers, FlickrFlickr reviews photos, and probably plenty of other social sites that you keep your eye on. So how do you keep up and engage with all the new content that’s constantly being added by friends?

You could try social aggregators and lifestreaming options like FriendFeedFriendFeed reviews or Strands, but if those are just too much, but interacting with Facebook and Twitter updates isn’t quite enough, you can find a happy medium in Skimmer — an Adobe AIR desktop client for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger.

Skimmer, which launches in beta today, is equal parts content aggregator, lifestream, and status updater with a penchant for visual stimuli. The site aims to strip away some of the bloated feature sets of other desktop apps, enhance your overall viewing experience, and keep the content dynamic but limited to five of the most popular social sites.

Once you download and install the application, you can connect your TwitterTwitter reviews, FacebookFacebook reviews, Flickr, YouTubeYouTube reviews, and Blogger accounts to start getting a stream-like view of your contacts’ updates. You can even view TwitPics in-line, filter your feed by keyword, service, or contact groups, and cross-post status updates to Facebook and Twitter. Skimmer also offers a few viewing and customization options, so you can alter the size and color scheme of the app to make it fit your personal preferences.

Where Skimmer really shines is via the Flickr and YouTube photo and video viewing experiences. Not only is the application’s design sleek, but it provides a superb, freshly-windexed window into content from both sites.

With Flickr, you can view you or your friends’ photos (quickly skim through sets or the entire photostream), view counts, and comments, as well as watch slideshows, with an experience is arguably more visually impressive than Flickr itself. With YouTube, users can view videos, comments, tags, views, and ideally do the same for videos from friends.

Skimmer is very obviously a beta service, and even though some of the bugs diminish from the overall experience, it’s still an interesting and entertaining desktop application that doesn’t try to do too much.”

Let me know if you set this up, and how you like it.  I’m off now, I wish to Barcelona, but, more likely, to watch my cat roll over. ( But, come May, to D.C. for web business building, and possibly in June to Barcelona.)

Pete Cashmore, CEO at Mashable, a social media company, and one of the most followed Tweeters on the Net at 319,528
Followers explains #followfriday at Mashable on Tumblr – How #FollowFriday and Hashtags Work. :

Since a lot of people are asking me about hashtags, and a Tweet isn’t enough space to explain, a few quick lines on how hashtags and #followfriday work:

1. Hashtags are used to identify a topic on Twitter. Add # to the front of a word to make it a topic. Example: #followfriday

2. #followfriday is a game in which people suggest who to follow on Twitter. It helps everyone find interesting Tweeps. You list the users you recommend following and add “#followfriday” so people can find your tweet. My suggestions: #followfriday @adamostrow @sharonfeder @jbruin @adamhirsch

3. You can find everyone’s #followfriday suggestions here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23followfriday

Hope that helps.

PS. Pete had nothing to do with the invention of #followfriday. You can thank @micah for that!

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