#Spymaster: Tips for the Twitter Game

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” – Auric Goldfinger

Update: If you’re here for the invite, add me on Twitter, and fill out the comment below. By adding me, I can DM it to you so I don’t hafta send the invite along the public timeline.

Chances are, if you’re on Twitter this evening, you just got an invitation to go play Spymaster. If you haven’t gotten an invitation yet, just leave your Twitter address in the comments, and I’ll make sure you get an invite.

Currently the game is invitation only, but the invites are spreading like wildfire at the moment, so it’s not all that exclusive of a club.

If you haven’t wasted time before playing MySpace or Facebook Mafia-Wars / Mob-Wars style games, then how to effectively play may elude you at first.  In an effort to cash in on this soon-to-be craze, I figured I’d offer the benefit of my experience, since I’ve whiled away far too many hours on the dozens of other clones in this style of game.

There’s definitely a trick to playing this game.  There’s more than likely a number of ways to skin the cat, but I tend to play the same strategy because it generally works better than any other I’ve tried.

My strategy overall is to focus first on getting the most experience for the least amount of energy spent, and then to focus strictly on maximizing profit through investments (or, as they’re called in this game, safehouses).

It sounds simple enough, but there are number of ways to get off track if you aren’t careful.

Game Basics
I’m going to more or less assume you grasp the basics of how the game works, if you’re reading this.  If not, a quick recap:

• You’re a spy.  Either for the KGB, MI6 or CIA.
• You’re supposed to do spy stuff, and you get paid for it as well as gain experience (tasks).
• You apparently have a license to kill (assassinate).
• You’re also an agency recruiter, responsible for convert spys (inviting to game).
• Your boss is a cheap bastard, and you hafta buy your equipment on the black market.
• You’re interested in buying (and what, sub-letting?) safehouses.
• You keep your money in a Swiss Bank Account, because let’s face it, you don’t hear them asking congress for a bailout these days, do you?

The overall goal is rather nebulous, but you’re motivated by not being too weak as a character, so that you’re not easy pickings for your enemies.

What You Actually Need to Pay Attention To
There are dozens of numbers and statistics that are thrown at you in games like this, and while they’re all generally fun to look at, they’re really only there to distract you from your goal, which is to be the richest and highest-level spy on the game.

Here are the stats in Spymaster to pay attention to:

• Spymasters – these are people who follow you on Twitter that’ve joined the game.
• Overall Funds – this is the amount of money you’ve racked up.
• Energy per Turn – you can deduce this simply enough; whenever the “refresh in” counter reaches 0:00, take a look and see how much your energy level jumped by.
• Maximum Energy – this gives you an idea as to how long you need to wait before you’re fully charged.  If you’re getting 25 energy every 5 minutes, and your max energy is 129, then you want to visit the game every half hour for maximum character advancement.

Why Are These Stats So Important?
What probably alerted you to the game were the assassination attempts you saw flash by on Twitter. Assassinations play an important role in any game like this, but if you want to survive long enough to win any of those attempts (or survive attempts perpetrated against you), you need to be well equipped.

What’s ironic is though it’s tempting to jump right in and start poppin’ caps into your friends’ Twitter accounts, if you want to actually win an assasination attempt once in a while, it’s the last thing you should start out doing.

Your First Steps to a Life of International Mystery
Your first stop should be to perform as many tasks as you can to start so you can get some operating capital. I suggest for best efficiency at level one to do the task that requires 10 energy. You get the same experience for that as you do the higher energy task, and the money you gain at this level is negligible compared to what you’ll be pulling down later on.

After that, head straight over to the black market.  Remember that first number I told you to remember?  Your spymaster number is important here. Buy enough weapons and armor to cover everyone in your spymaster ring.  You can theoretically buy more than that and it will increase your defense and attack scores, but the there’s a diminishing return to that.

Now it’s time to play the waiting game: since you’re armed up fairly well, you can afford to take a break and come back after a while.

While you’re waiting, it’s a good idea to invite as many people to the game as you think you can get away with.  The real power in these sorts of games comes from having a lot of folks in your Spymasters group, since that (and your character level) are the biggest influencing factors on how easily you can be killed.

Your First Goal: Gain Level 3
Once you’ve come back to it, you want to get to level three as quickly as possible.  Assuming you’re not the impatient type and you didn’t take your turns every five minutes, so you’ve got nearly full energy right now.

Go ahead and perform the 10-energy task until you’ve run out of energy or attained level three, whichever comes first.

Your Second Goal: Get a Safehouse
Once you’ve attained level three, your goals change again, and this means you’ve got to change the way you approach your tasks.

Your goal now is no longer to get to as high of a level as possible, your goal is to get as much money as possible, and as quickly as you can. The reason here is that, as I said, the best asset you can have is a large Spymaster count.  The problem with that is you’ve got to provide guns and armor for every one of your Spymasters, which can get pretty expensive.

Just like in real life, rather than actually working for that money, the best way to keep that expense paid for is to invest.  I’m not sure the in-story reason that owning a safehouse is making you money (perhaps you’re subletting?), but owning real-estate, as in life, is generally a good  investment.

The game assumes you can’t qualify for a sub-prime mortgage, and makes you pay for the safe-house up front.  This means you’ll need to come up with $80,000 to purchase the cheapest one you can find, a German condo.

The quickest way to get there, if you’ve followed these instructions so far, is to continue to perform the 10-energy task.  This may seem particularly counter-intuitive, and it is.  Here’s the explanation why:

If you’ve been performing the 10-energy task exclusively up until this point, you’ve likely gotten the proficiency of that task fairly high.  It’s a low risk task, which means it’s hard to fail anyway, but with a high proficiency, you’re almost guaranteeing yourself that you’ll receive compensation towards the higher end of the spectrum (the spectrum being $900 to $1,500).

On the other hand, you’ll waste a lot of turns and time failing while you learn the brand new level three 20-energy task.  The reward is higher, once you’re good at it ($2,100 - $3,500), but with your null proficiency, you’re guaranteed that you’ll recieve the low end of the compensation scale.

Thus two 10-energy turns will equal $~3000, whereas one 20-energy turn will probably equal closer to $2000.

Since your focus is solely money, the choice is clear.

Update: Since I’ve been playing the game today, I’ve noticed something that should have been obvious had I not been typing this long after my bed time.  Right around the time your proficiency in a task reaches 25-40%, your returns start diminishing significantly.  When this happens, you should switch up to the 20-energy task until you reach level 5.

Where to go from here?
Keeping in mind that I’m only a little bit less new to this version of the game than you are, I’ll give you the formulas I tend to work with, and let you adapt them as they work best for you.

Once you’ve gotten your $80k condo in Germany, you need to spend some time crunching the numbers on the real-estate market.  Your first purchase will be netting you money even when you’re not playing the game, which will allow you to more easily purchase more real-estate and more equipment.

This allows you from this point forward in the game focus on taking tasks based on what will gain you experience, purely, while letting all the money from your real-estate investments roll over into future investments.  I played this strategy on the MySpace version of Mob Wars, and within a month, I literally had more money than the game would allow me to spend.

As of the time of this post, my character is almost level four, and I’ve almost got enough cash for my German condo. I’ve really only been playing it a little longer than I’ve been writing this blog post.

This is a pretty addictive and ultimately fun game in all it’s incarnations, and pairing it with Twitter was a stroke of genius.

If you’re interested in learning more about the company behind this game, you should check out my buddy MG Siegler’s write-up over at Techcrunch. If you’re looking for an invite to play, leave a comment here with your Twitter username.

Otherwise, just go out and play Spymaster.

Technorati Tags: spymaster,playspymaster,twitter,game

It’s Not About Best Practices, It’s About the Constitution [Blogola]

After my post over at SiliconANGLE, I’m glad to see what I hope represents a softening position at Forrester regarding the new proposed FTC guidelines on blogging and disclosure (discussed here, here and here).

Josh Bernoff posted at the Groundswell Forrester blog a nice recap of some of the controversy regarding this subject, and stopped short of endorsing the new guidelines, saying “I don't expect all you gentle readers to agree with this -- it's too controversial a topic. But paying bloggers is here to say [sic]. So if you do it, do it right.”

I’m going to keep this short and sweet for two reasons: because I want my point to not get lost in other debatable semantics and my wife is serving a very enticing dinner right now.

There’s a big difference between endorsing best practices and having them mandated by law.

There are so many varying shades of gray in the New Media landscape when it comes to sponsorship and disclosure. It has to be – the landscape is constantly shifting.

The bottom line is that my words are constitutionally protected, and if I want to use them to undermine my own credibility, who is the government to say I can’t do that?

Cost to Fence the US-Mexico Border? $11.8 Billion.

Pictures are finally filing in from this vaunted fence that’s supposed to magically protect us from the evil Mexicans south of the border. The one above I found over at Zimbio. Part of the caption is below:

The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build.

Really?  $6 Million per mile?

I don’t usually talk aboudefet political issues here on this blog, but this is an issue I’ve been following for quite some time, and the only outlet I’d really have to talk about it on would be my podcast with Art on RFC Radio.  We just recorded that show for this week, and I really don’t want to have to wait another seven days to speak my mind on it.

Remember when we were talking, as a nation, about our immigration crisis? Remember how the best solution we could come up with was amnesty and a fence (and we somehow just ended up with a fence)?  Remember how the comedians ridiculed the idea, asking if white folks stupidly thought they didn’t have ladders in Mexico? Remember how the retort was that this was some sort of intelligent electronic fence?

The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build.

This is a section of the border only seven miles long that cost a total of $42 million to create. Are we safer as a result?

Instead of wasting $42 million bucks every few miles on a fence, how hard would it be for us to simply allow everyone to immigrate legally, and kill the incentive for people to risk life and limb (and $10 at the ladder store) to hoof it across the border.

Beyond that, how about an intelligent approach to border security? As I talked about back in December on the /robots blog, people are making do-it-yourself military UAVs with a few bucks and some ingenuity. How hard would it be to slap a camera and a mobile phone on one of those puppies and save the cost of gas for patrols and the cost of raw materials on an overpriced, easily defeatable fence.

Look – I came up with that idea in about three minutes.  Take your time, spend about a half hour thinking of your own method of cheap border patrol. I bet if we spend a day on it in the comments, we could easily beat the cost structure of building a “movable 15-foot fence.”

Seriously. Give it your best shot. I’m curious to see what people can come up with off the cuff.

..in which I beat up on Silicon Alley Insider

How hard it is to RTFA?

There are some folks over at Business Insider (recently rebranded from “Silicon Alley Insider”) that do some decent reporting. Nicholas Carlson was always one of my very favorite ValleyWag authors, and I think he’s still doing good work over at BI/SAI.

Unfortunately, the place is run by Henry “Google-at-$2000” Blodget, and the sensationalist and cavalier research and reporting methods he’s known for seem to infect some of the other authors there.

It wouldn’t be so annoying if it didn’t attract so much attention. I generally kept my mouth shut when I was at Mashable, since we had a general policy of not badmouthing other fellow bloggers in our space for most of my tenure. It’s honestly past the point, though, where I think it’d be irresponsible of me not to point out what I see as an ongoing pattern of wrong-headed reporting and posting.

And it’s not that Techmeme is the measure of all that’s relevant in tech, but somehow today, BI/SAI has gotten Techmeme headlines on each one of their short and incorrect blurbs they’re passing off as posts.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go too far into my backlog of irritating posts I’ve bookmarked from there over the years, but I’ve seen a few today that warrant mentioning (as well as a few that stick out in memory from days gone by).

• Google at $2000: I’d never heard of SAI before this article. I’m sure I’d read them before this, but the absolute retarded premise of this post alerted me to what Henry and company were up to over there.
  
  In general, the assertions in this article directly contradict a litany of posts from a few months later where he badmouths Google and ponders it’s eminent demise. If you page even further forward, he pretends like this was never even said as he talks about the eminent demise of all economies everywhere.
• Google Isn’t Recession-Proof: This is a premise the team there has been advancing since shortly after “Google at $2000.” Every quarter, though, Google has continually outperformed every other ad agency on or off the web.
  
  What’s worse is that by declaring Google not recession-proof, as Henry did quite often, it completely ignores the large market cap and cash reserves Google has, which in and of itself makes the company recession-proof.  There would have to be some very calamitous events to bring about the end of Google.
• Today – Wolfram Alpha Sucks. I wrote about this over at SiliconANGLE today.  Henry doesn’t even bother to read the whole press release or do more than look at the template before pronouncing Wolfram Alpha an abject failure.
• Today - “Peter Thiel Says Valleywag Is 'Silicon Valley Equivalent Of Al Qaeda'”. Certainly what Peter said, if you read only the first answer, is quite over the top. Dan Frommer quite obviously didn’t even read into the third paragraph of the post he responded to where Peter very clearly clarified his comment:
  
  “Terrorism is obviously a charged analogy, but it’s like terrorism in that you’re trying to be gratuitously meaner and more sensational than the next person, like a terrorist who is trying to stand out and shock people. It becomes this unhealthy dynamic where it just becomes about shocking people. On the other hand, it’s an interesting theoretical question, whether, if Valleywag went away, something else would fill in to replace it.”

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the host of un-researched and uninformed rants I’ve read by Hank Williams and other members of the team at BI/SAI.

I hate it when I’ve got a rant here that almost exclusively centers around a person or small group of people instead of an issue or an event.  I don’t like beating up on people for their practice of their craft.

It just seems like a total insult is being levied my way every time I’m lured into clicking on an BI/SAI link. The headlines are craftily written, their topic selection is impeccable.

Their analysis, either intentionally or unintentionally, is almost always completely out in left field. I don’t understand how it can be anything but intentional, since these folks aren’t spring chickens.  Most of them have been covering tech intensively for years.  It’s almost impossible not to pick up on this stuff through osmosis!

Somehow, they manage to get it wrong more consistently than any other analysts I’ve ever seen, and more amazingly never get called out for their consistently poor track record.

Texas Coworking Space Roundup

John Erik Metcalf on the podcast.

Coworking spaces are a mostly recent Texas trend I picked up on last summer during the SummerMash tour stop I attended in Austin. I got the opportunity to meet and talk with Cesar Torres and John Erik Metcalf, the founders of the company, both of which ended up giving a great interview to Aaron at the Stickam booth that night.

Learning about their journey into creating a shared office space geared around web and mobile tech startups reminded me of my own history in the 90s with a similar trend – geek houses.

It seems like not long after we profiled Conjunctured back at Mashable, and John Erik gave a perfect blueprint in the podcast on how to grow your own local coworking space, they started popping up everywhere.

This post was prompted by an alert I got this afternoon about a new (third!) coworking space that has cropped up here in the Dallas area, so I decided to catalogue all the spaces I could find state wide.

Here they are, in no particular order.

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CoHabitat – Dallas – What is now an almost fully formed (and fully occupied) co-working space just North of the downtown area, it’s a converted historic district house that’s been retrofitted on all three floors to support a number of different startups.

They’re still in the early stages of formalizing their online presences and relationship with the community, but I know that there is a variety of leading edge tech being developed there, including a semantic-centric search engine technology as well as a number of mobile-based app developers.

The regular Jelly events are also hosted here, as is generally something of interest to the community at large at least every other month.

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Big in Japan – Dallas – Big in Japan is a sort of “secret coworking club.” Their website is a front for most of their money making ventures, which are their iPhone and Android development efforts. If you know someone on the inside, though, you can get access to work in their posh Infomart accommodations under the watchful eyes of a nine and a half foot Incredible Hulk statue and a dozen or so toy robots.

I generally stop by the space at least once every couple of weeks and meet with the folks there as well as catch up with whatever work I happen to have on my plate. It’s a relaxed environment, and the coffee flows like water.

Alex Muse, one of the culprits behind the venture, has strong ties to the Texas Angel Network – and it’s not uncommon to be in the same room with folks who are in the midst of securing their angel funding (while you wait!), something that’s always exciting to witness.

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company|dallas – Dallas – This is a brand new coworking venture, one that I’ve absolutely no information on yet except for what’s currently up on their splash page:

• They’re scheduled to open for business May 20th.
• They’re located in the heart of Telecom Corridor in Richardson.
• They’ve got $20 day rates and $250 monthly rates.

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Conjunctured – Austin – Even if you’re not in Texas, you’ve probably heard of Conjunctured. Just this March, I sat down with Cesar Torres to get the update  on what’s new with them there, and if you don’t know what’s old with them,

Cesar Torres with me at SxSWi

there are plenty of articles throughout the Austin blogosphere, and even on Mashable.

Working at Conjunctured has been likened to many things, since it’s at the heart of the growing “startup district” in Austin: “like executive suites, but different,” “like a startup incubator,” and a way to “surrounding yourself with individuals passionate about their talents.”

There’s no doubt that community and the social media are at the heart of Conjunctured’s members, which include a branch office for Automattic, several designers and marketers, a number of professional bloggers, and a couple of rails developers.

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Launchpad – Austin – Launchpad doesn’t have the same noteriety outside of Austin that Conjunctured does, but they’re well known to the the Austin community.  I also briefly met the partners that started this venture, and while it’s a wildly different culture and caters to a different style of entreprenuer, they’re still a pillar of the local Austin community.

Whereas Conjunctured is more freewheeling SxSW style culture, Launchpad has a reputation for being a bit more planned and structured, while still maintaining the artists’ feel that’s endemic to Austin.

In addition to offering hourly rates for coworking space, they also play host to a cafe with “light healthy fare, specialty coffee drinks, and carefully selected beer and wine.”

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Caroline Collective – Houston – We’re getting into uncharted territory down this far in the list.  I’ve either extensive or passing familiarity with most of the previous coworking spaces on this list, but to be quite honest, while I knew there probably was a coworking movement in Houston and San Antonio, I had no idea who the players and locations were.

Caroline Collective seems to be the most popular and Web 2.0-friendly of the lot. Drop-ins are welcomed in free of charge, though at some point repeat visitors are encouraged to look at monthly plans ranging between $75/month to $300/month.

Your officemates there will include folks of the marketing, musical, blogging, designer, and app developer varieties. The location also seems to play host to community tech events on a seemingly bi-weekly basis.

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KatyDock – Houston – KatyDock seems to classify itself as more of a business incubator and  “accelerator,” than a coworking space, but the description given on their site seems to epitomize most of the other coworking spaces in the state:

“The Katy Dock allows Katy and West Houston area entrepreneurs - from freelancers to consultants to web developers to graphics designers - to work in a positively charged, creative atmosphere. Katy Dock has professional resources available through Katy Commerce Center and business advice and strategy through the TCWH. Most importantly, Katy Dock fosters a community that works together to help everyone grow.”

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C4WorkSpace – San Antonio – For those that want to see what it takes to build a coworking space, an interesting blog to watch is the one for the C4WorkSpace – as of the time of this post, they’re still in the midst of doing the construction on the facilities for what looks like an interesting and aesthetically pleasing work area.

Their opening date appears to (currently) be June 1st, and they have a number of locals already signed up to start working together: Debi Pfitzenmaier of Pfitz PR, Gylon Jackson of Blog Training Academy, Dan Hong of emembaVET, and Stephen Vanderver.

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The Creative Space – Bryan, TX – This site seems to be a well established coworking space, undoubtedly due to the nearness of College Station university Texas A&M.  Fourteen inhabitants are featured on the front page, as well as a host of projects ranging from robotics to design.

Their motto is simple: “The Creative Space is a group of like-minded individuals out to make great work, together. We all work as one to push the local community through artistic and business endeavors while sharing space and cost.”

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That’s all the co-working spaces I could find in Texas, excluding of course the numerous local Jelly events.  Do you know of one that I missed? Leave it in the comments, and I’ll include it in the next list I do!

Present.io Goes Live

The presentation and live collaboration utility Present.io goes live this morning – and I must admit I’m pretty duly impressed.

The program works with the feature set common to most online collaboration utilities like WebEx or GoToMeeting, but does it completely through the web with no plug-ins, Flash components or Java required.

Through it, presenters are able to play audio, video or slide decks with absolutely no problems stopping or starting it on the client side – it’s really quite effective.

The video presentation Sam Lessin put together for the project more or less says it all – give it a look-see.

Hulu: Content Checks In, But it Don’t Check Out

Earlier this week, MG Siegler over at Techcrunch took note of the fact that Hulu has gotten more anal than ever about geo-retarding their content, even going so far as to block access from anonymous proxy servers in an effort to prevent those overseas from seeing content from Hulu producers.

As a side note, if our government worked as hard to secure sensitive servers overseas prying eyes, perhaps we wouldn’t have enough break-ins to keep Fergie posting to his blog on a near constant basis.

Asides aside, today Hulu announced that they’re striking deals with overseas producers to syndicate their content to Hulu.

“We’re having discussions in the top six to eight markets…we’re laying the groundwork,” said Andy Forssell, senior vice president of content acquisition and distribution.

There are so many interesting angles to pick apart and destroy about Hulu’s approach to content distribution – I wish I could get into them, but I’m at a McDonald’s serving my youngest son lunch, and my battery is about to die.

I just find it hilarious that they’re letting overseas producers give them content, and giving them the finger in return if they try to hit the play button.

In other news, watch for my buddy Steven Hodson to give himself a Gillmor over this later today.

RSS Being Dead Makes as Much Sense as Steve Gillmor

“Apparently Rizzn hasn’t mastered the technology of escaping his ass.”  –  Steve Gillmor

Despite the fact that Steve Gillmor, host of the Gillmor Gang podcast on the TWiT network, has always seemed to talk down to me over the years I’ve enjoyed his recorded material.  He has a way of making meandering conversations with altogether too large groups of technologists still sound interesting and engaging.

Unfortunately, his oratory skills don’t generally translate well to his written pieces. I say this as the general rule and guide to Steve Gillmor editorials, although once in a while he’s able to make an lucid written point.

Today was one of those rare cases – he wrote a piece over at TechCrunchIT today that got snuck into the main Techcrunch RSS feed.  The point he was trying to make was clear enough: “RSS is Dead.”

Unfortunately, the first time I understand the thrust of a Steve Gillmor post, it’s thoroughly narrow-minded and outright wrong.

Steve explains that he now reads all his publications from links on Twitter, and I think he implied that he hasn’t used an RSS reader in over a year (at least I think that’s what the line “I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0.” is supposed to mean).

He makes some valid points: RSS inspired the “real-time web.” RSS is less of a consumer experience and more of a tool of memetracking machines.

Steve Misses the Larger Benefits of RSS vs. Twitter
“As usual Steve is going on in a roundabout, stream of consciousness way of saying “I’m a victim”, but he’s pointing his gun at some different people than the usual suspects this time.” – Mike Arrington

I think he misses the larger point, and the true effect of “real-time web,” and that is what will be largely missed by those who choose to read their news through tools like Twitter and Friendfeed as opposed to those savvy enough to maintain an RSS reader.

I casually surf FriendFeed and Twitter, personally, because to me they’re like the IRC chatroom you might’ve left open during your workday back in the 90’s and early part of this decade – it’s your friends, sharing thoughts and interesting links. What you see in there is your crowdsourced news alerts – the important and popular stuff will tend to bubble up into your sphere of attention, but only if you pay attention to it all day long.

That’s never how IRC works – you don’t pay attention to it non-stop.  It’s a background process, and unless you’re terminally unemployed (or Robert Scoble), it’s not how Twitter works either.

On the other hand, a well organized feed reader like Google’s or Newsgator’s will allow you to find and read the stories you would have otherwise missed.  The time that the story was posted has little to do with whether or not you read it or not – if it’s in your “must read” folder, you’ll catch it. If you rely on Twitter to notice it, you’re simply pulling the lever on the one-armed bandit, and hoping you don’t miss something important.

Maybe He’s Talking About the Public’s Usage of RSS?
“I came across Steve's post in the ZDNet blogs RSS feed which is a partial text feed -- so, yes, his attempt to make fun of partial feeds is, indeed, cut off itself by his own partial feed. I read Jeremy Zawodny's feed as well, and it's full text. So, here we have someone who has a partial feed complaining about the partial feed of someone who actually appears to only offer full feeds.” – Mike Masnick

Even if he’s talking about raw usership of one technology versus the other, he’s still wrong.  How do you think most of those stories are fed into Twitter and FriendFeed? If you said RSS, you’d be right.

We went through this exact same debate back in October of 2008 when Forrester released a report that loudly proclaimed consumer RSS adoption at a mere 11%. As I said in my response to Steve Rubel’s loud eulogy of RSS:

The truth is that it’s pretty difficult to hit a website these days that doesn’t use RSS in some way, shape or fashion. If you look at the average page here on Mashable, there are about two or three sections which rely on RSS to pull in information relevant to the readers. If you turn your attention to the most popular sites on the web, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google all have syndicated content strewn all through them.

Let alone sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo and and thousands of blogs and news sites out there that rely on aggregation of content via RSS.

Why is Real-Time Web “Succeeding” Now Where RSS Has Failed?
“Steve Gillmor is a bumbling fool. Without Google Reader, I wouldn’t read three fourths of the sites I do. Twitter doesn’t replace that.” – schammy

There’s no doubt, though, that the term “real time web” is getting a workout lately, and a lot of attention is being paid to Twitter, Facebook’s public timeline, and FriendFeed.

But that’s the mainstream crowd.  These aren’t news-junkies and writers.  Sure, those of us that fall into that category use those tools, but those of us that want a thorough and nuanced view of the world we’re interested in generally use RSS readers. Real time streams simply aren’t set up to give you more than a snapshot of what’s going on right now, and the memetrackers certainly do little more than tell you what’s popular at the moment.

I’m not dogging the “real-time web” here (I’ve done that elsewhere). I’m simply saying that because it is popular, and because Steve Gillmor uses it exclusively for his news-reading does not mean that RSS is dead as a technology, as he decrees.

I’ll bottom-line it another way – RSS isn’t dead simply because web tools use RSS differently now.  Even if most RSS feeds are read through “real-time web” utilities, RSS is still alive and well. Have you ever read an RSS feed in source-code mode?  Is that how you consume your news?

If you’re honest with yourself, the answer is no.  No sane person would.  RSS is always meant to be a machine-level format so that programmers can more easily import the information into other utilities, be they RSS readers of the traditional type, or real-time fed news feeds.

That, by definition, means RSS is alive and well.

Daisy Whitney Joins Beet.TV (and SiliconANGLE)

It’s amazing how fast things work in today’s always on world.  I just happened to catch a tweet earlier today regarding TVWeek going to an online-only publication, and Daisy Whitney, the woman behind the New Media Minute, potentially being on the open market.

I shot her an email, inviting her to be a contributor to the site I spend most of my days editing, SiliconANGLE (which she graciously accepted), and no sooner had I finished wrapping up that email thread with her, I caught an announcement at the top of Beet.TV saying she was being brought on board as a Senior Producer in the brand new San Francisco bureau of the site.

She’ll also be partnering with SiliconANGLE on the New Media Minute.  She’s moving the show to it’s new home at Beet.TV, but we at the ‘Angle will be an official distribution partner. You’ll be able to find her video updates there every week with a short write-up and any other thoughts she happens to have at the time of publication.

We’re glad to have her on board – I’ve been a long-time watcher of hers, and it’s cool to be able to work with her moving forward.