Connecting the dots ...
Why Plaxo, why do you have to keep on sending pointless, idiotic spam?
I obviously know I am a Plaxo member, I get my data updated ..etc. This email does not require action, does not convey any information. You just can’t rest without bugging me?
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(Updated)
OK, this is Feed Reader Day – just as soon as I finishe complaining about Frustrating Feed Reader Problems (Bloglines and Attensa), a Reader discussion on the “River of News” view breaks out.
Attensa’s Scott Niesen came to my blog and left some good news (?) in a comment: apparently both major glitches are fixed in Attensa 1.5. Well, sort of. Ok, I was ready to ditch it, but decided to give it one more try, dowloaded the new version.
I suspected and I can confirm: I really don’t like the “River of News” view. Why? Because I already applied a filter in the first place, when selecting feeds, and I like to see the posts sorted under the blog name (author). Although Attensa does not do what I need out-of-the box, I worked out a pretty good system of managing my feed.
In the Attensa file (pst) all feeds (blogs) have their own folders , but I dont’ read them directly: instead I set up a search folder for unread in the Attensa file, and made this search folder a favorite which I read, while keeping the original Attensa folder collapsed.
This way the favorite folder always shows the number of unread feeds, they are properly grouped under Blog titles, and when I read one, it automatically disappears from the favorite (unread) list, as if I deleted it. I already achieved one of the “improvements” of the River model. If I want to go back to an already read post, I just pull it up from the main Attensa folder.
Works for me … except that I still have the frustrating image download problem, which apparently Attensa only fixed in the River View.
Related posts:
Update (7/16): While not a generic River issue, just specific to Attensa, I think it’s fairly significant: the “river view” and the traditional folder view does not seem to recognize each other’s “read/unread” status. Whatever I read in folder view will be loaded again as new in the river view. This practically forces the users to make up their mind and stick to one view all the time, as switching between views creates redundant work.
This is the week of foodie topics. Tom Cole launched his culinary blog, Consuming Ambitions, covering Palo Alto restaurants, San Francisco Wine and Chocolate tasting, Grandma’s recipes as well 
as the Palo Alto Farmer market.
Fred Wilson has his business lunches at the Shake Shack, where you stand in line 20 minutes to place your order, then eat outdors in the park.
Christine Herron presents her favorites of the 25 or so mashups at Mashup Camp 2. She wrote a bunch of other articles on mashups. The title of one is quite telling: Monetizing Mashups – Still a Black Art. While the session discussed monetization plans like:
… these were just thrown out without getting into details. And she also heard:
That the above is quite a reality is shown by Zooomr being courted, reports TechCrunch. The asking price is reported to be under $1M, so Mike concludes this is basically “employment by acquisition”
Josh Kopelman ponders about the difficulty of sizing up entrepreneur in a few meetings. Comparing his striving vs. struggling investments, he finds few things stand out:
I buy it (almost) all but I’ve seen second, third-time CEO’s fail; on the other hand the true nature of being entrepreneurs is to go to unchartered territories… we’d all lose out big time not giving first-time CEO’s a chance.
Will Price discusses Age and Entrepreneurship. Quoting GSB’s Chuck Holloway: “There are two natural age peaks correlated to entrepreneurship – late twenties and mid-forties.” I’m relieved, all is not lost for me 
(hm, I guess I can’t hide I don’t belong in the first group)
Bloglines has a huge glitch. Huge yet so basic, I’m surprised it hasn’t been reported and fixed yet. If you keep your feeds organized in folders, you’d expect to be able to click either the folder name or the little plus sign to open up the list of feeds in the folder. Yeah, right. Click the folder name, and without warning ALL your feeds change to “read” status – i.e. disappear entirely, if you – like me- normally look at unread items only. Now what am I supposed to read?
I haven’t been an active Bloglines user for a while, just keeping it as a backup and benchmark against what became my primary reader: Attensa. The very reason I looked at Bloglines today is that despite all the hoopla surrounding Attensa, I am about to quit using it. Two frustrating glitches cause me spend way to much time, when a reader is supposed to save time and make me efficient in the first place:
Serving up the same old feeds again and again: Attensa keeps on presenting most of my feeds repeatedly as “undread” – no, they have not changed, and I verified it on Bloglines. I am either forced to fish for truy new entries or set everything to “read”, and miss some good posts. Who has time for this?
Not dowloading images: OK, this is an Outlook security setting. But in “normal” Outlook folders I can click and set the sending domain “trusted” after which I will get the images downloaded from this particular sender. Not in the Attensa folders: I have to click every single post every single time to make them readable.
There’s more, but these are the two killers, and after countless emails over 6 weeks, Attensa support still only seems to partially understand what the problem is, let alone any plan to fix it. I lost patience, I am spending way too much time testing and educating support – I am out of here?
Any recommendations for an offline reader?
Update (7/4): Hm.. Feed Reader day, lots of posts on Earthlink’s new reader:
Tags: Attensa, Bloglines, Customer Support, Feed Reader, MS Outlook, Outlook, Software QA, Earthlink
…just show her (him?) this video.
Tom Cole of Trinity Ventures is an active networker; I bumped into him at sveral events recently. But if you think he only attends the fancy $3K events, “VC Partner-style”, you couldn’t be more wrong: he was an active participant, note-taker and presenter of our workgroup sessions at the second Techdirt Greenhouse. (a lot of the content at the wiki would not exist without him).
Now he is showing us his gourmet side: his new blog, Consuming Ambitions has a decidedly “foodie” focus, talking about restaurants in Palo Alto, sharing recipes, wine & chocolate tasting in San Francisco and just about anything else food related in the Bay Area.
He finds ways of weaving startup business into food topics though: here’s a little push for Kaboodle, and a story of guerilla marketing by Josh Kopelman‘s Half.com: they stuffed coupons in fortune cookies.
I have to go, all this food-talk made me hungry 
Reddit took a chapter from Google’s book: customizing their logo for special occasions. The Reddit logo now includes a ball and the Italian flag…
Update (7/9): Alexis, Reddit’s cofounder pointed out while the original idea came from Google, they are now in the habit of making event-driven custome logos regularly. Thanks for the comment, Alexis.
“Friendster said Thursday that it has received a patent that covers online social networks, one the company had applied for long before its decline and recent recapitalization. The U.S. patent, which was awarded June 27, is extremely general, and would seem to cover the activities of many other sites, especially those like LinkedIn that allow people to connect within a certain number of degrees of separation. Naming Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, who has left the company, as inventor, the patent refers to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”” – reports the Red Herring.
Friendster is hardly back from the graveyard, Founder Jonathan Abrams is alreday busy with his second social network, Socializr, and of course noone knows to what extent Friendster will try to enforce this patent. Whatever happens, to me it’s yet another sign that the entire patent system is clearly in need of serious reforms – and it should be done by people who actually understand technology.
Related posts:
Update 97/7): Charlie O’Donnell sums it up: UFR. 
Kim Jong Il can’t get his Dong up and the Daily Show makes fun of the silly names he gives his weaponry.
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