Dan Romero

You may have already heard about it from Rob, but we launched the StrawPoll Platform today. Now any Twitter user can easily poll his or her followers. Whether it's to determine the outcome of a Batman/Spider-Man fight or simply where to have the weekly happy hour, StrawPoll can now assist you in your quest for answers.

Looks like Facebook is dropping its mandatory "is" in its status updates sometime in the near future. While hardly newsworthy (yet it's the top story on Techmeme), it's definitely interesting. I have always thought that Facebook status updates were the perfect evolution of crafty IM away messages. And with the rise of Twitter and the whole micro-blogging phenomenon, I think Facebook might be realizing what a real gem they have.

I am a firm believer that the Twitter phenomenon will eventually catch on and spread like a wildfire throughout the SMS-crazed college demographic. The big question is who will capture this market? As much as I love Twitter, I would have to think Facebook will win this.

That is, of course, if Facebook can actually make status updates more like tweets. Right now, updates are just News Feed (or as they say at Duke - stalk feed) fodder. Imagine if you said "hungry" and you were instantly sent a list of your closest friends who were also hungry. Now that would be slick.

Shooting straight up to the top of Techmeme, Google is slowly rolling out IMAP support for Gmail. Most of the coverage seems to be focused on how users will be able to use "advanced email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird." While this is good, it's not what I am the most excited about.

What is? Well, now I can actually use my iPhone's email feature. No more endless POP3 streams of already read messages. I feel so alive.

Today I finished the initial version of the official K-Ville Facebook application. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I was actually quite surprised by how easy it was to build it. It took me only a couple of hours. I guess FBML. for all its limitations, forces you to focus on content and functionality rather than design.

I would also like to thank the Pear PHP people as well as anyone who contributed to the Facebook Developers Wiki.

Yesterday, I tested the online photo editing application Picnik. Let me say first that it was truly a delight to use and it allowed me accomplish my task (making a photo black and white) in less than five minutes. In addition, as an aspiring web and user interface designer, the application's interface was both intuitive and impressive. The abundance of features did not seem overwhelming, and in fact, I was surprised at how much Picnik allowed me to do with my photo. From the basic resize and color change, to adding it to my Flickr and Facebook accounts, Picnik had everything I could possibly want to do available in a couple of clicks.

So if you haven't already given Picnik a look, you should. And if you are one of the Facebook application types - they have one of those as well.

UPDATE - So it turns out that they also have a number of other cool mini-apps for Picnik. Firefox/IE extensions, a bookmarklet, and even a Yahoo widget. Talk about easy access.

So I haven't posted for a exactly one month. That's a bad thing. But I guess moving back to college and trying to launch a large-scale consumer website will do that to a man (make him forget to post to the blog that is).

So anyways I figured I would give a fairly long update my favorite form of prose - a list.

• Coupon DJ - So this is the big news: we have officially launched. Check out the site and let me know what you think. A lot of time and energy has been put into this site by a lot of different people. Remix people, remix. And if you find any IE 6 bugs, let me know as well. I like to think of my self as an exterminator of such things, but alas, they always seem to find their way back into the code.
• Back at Duke - Moved back in on the 17th (of August) and have been loving it ever since. This place really does grow on you after a while. Not to mention the fact that my room is an iPhone's throw away from my room. If you are wondering why I would mention such an outrageous idea, it is due to the fact that my iPhone will not work in my room. After two months of use, this remains as my top complaint - horrible coverage. Fewest drop calls? I think not.
• Duke startup scene - So this summer has been a little coming out party for a number of Duke tech entrepreneurs. I have mentioned them before, but Shoeboxed was the big hit of the summer in terms of sheer publicity. They have been on Rocketboom, Mashable, and more recently, Lifehacker. Taylor has some great people working with him and its encouraging to see them move back to Durham (rather than Silicon Valley) after their summer in Berlin. Breck Yunits started SeeMeWin, an Internet entertainment network with an initial focus on scratching lottery tickets. They are doing some pretty cool things with Ustream.tv and are also donating a decent amount of money to charity. Finally, Sterling Cross has put together (along with a friend from the University of Michigan) an interesting spin on a college-centric start page, Daily Devils.
• Other notes - I would also like to mention two other interesting Duke students. Jeremy Welch and Robert Goodlatte. Both have some great ideas and are pretty darn good at what they do. Both are pretty active bloggers as well. I also recently purchased the Adobe Master Suite. $2500?!?! Nope - $500 with the student discount. As you can see, I am pretty excited.

I figured that I would resolve some housekeeping business with a post:

• Facebook does have some RSS - I stand corrected. After complaining about Facebook's lack of RSS a few weeks ago, I discovered today that your notifications can be read as an RSS. Unfortunately, I already get most important notifications sent to my mobile via SMS. This also doesn't address the Newsfeed RSS problem either.
• Wider blog design - Unlike the NYTimes, which seems to be getting more narrow every time I visit (more on this in a later post), I increased the width of the blog by about 60 pixels. The non-designers reading won't care, but I did this to increase my line lengths.
• New domain names - So I now have a whole bunch of domain names that I own: danielwromero.com, blazamos.com, dratius.com, coupondj.com, he.rodot.us, milliondollarhillary.com, feehanbooks.com. And now I have two more: danromero.tv and kville.tv. What they will be use for, that's still up in the air.
• Upcoming birthday - A much less pertinent piece of info, I will be turning 20 on the 12th. Scary.
• iPhone typing speed - I have been using the iPhone for over a month now and I just want to say that I can type very fast on the keyboard (with thanks to the auto-correction software). I will be doing a complete "one month after" analysis sometime next week.
• Next week - Expect some posts about Twitter/Pownce/Facebook next week. I also think a post about the new MMOG company Multiverse and Indiana University's The Synthetic Worlds Initiative. Exciting stuff.

Seems like I can't stop posting about Facebook. Oh well, at least I am not the only one.

Anyways, VentureBeat recently wrote an article profiling RockYou's new advertising network. RockYou currently has three big-time apps on Facebook: Horoscopes, X Me, and Super Wall, which according to the article:

RockYou has eight applications right now (with two more in the works) and claims to have at least one of its apps installed by a third of Facebook users, including Horoscopes, X Me and Super Wall.

This bold claim jumped out at me. So I did some quick research with my own group of friends. Out of my 414 Facebook friends, a combined 54 people had these apps installed (Horoscopes and X Me with 37 and Super Wall with 7). Not exactly 1/3. Upon further investigation, I found that the actual number of people was 35, as many of those users had installed multiple RockYou apps. I would be willing to bet that this trend is pretty common among RockYou app users, with many users having two or three RockYou apps installed on their account.

I am still waiting for an app that is actually useful to come out. So far, all the apps I've seen just make it harder to post on my friend's walls.

And speaking of posting, Facebook's recent addition of pictures/video to the standard Facebook wall makes RockYou's Super Wall king of worthless.

I think I am suffering from application overload. Here is a list of apps I use on a daily basis:

Web work:
• Trac - for software development
• Doku Wiki - general company wiki
• Highrise - contact management
• Notepad++ - coding
Day job:
• Microsoft Office 2007 - email, calendering, all other types of work
Personal:
• Gmail - all personal email goes here
• Google Calendar - calendar
• Google Reader - RSS
• Strongspace - file storage (for life)
• Mozy - remote backup (works automatically but its putting files in another spot, further spreading me out)
Social services:
• Twitter - microblog/status updates
• Facebook - social networking
• Flickr - photo sharing
• Skype - voice and video chat
• Meebo - IM
• Movable Type - personal blog
• Tumblr - linklog

Bonus: I have an Accelerator (M), Shared Hosting account, and a Connector (unused) for life from TextDrive/Joyent.

I think that it's getting to be a bit much.

Plain and simple: Facebook needs to implement RSS all over the site. Rather than spamming users with email updates (I have Gmail automatically delete them), Facebook could allow them to subscribe to a authenticated RSS feed. They could be customizable, such as new pictures feeds and individual user feeds.

As of right now, Facebook is a data black hole: information goes in but hardly ever comes out. Obviously at the end of the day, it's their data that's valuable, so it makes sense to keep more of it coming in than going out. But as the RSS adoption slowly inches higher, an increasing number of people would benefit from an RSS-enabled Facebook.