A few personal favorites in 2007

A few personal favorites in 2007.

Favorite blog: Futuristic Play. Original, high quality and actionable blogs posts.

Swedish Rookies of the Year: ehnbomcom.com. Personal while keeping a brand focus. Mindpark. Three, at times, (pro-)bloggers should create a good blog. It did.

International Rookie of the Year: Silicon Alley Insider. I like it more than TechCrunch & co, even though I don't always agree with Blodget & co.

Best Video: Charlie Rose. Interesting conversations.

Smart enough to make my brain hurt: bubblegeneration. Always bordering on being too far ahead of the pack. I'm grokking the 2005 posts now.

Best First Month of Blogging: pmarca. Marc Andreessen's first month of blog posts was amazing as he had a lot to say. It is still a good read, but if the current posts had been as good his blog would have been a contender for Favorite blog and it is not.

Turtle Award: Jaiku. I didn't get Jaiku at first, but once my friends got me to start using it I became an addict. If I was slow or if Jaiku is an acquired taste I don't know.

Best Music Service: Spotify (beta). It really is that good.

Feature of the Year: the Newsfeed

Looking back at 2007, one web site feature stands out in my mind. The feature wasn't invented in 2007, but it became popular with the rise of Facebook. I'm talking about the Newsfeed. It will likely become as prevalent as the search box as a way to navigate social web sites.

The name Newsfeed is closely connected to Facebook, but the "latest first" (reverse-chronological) way of displaying news (in this blog post I'll use the word news to describe what have happened on the specific web site since the last visit and not general news) were also seen on Jaiku and Twitter. In addition the "latest first" have always been the default way to display posts on blogs and the way, at least mine, to display e-mail messages in the inbox.

But why does the Newsfeed ("latest first") work? What makes it tick?

A basic service a web site can provide a returning user is the sense of change. Even a small change will stop the visitor from feeling like a schmuck that wasted time visiting a web site where nothing had happened.

Thus, it is not enough with only a newsfeed. A web site must also make sure something new has happened. Why have a newsfeed if nothing has happened? This interplay could be one reason why Facebook launched Applications this year, half a year after the launch of the Newsfeed.

However, if there are a lot of changes between two visits, a pure "latest first" way to showcase activities is not as useful. The publisher can likely provide more value to the visitor by showcasing the most important news first or selecting which items to show in the newsfeed.

So, a good newsfeed shouldn't provide too many items at each login. My guess is no more than 10 items per login. This calls for the newsfeed to prioritize which items should be displayed to each user. Is a new photo more important than the usage of an application? Is a new friendship more important than a status update? Etcetera.

I summary, I think a good newsfeed should have the following characteristics (and it is no coincidence that Facebook's newsfeed nails all of them):

* Always display something new
* Not display too many new things
* Display things that are of interested to the individual user

Please add your thoughts in the comments or in your blog.

Of note, 2007 edition

Some of the stories that were noted on this blog in 2007. Not a complete list, but one lens to view the year that was through.

January
January was "Swedish Acquisition Month" with Eniro acquiring Leta.se and MTG picking up Playahead. AOL tried to buy, and the founders and funders tried to sell, TradeDoubler, but the institutional investors turned down the offer.

February
Danah Boyd wrote about walled gardens. One of my favorite texts of the year. Twingly launched with Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. I noted the video Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, which was actually uploaded to YouTube the last day of January.

March
Viacom sued Google for a billion dollars.

April
EMI got a grip and started allowing the sales of non-DRM MP3:s. Other majors followed later in the year. Google acquired DoubleClick, which started an acquisition avalanche of advertising networks and ad servers. But Google didn't get U.S. approval for the deal until the very end of the year. Allers bought Blogg.se, which got Björn Jeffery to analyze the Swedish media companies' online strategies. He also published an article on Internet currencies.

May
I was the first to blog, thanks to some good friends' benevolence, about Spotify. I still think it is an amazing program. Tomas Wennström got me involved in What's Next (thanks Tomas!). Microsoft went big and paid a fortune for online advertising agency aQuantive and CBS did what was probably the largest 'pure' Web 2.0 acquisition when it bought Last.fm. And Facebook reached Sweden, even if the fever didn't hit until a few months later.

June
Trig.com didn't go bankrupt until later in the year, but this quote didn't give great promise. Terry Semel left and Jerry Yang became new CEO of Yahoo. SUN's CEO got something right when he pointed to the difference between fighting and monetizing the future. Metro launched Metrobloggen, but hadn't given the incentives enough thought.

July
I wrote about massmedia's business models and how it changes the incentive for quality. TradeDoubler bought The Search Works, its first large acquisition. I had the idea to blog about what make Internet startups tick, but the series fizzled after a few ho-hum posts. Probably because it was to close to everyday business for me.

August
Disney shelled out 350 million dollars for popular kids' site Club Penguin, with an earn out of another 350 million dollars. Twingly got 10 million SEK, which I think I was the first to write about. Veckans Affärer went crazy and thought that the laws of advertising sales didn't apply to blogs. Facebook fever hit Sweden, and Fredrik Wass survived to tell about it.

September
This blog turned five, which surely is of note compared with the other things mentioned in this year-in-review. ;) Mindpark launched. The Swedish discussion of free versus paid in the context of newspaper sites intensified, and I admit that I like some implementations of paid services.

October
I didn't blog a lot in October, but Radiohead's "open pricing" of its In Rainbows album was notable. As was, of course, Microsoft's combined investment and advertising representation deal with Facebook. Maybe the $240 million investment valued Facebook at $15 billion, but Microsoft got a lot in addition to the shares.

November
In November I blogged even less, due to work, but one thing that caught my eye was MySpace's interest-based targeting. In addition Facebook's flawed, and evil, Beacon advertising system was launched. Facebook later made changes to Beacon, but we now have less privacy as Internet users than before.

December
I tried to figure out how to think about what Google does and what value context brings to Facebook. At InternetWorld's Top 100 Aftonbladet revealed that Facebook is a competitor. In the last days of the year, LunarStorm went from fee to free.

Quite a few things managed to happen in just twelve months, especially as I didn't blog about a lot of stuff.

Which stories do you think was the most important of 2007?