TechWag

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The answer to the question is that he is “everywhere” and keeping up with Louis Gray can be difficult. Louis is involved in so many things; he makes the idea of multi-tasking seem easy. I was able to track him down and he was gracious enough to do an e-mail interview with me letting us know what he is up to, and where he sees things going. Between Kids, work, side projects, and social networking, here is what has been keeping Louis busy.

The trigger for this was running into some of his projects, SocialToo and BurnURL, and wondering what other things was interesting to know about. SocialToo promises to be an interesting way of tracking people who follow you on a daily basis. The good part about the SocialToo daily email (premium service) is that you can generate follow/drop stats and a number of other interesting statistics about what your followership needs. BurnURL is much like the Digg Bar and Facebook Bar, IFrames the page, with their own link floating on top. The idea is that the smiley faces on the bar can help the page writer understand if the user liked, loved, or loathed what you wrote. That can be helpful in monitoring how people perceive what you are writing, and getting good feedback on articles that often go uncommented, or do not generate a comment as a response. Here is the interview with Louis.

Q. What projects are you working on besides SocialToo and BurnURL?

I am currently an advisor to four small startups, each with a different approach to extending the world of social media and blogging to new groups or increasing the capabilities of tools we already use. Those include BuzzGain, a new way to approach “do it yourself PR”, leveraging social media statistics and monitoring, Teens In Tech, a Web platform for teens to communicate and share media and content, SocialToo, a tool that helps you automate and communicate more easily to your social networks, and ReadBurner, a democratic approach to finding the Web’s hottest news.

In addition to these official roles, I frequently get inquiries from entrepreneurs in the early stages of forming their products or business plan, and am asked to offer guidance or act as early third party QA (quality assurance). It’s a role I enjoy.

Q. What about these programs and services have caught your attention.

Even in these frustrating times for technology, entrepreneurs and innovation, there are interesting products looking to improve our online experience. I was the first to uncover ReadBurner early in 2008, writing about them before the service even had a domain name. I religiously covered its growth and was a frequent user. As the site changed hands, I was asked to help guide the new team as they developed new features, including their recent debut of BurnURL, a URL shortener sharebar that will use its mood mining capabilities for upcoming ReadBurner releases. BuzzGain makes logical sense given my real-world work background, which now includes a decade of working with PR agencies in Silicon Valley, as well as my blogging experience. SocialToo and Teens In Tech came about largely due to personal relationships with the founders, and from my providing them ideas on what could come next as they execute on their product roadmap.

Q. With all the other things you do, how do you find time for this, kids, social networking, and everything else?

Last May, I wrote a post on what I called “continuous parallel attention“, illustrating how I try to do multiple things at once, without letting one slip. And while that might be impossible with some tasks, it definitely means you shouldn’t let one task take over your world at any point. Having a full-time job and twins under a year means that I do the online activity in chunks – letting it fill the gaps between everything else, be they meetings, projects, etc. If it takes 5 minutes or 10 of every hour to go through Google Reader and FriendFeed during the day, that is a lot more useful than taking two solid hours and powering through what might look like an incredible to do list.

I also leverage my evenings for a lot of the activity. I have weekly calls with most of the companies I advise through the week, starting around 8 p.m. or so, late enough that the twins are in bed, and hopefully, I’ve gotten a blog post or two in. And when those are complete, I can still post news late into the night. It’s no secret that most of my posting happens between 7 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., so I tend to work when the kids are down. It might not be optimal for page views, click-throughs and the like, but if I am working on an interesting topic or a new company, it really does not matter what time this happens.

The kids themselves have actually become an interesting part of my online social activity. After blogging about their imminent arrival last spring, I posted updates to Twitter and FriendFeed as we were at the hospital the morning of June 20th. In fact, it was a tweet that hit Facebook which alerted my family to it. Given my wife was in labor around 1 a.m. or so, we didn’t want to wake everyone up, so the social networks did the news dissemination for us. Since then, we have had more than our fair share of fun sharing updates on the kids in pictures or videos, and we’ll keep doing it until the community politely or forcefully asks us to stop.

Q. What do you see as the bigger problems that need to be solved in social networking?

Social networking is not magic – but it is another tool, like e-mail or the telephone, or blogging that can be used however, you wish it to be. As such, social networking can be a haven for spammers, as e-mail and telephones have become. Moreover, businesses might be approaching these new sites as sources of income, not recognizing they are as much for information discovery and communication as they are about revenue generation. So I do worry sometimes that people can be deterred by the occasional bad apples who are mucking up our streams.

One thing that we are still reaching for and haven’t yet obtained, is truly breaking through these language barriers that continue to get in our way, not letting us truly connect with would-be peers around the world. Even on advanced networks like FriendFeed and Twitter, it can be nearly impossible to browse updates in Persian or other Asian languages, and ascertain what others are saying. Rather than pushing for higher quality video, faster updates or more compatibility, I’m still waiting for a fantastic solution that can deliver outstanding translation in real-time.

Speaking of real-time, while these latest advances in social networking are like manna from heaven for the power users among us, I know they can be confusing to those dabbling in these services. There have got to be lighter versions of these products, and easy to use manuals and filters that help reduce the noise and hone in on the signal.

Q. What do you see happening with tracking and monitoring of social systems like BurnURL and SocialToo?

I would be cheating the developers behind both services if I talked too much about what their future plans are – but I believe we are still in the early stages of fully leveraging the social data each of us are creating on the Web each day. With these types of tools, we can be able to find the most interesting and relevant data, important to us and our peers, and share new items we find quickly and more broadly than ever. Right now, much of what we do in our own information discovery is siloed. For the most part, our experience in Google Reader is solitary, and the activity happens downstream. We don’t know who is reading our Tweets, if anyone. We can’t tell Twitter to hide terms like SEO or Ashton Kutcher, no matter how much we wish it. So we’re going to need to rely on third party services to do the hard work, and developers like those behind BurnURL and SocialToo are coming up with new ways to sort, organize, prioritize and distribute our data.

With all the things that Louis is working on, this is a great catch up with him, and he is working on some interesting projects. Look at BuzzGain, BurnURL, SocialToo, and the other projects he is working on. There are interesting things happening, these products are worth checking out, and seeing if they can work within your own social networking program.