ATTENTION: If Your Subscribers Use Gmail Read This – Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips from Denise Wakeman: “Essentially, any URL that has a capital letter after the http:// is not an active, clickable link in Gmail.”

Denise learned about this from Alex Mandossian’s Productivity Strategies Facebook page.

Essentially if immediately after the ‘http://’ the first character is a capital letter the URL becomes just text. Click through to Denise’s article to see some examples.

     Facebook is taking charge of your online presence.  Mashable claims they are making it into a FriendFeed clone.  But what’s really happening? You can read what Facebook’s blog says, but let me share my thoughts.

     Let’s take just a couple of sentences from that post.

Your profile will automatically update when you upload a video to YouTube, rate last night’s episode of The Office on Hulu, and so on. If you have a personal blog, you can enter the URL in and a Mini-Feed story will be published every time you write a new post.

     Hmm. Remind you of some Facebook applications you might already have installed?  There are already plug in applications that let you import your feed, e.g. Flog Blog.  It makes me wonder if they realize they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

     Aside from aggregation of your online self, it appears they are stealing the thunder of their online partners.  Up until now you could already bring all of your various feeds into Facebook either through partner applications or third party applications.  Both of which allowed those sites to post ads.  What will happen now?

     Perhaps Facebook envisions you freely sharing all of your feeds, drawing in your readers and selling ads right there.  Ads that you don’t see any revenue from. I expect the next thing you’ll see is an increase of ‘relevant’ ads based on the material shared.  Can Friendfeed do a better job than Googld Adwords?

     What’s your theory?  Are you with Mashable? Got your own idea?  Hate Facebook already?  Can’t wait to add all of your feeds?

     Robert Scoble, most prolific geek on the net, shares his thoughts of Friendfeed and why it will or won’t go mainstream. His first post, Why FriendFeed won’t go mainstream, obviously covers the why nots.  The second part is Why FriendFeed will go mainstream.

     I’ll not spoil the articles for you, but did want to talk to one or two from each article. First from the Why it won’t article, #8, “It pisses bloggers off because all their comments are moving onto FriendFeed rather than staying on their blogs.”

     Scoble mentions that your blog post is likely to get more comments on Friendfeed than on your blog.  Why?  Because your friends and readers are no longer just following your blog.  They are following your videos, all three of your blogs, and your Pownce and Flickr streams.  They’ve found it easier to catch you in one place, Friendfeed, than checking all of those separately.   The concern is that your visitors will go down. Truth here.  All that Friendfeed shows is the link.  Folks still have to click over to read the article.  So maybe they aren’t commenting directly on the blog, but being on Friendfeed makes you a lot more visible.

     Then there’s #6 on the why not list, about finding new friends.  The argument being that it’s tough to find new friends there, unless you want to find Scoble, Dave Winer and some other uber geeks.  I’d contend though, that with this service, as others, that folks aren’t coming without their friends. Oh, they might be the first in their peer group, but rarely are they the only.  This is true for me.  Early adopter but now a swarm of my contacts is using it.  And believe it or not, finding my blog posts and stuff there instead of directly from my RSS.

     Now about the will go mainstream side. #5 is one of two favorites from the list, “It is freaking fast and much more reliable than Twitter.”   This is so true.  I’m often seeing Friendfeed show tweets before I get them on the client I use.  Reliable, even more so.  Twitter seems to be offline or bugged a noticeable part of the time.  Friendfeed is managing incoming data from a slew of sources and yet it seems to handle and keep up with them without error.  However, I wonder how dense the user base is yet.  Does it have the many thousands of users that Twitter has?  How will it fair in six months?

     Then my other favorite, #9, I’ll call it the all the cool folks are there item.  It’s the fact that many interesting geek and non-geeks alike are on FriendFeed.  Scoble mentions a few interesting ones, Barack Obama, and Gary Vaynerchuk. Hey, you’re there too right?  This is a deal maker for me.  I follow friends of course, but thought and discussion leaders are definitely folks I enjoy following as well. Are some of them just Internet rockstars? Sure. But some are well known in other arenas and just happen to be blogging, and making other social media.

     Where do I stand? I’m in the will go mainstream camp. My reasons? It’s only going to get easier to use, and people will become aware of it from mainstream sites, such as Obama’s campaign page.  Right now it doesn’t have the eyes of millions, but as it grows and changes, it’s user base will grow and mature as well.   The feedback is just beginning to role in for them.

     Where do you stand? User? Never heard of it?  Following a slew of folks? Or just your real life friends? Bloggers? Politicians? Your neighbor?