#SANANTONIO Bloggers where you anyone ? anyone LOL :P You know who's KING :) http://bl http://bloggerluv.com/S9MvZzb
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes tremendous pride in his public performances, and it pays off. His product presentations are usually seamless and even hypnotic. Even today at WWDC, when faced with a crowd that already knew much of what he was going to say before he said it thanks to Gizmodo, which got ahold of an iPhone 4 prototype that was left in a bar, Jobs was able to highlight still-secret features like a high-resolution screen in a way that left his trademark effect of a crowd desperately desiring his new product.
But one glitch almost took Jobs down. He couldn’t connect his live iPhone demo to the network using Wi-Fi because there were so many Wi-Fi networks in the room. Jobs blamed his audience, saying his tech team detected 570 separate Wi-Fi base stations. Those include MiFi cards and Sprint’s new EVO 4G phone, which can create shareable Wi-Fi hotspots based on mobile Internet. There wasn’t a Plan B, it seemed, so Jobs resorted to telling people to put their laptops down on the floor and police each other. Apple employees started circulating through the audience asking anyone who was using a computer to turn off the Wi-Fi and stop using their machines.
The real problem, it seemed, wasn’t attendees connecting to the open Wi-Fi network, but bringing their own networks as backup — something that has become a necessity, especially for bloggers and reporters, as the Wi-Fi at conferences including Apple’s is almost always slow, crappy or nonexistent. (I’ll admit I had both a MiFi and an EVO 4G on me, though the latter was being saved for backup.)
“I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if you want to see the demos, we’re not going to be able to do it,” said Jobs from the stage.
The thing is, access problems from mobile devices are a point of weakness for Apple. AT&T, the iPhone’s network of choice, has notoriously bad U.S. 3G coverage, and probably 95 percent of people in the room had iPhones. As soon as Jobs started having network problems, the crowd (that had given him a standing ovation just for coming on stage) seemed to feel the thrill of poetic justice.
When Jobs ran into error messages and slow-loading pages from his demo phone, he called out “Scott,” to Scott Forstall, the company’s senior VP of iOS Software, “you got any suggestions?” Multiple audience members shouted back in response “Verizon!” — referring to the network that often has more reliable coverage, especially here in San Francisco. Jobs took the bait, breaking the fourth wall to reply, “We’re actually on Wi-Fi here.”
Jobs didn’t let the subject go, either, even after the presentation got back on track, taking every opportunity to complain about the Wi-Fi. It wasn’t clear exactly what the actual Wi-Fi issue was, but it seemed that his demo iPhone may have had trouble staying connected to the Wi-Fi network it was supposed to be attached to given there were so many other options around. (If anyone can better diagnose the problem let me know.)
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Metered Mobile Data Is Coming and Here’s How
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| Kehalim |
Yes, I know you're a master of the web, that you've visited every website written in English, that you've been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.
But what have you shipped?
What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?
Go, do that.
12 More Websites To Show You the Hottest Twitter Topics http://bit.ly/dtdmLH
In the past two articles, 9 Websites To Show You The Hottest Stuff on Twitter Now and 10 More Websites To Show You The Hottest Twitter Topics we’ve taken a look at just how much information can be found when you dig a little deeper on Twitter. Going beyond the list of people that you follow, there is no limit to the amount of realtime information that you can find.
In the third and final part of this article we’re going to take a look at how to use Twitter on the go when you’re travelling in a foreign country, how to find content that is personalised just for you, how to find the authoritative voices on Twitter, and a few other specialised sites that use Twitter to find information on specific topics or hobbies.
Twittorati takes a slightly different approach to most Twitter related sites. Rather than plug straight into Twitter to establish what is popular, the site makes use of Technorati’s resources to determine who to follow on Twitter. The site tracks the tweets coming from the most popular and influential bloggers according to Technorati’s stats. It specifically features the Top 100 blogs, but there are plans to expand to include more influential voices from around the web. Tweets on Twittorati can be browsed by categories such as Technology, Business, Parenting and more.
The Twitter accounts include both the blogs’ official Twitter accounts, as well as the personal accounts of the people behind the scenes. You can also browse the most popular links being tweeted from these blogs, and their latest photos. Tweets are accompanied by additional information about the user, including real name and job title, as well as their Technorati authority rating. Logging in with your Twitter account allows you to reply or retweet directly from within Twittorati.
One of the great things about Twitter is how easy it is to access it when you’re on the go, which makes it a great resource to use when you’re travelling. Twaller allows users to share tips and information when you’re on the road, and accessing that information couldn’t be easier. Using the site, you can either search for specific information, or can browse by region or city, with major cities in Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Australia and South America included on the list. Each city’s tweets is divided into several sections, including where to eat, entertainment, things to see, weather and shopping. Twaller relies on hashtags to provide it’s service so the website is only as good as each city’s residents choose to make it. Signing in with your Twitter account allows you to submit tweets about the city you’re in directly from Twaller, as well as reply and retweet.
A great travel Twitter resource to take a look at before you hit the road is Travel Note’s directory of all things travel related – from airlines, to travel agencies, to travel writers, if it’s on Twitter, it’s probably listed here.
If you’re looking for a more personalised experience to avoid information overload on Twitter, there are several options available.
After both signing up for a Feedera account and connecting to your Twitter account, Feedera will proceed to create a personalised digest to be delivered to your inbox on a daily basis. The process can take several hours to complete. The digest consists of what is considered the best content shared by the accounts you follow, divided into photos, links, videos and music.
Popular content is determined by how often the link has been shared on Twitter, as well as on Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and a few others. Each link is accompanied by the number of your friends who have tweeted that story.
Signing up for an account with Chatterbox gives you a little bit more control over the kind of content that you will get to see. You can create as many “ChatterBoxes” as you like, each of which can consist of specific keywords mentioned on Twitter, and can even be further narrowed down to keywords mentioned by specific users.
ChatterBox takes it one step further, allowing you to share your results with other users of your choice. ChatterBox can come in handy when a company or team needs to be aware of specific information being shared on Twitter. For example, all Tweets about a specific brand can be listed in one ChatterBox, and shared amongst the staff. The members of the ChatterBox can then assign the response to a specific user, add categories, statuses, and priorities to these tweets, and even respond to users directly from within ChatterBox. ChatterBox is the perfect accompaniment to any corporate or company Twitter account.
Also be sure to take a look at Mahendra’s article, 3 Little Known Ways to Use Twitter Without Information Overload, which includes another great site for creating personalised feeds – Cadmus.
Twitter’s search feature leaves a lot to be desired, but luckily there are a few websites that make up for its shortcomings.
Topsy is a Twitter search engine that uses Twitter as a basis for the ranking of its search results. They are based on how popular a link is, as well as the influence of the Tweeple sharing it. You can search the web as a whole, can search specifically within Twitter, and can also do an image search. Results can come from within the last month, week, day or hour, and can be sorted by relevance or date.
Signing in with Twitter allows you to retweet directly from within the website, and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of any given search, or even create an email alert. Opening a link will show you who has tweeted it, what’s been said, and influential Tweeters are distinguished from the rest, with the ability to filter the tweets down to only influential users. Topsy also overcomes one of Twitter search’s main drawback – the inability to search beyond the past 10 days.
Microsoft search engine Bing has decided to get in on a little bit of the Twitter action with their dedicated Twitter search engine. The home page features some of the trending topics and popular links. Search results consist of the most recent tweets containing the search term and the most shared links on Twitter.
Any given link will be accompanied by two tweets mentioning it, which can be expanded to display more tweets organised by relevance or date.
If you have a hobby that takes up a lot of your time, chances are, there’s a Twitter-related website that you could find useful.
If you’re a wine aficionado check out WineTwits for the latest Tweets about wine related topics and events.
If you’re a sports fan, Twackle brings you the latest buzz on Twitter about the NFL, NBA, NHL and much much more.
For the latest on all things stock market related on Twitter, check out StockTweetApp
If health and fitness is what matters to you most, Wellness Tweets will definitely appeal to you.
And TwitArcade is the place to go if you want to share and find out about new online games.
What websites do you use to keep up with the hottest topics on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.
To crazy devs and bloggers adding these stupid toolbars on your websites: CUT THAT CRAP OUT! http://bit.ly/9QcvRT #webdevelopment #webdesign
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WordPress fans take note: it looks like we now have an iPhone app that may remove the pain from blogging upon our iDevices without resorting to “the way of the geek.”
BlogBooster has released an iPhone app that allows you to not only insert multiple images, but also includes a formatting bar allowing you to italicize, embolden, underline as well as strike through text without having to manually type in the coding. You can also manually insert hyperlinks as well (another plus!).
Although the app seems geared towards WP fans, BlogBooster also supports Blogger, Typepad and Tumblr, with more platforms on the way (not to mention an upcoming iPad app!).
Priced at $4.99 USD, some may wonder if the app is worth it, especially when their are less expensive rivals like BlogPress (not to mention free official alternatives for WordPress, Typepad and Tumblr).
So before you hit the buy button, here is an in depth review highlighting the good, the bad and the awesome regarding this new blogging app.
Currently BlogBooster is the only multiblogging app with a formatting bar. While the app is not the first to introduce this feature (as the LiveJournal.app launched a similar feature in 2008), BlogBooster is the first that I recall that allows you to format the color and size of the font (the former which will appeal to artistic bloggers).
You can also insert multiple images (as highlighted above), but BlogBooster goes one step further by allowing you to find images suitable for your post using their “Autocontent” feature.
Autocontent also allows you to locate blogs and news media discussing similar topics, and will allow you to insert a hyperlink from them automatically within the post.
BlogBooster also allows you to preview your post within your iPhone app, which will let bloggers know how their formatted posts will appear upon their blog.
You can also choose whether or not you want to save a draft on your iPhone or on your server (which means you can edit the post later on via the notebook).
For those of you who are fanatical about their image sizes, you can not only adjust the image size, but align them to the right, left or center of your post.
BlogBooster also supports tags, so BlogSpot fans and Tumblr freaks will be able to categorize their posts, although the app currently lacks categories (which will probably not please WordPress guru’s or Typepad addicts).
While I am glad that BlogBooster launched with a formatting bar, users may find formatting text near the top of the screen to be frustrating (as the “Select All” bubble will block the bar at times). They may want to consider moving it down near the bottom of the screen.
Also inserting images was not as smooth as its rivals, as the app would constantly favor inserting the images below the text, and not where you last tapped.
Speaking of images, I noticed that BlogBooster does not support uploading images upon the server (it supports Picasa Web only), a feature that will probably only appeal to BlogSpot fans.
While BlogBooster does highlight on their website that the app supports video, the app in its current form lacks video uploading capabilities, and only supports uploading images (so video bloggers are out of luck here).
Last but not least geo-location was surprisingly missing from this app, which is surprising as all of the official apps have this, not to mention a few of its rivals as well.
If you are a Typepad fan or a BlogSpot lover then this app will appeal to you, especially if you are heavy into formatting your posts (as well as loathe all things video).
This app will probably not appeal to Tumblr addicts (as it lacks a tumble-stream) while WordPress fans may want to hold out until the WP Masters unveil their upcoming iPhone app (which is rumored to include video support) before hitting the buy button.
If BlogBooster is able to find a way to support video uploading (perhaps via YouTube like BlogPress?) as well as images upon each platforms respective servers, I could easily see this as the blogging app for the iPhone worth $10 (let alone $5).
Shocking that an analyst would be wrong yet again about something. Particularly with regard to Apple.
Does anyone else notice that many of these analysts are sort of like bloggers who can get away with saying more outrageous things and yet no one really complains about it when they’re wrong most of the time?
Not only that, they keep getting cited despite their awful track records. It’s pathetic.
If I ever stop blogging, I’m going to become an analyst and just make shit up. And get paid to do it.
Seriously. I'm tired of digging through a bunch of fluff just to get to the meat of the matter. I know it's mostly for SEO, but give me a break.
- Rahsheen is aWeSoMe ™How Do You Push the Hard Message Through http://bit.ly/cY1Dom
One of our client partners, MolsonCoors, teamed up with Artists Raising Consciousness (ARC) to talk about irresponsible drinking. It’s a hard message to give for a few reasons. One, the company markets to this same demographic to encourage them to enjoy their beverages. Two, the target of these messages often feel a bit invulnerable and aren’t really the best recipients of such messages.
There’s a tighrope to walk in making sure the message is effective without being cheesy. There’s an importance to handling these issues, because it deals with occasional tragedy, and it deals a lot with making sure people take the key points away instead of get stuck on a side tangent.
And, as with everything, it’s hard to raise awareness and get things seen. The site The Message in the Bottle deals with that last bit by adding all the usual social sharing buttons, by using YouTube so that others can view the videos offsite, and by reaching out via bloggers (like me) instead of just using mainstream channels.
So, what’s your take? How do you see this going? What else do you think would make this successful? What do you think of the videos at The Message in the Bottle? Effective? No?
It’s interesting that lots of people who really don’t like Facebook’s privacy don’t get mad when journalists and bloggers put into public view Steve Jobs’ emails to them.
Today I got an email from Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/founder of Facebook. I am not going to be the one to put that into public view until he gives me permission to.
Why not?
1. Mark is a friend. Someone I want to have a long-term relationship with and I can guarantee you that if someone took MY emails and put them into public view they wouldn’t be trusted as a real-life friend.
2. If I start doing that, other people will trust me less. Even if I didn’t care about what Mark thought of me, I do care what other people in the industry think of me and I want them to be free to send me emails without having them show up on my blog without their prior permission.
3. If he wanted it in public he could have answered me in public, there’s lots of ways to do that, including at http://facebook.com/scobleizer
That said, I asked for permission to put the email into public view because I think you all should have access to the information in it. I’ll let you know later.
What would you have done with an email if Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg emailed you?
It’s amazing to me that people who are speaking up about privacy and Facebook, like Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis haven’t spoken out against having Steve Jobs’ emails taken out of a private context and printed in a public one.
If you don’t speak up for Steve Jobs’ privacy, what right do you have to speak up for your own privacy? Why isn’t that hypocritical? Just because CEOs are public figures and their emails contain information that would be of interest to the public?
Shame.
UPDATE: Zuckerberg gave me permission to print this email while I was typing this post:
Hey,
We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.
We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.
I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.
I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.
Mark
Here’s a screen shot of the email string:
Blog: when do you throw a CEO's privacy under the bus? (Mark Zuckerberg's email to me): http://bit.ly/cth5Jg
- Robert ScobleWhen do you throw a CEO’s privacy under the bus?
- Louis GrayShared by Bud
A key takeaway from this is to make yourself a source of k.knowledge on some hard to do area. If you succeed at that, social media is about making that expertise accessible.
Now that businesses have all rushed to have Twitter and Facebook profiles and to maintain company blogs, has the onslaught of information made it actually more difficult to get your message heard?
Business strategy and information technology consultant Stowe Boyd wrote a blog post on Thursday entitled "Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing" in which he suggests that the rise of social media might be making us immune to marketing. Boyd suggests that startups might benefit from rethinking how they position themselves online to land on the side of that signal-to-noise ratio so that they're actually heard.
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Boyd observes that "Even in a time of great noise, people are still looking for guidance: they still need to make informed decisions, and to take action on their own behalf or on behalf of their companies. To do so, they look more than ever to those individuals and organizations that they trust, those that have credibility and hard-won reputations." In order to capitalize on this search for expertise, Boyd suggests that companies try to situate their online presence less in terms of marketing and more in terms of thought leadership.
Boyd says there are three obvious ways to do this: Hire a thought leader. Ally your company with innovative, leading-edge programs. And actively participate in the community discourse in your field, either through written publications or through speaking events.
But these might not be viable options for startups. Hiring a thought leader is likely to be cost-prohibitive. As Boyd notes, "A startup wondering how it can stand out in a crowded field may just punt, and go down the classic social media route: the CEO and/or marketing folks will blog on the company website, and hope that people read the posts; they pay to attend conferences, and hope that they can get a speaking slot; and they try to make the company and its various spokespeople seem to be highly regarded in the community. This is the path that all companies seem to head down, so it comes as no great surprise that it generally doesn't lead to outstanding results."
Boyd suggests some alternatives:
Naturally, it isn't easy to become recognized and respected as a thought leader. Boyd does note that choosing to situate yourself as such will require resources, just as marketing and product development do. Perhaps even more so.
What do you think? Do you think we've started to wear out the traditional social media avenues for startups? And do you think a startup can (or should) focus on becoming a thought leader?
DiscussCultivating Thought Leaders versus Company Bloggers
- Panayotis VryonisRT @GrowMap: Perfect @Aweber contest for bloggers @dennisedell Win a lifetime sub-affiliate for best review #marketing http://bit.ly/bZGzDx
[Direct Link]RT @Knieriemen: Infosmack Podcast #50 - "Cisco, Gartner and Bloggers" with @etherealmind and @stevie_chambers - http://bit.ly/c5A7Xb
[Direct Link]Infosmack Podcast: Cisco, Gartner & Bloggers w/ @louisgray @etherealmind @stevie_chambers http://bit.ly/c5A7Xb /via @Knieremen
- Stuart MinimanR.I.P. World's Greatest Blogsearch http://bit.ly/9xg9oq
Searching the blogs, scanning the posts, feed-powered search: there used to be more startups offering blogsearch than there are charecters in a Twitter message today. But no more. Today blogsearch engines fade away all the time and almost no one notices.
But when Ask.com shuttered its blogsearch engine this month, I noticed. It made me sad, because it was the best blogsearch engine in the whole world. And now it's gone. You, dear reader, probably don't even care. But let me explain what we're missing out on now that it's gone.
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"We decided to sunset this feature on May 4 for two reasons," Ask's Jon Murchinson told us today by email. "1. there was low usage of the product and 2. we are dedicating all available resoures to our [November launched] Q&A strategy."
If a blog didn't have a meaningful number of subscribers in Bloglines, but it showed up in search results, Ask suspected that it might be a spam or low-quality blog. Likewise, you could sort results by most-recent posts but sometimes it was really nice to see what was being said about a particular topic by the most popular bloggers in a given niche. That was a useful feature.
And now it's gone, and that's a real shame.
Sometimes you're looking to see what experts in a field are writing in long-form on their blogs. Not spitting out on Twitter. Not posting on a static website. Blog posts. There is an incredible body of knowledge in that medium, and search by popularity was a really useful way to sort it. Surely someone offers a similar service. Who?
Venture Capitalists Chime In About the "Agile Board" http://bit.ly/d8cdZI
The great thing about following the hundreds of venture capitalist bloggers is that every now then when one of them writes a rather poignant entry, several other VCs will latch on and provide their opinions on their blogs or in comments. Such is the case surrounding a recent article by Mark Suster of GRP Partners about the "agile board," a phrase he has coined to explain the techniques startups should use to keep their board members more actively involved in the business. Since being posted to Suster's blog, Both Sides of the Table, a handful of other VCs have weighed in with their opinions on the subject.
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As Suster explains, VCs desperately want to help the companies they are supporting but they don't always know how. He suggests a few ways founders can involve their board members, including asking for key introductions to important people, keeping them aware of company goals and ensuring they are prepared to participate in the board meetings.
Suster's philosophy is essentially increasing the frequency of communication so that the board isn't digesting big chunks of information all at once, leading to a more complete understanding of your company. Since the publication of his post on the subject, some other notable VCs have offered their opinions on the matter, including Foundry Group's Brad Feld, Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson and Babak Nivi of Venture Hacks.
Nivi was one of the first to reply, and did so via a comment on Suster's blog. In his opinion, the focus of the post should have been more about hastening the "feedback loop" between founders and investors.
"Information is part of the feedback loop. What's missing is changing the board-level plan based on the new info that board members are getting more quickly. An agile board would change its board-level plan more quickly than a board that only adjusts the plan at regular board meetings," writes Nivi. "You talk more often so you can change your plans more often. The whole point is to change your actions more quickly so you don't drive the car off a cliff."
In a second post spawned from Nivi's comment, Suster agreed that having an agile board is just as much about making decisions frequently as it is about communicating frequently. Action, not just communication, is necessary between meetings to be truly agile, Suster says.
Brad Feld takes Suster's post to the next level, advising founders to give specific assignments to VCs like a teacher handing out homework.
"At the end of the first board meeting, spend some time talking about your expectations for your board members (including your VCs), ask if they are reasonable, and then go around the table and ask each board member what they'd like to specifically help with between now and the next board meeting," he says. "In companies where the CEO hands out regular assignments [...] the board members begin holding themselves accountable and the management team is much more comfortable working directly with the individual board members."
Fred Wilson agrees wholeheartedly with Suster on the idea of involving the board more voraciously. As he sees it, the founders and CEOs are ultimately in control of how active their board is, and the difference can be drastic.
"Some boards I am on only meet six times a year and there is very little involvement between meetings. Those companies might as well not have boards," writes Wilson. "I am also on boards where everyone is highly engaged between meetings. These boards are active in email discussions with the team, they are active in recruiting, business development, even strategy. They are agile boards who add significant value."
It is great to get a wide spread of opinions on an issue when the VC blog scene latches onto a topic such as this. If you are starting a relationship with a board of investors, it may be wise to discuss from the outset how they will take an active role in the company. As these venture capitalists have shown, more often than not, the more active and aware the board is, the more likely the company is to succeed.
Photo by Flickr user olaf d punkt.
Discuss
Facebook’s critical issue — and Achilles heel — has come to the fore again. After the company unveiled a program that automatically shared data with special partners and changed the way it tracks people’s interests last month, bloggers and users are up in arms over privacy.
No, there are no mass protests like the ones that 10 percent of Facebook’s user base joined in 2006 when the the company launched the news feed.
However, this time it seems more insidious and dangerous to the brand in the long-term. A few high-profile influencers in the tech community like Google’s Matt Cutts and GDGT’s Peter Rojas cut the cord and closed their accounts recently, while a New York-based group of hackers raised more than $100,000 to come up with a more private alternative to the social network. Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy Elliot Schrage came forward in The New York Times for a public question-and-answer saying, “Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice.”
But sending Schrage to the Times isn’t enough.
Mark Zuckerberg needs to come forward and explain what he truly and genuinely believes about privacy. Why? Because even as the company has created granular privacy controls, Facebook’s moves can appear disingenuous (even if they’re not). Why spend months designing a privacy overhaul and default most of the user base to public? Why do people have to choose between an emptier profile and making their likes and interests public? Where is this instant personalization project going?
It feels like a slippery slope. To where? Facebook’s users don’t know. So the company should just be frank and that message should come from the top.
Mark should write a Jobsian memo like this one explaining Apple’s deep aversion to Adobe’s Flash.
Or something like this Googley memo from senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg explaining Google’s philosophies on openness.
Or how about this one — remember this? “Calm Down. Breathe. We hear you.” That was from Zuckerberg four years ago when the company was much smaller (and more humble).
Or something like this piece Sergey Brin wrote to explain the mission behind Google Books in The New York Times last fall.
Facebook has a powerful mission to make the world more open and connected, but the values that Zuckerberg stands for aren’t clear. And that’s the problem. With other great technology companies (which is what Facebook aspires to be), the ideals have been apparent. Steve Jobs made technology an art form. Bill Gates wanted to put a computer in every home; now he’s out fighting global poverty. Even though Google faces constant public criticism, its cheesy “Don’t be evil” motto protects it. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have cultivated a public image of themselves as two brilliant technical minds who care about pursuing society’s best interests. So when they overstep, it’s often seen as a well-intentioned mistake.
When Zuckerberg got on-stage last month at f8, his speech was far-reaching. Visionary. But he expressed little empathy for the millions of users that have come to entrust the company with their most personal details. He wasn’t listening. At the company’s sixth birthday party when it launched another redesign, some employees (not all) made fun of bewildered and anxious status updates from users projected on a screen.
Zuckerberg has created a corporate culture where Facebook knows best. That may work for a hardware and mobile company like Apple, but it doesn’t work as well for an iterative and communal product like a social network.
I asked if Facebook’s public relations department earlier this week if there were any essays, public statements or speeches that reflected his philosophies on privacy. They didn’t respond on that particular question. But from what I can gather from his previous comments, here’s how he is thinking.
He believes that people should have a single identity: “You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
He’s a proponent of ‘radical transparency’ or that transparency will overtake modern life: “The world moving towards more transparency could be the trend driving the most change over the next ten to twenty years,” he said in the book. Another early Facebook engineer Charlie Cheever, who left and went on to start Quora, added: ”I feel Mark doesn’t believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping-stone. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong.”
But he is deeply conscious of the fact that most people don’t ascribe to that idea: “To get people to this point where there’s more openness — that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time,” Zuckerberg said in the book. “The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.”
Another long-time Facebook employee Yishan Wong, who recently left, wrote that the company spends an immense amount of time focusing on how users want to control information on Quora: “My observation of Facebook as a company (its people, including its executives) is that it cares a lot about privacy. It spends a lot of time thinking about it, it spends a lot of time thinking about how to protect its users’ privacy, and then (ironically) it is continually surprised at how the vast majority of its users don’t end up really caring at all to make use of various privacy-protection mechanisms built into the products.
He added, “Mark Zuckerberg probably cares about privacy, but he probably also understands it in a far deeper way than most people do, because he has to work with it in a real and practical sense, and so if he “doesn’t believe in it,” it’s in the way that someone doesn’t “believe in” a primitive and unexamined view of something when he has had to personally develop a fuller and deeper understanding of it.”
The problem is that privacy is not generally understood to be a reciprocal right, according to Wong. People love to invade other people’s privacy, but are upset when the same is done to them. Hence, every time Facebook has become more open and public, its usage has gone up because people suddenly get more access to each other’s information.
He believes that transparency has the power to create more empathy and tolerance: He emphasized the point again and again in speeches abroad to foreign developer communities in Europe.
He’s afraid that if the company doesn’t gradually open up, it will fail: He stressed the perils of building walls in the book. “The best thing we can do is kind of move smoothly with the world around us and to have constant competition, not build walls. To the extent that we think most of the sharing is going to happen outside of Facebook anyway, we really want to encourage it. I can’t guarantee we’ll succeed. I just think that if we don’t do this then eventually we will fail.”
He believes that Facebook’s approach to privacy, in which users explicitly share their interests, is more ethically sound than Google’s data collection approach: Zuckerberg tells Kirkpatrick, ”Let me paint the two scenarios for you. They correspond to two companies in the Valley. It’s not completely this extreme, but they are on different sides of the spectrum. On the one hand you have Google, which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that’s going on. They call it crawling. They crawl the web and get information and bring it into their systems. They want to build maps, so they send around vans which literally go and take pictures of your home for their Street View system. And the way they collect and build profiles on people to do advertising is by tracking where you go on the Web, through cookies with DoubleClick and AdSense. That’s how they build a profile about what you’re interested in. Google is a great company, but you can see that taken to a logical extreme that’s a little scary.
On the other hand, we started the company saying there should be another way. If you allow people to share what they want and give them good tools to control what they’re sharing, you can get even more information shared. But think of all the things you share on Facebook that you wouldn’t want to share with everyone, right? You wouldn’t want these things to be crawled or indexed–like pictures from family vacations, your phone number, anything that happens on an intranet inside a company, or any kind of private message or e-mail. So a lot of stuff is getting more and more open, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s not open to everyone.
This is one of the most important problems for the next ten to twenty years. Given that the world is moving toward more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think that’s critical for the world. That’s just a really important part of my personality, and what I care about.”
All of this reflects some incredibly thoughtful deliberation. The problem is the public isn’t aware of it. And because of that, users feel like Facebook is making them false promises that it will just take away in a year or two’s time.
If Zuckerberg has a carefully thought-out vision for where privacy is going, he needs to lay it out. Maybe then we’ll be willing to follow where he leads.
Companies: Facebook
People: Mark Zuckerberg
Marketers stiff mom bloggers at their own peril: http://bit.ly/cvzUfK Another hard-hitter by @Mom101.
[Direct Link]
Ever since this whole blog thing started to take off, marketers have been trying to horn their way into the conversation. It started out as crude pay-per-post schemes, and then evolved into more subtle “sponsored conversations”. Once Twitter and Facebook took off, some of those conversations also were for sale. It got so bad, the FTC had to get involved.
Now Six Apart is launching its version of sponsored conversations, which it calls TypePad Conversations. The trick to this type of marketing is to strike a balance between creating authentic online conversations and creating advertorials. The way Six Apart is trying to strike this balance is by getting bloggers to put up posts asking their readers general questions about a topic related to the advertiser’s interests. So Sprint, which is the launch advertiser, is advertising an upcoming HTC 4G phone by getting bloggers to write posts asking questions such as: “Do your kids respond better and faster when you text or call them?”, “If you could connect up to 5 devices at a time using just your mobile phone, how would that change how and when you access the internet?”, and “Is technology making us better or worse at communicating with each other? How so?” I fear the answer to the last question is “worse.”
The bloggers don’t get paid directly for the posts, but below each one is an ad unit showing a display image of the Sprint phone next to a stream of comments from across Six Apart’s blog network from people answering the same question. For some reason, Six Apart calles this ad unit the “Awesome Bar,” even though it is a square, not a bar. And it is not particularly awesome. It reads like an ad, and people will block it out just like they do most other ads online. It is wallpaper. Bloggers get a revenue share from the ad unit.
The program was announced in May, but it looks like it just rolled out today, at least according to a press release. Blogs such as Betty Confidential, GeekWeek, and Jessica Gottlieb are participating. The advertising program is open to bloggers on other platforms as well, such as WordPress.
Thankfully, Six Apart isn’t trying to get bloggers to spark conversations about the advertised products themselves, at least not with this first campaign. As forced as they tend to be, sponsored conversations are not going away as long as marketers think they can somehow capture some of that social media buzz.
Apple Acknowledges, Prepares to Patch iPad Wi-Fi Bug http://bit.ly/dAixTI
It's never easy being an early adopter of first generation hardware, but for a select group of iPad owners, an irritating Wi-Fi bug has put a damper on the fun of using the latest touch-based mobile computing gadget from Apple.
Shortly after its official launch, a number of iPad owners began to post about connection issues both on Apple's own support site and elsewhere. Now it appears that Apple is officially acknowledging the Wi-Fi bug's existence and, even better, is preparing a patch to fix it.
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The Wi-Fi bug plaguing some iPad owners has been a tricky one to diagnose. For some, the issue is simply weak Wi-Fi reception while others routinely lose their connection altogether...even as often as every 10 minutes. (The iPad owners here at ReadWriteWeb have the latter problem).
Everyone from bloggers to university I.T. departments have tried to diagnose the situation. Princeton, for example, found that the iPad doesn't handle DHCP assignments correctly. (DHCP is the protocol that provides IP addresses to computers requiring network connectivity.) Unfortunately, the university did not have a solution for the matter.
Then there was Loren Wiener, an I.T. consultant in Australia, who thought he discovered the fix which involved toggling a setting in the Wi-Fi connection area. However, his fix didn't solve everyone's problems.
The same goes for the official suggestions provided by Apple on its support site. A somewhat bizarre list offers potential workarounds ranging from setting wireless security to WPA on your Wi-Fi router to adjusting the iPad's screen brightness. Brightness? We don't understand that one either - perhaps it prevents the iPad from going to sleep?
Despite all the suggestions for potential workarounds, the only consist fix for the issue was this: turn the Wi-Fi off and then back on again. Or reboot the iPad.
For a company that likes to brag about how its products are simple and "just work," this bug is a bit of an embarrassment. However, early adopters aren't too put out by the mess - for the most part, they've come to expect issues when braving the purchase of first generation gadgets.
The only concern was that the bug could be hardware-related, and therefore, unable to patch via a software update. Luckily, that's not the case.
According to a recently updated support document on Apple's website: "Apple will also address remaining Wi-Fi connectivity issues with a future iPad software update." No word on when that patch will be available, but those affected are certainly hoping Apple doesn't wait much longer. Resetting the Wi-Fi constantly is annoying and has likely even led to decreased usage of the device in some cases, if not out-and-out returns.
Discuss
Shared by Jesse Stay
Facebook makes all this available in the API - I can get the e-mail from the user, for instance. I can pull user information and even store it in my database. Facebook is making an influence on the web with its brand, but it's certainly not "taking over".
It’s not happening overnight but it is happening. We are slowly handing the keys of our Web over to Facebook and other than a small vocal minority no-one seems to care.
It’s not something that is all that obvious but Facebook has all the pieces in place to hijack the Web from under us and we all seem to be willing to jack those pieces into the very fabric of the Web – our blogs and websites.
I am still ambivalent about the whole Like button thing even though I am using them over on WinExtra; and still debating their inclusion here and at Braincell Soup (my more artsy fartsy blog), I can see them quickly becoming the underpinnings of our socialized web. However they aren’t the real danger as are the other social plugins from Facebook.
The real danger I feel is the adoption of the Facebook Login connections that are springing up all over the place like some bad weed infestation. Ya there’s a smattering of OpenID type login options as well as Twitter but I have started to notice sites that use Facebook social login as the primary way for people to login to sites.
Prior to things like Twitter and Facebook site registration was always handled in-house which meant that people usually had to remember multiple login usernames and password which admittedly as a user is real pain in the ass. Now though services like Facebook through some slick salesmanship have convinced a growing number of bloggers and site owners to save their users from frustration by hooking into the Facebook way of doing things.
On the surface this seems like a great idea. One less headache for bloggers and site owners as well as a bonus for the users. No more having to remember all those logins just use your Facebook profile for everything.
Great idea but there are two things that really bother me about this.
First off by going this route you are basically handing over your complete membership database to Facebook. This may not seem like much when it comes to most sites or blogs but what if you have a site or blog that uses that database for marketing purposes? What if you have a newsletter that is an integral part of your blog or site?
Suddenly to reach those people you have to return to Facebook and use things like their Fan Pages or Groups because that is where all your readers / members have their contact information. You’ve for all intents and purposes farmed out your extras to Facebook.
The other thing that bothers me about this rush to use Facebook social logging in and registering is what about all those people who don’t use Facebook and don’t or won’t use it? Have you just limited your site to a specific segment of the web by going this route?
In our rush to be all cool and everything by implementing these great new social tools from Facebook are we just putting up a different type of Private Members Only sign?
Are we really benefiting our readers by becoming just another outpost for Facebook?
Who really is benefiting here?
The blog owner?
The site owner?
The users?
Or Facebook.
We’re handing the keys to the Web over to Facebook
- Rob DianaWe’re handing the keys to the Web over to Facebook
- Sarah PerezWe’re handing the keys to the Web over to Facebook
- Panayotis VryonisRT @jsinkeywest: The winds of change are coming http://bit.ly/cuzKpn #Bloggers would appreciate your feedback and RT :P Thanks
[Direct Link]The winds of change are coming
- John SullivanRT @jsinkeywest: The winds of change are coming http://bit.ly/cuzKpn
- John SullivanRT @jsinkeywest: The winds of change are coming http://bit.ly/cuzKpn
- John SullivanRT @jsinkeywest: The winds of change are coming http://bit.ly/cuzKpn
- John SullivanRT @jsinkeywest: The winds of change are coming http://bit.ly/cuzKpn
- John Sullivan
When you’re about to launch a new product or service, you need some buzz.
Sure, you can use your blog to mention your plans a few times leading up to the launch. You’ll probably ask some fellow bloggers to write reviews. You’ll use your best copywriting techniques to craft pitches for your blog and email list, and send as many people as you can to the sales page on the day of the launch.
That’s all good.
But there’s also a more subtle route.
You can generate interest in what you want to promote without actually mentioning it — and you can start building that interest long before you’re ready to announce it’s on the market.
Here’s how:
Every product or service should address a problem that your potential customers have.
(Note: if your product or service doesn’t address a problem, you don’t have a good product or service yet. Please go back and try again.)
Quite often, your customers don’t realize yet that they have this problem.
For example, my friend John Hoff created a product to help bloggers protect WordPress blogs from hackers. He knew that blog hacking is a problem many people have, but most bloggers don’t know they’re at risk.
For John, a bunch of guest posts around the web and a series on common ways blogs are hacked would have worked well to build some buzz for his product.
By the end of the series, readers would be getting a little concerned. “Hey, maybe this is something I should look into. This might happen to me, too.”
Then John could pop up with a nifty solution to the problem, and those worried people would be grateful.
A little education saves him the trouble of convincing customers that they need the product, and it benefits the reader at the same time. His sale gets infinitely easier — and he gets a bunch of informative blog posts, traffic, and readers out of the deal as well. Sweet.
When you blog, be sure to mention solutions to problems you’re going to solve.
You don’t need to go into step-by-step lessons and give every single answer away. That’s usually something you save for the product or service itself.
But you definitely should talk about what to do, and then sell how to do it. Blog about what solutions you think are best for different angles on the problem. Then sell them your expertise in the best way to go about carrying out those solutions for themselves.
This approach lets you show readers that you know what needs to be done. And your confidence lets them see that you have a very good idea of exactly how to do it.
A good way to reinforce the impression that you have expertise is by blogging about clients you’ve already helped. There are a couple of ways to do this:
By the time you’ve spent a few weeks blogging on topics that relate to the problem you’re about to solve, your readers will be fully informed and ready to buy. And you won’t need to beat them over the head with pushy sales talk. That’s a win for everybody.
About the Author: For fantastic web copy that solves your problems without using any ladybugs, get in touch with James Chartrand at Men with Pens. Or skip right through the garden and grab the Men with Pens RSS feed right here.
Jacob Gube is the Founder/Chief Editor of Six Revisions, a popular web development and design site and the Deputy Editor of Design Instruct, a web magazine for designers. He has over seven years of experience as professional web developer and has written a book on JavaScript. Connect with him via Twitter.
With so much content on the web, it’s nice to be able to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to help us discover noteworthy links and weed through all the stuff (and fluff) out there.
For designers who enjoy social media — or anyone interested in design news and resources — there are a number of sites and services for you to check out and participate in. Here are nine noteworthy social news and bookmarking sites aimed at designers and design enthusiasts.
This social news site’s interface will be familiar to those who use Digg, Reddit, or Mixx. The concept is simple: Get enough votes on your links and it will be promoted to the front page.
DesignBump currently has over 16,000 users, with some famous design bloggers among their active participants.
This free social bookmarking service puts a unique twist on the format: Instead of bookmarking web pages that you find, you bookmark images. Popular bookmarked images are displayed in a gallery-style format so that site users can see them for visual inspiration on their own projects.
design:related is a community site that seeks to bring together designers from many disciplines. You can set up a portfolio on their site, share what’s inspiring you creatively, and submit news that members can vote on.
The site is a perfect spot for inspiration-seekers, and those looking to stay up to speed on important industry news in a single location.
Established in 2007, DesignFloat is one of the first vote-to-promote social news-sharing sites dedicated specifically to designers.
The site has a broad range of categories for users to submit links to, including Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Industrial Design, as well as design-related topics like Photography. Each category has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in case you’re only interested in specific topics.
Graphic Design Links is another destination for creatives looking for socially promoted info. To help users see the most popular topics being submitted to the site, they have a Tag Cloud page.
Among the site’s submission categories are Illustration, 3D, Typography, and Web Design.
The Web Blend only has about 1,500 members, making it a comparatively small community — but smaller isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Some of its top users are popular design bloggers, such as Jad Limcaco of Designer Informer and Sneh Roy of Little Box Of Ideas. This smaller community gives members a chance to interact directly with some of their favorite content creators.
zaBox covers a wide range of design industry news, resources, and tutorials. Like most social news sites, a story’s popularity is determined by the number of people voting for it.
It also offers bloggers the ability to integrate zaBox into their site, including a button for voting and submitting their stories to the web service.
Visual bookmarking is a popular activity among designers. Collecting images for reference and inspiration later on can get you out of a creative funk in a jiffy.
FFFFOUND! is a web service where users can post and share images they’ve discovered on the web. The website is intelligent: It recommends images you might also like based on your bookmarking history.
The amount of graphic design tutorials on the web is overwhelming. Pixel Groovy helps point you to ones that its community members like.
The community-driven site gives editorial control to their users, empowering them with the ability to vote on tutorials that they deem worthwhile to be published and indexed on the site.
Aside from websites that are geared towards designers, major social news and bookmarking sites also have strong design categories that are worth checking out.
- 10 Essential Design Tools for Social Media Pros
- 8 of the Best Chrome Extensions for Web Designers
- 10 Fantastic Places for Finding Designers Online
- 5 Fantastic Free Tools to Showcase Your Portfolio
- HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog
Tags: bookmarking, design, designers, digg, List, Lists, Mixx, reddit, social bookmarking, social media, web design
