Our SocialFish webinar series on Social Networking for Events - last one features ASAE! http://bit.ly/cyRky0
[Direct Link]Yahoo’s New Features an Admission That Facebook Has Won the Social Race http://bit.ly/aWeeir
Yahoo is doubling down on its bets on social networking, but it is doing so by effectively outsourcing its social efforts to Facebook. The web portal this week is launching enhanced Facebook integration, along with a revamped personal profile feature called Yahoo Pulse, and also recently announced the addition of new Google Buzz-style social features in the company’s email service called Yahoo Updates. The new Facebook features are the result of an agreement that Yahoo signed with the social network in December to use what was then called Facebook Connect (now known as the Open Graph protocol).
The new features integrate Facebook status updates and activity streams into the customized user pages at Yahoo, including the home page and Yahoo Mail. Users can also share content on Facebook from any of the Yahoo content sites such as its sports hub, entertainment hub, etc. In addition, the site’s personal profile pages are now known as Yahoo Pulse, and the company says they will give users more control over how and where they share their content. Yahoo has been bending over backwards to talk about its new sharing features, including its Google Buzz-style social integration for email, hoping to avoid some of the privacy pain that Facebook and Google have encountered.
While the company no doubt hopes that its new features will encourage more people who visit the site to stay longer, they are also a tacit admission that Facebook has won the social race — one that Yahoo has not really been a factor in for some time. In a similar way, Yahoo has recently outsourced many of its existing services to others, including a deal with Match.com to handle the personals business and a partnership with Nokia for mobile email, not to mention the biggest outsourcing move of all: namely, outsourcing its entire search business to Microsoft.
In the final blow for Yahoo, a recent ranking of most-visited sites by Google showed Facebook the clear winner with 540 million monthly unique visitors, and Yahoo at number two with 490 million. Whether integrating Facebook sharing and activity streams will improve Yahoo’s position or simply accelerate the current downward trend for the site remains to be seen. The company appears to want to become a portal for the social web in the same sense that it used to be a portal for Web 1.0. — but half a billion users seem to have decided that they already have a portal for the social web, and it’s called Facebook.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Futurehttp://pro.gigaom.com/2010/03/why-newnet-companies-must-shoulder-more-responsibility
Like it or not, your personal email address says something about you. Gmail tends to be considered the cool email to have today. Apple’s .Mac addresses (now .Me) identify users who own Macs and don’t mind paying $100 a year for email and related services. AOL emails are tied to adults who haven’t changed their address since the dial-up days. And Hotmail is seen as old school.
Since its debut in 1996, Hotmail has soared to 400 million users world-wide. But it also lost users along the way—particularly in 2008—due in part to a general perception that Hotmail wasn’t as modern as other email services.
Starting this week, Microsoft Corp. will try to change the way Hotmail is perceived by rolling out a revamped version. The company, which bought the program in 1998, has scrapped its attempts to get people to use its site for social networking, acknowledging that companies like Facebook and Twitter are already doing the job. And it has cleaned up its once confusing nomenclature: Hotmail is the sole name for Microsoft’s Web email program.
To spread the word, Microsoft recently launched a massive marketing campaign, involving online, radio and outdoor ads running through the end of the year, that will cost the company tens of millions of dollars, according to Microsoft general manager, Brian Hall. Mr. Hall says that “The New Busy” campaign is intended to demonstrate how Hotmail’s organizational features help busy people with full lives. Part of the campaign will focus on reintroducing current Hotmail users to new features.
But should you really consider reviving your old Hotmail account or opening a new one? I’ve been using this new version of Hotmail for the past few weeks and I’ve found it handled large files with ease, performed browser-like tasks within the inbox and integrated third-party social networks and email accounts. Though the Hotmail name still conjures up frustrating memories of too much spam and the belief that storage was restricted, Microsoft has revamped its old email service into one that’s smart, robust and reliable. It deserves a second look.
Hotmail is still big on sorting emails according to your existing “Contacts” versus everyone else. This works well if you’ve taken the time to add all of your friends to the Contacts list, a procedure that takes a couple seconds per person and is done as you send emails to people. This prompting can be a bit of a pain, but if you haven’t done it, you might miss emails from people you care about. A Microsoft representative said that by the end of this summer, users will be able to opt out of this sorting.
At first glance, the new Hotmail doesn’t look dramatically different. But a closer look reveals intelligent organizational tools. Shortcut tabs at the top of the inbox display only messages from social networks (think of all those email notifications from Facebook and Twitter), pre-made email groups or contacts. Many other email programs only do this if users manually set up folders.
Another organizational tool is called Quick Views. It automatically sorts four types of emails into folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs and Shipping Updates. These categories come preset and cannot be customized.
Quick Views saved me from digging through my inbox for specific emails and from dragging certain emails into folders for saving. When I ordered gifts online for a friend’s wedding, the shipping notification emails from the delivery service arrived in my inbox and were also viewable in the Shipping Updates folder. Emails with attached Office documents were neatly sorted into the Office Docs folder.
Behind the scenes of the revamped Hotmail, Microsoft is powering all inboxes with Windows Live SkyDrive—an ever-growing, server-based storage repository that guarantees you’ll never be asked to clean out your inbox. (As with many Web-based email programs, Hotmail stores your emails on servers rather than taking up space on your hard drive.)
SkyDrive also gives Hotmail users more freedom when sharing photos: Images can be quickly uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends via a Web link. One message can include up to 200 photos of 50 megabytes each, or 10 gigabytes total. Meanwhile, Gmail limits attachments to about 25 megabytes per message.
When Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents are attached to any message received, they are opened right in the Web browser, without having to open another program. This works thanks to a program called Office Web Apps, which functions regardless of whether or not Office 2010 is installed on the computer. Just as photos are shared from Hotmail using a SkyDrive link, so, too, are Office documents.
Hotmail’s inbox now has a Sweep feature, which lets you move or delete all emails from a particular sender. (A similar option in Microsoft Office 2010 wipes out all emails sent prior to the last message in a thread.) Another option for tidying up your inbox is Conversation View, which sorts all emails sent in the same conversation into one group. Users can opt in or out of this, unlike Gmail, which offers only threaded emails.
Tough spam filters caught every Viagra-related email sent to my Hotmail address. And if you identify a piece of mail in the Junk folder that isn’t actually spam, Hotmail remembers this and sorts differently in the future.
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, now plays a role in Hotmail. It’s built into the search box as an option for scouring Web content directly from the inbox. It can be accessed while composing a message: A small “From Bing” drop-down menu in the email you’re writing lets you search for content to add to emails, like maps, videos, images and movie show times. This content appears in a right-side panel and can be embedded in email messages with one click.
To keep people from straying away to different Web pages while using Hotmail, Web functions can be performed from right within its inbox. These functions include watching videos from YouTube or Hulu, or viewing photos from Flickr or SmugMug. I clicked on YouTube links in emails and watched videos in a handsome overlay screen. And if an email includes codes for tracking packages using the U.S. Postal Service, the package’s real-time shipping status appears within the email. A Microsoft representative confirmed that FedEx and UPS are in the works.
I added my Gmail account to my Hotmail account, so I could check several personal email messages on the same Web page. In a similar manner, Hotmail can pull multiple contacts from several networks—like phone numbers and emails from LinkedIn or birthdays from Facebook—into a single Contact list.
Hotmail may have burned you in the past, but this beefed-up new version saves you time and is a pleasure to use.
Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com
How Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet) http://bit.ly/cMVMXe
Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In an blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says they are releasing their Face Tagging functionality "to show [their] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?
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Face Tagging literally works exactly like tagging photos on Facebook. While viewing a picture, the text "In this photo:" is displayed below it with a link to begin tagging the photo. By clicking the link, users can then pinpoint people's faces in the photo and a box will appear around the face, as well as a pop-up dialogue box in which to enter the person's name and Twitter handle. Once done, users hit the "Done Tagging" button to return to normal browsing functionality - just like Facebook.
Honestly, the only difference between tagging photos on Facebook and on Twitpic is that the "Done Tagging" button appears above photos on the former and below photos on the latter. While Twitpic's new functionality is a dead lift of Facebook's long-existing photo tagging feature, it is smart to copy the social networking giant. Why re-invent the wheel? Instead, Twitpic is giving users a familiar experience, making the process easy and intuitive.
When users tag a face in a photo, by default they can send a rather dry tweet announcing the tag and including the user name of the person tagged, effectively working as a notification. First of all, the inability to personalize this message is a bit of a downer, but you can always just uncheck the box and send out the tweet yourself. Secondly, by default it does this every time you tag a person in a photo. You thought Facebook notifications were bad? Just wait until someone tags a photo with ten people and unwittingly tweets the photo out ten times.
Additionally, the only way Twitpic alerts users that they have been tagged in a photo is via Twitter - so users could be tagged in hundreds of photos and not know it if the tagger chose not to tweet the tags. Users do have the ability to delete tags of themselves on other people's photos, but right now the only way of knowing of such photos is to be sent the tweet, which not everyone will choose to do.
In a phone interview today, Twitpic founder Noah Everett told ReadWriteWeb that additional features, like the ability to view photos you're tagged in, are in the works and should be out in a few weeks. The goal, he says, has been to launch the tagging feature and use user feedback to determine the next logical step.
That next logical step, for many users, may be privacy controls - something the new feature lacks. On Facebook, users have the ability to manage photos they have been tagged in and remove their association from a photo once-and-for-all. The only option related to photo tags for Twitpic users is the option to allow other people to tag their photos. Everett says they are looking into possible privacy controls, such as a blanket rule preventing anyone from tagging you, or specific user-based bans to avoid those "crazy ex-girlfriends", as he put it.
Personally, I use Twitpic mainly as a means to an end - I upload photos to the service for sharing on Twitter via a mobile application, which means I don't visit the Twitpic web interface too frequently. How am I supposed to know when I'm tagged in a photo if the user tagging me chooses not to tweet it? Even if I visit the Twitpic homepage, there is no way for me to view an aggregated list of photos I am tagged in and no system for notifying me of such photos.
Everett says they are looking into ways of notifying users, including email alterts, but hopes that eventually app developers will add the functionality using Twitpic's API. I guess the good thing is if someone decides to surreptitiously tag me in a photo, for now the general public has no real great way of finding it either.
The other important thing to note from the launch of Twitpic's Face Tagging functionality is that it is a new stand-alone platform for a third-party application to another service. What that jumble of words means is that when other Twitter-based photo sharing apps add this functionality, it will be nearly impossible for users to effectively aggregate their tagged photos (and other meta-data) across platforms. With the low barrier of entry to Twitter applications, it seems likely that Twitpic's competitors would adopt similar features to keep up.
I spoke with Thomas Vander Wal, father of the phrase "folksonomy" which refers to collective tagging of meta-data, and he shared some interesting insights into this situation.
"Since others have done similar things on other platforms (Facebook, Flickr) the [intellectual property] is fuzzy and Twitpic can't claim it, so others are free to jump in," Vander Wal told ReadWriteWeb. "It would be in Twitter's best interest to build a central aggregation point for this."
This is exactly why Twitter is rolling out annotations, which have been testing recently and should be out soon. The annotations will create a standardized framework for third-party apps to build from, making interoperability between services much easier. Everett said he actually spoke with people from Twitter today about "coming together" and "rolling [tagging functionality] into annotations."
Strangely, however, Twitter mentioned in April that they planned on having "trending annotations" and letting developers battle for standardization. It would make sense that meta-data for tagged photos could be added to Twitter's annotations, and if the services adopted the standard, aggregation would be simple.
If not, then the entrepreneurial community, "somebody like PixelPipe" as Vander Wal suggested, would need to create another third-party Twitter service that would handle this aggregation - not an ideal solution going forward. We can't blame Twitpic for this fate: what they're doing is good in terms of pushing the platform forward. We can, however, bring up the privacy issues they've have raised with their new service and its apparent lack of controls, but then again, it is a brand new feature and more functionality is on the way soon.
Tagging photo courtesy of the LA Times
Discuss
How Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet)
- Sarah PerezHow Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet)
- (jeff)isageek
Twitter now Boasts Nearly 200 Million Visitors is a post from Chris Pirillo
During the CM Summit today, Twitter COO Dick Costolo informed the gathered crowd that Twitter now has approximately 190 million visitors per month. Collectively, those people send out about 65 million tweets per day. Holy Twitter client – that’s a lot of updates. ““We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.”
The number of visitors to the site is not the same thing as the number of registered users. Costolo reminded us that most users never send out a single tweet (though I cannot imagine that!). Instead, they use the site to consume information and news. It’s also not clear how many of those 65 million tweets come from spam bots and the like.
Twitter is much more than just a place to update your friends and family. It’s honestly the fastest way to find out the latest news – usually while it is happening. For instance, my assistant Kat used Twitter two nights ago to track the deadly and destructive tornadoes that ripped through Illinois. She has family in and near the locations where the damage was the worst, and couldn’t reach them during the storms. She kept her eyes glued to Twitter, finding out information there far quicker than she did on any other source. The local newspaper website (and tv site) didn’t have ANY information about the storms until more than an hour after they happened. However, people living through the catastrophe were live tweeting every moment.
Social networking is about staying connected – with the world. When you open up your mind to the possibilities that are out there and learn to take advantage of them, you’ll find yourself learning new things every moment of every day.
Google Tries to Get Some Buzz for Wave With ‘Wave This’ Feature http://bit.ly/cQn1uE
Remember Google Wave? Before Buzz came along, Google Wave was the hot new social networking feature from the world’s largest search company. It launched with much fanfare at Google’s I/O conference last May, but has since failed to get much traction, in part because no one could figure out what to do with it exactly. Then along came Buzz in February and grabbed the spotlight from its Google cousin, in part because of the furore that arose over the service’s approach to privacy. Now Google Wave is rolling out a feature that it clearly hopes will catch the imagination of some web users and maybe jump-start Wave’s popularity.
The new feature allows users to add a bookmarklet to their browser that will create a new Wave from any web page, embedding a link inside the Wave so that other users can discuss it. If the page contains a video or image, that will be embedded as well — in a playable format, in the case of videos — so that users can check it out before discussing it. And Google has also provided web designers with an easy way to add “Wave This” buttons to their pages, and/or to produce clickable URLs that will generate a new Wave discussion.
Whether this new feature will bring in any new users for Google Wave is difficult to say. So far, the service’s biggest problem seems to be a lack of awareness that it even exists — since the initial attention around the launch died down, there has been little or no public discussion of the service (although it does have its fans), and Buzz has drawn much of the attention given to social networks at Google. Wave has been invite only until recently, however, and if the Wave This button starts showing up all around the web, it’s possible that it might get more popular interest. But then Buzz is fighting that battle too, and the king of the hill at the moment is Facebook and its global “like” button. There may not be much room left for Wave to capture a lot of social mind-share.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes
Google Tries to Get Some Buzz for Wave With ‘Wave This’ Feature
- Kol Tregaskes"The new feature allows users to add a bookmarklet to their browser that will create a new Wave from any web page, embedding a link inside the Wave so that other users can discuss it. If the page contains a video or image, that will be embedded as well — in a playable format, in the case of videos — so that users can check it out before discussing it. And Google has also provided web designers with an easy way to add “Wave This” buttons to their pages, and/or to produce clickable URLs that will generate a new Wave discussion."
- Kol TregaskesThis sounds like an interesting feature, so will these posts automatically become public posts?
- Kol TregaskesHow do you make Google Waves public now? Is it not by adding public@a.googlewave.com to the wave any more? When I do all I get is "Some participants are from outside googlewave.com.".
- Kol TregaskesAh it's public@a.gwave.com instead.
- Kol TregaskesFirst wave shared with the new bookmarklet: https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+LmD-KrZkMZw
- Kol TregaskesDon't Confuse Social Networking With Social Media http://adage.com/u/C3I75b
[Direct Link]
A new service called Yahoo Pulse will one-up Google Buzz by offering privacy tools and integration with Facebook news feeds on the Yahoo home page, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The Pulse site will behave a bit like Threadsy or the desktop app TweetDeck, aggregating real-time updates from your Facebook news feed alongside other social networks.
Yahoo has been trying for months to make itself the ultimate starting page for Internet users; you can already view your Facebook and Twitter feeds using Yahoo’s “Quick View” feature, but Yahoo Pulse will provide an improved, tabbed interface and offer new kinds of integrations in Yahoo and Yahoo Mail.
Notably, Yahoo Pulse will have a privacy menu that will apply to multiple services. That feature will be an important draw for some users, given that Facebook has dealt with a big privacy backlash in recent weeks. Don’t expect it to add completely new privacy features to your Facebook account, though.
The privacy angle is also pertinent when you consider that Google — Yahoo’s chief rival — made some major privacy errors that greatly hindered the launch of Google Buzz, a very similar service. Those faux pas and the lack of Facebook integration prevented Buzz from becoming a killer application. Pulse is Yahoo’s answer to Buzz; maybe it learned from its rival’s mistakes.
The specifics of the new interface and integrations have not yet been revealed, but it’s all expected to launch within a few days. We’re curious to hear what kinds of integrations with Facebook Yahoo users would like to see, so let us know in the comments.
Tags: facebook, flickr, google buzz, privacy, social media, social networking, Yahoo, yahoo pulse
Yahoo Pulse Beats Google Buzz With Facebook and Privacy
- Michael HocterMicroblogging, Instant Messaging and More Comes to Open Text's Social Enterprise Offerings http://bit.ly/ayxIwc
Open Text, Canada's largest software company, released two new social enterprise products this week: Open Text Content Server Pulse and Open Text Social Communities. The company also released a new version of its Open Text Social Workplace software, adding microblogging and instant messaging features.
Pulse integrates social networking, status updates, and content collaboration into Open Text's flagship content management offering Open Text ECM Suite. It also adds social features into existing ECM Suite installs while maintaining existing access controls and other configurations.
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Social Communities enables companies to create a variety of internal or external social media applications, such as blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks. It's a part of Open Text CRM Suite, which was previously known as Vignette Community Applications and Services. Open Text acquired Vignette last year.
Social Workplace - which recently highlighted by Info-Tech Research Group as one of the best enterprise collaboration platforms currently available - added microblogging and instant messaging to its mix of features, and improved its integration with Open Text ECM Suite and Open Text eDOCs. Social Workplace, previously known as Open Text Social Media, is also available as a stand-alone platform.
Open Text faces competition from many players in both the ECM market and the social enterprise market.
Screenshot courtesy of OpenText
Discuss
Google Desktop is a great tool for social networking. The Twitter and Facebook gadgets allow you to keep up to date with your friends without even having to launch a full web browser. Other gadgets, like custom clocks and computer performance meters, just flat-out look cool.
But Google Desktop isn’t just a novelty. There are many gadgets available for Google Desktop which can improve your productivity. This guide rounds up the top five productivity-improving gadgets you can find for Google Desktop.
To best way to add these gadgets is to simply to right-click on your Google Desktop sidebar and then click Add Gadgets. Type the name of the gadget in the upper left hand search field to find it. Then hover over the gadget’s icon and select Add. Google Desktop will handle the rest.
Having a to-do list can be great, but the old-fashioned method of putting it down on paper isn’t always the best. Paper can be easily lost, and you don’t want to have to stuff a list of things to do in your pocket whenever you travel, do you?
There are quite a few to-do list gadgets available, but the best one is the Task List and Time Timer. This list really serves two functions. The first is to keep track of what you have to do today. The second is to keep track of how much time you spend doing it. If you’re someone who is self-employed the timer is an amazing tool, as it keeps you honest about how much time you’re actually spending on work.
News isn’t always a distraction. For many people, it is important to have information as quickly as possible. However, the news gadgets which are provided by many media outlets are very limited in what they can do for you. They’re usually focused on getting you to go to their website rather than presenting news to you clearly.
That is where the Read Feed reader comes in. This simple RSS reader allows you to follow multiple RSS feeds at once. The news is formatted in simple text with basic images and dated, making it easy to read while minimizing its ability to distract you when you’re hard at work.
Adding your Gmail to your Google Desktop can help you answer emails quickly, but displaying your entire Gmail inbox in the Gmail gadget feels a bit clunky. A better, more focused way of responding quickly to emails is to use the Gmail Notifer.
Rather than displaying your entire inbox, the Gmail Notifier only displays unread messages. It displays them in a large, easy to click read format. Your can either read a summary of the email or open Gmail in your default web browser to reply.
Google Calendar is an amazing tool for all of use who can’t seem to remember meetings, birthdays and other important dates. The Google Calendar gadget goes even further by making it easy to access your Google Calendar information from your desktop.
Any date on which you have something scheduled will be show up in bold text on your Google Calender gadget. You can then click on the date to read a summary of what is scheduled for that day. You can also create a new event from the Google Calender Gadget or double-click on a date to open up Google Calender in your default web browser and display an expanded view of the day’s events.
The ability to connect with others across the globe online means you’ll inevitably come across situations where you want to read something which isn’t in a language you speak. Finding a website which will translate the text for you is one way to go about it, but if you find yourself running into this problem frequently you’ll find it much easier to use Google Translate, a Google Desktop gadget which will translate text for you once you enter it.
Google Translate can translate supports numerous languages. This includes widely known languages, like English, Chinese and Spanish, as well as less well known languages like Cherokee and Icelandic. Simply type in or copy and paste the text you need translated and Google Translate will handle the rest.
Ever want to know how a word is spelled as quick as you can snap your fingers? Usually you’d have to open Word in such a situation, or you might just type your suspected spelling into Google and see what you end up with, hoping that the Internet steers you true.
With the Spellchecker Gadget, however, you have no reason to doubt. This simple gadget allows you to enter a word. Press Enter and the word is checked for spelling errors and corrected if there are any. You’ll also receive a quick definition below the word.
If you work with web designs or photographs you’ll often need to measure an image of a size of page element. However, this can be difficult, particularly if importing the item you’re working on into your favorite editor is, for whatever reason, not possible.
The On-Screen Ruler can solve this problem. It is very simply a ruler which appears on your desktop and can measure the size of an image in pixels. By default it is 500 pixels wide, but it can be adjusted to be as wide or as narrow as needed.
How do you use Google Desktop? Any more productivity gadgets you’d like to recommend? Voice them out in the comments.
Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Do share our articles with others! It’s really important to us.
"Google Desktop is a great tool for social networking. The Twitter and Facebook gadgets allow you to keep up to date with your friends without even having to launch a full web browser. Other gadgets, like custom clocks and computer performance meters, just flat-out look cool. But Google Desktop isn’t just a novelty. There are many gadgets available for Google Desktop which can improve your productivity. This guide rounds up the top five productivity-improving gadgets you can find for Google Desktop."
- Kol Tregaskes
Every now and then, I’m asked to answer questions for other blogs and media outlets – more so lately due in part to the recent release of Engage!
The conversations that always ensue trigger new insights, ideas, or perspectives and sometimes, I believe that the discussion is worth sharing with you, here. This is one such discussion hosted by my friend in Belgium, Jean-Paul De Clerck.
#Engage!
1) A thought: Social networks are merely a technological extension of our human nature to connect, be part of something and communicate, and ultimately people are the social networks. What is your reaction?
Social Networks are hubs for the contextual connection of people around ideas, interests, and passions. But at the same time, while social networks serve as the enabling technology to communicate, the relationships that people forge within these networks are more reminiscent of relations rather than relationships. These short-form engagements actually strengthen connections with each exchange. And it’s the act of causing or earning responses that seduces users toward a bottomless cycle of acting and inciting reactions.
Over time, what’s truly fascinating about social networking, is the creation of a human network, a grid of relationships that link social graphs from network to network. One day soon, we’ll have the ability to effectively engage and interact with our contacts from one dashboard across multiple networks.
2) The days of broadcasting are over in marketing communication. I never understood the one-way communication mentality in businesses since in the word communication is derived from the the Latin word “communis.” Why do you think it has taken businesses so long to understand that it’s about relationships?
One-way communication is often cited as an oxymoron in Social Media.
Social Media purists indeed believe that communication is a two-way street, and for many, it is. However, when you review the definition of communication, you might actually be surprised.
Communication is defined as a transmission or a statement, essentially implying one-way messaging. Depending on the dictionary we use, words such as relations, socializing, and conversation emerge. While we may crave communication through two-way interaction, what I believe we are truly vocalizing is the need to be heard by those attempting to communicate to or with us. Let’s not mistake the value in communication or one-way communication though. It is necessary to share activity, updates, direction, and intentions and in these cases, one-to-many dissemination is more than reasonable, in fact, it’s necessary and useful as well.
Some businesses believe that when they speak at audiences and markets that they are communicating through correspondence or conversation. Others believe that one-to-many transmissions offered some semblance of control and falsely assumed or underestimated that any potential dissent would rarely earn the public spotlight. Now with the socialization of media and the rise of new influencers, prominence is earned through not only listening, but established through attentiveness and the corresponding actions that inspire connection and adaptation.
3) What, according to you, is the role of content in social media marketing?
Content speaks to the mission and purpose of a business optimized for the framework of the medium and always with the unique and varying audiences in mind. Content is critical towards establishing a effective inbound marketing initiative as it represents the brand when the brand representative is not present. This is why brands must become media. Strategically placing content in the networks where stakeholders, customers, and prospects are actively seeking information amplifies the findability of our value proposition, differentiation, and intentions. This is why possessing a genuine understanding of the wants, needs, challenges, and options of our markets and also where, when, and how they seek direction proves effectual. And when combined with social media optimization (SMO), our content rises to the top of keyword searches within social networks, addressing the specific needs of consumers based on how and where they search.
Content is easy to commoditize. Meaningful content rooted in empathy and value is precious and as such, dramatically increases the promise of connecting to those they’re intended to affect.
Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading my brand new book, Engage!
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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:
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Image Credit: Shutterstock
SocialMash:> Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART] - It may be the end of an era for Twitter trends, as Justin Bi... http://ow.ly/17y8LJ
It may be the end of an era for Twitter trends, as Justin Bieber is nowhere to be found on this week’s list. Instead, American Idol champions the chart as the show wrapped its ninth season and crowned some guy the winner of something.
Below that, international trends including Korean boy band Super Junior continue to dominate, while concerns over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico mount.
Once again, our friends at What The Trend have provided the insightful list below. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart.
You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week’s trends on What The Trend.
Rank | Topic | Top Index This Week | Previous Peak Index | Description |
#1 | American Idol | 1 | 1 | Lee DeWyze was announced as the latest American Idol winner beating his runner up Crystal Bowersox. |
#2 | Uniqlo | 1 | - | Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo ran a promo for their 26th anniversary in which Japanese users who retweet a message have a chance to win special presents based on a drawn ticket number. |
#3 | Cnectd | 2 | 4 | People are tweeting about the new social networking which connects all phones through a new type of messenger. |
#4 | Lost (TV Show) | 2 | - | People tweeting about the series finale of LOST that aired May 23rd in the US. |
#5 | Soccer/Football | 1 | - | Tweets about the Champion’s League Fnal in Europe, and preparations for the FIFA World Cup. |
#6 | Super Junior | 1 | - | BONAMANA continued to be a very popular song for Super Junior, and their fans, also known as E.L.F.s, said goodbye to member Kangin, who is enlisting in the South Korean army. |
#7 | Gulf Oil Spill | 2 | 6 | People are still awaiting the news as to whether or not BP has succeeded in plugging the leak. |
#8 | Google | 3 | - | Google is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the popular game Pac Man, offering a playable version as it’s homepage doodle. If you press "Insert Coin" twice, a second player can play as Ms. Pac Man. |
#9 | Dream Concert | 4 | - | Dream Concert is an annual concert in Korea which features many Korean singers, boybands and girl groups. Fans are tweeting about their experience. |
#10 | Paul Gray | 5 | - | Slipknot bassist Paul Gray found dead, at age 38. His body was found in an Urbandale, Iowa, hotel room Monday morning, 5/24/10. |
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ricardoinfante
Tags: gulf of mexico, gulf oil spill, Super Junior, Top Twitter Topics, trends, twitter, twitter trends
SocialMash:> Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART] - It may be the end of an era for Twitter trends, as Justin Bi... http://ow.ly/17y8LI
- Jim WilkersonTop 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART]
- (jeff)isageek
Foursquare and Farmville are among the world’s worst inventions, at least according to TIME.com’s list of “The 50 Worst Inventions.”
The list of “the world’s bright ideas that just didn’t work out” included both the location-based social game Foursquare and Zynga’s Farmville, among other items that ranged from tanning beds to spam e-mail. Foursquare, which Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove just reported is nearing 1 million checkins per day, made the list for promoting narcissism. Time.com’s Kristi Oloffson acknowledges its potential for being useful with coupons, such as Starbucks’s recent promotion for its mayors, but dismisses it as “another layer onto a generation living virtually.”
Farmville made the list for being a time-suck and an addicting game that Dan Fletcher says is “hardly even a game,” but instead a “series of mindless chores.” He’s quick to point out that the game has captivated the interest of millions. Farmville has 30 million farms created with 2 million in the U.S., according to Zynga.
Because Farmville is quite popular and Foursquare is gaining steam, we’re curious if you agree. Let us know what you think in the poll below.
Tags: farmville, foursquare, poll, social gaming, social networking, starbucks, Time.com
Zuck gave money to the Diaspora project. http://r2.ly/3uzm
You might expect that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would dismiss the four NYU college students who want to take on Facebook’s dominance of social networking by building a distributed, open alternative that includes a way for people to run their own servers.
But instead, Zuckerberg said he donated to the Diaspora project, adding to the $190,000 it has raised, in part because he appreciates their drive to change the world. (Note: This reporter followed up with Facebook’s press office Thursday to ask how much Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, but the press office said they’d rather not answer.)
In an interview with Wired.com on Wednesday after announcing simpler privacy controls for Facebook, Zuckerberg also talked about where he sees the site going, his drive to make the world more open, why the face in Facebook is so important and why he wouldn’t start a social network if he were launching a site today.
Wired.com: What do you think of the push for an open, federated social network and the four NYU students who raised $200,000 for the Diaspora project without having a single line of code?
Zuckerberg: I donated. I think it is a cool idea.
Actually it reminds me of this cool thing we built early on called Wirehog. Early on, it was clear that users wanted more photos on the site. There were a set of users who would change their one profile picture every day. And we looked at that data and took that as people want to share more photos.
But photos are expensive and we didn’t have an infrastructure. We were just trying to grow the site and add more colleges to the site. So we built this personal web server that people could install on their computer where they could put all their files on it — which at the time were mostly photos but it supported videos and music — and share it with your friends. So in a way it was the prototypical platform app, but it was also a decentralized way to share information.
So I think it is a cool idea just based on that.
I think it is cool people are trying to do it. I see a little of myself in them. It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, “We should try to do it.”
(Editor’s note: Wirehog was killed off by Facebook after Facebook’s then-president Sean Parker — who co-founded Napster — argued that Wirehog would face the same ugly legal death that the infamous peer-to-peer music sharing site did. On Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Parker called it “illegal” and said he “put a bullet in it.”)
In an interesting way, a lot of the privacy stuff is much easier to do in a centralized environment. Some of the simple stuff like friend-to-friend, peer-to-peer stuff is simple, but once you start getting into friends-of-friends, you start running into problems like we did with Wirehog. If someone can come up with a new approach, then [that's] awesome.
Only a little over two years ago, I covered well-respected Web user interface designer Kevin Fox's leaving Google for the then-startup FriendFeed. That's practically ancient in the world of the real-time Web, as since then, the company essentially rose and fell, before being absorbed into Facebook last summer. For the most part, the site was left on but ignored, as the team, now at Facebook, spread out and took on new challenges. Now comes word that Fox has determined nine months at Facebook was enough, so he is bidding "farewell".I can't wait to see Kevin's next exciting project. He has spearheaded some of my favorite tools/services. And I'm glad that he has now left AOL 2.0. Good luck to him!
- Lorin OlsenGrockit, a company that combines learning with social networking, has raised $3 million of its planned $7 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. The San Francisco-based company helps students prepare for standardized tests online in a peer-to-peer environment. The educational startup, founded in 2007, previously raised more than $10 million. Past backers include Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital Partners.
Companies: Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Grockit, Integral Capital Partners
Foursquare with Cash Rewards? WeReward Wants to Pay you for Check-ins http://bit.ly/dA6XbB
New from IZEA, the company that wants to monetize everything from blog posts to tweets, is WeReward, a mobile social networking application that promises to pay you for checking-in to local businesses via your mobile phone. Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the startup already supports 15 million U.S. businesses and has Domino's Pizza as a sponsor.
Is this the winning model for location-based social networking? Or are the payouts too small to make it worth the hassle?
Sponsor
The interesting thing about WeReward - besides the cash payouts, of course - is the fact that it's not just another standalone location-based mobile network. That is, it's not trying to be Foursquare - it's integrating with it.
To use WeReward, you search for a nearby business you want to check into and, like most other location-based social networks, you can optionally add a comment or tip. However, on WeReward, you don't check in so much as you "claim" your points. Another button lets you check-in via Foursquare, if you use that service, or share your check-in via Facebook or Twitter.
Here's where the setup gets a little tricky. You can't just say you're at the restaurant, bar, club, etc. - you have to prove it. With a photo. You can either take a photo of your receipt or of yourself at the business. The actual task may vary depending on the advertiser (the business itself).
Only after you share the photo and the advertiser approves it are you rewarded for the check-in. Payouts are sent via PayPal.
Also of note, the amount of money you receive per check-in will vary based on what the advertiser wants to pay. You receive points for each check-in and 1 point equals 1 cent. Some advertisers may offer several hundreds of points to make it worth your while, others may only offer a few. It's entirely up to them. (Domino's is offering 25 to start). Points may also be used towards other products or services in some cases.
Until we have a chance to test out the service ourselves, we can't vouch for the payout amounts or speak to whether it's worth your time to jump through these sorts of hoops. But assuming the check-in to reward ratio was high enough, it could entice people to try it out. We could all use an extra $10, right?
WeReward is currently available for the iPhone only. You can sign up to try it here.
Discuss
A few weeks ago, Facebook announced an Open Graph initiative --
a move considered to be a turning point not just for the social networking giant,
but for the web at large. The company's new vision is no longer to just connect people.
Facebook now wants to connect people around and across the web through concepts
they are interested in.
This vision of the web isn't really new. Its origins go back the the person who invented the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This vision has been passionately shared and debated by the tech community over the last decade. What Facebook has announced as Open Graph has been envisioned by many as semantic web.
At the heart of this vision is the idea that different web pages contain the same objects. Whether someone is reading about a book on Barnes and Noble, on O'Reilly or on a book review blog doesn't matter. What matters is that the reader is interested in this particular book. And so it makes sense to connect her to friends and other readers who are interested in the same book -- regardless of when and where they encountered it.
The same is true about many everyday entities that we find on the web -- movies, albums, stars, restaurants, wine, musicians, events, articles, politicians, etc -- the same entity is referenced in many different pages. Our brains draw the connections instantly and effortlessly, but computers can't deduce that an "Avatar" review on Cinematical.com is talking about the movie also described on a page on IMDB.com.
The reason it is important for things to be linked is so that people can be connected around their interests and not around websites they visit. It does not matter to me where my friends are reading about "Avatar", what matters is which of my friends liked the movie and what they had to say. Without interlinking objects across different sites, the global taste graph is too sparse and uninteresting. By re-imagining the web as the graph of things we are interested in, a new dimension, a new set of connections gets unlocked -- everything and everyone connects in a whole new way.
The problem of building the web of people and things boils down to describing what is on the page and linking it to other pages. In Tim Berners-Lee's original vision, the entities and relationships between them would be described using RDF. This mathematical language was designed to capture the essence of objects and relationships in a precise way. While it's true that RDF annotation would be the most complete, it also turns out to be quite complicated.
It is this complexity that the community has attempted to address over the years. A simpler approach called Microformats was developed by Tantek Celik, Chris Messina and others. Unlike RDF, Microformats rely on existing XHTML standards and leverage CSS classes to markup the content. Critically, Microformats don't add any additional information to the page, but just annotate the data that is already on the page.
Microformats enjoyed support and wider adoption because of their relative simplicity and focus on marking up the existing content. But there are still issues. First, the number of supported entities is limited, the focus has been on marking organizations, people and events, and then reviews, but there is no way to markup, for example, a movie or a book or a song. Second, Microformats are somewhat cryptic and hard to read. There is cleverness involved in figuring out how to do the markup, which isn't necessarily a good thing.
In 2005, inspired by Microformats, Ian Davis, now CTO of Talis, developed eRDF -- a syntax within HTML for expressing a simplified version of RDF. His approach married the canonical concepts of RDF and the idea from Microformats that the data is already on the page. An iteration of Ian's work, called RDFa, has been adopted as a W3C standard. All the signs point in the direction of RDFa being the solution of choice for describing entities inside HTML pages.
Until recently, despite the progress in the markups, adoption was hindered by the fact that publishers lacked the incentive to annotate the pages. What is the point if there are no applications that can take advantage of it? Luckily, in 2009 both Yahoo and Google put their muscle behind marking up pages.
First Yahoo developed an elegant search application called Search Monkey. This app encouraged and enabled sites to take control over how Yahoo's search engine presented the results. The solution was based on both markup on the page and a developer plugin, which gave the publishers control over presenting the results to the user. Later, Google announced rich snippets. This supported both Microformats and RDFa markup and enabled webmasters to control how their search results are presented.
Still missing from all this work was a simple common vocabulary for describing everyday things. In 2008-2009, with help from Peter Mika from Yahoo research, I developed a markup called abmeta. This extensible, RDFa-based markup provided a vocabulary for describing everyday entities like movies, albums, books, restaurants, wines, etc. Designed with simplicity in mind, abmeta supports declaring single and multiple entities on the page, using both meta headers and also using RDFa markup inside the page.
The markup announced by Facebook can be thought of as a subset of abmeta because it supports the declaration
of entities using meta tags. The great thing about this format is simplicity. It is literally readable in English.
The markup defines several essential attributes -- type, title, URL, image and description. The protocol comes with a reasonably rich taxonomy of types, supporting entertainment, news, location, articles
and general web pages. Facebook hopes that publishers will use the protocol to describe the entities on pages.
When users press the LIKE button, Facebook will get not just a link, but a specific object of the specific type.
If all of this computes correctly, Facebook should be able to display a rich collection of entities on user profiles,
and, should be able to show you friends who liked the same thing around the web, regardless of the site. So by
publishing this protocol and asking websites to embrace it, Facebook clearly declares its foray
into the web of people and things -- aka, the semantic web.
As I've previously pointed out on my post on ReadWriteWeb, there are several issues with the markup that Facebook proposed.
1. There is no way to disambiguate things. This is quite a miss on Facebook's part, which is already resulting in bogus data on user profiles. The ambiguity is because the protocol is lacking secondary attributes for some data types. For example, it is not possible to distinguish the movie from its remake. Typically, such disambiguation would be done by using either a director or a year property, but Facebook's protocol does not define these attributes. This leads to duplicates and dirty data.
2. There is no way to define multiple objects on the page. This is another rather surprising limitation, since previous markups, like Microformats and abmeta, support this use case. Of course if Facebook only cares about getting people to LIKE pages so that they can do better ad targeting, then having multiple objects inside the page is not necessary. But Facebook claimed and marketed this offering as semantic web, so it is surprising that there is no way to declare multiple entities on a single page. Surely a comprehensive solution ought to do that.
3. Open protocol can't be closed. Finally, Facebook has done this without collaborating with anyone. For something to be rightfully called an Open Graph Protocol, it should be developed in an open collaboration with the web. Surely, Google, Yahoo!, W3C and even small startups playing in the semantic web space would have good things to contribute here.
It sadly appears that getting the semantic web elements correct was not the highest priority for Facebook. Instead, the announcement seems to be a competitive move against Twitter, Google and others with the goal to lock-in publishers by giving them a simple way to recycle traffic.
Despite the drawbacks, there is no doubt that Facebook's announcement is a net positive for the web at large. When one of the top companies takes a 180-degree turn and embraces a vision that's been discussed for a decade, everyone stops and listens. The web of people and things is now both very important and a step closer. The questions are: What is the right way? And how do we get there?
For starters, it would be good to fill in some holes in Facebook Open Graph. Whether it is the right way overall or not, at least we need to make it complete. It is important to add support for secondary attributes necessary for disambiguation and also, important to add support for multiple entities inside the page (even if there is only one LIKE button on the whole page). Both of these are already addressed by Microformats and abmeta, so it should be easy to fix.
Beyond technical issues, Facebook should open up this protocol and make it owned by the community, instead of being driven by one company's business agenda. A true roundtable with major web companies, publishers, and small startups would result in a correct, comprehensive and open protocol. We want to believe that Facebook will do the right thing and will collaborate with the rest the web on what has been an important work spanning years for many of us. The prospects are exciting, because we just made a giant leap. We just need to make sure we land in the right place.
Facebook Open Graph: A new take on semantic web
- huixingThis vision of the web isn't really new. Its origins go back the the person who invented the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This vision has been passionately shared and debated by the tech community over the last decade. What Facebook has announced as Open Graph has been envisioned by many as semantic web.
- huixing“@jpschuerman: RT @NortonOnline: @marianmerritt on the top 7 tips for social networking and staying safe. http://bit.ly/aHNzQJ (client)”
[Direct Link]
Dallas Lawrence is Managing Director of Burson-Marsteller’s Proof Integrated Communications. He is a Mashable contributor on emerging media trends, online reputation management and digital issue advocacy. You can connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.
The recent firestorm over Facebook’s approach to securing the privacy of its more than 450 million users continues to reverberate around the globe this week as thousands of news outlets cover the unfolding drama with almost breathless zeitgeist. And while traditional outlets are grappling with what it all means for the future of Facebook, online denizens have trumpeted their angst about the company’s most recent changes with more than 25 million blog posts.
The current crisis of confidence leveled against Facebook once again centers on the core issue of how the social networking platform manages access to its users’ information. PC World columnist JP Raphael noted earlier this month that with the significant new changes announced by the Palo Alto-based social giant, “achieving maximum privacy on Facebook now requires you to click through 50 settings and more than 170 options — and even that won’t completely safeguard your info.” According to news reports this week, the company may finally be reversing course (again) and returning to a streamlined security process.
To be sure, Facebook is no novice when it comes to navigating the controversies of privacy in the online marketplace, and it will very likely emerge from the current crisis singed, but not terribly worse for the wear. What is surprising however, and perhaps most troubling for a company that nearly all watchers agree must prove its mettle with a public offering in the next 18 months, is the voraciousness of the global opposition the recent controversy has sparked, and the apparent lack of corporate agility at Facebook to respond effectively to even the most basic crises inherent to an organization so intertwined in the daily lives of half a billion users.
Purported 7-year old texts from CEO Mark Zuckerberg are now lighting up the online community with an amusing, and some may say prescient peek into the then 19-year old’s views on privacy. The constant and steady drip of opposition forming around the most valuable social media property in the history of the Internet is beginning to paint a picture of a company that has failed to fundamentally understand that what got it to where it is today will not make it into what it wants to be: A wildly profitable public company rivaling the reach and prominence of Google.
The $200 billion search behemoth learned these same painful lessons of accountability earlier in the past decade as they became the public whipping boy for privacy issues. Regular Congressional hearings, editorial columns and tech-savvy thought leaders all lampooned Google for their approach to user information. Many began questioning its very core mantra of “don’t be evil” that had mightily bound Googlers for more than a decade. Google’s response was to aggressively educate global regulators and privacy experts while dramatically expanding their Washington, DC footprint. They further ramped up public policy and communications outreach efforts to ensure they were accessible and accountable to those most concerned about their industry and how they as a company approached the prickly issue of online privacy.
As regulators and privacy watchdog groups from the EU, Canada and the U.S. begin to catch up to the social media revolution and the inherent policy concerns that came with it, Facebook’s maturation has reached a seminal moment in the platform’s life cycle.
For a brand built on the ideals of transparency (sharing your life updates with your friends and family), Facebook must begin to embrace the mantra of a transparent and accountable organization while remaining free from the constraints of life as a publicly traded, heavily regulated, investor-driven company.
Facebook’s chief policy guru Elliot Schrage appeared at least to grasp the challenges that lie ahead for the company during a question and answer session with The New York Times last week. “Another painful element comes from professional frustration,” Schrage wrote. “It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making … We may not always agree about the speed and comprehensiveness of our response but I’m here because I’m confident Facebook’s future success depends on our ability to respond.”
Tough words and sound perspective from a smart, well-respected industry insider. If heeded, they may finally drive the internal changes necessary for Facebook to complete its startup evolution and graduate into the world’s most dominant — and profitable — communications platform.
- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
- 5 Essential Facebook Privacy Tips
- 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
- The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, malerapaso
Tags: analysis, facebook, privacy, social media, social networks
An Open API from MasterCard to Develop Applications? Priceless http://bit.ly/be6ugu
In a press release this morning, MasterCard has announced that desktop and mobile developers will have access to an application programming interface (API) from the credit card giant later this year. The company hopes that by opening its technology to developers, new and innovative e-commerce applications that leverage the MasterCard network will be created, potentially competing with the likes of Visa, PayPal and Square.
Sponsor
MasterCard Chief Innovation Officer Josh Peirez says the company is "excited about tapping into the ingenuity of software developers around the globe to help create the next generation of game-changing payment applications." A newly launched portal - MasterCard Labs - will give developers access to APIs, SDKs, guides and forums for discussing and experimenting with the company's technology.
The announcement comes at a time when the mobile payments market has begun to heat up with competition between startups and large credit card providers. San Francisco-based startup Square has many people excited about their mobile application and dongle that will allow for scanning credit cards from various mobile devices, and online payment staple PayPal recently teamed up with Bump Technologies to provide a mobile transaction service as well.
Visa also recently announced its own foray into the mobile payments market. Earlier this month, the MasterCard competitor teamed with DeviceFidelity to launch special cases for iPhones which would allow users to take advantage of Visa's wireless and contactless payment method, Visa payWave, straight from their phones.
But mobile payments is just one of the platforms MasterCard hopes developers will innovate on using its technology. The company says it has identified 20 other areas in which their APIs could be used in, including payroll systems, social networking applications, eWallets, and online games. With the growing popularity of sites like Blippy, which allows users to automatically share their credit card purchases with their friends, MasterCard may be providing a valuable API to developers at a ripe moment for these kinds of platforms and services.
Many have been skeptical about these new services due to apparent security risks that come from mobile payment systems, but MasterCard is taking precautions to make sure their platform is not abused. According to their press release this morning, "all developers will be approved and registered by MasterCard to ensure that MasterCard payment and data services continue to be used appropriately and productively."
Discuss
An Open API from MasterCard to Develop Applications? Priceless
- Rob DianaSharing: An Open API from MasterCard to Develop Applications? Priceless http://bit.ly/chMcj9
- Rob DianaAn Open API from MasterCard to Develop Applications? Priceless
- Sarah Perez
Or let the paleontologists dig it for you. That’s what a team led by Yale researchers did last year in southeastern Morocco’s Lower and Upper Fezouata Formations. The result is covered by LiveScience in Oldest Soft-Bodied Marine Fossils Discovered . Specifically, “The animals represented by these newly discovered fossils, including sponges, annelid worms, mollusks, and horseshoe crabs, lived during the Ordovician period between 480 million and 472 million years ago, making them the oldest ever discovered during this period.”
So, while I have your attention on that, let me redirect you to Ron Schott’s Road Trip: An Experiment in Social Geology. He begins,
With your help, dear readers and fellow geobloggers, I’d like to run an experiment in social geology this summer. My hypothesis is that real-time/live-web tools and social networking can be applied to geology-focused road trips in ways that enrich the experience for both the road-tripper and the audience of active participants. This blog post is a call for collaborators, and a starting point for discussion and refinement of this hypothesis. I hope that it evolves into much more than that.
Me too. While Ron traverses The West, I’ll be heading to France for much of June and July. But I’ll keep up with him and enjoy vicarious digging of hard rock landscapes, many of which I already know but haven’t seen. Sez Ron,
The response to my blog posts two weeks ago using excerpts from John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World has inspired me to attempt to GigaPan at least four more of his I-80 geologic localities on my way out to San Francisco. Tentatively, and subject to tight restrictions imposed by the vagaries of weather and the need to arrive at the conference on time, I’m aiming to GigaPan the Gangplank/Summit area of the Laramie Range, roadcuts in the Rawlins, WY area, something in the Rock Springs/Overthrust area of western Wyoming, the Wasatch Front/Great Salt Lake, the Golconda Thrust, and an ophiolite in the Sierra Foothills.
The only thick book I’ve picked up nearly as often as McPhee’s Annals is Tolstoy’s War and Peace (though the latter not in the last couple of decades, I regret to admit). The Ganglplank and the Overthrust sites I have visited dozens of times in re-readings of Rising from the Plains, my favorite of the four prior books that Annals combines (with a bonus section called Crossing the Craton). The Wasatch, Salt Lake, Golconda thurst and Sierra Foothills ophiolites star in Basin and Range and Assembling California, which Annals also includes. Been to all of those many times as well.
Ron is a Gigapanner of the first water. Here’s the latest, shown with a Canon 5D like my own (though with a better lens than any that I have). Can’t wait to see what he shows. (Some samples from his professional work as a geology professor.)
Good to see by his tweets (he’s @rschott) that he’s still cruising the West Coast (after getting some gigapans in Utah). While he’s still out there, a few possible side trips:
I can think of many more, but that’s a start. I’ll add the rest later. Right now I gotta take the kid to the dentist.
Did you hear about the burglary down the block? Are you coming to the yard sale next Saturday? Did you see the new SUV in the driveway next door? A new location-based-slash-social-networking app named DeHood is coming to town, which is aimed at hyper-local communities: Neighborhoods. DeHood is a way to make the neighborhood a friendlier place, or perhaps just an easier way to keep up with the Joneses, depending on how you look at it.
DeHood, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, is launching the free app today on the iPhone. Users will be able to see the buzz about what’s going on around their location, use check-in features, report deals they see in stores to other users by taking a picture of the deal and sharing it, and so on. The product sounds like a bit of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr all rolled into one, and according to the founder and CEO Babak Hedayati, the company wanted to come out with all guns blazing.
“Our team [seven full-time employees] has a strong background in social networking, gaming and software development and when we started the company last December, people were able to bring in technology they had already been developing for a couple of years,” Hedayati says. Hedayati himself was the CEO of Vyoom, which aggregates all the social networks, provides communications tools and has a crafty reward plan, where active networks of users will be rewarded with Vyoom stock if and when the company goes public.
There are other products that are used for building on-the-spot, small social networks that combine aspects of different location-based services, like Zerista, which we recently covered. As the location space is teeming with players right now, any newcomers will have a hard time differentiating from the noise. The DeHood product has a fun feature called Scratchie, which is similar to lottery tickets. “Scratching” the scratchie, or rubbing a finger across the iPhone’s screen reveals a reward, such as a title the user can achieve or maybe a special offer on a product (see video below). Details like these can make for great word of mouth for a product. At the same time, Hedayati thinks the way to make it is to have the app take off in a few neighborhoods—Palo Alto being the first city DeHood is focusing on.
“We have tested our product prior to launch hyper-locally with approximately 30 people and their families and are happy that some of the features have been pretty addictive”, Hedayati claims.
DeHood has gotten seed funding from angel investors, and Hedayati has also put in a considerable amount himself. The company is actively looking to bring in more capital as it launches the product. As far as monetizing the free iPhone app, DeHood has built the platform and will offer an application programming interface or API for developers and is betting on selling “control panel tools” such as statistics and analytics tools for businesses to see who is visiting their stores.
Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 31. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.
Tags: hyper-local, location based services, Social networks
Companies: DeHood, flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Vyoom, Zerista
People: Babak Hedayati
I'll bet @percival will buy this if he dare clicks on the link http://bit.ly/9678vB
Sometimes when you’re sitting at that computer screen it gets awful lonely. No amount of social networking or online chats will give you the companionship that you need and crave. Just tap this silver little pet and he’ll respond to your touch in all sorts of pleasant ways. Then when you’re tired of his bouncy little personality, you can force him to fall asleep.
These lights come in a blue and red form. Tap them once while they’re asleep and he’ll pop to life. You can also lightly tap him and make him wink as well as make him go a little crazy. To make him sleep again just hold down with your finger a little bit longer. It plugs directly into your USB port to keep it up and powered. This won’t be available until about the mid point of June. You can pre-order the Mathmos creation for £35.00 or about $50.
Source: NerdApproved
I was reading a blog post today and was wanting to comment when the site asked me to register. To register? Create an account? That’s a bit 2000, not 2010. ZDNet’s Tom Forenski will never know what I thought about his piece on corporates and social networking. The registration hurdle stopped me in my tracks.
Commenting is at the very essence of blogging. The jump from publisher of content (“Here’s an article”) to curator of a content community (“Here’s an article, let’s discuss”) heralded the beginning of today’s social web.
In this post I will explore half a dozen “back to basics” features that your blog’s commenting should include to encourage engagement amongst your reader community.
Make commenting a single step process
This is the single most important point in this post. I don’t want to create another account with another set of credentials. A few fields and a “submit” button and I’m willing to share my insight with you. More than one click and some popups, and I’ve left your site before I’ve posted my comment.
When I hit this popup, I browsed onwards.
Actually, I tweeted a link and commented in the tweet – good for me, bad for ZDNet who lost out on the opportunity to engage with me.
Let me authenticate using existing web services
Let me identify myself using my Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or OpenID login. A lot of users already have these and, in a lot of cases, may already be logged into those services. Quick click click and I’m commenting.
The Next Web
Encourage conversation
A long string of comments under a single article can be interesting, but some of the nuance that exists in conversation can get lost. Introduce threaded replies and all of a sudden the comments forum resembles a real conversation. Much better.
Use Gravatar
Gravatar is one of the unheralded workhorse services of the web. Use my email address to pick up my gravatar and the comments look better already. Wordpress even integrates Gravatar into the package, there’s really no excuse.
Threaded comments with Gravatar avatars beside them.
Share comments more broadly
Obviously I want the world to see how insightful I am, otherwise I wouldn’t be commenting in the first place. Make it a simple click for me to post my comment into my Twitter stream, Facebook profile or LinkedIn profile. As an added benefit, I become an advocate of your content and drive traffic to the article.
Get rid of the spam
I don’t want to see dozens of spurious comments which are generated by bots to promote their links. Or long ASCII text comments punting pharmaceuticals. Filter them out or delete them – just get rid of them before they get rid of me.
There are already web services which do a lot of these things, which leads me to…
Use an existing web service
Why are you building something that someone else has already built anyway? Disqus and IntenseDebate have ready made widgets that you can embed into your blog. You get all these features, and a few more. Readers get a place to aggregate comments they’ve made across the web. Give considerable thought as to whether these services meet your requirements before building your own.
Disqus comment form, the picture is sourced from Gravatar and I can choose to share via Twitter
– oo –
For Tom Forenski’s benefit… I thought your article was interesting. Sir Martin’s concept of the “right thing” was a bit sentimental. We live in a capitalist world and someone has to pay for Facebook. I’m willing to accept some marketing in return for the service. If the marketing gets too invasive, I’ll leave the service. That’s the balancing act that Facebook, and other services, need to get right.
Are you chasing your blog audience away? http://bit.ly/9YVUmj [What do you use for comments on your blog?] #feedly
- Cheryl Allin
