Statuses

The @twitterapi has had two authentication mechanisms for quite a while now: HTTP Basic Authentication and OAuth. Basic authentication has gotten us so far! You can even use curl from the command line to interact with our API and simply pass a username and a password as a -u command line parameter when calling statuses/update to tweet, for example. However, as times have changed, so have our requirements around authentication
— developers will need to take action. Basic Auth support is going away on June 30, 2010. OAuth has always been part of Twitter's blood, and soon, we're going to be using it exclusively. OAuth has many benefits for end users (e.g. protection of their passwords and fine grained control over applications), but what does it mean for Twitter on the engineering front? Quite a lot.

Our authentication stack, right now, for basic auth, looks as so:

• decode the Authorization header that comes in via the HTTP request;
  
• check any rate limits that apply for the user or the IP address that request came from (a memcache hit);
  
• see if the authorization header is in memcache - and if it is, use it to find the user in cache and verify that the password is correct. If neither the header is in cache, nor the user is in cache, nor the password is correct (in case the user has changed his or her password), then keep going;
  
• pull the user out of storage;
  
• verify the user hasn't been locked out of the system; and
  
• verify the user's credentials.

Our stack then also logs a lot of information to scribe about that user and login to help us counter harmful activities (whether malicious or simply buggy) — but, the one thing that we don't have any visibility into, when using basic authentication, is what application is doing all this.

To verify an OAuth-signed request, we go through a lot more intensive (both computationally and on our storage systems):

• decode the Authorization header;
  
• validate that the oauth_nonce and the oauth_timestamp pair that were passed in are not present in memcache — if so, then this may be a relay attack, and deny the user access;
  
• use the oauth_consumer_key and the oauth_token from the header, look up both the Twitter application and the user's access token object from cache and fallback to the database if necessary. If, for some reason, neither can be retrieved, then something has gone wrong and proactively deny access;
  
• with the application and the access token, verify the oauth_signature. If it doesn't match, then reject the request; and
  
• check any rate limits that may apply for the user at this stage

Of course, for all the reject paths up top, we log information — that's invaluable data for us to turn over to our Trust & Safety team. If the user manages to authenticate, however, then we too have a wealth of information! We can, at this point, for every authenticated call, tie an user and an application to a specific action on our platform.

For us, and the entire Twitter ecosystem, its really important to be able to identify, and get visibility into, our users' traffic. We want to be able to help developers if their software is malfunctioning, and we want to be able to make educated guesses as to whether traffic is malicious or not. And, if everything is functioning normally, then we can use this data to help us provision and plan for growth better and deliver better reliability. But, if all applications are simply using usernames and passwords as their identifiers, then we have no way to distinguish who is sending what traffic on behalf of which users.

Phase one of our plan is to remove basic authentication for calls that require authentication — those calls will migrate to a three-legged OAuth scheme. After that, we'll start migrating all calls to at least begin to use a two-legged OAuth scheme. We also have OAuth 2 in the works. Start firing up dev.twitter.com and creating Twitter applications!

As always, the @twitterapi team is here to help out. Just make sure to join the Twitter Development Talk group to ask for questions, follow @twitterapi for announcements, and skim through our docs on dev.twitter.com to help you through this transition.

On the day Facebook introduced "instant personalization," I updated my status to this:

Facebook has sneakily rolled out a terrible "feature" to give your data to 3rd party websites, and GUESS WHAT, they opted you in without asking you. Go to Account --> Privacy Settings --> Applications and Websites & disable "Instant Personalization." Tell your friends.

The "tell your friends" part was entirely intentional — I was trying to get it to go viral. I had two goals for doing so: one, I wanted to express my frustration at Facebook's actions by inflicting a non-trivial amount of damage to them (in terms of getting users to opt out), and second, I wanted to see if it was really true that most people just didn't care about privacy any more.

Searching for public statuses a few days later revealed a hundred or so that originated from mine, including the inevitable mutations. Keep in mind that users whose statuses are public are much less likely to pass on a message about privacy, and so the true number of status messages is probably an order of magnitude higher. Assuming that each such user opted out of instant personalization themselves and also got a few of their friends to do so, that would mean that several thousand users opted out. Very gratifying, in terms of either of the abovementioned goals.

The interesting thing about memes is that they almost always either die out quickly, or go viral to reach a significant fraction of the population. Those that reach some intermediate level of success, like mine did, are rare. This means that a tiny difference in the original wording could have caused it to collapse or to explode. (For the mathematically inclined, this is because it changes the "branching factor" of the meme.)

A meme, like a virus, has two components — the payload and the replication mechanism. The payload is the part of the meme that urges you to do something. The replication mechanism is the part that urges you to pass it on. As you can imagine, changes in the wording of the latter have a particularly huge effect on the branching factor.

For example, it is entirely possible that if I'd ended my message with "Tell your friends!" instead of "Tell your friends.", it would have spread to ten times as many users. This mystifying power that tiny strings of text have over masses of intelligent human beings is what makes memes a fascinating object of study for researchers and a salivating prospect for marketers.

Even as I wrote my original message, I knew exactly how to word the replication mechanism to maximize impact, but I didn't because I felt it wouldn't be truthful. But someone else figured it out:

FB Privacy heads up! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization," which shares data with non-facebook websites, and is automatically set to "Allow. "Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Applications & Websites->Instant Personalization and UN-CHECK "Allow." Please copy and repost because if you 'un-check' this and your friends don't, your friends are still sharing info about you!

That meme got started the same day (around two weeks ago), and is still going strong, being reposted at the rate of once every minute or so, and that's just the public statuses, on a Saturday night! I'd estimate that tens of millions of users have seen that message.

Note the difference: while my meme appealed to people's altruism to get them to replicate it, this one appeals to their self-interest :-) "Repost this for your own good." It amuses me to think about whether users who copy-paste that are actually hoping to get every single one of their friends to opt out. Needless to say, it doesn't significantly affect you if your friends opt out or not (which I why I didn't feel comfortable using the more powerful wording.)

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that if privacy advocates seek to have any real effect on user behavior, they need to stop pontificating and learn to craft a successful meme. Or more generally: go where the users are, word your messages in a way that appeals to users' concerns, and make it easy for users to follow them. Because the groups that benefit from users giving up their privacy have long mastered the art of creating killer memes.

One of my favorite speakers at Free State Social was Sarah Evans who spoke on How To Make Your Brand Stand Out Online.

It’s busy online and everyone is competing for your attention. One out of every three online Americans update their social media statuses at least once a week. So how do you stand out or make an impression? Sarah’s goal is always to share practical advice you can apply or modify. She’ll share nine ways you can stand out online in a non-spammy way. Hear a personal case study to see what “Find an opportunity to showcase what you do best” looks like in action. Be ready to participate during this session…Sarah always likes to get the audience involved.

(note : i missed a little of the end when it came to question time due to my flip cam dying)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

A blogger named JeanPierre Chigne’s Twitter stream was hit with a DMCA complaint after he posted a link to a blog post he wrote about The National’s new album, which leaked last week.

According to a post on Chigne’s blog, titled JP’s Blog, he recently received this e-mail from Twitter:

“jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT):
Hello,
The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice:
Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 – New Post: Leaked: The National – High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/”

Last week, Chigne wrote a blog post about the leak of “High Violet,” the new album from Brooklyn band The National (the album was subsequently streamed for free on The New York Times’ website). At the end of the post, the blogger included an Amazon link to the album’s preorder page, as well as a MediaFire link to a track called “Afraid of Everyone,” which presumably comes from the leaked disc.

We wrote to Chigne about the takedown, to which he responded: “I uploaded the song to Mediafire, but only because it was already being hosted on Pitchfork since April 13.”

You can, indeed, download this song from Pitchfork — it was the second song the music website offered for download, the first being “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” which is also available on the band’s own website.

Pitchfork confirms that the site was hosting “Afraid of Everyone” legally — it was sent to them by the band’s PR.

In light of these facts, the situation becomes rather murky. If the song had come from the leaked disc itself, the DMCA complaint would probably be justified. According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, service providers are expected to remove material from users’ websites that appears to amount to copyright infringement. But what of an MP3 download that’s already free via another site? (A similar situation occurred a few months ago after Google deleted a ton of popular music blogs for hosting downloads.)

We asked Twitter for comment on the takedown, to which a rep responded:

“In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a Tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim.”

In light of this situation, it would most likely be in Chigne’s best interest to file a counter-claim — if the song, indeed, came from Pitchfork and not from the leaked disc. We’d be interested to see what the outcome would be.

We’re not sure who filed the complaint in the first place — an e-mail to the band’s camp revealed that they are unaware of the incident — but it does pose an interesting question when it comes to the power of the DMCA. Did the law function properly in this case? Or was it too much sound and fury signifying nothing?

---

For more entertainment coverage, follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

---

---

Reviews: Facebook, MediaFire, Twitter

Tags: dmca, music, piracy

Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech —

Last week, the big news in DMCA takedowns was the sweeping removal of Hitler parody videos. Earlier this year, it was Google suddenly wiping out six separate music blogs. Today, it's the removal of a tweet.

While this might not seem like a big deal on the surface, it leads to some much bigger questions about free speech, what content should fall under a proper DMCA take-down and whether or not the DMCA is a legal method of applying censorship by any content owner.

Sponsor

Here's the story as told by TechDirt:

The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP's blog. Not surprisingly, JP also has a Twitter account, where he mostly seems to post links to his blog posts. One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album... and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album.

According to JP's blog post on the subject, Twitter sent him a message last Thursday "in response to a DMCA take-down notice". The email, he writes, read as follows:

jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT): Hello, The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice: Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 - New Post: Leaked: The National - High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/

JP denies posting any link to the leaked album in his tweeted blog post, saying that he will not bother filing a counterclaim to the take-down. He also links to an article in Plagiarism Today from a year ago that alleges that Twitter's handling of DMCA take-downs and counterclaims is problematic and that "there is clearly an organization issue here and that's leading to confusion."

While last weeks' take-downs of parody videos may have been "overbroad take-downs of legal content", as the Electronic Frontier Foundation asserted, this sort take-down may go an extra step, beyond constitutionally protected First Amendment speech. With the YouTube take-downs, at least there was copyrighted content present, although it may have been used according to the law in the end. In this case, according to JP, there was neither pirated content nor a link to any DMCA-violating content.

While TechDirt argues that "specifically, nothing in the tweet itself is infringing -- which means that the DMCA take-down for the tweet is bogus, and a violation of the DMCA itself", we spoke with David Sohn, senior policy council with the Center for Democracy & Technology, who said that the question might not be so cut and dry. Section 5.12D of the DMCA relates to cases involving "information location tools" and "links".

"One possibility here is that Twitter has gotten a take-down notice that might not stand up as a totally valid take-down notice," said Sohn.

On Sohn's advice, we asked Wendy Seltzer, founder of ChillingEffects.org, what this all meant and she explained that the burden of proof lies with the person creating the content and not the platform. All the platform, in this case Twitter, needs to know is that the complaint me be valid and that, by removing the offending content, they cover themselves legally in the eyes of the DMCA. Whether or not section 5.12 D of the DMCA actually applies doesn't really matter.

The introduction to her recent paper, "Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor: Chilling Effects of the DMCA on the First Amendment" (.pdf), speaks clearly to the problem we saw when first reading this story:

Each week, more blog posts are redacted, more videos deleted, and more web pages removed from Internet search results based on private claims of copyright infringement. Under the "safe harbors" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet service providers are encouraged to respond to copyright complaints with content takedowns, assuring their immunity from liability while diminishing the rights of their subscribers and users. Paradoxically, the law's shield for service providers becomes a sword against the public who depend upon these providers as platforms for speech.

The problem with the current format of the DMCA, especially in the case of something like a communication platform such as Twitter, is that a DMCA take-down notice becomes an extremely effective means of silencing information for a legally mandated period of 10 days. In essence, it provides those who wish to silence a voice a quick and legal means of enacting what is called a "prior restraint", something clearly prohibited in First Amendment law.

"When non-infringing speech is taken down, not only does its poster lose an opportunity to reach an audience, the public loses the benefit of hearing that lawful speech in the marketplace of ideas," writes Seltzer in the paper.

Twitter offered this response:

"Twitter regularly receives DMCA takedown notices. We strive to balance the interests of our users and copyright holders by reviewing each notice. After determining whether the notice is compliant with the law, we also consider other factors such as whether the notice is abusive to our users, or fails to take fair use into consideration. You can read more about our DMCA process here: http://help.twitter.com/entries/15795-copyright-and-dmca-policy

"We are always working to improve our transparency. Users are notified immediately when content has been removed from their account. In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a Tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim.

"We believe that the reasoning of the DMCA claim and its origin should be transparent to both the affected user and other interested parties. We are working on further steps to improve access to this information."

So, our next logical question here is: Since this post includes the email from Twitter, which includes that original link to a blog post that supposedly linked to infringing content, can it too be removed according to the guidelines of the DMCA?

Discuss

Kin One and Kin Two: Microsoft Social Phones —

Kin One and Kin Two: Microsoft Social Phones is a post from Chris Pirillo

If you are a young person who spends a lot of your life updating various social network statuses and sites, the new phones coming from Microsoft may be something you’re going to want to get your hands on. The Kin One and Kin Two will be hitting stores (exclusively on the Verizon network) this May, and will be available (through Vodafone) in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom sometime this fall.

Kin One is a little palm-sized phone which works in portrait mode. It has a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a 5 megapixel camera. There is a 320×240 screen, VGA video recording capabilities, and 4GB of (non-expandable) storage.

Kin Two is a landscape version with a bigger screen. It also has the QWERTY keyboard, but it boasts an 8 megapixel camera. The Kin Two boasts a 480×320 screen, full 720p video recording, and 8GB of (non-expandable) storage.

These devices are not based on Windows Phone 7. Instead, they use a platform based on Silverlight which was built from the ground up for these phones. The two core components of this platform are The Loop and The Spot.

The Loop is the three-pane home screen. In one pane, you’ll find your news and social feed (such as from Twitter or Facebook). Another pane holds your contacts and the last one is where you access things like the phone or browser. As of right now, your contacts supports sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and (of course) Windows Live.

The Spot is a tiny circle found at the bottom of the screen. This is where you share content on your social sites. Drag things from your feed, browser, texts or email into The Spot. Now drag over your contacts with whom you want to share this little tidbit.

As with the SideKick, everything you do will be backed up in the cloud, via the new Kin website. Here you’ll be able to access your emails, texts and photos with a click of your mouse. There are no apps available, and you won’t find a calendar on the phones. However, there IS a Mac syncing client. This will let you sideload your iTunes music and iPhoto pictures from your Mac onto the Kin.

I don’t see these phones having much of a market outside of the teens and tweens who update their social status every 30 seconds. Although, I do happen to know many adults who do the same thing. Perhaps they’ll find this useful, as well. I’ve seen several people gripe at Microsoft for this very fact. However, think of it this way: those teens (and adults) I just mentioned make up a large share of the phone market. How many teens nowadays DON’T have a mobile phone of some type?

These phones aren’t “smart” phones, no. However, I do think the team in Redmond was quite smart indeed when they came up with this idea. NO ONE has come up with anything like it yet. I can already hear the begging and deal-making going on in homes all over the world. If you listen closely, you’ll hear about a bajillion voices telling Mom “I HAVE TO HAVE THIS PHONE.”

Photos courtesy of Microsoft

• Could the iPad Outsell the iPhone?
• Be Still My Beating Geek Heart
• Internet Magic Tricks
• Discovery Channel Store Black Friday Sale
• How to Convert Videos for the PSP
• Thanksgiving Dinner (6)
• Halley Suitt
• Mechanical Turd
• Are You a Social Media Sweetheart?
• Kat Got Engaged!!

Ribbit Mobile: Next Generation Voice Management —

The folks at Ribbit Mobile have taken Google Voice’s “one number for life” concept and expanded upon it. When I spoke to the folks at Ribbit recently, they explained that as they believe that personal identity is increasingly based on one’s cell phone number, they should improve upon the smartphone features we’ve become used to (address books, dialing by name, etc.) with lots of other useful functionality.

The service is still in beta, but it already offers many sophisticated features that allow users to:

• Use their existing cellphone or landline number, or get new numbers.
• Route phone calls to smartphones and other locations. One can set up Ribbit to ring multiple landline and cell numbers, as well as Skype. It can also be set to send SMS alerts with notifications of missed calls and transcribed messages.
• Make and receive calls through Ribbit’s web interface.
• When an incoming call arrives, be presented with what Ribbit calls “Caller ID 2.0,” showing the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr statuses of the caller.
• Transfer calls.
• Receive recorded and/or transcribed messages. Ribbit Mobile offers a choice of vendors, so one can select computer-generated or human-produced transcriptions.
• Archive and search messages.
• Take notes during conversations and attach them to the record of the call.
• Dictate memos.
• Specify what caller ID will be displayed with outgoing calls.

Ribbit Mobile offers several ways to interact with its service, including an iPhone app, plus web-based and AIR widgets for messages, conferencing, dialing and SMS.

With all of these features, I really wanted to like Ribbit Mobile. Unfortunately, at this point, it has some major shortcomings:

• Slow interface speed. The web interface is Flash-based, and seems to be very slow to load. I counted the load time (on my Mac, using Firefox 3.5) at over 90 seconds!
• Poor contact management. Existing contacts can be imported through Plaxo. Plaxo has its own problems, which I won’t go into here, but Plaxo imports are extremely slow (20 minutes for about 1,400 contacts), and the imported contact file does not include the social network information that’s central to the “Caller ID 2.0″ idea. You can go through each contact in Ribbit and add the social network info, but Ribbit deletes all of your current contacts if you re-import from Plaxo, which means that any social network links you add will disappear next time you import an updated Plaxo file. Also, since Ribbit offers no way to export its contact list, you’ll be forced to maintain two separate address lists if you don’t want to be tied to Ribbit.
• Inconsistent linking to social networks. The connections to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter seem to require frequent re-linking.
• Limited community interaction. Surprisingly, one must get approval to even view the forums. Not surprisingly, there aren’t many forum posts, which doesn’t strike me as a good sign.

During the beta period, Ribbit Mobile is free, and U.S. and UK residents can request beta invitations. After the beta period ends, Ribbit anticipates that the service will be sold for $10-30 per month.

Ribbit Mobile has potential, but right now, its slowness and limited contact management mean that it’s not yet ready for daily use. Ribbit was acquired by telecoms firm BT in 2008, so let’s hope that it gets its act together.

Share your thoughts on Ribbit Mobile in the comments.

If you’re a company considering using social media tools for business communications, marketing, sales, etc, you’re no doubt wondering about how much time it will add to your already busy day, especially if you’re a smaller business. The answer varies depending on how you’re using it, how many platforms you’re engaging, your goals, and more. But we can still walk through some potential recipes and give you a sense of what will take time, how you might budget for it, and how to consider your engagement efforts. From a business perspective (and you can stretch this for non-profits and other organizations), it comes down to a mix of prioritizing and satisfying customer needs. Here are my thoughts on scaling social media.

Methods of Engaging in Social Media

First, let’s level-set what we’re talking about here. When I talk about scaling your efforts, here are the efforts I’m talking about:

• Listening/monitoring for PR, for customer service, for marketing opportunities, for R&D opportunties.
• Customer service.
• Client relations.
• Social marketing (such as two-way sales conversations).
• Sales prospecting (including two-way conversations, but also listening).
• Publishing (blogging, video, etc).

Of these six, everything but “listening/monitoring” assumes a little bit of two-way participation, meaning that you choose to comment on the other people’s posts and statuses, etc. This takes time, as well. It’s part of the relationship-building, however, and can’t be skimped on.

Approaches to Assigning These Tasks

Listening/Monitoring – In my estimation, every social media effort has to have Listening/Monitoring at the core of it. I tried thinking of exceptions, and couldn’t (without accepting that some people choose to be scammy). That said, you can opt to split the listening/monitoring chores out such that each member of your team that will be touching the social web owns some level of the process. For instance, your PR person can use the tools to listen for crisis issues, for storytelling opportunities, etc. Your customer service team can use the tools to enhance their customer service channel. Your marketers can listen for opportunities. Thus, you’ve already looked at how to split the vast bucket of information that comes in during listening. Someone should still own it. Maybe that’s the product lead, the manager of that line of business, whoever is responsible for the bottom line. They should have their eyes on listening the whole time.

Customer Service – Some companies already have this nailed down. Dell and Comcast have built great customer service integrations using social channels. Zappos has, as well. This area seems the most important to scale. Customer service is a tireless experience, and requires prompt attention. Thus, you need a deep bench. I think Frank at Comcast has 14 people on his team at this point, to give you a sense of it. Of all the social media tasks, this is tie for the most time consuming and most important (client relations would be the other). Learning how to scale this might be nuanced and customized, but just by knowing that it’s the hardest part might be enough to get you a little further in this part.

Client Relations- I split out client relations from customer service, because I think this part includes managing things like Facebook groups, managing blog comments, etc. It’s the “there’s no problem, but I’d like to keep you warm” part of business. You sometimes see “community manager” in this role (though I see the best community managers as a blend of a few of the above topics). This is tied for first place in time-consuming with Customer Service. People want the warm touch. It’s also the hardest of the brand promises, because if you’re nice to me on Twitter, but your counter help stinks, did you really move the needle? I vote no. With time, this one requires perhaps even more special care and attention. If you start offering this to your customer base, you’ve got to maintain it. Toy with the hours spent here at your own risk.

Social Marketing – By social marketing, I mean things like finding new customers via Twitter, or coming up with YouTube challenges, things like that. This clearly falls into the marketing department of larger companies, and it falls on the shoulders of whichever of your small business partners markets the best. Like all roles in a small business environment, you should cross-train. Don’t get lulled into thinking that just because Surya has a Twitter account that he’s the only one who should do social marketing. This is probably the easiest to scale, but it’s also the one where you can see the most obvious results of marketing effort. For instance, if you build a loyalty program and you need sign-ups, you can count pretty easily how many people took advantage of your offer, so you now whether or not to add attention to it. This is probably a lot less personable than client relations and customer service, so can likely be scaled the easiest.

Sales Prospecting – Your sales team (or you, if you’re a company of one or two) should already be realizing the sales benefits of the social web. Every day, someone’s out there talking about their needs, and giving you a sense of how you could sell to them. It’s lots of opportunity and requires a bit of time, but not much more than old fashioned prospecting. Switch out some of your time from sifting through phone books or wherever you find your customers, and put it into using search tools on the web to find new clients. Also, for ongoing relationships, if you’re not keeping tabs on their social presence, you’re missing the opportunity to know how they’re doing before you make your important sales calls. This doesn’t take a ton of time, but requires you to build it into your process.

Publishing – Blogging, shooting videos, all that stuff – that’s where some of your time gets eaten up, and yet, that’s where a lot of the value comes from. In seeing some of the comments from my post about redrawing, a lot of people offered that maybe I should blog and tweet less. That’s where I get my revenue. This post? It will generate a query for business where someone wants me to further customize and formalize these processes for their organization. I give it away to you for free, and you can run with it, but someone will ask for that next step, and I’ll make money from that. Thus, publishing should never be considered the thing to slip. Hell, it’s the product sometimes, and other times, it’s the best advertising you could ever create. Never skimp on publishing.

Where Does That Leave You?

I’ve told you that everything’s important and that nothing can be cut back. So where do you scale?

• Spread listening/monitoring as deep as you can.
• Enhance customer service and deepen that bench internally.
• Add to client relations when you can, from internal resources. It pays off.
• Social marketing can be augmented by external help.
• Sales prospecting is a sales job, but can be augmented.
• Publishing is important, but can be augmented by external help.

That’s how I see it. Again, if you’re talking about smaller scale operations, you’ll have to find the mix. I’ve put it almost in order of importance, from top to bottom. You can shuffle it a bit. Is that how you see it?

For those complaining that social media doesn’t scale, the trick is this: we equate these tools to personal relationships. Because of that, we can’t just open a “call center” for many of the touchpoints. However, as we move forward, and these tools become the new phone, the new radio, the new TV, it’s no longer going to be a world of solo trust agents, but trust agencies.

Will you be ready?

Photo credit Bill Lapp

Listen to Facebook and Twitter With Aha Radio —

Listen to Facebook and Twitter With Aha Radio is a post from Chris Pirillo

Aha Mobile was a finalist in the 2010 Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at the SXSW conference last week. With so many new social media services cropping up left and right, we tend to look past many of them in frustration. Aha Radio, however, is one I can definitely get excited about.

Aha Radio will easily turn all of your favorite websites into on-demand radio stations, right on your iPhone. You can grab the App for free and set it up in minutes. Listen to all of your podcasts while driving, or catch up on your friends’ Facebook statuses. Keep your eyes on the road while driving, and let the App keep you in touch. Switch to the Nearby Traffic station to check traffic conditions, or even find out what restaurants may be nearby.

Check out some of the things you can do with Aha Radio on your iPhone:

• Check the Traffic Conditions – Get instant updates on traffic conditions ahead of you, based on your current location. The App pulls information from Inrix and Clear Channel. In addition, it also gives you instant information about accidents and things that other drivers using the App have reported. See something you need to alert drivers behind you to? No problem. Just tap the screen and leave a voice shout to let them know.
• Facebook Check-in – Trying to read status updates on Facebook while driving is a pretty stupid idea. Listening to them, however, is no more dangerous than listening to the radio or a CD. Aha Radio filters out game updates, and will only read actual status updates to you.
• Community Interaction – If you’re bored, check out this section. You can tune in to either the Jokes or Rants stations, and have a few laughs. There’s also a Karaoke area, where you can die laughing while listening to other drivers sing along to their favorite tunes. If you’re seriously brave, you can even record your own voice to share.
• Hungry – Ahhhh food. I don’t know about you, but I always want to know what food may be nearby on the route I’m driving. Using this part of the App will let me know what restaurants may be up ahead, and even prioritizes them according to your pre-set preferences.

This App is seriously cool. I downloaded it while still listening to the talk during SXSW, and I’m thinking you’re crazy if you don’t get it for yourself.

Thanks go out to AMD for helping me to attend SXSW this year!

• Make Monsters with Elmo and His iPhone App!
• Newton’s Balls are Hot on the iPhone
• Top 10 Signs That You’re a Social Media Douchebag
• Record Your Life with AudioBoo
• How Much Would You Pay for an iPhone App?
• Portable Scanner for the iPhone
• Creating Your Own iPhone App
• How to Make an iPhone App
• Social Media Questions and Answers
• SkyVoyager for the iPhone

Twitter has quietly changed the wording on the button users need to press to update their statuses on the Twitter.com website. It took them 10 billion (or so) tweets to realize we don’t ‘Update’, we ‘Tweet’.

A lot of people are noticing the change, although I have to say I had to hit the refresh button of my browser a couple of times before I saw it too. Could be Twitter bucket testing or a caching issue on my side.

This is of course a minor interface change and likely has nothing to do with the “nifty features” that were supposedly soon finding their way to the Twitter web interface, which is still the most popular client for Twitter users.

As a reminder: Twitter considers the word “tweet” to be a trademark of theirs, even though it hasn’t been officially assigned to the company yet.

Hat tip to @Orli for the heads up and the TwitPic.

While Twitter integration was a major selling point of Google Buzz, it seemingly went only one way.

Or at least it used to be that way. However, the recently released Buzz Can Tweet application allows Buzz posts to be automatically posted to Twitter.

By integrating Buzz updates into Twitter, the developers hope to integrate access to Buzz’s media capabilities into Twitter.

For those that find themselves constantly reposting statuses and links from one service to the other, this could be a valuable time-saving tool.

The tool provides a linkback to the user’s public Buzz profile if the Buzz update is too long to fit into a tweet. The tool also includes bit.ly integration and hashtag-based import control (updates sent to Twitter only if #twitter is at the end of the status).

The most interesting potential use of this service is based around Buzz’s media integration. Essentially, the tool allows users to use their Buzz accounts as a twitpic killer by linking to the media components of the original Buzz post. This integration is significantly simpler than linking the media with a URL shortener because it’s done automatically.

Of course, linking Buzz to Twitter has its own unique issues. It remains to be seen whether or not a Buzz post to twitter, reposted to Buzz via Twitter importation would start an infinite loop. At the very least, the tool’s creators admit, Buzz updates will reappear back in Buzz via Twitter. There also appears to be a significant time lag in certain cases, as Buzz connects to Twitter only intermittently. The tool’s developers claim that both problems are Google’s fault and that they’re hoping for a quick fix soon.

In any case, this tool probably won’t make users stop updating their Twitter accounts manually, but it could be a useful time-saving measure for those of us that make frequent use of both services.

MyNoSQL has up an interview with Ryan King on how Twitter is transitioning to the Cassandra database. Here's some detailed background on Cassandra, which aims to "bring together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model." Before settling on Cassandra, the Twitter team looked into: "...HBase, Voldemort, MongoDB, MemcacheDB, Redis, Cassandra, HyperTable, and probably some others I'm forgetting. ... We're currently moving our largest (and most painful to maintain) table — the statuses table, which contains all tweets and retweets. ... Some side notes here about importing. We were originally trying to use the BinaryMemtable interface, but we actually found it to be too fast — it would saturate the backplane of our network. We've switched back to using the Thrift interface for bulk loading (and we still have to throttle it). The whole process takes about a week now. With infinite network bandwidth we could do it in about 7 hours on our current cluster." Relatedly, an anonymous reader notes that the upcoming NoSQL Live conference, which will take place in Boston March 11th, has announced their lineup of speakers and panelists including Ryan King and folks from LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Rackspace.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 3.5 million events are created each month on Facebook, and the average Facebook user is invited to 3 of them per month. So if you’re one of the millions who uses Facebook Events to share your plans, or Facebook Birthdays to keep track of friends birthdays, then you should check out fbCal.

Built by calendar aggregation company Mixin, the free service lets you automatically synchronize this Facebook information to a variety of other calendar services, including Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal (including directly in the iPhone), Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Sunbird, and Lotus Notes.

Once you complete the syncing process, you’ll be able to see calendar entries for events and birthdays from Facebook within any of these programs.

Facebook itself lets you subscribe to individual events, which is a good option if you want to only add individual events. It has previously also let you do a bulk export of events so you can track upcoming ones automatically, albeit not with granular features that fbcal offers. However, while the bulk exporter option is still available for use by developers on the platform, and live for people who have previously set it up, it is no longer visible on the Events page. It used to be, but seems to have disappeared with the redesign earlier this month (we have an email in to Facebook about that and we’ll update when we hear back).

Instructions obviously vary for each program, and the company details them here. There are a few options to note for the calendar entires. You can choose to subscribe to various types of event statuses you’ve previously marked in Facebook, from “Attending” at the minimum to “Attending, Maybe attending, Not attending, Awaiting Reply” at the maximum. You can also subscribe to your Facebook calendar entries by RSS, if you prefer using Google Reader or another reader. Or you can download your existing entries directly — the problem with that option is that you won’t get the automatic updates from Facebook. FbCal provides the calendar in the iCalendar format (.ics), which is also used by other calendar applications beyond the ones we list here. Finally, among general features, you can set the time zone so the events match your calendar.

The birthday feature can also be useful, although it is a bit noisy if you have a lot of Facebook friends — a good addition would be a way to select the Facebook friends whose birthdays you want to remember.

We tried the service out with Apple’s iCal, and it worked very well. Click on the iCal logo for Events and the iCal desktop app loads, and asks you to subscribe to the Events calendar you’ve selected. Hit Subscribe and you’ll create a new Facebook Calendar (you can then choose a color, and other iCal options), then you’ll see your Facebook items auto-populated.