Entries Tagged 'Social Networking' ↓

Have you used Twitter yet? If you haven’t you should (you can start by following me). There are now officially 1 billion articles supporting the usefulness of Twitter - this in addition to the 1 trillion ways to waste time with Twitter. Google recently offered Twitter some assistance in dealing with the super tuesday tracking and Twitter just switched to Verio for their hosting for undisclosed reasons in addition to claims of providing better performance under high load.

So it seems that Twitter is all the rage, at least Jaiku and Pwnce would probably say so:

So why is Twitter going nowhere fast? Well, for one we have all heard about their business model, or lack thereof. But I think what hurts them more than not knowing the best way to convert 500k visitors to cash is all the crummy tools and products that are being built by independent third parties on unreliable APIs. Things just don’t work. I can’t remember the last time I tried to use any of the latest greatest twitter add-ons, tools or interactive sites without it either throwing an error or timing out. I couldn’t even get the direct message reply RSS feed to load into my Google Reader successfully. Hopefully these problems are basic infrastructure issues that will be resolved with the move to Verio. I would hate to see Twitter’s billion plus uses disappear at the expense of sloppy traffic mongers hungry for the link juice that the Twitter buzzword brings to their site however short lived it may be.

Of course there are some decent tools available in flock and jott. I gave flock a tough review before I had really set it through its paces. After spending more time with the browser I really like it. The Twitter integration isn’t great (maybe this is why it is getting a thumbs up?), but the people sidebar makes keeping tabs on the people you follow much easier than the Twitter site. It would be nice to include a right-click menu to interact with the tweets directly (reply, direct message, tinyurl integration) but it does the trick for the most part. Jott has direct integration with Twitter and Mosio and when it works it is great. Often times Jott is plagued by the same problems as the Twitter Facebook plugin - communication failures with the Twitter API.

The present day internet user’s attention span has a digg half-life and will not tolerate this. People are far more willing to stick with a useless crummy app/site as long as it is always available *cough* myspace *cough* but the instant they start experiencing issue upon issue they will be looking for the competition.

As a side note, another fun tool I recently started playing with is QNA which is a Mosio/Twitter mashup that allows you to direct message questions through the Twitter interface and have them answered by agents. In keeping with the spirit of super Tuesday I couldn’t resist the following:

Your Question
——————————

Is Hillary Clinton evil?
————————————

QnAgent Answer
————————————
No, just has bad social skills (like taking on a fake southern accent when in the south)

Facebook launched a new extended profile feature today that will allow you to simplify your default profile display.  It works by “hiding” applications and other profile boxes that may be cluttering up your profile.  This functionality was previously offered by third party Facebook applications like CleanProfile and fills an obvious need in the Facebook community.  Even in the last two days I have had a handful of people specifically use the term “clutter” when referring to Facebook.  As simple as the interface is to use, the clutter can be overwhelming to a new member.

To clean up your profile click on your profile link after logging in.  If this is your first time decluttering, Facebook provides a nice notification box at the top of the screen describing the new service with a link to the extended profile manager, otherwise you can scroll to the very bottom of your profile and click the “edit extended profile” link.

The extended profile manager will list the total number of boxes you have enabled on your profile and will offer suggestions to hide the boxes located at the bottom of the screen.  Check any boxes you want to hide and click OK.  Your profile will now contain links at the bottom of each column to “show more profile boxes.”  Obviously this isn’t rocket science and all the new feature does is prevent existing content from being displayed but it sure beats the MySpace model that requires you to clump jumbled code into the various sections of your profile page.

From the Hitwise Newsletter:

MySpace Received 76 Percent of U.S. Social Networking Visits in 2007
Facebook traffic increased 50 percent year-over-year;
95 percent of traffic to MySpace.com was returning in December 2007

NEW YORK, NY – January 16, 2008 – Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that MySpace.com averaged 76.35 percent of all U.S. visits in 2007^[1] among a custom category of 53 leading social networking websites. Facebook.com, Bebo.com and BlackPlanet.com received the next largest number of visits, as each received 12.57, 1.24 and .87 percent, respectively. The remaining 49 social networking websites in the custom category accounted for 8.97 percent of U.S. visits. 

Market Share of U.S. Internet Visits to Top 10 Social Networking Websites
Rank	Name	Domain	Dec-07	Dec-06	YoY % Change
1	MySpace	www.myspace.com	72.32%	78.89%	-8%
2	Facebook	www.facebook.com	16.03%	10.59%	51%
3	Bebo	www.bebo.com	1.09%	0.99%	10%

It seems that my last post is now merely hypothetical.  Facebook will be buying Plaxo and of course integrating their more powerful security and filtering features into the Facebook platform (not to mention you won’t have to get banned from Facebook to import your contacts into Plaxo.  Hopefully Zuckerberg didn’t take so much of a pounding during his 60 Minutes interview that Facebook will never IPO.

Although I rarely actually log on to Facebook, I do have it hooked into all my other social tools like Stumbleupon, Digg, Twitter and LinkedIn and I really like how it acts as a repository for all of my outgoing communication for “my network” to keep track of all that is going on.  I could personally do without all the MySpace-like features, daily gift, poke etc but overall it is the best social networking tool that can be used for legitimate purposes available today.  The addition of Plaxo’s features, if they can be integrated quickly and seamlessly, will quiet some of the nay sayers and improve the Facebook experience significantly.

The net was all abuzz today with the news of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account being deleted due to suspicious activity not conforming to the Facebook terms of use. I received a bunch of tweets from vaarious super bloggers via Twitter immediately with oodles of fresh tinyurl’d blog posts breaking the news. Scoble hopped on twitter a little later and described the slew of twitter posts as a “tweet storm.” I tried to hop over to the recently released twitterstats page to see what a tweet storm looks like. Unfortunately, twitterstat can’t handle the volume. I was able to get a rudimentary idea of the jump in volume using twitstat.

Of course after all was said and done Facebook reversed the ban and allowed Scoble to keep his own profile information if he would agree to not run data mining bots against their servers. Scoble wasn’t intentionally doing anything malicious, he just wanted to import his 4,999 Facebook contacts into his Plaxo profile.

Not that I need another social network to eat away at my time but I couldn’t resist kicking the tires on Plaxo’s latest Pulse beta after todays events. I haven’t had a lot of time to work with it but my initial experiences have been mixed. Profile creation and account setup are clean and simple and Plaxo offers so many hooks into other sites you are probabably already using like flickr, del.icio.us and digg. The del.icio.us import wasn’t working properly but that wasn’t my chief complaint. During intial account setup Plaxo offers to import your contacts from popular email programs like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Outlook. After having recently imported just over 1000 of my Outlook contacts into Gmail I thought it would be the way to go. Unfortunately, after what seemed to be a successful import Plaxo displayed a list of only 18 contacts that would be imported. After the import was complete there were 90 additional contacts that were created from junk HTML code. Surely I don’t have to upgrade to the Premium package for $50/yr to get my contacts imported properly. For now I will just chalk it up to a bug in beta 3 and stick with Facebook.