Dot Com Note » web 2.0

Birth of Microblogging and Death of Free Email

Dotcom Note — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:58:09 +0000

Is free email dying and the growth of blogs is slowing down? If the social networking using Facebook and Bebo has exploded in 2007, the year 2008 has started with the growth of a different type of communication medium. It is microblogging. Using short texts, and sometimes pictures and videos, you share your thoughts and actions. Its popularity is its simplicity. It frees you from hard thinking and wordy texts.

If you are comfortable sending text messages from your cell phone, you are ready for microblogging. However, instead of sending text message to one person, you use microblogging to broadcast to your social network.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/566128230/

What are the tools available at your disposal for this new and exciting medium of communication? The last few years have seen the birth of a dozen microblogging sites to carter to your various needs.

Twitter is the leader of the bunch. As soon as you create an account, you are ready to publish your micro-contents using your web browser, cell phone, or the email client. You can also follow interesting people like artists, athletes, bands, politicians and check out their insights regularly.

Want to share your files, events, and links using microblogging? Use Pownce to send your stuff to your friends. Pownce also provides a desktop software for you to download and install on your computer so that you don’t have to use the browser.

The site Tumblr has a refined and simple interface. Use it to publish photos and videos from your cell phone. Even if you are not wordy, you will be able to share your love and hate with others.

If you prefer talking, instead of writing, use MySay. You call the MySay service and leave a message. People in your contact will be able to listen to your thoughts using their phones, emails, or computers.

If don’t like texts or audio, use Hictu for video micro-blogging. Use your webcam to video your actions and publish it in Hictu with the click of a mouse.

IRateMyDay has an interesting angle to the micro-blogging. Instead of publishing mundane activities of you daily life, you rate your day on a scale of Worst to Great. You can also give some explanation for your rating.

Are you emotionally upset? Instead of using IRateMyDay, use EMotionr. If it is one of the happiest day of your life, rate it the highest possible 10. Don’t rate the lowest 1. It can’t be that bad.

Moodmill is where you should go after rating your day or emotion. This site is for managing your mood. Use the mouse to slide the mood indicator and share it with your friends and contacts.

If you are at ease with French or German language, you can use Frazr. It has all the features and functionality of Twitter.

2008 is the year of microblogging. As the free email was a radical communication medium a decade ago for the most folks and it eventually made the letter writing a lost art, micoblogging will surpass blogging within a few years.

2008: The Year of Twitter

Dotcom Note — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:14:45 +0000

2007 was the year of Facebook. According to people count statistics of compete.com, Twitter has registered a 1200% growth over the last 12 months compared to 119% increase for Facebook. While people are getting fed up with Facebook zombies and hugs, some have started realizing the value of Twitter.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilbear/206262544/

Twitter is a one-to-many communication medium. People call it a micro-blogging tool because you can publish your mundane daily activities using 140 characters or less. You express your thoughts and actions and broadcast them using Twitter.

At first, it seems very childish. You may be wondering, “how can I express my thoughts and actions in only 140 characters? Why people will like to read my mundane daily activities? And what value does it provide to my readers?”

Check out how Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama is broadcasting all the meeting schedules, caucus and primary results, informational and inspirational messages for volunteers to take actions.

If you are a blogger, you can tell your Twitter followers using some teasing information about an upcoming blog article before you publish it on your blog. This will create anticipation and desires.

If you are selling something on the web, you can use Twitter to publish hot sales for your Twitter followers. This will give you an idea which poroducts are hot sellers so that you can stock them before you announce the sale to everybody using other medium.

You can publish cool tricks and tips that you just read in a blog about personal development, productivity improvement, money saving ideas, etc. to your Twitter followers.

You can run a quick survey by asking a short question.

You can follow thought leaders, industry luminaries, artists, athletes and other interesting people in Twitter to gain insights on diverse topics.

For right now, I am using Twitter to follow Barack Obama. If you are not careful, Twitter can be a huge time waster.

Caroline has published an authoritative Twitter Guide. It is pretty large but very thorough.

Arrival of Social Mapping: Google’s My Maps is Now Our Maps

Dotcom Note — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:00:05 +0000

Google maps product manager, Jess Lee, has posted about Google’s social mapping feature in My Maps. Tagzania also offers collaborative mapping. However, there are few differences in the two offerings.

To enable the collaborative feature of My Maps, you click the collaborative link and add email addresses of people who can add and modify the map. Google will send out invitations to the those email addresses with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they will be able to modify it.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/techbirmingham/503950484/

You create My Maps and invite your friends and coworkers to edit your maps. For example, you are planning a hiking trip and identified a few trails and then you invite your hiker buddies to edit and modify the map. Your hiker buddies can add more trails, make corrections to your existing trails by editing the map and changing texts in the pop-up bubbles.

You can also publish the map for the entire world and any one can change that map. I can see the possibility of spams here.

This wiki style collaborative map is very powerful for creating lots of interesting and useful geo-groups, e.g. good Thai eatery in New York, surfing spots through out the world, great beaches in Europe, Buddhist temples in Asia, etc., using the wisdom of the crowd. The possibilities are endless.

Facebook Social Ads: A Sophisticated Referral Program

Dotcom Note — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:08:52 +0000

Facebook has unveiled the Social Ads system that enables advertisers use your friends’ endorsements to woo you in purchasing their products and services.

Businesses will create their Facebook pages just like Facebook users and slather those pages with texts, photos, videos, and applications. Members will interact with these pages, e.g. booking a hotel room or uploading a vacation picture in the company’s wall, etc., and the interaction information will spread to other users through the members’ social graphs. Users can become fans of businesses and refer those businesses to their contacts.

Image credit a little privacy please

Facebook places a cookie in your computer when you log in. That cookie will be used to track you when you visit one of the Social Ads network site. The Social Ads will allow members to share their actions on third party sites using the Facebook news feed.

For example, If you book an airline ticket in MyCheapAirTicket, a Facebook advertisement affiliate site, you will have the option to drop this action in your Facebook news feed from MyCheapAirTicket site. Also, when a member of your social graph visits MyCheapAirTicket, the Social Ads will show your action on MyCheapAirTicket site.

Facebook has collected a massive amount of personal data of its members. Now it will use that data to target ads based on age group, demographics, preferences, hobbies, etc. The Social Ads will also turn users into unpaid sales agents for endorsing brands and products.

Free websites generate revenue from advertising. There is nothing wrong with that. However, Facebook is taking your personal data and providing that data to advertisers, albeit in aggregated formats. The claim is that advertisers will be able to better target their ads because they know who you are from your profile information and what you do from your social actions. Taking your private information and broadcasting it to the world is reminiscent of Orwellian Big Brother.

You will share ads, in the guise of positive experience of a product, with your friends and fill up their Facebook news feeds with ads. If you do it too little, advertisers will not like it. If you do it too much, your friends will unfriend you quickly.

A contextual ad system like Google’s AdSense detaches your personal information and focuses on what you are interested in at the very moment you land on a web page. You have the choice to run away from the site, get the information you want and not look at the ads, or click a few ads to acquire more information on the the topic you are exploring. It also provides monetary help to publishers who put hard works in creating, developing, and maintaining free ad supported websites.

In contrast, the Social Ads will rely on your personal information and make you an advocate for the businesses. Business will reap benefits from your likes without compensating you. And once they compensate you, your likes are no longer unbiased.

Also, your friends’ likes may not be the same as your needs. You may be looking for an average quality, cheap camera and your friend has a strong attachment to a particular brand. There is no way you can always get the best product for your need from your online contacts’ recommendations.

In stead of developing an elaborate and sophisticated referral program while compromising members’ private data, Facebook could have implemented a simple shopping list application. Members list their shopping list, advertisers display contextual ads, and Amazon, CNET etc. provide product reviews based on the shopping list.

OpenSocial – What is in there for You?

Dotcom Note — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:18:55 +0000

Social networking is a rapidly growing web phenomenon with more than 100 million participants worldwide. Thirty percent social networkers have a Facebook account. Within a few months of opening up of Facebook platform to application developers, there was an avalanche of applications developed to lure Facebook members in installing them. And the Facebook members did at a blistering pace.

To counter the rising dominance of Facebook in the social networking world, Google, MySapce, and a dozen other social networking sites and a few software and service providers like Oracle and Salesforce have banded together to unveil OpenSocial. OpenSocial is an alliance, a platform, and a common set of programming interfaces (APIs) for developing applications for the OpenSocial platform.

Image credit: opensocial2

For developers, it is writing a social application using the technology that they are already familiar with like HTML, CSS, and Javascript and then deploying the application across multiple sites that have implemented the OpenSocial programming interfaces. There is no need to develop separate applications for MySapce, Orkut, or Ning. Unless Facebook joins the alliance, developers still have to develop the same application for the Facebook platform in addition to the OpenSocial version.

A Facebook only platform with its proprietary development language (Facebook Markup and Facebook Query language) for the increasing social networking properties is bad for the web because it establishes a monopolistic control over members’ data, their online social graphs, development language, and deployment containers.

OpenSocial by design breaks the monopolistic control of social networking data and application development technology by a single site. It uses web standards like HTML, CSS, and Javascript for development language. Member sites open their members’ data and related social graphs to other sites and application developers use a develop once and deploy everywhere model.

OpenSocial frees users from using only one site. Now their favorite applications can run in multiple sites. Users will not stay tied to one website. They will join multiple sites and the convenience of installing an application once and using the same application in multiple sites is very appealing. It also increases networking efficiency by bringing together users’ fragmented networks scattered across many sites. It is an empowering technology for users.

OpenSocial does not create a single social networking site. It brings diverse sites serving different group of people together into an open platform for interoperability. Web site owners can develop applications for OpenSocial platform for branding purposes and driving traffic to their sites.

OpenSocial provides a unique opportunity for website owners to penetrate the vast social networking world and reach its members. However, developing interesting applications that leverage their sites’ services and target members who are genuinely interested in those services are the key to success.

OpenSocial also opens up a new frontier for people who use the web for dubious activities. There soon will be thousands of spam applications, theft of social network graphs and members data, unauthorized access to and manipulation of members’ profiles, etc.

The verdict is still out. However, it is clear that OpenSocial will push the web into a level where isolated social networking sites will be able to communicate using common applications. Users will be able to move between networks seamlessly and run their favorite applications from any network. Developers will be free from developing multiple versions of the same applications for different social network properties. Website owners will be able to target their services to social network participants more efficiently than they are able to do it now.

8 Steps to Facebook Adventure

Dotcom Note — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 02:10:40 +0000

Once a social platform for college students, the 40 million active membership site facebook is the latest buzzword in social media marketing. However, most members are extremely online savvy and they smell blatant advertisements from miles away. It is important to know some basics and gain experiences in utilizing the site and interacting with its members before you start planning your facebook marketing adventure.

Image credit: MF-Facebook-Sep07-1.1

1. Create a profile. The first step is to create a profile. Sign up using your real name and upload some pictures. If you do not have an email with a top-level edu domain, by default you join a regional network based on your zip code or international address. Later, you have the option to join your company’s network and change your regional networks. You can change your networks twice in a 60-day period.

Always upload a profile picture. If you don’t upload a picture, facebook places a default question mark icon. It is a good strategy to show your face in facebook. Don’t use group pictures for your profile because others may have difficulty identifying you in the group pictures. Don’t use logos, your cute cat or dogs’ pictures, or a picture of your expensive car and boat.

You don’t have to fill all the profile information. Fill only the information you are comfortable sharing with others. If you want to find dates using facebook, fill up the relationship status feature of your profile accordingly. Don’t change the status often because others will notice it and doubt your trustworthiness.

2. Make friends. The site can find active facebook friends for you using emails in your address books of a few free web email providers like yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc. Once you get a few friends, new friend requests will pour in from your friends of friends. You can also search for friends and send requests. Work on creating a network of 100 to 200 friends. Don’t make friends with celebrities because in most cases these are fake profiles setup for marketing purposes.

3. Upload pictures and videos. Start uploading some interesting pictures and group them in albums of travel pictures, baby shower photos, bachelor party scenes, etc. Pictures help people connect with your life without meeting you face to face. Always upload a number of related pictures or themes.

Create a random albums and put all your random pictures in the random album. Tag your pictures to identify people on the pictures. When you tag your friends in your pictures, they show up in their wall. You can also share your albums with others outside facebook. You can upload personal videos using your browser or mobile phone and directly record videos to facebook.

4. Use friends’ walls and never post on your own wall. You have a wall in facebook for others to write notes. Don’t write in your own wall. Write in your friends’ walls. Your friends will write notes, share videos or links in your wall. You do the same in your friends’ walls. When a friend posts something on your wall, reply to the post. If you find the posting annoying, politely ask them to back off and clean up your wall.

5. Join a few groups. There are all sorts of organic groups in facebook. These are groups of people with similar interests. Find a few that interest you and join them. You can create your own group but first find out if one exists on the same topic. This is an excellent place to be creative and get support from a bunch of people for your cause.

6. Create events and invite people. If you want to host a party, this is the feature you will use. Create your events and invite others to join. You can make an event public for your friends to see or private for the invitees to browse. Under my event, you can browse your friends’ public events. You will immediately know who are your fake friends because they did not invite you to their gala dinner they are hosting.

7. Send notes and share links. You send notes to your friends. Depending on the topic, you can send a note to a few friends or to all friends in your network. Don’t send chain letter notes because people find these repulsive. Your notes show up in your friends’ news feeds or on their walls. A tagged note shows up on the wall, otherwise, it is found in the homepage news feed. Use share for sharing links, even though you can use this feature for sharing notes. Share that link of a cheap travel-booking site you have found while surfing the net with friends planning their upcoming vacations.

8. Visit your homepage everyday. Besides your profile page in facebook, you also have a homepage. You homepage displays collaborative news feeds of all your friends, event and group invitations, friendship requests, friends’ birthdays, etc. If you want to know what is going on in your facebook friend circle, visit your homepage everyday.

The other features of facebook are poke, marketplace, facebook mobile, and hundreds of applications that enhance the facebook experience. As the facebook awareness grows, online marketers have started pounding the facebook door to gain a foothold. Future articles will discuss different ways to market your products and services to facebook members without insulting their intelligence.

Social Video Remixing – 7 New Kids on the Block

Dotcom Note — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:59:20 +0000

The year 2006 saw the emergence of the social video market with the mass adoption of YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc. The 2007 has shaped up as the year when the hoi polloi finally takes control of the video editing functionality that was once the guarded secrets of only a few experts.

A bevy of new sites are getting the attention of social video producers and distributors. These sites are offering free online video editing capabilities. You don’t have to purchase expensive video editing software, sweat over the complicated installation procedures, and master the unintuitive editing jargon and functionality. A list of some popular sites and their capabilities are discussed below.

The simplest of the bunch is Cuts. The Cuts’ mission is “…easy control of the video experience…”. Using their online services, you can loop and cut video scenes, add captions and insert sound effects to enhance your online videos for distributing via social video sites or emails. In the future, they will offer more advanced features that will enable you to edit your DVDs or downloaded videos for enhancing purchased movies and TV shows.

Gotuit offers Scenemaker, an online video slicing application. You import your video in Scenemaker using an URL where your video has been uploaded, e.g. YouTube. Once the video is loaded in the online application, you will be able to mark the start and end scenes that interest you. Gotuit calls it deep tagging. It is like bookmarking a specific page in a website. After deep tagging your video, you will be able publish the selected scenes in your blog, MySpace page, or any other web pages and video sharing sites.

Eyespot is a full feature online video editing application. After uploading videos, audios, and photos, you can apply transitions, effects, titles, and music. You can mix free media sets from Colbert Report, public Enemy, and DreamWorks pictures.

Using a Flash interface, you add titles, effects, transitions, and music to your uploaded videos in Jumpcut. You can also upload audios and photos or import them from Flickr or Facebook. After editing your media, you publish them at Jumpcut site for others to remix.

Website owners can use a Flash widget from Movie Masher to allow their website visitors video mixing and editing capabilities. You customize the widget to match your site’s look for branding purposes. Using a timeline editor, your site visitors will be able to trim clips and add titles, music, effects and transitions.

Using muveemix, you add music, titles, and credit to your videos and then publish them to your social network profile or blogs. The editor is simple but it offers less features than Jumpcut.

Users can edit their videos from within YouTube using YouTube Remixer. You can insert graphics, audio, text, and overlays, and in-video transitions. Using a simple interface, YouTube is able to provide a one stop editing and video sharing opportunities for its users.

The dramatic rise of video sharing sites in the last two years has created needs for simple but sophisticated tools for the prosumers to enhance their creative works. More sites are stepping up to meet the challenges of online video editing and remixing.

Travel Organization Site Tripit: The Begining of Web 3.0?

Dotcom Note — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 03:59:41 +0000

Tripit is a travel organization site that just came out of private-invitation-only memberships. It is now open for anyone to sign up. It is an interesting site for do-it-yourself trip planners. You organize all your travel related website bookmarks, travel plans and itineraries in one place. In addition to printing your itinerary, you can also share it with your social network.

Tripit calls it the first intelligent travel organizer. It draws information from Google maps for directions, NOAA weather services, SeatGuru for airplane seat advice, Wikipedia for city information, Eventful for current event, and Flickr for city photos. It is the ultimate mashup wrapped into an intelligent travel organizer system.

After you sign up, you download and install a toolbar extension called TripClipper. As you browse different travel related sites, you clip things like restaurant, activities, reviews, etc. and add those to your trip plan using the TripClipper. You create a trip plan for each trip and add contents from different sites to your trip plan.

You can comparison shop different reservation websites from within TripIt for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Once you purchase your trip from a site, you email the information to plans@tripit.com. The system stores and organizes your information in a trip plan.

There are lots of other features and some of them will amaze you. Economist has mentioned this site in the context of semanatic web.

Social Network for Targeted Age Group – Good Idea?

Dotcom Note — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:11:18 +0000

Read/WriteWeb has a post about massive layoffs at Eons, a social networking site targeted to baby boomer generation. Bernard Lunn at Read/WriteWeb concludes that a site should connect to its visitors around contents rather than age. On the surface it seems to be a good suggestion.

If you are running a blog around personal development, your reader-base is people who are interested in self-guided improvement of their economical, social, intellectual, and emotional lives. You really don’t care their age group. You provide your insights for a college sophomore who wishes to increase his dating success as well as for a 40-something mid-level corporate manager who wants to reduce his job stress.

However, for a social networking site like Eons, it is different. The site does not generate contents. It expects its users to generate contents. If it is targeting a particular age group, it expects people from that age group will join the site and generate appropriate contents suited for its members.

Among other things, sites like Eons fail because they limit their potential memberships to a fraction of the population. Unless the site provides tools that are particularly suited for an age group, there is no reason to limit your potential visitors. I don’t no what age-specific tools Eons provides to its members. I will guess none.

Traffic From Niche Social Web

Dotcom Note — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 02:47:23 +0000

Are you tired of submitting your posts to digg and reddit? Are you upset that you only got a few diggs on an article that you spent hours researching and writing? This happens to many bloggers.

AjaxNinja says to stop submitting articles on the most popular sites like digg or reddit and he recommends submitting to niche sites. You can find a list of some additional social media sites here.

Sphinn is another digg clone. People have reported good returns on investment on the site. I checked out a few stories and found zero dugg stories had made it to the home page of Sphinn.

Write a powerful headline. CopyBlogger has three articles on how to write headlines that attracts social media crowds like a magnet. You can read the the three articles here, here, and here.

Create contents to touch your readers. We live in a sea of information. If you are like me who subscribe to hundreds of feeds, I know you are flooded with posts every morning.

My take on content is that your readers should feel the urge to visit your site to get new insights. You should also provide information that is buried in a dozen websites. It will be like a one stop shop for information in your niche.