Welcome, dear new follower!
I recorded this 1-minute introduction video for all my fellow tweet-geeks: micro blogging is great, and it's even more fun if you can put a face to the name. So this is how datadirt (that would be me) rolls:
Posts
Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 49/2008
It's been a week full of surprises: Pownce closed pretty unexpectedly, while Twitter is still growing at an amazing rate. And a new trend finally has been turned into an API, or rather two APIs: Google as well as Facebook try to decentralize social networking and at the same time establish their own platforms as the central social hub. I am really looking forward to buddypress – in my opinion, “hosted” services are fine as additional traffic streams, but no online professional should put his main assets into third-party hands.
Google friend connect is opening
Last week, Google started the public beta phase for its new service friend connect: Basically, we're talking about a social API here: there's a unified login via Big G and Open ID. The implementation is simple, there's a couple of ready-made widgets, but actually it's all about the community now, who is expected to build their own apps. Is this going to be a threat for Facebook? The future will show.
…and Facebook launches Connect
The new service is FB's version of a portable single-sign on. While OpenID is great in theory, I totally agree with Dan:
Truth be told, I
Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 48/2008
Another week bites the dust: and much ado is going on about something that hardly anybody understands: the global financial crisis is spilling over from bankruptcy-filing banks to the car industry and plenty other businesses. Neither Obama nor the new Austrian government (if this comparison sounds strange to you: I live in Austria) will have an easy job: and while the EU is planning coordinated measures, I keep asking myself one question that nobody could answer so far: The governments deem giving cheap credits to banks appropriate. Why don't they hand out those credits – on the same terms – directly to needy companies?
After all, this money is supposed to fuel the economic fire, but so far the amount of money parked at the European central bank by national institutes has increased! Doesn't sound like a good plan to me… but luckily, online-entrepreneurs who specialize in marketing need little to no start-up capital: and that's one of the reasons, why our businesses will bloom in the near future.
Who to follow on twitter
Dan has dug the archives and came up with a list of twitter opinion-leaders:
One of the best ways to get started is by following the
Blogcatalog premium features rule supremely
…over any other blog catalogue. These guys offer very good value for very little money, considering the popularity of the site. Some of my blogs have been listed for quite a while now, and I like the looks and usability of my blog catalogue profile page. Instead of trying to spam as many irrelevant directories as possible, bloggers are much better off concentrating on a handful of important dirs, and bc is definitely one of them.
Today I became a “supporter”: for 6$ a month bc offers a pretty impressive range of feats: supports receive a special profile icon, geta beta access to all new features and surf a completely ad-free site. Any freeware adblocker can do that as well, but not if you're on a public computer.
I can almost hear your thoughts – nice, but why should I pay for this? Okay, here's the two killer features: first of all, donors are able to integrate their other social media profiles and leverage their catalogue presence by doing so. Currently only twitter is supported, but Digg, Delicious, last.fm and others communities will follow in the near future. And finally, here's the juicy part: bc offers increased visibility, or in their words:
As a premium member your blog will be prominently displayed on our homepage, helping you get the exposure your blog deserves!
There's also a weekly snapshot update (a recurring task that bc should do for every users anyways, as it's in their own interest) or you might wanna spend some more money: an additional business model enables users to rent sponsored category links, the prices vary depending on the demand, but start as low as 8$ per month. Recently, Jeremy did an interview with one of the bc founders on these listings and on their newly launched social search. The reason why the made their prices so cheap is that they hope to make a lot of people use the premium services – at least in my case that worked quite well. I think this longtail-business-model is a lot smarter than high-prize premium placements and it shows that a good longtail site (containing no pr0n) *can* indeed be monetized.
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If donating some money for enhanced exposure in the bigges US blog catalogue (we're talking pagerank 7 here) sound like a good deal to you, simple login and chose “donate” in the account-menu. No subscription fees, just chose the time span (starting form one month), pay via Paypal and you're all set.
Twitter: cosmetic skin updates
While US, Indian and Australian users are still able to fully use twitter's great SMS features, European twitter fans dearly miss the fastest and most direct way to receive updates, a proven system that even works with a 10 year old mobile. I was pretty shocked about the seemingly impossible mission to find a partner for the European market, as one would guess that players like T-Mobile should actually be pretty interested in hugging twitter closely. And I don't believe that a few cosmetic design touches will make up for missing SMS support. I hope that twitter finds a way to enable short message service usage in Europe again, but on the other hand that's the best market-entry point for competitors, as long as they are able to offer SMS integration.
There's no doubt I like the new design – no major surprises in here, just a few investments into the future:
The most significant change you'll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we've moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we'd run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won't see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).
The completely unnecessary archive tab has been removed (finally – it showed exactly the same tweets that are listed on the personal profile page), some more Ajax is supposed to speed up page loading and the customizable design editor has evolved, featuring a couple of standard templates. The “fave” and “archive” icons have not disappeared completely, but they only become visible now when the mouse pointer hovers a tweet.
Like most power tweeters, I don't care much about those things – I don't know a single heavy user who is actually using the web interface, so the look of the skin is not really a big topic here. There's a large number of clients (from iPhone to Linux) available, and brilliant little pieces of software like Twhirl make twittering a lot more fun. I'm really curious about the new features, and I'm pretty sure the next release will not just be cosmetic one.
btw: Friendfeed bought some new clothes as well.
twhirl: sometimes twitter needs a break
The really annoying thing about the otherwise gorgeous thwirl client is its inability to pause the live-feed: on my windows mobile pda I use tiny twitter.
The client updates my contact feed every 5 minutes – but it does not auto-scroll, which means that when I start reading again I start exactly where I left off, scrolling through all the new tweets.
I really miss this option on twhirl: in my opinion, one of twitter's key-strength is the overview-factor… but with twhirl, I allways have to scroll back. New tweets are marked with an asterisk, but still I miss my “pause”-button…