Social Media

Back at the time of it’s inception, gather.com was one of the premier websites for writers to showcase their work and abilities – and snag a few rewards for doing so.  As time rolled on they remained the same and added an element of “newsiness” to their site by incorporating the Gather Essentials (major categories for posts – Money, News, Politics, Food, A&E, Movies, etc.)  In recent times, it seems that gather has moved away from any sort of creative or writers showcase and has become in their words “the premier social networking website for the 35+ crowd”.  Now that the social networking giant FaceBook has all but snagged every last bit of that crowd and allowed them to socially network in a popular and much easier way than was available on gather, it seems that gather is somewhat lost yet again.

I will give credit to gather for [click to continue...]

A growing trend amongst the increasing amount of social media adopters is to take advantage of integration tools which cross-network certain social networks and social media applications.  As more internet users (namely those from FaceBook) adopt twitter, they are making an attempt to kill two birds with one stone by porting their twitter updates to FaceBook.  It is my position that those who use social media in this way to not have an accurate understanding of the services that they are using.

Whether intentionally or not it seems the the prompts for updates are somewhat reversed based upon current usage of the services.  Twitter begs of users “What are you doing right now?” where as FaceBook kindly wonders “What’s on your mind?”  More often than not users are more apt to tweet what is on their mind in the form of [click to continue...]

Writing/Knowledge

Wikipedia – also known as the brain of the internet, contains information about almost any topic, person, or event worth knowing about.  The amazing thing is that it is completely written, edited, revised, and moderated by the public.

HubPages -  At HubPages users can create single web-pages (hubs) about any topic.  Users are compensate with a percentage of advertising revenues.

Squidoo – Squidoo works much the same way that HubPages does, except they prefer to call their pages “lenses”.  Squidoo also compensates users for contributions.

Knol – Knol is google’s attempt at building a sort of hybrid between WikiPedia, HubPages, and Squidoo.  Knol encourages experts in their field (i.e. PhD and other credentials) to write and share about topics relating to their fields of work.  However, Knol is not exclusive and does [click to continue...]

Numbers are a difficult thing to ignore.  In any social situation, it is generally understood that quantity prevails.  Many have bought into this idea on the microblogging service Twitter, and have lusted after large amounts of followers to the point of paying for a report about how one user managed 19,000 followers in 30-days.  While many people are placing stock in the number of followers they have ammassed on the emergent and just-about-mainstream social network Twitter, they are missing out on Twitter’s most valuable asset.

Twitter’s search feature is buy far Twitter’s most valuable asset, and could possibly be the internet’s most [click to continue...]

…and no, this does not mean they want the cliche MySpace user’s nudie pics plastered everywhere.

Social network dominator FaceBook has always had fairly flexible privace controls.  Today, the decided to loosen them up a bit more.  Previously, users were mostly restricted to sharing things withing their current networks and with their friends.  Other personal information like phone numbers and email addresses was subject to network or friend customization depending on what they user wanted.

Today, the FB released the option for users to make their profile and information available to anyone and everyone who wants to see [click to continue...]

Seth Godin’s startup Squidoo.com is not just another revenue sharing content website.  They allow their writers to donate all or a percentage of their lens earnings to charity.  Squidoo has also turned out a few charitable campaigns on quite a large scale, one via Twitter.   The basic concept let users choose a charity from a list and tweet a link with a special hashtag.  Squidoo donated $2 for each tweet.  The concept worked beautifully, and $80,000 was given away via voting on Twitter.

Yesterday, Tim Ferriss decided to take to turn Twitter charitable again.  Tim’s Tweet to Beat campaign aims to benifit public school students in the United States by bribing people to follow him on twitter for $3 each. [click to continue...]

Instinctively, my answer is no.

The growing popularity and virility of Twitter has confirmed my answer.  While personal interaction with content and medieval forms of social media have existed since the early days of the internet, it was the debut of networks like Blogger, Xanga, and MySpace that fueled the social media revolution.  These networks allowed users to have their own space on the internet.  They provided a platform for people to show themselves off to the entire universe.  Given such a large audience, it is no wonder why everyone has the desire to be widely known and recognized.  This drove many to add hundereds and thousands of [click to continue...]

12Seconds.tv is not anything new to anyone who even remotely follows technology, social media, and applications.  12seconds.tv is basically a twitter for videos.  Videos posted by users are only 12 seconds long (hence the name) and are shared to all friends and followers.

12seconds success to date has been decent.  Their current Alexa ranking is much higher (worse) than most other social networkinga and media websites.  12seconds rates about a 100,000 on the Alexa scale, finding itself outranked by many blogs, and some relatively undeveloped websites.  With Twitter number 360, 12seconds.tv has some serious ground to make up.  Alexa ranking doesn’t mean everything though, but there really is not much else to highlight about the website.  Sure, it was a creative idea and has had some success, but llacks the main feature of pracitcality and simple lifestyle integration. [click to continue...]

This post was made by fellow blogger Dot Com Dud, you can check out his Twitter profile @dotcomdud.

While you’ve no doubt heard of blogging platforms such as WordPress, you may not know about Twitter which is a little different because it’s a micro-blogging platform. What is micro-blogging exactly? The best way to answer this is to learn how Twitter works. By allowing it’s users to blog messages no longer than 140 characters, Twitter users can provide as many of these updates, or “tweets” as they are commonly known, to be read by anyone who follows them. You can choose whose tweets you want to follow and others will choose to follow your tweets too, especially if you keep your updates interesting. [click to continue...]