No matter what we do online, we can’t do it all ourselves, one of the most important aspects to all this lark is marketing, promotion, getting noticed.

On twitter the popular #FF or #followfriday hashtag has always been a great way to give some of your followers some extra exposure, hopefully helping them gain more followers, this was a trend that users started, not twitter.

The trend picked up fast, with everyone making #ff recommendations every Friday. (not surprisingly!)

Yet…

I think it’s becoming very redundant nowadays seeing we have list options, list you create for any reason you want, one of mine is simply called, “not ignorant”… and the main reason is the fact to make the most from twitter you need engagement, interaction.

Else you are shouting, they are shouting.

Instead of #FF tweets filling up my stream, I have started to point to the list of  ”not ignorant” people who if you follow them will engage with you, but you must also put in some effort.

Instead of seeing my stream filled up with tweets that are just a bunch of usernames and #FF, and there are more than a few from the same people, seeing as the limit on twitter only allows you to show a few people in any tweet, I’d waould rather see people create a #FF list, then just share that link, nice and tidy, only needs doing once too.

Even using a bit.ly link so you get stats on how iften your folowers will check the list out, if they don’t do it much, drop the whole #FF idea because they clearly don’t want to see it.

If on the other hand you find people do click them, you will annoy them less by posting less tweets with a bunch of usernames.

I know several of my followers have said they dislike #FF and that is one reason you don’t see me doing it anymore, I’d rather just point them to the “not ignorant” list.

Should we start a better movement like this?

How do you feel about it?

… in my back yard, but you are always welcome to comment! )

Comments, the community around any blog is built there, nurtured there and in some cases censored too.
Those that seem to censor the comments, there are a few, also say transparency is important to them… yeah right!

Anyway, reading feeds in Greader I am missing out on some great communities in the blogs comments, far to easy to just read the feed and move onto another…

While it’s ok to keep the noise level down to a manageable one it’s a shame to miss out on the communities on the blogosphere and the great characters within them.

You don’t need to join a cult though.

For this reason I am starting to choose the RSS feeds to read in the reader and visiting the blogs I feel have good comments and a good community to them, like one puts it… why your comment section should be like a forum

People need people.

That’s the bottom line, sitting here all day typing shit and doing this that and the other can get pretty boring and at times lonely, may sound odd with the millions within reach…but it happens.
People need people to have any sense of connection in the world…
Being deaf I know what a great thing it is to be able to do, if you can’t use a phone this is the phone!

If you have a blog do what James does and interact well with the commenters, after all, it’s your blog! )
If you’re like me and naturally social online then it shouldn’t be hard.

I’d swap all my almost 2000 twitter followers for a regular 100 commenter’s on a blog any day of the week.

What about you?

Over the last 7 or 8 years since getting online there has been some massive changes everywhere, things evolve at a rapid rate unlike anything we have seen before, which makes me think these “predictions” people have posted are really shooting in the dark.

Hence I don’t think I’ll be even trying to predict anything!

The biggest thing for me over the last ten years is the way the media as a whole has changed, the power of breaking news is in the hands of the people instead of the big news corps, we saw it clearly with twitter and Iran, twitter and Mumbai.

Don’t think the establishment and the big news corps like that much! )

Not a prediction but that’s only going to continue, more power into more hands with the rapid rise of mobile technology…remember they said mobile phones would never catch on!

We are the proles!  (1984)

I’ve been a bit off with a cold the last week or so, although having stayed in the loop I think it’s been an interesting week or so with several things happening that caught my eye, mainly though was the stupid changes with privacy on Facebook, we should all call it faceache, that’s certainly what it gives us.

No doubt millions of eyebrows went up when they realised what had happened.

I wasn’t going to post about it, mainly because I shared several good links on my own facebook page for others to read, some missed it though, and some readers on here don’t see my facebook page.

Then I realised I already shared what they should have done, they already had/have the right solution… they ignore what’s right under their noses, I’ll explain that in a minute…

On the week where that nasty scum who abused kids in a nursery then sent pics to perverts met VIA facebook I found this move very very distasteful, in fact facebook LOST trust, that trust they built up over the last few years dropped overnight.

Jason Calacanis asked a pretty strightfowrd question with…  Is Facebook being unethical, clueless or unlucky?

Before you go rushing to read that, my thoughts…

I think I tend to fall into the unethical argument, I felt it was a very sly move dressed with spin, IE they say one thing while it’s actually the opposite, they say it was to give more control over privacy yet they changed it without saying so, if you think the pop up box give us a say… you will find it was already changed, they are banking on ignorance.

If it was two days between your last signing in and getting that pop up box it means your profile and it’s contents were available to the search engines for those two days, enough for it all to be indexed!

In real terms facebook has been built on privacy, sharing with chosen people, family, friends co workers etc.

Most of the users are parents, family members, aunts, uncles, etc and don’t mix much with “everyone” online.

Facebook’s betrayal of your trust is immense… and they did it to several hundred million people!

It’s like you invite your family, friends round to your home, then share your latest holiday snaps with them, after they leave and you go to bed, facebook come into your home and took the photo album outside and put it onto a magazine rack outside your  front door, that’s the sight which greets you in the morning when you go to get your pint of milk from the doorstep!

A bunch of strangers and a possible pervert stood there rifling through your photos!

How would that make anyone feel?

As someone said.. they are the foxes guarding the hens!

They are indeed preying on peoples ignorance, how many of the 350 million people got confused and did nothing about it?
How many of them millions don’t even realised what’s been done?

Even if it was only a paltry 5%, that’s a HUGE number of people.

So, why did they do all this really?

Traffic, and money, NO other reason, they wanted profiles to be indexed by search engines which would create traffic, traffic they would like to monetise because they are useless at monetising in reality, how can anyone with 350 million users struggle to monetise it??

They have had crappy apps do better at monetising then them on their own site!

Yet, it’s a dilemma, they created a closed walled garden which was the main reason for that huge growth in the first place, now they realise it is also a hindrance to their own monetisation plans, so they tried to slyly trick us into it think it wouldn’t kick up a stink, daft move!

So, what should they have done?

Lets look at this from their point for a second, they wanted this purely so they could expand their reach using search engines and also as a way to battle twitter, which is in my view could have happened IF they got it right.

The already have the twitter rival in Lite.

Let me explain, when I first saw lite, my immediate reaction was to think, “wow, well, if they let us have both lite and normal facebook, yet seperate them completely they could probably dent twitter in a huge way”.

Not only that, a rival with an already bigger userbase than twitter! 350 million!

At the moment, every facebook user has a lite version, there is an option to make lite default but it’s just that, a smaller neater version of the facebook we already use.

What’s stopping them from keeping lite as a standalone platform with slight differences than the normal facebook set up?

Nothing! Less excuse now when they already have the great friendfeed team on board who know a thing or two about all this stuff.  It’s all in place already!

Here’s how I would set it up…

Don’t copy twitter, beat them at their own game.

Keep the main facebook is it is, have the settings so we do have complete privacy control and we decide in total what gets shared and with whom, keep the friend limit as it is or lower, 5000 is too many anyway IMO.

Have lite set up with no friend limit and have it default as open, but let people have the option to deactivate it completely, if they don’t want to use lite, let them choose to not use it.

Have the option to import all friends on your main facebook who use lite into your lite friend list, have the option to use the lists feature like we can on the main facebook and the option to have one list set to private… this could be the friends from your main facebook set up.

Have the option to cross post from lite to the main facebook but not the other way round.

Make lite work in real time like friendfeed does, use facebooks own fb.url shortner on lite and give us the metrics to use and work with so we can improve our lite experience as we go along.

Make lite a great addition to facebook not a small alternative.

That’s what I would do. What do you think?

P.s If facebook use this, a beer or two would be nice as a thanks Mr Zuckerburg!

…. wtf am I doing??

Then you gotta start to change things

Yeah I ask myself that at times!

A few lies here and there from others start to make me question things, well yeah I have “moaned” (in their perception) about friendfeed, facebook twitter etc over the weeks and I am not the only one to do so, the thing these liars miss is they prove the point by doing the very thing I supposedly “moaned” and “attacking” people..wtf?

Listen up you that lie about me, spread crap, I have never “attacked” anyone on these sites.. show me where I have… take your own advice and back ya shit up.. ie, man up or shut it.

Let me get this straight once and for all.

The ONE and ONLY reason I have written complaint post on here is because I CARE about it, I USE the places. I contribute, so want the experience to be as good as possible.. who doesn’t??

If I never cared, I wouldn’t say anything about it, I’d let you get on with it and say jack shit!
I care… so if I feel a point should be made which may improve the overall experience for everyone, I will make it… and I don’t expect to be attacked for it.

So.

YOU that attacked me and told lies are hypocrites, by attacking me and others in the very threads started about the post made complaining about it, not only mine, others too. THAT makes YOU the stupid one.

I like these sites but doesn’t mean I can’t also state my opinions on them on my own blog… be they good or bad, if you are looking for 100% positive fluff, look elsewhere, life simply isn’t like that.

I can’t believe the idiots and they are in the minority, and yes they are a bit of a different “mob” to the worse places, but they are still idiots. I’d rather not bother with them, but when they attack you personally with lies… you gotta say something.

If any other these post, threads whatever improve the place isn’t that a good thing?

It seems twitter and facebook are having some issues lately, of different sorts, problems that I’d have thought would have shown themselves to be obvious to them long before now, problems they could have then avoided by acting on what should have looked so obvious.

You would have thought with all the data they already had, IE …  before the massive growth both experienced due to free publicity, it would show them what looks to be an obvious weakness or potential problem further down the growth path.

The other thing which I think is an issue, one that should be a priority is the lack of trust and appreciation to the users themselves, after all these social sites are user driven.

The users can “police the place” in a more effective way at times than the owners themselves leaving the owners to deal with improving the user experience, the most important aspect they deal with. (friendfeed get it spot on). this is beneficial to both parties after all. The users want a better experience.

I write this as a user, from my own experience with the sites, not based on others opinions … my own experiences, and I do jump in. ;o) I will write about facebook in the next post … so …

“Twitter twoubles?”

Twitter has been suspending accounts by mistake recently while dealing with spammers, those who auto-follow using crap and follow trains, bots. There was a warning from twitter that they would deal with this sort of thing a couple of weeks back, how they were looking at the way people were using twitter.

It’s spammers, bad thoughtless marketers and porn floggers who only care about big numbers, it’s usually one or all of these that ruin things, just as we are now seeing here.

While I still have my account thankfully I have seen the rate the spammers and auto follow bots do this stuff, I have been blocking them daily for a few weeks so hopefully it’s something twitter will continue to deal with, not sure they will ever win that though!

To be honest the stupidest group is those who thought it a good idea to “jump on the bandwagon” with crap like the “get 400 folllowers a day” while not normally that kind of general twitter user, maybe this is what happened with some of these that were so called “accidentally suspended” or “legit users” to other users.
IE…
Twitter targeted them all, so those who thought….”well it won’t do any harm, it’s a one off” were effected, if so, tough, hopefully they think about it next time, plenty of us ranted against it long before this happened, so twitter are not really at fault, them users are.

The hashtag (#) is another thing they will always need to keep an eye on as it is used to get into the “trending topics” list on the home page, it’s not hard to do as users of a forum have proved, just as they have done with google bombing, using anchor links over the years (it’s not new) … what are hashtags again? Anchor links!?

Twitter also I think need to work with link shrinker’s and twitter app developers a bit more closely to jointly deal with any issues. Having a twitter only link shrinker with scanning process would get rid of the threat of viruses and worse which they have experienced a while back.

To have every single link converting into this twitter only shrinker would make a massive difference and could help with stats, both for twitter and the users which improves it all.

Working closer with those app creators who use the twitter API would only lead to improving the overall experience for the users rather than squabbling over the word “tweet” being used with the creators etc, and doing updates and more without working with the app developers to keep the experience hassle free for the users themselves.

Let’s not forget though, we as users should also play our part in keeping it to our liking, taking responsibly for how we use it, report the porn spammers and crap, play our role in using it how we want it to be used help the app developers improve the experience etc.

What about you? How do you feel as a user of twitter?

… blogging.

Lets get this straight …

Twitter will die long before blogging does, the fact it’s treated like a “popularity” contest with the auto-follow bots, crap follow trains (where you can “gain” 400, 500 or whatever number it is), lame competitions, and other sly abuses makes it worth less now for the user.

I am continually blocking some porn spammer or other spammy crap, I look at their twitter and they have one “tweet” and they follow 500 people, and have no followers, or they follow none and have 500 odd followers, not hard to see what crap they use!

I would rather have 100 followers with reach than 2000 with none, it’s not all a numbers game you know, I don’t really get better results traffic wise now I have more than 2000 followers then I did when I had 1000, there could be many reasons for it, but the more followers you have only means that, you have more followers. Not all followers are equal, just as not all traffic is equal.

People are vainly trying to get the twittering celebrities attention in order to get some response, saying that it will “make their day plus get me more followers”

I don’t give a flying shit about the fact some like A Kuchter has 2 million, and if he tweets to you you will gain tons of followers, who cares?

Meaningless …

The other thing is twitter is 100% usable without going to twitter, how do twitter monetise their “webspace” when everyone is using something else to post to it?
Ads on the main twitter “home” page would be useless in that respect, plus who would really take notice of them?

Much like any social site, if you get banned and your account is deleted, that’s it, you lose!
You have lost whatever you post to them, much like a few years ago with forums and people losing great content because they get banned.

Blogs are ours, I own this, noone can “ban me” from writing here, or delete this except me, or my host, and even then it’s possible to back up a copy of it all so you don’t lose it.

I am surprised at seeing someone say they get 90% of their business from twitter, they say that it’s usually new orders, ie not much repeat orders, they even say it would be devastating to get banned from there, wtf are you doing relying on twitter?

It’s good you get the work from there, if you do, not so good that you have to be there to get it and if you lose it you lose nearly all you incoming work.
If you have a blog you have a central for them to come to you.

Twitter will not outlast blogging!

Do you agree?

Any idiot can join and it looks like they do just that, with all the publicity it has had online and offline it now seems to be attracting the spammers, porn phone spammers and trolls, racist, ignorance and narrow minded arseholes like pigs to shit!

They don’t all last long most of the time thankfully, but do the best they can to get the attention they want, need, crave, while they can.

The trolls of old used to do the same things on forums etc, after being banned they would rejoin under another username, even create a few accounts to start an argument from both sides, usually they get caught out and banned but what a waste of time for everyone involved.

Now they are on twitter, doing the same things and yet still to stupid to do it for more than ten mins, pretty much how long it takes to get flamed and blocked. While it’s not hard to spot these dickheads, it’s not always obvious from the start as they usually start off seemingly ok, at least two tweets worth, then they simply can’t help themselves, they insult someone and get a reaction.

Starting to use the block far more on twitter than I have before as there really are some idiots on that site. If you meet one, don’t answer them, just block them. If possible report them too.

We don’t need these idiots anywhere and the power is in your hands to block them, so use that power and BLOCK them.
These are the sort you wouldn’t invite to a party you were holding, so don’t let them into your social space either.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd4WZ3LqCKw]

Having been ill, I have not posted for over a week, not easy trying to write something worth posting when you have the flu, not something I am too pleased about although just to look at it positively I got busy in other ways to take my mind off the sickness including trying something new, namely tumblr, which is a neat little blogging style platform anyone could use, which I will post about another time. ;o)

The main thing these last ten days being stuck indoors missing out on the nice weather (I did grab a few quick pics though) is that with the added lack of sleep, it gave me plenty of time being “social” online. Nothing new to me being social but I got the chance to look at things on a deeper level in several ways, with stats on traffic, the quality of that traffic and the general feel of being social on these sites, the community feel etc. I found a few surprises for myself and learnt a few things I would never have had otherwise.

Facebook for me has always been to connect to the people I genuinely know offline, old friends and people who live near me etc, as it is with most people, after all it’s what the original intention was with facebook. There has been some cracking pictures popping up of us in our schooldays and surprisingly from old school friends I never expected to hear from again. This is the beauty of facebook for me, it’s memory lane and I get the impression from my friend there it’s like that for them too.

So facebook I am still in two minds about, I won’t stop using it as I love the fact I can socialise with old friends living elsewhere and local people I see anyway offline. I don’t use it like some use it for business or other, using it the way they use other sites by which I mean connecting to anyone and everyone, as happens with myspace and having more followers regardless of what they are like is seen as being “better” than having fewer.

That could change with the friends list function now added as I could create a new list for the friends I know online from other social sites and see how that plays out. I am always one to try, test things for myself and see what happens. The one thing people have to get away from is taking what others say as being “gospel” or “the right way” and test things for themselves.

It’s the “marketers” I never really wanted to add to my facebook list as I know what will happen as it does elsewhere…they game it and non stop promote whatever they are promoting at that time. In one sense they ruin it. I had enough of that in the forums thanks. )

The recent (stolen?!) changes to facebook have made it far more interactive although it can still be improved in some ways, which it probably will over time. One missing thing is the real time updating which would stop us having to click “home” to refresh the page…even then the one problem is everything is buried way down the page which means people will miss things added to that item, over time it gets worse.

For example I post a link, two or three people comment on it within minutes and it’s getting eyeballs…it soon dies down and gets buried and weeks later I comment on it again, then the notifications show up on only those two or three that commented on it originally, they will be the ONLY ones to see it, everyone else misses it as they will should any of those two or three comment on it again. A flaw there.

One other thing is when some app has been used by a friend, ie a “quiz” they will often do another one while on the app page, I then decide to “hide” the “quiz” when their post shows in my stream, great, except they did another and that shows and I have to hide each one, then someone else does a quiz and it happens again, it really should have been “hide all quiz’s” rather than just that one.

Overall I feel I am still testing facebook out for what else I can do with it other than connect to real friends but also feel these changes were a huge step in the right direction. The fact that facebook has doubled it’s user base in less than a year from 100 million to 200 million is astonishing. Just beware of what you post there, assume the world IS watching…with tagging on pictures etc you can easily have something seen by someone you would rather not see it.

Twitter, although still so simple it’s now so frustrating and so… dying! Before you twitter fans bash me hear me out…I have been using it since march 2007, so a fair while and long enough to have seen the changes, of how it’s used and also the people who use it, without stereotyping anyone to insult or otherwise, it has changed whether we like it or not just due to those who use it.

Not so long ago it was such a diverse range of tweets going through the stream sharing great stuff and with a great community feel to it…but with the recent worm issues I am loathe to check out any link on there now. The lack of security on there means it will be a target for spammers and idiots.

The recent celebrity twitter craze due to the mass media coverage twitter has had, (priceless coverage too, triggered by celebs no less!) had quite an effect both good and bad in my view. It’s great when you think how it’s connected the celebs to their fans in a way there has never been before, and as often as the celebs chooses to be connected, whenever and wherever they are.

The bad side of that is the fact there is now so much “celeb stalking” going on which has lead to some people ignoring almost every other tweet on twitter, I have unfollowed people due to every single tweet they make being to a celeb…not what they did when I first followed them so there is no need to follow them anymore and it is getting worse with even more celebs getting on twitter.

Like I say it’s great they are on there but they will for the most part due to sheer numbers never see your tweet buried among the thousands, so if you are a celeb follower, don’t forget to connect to others you follow else you end up losing more followers. With twitter it seems everyone say’s it’s a numbers game, so I am sure you don’t want to lose your followers. ;o)

For me, I am happy to follow most on twitter giving anyone a chance to be in my stream but if you tweet crap, spam, etc I will unfollow you as I don’t care for that really, whether you follow me or not, don’t assume I have to follow you just because you follow me as I decide that. Yes I do follow a few celebs on there too, just those who DO interact and use it well.

I am getting away from posting on the twitter website itself as I see the damn fail whale (over capacity) page more than not! Another problem due to it’s sudden rise in popularity. Along with the all to often small problems twitter seems to have like the missing tweets etc. I don’t feel I am using my time well ON twitter, I feel it’s better spent elsewhere where I can also post to twitter with ease. (tumblr as mentioned at the start allows this)

Twitter for me is on it’s way out due to it’s limited use and functionality. It needs more than it has to be really useful and beneficial. Only time will tell us if this changes in a way it matters, I see they are adding search etc but it’s still so little.

I am a little dissapointed to see the problems they have had over the last week or so but then I think they could have even dealt with them problems better than they did, the worm was never even noticed by twitter for a while, if it was they never mentioned it for about
12 hours, it was those ON twitter who spread the message that it was infecting twitter users. THAT to me is lame.

I am using twitter less and less now due to it all, although I will still use it because I have made some friends on there, I will just use the actual twtter website itself less and less as other places allow me to do that and gain so much more at the same time.

Friendfeed on the other hand looks to be the real gem of the three here in many ways, for me that is, no idea what would it would be for you…but from my time there it seems to be the one that the others want to be. The place is simply head and shoulders above twitter and facebook are almost stalking friendfeed as a lab! (which should say alot)

Facebooks recent changes were taken (stolen?!) from friendfeed as I have mentioned in an earlier post, written around the time of the facebook changes themselves. Friendfeed has recently rolled out a new look in beta which I have to say I much prefer to the old style and smartly they did it after facebook made their (stolen?!) changes. ;o)

The biggest benefit to me is the fact it is more interactive with more commenting going on than it seemed before and it’s the commenting that matters to me, as that is the interaction going on. It’s easy to sit there and just “like” everything to build up your likes count…quite another thing to be commenting on everything.

There IS a tendency for some of the known names to shout out when possible how much they have “liked” things, as if that makes them some sort of “better user” than others, this is now leading to others “liking” everything just to get their own count up, sadly…while it also in a way does have some form of bookmarking and searching benefit I feel it has alot less merit than the amount of comments made.

It’s comments and post that show you are interacting there and being social, not likes alone. Don’t get me wrong the community there is superb, way better than the feel on twitter, facebook is different for me just due to them being the community I live with offline.

Friendfeed users share some great stuff and I often see things first there rather than anywhere else due to the sheer range of different style feeds that it allows to come in, even if it originates from twitter I will more likely see the tweet in friendfeed.

It is almost becoming my RSS reader in one sense, although I still use google reader to read feeds, I tend to scan more nowadays with so much crap posted it gets harder to filter out the good stuff, whereas on friendfeed the good stuff I often read in my RSS reader is already shared and liked by others who may also subscribe to the same RSS feeds as me…so I can filter them on friendfeed easier using the search with set criteria of number of likes or comments.

Another great thing is the ease in which you find other interesting people to subscribe to, as they make comments and like on other peoples things I would never see otherwise I can check how they interact on here and make a quick choice.

Because of this this your experience on friendfeed is better quality than it is on say twitter, as on twitter you have to follow someone to get a feel of how they tweet and then every so often “clean up” your following list to trim the people you don’t rate worthy enough to follow. You are constantly following and unfollowing to refine your twitter experience while still trying to gain followers overall.

Twitter IS a popularity contest in that sense. You want more followers, just as I do of course because it does matter in the sense of reach.

On Friendfeed it doesn’t.

Quality over quantity for everyone on friendfeed. Less is more as they say. I subscribe to more people on frienfeed than people subscribe to me and that’s great as I get the stream I want. I am not fussed if they don’t subscribe to me, if I want them to subscribe to me I need to be worthy of being subscribed to, but it’s not that important as it doesn’t take away from your experience of friendfeeds great community or the great things you will see shared and posted.

Friendfeed is still in beta and knowing how the team of just 11 people who run it have interacted with us there regarding the feedback etc I won’t be surprised to see things improve before they roll it out of beta…a lesson the twitter owners could have done with taking notice of.

The friendfeed team consist of a few ex google workers who while there worked on the Google mail or gmail as it’s known so I feel we are not seeing the best of it just yet. If things carry on the way they are going it’s going to be a good ride.

For me friendfeed is really turning out to be a great little place that has so much usefulness as well as some great users who make the place what it really is, a great community.

How about you and your social activity?