Social Networking Archive

Let’s start this journey by taking a ride back in time. Some of you are too young to remember the Internet of the early 90s. Back then one of the most popular ways to get “online” was to use AOL. This was the popular online service that came via disks you received in the mail. Prodigy and Compuserve were on their way out and this new service AOL was the darling of the time. I went to college in a small town in upstate New York which had no local number for AOL. I had to call to Albany to access AOL. And boy did I access AOL. One of my first months I received a phone bill for over $500 in long-distance charges (where was Vonage back then?!?) and that didn’t even include the AOL access fees. I still use the same username on AOL today that I originally registered way back then.

AOL was exciting – you could read news, send and receive email, play games, IM chat with friends, go into chat rooms based around topics, search for content, listen to music, send eCards, customize the home page to suit your preferences and a variety of other online tasks. In later versions of the AOL desktop, a Web browser was included and other “partners” were added to allow for additional content and, what I will call, applications.

It sure does seem that the more we try to move the Internet forward, the more things seem to copy the old. So with that said, allow me to introduce you to the next version of AOL… AOL 2.0… otherwise known as Facebook.

Read the rest of this entry »

TweetMeme, the service built completely on top of Twitter, has been down for over half a day as of the time of this posting. I first noticed that the service was having issues midday Tuesday when the little “retweet” button wasn’t being displayed on our stories. I noticed the button was also missing on Mashable. Luckily the button degrades very nicely so except for a bunch of beeps that it can’t find the server, the pages still loads just fine.

TweetMeme creator Nick Halstead posted several messages on Twitter – the last one coming 12 hours ago. He has three posts related to the outage:

• we are having a problem with our DNS for TweetMeme – we are trying to get it fixed ASAP
• .@Fasthosts your going to have some SERIOUS bad press soon unless you sort out problems out
• anyone know people at internic? we need help with a DNS issue ASAP

Twitter users are also posting about the TweetMeme outage. Apparently there is a full TweetMeme site that shows off the most popular stories based on who clicks the button the most. While the API didn’t load yesterday, for most of the day the main site did load as I noticed a couple of tech blogs up on the home page. As of the time of this posting, the main site was unaccessible as well. It appears that the main TweetMeme twitter account is working although the stream seems slow.

TweetMeme was in the news last week with the launch of “retweetable ads”.

You might use this down time to start to plan your Black Friday shopping. I wonder if this is affecting traffic to the Twitter-heavy blogs.

Update 10AM Eastern: The TweetMeme site is back – it appears you can now find all of the techcrunch and mashable stories on their home page once again.

After my post last week about where Friendfeed might be headed and after several other blogs made posts, Friendfeed founder Paul Bucheit has responded today with a very short note on Friendfeed about the status of Friendfeed.

You can join the discussion here and Paul noted, “First, FriendFeed is _not_ going away. (in fact, we’re working on switching it to new servers) Second, I know everyone wants to know what the team is working on, but we don’t pre-announce things, so for now all I can say is that there’s good stuff on the way. Re:”

I am glad to learn that they are moving to new severs – hopefully the service will be back to pre-acquisition speeds. Paul tells me in the thread that the slowness is due to growth of the userbase and the data storage.

I am also glad to learn that the service will not be disappearing. Johnny Worthington wrote a good letter to the Friendfeed team today.

While we don’t know what will eventually happen with FF, it would be smart for Facebook to keep it running smoothly as it’s a great way to introduce new Facebook features to the early adopters that live in Friendfeed.

Update: Many on the FF thread have been asking about the platform and whether development will continue. Paul responded with the following, “Jim, there may be a few new things, but as I said, the team is mainly working on fb platform and openness, so it’s unlikely that there will be any big new features of ff (except maybe one that I’ve been thinking about for a while…). – Paul Buchheit”

When you ride the subway, have you ever thought, “boy I’d like to get her on my Twitter”. Or what about, “his tush belongs on my Facebook”. Perhaps, “She would be a great friend for my feed”. But the problem is that it’s hard to go up to someone and tell them about your interests and desires on a train.

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

If you aren’t from the south, you may not have ever experienced eating at Chick-fil-A. The chain is well known for their chicken sandwiches and their usage of a cow as the company mascot. I prefer the chicken nuggets and lemonade to the chicken sandwich but do enjoy their “cow usage”.

Over the past few days, many of the coupon forums and sites have listed a promotion for a free Chick-fil-A 2010 calendar. It’s on Spoofee (deleted), Fatwallet (deleted), Coupon Saving Game and over 120 comments on SlickDeals. The calendar promotion is also listed on moms sites including KnoxMoms. There’s just one problem…the promotion is fake – was sent by someone outside Chick-fil-A.

When you click on the link to order the calendar, you are greeted with the image below and the following text, “Incorrect information has been circulating on the internet regarding the 2010 Chick-fil-A® Cow Calendar.  Chick-fil-A is not authorized to distribute free calendars nor to register those who log on to www.shopchick-fil-a.com.  Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.”

While Chick-fil-A had nothing to do with the fake promotion, they lost an amazing opportunity to turn a negative experience into an amazing moo-ving experience. From my perspective, the message they provided above was fine – it’s the truth. But why not offer the users something? A simple coupon off their next purchase or a free ice-dream with a combo…something! At an absolute minimum, offer the customer an option to signup for future (real) offers and savings. I can only imagine the influx of traffic that the calendar webpage received over the past 24 hours – and instead of capturing and getting more customers in the store, they let the deal hunter go away empty-handed.

Chick-fil-A does such a great job normally with promotions and coupons. Their coupons never expire and you can use them anytime.

The reason I am sharing this story is because it could happen to you and your startup one day. Make sure you never let a potential customer, and more importantly a spokesperson for your company, walk away with nothing.

It’s not too late Chick-fil-A…the links will be out there forever so offer something to the customers and create a positive social media and customer experience.

Outsourced government email delivery services firm GovDelivery has announced the acquisition of social networking provider GovLoop today. GovLoop currently has 20,000 members according to a comment by Steve Ressler, CEO and co-founder of GovLoop. GovLoop launched in May 2008. Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Carolyn Duffy Marsan at NetworkWorld has an in-depth post about the acquisition. Carolyn notes that GovDelivery is often referred to as “Facebook for Feds” and that the founders of both services met at Government 2.0 Camp back in March.

From the announcement, “GovDelivery’s reach has grown exponentially in the past two years. Currently, between 10,000 and 100,000 new people signup to receive updates to government information each day via the GovDelivery platform.” It looks like the two companies were made to work together as the email delivery can point recipients to the social networking platform. The companies believe that together they can help spread social media throughout the U.S. government.

Gautham Nagesh from NextGov notes that GovLoop was a pet project for Ressler.

This morning I met with NY-based Producteev CEO Ilan Abehassera and our video interview is below. Last week Producteev launched a variety of new features around social group task management. What makes Producteev unique is that it allows you to send tasks from nearly any social app and receive notifications via the same social app. For example, if you need to setup a task, you can send a direct message from Twitter, a chat message from Gtalk or submit the task via email. Your colleagues are notified via Producteev on the services they are using.

Another interesting feature of Producteev is the ability to collect responses to a question using any of the social services. You post your question or need on Producteev and then push it out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and your followers/friends can click a link and leave a comment on your task or question. This feature is called “crowdsource your tasks”. The best part about this feature is that the responses are grouped together and removes the need to gather responses on each individual network.
Read the rest of this entry »