Social Networking Archive

By now I am sure everyone has heard of the cash for clunkers (official name CARS - car allowance rebate system) program run by the U.S. government. It’s a $3 billion dollar bailout program for the auto industry paid for by tax dollars. If you are new to the program, here’s how it works. If you have a car that’s considered a clunker, you can get up to a $4,500 bottom line discount on any new car.

In my new role I see a lot of websites that are clunkers. Many of the sites haven’t been touched in a decade, are broken, are out-of-date, missing any current functionality or aren’t indexed in Google. How many dollars of revenue are these businesses losing out on because their website is a clunker?

I am not even talking about any sort of social networking or social media optimization. Just simple updates so that the sites are usable and, more importantly, findable. By investing in creating better small business websites, the local economy will benefit which in turn will provide more jobs and strengthen local businesses for the long term. Some of the concept overlaps with Robert Scoble’s 2010 web concept.

With that I’d like to introduce the concept of the “Cash for Clunkers Website Edition”. I’ve posted my initial thoughts on the concept and program in my Information Week column. Have a look at the concept and let me know your thoughts!

London-based Alterian has announced that the acquisition of NY-based Techrigy. Techrigy describes their service as, “providing visibility into social media for anyone managing brands and reputations online, SM2 combines a massive data warehouse of online conversations with state of the art search, analysis and reporting tools.” Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Alterian reported a 73% increase in revenue for the last fiscal year. Here’s an interesting tactic…to get Alterian’s current customers to test out the Techrigy service, they are offering a free trial which can then be converted into a premium account should the customer wish to continue use.

David Eldridge, Chief Executive Officer of Alterian said, “By combining Alterian’s platform with Techrigy’s SM2 technology, marketers now have a complete, easy and practical solution to understand the complete view of their customers and take action to use this to build brand equity and generate opportunity.”

As social media reporting becomes more important for companies, we will see more acquisitions in this space by larger agencies wanting to provide the tools for their clients in-house.

One of the most interesting parts about the “real time Web” is just how much we all miss when we step away. I mean I know today I missed Jenny telling me about her manicure mixup, Bob telling me about how much he loves his new iPhone 3gS and I may have missed Louis’ kids racing. So how do you make sure that your item appears inside the feed as often as possible so the maximum number of users see the item and can visit or act upon it?

The following tips are provided for educational purposes only. My hope is that the Friendfeed team can close a bunch of the holes so that the environment remains pure and doesn’t become a spammer’s paradise like Twitter is apparently moving towards.

Tactic #1 – the comment

Once your item is injected into your feed, it’s gone from the stream in minutes. One way to get it back to the top is to leave a comment. You can’t “like” your own items so the only option is to comment. The key is to make sure you comment at the right time. This means you shouldn’t comment immediately…instead give it some time and then leave a comment – blamo the item is back to the top of your feed and can be seen by a new group of followers who may have missed it the first time around.
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Cable tv and Internet provider Comcast has put out a release today with tips and ideas for parents who want to talk to their teens about social networks like Facebook and MySpace. I must be old because growing up parents were supposed to talk to their kids about drugs. Comcast actually has an entire security site which, among other things, tells us that our global security threat risk level is low.

Here are five of the tips Comcast recommends for parents who are planning to speak with their kids:

• Choose your pictures wisely
• Don’t talk to strangers and use privacy settings
• Keep your personal information personal
• Don’t be a cyberbully
• Go outside and stay active

These tips sure seem like 1995 to me – with so many new networks and ways for teens to interact online, parents really need a full education.

Comcast does recommend that parents learn about the new online networks so they can speak intelligently about them. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity there – people who teach parents about the current state of online networks and keep them up-to-date moving forward. In fact these people could even be there to “moderate” discussions between teens and parents so the teens can’t get over on the parents.

Apologies in advance for a semi-technical post on a Friday night but I think it’s a topic worth discussing. Over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more sites that are copying pieces of content from one social service and placing it into another social service or blog/website. Is this a good idea?

If I post a message on Twitter, it is instantly copied to my Friendfeed account. If I delete that twit message, it is not removed from Friendfeed. I selected to have Friendfeed read and aggregate my Twitter account so the behavior makes sense on the display side. Since Friendfeed can read and write to Twitter, can’t they just read the current status of messages?

I’ve also noticed more blogs sucking in content from Twitter and Friendfeed. It’s a smart move for the blogs because it makes for more monetizable content and can also make a blog appear more active. Some blogs appear to be scraping the content on their own, some are using comment aggregation services like Disqus. I asked Disqus about their social comment aggregation and was told that they store the aggregated comments on Disqus’ servers. Unlike Friendfeed where I specifically told them to aggregate my content, I didn’t authorize my comments to be aggregated on other blogs, etc. And with regards to Disqus, when I make a comment on Twitter or Friendfeed that is scraped back to the Disqus database, I don’t believe that it’s placed into my Disqus account. This makes it even harder for me to manage. Of course I have practically zero recourse for the blogs that scrape friendfeed/twitter directly.

My take is that it’s fine to display content from other social services but it should be a display only — not/never a store and retain. This way if the content creator decides to delete or edit the content, the updated version will be the one displayed across the Web.

Perhaps this is a data portability topic?

As more social aggregation services pop up and blogs look for more content to monetize, I believe this issue will become a hot topic this year.

Yesterday for a brief moment, lots of tech bloggers removed the twitter auto-post function and replaced it with excitement over the Google Wave announcement. I’ve read posts that say Google Wave will replace the Web as we know it and then I read posts that say nearly the opposite. I am just wondering, did anyone else immediately think that Google Wave looks nearly identical to Microsoft Outlook?

For reference, the main blue color in Outlook is #e3efff and in Google Wave the main blue color is #c9e2fc. Google Wave has pretty pictures too. I think if you add the Xobni plugin into Outlook, the screenshots get even closer.
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Social network app development firm Sprout has announced a new program today named F3. The Sprout F3 program costs $50,000 and includes the development of a Facebook fan page, Facebook Connect application to connect back to the company’s website and a Facebook application which the company says will connect into the Facebook news feed and realtime stream.

The release indicates that some new assets will be built for the app but I fear that it will be, at least, partly cookie cutter. The sales PDF shows an asterisk next to the words ”from scratch” but there is no additional note in the document. The Sprout F3 program is a smart idea to help get new customers in the door — naturally the clients will need either more services or long-term maintenance which will be billable. Reporting is included in the overall budget.

Another company in the Facebook app development space is NY-based Buddy Media.