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End video clutter: Add links to make online videos more effective, manageable and social

August 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Video content is an important aspect of every company’s digital marketing strategy. It’s popular, social and effective. According to a recent study, the average internet user watches 186 online videos per month.

Video is popular. The most recent comScore study indicates that 183 million U.S. Internet users watched an all-time record 33.9 billion online videos in May, 2010.

Video is social. YouTube is the most popular site for viewing online video (43 percent) and content viewed on YouTube and other sites is often driven by sharing on social networks where users spend the majority of their online time.

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Filed Under: google, youtube Tagged With: , , , ,

On the road to widespread location-based social networking

August 18, 2010 By 2 Comments

Many mobile users have tinkered with location-based social networking in the past 12 months.  However, things are expected to get serious now – as Facebook enters the fray.

The location-based social networking space is currently dominated by Foursquare with more 2 million users. Foursquare is a mobile/web application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location. 

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Filed Under: Facebook, google, Mobile, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

Follow your followers’ followers: Twitter crowdsources suggestions

August 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

Finding the best conversation in a party line with more than 100 million users can be a struggle. Twitter’s enhanced  “people finder” breaks through the chatter by leveraging the relationships you already have.

Until recently, your chances of being recommended by Twitter were rare and the rules for being added to Twitter’s suggested user list were vague.  It made unknown individuals like Anil Dash, spontaneously famous. Why? When a new user signs up for Twitter, they’re presented with a list of about 20 “default” accounts to follow — which often included Dash for no apparent purpose.

“I’m obviously not a better tweeter than 99 million other Twitter users, ” Dash blogged. “I never asked to be on the list, and it’s never been explained to me why I was chosen. Ultimately it’s clear that the decision of whom to feature is essentially an arbitrary choice by Twitter , and that at best, I represent something they’d want to show new users.”

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Filed Under: crowdsourcing, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

Wave “Goodbye” to Google Wave, a wonderful collaborative silo

August 6, 2010 By 8 Comments

Like other users who have had access to Google Wave for the past 8-10 months, I was impressed by Google’s technology — and frustrated by my inability to use it effectively.

Wave, Google’s innovative web application for real-time communication and collaboration, was a collaborative silo. This is why, on August 4, 2010, Google announced the suspension of Wave development: “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

The collaborative tools of Wave were fierce… It bundled email, instant messaging, threaded conversations and rich media as “waves of content” to be shared with others.  Wave updates were available in real-time — and historically via playback in chronological order. Any participant of a wave could reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process.

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Filed Under: Cloud, crowdsourcing, Email, google, Misc T, Twitter, Web Tagged With: , , , ,

Facebook Gift Shop fails in a strong virtual economy

August 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In the current, tough economy, this story is common: Marie Mace Owens, of Little Rock, AR, wanted to buy her friend a gift on August 1, but one of her favorite store was closed.

What makes Marie’s story unique, is that her favorite store was the Facebook Gift Store, which ceased operation this month. Almost half of all businesses fail within the first four years, and it seems that the Facebook Gift shop is no exception. Facebook launched Gifts on February 8, 2007, allowing users to send virtual gifts to their friends that appeared on their friend’s profile. Each gift was priced at $1.00. In 2009, Facebook began offering ‘Facebook Credits’ as virtual currency (10 credits for a dollar) that users could spend on premium gifts.

“Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts,” product manager Jared Morgenstern wrote on Facebook’s official blog. “We’ll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the ‘Like’ button and the Wall.”

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Filed Under: Facebook, Misc T Tagged With: , ,