Category Archives: facebook

Picking A Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

There are all kinds of apps popping up to help you keep in touch with co-workers, friends and, of course, your favorite social sites at a glance. Niche connection sites like Yammer and Socialcast let you connect with people in your organization. Blellow is a new and promising communication and collaboration tool for communities of interest, like entrepreneurs or web developers. It’s getting plenty of buzz at the moment. Guy Kawasaki even Tweeted today about having his own Twitter at http://laconi.ca/trac/; best I could tell, kind of a bare bones, do-it-yourself Twitter. But the epicenter of connection right now is for social sites, apps enabling the second by second buzz or real time news, trendy happenings, mainly on the web, gossip and daily trivia, like, as Guy Kawasaki puts it “my cat rolled over” or, more interestingly, and conveying that you are definitely in the loop, “I’m on the plane from Barcelona.” Duct Tape Marketing, today, even explained how you could set up your own social media dashboard.

The One Page Social Media Dashboard

I looked at it, and, although doable it seemed like a bit of a project. I’m leaning more towards Jennifer Van Grove‘s preferred screen Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites. Here’s how she sees it:

“You’ve got Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Flickr Flickr reviews photos, and probably plenty of other social sites that you keep your eye on. So how do you keep up and engage with all the new content that’s constantly being added by friends?

You could try social aggregators and lifestreaming options like FriendFeed FriendFeed reviews or Strands, but if those are just too much, but interacting with Facebook and Twitter updates isn’t quite enough, you can find a happy medium in Skimmer — an Adobe AIR desktop client for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger.

Skimmer, which launches in beta today, is equal parts content aggregator, lifestream, and status updater with a penchant for visual stimuli. The site aims to strip away some of the bloated feature sets of other desktop apps, enhance your overall viewing experience, and keep the content dynamic but limited to five of the most popular social sites.

Once you download and install the application, you can connect your Twitter Twitter reviews, Facebook Facebook reviews, Flickr, YouTube YouTube reviews, and Blogger accounts to start getting a stream-like view of your contacts’ updates. You can even view TwitPics in-line, filter your feed by keyword, service, or contact groups, and cross-post status updates to Facebook and Twitter. Skimmer also offers a few viewing and customization options, so you can alter the size and color scheme of the app to make it fit your personal preferences.

Where Skimmer really shines is via the Flickr and YouTube photo and video viewing experiences. Not only is the application’s design sleek, but it provides a superb, freshly-windexed window into content from both sites.

With Flickr, you can view you or your friends’ photos (quickly skim through sets or the entire photostream), view counts, and comments, as well as watch slideshows, with an experience is arguably more visually impressive than Flickr itself. With YouTube, users can view videos, comments, tags, views, and ideally do the same for videos from friends.

Skimmer is very obviously a beta service, and even though some of the bugs diminish from the overall experience, it’s still an interesting and entertaining desktop application that doesn’t try to do too much.”

Let me know if you set this up, and how you like it. I’m off now, I wish to Barcelona, but, more likely, to watch my cat roll over. ( But, come May, to D.C. for web business building, and possibly in June to Barcelona.)

Why You Should Start Your Own Page On Facebook

: Image via CrunchBase

Dan Schawbel makes an interesting point and one I think might be helpful to all of us about the value of starting your own page on Facebook. Schawbel in HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook notes that with over 200 million active users, Facebook has become a personal, product and corporate branding hub. He presents a very thorough guide to building your personal brand on Facebook, but the most interesting point he makes, I think, is How To Start Your Own Page.

“Facebook pages are for brands, ranging from Coca Cola to Barack Obama and even you. These pages resemble your Facebook profiles, so only use one if you have a large number of Facebook friends. By having a Facebook page, your brand can go viral, holding a spot on other people’s profiles. The other main advantage is that your page will rank high for your name in Google () () and you can use it for your professional career, while keeping your personal profile private.”

The reason I think this is a really good idea is because I recently read a study showing the most likely prospect for getting new business is from someone you are already doing business with. The next most likely place is from someone who’s heard good things about you from someone you are doing business with. In other words, credibility — being good at what you do—, attention to clients and colleagues and word of mouth or at the core of building your brand, your reputation and your business. Remember that when you are deciding where to invest your time. Facebook is a more intimate platform where you can get some of those qualities across.

Since I’ve just come upon this truth myself I haven’t built my Facebook Page yet, but it is now on my priority to do list. It will be a bit tricky because my Facebook friends come from many different personal camps or tribes, and my page will blend webbiz, social media and entrepreneurship. The idea will be to gather a small community with interesting thoughts on these subjects. An interesting challenge. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, if you’ve built a Facebook page or are planning to, please share your thoughts and experience.

How Will The Facebook Vs. Twitter Competition Shake Out?

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

That’s a tough one. Facebook and Twitter both have a lot of juice, a lot of followers and a ton of good reasons to use them. I’ve already looked at the similarities and huge difference between them: Twitter or Facebook? Why you need both for different reasons.

But guru Paul Scoble analyze’s these differences from a business point of view, and picks Facebook as a winner for forming a more intimate relationship with the Facebook user.

Why Rob Diana is right: Twitter gets the hype while Facebook will get the gold:.

“I’m going to skip right down to the meat of what Scoble’s thoughts are:

The “publicness” of Twitter makes a TON of sense for someone like Ronn Owens who wants to reach a world-wide audience with very little work. Facebook makes less sense because it’s not only more work (there’s a lot more to do on Facebook than just write simple text messages from a cell phone) but it isn’t as public so it’s harder to get new followers.

But this is exactly why people tell me they use Facebook instead of Twitter. So, Facebook has the numbers (about 180 million for Facebook vs. about 10 million for Twitter). It is also why Rob Diana is right: people will put more intimate stuff, like having a baby, into Facebook rather than Twitter.

Only weirdos like me like sharing intimate stuff in a public forum and having conversations. Hint: for every weirdo like me, there are 1000 who are like my wife and only want to discuss that stuff with their “true friends.”

Which brings me back to Rob Diana’s point. It’s those intimate details that will bring advertising opportunities. “I’m having a baby shower in San Francisco at the Hyatt” is the type of thing normal people will share in Facebook with their friends but will never think of sharing in Twitter. Yet that’s the kind of information that a brand like the Hyatt needs to engage with you.

When I went to Las Vegas recently and said I was staying in the Luxor, someone got back to me at the Luxor on Twitter and said something like “let me know if I can help you, I can get you show tickets and make reservations for you.”

This kind of customer intimacy will be far more prevalent over on Facebook because WE are far more intimate there.

Rob is right, I wonder how Twitter is going to shift to get us to be more intimate with sharing the intimate details of our lives?

Oh, and I wonder how Facebook is going to keep us sharing the intimate details of our lives as it tries to add businesses to the social graph? The first time some business answers back a Facebooker like the Luxor did to me on Twitter they might get freaked out, so Facebook has to be careful here.

So, why would Facebook get any money from the Luxor? I can see a ton of ways. Can’t you?

Think of the Yellow Pages. Simple listings are free there (or were back when I advertised in the 1980s). But bigger ads that are more impressive cost thousands per month. Use that model on Facebook. Imagine a brand, like Luxor, just wants to say hi. That’s free. But how about post a link? That’ll be $4 please. And on and on.”

Agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts! Come on….. you must all be on Facebook or Twitter or both. Let us know what you think.

Sorry Twitter, Facebook Is The Data Gold Mine (regulargeek.com)

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Category Archives: facebook

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