Robert Scoble is a one of the thought leaders and innovators on the web today.  He is a smart, engaging guy who gets around to listen and exchange ideas with many of the other web leaders. Scoble’s a great favorite of mine and when he speaks, I listen.  And so do a lot of other people.

On his blog today ,Scobleizer — Exploring the 2010 Web Scoble talks about going back to basics and refocusing on his blog. He talks about what some have called his obsession with Twitter and Facebook, where he has, in fact, been a major player. Scoble explains this by saying “All my fun experiments were over on Twitter, Facebook, or friendfeed. You could see that. Mike Arrington even tried to do a friendfeed intervention last December.”  So now, Scoble is trying to bring that sense of fun, experimentation and real time zest into his newly re-invented blog.  He is also trying to show the rest of us now to do the same, in real time.

(About a week ago I posted From The Mouth of A Guru: Why You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet which has many of the same caveats about the value of focusing your work on your own blog and letting Twitter be your outpost.)

In that vein Scoble lays out what he thinks the future of the web will look like:

“1. It’s real time. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are all moving toward architectures and displays that refresh in real time, or let you see what’s happening right now. We are at the extreme beginnings of that trend. You really should watch the video of the panel discussion I moderated on the state of real time search to get a sense of where this is going. That panel discussion will be remembered for years as a key point. One of the panel members runs Facebook search team. Yes, Facebook is working on real time search. (That video is in two parts since the meeting ran almost two hours long. I really do recommend watching it. Part I is here. Part II is here.).
2. It’s mobile. You’ll see this more next week when the Where 2.0 conference rolls into town, but if 40,000 iPhone apps hasn’t convinced you yet, nothing will. On Monday I’m meeting with Nokia to find out the latest.
3. It’s decentralized. Look at my behaviors. I’m all over the place. Six years ago I did only one thing: blog. Now I Flickr. YouTube. Seesmic. Friendfeed. Facebook. Twitter. And many more. Go to Retaggr and see all the places I’m at.
4. Pages now built out of premade blocks. You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages. See the friendfeed block to the right of my words? I added that by copying and pasting from the friendfeed widget page. If you know where to look a TON of cool pre-built blocks like this are available for you to put on your website or blog.
5. It’s social. This seems obvious to anyone on Twitter or Facebook, but how many businesses add their customers to their pages? Not many. Silicon Valley has done a horrible job so far of explaining why adding people to your websites matters.
6. It’s smart. We’re seeing more and more smarts added to the web every day. Tonight Wolfram’s new search engine turned on. Have you played with it? That’s the 2010 web and check out what you can do with it.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. When I visited 12seconds.tv in Santa Cruz they told me they were using a hybrid approach: they own a rack of servers but they also use Amazon’s S3 to “cloud burst” or take up the slack for files that are popular…

PR People: I even made a place you can pitch me on 2010 web ideas. It’s interesting that a bunch of people are subscribed to that room — probably lots of tech bloggers looking for ideas.”

I put in that last link so those of you who are bloggers could go fishing there for ideas.

I’m certainly going to watching the evolution of Scobles newlly updated blog and trying some of the same tools and strategies myself.  Are you?  If you do, please leave a comment and tell us what works for you and what doesn’t.  We all in this giant web conversation together, now that Web 3.o and the interconnections of social media and dynamic linking have arrived

Tags: facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Robert Scoble, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube

View more presentations from sujamthe.

Tags: facebook, Meetup, San Francisco Bay Area, Social media, Social network

I owe this to @charbrown from Twitter.  Still trying to learn and make my use of TweetDeck more effective. Charles said to group your favorite Tweeters…. ones who were consistently interesting and you might want to retweet….in one group or column on TweetDeck.  That allows you to clear out some of the noise and focus, for the most part, on only quality Tweets.

Problem was I didn’t know exactly how to do that.  @charbrown to the rescue!  Here’s what he direct messaged me, with admirable brevity:

“At the top of the screen you should see several buttons.  the 6th one from the right has a couple of heads, click that ….

continued) … and it will open up a window you can name your new group, it will also allow you to add selected followers

charles brown / charbrown”

Thanks, Charles.  It’s even easier than that, since a list of people you are following pops up and all you have to do is check their name and save.  Now you’ve also just saved yourself a lot of time sorting through tweets and made your whole Twitter experience more effective.  Thanks again, Charles

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Tags: facebook, iphone, Online Communities, Tech and Business, TweetDeck, Twitter

David Spark (@dspark), a veteran tech journalist , founder of Spark Media Solutions, who blogs at The Spark Minute, has done a lot of research to see how people succeed at growing their social networks. He discovers the patterns and dishes the inside how to’s at 12 Inspiring Stories of Successful Social Networkers.  They are all interesting and helpful examples, but I particularly liked:

Seed Your Network

“For six months and with only 150 inactive members, the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group was languishing. LinkToCharlotte’s goal has always been to connect local businesses and people in the Charlotte, NC area. Founder Andrew Kaplan decided it was time to juice the membership of his group. In June 2008, he reached out to local influencers who could attract others to his local network.

Already having ties with professional sports teams, tourism, and political advisors, Kaplan sent out personal invites to their respective marketing departments to join the group. Quickly seeing the benefits of being part of Kaplan’s local industry network, they in turn sent invites from their lists to join his network as well. Today, LinkToCharlotte’s LinkedIn () group has grown to 2,000, plus it has expanded to include groups on the NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter ().”

Take a look at how the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group , NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter () all play off each other.  It’s a road map to creating and leveraging your social media assets.

Let me hear what you think if you’ve created or are creating something like this.

Tags: facebook, LinkedIn, Online Communities, Social media, Social network, Twitter

Robert Scoble, Scobleizer, wrote what, to me, was a really amazingly insightful article on how the newspaper industry has let the Net take away bits and pieces of its franchise until there’s almost nothing left. But he does  go on to mention a few remaining pieces worth saving and pursuing on or off line. ( The newspaper industry just gave away another free meal, er Twitter: do they have any left?).  Examples of the giveaways:

“Free meal #1. Giving away classified advertising to Craig’s List.
Free meal #2. Giving away photography to Flickr (look at the photos from the Chinese Earthquake, why didn’t this happen on a newspaper branded site?).
Free meal #3. Giving away front page news to blogs like Huffington Post.
Free meal #4. Giving away “small” community news like births, deaths, birthdays, etc to Facebook.
Free meal #5. Giving away real-time news to Twitter.
Free meal #6. Giving away news distribution to Google News and Amazon Kindle, among others. With new sites like Kosmix coming on strong (hundreds of percent of growth month over month).
Free meal #7. Giving away restaurant reviews to Yelp.
Free meal #8. Giving away traffic information to Google Maps.
Free meal #9. Giving away celebrity news to Facebook and Twitter. (Why is Oprah on both of those, and why didn’t the newspaper industry lock up Oprah and keep her on a newspaper brand?)
Free meal #10. Giving away local news to Topix (at least that was funded by a newspaper brand).
Free meal #11. Giving away business news to Yahoo Finance and Google Finance (and something new that will get announced tomorrow).
Free meal #12. Giving away news ranking to Memeorandum.
Free meal #13. Giving away astrology to Astrology.com.
Free meal #14. Giving away comics to Comics.com.

What is their latest giveaway? Crowd-sourced news. I visit Twitter Search every day to find out what is “hot news.” That’s something I used to look at newspapers and older media for (radio, TV) but Twitter is just plain better at telling me what is trending.”

Scoble goes on to discuss what the newspapers haven’t given away yet, and that gives us lots of clues to which areas might produce a useful path for a website or blog wanting to stand out from the crowd.

You really need to read Scoble’s article.  But a few of his ideas are developing and displaying a deeper understanding of a local scene.  Also, focusing to the extent you have and present a much deeper understanding of a narrower topic.

Few in the world of Twitter, make the investment of time to understand in great depth, a particular subject they twitter on. Twitter requires speed.  Understanding in depth requires time and reflection.  It’s possible to do both.  Twitter with speed on many topics but also send out the occasional Tweet linked to a blog or website with a post about a topic which reflects your thinking and your brand, something you’re researched and thought about in depth. That, I think, is one successful way forward.  One where we citizen journalists and bloggers can bring a lot to the table.

Tags: Amazon Kindle, facebook, Google, Google Maps, Huffington Post, Robert Scoble, Twitter, Yahoo

It may seem like Facebook and Twitter are all we hear.  But that’s just a piece of the huge social networking puzzle.  Bebo seems to be one to watch: keep track of friends on other social sites in one place.  I’m giving that a try and also putting together a social network using Ning as a platform… really incredibly simple and powerful.  Here’s Adam Ostrow’s take on the social scene in The Fastest Growing Social Sites:

• Each month (and often more frequently than that) we take a look at trends in social networking, by the numbers. Recently, we’ve focused on Twitter’s astronomical growth – now up better than 2,500 percent in one year – and Facebook’s climb to become top social network over MySpace ().

  However, this month there are a few other trends within the numbers – provided by Nielsen Online – that highlight a few other storylines within the social media space, as well as continue to put meat behind the trends we’ve been covering over the past few months.

  Here are some notable developments from March:

  Ning, which recently announced that more than one million social networks have been creating using its service, is currently the 2nd fastest growing social networking property. It’s traffic is up 283 percent year-over-year, and it now reaches a total of 5.6 million people in the US.

  Bebo, which we recently reported saw a one month surge of nearly 50 percent on the heels of a redesign and AIM integration, has grown 148 percent in the past year, and now reaches more than 6.1 million people in the US.

  This is significant because Bebo is known mostly for being big overseas, but insignificant in the US. The next few months will tell us if this was a one-time pop thanks to AIM integration or a continued trend thanks to some innovative things Bebo is doing with Socialthing.

  LinkedIn () continues to be one of the quickest growing social sites and has more than doubled its size in the past year. It now reaches better than 15.8 million people in the US, ranking it 3rd in total size behind Facebook () and MySpace. It’s no doubt being buoyed by the weak economy and high unemployment as people turn to the site and their connections to find work.

  As for “the big three,” the story remains much the same:

  Twitter () is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565 percent. In total, it reached more than 13 million people in the US during the month – and that’s just on its website (i.e. – not counting clients like TweetDeck () or Seesmic Desktop ()). Next month will likely see this total continue to swell, thanks to huge mainstream media events like Ashton Kutcher versus CNN and Oprah jumping onto Twitter.

  Facebook continues to extend its lead over MySpace. In March, it saw 69.1 million visitors, versus 55.9 million for the News Corp-owned social networking site. In fact, MySpace was the only social networking site measured in the Nielsen survey that saw its traffic decline year-over-year.

  So, while not much changed at the top of the social media landscape in March, there are certainly a few new storylines emerging that will be worth watching going forward. The full report – sorted by growth rate – is embedded below:

  Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alexsl

Tags: Bebo, facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, ning, Social media, social networking, Twitter

Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog, I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get.  I keep a keen eye out for those “widgets” or “gadgets” as Google calls them, those tiny pieces of automated code that you can install on your page to work tirelessly behind the scenes.

Google Gadgets For Your Webpage offers you everything from mundane functions, like clocks and weather, but also gadgets which can make your site a lot more interactive, like Desktop Chat, Google Talk, Twitter or Facebook, right from your own page.

Yesterday, I started experimenting with Google’s customized RSS feed, which can bring your favorite “stream of news and updates” from your favorite sites to your own webpage. It’s very simple.  You just grab the code or tweak the colors, size etc., then grab the code.  I started first by installing several customized RSS feeds, in different colors, or “color coded”, putting up social media, tech news and updates, and “5 minutes for Mom” on my site, AdvancingWomen.com.  I am so pleased with that, I put on Twitter and Facebook.   Next I will be adding Google Talk to a number of pages.  Well, I’m pretty blown away with what Google offers so easily.  I can tell you I’d been wrestling with some other RSS feeds for awhile, and having trouble to get them to look and act quite the way I wanted.  So the simplicity and dynamism of Google’s Gadgets was a big hit with me.  Give it a try.  And let us know what you think and what gadgets worked particularly well for you.

Tags: facebook, Google, Google Talk, RSS, Social media, Twitter

We’ve already talked a few weeks ago about Why You Should Start Your Own Page On Facebook and given some details on how you might want to go about executing it. Now we thought a few examples from major and savvy marketers might be very helpful for you…and for me also as I navigate making my facebook page for my brand. Adam Ostrow in Facebook Shares Tips and Case Studies for Brand Marketers describes how the big boys and gals are using this resource to market their brands:

With its recent redesign and a slew of new features, Facebook has been moving to make Pages a focal point of the site. Personally, I recently described these changes as “the business model that moves [the company] from a successful social network to a highly profitable business.”Thus, it’s not surprising that Facebook is starting to do more to reach out to brands that might benefit from using revamped Pages. The latest example is (fittingly) a Facebook Page that the company has setup to promote “Facebook Marketing Solutions,” complete with case studies from a number of large brands using the tool, tips and how-tos, and discussion with marketers.

The brands that Facebook is featuring include household names like Adobe, Lionsgate, and Ben & Jerry’s, but there are still some useful tidbits for those with slightly smaller budgets. For example, Ben & Jerry’s implementation of Facebook Connect is something that any website could deploy with a bit of coding work and zero marketing spend.

• It lets visitors to Ben & Jerry’s website select their favorite flavor and share it on Facebook. Then, that user’s friends see the flavor selection on their homepage, and also get a link to Ben & Jerry’s Facebook Page where they too can become a fan.

  Meanwhile, for brands looking to spend money on Facebook (), namely by promoting their Page, the Marketing Solutions group shares a number of different types of campaigns. For example, Adobe’s “Real or Fake” campaign includes a game on the company’s Page, where users guessed whether an image was real or Photoshoped.

  Adobe describes its results: “About 10% of our page visitors played the game and, of those who played, 6% clicked the “Share” button at the end of the game, and 6% clicked “Buy Now” at the end of the game. Due to this game and media placement, our page received over 6,000 new fans too.”

  For Facebook, sharing this type of information using a Page is a great example of a company eating its own dog food so to speak. It’s also good to see that they’re both sharing tips that anyone can do – without spending significant money on Facebook – as well as case studies clearly designed to get big brands to spend big dollars on marketing their Pages.

  ---

  Additional Facebook Resources for Brands

  ---

  - New Facebook Pages: A Guide for Social Media Marketers

  - 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

  - 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence

Tags: Advertising, business, facebook, facebook pages, marketing, social media for Marketing

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, FlickrFlickr 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 FriendFeedFriendFeed 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 TwitterTwitter reviews, FacebookFacebook reviews, Flickr, YouTubeYouTube 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.)

Tags: facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter, Yammer, YouTube

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.

Tags: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook, facebook