Posts Tagged myspace
PhotoBlaster 3000
Posted by Paul Holmes in internet, social media on August 14th, 2009
Sometimes I take a photo on my iPhone that I want the whole world to see!
Do I really want to upload it 7 different times using a bunch of clunky apps, redefine the tags and so forth? No, my short term goal is to get it uploaded, and I can always tag it and such later on.
The easiest way to do this is to enable the ability to e-mail photos to websites. Currently I have this feature enabled on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, MySpace, YourCanada, and Photobucket. (Click on the link for each one to visit the instructions on how to set it up on your account.)
Have all of these special e-mail addresses set up as “Contacts” in your iPhone. Then, when you take that perfect photo, just forward the photo from within the album, select “Email Photo”, then when the e-mail comes up, send it to these contacts. Your subject line is your description.
I also use Flickr’s Flickr2Twitter feature, which kills TwitPic, or any other similar service, because you get the network value of Flickr, and the network value of Twitter in the same post. And this happens automatically when I e-mail a photo to Flickr (unless I choose not to).
I also built a very geekly hidden e-mail account that forwards my photos automatically to the following services:
- Flickr (and, thus Flickr2Twitter)
- Picasa
I tried redirecting this also to MySpace, Ning and Photobucket, but to no avail. They obviously don’t like redirected mail.
Social Media Binge Article 2: Social Networks
Posted by Paul Holmes in social media on March 17th, 2009
For those who missed it (most of the universe), article 1 was on micro-blogging sites. This one will be about social networks.
The idea was to see what was out there beyond FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace – of which, my opinions are published on my blog.
It is worth noting that most of these sites have something equivalent to a micro-blog called status updates, pulses or something else. If you do sign up to more than two or three social media sites, consider using Ping.fm to do your updates. They did not ask me to say so, I am volunteering this because it is really, really useful.
Caveat: If nobody uses these sites, they could be the neatest things in the world, but who cares. Ultimately this is where FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace have a massive advantage.
Tip of the Day: If you hate any of the big four, consider joining one of these social media sites just to spite them!
For each network, I’ve listed how many friends I found out of my gmail contact list (about 600 contacts). For comparison, I have about 200 friends on FaceBook (and only add people I have actually met).
Plaxo (7 friends) – I like Plaxo. First of all, 7 of my friends were already on it (which was more than MySpace). The layout is simpler than FaceBook, and the profile page is great. Like FriendFeed, it has the ability to pull in a bunch of your other public social media content (blog entries, micro-blogging, images, etc.), and inserts it into your public profile page. I hope Plaxo catches on.
Friendster (2 friends) – Unlike most of the sites where I found an odd person who happened to have signed up years ago, on Friendster I found a friend who was very actively using this program – 164 friends in her network. I get the feeling that some people really use this network. At first glance, it seems to be a poorly designed FaceBook. But dig a little, and there are some interesting built-in features over and above the standard FaceBook offerings, including classifieds, games, blogs, reviews, and “featured” friends. I think it might actually be the most “feature intensive” social network out there.
Orkut (1 friend) – Google has an offering (experiment) in the social network space as well – shocking, huh. Their micro-blogging program – Jaiku – is way better thank the mediocre Orkut, though. I could not find anything amazingly cool, original or particularly interesting about Orkut, not even the name. (In their defense, it is Beta.) If this catches on, it will be because it is run by Google.
Bebo (0 friends) – If there is one thing in life I want to do, it is to connect with other people so we can talk about the hottest celebs. Well good for Bebo to know what demographic they are targeting (note: not me), and to go after them fairly effectively. Bebo is really pushing for me to find or invite friends, and I really can not think of a good reason to do so.
hi5 (1 friend) – In competition with Bebo for the teen market, I suppose. Features include games and giving “fives” to your friends. There is a “Stats” meter (so you can see how awesome you are compared to everyone else). I’m pretty sure I won’t be frequenting this website very much.
Xanga (0 friends) – I wasn’t entirely sure whether to include this. It is sort of a hybrid between a blog and a social network. It is pretty neat, but sort of a strange animal in the social media jungle.
Yahoo! 360° (0 friends) – One of the disadvantages of having the old search engines get into the social network business is all the legacy baggage that you seem to drag along with you to the new platform. Yahoo! is no exception. While their profile pages are, in my opinion, the best designed, Yahoo! still thinks I live in the UK. Also, Yahoo! has reserved the usernames on their social network for the eventuality of every Yahoo! user ever setting up an account there – thus, getting a decent username on their network is impossible. Hi – I am tpholmes2001, and I live in Dublin. In terms of Features, nothing special here. Ironically, even though Yahoo! owns both, I couldn’t load my Flickr images onto my 360 profile – the option was there, but it didn’t work. (Yahoo! wants you to know that this program is Beta.)
Yuku (0 friends) – You get “kudos” for doing stuff, and can compete in the “hall of fame” with other Yuku social climbers, I suppose. I don’t really get it. I don’t see much else on this site that is terribly exciting. And it appears you cannot update your profile using Ping.fm, so I suspect I won’t be updating my profile here very often. Perhaps I’m missing something.
Tagged (0 friends) – The people who started this website must have learned their trade pushing crack cocaine. I started receiving the weirdest spam right away. People checking me out. Then, finally somebody bought me – how offensive is that. I think this is a website for lonely single people with no lives. I’m not sure. But there is a pretty good (free) poker game on it – if you can wade past all the spam and juvenile nonsense. As for me, I’d rather hang out with the intellectually superior regulars at Bebo or Hi5.
Social Networking – MySpace
Posted by Paul Holmes in advertising, internet, politics, social media on February 20th, 2009
Q: What does MySpace have going for it?
A: It is well established, as the first-to-market social network. It has hundreds of thousands of users. It is owned by News Corporation, which (in “normal” economic times) gives it pretty deep pockets.
Q: What does MySpace have going against it?
A: Almost everything else.
I am one of those 30-somethings turned off by MySpace because of its early reputation.
Nonetheless, I finally joined – mostly just to educate myself about it.
These are my immediate thoughts.
- It’s (still) ugly.
- It’s crowded.
- I could not find any useful applications that integrate other social networking tools into your profile (i.e. Twitter).
It’s easy to pick on MySpace, so I don’t want to sound like one of the usual folks. Until a week ago, I honestly never even looked at it for more than a minute or two.
MySpace has much going for it in that they are well established, and drew a crowd early on. If they want to beat FaceBook in the long run, though, they need to start being smarter. I can imagine there are numerous “legacy” issues as they try to take an application built in one “era” and transform it into the new “era”, and all the distractions this creates – compared to FaceBook who understood the business model, and did it right the first time.
I won’t say MySpace is useless, or that it doesn’t have a bright future. But I will say that it has many issues to overcome if it wants to be relevant in this new social media era.
I will also say that I have no intention of using it seriously any time soon. Then again, I’m not the main target audience.
Social Network Usage Stats
Posted by Paul Holmes in business, internet, personal, social media on February 11th, 2009
I was “tweeted” a fantastic article about social network stats released by compete.com.
There were a few non-surprises in it, however.
First thing, FaceBook has now surpassed MySpace in the U.S. as the number one social network. This should surprise nobody. MySpace had such a terrible reputation that most adults avoided it (I know I did). Now that adults have jumped onto social networks, they have jumped on to FaceBook. I think it’s fair to say we’ve reached “critical mass” there, and FaceBook has won the “generic social network” battle (at least for now).
Non-surprise number two is that Twitter jumped from 22nd to 3rd. Twitter has caught on with lightning speed. I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago, and have quickly become a tweetaholic. First of all the micro-blogging concept is very cool, then there are some neat “viral effects” you can encounter, practically in real-time, and then there are the fancy things you can do with your feed.
- Tip #1: Every company out there today should register their twitter.com/their_company_name right now!
This said, I do believe it will level off at some point. This doesn’t mean I think Twitter will completely go away – in fact, it still has tremendous growth ahead. It’s here to stay for a long time, but it will level off in a year or two as the novelty factor subsides. (Of course, who knows what other cool things are just around the corner – either with Twitter or elsewhere, which could easily change the game.)
Non-surprise number three is that LinkedIn jumped from number 9 to number 5. LinkedIn has played a shrewd game of connecting business people. If they maintain that focus, they’ll never be the “catch-all” network, but they will be the defacto “business network”, which, frankly, will give them a far better revenue model for the future than the generic advertising (or, gulp, user-pay) model that FaceBook and Twitter will struggle with for awhile.
- Tip #2: Every businessperson should have a LinkedIn account.
I believe the model is already taking shape: people do their friends, family, political, club, and knitting-circle networking on FaceBook, and they do their business networking on LinkedIn. Think to the future, and ask yourself: Do you really want to bother your business associates with pictures of your kid’s graduation?
Go through the rest of the list and check out some of the other sites that are there. Mostly niche stuff, which is cool if you are interested in those niches, I suppose. I’m going to have a bit of a sniff through and report on anything I find that proves interesting.
I am curious about the ranking’s absence of “Social Bookmarking” sites (I presume they didn’t look at these in the same category, which is fair game).
Also, the inclusion of 360.yahoo.com, but no mention of Google or Microsoft (which both have their own Social Networking tools). I suppose Google and Microsoft, because they haven’t changed the URL on their tools, cannot separate out the “search traffic” from the “social networking traffic”, so didn’t quality for the list.
(Note: I would have embedded the classic SNL MySpace skit here, only NBC is so backwards that they don’t have a YouTube channel, and the only site that has it doesn’t stream outside the U.S.)
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