Author Archives: Andrew Wee

About Andrew Wee

My name is Andrew Wee. I'm 32 years old, live in Singapore and am happily married with a 2 month old daughter. I've gone through a list of various occupations including: * journalist (for a business newspaper) * Internet content developer (for one of Asia's largest media group's Singapore Press Holdings) * trainer in entrepreneurship, business building, life skills * photographer/photojournalist * real estate agent * consultant * entrepreneur (I think that's enough for now...more later!) This is a personal space to express my goals, dreams and aspirations.

Social Media Still Needs To Grow Up…Some Possible Fixes…

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Twitter continues to be log-jammed, and I think every social network – MySpace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, all go through this phase.

In the case of MySpace, it’s become the hotbed of unmoderated bulletin spam and private message spam for ringtones, free ipod/xbox360/nintendo WII email/zip submit offers. I bet it’s going to take some doing to clear all that muck.

With Facebook, they’re taken the opposite tack of placing a cap on the number of private messages you can send out, limiting the ability of popular group owners to communicate with their members – forcing some to set up off-site bulletin boards to send broadcast messages out.

With MyBlogLog, the platform has a built a good userbase with its blog widget (though guys like Shoemoney had showed that it was pretty easy to abuse the “recent visitors” feature of it). The major sticking point is that Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have a concrete social media strategy (or at least an integrated one in place). I’m still hoping to see some of its community features like it’s Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, Mash social platform and MyBlogLog properties come together. And in my book, come together means more than a single unified Yahoo! login to tie the pieces together.

Even a 1-2 page weekly or bi-weekly updates or “What’s Hawt!” newsletter would serve to bring some of the pieces together…

So what’s the deal with Twitter’s sputtering and throttling down the flow of data?

With Twitter, I suspect it’s the Continue reading →

Twitter Goes Through Growing Pains…Applies Brakes

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Looks like Twitter is fast becoming a victim of its own success.

Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.

When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).

In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.

This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.

Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.

If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below:

Weekend Wonderings – 25 May 2008

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Twitter seems to have gone down for most of this past weekend. Maybe the Department of Homeland Productivity is seeing if their hypothesis that productivity increases by 517% when Twitter goes down can be proven in a real-world field test.

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The new Battlestar Galatica season 4 on the SciFi Channel continues to be one of the best series on TV.  Besides the typical science fiction themes and CGI special effects, the human story is pretty engaging and like any great movie/tv series mirroring real world reality (like Frank Miller’s “300”) it’s amazing how the creators mirror real world events in their storylines.

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Ongoing Project:  I’ve been working on a blogging-related project since early last year, and it looks like it’s getting into the final lap. Projected completion and launch? Possibly Mid-June.

It’s interesting how this blog has developed since its early root in 2005 from the old blog over at blogspot.

More importantly, it’s amazing how far blogging has evolved in the space of 2 years. (I can still remember when there were only 1 or 2 video blogs listed in the blog directories…now they’re everywhere.)

Yahoo! MyBlogLog Has New Leadership Steering At The Helm

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Yahoo! MyBlogLog had been the hottest blog/social marketing widget in my opinion in 2006 and early 2007. Somewhere in between the balance of power shifted to Facebook, which continues to be dominant for heavyweight networking.

Lately I’ve been gravitating towards using twitter, although the lightweight 140-character cellphone text messaging aspect of it, doesn’t feel very substantial, and conversations seems to ebb and disappear in the deluge of public and private messages being fired off every couple of seconds.

For a while, it seemed like MyBlogLog had been in a holding pattern, and I’d been hoping for some integration either with the Yahoo! shopping properties or its Mash social network.

I may be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like social media/social traffic is a major focus for Yahoo! now, and that’s where it might be missing the boat.

tilly mcclain

The New Face of Yahoo! MyBlogLog: Tilly “Two Thumbs” McClain 

Still, it was encouraging to see that Tilly McClain has been named Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager earlier this week (it’d previously been under the stewardship of Robyn Tippins and Ian Kennedy previously), and perhaps we’ll see some interesting developments in the coming months.

Maybe MBL might even have a podcast or a vlog?

I’m sitting here with my fingers crossed…

Friday Podcast: Niche Site Development with Zac Johnson

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Zac JohnsonI had a chance to talk with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson’s and pick his brain on his strategy in developing niche sites.

Some of the points we touched on:

  • How he got his start in internet marketing
  • How he developed a niche site which received 180,000 visitors per day and was hosted on 16 Dell servers
  • How he researches and develops new niche sites
  • His viral marketing strategies
  • Tips for new affiliates developing their websites

Tune in for another episode of the Friday Podcast

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And visit: ZacJohnson.com

Analytics-enhanced Aweber Autoresponder Service Accompanied by Huge Price Increase

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I signed up with Aweber for my email marketing solution when I started out 2 years ago and have been generally happy with their deliverability rates.

In a recent Friday Podcast, Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick alluded to some forthcoming enhancements to their services and it looks like they made the announcement today.

Here are some of the enhanced email analystics tools:

  • See exactly when subscribers open your message so you can focus on the right time to send your message.
  • Send a broadcast to only subscribers who didn’t open or click on your previous broadcast.
  • Send a broadcast to only subscribers who did click on your order page, but didn’t order.
  • See which subscribers are responding to your campaigns — which messages they’re opening, which links they’re visiting, and where on your website they’re going after clicking through.
  • Target subscribers by sending broadcasts to only those who responded (or didn’t respond) by clicking or opening a specific message or link.
  • Track revenue generated by campaigns and subscribers to see which subscribers and campaigns are making you money.

Together with click tracking, campaign reporting, email tracking, email ROI reporting and other features.

The old package cost $179.40 for 10,000 list members for a year. The analytics-enhanced service costs $69 per month for 10,000 list members.

With about a 362% increase in their prices, email marketers will have to decide if they need the enhanced analytics functions.

In an exchange between marketer Kevin Riley and Aweber founder/CEO Tom Kulzer, Kevin mentioned in a twitter update that existing customers can choose to remain on their existing plan.

Are the enhanced analytics going to be worth the upgrade?

I’m keen to hear some feedback from other marketers before making a decision.