Tag Archives: social-media

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:

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…

An Inconvenient Truth About Social Media

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One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

affiliate summit west

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLyn’s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But I’m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that Continue reading →

Friday Podcast: Social Media Explained With Sam Harrelson

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sam harrelsonThis week I got the recently nominated “Minister for Social Media” (yes, he drinks beer and curses…sorry, Jangro) Sam Harrelson on skype, and we chatted about the social media scene.

It’s the “thin client” computing discussion which Sam was refering to at the tailend of Geekcast Episode 13. (you knowyou’ve been listening to a lot of Geekcasts, when you’re typing “http://geekcast.fm/archives/category/geekcast/” into the browser address bar – bookmarks are overrated anyway…)

Besides having Sam do a rundown on his myriad of blogs/websites, we also talked about sci-fi, his new startup Big Idea Agency (the site design seems to change every couple of days, and viewing the page source sometimes shows some weird/arcane trivia).

Yes, there’s lots of social goodness ahead (together with a definition of “cloud computing”).

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

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31.5 MB | 1 Hour 16 Mins

WhoIsAndrewWee.com Inducted Into MyBlogLog Advisors And The Social Inner Circle

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I’d like to thank MyBlogLog Community Manager Robyn Tippins for the invite to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group (which I’ve accepted) and I’d also add on to my guest post on the MyBlogLog blog.

community

First the MBL Advisory Group: I’m looking forward to working closely with MBL to further bring the service to a new level. The other advisors are experts in their own right, like:

MBL is on the forefront of social networking especially for bloggers. In 2006, some naysayers were predicting that “blogging was dead, and Digg was the future”.

Uh huh.

Until Eric and the MBL team launched the MBL widget late last year which has become pervasive. In recent times, Scott Jangro’s BumpZee and BlogCatalog have launched their own variants of their social widget.

And lately you’ve got a number of wayward MBL users who’ve devised a number of dubious ways to generate income by comment or widget spamming the heck out of sites which use the MBL widget.

I think there’s a lot of bad information going out there. If you want to game social traffic or social media (depending on how you call it), you might like to Continue reading →