Disqus - Latest Comments for alexluft

Re: Potential New Audis Hinted At In Trademark Filings

Alex Luft — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 12:19:49 -0000

Who said anything about a "body on frame truck"? Th Q9 will be a true full-size crossover to accompany the A8:

A4 - Q5
A6 - Q7
A8 - Q9

Re: When Your Dealers Social Media Goes Extremely Wrong

Alex Luft — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:18:38 -0000

We will :) -- but we'll do it all in-house -- and will have complete control of the content and functionality.

Alex Luft
E-Marketing and Social Media Manager, Phil Long Dealerships

Re: When Your Dealers Social Media Goes Extremely Wrong

Alex Luft — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:19:33 -0000

Dear Jeff and the DealerRefresh Community:

My name is Alex Luft and I'm the E-marketing and Social Media manager at Phil Long Dealerships. Firstly, I would like to thank you for your article, as it sheds a considerable amount of light on the issues I've been having in attempting to delete the accounts you outlined -- include the Twitter account as well as the Community Page.

In short, I've been trying to remove the Ning Community page (PhilLongCommunity.com) and its associated Twitter account (@phillongcomm) for the last month and a half. Needless to say, neither is a shining example of communications -- or social media. As far as I know, both were created by third parties; since that time, we've brought all of our social efforts in-house. The third-party in question can not find the logins for either account -- and for the last month, I've been hard at work trying to remove both accounts via the proper communications channels with Twitter and Ning.

This has proven to be more difficult than expected -- since reporting the Twitter account to Twitter's @Spam bot has not resulted in the account being removed -- and contacting Ning is nigh impossible. The moral of the story is that things go down hill when
1) you don't have access to an account
2) the third party that created the accounts in the first place can't find the login info, and
3) getting in touch with someone at busy startups such as Twitter and Ning is a greek legend

It goes without saying that I will continue in my quest to remove these accounts from the face of the internet -- and would appreciate help from the DealerRefresh staff and community in bringing Twitter's and Ning's attention to the matter.

Having said that, here are some examples of Phil Long Dealerships' newly-established social media efforts:
facebook.com/mbcoloradosprings
facebook.com/phillongford

We're starting our social efforts slow and steady and will be picking up steam over the next two months. By that time, we certainly hope to be "knocking it dead," with an article on the front page of DealerRefresh.

Sincerely,

Alex Luft
E-marketing and Social Media Manager, Phil Long Dealerships

Re: Google is lost in location-based battle with Facebook, will it checkin?

Alex Luft — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:20:09 -0000

Thanks Robert. :)

Re: Google is lost in location-based battle with Facebook, will it checkin?

Alex Luft — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 18:07:42 -0000

Robert, this has to be one of the worst-written articles/posts I've ever read.

It lacks flow, which makes it difficult to read, and presents the info in a very illogical fashion... there's no order to the thoughts/ideas.

And to tell me that I should "find it on TechMeme" without providing a link... that's just a complete disregard for my time. If you want me to read your junk, at least make it easy for me to follow the conversation.

I don't mean to sound like an ass, but for a highly-respected _______ that Robert is considered to be in the industry, this article seems to have been written by someone in the 5th grade.

Re: How To See A 130 MPH Tennis Serve

Alex Luft — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:53:37 -0000

Dan,

Great post! Very fascinating to read. I wonder if the increased abilities developed in tennis players will carry over to other demanding motor-visual sports (like hockey, for example).

Alex from GM Authority - http://gmauthority.com

Re: WOW: Facebook Launches a Twitter App

Alex Luft — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:38:52 -0000

I think that's a common mistake when comparing Twitter and Facebook. For one to win, the other does not have to lose. So for Facebook to win, Twitter doesn't have to lose... and vice-versa.

The two can co-exist in perfect harmony and serve different markets and people - just like GM and Toyota.

We will be discussing this in further detail on today's TechNest Report podcast at 5:30p EST at http://bit.ly/tnrlive

(For some reason, my previous post was deleted)

Re: Google Chrome: Now with Bookmark Syncing (for the Brave)

Alex Luft — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:26:25 -0000

I wonder if Google is planning on eventually using its Google Bookmarks service to accomplish this for the user rather than Google Docs. Seems like a logical next step. Here's the TechNest Report take:
http://bit.ly/LtZ5l

Re: Documents are Business at Acrobat.com

Alex Luft — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:55:36 -0000

Those are awefully high prices for some very low limits on document creation: the basic plan is $12 per month and only allows for 10PDF files to be created - which equates to just over $1 per PDF. I can do it for free using Google Docs - and it's already free, exports to Word, plain text, *and* PDF. Typical Adobe: overcharge, under deliver. It will be successful :)

Re: Google: What is a Browser?

Alex Luft — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:49:01 -0000

Oh man, that's just sad. But - nevertheless - quite entertaining. Especially the guy who thinks he knows what he's talking about: "We have umm - AOL broadband and use Google as the browser... but go to Yahoo! sometimes just to give them some business."

Re: MySpace Terminates 400 Employees

Alex Luft — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:34:29 -0000

Agreed! I'll be diving into it more since I've signed up for an account, but from what I can tell at first glance, it looks very web-1.0 (hate to use a hot-button term for a design description, but oh well).

Re: MySpace Terminates 400 Employees

Alex Luft — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:03:37 -0000

I wonder how they'll get out of this slump they're in. Personally, I'm scared to use MySpace because of the horrendous design. I don't even have an account. But I guess I'll need one to figure out what's really wrong with it. Will be signing up for it soon.

PS: I find it hilarious that Van Natta is able to make such a statement about MySpace, having only been there for such a short period of time. I don't think he's the slightest clue of how to fix it and what's really wrong with it, although I could be very wrong.

Re: Big business responsive on social media

Alex Luft — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:52:49 -0000

Jason,

Great post! I think that as more and more people begin to use social media to express their dissatisfaction, frustration, complaints, or joy about certain products and/or services, the amount of people on the back end (of the company or service being talked about) is simply going to have to increase and it will all become like it is today with phone lines (or mail-in support/letters): only the most serious claims/problems/questions will reach a senior-level manager like a VP.

We're living in a very interesting time right now - let's take as much advantage of it as we can!

Re: YouTube XL Released; It’s YouTube Made for the TV

Alex Luft — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:17:20 -0000

So is this currently ONLY available on the PS3 and coming soon to the Wii?

When TV manufacturers are going to include this in TV browsers, how YouTube know to switch them over to the "XL" version? Is it a browser identifier that the TV makers will need to include in their browser?

It's interesting that the community features are stripped out. It would be nice to be able to have the XL interface send over the comment URL to my iPhone/Android phone for me to leave a comment.

Cool stuff, nonetheless.

Re: 4 Apps to Manage Amazon S3 on a Mac

Alex Luft — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:59:00 -0000

So after trying out Cyberduck, Transmit, and S3Hub, only one worked 100%: Transmit.

- Cyberduck didn't even connect to S3. It didn't recognize the user name/password, even after regenerating the secret access key (password) on amazon's web services site.

- S3Hub connected. But couldn't delete more than a certain amount of files at a time. I had about 10,000 files that were a few years old up on S3 in one bucket. I needed to delete all of them. But when I selected more than 50 files at a time and deleted, S3Hub hung. So it wasn't really deleting anything, just hanging.

- Transmit did the trick. It deleted everything I needed to be deleted in one fell swoop. I'm now uploading 50GB worth of raw podcast files from my podcast http://podcast.TechNestRepo... that I needed off my local drive. It seems to be going just fine. The only "downside" is that Transmit costs $30, but I'll gladly pay for quality software.

Well, there you have it. Hopefully Cyberduck and S3Hub will get better by this time next year. One can only hope!

<abbr>Alex Luft’s last blog post..Frame test - DiggBar: how much traffic does the DiggBar frame steal from your site?</abbr>

Re: YouTube is Huge and About to Get Even Bigger

Alex Luft — Mon, 25 May 2009 01:06:29 -0000

Those numbers are huge, indeed. But do you think that brand recognition is going to be the thing that drives some users away from the site? The fact that I'm NOT on YouTube and my player doesn't look like the YouTube player (and doesn't have the logo) makes it all that much cooler that I'm on Vimeo (for example).

But I have to say, that the YouTube community (which grows from its numbers) is super-important and super-huge. I do hope they can monetize it. I'm sure they have tricks. We're just in the beginning here. Let's see where this goes in two years.

Re: Twitter Tees: Twitter Launches Official Threadless T-Shirt Store

Alex Luft — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:45:39 -0000

Right! That's a great feature.

What I meant was more along the lines of if another t-shirt site wanted to do the same - print Tweets as slogans on a shirt: how would they go about doing that + the TOS?

PS: I couldn't find a way to respond to your post, Jennifer, so sorry for not following netiquette :)

Re: Facebook Embraces OpenID; Login With Gmail

Alex Luft — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:00:04 -0000

Google FriendConnect did support Facebook Connect but Facebook disabled it, saying that it violates Facebook's Terms of Service. Obviously, they wanted to push Facebook Connect.

I think that we are seeing all of these identity platforms emerge but what we need is one open-source one. Think about it, we have:
- Google FriendConnect
- Facebook Connect
- MySpace Data availability (or whatever it's officially called)
- Twitter sign-on
- Open-ID
- Disqus
- IntenseDebate
- Google account

Did I miss anything? We need one, not all of these. And one that is open-source and not proprietary. If you ask me, I'd say it's between Google FriendConnect and OpenID.

Re: Twitter Tees: Twitter Launches Official Threadless T-Shirt Store

Alex Luft — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:36:28 -0000

The relationship of Tweets and copyright is surely interesting. I'll be looking at the TOS for more information. How do other Twitter t-shirt manufacturers go about complying with the TOS, since Threadless is the one company that's directly affiliated with Twitter (officially official, that is).

Alex from http://TechNestReport.com - a blog, podcast, and TV channel that covers the tech industry from head to toe!

Re: 4 Apps to Manage Amazon S3 on a Mac

Alex Luft — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:31:27 -0000

Ok, S3Hub works... but doesn't work to delete a huge amount of files. Cyberduck doesn't log in. Going to try S3Fox and Transmit.

<abbr>Alex Luft’s last blog post..Some sites still don’t think Twitter is important</abbr>

Re: Use friendfeed to view Twitter replies

Alex Luft — Sat, 16 May 2009 14:56:29 -0000

Jason, great tip! I'm rather new to FriendFeed but see it can be used for so much more than a Twitter clone (not that it is one). I think that the difficulty I've been having with wrapping my mind around FF is that it has so many features: you can use it as an aggregator for all of your activities on the web, to post to Twitter, chat in groups - as if the entire web became a chat room (http://scobleizer.com/2008/..., and now - thanks to you - roll your own Twitter replies stream.

I've also been playing around with Microsoft's Live social network service (http://www.wired.com/epicen...

The Microsoft Live effort (I think they call it Live Network) is more or less an aggregator of all your web activity - like FriendFeed, but it looks like it's trying to take advantage of the user's current Microsoft Live/Hotmail contacts to establish connections.

Stay cool and keep building something beautiful!

Alex Luft from http://TechNestReport.com - a tech blog, podcast, and TV channel where we cover the tech industry from head to toe.

Re: 4 Apps to Manage Amazon S3 on a Mac

Alex Luft — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:50:57 -0000

Thanks for the post, Andy. I tried using Cyberduck to access S3 but failed miserably. It wouldn't accept my login info. This is coming from someone who uses Cyberduck exclusively as my main FTP client.

Giving S3hub a go as we speak. I have 50GB of raw pre-recorded podcasts that I need to get off my drive asap. What's the best place for them? S3, of course!

<abbr>Alex Luft’s last blog post..TechNest Report Podcast 34 - The make-up show</abbr>

Re: Since Everyone Loved Digg For Frames Facebook Follows Suit

Alex Luft — Sun, 10 May 2009 10:08:26 -0000

@spryka: and how does that have anything to do with the topic at hand - e.g. - site framing...

In other news, I thought digg fixed their diggbar to a certain extent. They didn't fix it completely (it still defaults to the diggbar if logged in) but for users that aren't logged in, it takes them directly (permanent redirect) to the linked-to site.
http://www.downloadsquad.co...

Alex from http://TechNestReport.com - a tech blog, podcast, and TV channel that covers the tech industry from head to toe

Re: Windows Mobile Sales

Alex Luft — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:46:03 -0000

22 million? So they're outselling the iPhone with an almost 2:1 ratio? That's interesting, given how horrible Win Mo is. Can we get some numbers to support this or is this all pie-in-the-sky?

Alex from TechNestReport.com - a tech blog and daily tech podcast