DISQUS

Monitter is a nice one, although really that search is superceded these days if you have an app like TweetDeck.

I always liked http://strawpollnow.com/ as a great visual way of using Twitter.

I think the lack of goals is often the biggest weakness. People blog without any real idea of what they are trying to achieve. Even those looking at monetising their blogs don't have any clear aim beyond "make some money".

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and have to kick myself from time to time to think about what I'm trying to achieve, and my strategies for that achievement.

A couple of aspects I'd add:

The splitting of goals into short, medium and long term goals. If you only have long term goals then you can feel demotivated because achievement seems so far away, and its difficult to identify progress. But only having short term goals means a lack of focus once they've been achieved.

And it's also important to constantly re-evaluate your goals as when as your strategy. Changing circumstances, new lessons learned, these not only impact how you go about things, but they can also make your original goals redundant or worth altering. People too often get stuck into the idea of "I set this goal and so I have to move forward" even if circumstances have changed and they can have more success with some flexibility and reevaluation.

I think the "sexy question" is also something that suggests a genuine interest, rather than just repeating a rote. That's the most important thing, people will be interested in you if it seems like you're interested in them.

Oh, one thing to add as well, and a vital one:

I've been to many conferences where there has been a bar. Or to networking events when there are complimentary cocktails.

Whatever you do, stay sober. There is no worse impression you can give than to get drunk at an event like this. Be careful you don't even get tipsy accidentally.

Good to see another example of individuals understanding the wider benefit of digital downloading as well as traditional commercial options. There does appear to be an increasing trickle towards this aspect of sales from a number of bigger names in different fields, e.g. Nine Inch Nails have largely embraced free downloads of their music.

I think early adopters are in some cases genuinely harming the take up of social media services on a wider level. What surprises me is that, if these services are as good as the early adopters claim, why are they limiting their own usage to tech related issues all the time.

I'm a social media junkie. But I don't talk about it *all* the time, even to other people who share the interest. I have the same interest in football/soccer, in movies, in sci-fi, etc. Those articles are rarely commented on or form the basis of discussion on Friendfeed, even by those people who puport to be big fans of the service. They seem to be fans only so far as they spend a lot of time discussing social media, and failing to utilise it more widely themselves.

It's difficult to differentiate, and you've picked out some great examples from different walks of life. I think in the web/online world it's easier to get away with a touch of quirkiness. But it's very difficult to find a balance between necessary seriousness and being overly gimmicky.

Personalisation, originality in site design while retaining intuitive navigation. Having a niche, even if it's not a massive difference just a different approach. E.g. I should focus more on my expertise in usability and accessibility in web design perhaps.

We're definitely in the honeymoon period as you suggest. We're in the boom, with everyone piling in with the *hope* that they can take advantage of the initial media interest and be a success. It's fractured and fragmented. Basically this is the Web 2.0 version of the initial .com boom, and probably with even less of an idea of how to monetise the services and businesses. It's fascinating quite how obvious the parallels are and how it seems that people are falling into exactly the same trap again.

You're right. The success of the most social networking tools is going to be achieving a functionality outside the early adopter market. I'm not entirely sure how many of them are even thinking about that. They have to be incredibly simple to use, almost entirely intuitive, and offer value to all,.

I can fully understand Pandora being careful on the legal issues. I think it's clear that they were seeking to offer a more comprehensive streaming selection than the other services that operate globally. Have a look at how often a track is "unavailable" on Last.fm. I'm assuming that's down to licensing issues.

I also miss Pandora as I was an early adopter who got shut out because of the licensing. But to be honest I don't see it as something to get annoyed about, because I see it as reasonably understandable. I applaud that Pandora is trying to provide the widest selection of music possible, and if that right now means they're limited to a US market then such is life.

The confidence is a huge part of it, and well highlighted.

Here's what I think is a big part of my secret to gaining the confidence, professionally, in-person and online, to be successful...

I'm a bit of a geek in my interests. Geeks generally aren't considered to be confident people. But one of my niche interests is live-roleplaying. In which I started to roleplay characters who were...well...more confident than I was as a person.

Effectively I faked it until I made it. And I found that doing it in a fictional setting transfers perfectly well to a real life setting. If I can pretend to be confident and carry it off successfully, then there's no reason why I shouldn't just *be* confident in myself. :)

Some great ideas already listed, don't think I could argue with any of them.

For me:

Definitely concur with the idea of being able to more effectively monitor/update/remove the dormant contacts.

On a more general note I'd like to see LinkedIn become more...um...actively interactive. At the moment while I have connections and a network there seems less impetus towards an active and communicative network. Q&A is excellent, but wonder if groups might be being underused (...albeit it may be me underusing groups).

#1 thing is definitely a note-taking ability though. That extends to notes about individual contacts, Q&A discussions, groups, etc.

That's a great cause, but also a great way to present it. Unlike many posts, even on otherwise unrelated blogs, it doesn't just say "charity event" and put me off. I was genuinely interested to find out about the background, the unique social media aspect of this appeal, and find out more about the individuals and the cause behind it.

Imaginative and worthy, and well worth getting involved in. Best of luck to all involved.

Never really understood the Technorati rankings. They do seem to be wildly variable, and therefore meaningless. I'd stopped looking at it entirely until you reminded me of its existence with the post!

As an example, I just hit refresh on my own blog's page on Technorati. My rank went from 460,000 to 520,000. For a page refresh. That just makes no sense. Authority I guess is a worthwhile measure, but even so I've little real interest in technorati any more.

Following up on what Mark said, I agree that staying away from the free services is probably a good idea for a corporate/business blog. In addition to the reasons he cites, I'd also suggest that you want to have the control over the basic blog design necessary to make it fully integrated appearance-wise into your own site. While that is possible with systems like Blogger, it's often a significant fudge (as used to be the case when I integrated Blogger into my site rather than control the whole thing with WordPress).

An additional suggestion would be to start a series early. As a blog for an existing company - particularly larger or well established companies - you have the advantage of some developed authority already. Use that to develop a regular tutorial/comment/advice series. In addition to developing traffic, a regular series of this type is great for getting you into the *habit* of blogging.

The free but ads based model isn't a web 2.0 thing though. It happened in exactly the same way...and with exactly the same lack of long term success...with web 1.0. That's what constantly amazes me, that both advertisers and site/service developers appear in many ways to be making exactly the same mistakes as happened in the past - basing their long term business success on either ad revenue or selling up to a larger corporate who would then fail themselves to monetise the site.

And the attempts to monetise largely failed. There's so much competition that people will simply move on, because there's always a free option. Easiest way for Facebook to kill itself in about five minutes would be to introduce a nominal charge. I don't see how you can monetise something effectively when you can't sell the service itself.

Although that being said, look at the explosion of free newspapers in the last few years (e.g. just in London you have Metro, LondonLite, TheLondonPaper). These are all advertising funded, but I can't remember ever looking at the adverts. So if the business model extends beyond the web, I'm curious as to how exactly it works anywhere!

Whole thing strikes me as a bit of a storm in a teacup. I'd never even considered my ownership of comments on FriendFeed or other blogs, certainly I'd never felt like it was hugely important I maintained rights over them.

On FriendFeed, if the original item is deleted from the feed then it makes sense that the comments are removed also. Otherwise it's a discussion with no initial context, which is frankly just going to clog things up and confuse. And ultimately there'll be a natural selection in any case so that users who do try to abuse the feature, and delete things to remove the comments...well their posts will just end up being uncommented.

I think you're taking a very sensible course of action. We get excited when opportunities come our way, often so excited that we say yes without really thinking about the consequences. Being able to step back and consider, and say no, is definitely going to be far better for your long term reputation than delivering late on a promise, or even worse not delivering at all.

It's tough though, and that's because it's great to be wanted. Have to say that Chip's idea of a "think week" is one of the best I've heard in a long time in terms of ensuring you keep your priorities straight.

I think I'd probably have to split my "first steps" into two stages - the first dabbles and then the genuine steps towards involving myself in social media.

The first dabbles were a good while ago, looking at the likes of del.icio.us, digg and myspace (for my sins). But never with great involvement, and the only consistent thing I did was occasionally post to Livejournal.

It's only really towards the end of last year that I got back into things, started blogging on a regular basis myself, and involving myself in wider social networks. I think the important think was realising that I had niche interests, and that I'd often found the likes of digg to be too wide ranging and too trivial. Now I focus on the likes of Sphinn and Mixx. I also think I'm more enthusiastic because of the greater interactivity of social media now, particularly the likes of twitter.

I'm not sure there are particular individuals I admire. Perhaps Maki at DoshDosh because, although I'm not personally looking to make money directly from social networking, I think it's reading there that really motivated me to get more involved on all levels.

@Anatoly - the privacy configuration noted above is a universal setting, so there's no need to know what applications your friends are using. You're setting your privacy as regards all their applications.

As regards the article as a whole, while I think the BBC exaggerated the danger some, I think this underestimates it. Yes, I think Facebook has got itself legally covered because of the options it's providing users. But I also think it's legitimate to highlight that many (most?) Facebook users may not be the most tech-savvy and that the potential dangers, and the extent to which they can protect themselves using Facebook's own settings, are going to go over their head. Certainly it's not something that Facebook highlights, for obvious reasons.

I agree that Twitter can make some moves to combat spam. CAPTCHA is not the way to go though. It's already been highlighted as a major accessibility block to social networking sites and is definitely overused. An easy "report spam" option and similar measures would be better.

A well worthwhile explanation. I admit it took me a while to get my head around Twitter and its functionality as a social networking tool. But over the last week or two I've started to focus on what you're talking about - the use of Twitter as a *listening* tool.

Let's face it, the interactive nature of the Web means that what we want to do most of the time is *talk*, whether that be through blogging, commenting, posting to social networking sites. Twitter is primarily a tool for listening, and sure it kind of falls down on functionality and purpose if all you're doing is checking out how your friends are "feeling a bit tired today" or similar. But following high quality posters and business leaders can help you be first on the buzz for topics, get the earliest links to new blog posts etc.

Sure it's still interactive, but it's more about providing you with information that you providing the world with your thoughts.

Facebook is reliant on its developers for any kind of deeper functionality. That's going to give them a significant problem in trying to make and changes, cosmetic or otherwise, to the site. Even if they communicate to developers, many applications are still going to fall over. And without the applications, even though most of them are trivial or entertainment based, what's actually left on Facebook beyond an initial hook-up with old contacts which you then switch to email?

I think there's going to be a significant challenge for Sandberg over the long term because I think Facebook has a hard ceiling of growth.

The more I think about it the more I feel that Facebook is one of the weaker social networking options around. It provides no real functionality or added value to users. Other options such as StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, even MySpace (for the music) offer resource for their users. Facebook provides a means to initially hook up with people, but no really blogging capability (a la LiveJournal or MySpace) and a lack of any depth barring user created apps that are almost always for short term entertainment.

Facebook has the "buzz" and a good growth rate but it all seems to be built on somethat that's lacking substance, and that's something they'll need to address for long term success.

It's fair to say that Blogger can be a bit of a pain to template, and beyond appearance I'd like to look at those templates and their ability to correctly render meta tag data. That was certainly an issue I kept missing for a while.

But equally these templates demonstrate that there is a lot more flexibility in the Blogger template than at first appears. Certainly I've been pleased with my ability to skin it at my site, and fit it into the overall theme very effectively. It's certainly not the most user-friendly to skin but once you work your way around its foibles it's not too bad.