DISQUS

I cannot wait to install this feature on my Disqus enabled blog. brilliant

Mark - I realize you like to "know" who the person on the other end of the brand is but I, like most people (I think) just need to know that it's a person. Heck, I don't care if that person rotates. If I know the person's name, then let me build a relationship with them separately - under their own Twittername. I love Pete to death and he has helped us out quite a bit, but I must state that his Mashable Twitter account has become 90% re-posting & marketing of Mashable content and 10% Pete. I really wish he'd split out the account name into an @mashable and a @Pete. There's not much of a human face to his Twitter acct any more. There's no deception behind a brand Twittering. Why on Earth would I expect a brand to be "going to an event" I'd rather think of it as a talking brand I can interact with.

We use Twitter a ton for both ourselves and our 2 brands. mark, you call for more transparency but could you define it better in this context? I mean, when I see a brand on twitter, I certainly know a person at that brand must be typing in the message and my expectation are already set as to what I will "get" from that brand. What kind of transparency is, then, lacking in your eye?

Thank you to all the Bloggers who thought us worthy of a Runner up. We a GiftGirl are truly honored - Jean & Mike

So Chris - excellent points that now have me pondering. A couple of questions though: How do you know it's down beyond constantly trying to subscribe to your own feed. I check Feedburner's site a few times a week and it always has stats, etc so nothing "appears" messed up. Are there other alternatives to keep tabs on your subs?

Thanks,

Mike

PS Glad to see @garyvee do a nice shout out

I have grappled with this dilemma for awhile now. We have a subscriber model on our main sight. I am in the camp of liking my content on the web (consumable reading type content a la online magazines, etc) to be free and ad supported. The reason is, there is just so much of it I try to consume, paying for it in the way I'd pay for a copy of Time at a news stand isn't practical - esp the way it is delivered in small chunks. On the other hand, I look to businesses like Club Penguin, et al who charge < $10/mo and are able to acquire 100's of thousands of subs. Their "content" is consumed very differently and the model seems to make sense to everyone. I think of ads on ad supported sites as part of the content, in a way. If the publisher wants to junk up their site with trashy ads, they will reap what they sow. If they try and include ads into the design and aim of their site, success will be achieved.

I'd be willing to bet the "mood" during the great depression was much worse, and I'm sure it stinks for the person who got laid off or woke up to realize that he actually shouldn't have borrowed 100% of the price of his house, but I guess I'm not so sure it's at an historic low

My biggest criteria to evaluate & compare is whether you like having feeds divided up by folder and that remains the domain of personal preference. I think "star" is misnamed, a common problem in UX. GR didn't put much thought into what they wanted the function to mean. Save & Pin do a better job, as you said. I'm also not sure I'd give as much weight to "settings", etc as we're probably more likely to sacrifice bad settings mgt for a good reading experience. Aggregation is also a personal pref thing: My feeds are so diverse, I can't imagine seeing them all together. All said, Bloglines has been in beta for so long, I think they forgot about it. It needs a great deal of work. Bear in mind, this is all from a person who doesn't like Gmail...an indicator

Why on earth would MySpace kick someone off? For being offensive? Or do they differentiate between lurking and offensive lurking? As a business trying to take advantage of the demo Mr. S. speaks of, I can only express my frustration. They are SO not trying to help. The only bright spot has been the very nice person in cust svc who always emails me and tries to fix my recurring problems with Pages. Of course, they still aren't fixed but at least she's not rude!

1. Nice to see Yahoo paying attention to who is saying what about them. re xian. More importantly, however, is the lack of transparency on just where they are getting all the content from. They claim it's from blogs all over but checking the Fashion & Beauty section, for our own research purposes (and to perhaps consider joining the conversation if we can) you find very few blogs and mostly stuff from writers at Allure, Lucky or Shine editorial staff. They don't link directly to these places and to subscribe you have to sign in and go thru Yahoo processes. There is also no listing at all of the contributors. It's practically as closed a system as Facebook. That's fine, of course, Yahoo can do what it wants, but seems to go against their mantra expressed as a place to get the best of the web for women, etc. All that said, we'll try to get in on the fun as you can't argue with 40mm girls!

I did the exact same thing several weeks ago inviting all my friends to StumbleUpon. To this day I don't know how I did it. Lucky for me the ex's are long gone from my address book and, interestingly, 11 friends wrote to thank me for the heads up on SU. I was pissed at them nonetheless. Oh, and one stone-age dwelling friend mentioned "What the hell is this you sent me?"

oops. i should have read Robert's rebuttal 1st. didn't mean to repeat his point. sorry Scobleizer, my bad

Judi, I respect your position although I disagree with some of your points. Here's one: by your logic (it's wrong for me, via Plaxo, to move my FB address book over to Plaxo - or similarly in Gmail) if I did the same manually, one by one, by reading the email image off of every one of my FB friends - I would be equally wrong? To my mind, Plaxo isn't moving the addresses - I am, with a Plaxo tool. I understand it feels spammy and a violation but I am having trouble seeing you "all address book importers are bad" argument, which is how it sounds. All that said I am now subscribing to your various feeds. another articulate voice to listen to.

How true. Aside from the sad fact that this app will lure plenty of gullible fools (thank God it's marked down from its original price of $87!) the real value is FB is the huge benefit to be gained by the slow, methodical, and personal acquisition of real friends on the platform.

Nick - I have been experimenting with pages and ads since the day they were introduced to promote and start discussion on my company www.giftgirl.com. The results are mixed at best. 1st Issue: technology. FB seems to think I have 2 pages and when I try to edit the "phantom" page it takes me to my personal page. FB support acknowledged this as a bug. I think it may directly be leading to other issues. I started running ads on Nov 07 and got a fair number of clicks when all of a sudden they dropped to single digits on the 16th. No explanation of why, etc I upped the bid, nothing. I then upped it to a ridiculous amount to experiment. Nothing. What changed? ( i do realize I could have just been way ahead of the curve and been the only one running ads! 2nd issue: management: You can't modify your ads, you must create a new one. bad. Graphs are on a week by week basis in the table. Why not allow for a longer time period? On a final note: They do a horrible job at telling you how to go about using pages vs groups. Should you post items? Should you post notes? Is there a way to put things on your fans' news feeds (perhaps with an opt out option so companies don't end up spamming) I created a fictional fb member to test what gets posted by my company page so I didn't annoy my fans and actually could tell how my actions looked as I posted them and I gotta tell you it's not obvious the best way to provide value to your fan base. The last thing I want is for the page to end up like a group....something that users join for status then blow off. Good article, Thanks - Mike