In yet another Twitter review (and a nice one at that), I caught this quote (emphasis is mine):
If you are a twitterer, you can follow my infrequent tweets under my screen name of tevslin. My last tweet is from 3:45AM this morning complaining that I was up for an early flight. Don’t know why you want to know this; don’t know why I wrote it; but that’s what social people do.
Excellent!
If you care about web promotion of your web site, if you post articles titled “10 steps to do XYZ” or “ABC in 3 minutes”, if you want your blog posts to be bookmarked across all social networks, if you follow your incoming links with more attention than your personal hygiene, then here is a tip for you.
Look at the limitations that social bookmarking services impose on their users. Make sure that you provide a quick way to bookmark your site with sufficient information which is within those limitations.
Take del.icio.us for example. Which limitations does it impose on the users? There are a few, but the main one is the length of the description. Whenever I bookmark your web site, I can only post 255 characters of the description. This is too much and this is too little.
This is too much if I will have to type my own description. I don’t have the time to describe all the web sites that I bookmark. For many of them, I don’t even have any idea of what to write, since I bookmark the web site to check it out later… So whenever I bookmark a web site, I look around for a quick way to generate that description. And the easiest and fastest way is always a copy-paste.
That’s where that description length limitation becomes too small. Most web sites have an “About” page these days. But it’s too long for a description. A couple of paragraphs could do, and I can almost always find those paragraphs to copy-paste, but they almost never fit into 255 characters. That’s where you come in.
First of all, make sure that there is a piece of text, less than 255 characters long, that gives me an idea of what the article is or post or page or web site is about. Secondly, make sure that I can find that piece of text easily. Make it bold. Put a border around it.  Slap a “Synopsis” or “About” or “In brief” label somewhere nearby. You can even go as noisy as “del.icio.us users might want to use this as description: …”.
Why would you want to go into all that trouble? Because this will help me, your visitor, to keep my bookmarks organized and annotated. I will be able to find this bookmark much faster later on. And that means that chances of me coming back, of me sending this link to someone else, or blogging about it are much higher. And that is what you, as a web promoter, want. Isn’t it?
Slashdot runs the “Turning E-Mail into a Social Network” post, which links to this article about Google and Yahoo approach:
Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.
This feels very natural. Both Google and Yahoo indeed aggregate a lot of personal data and a lot of personal relationships (who knows who, who emails who and how often, etc). It’s logical to assume that they want to expand what they have, and social networks is one of the ways to go.
So, why email? Email has a number of advantages over other media:
I wish email was better integrated with half of the social networks that I use. Most of them use some sort of their own messaging system. Some don’t even provide any messaging at all. And all of them would have to do much less work if they relied more on email.  I’m glad to see that Google and Yahoo realize this.
I’m always amazed and shaken when ugly things work. I know they often do, but every time it happens, it’s like the first time for me.
There are many examples around, MySpace.com being the most well known. The idea behind it is nice – to provide a place for youngsters to communicate and share pictures and music. But the way it is implemented is truly ugly. Yet, MySpace.com is one of the top visited web sites on the Web.
Odnoklassniki.ru is another example of this. (Odnoklassniki is a Russian word for “classmates”.) Again, the idea was pretty good – create a way for people to find their classmates and all friends easily. 10, 15, 20 years later names and faces tend to fade out and we don’t remember them all that good anymore. So, those of us who want to get re-connected with friends from the old days have some troubles locating those. With Odnoklassniki.ru it becomes pretty easy – pick the region, area, and school or college where you studied, specify the years during which your were there, and you’ll be shown other people who are registered on the web site, who studied at the same place during approximately the same years. Names and pictures are there, and those help a lot.
The way the whole thing is setup is terrible though. First of all, the web site is horribly slow. Always. I’ve been registered there since forever, and I was checking it out once in a while – always slow. Secondly, it tries to be everything – a contact manager, a search engine, people directory, photo sharing and rating service, messenger, forum, and so on. Needless to say, it sucks badly at most of these. There is not a single function that works properly.
But, the main thing is that it works. The web site is very popular in Russia and lots of people register there every day. I myself managed to find and connect with people who I lost and forgotten a long time ago.
When I think about how these things work, this quote comes to mind (from Pirates of Silicon Valley movie):
Steve Jobs: We’re better than you are! We have better stuff.
Bill Gates: You don’t get it, Steve. That doesn’t matter!
I am getting sucked into that thing called LinkedIn that I blogged about the other day. Yes, it is THAT good. If I were to measure the “goodness” of it, it’ll be just a bit under Flickr and just a bit above YouTube.
I was surprised to find out that not all features are available, or, should I say, so obvious on the first day of usage. The best of them, the real cream, comes on the second, third, and later days.
On the first day I’ve just created myself an account and filled in my profile with all the places I worked at and studied at. I also found some familiar people, got connected to them, and browsed through their contacts. That about it.
On the second day, when I logged in, I was presented with a whole bunch of news. First of all, there were news about my contacts. Some of those people updated their profiles, some quit jobs, some found new jobs, some added more contacts. I saw it all in a nice and clean way, with links for further information.
Then, further down the page, I was shown some statistics about my network. I was told how many people joined my network, how it expanded, etc, etc. And I had a link to even more statistics, which I will talk about in a minute.
Then, I had something totally unbelievable – three vacancies that met my specifications. All three in Europe, which I mentioned I was willing to relocate. And all three of these vacancies came from my own network of connections. That is not the complete “out of the blue”, but via people who I know via people who know… How cool is that?
Another sweet thing that I saw was information about new people entering LinkedIn, who studied in the same places that I studied at. It just said so in the most plain and simple way possible – “There is 1 new person from Intercollege”. And it was a link to that person’s profile. Wow. Really, really, nice.
Remember that statistics link I just mentioned above? Well, of course, I couldn’t pass it by. Click. Now I got even more stats, but, again, they were all nicely organized and presented in the most useful way. These new statistics told me everything about my network – locations, industries, growth and expansion, etc. I was also provided with links to profiles of people from my industry, nearby industries, remote industries, fast growing locations, random locations, new people from my own location, and so and so forth.
I think I’ve spent half of the day wondering around, learning about all the features and looking through all the people… Now it was time for more action.
I’ve sent invitations to many people, explaining to each of them what LinkedIn is and why they should join. Almost all of them did, by the way. Some of them just created a profile to “get rid of me”. Others proceeded to add their own contacts. My network is growing fast, as you can see from the image above.
With all these new contacts I started noticing that there are several ways I can reach new people, that I am connected to them via several of my contacts, and that some of my contacts know each other without even me knowing it. Even though, they live and work in different countries. Amazing!
With all that activity, introductions started to fly around. Introductions are this great feature of LinkedIn, which allows one person to ask another to forward an introduction to the third one. That is, if person A knows person B, who knows person C, person A can ask Person B to forward a letter to person C, so that they can get connected. It sounds a bit confusing, but it is extremely logical and very easily done at LinkedIn.
And so on, and so on, and so on…
It seems that features are endless at LinkedIn, and somehow they are all packed into this very intuitive and cool looking interface, which is a breeze to use. I’m almost speechless. I’m divng deeper and deeper into LinkedIn… C’mon you guys, dive with me!