Tag: social

Yahoo Life! anybody?

(Side note: punctuation in product names sure makes headlines confusing)

Mashable has a post about upcoming Yahoo Life!

The premise is this: take Yahoo Mail, and make it the hub of your daily online activities; turn e-mail addresses into social profiles; connect e-mail to other services, and use the info from the contacts in these services according to the context.

This sounds good.  This sounds like exactly what I need.  Of course, there is a “but”:

It sounds and looks great, but we can’t know how well it works until the product actually goes live.

OK, we have to wait and see.  But I see that this niche will get a bit crowded pretty soon.  With all those web services and social networks more and more people are coming online.  Social connections will be more and more important, and therefor we’ll see more and more tools that do this.  There are some specialized tools for these purposes already, but none of them have enough functionality and momentum to lead the way yet.  Hopefully it will change sooner than later.  And, hopefully, Google will play some major role in this too…

Blog 365 initiative

Via Web Worker Daily I learned about Blog 365.  That’s a nice idea which I heard and did before, and which I think is still valuable enough to bring attention to.

More and more people are joining the blogosphere every day.  More and more people ask the same questions over and over – “how can I improve my blogging?”, “how can I get more comments?”, “how can I promote my blog more?”, etc.  To all of them I answer – Blog 365.

You see, the hardest part of blogging is … actually, blogging – thinking about things, finding things, preparing content, and posting it.  You can have all bells and features on your blog, and it can be search engine optimized to no avail, but if you don’t publish any posts, nothing will matter.  Most blogs get lost and disappear because they don’t get updated anymore.

Now, if you are new to blogging, then posting every day may sound like a hard job to do.  I’ll tell you a little secret – it is, but for just a few weeks. The thing here is to make blogging into a routine.  Once your brain understands that it has to produce at least one post every day, it will start looking for and creating content by itself.  You won’t have to do anything, but pick the bits that you like better and write them down.

I did a “have to publish at least one post every day” experiment a few times myself.  The longest one was, I think, in 2004 and ran for about a year and a half.  My posts varied from thoughts, notes, and simple links to somebody else’s pictures and videos.  Eventually, I got it into my system.  I had no problems posting something every day.  Even better than that.  There was a period of time when I felt uncomfortable if I didn’t publish anything.

Sure, I did my share of polluting the web with crap that nobody cares about.  But that was all for the better.  Here are the benefits from the top of my head:

  • my English got better.  Much better.
  • my touch-typing  got better. Much better.
  • my Google skills got better. Much better.
  • my reasoning got better. I learned that if I say something, I might be asked for a reference, so I learned to check those references before I was saying anything.
  • my blog got more popular (more incoming links, more and better search engine results positioning, more people coming in and staying, more comments)
  • my understanding of many social (people, communications, other cultures) and technical (Internet, blogging tools, search engines) topics improved a lot.
  • I found a few more friends (not as in “close friends”, but as in “people with who I enjoy talking a lot”) that I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

These are just a few.  There are many more.  Like all those archives that I can search through and cross reference now…

So, if you are interesting in blogging, the Internet, or communications, take my advice – join the Blog 365 project.  It’s much easier to do this with several other people, than alone.  They understand what you are going through and how tough it is during the first few weeks.  They’ll help you out with ideas, tips, links, and comments.  You’ll get more out of it than you can imagine.  We all will. Just give it a try.

Blogging is a skill.  It’s like tough-typing, programming, riding a bicycle, or driving – you can read all about it you want, but you won’t get any better until you’ll sit down and start blogging.  A lot.  So, here is your chance.  Take it!

Marketing social objects

There are a couple of interesting posts (part one, part two) at gaping void on how the Internet (particularly, its social side) is changing marketing. As often with such analysis, the matters could be a little exaggerated and examples somewhat simplistic.  However, if you can handle those, you’ll sure find a few interesting points raised.

Let me get you started with a quote:

Now, when you buy something, you don’t phone up the company and order a brochure. You go onto Google and check out what other people- people like yourself- are saying about the product. In terms of communication, the company no longer has first-mover advantage. They don’t ask your company for the brochure until your product has already jumped through a series of hoops that SIMPLY WERE NOT there twenty years ago.
YOU NO LONGER CONTROL THE CONVERSATION. THEN AGAIN, MAYBE YOU NEVER DID.

30 Boxes solves calendaring

http://30boxes.com is a brand new webservices. The public beta was launched last Sunday.

The purpose of the site is to solve the surprisingly difficult problem of calendaring. What’s wrong with calendaring, you might ask? Well, lots of things. Existing calendaring applications are complicated and clumsy, unpractical for sharing and social interactions, and, well, “traditional”.

http://30boxes.com chose a fresh approach. They have totally and completely minimized and simplified the user interface.

Entering events can be done with as little as filling in one single text field. Application understands human language like “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, and “next week”. You can have “buddies” which is just their term for contacts. All you have to do to add a contact is specify email address. You buddies can have calendars of their own, you can share calendars and even use the system to send invitations and confirmations/denies for events. You can track a lot more information about your buddies too – Flickr photos, LiveJournal entries, MySpace blog, and any other RSS feed. When there are new items – you get a small icon on the appropriate day of the calendar and can quickly check what they are up to.

The interface looks very clean and works pretty fast. It’s also based on AJAX technology which allows you to see updates without refreshing the page – feels nice.

Check it out – it costs nothing, and can do a lot for your organized life!

Mr. Manners: Modern Greeting Techniques

College Humor has a nice article today about the art of handshaking. It is called “Mr. Manners: Modern Greeting Techniques“. It is written in an easy way which resembles a question-answer corresnpondence. Read it. It might help you socialize better. And it is pretty funny.