Posts tagged Time
The Time Suck of Social Media – Small Business Trends
Feb 8th
 PR Web (press release) |
The Time Suck of Social Media
Small Business Trends CNN Tech Don't forget about SEO. If you think social media negates your need for good Search Engine Optimization strategy, think again. SEO is still very much alive and very important to your online business even in the age of social networking. Hands-on conference teaches PR and marketing pros how to write social media … SEO Training SW hosts a #Social Media Workshop – Phoenix, Arizona 3 Ways Enterprises Cripple Their Online Marketing Efforts |
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Now is the Time to Quit Facebook
Feb 6th
There’s a debate going on about whether or not Zuck should hand over some cash to users. Nick Bilton at the New York Times is waiting for his cash out. I, too, have argued that Zuck should “share” his Facebook kingdom, an online culture that he created (and owns more than 25% of) and should probably participate in more. PandoDaily’s Paul Carr believes this is an entirely useless conversation: “People joined Facebook – in ludicrously large numbers – because they chose to. The package of free services that Facebook offers is so valuable (useful, fun, voyeuristically exciting…) that it outweighs the privacy costs and effort involved in constantly posting and liking and updating.”
And then there are the people who prefer to ignore this entire conversation, completely opting out of the Facebook cultural phenomenon. They have joined together on other social networks – Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ – to discuss leaving Facebook. On their website, http://www.im-not-on-facebook.com/, they sell mugs and t-shirts (women’s available in four colors! Crew neck available in five colors and white!) for as little as $10.99 a piece. In a Facebook-centric culture, these rebels need to band together and stand out. But are their measures too drastic?
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I’m Not on Facebook’s Twitter stream re-tweets conversations, other tweets and articles about people who have quit Facebook or who are considering the downsides of staying on Facebook. You have probably heard of those people – perhaps you’re even one of them. You talk about getting off Facebook all of the time. You love Facebook in those moments it works for you, and hate it when you “accidentally” waste an entire morning reading status updates about the Super Bowl. Or maybe you’ve done a “stopping Facebook” experiment and realized it’s just not for you. Internet users who are re-tweeted on @notonfacebook‘s Twitter are seriously serious about not being on Facebook. “I sold my iPhone, I quit Facebook.. I will probably sell my soul soon. Takers? lolz,” tweets @gwapz.
One story that @notonfacebook recently retweeted is titled “How I Deleted My Facebook Account and Walked Away from 555 Friends.” It is honest, important and worth a read if you give a crap about real-world friendships.
“Either way, I’ve always believed that real friendship is reciprocal, not promotional,” writes blogger Cindy La Ferle. “And certainly more than virtual. Real friends do more than punch the ‘like’ key on your status updates. Real friends call you directly on the phone, send cards, help you move furniture, meet you for breakfast, babysit your cats, or otherwise make three-dimensional efforts to be there for you.”
But the real reason she quit Facebook isn’t because she didn’t at some level enjoy the “promotional” nature of Facebook friendships. The problems ran deeper than that.
“Of course, you need lots of extra time for real friendship like that,” she writes. “My ‘networking’ on Facebook was devouring some of that time, and I was starting to feel guilty about it…in short, Facebook was becoming a tool to promote myself, with a few family photos thrown in for good measure…I’ve always tried to avoid one-sided relationships, but good lord, there I was, conducting one of my own.”
Not long ago, I made a new friend on Facebook. A few weeks later, we ended up at dinner with a group of other people. I was looking forward to chatting with him in real life – he was so interesting on Facebook, so I figured we’d have lots to talk about offline. But that’s not really what happened. We talked tech stuff and got our geek on. Then my Facebook friend mentioned something about the self-referential nautre of Facebook. The conversation stopped. Then he grabbed his iPhone and stepped outside for a cigarette.
I turned to a woman sitting next to me, who I am not Facebook friends with, and proceeded to chat with her for at least an hour. After dinner she gave me a ride to my bike, which I had left down the street. I didn’t think we’d have so much in common. And I did not go home and friend her on Facebook later. In fact, I am happy not reading her status updates.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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When Is the Super Bowl Start Time? The NFL Finally Gets It Right
Feb 5th
Super Bowl 46 kicks off on February 5, 2012 at 6:30pm EST on NBC. Amazingly enough, I found this information by searching on Google and clicking on the second result: nfl.com. Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Super Bowl Stat Time: Wolfram|Alpha Offers Stats Guide for Football Junkies
Feb 4th
If you want Super Bowl stats, the self-described computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha is the place to break down all the key Super Bowl 46 numbers before the New England Patriots and New York Giants game kicks off tomorrow night.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
It’s Time to Ditch StumbleUpon for Pinterest
Feb 3rd
StumbleUpon is one of those sites we’ve had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company’s redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.
The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user’s direct stumbling experience.
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“As part of redesign that spawns user experience that you write about, we look a lot at how users are using our service,” said StumbleUpon’s VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz. “We have some things in mind to address this concern.”
StumbleUpon’s response is that, well, they were “just trying to improve the user experience.” And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.
“Signed-in users, when they’re encountering the Web bar it is about their stumbling,” Leibowitz said. “Visitors can easily close the Web bar.”
In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don’t sign in.
What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user’s taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.
Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the “X” button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon’s main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.
“People would accidentally click the button – they don’t have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can’t go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com.”
This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks “X.” It could say something simple like: “Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?” Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users – not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.
“The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL,” Leibowitz tells us. “There’s no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code.”
For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.
What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?
Unfortunately for sites who depend on StumbleUpon for referral traffic, there aren’t too many alternatives.
“My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon,” writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. “After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further…especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview.”
Pinterest is now Davis’ number two referrer.
This is only one isolated case, but it’s telling. Perhaps it’s time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn’t look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.
Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Limited Time Discounts Announced by SEO Corporation, #1 SEO Company India – PR Web (press release)
Jan 30th
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Limited Time Discounts Announced by SEO Corporation, #1 SEO Company India
PR Web (press release) Outsourcing to SEO Company India can help save one more than 70% on In-house SEO. As for an example if a person from US, UK or Australia hires a dedicated SEO Expert in his own country it can cost him a minimum of $5000 but one can hire experienced SEO … |
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Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
Jan 27th
Two weeks ago, Google launched Search Plus Your World. Since then, Google has faced strong criticisms that SPYW is making its search relevancy worse and favoring its Google+ social network too much. Not so, says Google search chief Amit Singhal. Most Google users are happy, Singhal said. Of course,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
When’s the Best Time to Blog & Share?
Jan 27th
Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they’re on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Sharaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. See the results in Eastern Standard Time.
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Sharaholic looked at two metrics: social shares and traffic. For some, getting the highest number of shares is the goal; for others, increased traffic is where it’s at. Please remember that this data all comes from Sharaholic, so it’s specific to those users, though it’s possible to infer more from the results.
Thursday beats every other day. Why? People are probably bored at work, trolling about on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (and Orkut?), sharing to their hearts’ desire. Sharaholic’s data shows that 31%, or more than a third of the top 100 social share days, were Thursdays. The best day for pageviews, however, is not Thursday. In fact, it’s Monday. According to Sharaholic’s data, Monday captures 43% of the top 100 pageview days in 2011.
As most blogs know, the best time of day for social shares is between 8am and 12pm ET. Sharaholic’s data confirms this, showing that the most shares occur at 9am ET, moments before East coasters step into their offices to start the workday. Traffic declines throughout the day, spiking back up again around 9pm, and then slowly tapering off. Evidently, the best time of day to blog for pageviews is also 9am ET.
Image via UrbanHomesPDX.com.
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Rise of Mobile Web Apps Will Give webOS A Time to Shine
Jan 27th
Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced the open source roadmap for its beleaguered mobile platform webOS. This is HP’s last-ditch attempt to actually turn webOS into a viable product after it acquired Palm in April 2010. It looks like the rebuilt source code for webOS will not be ready until September as HP takes the long view of the platform. Yet, when webOS is ready for prime time again, it may be just in time to take advantage of some of the deep current flowing through the mobile ecosystem.
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IDC analyst Al Hilwa likes where HP’s webOS roadmap is going:
“Great to see this outlined in some level of detail. I am not surprised that it will take till September to open this code. There is normally a significant amount of scrutiny and code grooming to ensure that any sizeable chunk of code would stand scrutiny form an IP perspective. This is standard operating procedure. I think putting WebOS in the Apache 2.0 license is a bold move likely to maximize chances of adoption by OEMs because Apache 2.0 is both familiar and permissive. The Enyo JavaScript framework is likely to have a life of its own separate from WebOS because of the difficulty of building good JavaScript frameworks with support for sensors and device hardware. All in all this is a good first step to what might shape up to be an important contribution to the community with many valuable components, but we will have to wait and see if there are any actual takers. Feature maturity compared to Android may be a challenge for WebOS, but the elegance of the user interface and a more participatory governance model should attract some players in the embedded development space.”
The beauty of webOS is that it is the one mobile platform that takes a Web-first approach to application building. If you take a look at its application framework Enyo, it is clear that that webOS does not adhere to the principles of “native” platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or iOS.
One of the reasons that webOS was crippled in the era of the native platform is because it did not have a robust application ecosystem outside of its reliance on Web technologies. Palm built webOS to be of the mobile Web. In this way, Palm was ahead of its time back in the mid-2000s. Even when the iPhone first came out in 2007, it was designed to be a device to access the mobile Web. That all changed when Apple released the App Store in 2008 and the native model of application development and delivery was born.
It should come as no surprise that there were major similarities to Apple’s early approach to (what became) iOS and Palm’s webOS. A significant portion of Apple’s team at the time has spent time working on both platforms, including Andy Grignon, VP of webOS software and applications at HP (Grignon has some patents on a few of the prototype iPhones that Steve Jobs rejected).
Palm’s problem was that the mobile Web was not ready for devices. We are just now starting to see the problems facing mobile Web apps being addressed through the HTML5 spec such as CSS and rendering along with caching and device access to elements like the camera and accelerometer. The native platforms have had that advantage since the beginning.
This is where webOS has a chance. It straddles the line between Web and native in a very fundamental way. Mobile Web applications will continue to evolve in 2012 as progress is made on HTML5 and the spec and ecosystem mature. The webOS open source project should be designed to take specific advantage of those mobile Web apps. Upcoming releases of Enyo will include distribution of WebKit as along with Flash and Silverlight as plug-ins. The kernel will be based on the Linux Foundation’s standard kernel.
While HP has been criticized for how it has handled webOS, this new direction is exciting. Other mobile open source projects, such as Tizen, do not have the type of history and funcationality that webOS can offer. The biggest problem facing webOS when it is ready will be whether or not any of the major original equipment manufacturers will pick it up and run with it. Samsung would be a logical choice if it is starting to hedge its bets on Android reliance but HTC could make a dent in the ecosystem by differentiating itself through webOS.
What it may boil down to is this: Palm may have been ahead of its time with webOS, but it fell behind the times when the native app environment exploded. With the coming wave of HTML5 mobile Web apps, the time for webOS to shine may come again.
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Running Out of Time for Monki Gras Tickets
Jan 25th
The RedMonk folks are getting ready to close the door on signups for The Monki Gras. The conference is scheduled for February 1st and 2nd in London, and features a delightful pairing of industry experts and beer. If you want to attend, you need to speak up today – the organizers are closing ticket sales on January 25th.
The Monki Gras is a follow-on conference to Monktoberfest, which took place last October in Portland, Maine. (As some would have it, "the Real Portland.")
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What’s It About?
The Monktoberfest conference was the first time RedMonk went about organizing a conference. As RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady likes to note, the conference started as a joke. What if they threw a conference that focused on beer as well as an agenda for developers?
Here’s what happens: People show up. Also? They have a pretty good time while also learning quite a bit and sharing with other conference attendees. The "hallway track" is often the best track of any technical conference, and Monktoberfest put the hallway track front and center by arranging fantastic food and beer for the breaks and dinners. Oh, and the talks were quite good too.
One More Round
Monktoberfest was a resounding success, so they said that they’d do it again. This time, they’re doing it in London a few days before another (slightly larger) developer-oriented conference: the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM).
Once again, the focus is on tech and craft beer. This time, the beer focus is on the UK’s "burgeoning craft beer startup scene" and one or two Belgian beers, perhaps. The talk focus has been expanded a bit, though. Many of the folks at Monktoberfest complained that the event was great, but there wasn’t enough of it. This time around, the RedMonk crew is adding a half-day of talks on day two starting at 10 a.m. (not too early).
Some of the speakers you don’t want to miss: Bit.ly’s Matt LeMay will be doing the "Kitteh vs Chikin" talk again, Kohsuke Kawaguchi from CloudBees will be talking about Jenkins and building an OSS community. Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse will be discussing open source foundations, and Laura Merling of Alcatel-Lucent will speak on "how telcos got API religion and what comes next."
The Monki Gras will also feature folks from Lanyrd, Zendesk, Adobe PhoneGap, Joyent and others. I’ll also be doing a talk on day two on how developers can "bootstrap" coverage for their projects.
Tickets for the event are £140.00 and registration closes tomorrow. See you in London!
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