Posts tagged many
Big Question (Answered): “Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends?”
Feb 9th
Every day I jump onto Facebook for my work, but honestly, I never use it as it was intended. If you send me a message or like my status, I might engage, but I never reach out to folks. My stream is full of interesting content about people I don’t know enough to care about. I know that sounds rude, but there’s really only so much room in your life for connections. I have a little over 700 friends and I think that’s about 500 too many.
I’ve been considering paring down for some time, not because I think my connections aren’t cool, but because I’m missing out on things like my family’s birthday notifications and friends’ graduations. Not long ago I found out that one of my best friends had a son who was having brain surgery. Apparently he’d had a condition for some time, but I’d never seen her mention it because I have too many connections.
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Alicia Eler wrote about the overload of Facebook friends today, and she noted that many of us are seeing Facebook become something different than what it was intended to be. In some ways, the changes are quite interesting, but not helpful if you want to be able to see important items from close friends and family.
How Many Facebook Friends Do You Have? Are You Planning to Cut Back?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
For Many Artists, Spotify and Rdio Just Aren’t Cutting It
Feb 9th
For music fans, all-you-can-stream music services like Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio are kind of dream come true. Signing up gives you instant access to a library of millions of songs from major label and indie acts from around the world. Most services are now free, with some limitations on usage. For paying users, as long as you keep your subscription, there’s really no need to pay for most individual tracks or albums (unless you’re an audiophile). In the case of Spotify, you can even merge your local music collection with the service’s cloud-based selection of music. Awesome.
For artists, it’s another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.
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Paul McCartney became the latest artist to step back from the all-you-can-stream subscription model when he pulled his entire catalog from Rhapsody. Material by the former Beatle and accomplished solo artist was removed from Spotify in 2010.
Initially, independent artists such as bands on small metal labels started to question the value of Spotify and pulled their catalogs. Then bigger artists like The Black Keys and Coldplay followed suit.
Exact figures range (and are seldom made public), but it’s clear that streaming services simply do not pay out much money compared to physical album sales or paid downloads. According to CDBaby, iTunes accounts for 77.4% of digital revenue for indie artists, while sources like Spotify and Rhapsoy bring in about 2% apiece. Now, with iTunes Match, artists get an additional stream of revenue on top of their initial digital album sales.
In theory, the streaming services will grow their user bases and refine their monetization strategies to a point at which things are fair for labels, fans and artists alike. In the meantime, not everybody is willing to stick around and wait for their business model to mature.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
It’s True: You Have Too Many Facebook ‘Friends’
Feb 7th
Facebook can be whatever you want it to be. It’s a promotional tool, a way to keep in touch with family members, a space for lifestreaming your every move, or a community forum for meaningful discussion about a specific topic.
But sometimes, it all just gets too overwhelming to deal with. You have 1500 Facebook friends from all walks of life – why? Those social ties expired long ago. So what’s the point of holding onto that one last digital thread?
Last week Jenni Prokopy, a Chicago-based health care expert, freelance writer and founder of ChronicBabe.com, posted a status update that directly addressed this issue. With about 800 friends, Prokopy realized that her Facebook profile had become totally cluttered. “I started my Facebook a few years ago when there were no business pages,” Prokopy says. “People knew who I was online from ChronicBabe.com, so they started to friend me on Facebook. And I was just trying to build my online community so I said yes – and everyone was like yeah, build your online community! And so I did.”
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Before long, Prokopy’s Facebook profile had become almost useless. Checking it felt like a chore.
“I was going through tons of posts from people I didn’t know, and I don’t want to say that I didn’t care about them but I didn’t care to know the details of their lives,” she says. “But the thing that got me a couple of weeks ago is that I missed two important party invitations.” They had gotten lost in the flood of meaningless Faecbook marketing ‘events’ that were actually just invitations to ‘participate’ in various non-important mass events.”
Then there was that whole missing photos from family members thing.
“My sister would post photos of my niece, and I would miss those,” says Prokopy. “It felt like my Facebook news feed was Grand Central Station.”
A few days later, Prokopy spent 4-5 hours unfriending close to 800 people, decreasing her Facebook community to a mere 280 people. And since then, she’s been able to catch status updates from family members that matter to her. “I found out that my brother-in-law and niece, who live in New Orleans, were in a car accident recently. They were dealing with the details so didn’t call people individually – they just posted to Facebook. But I spoke with my sister the next day and got all the details.”
Russ Starke, VP of Experience Design at digital design agency ThinkBrownstone, had a similar experience with his Facebook profile.
“It was starting to become more of a promotional tool,” Starke says. “I wasn’t really checking what other people were doing, and I was only occasionally posting photos of kids. After seeing what Jenni was doing, I decided to try it, too.”
What really pushed him over the edge was the fact that metadata is tagged to an iPhone picture that a user uploads to Facebook. It’s easy to figure out where the user was when they posted the photo. “How is this going to affect my wife and I, and our daughter?” Starke asked himself. He also wanted to post about business trips, but then realized that there were people on his Facebook profile that he didn’t trust enough to do that. And then there were those expired ties.
“There are people on Facebookthat, when I look at our friendship history, I see that I’ve been Facebook friends with them for four years but haven’t interacted with them in that entire time. It doesn’t mean I don’t have fond memories of them, but I don’t need to be friends with them on Facebook.”
“It doesn’t mean I don’t have fond memories of them, but I don’t need to be friends with them on Facebook.”
When it comes to Facebook friends, Starke now requires a higher level of intimacy. If he wouldn’t allow you in his house, he is not going to be your friend on Facebook. It’s just that simple.
Instead of going through the painful one-by-one friend deletion process, Starke decided to shut down his account and start over in a month or so. For now, he’s enjoying the freedom that not being on Facebook is giving him.
Should You Be Reading Stories Posted by People You Don’t Know?
The Facebook news feed algorithm uses EdgeRank to detect which types of stories the user clicks the most, and surfaces those “highlighted” stories moreso than stories that users are less likely to clickthrough. Is it psychologically damaging to view posts from people who you have little to no connection to?
“While data has not shown that it’s unhealthy to perennially view posts from too many friends with whom people lack authentic connectivity, it has been demonstrated that those who do, may do so because they already have lower self-esteem,” says Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, the author of the study “Why Do People Use Facebook?”
She also found that sometimes having more than 250 friends isn’t very healthy.
“It has been shown that those users with larger numbers of friends may actually be triggering negative impressions. A study conducted about 3 years ago showed that both profile owners with lower number of friends (about 102 friends) but also greater numbers of friends (about 300 friends) both created impressions of lower levels of social attractiveness.”
In other words, having more or less friends than the average Facebook user may affect how other users view you, and how you feel about yourself. Too many Facebook friends might indicate that you’re participating in a certain Facebook culture of adolescence hat focuses more on popularity (hello, junior high!) and less on authentic, trusting friendships.
“We need to be curating not only the information we take in but also the information we put out.”
But really, Facebook is about the information that you choose to share. “We need to be curating not only the information we take in but also the information we put out,” says Prokopy.
How many Facebook friends do you have? Are you planning to cut back or add more? Tell us in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Surprise, Surprise: Amazon Doesn’t Say How Many Kindle Fires It Sold
Jan 31st
Amazon is notorious for sharing very little information about how its products and business units perform. Its new Kindle Fire tablet is no different.
Amazon just reported its fourth quarter financial results, and, shocking no one, it doesn’t disclose how many Kindle Fire tablets it sold. Or even how many total Kindles it sold.
Instead, Amazon just shared a few statistics designed to make it seem like the Kindle business is doing really well, without actually proving it.
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Specifically, Amazon said that “millions of customers… purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season.” And that Kindle unit sales, including the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-ink readers, grew 177% over last year during the 9-week holiday period ending Dec. 31, 2011.
So, the new Kindles helped Amazon more than double, and almost triple, its device sales. But unless Amazon makes a bold move and discloses more on its earnings call tonight, that’s about all we’ll know officially.
Apple, meanwhile, announced last week that iPad sales during the fourth quarter grew 111% year-over-year to 15.4 million units.
Of course, Amazon doesn’t have to disclose how many Kindles it sells. It’s actually probably to its benefit to keep that information secret. Still, it would be interesting for those of us who keep score to have real data and not just estimates. It could also be useful for mobile app developers to know what the potential market size for Kindle Fire apps is versus iOS apps.
Overall, Amazon’s fourth quarter sales actually came in below expectations, a bit of a surprise, actually, given all the recent talk from retailers about pricing pressure.
For the first quarter, Amazon now says it may even lose money. It didn’t specify why, but giving away millions of Kindle Fire tablets near cost, or at a loss, can’t help.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Apps To Help You Deal With Too Many Apps
Jan 30th
When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it’s all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need?
Lately, we’ve started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing one of these tasks across all the various apps for it. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here’s a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.
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Viewing Photos
A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further sorting of the photos into all kinds of categories, but its reach across social networks is what stands out. Pixable announced today that it reached a million downloads on iOS, and it also has a mobile Web version for users of other platforms.
Hopefully the creators will roll Instagram, Google+ and a few other services into this app. Then we’d only have to launch one app to see all our photos.
Videos
For viewing all the videos in your various social networks, Showyou is amazing. It brings any video from your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimoe and Vodpod accounts into one sleek, sliding touchscreen theater (Vodpod is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou). Apple people can even AirPlay the videos over to their Apple TV from the iPhone or iPad version.
Showyou is available for iOS devices and the Kindle Fire. If this app appeals to you, stay tuned, because we heard through the grapevine that Showyou has something to announce pretty soon.
Files
If you need to find files that could be anywhere, Greplin can help. It logs into your Dropbox, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter and more, and it lets you search all of them for the thing you need. Check out our guide to Greplin for more details.
It’s available for the iPhone as well as on the Web at Greplin.com.
Places
If you’re like most Americans, you might not get the point of location apps. The point should be to find cool stuff going on around you. But there are so many of these location apps, it’s impossible to know which one to use. That’s where Localscope comes in.
It’s a browser for the real world. It lets you search or browse across pretty much every Web service that shares public location data, and the interface is easy. You just click side to side between Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing and more.
You can get Localscope for the iPhone or webOS.
Do you use any other apps for dealing with too many apps? Share them in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
SEO Alert! Google Downgrades Pages With Too Many Ads – SitePoint
Jan 23rd
 ITProPortal |
SEO Alert! Google Downgrades Pages With Too Many Ads
SitePoint Adverts pay for many of the resources we take for granted on the web. No one begrudges a few ads — you wouldn't be reading this if you did — but some sites take adverts beyond a reasonable level. Google's latest search algorithm change attempts to … Ads As An SEO Factor: Oh No, Do I Have Too Many Ads? Google Updates Algorithm to Punish Websites with Excessive, Top of Page Ads |
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Google’s New Page Layout Update Targets Sites With Too Many Ads
Jan 20th
Is your website ad heavy? You may be in trouble. Google has announced a new algorithm tweak that will lower the rankings of websites that Google determines is providing a bad user experience – a move Google hinted was in the works in November.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm
Jan 19th
Do you shove lots of ads at the top of your web pages? Think again. Tired of doing a Google search and landing on these types of pages? Rejoice. Google has announced that it will penalize pages that are top-heavy with ads. The change — called the “page layout algorithm” —…
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
Big Question (Answered): “How Many Unread Emails Are In Your Inbox”
Dec 20th
As many of us prepare for some well-deserved vacation time, we’re faced with working hard to get those last minute items done before we leave. I know that my email inbox is my last priority this week, so I have 20 or so emails in limbo just waiting for my attention. Alicia Eler suggested we ask you, are you similarly suffering?
How many unread emails are in your inbox?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
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View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Blogger Gets “The First of Many Google+ Features”
Dec 12th
Blogger has announced “the first of many Google+ features” today, launching an automatic +snippet sharing box after you publish a blog post. It only saves a few clicks, but this makes it as easy as humanly possible to share Blogger posts to your Google+ circles.
In order to turn on this sharing option, Blogger users must link their Blogger and Google+ profiles. Blogger users got the option to replace their user profiles with their G+ profiles in October. Users can disable this feature in their sharing settings, and they can always share individual posts using the ‘share’ link in the post list.
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The +snippet to share a Blogger post is the same one that launched across the Web in October. Ben Parr reported in July that the Blogger brand was going away to make room for Google+, but that hasn’t panned out. Instead, Blogger launched new dynamic layouts and a new iOS app, showing a commitment to the product in the Google+ era.
The Blogger team is holding a live video Hangout on the Blogger +page at 3 p.m. Pacific today to discuss the new features.
Which blogging service do you use?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
