Posts tagged self
Twitter Launches Self Serve Ad Platform
Dec 2nd
Although it is in beta testing and currently only available to a small number of approximately 20 advertisers, Twitter has finally launched its self-serve ad platform. The new platform, which enables advertisers to use a self-serve system to purchase advertising without speaking to a human, currently allows the purchase of promoted accounts and promoted tweets. [...]
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Path, Timeline & Worship of The Self
Nov 30th
An app called Path launched its version 2 do-over yesterday. “The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love,” it calls itself now. I ignored this app until today. All I saw from version 1 was emoji spam in my Twitter stream. Let’s take it as read that version 1 failed to catch on, hence version 2. How does an app help you “share life with the ones you love?”
The tech “world,” or “scene,” or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went “stealthish” in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does “love” arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It’s a life stream. An ego trip. “Share life with the ones you love,” especially yourself.
Sponsor
Your Path, Your Timeline, Whatever
Path, in the exact manner as the conspicuously not-shipped Facebook Timeline, makes your life into a story, and your friends and family are the characters. You, of course, are the protagonist, the narrator, the star. Choose a profile picture. Choose a cover image. Share what you’re doing. Are we talking about Facebook or Path? Exactly.
But Path’s attention to detail puts Facebook to shame. Granted, that’s easy to do when you don’t have to bleed money out of your users’ eyeballs yet.
Path is a closed network. You can syndicate to Facebook or Twitter if you choose, but within Path, it’s for a limited number of close friends. It’s full of cute signals of feeling and emotion, including emoticons and Instagrams – I mean, photo filters. The user interface is damn awesome, eye-poppingly original, soft and intimate. You can go to sleep and wake up in it, and the icon changes with the phases of the moon.
Doesn’t that sound nice? Sure, it has that whole single-player-mode, where-are-my-friends problem, but it’s so sexy and flattering, even when I’m alone! Just invite them all. They’ll all join in. Right?
Stickiness & The Social Web
I didn’t do a poll or anything, but crawling the blogosphere every day, I get the sense that people aren’t satisfied with the Web. Why should we be? Bandwidth is expanding, interfaces are improving, the hardware is more responsive than ever. The Web is a communication medium that spans the globe, and by the measure of any engineer, we should be communicating better than ever. We probably are. But we aren’t satisfied.
We’ve wound up with a social Web in which tools have to be “sticky” to catch on. Facebook is the stickiest, because that’s where “everyone” is. But – no offense, Windows people – Facebook is like the Windows of Web 2.0. It’s the most broadly compatible platform, but we all resent using it a little. Do you know anyone who loves Facebook? It keeps getting noisier, more confusing, and less secure.
But 800 million people use it anyway. It’s “sticky.” “Everyone” is on there. “I don’t use Facebook” is the new “I don’t have a cell phone,” it is said.
So, here’s Path. What Facebook should be, some say. It’s for real friends, supposedly. not “friends” like the 2,000 people on Facebook. You can use Facebook like that, but then there’s all the politics: can I unfriend this person, maybe I’ll just mute them, what if I want to see their photos, &c, &c, &c. Sometimes it’s nice to get a fresh start.
But then you have the Google+ problem. You have to convince your real friends to join in. And you, as the kind of person who would try an app like Path, say to them, “You guys. It’s so cool. We can share everything with each other. Look at the moon!“
Then your friends go to the App Store or the Android Market and they peer into this uncanny valley of ego-streaming, and what do they do? Well, when Facebook introduced Timeline, what happened? A million or so (roughly 0.125%) users turn it on, Facebook looks at the data and panics. Launch date after launch date blows by. Facebook turns its attention to privacy concerns and doesn’t mention Timeline.
Path is just like Timeline, only more elegantly constructed. Unlike Timeline, Path is readily available now. Go ahead. Try it out. Gaze at yourself. Does it make you want to share?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
TweetSheet Will Surface Your Best Self Online
Oct 31st
People say everything bad you post online will be found when you grow up – but what if you could use help finding the good things you’ve posted to the web? Startup company Vizify believes there’s a need for that and the company’s first product, called Tweetsheet, is already showing me things about my use of Twitter that I didn’t know before. Here’s my profile page there.
Log in with your Twitter credentials and the service will show you what your most popular Tweets have been, how your Tweeting has grown or fallen over the past year, who retweets and replies to you the most and where the people who respond to you live. All this data is pretty straightforward but it’s presented well and is a good example of the company’s big vision: to help people surface their best historical content to present that to the world.
Sponsor
What did I learn from my TweetSheet profile? I found out that my activity spiked in June and hasn’t ever recovered since – thanks to Google Plus. I got a good picture of what the most popular content I share is – it tends to be news coverage of big brand name web apps. Unfortunately it’s tweets with the strongest language, the most audacious claims, that get retweeted the most from my account, too. I also learned that Portland coder Jeremy Felt really appreciates my twitter posts. That’s great.
There’s much more that could be surfaced just on Twitter – not to mention once the service expands out to more services. Todd Silverstein, CEO of the company, says that users will be able to use the surfaced data visualizations to edit together public profiles they could share with others.
“I began my career in publishing,” he says, “and there has always been a lot of ephemera published, much of it that deserves to be saved. I kept a journal when I was younger and I think it’s great to see where I was in my life at those times. I believe there is a lot of content in Twitter that deserves to be saved, too. But we don’t have the tools to understand it.”
Silverstein comes from Cornell, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, HarperCollins books, co-founded online custom jewelry startup Gemkitty and in 2009 was awarded a patent on a practice called Remote Purchasing that sounds like part of the Bruce Sterling short story Maneki Neko.
Silverstein says that despite the site’s simple looks, he’s got meaningful patents filed. “Acquiring that information, going through it and finding interesting things,” he says, “we’re doing it algorithmically, working backwards from an inspection of data, in the future new data we’re not yet familiar with – and that’s a non-trivial matter.”
Algorithms applied to real-time social software user data, in service of self-awareness and effective presentation. That sounds great, we’ll see what more Vizify can deliver.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Self SEO Tips: 5 Gauranted Places To Get Your Small Business Listed – Technorati
Jul 11th
|
Self SEO Tips: 5 Gauranted Places To Get Your Small Business Listed
Technorati In general, novice start-up founders have little or no knowledge about search engine optimization and these small businesses can't afford high skilled SEO firms to market their product online. As a result they struggle to market their quality product … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Training, A Self Taught Lesson – Reviews Of Electronics
Apr 27th
 Reviews Of Electronics |
SEO Training, A Self Taught Lesson
Reviews Of Electronics Changes to any SEO protocols can leave webmasters in at a loss. Most of the frustration comes from not understanding how the changes how effected their particular site. Search engine optimization has become a must-have for any company with a Web … New Infographic Shows SEO Spending is on the Rise Mannix Marketing Ranks #12 in Best SEO Companies by topseos.com for April 2011 Peak Positions, LLC Ranks #16 in Search Engine Optimization Companies by … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Webmaster Tools Provides Plugin for Self Hosted WordPress Sites
Apr 22nd
Google has released a new plugin that will help you verify your WordPress site in Webmaster Tools.
Blogger users already know this was an option for Google-owned-blogger blogs. Now, it’s an option for WordPress users as well. Bloggers who have a blog hosted on WordPress.com can’t use the plugin just yet as it only works on self-hosted WordPress installations.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
A Step Toward Inbox Zero: Email That Self Destructs
Feb 25th
If you go and look at your inbox right now, we’re willing to bet that there’s some email in there that’s completely stale. There’s no reason to reference it, search for it sometime down the road or keep it around for sentimental value. It’s just expired.
If OtherInbox CEO Joshua Baer has his way, this email could simply delete itself, rather than lurking in your inbox and continuing the clutter.
Sponsor
According to CNET’s Rafe Needleman, Baer spoke at the email-centric Inbox Love conference today and proposed “a standard that would let e-mail messages carry with them the date of their own irrelevance.”
E-mails could use the the "x-expires" header to tell the receiving in-box that they become outdated after a certain absolute date, or a certain time relative to when they’re sent or received. Baer says this idea has been "bouncing around" for 10 years, but he’s learned, "the best way to get a standard adopted is to work with individual companies first, and make it a de facto standard."
We recently wrote about a mobile app that worked to create self-destructing text messages, with the idea being that it would help keep communication secure. The idea here is much simpler and more obvious – your inbox is a cluttered mess full of irrelevant information that needs to go away.
Baer, of course, knows all about inbox clutter. His company, Other Inbox, is a wonderful email tool (which I just recently fell in love with) that categorizes all of the extraneous newsletters and notification emails so you can make sure to get the emails that matter.
If you’d like to hear more about Baer’s proposal, there’s a Google Group set up for discussion.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
StorageFront’s Creators Launch WebWorks for Self Storage, a New Service … – Benzinga
Feb 18th
|
StorageFront's Creators Launch WebWorks for Self Storage, a New Service …
Benzinga When the StorageFront team offered to fix the client's search engine optimization (SEO) problems, another marketing solution for self storage operators was born. This month Red Nova Labs – the company that created StorageFront … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
This Text Message Will Self Destruct In 60 Seconds
Feb 11th
The self-destructing message, whether a piece of paper that mystically disintegrates at the appropriate moment or the microfiche that goes up in a poof of smoke, is a staple of any spy movie and a childhood wish of my own. TigerText, a private SMS app, has made my childhood dream a reality.
The company, which has had a free app available, has brought this spy-novel feature to the enterprise with this week’s release of an enterprise app.
Sponsor
According to TechCrunch, the app lets users determine when and how the messages are deleted.
As we reported last year, TigerText’s mobile apps allows users to send text messages or photos that can then be deleted off both the sender’s and receiver’s phone after a selected period of time. Once a sender selects the message lifespan (from 1 minute up to 30 days), expired messages are not only deleted from both phones, but are not stored on any server and they cannot be retrieved once expired. Users can also select a “Delete on Read” option, which will delete the text 60 seconds after the recipient opens the message.
The latest version of the app caters to businesses by allowing users to perform a one-time login to authenticate with the company. TigerText describes the app as “a cross-platform collaboration tool for your organization that allows you to deploy your own private, secure mobile network where your employees can safely communicate on their existing mobile devices within your company.”
“Text messaging, just like email, can be used against your organization,” writes the company on its website. “If the messages no longer exist, there is no risk of data breach or exposure.”
The app is available on iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms and administrators can manage user settings from the Web. It enters an increasingly crowded space, with apps like Kik, Beluga and GroupMe entering the free message game, but this one has that special spin for the security-minded.
From what we can tell, however, the app is missing one huge feature – the little whisp of smoke, wafting out the crack of your phone case whenever a message is deleted.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Girl Scouts Research Shows How Social Networking Impacts Girls’ Self Image
Nov 7th
The Girl Scouts Research Institute celebrated its tenth anniversary yesterday with the release of its latest study into the relationship between girls and social media. The findings are based on an online study with 1026 girls ages 14-17 who had social network profiles.
91% of the girls in the study said they used Facebook regularly, while only 28% said the same about MySpace. Demonstrating that teens do not eschew Twitter, 38% said they had a Twitter account, and averaged about 8 Tweets per day.
Sponsor
Nonetheless, the vast majority said they prefer face-to-face communication. And 92% said they would give up all of their social networking friends if it meant keeping their best friend.
Girls’ Self-Image, On- and Offline
The study also found that girls see a disparity between their online and their offline image. 74% of girls agreed with the statement that “most girls my age use social networking sites to make themselves look cooler than they really are.” And 41% admit that this describes themselves.
But many girls also indicated that they think they portray a more well-rounded image in person than they do online. In person, girls say they come across as smart (82%), fun (82%), funny, (90%), kind (76%), and cool (55%). But when they describe how they come across based solely on their online profiles, they describe themselves as fun (54%), funny (52%) and social (48%). These results suggest that girls downplay positive characteristics about themselves online, particularly their intelligence and their kindness.
And the study also found girls who have a low self-esteem are more likely to admit that their social networking image doesn’t match their offline image. Furthermore, girls with low self-esteem are more likely to claim the image they portray online is sexy (22%) and crazy (35%).
“Safe” Social Networking
Although the vast majority of girls say they’ve talked with their parents about how to be safe online (85%), 50% admit they aren’t as careful as they should be. And only 59% said they think they have complete control over what happens with the videos, photos and other information they post online.
Many girls said they’re concerned with how things they’ve posted online may hurt them in the future. 42% say they fear they won’t get into the college of their choice, 40% say they worry they might miss out on a job opportunity, and 40% fear they’ll get in trouble with parents or teachers based on their social networking posts.
Girls’ Online Reputation
68% of girls have had a “negative experience” on a social networking site, such as being bullied or harassed. And nearly half of the girls in the study – 46% – said they think that social networking actually damages their personal relationships, causing jealousy among friends. 40% said they’d lost respect for a friend because of something she or he had posted online.
But the news isn’t all bad. 56% said that social networking does help them feel more connected to their friends. And 52% say they’ve gotten involved in a cause they care about through a social network.
But overall, this research suggests that social networking does not necessarily boost girls’ confidence and self-image, and girls online are (often knowingly) taking risks – with their reputations and their self-esteem.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
