This is a repost of an entry I initially made on my personal blog. As my new repository for all things technology related, I’m reposting it here.

Yesterday I had the need to host a conference call. Being a one person shop, it’s cost prohibitive for me to pay money to have an on demand conference bridge (especially when most of my clients have their own.) Back to my problem, I needed to speak with another small company yesterday and there were four of us that needed to be on the call. I can bridge two calls together with my Vonage service, or even just using my cellphone, but four - that’s one too many. So I tried FreeConference.com and was very pleased with the results. The base offering is free (you’ll pay toll charges to the dial-in line, MN for me - go figure) and they have a $0.10/minute plan for toll free numbers and will even record the call. After the call ended, I received a report of who was on the call and for how long, even what numbers they called in from.

Just saw a tweet about this from SXSW conference folks. Drop.io is providing private online temporary storage to folks - and the cool part is you can add items using just about any method you can think of, email, phone, computer… you get the idea. I decided to give it a try to see what the service was like. The site is very responsive and the application is simple and easy to understand. The announcement from SXSW is that the company is working on a Facebook app to bring this very cool functionality directly into Facebook. (more…)

MySpace, often considered noisy, brash and childish, is moving their platform into the hands of their users on Thursday (3/13) and developers are scrambling to get their widgets together. This is critical because of a serious first mover advantage that exists. MySpace has a huge daily user base, larger than Facebook, and will make or break widget companies who aren’t ready.

Compete’s metrics are revealing, an audience size roughly 2x larger than Facebook’s is nothing to sneeze at. Watch out Thursday as the gloves come off. What remains to be seen, is the growth rate that is possible with MySpace. Facebook apps had huge viral success due largely in part to very few early limitations on application interactions. That has all changed and apps are finding it harder and harder to grow their userbase. Now apps are limited to organic channels and may find branching into different networks more challenging.

Presumably, MySpace has learned from some of Facebook’s early mistakes. However, existing companies already have access to large networks of users through the Facebook audience with which they can promote their new MySpace applications. Of course it remains to be seen how large the overlap of users is from one network to the next.

Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch did a really nice summary of the live blog notes from the Apple iPhone roadmap event this morning. Unfortunately, as consumers we’re left to wait until June until we can actually get our hands on all the 3rd party application goodness that’s likely to spring forth. Application developers can get their hands on the SDK now. Guess I’ll be sticking with the Blackberry for a while yet.

Making me recall a certain Onion story, MySpace today made me a loser with no friends. The odd think about this is that if I were to re-connect to the friends I had, I’m unable to because we’re already friends. However, when viewing their profiles, they’re set to private. Clearly some type of bug has affected my user account or a cache somewhere has been corrupted. The authorities have been notified. (more…)

I’m onto my third Blackberry in the last 12 months (my second in 30 days) and I’ve put this together as a list of the applications that I constantly need to re-install as I’m getting the device back up and running. If anyone has some that should be on the radar, please let me know.

• Google Maps - The built in GPS + Google Maps = navigation!!!
• Twitterberry - Twitter on the go
• OperaMini - While the built in browser works, this gets the sites that aren’t so handheld friendly.
• Y! Go - I’m a huge fan of Flickr and use this to title, tag and upload photos.
• AT&T Blackberry Start - AT&T’s website for changing the device (without redoing all your email setup)

For anyone using their device as hard as I do, I recommend picking up a microSD card for photos and ring-tones (if your into that sort of thing.) It’s always easier to swap the card out than fight with buying and downloading them again.

Yesterday I posted about how bleak the social networking landscape was becoming on Facebook and by extension, other social networks as well. Today I want to explore what a traditional media and existing business can do to promote themselves on Facebook without assuming that a widget is the panacea to save their business. This is another excerpt from a proposal I developed and felt was worth sharing with the community at large.

Gone are the days of instant success large scale applications. Users have a plethora of options when selecting their applications. For example, Twitter has their own application - but there are more than 20 others that seek to compete against it, each leveraging the utility of Twitter in it’s own way. Success in this overly saturated market will come from the niche audiences and remixing successful sites that are not already on Facebook.

Businesses need to leverage the “page” feature more extensively on Facebook to build up their brand as well as a buzz. The “fans” of this page have indirectly offered you their email address through Facebook. While you can’t export them into your current email marketing campaign system, you can still target these folks directly using updates. You can promote products, actions and even feature partnerships. Very few companies are effectively leveraging this right now. (Red) and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama being two I’ve seen, although there are likely others.

Companies that have existing media outlets such as newsletters, brochures and websites can leverage their existing media to build the fan base within Facebook. Creating an online persona for their product or service is the first step. When users take action within the Facebook “page” they’re actions are recorded and eligible for promotion on their friends and larger network news feeds. This viral component is critical for success because their friends likely have similar interests. This indirect endorsement of your product reaches a like minded audience that is between 1 and 5,000 people each time one person becomes a fan, rates your application and so on. The implications are huge; it gets your brand in front of many many more people. MySpace is slowly copying this feature, under the name Friend Updates, from Facebook. This is a powerful tool that companies need to leverage effectively in their social networking strategy. How access to this feed of information is gated by MySpace will be interesting to watch as their platform goes live.

To show an example of this, I recently created a Blackberry Pearl “page”. With out advertisement, corporate sponsorship or endorsement by the parent company - without having any real content - it continues to attract “fans” whom I can now send messages to as I see fit! Not unlike traditional media, it’s important to respect your users, but you can see the power here. If RIM were to provide incentives on this page, they could grow this into a powerful advocating tool. Incidentally, if someone from RIM would like to take over this page, please just let me know. I’ve also noticed someone else followed suit and has created one for the Curve.

Depending on your core business, there may be an existing Facebook application that you can leverage to build your brand more completely. For example, if your business involves publishing of content, a RSS feed on your Facebook page is a no-brainer for driving traffic back to your website. In the event that building out your own widget is something you’ll likely follow through on, you’ll be able to leverage the fan base once you have an application. Spreading the word through direct communication with each and every fan of your application.

Last, but no least (truly most important) social networks are about making connections. If pursuing a widget is the correct strategy for your business, be warned that it must somehow allow self expression while allowing the user to feel they are connected and part of some larger community. You might be better served purchasing an existing widget that has some traction within the network, then building one from the ground up.

For some unknown reason, MySpace decided that instead of using the standardized monolithic file for OpenSocial (that developers host on their own servers) they would host the code themselves on their servers. This type of caching is great since it puts the burden on MySpace to keep applications available to their users, but it has an unintended consequence. One accidental database and your entire code base goes away. As a developer it’s frustrating enough to have to cut and paste code into their web pages or even just edit directly in their UI. This type of backup free zone and lack of revision control is very dangerous and challenging for developers. Today is a perfect example of why this was a REALLY bad idea.

This week O’Reilly Media is sponsoring the Graphing Social Patterns West (GSP West) conference in sunny San Diego, CA. Many leading application developers and minds are present discussing the future of social media as we know it. What follows is an excerpt from a proposal I developed for a potential client recently. I fell it brings value to the social networking community. It serves as an introductory piece in a series of posts for traditional media who have not yet grasped social networking for lead generation.

Leveraging the users social graph has grown increasingly more difficult in the last few months as providers such as Facebook lock down their social graph. Days of early growth fueled by numerous friend invites, notifications, newsfeed and messaging components has been replaced with systems of quotas and restrictions on use. Additionally, users are now more sensitive to the behavior of applications and quickly discard the apps they deem annoying or spammy. Not yet launched platforms from MySpace and Orkut have yet to implement these types of restrictions, but they have already received a bit of blogger attention for a platform thatʼs still in development. Given a little more time, more and more folks will be complaining and something will be done.

What this means for a content provider, seeking new audience through social media, is that growth must be fueled by highly engaging content and/or functionality. That’s right, just like traditional media - you can’t provide lip service. Applications now destined for failure include vanilla RSS feeds of site content, newsletter signups, subscription ploys and 1 time survey style quizzes that put a warm fuzzy icon on your profile. The limited engagement of one to many fails. Instead, engagement of new audience must include something for the user that makes them feel good about themselves and allows them to express themselves digitally, with their friends, in a way that no other application is already doing.

Users of social networking applications have a very low attention span and applications are competing in a more and more hostile environment each day. Applications are having to diversify their offering beyond the core application to retain users and increase traffic. Applications like Free Gifts have begun virtual economies leveraging game play, ultimately designed to increase time spent within the application, and rewarding users with special virtual gift incentives.

Revenue models that seem to have some success include pay per click ads and sponsored partnerships. Realistically, very few apps are able to sustain the technology costs, let alone development costs, with Google ads alone. There’s still a huge untapped market here for those who are willing to brave it. A few specific advertising networks have grown up to fill this space and offer CPM rates roughly double Googleʼs, but they are fueled primarily by other applications and not external advertisers seeking new audience. Likely due to poor performance of advertisements on social networks at large. Applications for existing media should be considered marketing expenses and not thought of as revenue streams (at least not initially).

Competition between friends (or even beyond immediate contacts to the network in Facebook or entire user-base elsewhere) definitely does very well with the Facebook / MySpace audiences. Applications such as Likeness show this daily. Additionally, leveraging user established in a recommendation style format is also highly effective. If your considering this type of application, be aware that there is a lot of competition in this area and micro-niche audiences on Facebook or MySpace are still too small to be sustaining.

Rewards based behavior works - however - there is a very short life span for actions that force virility based on user actions - that’s called SPAM. Meeting new people based on shared interests within a network will really enhance a users adoption and ultimately interaction with the application rewarding this behavior will enhance a products utility. Rewarding the users for daily and weekly interaction with desirable rewards will push the application much further along.

So the ultimate question then, how to promote a business on Facebook and other social networks? I’ll follow up with a post on that in the near future.

Recently I looked at my headphones when packing for a trip. They are six year old Bose QC-1 - the original QuietComfort noise canceling - they still sound wonderful. While figuring out which essentials I wanted inside the airplane cabin, laptop, book, pen & paper, iPod… I wasn’t sure if I should put my huge headphones in the computer bag along with their bulky case adapters spare batteries and the like, or just check them. They really are big - as one would expect from an over the ear headphone - and have a lot of “stuff” that goes along with them.

I bought these headphones when I was working in an open office environment. I wore them primarily at my desk to reduce the drone of co-workers and office automation equipment- think Office Space - so I could focus on my tasks. Now, I work from home and occasionally use the headphones for Skype and iChat, long plane rides without the family, working in the yard and the gym. I still enjoy music, but it’s rarely a personal experience for me anymore.

Every day I spend hours working on finding the right solution for the problem at hand. This manifests itself in finding more efficient algorithms, better resource allocation, better communication structures and the like - all creative problem solving which at it’s core is about choosing the right technology for the job. Why shouldn’t I do the same with my personal technology once in a while? After all, it’s the sense of accomplishment when something works well AND efficiently that keeps me up late at night, excited to work on a project.

My headphone technology was no longer serving it’s purpose. My requirements and needs had changed. The Bose QC-1’s were no longer the right tool for the job. It was time to make it more efficient. In algorithmic terms, the Bubble sort was no longer working, it was time to improve the performance; time to upgrade to a Quicksort. I required portability, decent sound quality and significantly reduced size. I had only one of the 3 basic requirements, decent sound, met.

I now work differently and am more mobile. The headphones I use should be too. I had decided it was time to say goodbye and replace them with something smaller and easier to travel with. My headphones shouldn’t be bigger than the device that’s powering them. The QC-1’s went up on eBay and I began the search for something smaller, lighter and easier to live with. Any audiophiles want to chime in on what would be a good replacement? I can’t wear ear buds (they fall out of my ears) and don’t like on ear headphones. In-ear buds seem to be the best option for me and I’d love to hear your thoughts.