farner(in)

This post takes a look back at my 5 ballsy social media predictions for 2009 post, written on December 20, 2008.

Needless to say, there will not be a predictions post written for 2010.  I am clearly not Desmond Hume (come on, LOST nerds).

1. Twitter will be bought. Nope.  They did, however, get a huge boost from Oprah.  Oh yeah, they also negotiated a few search deals and started *gasp* making some money. (0 for 1)
2. Plurk will disappear. Ahh, Plurk – the little microblogging service that should have quit a long time ago.  Instead, they persist.  I logged into the site for the first time in a year only to find that it looks exactly the same.  And by the same, I mean creepy. (0 for 2)
3. Louis Gray will surpass Robert Scoble in blog traffic. I thought this one was a slam dunk.  Robert thought it could happen.  Where did it all go wrong?  The two were separated by as few as 16,110 uniques in May 2009.  But in June 2009, Building 43 was launched and Robert blogged a bit more often.  When FriendFeed sold to Facebook in August, it was game over.  Scoble returned to his blog fortress and made me wrong yet again.  (0 for 3)
4. Pandora will all but kill Last.FM. Bzzzzt, incorrect.  Last.FM lives on due to the fact that, well, it works outside the United States.  Pandora does not.  In my own life, Slacker Radio has taken the lead – I suggest you give it a try.  And if you haven’t Groovesharked yet, please do it right now. (0 for 4)
5. The labels will introduce a mixtape service. Can you say “oh-for-five”?  I could have cheated right here and counted Apple’s “compile a bunch of songs in a mix and buy them for a friend” feature as a mixtape service but the labels had little to do with that.  (0 for 5, in case you forgot)

Do you have the results of your own predictions?  I’d love to see them.  You could not have done worse than me. ;)

Well, it’s an iPhone app. :)

Abuzz lets you search Twitter, the blogosphere, the forumsphere (or whatever it’s called) and Digg.  It lets you organize your keyword searches into campaigns so that you can keep your related searches together.  You can search all the supported services at once or customize your search to include results from just one or two.

What’s really cool about Abuzz is the built-in Twitter client.  It’s lightweight (just like the rest of the app) but gives you everything you need – you can tweet out, send replies, send direct messages, view profiles, follow/unfollow and so on.  You can interact with the tweets in your own timeline and your searches, which frees you from having to open another app if you want to take action on a tweet you’ve found in a search.

Let’s say you work for Apple and want to set up searches for the iPhone and Macbook.  You could open the Abuzz app, create a new campaign called “Apple” and add keyword searches for “iPhone” and “Macbook”.  It’s that easy.  You won’t waste a lot of time navigating through a dedicated Twitter app to set up searches or browsing through Safari trying to search blogs, forums and Digg.  Abuzz is social media search, plain and simple.

So where’s Abuzz?  We’re squashing our last round of bugs at the moment and we’ll probably have an App Store-ready app in three or four days. Keep your eyes peeled two or three weeks into January!  And if you have some search services you’d like to see available inside Abuzz, let me know!  Shoot an email to features@abuzzapp.com.

Now that I’m one day out from Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, I’m starting to see the move through a less emotional lens.  Do I still feel like the FriendFeed team sold us out?  Absolutely.  Is it their fault, though, that all the work we’ve put into our FriendFeed accounts might vanish one day?  I’m afraid not.

The fact is, nothing lasts forever, and the FriendFeed sale has made that more apparent to me than ever.  Money talks, and not just for small startups but bigger companies, as well.  If a product or venture isn’t making money, it either needs to start or it needs to disappear – that is what is in the best interest of the investors or shareholders.  And unfortunately, while we the customers help these companies grow, they don’t answer to us.

I fear for the future, now.  FriendFeed is not the only service I use on a regular basis and it certainly isn’t the only free service I use.  What if AOL decides one day that the AIM servers aren’t worth keeping on?  What if Twitter can’t monetize, its investors become impatient and it sells in a way similar to FriendFeed?  The only platform I can truly depend on to stick around is my blog, which is why I’m going to bring it back into the fold again.  The blogosphere needs to become a bigger piece of my conversation pie because, honestly, my trust in microblogging has been shaken.

If you’re a FriendFeeder with a blog, I would love to connect with you and toss your feed into my Google Reader list.  Leave me a comment and maybe some other visitors will subscribe to you, too.

Remember again – nothing lasts forever.  Especially things that are being given to you for free.  Choose the place you converse and make connections wisely, because it might not be around tomorrow.

Rather than subject you to an elaborate opening paragraph, I’ll just give you the beef.  Here are my 5 ballsy social media predictions for 2009.

1. Twitter will be bought.  By who?  If I had to guess, I’d say Google.  Then they could do away with that Jaiku mess they’ve been hiding.
2. Plurk will disappear.  Now that Twitter is much more stable and catching on with some of the mainstream, other microblogging services will suffer. But who? Pownce has already been put down, Jaiku might as well be dead and FriendFeed serves as more of an aggregator and has enough to set it apart. That leaves Plurk, a service that, in my opinion, is just a fad waiting to fade away.
3. Louis Gray will surpass Robert Scoble in blog traffic.  Louis has himself plus a talented team of guest posters, and as much as Robert tries to be everywhere and do everything, this team might be too overwhelming.  No matter who comes out in front, though, it’s a win-win for the community.
4. Pandora will all but kill Last.FM.  I feel that Pandora’s similar artists algorithm is worlds better than Last.FM’s, and I’m sure others would agree.  I feel that the only things keeping them from putting Last.FM out to pasture are the community features they’re lacking.  Look for Pandora to add them this year, along with scrobbling.
5. The music labels will introduce a mixtape service.  In the absence of both Muxtape and MixWit, music labels now have an opportunity to both generate some goodwill AND some revenue in the process. This is, of course, a gamble that the labels will follow through on a good idea. A lot of you might not be holding your breath, but I think it can happen.

What do you think?  Agree or disagree with any of these? Do you have predictions of your own? Leave a comment or a link to your own predictions in the comments and, in my next post, I’ll gather everyone’s prediction posts all together. Then we’ll see how right/wrong we were at the end of 2009. :]

In case you haven’t heard, Twitter has acquired values of n, the web startup responsible for productivity tools Stikkit and I Want Sandy.  These are two great apps, and upon reading, you might characterize this as a great move by Twitter to diversify their offerings.  Except it’s not.

On December 8, 2008, both Stikkit and I Want Sandy will be shut down, leaving a gaping void to fill in many GTD systems.  In the case of I Want Sandy, users will suddenly find themselves without their scheduling, reminder and to-do list service in less than two weeks’ time.  It seems that Twitter bought values of n not to explore other avenues in the web space, but instead to bring on values of n founder Rael Dornfest as an employee.  Sadly, two more web apps will now bite the dust.

So, why would Twitter buy the company and IP’s? Why not allow Rael to sell the services to another company, one that might keep them online? Or better yet – why wouldn’t Twitter just keep these apps online, themselves?  These are the questions many are asking at I Want Sandy’s customer support board, where the few congratulatory posts for Rael are drowning under a tidal wave of angry posts from jaded ‘Sandy’ loyalists.

Many of the frustrated posters make very valid points; for instance, how can users continue to trust that their data is safe in the cloud?  If someone had gone on a two week vacation starting this past Monday, they would return on December 8 to find that all of their ‘Sandy’ data is gone forever.  The two weeks’ notice given by Rael is hardly sufficient – users need a lot more time than that to backup their data and replace ‘Sandy’ in their scheduling systems.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like much, if anything, is going to change about this decision.

Do I blame Rael? Partially. I feel that he could have done more to fight for his users. I feel that, if he were as passionate about his projects as he says, he would have found a way to keep them online – even if that meant running them on the side.  If Twitter wanted him badly enough as an employee, they were going to hire him whether they got his web apps or not.  Now Rael is viewed negatively by many in the I Want Sandy user base, users who might happen to use…

Twitter.  This is where I place most of the blame for this debacle.  They should have known better.  This company has a historic lack of reliability and this move does nothing but reinforce that.  This time, it wasn’t Twitter’s uptime people were relying on – it was their ability to do the right thing. To generate some goodwill, for once, instead of having to dodge bullets from users.  I sent a few messages to Evan Williams (Twitter CEO) to no avail, but I’m sure he has his eye on the situation.  Hopefully he realizes that Twitter is now the center of a lot of negativity, a move that could have been easily avoided.

The bottom line is this – Twitter, you messed up.  You gobbled up another company and left its users out in the cold.  Luckily for you, this can be fixed.  You have the remedy.  There’s still time to do the right thing.

Please do it.

It’s been 11 days since I emailed Alpha Phi Omega President Maggie Katz to offer her a few National Convention suggestions.  I still have yet to receive any kind of response; not even a canned “Thank You” in return.  This is exactly how you shouldn’t do things – then again, the National Office has never been good at communicating.

Here’s a Google Search result for Alpha Phi Omega blog.  The National Headquarters is nowhere to be found.  Instead of leading the way, they’re simply nonexistant.  There is an unofficial blog ranking in at #1 with individual chapters rounding out the top few (my chapter is the fourth result).  Here’s a results page for Alpha Phi Omega Twitter.  You won’t find the National Office anywhere in these results – they don’t seem to have a Twitter account.  The first result is my chapter’s FriendFeed account, the third result is my chapter’s Twitter account and eight down you’ll find our chapter’s web site.  National Office = nowhere.

In case you were wondering, my suggestions to Mrs. Katz revolved around social media and Alpha Phi Omega’s need to embrace the medium.  I offered to round up my chapter and host a “Social Media Workshop” at the National Convention.  It was my hope that other chapters could use these tools to converse with their communites as well as each other.  I even thought maybe, just maybe, our National office could learn something, too.

Judging from the lack of response, though, they’re exactly what they deserve to be. Social media ghosts.

You can take a look at my FriendFeed stream today and find out that I’ve used both Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook today – not because I posted or tweeted this myself, but thanks to a tracker I installed for Wakoopa, a site that aims to socialize our application usage.  Going through the public stream, I can see that LouCypher has recently used Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.  Hasan has accessed the Command Prompt and used WordPress.  Haggis (Sean) has visited Classmates.com.

Doesn’t this seem like a bit much?

I pinged some of the folks on Twitter and FriendFeed for answers to this question – Are we sharing too much on social networks?

@jak440 – “YES!”
@hearsmusic – “When people are dying for changing their status on facebook, I think so, yes…”
@johnrogers – ” “too much” is relative to me. I am who i am, and tend to share everything. nothing to hide really”
@hbombx – “Yeah, some of the “meet me hear if you want” sound too much like “I’m alone and easy to abduct.” ”
@rahsheen – “I don’t know about sharing too much, I was actually thinking of going the full monty….ok not really…LOL” 
@rorowe – “There was a great article in Wired ~6 mo. ago about a guy who literally put *everything* online so the FBI’d leave him alone.”  (He later tweeted the article URL – here it is.)

Amber aka SDA - “A little”
Akiva Moskovitz - “What do you mean? I don’t even know your blood type… yet.”
Helen Sventitsky - “I’ve always shared too much. Half my offline friends block me because I’m such an embarrassment to them online, LOL! :D”
JMS likes you - “Perhaps”
Niki Costantini - “Well, it’s not that we are obliged to share everything, aren’t we? So “too much” is only up to us at the end of the day :)”
Sparky - “You are right. People share way too much on social networks. Like Akiva’s social security number 526-87-2412″
Vijayendra Mohanty - “Sharing personal information happens when you are not really ‘doing it’ also. Like metadata. The other kind of sharing (links, pictures) is a good thing, isn’t it?”
anna awesomesauce - “I was talking to some college students about to enter the work force, and one was like, “should I clean up my facebook page” answer: vehemently “yes!”
 tiffany needs a tissue - “i am. i need to stop that.”

So what do you think – are we sharing too much? And what do you think of Wakoopa – does this type of application cross the line between acceptable and “way too much”?  Comment away! :)

 
Justin Kownacki, a Podcamp Pittsburgh co-founder. (Image credit: pittprjns)

This past weekend I attended my very first podcamp, Podcamp Pittsburgh 3.  All I can say is this – if a Podcamp has even half the energy of PCPGH3, it’s definitely worth going to.

Here are the sessions I attended:

• “Making Social Media Visible” by Michael Munz
• “Blogging 201: Blogging Best Practices” by Cynthia Closkey and Mike Woycheck
• “Social Media Business Plans”, which was a panel featuring Aaron Tainter and Alan Veeck of Meakem Becker VC, Meredith Benedict of AlphaLab and Julie Morey of ElasticLab.
• “Feedback: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” by Justin Kownacki.
• An impromptu session on Second Life by David Fisher.
• “Social Networking/Media 201″ by Jennie Roth, Dawn Papuga and Missy Sorg.
• “The Art Institutes: Social Networking Strategies” by Jamie Sterling and Kimberly Blackstone.
• “Your Weekly Music Lessons with Walt”, a live taping of Walt Ribeiro’s weekly video show.

Have an IUP email address? Want to play with a new web app? Here’s your chance.

Go to Yammer.com and create an account using your IUP email address. For identification purposes, it’s probably best to use the address that contains your first and middle initials followed by your last name (ex. s.m.farner@iup.edu). Once your account is created, you’ll automatically be added to the IUP.edu network.

What you’ll find is a site much like the popular microblogging service Twitter. The difference? It’s only for people on your network. Yammer recently won best startup at TechCrunch50, an event where new startups show off the service or web site they’ve created.

Play around with it and let me know what you think. I can see this having TONS of potential uses on a college campus.  It could serve as a student-powered information machine or as an outlet for people to talk about whatever they want.  Just as Twitter has, in multiple instances, been the first source of breaking news such as earthquakes and other natural disasters, Yammer could be the fastest way to spread news to 15,000+ students.

But first, we have to adopt it.

A friend and I were reminiscing about the good old days of Xanga – a blog/journal hosting service that we used (along with many of our friends) to chronicle our lives and our thoughts.  As we moved from high school to college, our Xangas started to become less and less frequently updated until, finally, we stopped updating them altogether.

Since then, I’ve moved on to a more serious type of blogging.  I’ve started to write about the fields that interest me and have used my blog as more of a branding tool than as a place to talk about my life.  My hilarious (and sometimes R-rated) rants have been replaced by posts about Twitter and my thoughts about social media.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself – is this me?  Is this what I really want to talk about?  Would I use these words?

I’m finding out more and more that the answer has to be yes, at least here.  Shawn Farner can be found inside the domain name.  Shawn Farner can be found in the blog itself.  All of my social networking accounts, most of which have a link to this blog, have Shawn Farner as the user name.  There is no escaping the fact that this blog now belongs to Professional Shawn. Consider Professional Shawn an alter-ego of sorts, like Clark Kent is for Superman (except not as super).  As long as this blog serves to represent me to the social media world, I have no choice.

I suspect that a lot of people have found themselves in this situation.  Behind every blog you read is a blogger with a lot more to them than you could ever learn through their posts.  I suspect that someday soon, I’ll make another attempt at creating a more personal blog.  Until then, Twitter comes the closest.  And to get the full experience?  You’ll have to get to know me. :)