kfeighery’s posterous

Will get to this one later on this evening!

Twitters going to add accurate GeoLocation paramaters to its API - expect a flurry of apps to start using this.

Image via CrunchBase

I am not saying that this happens to everyone or that everyone is ticked that Facebook bought out FriendFeed. But obviously I have been disappointed by FriendFeed being bought out by Facebook. While I have a Facebook page, and am seeing FriendFeed user’s crossing over from FF to Facebook (thanks!), it is interesting what has happened to FriendFeed traffic since the buyout. I invested a lot of my time into FriendFeed, and while the main site will most likely hang around for a bit, in the longer run it looks like I am not the only one who is not spending as much time on FriendFeed as I used to based on the numbers from Compete.com

Of course the most dramatic one is the short three month term, from here it looks like they lost about 10% of their traffic since the announcement, and while that might not seem like much, it works out to about 100,000 unique visitors lost since the announcement.

The six month Compete score brings this more into perspective. Against the three month, the drop is still noticeable, but does show a slowdown of people going to FriendFeed.

The one year Compete score shows off the final metric in the grand scheme of how they have been growing traffic over the last year.

What makes this interesting to me is that many of the early adopters really invested a lot of personal time in making the network work, building the communities, and building the connections between people. Many of the early adopters are still there like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, but a good many of the middle tier, those that follow have reduced the amount of time that they are on the system. I know I have, and I have noticed some of my mid tier friends also cutting back. This could be to social networking fatigue, but then I also know that the month of August has been very bad for business and required that I refocus on my company and on my day job to make sure that ends met. There was not the time to devote to social networking that I previously had in the past. Unless the world had a really bad August and July, it is interesting to note that nearly 10% of FriendFeed’s audience dropped off after they got bought out.

What that means to Facebook is also worth noting, they bought a growing company, and the user backlash was probably unexpected on both companies. Social networks should look at the raw numbers and see if there is the potential for a backlash if they are looking to purchase traffic or backend support systems like FriendFeed will eventually become for Facebook. I have never been a big fan of Facebook because my boss is there, and most of the people I work with are there are well. FriendFeed was more of a playground without my parents hanging out, now I’ll have to watch what I say and post a bit closer than I had to in the past. Especially as Facebook starts integrating FriendFeed closer or turns it into their main real time status system.

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Valid comments I think - this whole takeover of FriendFeed by Facebook has made people stop and think about how much effort they should invest in social apps rather than in their own sources (such as their blogs). Its a real shame that FF was taken over because to my mind it was the best social app - I used it as a filter for Twitter - with the added bonus that those that I do follow I also get to see their Google Shared Items and other services such as Digg, StumbleUpon etc...On Twitter I followed much more indiscriminately than on FF (where I was very selective - in that I only follow those who share interesting content - any fluff and I unfollow). I also had the Desktop notifier plugged in so the news came to me- I didnt need to go to any client or website (I ignore it when I need to - with a bit of effort). But I find that I get to see all the most relevant and topical and informative news, info etc..without searching for it at all - it comes to me (which is the point of the realtime river of news when used properly IMHO). Anyway, in saying al that Im trying out Posterous as you can see :)) Facebook to my mind is too complicated - in that there's far too much noise on it for my liking. I do use it but they need to break it out into different services if they want to capture real-time audiences. They also need to search much more prominent - the little search bar is stuck up in the right hand corner of the page - which is ridiculous. Search should be upfront and in your face - and actually return relevant info - they've along way to go before they crack that nut.

Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year

August 20, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler and Matt Marshall

Yes, Twitter will start earning some income this year.

Co-founder Biz Stone said the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics. After that, the company might move into building business-oriented application programming interfaces, creating a “commercial layer” over the social network.

“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

The company has already moved in this direction by releasing a guide for professional users, detailing how companies can use it to find customers, pass on deals and perform market research. Stone didn’t give a specific timeline for when the company would launch the newer services.

It might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for.

“We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know — ‘How am I doing on Twitter?’” he said.

Building premium commercial offerings would put Twitter in closer competition with third-party developers like CoTweet, which helps brands manage customer relations on the microblogging network. Stone, however, was careful to stress that the company doesn’t want to disturb the world of third-party developers building around the network.

“We’ll continue to support the ecosystem with a whole new set of commercial APIs,” he said.

Guessing Twitter’s business model has become a perennial parlor game in Silicon Valley. The start-up has raised $55 million so far and zoomed past 44.5 million unique users in June, according to comScore. But it hasn’t revealed exactly how it plans to live up to that lofty valuation. Instead, Stone has said in the past that the company is learning and evolving with its user base.

He also wouldn’t rule out the possibility of further acquisitions, acknowledging that Twitter had talked to FriendFeed about collaborating or acquiring the company before it was bought by Facebook.

“We’re at a point where even though we’re only two years old, acquisitions are definitely possible,” Stone said.

Twitter’s already done one before. It bought Summize last year to build out Twitter’s search capabilities, an move that seems to have turned out well.

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They took their time - its amazing how little they've developed in terms of functionality this year - when you look at the likes of friendfeed who were trying to innovate - but of course the difference is Twitter has managed to grow exponentially without doing any real innovation to the service - the idea behind Twitter is clearly innovative and has captured peoples imagination - but the real innovation has come from the users.

Twitter from inside facebook - but only if you have a business page - not there for personal pages

Posterous’ new iPhone app could make citizen journalism and lifestreaming the norm

14 comments  

By Zee on 20th August 2009

Posterous, the blogging platform/lifestreaming service that really can be used for almost anything, has released an iPhone app.

The app, called PicPosterous, is focused primarily on media rather than blogging as such, but as you’ll soon discover, they’ve released some very clever features.

As Posterous describes, “PicPosterous is an entirely different way of posting photos and video to your Posterous site. Instead of posting photos from an event once, at the end, PicPosterous PicPosterous “>is designed to let you post photos live, as you take them. PicPosterous can replace the built in Camera app on your iPhone, and publish your photos and video online live.”

Lifestreaming done right.

So say you’re at a wedding party. With PicPosterous, you can take photos and video throughout the day and have them automatically uploaded – as you take them – for your friends who couldn’t make it, to see. You don’t have to stop and wait either, just carry on taking photos and video and PicPosterous will work in the background.

You don’t even need to login to get started, just start snapping/recording away and if you already have an account, Posterous will automatically transfer everything over whenever you login.

You can manage multiple sites, create private albums and auto-post to your Wordpress blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and FriendFeed stream.

Breaking News

What’s really exciting is the potential in news to break faster and with more information than every before. Sure, with Twitter, news has been known to break fast and with the odd image linked from within the Tweet too. With PicPosterous however, you’ve got video and images being immediately uploaded and shared across all the viral hubs (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc..).

The next step would obviously be to bring live video into the picture. Something which Apple seems to be preventing at the moment.

Limitations

As Robin Wauters on Techcrunch quite rightly points out, there are a number of limitations.

“First, when you send pictures or videos to your Posterous blog, it’s impossible to add any kind of text or link from within the app (something I was able to do when I simply e-mailed in photos I took with my iPhone camera using the mail application).

Second, when you add multiple pictures to one album you can’t delete individual pics afterwards, leaving you only the option to clear all your albums and start over.

Third, you need to use your iPhone camera in landscape mode when you want your pictures to come out right on your blog, something that’s not indicated anywhere and you need to find out yourself.”

and fourth, which wasn’t mentioned, video only works on iPhone 3GS.

Despite the Limitations

The ability to be able to relive precious (and the not so precious) events and share them immediately with others using photo and video brings a whole new dimension to the iPhone.

The immediate photo and video uploading, along with Posterous’ signature slick and easy autoposting functionality also means news could break and spread faster than ever before. Despite the simplicity and limitations, the potential here is big, trust me.

Try it out here (iTunes link), it’s Free.

The Yale-educated physics professor began his digital textbook 12 years ago, when his lecture notes "gradually morphed" into a book. His interest in the open-source operating system Linux convinced him that free was the way to go, and his textbook is available for anyone to use at http://www.lightandmatter.com. More than 40 colleges and high schools have adopted the book, according to the Web site.

Crowell isn't alone. He runs a site (www.theassayer.org), which catalogues free books on everything from philosophy to military science. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes much of its course materials, including textbooks and videos of lectures, available on its open courseware site (http://ocw.mit.edu). Professors at other prestigious institutions, such as the California Institute of Technology, have also written and released textbooks free of charge.

via physorg.com

Got to love all these colleges releasing courseware for free - just isnt enough time in the day or night to get through all the stuff that interests you. Also, check out the standford podcasts series - endless amounts of excellent content.

Here's the blog post from the Facebook Official Blog about the implmentation and going live of the Huffington Post Social News