Can Chen and Hurley Make Delicious Tasty Again?

In the early days of social media, social bookmarking was up there with social networking and social news as a primary way of sharing the world with others. Delicious was at the top of the bookmarking world, wildly popular amongst academics and geeks and poised to expand to the rest of the world.

In 2005, Yahoo! bought the site. Under the Yahoo! umbrella, Delicious did exactly nothing to expand and soon fell from grace and relevance. By the end of 2010, most were ready to accept that Delicious would go the way of Propeller and Mixx and fade into legend, a once-mighty site that drew attention from the tech world in its glory days but failed to adapt to the changing needs of a Web 2.0 society.

On April 27th, 2011, fans of the site were met with fairly good news. AVOS, a company led by the co-founders of YouTube Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, had freed acquired Delicious from the clutches hands of Yahoo! and were planning on doing something Yahoo! failed to do. They were going to change the largest social bookmarking site in the world rather than follow the path of inaction that Yahoo! had adopted for Delicious.

There was hope.

While details are limited about exactly what they have planned for the site, September 23rd marks the last chance that anyone has to transfer their Delicious account to their, well, Delicious account. In essence, all bookmarks that have been made on Delicious in the past can become part of the new Delicious as long as people agree to the AVOS terms of service. In reading through it, nothing sticks out as major. It’s just a legal necessity.

Listening to them discuss the future offers hints as to what Delicious will become in the near future.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on. There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”

As he notes, there is no shortage of data. Organizing it is the problem, and one that only Google has demonstrated skill in solving. Facebook search is awful. Twitter only goes back so far and is challenging to drill down without setting exact parameters. Bing is doing better (some say better than Google) but they haven’t put it all together properly yet. Can soon-to-be-Delicious solve some of these problems?

By redesigning the site, making the UI more robust and intuitive, and enhancing the software to organize links better, they might just be able to pull it off. They also plan on including personalization measures that will help prioritize links based upon actions and recommendations.

“We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing,” Mr. Hurley said.

It will take mainstream adoption similar to what they achieved at YouTube for the site to take off. The roots that Delicious once held strong are rotten – old users have moved on. Diehards want more but will stick around as long as the service is still available. It is in gaining a much larger userbase that Chen and Hurley will be able to make the site successful.

By staying lean, maintaining an office of fewer than 20 people (who are mostly developers and programmers) they should be able to self-fund and maintain mobility. Their biggest challenge will be in reaching the tipping point to where their data is valuable to the general public.

They will need to take Delicious viral. They’ll need people using it to get more people to use it to get more people to use it. It’s a different challenge than what they had at YouTube in the 18 months it took for them to build it up and sell it off to Google. YouTube could generate traffic without them becoming users. For Delicious, users will be the most important aspect.

In the next few months, we will see what they have up their sleeves. On a personal note, I’ve always been fond of the site and wanted it to succeed. I’m skeptical – Yahoo! really did everything they could to kill the site off completely – but hopefully Chen and Hurley will make lightning strike twice for themselves and bring social bookmarking to its next level, whatever that may look like.

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Read more analysis of sites like Delicious on this social media blog.

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5 Situations in Which You Shouldn’t Create A Facebook Page For Your Online Business

Setting up a Facebook page for your online business is free and easy, and takes just a few minutes. But it’s not always wise to rush in without having considered a few things beforehand. Just take a look at some newly-created pages of small businesses on Facebook and it will strike you that they all look more or less the same. And that’s not a good thing.

So, while it’s true that it’s becoming important to be present on Facebook, do consider not rushing in if you’re in one of the following situations.

With its hundreds of millions of users, Facebook is one of the best places on the Internet to spread word about your business. However, companies without at least a basic social media strategy don’t usually fare too well.

I think it’s not really enough to be on Facebook to spread word about yourself effectively – you should know why you want to be there and what you are going to do. So, think about devising a basic plan of action before creating your fan page; no matter how basic this plan is it will help.

Optimizing your Facebook page for a certain group of users tends to cement your engagement with them faster. Having no particular target, and so trying to attract all types of Facebook users, is a less-focused endeavor that is risky, and may in the end lead only to a great number of followers, but no actual people interested in what you have to offer.

You can find more about the user demographics, completing the blank fields, and then getting to the next page, which helps you identify user groups.

A dead Facebook page is not much good. To draw in people it’s necessary to add interesting content to the page regularly, and this is often more difficult than it sounds. I think one of the big misconceptions about Facebook is that it’s easy to keep your page updated.

It’s not! Unless you have others to help you and unless you have a strategy in place, chances are you will find it hard to submit 4 of 5 interesting updates every week, especially if you have little time to spare. One way to pass this obstacle is to ask for help.

Updates that are not made when most of your users are active on Facebook are not effective, reaching only a limited group of people. I don’t think there’s any simple way to discover when most of your followers are on, because usage behavior depends on many factors and changes quite often.

A wonderful study called The Science of Social Timing has come to the conclusion that it’s best to post on Saturdays, and then every other day. For best results it’s perhaps best to consider what type of users you have, and to try different updating plans. What’s clear is that haphazard posting is less effective than planned one.

In the beginning I’ve said that many Facebook pages created by companies look much the same. You would probably like to stand out, or at least to be different from your competitors. This can be done by customizing you page, adding a catchy wall logo, nice thumbnails, and if you’re up to it, personalized tabs. The latter can be done through the static FBML application featured on the website.

This application also lets you create an interesting landing page, which should be attractive because it’s the first one users see.

In conclusion, you will find it more rewarding to have a strategy before making a Facebook page for your business.

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LyricStatus: Because Expression through Lyrics Makes Facebook Easier

For some, Facebook is easy. As a social media society, we’ve abandoned our privacy, our ability to speak in complete sentence or use complete words, and our tendency towards any form of introversion. We want to encapsulate our moments, days, and lives into quick status updates that are intended to inform others of who we are and why we do what we do.

It all sounds very esoteric, but the goal is the exact opposite. We want to be understood by our friends and family, and Facebook has become the expression engine driving this desire. Sometimes, we simply need a little help. This is where music comes in.

It’s also where LyricStatus comes in.

“Ever misquoted lyrics or typed song lyrics out wrong?”  asked Ed Gain of LyricStatus Ltd. “Can be a bit embarrassing to make a heart-felt statement through lyrics on your Facebook status only to have everyone comment that you got it wrong! LyricStatus uses the official licensed lyrics where possible, so you can be sure the lyrics you quote are accurate.”

The concept is simple. Find a song or a lyric that matches what you want to say in your status update. For my test, I used the song “Bright Lights” by Matchbox 20.

The interface allows you to search by song name or artist. As soon as I started typing, the options started narrowing down the results. Once I  was done typing the name of the song, it showed a list of songs of that title ordered alphabetically by artist.

Since it attaches directly to Facebook, one only needs to highlight the portion of the song they want to post. After highlighting the desired portion of the song that I wanted to post, a prompt appeared allowing me to post what I had selected directly to Facebook.

Users can customize their post before it’s live, adding further explanation or posting it directly to a friend’s wall.

Once live, it gives an accurate song quote with proper attribution and a link to the song lyrics themselves. There is normally a YouTube video on the lyrics page so people can listen to the song directly on LyricStatus.

Overall, this is a very clever service that can help people express their feelings, sentiment, or moods through song lyrics. It makes accuracy less of an issue.

“Lyrics have always played a part in social networking, even in the pre-Facebook era, sometimes taking the form of MSN screen names or MySpace titles,” Gain continued. “LyricStatus.com looks set to encourage the trend on Facebook, with the added touch of leaving a link behind on your lyric status so that users can click to see what the actual song is that’s being quoted.”

As long as it doesn’t make us add MySpace bling to our Facebook pages, it should be an excellent free service.

About LyricStatus Ltd
LyricStatus is based in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, and was founded in the summer of 2010 by Ed Gain, 27, a former web design company owner. LyricStatus’ mission is to build the most complete and accurate database of lyrics and provide the best functionality for discovering and sharing lyrics.

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Technology, Social Media, and Their Affect on Long-Distance Relationships

Social media often gets blamed for bad things that happen in relationships. We now have the opportunity to find old girlfriends and boyfriends on Facebook, make new relationships on Tagged.com, and see things even have random encounters on, well, sites that we wouldn’t link to from Soshable. There’s another side to the story – social media and advancing technologies can be used to keep relationships going, particularly long-distance ones.

Mobile technology is obviously one way this is possible. We are connected almost everywhere we go if we have a smartphone, tablet, or even “old school” cell phones. Even when we’re on the road or in a plane, internet connections are often available and cell coverage is spreading the farthest corners of the earth.

There’s a scene in Transformers 2 where the two protagonists are separated by distance but attempt to maintain their relationship by having a “date night” on video. The movie may not have been worth watching, but this scene is one that is becoming a much more common occurrence in the real world. Video chatting and multimedia communications are making it to where couples don’t have be together to have face-to-face interactions.

The infographic below by our friends at Rounds shows the evolution of the long-distance relationship and points to our current situation as one where having face time (even on Apple Facetime) is easier today than ever before. Click to enlarge.

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The Ethics Behind Getting More Twitter Followers

Those of you who know our editor JD Rucker might remember that he stopped following Twitter users other than people he knew or wanted to follow over two years ago. After skyrocketing to the top 200 in the world, he simply quit adding and started the long process of removing people that either weren’t active, weren’t interesting, or weren’t real people.

Why? Because he was cheating.

Well, it wasn’t technically cheating. He wasn’t breaking rules or buying Twitter followers. He was simply tweeting a lot, adding a ton of people, and removing those who didn’t add him back after a certain period of time. He was churning. Had he continued, he’d likely have over 400,000 Twitter followers. Thankfully, he turned away from the dark side and the desires that continue to engulf many – the goal of getting a bigger Twitter account at all costs.

When he sent me this guide to get getting Twitter followers ethically, I couldn’t help but laugh a little. I knew he was one of the villains before, converted in recent years but still someone who would have frowned on these words in the past. Things are different. Social media is different. JD is different.

The world is different.

Check out the guide if you want to get more Twitter followers but want to do so using only white-hat method. It’s an excellent and comprehensive guide – highly recommended by me. Here’s a couple of examples of advice in the guide:

Even if you don’t have a blog of your own, you can easily gain notoriety by writing posts for other blogs. Running a blog is hard work, and most people and companies welcome well written posts to give them a break. If you do score an opportunity to guest post, link to your blog if you like, but be sure to link to your Twitter account as well. Some people will follow you if they liked the post…

Most of the time, offline strategies involve people finding you offline and connecting with you online afterwards. Tweetups are exactly the opposite – they allow you the opportunity to connect with Twitter users in person, even if you have never met before. Because the group of Twitter users that meet is often diverse (and often inviting their own followers and friends,) you will likely gain at least a few new followers from a tweetup…

Industry leaders, celebrities, gurus, and others with large followings love getting retweets. Some of them will even occasionally thank you for your retweets by mentioning your name e.g. “Hey @awesomeco4444, thanks for the RT!”. The benefits, just like replying, are that your name gets out in front of everyone that follows them! …

Most of it is really good advice. Some of it is useful to individuals. All of it is useful for businesses. Enjoy!

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The Evolution of Advertising Executives

Things have certainly changed in advertising over the last 50 years. Heck, they’ve changed dramatically in the last 5 years. While the industry has seen major shifts, it’s in looking at the people driving advertising that we see the most noticeable changes. What was once a job for the confident “Mad Men” of the world has shifted towards the aggressive “LinkedIn People” of the world.

It hasn’t only been a change in tools and venues. Advertising principals have changed. Certain things are still similar, but the transparency and communication abilities of the internet have shifted the message from a one-way broadcast to a two-way interaction. As a result, advertising must be at least somewhat interactive to truly work today.

Ads are ads. Companies still use television, radio, billboards, and other “old-school” techniques, but they’ve all turned social in one way or another. Even if there are no true social elements to the advertising, the consumers have the ability to make them social. Wild claims or unsubstantiated statements are easily debunked and can become nightmares on the social sphere when old techniques are used. Conversely, it’s possible to get the messages out and build ambassadors to a brand using the same styles that often work against companies.

Everything has turned to different levels of gray.

This infographic by our friends at BuySellAds breaks down the evolution over the past 5 or 6 decades of the stereotypical advertising executive of yesterday compared to those in the industry today. Click to enlarge.

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Digg Newsroom Beta May Just Be Enough To Regain Relevance

Over the last year since the launch of version 4, Digg has faced challenges in regaining its relevance in social media. Traffic is down. Users are less active. It has seemed at times as if Digg may go the way of MySpace, Propeller, and Yahoo Buzz – social sites that were once big news but failed to adapt to a changing social sphere.

Today, they launched Digg Newsrooms in limited beta. If it’s as successful as they hope, it could mark the shift that the site has needed to get back to the top of the social news game.

“There are so many social signals on the web and no easy way to separate the news that is most meaningful about a topic from the news that is most popular,” said Matt Williams, CEO of Digg. “With Digg Newsrooms now you can stay on top of the news that matters most to you, and interact with others who share your passion for a given topic.”

Here’s a sneak peek; click to enlarge.

By presenting the “best news” on any topic, Newsrooms adds interesting layers that Digg has never had in the past. The most profound change is in discover of content. Newsrooms analyzes “social signals” from Facebook and Twitter to help surface content. In the past, stories were either submitted by users or fed directly into Digg from RSS feeds for a short period of time after Digg v4 launched.

Now content can be discovered by Newsrooms through Facebook likes, Tweets, or simply because a site has a tendency to give quality content surrounding the topic. Unlike the disastrous auto-submission function of Digg v4, Newsrooms will only surface the content; users must still Digg the story for it to be submitted. In the case below, you will see a story that has surfaced in Mobile but that has not yet been submitted.

It surfaced because it came from Intomobile or because of the 12 tweets that have already been sent about the story. Once I click the Submit button, it’s now in the queue and I become the submitter of the story.

According to alpha tester John Boitnott, “Overall, I think the “newsrooms” project is a gutsy attempt by Digg to bring in new users as well as some of the old ones.

His praise comes with a caveat. “However, they had better be ready to stick to their guns and make this new beta work over the long term.”

In addition to content surfacing and creating communities through which users can interact with like-minded people, Digg is adding a layer of “fun” to the site. Awards are given to users for certain activities such as Ace reporter for having their first story promoted to that Newsroom Front Page. Sites like Reddit and Buzzfeed have had relatively strong success with badge features.

What will all of this do for Digg? It’s very likely that they will get a nice burst of buzz, as it’s the most profound change they’ve made in a year. The key will be old user adoption and new user acquisition. If this gets enough attention to start bringing new users in and if it’s able to work well enough that current users find it useful, it may be enough to make Digg one of those rare success stories of a company that crumbled and then rose from the ashes to reinvent itself as a relevant social media site again.

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