Color is the newest social media application on the block, launched just after SxSW and relying on proximity-based media sharing instead of a friend model. Founded by names from other successful ventures along with $41 million in funding, Color seemed poised to storm the social media market. One day after…
I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them “artists”). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that…
Developers are starting to lean on the features of Facebook outside of the walled garden of Facebook itself, and there are implications for us as users that we might not be considering. The current trends of web design include giant footers, social media icons, extensive background images, and the omnipresent…
URL shorteners are in your web logs, stealing your clicks. Ok, maybe not in all your logs, but certainly they can show up in reports, tricking you to click on them, potentially exposing you to spam or viruses. If you aren’t familiar with URL shorteners, they evolved as a method…
There was once a time that if you wanted to lodge a complaint with a company or organization, you could rely on writing a strongly-worded letter. You might get a response in 6-8 weeks. Then came a point when you could call a support line and speak to a human…
I can’t turn on the TV, surf the web, or peer into my Twitter feed without stumbling into another year-end wrap-up of 2010. These dime-a-dozen contrivances abound like the proverbial lemming to the cliff (lemmings don’t really do that, it’s also a contrivance). However, there have been enough of some…
Last night the local Social Media Club chapter here in Buffalo put on the event TacoVino, a wine tasting paired with a local taco truck who has social media to thank for some of its success. City Wine Merchant opened its doors, and bottles of wine, while Lloyd Taco Truck…
First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, “You get that for which you pay” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. In the last week I have watched two…
You might recognize the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) from such specifications as HTML, CSS, XHTML, ARIA, MWABP and other acronyms that are hardly pronounceable. Today the W3C has added yet another item to its list, in the form of the Federated Social Web Incubator Group (the announcement). You may…
Brighkite has made an announcement today that affects me and a handful of other people (not counting all the people on Facebook whose timelines I inadvertently spam): Brightkite is dropping check-ins, posts and streams. Brightkite started 3 years ago with a Twitter-like ability to share your random musings. However, it…
Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don’t know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general.…
I finally get to eat. Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite. In addition to a…