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by: Anne Haynes

In the past couple of months I’ve been playing around with Twitter.com and while this service was offered to me back in January 2008, I dismissed it as being lame. Why would anyone want to know what I’m doing right now? What value does knowing I’m drinking a latte at Scooters add to anyone’s day? Then one day I made “time” for Twitter! And it looks like Amazon has made 15 million dollars worth of time for Twitter. With this said, what does Twitter offer? Why would Amazon invest in a micro blogging service? Let’s discuss….

Product Ratings: real-time – Imagine if you purchased a mountain bike on Amazon and while you were riding your bike through the woods you loved it so much you sent a message from your cell phone. Yes, twitter allows you to send messages via your cell to a custom twitter email address. Now this review or rating you give via your cell phone syncs with Amazon and boom – you get the picture.

Product Photos: real-time – Imagine if you’re on that new bike and you decide to take a self portrait with your new bike – the one you purchased from Amazon (and the third party merchant). Well, now you have a following. While product ratings are great, personal pictures and events with a product are more interesting. Potential buyers need pictures and video on the internet today!

Product Chat: real-time – Imagine if you could talk to someone who’s purchased the bike right before you’re about to add your bike to the shopping cart? OK now it’s a different business model!

I remember back in 1995 when I was trying to be a chat room monitor for ZDNet. While I was never approved as a monitor on ZDNet, I did my duty monitoring an internet radio station’s video conferencing broadcasts using CU-SeeMe. And what I learned was there are “some” freaks on the internet! Mind you it was 1995 and I was one of the first women using CU-SeeMe and at this time – one of the first women on the internet and wow it was fun! I want to do another post about CU-SeeMe!!

Bottom-line, if Amazon is thinking of using real-time chat for products reviews, they need damage control! For the manufactures that create the products sold online, this should feel like a wake-up call. If manufactures aren’t listening to their buyers/customers this information should be a reason to install a blog and listen – track and monitor what the consumer really wants from their manufacturing plants. The best way to know what consumers/clients want is to listen and the best way to listen is to have a blog! Don’t worry enterprise manufactures, you have control over comments.

If you want to leave a comment, send me an email – I’m overloaded with blog spam and updating my own database and site – it takes time. Email me now!

by: Anne Haynes

In the last 2 months I’ve educated myself on social media tools and ways to make these tools work for you instead of sucking time out of your daily grind. I remember when I finally left myspace and went to facebook. It was early 2008 and while the glittery profiles brought me into Myspace and the music kept me logging into my profile, the industry news was drawing me to rekindle my facebook connection.

The facebook experience was overwhelming. It didn’t take long for me to hate facebook. The login alone gave me anxiety; too much to do and not enough understanding of what I was doing. Then the usability and data overload issues happened; friends requests, add application requests, announcements, etc. Facebook seemed like a big waste of time to me. But then I decided to soak; sit back, study, understand and analyze the facebook experience. It’s taken me a few months to get my facebook groove on, but it’s been well worth the time.

Today I read a segment in this months CREATIVITY Magazine (twitter:creativitymag) Refacing Facebook. In April of this year facebook announced a redesign targeting late spring, but the overwhelming feedback from the development community pushed the facebook redesign out. So with this said, more speculation on what will make a new facebook friendly is still out.

In the CREATIVITY Magazine article DL Byron, Principal, Textura Design mentions the lack of facebook integration within his other online presences/accounts. He specifically states flickr and YouTube. You know its times like these that DL Byron is wishing print production was just a little faster to the newsstands than technology is to social media. While he may have been referencing facebook as a technology entity, the facebook friendfeed application does this now. It’s clear in my consulting business and within the industry that the elite are onto these slick social media integration tools and it’s just a matter of time until these tools are second nature to everyone.

I’m just happy about my igoogle:

Let’s review:
I have the BeTwittered Google gadget on the left of my login page because well I read left to right and this concept is the same with dashboards. I have digg in the middle to keep me up on the hot topics on the internet. And finally, my favorite social media application: friendfeed on my right. What I find amusing is to see my twitters show up in friendfeed.

Now, let’s circle around to facebook:
In my facebook, I’ve added the friendfeed application and now all my friends can see my activity on the web.

It’s always tough to speak out about the social media industry especially when the topic is technology. Just when you say something doesn’t exist, the developers update the code and poof within seconds it exists.

For those of you wanting a dropbox invite, I just received a few more. If you need a BrightKite invite, shoot me a message.

by: Anne Haynes
You Know You’re a FriendFeed Poser When….

You find peoples names and do a Google search to figure out more about the person - then you add them.

You add people you don’t know.

Make comments in other peoples discussions, like they know you.

You find the latest, breaking news from someone else’s blog feed and then you blog about the same topic.

You start using old services you’ve lost interest in to be able to add more icons next to your name.

You create a room and no one joins your room.

You introduce FriendFeed and Twitter to your clients and make them use the services to communicate with you so you don’t feel alone.

You find yourself following someone you don’t know and liking things they like.

You “like” things you don’t read because you want to increase your “weekly” and “all time” numbers.

When everything is said and done, you’re not pretending you’re just following a bunch of people you don’t know. Then you realize - they don’t know all the people their following either. If you’re a FriendFeed user, will you please add me to your friends so I don’t feel like such a poser

The word is out on the internet that Yahoo and Google will make a joint announcement at 1:30 PST today. While I’m still looking for more information on this topic, TechCrunch is reporting “we’ve heard from a reliable source close to one of the companies” that an announcement is in the works. Ok, so the word is out - if this happens this will crush the competition and make Google the master of all paid search advertising. This is a sad day in search - let’s remember before Google, Yahoo! was number 1. More on this story at TechCrunch

I’ve been working with a client getting her iGoogle up and running with her blog site, Twitter, and FriendFeed. What I’ve noticed is that Facebook just appears when it wants too appear in FriendFeed. There must be a lag time of some sort - or I’m doing something wrong….

This morning a message from Twitter came through my FriendsFeed and I read, “Amazon.com Is DOWN”. I didn’t give it a second thought because systems go down and come back up within seconds. Well, I’m still reading about Amazon being down and at 2:41PM Central. So I visited Amazon and yes it’s still down.

When I worked at Kintera (recently purchased by Blackbaud) and the system would go down accidentally the business side of the house would joke about going home; “Sphere’s down”, “someone unplugged the internet”. But then there were times when internal teams were alerted of a scheduled maintenance and it was routine not to notify the customer. While most of the times the clients wouldn’t even notice, when they did project managers would back peddle and make up excuse after excuse. So, with Amazon being down it’s hard to say what’s really happening; accident or scheduled maintenance. When Sphere would die and all our clients became unable to access the back-end - the Error Page was always the last thing to edit or fix. One time there was a typo. Typos and misspellings are always a good way to showcase the brains behind a system when the sites go down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not much of a speller, but I’m not a software company either….

Update: I just published this post and refreshed my Amazon.com browser and poof it’s back 2:56PM Central.

Ok - so this is how it goes. I have gadgets all over my iGoogle and during my gadget twitter or digg experiences I ran across FriendFeed. I found the Google gadget and added it to my dashboard. I just watched FriendFeed for a few days then I started adding Favorites to my YouTube and Twittering and I noticed that all my stuff was showing up there…hence the “feed” in the name. I’m not a Super User - infact I’m a good tester because features that engineers and spec writers think are common sense, are not to me. Tonight I started looking closer at FriendFeed. I asked myself, “Yo Anne, why are there gray texts and black texts and the gray texts are indented? Honestly, if you knew me - you’d think I knew better, but really I’m overwhelmed with the internet - so sometimes I’m passive and tonight I took some time. FriendFeed is now my bestfriend! With Friendfeed it’s like being in a room with people in their lives and with twitter it’s like shouting from across a room. And here is the best of the best:

I decided to participate in the discussion tonight. I threw out a couple of comments and then added additional comments on inviting people to DropBox. A person named Defcon asked for an invite and within seconds, I had music sent to me from last.fm and digg shouts - it was awesome! It’s amazing what draws people to people! It’s about ideas, logic, feelings and just words. It’s official, twitter is lower on my iGoogle and FriendFeed is uptop and centered.

Need an invite to DropBox? Send me a message-6 more DropBox beta invites left.

Finally, a tool that integrates email, IM and soon social media sites. Orgoo allows you to access your email and IM without downloading any software. If you use GMail for Email and Yahoo! Messenger for instant messaging, then Orgoo is the tool for you. Check out the video below to learn more about Orgoo’s technology and features.

My most recent invite to DropBox was to Nathan Bollinger. He sent me an email stating, “Thank you so much! I have been looking for this for a few days now!” Nate, your welcome enjoy the next technology that will eliminate flash drive storage devices. Remember if you need a Beta DropBox Invite send me a message.

I have 8 more invites to DropBox Beta. send me your name and email for an invitation.