Yahoo! Pipes for Fun and Profit!
Have you used Yahoo! Pipes?
“Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web,” Yahoo! said stoically.
It sounds complex but Pipes is actually a really user friendly way to combine and filter information from all types of sources on the internet. Pipes gives you instant access to the data and functionality provided by sites like Flickr, Google Base, and Yahoo! Local & Search. You can also easily input your own data or RSS feeds. Once you have your source data, you can then use any number of modifiers to filter, combine, and analyze your data. It is astonishing how easy it is to do some really powerful things. The simple drag and drop interface is simple as can be. After watching a brief tutorial video you will be on your way. Welcome to the club, Pipe Builder…er…Plumber!
Confused? Don’t know where to start? No problem. There are tons of Pipes that have already been built that are just waiting for you to run them. Have a browse, there are some incredible Pipes. One of the best uses I have found so far is using a series of different Pipes for a quick and easy way to monitor what is being said about me and my brands across the internet. I use Pipes to monitor “Shoshul”, “Inkblot Robot”, and “Justin Thiele”. The Pipes create an RSS feed that is updated each time one of these terms is mentioned, for example, on Digg, MySpace, Twitter, or in blogs. This is a perfect way to keep your finger on the pulse of your brand all across the internet just by watching a couple of RSS feeds. Very productive and very timely.
Here are some good Pipes to get you started monitoring Social Media:
And one to help you find great deals:
How are you using Pipes for fun and/or profit?
Big File Sending
Do you ever want to share a file or two with family, friends, or colleagues? There have always been ways to do this. The most popular way that everyone knows about is to use email attachments. And this works well when the file is just a few megabytes, but for larger files other methods are required. For some FTP would be the ideal solution to all your troubles. I have been using it for years. However FTP is not for everyone. Once you know how to use it, it is pretty simple, but not so many do. What we need here is something as simple as sending a URL and the rest is self explanatory. There are many services that do this:
This service allows uploads of up to 100MB for it’s free service, with an option to upgrade to a premium service. The premium service includes 1GB of storage space for up to 1 year for $10. The site places emphasis on privacy. When you create a drop, you don’t need to enter anything! Just upload the file, and optionally place a password. On both the free and the premium versions, there are many ways to interface with your drop including email, voice mail, fax, an embeddable widget, and of course the web URL.
This one works directly with the email address of the recipient and yourself. There is a free service which allows up to 100MB and also tiered premium services. Premium service will cost quite a bit more than Drop.io, starting from a $9.99 per month account which offers 2GB maximum transfer with a 40GB cap on download bandwidth. Depending on the account you want though, you can spend up to $2999.99 per year, which allows 25 users, Unlimited bandwidth, and 60GB storage space.
The free account with DropSend offers 250MB of online storage, but limits the number of sends per month to 5. The premium accounts here are also tiered and offer no more than 1GB maximum file size, but up to 500GB storage space. The gist of this pricing schedule is that more dollars equals both more sends and more storage capacity. Those dollars amounts range from $5 to $99 monthly. DropSend does offer a desktop component for both PCs and Macs that allows you to upload without visiting the site.
L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Panel Recap & Notes
Last night I attended the L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Panel. L.i.S.A. is a 4 city panel discussing how businesses and consumers use social networks and where the opportunity lies to connect. I have been to a few of these types of event and panels and increasingly I am realizing that there is no secret to social marketing. The users need to “invite” your brand into their circle. Gaining that acceptance boils down to 3 major aspects:
- Content - provide content that your customers are interested in and is relevant to your business
- Authenticity - being transparent, trustworthy, and credible
- Help users socially connect with you and the community. Make it easy for them to use your service.
If you are not into the whole brevity thing. I have compiled my notes from the event below. I hope you can find a useful bit in there.
L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Portland, OR May 28, 2008
Moderated by: Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media
Panel:
John Furrier Furrier.org former CEO of PodTech
Michael Berkley - CEO of SplashCast
Dave Allen - Director, Insights & Digital Media of Nemo Design - formerly the bassist of Gang of Four
Hashem Bajwa - Director Digital Planning at Goodby, Silverstein & Partner
What is social advertising?
Enlists consumers to help tell your story
Building ambassadors to evangelize
Brands being invited in by consumers
Being accepted by the conversation
Web 1.0 was about website, self service, Web 2.0 is all about relationships
How do people communicate - peers, groups, context to the person
Interesting way: Using the “old media” model alongside social media - YouTube presidential debates
Wrong way: Budwieser spent millions to build Bud.tv, but the almost all of the ad views are on YouTube
Creating content for social media in your down time - HungryMan a production company has produced videos in their off time to post on YouTube that have been extremely popular
Do banner ads on Facebook constitute social advertising or is it old media model?
Clickthrough’s on MySpace and Facebook are extremely low
Would argue that this is still the “old media” view. A banner ad is a push ad. It is not social.
Just spamming your ad on a banner doesn’t work, you must be invited in. Consumer: “I want to be associated with this brand” & “I want to talk about this brand with my friends”
Companies need to understand and adjust for the “real time” environment we are in. How can you use this to add value to the user.
How is social marketing different from product placement?
Product placement is not authentic
Right way: Red Bull - gets popular athletes to organically promote & endorse
Endorsement in the community by a major player and influencer
Endorsement is one of the most cutting edge techniques right now
How does a brand get invited or be accepted?
Brands have fans that want to be associated with them
Start out with the consumer in mind
Example: people on Facebook care about recycling - HP focuses on recycling. Where is the connection
What do the customers think and care about
The metrics to measure social advertising are terrible. We can measure everything, but we don’t know WHAT to measure
Find your value and figure out how to apply it to social media. Understand your niche do something remarkable and the marketing and social media takes care of itself. You need to figure out what you want to do and accomplish.
How do you measure distributed content?
Are you gaining brand ambassadors
Track influencers (super distributors) - how many of their friends saw it and added it to their page
No one is more authentic than a friend
Build commerce into the distribution model
Brands must get invited into a social network that already exists. They can’t develop their own network, because it will automatically be viewed as an advertisement and inauthentic. The users won’t come.
Always put out content!
Content about your value proposition
People come from search - they find you on their own
Get in front of the eyes that are looking for you. Don’t try to make people look for you.
“The content is the ad”
Whoever creates the best user value win
AUTHENTICITY must be a core value
User experience is also key. What does my target audience look like? Jacob Nielsen is a usability guru.
The internet is an opt-in network. Aided (search engines) and unaided (offline marketing) awareness.
Single user on a small site can be a carrier to a bigger site and spread a message / opinion
Let the users do what they want to do. Stay out of there way. Let them talk to each other and try to measure it.
Be part of the experiments or at least talk with the people who are. Tap into the people who are doing interesting stuff.
Recommended Books
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz
Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
Social Commenting Systems
There are a number of new social commenting systems becoming available. These services are in kind of a weird space. After all, every blog already has a built in commenting system. How do you benefit from using one of these services and “outsourcing” your comment system? Traditionally commenting has been a pretty one way experience. The comments are reactionary to the post. Built in commenting systems don’t allow much community interaction. It is difficult to reply directly to another commenter and continually monitor the ongoing conversation. Disqus, Intense Debate, coComment, and SezWho are all trying to change this. There are some benefits to using one of these systems: better comment threading to enhance and simplify discussion, ability to use avatars and video comments, a voting system for commenters to build their reputation, and the ability to easily follow commenters across multiple sites. The biggest benefits I see, are to the commenters themselves. A system like this helps commenters “own” the content they create. Often times, the comments on a blog are more interesting than the post itself. Built in commenting systems do little to reward commenters for the content. These commenting systems make it much easier for commenters to build their personal brands through reputation, gain followers, and aggregate their comments from all over the web onto a centralized service.
I would, however, like to see these four services rally around an open standard. The ultimate goal is to have the comments for all blogs to be centralized to one service. Having four services would be better than thousands of built in ones, but not quite ideal. Some merging or standard would definitely be better for the web community.
I really think that if you respect your blog’s community, you owe it to them to use one of these services. We are now using Disqus for our commenting (incredibly easy to install). See below for my sample comment. Let us know what you think.
Overview of Location Based Social Networking and Brightkite Review
Sharing your location with your friends in real time might be the next big trend on the internet. Kirk touched on this a bit in our niche marketing article. There are scores of new websites cropping up to make it easier to let your friends know where you are, meet up with people in your area, or find out information about your location (not too mention show you location relevant ads). I came across a great video of Tom Coates from Yahoo! talking about Fire Eagle and the location based landscape. Fire Eagle is a web app that is designed to serve you content based on your location. The “consumer facing” features of Fire Eagle are actually pretty sparse. The really interesting things about Fire Eagle, however, are the APIs that they provide. Essentially they are working as a “location broker”, meaning they provide a backend location service for other web apps to tap into and use however they can imagine. In the video below Tom Coates talks about the plethora of location based sites out there and the potential in location based computing. The video is almost 18 minutes long, so I will post links to the websites below if you don’t want to watch the entire thing, though I do highly recommend it.
Services to update your location and current location based uses:
Navizon - Peer to peer phone app that updates your location every 10 minutes
Loki - Free location based search and navigation tool bar that also updates your location every 10 minutes
Zonetag - Geotag your photos from your mobile phone
Firebot - A Twitter based app. You Direct Message @Firebot your location and it updates Fire Eagle
Brightkite - Uses “check in” locations to update your location and connect you with your friends
Rummble - Helps you discover people or places that you would like based on your location
Plazes - Helps you create events and activities in the “Real World” at specific times and places
Spot - GPS Satellite Messenger Unit for Journalists, Backpackers, Travelers to show progress, check in with friends & family, and get assistance
Wikinear - Shows you Wikipedia articles near your location (this feature is also now available through Google Maps)
Lightpole - Helps you find restaurants and bars near you as well as reviews
Outside.in - Determines the location that blog posts and news articles refer to, and serves you them when you are near
Metosphere - A service that attempts to overlay meta data on the physical world. And introduces something called “GeoBlogs”
Fireball - Plots your friends’ locations on a Yahoo! Map
Fire Widgets - Widgets from Fire Eagle that give you weather and geotagged photos for wherever you are
Moveable Type - Introduced a plugin that displays your location on a map on your blog
So which of these apps will be the next big thing? Which are here to stay and which will just fade away? One thing is for sure, a great idea doesn’t necessarily make a great app. Implementation is just as (or more) important.
Brightkite has been getting a lot of hype lately. I have had a chance to sit down with this service a bit. Their proposition is that you can track your friends’ locations in real time and meet up with people around you. Long story short, it uses “check in” points. Meaning you periodically tell Brightkite the address of where you are. If you don’t know the address, you can do a search by company name (Starbucks, for example). This is pretty easily done via laptop from their site. However, the real opportunity for a service like this is in using your mobile phone. Unfortunately, Brightkite is less than convenient from your phone. The process is way to manual. You send a Text Message with your address. If you don’t know your address, send the name of a company. They then send a message back with a list of company locations for you to choose from (not an easy task to choose from a list of Starbucks in a downtown metropolitan city). At this point it is hard to see the full benefits of all your effort, because of the relatively small user base (it is still in beta, afterall). The process is too much effort and not enough reward. The implementation of Brightkite is just not simple enough yet. I don’t want to track down my address so I can tell it to Brightkite. It feels like I am doing the work for them! Updating your location needs to be more automated, using GPS or Wifi Triangulation. It needs to be as simple as 1 or 2 clicks to update and post your location. Minimize the amount of work I need to do in order to use Brightkite, then I will whole heartedly jump on board!
If you want to try out Brightkite for yourself, we have some invites. Post a comment below or find us on Twitter.
Mashing It Up
Mashups are very hot right now. Why? Because it is a natural evolution of the social networking phenomenon. You may have content on many social networking sites across the web. Friends and followers of yours don’t want to visit tens to hundreds of different sites to see what you have posted recently. Sites like Profilactic (which you can see to the right) and FriendFeed offer a way of taking the feeds from various social networks which you are apart of and putting it all in one place. If you are like me and are completely “ADD” about your web activity on a daily basis, you might benifit from one of these two sites or many other sites like it. All it takes is sign up and add the user name to each of you social networking sites. It only took me an hour to gather all of mine! Then you can use a facebook app, or otherwise embed this feed into your website or pretty much anywhere you want. See example below.
EDIT: Removed example. Slowed down page load, so on further thought, I don’t recommend it.
Spokeo: Track Friends (or Strangers) Across All Major Social Networks
There is a new social networking web service out called Spokeo. They say: “Learn something about your friends …Guaranteed!”. Basically, they are a social network aggregator (free to try, monthly subscription). Type in an email address and they search 22 social networks for any content/info posted by that person. The concept is simple enough. Initially, I thought that this would be a good way to find out which social networks your friends are using, so that you view their content or join and add them as a friend. I decided to give it a try. Upon logging in, I was amazed when I saw an aggregated timeline of all the updates that my friends had made across nearly every social network. Similar to FriendFeed, but force fed (everybody’s feeds are shown, no opt in required). The site has a lot more implications, both good and bad. This can be a good tool to stay current with your friends or just interesting people. If they post on many social networks you can receive all their updates in one place and not have to visit each site individually. And if they start using a new site, you will know automatically.
I do get a bit worried however. We are hearing more and more about people not getting hired for jobs because of content on their Facebook or kids getting suspended from school because of pictures on their MySpace. Not to mention this is perfect “stalker-ware”! This tool can make this process 22 times easier. No guessing what sites they use and searching manually. Incriminating evidence just shows up! Automagically!
This also brings up privacy issues. More specifically “privacy through obscurity” (similar to “security through obscurity”). You are not more private by using Picturetrail instead of Flickr or DailyMotion over YouTube or Bebo and not MySpace. And you never really were since the creation of Google, but it is getting a whole lot easier! Spokeo performs its searches based on email address. So by using different email addresses for different aspects of your life you can limit the amount of info Spokio can find. Beyond that people are left with a few options: (1) Either don’t use these social network services, (2) only use them if you can make a private profile, or (3) embrace it: put your thoughts out there for everyone to see, add to the global conversation, and stand behind your opinions/actions. I was in a talk with Justin Kistner recently and he said something that stuck with me: “Privacy is for the emotionally insecure”. I am starting to come around to his opinion (at least from a social point of view; political environments can make this tricky).
Services like Spokeo will continue to crop up and make accessing information easier and easier, you either need to be very conscious of your privacy or assume that everything you post will be available to the world.
firef.ly
If you look to the sidebar on the right of this page you will see a new widget called firefly. It is a new service that allows anyone who is on the same page to chat with you. The counter will tell you if there are others on the page and if any of them are currently chatting. Once you click on the “Join Them” button, you start to see mouse cursors of other users on the page and if they say something a chat box appears just above where they typed on the page. It is a really fancy, cool little web application. But how useful will it ultimately be? Justin and I were using it just a bit ago for a short chat session and we decided that maybe so, maybe no.
First of all, it can only be used to chat with other people on the page. I believe the intent is that other people reading the same article can discuss it. This makes me think of sort of an active comments section. A
pretty cool concept yes, but aren’t passive comments more effective for this purpose. You want to see the conversation about the article come from all the readers as a whole instead of the readers who happen to be there now. So for that purpose, maybe no.
I could also potentially see this service used on a site where you need to talk to an administrator or site operator. For example, if I had a business where I offer computer repair and consultation services, I could allow people who visit my website contact me directly. The problem is that the way firefly currently works is that I would have to be on my website at all times to receive messages. If the host could receive these chats via an IM client for example, this could become much more useful in this situation. Perhaps a premium service would be in order here.
I so far cannot see any opportunities for monetization with a service like this either. Possibly with premium services as mentioned, but at this point it seems more like site bling. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very cool bling, and I encourage you to try it on this site. If you can think of some great uses for this project please discuss in the comments below.
Links You Didn’t Know You Wanted
Social link sharing has become very important in recent years. Arguably even more important than the search engine in getting your brand out there and obtaining an audience. When I talk about social link sharing, I am talking about websites that allow you to find what you are looking for even if you didn’t know you were looking for it. Sites where your friends or a community guide you toward a web page based more on your interests or your friends interests. There are numerous different websites that do this, but in this article, I will concentrate on three of these: Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us.
If you are on this blog, you have probably heard of Digg. Maybe you even used it to get here, but for those who have not used Digg, I will explain. Digg is dubbed a “social news” site. In it’s earliest days, it was full of mostly links to articles and other web pages of interest to not much more than technology geeks. The way the site works is that the users of the site submit a URL of interest. The user enters a title and a description. Then it is posted to the upcoming links page of the site. Other users of the site then click on the hyperlink, review that submitted link, and if they like it, they digg it. There is a counter next to each link showing how many users have dugg an article. The more diggs an article has the closer it gets to being on the front page of digg.com. Being on the front page Digg is then like gold in terms of traffic to your site.
Digg has evolved considerably since it first came to be a few years ago. The site now has separate sections for news, pictures, videos and podcasts. Within those there are subcategories as well. Technology articles are still a pretty big part of digg’s traffic, but not even close to the majority it once was. Digg has grabbed the attention of many mainstream media organizations. Diggers often call out when major companies seem to be doing something unethical. Digg would appear to be a good thing in keeping companies honest, but some would also argue that the Digg community is nothing but a bunch of teenage whiners. Not only that but Digg has the constant cat and mouse game of stopping users, from gaming their site to get to the front page. I am sure that many websites have benefited greatly from a temporary hole in Digg which had allowed them access to the front page without the true user backup to get them there.
StumbleUpon is more of a toolbar than a website. The mere mention of the word toolbar might turn you away from this link sharing method immediately. I can relate. I didn’t like the idea of adding a toolbar to my browser either. At the time that I first heard of StumbleUpon, I was working in a computer repair shop. And working in a place like this, a person gets very tired of seeing browsers loaded with toolbars that have been installed by various malware programs. I was very resistant to the idea of a toolbar, however due to the request of the right friend, I tried it anyway. The way I usually describe StumbleUpon to folks who ask is that it is like channel surfing the web. When you sign up for it, you tell StumbleUpon what sort of things interest you based on which check marks you place in which boxes. After you are set up, it is as simple as pressing the “Stumble” button in the toolbar. StumbleUpon will then take you to a random page based on those interests. Some of the sites you stumble upon will be based paid for by advertisers, this is how the service is paid for. When you see a site you particularly like, you can click on “I like it” in the toolbar. Likewise, if you dislike a site you can click on the thumbsdown icon. There are other features such as sharing with friends who also have StumbleUpon accounts. You can stumble based on certain topics and more. There is a video site that StumbleUpon has which allows you to get random videos from various flash video sites. One of my favorite an maybe lesser known features of the video site is the special version it has that works with the Wii browser. It comes in handy on Saturday mornings when I want to find something to watch while I sip at my coffee.
Having your bookmarks on the web instead of stuck in a browser is exactly what del.icio.us is. There are many tools that allow you to integrate del.icio.us into your browser, and it also allows you to share your bookmarks with friends. On the front page of del.icio.us is a “Hotlist” which displays bookmarks that are currently being bookmarked alot by users of the site. del.icio.us also categorizes bookmarks used tagging. These days, everything on the web is tagged, including this blog post, but del.icio.us is one of the first sites that I saw incorporate tagging and introduced it to the web. I don’t use del.icio.us to my advantage as much as maybe I could, and maybe I will start. It is definitely something I could benifit from when trying to find links that I don’t know I am looking for.
These are just three examples of how the web is becoming more diverse and starting to depart from relying so much on the common search engine. Don’t get me wrong, the search engine will always be there, but there are many more ways that people find what they are looking for on the web, and business is not falling short of developing ways to use these models to get their name out. What are some ways that you find new links on the web aside from traditional methods?