my window on the web

Social Media

Post blog articles to Twitter with Feedburner's Socialize feature

Posted Thu, 31/12/2009 - 19:14 by Dan Murfitt

A friend of mine recently told me about Feedburner's Socialize feature, where you can aggregate RSS feeds and post the links to Twitter automatically. This is quite a neat feature as Feedburner can also include some of your content in the tweet, create hashtags from the post categories and create inline hashtags from the categories and words in the title and post. Check out this feature by logging into your Feedburner account, selecting the feed you want to use, then go to the 'publicize' tab along the top then the 'socialize' tab along the side.

Here's how your tweet will appear:

Feedburner Tweet

Facebook News Feed and Live Feed. What's all this about?

Posted Sun, 22/11/2009 - 11:49 by Dan Murfitt

I've been switching between Facebook's two feed modes, live feed and news feed, for a while now and up until now I didn't really know why. Facebook introduced these options a month ago and it's been confusing users ever since. So, what I've found is that by default I am shown the news feed which shows the most relevant information, but it's often out of date, sometimes by a couple of days. That's not good. Then you go to the live feed, which seems to be up to the minute but is bloated with Farm Ville and whatnot. That is also not good. The terminology "news feed" and "live feed" are also quite confusing, as you'd expect the "news feed" to be up to date and the "live feed" to be relevant.
I think people expect to go to one place and be shown the latest, relevant information rather than have to compromise between the two. The news feed bases its choices of what it considers interesting by looking at what type of content is posted, who posted it and how many people are commenting on it (see http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=408). Before this, you could control what is interesting yourself (and if you still can, I can't find how) by selecting types of content to show and also which friends to show more or less of (with granular control over this in turn).
One thing you can do to get live relevant information, which you have selected yourself, is create a friend list. With this you can group together selected friends and these will appear as an extra option under your news feed. To do this, go to: Friends > Lists (on the left) > Create new list, then give your list a name and select which friends are to be included. Now you should find the list appear on the left menu of your home page under news feed.

Twitter and the short URL conundrum

Posted Wed, 14/10/2009 - 22:09 by Dan Murfitt

Although the spam seems to be dying down a little on Twitter since they introduced their 'report as spam' option I'm still a little cautious about clicking some shortened URLs - SO many of the links seem to lead to spam (spam and more spam). The whole concept seems to have gone full circle as well with people using extensions like Long URL Please to make the short URL long again. Although I think this is a good a useful add-on, the whole process seems a little excessive. I can see benefit in using shortened URLs in printed media but, when it comes to the web, why are we making links short just to make them long again? I guess Twitter has a big part to play in this by restricting messages to only 140 characters, but surely there's got to be a better way?! With this in mind, I've been trying to get some perspective on the issues. Shortened URLs:

  • You can't see where the link is going to take you (without a plugin)
  • Because most are obscure, they are difficult to remember
  • Multiple links may be created to the same resource
  • Added overheads in the redirection process
  • People can track who has visited the link
  • Spam links look the same as legitimate links

With this in mind
Maybe Twitter could implement a better way for sharing links without using shortened URLs. If links could be 'attached' to tweets and replaced with a token in your message then it would be like wrapping an HTML 'a' tag around some text. You would be able to see where the link is taking you and the message is still short (or even shorter, as there is no more http://).

Social Media Revolution

Posted Tue, 18/08/2009 - 20:08 by Dan Murfitt

Very interesting, thought provoking video. We are well and truly hooked into social media - there's no turning back now!

Source of video and data

http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigge...