Social Media

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....

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what I’ve found is that by default I am shown the news feed which shows the most relevant information, but it’s often out of date, sometimes by a couple of days.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. ...

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: ...

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…