FriendFeed Is from Mars, Twitter Is from Venus

May 1, 2008 by 6 Comments

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint.

Friends of Men vs. Women on Social Networks, Rapleaf, 4/30/08

Blogger Corvida is a prolific Twitterer (Louis Gray Twitter noise ratio 9.75). She decided to go cold turkey on Wednesday 4/30/08 to see what non-Twitter life was like. She avoided FriendFeed as well. She blogged about the experience. These thoughts stood out to me:

Twitter is crack people (I’ve been saying this for months)! Twitter is more than just a social hub for me. Twitter is ME!

[FriendFeed is] not as addictive and I peruse it leisurely and more so for the conversations than the content. I wasn’t feigning for Friendfeed, but I sorely missed it.

My immediate thought was that I’m exactly opposite. I’ve really become a fan of FriendFeed, and think of Twitter as something I peruse on a more leisurely basis. And yet there are a lot of similarities between the services. Indeed, when Twitter was suffering outages today, people migrated to FriendFeed, as the conversation here shows.

Why the difference between Corvida and me?

  1. Myers-Briggs
  2. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

Myers-Briggs

You may be familiar with Myers Briggs – it’s a personality assessment test. After you take the assessment, you get assigned a 4-letter code. The first two letters in that code? “E” or “I”. Explanation of the letters from Wikipedia:

  • Extroversion: People with a preference for Extraversion draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline.
  • Introversion: Those whose preference is Introversion become less energized as they act: they prefer to reflect, then act, then reflect again. People with Introversion preferences need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy.

Twitter is a constant, keep-up-with-the-action experience. Now I’m always an “I” when I take those Myers-Briggs tests, so it’s no surprise that I don’t find the Twitter experience as compelling as Corvida (who has to be an “E”). It is fun though.

FriendFeed streams can flow quickly, particularly as you subscribe to many people. But via ‘Likes’ and comments, two things make a particular update findable repeatedly:

  • Each interaction causes the update to pop to the top of the page again
  • Your comments and ‘Likes’ serve as bookmarks, making the content and all its associated comments easily findable

So FriendFeed satisfies the introversion crowd: reflect, act, reflect again. It also has enough action for the extroversion crowd as well.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

More from the Rapleaf study:

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint. Spending less time on a social network but transacting more equates to having roughly the same number of friends as women, who spend more time on social networks, but are busier sustaining relationships.

The report doesn’t explain what a “transaction” is. I’m going to assume that men tend to have relationships around some sort of structure – a “transaction”. Women tend to have more general conversations to sustain their relationships, not needing the organization of a “transaction”.

FriendFeed has “transactions”. They’re the content updates that flow through there. Blog posts, tweets, FriendFeed messages, Flickr pix. Those updates are the conversational structures – your comment on the content itself, your ‘Like’, your comment on someone else’s comment. You have group conversations.

Twitter is less of a transactional place. It’s more of relationship-sustaining place. You can maintain parallel one-on-one conversations with many people at once. There’s not really an organizing principle in Twitter. That’s been one of its attractions. It’s a wide open social thing.

I enjoy the conversations around content that define FriendFeed. More so than general relationship building, for which Twitter is really good. As Corvida said, “Twitter is more than just a social hub for me. Twitter is ME!”

Final Thoughts

I know I’ve horribly oversimplified things here. Plenty of guys love Twitter and are really good at it. Plenty of women enjoy the conversational scrum around content that can define FriendFeed. And there’s plenty of room for reflection, not just action, on Twitter.

But assuming there’s truth to the averages, those are some thoughts into what will drive the relative successes of Twitter and FriendFeed.

*****

See this itme on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/f8827724-34f6-fa36-fca5-a00c75bc171d

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Early Adopters: Attention Is Migrating to FriendFeed

April 27, 2008 by 11 Comments

Based on the reaction to a recent post about Twitter early adopters, it’s clear there’s an appetite to understand when trends emerge and applications migrate across the technology adoption lifecycle.

To that end, there are important updates about FriendFeed.

FriendFeed has been out for a few months as this cool app that lets you look at what your friends are doing across social media. If you were to stop there, it sounds nice, but somewhat useless to everyday activities. “Yeah, I check it every so often to see what my friends are up to.”

But, it is so much more. FriendFeed is emerging as the one lifestream platform to rule them all. The ability to see and interact across a range of services is proving addictive. And it may inadvertently disrupt a few other services along the way.

Four recent comments show that a trend is emerging. People are consuming updates from their social apps not directly from the apps themselves, but primarily from FriendFeed. FriendFeed is starting to get the lion’s share of attention and page views, to the detriment of other services.

Here are the quotes.

Robert Scoble tweeted about his declining use of Google Reader due to FriendFeed:

FriendFeed has replaced much of what made RSS cool to me. I’m still reading Google Reader, but less.

Thomas Hawk messaged on FriendFeed about his declining use of Flickr due to FriendFeed:

I find that I’m going to Flickr’s most recent photos from my contacts much less than I used to and going to friendfeed to view my contacts and imaginary contacts flickr photos much more.

Steven Hodson commented about potentially leaving Twitter altogether due to FriendFeed:

FriendFeed as for me it is a much better resource than Twitter will every be. It has gotten to the point where even now I’m seriously thinking of moving strictly to FF.

Jason Kaneshiro blogged about his declining use of Google Reader, due to FriendFeed

FriendFeed is replacing Google Reader as my information aggregator / filter.

If you’re trendspotting, you’d do worse than to look at the comments of those four to see where the early adopters are moving.

Finally, the compete.com graph below shows March 2008 had a huge spike in visitors to friendfeed.com:

How about you? Are you feeling it?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/0b9e5d3f-e644-6105-5e28-7b4a95e1b34a

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Are You a Twitter Early Adopter?

April 25, 2008 by 12 Comments

Are you a Twitter early adopter? You know, the kind of person who’s “in the know”? If you’re not using Twitter right now, apparently you ain’t!

As noted earlier, Twitter saw a remarkable surge in visitors in March 2008. The hockey stick growth says Twitter’s moving into the mainstream.

And apparently, we have dates for when you were “in the know” and when you were “following the crowd”.

From Jeremiah Owyang, it’s April 25, 2008.

April 25th, 2008 1:06 pm

******************************************************************

I’ve noticed an influx of new users, there’s clearly a change now. I consider everyone above this line to be ‘early adopter’

From Robert Scoble, it’s April 9, 2008:

Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow.

So there you have it. If you joined on say, April 16, 2008, you’re in a tough spot. “Sorta” early adopter?

And we’ll leave open the question of why the hell it matters.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/f059c0b0-12f3-c761-f53f-d51c70cc3167

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Twitter’s Downtime…Remember AOL’s Access Problems?

April 22, 2008 by 1 Comment

Twitter’s current issues may remind the older crowd of the issues that America Online faced in the late 1990s. AOL had been humming along in growth, and then they hit an inflection point. They changed their offering to a low-cost, flat-rate fee for Internet access. Eventually, so many people signed up and used AOL that many people couldn’t actually get online. As Wikipedia relates it:

Originally, AOL charged its users an hourly fee, but in 1996 this changed and a flat rate of $19.99 a month was charged. Within three years, AOL’s userbase grew to 10 million people. During this time, AOL connections would be flooded with users trying to get on, and many canceled their accounts due to constant busy signals (this was often joked “AOL” standing for “Always Off-Line”).

I remember the news stories, and threats of government investigations related to AOL’s inability to deliver the service they promised. Of course, we know how that tale ended. AOL emerged as a dominant player in its day, eventually acquiring Time Warner.

The service disruptions and the noise they created turned out to be signals about how important the service had become.

Twitter’s taking a lot of heat in the blogosphere right now. But I think TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has it right today when he says:

I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Twitter%E2%80%99s+Downtime%E2%80%A6Remember+AOL%E2%80%99s+Access+Problems%3F%22&public=1

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New Kid on the Shortened URL Block: is.gd

April 19, 2008 by 3 Comments

Quick post. I’m seeing more long URLs shorted with the service is.gd. I, like most people, use tinyurl.com to shorten URLs. It’s great. But if you’re posting a URL on Twitter, those extra few characters in a TinyURL eat into your 140-character limit.

is.gd goes even further. Here’s an example comparing the two services:

Blog post: FriendFeed RSS Is a Fantastic Discovery Tool

Full URL: https://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/friendfeed-rss-is-a-fantastic-discovery-tool/

  • 82 characters

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/6qhk4n

  • 25 characters

is.gd: http://is.gd/7oc

  • 16 characters

So there’s a pick-up of 9 characters via is.gd. Can be quite valuable on Twitter, eh?

It doesn’t have a toolbar button, which makes converting URLs really easy with TinyURL. That’d be a nice addition.`

For a nice read on several different URL shorteners, check out Carlo Maglinao’s post on TechBays.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22New+Kid+on+the+Shortened+URL+Block%3A+is.gd%22&public=1

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Scoble the Twittering Machine

April 17, 2008 by 6 Comments

TechCrunch post:

Even Robert Scoble, the biggest Twitter whore on the planet who follows 21,000 people and receives one Tweet per second, can’t deal with it anymore.

My Twitter web page a few minutes ago:

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/202b3509-f2d5-e945-5cc7-eb427992c7f2

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Social Media: Lighter Beats Heavier Every Time

April 16, 2008 by 1 Comment

www.waystupid.com

Interesting tweet from Stanislav Shalunov regarding SocialThing:

Asking for my passwords makes SocialThing sound like a phisher. Won’t use for now. http://tinyurl.com/4dquxn

His tweet expressed something that I’ve been noticing for some time. I am gravitating more and more to the “lighter” interaction social media apps.

What is “lighter”? It’s the flick of a wrist. Enter text + submit. One-click subscriptions. Here are three comparisons, including the controversial one of aggregator comments versus direct blog comments.

Twitter vs Facebook

Facebook is heavy. To build out your network, you have to:

  • Invite others
  • Request a connection and wait for the response

These processes make a lot of sense for what Facebook is about – true relationships. When your friend invite shows up in the other person’s inbox, what’s their reaction? That’s the key to maintaining the integrity of true relationships there. I have turned down friend requests there from complete strangers. It’s why I’m comfortable blogging about my kids there but less so elsewhere.

And it inhibits using Facebook for me.

Twitter’s model makes social network set-up a breeze. Find someone you’re interested in, click “follow”. Done. But Twitter does support Facebook-like controls:

  • You can block specific individuals
  • You can set your updates to be private, only available to those you approve

Most people just leave their subscriptions wide open on Twitter. Which is great for the user experience. I have made connections on Twitter that I would never have made on Facebook.

The other thing that’s easier – communications. I’m a voyeur a Twitter, jumping in when I want. I just use the @sign to respond to someone, or the occasional direct message . Facebook’s status updates post to the newsfeed and a few are shown on your home page. But those aren’t really conversations. To talk with someone, you use the Facebook message system. Again, that’s really cool – you don’t need to remember email addresses. But it also is heavier.

No surprise Twitter’s been growing like a weed.

FriendFeed vs SocialThing

FriendFeed and SocialThing have a lot in common in that they show the activity streams of friends across different services. But there are key differences, which are well summarized by Mark Krynsky at the Lifestream Blog.

Creating your network: FriendFeed has the lightweight Twitter model. Find someone, subscribe. Done. SocialThing imports the friends you’ve made on each of the services. This is also light. But you can’t add new users directly inside SocialThing. You’ve got to go to the individual service, add the friend and then SocialThing is updated. This is heavier than FriendFeed.

Importing your services: FriendFeed asks for your login ID for a service (Twitter ID, Flickr ID, del.icio.us ID, etc.). enter it. Done. Your updates start flowing. SocialThing wants your ID and password. This enables SocialThing to send updates back down to each service. But as Stanislav expressed above, getting passwords is heavy.

Interaction on the originating services: SocialThing lets you respond to a friend directly back on the originating service, like Twitter. FriendFeed is adding this capability for Twitter, and perhaps others. But if you want to comment directly on the originating service, for the most part you have to leave FriendFeed and go to that service. Socialthing’s support for direct comments is the lighter experience.

It’s still early. But FriendFeed has the edge in the “lightness wins” battle right now.

Friendfeed Comments vs Blog Comments

Man, do I really want to write this? Well, here goes. Comments on FriendFeed are a lot lighter than those on blogs. Which means it’s an easier experience.

Blog comments have these qualities:

  • You want to be pithy in your comment. The blog post addressed a weighty topic, and you want to comment in keeping with that.
  • You enter your name, email and website each time
  • You might encounter a captcha
  • The blogger may hold comments in reserve until they’re reviewed
  • If you mess up, you can’t change your comment

Meanwhile, on FriendFeed, comments have these qualities:

  • You can comment pithily
  • You can write more of a meta-comment about the post
  • You can talk with others via comments
  • You can click ‘Like’ to provide a quick, simple comment about the blog post
  • Comments are easy. Click Comment. Enter text. Click Post. Done.
  • You can edit or delete your comments

This doesn’t mean commenting on blogs isn’t worthwhile or valuable. Reaching out to the writer is an important part of the participatory ethos of blogging. Your comment also breaks the ice on a post, making it easier for others to join in.

But there’s no denying the lightness of comments on FriendFeed. Expect their volume to increase.

I’ll predict that FriendFeed comments are those that bloggers never would have gotten on their blogs in the first place.

So the lightness of FriendFeed comments won’t steal from bloggers’ on-site comments. They’ll add to them. And that’s a good thing for the conversation.

What do you think?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/92524b04-4b9d-c0db-e09e-931c4f3e5084

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Twitter Just Grows and Grows…

April 15, 2008 by 7 Comments

Dion Hinchcliffe is an enterprise 2.0 guru, with a blog on ZDNet.com. I guess he runs ads for conferences he puts on, among other things. He’s currently running a Google AdWords campaign. He used all manner of Web 2.0 key words for his ad campaign. So it’s an interesting survey of interest in the different apps of Web 2.0.

He tweeted this today:

Interesting tidbit. I’m running a Google ad campaign with every single 2.0 phrase imaginable. The #2 searched for keyword? “Twitter”

Which made me check out the visitor stats for Twitter on compete.com:

Look at that sharp rise in March 2008. The Twitter train just keeps on rollin’.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/a2054173-1d1f-cebf-1a95-a578f2479ce8

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Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi

April 10, 2008 by 22 Comments

Thinking about the ever deeper levels of involvement one can have with Web 2.0 apps and the Web 2.0 ethos. Came up with this chart.

Thoughts?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Becoming+a+Web+2.0+Jedi%22&public=1

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FriendFeed RSS Is a Fantastic Discovery Tool

April 5, 2008 by 4 Comments

FriendFeed will be one of the best research & discovery tools there is. I don’t say that lightly. Here’s why.

Jeremiah Owyang has a post up today, My Essential Twitter Tools. He lists seven things he uses to get the most out of Twitter. Among the items are these:

  • Search: Use Tweetscan to see who’s talking about you, your brand, or a topic you’re interested in. For example, I may not just search on “jowyang” but also on “owyang” as some don’t use the full name.
  • Aggregation: Friendfeed puts all of our RSS content onto one page, making it easy to see from one glance (rather than going to different properties) and you can even reply from friendfeed to different tools. It’s smarter to organize around people, rather than tools.

Tweetscan is a great resource for finding out information on a topic. You see what others are talking about and passing along for a given topic.

Well, FriendFeed is even better. On FriendFeed, people share their Twitter posts, the same content that Tweetscan searches. But they share many other application there as well.

  • Micro posts: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Google Talk,
  • Websites, blogs: new blog posts, StumbleUpon, shared items on Google Reader, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Digg, Reddit
  • Presentations: Slideshare
  • And lots of other sources

All of these content sources are searchable. And they all have an aspect lacking in many search and discovery mechanisms: human filtering.

When someone takes the trouble to save or distribute content, that content has already passed an initial test. Does it have value to someone? If you save something to del.icio.us, that is your endorsement of its value. Add it to LinkRiver? Means you found the web page interesting. Sharing a blog post on Google Reader means the blog post held value. Recommend a book on Goodread? You get the picture.

The conversations that are captured are also incredibly valuable. They give insight into people’s thinking around a subject. They hold data that is useful. Many times, the micro posts include a reference to content that someone found valuable, even if that person didn’t bother to bookmark it to del.icio.us or share it on their Google Reader.

The implicit endorsements of content – via different services or conversations – are a tremendous benefit to someone doing research.

There’s also plenty of original source content that’s findable. Slideshare presentations. New blog posts. Videos. Photos.

Finally, from the recommendations, conversations and content, you can find people who share your interests. You may want to do the social thing and add them to your FriendFeed network. Or you can check out what other sites, content and conversations they have in their FriendFeed to potentially find other useful information. Heck, even reach out to the person to discuss a subject.

Adding RSS to this whole thing really powers it. You don’t have to go to the FriendFeed site to do a search. You can have new content delivered to your RSS feeder.

RSS? FriendFeed doesn’t have RSS?

Mark Krynsky over at Lifestream Blog has a wonderful hack that turns FriendFeed search results into an RSS feed. Click here to go his post.

I won’t stop using Google to search for a subject. But for leveraging the human filtering, I’ll use FriendFeed search. And for ongoing knowledge discovery, even when I’m not actively searching for a subject, I’ll use FriendFeed search RSS.

What do you think? Will FriendFeed become a primary research & discovery tool?

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter.

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Scoble Loses Interest in Facebook – 5,000 “Friends” Will Do That

April 3, 2008 by Leave a comment

In social networks, bigger is not necessarily better. Robert Scoble, famously with 5,000 Facebook friends, recently posted this on Twitter.

Spent some time cleaning off my Facebook Profile. Stripped it way down. Much nicer now, no crap. I haven’t been into FB for months. Sigh.

Normally this may not rate as important news. In fact, Scoble had a Feb. 22, 2008 post up on his blog titled Is Facebook Doomed? But there, his issue is primarily one of limits on the number of friends and messages. He still liked Facebook fundamentally.

But then came his recent tweet. While many technorati are expressing their ennui with Facebook, with Scoble it’s significant for two reasons:

  1. He’s the living embodiment of Web 2.0 openness and try-it-all, push-it-to-the-max gusto
  2. He’s argued passionately that 5,000 friends is just fine for Facebook

Let’s start with the idea that 5,000 “friends” is appropriate for a social network. It can be…but not for Facebook.

Facebook Is for Social Interactions, Not One-Way Communications

Let’s imagine having 5,000 friends on Facebook. What must that be like?

Newsfeeds. That newsfeed must be constantly in overdrive. People’s statuses updating. New groups they joined. Apps added. New friend connections. Friends compared. Blah, blah, blah…! A 5,000-friend newsfeed must be like a stock ticker. Hit refresh every second and a new set of newsfeeds displays.

Inbox. When you have 5,000 friends, your Inbox and Notifications are probably largely untouched. How do you go through the sheer volume of messages? Inbox from hell is what that is.

App invites. How many times has Scoble been invited to try every inane app out there? Especially since its Scoble. Get him to try your app and mention it on his blog or Twitter, and you’re on your way. Not enough hours in the week to try all the new apps.

Reaching out to friends. How do you figure out which of your 5,000 friends you interact with each day? Assume Scoble attempts a meaningful exchange with 13 friends each day, on top of all his other duties. That translates to contact with each friend once per year.

Here’s what Scoble said in his blog post defending his decision to have 5,000 friends:

In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong.

See, I have this theory about social networks: different ones are good for different types of social interactions. What Scoble is looking for is something different than Facebook. His interactions have more of a one-way quality to them. He’s really good with discovering and analyzing new things, and is eager to share them with the world. And that’s really cool. But he really doesn’t want to know that you just joined the Austin networking group, posted your child’s picture or that you’re working on that report for your boss. Nothing wrong with that – I don’t either. But I didn’t add you as one of my 5,000 friends.

Different Social Applications for Different Purposes

I believe Facebook is fundamentally tuned to be an interactive lifestream social network. That means it wants to be the place where all parts of your life are captured and shared. It’s built around that goal. Which makes it terrible as a large-scale broadcasting platform.

So it’s no surprise that Scoble has tired of Facebook. I assume he’s still getting to broadcast his life to the 5,000 friends. I’ll bet a lot of those updates occur as apps connected to his various preferred social apps: Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, etc. For him, Facebook is more of a broadcasting server, not a place for true social interaction.

For Scoble’s social networking style, he’s already got what he needs: his blog. He talks about what interests him. He responds only to comments that interest him. To complete his lifestream, more widgets for his favorite social apps could be added.

FriendFeed is emerging as an app to satisfy the social network needs of power users like Scoble. Unlimited (well, theoretically) numbers of people can subscribe to his feed: blog posts, Facebook status updates, Twitter posts, Flickr photos, etc. Anyone can comment on his lifestream. But he doesn’t need to subscribe to these same people. No app spam, inbox overload, etc. However, I notice he already has 1,700 “friends” there.

I suspect Scoble will probably find a better home for his mode of social networking on FriendFeed. And Facebook is just fine for what it wants to be: lifestream platform for interacting with your actual friends.

Scoble Is Great for Analysis

This post is not meant as a criticism of Scoble. Quite the opposite. He pushes the boundaries of all these social apps, and does so in a very public way. He’ll give you his take on his own actions. But by pushing things to the extreme, he also provides a great lens for analyzing Web 2.0. That guy’s got a cool life.

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The First 20 Blog Posts Are the Easiest

April 1, 2008 by 7 Comments

A few random thoughts on blogging after writing 22 posts and hitting 4,000 views.

Blogging is fun. I’ve enjoyed this more than I realized I would. Writing really is its own reward. I guess a paper journal might be a good outlet, but the social aspect of this is great. You get to join the conversation at large.

Blogging is work. Figuring out what to write is an ongoing activity for me. Seth Godin said, “I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.” I wonder when I’ll hit that stage.

Long-form blogging. Most of my posts are long form. I enjoy writing through and around a subject. But others seem to be quite talented at delivering posts that are short and a good read. I may have to mix some of those in here.

Spamming Marketing your blog. I’m experimenting with ways to get the word out about this blog. Just the act of publicizing my blog was a hard thing to take on. I don’t like a lot self-promotion, but if you don’t do it, who will? Of course, one could ask, “why do you need to market it?” I’ll answer that a bit more below. To get word out about my blog, I do the following:

  • Add posts to del.icio.us, LinkRiver, StumbleUpon, reddit
  • RSS on FriendFeed
  • Share posts, which turns them into news feeds on Facebook via Feedheads
  • Twitter
  • Comments on other blogs

Marketing via Twitter. The 140 character limit of Twitter requires a bit of creativity. But I try to avoid just putting the blog post title and tinyURL. How do you capture the blog post in a way that makes someone want to read more? This is actually kind of fun.

Marketing via comments on other blogs. This is one that must be done with care. I’ve seen godawful attempts to spam blogs. My favorite poster over at TechCrunch titles himself “I’m not commenting to spam my blog” (or something like that). Here’s my philosophy on this:

  • Your comment should be able to stand alone. The comment should be such that it adds to the conversation, not just link to your blog. After all, you’re a guest on someone else’s blog.
  • If your comment is relevant and useful, someone might actually want to click on the URL you include to read more on your blog.

Karma. Share the blogging love. Add new blogs to your RSS reader. Add links to interesting posts on other blogs. Post on others’ blogs. Add others’ posts to LinkRiver, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc. And do it for the smaller bloggers, not just the A-list. This is something I need to improve on.

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play. You never know how things will turn out when you blog. This blog continues to get a lot of hits off the search term “peanut butter“. My post about writing a farewell email is the most-read post on the blog. Pay By Touch had a following out there, and this was one of few blogs talking about it. I’m sure there will something in the future that will surprise me. Marketing the blog is a great way to figure out what people are interested in, and I treasure every comment and link to this blog.

No clue how to land on Techmeme. This is apparently a big deal for bloggers. No idea how that happens. May not ever for this blog. I’ll sleep at night.

Don’t put a period after the TinyURL. I use the TinyURL service to shorten the URLs for my blog posts. This is handy for putting a link to a post on Twitter or on a comment at some other blog. Well, it turns out if you put a period at the end of the TinyURL, you get a 404 page. Quite embarrassing, to tell the truth.

That’s it for now. Gotta think about my next blog post.

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