Tag Archives: Social Media

Posterous: three months in review

One of the greatest hosted services on the web is Posterous (pronounced a few different ways but consensus is: pahst-err-uhs). I experimented with the service for a few months and came to love it. If you take photos, its great. If you record video or voice notes, it’s excellent. If you blog, magnificent. If you want to do all of these (and more) in one unified place, then Posterous is the site to do it.

What is Posterous?

The concept is simple: send an email to Posterous and it creates a post. If you attach a series of photos, it creates a lovely photo gallery. If you simply write a blog post, it’s posted with tags, formatting, etc. If you include a YouTube URL, it uses oEmbed to automatically include the embed code and display the video. Easy!

Posterous autoposting

The next best part: it automatically posts this content to any service you want it to go (this has been coined as “lifestreaming”). Those photos you sent? They can also natively appear as a Facebook album, show up Flickr, or even Picasa. This is genius because, if you happen to use all three services, you likely have different audiences on each service. My college friends are on Facebook, my web friends are on Flickr. With the process automated, I simply post to one spot (Posterous) and everyone is kept in the loop.

PicPosterous home screen Create a new album

Other than the countless benefits Posterous offers, their iPhone application (PicPosterous) is one of the best photo applications I’ve used. In fact, it completely replaced the ‘Photos’ and ‘Camera’ apps for me for these past few months. With geotagging on your web posts, simple photo albums, Devin in HD became my only web destination for posting my mobile photos. It was a great experience.

It’s not for me

Unfortunately, the site is not for some power users. Sure, you can add Google Analytics, Feedburner, and a custom domain. The theming system is robust and you can modify everything. But beyond that, you can’t do some seeming simple things: change permalinks, enable redirect rules, create pages, and the domain redirection breaks most OpenID delegation. Again, this is a small list of issues but they turned into deal breakers for me.

Perhaps I should stick to the simpler ways, and for a hosted service, Posterous has had fairly decent uptime, but I prefer hosting, owning, and managing my own content. If this was my first time getting into publishing on the web, Posterous would be a simple decision. But, I needed a little more control. Most of the slick features (oEmbed, auto-posting, bookmarklet) are already implemented as plugins for WordPress. Since I’m much more familiar and experienced with WordPress, I came back to it. I would’ve done the same if I were reviewing WordPress.com (again, a hosted service). I need my control and flexibility.

With that said, check out Posterous. The founders Sachin and Garry are very sharp guys and are constantly improving the service. 4/5 stars.

Add Twitter Favorites to your site

Hint: if you’ve never used Twitter the following won’t make much sense to you.

I easily annoyed by people on Twitter who ‘RT’, or ‘re-tweet’; they simply post an update that says exactly what someone else says, plus attribution. Frankly, answering the Twitter mantra “What are you doing?” with “this is what someone else smarter, funnier, or more charming is doing” seems inane. It’s poetic, though, in the sense that it’s a quick litmus test for people worth “following.” Alex has always been against this practice and suggested an alternative to RTs: favorites.

Screenshot: History doesn't retweet itself

There are very few features on Twitter: updates, direct messages, replies, favorites, followers, followings. I charge everyone to use the favorites feature more often. In fact, there’s a site dedicated to finding the real good ones: favrd.

Point being: I’m a huge proponent of using the little star. I’ve started publicizing my favorites here in the sidebar of Mind/Averse and it took less than 30 seconds using WordPress. It’s really quite simple.

Add Twitter favorites with the WordPress RSS widget

Screenshot: WordPress RSS widget

Assuming you have a widget-friendly WordPress theme installed, simply do the following:

  1. From the WordPress dashbord, Browse to Appearance > Widgets
  2. Select the ‘Add’ button next to the “RSS” widget
  3. Visit your Twitter favorites page and determine your personal RSS feed (view the page source if you’re stuck here; find the <link> tag with http://twitter.com/favorites/youridhere.rss)
  4. Insert the favorites feed into your RSS widget, give the widget a title, pick your options, etc.
  5. Save the widget and save the changes to your sidebar

Now everyone who visits your site can immediately find the tweets you find useful. You’ll get to be cooler, smarter, and funnier simply by association.

Other ways to integrate Twitter favorites

I can think of various creative ways for individuals and businesses to use Twitter favorites.

For example, if I were a company with customers sending @replies to me telling me how great I was, I may favorite those. I can then use something like SimplePie to integrate my favorites into my blog as a separate page of testimonials. I know 37signals uses ‘buzz’ from Twitter on their site.

Screenshot: 37signals buzz around the web

Bonus: do the same with @replies

The @replies RSS feed is a bit different and uses the Twitter API and 401 authentication, not a custom RSS feed, for your replies. No worries, you can either pull the RSS feed from Twitter Search or you can do the same thing using the following syntax:

http://twittername:[email protected]/statuses/replies.rss

In theory, the API will include all mentions (any time @devinreams is included in an update, not just at the beginning of an update).

Ha, this is why they call me a social media pro.

Overlooked feature in Facebook

When the new site design launched nobody realized that Facebook added the ‘Top Friends’ functionality:

Always Show These Friends

I don’t see TechCrunch, Mashable, or anyone noticing this. But everyone was very quick to get upset when slide’s ‘Top Friends’ app was taken down (it was a legitimate security concern).

I hate this short-term-memory-loss-lynch-mob we like to call the internet. Uproar and knee jerk reactions over perfectly understandable non-issues. But no praise for the good anyone does. It seems the consensus is: “let’s move on to something else we can get upset about”. This is why Valleywag is dead. Nobody likes complainers. Do something about it. On the other hand, this is the same pandering nature that network news channels commit every day. The same ones that “we” bloggers say we’re up against.

Oh, and if you’re still reading and waiting for the punch-line, here you go. From the Facebook help page taken today:

Facebook Friends cannot be edited

The internet is weird.

Social media best practice: be authentic

Jeremy Tanner tagged me: I need to chime in and tell the world, in all my infinite wisdom, what a “social media” best practice is.

Interestingly enough my knee jerk reaction was to say either:

  1. if you call it social media you’re doing it wrong, or
  2. just stop trying, FFS.

At least, that’s the way I’ve felt in the recent months. In fact, it’s a new rule for me on twitter. If you’re a self-proclaimed “social media” guru, then you’re not.

That leads me to my point: to be successful in social media (or any media, I believe) you need to be authentic. It goes back to one of my personal favorite posts: my thoughts on transparency and honesty. If someone is extremely active across a variety of services and trying to connect with so many people (Linkedin, twitter, pownce, etc.) it sends the message that you’re convincing me I need to listen to you. It’s like trying to advertise your product after building it and calling that “marketing.” The biggest way to fail is to reach out to as many people as possible just to broadcast to your followship.

Instead, be an authentic person. Just be you and the right people will find you. For instance:

  • Penelope Trunk, although a writer (its her day job to make uninteresting things interesting), is a geniune lady who will bare all and do her best to connect. I consider her the Britney Spears of the internet sometimes but she’s authentic and, thanks in part to that, has a tremendous followship; in both size and passion.
  • Gary Vaynerchuk, although a marketer (its his day job to get the message out to everyone), is a geniune guy who will talk to anyone and go out of his way to make them feel important. He’s a busy guy but spends most of his day just talking to people via e-mail, twitter, facebook, and so on. In turn, he’s built up one of the most popular video podcasts about a product that no-one had ever thought to look for online: wine.

There’s my thoughts on how to do social media the right way. Agree / disagree?

Tag, you’re it: noah kagan, Andrew Chen, Ramit Sethi. (original link)