This afternoon I’ll be leaving to study in Berlin. Before I go, I thought this would be the perfect time to let my friends know how much they have meant to me. This year, each morning, coffee in hand, I began my day posting a daily bloom on the Kierkegaarden, often before sunrise. Next I began reading and sharing the news on various topics that I found interesting on Twitter, Friendfeed & Facebook. Apparently, many others shared my interests and found my posts to be of value and followed them.

Since I posted so frequently, I avoided posting too many personal comments, but that did not stop me from getting to know you. I’ve read yur posts and enjoyed them immensely. I’ve learned so much from you. Many of you responded to me and we got to know each other via DM’s and email. I really appreciate the connection and thought you should know . I hesitate to mention names here for fear of missing someone, but @ YOU and I know who you are. Some of you greeted me with a sun filled hello every morning. Some of us communicated personally by phone & email. Many of you sent tweets of gratitude and encouragement, confirming the value of my efforts by oh so frequent retweets. You have brought me great joy, and it has been a pleasure to ferret through the news and choose from a plethora of headlines to determine what may be of mutual interest and import. We’ve shared so muc together.

While I am away, although I will have internet access, I’m unsure how much time I wil have to continue as it has been my custom. However, I do plan to keep in touch as I can and take up where I left off upon returning. I’ll be taking my camera and Flip Mino with me and intend to blog about my travels.

I hope that you will stay and virtually join me on my European Journey. This represents a lifelong dream for me and has been a long time coming. I’m so excited, I can hardly breathe. I’m looking forward with great anticipation not only to the travel and study experience, but to meeting new friends and reuniting with those I’ve had the privilege of meeting on my last brief visit. I can’t wait to see them! That’s the best part of all.

Meanwhile, don’t let anyone tell you that Social Media is silly or meaningless. I’ve made some wonderful and VERY meaningful business and personal relationships here. It’s whatever you make it. My two cents to newbies… be honest, be open, be yourself, be kind & considerate. There are wonderful people in the world just waiting to get to know you.

Again, many, many thanks. Hang in there with me. Soon I’ll be greeting you from the other side…of the Atlantic, that is!!! Have a lovely summer. I’m sure I’ll be having a blast. Life is good.

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Charles Ommanney / Getty Images for Newsweek

Therapist-in-Chief: The President explains the details of his $778 billion stimulus package to a crowd in Mesa, Arizona

If Ralph Waldo emerson had a 19th-century Facebook page, his “Favorite Quotation” (or maybe I should say my favorite Emerson quote) would likely be: “Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.”

For the last six months, events have been in the saddle of the world economy and they might ride us for quite a while. Every day seems to bring bad news, with more on the way. Will commercial real estate crash next? Is General Motors toast? Dow 5,000, anyone?

When President Obama was sworn in, the stock market dropped. When he signed the largest economic recovery package in American history last week, the Dow plunged nearly 300 points. His widely panned bank rescue plan and even his better-received housing rescue plan both laid eggs on the Street.

Obama says he doesn’t worry too much about short-term market swoons, and he’s right not to. Who elected greedy gamblers to represent us? But the market is now based less on assessments of specific companies than on reaction to the federal government. And that reaction, cascading down to Main Street, is a fair reflection of the nation’s pessimistic mood. The new president is popular and refreshing, but still well short of transformative. For all of the legislative achievements of his first month in office, Americans have not yet had their faith in the future restored.

What’s a president to do? If he starts in with the happy talk, he sounds like John McCain saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” which is what sealed the election for Obama in the first place. But if he gets too gloomy, he’ll scare the bejesus out of the entire world. The balance Obama strikes is to say that things will get worse before they get better, but that they will get better. Now he must convince us that’s true.

Conservatives smell blood. The Republican National Committee issued a press release saying Obama’s first month was all about “wasteful spending, failed bipartisanship and questionable ethics.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer called the $787 billion stimulus package “a legislative abomination,” and Karl Rove wrote that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.”

Polls say otherwise. The public likes the signs of action, respects that the new president is willing to admit error and appreciates his constant reminders that there are no easy cures to what ails us.

Read full article…

Alter: Barack Obama, Bringer of Confidence | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com.

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Historically, specialists stick around

Geoff argues that once the PR, advertising and interactive agencies figure this all out, they’ll take the work back. This should be true, but it never is.

• 1996: “Once advertising agencies figure out HTML, they’ll do all the web development. These interactive agencies will be absorbed.” Should’ve been true. Wasn’t.
• 2000: “Once the interactive agencies figure out the tricks of SEO, specialists in search engine optimization will go away.” Again, didn’t happen.
• Today: “Once the PR people, or the ad people, or the digital people, or maybe the SEO people, figure out this social stuff…”  Not going to happen.

In fact, it never happens.

Big brands that are already utilizing social media agencies include Ford, Microsoft, Intel, SAP, Citibank, Coke.  The list goes on. These folks have access to all types of large, talented agencies, but they see a need for specialists—for some of what they do.

Divergence is the most powerful force in the universe

In their outstanding 2004 book, “The Origin of Brands,” Ries and Ries demonstrate how the world gets infinitely more complicated and products, and specialties continue to branch out. The telephone splits into landlines and cell phones. Landlines split into traditional and VOIP. Cell phones split into texting phones, smart phones, flip phones.

And on and on.

Complete article here…

Why the Social Media Genie Isn’t Going Back in the Bottle.

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Skyfire is a mobile web browser that seems like it’s been in beta forever.  That feeling won’t go away soon as the latest beta version has just been released, 0.9.  This new version of Skyfire adds support for new screen sizes on the Windows Mobile platform, WVGA and WQVGA, which means it will now work on the Samsung Omnia and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.

Skyfire is the server-based browser that can handle virtually any video streaming and that sets it apart from just about every other mobile browser out there. This new version is also adding social networking with the ability to aggregate your Twitter, Facebook and other network updates right on a convenient page.  From the press release:

The most noticeable change in the new version of Skyfire is a real-time activity wall which aggregates customized feeds from news, media, Facebook and Twitter. Skyfire is preconfigured with feeds from Digg, ESPN, Google News, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo! News that display real-time updates on the start page. It is easy to customize your experience and add new feeds from your favorite websites.  Skyfire now always keeps you connected with the newest content that is relevant to you.

Windows Mobile is not the only platform to get this new beta as a new Symbian beta is going live too.  Owners of Nokia E or N series phones will be able to give Skyfire a good workout too.  Owners of phones on either platform can get Skyfire Beta 0.9 from the web site.  I have been running this new beta on the HTC Advantage for a few days and it works pretty well, although I am running RealVGA and it sometimes creates display problems.

Last year we interviewed the CEO of Skyfire, who gave us a glimpse of what this new version brings to the small screen and also where the browser is headed.

Gadget Gurus – GigaOM – Salon.com.

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The bulk of the book, titled “140 Characters, A Style Guide for the Short Form,” will revolve around eight key lessons from the Twitter universe, such as the importance of simplicity, honesty and humor. The project will also highlight notable figures worth following on Twitter, anecdotes from the community and even examples of the few occasions Twitterers have gone overboard: For example, Mr. Sagolla points to “bathroom tweets,” or messages about bodily functions, as falling into the category of things not to post to Twitter.

“This is a new genre of writing,” said Mr. Sagolla. “A new form of literature, in some ways.”

A portion of the book will also double as a memoir from the perspective of Mr. Sagolla, who was involved in the early stages of development for the tool. Mr. Sagolla, who now works at Adobe Systems as an engineer, is also planning on including a mini-dictionary of Twitter lingo, like “retweet,” the reposting of another Twitterer’s message, or “twoosh,” a message that is exactly 140 characters.

The book came about after Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sagolla met after an informal gathering of iPhone developers and began chatting about Twitter. Mr. Sagolla decided to bring Mr. Jackson, who he said updates his Twitter feed as many as 10 times an hour, into the fold.

The two expect the book to be available for download on Apple’s iPhone by the end of the month. Although the plan is to eventually get a version of “140 Characters” in print, Mr. Sagolla said releasing the book through iTunes first would be a good way to reduce the need for a major investment upfront, as well as a springboard to attract interested publishing houses.

“140 Characters” isn’t the first book written about the popular San Francisco, Calif., micro-blogging company. There’s also “Twitter Revolution,” “Twitter Means Business” and “Twitter for Dummies,” for starters. But Mr. Sagolla says that while the previous publications tended to home in more on the business and money-making potential aspect of the tool, “140 Characters” is an attempt to create easy rules for all sorts of social networking sites, including Facebook.

“Our goal is to make Twitter applicable to any kind of user,” said Mr. Sagolla.

The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

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Doors reopened: Michelle Obama greets audience members at Ford’s Theatre, which celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial.

The Ford’s Theatre Society held a star-studded reopening to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and award film greats George Lucas and Sidney Poitier with Lincoln Medals. The invitation-only ceremony was held at Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric and actors Kelsey Grammer, James Earl Jones, Ben Vereen, Jeffrey Wright and Audra McDonald gave a presentation of Birth and Rebirth, a tribute to Lincoln. David Selby (Falcon Crest’s Richard Channing) portrayed Lincoln. Jessye Norman performed the Battle Hymn of the Republic with McDonald and violinist Joshua Bell. Richard Thomas (The Waltons‘ John Boy) was the evening’s host.

“There’s a lot of history in this building,” said director Lucas, 64. Lincoln “was a great man, and he served our country in a very difficult time.” As for Obama’s first weeks, “it’s nice that he started off on the right foot. Things are actually happening.”

Poitier, 81, was still moved by the election of a black president. “I never thought I would live long enough (to see one), which is an example of how far we’ve come,” the Oscar-winning Lilies of the Field actor said.

Grammer, a Republican, expressed support for Obama. “I support all presidents,” he said. “They have a very difficult job.” And, he said, “it brings a tear to my eye every time I see him on camera.” As for Lincoln, “he gave his life so that a president like Obama could come along.”

Jones, the Great White Hope star and voice of Darth Vader, talked about missing Obama’s inauguration, but added, “I figured I’d meet up with him somewhere along the way.”

Jones was right. At the end of the tribute, Obama spoke to the audience about Lincoln. “He had an unyielding belief that at heart we are one nation and one people. … That is what we remain.”

Ford’s Theatre packs in stars, and Obamas, for reopening

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This past weekend’s announcement by Facebook that the company would be opening up its APIs to allow for posting of notes, videos and more has left some companies scrambling to add new functionality to existing applications. Below we’ve highlighted a handful of the ones that let you post to Facebook from a desktop client, be it standalone or something that plugs into your browser.

We’ve talked to the people at each one to see when you should be expecting to be able to make use of the new API in each app:

“Blogo already supports Facebook status updates through its integration with Ping.fm,” says Benjamin Jackson, Blogo’s technical director. “As for more robust Facebook integration, you can be absolutely certain that we’ll be running to integrate this as quickly as possible. We’ll be shooting to send out a beta next week.”

Friendbar creator Edo Segal says “we love the fact that facebook [is] opening up more services,” and “definitely plan to include support for these API’s in upcoming versions.” Segal also says he wants a higher level of access to that data. “For example, to be able to post comments to users photos and status updates, and to directly send a Facebook message to a user via the API.”

Posting of notes through Ping.fm is up and running. “We’re still assembling some other ideas on how to use their new features,” says founder and CEO Sean McCullough. Worth a mention is that many of the services on this list go through Ping.fm to re-syndicate user messages.

“Sociagami has always been committed to deep integration with social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and we will definitely be taking advantage of the new API features in 2.0,” says Charlie Robbins, director of social network integration for Sociagami. “Unfortunately, using an API based implementation will mean that Sociagami 2.0 will not have the messaging and wall posting features that came with 1.0.”

Working on it for an upcoming build. “The video part will be an important one!” says Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic which acquired/owns Twhirl. The latest version, which was released on Monday added in Ping.fm support, letting you cross post messages to your Facebook profile.

“Yes, we are actively working on implementing the new Facebook API and rolling it out ASAP,” says Regan Fletcher, Yoono’s VP of business development. Our overall objective really is to maximize our use of the Facebook API in order to allow users who have added Facebook to Yoono to have the best possible experience and functionality.”

“It does look like some of this new functionality is available via the REST API which we use and we can run FQL queries (which we do),” says AlertThingy creator Clive Howard. “We will be revisiting this prior to the next version and if we can do then I’m sure it will make it into 3.x.” Version 3 of AlertThingy was released on Monday morning.
Apps that we pinged but have not yet responded: Flock, Feedalizr, Moodswing/blast, and Gwibber. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs? | Webware – CNET.

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(Credit: Compete.com)

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace’s 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we’ve seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in the country by total page views, with only about six million unique visitors but a whopping 54 million views.

Compete’s numbers are interesting, because they often are pretty different from other analytics firms’. Here are some clarifications, explained to CNET News in an e-mail sent by Compete’s Andy Kazeniac: These are numbers stemming entirely from Web browser data in the U.S. That means that you won’t be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook’s users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it’s likely that Twitter’s reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.

What’s also intriguing is that there are a few social-media sites, like Flixster and LiveJournal, with relatively low unique visitor counts but proportionally very high page view counts, indicating that they probably have smallish bases of very loyal users.

Also pulling in notable numbers are LinkedIn, with about 11 million unique users, Classmates.com, with about 17 million, and Reunion.com, with slightly under 14 million. On the other end? AOL’s Bebo, an $850 million purchase, which Compete.com clocks in as having just shy of three million unique visitors. True, its biggest user bases are in the U.K. and Ireland, but that’s not good considering the price tag.

Still, statistics are like tequila shots. Always take ‘em with a few grains of salt and a slice of lime, and be warned that they may give you headaches.

Whee! New numbers on social network usage | Webware – CNET.

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Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms.

Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.

“It’s so simple and easy to access, people are thinking of more and more uses for the platform,” says Dan Wasyluk, creator of the Twitter-based Snipt service. Wasyluk launched Snipt last week as a way to let programmers share short snippets of code over Twitter.

Launched in 2007, Twitter quickly became a darling of the life-and mind-casting interneterati. But some saw boundless possibilities in the 140-character limit, and what was a slow trickle of innovation is now quickly elevating what is essentially a micro-blogging service into one of the internet’s most important technologies, along with instant messaging and e-mail.

Though it’s main use — sending and receiving short messages to your social network — is often dismissed as time-wasting trivia, Twitter’s potential as a broad internet platform is just beginning to be fully realized. Twitter has grown into a ubiquitous presence — you can send tweets from your phone, your desktop and your browser — that has potential to not only facilitate communication among humans, but even to make machines do your bidding.

Businesses are starting to be built around it. Botanicalls, for example, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets your neglected house plants alert you when they’re thirsty.

The company has developed a tiny moisture sensor attached to a circuit board with an Ethernet port. You stick it in your plant’s soil, and when the moisture levels drop below a certain level, your plant sends you a tweet begging to be watered.

Using Twitter’s application programming interface (API), a programmer with even a modest amount of experience can create a web app that gathers public data from Twitter, or uses it to send links, commands or bursts of information.

“[Twitter's] open API is a huge reason it has grown into such a platform,” says Wasyluk.

File sharers were the first to rush in. The photo-sharing service TwitPic, one of the oldest Twitter mashups, lets users send pictures to their followers by storing a photo on its servers, then passing the link around on Twitter. Now there are newer apps like Tweetcube and Twittershare, which let users share larger media like MP3s and videos.

Twitter’s limited format of short, text-based announcements are a natural match for sites like TrackThis, which you can use to get status updates on FedEx and UPS packages, and Tweetajob, which job seekers can use to get real-time updates about new job openings.

Anyone who needs help quitting smoking can use Qwitter to monitor their progress. Those looking to lose weight can turn to TweetWhatYouEat or TweetYourEats.

Hardware hackers have put a new spin on the Twitter mashup — as it turns out, just about anything that can be plugged into the internet is capable of talking to Twitter.

Programmer Ryan Rose rigged up his washing machine to send him a tweet when his clothes are done. He just follows his machine’s twitter account (it’s PiMPY3WASH) and he knows when to go downstairs and move his undies to the dryer.

Linux hacker Shantanu Goel set up a video camera and some motion-sensing software on a PC connected to the internet. If anyone breaks into his house or goes snooping through his room, the software detects the movement and sends out a tweet.

Tech-savvy environmentalists can install Tweet-a-Watt, a gadget that plugs into your wall socket and connects to your wi-fi network. Once a day, the pocket-sized device broadcasts stats of your daily energy usage to Twitter.

Whether that sort of transparency results in embarrassment or bragging rights can be determined by a system like the one created by Justin Wickett. The Duke University student wired up his home so he could turn his lights on and off remotely, just by sending a text message to Twitter from his mobile phone.

Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots | Epicenter from Wired.com.

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In New York Magazine this week, both Stone and Williams said that charging companies for brand verification is something that the company was looking into. This makes a lot of sense, especially given the rise of fake profiles, like the one that was recently taken down for the Dalai Lama. They note that a paid corporate account could have features like a prompt when a new user joins a company’s feed.

Then today, Stone made similar comments to the UK-based Marketing Magazine. “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts,” Stone told the publication. He went on to note that other ideas of charging companies to use Twitter to market products and/or provide customer service were on the table.

The latter part is something which companies like Zappos and Comcast have been doing for a while. They have employees that scan Twitter (something much easier now with Twitter Search) to see who is saying something about their company. If it’s something negative, or there is some kind of problem mentioned, these Zappos or Comcast Twitter users send messages to the user having the problem. I’ve experience this first hand with Comcast’s Twitter rep, Frank Eliason, who tweets from the account ComcastCares.

Marketing products on Twitter is a potentially more interesting idea from a revenue perspective. Late last year, Dell reported that it had made over $1 million in revenue thanks to Twitter. More recently, Dell announced that it would start offering deals exclusively to users who follow its accounts on Twitter. With Dell using Twitter to spur sales and clearly making money off of it, it makes sense that Twitter should be getting some of that. But the question of how much, is a tricky one.

“If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere,” Bob Pearson, vice-president of communities and conversations at Dell told Marketing Magazine. Other companies Marketing Magazine asked about the idea of Twitter charging businesses to market on its service, said similar things.

This idea of charging for corporate accounts, has been around since at least October, when CNET reported it was hearing whispers about such a plan. Since then, we’ve heard the exact same thing from a few other sources. In November, Williams started to float that idea out there publicly. But now, with talk about this plan clearly picking up, I think it’s a safe bet that it’s coming sooner rather than later.

Twitter has raised over $20 million in funding. Recent reports suggest that it’s looking for another $20 or so million, which could push its valuation close to a quarter of a billion dollars.

Twitter starts to talk up the charging companies plan » VentureBeat.

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