While trying to log into Facebook a few days ago, I got the message, “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” I checked with friends, and they were able to access their accounts, so the problem seemed to be limited.
It turns out that there have been widespread complaints about this issue, which Facebook has acknowledged on its Help page: Read the rest of this entry »
Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement. Read the rest of this entry »
I remember when Dave Winer introduced Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in Radio Userland way back in 2001. At the time, the biggest problem was finding sites that had available RSS feeds. Today, it’s rare to find a site without feeds.
Despite feeds becoming a regular part of web sites, people continue to struggle with how to use them, and don’t want to have to schlep from site to site to find feeds that might interest them. Enter topic-based readers. With these services, you don’t need to seek out sites that cover the topics of interest to you. Instead, search for those topics and the service delivers what it thinks best fits your needs.
I’ve yet to find two sites offering topic-based aggregation doing things the same way. So your best bet is to try out the different services and see which suits you. The features you will most likely want to look at are topic selection, usability and “scannability.” You’ll discover that some sites are easier to use than others, while some do a better job of selecting and saving topics. The following four sites deliver content by topic to simplify your task of receiving content that interests you (Twine is another topic-specific aggregator that we’ve covered previously.) Read the rest of this entry »
The folks at 
Iterasi (covered previously on WWD) launched a product today that combines tools for archiving web sites with some slick ones for sharing the contents of your archive with others.
The new service, called PositivePress, is intended to overcome the transitory nature of the web by making a permanent and fully functional archive of selected sites that can then be shared. In order to make this happen, PositivePress has three main features. Read the rest of this entry »
I read a lot of online publications, and I like to share interesting articles with clients and friends on Twitter. If you use Google Reader to browse RSS feeds, as I do, it’s now easier to post links to news articles you’ve found in Google Reader to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.
In Google Reader’s Settings, you’ll now find an option called “Send To.” On that screen, you can specify which services you want to be able to post to. Once you’ve set it up, at the bottom of each article in the main Google Reader screen, you’ll see a “Send To” menu.
The system does work, but it’s decidedly low-tech. As an example, if you click “Send to Twitter,” Google Reader brings you to your Twitter account via a popup window, meaning that you’ll need to turn off popup blocking for google.com in your browser — something many people will prefer not to do. Read the rest of this entry »
In the current economy, business networking is more important than ever — we need to use lots of different techniques for finding clients. Social networks can be a great addition to our marketing toolboxes. Since I started actively using social networks (only a year and a half ago!), I’ve reconnected with old friends, and have gotten quite of bit of business that can be directly attributed to connections that were facilitated through these networks.
But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. However, If you focus on the marketing aspects of the networks, the time spent using them can consist of, as Meryl says, “zero-guilt activities.” Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been using Netvibes to make monitoring dashboards for clients because I like the visual dashboard layout and have found that it is fairly easy to use, even for people who are new to RSS readers. Because the layout is a little more visual than some of the other RSS readers, it works really well for monitoring conversations because you can see quite a bit of information across multiple feeds at a glance. One limitation with Netvibes has been the inability to create multiple pages, each with a separate set of tabs. Previously, you could only have one set of tabs. If you needed a new set of different tabs, you had to create a new Netvibes account under a different email address. Needless to say, I have more Netvibes accounts than I can keep track of as a result of this limitation.
Today, Netvibes will add support for multiple personalized pages. I’ve had the opportunity to check it out in advance. Now with one account I can create several pages, each page with a unique set of tabs. As a consultant who works with many clients, I love being able to separate the monitoring that I do for each client without having to keep track of multiple Netvibes logins. You can customize the look and feel of each page to add a logo or custom color scheme to easily tell at a glance which page you are viewing.
Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I admitted that I am an information junkie, and I wanted to follow up this week with a few tips for feeding your information habit by mining Twitter for information. Twitter tools are popping up like weeds lately, so rather than try to be comprehensive, I’m just going to highlight a few of my favorite tools for getting information out of Twitter.
Twitter Search
Twitter’s built-in search engine is probably my favorite way to find information in Twitter. It is great for quick searches to find specific pieces of information, watching trending topics, and persistent vanity searches for your name or company. While I do use the search engine to type in queries, the real power is in using RSS feeds for searches and running them through Yahoo Pipes for additional filtering. In many cases, I use Yahoo Pipes to loop through a series of keywords from a CSV file to search Twitter for each of those keywords and monitor the results as an RSS feed in my reader. I recently did a 2 minute video explaining exactly how to search twitter using Yahoo Pipes and a CSV file of keywords, so I won’t cover it in any more detail here. Read the rest of this entry »
While trying to log into Facebook a few days ago, I got the message, “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” I checked with friends, and they were able to access their accounts, so the problem seemed to be limited.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
