It’s a common discussion thread these days: one of our favorite products makes a big change to the way their product functions and within hours users are revolting. The latest in the series of big changes came from Twitter who earlier this week decided to disable a less used option to view all the @reply messages from users you were following. Whether or not you completely understand how Twitter functions, the important part of this story was that Twitter pulled the rug out from under many of their users who actively used this feature.
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MySpace has lost two of its most important executives, CEO Chris DeWolfe and co-founder and President Tom Anderson. With their departure we’re reminded of MySpace’s impending decline, but we wonder what MySpace’s next steps will be. Many complain that MySpace departed from its core competency of offering an online tool for musicians seeking a free place to build their brands.

But that often happens when a web 2.0 company is overtaken by a traditional media sector. And in the face of Facebook’s rapid growth these past two years, MySpace has also jumped on the open platform bandwagon after initially resisting integration from third parties. So what can MySpace do at this point? I’ve jotted down a few basic ideas, but it boils down to some semblance of reinvention, which i actually thing requires an introspective return to MySpace’s beginnings.
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Yep, Twitter is still growing at a break-neck speed. In the past four months alone, Twitter’s traffic has zoomed at an exponential rate, according to Alexa. Having surpassed 14 million users earlier this month, Twitter is certainly on the rise. Alexa points out some key demographics when looking at Twitter’s growth, noting its global presence as well. This is important, because Twitter being so readily compatible with mobile devices has enabled the microblogging platform to grow worldwide very quickly. But what caused Twitter to finally go mainstream after being around for three years?
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It’s sometimes difficult to imagine the money-making potential of businesses that thrive on the web–they’re so intangible, based on virtual social interaction and can be difficult to measure from an end-user standpoint. But the potential of virtual goods is increasing in attractiveness, not only for marketers and entrepreneurs, but for individuals as well. Perhaps its the current economy that’s driving more people to virtual businesses, but that may have been just the kick in the rear that we needed.
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You hear all the time that brands leveraging communities online are great ways to increase brand recognition. A new report from Powered, a social marketing company, has released its findings that support these claims. Conducted along with Next Century Media Global, the annual report shows that the return on investment for social marketing online delivers an average of $60 for every $1 invested. That’s a 10% increase from 2006.

The ROI Report and Benchmark for Social Marketing is specific to companies backed by Powered, so the findings are very narrow and can’t be fully applied across the board. But the report iself does bring up some interesting points to consider as marketers and online communities look to better engage users, especially for branding purposes.
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Below is some of my personal theory on the semantic web and feed aggregation. Please excuse the rambling :).
As companies race to effectively aggregate our content an interesting thing is taking place: suddenly an aggregation of all our web-based activities are available via multiple sites on the web. Personally, I have information aggregated at MyBloglog, FriendFeed, Facebook, and many of my activities also show up on Twitter. So with this information everywhere where’s the value add?

At one point, aggregation services that found you news or information related to your friends provided a valuable service, incentivizing you to return to the site in order to get the latest information about what’s going on in your world. Unfortunately, much of that information in now aggregated all over the web and the aggregation service is no longer the core value.
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This morning Mark Drapeau, the D.C. based Government 2.0 expert who is also an active “Twitterer”, wrote a post on his new blog about the most influential Tweeple (pardon the Twingo (Twitter lingo)) in D.C. I was fortunate to be included on the list this time around, but wasn’t on the highly circulated list from Politico yesterday which was titled “The 10 Most Influential D.C. Twitters”.

In reality it wasn’t necessarily the most influential D.C. Twitter users but instead the “most influential people in D.C.” that are on Twitter. Ultimately it was an arbitrary list which was highly effective linkbait. Mark Drapeau makes a valid point though that I immediately began exploring yesterday after that article: many large Twitter users aren’t joining the conversation.
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Tonight I was working on a presentation that I’ll be making in a couple weeks. In the process of developing the presentation I went seeking for inspiration and went directly to Ted.com where I’ve found some of the best presentation videos on the web. One video that I stumbled upon was Alisa Miller who shares information about our distorted view of the world.
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Could the federal government be getting in the way of transparent communication between officials and the public? According to The National Journal, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is caught between a rock and a hard place, battling with its desire to interact more with the public via online social networks and the federal regulations that require everything posted online to also be archived internally.

That’s a lot of records that need to be stored. And it’s quite difficult to store such records when you’re talking about activity across networks like MySpace and Facebook. Private messages sent between users, wall postings, status and mood updates…these are all things that change frequently on social networks, and they are things that quickly and easily convey attitudes amongst users. But they can’t be readily archived. Just think of your Facebook newsfeed, which can be completely renewed in less than a day’s time.
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As you probably already know, a large portion of my time from day to day is spent writing blog posts on this site and AllFacebook.com. With such a large investment of my time invested in blogging, I have to also figure out methods for increasing the amount of traffic to my sites so that I can increase the revenue generated from advertising. As most people know, the largest portion of traffic to blogs is generated by search engines which is why bloggers invest heavily in search engine optimization.

Aside from search engines, one of my largest sources of traffic is Twitter. I post each of my blog posts through the site and I also receive a large amount of traffic from people retweeting my articles. Something I realized over the weekend is that each of these links are essentially a “vote” for your site just like any other link on the web. Yet Twitter doesn’t want those links to count, choosing to use the “no-follow” tag which essentially removes links from being counted by Google.
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