Twitter can be a great way to gain feedback from customers, clients and consumers of your product or service, as many brands like Comcast are well aware. But if you’re looking fr a more direct and dedicated way to leverage the Twitter community for brand feedback purposes, a new tool called TwitFeedback is looking to make it drop-dead simple for you to do so.

Managed through a widget, visitors to your website can say in 140 characters what they think of your product or service. If the concept of garnering feedback directly from your site sounds familiar because of a certain side tab that became popular, you’ll be happy to know that TwiFeedback uses a similar tab that appears on your website. Non intrusive but inviting nonetheless, clicking on this tab will open up the TwiFeedback widget.
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MySpace has teamed up with business directory Citysearch to create a socially-oriented search portal within the MySpace community. The result is a new section called MySpace Local. This new directory is not yet available, but will be launched in beta later on this week.

Citysearch is bringing its database to the table, while MySpace is going to be “socializing” the whole affair. In doing so, businesses will be able to connect with each other, and users will be able to connect with businesses. MySpace Local will over listing pages for small businesses, which will cover three categories at launch: Restaurants, Bars and Nightife. On each listing page, users will be able to rate, review and share media for each business. Users will also be able to add the business to their profile, share a business listing with friends, and add it to their bookmarks.
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Are you working at a job where there is no end in sight? Has all the economic doom and gloom got you down? Have you ever started project only to start ten more and never get a single one of them complete? I’m happy to say that there is always a way to get through the confusion, to get past the pessimism, and to develop a vision which will succeed regardless of external forces that are out of your control.

You may be wondering why I’m talking like this since this is not a site typically meant for distributing motivational speeches. Let me give you a little background and then I’ll explain why I’m writing this, and how to get past all of the hurdles facing you to accomplish things you never dreamed possible.
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If you’ve been following along with the Social Times for the past few months, you may have noticed that the volume on this site has gone down somewhat. Why?!? Where did we go?!? Well, there’s clearly still articles thanks to the help of Kristen Nicole who has been doing a killer job. I intend for this site to provide even more value for the readers than it currently is providing though. Back at the beginning of the year I wrote about “The Curse of the Shiny Object“.

Little did I know that within weeks I would have figured out the most effective model for making a blog explode practically overnight. No, not this blog. AllFacebook has increased 500 percent in the past 30 days. It’s been great but I also realized that blogging “until your face falls off” (as Gary Vaynerchuk says) is not a very scalable business in itself. That’s why I’ve been spending the past few weeks building something that I think is much larger than these blogs and everything that’s been built over the past two years by Social Times, Inc.
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A new study from the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills in the United Kingdom reports that more British parents are using newer technology to stay connected with their children away at school, according to AllHeadlines.

Now, my mother and I weren’t always the best of friends, but while in college I still called her every Sunday afternoon. Back then, I called her on her landline. She rarely used her cell phone and had no idea how to send or receive text messages. Things have changed in the past few years, and my mother now happily embraces her Blackberry, email and LinkedIn. But how much easier would things have been if my mother had been on an online social network when I was in college?
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The past year has been an incredible one but over the past few months I’ve begun to lose sight of my vision and things have become increasingly unclear. What once started as an inspired attempt to build a successful blog, turned in to a never-ending daily grind, the exact thing I was trying to avoid when this all began. I increased my daily blogging volume from one post a day initially (back when I was writing TheWebpreneur.com), to eventually 10 to 12 posts a day at my max.

It’s clear why I was doing so. When I started blogging two and a half years ago I started after reading people like Mike Arrington, Pete Cashmore, Om Malik, Richard MacManus, Robert Scoble, and the numerous other thought leaders in the technology blogging space and said to myself “I can do that!” Ultimately I think I’ve proven to myself that anything is possible and I’ve also learned some important lessons from following this industry obsessively.
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You may have noticed that the site has been down this morning. There has also been connection issues over the past few months. I’ve now shifted Social Times to a new server and we will be back on a regular posting schedule. Let us know if you run into any problems with accessing the site.

Last week I came to the Bay Area to attend Web 2.0 Summit and it ended up being one of the most historical weeks in this country’s history. Following the election of Barack Obama there was a huge wave of inspiration that was felt throughout those attending the Summit and based on the news articles I’ve read, the entire world.

Whether or not you voted for Barack Obama, there is now doubt that the belief in the American Dream has been revived within this country. Without it, we could have not elected the first African American President. Without going on about the numerous emotions felt this week, I wanted to express some of the most important takeaways for me personally.

Must Move Beyond the Hype

Al Gore said something which was extremely important:

When people are displaying interactivity or user generated content or social networking or whatever, that’s kind of the gee-whiz stuff. I’m not trying to diminish that at all but I am saying that I think our challenge really, those of us who are excited about the speedier development of the full potential that we have here. We need to move past that as quickly as possible to a time where all those features are just taken for granted, and is just like the water the fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in, and how do we get there.

I couldn’t have agreed more. I spend day after day talking about each feature that every social networking site adds, each new platform that they launch on, and theorize about where all of this is going. Yesterday for instance, one of the popular stories in the tech blogosphere was that LinkedIn had added events to their site.

Yes, it is great to see them adding such features, and yes it is great to watch where all of this is going, but it’s time to focus on the bigger picture. Many of us though are already taking advantage of these new technologies (social networks, social media, etc) to communicate more effectively with each other.

The Energy Revolution

There are numerous crises taking place around the world today. Whether it’s the two wars we’re involved in, the financial crisis, or most importantly the energy crisis we are facing, there is a revived sense of urgency. One thing that Al Gore said yesterday particularly inspired me and I felt that it was important to share it with as many people as possible. While I can’t find the exact words he said, this is in essence the story he shared:

In 1961, John F. Kennedy stood before the American people and asked Congress to provide the funds necessary to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. The funds were granted and the mission was achieved. On the day that we landed on the moon, the average age in the control room at NASA was 26 which means that on the date of the announcing the mission, the average age of those individuals was 18. The young ones will also be the ones that are going to help develop the tools necessary to achieve complete energy independence.

While the numerous other crises facing this country are of equal or greater importance, it is important not to lose focus from energy related issues as it contributes substantially to global instability.

We Have the Ability to Get There

It’s time to start a movement. Al Gore sat down yesterday and told Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle that he feels as though he has failed. While he regularly instills the sense of urgency into those individuals that get to see him speak live, within a short period of time that sense of urgency is gone and most people fail to act.

Yes, switching out your light bulbs is one component of solving the energy crisis. I believe though, that given our knowledge of social media and our ability to spread ideas faster than ever before, we are properly positioned to drive the change necessary to accomplish extremely challenging goals. As we wait for a complete agenda to be put forth by the new Obama administration, it’s time to start preparing to leverage our expertise in social media and social technology to help drive change.

Whether you agree or disagree with everything that the new administration proposes, they are at least listening and that’s a hell of a lot better then before. The way to have the loudest voice is through social media, so use it for change and the betterment of the world. Below is part of Gore’s talk at Web 2.0 Summit provided by CNET.

This is a continuation in the series “The Social Web Economy“

Ad networks are the primary source of revenue for most of the product companies on the social web. While some companies have their own internal sales team, the majority of the product companies rely on these ad networks to manage most of their sales. They are too small to handle this part of their operations. Smaller media companies also frequently outsource their ad sales to an advertising network.

Distribution companies and social web agencies typically have their own in house sales team and as such they are not in need of outsourcing their sales operations. Frequently distribution companies and agencies will build their own advertising networks to manage their advertising distribution. Sales teams are important because they are able to negotiate higher CPMs.

For product companies, advertising dollars are redistributed from the advertisers through the sales teams to their companies at lower rates since the ad networks/sales teams have taken a cut. On the social web the majority of companies generate their revenue through advertising. I am regularly critical of the lack of traditional business models on the social web. Regardless, advertisers continue to put advertising dollars into this space.

Each product company and platform in the social web economy tends to have their own type of advertising which ultimately conflicts with one another. For example, some chat platforms provide advertisers with the ability measure the conversational impact of an advertising campaign run on their platform. Facebook measures conversations as well in their new video advertising solution.

There’s feed advertising and other forms as well all which in my own opinion end up confusing the advertiser more. Back in August when I wrote about the state of social advertising, I highlighted the challenges presented by inconsistent offerings among these companies. While social advertising cannot currently compete with search, an increasing amount of advertising dollars continues to pour into this space.

A substantial portion of this money is going directly to the sales teams and ad networks. Not such a bad place to be!

Next in this series: “The Social Web Economy: Analytics Companies”

Driving in the car en route to LaGuardia airport, I find myself blogging. I have finally removed myself from the barriers of the wired world and am now completely mobile. The only thing which remains unresolved is my mail but aside from junk mail most companies have made it possible to receive the electronic versions of my bills. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing but it is now part of my life.

While there will be new technologies that make mobile internet access more ubiquitous, there is sufficient technology available to make myself omnipresent. The only challenge while writing a mobile blog post is the continuous noise from the people surrounding me. “Shut up!” I yell, but they ignore me wondering why I continue to type on my keyboard.

I tried blogging during dinner but that didn’t work out so well. So now I’m blogging in a car and ultimately I’m finding that mobile blogging is nowhere near as efficient as sitting at my desk, focused on a single task. A while back I wrote that my goal was to become completely untethered (that word provided by my mobile companion). Soon enough I realized “detached” was not an adjective I wanted to use when describing myself.

Now I am completely mobile but I will still return to my home based. I guess it’s a fact of life. The totally nomadic life is a lonely one so I decided to opt-out and remain completely mobile yet not nomadic, if that makes sense. Have you figured out a way to become a completely nomadic? Do you think there is any reason for becoming a digital nomad or is being mobile sufficient?