Tag Archives: dashboard

by Brian Solis via PR 2.0

Following the solo media vs. traditional media race that led Twitter into both relevance and irrelevance, the result is that the carefully guarded community and its unique culture are now permanently altered – for better or for worse.

According to estimates sourced by Engadget Editor-in-Chief Ryan Block, Twitter grew by 1.2 million users simply as a result of the “Oprah-effect.”

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler also explored the process for estimating Twitter’s path into the mainstream.

1.2 million

So, how many new users really joined Twitter as a result of the celebrity-fueled popularity contest?

I’m not sure the answer truly matters. If we explore it from a sociological perspective, I believe that the culture of Twitter has been introduced to a significant event that may indeed shift interaction and behavior overall.

Going into the race, estimates pegged the active userbase anywhere between 5 – 8 million. Now post race and the Oprah-effect, over 1 million people were introduced to the service guided by a “follow me” mentality. This “overnight” expansion represents a potential 10-12% saturation ratio. These new users will participate and build communities around them based on their interpretation of the network as framed by those whom they follow. Remember, we are measured by our last 20 tweets or updates within each social network. Take a look for yourself, www.twitter.com/insertusername

It is what it is. The real question is, what do you want to get out of these connections?

In the end, we are still responsible for creating our own experience within the community and that is one of the true advantages and rewards of Twitter. We foster and cultivate individual ecosystems that bind us contextually.

Competing for Attention

Perhaps what is most interesting and prevalent is the behavior transformation in content consumption that is taking place in “Twitter time” and it’s establishing a new world authority. For many of us, we’re migrating away from destinations and potentially RSS readers as well as our primary source of news, relevant information, pleasant distractions, and trending topics. We’re quickly focusing on Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed and the statusphere as our highly curated and personalized attention dashboards.

As content publishers, producers, and creators, we need to acknowledge, understand, and embrace this critical disruption.

Let’s take a look at Twitter as an example. Before the April’s madness of follower contests, Comscore reported that Twitter had experienced a new record of 9.3 million visitors in March, which represented a 131% jump.

As you can see, the growth curve is practically vertical. And, we’re sure to see yet another surge in growth when April numbers are released.

However, Comscore is also observing what I believe to represent the hope and potential future for traditional media.

When they examined the percentage of visitors to Twitter who also visited the top online news brands and compared it to that of the total U.S. Internet audience, they discovered a strong level of overlap. The result is that the average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter users did so.

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and active online social interaction breathe new, and measurable, life into great content where it’s hosted, simply by connecting it to the potentially attentive people where and how they are currently engaged.

This is the Statusphere, a new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of viral activity. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.

In order to compete for prominence in the future, we must first compete for attention where and when it’s captivated. While we contribute to the evolution of new media and the supporting cultures within each network, we are responsible for what we contribute and what we gain from the interaction. We earn the relationships we deserve.

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by Brian Solis

Gearing up for South by Southwest (SXSW)?

PeopleBrowsr, an attention-centered dashboard for managing your online relationships and communications on Twitter and across social networks, will help you keep track of all your SXSW contacts, events, parties, and conversations at http://sxsw.peoplebrowsr.com.

PeopleBrowsr turns your Web browser into a simple, visual dashboard that combines all your profiles and connections into one easy to manage place. The tool offers either a columnar view or a “people” grid gallery of organizable tweets from everyone in the Twitter stream with additional columns for “following,” keyword searches, and replies. And unlike other third-party tools, no downloads or plug-ins are required.

Here are the Top Ten Reasons for Using PeopleBrowsr at SXSW Film/Interactive/Music:

1. View all conversations and content related to #SXSW on Twitter, Facebook, and other popular social networks in one dashboard.

2. Create Twitter groups to listen to a specific subset of certain individuals, those attending SXSW for example, to stay up-to-date with their activity during the event.

3. See all the SXSW parties in one master list without leaving your PeopleBrowsr dashboard.

4. Follow the buzz about the conference and parties – check out who’s going where, what’s cool, and what shouldn’t be missed.

5. Discover and follow new people and trends based on popular and not yet discovered hashtags such as #SXSW, #techset, #allhat, #bloglounge.

6. Power the SXSW flash mob mentality. There’s an embedded map for visually tracking where friends are tweeting while in Austin.

7. Check out the statistics and clouds for the most popular tags and words used during the conference.

8. Discover more about the people attending the conference. When you see an interesting Tweet, simply click on that person to see their other IDs and profiles across the social web, including pictures and videos. And to find out if that person will be at a party, check the parties stream or perform a Twitter search (e.g. +party +Friday) in that person’s stream.

9. Analyze Twitter activity by reviewing integrated reports. SXSW events have a higher concentration of Twitter power users, and PeopleBrowsr lets you keep track of activity such as who’s retweeting you, who’s retweeting your friends, and also who recently followed you.

10. Share Tweet searches. When you perform an interesting search on PeopleBrowser (e.g +party +Friday), you can instantly share the results with your friends in just one click.

Use PeopleBrowsr.com to keep up with SXSW from Sukhjit Ghag on Vimeo.

Also see Sarah Perez’ coverage on ReadWriteWeb and Jennifer Van Grove’s post on Mashable.

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by Brian Solis, portions sourced from PR 2.0

This week, RadWebTech released Scrapplet, a new solution aimed at aggregating social presences and brands into one central, and portable, domain.

Scrapplets are customizable online canvases that break down Social Media walls to help everyone create, consolidate, and share their Web, their way. This is especially important, now in the future, as the social Web encourages us to proactively steer and manage our personal and professional brands as well the content we produce, discover, and distribute.

Unlike everyday, do-it-yourself (DIY) Web site builders, Scrapplet is a customizable slate for centralizing social profiles, the relationships maintained across each network, as well as a showcase for ideas, thoughts, experiences, and expertise.

Here’s my Scrapplet.

It started as an application for Facebook and quickly evolved to provide seamless integration with MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and more. Now as a standalone Web service, Scrapplet makes it easy to drag and drop content and functionality from each network, tying distributed connections together, while creating a new kind of virtual website.

Scrapplet users can instantly add their friends, pictures, videos, music, widgets, and entire web sites to their Scrapplets to create a central HQ for sharing, updating, and communicating with friends, family and associates. Each microsite is also portable and can be placed within individual social media profiles, Web sites, blogs, and wikis, to showcase a complete, consistent experience.

At the very least, Scrapplets empower creativity and can scale with individual imagination. Each canvas offers tools and default objects to add and create news feeds, flash objects, mashups, animation, sliding panels, custom menus, special effects, and more. You can even embed Websites and third-party widgets directly on a page.

Each Scrapplet automatically generates site maps, navigation, security, search engine optimization, tracking, and also supports data portability, a privacy standard that enables users to control, import, and export personal information between trusted networks.

For those who dread the thought of creating yet another site login and profile, Scrapplet supports logins from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, OpenID, Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, LiveJournal, Verisign, MyOpenId, among others.

According to RadWebTech’s CEO Steve Repetti, “The response to the simple question ‘where can I be found on the web’ involves a long list of social networks, websites, blogs, feeds, tweets, life-streams, etc. Scrapplet does not replace this diversity – instead it provides a means to extend it and bring it all together in one virtual place where content and the social graph can be mixed, matched, and enhanced without limitation.”

Scrapplet is not just only for personal use; it’s also designed for business and application development. RadWebTech is a member of the OpenAjax Alliance and CEO Repetti sits on the board of director’s of the International Data Portability organization. These themes are embodied in the framework of Scrapplet and provide an extremely robust platform for business and developers as well as providing resources for the creation, hosting, and distribution of web applications, widgets, and mashups. And, to protect owners of copyrighted material, Scrapplets include embedded source information that can be used to track, monitor, and remove unauthorized copyrighted material if necessary.

Scrapplet is free and includes personal web address and a half dozen pages ready for customization. Additional pages are available for free through point acquisition. Points can be earned by referring additional users as well as getting great ratings for pages. Free pages include limited contextual ads. Scrapplet pages and premium content are also available for purchase as is Premium and Professional non-ad memberships for as little as $2.95 per month.

Version 1 may not be intended for the masses just yet, however, the vision and mission for Scrapplet is to ultimately help everyone more effectively manage and present their distributed brand and persona, regardless of technical prowess. For those who can’t wait, just view the tutorials and explore the options and menus – everything quickly comes into focus. With a little ingenuity and creativity, you’ll find the options almost limitless for creating and sharing a more engaging and centralized online presence.

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