Social Median Takes Guesswork Out of Online Mentions With Replize

As part of the Sunday panel at Blog World Expo, a key piece of the discussion was around whether it made sense to track down every conversation around your content, and whether you could rely on search tools within the major social aggregators to find when your content had been referenced, or if people were having conversations around your data. While the major content discovery sites have done a great job of enabling conversation, less effort, so far, has been made to finding when you've come up in conversation. But Social Median has added a new wrinkle today with a feature they call "replize". Now, if anybody mentions your user name in a post or a comment, with an @ symbol ahead of it, you will be notified by e-mail, taking the guesswork out of tracking your identity online.

Today, FriendFeed is really lacking in their ability to do "vanity searches", essentially, searching your own user name and finding if you've come up. Instead, it will only find your own posted content. But with Social Median's new "replize" feature, you're notified automatically, assuming somebody uses the @ tag and your name.


In an example last night, Social Median founder Jason Goldberg, wrote simply, "@louisgray, what do you think?" responding to a story on the financial crisis on Wall Street. That note triggered an e-mail leading me back to the discussion thread on the site.


For people who want to track their mentions online, or to get alerted to conversations where they can engage, the new "replize" feature is a good addition, and Social Median members will likely rapidly adapt it. But if you want to reduce your e-mail message load, this solution probably won't be for you, especially if you're popular. Turning it off is a simple tweak in your Social Median settings.

Just Wishing for Something to Go Mainstream Won't Make It So

After participating in two panels and seeing others in the three-day Blog World Expo this weekend, there were a number of repeating elements. First, Twitter has recovered from its near-fatal issues and is becoming a must-use tool for more attendees, who are using it for conversation and news discovery. Second, a concern that while we may be using services for microblogging, life streaming, videocasting and news aggregation, that we are the odd ones, and that the services we like are nowhere near the mainstream. But while I continued to hear this chorus of people saying Twitter was either not in the mainstream or just entering it, or declarations that FriendFeed and blog comment engines, like Disqus were not anywhere near the mainstream, I heard very few suggestions on how these products could cross the chasm. It's as if many thought you could, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, click our heels together three times, and find all to be well.

As I mentioned on Sunday afternoon's panel around distributed comments and fragmented conversations, we could very well have been having these same debates about whether other technologies would go mainstream just 10 or 15 years ago. Would AOL ever go mainstream? What about e-mail? Instant messaging? Texting by SMS? GPS? All of these are strong examples of products that may have seemed "out there" on the edge to many at first before becoming part of our every day lives. While Friendster didn't take the world by storm, MySpace did, with Facebook quick to follow. It's possible that the ubiquitous nature we see today with e-mail could be what we see with Twitter, or other similar services, in a few years.

There seems to be a general impatience among the early adopter and fast follower crowds to take the products we all like and use and expand their use to new groups. There's a desire to convert one's friends and colleagues to have the same kind of lust for gadgetry and Web applications as we have, and to adopt them with the same fervor. But we need to understand that with the vast majority of society, change is very hard. Adoption of the unknown is very hard, and it may take multiple incidents of exposure to have something that seems daunting seem comfortable, such that it's accepted and adopted.

On Friday, in my first panel, on micromedia, I was asked what it would take to "take Twitter mainstream", and I only half-jokingly said it would take a scandal involving a well-known celebrity which would lead to the service's exposure in a saturated media environment. Would the market that reads Perez Hilton, People and US Weekly discover Twitter or other similar services if somebody like Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake were using it? What if their tweets were splashed all over E! or Access Hollywood? I bet they would sign up.

In today's panel it was said that the theoretical gap between us "early adopters" and the mainstream isn't really all that much - we just choose to participate in different places. While some of us are Twittering, others are texting. While some of us are blogging, others are Facebooking. While some of us are sharing items and talking on FriendFeed, others are using forums on topics they follow. People have been using technology to form relationships and share news or conversations for years, but the tools to do so are ever-evolving.

I'd venture to say that it's no secret that not every technology we early adopters fall in love with will succeed in the way Google and MySpace have succeeded. But with exceptions made for company viability and competition, there's really no race or timetable to get services to cross the chasm from us on the edge to those later adopters. It takes time. It takes effort, and repeat viewings. Quick demos of products that would have us salivating may simply spark curiosity in those less likely to jump in with two feet.

On Friday, we discussed the dissemination of today's news was to tell 10 who tell 100 who tell 1,000. So it is with these services. If the 1,000 of us continue to tell this same 1,000 about the same items ad infinitum, we will never see growth and adoption outside our little world. The mainstream has proven they can grasp technology like e-mail and IM, texting and Web browsing. With time and ease of use, they can get these newer products as well, but it will take more than us just talking about it to get it done. We need to be patient, and act as guides when that time comes, rather than demanding change overnight and expecting someone else to do the work.

OpenMicroBlogger Shows Steady Growth in First Month

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

Last August, on Stay N' Alive, I wrote about a lesser-known open source microblogging tool called OpenMicroblogger. OpenMicroblogger has shown steady growth since my post, and I really think it could be a strong alternative to Laconi.ca in the terms of OpenSource, self-hosted Microblogging solutions.

The Stats

In just one month (August), in raw-traffic alone, it appears, according to Compete.com, that Laconi.ca has taken a sharp drop of almost 50% of their traffic (from near 30k visitors down to near 15k). At the same time, OpenMicroblogger.org, the location to download the OpenMicroblogger code, has seen a sharp increase, from near 0 visitors, to near 2,000 in just a month. While these numbers aren't huge, they show that OpenMicroblogger is quickly becoming a strong alternative, and justly so, to Laconi.ca. According to them, OpenMicroblogger has had near 1,000 downloads in just August alone, with little to no press or exposure.


Compete.com shows Laconi.ca's big drop in traffic month over month.
The working example of the OpenMicroblogger code-base, OpenMicroblogger.com (emphasis on the ".com"), has also shown impressive results in just the one month since launch. Identi.ca has seen an even sharper decline in traffic according to compete.com, losing near 53% of it's traffic, from over 140 thousand visitors down to just over 60 thousand visitors in just the last month. Twit Army, the Leo Laporte founded, laconi.ca-backed implementation, has remained quite steady, but saw a very slight increase since the last month. Leo's site went from near 40,000 to near 50,000 in the last month. Since it only recently started, that too is impressive, but it will be interesting to see if Leo can keep the momentum going. While not near the Identi.ca or Twit Army numbers (yet), OpenMicroblogger.com has gone from near 0 users to almost 2,500 users in just a month, and doesn't seem to be losing momentum - browing the public timeline shows steady, current, and regular use of the service. The recently announced Yammer, a closed, yet internal solution for organizations, has not published any statistics - I see these OpenSource alternatives as a serious competitor against the Laconi.ca and OpenMicroblogger code-base.

OpenMicroblogger as a Platform

The code for OpenMicroblogger is completely Open Source, and supports the OpenMicroblogging (OMB - Emphasis on the "ing") protocol, meaning the software can actually communicate with other OMB-supported software such as Laconi.ca (the software that powers the Twitter-competitor, Identi.ca). This basically means you can subscribe to anyone on an OMB-supported site such as Identi.ca or Twit Army (both Laconi.ca instances), while at the same time users from those sites can subscribe to you as a user of OpenMicroblogger - the horizontal structure of such a large network of "mini-microblogging networks" can be profound. Twitter does not support this, nor does FriendFeed, or even Facebook (but there's nothing stopping them).


Identi.ca similarly has dropped since its initial spike.
What's unique about OpenMicroblogger however is that it hits a mainstream audience of developers that would be implementing the software a little better than Laconi.ca. The code behind OpenMicroblogger understands much of the Wordpress API for plugins and themes, so many Wordpress developers can easily extend the software with little more knowledge than they already have about Wordpress development. In fact, OpenMicroblogger.com, the official working instance of the code runs on the Automattic-written Prologue theme with little to no enhancements.

OpenMicroblogger.com Working Instance

Brian Hendrickson, the developer behind OpenMicroblogger, as mentioned earlier has actually provided a working instance of the OpenMicroblogger code at OpenMicroblogger.com. As I mentioned, it shows continual, current usage, and even has some very interesting features that Identi.ca and even Twitter don't provide. Beyond simple Microblogging capabilities and OMB support, it appears you can also provide links, upload photos, and most impressive, provide tags with your posts. Each Tagged entry gets added in a list of posted tags on the right of OpenMicroblogger.com with the number of posts under that tag allowing you to see the most popular topics and categories of the time.

I have talked before about the power of having meta-tagging with Microblogging services such as Twitter or Identi.ca. Instead of poluting your existing 140 characters with hashtags, you should be able to post them via your client of choice alongside the message so they can easily be categorized. OpenMicroblogger.com actually seems to be the first service to provide this. The only additionaly thing they could add is ability to tag actual users within a post and it would hit what I was talking about exactly.

While still in its infancy having only been around for a month or two, it appears that OpenMicroblogger is becoming a serious contender in the OpenMicroblogging space. Having talked to their developer and knowing a bit about the future of OpenMicroblogger (which I will disclose later when some new features are launched), there is even much more to come. I'll look forward to trying to use the service, and look forward to other organizations trying to implement this innovative software.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

So, By "Overnight" You Mean Something Else Entirely?

It may seem trivial, but for me, the biggest disappointment of this year's Blog World Expo is that I didn't come fully prepared. Many of the peers I'm meeting for the first time are handing out fancy custom business cards with their blog URL, Twitter account, and other services, like LinkedIn or FriendFeed. Meanwhile, I'm left handing out my business cards from the office and having to explain the blog address or that my data can all be found online. And the blame squarely falls on my trusting an "overnight" prints service to do exactly what its name implied.

Early last week, knowing the event was coming, I made custom business cards from Moo.com, but quickly saw they weren't going to make it on time. So on the 17th, I went to OvernightPrints.com, and used a template I'd built several months ago. Their site said they would start printing as soon as 20 minutes after the order, and with overnight shipping, there'd be no doubt I'd have the cards by the 19th, when the show started, and when I had my first panel.

But... no. This is what "overnight" means to OvernightPrints.com.

September 17th: I make an order and get a confirmation.
September 18th: They print the business cards. (Allegedly)
September 19th: The cards ship from their headquarters.
September 20th: The cards arrive in Las Vegas.
September 21st: It's Sunday, so UPS is taking the day off.
September 22nd: The cards are expected to arrive.

That would be five days. Meanwhile, the Blog World Expo will have come and gone, ending today, and my cards will show up to the hotel, no doubt confusing the shipping and receiving department, as I'll be back in the Bay Area. And given the OvernightPrints.com cards are of lesser quality than those of Moo.com, I'll never need them, so they should just be destroyed. But it sure is frustrating.

You could argue that I should have been better prepared, and had them ready to go earlier, which is true, but I trusted what OvernightPrints.com said in that it would be "overnight" shipped on "next day air", and they would start almost immediately. Instead, I'm left talking around my cards that having nothing to do with the blog and my online presence. Silly, I know, but really annoying. If you're needing true overnight prints, I don't think I'd ever recommend this company.