As 2010 has begun to roll in around the world, I'd like to wish all my readers a wonderful new year and a fabulous new decade filled with great aspirations, unwavering resolve, and rousing successes--even if they require an occasional helping hand to get there. (Quite possibly my favorite viral video of all time.)
Sometimes I swear the geniuses at Facebook and Twitter are in competition to see who can be the most tone deaf to their users. Twitter has just taken a giant leap ahead with their new retweet feature.
The New Oxford American Dictionary has selected "unfriend" as its Word of the Year.
As we've discovered with the recent changes to the Facebook News Feed, Facebook is not really big on the whole, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" concept. Unfortunately, they're not much better on the flip side of the expression, namely, "If it IS broke, DO fix it!"
You may not think that picking a name for your blog is that big a deal.
You may have logged into Facebook recently, scanned your home page, and thought, "I saw all these yesterday... Where are the more recent posts?" Or, you may have asked yourself, "What's all this new crap showing up on here that I don't care about? Yes. Facebook has changed their News Feed yet again.
Once you've decided you're ready to start a blog, the biggest (and possibly most difficult) question is which platform you're going to use for it. This post will provide some information about the three largest platforms--Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress--to help you decide.
All this week I'll be writing a series on how to start your own blog. But before I get started with any how-tos, I'm going to pose a few questions you should be asking yourself before you begin to write that first post.
Okay, so it's really called Facebook Lite--Facebook's latest attempt to Twitterize itself. It's just arrived today, so this is my first look at it, and my first thoughts about it. If I say anything here that turns out to be incorrect, please let me know and I'll set the record straight.
A reader recently joined Twitter and found a number of other users who were tweeting about a topic that interested him. They were using a specific hash tag to identify the topic, so he began adding that tag to his own related tweets as well.
Shortly thereafter, someone contacted him claiming that his organization owned the hash tag and had even set their Twitter user name to the same thing. The organization demanded that my reader stop using the tag, so he wanted to know if this was fair game.
Over the last week, you've probably seen this notice about Facebook usernames at the top of your Facebook home page.
You may have seen this hash tag rear its ugly head in the last couple of days but not really understood exactly what the problem is.
Reader Kerry asked this question in a comment on my previous post, The Etiquette of LinkedIn Invitations.
In yesterday's post, I said that Facebook's new home page has changed its news feed so that all of your friends' activities are now posted in real time. I had thought the new feed included all the same types of info as the old one. I was wrong.
In my introduction to the new News Feed, I mentioned that it could be a bit overwhelming and showed how you can hide the posts from specific friends. Today, I'm going to talk about another helpful way to manage the stream.
Well. It looks like Mark Zuckerberg and his band of wacky Facebook developers have done it again. A mere 8 months after the last redesign of the site--one which launched a level of wrath not seen since the introduction of New Coke--they decided it would be a good idea to force their users to learn an entirely new system of navigating their home page.
In my earlier post, The INs of LinkedIn, I explained what a LinkedIn Invitation is and showed you how to send them. However, those were just the mechanics of it. This post will discuss some of the etiquette questions regarding sending and receiving invitations, such as who it is okay/not okay to invite and what do you do if you don't want to accept someone else's request.
Check out the blog of just about any hard-core Twitter evangelist and you'll probably find some variation of this statement: "I didn't 'get' Twitter at all at first, but now I LOVE it!"
Of all the software I have on my computer--and there's a lot!--without question, the application I use the most is my browser.
