Like many people, I’ve become frustrated with Twitter’s downtime. The fact that “Fail Whale” has become part of the social media vernacular is proof-positive and certainly not the type of brand awareness that Twitter wants. Despite it’s unreliability, Twitter has become part of our daily life. What else is there?

You can’t swing a dead cat in the blogosphere these days without hitting a post touting the benefits of Friendfeed. Scoble’s been using it for months. Now Calacanis is pushing it almost as much as Mahalo. I decided to see what the fuss was about.

First, the interface is much cleaner than Twitter. The more people you follow on Twitter, the harder it becomes to actually make sense of the information coming through. The noise to signal ratio goes way up. Unless you use a service like Summize, you easily miss content aimed at you. Friendfeed has threaded conversations. The ability to reply and comment in an orderly, easy-to-read way is huge.

Next, the process of following people on Twitter is tedious and time-consuming. Friendfeed integrates with your facebook account so the people you are friends with on facebook automatically become part of your Friendfeed network. Friendfeed also integrates your blog, YouTube, SumbleUpon, and yes, even your Twitter account.

The final feather in Friendfeed’s cap is it’s reliability. By many estimates they have half the users and traffic that Twitter has, and so far, haven’t had any of the scalability problems that have plagued Twitter since their inception. I’m not an IT guy and have no idea what it takes to keep a site like Twitter stable. BUT, I do know that they are sitting on a goldmine. The only thing killing them is their crappy infrastructure. Why on earth wouldn’t you make this your top priority and hire the right tech team to fix this issue once and for all? I know these things don’t happen overnight, but in 3 or 4 months it’s only gotten worse, not better. What’s the deal?

I haven’t quite rang the death knell for Twitter yet. They were the pioneer in the micro-blogging movement and they have a great brand. That will keep their head above water for a short time, but if they don’t resolve their tech issues soon Friendfeed is going to continue to poach their user base. Then, it will be too late and whale will have permanently failed.

One of the coolest new companies we talked to at SXSW was Utterz. You can send an “utter” in several ways - text, pictures, audio, or video through your mobile phone or computer and have it update in several places (currently I have it distributing my Utterz to my WordPress blog, Tumblr page, Twitter, facebook, and YouTube).

While the concept may have been around for some time, I haven’t seen it executed this well before. Today I was reading a story on CNN and thought that my podcast audience might get a kick out of my take on it. So, I called into the Utterz phone line, and recorded my Utter. Once I was finished, I snapped a picture of the website with my phone and emailed that to go@utterz.com. Because I recorded my Utter and sent the picture within 10 minutes of each other, Utterz paired them together into one post. A short time later the post with flash-embedded audio and an accompanying pic were across all my channels. How cool is that?

The ability that we have to spread information so quickly and with so much rich media is astounding. Imagine capturing that once in a lifetime picture, then recording audio commentary to accompany it and having it spread to the world in minutes. Technology is, and will continue to, change the way news is being reported and information is disseminated. Companies that adopt this new shift will be clearly out in front of the pack.

Look for our video interview with the crew at Utterz on Relevantly Speaking in the next couple weeks. 

SOAP? XML? WSDL? Acronyms abound in the world of technology, and the layers of the programming onion continue to get peel back so that individual marketers are required to have at least a high level understanding of what “AJAX” means, and how “web services” impact their success in online advertising.

Internet marketing consultant Carsten Cumbrowski has republished an older collection of resources for affiliates marketers who are interested in understanding the latest developments in internet development topics to include some of the newer methods and technologies that may impact their industry.

You can read his article here. 

I received beta codes for both socialthing! and Ping.fm through the social web, yet both experiences couldn’t have been more different, and yet so similar at the same, again proving that the social web is about interactions that are platform agnostic in intention, but directly tied to the platform or forum that becomes the channel. We met Matt Galligan, founder and C-E-Oh! of socialthing! at SXSW for an interview about the launch of the beta, and how they see themselves in the social media space. After the interview, he gave us a few beta invite codes as well as an invitation to the socialthing! party later that next evening (which we greatly enjoy Matt, thanks!). I received my invite code to Ping.fm from reading my twitter feeds, and although I wasn’t fast enough to get the codes that @chrisbrogan provided, Sean at Ping.fm was kind enough to shoot me off one and I am stoked that he did.

After only a couple of days on both, I am really excited about what I see. To me this is the closest combination to my killer social app that I have used. It is the Pushmi-Pullyu of the social web.

Ping.fm was very easy to hook up. After acquiring my credentials, It was a very simple process to associate my variety of “channels” into my Ping account. I am especially happy that they have added an AIM component as well, so that I can use iChat as my broadcaster. Ping.fm solves attempts to solve the problem of multiple social applications by allowing me to “ping” all of them from one interface, and an interface of my choice. I can text or email into my ping account and have it distributed to my many social footprints.

socialthing! approaches the problem from the other direction. After signing into socialthing! one of the first things i notices was the clever UI that they have used to associate my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts. Once connected, socialthing! provides for me a Lifestream, an aggregated view of the services I have identified, and allows for a display order that is either time based or user based. A side benefit of socialthing! was that I quickly saw how many “friends” I had collected on Flickr that now, unintentionally, were clogging up my Lifestream. A quick run through of my Flickr friends will clean out those that no longer participated in an active conversation with me, or were no longer of particular interest.

I was recently having a conversation with Brooke, a banker friend of ours, and explaining to her  my perspective on social media applications like socialthing! and Ping.fm. The combination of these two applications fit neatly into her “moment of clarity” when she proclaimed social applications to be a social GPS of sorts. The push distribution of Ping.fm and the pull of socialthing! combined with the triangulation of the content and context of the messages provide for a time, a place, and a perspective based on your knowledge of the author. It tells you exactly “where they are” in a near real-time fashion.

I am clearly going to continue using these services, and will speak with both companies to see if we can acquire a group of invite codes for our readers. Are you using either platform? What are your thoughts? We would love to read your comments. 

Christopher Smith and I leave for Austin Saturday morning just after 8 AM. This trip will culminate in several weeks of work in scheduling interviews, reaching out to companies, finalizing our production schedule, choosing sessions, RSVP-ing for parties, and tying up loose ends at the office. In short - we are ready to take SXSW by storm!

While I don’t want to jinx it by giving out names, I can tell you we have several top names in the Social Media and Online Design space lined up to get in front of our lense. Once we arrive in Texas that list is going to grow even bigger.

In addition to the celebrity interviews we’ll be doing, Christopher and I will be checking in each day with video updates and near-real-time blog entries. If there is a big announcement at SXSW, you’ll read about it on this page.

For those of you attending SXSW and would like to get together, please email me at SParent [at] MediaTrust [dot] [com]. We’ll be there from Saturday, March 8th until Thursday morning, March 13th.

I look forward to seeing you down south! 

Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb put together a great presentation about how he defined the Web 3.0. 

I highly recommmend taking the time to look at the deck linked to below. In his presentation he characterizes two things VERY nicely.

1. He defines the term Web 2.0 as an era, like the dotcom era, that graduated the web from ‘read only’ to ‘read/write’ (slide 3). This is a key developmental ‘era’ as it leverages the crowd to load the web with valuable information that can later be translated, analyzed and made more consummable by v. 3.0.
2. He makes the distinction that in Web 3.o, web sites will become web services as sites become less important. He emphasizes that the data behind them (if structured) becomes the critical element. When this data becomes structured and machine-readable, the semantic or thinking web kicks in to make this data smarter as the transactions between people and computers are recorded and analyzed with the purpose of delivering user or scenario centric information.

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Do you share his perspective on the New New Web? Wed love to hear your thoughts.

With the wild success of highly transactional performance marketing models like Google AdSense /AdWords, its easy to get starry-eyed around the dollars and lose track of the fact that in some cases human expertise and “craft” are ever more relevant in today’s performance markeitng landscape.

”The Goog” relies on a millions of small machine mediated transactions to earn its gobs of revenue. As we all know, the model is superb for many forms of promotion.

Yet the need still remains for the human touch. Not to toot our own horn too much here, but we receive quite a bit of praise from our Advaliant customers who cherish the personal attention and expertise our reps provide to them on a daily basis to help improve the efficacy of thier campaigns.

In our CPA network model, we rely on both the machine and man. However, when it comes to optimizing a campaign’s success, much of it relies on the “feel” of our business development reps who have the experience of running thousands of campaigns and the knowledge of the network of affiliates.

In the Advaliant business, the more premium there is on qualification, the more need there is for great campaign management from the advertiser and the network representative. These types of transactions are less prone to plug-and-play software applications of marketing..they require the human element.

While this model does not necessarily scale as well as the Google model, there is a sizeable market of Affiliate networks that serve the needs of marketers looking to acquire customers and qualified leads that don’t lend themsleves as readily to unmediated PPA or PPC campaigns running on a vast network of publishers of all sizes and shapes.

The principal issue in the success in these types of human-mediated campaigns is the quality of the human. A bad reputation exists in some marketer’s minds regarding Affiliate marketing networks. This stems from the lack of integrity and honesty due to prior greedy behavior of some of the unscrupulous networks, some of which still exist today.

Advertisers seeking to leverage the benefits of human-assited Cost Per Action marketing should seek out the networks that are looking to build long-term sustainable partnerships and ones that readily offer information transparency regarding the campaign. Also, most good CPA networks will only charge for performance (thought sometimes there is a minimal upfront fee). This aligns the goals of the advertiser and the network.

The quality CPA networks will continue to profit in today’s landscape becasue there are simply some things that the “machine” can’t do and that only the human mind is capable of.

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

About Howard Rheingold

Writer, artist and designer, theorist and community builder, Howard Rheingold is one of the driving minds behind our net-enabled, open, collaborative life. Read full bio »

As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.

“With his last book, Smart Mobs, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he’s starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.”

BusinessWeek

LESS Silos = MORE Relevance

Our interactive lives started with random behavior thru surfing the web.The random disconnected web then led us to the second major behavioral change which allowed us to search the organized web. We are now entering the third behavioral shift in our interactive behavior pattern, which breaks down the silos of the internet and connects the thread of relevance to us and everything that we do. Now that we have searched and found. We now want our interests to find us thru more relevance and less clutter. Silobreaker is a new tool that follows these foot steps heading into the new dawn of the age of relevance.

From the mouths of SiloBreaker:

“Silobreaker is one of next generation of online search services for news and current events that delivers meaning and relevance beyond traditional search and aggregation engines. Its relational analysis and explanatory graphics provide users with unparalleled contextual insight into the news stories of the day.More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user. The graphical search results enables users to quickly and easily understand connections, trends and topics or navigate deeper into the most relevant stories for them. No other news search service provides such an extensive suite of contextual tools in the industry today.Silobreaker pulls content on global issues, science, technology and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources. With the engine’s focus on finding and connecting related data in the information flow, Silobreaker’s user tools and visualisations are ideal for bringing meaning to content from either today’s Web or the evolving Semantic Web, or both.”

This is an interesting tool to use and a great example of the silo “less” interactive world we are heading into. A world of open, modular and interconnected platforms. Let us know what you think of Silobreaker. 

I think it is important to find visual tools that help us connect concept and reality. In this talk by Hans Rosling organized by TED we see the importance of understanding our data and the power of data visualization in our ever increasingly complex world. Rosling’s use of data shows us how a picture says a thousand words and explains to us how important it is for information to be shared, accessible, identified and visualized because information on the internet is cumulatively growing. As we move into the semantic thinking web there will be a need for info graphic visual tools to explain the web’s complex data.