social networking – Page 42

It seems the Twitter favorites function is rapidly replacing Delicious as a bookmarking utility for me and several of my fellow Twitter users. (If the idea of “favoriting” a tweet is new to you, here’s a primer on the favorites function.)

Back in the days before I ~~became so addicted to~~ relied so heavily on Twitter, I would post useful, interesting or bloggable links to my Delicious site. But I haven’t done that since January. Worse, I haven’t added any links to my blog-fodder category since last August. (That’s how I’d tag stuff I’d discover that I found worthy of a future blog post. Now I’ve got 91 items languishing there, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get around to blogging about any of them anytime soon.)

These days, I use my Twitter favorites category to bookmark sites for later reading.

A lot of my fellow tweeters do, too. @MasonDyer has amassed 618 favorites as of Tuesday. (“Hoarders” episode, anyone?) @nathanayres, @DebraSanborn and @mikepetroff all collect links with their favorites function. Even Delicious Super User Mark Greenfield, whose social-bookmarking prowess was the subject of a post on this blog last September, uses Twitter to store links that he later transfers to his Delicious site. This leads Mike Petroff to wonder whether a web app exists that synchronizes Twitter favorites to Delicious.

Sounds like a web app whose time has come. I wish Mike (or someone) would build it. I would use it. It’s just too bad the name Twitterlicious is already taken. Twitter favorites + Delicious bookmarks sounds Twitterlicious to me.

Five signs that some institutions have yet to get their ticket for a ride on the Cluetrain:

1. From FastCompany.com: OK Go Ditches Label Over YouTube Embedding Rights. You’ve probably heard of the band OK Go because of their insanely popular (and clever) music videos that have spread like wildfire on YouTube. The latest example is the amazing video for OK Go’s song “This Too Shall Pass.” But as Fast Company’s Dan Nosowitz reports, OK Go’s label, EMI, “in a misguided attempt to wring every penny out of the band’s success, decided to block embedding on the YouTube videos — meaning the videos were unable to disseminate out through music and pop culture blogs, news sites, and personal blogs the way they did before the restriction. And that’s not a minor detail: the band saw a 90% drop in views when that restriction went into effect. As in, 100,000 views one day, 10,000 views the next. … [W]hen the label makes their videos less popular, it means, in no uncertain terms, that less people out there know about OK Go.” And that translates into fewer album and ticket sales.

2. Worst social media “strategy” ever. A news and media company is trying to get into the social media consulting business by offering a cookie-cutter program. For a fee, the company will set up Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, promise one blog post a week, five to eight custom tweets a day, etc. The author of this post on Businessgrow.com calls it a “copy and paste social media marketing strategy” that also flies in the face of journalistic ethics. If this isn’t the worst social media strategy ever, it’s got to be close. (Via @NewsSocialMedia.)

3. How to screw up the higher education system in Ontario. See? Not even higher ed is safe from missing the Cluetrain. Best part of this blog post for me was discovering a new word: “mediocracy.” (Via @tsand.)

4. The truth about Twitter users. Yikes. Could even Twitter, which was all the rage in 2009, be standing at the station when the Cluetrain pulls away? As the above-linked Mashable story points out, most Twitter users are not active. According to Brad J. Ward, these stats further signify Twitter’s “growing irrelevancy”. Of course, he said that on Twitter, so take it for what it’s worth.

5. For kicks, here’s one from the days of steam-engine cluetrains: An essay by Clifford Stoll (remember him?) from 1995 on why “no online database will replace your daily newspaper.”