All posts in Social Networking

Bloapp – New Project (Bloggers’ Own App)

by Ades on May 30, 2011 in Blogging Tips, Business Ideas, iPhone, Marketing, Online Tools, Personal, Social Networking, Technology with 8 Comments

The project that I have talked in my previous post is Bloapp. It’s now live and all of you are welcome to use it :)

What’s Bloapp?

It’s a free tool for bloggers to create their own iPhone app for FREE. It supports self-hosted blogs, plus blogs that are hosted in these blogging platforms; Blogspot, Posterous, Tumblr, Weebly, Blogdrive and Tripod.

I have already created my iPhone app with Bloapp, here is how you can get it:

  1. Download the app from iTunes click here.
  2. Scan this QR code or search for my blog “Ades” and you are done! You can now read my blog in your iPhone.

Bloapp iPhone Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of the iPhone app for my blog. For your own app, you can choose different layouts and can customize your own logos, headers, backgrounds…

Web Screenshots

Creating iPhone app for your blog with Bloapp is very easy. Just 1, 2, 3 and you are done. Below is some screenshots from the website.

Dashboard: List of your added blogs/apps

Step 1 – Choose Layout

Layout 1 – layout with thumb, title, and post excerpt

Layout 2 – layout with blog post title and date

Layout 3 – title only clean and woody layout

Layout 4 – layout with thumb, post title and post excerpt, for techy blogs…

Step 2 – Customize your logo, header and bg

Step 3 – Customize your font style, text size and text color

Your are done – QR code for your blog

Promote – Counter chicklets
Counter script – display on your blog how many people are reading your blog via Bloapp

I hope you like it. Your feedbacks on this project is most welcome.

Sign-up for free: www.bloapp.com.

Get Twitter’s Official “Tweet” button

by Ades on August 14, 2010 in Social Networking with 11 Comments

Twitter finally launched it’s official “tweet” button. As you can see below, it comes in 3 different sizes.

twitter_offical_button.png

URL: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

It’s the “retweets” that count

by Ades on August 8, 2010 in Social Networking with 15 Comments

Latest study by HP Labs suggests that “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

That means it’s the retweets that really matter, and if you are a social networking advertiser you might want to find out the retweet rates of your twitter users that you are advertising on. Otherwise, if no one retweets their tweets, you might be wasting your money.

Because the research suggests that there are users with: 1) many followers and low relative infuence, and 2) users with fewer followers but high relative infuence. If you were to choose one of two, you should go for the second type of users. Because that way your message will be heard by a lot more people.

As we know twitter is like a river, at any given time you can only see the latest tweets and everything else is a history… So unless your “message” is retweeted, it’s as good as it’s dead.

I am just rumbling here, but I hope you know what I am getting at. Here is the research:

Influence and Passivity in Social Media – HP Labs Research

Facebook’s “Like” button for the whole web

by Ades on April 23, 2010 in Social Networking with 33 Comments

fb_like.jpegFacebook has a new plan for the web, and that is to put “Like” button on all websites on the internet. Whenever you click on them, your actions are recorded in your facebook account and then they are shared with your friends.

For some, it sounds like an invasion of privacy but for Mark Zuckerberg of FB, it’s one way to get people closer to each other. Read more on Mark’s plans here.

Last year they had released a plugin that could potentially replace blog comments, but that didn’t really take off. Similarly, Google’s Sidewiki project for the “web” also didn’t go well with people. Let’s see how people will respond to “Like” button strategy.

Social Media Cheatsheet

by Ades on March 9, 2010 in Social Networking with 41 Comments

social-media-cheat-sheet.png
click to view full image

via crenk.com

Social Media Pillows

by Ades on August 12, 2009 in Social Networking with 15 Comments

Spending too much time on your facebook? How about resting on a facebook pillow?

web2pillows.png

These Social Media pillows are sold by http://www.craftsquatch.com for about $18 each. Nice stuff.

via mashable

HootSuite is great

by Ades on August 4, 2009 in Social Networking with 19 Comments

I have been playing around with HootSuite and I should they have done a great job. It’s a professional twitter application that does many things. My favorite feature is the multiple twitter account management.

After adding all your twitter accounts to your dashboard, sending messages to each (or all accounts at once) is a snap (see screenshot below). You just type select the account and publish. No need to login/logout multiple times.

hootsuite

Some people might say, why you need multiple twitter accounts? Well, sometimes you need separate account for your projects…

If you want to know more about HootSuite, here is their promo video:

Website: http://hootsuite.com/

P.S By the way, follow me on twitter at twitter.com/ades

Blogged 2.0 looks cool

by Ades on July 8, 2009 in Blogging Tips, Social Networking with 26 Comments

blogged20.pngBlogged‘s new 2.0 version looks really great, lots of improvements. It’s more facebook’ish now, you can post stuff, follow people, comment on anything etc.

If you don’t know what is Blogged, it’s a blog directory that rates blogs and let people rate them too. With the new version, they have done it more like a Social Network site rather than a simple blog directory with rating capability, which is great.

If you have blog you should definitely check out Blogged. (Rate my blog at Blogged here)

Website: www.blogged.com

Twitter for Busy People

by Ades on June 30, 2009 in Social Networking with 24 Comments

twitterbusy.pngIf you thought twitter was simple enough tool to use, here is a great tool that will simplify your twitter usage even more. It’s called Twitter for Busy People.

It displays the twitter updates of your friends according to the Last Hour, Last Day and More than 1 Day (ago) messages.

Time difference is a major issue in Twitter, most of the time you will miss the tweets of the people you are following who are on the other side of the globe, this is especially true when you are following many people. With this above mentioned tool, it almost solves this problem.

Website: http://www.twitterforbusypeople.com

Some stats about Twitter’s users

by Ades on June 22, 2009 in Social Networking with 32 Comments

Here is some stats about Twitter users:

  • 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
  • 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
  • 68.68% have not specified a location
  • 55.50% are not following anyone
  • 54.88% have never tweeted
  • 52.71% have no followers

Seems like half of twitter-nation is inactive, 54.88% have never tweeted. And half of them has no followers (52.71%).

Read the full report by HubSpot here (PDF file, 9 pages).

Chance for you to make money with Facebook usernames

by Ades on June 12, 2009 in Make Money, Social Networking with 19 Comments

If you login to your facebook now, it will show you a notice at the top of the page which reads:

Soon you will be able to have a username
Starting on Saturday, June 13th, at 12:01pm, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile…

That means you will be able to choose any keyword for your account, for most it would be their names but for many others who want to make money that would mean registering new dummy accounts and getting like these keywords below:

facebookusername.jpg

.
Obviously you won’t be able to get keywords like facebook.com/google or any other keyword that is copyrighted, trademarked or infringes someone else’s Intellectual Property. Facebook says regarding this: Continue reading →

Making Money with Twitter

by Ades on May 1, 2009 in Make Money, Online Advertising, Social Networking with 34 Comments

While twitter is still trying to figure out how to make money, others are already making money with its platform. One such service is Magpie. Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter.magpie.png

How it works:

In basic terms, you allow them to access your twitter account, and they will tweet relevant ads to your account. You get paid based on your number of followers, the rate of the ads (different category ads have different prices), and the number of clicks on these ads. How exactly they calculate your earnings is obviously known only to them.

You can define the tweet frequency, and for maximum control you can choose to pre-approve each tweet from magpie yourself.

How much you can make?

It depends on the number of your followers. Magpie has a calculator on their website. According to this calculator with my 177 followers, apparently I could make up to 8.61 pounds per month (i know.. that’s very small).

aplusk.pngLet’s insert someone’s username who is influential on twitter. And that’s none other than @aplusk or Ashton Kutcher. He has over 1.5 million followers.

So the calculator says he could make over 90 thousands pounds every month! (see screenshot) Wow, that’s a lot!

Summary

So, as you can see, number of followers does matter. On twitter # of followers are like a “unique visitors” in normal websites. The more followers you have the more money you will likely to make when the twitter based publisher networks come out. Therefore, start building your twitter community, grow your twitter’s following. I am quite sure that twitter’s own (and other) “making money models” will rely on the number of followers that one has first. And perhaps this will be combined with the number of clicks that each ad will get.

Whatever it is, you will need to have a healthy twitter community, which is active and will actually follow your tweets. Because I am sure twitter (and other future publisher networks on twitter platform) won’t just pay you for having the most number of followers. Having thousands of zombie followers who do not click on your tweet-links won’t benefit you. Therefore, don’t try to grow your network with those automatic tools that will just fill up your twitter network with dead followers. Most of those followers are actually empty accounts that won’t get updated ever.

Well, Magpie might just have thought a lesson to Twitter on how to monetize their network.

Website: be-a-magpie.com (they should really get that magpie.com!)
Follow me on Twitter: @ades

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