The Insomniac Coder

How Pee Helps Us Understand Social Media The biggest problem I am having with this whole social media freakout is companies freaking out about it. People, on the other hand, are doing exactly what was expected with these new technologies. The problem with the companies is that they are too willing to shell out money to snake oil peddlers calling themselves social media experts, who are then tasked with shaping their "social media strategy." 99% of the time this means adding a  Facebook  group, a Twitter account, buttons to follow twitter and friend on Facebook on the corporate site, and telling everyone in the company to sign up for a LinkedIn account. When you go to their website, there's a link that says that they are on Facebook. When you visit their Facebook page, it is empty except for links back to the site, and a bunch of useless drivel, wall posts, like messages, etc. When you go to their Twitter, all you see is a bunch of regurgitated content ...

Image via Wikipedia Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter - NYTimes.com : "Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family." The best the NYT could come up with: Bloggers are lazy, it's easier to post to the FB wall or to Twitter. FB does a good enough job in reaching friends and family. From that they leap to the conclusion that blogs are waning. I imagine that in 3 months they'll write about how people are too busy to Twitter, after all, who has time to write 140 characters at a time? Maybe somebody is going to write an app that taps into your head and posts a stream of consciousness into your social media accounts of choice. The reality of the matter is that a lot of the people that "blog" simply do it because it is the cool thing to...

Image by Casul Media via Flickr The problem: We Xbox 360 gamers love to brag and share on our experiences playing the console, but there is simply no easy way to grab a screen capture or video. Some games have implemented this kind of feature and it is extremely popular. For example, Halo 3 let me record a game as pure telemetry, which kept the file size tiny, then use it to generate a video that I could edit for view angle (overkill). Forza 3 allows you to take captures with an in- game camera , and even allows exporting videos. Proposed solution: Implement changes to the Xbox 360 dashboard , that allows the user to: Hit the center button in the controller and quickly take a screen grab, which can be: saved to the Xbox 360 pictures library. sent to any of the members of the friends list. send it to the SkyDrive associated with the Live ID associated with the gamer tag . Optional: same functionality as #1, but as a video. same functionality as #1.2, but for other soc...

Go ahead and roll your eyes if you have sat in this meeting already: Extra points if you remember sitting in this exact meeting, but about SEO instead of social media . Do you ever wonder what gives these people the right to call themselves experts? WTF is a SEO expert? Is it a guy with 20 years of experience in SEO? Did this field exist 20 years ago? 10? 5? Under that standard, should I call myself a Caffeination Expert? Is there some enterprising dumbass out there selling other dumbasses a certification test that lets them use the SEO expert title just for passing a test? Is there such a thing for social media too? Related articles by Zemanta SEO & Integration With Social Media (webguild.org) Optimize Your Social Media and Make Your SEO More Social (harpsocial.com)