Image via Wikipedia

Why it’s tearing down the entire social sphere. Facebook spammers are at best a humorous bunch of people. They are at worst the heart of what is destroying the social sphere overall.

Not only is Facebook being destroyed by this lot of idiots who feel that posting random Follow me on twitter messages on every open page it can find is of any benefit to them or to the entire ecosystem is beyond me. It’s not only breaking down the system, but it’s an age old problem that has never been fully addressed.

Google+ while releasing a read only api for the time being is going to be under assault of this rogue group of people who’s only intentions are going to be to destroy the platforms that allow them to speak freely. Quite insane if you ask me, but hey, no one is addressing the issue of shutting down these rogue sites or groups of funny people. While everyone agrees it’s an issue only a few companies are tackling it.

While we wait for other people to figure out that this funny stuff spam is nothing but a destroyer of all that is good about social and open, it will be too late. The people who want to contribute to help grow the system will leave in disgust. Quite a shame, but that’s the truth.

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Image via Wikipedia

People seem to hit me up all the time about their startup. I find it quite interesting as half the time all they really want is an introduction to someone that I know.

That’s fine, just ask for that intro. I’ll usually give you my full attention to what it is you want to do, and I’ll think of who I can connect you with. Now if I don’t connect you with anyone, that means I don’t think your idea is worth a damn. But hey, I’m not someone that knows it all either, so just because I say it’s not worth it, doesn’t mean it totally sucks.

What I won’t do is lie to you and say “Yeah, you have a great idea!” – when it reality it isn’t a great idea and I can’t see any worthwhile thing coming out of it. Then again, there are things I’ve probably snubbed and would have gone on to make great ideas. Thinking really hard about it now, in the past ~8 years or so. I probably would have passed on:

- Twitter – stupid, it’s nothing more than SMS with some stupid naming conventions

- Skype – another dumb chat program with video chat, and the only saving grace may have been the encryption

- Facebook – who needs another MySpace/Friendster

As you can see, I would have not done a few things and probably would have been burned by that fact. All three companies listed above would have been in foresight been passed on by me. That goes to show you one thing.

Not everyone is perfect in their judgement of your startup. If one person says “No”, be sure to keep trying. That one person could be someone like me. A person that really only has an opinion and you know what they say about that!

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Image via CrunchBase

I get invites to be part of people’s LinkedIn all the time it seems lately. It’s almost as bad as how when MySpace was a valid social network, people would bug you to be friends with them. Almost as bad as how Facebook is. How bad Google+ will become if they don’t watch out or let loose a free to post api before they are ready.

Today, I saw an actual invite in my email that had me checking to approve. I looked up and saw a ton that I haven’t bothered to approve! So I went through each one, approving most except the obvious spammers. Like I said it’s like a good way to bug the shite out of people.

Not that there is anything wrong with Shite the religion, but rather shite the nice way of adding an “e” to not just write a word more commonly referred to as excrement. Seriously though….

LinkedIn is starting (has been for quite some time actually, just getting around to writing something!) to become just another social network. Speaking of which, I find most of them are pretty bloated places. Wondering why Facebook and Google+ didn’t learn from the mistakes of MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, etc… etc… The beat goes on.

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Use Google Translate if you can’t read Kanji

今日は明日されていない現実には日本では以上です。つまり、私はそれが既に存在を超えている5月27日に生まれた国です。 Google翻訳のおかげで、私は私の母国の言語でこの記事を書くことができます。私はそこにされていないけれども私はあなたの出身地隠そうとする方法を私が住んでいる彼らは’フードから実際にいるとき、私はシカゴに彼らの故郷を呼び出すこと知っている何人かの人々のように関係なく、推測〜5歳の頃から今私は否定できないメープルウッドミズーリ州と呼ばれる-私は5月27日に横須賀、日本で生まれた。

私は多くの知る限りではそのことについて日、今の子どもたちの多くは、時間のビデオカメラ、写真などのtechologyの進歩のための鮮明な記憶を持っていること、そしてもちろんFacebookに登録して、/ Ustreamのに戻って、歴史的な視点のイベントのライブストリーミングの日-私の生みの母親は、そのような利点を持っていた。実際に戻って当時では、それはおそらく非常に非結婚恥ずかしいと子供を抱えていた。したがって、私はかなりすぐに養子に与えられた。

したがって、私はどちらかの側に私の本当の家族の何を知っている。私は、彼はおそらく軍人だった知っているが、私の父は、私の出生証明書に入れていませんでした。私は彼女に位置することがないが、私の母の名前は、証明書を利用しています。私は彼女が見つけることを望んでいないと確信しています。私は彼女は、私が一年をとってきて、もう一度、彼女は生きているかもしれないと仮定する。

私はGoogle翻訳の助けを借りて、漢字で書くことができるというヘルプを超えて私の故郷に接続されていることかもしれませんが、私はそれは私の誕生のお母さんにありがとうを言う方法だと思う。同様に列挙されて二度とていた私の誕生父、限り。

私はあなたの両方に何を伝えることができますか？さてあなたはおそらく、常に”人に正確に自分の本当の親だった”知りたがっている5人の孫がいる。それは私が答えることができることは決してないだろうものです。私は、彼らがそれについて考えることにしようとどのくらいの空白、またはギャップを自分自身の歴史の中でどんな人生の空虚さを残すことと思います。あなたの孫のすべては、一部の日本人が知ることに誇りを持っています。さらに私は人生の中で持っているより。

私がそれを受け入れているよりも実際には私は私の実際の遺産を否定してきました。私はこのバックの段落に、これらを先行するになると思います。私は養父母（アメリカ）私の新しい国を採用していることがある意味、多かれ少なかれ私は過去に生まれた国を去った。

技術的に素晴らしい休日の週末を持っている、といえば。私の誕生日を持つことの利点のひとつは、月27日にされて、私は通常の休日やその周囲に右のいずれかにそれを持って取得するという事実です。 ：）

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的工具提供给任何人，我会写一份中文邮政今日（简体）根据谷歌翻译，看看是苍蝇。我不知道是否有人在俄罗斯读最后发表的文章，但我以为这是有趣的是如何自TweetDeck禁止或删除它的职位，刚刚发布的bit.ly网址。我想我必须要在那里后俄罗斯在俄罗斯或类似的东西。这似乎有点像Twitter的还是来自TweetDeck歧视？

说到歧视，有没有想过为什么有些事情是因为这样只能由美国公民自由联盟和其他一些激进的左派或右派集团考虑？我没有买成任翼，因为我认为两翼是一个他妈的一堆螺母工作。右和左。两者都应该被发送到/ dev/ null的’丽集团是正确的，因为没有100％的时间激进组织。两者都有它的日子，它的观点，但在任一修辞最想我要留言-关闭他妈的起来了！

中文（简体）书写让我说7个字，你不能说任何程度上，我他妈的吧。我不是一个戴夫麦克卢尔谁认为这是他妈的冷静地说所有的时间以及屎，妈的，混蛋，对母狗，混蛋儿子，假装喜欢的都好，因为他是从地狱天使超级混蛋。或类似的东西。我认为他其实是相当幼稚的把自己有帮助。但是，谁是他妈的知道吗？如果你有那么多钱，你很可能 你播种什么收获，因为他们说，他肯定了一些有趣的母猪的追随者。信徒要为他们的启动他的钱。不是所有戴夫或任何采摘，只是想指出，他说，他妈的一个一个假设与很多cash’ola的智能人非常多。

从技术上讲，这只是一个借口以发布在另一种语言的博客，这次放开与他妈的字位。我不是戴夫麦克卢尔，即使我有他所有的钱，我觉得成熟是不是像一些该死的白痴就是寻找更好的发射架F -仅仅因为他是谁，他能弹。这是我的意见，如果你他妈的不同意，让我在英国唯一的评论。 ：）

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Interesting information found here written by Dan Zarrella:

Some stats have been published, by researchers and the company themselves, about mobile usage of Facebook. But to content creators, one of the most important uses of the social network is when users create posts, sometimes posting original content, often sharing articles and media found elsewhere on the web. I was unable to find much data about how much of this activity occurs via mobile devices, so I decided to research my own.

I used a random sample set of more than 70,000 Facebook public posts (those from users with open privacy settings). The data includes status updates, videos, links and photos. 32.69% of those posts were created from mobile devices. The mobile Facebook website, m.facebook.com lead mobile usage with more than 18% of posts created through it. Below you can see a breakdown of the mobile applications used.

Technically Speaking, decent info with a cool infographic also on the post.

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This list is from some of the more intriguing ways I have personally seen people use Twitter.

Whether it’s via the iPhone, an Android device, or someone sitting in front of their laptop or iPad, tweeting your thoughts in real time in less than 140 characters can become a way to communicate with the masses. It can also become a way to just simply piss off the masses (ie: followers) a lot quicker.

1. The only thing you do is RT (re-tweet)

There are times that you find something so interesting that you have to reshare it with your followers. That is usually done with giving some attribution to the original publisher of the interesting link. The bad thing is that more often than not, the people you follow post more interesting items than you. No big deal, you just click re-tweet and off you go. Or do you?

Now this is probably the number one item that everyone abuses. The power of the RT. It’s also like the number one item that is ignored or sent to the Twitter Dev >> Null file rather quickly. It can also have you dropped rather quickly from being a followed person. You can lose much of your Twitter power as a known RT’er – or – you can become known as just another bot spammer type of tweeter.

Being an actual person, you probably do not want to be known as a bot or spammer.

Instead of constantly RT’ing, maybe you should do a /cc or /via at the end of the tweet to give credit to the original tweeter of the link, or the item. This is one small fix or change to my tweeting habits I started doing when I found my twitter account overloaded with RT’s. That is one way to make sure you don’t become a RT’er all the time – monitor your own twitter stream from time to time!

We are all guilty of doing this, so don’t feel bad that you violated this #1 item!

2. Never engaging your followers when they @ or DM you

This is probably the worst thing you can do. I don’t care if you are a celebrity or have a pseudo tweeter running your tweets, you should somehow respond to your @ or DM items. People like QuestLove who I happened to run into one time in NYC in an elevator, are for real people that take the time to tweet and engage their audience.

Not saying that you must respond to every @ or DM, but you should try to respond to the ones that touch you directly. If you are a celebrity, you should make your fans feel like you are in touch and not above them. Even if you are a pseudo internet famous celeb, you should try to reach out and connect more often than not.

This is probably close to ranking up there with the RT’er only tweeter. That is why this has to be the #2 item on the list of 3 ways to piss off your Twitter followers. Don’t engage? Expect to start in that long downward spiral of losing your fans.

3. Being an affiliate who uses Twitter to spam affiliate links only

If you are an affiliate and you want to use your twitter account to spam with, you should probably go out and sign up for a separate account just for that purpose. Using your personal Twitter account for only affiliate links will have you marked as an affiliate spammer. Your links and your thoughts will be ignored, and most likely your followers are only other affiliates or even worse, bots.

Remember, bots don’t click links, and bots don’t buy your promoted products. Also in that same thought process, most affiliates don’t click other affiliate links. They are usually all self consumed on their own products they are pushing. More than likely being an affiliate on Twitter is not quite as easy you think it is. If you are an affiliate, maybe you should stick to mass e-mail campaigns vs mass tweet campaigns?

Technically Speaking, those are the 3 proven ways to lose or piss off your Twitter followers. There are more, but these 3 happen to sit at the top of my thought list this morning. If you have more to contribute, please leave it in the comments and share them with the other readers of this blog post.

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Well the spammers out there are re-grouping and coming up with even newer scams since the last spam watch I posted just the other day. Seems that since that time, the phishers of the world are back to trying to attract just a slice of that ~500 million user pie with catchy titles like below.

- This GIRL KILLED Herself After HER DADs post on Facebook have already seen several bogus apps sites such as – http://apps.facebook.com/sadhappened/ and http://apps.facebook.com/wllposts are just two that have been reported in the past ~6 hours

- Also it seems that the Russian drug / pill / viagra sites are more plentiful than before and putting in the early holiday push for you to order some pills for your thrills. Sites such as http://rxtop-my.ru and the usual long winded pills for your kills sites like http://tabletscheappillssite.com are flooding your inbox in hopes that you try some of their version of viagra.

Technically Speaking, be careful out there and if you do happen to order one of those sub ~$100 Walgreens Maylong M-150 Android tablets, I’d like to hear your general review of it.

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Another post in my little series I of spam warnings.

The below is a screenshot of what the e-mail looks like. It looks almost identical to a real iTunes e-mail.

Now many of you are probably rolling your eyes and saying, “Why bother writing this post, and I’m not that stupid to click this!” This post is just an informational post for those that might freak out at seeing a $795.99 iTunes bill. How would you really feel if you do a lot of iTunes purchases, and you see this? Would you all of sudden automatically click and think someone hacked your iTunes account?

Again, you may not be that stupid to click, but you never can tell – and if you are not that stupid – at least have the sense to pass it on to people that you know might click. Look at the above, and look at the below now:

Technically Speaking, I’m not trying to insult your intelligence, but if you (after reading this post and viewing the pictures) rant and rave on twitter or Facebook about “boo-hoo, someone hacked my iTunes account… ” – well hey smart ass, you just were warned! :)

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This morning I saw a post from Amplify which along with many other sites encourages conversation around content that is already created. The small time blogger, unless they have a fan base, pretty much is talking to the hand at times. This post I’m referring too was called Most People Have Nothing to Say - and that was based on a Forrester research piece.

With that being said, people still try to build something from nothing and create more content upon original content. Like a comedian who is looking for material in every day life. While those that create original content seem to be in a niche category these days, but do rather well as long as they address the needs of their readers. Which ultimately means you have to spend more time fixing your blog and looking for new content creators.

Why have people dropped off from blogging? Well I did an experiment earlier this summer to see how much traffic I could drive between all my different blog properties. I basically regurgitated content about making money online, driving traffic, photoshop, graphics editors like GIMP, etc… Your basic high traffic type of content it seems. Traffic did really well, and actually finally got me over the hump of receiving a Google Ads money minimum.

Was it actually creating content? Not really. It was just a step below what I termed above as a comedian looking for material in real life. Only was way below that, because I really had nothing to say about the information I found. Sure it drove a ton of traffic and may have driven more, but is it any fun? Well I guess if you dive deep into it, like one of the people I know from Oz, sure you can make a living doing content optimization or as it’s better known SEO, SEM, etc.

Where is all the real content? Unfortunately for the naysayers, it’s on the social channels. As you all saw earlier this month, I set up a paper.li and twittertim.es page. You are going to read far more interesting content at either of those pages than I can crank out on a daily basis. Pretty much if you think about it, even one of the long time blogs who tried to always do the honorable and correct thing, CenterNetworks, is soon dropping away and selling.

Twitter, Facebook, and OneTrueFan are the benefits of the lack of original user created content. The sites that benefit from all of this are the main content churning machines like AOL/Techcrunch (my guess is ~$30MM + Incentives/Stock), VentureBeat, RWW, and your bigger niche sites like Inside Facebook, ValleyWag (Gawker), etc. Sites like OTF are going to win in the end since people will continue to surf even if there is no original content created.

As long as there is data out there for people to examine or think about, whether or not people have something to say will be irrelevant to the number of people accessing online entrance points. Data is the business model for many startups.

As long as mobile continues to grow hardware and software proportionate, there will be no need for people to say anything. Mobile analytics is another business model being adopted by startups. Won’t matter what people say, the money churning machines will continue on forward.

Technically Speaking, I have something to say all the time, most times these days, I just need to find the time to say it. I just said it, so if you have anything to say why not leave a constructive comment?

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You will want to read this entire post:

There are so many usual tips on money making and a whole lot of them are currently resting on my blog, now here I’m going to share a few tips that will help you make even more money from your blog. Here it goes,

Don’t monetize your blog

Wait, is this a SPEED BREAKER? Yeah this is a strategy. When you start your blog, try to build the content and don’t put any ads on your blog for at least 4-6 months. Promote your blog and add more useful content. When you will do this, people will see that this blogger is not monetizing his blog and will get more interested in reading your blog. People will connect with you and ask you for advertise on your blog. This way when you will open up the ads on your blog after 6 months (when you will have a good readership and a page rank) you will start getting ad offers and make even more money from your blog.

Optimize your adsense ads

If you are using adsense, then try to make it blend into your content and theme. Add less ad spots on your blog and put them in top. So you will get more clicks and more money. Try filtering the MFA ads using the competitive ad filter option in adsense to keep your ad stream free of low paying ads.

Sign up for many paid review sites

When you sign up for many paid review sites and submit your site on their marketplace, the chances are you will receive regular offers and can post the paid review in your blog. Paid reviews are great way to build content and earn extra money without even using ad space.

Offer a service

Create a section on your blog called “services” where you can offer your services such as consulting, freelancing, photography or logo design. I have a section called Hire Me and it has sent so many client toward my web design service. This is a nice way to make even more money from your blog.

Offer paid tweets

Here the key is to create and build a twitter account for your blog. Tweet your posts and useful information. Sign up for paid twittering platforms and you can earn money from your twitter account.

Donation button

Technically Speaking, the blogger that wrote this is from Bangladesh.

This is a short and sweet post:

One of the best twitter tips you can take action on is to change your background and make it part of you, your business, your brand…make it an extension of your blog.

My good blogging friend, Erica who owns the blog, www.EricaSays.com recently published a blog post discussing this twitter tip.

Erica says it all…there is nothing for me to add except just before Erica published her post, I did change my Twitter background.

Take a peek and follow me on Twitter while you are there. Here’s my Twitter page:

www.twitter.com/andrewrondeau

What do you think? Do you like my “Bob (Andrew) the Builder” character?

Now go and visit Erica’s post and take action on one of the best Twitter tips around:

Do You Have a Custom Twitter Background?

Technically Speaking, as always, go read more …

I’m deleting my Facebook page today at 1pm Pacific today.

You can watch live here, and perhaps join me!
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/this-week-in-startups

So what about YOU? Waiting for May 31st to roll around? Are you deleting your Facebook account, or at least by June 1st when this poll ends?

Vote in this Twtpoll:

Technically Speaking, are YOU joining everyone else and commit social media suicide as Frank put it?

I’m referring to this post as my spring cleaning event. The sidebar is clean. The theme is now clean. Rid the blog of an old non-functioning service (TipJoy was one that was causng a slowdown in page load since it shut down – check out Venmo for more payment fun), as well as updated the theme to a really simple b&w no frills, very fast loading theme.

Another thing I fixed on here earlier was the Past Writers page is now integrated into the Comments page. I also updated Mae Oakmont’s status with her new blog she is writing on (more than I am writing here!). That is her new Facebook profile picture.

Speaking of Facebook, one of the more annoying aspects is the whole e-mail thing when you comment or like a status. Annoyed me to no end. Of course someone reminded me that I could turn the notifications off. I just did. So the only time I’ll be notified is if someone e-mails me there, or one other item. So far, it’s nice an less inbox notices I’ve received. Nice.

Ever wonder if all the people complaining about privacy these days are all ga-ga over Foursquare? Kind of funny how the complaints about online privacy go up, yet the majority of writers out there are going bonkers about how great location everything is. Why does Twitter care? Why does Foursquare care? It’s all about the data. Data is money. The one who has the data at the end of the internet is the big winner.

One thing that people forget about as far as Twitter goes is what you can do with it. I always like reading a well written post by MK, and once again he nails another good read. Not only that, #pdxboom proves that those who are thinking ahead are going to be the ones that really take Twitter and other things to the next level.

What level is that? One that is not thought of yet, or in the early stages in late 2009 or 2010. That level. Those that want to venture out and try something different than the norm. Location everything was not the norm say 18 months ago, yet today it is the norm and becoming even more normal and not so next level anymore.

How many of you like Zemanta? Now that is a service that makes blogging so much easier for lazy non-updating bloggers like I have become. One of the things I do like about blogging here is that more people tend not to read my rambles more than ever before. That’s fine. It seems like the last time I had any readers here was when I offended an entire region or metropolitan area. The best way to tell if you have any real readers is via the comments. If there is a thread of comments, you are doing well. Obviously by the comment streams here, it’s the same six readers that I had back in 2006.

What do you think of work rant blog posts? I was reading one earlier today which reminded me of some items I put up back in 2004 about an old job I had at the time. The person blogging there might put up a work rant blog, on a new domain. We shall see if she decides to roll the dice and have some fun blogging about the weird yet cool experiences she has in her life. Those are usually the best blogs to read as well as the ones that receive the best traffic – and sometimes book deals, etc.

Technically Speaking, March 2010 now has a blog post entry!

MyContextualAds has an easy way for you to add a few bucks to your paypal account with their “Twist & Tweet” contest. You just have to tweet like I did here and here.

To participate in this contest, all you need to do is include the #mycontextualads tag in any tweet on Twitter. You can be creative with your tweet or re-tweet our message, it’s entirely upto you!
Don’t forget to follow @mycontextualads to find out if you’ve won!

You can tweet #mycontextualads as often as you like. Each of these tweets will be eligible and the winners chosen will be the top four highest tweeters! It’s as simple as that!

But please, no bots or automated scripts please! This is purely meant for fun and lets keep it that way!

Rules:
1. This competition is offered by Zytes Technologies Inc. (“Zytes”) and is open to anyone with a Twitter account who is at least 16 years of age. Employees and agents of Zytes and/or its affiliated companies and family members of such employees are not eligible to enter.
2. The competition starts on Dec 22nd 2009 and will continue till February 14th 2010
3. To enter the competition you must send out a tweet from your own Twitter account and include “#mycontextualads” in your message. The rest of the message is up to you, and you are welcome to retweet our competition tweet URL. Or just say whatever you feel like. And you don’t have to be a user of MyContextualAds to enter, so no purchase is required.
4. You can tweet as many times as you like (though entries using automated tweets will be disqualified).
5. Winners will be chosen at the end of the contest. Winners will be announced after the close of the contest from the MyContextualAds Twitter account and official blog.
6. 4 grand prizes will be available, one each for US $25
7. The prize money would be sent to the winner’s PayPal account – no other payment mechanisms would be entertained
8. Entrants’ personal details will be used by Zytes strictly in accordance with Zytes’s privacy policy.
9. Neither Zytes nor its affiliated companies shall have any liability for (i) any technical failures of any kind, including but not limited to malfunctions, interruptions or disconnections in phone lines or network hardware or software; (ii) technical or human error which may occur in the administration of the competition; (iii) any malfunction of or damage to the prizes; or (iv) any restrictions or delays imposed by any customs authorities or any import or other taxes of any kind imposed by any taxation authority in respect of the prizes.

Technically Speaking, it’s Friday, why not?

Twitter is totally worthless. Won’t make it until next year. Just a flash in the pan.

If it is so worthless, how did the Red Cross become tangled up with such a worthless communication tool? Guess that $10 million isn’t worth anything either in helping victims of this terrible disaster in Haiti? Worthless, flash in the pan, won’t last next year.

Those are direct quotes said to me. While it might be totally worthless to send out your 140 character or less tweet, it appears that those that can think outside the box and utilize it as the tool it can be is making it a difference maker. Who would have thought that something that is nothing more than another communication tool would be the one to rally people around a disaster?

Technically Speaking, those that dismiss technological advancements are the ones resigned to working the jobs that we all hate to say is a job at all.

Facebook is more like a two faced bitch if you ask me. Awhile ago I use to be part of a small Facebook ad network called Lookery. Well even back then, Facebook’s constant rule changes annoyed the hell out our publishers as well as other ad networks we worked with. They were basically a big fat PITA.

Now one of the so called “rules” – or as I like to say – “it’s my ball, and I’ll take it home whenever I damn well please rules” was you can’t pull user info into a banner ad. Like the ones that were quite annoying, but intriguing nevertheless. The ones that said “Your friend Todd Sawicki is now playing Vampires R Us, you should too!” – those ads. Yes, while rather annoying, they made publishers and advertisers a ton of money.

Well a few minutes ago I logged onto my Facebook account. At the top I saw the below banner.

Facebook banned ad networks from running these type of ads, but now they basically steal the idea and put it into play for their own use – what is more annoying – stealing a great idea or first saying it’s illegal and then stealing it and using it for your own use?!

Technically Speaking, if you trust Facebook to do anything but make a ton of money, you really should look a little deeper at what they do. What they do is all for the benefit of Facebook only. Like any good enterprise company should do I suppose. Just drop the act, no one is buying it. You are not a startup. You are full on corporate American greed at it’s finest. Just re-tooled for the internet and 21st century.

Yes, I have been around. Busy, busy. Miss me?

Check out my Tumblr blog

My Twitter stream

My Facebook

AIM (rexdixon2006), Skype(rexdixon1), etc.

Yes, even still keep a MySpace page going.

And somewhere out there I have a Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster account(s)!

Technically Speaking, if you can’t find me, you haven’t tried hard enough – because I’m pretty easy to find! If you didn’t get the GeoCities vibe, you missed the boat sometime back in ’99.

The news of the moment is that Twitter has been officially down for about 1.5 hours now, and looks like Facebook has suffered it’s own meltdown.

MySpace however seems to be rockin’ right along just fine. I haven’t checked any of the other social net’s – but it seems that out of the big two, the one that everyone has abandoned seems to be working just fine. A little too messy looking still, but hopefully in time the new leadership sees the error of the past administration that was in charge there.

It does bring up an interesting thought of maybe just possibly the social net revolution isn’t over quite yet. Stay tuned for sure, as with this mornings meltdown and people that can get in to update their fb status, all are crying that Twitter is down. Now I’m sure once everyone wakes up and the services come back, there will be a lot of analysis of this event.

Technically Speaking, a new social world is in order about right now; well if someone can tune the cloud, but as someone once already stated “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish!” >:-?

It looks like one of the leaders of the podcasting, blogging, videocasting movement if you will has decided earlier today that he had enough. He paid someone to trim his stream to a trickle. That almost sounds like a cheap porn movie title. In reality the stream became Scoble’s porn. He was addicted to it. Blogging, Podcasting, Videocasting, Twitter, Friendfeed, Area 51! Er, Building43! I think you get my point. Someone who has made his livlihood by living in the stream, drinking from the stream, has declared stream bankruptcy.

I saw that coming though. While certain people like Marshall will never unfollow you, there are others like me who have taken smaller drinks from the stream known as twitter, Friendfeed, blogging, podcasting, and videocasting. Sorry, no Area 51 for the moment for me! I’ve come to find that my current ratio of follow to followers keeps things interesting enough, yet not overwhelming. It also keeps my stream a worthwhile pursuit vs a living daily nightmare to even look at or make any sense of.

The bigger picture of course is the graphic I found earlier today on Seth’s site this morning. That is the question of the moment more important than any stream trickle trick. The main question that is brought up while we are in this downturn time we live in is where do we go from here. He laid it out in a very simple graphic on two axis that made sense. We see what works. We also see what takes longer to work and requires more work to get there. Twitter is something that worked due to Scoble and some of the early believers in it. They kept squirting their stream all over everyone, every single moment, every single day – until you just had to try it!

Technically Speaking, with Seth’s graphic from this morning in mind – A television show about a book reader that likes to IM his or her friends, while occasionally e-mailing a mysterious person they saw at the movies last weekend while they were tweeting someone from their cell phone and watching cable news and blogging their reaction to it – should go over like gangbusters! Wait for it… Wait for it…. >:-?