Image via CrunchBase

Yes, while I’m writing this about ~2 weeks in advance of it posting online, Google+ is turning into nothing but a cesspool of marketers and spammers. Too bad, as many of us had so much hope for G+ as the next social network that made sense. Of course those of us who are as cynical as I can be, realized that once they opened up access, so would the carpet baggers, hanger ons, and the scum of the internet would join. It’s come to pass, and even though I write this about ~2 weeks in advance, doubtful much will change by the time this post goes live.

While G+ goes down the drain in massive fashion, that still won’t prevent Google+ from going into a giant social space. Will it be used once the spammers flood the streams? That’s hard to say. Currently, Ignore All has become my favorite new addition to G+. Most of the crackpots that are joining, I wouldn’t want to see their streams on G+ or any other social network.

Here is to hoping that I’m totally wrong this time. Doubtful since I’m sure by the time this posts live, we’ll all still have spam in our inbox, as well as see spamvertised links elsewhere.

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• Is LinkedIn really that good or how to bug the shite out of me (rexduffdixon.com)
• more stuff to love on google+ (toomanytribbles.blogspot.com)
• Turns Out There Might Be Some Girls Using Google+ After All [Google+] (gizmodo.com)

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.

Related articles

• Facebook Makes It Easier to Stop Fan Spam (hubspot.com)
• Facebook explains why it tracks you even when you’re logged out (geek.com)
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• How to Effectively Manage Critics, Trolls and Spammers on Facebook Pages (socialtimes.com)
• Facebook denies cookie tracking allegations (zdnet.com)

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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• 21 gadgets that’ll make you feel really old (cbsnews.com)

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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Which of the three services do you like (you can like all three) and for what purposes are you using them?

Do you buy into what this article stated – Google+ is Awesome. Facebook Maimed, Twitter Mortally Wounded | Singularity Hub

Vote here or just leave a comment with your thoughts if you like all 3 services equally or have no real preference at this time:

Technically Speaking, how many think that the “awesome” Facebook announcement was lame? (leave a comment also if you want to answer that one!)

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• Google Plus for Business (insideview.ie)

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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My post earlier this week about Spokeo opened up a door again with someone I had connected with a few years back. That person would be the founder of Spokeo, Harrison Tang. He and I had a nice email exchange this past week post this Spokeo post I wrote. Go give it a read if you missed it.

One thing I would like to make clear before continuing: I did ask his permission to quote him from his email. Harrison, as like I have been, have been the victim of people who think they can just post any email online; damn the privacy of a one to one exchange. But that is the day and age we live in. Still the same, since I have had that done to me before, I always ask permission. It’s just the right thing to do!

One of the main things that he stated was in this day and age of valuations of companies going through the roof, you really don’t need millions of dollars to make something from nothing. Another successful serial entrepreneur, who I just linked, I know loves to say that as his calling card. Here now are some quotes from Harrison.

As you’ve noticed already, Spokeo.com has changed quite a bit.  The
team, however, is still the same small team that you knew since 2006
(we do have more than 15 people now though, as opposed to 6).  We
haven’t taken any VC funding, and no, we do not have an outsourcing
staff in India.  Everything is designed and built in USA.  A lot of
people are surprised by how such a small team can operate a site like
Spokeo.com.  Well … the truth is that you don’t need millions to
start a company anymore.

Surprised anyone? The truth is that you don’t need millions to start a company anymore. I suppose in defense of companies taking on the millions these days, it’s for scale once you get past that startup mode. The funny thing is, is that Spokeo has been around plugging away since 2006 when I first came to know of them.

We’ve done more than one “pivoting” (I guess that’s the buzz word for
startups nowadays) not because we like to pivot, but rather because we
need to pivot in order to survive.  Building a technology does not
always translate to building a business.  As we’ve learned from the
hard way, people do not pay for social network aggregators even though
it’s a cool concept and a very hard technology to build.

That is surely something to think about. Building a social aggregator is cool – but guess what – no one really will pay you to do it! For anyone contemplating on building the next Facebook/Twitter aggregation engine, you might want to think about that further before you execute it!

Why did they pivot and do the change from social aggregator to a more in demand product? It’s the users. It’s always about the users of your product.

It takes visions and creativity to create something different, but it
requires execution and discipline to turn that thing into a business.
Without vision, we could not have build something as innovative as
Spokeo’s underlying technology.  That said, without practical
execution, we would still be building a social network aggregator that
only technical people use, as opposed to tailoring our technology for
the larger target audience.  At the end of the day, we changed
Spokeo’s direction because our users wanted us to change, and they
voted for the new direction with their own wallets.

This goes back to the days I was playing actively in bands. One thing I always tried to relay to people is that not everyone will like you. But in the same token, you have to sometimes swallow what you want to do for the better of the whole. In other words, building the social aggregator was fun, but it was also not a true business that would succeed or gain any traction.

What about all the criticism that Spokeo was receiving in regards to the whole privacy issue, etc.

We are receptive of all criticisms
(constructive or not), and we try our best to address them one-by-one.
This explains why we’ve been constantly updating our website and
technology, making it more accurate and friendlier.

Going back to an earlier comment about one of my former companies, who Harrison even was nice enough to remember, what about the competition? Does it mean you shouldn’t do it?

There are hundreds of online directories out there (we are actually
not the biggest one), but since most of them don’t work that well,
Spokeo is the first people search engine that most people have ever
seen. Because Spokeo offers a lot better user experience than
traditional directories, we leapfrogged past the early adopter crowd
relatively quickly. We don’t have much time to fine-tune our product
and business model with the early adopters before going mainstream, so
we’ve had couple stumbles here and there. That said, if you’ve been
following the evolution of Spokeo.com, you can see that we’ve been
making constant progress in addressing all the issues.

Oh and to be clear, I don’t think I was doing anything crazy back in the day, but maybe we were. It’s nice to hear how some people see you from the outside.

Image via CrunchBase

The last time we talked you were doing crazy stuff at Lookery. Sounds
like you are even busier nowadays and doing well :)

One of the things that I realized back in the Lookery days was that most of the people in that company were engineers. Or very tech oriented people and very startup veteran. To illustrate what I mean, the one item that sticks out is the last thing Harrison said in our email exchange.

Anyway, we are engineers here, not marketers and philosophers, so we
know our most convincing argument is our product itself. With
millions of searches every single day, people are finding Spokeo
useful. This encourages us to keep innovating and making Spokeo
better for everyone.

With regards to that statement. It sort of bodes well for people like me as well as other people type of people. Every startup needs someone besides the engineers to scale well. While the product does matter, if you can’t win over the people, eventually you’ll be the startup with no one using that fantastic product. Just like back in the band days, while your material might be excellent, if you can’t put butts in the seats to listen, you’ll be playing for bartenders and barmaids only.

Technically Speaking, Harrison had a lot of great stuff to share, and I’m glad he gave permission for me to share it with everyone reading this. And one last item – Harrison is an Apple fanboy or maybe just a Steve Jobs fanboy! :)

We are fans of Steve Jobs here at Spokeo, and we will keep simplifying
Spokeo until every grandma on the planet knows how to use it.

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• Spokeo.com: This will freak out the privacy advocates (thoughtgadgets.com)

Ever ponder why Black Friday, Facebook, and Twitter are so successful? Want to duplicate the same feat with your startup or your venture? Just follow these 3 keys to success, and I’m sure you’ll have VC‘s and angel’s knocking at your door. Duplicate the 3 keys, no need to re-invent the wheel!

Step 3 – Go Mainstream

Well that goes without saying. If Black Friday wasn’t the term commonly known as the day after Thanksgiving, it wouldn’t be mainstream. Once it reached this level, it became quite apparent that to be in retail, you had to honor the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Facebook would not have survived as a college only social network. Once you are out of college, you are in the mainstream. To have been stubborn and not open to new ideas, it would have remained a small niche social network that, gasp – MySpace might have buried!

Twitter in 2006, 2007 was yet to reach mainstream. Once it clicked or resonated with the masses at SXSW 2007, it was off and running to the mainstream.

Step 2 – Get people talking about “it“

Whatever “it” is, you need people talking about “it“. If you don’t have the people buzzing about “it“, you won’t ever reach step 3 which as you just read is the mainstream.

For Black Friday, that mainstream was when the media picked up on all the sales post Thanksgiving and dubbed it by it’s common known name. Yes, Black Friday not only leveraged the media into believing the name it gave itself, it lent the tip to media to help spread the word of the “it” which of course is Black Friday.

Facebook became the “it” by simply being the “in” place to be first as a college only site, and by holding off the next level it pushed the anticipation of “it” by opening up the site to anyone. Once that happened, it quickly surged into the mainstream.

Twitter had a more difficult time since it wasn’t your classic social network. It was something new, but so new that it could never put it’s finger on”it“. Once it figured out that “it” was actually step #1 below, it quickly leveraged “it” to make a run to the mainstream quicker than either Black Friday or Facebook did.

Step 1 You follow therefore you become a follower

Black Friday would never have had the success it currently enjoys unless there were people seriously following the run up hype to the Friday after Thanksgiving. Retailers now even open on Thanksgiving morning since the hype (look for a new media dubbed name soon for the morning of Thanksgiving sales!) is so big for Black Friday. By hype, I mean lines of people (followers) that maybe won’t buy a thing unless they are tempted with super sales that the date offers. They still might not buy any item, but will be highly tempted by all the accompanying hype, so chances are they will spend some money.

Facebook would have never had the success without opening up and loading up their user base. Once they figured out that you hooked ‘em in college, but now most of their users were post college days, they needed to open it up so that their mainstream friends could connect. Once they did that, the next 2 steps were easier to achieve and success followed up quickly.

With Twitter this first step was more crucial since no one had a clue what Twitter was or how it was going to work. Twitter is/was almost like how this post started out. It had no idea where it was going, but figured that out when step #1 magically took off on it’s own. Once that happened, the powers that be at Twitter realized that it’s true calling was the followers that propelled it to be the darlings of water cooler chat, and then talk shows. It had “it” to talk about, even though “it” was still an unknown, but talking about “it” via the crucial follower step #1 helped it reach mainstream faster than Black Friday or Facebook.

Technically Speaking, if you gain some followers who talk about “it“, you’ll reach the final step in the 3 keys to success which is mainstream acceptance. If you want to put that in your pitch to VC’s and angel’s, tell ‘em you read it here first! Oh, btw, Happy Safe Thanksgiving to all!

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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.

More good blogs found on this post here, and now the 3 Secrets to Succeeding Online with Your Business:

So how do you figure out what your highest pay-off activities are? Start by making a list of your strengths and weaknesses.

Now look at your strengths. Out of those skills, what brings you the most money in the shortest amount of time possible? What you might want to do is make a list of activities and evaluate how much money you make versus time spent, then you’ll have a better idea what bring you the biggest bang for the least amount of time.

2. They DO their highest pay-off activities. Ah, yes. It’s not enough to actually know them, you need to actually DO them. And, better yet, you should organize your day around your highest-payoff activities. That way, you know you’re spending as much time as possible on your highest pay-off activities.

3. They delegate out or delete their weaknesses. Without a doubt, the successful entrepreneurs I know spend little to no time trying to “strengthen weaknesses.” What they typically spend their time doing is strengthening their strengths and outsourcing (or just plain dumping) their weaknesses.

Why do they do that? Because they make more money when they spend most of their time doing their highest pay-off activities. And they can’t spend their time doing their highest pay-off activities if they’re busy strengthening their weakness or doing low pay-off activities. We all only have 24 hours a day, so you need to know how best to use that time so you can become the biggest success possible.

Technically Speaking, you should always read more …

A good post to read if you have blogging burnout:

So there you are spending every waking moment on your blog, searching through the mass of information sites trying to find something interesting to blog about, even setting up search terms via TweetDeck for your twitter to see what’s going on.

But you ever take the time out and think to yourself that you could seriously get “blogger burnout” a point where you can sit in front of your computer and your blog posts are just erratic post or your blogging skills just start to go that lackluster that you stop posting for weeks at a time.

This has probably happened to a lot of bloggers, specially those that have been blogging for a short time and just do nothing but blog!

If you do get to the point of you are sitting in front of your computer and you have nothing, not even the title of a blog post, then what should you do, well the first thing you should do is turn your computer off and go and do something else.

Find some Blogging Inspiration

Go out for a walk, call a friend or family member, read a book, watch a bit of TV, it’s all up to you what you do, but staying away from the computer will really help, not only will it relax you and let your mind roam for a while, but you may even find some blogging inspiration from what you are doing, but, and this is a big but, as soon as you get that inspiration back, DO NOT sit in front of your computer straight a way, this is a major no, no.

Instead always have a small notepad and pencil with you and jot down your ideas and work from them, this way you may see something else even more inspiring for you to blog about and even something that will turn into that elusive blogging materpiece

Technically Speaking, always read more …

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 …

In case you are interested in fixing yourself on Facebook:

There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook’s privacy mess for days now. I bet we all know the story, right? Privacy controls are broken, everyone is getting irritated, and Facebook’s not too concerned, blah flippidy-freakin’ blah blah. Honestly, I’m getting sick of hearing people making a big fuss that they’re quitting Facebook on May 31.

However, don’t get me wrong; privacy concerns are definitely important for us to take note of. It’s just that there are no simple fix to ensure that your personal Facebook data is safe and secured from prying eyes. One way you could protect your data is manually tweaking the 170-plus privacy options scattered through different pages. And that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll cover every single one of it.

Now, there’s a simpler way through the Facebook Privacy Scanner; the one-stop privacy-fix tool for your Facebook profile. The bookmarklet focuses on just a few key areas where Facebook can share information with the public: having your contacts, connections, and tagged photos exposed to the public, as well as allowing your friends to accidentally expose that information themselves.

2 Simple Steps To Use

1. Add the “Scan for Privacy” link as a bookmark in your browser, either by dragging it onto a bookmark toolbar or by right-clicking it and selecting the “Bookmark” option

2. Head over to Facebook, sign into your account and then open the bookmarked link.

Technically Speaking, if you really have the interest to fix your Facebook self, you will 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?

Found this one about social landing pages and social e-mails:

Do you want your landing pages and emails to be shared in social media, but don’t know how to encourage your readers to do so? It is not as hard as you might think.

A simple way to make your landing pages social media friendly is to use a plug-in like ShareThis or AddThis. These sites add a small bar to a blog post or web page that allows content to be distributed to hundreds of sites.

The problem with this is you may want to customize the message that is going to be shared. This means sharing more than a URL by adding the content title or promotion into the message as well. Fortunately, custom links that share your content in social media are easy, too. This can be done in emails or landing pages for lots of sites including Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

Simply replace (xURLx) with the actual URL and (xTitlex) with the actual title for these popular sites.

Technically Speaking, and personally speaking, I still believe that the plugin is the best route to go, but this is good information!

Maybe it’s me, but the last time I looked 50 was not equal to 40!

	PICTURE	RANK	NAME	WEBSITE NAME	AGE	NETWORTH
		1	Mark Zuckerberg	Facebook	23	$700 Million
		2	Andrew Gower	Runescape	28	$650 Million
		3	Chad Hurley	Youtube	30	$300 Million
		4	Blake Ross and David Hyatt	Mozilla	22	$120 Million
		5	Andrew Michael	Fast Hosts	29	$110 Million
		6	Angelo Sotira	Deviant ART	26	$75 Million
		7	John Vechey	PopCap Games	28	$60 Million
		8	Alexander Levin	Image Shack	23	$56 Million
		9	Jake Nickell	Threadless	28	$50 Million
		10	Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith	Tagged	28	$45 Million
		11	Sean Belnick	Biz Chair	20	$42 Million
		12	Matt Mullenweg	WordPress	23	$40 Million
		13	Kevin Rose	Digg	30	$31 Million
		14	Aodhan Cullen	Stat Counter	24	$25 Million
		15	Markus Frind	Plenty Of Fish	29	$23 Million
		16	Robert Small	MiniClips	24	$23 Million
		17	Ryan Block	Engadget	25	$20 Million
		18	Matt Mickiewicz	Sitepoint	24	$18 Million
		19	Tom Fulp	Newgrounds	29	$15 Million
		20	Rishi Kacker and Matt Pauker	Voltage	24	$12 Million
		21	Catherine and David Cook	My Year Book	17&19	$10 Million
		22	Fredrik Neij	The Pirate Bay	28	$10 Million
		23	DAVID LEVICH	Iced Out Gear	25	$10 Million
		24	Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons	Yelp	30 & 29	$10 Million
		25	David Hauser & Siamak Taghaddos	GotvMail	24	$8 Million
		26	Rand Fishkin	SEOmoz	29	$6.5 Million
		27	Jermaine Griggs	Hear and Play	23	$5 Million
		28	Jay Westerdal	Domain Tools	29	$5 Million
		29	Ashley Qualls	What Ever Life	17	$4 Million
		30	Ben Way	Rain Makers	27	$4 Million
		31	Pete Cashmore	Mashable	30	$3.8 Million
		32	Seth Sternberg, Sandy Jen, and Elaine Wherry	Meebo	30,29 and 27	$3.5 Million
		33	Cameron Johnson	Millionaires Secrets	22	$3.2 Million
		34	Rob Benwell	Blogging to the Bank	23	$3 Million
		35	Alex Tew	Million Dollar Homepage	22	$3 Million
		36	Mario Lavandeira	Perez Hilton	29	$3 Million
		37	Lauris Liberts	Frype	25	$2 Million
		38	Neil Patel	ACS	22	$1.8 Million
		39	Zhang Rui	Mosh	28	$1.1 Million
		40	Matt Wegrzyn	Bodis	19	$1 Million

Technically Speaking, 40 is still not equal to 50!