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Users Trusted LA Times Over TMZ

June 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I posted a personal rant the other day about how TMZ broke the news about Michael Jackson’s death way before a lot of the network news outlets did.  One of my blog readers Simon Owens sent me a note that I found interesting today on Facebook, here’s an excerpt from his blog post:

TMZ has received a fair amount of coverage over the last few days for being first to break the news of Michael Jackson’s death, beating both the LA Times and CNN (which waited until the LA Times confirmed the death to report on it). But as a blog post in the LA Times pointed out today, sometimes it’s more important to confirm a fact than be the first to report it.

I will be the first to admit that there is something to be said about credibility and caution when it comes to journalism and reporting.  The thing that I have learned about getting my news via the web or social media (Twitter and Facebook) is that you have to first consider the source.  In the case of Twitter, you can just ask Jeff Goldblum or Britney Spears, who were recently rumored to have died, you have to consider the source.  Before retweeting or sharing anything I hear on Twitter with my friends or co-workers I always run it through Google News to see if there are any other headlines out there from credible sources to substantiate the story.  Usually traditional media will pick up the stories and report them within an hour or so if there is any truth to them, if not I dismiss the story as rumor.

I guess the point that I am trying to make is that I basically get my news from a variety of sources online but usually the first source for breaking news for me is via Twitter, but before it actually becomes factual news in my mind that I am willing to share, I have to also see it being reported by another credible news outlet.

Here’s an excerpt from the LA Times that Simon pointed out on his blog that brings up a good point:

Has technology’s ability to deliver information at such a rapid pace corrupted us? It’s one thing to marvel at how social media sites have helped spread Iranian news we might not have attained due to censorship — and with such timeliness; it’s quite another to have become a culture that prizes speed over confirmed facts.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With:

Glue Firefox Plugin

June 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I was contacted on Facebook by Christina Liang from Adaptive Blue, a New York City based startup that has released a new Firefox Plugin called Glue.  They are interested in becoming sponsors of our Central Arkansas Refresh meetings.  I went out and took a look at their software and I have to admit it’s a very cool idea.  They were recently featured on G4TV (see the video below).  If you are into the social thing, and love Firefox, like me, check this out… http://www.getglue.com

Filed Under: Central Arkansas Refresh, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

Facebook Connect is a Huge Success

June 30, 2009 By 1 Comment

I was reading today in the The Business Insider Insider that Facebook Connect was being hailed as a huge success. I started putting Facebook Connect onto client applications and websites pretty soon after it was released to the development community.  I am not typically an early adopter of any technology until I have had a chance to see it in action for a little while but Facebook has such a reach right now into so many households that I had a pretty good hunch that it was going to take off.

The idea of a user being able to use their Facebook account to login to their favorite websites or applications outside of the Facebook network is pure genius.  Let’s face it, no one likes keeping up with their login credentials for the various websites and services that they use.  The OpenID project probably had the idea before anyone else thought of it, and I guess there is also a few .net people out there that would argue that Microsoft’s passport has been around for a while too, but neither one of these two services have ever been able to recruit the volume of users that Facebook has, and probably never will…

Speaking from a developers perspective it’s a win-win situation. You provide users with an easy, one click way to authenticate themselves, or login to your application and you don’t have to store any login credentials or personal information on your end.  Something else I have found about Facebook Connect that I share with a lot of my clients is that the perception of Facebook has changed dramatically, even over the past year or so.  If you watch CNN you might have noticed that they are using CNN and Twitter to cover the uprising in Iran…

Here are some quick stats that were provided by Facebook to the insider:

 

  • Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
  • Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
  • Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site.  Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Facebook Connect Is A Huge Success — By The Numbers

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With:

Rackspace Handled the Outage Well (IMO)

June 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

rackspacelogoI should probably state for the record that I might be a little bias on this one because I currently serve as a member of the Client Advisory Board at Rackspace and provide feedback on various aspects of their hosted email applications.  But, as I am sure a lot of you realized today, there was a disturbance in the force.  Rackspace experienced an outage today and as a result, a lot of websites and email accounts experienced downtime.  While Pleth doesn’t host any websites at Rackspace, but we do however house some of our clients email solutions there. 

Usually when there is a major NOC failure like this I like to find a nice tight hole and crawl into it, fortunately these situations rarely happen. When they do it’s a helpless feeling for those of us whose connectivity is affected by it.  Normally we immediately call into our datacenter to see what news we can get, only to find that the call center is experiencing a severe meltdown thanks to the high call volume of resellers calling in to report the obvious.  At the end of the day all we want to know is the same thing, what is the ETA for everything being back online?  Well, thanks to Twitter, that’s all changed…

Today Rackspace did a great job getting updates out to their customers via Twitter, and I wanted to commend Cameron Nouri, the Rackspace Apps Evangelist who manages the @RackApps for doing an excellent job keeping us updated.  I know it sounds weird to give a company Kudos on a day that they experienced an outage, but let’s face it, these things are going to happen.  When these things do happen, keeping clients informed should be one of the top priorities for a provider in my opinion…

I know that there are going to be thousands of people out there that were affected that aren’t as calm about the outage as I am, and I promise I understand where you are coming from.  I just wanted to point out how well they did on keeping us all in the loop. 

Also, here’s a list of system status updates from the outage…

Filed Under: Email Solutions, Web Hosting Tagged With:

David Ebersman is Facebook’s New CFO

June 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Facebook named a new CFO today, his name is David Ebersman.  Ebersman has some prior CFO experience at other firms and should be a huge asset to Facebook.  I think the question that we have all been wondering about will soon be answered, and that question is, “when will we see the Facebook IPO?”

I suspect that it’s going to take a few months, possibly even a year for the new CFO to get a grasp on everything that Facebook has going on.  Let’s face it, from the onset Facebook hasn’t been your typical startup, they have been able to woo millions from angel investors and even pulled in way more than any web startup I have ever seen without facing up close and personal scrutiny from the government or SEC.  To put it bluntly, I am surprised that they have existed this long w/out going public.  The amount of money takes to fund an online community like Facebook would blow it’s users minds. 

One other thing that I am going to be paying close attention to is how Facebook plans to make money.  Sure, i know they have their ad sales, which are probably substantial, but probably not the complete answer.  I think that they missed the boat on the whole “vanity url” thing, that could have been epic.  Here’s the press release for those of you that might have missed it:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — June 29, 2009 — Facebook today announced that David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Genentech, the pioneering biotechnology firm recently acquired by Roche, will become the company’s chief financial officer.

Ebersman will report to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. He will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations, and real estate functions. He also becomes a part of the company’s executive management team, which directs all aspects of company strategy, planning and operations. Ebersman will formally start in September 2009.

“We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech’s CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.”

“After meeting with Mark and the rest of the team, I was thoroughly impressed with everyone’s drive and sense of purpose to help people connect and share,“ noted Ebersman. “Mark is constantly pushing the company forward and he’s assembled a world-class team that is achieving remarkable results both for its users and as a business. I’m excited to join this effort and this new industry.”

Ebersman worked at Genentech for nearly 15 years. He served as the firm’s executive vice president and CFO from 2006 through April 2009, when Roche Group acquired the company. Prior to joining the company’s finance organization, he was senior vice president of Product Operations. He joined Genentech as a business development analyst. Previously, he was a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Company Inc.

 

Facebook | Press Releases

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: ,

5 Tips for Freelancers

June 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This past week I received three phone calls from friends that I haven’t spoken to in a long time, when I asked how they were doing they each painted similar pictures, unhappy at their current jobs, hoping to pickup enough side projects and clients to justify going out on their own.  I know these guys and have worked with them in the past on various projects, they are very talented. One of them is a graphic artist and the other two are developers, very talented developers. Each of them wanted to let me know that they were looking to pickup some freelance work and wanted me to keep them in mind, I told them I definitely would do that, but currently we seem to have everything under control at Pleth, but that could change quickly given the nature of our business.

One of the guys asked me what advice I had for him, he hasn’t done any freelance work in several years and was finding it hard to get his groove back.  I shared with him a couple of things that I picked up over the years, I used to do a lot of freelance work back in the day.  In fact, that’s how I got started.  I was doing work for another company and developing websites for their clients, occasionally I would have a relationship with the client but often times I would not, which was fine with me.  Here’s are the things I shared with him:

Referrals are Huge!

When I was first getting started on my own I quickly found that a lot of my clients were the direct result of friend referrals, the same holds true for client referrals.  I would say that probably 80% of the calls I have gotten over the years as a result of a referral have materialized into projects.  When you do work for a client, there’s no shame in telling them to tell their friends.

Reach Out to Small-Medium Sized Ad Agencies

I found a lot of success early on by reaching out to ad agencies and letting them know that I was available to come on board as a member of their team on a project by project basis.  At the time I was breaking into the business the web was still somewhat new, and very few ad agencies actually staffed web developers, it was almost always a product that they outsourced, and even today there are a lot of smaller to medium sized agencies out there that still have a lot of success outsourcing their web work.  Trust me, ad agencies are awesome alliances to have and it’s a win-win for all parties involved.

Get Out and Meet People

This, for me, was always the toughest part, because as I have mentioned many times in the past, I hate playing the part of a salesman.  What worked best for me was to approach potential clients that I had a sincere interest in working with, regardless as to whether they had a website or not.  I would first establish a relationship with them and then share with them what I did.  Almost 100% of the time after finding out that I developed websites they would either tell me they had a website but it wasn’t doing as good as they thought it should or ask me if I thought they needed a website. It didn’t hurt that I had pre-rehearsed these answers in my head a few times before approaching them and had a smooth spill that I laid on them.  Early on I can remember landing just about every project that I went after, or course the market wasn’t as saturated with developers as it is now.

Befriend Other Developers

I know this sounds weird but trust me it’s in your best interest to be friends with your competitors for a couple of reasons.  Over the years I have been brought in by one of my competitors to help them out on a project, and several times I have brought in one of my competitors to help out.  You would be surprised at how many times I have been able to land deals that were actually referred to me by one of my competitors.  Why would they refer a client to me?  They might have been overwhelmed with projects in-house, or possibly I was a better fit for the project.  For example, I was one of the first in my area to use Flash on websites, and I admit now that it was kind of hokey, but that’s what a lot of people wanted, the animations and the music, etc.  A lot of my competitors didn’t do flash, but they would often hire me just to do the flash components.  This same theory can apply to PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, or whatever areas you are the strongest in, be open about what your strengths and weaknesses are.

Another advantage to hanging out with other people in the industry is that you can pick up on a lot of useful techniques or emerging technologies that are out there.  Let’s face it, it’s tough to stay on top of everything that is going on today within the web development community.  Once a month I have dinner and hangout with at least 50 other web developers at the Central Arkansas Refresh.  Technically, we all compete against one another for clients, but when we get together we share ideas and learn from one another, what this does is make our industry better as a whole.

Build Up a Portfolio ASAP

One of the first things a potential client is going to ask for is some examples of your work.  I found out early on that my portfolio was a big part of why a lot of clients chose me over my competitors.  Even if you do a job pro bono be sure to include it in your portfolio, the more screenshots you can crowd onto a page the better.

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I hope that this has been helpful, I am sure that I will remember some more things later, but this is all that comes to mind right now, it’s been a while since I was out beating the bushes looking for clients but I think that a lot of these tips are still relevant today as they were 7 or 8 years ago.  Also, if Pleth can assist you w/ hosting or email solutions, please don’t hesitate to let us know…

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: ,

Network News Needs an Enema!

June 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

cnn-logo This past Thursday was a huge news day, we started the morning with more details coming in from the mysterious runaway governor scandal and there were even had a few fresh glimpses into what’s going on in Iran too.  A short while later we learned that Farrah Fawcett had passed away…

Just when we were all able to get the image of Farrah’s famous poster from the 70’s out of our heads and finally return to work we started seeing reports that Michael Jackson was dead on Twitter.  Knowing what I know about social media, I knew not to buy into the story that he was dead just because I saw it on Twitter, but after about an hour or so I noticed the volume of traffic on Twitter and Facebook spike dramatically and there was no one questioning the legitimacy of the story.  Usually when a rumor breaks on the social networks, if it’s not true, it’s squashed or tagged “FAKE” pretty quickly, and I didn’t see anyone disputing the news.

I quickly flipped over to CNN to see what they were reporting, they said that he had been rushed to the hospital, flipped over to Fox, same thing.  I pulled up my favorite tabloid website TMZ and I was shocked to see that they were also reporting his death.  I just assumed that if TMZ and Twitter were both reporting his death that CNN and Fox were soon to follow so I watched for a little while and what I witnessed amazed me…

Both networks, obviously trying to adhere to some code of responsible journalism or something like that, didn’t confirm his death until an hour or two later.  I wasn’t the only one that noticed this either, several people on Twitter mentioned that it looked like CNN and Fox were doing everything they could to keep from saying that he was dead.  Now before you get the wrong idea, I understand the responsibilities that a news agency has to adhere to, and I understand responsible journalism and accurate reporting, I get it. As I sat there and witnessed Harvey Levin’s brainchild, TMZ, beat two of the most powerful news networks in the world to the scoop on possibly the biggest news story of the year by a couple of hours I realized something…

If Network News doesn’t learn to incorporate social media into their reporting a lot better, people are going to stop looking to them first.  A simple disclaimer like, “this is unsubstantiated, but according to the social networks, Michael Jackson has died”, and I honestly thing that could have helped them save face.  I know that CNN has done a great job embracing social media, but it blows my mind how they danced around announcing that he was dead.  Fox News is a distant second in embracing social media, in my opinion, but I honestly thought CNN missed an opportunity to shine on this one.  Eventually CNN did mention that some other news outlets were reporting that he was dead, but they could have just checked Twitter two hours earlier and reported, “okay, half the world is on Twitter right now reporting Michael Jackson is dead” and saved face…

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: ,

You Don’t Have to Compete

June 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I am usually not a huge fan of email newsletters but I do have one exception, the SitePoint Tribune.  If you are web developer you probably are already familiar w/ SitePoint and have been on their site and read their books, they put out good stuff.  This morning one of their editorials caught my eye and I thought that it was worthy of sharing, especially since I had this same conversation the other day with a friend who does a lot of freelance work. 

The editorial was inspired by one of the SitePoint forum users who asked the other developers on the forum if they even bothered competing against other companies because he felt that most companies almost always choose the lowest price when accepting bids but I tend to disagree w/ that philosophy, there are clients out there that will honestly pay more because they feel they will get a better product at the end of the day.  I can’t think of an instance where my partners and I sat down and decided to underbid a project so that we could land the deal.  In fact, we have even jacked up our proposals a few times in the past because we didn’t want to come in too low, or because there were some loose cannon’s or variables that we just weren’t sure about.

DrQuincy asks an excellent question in the forums: Do you bother competing with other companies?  He writes about how he feels he’s wasting his time when competing against others because the client will almost always choose the lowest price.   I totally agree — I hate competition for web development projects.

Looking at our projects on at the moment, we have 12 web sites under development: ten are redos of existing sites, while seven of those are sites we originally did. Two projects are new, both having been referred from existing clients. We have been the only web developer quoting on those 12 jobs. I love that!  The advantages of being the sole developer putting forward a project proposal are numerous, but here are the main two:

  1. You’re 99% certain of winning the job.
  2. You can charge more.

The big question is: just how do you position your business so that you’re the only ones quoting on a project?  What we do is simple — just two things:

  1. We ask our happy clients to refer us their friends.
  2. We position ourselves as experts so that existing clients and prospects assume we’re the best and never consider going elsewhere.

You see, it’s all about trust. If you’re a trusted provider or expert, there’s no reason for the prospect to go elsewhere. Fairly simple really and it can turn you from a struggling web development firm into a successful one.

Here’s something else that I shared with my friend that he got a pretty big kick out of.  When we put together proposals for potential clients, we put a lot of time in estimating development costs and making sure that we totally understand the scope of their project, but once the proposal is in their hands we don’t do the daily or weekly telephone follow-up thing.  We pretty much stay out of their hair unless they have a question or are ready to contract our services.  It’s not that we don’t want the business, it’s one of my quirks I guess but I hate to play the part of a salesman. 

I guess another one of my quirks is that if I don’t get a good vibe when talking to a potential client, they usually don’t even get a proposal.  I know this sounds like poor judgment, especially in this economy, but there’s nothing worse than getting saddled to a client that you don’t work well with or who knows everything for an extended period of time.  Fortunately my business partners feel the same way.  

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: ,

Dirty Neanderthal

June 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This is as close as I am going to come to a tribute for Michael Jackson, honestly I wasn’t that big of a fan.  I did admit on Twitter the other day that I do have 3 MJ songs on my Zune (We are the World, Ebony & Ivory, and Dirty Diana) and I caught more ribbing for carrying a Zune than I did anything else, that tells me there are probably more closet MJ fans out there than we know. 

Probably my favorite story where Michael Jackson’s music was involved was the first time I heard Dirty Diana on the radio. One of my friends and I were cruising Cherry Street one night with the t-tops out thinking he was saying “Dirty Neanderthal” in the song.  That’s it, that’s my Michael Jackson story, now let’s all move on…

Filed Under: Funny Tagged With:

Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting – Tuesday, June 30th

June 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I wanted to remind everyone that our Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, June 30th from 6pm – whenever.  We are meeting again this month at The Flying Saucer located at 323 President Clinton Avenue, see map below.  In addition to some great networking we will also have t-shirts, software licenses, templates, and other swag from our sponsors to giveaway…

This month Keith Crawford aka @tsudo will be our guest speaker.  Keith will be doing a presentation about FriendFeed.  I have seen a sneak preview of his presentation already and it’s very cool, not to mention informative.  Here’s a little bit of what you can expect:

Friendfeed is simply the most advanced content sharing and conversation platform you’ve ever encountered. Find out why you should be a using Friendfeed and learn the tools to become a power user overnight. Increase your productivity and your accelerate your community.  (visit Keith’s Blog)

If you haven’t already joined our Central Arkansas Refresh / Facebook Group, we invite you to do so, also be sure to follow us on Twitter, @refreshca.  If you are in our Central Arkansas Refresh / Facebook Group you can RSVP via event notification, if you would like to RSVP via Twitter, click here…
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Filed Under: Central Arkansas Refresh Tagged With: ,
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