Blog Entries - August 2008

Stalking Big Game on Digg

Don — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

We're starting to add data from Social Blade on the Top 100/1000 Diggers to our PMS Social Suite. As they say, their data is only an estimate, but it seems to be a widely accepted measure for the Top 100 and Top 1000 Diggers.

The first place you'll see this is on our Add Friends tab in the freemium version. Scroll over to the right and you'll see a new column in the results grid: Rank. If it's [...]

Why Twitter Will Be Sold in a Fire Sale

ltdraper — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I just can't see how Twitter is going to make enough money to justify their venture capital investment (which is reported but not publicly verified to be around $20M) or $80M valuation. Five years from now we're going to look back at the Twitter phenomenon the same way we scratch our heads today when we try to explain Pets.com. If you can't look at the [...]

Cross Pollinate Your Social Media Profiles

Don — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I did a simple experiment this morning and it has already paid off. Have you come across profiles on social websites that have a grocery list of links to other social networks? I've read that this strategy can be useful, but I didn't understand just how useful until today.

Today I updated my LtDraper Digg Profile and added my Twitter, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Delicious, and AIM accounts in the link section. It [...]

PMS Social Suite 1.1 Goes Live

Don — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

After a lot of work and even more bug fixes, we released what we're calling Version 1.1 of the PMS Social Suite on Sunday night. Those of you who asked for features will see much of what you asked for. You can go back to the post that suggested you watch our FireBoard RSS Feed and see that we've delivered what was promised, plus a few more extras. Let's go through the new features:

Cached Search/ [...]

Twitter Gave Me the Mark of the Beast

Don — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I got into twitter in a big way last week. My account had been around for a long time, but I wasn't doing anything to promote it. Then I started using our Twitter Greasemonkey Script and started following 2,000 people that were interested in the same things I was. After a few days I removed everyone that wasn't mutual (down to about 500) and started adding more. I was looking to build a large community of pe [...]

Take Advantage of your Opportunities for Communication in Social Media

Don — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You should seriously consider effectively communicating with the people that follow you on Twitter.

There's a twitter account called RU4real that claims to be an experiment. Here's the only thing they've tweeted:

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is an experiment to see how many people read the pages of the people they follow. You are a tool.

The problem is that this exper [...]

Twitter Smarter with Greasemonkey

ltdraper — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Yes, it's another cool Greasemonkey script from Promote My Site to improve your social media experience. This time it's for Twitter.

If you're new to Twitter, the first thing you find out is that you start off without anyone following you. So posting is like talking to yourself in the forest. Sure, your voice sounds great, but what's the point?

There are two basic strategies for getting people to follow you on Twitter. The first is to be famous. If you are Matt Cutts, Rand [...]

Voting Rings in Social Networks

ltdraper — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

A lot of "experts" in social media have made the assertion that if you participate in a voting ring on any of the major social sites, you'll get caught. There is a mystique around the all-knowing data centers that can track your activities on their site. If you cheat, you'll get burned. It's that simple.

I'm not going to pass judgement on whether or not you should participate in voting rings. It's proba [...]

McAfee Recklessly and Wrongly Accuses Yahoo Store Owners of Malware and Spam

ltdraper — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:25:00 +0100

We received a frantic phone call from a client on Wednesday. We had done a site review as a favor a while back and they've been friends of the company for a very long time. The conversation went something like this:

Client: Our web store has been hacked! McAfee Site Advisor says we have malware, spyware, and viruses on our site!

Me: Really? That doesn't seem possible since you've got [...]