AdamCovati.com

Everyone wants your most valuable content. It’s a constant battle and it’s easy to understand why. If you have the info you have the traffic.

While “Content is king” has had its heyday that doesn’t mean it’s not still not true, though there is a strong argument for Curation is king, but that’s another blog post.

I’ve spent about an hour this evening answering questions on Quora.com (a site I invariably spell wrong every time). I’ve derived quite a bit of fun and insights from reading through questions. I also managed to give myself that atta-boy feeling for answering a few as well.

It made me remember Linkedin Questions, Ning forums, and even my blog – all places that at one point in time were a favorite content repository for me. Lately Twitter and Facebook have taken over as one-stop shops for this information.

But is that the best place for it? Scattered through the morass of facebook comments and twitter musings are nuggets of extremely useful information. But there’s a large problem with that – too much uncategorized data. There is no taxonomy or filing system for Facebook or Twitter.

The most valuable information on most social networks is virtually inaccessible.

Maybe that’s a bit extreme, it’s easy to find value every day. But go back and try to find the best of twitter from a week ago. Or the best facebook comments about love or astrobiology – good luck pal.

Does this mean that there is a huge opportunity for sites like Quora to jump in and own good information on the social web? I think so. Will facebook just try to ‘me too’ its way into that market? perhaps.

So what?

Well for right now, it’s just circular reasoning that proves you need to own your own content in a searchable place (read as: Blog).

However, the large amount of interest we see in organized question & answer tools means that people are still interested in working through a long term solution to making that information more collaboratively created and less corporately owned.

Jeff Cohen, who blogs at DigitalPapercuts.com, and Kipp Bodnar, who blogs at DigitalCapitalism.com, came up with a list of 101 uses for twitter. This isn’t quite the 50 business uses Chris Brogan posted a while back; it’s a bit more fun.

Kudos to Jeff and Kipp for creating a list that not only provides some insight into the light-hearted side of twitter, it also mentions many of the buzz generating tweets (& accounts) as well as memes that have gone around recently.

Bolded below are the few I’ve managed to do:

101 Uses for Twitter

1. Answer the Question “What are you doing?”
2. Tell Your Friends Your Going To Jail
Read the rest of this entry »

What are you doing?

I’m getting sick of explaining that twitter isn’t just a random collection of facebook status updates – that’s what I’m doing.

I think the biggest objection I hear to Twitter goes something like “I don’t want to hear about my coworkers lunch habits, or when they go to bed, or what their kid is doing.” This complaint often stems from the prominent question on twitter’s main page (as well as the “home” page) of What are you doing?

The thing is, twitter is so much bigger than that. I don’t know how many times I’ve told people about the amazing capacity twitter has for link sharing, information passing, and relationship nurturing & maintenance. After about 5 minutes of back and forth I can usually get this across.

But the conversation almost always starts the same. So maybe we can get twitter to nip this in the bud. Maybe twitter can change the question.

What’s important right now?

This is how I see twitter. I mean, sure I do see a decent bit about lunch or people’s kids, but it’ usually not the mundane.  If I hear about lunch it’s because someone has something of note to say, good or bad. It’s really about what’s important right now.

I’ve heard twitter described as hyper-local, and while I feel this has some validity, I’m not sure why it’s really more local than blogging, for example. But I would say that twitter has time-context that blogs as well as many other avenues lack.

The huge value twitter adds is bringing you information in the now, not whenever you stumble across it, or after it goes through several editors. Changing the main question, that helps to define twitter, could help to change new twitterers mindset and present them a little better to the market in general.

So Twitter, capitolize on what you are good, play up the now. You’re better than just status updates.

I’ve been working hard on idek and I have been getting great encouragement from friends. One of the easiest ways for me to see how much they like idek (and of course how much they just like to help me out) is how often they recommend it to friends.

One friend, @MichaelBrooks told a friend who has quite a following. Well, it turns out that an early idek bug caught him when he placed the link on facebook. Mike told me and I messaged the chap. Well, you can read about his experience with proactive support.

I was glad to fix the problem for him, I was even more of win that he took it so well.

It just goes to show that people understand when you’re not perfect.

Thanks, Mike!

How Twitter can monetize it’s fast userbase has been a hot topic as of late. Recently @mike9r suggested that maybe twitter should allow people to pay for their service if they pleased. In return Twitter could allow them to have 240 chars instead of 140. An interesting idea.

And while I do agree the idea has merit, some might argue that it destroys something key to what makes twitter twitter. And I count myself in that camp.

Part of the value in twitter is that it’s quick. I’ve been annoyed more than once that I couldn’t get my thoughts into 140 chars. However, that limitation keeps you on target, it ensures that everything is bite-sized.

Increasing the character count could make it harder to quickly scan through tweets. My personal feeling is that this would just make twitter more distracting.

The other argument I made was that this could break many twitter clients. Mike argued that this was ok, essentially this was good for the market:

@covati It would kill a bunch of clients, but then again, why would Twitter care about that? 3rd party apps would race to make a new version

I argue that these clients and other third party are a huge part of what has made Twitter so successful. All these interesting integrations and efficiency tools have actually made twitter useable.

I personally find it daunting to try to interect with close to 400 people via the web interface. Tools like TweetDeck allow me to manage that massive flood of tweets. If the people who manage these tools have to deal with an ever changing and tool or API then they may become discouraged and stop maintaining them.

That’s my take, I love twitter, it’s a great tool. If they went with Mike’s suggestion I’m sure it would be fine. But for now, I say, stay with 140.

As I have mentioned before, I run idek.net, which is a url shortener. These are great for places where characters are at a premium. Some people have asked me how the url redirects work and how they affect SEO. This quick video gives a basic overview of 301 redirects which is what idek.net uses to get your from a short url to a long one.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owVh6PX9bw0[/video]

Other Resources:

• URL redirection on Wikipedia
• An example analytics page from idek.net

I have been working on http://idek.net for a little while now (it’s a url shortener with great stats, useful for twitter). It’s something I’ve been doing on the side because I love to create apps. Like many friends I have who are programmers I have had many side projects that never made it. So why did idek.net get launched?

Well, the answer is easy, I aimed small. I took a good bit of one cloudy weekend and wrote a useable app and launched it. Once it was live I slowly started adding to it. It now has most of the features of the competitors, and a few more great ones planned.

I was able to gain momentum and keep it by not taking on any huge tasks that would get stuck in the mud.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Here’s some one who went into a bit more detail on why shooting for attainable goals builds momentum.

Of course, if I could follow that philosophy more closely then I’d probably post here more often!

Google has just launched SearchWiki within their search results. This toolset allows users to alter the results that they receive from google. They can move results up or down, add new results, or even remove them from the results. You can also add comments to search results.

Now, I should make it clear that this does not affect page rank, or even the results that other people see when doing searches. However, other people who are logged into google can see, via the SearchWiki icons, what users are doing with results. This allows the SearchWiki community to function much like reddit or Digg.

We’ve always said that the best search engine is the one that understands what the individual user wants … SearchWiki really puts that in action: this is an even deeper level of customisation than we’ve offered before, because people know best what search results they are looking for.

Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google

This is a great step forward for google. Rather than entirely trying to mathematically determine optimal search results they are actually able to incorporate opinions from people who are doing the searches. So while this won’t have an affect on most googlers, it does allow them to start to harness the massive community of people out there who want to work together to find better results.

I can only hope that this is a start of something that will provide more power to the social networks of users who are depending on google every day. Moving google a bit more towards the digg/reddit model could help to make results more relevant and also drive more involvement. Of course reddit and digg are also gameable, often times political or underhanded forces take advantage of this to bias results on the front pages of these site. Google is no where near prepared to give their rankings or results over to the mob. This method does seem like a safe way to allow those crowds to have their say without jeopardizing Google’s standing as the best way to search. Learn more about Google SearchWiki:

• Google SearchWiki tool allows user to personalise search
• Google’s Help topic on SearchWiki
• Google’s Blog: SearchWiki: Make Search Your Own

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.

I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.

As a follow up to my previous article, Howto Twitter, I’ve written up a bit about the mass of applications that are now available as supplements to Twitter.
Follow this link to see the article:

There are, of course, too many to mention them all, but I have selected a few that I find the most useful, even on a day-to-day basis. For anyone getting started in Twitter, this list will help bring you up to speed a bit faster. For those who twitter everyday you may learn something new, and if not, let me know which apps I left out which should be listed here.