photo credit: premasagar

Who will survive?

All other services, be it the business contacts networks, specialized networks for other specialized groups as well as forums and the like of not-arrived-in-the-present-services, will over time perish, as the big three technically replaces them and it’s just a matter of time till people won’t pay for business networks and instead have their business connection in one of the other big three. The nature of those big three (although Google+ is not even a week old, I would call it one of the big three) is competitive, as they more or less all do the same thing.Beyond competitors, the metagame can be analysed. This is an old term from the time I played Magic – The Gathering, where always approximately three top strategies were around and you could outweigh their respective pros and cons, as well as which strategy won against which other strategy.

Facebook

Facebook does most, as it tries to be the one service to rule them all. Broadcasts, bookmarks, instant messaging, video, pictures, games, apps, interests, groups, and soon even videochatting? Check this for Facebook. Additionally, it has it’s own ad-system, product and company offers and even it’s own virtual currency. It is omnipresent and the strongest of the big three if you take into account that even your parents might be using this service. The usual homepage was replaced by a facebook-profile, and even usual websites begin just updating their facebook-page instead of their own HTML-website. Facebook as compelling support for 3rd party apps and native clients on all platforms – some smartphone even have a facebook-button built in their hardware.

Google+

Google+ tries to battle Facebook’s overwhelming power with a different approach. More configurability with circles gives you the power to share stuff only with that group of people you want to share it with and additionally, you can explicitly only read certain updates, for example those of the people you put in “Interesting People”. Additionally, it’s white and clean and not filled with ads and distractions like “have a look at the latest pictures of Adam!”. The other services like Google Talk, Youtube and Picasa are all well-included for good. “Sparks” is like a newsfeed for everything tagged with the tag you choose and the new hangout feature is a fantastic killer for IRC and Skype. As the service is really young, it’s missing all the native clients that could be used to get notifications and relies on it’s web interface and e-mail for notifications only, which is certainly going to change soon.

Twitter

photo credit: TarikB

Prediction

This is the point where I predict which of the services won’t survive: None of them. This was the point in the metagame of Magic back then, the big three are the ones that remain and kill off all the other small services that try to do something else differently. Even if one seems dominant and/or has the best technology, the best system or the best philosophy, there’re always enough people that want to differ and use the not-best-alternative. And as a Google-Plus-API will go public, there will be enough plugins and services to feed your info into the other services, so that you can use your favourite of the big three, while the next person will use his favourite. Only one thing is sure: there won’t be any more competitors than the big three, as those three services do enough for everyone.

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E-Mail

Have at least three different e-Mail accounts.

• One for work, use that on your work computer(s), but never on private machines.
• One for real communication. Keep this e-Mail-Adress as sectret as possible, never use it to register for anything (I only use it for the most trusted and important sites) and only give it to friends. Everytime you get a mail on this account, you may want to read that. If you have a smartphone, you should use ONLY setup this address on the device.
• And one for everything else (this will attract spam, so I often call it my spammail
  ). I have one mail account that I just use for everything on the web and it goes through several spam filters before it lands only on my primary private PC. Don’t check for mail on this account more than once a day.

Twitter

As with e-Mail, I use two different accounts.

• One is my main account which I use to follow everything and everyone that interests me. At this moment, I follow186 accounts, and if you’re between these, I really like what you tweet. I use this stream to feed my interest from time to time, but I won’t always read everything. Also, I don’t check in this stream when I have no time or I need to focus. Then I just switch to my private account.
• My private account only follows some few people that I don’t want to miss tweets from or that I know and that I only allow trusted people or people I know to follow. Again, on my iPhone I let this account notify me of @replies and direct messages, but not the “main” account where more often @replies come in.

Another point: Don’t set something up that pops up messages. This is distration you intentionally install. I use Echofon for Firefox on Windows and Mac and set the preference that it doesn’t pop up stuff. Therefore I can see how many tweets are waiting, but I must intentionally klick on the echofon icon to read tweets.

Facebook

I just don’t use it. It is a whole network just made for distration, so I just don’t visit it when I don’t need to. Therefore I feed my twitter account in Facebook so it looks like I’m posting there. And I set up notifications on iPhone for messages and use Meebo to communicate via “Facebook chat” if someone uses that.

photo credit: Big Fat Rat

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• All the little things & This year of my life

I bet if you use Twitter, you heard that too. In the 185 people I follow, not a single one tweets about food, and I seldomly see irrelevant tweets. But people not using Twitter just cannot get that. Therefore, we have to transport the experience into their world. The best analogy I could find was the following:

(Short version)

Understand Twitter as TV, and everyone can design 5 minutes of one channel every day. Either, you can use those 5 minutes to show the most impressive and interesting things you’ve seen, experienced or felt today – or you can talk about your breakfast, lunch and supper. And now guess which channels the other viewers will be watching.

(Extended version)

Not the “I had fish today” stuff – and if you don’t experience anthing worthwhile in your days, you should maybe not tweet too much, but you can still watch the other channels. And all the people out there do their TV channels in a different style, there are funny ones, newsstyle one, channels about one person (made by the person him-/herself) and lots of experts of a certain topic. For every topic, there are at least 100 people doing channels on it. Even for a topic that interests you. And using up 5 minutes of your day to get the best and most interesting experiences about everything that you care about is worth it.

(If they didn’t already drop you as lunatic and stopped listening to defend their life against the limitless possibilities)

Well, and this doesn’t even mention that you can connect to those experts, and you can keep up with friends and you can even directly message celebrities. You can have other people see what youre doing or what you’re inspired in or what music you like or which YouTube video is the really funny thing you laughed 10 minutes about. In the blink of an eye. And if you watch a channel that is boring, you can just switch it off. Oh, and you can install the twitter app on Facebook, so you don’t need to update Facebook anymore – it gets auto-updated.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

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Twitter Plugins

First, there were the plugins. I wanted Twitter, but I had to acknowledge that all Twitter-plugins I tried were incredibly slow. Sad, as there were some nifty functions and nice styles included, but I wouldn’t want my pages to load 5 seconds longer because of that. So I ended up with the really nice and fast Tweetmeme-Button and the not so nice but fast and easily customizeable Xhanch – My Twitter plugin to show my lastest tweets. Xhanch needed some customization, and I’ll likely make it look a little fancier by jQuery when there’s time.

Must Have Plugins

Then there’re some must-have plugins: Google XML Sitemaps thats unbelievably important for the pagerank. Gurken Subscribe to Comments, as you just need as subscribe-to-comments-plugins anyways, and this one does double-opt-in, which is sadly a law-enforced necessity here in germany.

Akismet is included into WordPress anyways, and your Blog wouldn’t survive without it anyway. I wanted to install the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin too, but forgot that you need to include code into the pages to show the mathematical question (like “type in the sum of 2 and 6″), so I deactivated it for now. Maybe it will already be active when you read this post.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is a no-brainer too – it optimizes META-tags, generates descriptions of your post if you’re too lazy to write one and generally is a good thing.

Speed Plugins

Sadly, Worpress was developed on PHP. This means, WordPress is pretty slow. You want to add some plugins, that help you with the speed as the visitor’s time is very valuable – don’t agrue with me here. To speed things up, you could install a lot of plugins, that help you.

First said, loading pictures is a pain for the browser, especially if you have a lot of tiny pictures for all the soicla networks you want the visitor to share your post – each of these usually uses another HTTP request, and those are damn slow. The jQuery lazy load plugin helps you A LOT here. It basically makes the browser only load pictures that your visitors can see, loading other pictures when the visitor is browsing down the site and reaches the point where the pictures are shown. One Gotcha here: the sidebar pictures were only loaded when you scrolled to the bottom, as the HTML code for that is below all the other stuff. But you can define a CSS class within the plugin, that get loaded the usual way. Putting this class in your image-tags will help you here.

For the same reason as above, the WP CSS plugin is pretty nice, as it includes all your CSS import into one file (meaning there’s only one HTTP-request for the CSS-files) and even gzips them, so they use up fewer space while getting downloaded to the visitor’s browser. Neat. (Update: Does not work with the @font-face CSS-stuff needed to embed a webfont – as that used on this site.)

Another plugin that strips out whitespace and compressed the generated HTML is WP HTTP Compression. No configuration needed — this just works, so use it.

The speed-bazooka after all is WP Super Cache of course. This plugin makes everything superb – the site that goes out to your visitors will be stored, and should another visitor want to see the same page, he will just get the stored copy, so PHP doesn’t need to use its slow braincells for putting the site together again. This one’s just perfect, I would only advise to disable it while you’re working on the design of your blog, because *deleted for obviousness*.

Then you can just Google for “improving wordpress performance” or “speeding up wordpress”, there are a lot more hints out there for stuff you can do without plugins. Like modifying your .htaccess file to stop hotlinking or keep spambots and other unwanted crawlers out.

Other Plugins

Efficient Related Posts is like the best plugin I wished everyone was using – so put it into your blog NOW. It uses the tags you put under your posts to look for similarities and puts the “related posts” part under the post. I often read a lot more that I wanted on other blogs, just because of me thinking “well, that post could really be nice too”. You can watch it in action if you’re on the posts single page below.

Zero Conf Mail is just the most simple solution to putting a feedback-form on your blog, in case someone wants to ask you something directly. I put mine in the about-page, in case you want to use or see  it.

Shadows is a plugin that will underlay all pictures on your site that you add a certain CSS-class to with some sort of shadow. I’m still experimenting with this one. If you want to use it with Zemanta (as I clearly want to), you’ll maybe have to hack a bit in your CSS files, as Zemanta adds some CSS that interferes with the picture’s shado and makes it look weird. If you want to see it in action with another picture I included, you can see that in the post What is Viral Marketing? for example.

When I have some more nice stuff to show off, I’ll post another one. Hope you like this post.

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But you all knew that already. I just got one more advice for you: if you’re going to apply for a job and have content you don’t like to see your employer on a twitter-channel, don’t apply with the E-Mail address that you use on Twitter. Because even if you think, it cannot be found on Twitter, you’re wrong. I’ll tell you how that (easily) works tomorrow.

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In case you don’t know this trick, I’ll show it to you. What helps us find a contact on Twitter is … Google! Did you already guess that? Well, its not like a usual Google Search. You can also find a lot of contacts a time.

First, have a Google Account – as we need Google Contacts for this. If you don’t have one (or don’t want to mix up with your existing contacts), go, create one (more). Then enter the E-Mail you look for in Google Contacts. If you want to bulk upload a lot of E-Mail-adresses, you can use Google’s import feature, that takes properly formatted .csv files – but remember that Google only allows up to 3000 contacts a time, before you have to mass delete all your contacts and upload a new .csv-file. Should anyone have a handy script for automating this, please drop a comment.

Then head for the Twitter page. Click on Find Friends and then Gmail. Enter your (new fake) Google Accounts login and wait for the info you look for. Now all that can save your job candidate is a private Twitter account or the wise selection of a different E-Mail adress. Go get yourself one.

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Yesterday, I summed up what viral marketing is intended to be. And I think that its as unrealistical as other social media to work well, if you’re not willing to invest a really big amount of time. But why do I think so even if Seth Godin tells us the opposite? (And he’s clearly more clever than I am!)

Well, to be able to launch a viral campain, you need to have a really creative idea. And you need a BIG reach, be that on Twitter or Facebook or Digg, or better on all of these. Maybe there are some who have success in social media despite of their small reach or a mediocre idea, but I guess there are also people winning the lottery from time to time.

What I intend to say is that Social Media or Viral Marketing only works, if you already have a big reach or a big budget to get people and campains running. Social Media basically works for the winners (of Social Media). If Seth Godin drops a link, the target site gets its audience, but if I drop a link it might have two or three visitors more. Even if I really drop high quaility links all the time.

The only thing that you can do when you’re shooting for Social Media is building up a reputation (or a “tribe”), then it will *maybe* work for you some day. But please don’t invest too much time if you’re not willing to bring it to an end.

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