Little by little I noticed that the once so-popular and hyped Facebook platform has turned in to a perfect spam box, spam with friendly greetings of… your friends.

Day after day my mailbox is flooded with spam messages, clickthrough messages, every time requiring me to visit the FB website. Sometimes just to read a message or discover that someone has added a picture. Basically the same thing I would have discovered anyway, when trying to follow my friend. That is whenever I log in. Daily actually.

And when I log in… then I am greeted by another spam box, the requests.
A little more than 24 hours of facebox absence generated this nice list, as seen in the screenshot at the right. This list obliging me to go on and on with my rant, because the screenshot is more than 700 pixel high. 700+ Pixels of useless spam, cyberwaste waiting to be added to the list of 32 applications I already have installed. And don’t use except for 4 or 5.

A never-ending list of applications, because most of time someone has been flirting cybervirtually flirting, more than just poke, and I HAVE TO add the application to see what they gossiped about me or check if they gave me a slippery banana or a wet nipple growing in my garden to produce endless bread for the rest of my life as a pirate bitten by zombies who lost the battle against the ninjas.

Not to forget the many notifications landing in my so conventional mailbox, because XXX wants me to add a slideshow to my facebox profile… just because she is too damn lazy to click the link to my flickr account in my facebook profile. *sigh*

Luckily facebox can be rather satisfying, ego-galaxy-stroking even, too… because right now I am… see the second screenshot.
If only they would have spammed me to let me know that!

Facebook, I’m done with you… you’re nothing more than a better looking, but worse, MySpace.

Steve Rubel, power marketer raises a good point in yesterday’s entry, Building an Online Identity Through Lifestreams.

Where I will publish in a year’s time is anyone’s guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

Right now, just as most other bloggers, the number of online profiles I have reminds me of the early days of domaining. You never have enough of them and any semi interesting, or worse even hyped, platform soon has you as member too.

But what’s the point of all those profiles? Agreed, there’there’s Facebook, where one can add almost everything. Or just stick to a Facebook profile and MySpace-ify the formerly geek cyber space of students.
But does exclusive Facebook networking alone satisfy the blogger or does one have to jump the bandwagon and spend valuable time on every possible network? And how much time does all this cost?

But most of all, where will you blog next year? Will any of those profiles, or services such as tumblr, replace your blog?

Since I started blogging many moons ago, one thing that has never failed to amaze me is how blogging communities will fight tooth and claw when getting into arguments. Call it the blogging possé, if you must, because it seems to be that way. And I don’t mean possé in the (generally obsolete) legal sense (meaning law enforcers deputizing the citizenry for law enforcement functions), but rather in the sense of cliques and gangs.

People tend to act like angry mobs when they feel the need to defend their favorite bloggers. Or taken in a less favorable light, bloggers sometimes tend to gang up on other bloggers (oh, the poor, defenseless things). This kind of activity is polarizing and tends to tear communities apart. You’re forced to choose a side. Otherwise, it’s “if you’re not with us, then you’re against us.”

It’s sickening to think how many blog readers have turned out to be “yes” or “me too” people. Most of the time when you read through the comment threads of blogs (more particularly the personal-oriented blogs), majority, if not all, of comments basically say “I agree” or “me too” or “same here.” I don’t think people have the balls anymore to disagree or at least to give other perspectives. What a shame!

And sometimes I think it’s the fault of a blog owner why his or her readers turn out to be this way. Some bloggers I know would delete or sanitize comments that oppose ideas on their blogs. Sure, that’s fair enough. It’s their blog, after all. But what I find really silly is how other comment-posters would gang up on these people with dissenting (but valid) views. Kind of makes you want to avoid these blogs altogether, eh?

The blogosphere exists for people to have a voice and to express themselves. But where there are people–more especially groups of people–there will inevitably be mass stupidity.

Sharpen yer pitchforks and light yer torches, everyone!

Forget Pay per post, review me, or other similar schemes. Blogging is crossing over to the mainstream, and in some places, it’s not uncommon for bloggers to get invited to press conferences and product lauching gigs. Inevitably in these events, people get swag like novelty items, gadgets for review, free subscriptions, and other such free stuff. At the very least you get free dining and entertainment, which is reason enough to attend events, as some would think (I’ve had my share of free food and booze!).

However, some would think that this dilutes a blogger’s credibility. Being a blogger usually entails being candid and straightforward. So it’s assumed whenever you write about your meal at this restaurant, or your experience with your cellphone network, or a certain laptop brand or software, you are being honest. But no one really knows if you’re actually on the payroll of that software company, or that laptop manufacturer, or that restaurant. Or at the very least you could be receiving free meals from these guys. And wouldn’t that result to some bias in how you write on your blog?

Whether you’ve been to one of the sponsored parties/events, been given gifts or prizes, sent out on trips, dined in a posh restaurant or handed out free stuff and services — you are automatically subject to questions of credibility. It may not happen now but it’s possible in the future. Reputation management need not be merely reactive. In fact, I think it should be pro-active (touch base with your target market now so that miscommunication and inconveniences could be minimized if not totally avoided in the future).

And with this, the importance of adequate disclosure is stressed. It’s important to be transparent not only with the benefits you get from being a new media practitioner (nifty term eh?), but also with your affiliations. So you could say you work for this certain company in real life (e.g., your day job). Or perhaps you can say that the product you’re reviewing or announcing is owned by the same company you work for.

Maybe then, you wouldn’t be branded as a shill.

Or perhaps you have a newly designed theme that has a sponsored link. Disclosure necessary? Ah, but that’s another (juicy?) story, altogether!

A problem with having your job/business involving writing about and reviewing web apps is that you tend to sign up for too many sites than you can handle. Worse is that you sometimes end up signing up for outright scams. And since you give some info to these people, you’re practically giving them the right to spam your email inbox with promotional material.

I recently got an invite (yet another one) into tagged.com, and I thought I might give it a try. I signed up and it seemed simple enough until I got to the screen prompting me to enter my Gmail password. I thought, WTF? What kind of phishing scheme is this? It doesn’t even give me an option to skip this step.

It asks innocently enough, which is in the guise of checking your address book for users already existing in the system. But what Tagged will really do is send email to everyone in your address book inviting them into the system and subjecting them to the very same process. It will not even ask you to choose which among your contacts they can spam.

I guess I was stupid enough to sign up for tagged.com. I’m not going to be stupid enough to enter my Gmail password. But what about 90+% of the population who are not as smart as I? They’re likely to just enter their passwords and end up spamming everyone on their address book. The cycle then continues. Lord knows how many email addresses and even passwords these guys have already harvested.

Tsk. This seemed like old news (horrors, even Wikipedia says so). Why, oh, why did I fall for this?

Stay away from tagged.com!

We bashed Truemors earlier last month, but I was surprised to learn this from Guy Kawasaki himself: Truemors doesn’t even have a business model.

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Sure, it’s okay for startups and Web 2.0 companies to run just because of raw passion for the medium and for the technology. But coming from a venture capitalist himself, it sounds like Truemors was one big (or small?) experiment. I would agree that if an entrepreneur presented a plan without a business model, then most likely Guy the VC would boot that guy out of his office.

And Guy even admitted that it was a stupid idea.

In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Hey Guy, you can even do it for less!

But then it got me thinking, Guy’s an entrepreneur, and also a capitalist. He’s one of those people who can afford to lose money. As long as he learns from the experience, then he ends up richer in the long term (money and experience wise).

Here’s the bottom line: Whether Truemors succeeds or not, I learned a helluva lot. One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company. With products like WordPress, MySQL, and Salesforce platform, things are a whole lot cheaper and easier these days.

Suddenly, Truemors doesn’t sound so silly to me.

[via Wired]

Some days ago I noticed Chris Garrett link to Blogg-Buzz, a Digg for bloggers. Of course I signed up, claimed my favourite Franky nick and submitted some entries.

Only some days later I wonder

Why, oh why did I claim a new nick and one became member of one more service?

A digg for bloggers surely sounds interesting and the Blogg-Buzz platform is a perfect copy of Digg cool platform already, although still in Apha stage.
Alpha, coming with all its own problems, such as few members, total self-whoring and little traffic. Right at the moment my biggest gripe towards Blogg-Buzz is that there’s no one and submissions hardly get buzzed and bring little traffic. No, I’m lying. My biggest gripe is that everyone submits his own crap!

And that I have one more profile to maintain. I’ve never subscribed to that many services as since I started blogging! We, bloggers are sheep. And SEO nerds. But we are social media!
No new service rises or we have to belong to it, try it out and pimp it! We live the social dream!

Well, I’m sick of it. Got enough of all those new platforms. I won’t subscribe anymore to any new service. I will only continue to maintain my 24 26 profiles I have all over the intarwebs and that’s it from now on!

NO NEW SERVICES/PROFILES FOR ME ANYMORE!

How does my Sunday evening look? I am going to visit all the profiles I have and try to do something useful with every profile today! One of my browser home tabs is My last.fm profile. I actually actively use last.fm. That means I scrobble all music I hear to last.fm. It serves me great to keep my network, my bandwith active. Otherwise… no damn usage. Oh, I forgot another usage of last.fm : help me monthly to get rid of $3 as subscriber.
Afterwards I am going to watch mug shots at MyBlogLog. We all like it graphic don’t we? Then of course I need to go submit some stuff to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Blogg-Buzz. After having read an overdose of nerd comments at those services, I need a break!
What would be better than go stalk my flickr stats and notice that 2 more people have found the way to my pictures. Sigh, I feel happy! After 2 hours of flickr stumbling, I’ll have a mosaic of pictures in front of my eyes and need to read something again! No better place than go stalk all my friends at twitter and facebook. STFU, I have no MySpace! At least not that I’d admit!
Of course I shouldn’t neglect my Jaiku and Wordie profiles either! They are valuable for traffic and user profiles are good for SEO! And to make myself important, everywhere I have to leave nice and insightful comments, so everyone sees I have been there and they’ll visit me my profile.

Luckily today is a great day. Zooomr is still offline, so I can’t loose any time there, but the name Zooomr alone reminds me of my UStream broadcast.
Sigh, webcam. When was the last time I logged in to Stickam and whored myself out there. I’m sure they all have forgotten me.

Screw it all, I’m not participating to all this anymore! No.way!
I feel old. I’m retiring. Come find me at My 9rules and Virb from now on.

Once social, always social!

You may now continue your regular scheduled capslock program. And prepare yourself for more entries from me, unless capslock kicks me out here!

Recently, there were rumors that Google plans to buy FeedBurner for $100 million. And even more recently, TechCrunch has posted that an insider confirmed the acquisition.

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

My first thought when I read this: What? Only $100 mil?

I’m thinking a hundred million buckaroos might be too small an amount for such a web app that’s big in the blogging community as FeedBurner. Sure, FeedBurner is mostly a silent player when it comes to blog software. It’s not a blogging package itself, and it even works behind the scenes, burning your feeds for your readers, and then giving you statistics when you need ‘em. But it’s this ubiquitousness that I think makes FeedBurner valuable. It’s the data that they are able to gather about blogs and bloggers that is powerful. Sure, Google can index your blog, and Google can even track your searches. But FeedBurner can track which blogs are popular (by the subscription metric), and which topics are popular (by the number of clicks on an item).

So it’s not just the potential Feedvertising business and traffic that Google is buying into. As usual, they’re buying into the rich warehouse of information they can mine later on.

At any rate, my congratulations go to all who are involved. It’s not as big an acquisition as, say, YouTube. But it’s big enough.

What’s next? WordPress?

Franky says Truemors was stillborn–dead even before launch. Imagine, a web app supposed to have been in the likeness of Digg, user-submission, voting and all. Truemors was heavily hyped up before launch, and then suddenly, the bubble bursts (and quite prematurely, I would say).

I’m one to follow the comings and goings of web applications. There are web apps that look promising. And there are those that would then disappoint. Then again, there are web apps that fly under my radar, and then rise into popularity all of a sudden. Truemors is not one of them.

I’m not much of a Digg fan, but Digg does have its merits. For one, it’s niche-based. It started off focusing only on tech-related topics. So tech geeks of all kinds found a great community with which to share their passions. But Truemors doesn’t have such a focus. Rumors? Anyone can be fond of rumors. You’ve got a very broad audience. So how will your marketing be done? Who will your audience be (in terms of advertisers, this can be very important).

Also, one thing I dislike about Truemors is that you don’t need an account to submit item, nor to vote. Just key in a “truemor” and let people vote it up or down. And you don’t even need an account to vote items up or down. Just click your preference (up if you like the rumor, down if you don’t) and the system will count your vote. This makes truemors very prone to gaming. You don’t have the usual safeguards of limiting voting rights only to registered users. And you cannot track and monitor trends and activity in terms of submission and voting. So it’s very easy to cheat.

To me, Truemors looks like half-baked. It’s been in beta for a while before the guys behind the site launched it. A little more effort, guys (actually, Guy, since Guy Kawasaki is behind Truemors), and maybe you’ll get it right.

Hello everyone. I’m a new contributor signing in. I never expected to write for JOAB, but I knocked, and opportunity opened its doors (wait, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?). For today’s post I would like to diss(cuss) Digg. I know it’s the darling of the new media/Web 2.0 world. When I first started using Digg when it first came out in 2004, I loved how people got to have their say on things, and how even the most obscure information got to be popular.

However, the novelty eventually waned, and I grew tired of Digg. After all, the information I found there were originally sourced elsewhere, and I found it easier to just keep those other sites on my bookmarks and RSS readers for later reference. And one thing I really hated was the weird news being promoted to front page. It seemed funny at first, but later on those items became quite annoying. It occurred to me that the news items being promoted to Digg’s front page might also reflect the character (and interests) of majority of the Digg population. And that made me not want to be part of it any longer.

I’ve been checking in time and again, and I still see the weird stuff getting popular. And I think to myself, there hasn’t been any improvement. Tsk. Even a multi-million dollar pet project could have its quirks. And it’s supposed to have been bringing out the collective intelligence among its users. Sure, you occasionally get useful posts. But then it’s mostly clutter.

As an example, here are a couple of really duh entries on front page lately.

What do I care about my neighbor’s dog? This is surely front page material. For a local tabloid!

So what if it’s about gadgets? I’d rather get my gadget fix by reading about laptops or the upcoming iPhone!

So there you have it folks. I know some of you are Digg fanatics. But not me. I have had my share of admiration for these folks. But seeing how they’ve fostered this kind of silliness for a long time now, I’d think Digg sucks. At least for me.