2009 June

Jun 30

SEO is pointless if your website does not convert

Getting listed on Google’s first result page is great. It’s not so great when you find out that you get a lot of visitors through your high Search Engine rankings but only a few customers. Search engine Optimization is pointless if your website does not convert visitors into customers. You’ll actually lose a lot of money if you don’t take the time to optimize the conversion rate of your website.

Jun 29

Birdfeed: A slick Twitter client for your iPhone

Continue reading Birdfeed: A slick Twitter client for your iPhone

Filed under: Web services, Commercial, Social Software, iPhone, web 2.0

Over the past year, there’s been something of a gold-rush for Twitter clients on the iPhone. From Twitterrific to Twitterfon, Tweetie to the recently-launched TweetDeck, there’s a bucketload of apps to let you use Twitter on the go. Today sees the launch of another challenger for space on your homescreen: Birdfeed [iTunes Link]: “A very nice Twitter client for your iPhone”.

In trying Birdfeed this evening, it’s clear that a huge amount of time has been spent on the application from the exceptional icons (similar in style to those in another Download Squad favourite-app, Things) to some smart touches. Here’s just some that caught my eye:

a small dot in the ‘Compose Tweet’ button to show the presence of a draft
a super-handy ‘home’ button that takes you back to your original list of tweets when you’re drilling-down in the options
the auto-loading of more tweets once you reach the bottom of the list
integration with services like Favrd.

It’s worth noting that Birdfeed doesn’t do absolutely everything you may see in other clients. However that’s of little concern to me quite frankly, as it features all the options I need on the go. Birdfeed is extremely well designed, super-snappy and well worth the $4.99 price. I know, we’re fickle here at Download Squad when it comes to Twitter clients. However if you’re wanting a slick new Twitter client, Birdfeed gets our thumbs up.

Birdfeed: A slick Twitter client for your iPhone originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 29

Tweetboard turns Twitter into a comment system for your site

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Web

The trend of using Twitter for absolutely everything doesn’t show signs of stopping. Tweetboard, the latest hot Twitter add-on, inserts Twitter as a comment system for your website. Conversation on the site is posted (neatly threaded, of course) in an expandable sidebar, and a user’s comments also post to their Twitter account. To make it easier for people who are reading these tweets outside of Tweetboard, there are two shorturls “posted.at” and “inreply.to,” that give readers a little context and a link to view the thread.

Tweetboard’s design is relatively inoffensive: it puts a tab off to the left side of your site with the number of tweets a site visitor hasn’t read. Fortunately, it’s a pretty small tab, so it’s not completely annoying to people who don’t care about Tweetboard. Once expanded, Tweetboard is laid out with tabs for all comments or just the current thread, and there’s a space at the top to post your own comments.

Judging by the Tweetboard’s quick jump to the top of Twitter Trending Topics when it launched, you’re probably going to start seeing it all over the place pretty quickly. It’s hard to tell right now whether it’s going to be a momentary fad or a lasting fixture. I can see the quick setup and ease-of-use appealing to site owners, but users might not go for Tweetboard. Some people just don’t want Twitter accounts, and some people who have Twitter accounts might prefer that you keep your comments on your own site.

Tweetboard turns Twitter into a comment system for your site originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 29

Explaining Page Rank

If you haven't seen the piece Matt Cutts did recently on page rank, you should take a look.

Matt provides one of the best explanations of page rank I've ever read. After a good look at how to think about page rank, Matt walks through a Q&A that touches on the differece between dofollow and nofollow links, how Google has tinkered with the process fo calculating page rank, and page rank sculpting…Q: Does this mean "PageRank sculpting" (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site …

Jun 27

BeejiveIM, now with Push, is the best iPhone chat client so far

Filed under: Social Software, iPhone, Mobile

I wrote the other day about the iPhone version of AIM, and how it takes advantage of push notifications in iPhone 3.0., but since then I’ve been testing a different chat client that really takes things to the next level: BeejiveIM. You might be put off by the $10 purchase price, but if you’re an avid IM fanatic, it will be worth every penny. BeejiveIM supports AIM, Google Chat, MSN, Yahoo!, Facebook and MySpace in a smart layout that makes it the most usable chat app I’ve tried on the iPhone yet.

The key features that make BeejiveIM a killer app are its support for push notifications, its horizontal keyboard, and the elegant way it organizes open chats. Rather than forcing you to dig through submenus on your buddy list, BeejiveIM puts the buddy list on one screen, and a list of your open chats on another. If someone IMs you while you have a chat open, you can tap once on the number of unread messages to switch between chats. This is right in so many ways, and avoids the clunky feeling of having to go back to your buddy list to switch to another conversation.

Sure, $10 is on the high end of the App Store price range, but there’s nothing going that beats BeejiveIM at what it does. It’s replaced both the AIM app and the Meebo web app on my home screen.

BeejiveIM, now with Push, is the best iPhone chat client so far originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 24

FriendFeed introduces file sharing

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Sharing pictures on FriendFeed is nothing new, but now it’s just as easy to share other file types on the popular social network. You can either upload a file on the FriendFeed website, or email it as an attachment to share@friendfeed.com. The feature is intended for stuff like PDFs and spreadsheets, but you can also upload music files like mp3s and m4as.

Mp3s are playable and downloadable on the site, but there’s a 3-a-day limit on the number of audio files each user can share. You can’t upload movies, and limit on mp3s suggests that media files aren’t the main focus here. Based on their blog post, FriendFeed mostly intends this feature for groups who use FriendFeed to collaborate and need to pass files around, and that’s how the FriendFeed team has been using it internally.

FriendFeed introduces file sharing originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 24

TweetBeep - track Twitter mentions via email

Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, Social Software, Search, Web

TweetBeep If your job has you tasked with monitoring your company’s online presence, you’re probably dealing with Twitter in some way. Running occasional manual searches for your company’s name is one way to go, but a better way would be to sign up with a service like TweetBeep.

TweetBeep is a free service that will email you as frequently as once per hour with any Twitter mentions of the search terms of your choice. The service is ad-supported, but if you find that you need it, TweetBeep also offers a premium option for $20US/month that allows you to receive updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, up to 200 different alert searches, and no advertising.

While TweetBeep allows you to set a number of criteria for your alerts, one of the most interesting is the ability to set an “Attitude” criteria. You can choose from three:

Positive attitude
Negative attitude
Asking a question

This appears to be a fantastic way to stay on top of how people are perceiving your company or brand, and gives you the ability to very quickly react to your customers or users. It can also be useful for heavy Twitter users to ensure they don’t miss any mentions. I should note that as of the time of this writing I had some difficulty with the email confirmation process - it took multiple requests and over an hour before my email confirmation arrived in my inbox.

[via Stay N’ Alive]

TweetBeep - track Twitter mentions via email originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 24

AIM for iPhone: now with push notifications

Filed under: Social Software, AOL, iPhone

Now that version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system allows third-party apps to take advantage of push notifications, we’re starting to see some of the first major push apps popping up. AIM for iPhone, available as a free ad-supported app or a $2.99 ad-free version, now offers push notifications. Now AIM doesn’t have to be open for you to see when you’ve got a new IM coming in.

New push notifications pop up just like SMS messages, but you can also set AIM to badge its icon with the number of new messages you have, or play a sound when a new one comes in. Since third-party apps aren’t allowed to run in the background on the iPhone, push makes AIM a lot more practical than it was when you had to have it open and active to see your new messages.

[via Lifehacker]

AIM for iPhone: now with push notifications originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 23

Twitter-Train - pyramid scheme for low-value Twitter followers

Filed under: Web services, Freeware, Social Software, Web

Is Twitter a popularity contest? If you think so, then you might be interested in Twitter-Train, but for the sane people reading this you’ll probably want to move on.

Twitter-Train is essentially a pyramid scheme whereby if you follow a prescribed list of Twitter accounts, you will be added to that same list for the next 40 Twitter-Train users. Basically, by willfully polluting your Twitter stream with updates from Twitter accounts that you care nothing about, you get the benefit of being followed by 40 people that care nothing about you. That’s a win-win if I ever saw one.

I mean seriously, what is the point of this? I can think of only one, and that would be if you somehow got paid to inflate an account’s Twitter followers by any means possible. But in terms of real value, there is none to be had here. You now have to filter through tweets that mean nothing to you, and the “followers” that you acquire are essentially doing the same thing.

I suspect this is one of the reasons that Twitter has not yet added host-side filtering to the service (the other being that Twitter seems busy just keeping the service up). Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop offer client-side filtering, which allows you to “follow” huge amounts of people while actually ignoring them. While I suppose to each their own, it’s still frustrating to see how users willfully abuse a system just to inflate their follower numbers to appear more important. Twitter seems to agree, given that they are disabling the auto-follow feature that had been enabled for certain select Twitter users.

I think Twitter should hide follower counts so that there is very little ego-boost from having a huge number of followers. This isn’t going to stop people that want to use Twitter as a spamming service, but it will kill the ego game that is plaguing most social networks.

Twitter-Train - pyramid scheme for low-value Twitter followers originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 23

For how many keywords should you optimize a web page?

his week, we’re taking a look at the number of keywords for which you should optimize a single page of your site. It is possible to optimize a web page for a single keyword and get rankings for many keywords.

Jun 22

CrowdEye: the real-time search space is getting crowded

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Search

It looks like real-time search - mainly built around Twitter - is the hot new bandwagon to jump on. Twitscoop, Scoopler, Twingly, Searchmerge, Collecta … we’ve written about all of these this year, and the grab for real-time search traffic hasn’t stopped yet. CrowdEye is the latest entry to catch our attention in this already-crowded field.

CrowdEye is limited compared to some of the above-mentioned competitors, in that it only searches Twitter. Collecta, for example, searches photos, news stories, and other microblogging services, and offers the option to filter any of those out if they’re too much for you. CrowdEye does offer some Twitter data that its competitors don’t, though: the popular links results are nice, and the graph of popularity over time for your search term could also be useful. For getting a comprehensive picture of what’s going on in real time, though, I think search sites are going to have to go beyond Twitter. Even popular Twitpics and Yfrog pictures would add a lot to CrowdEye, and that seems within the site’s capabilities to do.

CrowdEye: the real-time search space is getting crowded originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 22

Extend your Twitter posts with uri.is

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

The 140-character limit on each post is one of the most appealing things about Twitter, but it can also be one of the most annoying. That’s why uri.is was created. You can write as much as you want and click to post to Twitter, and uri.is will link to your full text via a shortened URL instead of cutting you off. Sometimes you have something that’s too long to tweet, but not long enough or permanent enough to post on your blog, so uri.is offers something in between.

Uri.is was built in a weekend, but it’s already got some good features, like auto-shortening URLs within your posts, to make sure as much of your long post as possible actually goes out to Twitter. The developer reports that he’s interested in having uri.is integrated with a major Twitter app like Seesmic or Tweetdeck, which is really the only way to achieve the goal of making it as easy to post long messages to Twitter as short ones. A bookmarklet or a Greasemonkey script would perhaps be more realistic ways to improve the service, so it’s nice to see that those are in the works, too.

Extend your Twitter posts with uri.is originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 19

Googling Twitter?

© szlea
Everyone (VentureBeat, Mashable, the Blog Herald) seems to think that Google will soon have a search Twitter function.Google is definitely collecting data on the web every second these days so the question is when, not if, Google will come out with its own microblogging Search Engine to compete with Twitter. Google is now preparing to launch a way to index and rank content from services like Twitter, according to the blog Google Operating System.Twitter has it's own search engine, of course. Google has pointed …

Jun 19

The Philoneist Tells You Who’s Behind that Domain, and More…

© chrisdlugosz
A new domain you've discovered is offering a variety of Web hosting services and you're wondering who's behind the site and whether its bandwidth will adequately serve your clients. Where do you go to find out?

With the influence of the Web growing, transparency has become a major concern on the Internet. The ability to find out just exactly who is behind a particular website has become important. And being able to find important facts about a web domain (like revenue, traffic patterns, and speed, …

Jun 19

Collecta is another take on real-time search

Filed under: Social Software, Search, Web

The real-time search arena, fueled by the popularity of Twitter, continues to heat up. Collecta is the latest and most visually appealing stab at getting real-time search right. It draws on images, articles, blog comments and microblogs for data, and refreshes automatically. The layout is a cool three-column affair, with filters on the right, live results in the middle, and a preview of your selected result on the right.

The ability to filter out different kinds of results is useful. Sometimes you just want to see photos or articles, and ignore all the Twitter, Identica and Jaiku chatter, or vice versa. Twitter is really the core of these real-time search sites, though, and Collecta is no different. It’s got Twitter’s trending topics on the front page. In terms of speed, Collecta is faster than the competitors I’ve tried out. If you’ve got a hankering for real-time search, this looks like the site to check out at the moment.

Collecta is another take on real-time search originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 18

Grooveshark faces lawsuit from EMI

Filed under: Audio, News, Social Software

I’m a big fan of the streaming music site Grooveshark. It’s a great way to listen to practically any song and share new music with friends. EMI doesn’t have any love for Grooveshark, though: the label is suing the service. It’s not clear what the claims in the suit are, yet, but Grooveshark’s side of the story is that they were negotiating some kind of licensing deal with the major labels, and EMI sued as a negotiating tactic.

I can see why a label would want to sue Grooveshark. According to one small label that’s done business with them, Grooveshark just uses the labels’ content to pay its bills, and offers little to nothing in advertising revenue in return. On the other hand, I don’t know too many people who use Grooveshark as a replacement for buying a legitimate digital download of a song. You need to be online to listen, and you can’t put streaming tracks on your iPod, so it hardly seems like an equivalent product.

I selfishly hope Grooveshark survives this lawsuit, because I enjoy being able to preview full tracks before I buy them. I also enjoy sharing music with my friends by embedding Grooveshark widgets or using the Facebook plugin, and maybe those friends will hear something they like and go buy an album. If I were the music industry right now, I might take those sales where I could get them.

[via AllThingsD]

Grooveshark faces lawsuit from EMI originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 18

City of Bozeman requires social logins and passwords in exchange for job

Filed under: Security, Web services, Social Software

Bozeman, Montana — a city just 5 miles to the east of freakin’ nowhere — as part of a more thorough set of background checks, is asking job applicants to, “list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

Federal law states that you can’t ask about religion or marital status when interviewing you for a job, but both of those things are conveniently available in most Facebook profiles. Added to which, giving a prospective employer all your logins and passwords gives them access to direct and private messages, and in the case of most social networks, indirect access to the information of other people who never granted the city access. The whole thing violates just about every social network’s Terms of Service, and just generally feels slimy.

In an interview with local news, the city’s attorney says it isn’t “trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we’re not able to use or shouldn’t use in the hiring process.”

Current job listings for Bozeman include a Water/Sewer technician so, presumably, with a high school diploma and a clean Facebook record, you could get hired to dig around in something that smells almost as bad as this hiring policy.

[via BoingBoing]

City of Bozeman requires social logins and passwords in exchange for job originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 18

Tgethr provides simple email-based collaboration for groups

Filed under: E-mail, Productivity, Social Software

There are plenty of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems out there, but the web developers at Tgethr found that they weren’t using all those extras. When it came down to it, all of their collaboration was happening over email, and Tgethr is just a way to make that email system work better. Start a new group with its own @tgethr.com email address, and Tgethr can encrypt and archive all the messages sent to that address online for easy reading.

The cool thing about Tgethr is that it’s not really another service to use and commit to. You can respond quickly to the group by using your email client, and all the messages wind up in your inbox. Attachments get saved and linked, so you can download them from the web instead of having them sit in the individual inboxes of people in the group. If you’re looking for a simple, sensible way to do email groups, Tgethr is a good bet.

Tgethr provides simple email-based collaboration for groups originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jun 16

10+ super geeky ways to use Twitter