DASH - The Real-time Career Management Tool

Twitter has been a revolution in many aspects. Not just a new mean of communication between friends, it is also a way to follow influential individuals or companies and stay up to date with industry news. As I've written in a past article, Twitter has somehow replaced RSS feeds in many ways for many people. One of these ways is to stay up to date with job opportunities matching your criteria of search. With the release of Twitter lists, people organise their contacts in different groups and online recruiters have widely benefited from this update.

Desktop clients such as Seesmic desktop or Tweetdeck let you organise the different feeds of updates from Twitter and Facebook in one single user friendly interface. However, there is a new player on the market, and it is called DASH. In this battle for status updates, it seems like Linkedin has stepped in a couple months ago letting everyone post a status easily to all of its professional network, including an option to "tweet" it. With DASH, you can easily stay up to date with all job related statuses on both Linkedin and Twitter. Using Adobe Air technology as well as the Linkedin API, DASH ressembles other Twitter desktop clients but focuses on career opportunities. You can use it to follow industry related news, recruiter twitter accounts, as well as a real-time Twitter job search (with filters). If you are looking for a job, especially in the digital industry, then you should definitely give it a try!

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The (never ending) Battle of Status Updates!

MSN Messenger and other chat programs probably didn't know at the time they would initiate such a massive trend when letting people add a short personal message next to their nickname. Yes, I do believe they're at the origins of this.
And now, it just seems like every major website is releasing an "Update your Status" option! The battle for the What's on your mind? between Facebook and Twitter has been going for a while now, but it has now expanded to nearly every social/networking site. Although I have been using several of them for different purposes, the concept remains the same: Telling something to people around you. Wow, what a revolution! I don't want to be critical. Mostly because I have been using them myself for a long time and find them very useful. I use Facebook updates to tell my (real) friends what's going on in my life. I used to do the same on Twitter but now I mostly use it to share interesting links with people (that I know in real life or not) with the same interests.
But beyond Twitter and Facebook, are other status updates really useful?

Facebook Status Updates

Twitter Status updates

As far as I'm concerned, I rarely use the Linkedin updates service but I can still see why this could be a good thing. We're in 2009 and the way people approach each other, even professionally, has drastically changed. I see people update their status to tell their network they're looking for a job while others might be looking for someone. Yes, it does make it easier. (Linkedin also introduced the "Update Twitter at the same time" option as you can see on the screenshot below)

Linkedin Status updates

Another example, Google Latitude's status updates. There again, I can still see the concept of letting people around you know exactly where you are and what you are doing. But this is definitely too intrusive for me and I don't want people to know where I am all the time, especially if I forgot to switch off my Latitude automatic location updates. This definitely raises privacy and security issues. Moreover, I don't think I know A-N-Y-O-N-E who actually uses Latitude on a regular basis, if ever! If you are a regular user, let me know, I'd be interested!

Google Latitude Status updates

Some of you might not even have heard about Yahoo! meme. The difference with Twitter is that you can easily post not only text, but audio, video and photo files. As much as I like Yahoo! and the simple/easy-to-use aspect of this website, I still think it is nothing more than a copy of Twitter and sadly, I don't like copycats! I therefore ask the same question, does any of you actually use Twitter memes or know anyone who does? I have tried once, wrote two updates, and never signed in again! I just don't know anyone and don't feel like building a 3,819th network.

Yahoo! Meme Status updates

In conclusion, I think Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter might stay for a while as they are the most popular and bring the most value to the online users. But I personally think Yahoo memes have no space in the new online world and will never take off, a bit like friendfeed which, to my eyes, won't succeed in the medium/long term. As for Google Latitude, I think this service might work, but in a couple of years from now. It is too soon and even though more and more people have smartphones with GPS antennas, they still represent a minority in the population.

I have only showed you a few examples and I am certain there are many more out there. But honestly, who has the time to manage all these different channels?
Do you think this is just a trend that has been going on for a couple of years now, but that will end within that same date range from now? Read the full post

Is Twitter killing RSS feeds?

This is a question I have been asking myself for quite a while now:

With Twitter becoming a major way of sharing content and becoming one of the main tools to drive traffic to your website, are RSS feeds meant to disappear?

I have been using RSS feeds for years, maybe even for a decade now. I've always loved it, for its simplicity of use and for staying in touch/up to date with many websites. I have used it for news, for blog updates, ranging from SEO/SEM to photography or entertainment. I know many people are big fans of Google Reader, but I have always used Netvibes especially for its large collection of widgets and tab browsing. In fact, Netvibes has been my default browser homepage for years.

However, since I have been using Twitter, I barely look at my RSS feeds anymore. I log in Netvibes perhaps once a week and that's it. Most websites whose RSS feed I used to be a subscriber of, now offer a parallel Twitter account to follow.
And for this exact reason, what's the point of following the same content on two different feeds?

I will still keep my RSS subscriptions though, for the simple reason that it makes it easier for me to know what has been read already... or not. In Twitter, as soon as you start following a good number of people, the feed quickly becomes messy, over populated or even over polluted.
So yes, applications such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop let you organise your Twitter feeds into different groups such as News or Sports but if you haven't been online for a couple days, it's very hard to check what's been shared in the last 48 hours, and that you haven't read yet.

With other services such as RSStoTwitter or Twitterfeed helping you automate your Twitter posting using your RSS feed, it seems like we are currently witnessing a transition from one communication tool to another. In 2009, real-time search and communication has become a major innovation in the online world, Twitter and smartphones being the main reasons of this change.

I am aware everyone has different ways of using Internet so don't hesitate to let me know what yours is!

• Do you think Twitter is a RSS killer?
• Which of those two do you follow the most closely: your number of RSS subscribers or Twitter followers?
• Do you believe both RSS and Twitter can live side by side?
• Which one is currently driving the most traffic to your website: RSS feed or Twitter?

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Some thoughts about Real-time Search Engines

The currently Google dominated search engine industry constantly evolves. We have seen new search engines appear, but have they really caused any impact on the industry? Let's take the example of the new and "revolutionary" search engine Cuil which had a huge buzz when launched over a year ago. Cuil was co-founded by several former employees of Google itself and was announced as THE search engine that will "destroy" Google. Well it seems that only a few months after the launch, Cuil was completely forgotten as you can see on the graph below taken from Google Insights for Search.

However, the biggest evolution to come, which has already started in fact, are real-time search engines. In this field, Twitter has taken a step ahead from all other networks. With over 10,000 tweets per minute (24/7), it is probably the best source to find what's being said "out there". From the beginning, Twitter Search allowed anyone to search all public messages written by its users. More recently, Twitter redesigned its homepage to fully integrate a search engine for visitors who aren't logged in, putting real-time search as one of its main services. Twitter APIs such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop have also integrated these search features letting users be constantly fed with the latest tweets.
The Facebook "What's on your mind?" status is very similar and brings the social network as an important and threatening competitor to Twitter. Last week, Facebook acquired Friendfeed in an unpredictable move meant to rival even more Twitter. For your information, Bing has already integrated real time results in its searches, Google will soon improve that as well (without mentioning the Google Wave meant to come out soon).

Real-time search engines, and at a broader level social media optimization, are undoubtedly great ways for brands to listen and watch what's being said about them or their products/services. Now if I've been writing this article, it's actually to introduce you to a video I had seen a couple years back on the TED website. This video is a presentation from Jonathan Haris about secret stories on the web. "Stories", because he was analyzing what people were saying, what feelings they were expressing and sharing on the Internet. "Secret", because his role is limited to observation. He is not interacting with those people; random people that he doesn't know. And yet, he is somehow entering their privacy and intimacy by reading their life.

Now you might wander what the relation between his work and real-time search engines are so I'll just leave you to watch the following video. That video struck me because what he was doing as an experiment and part of his work, is exactly what the web has become like, especially the battle between Twitter and Facebook and the related search engines. Also, don't forget his presentation dates back to 2007!

Enjoy the video and don't hesitate to comment below on your thoughts about real-time search engines and the way they will become (or not) a major aspect of the web. In my opinion, it will if not already.

Jonathan Harris: the Web's secret stories
TED talk posted in July 2007
Source

And for the curious ones out there, here's another more recent presentation from Jonathan Harris about stories collected on the Internet including his "We feel Fine".

Jonathan Harris collects stories

TED talk posted in July 2008
Source

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TwittARound - Merging Augmented Reality and Twitter!

Following my post from last Thursday about Augmented Reality (which you can read here), here is another interesting application soon available on iPhone and perhaps Android phones using the same technology and merging it with the use of Twitter!

The application name is TwittARound which as you guessed it would implement tweets in an AR (augmented reality) environment.

I could not find exact information on who is actually developping this application but it appears to be a German developper by the name of Michael Zoellner.

It's surely something twitter addicts might be interested in! It's fun but not sure to which extend you can really use it apart from playing around. Anyway, have a look at the video below.


PS: If any of you has more information, don't hesitate to share! Thanks!
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What the hell is #moonfruit ?!

I won't write an essay about Moonfruit as most of you probably heard about it already.

Moonfruit is a website that lets you design your own great looking site in a few easy steps. They have different types of templates (journal, video blog, business, travel blog, etc.) that you can use and customise.

In order to celebrate their 10 year anniversary, they've decided to give away 10 Macbook Pro laptops.Now in order to enter the draw, you simply need to tweet a message with the #moonfruit hash tag. Knowing the popularity of Apple laptops, having a chance to get one for free obviously got the attention of the Twitter community.
The problem lies there. This online contest drew so much attention that at some point, around 20,000 tweets (Twitter messages) were sent every hour using that tag (still around that rate at the moment I'm writing this post).

I searched the #moonfruit tag on Twitter search and within about 5 minutes, there were already over 1,600 results and counting (see below).


Three main issues could be raised:

1. This kind of contest using Twitter was surely launched in order to profit from the popularity of Twitter. Although this could be very true, it can also lead to an opposite undesired effect. This huge amount of tweets using one similar tag may quickly be seen as some sort of spamming. The Moonfruit will probably benefit from this craze in the end, but many people can have a bad image associated to the website name, and that's one thing you might want to avoid.
   
   
2. Secondly, I have noticed that a lot of people use these commercial hash tags for completely unrelated purposes. Most of which simply want to benefit from the popularity of this keyword with this easy rule: The more popular a keyword is, the more it will be searched and therefore the more people might read your tweet. Hash tags were created in order to discuss a particular topic. But if so many messages become "off-topic", then the whole point of the hash tag is debatable. For example, out of the last 4 tweets containing the #moonfruit tag, 2 persons make a joke, 1 person obviously has no clue what it is, and the last one makes a pointless tweet that doesn't have much sense (to me at least) using multiple tags.
   
   
3. And last but certainly not least, some people have written articles about how these kind of tags could "break" or "kill" Twitter. Don't hesitate to read the article on Mashable concerning the #gorillapenis hash tag attack on Twitter. Personally, I'm not so sure it would actually kill it. However, it definitely does have a negative impact.

In conclusion, brands should definitely be careful on how to use Twitter. In this particular case, the Moonfruit website probably increased their brand awareness by a million but with success rise problems and let's not forget what Newton taught us: "With every action comes an equal and opposite reaction."!

So much said about #moonfruit in this post when the initial purpose of it was to simply give you guys the link :)

Moonfruit

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