Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts

Monday, July 8, 2013

Backing Up Your Social Media

Social media icons Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do.

As an individual you might not care too much if one of the niche services fails. As a business who relies on social media, however, you should care.

Every post to Twitter or Facebook or Blogger or (insert whatever services you use here) represents effort spent to promote your brand. That effort is probably from paid staff (because nobody lets interns have the keys to their global brand, right?) and represents some cost as a result. Cultivated Facebook campaigns, Twitter conversations, Pinterest boards, all represent a combination of your effort and community participation.

When a service goes away, so does the money and effort you spent to cultivate it. So does the community feedback that demonstrates to others that yours is a good brand. So does any SEO benefit it may be giving you. So does the content you created.

I regularly ask social media practitioners how they back up all the data they post to these services and it almost always results in blank stares.

Most organizations make some effort to back up their marketing or sales materials, in addition to their intellectual property, but for some reason social media is left out in the cold.

I'll cover some examples of what I have done and do, along with some tips on how you can plan for your own back-up.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to produce an archive of all your tweets whenever you request it. What you will get is a link to download a ZIP archive which contains a completely stand-alone web site that allows you to see all your tweets. You can use this site right from your computer with no internet connection.

I suggest taking it one step further and creating a folder on your public web site so you and all your team (and even the general public if you want to share the address) can access all of your tweets at any time from any where. This method will also allow you to search all your tweets instead of being limited by Twitter's own date restrictions on searches. For example, I have my Twitter archive at AdrianRoselli.com/Tweets.

Tweets in the archive contain the full content of the original tweet, but do not contain any of the replies to, favorites of, or re-tweets of your tweets. They do, however, link you directly to the tweet at Twitter.com so you can get all that information.

As part of your job as a social media manager I recommend you set up a calendar reminder for the first of each month (or whenever works for you) to download and store your Twitter archive.

Facebook

Facebook also allows you to create an archive of everything you have posted, including photos, videos, wall posts, messages and chat conversations along with the names of your Facebook friends. It does not include comments you've left on the posts of others. An expanded archive option also provides historic information such as your IP addresses for when you have logged into Facebook.

As such, I recommend against posting your entire Facebook archive to your web site as it will probably contain information that you have opted to not share with the general public (especially since it can also contain other people's private information).

I should note that I am talking about a personal profile here, not a business profile. So far I have been unable to find information on how to archive a business/organization profile. Suggestions are welcome.

[Your Blog Here]

Quite a lot of social media involves maintaining a blog. This blog may exist on any one of many platforms, including one you've built yourself. For this example, I am talking about a blog that you host elsewhere, probably for free, such as an option from Wordpress or Blogger, among others.

In an ideal scenario you will have secured a blog sub-domain, such as blog.adrianroselli.com. This is the first step to having some portability and control should your blogging platform go away. It won't be so easy to get adrianroselli.blogger.com if Blogger goes away, mostly because I don't own (and likely would be unable to purchase) the domain blogger.com.

If your blog platform does go away and you have some advance notice, you have some options to get your content before it is lost. Some platforms will offer you a way to get all your content out and other platforms may offer you a way to import that content. If your failing platform doesn't offer an archive, you can always spider the content using a tool like HTTrack.

Ideally you'll want to recreate your content on your new blogging platform, so make sure you also recreate the same page addresses (most of the blogging tools allow you to create a custom page address, though it will be a manual process). In this scenario, any inbound links won't be broken. For those cases where you cannot replicate the page addresses, explore options to create custom redirections with your new blog provider or, if it's on your own server, through server-level mappings.

Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and Other Services

I have used many services over the years, in particular services targeted at image sharing. I have used Brightkite, Plyce, Picplz, Posterous and am now on to Tumblr. With the exception of Tumblr (so far), they have all gone away. I haven't lost my images, however. In the case of Brightkite they made everything available for download for quite some time and in a structured format. Picplz offered the same, but not until many users raised a stink and followed its founder to his next gig to push their point. Posterous made its site available as a static HTML archive.

Had these sites not made the content available, however, I still had a plan to get everything out. I simply spidered my profile page for each site using a tool (HTTrack again) that converts it all to static HTML. In short, I captured every page and every image to a format that I could simply post on my own site or view on my local computer (as I did with Picplz and Posterous). While I cannot replicate the old addresses (similar to the case with a blog domain), I can at least make my content available should I want to reference it again.

When Pinterest or Instagram or Tumblr or insert-service-here announces it is going away, I will simply fire up the same tool and begin my archive process. Each service may very well offer a tool to do this, but I'd rather make sure I have it just in case they don't. In addition, sometimes it's more work to process a stack of JSON files than it is to simply spider the site and post it somewhere on your own site.

Related Bits

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Facebook Graph Search and Lessons from Timeline

Facebook has announced its new Graph Search feature which allows logged in users to search for information across their friend profiles. Facebook even made it a point to set up a page about privacy in the graph search to try to head off concerns from users.

In this case, Facebook may over-estimate its users. Do you remember when Facebook rolled out its timeline to everyone? Do you remember all the cries of privacy violations in the form of exposed private messages and old relationship details? I do. I recall that it all boiled down to user's misunderstanding the feature and forgetting that they had publicly written and posted some things that might not look so good to them now.

I remember these headlines:

Let's see if the Facebook user base on the whole can remember a lesson not even four months old — lock down the stuff you don't want people to see in a search.

Complained about your co-worker? Remove it. Pictures of your former significant other? Hide them. Bragging about that thing you didn't win? Purge it. Denying the holocaust? Go to hell.

If you aren't sure how to do that, Google can probably point you to a pile of tutorials.

Update, Jnuary 23, 2013

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Monday, December 31, 2012

Social Media Goals for the New Year

Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it's really not much different from what we've done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong.

Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a New Year Resolution for it to take effect. So here's my attempt at guidance.

Background

When I got to college, few people had heard of email and even fewer used it. Usenet was a foreign concept to nearly everyone I knew in meat-space, but with so much traffic I knew it wasn't hurting for users. Before there was a web, I understood the notion of choosing my words carefully. Archives of all my posts would surely stick around for many years, I thought, and so they have. I can still find stuff I posted back in 1992.

As the web happened and it became easier for anyone to share anything, and as email flourished (back when we had time to read it instead of filtering it), I adopted a variation on an old idea of how to behave in email — never write something in an email you wouldn't want to be posted on the front page of The New York Times. Nowadays maybe it's a tweet on the front page of the Fail Blog.

I think we should all accept that with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, let alone all the surveillance cameras, web cams, and soon airborne drones made by 12-year-olds, everything you do runs the risk of being scrutinized and posted online for the world to judge. By posting your own contributions to social media sites, you (and I) continue to drive it.

When Facebook's co-founder's sister (who is also Facebook's former marketing director) posted a photo to Facebook and was surprised to see it tweeted by someone she didn't know, claiming it as an invasion of privacy, the collective web laughed at her. She became the holiday poster child for how confusing Facebook's privacy settings are to understand and implement — and she's the sister of the face of the company.

It also makes her follow-up tweet all the more laughable, partly because I doubt she asked the permission of her family members before posting their photos online:

What You Can Do as a Social Media User

Most importantly, don't think that just because you have locked down your social media accounts, no one that you haven't authorized can see it. An errant retweet or a misunderstood setting are all it takes to make that notion come crashing down. Just look at Zuckerberg's sister — she clearly doesn't understand either of the platforms she uses despite what she thinks.

I have my own set of rules I follow and I try to lead by example. That doesn't mean all mine are right, but I had to start somewhere.

  • For the most part, I do not post photos of people without their permission. Exceptions include crowd shots.
  • I don't post photos of children, though when there are exceptions I do not post names with the photos.
  • When I do take general place or crowd photos, I avoid posting ones with the faces of children visible.
  • I avoid posting photos with faces visible when I am making fun of a particular fashion choice.
  • I don't create venues for homes.
  • I don't post photos with street addresses visible.
  • I don't embed GPS information when tweeting from someone's home.
  • I don't retweet tweets from a protected account (unless I have permission or it's a particularly good insult to me).
  • I don't tag people in photos without permission or prior experience that it will be fine.
  • I don't tag friends in places when I am out, which is also why I don't auto-tweet my Foursquare check-ins (on top of the fact that it's annoying).
  • I don't include information about friend or family schedules in posts, especially when they are travelling.
  • I do not sync my phone with any cloud service or allow any auto-posting. I'd rather pick and choose than run the risk of the wrong image making it to the wrong place.

It's worth noting that I have violated all of these at least once, sometimes by accident and sometimes by stupidity. In a handful of cases I have been rightly chastised.

When it comes to kids (anyone's kids), I work to make sure I don't put enough information out there that a motivated offender couldn't just drive up to a kid on the street and spout enough information to make the kid think it's safe to get into his car. I wish more parents on Facebook made that effort.

What You Should Do as a Person in the World

Accept that everyone has a camera and can post photos and videos of you at any time. Accept that you may appear unintentionally in crowd photos that appear on everything from locked-down Facebook pages to the local news to band fliers and so on.

When you have a friend who keeps posting photos of you that you don't want posted, you should confront him or her. At some point you'll have to decide between how cautious or uptight you want to be versus how much that friendship means to you.

If you are a Facebook user, you can control whether or not you get tagged in photos (as a link to your Facebook page only) and you can even un-tag yourself.

Either behave or own your pile of crazy.

Related

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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Social Media Profile versus a Web Site

We paid $3,000 in Facebook ads last year to attract some new fans. Now, with this fancy [promote] button, we can pay $3,000 more for those fans to actually see our updates.
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page.

Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author's "infographic" that suggests users find Facebook more useful than a brand's site). I have been down this road more than once, but I thought I would follow the link and see what those six well-thought, sound business reasons must be.

1. Websites Require Constant Maintenance

Given the immediate nature of social media, a traditional marketing web site needs far less maintenance than trying to engage followers. I argue that many users expect content on a web site to be relatively constant, updated as appropriate and, in the case of some web applications, automated to a degree.

A Twitter account that pushes out content every few days, however, might be considered slow. One that pushes content every few minutes can be an assault to a follower's timeline. One that doesn't respond to tweets from users might be considered disrespectful.

Contrast this with a Facebook page that has some traction and has many fans. When those fans post to the brand's wall or comment on posts from the brand, there is an expectation of a quick response from users, which requires constant vigilance to keep users from feeling like they are being ignored.

The author also claims web sites can cost between $50 and $5,000 dollars to build, but makes no effort to identify how much a social media resource costs to maintain profiles and fresh content across multiple social media outlets. This assumes a business isn't so clueless that interns are considered good resources for representing the entire brand on social media.

Sticking with the cost argument, I think the author hasn't been paying attention to recent Facebook changes in the form of promoted content.

2. Social Media Is Scalable

The author seemingly assumes most web sites are hosted on servers under desks. Granted, the real point is that a web site may not be able to handle traffic from a random viral traffic spike.

This may very well be true for some sites, but given how many sites are hosted on, and get resources from, content delivery networks and national hosts, the need to scale can often be handled with a phone call to a hosting provider to kick the site into the next hosting bracket. One cannot call Twitter or Facebook when it has been overloaded and demand it scales up for your traffic.

Interestingly, pages on my own site have suffered far more downtime as a result of embedded content from Twitter and Facebook. When they suffer the inevitable and random "fail whale," their poorly-written scripts can take down my entire page. At least when social media platforms are on the fritz, I can still direct users to the rest of my web site for information.

3. Websites Require Specialized Knowledge

I am actually a little sad this point isn't true. With the preponderance of WYSIWYG editors, export-to-web features, free platforms like Blogger or Wordpress with pre-built themes, it's far too easy for someone without specialized knowledge to get his or her message out there. And this is a good thing.

The author does make a point that to have a truly unique site with modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS will require someone with skill to do it for you. Oddly, the alternative he proposes is to use exactly the same Facebook or Twitter layout as everyone else. And I can personally guarantee it won't be built to modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS.

To be fair to social media, almost no web site claiming to be built to modern standards actually is either.

4. Your Customers Are Already on Social Media

Really? He knows that? He has run a series of surveys, done market analysis, engaged my users directly and determined they are on social media? And he found more than 15% of US adult web users are on Twitter?

For my target audience, he is right. Although that's by accident. I can also rattle off plenty of businesses (including my own clients) who don't know that for sure, haven't done the research, aren't in a position to, and can even guess that it's still not true.

The assumption in the article is that users are already inundated with web addresses. He argues that somehow a link to a Facebook page can percolate above all that, that even a Twitter hashtag will make sense to more users. The logic is that users are already on social media, so they'll just go right to your message.

Nevermind that your target users may be in a demographic that doesn't use social media. Or your business may not be a fit for social media. Or that there are still more web users than Facebook users (even if you include the thousands and thousands of fake accounts). Or that there is already enough noise in my Twitter and Facebook feed I don't see stuff from my real-life friends.

5. You’ll Be Easier to Find

Using SEO as a dirty word (well, it is), the author suggests that it's hard to find things on the web. He says social media platforms have their own search already, so if you just focus there you will be found much more readily.

To make an anecdotal argument here, which is abnormal for me but curiously appropriate in this case, I can tell you that if I want to find a brand or person on Twitter or Facebook, I go to Google first. Google provides a far better search for me than I can get in Facebook's or Twitter's results, partly because both Twitter and Facebook are too busy trying to pitch me or assume I know their lingo. If I'm not logged into either one, it's an overall useless experiment. If I am trying to research a product or service, then Facebook and Twitter are the last places I'll go.

Given how readily Twitter suggests people or brands I should follow that are either promoted, of no interest, or that I have already unfollowed, I would not rely on the discovery method of gaining new followers. Given how Facebook has changed its model to require you to pay to get your message in front of fans and their friends (promoted posts), I wouldn't rely on discovery there, either.

If you dismiss the value of a search engine to help users find you and rely solely on the search and discovery features of social media, then you are painting yourself into a corner. Twitter use won't generate enough content over time for all your targeted phrases (unless you constantly assault followers) and neither will Facebook, because they both push older content down, out of the view of search engines.

6. Facebook and Twitter Facilitate Content Creation

Yes, they do.

When I am particularly angry at a brand, I go right to their Facebook wall and post my issue. I also approach them on Twitter. In some cases, I hijack their hashtags. I create all sorts of content about how much that brand has disappointed me. The brand may respond and make it right, but my words are out there, getting indexed by Google, being associated with the brand.

But that's not what the author means, he means (his words) content can often be generated through the simple click of an upload button. Regardless of the fact that you need someone to take that photo, craft that caption, be available to respond if people engage with it, and even hope that anyone cares, he's telling us that content is free and writes itself.

Which it doesn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have had such a good turnout (and feedback) at my content strategy session at the local WordCamp.

Wrap-up

Only in the closing paragraph does the author suggest that maybe you might still need a web site and maybe you might benefit from Twitter and Facebook. So I have to ask myself, why didn't he lead with this? Why are the hollow arguments told strictly from the perspective of spending you effort on Facebook and Twitter to the detriment of your site? Because he's a social media services peddler.

If the author truly believed that Twitter and Facebook are more important to have than a web site, then I look forward to when he demonstrates that belief by shutting down his site and moving it all to Facebook and Twitter. Until then, it's a poorly-argued sales pitch.

Related

These are posts I've written that go into more detail on some of the points I raise above. Traditional web sites easily have as many issues and more, but that's not what this discussion is about.

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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Facebook, HTML5, and Mis-Reporting

My Twitter stream and the headlines of sites across the web yesterday lit up with Facebook's CEO blaming its stock price (failure to meet hyped expectation) on HTML5 (and its failure to make the Facebook mobile experience suck less).

Even ZDNet jumped on that bandwagon with a post titled Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg knocks HTML5 in favor of native apps, using the summary, Mark Zuckerberg didn't hold back in acknowledging Facebook's mistakes, citing a focus on HTML5 as the biggest one. Bolstering its point, ZDNet included this quote from Zuckerberg:

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 rather than native.

That's it. No additional context, no more justification. An article clearly buying into the notion that Facebook is doing poorly because it built its mobile experience using HTML5.

Blaming a technology is easy. It takes the burden off the organization using it. No longer do you need to justify that your business model is broken, or the user experience is impenetrable, or that you didn't factor all the use cases. You can just blame the "savior" technology for letting you down.

That would be as silly as blaming responsive web design for Facebook's poor IPO performance.

The W3C, one of the organizations developing HTML5, today tweeted a link to a message from one of its mailing lists that includes the full Zuckerberg quote:

When I'm introspective about the last few years I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native... because it just wasn't there. And it's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, on long-term, really excited about it. One of the things that's interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us.

That statement better summarizes the situation. HTML5 is not done yet. It's not fully formed. Browsers haven't implemented everything and the rules are changing as (parts of the group of specifications that make up the marketing term) HTML5 gets into the wild. It also demonstrates that Facebook made a poor strategic decision by expecting too much.

In Facebook's case, relying on HTML5 to mimic an app just won't cut it for some of its features. While it has worked in other cases, that doesn't mean it will work in all cases. Facebook has consistently had a poor user experience on mobile. That's not the technology, that's strategy and implementation.

You can watch the full interview in the embedded video below. Make your own judgments about Zuckerberg's comments and compare it to how it's being reported across the web.

Head to ~11 minutes for the conversation about mobile.

Related

Update, September 18, 2012

Yesterday .net Magazine had a piece about Facebook's W3C representative posting to a W3C mailing list his troubles with the HTML5 approach. I read it not as a complaint but as someone raising issues and asking for help. I also saw some interaction on Twitter this past weekend, spawned by a tweet of mine pointing to the W3C email, between Tobie Langel (Facebook), John Dowdell and Brian Leroux (Adobe), and Steve Souders (Google). Following the link embedded in the tweet below demonstrates that there is discussion among the industry players and perhaps this entire media storm could help move standards further along.

More Update, September 18, 2012

Quora answers questions about rebuilding its app, a la Facebook, providing context from a different perspective.

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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Picplz Shutting Down, as Free Services Often Do

Picplz is a photo/image editing and sharing app/service that has been compared to Instagram and long referred to as the Android alternative (Instagram didn't support Android until recently).

At 10:17pm EST on a Friday night (last night), June 1, Picplz sent out the following cryptic tweet:

Even though I hate shortened-URL-only tweets, Picplz doesn't tweet often so I followed it to read this in the brief blog post:

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently, and all photos and user data will be deleted. Until then, users may download their own photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in their photo feed.

And that's it. Just about a month before it's gone. Just over 30 days to manually download each one of my photos.

My take? Oh well. It's a free service that just saw the darling of the photo manipulation and sharing space (Instagram) get bought up for an absurd amount of money. I suspect Picplz just gave up. I knew going into it that at some point I'd have to pull my stuff out (hence my regular requests on the support forum for an RSS feed of my full history).

In December 2010 I wrote about our reliance on and sense of entitlement to free services in You Get What You Pay For. This is the same thing. It's a perfect example of how you need to be prepared from the start that your favorite free service will change or go away. When it does, don't expect great (or even good or maybe any) notice or customer service.

Years ago I started using Brightkite to post images (and track my travels, share them with Twitter and Facebook, live as an online gallery, feed to mapping services, etc.). When Brightkite went away I dabbled in Gowalla and sensed its demise, so tried out Plyce, which also changed direction. I found Picplz and still dabbled in others just in case Picplz went away. Now I just need to choose my next photo posting platform and hope I can get a couple years out of that one, too.

In the meantime, I will be writing a script to wade through my 1,400+ Picplz photos and pull down all my images, descriptions and geo-data. Considering I paid nothing to use the service for over a year and a half, I think this is a fair cost to me.

Related

Update: Sunday, June 3, 2012

This post got a lot of traffic overnight and didn't realize why at first. It seems I scooped the regular tech news outlets and so for a while this post was the only one out there. Cool. These other posts have popped up since then:

Interestingly, less than two months ago Lifehacker ran the article Don't Bother with Instagram; Here are Five Better Alternatives for Android. Of those five, Picplz is going away and Lightbox Photos got gobbled up by Facebook.

Update: Sunday, June 3, 2012, 11:20pm

Earlier tonight Picplz tweeted out some hope for those of us with lots of photos who don't really have the time to download each photo individually:

Update: June 15, 2012

Picplz notified users (via another cryptic tweet that led to a blog post) on Wednesday that it would make each user's photo archive available as a download. Users would be notified via email when their archives were ready. I received my email late last night and am in the process of downloading my 1.5GB archive now (so I have no idea the formats of anything).

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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Failure of Responsive Design is Why Facebook's IPO Tanked

The Venture Beat article as viewed through a mobile browser.Stuck for ideas for an article? Did you hear that Facebook's IPO isn't netting them enough billions of dollars and so is referred to as a failure? Have you heard about the hot new technique for making generic sites mobile-friendly? Need to get people to click through to your article regardless of its content, requiring some sort of link-bait headline?

This seems to be the recipe for disaster that VentureBeat mixed up for its article What's next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?, written by the CTO of CBS Interactive. What's so awful is that anyone who uses Facebook both on a mobile device and on a computer can debunk the article almost immediately. Let's recap some points from the article:

Like many other engineering-led cultures, Facebook has embraced adaptive design, also known as responsive design, where essentially the same code can render itself down from a desktop browser to a tablet to a diminutive mobile screen.

This isn't even close to true. Facebook does not use the same front-end code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images) to power my experience on my phone as it does the experience on my desktop. I know this because I have to jump from one platform to another to perform some functions only available in one experience. I don't even have to view-source to know this.

[W]hen a full size web page is adapted down to a mobile form factor, it forces a lot of vertical scrolling — even if some components are removed and others are made smaller.

I thought we had debunked the resistance to scrolling. Even though we've known this for years on the desktop, users on mobile can scroll. If anything mobile users have had to scroll far more than desktop users for as long as they've been surfing.

[P]ublishers should embrace swiping. Users are not perturbed at all to see a full page interstitial ad stuck into the mix while paging through content, making the tablet extremely monetizable.

Here the argument against responsive design is clear — scrolling doesn't give sites the opportunity to stuff as many advertisements into content. Sites cannot monetize as easily with responsive web design as they can with interstitial ads in a swipe model. Except this has nothing to do with the technical merits of responsive design, just with a potential revenue source.

After a flood of comments, the author responds with this:

The point of this article is on the limited monetization potential of selling the same experience across different devices.

I propose then that title shouldn't be What's next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?, but instead could be Limited Monetization Potential of Same Experience on Different Devices. It's not likely to garner any clicks for its headline, but at least the author wouldn't have to endure a public flogging.

Blaming a development technique for a business case failure is silly. Responsive design is just a way to achieve an objective, not a business case itself. Blaming a technique or technology for a business case failure is the same as trying to apply the same hammer to multiple nails (to quote the article).

Using Facebook in the article as a reference point is technically flawed and cashing in on its recent headline domination. It's the kind of article I am obligated to address here so I can put a stake in the ground when clients and partners see this kind of headline percolate up into their view, otherwise forcing me to disassemble it time and again.

Speaking of flogging (I was, a couple paragraphs ago), when I drafted this up last night I had not seen that so many others had written up their own responses. I include links to a couple others for your enjoyment:

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Why All the Food Photos? (at evolt.org)

Photo of cookies and sipping chocolate.
How can you not share something so tasty?

The Internet has a thing for cats. There's really no denying it, at least when taken in the whole of the internet.

Social media, on the other hand, seems to have a thing for food. While social media is just one aspect of the Internet, we can take comfort that social media's penchant for food is not about cat food or edible cats. It is hard to deny, however, that social media, with its friendliness to instant image uploads, constant quick commentary, and location-based tendency, is dominated by food.

Read the full article at evolt.org

evolt.org I wrote an article for evolt.org yesterday that goes into a little detail on why people do this, along with some of my reasons. Go read the full article, including some of my own food photos, at evolt.org. If you are like me and post photos of your meals, snacks, or other random food bits, feel free to leave some comments here or there with your own reasons. I suspect some of the reasons I listed will look familiar to you.

Photo of wine and TacoVino sign.
Judge by how many of the Social Media Club chapter events center around food.

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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits

One of my un-fondest memories from my early days of web development was the constant client request for web site counters at the bottom of a new web site. Trying to explain to clients that showing a rather low number of visitors might not be something they want to brag about. And then I got the inevitable request to, like the sketchy used car dealer behind the warehouse, adjust the site counter ahead a few hundred thousand miles.

Today on the web services like Google Analytics, preceded by products like WebTrends, allow site owners to see the number of users visiting their sites without embarrassing themselves by displaying low numbers. These services have also allowed site owners to, for the most part, move past the goal of just getting hits on their sites and instead setting up better methods to track conversions — how many visits result in sales, or downloaded product, or filled out forms, or whatever the goal of the site is. Smart businesses aren't enticed by a count, they want to see numbers of qualified visitors.

So how do we not get this with social media?

I read an article earlier this week about a local firm doing good by helping local businesses to increase their Facebook "likes" (Buffalo Social Media Firm Focuses on Educating Local Clients). To be fair to the company being profiled, it's possible the writer just doesn't understand the business goals or what "educating clients" really means and did not provide sufficient context. When I see quotes like this I am more than a little surprised, given the boast of the article title:

"The key thing that a lot of people don't understand is it costs money if you want a 10,000 fan page. You've got to invest. You've got to run ads,” said Evanetski. Likes for the page have grown from around 450 before the ads launched to more than 1,700 by Sunday morning.

Nowhere does the article discuss just what those 1,700 fans actually mean for that business. Is the campaign over now, or are those fans being approached for more information, as sales opportunities, just for mining demographic data, or for something else? Educated clients should ultimately know that an increase in the number of people who follow / like / +1 them on a social media service in itself does not translate to anything. An educated client has a goal in mind and uses social media as one method to achieve that goal. If the goal is simply to garner fans and followers, then an opportunity is being missed.

I wrote about this very thing just a few days into 2010 — almost two years ago — and thought folks might catch on. It's worth a re-read: Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing. Seeing the reasons behind Newt Gingrich's absurdly high Twitter follower count (EXCLUSIVE: Twitter Analysis Vindicates Gingrich in Followers Scandal) should remind us all that such a high follower count is essentially meaningless, particularly if you've only cultivated followers who aren't prospects for your product or service.

If you are a business owner and are approached by firms offering to increase your Twitter follower count or Facebook likes (or other service-of-the-day verb-to-indicate-attention), just ask them, "Why?" The answer should include a tangible reference to your final goals for any marketing campaign. If it doesn't, then send them away.

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Thursday, March 3, 2011

Recent(ish) News on Google, Bing, SEO/SEM

Google Logo I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them "artists"). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that you should invest in the SEO vendor to do just that.

I also try hard not to spend too much time addressing the ever-changing landscape of the search engines, let alone focusing on just one of them. However, sometimes it's worth wrapping up some of the more interesting developments because they can genuinely affect my clients who aren't trying to game the search engines.

Content Farms and Site Scrapers

If you've spent any time searching through Google you may notice that sometimes you get multiple results on your search phrase that look the same in the results, but when visiting the site you find they are just ad-laden monstrosities with no value. Sometimes one of these spam sites would appear higher in the Google search results than the site from which the content was stolen.

Google has now taken steps to not only push those sites back down to the bowels where they belong, but also to penalize those sites. These changes started in late January and went through some more revisions at the end of last month.

I think it's fair to expect Google to keep tweaking these rules. Given all the sites that offer RSS feeds of their content (along with other syndication methods), it's likely that many sites integrate content from external sites into their own. The trick here will be for Google to recognize a site that has a original content that also syndicates third-party content from a site that has nothing but content taken from elsewhere. If you do syndicate content, then you should be sure to what you site stats and your ranking in the search results to see if you are affected at all.

Additional reading:

Page Titles

Perhaps you have spent a great deal of time carefully crafting your page titles (specifically the text that appears in the title and which displays in your browser title bar). Perhaps you have noticed that in Google the title you entered is not what appears on the search results page. This isn't a bug, doesn't mean your site was indexed improperly, and doesn't necessarily mean your page title had some other affect on your page rank. This is done intentionally by Google.

This does imply, however, that your titles are unwieldy. Google does this when titles are too short, when they used repeatedly throughout a site, or when they are stuffed with keywords. If you find that your title is being cut off (implying it's too long) then you may want to limit your title to 66 characters, or at least put the most important information in those first 66 characters.

Additional reading:

Social Media

It wasn't that long ago that Google and Bing said that links in social media (think Facebook and Twitter) will affect a site's position in search results (PageRank for Google). Some people may even be tempted to run out and post links to every social media outlet they can find, hoping that the more inbound links, the better for their site. Thankfully it's not that simple.

Both Google and Bing look at the social standing of a user when calculating the value of an inbound link. This can include number of followers (fans/friends on Facebook), number followed, what other content is posted, how much a user gets retweeted or mentioned and a few other factors. In short, those Twitter accounts that come and go in a matter of hours that tweet a thousand links into the ether aren't doing any good. A good social media strategy that is garnering success, however, should also give a boost to the sites it links.

What is not clear, however, is how URL shorteners (and which ones) affect the weight of those links.

Additional reading:

Random Bits

These are some random articles I collected for posts that never happened. I still think there's good stuff in these and warrant a few minutes to read.

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results and Bing: Why Google's Wrong In Its Accusations should be read together. The accusation from Google that Bing is stealing its search results is fascinating on its own, but reading Bing's response demonstrates a host of things Bing also does differently. For me it was an entertaining battle, but that's about it.

HuffPo's Achilles Heel discusses how Huffington Post relies on questionable SEO techniques, which I equate to spamming, and wonders how long the site will be viable if AOL isn't willing to keep up the SEO game as the rules change. It could be a great purchase for AOL, or a dead site full of brief article stubs.

Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality is a two-year-old article dealing with a twelve-year-old argument. And still relevant.

When A Stranger Calls: The Effect Of Agency Pitches On In-House SEO Programs should be particularly interesting to people who are charged with some form of SEO within an organization. Too often the unsolicited call or email comes in making grandiose promises and citing questionable data and results. This article provides a good position from which to push back and make sure you and your employer aren't taken to the cleaners.

A 3-Step SEO Copywriting Confession almost sounds like an admission of wrongdoing, but instead talks about how to structure your content for SEO without completely destroying it.

Additional reading (that I wrote):

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Facebook Likes…Your Data

Developers are starting to lean on the features of Facebook outside of the walled garden of Facebook itself, and there are implications for us as users that we might not be considering.

The current trends of web design include giant footers, social media icons, extensive background images, and the omnipresent Facebook Like button. This Like button is the eye of Facebook, watching our slow march across the web from its tower at the heart of Menlo Park. At least that's how it feels to me given its great potential to track my activity.

The use of the Like button on a site involves using Facebook's Open Graph Protocol, essentially allowing a site owner to publish updates to a user's feed. Facebook has realized that site owners aren't taking advantage of this feature as much as they could, so Facebook even reminded developers of this feature a couple weeks ago on its developer blog. If a site that has been liked by visitors decides it wants to start promoting heavily on Facebook, visitors might find their Facebook feeds being overrun with spam.

But that's not all. The Like button has just gone through a transformation, incorporating the more invasive features of the Share button, as the Share button itself gets phased out. Soon when you click the Like button on a page, you may find that your Facebook profile page (your own wall) will get the headline/title of the page, an abstract of the content and a thumbnail.

But wait, there's more. Facebook has just updated its Comments Box plug-in to make it available to outside developers with more features than previously offered. Users can leave comments that appear both on an organization's web site and on its Facebook page. Third-party commenting services like Disqus might be looking for a new business model if this takes off.

And that's just the last few days. You may recall back in January when Facebook decided to make a user's address and phone number available to developers. While this did not go over well with the community at large, all that angry tweeting and blogging (like this one?), along with some inquiries from Congress, have done nothing to keep Facebook from moving ahead. You may want to read today's post at Mashable, which includes some links to the letter from two US Congressmen and Facebook's response: Facebook Will Continue To Share User Addresses & Numbers.

As an aside, you may want to follow the advice from this tweet:

Since Facebook will now let apps access your address & number, I have set my no. to 650-543-4800 (FB Customer Service) http://bit.ly/gkJvYD

Facebook already contains the personal information of millions of users to varying degrees of detail. Add to that Facebook's recent moves to take over commenting and linking services, pushing third party content into its own walled platform, and tracking everything you do within Facebook itself, and you can see it is quite a pile of data waiting to be mis-used and abused by anyone who has access. Factor in Facebook's history of privacy problems and missteps, and we as end users should all be cautious about using all these features popping up across our favorite sites.

Perhaps in time we'll come to think of sites that incorporate Facebook features as phishing scams or as simply being out of touch. For now we need to be cautious consumers and responsible developers when it comes to the lure of the ease of use.


See the image in context at its source.

Related

I'm not proud to admit this, but if Facebook could somehow expand the Grammar Filter (scroll to bottom) to the entire web, I might be more willing to succumb to Facebook's rule.

Update March 3, 2011

Some time ago I heard about the Facebook limit of 5,000 friends. I had long since forgotten about it and the complaints people posted. Apparently so did Facebook. Jeffrey Zeldman ran into this limit and found it affects his ability to Link anything. This may be a blessing, at least from my perspective. Regardless, read his post Like and Friend are broken in Facebook for more info.

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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Twitter As Passive-Aggressive Enabler

Twitter stamp image created for Tutorial9 by Dawghouse Design Studio There was once a time that if you wanted to lodge a complaint with a company or organization, you could rely on writing a strongly-worded letter. You might get a response in 6-8 weeks. Then came a point when you could call a support line and speak to a human being and, for questions beyond a missing item from an order, your issue might have to go up the chain and you'd hear back in a week or two. Then email came about and a customer issue could be sent up the chain with a simple press of the "forward" button, reducing turnaround times to a day or two. Now there is Twitter, where a complaint directed at an organization's Twitter account, if not answered within a couple hours, is considered terrible customer service.

Forgetting all the companies that do it incorrectly (creating a Twitter account that only broadcasts, doesn't engage, and doesn't have a human personality behind it), there are organizations that have employed people to monitor social media (Facebook, blogs, etc.) to look for mentions of a company and, when negative, to proactively reach out to soothe the offended party.

My Own Recent Experience, Which You May Skip

I had my own experience lately where, after a painfully awful ecommerce experience, in my rage I tweeted how terrible it was and included the offender's Twitter handle. To the offender's credit, response was relatively swift for a Saturday afternoon. And then I realized that I had used Twitter to become a passive-aggressive whiner. The response from the offender only enabled that.

In an attempt to offset my poor behavior, I wrote up a very detailed email explaining the issues I encountered and sent it along to the offender's email address (I had already informed the offender it was coming). I asked for nothing in return — no free tickets, no special consideration. I followed up the email with a phone call a day for three days, never getting through to the offender's contact and never receiving a return call. What the offender did do, after my third call, is send me an email thanking me for my feedback and assurance that I would be taken care of. In addition, I received a friend request from this person on Facebook. A week later I received a voucher in the mail for two sets of free tickets, something I did not expect, and which even made me feel a bit guilty.

To the offender's credit, the response was swift and reparations were made that far outweighed the balance of my anger. But I never did get a human on the phone. I was relegated to an email-only exchange. Given the Facebook friend request, I couldn't understand why I was invited to connect with the representative personally when we had never exchanged words on the phone or face to face.

Anecdote Over, Now Back to the Meat

This entire experience got me thinking. I spent some time researching customer service in the context of Twitter. Comcast's own efforts have been a de facto standard for a couple years now, so it's easiest to explain the process through the lens of how Comcast started the ball rolling. Essentially, a very frustrated user complained about his Comcast connection on Twitter, and within twenty minutes received a call from an executive on the other side of the country. The guy who complained wrote up the story for TechCrunch and it became sort of a call-to-arms for companies who are playing social media and want to stand apart. You can read the full story in the post Comcast, Twitter And The Chicken (trust me, I have a point). Shortly after that article, ReadWriteWeb posted the article How to Get Customer Service via Twitter, which outlines how companies can and should monitor social media and how customers can leverage the platform.

This has enabled people to not reach out to a customer service phone number, a store manager, or make some other concerted effort, but instead to complain to the ether in the hopes someone is monitoring for such gripes. Often the complaint doesn't even warrant a response (is it really necessary to complain about the color of chairs?), but because it's so easy to do, the complaint comes out. Sometimes it's the equivalent to complaining that the steak was overdone, but only after you ate the entire thing (not just a tribute to Waiting, I have seen this in real life over and over). Organizations are rewarding these miniature rants by trying to soothe and ultimately offering something in return. And that rewards the people who gripe in this passive fashion, but not necessarily those who take more direct channels. It also means companies who are not monitoring social media may be unfairly judged as dismissive (does my local hardware store really need to be on Twitter?).

There will be times when the stewardess is a jerk. I don't expect the airline to give me free tickets as a result. Sometimes the waiter is in a bad mood, but I don't think I deserve a free dinner. My barista put too much foam on my latte? I'm so lazy I paid to have someone who is not me make it. The tech support rep doesn't have an electrical engineering degree and couldn't guess that a solder melted on my machine? Oh well, he can't peer across the phone lines into the hardware and see such things. I suck it up and recognize that these are real people with real lives, not mechanical protrusions of some corporate machine.

And yet too many of us feel entitled to being kept happy without reason. I'm not saying that life needs to be nasty, brutish and short, but it certainly can't be all rainbows and lollipops simply because we expect others to provide. Customer service (over)reaction on Twitter feeds this. People demand satisfaction quickly and out of balance with the issue. And when they get it, they talk about what a great experience they had, teaching others to use the same bad behavior to get their way.

Unfortunately, this builds on and reinforces behaviors that are already extant in our population. People pull out their cell phone cameras before calling 911 when they see a car accident. They take and post photos of their friends in compromising situations (which are usually nothing more than passing moments of poor timing and good photo framing). Couples engage in fights over text messages and forward responses to their friends. People maintain multiple Twitter accounts so they say what they really think about bosses/ex-lovers/family from a "stealth" account without fear of reprisal, or rather, fear of being honest and direct. These are all examples of how people give up their responsibility as a good neighbor to instead be the one to scoop the news, embarrass their friends, or win a pointless squabble. Unfortunately for so many who are not socially savvy, who rely only on examples of what the broad populace does, these cases only promote passive behavior — often passive aggressive behavior.

Perhaps if you are someone responsible for setting a policy of responding to complaints from Twitter you should consider getting the complainer on the phone. Usually, if it's worth complaining about, it should be worth spending a few minutes on the phone with a customer service rep. Those who resist are probably nothing more than whiners anyway. Sure, there is a risk that someone will complain publicly (blog, review site, etc), but you can demonstrate that you tried to reach out and were rebuffed. Maybe those aren't the customers you want anyway.

And if you find people engaging in other passive behaviors that involve you, perhaps the best thing you can do to ensure real and honest interaction down the road is to insist in face-to-face meetings or at least phone calls. When 44% of U.S. respondents to Opera's survey about mobile web use say they have asked someone out on a date via text message, it doesn't take much imagination to guess how those conversations go (lots of insincere "lol"s and other acronyms designed to give the asker a way out if the answer is a "no"). Perhaps instead of allowing people to text/Tweet you on a whim to get together, you should expect them to commit to it by making plans (gasp) a day or more in advance. Now you can take some comfort in the knowledge that you aren't getting the invite only after everyone else has declined.

Whether professionally or personally, don't be lured to the ease that Twitter (Facebook, et al) allows you to snipe. Make the effort to be direct and approach the subject of your ire. If you are on the other end addressing complaints, then don't fire back in the same medium. Reach out in the real world, showing that you care enough about the person or issue to make an effort. For both sides, don't hide behind the keyboard.

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Friday, December 17, 2010

You Get What You Pay For

We're just shutting down delicious, not selling your children to gypsies. Get the f-ck over it.

First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, "You get that for which you pay" just doesn't roll off the tongue.

In the last week I have watched two free web services I use announce (in some fashion) that they are going away. This has caused a good deal of frustration and anger on behalf of users. And it's all just a repeat of things I have seen on the web for 15 years now.

I have watched the Brightkite blog, Facebook page and Brightkite/Twitter accounts get hammered with angry and abusive comments from users (Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.).

I have watched on Twitter as people have derided Yahoo's decision to shut down del.icio.us, the place where they have shared and stored bookmarks for years (Leaked Slide Shows Yahoo Is Killing Delicious & Other Web Apps at Mashable).

I felt vindicated when Google decided to pull the plug on Google Wave, partly owing to the fact that nobody could quite figure out how to wield something that was a floor wax and a dessert topping all in one (Google Wave is Dead at ReadWriteWeb).

I have watched as some of the URL shorteners on which we have come to rely for services like Twitter have announced that they are going away, or have just disappeared (List of URL Shorteners Grows Shortener).

I, and perhaps the entire web, breathed a sigh of relief when Geocities announced it was going to take a dirt nap — and finally did (Wait - GeoCities Still Exists?).

I remember when both Hotmail and Yahoo decided it was time to start charging for access to some of the more enhanced features of the free email they offered users (Say Goodbye to Free Email).

I saw people panic when they might lose access to all sorts of free video, photos, and even text content from CNN, Salon, and others (End of the Free Content Ride?).

We Get It; You've Been There, What's Your Point?

These services all have a couple key things in common:

  1. Users have put a lot of time, energy, and apparently emotion into these services.
  2. They are free.

The second point, in my opinion, should mitigate the first point. If you as a user are not paying to use a service, then is it a wise decision to build your social life or your business around it? Do you as a user not realize that these organizations owe you nothing?

As Brightkite announced the shuttering of its core service with only a week heads-up, they were kind enough to allow users to grab their data via RSS feeds. Yahoo hasn't even formalized the future of del.icio.us, but already fans have found a way to grab the data. But in both of these cases, if you as a user aren't backing up your data, keeping an archive, or storing it elsewhere, whose fault is it really that you might lose it all?

Is it wise to build a social media marketing campaign on Facebook, a platform notorious for changing the rules (features, privacy controls, layout, etc.) on a whim? Is relying on a free URL shortener service a good idea as the only method to present links to your highly developed web marketing campaigns? Should you really run your entire business on the features offered by Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc? If you have to alert staff/friends/partners to something important in a timely fashion, can you really trust Twitter to do what you need?

The culture of the web (nee Internet) has always been one of an open and sharing environment, where people and organizations post information that they understand will be shared/borrowed/stolen/derided. Somehow users of the web have come to expect that everything is, or should be, free. Look at the proliferation of sites to steal movies and music as an example on one end of the spectrum. On the other end is the reliance on Wikipedia by every school kid across the country instead of a purchased encyclopedia.

Let's all take some time to evaluate our plans and what we are doing. When that vendor who builds Facebook campaigns comes back to tell you that what he/she built last year won't work this year due to a Facebook change, there is your cost. When you have to take time from your real work to download all your bookmarks just so you can try to find a way to share them again or even get them into your browser, there is your cost. When you build a business on the back of a Twitter API and have to retool your entire platform due to an arbitrary change in how you call the service, there is your cost. When your Google Doc is sitting in "the cloud" and you're sitting in a meeting without wifi just before you have to present it, there is your cost.

This cost, however, ignores something that can't be measured on your end with dollars. The cost of sharing your personal information, your activities, your habits, are all your daily cost for using many of these services.

You may be under the impression that I have something against these free services. The use of this very blog should tell you otherwise. Instead I have something against users who have an expectation of free, top-notch service from organizations who are really only around as far as their cash flow can sustain them.

I keep my bookmarks on my local machine and just share the files between computers. I have been archiving my Brightkite photos since I started using the service, and archiving the posts to Twitter and Facebook, all the while backing up my Twitter stream. I use locally-installed software (MS Word, OpenOffice) writing to generic formats (RTF, etc.) and keep the files I need where I can access them (file vault on my site). I pay for a personal email service in addition to maintaining a free one. Other than Twitter, with its character limits, I avoid URL shorteners (and have no interest in rolling my own). I signed up for Diaspora in the hopes that I can funnel all my social media chaos to the one place I can take it with me. I keep a landline in my house so when the power goes out I can still make a phone call to 911.

I don't tweet my disgust when Facebook changes its layout. I don't post angry comments on Brightkite's wall when they kill a service. I don't try to organize people to take their time to rebuild Google Wave when I cannot. I don't punch my co-worker when he buys me a sandwich and the deli failed to exclude the mayo.

Let's all take some personal responsibility and stop relying solely on something simply because it's free. Your favorite free thing is different or gone (or will be). Suck it up and move on.

Update: January 10, 2011

Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb echoes the general theme of expecting free stuff in the post "Dimdim: The Risk of Using A Free Service."

Update: January 12, 2011

Free sometimes means "full of malware and viruses," even when you are just installing free themes for your blog: Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else

Update: January 2, 2014

Jeffrey Zeldman explains the process in a narrative: The Black Hole of The Valley

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Friday, December 10, 2010

Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.

Brighkite has made an announcement today that affects me and a handful of other people (not counting all the people on Facebook whose timelines I inadvertently spam): Brightkite is dropping check-ins, posts and streams.

Brightkite started 3 years ago with a Twitter-like ability to share your random musings. However, it took the Twitter idea further and integrated built-in photo sharing and geolocation for each post. It was a while before Twitter even opted to offer location in tweets, and it still relies on third-party services to link photos. Brightkite also allowed for comments on posts and more robust friend (and fan) management. But being better or first didn't quite count (which reminds me, does anyone have a Betamax VCR I can borrow?). From Brightkite regarding place check-ins, photos, and user/place streams:

These features were the defining element to our company 2 and 3 years ago, but we no longer believe they are sufficiently unique or defining to be our focus, so we are dropping them.

Brightkite itself is not going away. It will focus on its group text feature, something for which I do not have any need. I did practically eulogize the loss of these features three months ago when Brightkite announced its first change in direction (Brightkite Changes Direction). I'll spare you the recap.

Others Starting to Offer Similar Features

GowallaThis isn't the only change in the location-based social media space, however. The idea of attaching photos to places and not just tweets has been gaining traction. Last March, Gowalla offered the ability to attach photos to a place (The Location-Based Wars Rage On: Gowalla Adds Comments, Photos & More). Users checking in to a place can see images from other users or contribute their own. The interface for the mobile application is a bit clunky, and it's not a major feature of the service, but it re-creates some of what we saw in Brighkite.

Gowalla announced just a few days ago that it is going to integrate with Foursquare and Facebook places, allowing users to see their friends in one stream of activity. This is a converse of the single-point check-in service offered by Check.in, offered by Brighkite, that allows users to check in to Brighkite, Foursquare and Gowalla at once using some place matching tricks.

FoursquareJust yesterday Mashable posted a theory that Foursquare is going to add photo sharing, based on a screen shot from a user and comments made by the Foursquare CEO about new features in the works. If Foursquare is really offering this feature, it essentially re-creates a core feature of Brigktkite. Whether it will offer a stream of photos with comments is anyone's guess. If it does pan out, it keeps Foursquare ahead of Gowalla, owing partly to Foursquare's Tips feature (Brightkite Photo Tips, anyone?).

Gowalla and Foursquare aren't the only players in the location-based world of photos. For those who know me, Foodspotting is right up my alley, allowing users to post food photos that are associated with food venues. SCVNGR also allows people to post photos with places as part of its overall game model, awarding points for the activity. There just isn't a good way to access those photos for users who are just checking in to a place to play the game. Facebook Places tries to offer some of these features, but it gets lost in the mountain of other things users can do on Facebook and certainly has its own batch of privacy issues beyond just giving up your location.

While users can now associate a tweet with a place and post a photo readily from their mobile phones, the existing photo sharing services don't provide a way to see all images associated with a place. That is why place-centric services are starting to see the value of relying on user-generated imagery to bolster their core offering — checking in to places. In the end, being able to see photos of food, the venue, the crowd, the lighting, specials, and the local drunk may be far more compelling reasons to use a check-in service than earning badges or pins.

That Brighkite is stepping away from this saddens me, but there are clearly going to be others offering at least some of those core features in the near future.

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