That was the headline in an article in the American Chronicle recently. The summary of the story was ???The viral and highly informative social network Facebook makes it a perfect marketing tool for many businesses. The top eight benefits of the Web site are detailed in this American Chronicle article, including the site’s high percentage [...]
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TipBin is a recently launched web site that developer Christian Cantrell touts as "Yahoo! Answers, but without the questions." The idea behind TipBin is that people will share, recommend, and discuss tips on any topic without prompts. That could include things like how to find better airline deals to how to refill printer ink cartridges to how to cook a better bundt cake.
The site is organized by tags and members can bookmark their favorite tips. Tips can be sorted by most recent, most recommended, most bookmarked, or most discussed, and they can be searched.
"Bacon is a delicious breakfast meat that is sure to please any guest (errr almost any.) However, it is important to remember the following: * While cooking the bacon, you should cover as much of your skin as possible. More simply put, never cook bacon naked." -- Tip from An_advrider
TipBin immediately brought to mind Daytipper, which is a similar, though more polished, tips community. There are some subtle differences between the two sites. Daytipper, for example, uses categories to organize tips, while TipBin uses tabs. TipBin relies on its users to keep the community clean via flagging of inappropriate posts, Daytipper, meanwhile, has an editorial team that approves tips (of 23,000 submitted so far, just over 5,000 have been accepted, and only 2,600 published).
Also, Daytipper uses a Yahoo! Answers-type up/down voting approach to determine the most useful tips. TipBin, on the other hand, utilizes a more straight-forward recommendation system. Of course, the biggest difference might be that Daytipper pays $3 for published tips.
Cantrell tells me that so far he has only shared TipBin with a few close friends and family members (the site has just over 30 members and a couple of hundred tips added to the system. If Daytipper is any indication of the size of this market, there may be 20,000 unpublished tips out there that could find a home at TipBin.
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Come November, I’ll be joining with my internet marketing/tech guru/new media wiz colleague, Rich Brooks from Portland, Maine, to host a session at the BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.Our session, part of the Executive & Entrepreneur conference on November 7, will be on a subject I love [...]
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Good post by Voltier.com where they interviewed several prominent people about social media marketing. The experts on the hot seat were:Mathew Inman of SEOmozEric Ward of EricWard.comGeoff Simon of Sky Search Placement MarketingRuss Jones of Virante Inc.Neil Patel of Pronet AdvertisingEric Enge of Stone Temple ConsultingDaniel Tynski of Voltier Inc.Some of the highlights from the [...]
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URL Split is a new service that allows web developers to create a single short URL that forwards to more than one destination -- seven destinations, actually. For example, http://www.urlsplit.com/UbbWn4Uh forwards to any one of the Read/WriteWeb network blogs. Why would anywone want to forward to multiple sites from a single URL?
As developer Dan Grossman explains on his blog, the service grew out of a frequent request from customers of his popunder traffic resale business. "Every few weeks one of my advertising customers asks if they can split the hits from their ad campaign among multiple URLs without buying multiple campaigns," Grossman said.
This site is smart for Grossman for two reasons: 1. listening to your customers is always a good idea, and 2. whenever you sign up for an account with URL Split, you're asked to opt-in to a mailing list to receive offers about his other web applications and services. Further, URL Split also provides users with statistics, broken down by URL, of how many visits each link has received, and displays the stats in a way that emulates the look and feel of his web stats service, W3Counter. That could help get people used to the "W3Counter way of doing things."
In general URL Split has a very limited audience and application, but it fulfills a specific need that Grossman's customers had. With a small amount of effort (the site took a few hours to make using the Symfony PHP framework, according to Grossman), he was able to add value for his customers and create a lead generation opportunity for his other products. There's a lesson to be learned there.
Disclosure: Dan Grossman and I both serve on the volunteer forum staff at SitePoint.com.
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ShareMethods is announcing two new apps to its open standards Web Office suite, ShareOffice, at the Office 2.0 conference today. We reviewed ShareOffice back in May when it launched, noting that it's the world's first open standards online office suite. The two new apps are an online calendar from Jotlet and real-time meeting from Persony. They join the existing ShareOffice apps - online word processing from iNetWord, spreadsheet from EditGrid, and presentation app from Preezo.
ShareMethods is also announcing today iPhone support for its on-demand document management service. This will target business users with a need for mobile access to their documents.
ShareOffice is different from most other Web Office suite offerings, because it's made up of third party apps that integrate using OpenSAM (Open Simple Ajax Mashup). OpenSAM is a consortium of Web Office vendors and its main output is a set of AJAX programming recommendations, based on open standards, that allow multiple online applications to integrate. It promotes itself as "one of the largest Mashups of independent applications available".
OpenSAM was founded by ShareMethods.com and iNetWord.com in September of 2006. It has recently expanded to 13 independent applications - the first wave were Caspio, EchoSign, EditGrid, ,iNetOffice, Joyent, Preezo, ShareMethods, and Sheetster. The new members are Huddle.net (collaborative workspaces), Jotlet, (online calendaring), Persony (web conferencing), Smartsheet (online task management), and Data Info Sys (email). It's an open consortium, so others are encouraged to join.
What's more, as the screenshots in this post show, ShareOffice is a part of Salesforce.com AppExchange - as well as being a standalone option.
ShareOffice with Jotlet
ShareOffice with Persony
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Our list today will look at the top 10 apps for utility. These are apps that are in some way useful. This was a pretty broad list, and probably took us the longest to cut down to a top ten. As a result, we were unfortunately forced to leave off a lot of good apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.
This post is the fourth in a 5-part series that will identify the top 50 Facebook apps (10 each in 5 categories). Be sure to check out Part 1: Work, Part 2: Play, and Part 3: Media, as well.
Scrawl Pad adds an editable text box to your profile that any of your friends can edit. While that makes it marginally less useful (since your friends can change anything it says, it's probably not suitable for important notes), it is still useful for sharing quick information with friends or coworkers about meetings or memos, etc. It blends very well into your profile and almost feels as if it should have been there all along.
The official Mobile app from Facebook adds Facebook functionality to your mobile phone. View and upload photos directly from your camera phone, or send and receive messages, notes, pokes, and Wall posts using text messages. The mobile application also includes a phone book that lets you look up your friend's contact info.
HTML Box is an app that lets you add pretty much anything to your Facebook profile. You still can't get around the no autoplay rule that Facebook has imposed on developers, but with HTML Box you could add almost any photo, video, text, or flash animation/application you can think of. In a way, HTML Box lets anyone have their own custom Facebook app running on their profile (i.e., this is perfect for advertising your website or business via your profile!).
ChipIn is how you raise money on Facebook. Using the ChipIn application you can solicit funds from your friends for an event or collection and keep track of everyone's donation. No one actually gets charged until you reach your goal. Trying to raise $100 for Bob's birthday party at the office? Install ChipIn, set $100 as your fundraising goal, and ask 20 co-workers to each chip in five bucks. The widget does the rest for you, collecting funds using PayPal and even keeping track of how far you are from your goal with a visual status indicator.
NewsCloud is a social news application for Facebook. The NewsCloud app lets you submit, read, comment, and vote on stories from within your Facebook account. It also supports videos from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. NewsCloud users can form and join "clouds" (groups) that focus on a specific topic of news, and can access Facebook's built in share utility to easily share stories with their friends.
my RSS is a simple RSS reader for Facebook. However, it's not really the greatest way to consume RSS feeds, because if you subscribe to multiple full text feeds it just displays them all one after the other on a single page. I also couldn't quite get the feeds I subscribed to to display properly on my profile. Hopefully the developers of my RSS will continue to work on it and improve on the UI because a full fledged RSS reader inside Facebook is a very useful application. Even not quite fully cooked, this was the best RSS reader I could find on Facebook.
Files, an application by online file storage company Box.net, allows Facebook users to share files from their profile. Each user gets 1GB of free space and their files are displayed in a box on their profile for anyone to download. The application is a snap to use, but I really wish there was a way to restrict files to certain friends or at least certain groups of people.
There's really no denying that Carpool is a useful app, and one that will only get more useful as people join. Carpool does just what it sounds like it does: it helps people arrange rides together. If you need a ride home from school or what to arrange a carpool to and from work, this app can help you find like minded people in your area. The developers are also working on making carpooling safer by helping you find rides with friends, or friends of friends who at least aren't total strangers.
Price Tracker is a useful little app for Amazon addicts like myself. The application keeps track of the price history for items on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk and notifies you when the price changes on an item you are tracking. The idea is that because the price of many items on Amazon changes rather frequently, by monitoring them with Price Tracker you can assure yourself you won't pay top dollar if you don't have to.
What's for dinner? Cookbook, a social recipe sharing app for Facebook, makes that a much easier question to answer. Browse, create, and share recipes, and see what your friends are cooking. Cookbook has 1588 recipes across eight categories as I write this, ensuring that you will never go hungry.
Those are the top 10 Facebook applications that for utility. Which apps did we skip that you think should be in the top 10? Which apps shouldn't be on our list? Please let us know in the comments. And be sure to check back in tomorrow for part 5 of our list. Let the debate begin!
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