Social Media doesn’t have to be as negative or fearful all the time though and the crew at Flowtown have created a great and funny infographic about the social media landscape in 2011. If you were in high school right now, would you be the Digg boy, or the band geek? Or the Jock?

The Gossip Girl (Twitter), the Teacher’s Pet (Quora) or the English Geek (WordPress)?

Infographic via Flowtown.

The post The Social Media High School Yearbook appeared first on The Blog Herald.

One of the things I said was that Google+ would have to take a clear stand and when, also enforce it:

I do hope you will collaborate and when users do report profiles of brands, no matter how big the brand or website and how popular the page, these profiles will subsequently be deactivated until the pages option for businesses is available.

And exactly that has happened: Christian Oestlien, announced that the Google+ team has deactivated multiple business accounts (also those of Mashable, Sesame Street and many more).

But the story took a rather ridiculous twist and SEO Google spammer par excellence, Pete Cashmore, A.K.A. as CEO and Founder of Mashable, quickly changed the Mashable News account to his personal name and also changed the profile picture, the latter similar to the Mashable Twitter account.

Within a short time, the community was up in arms, mainly because of Cashmore’s move and Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land, had following to say:

So on the brands are being killed from, +Pete Cashmore [1] news is back, except it's not really +Pete Cashmore [1] now but rather +Pete Cashmore [2]. By renaming the +Pete Cashmore [1] account as his own, Pete now takes ownership of the 100K people who were originally following Mashable news. And the old +Pete Cashmore [2] account that he had before with 40K people remains, though he says that's going to be winding down. Sesame Street remain out — maybe it'll scramble to find a founder who will lay claim to their own profiles. Or just hang in there until the limbo world of Google+ and brands finally get sorted out. Ford also appears restored despite not being a "person."

In the likelihood you might have lost Danny Sullivan’s thinking, I have added [1] and [2] to his Google+ entry, where [1] refers to the previous account “Mashable News” and [2] to Cashmore’s personal G+ account.

Technically there is nothing wrong with Cashmore’s move but the question we have to ask ourselves, and Oestlien and Co., is whether both Google+ and Cashmore actually do respect and value the user. The weird Mashable News/Pete Cashmore switch has been approved by the Google+ team:

We chatted with the Google+ team today about their plans for branded accounts, and we’ve both agreed that while the Mashable community is very engaged on Google+ and we all have great fun joining discussions here, it would be better for Mashable to wait for branded profiles to launch officially before having a company presence on here.

While we already know that Cashmore only interested in Google SERPs traffic bait is, rather than actually positively contributing to tech reporting and providing added insights, the decision made – and especially the Google+ team reportedly approving this move by Cashmore – is more than dubious.

Oestlien also commented on his announcement post that Google+ will not offer the opportunity to merge Business accounts with previously used accounts.

In allowing this move to stand, Google+ actually continues its two classes system and continues to push the small business owner who wants to be present, in order to avoid that competitors might benefit an unfair advantage.

Mike Arrington and MG Siegler, of Techcrunch, did not take the story lightly either. Having been compliant with the ToS so far, they now moved ahead and created a new Google+ account, under the pseudo Techathew Cruncherin. Google+ retaliated and swiftly closed the account.

The war continues and so far there’s only one winner and his name is… Pete Cashmore. Everyone else who uses the internet professionally is the victim and at the mercy of the Google+ team who have publicly chosen side.

Or said with Google’s now infamous and long abandoned mantra: Do no evil.

For people still interested in Christian Oestlien’s announcement, watch the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4oafKRykUg

The post Do No Evil: Google+ Shuts Down Top Brand Profiles, Reaps Ridicule from Tech Pundits appeared first on The Blog Herald.

While it is too early to call Google+ a success, more and more we see very interesting numbers emerge, combined with the fact that the immediate reception and hype around the service did push Google’s stock (GOOG) with 13%.
Hitwise estimated Google+ at around 300,00 daily US based visits after two weeks, comScore said on Wednesday that the site had reached 20 million page views already in only three weeks, Paul Allen estimates there’s 18 million users already and Alexa ranks the G+ subdomain at almost 2% of the entire traffic to Google properties.

In an interview with The Mercury News, Vic Gundotra – Google+ Project Lead, disclosed another interesting statistic: around 2/3 or more of the updates posted to Google+ are ‘Limited’ and shared only with a select number of people. Women are also likely to share more content privately than men and early statistics of a low number of female users (less than 15%) are wrong.

Google internal data shows that users are two to three times more likely to share content within one of their Circles than to make a general post. But Google+ is far from a finished product. Among the more glaring absences is the lack of ads. Nor does it have the massive list of games and other apps built by independent developers and outside companies like Zynga that run on the Facebook platform. There has been criticism that Google+ is too male-centric, although Gundotra and Horowitz dispute that, saying women in particular are doing more sharing in private circles rather than public posts.

The success of Google’s privacy features is not really surprising. Social network users have learned lots of the many different Facebook privacy issues, as well as a constantly rising awareness of the risks of using the internet and social networks to rant, and possibly damage their professional career.

While the circles feature made privacy easier, it needs to be argued that Facebook’s privacy settings allow to be fine tuned better but are more difficult to correctly set. Google+ made privacy and sharing with a restricted number of people easier and simple enough to be actually used. And the service continues to improve its privacy features.

Source: Mercury News

The post Google+ Early Success: Privacy. Around 2/3 of Updates are Private appeared first on The Blog Herald.

After little more than 2 weeks of wait, the Apple App Store crew has finally approved the Google+ app for iOS.

Sadly for many users it does seem that the app only runs on the iPhone, and not on iPod touches (even not latest generation). So far no iPad specific app has been released either and the app does not run on iPads. Rumors around the internet confirm that the Google+ app for iPhone only runs on iPhone 3, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.

If you can not find the app in the app store, via a search, try this link to the iTunes Store.

Where very often the iOS apps the more polished ones are, Foursquare being the best example, the Google+ app for iPhone does not belong in that category and it seems that the app was developed by developers without any eye to particular design. While both apps are very similar, the Android Google+ app is the clear winner when it comes to polish, design and interface. The iPhone app just doesn’t feel as finished.

At least WordPress fans will love the design of user profiles in Google+ for iPhone.

Most surprisingly the iPhone app does not have the much hyped Instant Upload feature we already know from Android. Instant upload when activated will automatically upload all your pictures to your G+ account, and you also have access to all pictures in your G+/Picasa account in the Android Gallery.

This is likely to be due to a limitation within the iOS ToS and not a built-in restriction by the G+ for iPhone developers team.

If you missed the link before, here is the Google+ for iPhone download link once more

The post Google+ for iPhone Released. Not Compatible with iPad and iPod Touch appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Just like many new platforms the Google+ interface is not optimal and every user might want to customize their G+ experience.
Luckily the online community is fast and several Google Chrome browser extensions for Google+ have already found their way to the Chrome Store.

Many users have already mentioned that they wished they could share better or organize their stream better, others wished that G+ had additional features or even a more colorful design. We found 15 Google+ extensions for the Chrome web browser, which can improve your G+ experience.
Neither of them is an extension to -1. ;)

1. Skin & Share for Google+ Facebook

Skins & Share for Google+ Facebook is a simple extension insertion social media buttons, all while the extension can switch the design and add more contrast to Google+. Funnily enough the extension also allows to remove contrast from the Facebook design.

We did notice a minor bug with the extension: the skin selector for Facebook will also display below like buttons if these are given a specific height in the code (Hint: check above!)

Get Skin & Share for Google+ Facebook here

2. Google+ Ultimate

Google+ Ultimate is a simple more contrast rich design improvement for Google+.

Google+ Ultimate also pins the header navigation and Google+ navigation/tab bar to the top of your browser, as well as making the sidebar pinned. I do think this was the first Google+ extension I used.

Although not as pleasing visually, Google+ Ultimate now also supports side-by-side view for larger windows/screen resolutions.

Get Google+ Ultimate here.

3. Beautify G+

Beautify G+ could arguably be misnamed and barely changes the Google+ design. Beautify+ allows the user to configure several areas of the design, pinning the sidebars and header or even add audio notifications.

Additionally the extension allows to display notification count in the browser tab and remove suggested users as well as the ‘Go mobile’ area (which did not work for me).

Beautify G+ is mainly for those who want to preserve the basic look of Google+, with some improvements.

Get Beautify G+ here.

4. G+me for Google Plus

G+me for Google Plus is an extension for power content consumers or people who struggle with how Google+ pushes content with new comments to the top every time. The extension transforms your stream in a collapsible dashboard, with quick access to content upon hover.

G+me also updates the entries with visible display of new comments, without bumping these back to the top. The extension is great but would be even better if there were a way to include autoload for ‘More’. With only limited items in the feed the improvement might be rather minimal.

A great feature of G+me is the notification stuck to the extension icon in the Google Chrome toolbar.

Get G+me for Google+ here

5. FaceG+

For those who absolutely can’t live without there preferred blue social network, but want to enjoy G+, FaceG+ comes to the rescue and does exactly what it says on the tin.

Get FaceG+ here.

6. Share+ Social Buttons

Want to share your Google+ content on other social networks? This one does exactly what it says on the tin and allows you to share any content found on G+ to the most popular social platforms. Whether others can read it or not depends on one’s privacy settings.

Get Share+ Social Buttons for Google+ here

7. G+Fix

G+Fix is a small and simple extension doing just one thing: pin the header navigation and keep it visible at any time when scrolling your Google+ stream.
Note that this extension does not work for other Google properties.

Get G+Fix here.

8. G+ Count Favicon

The G+ Count Favicon extension pins the notification count to the browser’s tab favicon, always keeping you easily updated with the newest comments or shares.

Get G+ Count Favicon here.

9. G Plus Plus

G Plus Plus is a plugin for the true Google+ junkie who constantly wants to return to Google+, no matter how hidden the tab is or how many browser windows they have opened. Just click the ++ icon in the extensions bar of Chrome and you will be taken to the G+ tab.

Get G Plus Plus here.

10. Adhik

Adhik is another more contrast rich style for Google Chrome. Adhik highly improves the separation of items in the feed.

Get Adhik here.

11. Goo Plus Manager

Goo Plus Manager expands Google Plus with several new and handy shortcuts/hotkey combinations (Using AddThis). Goo Plus Manager also includes links to translate every item in the feed and offers easy access to the Goo.gl shortlinks API.

Additionally Goo Plus Manager adds a dropdown menu with quick access to all Google+ sections to the header navigation.

Get Goo Plus Manager here.

12. g-

Get distracted easily by Google+? Don’t want to be notified whenever there’s an update… g- does remove the Share and notification count from the header navigation, to help users be less distracted when using other Google properties. Do not install is you spend too much time on Google+, g- is contra-productive to your G+ experience.

Those who truly don’t get anything done, thanks to Google+, can get g- here.

13. Google+ Stream Filtering

If you constantly leave your Google+ window open and want to filter certain content out, or read only selective content, the German Google+ Stream Filtering extension allows you to do so.
With help of the extension you can now have everything which doesn’t, or does, contain any of the keywords you entered, be hidden in your stream. Be careful this extension is very powerful and has can make your stream show nothing. Do not blend out Google+.

Get Google+ Stream Filtering here.

14. +onFB

If you still spend time on Facebook and love to discover new content on the network, you can now also +1 the content, and links, thanks to the handy +onFB extension.

Get +onFB here.

15. Google+♡

If +1 doesn’t do it for you, and you have never played role play games, you can now feel the love on G+ thanks to Google+♡ instead.

Get Google+♡ here and start feeling the love on all Google web properties, web sites.

Bonus: 16. Favorite G+ Stream

Favorite G+ Stream allows you to set a preferred circle as default circle for your G+ stream. Get it here.

As usually, you can follow me on Google+ for even more Google+ musings.

The post 15 Useful Google+ Browser Extensions for Google Chrome Browser appeared first on The Blog Herald.

In a rather unsurprising move, more and more companies have started to develop online Google+ analytics and tracking platforms, adding to their stable of social analytics. Even before any form of Google+ API has been released so far, and with mixed results.

Only days after Google+ was opened to a select group of people, FindPeopleonPlus was released, tracking 1 million Google+ users. Since the service received its 5 minutes of fame the number of people tracked hasn’t grown anymore and statistics haven’t been updated either, even though Google+ has grown to rather large numbers in less than a month already.

The newest kid in town, Plusalyzer by the German BuzzRank team, now tries to deliver the user a more in-depth level of statistics for their contributions to the social network.

It‘s not about charts. But charts are a good starting point for our upcoming Google+ Social Media Analysis, once Google opens up the API. For the time being we created a list with the Google+ User who are added to most circles. Add yourself here and see right away where you are placed.

We gather the amount of followers (people who decided to read the updates of a user) and friends (people who a user added to his circles). Based on this we can calculate daily changes, a ranking in our charts, the friend/follower ratio and and further interesting and relevant aspects.

Plusalyzer provides charts of the most popular people on Google+ as well. The lack of an API offering any service the ability of analyzing metrics is very visible. Upon signing up, Plusalyzer will return no results at all, a rather depressive moment for most social media experts and egos.

Even a look at most of the top users only returned results for the last 5-7 days. We assume the service starts tracking once the Google+ ID has idea has been added.

You can add your profile now at Plusalyzer.

The post Track Google+ Analytics and Influence with BuzzRank’s Plusalyzer appeared first on The Blog Herald.

For many the main decision to make when moving to Google+ is whether they will leave their social graph behind and start to rebuild from scratch at a new network. While we know that more than 10 million users have signed up for the new service from Google, Facebook has played a role for many and millions of users have developed their social online network over years.

The decision whether to move to a new network and possibly be alone, or have only is small circle, is one many users will not take easily. The new tool Google+ Exodus could come to the rescue.

Two Tufts University alumnis, Jack Carter and Albert Nichols created Google+ Exodus, which could make the transition easier.

Google+ Exodus is as simple as tools come and does all the work of inviting your Facebook friends for you. The process checks first your friend list on Facebook and then who has created an @facebook email account (Facebook users who have set a username).

Once this is determined, Google+ Exodus will send all these users an invite to Google+

When you use Exodus, all of your friends with Facebook Email set up (the ones with profile URLs like “facebook.com/username”) will get an invite to Google+. It will appear in the “Other” subsection of the Messages page. It won’t bother them by showing up in the notifications bar. If more than one of your friends uses Exodus, the messages will appear in the same thread, rather than clogging your inbox.

While the service seems to try to be ethical and avoid clogging the inbox of users, I checked with several people who were supposed to have received and neither did notice the invite.
The reason for this seems to be that neither of them actively checked their “Other” section of Messages, which usually is cluttered with updates of pages and too noisy too follow.

The intentions of Google+ Exodus are great, it seems that the opportunity to put the tool to good use was lost.

The post Google+ Exodus, The Simplest Tool to Invite Your Facebook Friends to Google+ appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Since Google+ launched, we have been left wondering how many users signed up, and were able to join in the first days. Wild estimates and predictions have been made, including complicated prognoses based on surnames. The latest and most widespread one by Paul Allen said that Google+ could surpass 20 million users by this weekend, as we reported here at The Blog Herald.

Until the Google(+) overlords decide they will publish user stats, we can only guess and guesses will continue to be made. But the service could be much more popular than expected already and with help of the Palo Alto search giant’s own tools, I discovered the rather amazing number of 40,100,000 profiles already.

Thanks to Google’s advanced search operators it is rather simple to do a search for profile URLs only on Google+. Use the following query to search to check yourself:

url:plus.google.com/*about site:plus.google.com

What this does is:
url:plus.google.com/*about: We look for URLs on Google plus containing ‘About’, one of the parts of your profile.
site:plus.google.com: Search for results only on Google+ itself.

You can check the result yourself here.

Right now the numbers seem to fluctuate between 39,700,000 and 40,100,000. It is important to understand that dynamic search engines such as Google (and most others) can not return an exact number of results found.
These search engines can only return an estimate at first. The number of results will be corrected as one cycles through the results and reaches the end of the SERPs for a query, when the SE determines how many results there are.

We do not know either whether all results returned are unique profiles, but based on the number around 40 million it is safe to say that Google+ has already reached more than 25 million users in less than one month.

There are only two further questions now:
1. Will Google+ reach 100 million users in less than three months, thanks to exponential growth?
2. How many of these 25 million users are active and contribute regularly?

Why don’t you join me on Google+ for even more Google+ updates and tips & tricks?

The post Has Google+ Already Surpassed 25 Million Users? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

After several months of waiting the Twitter Android app has finally received a much needed update and more even: features similar to the iPhone Twitter app.

The new and improved app for Android users finally has Multiple account management, push notifications and improved home screen widgets, as well as numerous bug fixes.

Fans of Push notifications: Open your account settings and select Automatic refresh. After doing so you can select whether you want Push notifications for Direct messages, Mentions and/or Tweets.

While the Twitter Android app seems to finally catch up with other Twitter clients for Android, especially by adding multiple accounts management, it would be nice to see a visual refresh of the app as well. Most Android apps still severely lack when it comes to visual design , and Twitter is no exception here. Twitter’s design has seen massive improvements over the last 12 months but we hope that Douglas Bowman, Twitter’s Creative Director, would start using an Android phone and subsequently improve the design of the Twitter Android app.

The post Twitter Continues Its Path to Dominate App Ecosystem: Android App Android App Finally Receives Push Notifications and Multiple Accounts appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The new design, here shown with the viral Nyan Cat video, is more polished than the previous Youtube design. Video player control buttons have been repositioned and are now more prevalent, while being integrated in a nicer way. Ads still continue to disturb the experience.

Significant changes have also been made to how playlists are integrated within Youtube, sometimes moving them from a sidebar to a horizontal scroll.

Channel pages also have received a complete make over and look much cleaner and more streamlined.

Surprisingly the new design does not integrate with the new header navigation design which came with the limited Google+ roll out.

Read the Youtube announcement here. You can activate the new Cosmic Panda design at the Cosmic Panda page.

The post Youtube Releases Experimental New Design Cosmic Panda appeared first on The Blog Herald.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_azOmh69A

Business profiles have been becoming more and more present on Google+, but were outlawed from Day 1 according to the ToS:

Your profile and name must represent one person.
Google Profiles doesn’t support profiles for couples or groups of people. Additionally, you can’t create a profile for a non-person entity such as a pet or business. Google may continue to allow existing profiles that don’t meet these criteria, as long as the profile names are unchanged.

Oestlien, who has Mashable News, Ford Europe and Ford Motor Company in his Google+ Circles, said that Google will actively collaborate with non-entity profile owners to help them shut down their service. Google will also allow a select group of businesses into the test of business profiles. According to Ostrien the profiles for businesses will allow more features and other uses, different to regular profiles.
Profile for businesses will be rolled out later this year but no date was given.

Business owners can sign up to be considered for the Google+ Business Profile preview here.

Business owners now face a difficult decision. With many brands already present on Google+ a business owner has to decide whether to create a new profile and hope that there will be a way to convert profiles in to business profiles once the latter or launched. Alternatively the business owner can sit back and look how competitors create profiles and gain followers already.
Of course there is always the possibility to report profiles, but we sincerely doubt this will work.

As I said in a previous Google+ status, addressed to Google’s Head of Web Spam Matt Cutts, I do hope that the G+ team means business (pun intended) and will follow through:

Dear +Matt Cutts,

I have enjoyed the successful launch of Google+ but sadly it has come to my stream attention already that so-called social media experts have set up pages for their business, as well as several companies who have already joined.
I am talking profiles such as +The Next Web ., +Mashable – and also brands such as Ford Motor Company and MTV India.

While I do understand that pages for businesses are needed and might come at some point, I do hope that the Google+ team will be loyal to its own guidelines and ban these accounts since I do particularly enjoy the experience of a spam free Google+.

In all honesty I am also looking forward to the option of pages for businesses since I am web publisher myself and have several clients as well, but I would like to see rules being enforced before the actual Google+ experience suffers f your typical social media expert who thinks every platform needs to be abused, regardless of ToS.

I do hope you will collaborate and when users do report profiles of brands, no matter how big the brand or website and how popular the page, these profiles will subsequently be deactivated until the pages option for businesses is available.

Sadly until the mega brands have their profiles deleted, we will continue to see new business profiles be created and follow users. While it might be a good move by the Google+ team to enforce the rules, I do think that it would be smarter to allow the profiles and offer a conversion tool once the official option is released.

After having enjoyed Google+ for almost a week now, I have changed my opinion and profiles such as Mashable and The Next Web do enhance Google+.

IMHO it would now be silly to deactivate profiles with thousands of followers already, because the true victim here is not the brand but the user who has decided to hang out on Google+ and follow their favorite brands on the newly launched network.

Christian and Team,

We do hope that you will consider the option to convert profiles, rather than nuke the active user experience. After all you also have brands in your circle and where’s the fairness if you can follow Mashable News but other publishers, such as we here at Splashpress Media are not allowed on the network, or I can not follow The Next Web on Google+.

Update: The profiles of The Next Web been deactivated already. All three business/brand profiles Oestlien follows (Ford Europe, Ford Motor Company and Mashable News) are still active.

Disclosure: We did go ahead and created a profile, noticing how many other brands are already present and very popular on your service.

The post Business Owners Face Google+ Dilemma: Google+ Team to Shut Down Business Profiles Until Roll Out Later This Year [Updated] appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Facebook teams up with Skype to copy the new Google+ Hangout feature deliver improved chat and video chat.

Newsflash: Skype was first launched in August 2003 and had an estimated 663 million users (in Summer 2010), more than the social network almost a year later. While the chat feature of Facebook has been a rather uneventful and often frustrating experience since it launched in 2008, the question to be asked is whether the collaboration with Skype will help Facebook to continue growing?

Facebook has been successful in moving chat users from other networks to its own platform, remember when everyone was on MSN? Me neither. But while many private users might have made the switch from MSN and Yahoo to Facebook’s network, times have changed and Skype has an entirely different integration among its user base.

Personally I have been using Skype since Fall 2003, shortly after it launched, and my Skype network has grown entirely differently than my Facebook network. In other terms: most people I communicate with via Skype are not part of my Facebook circles and might never be, because I, like many others, use Skype as a professional tool and Facebook as a way to procrastinate stay in touch with friends. Stay in touch with friends when I don’t have sufficient time to engage in a long chat session.

Chances that I will ever connect with all my professionals contacts on Facebook are rather slim as well, especially since many companies have blocked the social network giant in their internet policy and firewall.

While the video chat feature could become a possible improvement for Facebook, it rests to be seen if both networks which are notoriously slow to create mobile apps for Android and iOS will manage to leverage their size and influence and jump on the mobile video bandwagon. The next question would be whether users will want to leave their stable Skype client environment for the notoriously unstable Facebook chat platform.

Of course if you’re one of the cool kids around, you already were on Google+ Hangout and Huddle before Facebook announced video chat.

The post The Unthinkable Happens: Facebook to Improve Chat, Jumps on Skype Bandwagon. appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The main issue with Facebook Lists is that they are horrible to create and maintain, except for OC list users like me. There’s no hiding the truth, it is a burden to create and manage list (Bonus: the same applies to Twitter). With the smooth Circles UI of Google+ the game seems to change though and it didn’t take long before the same functionality came to Facebook. Albeit via a ‘hack’, or a third party application.

CircleHack launched yesterday, very quickly after first review reports of Google+ started to emerge and brings exactly the same easy way of organizing lists to Facebook. Whether Circlehack will be integrated in Facebook is still an open question. Especially with Paul Adams, one of the early Google+ developers, now at Facebook.

Paul Adams tweeted following about Google+:

Seeing Google+ in public is like bumping into an ex-girlfriend.

Let’s hope the breakup with his ex was painful and Facebook Circles will not be the next popular feature the Palo Alto giant copies and integrates in it platform, aimed at destroying the popularity other platforms might gather from new and cool features. I must admit though that I wouldn’t mind to see the Facebook Lists feature being improved and have a more user friendly way to publish selective Facebook updates to specific groups more user-friendly, just like Google+ has integrated Google Circles.

Go to CircleHack to start organizing your Facebook lists.

The post Facebook Circles: Create Facebook Lists Google Circles Style appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Buffer in two sentences

What you do with Buffer is you put a few tweets in your Buffer, say in the evening for example. The app then schedules these tweets for you during the day – that’s it.

Step 1: Throw a few tweets in your Buffer

After you created your account, you can immediately start putting tweets in your Buffer. Add them from your Buffer home account. Or make it even easier and install one of the browser extensions, which will let you add tweets from ANY page you are on.

Step 2: Edit, move or delete tweets

Once you have Buffered a few tweets. You can go back to your home account and reedit tweets if you want. Move them around or delete those which didn’t turn out so great

Step 3: Get analytics for your Buffered tweets

One thing you will particularly like when using Buffer is that you get analytics for your Buffered tweets. On your way to being awesome on Twitter this is key. Learn about which tweets to better than other, so you can adjust them towards getting better.

Using Buffer will allow you to tweet consistently, yet without spending all day on Twitter. Together with the possibility to see your impact via analytics will allow for more targeted tweeting.

One of the pitfalls for Buffer at the moment is that it doesn’t have a dedicated mobile version of it’s product. This should be a logical next step to make consistent tweeting even easier still.

What do you think about Buffer? Let us know below.

This entry was submitted by Leo Widrich, Team Member of Buffer App.

The post Use Buffer to Auto-Schedule Tweets and Receive Tweet Analytics for Your Tweets appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The startup, launched in April 2005 was sold to Google only 18 months later for the sum of USD1.65 billion. Even after the acquisition by the Palo Alto search giant, the video platform continued to grow and is now one of the most popular websites in the world, hosting billions of videos and playing more than 2 billion videos every day. Often marketing campaigns heavily rely on Youtube plays and many artists use the platform as well as MLM marketers.

Thanks go to the crew at Infographiclabs for another graphic.

The post The History of Youtube appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Together with the popularity of online video screencasting has become popular and one of the best tools for this certainly is Techsmith’s Camtasia a long time favourite for Windows screencasters and since recently also on the market for Mac users.

We analysed the last 5 years of online video history and the result is this awesome infographic, requested by Techsmith.

For a more detailed analysis of the history of online video, check out Andrew Baron’s A Decade in The History of Online Video.

We and the Techsmith crew thank the team over at Infographiclabs for another awesome infographic.

The post History of Online Video appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The post Search Engine History appeared first on The Blog Herald.

We wanted to know more and decided to analyse more data, such as how much revenue is generated from blogs and what are the key demographics for the blogging publishers. We also were interested in the languages used online and their spread. The result of all this can be found in our State of The Blogosphere infographic.

The average earnings made by blogs are a ten fold of the investment made to sites with most hobbyists surprisingly missing out on any earnings, but investing an incredible $1,500 in their blogs. In these economic challenging times for many, maybe it’s time to reconsider mortgages and loans and get some solid advice from the folks at Credit Loan. After all blogging is not a cheap task it seems and part timers invest even more in their blogging habits, more than $10,000, with rather low profit.

With huge thanks to the team of Infographiclabs.com for this graphic.
Visit our Infographics archive to find more awesome infographics about social and new media.

The post State of The Blogosphere in 2010 appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Even though it had been the subject of a crude attack by Michael Arrington, Zynga continued to grow and Mark Pincus was voted CEO of The Year 2009 by Michael Arrington’s organised Crunchies. Needless to say, Zynga has continued to grow and now counts even more games than before. We sat down and analysed the company, its platform and timeline, as well as Zynga’s revenue.

Many thanks to the team of Infographiclabs who created this graphic for us.

The post The Zynga Statistics: Games, Platforms, Timeline and Revenue Analysis appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The Blog Herald team had a look at the history and timeline of Google and all this info was compiled in an infographic.

Thanks to the team of Infographiclabs who created this infographic for us.

The post Google’s History: A Visual Look at the Search Engine’s Timeline appeared first on The Blog Herald.

1. Canonical/Core plugins
2. WordCamp to only support GPL compliant events anymore
3. ThesisWP-gate
4. And those are only the first three fights which come to mind for 2010

And with yesterday’s switch from Cutline to Coraline on WP.com the debate has been revived once more.
While in the latter case nothing can be done and I will resist to mention that Splashpress Media the legal owner of Cutline is after the theme and its rights were acquired early 2007, it is important to look further and consider what should be next for WordPress.org and the WordPress community. The protests against Matt himself tend to grow every week more, most of all from the commercial developers community. Words such as sycopath, dictator and others are starting to become more frequent when Matt, the WP founder, is mentioned. In Summer 2007 I rallied for the WordPress trademark to be returned to the Community and a WordPress Foundation to be created. I already mentioned then that there was a mixed interest from Matt’s side and I do stand by these words.

Before I go any further it is also important to also point out that Splashpress Media owns several websites with WordPress in the URL, all of which have been validated by Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic – the company then vigilante of the WordPress trademark and let’s also use the moment to clarify the license Cutline was released under by its creator.

So much though to get some facts and disclosure out of the way before I focus on the real topic of this entry.

What Should Be Next for The WordPress Foundation (and WordPress.org)?

When the WordPress Foundation was officially announced earlier this year the blogosphere and WordPress community generally rejoiced although there were some valid questions, many already stipulated in the announcement post or better even: not mentioned. Other than a philosophy there is no official documentation on-site nor does the WordPress Foundation have a publicly known board. When reading the WordPress Foundation news it is safe to decide that the Foundation an enigma is and the Community no step closer to clarity is. This is what I want to focus on here:

It is time for the Foundation to assemble and publicly announce a board and declare its projects, commitments and roadmap/philosophy for the future.

And I’m going to help the WordPress Community and Foundation by proposing possible members for the WordPress Foundation Board. Let’s be clear up front: this is not about finding people Matt would love to see on the Board but about finding a stable and balanced Board, a Board consisting of members who believe in WordPress, open source and the WordPress Community. A board which at times will argue about the future, argue for the better of the platform and the Community. The WordPress Community.

Matt Mullenweg

While I might not always agree with Matt, there’s no doubt that thanks to him the ‘internet has improved’ and I have gone on record saying that I think that Matt a great leader is for the WordPress Community. I still support that statement and we users have to thank Matt for years of dedication to WordPress.

Not only has Matt created WordPress but also his passion for the project and open source in general are beyond dispute and people can say what they want, Matt has grown remarkably as a person over the last years. The rest… live and learn, we all make errors.

Photo Credit/Source: Matt himself.

Mark Jaquith

As a lead developer of WordPress Mark Jaquith does not only take part to the development of WordPress on daily basis but his reasonable tone and willingness to help clarify issues has often been exemplary. The latest proof of this behaviour was Mark’s personal view on why WordPress themes are derivative and thus should be released under the GPL license. While Mark at times might let his passion slightly dominate his opinion he is a great contributor to the Community and a strong believer in open source.

Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner from Revolution Theme and StudioPress fame, has been a very important member within the WordPress Community theme scene. To say that Gardner revolutionised WordPress theming would be discrediting the work previously done by many a designer who already sold pre-made themes/skins for WordPress but Gardner certainly has contributed, arguably even revolutionised commercial theme licensing when Revolution Theme was released under the GPL. During every storm Brian remains calm and continues with his work, defending his believes in WordPress as a platform and the GPL as a license which allowed him to build a healthy business on.

Michael Heilemann

Not only is Michael Heilemann an integral part of the WordPress history thanks to the Kubrick theme which was the WordPress default theme for many years, only to be replaced with Twenty Ten, the new default theme. There is another reason to invite Michael on-board: he has seen WordPress from both sides – from three sides even. First of all as an insider and actively contributing member, then as a ‘leaving developer’ after the the Shuttle admin interface ‘debacle’ but more even, Michael has seen ‘the other side’ as a core contributor to the Habari project.

Photo Source: Michael’s Flickr.

Michael Torbert

Michael Torbert is the developer of the hugely popular All-in-One-SEO-pack plugin for WordPress but that is not the only reason why Michael is selected in ‘my WordPress Foundation board room’. Michael is excelled in supporting his plugin and since quite some time the plugin is also available as a paid Pro version. Knowing both sides of the Community, I reckon Michael would make a great addition to the board, also because of his serene tone.

Jane Wells

Jane Wells’ career within the WordPress scene has been more vertical than the Petronas Towers in Malaysia. While their might be doubts and questions about this incredible rise, Jane has supported WP awesomely with her contributions to the WordPress 2.7 admin redesign.

Some people might raise doubts about Jane and her stellar career but I will not be the one stating these suspicions. Needless to say though that if someone were to raise questions about this, they need to be answered as soon as possible and in all honesty.

Duncan Riley

Many will say that I must be on crack to propose Duncan, the founder of The Blog Herald, as a possible WordPress Foundation board member but the truth is that Duncan Riley one of the biggest defenders of open source software is. Although he has called BS on Matt more than once, and before that on Mena Trott from Six Apart, he also is the first one to defend both. When he thinks they deserve the praise.

Over the last week Duncan also has defended Chris Pearson, mainly via Twitter, because Duncan does believe in everything Chris has done for WordPress and as a business owner.

While Duncan might not be the person Matt would want to see on board, it is important to have a neutral who defends and believes in all three elements: the platform, open source and the possibility for contributors to be supported in their actions. Every board needs a ‘beeyatch’ among the members. Duncan Riley is the right person for this role.

Chris Pearson

In all honesty, everyone who has followed the open source platform WordPress for some years knows that Chris Pearson’s contributions have been numerous and have benefited a huge following. Not only was there the now from WordPress.com janked theme Cutline, but also PressRow (which will also be janked from WordPress.com because Matt Mullenweg “don’t want any of his junk touching our sites” [source], later the Copyblogger theme and now Thesis, a commercial theme now under split license and with more than 27,000 customers.

To refute the importance of Chris Pearson for WordPress would be ridiculous and as a theme creator who now has ‘seen the light’ and relicensed Thesis, Chris certainly belongs on the board of the WordPress Foundation.

What Should The Task of The WordPress Foundation Be?

First of all the future (?) WordPress Foundation Board should define the manifest and philosophy for the Community, avoiding any possible ambiguity and if needed even release the ‘WP-GPL license’.
The Board should also decide over the future of the software platform and be arbiter in situations such as the Capital_P_dangit() debacle or the Sponsored Themes FUD or even which colour the WordPress.org site should endorse. I fully support Brain Gardner if he says that every October WordPress.org should endorse a pink colour scheme.

Let’s not forget that the WordPress Foundation isn’t what Matt wants, what I want, what Splashpress Media would like to see and nor should our believe take over from facts. The WordPress Foundation has to be a balanced vehicle, an organisation representing the whole WordPress Community and all of its users. No matter whether you believe one license might be better than the other.

The post After ThesisWP-Gate It’s Time for the WordPress Foundation to Grow Up appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Just like with Twitter the numbers are rather interesting: did you know that Facebook is more widespread in the United Kingdom than in the USA? Did you know that there is one Facebook applications for every 900 members and that there are almost twice as many developers as applications?

Huge thanks to Infographiclabs for this graphic.

The post Facebook Statistics: The Numbers Game Continues appeared first on The Blog Herald.

So what’s it?

Twitter launched promoted tweets just before the start of the USA- Ghana knock out game today.

For a long time people have wondered what Twitter’s business model was and promoted tweets, announced several months ago already now have made their appearance.

During the biggest sports event in the world, which broke the previous Tweets/second record, before the nation with the biggest number of Twitter users plays a knock-out game.

Twitter’s first partner: one of the biggest brands in the world, Nike and also sponsor of the national soccer team of the USA.

The promoted tweet ranks on top of the search for the trending tag #USA. Even when new results come in, the sponsored tweet stays on top of the search results.

What are promoted Tweets?

Twitter is rather sparse when defining promoted tweets:

We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users. [source]

There is no information yet as how businesses will be able to ‘promote’ tweets but it is highly thinkable that an auction platform the base of twitter’s advertising business will be, just as it is the case for Adsense and Facebook Advertising. Get your dollars together and start saving to outbid the multinationals during the 2012 Olympics.

New updates by @nikesoccer are not automatically ‘promoted’ but the top spot of the trending tag is updated.

Update: Unpromoted

Only minutes after the game ended and Ghana knocked the USA out after extra time, the #USA tag was ‘unpromoted’ and not trending anymore. @Nikesoccer was not at the top of the search results anymore either.

The post Twitter Launches Promoted/Sponsored Tweets Before USA World Cup Game appeared first on The Blog Herald.

As Splashpress Media CEO I feel honoured that we will be able to follow in Deb’s footsteps and nobody else than Susan Gunelius will lead FWJ as Managing Editor. Splashpress Media is happy to have been chosen from the pool of bidders and will continue the site in the same spirit and with the same values Deb has built the site on:

Why Splashpress Media?
When I decided to sell FWJ I received a half dozen offers and the one from Splashpress Media wasn’t the highest. However, in selling I had three concerns and Splashpress was the only potential buyer who addressed these three concerns and promised FWJ wouldn’t languish or lose the message and image we worked so hard to maintain throughout the past five years.
My three concerns:

1. THE FREELANCE WRITING JOBS BLOG

What would happen to FWJ if I sold? Would it sit, neglected, growing tall weeds like some old, abandoned home? Would it become a haven for dollar jobs and spammers? I don’t think I can bear to watch that happen. The people at Splashpress promised they would continue FWJ’s mission and help writers to succeed and find work. They’ll continue to post the best gigs and offer top notch advice. To ensure this will happen, my friend, copywriter and published author Susan Gunelius, is coming on as Managing Editor. I’m confident FWJ will grow beyond even my wildest dreams with Susan at the helm.

2. THE FWJ BLOGGERS

The last thing I wanted was for Splashpress to pull some sort of b5media deal where all the bloggers were kicked out of their blogs and their hard work locked up and taken away. They care about FWJ as much as I do and I wanted them to be treated with dignity. I’m happy to tell you that Splashpress has agreed to continue to allow most of the FWJ bloggers to maintain their blogs. However, some of the bloggers have decided to move on with me. You’ll see a mix of old and new faces here in the upcoming weeks, and I hope you’ll continue to be a sharing and giving community. This is an exciting change, but it’s going to change for the better.

3. THE FWJ COMMUNITY

That’s you. I wanted to make sure you all still had a place to go for quality leads and advice. Anyone can start a writing blog, but not everyone has the experience and to help you land gigs or the talent to help you get where you’re going in a respectful manner. I think you’ll enjoy the new FWJ! Under Susan’s and Splashpress’ care, FWJ will grow bigger than ever.

The post Splashpress Media Acquires ‘The Freelance Writing Jobs Network’ appeared first on The Blog Herald.

After many years of existence BloggingPro has become one of the major blogs in the blogging and blog software scene. Of course we plan to continue expanding our horizons and deliver you more blogging news and tips, but that is not all and we here at BP want to deliver our users even more.

In our continuing effort to offer more to our readers, I am happy to announce the addition of the BloggingPro Job Board to the site.

Free Blogger Job Listings

Jobs can be added in three different categories: blogger jobs, blog designers needed and developers needed.

If you’re looking for a job as blogger or for a blogger, visit the BloggingPro job board and follow BloggingPro on Twitter (@blpro) to hear about new job listings first.

The post BloggingPro Launches Job Board: Free Blogger Job Listings appeared first on The Blog Herald.