Disruptive Conversations

Is Facebook about to give us more control over our Facebook Pages? Including the ability to get "notifications" of when there is new content on our pages? For a few minutes today, I had this capability!

Alerted by a tweet from fellow New Hampshire-ite Leslie Poston, I flipped over to Facebook and discovered that there was now a "Switch Accounts..." menu option as seen in the image on the right.

When you click on that menu choice, you are taken to a new box where you can login as one of your pages.
Here is what my list looked like:

All of those are Facebook Pages where I have administrative access. I pressed the "Login" button next to "Voxeo" and was immediately taken to that Facebook page ... in a new view that showed me ONLY that page!

Now, here is what is so HUGE about this:

Click on the notification icon... and HERE IS ALL THE ACTIVITY ON YOUR PAGE!

We've never had an easy way to do this before... we always had to scan down the page to see what was new. Very cool!

Clicking on the "facebook" logo in the upper left brings you back to your page...

And just as I was about to test out replying to people from the "Page" login and posting new updates... all of a sudden Facebook froze on me ... and I was looking at my regular personal wall again! Up in the "Account" drop-down menu, the "Switch Accounts" choice had disappeared...

Was this an "Oops, didn't mean to do that" by Facebook? A feature preview that escaped too early?

Whatever it was ... I WANT THAT FEATURE!

When will you roll this out Facebook? We want it NOW!

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The Atlantic has a great story out on "The Unknown Blogger Who Changed WikiLeaks Coverage". The Atlantic's article is a profile of Aaron Bady and his lengthy piece, 'Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; "To destroy this invisible government"', that did do much in explaining the underlying motivation of Julian Assange.

I remember reading Bady's piece back in the midst of everything going on and viewing it as one of the more intellectual and useful analyses of the underlying thinking behind WikiLeaks. Like I'm sure most readers, I had no clue who was behind the actual article - nor did I take the time right then to go learn more about who he was.

Given that the Atlantic piece is rather short, I won't steal their thunder and leave it to you all to read more. But I will quote this one bit:

And we should all be thankful that good writing can be recognized and quickly disseminated.

That is indeed the beauty of this new world we are in... anyone can publish their thoughts online, without the gatekeepers of the traditional media.... and maybe, just maybe, they, too, can wind up having the global impact that this one "unknown blogger" had.

Kudos to the Atlantic for getting the rest of the story.

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Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

and the video is really an animation of a whiteboard drawing that goes along with the talk. It's brilliantly done, and I see that the RSA has several other videos with "RSA Animate" titles that look similar.

I found it a fascinating glimpse into a topic I've always been curious about... how the pace of our lives affects our interaction with those around us and even with ourselves and our inner thoughts.

Along the the way there was a brief side note about technology and kids that included this quote that I agree with:

We are underestimating the power of technology in re-wiring young peoples' brains.

All in all, I thought it was a good use of 10 minutes - stimulated a number of thoughts I want to follow up on. Enjoy:

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Shortly after Bryan Person pointed me to the article, I took 5 minutes to create 5 images using Skitch on my Mac and upload them to Facebook. During the upload, I "tagged" myself in the images. The result is that when you go look at my Facebook profile those five images are (at the moment) what you see across the top of my profile:

I then looked at Bryan's Facebook Profile, which showed the five most recent pictures in which he was tagged:

With Bryan's permission (we were chatting on Facebook), I then simply went to each of my "photos" and tagged them as having Bryan in the "photo". The result was that now visitors to Bryan's profile get to see MY images and message:

Here's the thing:

I DID NOT NEED TO ASK BRYAN'S PERMISSION.

I just simply had to go and tag him in those "photos" that I uploaded.

That's it.

The other aspect of this is that:

Those images will stay on Bryan's profile until either:
1) I remove the tags;
2) Bryan removes the tags; or
3) someone else tags Bryan in new pictures.

Your profile page displays the five most recent photos in which you were tagged.

Now, Facebook has long had this ability for users to "tag" their friends in photos (without their permission), but photos were NOT as prominently displayed on your profile. Sure, that picture of you from 1975 that you were tagged in might show up on your Wall or in your "Photos" area, but that was it... a few people might notice it, but probably not many... and when you then went and removed the tagging they would disappear.

Now it is front and center at the top of your Facebook Profile... for all to see.

Stand by for all sorts of pranks...

And... are you an advocate for a cause? Why not tag your friends in some "photos" so that your cause shows up on all their profiles?

Of course, if you do this too much, those friends may very well "un-friend" you... but until they do that there isn't anything they can do to prevent this display. Facebook does not have any way to "opt in" to being tagged. You have to remove the tag on each photo after you have been tagged.

As a Facebook user, I do find it annoying that my main presence on Facebook is not under my control. I would like my profile to be a place where I specify the information that I want others to see. Sure, you don't necessarily look at other people's profiles all that often... but when I send a friend request, the recipient probably will look... and I'd like them to see what I want.. versus what Facebook wants.

However, this is the proprietary walled garden of Facebook... and if you want to be inside the walls, you have to abide by their rules... which are basically that they can do anything they want and change how info about you is displayed on their whim.

Welcome to our brave new world...

P.S. Should you try this yourself, the trick is to tag yourself in the images in the reverse order, i.e. you tag yourself in the last image first, then in the 2nd-to-last, etc.

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It happened again today... I received a news release via email from a PR firm that had some great news in it about which I want to write (and I will). However, there was one fundamental problem:

THERE WAS NO LINK TO THE NEWS RELEASE!

Not in the email from the PR firm. Not on the company/organization's website. Nowhere!

Here is the thing:

I WRITE CONTENT ONLINE!

I LIKE TO ***LINK*** TO OTHER ONLINE CONTENT!

When writing about news, I generally like to include a sentence along the lines of:

Today Company XYZ announced that ...

with a link to the news release.

Help me out here... give me a link and I'll link to it!

To me, this should just be part of PR 101. (And I do this myself... when I sent out a Voxeo news release this morning, I made sure that a copy was available for linking online from our news release page... and I'm also distributing that link in our media outreach.)

When you send me an email with a news release either in the email itself or as an attachment, please also include a link. Don't make me go search for it... if I care enough, I might... but odds are that I won't... and maybe that means I won't write about it.

Now maybe this means that you have to coordinate with whomever manages your website so that the news release goes live on your site at or before the news release hits the wire. Maybe this means that someone has to come in earlier than he or she normally does - or sign in remotely.

Do it!

Get that URL out there on your site. Or if you can't do that, at least send out the URL for where your news release is at the wire service you are using. (And I would argue to make it happen on your site so that you are driving the traffic to your site and content, versus that of the distribution service.)

And then send out that URL along with the news release!

Flickr photo courtesy of striatic.

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The content creators' creed:

We have an obligation to be interesting.

Ron said in a subsequent reply back: 'It came from a customer considering a company blog. He said, "So you're saying we have an obligation to be interesting?"'

We don't, of course, truly have that obligation.

We are free to go ahead and create the most boring, useless, trivial, mundane, unreadable and unviewable content.

We have that freedom.

There are no set "rules" that dictate what kind of content we must create online.

But...

IF we want people to read, view or listen to our content...

IF we want people to share our content to others...

IF we want people to take action based on our content (visiting a site, downloading something, buying an item, signing up, etc., etc.)...

IF we want people to choose our content amidst the insane amount of content being created each day...

THEN... I agree with Ron...

We have an obligation to be interesting!

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If you missed the free webinar on Tuesday were I spoke about how to scale your usage of Twitter and social channels, Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Support For Twitter, Facebook and More, a recording of the webinar and the slides I used are now available from:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/jamsessions/2010/11/

Additionally, all the source code for the Twitter apps referenced in the presentation is available for viewing and download and can be used with a free Tropo account. Additionally, you can download a free copy of VoiceObjects to try out the integration with IMified to link Twitter to your VO application.

Have fun with it... and I'll be writing more on the topic in the future!

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Can anyone recommend affordable hosting providers for WordPress that currently provide IPv6 addresses?

As I've written about before, I'm working on moving all my sites from TypePad over to WordPress and am currently evaluating several hosting providers. One new criteria I added to my list recently is this:

I would like my blogs to be available over IPv6.

Why? Simple. I tend to write across my various blogs on "emerging technology" issues. Much of the audience for my writing are the "early adopters" who are working with new technology, new toys... and generally working on the bleeding edge of communication.

As some of those folks (myself included) either move their networks to IPv6 or at least experiment with IPv6, I would like my sites to be natively accessible over IPv6 like many other sites are now available including Google, CNN, Facebook and more. Call me silly, but when I'm doing IPv6 testing, I'd like to be able to get to my own sites without going through a IPv6-to-IPv4 converter.

I also want to do this move once, because it's going to be a big enough pain-in-the-neck as it is, between the initial migration from TypePad and then pointing all the domains over, mapping them, etc.

I'm currently testing out Bluehost and in talking to their support team, they are looking to have some IPv6 options available next year... but I: 1) don't want to wait; and 2) want to be sure IPv6 addresses will be available. A2 Hosting offers IPv6 addresses, but only for their more expensive dedicated hosting offerings. I'm looking for someone who can provide more of a web hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) offering with IPv6.

SOLUTION?

SixXS offers a great list of hosting providers offering IPv6 and some of those look quite interesting... I just don't personally know anyone hosting on them.

There is, of course, one of the strong proponents of IPv6, Hurricane Electric, who offer a traditional web hosting offering... which might be okay, although I admit that I'm more partial to a system that gives me ssh access with ideally full root access. I can get that root access - and IPv6 - over at someone like RapidXen that goes to the other extreme and just gives you bare bones hosting, i.e. here's your server, here's your command line... have fun. (Which I can be fine with, although I'm not overly interested in being responsible for all the system admin of my system.)

So... with all that, anyone out there have recommendations for hosting providers where I can run WordPress with IPv6? (thanks in advance)

P.S. And yes, it's not 100% clear to me if WordPress plays well with IPv6, but then again, I know some people are doing it!

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One of the supreme annoyances with Facebook for companies/brands has been that back in April Facebook rolled out the ability for users to create "community pages"... essentially "unofficial" pages for companies or brands - or any other topic.

But what was most annoying was this:

In many places on the site, Facebook linked to these community pages instead of the pages that companies had already invested time and money in developing.

For example, on the Info tab of my Facebook profile, the word "Voxeo" is a link to a page:

Here's my problem as the person most involved with Voxeo's social media marketing. That "Voxeo" link does NOT go to our "official" page at:

http://www.facebook.com/voxeo

But instead goes to the community page at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voxeo/112160428800521

which only has information pulled from Wikipedia. That page does not have our most current info... has no contact info whatsoever... and all around is just a pretty useless page!

It's been a rather frustrating and aggravating situation for many folks out there... particularly those who spent a significant amount to build out very detailed Facebook Pages... only to have Facebook point their name in many occurrences within the site over to this new "community page".

How To Claim Your Community Page

Today, however, it seems that we may have an option. B.L. Ochman published an article in Ad Age today titled "Facebook Community Pages Are a Confusing Mess. Time To Fix Them" that points to the recent addition of a "Is this your page?" link at the bottom of each page:

BL Ochman also references an AllFacebook post about this issue from back on November 8th, so this link has been around for the past month or so. (Did you notice it? I certainly didn't... and I'm on our Facebook page pretty much every day... but I'm not necessarily scrolling all the way down to the bottom!)

Going through the process is fairly straightforward. First you must assert that you are indeed the "official representative" for the page:

Next you have to somewhat bizarrely click through another screen that tells you that they now need to verify what you just asserted:

[NOTE TO FACEBOOK: Sooo... why couldn't you have just put this text on the top of the NEXT page and killed this dialog box?]

Clicking through this useless box then gets you to this big long form where you "declare under penalty of perjury" that you are indeed the authorized representative:

After that you are rather unceremoniously dumped into Facebook's Help Center with a message up on the top saying that you will receive an email where you have to click a link to validate this new address.

I did receive that email, clicked the link and then got a message saying that I would receive additional information, presumably as they examine my claim to the page.

We'll see what happens next.

Merging Pages?

What was strange to me in the process today was that I did not receive the message that both BL Ochman and the AllFacebook article mentioned, namely this:

"Once you have submitted the request to merge the Community Page(s) to your authenticated Page, Facebook will review your request and verify that the merge request is for two similar entities. For example, the Community Page for Nike could merge with the authenticated Nike Page, but a merge request for Nike Basketball or Nike Shoes to merge to the general Nike Page would not be approved.

Please keep in mind that the review process may take a few days, and that we may contact you if we need additional information. If we approve the request, anyone who has "Liked" the Community Page(s) will be combined and connected to your authenticated Page."

I would like to merge the pages... in truth I'd really just like to eliminate the community page and have people go directly to our main page... but if that is accomplished by a "merge", so be it.

Is this the next step? After I have been granted admin access to the community page will I then be able to request a merge of the two?

I don't know... but I'll update this post as I find out more in my own process. And if you have already gone through this process, I'd love to hear about it in the comments - please do leave one!

I'm pleased (I think) that Facebook is appearing to offer companies a way to potentially gain a bit more control over how they are represented within Facebook. I'll be curious to see how it all really pans out... (Sorry, do I sound a bit skeptical? :-) )

What do you think about this? Are you going to go claim your community page? Have you already done so?

P.S. Hat tip to Donna Papacosta who posted BL Ochman's article to, where else... her Facebook wall! (and from there I saw it)

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Building off of something I did the first time back in July, I decided to see if I could fit in writing across as many of the sites where I can write as possible. Why today? Partly to celebrate C.C. Chapman's new book, "Content Rules", and partly because... well... it's December 1st and so it seemed a good way to kick off the last month of 2010!

How did I do this time?

Today's tally is 16 blog posts published across 14 sites. And, unlike last time I did this, today was not only about writing. Today's content also included a set of photos uploaded to Flickr and a video podcast. (And in the time it took me to create, edit, render and publish the video podcast I probably could have cranked out 2 or 3 written posts!)

With that... I'll get this post up in the final minutes of the day... and put this "One Day of Content Creation" theme back on the shelf for maybe another six months or so. :-)

For the record, here are today's posts... (and yes, the VoiceObjects Developer Portal post is listed as December 2nd because the server goes off of the time in Germany - and it was already "tomorrow" when I posted the piece there)

Personal Blogs

Disruptive Conversations:

• Congrats to C.C. Chapman on the launch of his new book, "Content Rules"!
• One Day of Content Creation: Dec 1, 2010 - 16 blog posts across 14 sites (this post)

Disruptive Telephony:

• Now We Know What Happens When The Skype Group Video Free Trial Expires...

Code.DanYork.com

• Python heading up O’Reilly’s recent book promotion?

DanYork.com

• Photo Set: Autumn 2010 in New Hampshire

Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks:

• Read the book? How about posting a review on Amazon?

Voxeo Blogs

The Tropo Blog

• Want to play with building Twitter apps on Tropo? Here's source code for 5 sample apps.
• Reminder: Beware of Duplicate Tweets When Testing Twitter Apps on Tropo

Voxeo Talks:

• Want to speak at eComm America 2011 in San Francisco in March?

Speaking of Standards:

• Internet Architecture Board (IAB) Seeking Comments on "Evolution of IP Model"

Unified Self-Service:

• Slides available for yesterday's Jam Session on building Twitter apps

Voxeo Labs:

• Want to understand Phono? Tropo? Voxeo Labs? Listen to this podcast!

Voxeo Developers Corner

• Miss our webinar on building Twitter apps? View the recording and get the slides and source code

VoiceObjects Developer Blog

• How to link VoiceObjects to IMified to create apps for Twitter or IM/chat

Phono Blog

• Using the WordPhone plugin for WordPress? Upgrade to version 0.2

Emerging Tech Talk (video)

• Emerging Tech Talk #58 – Book Review: Pragmatic Guide to Git

Blogs I did NOT update

And as the day draws to an end, I see there are still more blogs/sites that I did NOT update... simply not enough hours today: :-)

• Voice of VOIPSA
  
  
• Behind the Blog
  
  
• Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast

Next time...

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