The Danosphere.

Hey Readers,

Sorry for being so nonresponsive! I’m still very busy with CollegeBlender but when I get a moment to breathe I will catch up with you all. In the meantime enjoy this little trick I found:

So I haven’t posted in a while. I’m sorry but sometimes life throws you curveballs and you gotta deal.

My curveball in this case has been transforming an idea I dreamt up over a year ago- The College Blog Network, into something much more mainstream. It’s a project that has taken 7months and 4 people to complete and the end is near! This post isn’t so much about what the new site- CollegeBlender, will be, but more of an outreach to my friends to help build awareness of this new brand.

We want to give college students a stage- to show off their skills. We believe there is some amazing stuff happening at the college level, from blogs to videos to music and much much more, and we think it deserves some recognition. That is what CollegeBlender is all about. I can’t speak about it too much right now but it is launching in August 2009, and you can check out the site for a few more details here. Please show support for our mission by following collegeblender on twitter and becoming a “fan” (we don’t like that term) of our page on Facebook.

The site will be live in August! At which point I will be posting the much needed updates to my code and other goings on here! On my personal blog!

Thanks again!
Dan

:emerges from abyss:

Hey everyone! I’ve been on leave but wanted to post a lil update here. Code samples should be up this weekend, along with a more complete version of the “AS3 Node Network” complete with XML saving.

I also have a pretty awesome BitmapData writeup coming that really stretches the limits of Flash and Bitmaps, including an optimized Async JPEG Encoder- which allows you to encode JPEGs 4x faster than the default adobe lib, and also allows you to monitor progress of the process and merge multiple BitmapData objects seamlessly.

So what I’m trying to say is good stuff is coming, so stick around! Hoping to post this stuff over a series of posts, the first of which should be up tomorrow til then…

Oprah is now on twitter. Oh, my, gurd.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing??

Alot of my fav people over @tcbn have been getting on the Twitter train, which I highly encourage as tcbn2.0 may feature some solid twitter integration [hint]- more on that later. At first sight twitter is a strange and confusing place, and can really leave you wondering “wtf is this?”. Well, here are my tips for new users to jump right into the twittosphere instead of just walking around the edges in confusion. Oh and make sure to follow me and follow the tcbn twitter account too!

One more thing, post a link to your twitter account on your blog or website, its how I have found most the TCBN tweeps,  no one is going to find you if you don’t advertise just a lil

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Facebook, the monolith social network currently in charge of the social networking scene, needs to make money… like… really needs to make money. With an impressive 200million users you’d think the site would be churning out profit hand over fist, but it’s not. In an attempt to monetize and keep up with the explosive growth of Twitter, Facebook redesigned last month to look more like twitter, or did it? 

When you look closely at the redesign, the real emphasis is more about ‘pages’ and less about ‘trying to be like twitter’. But Facebook doesn’t want to shock it’s userbase with this new emphasis, it wants a slow dip in the pool, as opposed to a splash. 

And so it begins. If you haven’t noticed yet, your “highlights” column is probably about 50% page-based activities… your friends liking brands, ‘fanning’ brands, commenting etc. Facebook’s next move was relocating ‘People You May Know’ above the fold… previously it was underneath the ‘highlights’ column, generally below the fold. While the location change didn’t seem to be a big deal, the next move certainly is- “People You May Know’ is now ‘Suggestions’. These newfound ‘Suggesstions’ extend beyond freinds… to brands. Finally the Facebook vision is coming full circle, as it actively ‘pushes’ brands at you based on the activities of your friends. It pulls this off in a cunning way, by mixing in the brands with your friends.

Here is a great example of this, Facebook’s ‘Suggestions’ for me (and a bunch of people I don’t know):

Don’t get me wrong I love the office, but for me Facebook is about connecting with friends NOT about beomcing a poster child for a brand just because i may use/like them. I like “The Office” I watch it every week, but I am not a Facebook Fan of the Office. 

As Facebook pushes forward with it’s plans to monetize the question becomes “at what cost?”. Is Facebook alienating users by putting so much emphasis on brands and activities centered around brands? What do you think?