The Danosphere.

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

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?

I’m pleased to announce Snipt.org the twitter-based code sharing service is growing into much more. Today the Snipt.org API was released along with a number of other features including an AIR App, AS3 Library,  and Wordpress Plugin (which I’m using on this site!). Hopefully we will see some cool implmentation of the API in the near future (Textmate hint hint). To check out all the goodies head to Extending Snipt.org.

I was a little surprised when I went to make this post using the comedy central “video embed” and upon previewing my post saw tiny text-link advertisements for other comedy-central programming underneath the embedded video. I did not want this! I only wanted the video!

Direct Embed From Comedy Central:

Code Trimmed to Show JUST the Video:

So I hacked their code [deleted] to get rid of the advertisements which I never asked for to begin with. Want to see the difference between my “pure video” embed and the “advertised embed”. Here is the code comparison:

Pretty lame that they try and get people using the embed to unknowingly run their advertisements.