Earlier today, Director of Programming for Xbox Live, Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb asked his sizable twitter audience the following:

What new features would you like to see in the Xbox LIVE Twitter or Facebook applications? I think we know…but tell us

Months ago, Microsoft was first to take a step into the social networking space, adding apps for Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm to Xbox Live, the pay-to-play online network of the Xbox 360 gaming console. The Twitter app was essentially a simplified client to view and send tweets, with support for twitter search and trending topics as well. Though it worked just fine, there was hardly any value to tweet on the Xbox, for without a keyboard, the process of posting and responding to tweets proved to be quite laborious.

The Facebook app took the integration further, allowing users to post status updates along with the ability to edit their profile, and view photo albums. Arguably the most useful feature though was the ability to find facebook friends that also have Xbox Live. This Facebook app was a refreshing step in the right direction of integrating social media with gaming platforms in a truly useful way,

While I gave each app a fair shake, there wasn’t much substance to them, and little incentive to use them again (with the one exception noted above). I had all but forgotten about the whole affair until I saw Major Nelson’s tweet this afternoon, and that got me thinking.

Allow me to look up the gamertags of people I follow on Twitter, along with those who follow me.

Just like the Facebook friend lookup, why wasn’t a similar feature for twitter rolled out as well? Though I’m sure there’s a solid argument that the average Xbox Live user who is on Facebook is also likely on Twitter too, your friend/follower audience does not necessarily overlap completely. For me at least, plenty of my Facebook friends have 360s, but most of them are not followers of my gaming blog’s twitter account.  It seems like a fairly no-brainer, simple feature to implement, yet here we are without it.

Make Xbox.com more public, and integrate social streams from Facebook and Twitter as well.

Xbox, being a Microsoft product, has benefited from some of the natural synergies of other MS brands, such as the Windows Live ID. Xbox.com allows the player to log in with their Windows Live ID, view their friends, check achievements, etc. While a pretty cool idea on paper, the reality is a somewhat half-baked social network that is completly invisible to non xbox-live users, and has a frankly ugly interface.

But what if Xbox.com functioned almost like the World of Warcraft Armory, where you could look up anyone who had live (or by email address), check out their games, achievements, etc, all without necessarily needing to log in first. What if you could integrate your Facebook and Twitter streams? To me, Xbox.com is such a missed opportunity, one that sites like Raptr and GamerDNA have managed to fill in the interim.

There is a missing link. People like to share the networks that they are on. Look at all the social media icons on the sidebar of this blog, or any blog for that matter. Notice anything missing? Why can’t I link to my  Gamertag profile? Xbox Live is heavily reliant on network externalities, the idea that the value of a network grows as the number of people using it increases. So shouldn’t Microsoft want for me to  promote to everyone and their dog that I am on Xbox Live, and they should join too? It sure seems like a no-brainer to me.

Get these features out of the submenus, and put them front and center.

Probably what has hamstrung the Twitter application most is the fact that it was not readily available on the dashboard, you have to first go down to the community section, find the twitter icon, and then enter it. Its not available from the main xbox menu. And you know something? It needs to be. I need to be able to hit the xbox button on my controller, and in fewer steps than I can count on a hand, be able to post a status update. That update needs to be visible as my avatar’s “motto”, the small chat bubble that appears over Xbox Live member’s avatar when their profile is viewed. I need to be able to view any of my friends profiles and instantly be able to see their Twitter handle, if applicable, along with their linked Facebook account (should they choose to display it).

Stop hiding these applications if you expect people to use them regularly. Make it easier to update your status. Perhaps its offering the word predicting feature that the PS3 has. Perhaps its allowing you to tweet out your achievement the moment you receive it (I personally think status updates full of achievement notifications are annoying, but I know there are people that love this,  so there is definitely a market). Offer the ability to tweet the group you are in and the game you are playing, so that other friends that may not be logged on, but are watching their twitter feed will see it, and be able to hop on and join the party.

I doubt I am sparking any epiphanies for Major Nelson and the  Xbox Live team with these ideas, but you asked, so I answered.

Did you tune into YouTube on Sunday to catch U2 performing live form the Rose Bowl? If you did, you had some serious virtual company.

The LA Times reports that Sunday’s show generated 10 million streams across 7 continents. The whole show was archived on YouTube Monday and has been viewed more than 1 million times since then.

YouTube is calling the U2 concert the largest event in the company’s history and it very well could be a glimpse into what the Google -owned service plans in the future. After all, it’s hard to make money off of short-form content, but with live streams, YouTube could potentially capitalize and maybe even come up with a payment model (a la Pay-Per-View) for really big events.

I think this was an ambitious experiment that certainly seemed to work, at least for U2. I could see myself paying for a live concert or event on a streaming video site, I’m just not sure that site should be YouTube.

For a site that has been free-with-advertising for so long, I’m just not sure if a pay-per-view model will necessarily work with the brand that has been established for the site. Take the example of YouTube’s fairly recent expansion into movies and TV Shows. Despite the rather limited offering, I’m not sure how big of a dent it has actually made in Hulu’s market share for free, full length video.

Perhaps there is room for a new online video competitor dedicated to pay-per-view streaming broadcasts of live concerts and events. Thoughts?

Posted via web from Jeff’s posterous

Great news! You can now you can post your updates from CoTweet to Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer and dozens of other social networks.

Ping.fm is now integrated with CoTweet so you can publish once through CoTweet and automatically send your updates across the real time web. You can set up a unique Ping.fm posting group or account with each of your Twitter accounts, so you have ultimate control over which updates go where — essential for people managing multiple business accounts or a combination of business and personal accounts.

Set up instructions are available in the CoTweet Support Forum, which you can access once you’re logged in. Enjoy!

Filed under Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter for Business, Your Brand on Twitter, features • Permalink

via blog.cotweet.com

Co-tweet has always seemed like a great idea to me for businesses that need to manage multiple twitter accounts with multiple users, but it still isn’t where it should be, and it certainly isn’t a solution yet. I think this trend of “simulcasting” your updates to multiple networks from one location is valuable, but there really hasn’t been a great business solution yet.

CoTweet does still have its limitations: it is currently in beta and only 6 profiles are allowed to be managed per account. This really won’t scale for the bigger guys, but I think many people, even smaller agencies, would be willing to pay for less restrictions.

This new Co-Tweet feature is further hindered by the inability to see the responses to an update sent out to a linked Facebook fan page, LinkedIn Profile, etc. It limits what should be a two way dialogue into a broadcast medium with no ability to track the conversation. This new feature does not save me time if I still have to go into the individual networks to check to see the response.

I’d love to see someone tackle the heart of the problem, but given the rate of evolution in the social media world, the next few months will be interesting.

Posted via web from Jeff’s posterous

I must have missed the boat on MySpace during its heyday, but it certainly has lost relevance recently. The one thing I have always appreciated on MySpace is the music aspect. Perhaps this is just a sign that their intended size is no long realistic, and they should be refocusing on the needs of bands.

The music-focused social network market seems much less competitive than the general do-all be-all that Facebook has come to dominate. I could see MySpace making a strong case against the likes of Last.fm.

Posted via web from Jeff’s posterous

To some, it can seem daunting to maintain a twitter profile. Hundreds of people to follow and a constant struggle to stay relevant to your existing followers while attracting new ones can make twitter feel like a lot of work sometimes. So some people might think me crazy to have multiple accounts. I recently started up a video game site focusing on the industry and the community, Northwest Gamer. The site is partially an outlet to share my hobby with the web, but its also a personal test of my ability to build an online community.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Obviously social media is a big part of this project, and a key ingredient is Twitter. Less than a month into this project, and Twitter accounts for 80% of my site referrals. I suspect that focusing a twitter account solely on my target audience has helped this spike in traffic to my site. Most of the followers on @jeffrshearer are not likely to be interested in my video-game related commentary, while the same is true for my @northwestgamer followers.

Previously, my main twitter account attempted to serve all of my interests at once. It was both a professional networking tool and social instrument, and while this is still true, I have narrowed my focus on @jeffrshearer to focus on digital marketing, while @northwestgamer publishes my gaming activities. It is my belief that with this tactic, I can build a stronger, more relevant following with each of my individual twitter personas.

Twitter is used in many different ways, but it is my belief that it should not be all of these at once. There is simply too much noise on Twitter to risk trying to be everything to everyone. If you struggle with follower retention and growth, find your niche, your beachhead, and dig in!

I know I haven’t been great about updating this recently, but I have a small piece of news for now. A few weeks ago, I took a survey for ParkerLePla, a branding agency in Seattle. Completing the survey entered me in a chance to win a Flip camera, one of the more popular video blogging cameras out there for their simplicity.

I won the drawing, and I now have a shiny new camera coming in the mail! I’ve been wanting to play around with video for quite a while, so expect to see a bit of video blogging in the future!

Thanks ParkerLePla!

Finally, I’ve been working on a few new pieces for the blog, expect to start seeing regular updates starting next week.

Edit: After giving the toolbar a good month long trial, I decided to pull it down. I suspect it would be more useful for a enterprise level blog.

If you have visited my blog recently, You may have noticed the new toolbar situated at the bottom of the window. I am trying out the Wibiya toolbar (beta), which I stumbled across a few days ago on another blog. The thing that I was most intrigued by was the twitter feature, in the fact that everything can be accomplished on-site. I am a big proponent of eliminating unnecessary clicks in internet browsing, so I am giving it a try. It is easy to see that people are more likely to share a blog post, video, picture, etc if it is easy to do so, and fewer clicks is a technique for achieving this. Granted, I think the value of such a tool gains momentum when one has a larger readership, but it is worth trying out anyway.

I typically don’t like big, cumbersome widgets, because they can often make sharing a blog post more difficult than it should be.  The Wibiya toolbar, however, seems to have the right mix of simplicity and features.  If you’d like to try it out, head over to the Wibiya site and request a beta invite (I think it is just a formality, they sent me an access code within hours of applying. They seem like cool folks, give them a follow on twitter @Wibiya (be sure to check out the cool resolution adjuster on the top right corner of their website, it allows you to change from 1024 to wide screen at the click of a button).

–Jeff

There are a lot of blogging options out there to choose from. Blogger is probably the most popular, and one of the easiest to get started with. I originally started on Blogger, but I was left wanting more in terms of features and expandability. It allows for nearly limitless customization of its appearance, but the work involved in building a professional grade blog on Blogger can be time consuming.

Wordpress, on the other hand, allows much more in terms of extensibility via widgets and plugins, but has limited customization as a free blog. Hosting is limited, and CSS editing is disabled unless the user opts to host the blog offsite or pays a fee for editing capabilities.

If you want to blog and not pay a dime, the choice between Wordpress and Blogger is difficult. If you already own a domain or have hosting, Wordpress is the obvious choice. This website is powered by Wordpress, and I frequently find myself recommending the tool over Blogger for its no-nonsense interface and powerful extensions.

I’m not convinced purchasing additional hosting/css editing via Wordpress is worth it however; my recommendation is to purchase your own hosting and domain, through a provider like Blue Host (my host), and building a wordpress blog on it. You get all the advantages of a custom domain, more than enough hosting to meet the needs of a personal site, and full discretion on layout and design. For around $6-7 a month, I strongly recommend this strategy (plus, when you have money involved, you are more likely to post on a regular basis).

If you blog, what tool do you use, and why?

I was reading an article yesterday morning in the Seattle Times about the recently announced search engine partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. The writers made the claim that to win in the search world, continuous innovation is the name of the game. I agree with this statement. Google wouldn’t have the market share they have today without being on top of their game.The author then went on to state that Google is #1 because it produces the best search results, a statement which I disagree. Don’t misunderstand me, Google is my preferred search engine, but I wouldn’t say it is the “best” in terms of search results.

Here is an easy test. Go to http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Type in your search query of choice. Then pick the column that best matches what you were looking for. Was your pick the search engine that you expected? Maybe, maybe not. Personally I found that Yahoo matched my searches best . Even so, the results vary on the keyword chosen and the information you are looking for. My point here is that each search engine works a little different, but none (at least between Google, Yahoo, and Bing) are significantly inferior. Similarly, people become less sensitive to marginal improvements in search technology, so simply having a slightly better search engine does not guarantee your market dominance. So how did Google get to be so strong? My theory is a stronger brand and a “whole product solution”. 

“Google it!”

Google is widely used as a verb, which shows the strength of the brand. They achieved all this without any extensive marketing efforts, while competitor Bing has launched a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to attempt the same (so far, with weaker results). Google also provides what is called a  whole product solution, or at least more so than Yahoo and Microsoft. Google is not just about search anymore. It contains a suite of services: Gmail, Docs, iGoogle, Analytics Reader, Calendar, the list goes on. Google has managed to recognize the habits and activities of its users, and developed its product to accompany a user’s entire internet experience. When your search engine provides all of these added value features, you are much less likely to switch search engines.

Between the strength of the Google brand and the complete solution that the company provides its users, the battle for producing the best search results becomes less crucial. My point is that there is more to Google’s success than simply search results. What do you think?

While watching my twitter feed this morning, I came across a tweet referencing the video below, which attempts to awaken the viewer to the “social media revolution”.

So what do you think? Is social media just a flash in the pan?