Social Days

We announced this morning that Powered, Inc. has acquired crayon – here’s the official press release http://bit.ly/4rIR1q. We’re very excited about this merger and where it takes us, especially as the roll-up also includes two other great companies, Drillteam and StepChange.

I’m getting a lot of questions about what this means for me, personally. Immediately, it means that I have more resources to do my job and support our current client roster. Our services have exponentially expanded, and I’m having a lot of fun getting to meet everyone on the new team. I’m also hoping that this frees up some of my time to speak, write and learn more.

And maybe, that means time to blog again.

Some additional posts:
Greg Verdino
Joseph Jaffe
MediaPost
Powered, Inc.
AdWeek

I’ve been really impressed by the team at Revision3 this year and their commitment to great content and the way that commitment comes from the leadership on down. This is a good interview with Rev3 founder, Kevin Rose (by Sarah Lacy), on what’s next for Digg, what’s interesting to him at TC50 and what happened to Pownce (a site I really liked at it’s inception).

When I checked into my Google Reader this morning, I immediately saw a couple of new things. The first (seen here on a post from Daring Fireball) was that 14 people had “liked” this post, with a link added at the bottom to “like” something too. Very Facebook.

The second is the ability to search for people who are sharing – a feature I’ve wanted for a while. So, ‘scuse me while I go “like” some posts…

Yeah TechCrunch featured it, but as usual with anything of value lately, I found this through John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Pinboard, which calls itself the social bookmarking site for introverts (or the anti-social book marking site) has come out of beta – it’s what Delicious was before Yahoo bought it and put it in developer hell.

Features: (from the website):

• Easy import and export in del.icio.us format.
• Fast site with less clutter.
• Nightly database backups to S3 (welcome, Ma.gnolia users!)
• Lightweight to read status for things you want to look at later
• Private bookmarks and private tags
• Easier bulk editing

The one thing I love? You need to pay to play – and it’s a sliding scale. The earlier you get in, the less you pay (the formula is number of users * $0.001) so join today. Yesterday it jumped from @2.91 to $4.33 and still climbing (although I’m sure there’s a cap coming).  The fee will defray the costs of running the site and also discourage spammers. There’s also a blog and a Google developer group where you can interact with the developer on bugs and requests.

Pinboard is a simple tool that does exactly what it promised without feature bloat or clutter.

I’ve been having some issues with Social Days because of a plugin I was testing – it corrupted a bunch of stuff and I was unable to access drafts, some plugins or upgrade WP at all. So I exported and was able to set up everything as good as new on a MediaTemple account I’ve had for testing. This did not come as easy as hoped, due to some sleepy stupidity on my part.

I have to say that the MT support people were fantastic and helped over and above scope – and I really appreciate all of their effort. So consider this a STRONG recommendation from someone who uses a number of different hosting services – use MediaTemple.

Thanks again, guys!

…and by “we”, I mean me and my fellow-crayonista, (and social media Boy-Toy) Greg Verdino. Not only are we going to hang with the TechSet, maybe hit some Karaoke, and be social in a way that, well, isn’t me, but we have actual WORK to be done!

Two of crayon’s clients, ooVoo and Panasonic, will each be participating at SXSW.

I’ll be one of the people staffing the booth (#231!) for ooVoo, where they’ve announced the official debut of its open API - so they’ll be lots of demos and question-answering. And all you developers? Ask about the App Store that ooVoo’s putting together to showcase your applications – oh, and also make some money. Another sneak peak? Contests for the best application (and there are multiple categories) – if you ask, I bet someone will even suggest some apps to start. BTW – I’ll be looking for an iPhone app, once Apple opens the camera to video.

Also – another crayon client, Panasonic’s Living in HD Community, is one of the sponsors of the live Diggnation event on Saturday Night at Stubbs (see Event info/RSVP here and here). I’m really enjoying working with the Revision3 guys (Hi, Ryan!) and am really excited to show off the community (and announce some cool contests!) to this audience.

So – if you’re going to SXSW, let me know, it would be great to say Hi!

I’ve had a Flickr Pro account for over 2 years. There’s been this fantasy that I’m going to buy one of those amazing cameras, take a class and carry it with me everywhere (like CC Chapman and Brian Solis). So far, not so much.

Then I bought a Diana Camera this year – a quirky, plastic, “toy camera” that’s been a lot of fun and taught me a lot about patience in my instant-gratification life. But still, not so much my everyday companion.

I love my iPhone – and I’m an AppStore addict – so I constantly download, add (and subtract) applications, and was so excited to find an app called “ToyCamera”.

ToyCamera takes the kind of quirky, light-leaks filled pictures that I get with my Diana, without the wait for photo development. I think the developer, Takayuki Fukatsu, is an amazing talent, and has created an app that surprises you with every shot. The filters included in this app include:

• Vintage Green effect
• Vintage Yellow effect
• Vintage Warm effect
• Low Saturation
• High Saturation
• Toning Sepia
• Black and White
• HiCon Black and White

It also has an uploader to the BigCanvas Photoshare – which I don’t use – as well as a Flickr group.

This month I’ve made a commitment to take 5 pictures of wherever I am each morning and post them to Flickr, no matter how I feel they turn out. You can follow my progress here (and this one is my favorite so far). Takayuki Fukatsu has also made a couple of other fantastic apps, OldCamera (Black and White pictures), SepiaCamera (just as it sounds) and QuadCamera, a really neat effect that takes 4 quick pics and puts them in a number of different ways, stacked, side-by-side, etc. All of them are just as addictive as ToyCamera.

To upload to Flickr, I’ve been using the application by XK72, Mobile Fotos. Mobile Fotos allows you to view photostreams, favorites, tags, sets and groups, as well as search for photos, read and make comments, or see other Flickr members photos.And of course the easy uploader – I can upload to groups as well as my photostream.

Since this is a relatively new passion, I’ll see if this sticks beyond my alloted commitment. But it feels like it will. And I’m looking forward to seeing it in action at the next conferences I’m at.

Are there other apps I should check out? Any tutorials? Let me know.

Update 1.24: Just released – an online companion to QuadCamera, QuadAnimator, which takes your QC pictures and saves it as an animated GIF file.  Fun!

I’m going to be highlighting some of my favorite things of 2008 this week, and I thought I’d start out with this video. What could be better than Christopher Walken cooking?

Man Makes Chicken with Pears

From the Not column in the Dead or Not game, my crayonista collegue Greg Verdino brings you Genesis (the ProgRock group, Not Bible chapter):

Oh Phil Collins, you balding seer of online social networking.  How could you have possibly known that thirty years after Genesis released …And Then There Were Three… a band of raging Twitterati would be anguishing over who to twit and who to qwit? OK — technically speaking, Mike Rutherford wrote the lyrics to “Follow You Follow Me” and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking of Twitter, but I’ve got a soft spot for bald guys (or a bald spot for soft guys) so I hope you’ll let me off easy…Greg Verdino: Marketing, Media & Trends, Dec 2008

You should read the whole article. He goes on to talk about who he follows on Twitter and why. I’m always interested in people’s “Twitter Philosophies” (for lack of a more pretentious term) and I love seeing the rational behind who gets follow’d back – so how do YOU decide?

I don’t have a set criteria – I look at people’s profiles and tweets and try to see why they wanted to connect with me. Or if they bring the funny.

And as for Greg, well – was Genesis REALLY Genesis after Peter Gabriel left??

Today on the Pownce Blog, Leah Culver announced that the service would be closing in a few weeks and that the team would be moving to SixApart, makers of MovableType, TypePad and Vox blogging software. I was really excited about Pownce when it began because it seemed to take the next logical step from where Twitter was and enabled actual sharing of files and media. Perfect for my team and making a more social-enabled workflow. Immediately, I signed up for a Pro Account, to show support (although when it came time to renew, it was difficult and I quickly gave up) and distributed most of my invites. At the time it was the “New Shiny Thing” so a lot of Twitter conversations ported to Pownce. Unfortunately, even before coming out of beta, most ported back.

Acccording to the SixApart announcement, the incredible Leah Culver and Mike Malone are joining the SA engineering team (I see that as hugely important as the annoucement last week that Rael Dornfest is joining the Twitter team). Huge coup for 6A. Many people are taking that to mean that Pownce will be absorbed into the SixApart universe in some fashion, but I don’t think so. Too many microblogging platforms exist, all of which can be imported into any platform – why have another? Especially when there are so many features that I can see this team producing, adding immediate value to 6A – especially to TypePad!

It seems that Pownce Pro users will get their own free TypePad account for a year and that Powncers are able to export their posts and can then import them to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

Thanks to the Pownce Team for all of their work and a platform that I think might have been slightly aheaad of its time – I’m looking forward to seeing where SixApart goes from here.