I have a new social media friend and no, I’m not talking about the tons of random friends requests you get on a daily basis. I’m talking about a piece of social networking software that can help you get your arms around the online social scene. I’m talking about Flock, the web browser that’s based off the Mozilla project.

I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.

According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”

As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.

For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.

The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.

A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.

The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.

Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.

Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.

Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.

Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Recently Paul Collier, author of “The Bottom Billion”, gave a talk on Ted.com where he outlined a high level plan to improve the lives of what he calls the “Bottom Billion” of people who live in developing countries and are unable to affect change to improve their situation given the current political and economic systems.

What Mr. Collier discusses is fascinating not only from a real world stand point, but his ideas also have some interesting implications in the online social networking world as well.

If you are unclear how to best use social networking sites or unsure of the direction of these sites, then watch this short video about the great need for social interaction among real world groups and you will begin to get a sense of how these systems might effect change on society and business online.

“Paul Collier studies the political and economic problems of the very poorest countries: 50 societies, many in sub-Saharan Africa, that are stagnating or in decline, and taking a billion people down with them. His book The Bottom Billion identifies the four traps that keep such countries mired in poverty, and outlines ways to help them escape, with a mix of direct aid and external support for internal change.

From 1998 to 2003, Collier was the director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group; he now directs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, where he continues to advise policymakers.”

Source: Paul Collier’s Profile on Ted.com

Leave me a comment after you watch this video and tell me how you think his ideas apply to social media and online social networking in general.

Speak soon,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Well, it’s been four days since I posted about BrightKite and now I’m in. Someone was kind enough to send me an invite. I’d like to give a big thanks to whoever it was. The invite didn’t tell me so unless you speak up, it will just have to be your secret.

I’m looking forward to exploring BrightKite and reporting back what I find. One thing I can already see is the use of Placemarks, which are like bookmarks for the common places that you go to all the time. You can text @work to a special number and that will let people know you’re at work. This is like a short hand way of relating information.

I especially like that I can connect my Twitter account to my BrightKite profile. The advantage to me is that I can post to one source and have it distributed to multiple places. I have my Twitter account connected to several other social networking sites, so when I update Twitter I am also updating these places around the web. With the explosion of social networking sites and the maturing social market, I think it’s extremely important to automate your connection points as much as possible. It’s not practical to think that someone can go around to every social site and update their friends on what their doing. But if all those sites are plugged together, then it becomes fast and easy to let people know what you’re up to.

Eventually I can see this format expanding into the OpenSocial platform to provide you with one centralized social profile, but that’s another post all together.

So thank you to whoever sent me the invite and oh, and I have three invites of my own to give away. So, if you’re looking for BrightKite invites, leave me a comment about how you plan to use BrightKite (include a real email address in the address field) and I’ll send you an invite. Comment spammers need not apply.

Sharing the love,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Online social networking is still a very young industry and because of that there is still a ton of room for new ideas that can stretch and grow the current social landscape.

BrightKite is a new social networking player that’s bringing fresh ideas to the table. BrightKite combines a Twitter like social update service with mobile technologies to create a better networking experience.

Through BrightKite you can update your followers similar to how you update followers on Twitter. But BrightKite adds the ability to update followers on your physical location as well as your activities. Knowing someone’s location can easily open up opportunities for meetings and it adds a real option for creating solid offline social interactions and not just online connections.

According to the BrightKit website:

“Brightkite is a location-based social network that enables people to take their online profiles with them into the real-world and make real-world friends. Users can see where their friends are and what they’re up to all while maintaining comprehensive degrees of privacy to non-friends. Depending on a user’s privacy setting they can also be open to meeting others nearby.“

By Invitation Only

The service is currently in beta and they’re only accepting new accounts by invitation. Anyone can sign up to receive an invitation, but there’s a waiting list, so be aware. You can get an account early if you can find someone who’ll give you an invite.

This viral way of building a user base is absolutely genius. Google did this same thing when they originally launched Gmail and it created a powerful sense of exclusiveness that made people want to get in even more.

Now BrightKite’s “by invitation only” beta program is doing the same thing. By limiting how many people can get in they are effectively increasing interest in the service and raising demand for membership.

In fact, some people have started giving out BrightKite invitations as promotional items. Technosailor has been giving out ten invitations at a time as part of his efforts to promote his District of Corruption podcast. This shows that restricting the supply on digital goods creates demand and promotes a truly digital economy.

Searching Google

As of this writing, if you search for BrightKite in Google you’ll find that there’s quite a conversation happening on Twitter. According to TwitterStat results for the keyword BrightKite, the buzz around the service has increased sharply over the last month.

A side note here is that Google is indexing Twitter posts on a regular basis and people are using Twitter as a tool for getting into the search index. The search result for BrightKite is a good example of how Google is pulling in Twitter posts as part of the search index.

By Invitation Only

One interesting point about BrightKite is that even though membership is limited to invitations during their beta program, their overall system is still open for viewing and search. You can search for people by name, or geographic location and get back results complete with Google maps and comments.

This is another fantastic move by BrightKite because it lets people to see what their missing by not being on the inside. This increases desire for membership without increasing the supported size of your user base until your ready to open the doors to everyone.

Perspective

BrightKite promises to offer a better networking option than Twitter by adding location mapping which should help everyone create better connections. Twitter is good, but 140 characters can only go so far.

BrightKite is also showing their creativity and social awareness by generating buzz and interest in their service before they even open the doors to the public.

And no, I don’t have an invite. So, if you want to share the love, contact me and I’ll be sure to give you plug in my next update.

At home in my pajamas,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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I’m on the road to Austin Texas today to visit the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Conservatory so this Microtween will be really short. Last time you learned that you can get a variety of Twitter stats by individual from TweetStats.com.

Today, let’s find out who the top followed people are on Twitter so we can begin to explore trends and look for people we might be interested in following. Remember, when we follow people they are inclined to do the same which in turn raises our perceived value. For a good example of this be sure to read my article on how Obama and Hillary are using Twitter for their political campaigns.

To find the top people on Twitter we’ll be using Twitterholic. According to Twitterholic, “Our twittastic robots scan the Twitter public timeline for new users to watch. A few times a day, we calculate individual statistics for each user in our database.”

Twitterholic provides a top 100 list of most followed people on Twitter. This gives us a nice list of prospective people to watch and analyze for trends. It also gives us the chance to drill down into their lists and look for people and trends that might be interesting.

Perspective:

Dig around with this tool and the other tools we’ve talked about to do your own research. See if you can find interesting connections between people and look for valuable conversations. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, but the frequency and nature of the messages may tell you all you need to know.

The next Microtween will be about how to find people to follow and we’ll talk about why you might want to target specific groups of people to follow.

Do you know why people are following you?

Off to the flowers,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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