Instead of screwing with the granularity of your main page or account, confusing and aggravating the users, all that Facebook has to do is have two separate pages for each user: one completely private (except for those one chooses to be friends with), and the other completely open and connected to the open web. They already have this feature in “Pages.” All they have to do is tell people that this is your private page, and this other is your public page. To encourage users to create a public page, make the public page the only place that is searchable in Google or the open web. If only 10% of users choose to have a public page, you’ve got an automatic Twitter in one day. But to encourage even further adoption, innovate and iterate the public pages like crazy, and also tell the users, they must have a public page in order to search the public database. If the only way people can search and more importantly gain value from the Facebook public database, and the network effect that goes with it, is to have a public facing page, I can guarantee you 90% of users will adopt it.

What does this approach do?

• It restores user trust. If you’re main account is completely locked down, not even searchable, you will also gain more users. My sister doesn’t belong to Facebook. She doesn’t trust it. Maybe it’s too late, but if trust were restored, she and millions of others, who don’t even consider Facebook and option, may join. But even if they don’t, you’ve restored trust in your main user base.
• When users have a clear choice, they are going to contribute more value to the eco system. I recently heard Deepak Chopra quote, “A person convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.” This manipulation of users to “trick” them into sharing things in public, only makes them more reticent, if not in fact close their account, to share anything useful.
• You’ve simplified things. Not all those “sliders” to give everyone a headache over their account settings. The main account is completely private except for friends. The public page is completely open. No frustration or headaches. The simplicity will make the value of the network effect and the eco-system, and possibly even the number of users, explode.

When Facebook aquired FriendFeed last year, I thought this was the approach they were going to take. Dead simple. Everyone would have their private account and then a separate public page that would essentially be FriendFeed, with all its value of search algorithms that I had thought simply nailed Social search, and would not only prove fruitful to a business model, but also provide even more value to the user. The perfect recipe for “win, win”, the exact recipe for applying Google’s search model to Social Search.

Instead, they seemed, and even more so now after F8, to move in the opposite direction. Screwing with everyone’s main account, violating that sacred trust that enabled them to get such a large user base in the first place, and what is more, doing nothing with “Pages.” And now it seems after F8, “Pages” are almost being discouraged in favor of the “Likes” implementation. I guess they figure that anyone with a public page already has a website, and instead, why not just encourage them to virtually turn that open page into a Facebook page with the “Likes” implementation? Sounds good. But what are the implications? What happens when I the individual user clicks the “Likes” button? Is all my information being shared with third parties? What happens when that gets out, and every headline across the country screams, “Don’t click the ‘Like’ button!” Turns what might have been a useful thing for not only the user, but also the Facebook brand, into a liability, not to mention simply just bad Karma.

I don’t know Marc Zuckerburg, or know what his values are. If they are indeed, “evil,” a term the industry labels a company that tries to make their money through manipulation, then I guess this post is like talking to a tree. For even if they do “Correct Course,” as Dana Boyd, Tim O’Reilly, John Battelle, and many other smart prognosticators predict they will do, does it matter? This is indeed one of the salutary effects of a free market: Consumer push back and the realization that the big money is in making the “right” choices, forces a company to change or be in danger of losing its business. In a true free market, what’s right for the company is aligned with what is right for the consumer. But still, if Facebook is the “it” company of the next decade, and only the market is forcing them to make the right choices, the internet won’t hold in its hands a very transcendent leader. “He who is forced against his will, is of the same opinion still.”

The internet and the communications revolution is truly a place of infinite possibilities, almost a metaphor itself for the “Quantum Effect,” which states that, even in a complete vacuum, even in complete nothingness, (which is not to be imagined as a patch of empty space, because in nothingness, even space doesn’t exist), the idea of symmetry must exist, and the slightest break in it, which must occur, leads to an explosion of infinite proportions.

I would argue that Facebook would be of greater value and in turn be capable of making even more money than they ever imagined, by doing it the old fashioned way: providing value, innovating, and being completely transparant. Good will translates into cash in all sectors of a truly free market, but even exponentially so in the freest of free markets, one where “choice” and “free will” is the highest value: the internet. The Communications Revolution.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Neither Twitter, Facebook, nor Apple Will Survive the Open Web
2. Facebook’s FriendFeed Acquisition Could Be the Best Thing to Happen For Both Services and It’s “Sharecroppers”
3. Advice to Myspace: Open Up Immediately

I was thinking about this subject tonight, that there is no way such closed systems as Twitter and Facebook can survive the force of the open Internet in the coming years with the price of data, storage, and bandwidth all marching toward near zero cost, much less be an Eco System or “Platform.”

As these communication and computation costs lower each
year, it will drive so much innovation, the walls will be torn down.

See, what is exactly the value proposition of a closed network such as Twitter or Facebook?

A) The Network Effect.

The Network Effect, or “Metcalfe’s Law” says that the value of a network equals the number of users it has squared. Obviously, the more users the more exponentially the value of said network increases. Facebook has 400million users. Twitter around 50million. You might think Facebooks network effect is tremendously greater than Twitters, but Facebook is a much more closed network. On average a typical user may have 100 “friends” or network connections. On Twitter you can connect to virtually anyone on the network simply by “following” them. It doesn’t have to be a reciprocal agreement. Everyone on the network is accessible to you. This means Twitter’s more open Network is of far greater value than Facebook’s larger but more closed Network. That’s why Facebook is in a tremendous frenzy to open their network more through “Pages” “Facebook Connect” and changing the default privacy settings.

So if Twitter’s vastly smaller, but vastly more open network has more Network Effect value what does that mean? The more open a “network” is, the more valuable that it is. This means there is an incentive to build a completely open network. So one will be built, or shall we say, not built, but merely “facilitated” because the act of building one implies some degree of closed. The completely open network already exists. It’s called the Internet.

We all know how many users and how much traffic Facebook has every month. They say its like an upward hockey stick. But how much value are Twitter and Facebook giving off each month?

And how much traffic and how many users does Internet, Inc. have?

Basically you trade your identity and your content for their network effect. Also they throw in their bandwidth, storage, and programming. As of now this has value, plenty of it and that’s why you see the spike in these “networks’” traffic.

But now the process of them selling you down the river begins. They figure they’re giving you network effect, bandwidth, and storage for free in exchange for them selling your content. Sounds fine, right?

But the problem is innovation will drill a hole into any walled garden. Quickly, innovation will fork around sand boxed networks and find ways to connect people without them giving up their identity or their content. Each day, storage and bandwidth prices drop. They are heading rapidly to zero. So that part of the economic proposition is losing weight very quickly as well.

Twitter isn’t the network. Facebook isn’t the network. The network is the network.

Even the mighty Apple, as much as I am blown away by this iPad I’m typing on, can’t survive this onslaught of the open web. For instance, tonight I was watching a TV show on the wonderful ABC app and it occurred to me that I was being forced to watch the commercial because I couldn’t minimize the browser. it felt Pavlovian to me, being trained by the nature of the device, forcing me to behave in a way I didn’t want or like.

I don’t think the user will put up with theses strategies for long, and I’m sure the open web will come to the rescue.

It also occurred to me tonight that Gmail keeps 5 years and 25,000 of my emails forever available and searchable and yet Twitter only let’s me go back and see a few weeks of my Tweets, with a substandard if not plain archaic search system.

That’s just plain lack of innovation. And Facebook is hardly better.

Technology, driven by innovation as it is, is a poor place for a lock in business model. Technology doesn’t want to be trapped, and will eventually fork around it’s captors.

Sent from my iPad

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2. Facebook’s Privacy Solution is So Simple
3. Facebook’s FriendFeed Acquisition Could Be the Best Thing to Happen For Both Services and It’s “Sharecroppers”

Paul Thurrott on Crush It! and Gary Vanyerchuck

Link to listen on iPhone

I love Gary Vaynerchuck, his personality, his passion, what he’s done, and what he’s doing. So at the end of last week’s Window’s Weekly podcast #139 with Paul Thurott and Leo Laporte, I was excited to hear that his Audible recommendation was Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, the first book by Gary, which explains his how he turned his New Jersey wine store into a 70 million dollar business using Social Media, and how everyone can turn their passion into, if not a career, at least a living. This is because of the huge paradigm shift that’s happening right now in the communications revolution. Billions of dollars of advertising money is rapidly exiting “old media” and flowing into the new media world of the web. Advertising is becoming social and niche, and the advertisers are more and more diverting their budgets from the dying old media model of unengagement, the new media model of social, internet, and engaged, with the overriding theme of “real.” They are doing this because it is where the future is headed, or maybe I should say where the present is right now. They are getting more bang from their buck from interested, highly engaged, and authentic audiences, who themselves are becoming not just the consumers, but also the creators of the content that is informing the world.

Some highlights:

• “If you have any thoughts about getting ahead in life, I think you need to listen to this podcast, even if you can’t stand wine, because this guy is absolutely fascinating” – Paul Thurott
• “If I could boil it down to the simplest thing, what this book is all about, its that you need to really care about it” (i.e., the work you are doing) – P.T.
• “Anyone can start a blog. Anyone can start a website. Anyone can start a podcast. The trick is to keep doing it.” - P.T.
• “And the reason I keep doing what it is I’m doing, is because I love technology, and I love this work” - P.T.
• “I stick with things…er I should say I stick with the things I really care about. And you have to have a passion for it. You have to really care.” - P.T.
• “This is an incredible book by an incredible guy, and someone I don’t know, but respect so much.” - P.T.
• “He’s the real deal, and the essential point of this is right. The prescription in this book is absolutely right on.” – Leo Laporte
• “And you hit the nail on the head. There are times when this is going to be tough, whatever it is you choose to do is going to be tough, its going to be slow going. You may not get the rewards you want, but if you do something that you are passionate about, it will carry you through those times and you will succeed.” – Leo Laporte
• “You could jump start your life with this one. It could be that book that you go “Wow, I wouldn’t be here today, if I hadn’t read this book” – Leo Laporte

Related posts:

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This was done by Michael Sean Wright, of NiceFishFilms and Marc Ostrick, as they follow Scoble through CES in his quest to find the perfect equipment to build his own HD streaming studio. Like they say in the film this is really like a quest, a quest of merging “old media power with the heart of a technologist.” Through the journey we get to see some of the coolest cameras and displays at CES 2010 and get a feel for the conference as a whole. It’s really exciting. Robert Scoble is the No.1 influencer or “trust agent,” as Chris Brogan has termed it, and has the No.1 credibility, on the internet for technology, web services and social media. Louis Gray and Leo Laporte are a very close second. I would highly recommend following him, at least on Twitter if nothing else, even if you aren’t in the field of technology as I am not (I’m a writer and musician) as he will keep you informed on the coolest and most relevant trends. I have found so many valuable services (Soundcloud, Mylikes, to name just two) that are relevant and add value to my daily life just by following Scoble. He makes the best tech related videos on the internet. If Scoble interviews them, you know they are legit. Don’t worry about if you catch every one of his tweets. (He tweets a lot.) Just dip in and out of the stream and your guaranteed to find some serendipity.

This video is originally here at Eguiders.com, a beautiful looking blog, maybe one of the most beautiful I’ve seen, and worth following two, if you are interested in this paradigm of convergence and the overthrow of old media by new media, in other words as Time referred to as “You.”

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Comment!

Search for and visit sites and forums with topics that you are interested in. Read the posts, and make thoughtful, sincere comments. Of course put your name and site address in the comment form. This “puts you out there,” gets you exposure and drives traffic to your site. The better the comment, the more traffic. It’s a win win. You’re adding valuable content to another’s site, learning more information about your topic and in return getting a link back(more link juice) and at least some more direct traffic. Join Disqus. Giving your comments a social edge. This will make your commenting more effective, socialized, and it will archive them, putting you out there even more. Read all of the other comments. Any interesting ones? Visit their website and check them out. You may find an additional source of information and inspiration. Good Karma to have them perhaps visit you. *An added benefit: If your comment is bringing up an additional angle and happens to be a particularly long comment, you have the makings of an automatic new blog post to boot. The more blog posts you have equals incrementally more Page Rank which inevitably leads to more traffic.

Blog Posting

What are you really, really interested in, especially at this moment? Don’t worry about SEO, or will it make money. That’s editorial stuff that you can come back to later, but first you’ve got to get the lyrical part of your soul out first before you bring the editorial part in (copywriting, SEO, monetization strategies, etc.) You put those latter things first and it might work, but you won’t be happy, and it won’t be worth it. Let’s start with small baby steps first. What is the one thing you would like to do right now for the next hour, next two hours, whole morning or afternoon? Sure there’s things you need to do, and you make a list or read a book about getting organized and you do them, but in a relaxed way. The things you need to do, however small or insignificant they seem, can make terrific blog posts. You can turn problems into opportunities. For instance, let’s say you have a problem. (The more specific the better) You’ve searched and searched Google and found no easy or direct solution, but since it must be done, you do manage to find a way to figure it out, and you can explain it more clearly and simply than others. Bingo! You’ve just found an opportunity to help others, and you are also solving your own problem in a more creative, productive way. People will relate to you more than the experts who know what to do, but speak a lingo no one understands, or for whatever reason want to toy and withhold the information. And that builds trust as well. “Make a virtue out of necessity,” as Shakespeare said. So yes, the things you need to do, you must do, and the more of a challenge they are, the more of an opportunity they can be to find a better way and for you to express that better way to the world.

But back to what you want to do. After the needs have been met, surely you can find a couple hours a day for yourself? Like golf? Shoot some video of yourself during your next round. Who knows, you might just hit a hole in one! Thank that shot caught on video might not make the rounds on Youtube? New media shouldn’t be a distraction. It should be a new way of expressing yourself, and it can be a psychological tool really. Think about it. Got a guilt complex about doing the things you want to do? New media gives you a channel, a focus, to make doing what you like, important. It’s a long tail that will make that little complex crumble. and that’s a great mixture. Relax. Take some breaths. What one little thing, and I don’t care what it is (shopping? ladies there are a lot of men out there starving for an education on how to shop well!) lowers your blood pressure for a few hours, relaxes you (cooking, reading, working out, meditating, hunting or fishing?) These topics have audiences out there just begging for a fresh voice that will educate, entertain, and inspire them. And doing the things you love to do will inspire you too. The Google bots are being tuned for fresher, newer, different takes on the every day things we do in life. Really, Google and the other services of their ilke are working on the Search & Engine part of the equation. The Optimization comes out of your natural exuberance. All that silicon is just begging for a real, natural, spontaneous experience, and the deepest part of you is too. It gives us all a chance to inspire and be inspired, to fulfill and be fulfilled. So the best step is to step away from that computer (unless its computers your really interested in) and do what really inspires you. Theirs an audience for that, but find the thing that you most want to do even if there wasn’t.

Related posts:

1. How to Find Something To Blog About
2. Increase Visitor Length Time on Your Blog
3. An Easy Step to Increase Your Blog’s Authenticity

Nothing beats good, orginal content, but also nothing beats knowing that you are using the best techniques and procedures, for getting that content recognized, for inspiring you and your subconscious mind, to produce even more great, orginal content. When the bases are covered, the inspiration for hitting a homer increases.

Your ego can be a dragon that stops you, but your subconscious’ desire for some recognition is not a self serving type of desire. It’s an affect of the higher goal of being the most helpful and useful that you can be. In this case recognition can mean authentication, and also in the virtuous circle motif, authentication can lead to well deserved recognition. Maybe a perpetual motion machine exists after all. Here are some sites with information and tools to reach the maximal audience who is interested, or who may not even know they are interested, until they find you, in content related to your work, so that your subconscious has the most motivation to be original and to follow its bliss, which ironically leads to even better content. In other words, winning awards, can make your higher self work harder. Getting a No.1 record, for instance, usually makes a musician practice his guitar more. A “break” means you are given the luxury of more time to spend on your craft.

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ – Official News on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index. Google webmaster blog is well known as highly informative and as being reputable. And why not? It’s straight from the horse’s mouth, Google itself.
• http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/ – Bing has a good webmaster blog too.
• http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp – Google has just started a video channel for webmasters. Plenty of videos up already to answer common questions.
• http://www.seobook.com/blog –  by Aaron Wall. Learn.Rank.Dominate. They sell an SEO training program for $150, but also have a free blog with lots of free, valuable information. Looks legit and reputable.
• Highrankings.com – by Jill Whalen. They also primarily offer a paid for, but legit, consulting service. But there are lots of free articles on the site with a lot of great information.
• Yahoo Search Blog – Yahoo’s equivalent of the Google and Bing Webmaster blogs. A look inside the world of search from the people at Yahoo!
• SEO Moz –  Seo Moz serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help every SEO to be the best they can be.
• Blackwater Ops – Also primarily a paid consulting offering, but also many free articles and information to get your juices flowing.
• NowSourcing – Social Media Marketing explained. You’ll tend to find original content relevant to social media here, not just another top 10 list. One guy said about this service, “The only SEO that has been able to show me actual results”
• Virante – They have a lot of Free expert SEO tools here.
• Century House – Eating competitors for breakfast.
• The Blog of Matt Cutts – Most engaged Google engineer on the social networks, namely Twitter. He’s currently head of Google’s webspam team, but he’s also worked for years on search quality there. He knows and shares a lot of useful tips and information. Great, nice guy. He would be what Chris Brogan has termed a “Trust Agent.”
• Search Engine Land –  Must read news about search marketing and search engines. One of the best sites for Search related news.
• Google Blogoscoped – A site that covers Google primarily and updates you on new developments there especially as its related to social media, marketing, search.
• Google Operating System – Unofficial news and tips about Google.
• The Digital Point Forum – A great forum discussing all the search engines, marketing, and design & development. One guy said about this forum, “I’ve implemented some of their recommendations thus far and I feel like it’s already making a difference.”
• Google Webmaster Central Webmasters/Site Owner’s Help –  Google’s HTML documentation for Webmaster Essentials, Tools, Relationships, and Sitemaps.
• Google Webmaster Central Help Forum – All about crawling, indexing, and ranking, plus tools and even chit-chat.
• Eric Goldman – Specifically the legal aspects of search, but also a lot of broader information and observations that are worthwhile.
• SEO by the Sea – Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services, Consulting, and Research. Also talks about patents related to SEO/SEM search. This and the last are really good sources of information about blogging in general too.
• The Google Cache – Must read SEO blog. Web Marketing, SEO, CPC/PPC Blog.
• A simple Delicious Search for “SEO” – Search list results about SEO provided by Delicious.
• Search Engine Guide – The small business guide to search marketing. Small business help for website promotion and increased search engine traffic. Great advice from solid writers.
• Small Business SEM – Because not everyone can throw thousands of dollars at the ‘How do we market ourselves online?’ question… Also featuring the SEO Success Pyramid.
• Link Moses – Link building strategies.14 years of advice, rants, and tips on link building strategy and content publicity.
• Link Building Best Practices – Q&A with Eric Ward, aka LinkMoses, Questions, answers, opinions and advice on link building best practices based on his personal experiences as a content publicist for thousands of websites from 1994 until today.
• Yoast – specializing in WordPress SEO. Tweaking websites, from search engine rankings to speed and user experience. Joost de Valk and guests provide tips on optimizing WordPress, Magento, search engine rankings, analytics, and website performance. They also offer SEO tools, Magento extensions, and WordPress plug-ins to make it all possible.
• SEO Quake – a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.
• Web Page FX -WebpageFX is a leader in web design, web development, Internet marketing, ecommerce,flash design, and search engine optimization. We offer web solutions worldwide with a specific emphasis on companies in the Central Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic regions.
• World Wide Web Consortium – for brushing up on the compliance side of things (even if it gets a bit technical). It’s the standards by which the web runs, from the horses mouth, so to speak.
• QuickSprout – by Neil Patel. How to Optimize your blog for Search Engines. “Over the past few years I worked with 30 of the top 100 blogs to help them increase their traffic. The thing that all of these blogs have in common is that they have great content. But one thing that most of these blogs didn’t do right is leverage search engines.”( *WARNING – This is a great blogpost, and the guy looks legit and his blog as whole seems like an awesome resource, but I put that bit of code he mentions between the <TITLE> tags in the header of my WordPress Blog, and it broke my site. Was down for a whole day. Just taking the code out didn’t work. I had to COMPLETELY RE-INSTALL, a major headache. Maybe I have a crappy theme. Don’t doubt it, its free, and I know WordPress and PHP are possessed, but still a WORD OF WARNING about that CODE.)
• Black Hat World – An SEO forum and community.
• SEO Book for Bloggers – The blogger’s guide to SEO. What Google knows about your blog.
• Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Michael Gray became involved in web development and website management in 1998. He was Webmaster for a major specialty retailer, helping create their website presence and growing their online sales from less than $10,000 a month to over $25 million in annual web sales.
• WordPress TV – WordPress SEO and Optimization strategies. An outstanding presentation.
• Yoast WordPress SEO – The definitive guide to higher rankings for your blog by Yoast. 2009 Semmy Winner.
• Dragon Search – DragonSearch is a search engine marketing company with offices in New York City and Kingston, New York in the Hudson Valley region specializing in a wide range of search engine marketing consulting for online marketing and advertising ventures of all website and industry types.
• StomperNet – This one is PAID ONLY, but it’s folks have been recommended by reputable people so I thought I would still include it. Stomping the Search Engines. You will know SEO inside and out because when it comes to teaching SEO for business owners, no one knows it better than StomperNet.
• Confidential SEO Secrets Book – Revised and expanded August 2009. This is a book, so again, its not free, but came recommended. By Allen Harkleroad.
• Flowtown – How to use Social Media to expand your SEO horizons.
• SEO Mash – A mash up of a plethra of SEO, blogging, and Website resources.
• Alltop – the mega-aggregator from Guy Kawasaki and company has an SEO category
• OnReact – A real time feed for everything in the Social Media Sphere that gets voted up via social media services such as Twitter.
• Wiep – an internet marketing blog with link building as the main dish. Different link building strategies get discussed here, as well as several other search engine optimization related subjects.
• Blind Five Year Old – a product of A.J. Kohn, an experienced marketing executive with a successful track record spanning nearly 20 years.The name of the blog comes from his search engine optimization (SEO) philosophy, which is to treat search engines like they are blind five year olds.
• Wafer Scale – SEO tips for your blog, and bloggin tips to increase your traffic.

Do you have any more suggestions that I can add to the list? I would love to hear from you.

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2. The Best Commenting Engine for Your Blog
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*Update 10/28/09 – You know something cool that I just noticed: The post you make on FriendFeed itself gets indexed on Google. Type into Google: Increasing Blog Exposure. My Friendfeed Post is No.1! At least as of now. That’s not a bad keyword to rank No.1 on. Now its not a direct link to this post, but a direct link to the post I made in FriendFeed that has a link to this very post. It may be because there are 4 “Likes” and a few comments on the post itself that give it that extra juice, but that’s good if Google takes that into consideration because it’s using FriendFeed’s meta data to point to more relevant information. I may have mentioned it before, but by posting to FriendFeed you also get the benefit of an automatic back link. Same for Twitter. Oh, I would also say, make a Facebook “page” for your blog and post there too. I’m assuming since “pages” are public that they are indexed too, but I’m not sure on that point. Still it can’t hurt. You can also look for Facebook “Groups” that relate to your topic and post there, but you don’t get any media to put with it and you have to do them individually one by one. I’m hoping that since Facebook bought FriendFeed, they’ll be adding some it’s functionality there soon. Because Facebook has almost as many uniques as Google itself does! Massive untapped potential!

If you’re not a member already, join FriendFeed, a free microblogging network that is like the Twitter that we always wished that were. FriendFeed has a number of cool features absent in Twitter, namely in line media, uploading files, way better search, and for the purposes of this blog post, most importantly “Groups.”

Groups in FriendFeed is like a regular account but narrowed to a specific topic and most of the groups, once you join, allow anyone to post to them. So when you have finished a blog post go into FriendFeed and search for groups around your topic. You go into “browse/edit groups” and then at the top right there’s a link to “Find Groups” in which you can type a search term.

For instance when I release a new song I’ve recorded, I search for groups around music and join them. The other day I released a new song and did just that. There were a number of Groups concerning Music, some with thousands of members, some with hundreds, some with just a few. I chose to join 10 groups to start, there are many more, that I will probably add later.

Here’s the cool part: You only have to post one time to add the post to as many groups as you want. It’s like Twitter but you get more text to write, I think around 250 characters, and you can upload a photo and or a media file (in my case a song) with the post.

And as opposed to Twitter where you have to depend on the number of followers you have, and even then, there’s probably on a few percent of those who may be interested in the particular topic that you’ve written about that day, with Groups on FriendFeed, the members of those Groups don’t have to be following you to see the post, and they are already interested in the topic, so that even in a small group of only 20 or so, you’re going to get more engagement.

So the benefit with posting to FriendFeed Groups is that you can post just one time and get in front of an interested audience automatically, with the added benefits of a photo, media, and more text to grab their attention. Also, FriendFeed doesn’t shorten your link, so that viewers are more likely to feel safer and click it.

Now the drawback is that FriendFeed is small, but not too small (around a million uniques per month), and the topics and by its nature the membership leans more towards the tech arena. So for instance a topic like “Blogging” which is what this blog post is about it, has a lot of Groups, but a topic like “Knitting” may have very few or none at all (I haven’t checked) But I did have no problem finding quite a few groups around Music and Wine, the topic of a couple of my recent blog posts.

So depending on the topic this step may get you from quite a lot, to only a small amount of extra exposure. But with the ease with which its done, and the level of engagement that follows, its more than well worth it.

Also, it adds you some Google juice because the FriendFeed pages and Groups (unless they are private) aren’t behind a walled garden and are optimized for search. Plus you’ll be part of a like minded community to engage with, make new contacts, and increase your knowledge.

Oh, and did I also tell you that you’re post will automatically be Tweeted to your Twitter account by FriendFeed, if you so choose, as well?

Related Articles:

1. How to Find Something to Blog About
2. Increase Visitor Length Time on Your Blog
3. An Easy Step to Increase Your Blog’s Authenticity
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5. The No. #1 Skill Needed To Become a Successful Blogger
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3. How to Find Something To Blog About

Update 11/7/09* OK, it will halfway work, or 4/5ths work in 2.0 if you go into Customize Profile, select “No Theme” and then add the code below into the CSS box. But the damn thing is, you have to manually enter it. Won’t let you copy and paste, at least not on my Mac. And then you hit publish and it will say, “You have some custom CSS in your Advanced Edit that may not look right with this theme. Remove the custom CSS?” And you say no, keep the Custom CSS. Then when you publish the majority of your page will be transparent, but that big blue Myspace header is still there. I don’t know how to get rid of that. You can check out my page here: http://myspace.com/stephenkp and my music page which is still on 1.o here: http://myspace.com/stephenpickering

Update 11/7/09*If you haven’t guessed already or wanted to throw rocks at me in the parking lot, this code only works on Myspace 1.0. I just started playing around with Myspace 2.0 today and it doesn’t accept CSS code in the various info boxes that 1.0 did. From my brief playing around, I’ve found that you can sort of kinda do it by putting the URL of your image in the all of the places under “Advanced Edit” or you can import an image if you right click the URL box (Control+Click on a Mac) but I can’t seem to get rid of the massive blue Myspace banner up top, unless I choose the “Snoop Dog” theme, but in which case it lowers my photo and info bar too much. The whole thing doesn’t look as clean either as each “module” and “content” breaks off the continuity of the image. I have a solid red image that’s tiled. I can imagine if you had a photograph, as I once did of my dog, it would be a complete disaster. So the only option I can see is to roll back to 1.0 if you can (it allows me to). I don’t know what the solution is. Do you? Any ideas? And that damn myspace won’t let you cut and paste code into their Customize pane. I noticed there is a CSS box at the bottom of it, so I had to manually enter my code into that (tedious) hoping it would work, but it didn’t. When you save it, it keeps taking out the <> around the <style> tag and adding some gibberish to it. Maybe it would work if myspace didn’t mess up the code like that. I’ll keep looking. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear from you.

So, you want to know how to make  your myspace page transparent? I started this blog just as a tool for myself, just to post various things that interested me, so that I wouldn’t forget them, but now its like “Man, I gotta post something everyday!” Funny how the ideas quit pouring in, serendipitously, when your attitude changes. Oh well, for the most part it’s fun. So I was fooling around on my Myspace page and wondering how to make a transparent background on it to make it look cooler, to make me look cooler.

Below is the CSS code to make your Myspace page transparent. It’s pretty cool actually, but it would be nice to learn CSS completely so that I wouldn’t have to always be looking things up, and so that I could use Cascading Style Sheets to make even more custom changes to this and other pages of mine. Below is my Myspace page where I chose a background of a photo that I took of my dog. But you can put any image you want as your background, and still, for the most part, see all the foreground navigational links and boxes, or if you so choose you can make everything transparent on your myspace page.

I wish I could take credit for this, but I can’t. I got it from: this blog.
Go there and you can get the exact instructions (they’re easy) and code that you can copy and pace into your myspace. He’s also got some code there to make the boxes opaque. This is a lot of fun, and looks cool too. It’ll impress your friends, and you’ll really have street cred.
I guess I better reprint his post here in case the link ever goes dead:

For making your myspace profiles – If you dont pimp your profile, you are nobody. People wont respect you in the community. For making cool backgrounds, and your boxes (tables) transparent or moderately opaque, here are some tools I made today.
They are all clean now. if you do a search for these things normally, they will always try to enter in their own ads into your myspace page. dont be violated. I havent sold out yet – so here is some very clean code for pimping your myspace. Be Safe.

For: transparent boxes – custom background image
<STYLE>
td, table, tr, span, li, p, div, textarea, DIV
{
background-color: transparent;
}
body
{
background-image: url(http://XXXXXXXXXX);
background-repeat: repeat;
}
</STYLE>

opaque boxes and a background image>>>>

insert the following inside your style brackets… (What are Style Brackets?)

td.text td.text a img {width:50px !important;}
table, td, textarea, a, body, input{background-color:transparent;border:none;border-width:0}
table table table {border:10px double; border-color: 000000; padding:1; background-color:FFFFFF; filter:alpha(opacity=95); -moz-opacity:0.7; opacity:0.90; -khtml-opacity:0.4;}
table table{border:0px}
table table table table{border:0px}
body {
background-image:url(http:/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX);
}

you can play with the highlighted line to get the degrees how you want it. be careful! you may lose visibility altogether, and then you will have to navigate solely using your instruments.

*Note: This Article was orginally written on February 28, 2008 on another blog, so my Myspace page looks a little different now. It’s still transparent, but with a tiled solid red background.

Related posts:

1. Advice to Myspace: Open Up Immediately
2. Customize Your WordPress Page Tab Links
3. Google Font Directory – Free Custom Fonts for You’re Webpage/Blog

http://alternativeto.net

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Don’t you like information that’s simple, effective and that you can put to use right away? I thought so. Me too.

Here’s one: Put your contact information clearly on the front page of your blog.

Notice how Guy Kawasaki notes that most bloggers don’t! I said, “What?” And then I realized, although I have a “Contact” page, mine wasn’t either. But now it is.

Listen to Louis Gray talk about here in this video. It’s about a minute in.

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2. Increase Visitor Length Time on Your Blog
3. How to Find Something To Blog About