Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of “5 Social Media Secrets for 2010″. While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we’d connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy. Sponsor 1. Pay Attention to the Metrics: Sloane Berrent’s Kiva fellowship and Beth Kanter’s work with ChipIn . Neither of these efforts were well funded, but both leveraged leaders’ creativity to increase engagement and response. 5. Listen, Listen, Listen : Early last year we wrote an article on how sentiment analysis would heat up in 2009 . To track conversations about your company you can try

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Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

According to information just released by Google, its Chinese web portal, Google.cn, may be biting the dust shortly. In the wake of a string of cyber attacks, certain surveillance activities and long-standing censorship policies, Google SVP David Drummond writes, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn We should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.” Sponsor Last month, Google noticed a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their infrastructure that allowed for the theft of Google IP. The attack came from China and targeted at least 20 other major corporations involved in technology, finance, media and chemicals. Google believes the main reason for the attacks was to access Gmail accounts of advocates of human rights for Chinese people. Dozens of accounts with users based in the U.S., Europe and China have been accessed to varying degrees; Google denies any security breach on their part, stating that malware or phishing might have caused the accounts to be compromised. Although Google would not normally share information of this nature with a global audience, their team has decided to do so now because the attacks and account surveillance that have been uncovered speak to issues of security, human rights and free speech. “We launched Google.cn in January 2006,” wrote Drummond, “in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that ‘we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.’” Drummond also references China’s attempts in 2009 to curtail and censor free expression on the Web, which we have covered in depth and which we listed as one of last year’s greatest failures . Google execs, who have decided that serving censored search results is no longer an option, will spend several weeks talking with the Chinese government about whether or not they could run an unfiltered search engine in that country. If the two entities are unable to reach an agreement, it is likely that Google.cn will shut down, as will Google’s offices in China. What Took So Long? We’ve long been critical of major tech companies that, through acts of omission or under the auspices of compliance with foreign governments, do harm to human rights, privacy and free speech. In a post from October 2008 , our own Marshall Kirkpatrick questioned whether Google, Yahoo!, YouTube or any of the larger web companies operating internationally were equipped to handle the moral and ethical responsibilities of their expansion overseas into troubled territories. He reminded us of several affronts to human rights for which these companies were responsible, then noted, “It’s hard, because their fundamental drive is to monetize these huge markets.” Curt Hopkins, founder of the Commmittee to Protect Bloggers , responded with a similar point of view, saying, “Given that not just Google but every single other American tech company has shat themselves to get at the mythological Chinese market, this is way too long in coming. “What took so long? Did they finally realize that they are never going to make any money as things currently are so they thought they’d get some PR? This is great news, but you still have to ask: Who benefits from this? And how do they benefit? I hate to be cynical, but the best we can hope for is that Google says, ‘This isn’t going anywhere for us, and it’s so unpleasant.’… If I was in Google’s shoes, I would never stop talking about how wonderful we were for doing this.” Hopkins’s cohort Andrew Ford Lyons has posted a statement that Google ought to immediately remove filters from search results on Google.cn and promote uncensored, unmonitored web access “by channeling some of their incredibly smart staff’s efforts toward projects that protect privacy in China and help more Web surfers there quickly and safely bypass firewalls.” We will continue to update you on the situation as we receive more information. In the meantime, please let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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Google to Shut Down in China?

The only reason streaming web music hasn’t completely killed all other forms of music distribution is the fact that it’s not available when you’re traveling across wireless networks – say, in a car. Well hold on to your hats and start canceling your satellite radio subscriptions, Pandora is taking to the road. Sponsor According to a recent Paid Content article, Pandora announced a partnership with Pioneer at the Consumer Electronics Show. The speaker manufacturer will begin selling a device in March that detects users’ Pandora settings via their iPhones. While the $1200 dollar price tag for the connection device is high, the fact that the service is free will theoretically save consumers from paying monthly radio subscription fees. However, if Pioneer manages to partner with other music providers like Microsoft with Zune Marketplace , Spotify or MOG , then web subscriptions will simply be cross-platform music accounts. While Paid Content suggests that we’re looking at the end for satellite radio companies like Sirius XM, we think the greater effect of web-enabled cars might be the end of professionally curated music. Does web music spell death for disc jockeys? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Photo Credit: Michael Ruiz Discuss

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Does Pandora for Cars Spell Death for Deejays?

Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers. Sponsor My conclusions in the previous post still stand: 1) Google now dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market; and 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009/2010 due to Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, Firefox bookmarks, and more. However, a lot of commenters wrote that they still use RSS Readers each and every day. Here are the main reasons why: 1. Control over Information Flow RSS Readers allow users to control their flow of information , whereas it’s impossible to keep up with the Twitter firehose of real-time information. Mathew Ballad (comment 11) put it well: “I tend to check Google Reader multiple times a day. While I do keep up with bigger news through Friendfeed or Twitter. I like to keep up with multiple Graphic Design blogs, tech blogs, entertainment blogs, photography blogs and Apple blogs on my own. I just can’t see myself ditching RSS Readers for something that I really don’t have much control over.” It’s not just about controlling your stream of daily news. Many people have feeds that they just don’t want to miss. Tim Bray has a folder of feeds in NetNewsWire that he feels is “unacceptable when I don’t at least glance at everything those people have to say.” Some people would argue that it’s a thankless task trying to control your RSS Reader. I am one of those people who long ago gave up trying to keep my “mark all read” count at zero. Indeed I don’t even try to mark as read my email nowadays (I just let it all flow in and I mark the ones I should reply to with stars, in Gmail). On a similar point, RSS pioneer Dave Winer remarked (comment 80) that Google Reader “has the wrong view of RSS.” In a follow-up post , he wrote that “fundamentally, Google Reader views RSS as email,” by which I think he means users feel compelled to read everything in it. His view is that “reading every story is a meaningless concept” and that RSS Readers need to find a way around this issue. 2. Evolving User Interfaces Some readers are expecting RSS Readers to transform their UIs in 2010, in particular for “processing life and news streams in the same interface.” ( Marco A Torres ) This has already happened to a degree in Google Reader, which has many nice social sharing features. @businessquests (comment 57) called Google Reader “a monitoring and intelligence tool enabled by tagging and publication of tag-based RSS feeds.” Eric (comment 19) agreed, commenting: “I use it [Google Reader] not only as a constantly evolving newspaper, but to share and to create new snippets using the “Note in Reader…” bookmarklet. I also subscribe to others’ interests and see what they have marked to share with me.” Eric also noted that he gets breaking news in Google Reader, thanks to its support of the real-time standard PubSubHubbub. However a number of people complained that Google Reader isn’t evolving fast enough in terms of user experience. I would put myself in that camp too. So, like me, you may want to check out some new feed reading innovations. Feedly (one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 ), Fever (one of our Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 ) and my6sense (an iPhone app – our review ) are 3 apps that received multiple mentions from our readers. We use Fever internally at ReadWriteWeb and I just today downloaded my6sense onto my iPhone. As an aside, note that two of those apps (Feedly and my6sense) integrate Twitter as well as RSS feeds. 3. Tracking Twitter It’s not necessarily an either/or situation between RSS Readers and Twitter. Lynne Pope from New Zealand pointed out (comment 44) that she uses Google Reader to track some Twitter accounts: “Time zone differences mean a lot of good information can be missed in a tweet stream. Pulling the important streams into a reader means the information is readily available.” 4. Mobile News A number of people remarked that they commonly read their feeds via a mobile version of an RSS Reader. Something for those of us who are sick of being tied to PCs to do more of, perhaps. Bill (comment 46) wrote: “I use NewsRob on Android to pull the most recent 250 articles from Google Reader via my home wifi. Then I walk out the door and head for the commuter train, where I will read my feeds while other poor souls are stuck with the newspaper. Same on the way home and late at night when I’m rocking the baby to sleep.” 5. Categorized News Perhaps some of us are finding RSS Readers difficult to use nowadays because we don’t use them efficiently. If you spend some initial time setting up your Reader and categorizing your feeds, then chances are you will get a lot more out of it. Randy Orrison (comment 78) described a good use case that you may want to emulate: “I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC).” Conclusion Reading through all 160+ comments on my post restored some of my faith in RSS Readers. Viva la read/write Web! I’m going to test out some of the tools people suggested, find new ways to integrate Twitter streams with my RSS feeds, read more on my iPhone using my6sense and other services, and do some re-ordering in my Google Reader. What are your thoughts now about RSS Readers, given the discussion summarized here? Discuss

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5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. And enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator. FormSpring.me , on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral. It’s fun, engaging, and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It’s only missing one critical element. Sponsor A stable back end. But more about that in a moment. First, let me tell you what makes FormSpring.me so infinitely entertaining. First, the site is user-to-user Q&A . This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers . It’s also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark , which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt. Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users’ true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky. Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference . The provocative beginning question for the site is, “Ask me anything,” which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live – nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer. So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen. And if it weren’t for back end – which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we’ve consulted today – FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors . ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it’s been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then – god help you – general Internet users, the app’s database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandoning ship like so many faithless rats. And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn’t even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application? Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, “Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times.” Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala , and Facebook’s database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase – millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock – is what FormSpring is preparing for, they’re going to need a much more robust solution that’s much closer to bare metal than whatever they’re currently running. And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better. So, to take the site’s “Ask me anything” query and pose it to the site’s creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin? Ask us anything – or give us your frank opinions – in the comments. Discuss

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Anonymity, Self-Reference & Q&A: Formspring.me’s Winning Combination for the Social Web

We’ve been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we’ve been consistently impressed with their product. The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned. Sponsor The new product is based on Collecta’s site search platform and MySpace’s real-time API. For search results on everything from weather to celebrities to trending keywords, tit returns a filterable, streaming gallery of collection of comments, photos, links and videos posted to MySpace by users. Based on IM protocols, Collecta’s search platform pushes out content in real time as it’s published. Each result also includes the poster’s “mood,” which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis. “Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light,” said MySpace COO Mike Jones. “Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users’ moods and activities. It’s great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web.” Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, “MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn’t see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like ‘happy’ is incredibly fascinating.” In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace. Collecta’s general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well. MySpace’s partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta’s site search, but it’s far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website. Discuss

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MySpace Taps Startup Collecta for Real-Time Search

While 2009 has been the year of the API, it’s the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb’s writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My

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Augmented Reality: Passive Consumers versus Creative Contributors