Stephen Bolen's Internet Awesomesauce

Something VERY interesting happened to the Bolen Family tonight. We had a house showing from 5:30 – 6:30 and had to find something to do for dinner, so we pulled out the $50 Applebee’s Giftcard from Christmas and made our way to Maplewood for some fine dining.

Here’s the RFT Gut Check write-up of what happened.

Personally, I think it was the App Attacker:

What are you doing on April 19?

If you’re smart, you’ll be going to Social Fresh St. Louis. Unlike some other social media conferences that focus more on entry-level information, the Social Fresh series of events is centered around case studies and success stories.

From the St. Louis Social Fresh Page:

Social Fresh St. Louis is our fourth event of 2010. We have a host of big name national speakers combined with some strong local experts. It will be a full day of rich, case study focused content.

  

The sessions and speakers will strongly reflect all Social Fresh flagship events with big brands and real social media success stories, all specifically for marketing professionals. More case studies, less concept.

St. Louis will mark the second Social Fresh event I’ve had the honor of attending as a speaker.

If you want tickets, you better hurry up – Early Bird registration prices are good through March 2, 2010!

Maybe I’d like Google Buzz more if my inbox wasn’t full of emails from myself. Or was able to see newer posts show up first, as opposed to the posts with the most recent comments. There are a lot of gripes early on, but at the end of the day, Google Buzz can be a really great tool.

That said, here are the top 3 things I’d change about Google Buzz:

1. New Buzz items float to the top. Matt Cutts, Google’s webspam ninja and all-around Google evangelist, had a rather benign Hello World Buzz he posted on February 11. People are still responding to it as we speak. It’s been at the top – or near the top – since he clicked the post button.
2. Slightly better privacy options. I applaud Google for responding so quickly to security concerns with Buzz; however, I still think they need to do more. I’m being followed by an army of Asian spammers. I block ‘em, natch. But still. Please, Google, make it a little more difficult for people to follow me that aren’t one of my regular Gmail contacts.
3. iPhone/Android/Blackberry App. This is a no-brainer. You want people to check in to locations, a la Foursquare and Yelp? Well, make it easy for them, because pulling up the HTML 5-based Buzz site is a major Buzzkill.

Honorable mention: allowing users to attach more than one image or link to a reply. Hot damn, that’s annoying.

What would you change about Buzz if you were king for a day?

This was not what I wanted to read today: according to Tim Logan of the Post-Dispatch, St. Louisans are more likely to cut home prices than most of the United States.

Citing real estate website Trulia, Logan discovered that the average price reduction in St. Louis (city) is 8%. Of all properties listed in St. Louis, 29% had at least one price reduction.

This, among many reasons, is why I’m glad I have Kevin Cottrell selling our house. He put together an amazingly detailed market analysis and we ended up pricing our house in such a way that we’ve had an almost non-stop stream of people coming to view the property (which, by the way, has it’s own website and Twitter account) since listing.

What did Kevin have to say about this article? Well, that most agents can’t price houses.

Glad we have one who can.

Happy Monday, everyone!

Also, the heavyset dude in the keyframe is Fred ‘Rerun’ Berry. The internet is a beautiful place.

/via BoingBoing

I wasn’t one of the lucky few who had early access to Google’s latest offering, Google Buzz. In fact, I only gained entry via the backdoor, through Google’s awesome HTML 5 iPhone-compatible mobile site. I scratched out my first update and waited.

And waited.

But then I finally got in and was able to play around a bit. What I found was a strange hybrid between Gmail, Google Wave, Twitter and Friend Feed. What I immediately thought was “Oh. Here comes all those Google Buzz is an <insert social media company> killer! articles that I’m going to hate reading for the next six weeks.”

The thing is, I don’t think Buzz is a social media killer. I think it’s the bridge between Gmail and Wave. And, like Wave, I see a lot of the same usage patterns forming:

1. Google announces and/or details leak about Buzz.
2. Social Media sites go berserk trying to out-hype each other. The hyperbole is staggering.
3. Features and usage is speculated by “thought leaders” and “experts,” furthering the hype cycle.
4. Google opens the floodgates to users, slaps a “beta” tag on the product, then waits 4 years to remove it.
5. Everyone endures some sandbox time with Buzz. Subsequently, everyone is blasted with “Hello World!” messages.

What now?

Where it goes from here is up to Google. Buzz is tightly integrated with Gmail’s web interface, so I doubt it’ll burn out like Wave; at the same time, I’m not positive Google can sustain any sort of hype beyond the initial Hello World phase. Looking at what happened to Wave, I honestly can see the slow fizzle in a few months.

What I think it all boils down to is answering the question do we really need another location-based status update service? If you answered yes, you’ve got Google’s version of Twitter/FriendFeed/Foursquare.

If you answered no, you’ll probably end up like a lot of Wave users: inactive.

At any rate, when Google finally mashes up Buzz and Wave and moves the final product out of beta, they’re betting that they’ll be the future of the web. Or, at the very least, validate some of those articles touting that message now.

What are your thoughts on Google Buzz? Do you see yourself using it a lot? A little?

We got out the video camera for Jane’s favorite (for today) food: Bananas.

I mean, why else would they take out a 1:00 ad in the 3rd Quarter of the Super Bowl?

Sure, a minute of Super Bowl air time is the equivalent of a rounding error for Google, but plunkin’ down the cheddar to put some distance between themselves and Bing may not be a bad play. I’ll have to dig into some data and figure out how much GOOG’s search market is being eroded by Bing, but I’d venture to guess pulling the trigger on a Super Bowl advertisement is a good sign that Bing is gaining ground a little too fast for Big G.

Also worth noting: this video has been available for free on YouTube since November 19, 2009. It currently has 1,868,941 views. According to Nielsen ratings, 106.5 million people watched Super Bowl 44, making it the most-watched television event in history.

Money well spent.

Thanks for using TrueTwit validation service. When you sent me the auto-DM saying that you wanted me to validate my existence as a carbon-based life form by deciphering a captcha, I begrudgingly did it because I was legitimately interested in following you. When you sent me the second auto-DM without even so much as an @-reply, you lost me forever.

First, there’s nothing on the planet more annoying than unnecessary captchas (Chris at Rizzo Tees has expressed this beautifully in his anti-captcha t-shirt). I realize that all the text in the re-captcha project is to help digitize books, but c’mon. I’m trying to follow you on Twitter, not hack your mainframe.

Second, auto-DMs for new followers make me want to throw up in my shoe. Think about that. IN MY SHOE. I don’t even know you and you’re already telling me about how many “Fauxlowers” you have? Really? You just got your ticket punched for a one-way trip on the express train to unfollowville.

So heed this warning, Twitter-ers: If you want to screen your followers, that’s fine. But don’t use a service to do so. You’ll end up missing out on engaging conversations that you could have been having, if only someone could have cracked the captcha code.

Like me.

Selling a house is hard work.

There’s the obvious physical part – packing, painting, preparing – but the mental part is just as difficult. It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around leaving the house where I proposed to my wife (while she was waking up from a nap. Heh). Where we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Where we have so many great memories, all in 3 short years.

At the same time, though, I’m really excited about moving on to a bigger home that can actually accommodate my pack rat tendencies and piles of, well, stuff. And believe me, I have piles. I’m also looking forward to new home improvement challenges – I’ve done an awful lot to this house, and I finally feel comfortable with taking on larger projects and not screwing them up.

Plus, I’ll be a short walk away from Schlafly Bottleworks.

The biggest facepalm moment came yesterday: we finally started to update our kitchen, fully realizing that we’ll only get to enjoy it for the next (hopefully) two months or so until it sells. We ripped out the old butcher block countertops and replaced them with really nice new laminate counters. We also have a brand new drop ceiling in the basement room that my dad and I painstakingly framed in and I drywalled to help me pass the time when Rebecca was in the hospital on bedrest. It’s a knockout space that I was going to use for an office/media room, but now will need to be repurposed for whatever the new owners want.

My house craves attention

The coolest thing I’m doing is using social media tools to drum up interest in the property, pre-listing. I’m posing as the house itself on Posterous, where 7040 Lansdowne has a blog about being sold (acting as a proxy, I’m typing up what the house wants to say). The house also has a Facebook fan page (which I’ve quickly abandoned – nobody is looking for houses on Facebook) and a pretty cool Twitter account.

You can find my attention-whoring house here:

• 7040 Lansdowne (Posterous)
• Twitter
• Flickr (Photoset)