Stephen Bolen

My first post on the all-new Social Fresh is up – a case study/interview with the Gateway Grizzlies minor league baseball team, who recently ran a very successful Groupon promotion for their upcoming season.

What are you waiting for – go read it! Find out about how Groupon and Baseball’s Best Burger is driving people to the ballpark!

I hate moving. Despite my best intentions to stay organized while packing, crunch time almost always means “just throw a bunch of random stuff in this box and label it ‘random‘.”

Thanks to this helter-skelter method of packing, I somehow either lost, misplaced or threw away (accidentally, of course) my LaCie d2 500GB external hard drive’s power supply. Oops. Crappy thing is, this hard drive stored all of my music, and I badly need to sync my iPhone… I’ve made a lot of iTunes Store purchases, have new apps and am probably 2 iPhone OS software updates behind.

Not having the power supply wouldn’t normally be a problem – I’m kind of a tech pack rat when it comes to things like this – except LaCie uses a proprietary 4-pin power supply, of which I only ever owned one, which is currently M.I.A.

I went to LaCie’s website, found the exact replacement power supply, and initiated the checkout process. The first screen I was hit with told me that I needed to sign in to my LaCie account or create a new account in order to complete my purchase – even for a $19 power supply.

According to Forrester Research, 23% of shoppers abandon their carts when prompted to register before checking out. Can you imagine running a business where you let nearly one out of every four people shopping at your store (standing in line to pay, no less!) just put down their purchase and walk out? Aside from being totally unnecessary, it’s just a boneheaded move to put your products inside a walled garden away from one-off purchasers (like myself).

By including a guest checkout option (with the ability to register after the transaction has been completed), you not only build trust with the consumer, but reduce your abandonment rate.

LaCie got my $19 because they were the only official vendor with the OEM part that was 100% guaranteed to work with my LaCie hard drive. If there were options to shop elsewhere that didn’t require registration (and didn’t rip me off with FedEx Ground shipping rates), believe me, I would have been in the 23% who bailed on the purchase.

(Photo via Flickr)

Gizmodo is reporting that Google is finally – after a botched Google Buzz launch and a stalled Google Wave launch (is it even launched yet?) – hiring for a head of social media.

GigaOM acquired a recruiting letter from Google:

This is a new and very strategic position, as Google knows it is late on this front and is appropriately humble about it. In Google’s view, conceptually, there are two ways to tackle social, each impacting who may be successful in this senior post: 1) building an innovating offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ve probably seen my initial thoughts and problems with Google Buzz (aside from the whole privacy sinkholes – those were pretty obvious from the get-go). Would the director of social media have the authority to change anything about the products, or would s(he) only have the ability to promote and guide product launches? Clearly, there are a lot of unanswered questions one would have to consider before applying/taking the position.

So, your homework assignment for today: Would you tackle the position at Google? Why or why not? What advice would you give to Google’s new head of social media?

“If you have more Money than brains, you should focus on Outbound Marketing. If you have more Brains than money, you should focus on Inbound Marketing.”

- Guy Kawaski

So there’s this, uh, security exploit hole in Twitter, whereby anyone can force an account to follow your account. If you’re seeing 0 followers and 0 following on your account, don’t panic — Twitter knows about it:

We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to “force” other users to follow them. We’re now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place. Follower/following numbers are currently at 0; we’re aware and this too should shortly be resolved.

Update (10:18 AM PST): Of note: protected updates did not become public as a result of this bug.

To read more on this nefarious plot to have Oprah follow you back (finally!), check out the Gizmodo how-to/explanation.

As an aside, I now have the same number of followers as Ashton Kutcher. I believe that technically makes me a bigshot.

(Photo via Flickr)

How meta awesome.

Here is a Flash version of the presentation. Visit the link above to see the HTML5 version. See which one loads faster.

GO!

Scribd in HTML5

Even if you’re not really into the whole rockets-in-space thing, if you have a pulse, you’ll really enjoy this 8 minute narrated video of the Apollo 11 launch at 500 fps (frames per second). It’s everything that’s right about HD video (and then some):

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

(via BoingBoing)

On May 7, 2007, I joined Twitter. My account (@sbolen) is #5,842,232. By comparison, I opened up an account for a freelance client on Wednesday, and it was #140,663,441, meaning my account is in the earliest 4% of all users on the service today.

I missed SXSW when Twitter was launched, but was able to grab a beta invite from TechCrunch during the gold rush phase. I’ve been hooked ever since… even through the major outages (come to think of it, I almost miss the fail whale — that new iPhone announcement at Apple’s WWDC can’t get here soon enough).

On May 10, 2007, Biz Stone sent out an email announcing new mobile features. In hindsight, 2007 doesn’t seem that long ago – mobile devices sure have come a long way…

Hello Twitter-ers,

Technically speaking, Twitter has always been mobile because you can send and receive messages over SMS. However, there’s more and more folks accessing the mobile web from so-called smart phones these days and we figured it was high time we created a mobile version of the Twitter web site. So if you have a browser-enabled phone, head over to m.twitter.com and catch up with your friends, mobile style. Special thanks to xhtml-mp developer, Heidi Pollock for helping us put this new feature together. It was an instant hit with us at the office. If you’re on a standard web browser, we’re still here: http://twitter.com.

Twitter, Inc

Speaking of the office, Twitter is now officially Twitter, Inc. We’ve fledged from Obvious, LLC which was previously our parent company and we’ve even hired our very own office manager. Welcome, Krissy! The fact that we are no longer owned and operated by Obvious, is more a matter of paperwork than anything else. We’re still the same folks working behind the scenes. However, it does mean that we’re hiring more engineers so don’t be shy, email jobs@twitter.com if you’re interested.

New International Support

+447624801423 is our new UK longcode. With this new number we have significantly improved our international support and more importantly, Australia is once again fully supported over SMS. Thanks for your patience, mates! Also, 21212 is our new Canadian short code. So if you’re Canadian and twittering over SMS then that’s then number to use.

New Feature: Block

We’ve introduced a new feature lots of folks requested called “block.” Blocking someone means that you (and your pic) will not appear on the blocked person’s friends list, profile page, friends timeline, badge, or anywhere else. The person will not be notified that they’ve been blocked, but they will be unable to add you as friend. The feature is a hyperlink in the sidebar of Twitter profile pages.

Mixing It Up

Recently, there was a conference in Las Vegas put on by Microsoft called MIX and Twitter was used to keep attendees connected as well as entertained with an interesting application called Flitter. The application was displayed on giant screens featuring Twitter updates about what folks at the conference were doing. Neat! Flitter is open source and anyone can download it: http://tinyurl.com/257rlu.

Geeking Out with Twitter

Not that you’re a geek, but Twitter has a certain appeal to the geekier types. That’s why there is a fan-created web site featuring dozens of interesting Twitter integrations. For example, you can now Twitter from within your online calendar at 30boxes.com and party site Socializr.com has recently integrated with Twitter as well. Not to mention Twittervision.com which everybody loves. And for the really geeky, we have a surprise: Twitter now fully supports microformats. Now that is pretty geektastic.

Happy Twittering!
-Biz Stone and the Twitter Team

http://twitter.com/biz

Something strange happened to me on my way to work this morning — my low fuel notification came on in the car signaling that it was time to pay for my first post-BP oilpacolypse tank of gas. I zipped into the nearest service station near the highway, started pumping and attempted to check in on Foursquare. After all, this was a new gas station, so I’d get the +5 for a new venue and the +1 for the first stop in the day (as an added bonus, this gas station had no Mayor – one more fill-up and I’d be planning my coronation).

All was going according to plan, until I couldn’t check-in. I was served up the Foursquare version of the Fail Whale:

When I got to work, I pulled up Alexa and checked the historical traffic trends. The pattern between Foursquare outages and Twitter outages at about the same time in their explosive growth was pretty staggering:

In 2007, Twitter experienced approximately 98% uptime (or, to put it another way, roughly 6 full days of downtime). To date, Foursquare has been relatively immune to outages, but this is primarily due to the relatively scaled-back number of users. As of March 2010, Foursquare had 500,000 users, and were adding new users at the rate of about 10,000 per day:

It took Twitter a lot of growing pains before they were able to straighten out their network outage issues. It’s my sincere hope that Foursquare (and really, all location-based app services) can learn from Twitter and ensure reliable uptime. There is a definite future in location-aware advertising/marketing services, and nothing can scare off the n00bs quicker than service downtime.