Over the last year hashtagsocialmedia.com has grown and grown and we are attempting to match that growth with new and useful features. So here is the rundown:

Hosting Platform

Last year we were plagued by server and hosting issues causing the site to crash too often whenever traffic would spike. There is nothing wrong with this particular host. They just were not the right tool for the job and as our demands grew they just could not keep up. It happens.

In January We moved out Hosting over to Media Temple and it has been a huge improvement. So far we have not exceeded our resources even during our busiest events without affecting the site performance.

New Twitter Integration

A few new Twitter features and a few more to come:

• Twitter sign in through  Oauth
  • Users can now sign in through Oauth on our Live page or any of the event pages. This will let users Follow and favorite and participate in events directly from hashtagsocialmedia.com
    

• Filtering the #socialmedia noise
  • As the use of #socialmedia hastag grew we got so much spam that the we needed a way to filter the spam out. So we added the “Filter the #SocialMedia Noise” option to bot the live and event archive pages.So now when viewing the archives you can get a clean organized transcript of the event with the moderator highlighted for readability

    
    

    
    

    
    

• Follow users on twitter directly through the live and events page
  • When you sign in with twitter on hashtagsocialmedia.com you can now easily  follow people right from the archive page without leaving the site

    
    

    
    

    
    

• Thumbs Up Feature
  • This is a ratings feature. As the events wrap up we want to be able to highlight the most insightful tweets and report them back.  Right now this feature is 100% user powered so we need your help to mine out the most valuable points in each discussion. All you have to do is click the thumbs up icon and it will increase that point value for that tweet. You can give the “Thumbs Up” during the live events or when reading back through the transcript of an archived event.

    
    

    
    

    
    

• “The Big Follow”
  • This was just added yesterday and it is one of the features we are most excited about. “The Big Follow” button will be displayed on the event archive pages, but only if you are signed in through twitter Oauth, When you click “The Big Follow” your will automatically follow all of the participants of this event on twitter. This is a great feature as everyone that participates in the weekly chats are professionals trying to advance the world of business in social media. So you can easily follow a quality list of professionals on twitter.

    
    

• Profile Pages
  • We have added profile pages so that users can look back on what other users have tweeted in previous events. So if you are following the live events on Tuesdays you can easily click the profile button and get an overview of that persons activity in the #socialmedia twitter events.

Sorting Features on the Event Archive Pages

Last week we added some basic sorting features for viewing the archived twitter events. When and event transcript you can now sort the event ascending or descending based on the time of the tweet. In other words you can read the event forwards or backwards. We also added a requested  staggered chat view that may be easier to read for some.

New Ways to Connect

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn <– Just Added

Iphone App

A couple weeks ago our iPhone app was accepted into the iTunes store. It is a free app and provides some simple and useful features. We often hear that people can not participate because they are not at the office or in front of the computer for one reason or another and this app may solve that problem for some.

1. Read the Latest Blog Entries
2. Follow the Live #sm twitter events from anywhere –
3. Participate in the live twitter event by replying or re-tweeting
4. Follow the schedule of upcoming events

One Year Anniversary

Finally we have our 52nd event coming up in just a couple of weeks. A solid year of  hosting events every week. Congrats to Jason Breed and Marc Meyer for making it happen each week.

Good News!

The official  hashtagsocialmedia.com  iPhone App has been accepted into the itunes store and you can get it now!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/socialmedia/id352777958?mt=8

Why use this app? Glad you asked. Here are some of  the features

• Read the blog topics and full posts
• Follow the live twitter chats on the go
• Participate in the live twitter chats while away from you comp. … reply.retweet,…etc…
• Schedule of upcoming events

Our main goal in creating this app was to give people an easy way to follow the conversations when they are not at their desk. However, we are seeing more and more opportunities for this app already so we think this is just the beginning and that we can add more features soon.

(An SEO friendly URL shortener may not be far off)
Twitter really is making an impact on the Internet more and more, like it or not. URL shorteners have popped up all over the place to accommodate long links in the strict 140 character or less twitter world. Of course, the biggest drawback to these links is they are not SEO friendly. This is a big drawback. Since all url shortners do is act as a redirect translation system all short urls point to the url service. So if you are using bit.ly or tinyurl or aything else all you are  adding backlinks to the domain of that services. Sure those services claim to use 301 redirects but lets face it, it’s likely done via programming code which basically equates to a javascript window.location url. You might get something out of it but not much. Anyways, you don’t use URL shortners as an SEO tactic in the first place.

However, in the near future, using an shortened url service may may actually work with your SEO efforts. Google has just announced today the Google URL shortener. For the time being, it is only available for their internal use but they will likely open it for general use soon. The service is named http://goo.gl/ . Not too shabby. The domain name is only 6 character total with the .gl included. They even managed to brand it  by calling it googl. Not too shabby at all.

The benefit of this service, once it hopefully goes live to the public, is that you would be registering your short URL redirect with google. So Google would not have to index a service like tinyurl or bit.ly to understand what these redirects are. They will already know and could possibly fold this index into their other mystical algorithms.. This is very timely considering the rush to create a more relevant “real time social search”. Imagine trying to index every url shortening service out there fast enough to keep up with twitter. This could eliminate that challenge altogether.

So the question is… If and when this service goes live to the public, will you still use any of the other services? If so, why?

I have a 5 Google Wave invites available. Just leave a comment below and the email address you want the invite sent to.

UPDATE: I just received a whole new batch of invites so if you request one from me you will probably get it.

When we started the #socialmedia Tuesday discussions there really wasn’t a whole lot of use of the #socialmedia hashtag on twitter. As we and others used it more and more, spammers have jumped in and now the #socialmedia hashtag is flooded with #socialmedia tweets

Since March 23rd 2009 we have been capturing every #socialmedia tweet to  that has been tweeted. You can see in the graph below that the general use of #socialmedia has grown substantially.  No longer just a little spike on Tuesdays, all week long there is #socialmedia activity.

So far we have captured 271, 500 #socialmedia tweets. However the pace of tweets is increasing quickly and we have capture over 50,000 #socialmedia tweets in just the last 30 days.

All of these tweets have been made by a total of 46,781 twitterers

As a result  the hashtagsocialmedia.com website has gained more attention and you can see the increase in unique IPs in the graph below.

To be fair, our system has capture tweets on days when twitter users have been hacked/hijacked as well as days when the Twitter API failed to produce results. So considering these anomalies we have a pretty accurate picture of the use of #socialmedia.com.

I wonder if there are any other hashtags on twitter used as much and for so many months consistently as #socialmedia.

Over the past few months we have made a lot of changes to the hashtagsocialmedia.com website: A New Design, tweet directly on the live page directly, exposed some of the traffic and tweet counts and of course we have had some incredible moderators.  As a result we have seen more and more traffic and participation.  I’ll be revealing more of the stats on the use of the #socialmedia hashtag shortly.

Over the weekend we added a few more updates. We updated the home page with  a little bit of interactivity that will allow you to  browse the head-shots of our moderators, review the topics they discussed and quickly access to archive of that event.  We also added a little more detail to the event pages: properly calling out the topic and the main questions asked. We have more to do on these event pages but it is a start.

There are more features coming soon.

Often  a topic of discussion: How do you measure the success of your social marketing efforts? The most common idea I have heard over the last year is to wrap all of your efforts up in to one word, “engagement”.  And in this meaning, engagement includes, visits to your site, how many unique visitors, how often they came back, how log each visit session is on average. All of these are pretty basic web traffic measurements. However, if you add to these the measure of the number of people posting, commenting, and re syndicating your content you gain greater insight. At least that is the goal.

Their is a race out there to not only to establish an engagement measuring platform but also to simply define what engagement measurement is.

PostRank.comhas taken a step in that effort. PostRank.com website clearly states that is aims to “measure audience engagement” Interestingly it has begun to dissect what online engagement is and how measure different areas of engagement.

The 5 C’s of Engagement

• Creating
• Critiquing
• Chatting
• Collecting
• Clicking

Who knows if they have it right., but it is interesting to see the evolution of engagement metrics.

Post Rank integrates and measures via the following:

• RSS Feed Analytics similar to feedburner
• Integration with RSS Readers including Newsgator, Google Reader, Trawlr, Daisy Feed, FetchIt! and more
• Simple integration with major blogging platforms, Blogger, WordPress Typepad
• An API and developers section of it’s website.

What is not clear after my limited browsing of the is does this scale? Can this be easily implemented into a network of blogs or a  large scale community that goes beyond blogs and includes, forums, galleries and so on. Either way it will be interesting to follow and see how it evolves. Postrank has a BETA program for “Feed Analytics”. Go here to sign up.

My RSS Aggregator picked up a few items on Cloud Computing today and each item tells a very different story of Cloud Computing. 

1) Rackspace blows away cloud computing myths

2) Omniture’s Outage Woes

3) IBM Sets Its Sights On Cloud Computing With LotusLive

These items are written and posted all day every day. Contradicting each other in some ways, supporting in others, redefining and ever evolving.

This isn’t the first time we have seen Cloud Computing, it’s just the first time we are calling it cloud computing. Many years ago it was ASP ( Application Service Providers), recently it was SaaS and the emerging term now is Cloud Computing. Lets call all of these “Internet applications”

So why do we keep trying to push Internet applications as opposed to desktop software or internally developed and managed software. One reason, cost. Cloud Computing is the non committal IT purchasing mangers dream.  You can buy in and be up and running in minimal time at limited term requirements. Some service run on an pay as you go or  month to month program. Many of the larger companies in Internet Application  space focus on annual contracts to mitigate risks and cover setup fees.  Just because its in the cloud doesn’t mean there isn’t setup.

But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine otherwise we would all be operating on ASP programs and we would have never needed the reincarnation known as SaaS and  Cloud Computing.
Internet Applications failed to reach mainstream and overtake desktop software in the past due to the limitation of the web. That is limitation of the web servers, database servers,  overall speed and accessibility of the Internet and also very much due to the limitations of older browsers. Well Servers are more powerful than ever, the Internet itself is more accessible than ever and there is true competition in browsers that is driving progress and innovation. There is also an ever growing community of web developers with new ideas, talent and overall understanding of web technologies. 

So is Cloud Computing going to stick this time? Not if history has anything to say about. The problem is that the desktop is more powerful to the individual user than the service providing web server. So what happens is the demands of the user outpace the web technology powering Internet applications.

But does it matter if cloud computing survives this time? NO. This isn’t even the right question to ask yourself.

The right question is this.
 Is cloud computing the right option for my business right now? And to this question, in this recession, the overwhelming answer for almost all companies is yes.

This will not always be the case, technology will evolve, business will need more customization or privacy, users will require advanced services. And when these things come to a head it will be the time to invest in the desktop again with internally managed software. This is OK. This is a cycle and right now we are in the Internet Application segment of the cycle.

But can Cloud Computing sustain this time. Well what would it take for Cloud Computing to keep up with increasing demands.  How about the following.

• Fast and robust Internet connection,
• universal / anywhere access to the Internet
• Powerful Networking
• Powerful Servers
• Powerful Browsers

Each one of these items needs to not only keep up but lead the industry to keep Cloud Computing from losing out the desktop again.

Google knows this. I have to wonder how how long Google has been targeting and working on this strategy or if it just evolved into this. 
For Google Apps to take off and sustain popularity indefinitely it needs to address each of the items above. So lets take a look at what steps they have taken.

• Fast and robust Internet connection,
  • Google Data Centers and purchase Dark Fiber, an Internet within the Internet  http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Google-and-Its-Continuing-Dark-Fiber-Mystery/     

• Universal / Anywhere Access to the Internet
  • Google Lobbies for Wireless Spectrum usage  http://news.cnet.com/Googles-battle-for-wireless-spectrum/2008-1039_3-6199374.html
  • http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/breaking/google-wireless-spectrum-bid-is-on-328429.php
  • Obama Broadband plans http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_03/b4116027365196.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
    
• Powerful Networking
  • Google Builds its own routers http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10137682-92.html  
• Powerful Servers
  • Google designs its own servers to for powerful performance easy maintenance http://gigaom.com/2008/12/29/how-google-is-influencing-server-design/  
• Powerful Browsers
  • Google creates its own browser. Google Chrome  
     
• The only other thing Google needs is regular innovation in application features and design. And for them that’s easy
  • http://code.google.com/
  • http://www.google.com/programming-contest/ 

So will Cloud Computing survive the user demands in innovation and the competition of desktop performance?

I’s more likely now than ever and Google has a the infrastructure to make it happen.