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hashtagsocialmedia.com – New Features, New Platform

mckyton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:44:31 +0000

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.

Read the Latest Blog Entries
Follow the Live #sm twitter events from anywhere –
Participate in the live twitter event by replying or re-tweeting
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.

#SocialMedia (hashtagsocialmedia.com) Free iPhone App released

mckyton — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:55:26 +0000

: hashtagsocialmedia.com iPhone App

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.

#SocialMedia Stats (hashtagsocialmedia.com)

mckyton — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:12:07 +0000

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.

#SocialMedia Website Updates

mckyton — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:25:15 +0000

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.

Announcing www.Home-Things.com

mckyton — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:44:40 +0000

Announcing the launch of Home-things.com. Home-Things.com provides access to many rare and hard to find home decor items from around the world. Each week new products will be added to the online store and specials and coupons will be featured.

Home-Things offers a wide range of products including African American, Bath and Body, Candleholders, Candles, Clocks ,Garden,Glass Creations ,Home Decor , Household Items, Kitchen , Nautical, Picture Frames, Water Fountains and Works of Art .

World Wide Telescope

mckyton — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:05:10 +0000

Microsoft released a web based version of The World Wide Telescope today. The World Wide Telescope is a Microsoft Research projects that basically takes all of the high quality images of the known galaxy/universe/etc… and stitches them together into an amazing user interface. The Desktop client is very impressive and is a great experience if you have a powerful video card and processor.

One of the great things about this is tat users can create tours of tours of constellations and other celestial bodies and share them with the world.
It create more of a community feel and gives you a reason to come back often.

The web client can be found here:
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/ .

It looks like it supports everything found in the desktop application. The web client is running off of Silverlight. Silverlight is an animation / rich interface platform that competes with Adobe Flash. To be honest this is the most notable use of Silverlight that I am aware of. It is pretty impressive none the less.

User Experience: This site is worth the Visit – www.churaumi-hakken.jp

mckyton — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:13:19 +0000

This site is worth a few minutes of your time to day. www.thefwa.com has named it the site of the day.

The video interface and music comes together ro create a fairly seemless and immersive experience.

SxSW Finalist

mckyton — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:55:55 +0000

www.lynnmariesmith.net

I recently found out that a project I worked on last year, www.lynnmariesmith.net has been named a SxSW finalist in the personal portfolio category. I am really looking forward to this event and honored to be named a finalist. Finalists in other categories include, Yahoo Flickr, NBC Hulu, The Big Picture, CNN Shirt, Mint.com, StumbleUpon, Delicious 2.0 and many more amazing sites.

Here are some of the standout finalist and the complete list that are new finds for me.

http://www.iamsecond.com/

http://aviary.com/home

http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/

http://tracychapman.com/