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.

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.

This week was busy. What started as a simple question, “Can we use the Twitter API to create useful twitter events?” turned into a week of marathon coding to see an idea come to fruition. Enter hashtagscoialmedia.com (#socialmedia). #Socialmedia is a site that offers a window in to the hashtag social media. It creates an organized, automatically updating experience  to follow the social media discussion on Twitter. #SocialMedia will also host weekly events for all to participate. We will record those events for reference and encourage feedback for future events. Head over to hashtagsocialmedia.com next Tuesday at noon to join the social media discussion.

There are still a few bugs to work out and features to add, but why hold back a good idea.

I have spent the last week working with the twitter search API. I have to say that I think it is a very accessible API. I was able to pick it up and start developing within the hour.  In fact I will be announcing a new twitter app/site  in partnership with @marc_meyer and @jasonbreed. So look for that announcement later today.

All in all I have to say I am amazed by how much demand twitter supports. The API allows us to query twitter aggressively.  Many people complain when twitter goes down but considering how much they are delivery through their site and API I am surprised it does not go down more often.

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.

This year, one of my projects was named a finalist for the SxSW interactive web awards.
The project was www.lynnMarieSmith.net

I Iwas fortunate enough to get the chance to attend a few days of SxSW as well as the Award Ceremony.
The award Ceremony perfect. An excellent emcee, Baratunde Thurston, kept the event light, intelligent, entertaining and and fast paced. No one likes a 5 hour drawn out award ceremony. If you do not know Baratunde Thurston, get to know him here: http://baratunde.com/blog/ . It is worth the effort.

Unfortunately www.LynnMarieSmith.net was not a winner this year. www.Alifelski.com took home the award for the personal portfolio category. I was pretty sure that if we did not win, she would. And vice versa. Her design is original, well thought out and overall pleasing.
So Congrats Ali!

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.

The People’s Choice award voting has opened for SxSW. Please head over to https://secure.sxsw.com/peoples_choice/ and vote for www.lynnmariesmith.net You can vote daily. So please vote early and vote often!