Guy told me this was coming a while back when I’d asked about being able to save certain feeds and rearrange them as I saw fit, so MyAlltop didn’t come as a surprise to me.

Tomorrow, the “online magazine rack”, (one which all of my sites are on!) launches MyAlltop , allowing people to create custom collections of Alltop feeds. For me, it’s basically going to be replacing Google reader - at least for the sites I read regularly for news for the sites. I also suspect I’ll discover a whole ton of new sites as well.

Alltop

Every custom MyAlltop collection is a public page which can be shared with friends and fans.

One of the things that you know i s going to happen (and what I did right away) is that people are going to grab their vanity accounts, and the floodgates open tomorrow (Tuesday).

The good news is, you can create as many accounts as you’d like - one for personal use and one for your site. I don’t think you can embed anything on your site yet, but knowing Guy, I’m sure that’s coming.

Once you’ve gotten your account set up, you’ll have a personalized URL . The sign up process is uber fast, so go now - run, don’t walk - to  My Alltop and register your name before your user name gets scooped!

Ah HA! I’ve got it - I know what the Twitter business model is!! Just keep getting more VC funding!! This latest round, which Biz announced on the official Twitter blog yesterday, increased Twitter coffers by an additional $35 million, bringing their funding totals to more than  $55M.

Biz said that they weren’t actively looking for funding,  "because significant capital from last year’s partnership with Bijan and his team at Spark is still in the bank." [source] This new round came from interest from two firms who were attracted by Twitter’s phenomenal 900% growth.

Now, as you all know - I love Twitter. I’m a big Twitter evangelist, and I’ve made solid relationships with people that I never would have had the opportunity to meet "IRL".

That said, and despite the fact that Twitter maintains that it’s simply a robust communications utility/tool, I maintain that Twitter is a robust community and one that needs a community manager.

Biz did give me a touch of hope with this sentence:

We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products. Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead. [source]

So, with the phrase "ecosystem" and the fact that their "small team will grow", maybe, just maybe, the Twitter powers that be heard, finally agree and will begin to see their robust ecosystem for what it really is. A giant community, in need of a community manager and evangelist.

[image source: wikimedia commons]

This is something anyone who any sort of intelligence about wireless communications knows - they don’t really interfere with the navigation system like we’ve been told all these years. Now that Delta, American Airlines & Southwest are trying out satellite-based wifi systems, the concern is more around annoying the other passengers than it is about any navigational system.

The spokesperson for Delta Airlines is quoted in the New York Times:

“…said the airline will keep track of how customers use the Wi-Fi technology, then decide whether to set limits on how customers can use the Internet. Airlines can and do block access to pornography sites, for example, and Delta, like American, is blocking access to sites that offer Internet voice services.

“A lot of it will be self-policing,” he said. “If you’re not aware of it, your seatmate will make you aware.” [source]

So, ok, you might annoy other passengers, but what happens when wifi is everywhere, and your flight, which used to be an untouchable block of time, becomes office hours, in which you’re expected to work, rather than relax, read, nap, or like I’ve been known to do, watch a movie or write offline.

Here’s the other hitch - which airlines might be looking at inflight wifi as an additional income source, is it really going to make that much of a difference to the bottom line? The Times piece did some of the math - if every passenger on board a flight paid $12.95 for the 3+ hour trip, they’d make approximately $1500. Great, but will every passenger buy? My guess is no. Sure, some will, but I’d estimate that’s probably less than 1/3 of the passengers.

The others are going to be of the mind that I am for the moment - unless it’s free, I don’t really need to be online that badly, and even then, there’s got to be someplace in the world (or above it in this case) where I don’t have to make an excuse or provide a reason why I’d like to be offline.

It’s looking like YouTube is about to be made a star. YouTube is this close to signing a contract with the William Morris Agency which would give the company’s clients another screen to be on - the really small screen: made-for-the-Web productions.

Much like the music industry underwent changes to the distribution model when the dust settled and the internet became such a powerful force for music; this deal will underscore the ways the distribution models for television and movies on the internet.

There’s several actors and other celebrities are creating their own content for the internet, avoiding the red tape involved in developing a show for a network. Not only will the distribution change, WM clients will get an ownership stake in the videos they create for YouTube; something that television networks don’t offer.

So far, reps from both sides declined to comment when the New York Times asked to get one for their article. Two people who are close to the deal spoke to Brian Stetler on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the deal, described the arrangement as “YouTube’s most sweeping attempt to date to add professionally produced videos to its Web site”.  [source]

Even better, including celebrity videos on YouTube would solve the niggling problem Google has about how to make some cash from the bazillions of videos they host for free.

By signing a deal with a talent agency, YouTube is shouting pretty loudly that they want to be the next destination for Hollywood content. That concert they sponsored in November, YouTube Live, said exactly the same thing.

I guess we’ll see what happens when the deal’s finally done and the ink on the contract dries.

Through a link on Twitter which I can no longer find unfortunately, I came across a 23 page report on Social Media Predictions for 2009. It’s been contributed by such greats as Chris Brogan, Charlene Li,  Joseph Jaffe, and Jason Falls. The information is invaluable, and it’s all fantastic reference for the book I’m working on about social media and public relations.

Social Media 2009

Maybe it was Obama’s inauguration. Maybe it was the Hudson River "landing" that did it. Whatever the event, something catapulted Twitter even higher into the mainstream.  For the first time last week, the market share of traffic to Twitter beat out Digg, according to Hitwise. [source]

Hitwise also says that Twitter’s rise to power is due to increased traffic to the site from 25-35 year olds. This demographic is now making up 45% of Twitter traffic, vs a meager 12% from a year ago. Digg depends primarily on traffic from Google, but Twitter gets a larger share of traffic from social networks, primarily because of the networks that already feature the service.

Another metric to note - the Hitwise data doesn’t include any Twitter activity on cell phones and other mobile devices, which means that the impact of Twitter is higher, and more wider spread than just web visits. That also means that Hitwise also isn’t counting API requests, so for anyone using Twhirl, Tweetdeck or any other one of a myriad other desktop applications.

Digg on the other hand, brags about doubling the site’s audience to more than 35 million in 2008, but according to Quantcast, Digg’s traffic is only 11.7 million in the US and 23.7 worldwide. Maybe that’s why Rose is agreeing with the claim that Digg is worth more than $60 million, hey?

Tags: Twitter, Digg, traffic, Digg valuation, Twitter traffic, Hitwise

I spend a lot of time wandering about the interwebs and reading articles that interest me. It makes some sense - as a writer, I’ve got an insatiable curiosity about the world, so when I stumbled across an article titled  "The mother and son torn apart by web ‘cult’ that destroys families: Teenage follower of a controversial internet philosopher tells how he walked out on his family and why he now despises them" I was easily distracted and rather enthralled.

Turns out there’s a guy named Stefan Molyneux, who claims to be an Internet philosopher, who advocates, or perhaps just encourages a practice called "defooing" - the act of "freeing onseself from one’s family of origin". Turns out there are approximately 20 young adults - all above the age of consent - who have "defooed" themselves, leaving their families and simply going out on their own. The only reason this is different than when I moved out of my mom’s house when I was 18 is that I stayed in touch, and these folks are cutting their families off entirely.

The family featured in the story  - the Weeds - are claiming that Molyneaux is a cult leader with "malign influences". Molyneaux says that his site is simple the largest and most popular philosopy site on the internet.

When the Times Online interviewed Ms. Weed’s soon, Tom (who is 18), he said “Love should not be imposed upon a child, like a chore on a ticklist: mow the lawn, wash the dishes, love your parents, I started to examine my relationships with people in my family, and came to understand that they weren’t for me… I didn’t feel like I was listened to by my parents. Whenever I tried to make my preferences felt, they didn’t respond in an interested way.”(that last complaint seems like that of a frustrated teenager, not that of a rational adult to me.)

What I’m trying to determine now is whether or not this phenomenon is any different than any other so called organization. The only main difference that I can see is that Molyneaux is using social networking tools to reach more people (there’s that broader audience again). His Freedomain Radio site primarily uses podcasts as his method of information delivery, and claims 4 million downloads per year.

Do these tools simply make it easier for people to get caught up in what appears to be a random scheme, or are families simply applying some of the new social media tools and opportunities technology affords us to blame people when their children act in a manner they don’t approve of? Is social media just a scape goat?

Tags: cults, family, philosophy, scape goat

It’s been all over Twitter today - the “Koobface” phishing worm has hit Twitter. If you’re one of the thousands hit, you’ll receive a direct message saying “Hey - check out this funny blog about you!”, and then there was a second one which said “You are funny in this video!” with a link to a blogspot blog, which redirected to “twitter.access-logins”. 

If you’ve entered your user name and password into this site - which looks like twitter unless you look closely at the address bar - your information would have been phished.  The scary part of this is that most people use the same user name and password for everything from online banking and other services. 

Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher for McAfee Avert Labs said that, in general, Koobface strikes only social-networking sites - like Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter has posted a brief warning on the status blog, and there’s a warning at the top of your stream if you’re on the Twitter site (but not if you’re using a 3rd party application like Thwirl).

Twitter said:

If you receive an email notice saying you’ve received a Direct Message with a link that redirects to what seems like Twitter.com, be careful about entering your Twitter credentials. Instead, look closely at the URL to see if it’s not really Twitter but a sketchy phishing site like http://twitter.access-logins.com. If this has you feeling a bit weirded out, feel free to change your Twitter password.

Update: The suspicious site is being blocked. More information at the Twitter Blog.

If you have been affected by the Koobface virus, Facebook has posted removal instructions here.

Schmugar said this attack is similar to e-mail attacks 10 years ago in that Koobface is using infected friends lists, reminiscent of early mass-mailing worms. Just like back then, don’t open an attachment you’re not expecting, even from people you know, and be very concious of where you’re inputting your user name and password. 

The moral of the story? Make sure you don’t use the same password for each of your accounts, especially for your banking and other important identity/financial sites. If you’re looking for an easy way to create unique passwords, read this. 

(image screen shot caputured by Chris Prillo)

UPDATE: There’s another phrase coming through the Phishing scam: “hey. i won an iphone! come see how here http://helloiphones“. Basically, just make sure you don’t click on any links you don’t trust, and anything that seems to good to be true, likely is.

CyberAlert, Inc, is an online media monitoring company, with several different products to keep an eye on your brand. The two which are of particular importance to social media: Netpinions, consumer discussion, word-of-mouth, buzz monitoring service which monitors 100,000+ online message boards, forums, and Usenet news groups and BlogSquirrel — a blog monitoring service — which monitors 5+ million new postings each day in 25+ million blogs worldwide.

2009 marks the sixth year that CyberAlert will grant a minimum of 15 monitoring packages to not-for-profit organizations. Each grant consists of one full year of free news monitoring / press clipping services, ranging in value from $2,700 to $3,900. Last year, CyberAlert awarded 29 grants in 2008, with a aggregated value of over $275,000 to organizations like the NAACP, the Canadian Breast Cancer Network and America’s Second Harvest.  For a complete list, click here.

All not-for-profit, educational and charitable organizations in the United States and Canada are eligible to apply for the grants, except previous grant recipients. CyberAlert is accepting grant applications until December 31 and will announce the grant recipients in January. More information and a simple and secure grant application is available online.

On December 20th, a Continental flight slid off the runway mid-take off. There were some minor injuries, and of course, the whole thing made the news.

What’s different about this crash however, was the fact that Mike Wilson live-tweeted the whole thing.

Wilson has since been interviewed on several mainstream media stations including NBC, Fox News, and more. A Google search for “denver plane crash + Twitter” yielded more than 22,000 results.

It looks to me like 2008 was the year that Twitter started to go mainstream. It’s becomming the go-to for many for breaking news - the Denver crash was reported on Twitter before it hit mainstream news. Same goes for that F18 that crashed into a San Diego backyard a while back.

Personally, I find this fascinating. It used to be that we learned about the actual news from television news or the newspaper the next morning. Now we can get a play-by-play of events as they unfold. Usually, by the time mainstream news gets ahold of the stories, most of Twitter has already heard about it.

I’m wondering how this will change mainstream news reporting in the upcoming year. Thoughts?

(image source 2DrinksBack’s twitter stream: Twitter)