Category Archives: web 2.0

Social Media Moving

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
2

As many of you know, I am moving to Philadelphia this weekend for a new job. When most people move they have to empty out where they are moving from, organize all their things, pack clothes, ship larger items, but that’s basically it.

changing the location on social sites when you move

Yesterday I started to think about what moving means for all of my profiles all over the web. Most of the sites and communities that I am active on have a location, or a city in the profile. I will have to go through and change my current city on all of these sites. I know this doesn’t seem like that hard of a thing to do, but it can become very time consuming.

Even harder then physically changing your current city, is keeping everyone up to date with your location. People perceive you to be living somewhere, but that might not be where you actually are.

Sites like foursquare help with this. Letting you know where your friends are in your city, or when your out of town friends are in town. But one of the big problems with foursquare is that you can’t see where your friends in other cities are. You are only shown who is in your current city.

I have found that checking in on foursquare had helped my friends to be more aware when I am traveling, or in a new city.

Yesterday I tweeted “Are there any social media sites for moving to a new city”

tweet tweet

One person responded and said “Does craigslist count?” Craigslist is great when you are moving and need to sell large pieces or when you need to find and apartment.

But sites like Yelp! can also be very helpful when you are living in a new city. Yelp can help you find everything from good places to eat, to a great place to get a haircut. Yelp has been great for me in NYC, but I am hoping that the Yelp Community in Philadelphia is as active.

Do you know of any other sites that have been helpful for you during a move? Or sites that have helped you settle into a new city? I would love to check them out, so please let me know in the comments.

Of course I have my own personal tour guide to Philadelphia, Drew Olanoff (@drew) <3

But if you know me, you know I am always looking for new sites and communities to check out.

A friends thoughts on Twitter

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
4

So today I went to my local Apple store with my friend Rosie because her iPhone had gotten the white screen of death and we needed to get it replaced. While hanging out we started talking about Twitter. I was very interested to hear about her experiences with twitter. She has had an account for a while but only started using it regularly this May. She said she started twittering during finals week because she just wanted to tell everyone everything and then she remembered that she could do that with twitter.

She told me that she felt like she didn’t think she was really using it correctly. I told her that there really isn’t a “correct” way to use twitter, but I was curious as to what made her think that.

She had some really interesting insights about how she uses twitter and ways she would like to see it be improved. These were things that I had not really heard from a lot of users or really from the general tech community so I thought I would share them with you all.

The first thing that she felt was missing was a facebook type of “wall-to-wall” view, for your conversations back and forth with one person. I know that there are some apps that do this but Rosie mainly uses the main twitter web page when she is at a computer and twitterific on her iPhone. She would like these features to be built into the main twitter site.
However you can use search.twitter.com/advanced to search for conversations between specific people.

Advanced Twitter Search

She also was really wishing that she could see her list of followers/following in alphabetical order. This was something I never felt the need for but I was really wondering if other people might find this helpful as well.

Rosie also became frustrated that she could not just DM anyone. She wants to be able to have a private conversation with anyone, no matter who is following who. She said that it was kind of strange that you might be able to have a one-way DM conversation if you were DM-ing one of your followers who then could not DM you back because you were not following them.

Her last insight was that she felt that the interface and general feel of twitter was a little childish. She couldn’t really explain why she felt that way, but I thought it was interesting none the less.

If you want to follow her she is @rosesness on twitter.

I would love to hear your thoughts on her thoughts.

5 things you should consider when designing your web product

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
2

Originally this post was titles 5 reasons I won’t use your web product! But I decided that these were all things that companies could change about their products so I am trying to make it a more positive post.

I get asked to try tons of new sites and services every day. Sometimes people want me to review them on randomsarah.com, sometimes people want them to be considered to be featured on What’s it all About, and many times it’s just friends and other people on twitter telling me about new tools I might not know about.

I love trying out new online tools. It is one of my favorite things to do. But there are a few things right of the bat, that will make me not want to use a site or service.

So here is my list:

1. The Sign-up process: The first thing a new user is going to go through when trying out your site or service, is the Sign-up process. If it is to complicated, or long, I won’t even continue with the process.

Tumblr‘s sign-up page is a great example. 1,2,3 and your DONE!

2. Design: both Graphic Design and User Interface Design. I am a design geek 100%. I love shiny tools. But I have said this many times before, I will not use your product because it’s ugly. When you are starting a site, PLEASE take the time to invest in a good designer. I can promise you that it will pay off. People do judge books by their cover, and they automatically form opinions about your site within the first 5 seconds. Simply based on what it looks like.

For years I did not use GMail because I didn’t want to stare at it all day. I thought it was ugly. Once GMail added themes, I was hooked.

3. Video Tutorial: I can’t tell you how many times I sign up for a service and once I am done with the sign-up process, I have no idea what they want me to do, I have no idea what the service does. This is where I look for an intro video. A simple screencast on how to get started is really all it takes. Sometimes your users need a little push to start using the site. They need to know how, and video is the easiest way to show them.

Screencast video tutorials are very easy to do, but if you can’t do it yourself you can always find people to do it for you.

4. Something like it already exists: This one is a little harder to change, but I think it is worth it when you are creating anything for the web to REALLY see what else is out there. If your site or product is not WAY better than your competition, then people will most likely not give you the shot you deserve. Imitation is not a business model. It is important to create something new and innovative that people will love, and the critical mass will come.

5. Community: While community is not something that belongs as a part of every site, there are some great communities in places when it may not have been obvious that they belong.

Take Yelp for example. Yelp is a site where most people go to find restaurant reviews and other reviews. People can read reviews and write reviews. Now this might not be screaming for a community, but the Yelp community is thriving. You can ask questions, see what your friends are reviewing, create events, there is a ton of stuff to do on Yelp.

Listen to your users, if they are asking for community tools, give it to them. Even if it is just a place to give you feedback or talk about the service, people love community. Creating a strong community will only help your company. Story communities create brand advocates that will be willing to speak on behalf of your product and practically eliminate your need to do any marketing.

Whats it all about

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
2

Some of you may know that for the last few months I have been working on my podcast called What’s it all About. In late December I partnered with Ambush TV, the company that is producing Gary Vaynerchuk‘s new show Obsessed, with Samantha Ettus, and we started the process of re-launching a show.

You may remember when What’s it all about first premiered. It was back in September during Web 2.0 week in NYC. The first episode we did was explaining twitter, and it got quite a bit of attention. I was surprised at how people responded to a show that I put together in my bedroom with my iMac, but the response was good. At one point the show was featured in iTunes “New and Notable” category.

It was very exciting. However I soon came to realize that I wanted to do more with the show and I did what I never should have done and that’s doubt myself. I realized that I couldn’t put out the kind of quality show all by myself, without funding, from my bedroom. (I probably could have if I really tried, but I doubted myself and I didn’t try) I only made two episodes of the show before I got discouraged with technical difficulties and no one to help me fix them.

So I started to look for a way to make the kind of show I wanted. Ambush TV came to my rescue! My friend Tim Kres-Spatz was starting Ambush TV with his friend Mark and I thought it was the perfect solution.

Ambush.tv creates original video content based on the passions of fresh faces from across the internet. We transform great ideas into high value, high definition productions of broadcast television quality.

Ambush TV has a studio space not to far from where I live, and they had the equipment to help give me great production quality for the show. I still needed some help with the techinical side of things. I wrote the show and hosted the show, but my editing skills were never that great (I was using iMovie) and I had a vision for the website for the show that I could not exicute on my own. So I brought in my friend Rob Blatt. He is an award winning producer and has been a podcast guy for years. Rob is now co-producing the show with me, he edits the show, and he did all the design on the blog. He took what I had in my head and helped make it real and for that I am very thankful!

The show is still in the developement stages but we want to develop it with all of you. We want to hear from you about what you would like us to cover on the show. We want your feedback, and anything you could do to tell people about the show would be greatly appreciated.

The other day I was watching that first episode and I realized that in September when originally launched the show I had less than 300 followers on twitter. (These days it’s close to 1,400) it made me realize how far I have already come and I have this great community to thank.

Well here is the first episode of the show for your viewing pleasure.