Posts Tagged "review"

What is Google+?

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 12, 2011 in blog | 21 comments

Google recently started opening up the invite process for their new project: Google+.  Google+ is a social networking tool that allows you to easily share content with select groups of people.  It takes features from both Facebook and Twitter to create a tool that is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with tools you may already be using (the Google suite for example).

Targeted Sharing

The main feature of Google+ is circles.  Circles are groups of people who share a similar attribute.  For example, you could put all of your family into a circle.  Or your friends.  Or your friend’s pets (if they are on social media).  The benefit to doing this is that (a) you only need to listen to select groups of people at a time and (b) you can share your updates with select groups of people.

The upside to this type of sharing is that you no longer have to send your entire feed updates about your latest belt level in karate.  Instead, you can send those updates to your circle of martial arts loving friends.  Business updates?  Send those just to your business colleagues.  Unlike Twitter, this form of sharing becomes more highly targeted and therefore has much better reception.

Google’s circles setup:

Will You Be My +1?

Another feature of Google+ is the ability to share content via the +1 function.  If you browse Google lately, you may see “recommended by” or “shared by” underneath some of the search results.  These recommendations are coming from Google users who have +1′ed the content.  Once you +1 something, it then shows up under your +1s in your Google+ profile.  The beauty of this feature is that it now combines social bookmarking with a social networking tool.

Tools like Delicious were always interesting in theory but to use them meant opening yet another tab in a browser or having yet another profile to push people to.  Social bookmarking was one of those things that you either used a lot or didn’t use at all.  There didn’t seem to be a grey, passive area of use.  Now, with the +1 on Google, it seems like it may integrate beautifully into regular usage of the Google+ tool.

Google’s +1s showing up on a profile:

Google’s +1 beside search engine results:

(For more about the +1 button specifically, click here.)

Get Fed Relevant Content

Sparks is an interesting feature of Google+ as it allows you to setup targeted content streams that will display inside of your user interface.  The reason that these are exciting is because you can setup specific feeds that you (or your audience) may be interested in and then you can easily share those resources and links with your circles.

Previously, you might have setup a news / RSS reader with feeds from your favorite blogs or you might have setup Google Alerts to alert you when something exciting came up on a specific topic of interest.  Now, you can merge those two functions into the Google+ interface using Sparks.

Google+ Sparks in action:

Hanging Out on the Web

A feature of Google+ that may be less often used by the business crowd is “Hangouts.”  Hangouts is an area of Google+ that allows you to setup a video chat and then invite your friends in any particular circle.  Once invited, your friends can share their webcam as well and you can all sit around and chat via video (aka hanging out).

While the idea of a group video chat may not appeal to some, there will definitely be a group of people who adopt this as the norm in their business.  Team meetings, client coaching, etc. could all be done via hangouts if you shared the hangout with a circle called, “Team” or “Clients.”

How Might You Use Google+?

First things first, get on Google+ (if you need an invite, leave your e-mail address as a comment to this post and I’ll gladly hook you up) and play with it.  Look around and get used to the interface.

Then, organize your contacts into circles.  Decide who you want to listen to, engage with and share content with.  Don’t lump everyone together in one massive circle!  Instead, choose to share specific information with specific types of people.  Remember that not everyone is going to want to listen to specific information.

Setup some targeted news / information feeds in the Sparks area and use that to share relevant and on-target information with your audience.  Engage in conversation and create a meaningful place for people to interact with you on a regular basis.

To make the sharing of your Google+ profile easier, check out http://gplus.to/.  This site will help you create a URL that points directly to your Google+ account.  For example, mine is http://gplus.to/erinblaskie.

Share in the Comments!

What are your favorite features of Google+?  Leave them in the comments below!  Also, do you think that Google+ has staying power?  I’ll follow-up this post in a few weeks with an opinion post once I have had enough time to really use G+ on a day-to-day basis.

Fotolia.com Review

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 5, 2011 in blog | 0 comments

Stock photos are a necessity for all bloggers.  In this post, I will review Fotolia.com — a royalty-free stock photo site for bloggers.

About Fotolia.com

Fotolia is a website that features hundreds and hundreds of royalty-free stock photos that are perfect for bloggers, website designers and other users of the Internet.  The website offers subscription-based services or the ability to purchase individual images on an as-needed basis.

My Experience Using Fotolia

I use a lot of stock photo websites for our various creative projects.  Often, for blog posts, I resort to free stock photo sites because I don’t necessarily want to purchase a photo for use in a blog post.  So, for me to get great value out of the site, I’d need to find income-generating projects to use the photos with (ie: e-books, info-products, etc.)

When I was using the site, I had a subscription service which meant I could download up to 5 images per day.  The subscription may not be the best way to go though because if you forget to login and download your images each day, the cost per photo goes way up.  I prefer the idea of the pay-as-you-go / credit system so that you don’t lose your credits if you don’t login and download the images each day.

The other issue with a subscription-based service is that I sort of felt forced to choose images and didn’t always have something in mind to use them for.  I found myself getting buy now buttons and other generic, webby images so that I could use them on any project.

Fotolia does have an awesome selection of photos and I didn’t find myself searching very hard for what I needed.  Their search function is simple and effective and the photos are tagged very well.  That makes finding photos for your blogs very easy and very quick.

The sign-up process is straightforward and easy to navigate — even for the non-techhie.  Using the account is also straightforward — choose the image you want, add it to your cart and download the image.  The nice thing about the download process is that you can download individual images or, if you have chosen many, you can download a zip file.

How Fotolia.com Stacks Up

Seeing as there are a multitude of stock photo sites on the Internet, I wanted to do a little comparison between the sites to see how Fotolia.com stacks up against the competition.

Let’s first look at pricing…

• Fotolia is $249/month for 750 downloads
• iStockPhoto is $363/month for 900 downloads 
• Shutterstock is $249/month for 750 downloads
• Big Stock only sells via credit packs and is much more pricey than all listed options
• Dreamstime is $238/month for 758 downloads

Review of @TweetAgora – A Twitter App

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 6, 2010 in Social Media, Twitter | 0 comments

I came across TweetAgora recently and wanted to try out their iPhone-based Twitter application. On my own iPhone, I’ve been using Tweetie (which turned into Tweetie 2, which was then purchased by Twitter and named, appropriately, Twitter) and have not veered away from it.  I’m the type of iPhone app user that encourages and embraces simplicity.  There is only so much I want to do from my iPhone and too many options = too much noise = Erin’s lost interest completely.

So, today I downloaded TweetAgora from the iPhone app store. It has a free version which allows one Twitter account import as well as a ton of other features and it also has a paid account which introduces even more features for the Twitter user.  Here is a screenshot from TweetAgora.com illustrating their many features:

Once I downloaded TweetAgora from the app store, I took a quick scan through each of their screens.

There are a ton of features here.

One of the features that draws me in the most is the ability to filter down content into “Agoras” that you can watch or pay attention to. This is particularly helpful when you are attending an event and / or tracking a hash tag.  I often find that I’m using my iPhone the most when I’m out networking, socializing or otherwise attending things that I might also want to Tweet about.  It’s great to know that I can build “Agoras” before I go and then track or follow them while I’m out.

Now, I realize you can do that with the Twitter client too so maybe that isn’t such a feature draw.  In the Twitter app, you can really only setup a basic “search” on a keyword or a hash tag.  However, when creating “Agoras”, you can filter it down by lists, keywords and even by person.  This way, you can follow a hash tag but maybe only when people use certain keywords AND the hash tag.  Helpful when trying to find specific people or specific conversations.

I also enjoy the interface a bit more. The profiles contain more detail in less clicks and it’s easy to tell whether or not I’m following someone and it’s easy to follow them back.  You can also mute out noisy Tweeters which is helpful when looking for specific info.

Another of my favorite features? You can look up a person and then look up specific questions that they have asked. I LOVE answering questions and I’ve built a business on doing so.  The fact that this iPhone app makes that even easier is awesome.  It will pull a filtered list of all of their questions so you can respond directly to that person with an answer.

One thing I dislike? It needs a web client…

Visit TweetAgora.com to learn more or download their app on the iPhone app store.

Not Jumping on the ClickableNow Bandwagon

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 29, 2009 in Social Media, Twitter | 18 comments

Just found out about ClickableNow via my graphic designer Lukas.  Thought I would give you my opinion on this website in case you see it and get super-duper excited.

I’m taking the stance that I won’t be getting excited anytime soon.

While I think the concept is commendable, here are some flaws.

1. People aren’t looking at backgrounds enough to warrant the fee.
   Most people are using TweetDeck or, visiting your profile once and following you and then just looking at your updates from their profile.  Most people aren’t returning to your Twitter page enough to warrant the cost.
2. The backgrounds ARE NOT actually clickable for most people.
   Here’s where the service had me asking questions of the people featured on the ClickableNow website.  I visited the featured profiles to see this technology in action and … well … the profiles weren’t clickable.  Turns out, you have to download a script before they’ll be clickable.  So, you pay them $20 BUT the only people to see it are those who have the script downloaded.  Keep in mind, they don’t really say this anywhere on their website.
3. The profiles of the people who are using it load really, really slow.
   In a time where people are moving ridiculously fast and don’t have time to wait, I certainly won’t be waiting around for these profiles to load.  Not only that, I don’t want my profile to load slowly.  People won’t wait around.

The website needs to do a better job of educating people on how it works before they purchase as I think it’s a bit misleading right now. I’m not trying to be mean but I really think people need to know that this is not just a cool little tool that will change their Twitter experience.  It won’t.  Unless you force people into downloading a script to then click on your link.  In my opinion it’s much easier to just use the link function built into the sidebar of your Twitter profile.

What do you think?

** Update – July 29, 2009 @ 4:55pm **

From ClickableNow’s Twitter:

We’ve been listening & we agree. The entire service is now free. Create clickable background links on your profile – http://clickablenow.com — about 3 hours ago from web