I talk a good deal about Twitter’s deafeningly absent (but once very present) Track feature because Track was helping to usher in a new paradigm of finding information in a post-google age until the revolutionary functionality was thrown out with the bath water of scalability earlier this year as Twitter sought to sure itself up.
I still have faith and hope that Track will be restored to Twitter (or a similar service with significant uptake… what Identi.ca could have been but never matured into) in some capacity, even if its in a “Pro” package. There’s just too much potential to let the idea and implementation of Track disappear into scalability limbo.
I’m glad to see there are services trying to fill the gap between minutes and hours of latency with RSS with a more real time experience. One of those services is notify.me:
notify.me - About Us: “notify.me delivers notifications that interest you in near real time. It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are pushed to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application. “
I’ve been using the service for the past week. While the response time is dependent on the actual services being observed, it is a good clearing house for info that you need to get sooner than later.
There’s nothing like the real thing, but it’s good to see the drive towards real time discoverability picking up steam with other services.
Bill Wilson, AOL’s EVP of Programming, emailed me a followup to my post on AOL’s recent successes to let me know that the new comScore Media Metrix reports were out.
AOL had significant growth both in the passive page view metric as well as the more active attention metrics. New visitors and users were also both up 9% this year over last.
The corporate press release with all of its statistical goodness can be found here:
AOL Sites Hit Record Audience Reach and Engagement in October | AOL Corporate: “AOL programming sites hit all-time high traffic numbers and marked the 21st month of consecutive year-over-year growth for unique visitors, according to the October 2008 comScore Media Metrix report. Unique visitors to AOL’s programming content sites grew 7% year-over-year to 54.3 million in October, and page views more than doubled, up 101% year-over-year to 4.2 billion. Engagement (total minutes) grew 51% year-over-year in October. Total minutes reached an all-time high on AOL.com, http://aol.com, growing 27% year-over-year. Additionally, AOL.com page views grew 27%, and unique visitors and total visitors were up 9%, year-over-year, as the site further opened up to third-party content, services and features. In addition, AOL Webmail, http://mail.aol.com, reached an all-time high of 3.5 billion page views marking a 31% year-over-year growth. “
As I wrote in my post last week, AOL is on the right path with their decision to open up and allow existing and new users to leverage the AOL.com homepage as their home base for the web. We’ve recently seen Yahoo and just this week Microsoft’s Live.com follow in similar paths as well as Google with the iGoogle platform.
I don’t think we’re in a return phase of the “power of the portal,” but we are seeing the metaphor of the portal being expanded to encompass social media and social networks and real time (AIM) data deliverability and consumption.
I frequently mention Loa Power Tools on podcasts, but I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about it.
I’ve been a subscriber for the last six months or so and I can’t tell you how frequently Loa saves my rear when trying to send an email from a wifi hotspot, airport, university building, etc that doesn’t want to work well with my email client.
Or if you have an AT&T DSL line at your office space like I do, you know the frustration of trying to send out through an SMTP other than AT&T’s designated one. Loa solves that.
Yes, I do love and use GMail, but there’s the whole business aspect of not looking professional when you have the “sent from GMail on behalf of CostPerNews.com” in the header. Sure, I could go with Google Apps, but I’ve got 4 years of mail archived in my personal GMail account. Loa solves a huge problem there as well (and there’s a special plan for GMail users).
And that’s why I like Loa Power Tools. It’s a problem solving application for power email users that you don’t notice running in the background because it does what it needs to do quietly.
Just thought I’d plug the service (no, this is not a paid advertisement, I’m just a fan) because it’s an unsung hero of my daily work flow. Go read more and give it a shot if you need this sort of a solution (and who doesn’t with the ubiquity of wifi hotspots these days?)…
Tell me more about Loa PowerTools: “Loa PowerTools is a tiny utility that lets you send email from any internet connection anywhere. Once it is installed, you don’t have to change your life at all. You can use whatever email software you prefer: Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird … it doesn’t matter, but Loa PowerTools will send your mail out through the Internet in a way that can’t be stopped by any but the most aggressive firewalls. And by ‘aggressive’ we mean firewalls in secure places where you wouldn’t expect to be able to have much Internet contact with the outside world.
It’s particularly useful for laptops. Without Loa PowerTools, when you travel from connection to connection, you never know what mail server to use to send mail. You often have to spend a lot of time fumbling around to find the address of an SMTP server that will let you connect. Even if you can find one that would let you connect, more and more often these days the network you use won’t allow any mail at all. The provider of the connection deliberately blocks all outward-bound mail. The detective work you have to do is exhausting and often fruitless! You never know from one trip to the next whether you will be able to send email when you are at your destination hotel, in a conference room or an airport lounge or using some other publicly available network. And as the number of malicious exploits around the Web increases, the problem is only getting worse: network operators are being forced to become more and more protective of their networks.”
Plus, they take PayPal. Can’t beat that. Tell ‘em uncle Sam sent ya.
Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media (which is the umbrella for such wide-read and influential blogs as Lifehacker, i09 (one of my favs), Gawker, Valleywag, Fleshbot, etc) writes about the coming online advertising apocalypse…
Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan: “Internet advertising is by no means immune. Advocates of the internet claim that the sector is both more mature than it was during the last downturn; and it’s more ‘measurable’ than other media. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 27% decline in 2000-2002. Good luck with that. The sector’s maturity also means that its underlying growth is more sluggish than it was in the late 1990s. In 2001, internet advertising swung to a 13% decline from 78% growth the previous year; this time the sector starts from a growth rate of 27%; I would hate to see what a swing as violent as the dotcom burst would look like. As for the measurability of internet media: sure, marketers and their agencies can track engagement and clicks in great detail online; but it’s still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer’s sales.”
What Denton and Calacanis, etc fail to come to grips with is that the model of ad welfare which has supported the Silicon Valley lifestyle and worldview over the last 5 years of web2.0 is not (and has never been) the reality of actionable advertising or marketing.
Despite Calacanis’ dire predictions of affiliate marketing’s irrelevancy at Affiliate Summit West ‘08, there is a brighter future for the industry compared to what the Valley will have to endure in the coming years.
I’ve been a long time proponent of “cloud computing” and can’t imagine trading in my GMail or Google Docs on any machine I’m using for Outlook or Office tied to one machine or one OS.
Whether I’m on my Blackberry, Ubuntu laptop, Macbook Pro, Nokia N800, iPod Touch, Mac Mini, my wife’s Vista laptop, etc I can get to every piece of email, every document, every note (through Evernote) every task (through Remember The Milk) that I need.
It is beyond liberating and the type of freedom that any heavy user of computers should seek out. I simply cannot wrap my mind around people that continue to tie themselves to one desktop or laptop or even one operating system.
Firefox is my operating system.
However, the biggest concern I hear (and I have) about using “web apps” like GMail is whether or not they are stable and secure. What happens when their server goes down? What if you can’t get to your GMail because Google is doing maintenance? It’s a very good question and something I consider a cost for having the freedom of mobility.
This morning, Zoho is launching “Zoho Status” which monitors the health and stability of all the Zoho web apps (and they are numerous)…
Zoho-Status: “Today, we are adding a new section to our website - Zoho Status - which displays the health of all Zoho Applications. You can visit http://status.zoho.com to see if our applications are running and responding fine. The site provides you availability & response times for the past week along with downtime, if any. “
I find this highly important and relevant to web workers like affiliate marketers because many of us do use GMail or Google Docs on a daily, if not hourly or minute-ly, basis.
Zoho is, yet again, pushing ahead past Google or other web app providers here just as they have done frequently in the past. If you’ll remember, Zoho was the first to integrate Google Gears with its word processor to allow for offline work that syncs to the server when you are back on the network. Google Docs now offers this. Just recently, Zoho released Zoho Mail. I honestly think it’s a superior product to GMail because it takes the best of GMail and melds it with the functionality of Outlook, all in a web interface, complete with Google Gears for offline mode. GMail doesn’t have Gears integration yet. I’m not switching just yet, but it is tempting given Zoho Mail’s range of functionalities that GMail is just starting to catch up to with its own Lab features.
So, as a web worker, if I’m looking for a stable suite of web apps to use in place of Outlook and Office, I’m looking closer at Zoho today. Much of what I do on the web is mission critical in one way or another, and having the peace of mind that Zoho Status provides (at least in a placebo effect way) is calming.
37signals is the company behind such popular web worker products as Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise and Campfire. You’ve probably noticed the BackPack banner over in the sidebar, but now they’ve expanded the affiliate program to include their other productivity products. I’m pretty excited about that.
If you’re a small business doing online markeitng and not using Basecamp, you’re really missing out. It’s the hub of my online business life and people like Scott Jangro are also big fans.
I want to reiterate how reliant I am on Basecamp and Backpack for organizing my personal and business (and academic) lives, and also how you should be promoting these products if you’re in the B2B affiliate field.
37signals Affiliate Program: “The 37signals Affiliate Program pays you once after a customer’s first monthly payment, plus 5% of that customer’s future monthly fees for as long as their account remains open. “
Of course, if you’d like to sign up for any of their programs, feel free to do so with the affiliate links in this post (b/c CPN always needs and appreciates your support!).
AOL has been on the receivingend of muchnegativepress in the tech and marketing blogosphere over the last few weeks as the worldwide economic downturn continues to have ripple effects in the first tier advetising sector. I’m not immune to putting the heat on them either.
Amidst all of these reports, however, the press and bloggers are overlooking the very important moves AOL is making on two fronts these days: a better persona with a revamped home page and Platform-A.
1) New Homepage and More “Openness” Will Spur Better Social Web
A revised portal is nothing new for any online company or property (especially one that deals with a variety of front-end services like AOL). Before this most recent update late last month, it had been 18 months since AOL’s last front page revision. The web changed a great deal in those 18 months, moving to a much more social and interactive nature. For the most part, web users have become much more savvy and demanding in terms of seeing beyond walled-gardens. Even Facebook, the most walled-off garden of web2.0, has had to open-up with its app platform in order to sustain momentum.
So, it was not a huge surprise that AOL would allow for thrid party content such as GMail or Yahoo Mail access.
However, the innovative trick in all of this is that AOL is also helping to spur access (and perhaps innovation) among its users for services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace through a global status update manager. We haven’t seen this sort of push towards the social from the large portal sites, so I’m hopeful that more people will come to experience and love services like Twitter because of their reliance on AOL.
Not to mention there is a built-in RSS reader.
We who are well-versed in the social media space often forget there is a “great unwashed mass” of humanity out there who has no clue what to do with Twitter or RSS. AOL could help change that and in the process change Twitter (and even RSS) for the better.
Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programming, gave me an exclusive quote on the revamp of the homepage and how it relates to their vision for better marketing campaigns and metrics:
“As the Web becomes more fragmented, consumers want choice and relevance in their Web experiences. AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place. Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com.
We have already seen success by opening up AOL.com to other e-mail providers. We will continue to enhance the appeal of our portal with the changes we are making today by adding more relevant programming, customization opportunities, greater integration of third party content, improved design and access to social networks directly from AOL.com.”
“We are creating opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers through engaging and relevant content. As part of this redesign, there are more robust capabilities for advertisers including customized wallpapers, increased rich media capabilities, much deeper and richer content integration opportunities and more.
For example, a recent one-day advertisement for the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull DVD provided a chance for the advertiser to own the AOL.com homepage wallpaper for the day to reach consumers in a highly customizable and measurable way.”
I don’t see this as a replacement for iGoogle or NetVibes (or myAOL), but I do see the new AOL frontpage helping to push people towards those types of services as they develop an appreciation for the ability of the social web to both solve problems and provide community. Fascinating times we live in, folks.
2) Advertising.com / Platform-A / buy.at
I’ve long said that I’m bullish on AOL because of Platform-A. Simply put, I think they are doing things right across the board from large media buy type marketing down to direct performance marketing.
AOL has what every advertising company should be drooling for in terms of reach. As buy.at continues to be integrated with the overall AOL advertising family, I expect them to become leaders in our space. There’s no reason for them to fail at this point.
And with Platform-A’s reach across the globe with Advertising.com, the European ad company AdTech (not the conference), Quigo, and Tacoda to go along with buy.at, I expect AOL to come out of the global recession in fine shape.
If you’re somewhat unsure of the whole Platform-A experience, take a look at this video that the Platform-A team put together (plus, the video features one of my favorite songs…”Such Great Heights” from the Postal Service as the soundtrack… so they have good music taste as well).
At the end of the day, don’t count out AOL. The company is nostalgically synonymous with the internet in my mind (having been a teen in the mid-90’s and remembering the days of the ubiquitous AOL floppy) and given their push into the new social web as well as advertising, they could do very well at rekindling the magic.
There are a number of tools (some free and some paid) that perform the same function as Backlink Watch, but if you need a quick and easy checker to see who is linking to you and with what anchor text, it’s not a bad little tool.
Regardless, you should be keeping an eye on these sorts of things for SEO purposes as well as reputation management. And if you’re running an affiliate site that is composed of more than just affiliate links, it’s always a good idea to see if anyone else is including you in their posts or blogrolls.
Backlink Watch with something like Google Alerts should get you to 99% of what you need in this realm.
A new report from Asustek (say it out loud… it’s fun) says the company will be shipping $200 variations of its now famous (and ubiquitous) eee PC.
I grabbed a 7″ model in January of this year before Asus flooded the market with more variations than imaginable. It’s one of their “weaker” machines in terms of specs now, but I still love the little guy to death and wouldn’t part with him for an ATOM processor-based 8.9″ eee for anything.
Part of the charm and mystique of the little computer that started a revolution is its amazingly small size and form factor. I constantly get asked what it is when I’m out in public. When I have the eee and a Kindle at a coffee shop, I look like a real geek freak.
So, go grab a 7 inch Asus eee while you can (only $330 at Amazon!). They are cheap and don’t have as many features as the more expensive 8.9 or 10 inch models, but we’re talking about a netbook here. All you need is Firefox and you’re good to go.
while you can (only $330 at Amazon!). They are cheap and don’t have as many features as the more expensive 8.9 or 10 inch models, but we’re talking about a netbook here. All you need is Firefox and you’re good to go. 
