Apparently Google Realtime Search, which pulls in posts from Twitter, prominently displays “Promoted Tweets.” You can see an example of a Skype Promoted Tweet below. There is a blog post by Twitter called “What Are promoted Tweets?” which explains what a Promoted Tweet is.
The other day I was on the LinkedIn website. There were some charts on how many times my page came up in search results and how many times it was visited and viewed.
APPEARANCES IN SEARCH
VIEWS
Of the 32 times my profile came up in search results, 15 times someone actually clicked on and came to my LinkedIn profile. Of those 15, LinkedIn provided me 5 results with either the name of the person or enough data to find out relatively easy who it was. To see the other 10 visitors I’d have to become a paid member. There is not enough value for me to do that at the moment.
How will you know?
Organize people, get them to commit to a date, time and place. Use software to get their commitment one way or another. If people change their mind or something comes up, they can cancel and people attending will know not to expect them.
Suggested Tools
Notes: There was a #Breakfastup tweetup (meeting of Twitter users) planned for this morning, Friday March 18, 2011 for 9 AM, and there were a bunch of cancelations and no shows. There was no way to know who would show up. Actually, it would have been good to see who still planned on going, it would have enabled the event to be rescheduled. In the end, only three people attended including me. We did have a good conversation.
Many bands played at the SXSW (South By SouthWest) festival in Austin, Texas. There is free music from twenty or so artists via the iTunes store.
See the post on the SXSW blog.
Below is a screenshot from iTunes as I downloaded all the tracks. believe I did this as the album and not as individual downloads. You can preview all the tracks and just download the ones you like too.
C-CAP : Critical Customer Adoption Point – Amount of users, also knows as paying customers, required to make a business or organization sustainable. Sometime this is a point in time that is not reachable with current funds on hand and there are no investors banging on the door with bags of money.
What can you do to survive longer so you can reach the C-CAP?
Get creative to legally acquire the funds you need to survive until you get to the C-CAP.
*Read the post by Fred Wilson on Airbnb.
As I was checking the weather radar this evening I noticed an ad at the bottom of the page, see banner images at the bottom of each of the images nearby. Apparently the iTunes Store from Apple will rent movies before they hit the theatre. There is a bit of a price premium, but if more than one person was going to the theatre, the $9.99 price to see it early is cheaper in most cases.
This could become an interesting play on exclusivity. The question I have is, is there a limit on the total number of households that can buy in on this deal? Some amount of exclusivity might drive word-of-mouth especially if there is a number that continues to fall towards zero as people buy the offer from iTunes.
What if people could buy in on this even after it is in theatrical release for the same price …
Hopefully this is an issue to revisit in April as the movie is in theatres.
NOTES:
Movie: Ceremony via IMDB.com
This bottom banner as was seen in the AccuWeather app for iPad on March 10, 2011.
The Zite app for the iPad was released in the past few days and users have been seeing error messages. The influx of new users looks like it might have been more that Zite could handle.
In the mean time, I’ve added the RSS feed for the @ziteapp Twitter account to Google Reader to keep up with the latest news.
Well, the rumors were true, the iOS 4.3 update became available a few days early and at 1 PM EST. Just a few minutes after 1 PM the update appeared in iTunes.
It’s a rather large download too at 596.9 MB.
“Google should add a priority box to URL’s in search results. Let me curate the sites that matter.” I was about to tweet that when the idea moved me to write a longer post first.
Currently Google allows users to block domains from search results. Earlier today I was wondering if there was an easy way to get RSS posts out of Google Reader and into my Twitter feed. You can see the two results that looked relevant and interesting to me in the screenshot nearby. Here is a request to Google, create a 
way to add the sites that are relevant to users, for example mashable.com and louisgray.com, to a priority list. This list would search these sites as well as all others, but would put their relevant posts higher up in results, possibly even to the top.
Facebook may be creating a similar system from their “Like” feature. As people Like more and more pages the content in their news feed will become harder to find. Facebook may add an element that enables users to search amongst all the pages that users have previously expressed and interest in. Google already makes much of the web available to us. If there was a way to add priority to the sites that truly interest us, that would be very useful.
Google Bookmarks was a good step, but Google Priority Search would be like putting a man on the moon as compared to what happened near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Please make Priority Search a reality. Thank you.
A game or a sequence of events. It starts as a pattern. It may not be clear upon a first look. There is always a first piece that tips and sets everything in motion. You put a product, service or idea out for the public to examine. If it meets their needs they might buy it. The key is for you to start, to not be afraid at how IT will be examined and judged. IT may fail. It happens. It’s very rare for a first idea to succeed without any setbacks. Setbacks and failure go with the territory. What you do as a result of those happenings is what matters. Does the idea that failure might, WILL happen scare you to not even try?
Start, start, start. That is probably a good mantra for someone with lots of good ideas but not quite the courage, yes courage, to apply their idea to reality. From dream to reality, now there is an idea. Apple seems to be dreaming and creating products into reality. iPod, iPhone and now, iPad. Those are three really good ones that have had and are creating a great impact on the market. Even the seemingly infallible Apple has failed. Remember the Newton? Here are some more product failures of Apple.
The story of Thomas Edison working on inventing the light bulb usually includes the mention of 10,000 ways not to create a light bulb. That’s 10,000 failed tests! With that many failures one might think this guy will never achieve anything. Ah, there you would be mistaken. Edison is probably considered one of the top 5 inventors of all time. Here is a list of accomplishments of Edison as well some biographical information.
D.L. Damore 