MessageStream with Tags : digg

Finally, a way for us schmucks to make money in social media!

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-07-09T00:31:35Z

Verbs 2.0 -- tweeting, digging, blogging, emailing (ok, that one is 1.0) -- can now make you some extra change for doing what you do already. All you need to get is a Google AdSense account and add it to your MessageDance profile. Send YouTube videos, Songza songs, Digg articles, Amazon product recs, and emails to Twitter (and any of your other social networks) and when people click through to your message detail on MessageDance.com, your AdSense ads will show on the right side bar. The impressions and clicks are all yours!

Imagine, when you tweet about how you just ate a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast, you might make someone realize it would be cool to order a box of Wheaties with their face on the cover. And you"ll make some money off that weirdness (maybe $0.02, but hey it adds up).

But seriously, why not? Set it up once and see what happens. We at MessageDance are constantly surprised by the traffic we get on our users content. It"s your content, so someone should make money off of it. Why not you?

Here"s how you set it up.

Community support comes to Mixx.

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — 2008-06-25T18:21:33Z

Go to Mixx Communities Popular News Entertainment Tech

Introducing Mixx Communities!
We've been a tad quiet for a couple of weeks and at last we're ready to emerge from our cave and tell you why! Today we're taking our mantra of ultra-personalization to a whole new level with the launch of Mixx Communities. You may have already noticed that the "Groups" tab in your navigation bar has been replaced with a shiny new "Communities" tab. All of your Groups are still there and will reside under this tab but we've added Mixx Communities, which some here have described as "Mixx Groups on steroids."
Mixx Communities offer an easier way to focus on the topics and issues that you're most passionate about, whether that's wildlife activism, social media, political reform or the NY Giants. Once you start a Mixx Community, it will reside within Mixx but you can give it your own stamp by importing an image header and/or logo, choosing a custom color scheme, and determining specific topics and categories to include. For instance, if your Community is dedicated to environmental preservation, you might want to have as your topics "News," "Science," "Politics" and "Education."
Your new Community will have the same benefits as a Mixx Group, with a few more bells and whistles. Well, OK, a lot more bells and whistles! You'll have:
Your new Community will have the same benefits as a Mixx Group, with a few more bells and whistles. Well, OK, a lot more bells and whistles! You'll have:

Prominently placed space for your editorial and/or promotional content

A sub-domain name

The ability to import existing tags—this means that as soon as you've finished your set up, your Community will already have content

The ability to embed video through YouTube and MetaCaf�

Mixx is also excited to announce that as part of our community offering, we will allow users the ability to participate in a revenue sharing program. The revenue sharing will be made possible by Mixx's integration with the Google AdSense API.
The members of your Mixx Community also get some pretty cool benefits:

A more customized experience

More prominent message boards

The ability to take part in polls that relate to your group's message

Karma points earned in the community are automatically added to their general Mixx karma pool (NOTE: Karma points are only added if the content is exclusive to the Community.)

Improved comment following: Read the comments on a particular story across all groups, both public and private, that you are a member of.

Though it will take a little more time than setting up a Group, creating a Mixx Community is a simple, five-step process that any non-techy person can do. But if you're not ready to go all out, Mixx Groups are a great way to get your feet wet. It takes just a couple of minutes to set up a Group and you'll be on your way! Then whenever you're ready to take the plunge, you can upgrade your Group to a Community.
We're really excited about Mixx Communities and think they're going to completely change how you use the web, so go check it out, and as always, please let us know what you think!
Your Mixx Team
(As a friendly reminder, you're receiving this announcement because you've opted to receive updates from us. Details on how to unsubscribe are available at the bottom of this email.)

Tell your friends about Mixx! Forward this newsletter to all of your friends!

Reddit goes open source with CPAL license, probably caused major LOL in Diggnation

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — 2008-06-18T12:33:35Z

Reddit is releasing source code of it's news voting engine. Light weight voting utility was already available in the form of Pligg, Written in Python, this can at best be a launch pad for developers to get onto Google App Engine. Reddit announcement can be interpreted in two ways. One is that they are letting developers look inside the engine and add value-add code. Stuff like widget, trackers, analytics plugins etc come to mind immediately. Second motivation, important one, is to let publishers run their own news...

Read the complete blog post here

Email still has plenty of juice left.

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — 2008-05-10T20:31:14Z

"Oh! I have so much data, I want to protect every bit of it and I want users to come to me everyday" said Social network sites when they gathered millions of users. For well known reasons social media world is keeping the tremendous amount of valuable data trapped within its arena. This is no secret to savvy users of all these different services. So we see initiatives like DataPortability and OpenSocial picking up good traction. Facebook, MySpace are doing this but taking careful steps as they have a lot tied with their data which they want to protect as much as they want. Users want their data to be portable and they want it quick. On the other end we have "email" which is loved my billions from its inception thru today and it is still not used very well in the context of social communication and messaging except basic notification service within every major social media sites.

There is a huge gap between email world and social media world as far as data distribution is concerned. Email should go beyond "Notify me when I have a new message or comment" notion. Wouldn't it be helpful to get all that email power close to social media community in terms of outreach, sharing and connection.

As per About.com

183 billion messages per day means more than 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% (or between 128 and 132 billion) of them might be spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.2 billion email users.

Recently as per Techcrunch on the other topic very interesting numbers came around usage/how much time users spend on different desktop applications. If you relate these numbers with email.

In top 10 , users spend more time on 4 email applications (Outlook, Gmail, mail, Thunderbird)
In Top 3, users spend time on 2 email applications.

So we love email here at MessageDance and believe that there are enough innovative and intriguing things can be built around it using users current attention span and exposing them to the interesting content sharing model across social media. To facilitate this, in last few weeks we have released nice little features like

Sharing and blog right from Amazon, Google Reader, Digg, YouTube, Facebook and iPhone
Tag messages as you write them and make your messages more social.
Multi email support : Add multiple email addresses to the account. With this you can blog right from your blackberry when you are on road and go back to office and blog from your outlook.
User's entourage : you can see what your friends and your friend's friends are talking about.

We are working on lot more in coming weeks.

As we let the time and great ideas build the gap between, so called "legacy email" and emerging social media, we will run into creative ways of using our daily life which is trapped in the wonderful world of email.

I sense a disruption in The Force!

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-05-09T11:47:23Z

Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says he will reinvent Nokia into an Internet company as detailed by Anders Bylund of Ars Technica. It's a clear reaction to the success of the iPhone (with the frenzy of activity around jailbreaking it and the new SDK), the poorly kept rumor about the Google Phone along with the Android platform, and of course the decreasing margins that always come with hardware. I disagree a bit with Nokia's intention to not innovate in hardware design and Anders' thought that mobile devices will converge to basically the same feature set because there is a lot to be done in the area of usability and power consumption that a device maker could still differentiate itself greatly. The iPhone is an incredible step forward but there is obvious room for improvements such as data input and power usage.

ALL mobile phones are fast becoming mobile computers (not limited to "smart phones") with incredible power, storage, and Internet capabilities. While I believe you can still set yourself apart as a manufacturer, it will be the services and software native to the phone that will be an even stronger selling point. For web companies, why build an app or user interface specific to each device when a really good Internet browser is all you need? Safari on the iPhone proves this. Why build a special mobile data integration layer for each device when you can just use the email client native to the phone? Web companies should build their site and services with this in mind and the device/platform companies should optimize their native apps and OS for these simple requirements.

At MessageDance, we recognize that the browser and email are the apps found on virtually every PC and soon on every mobile device. We're not too keen on being device-specific so we use the ubiquitous tools already available and everyone knows. Using the "Share" feature found on many social sites like YouTube and Digg (and probably on all sites sooner rather than later), our users can send their favorite content to their favorite social destination or their friends' by using their MessageDance email address. They can create a blog post from their iPhone or Facebook Messages section by simply emailing it to "blog @ messagedance.com". The blog post also can go automatically to Twitter. All of this is done by a simple yet powerful email address.

Nokia senses the disruption caused by the iPhone and Google. They believe the higher margin business will come from the platform and services built on top of their devices. This is a natural evolution as witnessed in the PC business as well with IBM focusing more on software and services. I hope they will continue to innovate on the devices as well as make the platform and native apps stronger so companies like MessageDance can innovate and develop their offerings to be useful anywhere and from any device.

MessageDance - Jailbreak Your Blog

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-05-01T15:25:24Z

Another installment of a "how-to" video from MessageDance. See how to break away from your blog platform and blog from virtually anywhere. BTW, it's pretty darn easy making YouTube videos using Snapz and iMovie. Only wish the video quality was better on YouTube.

MessageDance - Jailbreak Your Blog

Ask Sam (AskSam) — 2008-05-01T15:19:13Z

Another installment of a high quality educational video! Learn how easy it is to create blog entries to your WordPress and Blogger blog with Google Reader, iPhone, YouTube, Digg, Facebook, your favorite email client, and more using MessageDance!

Email for the rest of us

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-04-29T01:41:52Z

No matter how hard we try, we can't seem to shake off email. While it basically hasn't changed much in 15 years, it serves its promise of delivering data very effectively. It certainly has its issues with spam, but if email is used in the context of an integration layer for the Internet, its future has never been brighter.

Brad Feld shouts "I Love Email":

Every now and then the "Email is dead" meme makes the rounds and lights up TechMeme. The right answer isn't that "email is dead"; it's that new and exciting stuff is happening around the use of "messaging" and it's time for some new innovation.

His partner Chris Wand of Foundry Group goes further:

In a time when many folks view Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as the new darlings of the Internet, we still believe that email has been and will long continue to be one of the Internet's few enduring killer apps.

The keyword that Chris uses there is "Internet". Email is an Internet app. Its largest value isn't on the desktop; it's the ability to transport data.

TripIt has it right with using email as the input mechanism for user data into their system with a transformed output delivered back to the user. Their presentation at Web 2.0 Expo is right on the mark.

At MessageDance, we use email as the engine for our users to share content from their social sites to wherever they choose it to go. They each have a powerful email address ("you"@messagedance.com) they can use to share conversations, videos, and blog posts from sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Digg. Their sharing doesn't have to start from an email client, but when it does, it can be very powerful, as this blog entry itself was fully written and posted from my Gmail account, including image placements, tagging, and category assignment. It also went to my Twitter account automatically.

It's great to see our private beta users really spanning the spectrum in the email clients they use and the integrated services they are sharing from. Here are samples I've pulled from the shameless snippets we add to the end of their blog posts created with MessageDance.

We're just getting warmed up, so stay tuned for more innovations in the way you will use email in the future.

Why Kevin Rose has more followers on Twitter than Evan williams himself?

Drew Long (crazyfoxmedia) — 2008-04-23T08:51:33Z

Kevin Rose (digg fame) who also launched pownce with his friends, a competitive service to twitter which was started by Evan williams (blogger fame) with his friends.

As everyone know twitter being center of the web2.0 universe right now. Kevin also hangs out on twitter and Eve as well (offcourse!).

Kevin Rose has 16,981 followers (See the image below)

Evan williams has 10, 418 followers (See the image below)

So question is How come Kevin R has more followers on Twitter than Evan W (even though he is THE twitter guy) ?,

Kevin more popular than Eve ?
Digg more popular than Blogger ?
Pownce catching up with Twitter ?
May be I'm feeling sleepy this morning.

@guykawasaki I like designs in following order

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — 2008-04-18T11:25:10Z

digg, google reader, alltop, techmeme, stumbleupon, bloglines, google news.