Yesterday, following on to our discussion from earlier in the month on what further efforts FriendFeed could make to attract and keep new users, a commenter wrote:

"I'm a little nervous about investing a lot of time and effort in, or become reliant on, a product that has no business model - whether it's FriendFeed or Twitter. Sure it has plenty of VC money, but who knows when they'll pull the plug."

Given the uncertainty we've all seen in the greater business market, and with Silicon Valley in particular, there is no question that some Web services are in dicey positions. Pownce recently closed after its acquisition by Six Apart, and users weren't given a whole lot of time to extract their information. So, for some, it makes sense not to take a risk with their time and their data.

I tend to be of the opinion that as consumers, we should use those products that give us the best experience, community or enable us to do things that no other sites do. I feel that it's not typically our role to choose what sites are going to be successful and which ones are not. We don't always know the financial underpinnings of a company. We can't forecast whether something will succeed or fail. And often, if you like a product, so will many others like you, meaning that if the time comes to eventually shut the site down, there will be a buyer, and more likely than not, the service, and your data, will be retained.

As much fun as it can be for us to try and predict if Twitter will go mainstream, and much of the conversation in the echo chamber today was around the company's hiring of a new business development manager, seen as the first step toward getting revenue, I don't really care all that much what these companies' business models are - so long as my data isn't being sold or manipulated, or ads don't obscure the product itself. But that's my less conservative side showing - and maybe my position is wrong.

Have you ever liked a product, but steered clear of it because you didn't want to get attached in the event you might later have a costly breakup?

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


This post touches upon what I feel social media is and isn’t. It does not matter what your purpose is for using social media. The key elements are and always will be the same. Your desired outcome is dictated by the basic fundamentals of the core of what social media is. This post touches upon the most important ones. I could have went on and on with this list, but I don't think that was needed to drive home what I'm trying to get across. Please feel free to add to it by leaving your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

What social media is:

1) Conversation: Social media is all about word of mouth. The message you are trying to convey might vary for personal or professional gain. This is the social in social media. Without this, it's just plain old media. Traditional marketing methods are one-way, one-sided. Social media and social marketing is all about two-way communication, never forget this. Marketing in the social web means you must participate, lead and when necessary react to conversation.

2) Commenting: This goes hand in hand with community and conversation. You should actively comment on conversations. If you have an opinion let it be known, otherwise you are a shadow lurking in the background. Comment only when you have something constructive, or positive to add to the conversation. Commenting just for the sake of commenting adds no real value, all it does is add clutter to the conversation. Commenting also reflects on you as the individual or brand, so always beware of that fact. Choose your words wisely, think before you act or react.

3) Community: This is formed from conversation. This is where people are talking. The communities may vary across all the social networks. Go where your existing and potential customers are talking and engage them. It could be on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and so forth. If your goals are strictly for launching a new product, you should be creating a community around it and for it.

4) Collaboration: Work with anyone, anywhere to achieve a common goal. This should be key to any company, especially when launching a new product. Your customers could be anyone. Who better to solicit feedback and ideas about your product than the ones who are already using it? Going beyond that, the social web allows us to collaborate basically with anyone that's connected to the web. Collaboration fosters creativity and innovation. It would be foolish not to use it. Forget the costly and expensive R&D teams. Collaborate with your employees. Like your customers, they are the ones who know and work with your product day in and day out.

5) Contribution: First and foremost this means being helpful. What you put into social media, is what you will ultimately get out of it. It's really that simple. You need to contribute before you can ask for something in return. On Twitter, re-tweet valuable information from your followers and abroad. Contribute to the conversations going on around you. Every avenue of social media allows you to contribute and participate in someway shape or form. I don't think I need to expand on this any further.

6) Sharing: This aspect is especially true if you are using social media for personal branding. Share your knowledge with others through blogging. Knowledge is power, and by sharing it you, are arming people with power. Share and promote quality content whenever and wherever you find it. The knowledge you share either through blogging or Google Reader is the foundation for what social media is based upon, conversation. Always remember, sharing and self promotion is always a two-way street.

What social media isn’t:

1) Social Media isn’t easy. Anyone can set up a blog, Twitter and Facebook account. That's the easy part. You could teach a child to do that. It's how we use these tools that is the challenge. Social media takes time and plenty of it. It takes commitment and also an understanding of how things works. This is not something you can just jump into and reap the benefits. Like anything else you must crawl before you can walk.

2) Social Media isn’t the end all solution for every business. There are some industries that are very niche or for instance locally based, that social media is just not a viable solution for. Tom's pizza shop down the block could care less about social media. He might have a need for a website, maybe listings in the local Yahoo or Google search, but that's about it.

3) Social media isn’t about list building and Friending hundreds to thousands of people. Social media is about connections, meaningful ones at that.

4) Social media isn’t a "set it and forget it" type of medium. Read #1

5) Social media isn’t a replacment for SEO. It's simply an effective tool that compliments it, but should not relied upon as a total replacement.

6) Social media isn't about ROI (to some extent). If your goal is strictly to make money, you are not going to last to long. Social media is about VOI (Value of investment). Social media is about the conversation. You cant put a price tag on conversation. Instead, you should be measuring the success of the conversations. Currency in social media is valued in the content that is created along with relationships. Both of these elements are needed, not one or the other. The VOI is measuring value of the conversations. How many comments were left? Were they positive? How much buzz is happening on Twitter? How many back-links were generated in the search engines? What bloggers/blogs are talking about us? Did we build brand awareness, create and build customer loyalty? VOI is always measured for the long term and never short term.

I want to close this with a fantastic video by Perry Belcher called the 7 secrets of social media. I have embedded it below. Please take the time and watch the full video. It outlines a lot of what I have talked about in this post today, along with a few other key elements that defines how to successfully get involved with social media.



Image by Jason Vance under Creative Commons License.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The Palm Pre has surprisingly gotten the gadget industry abuzz after being announced at CES this year, after the company had largely been given up for dead after seeing its leadership decimated. And they are working to ensure the buzz doesn't end up being a one week blip. Apparently, Sprint has been 'softening the ground' so to speak by giving Palm Centro owners a sneak peek at this new gem to ensure a excited and willing reception when the Pre is released to retail. But today I wanted to speak more about some of the user interface choices Palm made in designing the software and hardware for this phone.

Hardware

The Pre is a silky little pebble of a device. When the screen is off, the shell is inviolate except for the single button and earphone grill. The back of the device is much the same, with speakerphone and camera ports. The back cover comes off to reveal the battery in case it needs to be replaced. So we have touchability covered. Yeah, I probably just invented that word. But it works.. the Pre looks touchable.

Surprise number two is a hidden keyboard. Slide the screen up and the keyboard (more of a thumb-board) is revealed. And if you look at this keyboard, you might notice a resemblance to the keyboard on the Palm Centro. I am sure this is no accident. The size and orientation tell me this is specifically to ease the transition of people off of other Palm products and on to the Pre.


There is a 3.5mm headphone jack.

On the front of the device, we have a single, centrally placed button. Visually, this may be a nod to the iPhone, but the button in fact does something quite different than the iPhone's 'home' button. Surprisingly, the button is actually the least interesting part of the area on the Pre. The smooth expanse of plastic surrounding the button is where the magic happens.

User Interface

While the iPhone has boldly wasted space around their home button in the name of asthetic pleasingness, Palm engineers have taken the concept of a 'touch area' going back all the way to the Palm Pilot and have extended the touch input sensor down around the button. This small change is at the core of the user-interface innovation on the Pre. It's extremely clever.

First, Palm probably secured a patent on gestures outside of the display area a long time ago.

Second, there is a competely mental resistance some people have to touching a surface with an image projecting through it. Think about when people at work touch your monitor screen. Doesn't that drive your crazy? I know it does me. And I have an iPhone, I'm constantly cleaning the screen. The touch area below the screen means no mental resistance to befouling the pretty display.

Third, and this is the big one, having these areas do the same magic no matter where you are in the interface means that they could get away with all sorts of interface cues, close and minimize buttons, menus, etc. When you sensitize yourself to what you are seeing when you watch one of the Pre OS demos, you will notice this. Applications only have content in them, no UI elements. When an app is relegated to a 'card' (what Pre calls an app running minimized or in the background), no controls appear. The Pre OS has the most invisible user interface of any smartphone currently out there.

Synergy

The last big game changer I am going to touch on is Palm's focus on what they call 'synergy.' They designed the Pre OS from the ground up to be aware of applications that live online (or 'in the cloud' or 'software as a service,' etc.) Apps like Google Mail, AOL Instant Messenger and MobileMe calendar sharing. But support for these things aren't bolted-on like they might be in an older, more established mobile OS. No, they are integrated so tightly that the apps combine all the information from these various sources and present to you a unified view.

In the world of online calendaring, this has been done for a while. Most calendaring applications have had the ability to display a full or filtered view of multiple overlaying calendars for years now. But how about your phonebook pulling in not only your email addressbook, but your buddy lists and other sources and then intelligently combining the results? How about an instant messaging application that not only shows you a combined view from AIM, Yahoo! IM, Google Talk, etc. but also shows you when you get an SMS in the same interface, or lets you choose how to send a message to your friend, via IM or SMS? And threads the resulting conversation together seamlessly? Now you are getting the picture.

Multitasking

Not a game changer, but worth noting. The OS lets you open and run any of its apps simultaneously. From a workflow perspective, this is essential and something the Blackberry gets right as well. The iPhone? Not so much.

Conclusion

What Palm has done here is fundamental stuff. It may not be as flashy as some other phones, but its real meat-and-potatoes work that will pay off big in the long run for them. Why? Wait until the phone is released. Get one and use it for a week. Then try to go back to your iPhone or Blackberry. You will find yourself wondering why your old phone is slow, or clumsy, or doesn't do something so simple you got used to it in 5 minutes on the Pre.

A month or so ago, following my review of the new Price Is Right application for the iPhone, the always conversational, if not controversial, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks asked "why people are so quickly willing to drop massive dollars on iphone apps" but will do whatever they can to avoid paying for content, including the use of ad blockers. As with offline purchases, everyone's rationale for purchasing can vary, but here's some of the thinking behind my own behavior:

Worth Buying: Something Tangible You Can Keep

The "Commerce" folder in my e-mail box is flooded with iTunes Store purchase receipts going back years, thanks to the Apple offering me thousands of songs I can purchase, films, television shows, and now applications for the iPhone. With hard drive capacities ever increasing, I have very little need to ever throw away a song, so purchasing it for keeps makes sense.

I also purchase software applications for my computer online, which when downloaded, are essentially there forever. Also, as downloadable software applications are typically the same content as retail boxes of software, I know they have equivalent value.

Not Worth Buying: Something You Don't Keep

Even if it would likely save me money over the long run, I won't pay for a subscription model of music. If I ever chose to stop paying, I would have no assets. So that doesn't make sense.

Not Worth Buying: Something Useless Tomorrow

Practically everything has a shelf life. Information and news ages faster than just about anything else out there. News that was breaking this morning is old news this evening and ancient by tomorrow. That's why I am no longer paying for Newsweek's print edition, or Sports Illustrated, Macworld, or even the Wall Street Journal online edition, as their content had already been discovered somewhere else closer to real time.

Worth Buying: Unique Insight and Direct Access

Thought it's unusual, some subscription models work, if online consumers believe they are getting more of the story, or get additional tips that free users are not getting. ESPN.com's Insider feature, though maligned by many, has been a must-renew each year, because much of their quality content is behind the paywall. Similarly, at times I have been a Wall Street Journal online subscriber, and previously a subscriber to TheStreet.com. The last two are particularly important because they deal with finance and many believe that the money they will make back off their content will more than outweigh the initial spend.

Not Worth Buying: Duplicate, Non-Unique Items

The "for pay" content successes are few and far between. Much of that is because it is getting easier and easier to publish content quickly these days, and if one source doesn't cover a story, another one will. In television, all the news networks and cable channels cover the big stories. In the blogosphere, most of the brand names echo each others' content, driving down the average quality, and practically making every single one of them replaceable. With very little unique content and access, none derive enough value for users to pay, except maybe out of pity.

Worth Buying: Time Wasters and Entertainment

It's a lot more fun to play cards or video games than it is to pay bills. And while office productivity applications might be among the most useful applications you have, the number of games you have on your PC or your mobile phone may outnumber these tools by a factor of 3-1 or more. For every Microsoft Office I have, I also have a handful of card games, board games or arcade games at the ready, each of which is probably in the $5 to $20 range to buy.

Not Worth Buying: Access to Social Communities

The very nature of social communities is that they rely on the people themselves to deliver the value, and on the Web, those communities are extremely mobile. As much fun as you may be having on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed or other networks, you know you were probably spending the same amount of social capital somewhere else a few years ago, and you'll likely be spending it somewhere else in a few years. Given the entire community can move, you don't want to find out the last thing people will remember you by is your credit card number.

Worth Buying: Items With Offline World Equivalents

Lest I be seen as overlooking the entire world of e-commerce, yes, buying real-world goods and services online has value, so long as it correlates nicely with offline costs and deliverables. Online purchases of tickets, apparel, food, and services make sense. I'll pay for Quicken Online. I'll pay for Netflix videos. I'll pay for MLB.com broadcasts, and I'll buy physical items on eBay, Amazon and other merchants.

Not Worth Buying: Content

Content itself is not king as once was thought. With the advent of wire services and RSS, content created in one place can move to another in rapid speed. Syndicated content can build up a shell of a site and make it a destination. Bloggers can niche themselves and create original content, or they can be repeaters and post many times a day, putting quality in the wind. Building a Web site is very cheap right now, and creating content is very cheap as well. While consumers are suffering with a reduction in the availability of great content by those who practice their craft well, the amount of content available is overwhelming, and if one publication disappears, another can rise up almost instantly to take its place. Even the biggest brands we know today in content can be replaced.

For many content producers who have made this their craft, the realization can be very frustrating, as they know their efforts have value, but as consumers, we don't always recognize it. I may be perfectly okay in shelling out $8 to play the Price Is Right on my iPhone, or I'll pay $10 to download an album from iTunes, but ask for $1 an RSS feed, and I'll say no. Cognitively, that is broken. But that is where we are.

Any other thoughts? There's no way my list is complete. And Allen, I expect to hear from you on what I'm missing.