TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

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Update Twitter automatically with your Playstation 3 trophies

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Twitter and Facebook integration has come to two of the big three consoles of this generation with both the Xbox 360 and PS3 now allowing you to keep updated in between games.

Although your Playstation will automatically update Facebook when you earn a new trophy in a game, apparently that functionality is missing for Twitter (I own an Xbox 360 instead so can’t test).

But Dirk Olbertz has come to the rescue – he emailed me to say that PS3Heroes.com now allows you to update your Twitter status with your new PS3 trophies.

You’ll need to register with PS3Heroes.com, add your Twitter username, and allow access via OAuth.

And that’s it done.

I’m surprised the official auto-updates favour Facebook rather than Twitter – in terms of auto-updating accounts, you’d assume the focus would be reversed – but this will solve the problem for the time being.

Track Lufthansa plane flights (and your friends) via Twitter

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I remember suggesting something along these lines a while back to a friend – so it’s great to see you can now track commercial flights via Twitter and Facebook social networks.

Lufthansa has launched MySkyStatus which automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook. Aside from the vicarious thrill of following people on their travels, it has a definite practical application if flights are delayed, for example. And that could mean potentially skipping waiting times of several hours, particularly in winter when clearing snow can definitely affect timetables.

Updates are posted around once an hour, which could mean 20+ tweets on a long-haul flight.

Updates simply state that someone ‘ is flying over xxxx,xxxx in Geramny on Lufthansa’

Bit of a round-up for a busy day…

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It’s been a busy day at work, so rather than adding to my list of ‘things I should really blog about when I find time’ file, I thought I’d clear a few things out:

  • First up is the news that that two Australian girls stuck in an Australian storm drain decided to update Facebook for help rather than phoning for help. My first response channelled the spirit of Bill Hicks, but it certainly raises an issue about how younger generations wish to communicate, even in emergencies. Should emergency services monitor the main social networks as a necessity, just in case? What happens if you’re a user of a niche social site, rather than Facebook or Twitter? And no monitoring system to my knowledge is 100% accurate at picking up every message on a service…
  • ‘Just’ 25% of women are influenced by social networks when making purchases. Firstly, the fact that 25% are conscious of the influence is pretty impressive considering how new social networking still is for many people. Secondly, they aren’t influenced by social networks – they’re influenced by other people – the social network just makes this less geographically limited. I’d agree with Matt Wise from Q Interactive, who conducted the survey, that “brands are failing to use social networks to effectively target women” (Except I’d use the words engage or serve women), but in a lot of cases, they’re also failing for men too. And I’m not going to mention the Brand Republic headline for the story…
  • Technorati appears to have given up on monitoring. I can understand that Technorati has lost direction, particularly given the plethora of real-time search services, plus Google blog search etc. But I’m surprised that rather than concentrating on making their core business better, they appear to be trying to emulate the big content sites – given the efforts of brands like AOL etc, I can’t see Technorati being a big draw for content consumers (although I could be wrong). And the fact that they’ve dropped blog roll links from their monitoring, whilst also producing a lacklustre monitoring nod to Twitter, really suggests that they’re in search of a plan. Because obviously as I write this, blogging is dead…

That’s probably enough for today – I’ll end on a more constructive note for Technorati – rather than throwing away the monitoring side of the business to jump on the blog content and real-time bandwagons, why not improve the core product, as people have asked for years, and perhaps also implement a decent alternative to Feedburner? Give me decent monitoring, monetisation and innovation in RSS delivery and I’ll be a lot happier, as my RSS readership continues to grow proportionally. There are a lot of issues with the real-time web at the moment, and the non-real-time web isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

When numbers become meaningless and dangerous

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I’ve just been looking at the latest stats from comScore (Via Techcrunch), and the statistics for Facebook‘s arrival as the fourth biggest site in the world illustrated for me why site stats can become both meaningless and rather dangerous.

For starters, the numbers of the top sites are so big that we don’t really have any way of gauging them – as Eddie Izzard explains using the examples of mass murder (some NSFW swearing).

But the big problem with numbers like these is that they can become very dangerous, due to the tendency for people to quote them as law, and rely on them:

Reasons to worry:

  • Monitoring services like comScore and Compete can only track online traffic to domains – no clients and no apps. A particular problem at the moment for Twitter, but growing for all sites.
  • A certain percentage of users are always unquantifiable thanks to cookie deletion etc, or end up showing up different times on different computers
  • In the comScore example, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sites are bundled up into their respective companies, so you can’t tell what comes from Google Search and what comes from Orkut or Google Maps.
  • No accounting for OpenID, Facebook Connect etc.

But essentially, the big risk is:

  • Unless you’re one of the top 20 or so sites, the total number of users of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc won’t matter much – you’ll still be able to get 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 fans/friends. What really matters is what you want to achieve, the relevancy of the network, and how you work at building valuable relationships rather than numbers.
  • And rather than numbers, look at the interactions, or for the business minded, how many people actually buy something…

But on the bright side:

Besides the fact we can accept social networking reaches almost as far as the internet with Facebook getting 340 million uniques per year, the fact that Wikimedia Foundations sites clock in right behidn it at 303 million uniques also shows the undeniable value of crowdsourcing user generated input if it’s done relatively well.

And maybe the combination of my three blogs will crack the top 10 next year!

My presentation on building online communities

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I was invited to speak about ‘Building online communities to support successful media brands’ on Tuesday by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, as part of an event covering what Scholarly Publishing can learn from other industries.

As the opening act, and with a subject so huge, I opted to go for a fairly general overview to hopefully inspire more people to give it a go without worrying about the ‘correct’ way to do things – because I’ve found that beyond some simple principles, the most important thing is tailoring what you do to your specific community.

In retrospect I probably could have included some more specific case studies – for instance Absolute Radio on Twitter and Facebook! But that’s why I subtitled it ‘a work in progess’ because anything on online communities is going to need constant revision and updating, and I intend to create v2.0, v3.0 etc and hopefully involve some more people to create a more comprehensive guide.

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