Time Tracking & Analysis

So I’ve religiously logged my time for a couple weeks now (using a desktop widget from Paymo.biz), and come to the following conclusions -

Virtual Assistant Providers

Job posting boards

Outsourcing companies

So, just when you thought you were already overwhelmed with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along comes yet another social networking/sharing service.

Google Buzz has joined the party.

There’s already lots of rants floating around about why it’s awesome or why it’s great, but I’m going to talk specifically about what should be improved with it.  To be perfectly honest though, I do like the idea of having a social networking tool integrated into Gmail, since I already use it for all my email as well as chat.  Plus, the Gmail search feature is wicked-cool and will undoubtedly be useful with Buzz.

Confusing Privacy Features

Most people want to be able to manually approve each follower, rather than having them auto-follow.  However, they don’t realize that Google Buzz is integrated with your public Google Profile.  So this means whatever you post in Buzz as “public” can be viewed by ANYONE on the internet via your Google Profile page.  Therefore it doesn’t matter if people have chosen to follow you or not.  If you are concerned about the privacy of a post, simply choose “Private” and optionally post to a “group” of Gmail contacts.

No Way To Tell Which Post is New

It’s nice that there’s an indication near the Buzz logo in your Gmail menu of how many new Buzz posts there are, however once you get into Buzz there’s no way to know which posts are the new ones.  So you’re stuck reading through a lot of what you’ve already read.  Definitely a time-waster.

No Tags / Keywords / Categories

These would be very handy to help search and organize our Buzz’s.

Can’t Include an Image in a Comment

When you create your own post there’s a useful link to insert a photo from your computer.  However, this isn’t possible when commenting on your friend’s posts.  There’s been a few times I wanted to include a pic in my comment but wasn’t able to.

Re-Buzz?

Similar to a Twitter Re-Tweet, it would be cool to be able to send a Buzz from one of your contacts along to your other contacts.

That’s about it for now.  Does anyone have other ideas?

The more I learn about this new service being developed by StumbleUpon, the more psyched I get.

If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, they are one of many social bookmarking websites, but they are unique in the fact that they offer users the ability to just browse or “stumble” through a never-ending list of sites recommended by other users.  Pretty cool idea.

I read about their new product, called SU.PR (pronounced “super”), from the blog of Tim Ferriss (the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”).

Well apparently SU.PR will allow users to do the following:

• Submit their content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post
• Have their best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page that’s linked to (here’s an example)
• Get suggestions for optimal posting times:  get more traffic per post
• Schedule as many tweets or posts as they want, for any time
• See their click-through statistics in real-time
• See retweets for each post, including the biggest influencers (with rankings)
• Post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, with more platforms to come…
• Use their own short URL (i.e. www.mysite.com/abc123) instead of something like bit.ly

Dang, that sounds pretty bad-ass.  Apparently Tim said while testing SU.PR he started receiving up to 10% of his unique traffic from it, and got 24,000 visits to a single post in 24 hours.  Holy smokes!

Here’s a sample of the SU.PR dashboard:

Well if you’re excited and want to get in on the action ASAP, they’re giving out free beta testing accounts for the next few weeks.  Here’s how to get one:

1. Go here http://su.pr/
2. Click “request one” if you don’t have an “invite code”
3. Follow StumbleUpon on Twitter to get the code when they periodically release new ones

I’m not gonna lie to ya – when I first found out about Twitter I wasn’t impressed.

I’m the guy who has NEVER (no lie) set his FaceBook “status” because I didn’t want all my friends knowing where I was or what I was doing 24 hours a day.  As far as I could tell, Twitter was just like a stand-alone verion of the FaceBook “status” functionality.

Lately I’ve started to realize that Twitter can be an incredibly powerful internet marketing tool.  I also feel bad for people who want to use it for its original intention (micro-blogging), but are being bombarded by IM-centric messages and users.

Here’s why I think it can be such a useful marketing tool:

Finding people with similar interests

• The search functionality is great for finding other users with similar interests
• If you have a site centered around a specific niche (say iPod Nanos), it’s easy to find other people with the same interests
• Simply follow someone and there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back

Learning about your niche

• If you aren’t sure about something, just Tweet and ask a question; there’s a good chance you’ll get a response

Promoting products & getting TRAFFIC

• This is probably the best part of Twitter…for people doing IM
• If you just wrote an article on your site with an affiliate link, simply send a Tweet to your followers with the URL to let them know
• Most likely you’ll see immediate traffic (depending on your methods for tracking traffic)
• If you have hundreds or even thousands of followers, your web server better be able to handle it!