Mix-ins Add Social Networking Sites and More to Your Contacts

The AddressBook application isn't just one app - it's a combination of the core application and additional, optional apps called "mix-ins." Depending on your own personal preferences, you can download and install any of these mix-ins to integrate the social networking services of your choosing with the main AddressBook. After adding a mix-in, the app also helpfully auto-matches your phone's contacts to your friends on the social networking site you selected. The option to manually match your friends is available as well.

For the most part, this feature worked as advertised, but with Twitter there were some issues. The mix-in didn't pull in my complete friends list and when viewing the mix-in itself, contacts were listed as "null" instead of by their Twitter username. It's hard to say if this was an issue with the AddressBook itself or something that was going on with Twitter at the time, but it could point to a few kinks that need to be worked out.

Each social network has its own mix-in, but you can also find other mix-ins for social games like "AngelChess" for example. And because anyone can develop these mix-ins, the company hopes that developers will create even more to choose from in the future.

In addition, updates from your social networks will appear along with your other standard notifications in Android like new voicemails, new emails, new text messages, etc. You can finely control which networks and friend groups you receive notifications for, too, so you don't get overloaded with updates.

Similarities to Other Social Contacts Apps

At first the AddressBook application may bring to mind another mobile contacts app for iPhone - the newly launched Gist. However, although Gist's app also lets you keep tabs on what your contacts are up to through social networking integrations, Asurion's app is more of a consumer offering. There's currently no focus on integrating with CRM systems like Salesforce or even the business-focused social network LinkedIn.com.

Another great feature in the AddressBook app is "Smart Contacts." These are location-based business listings which provide quick access to maps, addresses, store hours, phone numbers and more. With these unique contacts added to your address book, you're able to find that company's nearest location with just a few taps. This feature somewhat resembles the "RingPages" feature in the upcoming iPhone app CallSpark. Those, too, are location-aware business listings which can be added to the main contact application.

Business Plan: App to be Free, Affiliate Model in the Future

For now, the company isn't as focused on their business model as they are on just increasing the adoption and the app's user base. However, they do say that the AddressBook app will remain a free download and will never include in-app ads. Instead, the company may eventually be able to generate revenue by sending traffic to the businesses included in the Smart Contacts section. Though the details of this affiliate model still need to be sketched out, it's clear that the company's goals don't involve having app owners pay for its services.

If you're an Android owner looking to try the AddressBook beta, you can download it here.

Update: The company now reports that the Twitter bug described above has been fixed.

The way that Nomee's CEO Kevin Mokarow describes his new Adobe AIR application is that it lets you follow "people, not web sites." This is accomplished through the creation and exchange of "Nomee cards." In your card, you enter in your contact information and your social networking profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and hundreds more - anything with an RSS feed is supported. By creating Nomee cards for select groups, you can specify who gets to see what information. For example, if you want to share your card by posting it to your blog, you may want to include your Twitter, FriendFeed, and MySpace information, but not your Facebook profile. For your close friends, however, you could share a separate Nomee card which contains your Facebook profile info, too.

Nomee also provides pre-built cards for certain high-profile persons including celebrities, sports players, and the occasional politician (yes, it's Barack Obama). Anyone can subscribe to these cards just as anyone can subscribe to yours - and you don't have to reciprocate by accepting their card in return. It's entirely a one way experience.

Within the Nomee application the cards can be organized into groups and clicking on any user's information will display the number of updates per service in a very iPhone-esque fashion. You can also view a stream of that person's most recent updates across all their networks.

Some Issues

Obviously, keeping track of all your friends and colleagues in Nomee could be very inefficient since you have to click on users one-by-one to see their respective streams. The only other option for seeing friends' updates is turning on the desktop alerts - a feature you'll either love or hate. If you only have a few contacts, it may be nice to get the occasional pop-up, but most of us would be overrun with alerts.

The company intended this application to be a way to stay tuned into what your friends and other contacts are up to, but outside of those pop-ups, its interface makes this relatively time-consuming and inefficient. However, in playing with the application ourselves, we saw the potential for it to become a social address book. Of course, transforming the app from a stream-based aggregator to an address book would require some additional work on the company's part.

Still, the idea is intriguing - an address book that's filled not only with traditional contact info, but also with the status updates and other social data produced by that contact across the social networking arena. That could actually be a useful desktop application. Add a mobile sync feature and there could really be something there.

In order for this to come to pass, though, Nomee would have to add a lot more features. For example, it would have to allow you to build contacts on your own and it should let you accept vCards from others which you could then customize by entering in things like their Twitter username, etc. Supporting a standard like vCard is important because you can't assume that everyone is going to be creating these "Nomee cards."

At the moment, Nomee is somewhere in between web-based aggregation portals like FriendFeed (or, these days, Facebook's stream) and desktop-based AIR apps like TweetDeck's Twitter-tracking tool. The company needs to decide how committed they are to being an aggregation tool versus a social contact organizer. If it's the former, the current iteration somewhat fails for anyone with a decent amount of contacts to follow because it's just inefficient to track updates with this app. But if it's the latter, after some work Nomee could become a useful way to pull up contact information while also seeing a person's latest social activity.

We suppose that, to a point, you can use Nomee in this way right now. However, you're restricted to those who already have Nomee cards - which includes very few "real" people at the moment. (All you have are celebrity "news makers.") And without real people to follow, there isn't much you can do with a social application.

Details on how Sprout's foray into social media campaigns will work on a technical level are not outlined in the provided documentation. But, if it is telling us that a marketer or advertiser can use their product and deploy it cross-platform without any coding skills, it could potentially add up to a big cost savings overall and may make the difference between Sprout and one of its competitors. Plus, one of those platforms is Facebook, which means instant viral exposure to millions of active user accounts.

Reframe It also announced that it has added Lawrence Lessig, John Seely Brown, Terry Winograd, and Clay Shirky to its Advisory Board, which already includes an all-star line-up of Internet luminaries like Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Howard Rheingold.

Recommended by Mozilla

Reframe It also recently became a recommended addon by Mozilla, which should allow the company to grow its user base at an even faster rate.

Facebook and Twitter Integration

Reframe It's Facebook and Twitter integration works just as advertised. Given that Reframe It is still a small service, these new features will not only provide more visibility to Reframe It, but they will also allow users to start a discussion on the service and then take it to their favorite social network, where the rest of their friends and colleagues can chime in.

Brian T. McKinney, Reframe It's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, tells us that the service will support Twitter's oAuth implementation in the second half of April, but for now, you still have to enter your full Twitter username and password to use the service.

How Does it Work?

We really like Reframe It's approach to social annotations, and the user interfaces of its web service and Firefox plugin are easy to use and very efficient. Once you have signed up for Reframe It and installed the plugin, the extension lives in your sidebar and will show any public annotations that other users have left by default. To add your own annotations, you just have to highlight a chunk of text and Reframe It will automatically use this as the anchor for your annotation. Through this, you can basically write comments into the margins of the Internet.

Fishkin told us that a lot of Reframe It's users utilize the service in a professional setting to annotate legal texts, for example, but a lot of users also use it in a school setting. Thanks to Reframe It's private groups, your annotations can stay private, though you can also choose to make your comments available to all Reframe It users.

Reframe It is clearly on to something, and thanks to its stellar advisory board and the team's clear vision for where they want the service to go, we expect to hear a lot more from them in the future. Other services like Diigo, for example, offer very similar services, however, and it remains to be seen which service users will prefer in the long run.

We found the DropPlay interface painless and fun to use. The YouTube integration was pretty seamless and there is a quick setting to compensate for a slow network connection. Plus, there is a lot of potential for the social side to really explode with the decision to go with Facebook Connect. It's still a little rough, but for an initial beta release, overall, we don't have a lot of nits to pick with the way it works.

However, we do have some thoughts we'd like to address overall.

First, just like with Muziic, this service leverages YouTube specifically for music videos (via the YouTube API) and appears to not honor YouTube's advertising model. This means that it is, in essence, getting the 'milk for free,' something that we believe can last only so long until Google clamps down on this sort of behavior, either by making the API more restrictive or being more aggressive about removing music videos.

Second, although Facebook Connect is used so that you can easily log in, find Facebook friends, and save playlists, there is no export option once your playlists are created. This means that all the work you do lives in this app, and you must resign yourself to a possible future where the site may disappear one day and any playlists or shares will vanish with it.

Finally, there seems to be no support for sharing any discoveries you make in DropPlay with outside services, except perhaps your Facebook friend's wall. There's no link back to the original YouTube video and no sharing options via email or other social network. While this approach seems to mimic Facebook's own original 'walled garden' approach, even Facebook realizes they themselves must become more open and share more social graph data with other networks.

Midlife Crisis

During a talk at the Semantic Community-Semantic Exchange Workshop, Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, outlined some of the reasons for this reluctance to adopt the Intellipedia.

One of these reasons cited by Rasmussen is a fear of the unknown. Instead of solely relying on Intellipedia, users often use additional, unconnected systems to save their information as well. Rasmussen also notes that some users are simply not comfortable with contributing information to a social-networking tool.

Rasmussen also points out some problems with the grass-roots approach that is at the core of the Intellipedia, which, by the way, is built on top of MediaWiki, the same software that powers the popular Wikipedia. As there is no standard for tagging articles, for example, users often use very 'agency-centric' terms to tag their posts, or use the wrong tags altogether.

Solution: Force People to Use It (?)

The solution to this? Rasmussen tells the GCN that the grass-roots approach has gotten them this far, but that a top-down approach might be necessary to push the project further: "This is work. We force people to do stuff [they don't want to do] all the time -- we make people come in sober and wear clothes. In certain cases top-down may not work, but in certain cases it does."

Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.

One of the best features of the new AIR application is how it syncs with the online version of FriendDeck. That means whatever changes you make within FriendDeck on the web show up in the desktop application and vice versa.(Side note: how we wish TweetDeck did this!)

But let's be clear. The Adobe AIR version of FriendDeck still needs a lot of work. The slider bars are hard to see, the columns can't be moved around, "un-like" didn't work in the first version we tested, pictures don't show along with posts, and performing searches requires the use of specific query syntax, like "friends:username." That last bit practically requires you to use a cheat sheet when building your columns. (For search query syntax, see the list provided here.)

Yet despite these problems - all of which are being addressed according to the developer - I still can't get enough of FriendDeck. Why? It's simple: FriendDeck gives me an eagle-eye view of the topics I care about on FriendFeed. Using the app, I can see a lot more information with a glance than when I use the FriendFeed web site itself.

Use FriendDeck to Follow Your Lists, Rooms, and Searches 

There are a couple of ways you can use FriendDeck. For me, a compulsion to organize things into groups has led to the creation of over 30 lists for tracking specific topical areas outside of my "home" feed. I don't check each list daily, but it's nice to have them there. I doubt that anyone else has embarked on such madness, but even if you have only a few lists, like "Favorites" or "Personal", you can add them to the FriendDeck application by typing in "list:list_name" (where, obviously, "list_name" is the name of your list).

Similarly, if you're less inclined to use lists and more inclined to track items by keyword, you can instead just type in the word or words you want to track in the search box. For rooms, you would just type "room:room_name."

Use FriendDeck as a More Advanced Feed Reader

Another great way to use FriendDeck has to do with one of the biggest secrets surrounding FriendFeed itself: you don't have to participate to use the service. Although community members will tell you this goes against what FriendFeed is all about, it's true. If you're the kind of person who could care less about "liking" items or leaving comments on the latest internet meme, you can alternately use FriendFeed as an aggregator on topics you want to track, no participation required. Instead, FriendFeed can simply become the framework you use to build the feed reader of the future: an aggregator which lets you follow much more than RSS feeds alone.

For example, take any subject about which you're passionate. You could build a private FriendFeed room that you fill with blogs, news sites, Twitter searches, Google searches, well-known Twitter users who post on this subject, and more. Within one interface, you can track it all. This is a million times better than just following blogs in an RSS reader or just tracking Twitter posts using Twitter's search engine because you're not limited to RSS alone.

You can share these rooms with others either by making them public or by inviting select users - like your colleagues - to join. Alternately, you can keep them completely private and only for your personal use.

You can then add these personalized rooms into FriendDeck by typing in "room:room_name" and soon you'll have one single application that tracks everything you care about on the internet - from blogs posts to tweets and so much more. And it's all in one window.

Too Complicated?

In explaining how FriendDeck works, it occurs to us that it may sound a bit complicated for the average user. That may be true, but then again, FriendFeed itself is an application that requires a lot of explanation, too. It's also quite possible that FriendFeed and FriendDeck will never cross over into "regular user" territory. That's OK, though. For anyone who has learned how to use FriendFeed - really use FriendFeed - applications like FriendDeck will hold appeal, despite their complications.

It's still far too early to call FriendDeck a complete success or failure, but it's not too early to use it. If you're geeky enough to learn its quirks, you may find the FriendFeed desktop application you've been waiting for. If not, then feel free to return to your browser.

Now, it can be. Today, SlideShare is introducing the "SlideShare Ribbon" an add-in that makes the sharing and social features of SlideShare accessible without even leaving PowerPoint.

Using the SlideShare Ribbon, users gain the ability to share presentations from within PowerPoint, update existing presentations with new content, search existing SlideShare presentations for examples, download SlideShare content for remixing, and view presentations from contacts and groups. User can also check their SlideShare statistics from within PowerPoint.

In short, SlideShare makes PowerPoint social.

That's what makes this release so interesting. SlideShare has taken the opportunity to move beyond browser development - the traditional home of social features - to work on a different piece of desktop software. And in PowerPoint, SlideShare has chosen an app that, by and large, has not been seen as a venue for social behavior, at all.

The idea of using PowerPoint to access Web resources isn't earth shattering. Microsoft has provided the ability to dynamically download PowerPoint clip art for quite some time. But that has always been within the realm of delivering Microsoft content to the user. This is the first time that those types of Web-based interactions have taken on more of a social-networking context - by delivering and sharing content from a variety of users. And that suddenly casts all desktop software in a new light - no matter how "unsocial" a particular app may seem.

No doubt this is just the first of many such add-ins that will imbue our most used applications with social features. And that will make even the most tedious of applications increasingly valuable to us.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you'll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Unlike most social networks, which are based around preexisting relationships, FileRide focuses more on shared interests. Instead of having to go out and find like-minded people, however, your music collection or your favorite YouTube videos already form the basis of these relationships. FileRide also features groups for different topics.

FileRide's desktop program runs in the background and notices whenever you copy and paste a file, image, or link. In these cases, it will pop up an alert and give you the option to add these files to FileRide. Links to YouTube videos will automatically be filed into their own 'YouTube' category on the service. Of course, you can also drag and drop your MP3s or other documents onto the FileRide desktop directly to add them to your list.

For songs and images, FileRide creates digital fingerprints, so that users can still 'gather' around these media files, even though the files might have different names. Supposedly, these fingerprints even work across different file types (think MP3 and AAC files, or different bitrates for songs), though we weren't able to test this yet.

Overall, FileRide's feature set is impressive and we barely have the space to touch upon its core services here. It includes a micro-blogging service, a Facebook-like wall (the 'Smorgasbord'), the ability to subscribe to newsfeeds from your friends and groups, as well as desktop alerts when new chats or comments appear in a group you follow. The desktop software will also display relevant blog posts and Wikipedia entries.

Soon, FileRide will also be able to recognize ISBNs and other contexts. FileRide's development team also plans to integrate Spotify's music service soon.

Sign up by November 30

FileRide is also taking an interesting marketing approach. Instead of launching the service with a private beta, sign-ups will only be open until November 30th and after that, the FileRide will become invite-only, so if you want to try the service out, now is the time to sign up.

Verdict

We can't blame you if you are skeptical about yet another social network, but we have been testing the service for a while now and have been quite surprised by how well the concept works. As is typical for these social services in their early stages, the current number of users hasn't quite reached the critical mass yet where you can expect a constant stream of comments and updates. However, as FileRide's founder Patrik Hedmalm told us, since its launch a few weeks ago, the service has been growing steadily thanks to effective word of mouth marketing.

Generally CIOs love technology and innovation. It is why they went into technology. Nor do CIOs want to control everything, they know it is impossible and life is too short. Most see that Social Media technology has positive potential. But they do have legitimate concerns. Specifically, social media startups that want to tap enterprise budgets need to deal with 5 big worries:

1. Unpredictable scaling issues. Twitter failure is OK when we are just twittering about our cats, but would be totally unacceptable if this was an enterprise app. The viral nature of adoption is a concern for people who have to ensure that the lights are on and the trains run on time. If you are asking people to do serious business on your service, you have to be solid on the reliability and performance scores.

2. Security against IP loss. This is a legitimate concern. The impact can be major. The fact is that it is no longer possible to "bolt the stable door" as the horse has already escaped. It is virtually impossible to stop an employee, either foolishly or maliciously, sending digital data that should not be sent. Just make sure that your service does not make this worse and has some reasonable controls.

3. Integration. This is the big "well what about...." objection. Just touting open Internet standards is not enough. You need to show how to build adapters to internal legacy systems that don't work to those standards. Without integration you cannot answer the next one. Building adapters is tedious work. But once you have a library of them, they become a barrier to entry.

4. Loss of productivity. Services for consumers do not need to answer the productivity question. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries.

5. Accidental brand damage. People who grew up with social media know that the brand cannot be be protected other than by great products and services. Anything bad that happens will get out there. However this scares the bejesus out of traditional Enterprise managers. It is also a legitimate concern that if you give a lot of powerful social media tools to people who don't know how to use them wisely, there will be a lot of collateral damage. Like physicians you need to show that your service will "do no harm".

These are all negative, objection issues. Clearly there needs to be a compelling positive reason. We will focus on that in a future post. First step is making sure these objections don't stop you on the way in.

If you want to listen directly to one CIO who is thinking hard about this, see this podcast by Intel CIO John "JJ" Johnson on social media in the enterprise.

What have you experienced? As a vendor, have you found and handled these or other issues? As a customer, have Social Media start-ups shown a good understanding of these issues? What other issues are critical?

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan began developing Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Since then, Tejit has expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Tejit's semantic-analysis engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content.

A Flawed Tradition

According to SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta,

The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users' participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.

There's no doubt that the traditional rating system for comments has its flaws. In a post titled "Disqus Clout: Fail!", Phil Glockner of Scribkin points out one of the biggest flaws of comment rating systems using Disqus as an example. In the comments section, Louis Gray sums up the problem nicely:

I would expect it rewards those who comment most frequently, and wouldn't be so much a subjective view.

More Than Just A Rating System

Instead of replacing your comment system, SezWho aims to augment the conversations. Keeping the aforementioned flaw in mind, SezWho considers two important factors that: distributed conversations and the people behind them. SezWho provides a meta network information around participants and context. The context has information from various platforms to allow data and content to reside within the community. The service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors. Community ratings are only a portion of the cumulative rankings for an overall score.

SezWho provided us with a comparison chart to better demonstrate the differences between what SezWho offers versus competitors Disqus and Intense Debate, which we've previously reviewed.

Adding Noise or Resolving Issues?

With all that SezWho adds, it can be argued that some of it will amount to more noise for users. While, we've previously used SezWho here on ReadWriteWeb to enhance our community, some of our writers are using the less complicated Disqus platform on their personal blogs. We wonder if the amount of blog coverage has also affected SezWho's userbase compared to Disqus, which has seen tremendous coverage since its launch.

With SezWho, other important issues are being tackled beyond their enhanced reputation system such as keeping track of conversations over a plethora of platforms and enabling a more sophisticated way to discover relevant content. SezWho aims to enhance communities rather than replace them,but can they filter the noise that's add everyday?

Blog for the Victims of the Chinese Earthquake

Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been using his blog to bring attention to the situation in China after its devastating earthquake which may eventually claim over 50,000 lives. Jeremiah used his blog as a platform to inspire people to donate money to the Red Cross. On May 15th, he blogged a series of photos compiled from his trips to China which showed images of everyday life in China, cityscapes, beautiful outdoor shots of flowers and gardens, and smiling children, among many other things. He followed up again on the 20th, this time to help people understand what a large number of people were affected by the quake. This post showed pictures of U.S. cities in an attempt to illustrate how many are homeless after the Chinese quake.

He has also made sure to update both posts with a link that allows you to Digg the story.

Raise Money for a Cause via Twitter

When our very own Corvida awoke to a tornado tearing through her neighborhood on May 11th, she immediately Twittered the news. After hours went by she checked back in and was greeted with tweets of concern and support. Then, when her family couldn't afford the hotel room rates in the area, she hesitantly reached out to Twitter for help. Her Twitter family didn't let her down - donations came pouring in. She received about $150 total - enough for the hotel room and then some. She used the remaining funds to help the other families on her street with their needs, buying them supplies and food. This showed that even a small community like that of Corvida's Twitter social circle can affect a big change on many lives.

Support Social Causes on Facebook & MySpace

A post earlier this year on RWW highlighted some ways that Facebook was being used as a vehicle for social change. One of those ways is the Facebook Causes application, which "connects thousands of people with common interests in humanitarian efforts." You can use the app to browse through all sorts of social causes which include relief efforts, environmental causes, political causes, educational efforts, and more. For example, there's now the Red Cross's Causes Page which helps raise money and awareness for the relief efforts in China. There is also a similar service on MySpace called Impact, which is more like a portal for non-profits group activity, featuring news, videos and events..

Use YouTube to Promote Charities

Last December, we wrote about how two brothers used YouTube to promote various charities. The brothers started a project called "Nerdfighters Power Project for Awesome," which entailed a series of videos, each featuring a certain charity. Their videos briefly became YouTube's most discussed videos, filling each one of the slots on the YouTube's Most Discussed Videos page. They didn't use any tricks to do so, either. Instead, they reached out to the YouTube community to generate interest, messaging many high-profile YouTubers and generating a mailing list of around 4,000 interested people who were later alerted when it was time to act.

Use Your Mobile Phone to Spread News, Make Change Happen

As we reported in April, a UN report showed that mobile technology is changing the way that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work, using mobile technology to overcome humanitarian challenges. According to Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation, the technology is being used to "connect families separated by disaster, help emergency relief workers respond more quickly, empower health workers with data to help combat disease and epidemics, track the impacts of climate change, and even help in the resolution of civil conflicts."

The technology is also heavily used today to get information from citizen journalists to the mainstream media. For example, during last year's wildfires in California, major news outlets like NBC San Diego and CNN's i-Report each received around 2,000 submissions of photos and video from people who sent in submissions via their mobile phones. In fact, CenterNetworks reported that the spread of information didn't even stop there, but that other social media sites like flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and others were also used to get the word out.

And if you want to get involved with mobile activism, there is MobileActive.org, a site that is an all-volunteer community of people and organizations using mobile phones for social impact. Their aim is to promote the use of mobile technology, which can help NGO's better serve their communities.

Use Viral Marketing Techniques to Send a Message

A recent spinoff of the infamous "Hot or Not" web site launched by MTV’s college network and the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation, is www.posornot.com. The questionably tasteful but well-intentioned site is an educational effort on the subject of HIV. Disguised as a game, visitors click to guess whether the people in the photos shown are "Pos" (positive for HIV) or "Not." The message, obviously, being that you can't tell just by how someone looks.

Social Network for Social Good

A post on the Online Spin blog focuses on how social media can be used for social good. Featured in the article are numerous sites that harness the power of social connections for good causes, like Charity Water for example, which aims to get the word out about the need for clean drinking water worldwide, and Jessica Biel's social network, the "Make the Difference Network", where she uses her celebrity status to get people involved. There are other great sites you can get involved in, too, like Idealist and Change.org.

Time For Change

Even on a smaller scale in the tech community, we have "internet celebrities" of our own. If they chose do to so, they could influence their fans and followers to do much more than just sign up for the next greatest web app.

All across the social web, you'll find sites where members of the tech community are helping non-profit organizations help leverage the power of the social web to do good. Sites like NetSquared and NTEN, for example, are great resources for helping non-profits. And here at RWW, we put together a Web Toolkit for Non-Profits, which included tools for creating a web site, communication, fund-raising, recruiting, and more.

Have you been inspired to do good via social media? Let us know how in the comments.

For every roadblock to using social media at work, there is a workaround. Maybe you've been nervous to try these things because you're not sure of how much you're being monitored by I.T., your boss, or even your colleagues. You don't want to appear as if you're goofing off all day, do you? That being said, even the most diligent office drone deserves a break from time to time, and these days, those breaks often include a little brain candy in the form of social media.

If I.T. has your PC so locked down, you can't add or remove anything, you can't download anything from the internet, and you hit blocked pages all the time, then good! I.T.'s doing their job. But here's how to get around that.

Bring Your Own Browser

Just because your PC is locked down, your USB ports are probably still available. Only the most paranoid of companies use software to disable the optical drives and USB ports. If you can open files saved on a keychain USB drive, then you're in luck - you can use your ports.

At home, prepare a USB drive with the PortableApps suite. The standard edition offers a web office to go, featuring portable editions of OpenOffice, Sunbird, Thunderbird, and AV.

But most importantly, PortableApps offers portable Firefox, which we all know no social media lover can be without. Now, just like your were installing Firefox on a new computer, prepare your portable version with all the toolbars, bookmarklets, greasemonkey scripts, and add-ons that you can't live without. Once back at work, just pop in your USB drive and it will be like you've never left your home PC.

Dying for IM

If your I.T. department blocks you from installing IM, you can try Gaim Portable that came with the Portable apps you installed.

If that doesn't work, you might find that a web-based alternative like Meebo meets your needs. You can try their Firefox extension, too.

However, savvy I.T. personnel have heard of Meebo and block it on the firewall. But there are a few alternatives that they may not have blocked just yet. These include MSN Web Messenger, Yahoo! Web Messenger, AIM Express, Kool IM, ILoveIM, Mabber, Snimmer, Google Talk Gadget, ebuddy, and Robin Good lists a few more. Plus, you might want to check out Gmail's integrated Gtalk client to see if that works.

Just be warned, if your company policy states IM is not allowed, being caught doing so could be serious. For companies that deal in trade secrets or financial information, such a violation could even lead to termination. So for the uber-paranoid, just break out your phone. Most modern cell phones and PDAs ship with an IM client or two already installed. If not, go grab your favorites from the web: MSN Mobile, Mobile AIM, Google Talk (for some smartphones).

Sneaking in Your Tweets

Not comfortable with twitter.com loaded up on-screen for everyone to see? There are other ways to tweet undercover. Download Twhirl if you can. You may also want to check out OutTwit which lets you get your tweets via Outlook email.

If you can't download or install anything, just subscribe to your Twitter feeds via RSS instead, being sure to use an online reader.

Of course, for mobile users, tweeting by IM (see above section) is a possibility, as is tweeting via various mobile apps, like Blackberry's Twitterberry, ceTwit or Twobile for Windows Mobile, MoTwit for Palm OS, Tiny Twitter or jtwitter for Java-enabled phones, or, for anyone else, EmailTwitter, which lets you send tweets and retrieve your timeline via your phone.

Mindless Blog Surfing

RSS. RSS. RSS. If you're not already using an online feed reader, like Google Reader or Bloglines, now's the time to start. Too busy with that "work stuff" to do more than just scan articles? Set up a tag just for your "read it later" items or star them. Revisit them later when you're back at home.

Another option is to subscribe to blogs in Outlook. In many traditional companies, Microsoft Office is par for the course. If your company has revved to Outlook 2007, you can read your RSS feeds right there, no additional software needed. To kick it up a notch, Inbox 3.0 integrates with Outlook, too.

Want to actually go surfing outside of your feeds? Any web surfing at work has the possibility of interruptions. So save the things you come across for later reading at home. Using your portable Firefox, install Idea Shower's "Read It Later" extension for saving items you come across on the web.

Even better, the new ReadBag app built on Google's new apps engine, lets you save links for later reading too, but this tool also offers a daily digest that can be emailed to you at the time you specify. Readbag works via bookmarklet or Firefox extension and provides mobile access to your saved items.

Facebook at Work

What's that? Facebook's blocked? How could they? Proxy sites come to the rescue. If you desperately need MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Digg, Mixx, or any other restricted site, you can try a proxy like: Access Facebook, Facebook Firewall, or VisitSitesAtWork. You can also check out the list at Proxy.org. Just be sure to clear your cookies, your history, and your cache when done. The domain names pretty much give away what you were up to there.

Another idea is, again, mobile access. Blackberry users have their own mobile Facebook app, iPhone users can go here, and, for others, you can visit the Facebook Mobile web site.

Fight FriendFeed Withdrawl

If you successfully installed Twhirl for tweeting at work, then you're in luck since it also lets you access FriendFeed. Other FriendFeed AIR apps you can try are AlertThingy, Feedalizr, or bTT.

If you are prevented from installing programs, consider FriendFeed access via RSS feeds. Just subscribe in your online reader. 

For mobile users, the moblf app can help. This app gives you access to FriendFeed, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn updates via SMS on your mobile phone.

Other Tips

If you can't download files form the web but you can install them, just load the executables onto your USB key and bring them into the office. Another alternative is to zip them up and store them online at an online storage site like box.net or SkyDrive.

You also need to know how to quickly minimize your activities. On a Windows PC, Alt+Tab switches you from window to window. Have only two open - the web browser and the spreadsheet, for example. This way, you won't accidentally mess up and Alt+Tab too many times in haste as your boss approaches, and end up switching to yet another inappropriate window.

Why?

Having been in I.T. myself for years, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to subverting I.T. policy to goof off at work. Why would I share this with the world? Because any I.T. manager worth their salt should know all these things already and how to combat them (if that's what the company wants.)

And every company concerned with employee productivity needs to determine for themselves where they draw the line on non-worked related internet activities and take the appropriate measures they deem necessary for blocking, stopping, tracking, and monitoring employee web use.

Finally, remember: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If you really are slacking at work, people know. I've honored more than one request throughout my years in I.T. to monitor an employee's activities on the DL and your I.T. guy probably will do the same. Proceed carefully.

Even though we all know that the social media being wrangled by today's political candidates is really in the hands of staffers, we still appreciate it when it's done properly - giving us the illusion the candidates are listening and they really do care.

In Barak Obama's camp, whose tech-savvy we've pointed out in the past, seems to get Twitter. Besides just tweeting his news, it's clear he's using some sort of auto-follow script to follow those who follow him.

Getting Followed Feels Good

You're Doing it Wrong!

As Charles McKeever says on OpenSourceMarketer:

"Even though an automated script would not seem very sincere, there is a powerful psychological trigger going on here. By following you Obama’s campaign is trying to send the message that they understand how things work, they want to communicate, and they want to hear from you."

By not following any users on Twitter, Hillary's page seems stark and empty - no faces and icons filling up the sidebar. McKeever notes that her lack of participation also highlights the words at the bottom of the Twitter sidebar more clearly on her page: "block hillaryclinton." These words, thanks to the lack of icons, appear above the fold.

Image via OpenSourceMarketer

Meanwhile,  Obama's camp has gotten into the spirit of Twitter. Maybe it's no more genuine than any other politician, but at least it's a good show. His page is brighter, branded with his logo, and filled with the faces of those he follows.

Comparing the Twitter pages of the candidates

John McCain, on the other hand, appears to be ignoring Twitter completely. A search of his site reveals no results for any mention of Twitter and a search on Twitter reveals no official John McCain user.

Where's the real McCain?

The Exploitation of Social Media

Unfortunately, after the campaigning ends, it often becomes apparent that the illusion that candidates were listening, really was an illusion after all. Take John Edwards's use of Twitter, for example. When his campaign ended, so did his tweets. No so long, no goodbye, no account deletion. Yet he still has 4,573 followers.

The abandoned page

For the citizens of the web, the feeling is that of having been exploited. On his blog, Stowe Boyd writes:

So, you opt to try to exploit the edglings by signing up to Twitter, and writing a blog, and all that newfangled web stuff, trying to mine the potential there with ersatz involvement and cheesy, inauthentic participation: cramming old one:many messaging into a conversationally rich environment. Then, you drop out. And proof [sic] that it is totally bogus, you just stop...Proof of old politics wolf in new politics sheep's clothing: they assume the ways of the new social web revolution as a means to come into contact with us, but when they lose (and maybe when they win, as well?) they drop the pretense of involvement, and go back to whatever they really believe in. Which is clearly not this new emerging whatever-the-hell-it-is on the web.

That's a bit dramatic, notes Craig Stoltz on Web 2.Oh...Really?, especially considering Edwards' wife illness, but nevertheless, it raises a good question - will the tweeting end when the campaign does? Win or lose?

Should Social Media Be Important to the Candidates?

Of course it should. The online crowd may be a niche audience when it comes to the nation as a whole, but it's a crowd that is easy to find, access, and connect with. We even provide the tools to do so. We're practically begging to be won over. Just show a little savvy in the ways of tech, and we're yours.

However, we would like to see candidates who didn't rely on faceless interns to update their various accounts so much. Why not have a social media community leader/evangelist in charge of the political brand instead? We know that it's not really Hillary at the keyboard anyway, so maybe it's time to drop the illusion.

But why would an evangelist be a good thing? As Mario Sundar notes on Marketing Nirvana,

"The same reasons it helps a company have a community evangelist. Two main reasons. 1. It humanizes the political brand - it helps having a turn-to person when you’d like to offer feedback 2. Crisis Management. Like in Edwards case, given all the brouhaha over his absence these days, it’d be nice to have someone from their campaign (it could be an intern) who actually responds authentically to social media mentions."

An evangelist would also be real. Unlike an intern pretending to be the candidate, the brand would be represented by an actual person. One who knew not to upload inflammatory videos to YouTube. One who knew what Twitter tools to use to send thank you notes to followers. One who knew the power of the blogs. And, maybe one who would continue to tweet, perhaps even for free, after the votes are counted and the campaign comes to an end.

Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and Michael Pusateri (Disney) are discussing using SocialText (and blogs and wikis in general) in business. Michael works for the television/ABC arm of Disney, and they're using SocialText. He has a great point: how do you get users to accept the new methodologies? Simple. Don't tell them. Don't make a big deal about trying some revolutionary new tool. Just train them and let them discover things like why email doesn't make a great file system, but a weblog is another story. They're also using Newsgator with Outlook to help people aggregate and survey what's going on on all the Disney weblogs. Told the users: "We're going to put some stuff into Outlook so you don't have to go check the Web pages anymore." Response: cool! No discussion needed about the joys/promise of RSS, etc.
(emphasis mine)

It's the same kind of approach that Yahoo! is taking with their new RSS services.