I asked a friend on Twitter how he was able to consistently keep his blog updated with fresh content, and was told to write about my passions. It never occurred to me that this might be the problem. My day to day activities are pretty squarely centered on web apps, and my intuition was to maintain my own content similar to my peers. The reality is that while coding is certainly one of my life’s passions, I find myself increasingly absorbed in the industry that keeps me employed: marketing.

There’s a new hotness the industry is trying to sell right now: social media. Self-proclaimed Social Media Experts are a new breed of marketer, and they’re here to help you make money on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to make use of these sites to promote your business, there is nothing compelling these people can offer over a real marketing expert without the specialization. ¹

I’m wary of this niche over something that’s largely semantic in nature: the word “expert.” We can debate the meaning of the word, but I have never met a successful internet marketer who wasn’t able to make social media work for them by applying the same basic common sense tactics. If you’ve got 140 characters, you need a hook. Something that grabs the user’s attention. Most marketing works that way. You also need something compelling at the other end. Your call to action has to lead to something that some people will actually want. Good marketing can sell a bad product, but it won’t sustain a bad business in the long-term. This, again, is nothing new. ²

There is also the aspect of how much time it takes to attain a mastery of anything. Geniuses do exist, but they rarely manifest in the form of a marketer. Most people, myself and marketers included, have to work at something to get better at it. We progress at different speeds, but the slope of progress generally trends north so long as diligent effort is paid to a task. The Social Media Expert has no defined task, so what specifically are they mastering? There may be people who might actually qualify for the title, but the only ones who ever seem to come close were already excellent marketers before the name change. It pains me to see an individual tag oneself with a ridiculous label in order to fit in, but what is advertising if not compelling demographics to do something en masse?

I had the sad realization the other day that for as much money as marketers are making on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like, the people behind the applications themselves are usually running in the red, with no clear way to the black. Facebook looks like it’s going to figure out how to make money long-term, and it’s certainly got the largest userbase, but the reality is that while advertising in the United States alone is a $150bn industry, that spend is increasingly spread over a larger pie, and at some point there simply won’t be enough to support it all. It is true that advertising dollars are shifting online at an increasing rate, but that money is primarily going into classic online ads. Google already owns the lion’s share of what’s being spent online, and combined with its closest competitors makes up the overwhelming majority of the entire online advertising market. Facebook is banking its future on grabbing enough of the advertising pool, but their concept seems to focus around highly targeted banner and text ads – classic online advertising. Right now, if you want to make real money online, you are still monetarily better off spending your advertising dollars on email programs and pay-per-click advertising, or a combination of the two. There is no need to spend money on a social media expert.

Nine times out of ten, if I find a company’s Twitter marketing spammy, a self-proclaimed SME is at the other end of the keyboard. It’s hard to mask the scent of bullshit when you only have 140 characters to make your case.

You should absolutely be on Twitter and Facebook, but the companies that do this best are companies that have a person in-house who actually gets it: someone who primarily uses social networking sites to network socially. Need an example? Take a look at game developer Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling. Better known by his gamertag, @fourzerotwo has been tweeting and blogging constantly about Modern Warfare 2, their upcoming release. ³ Earlier this year they launched #mw2, a site that allowed people to submit suggestions for the game by posting a tweet with the #mw2 hashtag. It’s the best use of Twitter for marketing I’ve ever seen, and it was built by a very small team headed up by Richard Henry, an English web developer – not a marketer.

Social media is too young for anyone to really be an expert. At best, what we have today are Social Media Technicians. They know how to work the buttons in a way most marketing execs don’t, but there isn’t a skill in and of itself they have mastered. I honestly get the impression most of them just spend so much time on Facebook that they had to figure out a way to make it pay the bills.

I have no doubt there is plenty of money to be made here, and I don’t blame anyone for capitalizing on the market opportunity, especially in this economic climate. That being said, marketing dollars are normally the first to go when times get tough, so what you do spend needs to deliver. A smart email program and PPC campaign will almost always be better for you if the product you’re selling doesn’t have general mass-market appeal. Go ahead and spend ad dollars on Facebook, but trust a PPC expert to set that up.

1. Personally, I blame CNN. These people were out and about beforehand, but as soon as mom and pop heard about “The Twitter,” I knew it was too late. ↩
2. Unless, of course, you work for GM. ↩
3. Disclaimer: My enthusiasm for this game knows no bounds. ↩

For those unaware, Spyma- oh who are we kidding? You all know about Spymaster by now. What you might not know is that earlier today Spymaster reset a number of member accounts, wiping out their experience and funds. Here’s the explanation on Get Satisfaction:

Hello guys, I’m Eston, the director of MI6.

The Directorate have found a large amount of Spymasters have mysteriously ended up with quite a few billion dollars in their Swiss Bank accounts, something that isn’t even possible for as short as our spy rings have existed.

This means that all of this money has been generated through exploiting the wire transfer service and through a lot of hacking of the Spymaster system. It is all part of a large money laundering operation that has been put in place by rogue agents. Because of this, we have reset all accounts that have been affected by the hackers in this money laundering scheme. This means it will appear that your account has been opted out of the Spymaster system.

If you want your account back and we have banned you, you may appeal by posting your Twitter username here. We will reinstate your account’s original level, experience, and spy ring, but we cannot reset your funds to the same amount. . You have been scammed by the money launderers and should blame them for any financial issues you have.

The Directorate is not responsible for money laundering operations and, just as in the real spy world, you should never give out your Swiss Bank account number to anyone you do not know.

I was one of the affected people. As instructed, I added my name to the list. We’ll see what my account looks like after a few hours.

The bottom line here is that Spymaster was hacked, and a large number of people have had their accounts reset. While it’s certainly unfortunate that this happened, cheating is a common problem in all forms of gaming both online and off. Blizzard spends a considerable amount of energy working to keep all walks of the unscrupulous in check. Vegas casinos spend huge sums of money to combat the issue. In either case, when someone is accused of cheating, the proper protocol is to notify the suspect of the claim, present evidence, determine the punishment, and provide a means for appeal. Spymaster has failed on three of these four steps.

I wasn’t aware this had occurred until I attempted to sign into my account earlier this evening, and was informed that I had opted out of Spymaster Twitter invitations (I hadn’t). After posting a quick tweet I was informed by a follower that Spymaster had detected some cheaters and reset their accounts. That led me to this tweet: “All of those blatantly exploiting Spymaster, your accounts have been reset to zero.”

At this point the only evidence any of us have is the explanation provided on the Get Satisfaction page. While Spymaster has made provisions for accounts to be reinstated to their former state, all earned funds are lost, and at this point it looks like there is no means for us to get our money back.

Spymaster is gaining traction quickly, and with good reason. It’s a fun game with very little commitment. I’ve been playing it daily since I got my invite, and while I’m disappointed, I understand that these things happen. What I’m having trouble swallowing is the fact that Spymaster publicly accused all of the affected of cheating and reset our accounts with absolutely no evidence that any of us did something wrong. Their explanation regarding Wire Transfers and Swiss Banks Accounts rings hollow, as I never once used a Wire Transfer and had not yet earned enough to open a Swiss Bank Account ($560k). As I noted in an @reply earlier today, the concept of exploiting the app in any way had not occurred to me. While I don’t mind having to re-earn what little money I had, Spymaster’s own words on the matter border on libel. Many of the people in our Spyrings are colleagues and other business professionals, and I take the accusation very seriously.

I hope that after everything settles down Spymaster will come forward with some evidence of wrongdoing, or at the very least a better explanation of how it was determined that an account was involved. The Directorate owes us that much.

In its recent quarterly call, Apple announced iPhone sales of 4,363,000, “representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.” That’s an incredible accomplishment. The United States (and most of the world) is in the middle of the worst recession in recent times, yet the company famous for its logo tax managed to nearly double sales of a high-end electronic device. The iPhone is here, and it isn’t going anywhere.

And why should it? Make no mistake about it: the mobile phone landscape would look eerily similar to what it did nearly two years ago when iPhone crashed the party. No one in the general public was excited about handheld applications. Browsing the web was like a trip down memory lane in a 56k modem. Despite the general availability of high-speed mobile networks, innovation had simply disappeared in the mobile phone arena. A smart phone was something that ran some version of Windows Mobile, and it was generally a hulking mass of a device that required a pen that was always too small and entirely too easy to lose.

Apple has laid out a world-class game plan for how mobile phones should look, act, and – yes – cost. My mom, who sent her first email just this past year, knows how to zoom a photo on iPhone. It took her exactly two seconds to learn it. That’s the brilliance of what Apple has put together, and that’s why so many people have flocked to the platform. The need to use Objective-C and develop on a Mac hasn’t stopped thousands of developers from making thousands of applications. The billionth download was recently logged. Many people are making money on the device, and many more are clamoring to learn the tools in an effort to cash in.

The iPhone is good, no – great. It’s in a league of its own. ¹ And that’s the problem.

The level of interest in developing for the iPhone is so powerful, so overwhelming, that it may come to the overall detriment of mobile phone software innovation. Apple is set to capture a huge amount of the mobile market in the future. The general public now understands that real applications can run on mobile devices, and as far most people are concerned, if you want those applications you need to have an iPhone. Apple’s done a fantastic job with iPod, but the last thing we need in this market is an overwhelmingly dominant player. The best way to push innovation forward is strong competition, and Pre may just have what it takes to make this a two-party fight.

Palm’s Pre is decidedly anti-iPhone in a number of ways. Whereas most iPhone applications don’t run in the background, Pre’s webOS operating system assumes that many apps will not only run in the background, but will want the user’s attention. ² iPhone’s forthcoming push notifications will offer several ways to inform the user that an app wants his or her attention, but it requires servers on the developer’s side. That means many push-notification applications won’t work, or will work with a reduced feature set, when a network connection is not available. On Pre, a unified notification system not unlike Growl provides an efficient means for getting the user’s attention. More importantly, real background applications will allow for apps like alternative media players. How great would it be to let Pandora run in the background while browsing Safari? This will be possible on Pre.

Without question, the single biggest difference between the two devices comes in the form of their respective SDKs. iPhone applications are written in Xcode on Macs in Objective-C. Pre applications will be built on webOS’s Mojo WebKit-based platform, with no restriction on a developer’s platform of choice. HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS are the main players. While the SDK isn’t yet public, early feedback from the lucky few who have access suggests webOS apps will look and feel like native applications. The jury’s still out on what this all means for apps that wouldn’t be built using most of the core SDK (games), but it would be folly to assume Palm hasn’t considered the runaway success of casual gaming on iPhone.

Pre is important because it is the first real competitor to iPhone that has the possibility of matching it where it excels (aesthetics, look and feel, user experience), and blowing it away by offering features iPhone doesn’t yet have (background applications, data sync from multiple sources). The web-based nature of webOS means many thousands of modern web developers will instantly feel at home on the device. As a web application developer, I find the prospects incredibly exciting.

If Palm fails in this endeavor, the prospects for the mobile marketplace are somewhat disappointing. While Apple will no doubt continue to improve upon iPhone’s hardware and software, we need a company like Palm to offer a strong contrasting opinion. We need a company to say, “No! You can have background apps that won’t drain your batteries.” We need a company that will put standards-based technologies at the core of its OS.

Competition is a good thing, and I’m hoping for quite the battle. Anyone who uses a mobile phone benefits from the existence of iPhone, and that isn’t something that should be discounted. When I look back at other devices for which I’d paid $399+ in the past, the comparison is comical. It came out of nowhere despite years of rumors about what it might look like. It drove down the price of the crap we used to buy to “free” (with 2-year contract), and lowered the overall price point for high-end devices. Palm could one-up Apple with Pre, but they need to get it right where it matters. The SDK needs to be solid, and it needs to be exciting for developers. It needs to function as well as it looks. It needs a battery that doesn’t falter under the strain of multiple background apps. It needs tight integration with applications like iCal. Above all, it needs to be accessible to the general public.

Of course, at this point, I’d settle for a release date.

1. I’ve left Android out of this discussion because frankly, at this point, I question Google’s commitment to the platform. Having spoken with a number of people who own a G1, I hear a lot of “It’s great, but…” Right now, Android reminds me very much of Linux desktop: a capable option, but underdesigned, with too many rough edges. ↩
2. The only exceptions to this rule are apps written by Apple ↩

The blogosphere has been jolted anew with Microsoft’s latest foray in its new ad campaign. Here we meet Lauren, who has been told she can have any laptop she wants, so long as it’s under a thousand dollars. I won’t recap the whole thing, as it’s only a minute long, and worth watching regardless of whether you’re a Mac or PC.

What’s interesting to me about this campaign in general, and with this latest ad in particular, is just how ordinary Microsoft is willing to have Windows appear. It’s as though Apple is saying “I’m better than the rest,” while Microsoft is saying “yeah, but there are more of us.” With Apple, you choose to be different. With Microsoft, you choose not to be. This is the crux of my longheld opinion regarding most Microsoft products in general.

Take Internet Explorer. We all recall the hot water Microsoft found itself in for its bundling of IE and its subsequent destruction of Netscape. During those first great browser wars, Netscape found itself in the unenviable position of selling a product that didn’t come with your brand new PC to replace the free product whose icon was already on the desktop. We can argue features and functionality left and right, but “free” is an incredibly strong economic aphrodisiac, followed closely by “easy.” This one-two punch was something with which Netscape simply couldn’t compete, and Navigator died a long, painful death. ¹

When an individual or organization chooses to purchase a Mac, it’s almost never spur of the moment. First-time Mac buyers are typically curious about the platform and often feel that Windows is more work than it’s worth. This was exactly the position I was in several years ago when I pre-ordered a top of the line PowerMac G5. I had been learning Java in school, and was doing all of my programming in Eclipse on Windows XP. At the time, I’d been intrigued by the gorgeous design of the tower, and Apple’s claims of performance were very interesting. In addition, I’d been fooling around with Linux, and the idea of using a *nix as my desktop machine was very enticing.

Every switcher has his or her reasons for doing so, but every single one of us made the calculated decision to buy that first Mac. What Microsoft is attempting to do with this latest ad is classic misdirection. They point to the cost and talk about features, completely neglecting actual functionality. They speak like all 17″ screens are created equal, but we all know that isn’t the case. Anyone who’s ever purchased a TV knows that, and the same goes for the rest of the kit. Not all hardware is engineered to the same level of precision, and not all hardware includes the same quality components. Having 4GB of RAM means fairly little if the unit in question has integrated graphics. It also says nothing of durability, or for that matter, weight.

There’s nothing wrong with buying an HP laptop, but Microsoft is missing the mark if they’re trying to convince us that Macs are simply too expensive. For this ad campaign to really succeed, Microsoft needs to change the way we think about PCs. The stock Windows-based PC is the default in the same way that Internet Explorer is the default web browser. People neither choose Windows nor do they choose Internet Explorer. Those are simply defaults. When people start choosing Windows over Mac OS X, Microsoft will have succeeded. Until then, they’re just blowing smoke.

If there were a 17″ MacBook available for under a grand, I’m fairly certain Lauren wouldn’t have bought that HP. The Apple Store is the first place she went. The funny part is that a cheap 17″ laptop is a very low-margin piece of kit. I wonder how many of them HP would have to sell to make the profit Apple extracts from a single MacBook.

1. Ironically, Firefox – born of the ashes of Netscape Navigator – now commands a much larger marketshare than any single version of Internet Explorer. ↩

After my last rant over the Cox HD DVR, I decided to call in and see if the situation had improved on the TiVo HD front.  I had given up the hope of using my TiVo HD with Cox Digital Cable, as the CableCARDs proved to be very unreliable.  Individual cards are tied to specific devices, so for a CableCARD to decode a digital cable signal, it must be paired and authorized at the Cox home office with the specific device that’ll be using it: my TiVo.  Approximately once a month the card would lose its authorization.  In a classic case of bad policy, Cox will not issue new CableCARDs directly to customers.  Instead, each one must be installed by a Cox technician.  As a result, when one of them fails, the customer is unable to access anything but basic cable until a technician can come out to replace the card.  We went through this several times before throwing in the towel and settling with the Scientific Atlanta box.

The call took about half an hour.  I was informed that by adding phone service I could actually save money; this offer I accepted.  I haven’t had a home phone since I was a sophomore at the University of Arizona, and with my GrandCentral Google Voice number in hand, I figured it would be a nice way to save some money on top of the savings in monthly fees.¹

The latter fifteen minutes were spent on TiVo. I was informed that Cox, TiVo, and other industry players had come together to create a tuning adapter designed to utilize new SDV video services. This box, in addition to providing access to switched video content, also provides two-way communications for the TiVo. This should enable the TiVo to utilize Cox’s OnDemand and other premium services directly. I was assured that all of the kinks had been ironed out, and was delighted to hear that the tuning adapter and professional installation was available for free.

And so it was that a very courteous and professional gentleman named Art showed up at my doorstep early this morning. Ten minutes after he arrived the phone line was ready, but it took another hour to get the TiVo set up. After plugging the CableCARD into its slot, Art called Cox to provide the TiVo’s Host ID. As he was reading the number to the rep, the TiVo initiated a firmware upgrade for the CableCARD. Art told the rep he’d call her back when it was finished, which ended up taking about thirty minutes. After he’d called it in the second time it took another ten before the TiVo received the signal. Then we got to wait another twenty minutes while it retrieved channel information. After another ten minutes the tuning adapter was installed and everything was working as expected. As I write this, Big Love stands paused and ready.²

Overall, I am impressed by the strides Cox has made. I received an emailed confirmation of my order moments after it was processed. This email included the scheduled appointment date and time, which tells me Cox is willing to stand by its promise dates. The technician was easily the most professional home cable installer I’ve ever had to deal with, and the entire process was complete before the scheduled window was over. This is in stark contrast to some of my prior experiences with Cox, most of which occurred during my first ordeal with the TiVo.

Time will tell if Cox has indeed killed the bugs that plagued its CableCARD service, but it’s good to see improvements in many other areas of the company as well. When I called Cox tech support this afternoon, I was downright shocked to hear the computerized voice ask me if my call was technical in nature, and related to a prior issue for which I had recently called. It then told me that if the issue was related, I could skip the line and go right to support. Nice.

I do think it is silly to require professional installation for what amounts to swapping out a PCMCIA card, but I suspect that will be a minor quibble if the issues with the cards have actually been resolved. In addition, Cox should be downright ashamed of the cable boxes it issues to customers. For digital cable customers, the cable box is the most direct interaction anyone will have with Cox service. If that interface is terrible, customers will assume that Cox service is terrible. One hopes that they can make some progress on this front, but for the time being, I’m just happy to have my TiVo back.

It’s probably a foregone conclusion that if it acts up again, you’ll hear about it.

1. Incidentally, this gave me the opportunity to peruse Best Buy’s assortment of home telephones. I’m used to my iPhone, and the Uniden setup I ended up choosing feels decidedly dated by comparison. ↩
2. The tuning adapter sits in the middle of the signal path to the TiVo. The RF cable carrying the Cox signal plugs into the adapter, which then has an output that runs to the input on the TiVo. A USB cable also connects the two. Unfortunately, the device is not powered via USB, so it takes up an additional space on your power strip. ↩