Note: This will be a quick one long and rambling, because my Macbook Pro is in the shop and I’m using an old 13″ Macbook to write this, and it makes me want to punch babies that’s how I roll.

RockMelt is a new browser that puts more emphasis on your own social network of friends, backed by the some of the guys behind the Netscape browser. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of it, watch their promo video below:

That video is pretty much all their website has to offer curious onlookers right now, and it sure makes you feel good watching it. Until you realize that the warm fuzzies Toby is talking about have more to do with his involvement in social networks and being connected to his friends in general than they do with those connections being integrated into your browsing experience.

Personally, I think the toolbars of your Facebook friends and applications looks nice, but after using it for five minutes, I wanted to hide them. I like my screen real-estate, and it’s creepy to have a dozen of my friends and family staring at me from the sidebar while I’m spanking it to my favorite Brazilian transvestite pr0n.

If I hide that toolbar, I’m hiding the very feature that sets RockMelt apart from other browsers, so while it’s great that you can hide it, what you’re left with at that point is a very vanilla browser that is exactly the same as every other browser.

One thing that actually really pissed me me off is that when I connected RockMelt to my Facebook account (which it prompts you to do immediately upon first-time launch), it set my online status to “online” automatically. I never show myself as online, because if you don’t have my real chat client names (Gtalk, AIM, etc), I probably don’t want to talk to you anyway. It took me a minute or two to figure out how to turn it back to “offline”. I don’t know if that’s RockMelt’s fault or Facebook’s, but given how creepy-uncle Facebook has been over the last year, that did not make a stellar first impression.

Speaking of Facebook – am I the only one that’s creeped out by the fact that Facebook is one of the backbones of this browser? For all they have done to betray my trust over the past year, the LAST thing I want to do is facilitate them knowing what I’m doing online more than they already do.

Do I think RockMelt has formed an unholy union with Facebook to spy on me? No – but RockMelt doesn’t tell you much of anything right now (and Facebook never does), so my lack of understanding about what data is being collected and stored by Facebook by way of RockMelt makes me very uncomfortable.

Also, it’s pretty clear by the way Facebook integration stands apart from the other social networks like Twitter that RockMelt is focusing primarily on Facebook. Considering how often Facebook’s API changes (read: breaks) and how much they are moving forward with their own agendas, I’m not sure this is a good long-term plan. One article on TechReview comments: “It’s not a generic ‘social browser.’ It’s a Facebook browser.”

Considering how Facebook is already trying to re-invent the web, I don’t know what that means for RockMelt in the future.

There are some nice features to RockMelt though. The right-side sidebar gives easy access to twitter with a simple but elegant UI, however it doesn’t really seem to be optimized for people with a large number of followers/following.

Also in that right sidebar, you can add RSS feeds to keep track of your favorite websites. They’re displayed beautifully, with a square site icon (based on the site’s favicon) and an unread count badge. If you’re on a site that has a detectable RSS feed, the “add feed” button turns green.

I think this could actually work to help people who don’t know or care what RSS feeds are learn to use them more. The one-click nature of subscribing when you’re on a page with an RSS feed makes the whole process cleaner and more clear than traditional RSS subscriptions, where the process is slightly more technical and deliberate.

On other browsers, even if a non-technical user can decipher what “Subscribe to RSS” means, they still have to do some work to access those feeds. RockMelt makes it a no-brainer – the user doesn’t need to know what RSS is for them to immediately see the benefit of subscribing – however it also simplifies it to the point where it could potentially be useless for people who already know and love RSS, and are subscribed to many feeds.

I subscribe to over 100 RSS feeds, so RockMelt is clearly not going to be of much help there. Maybe one solution would be to sync with Google Reader (please?) and let you pick your top five that you want to have in your sidebar.

That right-side toolbar references “Apps and Feeds”. I wonder if some sort of Facebook application integration is on their roadmap, which would be great, because then the useless jackholes that spend all day playing Farmville at the office won’t even need to switch browser windows to annoy the living shit out of everyone they know.

Another nice feature is the “Share” button built into the browser, that puts Twitter and Facebook sharing just a click away.

Of course there are already bookmarklets for all that already, and most websites now have share functionality built into their content, but for the less tech-savvy who might not know they exist, this makes it easy for people to share what they’re looking at in a way that uses a consistent UI on every single page they visit.

One UI irritation I ran across is that if you have the share pop-up activated and switch apps, it can be easy to forget that it has focus, so when you switch back to RockMelt, and go to type something in the url bar, the comments box in the share popup still has focus, which could lead to some embarrassing moments when you meant to pull up your favorite pr0n site but ended up accidentally sharing it with your Facebook wall. (I only accidentally shared the RockMelt website. This time.)

Ultimately, other than perhaps a morbid sense of curiosity, whenever a new browser comes out, I’m more worried than excited. If it becomes remotely popular, that’s one more browser I have to test on, one more variable thrown into the standards mix.

It’s not as bad these days as it used to be. Most current browsers have some semblance of standards-compliance, and display differences are minimal. (If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been in the industry as long as I have. Trust me on this one. It used to be so, so much worse.)

I’m pleased to say that RockMelt’s rendering seems fine, and while I haven’t had a chance to do any complicated DOM-tomfoolery with it yet, all of my initial tests showed layout and javascript working exactly as expected, and exactly as it would appear in any other browser. So that’s good news.

It may seem like I’m hating on RockMelt – I’m actually not.

Is it a browser for the power user? I’d say not.

Is there a market for it? I think so.

Most of the tech site reviews have been neutral at best, or condemning this browser to failure before it’s even open to the public, but I think that’s a symptom of who has been given access to review it. Naturally, the techies are going to be the ones with the first-look. In fact, they’re normally the only ones that care about a first-look. And techies are exactly the audience this browser will not fly for. At least not at this point.

But it’s important to remember that there people out there that aren’t as tech savvy – who wouldn’t know a Firefox addon if it bit them in the ass, and have no desire to know more. I look at my biological father, who only recently got an email account and joined Facebook. He doesn’t know or care about computers, and the only reason he finally broke down and got an email account was to stay in touch with my sister and I. As he uses the internet more, I expect him to find more things he likes (pr0n), but he just doesn’t care about how or why it works, and won’t go to great lengths to figure stuff out.

To techies, Facebook may be an aggravation – something we put up with because it’s part of our jobs or because it’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to leave. But people spend more time on Facebook than on any other site on the web, so clearly, there are plenty of folks (and by plenty, I mean *millions*) that love it and use it constantly.

RockMelt’s tagline is “Your browser. Re-imagined.” So far, it’s more like “Your browser. With some integration that’s already totally possible with plugins, for people not savvy enough to use plugins.” But it’s early yet, and I’m curious to see where it goes.

Also? Dumbest name ever. Seriously guys. WTF.

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Because I am not aging gracefully, and because what I would consider my life’s work lives almost entirely online in the ether, I think about this a lot. Probably more than is healthy, but that’s what booze is for.

This question is more complex than it seems, and becomes increasingly complicated if you have your own independent websites, as I’ll discuss later in this post.

Social Networking Sites

In the case of social networking sites, in most cases, your account will simply linger online with no new posts unless you have given a friend or family member your login information through which they could post a death notice and/or delete your account. In the case of MySpace, there are websites such as MyDeathSpace that allows you to memorialize a recently deceased friend or family member’s MySpace account.

The exception to this (so far) is Facebook. When you join the choir invisible, friends or family can fill out a form to report a profile as deceased, which requires knowledge of the person’s date of birth, email address used for the account, network, and full name. Once a profile has been set to ‘deceased’, friends may continue to post memorial notes on your wall, but you will not (or should not, anyway – I have found this to be buggy) show up in Facebook application invites, etc.

If you have a paid account of any kind, for example with Flickr or LiveJournal, your account will obviously revert to unpaid when the yearly renewal fee is not paid. Even so, unless you have provided instructions and your login information to someone still alive, the accounts will remain available and untouched unless a family member petitions to have them deleted.

Emails from Beyond the Grave

If you’re the kind of control freak that wants to have a say in who gets notified about your death and what that message says (no shame in it – I *am* that freak), services such as GreatGoodbye.Com or MyLastEmail will let you prepare a message (including photos and video) and recipients in advance. A code is generated that you give to a trusted friend or family member, and when you finally lay down for your eternal dirtnap, that person activates the code and the emails get sent.

I’m a little torn on this. While I want to make sure that I get a chance (even if posthumously) to tell the people I love how much I loved them, not all of my loved ones have email, and frankly, it still comes off a little creepy to me.

Of course, if you’re a passive-aggressive dick, you could use a service like this to get the final digs in on someone you weren’t very fond of. You will absolutely have the last word, although honestly, if that kind of thing is worth the cash to you, the world is probably better off without you.

Dead Man’s Switch

A digital dead man’s switch works exactly like the dead man’s switches in movies, only instead of blowing yourself and the hostages up if your finger comes off the button, your carefully crafted post-death plan is triggered.

As Tony Geis explains in an interesting article from NPR entitled Dead Man’s Switch: CC Me From The Other Side:

“I concocted the idea one day when I was almost hit by a car. A program running on a couple of my servers supervises my online presence in various ways. It notices if I post on Facebook, Twitter, my blog, etc., log into any of my servers, send an e-mail, etc. Things like that. If it becomes apparent that I haven’t been around in quite some time, it ‘unlocks’ and a trusted individual can activate it. When it is activated, various trusted individuals will be sent e-mails explaining the situation and be granted access to my accounts.”

Geis rigged his own system as an alternative to using a service like GreatGoodbye, but not everyone will have that level of technical skill, so perhaps a service like GreatGoodbye (or others) would be a good idea if only to email your selected, trusted contacts your login information and instructions in the event of your passing.

According to Forbes magazine, if you’re serious about keeping your online presence going you should appoint an executor, somebody who’ll handle your affairs when you’re gone. Leave him or her your logins and other key information, and if there’s stuff you’d rather the family didn’t see you can arrange for the executor to delete specific content from your computer or online accounts.

Speaking of deleting your social media profiles, website SuicideMachine helps you do just that. It was recently featured on Lifehacker.Com, so if it’s not responding quickly – or at all – that’s why. Just give it a little time and check back when the crushing force of the Lifehacker effect has subsided.

Incidentally, although we’re discussing the topic of actual IRL death it should be noted that SuicideMachine’s name refers to killing off on your social networking profiles. It’s not advocating suicide (that I know of) and isn’t positioned to be a tool to delete your profiles after you’ve passed on, but the combination of SuicideMachine and the Dead Man’s Switch might work in a will to make it easier for your family to delete your online presence if that is your final wish. It works with most of the popular social networks, and can really cut down the time it takes to nuke them all. Sadly, Facebook is being douchey and blocking their IP, so the Facebook integration aspect isn’t functioning right now.

Challenges

As I mentioned, I’ve thought about this a lot. While some of the solutions mentioned above are better than nothing, I think they overlook some less-obvious issues – or at least issues that come up when your online presence is a little more complicated.

Multiple-Personalities

In my case, I have a robust online “persona” on Twitter and other social networks (even this blog) that are very true to my personality. I’m snarky, occasionally funny and mean, and I see my interaction online as a bit of a performance art. I also, however, run a very serious non-profit organization that I founded 8 years ago. Clearly, the messaging I might wish to send to my Twitter friends would likely be different than the messaging I would send to my colleagues through my non-profit work. (Probably slightly less swearing. Probably.) In short, I maintain a professional appearance for the benefit of my organization, as one would expect of the President of any serious company. Trying to sort out the nuances of which group gets what messaging would be complicated and challenging, and the very last thing I would want would be to screw that up and send a message intended for my personal friends to my organization’s list. I can see it now: “See you in hell, bitches! I’ve brought the beer, you bring the hookers and blow!”

Real-Life Friends? Online Friends?

Another interesting challenge is that with social networks evolving to the point where they are used to connect with people you didn’t know before, the lines between “real life friends” and “online friends” becomes more and more blurred. Twitter is a great example of this. The followers on Twitter that I interact with frequently have become as much a part of my life (if not more so) as the “real life” friends I have known for decades but to whom I rarely manage to talk. I don’t even have most of their email addresses, and who knows if we’ll still be in touch by the time I actually kick the bucket. I certainly hope we will, but lives change, priorities change – the same things that make people spend less time with each other in real life get in the way of people spending time with their online friends.

Honestly, I wonder if the terms “online friends” and “real life friends” are even valid anymore. They’re friends. However, because we know each other through a venue that doesn’t provide email addresses, a simple email solution just won’t work if I want to include those friends in my final messages.

But because I know people from all of these different online communities and networks, many of whom are not in my address book, the solution here isn’t necessarily a technical one. Sure, I could create a Facebook/Twitter/MySpace application that allows a trusted family member to trigger your last wishes messaging to your friends in those communities, but what about the Godsmack forums, of which I have been a moderator for 8 years. Or the stone carving listserv I’m on, or the forums for my martial arts school? You get the picture. I would certainly want to include an announcement to them, but those systems don’t have an API that can be tapped into.

Parts of this process would still have to be very manual, which means putting that responsibility on someone I care about, just hours or days after I’ve died.

Passwords and Friends Change

The biggest challenge I see in the automated services solutions is that I change my password often, and use distinct passwords for just about every website I join. I also add new contacts to my address book, friends groups (and friends lists) weekly. Using the automated email workflow concept, I would have to manually update these contact lists every week for the rest of my life. Even as morbid as I am, I don’t want to be reminded of my own mortality that precisely every week for the rest of my life. Even setting website logins aside, the FTP account information for the dozens of websites I run or manage are frequently changed. Which brings me to the most difficult challenge for me, personally.

Non-Technical Friends and Family

As I mentioned, I’m a prolific (one might say habitual) website developer and writer. I can think of at least 10 websites I run that have content that requires constant curating, and probably 15 more that are static that I don’t want to disappear after I’m gone.

FTP login information could be granted to a trusted person by firing off an email with the login to my computer, and then instructions on how to login to my KeePass application that contains the usernames and passwords to my FTP and MySQL sites. But then what? I do not have any close friends or family that even know what FTP is, let alone how to handle creating a new post/page/whatever on each of the proprietary apps I’ve built. It certainly could be done, but that’s a metric assload of work to generate that much documentation, especially when you consider that I may well end up completely changing the software that powers these sites several times before I die. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

Moar Monies!

Naturally, hosting costs money. In order for my vast, craptacular works to live on beyond me, someone would have to be paying for it. I currently have it stated in my will that I wish for x amount of money to be allocated towards hosting fees to keep them alive for a specified amount of time.

Relevance and After Life Lifetime

This is less of a challenge than just something to consider while you’re making these types of plans. As much blood, sweat and tears as I’ve devoted to Snipe.Net over the past decade, will it really be relevant enough to keep alive 10 years from now? My tech tips, programing snippets and observations on social media will most likely not be relevant anymore. Keeping that in mind, if I died tomorrow, how long would be appropriate to keep this site alive? A few years maybe? Technology changes so quickly, it’s likely that anything I’ve written here will become obsolete within 6 months, let alone 10 years.

Privacy

In the example I gave above, I would be giving my laptop password to a trusted friend or family member (either informally, or formally by way of an executor), with instructions to access my KeePass file to unlock my other accounts. This also inherently means that the person I entrust with this information has access to all of my files, all of my past emails, all of my social networking private messages, and all of my pr0n. Uhm.. did I say pr0n? I meant banking information. Right.

So short of encrypting large sections of your drive, handing someone the keys to your hard drive is effectively handing them the keys to your entire life, including the bits you may not want to be made available to people you love. Speaking as someone whose step-father once asked her to help him cancel his porn account and remove the malware he got from a porn site, I can tell you there are parts of your private life that really, really, really should follow you to your grave.

Hmmm

As upcoming generations rely more and more on online services and communities and become closer to friends they only know from online who may have no connection to their “real life” friends, I think we’ll see more of this kind of thinking.

Perhaps more importantly, the generation of people whose entire life’s work is purely digital is starting to get older (like me), we will need a more organized, integrated way to handle our online legacies. The most significant, important things I have accomplished in my life so far will disappear if I don’t have a system in place – and right now, that system is kludgey at best, impossible to execute by the technically challenged people I love most at worst.

I do not have children (thank God), and do not want children. My digital creations, self-indulgent and rambling though they may be, are my legacy. They are the only thing I have that has a chance of living on beyond me.

As I’m writing this, I realize that there is currently no solution that does exactly what I need and want. Anyone with some VC capital want to start a company? I’ve already got a plan. Drop me an email if you’ve got some cash to blow.

Your Responsibility?

Is it weird to think about this? I don’t think so. I personally feel that just as it is responsible to have a will, it is responsible to leave your last wishes and instructions for your social networking profiles. Having had a few friends pass away in this digital age, I wish they had considered their social networking profiles in their last wishes. To your friends and family, it can be heartbreaking (and more than a little creepy) to see haunted by your profile on their friends list after you’ve passed. I lost a friend to suicide this time last year, and it took 4 months for Facebook to finally get the memorial status of his profile set up correctly. It was a painful daily reminder to say the very least. Not to mention that neglecting to make formal plans for your eventual death puts the burden of deciding what to do with your social networking accounts on the very people who are already grieving.

Happy New Year to you all. Stay safe, and consider adding a posthumous persona management plan to your resolutions list. What are your thoughts on this? Is it going too far? Not far enough? Do you already have a plan in place, or a pre-recorded “screw you, world!” video set to be published when you kick it? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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This has been a bug up my ass for a while, but I let it go, since it seemed like there were really only a handful of companies pushing them. Now that the trend seems to be spreading like social media herpes, I decided to share a few thoughts.

If you were the FIRST person to come up with this idea, you *might* have been clever. But you weren’t. Odds are, you weren’t even in the first thousand to try it. You jumped on the bandwagon after you saw people you follow mindlessly posting contests and promotional tweets in the desperate hope of winning a donkeypunch, or a unicorn or whatever it is the company was hawking.

Fundamental Misunderstanding of Twitter

I can see the allure. It’s free, and has the potential to spread like wildfire, as many things do on Twitter. And it’s ZOMGSOCIALMEDIABBQFTW!!

The problem is that as this technique gains popularity, it begins taking over user’s Twitter streams, especially when it’s being used by a popular company.

Okay, I lied. That’s not the only problem.

The second problem is that it demonstrates once again a fundamental misunderstanding by companies about how Twitter should be used – or rather, how Twitter users expect and want it to be used. I have said this a hundred times, and will likely say it a hundred more – Twitter is about conversation. It is a two-way street. If you’re looking for a way to broadcast promotions, use an email newsletter list, targeted ads, or another more appropriate advertising vehicle.

Another facet to this is the fact that many companies don’t grok that Twitter isn’t Facebook. Twitter isn’t just a place where you connect with people you already know – trusted friends and colleagues. Twitter, by it’s very nature, encourages you to connect with people you have never met, and with whom you may share *some* common interests, but I can tell you my own list of Twitter followers are as varied as colorful as can be imagined. A good many of them classify themselves as geeks in one way or another, but even with that seemingly clear delineation, some are math geeks, some are science geeks, some are literature geeks, and so on. Some are Mac users, some are Linux/BSD or Windows users. Even out of the smaller subset of people on Twitter that I interact with every single day (my Twitter BFFs?), they’re not going to have the same interests.

Encouraging your Twitter followers to spam their friends with contests and promotions that they very likely may not even be interested in will only result in their followers resenting you *and* unfollowing the original tweeter. I treat RT contests very much like the recent syphilitic plague of Twitter-based games such as Mafia Wars. If I get an @reply or DM that was generated by a Twitter game, that is an instantaneous unfollow, no backsies.

I have marginally more patience for RT contests than Twitter games, only because I still see them less often, but anyone who knows me knows patience isn’t one of my many, many virtues, so if this trend continues, I could easily see my stance getting a little more aggressive on it.

Worst of the Worst

The worst offenders are folks like MacHeist, who offers free Mac software for download, but only if you tweet an ad for them. Their system actually checks to see if you have tweeted this message, and only then will allow you to download the software. Fucking lame.

They’ll call it a clever promotional tool, I call it blackmail. Somehow requiring a user to tweet something in order to enter a contest feels less awful to me than their approach – perhaps because contests already come with the sense that your chances of winning are limited, so a user is more likely to opt not to tweet and enter because they have decided that their slim chance of winning is not worth pissing off their followers.

Incidentally, I have spoken to a few groups that have used Twitter Tweet/RT contest promotions before, and according to them, their success rate wasn’t even very good, according to whatever metric by which they gauge this sort of thing. That is, of course, entirely anecdotal, since I made no effort to solicit this information from many of the larger companies using it because I don’t *care* how successful it is. It’s still obnoxious.

I was curious what my own Twitter followers thought, so I posted an (unscientific) poll:

Only *one* user voted that they felt this was “clever marketing” (and that vote followed me remarking that I found it interesting that no one selected that option yet, so there’s a good chance the voter was just being a wiseass.) Almost 25% answered that they felt it was flat-out SPAM, and over 60% said it depends how it’s executed, but it feels mostly spammy to them.

The Secret

Here’s the big secret these companies seem to be missing – if your contest doesn’t suck, many of your users will retweet it because they *want* to, not because they have to.

Make it easy for them to tweet it – set up a pre-filled Twitter message so they only have to click “tweet” (but always always ALWAYS give them the chance to alter or add to the message) after they’ve signed up for the promotion and they probably will! If the prize or promotion is good enough on it’s own merit, people will talk about it. You don’t need to strong-arm them into doing it.

It comes down to part of the psychology of Twitter users. Being the first to tell their followers about something they think is awesome, and they think their followers will find awesome, is one of the most rewarding aspects of Twitter. It helps establish them as an authority on all things awesome, and shows their followers that they have something of value to offer. In return, their announcement gets Retweeted, and they feel good knowing they have sent a message that resonates with many of their followers. It is a win-win for the original tweeter, and for their followers.

Let this social dynamic of Twitter work on it’s own. This organic way of spreading information is exactly what made Twitter popular – not by companies forcing users to shill for them.

What are your thoughts? Am I over-reacting? Let me know in the comments.

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Twitter “Contributors”

Yesterday, Twitter announced the very limited beta release of a new feature they’re calling “Contributors”. From their company blog post:

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

Before this feature was introduced, enterprise-level Twitter apps that focused on facilitating a team of people servicing a single account – services like CoTweet and HootSuite – encouraged team members to “sign” their tweets with an initial, such such as “^S” to indicate which team member posted.

This new API feature, in addition to the launch of Twitter’s Business site, shows that supporting and cultivating business interaction on the platform is clearly something on Twitter’s long-term agenda.

I, for one, am pleased to see Twitter going in this direction. Whether or not you agree that businesses should be on Twitter, the fact is they’re here to stay- and by adding this functionality to the API, they are encouraging something I have felt was important for as long as social media has been in the mainstream: personalizing your public face.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the companies that seem to be doing things right with regard to Twitter seem to be the ones that grok the concept of the ‘conversation’, and allow the personalities of their Twitter representatives shine through.

To put a finer point on it, several studies have been done that show that doctors who have poor beside-manner or come across as uninterested in their patients have a higher risk of being sued for malpractice, regardless of their technical skill as a physician. [more] In short, patients don’t sue the doctor’s they like.

Customers have a harder time getting angry or frustrated with companies when they get to know the employees as human beings. I felt the full impact of this myself just a week and a half ago at the Microsoft Web Developer’s Summit, and have often referenced Rackspace’s presence on Twitter as being a good example of this.

Conversely, if you have a bunch of assholes handling your Twitter account, expect to feel the backlash of “social media malpractice”.

Is it risky to let customers or potential customers get to know your company employees on a more personal level? Absolutely. But if you’re not prepared to handle that risk, you should probably rule out social media as a service, support. or pre-sales tool. Stick with your static Facebook fan page with your carefully crafted and copy-edited status updates.

Like everything else in this world, you need to evaluate the risk-to-reward ratio, and determine whether or not you’re willing to give up a little bit of the structure and control of traditional media for a chance to really connect with your customers and establish brand loyalty on a deeper level. If you’re not, that’s totally fine. But if you’re going to do it, you damn sure better do it right, because if you don’t, the spotlight will be on you, and it gets hot as Hell. I’m talking to you, Dell, HabitatUK and countless others.

Obviously, if you’re going to take advantage of this new feature, you will want to set up some corporate guidelines for what is – and is not – appropriate for a personal Twitter account that is effectively endorsed by your brand, but remember not to hold the reigns too tightly. Just as you would hire the outgoing, friendly, charming associate with the dynamite personality to be your public sales face, choose your brightest, wittiest and most interesting employees to be your Twitter face.

If your company is just starting to (or starting to consider) venturing into the Twitter depths, be sure to take a cruise through Twitter’s Business site, which features a breakdown of how Twitter works, business best practices, Twitter lingo, case studies and a slideshow for download that is tailored just for you.

Additional Links

• DigitalBeat – Twitter has made Dell $1Million in Revenue
• Social Media: The Best and Worst of 2009

Blog photo credit: Tom Hoffarth, InsideSocal.

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Regardless of the actual job title that was advertised, 90% of the job description had to do with the applicant’s ability to make nice on Twitter and other social networks. For this article’s sake, that job title will be referred to as “Social Media Douchebag.”

I should interrupt myself here and clarify that I am not talking about hiring other companies or individuals to develop or execute specific social media campaigns, such as Facebook applications, etc. That’s part of what the agency I work for does, and we do it better than most companies would if they tried to do it themselves. Clever viral campaigns like Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice” or Vitamin Water’s “Great Debate” could probably never have been developed internally, and there is a legitimate purpose to hiring an agency to handle those types of things.

I’m referring specifically to the situation where a company is providing some level of day-to-day customer-interaction support via social networks like Twitter, either sales, or pre-sales or tech support.

This company historically has had an excellent track record for doing things right in social media. They didn’t hire a bunch of outside social media douchebags – they encourage their current employees to branch out into social media, so the people their customers (and potential customers) interact with on networks like Twitter are actual employees with real roles in the company – systems administrators, technical support – the same people they would be talking to if they called on the phone. Their regular employees became brand ambassadors because of their knowledge, openness, and accessibility.

Knowing that there are real people, not social media douchebags, behind the Twitter names is the single most important reason social media has been successful for this company. They got it right – social media became an extension of their current service and support, not some new, pathetic attempt to use social networks to pitch new customers or give lip service to their existing customers.  There is nothing phony, forced or contrived about the people they have on Twitter. And that is exactly the way it should be.

Social networks are OUR turf, boys. They are where we – your customers – live, talk to our friends, review products, and express ourselves. If we let you enter our world, you should know that it is only with our permission that you are allowed to exist here – and that the privilege can be revoked at any time. Treat that knowledge with the care it deserves.

Employees = People

When you follow the folks this company currently has on Twitter, you get to know them as people. They bend over backwards when you need help, but when they’re not saving the day, you learn about their kids’ baseball games. Some might argue that that sort of non-business chatter has no place in a support venue, but I disagree.

As consumers, we will always return to the brands that we feel most personally connected to. It’s a lot harder to fire a friend than someone you never bothered to get to know very well, and when your customers start seeing your employees as people, I think it can actually make life easier for customer and employee alike.

Generally speaking, when you get to know your service providers as actual human beings, you will be more forgiving of their mistakes, and less likely to jump to the conclusion that they are just out for your money and they don’t give a damn about you.

Naturally, if the employee is particularly verbose (or particularly offensive, as I am), I might recommend they set up a separate Twitter account for their very personal stuff. Fortunately for everyone involved, I haven’t been asked to Twitter on my company’s account yet, so it’s a non-issue for me.

That said, not every company chooses to go that route with their social network support. Many keep it all business, all the time – and that is effective at accomplishing their goals, and it works for them. However even if a company takes a less personal, business-only approach, customers will KNOW if the person on the other end of that Tweet or Facebook message is a real service representative, or just a social media douchebag.

Social media douchebags are no more valuable to me than automated telephony systems. They can be useful for answering the same basic questions that a corporate website’s FAQ can, but to real people, real customers, they are as infuriating as getting stuck talking to customer service or billing when you have a technical problem. Sure, let me waste 10 minutes of my life explaining my problem to someone I know from the outset has no idea what my problem is or how to solve it. Let me plead my entire case to someone who doesn’t understand half of the terms I’m using, just so I can finally get transferred to someone who may actually potentially be useful to me, just so I can start over again.

I don’t know about you, but my hourly rate is outrageous. I should send these people an invoice for wasting my time.

Even the ones who genuinely care are still utterly ill-equipped to actually solve people’s problems, whether those problems are technical or sales or pre-sales related. They are the piker stock broker (I can say that, because I used to be one), going through their call lists, making cold calls with no real knowledge of the company or how the company relates to the specific industry. They have a pitch-book of bullshit responses and platitudes, but because the only role they have ever played at the company is that of a social media douchebag (or stock broker), they have no real answers.

Only the people who do actual work have those. Which is why those are the people you want handling your social media outreach.

Fortunately, for the company involved, they immediately recognized that this was the wrong way to go (not without a fair bit of ranting from my end, naturally.) And for that I’m relieved. God help them the first time I reach out on Twitter (or anywhere else) for support and am answered by a Social Media Douchebag. One of the things I really like about this company is that 24/7, I can reach someone online who has extensive, intimate knowledge of the product and wants to help me solve problems. Even the most well-intentioned SMD’s just don’t have the skill set or knowledge to be anymore more to me than wasted time and an additional mouse-click or three.

Do I expect full-service support through Twitter or Facebook? Of course not. But immediately connecting to people who care about my problem and are ready and able to help me fix it is very important to me.

Save yourself the money on hiring some self-proclaimed expert and set up a smart email auto-responder. It will be slightly less annoying for your users to deal with, about as productive, and at least then they can blame the technology if they walk away feeling like their time was wasted.

One size does NOT fit all

So how are there jobs out there for “Social Media Marketers”? If I had to guess, I’d say that many more traditional companies are feeling overwhelmed by the popularity and potential of social networks, so rather than spending the time getting to know how their users (or potential users) use these networks and tailoring a service solution that makes sense for them, they panic and take out a job ad looking for a social media marketer.

I gotta tellya – social media hadn’t been around long enough (with consistent user behavior) for anyone to be considered an expert or a guru. The self-proclaimed “social media guru” means the same to me as “social media douchebag.”

This isn’t voodoo. The only real rule to being good at social media is to not be a douchebag, so clearly, you can see that a social media douchebag is a paradox – and if they continue to exist, a singularity will be formed, and the universe will implode .

The reality is that social media is a relatively new field, and the “experts” are just smart people who managed to guess right slightly more often than they guessed wrong.

Treat your followers/fans/network with respect. Respect their time, and bring something of value to their lives. Honest to god, that’s all there is to it. Finding a way to make that fit into your support model isn’t nearly as hard as you probably imagine.

Are there ways for companies to handle social networking right? Absolutely. Unequivocally yes. And in fact, it’s not just a good, progressive plan – it will be a necessity within just a few years for every large company to have some level of social network support. But expecting a one-size-fits-all answer here is naive. You wouldn’t do that with any other aspect of your business, so why on earth would you do it here, in a place that is more public, more open to criticism, more likely to be cross-posted and nitpicked than anywhere else?

Stop panicking. Social media isn’t fairy magic. This isn’t rocket surgery. It’s simply an extension of what you’re already doing – and no one is more qualified to do that than the people who already work for you. They are invested in your company, and they have the experience to actually be useful to your customers. They are your very best brand ambassadors, and if you’re smart, you’ll offer your current employees a pay raise or additional bonus for taking on the additional responsibility, rather than drop money on hiring someone from the outside who doesn’t know your company, how it works, or what your customers need.

I have no idea where this glut of “social media experts” came from, but it looks like they’re not going away any time soon. There are no degrees in social media (not yet, God help us all), so I am always curious as to the criteria by which these people use to declare themselves “experts.” Whatever color the sky is in their world, the reality is that being genuine is the only thing that has consistently withstood the very public and very close scrutiny of corporate social media efforts.

So yeah – “social media marketing” isn’t a job title. It may be one part of a job description, but it is not a job title. And if it is, you’re doing it wrong.

UPDATE: I have created a new website – SocialMediaDouchebag.Net. Check it out. You might rofl or lawl. Ad Age even posted about it. Be sure to check out the notes page to learn more about it, and the kickass people on Twitter who helped me come up with some of it. It should be mentioned that the SocialMediaDouchebag.Net site is aimed more at affiliate/MLM marketing douchebags, not corporate douchebags, like I’m discussing in this article. Perhaps a “Corporate” version is necessary…

What are your thoughts? Leave ‘em in the comments.

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The first article discussed what features and screens you have available to you in Facebook apps in general – and in this article, we’re going to go through the process of actually planning a real one. You’ll see some pitfalls and hopefully learn to think about your applications in a new, more complete way, harnessing all of the aspects of Facebook’s platform.

Although we won’t be delving into code in this article either, I strongly encourage you to read this article (and the previous article, if you haven’t yet) for your own sanity’s sake. For all the frustrations that come with writing Facebook applications, I can say from experience that at least 75% of my frustration was a direct result of devoting enough time towards the planning phase of each specific application. Plus, the application we spec out in this article is going to be the base that we use in the next part – the one where we actually do start touching code. That article is about 60% written, but breaking it up makes far more sense, since you SHOULD be planning your applications before you start touching code anyway. I promise you, getting this part right will save you days, if not weeks, of re-writing code and fixing issues. I’ve done it. It sucks.

Determine the Social Action Points Before You Start Development

One thing I have learned with regard to Facebook application development is that its very easy to rush into development and inadvertently miss some key integration and social action points.  It’s easy to do, since they are not “visible” as you’re developing the app. When the user interacts with your application, you may forget to consider all of the potential notifications that can be triggered, because you can’t physically see them. Out of site, out of mind means that you’re throwing them in haphazardly after the app is built, or worse yet, not using them at all.

“Invisible” (but very important) things to consider are:

• Newsfeeds – when a user directly interacts with your application, you can post that action to the user’s newsfeed.
• Email notifications – if a user has permitted your application to send them email, you can send plain text or (limited) HTML emails to notify them of action items

Newsfeeds are an absolutely critical part of your Facebook application, so spending a little time planning what actions a user can take on each screen of your app is a great start. The actions the user takes that are entered as newsfeed items are prominently visible on the user’s profile page, and will be visible to their friends on the Facebook “home” page that shows recent actions friends have taken.

Sample newsfeed application items

The main goals of your newsfeed items should be to highlight worthy user actions – the benefit of this will be that the user’s friends see these newsfeed items and may be interested in checking out your application.

Emails are important, but since your users must opt-in to receive them, you may not reach as many people with them. Still, its important to plan them out the same way you plan newsfeeds.

As we go through the sample application, we’ll figure out where newsfeed items would be appropriate. Each application is allowed x number of newsfeed posts per user per day, so you want to choose them wisely and make sure they are truly relevant and not spammy. Each application’s cap is different, and that number changes based on the way people interact with it, but applications start off with around 20 max newsfeed posts per user per day. (This can make testing a bitch, which is another reason its important to get them into the application early in development.)

Also bear in mind that Facebook’s newsfeeds MUST be triggered by an action the app user has taken. You cannot have your application send newsfeed entries without the user clicking on something or interacting in some way. The format must be “<user> has done xyz”, so the newsfeed reflects on the action that specific user took.

Three Sizes of Newsfeeds

Facebook allows you to create three versions of a newsfeed item – a headline, a short story and a fullsize story. Headlines are the default view, so they should be well-crafted. If a user likes the headline, they can click to see the short story or fullsize, but your headline version has to be great to make them click.

Our Sample Application

Because no application should be started without a game plan, we need a plan for what the sample application we’re discussing here will do. For the sake of this tutorial, our application will behave similarly to the “poke” feature of Facebook, only we’ll be blowing kisses. (I realize this is a cheesy idea for an application, but it will keep it simple, and will allow us to demonstrate actions that can only be invoked when a user takes action on another user.) You can see this app live in action here.

In the Planning Your Facebook Application article, we discussed planning out each of the boxes that will be available to you in the application. So for this application, we’re going to plan for this:

1. Application canvas page – listing of recent incoming and outgoing kisses for the viewing application user
2. Profile box - display of recent received kisses for the profile owner, with action item for viewer to send the profile owner a kiss
3. Boxes tab: Wide -  listing of recent incoming and outgoing kisses for the profile owner user, tailored for non-application users, since Facebook users other than the profile owner can see this page
4. Boxes tab: Narrow – Smaller version of the wide display, for users who opt to use the narrow box column
5. Fan page – Although I opted not to create a fan page view of this app in the real app, for the sake of argument we could include a list of most recent back-and-forth kiss activity, or a leaderboard of the most active kissers – with an action item inviting users to start blowing kisses. Remember that not everyone viewing the fan page that your app gets added to will have added the application, so the view should be tailored towards viewers who are not application users. Since it will be on a fan page, and could get decent exposure depending on the popularity of the page to which it’s added, you’ll want to make sure this view encourages sharing and competition to compel new people to add it.
6. Application tab – same display as the canvas page

I encourage you to actually draw these screens and boxes out on paper, or in your favorite graphics program. It won’t take long, and will be a huge help in thinking through the interface and making sure you’re writing the app in a way that will make sense to the user. The mockups (often called wireframes) don’t have to be complicated or pretty, but they should roughly represent all of the key interface elements in position and placement.

Our application is very simple, so we only have two main screens: the homepage that will display the incoming and outgoing kisses, and the page that allows the user to pick from a list of their friends and blow kisses to them. A more complicated application could require a dozen or more screens, with each screen representing a page of functionality within the app.

Canvas page (displays recent kisses, sent and received)

Homepage mockup

Send kisses page

Blow kisses page

As we’re creating these wireframes, it becomes easier to figure out where newsfeeds and app-generated emails will be most useful.

One the canvas page, the page listing incoming and outgoing smooches, the user isn’t taking any direct action, so there is no direct newsfeed trigger for newsfeeds or emails. The blow kisses page is a good place for both.

When the user blows someone (or several someones) a kiss, it should trigger a newsfeed item: “<user> has blown <recipient> a kiss!” Because of the rule that the user has to directly trigger the newsfeed item, it would NOT be permitted to also add a newsfeed item into the recipient’s newsfeed such as “<recipient> has received a kiss from <user>”. You could trigger that second newsfeed item when the user picks up their kiss though, since the user (in this case, the recipient) took direct action with the application. This may seem like nuance, but its important to understand the difference in order to remain compliant with Facebook’s terms of service.

The recipient should then receive an email notification letting them know someone has blown them a kiss. If the user has not yet allowed the application and agreed to let the application send them emails, they will not receve this notification, however, so its not a form of communication you should rely on.

Another Example

As I have mentioned, this application is extremely simple. It was designed to be simple to keep the coding part (coming soon, I swear) simple – but it doesn’t give us the opportunity to really demonstrate places where newsfeeds will serve you best in your application.

Another application I wrote (which is a work in progress) might be a better example. The WoW Toons application, which is a simple application that allows users to display their World of Warcraft characters on their profile, has a few more potential interaction points.

Canvas Page: Displays the user’s current WoW characters (also known as ‘toons’) with level, race, class, etc. It also contains the functionality for the user to force an update to their character, so if they have gained a level, the app will reach out to the WoW database and fetch new data. It then compares the newly fetched character level with the one stored in the database, and if the new level is higher, it updates the database AND triggers a newsfeed item: “<user> has reached level <level> on <pronoun> <race> <class> – Ding!”

When a user adds a new character to their profile, a newsfeed item gets inserted: “<user> has added their level <level> <race> <class> to their Warcraft Toons profile”

Newsfeeds also allow you to add an action item link (although its small and arguably not that noticeable.) For the Blow Kisses app, a “Blow <user> a Kiss Now” link with a link to the WoW app would be appropriate. For the WoW Toons app, something like “Add your own Warcraft toons now” link makes sense.

WoW Toons canvas page

The WoW database also provides data on specific gear (armor, weapons, pvp stats, etc), and although I don’t currently track that data (might tho), when a user refreshes their gear, it would be appropriate to add a newsfeed item for new weapons, stats, etc. “<user> has reached 1045 pvp kills”.

Your Friends Toons Page: In the WoW Toons application, you can see a listing of the toons for your friends who have added the app.

Friends page

One possible feature that could be added would be to show the “last updated” date on this page, and allow users to “nudge” their friends if the friend in question hasn’t updated their characters recently. “<user> has nudged <recipient> to update <pronoun> Warcraft toon.”

In the Mr. Right application mentioned in the first article, we wanted to use newsfeeds to show the gifts that Mr. Right (a fictional boyfriend avatar) has sent the user. Because it is not allowed to automatically generate newsfeed items that a user has not triggered, we had to change the app to let the user click on a button labeled “Send me a Gift”. Since the user took direct action by clicking the button, we were able to insert a newsfeed item: “<user> has received a <gift name> from Mr. Right.” The action text was then “Get your own Mr. Right now”, linking to the application.

Mr. Right gift newsfeed

The above is an example of the short story newsfeed format. “Alison received a puppy from Mr. Right” is the headline, and then the short story body contain the image and additional text.

Conclusion

I’m sure I sound like a broken record by now, encouraging you to take the extra time to create wireframes and plan out every part of your application before you start coding. I promise you that it will be worth it in the end – you will end up with a better application that users will find easier to use and that more effectively uses the social parts of the social networking platform. I have personally cut corners and skipped this part too often – its so tempting. “Oh, I know what its supposed to do. Its a simple application.” And it never, ever is as simple as it first seemed.

Coding comes next, so be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss the next part in this series, where we walk through creating a simple Facebook application based on the dicussion in this article.

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In his article 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business,  blogger and 10-year veteran of the ‘Net industry Chris Brogan writes:

We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.

In his article, Brogan runs you through first steps, ideas on what to tweet about, potential pitfalls and criticisms you may encounter, and some possible positives you can throw back at the naysayers.

In a WebProNews article from today titled The Poetics of Professional Tweeting, blogger Jason Lee Miller takes a step back and looks at Twittering for business in a more abstract sense, discussing what’s working and what’s not.  He writes:

Over at Wired.com’s “Listening Post” blog, Scott Thill bemoans the lack of “penetrating insights” from the band REM’s Twitter feed before noting the un-Snoopness of Snoop Dog’s. Some PR poser, someone completely out of touch of with the bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yay-ishness of Snoop spends 140 characters telling followers to pick up a copy of the new album at their local Wal-Mart.

Not very Snoopish, at all.

While Twitter wasn’t created with the intention of becoming a business tool (to my knowledge, anyway), it was only a matter of time before marketers would start looking for a way to leverage it to reach out to customers (and potential customers).  While Brogan offers specific suggestions on what to tweet about, Miller cautions potential business-tweeters about remaining true – sound advice for marketers in ANY medium.

Another interesting article comes from Mack Collier of Search Engine Guide, which brings up an interesting point of what happens when companies try to use Twitter (or other social networking tools) on their own terms, instead of as the rest of us use them. His example, titled Worst Example of a Company Twittering?, shows an interesting scenario involving DirectTV.

I don’t know what the future holds for businesses and Twitter, but I do know that people can tell when they’re being played, and when your attempts to seem hip and young and cool come across as phony and contrived. Like every other aspect of successful marketing, the message you’re sending and the venue by which you do it should feel authentic or it just won’t fly.

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Let me start off by saying that I was a relative late-comer to Twitter. It had been popular for quite some time before I signed up, because I, like many of you, thought “I’m already on Livejournal, MySpace, Facebook and <insert other social networking site here>. What’s the point?” Why would I need yet *another* social network to keep track of, update, care about, post to, etc?

At the time I signed up, it seemed to me that Twitter was basically just the “status” part of the other social networks. Tweets were simply status updates – but since status updates are one of the few aspects to the major social networks that I actually enjoy reading and posting, it seemed worth a try. I used to try to update my Facebook status a few times a day – and thanks to the Facebook toolbar for Firefox, this was incredibly easy to do – I didn’t even need to load the Facebook website.

Twitter as a Social Tool

I got into a discussion on Lifehacker recently about using Twitter as a social tool. I explained that I think Twitter allows you to have *more* intimate contact with friends throughout the course of the day than most other social networks. How often do most of us email our friends? (And no, forwarding interesting news, stories, etc doesn’t count.) I know that for all the people I care about, I don’t get to spend nearly as much time talking or interacting with them as I’d like. But a good email that actually covers anything of importance is going to take me at least 45 minutes – because I talk too much. There just isn’t enough time in the day to stay in close touch with everyone I’d like.

Social networks are a good start, but still not perfect. I check into my Facebook account maybe twice a day (if that), and my MySpace maybe once a month – but I use Twitter all day long. I have a browser addon (TwitterFox) that lets me post new “tweets” from my desktop, so I don’t have even have to load a web page to update my status. Plus its got text message (via cell phone) support, so you can update your status from anywhere (at concerts, events, whatever). I was tweeting from the @jonathancoulton concert a few weeks ago and it made feel even more gloriously nerdy than I already did, surrounded by people who – without missing a single beat – broke into the Star Wars Imperial March when asked.)

It can be argued that Facebook at least offers cell phone status update support as well, however thanks to the Twitter Facebook application, I can send a text message to update my Twitter status and my Facebook status gets updated automagically. So my friends who don’t Twitter (but do use Facebook) are still able to see what’s going on.

The beauty of Twitter is that you’re limited to 140 characters, which means there isn’t that struggle to find the time to post or reply to friends (as you might in a blog situation.) If a friend posts something funny or interesting, you don’t have to figure out from where you’re going to steal the 30 minutes it will take for you to write a long e-mail or blog entry about why you think the way you do about whatever they posted about. You don’t have to apologize for not writing more – your reply is *expected* to be brief and clever.

As a result of this dynamic, I find that I interact with my friends far more than I ever did in any other social network. And I do mean “interact”, not just “read”, “follow”, or “keep tabs on.” I find something much more intimate about getting a glimpse into a friend’s daily life, and being able to participate with their lives, no matter how far apart you may geographically be. (For me, I’m 3,000 miles away from many of my friends.) That’s not to say that I didn’t make time for friends before Twitter – just that our interaction was much more planned, scheduled and deliberate.

Interacting on Twitter reminds me more of being in the same office with your friends, where most of the day, you’re doing your own thing, but occasionally someone strikes up a short conversation about their lives. You engage, you go back to work, knowing a little bit more about each other than you did before, because that little 15-second nugget would never have made it into a 45 minute blog post.

And just like being in that big office with your friends, sometimes you’ll overhear a conversation (in this case a volley of tweets back and forth between two or more friends.) Some of the funniest things I’ve seen on Twitter were conversations between friends that I wasn’t even a part of. And I think many Twitterer’s expect that, so they use that 140 characters to craft the most amusing or poignant messages possible. Its an feature that’s part eavesdropping and part water cooler, but it can prove to be both enlightening and entertaining.

And for people who actually do blog elsewhere, a free service called LoudTwitter will allow you to post a daily digest of your tweets to your blog, so even your non-Twittering friends who aren’t on Facebook can get a recap in one post.

Twitter as a Life Tool

Another added bonus of Twitter is that its not just for chit-chat. There are some very useful Twitter-based bots and concepts out there that actually help people get things done, lose weight, save money, and more. Courtesy partially of Lifehacker, here are a few:

• @FuelFrog – http://fuelfrog.com/ – track gas mileage
• @multimap – twitter bot that helps you to access maps, directions and local information
• @commuter – lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter. You can also subscribe to your local reports via RSS, so you’ll know what the traffic conditions are like and which routes to avoid.
• @timer – Timer is a twitter bot that lets you set alarms for things you need to remember.
• @junglebot – search for books, DVDs and music on Amazon.com
• @MarsPhoenix – news on the Mars Phoenix project

Twitter for Fun
And there are more entertaining aspects too. One Twitterer I follow is DarthVader. His posts make me laugh out loud (since I’m a giant geek). From yesterday, he wrote: “Guys night in. Had Fett send out for Bantha Burgers while we watch pod races on pay-per-view. Blowing up a small moon later.”

And or those of you into this sort of thing, the BSG characters actively twittering (in character – its quite amusing): @leoben @cylonhybrid @gaiusbaltar @billadama @thefinalone @capricasix @toryfoster @karathrace

And just to continue the geek-theme, I also follow Wil Wheaton (@wilw) and Felicia Day (feliciaday) because they are nerdy and delightful.

Twitter Downtime

Yes, Twitter is down a lot – but that gets much less frustrating when you’re using a desktop client (or Twitterfox) than if you’re trying to update via the web. The reality is that Twitter is a phenomenon, and I don’t think its going to go away anytime soon, specially since some impressive people have decided its worth their investment. If it does go away, something will be there to pick up where it left off.

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