After nearly 8 years of living in its Blogger home, my blog has now moved to its new home on Wordpress. The content is all there, but under the hood, I am happy to have a better engine powering it.
To get to it, point your browser to: http://askmanny.com
(the next few hours, while the change of name servers propagates, you may or may not be taken to the right place... but give it enough time and AskManny.com will soon be in Wordpress.)
Thanks to my friend Danilo Campos (who is also now a Bay area neighbor) who gave me a hand setting it up!
Know those semi-cryptic wavy characters that you need to type back in when trying to link to a web site on Facebook or sign up for some web services? They are known as captchas and, in case you are wondering, they are there to try to keep spammers at bay (though spammers are never shy of exploiting good people around the world and pay them to sit at terminals typing these in for pennies an hour...)
This morning (probably the result of not enough sleep or coffee... or both), I was wondering what my favorite kind of captcha was. There are, of course, the ones so cryptic that it takes a true calligrapher to tell what the heck they say! I am sure those keep spammers at bay, but they probably also keep REAL people at bay, because they are so hard to read! :(
So, I guess my favorite kind of captcha is the one I encounter in Facebook:
I can not only read the words, but it also provides a certain level of entertainment, because they are real words ("wagons" and "unfair" in this case) that leave me wondering sometimes what the connection may be between them... Are wagons unfair? Is it unfair to ride a wagon? What's a wagon? What's fair...?
See? Next time, I will get more sleep or get more coffee into my system before I blog! :)
Last week I learned about NutShellMail. They dub themselves as the "DVR for your social networks" and the more I think of it, the more I agree with the name... and the more I am liking the service. So much, that we rolled out NutShellMail on TuDiabetes this week.
What do I like about it? I am constantly on top of 3-4 sites that I monitor for content and conversations, among them TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes (of course) but also, Twitter and Facebook, where I spend most of my social media time these days.
NutShellMail precisely hits the sweet spot, by allowing me to configure the combination of updates (from the combination of sites -my network on Ning + Facebook or not + Twitter if I want to), and sends me an update via email up to 3 times per day.
"Email?!!" you may say. Yes. I find it convenient, b/c it combines updates in a single place that happens to be another space I spend quite a bit of time on (my inbox). So, while it may not be for everyone, I find it to suit my needs and I highly recommend it!
This weekend, I was reading the interview of Techcrunch with Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning) in Davos. In it, Gina argues that that she doesn't see Nign as a competitor of Facebook or Twitter.
I agree with Gina's statement to a certain extent. Quote:
"Facebook... is actually going more in the direction of connecting you with the people you have strong relationships with your real identity, with status messages, and with photo sharing... Twitter’s about news and real time events."
Ning instead is about building (strong) relationships with people you may not know in real life. So they overlap nicely to a certain degree, in terms of what they allow you as an individual or as a business to do.
But I still feel they are in direct competition, not only against each other but with all other things that pull us in different directions in our lives. We each may belong to dozens of social networks (online), be a part of multiple networks (offline -think your children's PTA, homehowner's associations, trade groups, etc.) and each of these expect a chunk of our time. No matter how effective we are, days are still 24 hours long and we have a few hours we need to sleep every day. So in the end Ning, Facebook, Twitter and all manifestations of social media in our lives are in direct competition for our most valuable asset: time.
