Ryan A Graves .com

As many know Facebook held their annual developers conference yesterday at the San Fransisco Design Center. The agenda (shared below) emphasized three main changes coming to FB: more sharing, simplification, and getting developers more involved. There were a few main sites that will now be much more integrated with Facebook such as Digg and Seesmic! The live blog of that event was covered extremely well over at TechCrunch.

The question that was never answered fully is one that Max Levchin founder of Slide asked, “is Facebook going to create more contracted agreements with app development houses?” I can see why Max would obviously love that as one of the premier app developers. However, I don’t see that as such a great thing for Facebook or the development community as a whole. If Facebook starts entering into contractual relationships with the “big swinging dicks” of app development (Slide, RockYou) then the “little guy” development houses will not be able to participate or continue to  feed the Facebook app community with innovative ideas. Keeping things open and available for anyone has been the strategy for Facebook to grow their development platform since the beginning and judging by the excitement and attendance of yesterdays event it looks likes it has been working quite well!

So Mark, listen, keep the platform open. Give the little guys a chance at “making it big”. There are a lot of great start-ups out there that would love to use the Facebook platform to change the way people use the web but if you cut “deals” with these big dogs of the FB app world the small man is out of the game. Give’m a chance.

*I just saw this morning that my Facebook profile has been updated and wanted to share a small portion of the new look.

Agenda:

12:00 - 1:30 pm: Doors Open

Registration & Exhibitor Area Open

1:30 - 3:00 pm: Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg

3:30 - 4:15 pm: Breakouts Round 1

User Experience: Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More

Technical: Building to Facebook Scale

Business: Building a Business on Facebook

4:30 - 5:15 pm: Breakouts Round 2

User Experience: Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website

Technical: Advanced App Building

Business: Marketing your App on Facebook

Workshop: App Building 101

5:15 - 6:00 pm: Break

6:00 - 6:45 pm: Breakouts Round 3

User Experience: Building Great Applications on Facebook

Technical: Feed & Social Distribution

Business: Entreprenuership on Facebook Platform

7:00 - 7:45 pm: Breakouts Round 4

User Experience: Design & User Experience at Facebook

Technical: Made for Mobile

Business: fbFund - A look inside - Seeding Opportunity on Facebook

Workshop: Taking your Platform Application Global

8:00 - 12:00 am: After 8 Celebration

*Photos courtesy of Brian Solis

This was a quote from the most recent Career Moments by Peter Berner. It made me laugh and it’s a great point so I thought I would share.

“It’s Not my Job”! Four killer words that can wreck a career quicker than using your parole officer for a job reference.

This incredibly inspiring and well creatively delivered video helps again show how the original web (html) is being transformed into a dynamic, mutational source of user contribution and innovation. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University helps anyone who is still trying to understand the over but enevitably used term “web 2.0″.

This weekend I attended my first Jimmy Buffet concert at Alpine Valley, WI.  In the words of my dear mother, “Everyone needs to see Jimmy at least once”. Jimmy Buffet, like no other musician that I’ve ever seen in my life, draws a very diverse fan base. Based on what I saw this weekend, literally anyone can go to a Jimmy Buffet concert and love it. There is no racial divide, no economic divide, no gender divide and definitely no age divide between the Parrot Heads.

As a blogger I obviously follow my audience fairly closely and like to know who enjoys reading or watching the content I create. Also, it may be obvious that I would like that number of people to grow. If that number grows the purpose of my blogging also grows, not to mention it makes me feel good. With that said, I think I, and bloggers like me, have a lot to learn from Jimmy Buffet. His open and all-inclusive style is one worth emulating. Gary Vaynerchuk is another web personality that masters this open and inclusive style.

Studying how Jimmy and people like him create such a following, I’ve come up with 2 main ingredients that feed this diverse following:

The strongest characteristic of Jimmy’s all-inclusive personality seems to be that he is always happy! Inherently people want to be happy, so when a person is happy and fun others are much more likely to be interested in being around or in this case following that person. There isn’t anybody that is sad at a Buffet concert. People are carefree and on the whole in great moods. If you go to a sporting events or other places where there are large crowds you often see fights and angry people. Even with the inevitable over consumption of alcohol, I didn’t see one fight all day. Jimmy is happy, the mood is happy, and people love happy.

Also, Jimmy’s music also reminds people of vacation, it takes them away from the routine of their “normal” lives and people are attracted to that “get away” feeling. Jimmy knows how to help people have fun; he has completely embraced the tropical mood of a vacation into his personality and musical style. He has done a wonderful job at managing his image in this way. People love doing something different than the norm and a Buffet concert is no doubt outside of the norm. Help create the feeling of ‘getting away’ and people are bound to follow.

So as you blog, speak, or create music remember that if you create a place for people to get away and create a happy aura and a happy mood your fans will increase, become more engaged and you’ll find that the impact of what you create will drastically increase.

Today when Amazon had there little S3 hick-up, the pictures/avatars in Twhirl (my Twitter app of choice) wouldn’t show up. I realized that my experience using Twitter was significantly worse without the picture and I realized that the picture that shows up next to the 140 character message is significantly important.

In the olden days when people would constantly check away messages on AIM the messages were fairly impersonal. Those away message were just left for whoever cared to view it. You had to actually go into each persons away message in order to view it. With Twitter the message comes to you, there is much more of the feeling that the person wrote that tweet ‘for me to see’ versus ‘for people to see’.

Now after using Twitter for a while I now know the people I follow by their avatars and I realized that this avatar makes the tool (Twitter) so much more personal. This personal aspect of Twitter makes the messages worth checking.  This is one reason why Twitter works so well, its personal.

Lesson: Keep it personal.

Seesmix, the daily wrap-up of all the Seesmic videos is back! Seesmic does a great job of summarizing the content on the site and they do a great job of create entertaining new content! For a while the Seesmix show went away, and by the request of the Seesmic community the show returns!

Watching the new show I realized that I have the honor of being in the intro! I’ve grown to be a very active user of Seesmic because of the many great conversations I’ve had and the network that I’ve built! Seesmic thanks so much for including me in the intro!

I’ve been working in and with web 2.0 applications for about 5 years and in the paste 2 I’ve really focused how people use web 2.0 apps in their business and their lives. As part of the process to establish myself as an expert on social software and the craze that is web 2.0 I decided to create my social software graph.  These are the applications that I think are best in each category and how I use some of these tools.

Blogs

I’ve included my personal blog Ryan A Graves.com and also my start-up ActionsTalk. I included ActionsTalk in this category because it uses a vlog (video blog) template and because it is a site where I am the sole (with my co-founder) contributor. My blog is used not as a one way tool but as a platform to start conversations. I encourage readers to leave comments (and video comments) in order to leave feedback and thoughts. And I always reply to them!

Micro-Media

Twitter is the obviously dominant tool here. Users basically answer the question, “What are you doing?” For myself, Twitter has proven to be the most effective networking application of all of them. They have had some serious problems however with keeping their site up. The surge in users over the last few months has taken servers down an uncountable amount of times. Plurk is basically a Twitter copy-cat formatted in a horizontal time line fashion. Where Plurk struggles most is that the size of the user base, Twitters large advantage, is significantly smaller.

Livecasts

In this space I only use Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is accepted as the best livestream tool and is used by “livestreamers” like Chris Pirillo who many times has thousands of people watching live. Another user of Ustream.tv that I follow is Jake Marsh.

Rich Media

Rich Media consist of things like video and photos. I’ve held a pro account on Flickr for a year and I will definitely continue to use this service. The quality of photos shared on Flickr is phenomenal. For video I use Viddler for uploading and sharing Ryan G TV episodes. I think that the video quality is highest, the player is clean and simple and it is very customizable. Then there is the obvious Youtube. I don’t upload many vids to Youtube but I do watch a ton! You tube has recently given blogger and founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur tons of trouble.

Aggregators,Activity Feeds

Aggregators or Activity Feed sites pull in the changes or activity from all of your other social software. Pulling in things like Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm and many many others. The dominant service here is FriendFeed. It is so dominant in fact that many think that FriendFeed will take over as the dominant mircro-blogging service in place of Twitter.

Audience, Communities

MyBlogLog is probably the most popular service for keeping track of who reads your blog. MyBlogLog allows you to embed a widget on your site that shows an avatar (small image) of everyone who has viewed your site. I use my blog as a platform for conversation and MyBlogLog helps me connect and converse with readers.

Social Graph

The social graph or social network is the most common type of application in the web 2.0 suite. Facebook and LinkedIn are networks that allow you to stay connected and share mediia between friends and contacts. Facebook started at Harvard and works its way around the countries colleges, while LinkedIn helps to promote business networking.

Content

In the content category its all about sharing. The internet is obviously huge and some of the most efficient ways to find good content is to see what others are reading. Sites like Digg and Del.ici.ous help people share and find the best the internet has to offer. Digg is set up in a voting format so people submit content and other users vote the content down or up the popularity scale. The cream of the crop rises to the top.

Music

I love listening to music but I’m not good at finding or sharing so the web 2.0 music apps are the ones I use the least. Last.fm allows you to share music and find friends with similar music preferences. The coolest thing about last.fm is that it suggests music that you will like based on what you ‘favorite’. Pandora does the same thing, you create a channel based on a song or artist and the following songs will be similar to that song; another great way of finding new music and bands.

Travel

Dopplr is the only tool that I use for tracking and sharing my travel.  I have a widget embedded on my blog that lets people know where I am currently and what trips I have planned in the future. Dopplr is very simple and very useful. They also ask what your mode of transportation is for each trip and calculate your use of carbon in all of your trips.

Events

I don’t create many events. But tons of events come to me, so its helpful to know what is going on and when. Because of the wide use of Facebook that seems to be the tool of choice for sharing a party or conference but recently Upcoming.com has create a stir in this space. Upcoming is great way to keep event goers informed and is also a great way to publicize an event. When ActionsTalk was first starting up we used Upcoming to promote the first ActionsTalk meeting and it worked wonders.

Niche Networks

Ning allows users to create very simple social networks. People can sign-up and share very easily. I don’t have a Ning network that I created myself but I belong to a few. The networking group in Milwaukee called Spreenkler uses Ning to organize events and the group and the simplicity of the site is what makes it so appealing.

Ryan A Graves.com, fun for every… (man or woman) t-shirt is available.

As I begin to watch the metrics on ActionsTalk.com, knowing how to analyze and react to certain data points is becoming more and more important to me. ActionsTalk recently jumped from 13 to 71 users in a day and I expect as the quality and quantity of content increases those number will continue to skyrocket. Learning about things like the difference or the affect of 1000 registered users vs. 5000 unregistered on a sites monetization strategy is critical for the new start-up founder.

This slide show by Dave McClure was given at Foo Camp put on by Tim O’Reilly last week and offers some incredible insights into what is important for start-ups to measure. Thanks Dave!

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Remember to please use the txt and video comments to share your thoughts on alternative modes of transportation and anything else that is on your mind! Thanks.