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taking joy in the popping of the social media bubble & other web 2.0 silliness

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So, Blippy is no more. Well color me surprised

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Steven Hodson
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I just finished reading a long winded post over at TechCrunch about the waving good-bye to Blippy – the service that let you share your purchases with anyone who cared.

Things eventually quieted down as they are wont to do in media hype land. And then we kind of stopped writing about it, caught up in the hockey stick growth of Groupon and Facebook and Quora. We stopped writing about it so much so that we missed the fact that it pivoted from a purchase sharing site to a user reviews site, starting with the introduction of user reviews on July 23rd 2010 and then moving of the platform fully on to reviews by October of the same year.

“One of the reasons we switched to reviews was to increase user engagement, but that hasn’t really increased either, “ Kumar told me resigned, revealing that Blippy has 100K registered users and that 30% have shared a purchase — Numbers that are not spectacular. The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.” But later never came.

What did come was the sense (and the whispers and the TechCrunch tips) that Blippy was over and that it was time to move on. For co-founder Philip Kaplan this meant stepping down as CEO to go make a bunch of silly iPhone apps at the end of March, telling PE Hub’s Connie Loizos that Blippy was “doing better than most people could do … But it hasn’t, like, exploded into something huge yet.” Which basically meant that traffic had leveled off. And the loss of its figurehead left many, ourselves included, concerned about the service’s future.

Well the truth is it doesn’t have much of one.

Well gee, I seem to recall suggesting at one point that this had to be one of the stupidest ideas (at the time) and regardless of how many millions were poured into it there was no way that Blippy would succeed.

I’m sorry but there is nothing interesting or fun about this idea. Just as it is nobody’s business as to what goes on in my bedroom, my purchasing habits are just as private and personal. The idea that wrapping it up in a bunch of social media mumbo-jumbo makes sharing that kind of information any better is fundamentally screwed.

Blippy is currently in private beta and this is one person who thinks it should stay there or be prematurely thrown into the deadpool.

Chalk one up for the cranky guy.

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Categories: Opinion, Technology | Tags: over sharing, social media, stupid idea

Pimping a new book Vaynerchuk says 99.5 percent of social media experts are clowns

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Steven Hodson
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Over at TechCrunch Gary Vaynerchuk who is considered to be one of the social media rock stars came out with a pointed observation about the whole social media expert space

In essence, businesses need to better understand how to use social media and how to apply an authentic human touch while doing so. Vaynerchuk thinks current efforts are abysmal. “”99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns,” he says, continuing with “we are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.”

Well DUH!, I’ve only been saying the same thing for the past couple of years.

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Categories: Opinion, Technology | Tags: experts, shills, social media

About this Bin Laden Killing Tech Blogging

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Steven Hodson
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Pot_Meet_Kettle

Really M.G.?

You, of all people, is calling out Mashable over their playing a SEO pageview grabbing stunt on the back of the Osama bin Laden raid?

That’s rich and really there is only one thing to say:

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Categories: Opinion, Technology | Tags: blogging

It’s been awhile…

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Steven Hodson
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It’s been awhile since I either wrote about anything to do with social media (per se) or even posted anything here.

Well the first part was taken care of yesterday and while it isn’t posted in full here you still might find it some interesting reading. Here is the opening couple of paragraphs of The modern Great Gatsby Syndrome and the coming Social Perfect Storm:

It’s been interesting watching the world of change that is happening in places like Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and other countries in that region and how social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are being used.

It has also been interesting to watch the discussion among the digerati of how services like Twitter and Facebook have influenced our changing society; and regardless to which side of the importance scale you might fall there is something much more subtle happening and it’s not restricted to places like Egypt.

Yes, these social media services are important and in a lot of ways extremely subversive; which is why governments around the world are worried, but they are just the tools being used by a fast growing part of our society that wants change.

We aren’t just talking about countries being imprisoned by dictators either as these self same tools are being used by regular people as a way to have a say in the political processes of democratic countries; and often with growing success.

It is easy for us, here in our comfortable homes and with our fun toys, to slough off Facebook as nothing more than a destination point for wannabe farmers and Twitter being the cyber warehouse of pointless 140 characters being spewed forth endlessly. However, the youth of places like Egypt and Tunisia have shown us that these tools can also be used to reach the disenfranchised and ignored to give them a platform from which they can lay the groundwork for change.

You can read the whole posted over at The Inquisitr.

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Categories: Opinion, Technology | Tags: Facebook, social media, Twitter
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