FaceBook Fan-page Analysis

But what about Canada?

With the emergence of several new sources of data this week the lowly analyst is bringing fascinating new insight into the world of Data Mining and social applications like FaceBook. Check out this cool little web-data page to get the lowdown on fan-pages.

Here is part of a fascinating article "The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul"

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

If you think that's interesting you will really enjoy these defining zones in good old USA.

In a nutshell, Warden’s data analysis showed that Facebook users in the U.S. can be roughly segmented into seven regions, which he named facetiously:

Stayathomia: This belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far.

Dixie: Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.

Greater Texas: Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.

Mormonia: The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.

Nomadic West: The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities; it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county.

Socalistan: LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first.

Pacifica: Tightly connected to each other, it doesn’t look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation.

G-mail Still the Best

If only it did the dishes too...

If you didn't already know... Gmail is a free webmail and POP email service provided by Google, known for its abundant storage and advanced interface.

It is known as Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany and recently aggregrated Google Talk to its online service as well, providing users with an online chat feature for quickly communication from any computer in the world.

It currently offers 2GB+ of disk storage for emails and attachments and it’s fully integrated with Google Calendar. The account memory increases the longer you have the service.

Now, if you know all that, you might be interested in super charging your g-mail skills using Firefox (don't get me started on how good this browser is) . Check out these 2 great locations. If that's not enough then check out this blog post at lifehacker.com for lots of great posts.

TED Continues to Amaze All

But now I have to think more!

"There's a flip side to everything," the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

Why you should listen to him:
Derek Sivers (link to his blog) is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician since 1987, he started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too.

CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients.

In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company, MuckWork, where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their "uncreative dirty work."

"Derek Sivers is changing the way music is bought and sold. A musicians' savior. One of the last music-business folk heroes."

Esquire Magazine

A Message for All the Thinkers Out There

This makes me want to try some more...

Who can’t use a little dose of inspiration in the middle of the week? Christian Borstlap recently finished these deliciously simple animated illustrations for Dutch children’s charity, Kinderpostzegels.

Paul Postma did a great job of bringing Christian’s colourful illustrations to life, complimenting them with a playfully restrained animation style to really let their personalities shine.

Auto-Post Tools for Social Medias

Can you change the concept a bit?

Thanks to Jennifer Stalford for his original blog post.

1. HootSuite 2.0 allows management of multiple Twitter accounts with tracking capabilities, scheduling features and feeds blogs to Twitter. It now also interacts with LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, and Pingfm.
2. Ping.fm - ”Post From Anywhere – To Anywhere”. This can auto-post to 49 different social medias. The biggies included are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Delicious, and WordPress. Users can also use this on their SmartPhone.
3. Posterous is “the dead simple place to post everything”. This is done directly through your email account. In addition to having it auto-post to 10 social medias, users can attach url links, files, photos, video, blogs, and MP3’s. The largest social medias it works with are Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and WordPress.
4. Twitter Feed - This works with Twitter, has analytics that are viewed on a personal dashboard, rss capabilities, works with blogs, and improvements have been made to the login process.
5. Friendfeed states that it’s ”the easiest way to share online”. Users can post something on their phone, Facebook or email and it disperses it to their friends.
6. Facebook allows users to auto-post to Twitter but only works with Facebook pages so it is ideal for businesses.
7. EzineArticles has a feature that auto-posts a message on Twitter that indicates a user’s article has been published.
8. WordPress to Twitter rates very well by users, shortens links and is compatible on WordPress blog versions up to 2.8.4.
9. Twitter Notify is a blog plugin created by Windows Live Writer Microsoft for Live Writer. It posts to Twitter and shortens the link to a blog post.
10. xPollinate is another free blog plugin for Live Writer. This can auto-post a portion or an entire blog post to multiple social medias including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more through Ping.fm.
11. Socialooph is a free social media management site for managing your Twitter account.
12. Postling is “social media management for businesses”. It allows multiple people to manage multiple accounts. You can create accounts for your team or your clients and control their access, including which brands they can interact with.