Mecca Ibrahim's Bits & Pieces

At the Future of Web Apps conference Kevin Rose (Digg, Pownce, Wefollow) gave a cool presentation on the top 10 down and dirty ways you can grow your web app. He took the questions he’s most often asked and turned it into a very informative talk.

Good to see the same classic tips on community retention

This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place. These have been collected from a number of third party vendors covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time.

The reminder a couple of weeks ago that pioneering blog publishing engine Blogger was launched ten years ago got me thinking.

I’ve been blogging for nearly ten years now - since it began with a W - and being involved with something from the beginning, plus passionate (and sometimes despondent) about its potential and usage in the years since means I’ve had a lot of time to watch and think about how it has matured and been used. There are certain things which we can now look back on and consider milestones in the development and maturing of blogging - like how the media responded to it, how people embraced and used it and how it penetrated mainstream web usage over time.

Likewise, Twitter.

Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. I put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

How businesses are using Twitter in Twitter’s own words

The insights in this report are built on three pillars - a survey with 1,000 North American consumers, six months worth of real conversational data to frame the introduction of a new social index and the experiences of Razorfish Social Media Leads across the world who advise marketers in industry leading companies everyday.

Last year, marketing director Marta Kagan helped solve this problem with her presentation What the F**k is Social Media?. It was quickly a social media hit for its wit and its very convincing case for the raw power of social media.

With the tremendous growth of Twitter (), Facebook (), and blogging in the last year though, Ms. Kagan thought it was time for a sequel. We couldn’t agree more. The stats she cites and the savvy she employs in What the F**k is Social Media: One Year Later makes it a worthy successor.

The next time you need to explain the benefits of social media to someone, just send them this post and make sure they flip through the entire presentation. Here it is: