google

By Invitation Only

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Sam Harrelson has put together a nice post detailing the buzz surrounding the GrandCentral acquisition. Sam discusses the activity with GrandCentral before the acquisition and then after. Once GrandCentral was acquired, Google then locked down the system to new users by making it an invite only service. Because of the acquisition and the move to an invitation only service, the interest in GrandCentral has skyrocketed.

Sam makes an excellent analogy between GrandCentral and the recently launched service, Pownce. Pownce, Kevin Rose’s new startup has become the hot commodity to be invited to. Everyone and their mother is seemingly still trying to grab an invite to the service, although it is not necessarily brand new.

Whats the moral behind this story? If your a Web 2.0 startup, lock down your service. Invite a couple of big name web sites to review your service and give them the ability to hand out a number of invites. Those who read the reviews will then have an opportunity to sign up to your service and in return, invite their friends. You can see where this is going. Although the invitation only technique only works for a prolonged period of time, it is hard to argue against it’s effectiveness. I suppose being part of a locked down community gives users the impression that they are special, that they are among a group of elitists.

I asked my dad if he thought that perhaps there would be some sort of business opportunity surrounding invitations to these new services. Allow people to bid on an invite or pay a low price. My father responded by saying “people won’t pay for something that is free, or that they could obtain by some other means.”

Whatever the case may be, the strategy of being an invite only service in the beginning appears to be a winning one!

E-Learning 2.0 What You Need To Know

Read/WriteWeb has put together quite an interesting article detailing E-Learning 2.0 using Web 2.0 technologies. The article provides an overview of e-learning 2.0, including the leading web apps and sites in the niche, and predictions for its future. It’s awesome to see how all of this Web 2.0 technology stuff is being implemented in such unique, informative ways.

As this article shows, there is a lot of web 2.0 activity in the e-learning space – including from the big Internet companies like Google and Apple. The current era of the Web is all about two-way communication, collaboration and ‘read/write’; and the classroom is an ideal place to utilize these technologies.

E-Learning 2.0 What You Need To Know

My Website Failed

Website Grader

Thanks to the InstaBloke for this service. It’s called Website Grader. Website Grader uses an algorithm to calculate a final score for a particular domain to determine not only it’s SEO optimization but how marketable the website is.

Because the domain jeffro2pt0.com is less than one month old and I have yet to perform the SEO work that will be involved in getting my domain listed higher in the search engines, I have failed the test by receiving 35% or 35/100 for my overall score. This is understandable considering the situation, and I hope that by the end of this month, I can improve this score from 35% to at least 45% which of course is going to require a good bit of work.

To check out why my score is so low click on the following link Report For Jeffro2pt0.com I encourage you to perform a Website Grader check on your own domain and post your score within the comments area. If your feeling good about your score, post a link to your report.

*UPDATE* After performing a few techniques today, I managed to increase my score from 35% to 54% which accomplishes my goal for the month of June. That was fast!

Who Needs Privacy?

As illustrated by Nick Douglas writer for Valleywag and a recent article on Mashable.com written by James Mowery titled Stalking 2.0 have users switched from wanting to remain anonymous to practically being stalked and not giving a hoot about privacy anymore? As most of us know, anonymity on the Internet is a tough thing to come by. Some say it doesn’t even exist. Why is it then, that so many people are using Web 2.0 services that practically broadcast everything they do with their computer system to the web?

It is unnerving to see so many users literally broadcasting much of their personal information to the web. I feel that if this trend of broadcasting ones life to the Internet continues, there will be a sharp increase in the amount of cases that deal with identity theft. Each one of these broadcasting services is a piece of a puzzle, collect enough pieces and you can put together a comprehensive profile on a specific person. One thing is for sure, browsing the web and going through a user’s online presence to compile personal information is a whole lot easier than hacking into a user’s system.

The next time I hear someone complain about Google and how much information they store on their users to accommodate targeted advertising, I am going to remind them that there are folks like Nick Douglas who can likely find the information they need about a particular person within 60 minutes of browsing each social networking site that a user may be apart of. Not every guy is as nice as Nick, and I whole heartedly believe that the social engineering types are gleaming with joy as the information they needed to work so hard to obtain is now given to them on a silver platter.

Who else is concerned about what is going on? Do I and others have nothing to worry about?

Crank Up The TweetVolume

TweetVolume.com LogoI recently discovered this site by accident and although it’s use is fairly simple, it gives the user a chance to look deep inside in the Twitterverse.

TweetVolume is a service which uses a combination of Twitter and Google to visually show how many times a word or phrase has been used on the Twitter Network. Although the Twitter userbase makes up a small portion of the Internet, it is quite entertaining to figure out what the GENERAL interests are within the Twitter community.

TweetVolume in action showing how many times the words Tea, Coffee and Water have appeared on Twitter

For instance, Coffee appears over 15,000 times while Tea appears only 5,010 times and Water only appears 3,920 times. Therefor, it is safe to assume that the majority of Twitter users are coffee drinkers. It’s also interesting to note that the word Lunch appears over 17,000 times which is the highest amount when compared with other times of the day. So now we know what workers are really doing on their lunch breaks.

If I had one suggestion, it would be to somehow someway include the actual Twitter message or messages that included the searched term. This set of results could also be complimented by the username who created the message and then the username could link to their Twitter page. Think of these as Twitter Referral links which would show the actual post that the word was used in. I think that would be pretty cool.

I’ve already spent an hour dabbling with the service and I’m sure I will probably waste even more time trying to figure out what the buzz is all about within the Twitterverse. Give it a shot and report back with your findings!