Category — Head Space

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook Polls is no longer available. Facebook Polls enabled anyone to create a paid poll targeting a pre-defined group of users.

The link that used to redirect to the service now forwards to the Facebook homepage and there is no longer any reference of Facebook Polls anywhere in Facebook.

Facebook put Facebook Polls on hold last October when there were internal questions about the priority for the product. They advise users to switch to one of the third-party polling applications that are available.

Facebook’s statement:

“The ability to create Facebook Polls is no longer available on the public site, though users may still receive Facebook Polls created internally by Facebook. Facebook is exploring options for making a polling product publicly available again in the future but has no definite plans to discuss at this point.”

This seems like an odd move, especially as LinkedIn is making a large push towards making their users available for market researchers and other pollsters via LinkedIn Polls.

SocialToo was one of the first Twitter apps I used.  As a Twitter noob, I wanted to grow my followers as much as possible. Following the advice of Scoble and Kawasaki, I used the service to automatically follow anyone that followed me.

But I ended up following too many spammers. I still follow most people that follow me, but I do so manually to ensure that I don’t fill my signal with offers to make millions in my underwear.

I also used SocialToo to automatically send a direct message to anyone that follows me. I thought it would be nice to tell my new followers that they were my newest, most favorite Twitter friend.

Then I started receiving the same type of messages and realized that they come across as very impersonal and generally offer no value. So, I stopped using that service too.

Now SocialToo offers the ability to refuse auto messages from any other SocialToo user. This is awesome!

Everyone else can send and receive auto-messages if they like - but I’m not going to get any. At least not from SocialToo.

I recommend you join SocialToo even if it is only to block messages from their robots.

Thanks SocialToo!

Everyone is talking about Twitter and how rapidly it is growing. But in the 12 months ending in November ‘08, Ning is growing at a faster clip.

Ning has grown 667% compared to Twitter’s 640%.

Seth nails it.

When running digital ads, you should be able to determine their success or lack thereof. You know what you pay for them and you should know what each one generates.

So, if they don’t result in a profit, why are you running them?

If they do result in a profit, why aren’t you running them to infinity?

As Seth says:

How often do year the marketing person say, “that’s a neat idea, but we don’t have the budget this year”?

Shouldn’t she say, “We have an unlimited budget for ads that work”…

I recently told you how to get your contacts to love you by using Zentact.

Jared just sent me a link to allow you guys to bypass the waiting list and join the private beta.

http://zentact.com/users/new/JRBZEN

Thanks Jared.

How would you like your contacts to view you as the guy that always keeps in touch - and the one that also remembers the details of what they are in to?

If you’re like me you have many online contacts and you have every intention to stay in touch with all of them. But before you know it, months (or years) slip by without talking. When you do get around to dropping a line, you’re left to ask some generic, boring question that tells them you don’t remember many details about them.

Zentact offers an idea to solve this problem all while you go about surfing the web. Users load their contacts into Zentact and then tag each one with unique keywords that are of interest to that person. When the user comes to a site that relates to a keyword, the contact pops up with a reminder.

For example, let’s say Eric Trekford is in my address book. I have him tagged with topics that would be of interest to Eric, like web design, Austin, jazz, or market research. Then, while reviewing my feeds, I discover an article on the SXSW festival in Austin, TX. If I have Zentact’s Firefox plugin installed, an alert will pop-up suggesting that I contact Eric. In the pop-up, Zentact tells me the last time I contacted Eric, and lets me know why the site might be interesting to him. I can even send an email directly from Zentact along with the URL and a message from me.

Eric now thinks that I am the greatest, coolest person he knows.

You can also sync Zentact with your Twitter account so you can @reply to someone instead of emailing.

Yet another instance of “why didn’t someone think of this sooner?”

You currently need an invitation to join Zentact. You can get one by signing up here.

Matt tells us five ways to use an online research community:

1. Get customers involved in your business
2. Innovate with your customers
3. Fins out how your customers interact
4. Learn the language your customers use
5. Find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

Nowhere does he suggest you ask them ten pages of grid questions.

Twitturly is a service that tracks what URLs people are talking about on Twitter. The site displays the 100 most popular links within the past 24 hours.

Users can use TinyURL, Snipurl (snurl), or link directly to the final URL in their tweets. Each time a link is sent on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it. The more times a link is sent, the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page. As the links increase, it gets displayed higher up the home page.

TwellowHood provides a list of Twitter users within specific geographies.  Using a map-based platform, TwellowHood can provide a list of Twitter users within a specific state/province or municipality.  The service currently only lists users that indicate Canada or USA as their home.

There are currently 71 users listed as being from Scranton, PA.  Not surprisingly, a large percentage of those are employed by Dunder Mifflin.

StatTweets is a service that allows Twitter users to pull statistics from sports service, StatSheet.com. When the #StatMe tag is sent to any one of StatTweets’ team accounts, a return tweet is sent with a variety of team stats.

When I sent the tweet @PennStateFB #StatMe, I got the following in return:

@MikeMacLeod PPG 40.2, YPG 452.2, TDs 60, Pass% 58.7, PassYdsPG 240.6, RushYdsPG 211.6, RecYdsPG 240.6, FGMade 20, FGAtt 24

StatTweets currently provides stats for the NBA, NFL, and college football and basketball.

There are also a number of options that can be included. By adding additional variables to the initial tweet, users can request rankings, splits, and future schedules. The stats for the previous or next opponent can also be requested.

Individual player stats are coming soon.