Changes at StumbleUpon
I woke up this morning to a nice Stumble Upon surprise. It looks like you can now friend over 200 people on Stumble. The only thing is that after you add friends it seems to be taking a while for you friends list to update (if it ever does) and same with the toolbar.
Here’s some of the new changes I stumbled upon this morning.
After opening my inbox I discovered this message:
This is new and I like it because it gives you an indication that someone has friended you where as in the past, the only way you’d know is if you knew what the fan number was on a daily basis.
So after accepting the friend request nothing different happened, other than I was curious and started adding people to see if it would let me…and it did.
This is what you see now to add friends.
SU is also telling you if you have similar interests
So apparently there is a limit with how many friends you can add at any given time. I got this message after about 15 or so.
They have also changed the name of fans to subscribers and like I said before, the page with your fans subscribers is not updating right away so I have no idea who I added this morning. At least I know they’ll get a message from me though.
Lastly…avatars now come with the online indicator next to them. Not too sure if I care about that, but I guess it’s nice to know if someone is online at a glance instead of having to look at their page.
I have not found an official announcement and did not find anything on the SU website stating this, but I do know that I’ve been maxed out on friends for a long while and was able to add more this morning. I hope they leave it like this. Who needs Ebay anyway? 
Top 10 Reasons Why You Must Tweet
As I stated in my SESSJ post Twitter was a hot topic at the conference. People were talking about it and people were using it. When Greg and I go to conferences we always turn on our mobile tweets so we can keep up with where everyone is and what everyone’s doing. God forbid we miss something good.
Between the two of us we have about 1700 followers (Greg has more damn it). Now I know a few hundred of those are bots, but the point is we’ve been on Twitter less than a year and that’s a lot of frickn people to be connected to throughout the day. In fact it was last year at Pubcon that Vanessa Fox forced talked us into signing up. We were very resistant to it. We thought it was totally lame and only for total nerds. Nine months later we are admittedly hooked on Twitter.
Twitter has so many benefits and the opportunities you can find on Twitter are endless. It isn’t going anywhere and with over one million users, everyday that passes before you join is a missed opportunity for you. Stop asking how and why. Stop saying you just don’t know what to do or what to say. Stop saying nobody cares what you would tweet about. It’s a simple question…What are you doing? Answer it a few times a day.
Still a hater? Let me give you some examples of some amazing, funny, interesting things that happen on Twitter.
Proposals
In March of 2008 the micro-blogging world was privy to its first virtual wedding proposal.
and she said
If you want to know more about this one you can check out the Wired post or follow them on Twitter.
Survival
In April of 08 James Karl Buck, a UC Berkeley graduate student, was in Egypt covering a protest when he and his translator were arrested. James reached for his cell phone and tweeted one word.
Now can you imagine the stress and anxiety you’d feel if you were across the world and got arrested and were unsure of what was going to happen to you. James was eventually released, but he had the comfort knowing that all of his followers knew what had happened. Not planning on traveling to foreign countries? Replace the word arrested with ‘accident’ or ‘robbed’ or ‘help’. It could come in handy.
Finding a Job
Look out Monster here comes Twitter.
Customer Service
Many companies are using Twitter to reach out to their customers and to keep an ear open for people talking about them.
Now I know from first hand experience that when you complain about @southwestair on Twitter, they respond. Just one more reason why I FLY SWA. A couple other companies tweeting are @starbucks and @jetblue.
Diggs
You might totally suck at getting stories to the Digg front page (not saying this guy does), but if you have enough people following you on Twitter, you may just get enough of a boost to get noticed on the Digg upcoming. Of course your story still has to be good.
Host a Party
So just like that, we’re having a party. Tony tweets it and all of his followers in LA get the message and we are getting together (the 6th is fine for me Tony, see you at the Bow).
Having a Baby
I found this one on BlogHer. Now granted she didn’t actually do it because well, she wasn’t in labor long enough :/. It’s only a matter of time though.
Expose Dumbness
Michael Gray is really good at this. In fact if there were a crown for the best Twitterer…he’d be wearing it.
In case you’re wondering what Michael is talking about here’s the link to the LA Times home page. I’d actually be interested in an explanation too.
Ask a Question
Chris wrote up a great presentation about Twitter using all of his responses from this question. Just brilliant!
Breaking News
This past week I have been marveling about how so many of my bloggy mom friends are at the DNC. My tweets from them have gone crazy and I almost feel like I was there. Getting all this breaking news every few seconds is better than watching it on TV.
I hope you’re more intrigued and give it a try. Just do it. Join Twitter today and of course follow @barbaraboser and @gregboser.
Useful StumbleUpon Feature
Stumbleupon has a feature that I really like. SU users have the option to look at their favorites and other SU blogs in a grid format.
This is either new or I have honestly never seen the link at the top right corner before.
At any rate, the reason I am a fan of the grid is for 2 reasons:
1. Occasionally some sneaky SU users will change the page after it has been stumbled. The fact that SU now takes a screenshot and displays the original stumble is great for the reviewer.
2. Finding good SU friends is not as easy as it may sound. Some users only stumble their own sites. If that’s the case, when I click on their avatar to see what they are stumbling, it’s so easy to see all the screenshots and know at a glance that this user is only in it for themselves.
If you are on StumbleUpon, give it a try. If you aren’t a Stumble user, what the heck are you waiting for? Get with the program. :)
SEOWife - Social Spark
I just received this St Patrick’s Day box from Social Spark.
It was a nice surprise. I had met one of these Social Sparkers at SMX and the box was not necessary, but much appreciated. It did indeed spark my interest to see what Social Spark was all about.
So basically, they are an online social marketing network. It’s a place that brings advertisers and bloggers together. They have a network of over 100k bloggers, so I imagine if you are looking for a writer, this might be a good place to go search for one.
I’m leaving for New York on Sunday, so don’t know if I’ll have time to play around with this further til I get back, but if you go to their site, there’s a video that describes what they do in more detail.
Anyway, thanks for think of me guys! I’ll take my St. Patty’s Day stuff to the big apple!
SEO and Social Media Presentation
I spoke yesterday at the SMX West conference on Social Media/SEO. My presentation was based on how to build a strong social media presence (in about 60 days or less).
A few people asked if I would upload the power point for them, so here it is.
I’ll be writing more on this over the next few weeks as a follow up to the slides. Heading back down to the conference now.