In no particular order :

1. [ Watchman ] movie will be pushed back and will end up being a Christmas blockbuster instead of the summer blockbuster starter they were hoping for. Thanks Fox for taking something beautiful and trying to crap all over it.  Just one more, in a long list of reasons to despise you as a company.

2. Nothing excitingly new will come from this years, and Apple’s last, MacWorld.  By the end of the year, Steve Jobs will have stepped down as CEO and will fill an emeritus roll of some sort.

3. [ Twitter ] will be overrun by malware, spam, and hackers making the service useless and a thing of the past.  We have already seen the start of this, and unfortunately the twitter API is full of security holes, and the twitter dev seems to have reactionary view of security instead of a precautionary view.  Since Twitter is finally starting to make it stamp in histories timeline of the internet, it will draw far too much exposure from unwanted forces.

4. Net Neutrality will finally get the political backing that it needs to become an actual reality, and yet somehow, the US gov’t will still think that they have the ability or the right to control content on the intertubes.

5. [ Wolverine ] will kick so much ass, that it will make us forget, at least for a little while, how pissed we are that [ Watchman ] still hasn’t been released.

Today MarsPhoenix (on Twitter) left us with a final message :

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000

For those non-geeks out there, that is binary for “Triumph”.  The mission was a triumph indeed and through social network sites like Twitter and Plurk, we got  to follow the mission and bond emotionally with a lonely lander on a far away planet.

We learned much from our far away friend, and many of us are sad to see him go.  For me Dr. Suess said it best :

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

On July 1st, I started an experiment to see how beneficial Plurk could be as a viral marketing avenue.  The results were pretty interesting.  Before I go into detail about it, I want to set the stage on what the expectations were, since we didn’t do any massive numbers.

For the Love of Geeks is a relativally new blog that I started back in January.  It was initially designed to be my personal blog, but it quickly developed enough of a following that I thought I should at least start posting useful (at least I like to think they are useful) bits of information on geeky stuff that I like.

This blog generally receives about 10,000 - 15,000 page views a month, and I can generally count on each of my posts to get 2 or 3 diggs, and each post generally gets about 100 individual page views, and comments are a rarity.

On Plurk, I am not a major player.  I have about 125 “friends” and 25 “fans” (or people that follow my plurks).  Compared to people like Leo Laporte who have 1767 friends, and 1592 Fans, or Tony Hall, who has a whopping 2040 friends, you can see that my reach is much much more limited.

Even though I have a smaller number of people on Plurk, I was looking at it from the standpoint of the MLM pyramid aspect.  My 100 friends have 100 friends who have 100 friends, etc.  Could I get them to pass the along the link to thier friends and then in turn keep it going.

Another aspect of the experiment that is very important is that there was no real content being passed.  It wasn’t some fascinating article solving all the problems in the world, or some new peice of tech that was previously unknown.  It was a simple request to digg, comment, and pass on, and I let them know it was an experiment.  That would also have tainted the results, but the goal was to see how deep we could go.

So here is a breakdown of what happened.

Within the first hour, there was 25 comments, and about 10 diggs.  At this point, most the people coming were two deep. (meaning that a friend of mine had sent them there.)

Within 2 hours we were up to 50 comments, and were now about 4 deep.  (me > my friend > thier friend > commenter)

By the end of the day 1.  We got up to 75 Comments and were at about 40 or so diggs.  At this point the post had been viewed several thousand times.  The view count is a little skewed, since the post got stumbled and was linked to by a few other blogs and websites.  So, the traffic count became little less important in our experiment.

At the end of day 2, we had 107 comments, and I “estimate” that we had gotten about 6 levels deep, and the tally of comments so far is 112, and surprisingly almost a week later, I still see traffic coming in from people on Plurk.

In the end, I have to declare this a win.  It was really cool too see the frenzy this idea caused and how excited everyone was to be a part of it.  I did see some people who made comments like :

“I clicked the link, but don’t want to share” or

“I don’t want to see this”

Also, I found it interesting that a large part of the plurk population is not a part of digg, or at least they didn’t want to digg the post if they were.  I have found that people who are a part of one social network are generally a part of several others as well, so this surprised me a little.

It is important to note, that plurk doesn’t favor spammers, and if you post nothing but to this link plurks, they will likely be ignored.  Also, when I have posted specific blog postings I can get a decent amount of traffic from my friends, but it doesn’t get passed around automatically.

People like Tony Hall have very low karma because I think people have stopped following his plurks since they didn’t really carry a social aspect to them.  They were more of a marketing thrust, trying to get his masses to do something.

On the other hand, people like Tom Merritt, or Leo Laporte have the ability to post a request and have that go viral almost instantly, since they carry a bit of “internet celebrity” status, and they have friends who have more of a “follower” mentality then a friend one.

Ultimately, I think that Plurk definitely has the potential of being a very very important marketing tool, and I can totally see targetted advertising going in this direction soon.  Other services, that are more entrenched, such as FriendFeed, or Twitter have a much larger capacity to go viral since the user base is much larger.

In the end, this was fun, and when I have more time,  I am going to run a similar test through twitter, so stay tuned for that.

If you have come here, and don’t follow me on Plurk, feel free to add me .. [ darthweef ]

If you have no idea what Plurk is, and want to have a little fun online, sign up - here is in an [ invite ]

Also, give me your thoughts on people using plurk as a marketing tool in the comments below.

The latest online craze is the social network, and Twitter is/was among the most popular of them all.  Twitter, for those you living in caves, is an online micro-blogging social network application that allows users to blast 140 character messages to the world.  You can follow other people’s “Tweets” and others can follow yours.

Recently, though, Twitter has become more famous for being unavailable then for the impact it has made on the social networking market.  The “Fail Whale” is quickly becoming an internet celebrity, and if you go to Twitter you are more likely to see him, then your tweets.

Online “celebrities”, such as Leo Laporte, and Kevin Rose have made a game out of seeing how many followers they can get, and who will have the most.  They are both well over 30,000 followers.  Politicians, most prominently Barack Obama, have been using twitter to be “more in touch” with the younger constituents.

Twitter, although having no real monetization plans, seems to continue to be valued at higher and higher dollar amounts, allowing them to continually receive funding.  In May, they received 15 milion dollars, based on a valuation of $80 million, and again just a few days ago, they received another round of funding.  This time Twitter referred to itself as a communications utility, and Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions bought into it.  No one is saying how much, but it appears that it was more then the last round.

So, with all this support, and all this money being thrown at Twitter, why do we see the whale every day.  Just this morning I received the following messages via Plurk :

“Twitter is down again”
“Fail Whale for the Lose”
“Twitter = Epic Fail”
“I deleted my twitter account”
“I am so done with Twitter”
“Twitter is still down.. they might as well pull the plug and walk away.”

This is just this morning, and this is just from someone who has about 100 followers on Plurk.  That is a small cross section of the real social networking scene.

So, can Twitter survive when it is quickly getting a reputation for being a failure?  Will they be able to compete in a market that is quickly seeing better and more stable alternatives to Twitter?

While the twitter funding rolls in, the users are left to wonder what the money is being spent on.  Surely not hardware since they have continued to have more outages in the month of June.  Obviously not on staff members to improve scalability… since as I said, still having outages.

The Web 2.0 frontier is showing promise of being the dot com revolution that should have happened in the late 90’s, where internet companies are provided funding and actually make money, but when I see Twitter, I just seem to go back to the 90’s when people with good ideas got tons of money and then sat around wondering what they should do with it all…

For those of you tired of riding the Fail Whale, stop over to [ Plurk ] , it is more fun, more interactive, more stable, and simply more then Twitter.

The social networking side of the net has really be exploding lately.  Web Apps like [ Twitter ], [ Facebook ], [ Pownce ], and even [ Digg ] have created an almost viral desire for people to stay connected on a real time basis.

When blogging began to be used on a personal level, it was a great way to find out what was happening in people’s lives on a daily / weekly basis and we saw a whole new medium of socal contact being born.  Enter Twitter and now, instead of a daily mass of blog to read, you were able to get 140 character updates from people sent to your computer, or your phone… Life was good, albiet a little distracting.

Twitter, however, has now become more known for being unavailable, then it is for being a revolutionary way of communicating.  While I think it is a little unfair, they are bringing that onto themselves since they can’t seem to keep the site up and running for more then a few hours at a time.

Enter [ Plurk ].  Yeah, I didn’t misspell that.  Plurk is the newest addition to the “micro-blogging” world, and it is something else.  The time line takes a little getting used to, but I think that was you do get used to it, it is much better for maintaining conversations, which is something always bothered me about twitter.  I will get responses on twitter to something I said hours, even days, ago and have no idea what they are talking about.  Whereas plurk keeps everything in a nice little box connected to your original statement.

Plurk is obviously a “Work in progress”, but is definitely enjoyable being a part of a new and fresh community, so I am happy to help them work out the bugs.

Plurk will have to start providing some external apps to allow you to break free from the browser, but I know that will be coming.  They also need to provide a way to stop being updated on certain topics..  For instance, I am “friends” with Leo Laporte, meaning that I get his plurks, and he gets mine (along with several thousand other people ) and every time he says ANYTHING he get about 200 responses.  Personally I am not interested in reading all the fan boy responses, so I would like the option of shutting that off .

All-in-all… plurk is very addicting, and I like the Karma aspect of it, makes plurking almost like a game where you earn points, and then get cooler stuff from the site.

I think that Plurk will need to pay close attention to the mistakes that Twitter has made, and correct them before they are made, since the overall feel of the plurking community is that they are shifting from Twitter to Plurk, and with heavy users like Leo Laporte, and the c|net crew making use of plurk, it has already starting to show sign of hiccuping…

So, come join me in the Social Networking world :

You can plurk me at [ Plurk ]

You can follow me on Twitter : [ Twitter ]

You can Pownce me at [ Pownce ]