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Posterous Targets Ning In Massive Switching Campaign. Who Is Next?
We’re big fans of easy-to-use blogging platform Posterous, which has seen fast growth, revenue and impressive funding since its launch in 2008. Over the past six months Posterous has steadily added nearly a dozen innovative features to its publishing platform, including static page support, comment moderation, custom domains, and a media sharing service for Twitter. And it’s no secret that Posterous is hoping to be the go-to simple everyday posting platform for consumers. Today, in its quest for world domination, the startup is unveiling a massive switching initiative to help users transfer all content from other posting and blogging sites over to Posterous.

For the next 15 days, Posterous will announce a different service daily that will allow you to transfer your account, blog, videos, images and more over to the simple blogging site for free. First up: Ning. To switch, you simple give Posterous the URL of the Ning blog you want to move and your email address and Posterous will send you an email when they are done copying a site. You don’t have to have a pre-existing account with Posterous either to make the switch.

The switch over times will vary based upon size of site that is being converted, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal. Ten posts will only take a few minutes, but 1000 posts and large amounts of video and images (which Posterous will host) will take longer. The best part is that all of this work is done for you for free. And in case you don’t buy Posterous’ claims, here’s a testimonial page of beta users who have used the importing tools.

As for the platforms that Posterous will now offer switching from, Ning makes sense considering that many Ning owners who were using the network for free may be looking to switch after Ning shuttered its free service. Posterous is a nice alternative, with its enhanced customization features.

So which service is next in the switching plan? Agarwal and VP of Marketing Rich Pearson wouldn’t tell me but I think it’s safe to assume some of the platform that Posterous will target. While Posterous unveiled a “quick and dirty” converter for WordPress last year, Agarwal says it was fairly simple. It’s safe to assume that the startup will be launching a more comprehensive migration tool in the next two weeks. And it’s also safe to assume that TwitPic, Google’s Blogger, TypePad and Tumblr are also included in the lineup.

For Posterous, this is certainly an impressive campaign. Agarwal and Pearson say that this has been something the team has been working on for months. Clearly, Posterous has ambitions of becoming the defacto posting platform and is now making it significantly easier for users to switch. While the company doesn’t reveal number on how many blogs it hosts, Pearson saud that the site is growing in userbase by 20 to 25 percent each month. A little aggressive marketing could speed that growth up significantly.

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2 months on
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Google Voice for everyone (Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!

If you haven’t yet tried Google Voice, we can’t wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think. Check out our revamped features page to learn about everything Google Voice can do, and if you haven’t seen it yet, this video provides a good overview in less than two minutes:

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology. It’s even more amazing to think about how far communication has come over the last couple hundred years. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before (click the image for a larger version):

Posted by Craig Walker & Vincent Paquet, Google Voice Product Managers

2 months on
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Welcome to a whole new way of experiencing LinkedIn Groups
Starting today, we’re rolling out some updates to LinkedIn groups – the first major update since we launched discussions in Groups at the end of August 2009. This is the first of upcoming upgrades to our groups’ platform, conversation system, and moderation toolkit coming shortly. Please bear in mind that these updates will be rolled out over the next week, by when you should see these feature updates applied to your groups.

Here’s a quick video that walks you through the key features you can expect from the new LinkedIn Groups. More details after the jump.

What’s different in LinkedIn Groups today?

1. An improved look and feel

We’ve made the conversations within groups similar to face-to-face professional interactions by removing the wall between original remarks and off-site content such as shared news articles. The rich link-sharing experience you already enjoy on your LinkedIn homepage is now also available within the context of groups.

Even better is the ability to easily recognize the participants of a conversation by linking to individual profile pictures that makes the experience more personal. It also brings to your finger tips profile information of the professional participating in that discussion.

2. Ease of use

The new design makes it easy to browse through the latest updates of a discussion and make comments quickly and easily. You can roll over the images of the last three participants on any thread to see comment previews and click their profile pictures to jump to their segment of the conversation.

Alternatively, you can chime in right away by commenting in line without drilling down into the whole discussion. If you’re new to the thread, clicking the discussion headline or the “See all comments” link will take you to the beginning of the discussion.

3. Surfacing the most popular and recent discussions in a group – faster

A key part of the new groups experience is the democratization of discussions, as group members actively curate the conversations that will be seen by the group. This is most obvious in the carousel of new content – original posts, RSS items, and off-site links shared by group members – that can be voted up or down by any group member.

This feature allows users to quickly peruse new content and vote either by “liking” or commenting on discussions they deem worthy of the group’s attention. Users who prefer to see all discussions sorted chronologically can just click on the “See all new discussions” link on the homepage.

In a live discussion, nodding fuels a conversation and the new “Like” button is a simple way to do this virtually. You can also see who has liked a conversation to get a sense for topics that group members are gravitating toward. The “More” drop-down in the carousel also makes it easy to flag new items as a job or as inappropriate for the group.

4. Making it easier for you to receive email updates from select group members

While you may check in to groups ever so often to get the latest news and discussions from your fellow group members, you may also like to set up a persistent email alert when select members of the group make a contribution (like or comment) within the group. This is easily accomplished from the global Groups’ People I’m Following page.

5. Shining a spotlight on users who add most value to the group each week

Finally, the new groups interface introduces an easy way to discover participants who truly drive the activity of the group’s discussions each week by highlighting them as “top influencers”. This designation is given not only to those who contribute the most, but also to those whose contributions stimulate the most participation from other group members.

Members who are highly regarded and heavily followed in the group often play a key role in stoking the conversation with their comments and Likes even if they don’t start a thread. Of course, the authors of popular threads are often the most influential.

We’re all about nurturing the professional conversation, and we hope the changes to LinkedIn Groups will make it even easier for you to contribute and participate in a professional groups setting. We’d love to hear your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post or @linkedin us on Twitter.

Filed under: Best Of, Groups, New LinkedIn Features

2 months on
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Bing for iPhone Update
Today we’re stoked to have an update to the Bing app for iPhone and iPod Touch for all of you. There are a few new features to tell you about – some of which you’ll see right on the new home page.

Social – Now you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and see combined status updates from your friends from within the Bing app. But that’s easy. When we asked what else we could do with this personal intelligence, we looked at the data behind how people were using their social networks. Turns out that over 40% of the time when people ask ambiguous queries that don’t have a defined answer (like where should I go to eat tonight), social networks are faster at providing a great answer than traditional search engines.

So now when you search for something using our (beautiful, if I might say) Bing app, you’ll see web results along with relevant results from your social network. So if you search for a movie, you’ll see movie showtimes first, then anything your friends may have said about it next. This is also handy for local businesses or products where you want to see what your network is saying. Last, when you find something you like using the app, you can easily share it with your network on Facebook, Twitter, or through email.

Visual Scanning - speaking of finding products, the iPhone app now features visual scanning of barcodes and cover art. Use the camera on your iPhone to scan the barcode of any product or the cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games. You’ll see descriptions, and often reviews, prices, and links to merchant websites. This feature makes it easy to comparison shop for your favorite products or just find a place to buy that book your friend won’t shut up about.

In addition to these new features, the team also made improvements to the Movies section, where you can now get even more video and trailers and easier access to showtimes. And since we know commerce is one of the main tasks people are doing with these devices, the new Shopping section lets you find products super fast along with prices and links to stores selling the products.

Download the update using iTunes today and try out the new features!

Justin Jed - Bing for mobile

Other posts of interest:

Bing Comes to Safari

Updated Bing App for Windows Phone

Grooving to the Music on your iPhone courtesy of NuTsie and Bing

2 months on
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Is Social Media Traffic Good For B2B Lead Generation?

Social media marketing has proven to be very successful for B2C marketing, but how is it for B2B marketing?

Not that good according to a study by lead generation provider LeadForce1. LeadForce1 looked at where visitors to B2B Websites from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Wikipedia went.

There conclusion was that traffic from the top social media sites were generally uninterested in product or contact pages, suggesting they were not in the market for the company’s products or services.

Visitors from Facebook were most likely to check out a company’s “about” page or blog posts.

Twitter-directed visitors had similar behavior, with blogs coming out on top.

In addition, their research showed that most site visitors referred from Facebook or Twitter visited only one page before leaving. What this suggests to me is that if you are targeting social media users, that the landing pages that you are sending them too should be specifically created for them. If you are sending traffic to a generic home page, then your campaign will never be successful.

The LeadForce1 research so that LinkedIn users tended to be interested in “careers” pages (no surprise there) and that Wikipedia visitors were most likely to be carrying out product research (probably because the Wikipedia page links to a product page.

Social Bookmarking

2 months on
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Getting used to the new Windows Live Writer
Microsoft is expected to unveil the next version of Windows Live Essentials (codenamed Windows Live Wave 4) in the coming days.

The suite offers an impressive array of free software programs including Windows Live Writer (for blogging), Movie Maker (for editing videos), Photo Gallery (for managing pictures) and Windows Live Mail (an excellent desktop email client).

Windows Live Writer – Wave 4

I have been writing this blog using the new Windows Live Writer since the past week and am a bit surprised to find that, except for a couple of cosmetic changes to the interface, there’re no new features in the software.

Writer now sports the ribbon with contextual tabs and therefore almost feels like part of the Office family.

If you are a power user, who likes working with keyboard shortcuts, you can always minimize the ribbon and get more writing space. You’ll however still need the ribbon for inserting pictures in the your blog posts because the good old CTRL+L shortcut has been reassigned for left alignment and I don’t know if there’s a new shortcut for insert pictures except for Alt –> I –> E –> C.

The sidebar in Live Writer is gone and some of the common tasks, especially those related to drafts, have moved to the main menu. If you also prefers saving drafts online instead of the local disk, you may find the new location a bit inconvenient.

Personal bloggers will love the new image enhancements in Writer. You can now quickly add new effects and borders to your pictures without requiring an external image editor. The downside is that Writer, like in the previous versions, adds inline CSS styles to your pictures and there’s no way to disable that setting.

The input boxes where you add tags and categories to a post have moved up and the advanced post properties – like post slug, post excerpt, etc. – are now hidden by default under the “View all” menu.

Maybe the Writer team is trying to widen the appeal by making the interface more simple but if you have been using this software for a length of time, you may be a little disappointed as some of the regular tasks now require a few extra steps.

Getting used to the new Windows Live Writer

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

2 months on
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Adobe Starts Shipping Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile – Let The Real Testing Begin
About 7 months after the release of Flash Player 10.1 for desktops (beta), Adobe has today announced it has shipped its mobile sister to partners worldwide.

Adobe unveiled a beta version of Flash Player for Android about a month ago, but has been dabbling with bringing Flash to mobile devices – including Android handsets – for much, much longer.

Make no mistake about it: Adobe really needs to get this completely right.

They need to, considering the harsh criticism it has been given for the shipment delays and claims regarding its stability, security, resource usage and whatnot, the majority of the deriding notably coming from Apple chief Steve Jobs.

Adobe can prove Apple’s decision to bar Flash from running on some of the world’s most popular and capable smartphones and the iPad wrong, but only by doing what it is doing now: by actually shipping Flash for Mobile and showing that it knows how to make it an integral part of the mobile experience, without slowing things down.

Running a bunch of ads, pre-approved demos and canned ‘industry feedback’ won’t cut it. If Adobe thinks Apple is wrong for blocking Flash from their mobile devices and referring to it as a technology only fit for “PCs and mice”, let them prove it where it really matters: in the hands of phone users all across the globe.

Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile should be available for download today on devices using the latest iteration of Android, version 2.2 aka Froyo (no surprise there). As Adobe writes, devices supporting Android 2.2 and Flash Player 10.1 are expected to include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One (that one actually already does), HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, Motorola DROID, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S and others.

Once upgraded, smartphones, tablets and other devices can be updated with Flash Player 10.1 over-the-air in a variety of ways, including content triggered downloads, system software updates and on-device app catalogs such as Android Market, Adobe Labs and others.

Adobe says it has shipped also Flash Player to its other device partners, readying its roll-out on BlackBerry, Palm webOS, Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian phones.

All eyes are now on Adobe. Soon, the real testing will commence and it will continue for a couple more years as Flash Player makes its way to mobile platforms other than Android 2.2. By 2012, Adobe plans to have Flash 10.1 on more than half of all smartphones shipped – assuming no major market share changes.

If Adobe manages to deliver a great product, consumers will be better off and Steve Jobs will become pretty much the only person who continues to badmouth Flash for being a technology of the past rather than the future. If it doesn’t, Adobe stands to lose credibility, and face.

That may not sound like much, but it makes a world of difference in the software industry.

CrunchBase Information
Adobe Flash
Android
Adobe Systems
Information provided by CrunchBase

2 months on
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Social Media usage worldwide: Australia / Brazil lead the way
The latest global survey from research house Nielsen shows Australia and Brazil are the top Social Media users in the world.

Australia leads the table of most time spent, with each user spending on average 7:19:13 hours per month on Social Networks/ Blogs (SN/B).

Brazil leads the countries with the greatest reach, with 86% of their Internet population active users of SN/B.

While Brazil and Australia share some of the best weather and lifestyle in the world (which might at first seem at odds with time spent on SN/B) the two countries got to the top on the back of different Social Networks – Facebook in Australia and Orkut in Brazil.

Below are the results from other countries included in the study:

It’s a bit odd that Nielsen only includes Japan, Switzerland, France, Germany, Brazil, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, United States and Australia in their “global” report, but you’d think that they’ve picked a good sample of countries to demonstrate the difference across territories.

Other interesting data from the study shows that
- Almost ¼ of all time spent on the Internet is spent on Social Networks/Blogs
- ¾ of global consumers who go online access Social Networks /Blogs
- A 66% increase in time spent on Social Networks/Blogs compared to last year
Original title and link for this post: Social Media usage worldwide: Australia / Brazil lead the way
2 months on
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How to add PDF files to read in iBooks on your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone
This brief tutorial will show you how to add PDF files to iBooks so that you can read them on your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone.

First up – we’re going to make the assumption that you have iBooks installed on your iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone. If you don’t, click here to install it.

Now open up iTunes. Select File -> Add to Library….

Navigate to the PDF file(s) you want to add to iBooks. You can select more than one file, or select an entire folder. Once you’ve made your selection, click Choose.

Now select Books from your iTunes Library. You should see the PDF file(s) that you just added, now listed.

click to enlarge

Right-click (ctrl+click for single-button Mac folks) on the newly added PDF and select Get Info.

First select the Options tab. Make sure that the Media Kind: is set to Book.

click to enlarge

Now select the Info tab. From here you can add any missing info – the authors name, the published year etc. When you’re done, click OK.

click to enlarge

Almost done. Now select your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone from the Devices list in iTunes. Select the Books tab from the list at the top. Make sure that Sync Books is checked. If you want to sync all of the books you’ve added to iTunes, select All Books and then click the Sync button. If you want to only sync specific books, choose Selected Books and then place a check next to each of the books you want to sync (and then click the Sync button).

click to enlarge

Now open iBooks. You’ll see a PDFs button at the top. Tap it.

click to enlarge

You’ll be presented with a list of all the PDFs you added via iTunes. Tap one of them..

and it will open in iBooks. At any point in time you can tap the screen and a menu will appear at the top. From here you can change the displays brightness, search the PDF, bookmark a page etc.

click to enlarge

That’s it – you’re done!
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Related Articles at Simple Help:
2 months on
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iBooks on iPhone 3GS – app review
Finally, iBooks for iPhone arrives! I have been enjoying iBooks on my iPad for some time now. With iBooks for iPhone many more people can enjoy portable reading with their phones. How does iBooks measure up? Keep reading to find out!

After updating to iOS4 for iPhone 3GS I promptly downloaded iBooks. Apple has done a fantastic job with the application and it translates very nicely to the small screen. Let’s start off with actually getting a book on your device. When you first launch the app, it asks if you want it to sync with other devices to keep bookmarks, notes, etc. in sync. Next, you are presented with a blank bookshelf. The promised Winnie the Pooh book is free, but you have to get it yourself. So to do that, I tapped the store icon and the app rotated in 3D very smoothly to reveal the iBooks store. From here you can find any Featured books, the New York Times Charts, Search and review your purchases.

Tap a book you are interested in and and you can download a sample (the samples typically contain at least one whole chapter, but sometimes more) or purchase the book. So, I went to the search option and looked up Winnie the Pooh. After finding the book, I tapped the “Free” button, the store flipped back to reveal my bookshelf, or Library, and it proceeded to download. About 10 seconds later I had Winnie the Pooh on my iPhone.

To begin reading just tap the book and you are taken to the first page. To go back to the Library, tap the icon in the top left. To view the Table of Contents and Bookmarks, tap the icon next to that. Simply tapping the left to right side of the page turns it. You can’t scroll up or down; that’s not very book-like. You can tap and hold on any text to bring up a few different tools. Some of the more useful ones are Highlight, Dictionary and Note. You can tap highlight and iBooks applies a highlight to the text. Tap again and you can add a note or change the note color.

If tapping the side of the page doesn’t excite you, the page can be manually turned by tapping and holding the bottom right corner and turning the page like a real book. The effect is gorgeous and it really is impressive. At the top of the page you have more choices beyond returning to the Library or the Table of Contents. You can adjust font size, change the font, adjust brightness (especially helpful at night) and a new feature- sepia color. This is particularly nice as it dulls down the very bright background and makes it a little easier on the eyes. Next, you can search within the iBook, but it doesn’t stop there. You can also search in Google and Wikipedia right from the search page! When done reading, you can tap the top right corner of any page and place a bookmark. All bookmarks, notes and highlights are accessible from the Table of Contents page.

Another new feature that Apple added with this release of iBooks is the ability to read PDFs. You can add PDFs a couple of ways. First, you can add a PDF in email to iBooks directly from the mail app. Second you can add PDFs to the Books section in iTunes and sync them over. Once a PDF is added, you see a PDF button next to Book on the top of the Library. Tap the PDF button to look at your PDFs and they are beautifully rendered. Scroll your finger along the bottom to view the different pages or Tap the Table of Contents button to get a zoomed out view of all PDF pages. Search, bookmarks, etc., work with PDFs as well.

They only real chink I can find in iBooks armor is there is no option for landscape in iBooks or PDF view. This is disappointing since on the iPad app, you get a two page view. I understand this may not be possible with the screen real estate, but just like the web, sometimes landscape is preferred. Many apologies. I was impatient waiting for my 3GS to rotate. Many thanks to the commenters on this post for pointing this out.

This is a must-buy free app for Apple. You have access to more than romance novels. Technical references abound and can come in really handy when you need them and viewing PDFs is very convenient. If you would like to know more about iBooks for iPad, check out our earlier review.

[Free- iTunes Link]

Pros
- Beautiful layout
- Fast
- Wonderfully animated
- Great tools for navigation
- Easy to use
Cons
- No landscapeI was too impatient with my device for it to rotate
- Can’t export notes
- Can’t copy text
iBooks on iPhone 3GS – app review is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
2 months on
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The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web
Posted by randfish
I've been having a similar conversation with a number of folks from the world of search that's interesting enough as to deserve some transparency and discussion. It centers around the idea of the web's link graph and how it operates to power the rankings of relevant results in the major search engines. If we follow this brief timeline, you'll see what I'm getting at:
- 1993 - 2000: The beginning of the web is marked by an influx of researchers, academics, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Nearly every link created has an editorial, reference purpose behind it. A link is one page telling its viewers that another page has useful, interesting or worthwhile information about a specific topic.
- 2001 - 2005: As the web commercializes at an accelerated pace and PageRank becomes a familiar concept, links drift further away from editorial votes and more towards self-interested endorsements, often with financial motivations.
- 2006 - 2010: The web's link graph swings further away from editorial references towards ever-more commercial interests. Meanwhile, the social web rises with the popularity of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. These communities often contain a much higher percentage of editorial citations, particularly those that contain smaller communities inside them (LinkedIn groups, pockets of Twitter users and Facebook friends)
During chats with some folks from Bing, Google & the SEO world, it became clear that nearly everyone is aware of this ecosystem and thinking more about how to leverage it to make search better. Bing & Google obviously made back-to-back deals to get the Twitter firehose late last year. Google's been trying hard to get Facebook data without success (and Bing may have it, thanks to their investment in Facebook in 2007). Both engines could certain extract citation data from other web communities that publicly publish (Delicious, Reddit, Digg, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, StackOverflow and as of today, Quora) and extrapolate reference material.
The problem for the engines is that links on websites have a high probability (probably not 50%, but maybe as high as 20%) of existing specifically to influence their rankings. While some of those influence-targeted links certainly do point to great content that's relevant and high quality, the engines would prefer to return to a web of "pure" recommendations. The social web might offer more of that type of web environment. Sure, we all tweet/share/post links to our own websites, but those are easy for engines to detect and treat as "internal" references. The "external" endorsements, however, are often much more genuine than what exists on the open web's link graph.
If you're in the field of SEO, I think this means social media marketing is a no brainer. And if people aren't recommending and endorsing your site editorially in their Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, LinkedIn groups, answers on Q+A sites, and when socially bookmarking, tagging and voting, I'd be thinking hard about how to change that.
p.s. I still think the social graph overall is still a very small portion of the engines' ranking algorithms, but I think Bing & Google are both racing towards innovation on this front as fast as they can. SEOs should, IMO, follow suit.

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2 months on
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