Daniel, Joe and I did a great podcast on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed today:
This is a special edition of the Geek Dads@ Home podcast. Sam Harrelson, Daniel M. Clark and Joe Magennis discuss the issues that felled Twitter today. We highlight the importance of Friendfeed as a service and how it could be the big winner from this event.
Basically, if you want to know how I feel about the future of Twitter (or twitters), then give a listen. Today was a very significant day for how the future of the twitter protocol will play out.
Well, not really ditching. I’ll still be following Twitter folks via Google Reader with this great tool from Dave Winer (who is really kicking butt with the rssCloud project):
When you return to the Google Reader main page, you’ll see a new top-level section for your Twitter subscriptions. Pretty cool. Permalink to this paragraph
I love RSS and I love real-time. Twitter has always been more of an aggregation listening post for me while FriendFeed is dirty, transient and a movable feast. I’ll still be interacting on Twitter but FriendFeed (with the awesome BuddyFeed app on the iPhone) is where I’ll be actively participating.
When I started CostPerNews in October of 2006, the affiliate marketing blogging scene was quite crowded. Between ReveNews, Shawn’s AffiliateTip Blog, Jeff’s ThoughtShapers, Scott Jangro’s blog, Jim Kukral’s blog and smaller blogs like Mark’s 45n5, there was always something to read and always some place to get into an argument about the early days of Twitter.
However, as we approach Affiliate Summit East 2009, it seems that the once-crowded scene has become emptier than a 4pm ASE session on legalese for network executives with no wet bar.
What happened?
1) Jangro’s BUMPzee went away. Scott, save the cheerleader, save the world. Bring the site back and save affiliate blogging. Please.
2) Twitter. Like it or not, Twitter took the place of the town watering hole that affiliate blogs had previously filled. As we all become more comfortable with Twitter, I expect that process to reverse.
3) Affiliate marketing is growing outside of its old wardrobe and it’s become increasingly hard to write as about “affiliate marketing” and stay sane. Trust me. My particular take is to focus more on the tech/geeky side of affiliate marketing. Maybe nichification will bring more folks back to the blogging fold?
4) There’s no money in it. I made decent money by selling CostPerNews (twice), but there really wasn’t much there in terms of monthly revenue (I did have some great sponsors, though). It made for some nice PayPal gadget money, but the time invested there against the money return is/was laughable. I’m not doing this for the money, either. And I suspect that keeps some bright (or non-bright) people from actively blogging when they could be making much more money doing something else. My line is to always remind people that blogging doesn’t give you an ROI directly, but the opportunities, gigs, speaking events, etc that you do get as a result of blogging will more than pay the bills.
5) Attention is short. That’s never going to change.
So, what can we do?
I’m not sure. I’d love to see more affiliate bloggers, though.
[Edit] I should include that there are still a number of great affiliate blogs out there like Tim Jones’ blog, Andrew Wee’s site, TrishaLyn.com, Mike Buechele (nice theme), Daniel Clark and a few more that I’m forgetting. Go read them and support affiliate blogs.
[EDIT 2] I completely forgot Geno Prussakov’s well-written Affiliate Marketing Navigator blog as well. Many apologies.
Looks like this post has helped to remind me that despite my earlier thought, there are still some great affiliate blogs out there. If only we had a place to discover them all (cough BUMPzee cough).
As I’ve talked about before, the future of “social media’s” success formula will have nothing to do with the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, your RSS feed, etc.
The future of social media success will have to do with Likes, Favorites or Thumbs Up. Companies, marketers and advertisers will scramble to produce content that will receive the most Likes possible rather than just amassing non-interactive followers.
Google Reader has made a step towards that future today by making the Shared Items feature a real-time experience both within Google Reader and places such as FriendFeed where the Like mechanism is so important for discovery and relevancy in that particular community:
We’re therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there’s a element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.
Affiliate marketers need to start positioning their content, sites, items, feeds, etc to better integrate with the real-time and “likable” future where discovery will be dependent on the metric of Likes.
