How Many Times A Day Do I Visit Facebook?

by Ryan on January 6, 2010

I post to Facebook and Twitter a lot.  I mean A LOT.  When I run into my Facebook friends in the real world, I’m often asked how many hours per day do I spend on Facebook?  The answer may (or may not) surprise you.  I spend, ZERO, absolutely zero hours on Facebook each day / month / week. The only time I go onto Facebook is to accept friend requests and check our advertiser and / or developer account at AudioMicro (AM integrates with Facebook).

Question: Then how does my Facebook account get updated 5 times per day (with an average of 4 shared articles and at one status update)?

Answer: RSS, more specifically RSS feeds viewed through Google Reader on my mobile phone with shared RSS items fed into Friendfeed, and distributed to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and just about every other social network on the web.

Ryan Born RSS

In 2009, a great deal of discussion has been going on regarding the death of RSS. Proponents of the death of RSS believe that services like Twitter and Friendfeed are replacing RSS. This is certainly true for the Average Internet User (AIU) because the AIU never adopted RSS.  Despite its simplicity, the AIU still finds RSS confusing. RSS often requires copying and pasting a feed and or clicking on an orange button that brings up a bunch of text, and the AIU does not know how to utilize this text by copying the feed sources, pasting the into an RSS reader, and using the RSS reader to organize and automatically update feeds from across the web. The idea that one must have another account to login to (their RSS reader) and visit through a web browser is far too complicated for the AIU. The AIU would simply prefer to load up Google, Facebook, or Twitter on their homepage and either search for news (in the case of Google) or be spoon fed news by their friends / followers (as in the case of Facebook and Twitter).   This works great for the AIU. RSS is dead to the AIU, but RSS is certainly not dead to more advanced internet users.

But what if you would rather be the one doing the spoon feeding?  i.e. The influential user that locates news worthy topics, shares this news, and drives traffic the the publishers that create content.  RSS is the answer for this and here is how you do it…

1.  Register for a Google Reader Account

2.  Subscribe via RSS to the publications of your choice (HINT:  Click one of those little orange icons you find on most blogs and web pages)

3.  Register for a Friendfeed Account

4.  Link you Google Reader Shared items to your Friendfeed Account (HINT:  Locate the feed URL for your Google Reader Shared items, and copy and paste this URL into Friendfeed’s Google Shared items feed)

5.  Link your Friendfeed stream to both your Twitter and Facebook Accounts (this is really easy to do once you have a Friendfeed account and you can also link to any other social media outlet that you are registered with – e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, etc.)

6.  Now you are set up for one click mobile syndication.  Visit your Google Reader account from your mobile phone, iPhone, or web browser, find an article you like, click the “Share” button below any post you see within your Google Reader and this item will be automatically posted to your Facebook and Twitter.  If you set things up correctly, it will automatically title your post and shorten the URL’s through http://bit.ly so that you can track how many clicks you get for each item you share.

My Personal Stats:

For every item that I share through Google Reader, I receive an average of 30 clicks.  The majority of these clicks come from any one of the 15,000+ twitter followers to the @audiomicro account.  A few others come from my Facebook friends and personal @bornryan twitter followers and a couple come from LinkedIn and a few stragglers from MySpace.  Pretty much what you would expect in terms of the influential sites where discussions are occurring on the web.  In short, I can drive 30 clicks to any article on the web, simply by clicking the “Share” button in my Google Reader account.  That’s not bad considering that 30 clicks could sell for $10 or more on Google if you were buying clicks through Google Adwords.

Would you like 30 new hits to your website? If so, just let me know and I’ll share a link for you.

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Put Your Music In The Cloud | Try Posterous

by Ryan on December 30, 2009

Posterous Pictures, Images and Photos

Upload your music to LaLa – now!  I have had about 100 GB of music on an external hard drive for about 3.5 years now.  The problem with having all your music on drive (beside the potential for drive failure / data loss) is that you must have the drive around (or remote access to your machine) to listen to the tunes.  I decided a while back on backing up my entire hard drive to a personal Amazon S3 account (and if you’re a PC user, you can use this free S3 backup program for doing so).  But even direct cloud backup doesn’t solve the playback issue because you must map your iTunes library to your cloud drive, which can be accomplished with services like JungleDisk (which I don’t recommend because it’s clunky and costly).  Anyways, the solution is LaLa, which is now owned by Apple.  Upload your music to LaLa for free, and stream your entire .mp3 collection from any computer, any time, without the worries of hard drive failure and loss of data.  Your tracks will forever reside on LaLa’s servers and Apple will float the storage and backup bills for you.  You’ll be happy you did it.

If you like blogging, or want to try blogging, I highly recommend Posterous.  It’s a dead simple way of blogging.   In short, you can email any media (text, photos, video, audio, etc.)  into posterous and and it will post to your posterous blog.  You can also set it up to auto-post to a self hosted WordPress blog, Twitter, Facebook, and pretty much any social media outlet under the sun.  At first I thought it was just another over hyped service that I didn’t need because one post photos and video to a blog via email through Flickr.  In addition to Flickr email to blog posting, WordPress has it’s own built in functionality that allows you to make new posts to a WordPress blog via email, but when I went to test out WordPress’ email option, I couldn’t get it to work.  WordPress is great, but this one little feature is not so great and it’s malfunction is the sole reason that I discovered Posterous.  While I had demo’d Posterous (and Tumblr) in the past, I had no use for the service until I ran into the “post to wordpress via email” problem, which Posterous easily resolved.  By setting up a Posterous account and inputting my blog URL and login creds, I am now easily able to create new posts on the fly, via email.  Posterous is slick.

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A Lot Can Happen In Just A Few Short Years

by Ryan on December 24, 2009

So it’s been 22 months since I last wrote a personal blog post.  From time to time over the past 22 months, I’ve done some blogging on the music industry over at the AudioMicro royalty free music blog, but for the most part, I have had my nose to the grindstone growing the business at AudioMicro and not blogging for personal pleasure.  Now it’s the holiday season and while my email inbox is slow, it seems like a good time to get back into the swing of things.  I”ll try and make a weekly post from this point hereafter.  Of course, we’ll see how it goes.  If I can post monthly, let’s consider that an accomplishment.  To ease my way back into this, why not recap what’s been happened in the last 22 months since my last post?

A quick look at my old posts reveals a lot about how quickly things can change…

-In September 2007, Windows Mobile teamed with Palm to release the TREO 700wx on Verizon.  This phone was supposed to be a game changer.   iPhones weren’t even around.  Palm has since struggled to survive.

-The Dow reached an all time high of 14,100 in late 2007 and in early 2008 Jim Kramer was even talking about the possibility of a rally that would break through that all time high.  Breaking through 14,000 seems light years away today, though I would not be surprised to see it happen by the end of 2012 (just 3 years from today).

-In Feb 2008 the Tennessee Vols were the #2 ranked men’s bball team in the country.  They ended up losing in the first round of the NCAA tourney.

-Cloud Computing and browser based software solutions were just beginning to come to market.  Fast forward less than 2 years and nearly every software on the market has browser based capabilities and many of these applications can be accessed via mobile phone.

-Just 3 years ago, I dreamed of building my own business in the licensing space, and out of this desire grew the stock music library AudioMicro.com, which now possesses over 200,000 individual tracks which are routinely licensed into new media applications including hilarious web videos, popular video blogs, iPhone apps, and even cable TV shows.

Looking back on the past 3 years is humbling.  It’s amazing to see what has been accomplished.  At the same time that I am amazed, I am troubled by the state of the economy and the impact that recession can have on people.  The good news is that I truly feel that the worst is behind us.  I have felt this way for quite some time now.  There really cannot be any more bad economic news to be announced that would have a negative impact on the market.  What I mean is that all the bad news is already out there and expected.  Any additional news that could be negatively interpreted will have little downside pressure on the market because it’s already been beaten up so badly and we are used to hearing bad news.  It’s like playing roulette and hitting red 10 times in a row.  There will ultimately be a run of black sooner or later, regardless of what the statisticians say about the future odds being 50/50.  The market can only go up from here.  Once the numbers show consecutive months of positive GDP growth, housing, and employment numbers, I expect the market to bounce back with extreme resilience.  If it took just one year to fall from 14,100 to 6,550 I think it we can get back to 14,000 within 3 years – i.e. by the end of 2012.  Time will tell but it would certainly be nice to see.

To close this post, I’d like to set out a but of groundwork for this blog going forward.  There is no central theme other than that it will be a place to air my thoughts.  From time to time I plan to post a few photos, and I certainly intend to share some ideas and insights on business, entrepreneurship, technology, people, and life.   Each blog post automatically syndicates to my Twitter and Facebook stream, so if we are connected online, you’ll be notified about each new post.   I tend to ramble a lot in my writing and take a bit of a stream of consciousness approach.  I think a lot faster than I write, so I hope that the idea comes across to you as well as it does to me.   I do not tend to proofread and my grammar skills are average at best, so please don’t mind the typos and run on sentences.

Looking forward to a great 2010.  In the words of my friend Bob Rice, “I hope that 2010 is your best year ever”.

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Bloggin Again

by Ryan on December 22, 2009

I am thinking about blogging again.  It’s been about 2 years since my last post and I am way rusty.  I’m dusting off the keyboard and setting up with WordPress blog.  I may even restore some old posts.  Let’s see if I can ever get around to doing it.  To be continued…

Is Tennessee Really Number 2?

by Ryan on February 19, 2008

I haven’t been watching college basketball this year so I am in no way qualified to make an educated post. I heard that the Tennessee Vols are ranked number 2 in college basketball this season and I couldn’t help but think it was the Lady Vols, but in fact, it’s the men. Crazy…I am willing to bet that they don’t make the final four, any takers?

UPDATE:  The Vols lost in the first round of the 2008 NCAA tourney.

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