Cyber Imprints

Facebook is continuously adding new things on its interface and features. The most popular feature that was added lately was the VideoChat. A friend of mine already used the Video Chat feature of Facebook to chat with her friends abroad.

Now, I noticed another new thing when I made my usual visit to my Facebook account. Here is what I saw:

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Please click on the photo to see a better view of the image.

Facebook added a widget to the right side of my Facebook "Home" page. The widget shows the latest updates from my contacts in Facebook. The widget is being updated in real-time.

If you click on one of your friend's updates on the widget, you will see this:

The status update will expand to show you the whole thread. Using this feature, you can easily comment on the thread without the to look for it one your FB Home page.

This new feature of Facebook is pretty neat because you can see the updates from your friends in real-time. It will also be helpful for the FB users to see friend's updates that were already buried by loads of other FB statuses and updates on your FB page.

Their is only something that makes me think with this new feature of Facebook. It looks very similar with Twitter.

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Visit Before the Eastern Sunset and read about the State of the Soul of the Nation Address.

Social Media sites are websites that allows the subscribers or members of that website to socialize with one another through the sharing of comments, pictures, videos, and other online interactive activities. There are numerous social media websites that are present in the World Wide Web. Each of these websites caters to various groups and has their own strengths and weaknesses. Some of social media websites that I encountered through the years are Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, Yahoo 360, and Plurk.

Social Media Optimization, or SMO, is the process of creating awareness of your blog through the use of social media websites. It is opposed to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that focuses more on increasing the rank of a blog in search engines. Because of the continued prominence of social media websites, successful bloggers utilized them to promote their blogs and reach out to more readers.

I also use SMO to promote my blog posts. The social media websites that I currently use for my SMO are Facebook, Twitter, and Friendster. Prominent bloggers already attested the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as SMO tool. I have not seen any review for Friendster.

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Friendster is one of the leading social websites in the Philippines and it still boasts of thousands of active Filipino users. Though, many of its veteran members shifted to Facebook. I observed that very few bloggers use Friendster as a blogging tool. 

The main page that is fronted to other Friendster users is the Profile page. This page contains the self-description of the Friendster user and the comments made by his/her friends. The profile page is the main page where a blogger can leave links leading to his/her blog. Bloggers could also use the Friendster bulletin for blog promotion.

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Facebook picked up the comment elements of Friendster and expanded it. Interactivity in Facebook is through posts that are posted by the Facebook user and is visible to all of his/her friend’s Facebook main page. His/her post can be commented by his/her friends and the comments are showed in a nested form. This ingenious mode in Facebook promotes online conversation because commenters reply to one another.

Facebook is more blogger friendly because it is easy to post links that lead to your blogs. An added bonus is the use of Networked Blogs that automatically pull your blog post and is ready to be posted on Facebook.

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Twitter is almost similar with Facebook in that it also uses the posting system that could be found in Facebook. The main difference is that you are limited to 140 characters (space included) for your posts or more popularly known as tweets. This limitation is not a disadvantage though because many people subscribed for this websites and that includes successful bloggers. Leaving a tweet could even be made through SMS messaging of mobile phones.

Of the three social media websites that I used, Friendster is the least effective, which is followed by Twitter. The most effective is Facebook. Friendster contributed 17% of the readers coming from social media sites, while Twitter contributed 33%. Facebook, meanwhile, contributed 50% of the visitors.

This simple statistics only shows that Friendster is not a good platform for social media optimization. The possible cause of this is that the facilities where I place links to my blogs is usually ignored by Friendster users. Whatever the reason, it only means that Friendster has to redefine itself to be more blogger friendly.

For better social media optimization, I suggest that you both use Facebook and Twitter. These two websites were somehow compatible with one another. An example of this compatibility is a Facebook application that posts your tweets on your Facebook wall. 

You can stay away from Friendster when doing social media optimization and you will not be missing anything.

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For more information on how to use Friendster as a blogging tool please read “How to Get Inbound Links to our Blog.”

Further comparison of Facebook and Friendster could be found at my article “Facebook vs Friendster.”

Logos of Facebook, Friendster, and witter are under the copyright of their respective owners.

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As a blogger and as an Internet addict, I have many accounts on many social networking sites. I have an account in Twitter, Facebook, Multiply, Friendster, and Plurk, not to mention my e-mail addresses and other website for blogging and other activities. The sheer number of accounts is overwhelming especially if you are like me who have two accounts for Facebook and Friendster and four e-mail addresses. I have a personal account and an account for blogging in Facebook. I have an e-mail for blogging, an e-mail for work, and another e-mail address for personal matters.

Managing these accounts poses some problems and one of these problems is if you want to open those accounts simultaneously. In your browser (be it Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer), you can only open one Facebook, for example. Even if you open another tab, it would only show the account

So how can you open your multiple accounts simultaneously?

The only trick is to have more than browser in your computer.

I, for instance, have two browsers in my computer. These are Firefox and Google Chrome. I open one of my Facebook and e-mail accounts in one browser and then I open my other accounts in Firefox.

There are also other browsers out there if you want to open three, four, or higher number of accounts simultaneously. All you have to do is to download those browsers. Here are the browsers that I usually use (click on the link to go to the download page): Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera.

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