LwEEs.com

Pushing my luck and looking for an online change, I switched my blog to a social networking site. The blog functionality still on, the main difference now is that I’m focusing more in the users, my visitors, in other words “you.” I spend a great deal of time helping others, much of it commenting on other people blogs, forums, and social sites like Facebook. With that in mind I’m hoping to bring all these interface ideas, help, and tips and tricks to one place to bring you “in” and have you spend some time with us.

While all of this may sound like a great idea, social networking has its limits, you have to spend a lot of time monitoring your users, moderating their content, and is very hard to get new quality users. Automating most of the parts of your social experience within your site is part of the trick to not go crazy while trying to maintain your site. Thankfully, WordPress makes moderating easy and developers have made great plug-ins that help your manage your online experience even more.

The tools are just part of the problem and the solution at the same time, the people contributing are also hard to manage. Sometimes you get so frustrated trying to explain others to keep your vocabulary clean, I have kids and I would like them to be able to read my blog posts without having to worry about explicit content. Monetization of a social site is also very difficult, if you don’t believe me try asking the guys at twitter, they are still studying different ways to earn money from a simple social networking site.

To start, I added a simple Amazon add that changes depending where the user is at any point. Integration with twitter is done as well, so go ahead, create a profile on this site and link it to your twitter. My next project is to add Facebook to my site so that you can link to your Facebook profile as well. Do you have any ideas? Contact me at webmaster@lwees.com and let me know what you think, thanks for stopping by.

I don’t like having any kind of applications on my Facebook account, they always seem to be unsafe and I was right. Some time ago I accepted an invitation to YoVille, mainly I was interested in testing the application environment to determine its potential for social interaction. While the game itself is very entertaining I find that if you use a wrong web browser and no anti-virus on you PC, you are out of luck.

YoVille, which is develop by zynga, is a community where you create an avatar and play a simulation game (ala second life.) You are given an apartment and the ability to earn YoVille money to buy stuff to furnish you environment. While it can be very addictive, I find that some people get the best out of it and the interaction is pretty cool.

What’s the problem?

I logged into my account and a document automatically downloaded, (see attached screen shot) it was an .aspx document that tried to open a Citrix environment on my Mac. If I was to be on a PC, this could potentially send me to some other place, like an automatic forward from one place on the web to another.

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I getting deeply involved in social media or social networking and its integration with business blogging, so much that I have a great number of friends on places like Twitter and Facebook compared to what I had a couple of months ago. The other day I had a Twitter update from a Japanese friend in Japanese language, he’s Twits are often in English but this one was not, I immediately asked myself is this a problem or not to my followers.

My native language is Spanish and I have a large number of Spanish-speaking friends along with my English-speaking friends. I started wondering how much of an annoyance is for my Spanish-speaking friends to see posts in English and vice-versa. Is it time to split these two groups?

I’ve been blogging for a while now, and all this time I’ve been blogging in English, when my Spanish-speaking friends visit my blog they know what to expect, but when dealing with social media, with social networking tools like Facebook I’m not sure how to react to this line of thinking. Read the rest of this entry →

Unless you’ve paid no attention to the web lately, you should know by now the mess around the facebook their new terms of service. To summarize the news, facebook launched new terms of service on which they explicitly said that they own you. Sorry, I tend to exaggerate sometimes, the terms of service covered almost anything you do or post to facebook even when and if you delete your profile. What this means is that facebook has the rights to use anything you post on your facebook page without asking you permission first.

Let’s make clear that this is a common practice in web communities, the problem is that facebook’s language on their terms of service was so vague that it made it sound like they owned and have the right to anything you do on your profile forever. This resulted in criticism so bad that facebook backed down removing the newly added terms of service and reverting back to their old terms of service. Read the rest of this entry →

If you read my blog regularly then you know what I think about social media, I love them, I’m pro all of them. I think its very important to have a presence in every social media website possible, the logic is not for you to visit and update them every day but to make sure that when people wants to find you, they can find you anywhere.

With this in mind, I’ve heard a lot of grief about Facebook (link to my profile) lately, the main complaints are because of some “applications” within Facebook. It looks like everything is an application inside Facebook, you try to be nice playing with your friends but applications tend to take over and start spamming left and right leading people to believe that the problem is you.

I use Facebook mainly as a repeater for other activities I do on the web, it shows my blog entries, my twitter entries, and my flickr entries. I try not to accept anyone’s applications, but if someone sends me a message that includes an application what I do is that after I decline the application, I send a message to the user explaining why I declined his or her invitation.

I try to play nice but it’s your name the one that gets damaged if any of your applications start spamming other Facebook users. Beware of those application that wants to access your email account, just say no, make sure that you don’t install an application unless you know is going to help on your goals as a Facebook user. One example is Flickr, if I didn’t have the need to display my photos automatically, I wouldn’t have installed the application.

Facebook is a great platform, I have lots of fun talking to my family about anything. While there’s a couple friends and podcasters that uses the service on my list of friends, the only one who uses it more often to connect to me are CC Chapman from Managing the Gray and Kevin Rose from Diggnation.

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My sister is hilarious, yesterday she posted a comment on her own MySpace account the almost kill me. She wrote, “Warning, friends with no hands will be deleted.” Immediately her friends started writing to her saying hi or whatever, I found the idea very cute but after doing some thinking around her motivations to do what she did, I asked myself how social my networking is.

Every time I hear about a new social networking platform, I head to the website and create an account. I just create a presence and sometimes I don’t even get to updated it as often as anyone would think. One example is my iMeem account, I created it and never even wrote my bio, it may very well be close by now. The idea is that if anyone that knows me creates an account on any of these new social site and looks for me, at least they find something.

When it comes to update these accounts, I just don’t do a good job. I try to simplify my life by adding picture to Flickr and getting links wherever possible so that I don’t have to upload them twice to different sites. I use different social sites for different purposes, for small rants I use Twitter, for links I use Pownce, for day-to-day stuff I use either MySpace or Facebook. I have a Jaiku account that feeds whatever I do on Twitter, and a Virb.com account that feeds from my blog.

I created a Bebo account that I never pay attention to, I have an account with Digg with one friend that I only use, well for Diggs. This is why I think my social networking skills suck, at least on the web. I update my profiles like once every two weeks, I barely say hi to my friends unless I know is their birthday. I consider myself very unobtrusive, which is not bad, I think.

I would hate to have friends that write to me every single day, except for my mom, which she actually does write to me every day. Even when at the same time, I don’t mind anyone writing to me constantly, as I check my accounts maybe, once a week. What is your experience?

I have a Find Me At tab on my Wordpress blog that holds my accounts for every single social site that I’m in, go ahead and add me. I promise I won’t be intrusive and I only leave comments that are of good taste. A final word, go out there and get as many friends as you can to subscribe to your social sites and keep them growing.

What happen when you take some vacation time during the holidays to spend some time with your family? You don’t get anything done, by the time you are back from vacation you have to work twice as much to get back on track.

That is exactly what happened to me, I took some vacation time from December 27 until January 2 and only today, I finally found some time to write a few words. I miss the blogosphere, there’s so much happening that I don’t know where to start.

Scoble has been criticize a lot for the Facebook incident, rumors of new Apple products surface every hour, and the sky is falling. Sorry, scratch that last one. From today on you should find interesting content on my site, as well as great tips and tricks for your daily commute with technology.

Please stay subscribed, tell your friends and family members about www.lwees.com and happy New Year 2008. Thanks for reading.

Is not a secret that I’m a big advocate of social media and almost every new media idea that rolls out on the web, I try to get as many people as I can get in my profiles without looking like a spammer. Each one of the social media/microbloggin/myspace-type sites that are available right now have very different attributes that can work for you or annoy you if you don’t control them. I got into Jaiku a couple weeks ego, I like the way you can add feeds to the mix. Jaiku was bought by Google last week, hopefully they won’t change its functionality as they are ok now.

The questions that now I ask myself is what to do with all these sites to benefit my blog, how can I attract people to my blog my making an interesting social site space. The first step is to define the audience on each one of them, we know that most people use MySpace. Younger people use Facebook while micro blogging is used by a selected group of people. The experiment I’m going to try is to talk more about iPods, iPhone, and PSP on my MySpace and Facebook accounts, news will be left to update Twitter and Jaiku.

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