The maximum number of friend requests you can send per day, as far as I can tell, is 100. I may be slightly off. Here’s the thing:
When you run out of friend-requests, it doesn’t tell you! So you can end up spending an hour (or hours) adding people without realizing you are accomplishing nothing! The way to tell is you refresh that user’s page, and it doesn’t say ‘friendship requested,’ or you just send the request twice and the second time, it will say the same thing it did the first time: “Do you want to make friends?” instead of “you already requested this person’s friendship” (or whatever the specific wording is, you get the point.)
Diclaimer: I may be blocked or something rather than just hitting a preset speed-bump. I did sent a lot of requests. I’ll know tonight at either Midnight somewhere in the US or in the UK.
Recently I found an awesome user group on Last.FM that had showcased one of my tracks as the “sound of the year…”
So I figured I’d better add all of the members as friends.
I know that back in the day, MySpace had a policy that allowed somewhere around 400 actions per day, that is to say, if you sent 400 friend requests, you wouldn’t be able to message anyone or anything…
LastFM doesn’t seem to have much trouble with unwanted spam. I have a few friends on Last.fm that spam me, but it’s all good spam (decent or great music to check out).
I’m basing my number, 100 on the fact that I got through two, fifty-user pages before the requests stopped working.
UPDATE: Two days later
After Midnight PST, was able to send 100 more friend requests.
But after Midnight the following night, I was only able to send around before they stopped working. I added a thread on Last.FM’s community/support forum here.
Maybe someone will shed some light on this. Search engine results for this problem are horrible.
OK so I have to admit that I’ve overestimated the popularity of Last.FM. At least, I am realizing how different LastFM is for a user like me that mostly has mp3s on my hard drive, and users who stream music from lastfm.
PowerPlay isn’t going to do a lot of good for me very quickly since I’ve chosen to buy impressions on radio streams for artists that are pretty obscure. I did this because conversion rates (see web marketing 101) are higher in a narrower target, so if I try to compete for impressions/plays on Bjork’s radio stream, the chances that the users will actually like my music are considerably smaller than if I target people who like more obscure music like the constellation acts or something. Going for Bjork is more like going for Britney Spears in that there’s a fairly diverse audience and the users are more likely to be fairly mainstream (Bjork being one of the strangest things they like). Going after a band like Excepter or HRSTA is a better bet for me because these are people looking for fairly unconventional soundtrack-y experimental music.
In ten hours since I launched my first $20 Powerplay campaign (100 plays on radio streams of ten artists I chose), I’ve gotten ZERO plays.
On the upside, twenty bucks is going to provide my with at least 3 months of entertainment since I’ll have one more site to check in with a few times a day when I’m being neurotic.
The music industry is a mess. The best discovery tools suck because the content owners are afraid of change, while the best music delivery systems are either incomplete (legal or illegal but private) or unreliable (illegal but public).
And legal or not, there’s no real integration between the streaming services and the OS environment.
Maybe the Chrome OS or the Smartphone market will change that. I’m sick of storing tons of MP3s.
OH! If these other music acts are so obscure, maybe I should buy their Keywords from Google. Hmmm…
Comment I left on zaproot‘s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…
Here’s the Video I’m responding to:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70HFEHB6dag]
I love me a good conspiracy theory.
I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).
Are there other sources?
I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.
I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.
Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228
Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…
I just want my skepticism to be smart.
Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.
The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.
Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?
You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.
Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?
This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!
If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew
I just heard about this from the Inside Silicon Valley Podcast from The San Jose Mercury News (the site of which, sadly, has no RSS feed metadata in its html head. Get it together, people!)
Anyway, this guy apparently made a fortune as a Texas oil man. Now he’s decided to spearhead a movement toward “energy-independence.” In a nutshell, he wants to shift our use of Natural gas over to transportation and replace its 20% share of electricity production with wind power by building out the “Wind Belt” with turbines. The result, he claims, would mean consuming about 38% less foreign oil. It would also mean cleaner transportation and electricity production.
Pickens has launched a totally kick-ass, Web2-savvy campaign to recruit online “foot-soldiers,” for his movement. He has already met with the “president” and says he also plans to meet with both mainstream presidential candidates “at the same time.”
He claims that the site moved into the top-1000 most-viewed sites in under three weeks, with 2.5 million hits and about a one-tenth conversion rate (people signing up to get involved, subscribing to get updates etc)!!! (three exclamation points!!!) In addition, he’s touring around giving “town-hall” meetings all over, and spending his money on TV advertisements.
Techno-Activism? Go to PickensPlan.com and look around. What do you think? I like seeing rich-ass people putting their dollars into making positive changes in policy and public perception (if that’s what this is (I’m the first one to admit that I’m no expert on what the best route to sustainable energy is)).
Whatever you think about the plan, you have to admit that the campaign is being smartly executed. He must have a great team working for him.
This video is an overview of his “plan” (the second is one of the TV advertisements he did, which sufficiently pulls on left-wing heart strings since it has plenty of imagery of smoke pouring into the air)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQa-ibNOKM&NR]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bOug1d20c]
(Lately I’m realizing that good companies and orgs have watchlists so a post like this one serves as an open letter to the company, unless of course, they’re not listening, which of course is their problem, a big problem.)
I love that you’re providing all of these stimulating and informative videos. Thank you for that.
But why did I just spend five minutes clicking around on ted.com, looking for a “Podcast” or “RSS” link?
I was thinking “C’mon! You MUST have a feed here somewhere!!”
Finally I decided to search the iTunes Music Store for TED… There it is! WTF? Why are you hiding your feed?
I’m so glad I found it. But you need to put a link somewhere on your site so people don’t waste their time looking for what’s not there.
Please?
-Andrew
Lately I get about 100 organic hits to my blog per day, which isn’t bad considering…
Yesterday I posted an ad on craigslist (Free Stuff in the North Bay/Marin Area) in response to an item being offered for free and I included a link in the ad linking to the rant I posted here about it (the painting I wanted). In the first half hour or so I got around 100 hits from craigslist! And it keeps coming…
If I was a spammer, which I’m not, I’d seriously consider trying to leverage craigslist’s community and traffic.
Big Rant.
Using HTML was once a smart move for findability online. Seems obvious to us now, but in case you don’t realize how stupid people were during the initial growth of the Web back in the late nineties, imagine this: People used to send cease and desist or take-down letters to owners of other sites because the other sites were linking to them.
“How dare you link to my site! You have no right to mention my existence and if you do not remove the link, I will sue you!”
In other words, we have a hard time looking beyond the current paradigm. Right now that paradigm is something like, in order to be findable, spend a lot of time working with the wording of your site’s copy, and make sure your metadata and you document structure are written to reflect what search results you want to win.
It’s funny though: Still, one of the best things you can do SEO wise is to have an RSS feed. And in case you didn’t realize this, RSS is a Semantic Standard. Apparently RSS 2.0 is a little convoluted (the adjustments made to the standard since it’s creation are not entirely in line with the Semantic Web school), but the original RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. Blah blah blah. Go look it up.
A little bit of Semantics is potentially way better for your site’s visibility than a whole lot Keyword tweaking.
FOAF, SIOC and the countless other Semantic Markups are a way for you to get your foot in the door now! A bit like the people that realized early on that they needed to have a website at all in the first place.
A little bit of early adoption of Semantics for your information could really pay off as we start moving toward a smarter Web. And we are moving toward a smarter Web. Who will be part of it when it reaches it’s tipping point for large scale adoption? Will you or your business? Or will you wait until some news report announces that the rest of the world has already gone semantic? I know I’ll be there. I already am.
Because what Search Engines are trying to do is provide users with access to what users are looking for, the process of SEO, when it consists of tweaking Keywords and/or document structure around, according to whatever the latest rumors are on what silly and temporary way Google seems to be currently making decisions about relevance, is always going to be flawed and as long as these SEO rumors are floating around, people will be trying to game the engines and in turn, people are collectively increasing the need for the engines to change their parameters, repeat, repeat, repeat. Search engines do not try to index sites based on the sites’ application of SEO techniques, engines index sites based on an attempt at creating an Information Architecture… This is hard to do because most website aren’t presented in a architecture-y way. So we’ve come full circle. Feeds are an architecture-y way to present your content, so it’s no wonder they help with SEO.
You might ask “So what’s next beyond RSS? How can I make Google love me even more?”
My answer is: “Stop lying to them with your SEO, and start helping them with Semantics”
And just remember what happened when a little bit of semantics got put into effect? Remember RSS? Well the blogosphere basically happened and in turn the “Live Web,” Podcasting and all that. Powerful stuff, and Web 2 is just the tip of the iceburg.
For more info, visit From Here To Awesome
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHUwTkbAvn4&rel=1]
Tim Berners-Lee recently posted on his blog about the idea of the “Giant Global Graph,” an alternate name for the Semantic Web which is also called “The Data Web” (as opposed to the “Document Web”) “The Web Of Data” (as opposed to the “Web of Documents”), and even “Web 3.0″
Cool quote from his article:
“The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.
People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over. People making web sites sometimes tried to legally prevent others from linking into the site, as they wanted complete control of the user experience, and they would not link out as they did not want people to escape. Until after a few months they realized how the web works. And the re-use kicked in. And the payoff started blowing people’s minds.
Letting your data connect to other people’s data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don’t have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.
It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.”
SEO, “Search Engine Optimization,” Beyond a Healthy Discipline is a process of trying to trick search engines into endowing your site with findability, as in getting onto the first page of search results for certain phrases. I say beyond a heathy discipline, because its more basic techniques are in line with usabilty, accessibilty, and being standards-compliant. Beyond that, SEO heads down a rickety spiral of uncool tricks, many of which are also considered (by people who consider these things) to be in the realm of “SMO” or Social Media Optimization. SMO often has to do with trying to game
folksonomies by posting and tagging things on sites like our dearly beloved Del.icio.us.
The following is a (very long) quote from Jason Calacanis who is currently the CEO of mahalo, formally co-founded Weblogs, Inc and used to work at Netscape. I like the original post too much to not just steal the whole thing and put it here.
Original Article: “Why people hate SEO… (and why SMO is bulls$%t)“
This video is so cheesy you have to think it’s a fake… but I don’t think it is. (Hat Tip)
The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman. These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not getting it organically so they hire the slimebuckets to game the system for them.
Note: There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means “gaming the system” to 90% of us.
Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you’re gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google closes the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.
PS – And to the SEO idiots trying to “take over my SeRP” on Google you’re proving my point exactly. Grow up.. the only thing you’re ever going to prove by trying to game my SeRP is that you’re low-class idiots.
PSS – This whole gaming of digg/Netscape/MySpace is being called SMO–social media optimization. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. Anyone who hires an SMO firm is an idiot. The whole point of social media is TO BE REAL NOT FAKE!!! Just be yourself and participate… that’s all it takes (and note, participation is not just putting in your own links, it’s voting/commenting on/submitting other people’s content too!).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shwGa9uBJ7k&rel=1]
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