WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Thursday, August 14, 2008

WATBlog Update There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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Life of A Social Media Junkie
The Social Age of Blogging: Movable Type Pro Launches with Social Networking Features
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There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Life of A Social Media Junkie

Social networking is fun. At least, it used to be. When Orkut started, it used to be a real good time pass for jobless people like you. New friends kept poring in, very old acquaintances, who were out of touch for a long time, started sending you teasers, meeting plans were hatched on Orkut and you, being early users, started creating communities on a lot of your passions. I was joining a new college at that point of time and I used Orkut extensively to connect with a lot of my seniors to ask a variety of questions. Alas! It was back then…

As time slowly passed, you started wondering what to do on Orkut. People kept asking you the same silly questions on your scrapbook over and over again - “Hows lyf “, “How are you doing” , “What’s up” and other similar trash. Moreover, every time you replied to them, you could always come up with the very same set of answers, “I am fine”, “Nothing much” and the likes. If somebody had asked you this question after a year, you could have told him something but what do you tell a guy who had asked the same question two days ago. [Especially when you lead a normal life. Not everyone is Calvin, after all!]

You, finally, realize that you have nothing left to explore on Orkut and it’s an utter waste of time. You have already dug up all your chuddy-buddies and ex-flames who are on the network. The communities, which you had both joined and created, are all dead with the last thread on their forums posted about a year ago and your scrapbook is filled with questions like those above.

What do you do then? You make a quantum leap and jump to Facebook. Although in your country, it hasn’t become a rage yet and very few are on it, every blog (be it on social media or business ) just can’t seem to get enough of it. Anyway, you jump into the bandwagon and struggle to find your fast friends. Well, as they say, jobless people are everywhere. Very soon, you find your entire group of your friends out there on it and you start adding them up, painfully describing how you know each of them and even getting those pieces on info confirmed.

There is one great thing about Facebook which distinguishes it from Orkut (no more, though). Even if you don’t have friends, there are also a lot of cool applications for you to waste your time on. You can use iLike to browse your favorite music or you can use Flixter to review movies and find reviews by others too. For some studs, there are also applications like “How sexy are you “, “What does my name mean”, “Which Godfather character are you?” to make them feel good about themselves. You browse through these applications to make your profile look cool but later realize what an idiot you are. So, you quickly remove them and add the few sensible applications which you find on Facebook. Some of them are -

Flixter – Review and rate movies and read reviews of others.
iLike – Browse for your favourite music and artists. Get information on the latest concerts and albums and dedicate songs to others
iRead – Just the same as Flixter but here it is all about books.
Causes – If you are interested in doing a bit of good in the world (yeah, yeah…it’s John Mortimer ) then this is the place.
Fans – You happened to watch a match of ‘Manchester City’ by chance and just loved that player on the right wing. You are dead sure you are not going to see a match of this club again. What do you do? You visit this application’s page and become a fan of him.

By this time, you realize that Facebook is beginning to pick up in your country and more of your friends are joining in every day. You are back to the phase you were in at the start of Orkut but only this time on a different platform.

The world is definitely round, ain’t it?

Shāyon Adds : You must be perplexed to read a post like this on WATBlog, ain’t it so? Well, isn’t it Independence Day? So, even WATBlog took the liberty from breaking free from its regular tone of news reporting & analysis and decided to come up with something very fresh.

The reason why this little post caught our fancy is because the author has actually managed to capture almost every Indian’s foray into online social networking pretty beautifully. It’s a pity that we got no name or face to attach to the post.

While talking about social networks and the nature of repetitiveness that they are slowly garnering, I thought it would be an opportune moment to mention Facebook’s wonderful and commendable efforts to keep their users engaged within the site as much as they can manage. Of course, various apps, fan pages and feeds about your friends’ activities do help a lot to retain users. In addition to it, Facebook has again launched a new feature that allows users to decide which feeds s/he likes more and which ones should rather be reduced to the minimum. For more info on the same, do chack out this fine post by Mike Arrington on the same.

And with that, we wish you all Happy Independence Day! Peace!!

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The Social Age of Blogging: Movable Type Pro Launches with Social Networking Features

I have used Movable Type and I must admit I am not their biggest fan. However, I have always given it to them for having pioneered the open source blogging systems, I sort of have a job because of that.

And much like the early part of this decade MT has come up with the direction for blogging platforms to move ahead. Yesterday the MT blog announced the launch of Movable Type 4.2 and Movable Type Pro. While ver. 4.2 claims to have cured MT’s chronic slowness and offers easier customization it is the Pro that really means some serious business.

It brings 3 of the current main drivers of the web publishing business on one system. MT Pro integrates blogging, content management and social networking together to come up with the most complete publishing platform.

Some of the features that Movable Type Pro brings to the table are:

full-featured forums, community blogs and group blogs
customizable profiles, personalized user pictures (avatars), and add friend feature for members ( Open ID support)
Content submission, review submissions, and the submitted posts show up on user profiles next to their activities …(hmm WATConnect..)
Ratings and Recommendations - powerful enough to create a voting community within the blog

Another crazy news they shared said,

“Starting today the Movable Type Pro Blogger License is available for free to anyone and everyone not running an official business. With this license, users can have:

unlimited blogs

unlimited authors

unlimited community members

unlimited everything

That’s right, the Blogger license does not impose any caps upon its use and is free of the greatest barrier of all: cost.”

I am really liking MT right now, though I feel guilty of waxing its eloquent on a Wordpress powered blog.

The guys at Automatic, who make Wordpress have been trying to build a separate platform with Buddypress since quite a bit now, and with relatively similar features expected MT has clearly outdone them on this. I was looking forward to Buddypress since the time I came to know about it a good 6 months back, and had lined up a few personal projects to test it. And honestly I am tempted to go to MT.

However, it might be a bit early to judge because of a couple of not so enjoyable experience I have had with Movable Type. And to be honest, I am not too sure about the MT community.. the open source mavens of Wordpress who make the most mind blowing plugins and themes have my vote of confidence and perhaps that can be the deciding factor for many.

However, more importantly by launching the Pro, Six Apart has gone one up on Automatic. This surely is going to be another community showdown, which I expect will make both platforms a lot more powerful. When two quality companies go to war, the users get much better products.

All said and done, I am very excited to now these new developments at MT for this very reason. And no matter how bad or good the system actually turns out to be, just the whole set of features they have brought out is enough to give MT 4.2 and Pro a double thumbs up. This certainly sets the game up for more such developments and hence more powerful systems for us publishers. The uber-social age of blogging is upon us (uber considering blogging already is social…).