Don’t bet that Google Me won’t succeed in social media

Bloggers, including this one obviously, are abuzz about Google Me, the Facebook-killer-wannabe rumored to be under development in the Googleplex.

Of course, the naysayers are pointing out that Google has flopped with two ballyhooed social tools in the past year: Wave, which was launched with lots of hype and anticipation, and Buzz, which snuck up on the market, generated a lot of brief (yeah) buzz, then virtually vanished from the social conversation.

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Syncing social tools (especially Foursquare) requires some thought

If addiction is the second stage of Foursquare use, I am still at stage one, curiosity. But at least I’m a curious Mayor.

Blogger Dan Macsai described the Five Stages of Foursquare Use — curiosity, addiction, socialization, greed, apathy — in a blog post. While it was amusing, he didn’t really address the factor that’s been getting lots of discussion recently on Twitter, which Brian Moylan addressed in If You Use Foursquare, You Are an Annoying Jackass.

I do use Foursquare, so perhaps I am an annoying jackass (for that matter, I might have been an annoying jackass long before I started checking in digitally). But I’ve adjusted how I interact with other social media on Foursquare, in hopes of being less annoying.

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A decade’s experience in news, training, innovation

This decade is ending with much less fanfare than the past one, which was the turn of both a century and a millennium.

This decade passed without really getting a name — the Oughts didn’t quite stick, like I guess they did a century earlier (they so didn’t stick that I don’t even know or care whether Oughts or Aughts would be the preferred spelling).

If you don’t have much patience for self-indulgent reflections, this might be a good time to go read something else, because I’m going to look back on the past decade of my career.

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10 tips on using social media for business

Whatever your business or profession and whatever social tools you are using, these tips apply in most social media situations:

1. Decide what your goal is in using each social media tool and reassess from time to time how well the tool is serving that goal.

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Social media help old friends connect in person

I was busy enough in June that I didn’t take time to blog about an interesting social-media experience. But when a similar thing happened this week, I decided it was time to take note.

I can’t recall how I first learned about TripIt, though it probably was from Mark Briggs, who was my first TripIt contact. I had already joined Dopplr, a travel-oriented social tool co-founded by my friend Dan Gillmor (who was a reporter assigned to me at the Kansas City Times before he became a new-media star). I travel a lot, so I figured I would try them both out and see which one I liked better.

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