Daily Bits

7 Reasons to Work in the Cloud

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The following is a guest post by Selena Narayanasamy. An avid lover of all things caffeine, Selena  currently does SEO and is a social media marketer/analyst as well as a writer. She has multiple degrees in business, marketing and finance. Along with all this, she also writes for Searchenginejournal.com and is growing Esvienne.com, her own personal social media and tech blog.  Twitter- @esvienne

The cloud is something that has been all around us for quite some time now, but we may not have noticed. Many of us didn’t think we needed to utilize the cloud; and we’re right. We have our own ways of managing tasks and information, from planners to our cell phones. There are certain markets that should be using the cloud, specifically small and large businesses. Since the cloud is ever-changing and nothing solid, it’s often confusing to a company who may be considering a work-flow overhaul and is looking at different options. There are 7 reasons in specific to use the cloud:

1. Employees are utilizing the same resources:

This can bog down your network and kill all chances of getting a good system flowing. Frustration with editing and slow resources can add stress to employees and hinder their abilities to work effectively and efficiently. Having many tools available in the cloud will allow there to be a place where everyone can work and collaborate freely. You won’t have to keep asking and waiting for someone to email you a document or a zip file. [Read more…] about 7 Reasons to Work in the Cloud

Google Buzz Posts Are All Auto-Feeds

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Here’s an interesting look into the current buzz being posted on Google Buzz. The study was conducted by Post Rank which tracks engagement activities on over two dozen social networks and recently added buzz posted on Google Buzz.

During their analysis of  Google Buzz feeds, Post Rank found some interesting points regarding all the noise that have been building up on Google Buzz.

Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service.

The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it’s automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. Perhaps you shouldn’t hurry to install that Buzz button on your site just yet…

What does this all mean. If you’re a social media marketeer eyeing to implement some marketing campaign on Google Buzz, well you might want to hold back for awhile as there is no clear chance that your campaign would reap higher engagement.

It seems that the activities on Google Buzz right now are all automated. Well, of course you might be engaging with “real people” in your own Buzz streams and that’s pretty understandable since you’ve selected people to follow on Google Buzz yourself.

But then as what Post Rank’s study yielded, majority of Google Buzz posters are actually non-human.

Text Messaging Among U.S. Teen Explodes

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Following our recent coverage of  how young online people value their privacy, here comes another report centering on the same demographics this time looking into the exploding text messaging habit of U.S. teens. The study, conducted by Pew Internet shows how teen-agers have embraced text messaging and made it as their main communication medium among circle of friends.

According to the study, some 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones.  And those phones have become indispensable among teens when communicating with their friends. Around 72%  of American teens engaged in text messaging. Even more interesting is the fact that more than half or 54% to be exact of American teens are daily texters. In fact, texting has overtaken other forms of interaction and communication among American teens today.

Other key findings of the Pew Internet study include:

  • One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day, or 3000 texts a month.
  • Calling is still a central function of the cell phone for teens and for many teens, voice is the primary mode of conversing with parents.
  • Girls more fully embrace most aspects of cell phone-based communication.
  • For parents, teens’ attachment to their phones is an area of conflict and regulation.
  • Most schools treat the phone as a disruptive force that must be managed and often excluded from the school and the classroom.
  • Cell phones help bridge the digital divide by providing internet access to less privileged teens. Still, for some teens, using the internet from their mobile phone is “too expensive.”
  • Cell phones are seen as a mixed blessing. Parents and teens say phones make their lives safer and more convenient. Yet both also cite new tensions connected to cell phone use.
  • Cell phones are not just about calling or texting – with expanding functionality, phones have become multimedia recording devices and pocket-sized internet connected computers
  • 4% of teens say they have sent a sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude image of themselves to someone via text message

So there. Now you know what your kids are up to in case they use their mobile phones more often than you’ve expected.

Are You Going to Play FarmVille on Your iPhone, iPad or Android Phones?

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I was supposed to cover something else but stumble upon this post and of course, it’s about so FarmVille, so I should cover it first. Anyway, Mashable is running this report saying that Farmville may soon be coming to the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Of course you know Farmville, right? If you’re on Facebook and you have not played Farmville even just for once, chances are you’ve received updates from your friends saying that – so and so have harvested something from their farm. Yes, that’s Farmville folks.

Anyway, one proof cited by the report is the blog Supererogatory found out that the domain names farmvilleandroid.com, farmvilleipad.com and farmvilleiphone.com have been registered under DNStination which happens to be the registrar of FarmVille.com.

If those domains were not enough to convince you that FarmVille is coming to mobile platforms, how about a Zynga spokesperson response to Mashable’s inquiry saying – “Zynga plans to expand to various mobile platforms. We cannot provide additional information at this time.”

That’s pretty obvious, right? Unfortunately, the Zynga spokersperson did give out any other detail. But it’s probably enough to elicit some excitement among FarmVille users and fans which currently number around 80 million right now.

Are you ready for FarmVille mobile? Will you play FarmVille on your mobile phones?

Seesmic for Android Gets Geotagging, Widget and Native ReTweet

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The folks at Seesmic has just updated their Android app, adding three very useful features – widget, geotagging and native ReTweet. If you haven’t downloaded and installed the Seesmic App for Android on your phones yet, why not grab it from the Android Market now or read along as these new features might convince you to use Seesmic’s twitter app after all.

The new Seesmic for Android now comes with the first version of its widget. This allows you to read tweets entirely and compose a new tweet from the widget and then tweet it to all of your Twitter friends. To get add a widget on your Android phone’s home screen, simply long press on your home screen and add the widget to view your timeline from your phone’s home screen.

The next new addition to Seesmic for Android’s features is native retweet.  It supports Twitter’s native Retweet functionality and lets you choose various ways of retweeting – that is you can either use the old quote or Twitter’s new Retweet function.

Finally, there’s also geotagging feature.  This allows you to tell your friends your location when you posted a tweet or reply to their messages. Geotagging also allows you to see any tweets that support geolocation geographically.

All these three features just made Seesmic for Android a worth contender in the growing mobile Twitter app space.  So, what Twitter client do you use on your Android Phone?

British mom seeks one million from odd-job web site

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Million dollar pixel pages might be old hat now, but a British mom has twisted the idea with the launch of her “A Million Jobs To Do” web site.

Spurred on by her dream to buy a £1m house, Chrissi Sharkey set up the web site to allow anyone to hire her services for a minimum of £1 per job.

Prospective clients simply suggest a task that they need doing and the amount they’re willing to pay. The two sides then negotiate to find a favourable deal, the job gets done, and Chrissi gets paid.

Jobs she’s taken on so far include testing out three floral bras for a bra review web site, organising a ballot, and theming a child’s party.

Only via Internet could you easily, and cheaply, hope to reach such a goal. Let’s hope she gets more than the minimum amount per job, though, because a million jobs is going to take a long, long time to finish.

Dream house aside, she may need to invest a bit more in web hosting, because the recent publicity drive seems to be hammering her web server.