Orsiso version 1.1.26 (screenshot dated August 21 2009)

Orsiso version 1.1.36 (screenshot dated October 23 2009)

Albums section is where you get to view your friends photos, from both Flickr and Facebook. This is probably the stand-out feature and it does feel as if Orsiso is designed for this purpose. No other client, so far, allow user to search and view photos. You can search photo with keywords. You can share each photo easily on your social network e.g. Twitter and Facebook. View photo of friends, based on user-defined closeness filter.

Search and View Photos on Orsiso

Kinks and The Road Ahead

Orsiso is ambitious in scope but still far from perfect. Grouping is relatively inflexible. You can only group your friends, based on Closeness (using 1 to 4 scale). It would be great if it can offers the flexibility like Twitter List. I also find the updates streaming is not as real-time, as I want it to be. Although I set ‘check for updates’ to 1 minute, the updates stream (at times) doesn’t seem to refresh automatically. And no, it doesn’t have a refresh button. Orsiso’s Friend Merge feature enables you to combine the multiple ’social’ profiles of your friends. This only work for some of my friends, but not others.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to more improvements in coming weeks, for it to seriously challenge social streams aggreggator like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. On commercialization, Orsiso has banner ads on its Contacts’ profile page (although, I think, this is still in experimental stage).

Orsiso Is Getting Good At Aggregating Status and Photo Streams originally appeared on GreyReview on October 24, 2009.

• Despite being branded a failure, there are 350 million PCs with Vista.
• Windows 7 been winning positive reviews.
• Bing is gaining market share at 9% of search share. When Yahoo! started using Bing across its many properties, Bing’s search share could jump to 30%.
• Despite the economic downturn, Microsoft can still afford to spend $9 billion on research and development.
• Various versions of Windows run on more than 95% of all PCs; the remaining are being shared by Mac, Linux,..
• Microsoft to spend up to $11 billion on its new search engine, Bing.
• Microsoft still with annual net income of $15 billion; many expect Windows division to earn $11 billion in profit for fiscal year 2010.
• It has CASH reserves at over $20 billion.
• It has market capitalization of $230 billion (Google with $158 billion).
• Browser IE still with over 60% of market share (Firefox in distant second at 23%)

All (almost) of the above details were derived from an article in the latest Fortune mag (Oct 26 2009 issue), titled Microsoft Reboots.

I Don’t Use Windows, IE and Bing BUT I Don’t Think Microsoft Will Give a Shit originally appeared on GreyReview on October 22, 2009.

Its Twitter account @every1connects with 184 followers; averaging 61 new followers per day over the past 3 days. The two key hashtags used are #ThroughMyWindow and #EveryoneConnects with the following stats:

• #ThroughMyWindow: a total 236 tweets from 154 contributors carrying the hashtag; averaging 33.7 tweets per day. And 10.6% are retweets.
• #EveryoneConnects: a total of 243 tweets from 165 contributors; averaging 34.7 tweets per day. And 5.8% are retweets. (Source: What’s The Hashtag?!)

On Facebook, there are already 947 fans on its Facebook Page (as of early this morning).. and before the week is over, I believe it can breach the 1,000-mark. To date, only 13 updates on its Wall. From these 13 updates, it generated a total of 94 comments. That’s average 7.2 comments per update!

What we can learn:

1. It is relatively easier to expand your community on Facebook compared to Twitter. Then, maybe it’s easier to go ‘viral’ on Facebook.
2. Facebook Wall with more richer contents (photo, video), which act as effective social objects for people to make spontaneous responses and also, engaging people and elicit their comments.
3. Higher re-tweet rate is useful for a hashtag can go viral. Or is it? Looking at the example of the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas with hashtag #spc09, which was in the Top 10 Trending early this morning (2am, Malaysian time), the retweet is 17.1% out of 12,020 tweets. In terms of retweet, both #ThroughMyWindow and #EveryoneConnects are not far off, 10.6% and 5.8% respectively. Both didn’t make it to the Top 10 trending but #throughmywindow was Trending in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Monday 19 2009; #throughmywindow was number two after ‘beyonce’ (Source: Trendsmap). Retweet help but it’s not really a critical factor. In the case of #spc09, total tweet per day is more than 1,700 tweets; each contributor averaging 7.2 tweets. Yes, to make it to Trending, you just need sheer number of people tweeting, at any one time.

Verdict: From reach and richness perspectives: Reach refers to total number of followers/fans and richness refers to the dynamics of engagements and conversations. In the case of EveryoneConnects, on both reach and richness dimensions, Facebook wins!

Twitter vs Facebook Face/Off For #EveryoneConnects originally appeared on GreyReview on October 22, 2009.

Song as teaser, Twitter stream on website and profile pages on social networks – ingredients for brewing a groundswell? At the time of this posting, Twitter, Facebook and Friendster pages are still relatively empty. Search the Whois database and the record shows the domain ‘www.EveryoneConnects.net’ was created on September 29, 2009 and is registered to Monster Interactive Sdn Bhd (the interactive agency for this campaign?).

‘Through My Window’, part of Microsoft Windows 7 campaign? Or is it for a music-centric social networking site? Or is it by a communication/colloration software solution provider? Or is it… Anyway, let your imagination run amok and enter your wild guess in the 1Question Survey form below.

Through My Window, I Can See A Silhouette of A Social Media Campaign originally appeared on GreyReview on October 19, 2009.

On October 2 2009, it launched ‘Follow and Retweet us on Twitter‘ contest. Weekly winners get free Amazon.com vouchers; monthly winners get free stays at the hotel. But I think its Grand Chrismas prize is the main attraction: 3Days-2Nights stay at its newly renovated Executive Room, MacBook and iPod.

RoyalPlaza sent me ‘this might interest you’ tweet, informing me about the contest. Most likely, @royalplazatweet remembered the past conversations I had with them and noted my interest in their hotel rooms. I found the tweet relevant to me (so will its customers and prospects).

Key takeaways:

• Branding through conversations Twitter allows companies to stay in touch with its customers and prospects. Through conversations with customers and prospects, you can impress upon them your brand promise and image. This posting is mainly motivated the pleasant conversation this author had with @royalplazatweet. Probably, with more great conversations with more people, more mentions in social media space. Result: Free publicity.
• Serve contextual tweets Over time, you can get better understandings of your community members on Twitter. Each with specific needs and interests, in relation to your products.
• Response to tweets, fast Be responsive in your tweets. Even when you don’t have the answer with the queries, it’s good to let those who tweeted that you’ve read their tweets and will get back to them, as soon as they can.
• Growing community needs enticements Contests seem to be a popular method to entice people to increase Followers count on Twitter. But its effectiveness is still debatable, as it works for some but not others. For @royalplazatweet, its number of Followers has been steadily increasing since the contest started.

Don’t Know Much About RoyalPlaza on Scotts Hotel But I Think They Serve Good Tweets originally appeared on GreyReview on October 3, 2009.

The Study is conducted by the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics; sponsored by Cisco. To determine the Broadband Quality Score, the researchers analyzed a total of 24 million records sourced from broadband tests using Speedtest.net (Ookla) during May 2008 and May – July 2009

This year, the study covers a total of 66 countries (and 13 are from Asia); additional 24 countries compared to 2008, plus new analysis on broadband quality in more than 240 cities. In terms of Broadband Leadership score, among Asian countries, Malaysia is behind South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan; ahead of China and India.

Asian Countries and Broadband Leadership, Broadband Quality Score and Penetration 2009

In the Broadband Leadership Matrix, Malaysia is placed in between ‘Leap Frog’ group and ‘Catch up’ group.

Malaysia is among the countries with the slowest download speed; only faster than South Africa, Tunisia, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya.

Download Speed, by Country

In terms of Broadband Quality Score, Malaysia is in the ‘Below Today’s Applications Threshold’ category.

Broadband Quality Score, by Country

More about the Broadband Quality Study here.

Malaysian Broadband is ‘Below Today’s Applications Threshold’: Broadband Quality Study 2009 originally appeared on GreyReview on October 2, 2009.

He also mentioned Twitter in 2006 is the “last time there has been a significant web application that comes along the social media space and captivated the whole world.” Interesting observation. Anyway, here are audio snippets from his keynote, accompanied by his slides.

Overview of Social Media landscape

What’s Hot, What’s Not

How many friends do you have?

Youth and Social Networks

Age Groups and Social Networks

Web Evolution

Maturing Social Networks

TechCrunch Quote

The Road Ahead for Social Networks

The Shifts

You can view Ian Stewart’s entire presentation slides here.

What’s Now, What’s Next for Social Networking: Ian Stewart, Friendster (with audio clips) originally appeared on GreyReview on September 25, 2009.

Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

In the dot-com era, e-commerce changed the way we conduct business activities. Social media is changing the way we interact and converse with the market. Memes shifting from transactional (e-commerce) to conversational (social media).

Social Media World Forum Asia: Is Social Media a Fad? originally appeared on GreyReview on September 22, 2009.

So, the call-for-action MUFORS website invites users to submit their pledges; be the change agent. Pledges can be made in the forms of text messages (SMS), photo or videos. Those who made the pledges are expected to honor them on September 09 2009, designated as Malaysians Unite for Road Safety day. This road safety campaign comes with social media ingredients – YouTube, Facebook, news feed, rating and poll.

As the time of this posting, MUFORS garnered over 99,000 pledges. And it’s unclear who’s behind this initiative and kudos to them. Anyway, go make your pledge today (I’ve just made mine).

UPDATE: This campaign started on August 18 2009 and supported by highway operator, PLUS and its partners. Thanks @feistyflo.

This Is NOT Your Plain Old Road Safety Campaign originally appeared on GreyReview on September 3, 2009.

By the way, in case you don’t know what Posterous is, it is a dead simple blogging service (and it seems Michael Arrington is a fan). Since its launch in June 2008, Posterous has mastered the art of incremental improvements and each feature release resulted in even greater simplification of blogging. Some of the fabulous features of Posterous are autopost everywhere, post tagging via email, group blogging, group blog doubled as email list and Posteorus iPhone app.

Now, back to the guessing game. According to the United Nations, the Earth population is expected to reach 7 billion by 2013. I assume there’s more than 100,000 Posterous users, judging from its increasing popularity. Now, with a current total of, say, 125,000 users and a stubbornly consistent 25% month-on-month growth for 49 straight months, Posterous’ user base will exceed the 7 billion mark by September 2013 (see here for the crude calculation). BUT, as Garry Tan indicated in his tweet, it’s an optimistic projection. Not to imply that there won’t be a groundswell of Posterous users, but the projection is sure bursting and brimming with wild flashes of optimism!

Current Posterous population at 125,000 with 25% month-on-month growth, how close to the actuals, Messrs Agarwal and Tan?

UPDATE: I’ve requested Garry Tan for feedback on the estimation, but he can’t comment.

Posterous to Surpass Earth Population by 2013 IF Only.. originally appeared on GreyReview on September 2, 2009.