Here are a few wonderful photos I found while browsing Flickr about this subject. Stunning!

All Rights Reserved (c) Cuba Gallery

All Rights Reserved (c) Ben Heine

All Rights Reserved (c) Job Earth

All Rights Reserved (c) Cuba Gallery

All Rights Reserved (c) Lord V

All Rights Reserved (c) Ben Heine

All Rights Reserved (c) Adam Foster

All Rights Reserved (c) Adam Foster

All Rights Reserved (c) Patrick Smith Photography

All Rights Reserved (c) Katarina Stefanovic

I think that the graph below speaks by itself, right?

It’s pretty clear that doubling the unique visitors in a few months is a big deal, right?

At the same time, you can notice that Techcrunch‘s number of visitors has been frozen in the past year, definitely not a good sign. I’m myself reading it less and less while one my first sources of tech news is slowly becoming TheNextWeb, the new entrant that is slowly getting a big slice of the tech-news pie.

Mashable, instead, is always growing without any pause. No surprises about that and both Mashable and TheNextWeb deserve that.

Do the graphs above mean that Arrington is really focused on selling soon so he’s not putting into the company enough effort to grow the numbers?

The Problem
I wanted to create a stream of all the stuff that I shared online, including (1) photos taken on the go or (2) interesting news found everyday on Google Reader. Then, I wanted this stream to be posted to various social networks, in realtime. At the same time, I didn’t want to use this blog for this purpose.

The Alternatives
After some research, I found that Tumblr and Posterous were the two best alternatives to make that done. While I knew those two services since their launch, I never had the time to really look into them. My only experience with Posterous was in regards of our Twimbow’s blog, but we just needed a quick way to push updates to our users without spending too much time in creating a blog from scratch. On the contrary, I never used Tumblr so far.

The solution

Well, I have to say that none of the alternatives above succeeded in solving my problem completely. While both could easily become my centralized repository for photos shared online and Tumblr could also import my Google Reader Shared Items‘ feed, the latter fails in doing this in realtime since it seems it doesn’t support pubsubhubbub, that is a way to get realtime updates about the news I favorite on Google Reader. The result is that these news get posted all together, something annoying for my Facebook/Twitter friends.

At the same time, I didn’t find an effective way to get my favorite news imported to my Posterous’ stream and auto-posted to my social networks. So, why both could perform the first task, both failed with the second.

The Winner

Despite what I said in the previous point, I ended up sticking with Posterous. You can find my stream here: http://lucafiligheddu.posterous.com.

I found it way lighter than Tumblr and, for sharing photos, the ability to easily do that by email is a winner. Frher om this standpoint, Posterous is just perfect. Moreover, while Tumblr provides a very nice app to share things from my BlackBerry, I found it almost unusable because of its tremendous slowness. Lots of attempts failed because of connection errors and timeouts.

Last but not least, while I clearly understand what Posterous is, Tumblr looks too much for being like Posterous itself and offers few features to compete with WordPress.

Bonus

How did I manage to post my Google Reader shared items to Twitter (at least) in realtime? Well, Google2Tweet does it very well, despite I haven’t found any way to post them to Posterous yet (with an excerpt…).

A few years ago when I wanted to share an interesting news, I simply wrote a blog post where I quoted the original source and, simply, added my comments to it. This was pretty much the only way to share the news and, if you were new at blogging, a good way to catch the attention of the blogger who published that news and make him/her visit your blog.

Alternative ways were (are) Digg, Delicious or Stumbleupon (the last one very effective), too, but some bloggers used to first quote the source on their blog then Digg their own post to gain more visibility.

Nowadays social media changed this behavior completely. It is very rare for me to do what I mentioned above. Why? It is just less effective than before and, above all, you get a much smaller audience. There are lots of people who could be interested in that news but are not your blog’s readers. Moreover, these people could be a potential good channel to spread that news even more.

This is certainly valid for news you find over the internet, but it could be very helpful to spread the word about your own blog posts, right?

1) Like Button

The like button is provided by Facebook and lets users share, on their FB profile, that they “liked” a certain news. It is not my favorite way to share a news, but for people with lots of FB friends, it could be quite effective. It also offers blog’s owners a pretty good way to check how many users “liked” their story.

2) Retweet Button

Sharing a news/post on Twitter is a must. I noticed that if I don’t (or others don’t) post a new blog post on Twitter, it gets much less views. A retweet button is a must for your blog and it is a very quick way to share a post to your Twitter followers.

There are two main retweet buttons available: Tweetmeme and Easy Retweet. While the  former is more popular and they just launched a new version of their service, I’m currently using the latter since it show the actual views of your post thanks to the retweets and not the number of retweets it got. I find that number more useful to get a better idea on how much Twitter affected the views of that post.

3) Share on Facebook

This is another widget provided by Facebook and, honestly, I like this one better than the Like Button. This widget lets you post an excerpt of the news you are sharing together with an image, something that is more likely to catch the attention of your Facebook friends.

4) Digg It

While Kevin Rose‘s toy was very popular a few years ago, it lost most of its appeal lately. Fortunately, they just launched a new version recently and I definitely like it. You can also cross post to Twitter or Facebook at the same time.

5) Google Reader

A very good way to share a news you like is to “Favorite” it on Google Reader. Moreover, you can configure services like Twitterfeed to post your favorites on Twitter. Nice, right?

6) Feedly

If you use the awesome Feedly to read blogs and news, it offers an impressive number of ways to share a post. Just try it.

One thing that I believe is worth saying is that behind the art of sharing there is the power of knowledge and of staying on top of things. Thanks to people who share interesting news, if you use Twitter and Facebook you are more likely to come accross interesting stories worth reading. Thanks to everyone who shares!

I‘m writing this post from my BlackBerry and sitting near a wood just 20 meters from the beach where I just spend yesterday and this Sunday morning.

Unlike others, I took the decision to avoid working on weekends. There have been periods when I had to work, but since the arrival of my first son almost four years ago, I decided that my weekends were worth more than anything else.

If you have the fortune, like me, to work where your family is, weekends are the only moment when you can fully concentrate on it. I work a lot during the week, not less than 10-12 hours / day, so I can barely see my sons when I get up. And when I hear them asking me when Saturday is gonna come (so we can stay together), I look forward to it even more.

All that said, here are three reasons why you should always dedicate your weekends to your family:

1) Don’t feel guilty, most companies are closed on Saturdays so no interactions, no calls and emails are way lessa than usual. If you have something urgent to get done, work more during the week, but save Saturdays and Sundays for your family.

2) Any minute you don’t spend with your sons, is lost. It doesn’t come back and the time machine doesn’t exist. Do it now, don’t procrastinate.

3) Your sons need you and especially when they are very young, they ask for you, they want you! There will be a time when they will not ask for you anymore and it’s gonna be difficult for you to think of how much time you wasted not doing what you had to do.

Now, honestly, did I convince you? Are you still thinking of working next weekend?

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As both a WordPress user and a Thesis power user, the WordPress-Thesis debate caught my attention yesterday. The complete story is well summarized here.

In a nutshell, WordPress fouunding developer Matt Mullenweb stated that premium WordPress themes must be released under GPL license while Thesis developer Chris Pearson strongly disagreed.

I’m not a lawyer so I don’t want to dig into the details of this story too much (others did, way before this story started), but what I’d like to fully understand is what Matt really wants. Yes, because if you shout out loud about this subject, it means there is something that you want to achieve and, honestly, I don’t think it is only a matter of principles and laws.

Thesis is maybe the most powerful WordPress theme out there and it’s much more than a theme, it’s rather a framework. It’s so flexible that by using it on your WP website/blog you can change the appearence completely without the need of using another theme. That said, I have to say one of the reasons I’m sticking with WordPress is also thanks to Thesis.

So what? Any idea? Is it a problem that Chris is making very good and deserved money with it? Is it a problem that there is a network of affiliates that are making (a lot of) money out of it? In my opinion, Thesis is a big deal for WordPress and Matt should admit it, sooner or later.

UPDATE: check this post out, I agree completely.

UPDATE 2: check Matt’s reply to my comment on his blog

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If you are looking for a professional, state-of-the-art, effective, powerful and cheap way to send newsletters or direct email marketing campaigns to your user base, look no further: Mailchimp is your one-stop shopping.

We are successfully using it to send our Twimbow invites and I can tell you I can’t find anything Mailchimp doesn’t do. It does everything and in a very powerful way.

Creating a list is a joke, since Mailchimp lets you import it in 14 different ways. Then you have tons of templates for creating your email or you can just create your own.

The most powerful part of the story is, in my opinion, the dashboard. You get lots of very important information on how your campaign performed and, therefore, fine tuning it in order to get better results in the future.

Listing all the benefits we are getting from using Mailchimp would be a very long job, so please jump to their website and check by yourself. Highly recommended!

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After we released the first version of Twimbow, our web-based Twitter client, I realized more and more how true this statement is: users don’t know what they want.

People using Twimbow started asking us for “more columns”. Twimbow, unlike other clients, offers three columns only. I knew we were going to release something way better than “more columns” (the monitor, released yesterday), but users kept asking for that. What I slowly realized is that they were asking for more columns because no one offered them alternative ways to do the same without more columns. “More columns” was the only way made available by other Twitter clients to keep track of keywords on Twitter (search columns) or having a “type” of message always available in a certain column.

Since users had no alternatives, “more columns” was the only thing they could ask for. This is just an example, but I noticed that this is always true. Think of a touchscreen phone (where is the keyboard?) or an Apple mouse (where are the buttons?) or of other innovative “things” that offer you the functionality you want but in ways that are different to what you are used to.

In conclusion, another good reason to try to innovate and not imitate. Users ask for what they are used to, but there is always a lot of space to innovate and offer them something new that they never thought of.

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When releasing a new product/service, you have two main alternatives: you can (1) imitate a similar product and try to make yours better or (2) you can innovate.

Option #1 is certainly way easier than option #2, but the latter has a major advantage: if you do the right thing at the right time, you quickly jump ahead of competition.

Sometimes people could ask you for features they saw in your competitor’s product/service just because no one offered them something to do the same in a way they never experienced before. The challenge is to find that way. Apple did with the iPod and other products, other big and small players did it in other fields.

Focus on finding new alternative ways to offer your clients/users what they need, take time to discover what it is not obvious: it is challenging and way more difficult, but it will pay off in the long term.

The upcoming release of a new web version of YouTube for the iPhone is an important milestone in what I define the demise of standalone apps.

With the advent of HTML5, with the huge investments in R&D applied to the browser space (Safari 5, Chrome, Opera, Firefox 4, IE 9 etc.), with more and more services “in the cloud”, the need of stand-alone apps, in particular in the desktop world, is becoming less and less important for an internet user. In this perspective, Chrome is ahead of the competition since they are starting to release the so-called “Web Apps“, online services that can be installed inside the browser like apps.

This trend, definitely lead by Google, is slowly going to involve the mobile world as well, being the new YouTube for the iPhone a clear example.

On the other side, there are apps that can’t be run inside the browser yet. Aside from “proprietary” apps in some specific spaces (CAD, etc.), I still haven’t found a good alternative to a standalone newsgroup reader, Skype (of course) and a very powerful Instant Messenger app. Meebo is great, but it doesn’t work with my company’s internal Jabber network, for example.

In my opinion, there is still a lot of work to be done by companies that want to catch this opportunity, the right time is definitely now. With my company’s new venture, Twimbow, we are also focusing on a browser based service only, too. The new available technologies and development tools give us all the power to offer a service that could be even better than a standalone app.

What’s going to be the next app moving to the browser? Leave your comments below.

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