How Far We’ve Come

It’s amazing to think this was less than 20 years ago…

Conan’s Social Overload?

Someones always got to push the limits on Facebook… and today’s winner was Conan O’Brien. From what I gather, he spent an hour “hosting his show” on Facebook, to his 1.5 million fans.

Sounds like a smart idea — but rather than sharing a live video stream, he posted status updates… again and again, and again and then some more, non stop.

Now, this could go either way — either be incredibly annoying, or insanley brilliant. Annoying, well, because they took over their fan’s news feed. Brilliant, because for every ‘like’ or comment one of their fans would post, means ANOTHER group of friends would be exposed to CoCo and his show.

My first impression was that people would unlike the page en mass. When I first noticed it, they had 1,523,043 fans… by the end of the episode, they dropped to 1,522,047 — a loss of just under a thousand?

I’m guessing they lost a bunch more, but for every unlike, they probably picked up 5 more likes, simply because of the viral aspect of Facebook.

And on top of that, I suspect CoCo will pick up some additional exposure somewhere on broadcast news and blogs.

The only real question I  had at the end of it, is why didn’t this trip some sort of Facebook alert, to freeze his account after the 50th post, all a minute apart? (I counted 96 in total…)

All in all — I’d rank this one as a clever use of Facebook. Though, I don’t think every brand could pull it off.

Epic: Google Docs Animated

Stumped across this example of Google Docs in action…. not so much world processing, but a group of artists animated a Powerpoint presentation to make a pretty impressive video. Take a look,

Copy, Paste, Append?

Was browsing the CBC.ca website the other day reading the news, and I came across an interesting (though, potentially, annoying feature).

Find an article, any article — and copy some of the text. Then paste it. CBC, has found a way to add on a ‘read more’ call to action, along with a link to their page.

Smart? I don’t know — when I want to learn more about a particular word or phrase, I typically copy and paste into google — now, I’m searching for the two words, along with the entire ‘Read More…’ plug, returning 0 search results.

“We have travelled for almost four months with much suffering and pain,” one of the letters says.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/16/tamil-migrant-ship-toews.html#ixzz127ZmYYsg

Now my question is — if I can add text like this, what’s stopping a website from changing what I’m copying all together. How about “I just lifted this entire paragraph from website XYZ!”

Googling Adwords for Results

A great 1 minute video on how someone used Google Adwords to land himself a job interview…