If you’re building your site for the web savvy, that’s quite a different crowd than the “my kids just got me onto Facebook” set. How do you accommodate both? It’s probably not just as simple as putting a phone number on every web page, but that wouldn’t hurt. But then, is it about your website at all?

The idea is that there are a lot of people who read blogs, some of which you never intended to reach. In my case, I figured that I would reach developers mostly, and some of those tech people interested in social media. However, because I write about “conversations” and “audiences” at times, I have had discussions with educators, librarians and journalists. These are people I never intended to target, but I have purely by accident.

When dealing with the FeedBurner changes, Jorge Escobar felt that an audience is an audience:

if you and your blog are one (which is my personal case) and my blog headlines are being seen along with other headlines (which is what happens in any RSS reader as well as in FriendFeed) there is a valid point that people are subscribing to my content and could be counted as part of my audience.

Granted, I am taking this quote completely out of its original context, but the meaning is that people subscribed to Jorge on FriendFeed are looking at all of his content, including his blog. However, the people on FriendFeed have subscribed to you, the person, because they found you interesting.

So, how do we distinguish between those people that subscribe directly to your post and those that “passively” subscribe through something like FriendFeed? Should we write content, be it on the blog or a simple comment on FriendFeed and Twitter, that caters to all of the people that may read it? Or do we write content specific to the audience that may be reading?

For example, this blog is technical so most topics stay fairly technical (except things like today). On FriendFeed, things are still somewhat technical, but there is much more “conversational” topics as well like a virtual watercooler. On Twitter, I stay somewhat technical with a few other bits of commentary, but mostly in the social media topic. So, where do we draw the line? How do we deal with each audience differently? Should we deal with each audience differently?

I know this is some significant rambling on a Monday morning, but with the proliferation of social services, there is a definite distinction between these potential audiences. The question ends up being, do we care what knowledge the reader has? Using Chris Brogan’s example, someone who just got onto Facebook probably will not read this blog directly, and probably shouldn’t. However, they may enjoy reading some of the content I aggregate using FriendFeed. This is more due to the nature of the way that FriendFeed works as well.

Audiences tend to grow organically as well. People that have found my content on FriendFeed may have found it completely indirectly. As an example, Louis Gray subscribed to me ages ago. Robert Scoble could have found me through Louis recommendation, and Alex Scoble found me because of his brother Robert. Alex is very active on FriendFeed with tons of people who are not really technical, so there is a completely different group of people that are now exposed to content they likely would not have seen before.

Due to this ever-changing group of people, it reinforces our need to be “natural”. Do we try to force our content to fit all of the potential readers? Absolutely not. If I tried to reach all of the people that have subscribed in some way, the content here would become very generic. I would need to find the commonality between all of these groups of people. If you tried to find some topic that all of these people were interested in, you would probably fail. That is, you would fail until you realized that the commonality is you and your content. If these people have subscribed to your content, they know that some days you will write something they are not interested in.

So, are audiences different? Absolutely. Do we need to talk to each audience differently? Overall, we probably are, just due to the variety of content that we produce. Should we try to reach everyone with every post? Absolutely not, because we would be diluting the value of what we post. In any case, the need to keep the content “natural” must be remembered or we could lose our audience.

In the past week, we saw the ever reliable Rackspace go down, taking a whole bunch of sites with it. Just a few days later, Authorize.net went down due to a fire. TechCrunch relates the seriousness of this outage:

Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites…

Now, imagine if you are an ecommerce website like Toys R Us. Your host, or even your CDN, goes down. If this is during your peak season (Nov. and Dec.), you could lose millions of dollars … in an hour. If your payment processing goes down, the situation becomes more interesting. You cannot make transactions, but your site still looks live. This is potentially more frustrating for customers, who may have been willing to wait for an outage to clear. The “odd errors” customers are likely to see when part of the infrastructure goes down, could cause them to go to another site for their purchases. So, what should you do?

First, if you are a major ecommerce site, you should ensure that your main hosting services are properly redundant. So, if your hosting provider loses a data center, your site should not be impacted. This is not necessary, or affordable,  for smaller sites, but for ecommerce you need to ensure reliability. The main idea with an ecommerce site is that you need to “keep the lights on”. What if your favorite provider does not have redundancy across data centers? In this case, you should look into a smaller and cheaper hosting provider as backup. If you always have your site deployed to a backup server, you can quickly redirect services to the backup site. Granted, their are a lot of pieces in this idea, like the DNS and database servers, but if you have the potential of losing significant revenue due to an outage of one hour you have to take precautions. In some cases, you could even be using these backup servers as external beta servers, so that you do not feel like you are throwing away money.

In the case of Authorize.net’s outage, you can take an example from Twitter. Whenever Twitter has had high loads or general database problems, they turn off a feature like searching. As annoying as that feels from the user perspective, they manage to keep the lights on, but with a limited feature set. Going back to the ecommerce example, if your check processing provider goes down, it would be nice to be able to turn them off, but still accept other forms of payment. Even more impressive would be the ability to quickly switch from one provider to another. Wouldn’t you rather accept payments for a limited number of payment methods, than not accept payments at all? Maybe you can still generate 50% of your normal revenue during that time.

I am assuming most of my readers do not run ecommerce sites, but there is a lot we can learn from these issues. Even a social media application like Twitter wants to maintain as much uptime as possible. So, they turn off search capabilities for a little while. Almost any application can benefit from the ability to turn off a specific feature at any given time. What are you doing for your site to keep the lights on?

Real-time web is a publisher’s thing, not a consumer thing. There are few situations, usually disasters,  where I might be in need of a real-time web. The geek will tell you that it is great to be able track what people are saying when a plane crashes, Obama is inaugurated, or a famous pop star dies. The problem I have with those examples is that life isn’t like that every day.

So, outside of emergencies and major breaking news, do people know what to use the real time web for? The mass consumer likely does not. This can be seen in the comments that Facebook receives as they inch closer to becoming the main real-time platform. Why have “the masses” not been converted into real-time zealots? This is probably due to the lack of a defining problem.

Valeria Maltoni wrote a somewhat related post today regarding the “Social Media Program Lifecycle“. The basic idea is that a marketing campaign that uses social media goes through a lifecycle, and you can expect to see a certain level of “buzz” during each part of the lifecycle. In the post, she describes a graph that visualizes the “dynamics of attention”:

…distinguishes between the actions of the company and/or agency, which are designed to create higher, artificial buzz, and the reactions of the public involved. You can see in the graphic, how those generate lower buzz, yet genuine (here we say authentic) engagement.

I recommend you read the post to get the full idea, but also notice something very important. There are zero mentions of the real-time web or Twitter specifically. Facebook is mentioned, but only in the applications perspective. Blogs and reviews are mentioned, but more in the terms of engagement. Valeria is well respected in this arena, so why does she omit mentions of real-time?

As much as it pains me to say this, the “real time web” is currently in a hype cycle and is a solution in search of a problem. The breaking news usages will not make a revenue-generating industry around this. There has to be some problem, some pain that this solves. We have seen some possibilities with reputation and brand monitoring, but that is highly focused within the more marketing aspects of any business. Is there some larger problem this solves? We cannot really say that instant communication is the game-changing thing, because instant messaging broke that barrier years ago.

Twitter probably is not the real long-term winner for the real-time web. Twitter, and the concept of status updates, is really just an enabler. What problems can the real-time web solve? And what type of application will really solve that problem? Whoever figures that out will be worth a lot of money.

This is the internet and the way it works. Get used to it.

Jesse Stay points to the general concept as well.

The problem with today’s “Groundswell” is it now targets the personal brand as well as the corporation. We see that in Arrington’s situation, as well as several others that have recently been targeted. It could have happened on Twitter. It could have happened on Youtube, or Digg, or anywhere else. The fact is when someone the majority likes is targeted, or the service the majority likes is targeted, or has the appearance of being attacked, the mob goes in defense mode, attacking back.

Personal feelings become more involved now because we are more directly involved. If we go back a few years, the only place people could comment about a blog post was on the blog itself. Now, there is Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed and a whole lot more. Now there are several places where the mob can form, but some places it may be more likely than others.

Steven Hodson mentions part of the reason that we see this behavior.

As with human nature, and anything we touch, there is always a negative side, the dirty side of the story that no-one likes to talk about or admit to. The same applies to Social Media and we see it rear its ugly with every case of Internet flash mobs of hate and recrimination.

You can see human nature pushing through on almost every social media site. If you get something controversial on Digg, I bet that the comments will be just as bad as those Arrington mentioned from FriendFeed, maybe even worse. The problem that arises on some sites is that all of the comments are together, as in Digg and FriendFeed. Sites like Twitter do not have as much of a problem because they have comments strewn throughout a stream. The big difference is that when the comments are centralized, a conversation or argument ensues. On Twitter, there may be a few @replies, but it is much harder to maintain a conversation.

So, why blame FriendFeed specifically? Why not blame Digg, the father of all things comment related? Obviously, you really can’t blame the platform, because they did not make the comments. They can apologize for being an enabler, but that is as far as it goes. If you blame the people, things become more difficult. This is the internet where anonymity rules, so you don’t always know who you are dealing with.

I would say let’s just all act like adults and treat each other with respect, but I know that will not happen overall. You can choose what conversations you get involved in. If you see a thread that talks about you in a bad way, be the bigger person and do not join the fight. If you have a platform as popular as TechCrunch, I would believe that there is more power in a blog post than a single thread on FriendFeed. Will you get nasty comments on the blog? Yes, but you do not need to respond to them either.

So, how do we get around this problem? Steven Hodson thinks we need a John Lennon for social media. Honestly, I think we have to accept it for what it is. This is the internet. You can choose to ignore some of the hate and vitriol, or you can be overcome by it.

So, I may be called stupid for this, but they have given the average user far too many options, and they get confusing. One bright spot is the simplicity of sharing all of the media types. If you look at the image below, you will see the image that most blogs have included.

What people seem to have conveniently missed are the rest of the options. Most blogs have been excited about the inclusion of the “Everyone” option. My problem is that they just made this sharing process complicated. So, you can choose Everyone, your Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends or Friends. That way, you have some list sharing capabilities that Twitter does not have. FriendFeed does have similar options, so this is not entirely new functionality, just an incremental improvement again. Then there is the last option, Customize. This brings you to a popup that allows you to customize who can see the message. This is where things get really confusing.

The idea is that you can select multiple options for the share, or hide it from specific people. Obviously, there is a lot of power here, but this is getting more difficult than just sharing a status update. This is becoming a messaging platform. This is also overly complicated. If I want to share with a few people, or multiple lists, I have to click at least 3 times after typing in my update.

This is yet another area where Facebook could learn from FriendFeed. FriendFeed recently added the ability to share a message with multiple people. You can see how they do this in the image below. First you see “My Feed”, and I typed in “building43″ which was “autocompleted”. I can keep typing in various names of people, groups and rooms. It is completely unobtrusive, and feels just like an email. More importantly, it is really simple with autocomplete.

Most likely, we will see a few changes in these sharing options before they are released to everyone. If they do not, they really run the risk of people not changing anything about what they do. Facebook has some good ideas here, and could solidify their position by making it really simple. If they don’t, there will probably be tons of people complaining about the latest thing they don’t like about Facebook. Hopefully, they realize how to change this and they do it quickly. I am not sure if I can take another batch of complaints like we heard about the home page.

We’ve just released a new Platform API method, fql.multiquery, which lets you send a batch of queries that Facebook processes all at once. What’s more, you can use the results from query A, for example, in query B, even when both queries are included within the same fql.multiquery call. Simply specify the name of query A as if it were a virtual table when you formulate query B.

Then there was the announcement of the new search coming. This is fairly big news as it is just like Twitter search as long as people’s profiles and updates are public.

With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone.

Of course, these are not huge changes, but it is the type of incremental change that Facebook has continued to implement on its platform. Some people may complain that “Facebook is too closed” or “walled gardens will fail”. There was even a good conversation on FriendFeed about this. There is a very strong feeling from developers that a closed system like Facebook can not succeed. While I tend to agree that a completely closed system will have difficulties, Facebook has slowly opened up little by little to a decently open system. They still have some work to do before they become as open as Twitter, but the foundation has been started.

Because of the FriendFeed conversation, I had both posts up at the same time. That is when it hit me. Facebook has seen the problems developers have had with API rate limits on Twitter and various other sites. In two separate posts, they just made the possible search applications very viable. Even if there is a rate limit, you can batch queries together to help avoid this problem. Again, it is an incremental change, this being an improvement over what other APIs currently implement.

Because of these incremental changes, people may not see that Facebook keeps leaping over other competing applications. Because of their original “closed nature”, people have not noticed that Facebook is just as open as many other platforms. As I said before, they still have some work to do, but they are positioning themselves as a giant platform. Fairly soon it will be very hard not to notice.

Photo Courtesy of "SIR: Poseyal Knight of the DESPOSYNI's on Flickr

Readers of this blog have probably noticed the lack of political or religious content regardless of what is happening in the world. I try to avoid topics like these because they are extremely polarizing. Most of the time, people on both sides of the argument have valid points, and there is no clear answer. For the most part, I avoided politics during the US presidential election, but today I wanted to post about the Iran election. Almost everyone has been talking about this topic, and many people have mentioned how this has been a major turning point for Twitter. Those people are wrong.

Valeria Maltoni has an excellent post on this topic as well. She does mention that she believes new media has led the way as well.

The Economist says the real winner was an unusual hybrid of old and new media. I beg to differ because new media clearly led the way this time. It was clearly in the lead from the beginning and remained that way for its ability to not just inform (ok, in some cases misinform), but to touch such a diverse audience, to reach out from the screens to the hearts of the people – because everyone was participating in the news, not just watching from afar.

She is somewhat wrong as well, but more because she did not take this far enough even though she mentions the real winner.

The social media community is the real winner. Yes, I mean me, you and all of those people using sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Why are we all the winner? Twitter is the tool that people used to promote news about the election. Did Twitter make this happen? No, Iranians used their cell phones to connect to Twitter and post updates. Did the cell phone companies make this happen? There is a better argument for them, but they have been very silent during much of these events.

The difference here is the people. People connected on Facebook, and notices have been posted on Mir Hossein Moussavi’s Facebook page. If you look at some “old media”, you will notice an interesting contrast. On twitter, people have been posting links to articles and videos. On a site like CNN, even when the story talks about Moussavi’s Facebook page, there are no links to the page in the article.

When websites have been blocked in Iran, people setup proxy servers so that the content was still available. Were these people all Iranian? I highly doubt that. This has been an effort by the people on various sites. Each of these sites was just a tool that was used. People have found ways around publicly posting information, sometimes spreading proxy addresses through Twitter DMs and Facebook messages.

The community continues to power the spreading of information, and that is what is important.

Photo Information: I highly recommend you look at the photos on Flickr where the one above came from. Some very moving images.

So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you’ve added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog’s feed.

I understand that they are just trying to help, but the trend is what concerns me. First, let’s look at some numbers of a few blogs and FriendFeed users. This blog had 1544 subscribers yesterday. Today I have 2869 subscribers, with the gain mostly due to people subscribing to my FriendFeed account. Louis Gray’s blog had around 8000 subscribers almost a week ago. Today, it shows that he now has 13814 subscribers (he is louisgray on FriendFeed). Lastly, we have the Stay N’ Alive blog that had around 950 subscribers earlier this week. Due to Jesse Stay’s FriendFeed account, the blog now has 4730 subscribers.

Now, I am all for the ego stroking goodness of my subscribers growing, but the problem is whether this growth can be considered natural. I will not go into the true accuracy of the Feedburner statistics, but at least it was a benchmark of how many people were reading your RSS feed. FriendFeed puts a layer of abstraction between the blog and your readers. I know FriendFeed can drive some good traffic to the blog, but returning a subscriber count for the blog does not seem quite right. FriendFeed is an aggregator, so my subscribers are really subscribing to me, not my blog.

The real problem, as I said earlier, is the possible trend. Using FriendFeed, I post an update to Twitter and Facebook whenever I write a blog post. What if Twitter and Facebook started to report subscriber numbers because I post a blog link there? Granted, my subscriber numbers would not go up that much, but the inflation of those numbers would cause the subscriber statistic to be completely useless. My reasoning is that applications like FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook provide you with passive subscribers. They get links to your blog whether they want to or not. People subscribing to your blog’s RSS feed did so specifically using their reader of choice.

Nothing against the FriendFeed team, as they have always been awesome, but I think the subscriber count reporting may be a bad idea. I would prefer that they remove the feature (not that I have a choice) and continue adding awesomeness to FriendFeed itself.