SEO is long gone. Hail, OEO.

You know that kind of uber-science that applies to making your ridiculously designed, badly developed and utterly irrelevant website climb up the gazillion of steps in Google’s stairway to search heaven? Those “white” or “black” hat wizardry that Internet marketing gurus, SEO wizards and other Gandalf-like creatures are willing to perform (for a slight charge) to boost your company into mythical success?

It’s tagged SEO, for Search Engine Optimization. And it’s dead.

Amidst of a post-web 2.0 era struck by a recession and succumbing to the ultimate power sprouting out of the social media heaven, who needs SEO? There’s no search engine in Twitter, so who cares if your website is not listed in the first search results page? All that matters is to have a few hundreds of thousands of followers. Every person, service, website or even electrical appliance is on Twitter now, so who gives a damn about search engines?

Does SEO help you gain more friends in Facebook? No! Does SEO help you gain more followers in Twitter? No! Search engines are R.I.P., done, dead, kaput and in a state of panic. So forget about all the SEO crap, jump on the social media rescue wagon before the rest of the web plummets into cyber oblivion and let your social presence make you really famous!

Where do we go now?

So it’s the end of the Web as we know it, but what now? How can the social media help you get rich and famous? This is where the new wizardry comes in place: introducing the art of Own Ego Optimization, or OEO for short, the next-gen rituals that are guaranteed to boost you into the highest heights of Twitterland and the rest of the social network universes out there.

Now, out of an untold gesture of generosity, I am about to unfold the well hidden mysteries of OEO, so you can take advantage of this new extraordinary phenomenon for your own benefit without having to spend a penny. Pay attention, and you shall achieve social greatness!

So without further ado, here’s the ultimate spellbook of OEO wizardry:

1. Orientation: If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years and you’re not on Twitter already, do it now. This is the most important step of your road to success.
2. No-one really wants to see you or your friend’s ugly bald head popping in their Twitter client next to your tweets. Instead, use the photo of a hot girl with big cleavage. It works wonders.
3. Follow as many people as you can. Someone tweeted about politics? Follow them. Or maybe someone tweeted about sports? Follow them. If someone tweets about new techniques to clean decayed elephant teeth cavities, follow them. The rule of thumb is, if it tweets, follow it.
4. Argue with everyone. Be an a**hole. Let everybody argue with you, debate you, and hate you. Many people have become famous using this spell alone (ha, no I won’t link them here, sorry!). Just remember: there is no bad publicity!
5. Feel free to act like a web celeb, even if you still haven’t become one. This will make you look like one of those uber-cool online celebrities. Actually it’s pretty easy; all you have to do is tweet about your daily activities, i.e. “bored, going to bed” / “out with @someguy, drinking beers” / “lol, you shuldn’t twerereet when yo’re drun k” etc.
6. Get all of your friends on Twitter, then tweet about things you do in common, i.e. “out with @supercooldude and @awesomepal drinking beers and designing our next web 4.0 app“
7. Organize and host conferences, un-conferences and social media seminars. (Caution, this is a really powerful spell!)
8. It’s pretty obvious but still has to be mentioned for the goofballs: constantly tweet about social media, Twitter and OEO
9. Re-tweet every 1 out of 5 of your friend’s tweets. It makes them feel special and they get to love you more. As a rule of thumb, if a tweet is not absolutely and utterly pointless, re-tweet it.
10. Get yourself a Friendfeed account, so you have something to do when the failwhale beast appears on your screen and you spare the suicide.

These are the pretty basic rules. Stick with them, and soon you’ll be a Twitter celebrity! Yes, it’s that easy. Many people have gone this path and so can you! All you have to do is dare to try it.

(If you found this post useful, tweet / digg / stumbleUpon / blog it by any means and go follow me on Twitter!)

Wordle fun

I just discovered wordle.net, a fun website that lets you visualize the most prominent key words in a bunch of text as a “word cloud”, a website or a feed. Here’s the generated image for my blog:

Head on to wordle.net to create your own.

Bye bye Facebook

I have finally decided to delete my Facebook account. I could write a long post analyzing this decision, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just quote a short note that I’m going to publish on my Facebook wall.

I have decided to leave Facebook. I never really liked it in the first place. It was fun commenting on your photos and your status messages, learning all those little details about you that I never really cared for and watching you throwing Britney Spears’ to each other.

I won’t miss the myriads of utterly useless groups you’ll continue to become members of, nor the bazillions of ugly applications cluttering your “walls”. And I’m pretty sure Facebook won’t hire a designer before either cold fusion replaces oil or Google hires one.

I am going to delete my account on February the 27th, a day after my birthday. This way you can all wish me happy birthday by writing on my wall and save the phone call or sms! (That is, before Facebook reads this note, gets mad and kicks me out of it before that date!)

I am jumping off the social crap wagon, but you’ll still be able to find me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis). That is, until I delete myself from there too, but I don’t think this will happen pretty soon.

I urge you to re-consider your goals in your everyday time-wasting habits and ponder the question of whether you need to create detailed records of your lives on some (rich by now) twenty-something guy’s servers. I won’t do that anymore.

So take care, have fun and be well. I hope to see you in the real world.

Do online identities go to heaven?

It looks like creating an online identity in the post-web 2.0 era that we’re living in is essential. People go into great lengths to present themselves in the online world, participate in as many social networks they can, flood microblogging services like Twitter and Friendfeed with their thoughts, opinions and emotions, share their photos on photo-sharing sites, upload short video clips of themselves on sites like Seesmic, and the list goes on and on and on.

After great effort, we manage to create a solid social online identity to expose our selves and our lives to the public, updating it with fragments of our personalities and everyday activities. But what happens to our online identity when we die? We are all going to die one day — that’s for sure. Have you ever wondered what is going to happen to your online identity in that case?

All of a sudden, you will stop updating. People may nudge you, poke you, send you direct messages, but they wouldn’t get any replies. E-mails that are reaching your inbox will never receive a reply. Cold silence will come out of your Twitter account and your Facebook friends will wonder what’s keeping you busy. Your blog’s RSS feed won’t show any new activity and all the myriads of social networks you joined during your life will host an account that never updates.

How will your online friends know what happened to you if none of your friends or family members are using those services as well? Will people ever wonder what may have happened to me if all of a sudden I stop posting updates on Twitter? Are they going to search for me in other social networks, or leave a comment on my blog, or e-mail me asking why I’ve stopped participating? No person in my physical environment is using Twitter, so no-one’s going to post news about my death.

Will people care after all? Is there any “friend” or “follower” that is going to care that I’ve ceased to post and to exist? And if they got to find out, how would they react? Would they mourn, sob, laugh, re-tweet the news of my death or just un-follow me since no more updates would ever be coming from my account?

Finally, what is going to happen with the information that I’ve submitted to all these sites and services? Will my Facebook account or my Flickr photos still be there, years after I die? Would my family be able to browse my photos, my social networking timeline, my videos and my e-mails and all the myriads of tiny fragments I’ve submitted to the Internet (e.g. comments on other people’s posts)? Would it make them feel better if the data was still there, or would they merely be unable to delete my accounts (since they don’t know the passwords)?

I can’t help but ponder all these questions. I don’t know what’s best to be done. Entrepreneurs could build on this idea, and create a “social memorial” or “web graveyard” for the lost souls of online identities of departed persons. They could even create a service that monitors all online activity of every person and declare them as “missing” if they don’t update in any online service for some time (i.e. a year), or declare them as “dead” after more time passes. They could even crawl the web for every piece of information regarding that person, gather it and create an entry in their Social Memorial so people will remember them.

They could even give the option for their family and friends to pay in order to promote their loved one’s profile to the top of the list, so they could gain more new “mourners”. There may be a grader for these deceased online identities, measuring the value of each one and creating lists about who was the most social one. Such a service may exists even now, as I’m writing this. If there is, please leave a comment and let me know, and if there’s not, I’m damn sure there’s going to be one in the future. This is the social era, everything can be used (and abused) in the name of profit!

For the ambitious entrepreneurs that may be reading this, here’s one more idea: give people the ability to sign up for such a service while they’re living, so they can link it to all their social networks and other sources of personal information. The service would monitor all these sources and upon a prolonged lack of activity, it would create a memorial for them. There you go, I give you this idea for free — it’s too morbid for me to monetize on.

Update [20 May 2009]: Looks like somebody decided to monetize on the premise. I was damn sure this would happen.

World of Twittercraft: Social Media are MMORPGs

I haven’t been a hardcore gamer in my life, except for manically trying to finish the Monkey Island series when I was younger and perhaps the short burst I had with Grand Theft Auto, but I don’t usually play games. I did, however, indulge into trying out World of Warcraft (WoW) which led to some serious time-wasting that could almost be classified as an addiction.

Having played WoW for almost a year before quitting and indulging into social media lately, I can’t help but witness the similarities between the two (of course this applies to almost all MMORPGs, but I’m referring to WoW since it’s the only one I’ve ever used).

A whole new world

World of Warcraft is actually the MMORPG version of the game Warcraft, and Blizzard (the company that created it) did a very nice job in creating a massive and diverse universe for its players. The world is quite big, spanning continents with dozens of areas, each being special in its own way. It’s not so trivial to explore all the different lands in the game since the world is just too big.

Social media, on the other hand, don’t have the equivalent of space – there is no such thing as a “world”. However, explorations are not at all absent, since there are many different “areas” that users can explore. For example, Facebook sports applications as well as groups, and even browsing all of them could possibly take years. There’s something new to explore, and there are even applications (games) on Facebook that are plain versions of MMORPG’s (e.g. Mob Wars).

A parallel universe

Even though scientists have yet to decide upon a commonly accepted universal theory about the nature of our universe, it’s pretty safe to say that we (at least physically) appear to be living in the same universe with each other. However, our players in WoW are living in their own universe. It doesn’t really matter if that universe exists only inside Blizzard’s servers, it’s still a valid universe with its own space-time and its own laws. It is a parallel universe to ours, albeit in a Matrix-like fashion (maintained by computers).

Who’s to claim that the Internet isn’t a parallel universe as well? We all know we can go “online”, but where is that online space? Your online identity exists not in the real world (there you have your “actual” identity) but in the Internet world. You can log in anytime to this world and interact with it. You “peek” into this universe every time you launch your favorite Twitter browser, so you can interact with other “online” versions of actual people (or even robots – bots). You enter it every time you’re on Facebook, and in a more direct way when you log into the 3D virtual world of Second Life.

Be it newsgroups, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, WoW or even the web, the Internet is a parallel universe created and maintained by humans with the aid of machines. Each one of us has their own (possibly multiple) identity in each of such worlds.

Levelling

One of the most important aspects of WoW is that of levelling. You start at level 1 as a young and poor guy (or gal) with practically no knowledge of surviving in the world. You soon begin to learn how to combat, so to protect your life from predators as well as how to make money out of the items you get by looting their corpses, so you can buy new clothes, weapons etc. Every time you gain enough experience, you “level” (used as a verb) and become more powerful; your health, strength and other stats are increased and you can buy arms and clothes of higher quality.

Levelling makes the world really addictive mainly for two reasons: first, players always want to gain “one more level”, so they never stop playing; second, because they’re in a constant direct/indirect competition with all the other players, so they need to level up and become better than them. This is so true in WoW, that having a character of the highest possible level brings much joy to players and makes them feel rather superior to their lower level peers.

People are always in direct or indirect competition to each other in our society and it’s always enjoyable to feel “better” than others or “superior” to them. Social media was built on this premise, which is the key to their success: people want to show-off and become “better” than others, even if it’s only for their online presence (they may still suck in the real world). Showing off is perhaps the most important reason people are using social media for.

But since the media itself is an arena where players from every corner of the planet can compete in becoming the coolest person in the universe, the idea of levelling is not absent. Not only does a person’s status increase by the mere number of followers in Twitter, or friends in Facebook, but there are dedicated services like Grader that calculate a score in the range of 1-100 that’s based on how important your online “character” is. Even top user lists are compiled, where people compete to climb up and beat their peeps, in either ethical or “unethical” ways.

Socializing

We all know that prolonged use of computers is supposed to make people less social in real life, but at least the Internet helps people socialize in the online life. WoW is quite fun to play mainly because you get to play along with other players who are not bots but actual persons. You can form a team and beat hard enemies, fight other (real) players of the opposing faction, form “guilds”, chat, and even flirt with them. There have been cases where people met in the game and then got married in the real world (but unfortunately I don’t have reference for this one). The bottom line is that fun comes when interaction with other humans is in play.

Of course, the same applies to social media. You get to chat with your friends or with people you don’t know, become friends with them, flirt with them, get on a date or even marry someone you met online. Although, as in WoW, you never really know the gender or looks of another person as it’s pretty easy to present yourself as something that you’re not.

Time-wasting

One of the main reasons people are condemning WoW players is their severe time-wasting, since they may be playing for many hours every day. But aren’t there Facebook users who spend hours in front of their computers, “socializing” with their friends and spending great amounts of time (and even money) on useless and almost pathetic “applications”? Both activities are huge time-wasters, but it’s still a matter of taste if one fancies spending their time killing virtual beasts, or throwing Britney Spears’ to their buddies and feeding their virtual pets!

Social media are MMORPGs

Examining all the differences, we could say that social media are indeed a form of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. They are used massively by multiple “players” all over the world who go online to create their own “characters” and engage in a role-playing “game”. In both of them, you get to interact with people who you don’t know, compete against them, show how “cool” you are, try to become better and more important than others and gain popularity. There are many new things to do and unknown territories to explore.

Participating in either MMORPGs or social media steals much of your time. Both are worlds of their own, in parallel to ours. They’re both another way for a person to participate in a “non-real” environment where they can show-off as much as their heart desire. Aren’t they all nothing more but different facets of the new multi-dimensional universe we have created, named “The Internet”?

Day 2 of the No-Internet experiment

The second day of my No-Internet experiment wasn’t the most suitable test subject, since I lost all morning running for errands and taking care of stuff outside of the office. I finally faced my computer about one hour after midday, and when I checked mail (this was the morning check) I was cheering to see that Apple finally approved my company’s enrollment for the iPhone Developer program!

Since I’ve been waiting for Apple to complete the enrollment process for almost 3 months, I decided I could make an exception and stay online for a little while to browse around the iPhone dev portal. This, however, didn’t last long, as I felt an urge to continue my work; the pressure of all those lost hours was intense. This made me realize another important facet of my new working habits:

Time matters. I have to track the time wasted and compensate for it.

Upon getting back to work, I managed to become quite focused, with almost no distractions at all, online or external, for about two and a half hours until my lunch break. Even though the task of styling my client’s CSS menu was becoming quite tedious at times (styling becomes more and more tiring for me as the years are passing by), I didn’t deviate from it, something that wouldn’t have happened last week; I’m sure I would have engaged into some online activity to rest myself a bit.

During work, at one point I was talking with my wife of the phone, and she asked me how it’s going. “Do you still have the Internet off?“, she asked. I was amazed to find out that, I didn’t know whether it was on or off! After checking it out, I discovered that it was on, yet I hadn’t used it for the past couple of hours. So it looks like not using the Internet is becoming a habit to me.

As the days are passing by, I see that this experiment is quite valuable in adjusting my daily habits and schedule while at work. However, the real value of this experiment could be the need to answer the underlying question: “what is information, and how much of it do we really need?“

Day 1 of the No-Internet experiment

It’s almost half an hour past eight in the afternoon and I think it’s time to call it a day. Evaluating the first day of my No-Internet experiment, I can say that it worked well, distractions were reduced and overall I worked much more than I would on a typical day with the Internet on.

At first, thoughts of performing those almost ritualistic time-wasting habits were surfacing my mind, but the instant I was initiating such an action I reminded myself that the Internet was off, so I kept getting back to work. When I felt that I needed a break, I’d have to get up and walk around the office a little bit, have a snack or drink some juice, or just gaze the hill outside of the window.

I realized that these breaks were much shorter than those in which I spent time online. Most of the times they wouldn’t last longer than five minutes, quite less than an average “online time-wasting” break. Upon returning to the computer, I’d go straight into work again without wasting any time on the ‘Net. This makes me realize that the most crucial moment of potential time-wasting is probably when I was getting back to work; instead of continuing the task that was interrupted, I used to take advantage of the interruption to perform some other task, i.e. check mail or Twitter. Now, with the Internet off, this isn’t the case.

There were times when I needed the Internet to perform some task for my work, i.e. check out online documentation or google for some specific CSS hack. Since I’m turning off the Internet in order to assist my work and not the other way around, I had to turn it back on at times to find the information I was seeking. Later, I decided to let the router on, and just disable Airport (wireless) during the day, so when I needed the Internet for some crucial part, I could instantly turn it on.

This, of course, requires some discipline since it’s quite tempting to make thoughts like, for example, “hey, since I had to turn it on, let’s spend just a few seconds to check mail…“. Luckily, when I had to turn the Internet on, I used it only for the task that required it, and immediately turned it off again. The discipline that I portrayed, amazed me!

Until now, I checked mail once, upon returning to the office after lunch, and I’ll do it a second time after I finish writing this post. I realized that having the mail notifier off helped a lot into minimizing distractions, and decided to remove it from my auto-launch group of applications and keep it always that way.

Considering a whole day without Twitter, Facebook, news and e-mail, makes me feel much calmer, more isolated and focused, and eliminates the anxiety of information overload. No more stress to have to catch up with the news, and no more need to filter dozens or even hundreds of tweets to find out the few that may be worthy of attention. It amazes me when I realize that the process of information filtering is a quite stressful activity.

So day 1 was a success, but it’s not long enough to make a verdict. I’ll just publish this story and go home. I’ll tweet about this post, but I promise not to peek into other people’s tweets!

The No-Internet Experiment: A week without connectivity

Part of my resolution for the new year was to get things done, stop wasting time and make my plans come true. But after the first working week of 2009, I see that there are still old habits that are plaguing my productivity, as I found myself pondering at the end of the day, why my work didn’t advance as much as I’d want it to.

I came to the conclusion that the main reason that’s hindering my productivity is getting distracted, not away from my computer but inside it! I do spend most of my day (while working) in front of my iMac, sitting in my office, but am I doing what I am supposed to be doing, or am I constantly wasting my time in a never-ending cycle of tedious distractions?

Reading the news, connecting via Twitter, checking on Facebook, reading (and replying to) e-mail the moment it arrives, engaging into some chatting on MSN or googling that thing that occured to me during the previous night while I was trying to sleep is a huge time-waster. All of these tasks seem quite innocent and may require no more than a couple of minutes to perform, yet there’s an urge to do them again and again during the day, which results in a big waste of precious time without realizing it. I guess this applies to many people who work online.

For example, here’s a quick list of thoughts that trigger such actions:

• “Hm, what’s going on in Twitterland right now? I’ll only take a quick look.“
• “Let’s check my friends’ status on Facebook for a minute.“
• “Gotta check the news, maybe there’s something big happening right now, I’ll just scan the headlines.“
• “Hm, new mail, gotta check it out, I want my inbox to be empty at all times“
• “It’s been some time since I last checked Google analytics, how’s my blog doing lately?“
• “Is a replacement for the Epson R2400 out already? Maybe it’s time to get myself a good color printer“

and the list goes on an on and on…

Not only do these things feast on my time, but more importantly even if they’re only distracting me from work for a couple of minutes, I still have to set my mind again into working on the problem that got interrupted, which can cause mental fatigue if it happens too often. So here I am in 2009, postponing all of my great plans until I’m done with some client work that has been already delayed a lot.

I realized that finishing this work for my clients is a big barrier for me, since I can’t dive into anything big (i.e. start developing an iPhone app) until I’m done with it. If I ever want to begin doing all those things that I long to, I have to get over this barrier, get all those distractions out of the way and boost my productivity.

Shutting down the Internet

In order to do this, I have decided to shut down my office Internet router for the week to come, and see how much more (or less!) productive I’ll be by Friday evening. Not being connected to the Internet means that I won’t be able to do any of the aforementioned actions, therefore I’ll be able to focus on my work and, hopefully, get it done after a week’s hard work (it’s a project stuck in 90% for quite some time).

But why go to such extremes? There are other successful ways of getting things done, i.e. batching your actions, time-scheduling etc. True, these methods are quite effective when it comes to minimizing distractions and focusing on work, yet I think that shutting down the Internet for a (working) week will have a much more powerful effect. It’ll be a standard, to which I’ll be able to compare the amount of online time-wasting I’ll be doing when I turn the router back on next week.

So, starting on Monday morning, I’m shutting down my office Internet router and start working in an environment without connectivity. That means that I’ll also have to turn off e-mail auto-fetch in the iPhone and not allow myself to peek into the Internet over 3G! I’ll still check mail once or twice during the day, only to see if there’s something urgent that I need to act on, and I’ll blog about the process daily when I get back home in the evening, but that will be all.

I think it’ll be an interesting experiment!

A traditional dead-easy way to read the news with Alltop

When I first started using the Internet in the mid-nineties, I didn’t know much about it apart from that it got information about almost anything. I knew there was a search engine that helps you find the stuff you’re interested in, so I usually fired up a browser and went to Yahoo to browse it’s categories and find interesting webpages.

Later, I found out that Google was working in a different way and returned search results based on relevance to they keywords without any categorization. At first I didn’t like that, but I guess the Internet is huge enough to categorize every web page that exists, so I made friends with the idea over time. But I miss those early times of my Internet adventures and Yahoo’s categories.

Today, most of serious Internet users (web freaks and information addicts like us) spent a big fraction of our online time reading our favorite feeds, Twitter conversations and the like, but I still find it hard to convince non-tech friends of mine (e.g. lawyers, accountants etc) to use RSS. They either can’t see the usefulness in it or don’t seem to get it at all. So they end up visiting the same old half dozen of informative sites they know on a regular basis to get the news.

An easy to use headline aggregator

What these people could benefit from, is a single news aggregator with an uncluttered and dead-easy interface with almost no features at all. And it turns out that Alltop.com may be just that, a place where one can get the headlines of the best sites about a topic. No RSS or any other acronyms to grasp, no need to download a feed reader application to your device, no social features that clutter the interface, and perhaps the most important of all: categorization done by humans.

Just find the topic you’re interested in, bookmark it and visit it when you have time to read the news. Since it’s actual human beings behind each source that gets into a topic, this means that all sources are relevant. Of course this means that the set of sources is limited, but I guess that’s exactly what this team of users want: a limited set of relevant news sources to get the job (of providing information) done easily and quickly, instead of spending hours digging interesting stuff out of automated aggregators.

In an era where start-ups spring like mushrooms after the rain and we’ve laid our hopes of getting information in either the hands of algorithms or social interactions, I’m glad to see a different approach that goes the traditional way. It will be interesting to see if it gets to succeed or not.

jQuery: What to do when replaceWith() doesn’t work

Nothing’s perfect in this world and jQuery is not the exception to prove the rule. Sometimes the replaceWith() function doesn’t seem to work, no matter what you do. It looks like the function does nothing, and that’s a problem. But don’t bother; this will do the trick:

instead of

$('#someElement').replaceWith('something');

use this:

$('#someElement').empty().append('something');