Razvan Antonescu

Looks like Apple is not interested in Microsoft’s efforts to port Silverlight to Iphone. This could only mean that Live Mesh will never make to the Iphone either and through this we will never see an intelligent syncing solution between Apple devices and Web/Windows over WiFi. Too bad. But this is just another reason to wait for an Android power phone that I would like

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• apple sucks big time
• apple sucks

If you have a US Social Security number or Tax ID and one or more english based websites, OpenX offers you the chance to be one of the publishers to try Microsoft Content Ads. More details here, and the registration form is here.

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Launching a webservice today has become a pretty simple job. Launch a private beta, launch some teasers here or there, get a post on Techcrunch, attend to some conferences, make a press release and that’s it. You have a few thousands users registered to your website. And everybody is happy. NOT.

Not in a few days or weeks when you analyze your internal usage statistics and you realize that the visitors that have registered are not coming back. In that case there are strategies and strategies.

One set of strategies are to get back to the drawing board and see were you have failed. To see why your users were not happy and repair it. To add features that will keep the the users interested in you, to listen to your customers feedback.

And there are dirty strategies. One company has sent me today my username and password. As requested by me. NOT. It was my password but I couldn’t even tell what was that service about and when I have registered. Most probably because it sucked big time. It’s not a very popular service so I excluded the case where somebody has tried to brute force the account. The other explanation is that an internal bug triggered that email. But something makes me think that this was a marketing ploy. Dirty but CLEVER.

So. If you are in the position of having trouble with your users returning do this:

1. Start logging user activity.
2. Depending on your type of service set an internal threshold (let’s say 6 months)
3. Once an account has been inactive for six months, sent an automated email with BOTH username and password and make it look as it was requested by the user.
4. Analyze the results. See how many of the targeted accounts have been re-activated and how many of the re-activated accounts are starting to become active

Incoming search terms:

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It seems like twitter is having his momentum right now, with more and more people joining. So, here is a quick tutorial on how to use it in order to accomplish the following goals:

• Bring constant traffic to your site
• Create an interactive and dedicated community

First of all, this quick guide doesn’t apply to any of the black hat projects that you’d might have. It simply doesn’t work this way.

You will need to have a site that:

• Is community oriented: this implies one or more of the following:
  • visitors can create accounts on your site
  • visitors can create content on your site
  • visitors can comment on the existing content
  • any other way of interaction between the visitors and your site
• Is not static: this implies that you have periodically fresh content (news/articles)

Using twitter for traffic and community has 2 ways:

1. The passive way. This is pretty straight forward. Create a twitter account, announce that on your site, make a link on the homepage or on your template, add your website to your twitter profile and start using twitter. That rest will follow. Slowly but steady.

2. The active way. This is what this post is about.

• First of all, start doing the steps from the passive way.
• Than use twitter for 1-2 weeks, periodically adding content
• Identify twitter users that might be interested in your site. Do that by searching in Google for: site:twitter.com [keyword]. Where the [keyword] represents the main keywords for your website. If you do that, you’ll get as results people that have used on their twits that keyword. Some of them have used them accidentally, but most of them will have a real interest in your topics.
• Make a list of all the profiles identified. From that list eliminate all the profiles that are dead (no longer updated) and start following the remaining ones. Many of them will reciprocate.
• Start interacting with the followed profiles, try to answer any conversations.
• Make periodical announcements of new content on your website and be active in answering any feedback.
• If you have an RSS feed for your site, for your own good don’t be an idiot and add that to your twitter account. Is one of the most annoying and lame behaviors and will soon result in people following you to use the block button

Well, that’s it. happy twitting and if you will use this mini guide, feel free to post in comments any results that you will get

This morning I got an email from Intensedebate asking for feedback. Well, I thought of turning this into a post.

The good news is that I like the idea and the current implementation. But, nobody is perfect, at least in the early stages, and here is my wish list:

• I like the fact that they promote the fact that you can leave their service and take the comments with you. This means freedom and is important. But the sad part is there are no tutorials or tools on how to do this. I am aware that technically this is not possible for Blogger based blogs, but they can build up some wordpress tools.
• Comments provide feedback to blog owners. But more than that they provide unique content for search engines. Due to the fact that Intensedebate is javascript based this factor dissapears. Again. Make a php script for WP blogs.
• Search. Where is the freakin search on my Intensedebate account?
• Details about the commenters. WordPress gives me the IP of a commenter. A service like Intensedebate can offer more than that (IP/Country/Browser etc)
• Create ghosts accounts for those that are not already users. This implies that an account is created for each person based on his email address. By doing that a ghost account can be claimed through email validation
• Give me an option to stay logged in. I hate logging in every day.

This are a few things that came up in my mind. I’ll add more if I remember any. I am very aware that the things I’ve listed are not a piece of cake. But this is what I want
P.S. Please guys pay attention to the javascript. I had 2 sites down for a few hours because of that. If that happens again I am out. With or without comments