My First Faceversary: One Year of Facebooking

Facebook
Today is my first Faceversary (i.e. Facebook + Anniversary = Faceversary) of the day I rejoined Facebook. Now that it’s been exactly one year since I rejoined the social network I thought it would be a good idea to share my first-year experience.

Overall, my first 12 months on Facebook went really well. However, things have definitely changed since I left the social network in 2006. The site went through some major redesigns and a boatload of new features were added. I remember when the Facebook Wall was the only feature on the social network that people huddled around.

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Why I Joined Facebook – Again!

Facebook
On Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at approximately 8:30 p.m., I joined all my family and friends on Facebook. This wasn’t the first time I joined the social network, however. In fact, the very first time I joined Facebook was back in July 2005 along with a couple of my college buddies – Eric and Coby. At that time it was called “The Facebook” and was only available to the college crowd. It wasn’t until a few months after I joined that the social network dropped “The” from its name and changed it to simply “Facebook.”

When I first joined the social network not much was going on as you can imagine. Facebook was still in its infancy and wasn’t well polished. It lacked all the bells and whistles we see today. For example, there wasn’t a news feed, photo or video uploads, chat, vanity URLs, Like or Share buttons, smartphone apps, games, and privacy settings were weak. In a nutshell, we had a Wall. That was our excitement on Facebook.

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How I Use Posterous

After kicking the idea around for a while, I finally decided to sign up and give Posterous a try. For those of you who are not familiar with Posterous, it’s a simple blogging platform that allows you to post anything to the Web using e-mail. Simply send an e-mail to post@posterous.com including content such as text, documents, photos, videos, music, or audio and Posterous will take care of the rest.

The reason I decided to use Posterous is because it bridges the gap between Twitter and my WordPress blog. There’s a lot going in the space between Twitter and a full length blog so I felt it was necessary to have space where I can post content that exceeds the 140 character limit and falls short of my formal WordPress content.

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Twitter Launches Embedded Tweets, but there are Flaws


Ever since this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin Twitter has been quite busy lately with acquisitions, rolling out new services, and launching their own Twitter clients. Well today Twitter took another step forward and launched a new tool that allows users to embed a tweet into a Web page or blog post. The new tool, Blackbird Pie, is a website that will create an embeddable tweet once a user has entered the tweet’s URL in the field provided.

Here’s How It Works
1. Copy the tweet’s URL you wish to embed by clicking the tweet’s timestamp. (i.e. about 21 hours ago)
2. Visit Blackbird Pie, paste the tweet’s URL in the field provided, and then click “Bake it.”
3. If you’re satisfied with the preview, select and copy the code at the bottom.
4. Visit your Web page or blog post and paste the code into the desired location.
Done!

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My Foursquare Buttons, Stickers, and More

There really isn’t much to write about in this particular post other than I recently received some Foursquareswag.” About a week ago I asked Dennis Crowley for some branded merchandise so I could help promote the company when I’m in Atlanta. Promote. Foursquare. Atlanta. Awesome. That’s pretty much how the chat went between us.

Shortly after our chat Dennis was nice enough to hook me up by shipping out some stuff so I could pass it around inside my circle of friends as well as share it with potential “Foursquare-ers.” I’ll be keeping a few items for myself of course.

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How Mayorships are Awarded on Foursquare?

Recently there has been a lot of confusion about how mayorships are awarded on Foursquare. Hopefully this blog post will help clear up some of the confusion and provide users with a better understanding of how mayorship battles are won.

After doing some digging, I have noticed that more than 90% of the blogs, and even a few websites, I have read are feeding wrong information to its readers about how mayorships are awarded on Foursquare. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, mayorship information isn’t explained very well on the Foursquare website. According to Foursquare’s “Help” and “Learn More” Web pages, mayorships are awarded “If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else.” Although this information is posted on the Foursquare website, it’s not how the algorithm works. Since there has been a lot of questions surrounding this topic, I decided to send a tweet to Foursquare about this issue so they could clarify how mayorships are awarded on their website.

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