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Facebook Family: Preserving Your Family Tree Through Social Media

Posted on June 28, 2011 by jessestay

This post is a guest post from Joe Baker, a long time reader of this blog and as I think you can see, a great writer. Moving forward, I’m going to start featuring more guest bloggers. If you’d like to be a guest blogger, just send me a post you’d like to submit to jesse@staynalive.com and I’ll consider your post (no guarantees it will go live!). I always give credit with a link back to your site or blog.

Before making a monumental move from the Midwest to take a job in the great white northeast, I found myself sitting in a mostly packed living room waiting for the movers to arrive, load my life into their truck and drive it across the country. While kicking a roll of tape back and forth, I noticed an unsealed box with no label. Horror! Obviously, I could not let this pass; how would I know where to unpack the box if it didn’t say what was inside?

After investigating the box, I discovered it was filled with family pictures dating back to my parents’ childhood. “How did I get this box?” was the first question, quickly followed by, “how can I share this with everyone?” Lucky for me, I live in the 21^st century, an era where the planet stays the same size, and yet the world is constantly shrinking.

After buying a cheap negative scanner, I scanned and uploaded all the pictures to Flickr, then sent the slideshow link to the extended family. The photos included pictures of my now elderly aunts and uncles as children growing up in Michigan and northern Iowa; photos none of them had seen in decades were now available to them with the click of a button.

The growth and increasing reach of personal communications technology is astounding. With at least 4.6 billion cell phone subscriptions in the world (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-10454065-78.html) it hasn’t been easier to keep in touch with family than it is now. Additionally, social networks like Facebook provide 600 million users with a platform for sharing information, chatting in real time and showcasing pictures to share with family.

The great unifying force of the Internet is news to few in a world where even young children maintain Internet personas. For some babies, the first thing they see as they emerge into this world is an iPhone camera lens snapping their picture and uploading directly to one of the myriad social networks available. It’s much easier for people to access and share information about family with family, and families who move around frequently stand to gain the most from the way social connectivity is evolving. And who moves more than a military family?

Growing up with a parent in the Navy, I had many opportunities to travel. The privilege of this was unfortunately lost on me, because every move meant losing good friends and having to make new ones. Now kids can easily keep in contact with their friends on one side of the world, long after having moved to another. I know whole extended families that use computers for two things: Skype and Facebook, the former to read about the lives of family members and the latter to hear updates from the horse’s mouth. Three years on a base in Germany, isn’t as devastating to family connections when you can broadcast your face via Skype and life minutiae via Twitter.

After loading the photos to Flickr, I chose a select few to post on Facebook, where most of my family spends their Internet lives. After some tagging, many family members came out of the woodwork. Reading the comments was like going to a reunion and memories came rushing back to folks. Stories about long lost family members poured forth for all the younger generations to read and participate in. It was a really fascinating thing to watch.

So I’m glad that in spite of the inherent hassles of moving, I was able to pull something valuable out of it that not only gave me insight into the family history, but was something the rest of the clan could see and interact with thanks to the magic of the internet!

Im Joining Xydos Advisory Board

Posted on June 13, 2011 by jessestay

One of the things I share on Twitter and this blog that I get the most comments on in real life has been that of Xydo, a personalized news service comparable to the likes of Digg, with a Quora-like twist (with the ability to edit, claim, and subscribe to topics of your choice). The other day someone mentioned in front of me to a friend of theirs how cool this service was, and that it would “just work”, showing you all the news you were interested in just by the links your Twitter and Facebook friends are sharing (as well as those you post and share online). It was then that I knew I was onto something. Just last week they announced a $1.25 million funding round, and I’m proud to announce that with that, I am now officially a small, equity-holding (non-paid) member of Xydo’s Advisory Board.

When I met with Eric Roach, Xydo’s co-founder, a few months ago, I was sold. Digg is old-school and I have been eager for something new and innovative that could be much bigger. Eric, who has multiple exits himself in the past, has the experience to make this happen, and I’m very excited to help them in this endeavor. It’s also great to have Epic Ventures, one of Utah’s most successful Venture Capital firms, backing them in this effort.

What does this mean? It means I will be able to have an even stronger, and more official, say into the direction of Xydo and how they grow moving forward. I truly see this being a significant new way to consume news in a very social manner, based on relevancy to who you are, where you are, and what types of things you are interested in. I hope we can even further bring in influences from sites like Quora and Digg, and bring the era of news consumption to a new and better level than ever before.

My hope is that this does not affect too much bias here, but I would be lying if I didn’t say it didn’t give me any bias at all. This is just one more thing added to my continued list of advisory roles and client relationships that I will always disclose here if there could be any conflict. On top of this I still consult, I still run SocialToo.com, and I still work in my day job at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

If you’re ever in Utah please come say hi and I’d be happy to take you up to Park City for some skiing and a visit to the Xydo offices there. This is a great company, with great talent, and a great vision for the future that I can see big things for. Of course, please try out their service – share it with your mom or grandma. Xydo is a news service for all who like news! You can try it out at http://xydo.com.

Twitter is Just The Launch Partner. Will There Be "One More Thing" for iOS 5?

Posted on June 8, 2011 by jessestay

The blogosphere is abuzz about Apple’s announcement that iOS 5 will come bundled with built-in Twitter support. I admit I scratched my head that Apple chose Twitter over Facebook. Twitter, having only about 30-40 million active users, vs. Facebook, with near 600 million active users, seemed like the least likely choice for a service Apple’s customers would use (which one would your mom use?). Some are blaming Facebook’s reluctance to sign to Apple’s Terms on Ping. Maybe that’s it, but I don’t think Twitter’s inclusion is the full story. I think Twitter is just the launch partner for something bigger, and after playing with it myself in a developer build, I’m beginning to think Apple’s about to release something even bigger for developers, of which Twitter is just the included example.

If you look at the Twitter integration in iOS 5, it’s all part of the Twitter app. In fact, it doesn’t even work until I authenticate Twitter in my settings under the actual Twitter app itself. Then, when I view photos and other media I just hit the “share” button and I see a new “Tweet” option at the bottom of all the other share options that used to be there. I’m pretty sure that “Tweet” button is just part of the Twitter app as well. The way it’s laid out though seems to be something that could allow other apps to also add their own sharing functions.

Here’s what I think is going on: Twitter was given access to a private API Apple has provided that gives them access to that screen, and allows them to provide the interface for what happens when people want to share that item. Twitter has been given various integration points within iOS, which they can make API calls and provide interfaces that users can rely on, and other apps can tie into. Apple did not build this. Twitter did, and they’re using unreleased APIs to do so.

So what happens when Apple makes this interface available to other developers? Then, it doesn’t matter if Twitter comes bundled with the phone (they still get the first mover advantage). Facebook can create their own experience that automatically integrates with that experience when you install the Facebook app. Instagram could immediately send photos to a filtering page that then shares it on Instagram. Other social networks and entrepreneurs could create their own experiences as well which tie into that.

I’m beginning to think that Apple is onto something much bigger here with the inclusion of Twitter in this launch. I predict we’ll see APIs for this released, either in this release, or a future version, which will allow other apps tie into this interface, and you won’t have to have a special deal with Apple to do it.

Mark my words (I was right so far on my iCloud prediction after all)…

(btw, this is my 1,000th post)

iCloud Will Do For the Cloud as iPod Did for MP3s

Posted on June 6, 2011 by jessestay

In the days where MP3 players were a dime a dozen, everyone was scrambling to pick the best device. There were dozens of, perhaps too many choices – some had large storage. Others had better interfaces, or supported different file formats. Some even played (gasp) CDs. But when Apple released the iPod that all changed. Apple made it dirt simple for anyone to plug in an MP3 Player, and nobody had to manually copy files to get them to sync. It worked across multiple operating systems and “just worked.” Soon Apple added a music store to make it easy for music labels to get their music onto these devices, and people were sold everywhere on what an amazing device this was. I’m going to make a prediction, but knowing Apple I don’t think it’s very bold to say: iCloud, which launches tomorrow, will do the same for “the Cloud” as the iPod did for MP3s.

Think about it – there are dozens of cloud options available out there. Microsoft started with their Mesh platform for syncing files across multiple devices and servers. Soon, services like Dropbox came about, making it possible to sync files to the internet. Now we see dozens of “cloud” music services popping up. Google just launched Google Music. Amazon has their Cloud Player. I use a service called Spotify, which isn’t even available in the USA yet. We’re in a similar era to the MP3 right now.

However, right now all these Cloud services are hacks. With Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player I have to manually upload all my music to them to use their Cloud service (unless I buy the music from them, in Amazon’s case). On services like Dropbox I have to manually set up the file syncing, and it gets expensive the more I upload. Like the MP3 players of old, there’s simply too much work to get “the Cloud” to work on any of these services.

However, Apple has the ability and the talent to build a system that, just like the iPod, “just works.” Imagine turning on your Apple TV and being able to buy a movie, but never having to worry about downloading it anywhere. Add to that just inserting a DVD into your superdrive, having it recognize such, and having it added to your library, which doesn’t matter if it’s on your computer’s hard disk or in the cloud. Or what about photo storage? What about the apps you run on your iPhone, or on your computer, and the files they store on those devices?

As of tomorrow, the concept of a “disk” will be gone. You won’t even think about where on your computer you need to store things – they will just save, and you’ll be able to access them with ease, from wherever you are, whatever computer or device you are on. You won’t have to think about that part of your computer again – no “My Computer”. No C: drive or root directory or user directory. No “My Documents”. No “My Pictures”. Heck, maybe even no “Applications.” It will just be “save” and “search”. Nothing else to ever think about again.

It could be bigger though – think of my “web with no login button” concept I’ve mentioned before. Imagine an operating system that detected the files and apps and music and media on your personal “cloud”, and brought those things into each website’s experience as you visit from site to site. Or what if you’re walking down the street, it detects the NFC from your phone, and pulls those files into the signs and places you’re walking past (all hopefully with privacy controls, of course). That’s where an interconnected Apple based on the cloud could take us.

Of course, we have yet to see what Apple releases tomorrow, but no matter what happens, we know Apple will innovate. They will likely take us to a new understanding of “cloud”, and it will “just work,” just like every other product they produce. I can’t wait to see what they have come up with.

The New Twitter and Why Im Purging All 30,000 of My Friends

Posted on June 2, 2011 by jessestay

This has been done many times before and I’ve resisted it for years now. The fact is, auto-follow is a core service to my company, SocialToo, so choosing, as a user, to move away from such is a big deal. We invented auto-follow. It’s a great idea because it focuses on relationships. The fact is, and it’s taken me a long time to come to grips with this:

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t want you to auto-follow.

For that reason I’m using Twitter the way Ev and Biz want me to, and I’m starting over. Stay with me on this though, because there are better things in store, and I think there are ways to still focus on the relationship side of things. Let me explain.

The New Twitter

With the recent launch of embedded photos today and potentially videos within the stream on Twitter, Twitter.com is very quickly, just like Facebook.com is for Facebook, becoming the de facto client experience for Twitter users. I can go there and look at lists. I can see all the photos and videos of my friends. I can get regular updates from them. In the future, developers will be able to build apps for the experience (you heard it here, folks). The fact is, I’m getting more and more of a great experience on Twitter.com and having much less of a need to use Tweetdeck (my current Twitter client of choice) as a result. Especially with browser extensions like Kynetx, my web browser is now becoming my multi-network experience and I need a separate social networking client less and less these days.

There was one problem though, and I mentioned it on Twitter today: My default feed on Twitter defaulted to my main Twitter stream and Twitter provides no experience to “hide” users that I follow from the stream. Twitter’s entire focus is on the stream, not the actual users like on Facebook, and because of that I don’t think “hide” will every happen.

How I Used to Use Twitter

Since I auto-follow, I’ll be first to admit my main Twitter stream is getting pretty cluttered right now with 30,000 people in it, and in TweetDeck, I don’t even have it as a column at the moment. For my purposes though, auto follow worked well for me. I have people that read my books and read this blog and watch me speak, and I want to have the opportunity to meet those people and get to know them eventually.

It didn’t really matter that my main feed was cluttered though because by auto-following, I got to focus on what mattered most – relationships. Each and every one of my followers (with the exception of bots, which there are many) has some sort of interest in me, and I never want to neglect the opportunity to meet them, converse with them, and perhaps follow their updates some day. For that reason I would use lists, and the people who I had built relationships with and whose updates I wanted to follow I would add to those lists. Rather than my main feed, I would use a series of lists to see what people were up to and I would create a column for each inside Tweetdeck. It was much more organized that way, and by doing so I could focus on a backlog of people I could potentially get to know better, and I really would as they DM’d me, replied to my updates, and more.

Twitter is Made of Content, Not People

Today I came to a realization though that Twitter wasn’t built that way. On Facebook the relationships are 2-way, so accepting every friend request and using lists to filter people out makes a lot of sense. It’s more a contract on Facebook – “I’ll trust you if you trust me back”. I could then use lists and privacy controls to ensure my closer family and friends were protected.

However, on Twitter, an almost 100% public ecosystem, I don’t have that liberty. When I follow you, you don’t have to get to know me back. It’s all about the content, not the people, I want to subscribe to according to them – I don’t think that’s going to change unfortunately (but my focus on people will still remain the same). Regardless of Twitter’s focus, since I was using lists anyway, it really didn’t matter if I followed you in the first place. If I wanted to get to know you you could still reply to my tweets, and I could still add you to the lists I pay attention to. Not to mention the fact that Biz Stone himself has said he didn’t agree with auto follow.

So, wanting to use Twitter.com more, and realizing Twitter’s intentions, I decided it was time for a change in strategy. My focus still being on relationships. I decided that I would go ahead and unfollow everyone first, starting with a clean slate. Then, I’m going to focus on a new auto follow strategy.

My New, Still People and Relationship-Focused Strategy

Instead of auto-following everyone that follows me, I’m now going to start running a script that auto follows everyone that mentions my name, as well as people I add to a specific list. So, if you or I engage in conversation, I follow you. This way, I follow everyone who truly has a genuine interest in being a part of my community. I am also, through the list, able to follow others that I just find genuinely interesting. If they spam me, I just have to block them and they’ll never be followed again. And of course, I can always manually follow as well if I don’t want to trust the script (which I’ll likely do).

As a result of this I’m going to start a new focus on SocialToo as well. Auto-follow will still exist. The current tools will all still exist. However, I’m going to start focusing more on lists, and on being able to auto-follow and auto-add people to lists that are truly engaging. I have many of these tools written right now (if you want one right now ask me and we may be able to work out a deal), and should start integrating them shortly into the services we offer.

So if I unfollowed you tonight, don’t worry. If you are worried, just retweet me or reply to me or do something that mentions my Twitter handle (@Jesse) and you’ll be refollowed as soon as I’m done with the purge. I’m excited to see where this goes. Following Twitter’s own intentions should put me more in a mindset to understand how future users will be using the service.

If you have any ideas as I do this, let me know in the comments – I’d love to hear your thoughts!

The Perfect Family Tree

Posted on June 1, 2011 by jessestay

I’ve talked before about how I think there needs to be more semantic standards adoption in Genealogy. I’ve been thinking a lot about what that would look like. Here are the key factors I think the perfect “Family Tree” would include:

Each individual has their own, unique URL. In a sense, this would give the dead identity.
Individual pages should be wikis, ie, anyone can edit them, and they can add *anything* to the page (not a pre-defined list of fields). A predefined list of fields can be defined through semantic markup though, which should aid search. There could be discussion pages for each individual similar to wikipedia for any disagreements.
Each individual page lists parents and siblings and other relationships through simple, standardized markup such as FOAF or XFN
Each “owner” should own an additional “family tree” index. This is where all the relationships between individuals are mapped out. A simple site map syntax ought to solve this (which could be organized in a pretty tree like format through CSS if you chose). Individuals in that tree ought to be able to identify their place in the tree.
It should be 100% open (perhaps with privacy controls just for living individuals – still need to work that one out, but we already have many examples to learn from)
The system hosting the “family tree” should be 100% open source – this ensures that anyone else who wants to host a compatible system can host it with no worries. I foresee many of these, all compatible, federated, and individuals and family trees linking across multiple domains and hosting environments. I’d like to host one of these for my extended family, for instance, where we can store all the stories and family histories we’ve archived over the years – others could easily contribute.
Content within each individual page (for dead individuals, at least) should be licensable according to specified, open licenses, similar to Flickr.
The system hosting should detect when there are other duplicates on the web – perhaps Google could provide an API off their index to make this easy (or maybe FamilySearch.org could do something like this). It should automatically flag records that are potential duplicates and share where the duplicate records are.
If I want to host my own family tree, I should have the option to download my family tree from any system, and be given all the files necessary to host my own system on my own servers for others to access. It would work exactly the same as all the other systems, be 100% compatible with all the other systems, and ideally, if I agree another record is correct, ought to link to records on other systems when I don’t need to host the data myself (to avoid duplicate records if I don’t want them).

I think with all these factors in place, a fully distributable, 100% owned by the community, system can be created to host genealogy data. No one organization ever has to own the data, and anyone who wants to own their own piece of the puzzle can take it, free of charge. Any search engine on the planet can help index this data. It’s the essence of open.

So who will be the first to create it? Or maybe someone wants to fund it/donate and I’ll hire the developers?

These opinions are obviously my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

Facebook Listens. RSS Added Back to Pages. Will Twitter be next?

Posted on May 21, 2011 by jessestay

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In perhaps one of my most controversial articles (unintentionally), I wrote a week or two ago about how both Twitter and Facebook both quietly removed RSS from user accounts and Pages. Of course, with Facebook, on user accounts that made sense since they were intended to be private, but with Pages, 100% public versions of the site, it didn’t make sense that they would remove the links and access to be able to subscribe to updates via RSS. It appears that Facebook listened though, as there is now a “Subscribe via RSS” link on Facebook Pages, and the source now links to an atom feed for clients that want to auto-discover the feeds. You can see it by looking down at the bottom left on any Page now.

David Recordon, Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, mentioned in the comments of my previous article, “I actually think you’re misinterpreting the reasoning here. Today JSON based APIs are quite a bit more powerful than RSS feeds and have become preferred by the vast majority of developers when building on the platforms you mentioned. This means that it’s worth investing more time and energy into APIs over feeds. So I don’t think it’s that anyone is looking to actively remove feeds, rather they’re just stagnating over time as more functionality is built into APIs.” Of course, he had a point. It was also something I mentioned in my previous article, that sites are moving more and more towards proprietary JSON APIs vs openly available and reproducible RSS. The problem is API or not, Facebook’s Graph API (not to be confused with Open Graph Protocol) is still closed – until they open that up as a standard, it will not be easily accessible across clients and content consumption programs.

It’s really good, that on top of their existing (and really easy to use) Graph API, to see Facebook move towards something that not just developers can easily consume, but any user can also consume and do things with in a simple fashion. Until (and if) Facebook opens up its own API, this is the right approach to take, and they should be commended.

There is a glimmer of hope with this move by Facebook. Of course RSS isn’t dead, but my worry is that as we see Twitter and others slowly removing remnants of the protocol one bit at a time, these open standards may be swallowed up in favor of more proprietary APIs and formats. I’m really proud of Facebook taking a lead here in open standards adoption as they have done in the past – let’s hope they continue to do so in the future.

The question now is, in this regard, does this make Facebook more open than Twitter? (I argue Facebook has always been more open than Twitter in various capacities, but in this regard, I think it says something about Facebook’s motivations vs. Twitter’s) I’d really like to see Twitter follow suite and reconsider their stance on removing RSS moving forward.

How to Build Your Value and not be an Influencer on EmpireAvenue

Posted on May 14, 2011 by jessestay

For those of you involved on Empire Avenue I have a quick tip for you that will keep producing revenue for you so you can keep investing in more stock and therefore improving your value.

The secret lies in the number of dividends per share. The number is at the top of each profile next to the tabs, under “Dividends”. If you look at that number, that is the amount, on average, that you’ll get for every share you own in that individual. The other number you need to pay attention to is the growth of the stock per day – it’s the number in parenthesis next to the individual’s value in their profile (at the top).

Here’s what I like to do – I’ll look at the dividends per share weekly average and multiply it times the number of shares I have in that individual. That is the amount, minimum, that I’ll likely receive on a weekly basis by owning that individual. Now, divide that by 7 and you have the average amount per day you’ll gain. Then, add in the growth from the previous day of that individual (you can look at the growth over time if you like and average it if you want to stay consistent), and you now have a true value of that individual in its current state.

Here’s why you have to take into account both: Some individuals will bring you lots of Eaves on daily growth, but little in dividends. Compare that against someone that is bringing less Eaves on daily growth but have a lot of dividends. You’ll want to decide, based on that, which brings you more Eaves. Some times you’ll want to pick the fast movers and take the Eaves you get from the quick growth, and sell when they smooth out once you see they aren’t producing any long term value through dividends. Others you may want to keep because the dividends are producing well, despite a loss in daily growth. It’s basic math.

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How to get Dividends

This is really why Empire Avenue is more than just a game, and it’s about building relationships. You get dividends by interacting with people, and by building them up. If you share an individual on your Facebook Wall, that gives you a dividend. If you post a lot on Twitter, that gives you dividends. If you post on Facebook, that gives you dividends. If you write a blog post, that gives you dividends. If you post and respond to people on Empire Avenue, that gives you dividends. All these are forms of building strong relationships with people, and that’s how you grow in the game.

The minute you start focusing on that, you will then become a target for people to purchase your stock, just as you embrace the strategy I mention above as your plan to purchase. You are now a valuable commodity, and because of the relationships you build, and your net gain to the individuals that invest in you, your stock will grow.

I realize this doesn’t benefit anyone but those that use Empire Avenue, but you can always join by following this link. Be sure to invest in me when you get there, by going to (e) STAY (see what I just did there – I just increased my dividends).

If you want further info, be sure to see Chris Pirillo’s free tips here.

Of Worldwide Religious Social Media Presence, the LDS Church Ranks Well

Posted on May 14, 2011 by jessestay

On the LDS Church Newsroom blog today, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Mormons) (and my employer) released some interesting stats about its social media presence online. According to the post (and AllFacebook.com’s Page Statistics), the Church has 5 of the top 90 Facebook Pages under Facebook’s “Church/Religious Organization” category (the top is ranked #10), is ranked #2 on Youtube for number of views in the “Non-profits and Activism” category, and trends at least twice a year during its biannual General Conference in Twitter’s worldwide and US top trending terms.

It’s no secret the Church takes its online presence seriously. I’ve shared before that the Church’s online presence ranks high on Alexa, and has some of the top blogs listed on Technorati and elsewhere. We have Youtube videos in the millions of views, Twitter accounts in the tens of thousands, and Facebook Pages in the hundreds of thousands of likes.

Facebook.com/LDS is a Facebook Page targeted towards members of the LDS Church

You may be wondering, “why”, though. I’ve shared previously the natural desire of Mormons to share their beliefs, and, in a way that we’re natural marketers by just wanting to share something we really believe in and which is doing great things for the world. As Mormons, our entire beliefs are centered around relationships with each other, and with our God – social media lends a natural way for us to focus on those relationships and to extend those worldwide.

As the LDS Newsroom article states, Mormons are counseled, “With so many social media resources and a multitude of more or less useful gadgets at our disposal, sharing the good news of the gospel is easier and the effects more far-reaching than ever before” (President Uchtdorf) (see the like buttons on that page?) As Mormons, we realize the incredible opportunity online tools such as Facebook provide to spread a message, and we can now do so in a manner that is interesting to those that are truly looking for it.

As a charitable organization, we also have the opportunity to help the world in a greater way, and as Mormons we take that responsibility seriously. Our efforts in Africa, for instance, are showcased on the LDS Newsroom blog in a shareable infographic that is perhaps more educational about the good the Church does there than an hour with Matt Stone and Trey Parker will ever teach you. We have incredible efforts in the damaged earthquake areas of Japan, and Christchurch, New Zealand. You can follow those efforts on the individual areas’ Facebook Pages set up for those causes here and here.

With social media members of the Church are able to share their own beliefs, from their own perspective. You might notice this with the member focus of Mormon.org. Search for any demographic, any type of person, and you’ll likely find a member similar to yourself that believes in what we do, and you can learn straight from them. You don’t have to take the Church’s word for it.

Social media is about personalized messaging, and allowing others to opt-in to the messages they receive, and receive the messages in the most personalized manner possible that is interesting to them. The Church’s social media presence is making this more and more possible, so that those truly interested in its message are able to receive it.

So ask around if you’re interested. There’s a good chance one of your friends is a Mormon and can likely answer your questions. And if not, you can find us and subscribe to us just about anywhere on the web, in the environments you find are most comfortable.

In the meantime, here’s a great video that just released today on the Church’s Youtube channel. I think it has a great message for any God-believing individual (Christian or not), and I think it gives a good sense of why the LDS Church is interested in Social Media – it’s about relationships! (and please share it if it inspires you!):

Disclosure: In my day job, I am currently working as the Manager over Social Strategy and Solutions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While they are currently my employer, this article by no means represents any official announcement, declaration, proclamation, or doctrine on behalf of the Church. All claims or topics written are solely my own opinion and not the opinions or official word of the LDS Church. To be clear, regardless of my day job, I am still a member of the Church and I still believe its teachings and will always have beliefs to share surrounding the Church and its teachings. What I write here should be considered as such.

Why as a Developer, I Switched to Blogger.com and Why I’m Staying With It

Posted on May 9, 2011 by jessestay

Since writing for LouisGray.com a few years ago I’ve been curious about Blogger. Louis Gray used it at the time and he really swore by it. I talked to Rick Klau, Blogger’s Product Manager at the time, at a BlogWorld expo a few years back and he insisted I try it. He suggested that even as a developer I would be pleasantly surprised. I was surprised by him even saying that.

I admit I didn’t like the interface of Blogger at first. It was klunky, and seemed very limited compared to my self-hosted WordPress install I had been on for years. But I was intrigued at what Rick Klau had told me. At the same time, he Tweeted back in December that over a 2 month time frame, Blogger had experienced a 100% uptime. This further intrigued me.

Just last year, I was running this blog on a self-hosted WordPress instance, the same server I was running SocialToo.com. Being a one-man show at the moment (I do most of this on the side so I can help out the LDS Church with their Social Media efforts), occasionally that server would go down as a result of heavy activity on SocialToo, and with it, my blog as well. I’ve fixed those issues since, but I realized I had to have a more reliable, redundant solution so my communications weren’t cut off when my other services were. It was at that time I decided it was worth trying something else out that didn’t involve me having to worry about hosting.

The Choices

The main choices I had were self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org), the subscription, pay-as-you-go WordPress.com, and Blogger.com. There were others, but I was looking for reliability and Blogger and WordPress seemed to have the best uptime. Self-hosted WordPress I had already realized wasn’t an option for me – I loved the flexibility of it all, but I just didn’t have the time any more to keep worrying about whether my servers were up, whether I had appropriate cache set up, and everything that goes with it.

So my main choices were Blogger and WordPress.com. To tell you the truth, my first inclination, as a WordPress user and developer (I’ve written a few WordPress plugins and even put together the theme for this blog with help of a designer), was to try out WordPress.com. I began looking at it, and quickly realized to get “StayNAlive.com” as my own domain I would be paying $12 per year. Then, to add my own customized design, I’d be paying another $15 per year. To remove ads, that would be $30 per year. If I wanted to accomodate my entire community, that would be another $30 per year. The entire bill to switch was going to cost me $87/year! All that and I would still not be able to fully integrate the design I had from my own hosted solution. I don’t make a ton of money from this blog (I do make a little from ads to support it), so that’s a huge chunk of change for just a blog, and I wasn’t planning to get rid of any servers to be able to pay for the blog (since I still needed to run SocialToo).

That left me the choice of Blogger.com, so I decided to try it out. Blogger is 100% free, and has close to 100% uptime thanks to Google’s incredible infrastructure. I decided to try it, and boy was I impressed!

Let me share some of the pros and cons of why I decided to stick with it:

The Pros

I always thought of Blogger.com as a place for mommy bloggers (no offense to all of my mommy blogger friends!). It was the place I always sent people with little knowledge in technology and who just wanted a good place they could start a blog. Maybe that’s it’s biggest advantage. I quickly learned as I was getting started that the interface was mind-numbingly simple. It was really easy to manage!

Like I said though, that was what kind of kept me away in the first place. What I discovered however is that Blogger, while simple on the surface, has some very developer-friendly features that to me, seemed even easier to deal with than my custom-hosted WordPress solution. Here are the advantages:

Simplicity. I said it already – Blogger’s interface is mind-numbingly simple.
Reliability. Rick Klau isn’t lying. I can expect my blog to be up 100% of the time. They simply don’t go down! It was actually quite a relief today, with such a high traffic day (see my blog post about it), to not have to worry about any of my servers in the process. You simply don’t need to worry about a burst in traffic, DoS attacks, or anything like that. Google handles all that for you and they’re pros at it.
On top of that, I added Torbit caching to the top of it all (they offered me a free beta of their service), which made it even faster. That took away any need for customized Apache caching.
OpenSocial Support. I think this is the coolest part. WordPress has plugins, but Google uses the standardized OpenSocial API, along with Google Gadgets, to provide an interface to Widgets and other features within the blog. To code a customized feature, I just need to know a little OpenSocial (which works with many other sites), and boom! It works right on my blog. That really got my Geek and Social Developer blood going, and I’ve only started to learn what can be done with it.
Simple, XML themes. You don’t have to know how to code (for the most part) to build a Blogger theme. Of course, I know how to code, but it’s not completely necessary. Look at the design of this blog (assuming you’re not viewing it on a very small screen or mobile device – more on that in a second) – all this custom design was built using Blogger’s own XML format. It was a pretty simple integration. I downloaded the XML file, edited it, uploaded it, and tried it out until I got the design I was looking for.
Seamless Integration with other Google Products. I say this with an asterisk. It works really well integrating with Google Adsense, Feedburner for RSS tracking, and a few other Google features (including any Google Gadget, as I mentioned above), but some obvious Google products have not been integrated. I’ll share more on that later.
Instantaneous RSS updates. When I publish a post, almost instantaneously it goes out to Google Reader and other readers that support the Pubsubhubbub format.
It’s free! The best part of it all is I don’t have to pay a thing to run it, and I don’t have to run ads on the site for it to work. It’s a cheap, very customizable solution any blogger can use. I don’t have any special deal to get what you see here – anyone gets this.

Cons

While the pros certainly outweigh the cons, there are still a few pet peeves of mine I’d love to see Google resolve. Some of these are obvious, and I really hope Google puts focus on them. Blogger could well be one of the most social products they own, and I hope they realize that. There’s a big bonus check in store for the employees that do get this.

SEO. I hope Matt Cutts is reading this (he doesn’t even use Blogger for his blog). The transition from custom WordPress to Blogger is horrible for SEO! In WordPress, I had an interface to customize the link structure so it matched the previous blog where my content was stored. That is non-existent in Blogger. They do provide a URL you can fall back to when your content doesn’t resolve on Blogger.com, but that means I’ve got to keep my previous custom WordPress solution running for it to work.
The solution for this seems simple. Google already has a cache of every website known to man. They already have a cache of my entire blog. Why not use that cache to resolve current content that doesn’t resolve from old links on the site? Or, they could just do something like WordPress does – I think the former would be cooler, and more Google-like.

In addition to URL structure, there is no good way to create a site map in Blogger. They provide an RSS feed, and you can submit that to Google Webmaster tools, but I’ve found Google is still missing links in their index from my new blog despite giving it my RSS feed. I’m now trying to just include the Archive of all the links on the sidebar of the page, but that’s hardly optimal, and cluttered too. It would be nice if Google just provided a sitemap, or automatically indexed it for you since they own the site anyway.

There are also no good ways to customize the way your title, description, tags, and other data are formatted. You can sort of do this in your theme design, but it’s hardly an easy thing to do.

That said, the uptime, and giving it time to index everything, does eventually make up for the bad SEO features of the site. I’m finding I’m almost all the way back to where I was traffic wise on Google.
Plugins. I mentioned OpenSocial and Gadgets as an advantage, but if you are used to the custom WordPress install, there is still a lot you cannot do on Blogger. For instance, to provide an alternate, mobile, version of this theme, I can’t just install a plugin to do it. I have to hard-code it into the main theme itself, which is clunky and bad looking. I’d love to see more fully integrated, and better plugin support. They could really take this to another level.
Storage. If I want to store something at the root of my domain, I have to figure out a way to hack my server as the root controller domain that forwards all other requests to blogger. Or, if I want to upload an image, it’s a rather clunky process. I have to upload it as an image on an article and link to it that way from my theme code, or upload to Picasa or some other location to host it there. There’s no good storage solution that fits well with Blogger. Google could do better integrating this.
The Cloud. The fact is, when your data is in the cloud, if something dies, so goes your content. I’m very aware of this. I’m trying to consider solutions of redundancy at the moment. I’m hoping to find something. It might be nice to auto-back up your blog to an external server somewhere, and that leads me to my next Con.
It’s proprietary. Blogger is not Open Source. I can’t install it on my own server like you can WordPress. I can’t contribute to its development. I can’t create my own instance if, knock on wood, Blogger ever does actually go down. I can’t send my backups to a server and have it continue to run there if my blog ceases to exist on Blogger.com.

The Summary

If you’re considering an alternative blogging platform, getting sick of hosting it on your own, or just want to try something new, I highly recommend Blogger.com. Speaking as a developer, it really isn’t your mamma’s blogging platform any more. There is so much you can do with it, and so many ways you can configure it, that it’s definitely worth a consideration.

If you really needs something fully customizable, are concerned about strict SEO, or need better plugin support, you may be better off sticking with a custom WordPress install, or some other open source blogging solution (hopefully that’s Blogger at some point). WordPress.com is simply too expensive to compare – I’m still unsure why people choose it, unless they don’t care about the custom features I mention above. That said, for me Blogger’s advantages far outweighed the SEO and any slight customization I would need. I also have faith that they will improve.

In a high traffic day like today, Blogger has been a life saver. I’ve been able to replace almost everything I had in my self-hosted WordPress instance, and it’s completely free to do so! I encourage you to carefully weigh the pros and cons but give it a try.

In another post I’m going to share the steps I took to transition from WordPress to Blogger. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime I’m interested in hearing your experiences. What pros and cons do you see with it?