New Social Network on the Scene, KENEKTED

Two Kenekted developers discussing a project at a recent code-a-thon at Kenekted.

Most of us use our Facebook accounts as a sort of scrapbook. We post pictures of our families, our pets, we share with our friends what we're watching on TV. But while Facebook is a great place to share with your friends what's going on in your life, it's become a bit crowded with Fan Pages, Games, and Targeted advertisements.

Facebook's platform is so crowded because it requires ad revenue to survive. By sharing status updates, posting on your friend's walls, "Liking" games and pages, you are painting a portrait of yourself for advertisers to target you based on your interests and lifestyle.

Now enters Kenekted (the phonetic spelling of connected). A couple of things you'll notice about Kenekted right away: 

1. It has no advertisements. Kenekted's creator, Jeff Peak (@pjeffpeak on twitter) has promised that there will never be any targeted advertising on the site. This means that your information will never be used by third-parties for profit. 
2. There are no games or other applications. This provides a clean platform for you to share with the people in your life. As well as meet new people..something that is almost impossible to do on larger more well-known sites.
3. It is fully integrated with the accounts you already have; you can post to Facebook and Twitter from Kenekted and vice versa. However if you post to Facebook from Kenekted, Facebook still collects and stores the information you post.

Kenekted has all of the features you're already acustomed to, like photo tagging and @mentions. So with all of this at hand, it's no wonder that Kenekted is positioned perfectly to become a major contender in the social network landscape.

You can create your account at Kenekted.com try it out, and if you like it, you can help this small Midwestern Tech Startup gain popularity by spreading the word around using the networks you already use. And if you don't like it, you can "delete your account and Kenekted will have absolutely no record of you ever having signed up at all" - from the Kenekted Privacy Policy. 

We live in an interesting time. Companies will rise and fall and with Facebook about to release it's IPO and make a quick $10,000,000,000 (ten billion bucks) why not help out the little guy. Small business is after all what changes the world.

Peace,
MidwestTech

What May 21st Said About Social Media

Saturday, May 21, 2011 was a wedding anniversary, birthday or other momentous occasion for some. For others, May 21, 2011 was the day during which many believed or at the very least feared that the heavily publicized predictions of 89-year-old Christian broadcaster, Harold Camping's "rapture" could have some validity. Whether you were a believer or cynic in regards to Camping's predictions of the "end times", as a generation, we can unanimously agree that this end of the world scare will go down in history as the property of social media.  

Harold Camping gained momentum amongst today's generation after making a startling prediction earlier this year that the world as we know it would end on May 21, 2011 with what many religious believers refer to as "The Rapture". Camping's prediction included intimate details about these end times, including an exact time at which catastrophic earthquakes were said to begin destroying the sinners remaining on Earth after the second coming of Jesus Christ.

As the hours passed and May 21st arrived for many countries overseas, where was it that fearful or even curious followers of this supposed rapture turned to? Twitter. The choice of many to turn to a website in general, let alone a social networking site which runs solely off of user generated content, makes a significant statement about our generation. We truly are living in the era of the internet and social media.

May 21, 2011 was the first prediction of the end of the world that took place during a time of such social transparency. The Y2K scare of 1999 and other similar predictions took place during times of lesser technology that did not connect people across the globe. It is, in fact, arguable if Harold Camping's prediction's hype is a direct result of its viral spread across social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

May 21st reminds us of two key characteristics of our current state of technology. First of all, we live in a society in which all individuals are informed, including all age groups and all financial classes. The news never ceases to be broadcast and the mediums by which individuals can receive news are multiplying by the second, making breaking stories accessible to any individual. Today's news is instantaneous. As reports came in across the internet that Christmas Island, Kiribati (an otherwise unknown location) was the first of the world to experience and live through 6PM on May 21st without a world ending earthquake, people across the globe celebrated via tweets and Facebook statuses after learning of this information via those same social networking sites. In that moment, all who participated became instaneous broadcasters. 

This brings me to the second statement that May 21st has made regarding our world's current technology. Social media undoubtably is the way of the future. In years prior, only trained professionals or trusted news anchors could deliver us information regarding such serious events as the supposed end of the world. Yet when crisis struck and fear took over, thousands of individuals turned to Twitter as their source of information. And as the clock struck 6PM in Christmas Island and progressively in other countries across the globe, the world rejoiced together. Predictions of Camping's Rapture immediately became a bit less frightening regardless of the fact that people were reading tweets published by strangers.

The atmosphere on the internet was quite warm on the eve of May 21st and the internet's bombastic social media capabilities are to blame. Sites like Twitter reconnect us in a way humans have not been connected in decades. Our world is drastically smaller now that we are in contact with individuals we may not even know in our "real lives" in countless virtual ways. The fear amongst some users was similar to the fear that some experience regarding terrorism on a daily basis. This unique kind of fear brings humanity as a whole together. And in our social networking based world, we now find comfort in the text based, faceless messages of people that are complete strangers when it comes down to it. Now, everyone with an internet connection has a voice. The world is changing. Communication is changing. This rapture belongs to the internet.

YouTube

Turn Your Social Media into Revenue

There is a big topic nowadays about generating extra income from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Today I have my TOP 3 ways of doing so, all of which I am using right now. These are all free to use services and are quite simple to work with.

The first one is a service called Twtbuck. Twtbuck is a service that couldn y be any more simpler to use. They generate affiliate links for you, all you do is copy and paste them to your social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, or even your own website. They also have a referral program that offers 30% commission from all of your referrals. The payments are constant and you can be paid via paypal The steps are as simple as

Grab Ad Links or Widgets
Begin with Tweeting the ad and then share on Facebook and IM
Check out the link and write a small review about the link on your blog and give your ad links in the blog post.
Use ad links in your email signature or forum signature
For every click you get on these links, you get paid. Simple!

This service is by far my favorite out of all of the services I use and I highly recommend it to new beginners looking to add a little extra cash in their pockets. If you are interested in checking out this service go ahead and click here and begin earning today!

MagPie is a twitter only service that allows advertisers to post from your twitter account. Now when I say they can post from your account, no, that does not mean you give them your account information and they have full access to it. It s basically an ad post on your twitter feed that you get revenue from. You can set the ratio of how many tweets advertisers can post in your account settings so they aren t posting ads every time you post a new tweet. For example, I have it set up to where every five tweets I make, advertisers get one tweet. The payout for this service is $50.00 which is a bit high in my opinion. While this service is good, it is my least favorite simply because of the amount you must earned before you can actually be paid.

If you re interested in the MagPie service check it out here and give it a try.

Option number three is called Sponsored Tweets. Sponsored Tweets is a Twitter advertising platform that connects advertisers with tweeters. The site provides robust targeting and detailed analytics.

1. Set your price.

All you need to get started is to set your price, add a category and some keywords then wait for offers to roll in from Advertisers.

2. Choose your offers.

As offers come in you can accept or reject them.

3. Receive Payment.

If you accept an offer, your account will be credited within 24 hours of your tweet. You can cash out once your account reaches $50.

All these services combined can earn you an outstanding amount of extra cash, simply by integrating advertisements into your everyday social media connections.This is another one with a high payout, but in my experience, you earn greater revenue due to the fact that you can set your own prices.If you are thinking of using Sponsored Tweets, get more information here.

The Daily for iPad - Is it Revolutionary?

Yesterday, the very much anticipated new digital news publication from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, The Daily was released. The Daily is one of the applications that brings the newspaper to iPad. The cost for getting the app to where it is now was about $30 million, with a budget of the newspaper is $500,000 daily. Murdoch strongly believes the app is going to revolutionize the way users consume the news.

The Daily holds over 100 pages of content, HD video, hi-resolution photos, all the aspects of the print newspaper and even Sudoku and Crossword Puzzles. Each morning, new content is pushed to the application. With the rate at which news occurs and breaking news flashes, The Daily will drop in the new content right as it happens. To get the new paper everyday you must purchase a subscription. The weekly subscription is just $0.99 and $39.99 for the year. The subscriptions are a new feature in the App Store that Apple wants all digital publications to use. The app, itself, is free with the subscriptions added on. As of now, a free two week subscription is running.

My thoughts on The Daily: The Daily had quite an amount of hype leading up to the release and this has caused many people to be very underwhelmed with the app, just as some skeptics were with iPad. In my opinion the app has many good and interesting features like in-app voice comments and the 360º photos, but there are many things that need to be fixed. Scrolling through pages is rather slow and quite annoying at times. The actual news content is alright, but I would have to say that I prefer the likes of The Huffington Post and The New York Times. Page previews are low quality, but look better when opened. The biggest problem with The Daily, is the amount of crashes. So is it revolutionary? As of now I really can't say so, yet. I do believe that The Daily may soar to unmeasurable popularity, but we must give it some time for now.

Down below is a video hands-on with The Daily from my YouTube channel, TechVetica. Thanks for reading.

Stick to what you Know, Apple. Ping Sucks!

iTunes 10 came out yesterday and offered one major change - Ping. Steve Jobs touted it as "a social network for music". You were supposed to be able to follow bands and friends and share what music you were buying, listening to and where concerts were being held. Sounds cool right? Well its not. First, Facebook is blocking Ping so you can't connect with your friends. The only way you can find them is though search or emailing them directly and who wants to bother with that. Second, the software doesn't find similar music to what you like for recommendations, but instead only what's popular. Lastly, the software doesn't seem to filter spam and will let you take whatever name you want. Thus follow me, Kurt Cobain!

Apple even had Facebook connect on its own website yesterday morning. However, Facebook started blocking Ping as there was no contract in place. This would be really funny as Apple is getting some of its own medicine, but without Facebook Ping is terrible as a social network. You can't connect with your friends easily. What good is a social network if you can't easily find the people you want to be social with? When I created my profile I picked Nirvana and Alice in Chains as the only two bands I liked. So whom does Ping recommend that I follow? Lady Gaga and Katy Perry! Obviously the software is just showing you what is popular (Lady Gaga already has over 150,000 followers) rather than what you might like that is similar. Another issue is that you can pick any name so there are already six Justin Biebers. I took the name Kurt Cobain. Yes, I have taste and while I don't see myself using Ping much - follow me for kicks! The other big problem with Ping is it doesn't filter spam in the comments. I followed Rick Rubin and there were 82 comments on an album he liked. At least ten of these were "get a free iPhone at . . ." with a link to the same website. Apple needs to get this under control really fast or Ping might be their biggest flop since the first generation Apple TV. I'm a big Apple fan, but just like Google should never had tried to make a smart phone (sorry to anyone who bought a Nexus One), Apple should stick to what its good at. Unless Apple works out a deal with Facebook and gets a handle on the spam, Kurt Cobain says, "Stay Away!"

You can find other iPhone releated articles and content on my site.