This week was a bit tough, upgrading to Wordpress 3.0 was troublesome. I am back in business though, and it’s time for some Sunday links.

Picture of the week – from a trip I took to Dubai a few years ago, I’ve been thinking about going back.

The red sand was stunning. This was taken during our duning adventure.

Get ready for it – the top 10 cutest cats from Zooborns.

I guess that giving the iPhone testicles will appeal to some people?

Great collection of social networking visuals from Edelman Digital.

Gorgeous desk posted on IKEA Hacker. I wish it wasn’t facing the wall though.

I had a friend email me the link to this video, and I find it really inspirational for a number of reasons. Mostly though, great song, great scenery, and photographers!

Death Valley from Scott Gold on Vimeo.

I had noticed it was approaching, and today I reached 1,000 followers on Twitter.

I am happy to report that I think that most of my followers are real people or businesses.  I have blocked some followers that I just wasn’t interested in, and haven’t auto-followed anyone back, which has resulted in my follower numbers fluctuating regularly as those I didn’t follow back unfollow me. 

I follow quite a few Third Tribe members, adding them has significantly increased the great content coming in through my Twitterstream.  I follow celebrities that interest me, although I am quick to unfollow if it becomes too random or erratic.  I follow many online friends that I’ve met through message boards and other places I’ve frequented over the years.  I almost can’t explain to people what it is that I like about Twitter, other than mentioning that most of the greatest content I am exposed to online is because of the quality of the 1,676 people that I follow.

So, now what?  It’s just a milestone, just something to acknowledge and then move on, a lesson learned from turning 30 a few months ago.

What are your thoughts on follower count? Is there a magic number that matters?

So, new updates to Facebook again. I’m generally fine with the new feed stuff, especially now that I get the difference between them and I’m understanding the newsfeed more these days.

However, new Facebook is pretty presumptuous,  and appears to think that we are living in rainbow marshmallow fantasyland, where everyone is super close and super friendly.

Examples

(The top suggestions are friend or fan suggestions, and those are fine, they make sense.)

The “you haven’t talked to that person from your English class who you didn’t actually interact with socially in high school” messages.

On a related note…

I do not need to reconnect with these people.  If I want to reconnect with someone on Facebook, Facebook, I will take care of that on my own.

So Facebook, come on.  Are you not getting that a large portion of the people I’m connected to are from a previous time period in my life?  Sure, we can be “friends” on Facebook but we aren’t going to be chitty-chatty all of the time.  In fact, it is likely we won’t connect at all, save the occasional birthday message or a comment on the same wall post/status update.

The “someone you connected to signed up, added some friends and then disappeared and is not helping our revenue” messages.

Oh Facebook. First of all, why don’t YOU make Facebook better for the mystery girl? Writing on her wall is probably not going to be a Facebook game-changer for her.  And the FB user with “only” 17 friends?  Why assume that this person wants to connect with so many others on your site?  If I was only connected on Facebook with the people I see and talk to on a regular basis, it would be maybe 35-40 people. 

People will use your website in different ways, maybe not everyone cares to connect with people who are just acquaintances or just coworkers but people they see as ACTUAL friends.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today, I’ve been seeing these messages for a while now and think that Facebook’s presumption is a bit much.

(Oh also, Facebook, please move the birthdays up near the suggestions box, thanks.)

What do you think of the new Facebook changes, particularly these new “suggestions?”

I asked someone recently what their goals and objectives were in relation to using social media tools for their business.  They responded with “well, we have to,” which made me cringe a bit.  I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been said when I say that NO,  you don’t have to use social media tools.  Especially not if you aren’t ready to commit to it in such a way that it is given a real chance to help you connect.

I was surprised yesterday to visit GourmetLibrary.com, one of the latest ventures of Gary Vaynerchuk and Wine Library, and not immediately find links to Twitter, Facebook, etc.  (A link to Twitter has since been added, as you can see on the screenshot from this morning.  No tweets so far yet though, not even an introduction.)

I was surprised that the site was even launched without those things in place.  I can’t be the only person who immediately looks for ways to connect to online shops or brands that I’m potentially interested in buying things from, whether it is subscribing to a feed about sales or connecting on Twitter or Facebook.  How many other people who follow @WineLibrary, who follow @garyvee, clicked on the site yesterday and then had no way to connect?  It seems like a major miss, especially surprising to me given who is behind it.  I am connected to a few Wine Library employees that I met at a Tweetup there a few months ago, and they are all great.

There are 114 followers (as of now) on the GL Twitter account, but I would imagine that number would already be so much bigger if there had been prominent callouts to connect on the site BEFORE it was announced.  I know that there is a massive amount of promotion that the site will get through the thousands of people watching Wine Library TV, so maybe this isn’t seen as such a big deal to the people behind GL.

Bringing it back to my story at the top, this is definitely the place to connect with potential cheese (etc.) shoppers!  If I had an online retail business, I would be all over this.

Update: I pulled the first screenshot this morning, now it is nearly 7pm and Facebook has been added as well:

Watching these things go up now makes me think that perhaps they saw the miss with these items as well.  What do you think?

Update, the day after.  Look who’s tweeting up a storm!

I am happy to see this engagement but still think that I made a valid point by wondering why this wasn’t all in place before launch.

I was lucky enough to co-host the latest episode of Lipgloss and Laptops, a wonderful beauty podcast that I’ve been listening to for a long time!  In this episode, Airdrie and I discuss eyeliner, blush, the iPhone, Nine Inch Nails, Twilight, and more.

I had a wonderful time with Airdrie over Skype and she’s already sent me new eyeliners to try out, which has been fun.  I look forward to being on the show again to discuss them.

The episode can be found here.  I highly recommend subscribing to the show in iTunes.

Thanks again to Airdrie (and her husband Derek for the technical assist).

Posted via email from Jamie Sanford’s posterous

I am a few weeks late in posting this but better late than never, I’ve got many drafts of blog posts that are incomplete, but with 5 days of coursework remaining, I intend to get back into blogging!

I’ll let the tweets tell this story.

This tweet was followed by a DM from @ComcastSteve where he asked for my home number to try and locate me an appropriate cable box that I could pick up.  I sent another DM back with my phone number.

@ComcastSteve responded to me within minutes.  He was super pleasant and helpful.  I responded by giving him positive love online with happy tweets and a Facebook status update:

From where I’m standing, Comcast is doing a GREAT job handling online customer service.  I told everyone I know that I was so excited about having gotten such a quick and helpful response.

However, I had spent the previous 4 days or so complaining because the customer service I received over the phone and the 2 times I drove to the physical location was nowhere near as good as what @ComcastSteve gave me in 5 minutes.  Does this leave me happy? Yes.  However, it’s a bigger problem that the majority of the Comcast customer service team are not this interested in ensuring customer satisfaction.

I personally think that @ComcastSteve should be leading training sessions for the Comcast reps who answer the phone, at the very least.

What would you have Comcast do to improve this situation?

I am still swamped (and obviously a few days late) but wanted to post these images for anyone who still doesn’t think that Twitter is important.

This is the longest I’ve gone in a while without a blog post. However, I am in the last 8 weeks of school (CLEP test after that) and looming deadlines have kept me extremely busy at the office as well.

I’m so glad to have attended last week’s tweetup at Wine Library! Organized by Eva Abreu, there were about 25-30 people in attendance.  The Wine Library tweeps were wonderful hosts, we had great wine to taste, watched Gary Vaynerchuk tape an episode of Wine Library TV, and mingled.

Full set of photos is here on Flickr, I’ve noted those photos to ID everyone as best as I could – please let me know if I missed you!

@garyvee doing his thing.

Mingling and drinking some vino.

Eventually the party moved into @garyvee’s office for some live UStreaming and interesting discussion.

Eva’s post about the event, containing the list of attendees, is here.  It was great to meet everyone and I hope to see you at a future tweetup!