I was taking out trash out last night, it was New Years day. A good day to reflect on the new year, the future, and the like. I started to wonder, is the  future here yet? Because when I was a kid 2009 seemed so far away, like flying car/star trek far away. As my mind wandered, it happened….

A loud SWOOOOOSH rang out from my pocket. It was a noise I’ve heard many times before, the simple sound an iPhone makes upon sending out a new email message. You see moments before I tended to my husbandly trash duties, I took a picture in our kitchen, attached it to an email, and sent it. As I walked the courtyard the following technical marvels were going on, right in my pocket:

• The image was being sent over the airwaves through AT&T’s 3G wireless network.
• It then bounced off my personal email server, where it was processed and send on to its final destination at Flickr.
• Once Flickr received it, it was automatically processed and uploaded to my photostream.
• Moments later that image would be aggregated to services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

All of this would happen before I even got the trash downstairs. So we don’t have flying cars, but holy shit we have some cool tech. 

Enjoy and happy new year.

If you send direct messages on Twitter via TXT it has always been easy to slip up, instead broadcasting your private message to the world.

A service called DMfail even launched to aggregate failed direct messages. Most of these fails occurring when a user entered the command DM, instead of just D.

Today, and with an unusually speedy response, the big T has already fixed the issue. Effectively failing DMfail.

As you can see to the right, both D and DM will now properly send your secret communications. Fear not, your privacy is still totally safe and always will be!

Now excuse me, I’m overdosing on Twitter memes and need to purge in the bathroom Lohan style.

It was MySpace that first got me into the social media game, at least the marketing side of it. At one point it was even a full time job for me. Leveraging the massive social network for myself and clients, I launched various campaigns for both fun and profit.  It was also around this time that Que publishing discovered some of the work I was doing in the space. They asked me to capture some of my techniques in a book for them. The result being the MySpace Marketing book.

The release got delayed a few times but that gave me the opportunity to keep the book up to date. For example it now includes information on how to get started with the MySpace self serve ad system and developer platform. The entire book serves as a great premier to anyone using MySpace for online marketing. Its also a nice introduction to social media marketing in general. I hope you enjoy it!

Special thanks to Brian Solis for writing an awesome forward for the book.

Check out the MySpace marketing social network on Ning as well.

On a slow news weekend it took just one request from Frenchmen Loic Le Meur to set the tubes a blaze.  He wanted to see Twitter search results by authority (number of followers). While this certainly raises some questions, its not a terrible thing to request. In fact I was also curious what the search results might look like. 

So I asked our special projects guru Ryan Sit to work something up. The result is an interesting mashup,  results based on rank and time posted with both being displayed side by side. Give it a test drive yourself here. 

Let’s start with the original reason Loic requested the feature, ego searching his Le Web event.

Already we can begin to see some of the shortcomings, at least for this topic. When ordered by rank the first results are dominated by Robert Scoble and Loic himself. Once you scroll down a bit though you begin to see some other nice results based on rank. The right side displays most recent twits and also looks to contain some nice results too.

Try it with a few other topics:

• iPhone
• Xmas
• Your Name

Tomorrow we can add a few more tweeks to the site and welcome your feedback. I’ll also have Ryan share some of the ways he has done this using the Twitter API.

Do Twitter results based on authority do anything for you?

Yea I hired Mona Nomura and you didn’t.

Turns out FriendFeed is not only a cool service, but a great place to find talented content producers too. After all, its on services like FriendFeed that users like Mona break online trends or just upright create them.  Anyone who actively uses the site is well familiar with Mona’s work, you might even say she is the Queen of FriendFeed. That would of course imply that someone is worthy to be the king (Scoble?).

Needless to say I’m happy to have her involved with the work I’m doing at Tsavo. Her unique style and character, along with trend spotting ninja skills and social currency make her a valuable part of the team.

Mona is going to be blogging on a new property of ours, Twirlit. The site is a women’s site that focuses on beauty, fashion, food, celeb gossip and more. It is still under some development but please stop by and let me know what you think.

From here you can also begin to see some of the Tsavo network unfold. Incorporating high quality content along with relevancy and new search technologies. Lots more announcements to come on this, along with a few other cool hires and acquisitions. 

In the meantime please subscribe and follow along:

• Twirlit RSS Feed
• Mona’s FriendFeed
• Mona’s Twitter
• Mona’s Blog