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There’s a new ISP in town: Facebook Unleashed its Titan.

May 13, 2011 Business & Marketing, Email Marketing 1 Comment

RIP Email Marketing as we know it.

Facebook just released its Project Titan, which is their email ISP platform. It allows users to have an @facebook.com email address that integrates directly into their Facebook account.

This is genius on Facebook’s part. It keeps the user logged into Facebook that much longer. Now they can share photos of the kids, chat, get “where r u” updates from check-ins, see who likes what pages of the internet, who’s in complicated relationships and nasty break-ups, play some dumbass Zynga games, and give up all their privacy rights without realizing it… AND now check their email at the same time.

What’s different about this system vs. Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and others is that each user serves as their own gatekeeper. Only messages from connected Facebook friends and conversations initiated by the user are allowed in the inbox by default. Any third-party messages are sent to an “other” box. And if the domain/ISP/brand isn’t trusted by FB’s postmaster yet, it doesn’t even get delivered. At least the FB postmaster does send a gracious bounce response back to the sender stating the user doesn’t like you yet so you can’t talk to them.

In a discussion thread with some colleagues, I talked about how this is changing the game of email marketing:

“They aren’t dealing with false positives, at all. Every message from someone who isn’t already a connected friend on Facebook goes directly to your junk box. You have to manually let third-party senders into your inbox with a rule.

In theory, this makes their junk box actually have a higher intrinsic value than other ISPs. Habitually, I never check junk boxes. But now, I’ll feel a need to because ALL mail from new senders will filter there by default.

In dog training, they call this behavior modification.”

The response: B F Skinner would be proud of Zuck. :)

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Jan 30, 2011 Affiliate Marketing, Business & Marketing, Help Yourself, Lookatme, I'm Web 2.0!, personal Comments Off

My mother-in-law sent me a quote today that happens to be from one of my all-time favorite transcendental authors. It was entirely appropriate timing too, as I just started my latest venture Murphy Group Media. I have to say, I couldn’t agree more!

… if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ~Henry David Thoreau

Thanks Mom!

Today, I write.

Oct 9, 2010 Help Yourself, Lookatme, I'm Web 2.0!, personal 2 Comments

It has been a long while since I had any desire to blog. It’s almost disheartening to login to my WordPress admin area and see all the outdated plugins, all the spam comments sitting in queue, and the notifications that my core is out of date. It’s overwhelming. But I’m blogging anyway.

You see, you may or may not have known this, but I’m out of a job.

I won’t go into detail, but it was time to for me and my former employer to part ways. While I enjoyed the company of peers, it was very difficult for me to stay fully engaged in work that I wasn’t originally hired to do.

What now?

I have many opportunities for full-time positions and people inquiring about consulting and contract gigs. I’ve started creating my own company that I can umbrella all my projects and gigs under. But there’s just SO MUCH to do.

So, today I write.

One thing that is a definite constant in the industry I chose is the continual need for new content. That means either new graphics, video, audio, or written words. Since my drawing and design skills are akin to that of my 3rd grade son, and I lack the proper tools for a/v editing, I’m choosing to write.

And what a choice! All of my sites have been on hiatus, more or less, for the past 3 years. It’s a mess. Like I mentioned earlier, plugins are out of date, code is broken, DOMAINS ARE DEAD, etc. Add all that to the three years of evolving the industry has done with integrations of FB, Twitter, Google, and OpenID to all and every property on the web, and, well… I’m a little behind the eight ball.

So I choose the constant. I write.

Regardless of how many details are on my to-do list, I could spend weeks on them before I even put a single word on the web. My sites will look pretty, but they won’t have evolved much and they’ll still be getting the same few non-human visitors that they get anyway.

A few minutes, a few words, and I too can produce something new. Now carry this action to all of my sites and my garden begins to grow again. After the content, I can focus on tidying up one of the sites. Tomorrow, I write again, and then I focus on bringing a different site back to life. Then I do it the third day, the fourth, the fifth, and so on.

Soon, it will be 2005 again and I’ll have a wide network of sites and content in my toolbelt once again. Or so I hope.

But this time, it will be different. This time, it’s not a hobby. This time…it’s my job!

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