The Facebook Backlash
Facebook is done. The New York Times has declared an exodus from the popular social networking site started by two enterprising Harvard University students in 2004. “If you ask around, as I did,” writes Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times, “you'll find quitters.”
Why this disillusioned departure? “It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the web, beholden to corporate interests,” says Heffernan. If this concern doesn't sound familiar, it should.
Consider GeoCities, the online homesteading service which debuted in 1995. When they were purchased by Yahoo in 1999, users bemoaned the new corporate owners, who disbanded a popular community leader programme and declared ownership over anything users posted to their pages. “They wanted our 'community' but they pretty much have altered it and made it into something else … exactly what they told us they would not do,” one user explained to CNET.
via The Facebook backlash | Phoebe Connelly | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
Blogging Lawyers — Writing Great Posts
Lawyerist is a brilliant law practice blog, where the Lawyerist team writes about marketing, practice management, career development and more.
Last week, Sam Glover wrote an excellent post on writing great posts.
And therein lies one of the primary reasons that I’m crazy about social media for lawyers, and social media in general. A person in Minnesota shares great information, a person in California admires it and then she gets to share it with an audience of people that are interested in that very message. How cool is that?
Great stuff, Sam! Thanks for being social.
750 Twittering Lawyers
Want to see what 750 lawyers have to say for themselves on Twitter? Hop on over to JD Scoop and pick up the addresses.
Hat tip to Adrian Lurssen for gathering the information. The list is current as of last month, based on Twitter bios and other online materials.
Make that 751 with @pluggedinlawyer. =-D
No Tweet Trademark for Twitter?
Last month, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone penned a blog post in which he discussed the company's efforts to trademark the term “Tweet”, but it appears that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is not making that quest very easy.
Blogger Sam Johnston uncovered some documents that suggest the USPTO slapped Twitter with a partial rejection of its application on the same day as Stone's blog post.
Twitter filed its application on April 16. Stone posted his blog post on July 1 around 1:30pm Eastern time. Around 8:30pm that same day, the USPTO initiated an X-Search, an automated search of its system the agency uses to determine if any existing trademarks conflict with those on pending applications.
By 9pm, the agency fired off a letter to Twitter that said it had not uncovered any existing “Tweet” trademarks, but it did find three pending applications that used some form of the word Tweet — Tweetmarks, Cotweet, and Tweetphoto — and might therefore conflict with Twitter's own application. The USPTO has responded to all three Tweet-related applications and asked the applicants to answer questions about their plans.
But until those responses have been collected and the USPTO has handed down final decisions on Tweetmarks, Cotweet, and Tweetphoto, Twitter's quest to trademark Tweet has been suspended “because of a likelihood of confusion between the two marks,” the agency said.
Twitter To Roll Out Commercial Accounts This Year
Yes, Twitter will start earning some income this year.
Co-founder Biz Stone said the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics. After that, the company might move into building business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), creating a “commercial layer” over the social network. The commercial APIs would be out “later this year,” he said.
“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”
via Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year | VentureBeat.
The Zen Of Blogging
The Zen of Blogging is the story of an aspiring blogger who sets out on a journey to discover the secrets of blogging. Told in the style of a parable, this 10 minute read will give you a great overview of the different styles of blogging and what is “right” and what is “wrong.” The story covers domain names, blogging platforms, themes, plugins, posting frequency, social media and more.
Plugged In Lawyer 