Month: August 2012

Found Tweet Friday


Found Tweet Friday!

August 31st, 2012 (I hear it’s “Love Litigating Lawyers Day” So, um, hug a lawyer, I guess. Or just celebrate Labor Day for four days.)

Welcome to the Redlight District of Twitter

I spend a good part of my day using Twitter to find potential customers for my clients. I use the Twitter search function and locate people talking about relevant things that could translate to needs my clients’ products or services could fulfill. During this digging through the nonsense, the marketing messages, the slang and abbreviated hashtags, I find some pretty ridiculous tweets. Many that make my jaw drop. It never ceases to amaze me how many people forget that their tweets are completely public while they treat their Twitter conversations as if they were private. Some of those are simply too offensive or gross (not to mention misogynistic and lewd) for me to bother posting, but below are a collection of this week’s gems that I just had to share. My occasional commentary will be the parenthetical portions. Enjoy!

****Warning: Some content may be inappropriate for young or easily offended readers****

Found tweets:

  • Can’t decide what to get for my first car. BMW, Porshe, Mercedes Benz, or Range Rover? #whitekidproblems (Wow. For that, I hope you get NO car. Tool.)
  • DID YOU GET A HAIRCUT? No, I just dyed the tips of my hair invisible. (Oh! You jus’ so clever!)
  • A bikini waxing boutique just asked me to connect on LinkedIn. #seriously #whensocialmediagoeswrong
  • My dog just ate a frog. Then threw the frog up. (I guess it could be worse. You could be the frog.)
  • My gf rubs my stomach while I Pooh bear (does….does this mean what I think it means…?)
  • I’ve been waiting for an oil change/repairs for 3 hours and someone just told me the mechanic quit his job in the middle of working on it? (Think YOU’RE having a bad day?)
  • A world first: Bionic eye transplant lets blind woman see http://t.co/QQjlKUlO (You GUYS, Terminators are coming. But also, this is amazing.)
  • Women’s Wrestling matches drag like a wedding dress. I’m w the Taliban when it comes to this stuff. (Well, I mean, you know how well the Taliban is liked in the U.S. right? Maybe you don’t want to announce that.)
  • So the moral of the story is yolo but if you do drugs too much you’ll olo w/fucked up teeth & a burnt off face & maybe no legs or friends (Way to be a YOLO downer…)
  • Driving with the hood of my car down (I don’t think that word means what you think it means…)

There you are folks! Obviously, some weeks will be less interesting than others, but I hope you enjoy it. Also, if you ever see any great tweets worth pointing out, send them to me at robzaleski1@gmail.com and they might make the list!

Now go get your social on!

Follow this blog on Google Currents! Download the app in your app store or marketplace and click here to subscribe.

LinkedIn’s Profile Facelift, and a Feature You May Not Know About

As many of you have probably heard or seen, LinkedIn announced that it is giving profiles a facelift and working on making the site better equipped for social interaction. This surely is in part due to the split from Twitter. If you haven’t seen the changes on your profile and mobile apps already, you will soon. It’s cleaner, clearer and an undeniable upgrade. Here is a great article outlining some of the major changes and discussing how they may effect you. Perhaps it’s time to spruce things up a bit on your profile.

While checking out my shiny new page, I noticed that LinkedIn is focusing even more on the important stuff. As you scroll down my page, you see my summary, experience, publications, and projects. In that order. This means that as people are viewing your previous experience, they are likely to see your Projects too. Are you using this great, but highly undervalued feature on LinkedIn? I’ve included a video below explaining how to add one, and the great benefits that come along with creating Projects (like strengthening and increasing your connections). I guest posted about this on Entrepreneur Magazine columnist Starr Hall’s blog a couple months ago, but I feel it bears mentioning again.


What are your thoughts on this feature? What do you think of LinkedIn’s new profile pages? Do you have any speculation as to what’s coming next for the professional network? Let me know below with your comments.

Thanks for reading. Now go get your social on!

Follow this blog on Google Currents! Download the app in your app store or marketplace and click here to subscribe.

Found Tweet Friday


Found Tweet Friday!

August 24, 2012 (Good: National Waffle Day! Bad: Pluto Demoted from a Planet Day)

Welcome to the Redlight District of Twitter

I spend a good part of my day using Twitter to find potential customers for my clients. I use the Twitter search function and locate people talking about relevant things that could translate to needs my clients’ products or services could fulfill. During this digging through the nonsense, the marketing messages, the slang and abbreviated hashtags, I find some pretty ridiculous tweets. Many that make my jaw drop. It never ceases to amaze me how many people forget that their tweets are completely public while they treat their Twitter conversations as if they were private. Some of those are simply too offensive or gross (not to mention misogynistic and lewd) for me to bother posting, but below are a collection of this week’s gems that I just had to share. My occasional commentary will be the parenthetical portions. Enjoy!

****Warning: Some content may be inappropriate for young or easily offended readers****

Found tweets:

  • Saw a guy with a Walkman. Wondering if my Audi’s flux capacitor kicked in when I hit 88 MPH. (Nerdy, yet douchey at the same time)
  • A Maserati just backed into a BMW (@ Starbucks) (Expensive day for someone)
  • Moral of the story if you eating the nanny you basically eating yogurt (Um, what the hell was the story??)
  • Forgot to shave my Pitts, now I have ll cool berries (Gross, yet funny)
  • FACT : 70% of women use a smile to hide emotional pain.” (You can’t state it as a fact if it is not, in actuality, a fact. Show me your statistics…)
  • I’d have to call what my kids are doing right now a kind of cross between wilding and Pokemon LARP… #feral
  • Damn. Someone in this office smells like a wet dog slathered with mayonaise. (Ew…)
  • Well, The Mildred Pierce Miniseries can certainly be filed under “birth control” (Hallelujah sister)
  • The frog has been found. Funeral is set for this evening. Dog is innocent. Daughter is sad. #BadDay #FirstWorldProblems
  • What is everyone’s Obsession with instagraming their nails? Maybe I should start posting my freshly trimmed pubies every time (I mean…it’s your Instagram. Do what you want…)
  • tip of the day: *never* do an image search for “that’s big” without turning SafeSearch ON! oh my. (File that one under ‘Obvious’)
  • I’ve hit the late summer allergies. Mid afternoon my brain goes all Blue Screen of Death. (And we all know that means you have to shut down and reboot, right?)
  • take a breath & just think about how you’re not engaged to chad kroeger, and that should make you feel better
  • Why aren’t I engaged to Avril Lavigne.. I’m much more attractive than Chad and my hair doesn’t resemble Ramen Noodles
  • Niall its not ok to wear your hair like that u know it makes me peel my shins off (I mean, I know some of these One Directioners are a little off, but what the hell??)

There you are folks! Obviously, some weeks will be less interesting than others, but I hope you enjoy it. Also, if you ever see any great tweets worth pointing out, send them to me at robzaleski1@gmail.com and they might make the list!

Now go get your social on!

Follow this blog on Google Currents! Download the app in your app store or marketplace and click here to subscribe.

Rise of the Social Homepages

Time is becoming a very precious thing indeed. Trying to keep up on blogs, social networks, news, friends, family, work, and having non-computer related experiences create a life of constant pull on our attention. This constant pull in a gazillion different directions is exactly why I think these “Social homepages” are becoming more and more relevant. I’ve only joined two so far, and each has some functionalities that they can boast. Basically, they connect all of your social status updates and put them in a visual ‘homepage’ where one can visit and see everything that you’re sharing. The key here is the visual element. Photos you take, images pulled from links, videos; all these create a visually engaging aesthetic that will save your friends and followers time from visiting all of your networks. Let’s take a look at them.

Social networks all in one place

RebelMouse was created by by the former CTO of The Huffington Post, Paul Berry. It’s still in beta but is receiving a huge amount of buzz. Features have already been added from when I first received my invite. You can now embed your RebelMouse into your website or blog, thus making all your social updates visible from either. This is huge because your customers, potential clients, or friends don’t have to leave the place you’re putting your best work, as well as your products or services. You also have the ability to highlight certain posts that you want to stay stationary and maintain good real estate on your page, which I love!  As of right now, RebelMouse allows you to pull updates from Facebook profiles and pages, Twitter (you’ll need to use either to create your account) and just recently, Instagram. In an interview on July 9th, Paul Berry states that more networks are coming, such as Google+ and Tumblr. You can also manually add stories, which I imagine people who fully embrace their RebelMouse page as a homepage will be doing often. You can create separate RebelMouse pages for Facebook pages of which you are an admin, which is a great advantage to admins of multiple pages that aren’t really related. You can view others in your Facebook or Twitter networks that are using RebelMouse and follow their pages. Since it’s still in public beta, I can’t wait to see what new things come out of this already-popular platform.

glos.si for social networks

I was actually reached out to on Twitter by glos.si’s co-founder Sandy Lin while tweeting about RebelMouse (good poaching!). Since I dug RebelMouse, I figured it was worth a look, and I set up my own glos.si page. The first thing I noticed was that glos.si takes the same approach that Klout does and connects just about every social network under the sun. The designers to a great job of helping users show off their networks by listing them with icons in the profile heading. This is nice, just in case followers want to go and focus solely on a single network. glos.si uses the same idea I mention above for RebelMouse of creating something visually engaging, with your Foursquare updates staying stationary on the right and your other updates visually represented in tiled columns to the left. The option to change your view between images, articles, videos and everything makes reading pages a breeze. You also get to choose a background image, thus creating an even more personalized experience. The site uses a pretty cool randomized search to allow you to connect with other glos.si users not already in your other networks. As for connecting with friends using glos.si, you can only search Facebook and Twitter. One feature that I find really cool is the Newsstand feature. This creates a glos.si page of updates from everyone you follow, saving you even more time.

RebelMouse is already a slick platform with a very believable promise that there’s more to come. glos.si has a great interface already, and is strides ahead of RebelMouse since it was started back in September last year. Once RebelMouse comes of out beta, these two will certainly be in head to head competition. I’ll be interested to see where the two of them go.

Are you using either of these sites? Are there other “social homepage” sites that you’ve come across? Let me know below with your comments.

Thanks for reading. Now go get your social on!

Follow this blog on Google Currents! Download the app in your app store or marketplace and click here to subscribe.

Found Tweet Friday


Found Tweet Friday!

August 3rd, 2012 (Watermelon day! Picnic anyone?)

Welcome to the Redlight District of Twitter

I spend a good part of my day using Twitter to find potential customers for my clients. I use the Twitter search function and locate people talking about relevant things that could translate to needs my clients’ products or services could fulfill. During this digging through the nonsense, the marketing messages, the slang and abbreviated hashtags, I find some pretty ridiculous tweets. Many that make my jaw drop. It never ceases to amaze me how many people forget that their tweets are completely public while they treat their Twitter conversations as if they were private. Some of those are simply too offensive or gross (not to mention misogynistic and lewd) for me to bother posting, but below are a collection of this week’s gems that I just had to share. My occasional commentary will be the parenthetical portions. Enjoy!

****Warning: Some content may be inappropriate for young or easily offended readers****

Found tweets:

  • I can’t tell if this dude is running for exercise or if he’s being chased by invisible werewolves (It really is hard to tell. Some people run very frantically for no reason.)
  • I accidentally used Right Guard. Now I smell like a middle school gym locker in 1980.
  • Willa kissed neil then asked “did that taste like dog lips!?” hahahahaha things you don’t want to hear from your 4 yr old. (Sometimes the honesty of a child is not the best thing.)
  • CAT WOMAN, HAVE MY BABIES (Yeah. Can’t disagree with that one.)
  • Everywear I go bittchs always know charlie scene has a wenine that he loves to show, BITTCH, wake up grab beer,grab rear,shave beerd, H.U. (It…it just hurts me so.)
  • grammy: “she tried to get me to get a brazilian wax, it was kinda kinky.” me: “yeah, hairless vaginas…kinky.” grammy: “i know right.” (#generationgap)
  • Maybe you should eat some of that makeup so it can make you pretty on the inside too or kill you… (Twitter just got real vicious. Yikes.)
  • i fucking hate my father i can’t wait to live out of the house where i can fap in peace. (there’s a REALLY awkward story here…)
  • he looked great til his eyebrows punched me in the tit (Wait…what? How? I just don’t even…)
  • On the bright side, Snoop Dogg / Lion just gave Apple a brand new cat to work with for their next OS. (Will it be called the iOSizzle?)
  • Caught my dog licking the Ouija board with his lipstick out, so pretty sure the house is haunted & he will kill me in my sleep tonight. #BOO (Coming to a theater near you, this Halloween.)
  • Thinking about removing your own #50ShadesofGrey…#——- is ready to help with lots of great #Rekden products! #Miami #salon #haircut (…really? Salon name removed, for obvious reasons)
  • I had the worst dream ever, I went to school with no eyebrows, and I had to draw them with pink markers. So then everyone knew I was high (Drugs are bad, kids.)
  • “Just some guy she met at the gym with Brad Pitt’s face and Jesus’ abs.” (Crucifixion is the new Pilates?)

A couple other things to check out. I have a post up on the Social Penguin’s Friday Freakout today as well. I think customer review sites are potentially ruining customer service. What do you think?

For those of you tired of the Instagram hype, McSweeney‘s has a piece just for you.

There will be no posts next week, as I’m traveling to visit family. I’ll be back soon, don’t you worry about it!

If you ever see any great tweets worth pointing out, send them to me at robzaleski1@gmail.com and they might make the list!

Now go get your social on!

Follow this blog on Google Currents! Download the app in your app store or marketplace and click here to subscribe.

Brand Your Instagram Photos Using Over App

Over App
Taken with Instagram, text added with Over

A couple weeks ago, Chris Brogan tweeted about an app he was digging and shared a Google Hangout he had with a guy named Aaron Marshall. The app was called Over, and it allows you to add text over pictures on your iPhone (for the time being) using a really slick interface. You can then post your edited photos to Facebook (profile not page, yet), Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr (having issues getting mine to show up though) or send the image via email. I’ve yet to have Chris Brogan steer me wrong, so I checked out the app myself. Seemed like a fun way to spice up photos and I really enjoy the use of a scrolling wheel to go through all of your options. Later, I read a blog post shared by Valerie Deveza reminding bloggers that you can (and should) easily use your own, royalty-free images in your blog posts. This saves time scouring for usable images (and potential distractions of perusing the internet) and any concern of copyright infringement. Then. It hit me.

Over App
Taken with Instagram, text added with Over

A fantastic use for Over is to “brand” your photos that you take on your iPhone. If you already use Instagram or Facebook Camera, take your pictures and add your filters as normal. Open Over and load the picture in, add your company name, website, your name, message, etc, choose a font (more are available for individual purchase) and suddenly, the photo is officially yours. Also, if you’re a fan of Paper by 53 for the iPad (of which I am a raving fan), you can doodle your image, email it to yourself or screen capture it, add your text with Over, and suddenly it becomes branded as well. (Conversely, you could write out your company’s name/info in Paper if you have a steady hand, but I know many professionals whose handwriting is pretty atrocious.) Either way, you’ll get to show off your creative side and never worry if you’re going to receive a cease and desist letter for an image you’re using. Even with proper credit, you just can’t be too sure when using others’ intellectual property.

Fifty-Three, Yelp, Over App
Drawn with Paper by 53, text added with Over

The best part about using Over with the apps I’ve discussed is that you don’t have to go and buy (or illegally download) any expensive software. Over and Paper may cost you a few bucks, then you’re off to writing your blog safely, further engaging your creativity and artistic side. Just think. You could even create your own memes!

What are your thoughts on this approach? Are you using any other text-overlay apps that you’re hooked on? Are you already using your own images in your blog posts?

Let me know below with your comments.

Thanks for reading. Now go get your social on!

Follow this blog on Google Currents! Download the app in your app store or marketplace and click here to subscribe.

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