It’s funny how Google conditions our blogs, our articles, our thoughts. We are used to indulging in auto censorship with one eye in what we want to convey and the other on how to rephrase it so it pleases the spiders and we get some visibility. We knew how to do it cause we learn fast…but wait, just when we think we are playing the politically correct writer big brother comes and says now we go on real time search and a better index called Caffeine. Having that in mind, I have decided to change the title of my blog and the introductory words to describe what it is about. Let’s be serious, I am neither Chris Brogan nor Robert Scoble so the possibilities someone searches for Carlos Lorenzo and lands on my site are as probable as me being hit by a meteorite, so Carlos Lorenzo’s Blog on Social Media sounds more realistic and allows me to compare probabilities with more reliable objects offering less margin of error like a Frisian cow hauled by a tornado or a rain of frogs. As if with words like “blog” and “social media” were not enough (I am sure I managed to go up a couple of pages in search engines from the last place in those 181,000,000 results), I decided to enhanced the description as I said, by stealthily dropping the word Photography and squeezing in the term “social web”. These minor but essential changes will bring me out of anonymousness but hey!, remind me to publish at least three times a day, to tweet my posts  and to create a page on Facebook to duplicate my work. It is time to forget about playing the lonesome rider of blogging anymore. In other words, someone pushed the button at Mountain View to go full throttle and here we are with our faces stuck on the passengers cabin walls traveling at the speed of light with no seat belts on.

Google is slowly changing the rules of the game. It is happening slowly but it is here to stay. Real time search is permeating our daily habits, the way we approach information. Although the average user is still reluctant to click on the search options and keep an eye on the latest results for more than five minutes, it is true that we are getting more demanding. This morning news are old. The classic media, even Google news, are outdated. There is a certain lag and sometimes getting the scoop that happened seconds ago makes the difference. Of course there is the broadcaster and the consumer. The vast majority of mortals cannot afford to stay 24/7 in front of a screen classifying the right stuff to give their social network the most relevant news. This implies that some people will accept being passive users and rely on the service of the broadcaster in their social circle. And this need is getting stronger than ever cause sources increase in number and speed, and trust is becoming an asset. Some time ago CNN was perhaps the most reliable source to stay up-to-date on recent events. They are still good at that but twitterers have proven to be efficient reporters, so efficient that traditional newspapers have had to accept the inevitable and implement real time widgets on their sites. And if the hot news are no more in the hands of newspaper tycoons but in the mouths of social broadcasters then you might as well be one of them.

Information is not controlled by a few anymore. Now we fully depend on the power of the cloud, the number of synapses in a neuronal system. It is time to build our social network and that my friend cannot be achieved in the isolated cell of your blog. Those times when SERPs were determined by a few keywords and a high PR are becoming rather obsolete.

1. Create and/or improve your Google Profile: Apparently Google is giving more relevance to your profile. At first it was just a pretty silly page but this year its importance has grown exponentially, up to the point that all your social circle is going to swirl around that list of innocent links you personally suggest at least for Google. They position of your links in that list seems to count so try to place your faves way up. Social search now in open beta can give you an idea of how the profile influences your circle and the results given by Google.

2. Use Google Reader as your headquarters: It takes some time to get how Reader works. It may be boring to many but it is so far the most powerful tool to control the enormous flow of items incessantly coming your way. You have to be familiar with feeds and keep it clean, nicely classified in folders. Don’t hesitate collecting as many feeds as you can but always sifting the right stuff from the useless source. I personally have thousands of feeds although I specially visit my tech and socia media folders. Keep those faves more visible. If you are using Firefox there is a nice plug-in to add PostRank to Google Reader  so you always find the most popular stuff and save some time. Sharing is absolutely important. As you can see you’ve got a sharing section on your sidebar. Work on your shared items page and promote that with a link somewhere else, for example, your own Google profile! Find friends from your contacts inside reader and connect with them. This way of interaction is proving to be more relevant for Google.

3. Subscribe in as many social networks as you can and link to your Google profile if you can. Your profile is now your headquarters so it makes more sense to send your interaction over there for it to distribute the stream to your blog or web.

4. Examine real time search results and watch behavior of the latest results as they appear. What do you see? Mostly Twitter and Friendfeed. That is where you want to be then. Try to send relevant tweets that call people’s attention or share attractive stuff in Friendfeed, preferably commenting others’ shares or simply liking some. Be honest though.

5. Build up your social circle, expand it, nourish it at least once a day. Every member counts. Don’t just go for the big shots. That’s a mistake. Cohesion in the cloud is a must. Remember chess, you can beat a king with just the pawns.

6. Think more in terms of followers and the influence of your networks than in Google PR. Basically because Google is already doing so!

photo credit: TheJCB

The tradeshow for the mobile phones market, the Mobile World Congress 2010, is near, starting next February 15th in Fira Barcelona venue, Montjuic. The event, the largest exhibition in mobile industry,  gathering more than 1,300 companies is not only a unique opportunity for business  and deals but also to discuss, to connect and exchange, to attend industry seminars and conferences by keynote speakers as for example,  Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive of Vodafone; Cesar Alierta, Executive Chairman and CEO Telefónica; Eric Schmidt CEO from Google; Hans Vestberg President and CEO at Ericsson; Mr. Lu Yi Min President of China Unicom; etc.  To entertain participants there is the Congress Party & Awards Celebration that will take place on Tuesday 16th headlined by famous rock band Duran Duran and hosted by actor Stephen Fry who will present the awards. Check here categories for 2010

But what will be discuss in the congress? Well, according to the agenda, topics like mobile money, the capability of mobile app stores to bill content in a framework of strategic relationships with third parties in new business models focused on cloud computing and service oriented architecture all made possible thanks to the implementation of new technologies. The impact of fragmentation and strategies to cope with it as well as the effect of  latest innovations on the consumer will be  also analyzed. Keynote sessions will cover important issues like how LTE (Long Term Evolution) is central to the business strategy of mobile network operators or the deployment of a variety of new technologies by world leading vendors and operators that will accelerate the adoption of Mobile Broadband across the globe. The evolution of femtocells by enabling a new generation of apps based on common APIs previously agreed upon by the industry and  the need to court the developer community.  Of course the agenda includes more items that we can discuss later on before or during the congress. I suppose hot topics like near field communication (NFC), location-aware apps using GPS or augmented reality via camera view and multiple layers will pop up. Things like barcode scanning, RFID and sensors will mark the future of smartphones this year.

Maybe security aspects will acquire more relevance after recent GSM code-cracking reports that GSMA had previously considered to be irrelevant.

Exhibitors are numerous and cover all fields in this sector. I just wanted to mention two that called my attention and who already announced their attendance on their respective webs:

Oracle

Adobe

I hope this post serves just as an introduction to this vital event taking place next February, a congress that will probably generate more than 200 million euros for the city and will push economy in these times of crisis. I’ll try to keep you posted from Barcelona.

* Venue: Fira Barcelona,  Montjuïc
* Location:  Barcelona
* Date: 02/15/2010 – 02/18/2010
* Website: www.mobileworldcongress.com

After reading Matt Cutts‘s recent update on this August post at  Google Webmaster Central about a project codenamed Caffeine, it is evident that Google insists in perfectioning the search engine algorrithms by adapting them to the present state of the web and this time is more than just a small tweak. In a scenario where the common information streamline has changed from a peaceful water spring into a violent torrent, traditional search methods rapidly get to be obsolete and obstrusive. If you are one of those concerned about your SEO, you must have noticed the constant fluctuations in your SERPs due to the influence of social networks like Facebook or Twitter just to mention some. The clot in search results is thicker than ever up to the point that you can’t tell good content from bad efficiently. So there came real time search options like Updates. But now things promise to get even better. Google has decided to face 2010 with full power by adapting their best weapon in a way that it turns faster and deadlier, now more multimedia aware and generic search-friendly maybe with an eye on Bing and/or Rupert Murdoch and building the perfect nest for the ads goose to lay more golden eggs of course.  Expectations have grown to test the new possibilities the implementation of this under-the-hood system will bring since Matt confirmed that after the holidays Caffeine will be available in all Google data centers. SEO companies are worried for obvious reasons as traditional ways to get clients or themselves to front page Google results may soon change. Of course, this is just a theory, but previous experience advice to be on alert. The principle of having good content in a spider friendly and clean neighborhood context will prevail I assume although it would be interesting to see how we can influence results via social networks. It is not a crazy thing to say that those who continuously post relevant content and update faster and most important, with a higher social recognition within trendy social networks will stay on top perhaps by introducing social search experiment features that are now in Google Experimental labs for example. Whatever it is 2010 brings I think it will be for the better and once again thanks guess who. If I were in MS’ shoes I’d start spying on this secret experiment codenamed Caffeine to be unveiled next January before it’s too late.

photo credit: hettie gm

Google Chrome? With extensions, please. Yes, Google Chrome tastes better with extensions, if you’ve got the beta channel of course, at least for now. But let us talk about an announced fight. Contenders were friends. One was an expert, a veteran boxer yet an amateur with the wrong sponsors and in spite of that had eaten off almost the whole traffic pie from old crumbling Internet Explorer, but who  still believed in open source, good will, helping people and the tooth fairy. The other was a pro, hardened in a thousand combats, trained by the best and with billions in the bank as to become his own manager. The Mozilla Firefox vs Google Chrome fight will be probably announced before expected and will catch many unawares in spite of the commercial relationship between both firms that represented more than 90 percent of the Mozilla foundation’s total revenues in 2008  (they’ve been cashing around $60 million a year from Google since the contract was extended in August that year).  Mozilla will benefit from Google till November 2011, but this sudden move of announcing extensions and the whole campaign behind it sounds like they might be holding the tomahawk behind their backs while puffing the pipe of peace. Mozilla is trying to diversify their products now that they have the money and more than a 110 million Firefox users a day in a desperate attempt of finding ways to dodge the body from Google’s terrible smashing blows.  And you know it is always too late when you feel Google breathing down your neck. From my end user perspective, I still had my doubts with Chrome till very recently. Yes, it is damn fast, it starts independent processes with each tab you open, it is simple but so far it was lame cause it was too dull for average users and we already had Opera for that. But now, if you download that famous Google Chrome beta launched first for Windows and Linux and now also for the Mac, you can have access to more than 300 Chrome extensions (PC and Linux machines) rapidly growing which are easier to install and much more visible than Firefox add-ons (that does not mean they work better though). So the scenario is changing and those features long claimed for the new browser are showing up blatantly under the spotlights for everyone to see. Here are five of them I would like to list so you can judge by yourselves:

Google Mail Checker  

RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)  

StumbleUpon 

Google Wave Notifier 

Chromed Bird

Things at Google sometimes go slow but they certainly work in the end once the product is solid. In other words, when the app sees the light of day it is going to be a reliable asset on the market. Besides generally buying the right stuff from the right people at the right moment, they have this 20 percent time company policy for engineers to indulge in developing an idea once a week. On top of the given productivity yielded that day lies Google Labs, founded by the company in 2002 . Many bright ideas have evolved in there on their way to success while some others still rest at the bottom of a drawer or get personally killed by Google  from time to time. The idea does not always appear from scratch but belongs to another company with a lot of expectations set on passing the key tests Google imposes on the ultimate toy before it comes of age. That’s simply the way Google has in order to be sure about certain products. They give their employees some time to play with raw material, domestic or imported, let everybody see what’s happening on the benchmark, allowing customer feedback, if interest grows then that project gets the green light and full priority. If the stuff is superb but is shunned by potential users, then it is bound to fail. The equation favors demand so the odds are higher for it to succeed by reducing the error margin. But why am I giving you this sermon today? The purpose of this introduction is to announce the recent appearance of a new Google Labs project called Image Swirl.

What is Image Swirl?: It is a tool that takes features from Similar Images recently introduced in Google Images as a “Find similar images” link under many of the pictures and Google Wonder Wheel launched in May 2009 and shown in the options section of Google search engine results. This time, instead of grouping relevant words in a cluster as in the latter we will be dealing with images. Not that the idea of clusters is new but applying this technology to Google Images is definitely an interesting move. Perhaps the project is finally buried when users get bored of fumbling with the brand new contrivance but the intention behind revamping Google Images is what counts. Google Images search handles a gargantuan amount of traffic and of course the company does not do this out of philanthropy. News like Google giving funds to Pixazza last March (finally they raised $5.75 million in Series A funding), a sort of Adsense for images “enlisting people to tag photos with links that let Web surfers buy the products shown” ring a bell now in November. What is Google up to? (redundant question lately).  I don’t really know. Hopefully, that huge investment is not related to Image Swirl at all but I am reluctant to accept that this is just to improve the user experience. Guess what, last Oct 27 they announced here a brand new Product ideas for Google Images page. After all this time!?

So here is my point, this is not just one more insignificant minor project to play around with cluster technology, this is just the tip of an iceberg. Adsense ads are already on top of the thumbnails while you use Google Image but what about placing the ads inside any odd harmless picture in every cluster. But let’s not be that negative and hope for the best; let’s just expect new technologies to be applied in our favorite search engine. Business is business and people have to make a little money to make ends meet.

This is an update to previous post: Smarter Connections with Glue by AdaptiveBlue

After the huge success of AdaptiveBlue with their browser plugin Glue, a sort of toolbar buddy that collects your cultural likings while you surf and allows you to share them with your memes, the company finally has decided to materialize its virtual world into a solid social network with the announcement last October 26th of GetGlue.com. If you had your doubts about the steady growth of Glue take a look at the number of downloads at the plugin page:

Version 4.5.11
Works with Firefox: 1.4 – 3.5.*
Updated October 22, 2009
Developer AdaptiveBlue
Homepage GetGlue
Rating Rated 5 out of 5 stars 219 reviews
Downloads 2,118,004

In spite of the fact that the plugin has evolved into a more efficient tool the arrival of this new site is indeed welcomed by users as the plugin seemed somehow beheaded without a physical social network to improve communication channels. The content was all there but inside a bubble of your own. Now there is a more personal contact and we can say that Glue has finally come of age. But what is GetGlue.com and what does it offer? According to the press brief on their site, I quote:

GetGlue.com is:

GetGlue.com is a social recommendation network for interests like books, music, and movies. GetGlue.com offers a stream of suggestions based on user interests, friends activity and things that are popular with everyone. Users can also add GetGlue to their browser to more quickly build their taste profile and get suggestions in context, on hundreds of popular sites like Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Wine.com and Citysearch.

GetGlue offers:

1. Suggestions Stream: A continuous stream of suggestions is generated for the users based on what they liked, friend’s favorites and everyone’s popular.
2. GetGlue Profiles: New profiles make it easy for users to save and share their favorite books, music and movies.
3. Stickers and Guru: Users can earn stickers for participating and get recognized as a Guru for things they actively comment on.
4. Browser Addon: Glue appears around the web providing in context suggestions, friend reviews, clips, and a way to quickly build a taste profile.

As some images are worth a thousand words take a look at the promo video and judge by yourselves.

Nikon D3S is finally here. Another toy in search for perfect results in low light. Take a look at ISO  range of 200 – 12,800 + three additional boost levels up to a 102,400 equivalent! And what’s more it takes DSLR movie capture to the next level. More details:

• New 12.1 megapixel Full-Frame (36 x 24 mm) sensor
• ISO 200 – 12800 (ISO 100 – 102,400 in Boost mode)
• 720p / 24 fps HD movie mode
• Eleven frames per second in continuous and DX mode
• Larger buffer for 48 RAW frames in one burst (18 on the D3)
• Multi-CAM3500FX Auto Focus sensor (51-point, 15 cross-type, more vertical coverage), fine-tuned for improved acquisition and tracking
• In-camera RAW processing
• Also supports DX lenses, viewfinder automatically masks (5.1 megapixels with DX lens)
• 14-bit A/D conversion, 12 channel readout
• Nikon EXPEED image processor
• Super fast operation (power-up 12 ms, shutter lag 41 ms, black-out 74 ms)
• Kevlar / carbon fibre composite shutter with 300,000 exposure durability
• Auto-focus tracking by color (using information from 1005-pixel AE sensor)
• Auto-focus calibration (fine-tuning) available (fixed body or up to 20 separate lens settings)
• Scene Recognition System (uses AE sensor, AF sensor)
• Dual Compact Flash card slots (overflow, back-up, RAW on 1 / JPEG on 2, Stills on 1 / Movies on 2, copy)
• Compact Flash UDMA support
• 3.0″ 922,000 pixel LCD monitor
• Live View with either phase detect (mirror up/down) or improved (30% faster) contrast detect Auto Focus
• Virtual horizon indicates if camera is level, available on the LCD during video capture
• HDMI HD video output
• ‘Active D-Lighting’ ‘Extra High’ setting (adjusts metering as well as applying D-Lighting curve)
• Detailed ‘Control Panel’ type display on LCD monitor, changes color in darkness
• Buttons sealed against moisture
• Dual battery charger as standard

Sample images

Officially announced October 14th:  Nikon D3S

Image source:
www.crunchgear.com: Nikon D3S Official, costs $5.200 by Devin Coldewey

A SEO friendly post is based upon a certain set of rules which you must respect just like you do with traffic signs. You need to have control upon your blog, you learn to drive it till it becomes part of your body. The blog should not control you. The moment you master the technique, then you’ll have time to see what’s happening on the road, the road to success. You may be the best content provider and yet not be visible on search engines, at least, not as visible as you would like. In the meantime, you watch other people attracting a bigger audience, maybe with poorer content. Why?

Placing your posts among the first results of Google search engine (let’s face it, we still have to count on their powerful algorithm to survive on the net) is not an exact science. Maybe it is for bots crawling your site but not to us. Some automatism helps but there’s also a lot of intuition implied.

It is all part of a long term process. Keep posting that good content on a steady basis. Get a name on the market. Create your brand. Have an original idea and publicize it, as if your life depended on it. Be yourself, have a style of your own but don’t hide in your shell either. Share with others. Remember no man is an island.

Like a good general, you should have a strategy to win the battle and take care of several open fronts. You have to keep an eye on style, grammar, content, links, etc. Let’s explain this using today’s post as an example. We could have simply provided you with a simplified step by step list. That will do the trick on most occasions. I find it too impersonal though and in general, although useful, I tend not to trust sites abusing on that. How many top ten, top five, top thirteen ways to do so and so better than anyone have you heard of. Outlines are great to remember things but a good image, a well explained idea stays longer and deeper in your mind.

When I start musing about a future post, I approach it like some sort of short story. It needs an introduction, a main idea, an argument that reaches a climax and an epilogue or final blow, preferably with an element of surprise. My readers probably will be thinking about helpful resources, or say, ok, I read your stuff but now come and check mine. That’s normal. Be brief, be concise but intelligent. Make them fall in love with your style. Many will hate you, envy you but few will remain indifferent. Remember all that litany about leaders and what it takes to be a real one. You know.

So we were saying that you needed a short story with a logical sequence. Most people read only the content above the fold and don’t even try to go to the bottom of your front page not to mention the archives. How discouraging! I think it is nobody’s fault. It is a matter of excess of information. Why on earth would someone waste time reading my post if there are thousands of pages with much more experience to consult in the first place? Well, they also had a first time. Every post is like an audition where the jury is giving you a last chance. You could change the jury everyday and rely on new visitors, there are billions of potential readers but it is wiser to make the audience addicted to your writing, create a community, be friendly and have your own followers, they make you what you really are anyway. It is that spirit of trust and cooperation what makes your success grow. But it is not about pretending. Feel it.

You have the audience and the good writing. Now what? Search engines care about that: good content and interaction, in the way of comments and links. Great. But can the information be accessed properly? Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling.  A good structure will facilitate this task so check for broken links, redirects, 404 errors, duplicate content. Providing a sitemap is important. But let’s take for granted that you already have those things under control and stick to the post level. If you want to know more check How does Google work?.

All good stories start with an attractive title. Coming up with the right title including keywords related to your niche guarantees almost fifty percent of a post’s success. My title today is not fascinating, it talks about a well trodden matter so I cannot do miracles. Nevertheless, I  took the time to check other similar posts on the engines and assessed the possibilities of being well indexed or not. I noticed there is a “Make a SEO Friendly Post” so I thought the word build would do the trick. It is important that you check the existence of a similar combination of words. Don’t be afraid to add a third or a fourth. With time you get to choose your own odd phrases automatically.There are free tools to help you choose good keywords. Do try Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Or an all-in-one service like SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. On the other hand it is a shame that search engines are controlled by marketing companies and SEO experts who know all the tricks to make clients show on top. Accept the fact that they will also use perfect SEO friendly keywords. Try to be better. Your visitors will probably surf for good content and not for marketing products. In my other blog called Barcelona Photoblog, I have to compete with many sites focusing on the travel sector. Go and google the word Barcelona and tell me how many sites you find talking about the city without blatantly showing booking searchlets or accomodation prices first. There are good travel guides but top pages are controlled by a few people in the accommodation business. They will take a big share so you have to swim twice as hard to stay among them. An awesome, unique title, that reaches those niches they wouldn’t think of not even in their wildest dreams is certainly the right way to start. Remember to use a bigger font size in the header cause bots give credit to that. Be clear. You may be an expert, a specialist in your area, go ahead and talk about quantum physics if you must but always include keywords that are relatively common and looked up by a wide segment of people. It does not matter if you reach too many. You wanted visitors, didn’t you?. Combined them in a way that the most attractive and relevant words come first. Then add that unusual touch at the end. I don’t know, things like: Easy Quantum Physics Lessons Stephen Hawkings Never Taught. Wild but relevant.

Step into the content now. It is essential that you repeat some words from the title in the first lines. It is not compulsory but never place them too far. Your own judgment will tell you. Try to use bold or italics to highlight the most important keywords in your paragraphs. My advice, use italics for places, names, etc and bold in only one word or phrase. Repeat keywords. That makes your idea more relevant. But watch out so there’s not too much iteration. You are a writer and need to keep your style clean. Avoid misspelling, grammar mistakes. Don’t try to be like Joyce or Proust. Colloquial talk won’t hurt your credibility if well administered. Elevated conversation may give the wrong impression, specially to new visitors. Avoid the opposite as well. Offensive language, obscene words are not advisable. Try not to link to so called bad neighborhoods: those sites related to activities who may be banned by Google. They may affect your PR and reputation on the web. Try this bad neighborhood link checker and find out who’s behind that harmless link on your sidebar.

Try to use videos, maps, slides, whatever multimedia resource that will serve to portray your ideas. Be of help. If you talk about a place, give directions, links, phone numbers. When your readers leave your site they must be already longing to return. That little spark must catch on them so they remember you are there with your interesting writings and tips. Anyone can give tips no matter how modest they are. Look at me!

Constantly check the engines and contemplate your posts silently go up from the deep dark pages nobody cares about towards the first ten results. Don’t forget to introduce some relevant metatags in your html code. This seems to be less important nowadays for the spiders but it is not harmful. About twenty would be great, not more. By the way, check that you are not blocking the bots. There must be this line of code somewhere in the meta tags:  meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” or meta name=”robots” content=”all”.

Another fantastic way to guarantee you are indexed often is to verify your blog via Google Webmaster’s Tools. Also remember that your feed is one of the best instruments to propagate your work on the world wide web. Notify RSS engines everytime you post by sending a ping. Although some hosts offer a pinging service it is a good idea that you try free ping services or shareware programs like Blog Blaster or RSS submit by Ksoft or RSS Submit by Extralabs to instantly reach every possible blog or RSS search engine on the market. Or even better make use of social networks like Twitter, Facebook-Friendfeed, SocialMedian, Mashable, whatever, to tell the world you wrote something new. Although social networking has come to stay and bloggers were in danger of extinction, there seems to be some kind of renaissance for good old familiar bloggers. Not everything is about chatting, twitting, sending karmas and giving Likes. There must be some solid content with a style of your own in a place of your own. That’s what makes your work unique. Social networks must be a tool and not an obstacle that impoverishes your creativity, your art or whatever you are good at.

Don’t quit on your content, control all those open fronts, be stubborn. In about 3 months I guarantee you will get results and your posts will be on top of the charts.

If you have any doubt and still wonder what to do next please tell me about your blog and what your plans are. I will be glad to help.

I wouldn’t like to sound phony and cast false predictions without a solid foundation but I see that some other people have the same feeling about the present and future of Twitter. I don’t know about you but I am getting bored lately with the increasing flood of spam on Twitter. I was swimming in some exotic beach with pristine waters and all of a sudden civilization popped in, you know, with their towels, their hammocks, their suntans and all the garbage left behind. At least, that’s the feeling I have. At what point did that occur? No idea. Now Twitter looks as shabby and decrepit as Facebook, Myspace or Blogger. The idea is good and the mechanism is going to last; the way people interact, the speed and the social power will continue to exist but somewhere else, like a new volcanic island that suddenly appears on the surface. Jack Dorsey et al, founded a brief empire without even knowing it. They didn’t have the vision or the money it takes to conquer more territory and send dangerous messages to neighboring empires. In comparison to Facebook, Twitter never went beyond the mediocre barbarian invasion, with a lot of impetus, yes, but with a poor strategy, so on numerous occasions the hordes of Twitterers tried to find some meaning, claimed for leaders that helped expand the fresh sap of social networking and compete with the rotten empires of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg but Twitter execs were at a loss, turning their backs on foreign affairs and so it came that the empire-to-be succumbed to its own lack of perspective and ambitions and its people indulged in an orgy of neglect and narcissism. I still visit Twitter sometimes but I get a bittersweet taste more than often so I run and hide in my blog. I wonder what is going to come next. I am sure something new will see the light. In the meantime, I will keep visiting the village for food and perhaps some thoughtful conversation with a philosopher or two, but I will try to return to my own secret hideaway before dusk. History books will record the events and future generations will learn about the curious deeds of a brave tribe that wanted to build an empire but never went beyond its boundaries.