Fluidesign Blog

It turns out that you can do more through social networking than find a date or stalk your ex- who’d have thought! In fact, you can help real people all over the world lift themselves out of property through micro-loans.
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to entrepreneurs in the developing world. The site is composed of two groups: entrepreneurs and lenders. Lenders request an amount for their loan (generally around a couple thousand dollars) and then several lenders contribute to that amount. In fact, the minimum loan is as low as $25.00.

One such lender is lawyer and author, John Kirkland who introduced me to the website. John is using the sales of his new book Love Letters of Great Men to fund Jasminka Salkievi’s clothing store in Bosnia, Mirza Sayaad’s grocery store in Afghanistan and several other in-need entrepreneurs.
This it truly the incarnation of the “fish you teach a man to fish” adage and a move towards positive interaction on the internet.

Newsbreak: Collective organization of Flickr photos relating to the Earthquake in Los Angeles can be found here.

Oh yea, if you haven’t heard, the internet is huge, over 1 trillion unique urls I hear. While this feels like an accomplishment, I believe we need to do some good old fashion spring cleaning.

But for now, here are some of my latest solutions to organizing and tracking things of interest on the internet:

1) Update your facebook’s “More About These Friends.” Now you can add up to 80 friends so that your news feed will display updates from these friends more frequently.
2) If you like to photo comment with others, get an RSS that combines all of your contact’s comments on Flickr.
3) If you are interested in specific subjects, try an RSS feed using the New Media Buzz Tracker. It tracks your subjects across Yahoo, Google News, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Twitter, and Flickr.
4) If you’re on tumblr and you want to reblog/discuss key topics, i recommend using the Track Tumblr alert.
5) And lastly if you are a sharer, perhaps you should track how many people actually click on your links (i.e. stop telling me what you ate for lunch on twitter.)

Learn more about why the above is important, here and here.

P.S. I might be stalking you!

So the hot dog dude created a twitter profile for a hammer. And 12 minutes in, 217 followers.

I started following The Onion the other day on Twitter and here’s a couple things I noticed and enjoyed:

After clicking “follow” I got this direct message:

The Onion directed this message at one of the people that they follow/that follows them:

What an interesting approach, huh? As you can see, The Onion read that one of their readers was having a bad day and then sent them a relevant humorous Onion article.

The Onion gets it and is paying very close attention to their community, responding in creative ways, really extending their brand, and of course increasing web traffic to new and archived content!

Blip, dubbed “twitter for music”, has been up for about a month or so and last week I finally had a chance to check it out. So, this is how it works.

Let’s say you are listening to a song and you want to share it, you go to blip, and if you integrated last.fm, you’ll see that song already listed in the “What are you listening to?” field. Then all you have to do is “blip” (post) it with a comment.

Like twitter, you can direct the post at someone, and because they allow twitter integration, you can direct it at someone on twitter as well, and your blip gets posted there too. On blip, all your music posts gets organized into an ongoing playlist. And like muxtape, the interface is awesome, as you can use you arrow controls to navigate through the list. And again, like Twitter, people follow your ongoing playlist (feed) and can see your new blips on their homepage where all of their follow’s blips live into a combined playlist.

Here’s a screenshot:

Now check out this music industry predication graph by Enders Analysis:

Via Heavy Bag Media

My prediction is that if people start using blip, you’ll see a higher “listen-to-buy ratio” because 1) as a user, you’re getting very qualified music recommendations without having to do any active work, as your friend’s blips automatically are added to your home page 2) blip makes it really easy to buy; each song has a “buy” link to amazon.

This is different than lastfm.com where you have to literally, consciously, decide on which friend’s music to review, go to that page, read through what they have been listening to lately (not songs they especially like), and possibly listen to it. With imeem.com you have to do the same, but it’s a little better because you can check out their playlists, which is obviously songs they like. And with ilike.com, it’s pretty annoying because if a friend does send you a song they like, in most cases the full song is not available to listen to, and you come to a dead end because we’re all too busy to go to another music service, try to find the full song, and then maybe or maybe not buy it.

So here’s my tip to the music industry, specifically to record labels. Go create an account now, and promote it a bit, and have fans follow your feed of all of your musician’s new music. Then come back and tell us what your “listen-to-buy” ratio is compared to all the other music social networks. Seriously, as mentioned in a previous post, I’d really like to see the music industry start making money again.

Follow me on blip here!
To read my last music industry tip, click here.

If you have been reading our blog, you may have read that we went to EconSM a couple weeks back. There, Dalton Caldwell, CEO, of Imeem said that they are currently not profitable, but they do have a long-term plan. He also briefly mentioned that in the near future they are going to allow developers to create applications on the site (you know like facebook apps, but on imeem) and allow them to use the site’s music within the apps (cuz they have the license to do so). Well, this was officially announced yesterday, see “Imeem Adds OpenSocial to Media Platform”.

I think this is particularly interesting for brands that want to use music to define their brand, reach out to their target audience, and create a cool, fun application. Could be anything right? A game, a video, really anything that combines the brand with the music on the site. I am sure there will be some cool ideas that come out of this.

However, maybe Imeem should charge developers (or brands) to use the music. But maybe this is in their long-term plan on becoming profitable. Because, really, aren’t the musicians going to want a kick back too? Well, I want the music industry to start making money again, so my vote is charge ‘em.

And for your thirsty mind, check these stats out:

More info on music industry stats here.

On a side note, but relevant, we are attending Economics of Social Media Conference here in LA at the Skirball on Tuesday. See ya douchebags there!