Its been a long time since i blogged here. Its kinda weird ya know, if i get a nice little run going then i really get into blogging, but if i stop for a month or so whilst i am trafficking small children across the globe it kind of ruins my stride.

Silly jokes aside though, i just read a post on Mashable which reaffirms what I have been saying for ages when i have been championing technologies like Facebook connect. Users who visit your site from Social Media websites are loyal and they will return, why? Because they probably found your site through a friends recommendation, and people are friends because they have things in common, well either that or they have lots a chocolate chip cookies that they like to give out.

Since i am lazy and i have said all i want to say at 17:24 on a Tuesday afternoon, i am just going to quote the Mashable post about this…

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analysed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.

So just remember, it is always worth having a presence on social media sites, just make sure you do it properly.

So a few months back i bought a pair of V-Moda headphones, i would link you to it but i can’t be bothered to create an Amazon affiliate ID so you can search it yourself Err, anyway, yeah back to the blog post. So i bought these headphones and had some problems with them, as such i decided to follow @Vmoda on twitter and send them a tweet about how my headphones had messed up and i wanted them replaced.

Everything was all good and i got them replaced, but i kept an eye on V-Moda to see how they were marketing their products on Twitter etc. So yesterday they create a tweet saying “Win a V-Moda beanie! First 5 to answer this. What are the ones and two’s”?

Well the obvious answer is that they are decks. Never being one to pass up on a free beanie i decided to answer, to ensure i didn’t miss out i decided to do a search for @vmoda n see who else had managed to respond, looks like i was the 2nd to respond but the 1st with the right answer (I ROCK! – see image below).

So looks like i have won a beanie hat right? Errrr wrong. I sent ANOTHER tweet to V-Moda jokingly asking “where’s my beanie” but they didn’t respond. Regardless of the glorious London sun at the moment I wanted my free prize, so checked twitter today to see if there was any response from V-Moda, none! I thought well i will check their Twitter page, see if there is any announcement about it… err none, and what’s more they have DELETED the original tweet (FAIL! – see image below).

Now i know that the prize was a a shitty beanie, and i know that perhaps someone decided to do such a thing without permission from their elders, however, if someone in your company created a little competition for a prize which probably cost about 0.00000000000000000000001% of your daily turnover, then it is advisable to at least see it through and NOT cover up the evidence that you ever tried it.

I feel cheated out of my beanie hat V-Moda, but more importantly, I think it sucks that you pulled a social-media-back-peddle stunt like that.

If you don’t get it then you are stupid, simple as that :p

Source: http://www.thebitsource.com/

Anyway, a lot of people have been upgrading in the UK and trying out the MMS on the iPhone. It seems the majority of people have been having problems so i have gathered some info from around the net that may answer your questions.

In a blog post i wrote last November about How to get MMS working on the iPhone with O2 i stated that iPhone contracts aren’t set up to actually send the MMS message to the device. Instead they hold the message on the internet and send you an SMS message to tell you how to access it using your browser. This indicates that all those contracts would have to be updated to allow MMS message to be sent directly to the device, and of course, O2 would have to send the MMS settings to the iPhone using an over the air update.

This seems to hold somewhat true as many users are tweeting that they couldn’t send MMS message until a text came through from O2 with the MMS settings.

So, if you are having problems, i am afraid your just going to have to wait until O2’s computer gets round to your ‘contract’ and sends you the settings message, then you’ll be MMS’ing in no time.

Oh, and for those that are wondering, the cost of sending an MMS message on O2 with the iPhone is the same as sending 4 SMS messages. That will either be taken from your free text message allowances or, i assume, be charged at 40p 25p (thanks Finch) if you have none remaining for that month.

Some people have also tweeted that you can just send an MMS to 0101 or 1010 and O2 will update your settings. Although i obviously haven’t tried that.

Bonus tip: Want free teathering with your iPhone instead of having to pay out £15 a month? Check out this post on how to do it for free

Basically, what will happen is when you login after the above mentioned time, you will get a message asking you to register a URL There are a number of different suggested options and also the chance to pick your own name. Now i imagine that a lot of the big company names are not allowed, however if Facebook aren’t too strict then i wonder how many people will register competitors names. giving us a new form of cyber squating? Will Facebook take steps to stop people registering trademarked names? What happens if you do, will they take that name away from you? These are all questions that are left unanswered that this time.

The above image from the Facebook blog shows how you will be able to select your name, i feel sorry for all the people with common names who are probably going to end up with bobsmith1982 or something alike. Still, i am sure that many people probably wont be that fussed.

So get your alarms set for 05:01 if you want the choice of the so coined ‘vanity url’ that you have always wanted.

Yep, even though my website has the most backlinks for the term “dean chew”, has content saying my name is Dean Chew, and has some authority, then why the hell does it rank 9th? I know i don’t have “dean chew” in the title, but jeeze. Besides, what the hell is Dean Forge doing in there, is that what i searched for? No! What’s even worse is that if you search just in the UK then i don’t rank on the first page at all.

Lets see what the big G has to say about this?

Thanks Google, all is right with the world again. My guess is that MS engineers are rectifying this as i type, what with all those millions of searches for my name going unclicked

That is all.

The second part is that there is going to effectively be a Facebook application on the XBox which will allow you to see friends photos, comments, videos etc.

All this news came from the Gizmodo Live stream which is following the E3 conference, where by the big names in the gaming industry show off whats new. I am very surprised that Nintendo haven’t jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it would seem to fit very well with the Wii.

Edit: At the Nintendo conference in the afternoon, they announced that the DSI would integrate with Facebook to allow users to upload photos straight from the device.

There are some suspected 20 million + XBox live owners, and since Facebook connect now integrates with 3rd party websites, iPhone applications, the XBox, and now DSI we should surely see it grow and grow into a monster application.

The other panellist’s were excellent also, and we all complimented each other very well.

I have put my presentation from this panel right below, just click the image to download.

As a bonus i have put up my presentation from SES London on Successful site architecture.

Please enjoy and let me know what you thought.

Hi, we no longer work

Here’s the deal, i have some rather annoying friends, people who i love dearly in real life but cannot stand the junk they post on Facebook. I can’t really remove them as friends because they are friends in real life, so i wanted a way to not see the crap they post unless i specifically go to their profile page. After the introduction of the feed prefs i added these people and sure enough they literally NEVER appeared in my news feed. Since the new home page roll out though, these people are continually in my feed and literally doing my head in. On the feed prefs page, it states…

You can select up to 200 friends that you prefer not to see in your News Feed. You will only get stories about these people if nothing else is available

Now i have over 600 friends (yes i am a whore and, yes they are not all real friends) and the people that I have added to the ’see less of list’ are still appearing. Are you trying to tell me that out of 600 people, there isn’t enough ‘news’ that it has to show me MULTIPLE news stories about people i don’t want to see anything about? I think not.

To me, it seems quite apparent that the whole news feed prefs is broken and simply doesn’t work, i don’t know if Facebook know about this, or even if they care. But it definately needs looking at. Whilst they are at it, there should be away to stay friends with people but not show anything about them at all on your news feed.

Go ahead and try it, add someone who you know is a big Facebook user to the ’see less of’ list’ and then watch as it changes absolutely NOTHING!

Facebook, please fix this, some of us ‘power users’ would like functionality that you offer to actually work, thanks.

Im hotlinking this image because my uploader won't work

I am planning on speaking about utilising Facebook and Twitter, much of the presentation will be spent on Facebook Connect and also using the twitter API. All this will be wrapped in some case studies which should push people to really consider the power of using such technologies.

Come along and say hi if you are there, i really do think it will be a good panel