A few weeks ago I decided to set up a new service on my personal website to track all the social services that I’m a part of. Basically I wanted a central place where people could go to find out what I was up to, what pictures I was posting, and where I’d been. Now, I know there are services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! that do this on a larger scale but I don’t foresee many of my family members signing up for those just to see what I’m up to.

Enter Sweetcron, a free Wordpress like PHP and MySQL content system specifically built to handle lifestreaming. I heard about Sweetcron from my buddy Ryan and decided to give it a try for my new site. To my excitement it was exactly what I was looking for. Below I’ll cover the installation, interface, and end result of my Sweetcron experience.

Installation

Sweetcron is the easiest content system I’ve set up in quite some time. You download the compressed files and upload them to your server, create a MySQL database, and edit a few lines of a configuration file with the info. Once this is done the script has a built in installer that runs to finish the installation. By the time you’ve gone through this process you’ll have a username and password through which you can login to your Sweetcron administration section.

Interface and Use

Once you’ve logged into the back-end of Sweetcron you’ll see a few pretty basic options. Write: for posting quick notes, items: a list of your imported (published or unpublished) feed items, feeds: a list of the feeds you’re importing, and options: which contains basic account settings. Setting up your feeds to be imported into your lifestream is a piece of cake. Grab RSS from your favorite social networks and add them into your feed list¹.

Adding a Feed

Feed List

Imported Items

Sweetcron will automatically format and grab the necessary items related to the feeds. From there you can select from a few different themes of how you want your information to be displayed. If you’re ambitious you can set up your own theme by using the Sweetcron documentation.

Pulling Results via Cron

As the name suggests Sweetcron is reliant on pulling information from your RSS feeds at a regular interval in order to update your database. To do this Sweetcron works in one of two ways. First, you can use a pseudo method that will have Sweetcron update itself if the last update is older than 30 minutes. This method waits for someone to hit the site and then has that visit trigger the fetch. This may work for people without cron hosting access but I found the normal cron method to work better. To set this up I logged into my hosting administration and had the following cron job run every fifteen minutes:

/usr/bin/curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link Note that sweetcron uses curl and this program may be located at different locations on different hosting providers, for instance:

curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link

End Result

The end is a great looking lifestream that stores all of your information into a MySQL database that you host. The benefits are awesome. First, you own look and feel of the information output. Second, you don’t have to rely on a 3rd party service. And last, the whole setup is opensource, free, and easy to set up.

1. If you have issues with a particular feed’s RSS being supported I’d suggest routing it through Feedburner first and then importing it into Sweetcron. I had to do this with Brightkite.

I’m currently trialing LinkedIN’s DirectAds. I must say, I’m substantially underwhelmed. Despite the ability to really focus in on your target demographics, DirectAds doesn’t deliver RESULTS. This is usually why I’m skeptical of any service which is based on impressions rather then clickthrus.

In the spirit of openness, here is our report on the last few days of activity.

Sure, I know ad copy can be tweaked and written for better optimization but when 1600 impressions yield 2 clicks that is a pretty abysmal showing on behalf of LinkedIN. I do hope that overtime DirectAds improves the quality of the network and also gives me the option to select impressions or clicks. Until then, we’ll skip on DirectAds.

Given the state of the economy I’m hearing more clients ask about how to take advantage of the Social Web. Translation: [Marketing dollars are drying up and they need to do something on the cheap. This Social Web thing sounds low-cost and easy to do.] The increased media coverage of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN are certainly partially to blame for creating the impression that “everyone” is engaged in the Social Web. Personally, I think this is more hype then reality. There are a number of individuals who are developing networks, contributing to blogs and actually using Twitter to it’s fullest. There are however very few companies who’ve managed to pull this off successfully. I believe there are several reasons why.

Lack of Authenticity
Social media, the Social Web or Web 2.0, whatever you want to call it, only works when you are authentic! Let me repeat, it ONLY works when you are authentic. Your efforts will fail the minute you or your company tries to manufacture buzz or censor the message. Frequent users of social media can smell a fake.

I realize this is a serious shift in thinking for most businesses. In America especially, political correctness has been so ingrained in our culture that we often over-sensor our communication and shred any meaningful substance from the message. Anyone can write a glowing press release full of pat-yourself-on-the-back statements and fluff but it takes real balls to write about your failures and your missteps. Be real with your customers and followers. Give them something they can sink their teeth into, don’t dish them up whipped cream when they want steak!

Lack of Identity and Vision
Who are you? Think about this. With an exception to Howard Hughes I’m at a lost for an example of a hermit who’s made a name for themselves. Likewise a corporate identity is grown overtime through interactions and positions on various issues. Companies need to wake up and develop real corporate visions and position statements, then hire employees who buy into and champion that vision.

This is something we are currently struggling with at Imulus. We admire companies like Patagonia, Apple, 37Signals and IDEO. These companies have clear positions and identities because their founders have laid out the basic tenants of the company’s values. In a sense, these companies are creating a movement and asking their employees to be activist. This is why so often you’ll see the term “cultist” tied to Apple fanatics.

Lack of Interaction
A conversation is quickly killed when one of the parties doesn’t shut the hell up. For companies to really benefit from the Social Web they need to interact with followers and customers. Ask questions, read what others are saying and participate. This isn’t a one-way street.

As an example, I wrote a blog post about Quantcast a few months back. Within 2 days of the post, Adam, the CMO of Quantcast left me a comment. That, is a perfect example of how to use the Social Web.

We’ve been receiving traffic here and there from Spoke.com and I’m really not sure why. The site is a piss-poor rip off of LinkedIN plus its’ loaded with inaccurate information.

For our company, Spoke is listing the names of two of our clients as Imulus employees. I see a problem here because Spoke is giving false data; and therefore misrepresenting a company profile. To me, Spoke feels like an spam outfit, setup to capture the names and emails of various corporate accounts. I’ll explain why:

1. In an effort to correct the data I created an account; now they have my contact information.
2. Upon confirming my account; I was redirected to the Spoke Web site, asked to complete a basic profile, but rather then COMPLETE / SIGN-UP or SUBMIT, my option was to “Install Windows Toolbar.” OK, now that is shady.
3. When I attempt to modify the company data, I’m greeted with a pop-up form stripped of all browser controls. The form fails to validate my completed fields, then it tells me to click “back” on my browser…. hello, you removed my browser controls!

Please tell me I’m wrong, but so far I feel like I’ve given my information to a spammer.

Is it me or has social networking been played out? It seems that every magazine or newspaper that I read makes mention of some local social networking start-up company looking to make millions online just like MySpace and Facebook. There are social networks designed around music, soccer and even shoes!

I personally can’t keep up; even though I feel like I need to be on-top of all things ‘online’ related. I’ve never been a fan of MySpace because the user-interface is just butt-ugly but Facebook has attracted me, and likewise LinkedIN. Otherwise, what can I do on these specialized social networking like ShoeTube which can’t be paired down to function on Facebook / YouTube?

Granted I’m not a student any longer, and now as a papa I find myself with even less time to engage with social networking sites; therefore my view is certainly slanted to us ‘old’ folks. Isn’t there a side effect to trying to socialize on several sites as opposed to just one or two sites? Doesn’t the plethora of social networking sites reduce the depth of content to just superficial ‘pokes’ rather then real meaningful socializing?

Help this old guy see the light, show me what I’m missing out on.