5022 items (4497 unread) in 3 feeds
Google
(304 unread)
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
(304 unread)
SEO
(4193 unread)
Search Engine Roundtable
(3859 unread)
Related tags: Optimization [+], Engines [+], video, tools, tips, results, in, Yahoo, West, Web, Topics, Theory, The, Technology, Strategies, Spam, Seattle, San, SEO, RoundUp, Round, Recap, Pulse, Podcast, Photo, Other, Of, News, New, Microsoft, Marketing, MSN, Local, Legal, Issues, Israel, Industry, Google, Forum, Expo, Engine, East, Conferences, Chicago, Buzz, Bing, Ads, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008
As expected, Facebook filed their IPO registration with the SEC.
The numbers are fascinating, and I was tweeting some of it. We posted some nice charts on the numbers and Danny did the S-1 review at Marketing Land.
So will you be buying into the IPO?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
The big news from yesterday was from Facebook who built a bookmarklet tool that aims at changing how Google shows Google+ results in the new Google Plus Your World launch.
It is fairly simple, you install the bookmarklet, click it when on the Google results, and the Google+ results will change to either Twitter, Facebook or another social network.
The campaign is named Focus on the User and they write:
How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Googleâs own relevance measure-the ranking of their organic search results-to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.
All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google's own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.
Here is what it does:
Pretty clear? It does more but those are to examples, many more examples over here.
Danny Sullivan has a great write up over here and here is a video demo:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
The big news yesterday was that Twitter announced the launch of their new Twitter design. The new design is aimed at making it easier to use and easier to find and discover things within the ecosystem.
My favorite parts of the announcement is a new TweetDeck for Chrome and Mac OS App Store plus the new app and finally the embeddable tweets.
On the search side, Greg Sterling reported that the search was improve but said, "although no one could tell me specifically what they were."
Here is an embedded tweet:
I like the new TweetDeck for Mac OS
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) December9, 2011
You can see the embed tweet link when you view the tweet detail page:
Then a pop up box comes up with the embed options:
To see more details on the new features, designs and ability to discover new content, see fly.twitter.com. To get it yourself, just update your mobile app and Twitter should give you the new features on Twitter.com soon after.
If you are a brand, you probably want to read this.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Facebook yesterday announced a new feature named Timeline.
As Facebook describes it:
With timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you've already shared. They don't just vanish as you add new stuff.
Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it's a lot more visual. The first thing you'll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it's completely up to you which of your photos you put here. As you scroll down past your cover, you'll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what's featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.
Here is a video demo of how it works:
Greg Finn does a good job summarizing many of the features at Search Engine Land.
A WebmasterWorld thread has people saying this is all a bit "creepy", other's saying "too much change too soon," but others are finding it pretty cool.
I am not sure, I rarely put personal stuff on Facebook, so I am not sure how this would apply to me yet.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Inside Facebook reports on recent data from their gold reporting service that Facebook has lost 6 million users from their U.S. base.
Inside Facebook said Facebook in the "United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year."
US wasn't the only place losing users, "Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000."
They posted the top gaining countries:
Webmasters and SEOs are discussing what is going on here. Supposedly, the data Inside Facebook uses to get this data is from Facebook's advertising tool. The tool may have reporting bugs leading to issues with these marketshare reports - so it is hard to be 100% positive that Facebook lost 6 million users in the US market.
That being said, a WebmasterWorld thread has some people saying they are not surprised. They feel Facebook is becoming too commercial and at the same time people are leaving because it is overwhelming and too time consuming for users. Meaning, people want to focus more on work and less on social things.
I am not too sure.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Last week we ran a poll asking Are Search Results Better With Social Ranking Signals?
We now have over a 100 responses and I wanted to share those results:
I am pretty confident that Google and Bing have tested the quality of those search results with social ranking factors on and off and have shown that they do improve search quality. But this is the perception of webmasters and SEOs.
Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.
Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.
About a month ago, I showed you all a presentation given by Eli Pariser at TED named Beware online "filter bubbles".
The argument is very convincing, and I strongly recommend you watch it, if you have not done so already.
It makes the argument that personalization on the web, which is growing and growing - is a form of censorship and we shouldn't have it in many cases.
So I ran a poll asking SEOs, who should fundamentally understand the reason and technical pieces of personalized search results, if they felt it was a form of censorship and 73% said yes, it is a form of censorship.
I asked: "Is Personalization A Form Of Censorship?"
I believe I was part of the 23% this time.
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.
Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.
Twitter announced they have improved Twitter Search by adding relevancy and personalization to the search results.
Twitter said, "Not only will it deliver more relevant Tweets when you search for something or click on a trending topic, but it will also show you related photos and videos, right there on the results page."
If you look at the Twitter Engineering Blog you can learn a bit more about what this means.
In our new search experience, we show search results that are most relevant to a particular user. So search results are personalized, and we filter out the Tweets that do not resonate with other users.
To support relevance filtering and personalization, we needed three types of signals:
(1) Static signals, added at indexing time
(2) Resonance signals, dynamically updated over time
(3) Information about the searcher, provided at search time
There is a lot more detail on how this works at the engineering blog. But let me show you the differences in the results:
Here is the default search view, which sorts Twitter search results by "top" results. Take notice that there are huge gabs in the timeline as to minutes between tweets. Clearly, Twitter is filtering out results here:
If you look deeper, you will see that you can click "top" and change it to "all." It will then show a timeline of all tweets that have query word in them. See the difference?
How about personalization? Well, check out me logged in versus not logged in:
Logged In:
Logged Out:
See, my tweet didn't seem relevant if I am not logged in.
Here is a video demo from Twitter on this new release:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
There is an excellent verbal poll running at Sphinn now asking SEOs if they feel that social ranking signals are making for a better set of search results. It is a good question - do you feel the search results are now better since Google and Bing began integrating social factors such as Facebook Likes, Google +1, Tweets and other social sharing features into the algorithm?
Take our poll:
Are Search Results Better With Social Ranking Signals?
Here are two comments from the Sphinn thread:
Jill Whalen said:
I don't see how we'd be able to know what difference social signals is making.That said, I do like when I'm logged in, to see the things people in my social networks are saying or recommending based on my searches (as long as I'm not looking for clean results for business purposes).
Matt McGee added:
For the most part, I feel the same way. I think there's some value in seeing a note that a certain friend/peer has shared/liked some URL in the search results -- or some local business in Google Places (which also mixes social elements into the UX). But I'm not a fan of the Blekko implementation where Facebook status updates and/or comment threads are shown next to search results. Too much clutter and not enough value in that, in my opinion.
We did have some SEOs complain that the results are doomed due to social ranking signals.
Please do take our poll and be as biased as you like. And also join the conversation at the thread.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
Twitter has announced their new Follow Button. The follow button will allow users logged into Twitter to follow you directly on third-party sites by clicking the button, for users not logged in, you will be taken to the Twitter profile.
Here is my follow button (feel free to follow, if you don't):
Here is the Search Engine Roundtable follow button:
As you can see, you can customize the follow button.
You can create your own over at Twitter's resources and for even more customization methods see the developer documentation.
This announcement came the day before Google is expected to launch the Google +1 button for publishers.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
There is an outstanding thread developing at WebmasterWorld on the topic of social search ranking factors versus content ranking factors. The discussion is fairly thought provoking, which is why forums still rock.
One webmaster is on the verge of complaining that Google and Bing are trumping their social search ranking features and downplaying the importance of quality and authoritative content. He said out of frustration:
As social factors increase in importance, the point of creating original, thought leading, anything OTHER than simple mass content is removed.
I'm seriously stunned here. I hope I've got this wrong, but not only has Google crushed businesses like mine that trade in ideas and content, it has the potential to significantly damage the society at large by LIMITING (unintentionally) the spread of the very information that runs the economic engines of this planet.
Some pretty strong words but is this really Google or Bing's goal? Are social factors going to take over the ranking game or just add some weight here and there?
There is no doubt in my mind that Google and Bing want the most authoritative content to rank the highest but when there are two pages that are close on the same level of expert content, which should they rank higher?
Also, think about social factors and what Google and Bing use to determine what is authoritative. Links, at least originally, were a form of social liking. If someone linked to your content, it meant they liked it and thus it ranked higher. Social liking or +1ing is a form of that.
Do you not think that if you have awesome content that it wouldn't be shared through social channels? Even if it wasn't - people would reference it, link to it, and hopefully it will trace back to that source at the end.
Personally, I am not worried. There are many cases of the original source not ranking higher than a site covering it later - but is that the goal of Google or Bing? The answer to that is the answer to if you should be worried or not.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Pew Internet announced a report they released on Twitter usage. You can download the PDF report over here.
Everyone is talking about the 8% figure. 8% of Americans are on Twitter. Wow! Most people think that is a small number, to me, that is huge. I bet it doesn't compare with Facebook, but 8% of American's have used Twitter! That is big.
But they also say 21% of those Twitter users don't read content on Twitter. They may post content, but they do not read content. In a sense, it might be automated or just random tweets or they might not tweet at all. Either way, about a quarter of Twitter users don't really use Twitter. Almost half barely use Twitter - they check in every week or so, which is not the way to use Twitter - ask any Twitter user.
So I'd say probably 50% of the 8% really use Twitter. So maybe that number is closer to 4% of American's use Twitter. Maybe that number is more realistic.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Everyone was expecting Facebook to announce a new email service to compete with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and others. Facebook made a point to say they are not producing a Gmail killer, but if their new service kills email, well - that is okay. But they are 100% not launching a Gmail killer. ;-)
If you missed the news, you can read the announcement here. In short, Facebook wants to place all your methods of communication in a single thread. So if you text message your sister, then email, then Facebook her and so on - all that communication is stored in a single thread on Facebook.com.
Here is how Facebook put it:
Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message. We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.
It is neat, but I saw a lot of feedback on Twitter as Facebook was announcing it. As some of you know, I really am not a fan of Facebook as a user. Maybe because I set it up wrong, but I personally barely use it. I know most people spend much of their day on Facebook, so I know how valuable it is.
Here is one Tweet, from Vanessa Fox, I want to highlight:
.bbpBox4239294440931328 {background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1288742912/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #ffffff;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}
Don't most people mostly use email for business purposes? Do we really need that communication to be more personal and immediate?less than a minute ago via BrizzlyVanessa Fox
vanessafox
But you really cannot deny the power in this. Unified messaging is nothing new. But Facebook has the power to make it work beyond everyone's wildest dreams.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.
The big news last night was that Twitter is rolling out a redesign. If you watch the video below, start about 1 minutes and 10 seconds in, you can see the new design.
You can also read more about it at [twitter.com] or on Techmeme.
Here are the core changes:
Oh, follow me on twitter @rustybrick.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Marty at aimClear posted his Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, 2010 Study Results, which he presented at SMX Advanced just a month or so ago.
A Sphinn thread has discussion around the study. Let me summarize the key points:
Marty goes through how Facebook search suggestions and how to leverage those suggestions to your benefit. He then describes how Facebook ranks their results, and the most important factors for that ranking. He moves on to Facebook pages and how to help those pages rank well. Then there are Facebook Group pages, App pages and event pages for ranking.
If you are interested in how Facebook search works and ranks, check out Marty's post.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
Twitter announced promoted tweets about a month ago and back then, we asked our readers if they think they will be a success or not. Personally, I am unsure. On one hand, I can see how they can make a nice amount of money, but I really don't think they can ever bring in the revenue an AdWords machine brings in today. Twitter is just not essential as web search and I can't see it ever being.
We ran this poll and it only received about 60 votes. Almost 50% of those who responded said "Yes, They Will Be Twitter's AdWords." About 30% said "No, They Will Fail To Be a Success." 16% said they were unsure. The rest gave no answers but in the "other" category.
I am still unsure if this alone will keep Twitter alive or if it will ultimately lead to Twitter's death. Don't get me wrong, I love Twitter.
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.
This was scheduled to be posted today. I am offline today and scheduled several polls for the days I am offline. I am back Friday, May 21st.
Danny Sullivan broke down the reality of Twitter announcing at the Chirp Conference that they had about 19 billion searches per month. Comparing that to Google, Bing and Yahoo - it passes Bing and Yahoo combined!
The thing is, as Danny said, this number is not coming from comScore or Hitwise, an independent stats company, but rather from Twitter themselves. Plus, since 75% of the traffic on Twitter come through APIs, such as TweetDeck and other applications, it is hard to validate this. There are more caveats that Danny covers in his analysis.
Here are some other interesting Twitter metrics:
With 19 billion queries per month, if they can monetize that with their ad system, they can be making serious cash.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Facebook announced they will be adding usernames for profile URLs. For example, my current Facebook URL is [www.facebook.com] but hopefully sometime early next week, it will become facebook.com/barryschwartz. In fact, it will, since Journalists don't have to wait for the Friday night deadline to secure their username on Facebook.
How does this apply to SEO? Well, for public profile pages that want to solve any online reputation management issues, a nice URL with your name in it, might help a bit.
So what is the issue? Well, as I tweeted the other day, Facebook is opening the first come first serve username registration at the same time Sabbath observers (like me) cannot login and reserve our names. Facebook said, "starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you'll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/."
Do I think Facebook did this intentionally? No way. Probably just an oversight that will impact many Facebook users. Personally, I did not care that much, I just felt bad for some die hard Facebook users. Now, I can even less, being that I am a journalist and I reserved my name already. But I still feel bad.
Tamar FriendFeeded (is that a word) that she was upset she couldn't secure her name since she is also a Shabbath observer. Hopefully someone can help her out. I was told that /barry was already taken, I think by a Facebook employee.
A WebmasterWorld thread has SEOs and marketers already thinking of ways to use these username URLs for their benefit.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
A Sphinn thread has discussion around the topic of how much Digg might not like SEO sites or blogs.
Back when Digg was first getting started, SEOs flocked to it, as a way of driving traffic and ultimately links, to help promote the site in the search engines. In fact, this site was often features on Digg's home page, not because I gamed it or wanted the links, in fact, it often put stress on my server, which I didn't want. It was featured because, on occasion, we write something that is quality. The last time we were featured on the Digg home page was in June 2007 for a brief period until it was manually removed. Since then, hundreds of people submitted our content to Digg and none of it made it "hot."
Personally, I gave up caring. But there is no doubt, the Digg community doesn't like the SEO community. It is understandable and it is their community.
The Sphinn thread discusses some of those reasons.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
Yesterday was a very interesting day for Twitter. In short, Twitter removed the ability to see @ replies. Then they brought it back but in a limited fashion. The Twitter blog explained:
We're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.
Read that a few times. Neither here nor there.
Well, you might be able to see people who @ reply you or maybe not, it depends. That is why you might want to conduct a Twitter Search for your name and subscribe to the results via RSS. I do for both @seroundtable and @rustybrick (feel free to follow both).
To catch up on the Twitter action over the past 24 hours, TechCrunch posted a quality summary of what took place.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and make sure to follow @seroundtable and @rustybrick on Twitter.
The Searchlight Digital blog has a detailed analysis of three weeks of Sphinn frontpage success. The analysis takes a look at the top contributor and the categories in which the stories became popular.
From looking at that data, the conclusion (besides being a power user) is obvious:
If you want to kick ass on Sphinn, there are specific topics you should be writing on, namely SEO, social media and Google.
Well, that may be true, but the Sphinn discussion says that the other sections (e.g. Usability) have less submissions overall so there's a higher percent change that the usability stories will frontpage versus a SEO submission (among submissions in the same category). At the same time, those topics don't have submissions in them because there's a lot less interest compared to more general topics.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
Sphinn is a little over a year old now and the Problogger blog has a tutorial for beginners on how to take advantage of the highly popular Internet Marketing social news site. The article is broken down to history, how to get started, how to navigate the site, and how to submit an article. Some pitfalls are discussed, but ultimately the value of Sphinn is seen:
For users, the benefits are being able to locate internet marketing themed posts that hopefully have some value and can add to your internet marketing knowledge. For industry writers and bloggers, one of your stories being submitted and going hot on Sphinn can bring your site exposure and traffic.
Everyone knows that a site like Digg and StumbleUpon, being that they're both not as niche sites, can give you traffic. The question, though, is "is this targeted traffic?" Most people (and even the commenters on the post) don't realize that this is the biggest and most valuable type of traffic because people are specifically seeking out articles that address Internet Marketing and Search.
But in the meantime, while Sphinn rocks in its own regard, there are also conversations of raising the bar. Right now, it's fairly obvious to regular users that you need 22 votes to hit the front page of Sphinn. The problem is that this system can be gamed -- and yes, there's one guy who keeps asking me for Sphinns even though I wrote this for him over a year ago. Thus, it's currently being discussed on Sphinn to raise the number of votes to 30 so that higher quality stuff rises to the top and the low quality and gamed content doesn't make it.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and Sphinn.
Yelp.com, the review site, is reported to have been engaging in some shady activity with business owners. In one example quoted by the linked article, a business owner was told by telemarketers that if she paid $300, reviews can be rearranged where the negative reviews would be essentially placed "below the fold." However, Yelp doesn't actually allow that.
At Cre8asite Forums, it's suspected that Yelp.com's employees may even have a hand in writing bad reviews for local businesses to encourage them to purchase into the paid program. A pretty shady operation, don't you think?
In fact, if telemarkers engage in a practice that Yelp obviously approves of (they're reading from a script, after all) and Yelp gets a negative review by business owners for actually engaging in these shady operations, is it legitimate for Yelp to remove those negative reviews? In another article, a business owner states that her negative review about Yelp itself was removed by Yelp.com. (But wait, she can't remove her own negative reviews, so why doesn't it work both ways?)
Is this practice extortion? Is Yelp.com legit? Is it time for a new company to take over and do it better and ethically without greed of money being on the mind?
Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.
Peter Da Vanzo poses a question on SEOBook asking if social media marketing is a waste of time. In it, he adds a few qualifiers including traffic (is the traffic to your page to see a monkey riding a bicycle worth it?), an uncontrolled message, a concern about the ability not to measure branding, the level of interaction isn't clear, it takes time, it's stupid and is a useless distraction, and it's difficult to scale.
This all may be true to an extent. EGOL recounts his own experience being Dugg: when the page was submitted to Digg, it had no inbound links. Within a few weeks, though, it had several hundred. Three years later, it's still on the top of the Google SERPs.
That said, it's not completely a waste of time.
I should add that this industry is very focused on Social Media Marketing as getting Dugg on the front page. That's not all there is to SMM.
One important thing to note, as shared by forum member glyn:
The thing with Social Media is the moment you get too specific with your advertising you scare the user base away.
Forum discussion continues at Crea8site Forums.
Jordan Kasteler recently published a short 14-question quiz asking whether you're a social media addict. Questions range to "do you have more friends online than in real life?" to "do you ask your real life friends if they're members on your favorite social networking site?" to "do you spend more time on social media than your family?" Other questions include "are you afraid to admit how much time you spend on social media sites?" or "do you go crazy when social media sites are temporarily down?"
I'm guilty. According to the quiz, the answer is 89%, though I take offense to such a low number. (Sorry Jordan! When you breathe, eat, and sleep social media, you're a default 100% and you wouldn't be afraid to tell the world. You're also allowed to freak out when other sites -- not Twitter -- go down! When Digg did a few times, I went NUTS.) :)
How do you fare? Take the quiz.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
In July, Dave Naylor spotted a "Twitter loophole" in the bio section of Twitter: Twitter nofollows users' web sites but links in the biography were actually not nofollowed. When Matt Cutts read the post, he notified Twitter's staff about the issue. Consequently, Twitter made some changes to disable the links in the biography, a move that appears to have occurred yesterday.
The move has hardly been received well by the search community. In several blog posts, one by Kevin Gibbons and the other by Rae Hoffman, one wonders why Twitter decided to make this change and they suggest alternatives for how Twitter should best handle it.
The problem isn't necessarily the abuse of the system, which might be something that Twitter thinks can be a problem, but more about the fact that people who use Twitter are the ones propagating that profile and building up their solid account. As such, the mindset is that Twitter should not penalize users who have already established themselves as active community members.
Perhaps, then, Twitter should look for an incentive program for good contributors rather than penalize everyone. Kevin suggests a good compromise:
... in my opinion Twitter could learn a great deal from the way Sphinn and SEOmoz reward the active members in the community. Sphinn nofollow all submission links until they hit the homepage and SEOmoz nofollow profile links until you reach 100+ user points.
At this point, I'm compelled to agree. Nobody loses here. Twitter members who have been active for a certain amount of time or who have established themselves should not be impacted.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
A very cool post by Web Professor was published yesterday about the 11 1 most important stories about Sphinn ever. The post goes into detail about who the big community participants are, what the best posts about Sphinn are, and what kind of Sphinn discussions there have been since its launch last year.
This post goes to show the power of "social" media and how we're all united by a community bond of some sort. Plus, it's a great post that illustrates that many people share information about what they're passionate about.
If you're new to Sphinn, it's a great read. If you're old to Sphinn, it's also a great read. The links (111!) will tell you the ins and outs of who and what Sphinn is all about.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
Before reading on, would you consider forums "social media?" This is the question that is posed on a High Rankings Forum post.
Many people find that the answer varies. Forums, after all, are inherently social -- they bring people together on common ground. But others disagree. Forums are not "social media" because they don't like the negative connotations of social media (such as being "poked" like on Facebook). In other words, the person finds social media as meaningless but forums are meaningful. Your mileage may vary.
Forums really do predate social media. If I'd give my insights, I think forums are not "social media" per se (the way we social media folks see it), but they certainly were a stepping stone and precursor to "real social media." However, of course, there's the other side of the coin: social media is, after all, the technology that people use to share their opinions and insights, and forums definitely provide that.
Yay or nay? Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.
