paz on TypePad

Facebook is not enough! Why you need to be everywhere and how you can make it

You're on Facebook. And maybe you're on LinkedIn too. I tell you something: it's not enough.

Hundreds of people won't find you on their favorite social network. Some other people cannot spell your name correctly and don't know what to search on Google. A few know your name, are connected to you but don't know you're blogging somewhere on the web.

Even your closest friends are missing something about your online persona.  And it's not good for you, because maybe the will find something interesting and can tell you something you don't know about your niche. Don't you believe me?

An old friend connected to me on Facebook, and asked me something about what I've written on a blog. It was an interesting conversation and I had a great time talking again with him. I put all my blogs on my Facebook URLs so everyone can easily check all my online spaces. And I put them on FriendFeed too!

I've been using FriendFeed for a few weeks by now, and I think it's very useful because it can do a very simple thing for me: track all my contents published on the web (serveral blogs, delicious, youtube, twitter). Although it can be a conversational social network I use it in a very basic way: I just put my RSS feeds in it and it does all the rest!

I post on twitter, save bookmarks on delicious, publish video on youtube and write on several blogs. My friends probably visit two or more of my blogs, but still not all of them. My random readers will probably visit just one of my spaces. So, both to the first and to the latter, I can suggest something I've written that might be worth to read.

Here's my advice for you: try to inter-connect all your social spaces between each other (via a simple link) and use some aggregator - like FriendFeed - to give a unique stream of all your social media. You will get more readers, and you could offer a good service to your loyal followers.

Feel free to add me as a friend on Facebook, btw.

New Killer Application on Facebook: Blog It lets you post on multiple blogs!

There's a new cool Facebook App called Blog It: it lets you post on multiple blogs (all main blogging platforms are supported) while remaining on Facebook.

Blog It is a whole new way to post on your blogs: it connects with your blogs directly and lets you post on multiple blogs at once, even if they're hosted on different platforms! Blog It is terrific for intensive and professional bloggers, because you can use it to replicate the content you post on different blogs. It's also a killer application for compulsive amateur bloggers :-D

But the most innovative thing is that you can post on your blog without leaving your Facebook profile pages: Blog It is in fact a Facebook Application developed by TypePad™, and is completely free!

As you can see in the image above the supported blog platforms are TypePad (of course!), Wordpress (both .com and privately hosted versions), Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pwnce, Tumblr, Twitter, Vox and Facebook profile status and The post editing interface is really simple and you cannot upload images: but I'm sure it's a limit that will go away with future versions.

Click here to install Blog It Facebook Application »
(Facebook account is needed)

BTW: if you're on Facebook, add me (Pasquale Borriello) to your friends!

Why I've joined the Facebook translation team

Facebook is becoming an important tool for web marketers, social media specialist and online media planners. It delivers targeted-contextual display and text ads, profiled leads and contacts, demographic stats on pageviews and much more.

What's wrong with that? Read on to know what's wrong.

The content is multilingual because the users are in fact multilingual. But what about the interface and the profiles? They're limited to 4 languages and targeted ads and social media campaigns simply don't work well in other languages. Facebook is currently available in 4 languages: English, Spanish, French and German. What about Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and all the other languages?

The bad news is that there's nothing a normal user can do about it. Well, almost.

Because there's a good news: Facebook is being localized in "minor" languages by indipendent translators.

There's a community of volunteers for those who want to join the Facebook translation team. Can you figure out where this community is? Yes! On Facebook of course.

To join the Facebook translation community all you have to do is add the "Translations" Facebook Application (just type Translations inside your Applications search box).

This application is really easy to use and lets you translate "inline" every piece of Facebook still unavailable in your own language.

I've joined that community to translate Facebook from English to Italian because I believe that Facebook is an important marketing tool, and it can become even better if it is localized in my native language.

There are 4000+ phrases left to complete the italian translation: feel free to help us!