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Subscribers of this blog might have realised that it got quiet around here during the last weeks. The reason: I’ve signed a book contract with O’Reilly Germany for a book about Facebook.

The German eBook introduction to Facebook I had published in July 2009 is in its 10th edition by now and has been downloaded more than 12.000 times by now! And so O’Reilly asked me if I didn’t want to make an “extended version” with them in print. So this is what I’m mainly working on at the moment…

I know I’m negelcting my non-german speaking readers but I just cannot handle it all at the same time. I hope to get back to this blog more often once the manuscript of the book is out  in a few weeks.

But I’m still here to reply to your comments and questions, no matter if they’re about facebook or any other social media or communications subject. Just let me know if I can be of any help.

Thanks for your patience,
Annette

Those of you who follow my work know about my client, the Norwegian writer Pål H. Christiansen. In 2002 he had published his novel “Drømmer om storhet” about the desperate writer Hobo Highbrow who first loses his job, then thinks he has lost his girlfriend and finally loses grip on reality. The only orientation remaining in his life is his admiration for the Norwegian band a-ha, especially their composer and guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy.

Pål H. Christiansen’s novel has been published in print in German and in English translation so far. We’re also publishing a French and an Italian fan (!) translation bit by bit on his fanblog at the moment.

And now we have written a supplement to the novel together called “Hobo’s Guide to Oslo” – a free eBook that can be downloaded on Pål H. Christiansen’s website. So when you come to Oslo next time, make sure you have this little companion and the novel with you! ;-)

Hobo's Guide to Oslo

Did you know 4.0

A new presentation of statistics around the evolution of social media usage from the “Did you know” series :

(via Christian Henner-Fehr)

Just received my Google Wave invite! Thanks @sebastianvoss! Here’s the short version of an introduction to Google Wave:

Btw. I have five invite nominations left for friends or collegues. Let me know if you want one. ;-)

Or you ask for an invitation on the wave signup page.

Here I am back on duty! :-)

I have not forgotten to post the promised translations of my facebook introduction here. It just wasn’t possible to start it before my holidays. In the meantime the German version has got big attention and the resp. ebook has been downloaded more than 2000 times already!

Thanks to all the great fans of the facebook fanpage of schwindt-pr I was able to get a name url for it. Thanks a lot for that! you can now find the fanpage on http://www.facebook.com/schwindtpr too. :-)

Two interesting news during my holidays:

And now back to work! There are some interesting old and new projects waiting for me! :-)

If you are interested to work with me too, just drop me a line!
You find a list of my services on
http://www.schwindt-pr.com/english/about.html#service.

Looking forward to hear from you! :-)

The agency schwindt-pr is on holiday for the rest of August.
Back in the office at September 1, 2009.

Have a nice summer everyone!
:-)

If you follow my social media activities you might have already heard about the German eBook about facebook basics I have published earlier this week. Even before the blogpost series on my German agency blog that this eBook is based on was finished I was asked if I was going to publish the same thing in English too! The answer is: yes – but…

… it might take a little time as I do not only have to translate the complete text (51 pages) but I also have to do all the screenshots (100) again with English default language. So I’d probably do as in the German version and publish the different chapters as blogposts here first and in the end sum them up in an eBook too.

Until then here’s the index of the German version translated to English:

“Introduction to the basics of facebook”

1) Facebook – the social network

1.1) How to sign up on facebook
1.2) Your facebook profile

2) Privacy on facebook

1.1) Where can I edit my privacy settings?
1.2) Edit profile privacy settings
1.3) Define visibility of photo albums
1.4) Privacy of my contact information
1.5) Who can find me how?
1.6) Set up what else others can see
1.7) Privacy settings of applications
1.8) What your frends are allowed to do on your wall

3) Posting on facebook (share)

3.1) Share text
3.2) Share links
3.3) Share photos
3.4) Share videos

4) Your Facebook homepage

4.1) Friend requests
4.2) Filtering
4.3) More

5) Friend requests and friend lists

5.1) Sending friend requests
5.2.) Receiving friend requests
5.3) Set up friend lists
5.4) Delete friend lists

6) Use applications on facebook

6.1) Where to find applications
6.2) Useful applications
6.3) Use applications
6.4) More applications settings
6.5) Import more updates on your wall

7) Notifications, private messages, chat

7.1) Notifications
7.2) Private messages
7.3) Facebook chat

8) Facebook groups

8.1) Find groups
8.2) Group types
8.3) Being active in groups
8.4) Start your own group
8.5) Edit group
8.6) Notifying group members

9) Facebook pages

9.1) What is a facebook page?
9.2) Becoming a fan of page
9.3) Participating
9.4) Set up a facebook page
9.5) Applications
9.6) Other particularities
9.7) Conclusion

10) The facebook fan box

10.1) Where to find the fan box
10.2) Alternative

As with the German version I suppose there will be a lot of updates to facebook while this blogpost series is going on. So the index shown here might change while the work is in progress. I might even post in subchapters to make it all go quicker. ;-)

Until then thanks for your patience! And if you haven’t become a fan of schwindt-pr’s facebook page yet, please feel free to do so and help me reach the 100 fans to get a name URL for it. You can of course get updates about recent facebook news and other interesting social media stuff there too. ;-)

Okay, this is a good start but still not what we were looking for… Twitter might have given the follow lists a more stylish design but still you are not able to sort your lists differently than getting them displayed in revert chronological order.

You can now chose between pure list view…
twitter_list

… or the enlarged version…

twitter_listlarge

that also shows name, location and – not the bio but the latest tweet!

lasttweetTo read the bio you still have to go to the person’s profile. Of course you should do that anyway if you want to read more than the latest tweet to help you decide whether to refollow that person or not.

Getting the option to to display the lists alphabetically and having the number of followers/followings and number of tweets per person shown would be a good update on this.

Looking at your follower list you’ll see the following icons now:

twittericonsThe left one is for refollowing a person:

follow

The right one is for further options:

twitter1

Once you have followed a person, the left icon changes to:

following

And the menu of the right icon changes to:

twitter2

Btw. the “Block username” option is still leading you to the blocked person’s profile to verify blocking which is still user-unfriendly. this could be made more practical by just having it done within your list.

Conclusion: Stylish new look for these lists but still not as usable as we would like them to be.

What do you think?

facebookFor all those who haven’t heard it yet: since this (early!) morning 6.01 a.m. you can set up your own custom url for your facebook profile. No complicated urls with lots of numbers in anymore.

All you need to do is got to http://www.facebook.com/username and chose a username (wich is usually firstname.lastname) for your profile.

So mine is now: http://www.facebook.com/annette.schwindt

If you have linked your old url in your blog, website or wherever and set up a new name url, no need to panic: the link is redirected and still working.

It is also possible to register such name urls for facebook pages now. But for the moment it’s only possible for pages set up before May 31, 2009 and with over 1000 fans.

Have you secured your name url yet?

Social media is about sharing and there are different tools out there that help you make your blogposts or website’s pages shareable. But most of them are based on some external script. Moreover someone who has deactivated Java will not be able to use them.

The good news: you don’t have to use scripts to make things shareable. You can also do that with normal html and a few commands inside that. You only have to adapt them to the resp. link you want to share (which you would also have to do if sharing via script).

Make sure you get the quotation marks in the right place and that you add a slash / at the end of a blogpost-url or the .html ending (or.php or .htm or whatever you use) at the end of a website’s url (if you link to an index page, use the complete url like http://www.schwindt-pr.com/index.html).

Ready? Here we go:

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Twitter

Code:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=http://yourlink” title=”Share this on twitter”>Twitter</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/” title=”Share this on twitter”>Twitter</a>

Try it: share this post on Twitter

As for twitter it might be useful to insert not the extended url but to use a never expiring short url (as with tinyurl) instead. And you can also add some more text. Which would make the code change to:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading how to code share links by @schwindtpr http://tinyurl.com/ngqtfl” title=”Share this on twitter”>Twitter</a>

Try it: share this post on Twitter

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Facebook

Code:

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://yourlink” title=”Share this on facebook”>Facebook</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/” title=”Share this on facebook”>Facebook</a>

Try it: share this post on Facebook

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Delicious

Code:

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://yourlink&amp;title=Whatever+this+link+is+about” title=”Share this on delicious”>delicious</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/&amp;title=How+to+code+share+links” title=”Share this on delicious”>delicious</a>

Try it: share this post on delicious

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Friendfeed

Code:

<a href=”http://friendfeed.com/?url=http://yourlink&amp;title=Whatever this link is about” title=”Share this post on friendfeed”>Friendfeed</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://friendfeed.com/?url=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/&amp;title=How to code share links” title=”Share this post on friendfeed”>Friendfeed</a>

Try it: Share this post on Friendfeed

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Stumbleupon

Code:

<a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://yourlink” title=”Share this on Stumbleupon”>Stumbleupon</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/” title=”Share this on Stumbleupon”>Stumbleupon</a>

Try it: share this post on Stumbleupon

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Digg

Code:

<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?url=http://yourlink&amp;title=How+to+code+share+links” title=”Digg this”>Digg</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?url=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/&amp;title=How+to+code+share+links” title=”Digg this”>Digg</a>

Try it: share this post on Digg

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Google

Code:

<a href=”http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=http://yourlink” title=”Share this post on Google”>Google</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/” title=”Share this post on Google”>Google</a>

Try it: share this post on Google

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Myspace

Code:

<a href=”http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?l=3&u=http://your link” title=”Share this post on Myspace”>MySpace</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?l=3&u=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/” title=”Share this post on Myspace”>MySpace</a>

Try it: Share this post on MySpace

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Reddit

Code:

<a href=”http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://yourlink” title=”Share this post on Reddit”>Reddit</a>

Example:

<a href=”http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://blog.schwindt-pr.com/2009/06/10/how-to-code-share-links/” title=”Share this post on Reddit”>Reddit</a>

Try it: share this post on Reddit

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If you considered this blogpost as helpful I’d be happy if you left me a comment here or use one of the try out links in this blogpost to share it. ;-)

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