Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker is appearing in our newsfeeds with increasing frequency these days.

First, there was the Forbes cover. Then there were the Facebook ads asking users to “Like” Sean Parker on Facebook, which Gawker discovered was part of an effort to build up buzz for an upcoming blog. On Monday, we learned Rhapsody had signed an agreement to acquire Napster, the music-sharing site he helped start (though there is some dispute about his exact role, and whether he was a co-founder of the business along with creator Shawn Fanning) at age 19.

Parker sent his first tweet Monday afternoon, apparently apologizing to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for joining a rival service. It reads: “Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually. (Actually @scooterbraun made me do it.)” Scooter Braun is Justin Bieber’s manager.

As The Next Web points out, it appears Parker has been planning his Twitter debut for some time. His account already has verified status. He has amassed 3,600 followers and counting at the time of writing.

The question is: Why now? Is he launching another startup? Is he seriously invested in his forthcoming blog launch? Or is he suddenly interested in making himself better known?

In the meantime, we wonder how many followers he’ll have by the end of the day Monday. My bet: 60,000.

Here’s a Squidoo update, along with a chance to share your work and your passion and perhaps find a new gig.

Six years after our founding, we’re now ranked #73 out of the millions of websites in the US measured by Quantcast. We now get more traffic than Digg, NBC or Hulu.

Millions of people have used Squidoo to build pages about content that they care about and want to share. What we’ve discovered is that in fact, self-expression is truly important to many people. That rush you get when you know an audience wants to hear what you have to say about something you care about–we’ve been supporting that for a while and it’s clearly resonating with people.

What we’ve been committed to for the last six years is the idea that self-expression is at the heart of the best content, and that the web makes it easy to create personal media. Squidoo gives people a chance to build a personal interest graph online, page by page, interest by interest.

Announcing magazines: Squidoo is adding on to our core by launching a series of online magazines, highlighting great content, publishing original articles and connecting passionate people via Facebook. With Halloween right around the corner and more people eating vegetarian we thought we’d start there, but with a lot more to come. The team has done a fabulous job launching these, I hope you can take a look, or even better, join in.

If you’d like to contribute to our upcoming roster of new magazines (either to promote your own work or to be considered as an editor) please fill out this quick form and we’ll send you regular updates.

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

• Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
• None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

---

1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

---

So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

Facebook has overhauled its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new metric to gauge the health of a page: “People Talking About.”

That statistic, which users will see on Pages below the total number of “Likes,” will be one of four tracked by Pages Insights. The idea is that users will understand a Page with a high People Talking About rating is one that has compelling content. Likewise, content creators will be motivated to make their Pages more comment-worthy.

People Talking About (that might not be the final name for the metric; at press time, Facebook wasn’t sure) will measure user-initiated activity related to a Page, including posting to a Page’s Wall, “liking,” commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, “liking” or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.

The other metrics, which are designed for administrators of brand and media Pages, include “Likes,” “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” While “Likes” is self-explanatory, Friends of Fans is the actual number of friends your fans have, and weekly total reach is designed to be an accurate assessment of how many total people have posted something about your Page, how many news organizations (within Facebook) have referenced it and how much viral distribution elements of your Page has gotten.

David Baser, product manager for Pages Insights, says that despite a raft of new activities that Facebook will be introducing soon under the Facebook Gestures banner, those four metrics will remain and the “Like” will maintain its ranking as a top measurement. “Likes are an expression of identity,” Baser says. “It’s a user saying that I have a relationship with this brand.”

In addition to tracking the four metrics, Pages Insights will also offer a deeper dive into data around specific updates. Facebook will list your last 500 posts (the company began tracking them in July) and count the total number of engaged users, People Talking About it and virality. The latter measures the percentage of users who commented on the post.

Sentiment, however, will not be part of the calculation. Whether a user is lauding a comment or trashing it, it will count the same.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca

Source

You’ve all heard the stat, if Facebook were a country, it would be the the third largest in the world. That stat was initially shared when Facebook hit 500 million users. Now the site has more than 800 million users and a new comparison that’s worthy of blog posts, tweets and conference presentations…Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did in 2004, which ironically is the year Facebook debuted.

According to data released by Pingdom, Facebook is also larger than the population of Europe, with Russia included. But when it comes to comparing Facebook’s population with worldwide users of the Internet in general, you can see that it ranks only second behind Asia. At 800 million, Facebook represents 28% of the current Internet population and 168% and 294% of the Internet population of Europe and North America respectively.

Pingdom also compared Facebook’s global citizenry with the actual populations of countries around the world (not just Internet users). Here you can see that Facebook’s active user base is 2.5x the population of the United States, 3.9x the population of Brazil, and 13x the population of the United Kingdom. Only India and China have populations larger than Facebook.

In the face, pun intended, of an important migration from that of a destination web to that of a social egosystem, businesses must rethink their web strategy. No longer is having a centralized www presence enough to satisfy the needs of online consumers. I’ve long maintained that businesses must augment their traditional web site with that of a social home page as well as a mobile experience. Catering to attention where it is focused is the only way to earn relevance in a new era of social consumerism. In doing so, businesses must also adopt a new mindset that doesn’t simply market to consumers the same old way just in new networks, but instead foster meaningful engagement and connections by providing value…as defined by the very consumers you’re trying to reach.

This is your time to not only earn Likes, but also make them count now and in the long term.

This is the most important decision in your career (or even your day).

It didn’t used to be. What next used to be a question answered by your boss or your clients.

With so many opportunities and so many constraints, successfully picking what to do next is your moment of highest leverage. It deserves more time and attention than most people give it.

If you’re not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Pinterest

Quick Pitch: Pinterest is a digital pinboard for things you love.

Genius Idea: A bookmark that makes it easy to save photos from any webpage.

---

When Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann was looking for an engagement ring for his girlfriend, he turned to his own product for inspiration. He found the right one on the list of a jewelry enthusiast, and pinned it to his digital board.

He also used Pinterest to help plan the wedding, keep track of potential future vacation destinations, list his family’s favorite recipes and just remember images that fit the title “little things I love.”

This flexibility is part of Pinterest’s draw. Expressing passion for a hobby is just as easy as browsing for your next purchase. But what’s even more addictive about the site — a collection of collections — is that it’s just as much about the users as it is what they’ve posted.

“The things you collect say a lot about you, and we wanted to bring that experience online,” says Silbermann.

Here’s how Pinterest works: Users create lists about anything and fill them with photos from around the web. They can follow other lists and users, and “repin” specific items. An Instapaper-like bookmark makes adding to a list from anywhere much easier than writing a blog post or uploading an image to a photo-sharing service. And the browser experience is ideal for the small attention spans of web readers — almost no text, almost all pictures.

Pinterest revealed Friday that it had raised a $27 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

The site is still not open to the public, and users need to request an invitation to use it. Silbermann says that there are no monetization plans in the works. It’s unusual for a startup in private beta to get this much attention from a top investment firm — especially a startup with no clear path to making money.

What Pinterest has is people’s attention. Judging by the 4.5-star iTune rating of its iPhone app, that attention is positive. Though the company declined to reveal information about their userbase, almost 30,000 users have taken time to rate the app in the app store.

That’s about as many ratings as Tumblr’s iPhone app — which had a four-year head start.

Image courtesy of istockphoto, chieferu

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Some of the most respected influencers on the Internet today were viewed as illegitimate sources just a few years ago. You know them as “bloggers.” In a recent Technorati poll, more than 40% of those surveyed stated that their views closely align with those of bloggers, while their trust in mainstream media continues to wane.

For those who seek to market a product or service online, this is the perfect moment — many of the top industry influencers are also the most accessible. A single relationship with the right blogger could lead to thousands of instant relationships with targeted readers who fully trust that particular source; not to mention the back links. Unfortunately, the hunt for the right blogger can be a job all its own. Here are five tips to help make the hunt for the perfect blogger a bit easier.

---

1. Look Right Under Your Nose

---

Simply scouring the web in search of the right blog can result in an overabundance of bloggers ill-matched to your business. Why search aimlessly when some bloggers have done a lot of the work for you? Review your site for comments, revisit old emails and check for Twitter mentions where a blogger may have already reached out to you. Bloggers who have made the effort to engage you have proven they are diligent marketers and will help get your brand seen and heard once you collaborate.

---

2. Reference Blog Directories

---

Browse Technorati, review Alltop, crawl BlogCatalog and search Alexa to determine who is the big blog in your field. Find the top influencers in your industry, research them and move in for the kill. If there is a blogger you wish would highlight your business, but you feel they are too big to conquer, search the content of their blog for mentions of smaller, yet related blogs that you can successfully connect with. Once you have built relationships with these smaller blogs, you can return to the once-unapproachable site with some posts under your belt that are worthy of mention.

---

3. Help a Reporter Out

---

Join HARO, a service that compiles lists of queries from reporters and bloggers who are seeking experts willing to share their experience, tell their story or sell their product. HARO sends out thousands of daily requests directly to your inbox and can often be better than the best of leads. Since 2008, HARO has published more than 750,000 journalist listings, including many from The Huffington Post and Lifehacker, all of whom need someone like you to complete their post. This tip is a must — it’s free and extremely useful.

---

4. Utilize a “Blogger Dating” Tool

---

The rise in popularity of blogger outreach prompts the emergence of sites based entirely on this concept. There are now a number of services to help you find, research, contact and track your outreach effort. Much like dating sites for bloggers and marketers, services like BlogDash, eCarin and GroupHigh help you find relevant influencers and allow you to rate them, group them, contact them and follow up.

---

5. Utilize Good Ol’ Fashion Google

---

With all the Google products in existence, it’s no wonder that more than one can aid with blogger outreach. The obvious choice, Google Blog Search, is where you can search keywords relevant to your business as well as your business name. This allows you to locate and contact those who may already be an evangelist of your product (see Tip #1 above). Similarly, Google Analytics can reveal your product preachers through reports of blogs that have linked back to your site. Need just a simple blog suggestion tool? Google Reader suggests blogs that address the topics you care about and never seems to run out of recommendations.

---

Follow these five tips and you will find many relevant bloggers, but unless you properly organize your findings, you will end up overwhelmed and discouraged. From the very beginning of your hunt, list all possible candidates in spreadsheet that includes columns for contact email addresses, dates of interaction or engagement, page rank, web statistics and, once a post is uploaded, back links. Implement these tactics in an organized manner and you will be well on your way to a successful and pleasant blogger outreach effort.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, loooby

Apple is bringing speech recognition to the masses with its new iPhone 4S, equipped with an intelligent assistant named Siri. It’s a major differentiator for the new iPhone, setting it apart from its predecessors. I’ve been using speech recognition software for the past 8 years, so I was eager to take this enhanced version of Siri for a spin. Here’s my review.

Siri is not new. It started its life as an experiment funded by DARPA, said to be the largest artificial intelligence project to date. Next, Siri, with the same Nuance speech recognition tech built in that also powers the application I’ve been using for years, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, was first available as a free app on the iPhone in February, 2010. Then Apple bought Siri in April of 2010 and decided to incorporate it into its new iPhone 4S, breaking the old Siri app on other iPhones (unless you want to perform a crude hack).

So now Siri is baked into every iPhone 4S, and not available elsewhere. Siri has come a long way since it was first introduced as a less-accurate and somewhat incomplete iPhone app. Now it’s better integrated into iOS 5, and my immediate impression is that it’s more accurate than it’s ever been. Even in a noisy environment inside a car going 60 miles an hour, it can still understand most of what you’re saying if you hold the iPhone up to your ear. Its speech recognition isn’t perfect, and some of its errors are laughable, but in a quiet environment its accuracy is nearly equal to that of the desktop version of NaturallySpeaking running on extremely powerful processors.

Its integration into the iPhone 4S’s iOS 5 software makes it convenient to use. You press and hold the iPhone 4S’s Home button, and it springs to life, sounding a short beep to signal for you to begin speaking. You can use it in this speakerphone mode, or if the iPhone 4S is turned on, you can simply raise the handset to your ear (a necessity when riding in a noisy vehicle) and the phone’s proximity sensor activates Siri, usually prompting you to begin speaking (inexplicably, sometimes it doesn’t respond).

That odd non-working tendency must be why Apple is still calling Siri “beta.” The company reassures users that the Siri will be continuously improved, adding that the software learns how you speak as you go and will perform more accurate recognition as it learns your way of speaking. Still, loading beta software into a new piece of iPhone hardware is a thin thread on which to differentiate this new product. Only a company with the chutzpah of Apple would have the courage to try something like this. But Siri works just barely well enough for Apple to pull it off, bolstered by the iPhone 4S’s faster processor and better camera (among what Apple boasts as 197 other incremental improvements), all doing their part to strengthen the lure of this updated iPhone.

Over the 48 hours I’ve been using Siri, it’s hard to tell if it’s actually improving its speech recognition, but as it stands, it’s just good enough to be fun to use. I especially like the way you can almost carry on a conversation with it. For example, you can ask it, “How’s the weather in New York today?” It will answer by showing you the iPhone’s weather app with New York’s data displayed. Then, if you ask it, “Where are the good Italian restaurants there?,” Siri responds by finding 24 Italian restaurants in New York, sorted by rating. It knows you’re still talking about New York. Clever.

As you can read in our posts about Siri, it does bring a slight attitude along with it, which I find refreshing. Other times, it has hilarious misunderstandings, such as when I asked it yesterday to “Call me an ambulance,” and it responded, “From now on, I’ll call you ‘an ambulance’. Okay?” I was disappointed to hear Siri’s voice, which still sounds way too robotic for my taste. I was thinking that somehow, now that Apple owns the app, it would gussy it up to sound more like GPS units do, or like the mellifluous yet mutinous HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I suspect that’s still way off in the future. Instead, there are some oddities in its stilted pronunciation, such as the way Siri says the word “restaurant,” speaking with a drawl that sounds like it’s straight out of my native Southern U.S.: “Resta-runt.” Grandma, is that you?

Among its myriad capabilities, of course Siri can help you place phone calls with aplomb, where all you have to do is speak the name of anyone in your Contacts app, and it quickly connects you (something that’s been possible for years with much lesser cellphones). Beyond that, it can also help you speak an email and turn it into text, where it walks you through by asking who you’re sending it to, the subject line and so forth. However, it’s not too adept at breaking out separate paragraphs of text, even if I spoke to it the way I do with NaturallySpeaking, specifying things such as “new paragraph.” Although the email function could be useful for creating short emails while driving (not recommended), it still has some polishing to do before it’s truly useful for sending emails solely by speech.

Some of its capabilities go deeply into science fiction territory, such as pushing and holding the Home button, and then telling it to set a timer for 15 minutes. I especially like telling it to set an alarm, asking it directions, or asking it to launch a playlist in iTunes. I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t able to interact with Twitter, but I found a workaround for that, so that problem is solved already. Still, Apple should have made that capability available from the beginning, and if the company follows through on its promise, we will soon see a lot more interaction with various iOS apps.

Siri on the iPhone 4S still feels like a work in progress. I think it could have used another few months of development before it was released to push it well beyond gimmick territory. But Apple was already later than usual in its product cycle with this iPhone 4S, so might have been compelled to release it early. Even so, Siri as it stands now gives us a hint at what’s to come, and the future looks bright.