How to have a business website for (almost) free


You do the following:
















2. Create your company’s profile on LinkedIn. Cost: free


















Il meglio e il nemico del bene

The new Facebook is awful. I cannot find anything, and the links I need, search for and stumble upon by pure miracle just don’t work.
Why do some people have an itch to “improve” something that works just fine?

Hussein Fazal: Social Network Advertising

I attended this great presentation by Hussein Fazal in December. Check it out if you want to know how to promote your product or service through social networks, getting the most of your advertisement dollar.

My social networking (for business and pleasure)

I talked to my SEB program advisor the other day and mentioned that I try to attend one networking event a week, and not more than that (otherwise, I would have no time for the actual work). She was pleasantly surprised that I manage to find so many networking events while some other people just have no idea where to go and how to start. In fact, once you have a social network established and use the proper tools, the information starts coming from all directions.

All the further stuff is trivial for a digiterati, so, if you heard of Twitter or know what a RSS is, don’t bother to read on. However, today I got another reminder of the digital gap: a classmate in YorkU proudly mentioned she was going to a workshop where they will teach her to use comments in Microsoft Word and other advanced stuff. So, I suppose, these notes could be of use to someone. Read the rest of this entry » sucks

1. Has no integration (except for importing my events from Facebook; for all the other types of calendars it suggests exporting events into a CSV file, and presumably I have to do this every time I add an event).
2. No integration for birthdays, even for importing them from Facebook (there was a box that I was supposed to click but it did nothing).
3. The thing assumed by default that I am in the US and adorned my calendar with Columbus day etc. There is life outside US, you know.
4. The application is full of bugs and usability crevices. The contact importing “wizard”, for example, does not allow you to import more than 100 contacts, but displays a “You can have up to 100 contacts in your account. To add more, you’ll first have to remove one.” about 200 times (my guess is, once for each contact that could not be imported).
5. I don’t really see the point of the whole thing, maybe it is the integration of social networking with a calendar, but right now it looks pretty unusable. Besides, a limit of 100 contacts is really, really funny. On the other hand, do I really need to know what 100 people are doing on any given day? I think I’d rather stick to Facebook for following what my friends are doing and to Google calendar+Toodledo (they actually integrate nicely) for todo lists and calendar functions.

Meetup + Facebook + kittens

Found out there is a Meetup application on Facebook. My heartfelt thanks to whoever wrote it. It is not very integrated (i.e. the meetup meetings will not appear on the FB Events calendar, or maybe I am missing something again, a fake highlighted blonde that I am). This kinda defies the idea of integration. However, I can now see what meetups my FB friends are going to (only if they registered Meetup on Facebook, which isn’t very integrated either.) However, there might be such feature on Meetup as friends search by name but I did not find it. However, Meetup, unlike Facebook, DOES have a “export event into your calendar” button that makes life easier.

So, the things that would be nice to have in Meetup-Facebook integration:

1. To be able to see my meetups in one list together with my Facebook events.
2. To see meetups of all my FB friends, not just those who added Meetup application.
3. To be able to dump my FB friends list into Meetup and friend them on Meetup too (right now, as far as I know, Meetup has no people search whatsoever, or maybe I don’t know where to look).

Alternatively, of course, people who use Meetup can migrate to Facebook and stay there so everybody is happy. AFAIK, aside from “export event into your calendar” button, Facebok has all the same functionality implemented.

On the same note (or an altogether different one), I found out that Jane Zhang fosters kittens for Toronto Humane Society. My deepest respect. I have one cat (taken, incidentally, from the same institution) and that’s pretty much all I can do.