Last week my column for Information Week was titled, "Always Think Before You Submit" and took a look at examples of people who made mistakes when they have said things online that have impacted their careers. The column includes a look at the recently fired Virgin Atlantic staff after they said things on Facebook.

Today we learn via Rick at Readwriteweb that the delete function has been removed from Twitter. Why they did this is beyond me… Rick guesses it might have something to do with performance. Users have also been wondering what’s going on via Twitter Search.

So now more than ever, THINK BEFORE YOU TWIT. This advice might sound silly but considering how much of an emotional tool Twitter has become, don’t let it ruin your career. What sounds funny today might be looked at very differently in the near future. Type your message in, leave it for a moment, take a breathe and then click submit.

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Cyndy Aleo-Carreira is reporting that Yahoo has announced the closure of Yahoo Live. Yahoo Live was part of the brickhouse program which was where Yahoo would try out a large number of different "quick apps" and see which ones stick. The Yahoo Live blog confirms the closure and notes that the service will shut down on December 3, 2008.

Another service I’ve wondered about is Yahoo Kickstart, a "connection" source for students and alumni looking for a job, hiring or just keeping in touch. When the service launched I wondered why they created it and gave it a "WTF alert". As of this afternoon, attempts to load the site are met with the error message below. Perhaps Yahoo is really starting to focus on the applications and services where they can drive usage, revenue, and value.

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Source:CenterNetworks

We’ve learned via Yakov at Quintura that the AltSearchEngines blog has moved into independent status. This info has been confirmed by AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight.

The site launched in June 2007 and Compete shows 40,000 unique visitors in September 2008.

This news comes just days after the launch of the ReadWriteWeb Jobwire which will share stories of new hirings across the social media and new technology categories. In the first week since launch we’ve learned that BrightKite hired Tom Anderson, Mike Mueller has moved over to Fidelity National Title and Brickfish hired a social media director.

I’ve enjoyed reading AltSearchEngines and learning about specialty/niche engines. I wish Charles and the team much success moving forward.

Yesterday ReadWriteWeb Content VP Marshall Kirkpatrick posted the results of a survey that apparently looked at "Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants" and the current pay they receive. The title doesn’t mention tech bloggers but Marshall notes that the survey only went to "20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants". I wonder what makes someone a top social media consultant. More importantly only 10 people participated in the survey. That in itself makes the survey unreliable and probably should not have been posted without more responses. But hey, it hit Digg, apparently that instantly makes it reliable and accurate.

So what do we know about, and from, this survey?

• The survey went to 20 people (including me, I didn’t reply) and only 10 apparently replied
• The 10 participants posted on a wiki page and we have no idea if it was actually 10 unique individuals
• Site founders weren’t included
• We have no way to tell what makes someone a "top-tier tech blogger or social media consultant" - i.e. there’s no benchmark
• RWW was able to grab data for use with their own bloggers in future negotiation
• Apparently RWW bloggers weren’t included in said survey unless Marshall makes a max of $90k
• Less than 24 hours were offered to participate
• There are numerous disclaimers within the survey findings
• Apparently the survey was sent to only Web 2.0 bloggers, not tech bloggers in general
• No mention on U.S or International

One apparent respondent says they make $15/post but $300/hr consulting. That’s hilarious. The real issue is that without knowing A LOT more about the responses and detailed information about the overall situation, it makes it near impossible to take this data for anything. What scares me is that Jeremiah Owyang calls this a "great post" - isn’t he supposed to be an analyst?

Would a blogger pay survey be a good idea? Absolutely! But it needs to be well thoughtout, have appropriate questions and answers, be statistically relevant, and get a diverse range of responses.

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This morning I headed down to the Apple Soho neighborhood to meet with the team at Betaworks. I wanted to find out more about the URL shortener that’s apparently a tech blogger’s dream. The name of the URL shortener is bit.ly and bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick were in love with the tool like nothing else. Before we get into bit.ly, here’s some details on Betaworks.

Betaworks is a NYC company that helps startups move forward. They were quick to say they aren’t a vc or an incubator like Y Combinator is. They have a variety of NYC-based companies they either work with or invest in. The Betaworks company list includes: microblogging service Tumblr, location service Outside.in, conversational search service Summize (recently acquired by Twitter) and casual games site iminlikewithyou.

Alright, now back to bit.ly. Bit.ly is a URL shortener. What that means is that if you want to share a long URL in an email, it can create a nice short one that doesn’t break onto multiple lines, etc. That’s the basic concept for all URL shortener tools. The idea for bit.ly came from another project the Betaworks team was working on. They needed a URL shortener for Twitabit and the current 70+ shorteners didn’t fit the bill.

In my chat with Betaworks executives Andy Weissman and John Borthwick, they called bit.ly the "professional" URL shortener. There’s statistics, an archive, page thumbnails, and a platform and API which is open to all third parties. The real key they say is in the API and the ability to process pages for "entities". Entities are bits of content on the page that bit.ly can extract and display them to help find other content that matches one of the entities you select.

Currently they use Amazon Simple Database for the database functions but are in the process of moving to MySQL. They also use Amazon’s S3 storage option for the site thumbnails. There have been 40,000 bit.ly URLs created so far with 5,000 added everyday. They are a Mac shop and here’s bit.ly lead developer Nathan Folkman cranking out code:

Betaworks is now an investor in Twitter after the Summize acquisition. I was curious to find out if they planned to push Twitter to move away from TinyURL and instead use bit.ly as their primary URL shortening service. John replied with a "no comment" but noted that they want to earn respect as the best URL shortener first. Here’s my bet… the switch over will take place by the end of 2008.

Lastly we spoke about the bit.ly business plan. While they wouldn’t share any specifics yet, the model is centered around data, data usage and there will also be a set of premium upgrades available for publishers and companies using the bit.ly service.

The bit.ly team is currently working on a sign-in option which will allow vanity URL’s to be changed. They are also working on continuing to improve the API and on datastream access.

Can a URL shortener become a real business? I guess we will see as bit.ly moves forward on their product roadmap.

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Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb has a great look into how users consume content in one place and discuss the content in another place. Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a variety of questions we should be asking ourselves based on Sarah’s post.

The net discussion is around keeping up with all of the places discussion may take place based on the content (video/text/audio) that one produces. Sarah has a list of all of the 400 tools and methods needed to track everything related to a piece of content. I’d like to look at the topic from the content publisher side.

About a year ago when CN was only live a couple of months, I asked why Digg allows comments. Now we have even more services to attempt to follow, track and join the conversation around our content. Here are a few examples: Facebook, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller, Twitter, Pownce, Disqus, and FriendFeed.

When I took a look at FriendFeed last week, the first thing that smacked me straight in the face is that they allow comments on my content. Why? Would it be so hard to integrate my comment form into FriendFeed and let the comments reside on my content?

Sure, I lose page views, traffic, monetization of those visitors, ability to move them to a loyal status, learn more, etc. But the bigger issue is that readers to my article miss the discussion. No reader is going to hit up all of the services listed above to try to track and join the conversation. Instead all they get is my viewpoint as the author and miss what could be a variety of excellent complementary points or other views into the content.

There’s a business idea in all of this. What’s needed is a way to centralize the conversation back on the original content source while still allowing users to get involved on the platform they choose. While the new commenting services have moved commenting a bit further, centralization would spark real innovation.

Check out the printer we used for our business cards:

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW has the lead on a major announcement by the DataPortability workgroup. To summarize the announcement, a Google representative and a Facebook representative will be joining the DataPortability group. 

Marshall notes, "If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet." I have checked in with Marshall and he is recovering nicely from the shock.

From the release, "The DataPortability Workgroup is, among other things, actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability. This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems." 

The new representatives are: Google - Brad Fitzpatrick, Facebook - Benjamin Ling. Plaxo is also sending a representative, Joseph Smarr, to the table after breaking one of the "laws" of Facebook.

Here are the other members of the group: Chris Saad (Faraday Media), Stephen Kelly (Peepel), Ben Metcalfe (Consultant to Seesmic and Myspace), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency, Microformats), Daniela Barbosa (Dow Jones), Phil Morle, Ian Forrester (BBC), Kristopher Tate (Zooomr), Paul Keen (NineMSN), Brian Suda, Emily Chang (eHub), Danny Ayers (Talis), Robyn Tippins (Yahoo!), Robert Scoble (PodTech).

I’d love to get involved - how does someone from the east coast apply?

In the beginning, meebo was "just" a chat aggregator. Over time they have grown to add Rooms, a Platform and they are announcing a partnership tonight with Joost. Meebo will provide their Rooms technology for the 250 channels on the Joost network. Nielsen/NetRatings reports that Meebo is the fastest growing IM destination (they don’t include eBuddy in the report).

Joost presented at the NY Video Meetup last week. I noticed a much improved user experience over the initial version I tested earlier this year. If you haven’t tried Joost recently, I would try it again. Does the combo of Joost and Meebo leapfrog Hulu? If the integration is seamless, it could be pretty sweet. The part I am unclear about is whether the Meebo Rooms for the channels will be embedded into the Joost interface or a link to the Meebo room will be provided.

"Participation in community activities has emerged as one of the most significant trends in consumer behavior," said Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost. "By offering our viewers a robust channel chat option, they can chat with people interested in the same shows and subjects - and ultimately customize and enrich their entertainment experiences."

"Even in an on-demand environment like Joost, people can experience live community around popular channels and shows," said Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder, meebo. "According to a recent internal survey at meebo, 25% of meebo users IM while watching TV - there’s a lot more we can be doing to connect people who share a common passion around a specific show or genre."

Check out our interview with Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg.

Source:CenterNetworks -

Just noticed this on the Techcrunch toolbar, "Crunchies". It appears to be a partnership between Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Webware/CNET had their similar Webware 100 earlier this year.

From the site, "The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony for the most compelling startups of the year."

Looks interesting and awards for the hard work and effort startups put in should be rewarded. If you think about it, all those startups is what keeps a good bit of the press moving! The Crunchies are sponsored by Sun.

I am curious as to the name choice - wouldn’t something general enough for all 3 sites make more sense? Will we see Mint win this too? LAWL

Update from a CN reader: Mashable launched "Mashable Awards" this past weekend though it seems to focus more on social networking and new social sites.

Calling all CN readers - we need to band together to help our friends at ReadWriteWeb win the Best Technology Blog award. RWW is a huge inspiration for me and when I think about overall analysis, RWW is the tops. Maybe it comes from the fact that all the writers have beards!

Anyway, get out and support one of our own and help RWW beat the others. One vote per day and the voting ends on the 8th so you best have 5 votes each!

One of the things I have found very interesting over the past year is how quick Internet viewers are to believe whatever an "A-lister" says. It could be somewhat misleading through absolutely incorrect, but slap a popular name on it and it’s gospel. I have two good examples, one from Steve Rubel last week discussing economics and from yesterday we have Robert Scoble’s attempt at defining analytics. Neither is absolutely incorrect but both seem to be going in the wrong direction with their analyses, so let’s see if we can get them back on the right track.

Steve Rubel - Web 2.0 Economics 101

Steve Rubel, VP at Edelman, attemps to teach us all about how supply and demand works. I have very much enjoyed reading Steve’s blog for a long time but lately more posts are negative which I frankly don’t get. Steve makes two economic points:

1. As the supply of content rises, attention decreases and demand lowers - e.g. traffic thins 
2. As the supply of ad-supported media rises, inventories swell - e.g. this equals less ad revenues

One of the commenters noted, "Just stick to using frameworks you understand. Don’t write about economics ever again, Steve." I agree. Had Steve presented these thoughts in the context of the Web without the economics, it might have worked be