There is a fine line between the two and it’s easily crossed.

Seth Goldstein.Net — Thoughts on Social Media, Social Media Marketing and thought who call themselves experts from Seth Goldstein on Vimeo.

So in January, Ms. Herrscher began thinking about ways to apply the principles of Twitter to her site. She wanted something where her readers “wouldn’t have to dig through the millions of people on Twitter to find moms, or moms in their area or moms with their common interests,” she said. “It’s a smaller, manageable community.”

via A Twitter Spinoff Launches for Moms – Digits – WSJ.

So here’s the thing, all of these Twitter spin offs, Laconi.ca installations etc., are great. Yet they are missing two things, in my opinion, the community and the interconnectivity. The majority of people are on Twitter. Yes there is a following for spin off sites like Identi.ca and the TWIT Army (both of which I belong to), but the fact that Twitter has almost everyone on it and the developmental chops via the API makes it seem so much more powerful than it’s clones.

Though Rachael Herrscher might be on to something, I just feel that we’re dealing with an overload of social media sites. On a daily basis many of us are checking at least three if not more programs to follow people and get our news.

Personally these are the services that I use on a regular basis:

• Twitter (always open in Tweetdeck)
• Facebook (always open in a tap in Firefox)
• Linkedin (I jump back and forth when I get a notice or an email about something on the service)
• FriendFeed (when I’m not already overloaded)
• Google Reader (for Twitter search term feeds and blog updates)
• GMail (for my email)
• Delicious (to share sites that I find on a daily basis with the world)

Now that’s just on a daily basis and thankfully I’m still able to get my work done. Granted my business is closely tied to social media and the Internet so I’m able to suppliment my life with these services. But when is adding services causing more harm than good or even not contributing anything.

I’m also on theses sites (and I’m missing tons):

• Identi.ca ( a twitter clone network. Find me as GoldsteinMedia)
• Army.Twit.Tv (another Laconi.ca opensource Twitter clone run by Tech guru Leo Laporte of This Week In Tech and TechTV fame)

The solution, in my opinion, is not to stop innovating or making new services. The solution is to make all these clones and networks talk to each other (easily). That way people can interact on a broader scale without major time-consuming social media burnout.

I’m interested in what you think. Post your comments below.

On March 24th, David Sarno in his LA Times article “There’s Twitter the companym and Twitter the Medium” highlights some important concerns with the relatively new and booming microblogging service. Technology celebrities like Leo Laporte and Dave Winer have both addressed the need and appeal of Twitter as well as their concern about the closed, non-transparent nature of the company that runs it.

“They kind of have you,” said Laporte, who now has more than 100,000 followers on the service. “The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is.”

Still, being in thrall to Twitter hasn’t stopped Laporte from joining a conversation that’s taking hold on the service’s fringes. As this group of Web subversives sees it, the once-tiny Twitter has grown like a magic beanstalk into a full-fledged communications medium — taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television. And though the 30-person, San Francisco start-up is not exactly General Electric, digital trust-busters believe the same rules apply: One company shouldn’t have a monopoly…

…on an entire medium — even if it invented it.

“Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it,” said Laporte, referring to the tweets users pour into Twitter’s databases every day by the million.

People love the convenience and reach of social media systems like Twitter, he said.  “But what they ignore is that there’s a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what’s going on.”

With this concern comes new innovation, open source ventures like Laconi.ca and it’s initial install Identi.ca have spawned Twitter-clones for those who want to break from the mold and grasp of the extremely commercial Twitter.

Now with these other incarnations of Twitter comes one inherent issue… lack of communication between the original and those clones. Unlike other popular clones (IBM-compatible computers and the new Hackintosh) these Laconi.ca installations talk to one another but don’t exactly communicate with the original. On Identi.ca you can send your posts from that service to your Twitter account but you can’t set it so that your Tweets on Twitter go to you Identi.ca and other Laconica installed programs.

Another issue that I see that is hindering the growth of Twitter-clones is the lack of connection and polarization. On Twitter, “everyone” is there. People from Laporte and Winer to Kevin Rose, Shaq and others. Twitter is the “IT” place to be right now. At almost ever tech event the biggest thing in the tech community (in the Valley and beyond) is your Twitter identity. People wear their @twitternames on name tags like badges of honor and look to connect with everyone they meet on a more interactive and social level. Tweetups have spawned and become a new word in our vernacular and have extended “Social Media” beyond the desk, keyboard and mouse to local pubs and meeting places.

With this in mind, the idea that one, yes one, company is the gate keeper of all this exchanging of ideas and clearly (rightfully so) is capitalizing on it is a bit worrisome. When Twitter goes down or launches a Fail Wale, that iconic image that emerges from the depths of the Twitter  ocean every time the service has a hiccup, the community is held hostage. This is a concern, with this new era of transparency, in Washington and online Twitter is an ivory castle with big thick-doors keeping peering eyes from peaking in.

The only way that Twitter as a medium can grow and truly be a medium for the people is to intertwine itself or have the clones intertwine themselves together for cross pollination between the different Twitter-like services.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you concerned? What do you think should be done to open up the system? Post your thoughts below.

Blellow is very neat. Is it a Twitter Killer? No. But a neat concept.

The idea of Twitter was to share what you are doing with your friends and fans, but it’s evolved into so much more. Twitter is like Blellow just without the amount of functionality that Blellow provides. I’d be interested to see if there will eventually be integration between the two.

What are your thoughts on Blellow? Post them below.

Microsoft has a vision of the future it looks really neat.

Jesse Newhart (@jessenewhart) has posted an amazing video on YouTube on how you can get the most out of Twitter using Tweetdeck. Check it out. How do you have your Tweetdeck setup? Post your comments below.

A must watch from Gary Vaynerchuk. He makes some very good points about leveraging your brand on the Internet and how if a company isn’t they need to be.

Recently Google screwed up. The search giant found a bug that shared unshared documents in Google’s famed Google Docs with others. According to their figures only affected 0.05% of users, the the implications are huge for the idea of putting everything in the cloud.

Dear Google Docs user,

We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.

The Google Docs Team

Granted there is an inherent risk to putting your documents online, but a snafu like this could have cost companies using the Google “operating system” tons of money.

The draw to using the Cloud for computing is simple. You can access your documents and files from anywhere in a “secure maner.” Now Google says it’s fixed the problem, but should we trust that it won’t happen again? I’m not so sure.

What are your thoughts. Post them in the comments.

Gary Vaynerchuk had another great video posted today about how a hip/swanky hotel’s brand was damaged because of a decision they made. Never under-estimate the power of social media. Check Gary out on Twitter at @garyvee

I was in Miami last night and we had a little run-in with the hotel, which led to some tweets about the situation, which led to a person changing their mind about using the hotel. Watch as Dave Morin and Josh Elman of Facebook and David Recordon of 6 apart tell the story.

“Every Touch Matters”