Further to my previous post about Pear Analytics’ Twitter usage study, it’s probably a good time to point out that Facebook very recently purchased fellow Silicon Valley social networking company FriendFeed.

FriendFeed’s service allows users to collect together details about what they’re up to on a vast range of different sites, such as Flickr, Youtube and Facebook, all into one place. This information can then be viewed on the FriendFeed site by others, or published to, for example, Facebook.

FriendFeed also has a built in chat system, which one would assume would result in a lot less of what Pear Analytics called Twitter’s conversational and “pointless babble” posts.

The other really cool thing they have up their sleeves is their real-time search. If you go to FriendFeed’s website and do a keyword search, you’ll find the results update right before your eyes as relevant posts are made by FriendFeed’s users.

With Facebook’s acquisition of the company, we can expect to see a lot of this kind of thing incorporated into their own site. In fact many believe that as Facebook picks up more momentum they will simply start to swallow up companies and incoporate their innovations into it’s own site - and FriendFeed is to be no exception.

Whichever way things go, it looks like FriendFeed and Facebook (FriendBookFeed, FaceFeedFriend, FriendBookFace..?) could be a much more viable option for promoting your business than Twitter.

According to a report released by US research firm Pear Analytics, 40.55% of Twitter posts are “pointless babble” like “I am having a sandwich”, and 37.55% of them are “conversational”, and of no particular value to others. And 3.75% is spam.

So basically, 81.85% of Twitter posts are pretty much worthless to anyone thinking of getting involved. Supposedly.

I wouldn’t say that these findings mean you shouldn’t use Twitter to promote your business. If anything I’d say it goes a long way to prove that Twitter is very popular among Internet users. But popularity has it’s drawbacks - the main one being that your business’ carefully crafted Twitter updates can simply be drowned out by all the “pointless babble”, spam and general conversation.

It’ll be interesting to see how viable Twitter is as a tool for company’s to get in touch with their target market once the initial craze for Twitter dies down.

Check out Pear Analytics’ full report

So, lately I’ve been getting more letters than usual, which is kind of nice. I must be popular.

Oh wait, hang on.

Turns out they’re rubbish letters, from some company calling themselves the Domain Renewal Group. They send out a lot these letters to people who own domain names.

Read carefully - all is not as it seems

The letters are designed to look like invoices, urging you to pay up quickly, before your domain expires.

What they don’t make so clear is that they have nothing to do with the company who you purchased your domain from. They’re basically just looking to steal your custom. The letter is actually an invitation to transfer your domain to them, so that they can look after it instead, for massively inflated prices.

It makes me mad to think that this company are making money ripping people off like this, but I guess the authorities will stop turning a blind eye to this creative misinformation and catch up with them eventually.

Until then, just remember to read anything that looks like an invoice carefully before signing anything or sending any money. In the case of the Domain Renewal Group, definitely, you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle and cash.

Take a look at our clever little blog for all the latest hints and tips to get clever with your website.

Website traffic is one thing, but your website content is just as important. People strive to be on the first page of Google, but what’s the point if visitors arrive at your site to find out of date or irrelevant information? They’ll just leave..

At Primate Designs we - well, Jon - just rewrote nearly our entire website. Ok, we do practice what we preach and update it regularly with new things that we’re doing but it’d become a bit fragmented and didn’t read as well as it could. Time for a spring clean - new news, new product information and new client portfolios, not forgetting plenty of web design optimisation!

Maybe it’s time you took a fresh look at the copy on your website. Remember: If you can’t edit your website - go ape.. (Then contact Primate Designs!)

Those cheeky Polish scammers have been hard at work crafting rather convincing scam email in the style of a Paypal email receipt for a Sony Vaio laptop. At a glance it can have you confused, even tempted to click the link which says it will cancel the transaction. Don’t panic. If you look closely the link is not to paypal.co.uk but to paypal.co-uk.pl - easily missed if you’re not too savvy with urls. Delete it and definitely don’t click on the link or you’ll find yourself unwittingly handing over your account details.

Google have started to use their keyword help (as seen in the Mozilla Google Toolbar) on their search homepage. The neat thing is, not only does it suggest words or phrases that you may be typing, but also suggests approximately how many pages each of those search terms will return!

Couple that with their Free Keyword Suggestion tool, Google seem to be more willing to share information on their usage statistics than they have been previously.

Spell checking is getting easier and easier - with more intelligent and comprehensive word libraries available in a multitude of languages. This means it’s not uncommon for words to be spelled correctly but for sentences to make little or no sense because completely incorrect words have been used.

Take the time to get someone to read through your text with a fresh pair of eyes, but in the meantime take comfort that even the big boys get it wrong fairly often. We commented on the nonsense question in the Microsoft Partner Programme and here’s another from the new Windows Live Messenger:

More Interesting Use Of English By Microsoft

Looking for a company to create a website that will empower you and benefit your business?

There are many decisions to make, however the following will give you a good start.

1. Take your Website seriously
It is a common mistake to ignore the importance of websites, if you value your business you must ensure that those providing your website understand business. A website should be a vehicle, the end product being where you want to be in business. This does not mean spending lots of money, again those who understand business will be able to cater for all budgets. Have a look at our Free Websites here

2. Google likes websites that are up to date, is yours?
These days there is no excuse for a web developer to provide you with a website that cannot be kept up-to-date by you. If you are in business you cannot rely on a third party to ensure that your online content is correct grammatically and historically. Again a web design company that understands business will provide you with this invaluable platform.

3. Ensure editing is easy
So you have a great company in mind, you understand it is vital to be represented online in a professional way and you have been told that you can keep your information up-to-date, the final step is to ensure that you can do so easily, how? Simply by testing their editing platform yourself, from work at home, with others that can advise. Basically anywhere that does not have the providing web developers present.

Why? Simply if you cannot use this without constant guidance and referring to help notes you simply will not use it. Most people have enough to do in business without learning more ’skills’

Try our Free Online Demo at www.editmy.co.uk

We hope this helps, all the best from Primate Designs

It’s a popular phrase these days, especially among salesmen, to refer to <insert their new product> as <product you already use> “on steroids”. Faster, more secure, more features, better..

..well I’m not so convinced.

It’s important to keep a sense of perspective when considering your software choices, as with any other choice in life. Why pay for something you don’t need or will only use a fraction of? Is that fancy gimmick really going to make your life easier or help your business earn more?

The Primate web monkeys do like to keep abreast of new bits of internet-related software but these days they’re coming thick and fast, all promising a myriad of features to make your life complete. There are a few simple things to bear in mind when choosing, and reading the company’s website or talking to the salesman for hours on end are not on the list.

Try before you buy: We can’t stress it enough! Can you actually use it? Is it intuitive? Can you break it or find any bugs in it? At Primate Designs we make sure our customers can “have a play” with our software whenever they want to, free of charge, and we don’t see why every company shouldn’t do this.

Make your own features list: Write down what you want from the product, not what you’ve been told you need, or what your current product does, but what you actually must have. Then you can write down all the luxuries and extra features that it would be nice to have. Compare them to the product feature list supplied by the manufacturer.

Read the support forums: There are plenty of products out there at the moment which look fantastic. They may have a really polished user interface and boast a fabulous range of features, but are fundamentally unstable. If the support forums are clogged with people asking questions as to why they cant get something to work or asking what is causing error messages, be worried!

As for “software on steroids” boasting more features than you can shake a mouse at, if you take a considered approach you may find that you barely use the features you have at your disposal currently and suddenly paying for even more seems like less of a great deal.

Remember; less is often more so keep it simple, stupid.