WP plugin developer Timan Rebel just launched a new WP plugin called Twitter Publisher, which is a great way to automatically tweet new blog posts when they are published.
Twitter Publisher supports both bit.ly and awe.sm to shorten the links going to Twitter, and it will even add Google Analytics campaign parameters to the bit.ly links for you (awe.sm does this automatically ). But the coolest feature IMHO is the ability to give the author of the post credit in the tweet. This is great for larger blogs with multiple authors. However if you’re just rolling solo, it’s not a huge advantage over Twitterfeed (which also supports awe.sm ).
We’re gonna test it out on this blog to see how it works, but probably stick with Twitterfeed on my personal blog for now.
Update: It looks like there are still some bugs in the Twitter Publisher plugin, specifically it is ignoring the setting to use awe.sm and using bit.ly instead. We’ve alerted Timan, and hopefully he will release a fix soon.
Update 2: The plugin should be working correctly now.
We’ve mentioned awe.sm a couple of times on this blog, and now it’s finally time to pull back the curtain and tell you guys what it’s all about. awe.sm is an open sharing analytics platform — a way to instrument, track, and analyze how content and attention flow through the social web. Since February, we’ve been working with a select group of application developers, tools partners, and content publishers to test and refine awe.sm and help us get it ready for today: the launch of our private beta! While we’re not quite ready to take all comers, we are now officially opening up the invites beyond the group that’s been so helpful these last 3 months. If you’ve already been in contact with us, thanks for your patience and we’ll be reaching out to you directly over the next few weeks with your invite. If you want to know how to get an invite, read on…
awe.sm for Publishers
Our mission here at the Snowball Factory is to help connect creators of interesting content with the people who love it. And we believe social media provides an incredibly powerful infrastructure to do that. awe.sm is the centerpiece of our efforts to make social media a more efficient, effective, and measurable marketing channel for content publishers. awe.sm integrates with the tools you already use to make the whole of your social media self-promotion efforts (e.g. pimping your latest blog post on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc) greater than the sum of the parts by giving you a comprehensive view of the resulting traffic *right in Google Analytics*. awe.sm is currently supported in Twitterfeed, AddToAny, TweetFace (which we built too ), and our version of the Sociable WordPress Plugin. We’ve been working with TechCrunch as well as a number of smaller publishers during our alpha, and as of today we will be handing out invites to publishers who complete our survey. For more information on our publisher offering, please drop us a line to publishers [at] awe.sm.
awe.sm for Developers
In building awe.sm, we realized that sharing analytics is a pain point felt by a broader group than just publishers and we wanted to make our solution available to others building applications with sharing components. To that end, awe.sm was built from the APIs up and developers can recreate any of our features (or build new ones of their own) entirely in their own apps. We like to think of it as analytics infrastructure-as-a-service. And we’re proud to already be powering features of Zentact, Famery, SimplyBox, and KISSmetrics. We’re still limiting access to our API documentation at this point. But if you’re a developer who would like to check it out, please send a brief description of your application and how you would like to use awe.sm to developers [at] awe.sm.
awe.sm Partners
Each publisher’s approach to social media marketing is different, and we don’t believe there is (or should be) a one-size-fits-all solution. And while we will build some tools, like TweetFace, ourselves when we can’t find existing ones that do what we want, we’d much rather partner with folks who are totally focused on making a great tool to solve a particular publisher need. That’s why we’re very excited to announce awe.sm support in AddToAny, one of the most innovative share widgets out there, to go along with our previously announcedTwittefeed integration. In addition to recommending partner tools to awe.sm publishers, we also plan to offer an affiliate model for partners who drive premium awe.sm signups. So if you’ve got a publisher tool that you’d like to integrate with awe.sm, please hit us up at partners [at] awe.sm.
Private-Label URL Shorteners (What you can get right now!)
One of the most notable features of awe.sm is that it can shorten long URLs, which we’ve been told is particularly useful for this thing called Twitter that everyone is talking about . It is such a notable feature that a bunch of people asked us if we could do it using domains other than http://awe.sm, which we can. In fact, we’re already powering URL shorteners for some of the above mentioned partners including TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), KISSmetrics (klck.me), Topspin (t.opsp.in), and AddToAny (a2a.me). So starting today, we’re officially offering *private-label URL shorteners running on your domain starting at just $99 per year*.
For $99/year, you get:
a hassle-free hosted solution with no set-up costs
10k shortened URLs per month and no limit on redirections
full clickstream stats and Google Analytics integration
support in all awe.sm-enabled publisher tools
99% monthly uptime money-back guarantee
We also offer advanced features like the ability to build your own stats UI as well as dedicated servers and higher SLAs. You can get started now or ping us for more info at domains [at] awe.sm.
I just finished my presentation at BarCampLA 7 called ‘URLs are the new cookies’ (name credit: Alistair Croll). I talked a little bit about awe.sm, but the point was more to discuss the problem statement awe.sm is trying to solve.
See for yourself:
And here’s a link to the PDF version. Thanks to everyone who attended for being a great crowd and having some really insightful questions.
P.S. This is my second time presenting at BarCampLA. The last time was at BarCampLA 1 in 2006
I just finished reading Clay Shirky’s *phenomenal* (if comprehensive — i.e. long) post on the future of newspapers journalism that everyone was talking about at SXSW a couple weeks ago. Anyone interested in journalism as a social utility (which should be everyone IMHO) should make the time to read this piece in full.
But the reason I’m writing about it here is to highlight how many of the lessons Shirky has drawn from the plight of the newspaper industry in the Internet age can be equally applied to the entertainment industry (i.e. studios, labels, networks, and publishers). Here is my Readers’ Digest version of Shirky’s post with notes added to emphasize the analogies to the entertainment industry:
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several…As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios…In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow…People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)…DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
This is a classic example of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma theory in which entrenched incumbents (the newspapers in this case, but equally the labels and studios) see disruptive or even revolutionary innovations coming often before anyone else but still fail to adapt. Christensen’s explanation is consistent with if a bit drier than Shirky’s above. Entrenched incumbents are organizationally predisposed to choose sustaining innovations over disruptive innovations because of the phenomenon of middle-management. Middle-management is meant to act as a filter for senior management, and their incentive structures are generally set-up to reward passing up ideas that win the approval of their superiors. And of course the ideas most likely to win approval from senior management are those most similar to ideas that have been approved in the past. So, the system is inherently set-up to promote sustaining innovations and filter out disruptive ones — or as Shirky puts it, create “Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.”
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
In his original Long Tail article for Wired (4.5 years ago!!!), Chris Anderson declared an end to the “tyranny of physical space.” What that meant was the Internet fundamentally undermines any business model based on technologically inferior distribution. As content has no inherent physical requirements for consumption (and thus distribution), any model reliant on that is technologically inferior and thus ripe for disruption. The effect of this disruption is to eliminate the market inefficiencies and redistribute any value that was artificially aggregated by exploiting them. In other words, the margins that the content distribution gatekeepers were able to extract from the old system do not exist in the new system without gatekeepers.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points [my emphasis]…[T]here is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
We don’t really want movies or tv shows or CDs either, what we want is entertainment. By moving us beyond the “tyranny of physical space” the Internet is also freeing entertainment from the packaged goods business model that is required for physical distribution and opening up the possibility of real models for entertainment-as-a-service. And just because there isn’t an immediately clear answer to what the successful new models will look like doesn’t mean they won’t come in time or that they haven’t already.
I just got back from a really fun (and delicious) lunch with Peter of Pantless Knights, who is in LA working on a hilarious new video, and one of the main things we discussed was the idea of Entertainment-as-a-Service. The term is a reference to the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is a business model generally contrasted with the conventional packaged or ’shrinkwrap’ software model. Essentially, SaaS is a subscription business and packaged software is a retail business.
The entertainment industry is a retail business. Books, movies, tv shows, music are almost universally sold as one-off purchases. But, those things are just the packaging and the people selling them to you are just middle-men. The business of entertainment (not to be confused with the entertainment *industry*) is fundamentally a marketplace of attention between fans and content creators — fans have a finite supply of attention for which content creators are competing. So, then what is the entertainment industry? To use a very relevant analogy, it is the collection of intermediary businesses (i.e. publishers, studios, networks, labels) that have been acting like investment bankers, taking the raw materials of talent and creativity and packaging them up in a form they know how to sell (i.e. retail) and commanding a big slice of profit along the way. Entertainment doesn’t want to be a retail business, and that is the fundamental essence of the disruption the Internet has unleashed on the entertainment industry.
[Clarification: For the sake of this discussion, I'm using the term 'content creator' to represent those who add unique creative talent to the production process. As my dad pointed out, content creation is rarely a solo effort (most notably in film production, which can involve hundreds of individual contributors) to which studios, networks, labels, and publishers often contribute substantial value. But as those contributions are opaque and thus interchangeable as far as the consumer is concerned, I am excluding those who make them from the class I refer to as 'content creators' in this post. Otherwise said, even though the sound engineer plays a crucial role in creating the album, no one buys it based on *who* the sound engineer was.]
When you think about what elements of the entertainment business technology has really undermined, it’s nothing more than the packaging — the time slots and release dates and viewing windows and region codes that are artificial constructs of these middle-men trying to slice-and-dice the content into as many tranches as possible to squeeze out every last cent of profit. Just like the investment bankers and their CDOs fragmented and obscured the connections between investors and their investments, so have the studios, networks, publishers, and labels introduced complexity into the connections between content creators and their audiences. While that complexity, and the companies who created it, may have been a necessity in an era of technologically inferior marketing and distribution systems, they are simply market inefficiencies in the Internet age.
The business model of packaged software invites feature bloat, because it’s upgrade driven and you need to continually find ways to justify why Thingamajig 2009 Pro Edition™ is so much better than Thingamajig 2008 Pro Edition™. Software as a Service businesses have a much different (and arguably greater) challenge, they need to continue to create value for their customers month after month….So, you end up with a much more customer-centric product…and a vendor who is truly interested in addressing your customer needs.
The first priority of a retail business is to maximize sales, building brand loyalty and repeat business may be means to that end but they always take a back-seat to whatever else will drive more sales. Whereas in a subscription business, customer retention (and thus customer satisfaction) is always top priority, even above new customer acquisition. So if a studio believes they can get a lot of people to see a crappy movie by spending more on marketing and less on quality, they will (and do, again, and again, and again…). Because all you’re buying from them is the packaging, they know you aren’t really paying attention to whether it’s a Fox or Warner Brothers or Paramount film (do you buy your cereal based on who made the box it comes in?). But, a director would rather disown a bad film than endorse the studio releasing something that doesn’t meet his standards and his fans’ expectations. This is because the director knows that his relationship with his fans is a subscription business, and if he disappoints them he will be unable to continue exchanging his content for their attention in the future. The studios understand this too — they don’t give Tom Cruise $25M (plus a cut of the gross) per movie because his acting skills bring $25M of quality to the screen, they do it because he has more than $25M in ticket, DVD, and merchandise sales worth of fans.
Entertainment is naturally a subscription business, and the Internet returns it to its natural state. The content creators who thrive online are those who understand this and focus on the ongoing satisfaction of their customers (see Ze Frank, Michael Buckley, Chris Leavins). The level of customer satisfaction these creators deliver is really only possible on the Internet because they can go direct-to-consumer without need of the middle-men and their packaging. These creators publish in all forms — video, photos, blogging, micro-blogging, music. They do not see themselves constrained by the legacy dividing lines of the entertainment industry, their goal is to entertain their audience by any and all means available. There is no distinction for them between primary and ancillary content, they are 360° entertainment brands. The other thing that has made these creators so successful online is their direct interaction with their customers. The best your most engaged fans can do offline is give you their personal attention (and the money that comes with it) and try to recruit others to do so as well. But online, they can interact with you and become part of the show. Empowering your customers is the surest way to make them even more engaged. As I wrote in another recent post on my personal blog:
Bringing your customers into the product development process has the dual benefits of helping you build better and more customer-centric products and making your customers your most passionate sales people (because after all, it’s their product too).
So, the Internet enables these creators to spend more time listening to their fans and creating new content they’ll enjoy while outsourcing the marketing to the community for free. This is the exact opposite of the offline retail model in which the studio takes money out of production budgets to put it into marketing campaigns. The ability to establish deeper relationships with their fans also allows online content creators to attain higher average attention per customer (ARPU) than is possible in the retail world, thereby making it easier to build more value by going deeper with a smaller audience.
To be clear, I’m not trying to say the only business model for content on the Internet is a recurring subscription fee. The ’subscription business’ to which I’m referring is more the theoretical exchange of value between content creators and their fans, which can and will take many forms — including selling packaged goods. I’m also not saying that the online entertainment market is solely the domain of Internet-only content creators. In fact, I believe the Internet is most powerful as an entertainment marketplace when the quality and reputation of a historically offline content creator is freed of the constraints of the legacy packaged goods business model. Take for example Josh Freese, who gets extra points for using this freedom precisely to illustrate the absurdity of the conventional retail approach.
While this is ostensibly a post about large national/global brands, I found the underlying lessons from these examples to be potentially useful to *anyone* seeking to use social media to build brand equity. You should definitely go read the original post for the full details on each campaign, but here’s my take on the important lessons from each one:
Blendtec Blends it on YouTube – Creativity is king; advertising is just content someone is willing to pay for you to watch, it doesn’t *have* to be annoying and uninteresting
Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application – People like to have fun
Sun Microsystems and the CEO Blog – Kill them with transparency (a variation on my dad’s old adage: ‘kill them with kindness’); disarm your critics by giving them a voice and answering them back
IBM With Lots of Blogs – Content == Authority; as long as it’s quality content (and on-brand), more *is* better on the Internet — it gives you higher search engine ranking and it doesn’t hurt to be the first thing a prospective customer finds when they do research on your area of interest/expertise (what do you think this blog is all about? )
Zappos on Twitter – A company (not just a brand) can have a personality in the Internet age, and it is defined by its employees; being accessible and relatable reminds your customers that there are real people behind your brand, and that tends to make them like you more (unless those real people really suck )
Comcast on Twitter too – Empower your community manager to address customers needs; Frank from Comcast doesn’t just spew marketing platitudes into the Twittersphere, he actually helps customers in need (Corollary: if you have an unempowered community manager fronting for your brand, he/she is bound to get slaughtered and likely do more harm to brand equity than good)
Ford and Social Media PR – Bad press doesn’t go away on the Internet; it’s not like the conventional media world in which all you need to do is weather *this* news cycle — that disparaging blog post will be popping up in searches for your brand for the rest of your life and beyond, so you’d better get out there and address it
Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr – *Every* customer should be writing a testimonial; make it so easy and fun for your customers to show their brand loyalty that it’s a no-brainer for them
Dell Doing it Everywhere – Social media isn’t media; this isn’t an ad buy you make selectively based on demographics and vertical content, it’s a horizontal platform for customer engagement comprised of many different elements — you may not have the time or resources to be everywhere, but take the time to craft a campaign in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, the code below will not work for you. Instead, go here to get the plugin.
Techmeme is an essential news discovery tool for me. It replaced my RSS reader and the totally unmanageable list of blog feeds that came with it years ago, and now I’d estimate that at least 95% of the news I consume is discovered via Techmeme or Twitter. For me, more than Digg or Hacker News or anything else, Techmeme is my social news source.
As such, it was big news to me when Techmeme announced this past Wednesday that they’re now accepting “tips” via Twitter. So much so that I was hoping (and even not so subtly suggesting) some of my Twitter “friends” would submit one of the blog posts I wrote since the feature was announced. But, then I realized most of my friends didn’t know they could do this — and even if they did, the syntax is irregular (why “tip @techmeme” instead of just “@techmeme”?) and the whole process is a bit complicated.
So, it occurred to me we should have a “Digg It” equivalent embeddable call-to-action for Techmeme submission. Since no one else seemed to have made one yet, I took a stab:
As you can tell, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m just a lowly product monkey, and this isn’t meant to be anything more than my version of a working feature spec.
That said, here’s the code:
<div class="techmeme-suggest-button">
<p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small">
<a style="text-decoration: none" title="Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter" href="javascript:var d=document,f='http://twitter.com/home/',l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p='?status=tip%20@Techmeme%20',q=e(l.href)+'%20'+e(d.title);1;try{if(!/^(.*\.)?twitter\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z){a=function(){if(!window.open(f+p+q,'twitter'))l.href=f+p+q};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)">Suggest to <sub><img src="http://thesnowballfactory.com/images/techmemechicklet_16.png" border="0" alt="" /></sub></a><a style="text-decoration: none" title="What's this?" href="http://news.techmeme.com/090128/twitter-tips" target="_blank"><sup>?</sup></a>
</p>
</div>
If you want to use it, just copy and paste it into the bottom of your blog posts (make sure you’re editing in HTML mode). You can change the size and font of the text by editing <p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small"> (for example, try font-family: serif or font-size: medium). You can also change the size of the Techmeme favicon by switching out techmemechicklet_16.png for techmemechicklet_24.png (24px) or techmemechicklet_32.png (32px).
Lord knows it’s *ugly* (both the code and the design). So, real developers and designers I invite you to please improve upon it. All I ask is for you to post a link to your better version in the comments below, so we can all use it (and I can stop using my crappy one ).
Update: This blog is hosted on WordPress.com. And I was pretty surprised when I was originally able to embed the javascript for the buttons and it didn’t get stripped out, because I thought you weren’t allowed to run any scripts on WP.com. Well, it turns out you aren’t but they just don’t check for it when you post. At some point in the last 11hrs, the javascript powering the buttons in this post got stripped out (thereby breaking them, to which Russ alerted me). To make them work again, I’ve now just hardcoded the URL’s for them. The example javascript should still work for you (as long as your blog isn’t on WP.com), and you can see the javascript version in action at the bottom of this post on my (self-hosted) personal blog.
Update 2: The post just made the front page of Techmeme thanks to a mention from Gabe and a tip from Rahmin. If that’s not meta, I don’t know what is . And, it’s super cool to get some love from Gabe — I’m a huge fan of what he and the team have done over at Techmeme.
Update 3: As my buddy Mark just figured out, even self-hosted WordPress chokes on javascript in the body of the post. The only reason I didn’t notice this on my self-hosted WP blog is because I have the (very handy) Exec-PHP plugin installed, which apparently not only executes php in your posts but also js. The elegant solution (other than you also installing Exec-PHP on your self-hosted WP blog) would be to do a php version or maybe even a WP plug-in or template tag. But, frankly I can’t be bothered . So, I might just make a bookmarklet that generates static HTML for a ‘Submit to Techmeme’ button based on whatever page you’re on, so you can copy and paste it into any post on any publishing platform that supports HTML.
When Ian first suggested I start this blog over Ethiopian lunch a few months back, I started making a list of useful posts to write. Ironically, the first real post on this blog is about how the first one on that list – what video hosting service to use – is now moot.
That little 'watch in HD' link in the bottom right corner used to say 'watch in high quality.'
In chatting with the guys over at Handsome Donkey about what to do with their new site (which isn’t done yet), one of the topics that came up was what service they should be using to host their videos. They put a lot of production value into their work, and it frankly gets lost at ‘YouTube quality.’ We talked about using a service like Vimeo for embedding the videos on their site. But, it was a no-brainer that they needed to at least have their videos on YouTube in parallel for two reasons: 1) the YouTube audience is too big to ignore; and 2) view count on YouTube is the closest thing web video has to Nielsen tv ratings (and a hell of a lot more accurate).
As of Friday, there’s no more dilemma since it appears YouTube is now offering real 1080 x 720 HD for some videos. You can check out the full specs in comparison to other services here, but the bottom line is that YouTube HD is pretty much tied with Facebook HD for the highest quality. (On a geeky side-note, Vimeo’s encoding, VP6, is less processor intensive for the end-user than everyone else’s, H264.) It’s not clear yet how the decisions are being made on which videos are offered in HD vs. ‘high quality,’ but the first requirement is definitely to use the beta uploader (which allows for files up to 1GB) and upload the highest quality version of your video.
With the ability to embed high quality videos, the custom player wizard, and the chromeless player API, the folks at YouTube are getting rid of the most common excuses not to use them to embed videos on your site. And, the value of getting as many views, ratings, and comments on YouTube as possible greatly outweighs pretty much all other considerations.
Update 1/29/2009: After in-depth testing, Webware has weighed in on its pick for the top HD video hosting service — YouTube. The full post is interesting and contains a head-to-head comparison table (though on features and price, not encoding specs). But in case you’re busy, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version
The victor: YouTube
This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can’t beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it’s up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies.
Runners up: Vimeo and SmugMug
Only one of these services will really cost you money (SmugMug), but both give you really great-looking HD Web video. A nod must be given to Vimeo for blazing the trail here. It’s been doing HD video for a while now, and it is one of the most colorful and beautiful sites around. Likewise, SmugMug’s player and interface are top notch, although it’s not as social, and the $150 price tag might be a turn-off to casual users who don’t intend to use its photo-hosting features.
). But the coolest feature IMHO is the ability to give the author of the post credit in the tweet. This is great for larger blogs with multiple authors. However if you’re just rolling solo, it’s not a huge advantage over Twitterfeed (which also supports awe.sm 
). 
