Merton of Chatroulette Piano Guy Fame Returns [Video]

That mysterious hooded wonder that is Merton posted another video to his Youtube channel this past weekend. This time he uses not only Chatroulette but Omegle, the former’s older and less popular brother program (of sorts, go along with the bad analogy please).

It’s worth checking out. Definitely make sure you watch for the song Blueberry Pancakes from Hell.

Link Post for May 5th

This is the A2SM Link Post for May 5th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • Major University Dumps Gmail Over Security Concerns – The University of California – Davis has stopped using Gmail for its 30,000-member staff and faculty body. The university was trying Gmail for faculty and staff with plans to roll out service to the entire campus. But school officials say this email system isn’t secure or private enough to meet their standards.
  • Skype Will Launch Group Video Chat and Updated Calling Plans « Black Web 2.0 – Everyone’s favorite Internet calling service Skype will be conducting a public beta test for a new group video chat function. This will allow up to five people participate in a video call at the same time. While this isn’t something that’s never been done before, it will definitely be awesome to have and was actually one of the most requested features from current Skype users
  • Here It Is: Google’s Kick-Ass Chrome Speed Test Video
  • Google Search Gets a Major Overhaul [PICS] – The new version of Google has some major differences, but the changes can be broken down into three groups: design changes, the addition of a left-hand navigation panel and a more “unified” search experience.
  • Facebook Chat Down for Maintenance Following Privacy Lapse – Facebook Chat is now down for maintenance. The feature was presumably disabled following a report that exposed a Facebook security bug that allowed users to access and view friends’ live chats, friend requests and friends in common.

Link Post for April 16th through April 18th

This is the A2SM Link Post for April 16th through April 18th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • 12 Chatroulette Clones You Should Try – Chatroulette has been giving journalists reporting fodder for slow news days for a few months now — enough time, apparently, to spawn a number of clones.
  • 5 Tips for Creating the Perfect Profile Pic – No matter how much quality information or witty repartee we send out into our social networks, first impressions are almost always visual. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the first thing we see when checking out a new Twitter (Twitter) follower, Facebook (Facebook) friend, or LinkedIn (LinkedIn) connection is a profile photo. And in a world of quick clicks and divergent attention, if the photo you present isn’t eye-catching, or illustrative of your personal brand, you may miss your shot at making a positive first impression.
  • HOW TO: Maximize Your Content’s Reach on the Social Web – We have all heard that “content is king” — Sumner Redstone deemed it so, then Rupert Murdoch upped the ante, calling it “emperor.” But how do we make sure content is delivered to the right places, at the right times? How can we measure the effectiveness of this content and its distribution?
  • Spam Suspect Uses Google Docs; FBI Happy | Threat Level | Wired.com – FBI agents targeting alleged criminal spammers last year obtained a trove of incriminating documents from a suspect’s Google Docs account, in what appears to be the first publicly acknowledged search warrant benefiting from a suspect’s reliance on cloud computing.
  • Study: Young adults do care about online privacy – Yahoo! News – But it's not quite true, a new study finds. Despite mounds of anecdotes about college students sharing booze-chugging party photos, posting raunchy messages and badmouthing potential employers online, young adults generally care as much about privacy as older Americans.
  • DOJ abandons warrantless attempt to read Yahoo e-mail | Politics and Law – CNET News – The U.S. Justice Department has abruptly abandoned what had become a high-profile court fight to read Yahoo users' e-mail messages without obtaining a search warrant first. (via Matt Cutts)
  • Good Enough For A Pulitzer, But Not Good Enough For Apple | Techdirt – Just as online content only begins to get some recognition as being Pulitzer worthy, it looks like those content creators still have a major hurdle to overcome: namely, Apple's incredibly screwed up application approval process. Cartoonist Mark Fiore made Internet and journalism history this week as the first online-only journalist to win a Pulitzer prize for his work over at the San Francisco Chronicle. Much more difficult? Getting his iPhone cartoon application past Apple's application store guardians. Fiore says his application was rejected last December because, as an Apple letter phrased it, his satirical cartoons "ridicule public figures," a violation of Apple's iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

Link Post for April 14th

This is the A2SM Link Post for April 14th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • Tweet Archives to Find Home at Library of Congress – Most of the information you find in the Library of Congress is a bit more substantial than: “Saw Jimmy at the mall. He winked. OMG!! LOLOLOL!!!” But now the Library of Congress is going to have plenty of vapid, meaningless content. Both Twitter and the LOC announced today that the entire catalog of Twitter archives is going to be digitally stored at the national library. Every single tweet since the beginning (March 2006) will be there.
  • Each Facebook Fan Is Worth $3.60 Annually – Social media marketing platform company Vitrue has determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 in equivalent media each year. This calculation is based on having one million Fan Page fans, and is not weighted for brand recognition.
  • 6 More Desktop Chat Clients That Use Facebook Connect – As a follow up to our 9 Killer Desktop Facebook Chat Clients, we looked to our readers for suggestions about more desktop chat clients that use Facebook Chat. Fortunately, our readers came through, and here is the list of 6 more clients that you download to your desktop and connect to Facebook Chat.
  • Is Social Media Becoming Boring? » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg – For most, social media is new and fun. For others, though, social media is old and is falling out of favor. I’m seeing it happen of users who were happy about social media when it became hyped but are now realizing that they’re not yet ready to hold onto social media any longer. It’s boring, too challenging, and uninteresting. Catering to individuals seems to mean you need to bend to their will at every turn. Nobody wants to have to to a minority that seems to be unhappy with the content you’ve spent hours upon hours writing.
  • 7 Truths About Social Media Marketing » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg – But despite the vastness of opportunities that social media affords, it’s just one channel in a series of many. We should still tackle some realities about social media marketing before you get too excited about its potential.
  • Why Banning Social Media Often Backfires – Humans have a natural proclivity to want what they cannot have. Our insatiable appetite for sharing information, combined with the nearly limitless ways to access the web have thus far frustrated the most sophisticated attempts to block access to social media services.
  • Analytic.ly Provides Real-Time and Historical Twitter Analysis – For brands, developers and curious users, PeopleBrowsr is rolling out an interesting new tool. Analytic.ly helps people and companies “visualize, study and measure” Twitter conversations happening all over the web through general and custom reports and graphs.
  • History Channel Launches Foursquare Campaign and a New Badge – America might be one of the youngest geopolitical nations around, but we’ve still got some interesting history to discover. Thanks to a partnership between Foursquare and the History Channel, some of the app’s users will get to learn a lot more about the history of their checkin locations over the next couple months.
  • The Streamy Awards: How to Unwreck the Car [OPINION] – In the small world of made-for-the-web TV, industry figures and fans alike hoped that the 2010 Streamy Awards would prove to mainstream audiences that made-for-the-web television is the next big thing — an industry of serious artists, fine entertainment and ultimately, booming profits. After a crowd of professionals in suits and lavish dresses took their seats, it started with a Broadway-style musical number. That’s as high as Icarus flew before his wings melted off.
  • Notable Makes Website Annotation Fast and Easy – otable makes it extremely easy for teams and individuals to provide effective feedback on websites.

Link Post for March 26th through March 28th

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 26th through March 28th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Turtles: So Hot Right Now [Randomly Viral] – Watch out cats and kittehs everywhere — your spot atop the heap of most viral animals is about to be usurped by a whole legion of heroes on a half-shell. That’s right — for some reason that I have yet to ascertain (aside from the obvious, “I like turtles” sentiment), turtles have become a seriously hot Internet meme.
  • Violent Flash Mobs Becoming a Problem in Philly – Flash mobs are usually associated with randomized fun (or pantlessness), but in Philly, they’re basically akin to randomized violence. Last night, Mayor Michael Nutter and District Attorney Seth Williams took to the streets to spread a message to the city’s young, social media-savvy inhabitants: Flash mobs will not be tolerated.
  • Why Chatroulette Is More Than Just Penises – Five months ago, right around the time that Andrey Ternovskiy was building Chatroulette, no one could have predicted that being “nexted” would become the modern day equivalent to a rite of passage.
  • See Yahoo’s Sketch-a-Search in Action [VIDEO] – Earlier this week, Yahoo launched a new iPhone app called Sketch-a-Search that allows you to trace an area with your finger to get restaurant results in a specifically defined region.
  • Browsing the iPad App Store [VIDEO] – Feverishly awaiting the release of the Apple iPad and all the goodies that go along with it? Well, now you can take a virtual tour of the iPad App Store, via a video that purports to depict the storied place.
  • 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page – If you’ve already searched for some Fan Page inspiration and undertaken the task of building a custom landing page for your business’s Facebook presence, you may now be in the market for some features that will further engage your fans.
  • Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp – Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. That’s what some startups say is the key to success in the freemium business. But the biggest reason the five presenters this morning at the Freemium Summit in San Francisco — Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic (see disclosure at the bottom) and MailChimp — are doing well is because they have great products that people want. They’ve been able to get those products to a broad audience by using the freemium model — that is, offering a free service with the option to upgrade. It’s an increasingly important business model, but one that’s hard to navigate, so their anecdotes, open sharing of data, and lessons learned were really valuable.
  • Free email archiving and backup software – MailStore Home – MailStore Home enables you to backup all your email messages from multiple applications and accounts into one secure and persistent archive. Lightning-fast search, one-click backup, powerful export – all information from your email is at your fingertips anytime. Never lose important email again!
  • The Magic Formula For Blog Retweets | Bit Rebels – You’ve worked hard on a post that you think many people will like. You tweet it to all your followers and wait to see all the RTs come in on your stream. They aren’t there. It’s like a ghost town. What happened?
  • CITY OF PHILADELPHIA TO COMPETE TO BECOME A GOOGLE INTERNET TEST SITE « City of Philadelphia’s News & Alerts – Today Mayor Michael A. Nutter declared that tomorrow Philadelphia will be known as the “The City of Google-ly Love and Gigabit Affection” in support of the City’s application to become a Google internet test site.

Link Post for March 19th through March 21st

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 19th through March 21st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Sprint Makes Your iPhone 4G [VIDEO] – The iPhone 4G (next generation iPhone) is yet to be released, but Sprint is cleverly advertising “4G speeds” on your iPhone thanks to its Sierra Wireless Overdrive 4G WiFi hotspot.
  • Yelp for Business: 4 Steps for Success – For local small businesses, Yelp (Yelp) isn’t just an option — it’s a necessity. People in urban centers use it to choose where to go to dinner, where to buy clothes, and where to be entertained. Users decide where and how to spend their money using Yelp, so if your business is local, you need to curate your Yelp page.
  • 4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz – When a green field lies before you, so does opportunity. Some non-profits stand to gain from being part of the early Buzz adopter community. Whether a cause needs to further the dialogue with a tech-savvy crowd, or is attracted to the functionality of Gmail (Gmail) integration, Buzz does bring some new capabilities to bear.
  • Ben Folds Plays Chatroulette Live in Concert [VIDEO] – Singer-songwriter Ben Folds visited the random video chat site Chatroulette during a recent live concert in Charlotte, North Carolina, playing improv piano tunes about the people he was connected with.
  • New Twitter Phishing Attack: “You’re On Here?” [WARNING] – Twitter users are reporting a new attempt to extract their usernames and passwords — a Direct Message attack that asks “You’re on here?” with a link. Others report DMs linking to a site called “mhansenhome” with the message “’someone posted on their blog about you”.
  • Happy Birthday Twitter! – Sunday, March 21st (a few hours from now on the West Coast) marks Twitter’s 4th birthday — exactly four years since Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent his first Tweet and, along with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, started a phenomenon.
  • In choosing its battle names, the military must know its target audience – washingtonpost.com – Names are important, especially in war. Like a good advertising jingle, war names must be catchy and concise. But above all else, they have to sell — all sorts of things, to all sorts of people: inspiration to the troops, righteousness to Americans at home, partnership to allied countries, peace and promise to non-combatant civilians.
  • Social Media & Scott Monty @ Ford Motor Company – Online Marketing Blog – When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the Ford Fiesta movement generated a tremendous amount of awareness (and pre-orders) for a vehicle that wasn’t available to the public yet. (Great summary on Jeff Bullas’s blog) At the same time, it inspired a community to engage, create content and continue discussions about the Fiesta with over 7 million video views.
  • Social Media Optimization Tools – Online Marketing Blog – Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.
  • Responsibilities of Community Managers » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg – Every time I tell someone I’m a Community Manager, I get a varied response. But the response doesn’t vary enough. The response is usually something along the lines of “Wow! So you tweet and facebook for a living! Kewlz!” or “So do you blog on the interwebs all day, or sumthin?” Another favorite is “What’s that?” That last one might be the most honest of the three, since asking a Community Manager whether they tweet for a living is like asking a construction worker if they cat-call for a living, or a doctor if he asks people to say “ah!” for a living.

Link Post for February 17th through February 18th

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 17th through February 18th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Google Buzz: What is it good for? – CNN.com – (CNN) — Google Buzz, the search engine's latest foray into the social networking realm, hasn't been out of the tech headlines since its launch last week.
  • Google Buzz: What is it Good For? – But what’s the place for Buzz among existing social networks? Does it compete more directly with Twitter (Twitter), or Facebook (Facebook)? Is it an entirely new approach to status updates that can co-exist and integrate with these tools?
  • AWESOME: Museum of Modern Tweets [ART] – Listen up, y’all: I’ve got another delightful time-wasting Tumblr for you: Museum of Modern Tweets. Every Tuesday on this inspired blog, artist Odessa Begay renders a visual representation of a celeb’s 140-word message.
  • Sony Ericsson Turned Down Opportunity to Build Google’s Nexus One – It’s common knowledge that HTC is the hardware provider for the Google Nexus One, but new statements by Sony Ericsson’s president indicate that electronics maker Sony Ericsson may have been approached first by Google.
  • PayPal and Facebook Credits Will Play Nice After All – Long imagined to be a potentially significant threat to PayPal, the Facebook Credits payment platform will actually work with its once theoretical rival, according to a post on Facebook’s blog announcing a strategic partnership between the two companies.
  • Can E-readers and Tablets Save the News? – Sales are robust for e-readers and there is no shortage of tablets yet to launch, including the new Apple iPad. But will strong sales translate into a boost for the media industry?
  • How to Make the iSandwich 4G [VIDEO] – By now you’ve probably seen photos of that delicious lunch treat, the iSandwich — a sandwich that is basically shaped like an iPhone. But have you ever stopped to think how it came to be? Well, thanks to a video courtesy of the blog iSandwich 4G, you can learn all the steps necessary to make one for yourself.
  • Calculate the Cost of Wasteful Meetings With MEETorDIE
  • Chatroulette shines Webcam where kids shouldn’t look | Safe and Secure – CNET News – Make sure there are no kids in the room if you plan on trying out the Chatroulette video chat service. While I was able to have a couple of very nice conversations with fully clothed polite individuals, I saw some things I would rather have avoided as I tested this relatively new service.
  • Philly authorities target Facebook, Twitter after snowball fight turns ugly | The Social – CNET News – Two members of Philadelphia's city council are considering legal action against Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace in the wake of a "flash mob" earlier this week that turned violent, according to a letter sent to the city's mayor and obtained by CNET. They claim that social-media sites don't do enough to keep tabs on violence that could be organized through their communication channels.

Link Post for February 9th through February 10th

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 9th through February 10th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta “Steps Down” – This evening MySpace sent out a press release announcing that the company’s CEO, Owen Van Natta, is stepping down and will replaced by Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn who will serve as co-Presidents. There are a number of interesting components of this news story. The most interesting is that we’ve been hearing rumors that Owen Van Natta was under strict orders to turn the company and if it wasn’t turned around within 6 months he was out. The other interesting tidbit is that Techcrunch recently published that Jason Hirschhorn was exiting the company.
  • Facebook Chat Launches XMPP Support – If you’re a fan of Facebook Chat but haven’t been able to use it in your favorite chat client, good news: Facebook has just launched support for Jabber/XMPP, an open protocol that makes it very easy for any chat client or web service to integrate Facebook Chat (it’s also the same protocol used by Google Talk).
  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • Google Buzz: Is Its Real Value in the Enterprise? – WebWorkerDaily – Google yesterday released Buzz, its newest foray into the social networking space — and a direct assault on Facebook. There’s a good overview of the new service over on GigaOM, but basically, Buzz provides social networking features (like status updates, photo sharing, location-aware sharing) built right into Gmail. The service is currently being rolled out to Gmail users.
  • Google Retail Blog: Trend to Watch: Consumers Start Early, End Late (1 of 4) – The online holiday shopping season was a season of historic highs: $29 billion in online sales, the first $900M day in e-commerce history, 20% growth in Black Friday searches, and an even more impressive 60% growth in Cyber Monday searches.

Link Post for December 8th

This is the A2SM Link Post for December 8th:

  • Social Media News and Web Tips – Mashable – The Social Media Guide – Page 2 – The sheer size of Apple’s app store makes it difficult for independent developers to stand out from the crowd. Some developers come up with creative concepts to get the word out, others rely on scamming and gaming different iTunes policies.
  • Why Facebook Chose to Limit Google and Spare Twitter Search – Google really unleashed a torrent of news and updates today. While events such as the launch of Google Goggles are very interesting, the big news is clearly the launch of real-time search within Google. Now as events unfold, Google will capture the chatter about it in real-time from sources such as Twitter, Yahoo Answers, news media and Facebook.
  • HOW TO: Start and Run a Successful Twitter Chat -
  • Dell Rides Twitter to $6.5 Million in Sales – They’ve now generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter (Twitter) presence, where they have nearly 1.5 million followers on their @DellOutlet account (and 3 million “connections” across all social sites).
  • Twitter Deal: CelebrityTweet Acquired by Russell Simmons – But apparently, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons doesn’t think so, as his Web site GlobalGrind has just acquired CelebrityTweet, a site that aggregates the tweets of famous people, both on the Web and via mobile applications.
  • Google Real-Time Search Live Now (Video, Links) – Google held a major search product event today and among many incredible new products and features displayed was real-time search. Fresh search results pushed live to the search results page, with a pause button above that section of the page.
  • Facebook Will Be Google-able (If Your Profile is Set to Public) -
  • 5 iPhone Apps to Get You Ready for Le Web – If you haven’t already heard, this week is the Paris-based Le Web Conference. ReadWriteWeb will be live blogging the event in the next couple of days, with startup writer Dana Oshiro attending with the Social Media Club House and news writer Frederic Lardinois attending as a TravelingGeek. The event will showcase some of Europe’s best and brightest tech companies. Below are a few resources for those attending the event:
  • Google is Beating Bing & Yahoo Again, Now In Real-Time Search – Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results – sometimes just above the fold of the page.