Category: Blogging

Facebook Fatigue, Fastpitch Networking the answer?

Unpleasantness again?

Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Sometimes this is what I get if I try to connect with Facebook after some of my contacts on Facebook “did” something that cluttered my e-mail in box. Usually I find myself reacting only to one in ten e-mails, as each and every company out there seems to develop its own Facebook application.

Last week it was even worse….I got no unavailability message when I tried to log in. I simply weren’t getting access. Is it a glitch of my latest Firefox update maybe? No, I get the same result in IE. Is my IP blocked maybe? Possibly, as from another computer which uses another IP I get normal access. Very strange….Restarting my computer may have helped….Yes I do run anti virus software and anti trojan software and whatever…

The Banning policy of Facebook
This unpleasantness made me remember that an update on my post Happy Hotelier Banned from Facebook? was on the back burner.

I got some comments to that post.

Sean Scully a freelance writer in Philadelphia, USA, got the same treatment to his great annoyance. Unlike me he wasn’t re instated apparently.

The reverent Huffington post’s Ann Handley noticed Sean’s rant as as well as a similar rant from Harry Joiner of Marketing Headhunter who uploaded 4.600 contacts of his gmail addressbook (so invited by Facebook) with as a consequence a permanent ban without any warning.

You can find many similar rants between their comments.

When you Google on “Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information” you get even more input on the subject from other Bloggers who got the same experience.

One of the funniest I think is this one: Faceless Book

So the conclusion is that you not only must not send the same text when you invite some friends. You also mustn’t invite too many friends at once.

Access denied to Facebook

The opposite of being banned by Facebook is being denied access to Facebook that many employees seem to encounter. The UK Telegraph names a few City Firms that ban employees from sites as Facebook: Credit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort , The Metropolitan Police, British Gas and Lloyds TSB.

According to the Blog Facebook Observer the latest news here is that many people in Iran are not able to get access to it.

Fatigue
Wisdump wrote about it.

Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time.

I should have been warned for Facebook already: Esme at Pajama Entrepreneur did that in her post Why I’m not falling for the Facehook Hype…Curiously each of her posts has a button “share on Facebook”…

Esme pointed me to a post of Giga OM about Facebook Fatigue. His approach is this: If you want to connect you don’t want to attend a mega dance party where you cannot talk. Look in your mobile phone addresses: Those are the people you want to connect with. Whatever the people behind Facebook want to acchieve, ultimately they will find out that the hordes will move on from Facebook to another place where there are no masses already taking up all your time.

So, Why am I still on Facebook?
The reason is this: I managed to re establish an old contact with a distant cousin who I met 8 years ago when he lived in South Africa. Subsequently he moved to the UK and I lost contact, because I only had an e-mail address of him and several computers later I had lost it. Through Facebook we were able to re establish contact and he actually visited us traveling through The Netherlands and visiting various family members, because he is on the verge of going back to living in South Africa again. So that is a little plus for Facebook. I will hang in for some more time.

Is Fastpitch Networking an alternative?

Fastpitch

If you look at their features as compared to Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing, you might say “Yes”, but for the moment I fear I will stay away from another time consuming experience. What is your take?

Happy Hotelier on Bloggers Choice Award

bloggers choice awards

I noticed Bloggers Choice Award’s Best Travel Blog Category out there and thought: “Why not advertise myself?” and nominated Happy Hotelier for Best Travel Blog….A long way to go still.

The funny thing is there are hardly any Blog from the T-List, but there are many Blogs in the travel category.. It seems there is a sort of explosion of Travel Blogs out there…..
and, and, and: It is already a year ago that I started publishing this Blog…Hurray for Happy Hotelier!

If you like what you read here, I would appreciate a vote from you:-).

Just another way of community building….The other way around works also…vote for me, leave me a note here and nominate yourself and I’ll vote for you as well.

Update: The site disappeared since and is now part of the Dead Travelblog Society

Happy Hotelier banned from Facebook?

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information.

That is the message I get on my login page after I have invited a couple of fellow members of the T-List group on Facebook (Facebook | T-List Group) as friends. I really don’t know what I did wrong. Did I invite too many fellow T-Listers in one session? If that is the case, it would be helpful if one got a warning in the inviting process, such as MyBlogLog does by simply indicating that you are linking to too many persons for the day after they had to limit the daily hooking up to a maximum of 20 because frequent hooking up generated too much traffic on their site. I didn’t keep count of the number of invites I sent, but it were maybe 12 or 15 invites, on a total number of group members of not more that 35 or 38 and several members are (or better said maybe “were”) on my Friends list already.

I have send an e-mail inquiry as suggested, even two, but am getting nothing else back than an automatic reply that they “are looking into it and will answer as soon as possible”.

Thereafter I noted several times that the site was not approachable. Are they facing capacity problems or are they maybe subject to a hackers attack and trying to plug the holes? I can imagine that, like credit card companies, Facebook has tons of information that hackers would drivel about. There are already some rumors in the Blog community that the information Facebook collects makes it very vulnerable for identity theft.

By this action Facebook has definitely sunken on my radar and on my list of possible platforms for building a T-List and a L-List Community. Isn’t that what communities are about: Linking with as much as possible people with the same passion?

Post Alia (added August 3, 2007)

Facebook reinstated me yesterday and explained that a Facebook user is not allowed to send the same text several times as such could be construed as spam…..that is exactly what I did with several invites. No warning was given, at least not noticed by me. The site was on and off, so maybe that caused the problem of not showing the warning. Sending several invites without text is not considered as spam. I still don’t get it…..

Something to say about life in The Netherlands

Something to say about Living in The Netherlands

When traveling I am in favor of primary city hopping and I usually try to get information about 4 distinctive areas of interest:

  1. How to travel from A to B? Like: by plane, train, car or by boat? (I hate buses).
  2. How is B looking? Maps, pictures and descriptions (what you usually look for in a paper guide)
  3. How are the people of B?
  4. Things to do in B? Bars, restaurants, theaters, musea, scenic parts

With respect to all areas it is very easy to get tons of information via the Internet except for question 3: “How are the people of B?”. The more I surf around, the more I believe the expat Blogging community is the community to revert to: They give you a wonderful insight in the idiosyncrasies of the people you will meet in B.

One example of what I mean with idiosyncrasies can be found in this post : 51 Tips: An irreverent guide to international travel behavior from the Los Angeles Times (via The Worldhum Travel Zeitgeist): a simple list of do’s and don’ts in various countries.

One of my aims with this Blog is to make foreigners more aware of how the Dutch are. Therefore, I like to introduce you to an expat living in The Hague: Jenn in Holland, living in The Hague, who describes her adventures sometimes in a hilarious way in her Blog Something to say about Life in The Netherlands. Enjoy reading.

T-List and L-List: The Next Step: Community Building!

Time for an update on the T-List and the L-List:

First some history:

  • On March 2, 2007 the T-List was launched by Quebec (CAN) based Mathieu Ouellet of Radaron who modeled it after the Z List, originally launched by Mack Collier of Viral garden.

    Mathieu now states in a response to Leeds (UK) based Darren Cronian’s provocative and funny The Death of The T-List:

    I’ve created the T-List for fun and also to see the impact it could have in the tourism&travel bloggers environment.

    If you take a look at my own blog, you’ll see that I talked about the T-List only once since it started. Exactly the same number of times you did. I’m not the hardest defender of the T-list. haha ; )

    I’m bored of the T-List itself but if there is something to remember from it, it’s that there are a lot of tourism & travel bloggers which would like to connect with each other. Is it good or bad? I don’t think there is something bad doing that. I don’t have personally any particular plan about it but I guess that some people do. Good for them.

    I found some interesting blogs/people with it so I’m totally happy 😉

  • Shortly thereafter. on March 7, 2007 Lake District (UK) based Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog launched the L-List, modeled after the T-List.
  • I have since tried to keep a tab on the development of both lists on my Happy Hotelier deli.icio.us driven page T-List and L-List. Currently I count 185 Blogs on the T-List an 49 Blogs on the L-List.
  • On June 14, 2007 after a quiet period, London (UK) based Kevin May of The Travolution Blog revives the T-List with his post Revisiting the T-List.
  • On June 16, 2007 Keith of Tripcart reorganizes the T-List with his post The T-List Reloaded and presents it in a nice way (a lot of work!).
  • On June 27, 2007 Scott Rains of The Rolling Rains Report copies and pastes this reorganized T-List in his post TripCart Spotlights the T-List.
  • On July 11, 2007 Intermundial shows us The T-List Reloaded.
  • On July 17, 2007 Darren Cronian posts his The Death of the T-List.
  • Also on July 17, 2007 London (UK) based Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs 2.0 posts a reply in another tongue in cheek post: Battle of the Blogs regarding the T-List.

Sofar the T-List history part and now the community building part of some T-Listers:

  • Barcelona Based Albert Barra had set up Travel in Blogs. I noted this here in my post Travel in Blogs: A new Travel community? and showed some scepsis. Albert replied correctly to my sceptical questions:

    Hello all,
    I’m Albert Barra, I have been reading all comments and articles regarding my blog and TravelinBlogs.com and decided to post to clarify your concerns.

    TravelinBlogs is an idea that came up between me and other bloggers some time ago. It was an idea that was created time ago when we noticed that there were very few interesting blogs about tourism, travel and Hospitality, and we considered it would be a good idea to put them all together or just listing them would be fine.

    The original project was called thBlogs.com and we started with it by posting manually those articles we liked. It has never been an interest on making business out of it.

    Danay, who is actually my wife, runs the site, and the admin user you mentioned is here. There is no machine thing at TravelinBlogs, but just RSS syndication of those blogs we like, and yours is one of them.

    Then came the T-list and we discovered new blogs. Some of them posted about TiB, and traffic increased fast.

    We still understand that having a Digg like project for the Travel and Hospitality would be of interest not just for the readers, but also for the bloggers as it allow them to get noticed and get extra traffic.

    Regarding your concerns about the reason why there are also categories in Spanish, the answer is quite simple, my blog which is considered of the best Spanish hospitality ones is in Spanish. There are also excellent Spanish blogs that deserve being promoted,and we post their articles at the site manually. Since then they are getting new readers from Germany that understand Spanish, and had no idea that those blogs existed. And last, our idea was also creating categories in German where there are also fantastic blogs, and French, but we are not so fluent in those languages to translate the categories.

    I hope I have clarified some of your concerns. You are welcome to visit the site.

    Albert Barra

    I joined the site and rummaged around. Look for yourself to see who from the T-List is also rummaging around. Thus far there is not a lot of communication going on between the contributors.

  • The Beta launch of VibeAgent, who by the way finalized an angel seed round today, also drew some T-Listers as beta testers which resulted in some contacts between them.
  • Then Vancouver Based Chris Clarke, also known as Chrispitality from his Blog Crispitality media Blog, a hotel industry blogger on Vacant Ready who earlier had set up the hilarious site Bed Jump Com as a stand alone which he later syndicated with Hotels by City, launched Hospitality Wiki as an experiment. He couldn’t find a relevant, interesting hospitality-specific online wiki anywhere, so he has created one and asks to participate! You will find some t-Listers there as well. Have a look.
    As a side note: have a look at this bed jumping project mentioned on Worldhum
  • There is another T-Lister who is setting up a T-List aggregator, but I lost the URL. When I find it I will fill it in here.
  • On July 4, 2007 Eric Daams (AKA Dr Pepper), A young Dutchman, living Down Under, who contributes with his brother Peter Daams who also lives Down Under, and with a third Dutchman, probably their oldest brother, Sam Daams (AKA Sam I am), who lives in Norway, to the Blog From the Swiveling Chair from the Travelerspoint travel community a post 12 Blogs I Like.
    Actually the format of this post gives me a great idea! Suppose each T-Lister posts about the 5 best posts he has seen on T-List blogs in the past week, or the past month. Then you get some real synergie! Then you really start building a community!
  • Then, on July 15, 2007 Vancouver (BC) based Jens Traenhart of the Tourism Internet Marketing Blog proposes in an excellent post T-List on Facebook to the T-Listers to join the Facebook | T-List Group. Currently there are 34 members. Have a look!
  • Finally: Off course Paul Johnson couldn’t stay behind and created via The L-List on Facebook the Facebook | L-List Community, currently with 8 members

So those are exciting developments and give plenty a possibility to building T-List and L-List communities. The only question is: which forum will prevail in a couple of months?

Note:
In researching one and another I added some details after the publication date.

Last edited by GJE on December 6, 2011 at 8:38 am