Every few weeks I scan the Ad Age 150 – a comprehensive list of industry blogs indexed based on popularity and relevance.  They index over 1000 blogs, and the top 150 have been published annually in their magazine.

Two things really stuck with me yesterday

1. Seth Godin‘s blog had dropped from first to 28th.  His blog ranking has recovered this morning to second spot – but the fact he is no longer on top of the blogsphere is a seismic shift from the last three years
2. The number three blog Micro Persuasion (also consistently in the top 5) has declared his blog dead. He’s walking away from impressive rankings in Alexa, Technorati, Google, Post rank,Yahoo, and Collective Intellect in order to start a new site he’s calling  The Steve Rubel Lifestream – which is really just another blog, but with a new POV that instead of writing long articles supported by several references he will post snack sized bits of information several times a day.
   

Looking at my 300 subscriptions in my RSS feed, nearly half the blogs have either stopped posting or at least reduced their frequency. Although I wrote about 5 reasons why twitter is making many blogs irrelevant here, I think it would be a mistake for people to abandon their blog in favour of a micro-blog such as twitter or a feed aggregator such as friendfeed.

Given that the most important brand you ever work on should be your own, your blog should evolve to be more than an opinion site, but one that aggregates and presents your personal brand. I was speaking to my friend Ted last night about this, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s also something I’ve intuitively done over the last year with this site.

CVs are dead – long live your personal brand aggregator!

Instead of killing your blog in favour of another platform, use your blog as the platform to other branches of your personal brand. Linkedin for business networking, slideshare for presentations, twitter for the in the moment perspectivce, facebook for the more personal connections, and youtube for videos.

While you’re at it, be sure to include a “share this” widget so that others can easily share your awesome content with their network and be sure your blog is mobile friendly – as increasingly your fans or those who stumble upon your site will be accessing it from their smartphones.

It would seem that blogs are in fact undead.

Twitter was the social media darling and top story in 2008 with over 700% growth.  It even trumped the news that facebook had finally caught up to myspace for overall traffic.

Then came the news that facebook was offering $500 million in cash and stocks to buy Twitter.  Twitter declined. Thanks to a flexible API, there are now over 150 tools that leverage, integrate and build on the Twitter platform.

It seems like nothing will stop Twitter’s rise to world social media dominiation. Except maybe facebook.

CNN and facebook have teamed up to offer live facebook status streaming during Obama’s inauguration on January 20th.  Point your browser to http://www.cnn.com/live and then update your facebook status which will then stream to the CNN live page as pictured above on the 20th.

What’s interesting is that facebook is turning what was a closed broadcast system (your status update to your friend network) into an open broadcast system – like Twitter.

The end result could fundamentally change the way people use facebook while trumping Twitter’s momentum.

facebook could be the new twitter – and the story of 2009.

They’ve already trumped friendfeed (a personal social media stream aggregator) by copying their unique features into facebook’s homepage, so this doesn’t come as a complete surprise.

facebook also has something that twitter doesn’t have – critial mass of non techno-geeks.

That $500 million offer may look pretty good afterall.

One unintentional outcome of opening up the facebook platform last year was that  facebook pages started looking a lot like myspace pages – littered with silly applications that not only cluttered up the page, but created unbelievable load times on servers. 

The new facebook design streamlines the user experience.

At first I was like many of my friends and didn’t like the new interface. It’s such a huge departure from the old site that it took a while to figure out where everything went and how to navigate around the site. I’m not against wholesale changes to a site as long as the user experience improves and / or there is some inherant value being added.  

Overall the site is still pretty easy to use, but their new design has one major flaw – it heavily discounts all individuality.

Although facebook feeds represent much of the content that drives the social graph and facebook ecosystem, it was the ability of users to customize their facebook page to reflect their personalities through their badges, applications and customization of the page layout that made the site one of the stickiest sites ever on the interweb.

Now my landing page and everybody else’s looks the same.

Whoever thought “boxes” was a good tab name to stick all the items that used to be on the landing page should have their head examined. You might as well have called it “all the stuff that made you come here in the first place but which facebook has deemed irrelevant on your behalf.”

I would love to see the stats on application and group use and removals since the new design as i’m sure their drop would rival the stock market right now.

What use do I have for my twitter feed, travel map, delicious bookmarks or QR code if nobody sees it? They were effective before because people didn’t have to click to find them. Having a strong sense of self-identity online encouraged me to participate and add to the social graph. 

If all I wanted was a feed of friend and network activity, I would just use friendfeed, social thing, yahoo oneconnect or some other feed aggregator.  

It’s like when you first arrived on your first day of university or college at your dorm – all the rooms and hallways are painted the same colour and looked the same. Sure you still have a community – but no real social interaction occured until people personalized their rooms and halls.

Before you could join the crowd, you had to first assert your individuality. 

I totally get why the new design was necessary and overall they did a pretty good job at it.

My suggestion?

Allow some degree of customization on the personal page so that people can still hang a few badges on their site to maintain a sense of individuality. While they are at, please rename “boxes” to “applications that no longer fit on your homepage, so remove it because nobody is clicking here, man.”

The highlight for me yesterday at CTIA was the keynote address from Yahoo executive Vice President Marco Boerries where he announced the introduction of Yahoo! oneConnect for the iphone.

The live demo demonstrated how this new application (optimized for the iphone) takes your address book and makes it social by aggregating all your mobile messaging via IM and SMS and all your lifestream feeds into one amazing interface.

Like friendfeed and Social Thing, you can add myspace, last.fm,dopplr,twitter, friendster, bebo,flickr,youtube and facebook feeds to oneConnect under their Pulse feature. You can now scan what is happening across all networks from one mobile interface.  This also means you can update your status in one place and have all your other streams automatically updated.

Users will also be able to track their contacts on a single screen, with information on their status and the ability to quickly call or send an IM or email.

The application is available for free in the app store – although it wasn’t indexing yet on their search tool. If you are having problems finding it, go to mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect/iphone and click on the app link. This will bring you into the app store for immediate download.

I’ve spent some time on it so far, but I’m afraid of the roaming charges associated with customizing it right now, so look for additional perspective later.

Yahoo plans on releasing versions for other platforms, but it’s hard to imagine how they’ll be able to create a comparable experience on other platforms.

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook – but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing – they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great – instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once – much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) – I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed – so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion – build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.