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B2B Social Bookmarking – Del.icio.us

What? Del.icio.us? What kind of url/company name is that? Well, it’s both a company name and a url, and Del.icio.us is one of the more popular social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is sharing of website links publicly or through your network. Del.icio.us and many other services also allow you to tag the link with keywords and a short description or comment. You can decide per link whether it is shared with others and every keyword has a RSS feed tied to it so people can subscribe to your link feed (and to your del.icio.us profile page). Del.icio.us is valuable as a content provider, link network, research tool, and seo tool.

Content Provider

Del.icio.us is an easy way to add link blogging to your B2B website or blog. Once you add a link to del.icio.us, you can set it up so it automatically appears on your blog (through a script/tag). This is also an easy way to add content to your blog – tagging pages as you come upon them throughout the day. Both Firefox and IE have del.icio.us extensions which easily allow you to add the site you’re looking at to your profile.

Link Network

If your friends or colleagues are on del.icio.us, you can easily send them specific links (and they can send you links). This is a very valuable way of sharing important information or websites and allows others to browse them at their convenience. If they are sharing their links, you can also see what your network (or others) have tagged for various keywords, which is a very valuable way to keep up with what people feel is important online. This can also be valuable way to show your expertise in the B2B marketplace for whatever niche industries you serve.

Research Tool

Need to know what’s going on in your industry? Need to find links for a particular project or client? Searching del.icio.us for content can sometimes be more reliable than search engines (depending on the subject in question). I find it particularly valuable for subjects that search engines and other social bookmarking sites tend to bury because the subjects are not consumer oriented. Even if there are only a few entries for a particular subject, del.icio.us will give you access to all of them in a very easy-to-navigate format.

SEO Tool

Del.icio.us is a very valuable tool for sending traffic to your website, allowing you to submit and tag your content very easily. More importantly, it is not spamming the system, and usually not frowned upon (although it will look better if your link feed includes links other than your own content). It is also important to give your readers a link to del.icio.us on everything you write, to make it easy for them to submit and add your links to the network (add this! is a good product to look at).

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B2B Micro-blogging – Pownce

Pownce, similar to Twitter, allows you to send short messages to your friends or colleagues or to your Pownce profile page. Pownce has additional functionality to send files, links and events. You can also sub-divide your colleage or friends list into different groups to send different things to different groups. However, unlike Twitter, Pownce does not (as of yet) have functionality to update from your phone by text messaging. They do have a bare-bones mobile site which is ok. Pownce also does not integrate into your website or blog to show your “pownces”.

For the B2B marketplace, Pownce could be useful for conducting online meetings or events (reasonably small groups). If you do not currently have a blog, and don’t want to or have time to write long posts, Pownce could be an alternative – as long as you’re not interested in typical web statistics. The integration of messages, links, files, events and comments provides a very robust, conversational micro-blogging platform.

Pownce is relatively new to the micro-blogging marketplace – created in June 2007 and available publicly in Jan 2008. With the ability to send a feed to a blog and the ability to post via text messaging from phones, Pownce could become the platform-of-choice for the B2B marketplace.

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B2B CDN Revivew – CacheFly

In previous posts here and here I have discussed Content Delivery Networks in general. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper.

CacheFly is a price-point based Content Deliver Network provider that has positioned itself as the CDN of first consideration for small businesses and first time adopters. Their business strategy seems to reflect this on their website by openly promoting prices, something few other CDNs do. They seem to have aggressively positioned their services into the larger pool of start-ups, cost conscious companies, and focused industries who need fewer services. This could make them a good partner to consider for a B2B company looking to start out with a CDN. I have a different opinion, which you can read under ‘Personal Take’.

Their moniker is ‘Stop Hosting – Start Delivering’ which may mean something to their core audience but to this network engineer is a distinction without a difference. It may be a reference to their more fixed package service offerings; a unique feature of what I will term a discounted CDN service. Many CDNs will try to mold packages of their offerings into solutions that are meant to apply broadly for specific customers. CacheFly seems to have taken a different approach, whereby customers often know what they want and need and simply select the package of services that fits. For companies more traditionally comfortable with solution providers than technical sales reps, this can be a bit jarring. Many online service providers are using this model, however, so it does behoove you to look closer at this style of partnership.

CacheFly has four categories of service: Software Downloads, Web Performace, Streaming, and Podcasting. Each of these categories uses the foundational technique of distributed hosting servers, discussed in the first post. A demonstration of how CacheFly applies the technology can be seen here. A deep discussion on how the TCP stack handles windowing would great fun, and I welcome anyone to email me if you are looking for more technical explanations on how it all works. They have a light-weight crib on the subject to get you started.

Software Downloads – This service is what you would think it is. If you have files that you want to get to your user base you usually put them up somewhere on your site. The larger the files become, the larger the number of files and the more people downloading them all add up to high bandwidth usage on our host site. That high bandwidth may both cost you excessively if you are over a threshold or delay your customers significantly in downloading the files.

Website Performance – All websites are not created equal. The prevailing trend in websites recently has been to offer constantly updated content, backended by a database and a Content Management System (CMS) For sites like these, CDNs are not of much help. If, however, your site is of a more static nature you can some or all of the pages hosted at the CDN for rapid response times. Many B2B have small, flash based sites that can greatly benefit from a CDN’s hosting network.

Streaming Media – See my earlier post for information on Streaming Media and where it can be used. Here, CacheFly is offering Progressive Downloads as their service for streaming, which is a bit of a misnomer in my book. Still, with the popularity of YouTube using HTTP Progressive, their core market likely has also focused on that type of video offering so it makes some sense.

Podcasting – Not much different than Streaming Media or Software Downloads. Here the target file is either audio or audio/video.

Personal Take As this is a review site, I like to interject my personal opinion of the products and services I review. CacheFly is a well priced option. Pricing is available here. There are lower priced CDNs, but none I would consider as reputable. I have personally used the CachFly technology recently and have had good results with the hosting. There is a downside with them, however. As is common with discounted service providers, their customer support is mediocre at best. Email only options for contact are, in my opinion, acceptable for only a smaller subset of technically savvy customers. Even the emails were delayed in response, indicating to me an over subscribed support system. They handle very large tech podcasts, like Diggnation from Revision3. The success of these shows may be over inflating their customer base, I don’t know. My personal recommendation is to not try CacheFly as your first introduction to a CDNs. If you are a veteran, then they will save you money. For all others, the waters are just too choppy to be doing it without a reliable life jacket.

Addendum (4/17/08) – CacheFly does have 24/7 phone support. Customers using their customer portal, as we were, did not see this option. This has now been fixed.

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