Twitter Outages – Really? How many outages can a company have on a website on any given day? It’s not like they are passing on photos or files…it is 140 characters!

Facebook – Privacy is a big issue and these guys have dropped the ball. Their CEO has said in the past that people are dumb to give him that much info…have you changed your privacy settings yet?

The iPad – What a great device! I love watching Netflix, playing games, surfing the web, checking email etc on mine. My COO uses his to work on…really work. His favorite apps are omnigraffle, imockups and iwork suite. Good battery life and quick start ups are a plus as well. Will it take over the laptop? As it sits today…no. Give it till the 3rd generation and then lets’ talk.

LinkedIn – A mid-year prediction for everyone. Salesforce.com will buy LinkedIn and solidify itself even further as ‘the’ CRM of choice.

Trends – Did anyone see the news? For the first time, Facebook overtook Google as the number one US website for a week (roughly 7% of all website hits). With over 400 million users and growing, this company is on the move.

Search – We did a graph for a client yesterday showing that their #1 keyword/phrase wnet form 80K searches a day in 2004 to now under 40K searches per day, while during that same time span, Internet usage has more than doubled from 800 million users to over 1.8 billion.

Does anyone know who created this masterpiece?

(Click to view larger image)

We think it is very irresponsible of Facebook, who is still young in the professional world, to treat paying customers like this. Facebook is a great place to grow your business online, but behavior like this is downright terrifying. Business need to have confidence that they are safe investing money in Facebook.

We created this video to express our frustration and confusion.

If you have had this happen to you, please leave a comment and help us spread this video around the web!

Fat Atom Internet Marketing
http://fatatom.com

Ok, now that we have the small business owners who want to work hard, work smart and get something good, for just a little investment and planning, here goes:

1) Email Marketing – With so many online companies offering cost effective services, why aren’t you using email to help grow your business? For under $25 per month, you can mail promotionals, coupons etc to up to 5,000 of your opt in clients. And if the offer is good enough, watch out; that email will go viral.

2) Text Messaging – Why not add this component to your existing marketing to help judge what is working. For under .20 cents per message, you can market to people who are on the go. Collect phone numbers and use SMS like email – but more effective, after all, who doesn’t carry a cell phone 24/7 today?

3) Facebook Fan Page – Here is the real “no brainer” of the group, because it is FREE. C’mon; set up a page, come up with a 3 point strategy and execute it. It doesn’t have to be a 10 page plan, but do three things well and systematically on Facebook and the rewards could be great.

Yes, like rats leaving a sinking ship, all the cyber-sex prostitutes, multi-level marketing scammers, male enhancement salesmen, and all other species of spammers are bailing out of their MySpace strategies and have moved on to Twitter. I don’t know what kind of official projection statistics have been done regarding the amount of spam and the growing success of a social media website have been done, but its solid enough evidence for me.

My own MySpace page friends list has dwindled to almost nothing as even my real friends are focusing on Facebook. I hardly ever visit it, and sorry Tom, but your just not worth it. (I never liked you anyway). While I am sure MySpace’s remaining loyal followers, independent punk rock groups and pedophiles, will keep it trudging along for a couple years, it seems clear to me it’s days are numbered.

While I am sure many will disagree with my incredibly scientific analysis, MySpace needs to think of something Facebook and Twitter haven’t thought of yet to attract users back. In the meantime, I will be sticking with Facebook and Twitter where I find real people actively participating and random anonymous women still think I am “hot and sexy”.

I know I have to do it, but I hate it…. BUT WAIT! There is GOOD NEWS!

Did you know you can use a website called Ping.fm to update all your social network statuses at once? It’s great, and it support just about every major social networking platform you need: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Just head over to http://ping.fm/ and take a look for yourself. A few minute setting up your account can save you hours of headaches later on. You can keep your friends (and digital acquaintances) connected without ever letting them know you really have better things to do (ha ha!).