Pinterest hasn’t had a 1:1 relationship between events (Follows, Likes, Repins, etc) and notification emails for a while. This isn’t unique to Pinterest. For example, Twitter often “clusters” a group of your new followers into a daily notification email.

Where Pinterest is different, though, is that its on-site activity feed is incomplete/ephemeral. Stuff slides off the timeline, fast. (Compare to Twitter, which lets you scroll back in time until forever ago.)

Pinterest’s blink-and-miss-it activity feed creates some management pains for brands (and social pains for personal use) so it’s great news that they’re improving it.

This hasn’t gotten pushed live yet, so all we have is a screenshot to go on. Honestly, it still looks tough to navigate if you have a lot of events to scroll through, but it’s definitely better than before.

This change is part of a long list of updates/improvements to the new Pinterest UI.

“Recent Activity got an upgrade! It’s now located in the upper right corner. You’ll know when someone follows you or your boards; repins, likes or comments on your pin; or mentions you. You can even see older notifications.”

-Better search: Now we’ll suggest search keywords as you type. If you’re looking for “bacon,” you might see suggestions like “bacon roses” or “bacon desserts” (Yum.)

pinterblog:

Since we announced our new look, we’ve gotten lots of feedback from our community about things you love, things you miss, and things that could make Pinterest even better. Thanks to you, we’ve made some changes that we want to share with you today.

Stuff we’ve brought back. Hooray!

-See it now: After pinning, you can check out related boards or go straight to your pin by clicking “See it now.”

-Pinned from: Lots of you told us you missed the “via” feature, because it helped you find other people with tastes like yours. Now when you click on a pin, you can see who it was pinned from.

-Mentions: You can mention your friends in pin descriptions and comments by typing “@” before their name.

-Find friends: You can see which of your Facebook and Twitter friends are on Pinterest.

Stuff we’ve improved:

-More notifications: Recent Activity got an upgrade! It’s now located in the upper right corner. You’ll know when someone follows you or your boards; repins, likes or comments on your pin; or mentions you. You can even see older notifications.

-Better search: Now we’ll suggest search keywords as you type. If you’re looking for “bacon,” you might see suggestions like “bacon roses” or “bacon desserts” (Yum.)

-New pins (coming soon): We’ll let you know when new pins have been added to your home feed.

Stuff we’re still thinking about…

We know there are other things you’d like to see on Pinterest—like the ability to rearrange your pins, search for your pins, know when you’ve pinned something already, or create a board within a board.

We take these suggestions to heart, but it’s tricky to make them work for everyone. Some people don’t have a lot of pins, for example, so they don’t need boards within boards. We’re listening, though, and we’ll keep looking for ways to organize your stuff on Pinterest.

Thanks so much for sticking it out with us as we work together to make Pinterest better. We hope you like these updates, and keep that feedback coming!

P.S. We’re still rolling out the new look to everyone. If you haven’t gotten it yet, you can click on the “Get it now” button located at the top of your home feed.

—Cory Carpenter, Product Manager, Currently obsessed with pinning to Ideas for bedtime stories

Yesterday Facebook launched a developer (video) channel featuring screencasts, tutorials, and talks about its ever-changing developer experience. Especially useful for agencies creating and measuring social projects.

It’s a little confusingly-named, “Facebook Developers Live,” which suggests an event, but it’s actually more of a hub. That said, there also appears to be future webinar/Google Hangout-like “live” events that you can attend. (which will be recorded and available there)

TL;DR: I’m making a field guide for agencies and brands who want to avoid getting snagged in spammer nets on social platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and now is the time to let me know what you need included in it.

(breathe)

As my Twitter family saw earlier today, I’ve been conducting some live-editing parties (they get pretty crazy, *nerd snort*) on Google Docs for a new field guide that will be released in 2013 all about…

RATE LIMITS ON SOCIAL PLATFORMS

</voice of God>

Basically it’s all about Twitter Jail, Pinterest Jail, getting annoying captchas thrown atcha every other second, and getting suspended… when you’re an innocent agency just minding your own marketing business.

This field guide is not for agressive marketers. It’s for agencies and brands who manage lots of accounts, and accidentally get treated like spammers. #injustice

As people who’ve been in on the Google Docs editing sessions know, there is already a lot of structure and content, but it’s not too late to throw stuff at me about what you/your agency needs included.

The usual contact methods:

twitter @bluechoochoo
tumblr [reblog this post w/commentary or send Tumblr Mail]
email: lilbluechoochoo [at] google’s mail situation

If you wanna be kept in the loop, sign up for the mailing list.

(screenshot/preview from live-editing session below. Ripped from the Google Docs)

In social media, so much stuff is undocumented by social platform vendors:

• What is the specific maximum number of tweets you’re allowed to send per hour? (You get 1000 tweets per day. But beyond that, it gets fuzzy.)
• Why does Pinterest sometimes tell you “Slow down, you’re Pinning too fast?” What, exactly, is “too fast?”

You don’t have to be a spammer to hit limits when you’re doing something creative on a social platform [example: Firstborn’s epic Pinterest hack for Uniqlo].

So how do you figure this stuff out? Well, if you’re a huge brand spending a bit on paid media, you may have an account contact inside company who can feed you the inside dirt.

But another great way of figuring out all this undocumented stuff is hanging out with spammers/blackhat marketers (not in real life. in forums, chat, etc). As annoying as hearing about Viagra on Twitter is, the people behind those accounts actually talk to each other and share stuff they’ve figured out about Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, etc.

I’m not very interested in the field of “security” (firewall rules? zzzZZZZ). But there are areas of the domain that actually end up being really related to modern marketing.

For this reason, my ears and eyes perk up around stuff like Trend Micro’s recent research paper: Russian Underground 101 (warning: PDF link). (source of the image above)

While half of it is about straight-up illegal, destructive stuff that in no way would benefit a legit business (denial of service attacking a call center?!? yikes! (and also: why?)), the other half dances around stuff that any hands-on social media marketer has to interact with if he/she is a power user: proxy servers, VPNs, seo, traffic.

Trend Micro’s report is a read-only, and extremely high-level survey of the field. WiredUK(quoted below) wrote a feature with an hacker-heavy interpretation of the report.

Ultimately, the i-want-to-hack-a-person (boo!) communities are quite different and usually separate from the i-want-to-hack-a-platform communities. The latter will get you much closer to understanding modern platforms. Stuffy suits and law and enforcement tend to conflate the two. (For example, the reports covers both.) But  basically if you’re a marketer: the former is a bit more boring/irrelevant.

So what’s the lesson for today? If you’re never satisfied with social platform documentation, you gotta stop depending on “official” documentation, and start listening to some shady characters. Turns out, they’re pretty reliable.

If you don’t wanna bother with that, you can subscribe to my mailing list, but I’m way more boring than spammers.

If you want to buy a botnet, it’ll cost you somewhere in the region of $700. If you just want to hire someone else’s for an hour, though, it can cost as little as $2—that’s long enough to take down, say, a call center, if that’s what you were in the mood for. Maybe you’d like to spy on an ex—for $350 you can purchase a trojan that lets you see all their incoming and outgoing texts. Or maybe you’re just in the market for some good, old-fashioned spamming—it’ll only cost you $10 for a million e-mails. That’s the hourly minimum wage in the UK.

This post is mostly for geeky, but non-dev agency folks.

Many of you have fancy, featureful, but bulky and burdensome reporting and monitoring tools for social media stuff. But sometimes you just want find One. Thing. Fast.

Without bugging the technology team.

And you can!

While lotsa marketing folks may not be programmers, many self-identify as “nerds” and are willing and enthusiastic about using little building blocks that get close to “programming” but stop just short of that.

Let’s begin:

Many of us know how to find Facebook share count:

http://graph.facebook.com/http://yoursite.com

(plugin any URL at the end)

Example with a URL from my Tumblr:

https://graph.facebook.com/http://bluechoochoo.tumblr.com/post/25889624609/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest

Output:

{
   "id": "http://bluechoochoo.tumblr.com/post/25889624609/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest",
 "shares": 13
}

But what about LinkedIn? What’s the equivalent quick-n-dirty? (I didn’t know before an hour ago.)

It goes a little something like this:

http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://yoursite.com

Example with a URL from my Tumblr:

http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://bluechoochoo.tumblr.com/post/25889624609/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest

Output:

IN.Tags.Share.handleCount({“count”:10,”fCnt”:”10”,”fCntPlusOne”:”11”,”url”:”http:\/\/bluechoochoo.tumblr.com\/post\/25889624609\/uniqlo-firstborn-pinterest”});

That’s it. Pencils down. Just paste those tricks into your address bar, and your wrists will be saved from tons of annoying clicks.