But it all started with this tweet, which at first glance seemed to be a random venting of frustration by a faceless social media plebe:

But this tweet seemed much more calculated after the events of the next few days.

Two days later, the online storefront was gone – apparently shut down and replaced with a short message:

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form. We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming. This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

GOG.com kept tweeting:

The news about the site remaining available for people to redownload their games was a tip off. Why would a company keep the site live for people to redownload past purchases if they had no new revenue coming in to pay the server bills?

That same day, rumors spread that the site shutdown was a hoax. And people were angry!

On September 20, the site message was updated:

First of all, we apologize everyone for the whole situation and closing GOG.com. We do understand the timing for taking down the site caused confusion and many users didn’t manage to download all their games. Unfortunately we had to close the service due to business and technical reasons. At the same time we guarantee that every user who bought any game on GOG.com will be able to download all their games with bonus materials, DRM-free and as many times as they need starting this Thursday. The official statement from GOG.com’s management concerning the ongoing events is planned on Wednesday.

The news was finally broken on Sept. 22 that the shutdown was a build up to the site launching out of beta. Anger still washed over the social media streams:

GOGcom apologized, but some feared too little, too late:

But the next day, it was business as usual – actually, more business than usual:

GOG.com seems to have generated the buzz it wanted and even earned back some customers’ trust with the addition of two popular classic games and a large sale on “favorites.” Time will tell if the stunt hurts them or served its intended purpose.

But as a social media manager who aims to understand customer needs and perspectives and strives for transparency in communications, I have to wonder if hoaxes and stunts that anger customers are ever a good risk.

Here’s how I might have handled it:

GOG.com is going down for maintenance. We’ll be shut for 5 days as we prepare to launch the new site with exciting new features!If you make a GOG purchase today, download it right away. If you don’t complete the DL you’ll have to wait til the site comes back on 9/23.

Don’t worry, your GOG.com purchases are safe! You’ll still be able to redownload everything you’ve ever bought! Big announcements coming!

Here are some new features you’ll enjoy when GOG.com comes back on 9/23: More news, community features, quick browse catalog and reminders! 

Feel free to speculate on the game news. We can’t confirm yet, but watch our Twitter on 9/22! We think you RPG fans will be pleased.

While the site is down, how about we give away a few copies of the mystery RPG. RT the following message for a chance to win!

GOG.com is back up. You may see hiccups as we continue to add servers and manage 5 days of pent-up demand. Tell us what you think!

Flipboard Contents 'page' - click to view gallery of Flipboard images

The buzz surrounding Flipboard for iPad hit suddenly. One minute I’d never heard of it and then the next my Twitter timeline was drowning in posts about it. I downloaded it just in time… to be blocked by everyone else trying to get in! The next day, Flipboard’s creators announced an invite system where you’d be queue’d to get the OK to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Even without the social media integration, I immediately saw the appeal of Flipboard via the various news feeds it aggregates. It has the glossy look of a neatly arranged and typeset magazine, only populated on-the-fly with stories and images from the Internet. Flip through the virtual pages just like you would with a paper copy of Wired or Vanity Fair. Some excerpts are short and sweet, others lengthy with a link to the full article. Spontaneous photo essays abound! Tap an image to open a focused view of it, then tap it again and it fills the screen. (Alas, you can’t tap and hold to save favorite images to your local photo album.)

I did get my social media invite a few days later, and suddenly it became much more personal. People I follow everyday get featured pull quotes daily. Gamers I know show off recent play summaries in greater depth than I ever see when browsing my timeline. Articles that were simply shortened links are blown up and instantly readable. My friends’ photos become instant photo essays or one-off illustrations breaking up a sea of article text.

Flipboard turns your Facebook and Twitter feeds into a glossy magazine - click to view gallery of Flipboard images

As much as I love Flipboard, it’s more of the sort of thing a social media consultant like me uses to unwind after a long day slaving over Twitter timelines, @ replies and Facebook walls (seriously, we never unplug – just ask my wife!) than a tool to be used for everyday work.

Here are some areas I would like to see improved:

1. The Contents page only has nine slots, two of which are locked for Facebook and Twitter. I would probably fill 20 if I could with additional Twitter lists and news feeds! Scrolling would probably break the magazine metaphor, but it’s not unheard of to have more than one contents page. How about up to three pages for a total of 27 possible categories?
2. You’re never going to get a comprehensive view of a busy Twitter or Facebook feed with a magazine style client like this, but how about letting us choose which friends we want to see or drill down to view? I recently posted a photo album to Facebook myself but didn’t launch Flipboard for several hours, and by then it was buried under my friends’ posts. I would have loved to see it turned into a photo essay! Likewise, I would like to browse or select sets of Facebook friends for spontaneous views of their recent status updates. And add sites I like that aren’t on the Flipboard team’s radar, or at least suggest them to the team for future inclusion.
3. Flipboard doesn’t cache content for offline use. Since I didn’t spring for the 3G iPad, this meant I couldn’t show off the app to a friend when I took it to a café that didn’t offer WiFi I could use. Fortunately, I had already snapped some screenshots of Flipboard including the photo essay it had made of her recent gallery of self-portraits. Likewise, I would like to save favorite pages to an offline gallery within Flipboard to browse them again later, much as I might revisit a magazine article or photo layout.

That said, these are minor quibbles with an iPad app that is both free and very good at what it does - presenting social media in an old familiar format but in an interactive manner you’d never get from a paper periodical. If you have an iPad, it deserves a slot on your Home screen.

Whether by design or sheer luck, updating my profile was incredibly easy… because everything I needed was already in my completed LinkedIn profile. I was able to pull dates and copy/paste descriptions straight from LinkedIn, saving a tremendous amount of time. My profile was done in about one-third the time I had set aside for the project – time I used instead to fill in some holes I discovered on LinkedIn. I then transferred the information to Plaxo.

Join my network

Plaxo profile complete, it was time to find people. I took a cursory look at my recommendations (”People you might know”) but realized that until I had built at least a small network, I was unlikely to get many good hits. So I did something I swore never to do: I allowed Plaxo to pull information from another network.

Like most social networking sites, Plaxo offered a tempting shortcut to finding friends: tapping into an existing wellspring of information. In this case, my options were limited. There were the sites I don’t use (Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL) and the account I wouldn’t use (my personal Hotmail account). My attempt to follow LinkedIn’s directions were a miserable failure. There was one candidate for success, however: Facebook.

Double exposure

I studied the text carefully and confirmed that yes it would only bother people in my Facebook network who were already registered Plaxo users. I clicked the button to access my Facebook account, and noticed an immediate change in my Plaxo view: a photo appeared in my profile. Plaxo had co-opted my Facebook image – an Xbox Live avatar – for my professional profile. Panicked, I immediately went to update my photo… and found several photos of my child. In my Plaxo profile. That I had not uploaded to Plaxo.

Apparently, when I tied my Facebook account to Plaxo, it took the liberty of pulling my various friends-and-family-only photo folders and added them to the “Photos” tab of my profile. While there was nothing incriminating (keep your Facebook clean, folks), I don’t want strangers to have access to family photos – even if they are just my child drinking hot chocolate at Starbucks.

All images were in folders, just as they appeared in Facebook. Fortunately, Plaxo allowed me to delete entire folders, saving me a lot of time. If I had to delete each image individually, odds are the only thing I would have deleted was my Plaxo account itself.

After I finished cleaning out my personal photos and updating my profile pic, I reviewed ALL sections of my profile to ensure no other stray Facebook goodies had moved over. It appears contacts and photos were the extent of the damage.

Contact Us

Satisfied with my damage control, I moved on to the final section: Websites and Personal Info. Opening the Websites section results in an icon explosion – add your Facebook! Share your Amazon Wish List! Tell the world your twitter name! (Just one? I have two, but had to choose…). Not to mention Facebook, YouTube, Last.fm, MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr… and that’s just a very, very small fraction. If you’ve ever shared content online, odds are you can share it with your Plaxo network. (Or everyone. Or just Friends. Or just Family. It’s up to you.)

I chose a few resources, reviewed my restrictions and unleashed my profile on the world. All this took about an hour, during which time I received numerous mails in the background. I finally went to catch up and discovered I had four new Plaxo and two LinkedIn requests/friends.

Every single one was from Facebook.

By default, Twitter posts are viewable and searchable by anyone. Using your real name or providing enough private details could make it easy for anyone to figure out where you live. If you don’t want to protect your tweets by making them private, you should not use Twitter to share your vacation exploits.

Here are some tips to help you stay safe in virtual space – and the real world one:

Twitter. The safest thing you can do is protect your updates and only accept followers that you know. This sort of defeats the potential of Twitter since none of your witty wordplay will be seen except by a select few and you’ll never get a gajillion followers. If this is important to you, just open two Twitter accounts – one for friends and the other for your public persona. Then just make sure that you only post the private stuff to your trusted friends.

Facebook. On the whole, Facebook tends to be a safer place to share your travel plans since most people only accept friend requests from trusted friends. But there are some ways you can fine-tune your privacy. Click on Settings in the top blue bar and select Privacy Settings. From there, you can choose who can see your profile and personal information, tagged photos, etc. If you or someone you know is going to be posting and tagging photos of your family to Facebook while you’re out of town at obvious tourist locations, you might want to limit these to just your friends. Be sure to go to Contact Information and set your current address to No one. Your friends will know where you live or can call you if they need this information. There’s a nifty feature that lets you preview how a specific friend sees your profile, which will give you a good idea whether you’ve done a good job locking down your private details.

Blogs. If you have a blog, you should use private domain registration so if someone looks up your domain contacts, they don’t get your home address and phone number. As a quick fix, you might be able to update your contact information to your ISP’s, so that any lookups and inquiries go to them. Private registration may cost a little more, though some places do offer it for free.

If your blog is only updated sporadically (once a week or less), taking a week off shouldn’t be any big deal. But if you have a following and readers have come to expect daily updates, you’ll probably want to mention that you’re taking a break and that updates will be a little less frequent while you “enjoy some personal time” (saying it this way doesn’t signal that you’re leaving town). You don’t have to be specific about your plans unless you feel comfortable doing so. You might also preload some posts and, if your blogging software supports it, schedule them to go live on the days you are away. In my case, I alerted readers that some regular features might be incomplete or delayed and then preloaded several posts that I then published remotely each day using the Movable Type for iPhone interface.

TweetDeck for iPhone

Back in April, I deconstructed what I thought was wrong with TweetDeck. Now I only do this sort of exercise with products I think show real potential. I did the same on BusyGamerNews.com for the Nintendo Wii user interface and twice for the Xbox 360 (but never got around to the PS3).

I critique because I care.

It appears that someone at TweetDeck is listening. But they have their own ideas too. And it’s hard to tell whether it’s getting better or I’m just getting used to the ever-growing array of columns that stretch off the right side of my screen.

The big news is that TweetDeck is now available for iPhone. And it’s free. The column metaphor actually seems to work well with a touch screen where you can swipe to quickly flip columns. I currently trade off between TwitterFon (slightly old version since people dissed the latest update) and Twinkle (nice for community tweets though Seattle lately has been overrun by overly dramatic teens and tweens with iPod Touchs who feel the need to text for attention every 12 seconds or so!). I’ve also toyed with Twitterific but so far it hasn’t stuck.

TweetDeck for iPhone looks promising, though it is a little crash prone (not unusual with first gen iPhone apps). What might keep me coming back is this: Sync with my desktop TweetDeck. The way this works is that you either use the iPhone app or the newest PC version of TweetDeck to create a TweetDeck account (yes, another password to remember). You then login to the other version and it offers to sync your columns – to a point. The iPhone version doesn’t support Facebook (at least not yet) so that’s not carried over from your desktop. Nor are any secondary accounts you add. You have to manually add these in both places. And sync’ing doesn’t seem to work from the iPhone back to the desktop, though I could be wrong. I’m still testing this.

Wait, did you catch that? Multiple Twitter accounts are now supported – on both versions! Other new desktop app features include unlimited columns, trends for any column, reply all, YFrog support, spam reporting and smart filtering. Supposedly there’s a conversation window, which sounds great - but I couldn’t find it.

Still, all in all, TweekDeck continues to show promise. Just when I was about to go fishing for alternatives.

Movable Type is an impressive blogging tool, and I’ve invested a lot into it. I love the promise of community features, though I haven’t had the time to keep up with all of the updates that would enable these (they have to be manually installed and sometimes reconfigured). Also, price is a consideration. When I last checked, the richer community tools were targeted at corporate clients who invest $10,000 or more into their site. Too rich for my little labor of love gaming site.

Last Friday I launched my effort to move our The Writer’s Bloc business site from a collection of standalone pages to a blog where we can post articles and musings on the industries we work in. I had set up Philanthropy Northwest on Wordpress a couple years back and, while the experience wasn’t problem free, I liked what I saw and thought it would be helpful to keep up with another blogging platform. 

My hosting provider, Westhost, offers a Web-based interface for easily installing WordPress with just a couple of clicks. That was easy! I even had to upgrade a dependent PHP app first, but even that took only a few extra seconds. WordPress then auto-detected that there was a newer version available than what my host installed, so I clicked a link and installed that too. I browsed and found a theme that I liked and spent a little time customizing it. I might move to something flashier later, but this works for now and already looks nicer than the old site. I then used the WordPress plug-in auto-install feature to add some social networking/sharing links, a CAPTCHA with a built-in audio playback for form protection from spammers, SEO options and more in-depth stats tracking including Google Analytics. I still need to improve my old contact form (which I hastily ported to a WordPress page),  but really that’s not bad for half a day’s work.

It’s early to wholeheartedly recommend WordPress, but thinking back to the months it took to get CAPTCHA working on Movable Type a few years back, I have to say that so far I’m impressed. When things calm down, I’ll spend a day upgrading Movable Type and see if it has gotten any better than the early v4 build I’m using.

So we have relaunched this site as a blog where we can tell you some of what we’re up to and share the unique insights we’ve uncovered to help you navigate the stormy waters of Web 2.0 and beyond.

Our clients include Microsoft (including Xbox and Office Live), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Philanthropy Northwest.

We are both former newspaper reporters, freelance writers and Internet pioneers with a diverse skillset and versatile range. We have written articles and reviews for various newspapers, magazines and Web sites including Microsoft.com, Xbox.com, ABCNews.com, O’Reilly, MacAddict, Internet Strategies, BBS Magazine, Faulkner Technical Reports, Internet Voyager and Orbit Video magazine. Prior to founding our own company, we built online communities for Big Fish Games and HealthTalk, produced marketing videos for Amazon Kindle, and planned and launched sites for Nickelodeon, Raleigh Diamondback bikes, Lettuce Entertain You restaurants, Redhook Brewery and F5 Networks.

In addition to our daily work, we write BusyGamerNews.com – a daily blog devoted to news, reviews and advocacy tuned to the needs of working gamers.

Contact The Writer’s Bloc