Want to know what’s going on behind the scenes, in real time, during the baseball All-Star Game on Tuesday? Check out Twitter, where Major League Baseball has told players to tweet away during the game. But will the players be allowed to say anything interesting?

The idea sounds promising: "Fans want to get closer to sport," said Matt Bourne, Major League Baseball's vice president of business public relations. "Players tweeting while the game and other All-Star week activities are in progress is an interesting and unique way [for fans] to feel closer to the game.”

However, tweeting during the All-Star Game will be tightly controlled. Players who are actively involved in play won't be allowed to tweet during the contest. Only players who are no longer in the game will be able to use Twitter and Facebook. “After a player leaves the game, they do a media circuit: Typically they talk to Fox - the game’s broadcaster - and some print reporters. Now we've added one more step for the players’ postgame wrap-up: the social media room,” Bourne says.

Beyond that, players will be able to use Twitter or Facebook via their personal accounts. Those who don’t have personal accounts on either social platform can utilize the MLB All Star Game Twitter account or the Major League Baseball Player’s Association, or MLB’s Facebook page. Part of the plan is to set up Q&A sessions between players and fans during the game on Facebook. Bourne also expects players to respond to fan tweets.

But the messages players post on Twitter and Facebook are likely to be innocuous clichés. The MLB hasn't yet issued comprehensive guidelines for the All-Star game. Officials will meet on Monday and Tuesday to discuss what they will do if a player posts something during the game that is not appropriate. However, MLB officials will be posted at each station, so they may literally be looking over players' shoulders as they tweet.

The better a player is, the more interesting and provocative he can be, says Jim Bouton, author of the groundbreaking and bestselling baseball tell-all Ball Four. “You’re only as smart as your batting average,” Bouton said. “And the guy who is outspoken and candid with sports writers is probably going to be the same personality who tweets.”

(That is, if the players are actually writing their own tweets. “The Tweets may or may not be real,” he added. “Players didn’t used to respond to their own fan mail. Others did it for them. It’s likely to be the same with Twitter. Some guys will actually tweet, and others will have someone else do it for them.”)

Sports leagues are only just beginning to experiment with orchestrating players' social-media presence. The NFL first allowed its players to use Twitter via computers set up on each sideline during the 2012 Pro Bowl. The NFL let them tweet whatever they wanted - presumably because the Pro Bowl is a meaningless game.

In contrast, the MLB All-Star Game will determine which team has home-field advantage in the World Series. Consequently, the MLB has put big restrictions in place. “We don’t want them relaying information that may change game strategy,” Bourne said. A player could, for example, tweet that one of his team’s players is sick or has a sore arm.

That may be about as exciting as All-Star tweets could get, even without restrictions. The Pro Bowl tweets tended toward blather, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which cited examples like this from Steelers wide receiver Mike Wallace: “Having a great time out here with some awesome players!! Plus we get to tweet on top of that!!!!”

MLB is well aware of the importance of social media. It maintains many official league Twitter feeds, as well as 30 official team Twitter accounts. Players can pretty much use social media freely. Some, Bourne said, have done so very effectively. “We’ve seen a change in endorsements and companies looking to partner with players," he added. "They look at a variety of factors when they consider these partnerships, and if a player has strong social media reach, they become more attractive.”

While the restrictions during the All-Star Game may make player tweets largely innocuous, the sheer volume of fan activity on Twitter, combined with some interaction with players, is part of a bigger strategy: Meet the fans where they are. Then see what works and what doesn’t. “There’s anecdotal information and research that when something catches fire on Twitter it drives people to watch,” Bourne says. “We could be talking to people already watching and who are chatting in real time, or something interesting could pique the curiosity of someone not watching. It’s the first time that we’ve done this, so we have to just see what happens.” 

The researchers used an automated script to bring up a series of URLs inside a virtual Windows VM and observe what happens to its OS, plug-ins, and other browser settings. Once the site is visited, the VM's network traffic is monitored to see what malware has been placed on it.

On the link on their blog post is more information on their methodology and the complete infographic, which we have truncated here in the interests of readability.

Here is an example of how they work with TeamSite, so you can see notifications of your documents in your stream and still use the native TeamSite controls and menu ribbon too.

The idea is to establish an enterprise-wide social fabric that connects workers and enhances their ability to work together efficiently by sharing whatever tool each user is most comfortable with, at least in theory. Besides TeamSite, there are integrators with SharePoint and Dynamics CRM services too, so you can place activity streams inside their interfaces. There is also integration with Microsoft Lync, so you can send IMs from within Pulse. Pulse also has native apps on all three mobile platforms:
Android, Blackberry, and iOS.

What is intriguing about the product is that you can follow all sorts of things besides people in your activity stream, such as groups that are setup around specific topics, or even documents in your SharePoint repository. A few other social networking services have begun offering this flexibility, such as Yammer Files for example.

Pulse comes in both on-premises (with typical prices ranging from $8-$10,000 for a one time license with annual maintenance extra) and cloud versions. The private cloud version is $12 per user per month. One nicety is that there are no add-on costs for the various integration services.

McDougall starts off his book by saying "this is not a social media marketing manual." And it isn't. If you have had trouble getting engaged with Twitter, then his 25 suggestions of simple "projects" (and don't be scared off by that word, they are really easy things to do, many of which can be completed in a single sitting and in just a few hours) to kickstart your Tweeting career. His goal with this book is to come up with ways that you can build and augment your existing community of customers, followers, connections, or whatever you want to call the people that you are communicating with using other mechanisms.

And these projects are designed for quicker payoffs and to see the results of your efforts, in keeping with the low attention threshold that is Twitter. Some of the projects that McDougall describes include:

• Run a contest like your typical radio station: "be the 10th person to tweet" and give away a small prize
  
• Create a hashtag game around your company or products
  
• ?ake MadLibs out of your marketing copy or mission statement
  
• Hold a scavenger hunt, and relay clues via Twitter
  
• Organize a weekly Twitter chat on various subjects
  
• Solicit funny product shots, using Twitter's photo-sharing utility
  

For example, you could run the hashtag game at your next user conference as an ice-breaker, and as a way to get your customers involved in doing something other than sitting in a meeting room. The idea is to have some fun with these ideas.

I admit that I could be a better user of Twitter: part of it is sheer laziness, part is just having too much to do in an average workday. But this book has got me fired up to try a couple of his suggestions. You can view a sample of McDougall's book and purchase it from O'Reilly's site here.

Over the last two years they have been using Nimsoft's WatchMouse SaaS-based server monitoring tool to keep track of their digital assets. Prior to WatchMouse, they had a homegrown solution that told them when a server was down, or waited for a user to let them know. But this wasn't perfect, because so much of Wikipedia's content isn't directly accessed by users, but through third-party apps via programming interfaces. This is a lot harder to track. Plus, Wikimedia wanted to become a lot more transparent about its operations, and have a dashboard (available here) that shows uptime and other statistics, as you see from the screencap below.

"Transparency is a big part of who we are as an organization," said CT Woo, the director of technical operations for the foundation. "We have an obligation to make information about how we operate available to our user community." The status page is hosted on Amazon's Web Services by Nimsoft. Since deploying the solution, they have been able to better keep track of server uptime and performance issues and become more proactive when there is a connectivity problem or traffic bottleneck.

At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.

Back in the day, we had to do mods on our vehicles the hard way: with timing lights and crescent wrenches and a lot of getting grease on our hands. Now, through the miracle of software, you don't even have to step into the garage. One suggestion from the site is to better tune your GPS antenna. Any data feeds from the car will be isolated from the actual operations and vehicle control systems, so you can't do damage to the vehicle. And you thought you just had to worry about distracted driving?

Here is an example of one app already built to monitor your fuel efficiency:

The first beta kits will be soon sent to various university engineering teams and independent developers, including WeatherUnderground.com and HCL Technologies in India.

Ford has been building upgradeable firmware into its cars for several years now, indeed the new cars get their latest update as they are passing through the assembly lines, which are equipped with Wifi-routers to beam the updates directly to the cars. Ford and Bug Labs aren't the first, and certainly not the last effort to try to introduce more open source auto software: the Oscar project has been around for more than a decade, working with the folks at Technology Review magazine.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

• Timing is important for live events. Most people avoid conducting webinars on Mondays or Fridays, because your audience isn't as engaged as the middle of the week. Also, if you are going for an American audience, try to do it in the middle of the day, say between 11am and 3p ET, so you can cover most of the time zones. While most webinars that I have been a part of are scheduled for an hour, try to make them shorter because of reduced attention spans.

• Advance work is critical. SAP suggests that you start at least 12 weeks out before the actual event: that is probably excessive, but still you want to do some advance work in terms of promoting the event, booking your speakers, and making sure your content is ready. And make sure you start your meetings on time, too! No one wants to wait around while you fiddle with the controls or because a speaker is late. This means testing the visual and especially audio quality ahead of the actual event to ensure that you know how to operate all the various controls. The cheaper products tend to fall down when it comes to audio quality, but this is critical to keeping your audience engaged.

• Yes, I said speakers, as in more than one. I find a world of difference between solo and even having a single guest on my webinars. You want to vary the tone and perspective and create a conversational tone between the two (or even three) of you. No one wants to hear a monologue, unless you are a late-night TV host.

• Flog your internal customer lists and get the word out. Part of the advance work is promoting your event with as many different tools as you can: email, social media, links on your blogs, and so forth. Post the recorded play-back on your site and link to the slide deck on Slideshare.net. (Or if your provider doesn't have a mechanism to do this, take a look at the tool from Artic Fox we covered last fall.) Make use of a custom registration page to capture the leads and follow up with emails afterwards with these links.

• Nix those bullet-point slides. In any event, don't produce slides that are just text and certainly don't read those bullet points. You want something more engaging. Use the camera controls if you have access to these to move around in your office studio, or vary between showing the speakers and your PC screens. It is okay to have one or two (such as an agenda slide at the beginning) but don't roll out lots of text.

• Make your presentation engaging. Leave places in your presentation to solicit questions from your audience. If your webinar service provider has a polling feature, put up a couple of polls during the presentation and ask your audience for their perspective. Take questions from social media too if you can.
  

Good luck with your webinar, and feel free to share your own best practices here too.

The company monitoring 46 different vendors' websites yesterday and found three big losers:

1. The Coke Polar Bears Facebook page and main website was unavailable in five languages, as you can see in the screen capture below:

   

2. Act of Valor had a very impressive ad, but their website was less so. According to Yottaa's monitoring, it seemed every time the spot ran the site crashed, with more than six outages of five minutes each. The site was also five times slower yesterday during game time.

3. Acura cars had problems too. "The launch of their new performance car was met with poor performance from their website." Their home page was fine, but the call to action pages were saturated with traffic on Sunday.
   

Cars.com, TaxACT.com, GoDaddy.com and History.com all fared really well during the Super Bowl, according to Bob Buffone, writing on Yottaa's blog. He emphasizes that live stress testing is critical at this big event-driven moments, and instrumenting what is going on during the event is essential if the sites are going to meet the anticipated demand.

Like Hootsuite, you can schedule your tweets in advance and the free service allows you to access five different social media accounts across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can schedule up to five messages per hour for the free service. There are numerous charts and graphs to show you various statistics, such as the number of LinkedIn posts per day as you can see below:

Gremln has lots more to it than just stats, though. It works with Brev.is or Bit.ly to shorten and track your URLs in your Tweets, you can add RSS feeds to your dashboard, and it even has a UI that looks a lot like Hootsuite, if you don't want to leave that behind.

There are various paid plans that start at $6 a month and expand the number of Tweets per hour scheduled, the number of saved report templates, and that add the ability to include Web analytics so you can track the results of your social networking campaigns to see if they actually resulted in increased Web traffic. And there are ways for work teams to share and jointly manage their accounts, something that Hootsuite isn't good at. If you are obsessive about your Klout score, you can link to your account and watch it ebb and flow as the company tweaks its algorithms too.

You can sign up here on the Gremln site and try it out.

Besides the usual Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube statistics, you can also add in Google Analytics and AdSense, Wordpress (provided you first install the Cyfe plug-in to your account), Alexa rankings, SEOMOz, Zendesk trouble tickets, Freshbook open invoices, Salesforce leads and tasks, GotoWebinar registrations, Constant Contact emails opened, Amazon's Cloud Watch stats, Pingdom's response time, Feedburner RSS feeds and more. If that isn't enough, you can create your own custom charts and graphs based on this information. Here you can see one dashboard (you can have multiple ones, too) that I set up in a matter of minutes to examine Tweets, Web site page views and YoutTube stats:

The Twitter widget will scroll as your Tweets come in. If you click on the graphs you get a pop-up legend that shows you the particular stats, similar to how Google Analytics works. Both are nice touches.

Hootsuite, Bottlenose and SproutSocial are some of the numerous dashboards that we have covered in the past, but Cyfe has promise: if they can continue to tread the line between easy setup and dense coverage of multiple analytic methods.

As I said, the free account gives you five widgets and multiple dashboards. You can spend up to $49 per month for 100 widgets.

Influence can be used in several different situations: You just want a poor man's Webex without the hassles of setup and still have the ability to make a few comments about screen layouts for example. Or you might want to get a quick "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on one of your designs, or some detailed annotations on each mockup in your design presentation. All of these are better than the tried and true method of the past: sending email attachments and trying to manage the resulting feedback and email streams and conflicting recommendations. You can see a screen shot of the various choices here:

We have written extensively about the company's annotation and collaboration tools before, including Notable (for cross-device graphic collaboration), Reel (an alternative to Slideshare), and Verify (for collecting user feedback).

Pricing hasn't yet been announced but will be similar to Notable: $19/month for basic features and $49/month for premium accounts. You can request an invite to their beta now and try it out for free here. You might want to wait a week or so for the service to settle down: both times we tried to upload a PPT deck and didn't get very far.

The current report shows that business users radically increased the amount of time spent looking at their Tweet streams and using Facebook apps. Palo Alto's firewalls captured 65 different Web-based file sharing services, with an average of 13 being used in each corporation. That is a lot of file sharing going on, to be sure, but still in the aggregate only another one percent of total network bandwidth. And the amount of browser-based file sharing is roughly equal to the amount of social networking going on, in terms of total bandwidth consumption, as you can see from the table below:

More than 90% of the organizations sampled have both file sharing and social networking happening over their networks. The biggest bandwidth hog is Megaupload, which is used for sharing video files. The company found that Megaupload was found in 57% of the organizations it surveyed, yet it consumed the highest proportion of bandwith, a quarter compared to 22% for Dropbox. Here are more stats on the trends that they have observed:

(Click to enlarge.)

Usage of anonymizing tools also rose: Tor is now found on 13% of the corporate networks instrumented by Palo Alto. You can download the report here.

Included are several enhancements for showing a call-to-action slide that will come at the end of your video stream (the controls to set this up are shown below), new social sharing buttons that will appear at the bottom of the video frame, along with a place to add your logo too. As if this isn't enough, there is also the ability to add an interactive transcript that scrolls along with the video. Some of these can be found in competitive players, but none in a package for the equivalent cost of Wistia's hosting service.

The nice thing about Wistia's transcripts is they contain essential Google SEO juice. You can click on a particular word and be magically transported to that portion of the video. Wistia has a two-step process: they convert the text automatically, and then spend another day passing the text through human readers to ensure accuracy.

The new features are all part of your account at no extra charge, with the exception of the transcriptions that will cost $5 per minute of your video. Plans begin at $23 a month for hosting up to three videos, and jump to $79 a month for unlimited videos. And, as the company says, "They will work on your desktop, they will work across browsers, they will work on all mobile devices, with no extra work on your end." That is great news indeed.

What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.

I tried out MaaS360 on both a Kindle Fire and an iPad and got them under my corporate thumb within about an hour, including the time it took to learn more about the various requirements for the service. Fiberlink claims that they are the first Fire supporter, I wasn't able to verify that. Here is a nice short video explanation of what the product does with an interview with our own Dan Rowinski.

If you are going to evaluate any of these products, the first thing you want to examine is which devices do they manage. For that, you will need special client software. If you want to allow anything on your network, you need some kind of agent that keeps track of what your end users are doing with it, and can protect it in case of malware or other infections. MaaS360 has versions for iOS, Android/Kindle, Blackberry, Louts Traveler, and Microsoft Exchange, among numerous other tools. Its download page (you can freely try any of these out for 30 days) is almost overwhelming.

Depending on what platform you are protecting, you will have to go through a process to install the agent and set things up. Any iOS device requires a series of cryptographic certification installation steps to get things going, which is somewhat annoying (this is from Apple, not the fault of anybody else). MaaS360 is fairly straightforward: you register your device on this screen:

And then it sends you an email with the download link that you open in the mobile's browser to finish things up.

Once you have your agent up and running, you go into your portal to track what is going on. You can get lots of detail such as the report below on a Kindle Fire (running the Android OS) that you see below:

MaaS360 can integrate with your Active Directory or LDAP server so you can bulk load up your management system without having to do much manual installation, but there still is some work involved.

A second issue is in understanding the portal page where the service tracks what is going on across your network. What information is presented, what is actionable, what you can safely ignore. It could be more work to understand what you are seeing than you bargained. This is somewhat akin to when intrusion detection products first came into corporate networks; we needed to train our security staff what they were reporting and what they needed to pay more attention to.

Next, you want to examine how flexible the device management policies are with the service. With MaaS360, you have dozens of different levers you can push to prevent the device from connecting to particular Wifi networks, allow installation of particular apps from outside the approved marketplaces, and enforce device encryption.

Finally, what is all this going to cost? MaaS360 starts at $6 apiece per month in quantity of 100 devices and discounts are available as the number of devices increases.

MaaS360 is just one of dozens of MDM and endpoint products that are out there. One of my favorite for ordinary Windows and Mac desktops is Symantec's Endpoint Protection, which currently doesn't offer any mobile agents - yet.

DNSCrypt solves one critical flaw in the DNS process: the ability to snoop as a "man in the middle" of a conversation between two computers, because it encrypts all DNS traffic between your computer and the Internet. This is a real concern, and there have been several exploits lately that took advantage of DNS requests, because the vast majority of them are issued in the clear. (Just like most emails.)

The version of DNSCrypt that is available is a "preview" meaning that it could have problems in daily use. We haven't yet tried it.

DNSCrypt isn't the only game in town, and for years an effort called DNSSEC has been trying to take hold for increased DNS security. DNSSEC solves a larger problem: not only does it provided an encrypted channel, but also adds authentication and a chain of trust to ensure that the expected DNS record hasn't been tampered with. They can be used together. Sadly, few sites have implemented it to date.

"In theory, the user can just run their own DNS server on their own machine with DNSSEC enabled, and be protected," says Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS and now the chief scientist with Nominum, a DNS supplier. "But in practice, a variety of last mile, performance, and code readiness issues deter all but die-hard end users from doing so." Mockapetris says that DNSCrypt "probably doesn't add much for the enterprise user who is sitting at his desk, but could be huge for an enterprise user who is using an open hotspot in some random wine bar in a foreign country or an ancient WiFi system in some hotel that lets one guest see another guest's traffic." Given the number of hotels that I have stayed at that have open networks, I would say this is a real issue. (See my suggestion here for closing your file shares when you travel.)

"It would have been better to have the DNSSEC designers bite the bullet and insist on and design for end-to-end DNSSEC, but until then DNSCrypt is an idea whose time has come," he says.

As you can see from the screen capture, you have all your controls and buttons on a single page, enabling you to assemble the code for your player from various options. You can loop the video or have it pause on the last frame (the latter is my preference, and why I design a specific endcap slide for that position). You can change the color of the player with a simple mouse click, or type in the color value directly in the color chart on the bottom right. You can simply resize the video window to any dimensions by entering them directly in the upper right boxes. You have your choice of two sizes of play buttons.

According to the company, the video stream automatically adjusts depending on bandwidth available to the browsing client, which is another nice touch.

Wistia offers a solid dose of analytics if you use their player, as we have written about earlier this summer here. Plans begin at $23 a month for hosting up to three videos, and jump to $79 a month for unlimited videos.

Jabber will have a free downloadable Web plug-in to make it easier to access the Cisco communications features. This means that a user with a browser can do text chats and participate in video conferencing across a wide range of client devices, including iOS, Android and Blackberry phones. Cisco has the first version of an SDK that is available here to help corporate developers incorporate Jabber features into custom apps. To incorporate these features, you will need a no-cost license for Cisco Communications Manager.

Not to be left out of the free action, there will be a new "Basic" edition of WebEx that will support up to three participants with the full range of features, which will be available early next year. The new features include Cisco's "one-button-to-push" technology, where WebEx users can now easily connect into Cisco TelePresence meetings from their Android and Apple mobile devices. Integrated experiences will also be provided with Cisco Jabber, Cisco Quad and Cisco Medianet. A public beta is expected next month. Added to WebEx will be the ability to have persistent storage similar to the cloud-drive products, so that work teams can more easily collaborate on documents. The meeting space (see above) looks a lot like Facebook/Yammer/Socialtext and other social sharing apps.

Timeline view is still available in Google News, but it only searches certain archived publications instead of all Web results. Google community managers have suggested the normal date range filter as an alternative, but this isn't a browsable feature like Timeline was. Just as it has done with Google Reader in recent weeks, Google has killed off a feature used by a small but dedicated set of its users.

In response to user complaints about the disappearance of Timeline, Google search community manager Kelly Fee suggests using google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search for graphs of search results over time, but those tools only go back to 2004, and they aren't a part of Web search. She also suggests the Google Books ngram viewer, but that's only for book searches.

Google's Going Real-Time

The end of Timeline coincides with its implementation of new real-time search algorithms that privilege recent results over old ones by assuming when users want current information. It's also experimenting with real-time search on Google+, and it's surfacing recent posts from the social network in Web search. The removal of Timeline pushes users of Google search away from historical content and toward real-time results.

Google can do whatever it wants with its free services, and it doesn't have to explain itself to anyone. And pushing around smaller products like Google Reader in the interest of Google+ is a sensible business move. But taking away useful features of Google search raises a more core issue.

As Vic Gundotra has made clear, the + part of Google is integral to Google itself. Is it starting to change the company's priorities? Google's mission has always been to organize the Web's information. Is its new social experiment in real-time trends compromising that?

Timeline search screenshot credit: Digital Marketing Rucksack

(Click to enlarge the screen. There is a "before" picture posted on TechReview's site too.)

Of course, by October things were a bit different in the Twitterverse, as on the streets of New York and elsewhere. The above screen shot shows centers of influence from Huffington Post and Keith Olbermann, with smaller nodes from the New York Post, CNN and the Associated Press. Where is the coverage by the Grey Lady? Too small to see with my eyes. That in itself shows you how the message was spread and who was relevant and who wasn't. Fascinating.