This is the 1st part of Social Media 101 Series.

Social media is a web-enbaled social platform, a world built on ideas such as participation, openness, conversation, community and connectedness. A world where people are linking up with each other in various ways…

They write reviews for each other on Epinions and Yelp
They connect to each other using social networks like Facebook and MySpace
They upload, share and comment on each other photos on Flickr
They record, upload, share and comment on each other videos on YouTube
They collaborate with each other to create valuable information on wikipedia
They post their short thoughts and connect to each other on Twitter
They react to and help each other on forums
They organize the world information through links and tags
They post their ideas on everything using their blogs
They write, post and read their news on digg and Mixx
They save their bookmarks on del.icio.us
and many more…

In other words, Social media describes the online tools and platforms that people use to connect with each other, and share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives.

Social media has many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social media sites include blogs, social networks, forums, social news, podcasts, wikis, social video and widgets.

The web is a connection machine. It is connecting people with information, action, and each other. It is in those connections that value is created, knowledge is built, and relationships are formed.

Every action, every link and every click is an expression of a connection.

Social Media is the new web-enabled layer of easy, natural, instant and continuous connections over society.

Since we’re working in the Social Media space, we’re being asked all kinds of questions about Social media, by partners, clients and people who are interested to know what we’re doing.

Some of those questions we know the answers to and others we (as part of the industry) are still trying to figure them out.

We decided it would be a good idea to put the questions/issues and their answers here on the blog to help everyone quickly get educated, and provide them with proper info and details to pass around to their colleagues, bosses or clients.

We’ll start with the four basic questions, which are on everyone’s mind when we mention Social media:

What is Social Media?
Why does it matter?
What does it mean to my business?
How do I do it right?

The series is a continuous effort without an end in mind, it will updated regularly as we tackle further questions and issues, please bookmark this post and check back for updates.

On a closing note, you are welcome to send us any other questions you might have or issues on your mind regarding social media and its business applications.

Every business should have certain guidelines that decide which gigs to take and which to turn down, our 5 simple rules for that are (in the particular order):

1- Will it be fun?
2- Is it something new and innovative?
3- Will it bring good income?
4- Will it bring us closer to our goals?
5- Do we feel good about our client?

Projects have to provide two of the above to be worth taking, otherwise we say “No” politely and refer the client to one of our partners.

Of course there’s bound to be exceptions, like a certain project that carry one factor that significantly shadows other factors, but they are few and far between.

We believe that learning when to say “No”, matters more to our success than saying “Yes”.

And it’s not only because we have limited resources, but also because we (and you) should care about the output of our work, and any project that doesn’t carry some of the above rules won’t come up as good as it optimally should be.

Do you have similar rules in place? and if yes, what are they?

Judging by our name “CloudAppers”, you can figure out that we are firm believers in the Cloud power, and it makes perfect sense to use as many web-based tools as we could to provide our services, build our projects, products and handle our internal processes.

Here’s the list of apps and services that make the experience of running our business a breeze:

•  We’re using Macs as our machines (obviously!!)
• For accounting, tracking proposals, invoices and payments we use LessAccounting.
• For programming and development we use TextMate and AptanaStudio.
• For HTML and CSS work we use Adobe Dreamweaver.
• For FTP we use Transmit.
• For creating documents we use Google Apps, Scrivener and iWork.
• For Email we’re using Gmail.
• For Instant communication we use Adium and Skype.
• For Project Management we’re using Basecamp.
• For Contacts management we use Highrise.
• For Email newsletters we use VerticalResponse.
• For Internal Bug tracking we use Trac.
• For code versioning we’re using hosted Subversion (SVN) on hosted-projects.
• For creating mockups we use OmniGraffle.
• For image capture we use Jing.
• For graphic design and image editing we use Adobe Illustrator and Pixelmator.
• For Web hosting we use Joyent, ASmallOrange and BlueHost.
• For running our blogs we use Wordpress.
• For Blogging we use MarsEdit.
• For Analytics we use Google Analytics.
• For creating Forms we use Wufoo.
• For managing RSS Feeds we use Feedburner.
• As a development environment, we’re using Apache, MySQL and CakePHP framework.

What tools/software do you use for your work and business?

Since the soft launch of CloudAppers, a lot has happened that steered the company in a direction different from the one intended at the beginning.

As a result of Market research, clients feedback and the influence of current partners, CloudAppers decided to become more focused on providing Social Media strategies for the web, combining web technologies, new media, and innovative ideas to create really cool stuff for clients.

In addition to Social Media, CloudAppers provides PR 2.0 services, which come as a natural extension to Social Media.

The Website has been updated to reflect the new changes, for more information about the previous services, please refer to the “Services” section for more info about the previous services.

I’m proud to announce that CloudAppers is officially a registered company in Dubai Media City as “CloudAppers FZ-LLC”, our office is located at Dubai Media City, Al Thuraya 2 Building, 6th floor, Office #5.

Everything is in place for CloudAppers to transition from solo venture into a full-blown business, stay tuned for accelerating development during the next few months.

It’s been 2 months now since the soft launch of CloudAppers, and I haven’t posted since then, and the reason as you might expect is that I’ve been extremely busy with getting this business up and running, so to speak. And whatever free time I have left, I’m spending it on my blog Technozzle and Twitter.

As for updates on CloudAppers, things couldn’t have been any better.
Even though CloudAppers isn’t actually seeking work, I’m barely keeping up with the demand from clients referred to me through my friends and contacts.

Concerning officially starting the company things haven’t progressed according to my hopes, because of some complications with my previous company and the amount of paperwork needed to be done to register the company.

Been busy talking with clients, doing some work for them, interviewing future employees, talking with interested investors, working on some internal projects, and getting the hang of being a business owner.

In a nutshell here are some quick updates about CloudAppers:

- Working now on the paperwork necessary to register the company.
- Settling in an actual office will be subject to space availability in Dubai Media City, which is said to be pretty cramped up.
- 2 amazing guys will be joining CloudAppers family soon, more details about them in a future post.
- Although I intended for CloudAppers to be self-funded and didn’t actually seek any funding, a couple of investors have approached me with attractive offers, so I’ll be looking more into them instead of shutting them down.
- Working on a couple of very innovative projects for local clients, unfortunately I cannot reveal any details at the moment, but I promise you that they will be nothing short of revolutionary.
- Already started to work on a couple of very exciting internal projects, hoping to start releasing them in the next couple of months, Stay tuned.

I will post more details about the previous updates and other future ones soon enough, in the mean time wish me luck

If our computers could be described as the earth we live on, then the web is the cloud, and its explosion is the best thing that happened to the technology scene during the past years.
All aspects of our digital lives are moving to the cloud, be it software, data (videos, photos, etc.), computing, and even social interaction and networking.

We believe that the future of software belongs to the web, and we’re here to help you be part of that. We are committed to building state-of-the-art applications to help our clients achieve seriously cool things on the cloud.

CloudAppers will be established as an official company in Dubai, UAE during the next few weeks, so this website may be considered as a soft launch of the company.

We will try and do things differently.; We are going to build the company and the projects in an open, public and transparent way.  We’re planning to tell everyone what we’re up to and how we’re doing it, hoping for your feedback on how we can become better.

CloudAppers is already involved in ujoor, an online payroll service in the UAE that will launch in early 2008, and the first product of CloudAppers will be Technozzle, which is a blog covering web technology news with an emphasis on web apps and cloud computing.

There is a couple of other very cool projects under design and development at the moment, we will announce them in the next few weeks, stay tuned and please check back here often, or subscribe to the RSS/Email feed on the sidebar.