December 21, 2008 at 7:47 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Did I scare you? Let me explain…
Last week, I had a great time hanging out with Biz, Battelle, Shellen, at the Unilever All-a-Twitter conference arranged by Silva. During the conference, Biz gave a great talk on real stories about his company, Twitter. The theme of his talk was how Twitter has enabled the dynamic creation of real-time communities.
One such community that has emerged that is near and dear to my heart is themediaisdying. This community emerged over the last two weeks and has rapidly gained over 7k followers! The goal of this feed is to update people on changes in major media companies such as layoffs, bankruptcies, etc.
This feed is a great example of what Biz was talking about and is also pretty useful. if you are in the online/media biz (no pun intended), I would check it out. If you have some time to kill check out this old post I wrote on the changing landscape 2 years ago. Seems like I was not too far off.
Later fan-boys.
December 17, 2008 at 10:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
As you may have noticed, or NOT noticed, I have been away for a bit. I needed to take a little break to focus a bit on work and, more importantly, rediscover my creative muse.
For those of you that have been doing this for a couple of years, you probably know the feeling. You love to write and chat with the community and - frankly - you would do it no matter who reads it. It’s just plain fun. But for whatever reason, sometimes you lose perspective. Things that you usually did with a vigor end up feeling like a chore.
I suppose that’s the ebb and flow of life, but anyway, I’m back. My hiatus felt good and now I have a ton to share. For those of you that have stopped by in the past, I am amped to chat with you again.
December 17, 2008 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I was talking to a good buddy of mine out in the valley about the component services required to build an open content sharing solution. Specifically, we discussed an open infrastructure that would enable web application developers to build sites that enabled users to move images, videos, widgets, etc from their site to other endpoints. In the context of that discussion, however, we spent a lot of time discussing a very narrow topic. What’s the future of URL-shortening?
For those of you that are not familiar with the URL-shortening space, it is a web service (typically exposed on a website via a simple form), that enables a user to take a BIG url and make it smaller. Why the hell is that useful? Well, for services like Twitter with character limitations - this service is essential. A big huge url string will take all of the space you would use all the characters within your message. Some leaders in the space are Tinyurl and Bit.ly.
At Clearspring, we are interested in understanding the future of these solutions because of our AddThis Sharing and Bookmarking service. AddThis is a sharing tool that publishers can quickly add to websites and enable users to post URL-based content to places like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and more. As we started exploring, I started to wonder…
- 1. Should a sharing service build their own url-shortener, or integrate?
- 2. Assuming you integrate, what’s the business model for the url-shortener?
- 3. As sites become more used to exchanging data, will url-shortening even matter?
I am a big fan of these services. There are probably a ton of applications for their data, but I still have questions. Would love to hear any thoughts on this.
November 2, 2008 at 8:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Like many of the 2.0 geekery out there, I have been blogging for a couple years now. My first real blog, Convergence, lays dormant collecting dust in the boundless information sphere that is the web.
Blogging is a great way to organize my thoughts, put out new ideas, and get feedback on concepts that I am kicking around. The general idea, however, is that I can broadcast a collection of ideas via a post that, in turn, becomes part of the web and attracts comments from interested folks in a community of interest.
I originally started blogging on Blogger. I moved over to Wordpress about two years ago. Recently, however, I have been spending more time using services that let me communicate in smaller chunks. Specifically, I have been using Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. Because of the ecosystem of Twitter applications, I have managed to collapse my communication channels down a bit. All I have to do is post to Twitter and - POOF - my post is on Facebook and Friendfeed - ready to be commented on.
Today, I posted a little thought I had about connecting Pandora and Facebook, on my wall:
Hooman is thinking that it would KICK ASS if pandora would dynamically update my status with the song I am listening to and a link. Thoughts on this revelation?
Within the day, several friends quickly started discussing the idea. The total comments on the topic last time I checked were six. That’s pretty powerful. More and more I am spending time communicating in short bursts. It seems like it makes more sense for me to publish large collections of ideas via my blog and the rest via microblogs.
What does microblogging mean for the future of blogging platforms? Will less people blog? Or will the platforms themselves evolve to enable short-form communication? Wonder what Matt Mullenweg thinks?
October 2, 2008 at 1:18 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Nick from SocialTimes had an interesting post today on the future of widgets on Facebook. His conclusion - Widgets are dead on Facebook. Well, let’s think about that…
Since the new Facebook profile was released, we have gotten a ton of inbound inquiry from customers asking us a simple question - what are the implications of this new design? From my interaction with users, they are not exactly thrilled with the new design. Even the terminator seems disenchanted. It seems that these users are not alone.
Developers that created social applications have also felt the hit. In particular, those developers that have applications that were dependent on badges, or widgets, on the profile page have been hit extremely badly. Nick was one of those developers whose traffic tanked because of the new design. I would not be shocked if many others felt the pinch given that the meteoric successes on Facebook were early on and assumed that the profile was a central part of their design.
So is everything lost? Are widgets dead on FB? Nah.
1. The new profile is focused on a feed-centric design. For publishers and developers, getting into that feed in a real way is key as it is the new center-stage. As it happens, one way to get into feeds is with - you guessed it - widgets. For example, NBC’s Tiny Fey’s now famous Saturday Night Live skit made it’s way to thousands and thousands of users via a Clearspring-powered video player. The more users that post into their feeds, the greater viral distribution the widget receives. Ultimately, the widget will get ‘worked-out’ of the system, but the ability for the widget to virally spread is clear.
2. The relative prevalence of the ‘Boxes Tab’ to the other application access mechanisms gives widgets (boxes) greater prominence relative to the canvas page and makes Facebook’s application management interface much more akin to start pages like iGoogle, or Netvibes - classic widget repositories.
So, are widgets dead on FB? No. Applications that depended on a consistent profile presence like Bumper Sticker, or the Bush Countdown Clock are definitely impacted. But it seems that amidst the hype around apps, old reliable (widgets) are here to the rescue.
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