March 2009
Enterprise 2.0 Blog
I have posted a new video interview up at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, a great interview with Joe Schueller at P&G.
I had the opportunity to talk with Joe several times in the past weeks, and I found the experience extremely rewarding. Every word is worth listening to, since P&G is so large that nearly every issue crops up, and Joe knows his stuff.
Bit.ly Funding Round Announced
I am happy to see that the new round of funding for Bit.ly has been announced by Marshall Kirkpatrick.
Bit.ly has been incubated by Betaworks, and the round of around $2M was led by Alpha Tech Ventures (the O’Reilly venture fund), with participation by Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, The Accelerator Group, Jeff Clavier, and Howard Lindzon’s new Social Leverage fund.
Bit.ly provides...
Micropsychographics: Twitter Types And Retweeting
I had dinner with Alistair Kroll last night, and we fell into a discussion of the inevitability of Twitter being overrun with corporate marketing folks, eager to have the twitterati clicking on and retweeting various URLs they would be embedding in their corporate twitter streams. For the purpose of this discussion, I will refer to all tweets with a URL as URled (pronounced...
wwwitter: Twitter Tweetbacks
Stumbled upon a neat tool, wwwitter (http://www.wwwitter.com/), that displays tweets referring to the webpage you currently have open in the browser (“tweetbacks”):
wwwitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
What I want is to have this embedded in every blog post, next to the comments section. I have asked the geek behind wwwitter to consider that.
Gtdagenda: Not On My Agenda, You Don't
Maybe it’s just been a long week, and I am getting crotchety, but I opened this new task manager app, and I was stopped in my tracks by the UI.
Gtdagenda.com, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Ok. I created a project. Then I wanted to add a task to it, so I clicked on the Task tab at the top. That took me to the screen above.
Then I stopped.
Just too many things on the screen I...
I Am Afraid Of Ghosts: Guy Kawasaki And The...
I read the recent interview with Guy Kawasaki at Iampaddy and I was saddened to read his thoughts on ghostwriting on Twitter:
Why does it matter who is doing the tweeting? Either the content is good or not good. I’d rather follow a smart intern tweeting for a CEO than an dumb CEO tweeting for himself or herself. Twitter is great that way: Everybody, no matter who they are, gets 140...
Ada Lovelace Day: Barbara Liskov
A long, long time ago, I was a software researcher, and my focus was software tools and programming languages. One of the biggest influences on my thinking about programming languages was Barbara Liskov, a professor at MIT, who had developed the CLU programming language in the mid 70s. I think its fitting that my Ada Lovelace day honoree (if this is an honor for her, in fact) is someone so...
Open Enterprise 2009: Andrew McAfee Interview And...
I am happy to say that Oliver Marks and I have agreed to dovetail the research we are doing for the Open Enterprise 2009 Study with the Enterprise 2.0 conference. As a result, we are publishing the research on the Enterprise 2.0 blog. We will also be presenting our results at the conference in June.
I recently interviewed the godfather of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee of the Harvard School...
Reaching The Limits: Twitter-in-the-Large and...
Two scare pieces have appeared at around the same moment, both ignited by the spike in Twitter usage that accompanies SxSW.
The basic premise is that we are reaching — or have already reached — the limits of what I will call Twitter-in-the-Small, an era when Twitter was a community of a few hundred thousand bitheads. As the Twittersphere grows to include millions — and not...
Word Of The Moment: Mindcasting
[via On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting | Technology | Los Angeles Times by David Sarno]
There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.
Mindcasting is where it’s at.
The...
TwitterCounter: Paying To Be "Featured"?
Yet another questionable business practice: charging users to be “featured”?
[via email]
Hi,
You recently inquired about becoming a featured user on TwitterCounter. We get a lot of requests for that position so decided to charge a fee for the privilege. We currently generate 17000 page-views a day and featured users are displayed on every page. The price for a week is...
Poll: Pay For Post Concept Is Radioactive
PRsarahevans poll, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I think the reality is — demonstrated by @prsarahevans poll today — that the term PayForPost has become radioactive. It’s plutonium, and despite what Forrester social media experts tell you, we should stay far, far away.
More Complaints About Yelp Business Practices, Now...
The Yelp story is like a fire in a peat bog: it doesn’t go away, even when it looks like the flames are completely gone.
The newest chapter is based on allegations by Chicago store owners [via DCSmitty]:
[from Chicago proprietors add to Yelp allegations by Monica Eng]
Ina Pinkney of Ina’s restaurant in the West Loop said that last summer a Yelp salesperson offered to...
How To Value Social Networks?
Jemima Kiss makes a seemingly innocuous statement in a recent piece in the Guardian: Report: Social networks flourish - but still have to solve the targeted ads riddle:
The usefulness of social networking sites is proportionate to the number of users they have
I disagree, really. But it begs the question: how should we value social networks, if not based on population?
I maintain that we...
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Things Fall Apart: Edge Economics And Crisis
There are a lot of folks suggesting that the Econolypse might lead to something more than a recession and a rebound. Jeff Jarvis suggests that we are headed to a ‘great restructuring’ of our economy, with great parts of it (print media) perhaps completely wiped out, or crushed to a fraction of their former size. Umair Haque has suggested we are in a ‘compression’...
Done Is The Engine Of More
A pointer from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing led to the revelatory post from Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, The Cult Of Done Manifesto. I resist the temptation to reproduce it in all its thirteenish completeness. Here’s a few nibbles:
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if...
Manymoon, Staction and Posterous: Workstreaming
I found myself wanting to like Manymoon, a new project manager app that touts itself as the ‘first social project management tool’, but try as I might, I don’t like it.
Manymoon | Project | manymoon, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
The idea of a stream of project-related updates and items is a good one — I used this premise in the design of Workstreamer several...
Google Real-Time Twitter Search... Sort Of
I found a link to a MT-Hacks post [via Microplaza, which is another pending post] describing a greasemonkey script that brings real-time Twitter search directly into Google search results:
twitter search results on google - Google Search, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I installed the script, created by Mark Carey, and it seems to work, albeit somewhat slower than the native Google...