Tag: twitter

  • Twitter – the official version

    There were some pretty interesting new things that came out at TechCrunch50 last week. TC50 was a conference that took place from September 8-10, 2008 where 52 of the ‘best’ startups were launched in front of an audience that consisted of the industry’s most influential venture capitalists, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, and press. I guess that would be bleeding edge. I followed it, thanks to some excellent coverage by StartupMeme. And that’s where I read about Yammer.

    Yammer intrigued me because of its utterly simple premise of ‘Twitter for business’. Where Twitter asks ‘What are you doing’, Yammer asks ‘what are you working on?’ I was even more intrigued because that’s a question LinkedIn has been asking for sometime now.  While the premise is simple, it does create some interesting new propositions – it only allows logins through official mail ids, making it quite secure, it lets users start their company network, invite people, and then serves as a database with individual profiles and conversations. For any user, it would be like a Twitter limited to his colleagues. All this is free, and if the organisation wants to play admin, it has to pay. Yammer already has Blackberry and iPhone apps. Apparently its demand was such that about 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the day it launched.

    And then Yammer just went ahead and won TC50. Chris Brogan smartly notes that the Twhirl client + a laconi.ca backend would amount to the same thing, with the added advantage that Twhirl also allows tabs of Twitter and Friendfeed. RWW just ripped the Yammer model threadbare.

    Now, I see some contradiction in all this. Twitter’s popularity lies in its simplicity, and a quite transparent way of communicating, and sharing. There is no officiating, there is nobody looking over your shoulder. To me, Yammer sounds a lot like Intranet 2.0, and assuming that organisations do allow it, later, if the organisation takes admin charge, I don’t know how many employees will still be comfortable using it. And why would organisations want control in the first place, if the idea is conversation? I’m wondering whether the existence of Yammer will make a Twitter enterprise solution irrelevant.

    There’s been some stuff happening over at Twitter too. The recent coverage of a funeral via Twitter led to questions about privacy issues. (via RWW) My take is that in a social environment, you avoid people whose conversations you don’t like, just like in the real world. In the long term, it will help people decide what they talk about and how. I’d mentioned two tools in my last Twitter post. A cool tool for marketeers – Twitterise, and Twiggit, a good mashup of Twitter and Digg. I came across two more tools – Tweetburner, a sort of feedburner for Twitter which could be a great tracking tool for brand and PR guys. Read more about it here, and Dwigger, another Twitter+Digg tool, but different from the earlier one i mentioned. In this you can paste a twitter message URL, or a new Dwigger only message, all in the by now familiar 140 characters, and submit it to Dwigger, to be voted and commented on. Hmm, more on that here. I also found a personally useful tool, which gives an analysis of your Twitter usage. They have done it using Yahoo Pipes, and rendered it using the Google Chart API. Very interesting. Check it out here. Meanwhile, Mashable has just posted their review on Fidj.it, ‘a micro-blogging service that’s like a Twitter and Pownce mashup.’ Shall check it out soon.

    To conclude, there are more and more twitter tools being developed for different user needs. If Yammer actually becomes a huge success, through some radically fresh employer attitude, I’d like to see a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users. It could be quite an awesome combination.

    until next time, feeling fidgety already?

  • Twitter Updates

    While the last post covered some ground in terms of social media, an entity which was conspicuous by its absence was Twitter, perhaps the social media tool that I use the most, these days. From sharing my anguish at Raikkonen ruining the Ferrari party in the penultimate lap of last weekend’s race, to checking out exciting sites/services that others have found, Twitter plays multiple roles in my communication.

    There have been several Twitter based services that have been launched since my last twitter post. We’ll start with Twittad. (via Mashable) If you have a not-so-bad twitter following, you can just sign up on the site, give your number of followers, and auction your twitter page to an interested advertiser. Check out the left side of this profile, he got $15 for a month’s display of that ad. Now, the background in Twitter is not clickable, so its just like say, a virtual non-interactive billboard. My bigger concern is that this is visible only to those who use the web interface. If you use say, Twitterfox, a browser plugin, or a desktop client, you may not even see this ad.

    That’s not the only advertising model available on Twitter. Another option I came across is Twitterise. This seems a more robust tool, and allows marketeers to use twitter as a platform. With a twitter account, you can schedule communication to go out to consumers, and more importantly track it in terms of response. Read more about it here. Its a nifty lil tool, and once users can get more detailing in terms of the clicks (who, when etc) generated, its a do-it-yourself kit for any brand manager to test out twitter. I’m going to give it a spin very soon, for my brand. 🙂  But the real story is Cherp, which is an entire agency that’s “dedicated to finding brilliant ways to leverage the Twitter platform and network”. I’m lost for words, even 140 characters!! On a sidenote, I read an interesting suggestion for Twitter to get some revenue.

    There are some interesting stuff for regular users too. For those who are also active on Digg, there’s a new tool Twiggit, which allows you to let your followers know everytime you Digg an article. Two great services, and one awesome mashup, i think!! The other tool I came across is Lazy Tweet, which works on crowd sourcing your answers. While I already use Twitter to get lots of answers, the next time I want a question answered, all I’ve to do is start the tweet with lazytweet (or a few other options), and I’ll get access to a bigger crowd than just my followers. Read more about it here. If you’re the video kind, Viddler has launched a new service called 15s, which lets you share your 15 secs or lesser video with your twitter friends (via Center Networks). There’s already a player in this market – 12seconds. And lastly, if you’re the textual kind, check out this post on literary experiments on twitter.

    I read a post on how a tweet does not make a brand. I agree, one does not, but the idea is of conversation, of engaging with consumers in real time. The objective is to involve the consumer in the idea of the brand and thus make the brand more than a soulless entity that caters to one specific need in their life. Many brands are making an attempt at this conversation, take a look at the stories here. And of all the efforts, I’d rate CNN as the best. In spite of the Olympics argument, it still experiments with the medium. I read a few days back that it was promoting Twitter heavily on air, now that’s what I call great integration. And it’s not just one anchor, the engagement on Twitter is being taken to different levels, including a Twitter show. Really awesome stuff. I hope we get to see more more activity, and from more organisations.

    until next time, go tweet

    PS. If you use twitter on your blog, and are okay with handling code, you could check out TweetRemote, which allows some level of customisation.

  • Tweetorial

    I’ve been seeing several sites recently trying to take the online offline – ActiveCiti, MeetUp, to a certain extent AroundMe, but I wonder if any of them would ever get the kind of enthusiasm that the recent tweet up in Mumbai received. That got me thinking of Twitter….again. Though I feel its a bit too late to answer the question “Par, Bhaiya, hum twitter kyun karte hain”, I’ve never actually dedicated an entire post to twitter, so here goes. (more…)

  • Linkin Parks

    I’ve been a fan of del.icio.us for a long time, and was extremely happy with the plug-in they’d made for FF3.  Although this offers a perspective of people who don’t bookmark, I’ve found the idea of a taggable, online database that can be shared, extremely valuable, which is why the question of what Del.icio.us 2.0 would offer was an intriguing one. But I was quite disappointed with the url change, to delicious.com . There was something cool about the earlier url, but they have their reasons, as has been well documented by another fan here.

    So what did they say the improvements were? You can hear it right from the horse’s mouth here. To summarise, they have promised speed, a faster and more social search and a new design. Hmm, good, but I think they could have done better, because to me, this is a maintenance job, albeit a good one. As a die-hard fan, I wanted something radical, like Facebook (another favourite) taking the pedal off social networking and putting it on conversation sparking off comparisons to Twitter and Friendfeed. Yes, it has its detractors, and they’d say not many conversations seem to be happening there, but hey, only a small % of my fb friends are on twitter, its early days, and I, for one, am getting responses to my status messages, video uploads etc.

    But meanwhile, more than an FB progression path, this user generated discontent has been sparked off by a couple of entities I happened to come across, each of which could have been the lateral step that Delicious could’ve taken. I’ll start with Social Median. Its an online community where you can share links. So?  Well, if you use twitter, you’d realise the number of link sharing that happens there. Well, you can submit news to SM through Twitter. So, in this age of ‘noise’ you get like minded users to do “collaborative filtering to help people with similar interests identify/discover what to read/view.” And it’s not just people you can follow, its topics too. It is packed with features, perhaps thanks to an extremely user feedback based alpha mode. You can vote on the ranking of the keywords, sources that are used to seed the networks and can rank topics based on how important they are to you. In essence, it allows you to customise how frequently you want to read about ‘x’ topic and from ‘y’ media source. You can share the news you add, find through mail, and even twitter. You can also add a bookmarklet to your toolbar and add news to SN as you browse. A short term problem I see is the noise level, since many people would want to be community makers first. But the system will filter it in due course. They’re also planning to use the Google Social Graph API in some pretty advanced ways. While it seems closer to Digg, or Mixx, as a user, to me its fundamentally a collection of links, and shared interests,  and that’s Delicious’ premise. Meanwhile, there’s another one with the same idea, though not as feature packed.

    The other site I came across is httpfuse (via pluggd.in). The idea here is to allow the community to build a set of ‘fuses’ (bookmarks/links) around a topic of interest. Their differentiation wrt Digg, Delicious etc is clearly explained here. While I agree with the explanation on Digg, I am not quite convinced on the Delicious part. Maybe I need to explore more. But one thing I’ll grant, and I’ll use an example for this. If I search for ‘India’ in Delicious, I’ll get links bookmarked by other people with all the tags they have used. But when I do the same in httpfuse, it shows me the subtopics under India. And that’s definitely better.  I’d like a browser plug-in though, or did I miss it? Again, a focus that Delicious could’ve tried out.

    The last entity, is Browzmi, a browser within a browser. It not only allows real time collaborative browsing and bookmarking, with comments, but also has a chat functionality built in. You can also clip photos from a site you’re visiting, and share only that. All your actions are stored and can be viewed like any lifestreaming service. Unlike say, Yoono, its not an extension, and is actually quite a cute social browser which can be just another tab in your FF/IE browser. This is way lateral, but no harm in imagining. 🙂

    That said, you are still my first bookmarking love, Delicious. But the competition is getting hotter, and  you seem very absorbed in a linear way, so please buck up.  I really wouldn’t want to see you in this list. You could at least have added image bookmarking, you know.

    Meanwhile,a couple of other things you should check out, Feedly, an FF extension, which brings Google Reader closer to home, er homepage 😉 and this one – iglue, which reminded me of Snap (only reminded, its not the same) and left me very impressed, with its potential.

    until next time, spread some link love

  • Microlives

    I read a few interesting news clips about AOL today. While one was about Time Warner thinking of splitting up and selling AOL, the other two were more interesting to me – AOL’s acquisition of Social Thing, a lifestreaming site, and their introduction of Buddy Updates, which  lets you share and view your online activities with your buddies. They have a fairly good list of services supported – Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, RSS Feeds….

    And that made me wonder on where exactly two other lifestreaming services i took for a spin around the weekend would fit in. One is Lifeblob and the other is LifeinLines. I have to admit that i spent more time on the latter since I found the interface a bit more ‘warm’ and easier to relate to. I guess I was also influenced by Ankur’s blog where he explained the reason for starting LiL, and his taking time out to explain things to me. 🙂

    The best part about LiL is its almost exhaustive means of updating – email, Gtalk, SMS, Voice, or directly from the webpage. Very cool. The user interface is also extremely friendly, and it has layered privacy settings, which helps you to define different settings for different friends, thus retaining gradients of privacy within a social environment. It also allows you to choose your moods and do a bit of location tagging. In that sense, a few years from now, this is perhaps a great way to visualise what you were doing at 9pm on Aug 4th 2008. It could be text with mood, location or your own voice. 🙂 What I’d love to see is more connection with my existing favourites – twitter (which they’re working on), an FB app (yes, again), and a browser plugin (that’ll be later). I asked about the last one because my twitaholism started after I discovered Tweetr, and soon after, Twitterfox.

    LifeBlob is more visual, connects ‘lifelines’ of people, and allows tagging other people, hmm, like Notes or Tagging in Photos in Facebook, as a rough comparison. It also allows you to import photos from other photo sharing sites and allows imports from blogs too. I quite liked the ‘Places’ and ‘Tags’ clouds on the homepage.

    While both are lifestreaming services, the approach is quite different, and thanks to UI and features, they are differentiated. But I was looking at it from a user point of view, okay, my point of view, since I believe in the Long Tail. 🙂 While Twitter is always referred to as a microblogging service, its fundamental question ‘What are you doing’ makes it a lifestreaming service to me, which people have used to communicate just about everything, including @having !! I also have a few blogs, where my rants are in say, large formats. I have pretty active Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. In addition, there is Friendfeed, which I have promised myself to explore, the virtual worlds, so how many microlives am I expected to have??!!!

    So you’ll say, “oh, you’re back to saying consolidate“, but no, that’d be so predictable, and boring. Remember the long tail I mentioned? Well, so, I forced myself to be a lil more objective before I made such sweeping rants. And I realised that this is only the beginning of the social universe, a big social bang if you will, there are so many ‘shiny objects’ out there, and more are being made as we speak. Nothing is defined yet, so spaces and uses and therefore users, are still debatable. In a country like Japan, Facebook and MySpace are yet to make a mark. Back home, in India, I have so many friends who just refuse to let go of Orkut. Most people I come across have not experienced the magic of Twitter. Perhaps, I will even discover a long tail of my internet media  usage – a large amount of time for some services, and smaller amounts for other services. 😉

    What I’m trying to say is a very simple thing – in between the blogs, the social networking of Facebook, and the updates on Twitter, there are many worlds, and many parallel worlds. Also, the large players may not be able to provide great levels of service as they scale up (a good note here albeit on real world entities), and the ‘my’ kind of service that many users want. Perhaps that’s where the opportunity is, for Lifeblob and LifeInLines, and others like them. The threat, of course, is not being able to find that critical mass of users ASAP, for they will ultimately hold the key to revenues.

    until next time, one life, many moments 🙂

    PS. My dear 2.0 readers, do not be alarmed if you don’t find a post tomorrow. I’ve reviewed my strategic  long term intent for the site, and the scalability that I can offer. (I’ve always wanted to use those words, basically means that while I won’t lack the material to rant about, I may not get the time to do it) Keeping that in mind, I have decided to make it 3 posts a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

    Update 05/08/08: Just read a very good case for Lifestreaming