Tech IT Easy » Twitter

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

Kari Silvennoinen — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:13:13 +0000

A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

What Twitter Trains You For [2Long4aTweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:49:29 +0000

Filling out a form with boxes of max. 1000 characters is just as hard to do that as writing a 140 character tweet. 20-50% of the time I spent to tweet is usually about shortening the message using only the most essential words. And that is exactly the same for a 1000 character box.

Blogging doesn’t train you for this. Sure, you develop an instinct for when you exceed 400 words (the magic number that makes up a perfect blog post), but nothing physically stops you. We may hate the Twitter-box for imposing this limit, but in a user-generated world of way too many characters, some brevity is really, really refreshing.

- – Vincent van Wylick (again, too long for a tweet)

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Social web for the long-term

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:53:31 +0000

Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

Must Use Twitter Tools for Corporate Users

Anand — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:32:24 +0000

If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to promote his/her business .

Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool. Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

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The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:17:21 +0000

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
Beneﬁting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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An interview of Yoolink Pro’s bizdev director, Sebastien Blanc

Jeremy Fain — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:55:08 +0000

I had wished very hard my sharp-minded friend Sébastien Blanc joined me as a partner when I founded environmental management software company Verteego, almost two years ago. Instead Séb accepted an offer from online collaborative tools Yoolink, which makes me think that either I’m very bad at convincing people on joining me in projects, or that Yoolink is a very special startup. Although both options are still wide opened and not exclusive at all, I like for some reason to consider it’s Yoolink that’s an amazing company and felt it would be just fair play from me to interview Sébastien on what actually Yoolink is doing for its enterprise customers.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and WordPress altogether?

WordPress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and WordPress. WordPress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

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Teenies are not us

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:41:22 +0000

NY Times writes that teens don’t dominate the Twitter-sphere, thus proving that kids don’t always drive innovation.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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How, if You Want to “Crowd-Source,” You Need to Keep Your Questions as Simple & Stupid as Possible

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:22:53 +0000

I once asked a friend how one of my clients should improve their sales technique for a technical product, knowing that his company is very successful at what it does. He, himself a “sales engineer” (i.e. a technical sales guy), found the question very difficult to answer.

I had to reshape the question to “so, how do you guys sell your technical products?” And then he was able, with full vigour, to tell me how they do it. It should be mentioned that market plays a strong role here; my friend works in a very niche business, while my client suffers from powerful competition.

I’m starting to loose my naiveté, as far as crowd-sourcing is concerned. This easy-to-communicate world we live in, sometimes makes me forget that, just because we can ask, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Technology may have changed, but people’s brains, psychology, and business principles have not, at least not at that rate.

My general stance these days is that, no matter what context you talk in with people, you should always assume a complete lack of imagination. Instead, by either spelling it out, or better, by asking the best interview-question in the world “tell me about YOU!,” and then extracting what you need from that, is much more effective.

It’s as Jeremy advised me to blog when I started here, Keep It Simple & Stupid (K.I.S.S.). Even though I have ignored that lesson at times, it’s a good one to follow in this all-too-unsimple world.

Apart from crowd-sourcing, the same, incidentally, applies to:

selling people stuff: spell them out exactly how your product/service benefits them!
applying for a job: spell them out exactly how you will make them money!
and everything else.

Want to make the world a better place? K.I.S.S. it!

Vincent

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The Future of Television, Facebook it isn’t.

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:31:57 +0000

I don’t know if anyone of you caught the CNN+Facebook stunt two days ago, where the, I guess burial (?) of Micheal Jackson was shown live on CNN.com, next to a stream of Facebook status updates on the same screen. If I say “Micheal, we LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went. The CNN-part was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, Stevie Wonder was singing and he rocked. But somehow those two, Social Media with Old Media, didn’t seem to mix at all.

In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

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Blogging’s not dead, but it’s pretty damn unrewarding

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:47:29 +0000

In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What is the problem? How about: finding the inspiration, not getting (m)any comments, balancing it with your actual job, etc. etc. Also, the baby eventually grows up, you eventually return from your trip, and there’s only so much to say about self-help (in my opinion).

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned. Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

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Is it time for a more responsible internet?

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:39:35 +0000

On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

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What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:18:47 +0000

It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

A willing human recorder
A recording device designed for capturing experiences
A way to process that information into “usable bits”
A favourable legal environment
And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

Why marketeers should STFU (pardon the French)

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:03:31 +0000

Tired of the gazillionth post about 10 marketing tips for social marketeers? Tired of marketing all together? I think there’s a reason for that, it’s because marketing should be invisible!

Let me give you a brief example and then I will stfu. For my high school, I’m organising a reunion together with a team of 2-3 people. We started a Facebook group, ca. 140 people from all over the world have signed up. We hold mass-mailing campaigns only to find out what people’s preferences are. We use that data, derived from poll-answers mostly, and design, hopefully, the perfect reunion event.

When the day comes, this September, I’m sure someone is going to say: “thank you for all the work you did.” But that’s b#llsh#t! Because it wasn’t us doing the work, it was everyone filling in what they wanted and everyone designing their own event. All we did was mediate, using the free tools that are available to anyone at zero effort.

That’s the way all marketing should be. Because if you think about it, marketing is about giving customers they want. And how do you do that? You listen to customers, stfu, and deliver.

Vincent

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What I'd like: a spoiler-and annoyance-free web

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:06:14 +0000

I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

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An interview of a web marketing strategist: Michelle Greer

Jeremy Fain — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:33:41 +0000

My cofounder at Verteego Rupert and I met Michelle Greer in the line to the TechCrunch Party during last December’s crappy LeWeb Conference in Paris. Michelle was the sunshine of at-that-time very cloudy Paris for us: we could discuss blogs (see Michelle’s blog), Twitter (follow Michelle here), hot startups, online business models, web marketing, as well as music, France, the US, blablabla

Since then, Michelle being based in Austin, Texas, we’ve been keeping in touch and I couldn’t resist introduce you guys to Michelle Greer, a great professional as well as an amazing person. Plus, I’ve become lazy writing blogs just myself with me and I, so here Michelle goes:

- Hey Michelle, could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Michelle Greer and I am a web marketing strategist here in Austin, Texas. I love good movies, traveling, funny people, skiing, tennis, yoga, and using the web to connect people.

- what is it to be a web marketing specialist? The web has become such a broad universe: what exactly are your areas of expertise?

I’d say my specialties are copywriting, community building and social media. Whenever I write something, I think, “What would my intended audience want to share with other people?” I also understand social networking tools well, so I like using them to create fun campaigns for people.

- who are your typical clients: startups? large corporations? …

I don’t like the bureaucracy of large companies. The money isn’t worth it because you can’t accomplish anything without six people’s approvals. I also don’t like how most large companies do business, because it’s about growth instead of value. Right now I am in charge of the Twitter contests for @NameCheap and marketing for Interspire, a community-built software company used by small businesses around the world. They aren’t complete startups, but I have access to the CEOs, and I like that.

- what value do you bring to your clients: traffic? revenue? search engine optimization? improved conversion rate? enhanced visibility on social networks?

Customer service is the new marketing. I as a marketer am one person. Whether its NameCheap or Interspire, if I make customers insanely happy and then ask them to leave reviews online, they’ll do it. The advantage of using someone like me is that I value being able to sleep at night knowing that I did a good job over pure cash, and customers know that. It’s amazing how many companies do not understand that if you just take care of people, they want to see you succeed and they’ll send you customers and leave good reviews for you online if you ask them to.

- what is your secret sauce: what makes people absolutely want to work with you and no one else?

I can speak geek and speak to normal people. It’s important in my line of work and most software salespeople and marketers are very deficient in their technical knowledge. I also enjoy pushing the boundaries of what people think social media is for. It’s not about talking–it’s about doing!

- you have become quite a famous blogger: how did you come to blogging?

I hated my job at the time and wanted to get my name out there. My boss would rewrite everything I wrote, even though he knew nothing about writing. I felt like I had nothing to show for myself.

- do you think micro blogging has killed or will kill blogging?

No. If you look at what is often tweeted, it is links to blog posts. There’s only so much you can say in 140 characters.

- what are your 3 favorite blogs and why?

This is hard. I like gapingvoid.com, mashable.com, and treehugger.com. I will probably think of six more immediately after sending this interview.

Thank you for your time Michelle! Looking forward to seeing you in person again, in Texas maybe?

Michelle Greer was interviewed by Jeremy, who didn’t get paid for it! Look, Tech IT Easy isn’t even mentioned in Michelle’s favorites…

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If you're following me on Twitter and I'm not following you, it's because…

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:31:27 +0000

…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

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A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook's (or equivalent) future

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:40:07 +0000

OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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Join me on Blellow!

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:42:04 +0000

After reading this Techcrunch intro, I just joined Blellow today. While I’m not much of a bandwagon guy, as far as social networks are concerned, there are a couple of reasons, which I vocalised on this blog, why I dig the idea of this social network.

A short history of my adoption of social networks

When I started coming on Twitter, I was excited about creating a Hive Mind. What attracts me about the internet, blogging on Tech IT Easy, and social networking, is that it can be similar to forming neural connections between smart nodes, much like in your head. Twitter didn’t deliver much on that promise so far, however, because, even though there are a heck of a lot of smart people on the service, it’s very difficult to manage that data, let alone make it useful.

Friendfeed is another service I use and have written about. Two things that attract me about it: Friendlists, which allow me to segment my interests and social circles. For instance, I have a Tech IT Easy friendlist where I just see all the Tech IT Easy bloggers and their twitter-updates—many of you probably didn’t know that—allowing me to keep up to date, at a glance, on what these smart guys are up to in their lives.

What I also like about FriendFeed is their rooms, which allow me to focus on specific content like apps, and ask questions to an audience interested in that same content. The downside: there is no real working index for rooms, you just have to do a dedicated site-search on Google , I guess.

Let’s get to Blellow!

The service isn’t on the same maturity level as Twitter of Friendfeed yet, which is also partially why I’m asking you to join me. For instance, I cannot yet search for friends whose email-address I have (and I also hope they add searching for Twitter-contacts, like FriendFeed has). Following is a short commercial, which you will have also have seen on Techcrunch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTV6fCo92xI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

What Bellow does is the following:

Instead of joining a stream of content, which grows exponentially with more users, you can just focus on groups that specialise on content like SXSW 2009, Apple, B2B marketing, Photoshop, etc., etc., you get the idea.
You can create private streams between a select group of people, sort of a private IRC channel, if you will.
When you create your profile, you have to add a lot of info about yourself, hypothetically allowing people to search for keywords and finding a kindred soul. The video shows a freelance flash developer searching for other developers on Bellow and getting the advice she needs.
Other things it also allows, but which are underdeveloped, is search for jobs and projects. Sort of like e-lance, with the added benefit that you get to see what people say before you hire them.
Meetups are another feature, but are, as usual, focussed on the US only, leaving us “old-country” Europeans in the dark.

That’s it! A short review of the first 30 min., I spent there. But hopefully I get to see some familiar faces soon!

Vincent

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A theory of 'networking' but more of a perspective on market research

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:17:21 +0000

I get a lot of Twitter-followers, based on keywords like, eh, ‘Screenplay’ and ‘Consulting,’ and it annoying to say the least. Why? Because I don’t believe in mass-networking and I will explain why in the rest of this post (there are other reasons, this was just the trigger).

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of experience in market research and I’ve become pretty good at it. From selling myself over the phone in a minute or less, to overcoming gatekeepers, to learning to really listen to people, to arranging personal interviews and transcribing the results, to designing and co-ordinating mass-research campaigns, and analysing them, I feel I’ve seen a lot and I’ve also seen a lot bad practices.

Why does market research get a bad rap? Because a lot of it focusses on getting as many results in as possible. It’s called “statistical significance,” for the newcomers to this field, and it means that getting the answers of 10 people is less subjective than getting the answers of 2. Of course you have to take into account that there are different types of market research: those that lead to clear outcomes and those that lead to lot’s of data that can be analysed and interpreted. Being a practical guy, I much prefer the first as the other kind often feels like a waste of money to me.

How do you design an outcome-focussed research campaign? Pretty simple: you get as close as possible to the outcome and you test it. In tech-world, this would be developing a prototype and testing it. In web-world, this would be something like A/B-marketing, where you design different versions of the same page and test their effectiveness on different samples. Of course, you can conduct plenty of market research before also, but as a favourite lecturer of mine once told me: “how do you research innovation (i.e. something new)? You can’t, because people really don’t know how they feel once the innovation is there.”

The other kind of market research, the one that produces a lot of data, is a gold-mine for journalists, analysts, and consultants. They all love to deal with abstractions that can be applied to many different situations. “Research showed that people are getting tired of green advertising. Therefore, we can write an article/report/advice to our clients that green advertising sucks.” The end, pay me.

That is not to say that more results does not provide a more unbiased perspective on a problem, but it’s just not as simple as asking a lot of people the same questions. There are ways around that, such as collecting demographic and psychographic data and I don’t want to cheapen that. I’ve written before about how statistics only matter as much as where your data comes from. But I’ve also written that triangulation is a large part of my research philosophy, which means getting different perspectives on the same issue. Yes, kind of like A/B marketing. So, I do desk-research, I do web-based surveys, I do interviews with consumers and experts. All of which provides me with a more objective view of the solution to a problem.

Networking, and now we come to the gist of it, is also a philosophy with different flavours. One, the Twitter-kind, focusses on buzz-words, reciprocity (I follow you, you follow me), and the masses. Facebook and LinkedIN are more about: so, how do you know this person? Similarly, in real life, business cards are the equivalent of Twitter: “I’m a consultant, here’s my card, can I have yours?” And friendships, both business and personal ones, are the ones that are about: “so, how do we know each other again?”

I have yet to get much value out of the web, so my cynical view on Twitter may be too cynical. I have also, as yet, received fairly little value from business cards, I should mention. I don’t go browsing through them and call people at random, same way I don’t twitter at random. Facebook is my number one web-tool, as I use it as a platform to do other things. Similarly, my friends in real life are an important platform for me also, to discuss ideas and hopefully build on those.

I think there is some kind of parallel between what I feel is effective market-research (many different perspectives, not quantity-, but quality-focussed) and networking (essentially the same). Arguably, my stance on networking may come from my own personal attitudes, I won’t deny it, but also because I believe, from my marketing background, that it just isn’t effective.

But this is just my opinion. What’s yours? Network in mass or Network in class?

Vincent

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Favourite Web Tools to start 2009 with

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:32:34 +0000

I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my Mac.

The list:

Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
WordPress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

Last.fm and favtape.com for music
Tinyurl for rickrollling people
Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

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LeWeb '08 Conference sucked big time

Jeremy Fain — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:19:56 +0000

I attended LeWeb, a conference dedicated to…the Web industry, almost 2 weeks ago in Paris. I apologize not to have blogged before, but December was a frantic month, business-wise, and I wish I could blog during the conference but as you may have read on the blogosphere, there was no Internet. On top of that, I wanted to leave some time before I blogged to check whether my words would soften.

I arrived at Le Web, investing a lot of time (2 full days) and money (more than EUR 800, that is to say around USD 1100 – which is a lot of money for what I got), with very high expectations, and I have to say that this conference was a huge disappointment to me. Actually, it was more of a disappointment: I actually found Le Web ’08 conference to be a huge piece of crap. Here’s why.

The organizers: Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur

Prior to the conference, I was a big fan of Loïc Le Meur. The guy looked like Midas to me: everything he touched became gold. The guy gets people lining up to invest in his startups (look at his list of investors in his last startup Seesmic here, impressive). Loïc understood that blogging was going to be big before everyone, and positioned himself accordingly (a huge blogger and founder of Six Apart, the editor of TypePad). Loïc is also an early investor in LinkedIn, my favorite web app, and recently founded and funded Seesmic that I find to be a very cool video conversation platform. Well, the guy seemed to be the perfect investee for VCs, and the perfect investor for entrepreneurs. However, when it comes to organizing conferences, I would tend to say it’s not there yet. Loïc and his wife Géraldine have been organizing the Le Web event for something like four years. Last year already, criticism had emerged, but overall comments were positive. Well, after attending one Le Web conference, I can only blame myself for not having due diligenced better: I wasted my time and my startup’s money.

The theme

Love. This year’s Le Web conference was about love. At first sight, I found this theme brilliant – too bad the idea wasn’t well executed. Love is a universal value that is only discussed in novels and Vogue. Plus, Love is the perfect theme if you want to think an outside-the-box conference program. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all. Although there were a number of supposedly quality speakers, most didn’t actually mention the theme, and I guess some didn’t even know that the theme was Love (Marissa Meyer of Google, Didier Lombard of France Telecom, Maurice Levy of Publicis, to name some of them…). I think it’s a big waste, because having a truly deeply-thought consistent program around Love, with at least some continuity between speakers, could’ve made of Le Web a truly mainstream event rather than just a reunion self-proclamed visionaries.

The speakers

Speaking of self-proclamed visionaries, I had a hard time looking for new ‘stars’ on Le Web panels. Or even just interesting content.

Paulo Coelho is a brilliant man, but he had nothing to do at Le Web: his speech didn’t bring anything new, it was self-promotion, and an uninteresting one as a matter of fact. Same with Susan Wu from Ohai, preaching her church (virtual goods): boring slides, boring intervention.

Didier Lombard was absolutely out of scope too. He basically paid to get on stage. And you could feel it.

I was very disappointed by Maurice Levy from Publicis (and by the questions asked by Loïc Le Meur: boring) – the guy could’ve given us interesting insights on web advertising. Instead, we had a boring “fireside chat”, as they say. I liked one thing about Maurice Levy though, he publicly gave his email address saying he was looking for startups to invest in.

Startup competition updates were extremely repetitive; the only thing you could here was “despite the crisis, there are still a lot of innovation around; I’m thrilled by what I saw in the startup competition room”. Except that when you looked at the jury in the room, they were all on their Blackberry or iPhone aswering emails.

I liked Yossi Vardi, Chris Anderson, John Buckman (good tips for entrepreneurs), Marissa Meyer (a few insights on the Google roadmap, like wanting to take Chrome out of Beta) & Joi Ito though.

The sponsors

Le Web’s official sponsor was no company else than Microsoft, the tech giant that probably least understands the Web provided the very poor quality of its online applications, like Hotmail, or its total absence of the collaborative web apps landscape outside its expensive minority stake in Facebook. The good news is, Microsoft folks are smart asses and let some selected startups (some of them embedding no single Microsoft technology) demo their applications rather than demo Microsoft products. Microsoft alone paid Le Web USD 110,000 or EUR 80,000 to get its brand on top of others, rent a lounge space, and get speaking time.

Google also was a sponsor of Le Web – they had Microsoft move first when it came to getting the “official sponsor” title. Google had a special room dedicated to presenting its own stuff during day 1. Nothing new there, except that Google brought in speakers on a number of topics like Adwords, APIs, etc. I guess the fee also included the 2 keynotes Google got. If I were Google, I would, to ensure a maximum buzz around my brand, not attend or sponsor Le Web. That would make the entire conference speak about the absence of Google whilst the whole web revolves around the Google search engine. Google being a sponsor amongst others makes of it a regular company. Too bad.

There were other partners, like SwissCom that sucks big time (they had a booth, and did not manage to make the Internet work during the entire conference + Loïc Le Meur says they got paid more than USD 100,000! to make nothing work), Facebook (?), SixApart & Seesmic who got it for free obviously,…and a number of others that are not worth talking about in this not-so-long post.

The budget, the price

1,400 participants x an average of EUR 1,000 per entrance

Sponsoring & demo room for at least EUR 200,000

The overall budget for this 2-day conference amounted to EUR 1,500,000. Yet, there was no wifi running, definitely not enough food for all participants (I had to go grab a sandwich each 2 days), no consistent editorial line, a crowd of people investing time and a lot of money to listen to the same self-called visionaries on stage.

I haven’t paid myself in one year (I live on my fiancée’s salary), every since I started Verteego. I bought myself a ticket to Le Web almost as a Christmas gift, hoping to enjoy a lot. It was a sort of sacrifice (EUR 850 + 2 days of turnover for Verteego – I’m the sales guy there – is hell of a lot of money! the price of a superb laptop or a great long weekend, say, in Venice) but I was plenty of hopes. The least I could say even 2 weeks after the conference is that I have a very angry feeling at myself: I feel I’ve been financially abused. And I lost two days of hard work during an important period.

The place, and the temperature…

Well, it was free-zing. Which is okay for me, except that with so many people inside, there must have been a sort of natural warmth, which wasn’t the case. I felt this place had the worst energetic efficiency in Paris. This absence of environmental awareness stroke me: the second day, it was warmer. I couldn’t believe how much energy was used to heat the place. I am very disappointed by the overall lack of consciousness of web entrepreneurs for environmental issues: if you are really about changing the world, then you should think about measuring their environmental footprint and take action to reduce it from one year to another & compensate the remainings. But they sure didn’t. And I’m not writing this just to sell Verteego Carbon here: I just don’t understand entrepreneurs to pretend they want to change the World and who don’t care about behaving socially & environmentally responsibly. I think that Le Web, an event that took place in Europe at the same time as the Poznan conference (pre next Kyoto talks in Poland) AND which theme was Love, was just perfect place to ensure Social Responsibility and Sustainability became buzz words in the blogging, startups & VC microcosm. Géraldine & Loïc completely missed the train here.

The startup competition

I didn’t apply to the startup competition. I felt it wasn’t right to make startups pay EUR 1,500 for just a pitch. I was wrong in doing so. The startup competition was probably the only interesting thing during this conference. I paid, as I said, EUR 800+ to go to Le Web Paris ’08 and basically meet with friends. It would’ve been worth paying the double to try and get 7 minutes to pitch Verteego in front of around 300 people. That makes it 5 euros per viewer’s attention, + the backlinks, visibility, and blog coverage you could get later on. Not applying to the startup competition was perhaps my only regret. And that would probably be the only reason I would attend next year.

The food

It was a shame. There’s no other word for it. I could get no food at all, not during the first day, not during the second day. The first day because there was none left. The second because there was no vegetarian food! Both days I went outside for a sandwich. I could then make friends because people were coming to me to ask where I had gotten this.

Worse: during Day 2, I needed to drink water during the day because I caught a cough during Day 1, because of the cold. And I was basically given a negative answer, because the bar was opened neither at 11am, nor at 3pm (which actually made me leave the place). You get 1500 people pay EUR 1000 on average, and there’s no food, and no water???

The Internet

There was very little Internet during the whole conference. Here’s a recap of this lousy situation: not only were you locked in with boring old speakers & because of the price you paid, you couldn’t answer client requests, or blog because of this.

Loïc Le Meur wrote an apologetic post, but I found this post actually ridiculous for him: Le Web gave EUR 100,000+ to SwissCom not to get a service. The excuse is: no provider is used to so many attendants. This is untrue: the very week before Le Web, I attended a huge (20,000 visitors per day!) Trade Show, Pollutec, in Lyon. And there was perfect Wifi.

The attendants

Obviously, I met with many of my existing friends, and I was glad to. I also met with new people from everywhere around the world. Lots of great people there, from everywhere around the World. But come on, at what price…Furthermore, the mindset was rather negative: people weren’t ambitious or optimistic. They should be: the crisis is a great opportunity to move fast whilst remaining lean.

The TechCrunch party

It was so-so, I was disappointed and angry: 1) I had bought my business partner (who hadn’t attended Le Web) a EUR 30 ticket, to be told at the entrance that a pass to Le Web was worth 2 entrances. I think it should’ve been explained somewhere because I basically wasted EUR 30 with no possibility to get a refund. 2) I waited for 30 minutes outside, in line, to get in. And during this time I saw 2 groups of people showing up in front and squeezing the line: I found this very abnormal, because the Web is about democracy, having all the same access to information. 3) the place was very small, but this is less of an issue.

Conclusion

For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible at that cost. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should’ve refunded participants for providing such a low standard service rather than making this huge profit (I also think they should display publicly the P&L of the conference). This is the least they could’ve done since giving me back 2 days of work isn’t physically possible. Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur didn’t show any social responsibility here, no respect for their customers.

Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ’08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.

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The key to prolific writing, part 4: how to start yourself up again after a break?

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:31:21 +0000

This is one the hardest things ever. While I was blogging daily it was easy; you somehow get into this rhythm of pumping out text everyday and, at some point, you’ve hit your groove. Taking my break really made little sense to my brain whatsoever, as day-after-day, I kept on writing draft-after-draft, while I was meant to take a break!!!

Luckily-unluckily I eventually gave that up…

Now, I don’t actually thing there is any great secret to starting up again. It’s going to be a bitch, we all know that, and we can all remember that first workout in the gym / at home, after taking much-too-long-a break. Muscle Ache!!! Which in blogging-terms, translates to brain-ache or have-I written-sh*t-today?-ache. I know that, writing this, I will check back over and over and over again to see if it made any sense.

No, the real secret to starting up again is just… to never stop! Or, to continue like you never stopped and have faith in the imagined fact that someday that brain-ache is going to pass… even if it doesn’t feel like that right now.

See you tomorrow, Tech IT Easians!
Vincent

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Approaches to search

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:12:42 +0000

Looked at two new (for me) search-engines this week, Cuil (pronounced cool) and Keyboardr. Keyboardr is a geek-project and, like Mac’s Quicksilver, is all about navigating via a keyboard. Cuil, which I had heard of before, I was made re-aware of by a recent Stanford entrepreneurial thought leaders podcast, in which its creation and the theory behind it was discussed. I liked the idea of approaching search as a visual placement problem, as that is how humans (in my opinion) often judge information. Still, I didn’t think that Cuil was particularly innovative, from a GUI perspective. Even so, all interesting projects, as is Mahalo—human powered search.

What remains clear is Google will continue to be the thought-leader in this field, not because it is a better search, but because it is so integrated with the web.

What I’m thinking about is how search can be improved to become useful for human beings, rather than search-engine optimised websites, and the key to that seems to me to be presenting information in the right way for the right person.

Take Java tutorials, which I was looking for last week and where my priority was to find a. the right tutorial for my beginner-level and b. be taught by a good teacher. Two elements that matter here are level and quality, of which the first is easy to search for—just insert ‘beginner’—but the latter is currently being solved by Google as follows: the more it is linked too, the better it must be, which also makes sense. But it does ignore an element, discussed in the Stanford podcast, which is that unknown teachers can both be bad, but also exceptionally good.

Education online is different from education offline. The latter, if good, will be very popular, but interested people will run into a physical constraint—only so many students fit in that building. Online education, if good, will also be very popular but not have the same physical constraints, though possibly imposed price-based ones. But since we are talking good old open source Java, let us assume that price is not a factor. If everyone picks the most linked tutorial, which is also of good quality, it means that everyone potentially ends up with the same knowledge. The commoditisation of code.

But how do you produce exceptional Java-coders? These are arguably all people that walked the extra mile, either through inner potential and/or through environmental factors, such as an exceptional teacher. There’s another factor, which is that diversity can also breed innovation, by exposing people to a wide variety of ideas and perspectives, again made possibly by people working with a wide variety of tutors. Still talking Java here, but it could be applied to anything.

Search, in other words, promotes mediocrity, by leading people to pick the most common denominator, the top-result, rather than across the wideband of possible results, made possibly by the widely hyped up “long-tailed” nature of the internet.

And that is one problem that search is currently facing. How this is solved, is possibly a GUI solution, by presenting results in the right way and right variety. It could also be a human solution, such the one used by Mahalo. It could be a user-generated solution, using social-based variables through sites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, now LinkedIN, and something that Google is also implementing (badly, I hear). It could be a technological solution, something Cuil is also working on… etc. etc.

One thing is certain, that Keyboardr, no matter how geeky and cool, won’t exactly solve this problem

Vincent

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Why people "UnFollow" me on Twitter

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:56:51 +0000

Some time ago, I promised to stop writing about social networking, except if there is some tangible data involved. Well, I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now, FriendFeed for a few months, and a new service, called Qwitter, for a few weeks. Qwitter’s raison d’être is the topic of the day today.

What Qwitter does is tell you when people stop following you on Twitter. I fear that many people won’t be interested in using it, as there is a natural bias towards the positive. And Qwitter’s core-business is providing you with negative news.

Still, I saw my follower-numbers (currently at ca. 120) going up and down regularly, and I was curious about why this is happening. And the answer is pretty simple:

What Qwitter does is send you a mail-message with the name of the person “qwitting” you, as well as the message that may (or may not) have been the instigator. So far, I received 8 of these, with one person unsubscribing from me three times (!), and one celebrity unsubscribing from me, Guy Kawasaki.

The one that “got away”

Why do I say that people unfollow me, because I don’t follow them? I think the data says a lot.

Subject 1, let’s call him J., follows 2,447 and is followed by 2,393. He unsubscribed from me, when I said: “@ksilvennoinen welcome back to the internet!“
Subject 2, let’s call him G. (has been trying to subscribe to my LinkedIN and Facebook as well, btw. He follows 1,868 and is followed by 1,132. The Twitter-message: “P.S. to my blogpost: 2nd Antarctic explorer turned public speaker that I’ve heard. Superb motivational speakers. Living life 2 Xtreme rocks!”
Subject 3, let’s call him R., follows 2,225 and is followed by 2,106. The Twitter-message: same as above.
Subject 4, let’s call him J3. (the guy who unsubscribed 3 times), follows 219 and is followed by 331. The Twitter message: “sipping Bacardi and writing a presentation for tomorrow.“
Subject 5, let’s call him M., follows 1,611 and is followed by 1,482. The Twitter message: “Today, German shepherds with machine guns on their backs killed me 34 times. Guess what game I played?“
And, the cream of the crop, the Alltop-guy, Guy Kawasaki……… follows 24,104 and is followed by 24,058. The Twitter-message: “I long for the day where the letters PeeCee stand for P**sEasy (no joke).“

Now, you may notice three things. One, that my Twitter-messages are pretty entertaining… Two, that most of these guys follow a lot of people. And three, that there is nearly perfect parity between their followers and who they follow.

What is your problem?

“What is your problem?” you might ask. “Following back is only polite.” I agree to an extent, and I appreciate if people follow me back. But I don’t expect it! For one, why do I use Twitter? To keep track of things, like my friends and news-items. Some pretty interesting links come across my screen every once in a while. If I need to talk to people, I’ll say stuff, but those people I want to talk to, I have their email-address. Talking on Twitter is not my motivation.

The other side of the coin is that if someone follows 24,000 people and you are 24,001, you get a very tiny portion of the attention that you deserve as an individual. It’s nearly the same as saying as “I don’t really follow you at all.” Imagine what that person’s screen must look like? 3-4-10 messages per second? So, I don’t, on principle, follow anyone that is following more than let’s say 200 people… Unless they actually say something meaningful as well.

Many people who follow 1000s though are a. in social media/marketing, which automatically makes them less interesting to me (because there are just so many of them), and b. respond to so many people that I find it very hard to judge the quality of their “original thinking” by looking at their Twitter-feed.

Why do I write this post?

Because I want to make people aware that if you do follow me, please don’t expect me to follow back automatically. And if you want to get my attention, a good start is to *talk to me,* you know, use the @-symbol!? And third, if possible, make the content original. There’s so many social media marketeers out there, it’s not even funny. Be original, be fun, talk to me, I’ll be there.

The irony of it is, do I really expect someone that treats their Twitter-follows & followers with so little respect to read my blogpost?

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