Clunky Flow

Stephen O’Hear’s got the details over on The Social Web anf Pete Cashmore got a nice piece here on Mashable

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In the entertainly grumpy curmudgeon corner we have John Handelaar recounting his experience with this new fangled fad that is Twitter (via Eirepreneur)

1. You can manually post a message on its website and then hang around and make coffee for everyone while a rather tedious lottery plays out — will it post after stalling for several minutes, or will it simply cause a browser timeout? I can hardly wait to find out. Oh the excitement.
2. You can send a text message to a fourteen-digit international mobile number in the UK and pay the highest data packet transfer rates available anywhere on the planet. And then Twitter will either dump your message into the ether or post it at some point convenient to itself at some unspecified point in the next 72 hours. So just like instant messaging, then, except at telegram-delivery-boy speeds not seen since the end of the 19th century. Feel the future….(Full post : Now, what rhymes with Twit, then? or Everything you like is stupid)

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Lifted from GigaOm, who took it from Found+Read repeating what Evan William’s said to Liz and worth lifting again.

Evan Williams’ Obvious Corp. said this week that it’s spinning off the tool into its own firm.

The time has come for Twitter to make that leap. We’re happy to announce that Twitter is graduating from the home of Obvious and becoming its own company—appropriately named, Twitter, Inc.

When your service name gets that much more high profile than your company moniker, its time to send the kid off to college. Williams says:

Twitter continues to grow, it will gain less from being under the Obvious umbrella and perhaps even push that umbrella until it flips inside out. Which doesn’t make the umbrella happy, and just gets in Twitter’s way. Perhaps I took the metaphor too far.

Perhaps, but we know what you mean.

…Yes, and thanks to Mr. Williams for sparing us from receiving this news in the dead-eyed quasi-legalistic format of some dusty old corporate press release. 

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MySay (open to the public for 2 days now) is amazing.  With beautiful simplicity, its got deep appeal.

Its already been compared to Twitter: Think Twitter for voice.  You could say that if Twitter’s addictive appeal is as lightweight blogging platform, then MySay’s appeal will be as a lightweight vlogging or podcasting platform.

So what does that mean? Is it a significant distinction? Well, yes! Just think about the most popular blogs out there and you have the likes of Om Malik whose considered opinion and expertise is widely respected and admired.  And then think of the most popular vlogs and podcasts out there and you have the likes of zefrank , beloved for his wit and entertainment value. 

In short, text is good for conveying information but voice excels at eliciting and conveying feeling.  Voice generates social bonds and engagement. If MySay and Twitter were cute near-identical twin sisters then MySay would be the one you’d warm to immediately because she’d be more expressive, outgoing, charming, playful and fun.  While Twitter, her near-identical twin sister would be the more considered and serious one.

When it comes to social tools.  I know which one I’d be backing.

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Nokia has confirmed that they will launch WiMAX enabled phones in early 2008.  Reuters
A former colleague of Pat Phelan’s who is involved in testing of WiMAX for voice in London has guaranteed him that voice will run perfect at distances of almost 15 miles.

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The Essence of Duct Tape Marketing

Duct tape (the tape) is simple, effective, and affordable—it’s not always the prettiest solution, but it does always work. The central theme of Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by John Jantsch is that effective small business marketing is a system—not an event—composed of simple, effective, and affordable techniques.

When you combine that with the cult-like obsession many people have for all things duct tape you also get a pretty good example of how something simple like the right name can do a great deal for a company, product, service, or book. I asked John to distill his marketing ideas to a top-ten list, and here is what he provided:

1. Narrow the market focus. Create a picture of the ideal client: what they look like, how they think, what they value, and where you can find them. Start saying no to non-ideal clients.
2. Differentiate. Strip everything you know about your product or service down to the simplest core idea. Make sure that the core idea allows you stand out.
3. Think about strategy first. Take everything you’ve done in steps one and two and create a strategy to own a word or two in the mind of your ideal client and prospect.
4. Create information that educates. You are in the information business, so think of your marketing materials, web sites, white papers, marketing kits as information products, not “sales” propoganda.
5. Package the experience. Put visual elements around every aspect of the marketing strategy that you adopt. Use design to evoke the appropriate emotional response from your ideal prospect…..More

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Lifted from O’Reilly Radar here:  

These are basically little nuggets of wisdom for bite-sized nutrition. Enjoy.

Pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone — this is taken from Paul Hawken’s Growing a Business. Sometimes an idea catches hold of you and you find you can’t put it down. Pay attention to that! Just start working on it. Can’t get yourself to do anything on it? Move on. Find yourself waking up out of bed to write down new ideas about it? That’s a good one to choose.

Give people what they need, not what they say they need — interviews are tricky. People will swear up and down that they would buy a product you describe if only it were available, and then fail to do so as soon as it is. Likewise, in conversation an idea can sound terrible, but in actualization the idea can become a compelling product. You have to sherlock out the truth of the interest people express, and “yes/no” questions are usually less useful than “how much” or “how bad” questions.

Cool ideas are useless without great needs — this is the classic engineers’ entrepreneurial mistake (or at least I’d like to think so, since I’ve made it). Techies love tech, and a new technology can produce a lot of companies that don’t really meet a need. Better to start with the need, and then see how what you know can produce a better answer to that need. (Marketers tend to have the opposite problem: real, pressing needs with completely unworkable solutions.)

Build the simplest thing possible — engineers have the hardest time with this, with not overdesigning for the need they’re addressing. Make the simplest possible product that makes a significant dent in that need, and you’ll do far better than you would addressing two or three needs at once. Simplicity leads to clarity in everything you do.

Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible — small budgets give big focus (probably another line I’m stealing from Jason Fried: it sounds like something he’d say…) Don’t go out and raise a ton of money right away. Instead, give yourself just enough to get going, and use the limits that imposes to motivate yourself.

The best investor pitches are plainspoken and entertaining (not in that order) — think about what this implies. A plainspoken pitch is the surface of a very solid business. If you have to fudge and lie to get investors interested, why is that? If you’re running a great business, it is not hard at all to lure investors into it; the worse your business, the bigger (and more odious) your fundraising task is. Entertaining implies a fun person to work with, and VCs like working with people they like as much as the rest of us do. If you don’t bring the funny, bring the person who brings the funny.

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That’s twice what they paid in stock for YouTube last year!

I also think that DoubleClick was taken private by a buyout firm in 2005 for about $1.1 billion.  Not a bad return.

Anyone who knows anyone that has worked for DoubleClick since they set up in Dublin in ’98/’99 on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay before the move out to East Point Business Park will know what a rollercoaster this company has been through.  Darlings of the dotcom boom and bare survivors of the crash, they held in there while the industry cried out that banner ads were over with the rise and rise of Google.  

New York Times report here

The sale offers Google access to DoubleClick’s advertisement software and, more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies.

The sale brings to an end weeks of a bidding battle between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has been trying to catch Google in the online advertising business, and the loss of DoubleClick would be a a major setback.

“Keeping Microsoft away from DoubleClick is worth billions to Google,” an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, Jordan Rohan, said.

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Andrew Kantor writes dismissively about Twitter for USAToday and Stowe Boyd lets him have it.  First here and then here.

 Kantor:

Twitter is a bad, bad thing — not just because of what it does, but because of what it says about all of us and our need to be connected. Twitter’s whole existence is based on the premise that we aren’t yet in touch with one another quite enough.  According to Twitter, you see, we should be in touch every second — every moment. This is madness, and down this road lies overscheduled kids, over-prescribed Ritalin, and anti-depressants in value-sized jars.

Boyd:

Andrew Kantor does us all a service by snidely collating the most conventional arguments against Twitter in one place. Where better than square, middle-of-the-road USA Today?…  I just love the sanctimonious tone that the Twitter haters take…[Twitter] will bring out the Calvinist lurking not so very far below the skin of our self-appointed arbiters of morality, like Kantor.

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