…even a dice can roll
Jul 29th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized & facebook
Pix.ie really has the most user friendly photo sharing site on the web today. And some of the ideas that Marcus has been pushing out over the 8 months since this video was taken are really exciting. Sign up today and see why.
Part of the Tuesday Push.
Jul 19th 2008NiaLLLarkinSocial software & Uncategorized & socialprivacy
Karatechimp
There are 3 main life stages of a trend monkey. A species commonly spotted out and about on the techpreneurial scene.
Stage 1: I’m pretty certain we’ve ALL been here.
Imagine the scene. You just met someone and they say to you
I’ve got this cool new idea. Yeah it’s a social network for X. We KNOW people like X, right? And we know people love social networking, right? So my idea is to put them together? Brilliant. Right? Yeah, I know we’ve got competition. But that just validates the market right?
You are standing wondering if this person realises they sound like they are trying to pitch cheesy peas?
Stage 2: I’ve a good feeling we’ve ALL been here too:
Six months pass. The market is getting a wee bit noisy. Ever day its getting more difficult to differentiate. And every day there are more and more ‘me too’ start ups entering the market. At first. most of the ‘me toos’ are run by the young and hopeful. A bit later they are run my old media types trying to cathc a bit of cool. Its beginning to look like this market is going to be ‘validated’ out of existence.
You bump into ’social network for x’ and ask how they are getting along. They say:
Its not really a social network as such. Its really all about X. Okay it has some social networking functionality in there too. I mean you have to have that these days, right? But is not really about that. Its about our really fresh new approach to X. It’s an approach that’s never been done before. Well. Not exactly in the way that we are doing it anyway. It could be quite revolutionary so we’re not really ready talk about it yet.
Stage 3: I’ve got a feeling we are all going to be hearing a lot of this in the next 6 months.
We’ll hear a lot of people explaining that THEIR service is NOT a social network. In ANY way. It will go something like this.
Our service has no social networking features because it is not a social network. That’s not our thing. There are others that provide those services and good luck to them. That’s not to say that we won’t serve social networks as customers. In fact we are happy for them to use the valuable data we will provide to enhance their services. But we will NOT be confined to servicing the needs of social networks alone. Our data will in fact be used by all sorts of services that make up the entire internet ecosystem. For example merchants like Amazon, Ebay, Travelocity would find our services especially useful. But we’re not just talking about Amazon and Ebay here. A whole multitude of online sellers big and small could use our services. We thinking we can actually reach out to the high steet with this. Its a massive, massive market.
Important Disclaimer: At this point, I think it highly advisable to point out that most of those you meet who have passed through these same 3 life stages are not trend monkeys. In fact it can be very difficult to come up with useful screening criteria to distinguish the trend monkeys from those who genuinely do have revolutionary new ideas. There’s little doubt that any such screening criteria would have filtered out Google as Johnny-come-lately, trend monkeys trying to hitch a lift on the search engine bandwagon. The same goes for Facebook, with their social network for the university campus.
STOP PRESS: I was just about to post this. When I came across someone tackling this subject from another angle. So, I’m tagging it right onto the end of the original post
What a nice piece of synchronicity. I just came across the video below on Mulley.net: “The Cool Curve” by Toby Moore CEO of Sleepydog talks about ideas that are in the comfort zone that exists somewhere between far out creativity and what the world ready to adopt. He puts the whole thing in much better context. He talks about those creatives that are sadly ahead of their time, those that are one hit wonders, and those are bang on consistently over time.
He describes what I call the trend monkeys at t=5:00 as:
…the flighty ones, they think they know about all kinds of things but actually know very little. They flit from thing to thing. They’ve always got this great idea. They are basically just headline people. They’ve read the headlines. But they have no depth. They are just. really. tiring. people. to. hang out with.
Spotting a trend monkey is not as easy as I thought it was when I started writing this post. In fact, I’ve decided that Toby Moore’s characterisation ‘they are just really tiring people to hang out with’ is pretty good indicator of who you are dealing with. Which you could argue exposes this post as woefully incomplete. And/or creates an open invitiation to any passing readers to drop comments describing the judging criteria that they use or that they find works for them.
Jul 15th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
The Tuesday Push this week is for 1time.
Always on the ball, Derek Organ was captured pitching to a waiter here.
Conor O’Neill has called it “an incredibly useful tool for time and expense tracking both for internal business use and service providers like freelancers.”
Joe Drumgoole calls it “a cracking web based time tracking tool [that] provides a perfect tool for sole traders or consultants who need to keep track of their own time or client time.”
The software is free for one project for a single person.
Sign up over here.
Jul 12th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
Back in April, I wrote ’search is dead’ and used the phrase ‘discovery is the new cocaine’ a phrase I picked up from the discoverio guys at the Web2.0expo.
Web2 is about participation, but what comes after that? We think it is all about Discovery, the art of helping users serendipitously discover content and people that they did not know they wanted to know. Discovery is what makes people come back again and again, interact, and explore.
So the guys made the slideshare homepage with presentation they gave at SXSW. Its brilliant and insightful and may just change the way you look at things.
Jul 11th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
@davebarrett posted a link to this on twitter just now.
Jul 10th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
For quite some time Google has been feeding us the nonsense line that your IP address is not personally identifying. The absurdity of this stance is almost blinding but the reality has been brought into sharp focus by the to-ing and fro-ing in the ongoing Google-Viacom case.
Here’s how the excellent Kaila @VortexDNA characterises it:
Google: “You don’t need to have any privacy concerns about the IP addresses that we store — they aren’t personally identifying.�
Viacom: “Okay, then, give us your user logs.�
Google: “No! That’s a violation of privacy!�
Judge: “But you just said…�
The judge understandably confused has elected to assign more credibility to the claim that Google has been making before getting sued. The only problem is, they were actually telling the big lie BEFORE being sued!
Now you would think that the upshot of this would be that Google’s weasel words would now be biting them in the ass. I’m sure that’s what the judge expected to be the outcome. But no that’s not the case…the fallout from this lands squarely at your feet. How did that happen? For that I’ll pass you over to Mashable:
From Mashable on recent developments in the Google-Viacom lawsuit
When you first read about the Google-Viacom lawsuit, you never thought that it would affect you directly, did you? Think again.
Unless you’ve been extra careful to only watch non-copyrighted videos on YouTube (yeah, right), Viacom could sue you. No, it’s even worse: they could actually win
However, and interestingly enough, the court denied Viacom’s request of YouTube’s source code, which means that the big company - Google - got protected, but the little guy - us - got screwed.
How about that? They say sh1t rolls down hill.
Jul 10th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
I’m simply reposting from 37 signals here. I loved the title of their post and reused it. Other than that this is just a reminder for myself really. From 37 signals.
Allocate your fear properly
When it comes to building a web app, some things create more fear than they should…Fear: It won’t scale
Truth: You’re not going to be Google overnight.Fear: Too many bugs
Truth: As long as they don’t wipe the database, you can live with most bugs for a while.Fear: Too few features
Truth: You can always add features later.Fear: Never go down
Truth: Once-in-a-while downtime won’t scare people away.Fear: It’s too simple
Truth: Simple solutions are fine if they get the job done.Fear: They’ll copy us
Truth: It’s about the execution, not the idea.Fear: We must sound serious
Truth: Trying to sound serious all the time makes you bland and unremarkable. It’s ok to be playful and have personality.So get a grip. Yes, these things matter. But some people get hysterical over these issues before they even deserve to be on the radar. If you fear one of the above issues, make sure it’s due to a genuine risk and not just something that’s giving you a mental stiffy. Otherwise you may be wasting time chasing phantom problems.
The flip-side is that you need to recognize genuine threats — even if they’re “boring� issues. Things like these are a lot more likely to actually cripple your chances of success:
Taking forever to launch
Running out of money
Not solving a real problem
Designing a confusing UI
Obsessing over the wrong things
Trying to do too much at onceNever ignore real here-and-now threats in order to focus on maybe-in-the-future threats.
Jul 9th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
This presentation seems designed to reach traditional marketers and help them catch the cluetrain. If it helps one marketer run with one less cringe inducing product placement into a conversation then thats got to be a good thing.
Jul 9th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
Joe Drumgoole invited me to join him on his regular technology slot on “The Right Hook” last Monday.
Good fun. I relayed a couple of tales illustrating some of the pretty unexpected ways innocent use of Facebook could end up biting you in the *ss.
These are not isolated incidents. There’s a story in the paper every day. In fact, as if to prove the point Darren from Putplace picked up this story on breaking news right after the show.
A winger with Crystal Palace, shared the fact that he was about to have a trial with Fulham with a select group of his friends via Facebook. Or so he thought. The details of the message could be seen by all 2.7m members of the site who have joined its London section. As a member of the London section himself he unwittingly broke the story to supporters of both clubs and to anyone else in the capital interested in reading candid transfer gossip.
Jul 9th 2008NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
Data from Hitwise reported in Time magazine last October.
Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. [The trends appear to indicate that 18-24 year olds] are too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.
