The Risk of Starting Your Tweet with @name

Social Networking September 30th, 2009

This is so obvious, yet little known – and although Mark Suster warned us all, I keep on falling in this trap.  Just today as I wanted to announce yet another great post by Mark, I tweeted this:

@msuster discusses how the Ice Age is thawing for Venture Capital

Big mistake.  Had I written “great discussion by @msuster”, a lot more people would have seen it. Why?

Read on to find out…

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Startups: Growth or Revenue First? The Case of Twitter and Yammer

Startups October 21st, 2008

The New York Times presents the perfect showcase for what I’ve been preaching in my recession / business models mini-series:

  • turn to businesses
  • stop poking around, create a valuable service
  • charge for it (yes, revenue is not a crime)

The showcase compares Twitter vs. Yammer and their categorically different approaches to business.

Twitter is the leading micro-blogging service – they have a strong brand with zero revenue.

Yammer , riding on Twitter’s coattails has followed the exact opposite model: focus on revenues from Day One.

Is one model better then the other?  Are they both sustainable, especially in a downturn?

Read more here…

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SocialText Becomes Really Social

Collaboration, Social Networking September 30th, 2008

Socialtext, the enterprise wiki company is no more… a wiki company, that is.  Not since Socialtext 3.0, the new release announced today.   Founder and Chairman Ross Mayfield calls his new baby a Connected Collaboration Platform, that’s modular, built on a widget framework, and consists of:

A fourth piece, Socialtext Signals is in the works, in private beta testing – I guess we could call it Twitter (Yammer?  ESME?) for the Enterprise.  Actually more, since it involves active microblogging – quick messages – as well as pulling in what users do elsewhere (FriendFeed?)

The platform is flexible, easy to customize via widgets, clearly the vision is that in an enterprise environment actionable information is pulled in from the transactional systems, too – i.e. ERP, CRM.

Knowing Ross as the uber-social guy something tells me this is what he always wanted to to: create Social Software.  But I tend to agree with Jevon MacDonald, who differentiates social software from the wiki, which is primarily a collaboration tool.  So Ross was really in the collaboration business and given his name became synonymous with wiki evangelism, he will no doubt have a hard time changing that image. smile_wink

This is not to say the wiki part, should be neglected… It is the primary collaboration facility for anything not well handled by process-driven, transactional systems, and all this social layer is just the glue that holds it all together.  (Hint: you will hear a lot more about Glue soon).

I had in the past been quite critical of Socialtext’s wiki component, and am looking forward to revisit it, as part of our wiki-series in the coming weeks @ CloudAve.  In the meantime, enjoy this video:

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Did Twitter Kill Summize?

Collaboration, SaaS July 14th, 2008

Summize has always been fast and reliable. In fact in the days of the worst Twitter outage, with Reply and other functions disabled, Summize was the savior of the Twitterverse.  But now that Twitter acquired Summize, I’m seeing it dead quire frequently.

The Twitterization of Summize has begun smile_sad

Update (7/24):  In the meantine Twitter closed the deal with Summize, it’s now rebranded as Twitter Search.  While Summize used to be rock-solid and fast, I can confirm that Twitter Search is spotty (simply missed entries) and is often delayed.  A sad transition, indeed. :-(

Update: (5/22/09):  Finally, a year later others agree that Twitter’s Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken (Louis Gray)

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