Spam in Twitter is becoming a problem. Full 75% of my new followers yesterday were some kind of crass commercial, “I’ll show you how to twitter for money” or “check out my new multi-level marketing scheme.”
But some folks are using twitter for their business in some useful and interesting way. The latest I’ve learned about is a bunch of food twitters, including @chezspencergo, just profiled on sfgate.com:
Continue reading “Commercial email, or even tweets, aren’t necessarily spam”
My friend Ken wrote a nice piece a couple days ago about ROI and the role of the community manager. In particular, I liked this observation:
… The community is not a structured presence. You cannot simply pen in the community as they’re a wild herd of virtual voices. The skill of the community manager is their expert knowledge in finding these “voices” and listening to them.
[From Managing ROI for Community Managers | TheLetterTwo.com]
Darius says “Go read the whole thing…”
Last week I attended the VRM West Coast Workshop and one of the many impressive folks I met there was Joe Andrieu of Switchbook. In a recent blog post, Joe describes the The Identity Quartet – the key services that allow user to express their identity in online services. It’s one of the most clear descriptions of the identifier issues I’ve read. Joe even makes the point:
The Identity Quartet pattern isn’t rocket science. In fact, it makes things simpler when it comes to security, maintenance, and user control. The Quartet makes systems more flexible and more secure while giving users more freedom to manage how they interact and present themselves online. It is one way to turn user-centric Identity services of OpenID and Information Cards into truly user-driven Identity.
[From The Identity Quartet]
His post is recommended for anyone wanting to start understanding the issues of identity and security in internet applications and services. Check it out!
Congratulations to my friends at Seesmic for being at the front of the Facebook Open Stream…
To get things started we’ve worked alongside a few beta partners to test the Facebook Open Stream API. For example, Seesmic Desktop is now a full-featured client for the stream and Adobe has created a simple stream Notifier using the AIR development framework.
I’ve been using Seesmic Desktop since it’s launch, and loving it. It doesn’t support all the services I’d like, and maybe could have a few other features, but what they have implemented has been done well. Keep it up!
I’m not sure I like “4th party” as a description. We spent way too much time at the VRM West Coast Workshop wrangling over the naming of firs, second and third. But when you get past all that, this key idea is really something big:
VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also about building fourth-party user-driven (and within that, customer-driven) services, which make use of first-party enablement.
…
Fourth parties will provide many services for first parties. In fact, VRM should grow large new fourth party businesses, and give new work to large old businesses in the same categories. (Banks, brokers and insurance companies come to mind.) Native enablements, however, need to live with first parties alone, even if fourth parties provide hosting services for those enablements.
Fourth parties also need to be substitutable. They need service portability, just as the customer needs data portability between fourth (and other) party services. That way whatever they can provide can be swapped out by the user, if need be.
The combination of service portability and data portability doesn’t just put the user in charge, it also makes the data better. Companies should be very interested in that.
“It’s not a surprise if you’re paying attention,” says my wife. Of course, when it comes to new sexy toys from Apple, we want details and dates. We know it’s going to come… eventually. It’s fairly obvious that the Macbook Air was the first step. This is the product development process we’ve come to know. And when Steve Jobs says, “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk… ” we all know to add the implied “… yet.
Still, I was pleased to read Jason O’Grady’s article in the WSJ this morning:
Less than a year after Apple dismissed netbooks as a “wait-and-see” product it may be getting upgraded to an actively-developed project overseen by none other that Apple’s mercurial CEO Steve Jobs. According to the WSJ the Apple’s netbook-like device will come in at a size larger than the iPhone/iPod touches, yet smaller than any of its laptops.
Wall Street Journal reports that while Jobs is technically on medical leave from his duties as CEO, he remains actively involved with business decisions and has completed a 180-degree turn and is taking a more critical look at a netbook device.
[From WSJ: Jobs heading up Apple netbook project | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com]
Will we see this before WDC? I doubt it. I’m guessing the new iPhone will be first and this netbook/notepad won’t be until summer, at the earliest.
This just cracked me up…
Markets are Hanging Up On Customers
I just recorded my call with Apple Support to improve customer service:
[Click to listen] How to hang up on a Mobile Me customer.
[From ProjectVRM Blog » Markets are Hanging Up On Customers]
Follow the link and have a listen. Truly amazing.
When dealing with complex issues that spread across functional lines, a senior executive focusing on the issue can being important focus and coordination to the effort.
But too often, people are paying more attention to the politics of Turf instead of the value of that cross-organization emphasis.
I started thinking about this after reading a piece by Jonathan Martin of Politico. He may be right about Obama’s strategy. He believes he’s bringing power in closer to him and taking authority away from Cabinet positions. For example:
“Czar” Carol Browner will head up Obama’s fight on global warming, where once his energy and environmental chiefs might have stepped in.
[From West Wing on steroids in Obama W.H. – Jonathan Martin – Politico.com]
But the spread of authority on some issues, such as global warming, is exactly the problem that needs to be fixed. These problems need focus and it helps to have someone focusing on the issue and actively figuring out how to bring together the disparate objectives throughout the administration.
The same applies to any organization. This approach can be great for everyone involved. But infighting and turf battles do happen.
What’s the key? How does it all come together? What is it that really makes the difference?
Robert Scoble posted details of this week’s blow-up over failing drives and censored forum posts:
Seagate (maker of hard drives and storage devices) has been getting slammed on forums and blogs the past couple of days. Partly because they had a bad batch of hard drives and didn’t properly recognize or fix the problem quickly. Partly because they removed a few anti-Seagate threads from its forums.
This one is going in my file for great examples. It’s surprising how often you’ve got to walk companies through this logic.
The May 30th Gillmor Gang is all about FriendFeed and it’s one of the best I’ve heard.
http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2008/05/31/gillmor-gang-053008/
Why FriendFeed Matters
Bret Taylor of FriendFeed makes the point that different people use different tools, and that’s one of the reasons he created FriendFeed. He says: “The union of all of your friend’s one or two services is a really diverse set of information and a really diverse array of services.”
For me, this is the key point. I shouldn’t have to use the same tool as my friends in order to see their photos, videos, favorite music or movies, recommended news articles or podcasts. The key is in how usable my view into all this information can be.
Following the conversation
Today we can search, but when the conversation is flying, I really want to see “who else is talking about this”. Within that view, I may want to be able to limit it to what my friends are saying, or maybe what their friends are saying, or just see the whole conversation.
This is not a trivial problem. The conversation isn’t a single thread; it doesn’t start from a single place. So bringing it all together in a coherent way is not easy. I shouldn’t have to be an expert at crafting a search string in order to find and follow the conversation. That search complexity should be hidden – It needs to be a usable, intuitive interface that lets me focus on the content, on the conversation.
Segmentation of content
I’m not very interested in Robert Scoble’s twitter feed or his shows on Qik, but I’m very interested in his events list on Upcoming, shared items from Google Reader and his detailed posts on technology. Can FriendFeed be the place where I follow just the parts of Scoble’s prodigious output that interests me? Can this kind of fussy control be provided without making the user experience so dense that it drives away users?
Take a Listen
The Gillmor Gang today covered all these questions and more. It was a fascinating hour, and the FriendFeed team handled it all thoughtfully and with great insight.
Hugh McLeod says “Being a nucleus is the money shot” for FriendFeed, and I think he’s right. The FriendFeed team seems poised to really make it work.