About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
In continuing my short sell of social media, I’ve been imagining Twitter and Facebook as holdings in a hedge fund manager’s portfolio. In my amateur understanding of hedge funds: the goal is to reduce risk and maximize returns by investing in assets that move in the opposite direction. The magic is in finding the complimentary …
Continue reading “Mental Exercise: Who Wins When Twitter Stumbles?”
Over on the Twitter the other day, I wrote: “Yes, that giant sucking sound you hear is me buying up CDSs against UGC-backed securities. #shorting_social_media” Right now, the similarities between the overheated real estate market of a few years ago and the current chatter around the marketing potential of Twitter and Facebook are uncanny. Turns …
In my world – Twitter and Facebook streams seem to be slowing down, while I’m hearing rumors of more people “using” both services – it’s not translating to me seeing new faces. Hell, I’m even seeing fewer familiar faces. And half expecting to hear Whit Stillman‘s next project is titled “Social Network”. Not a bad …
Continue reading “Please Exit the Silo in a Calm and Orderly Fashion”
A while ago, I heard Someone Influential1 arguing that the problem with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc, is that they are inherently interpersonal spaces designed and built by asocial people. Who else happily spends that much time between-chair-and-keyboard rather than out, with, um, people? As the argument goes, our actual social relationships are …
Continue reading “Dr. Sheepthrow Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media”
It’s conventional search engine optimization wisdom that URLs should contain words, separated by either dashes or underscores. This approach improves the readability of the URL – making it more usable for people while simultaneously giving internet robots something to work on. But with people sharing URLs within places – like Twitter and Facebook (and … …
While, I wasn’t kind to Pownce a year ago, twice even. There are many unfortunate things about the shuttering of Pownce. Halfway down the list is making the mistaken assumption that the same shuttering couldn’t happen to Twitter (or any other centralized, free, web service). Remember Evan sold Blogger to Google 6 years ago – …
Like yourself, I travel in a number of personal and professional circles; dad’s open gym night, neighbors, this project team, that project team, peers via podcasting, peers through information architecture, peers through visual design, etc. Each circle has different values and finds different things relevant. The chances of something I find interesting being relevant to …
“I WANT to be enthused about things like Myspace, and Facebook, and Second Life, and iLike…In every case, I feel like people are blindly giving away value, and not getting enough in return. What do you get from these websites that you can’t get on your own? What do they do for you that you …
My only issue with A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web is that it seems to assume a silo. Cause, why else would it be needed? If I always have full control (i.e. installing and maintaining a wordpress install on my own servers – not at wordpress.com) why would I need beg …