Mental Exercise: Who Wins When Twitter Stumbles?

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 …

Shorting Toxic, er, Social Media

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 …

RealTimeAds.com Launches at MinnPost.com

I’m pleased to announce the launch of RealTimeAds.com – a advertising product now in beta testing at MinnPost.com Karl and I have been building and testing the system for a couple of months now and I’m quite happy with it on three of fronts; It feels like it makes advertising approachable to people and organizations …

What if Google Blocked Your Site?

“Yet, Google’s system makes no distinction between people who have malsites and people who get hacked and then fix their sites. Neither Google nor Twitter notified me at all, despite the fact that both have my email address via my respective accounts at those services, nor did they give me any fair warning to remedy …

More Usable URLs: Twitter.com

URLs are consistently the least usable aspect of our interaction with web-based information services – which is terribly unfortunate considering their prominence in how we access, share, and interact with these services. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how Twitter’s URLs could be more usable – by either being more logical, more …

Unspoken, Unfortunate, Synonyms

From what I can tell; “SEO” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Google” “Social Media” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Twitter” Both of these are unfortunate for they: turn something easily understandable into something vague and amorphous – the exact opposite of good framing mask the monopoly those companies have …