Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

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If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape.  You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools  along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to  promote his/her business .

1. Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool.  Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

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I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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I had wished very hard my sharp-minded friend Sébastien Blanc joined me as a partner when I founded environmental management software company Verteego, almost two years ago. Instead Séb accepted an offer from online collaborative tools Yoolink, which makes me think that either I’m very bad at convincing people on joining me in projects, or that Yoolink is a very special startup. Although both options are still wide opened and not exclusive at all, I like for some reason to consider it’s Yoolink that’s an amazing company and felt it would be just fair play from me to interview Sébastien on what actually Yoolink is doing for its enterprise customers.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and Wordpress altogether?

Wordpress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and Wordpress. Wordpress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

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NY Times writes that teens don’t dominate the Twitter-sphere, thus proving that kids don’t always drive innovation.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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I once asked a friend how one of my clients should improve their sales technique for a technical product, knowing that his company is very successful at what it does. He, himself a “sales engineer” (i.e. a technical sales guy), found the question very difficult to answer.

I had to reshape the question to “so, how do you guys sell your technical products?” And then he was able, with full vigour, to tell me how they do it. It should be mentioned that market plays a strong role here; my friend works in a very niche business, while my client suffers from powerful competition.

I’m starting to loose my naiveté, as far as crowd-sourcing is concerned. This easy-to-communicate world we live in, sometimes makes me forget that, just because we can ask, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Technology may have changed, but people’s brains, psychology, and business principles have not, at least not at that rate.

My general stance these days is that, no matter what context you talk in with people, you should always assume a complete lack of imagination. Instead, by either spelling it out, or better, by asking the best interview-question in the world “tell me about YOU!,” and then extracting what you need from that, is much more effective.

It’s as Jeremy advised me to blog when I started here, Keep It Simple & Stupid (K.I.S.S.). Even though I have ignored that lesson at times, it’s a good one to follow in this all-too-unsimple world.

Apart from crowd-sourcing, the same, incidentally, applies to:

• selling people stuff: spell them out exactly how your product/service benefits them!
• applying for a job: spell them out exactly how you will make them money!
• and everything else.

Want to make the world a better place? K.I.S.S. it!

Vincent

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I don’t know if anyone of you caught the CNN+Facebook stunt two days ago, where the, I guess burial (?) of Micheal Jackson was shown live on CNN.com, next to a stream of Facebook status updates on the same screen. If I say “Micheal, we LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went. The CNN-part was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, Stevie Wonder was singing and he rocked. But somehow those two, Social Media with Old Media, didn’t seem to mix at all.

In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

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In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What is the problem? How about: finding the inspiration, not getting (m)any comments, balancing it with your actual job, etc. etc. Also, the baby eventually grows up, you eventually return from your trip, and there’s only so much to say about self-help (in my opinion).

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned.  Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

• The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
• The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits  of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
• The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
• The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
• The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
• The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

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On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

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It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

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Tired of the gazillionth post about 10 marketing tips for social marketeers? Tired of marketing all together? I think there’s a reason for that, it’s because marketing should be invisible!

Let me give you a brief example and then I will stfu. For my high school, I’m organising a reunion together with a team of 2-3 people. We started a Facebook group, ca. 140 people from all over the world have signed up. We hold mass-mailing campaigns only to find out what people’s preferences are. We use that data, derived from poll-answers mostly, and design, hopefully, the perfect reunion event.

When the day comes, this September, I’m sure someone is going to say: “thank you for all the work you did.” But that’s b#llsh#t! Because it wasn’t us doing the work, it was everyone filling in what they wanted and everyone designing their own event. All we did was mediate, using the free tools that are available to anyone at zero effort.

That’s the way all marketing should be. Because if you think about it, marketing is about giving customers they want. And how do you do that? You listen to customers, stfu, and deliver.

Vincent

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I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

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My cofounder at Verteego Rupert and I met Michelle Greer in the line to the TechCrunch Party during last December’s crappy LeWeb Conference in Paris. Michelle was the sunshine of at-that-time very cloudy Paris for us: we could discuss blogs (see Michelle’s blog), Twitter (follow Michelle here), hot startups, online business models, web marketing, as well as music, France, the US, blablabla

Since then, Michelle being based in Austin, Texas, we’ve been keeping in touch and I couldn’t resist introduce you guys to Michelle Greer, a great professional as well as an amazing person. Plus, I’ve become lazy writing blogs just myself with me and I, so here Michelle goes:

- Hey Michelle, could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Michelle Greer and I am a web marketing strategist here in Austin, Texas.  I love good movies, traveling, funny people, skiing, tennis, yoga, and using the web to connect people.

Michelle Greer was interviewed by Jeremy, who didn’t get paid for it! Look, Tech IT Easy isn’t even mentioned in Michelle’s favorites…

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…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

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OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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