To a product manager, user “love” is not just a nice thing, it’s a tangible strategic victory. It means a user, even if presented with an objectively “better” product or a lower price, may be hesitant to abandon your product. A switching friction is introduced into the equation, a friction which involves issues of identity, [...]
Twitter can be viewed as an infinitely overlapping structure of reverse panopticons, with each participant at the center of his/her own universe, with no visibility outward back to the people who are watching them. There is no “conversation” per se (without a tedious, forensic reconstruction process), as each participant is experiencing and responding to a very different messaging landscape. In such a chaotic landscape, shared norms (a key component of a “community”) cannot emerge. For example, if I follow a bunch of dirty-mouthed comedians (as I do), I might easily get the sense that the ethos of Twitter is wild, profane, and uncompromisingly edgy. But then when I comment in kind, I may well shock the sensibilities of (say) the internet development professionals that follow me. Now multiply this dissonance by the number of individual nodes in the network, and you have a custerfluck of epic proportions, with millions of people shouting together, alone.
Hello, Portland. I’m ready to take the next step, if you are. I’m plotting my next career move, and would love to stay here in our lovely, livable town. The only problem is that all the juicy digital media jobs for someone like me seem to be in New York, L.A., or San Francisco. This [...]
We are all many. Whether you call them “masks” or “hats” we all have several we shuffle through each day. Not only are we interested in consuming different categories of content, but we are interested in creating content in different categories as well, thereby presenting specific facets of ourselves to the sundry social spaces we each occupy. To that end, Twitter should implement some notion of “personae”, in recognition of this idea that each of us are (perhaps subtly) different things within different social contexts, and might like to preserve the separation of those spheres in our social media.
If it’s optimized for a search engine, it’s *not* being optimized for me. I want my content to be HIO – human intelligence optimized.
A few days ago, it was rumored that Twitter would begin charging brands for commercial use. This was soon denied, and rightly so — it makes no sense, as it’s just impossible to adequately delineate. There’s been talk of charging for “brand verification” as well, to ensure, say, that the person who claims to be [...]
Well, sort of. Nearby Tweets just uses the location you stated at registration time, but it’s a very cool user-discovery feature nonetheless. I love an app like this — it does one thing, and does it well. It throws a simple user interface on something that was already available in the twitter API (thanks for [...]
Looks like a preview of the new muxtape.com is up, and while it has a certain aesthetic appeal, I’m not quite sure what niche it’s trying to fill. I mean, obviously it’d like to be what myspace has been in the past — a turnkey online presence for artists, simple to use and appealing to [...]
Plinky launched today, and it appears to have the twittosphere all a-twitter. The promise is simple, but well, promising: they will present you with a “prompt” every day — a little evocative question or assignment — and you will respond, sharing your responses on twitter, or facebook, or your blog of choice. It’s a smart [...]
The always enlightening Mike Speiser on why it pays to target your messaging at the most dedicated 20% of your customers/audience, rather than trying to speak broadly to everyone. An excerpt:
Another big learning was that, for most companies, the average cost of moving a customer from the second most loyal to the most loyal category [...]