TheVvibe

Twitter: Personalize == Destroy?

2009-08-06T18:12:00.001-07:00

If you assign or calculate authority you're dis-empowering your grass roots audience. People tend to dis-like this. Alternatively, it might create an interesting game where good behavior gets you authority. Would you play?

Disclosure: This question is very interesting to us. There's a tangle of delicious and intriguing subtleties here. This is one is a tough nut, with few promising solutions in sight. Even untangling why this is a problem is a challenge... The original post is well worth a read (read more button).

(Continued)

clipped from venturebeat.com

Please, please don’t personalize Twitter for me

allows companies to share information about each other’s customers would empower them to deliver more serendipitous automatic content to these customers. The concept is called “discovery,”

But it worries me to see Twitter CEO Biz Stone quoted and linked in the middle of Sherrets’ story, talking up plans to rank Twitter results by authority — by assigning different levels of importance to different users. That would, Stone says, float the “important” tweets to the top.

Biz, that sounds like a great optional feature. But if you replace the current all-tweets-are-equal system with yet another Internet pecking order, you’ll ruin a big part of Twitter’s appeal to the masses, and to me.

1. Too much of the Internet is published by the same few people — We used to call them The 250 on Valleywag.

2. Twitter’s unranked content draws eager participants — People who aren’t already famous or important love Twitter

What the F**k Is Social Media? Are we there yet? No, it's more like teenage s__

2009-08-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, some marketing firm cooks up a self promoting something *designed* to go viral thing actually worth it's ink. This might be one of those times.

http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-is-social-media-one-year-later

So, are they right about the teenage thing?

(Continued)

clipped from mashable.com

What the F**k Is Social Media? Here’s an Answer

But what do you say to someone who doesn’t get it? Maybe you have a boss who thinks social branding a waste of time or chatted with a friend who doesn’t believe that Twitter can help land her a great job. Maybe they have no clue what social media even is.

Last year, marketing director Marta Kagan helped solve this problem with her presentation What the F**k is Social Media?. It was quickly a social media hit for its wit and its very convincing case for the raw power of social media.

The next time you need to explain the benefits of social media to someone, just send them this post and make sure they flip through the entire presentation. Here it is:

twitter for small biz, charging a freemium (?) #blog

2009-07-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

Twitter has been one of the fastest growing web phenomenon in history, with nearly 900% user growth last year. What they didn't have, and perhaps didn't need, was a business model. The article below has perhaps the best insight so far into how they will bill.

(Continued)

Twitters vision of a B2C attention hog

The idea being twitter using twitter as a B2C medium, charging for analysis and reporting tools. You'd also expect them to charge for recommending new twitter users to follow you etc. There is already a discovery mechanism for this.

Twitter has a great deal of momentum going for it and the vision in this article of "freemium" marketing is appealing. It encourages users to either fine trim their follow list or deal with a tsunami of information. In the latter you might pick out random bits out of the soup that happen to catch your attention. In the former you'd likely be considered a snob but you'd also be able to form relationships on twitter. Some say friendfeed addresses this dilemma but in the end it's a simple matter of attention, and it's scarcity.

As a business you'd like to gauge the impact of a communication. The article refers to one example of this, where a sushi restaurant offers free seaweed salad to anyone mentioning twitter. In the context of twitter you might want to know metrics like how many times your message was viewed or the average number followed by your recipients.

gmail vs the future

2009-07-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

I'm fanatical about the promises of the social web. I wish they materialized tomorrow! But they won't. This post isn't about what we're working on, but finding bits and pieces of the future, available today, and making the best of it. Today I'm interested in how we all get the most out of Gmail.

(continued)

Pro-Filtering?

I'm assuming you know all about gmail filtering, or how to google it ^^ Here I'm more interested in that additional edge. Here are a few quick hits I found smoothly saves a bundle of time. Got any of your own?

Use code words

I include one unique tag word for quick notes and one for long term storage of information.

This way you'll be able to find it way after you forgot all the specifics.

These days there's so many access keys, times/dates, confirmation numbers and who knows what else to keep track of. Just include the code word when forwarding or send the info to yourself in an email. Search is still king I'm afraid... You just need to know what your're looking for.

Filter code words into "code" label

Just including the code word is way quicker than labeling, especially from a mobile device/blackberry.

Finding "multiple inboxes" from labs works great with this. Also, guilty as charged, I use android's shortcut to gmail label to skip right to my latest info. One touch of the screen...

My inboxes below, what are yours?

Family
Company
Billing
Code, for code words (archived)
Social Alerts (archived)
Newsletters, commercial etc(archived)

One great thing about this is that the number of emails in your inbox doesn't matter. You could have 2000 or have archived them all. You can see what's recent or bring them all up in once click.

Used to keep them to the right of my inbox, but after using an asus 1005HA netbook I now keep them below due to the smaller screen. Got used to it quickly though, now computers that looked tiny before seem huge. Funny thing.

Let me know if you found it useful, or if you do it differently. I'm aware that not everyone has use for this much organization. Personally, I find it quite nice. It affords me greater freedom and less time spent filing/retrieving information.

The connection

With all this automized filtering, what could possibly be missing? Well google wave is coming, which aims to reinvent email with the technology of today. This instead of technology that's been around decades before the likes of me. You could think of it as a real-time scratch pad, what seems more like a multi user chat+wiki than email. Which is all nice and well, but probably won't do much in regards to above.

I'm keenly interested in how to maximize you're use of gmail for a few reasons. For many people, much of the time it exposes a more fundamental problem about current means of communicating online. Online interactions contribute less to the real world than they could. Twitter, though nice, ain't the answer. Neither is clicking "yes" on a facebook recommended friend from grade school. Looking the current social web, there's no real change in sight on this one. Or?

Presently considering what to be secretive about and what to share. These ramblings will make more sense as we release more in the coming months, and of course commence beta testing.

stabilizing alpha systems: live website and chat interface

2009-07-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

We now have a website up at thevvibe.com and a chat interface live. Contact us if you're interested. We're in alpha stage and need your help testing it and giving feedback. The community page has more.

Please click here to subscribe to updates from the official blog. We will keep these infrequent. If you want to know more click here to follow this discussion blog. This is where the magic happens...

(Continued)

Our priority now as we get the alpha up and running is to focus on the core technology. We're somewhat secretive but as we get closer to production more details will be released. Our main venue for this will be blog.theVvibe.com.

TheVvibe.com has a community section with a brief synopsis of how the chat interface works. There's also mention of a web interface, that's under construction however. A few quick links above this paragraph.

Again, we're in alpha so we need you're help with testing and feedback. Thanks in advance for all your astute feedback!