Blogging - opening the door to sales

Blogging for money may be a dangerous use of resources but what about ‘trolling’ for money.  Today I came across this awesome blog post by Jeremiah Owyang (Senior Analyst for Forrestor) - someone that I follow on Twitter and a blog that I enjoy reading.

The post (entitles CMS Horror Stories, and Your Soon-To-Be ‘Legacy’ Community Platform) is a real good read for anyone who is in the midst of a CMS selection.  In his post, Jeremiah asks to very key questions:

1) I’d love to hear from you about your CMS horror stories, feel free to leave a comment below, go ahead, vent away.

2) Are you deploying a community platform for your web strategy at your company? What are you doing to plan for the long term 5+ years impacts of this system in regards to the rest of the enterprise web strategy?

I work at PaperThin (makers of the CommonSpot Content Server) and I have to say that Jeremiah opened my eyes with this post to an amazing sales opportunity.  One that I am sure smart people are deploying (and we will be shortly as well) - and that is ‘Blog Trolling’.  A quick search on Technorati for CMS returns over 22K results.  Each search result a Blog with some information about Content Management Systems.

One of the most difficult thing to do in the world of sales is to find your target market.  What better way to find a customer interested in a CMS then on a blog post (an open communication channel) that is discussing pains or issues with their current CMS.  In solution selling this would give us the opportunity to “Recognize the pain” - for most of the people who post comments on Jeremiah’s post they are admitting their pain publicly.

Best thing about comments on a blog - since most people are constantly trying to sell their blog to readers of other blogs, they include the link in their comments (just click on the persons name).  Can’t fault a sales person from e-mailing or calling (most blogs extend contact information) you and saying:

“Hey, saw here that you were having difficulty with your current CMS and that you feel like it is ‘inflexible’.  Give me a half hour and I will show you how flexible our application is …”

In all honesty, when you post comments on a blog you are openly asking someone to contact you.  You are begging for it.

Note: More on his second question (about your Community Platform) a bit later.

Twitter: What improvements and where is the money?

With all of the buzz around Twitter lately (Michael Arrington feels like Twitter will soon go mainstream - whatever that is - shortly) the conversation will obviously turn to valuation.

Twitter is currently looking for funding (with 17 people I am not sure why they need that kind of funding) to improve operations and possibly make enhancements to the product.  This brings two thoughts to mind:

1.) What improvements really need to be made (or better still where is the technology going…)

2.) Where is the money

What Improvements
When you think about improvements at this level you must separate the technology that is Twitter and the applications that allow us to use it.  Twitter is nothing more than a set of web servers, a few databases and a set of API’s.  Older data lists that twitter.com is used to post up to 60% of the tweets.  So that leaves 40% of those tweets to applications and Instant Messaging - all of which are not controlled by Twitter themselves.  These applications use the Twitter API’s to handle the posts and responses.

So, when you think about what improvements you may think about improving the website but I know in my circle of users - twitter.com is used way less than 60%.  I use occasionally and that is only from my mobile phone.  Give me something like Digsby on a mobile phone and I am all over it.

Where is the Money?
So have you noticed?  Twitter is free.  Not only that - you are not subjected to silly AdWords from Google every time you make a post.  Um yeah … sit back and chew on that for a moment.  There are not that many truly free services (of the magnitude of Twitter - 1 million users) out there.

I know that when I sit down with a VC group about my “idea” or “proof of concept” and I am looking for funding - they want to see revenue potential.  How is Twitter going to pay back all of the money that they borrow?

One school of thought would be that the Web site could serve up ads like they have done in the launch of Twitter for Japan.  I don’t have numbers to back this up - but my gut feeling is that the use of Twitter through a web site will continue to diminish and so too would the revenue stream if they were basing that on Ads.  I have read a ton on the web about the degeneration of Ad based revenue and what it means for the Web2.0 style applications.

Another avenue for Twitter would be to turn there features into a pay for service style application:

• Small usage account is free - 20 followers - 20 tweets a month
• Medium usage account costs $19.95 a year - 20 to 100 followers with 100 tweets a month
• High usage account costs $5.95 a month - unlimited followers and unlimited tweets

It would be difficult for me to justify my use of Twitter if I had to pay a monthly fee (not that I am a “High Usage” account).

So I again have to ask - what is this money really going to do and how is Twitter going to pay it back?

Talking loudly on Twitter

Earlier this week Louis Gray wrote about his “Tweets vs. Followers” theory. His post cane be sumarized as:

I feel there are different categories of Twitter users, from those who have a listening audience, measured by a high “followers” to “updates” ratio, those who are engaging, seen with near equal “followers” and “updates”, and those who are more noisy, with a lot more “updates” than actual “followers”.

I guess I take offense (in a very lightly term) to the statement that there are more “noisy” people who have “… a lot more ‘updates’ than actual ‘followers’…”. While those that have a lower ratio between “tweets and followers” are “engaging”.

So if I have 2500 followers and 1400 tweets than essentially I am not even saying “hello” to all of the people that I am “engaging”. I think that what Louis is saying is that there are some people out there who are just blindly talking. And I would agree.

I have been followed on Twitter by various people and since I am using Twitter as a means to meet more people I used to be in the habit of of following people back that followed me. I have seen the type of people that he is talking about. They post their every move:

I just ate my apple about 5 hours ago from twitterfeed

Got my apple out of the fridge about 5 hours ago from web

I think that I would like an apple about 5 hours ago from web

Boy, I sure could use an apple about 5 hours ago from twhirl

I think that there is an interesting discussion here and it goes beyond the numbers of “tweets and followers” but what was Twitter really designed for.

I use Twitter for a couple of reason.

Reason 1: Keeping in touch with people I meet
I travel quite a bit and I meet some interesting people whom I have a lot in common with. In most cases, these people that I meet also have something common with each other (even if they don’t even know each other). Twitter is a great medium to touch them all with thoughts and questions easily.

Reason 2: Mini-Blog
Blogs take a lot of work and there is some distance between writing for fun and getting paid. I like to write and I like to “talk”. Twitter is an awesome medium for talking (quietly =). Sometimes I will have a quick idea that maybe doesn’t require an entire blog post. You can get an amazing amount of thought into 140 words.

Reason 3: It’s fun
I love to hear what other people are doing (at least the ones that I know). So Twitter keeps me smiling when I hear a friends joke or funny event. Inside jokes on Twitter are great.

I only have 66 followers yet I have posted almost 700 times. If I look at the people that I converse with the most - many of them have the same ratios that I do:

@reneemck 280 - 27
@protoolspc 205 - 30
@gregpc 1223 - 182
@mhostad 561 - 65
@knochie 754 - 43
@georgedearing 2451 - 305
@tpryan 1234 - 95

So one could argue that if you are communicating with 20 of your 2000 followers you are probably either more noisy or more popular than someone that actually communicates with more than 1% of their followers but you are certainly not more “engaging”.

The illegal usage of RFC 822

OK I will admit that RFC 882 did not have a true “usage” section but I can guarantee that if the folks at ARPA knew (not like they aren’t alive anymore) what we were using E-mail for we would certainly have this wonderful tool take away from us - much like a child’s toy is taken away when it is misused.  They define this as the “Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages”

When I was in high-school, e-mail was exclusive to higher education and governmental sections.  At the time, I took a shop class (where you learned how to build things with wood and such) and my teacher informed me that the Screwdriver was the “Most misused tool” in the tool belt.  While I would agree that I have used a screwdriver as a hammer, a chisel, a saw, a crow bar, an awl and probably nine hundred other things, I would have to say that it is no longer the “Most misused tool”.

I would like to submit my nomination for the current “Most misused tool”: E-mail

Let’s talk about the ways that I have seen E-mail used over the past few weeks:

Replacement for the “I know the answer to this but…” IM
Instant Messaging (essentially an extension of “Internet Text Messages”) is one of the fastest and most non-intrusive way of asking a question that you probably know the answer to but are too lazy to figure out for yourself.  I do it myself quite often.  However, IM offers the receiving party (the one you are interrupting for this stupid question) the option to answer your question or not.  I can’t count the number of  times I have received an e-mail - responded to it - and then realized that about 10 e-mails later, that user had already responded saying “never mind”.

Alternative to true IM message
Last Friday I responded back and forth with one of my colleagues more than 15 times in under ten minutes on three topics.  Essentially, some back and forth that would have been better suited for a quick chat via IM.  The kind of conversation that didn’t leave either of us with any “action items”.  Funny thing was, about an hour earlier, we had an IM conversation for about 10 minutes where we exchanged a ton of comments on what was going on between us and work.

Mechanism for sending large files
I know that we haven’t totally solved this problem yet and while there are a ton of options, most of them require you and the person you want to send files to an account - but there has to be a better way.  I received 20 e-mails this week with attachments - 4 of them were over 2 MB.  Ideally, I should have no issue keeping my mailbox size under 500MB but this becomes a challenge when e-mail’s are misused.  A reminder: They called “Standard for the format of ARPA Internet TEXT messages” - TEXT.

Method for sending and spreading crippling Viruses
For most of this unfortunately, this is related directly to the above, however if we were capable of keeping e-mail to simple text messages - we would not have this problem.  Virus writers would have to search for other ways to to send viruses.  2 places I won’t have to worry about getting Viruses from: Twitter and IM (it is not IM but the file sharing aspect of IM that causes problems).

I commend people that are beginning to write about this: Whipping up a batch of effective communications and Struggling to evade the E-mail Tsunami.  I can guarantee that my children will have solved this problem, not because they have to think long and hard about what an e-mail is and what it shouldn’t be, but because they will have available to them a whole new set of tools which will make the use of e-mail already either obsolete or useful for specific tasks only.

Update: 4/21/2008 - 19:21

How timely, I am now receiving 30 e-mails a day about an e-mail that I could not deliver:

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject:    Эффективная система обучения и развития персонала
Sent:    4/21/2008 5:22 PM

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

mail@oxp.ru on 4/21/2008 7:10 PM
The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason.  Check the address and try again.  If it still fails, contact your system administrator.
< internet.referent.ru #5.0.0>

Um - yeah I must have a virus or something because I surely did not send an e-mail with the subject: Эффективная система обучения и развития персонала.  Awesome!

And - I also recieved this e-mail today (withholding senders address):

Subject: It’s too big…

Message: I will post it to the web

Oh boy I love e-mail =)

Why I have given up on Trillian and switched to Digsby

Hopefully I can do this justice - because it really does deserve it.

I have been a faithful Trillian user for quite some time - probably pushing 3 years which is an eternity in the software world. I really had no issues with Trillian, it served me well. But as my use of Twitter and Facebook increased I needed to change they way I conducted public and private conversations.

So I have now officially switched to Digsby. And if you do not follow me on Twitter (shame on you) then you don’t know how annoying I have become. One recent post I got was that me “… and Digsby: [should] get a room!“.

Let me start with the features I see as being paramount for Digsby

1.) True integration - I have one client that integrates all of my IM accounts (except Skype =( ), my Gmail account, my Facebook and the two Twitter (and) accounts that I use. One application. Nice

2.) Quick access to Twitter - The Twitter Icon sits in my task bar (1 for each account). Clicking one of the icons displays the recent history in a very nice window with a scroll bar and little images next to the individuals that have made the post.

3) Send Twitter updates quickly - An “update” link is located at the top with my latest update, which allows me to make easy posts to either Twitter account.

4.) Automatic URL inserting - you can easily insert links (it doesn’t use the usual TinyURL but it works just the same) just click on the Insert Link button and away you go…

5.) Pop-Up notification - Twitter is a conversation piece (and a resource hog) - it allows me to follow conversations (when i want to). Even if I just laugh as a funny statement flies by or file it under - “Hmm got to take a look at that later. Really, really nice.

6.) Twitter management features - you also get the normal “Star”, “Reply” and “Trash” features you would get with your web based Twitter application. Each Twitter post by someone you are following appears with their name first which is clickable to their profile page. In addition, you can click on your name to go to the standard Twitter page for your profile. I no longer need quick links in my browser toolbar. In addition at the top of the toolbar I can click on a “tab” to see the different categories of Twitter posts like: Responses, Favorites, Direct Messages etc…

7.) Mini Gmail management - when an email pops up (just like Twitter) I can click on the pop up and it will take me to that e-mail. However, the real nice feature here is that when you click on the Gmail icon you can quickly delete messages that are useless without going to Gmail (which continues to take longer and longer to run lately) - very nice.

8.) All Facebook notifications - pokes, messages, walls, alerts even the news feed is updated. From here you can click and get to your Facebook profile. Again - really nice.

9.) IM Management - so ok yeah - first and foremost this is an IM application. For those that have multiple IM accounts and that have not used applications like Trillian - this will seem like an amazing thing. All of my IM accounts in one place? There are no real advantages over Trillian (and I am sad to say that I have reported a bug in Digsby related to contacts that I think is associated with the fact that I had two MSN accounts and it got a bit confused. However, I relinked those contacts that were missing and I am off and running again.

For those users that have Twitter, Facebook and Gmail accounts (along with the plethora of IM accounts you surely own) - this is a great application. Right now it is in beta and they seem to be putting out consistent releases (I have had 3 updates since I started using this about 2 weeks ago). Each update went off without a hitch.

The developers seem keen on adding in features. I would have to say that my feature list would be:

1.) When adding an update to Twitter and type in “@” - give me a suggestion list of people that I can go to. I cannot remember everyones Twitter account and it gets annoying trying to remember them.

2.) Integrate Search. This would be the killer feature and I think it would then win this software some awards.

3.) Gmail - let me compose an e-mail (and/or reply to an e-mail) directly from the client. It is a pain in the butt to go to Gmail through the web - soooo slow. Even Bill and Karolyn Slowsky think it’s slow.

4.) Oh yeah and for those less fortunate (ProfeC) I would love to see Mac support.

Follow up to ‘I am with Louis’: Where is my conversation?

Interesting thought just came to me (which further enhances the fact that we need to have a system here - sort of like the Web archives).

With the conversation moving away from blog posts (maybe not entirely but certainly incresingly more and more) what about the history side of this.  Take something like Twitter.  I have often wondered where will this service be in 5, 10 or even 15 years (holly moly that is a long time).  Certainly it won’t exist the way that it does today but what if didn’t exist at all.  With so much activity going on outside of the traditional web page - how are we going to keep track and record this?

The web pages are easy.  We have the “Way Back Machine” to help us remember what the world looked like 5 years ago.  If someone were to research a topic for say an article - would they be able to capture the essence of the conversation?  Could they grasp the tone of the community and understand what the statements meant at the time?  And what about all of the effort being put into these communities - one would hate to see that get lost.

We need a “Way Back Machine” for Twitter and Shiftr and FriendFeed and whatever other application appears in the next 5 years funded by some fool which ultimately goes out of business.

I’m with Louis

There has been a lot of talk lately about the “fractured feed reader” which can be summed up as from Dave Winers post here (and since he kind of started this whole thing I think his point of view matters):

This week’s Bitchmeme is about comments on blogs and where they belong, on the blog, or on an aggregator. For example, when this item is viewed through FriendFeed they will allow comments on it over there and I’ll probably miss them unless I go look for them. I will certainly miss the comments on Shyftr which I have never heard of until today and have never used, but from what I hear it does the same thing. Is this a good or bad thing? Well if you like to know what people think it’s bad. If you ask a question in a post, as I often do, you might miss some good info.

While I can understand how someone would prefer conversation about a piece of content they wrote remain in the context of the content (in this case a blog post) I think that there is one fundamental problem. The medium for “conversation” around a blog post is poor.  Mikull and I have been discussing this off line recently and we feel that there is a significant difference in the way people use tools to have a conversation.

He has had a raging battle with his site visitors about the potential removal of his forums.  For various reasons the forums have become a bit too much work and present a road block with future growth for his site.  However, as you can see here they are an important part of many peoples lives.

The main focus here is that the blog is just not a good way to follow a conversation.  Additionally, it is difficult to find a blog that doesn’t turn into a flame war fairly quickly.  That is why places like Twitter and FriendFeed are so important.  It is where the conversation is happening.  It has become the new medium and it makes sense.

If I read a post on a blog that I think is important and I want my friends and I to have a discussion about this - I don’t post a response to the blog.  First I can’t guarantee that my friends will go there and follow me in the discussion and Second - who sits on a blog page all day hitting refresh waiting for someone to make a new post.  At least with the message board I can get an e-mail notification when there is an update.

With twitter I can post the link - make my short and concise comments (who has time to read fifty 400 line responses to a blog) and then let twitter notify me when my friends have something to say.  The difficult part of this (and where I feel there is a tremendous amount of opportunity) - and why I think Eric Berlin may be irked is how do we capture this conversation.  We can’t force the conversation to remain on the blog site simply because that is the easiset way to “archive” the conversation.  We need a meta-sphere application that follows the conversation or connects the dots.

Any python developers out there =)

The incredible human mind

I would have posted this on twitter (@notronwest) but since I am limited to only 140 characters, Twitter would not be the best place to put this.

Are you in the top half or the bottom half?

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it

Do a google search on “fi yuo cna raed tihs”.  Amazing!  I love this world we live in.

One person even tried to use the above phenomonon to help people understand

Did you read the text and were you able to understand the meaning and the message it contained, If so think about it if you can read the message even when the order at which it is written is changed, Our DNA is also evolving in a similar fashion, now go on read about DNA, Gene splicing, SNP, Jumping genes or Transposons you would understand them better

What?!?

Social Networking vs. Robotics

Hopefully you have had the opportunity to see the video floating around the Internet about BigDog.  The robot prototype that Boston Dynamics has put together which is absolutely amazing.   (Follow this link to see a few that have wound up on YouTube).

Boston Dynamics is the same company that built the AIBO series robot dogs distributed by SONY a few years ago (always wanted one of those).  A few of the articles that I read about the prototype was that it was built from a grant from DARPA (the same organization that gave us TCP/IP and eventually the Internet - thanks).

My question is this:

With the ever increasing concerns about the economy, are we better off investing $50 million dollars in Slide so they can build applications for the Facebook (and other) social networking site or, can we continue to revolutionize the robotics industry and build some robots that actually do something.

BigDog is amazing and while I am sure that it did not take the full $10 million DARPA gave Boston Dynamics to build it, I am sure that there is no plant waiting to mass produce them.  And I am sure that even if they do, there may not be a market outside of the government which can sustain the costs of one of these machines - but - we will never get to the Matrix if we don’t start soon.

(um…yeah… a bit overboard - but - still).

Why Facebook has a $1billion dollar valuation

I know it is scary to think about this but I believe that the potential for an application like Facebook is larger than advertising.  Think of it this way:

1.) 34+ million users (in best Dr. Evil impression) - yeah the statistics will tell you that the site growth is capping off and that only a percentage of those users actually log in - but they still “touch” a ton of people.

2.) Communication is changing on the web (talked about this before).  Thing about it is, no one really knows where it is all going.  Clearly E-Mail is not going to be the main channel for all communications 10 years from now.

3.) People are getting tired of all the applications out there - there has to be a shakedown.  Companies that are in endless beta will eventually give up.  Since all they want is Facebook fame not truly affecting the flow of information.

4.) Facebook has something that no one else has - the API.  Call it silly - call it dumb - say it will never support business to business - but don’t deny the fact that there is something tangible here.  Slide - the company behind a few of the most popular Facebook applications (which coincidently did not exist before Facebook) just secured 50 million dollars in funding (yes - in my best Dr. Evil impression).  Even with a horrible burn rate of 5 million dollars a year, you are still looking at 10 years of comfortable opportunity.

5.) The web is changing and so is communication.  Teens and college age users are done with E-mail.  They use IM, Twitter, SMS etc… to keep up with everyone and they are huge on ‘networking’.  Go find a teenager that doesn’t have 100+ contacts in their list.  In the past those types of contact lists were reserved for Stock Brokers and Insurance Salesman.  There is a real network growing here and kids are learning how to connect quicker then ever.

So where does that leave us:

Doing nearly everything on Facebook.  Think of this as your “portal” to the rest of the world and anyone that you give two hoots about.  I am not a kool-aid drinker here but there are some astounding opportunities for this site which not a lot of people are aware of.

Take some common tasks:

- Buying music - with iLike I can not only keep tabs on all my favorite artists, with my network of people I can see what else is out there.  If trust you to be in my network, I probably trust you to recommend some music.  With everything from concert updates to record releases (and links to shopping) you can do it all - without having to leave Facebook.

- Renting movies - my Blockbuster online account is now integrated with Facebook.  I can actually add movies to my queue from Facebook without ever leaving the site.  On top of that, I get recommendations from my friends…

Ok, let’s stop there!

Take Blockbuster for example.  Let’s look at what they have done.  Instead of building their own social networking architecture (Friends, Comments, Ratings, Recommendations etc…) they just tie into Facebooks framework.  Cut development time in half.  Cut maintenance time in half, and to top it all off, they don’t have to go and find a marketing channel.  When I logged into Blockbuster they popped up a window “Hey, do you have an account with Facebook - we integrate …”.  On top of that - they can send broad messages to Facebook informing people that the service is there.  Why would Blockbuster want to compete??  Search for Netflix - they have done the same thing.  Why not?

I could go on with all of the general actions you take on a daily basis which require recommendation - buying a car, getting a loan, renting a house etc… Why not connect with other people.  Thinking about moving, look in your friends networks, anyone live in an area that you are interested in - connect with them.  Find out what the housing market is like, the places to look and the places to stay away from.  Six degrees of separation times 10 (or like 100).

Want proof: “Facebook Taps Blood Donor“

That same story has certainly come out of Forums and other web based communication channels but that was in the past.  This is the now.  You might be asking me to tip my cup back down and stop or I will get a head rush.  You may be right.  But I don’t think you can deny the potential.

Is it really that bad that you would log into Facebook every day - at least once?  I haven’t even mentioned things like dating, sharing photos, having fun…