Toluu : Profy.Com

It does not look like web developers will ever get tired of building applications for Twitter: with a friendly and powerful API and huge popularity they seem to come up with new ideas for new applications pretty frequently.

Today a new application named Twicli is launched to combine Twitter and photos and even though the idea is hardly new at all, the execution definitely deserves taking a good look and maybe bookmarking it for when you are in the mood to do some more photo sharing on Twitter. The application has been developed by the creators of Picli - a Digg-like social voting sites for photos that we’ve reviewed here before.

The idea behind Twicli is a simple and straightforward one: upload your photos and videos to Twicli and share them and discuss with your Twitter followers. User interface similar to that of Twitter is one of the priorities of the new application so you will most certainly feel pretty much at home on Twicli, especially after they invite you to stick to your Twitter background and colors on Twicli as well.

After users upload their media content to Twicli, other users can browse such photos or videos and comment on them. The comments

As a marketing person myself, I have participated in quite a number of animated discussions about how a worthy product is supposed to sell itself and you should not really waste money on stupid things like advertising or brand promotion because if people need the product you have, they will find you and buy your product anyway.

First time it happened to me was back in my years in aviation marketing: the company I worked for manufactured a new aircraft type that was a good and cost-effective substitute to many existing better-known analogues but lack of promotion left us with virtually no customers. Yet whenever I came up with some creative idea on how we could approach prospective customers better with our information, I was invariably told that the airlines that needed the type of aircraft we had would eventually find us anyway.

As you understand, I used to be the proponent of the idea that you need to invest in marketing properly for your product to get the exposure it needs for people to find the product and at least add it to their comparison lists instead of just going to the bigger names they are already aware of.

But later on, during my years here in internet marketing, I had to change my point of view quite a lot to accommodate another simple truth: there are different kinds of good products and while some good products will actually sell themselves, others will need significant PR and social media help to get into the market they belong to.

If you are a blogger, you must know a very simple principle of blogging when you do it for eyeballs (and ad impressions obviously): whatever your actual topic is, whenever there is something huge (positive or negative - does not matter) happening in the world that everyone wants more and more information about, think hard about how you could connect this event to the topic of your blog (even remotely) and you will get all the eyeballs you need - guaranteed. Some bloggers will probably want to argue they never do that, but I simply won’t believe it as if you want your content to be popular, you should cover things that are already popular - but from your own point of view.

In fact, I believe that even this particular post of mine can be considered as an example of exactly the same approach as I know quite well that the post will get a good number of visitors from search engines because of the hot topic covered. And while I don’t feel very good about posting it, I think I have the right to share my doubts about people shamelessly cashing in on the hysteria surrounding the latest threat to the human race - the swine flu.

I myself live in Russia where we have not had any swine flu cases for now (and I hope we won’t though it’s quite difficult to expect it is possible given how closely interrelated the entire world is these days). Yet it looks like whenever I turn the TV on in the kitchen to spend some time away from the computer and have a breakfast/lunch

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the paradoxes in how some companies approach going global and investing into such globalization. Usually every startup and even some established internet companies I talk to about why they don’t translate their applications to other languages quote the costs involved in translation as the main reason for why they stick to English speaking users only. But my question is why they keep ignoring the revenues that are waiting for them abroad after some small investment in translation?

Living in Russia I’ve been watching the Russian internet market for quite a while now and the most irritating trend here is how clones of various successful US projects turn into market leaders here while the original products ignore the market entirely and only enter it when it is already too late.

The most famous example is of course Vkontakte, the social network that is nothing but a Facebook clone: they simply copied everything down to the last design element and easily made it to the position of the market leader in social networking. Facebook kept ignoring the situation for years and only in summer of 2008 they finally noticed the Russian market and launched a localized version. But of course with two established market leaders sharing the social networking space it is now virtually impossible to gain any success in the market for Facebook now and users keep asking why this newly launched Facebook looks so much like their favorite Vko

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the paradoxes in how some companies approach going global and investing into such globalization. Usually every startup and even some established internet companies I talk to about why they don’t translate their applications to other languages quote the costs involved in translation as the main reason for why they stick to English speaking users only. But my question is why they keep ignoring the revenues that are waiting for them abroad after some small investment in translation?

Living in Russia I’ve been watching the Russian internet market for quite a while now and the most irritating trend here is how clones of various successful US projects turn into market leaders here while the original products ignore the market entirely and only enter it when it is already too late.

The most famous example is of course Vkontakte, the social network that is nothing but a Facebook clone: they simply copied everything down to the last design element and easily made it to the position of the market leader in social networking. Facebook kept ignoring the situation for years and only in summer of 2008 they finally noticed the Russian market and launched a localized version. But of course with two established market leaders sharing the social networking space it is now virtually impossible to gain any success in the market for Facebook now and users keep asking why this newly launched Facebook looks so much like their favorite Vko

Toluu

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