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- Randy PauschJuly 25
- Today, Randy Pausch passed away. I blogged about his "Last Lecture" a couple months ago. In the final months of his life, he touched more people than most of us will ever touch in our entire lifetimes. He taught us how to live and how to look at life differently. Thank you, Randy.
- To Go Mainstream, Twitter Must Have More PurposeApril 29
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Yesterday, Kara Swisher did a post that concluded Twitter is not yet mainstream. She came to this conclusion based on an informal survey of people she conducted at a wedding in Washington, D.C. this past weekend (nobody in the group of thirty people surveyed knew what Twitter was). The fact that Twitter is not yet mainstream is not a surprise to anybody. To substantiate this point further, data just released by Hitwise shows that Twitter accounts for a very small percentage of Internet traffic in the U.S.
Kara's post, however, did spawn a lot of discussion in the tech blogosphere about when/if Twitter will become mainstream. It even prompted Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC to do his first blog post in months (he has been just Twittering). I agree with many of the points made by Jeff: that Twitter -- and micro-blogging, in general -- will become mainstream; that micro-blogging is less time consuming than blogging and, therefore, less intimidating to many people; and, that the adoption of smartphones, like the iPhone, will ma - The Guiding Principle of Web 2.0April 24
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Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at the Web 2.0 Expo. The opening keynote address was made by Tim O'Reilly where he gave his perspective on the current state -- and future of -- of Web 2.0. For me, the takeaway from the speech was Tim's guiding principle on what makes an offering "Web 2.0". This is me paraphrasing...
As a prime example of this principle, he talked about Wesabe (O'Reilly is an investor in the company). Wesabe, like Mint, is a next generation version of Quicken. It looks at your spending transactions to provide you insight into how you spend your money. By leveraging the spending data of their users, Wesabe recently introduced a new capability where it can compare different vendors (auto mechanics, for example) to see how much, on average, people spend at each of the vendors. That is incredibly valuable information for anybody that is at all price sensitive.A service that derives insight from user-generated data and then delivers to users capabilities based on that insight.
I've heard O'Reilly talk about this principle before but it's always a great reminder for me. - The Brilliance of FacebookMarch 25
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During my consulting gigs to start-ups (and as I consider starting one of my own), I’ve recently noticed how often I think about how Facebook (the company) addressed particular issues and how often I come to the conclusion that their approach was brilliant.Here are a few examples that I feel demonstrate the brilliance of Facebook…
- Go-to-Market Strategy: For its initial go-to market strategy, I feel it was brilliant for Facebook to start with one very focused user segment – college students – even though their technology probably could have handled multiple user segments at the beginning.By starting with college students, Facebook was able to test out their technology with a pretty forgiving user base and build up demand as the buzz about their offering grew.Having this type of discipline is difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially technologists.It is not uncommon to find technologists who like to expose all of the different capabilities of their technology platform to all types of users from the get-go.As well-documented by Geoffrey Moore in the high-tech marketing bible, “Crossing the Chasm”, this is usually not a very smart approach.
- FriendFeed, Knowledge Networking, and Ambient IntimacyMarch 18
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Last night, FriendFeed announced support for search.Much of the talk in the blogosphere has highlighted the notion that now you can search Twitter tweets via FriendFeed.I feel that FriendFeed’s search capabilities has far broader implications.
I have done several posts on a concept I call “knowledge networking”.As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts…
Recently, I have started to use Twitter and have become a fan of the service.The reason I like it is best summed up by a post made early last year by Leisa Reichelt called, “Ambient Intimacy”.Leisa defines “ambient intimacy” as…I define knowledge networking as the ability for people to connect with the purpose of leveraging each other's knowledge. This is different than social networking where people connect with the purpose of communicating with each other.
…being able to keep in touch with