Tag business

Entries 11 Total

Twitter and its plan to run advertising

I wanted to jot down two quick thoughts about Twitter’s announcement earlier today.

First, the money for Twitter is not going to be in running ads against search terms. I just do not think most people use Twitter as a way to consistently search for information. Google can get away with this because a search engine is not traditionally a personal thing. Google leverages the power of the many, Twitter relies upon relationships between users.

Twitter’s true value in advertising, is going to lie in leveraging what it knows about users you follow. If Hunch is able to build something that predicts tastes based upon following habits Twitter ought to able to develop something similar to deliver targeted recommendations.

This last part is what has me actually excited about advertising on Twitter. This could be huge. It could take the type of recommendation-engine that is true of advertising on The Deck and Fusion Ads and extrapolate it to a service with millions of users.

Posted on April 13, ’10

Doc Searls On value and valuation

If you listen to Rebooting the News it’s a point that you’ve heard before but Searls puts it well:

If you had told me in 1999 that the two hottest names on the Web in 2009 — Facebook and Twitter — would both be silos, I’d have been disappointed. I’d have figured that by now most folks would understand the infrastructural nature of open code, open protocols, open formats.

Posted on September 27, ’09

The next generation bends over

My sentiments exactly. This is why I cancelled my Mint account. They had so much going well for them I just can’t trust that the same level of innovation will be there after the sale to Intuit.

But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.

Posted on September 17, ’09

End of year reviews and the grading system

This would be ideal:

In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over the year. It also contains constructive advice and insight regarding how your boss believes you can improve on that performance. My dream is that you already know all of this information because you’ve been getting year-round feedback from your boss.

Posted on August 30, ’09

Why aren’t there any journalistic startups?

Just came across this older post from Kyle Neath:

Maybe it’s me, but the answer seems so clear in my head. We have thousands of unemployed journalists. Good journalists. We have VCs ready to hand out money for a shit sandwich. We have a proven business model. Why don’t I see a flurry of journalistic startups? Get rid of the cruft of the newsroom, give power to the reporters and content producers.

Stop trying trying to grasp onto idiotic ideas like “social news” or stabbing blindly at twitter in hopes of saving an archaic organizational structure. People aren’t buying printed newspapers? Stop printing them. People only want to read their news online? Let them read it online.

America needs to stop concentrating on how to save our dying industries and start concentrating on how to create the next booming industries. Isn’t that what the American dream is all about, anyways?

Sounds like a plan to me.

Posted on August 15, ’09