Archive for April 7th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur just held a press conference (on Ustream as well) at Seesmic’s San Francisco Headquarters to announce Seesmic Desktop, a new Twitter client (currently being previewed) that will look to compete with TweetDeck, the most popular Twitter desktop app to date. Seesmic has completely re-written the code from their existing destop Twitter app – Twhirl - (4th most popular Twitter client), which has 1.2 million downloads to date and 200,000 active users updating with new versions. Loic noted that they will discontinue writing new versions of Twhirl and focus on Desktop moving forward. Although the preview version of Desktop won’t support FriendFeed and Facebook, as Twhirl currently does, they will look to build in that functionality in the near future.
Loic called the new Seesmic Desktop app, “The Bloomberg of social software,” offering multiple columns across your desktop. At the conclusion of the press conference Seesmic sent out a preview release (picture embedded below) of the new app (go here to receive), which I’m currently giving a run.
New Features:
- Multiple accounts in one. Loic focused on the ability to use multiple accounts at once within one column. This is a good new feature for folks like myself that are use to having multiple Twhirl windows open for personal and brand handles. Not only do they become hard to manage, they also drain memory from your PC. When a tweet comes into the first column of Seesmic Desktop it notes which handle it was received as. If you go to respond to that message, Desktop will use the handle which received the message as the default responding handle. Those that are using multiple accounts will just have to double-check that they are responding under the correct handle.
- Bloomberg / TweetDeck Column set-up. Reply, direct message and search columns that can be adjusted on the fly. You can move around where you want to place columns, including existing search columns from left to right and right to left.
- PeopleBrowsr-like lists that can sort your contacts under different columns. A nice add on, especially when you consider that it can do this with multiple accounts in use.
- Drag and drop phots. Twhirl was one of the first apps to really push Twitpic. Seesmic is improving those capabilities by allowing drag and drop photo insertion with Seesmic Desktop.
- More stable than TweetDeck? Although I don’t use TweetDeck, many of my colleagues swear by it. The one problem? It is a huge memory drain on their PC and highly unstable. Some folks I know, have had major issues signing onto TweetDeck for over week now, because of this instability. Loic made a point to say that although this is a preview of the new app / client, it is much more stable than TweetDeck.
April 7th, 2009
By Ben Haber
In this week’s Market Edge podcast, Larry Weber spoke with former Yahoo! executive Usama Fayyad about about the future of data mining and online advertising.
Fayyad served as the Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo! until he stepped down in September 2008. While he was at Yahoo! Research, Fayyad built the premier scientific research organization to develop the new sciences of the Internet, online marketing and innovative interactive applications.
Today, Fayyad is the founder and CEO of Open Insights, a data strategy, business strategy and technology consulting firm that helps enterprises understand and deploy data-driven solutions. Fayyad also recently joined ChoiceStream Inc. (a Racepoint client) as a member of the board of directors and strategic adviser, and is working to make online display ads more personalized.
April 7th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
In their latest question of the week, the Social Media Club, asks: What makes a community real? That is, When does a Website feel like a place to be, instead of simply a page of information to visit?
The question was spawned by the Social Media Club, previewing the results of the Social Media Buyer’s Guide at Web 2.0 in San Francisco last week (presentation of results embedded above). It includes some great data, which I’ll likely cover in future posts.
Now for an answer to the question. In its definition, a community (of any kind) consists of a group of people connecting around common interests. That was the original structure for social communities online. However, early models of online communities, structured as such, were often closed to outsiders. Friendster was Facebook in a lot ways, before Facebook was Facebook. However, it was stuck within its walled garden, limiting its appeal as a “place to be.” Why? Freindster never went mainstream enough to allow community members to expand beyond their real-life networks. In addition, after their founding in 2002, Freindster remained closed to developers and outside content for four years – closing off its reach.
The connections that make up an online community determines – in many respects – how useful it is to individual users. Open communities, with wide-ranging ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas and foster communal results (Revolution Facebook-style). While Twitter’s growth of 1382% is staggering, its connections are minuscule in scale when compared to Facebook. Twitter has north of 6 million users (i.e. connections) to date, while Facebook has 175 million users. The number of connections and groupings that can be made between those 175 million users is staggering. Especially, with the addition of Facebook Connect, openness to outside developers and the limitless sub-groups it provides. Combined, they’ve made Facebook a “place to be,” and has increased time spent on the site by over 566% in the last year.
However, to play devil’s advocate for a minute, there is a new factor emerging. It’s called interaction, and it could turn the idea that: “connection scale makes or breaks an online community,” on its head. There is a reason Twitter is growing so fast, and a reason everyone from Facebook to FriendFeed are emulating their real-time status updates and conversations. To the next generation of Web goers, real-time connections seem to be more important than the amount of connections possible. At the same time, Twitter’s growth is beginning to make those real-time connections more wide-ranging and meaningful. A combination that appears to be the holy grail of future online communities: Communities with seemingly endless connection possibilities and second-by-second interaction.
April 7th, 2009
By Ginger Lennon
Have you been using Twitter or Facebook more frequently the past few months?
If so, you are one of the 14 million plus people in the U.S. that logged in to Twitter.com (this figure doesn’t even include TweetDeck or Twhirl traffic) and 91 million plus people that signed on to Facebook in the last year. Mashable recently reported these figures, noting that the uplift in traffic could be attributed to the increasing number of mainstream media and entertainment outlets now using the social networks.
The Boston FOX affiliate is one local example of a news station that has been successfully using the platforms to connect with their audience. Every morning, the anchors ask viewers to post questions and comments to their Twitter account, then address some of the tweets on air — it’s pretty cool to engage in that instantaneous communication with the people that just a few years ago might have been referred to as “talking heads.”
With Twitter and Facebook growing more than 75% and 23% respectively last month alone, the media outlets that embrace these platforms and harness the power of digital media will surely prove to hold their ground in this tough economy. Every week, another traditional media outlet seems to fall prey to bankruptcy or threat of closure, yet what amazes me is that that the “surviving” outlets aren’t jumping out of their chairs to enroll in Digital & Social Media 101 to learn how to adapt to this trend!
Here is a tip for the Boston Globe: “Meet your audience where they want to be met.” If I can’t name one person on my hand that subscribes to the print edition of the newspaper, yet can name at least 50 people that visit Boston.com regularly, chances are you need to update your business model and embrace the digital wave (perhaps promote your Twitter account in a place where it doesn’t take me 2 minutes to find it on the homepage!)
April 7th, 2009
