Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on January 7, 2009 – 4:14 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
Although many of you probably use mobile or desktop clients such as Twibble or Tweetdeck to access Twitter, if you are using Twitter in your browser, and want to find out a little more about a Twitter user, there’s a faster way than visiting their profile.
Just type ‘whois username‘ into the twitter status field when logged in, and hit the [Update] button. (You don’t need the @ character preceeding username.)
Voila! You’ll be presented with the Name, Date of joining, Biography and URL for that user.
All that’s missing perhaps is the ability to immediately follow that user, or go to their profile page with a simple link - but it’s a quick way to check who’s who. Try it for yourself - [Open Twitter WHOIS in new Window] Simple. Nice. Who knew?
(Thanks to @andrewburnett for the tip, retweeted via @tomcritchlow from an original by @robousbey)
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 19, 2008 – 2:30 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
I managed to grab socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg for a rapid-fire interview this afternoon, following the announcement this morning of the acquisition of SocialMedian Inc. by Xing, as reported earlier today on The Next Web.
Jason Goldberg of socialmedian
DP: Hi Jason - congratulations on the news.
JG: Thanks!
DP: Do you anticipate Social Median being integrated into the Xing.com network, or are there other opportunities will you be pursuing following your acquisition by Xing?
JG: We will continue to operate and grow socialmedian as a standalone service as well as integrate features from socialmedian into Xing. We’ll also be working on other applications that bring relevant content and increased user engagement to the Xing platform.
DP: The Xing Appplications Platform?
JG: We will be launching and developing a platform which enables third parties to connect with Xing’s network of users both on Xing as well as integrating aspects of Xing onto their own sites.
I’ll be leading this effort to make Xing the go-to place for companies and developers to connect with Xing.
DP: Cool. Sounds very exciting. I remember tipping social median for success in May 2008 when it was still in alpha release. Socialmedian has been built and developed rapidly - what have been the key driving factors for you?
JG: The key to developing socialmedian has been a rapid development process in which we built every step of the way with our users. We constantly gather user feedback which drives very short development milestones. We test stuff by shipping it vs. pretending we know all the answers. Ultimately the user is always right so it’s most important to grow and develop with your users. As an example, our first development milestone was 3 weeks long. We then shipped that code to a small group of people and got their immediate feedback, then repeated that process weekly.
DP: And it worked well! What have you got right, and what have you got wrong along the way?
JG: I’d say we get 30% right at first and then learn the other 70% as we go. The key is getting the 30% done in a way which it enables you to learn the rest from your users and to be able to rapidly adjust as you learn from them.
We got our learning model for product development really right - we put less focus on user interface than we maybe should have, but users seem to forgive you on design when they like (or at least respect) the core functionality.
DP: I understand you’re going to be based in Germany - what changes do you think that will bring for you?
JG: I’ve promised myself that I will learn two languages in 2008: German and Ruby on Rails.
Our software is developed in Ruby, and Xing is making a major investment in Ruby. I am serious about getting more into the code. At heart I’m a product guy.
DP: How you see elements such as Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect driving developments in the next few years offering ‘friend-filtered’ information, and where do you think socialmedian fits into that picture?
JG: I do think that we are just in the very early days of the distributed web and that the portable social graph will be a big driving force of further developments in 2009.
DP: Finally, what’s your key single-sentence piece of advice for a web startup?
JG: Earn one success at a time. Meaning, while you may have a big grand vision, getting on base at first is more important and practical than hitting a homerun (in U.S. baseball terms). Just focus on achieving 1 milestone at a time and don’t get ahead of yourself. And spend as little as it takes getting there.
DP: Jason, thank you so much for your time. I hope we might see you at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam in April 2009.
JG: For sure!
Written on December 16, 2008 – 10:42 am
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
Do you remember what you said when you first used Twitter? Do you remember when it was - or who you were with?
The text of My first ever tweet.
Actually, neither did I - until I came across My First Tweet - which, unsuprisingly, will find your first ever entry on Twitter. It’s not guaranteed to work if you’ve twittered more than 3,000 times, but it’s worth trying out anyway.
If you can find it, go ahead and add your first tweet in the comments. Who was the earliest adopter among Next Web Readers? I started twittering on March 2nd, 2007… and you?
Written on December 15, 2008 – 1:02 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
I have to admit, twitorfit is puerile, silly, and quite useless. But I love it - it reminds me of when @bomega (edit: I’m @boris now!) announced he was an ‘influential twitter’ and I responded he might just be an influential twit. The idea has taken shape rapidly from a few ideas twittered recently - see the twitorfit blog.
The premise is very simple - you rate Twitter users, based on seeing their avatar photo, as ‘twit’ (low score) or ‘fit’ (high score). You can also ask people to rate you automatically when you vote, and see your own score. Vanity. Always popular.
I just updated my @clarocada avatar with a Christmas theme, and so far, am cursed by mediocrity at about 4.8! But my @certainhost avatar was proudly on the ‘twits list‘ last I checked. You can also find new people to follow on Twitter, naturally.
(A note for the Twit or Fit authors: It would be great to see an individual’s twitter biography, as well as their last tweet — this is what I often look at when deciding whether to follow or not).
UPDATE: My loyal readers and followers have taken my score down to 3.75 (and plummeting) and I have just noticed there’s a widget you can add. Please click to humiliate me further:-
Written on November 28, 2008 – 12:05 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
Twitter is pretty boring until you start to follow people. And it’s also pretty boring if the people you follow don’t update more than one a week, don’t follow you back, or only tweet about themselves. So how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter?
Enter Mr Tweet, a new service from @mingyeow and @ambivalence. Mr. Tweet looks through your extended network on twitter to help you build relationships on Twitter, and answers two very simple, and very important questions: —
* Which are the followers I should be following in return?
* Who are the influential people I should be following?
How it works is incredibly simple. You follow @mrtweet on Twitter. And that’s it. Mr Tweet will then send you a direct tweet pointing you to your personal report at the Mr Tweet web site. When I followed Mr Tweet, my report came through in about 6 hours - but due to rising popularity (Robert Scoble found it), you may have to wait up to 48 hours, especially if you have a lot of followers and / or follow a lot of people - but it’s well worth waiting for.
The report you receive (see my example report for @clarocada here) is produced online at Mr Tweet’s site, and allows you to either find influencers beyond your network or show which of your followers you should be following back.
The beauty of Mr Tweet’s reports is that you can assess whether to follow twitter users suggested to you on the basis of a great deal of information: -
- Examples of who, among those you follow, follows them.
- See how many of the people that you follow, follow them.
- How many followers they have.
- How many people they follow.
- A quick ‘following/followers’ ratio.
- A reciprocity statement - such as ‘frequently replies to non-follows’, ‘usually follows back’.
- How often they update - you may want to limit the number of ‘57 tweets a day’ people you follow!
- Link to their web site or blog as noted on their twitter profile.
- Brief biography from their twitter profile.
- View their last 5 tweets (A really useful touch).
The Mr Tweet Blog has just had its first entry, and they encourage feedback at Get Satisfaction. All in all, Mr Tweet is an extremely useful, very well-designed and beautifully easy to access service.
Follow @mrtweet and see who you’re missing…
Written on October 29, 2008 – 9:30 am
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
The answer is 236. I’m one of 237 authors who have contributed to the publication ‘Age of Conversation 2 - Why don’t they get it?‘ and I’m very happy to announce that you can buy the book from 08:00 US EST today, 29th October 2008 here - http://www.lulu.com/ageofconversation. For those of you in the UK, that’s on sale from 12 Noon today, 13:00 in Netherlands, France, Spain etc.
The publication is a series of themed short essays, involving 237 marketing professionals who blog from 29 states throughout the USA, and from 14 other nations from Australia to the Ukraine. All contributed one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”.
My contribution to ‘AOC2′ was a chapter entitled “You’re a facilitator, not a creative…” in the section of the book called ‘A New Brand of Creative’.
“I can think at about 1250 words per minute, but can only speak at about 250wpm. So I am five times more clever when I keep my mouth shut…” - David Petherick, writing in Age of Conversation 2
There are two important things to note: 1) You can get it in hardback, or in paperback or in e-book format and 2) All the proceeds go to the International children’s charity, Variety. Not one of the authors receives a complimentary copy - we have to buy ours too. The authors are aiming to raise $15,000 for the charity - if you order a copy, add your name below in the comments, and I’ll send you a special extra gift to say thanks.
So if you’d like an autographed or personalised copy, or a review copy - then buy it, ship it to me, and I’ll send it on - my contact details are here. It would be quite a feat to get all 237 authors to sign it - any ideas on how to do that ‘2.0 style’?
Full list of authors is here. Good old fashioned press release is here.
Written on October 10, 2008 – 1:35 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
David Petherick was at FOWA 08 and spoke to Todd Fast of Zembly, which offers the prospect of allowing us to create our own Facebook, Opensocial Meebo, iPhone apps, as well as Google Gadgets, and other widgets using drag and drop building style, and with a community behind it…
Written on October 10, 2008 – 12:14 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
The Next Web talks with Tim Bray at Future of Web Apps, London. Tim gives us some tips for the tough times ahead. He knows that even if he’s wrong, we should listen.
Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterli. 
Replies. mp3
Written on October 9, 2008 – 7:08 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
The Next Web spoke with Ben Huh of I can haz cheezburger about why content wants to be free… click to listen to what he has to say.
Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterli. 
Replies. mp3
Written on October 9, 2008 – 1:23 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
Kevin Rose kicked off the Future of Web Apps Conference in London this morning, on the topic “The Future of News”. He started out by asking several broad ‘unanswered questions’, which he went on to detail in his keynote.
- How do we create an experience YOU enjoy?
- How can it get better with your participation?
- How can we empower people to share information with people that want that information?
- How can we improve the conversation?
Kevin described the gap he wanted Digg to fill as being placed between the filters of people you know, and an unfiltered mass audience. This gap, said Rose, would be filled by Digg in future with its recommendation engine, providing an intersection of your news, and news from ‘diggers like you’.
Digg’s traffic has grown by over 40% since July with the recommendation engine being the fuel for this, and they now plan to open up their taxonomy to allow dynamic grouping - the aim with this is to promote conversation amongst similar users.
Thus, a group can ‘reject’ a spammer or someone who is interrupting, and include those who make valuable contributions. In this way, an individual can ’show their impact’ to other users - as you Digg, it shows you the number of people like you who, in a dynamic group, you are sharing this with, or the number whom you are ‘denying’ seeing the story if you are ‘burying’ things you don’t think deserve an airing. Nice tool - why would you want to disappoint 3,421 people like yourself?
Digg also want to be a conduit to other places, like Twitter, Facebook etcetera. They are also developing and extending the recommendation API and tools for publishers. My immediate thought was that the publishers might welcome this, but it would depend who was branding (or monetising) the end delivery to the consumer.
Responding to questions at the end of his presentation, Rose revealed that Digg has plans to develop internationally, with Rose saying this will be a big initiative next year. One big reason for taking their last round of funding was expanding internationally to take on the local ‘Digg clones’ in the likes of Germany and Spain.”We’ll be moving servers overseas, and by Q4 2009, we will be addressing international markets.”
So watch out, looks like the Diggers will be the future of news. So, please Digg this story…
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
