The Next Web

I don’t do meetings. I do tweetings.

Written on September 6, 2008 – 12:00 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

[ This article was originally published at Digital Biographer on 5th September ] © Copyright 2008 Clarocada Ltd. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” - Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

The change from meeting to tweeting - where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content - has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so - but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

1. IN GOOGLE TIME
   I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things - I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.
2. HOLA FONEROS
   I have a laptop computer and a mobile phone, I can work from a cafe terrace in Banyalbufar just as easily as anywhere else. As a result, I don’t have the need to restrict myself to doing business with those who are within easy reach of where I live or work most of the time.
3. HOME OFFICE DRESS CODE
   I don’t need to have an office in the city centre to get my work done - I can do it from my home office. As a result, I don’t need to spend time travelling, and so I use that saved time productively. I also find wearing a suit in my own kitchen a bit pointless, so feel there has to be a very good reason to dress up to go somewhere. I like the fact that my carbon footprint’s lower with less travel.
4. MY ONLINE VISIBILITY
   Whereas I used to have to push information out to people in brochures, newspaper interviews, in meetings, at trade shows, I now have online profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, Friendfeed, MyBloglog etc, and I have blogs and web sites that I can update easily in seconds. As a result, I don’t have to spend so much time introducing myself, and explaining what it is that I, or any of my enterprises provide - people find out about me before they meet me, or get to know me through following my activities online. People can meet me at airports because my photo is online. They can also decide whether they need to waste their time meeting me.
5. I HATE COFFEE
   I don’t really like coffee any more. And I especially never liked paying €5 for a cup of it unless it was refilled all day and came with free wi-fi. As a result, when someone says - let’s have a chat over a coffee, I say “No. Let’s save the time and money, and spend five minutes now working out if we need to meet - and if so, what items on the agenda we can dispense with before we need to have a meeting”.

(more…)

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Boris, business, meetings, microblogging, time, time management, tweeting, twitter

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Preople sells out on Ebay, as Wired clones the ‘net fame-o-meter’ idea.

Written on July 29, 2008 – 6:20 pm
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

I first came across Next Web co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten when I stumbled upon his quirky site ‘Preople‘ in early 2005. It had an irrestible and simple hook - you’d compare yourself with others (or compare any two people or things) to see who was more famous, and you could email the results to people, and invite them to challenge others.

Preople also had a odd and endearing community of bloggers grow up around it (including myself). It was fun, and very viral, but I don’t think anyone too it too seriously, and it was really not doing very much for the past few years after the initial novelty had worn off. So, being the pragmatic entrepreneur he is, Boris decided he’d offload the site by - what else - selling it on EBay, with a minimum bid of $999. And the news is - it’s sold! The winning bid was $1025! Boris was unavaible for direct comment today, but rumours have circulated on Twitter that he’d blown the proceeds on an extensive lunch in Amsterdam.

Great minds think alike…

Now it may be a coincidence, but I was amazed by the similarity of this tool available at Wired - entitled the ‘Wired Celebrity Meter’, and has some very familiar sounding ideas. Here’s how the service is described: —

Are You Internet Famous?
How It Works
The Celebrity Meter scans your URLs and scores internet fame based on:
* webpages linking to you
* your friends across social networks (just Twitter and MySpace for now)
* pages linking to your photos

Being of 2008 rather than 2005 vintage, The Wired Celebrity Meter is of course an embeddable widget. Try it out for yourself… but be warned - if I am only scoring a few hundred fame points behind Kevin Rose, then there’s something odd going on, or perhaps I need a new agent…

Boris, ebay, preople, sale, Wired

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