Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 15, 2008 – 2:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
For everybody whose interested in the Northern European tech scene, Arctic Startup is a great source. Of course, we cover the basics, but Antti Vilpponen and his team don’t leave any details uncovered. Oh and yeah, most of the times we grab the highlights from their blog. Yep, guilty.
No more cupcakes?
Like this one: Ville Vesterinen reports that the loyal Finnish Jaiku community slowly turns its back to the Google-owned microblogging service. He noticed a Jaiku discussion (in Finnish) where the symbolic rats jumped off the sinking ship.
Who can blame them? I hear from several sides that, just like Pownce, Jaiku had some issues which nobody resolves. Before you know it, my co-editor Zee is dancing on your grave because you didn’t listen to your users.
Vesterinen points out several painful issues: feeds aren’t coming through and the SMS service has been disabled for three days now (sounds familiar). But the major reason: you’re missing out on a whole lot of interesting conversations when ignoring Twitter.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on November 25, 2008 – 2:05 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Want to engage people in conversation but keep them within your tightly controlled domain? Give ShoutEm a try. With no more than a few clicks you will have your own Twitter running on a subdomain like this: http://thenextweb.shoutem.com
Patrick de Laive met the founders of Shoutem earlier this year in Zagreb when they were still focused on Mobile Social networks. Their new focus is to become the Private Twitter network for popular websites and communities. This is a crowded market with companies like Yammer and Twingr doing similar things.
As you will see the templates are easy to edit and customize. For a few dollar more you could even host the conversation on a subdomain of your own domain. That is part of their business model. If you don’t pay you have to live with a few Google Ads. And even those you can customize.
The service looks easy enough to sign-up, requires some basic CSS and HTML knowledge to pimp to your satisfaction and has enough features to keep your audience playing. If you want you could even upgrade (or downgrade depending who you ask) to Pounce functionality with one click. The challenge will be to get people Tweeting on your MicroTweet environment instead of the ‘real’ twitter.
After all; If a tweet is tweeted in a private twitter and no one is around to retweet it, does it make a tweet?*
Invitation codes!
Find out yourself by using ‘doneright‘ as the invitation code at Shoutem.com or check out The Next Web or Mashables Shoutem versions.
Written on November 13, 2008 – 7:54 pm
Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Twingr is a brand new startup which essentially lets you create your own microblogging community. The site slots directly in with the continuing craze for microblogs and lifestreaming, and ways to make a viable business out of the two.
For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, it’s simply a way to post short nuggets of thoughts, ideas, links to a website where they can be shared with others. The largest of these websites is undoubtedly Twitter, although there are many competitors along the lines of Plurk, Identi.ca, Rejaw and Techcrunch 50 winner Yammer.
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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”.
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Written on April 28, 2008 – 8:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
While in San Francisco I had the chance to meet and interview someone who most people won’t ever meet. And if they do, they might not talk about it publicly. The person I interviewed is known to most people only as ‘Fille deLouer’. She is an active blogger (http://filledeloyer.wordpress.com/), twitter-er (http://twitter.com/fillealouer), works in the tech industry AND as an elite escort.
Yep, an elite escort.
She has paid sex with men.
There are lots of reasons to blog and twitter and one important one is to strengthen your online presence and do a little self-promotion. This surely can’t be the case with ‘Fille aLouer’ who is very strict about her privacy and doesn’t want to get known. So why does she do it? Why do people twitter in general? I wanted to find out.
I spent some time setting up a meeting with Fille but she refused to do so in order to protect her privacy. I did end up meeting her but will only tell you about that at the end of this story. First the interview:
My first question: are you real or just a blogger having fun with an alternate identity?
hello, Boris. Before I answer your first question I’d like to clear something up. It is very important for me to safeguard my identity but I actually do use twitter to promote my blog. I don’t think “self promotion” is a dirty word. And I don’t believe for a minute that most people who twitter aren’t using it as some form of self promotion. Nobody is that interested in status updates. I mean c’mon. Do I care if someone tweets that they can’t decide what shoes to wear? Not really. I do like knowing that someone’s put up a new post on their blog though. And I like being directed to a cool article or video or product review.
So, back to your original question: am I real. I don’t think some random blogger could make up half of the things I’ve experienced and talk about on my blog. I am, in fact, very real. But having been a part of the tech industry for the last several years I’m not surprised by this question. Skepticism seems to be endemic in the community. Whether it’s a healthy skepticism I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just annoying. I’ve gotten this question a lot.
Ok, can you tell me how you got started with this? (more…)
Written on April 23, 2008 – 10:49 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During the “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia” Web 2.0 Expo session, attendees were able to ask questions by sending a Twitter message to @micromedia2. As you can imagine, updates like “the man next to me smells a bit” and “Thank god Scoble isn’t in the room..” appeared on the two screens. Yet some folks of the audience managed to influence the topics Gregarious Narain (Blue Whale Labs), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd and Brian Solis discussed. They asked for some business insights, and they got it. So gentlemen, how CAN we use Twitter for business?
Brian Solis praised Dell. The computer company follows the Twitter conversations by using Tweetscan and reacts when (potential) customers ask questions or complain about the Dell products. Forrester research does the same thing. “We listen to what people are saying and usually engage in the conversation when we notice one. Other companies like Jetblue, Marketingprofs, Zappos and Comcast do the same thing”, Owyang said. “That’s the immediate benefit”, Boyd said, “Yet the big picture here is that streaming services like Twitter are potentially very big for enterprises. People can follow projects or other companies by having things streamed to them. They don’t have to look it up anymore”.
But what if companies don’t keep an eye on Twittter, like the majority does now. What will they loose? Solis: “The conversations will take place anyway. With or without you. And hopefully, the Twitter conversations might become even more more substantial. When you ignore questions then, especially the one full of hate, you leave the answers to other people.”
Stowe Boyd pitched a pitch concept of his own: TwitPitch. The amount of emails from start-ups who wanted his attention drove Boyd mad, so he came up with a short ‘n’ sweet Twitter format. Now start-ups can pitch to Boyd with one update. That saves him time, and he actually noticed some good ones which he then retweets. “It’s very interesting, the whole pitching process is now in the open discourse. Followers are getting to see the pitches, it’s more of a performance now. We took pitching out of the smoky black room that is email”.
Written on February 17, 2008 – 2:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a Twitter-user and fond of Shakespeare? Start following @billionmonkeys . Behind this account, @bopp and @jadwigo have instructed a monkey to post an update every once in a while. What does the monkey say? So far it has mentioned 14,481 lines from almost three Shakespeare books. The little creature has just finished @Romeo’s and @Juliet’s love story. Its instructors were inspired by the famous quote:
“Given enough time, an infinite amount of monkeys will reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare”
It’s not right there yet, but @billionmonkeys has already surpassed some of the most famous twitter-users in the number of updates. That makes you think about the value of this number. In the lively Dutch Twitter scene it’s pretty important how much you’ve updated. When Hollands no 1 Twitter-user @erwblo reached his 20,000th update, it was a really big thing.
I think it’s better to focus on quality instead of quantity. I’m not saying that Erwin Blom aims for updating as much as possible, he has just started early. No, I’m talking about people who mention they just ‘finished first cup of coffee’ or ‘waiting in line for the ATM’.
In an email conversation I had with Reinier Ladan from Digital Energy, we discussed this phenomenon. . Reinier came up with the following calculation:
Let’s say you start ‘twittering’ today in order to reach the magical 20k as well. Imagine you’re updating every minute. That’s pretty fast, I know, but it’s worth trying. It will cost you 320 hours of twittering, that’s 40 working days. Yeah, you’ve read it right, this comes down to 8 weeks of working. Think about that, next time you want to aim for that update no 20,000.
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