What makes great service?
It’s something I’ve cared about a long time, since helping run consumer electronics stores in the 1980s to working at Rackspace (which regularly wins awards and praise for its quality of service).
I keep hearing about six-year-old Tiny Prints and how awesome its service is and [...]
I still like listening to KGO Radio (AM 810 San Francisco) but on there they still make a big deal about having a traffic helicopter and a team that covers traffic. Every day they put on air someone caught in traffic too, mostly on the Bay Bridge, to report [...]
When Salesforce copied Facebook a week ago and put social information into its service with a new service called Chatter it got me to look around at what else was out there for Enterprises. Companies like SocialText, Jive, Yammer and others are out there. But Blogtronix was showing up on [...]
If you attend a tech event or conference you will probably run into Brian Solis. He’s one of those rare PR birds: everywhere all the time. He’s always on Twitter and Facebook too. Plus he guest posts over on Techcrunch, which shows he’s gotten the respect of Arrington, which [...]
Imagine you had an infinitely-long strip of paper that you, and your friends, could write on anywhere along the strip. Imagine that you could write anywhere along that strip anytime, or even all at the same time.
That is exactly what Google Wave is. Except it’s not a piece of paper [...]
In 2006 I wrote that I wouldn’t use any news aggregator or feeds that aren’t full text. I was wrong.
See, I often do get it wrong. Or, even if I’m right today, I can be proven wrong tomorrow by market changes.
What changed since 2006?
1. I have moved about 70% [...]
It started as a little joke that I said on stage at the BlogWorld Expo. One of my fellow panelists said she didn’t like people who told other people that they were doing Twitter wrong. So, of course, I blurted out “Chris Brogan is doing Twitter wrong.” Mostly as [...]
One is a huge company that’s well known inside huge enterprises. The other is a startup with five employees that hardly anyone knows.
But they both shifted the world last week in big [...]
I believe that people who produce content should be able to make a living for producing that content. If we want journalists, bloggers, photographers, and videographers to bring us interesting stuff that makes our lives richer, we gotta figure out a way to get them paid. That’s why I care [...]
Today InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy says that Google’s Chrome OS will fail.
What he is missing is he’s looking at the wrong field.
Google is playing a different game. Google Chrome OS is NOT about killing Microsoft or Apple.
What is it about? Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
See, what happens if the world [...]
Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, today, at the TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup (live video of the conference is live now on building43, there will be lots of news all day long from this event), told the audience that Twitter is, indeed, going to turn on an advertising model.
This is [...]
I use Twitter and Facebook a lot. Probably more than 99.9999% of people in the world. I am in search of the perfect client that will help me use Facebook and, particularly, Twitter (which I use a lot more than Facebook because that is the best place to network [...]
Microsoft exec Ray Ozzie, at a lunchtime session with bloggers at its PDC conference told the bloggers that apps won’t be a differentiating factor on smart phones.
He is wrong. Totally wrong.
Why is Mike Arrington so passionate about his Droid (we argued about it for 39 minutes on the [...]
At the Blog World Expo a few weeks ago someone asked what Twitter is for and I answered “pimping your blog.”
Hey, it works for TechCrunch and Mashable, why not you?
Or me.
So, I’ve finally figured out that I was clueless because I didn’t have a Twitter account for my [...]
Chris Walker, on Twitter, asked a question I get often: “Any advice on getting followers?”
It’s the worst question in social media. Sorry Chris for picking on your question.
It’s actually a question lots of people wonder, but it’s the kind of thing that no one really can answer.
Why?
Because we’re not [...]
Twitter’s new list feature is one of those things that seems simple on the surface and is easily ignored.
But it has deeply changed how I get my news and how I interact with the tech community.
Click through these lists and you’ll see a different world than you would have [...]
Mike Arrington, founder of the famous and influential TechCrunch blog, and I totally disagree about the Motorola Droid and whether or not it’s a great product or not. To be fair to the Droid I’ve been using it all week to see if my opinion changes (I left [...]
So, the hype got to me. Yesterday I headed to Verizon and bought a Motorola Droid, which runs Google’s Android operating system.
Last night my friend Luke Kilpatrick came over and we compared the Droid to the Palm Pre and iPhone. He’s a bit biased toward the Palm, and ran [...]
I love giving Gabe Rivera grief, founder of Techmeme. But I do love Techmeme. I read it every day.
But now that we have Twitter lists, I’m finding I read Techmeme differently. Why? Well, TechMeme has a Twitter account.
So, when something gets added to Techmeme it gets added [...]
One of my favorite posts Louis Gray ever did was this one where he explained the stages early adopters go through as we use a product.
He explained how early adopters go through five stages of using a product starting with discovery and ending with migration.
Right now [...]
I’ve been doing online communities for more than 20 years, starting in 1985 when a friend had a BBS. One thing I’ve noticed over and over again is that chat rooms and forums start out fun and then devolve over time for various reasons.
But in 2000 I discovered that [...]
I was talking with Loic Le Meur, CEO and founder of Seesmic, the other night and he was saying that he’s running his business by looking at the numbers, not listening to the hype. He told me that the iPhone isn’t the only platform out there, although he admitted that [...]
Chris Brogan wrote that Twitter’s Lists make Chris Brogan feel bad. Why? Because he sees them as exclusionary. Chris doesn’t like that lists exclude people, by their very design.
Here, look at my list of programmers. It excludes me.
That makes me feel bad, according to Chris Brogan.
Except, well, I’m [...]
Be helpful, even to people who want to take their business somewhere else. It’s a tough thing to do sometimes, but I want to have the most complete list of Web Hosting Companies on Twitter. Are you one? Do I not have you listed yet? Let me know. Leave [...]
Terry Storch, over on Twitter, noticed I was slamming Google Reader and wrote “is it me…or did you go from Google Reader being the best thing in tech, to Google Reader sucks? Hot or Not with Scoble…”
Yes, two years ago I thought Google Reader was the best thing to [...]
If you visit my blog and look at the right side you’ll see a new widget: my favorite Tweets from Twitter. I am now watching more than 10,000 accounts and I click “favorite” on the best ones, which instantly puts them here. In the past two months I’ve [...]
An hour or so ago I wrote a post over on my Posterous Blog about why I don’t use Google Reader much anymore and it’s already gotten a ton of interesting comments and been viewed 1,600 times. Since it’s the middle of the night in San Francisco, that tells [...]
Yesterday at the Startup School (a freaking awesome event for entrepreneurs, by the way) I was sitting next to Mitch Kapor while Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on stage. The picture above is of Startup School hearing from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who gave a great [...]
There’s nothing geeks love more than to argue mobile phone platforms. Here’s Matt Blaisdell saying that apps weren’t key to iPhone’s success. That’s true, but now that Apple has apps the world has changed and challengers to the iPhone will find it very tough.
Here’s why: everyone is using a [...]
Last night I bought the 27-inch iMac. Sitting next to it is a 24-inch screen. It is totally amazing how freeing this much screen real estate is.
The new iMac? You can’t even tell it’s not just a monitor. It is just barely thicker than my 24-inch monitor. It is faster [...]
Facebook yesterday turned on a bunch of new features on its news feed (here is TechCrunch’s writeup of the new features). It looks a lot more like FriendFeed, even though Facebook claims that the FriendFeed team didn’t work on these new features.
What does it do? Now Facebook mostly displays [...]
This isn’t sexy like my last two blog posts. No killer video. No consumer service.
But if you are an architect of software services based on cloud computing architectures you have a new kind of problem: figuring out what is going on in your systems across vendors and across services. What’s [...]
After watching that last video edited by two pros I’m jealous. How can the rest of us who have iPhone video cameras, or low-cost Flip or Kodak cameras, going to make killer professional quality videos?
Animoto and Smugmug, this morning, announced a partnership that makes it possible.
Why does [...]
Last night I attended a Weezer concert thanks to MySpace. When the lights were off you could see the revolution: lots of little screens all over the concert hall capturing the event. I posted mine to 12 Seconds TV.
But there’s something deeper going on. Last week I met up with [...]
No, it’s not FriendFeed, although yesterday didn’t provide any good news to users there who really would love to hear that their community still matters. Google and Microsoft said “no.”
So, who is the biggest loser in the Twitter search deals announced yesterday (First Bing announced it made a deal [...]
I just read Jason Calacanis’ post about angel investors who are charging to have startups pitch them.
That’s totally ridiculous.
I NEVER charge for pitches and NEVER charge to interview startups or people for my video show or to get on building43. I don’t even ask if you are [...]
So, I’m tracking the success of Tweetie 2.0, which was released yesterday (it is currently the number one highest grossing app on iPhone today in USA). I’ve been using it a week and it already has become my favorite Twitter app on the iPhone. I own (and paid for [...]
OK, so when Twitter came out with its Suggested User List I went through a bunch of emotions. Hatred. Jealousy. Self loathing. Blaming. Anger. Denial. All that kind of stuff. I have lashed out at it over the last few months here and there. Pissing off Tim O’Reilly and Veronica [...]
TechCrunch is famous for not accepting PR people’s embargoes.
I’m always shocked that PR people care in any way about this, because there are so many ways to force TechCrunch (and anyone, really) to abide by embargoes. Here’s my favorite ways:
1. Copy Evan Williams (CEO/Co-founder of Twitter). Twitter didn’t launch [...]
This week I got a press release from Gowalla. It went on and on about how much better its feature set was than Foursquare, a point of view backed up by one of my favorite tech writers, Zee, so I gave it a second chance.
Why did [...]
If you were following my Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or Flickr feeds you know by now that we had a baby on Saturday night.
Tonight, over on my Posterous blog, I asked the industry to give me curation tools so that I can tell you what I’m seeing on my [...]
One fun thing I like asking representatives from Nokia, Microsoft, or Research in Motion is “what does the post iPhone world look like?”
It is my way of sensing whether they’ve done any creative thinking. So far I’ve gotten mostly blank stares.
It’s like Steve Jobs has convinced everyone in the industry [...]
Go back three years ago. Twitter was being used by the same crowd that is playing with Foursquare today.
What is Foursquare? It’s a location game. When I visit somewhere, like Sequoia Hospital, where I’m hanging out with Maryam (we’re having a baby sometime in the next 24 hours) [...]
I just looked at the baby photos of Milan being born. Back then we did something pretty cool with a service called “Twittergram.” We recorded his first cry. But now Twittergram seems to have gone away and with it, our baby’s first cry. That was only two years ago. [...]
It’s been a while since I’ve talked much about building43. Heck, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged that much! But we’ve been busy over on building43 helping businesses get into the modern world.
It really pisses me off when I try to find a business on Google and they [...]
Yesterday afternoon I visited a startup, CitySourced, that is so new that they haven’t even bought any chairs yet. So we sat on the floor. Me. Kurt Daradics, co-founder. And David Kralik.
You probably know that CitySourced almost won TC50 (they came in second and today Sarah [...]
In just the last month I’ve really started using Twitter’s favorite feature. I’ve used it 3,571 times so far in just the past month. What is it? Well, I read thousands of tweets every day and I pick my favorite ones and click “favorite” on them. What does that [...]
A few weeks ago some hackers broke into my blog here (this was before 2.8.4 was released). At first I thought they just left some porn sites in a couple of blog entries. So we upgraded Wordpress (I was on 2.7x back then). Deleted a fake admin account. Deleted the [...]
Yesterday Rackspace launched a cloud app partner portal called Cloud Tools. That’s a really boring way of saying that our partners rock and that we’re trying to help them build their businesses.
Why do that? Because by showing off the cloud tools ecosystem we help developers build their [...]
Marshall Kirkpatrick takes on the “RSS is dead” meme, started by Steve Gillmor, but really started by all those people who haven’t been using RSS much anymore.
My answer to Marshall: I’m not in the news business anymore, but if I were I’d keep Twitter up on screen. I’ve [...]
Augmented Reality apps are about to become the HUGE rage on the iPhone. Why?
They demo well.
What are they? These are new apps that use the iPhone 3GS’s camera, compass, accelerometer to overlay data on real life. You point your iPhone down the street in New York, for instance, and it [...]
Last week I sat down with Disqus CEO, Daniel Ha. Here’s that video where he explains the new real-time features (among others) that were just turned on this morning. Including on this blog. This means you can comment and “chat” with other commenters without reloading the page.
I keep one of the most complete lists of upcoming conferences and events in the tech industry. Why? Because I have thousands of friends who report to me over on Yahoo’s Upcoming.org the various events that are happening. Even more come to me via the tagging and search [...]
I’ve been playing around with Posterous, which is a hot new blogging service. Matt Mullenweg better watch out for this one. It’s nicer to use than Wordpress.com. Way nicer. Especially if you are a 2010 web guy like me who carries an iPhone everywhere (that’s why I’ve been [...]
So, the other day when I signed onto FourSquare for the first time in a while I found 442 people waiting for me. As I looked through the names I saw the same names that had first added me onto Twitter. And Dopplr. And Google Reader. And Facebook. And [...]
Caroline Halliwell asked a question I’ve frequently been asked “how can anyone honestly follow 10s of 1,000’s?”
She was talking about Twitter. I made fun of Chris Brogan because he follows almost 90,000 people on Twitter and today wrote an blog about friending and reputation.
Chris autofollows everyone back. [...]
I’m over looking at my Facebook Page and just finding it lacking. It hit me, it will never be a place like Twitter or FriendFeed where we can have open, public, conversations about stuff that interests us. Who wants to have conversations there? Yeah, a few people will, but [...]
When I heard the news I was walking through San Antonio’s Hard Rock Cafe looking at Kurt Cobain’s high school photograph. Wow. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook.
I quickly wrote a DM to Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, co-founders and said “call me.” They did, and I got one [...]
So, now, Tr.im’s parent company, Nambu, has announced that the URL shortening service known as tr.im is turning off its service and that links will stop working after December 31. Here’s the news on Techmeme.
What will this do? Well, first of all, any stats are gone. Bam. Second [...]
Whew, it’s been a while since I’ve done a good old fashioned blog. I’ve been busy, though. Posting tons of videos, both on my personal site on Blip.tv as well as professional videos over on building43.com. Last night I put up a live video of USA’s new CTO [...]
Today we’ve turned on JS-Kit’s new real-time commenting engine over on building43. We are the first site to use it, and already the comments are coming in very quickly. You can compare to Disqus because over on building43 we’re using JS-Kit and here on my blog I’m using [...]
I’m not a developer, but I can still read an API spec and I’m still excited in what I’m seeing from the just announced FriendFeed 2.0 API. I wonder what real developers, like those who build Twitter apps like Seesmic, TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr think. Dave Winer started a conversation [...]
Since last week we saw the publishing of confidential documents from inside Twitter (I doubt any of you missed that, but if you did, TechCrunch last week got passed documents from a hacker who figured out how to get into several accounts at Twitter).
As I travel around the world I see all the hype Twitter is getting. It’s on CNN. It’s on Entertainment Tonight. Everyone in UK seemed to be all atwitter. In Virginia the local TV weatherperson was touting her Tweets.
Ad Age today commented that the free publicity alone is worth [...]
SoundCloud is getting noticed in Europe and, last week, won two TechCrunch Europa awards (we filmed this right before they learned they won — I was there as part of the Travelinggeeks tour).
They won best design and best entertainment app categories.
What is SoundCloud? A way to share [...]
When I left Microsoft about four years ago, I remember Steve Gillmor telling everyone that Office was dead.
I sort of went along with that, after all I was leaving Microsoft partially because I thought that Microsoft didn’t have an interesting product pipeline and wasn’t going to get the Internet [...]
I’m largely seen as FriendFeed’s #1 cheerleader and customer #1.
Rackspace’s President, Lew Moorman, and I have been having an interesting debate. He even wrote up his thesis: that FriendFeed should just become a great Twitter client to become relevant.
I have got to be honest: [...]
When I first started visiting Europe about 15 years ago Europeans used to love taunting me with their wonderful new phones that were, back then, years ahead of the devices we’d get in the United States.
It was a point of regional pride that even though Silicon Valley and Microsoft had [...]
Did you know that London’s Tower Bridge is on Twitter? What does it say? When it opens and closes. Fun example of an object in physical space using Twitter to communicate to the world. That reminds me of the Canadian border crossing that uses Twitter to tell the [...]
Ahh, the New York Times has an interesting article on PR in the tech industry. Funny that Brooke Hammerling doesn’t even live in Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley is no longer a location, it’s a state of mind (I’m writing this in London where I am hanging out with [...]
Gary Vaynerchuk’s dad came to the United States with nothing in his pocket. He worked for less than minimum wage and built up a business, Wine Library, that today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey.
Today Gary is building on top [...]
After we had our Building43 launch party I wanted to explore more why small groups of people are so much better for actually learning something. By the way, Michael Sean Wright put together a neat little video of our launch party. He’s the one who produces Peter [...]
I love hearing stories about how people turned their passions into a career. Lou Mongello used to be a lawyer, but he kept going back to a childhood memory: his family kept taking the family to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He turned taking his own family there into a [...]
Steve Gillmor has been hard at work putting together an interesting day for those of us who are interested in the real time web.
The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.
But that’s not [...]
TechCrunch and others are saying that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon.
Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing!
This strategy is winning. Google is losing market share and hasn’t yet figured out how [...]
It’s been just about a month now since I stepped off of the USS Nimitz. Well, was flown off, more accurately.
I took a month off to let is sink in just what I was [...]
How do you improve the world if you worked at a charity? Well, in the old days you would do a lot of work just to meet people. You’d use direct mail. You’d hire phone banks of people to call and bug other people during dinner (we get those calls [...]
Don’t know what StockTwits is? It’s a way to talk about stocks on Twitter. Is it popular? Yes! Is it popular? Yes! Will it be profitable? I believe so. (Advertisers love an audience of people who are trading stocks). Is it using Twitter in a unique way? Yes!
So, [...]
Heh, Tom Foremski reads too much into traffic numbers, he notes that my blog’s traffic is down by half recently. Well, duh! If you don’t blog people don’t read.
But my numbers are way up elsewhere.
Who cares where the audience is? I don’t. Now thanks to working on my FriendFeed [...]
Item. Thomas Hawk praises Cooliris as the coolest new way to see photos on Flickr.
Our systems at Rackspace just had a major outage that is still going on. There is nothing worse than having our customers be down. You can see all the people talking about the outage in real time. Hundreds of people are working on getting all systems back up and [...]
One thing I have grown to dislike is FriendFeed’s list of suggested users. Twitter has one too and I’ll talk about that later. Here’s a conversation about FriendFeed’s list and the effects it is having on building a rich community.
Here’s [...]
It’s Ironic that Facebook is moving into a more public space occupied by Twitter and FriendFeed.
I think their jealousy of the hype that Twitter is getting might be leading them astray.
Why?
I’ve been asking “normal people” what they use. You know, people like my wife and her friends who aren’t [...]
Dave Nielsen, co-founder of the Cloud Camp series of unconferences (one was just held in San Francisco) gives me an innovative way that he’s found to introduce unconferences (video) to people who don’t know what those are. I like his approach because we all have to teach people [...]
Twitter. It almost means drama. Heck, for those who didn’t catch musician Wil.i.am and Perez Hilton going at it over on Twitter you can get a whif of the kind of things that seem to happen in our real-time entertainment-focused world.
I have drunk too much from that world.
It’s too [...]
Hey, I’ve learned you gotta write a catchy headline to even have a chance to get attention. Even then, this one will probably barely get noticed in the river of Tweets and other noise rushing by. (UPDATE: I changed the headline, cause many people complained about it).
But there’s a point [...]
Ever use a crowd to learn something? I have. Here’s some of my favorite ones:
1. What Netbook would you recommend?
2. Examples of “now” marketing.
3. Teaching me about microformats.
4. Top apps to load on your new iPhone 3GS.
Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.
One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. What would [...]
Sorry for being gone so long. It’s clear I have spent too much time on social networks. Been hanging out on FriendFeed and Twitter and not blogging.
I’m not the only one, Steve Rubel, famous PR blogger, said he’s giving up his blog for lifestreaming.
Jeremiah Owyang, the other night, [...]
Yesterday is the day when Twitter thoroughly beat CNN. Badly beat CNN. Embarrassingly beat CNN. And most other USA-based media too.
Over on friendfeed we’ve been talking about this for the past 12 hours. Here’s one [...]
Sanaz Ahari just sent me a Facebook message that Steve Rider has passed away, he died from pre-leukemia on June 5. He was diagnosed just a year ago. I interviewed him back when I was a Microsoft employee and he was doing incredible work, both back then and then [...]
This afternoon we turn the key on Building43. I’m up at 5 a.m. to help the team put the finishing touches on the site, and thought it would be a good place to [...]
Can we just head this trend off at the pass? It seems that Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, at their “All Things D” conference announced the beginning of the Web 3.0 era.
That’s ridiculous.
And I’m not the only one to think so.
Short aside: It’s interesting that neither [...]
This week is a key moment in Google’s life. It is being challenged by a change in the ecosystem. We’ve seen this happen with other companies before. Remember Microsoft in 1994-1996? It responded to the changes in how we exchange information by turning the company hard toward the Internet. Too [...]
If you look over to the right side of my blog you’ll see a Google Latitude component.
What does that do? It shares my location with you.
Why is that cool? Because now you’ll be able to watch as I head to Adobe’s offices to meet with the Flash team there [...]
One of the first things I wanted to do this morning was to add Google’s Friend Connect widget to my blog. You can now see that component on the right side of my blog, right above a widget that adds Facebook Connect capabilities.
