Corvus Consulting is now part of Denim & Steel Interactive. We help startups, product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Visit Denim & Steel to Learn MoreNewly-launched Fflick taps into Twitter to get opinions on movies, most notably from your friends. It’s a neat idea and a good-looking build that advances the idea of Twitter as a platform. It also makes one big mistake by co-opting people’s identities and using them as shills to grow the perceived community size.
Last week I found myself in a guerilla marketing campaign that started while waiting for a friend on Granville St. here in Vancouver and ended up in the pages of the Globe and Mail. While not the most memorable affair, campaign for the Sumac Ridge winery left me thinking about subtle line that smart marketing can cross into bad experiences.
Things are moving fast these days.
Only a few weeks ago (er, make that months), I wrote that major search engines were finding themselves ill-equipped to keep up with rapidly-emerging trends, while Twitter and other social networks were becoming good at this realtime reporting. I also thought that Twitter’s major business direction had been set straight for search given the focus on search throughout its website experience, and that they were bound to collide somehow.
After a long hot summer and into autumn I read that new deals with Twitter allow Bing and Google to include tweets in search results. Bing scores a second time through Microsoft’s stake in Facebook by also drawing in status updates from that community. These deals help solve for the search engines’ the problem of knowing what parts of the web are changing so that they can index significant changes almost immediately after they happen.
But this post isn’t really about what I got it right. Rather it’s about what parts I didn’t see coming, and what can be gleaned from that, which turns out to be more interesting.
Have you ever wondered if the web is the first medium where businesses could make something deeply valued by customers but struggle with how to actually make money from their innovation?
Radio and television must have faced the same problem, and born lacking a way to meter and charge individual use, broadcasters turned to predominantly ad-based subsidies for free content traded with consumers for their attention. If content producers for radio and TV had been able to control distribution like newspapers did (by nature of selling a physical medium) from the start, I suspect we’d live in a very different media universe. For starters, maybe we wouldn’t have to wonder about ironically-combined cable channel bundles.
Like TV and Radio, the web delivers content people value, and has tried to ape the ad-supported model with dubious results, the most dubious being the rapid consolidation into a monoculture ad economy where one player outweighs them all. The ad-supported model doesn’t seem to scale enough to float really successful web content or services. While the web can deliver on the alternative, metering and collecting payment for content and services, the culture has been saturated by TV and radio to expect the content for free. Now that’s a conundrum.
But you know what, none of that matters, because OMG Twitter changed its homepage. The change is more than aesthetics, and I think it shows how they intend to escape the conundrum of high value and the revenue vacuum.
Can I get an amen? I tried to think of more to say in a first-day review, but it really comes down to this: Tweetie for Mac isn’t just a Twitter client with a focus on posting. If anything, it’s a Twitter browser, giving primacy to following the threads of interest and conversation that make Twitter compelling. So far the best surprises have been a built-in search on any given hashtag, and natural conversation threading.
I’m looking forward to seeing how the beta unfolds into a 1.0 release. From this point, though, as with the iPhone so with the Mac: Tweetie is a welcome entry into an already busy category.
Have you visited Twistori.com? If not, do so only with a few minutes to let slip away to wherever minutes go while we’re pleasantly distracted. Simply put, Twistori is a keyword browser that sits on top of Twitter posts, presenting what it finds in way not unlike watching water flow by in a stream; it’s somehow engaging, every changing, and meditative at the same time.
I liked, but often forgot about the Twistori website in moments that would have been perfect for it, so finding that a desktop app for Mac had been launched into beta was welcome news. While in beta, a license for Twistori Desktop can be had for just $12 (after beta, the price goes up to $16), and that sounded good to me but I recoiled at the only payment option: Google Checkout. And that’s how $12 started to turn into $25…
Spring is in the air, and to celebrate I joined in the annual pilgrimage to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive conference. This is my second year attending, and though knowing the lay of land makes many things easier, every day still has more than one can possibly take in. The days full of sessions, packed with more food for thought than a week’s reading in regular times. The nights are filled with events, many offering free drinks. Since it’s rude to refuse a drink, one must take pains to visit them all and not risk offending the hosts. In between, it’s a carnival of BBQ, which isn’t so great if you’re vegetarian, but makes for good memories for the omnivorous.
Normally on trips like this my SLR camera would be a nearly-constant companion, making the best of a fresh context and different light. I got in some decent still shots, but most of my recreational photography was with a Flip Mino HD camcorder. I had this in my pocket most of the time, and shot about an hour’s worth of footage. A few hours in iMovie 09 has trimmed that down to about 8 minutes.
