DISQUS

Come on, this is a little silly. At the same time that you have people goo-gooing over Facebook handing out personalized (branded) URLs for some of their hundreds of millions of accounts, why should we cry about Twitter becoming popular? I love Mashable, but sometimes the incessant desire to be doing what's coolest really doesn't speak to where the industry is going. The fact that people talk about a "twittersphere" the way they used to talk about the "blogosphere" is not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, silicon valley is moving on to the next bright, shiny object that catches their attention, but that doesn't mean that broadcast real-time messaging is any less important - be it via Twitter, Google Wave, or whatever.

Glad to help, I gave a presentation on my book "Content Nation" a couple of months ago in NYC.

Good post, Barry. Another factor to consider is how many new accounts are spam accounts caught relatively quickly by Twitter staff but not necessarily right away. It's harder to set up a spammer account on Facebook, and becoming harder to do so on MySpace. So although people not "getting" Twitter may be a factor in account abandonment, abuse that's eventually filtered out may be a key factor also.

With due respect, this is a pretty weak showing for a reference appliance that was supposed to be the second coming of search. All I am seeing is some table lookups that most well-stocked databases could handle with little difficulty. The only difference is that there's a non-SQL front end that (sometimes) can interpret requests with some semantic smarts. Mind you, it's early days, but editorially and technologically this product is a bust so far.

Great analysis, clearly social media provides a complementary role in crises, spreading real-time news, then aggregating it when services like Ushahidi emerge to use social media aggregation tools that create a community knowledge bank. I highlighted some instances of this coordination in my book Content Nation, will highlight on the blog also.

All the best,
John Blossom

Great post, Scott. It's a key point that many marketers just don't get. The "Fake Parker" blog for Microsoft's I'm Talkathon sticks out in my mind as a key example of what happens when you try to make fake viral content. It makes you feel unclean. http://tinyurl.com/5znhb8

Barry,

Wow, what a haircut week for Yahoo. Can't win for winning or losing.

I agree that good content is what saves the day for Yahoo - as well as very well designed user interfaces. What they haven't done well is to integrate all of their disparate holdings well. While the Silicon Valley pundits wring out endless Schadenfreude over the exits at Yahoo, some newer blood and lighter executive infrastructure is probably going to be a good thing overall. In spite of the good talent that's bailed there's a fair amount of ego that went out the door as well, which is probably a good thing in the long run. The main question mark in my mind at this point is Susan Decker, who knows how to manage a bottom line well but now has to convince new talent that she's worth working for.

At the end of the day there will be a Yahoo a year from now, probably still independent and bolstered significantly by Google ad revenues, and probably still very popular for the things that it does well. Hopefully they come to do more things better in integrating social media.

All the best

We've been using Yahoo! Pipes for the back end of our FeedBlitz-based newsletter for a couple of months, it was relatively easy to build in spite of very limited documentation and operates very smoothly. It gets hung up on relative timestamps, though, which can be a pain. Take a peek here at how we do it:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=...

PopFly sounds like a widget machine, whereas Yahoo! Pipes is a feed machine. Different strokes for different folks.

I agree that Google seems to be fairly clueless about interfaces at times, but it's not as if it's slowed them down much - so far.

All the best,
John Blossom

Pete,

I think that you missed the boat on this one. The ads are not required to use the feature - if you look carefully the CBS site's popup box is co-branded and the ads are for CBS shows. Doesn't sound like a revenue-loser from my perspective. More at:

http://www.shore.com/commentary/weblogs/2007/02/answercoms-answertips-come-to-weblogs.html

Best Regards,
John Blossom
President
Shore Communications Inc.

Thanks so much for the very kind comments on our News Analysis piece, it's rewarding to get this kind of feedback. The "art and science" of content is very much the value equation that needs to be explored by many who have been seeing it as an either/or equation.

Best Regards,
John Blossom
President
Shore Communications Inc.