DISQUS

Chris - with all due respect, spam is in the eye of the beholder, not the sender. If a percentage of the people you mailed are saying "this is spam" then to them, it is. Arguing with them is not going to change their perception of being spammed, it's just going to piss them off.

That doesn't mean you're right down there with the scum of the earth spammers who clog our inboxes trying to push pills, p0rn, and other crap. It just means you should think things through a little better next time you want to send out bulk email to people that you don't know very well.

Didn't Thomas Hawk make a similar point about how he was using FF?

I'm still not sold on the site, but it makes a lot more sense positioned as a social feed reader than it does a "Twitter replacement".

Look, FriendFeed is nice but it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Twitter's utility is its brevity and ubiquity.

I can use Twitter just fine from my Blackberry while Caltrain, in an airport, or even out at dinner. Not so for FF.

Since my food blog is in Alltop, I can't really be impartial about it. :)

My interest in using Comcast for anything other than basic cable was never very high, but it's dropped even lower after reading this. Seriously, why go through that BS when there are perfectly good bandwidth alternatives?

The issue here is more money than commentary. Someone leaving a comment over at Friendfeed versus on a blog is not that big a deal. Someone scraping a blog's entire content and making a bunch of money off it is.

IMNSHO of course :)

Chris, you have just shy of five thousand followers, which is orders of magnitude more than most people on Twitter do. All you needed was a 1% response rate of $10 donations and bang - $500.

That's not to say that people with only a couple dozen or a couple hundred nodes in their network cannot pull off what you did, but not anywhere near as easily or as quickly. Do the same math for someone with 250 followers and they'd raise just $25.

I don't mind a few ads. It's when the ads start overwhelming the content that they get annoying.

After a recent incident where Stumblers brought our home network to a crawl (an image on hubby's personal web server got huge Stumble trafic) I decided to take a closer look at StumbleUpon.
I'm rslux there, same handle as on Twitter.

I'm still undecided about it. On the one hand, it's interesting and clearly it can drive a lot of traffic, on the other hand, it feels both overly complicated and very quiet (I only have a couple of friends so far). I think, like Twitter, StumbleUpon is a tool that you need to use it for a little while to really get a feel for.

I don't think the idea is a bad one, Chris. You've identified a need: It's very difficult to figure out who is who and what area(s) of interest everyone has on Twitter.

The only criticism I might offer is that I am not sure a wiki is the best choice for implementing this idea. I know it's easy to set up, open, and fast, but as some have noticed, it's a little lacking in features and open to gaming.

Long-term, a database might be a better choice. If I were a coder I'd set one up, but as I'm only a marketer, the best I can offer is hosting space for such an effort.

Sticking with Twitter.

From the user perspective, peak concurrency can be connected to user satisfaction -- the more users that are online the same time as you, the more people for you to interact with.

Being the only person running around an online zone gets boring really fast.

This past fall my company held a developers conference with a mix of people who'd known each other a long time and some total newbies.

I decided to set up a site on Ning for conference attendees to "meet" before the conference. It worked very well. The oldtimers got to see which of their friends were going to be there and get in some pre-show chat and planning. The newer folks got a much better sense of what to expect at the conference. Plus, by being able to recognize faces and names when they got to the conference, it made the experience much more friendly.

All in all, a big success, and I'll be doing something similar again next time.

Last time I checked Plaxo out, they had zero support for my e-mail client of choice, Thunderbird. Since manual import data would have been a huge drag, I punted. No regrets.

I like Facebook, but I don't like it enough to want to spend a bunch of time segmenting my personal and professional contacts, deciding who gets to see what information about me (or deleting stuff if that's not possible), etc etc. That would be a lot of work and not much benefit, IMO.

I have a Jaiku account but I never use it either -- everyone is on Twitter.

I would expect that Google will eventually incorporate Jaiku into whatever social media plans they have, but given the slow pace of Google product launches that probably won't be until 2009.

Building a 10MM/monthly user service may be necessary if your goal is to build a successful consumer Web service, but that's hardly the only model for building a successful business.

What's annoying is that Google only lets you delete 20 contacts at a time, so if you've accumulated a lot of random e-mail addresses in your Contacts, weeding them out is not a quick and easy process.

One more thing I'd add to your excellent list -- and apropos of this holiday season -- is to listen better to your non-technical family members and friends when they talk about the Internet and what they're doing with it. They're your own built-in focus group; you can take advantage of that fact if you choose to.

The drumbeat of concern over the level of involvement Google has with our online lives is going to get louder, not softer, as time goes by.

An argument could be made that publicly-traded companies do have some issues that privately-held ones don't have to worry about, but other than that, I think you're on the right track.

Verizon = CDMA = essentially useless outside the USA.

I see this more as an attempt for Verizon to remain relevant despite their adoption of the wrong protocol than as a smack at Google.

The Spouse installed it on his Blackberry Pearl. It put him about three blocks from his actual location. Not bad, but also not necessarily helpful in times of real need - e.g., if you're in an unfamiliar neighborhood and/or can't see the street signs.

I'm still trying to figure out why I should pay $399 for a single-use device, plus another $24 a year for content I can already get for free on hardware that I already own.

Congratulations, Chris! I'm glad I got to meet you in Vegas.

I'm sure whatever comes next in your career will be exciting both for you and for all of us. :)

Before decreeing the new Google platform any sort of killer, it would be nice to see the thing in action and find out if it actually delivers on what it promises.

I've been around long enough to remember the fear and trepidation accompanying the launch of MSN on Windows 95, which was supposed to kill all ISPs, including AOL, and force the world into a new Microsoft-controlled Internet.