Facebook And Twitter: The Only Two That Count

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: 2010 State Of The Blogosphere: Facebook And Twitter Drive The Most Traffic (Slides): They use many types of social media (LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg), but when it comes to driving traffic back to their blogs only two social media services really count: Facebook and Twitter

I have long suspected this. People have been like if you want traffic for your blog, become a regular on Digg, go visit StumbleUpon, and I have resisted. I have put my efforts only into Facebook and Twitter.

Movies, Dude

So I met this guy at Digital Dumbo last week, and we exchanged cards, and we exchanged emails later. And we are talking and he is like, how would you like to come to this event I am co-organizing? I forget precisely what, but it was nothing to do with movies.

Google Needs To Reinvent Gmail

Image via CrunchBaseI have heard this over and over again over months from many, many people. Gmail has slowed down to a trickle. Email continues to be a massively popular program. Google might have tackled the web over a decade ago, but no one has been able to tackle the inbox. The inbox is ripe territory.

TechCrunch: Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back

TechCrunch is a blog that mostly talks about which startup got funded. But today it has been talking about the slowness of Gmail. Fast is a good reason to be in news, not slow. Slow is no good.

Zuckerberg Interview: Scoble's Recording

(Source: Robert Scoble)

Andy Bechtolsheim: 100K To 1.5 Billion Through Google

This is a remarkable story. A hundred thousand dollars turned into a billion and a half dollars in a decade: that is utmost remarkable. There is no lottery, no Vegas that can give you that kind of a return.

A lot of people could cough up the 100K if they had to. The question is what was Andy doing at the right time at the right place? What was he doing at that Stanford faculty's home that particular morning?

Facebook: Mobile, Social, Local, Deal, Check, Deal

Watch live streaming video from facebookinnovations at livestream.com

(Via Rachel Sterne)

Facebook's Aggression

Facebook Blog: Making Mobile More Social
Search Engine Land: Big Deal: Facebook Emerges As Major Player In Mobile And Location-Based Services
TechCrunch: Facebook Revamps The Mobile Log-In Process With Single Sign-On
BGR: Facebook has 200 million active mobile users, improves iOS and Android applications
TechCrunch: Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database)
Inside Facebook: Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places

Image via WikipediaFacebook's out to conquer the web. Facebook is the biggest competitor that Google ever had. It is not Microsoft. To compete with Google, you needed to be online, and Microsoft is not exactly online. And this competition did not come from search, it did not come from the government stepping in with some anti-monopoly lawsuit.

After Party

I have missed three NY Tech MeetUps in a row. That is uncharacteristic of someone who used to show up when the NY Tech MeetUp was half a dozen people at a Lower East Side bar. But I missed. And livestreaming does not work for me, I never really went that route. So I showed up for the after party last night: 218 Sullivan. No presentations, and no beer, I decided, and it was such great fun. I worked the room like a politician.

Paywalls Make No Sense

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.

Intelligent Manufacturing

Factories getting carted away to Mexico was that "huge suction sound" Ross Perot heard way back in 1992. That image still persists. The Great Recession has made those fears much more concrete and real. Those jobs that are gone are gone. That seems to be the thinking.

The Mobile Web, The Audio Medium, The Global South

the human in the loop: The Audio Medium: A Third World Revolution Waiting to Happen Even a cheap feature-phone can be made to play audio content. And cellphones have high penetration in the developing world .... Cellphones will need to support easy phone-to-phone transfer of audio content ..... Podcasts may be a niche medium in the U.S., but there will be enough demand for audio content in the developing world that it will be as ubiquitous as blogs are in the western world. And like blogs and other long tail text content, content publishers will create content without the expectation of revenue; this audio content will be free and/or ad-supported...... All the existing content in text form can automatically be converted into audio form. This is huge, because it makes all existing text content accessible to the developing world...... 5 centuries ago, the written word replaced the spoken word as the dominant means of information transfer. I am rooting for the spoken word to stage a comeback.

Lykke Li: Get Some

(Via Fred Wilson)

Dropio Acquired

Image by jessica vascellaro via CrunchBaseI was just over at Mark Peter Davis' blog for this blog post and learned there Dropio has been acquired - wow - and by Facebook? Congrats, people.

FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
The Far Future Of Databases At The Dropio Offices
A MeetUp Has Me Excited: Y + 30