Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem

Measuring Your Twitter Influence
Who Is Andrew Parker?
Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO
My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp

Fred Wilson: The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point (My Comment)

"Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience." 

There you go. That has been my point. Twitter needs to eat into its ecosystem. Windows did that. Bill Gates' last threat was he was going to incorporate antivirus software right into Windows. Good thing for Norton that he retired instead.

And Twitter needs to appeal more to the mainstream users. The first page is not welcoming for new users. For one, it is cluttered. Tumblr could teach here.

One way to eat into the ecosystem is to go on a buying spree. For that you need money. You get that money by going public. (Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO)

You should hire me and put me to work on this. (Who Is Andrew Parker?)

Don't get me wrong. Blogger remains my favorite social media platform (My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp) And my enthusiasm for Twitter is well documented. (Measuring Your Twitter Influence) It is not possible I lack respect for Evan Williams. But I think I can help.

Hire me for a year, and let this be my first project. :-) Seriously.

10 years back a lot of people wanted to go online so they could get Hotmail. Twitter has to reach that level of appeal.

" I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone."

True. But not true. 2009 was Twitter's year. True. 2010 is the year for location, random connections and the inbox, as I see it so far. That list might look different in six months, I don't know.

But Twitter could still do it. It needs to eat into its ecosystem.

Right now I feel like Bill Clinton felt when he was applying for colleges. The dude applied to just one college: Georgetown in DC. He wanted to be in DC, Georgetown was a good college, and it had a strong foreign service program. Right now when I have decided to get the first real job of my life and to postpone work on my startup by about a year, I find myself wanting to work at Union Square Ventures and no place else. The more I think about it, the more I want to do it. There are currents and counter currents of thoughts.

• Fred Wilson is too big for me. 
• They might not even hire me. 
• They will definitely not hire me. 
• What am I thinking?

Some of the counter currents:

• What if I end up being a VC in a year? That would be horror. I have enormous respect for VCs, but I don't want to be one. 30 years from now I want to be known for a company I created.
• What if it feels like a corporate job? What if it is not entrepreneurial enough?
• There must be holes in my abilities. There most definitely are if the idea is to find a photocopy of Andrew Parker. Andrew Parker's tumblog is definitely better than mine.

What I want.

• I do want it, and I am going to do my best this month to try and get it. But I am not going to email Fred, although I have emailed him several times on frivolous topics like, well, Happy Holi Fred Wilson. (Happy Holi) If they want me, they will email me. If they get someone else, I will read about it on Fred's blog that I have taken to reading daily. His mantra: blog daily. My mantra: read daily.
• Doing my best is to put out a series of blog posts at my blog. They are not asking for a resume, they are asking for a blog. That is insurance that this is going to feel like a startup, and not some ossified corporation.
• Words like guru, don come to mind. Fred Wilson is a big shot who is hugely accessible. I mean, the guy has a blog that is so good he could be mistaken for a pro blogger. 
• I want a decent six figure salary.
• Can I do 10-6? I don't need a lunch break. But I am not going to be happy working only 40 hours a week. I have that personality type that wants to work long hours. But I like flexibility in how I spend some of those hours. What is the USV version of Google's 20% time? Let me spend 20% of my time going to events in town and networking in the industry, hanging out with startup people. 
• Take Twitter public in 2010 before Facebook. I want that to be my first project. If I fail, I am just a guy with a six figure salary. If I succeed, I want a percentage. So if USV owns 10% of Twitter - I don't know what it owns, it is very likely less - I want to end up owning 1% of Twitter, something like that.
• Invest in Chatroulette, help it avoid the Twitter mistakes, turn it into the leading Random Connections service.
• Help take FourSquare to the next level.
• Find the next FourSquare. 
• These are some of the things I would want to work on.
• Andrew's title was Analyst. I want mine to be Junior Partner. He has a better tumblog than I do, but other than that I bring more to the table. 
• It might be a good idea to hire one a half people plus an intern. One would be me. 
• I have never had health insurance. Push ups have been my idea of health insurance so far. If I am hired, to me it is going to feel like Obama made Fred Wilson give me health insurance. Okay, okay, that sentence sounds convoluted, but I did put numerous hours into Obama 08. (Jupiter And Obama, Switching To Obama)
• The tweet is to the web what the atom is to the universe. Twitter has to prove that. Twitter is lucky that there is no Gowalla around, but it sure needs to feel the time pressure. 

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Andreessen, Conway, Hornik

The iPad

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea

A few days back the image above started showing up when I loaded Farmville for me. And I am like, yes! I suggested this directly to Mark Pincus. He said he liked the idea, but that was a while back. Looks like finally he has gotten around to doing it.

I came to Farmville late. I have not been much of a gamer. But Farmville was talked about so much in the blogosphere. And the TechCrunch dude Mike Arrington had just given the game quite a beating. Some of my friends were on the game. What had most got me interested was there were reports Farmville was using the Facebook platform to beat Facebook itself in the monetization game. That piqued my interest. It also helped that I grew up in a farming family. Have you watched the milking of the cow/buffalo - by hand - the milk that you drank an hour later? I have.

So I got onto the game and was hooked. So hooked I went on to become the richest farmer in my neighborhood, bought a million dollar villa, and so on.

My Facebook Photo Album: Farmville

Note, Anu Shukla is one of my neighbors. She just might be my very best neighbor. And, by now, she has the most beautiful farm in my entire neighborhood. She has really taken to farming these past few weeks. There is something to be said of people who sell their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. When they take to farming, they really take to farming.

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I have said several times in Fred Wilson's comments sections, (Fred Wilson's Insight) and I will say it again, Farmville is the media savior, it is not the iPad. Look at the Farmville business model, 99% of the users do not pay anything, and Mark Pincus is not up in arms about it. In fact, Farmville has been teaching Facebook how to make money. Trying to walk away from the browser is not a good idea. Trying to create artificial scarcities and artificially high prices is not a good idea.

And, while you are at it, call the firefighter.



This is from Social Media Week in early February. (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever)

Startups And Immigrants

Thomas Friedman, New York Times: Start-Ups, Not Bailouts

“Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.” ..... “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. ...... What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets...... “We ought to have a ‘job-creators visa’ for people already here,” said Litan. “And once you’ve hired, say, 5 or 10 American nonfamily members, you should get a green card.”

Voices like that of Friedman are important because we are about to embark upon the great national debate on comprehensive immigration reform. The success on health care will make it easier to wade through this new debate because success will be a foregone conclusion, but some of the debate is going to be nasty. We have to brace for that. Free speech can try you sometimes.

Fred Wilson: Immigration Reform And The Jobs Bill

Links: April 2

Charlie O'Donnell: Rainy Day At The Ace
ReadWriteWeb: Tellmewhere Makes Location-Based Social Networking More Useful
Fred Wilson: Do Network Effects Span Geographies?
Robert Scoble: Are Location Geeks At Where 2.0 Off The Path To Real Money?
ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login
Startup Strategy Roundtable: Beyond Validating Your Ideas
Blog Of Note: Sramana Mitra On Strategy
ReadWriteWeb: Chatroulette Clones: A New Market for Random Connections
Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP
Life's Too Short: I'm Getting an iPad Right Away
Harvard Grad on Why MBAs Stumble Off the Blocks
Cracking Facebook's Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer

News: March 30

CNet: Brightcove Eyes iPad Flash Void With HTML 5
Time: US UK Special Relationship Is Over
CNet: Clearwire 4G Launches In Houston
Time: Is A Biometric Identity Card The Key To Immigration Reform?
TechCrunch: Apple Market Cap Passes $210 Billion, Now Within $50 Billion Of You-Know-Who
Mashable: Apple To Launch Two New iPhones, One For Verizon
TechCrunch: Hello iPad, Hello Cloud 2
TechCrunch: Gruber Hints At Possible Next-Gen iPhone Specs ... Sort Of
Mashable: Minnesota's Governor To Host Town Hall Via Facebook
GlobalThoughtz: China Is Not Alone, Germany Has Web Censorship Too