Archives for the 'miscTech' Category
Two-phase user adoption: from “oh, wow!” to “oh, yeah…”
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Note: I’m framing this post in terms of ExtensionFM because of a tweet, and because I believe that ExFM is a particularly interesting case, but this issue absolutely applies more broadly. A few days ago Lucas Gonze Twittered: I got drawn back into my Extension.fm setup today after forgetting it for a while. Important for [...]
Letter.ly’s Money Issues
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
A few additional thoughts around the “paid” part of paid newsletters; in short, I’m wondering whether introducing money into the system is actually worth it for personal email newsletter creators. 1. Money as Motivation for Writers A couple of letter.ly writers have mentioned the motivation to write that comes from having paid subscribers as a factor [...]
Obvious But Important
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Being a post on why I probably wouldn’t actually do what I asked Foursquare to do yesterday. Yesterday I vented via feature request, noting that Foursquare has the potential to offer me more information about why I might want to be “friends” with people that I don’t know in person. But in talking with a [...]
Conversationlists: Some Object, Strongly.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
For the most part, the response to conversationlist.com has been really gratifying. A lot of people found it interesting, some found it really useful, and for the most part the criticism we’ve gotten has been well thought out and constructive. Sure, plenty of people found it uninteresting, stupid, or felt that something like favstar.fm’s dynamic [...]
Get Out of the Way
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
About a week ago I learned of last night’s checkins, a newly public service built using the Foursquare API. Once you allow the service to access your Foursquare account, it starts sending you a daily email listing your checkins for the past 24 hours or so. Reply to that email with some notes about each [...]
Twitter Lists: Categories and Conversations
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Anyone who’s spent any time with me in the past week or two already knows that I’m not a huge fan of Twitter lists, but I’ve come to realize that I’ve (once again) left many people with the impression that I’m more anti- on the topic that I actually am. In this post I’ll cover [...]
Microsoft marketing: welcome to the social, sort of.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Update, only a very few hours later: wait until you’ve read the rest of the post before you click through here, but it just gets worse and worse. As Microsoft marketing oopsies go this barely even registers, but it hits a number of interesting points on its path to cringiness so it’s worth a little [...]
Always and Everywhere
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
One: On Monday morning, Fred Wilson posted a little joke. Louis Gray had noted that a new addition to the Twitter staff appeared as a member of the “twitter team” list on Twitter before any announcement of the hire came out of the company, and Wilson added: “Hmm. No need to send out that obligatory [...]
Thoughts on a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Earlier today Josh Stylman pointed out an interesting post by Mark Pilatowski entitled Search and Social: Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose? While the short answer to that question is “what do you mean will become a sewage-filled spam hose?” I’d like to dig a little deeper than that. It’s well worth [...]
Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Contemplation
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Tom Johnson’s Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass is a fascinating composition. It’s music and text that explore the idea of failure, and well worth the nine minutes you’ll invest in listening. The piece popped into my head because of a conversation I had a couple of days ago. We were talking about [...]
