I had a great conversation with a friend today (Sree Nagarajan, founder + CEO at social media research platform Colligent) that gave me a new handle on the threat that Facebook poses to Google. We were talking about what Colligent does, which is to allow any brand to measure and track their relative affinity with continue…
I just came across this mini-rant by Fred Wilson in my feed reader and couldn’t agree more. His key point: “Aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web. It’s not going to get shut down by calling these services names, suing them, or even worse taking your content out of them. The continue…
Just discovered this deck (thanks for the tip iseff) – great current take on personalized intermittent reinforcement in social media. If you’re designing a social site and want to create user addiction, this is a great refresh on the levers to pull.
This mention of a possible revival of Google’s MyStuff idea caught my eye. I’ve been interested in the idea of a persistent personal data archive for a while now, and Google’s a natural for it. I was initially optimistic about EMC’s plans for Decho (their combined acquisitions of Mozy + PI Corp), but if so continue…
Just saw this article in today’s New York Times. A pilot project in Washington State gave ratepayers live data on their energy consumption and let them make consumption changes (e.g., furnace and water heater thermostat adjustments) remotely in response to market conditions, resulting in an average 10% reduction in consumption across the sample. This is continue…
You can tell I’m catching up on my feeds post-holiday, can’t you? This piece from Mark Hopkins at Mashable is (from my perspective) missing a crucial point: Amazon has built a very slick Roach Motel for your purchasing history. What they need to do next is give you the option of downloading (and/or feeding over continue…
I can’t possibly do justice to his great post, but Andrew Chen has been doing user interviews to understand how people think about their web of personal relationships, and his conclusion matches up well with my own intuitive sense for where the useful social graph really lies: it’s not Facebook, it’s not the inbox, it’s continue…
Diving deeper on my current obsession with data portability and legacy datastores, here’s an idea that someone’s probably already working on and that should definitely see the light of day (with a nod to my friend and colleague Dave Naffziger for inadvertently planting the seed last April). First, a pair of assertions: Humans are peer-obsessed; continue…
I read with interest (and even some excitement) this week’s announcement from the Data Portability Workgroup that both Google and Facebook had signed on to (in principle at least) make their users’ social graphs and other information portable across applications. It makes perfect sense that these Web leaders would be among the first to see continue…