Category: Web 2.0 (Observations)

In The Online Twitter/FriendFeed Widget War, Only The Users Win

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Perfect – Twhirl (from Seesmic) has decided to add in FriendFeed features, and Alert Thingy (Howard/Baines)has integrated Twitter. Two applciations, looking to be the best, are going to deliver the best possible value… to the user. There’s nothing like an arms race to drive innovation. One of them adds a feature, the other follows, and then adds another edge, which gets replicated and trumped, and so on. Love it! So let’s wind back just a touch to what these bits of software are. They both look at two online web services, Twitter (the short message based group conversation) and FriendFeed

Microsoft Vista Rocking Video and Spitting Image’s RS232 Interface Lead

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A number of sites picked it up, and probably called it correctly as Epic Fail (for example Matthew Ingram’s “Suuuuure it is, whatever makes you guys feel better. I suppose all of these incredible lame videos were in jokes too, right?”). You see, things are funny when the viewer knows they are meant to be funny. There are lots of funny songs about computers and technology – if this had been published by DogHorse, and pushed by B3ta, we’d all be happy with it. After all, Spitting Image managed to rack up a love song to the RS-232 Interface Cable..

Compare and Contrast: Mowser and Mippin’s Variable Fortunes

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Russ Beattie, head of Mowser, shut up shop on the venture this week, and placed the content re-aggreator into the mythical Deadpool. But the traffic never showed up, and what did show up was of questionable quality at best. (Easily 80% of Mowser’s traffic has been related to porn). Maybe that means that the service sucked or it wasn’t sticky and/or viral enough – that may have been part of it, but having used the site myself, and seeing how some users did continually return to use it daily, I think in fact the general market demand just never was

Good News! PodCamp Boston Charging $50 A Head

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News from Penn and Brogan that the upcoming Podcamp Boston (July 19-20) will be charging attendees $50 per head. Do I agree with the decision? As someone who has organised big events, rationally I do. Attendance at any conference should be worth something, and $50 seems about right as a ‘token’ payment given that a good Hotel room is going to be $100 a night for potentially three nights, alongside some drink and food budget. Getting over the no-show problem, especially when a lot of sponsorship will be predicated on having a certain number of people attending. The last Boston

Twitter For Sale on Ebay: One Careful User Only

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Andrew Baron has decided to sell his Twitter account to the highest bidder (hat tip to Chris Brogan for the info). On offer through Ebay are his account, login and his 1387 followers. Bidding is currently just under $500, which works out at around 30 cents (14p) per user. Baron’s Ebay Auction Now, putting aside the person doing the actual selling (Baron has history as the founder of Rocketboom, amongst other things), is this an approach that’s going to be worthwhile long term? I don’t think so. Even though the metrics are going to be discussed in a similar vein