Showing posts with label Biz Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biz Stone. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Twitter Making Second Big Mistake On Jack Dorsey

The first one obviously was when Jack Dorsey was ousted as Twitter CEO the first time around. Evan Williams, smart guy, shot himself in the foot. You shouldn't do something just because you can.

It is a DNA thing. Only the inventor can come up with killer features for the product. That person in this case is Jack Dorsey. The Twitter Board is in no position to decide.

If I were the Twitter Board, I would salivate at the prospect. Jack Dorsey is no longer a green horn CEO. He has now become really good at it. The first time around he was like, I should have held weekly meetings.

Twitter Board's problem should have been, maybe Dorsey is not available. Giving an ultimatum is bad manners. And it will hurt Twitter, which has been stagnant for a long time now.

I always thought Dick Costolo was more of a COO person. Evan Williams could have been Chairperson. But neither were cut to be CEO. And Twitter lost major momentum along the way.

A new direction would be to get much better at curate-and-display. Most people don't really want to tweet, they just want to consume.

This is not about whether Jack Dorsey is a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk. This is about whether there is anyone better for the job, and there isn't. It goes with the territory.

Sorry Jack Dorsey, Steve Jobs And Elon Musk Are Exceptions
Currently, Musk serves as the CEO of publicly traded Tesla Motors and the private company SpaceX. Tesla is currently valued at about $25 billion and Musk has his sights set on a $700 billion valuation.


Thursday, August 16, 2012

Medium: Kind Of Like Pinterest

What does a "re-imagined" publishing platform look like? A bit like Tumblr, with a pinch of Pinterest and a sprinkling of Reddit's ranking system. .... "Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be."

takes submitted content such as text and photos and organizes related items in collections that multiple people can review and add to. Instead of being listed chronologically, posts getting the highest user rating will appear at the top

a collaborative, lightweight way to express themselves online with images and text ..... people should be able to publish without “the burden of becoming a blogger” and worrying about developing an audience. The layout looks a lot like Pinterest, but contributions include both pictures and text. .... Currently, anyone with a Twitter account can read and provide feedback on the new platform but only a limited group of invited friends and family can post.

Medium is seemingly put together with parts from other sites: posting is simple and template-based, like Tumblr. Posts are organized into collections, like Pinterest. And within those collections, the posts are promoted by readers, like Reddit.....

The site's interface may be its strong suit.... As for written content, the site is fundamentally no different than Slashdot. .... Obvious used a Tumblr post to announce Branch, a tool designed to facilitate conversation online.

Web-based discussion site Branch...... a simple way to post to the Internet without taking on the responsibility of a personal blog brand. .... combines "the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the Internet." .... hopes to turn Internet monologues into online dialogues ..... By allowing users to pick who they want to talk to, Branch opens the diversity of the Web but prevents the discussion from turning into Internet noise. .... "We want it to be a place for you to talk about all the things that are happening in your world."

called "the next big thing in Web publishing" .... The reason this is different than the tools around today, like Tumblr or Twitter or Word Press is that it supposedly values quality, while also lowering the barrier to being a blogger. .... Medium will make the Internet easy, beautiful, and high quality all at once. .... Who gets the book deal for the Been There, Loved That, for example? ..... Medium looks and works like Pinterest, Tumblr and Reddit. Tech blogger Mathew Ingram called it "a cross between Tumblr and Pinterest" ..... "Right now it just seems like a Frankensteinish PinTumblReddit," wrote Gizmodo's Mario Aguilar. It's a blog that sorts things differently than blogs out there today. ..... "There are seeds of a backlash against the beautiful chaos the web hath wrought, the desire for a flight to quality. There will be new ways beyond ease of use to harness the creative powers of the audience," writes Benton. Even if Medium doesn't define that revolution, it reminds us that the Internet is not dead, and that it continues to evolve.

Both platforms seem to be very optimistic in nature, aiming to get each and everyone of us to share our ideas and thoughts in a clean and productive way.

With Medium, they aim to inject a dose of collaboration into Web publishing and distance it from print publishing practices. They also want to raise the quality of content.

Through Medium, readers and contributors alike, are able to interact with one another at a “level of contribution they prefer.”

an embeddable discussion platform called Branch. .... he is widely credited as the inventor of the term “blog” itself .... Obvious focuses on Internet software and “systems that help people work together to make the world a better place”. Besides developing its own projects, it also invests into promising, “philosophically aligned” start-ups, such as Beyond Meat – the company which aspires to perfectly replace animal protein with plant protein. ..... The project mixes blogging and social networking, borrowing ideas from Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter and pretty much any other successful Internet media platform. Posts can contain text and pictures, and are displayed using modern, minimalistic design. .... Medium aggregates posts by topic instead of by author, and assembles them into “collections”. Every post can be rated by users, and highest-rated posts will always appear on top of a collection. ..... should be equally appealing to both the casual readers and dedicated bloggers. .... Branch – an online discussion platform that has been described as “Twitter with no character limit”. Branch can be embedded to any website, and host discussions or comments on any topic. But the most interesting feature is that any conversation can “branch” into separate posts. .... it is interesting to note that some features and the overall design of Medium look somewhat similar to recently relaunched Digg.

They inspired a boom in self-publishing with Blogger, then turned the world to 140 characters with Twitter. Now Ev Williams and Biz Stone have launched two new websites – Medium and Branch – in what they hope will prompt an "evolutionary leap" in online sharing. .... people can read, view and vote on content without worrying about developing their own audience. .... Branch is the place for Twitter users to have more in-depth conversations with each other. You can start your own "branch" and invite other Twitter users to join you. There is no need to set up a separate Branch account. .... "Between articles, blog posts, and tweets, the internet is dominated by monologues. So we want to build a home for dialogues online, by combining the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the internet." ..... Branch brings the simplicity of Twitter and a more expansive, specialist conversation that can be found on Quora. Its success is more likely to be judged on the quality of conversations and return rate of its users, rather than the number of sign-ups. ..... Medium is not meant to be a repository for the badly-lit photos of a bazillion users. ..... What will be interesting is how both Medium and Branch affect Tumblr, the lightweight blogging platform whose biggest threat is being overwhelmed by low-quality content posted without a second thought.

"While it's great that you can be a one-person media company, it'd be even better if there were more ways you could work with others." .... Williams, Stone and Goldman were also investors in Branch Media, a New York startup that came out of private beta Monday. .... Stone, meanwhile, has a side project: He's signed with camera-maker Canon U.S.A. to work with acclaimed Hollywood director Ron Howard to produce one of five short films that will be based on photos sent in by consumers.

Is Medium going to be as revolutionary? That seems unlikely — but it’s still interesting. .... collaboration and the crowdsourcing of quality content are two of the core principles that Medium is based on .... What else is Pinterest but a collaboration platform .... while the Obvious founders say they want to make it easier for people to publish and share content, you could argue that Tumblr pretty much has a lock on that phenomenon ..... Of course, both of the things Evan Williams is famous for also looked either unnecessary or unimpressive, and in some cases both. Blogger was cool if you were a geek and wanted your own website, but it was far from obvious at the time that self-publishing was going to become something huge or crack open the media industry in a fundamental way. And Twitter looked so ephemeral (not to mention the ridiculous name) that many people dismissed it as a plaything for nerds that would never amount to anything. .... it looks a lot like a mashup of Pinterest and Tumblr. .... one of the things the platform does that is unlike both Blogger and Twitter is it subverts the notion of the author as the most important thing about the content. .... Medium is focused more on the value of the content, regardless of who is producing it or voting on it. .... it feels like a mashup of all the other tools that are out there rather than something with a compelling feature of its own .... certainly an interesting piece of an ongoing puzzle.

Obvious–a sort of idea incubator that’s “more of a philosophy than a company or product”

it is based around well-designed templates like Tumblr, and can be heavy on images, like Pinterest. ..... For now, Medium sounds like a potentially large collection of online forums, not much more. Yet, given the meteoric track record of its developers in the past, Medium has a much better than average chance of success. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Medium can reach anywhere near the level of success that Twitter has enjoyed.

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens, the finest poet to ever serve as vice president of the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company.] .... Obvious is the most recent iteration of the company that created Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter. .... Odeo was a podcasting service that never really took off — 20 percent ahead of its time, 80 percent outflanked by Apple. ..... the underlying structure of Medium, which upends much of how we think about personal publishing online. .... When the Internet first blossomed, its initial promise to media was the devolution of power from the institution to the individual. Before the web, reaching an audience meant owning a printing press or a broadcast tower. It was resource-intensive, and those resources tended to congeal around companies ..... The political blogosphere — the cacophony of individual voices on both left and right circa, say, 2004 — evolved toward institutions, toward Politico and TPM and The Blaze and HuffPo and the like. ..... Personal publishing is like voting. In theory, it’s the very definition of empowerment. In reality, it’s an excellent way for your personal shout to be cancelled out by someone else’s shout. ..... That was when a few smart people realized that there was a balance to be found between the organization and the individual. The individual sought self-expression and an audience; the organization sought sustainability and cash money. ...... What’s most radical about Medium is that it denies authorship. ..... it degrades authorship, renders it secondary, knocks it off its pedestal ..... The shift to blogging created a wave of new individual media stars, but in a sense it just shifted traditional media brands to a new, personal level. ..... Sites like Buzzfeed are built largely on reshuffling the Internet, rearranging work into streams and slideshows. ..... When you click on an author’s byline on a Medium post, it goes to their Twitter feed (Ev synergy!), not to their author archive — which is what you’d expect on just about any other content management system on the Internet. ...... “Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category.” .... Medium’s posting interface brought back super-pleasant memories of Blogger’s old two-pane interface. Felt like the Clinton years again. ..... The mass of quality content is much higher too, of course, but it’s surrounded by an even-faster-growing mass of not-so-great (or at least not-so-great-to-you) content. ....... Medium believes in editorial judgment — but everyone’s an editor. ..... good stuff being buried beneath something inconsequential posted 20 minutes later ..... Branch is based on the idea that web comments are shit and that you have to create a separate universe where smart people can have smart conversations. App.net, the just-funded paid Twitter alternative, is attractive to at least some folks because it promises a reboot of the social web without the “cockroaches” — you know, stupid people. Svbtle, an invite-only blogging platform, is aimed only at those who “strive to produce great content. We focus on the writing, the news, and the ideas. Everything else is a distraction.” ....... modernized with nice typography, lovely textures, and generous white space ..... the white flight argument — the idea that the privileged flee common spaces and platforms once they stop being solely the realm of an elite and become too popular ..... That the web’s pressure to Always Keep Posting New Stuff leads to a lot of dumb stuff being posted. It’s a critique of pageview chasing, a critique of linkbait, a critique of content farms, a critique of SEO’d headlines — a yearning for something more authentic ..... Is this Blogger or Twitter, or is it Odeo?

Branch I find more intriguing. I don't know what it is.

Collaborative publishing might save Medium. That might be the opening.

I might share photos on Medium to see if they rise up the ranks! Once they allow me in, that is.

This is the best commentary on Medium of all that I read.

Nieman Lab: 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious


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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Ev's Medium: Shaking It

Nieman Lab: 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious
Huffington Post: Medium, Twitter Co-Founders' Latest, Has Big Goals For Even Your Small Updates
CNet: Twitter co-founders preview Medium, a new publishing tool
GigaOm: With Medium, Twitter founders want to ‘reimagine publishing’ — again
MSNBC: Twitter founders start new 'Medium' social publishing site
Network World: Introducing Medium, the next big thing in Web publishing
PC Mag: Twitter Founders Unveil New Social Products: Branch, Medium
The Atlantic Wire: Medium Isn't Going to Save the Internet
Red Orbit: New Online Platforms To Share Ideas In Elegant Ways
PC World: Twitter Co-founders Seek to Shake up Web Publishing With Medium
App Advice: Twitter Founders Introduce Medium For Non-Bloggers To Speak To The World
Tech Week Europe: Twitter Creators Say Medium Is the Message
The Guardian: Twitter founders launch two new websites, Medium and Branch
San Francisco Chronicle: Medium is latest work from Obvious Corp.
GigaOm: Medium is well done, but is it the future of publishing?
Wall Street Journal: Twitter Founders Unveil New Publishing ‘Medium’
CIO Today: Twitter Co-Founders Launch Medium, Say It's Evolutionary






Someone once asked Sam Walton if retailing can be reinvented again. Oh yes, he said, it can be reinvented over and over again. That might be extra true for publishing.


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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The Mother Of All Twitter Lists


I follow too many people on Twitter - 45,000? - for my Twitter stream to make any sense to me. I will log in and before I click on the Mention button - the Twitter inbox - I will glance through the first few tweets in my steam, and sometimes I will find a snarky comment from someone - Having Coffee - that I will retweet and then I am done. That is not to say I don't want to follow people. I have gone to great lengths to build my lists on Twitter. I add people to my lists every day, most days.

But there are a few problems. Twitter allows you to create only 20 lists. I don't get it. Why is 20 such a magic number? Why not 30? Why not 40? Or 25?

Monday, May 09, 2011

Tweet Embed Option Needed

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter.Image via WikipediaNo, Biz, Twitter Has Real Issues

I think Twitter needs to give me the same embed option that YouTube does. Very often I feel the need to embed a tweet at my blog. And I ended up taking a screen shot, using the Paint software to resize it and all. It is tedious. It is a few different steps. I think it is like five steps. Takes a lot of time I don't have.

Linking to a tweet is not the same thing. Just like linking to a video is not the same thing. And taking a screen shot makes the tweet go dead. The links freeze. There is no retweet button.

A tweet is like an atom. It is a basic building block of the web. And we should have the option to take the atom wherever.

Friday, April 15, 2011

No, Biz, Twitter Has Real Issues

Biz Stone, co-founder of TwitterImage via WikipediaI am a huge fan of Twitter, an avid user, and I have blogged extensively about the service at this blog. I joined the service the same day Demi Moore did. Coincidence.

And I understand the media thing Biz Stone is alluding to here. The media likes drama. They report of fights where there are no fights. Friction sells better than peace.

But I do believe Twitter does have real issues.

Twitter does not have that Gladiator Steve Jobs, or the Knight In Shining Armor Mark Zuckerberg. But that lone warrior Founder CEO is not the only formula for grand success. Maybe greatness can also arise out of collective leadership.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Jack Dorsey Returning To Twitter

Jack Dorsey, a co-founder and the chairman of ...Image via WikipediaI put out this blog post - Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well - and the following day news was that Jack Dorsey was going back to Twitter in a major way. I felt vindicated.

I have a thing for the Founder CEO. (Larry Page At The Helm) Jack Dorsey is the Twitter Founder CEO. No, Biz Stone did not co-invent Twitter. Jack Dorsey getting booted out of Twitter is not exactly the same as Steve Jobs getting booted out of Apple in 1984, but it is in a similar vein. It is a DNA thing, it is delicate. Only the Founder CEO can pivot like a service like Twitter needs to pivot. Facebook has not had that problem. Zuck's being in the driving seat explains that. Facebook has pivoted relentlessly.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Social Ties And Social Media

Malcolm Gladwell speaks at PopTech! 2008 confe...Image via Wikipedia
Chris Dixon: You Need To Use Social Services To Understand Them: I’ve made more strong ties through Twitter (and blogging) than I have through any communications medium I’ve ever used before...... I barely tweeted or blogged for a long time .... the insistence of Caterina, who had the foresight to insist that everyone at Hunch blog, tweet, contribute to open source projects, etc. ...... I now get some of my best ideas from responses to tweets and blog posts, and have developed dozens of strong relationships through the experience.
This Gladwell article in The New Yorker has been making the rounds. Biz Stone talked against it in an article in The Atlantic. He figured between The New Yorker and The Atlantic one is the Republican Party and the other is the Democratic Party. Chris Hughes countered the Gladwell article almost immediately at his tumblog.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas



There are many ways to monetize Twitter. I say scale it (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter), monetize it, and then go public. This is a company whose market value will be in the billions. But monetization is key.

(1) Twitter Enterprise

There could be several versions. Companies could pay for premier accounts. Of course they could opt to have free accounts just as well, like many small businesses might. But my idea of Twitter Enterprise sees similarities with Google AdWords. Companies small and big use AdWords.

The first order of business would be help companies make sense of the vast order of data that might accumulate on Twitter around their brand names, mostly real time and near real time, but also digging into the archives. What if I want a snapshot for the past week, the past month?

(2) Twitter Ad Stream

The second order of business would be displaying ads. Use the real estate. My Twitter profile page has space for ads I think. Each tweet has its own unique web address. And each such page is more real estate for ads. Maybe ads on Twitter should be limited to 70 characters. And ad streams would be handled by Twitter Corporate. Catchy text plus tiny URL.

Once you create the concept of the Twitter ad stream, you could put that out many places including in the live streams of individual account holders. If every 30th tweet in my stream is a 70 character, one line ad, so be it. The ads should look like ads.

Just like Facebook's ad space is different, (Facebook's Ad Space Is Different) Twitter's ad space is also different. It has to be to stand out.

(3) Tweet Ads

The concept has to be introduced. And it should perhaps be automated like AdWords. People and businesses sign up online, pay by credit card, design their 70 character tweet ads, and pick the kind of streams they would like to go down in. And of course the tweet ads can be retweeted.

How To Increase Your Following On Twitter
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter
NewsDesk: China, Twitter, Hawking, Obama
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher
Twitter Is Not Micro
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase


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I Get Twitter
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