Apple And Pinterest

How is that a fit? Facebook, yeah, but Apple?

Apple Wants To Buy Pinterest Rival, The Fancy

The Fancy takes a 10 percent cut of purchases. Last we checked in, sales were exploding.... Einhorn and Apple CEO Tim Cook met at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley conference earlier this year. The notoriously private Cook, who does not visibly participate in any well-known social media sites, started using The Fancy shortly afterwards. ..... The Fancy raised a $10 million round at a reported valuation of $100 million last fall, led by PPR, the French luxury conglomerate behind Gucci. It previously raised $6 million in 2010; $2.7 million of that round went to Einhorn and his cofounder, his brother Jack Einhorn .... Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are on the board .... Apple could well build an e-commerce layer into its operating system and let application developers hook into it, giving them a way to make money besides advertising. .... The Fancy's offices are situated above an Apple Store in New York City

My first time hearing the name The Fancy.

Pinterest Competitor, The Fancy, Now Powers $10,000 Per Day In Sales

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Odeo Should Have Stuck Around

The logo used by Apple to represent Podcasting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I say bring back Odeo.

An Insider's History Of How A Podcasting Startup Pivoted To Become Twitter

it started out in 2005 as Odeo, a podcasting company founded by Evan Williams. When Apple iTunes moved into podcasting, Odeo found itself going nowhere fast, and so it needed to pivot..... Noah Glass, who came up with the name Twttr .... Odeo's team pivoted to fully embrace the 140-character side project. The rest, as they say, is history (in progress).

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Free Food Goes A Long Way

It is not really a budget issue, so I don't see why more companies don't do it. Another good one is the 20% time. A third is child care.

This free food thing was a great early step to take. So simple, so obvious, so visible. It will garner headlines.

In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo: Free Food! Friday Afternoon All-Hands! New Work Spaces! Fab Swag!

a weekly Friday afternoon all-hands meeting ...... Mayer is also prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, as well as upgrading swag in its stores..... Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google’s success at creating an always sunny work environment. ..... “It might be just a small thing, but people are thrilled,” said one Yahoo employee, in a common sentiment about the symbolic gesture of free grub...... Mayer has been up to much more serious business.. most especially pushing product innovation as the savior for Yahoo to anyone who will listen. ...... Better email! Better Flickr! Better search! Better ad-serving! ..... “This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again.... It will be all about platforms and products.” ..... a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction. ..... Will Mayer, as Google CEO Larry Page has done forever, approve all hires at Yahoo going forward? ..... Mayer has been studying org charts carefully this past week, and several sources told me that she has asked all her direct reports for strategic plans in the next 45 days.

Jack Dorsey got elbowed out of the CEO position at Twitter by Evan Williams. Months later Dorsey said he should have had weekly team meetings.

Flat workspaces are another thing. No cubicles. Just one big, open space.

You want your people to be happy.

I asked for a free Flickr, (Make Flickr Free Again) but got free food instead.

Of all the Google things, the 20% time I find the most intriguing. That is Google's elixir of youth. That is the reason why when Google becomes bigger it tackles bigger problems instead of going staid and corporate.

Free lunch in week two is a master stroke.

What will be Mayer's first acquisition? I bet many minds are asking that question. Flipboard would make a lot of sense.

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Twitter Integration Into Google's Search Plus

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeDick Costolo in GigaOm: “Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

The Next Web: 2009: Total Tweets Tweeted Nearing 5 Billion

http://gigatweeter.com/counter: 29 Billion Tweets

Twitter Blog: Measuring Tweets

If there are 29 billion tweets out there and counting, and according to the Twitter CEO Google has indexed three billion of them, then obviously Google does not have access to all the tweets out there. There is some cooperation that is necessary. And so far it has not been forthcoming.

I speak for the consumer. If tweets are not included in Google's Search Plus Your World, that is not a good thing. I hope the two giants work things out.

Dick Costolo Of Twitter
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Twitter, France And Germany
Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

Twitter misunderstands real time.

Google Plus Plus Google Search

Real time is not just real time as it is happening right now. Real time is also real time as it happened in real time two years ago. But Twitter thinks only your 3,000 or so latest tweets are relevant. It does not destroy the old tweets, but it disallows access to them, which in my book is akin to destroying them.

My single biggest frustration with Twitter has been that I can not search through all of my own tweets. If I could, Twitter would be my Dropbox. But no, Twitter would not open up its API.

Twitter Is Seeing Rebirth
Twitter Asks
Being Able To Embed Tweets Is A Revolution
Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well

Twitter opening up its API would mean Google being able to access all tweets without paying Twitter. Bad deal for Twitter? No. Like Jeff Jarvis says, do what you do best, link to the rest. Twitter does not do search right, if at all. My tweets belong to me, not to Twitter. At the least I should have access to them.

All tweets ever tweeted becoming fair game to Google Search would enhance the piece of real estate called the tweet tremendously. It is in Twitter's interests to open up. Lift the iron curtain. Mr. Dorsey, tear down this wall.

TechCrunch: Twitter Really, Really Hates Google’s New Google+ Integration

Twitter Is Seeing Rebirth

Being Able To Embed Tweets Is A Revolution

Being Able To Embed Tweets Is A Revolution

I have been blaming Evan Williams for this the entire time. He ousted Jack Dorsey, and I can't even freaking embed tweets in my blog posts. I mean, I can. There are services like Embedly. But they generate five hectares of code. A tweet is not more complex than a video clip, and YouTube generates one line of code for you to embed video clips from YouTube. Embedding a tweet should feel as effortless as retweeting. A tweet is a unit, and that unit you should be able to carry with you.

I still don't have it yet. I guess they are going to take their sweet time to roll it. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. But that's okay. I mean, it's not. But what you gonna do?

Jack Dorsey With Om

gigaomroadmap on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Source: GigaOm

Twitter Asks

Well, Jack, I am glad you asked. Finally. I have been spouting over the months without even being asked.

Twitter: Too Complex
Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
Screw Twitter, Screw Facebook
Tweet Embed Option Needed
Twitter: $45 Million To $150 Million To $250 Million
No, Biz, Twitter Has Real Issues
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher

Twitter Trouble?
Why Jack Dorsey Invented Twitter
The Mother Of All Twitter Lists
The New York Times Is Bullish On Twitter

The Good

(1) That Twitter exists. That it got invented. It was necessary. Twitter could become Google size. Or maybe it is too late.

The Bad

(1) 2000 was when Twitter's time had come. Waiting all those years was a bad move.
(2) Removing the Founder CEO was a bad move. I don't know all the gory details, I don't even want to know. But that was a bad move. If the same would have been done to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook also might have been by the wayside. It is a DNA thing.

The Ugly

(1) You don't get to delete my tweets. All my tweets are belong to me. And I want them available, to me and to all interested third parties. Real time also means real time as it happened yesterday. I want to be able to search through all my tweets.



Feature Requests

(1) I want to be able to delete many Direct Messages at once, not one at a time.
(2) I want to be able to search through my Direct Messages like I can my email inbox.
(3) I want Facebook like notifications for new tweets where I am mentioned, new Direct Messages. I am talking about that red button on Facebook that shows up with a number.
(4) I want to be able to embed tweets in my blog posts in an easy way. There should be an embed button like there is a reply button, a retweet button. Generate one or two lines of code max. If YouTube can do it with videos, I mean.
(5) Why only 20 lists? I want to create more lists. If you can't give limitless, give me 50, give me 100.
(6) From the Home page, when I click on the Retweet link at the top next to the Mentions button, I should end up on a page that gives me an overview of all my retweet data/information.
(7) Same with the search button. I should be able to customize my searches. Search all of my tweets. Search all of my tweets from this time period to that time period. Search all tweets by people who follow me. Search through all tweets by people I follow. Search all tweets. Search all tweets from the specified period. Search all tweets from a specified geographical location, might be a city, a country, region, a continent. Search through all tweets from a specified location and a specific time period (for when I want to relive a revolution). Search only through tweets with images attached. Search only through tweets with videos attached.
(8) Clicking on Lists should also take me to a page that should automatically display the timelines for my top two or three lists.
(9) I don't have this problem yet, but after I become rich and famous (like you) I want to be able to read many tweets at once. Give me visualization options so I can read 100 tweets at once. As in, these are the last 1,000 tweets from people you don't follow in one infographic. And I would want an embed option on that "read." I want bragging rights.
(10) My profile page should have links to my Facebook page, my blog, my LinkedIn page without taking up too much real estate.
(11) I can now upload a picture directly to Twitter. Thanks. That should also apply to video clips that are a minute or less.
(12) First and foremost - and I repeat - do the search thing.
(13) Tell Sean Parker I said hi.

Sean Parker: Mystery Man

Image via CrunchBaseForbes: Agent Of Disruption

Sean Parker rocked the music industry with Napster and unleashed viral marketing with Plaxo. His vision shaped Facebook; so did his paranoia. Now 31 and worth $2.1 billion, he's just getting started. ...... one pale hand on the wheel, the other toggling through thousands of songs uploaded on the car's sound system. ..... Over the last ten hours he's interviewed two potential VPs for his new video startup, answered hours' worth of e-mails about the music platform he's backing, Spotify, and met with a potential CEO for his Facebook charity app, Causes. He's also booking bands and wrangling vendors for his engagement party, scheduled in New Jersey the same night Hurricane Irene looks to hammer the Northeast ...... breaks from work to dine with Jack Dorsey ...... By the time he drops me off at my hotel, it's 11:30 p.m. Parker's day is about half done. ...... For the next six hours Parker fires off e-mails, then turns to his private Facebook page. The previous afternoon--or earlier the same day, if you're on Parker's body clock ...... Around 6 a.m. Parker posts this Schopenhauer quote: "We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success." It immediately leaks. Gossip site Gawker accuses him of dancing on Jobs' grave. He e-mails Gawker that the quote was a tribute to Jobs--his longtime idol and more recent rival (iTunes versus Spotify). Just before 7 a.m. he goes to bed. ........ Four hours later he's up ..... Flighty, manic and unpredictable, Parker grates on investors--he's been jettisoned from the three companies he helped create, soon after they lifted off. "He's seen as an unknown quantity, and VCs love for things to be very much in control" ....... But VCs also love big ideas, and Parker has those in spades--LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman calls him a "big-ass visionary." And in terms of boardroom scheming, he's nothing like his fictional portrayal in The Social Network. "The movie needed an antagonist, but that's not what he was," says former Facebook growth chief
Image by cattias.photos via Flickr Chamath Palihapitiya. "He's really the exact opposite of his portrayal in the film." ...... a human accelerant, an idea catalyst who, when combined with right people, has fueled some of the most disruptive companies of the last two decades ...... At just 19 he blew up the record industry as the cofounder of the music-sharing site Napster ...... 24-year-old president of Facebook ...... He's also hunting new startups as general partner at venture firm Founders Fund and reuniting with Napster's Shawn Fanning to create Airtime, a live video site. ....... His personal network is astounding, a combination of foresight and fate. Starting as a teenager, when he interned for current Zynga Chief Mark Pincus, Parker has teamed, in one way or another, with the men who now control the modern Internet: Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Yuri Milner, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D'Angelo, Daniel Ek, Ron Conway, Ram Shriram and Jim Breyer. ....... "Parker has access to trends and signals that are invisible to many people. For him it's like hearing a dog whistle." Parker doesn't disagree: "I find a lot of things relevant that aren't necessarily relevant to the world when I'm thinking about them." ....... Parker is drawn to big, universal problems and spends years looking for them. ...... his recently purchased $20 million Manhattan town house ...... "The transition strategies are more important than understanding what the outcome state will be." ...... Parker put himself in position for the string of blockbusters that his critics blithely attribute to sequential luck. ..... "He thinks about where he perceives the world to be going," explains Spotify founder Daniel Ek. "If he doesn't think there is a company that will win, then he builds it himself." ....... Ask Parker about the genesis of his former company Plaxo and he starts with theories of how real viruses spread across populations. Before he shares the name of his favorite sushi restaurant--prior to one dinner we had in New York he called five to find out which chef was cutting the fish that night--he discusses rice density and the ideal geometric shape for sushi cuts (trapezoids). Question the audiophile about the best brand of headphones and you first learn how sound waves are registered by our tympanic membranes. As the expression goes, ask him for the time and he'll tell you how to build a watch. ........ "We talked for what I originally scheduled for an hour, ended up being three hours," Reid Hoffman recalls about their first meeting back in 2002. Twitter founder Dorsey had the same experience: "It's rare to find someone who can have those kinds of conversations. ... I appreciate any conversation where I can walk away questioning myself
Image by Getty Images via @daylife and my ideas." ........ Parker's life becomes impervious to time, a subject friends and business partners acknowledge with a defeated laugh. Peter Thiel calls it Parker's "absence of dramatic punctuality." Ek manages Parker by telling him there's a meeting at 11 a.m. and informing others it starts at 1 p.m. There's even a name in Silicon Valley for this phenomenon: Sean Standard Time. ...... When focused on a task, he blocks everything else out and works himself into a trance. The outside world fades; time slips away. "It requires a lot of rescheduling, but I try to focus on things that are the highest value and get those done perfectly." ....... Parker's definition of "done perfectly" is extreme. ....... He's trying to lose weight and is eating only vegetables. ...... After hundreds of photos in four locations around the house, the shoot is finished. It's now 2 a.m.--perfect, calibrated Sean Standard Time. ........ Two nights later I arrive at his house at 11 p.m. A chartered G450 is scheduled to fly to San Francisco from Teterboro, N.J.--wheels up at midnight, sharp. Parker is out meeting Spotify's Ek. When midnight hits and there is still no Parker, I get a little nervous. Everyone else yawns. Parker struts in at 2 a.m. He still has to pack and shower. At 3:30 a.m. a Cadillac Escalade is loaded with luggage and take-out fried chicken from Blue Ribbon, a late-night New York chefs hangout, and across the Hudson we go. ........ We take off at 4 a.m., a half hour before FAA fatigue laws would have grounded the pilots. When I awake to a view of the California desert outside the plane window, Parker is sitting across from me, snacking on a piece of fried chicken, his veggie-only diet already over. "Did you sleep well?" ....... his father, Bruce, formerly the chief scientist at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association, taught him how to program on an Atari 800. He was in second grade. ...... At 15 his hacking caught the attention of the FBI, earning him community service. At 16 he won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing an early Web crawler and was recruited by the CIA. Instead he interned for Mark Pincus' D.C. startup, FreeLoader, and then UUNet, an early Internet service provider. ......... Parker made $80,000 his senior year, enough to convince his parents to let him put off college and join Shawn Fanning, a teenager he'd met on a dial-up bulletin board, to start a music-sharing site that became Napster in 1999. ....... "I kind of refer to it as Napster University--it was a crash course in intellectual property law, corporate finance, entrepreneurship and law school," says Parker. "Some of the e-mails I wrote when I was just a kid who didn't know what he was doing are apparently in [law school] textbooks." ........ by that time Parker had already been exiled by management and was living in a North Carolina beach house. "I didn't understand at the time that when someone asks you to take an extended vacation that's basically a prelude to firing you." ........ While at Napster Parker met angel investor Ron Conway, who was funding another company in the startup's building in Santa Clara. Conway has backed every Parker production since. ....... Napster was less a company than an all-hours circus, a strange tangle of people who thought they joined a renegade social movement rather than a startup. ....... "So much of what I learned at Napster was learning what not to do," says Parker, as Conway scribbles on a notepad. He learned to listen to Parker the hard way. "When Sean became president of Facebook, he called me and said, ‘You have to look at this company.' The killer is that I could have been Peter Thiel," says Conway, referring to Thiel's investment in Facebook that made him a billionaire. "But I said, ‘You have to clean up the issues at Plaxo, so don't introduce me to this Facebook thing.' " He sips his wine, shakes his head and laughs: "These are painful memories." ......... Plaxo was Parker's first attempt at creating a real company--an online service that aimed to keep your address book up to date. It sounds boring compared to Napster and Facebook, but Plaxo was an early social networking tool and a pioneer of the types of viral tricks that helped grow LinkedIn, Zynga and Facebook. "Plaxo is like the indie band that the public doesn't know but was really influential with other musicians," Parker says. ........ "In some ways Plaxo is the company I'm most proud of because it was the company that wreaked the most havoc on the world," says Parker. ........ There are diverging stories about Parker's swift exile from Plaxo. His take is that Ram Shriram, a former Google board member recruited to help manage the company, conspired to throw him out and strip him of his stock. "Ram Shriram played this very vindictive game not only to force me out of the company but force me out broke, penniless, impoverished and with no options." ........ cofounders Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring share a different story: that Parker was essential in creating the company strategy and raising money but grew bored with the daily grind of running it. Masonis claims that Parker was often absent, and when he was around, he was distracting: "It was the sort of thing where he doesn't come to work, but then maybe if he does it's at 11 p.m., but it's not to do a bunch of work, it's because he's bringing a bunch of girls back to the office because he can show them he's a startup founder." .......... Whatever the motivation, Parker's removal was messy. He insists investors hired a private eye to build a case. ........ Parker was on his own, isolated from his cofounders and close friends. "I felt a complete loss of faith in humanity, impending doom, a sense that I couldn't trust anybody," says Parker. ....... shown Facebook by a friend's girlfriend (versus the one-night stand depicted in Aaron Sorkin's screenplay) he was already a social networking veteran, both because of Plaxo and, more directly, as an advisor to Friendster, the ill-fated Facebook forerunner he stumbled across when reporters asked him if it was connected to the similar-sounding Napster. ........ He wrote to Facebook's generic e-mail address and later met Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin over a Chinese dinner in Manhattan in the spring of 2004. ........ A few weeks later, by chance, he ran into Zuckerberg and crew on the streets of Palo Alto and shortly moved into Dustin Moskovitz's room at the rented Facebook house. "It's the only thing the movie got kind of close to right," deadpans Adam D'Angelo ......... Just 24, Parker was Facebook's business veteran. He helped the collegeaged Facebook founders network around Silicon Valley, set up routers and meet benevolent investors like Thiel, Hoffman and Pincus. ........ "Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company," Mark Zuckerberg says in an e-mail. "Perhaps more importantly, Sean helped ensure that anyone interested in investing in Facebook would not only buy into a company, but also a mission and vision of making the world more open through sharing." ........ D'Angelo credits Parker for recognizing that design was as vital as engineering. ....... Together with Aaron Sittig, an early Napster friend who would become Facebook's key architect, Parker helped drive Facebook's minimalist look. He was adamant that the site have a continuous flow and tasks like adding friends be as frictionless as possible. "We wanted it to be like a telephone service," says Sittig. "Something that really fades into the background." Later Parker helped push Facebook's photo-sharing function. It would be one of his last acts as Facebook's president. ........ In August 2005 Parker was questioned in North Carolina after cops found cocaine in a beach house rented under his name. He was never arrested or charged, but the incident swiftly kick-started his downfall at Facebook. ....... Accel Partners resented him because he forced the VC to invest in Facebook at a then high $100 million valuation ..... He had been pushed out of his third company in five years. He moved to New York in the fall of 2005, crashing with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, a friend from the Napster days. ....... was a strong outside influence in the development of Facebook's "Share" platform, which allowed users to upload news articles, video and other third-party content. ....... his greatest contribution to Facebook was his creation of a corporate structure--based on his Plaxo experience--that gave Zuckerberg complete and permanent control of the company he founded. ........ Parker's plan fortified Zuckerberg with supervoting shares that resisted dilution during fundraising and armed him with enough board seats to stay in power for as long as he wanted. ...... At Plaxo Parker had endured in real life what the fictional Saverin suffered in the film. "I don't mind being depicted as a decadent partyer because I don't think there's anything morally wrong with that," says Parker, quickly adding that the partying was exaggerated, too. "But I do mind being depicted as an unethical, mercenary operator, because I do think there is something wrong with that." ......... "I was a mess at that point because the movie had hit, the depiction of me was so far from reality I was having a hard time psychologically dealing with it," Parker says. "I was all bummed out, I had just broken up with my girlfriend of four years and I just had knee surgery, so I couldn't walk." ..... a mutual friend introduced him to his future fiancée, the 22-year-old Lenas, a singer-songwriter. ........ remains a hacker at heart, motivated less by money than the drive to disrupt. ..... he never stopped thinking about Napster. Eight years after it had been sued out of existence he was still searching for a company that could fulfill Napster's promise of sharing music ...... Two years ago a friend told him about a Swedish music site called Spotify that offered unlimited, legal songs. He scoured his network for an introduction, and without seeing the product in action, blindly e-mailed founder Daniel Ek, outlining his ideal music platform, hoping Spotify fit the description. ......... Ek had been a huge fan of Napster, and Parker's suggestions caught his attention: "This was someone who had spent more time thinking about this than I had done myself." After a series of e-mails and a test drive of the platform, Parker was sold and tried to invest. Armed with a cash infusion from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, Ek wasn't looking for any more. Parker would have to prove his way into the company. He introduced Spotify to Mark Zuckerberg (a Facebook integration plan was scheduled to be introduced shortly after this article went to press) and helped open doors at Warner and Universal, winning over Spotify's board: He eventually invested about $30 million. ......... communication and sharing in real time--something he thinks is underserved on the Web ...... "My pitch is eliminating loneliness," Parker says. There's also a random video chat function similar to last year's voyeuristic flameout, the now defunct Chatroulette. ......... He flies in a monthly loop from New York (base) to Los Angeles (music executives) to San Francisco (Founders Fund), then Stockholm and London (Spotify). In my last meeting with him I asked where he files his taxes. "That's a damn good question. I don't even know." ....... "I actually couldn't honestly tell you whether we've been here for two hours or 20 minutes." ....... Spotify and Airtime, that may yet again redefine life on the social Web.

Slate: Lunch With Sean Parker

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?

Square: Jack Dorsey's Second Act?

(Article first published as Square: Jack Dorsey's Second Act? on Technorati.)

As I was watching Jack Dorsey call cash registers "ugly" the other day at TechCrunch Disrupt, I found myself thinking, is Square Jack Dorsey's second act? Is he getting to do with Square what he was not allowed to do with Twitter?

I think so. The Founder CEO is a rare animal, but it is my favorite animal. All the trailblazing companies I know have had Founder CEOs. Twitter stands in stark contrast to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has relentlessly pivoted, he has relentlessly added features. What used to be The Wall became The Stream. We now have a like button to press. There are Facebook Comments at blogs. Twitter, by comparison, stagnated. There has only been scaling and a little bit of monetization.

Why Jack Dorsey Invented Twitter

I think Jack Dorsey invented Tumblr, sorry Twitter, is because so he could claim and hog the Twitter handle Jack. When you are on Twitter it feels like Jack Dorsey is the only Jack in the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is Hugh Jackman. There is Jack Nicholson.

Tweet Embed Option Needed

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.

No, Biz, Twitter Has Real Issues

Image 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.

Twitter Trouble?

Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well

Fortune: Trouble @Twitter: There's no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders. (Like Williams. The day after Dorsey announced his return to the company -- via tweet, naturally -- Williams quit his day-to-day duties at the company, although he remains a board member and Twitter's largest shareholder, with an estimated 30% to 35% stake.) These theatrics, which go well beyond the usual angst at a new venture, have contributed to a growing perception that innovation has stalled and management is in turmoil at one of Silicon Valley's most promising startups, which some 20 million active users rely on each month for updates on everything from subway delays to election results -- and which a growing number of companies, big and small, seek to use to market themselves and track customers. ...... It has been months -- an eternity in Silicon Valley -- since the company rolled out a new product that excited consumers. ...... Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg used to watch developments at Twitter obsessively; now he pays much less attention to the rival service. ...... Twitter doesn't lack talented engineers, potential paying customers, or loyal users -- and it certainly has plenty of money in the bank ..... The problem is a board and top executive team that don't always appear to have control of its wide-ranging cast of characters, including founders who have attained near-celebrity status (another co-founder, Biz Stone, is a regular on NPR, and earlier this year Dorsey was profiled in Vanity Fair), headstrong and divisive managers, and investors used to getting their way. ....... in the first half of 2009, Twitter added more users more quickly than almost any web service in history ...... the company tells Fortune that in coming months Twitter will roll out new features and ad products ...... "Twitter could be 10 or even 100 times bigger. I'm hopeful for that," says Reid Hoffman ....... "But it's not a given. It's never a given." ...... Twitter hates being lumped in with Facebook as a social network, but comparing the two companies helps illustrate why Twitter finds itself stuck in neutral. ...... Zuckerberg .... although he still dabbles in writing code, he spends his time refining the product and strategy. He's been criticized for being ruthless, ambitious, and single-minded in his quest to build Facebook -- a common knock on the few founders who stay atop their companies. (Exhibit A: Bill Gates.) ...... Unsure of what they'd created, the founders basically turned Twitter over to its users -- initially a bunch of techie early adopters -- and watched what they did with it. The result was a bit of anarchy ...... By the end of 2008 the board decided that Dorsey, a taciturn engineer with no previous management experience, was no longer the right CEO. Williams, who succeeded him, has been accused of pushing Dorsey out, but in an exclusive interview for this story, he put the responsibility for making that decision on the broader board: "We thought about recruiting somebody from the outside," he says, "but the company at that stage was so fragile that bringing in someone from outside was risky. So the VCs asked me if I would do it." ....... By that time, communication among the Twitter founders, especially Dorsey and Williams, had started to fray. According to Greg Kidd, an early investor, Dorsey today is circumspect but firm on the subject of his relationship with Williams. "The most he's ever said about Ev is, 'We don't talk.'" ........ Williams, a reserved Nebraskan ...... Having dabbled in improvisational theater early in his adulthood, Costolo inspires confidence with his refined public speaking ability, quick wit, and fast decision-making skills. ...... Williams left in December for vacation, extended it to January, then through March. On March 29, the day after Dorsey returned as product chief, Williams announced he wouldn't return to the company in a management role. ...... growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009 ...... international traffic to the site jumped 83% in the past year ...... the 20-month plateau has come so early in the company's trajectory ....... Many believe that Twitter's search results, which increasingly show up on other sites, are its real jewels. For anyone striving to see events as they unfold, there are few better places to turn. ...... the company lacks a coherent philosophy about what it wants to deliver to customers in the first place. ...... Three days after Dorsey's March 28 return to daily duty at Twitter, the company killed the Dickbar. ...... three people close to Square say Dorsey told them that he views his involvement with Twitter as short term. ...... "The act of getting from there to here was violent," he says. "We've had a revolving door of senior leaders who leave." ...... if Dorsey is right and managing a startup is indeed like managing a theatrical company, it probably is a good idea to give the performers and stagehands a little love. That way maybe they can #gettheiracttogether.

I did offer my services but Twitter would not listen.

Making Dick Costolo An Offer He Can't Refuse