Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts

Monday, November 04, 2019

Corporate Values Are Make Or Break








at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Discovering LinkedIn In 2019

I discovered Twitter in 2009, and JP Rangaswami was a big reason why. His blog Confused Of Calcutta that a friend pointed out to had many posts where he shared his enthusiasm for Twitter. I got infected. Within a year I became a top followed in NYC on Twitter. And I was no Ashton Kutcher. I worked hard at it.

It is not like I had not heard of Twitter. I had. But at first, I thought it was ridiculous. (I was also in attendance at the NY Tech MeetUp where FourSquare first presented, and I was unimpressed with what the two Founders called "check-in") I had been an avid blogger for years. And I thought Twitter was for people who can compose full sentences, but full paragraphs are beyond their reach. I was not going to stoop down.

LinkedIn I signed up for not long after it was launched. I have been a keen reader of tech news since the late 1990s, and so I seldom missed developments. But until this year, I never really used LinkedIn. I updated my profile and kept it current, but that was just because.

This year LinkedIn has become my favorite social network. I have become an avid user. I have been using it for hours a day. It keeps running in the background. It has become more like an Operating System.

When I was living in the city (now I live 90 minutes out, more depending on your mode of transportation) I went to numerous tech events. And often you exchanged business cards. The idea would be to try and connect with those people online.

Now I realize I was doing it in reverse and wasting a lot of precious time. You meet people online. You try to connect with them. They might, they might not reciprocate. Which begs the question, did you have a good enough reason to connect, did you write a relevant enough first email?

After you connect, you can have so much communication online. LinkedIn messaging might not be the best messaging out there, but it works fine. And if you connect with someone enough, you might even want to meet. But that is a rather high threshold. What will you talk in person that you can not over email and voice chat? Especially when a meeting is so hard to arrange. For both parties.

I continue to use Twitter and Facebook, pretty much daily. And although I don't blog as regularly as I used to, my blogs are still active. Now I also blog on LinkedIn itself. But that is deliberately few and far between. If people decide to read my articles, let them be few enough that they might actually read them. That is what I have thought.

The LinkedIn profile is an excellent format. If you have only a few minutes to get to know me, reading my LinkedIn profile might be how you ought to spend your time. The kind of work people have done over the years gives you a pretty good picture of who someone is as a person. Even if your interest in them might not be work-related.

And so I have been networking on LinkedIn like crazy. I don't miss the city. I quite like the clean air around where I live. And I don't much miss the networking tech events either. LinkedIn is far superior an experience.

It feels like for the first time I am building a company (two, actually) in earnest. And LinkedIn is the Operating System I am happily using.

LinkedIn trending topics has also become my favorite place online to go for news. Although I go many places on a daily basis.

And to say I have actually seen Reid Hoffman in person. Mike Bloomberg threw a party. I don't know how I got invited. But that is where I got to meet and know Arianna Huffington also. Hoffman was the featured speaker.





at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Dorsey Ouster Was DNA Damage At Twitter

One can argue the service never really recovered from it. There is just something to the Founder CEO.




at No comments:
Labels: ,

Monday, January 25, 2016

Twitter Board Diversity





Zuck, Free Basics, India
FourSquare: What Has Become Of You
















How Diversity Makes Us Smarter

Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working
Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups. ...... It seems obvious that a group of people with diverse individual expertise would be better than a homogeneous group at solving complex, nonroutine problems. It is less obvious that social diversity should work in the same way—yet the science shows that it does. ...... This is not only because people with different backgrounds bring new information. Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort............. The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. ....... you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts—but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside? ........ The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. ..... Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers. ....... People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from one another as an engineer and a physicist—and that is a good thing. ....... on average, “female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value.” They also measured the firms' “innovation intensity” through the ratio of research and development expenses to assets. They found that companies that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks. ........

Racial diversity can deliver the same kinds of benefits.

...... For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance. ...... companies with one or more women on the board delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing (that is, net debt to equity) and better average growth.
......... Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they only show that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps. ........ The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity. Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation. ....... When a black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of whites, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective. The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us. ......... Democrats who were told that a fellow Democrat disagreed with them prepared less well for the discussion than Democrats who were told that a Republican disagreed with them. Republicans showed the same pattern. When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not. ......... papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers were associated with a greater number of author addresses; geographical diversity, and a larger number of references, is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.
......... Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them and that belief makes people change their behavior. ............

people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.

........ diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case ........ This is how diversity works: by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles.

Twitter Making Second Big Mistake On Jack Dorsey
Brazil On Twitter
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
Brazil And Twitter
Twitter Vision
Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive
Twitter DM: Make It Usable
Twitter Is Massively Complex
Twitter Has To Scale The Signals
Twitter Does The Deed: Ads
TCC: Twitter Community College
Executive Change At Twitter
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Facebook And Twitter: The Only Two That Count
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
Can Tweet Google, Can't Tweet Twitter
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas
If You Are Twitter
Dorsey's Second Snub At Twitter?
Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?



Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Twitter Is Not Micro
What Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail Can Learn From Twitter
My Twitter Suspension Lifted
I Got New Twitter Now
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
Facebook And Twitter Suck When It Comes To Searching Their Own Sites
Going Backwards: FoodSpotting, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook
Jeff Jarvis, Me And Twitter
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Twitter Top 0.1%
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
The Best Follow Friday I Ever Received On Twitter
Twitter Asks
Twitter Number 115 In New York City

at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, June 24, 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.


Related articles

at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Constantly Voting People

English: Ballot Box showing preferential voting
English: Ballot Box showing preferential voting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Recently Twitter bought a company in India whose key insight is the missed call phenomenon. I guess in India you buy a phone. And there is no monthly fee. And if you only receive phone calls, you don't owe the phone company anything. I still think the phone companies make a ton of money in the process because Indians are a talkative bunch. Indian take the whole democracy thing a little too seriously.

So this company mastered the art of customer service through missed calls. And it had an impressive exit.

This reminds me of the power of SMS. We are squarely in the era of smartphones at least in the rich countries and very fast catching up in the poor countries. But SMS is still the killer application. The most popular apps on the smartphone revolve around SMS. And I believe there is a message there.

Seeking out numerous voting opportunities for people would be an idea. Let people be constantly voting. SMS based daily voting, voting multiple times a day. On all sorts of issues.

Related articles

at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Thursday, January 08, 2015

Are Google's Best Days Behind It?

Wi-Fi Signal logo
Wi-Fi Signal logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I love Google like some people love Apple. I have also said before Google is going to be the first trillion dollar company in history. But to get there they need fundamental businesses.

The driverless car could be one such business. Not an almost driverless car, but a completely driverless car. If they can do that, they will have added something as fundamental as search to their hat. And that would be big business.

Another part is connectivity, the business of taking more people online. I was yelling years ago that Twitter should make it possible for people to search through all tweets. I have been yelling that Google should be in a big hurry to take more people online, take all people online. Because Google is better positioned than anyone else to make money off of that. And Google has been moving oh so slowly there. They should be able to say, we are taking all seven billion plus people online, and here, we are willing to spend 50 billion dollars to that end. But no, they have been dragging their feet on this.

And it's not just people in poor countries. Right here in America they are not moving fast enough on Gigabit broadband, and on getting into the TV spectrum of taking WiFi to the masses. People using free or supercheap WiFi is good for Google. But they are moving so slow.

Some of the top stories today ask this question: Are Google's best days behind it? I don't think so, but Google needs to make some moves fast.

Related articles

at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, November 07, 2014

Twitter Vision

Idea: Show visitor count on each tweet.
Vision: Your real time world in snippets.
Top priority: Making it possible for users to search through tweets, and display them in small and large numbers.



Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Struggles to Define Vision
issues with users not being able to easily search for tweets. He said Twitter has “a lot of potential” if it can address that

Related articles

at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Pinterest Dwarfing Facebook?



Pinterest dwarfing Twitter is yesterday's news. But Pinterest dwarfing Facebook?

Inside Pinterest: The Coming Ad Colossus That Could Dwarf Twitter And Facebook
A visual social network where people create and share image collections of recipes, hairstyles, baby furniture and just about anything else on their phones or computers, Pinterest isn’t yet five years old, but among women, who make up over 80% of its users, it’s already more popular than Twitter, which has a market capitalization of more than $30 billion. Pinterest’s U.S. user base is projected to top 40 million this year, putting it in a league with both Twitter and Instagram domestically ........ To date, Pinterest’s users have created more than 750 million boards made up of more than 30 billion individual pins, with 54 million new ones added each day. During the 2013 holiday season Pinterest accounted for nearly a quarter of all social sharing activity. Among social networks, only Facebook, with its 1.3 billion users, drives more traffic to Web publishers. ...... on the basis of average revenue per user, it’s only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack. ...... As Silbermann explains it, Facebook “is about your connections, your past events, your memories.” Users on Facebook volunteer a staggering amount of retrospective information such as birthplace, alma mater and vacations, data the company can use to power its highly targeted ad offerings. Twitter can’t offer that level of detail, which is why its revenue per user, at around $3.50, is only half that of Facebook’s. Twitter’s value remains stuck in the now, promising advertisers a presence in real-time conversations about the World Cup, a presidential election or Orange Is the New Black........ If Facebook is selling the past and Twitter the present, Pinterest is offering the future. “It’s about what you aspire to do, what you want to do down the line,” says Silbermann. And the future is where marketers want to live. ..... that delicate moment when browsing becomes shopping ..... For now advertising is Pinterest’s only revenue line. But it requires only the tiniest leap to conjure a scenario in which the company acts as middleman for the hundreds of thousands of retailers already showcasing their wares on its platform. ..... This is Amazon’s turf, but Facebook and Twitter have been making incursions, with both companies conducting tests of “Buy” buttons for frictionless shopping. ..... In his Cannes keynote Silbermann dismissed Google as “the ultimate card catalog,” an outdated technology useful only if you already know what you’re looking for. ..... Pinterest, he says, “exposes people to possibilities they never would have known existed.” ..... Silbermann grew up thinking he’d be a doctor like his parents, both of whom are ophthalmologists. An accomplished cellist and debater, he spent the summer before his senior year in high school at MIT’s elite Research Science Institute and then enrolled at Yale, where he took premed courses. Halfway through college, though, he caught the business bug. Instead of taking the MCAT upon graduation, he took a job as a management consultant at the Corporate Executive Board in Washington, D.C. “Like a lot of young people, I just wanted a job at the beginning,” he says of taking the road more traveled. ........ After three years as a consultant he scored “ the only job I could get at Google,” as a product specialist, and moved out West in 2006. Silbermann spent his days translating customer feedback into product refinements, acquiring a skill he considers crucial to Pinterest’s success. ...... Silbermann was visiting New York when he met through a mutual friend a Columbia architecture student named Evan Sharp. “We both had the same hobby, which was the Internet,” Sharp says. “I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and Ben grew up in Des Moines. For both of us, in a way, the Internet was this really precious window into worlds outside our day-to-day experience.” ....... Sharp told Silbermann about his collection of thousands of architectural drawings and photos, which had become increasingly hard to organize. That resonated with Silbermann, who’d noticed that Tote’s users seemed more interested in saving photos of products than in buying the products themselves. ...... the three launched the first desktop version of Pinterest in March 2010. Users could save images from anywhere on the Web to thematically organized boards ..... As the work progressed, Sharp moved to the Bay Area and took a job at Facebook to support himself while the three worked from their makeshift offices, a “dirty apartment” in Palo Alto. ..... Its early gains were the result of laborious word-of-mouth marketing, with Silbermann leaning on everyone in his network to spread the word and personally contacting several thousand users to quiz them about what they liked and disliked. “If he hadn’t done that, my guess is we would’ve given up in a few more months,” says Sharp, 31. “It’s kind of ridiculous how long we worked on it, given how little success we were seeing.” .......... Nor was it an overnight sensation with investors. “He had a hell of a time raising money in the beginning,” says Ron Conway, a perpetual member of the Forbes Midas List, whose firm, SV Angel, invested in April 2011 at the urging of fellow angel Shana Fisher. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman was one of those who failed to see the potential. “A friend sent it to me, and I didn’t even take the meeting,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Ehhhh, this is interesting, but I don’t know what to do with it. It’s too conceptual for me.’ ” ...... To date, Pinterest has raised $764 million in seven rounds from a group of investors that includes FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. In May it closed that blockbuster $200 million round that provided fuel for its international expansion. At that valuation–and given the mania for fast-growth companies over the ensuing six months, a raise in the range of $8 billion to $10 billion is possible–Silbermann’s estimated 15% stake and Sharp’s estimated 10% would make them, on paper, candidates for the FORBES billionaires list. ........ “ I spend a lot more of my time trying to clearly communicate where we’re going so everyone can march in the same direction,” Silbermann says. “Technology has made it easier for small teams to scale fast, but no one’s ever released something that makes it easy to build a culture proportionately as fast.” ...... “My mind is like a warren, whereas Ben’s is like a f–king database.” ..... the phases of the so-called purchase funnel: awareness, consideration, preference and purchase. ...... More than 90% of Pinterest usage is on mobile, higher than Facebook (68%) and Twitter (86%) ...... Every Promoted Pin has to start out as an ordinary pin, living on the partner’s boards, and stunts like price promotions and contests are off-limits. ..... “How do we do for discovery what Google did for search?” Silbermann muses. “How do we show you the things you’re going to love even if you didn’t know what you were looking for? We think if we answer that question, all the other parts of the business will follow.”
Okay, so the metric is revenue per user. I can see Pinterest going past Facebook on that.

Ben Silbermann On How Pinterest Slowly Grew To Massive Scale
In June 2010, more than two years after Ben Silbermann left his job to start what became Pinterest, and three months after launching, the site had 3,000 registered accounts.

Related articles

at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)