Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Ill-equipped to act, with insufficient tact
This didn't last long. On the advice of one of my developers I deviated from the personalized tweeting and sent the same reply to 20 or so folks on Twitter yesterday. I searched for people tweeting about short selling and then suggested they might want to check out shortscreen for other short ideas. In fairness to my developer, he didn't suggest to do that, exactly: he suggested to tweet a handful of folks at once. In any case, my Twitter account has been suspended, which frankly surprised me.
Judging from 100% of the tweets I received from 30 individuals over my few days-long Twitter career, my tweets were better targeted and more relevant than pretty much any of them. For example, unlike the fellow who managed to send me -- someone hasn't golfed in maybe four years and has a set of Costco clubs gathering dust somewhere -- 20 links to golf tips in two days, I only contacted actual short sellers about a site geared to short selling. That's not to suggest that all of the tweets I received in the last few days were commercial in nature: some were just inane bits of trivia, e.g., the one from a woman in the Southwest who mentioned that she had moved that day and asked if anyone else liked moving.
I appealed for clemency to the powers that tweet, noting that after reading the TOS I understood my mistake. The form for contacting Twitter about stuff like this includes a field asking "how do you feel"1. I entered "chastened". But I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, the ratio of visits to Shortscreen from Twitter to my tweets was pretty high -- about 50%. On the other hand, the whole Twitter enterprise seems like a pointless time suck. So I leave it to the folks at Twitter to decide if my tweeting days are over. If they are, so be it.
1This question reminded me a little of that test the reincarnated Spock takes at his parents' house on Vulcan in Star Trek IV. He gets a series of questions, one of which goes like this, if memory serves, "Adjust the sine wave of the magnetic envelope so that anti-gravitons can enter and anti-protons cannot". And then he is stumped by the last question, "How do you feel?".
Judging from 100% of the tweets I received from 30 individuals over my few days-long Twitter career, my tweets were better targeted and more relevant than pretty much any of them. For example, unlike the fellow who managed to send me -- someone hasn't golfed in maybe four years and has a set of Costco clubs gathering dust somewhere -- 20 links to golf tips in two days, I only contacted actual short sellers about a site geared to short selling. That's not to suggest that all of the tweets I received in the last few days were commercial in nature: some were just inane bits of trivia, e.g., the one from a woman in the Southwest who mentioned that she had moved that day and asked if anyone else liked moving.
I appealed for clemency to the powers that tweet, noting that after reading the TOS I understood my mistake. The form for contacting Twitter about stuff like this includes a field asking "how do you feel"1. I entered "chastened". But I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, the ratio of visits to Shortscreen from Twitter to my tweets was pretty high -- about 50%. On the other hand, the whole Twitter enterprise seems like a pointless time suck. So I leave it to the folks at Twitter to decide if my tweeting days are over. If they are, so be it.
1This question reminded me a little of that test the reincarnated Spock takes at his parents' house on Vulcan in Star Trek IV. He gets a series of questions, one of which goes like this, if memory serves, "Adjust the sine wave of the magnetic envelope so that anti-gravitons can enter and anti-protons cannot". And then he is stumped by the last question, "How do you feel?".
Friday, September 25, 2009
37 Signals Satirizes Freeconomics
37 Signals founder Jason Fried's take on the current wave of venture capital interest in Internet-based companies that aren't making money, "PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT". Excerpts:
CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.
Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.
In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money.
[...]
A $100 billion value for 37signals is “not outlandish,” says Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, a finance professor and valuation guru at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business. Bhatnagar points to a leaked, confidential corporate strategy plan that projects 37signals will attract twelve billion users by the end of 2013.
How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion people alive today? “Why limit users to people?” said Bhatnagar.
In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (RSS subscribers + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)2 and then doubles if it they use Ruby on Rails[1] or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.
I wonder if Fred Wilson, venture capitalist investor in Twitter, among other Internet businesses, will respond to this on his blog. If so, it should lead to a spirited discussion in the comments.
[1]Ruby on Rails, the web framework my developers use, was created by one of the partners in 37 Signals. My web developers mentioned this to me when I asked them if they had read the book Getting Real by 37 Signals, which I had first heard about from this video blog post from Tim Ferriss's site.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Another Take on Social Media
Via the Un-Marketing Blog:
David Silver agrees with the point about product sales being driven by recommender communities versus advertising, but I imagine if he saw this video he'd reiterate that all the big numbers for the general-purpose social media sites haven't translated into profits.
David Silver agrees with the point about product sales being driven by recommender communities versus advertising, but I imagine if he saw this video he'd reiterate that all the big numbers for the general-purpose social media sites haven't translated into profits.
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