From the Eyes of an Entrepreneur

Social Business Evolution Starts with Good Social Service, Thank You @CathayPacific

2011-11-10T11:20:00.001-08:00

I had a recent experience with Cathay Pacific and want to share how Social Customer Service made a difference and some lessons for any business offering Social Service.

Cathay Pacific and me as a customer

First, I am fan of Cathay Pacific. I love flying on Cathay Pacific for my international travels. In the past, everytime I got to talk to a real customer service person on the phone or at the airport they were awesome. Service online is excellent.

However, web and phone which are traditional customer support channels fell short for Cathay Pacific support when I needed it this week.

1. Cathay's web site is functional but does not communicate well if something does not work because of a business rule. I ran into just that trap and began spinning my wheels early this week.

I changed my mother's Cathay Pacific ticket to a new date and could not get seat assignment done online. The online site told me I was eligible to get special seat assignment but gave no details.

2. Cathay Pacific has several local phone numbers for US and I recalled from my past interaction they have a separate number for eservice for tickets purchased online.

The eService number failed repeatedly saying the number does not work from the number I called (which was a local US phone I called from).

They have several local US numbers and the California number seems to work only from 9 am to 5pm California time. This number hung up on me saying there is large wait time everytime I called.

As a final resort I found Cathay Pacific has an international support number which is a Hong Kong number. I reluctantly called them as an international call staying up late at midnight my time. I had to choose several options which did not lead me anywhere.

Enter Social Media Customer Support

Frustrated and helpless, I did what I always do. I tweeted. I called out @cathaypacific and complained. My Twitter friends tweeted back empathizing saying it is bad if I had to do an international call for support.

@CathayPacific tweeted me and brought in @cathaypacificUS to the conversation.

Over the next 2 days I kept tweeting as I tried their various 800 numbers.

As I felt alone and helpless as the 800 numbers failed or hungup on me, I tweeted (see screenshot below). At it escalated I called out MarshaCollier who is the guru in Social Customer Service. So when my problem was solved Marha ReTweeted to her 42,000 followers.

@CathayPacificUS kept the engagement with me during this time. They sent me direct message on Twitter and found out that my ticket was of a particular class and hence I could get not get seat assignments. A twitter Direct Message in 140 characters could not solve my problem. I had more questions on why my ticket was of that class with the limitation.

But it served one purpose. It kept me engaged with CathayPacific. It did not make me lose faith in them as a brand. It did not encourage me to continue negative tweets.

They tweeted me saying a rep was going to call me and they did after a day. My ticket class type could get seat assignments only 48hrs before the flight time. This was never communicated to me on the web site or in my eticket. It was flaw in their online system, it was a flaw in their 800 numbers line management, it was a flaw in their communication to customers.

But this experience proved to me Cathay Pacific cared for me as a customer. They went out of their way to solve my problem. Thank You CathayPacific Twitter Support team.

Setting up Social Business Process for Social Customer Support

As I work in social media in a large company I wonder about these questions about Cathay Pacific:

1. How @CathayPacific and @CathayPacificUS are connected, what is their internal workflow to transfer a US customer complaint from their social listening platform?

2. Did they treat me differentlty in their Customer Service response because I had a large Twitter following? Or were they able to give such a response to all customers?

3. I wonder how they escalated across the Twitter Service and their regular phone reps to arrange for a rep to call me and I am thankful for that.

4. Calling a customer back is expensive, how would they measure the ROI of supporting me? I am happy and going to stay their continued customer and will likely tell a lot of others that Cathay Pacific is a good airline. Do they measure this differently or I was a spike in a call center cost because I was noisy on a social network?

5. Do they monitor their customer conversations and will my tweets add to the sentiments they track?

6. I have given valuable feedback on their online system that did not tell me my ticket class allowed me to get seat assignments only 48 hours earlier. I have given feedback on 800 numbers that do not work for US customers. Do they have a process in place to send my feedback to the correct departments? If so do they listen? Again, how do they measure the value of this customer feedback?

7. Now my perception of Cathay Pacific has changed from this cold website and 800 number to a personable brand with real people who care. Do they know and have a way to track the sentiment change of a customer served via

I am still pondering who are the kind souls behind the Twitter Support in Cathay Pacific, how many of them are there and did I make their job difficult and do they know how much value their support and that they have earned me back as more loyal customer back for their company and brand.

Top 10 Consideration to build out Google+ For Business

2011-08-13T00:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Google+ Business Page Team,

I have worked with Brand Managers and Marketing Execs on Facebook fan pages since its early days and have built brand pages for DEMO conference, AOL, PayPal, Intuit and several nonprofit brands. I want to share my experience here to help shape Google+ brand page experience to be better than that of Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn’s company pages today.

I have always loved Facebook fan pages but my heart goes out for its limitations. Facebook started with Groups then added fan pages, relaunched Pages and has adapted to growing demand from brands since then without (so it appears) a thorough customer study of enterprise brand processes and team roles.

So, Dear Google+ Team, I would like to offer these suggestions to help you create the best experience for brands. Please do not replicate the current Facebook Fan Page experience but build it based on a deeper understanding of customer use cases, roles and enterprise/team processes.

Top 10 consideration to building business brand pages:

10. Analytics is huge and Google+ team has made a great start in identifying analytics as one of the top two upcoming features. Please note that it is important to offer analytics from a brand’s perspective not replicate the Facebook insights offered in their pages today. Facebook added analytics after the fact and lot of Facebook insights are not actionable.

For example, Facebook analytics do not tie into a multi-channel campaign to compare how that channel is performing. So Google’s plans to connect your analytics to AdWords is a great start but please plan on a holistic approach to help us compare channels. Webtrends integrates Facebook Analytics by using Facebook API but it is not the same as offering an integrated analytics for multiple channels.

9. Facebook analytics for 'likes' when the fan page widget is embedded in a web page is awesome. This is a huge win for Facebook with their Open Graph Protocol. The metrics showing scale of growth of impressions is very important to get buy in for pilot projects before they scale social media ad budgets.

8. In Facebook for the longest time when a user creates a page, they became the admin and could not be removed (easily). Companies use agencies, students and consultants to create fan pages so the creator’s user profile has to be independent of the brand page once they are not associated with the brand or project. Facebook has since added this functionality and offers the page admin a choice to share feeds as two personas one as their consumer profile and one as the brand page. This gets confusing for people as they create and manage multiple brand pages and can be done with better usability.

7. Every brand has many pages for their main brand with several shared admin and several pages for brand extensions and different regions and languages owned by different groups inside the same company.

Please understand the roles of different players involved in the brand pages to set right access control. One admin adding many other admins in Facebook fan page as done today does not work for real enterprise social media teams. This will not come up easily in your market survey as this is a boundary condition and a pain of the social media guideline provider taking care of employees who transition out. Many social media pages have multiple employees as admins and not many brands worry about the liability of the ownership of the pages. They usually wake up to it one day. I have been part of the rush of many brands that go through a brand audit to check which of their pages are owned by someone inside their own company. Expect management time on your policy team’s part unless you build a self management module for a master admin for a large brand. LinkedIn company pages is a good example of adding company admins in one place.

6. Fan page today is not setup to run campaigns, this is a major design flaw in Facebook.
I have experience running a campaign connecting Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs on a Facebook fan page. It was difficult for users to engage on the page until they fan the page. Then based on the admin access of whether the fan can post pictures or videos etc users could engage with the page. This is reverse to how user engagement should be done by creating easy call for action, much like the web. So we cannot measure page views of users visiting a fan page untill they fan the page missing out on people who leave without becoming a fan.

At DEMO, we tracked fan count when VCs with large friend counts responded to an entrepreneur question on the Facebook fan page, which was DEMO’s real campaign goal. We had to track it manually and not in the Facebook fan page insight. So in summary, we need fan growth tracking on campaigns for a variety of campaign situations.

5. At AOL we had a scavenger hunt at events and got users to friend the fan page. At Intuit we had a different quiz game at conference booths to increase fans. These again were not trackable with direct metrics. So metrics should have several attributes - location, time, device and custom fields to be tracked by campaign manager. The campaign manager should be able to track the metrics based on the campaign goals of whether it is lead gen or engagement and define what that means for the particular brand.

Palm Norchoovech from SAP says “We have several fan pages for different regions and languages and spend lot of time to sort the fans into multiple lists. If Google+ page can follow back all fans and sort them into groups automatically based on the criteria in their profile info (locations, languages, etc) it will save business page admins valuable time. Then, we can use only one business page for one brand and not multiple pages based on languages. It will allow admins to send updates to the right target fans.”

4. Sun Microsystems used fan pages to communicate with their base like a newsletter. We used this at DEMO minimally, although this again is not easy in Facebook fan pages. Communication in a company is done by a marketing communication or marcom team that is different from the brand page admin. The comms team makes the creative of the newsletter in HTML. But Facebook messaging for fan pages is primitive and non-HTML making it extra work for the admin to make a text of the message to update fans via Facebook Fan Pages. This should be improved with Google+ business pages. Google+ could integrate standard email programs directly instead of offering basic messaging options from brands to fans.

3. Facebook struggled with differentiating between Groups and Fan pages in the beginning, so some business were stuck in Groups unable to transition to pages. So Google+ should look very closely at Facebook Groups and Pages to understand the various brand profiles and use cases.

2. Branding the brand page is a killer need. I remember endless conversations within companies explaining how a brand name cannot be translated to a vanity URL. Worse is to beg friends inside the company to fan a page to get 100 fans (now 25 fans) to claim the fan page.
This again is against standard enterprise behavior and worse is that leaves many employees as fans of the page influencing decisions of what consumers really want. You will need to ensure there are enough fans so there aren't empty brand pages. But why not get creative to allow brands to run campaigns to get fans as part of their fan page creation process?

1. I love how Google+ calls it Google+ pages for brands, bands and beyond.

Facebook allowed fan pages by real fans as an afterthought to allow for community of fans of a brand to maintain a fan page. This is good for me as a consumer and not an easy thing to accept as a brand. It offers a dichotomy of brand adoption and brand dilution in one.

So Dear Google+ team you cannot plan ahead for all kinds of pages types, so plan a flexible structure to adapt to change. Be prepared or Google’s loyalty will be torn between consumer groups and Google’s customers who will want to control the brands.

I hope Facebook Pages team reads this and brings innovation to Facebook Fan Pages too. I join the many brands and social media enthusiasts as we wait for innovation in brand pages to truly bring social media to connect us to our customers to let our customers lead us.

Readers: Share your thoughts on what else you would add. Comment here or Tweet me @sujamthe

My random lines of wisdom influenced by that of @BenParr

2011-06-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

Ben Parr blogged about his philosophy in life as "Random Lines of Wisdom". That has promoted me to write my own philosophy. Thanks Ben! People reading this: you should think about yours and share if you are comfortable.

1. Be yourself

This seems the easiest to say but hard for many to follow. I am most happy when I am true to myself. I get my full potential when I follow my heart. This philosophy has led me to constant introspection of who I am, stay humble, keep learning and be honest to myself.

It has helped me in time management as I look at what I am doing, is it true to myself or do I feel butterflies in my stomach when I get ready to do something. I go all out in full bloom when I am myself and stick to jobs that bring out my passion for them, for teams and environments that help me be myself. I challenge myself if is this me often and see if I can expand myself better as a more open person.

2. People matter the most in life

I am a big extrovert, so I love meeting new people and helping them is so fulfilling. I have built a habit of tweeting out names of authors as I read articles or books I like, meeting new people all around me - coffee lines, strangers, friends of friends. I love finding ways I can help people unconditionally. I refer people to jobs or help anyone looking for connection to anyone else. Once I reminded a guy who tweeted to remind him to take beer out of his fridge in 30 minutes; I checkin on twitter if someone sounds sad or complains about their lack of sleep.

I learn so much from the new people I meet. I am surrounded by such positive energy from the people I interact daily. I am humbled by many conversations online and offline.

For example I found our cook in the PayPal cafe has traveled and lived in 7 countries and has amazing passion for various spices he uses in his daily cooking. The starbucks server Anahi got her name from a movie character her mom loved making me wonder about mothers, movies and brand names (which brings me back to my job and social media).

One thing I try hard and need to get better at is at staying in touch with my friends. Of all the people I meet many stick, social networks makes it easy for me to engage and stay connected but I struggle with staying in touch with a large inner circle of friends.

My network seems to expand not because I add new people to it but because I help them by connecting them as a habit and they get bonded well or work together and recall me when they meet, strengthening my network with them even when I am not in touch with each of the two as much the two I connected.

The people who impact us make us who we are, and the people we impact shape our world so it is such a blessing to be able to help people and being able to help people.

3. Be Thankful

I have learned this recently. We all have so much to be thankful for. It gives us perspective to be respectful of people who helped, our jobs, our family, our mentors, our guides, our past colleagues, several people who set examples good and bad and guide us to be who we are.

I believe in paying forward and appreciate my early managers who have taught me the value of teamwork, several new friends who inspire me daily and help me stay on top of new technologies by their passion and innovation and for my family and friends who let me be myself.

Thanks to BenParr for getting me started to think about my philosophy.

Social listening for Product Managers from Silicon Valley PCamp

2011-04-02T16:24:00.001-07:00

I was happy to be immersed by smart product managers all day long with awesome sessions and learning.

My panel was called "Social Media Listening for Product Managers". I hosted this along with Stephanie Shum, Yahoo! Mail Product Manager and Van Riper of Google.

Below is the slide deck we shared.

Here is my learning from Pcamp and my session:

1. Yahoo uses http://suggestion.yahoo.com to gather feedback from existing customer base of 270Mil users with 5/7 PMs listening.
2. You listen and then decide how you prioritize the features.
3. Social Media listening tools are evolving, people are hungry for such tools so they can filter around specific products.
4. I met PMs from many companies and it is a real issue that the company has to be ready to be transparent from the highest level.
5. I am pleasantly surprised to hear about Tweetchats, how several people are hosting tweetchats and learn about tools for it.

Cindy Solomon hosts weekly Product Manager Talks weekly over Twitter at 4pm pst. Follow her at @prodmgmtalk She co-hosts this with her host from Australia and is developing the science behind Tweetchats for companies.
I also learned about Twitter chat

I was happy to be immersed by smart product managers all day long with awesome sessions and learning. My panel was called "Social Media Listening for Product Managers". I hosted this along with Stephanie Shum, Yahoo! Mail Product Manager and Van Riper of Google. Below is the slide deck we shared. Here is my learning from Pcamp and my session: 1. Yahoo uses http://suggestion.yahoo.com to gather feedback from existing customer base of 270Mil users with 5/7 PMs listening. 2. You listen and then decide how you prioritize the features. 3. Social Media listening tools are evolving, people are hungry for such tools so they can filter around specific products. 4. I met PMs from many companies and it is a real issue that the company has to be ready to be transparent from the highest level. 5. I am pleasantly surprised to hear about Tweetchats, how several people are hosting tweetchats and learn about tools for it. Cindy Solomon hosts weekly Product Manager Talks weekly over Twitter at 4pm pst. Follow her at @prodmgmtalk She co-hosts this with her host from Australia and is developing the science behind Tweetchats for companies. I also learned about @B2B_Chat for B2B top tweetchats (Also check #B2BChat) It was good to see all the local community and product management influencers. Thanks to the tweetwall by @socialping we could engage the larger community via Twitter.<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_7494760"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/sujamthe/social-listening-for-pms-for-pcamp" title="Social listening for pms for pcamp">Social listening for pms for pcamp</a><object id="__sse7494760" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=sociallisteningforpmsforpcamp-110402161703-phpapp02&stripped_title=social-listening-for-pms-for-pcamp&userName=sujamthe" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed name="__sse7494760" src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=sociallisteningforpmsforpcamp-110402161703-phpapp02&stripped_title=social-listening-for-pms-for-pcamp&userName=sujamthe" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div style="padding:5px 0 12px">View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/sujamthe">sujamthe</a>.</div>&lt

for B2B marketers Use hashtag #B2BChat @B2B_Chat . Check it out weeklty thursdays at 5pm pst.

It was good to see all the local community and product management influencers.

Thanks to the tweetwall by @socialping we could engage the larger community via Twitter.

Social listening for pms for pcamp

View more presentations from sujamthe.

Updated 3/12: Sudha's Guide to Geekdom at SXSW 2011

2011-03-10T23:13:00.000-08:00

I want to share my list of geekiest tech activities at SXSW as I am making sense of it all. So all your own suggestion in the comment if you think I am missing something cool!

My own panel is on Sat at 3.30pm at The Hyatt with the awesome Dave Peck (details below). Hope I'll see you there, else ping me on Twitter. I plan to be at Tweethouse friday evening and livestream interesting peeps at PayPalX #Livebytes channel, so let me know about interesting people to cover!!! Best way to reach me is Tweet me @sujamthe

Sudha's Recommended List of SXSW sessions and talks (not all parties covered)
=================================================================
Thurs 3/10

7pm: Girls in Hack e 6th St, Austin, TX

3/11 Friday:

2 to 5pm Tweet House Sponsored by Chevrolet from (several panels) then party at 5pm by Steve Broback at 501 Studios – 501 I-35, Austin, TX, 78702
9pm “American Express Presents the Tweet House After Dark” party will feature iPad D.J. Rana Sobhany (I've heard @rana at Iosdevcamp last summer she is awesome) (#chevytweethouse, #sxsw details: http://bit.ly/h6Vl2E)

3/12 Saturday:

9.30am: iPad Design Headaches (2 Tablets, Call in the morning) by Josh CLark, OReilly author at Salon J, Hilton
11am: Abeywickrema, Punsri at panel: The New Sharing Economy at Hilton (500 East 4th St) Salon K
11am: Banks: Innovate or Die by Bob Weinschenk of Smartpigs, Rob Garcia of LendingClub, Brett King Author Bank2.0 at Hilton,Salon F/G
11am: Startup America, Reducing Barriers by our USA CTO Aneesh Chopra at AT&T Conf Center Grand Ballroom, 1900 Univ Ave.
11am: The King of Lean Startup at AT&T Conf Center by McClure, Scoble, Stacy Higginbottom Room 2.04
12.30pm: The Lean Startup Pirate Metrics by Dave McClure AT&T Conf Center Room 2.04
12pm: Surviving Hockeystick Growth by Reddit founder Alex Ohanian at Hilton Salon AB
12.30pm: Why can't startups and brands play nice? by Charlie Taylor, GM Digital Marketing, Volkswagon Jay Adelson Hilton Salon C

3.30pm: Building Community Ass: Building Better Influence by Sudha Jamthe (me) and Dave Peck at Hyatt Hill Country CD, 208 Barton Spring Road

5pm: Lurkers, your most important community members at Hyatt, TX Ballroom1 208 Barton Springs Rd
5pm: Flipboard Fad or not by Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and Kara Swisher at Radisson, Town Lake BallRoom, 111 E. Cesar Chavez St
5pm: Welcome to the EGOSystem by Brian Solis at Austin Convention Center, Ballroom D
7pm to midnight - Diggnation Live at Stubb’s - 801 Red River, Austin, TX

Sun 3/13
10am to 4pm: Ebay SpeedHackat Lucent Alcatel Lounge, Room 406 4th floor Hilton
All Day: DogPatch labs Treehouse Pub 501 E.6th Street. Startups go an make a pitch there.
1pm to 6pm: Google Developer event (several sessions) (at Speakeasy 412 Congress Ave at w 5th · Austin, Texas

)

5pm: Boston in Austin Tweetup at Fado at 214 W 4th (updated new)
7pm to midnight: League of Extraordinary Hackers/SHDH@SXSW by Chris Messina & Boris Smus
10pm+: Red Laser Party with Chromeo

3/14 Mon thru Tues 3/15
From midnight Sunday to Monday Mashable House SXSWi 2001 (public free events ) at Buffalo Billiards, 201 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701

3/14 Monday

BizSpark Startup Accelerator Emceed by Tara Hunt, supported by Frank Gruber's TechCocktail delivering happiness teaming with Zappos Tony Sheih. Included PayPal developer Yapper as one of the finalist. Judges include many notables.

Tues 3/15
11am What’s In Your Virtual Wallet at Town Lake Ballroom, Radisson, Town Lake Ballroom by Richard Brewer Haye, Laura Chambers and Red Laser's Rob Veres

=========

Closing remarks: Let me know if I am missing any event thats a must-attend and I'll add it here.

Check RBH (@ebayinkblog) schedule of SXSW here

==
Updated:

Peeps I am adding new events as I hear from you here!

Developing a Social Media Plan

2011-03-03T15:12:00.001-08:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Developing a Social Media Plan

View more presentations from ifPeople.

The Birdie In the Mirror

2011-01-19T23:20:00.000-08:00

I saw a bird in my yard pecking at her own image in a mirror repeatedly this afternoon. At first, it was funny. She came and gave a look at the bird in the mirror, fluttered her wings to scare it, pecked at it from all heights. Then she left, sneaked back to check if her opponent was gone!

I have been working on a social media plan for work very obsessively focused getting input from many internal teams excited to "do social". So naturally I saw the parallel with companies doing social. Well, now you know what this post is about, read on if it interests you!!!

Watching the bird hit me - All Social Media campaigns which are not listening are all birds in the mirror.

Companies plan elaborate tweets to push their product information. They build plans and schedules and execute the campaigns with their small set of friendies and PR support. The get metrics, report internally but no new real customers and don't move the needle of their business.

They are like birds looking at themselves in the mirror! Whatever they do, they see an impact, they stare and the birdie stares back, they fly high and the birdie flies back.
They get RTs and reach numbers to quote but are looking at echos of their own push messages.

Real Social Media is about conversation!

Each of us has a personal communication style as unique as ourselves. Some are short, some curt, some prolonged, some courteous, they all count if you have a listener and you engage in a conversation.

Same is true for social media. Chat with your ecosystem, and if they care and listen and engage back, you are on a path to success.

So if you are like me planning your social media plan for a company, build listening campaigns if you need a campaign for focused tracking. Some initial ideas about listening campaigns are:

1. Set 30 min of your time to engage with your users and listen and help them where you can, share your excitement for their success. You will be surprised to make real friends of your customers who care and appreciate you, the real human representing your brand.

I remember my customers at Dash Navigation who appreciated the conversation and would go to great lengths to help be our advocates with media folks to do test runs in traffic with our product, a traffic telling GPS device.

2. Plan a fun campaign to engage your users on issues that they need help with. I am thinking of this as your FAQ on your web site but on steroids. Engage in a conversation to answer FAQ questions but with real user. The trick is to go on till you find the first real user who has a real question.

3. Start a Tweetchat. SAP called these online meetups. These are events with programming, speakers and schedules but on social media. There are several variations of them. Again keep them as a conversation not as a broadcast.

I hope this is the start of a fun conversation between you, me and likeminded folks who care about listening and customer engagement. Please share your suggestions/examples of listening campaigns. Post a comment below of tweet me @sujamthe.

I am looking forward to our conversation about social media conversations (Ah I like how that sounds)

What is a not a conversation is not social media

2010-11-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

I spoke to Ben Parr recently about B2B social media and it got me thinking!!! This morning I woke up to ChrisBrogan's blog about conversation and innovation (not to mention the twinkies picture I saw before breakfast). I am hungrily looking to find ways on how companies engage with their customers using social media. If you are one, please read on and do share your comments.

I have used social media in several different ways in the past 3 years.

Many are for marketing, from events and sharing new products and features. That is useful but not a conversation!

While at Intuit I've done alpha testing of messages using Twitter to test what message worked, at what hour to what segment of audience. Audience reacted and we learned. Not a conversation still!

While at DEMO we built community on Facebook with a campaign called "Entrepreneur asks, VCs answer". Users posted questions and VCs answered on the Fan Page. It built community and followers but not a continued conversation.

Two weeks back we completed PayPalX Innovate conf and are still wowed by the engagement from our users and the echo of the excitement from our echo system. I loved the conversations, the passion and the real time speed of the echo by our partners, global customers and friends.

We had a dedicated team that had the joy of monitoring tweets and responding to users, listening, monitoring beyond our social media presence to scout all conversations and become part of them! We had a separate team that captured the excitement of the 2000 audience and brought videos, live ustream, Tweets, facebook, photos, blogs and tweeted everything out to Millions out there!

Now as we take a step back after Innovate I am looking to find how we can continue the monitoring daily to build that listening and social media conversation into our DNAs?

How can we go past social media being a job to making it a way of life to have daily conversation with our customers? Can we create processes to listen and metrics to track to see what works to course correct?

I know several brands that monitor Twitter to provide customer support:
1. Bank of America is my favorite example as they always respond and excel in their service using Twitter to go out of their way when I am looking for their ATM or reporting bugs on their mobile app or asking for their service.
2. BestBuy is known for it monitors in their CMO office monitoring all tweets.
3. Kodak is my favorite as they have transformed their business by listening to tweets and letting us name their products, offer deals and for quick support.
4. Intuit has an army of Tweeters listening and providing support and product info on all products. My favorite is @alisonatintuit

Do you know of companies/brands beyond CS that uses social media? I am hungrily looking for models here. I'll update here or write another blog summarizing my finding.

Which Product Managers use Social Media to listen to customer feedback to build products?
Which companies use social media with their suppliers?
Who all connect with their partners to extend their relationship across connected communities?

Let me know!!!

PayPalx Innovate - Its all about the Developers and theres THE BenParr and MarshaCollier

2010-10-28T10:40:00.001-07:00

Innovate 2010 rocked thanks to all of you who helped make it happen, showed up and immersed us in Innovation. What an awesome two days! Can't believe its over!!!

Here is a tweet size summary of both days:

Day1 - Oct 26 - 2000 developers came, wowed to hear about Mobile Express Checkout and PayPal's Digital Goods beta with all demos with developers Payvment, Ooyala on stage

You have to Watch the Day1 Montage to see the energy and passion - here

Day2 -Oct 27 - Developers hacked and launched 15 apps overnights, 22 DevChallenge Global Winners showed cool innovations, the winner walked away with a cooler mobile (yeah its real) and the winner was IConcessionstand who won $100K.

I don't remember any other conference that had so much developers on stage and part of the show all day long. Watch the Montage of Day2 and decide for yourself.

I am humbled by all the teamwork I experienced behind the scenes with fellow PayPalians and the innovation and ideas that sparkled the air all two days.

We had fun too, with our parties (too many) . Catch a glimpse of it with the "Live from Innovate" we ustreamed on Day1 with Edwin Aoki, Marsha Collier and THE BenParr with many surprise guests.

Live from Innovate - Part 1

Live from Innovate - Part 2

Live from Innovate - Part 3

Enjoy!

Social Media for Business by Michael Brito @britopian at Ebay Social Media Council

2010-09-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

Michael Brito is here as our guest speaker at Ebay Social Media Council. Here is my summary of interesting learning from the talk about "Social media for business".

How do you make your customer that you listen to them?

Be Authentic - we are authentic with our families, with our kids teachers, with neigbors. We need to bring that authenticity to the online world.

How to make a brand believable?

Stay engaged with your customer, that is key to make your brand believable. Ebay is No.3 in Altimeter's Top 10 brands measuring breadth and depth within the social web.

Purchase Funnel is changing with Social Media

The traditional purchase funnel is linear - awareness

If you love your customers, they will love you and tell others. Focus on your advocates more than influencers, they love your brand and tell others.

Crowdsource and listen to customer to build product/brand

Starbucks splashstick was a crowdsourced customer developers product. GM canceled a car they were designing based on user's feedback.

Intel did Ajay Bhatt (founder of USB), was surprised to see users wanted a tshirt seen in the background, moved fast ran a global contest and gave away those tshirts and built Intel Advocates. Smart! Nice success story of how they built brand advocacy by listening to users.

Advice I got and loved from this talk:

Build a Social media council with cross functional teams across marketing, pr, community, legal to build process, infrastructure and governance to scale social media inside the company. It requires a lot of conversation and collaboration across groups inside the company. It helps when top management gets it and makes social a top mandate in the company

Trends in social commerce

2010-08-22T22:19:00.001-07:00

I enjoyed presenting Social Commerce Trends to Social DevCamp Chicago last week to an awesome roomful of audience.

here is the presentation as I promised to share! Let me know any other trends, companies shaping social commerce.

Trends in social commerce

View more presentations from PayPalX Developer Network.

First 25 hour summary of IOSDevCamp - awesome community innovation!!!

2010-08-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

I am very thrilled to bring a quick summary of the awesome energy and excitement of Iphone and Ipad developers from IOSDevCamp, a project my team has been involved to foster community driven innovation.

Iosdevcamp is the 5th in a row of IphoneDevcamps organized by a non-profit group of four community leaders - Raven Zachery, Dom Sagella, Christopher and Whurley. It is hosted at PayPal campus (where I proudly work) this weekend Aug 20-22.

300 developers are charged with amazing ideas, forming teams and working hard to build 40+ awesome applications with 55 hours to launch tomorrow night.

Here is a montage of the kickoff from friday night kickoff!

Today I hosted a BlogTalkRadio show with Raven Zachery of IOSDevCamp, Naveed Anwar and Edwin Aoki of PayPal and met a flow of developers who stopped by and shared awesome ideas they were working on! Daniel Bru who is the most inspiring teenager I've met ustreamed the show live too!

Come join us tomorrow (Sunday Aug 22nd) 2 to 4pm as the IOSDevCamp opens the door for friends and family to join us for free to watch and support the launch of the awesome applications to show a sneak peak into awesome future apps and startups in the mobile world!!!

If you are far away, you can watch the live stream on the iosdevcamp.org site or watch the twitter stream here.

Team Power and F8 Virality at Facebook Meetup June2010

2010-06-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

Last night was my 33rd Bay Area Facebook meetup event since July 2007 and I am amazed at the transition of F8 platform and was thinking about the facebook team people who have shaped it and changed it and my amazing volunteer team who run this group for the last 3 yrs.

Hiten Shah of Buzz metrics talked about metrics and people came from everywhere to hear him and plan how to measure and tweak their apps for growth. Steve Meretzky and Matthew Davie of Playdom shared their experience on creating viral play and monetization for games.

See John Lin's ustream of the evening:

As I sat and watched this intense group of 120 geeks, I realized how Facebook has come from starting with unlimited notifications, to restricting notifications (quoting Zombies app) to recently dropping notifications. FBML to FQL to Facebook Connect to now HTML for fb apps.
Ben Ling lead the platform to scale it first, then Dave Morin scaled Facebook Connect and Josh Elman went on connect it to every ecosystem - IBM, Adobe and everywhere on the Web.

At the facebook meetup, we started with Lawrence Sinclair, and then came Shuchi Rana, and Abbas Zaidi. Then Perrine Crampton brought her personality to the group and made sure we organized the meetup with google docs and John Lin became the silent force to ustream regularly every month. Now we have Robert Schwentker who brought his unique touch with indepth content and has made last night a huge success.

I am thankful for my team, their dedication, creativity and love of geek developer energy which bonds us all. Thanks for all your hard work!

Social Media Strategies Conference Day 1 summary (includes my social commerce panel video)

2010-05-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

I attended Social Media Strategies conference in Santa Clara and started blogging live select sessions I get to attend and the nuggets of wisdom I find worth sharing!

11am Keynote: The True Drivers of a Successful Social Media Strategy by Francois Gossieaux @fgossieaux

1. Be real people, passionate with reciprocity helps companies on socialmedia.

50% of community members are active lurkers. Companies treat their facebook fan page as coupon centers. Success comes when the people engaging on social media are human. Someone in audience put it well "It is the difference between being and doing". So the lesson is to be real and engage with your customers.

2. Turning Business Process to Social Process

Social Media can get your employees to help in areas that was not in their original job responsibility, this is when your have a business process becoming a social process.

I can relate to this as I focus on events and social media for PayPal from their Developer Network whose charter is to foster community driven innovation. I get help from multiple teams inside PayPal who are excited to participate in events to meet developers wherever they are and get feedback and help them disrupt payments industry with their innovation. I see a fundamental shift in our internal process as I hear from across our global offices to engage with us with local events and for social media outreach.

3. Department that are easy to become social enabled

Many departments are adopting social media:

Customer Support
Employee Communication
Lead Gen
Market Research
Marketing Campaigns
Product development

This is because they engage with customers in some form and are ready to speed that engagement via social media.

Two departments that the speaker hasn't seen adopt social are financial dept to social because they are focused on corporate entity, not customers directly.

1pm: New Paradigm in Social Commerce (my panel)

I moderated this panel and the panelists were:

Laura Peile,head of mobile, PayPal
Katie McMahon , SoundLoud
James Dellisanti CEO of ilikelist
Gordon Liametz ,CEO, Revenue Performance
(Thanks to Mary Vincent for the entire panel video)

The panelists started out by describing social commerce as -

shopping with friends,
customer reviews from trusted social graph that influences purchase,
bringing customers from top of the sales funnel where they go look for comparison shopping to a friend referring a product to buy online similar to an offline social setting and
focusing on reviews and community to influence positive referral of your product.

Nuggets I got from this panel from panelists and audience questions:

Audience were hungry to learn about real experience in making social commerce work for them as entreprenuers, startups and businesses.
Mobile Commerce is overlapping with social commerce and there is so much room for innovation.
Social media feeds are about people wanting to create an inclusion experience for their friends who are not with them at a game or a store , and is the core of social commerce recommendation
Privacy is important, people will want to each share certain type of information.
Identity of who is making the word of mouth referral is key to its value to a friend, so facebook with its social graph makes it very powerful for social commerce
Interesting possibilities of social commerce was brought out, one was for a lady to share a picture of her dress from a store to get friend's recommendation as she tries out new clothes from Macys (I'd like this one)
Lot of discussion about negative feedback in a community setting and how to differentiate the intention of the user, how to distill the feedback into your product, how to respond to negative comments, how to manage the balance to negative comments

Other Observations from the conference:

I met a variety of interesting people and some products.

1. Position2 is a new Brand monitoring tool, looks new fresh UI. I hope to check it out and write further.

2. Met many of the local valley influencers - Shirley Lin from APWT Women in tech group, Mary Vincent of Green Strategy/Greenappstore, several followups from Santa Clara Alum social media panel at PayPal, several cool social media strategy types each with different flavor of experience and expertise.

3. Ed Terpening of WellsFargo,

4. Richard Brewer Hayes of Ebay, awesome speaker and blogger.

5. Ofcourse I met couple interesting people who wanted to switch to PayPal, gave feedback about PayPal APIs and some who had attended Innovate09.

Awesome work by Daya and Rashmi of WebGuild with another successful show. Nice detail on a sit down lunch, excellent speaker, good workshops, crowd, mixer and care for detail on content.

I look forward to Day2. I am participating in a social media metrics panel at 2pm. Hope to see you there!

Tweet away, the conf hashtag is #smconference or some are using #sms

A Cone of Ice Cream leads to Community Innovation, How Sweet!

2010-05-02T20:31:00.001-07:00

Friday night I joined StartupWeekend mixer at PayPal to pickup a cone of icecream from @treatbot (yes a tweeting ice cream truck).

I had been privileged to work with the StartupWeekend team to host them at PayPal campus and was ready for icecream, and ready for 150 geeks to come together brainstorm ideas, form teams and build and launch cool apps within the weekend.

Naturally, I asked Ryan who was at the icecream truck why he was asking for cash and not taking PayPal. He said he was waiting for the Ipad with 3G and wanted a point of sale app to accept Payment and would love it to be PayPal. What I did next led to a cascade of activities and here I am!

What did I do, I did what comes to me naturally!

I tweeted!

PayPal has a team of people who had volunteered to support the event on campus and got excited by the energy and decided to build their own app and were brainstorming ideas.

They saw the tweet and decided to build it. If a customer wanted it that is what they would build!

Here I am sitting at the final day demos. The PayPad was born here and here's the demo.

The team came together, learned Ipad programming, and built and thought through how to get a storefront for a customer on the Ipad.

Here's to you @treatbot!!! Are you ready to beta this?

IpadDevCamp takes over my world

2010-04-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

I have been lucky to be working with the organizers of the IPadDevCamp as they planned to bring 400 awesome developers to PayPal campus for a community driven innovation this weekend.

We got started 6 weeks back and I spent time building out the PayPal team supporting this event optimized to get our campus to support 1000 concurrent wifi connections, to make 400 geeks feel comfortable for hacking and our Mobile team and evangelists plan a session about PayPal Mobile embedded Payments.

On friday Apr 16th, 400 developers arrived, brainstormed ideas, formed teams and began developing apps.

All Saturday they coded and built app. The team energy and raw brainpower was amazing. We could see the hope of new ideas forming.

Its been fun, *lot* of hard work, very humbling to learn and to be surrounded by such smart minds and inspiring to see such amazing creativity all around me.

We had good keynotes. Among the logistics running around, I got to hear only Larry Tesler. He said something that seems to resonate well as I see the demos live now.

The Ipad is not a big Iphone and the developer aware of the difference can build different applications for each and become a winner of this space.

I am sitting now watching the demos live. They have been 54 new apps that are launching now.

Awesome apps ranging from social games with multiple users using 3-4 Ipads simultaneously, eg. Ipad Slot Machine, Whack a mouse, unique use of Ipad for variety of disabilities, and lots of opensource code on github.

So much legacy as people built upon their work from past IphoneDevCamps. Nice!

List of apps that launched this weekend:
Photo Buffet HD
Kidney eGFR Estimator
P.A.D. = Personal Armour and Defense
FACEAGE
Relay
LoopTek Morning NewsPaper
ChessFlock
Netflix Actors
Calculator Paddy
b3wm
iPad Slot Machine
Safewaters
Magic Window
DesignScene
Tank or Die
iConcessionStand
Autumn Gem
Timelines
Robin
Whorl'd Champions
SpOT - Specialized Optical Tool
AQGridView
Executor
Tick Tock Push
Shopkeep
TinyRacer
iUiPad
FanConnect
Popic: Web Images in Spotlight
West Seattle Herald
iApples
DicePad
DevScope
Seller Dashboard
Drift
Un-Bored Game
Whack A Mouse
Muse messager
Blackboard
AppInvaders
Pondlet
DyslexicMath
Malen21
British Accent Training
AirHawk
City Church
ClipDocs
CoffeeTable
MediaShower
muse ontology tr3
Readability Browser
CodeBlade
Whack A Mouse

Congratulation everyone! I work for this feeling of hope with community driving innovation, bonding and building out a full conference and solve real problems and sharing to create giant shoulders for others to build more solutions!

Thanks to Dom, Colin, Christopher, Colin, and their volunteers for the long hours, planning, mentoring and passion for the I

Chirp Twitter Conf Roundup - Day2

2010-04-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

I am here Day2 of Chirp, Twitter Conference, hackday.

Ambience - Open letting developers rule
Chirp is organized by Carsonified who organizes FOWA and is the king of the event experience - All geek, open, free setup to hack and network!

Cool Developers from All Around the World

Twitter celebrities Parr, Scoble, Jodi Dell, Laura Pistachio of @oneforty ...

Event @jot of Devnet Uk, @vanriper of SVJUG, Steve Broback @broback ....

Top developers Twittelator Andrew Stone, Twitpic Noaheverett, @twitsnaps, @Rodney Rumford of Tweetphotos, Adarsh Pallian of NY, from Philly, Fb developers with cool apps all hacking on twitter apis, Jodi of Peoplebrowser, cotweet @kyle ....

Evangelists from PayPal, Linkedin, British Telecom Kevinmarks are all hobnobbing here.

There are about 500 geeks here, about 250 have been hacking head down.

Creative release:

One guy decided to gather together to draw something for creative release. Wait till you see the picture of video (will update once its uploaded)

Finale Demos:

117 demos were launched within this hackday, 7 are demoing on stage to Merissa Mayer, @blippy @pg Paul Graham critiquing them.

1. @mhp on stage demoing Tweet AGORA Iphone app, all abt filters mute hashtags

2. @Twitterlator shows top Ipad App demo, here from Alberque, NM

3. Twitpic Noaheverett, @twitsnaps, @Rodney Rumford of Tweetphotos are all here from twitter photo companies and here launched crowdreel a new app hacked and has 19Mil photos within 2 weeks.

4. Tap11 - Google Analytics for Realtime web.

5. Sonicliving - started all at 2am last night and build app integrating music from everywhere shared by your social graph.

ps: I have videos and pictures which I'll upload and update here later , folks.

Enjoy!

Twitter team everywhere and accessible

They did sessions on OAuth, @Anywhere, Scala, Streaming API, but most important is they listened chatted and engaged with developers all day long. That just summarizes it.

Does your social media strategy suffer from Slide 29?

2010-03-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

BL Ochman's blog post resonates well with me so I want to share my 2 cents about the role of social media in a company.

Ochman's point is that some agencies add social media as an afterthought and do not understand that it is not about Twitter and Facebook buzz but a state of mind to be transparent and listen to customers.

I woke up today thinking about this same topic in a different angle. (ya, think about getting from bed thinking about it :))

I work on social media for PayPalX Platform, building out community innovation by using social media. My team offers social campaigns for launches, social media at events as a way to engage and listen to developer ecosystem and offers support via Twitter. My main job is bringing about the innovation with transparency but it is not surprising to hear needs for tactical event templates for social media.

Recently I have been looking into what is the best way for us to provide localization of social media for the same brand for global geos. We have our common brand 'paypalx' we have several geos who are social savvy with people who have created their own handles. Now we need to arrive at optimal guidelines for rest of the regions.

I have created training plans to educate people who are experts in our product and real customer advocates to become social media savvy. We have a bunch of agencies local to each geo offering to do social media for local events. We experimented with one in Singapore recently.

As we scale this globally across 190 countries, the challenge is not creating another slide or template and finding the right time zone for training timings or visits, but education on the role of social media in enhancing our goals by being transparent, embracing customer feedback and building solid process and programs to build on the strength of real passionate people in the company.

Are you facing similar situation in educating your company about the real power of social media, are you making decisions about localization of social media for global markets, do you have a story on what worked or did not work? I'd love to hear from you.

You can add comments or trackbacks or ping me on Twitter @sujamthe.

If I get enough nuggets of wisdom, I'll do a followup post. Stay Tuned!

A very unique version of Mint story from FOWA Miami

2010-02-23T08:39:00.000-08:00

Listening to Aaron Patzer, CEO of MINT shares his lessons of growing Mint from idea to $170M acquisition.

I had a different view of Mint as a company which was getting lot of press and growth but didn't know to hire really passionate early employees dying to be part of Mint.
I knew of a friend who was super passionate about personal finance and was referred by a Mint angel investor and did not make it through to even get an interview call giving a sneak peek into some some growth pains as they scaled.

I am sitting at FOWA Miami and listening to Aaron Patzer, I hear a very different he shares the real story of his experience.

I am blogging live, here are my notes, its valuable lessons for any startup entrepreneur:

Aaron is so real, talks about his experience in taking his idea to exit in 3 stages

1. Garage (idea) 2 <$1M 3 >$1M revenues

Details now:

Stage 1: Garage --> Seed: Raising Funds

Solve a real problem
In a large market
Real rev potential
Sustainable advantage (best tech guy, patents filed, good UI)

Key learning here is - Find What is your per user or per transaction revenue is important not the hockey stick of growth

Facebook makes $2/user Google makes $6/user

Mint developed estimates for lead-Gen for categories Credit Score, Credit cards, IRS, CDS, Mortgage redifinancing. Aaron built a justification of each of these as estimates to CPA of $30/user. So the built a B Model on lead gen and estimated user base x rev.user/yr = Mint opportunity at $1Bil.

Seed stage got funded by Josk Kopleman because Aaron had a working prototype and showed it to Josh passionately. Raised $750K in April 07

Stage2: Funded: Scaling People

'Why" is more important than "what" in hiring interview. He shared his interview style.
Aaron shared his experience of buying mint.com by giving the owner of that domain name stocks in mint.com (smart!)

My notes: I wish we had heard more from Aaron's practical experience of scaling team from Engg to business folks, as this is where they seemed to have hired initial set of people based on where they came from and not so much on their real passion for Mint.
Is there any lesson on hiring, team building as you scale and lessons in building a real management team as Mint seemed to have done it successfully to exit. This is typically a leap for an engg founder to comprehend what it takes to be successful here.

Aaron gave a Book Referral : Top Grading by Bradford D.Smart.
I want to check it out for some learning!

Stage 3: Funded: Beta to Big Launch

Venue Techcrunch40
Hired an aggressive PR agency
Offered free alcohol and won people's choice award and leveraged it to next level of PR.

Q: How do you validate your idea
Talk to as many people as possible, don't be secretive, let them poke holes.
Did concepts chart of value and tested with normal people at train stations.

Q: Missed the user question, but Aaron's answer had a nugget of wisdom here.
Mint hired someone who did UI wireframe to Product dev instead of a silod resource so it helped in smart execution of Mint UI.

Summary: One of the most honest and valuable startup entrepreneur lessons I've heard it a while.

Facebook and PayPal - Today is an exciting day as my two worlds merge

2010-02-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

Many of you know me as the Facebook enthusiast running the Bay Area Facebook Meetup and volunteering at grassroots Hackathons and Community Leadership Summit. Then there is my real job, as Social Media Strategist at PayPal, where I am part of the PayPal Developer Network.

Some of you know of my pet project "socialmints" where I was part of a visionary team who built the first micropayments app for Facebook in early 2008, allowing PayPal integration to developers like Blake Commagere, Puzzlebee, Zoo and many Game Apps to offer virtual currency to play with virtual goods.

Today my two worlds are merging into each other as Facebook has teamed up with PayPal to offer PayPal as an option to buy Facebook Credits and Facebook Ads.

It has sparked a lot of excitement from lot of media, inc my favorite Allfacebook.com who was the first to write about Facebook and Payments since GSP08, GigaOM, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, CNET, WSJ, Associated Press, Business Insider, Reuters, Mashable, AllThingsD, ReadWriteWeb, FinancialTimes, RegisterUK.

It is an exciting new era for developers who are waiting! It opens two worlds - the largest social network where we hang around with our friends, send free gifts and valentines and a secure Payment platform that is compliant with global laws and takes care of risk models to avoid, so we can build apps and focus on truly monetizing them.

As users, we can just continue sending sheep to our friends and BuddyPoke hugs with total peace of mind knowing that PayPal is taking care of the risk and compliance and security in the background.

ps: Thanks to Tsukuyomi-No-Mikoto on Flickr for the BuddyPoke picture.

Corporate Twitter Toolbox - My Blog Post on Mashable

2009-08-17T20:44:00.000-07:00

I am very thrilled today as my blog post about Twitter Tools for the Enterprise aired @Mashable.

I have been blogging since May 2005, I have team blogged and guest blogged before, so I thought I'll respond to comments on my post couple times through the day as Mashable has 1 billion pageviews. I am wowed by my experience today as my post got tweeted times so far and so many people did RT (Repeat Tweets), friends liked and added comments on the article at Facebook.

Thanks Everyone and Mashable, you've made my day!!!

Mashable has done an amazing job with their site to make it easy to tweet and show social conversations separately. They tweeted the post, shared links on their facebook fan page and made it so easy for their readers to extend the conversation into their ecosystem. I want to explore this further as its set the golden standard for extending your site into an ecosystem.

Here's the blog post I am referring to below:

Twitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers; and there are a variety of tools available to help groups and corporations tweet, collaborate, and generally manage their (Twitter) workflows. From tweeting and responding to customers to tracking the conversation and measuring the effectiveness of Twitter campaigns, there is a bevy of great tools out there for corporate tweeters. Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets.

This is a list of the top Twitter tools to manage your social media engagement with your customers. Read More

update: Thanks for the twitter RTs to @jasonwiener @Mindfieldusa @thinkmaya @pcrampton @prisch @cdiamand @mjcarter @sumaya @LadyLeet @tifroz @ak2consulting @betsybrottlund @alexanderking @maryamwebster @carolynmellor @lars_kamp @mogotix @GhadaLancer

Twitter and Extending Community to Social Ecosystem

2009-07-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

Twitter developer Jesse Stay blogged about how Twitter changed their api and once again did not proactively tell developers. It is brewing a discussion from developers trying to communicate their frustration to Twitter with 84 comments last I checked and got him onto the techmeme leaderboard.

Extending Community to Social Ecosystem

Yday, I led a discussion at the Community Leadership Summit (#CLS) in San Jose about how communities are being extended to social ecosystem and twitter is facing just that today!!!

First I define "A Ecosystem is all online touchpoints where your customers congregate".

Earlier, customers were contained on your web site with forums and mailing lists. Then came social media where you added blogs, wikis and embedded pictures and videos from flickr and youtube into your web property.

Now it is impossible to contain your customers on your site. They are on all social mediums.

So a community manager has to go where customers are and engage in conversations there!

My savvy audience at the Community Leadership Summit discussed the complexity of tools to do this, the time and resource limitations to monitor all blogs and social sites and the fragmentation these conversations caused when they were trying to build one cohesive community.

Twitter Developer Community and Social Media

Twitter API team has many social media footprints to engage with developers!

1. An active developer forum with 4600 members where this is not brewing as the hottest topic.

2. A customer support twitter handle @twitterapi, which they do a pretty good job of monitoring and responding to users.

3. A wiki since Nov08 which the api team update often from their conversations on the forum or twitterapi.

4. They have a new api blog since mid June09 which is announcements from the api team.

5. I found Twitter API team has an announcement group on Google for Api releated notices.

6. Increasingly, the twitter api team is making time to visit with developers face to face.

Yet, developers are screaming and discussing their new api change on Jesse's blog today! Twitter api team hasn't arrived on the scene (atleast responded to it there yet).

So when your customers talk among themselves elsewhere, its your ecosystem, whether you like it or not!

The good news is that as long as your community is talking they still care about you and are ready to engage and help make the community better.

Twitter API team has not been afraid to admit to things that were their fault to help developers before. See tweet below:

My suggestions to extend your ecosystem are:

1. Engage your evangelists. Jesse has been a vocal voice of reason for the developer community and this is not the first time. Top developers are posting comments not only because the issue resonates with them, but because they respect Jesse.

2. Setup a listening post to find where there is chatter about your topic and watch where your customers actively engage in conversations. This can be done by a social media metrics tool like SM2.

3. Educate your community to come and talk to you where you are most comfortable to answer their questions. Go where they are and bring them to your forum or blogs by acknowledging their concerns and directing them with a a link to a tweet or blog post or brand page.

How can twitter handle this conversation everywhere? Are you a community manager, how do you handle your customer conversations across ecosystems?

Tweet me @sujamthe or post a comment!!!

Starting Twitter Meetup in the valley and seeding them worldwide

2009-06-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

I have always been fascinated by the bottom up innovation from barcamps and meetups.

I enjoy the facebook ecosystem thanks to The Bay Area Facebook Meetup . Our mailing list guides me on what is hot in facebook and extension into the world of iphone apps, opensocial and now twitter apps. Fellow facebook garage organizers worldwide connect with me and I invite them on local visits or share live event videos.

I want your advice, suggestions on what will work best to create twitter meetups worldwide and facilitate interaction amongst twitter developers across them.

First I am starting a twitter meetup in the valley

I have started a new twitter meetup in the valley here. Its a place for developers to demo their cool twitter apps and come together to hear from the experts on what makes a success twitter app and keep up with the changes in the twitter app world.

I want to seed Twitter Meetups Across the world

Twitter apps do not reside on twitter, and as twitter Api lead Alex Payne put it "twitter operates on the edge of other networks". So its all the more reason for us to get together and learn how to build twitter apps that integrate into all other app ecosystems.

I am humbled by the fact that innovation happens one mind at a time all around the world. So I want to tap into the learning of twitter app developers in various pockets of creativity worldwide across the US, across the world in different time zones.

The marketer in me warns me that I have to understand twitter app developers and twitter app organizers as they evolve, but here are worldwide developer meetups/camps by different friends of mine that I hope to learn, emulate and draw inspiration from!

IphoneDevCamp started in the BarCamp model by Dom Sagella (@dom) and @RavenMe. They host annual iphone developers camp in the valley and have inspired 20+ satellite camps nationally and internationally with their own original events happening at the same time worldwide.

PreDevCamp is the newest in the world of Dev Camps, started by Dan Rumney, Greg Stevenson and Lisa Brewster (@whurley @giovanni and @dancrumb ) following on the IphoneDevCamp model to create many local developer camp events.

Drupal Meetup Worldwide organized by Robert Douglass is on meetup organized by a central group with organizers all around the country.

Social Media Club was started by @ChrisHeuer and @Kristie's Wells with a membership driven model with chapters worldwide. I worked with Chris on the barcamp event of Dave McClure's Graphic Social Pattern (GSP) conference in 07. I am not planning for a centralized or membership dues driven group. But lots to learn here on the motivation, inspiration and hardwork from Chris and Kristie.

DevNest (UK) by Jon Markell has twitter developer events in UK and has been an inspiration to me.

There are several CodeCamps, BarCamps, Cocoa Camps worldwide, they are annual events and not ongoing monthly meetups I aspire for!

I want to hear from you if you want to start a local twitter meetup, do you want to volunteer in this endeavor with me? Ping me @sujamthe on twitter.

Share a tweet with @sujamthe on what makes a good app #140tc

2009-05-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

That was the call by Tweetie developer Loren Brichter that got twitterville to speak up to make Apple approve tweetie's new version. Loren is joining Dom Sagolla, who helped build twitter and makes awesome iphone apps and Britt Selvitelle of Twitter for a panel on "What makes a good app" tomorrow May 26th at 11.30am at the Twitter Conference 140tc in the Computer History Museum.

Need I say I am super excited to moderate this panel!!!

Do you have questions for this panel? What do you think works , what doesn't?

Here's my thoughts on this topic, read on and go ahead and send me a tweet, hashtag it with #140tc and #Twitapps or call me out @sujamthe !!!

I have seen the Facebook developer developer ecosystem build up since F8 Platform launch in July 07. After several meetups, hackathons and several repeat attempt by developers the secret is out. A good Facebook app is about fun apps that tap into 15 viral channels inside Facebook and build good metrics to track what works and adapt quickly to the users.

Twitter Apps are Unique so what makes a good twitter app is Unique:

Twitterville has a unique community engagement model which helps the viral adoption of twitter applications.

Twitter Apps do not reside on twitter. They connect to twitter using twitter API or twitter search API and reside on different web domains, mobile devices and sometimes float virtually connected by the viral feed on twitter aka a tweet.

Twitter API Platform is bubbling with energy. I see 50 new threads of developer discussions daily in the twitter forums. I see 10 new apps going live daily (there must be many more).

There are apps will millions of users - twitpic gets million users, twitstock raised $800K funding,

What makes an app good?

I would define it as initial adoption and engaging users to scale successfully.
Do you have any other definitions for a good app?

These different types of twitter apps sure gets our initial attention:
1. Twitterville never tires of new twitter clients:
We see twitter clients for diifferent mediums with competing functionality to support enterprise (multi user profiles), stats, access from multiple devices e.g. tweetdeck, tweetie, twirl, twitroid, twitterberry, hootsuite, cotweets
2. Apps adding functionality to keep twitter simple
Photo on twitter - twitpic, tweetphoto for photo sharing, bubbletweets with videos on twitter,
3. Innovative and simple to use goes with basic twitter
twitpay, tipjoy, stockpic, twitcal
4. Churning twitter data
twitgrid, twitfall, twitanalyzer

How do you scale the apps? On Twitter? Mobile Apps? Twitter Apps on Different Platforms?

1. What are viral hooks you can build into your app from the twitter api?
Via appname is one, what else is there?
2. Engaging community of users to drive your future functionality, how has it helped you?
Tweetie is a classic example of this. "user-driven evolution is mandatory for any product that works ontop of Twitter, much like Twitter itself says Loren Brichter of Tweetie. Tweetphoto got 5000 new users on Day1 with some creative launch strategy.
4. How much metrics and tracking do you have built in to see what functionality works for your users?
5. How is it different to build a good app on iphone vs twitter?
6. What is unique when you connect two platforms? e.g my app tmeet on iphone, or tweetpo.st app on facebook

Look forward to the conversation on Twitter and to taking it to the 140tc conference.

TechPolicy Summit brought geeks and policy gurus for amazing discussions in silicon valley

2009-05-17T19:47:00.000-07:00

TechPolicy Summit started with TheFreeSummit on Monday May 11th followed by two days of in depth discussions at The TechPolicy Summit.

I was lucky to attend couple sessions. I went in ignorant about the need for geek entrepreneur's participation in tech policy and walked out with lots to ponder about.

Day 1: FreeSummit 6.45pm: @KaraSwisher Interview of Chris Kelly (@ck4ag), Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook and CA Attorney General Candidate.

Summary:

Chris Kelly brings his experience from addressing privacy concerns for 200Mil users to become the potential attorney general of California.
Karawisher, the master moderator navigated questions to bring out a very interesting discussion. Panel video part 1 , Panel video part 2 Panel video part 3

Audience were amazingly well prepared for Q&A and added to the discussion well.

Day 3: Govt Transparency Panel with @TimOReilly, @Craignewmark, @Carlmalamud of Public.Resourc.org, Ellen Miller, Bill Schrier moderated by Andrew Rasiej, Co-founder, Personal Democracy Forum

I loved this panel!!! Now I understand that the place of @TechPolicy Summit in the valley is to wake up tech entrepreneurs to the opportunities waiting for them with Gov data. The organizers had the right mix of experts and the panelists discussed openly to build upon each others point to bring out nuggets of wisdom.

Tim O'Reilly talks about his vision for identities and tech policy.

There was lot of discussion about opening up Govt data and what are the hurdles today in creating that transparency.

Carl's 8 Principles for how govt data should be made available.

1. Data has to be complete
2. Primary data should be available.
3. Should be timely
4. Should be Accessible
5. Should be Machine Processable e.g. check Recovery.gov
6. Should be non-discriminatory
7. Should be non-proprietary
8. Should be license free

How do we get tech entrepreneurs to get involved in working with Govt:
Tim O'Reilly said there is more data collected by govt than exploited. We don't have to persuade the private sector. We just have to figure out what govt can do to enable private sector. e.g. we get financial data, weather data. Amazing entrepreneurial opportunity here to build businesses if more data is opened up.

CraigNewmark said it benefits us all if we have a govt that works. He gave an example of his vision of how citizens can participate. We could use our smartphone, take a picture of a pothole and send to govt and get it fixed quickly. There is a startup idea waiting to happen!

Washington's clay layer of resistance to change and the panel's recommendation to make it work for all of us:
Ellen Miller of Sunlight Foundation brought lot of stats from real life projects working in Washington.

Inspired by the Apps for Democracy by DC CTO, Sunlight Foundation did 'Apps for America' and got 45 remarkable applications developed. They built a community on sunlighlabs.com to begin a conversation about how technologists could engage with data that govt was setting free. They quickly followed this with a wiki. Now state/city legislative info is being scrapped by volunteer technologists and 35 has been completed so far.

She quoted Rep Mike Honda as the Member of Congress who is an innovator who enabled availability of bulk legislative data. She said otherwise there is generally a culture of resistance.

Tim O'Reilly brought some hope by the term"clay layer". He said people at the top and people at the bottom want change and are stuck by the clay layer, the middle layer of people in Govt. who oppose change.

Craig Newmark offered a solution to permeate the clay layer. He said very emphatically that people want to be part of something big that works, so keep showing it works. If people outside of govt stand for people inside the govt, they will be part of something bigger and will feel motivated to create change and build transparency.

Thanks to @techpolicy organizers and staff for the awesom show and for Debbie and Ellen for getting me Veggie food!

Dear Twitter, we are your community, please talk to us

2009-05-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Twitter,

First, it is not a small change to remove @reply setting which is the life blood of twitter, accessing real people in real time.

@Reply is part of the real person connection which facebook or any other social network does not have.

We use @reply not just to do a quick IM with people we know but the discovery you mentioned in your blog.

We actually recommend new friends subtly to our existing friends by having an @reply conversation with them.
It helps discovery in two ways:

1. We get curious about the stranger in the @reply because of the credibility or conversation topic going on.

One example is I saw a friend inquire @PanerabreadCo and tracked back to find the friends' friend had found a screw in her coffee cup at a Panera Bread. It made me chat with that new friend to find out which location and engage in a conversation.

2. The content of the topic sometimes leads to discovery.

I would compare this to going into a crowded party and discovering our friend chatting with a friend not-yet known to us and getting interested in knowing the new friend from the fragment of their conversation.

Twitter works because it brings our real selves and lets us be.

@stephendann nicely puts it. "A half conversation is just a friend you haven’t yet"

I hope there is some new finding from our usage pattern that drove twitter to make this drastic change. I am curious to learn what it is.

I have two requests for you:

1. I request you to make @reply to a friend's friend or strangers an advanced option instead of turning it off.
2. Please hire a marketing communications person to help plan your customer and developer communications so you engage with us and tell us what you plan to do and why and continue to do what is in your best interest to grow, scale and keep twitter alive.

That way your community will guide you with real data beyond just the reports you see of our usage pattern because numbers can be interpreted in many different ways and we as your community will engage and find ways to help you grow in our mutual interest.

If (I am speculating here), this change is driven by the newbies who came to twitter from @Oprah, we can help them get comfortable with twitter and come up to speed by coming together with a wiki or some way to build an education tweet channel for them. I am sure twitterville will have many more ideas for all your concerns. All you have to do is ask!

To continued conversations!
Best,
@sujamthe

Facebook has set the gold standard for developer engagement with feedback center

2009-05-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

Developers Lead on Facebook Platform Engagement

Tyler Ballance as an early developer had created a Bugs App to track bugs and feature request for facebook and other developer apps in mid 2007 and facebook took over with their Bugzilla app to let developers openly share feature requests.

Facebook Platform has been a living breathing thing growing with new apis every day with a loyal following of developers with 600K apps and close to 200 meetups/garages worldwide. Facebook Platform's strength is that facebook truly listens to developers (not necessarily agree to everything) and let developers lead the growth of their platform. They have wikis, Forums and a Platform Page to engage with developers on a daily basis.

Open Feedback Center - A new gold standard for developer engagement

Now, Facebook has adapted a new level of transparency by Opening a Feedback Center.

This allows for developers to submit feedback on the developer related documentation and rest of the community to vote on it. It is an important step towards openness and not being afraid to listen. This is focused on documentation only so they have made their survey a monthly feature.

As facebook opens new apis, one common caveat developers face is that they get excited by a reference implementation, or from a blog post about the new api only to find that the api is not available in their preferred language of choice. I remember developers excited by status.get didn't find the Javascript version and went about to build their own wrapper.

So this is a great start for facebook to understand what developers truly want, the voting justifying the volume of developers asking particular support.

What caught my eye the first time I clicked on the Opening a Feedback Center was that Facebok chose UserVoice to provide this capability and allows user's to login using facebook, twitter, Google, Yahoo, OpenID or MyspaceID before it is mapped into a new UserVoice account. It is amazing that Facebook is truly open here.

It seems fitting in this era of social media to come from the leader in the social platform space.

When you look at Earth from Mars in 2400

2009-04-13T16:55:00.000-07:00

update: I had this sitting in draft, its worth a read even if late!

I spent a fascinating evening on Apr 7th, listening to Esther Dyson talk to a room full of well fed hungry minds at the CIO meetup, organized by Tatanya Kanzaveli who brings her unique touch to her events in the valley. CIOTech's official blog post is here.

I was supposed to have met Esther in 1999 when my investor of my first startup Coola said, "you are sitting on a big idea, go find Esther Dyson in NY or Chris Shipley in CA". Chris replied to my email and I launched Coola at DEMO and am lucky for @cshipley's friendship and for Demo Conference to set the bar high about launch for me.

I went to finally meet Esther and got my answer, she had taken her vacation in 1999 after 20 years right when I tried reaching her in 1999!!!

Esther is an amazing person so full of intellectual warmth and passion for all the topics she covered. My attempt to capture the mesmerizing evening is here. It was a free Q&A style event and I have 15 video clips of each q&a here (low sound quality because of my iphone and good video quality because of Qik) See official video of the full event below:

Social media

Social Media has been a latent urge like our biological urge to spread our presence all over the web at all times. eg. news feeds show your picture you posted to friends even while you sleep
Search is God's gift to marketers. Social media is about listening without imposing their message which marketers are still learning.
Sponsorship is the right opportunity in social
Its amazing how people endorse a brand using social media, that means marketers get to hear good and bad.

Space

Amazing stuff. She wants to goto Mars ofcourse.
Lot of discussion about space travel, her experience training to goto space and dreams for earth to colonize Mars.
Fascinating views on how we should make a controlled test environment on mars and come back and reclaim earth as there are too many vested interests that won't allow us to do the right thing to save earth for all of our species today.

Opening up healthcare data

Esther is passionate about this and has some investments in this space.
Lot of discussion about disintermediating healthcare as a business by getting healthcare data online.

Russia

Esther is from Russia and shared stories of her investment fund and her views on Russia as an entrepreneurial bed and how it was transparent about its opaqueness.

Platform Play and my plan for Web2.0 Expo 2009

2009-03-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

I gave a presentation at P-Camp at Yahoo called Platform Play on Mar 14th 2009. The talk was about how the trend today is for all technologies to extend into platforms with developer APIs to tap into the innovation of developers. We shared best practice involved in extending a product into the Cloud (Web), Mobile and Social.

It was targeted at Product Managers and Program Manager and we had a lot of interaction with excellent audience. I presented how to add Social to your product, my friend Ed Maier of AOL Dev Network presented AOL's experience of opening up into the web and John Lin, an excellent PM ex-Adobe, presented how to scale into mobile with APIs. Thanks to attendee Srinivas who captured an excellent summary.

Platform Play Web Social And Mobile For P Camp09

Web2Open at Web2.0 coming up Wed Apr 1 and Thur Apr 2nd:
Web2.0 Expo starts tomorrow in San Francisco and has a Barcamp event called Web2Open on Wed and Thurs. I am thinking of participating and want to do a session.

Please let me know if you have ideas on what I should present or will there be interest if I repeat this topic of extending your product to social.

Tweetdeck bridges twitter and facebook, yay!

2009-03-16T21:51:00.000-07:00

My facebook love: I love facebook for what it offers me, my real social graph, way to connect to friends with privacy controls, power of tagging and now extending facebook via Connect to the web. But the most important attraction has been the energy of entrepreneurs as they build new apps on the facebook platform and how the platform adapts to the needs of the users by opening up organically.

My twitter love: Twitter on the other hand is different as a platform as its totally open, the functionality of posting tweets is open and the data of twitter is available via twitter search api. On facebook, you can execute apps in the facebook as a platform. Wheresas with twitter can access twitter and build your own app to execute on the web, desktop and mobile. This is the magic if amazing creativity in twitter apps, which enhances twitter usage and is spreading it everywhere.

Tweetdeck is this new shirpy bird on my desktop that brings new tweets organized in groups and makes twitter very usable.

I love tweetdeck, twitter is not the same without tweetdeck for me.

Tweetdeck bridges twitter with facebook!

Today tweetdeck integrated with facebook connect to allow posting tweets or facebook updates or both all from tweetdeck. Nick O Neil predicted this last week but I am not sure I agree with the recommendation of name change as tweetdeck has brand equity.

What does it mean for facebook users on twitter:

First it gives you control on what tweets you want to share as status updates on facebook. So if you have a twitter app making all your tweets as status updates, it is time to turn it off.
After all the talk about facebook vs twitter it makes us think about what we mean when we post something, is it for specific friends, or we just thinking aloud w/o thinking about the world or something else
Tweetdeck solves a problem that twitter offers and facebook doesn't, ok, to some extent. You can call out a friend with a @reply on twitter, now you can call that friend on a status update on facebook from twitter using tweetdeck.

You can get the beta of tweetdeck here. Look at the comments here, they talk about user's excitement and how they are asking for more.

I love the innovation and how competition is getting us better goodies!!!!

Share your experience, are you using this as a twitter user or facebook user or a tweetdeck loyalist, how do you see it affecting your social updates.

15 Similarities between Twitter and Facebook and 5 HUGE differences and what it means for social media

2009-03-05T02:49:00.000-08:00

Oh How Similar They Are!

Facebook = Twitter
1. Poke = Nudge
2. Post Pictures = Twitpic and it tweets with a url to your picture
3. Videos = Tweet tinyurls, made easy by many twitter clients like twitterific
4. Share Links = Tweet tinyrls
5. Tag pictures = @name callout a person to tag
6. Comments = Reply to tweets
7. See a shared link and share the link = RT (stronger endorsement by the user)
8.Add link to feeds = Star favorite, you can also get back to your favorite tweets later.
9. Message = DM
10. Private profiles = Closed updates approved by user
11.Notification and feeds = Tweets
12. Status updates = Tweets, in twitter apps like twitterific you can add your location to your tweets or pictures too.
13. Facebook Apps – keep content fresh on facebook with fun tools = Twitter Apps is evolving with array of tools to offer new ease of use for twitter
14. RSS feed of feeds = RSS feed of specific user (more granular control, also keeps the focus on the individual)
15.Threaded comments = Comments not threaded, but theres a twitter app that offers that to people who want to track tweets as conversations

Oh How Different They Are!

There are amazing differences that are continuing to take them apart into different worlds and drags us as consumers that I suspect, we will soon reach a day when our loyalties are tested to choose one over the other, unless of course they partner or merge!

1. Private vs. Public Social Graph

Facebook is our real social graph, real family, friends, collegemates co-workers, teachers, colleagues, fellow churchmates, fellow parents, friends suggested or referred by real friends. Facebook is also single mindedly focused on offering the best privacy controls to the users so they can share as little or as much of their pictures, profiles, videos etc. with their real friends.

Twitter is your public social graph. Everything is open, anyone can follow you and there is lot of chatter anytime you tune in.

Chris Brogan the unchallenged Social Media Maestro, No.1 on twitter, facebook and blogosphere got me thinking about this very differently.
He says
a) we need a portable graph. It's silly that I can walk into Facebook and have amnesia of the friends I have on Twitter.
b) we need more than one face. I might have business colleagues, religious colleagues, friends from school, and admirers, and I don't want them to know about each other.
c) I need to have metadata and annotation that's only seen by me so I keep track of who's who in my own ways.

Mari Smith, fb queen (she actually has a tiara in her profile picture) says "There is much overlap between my personal and professional lives. I’m very open with what I share – yet always deliberate and strategic. I don’t share what I wouldn’t want on the front page of the New York Times, found in a Google search or that I’d be proud for my grandchildren to see in several decades’ time. Yet, where I draw the line is my private life and this is something really important for business people online to get. You don’t have to live in a glass house and reveal all.". Sound advice here!

2, The Real Me , Real Time!

Twitter gets access to the real me by the ability to call out a user with a @username. There is inherent viral play here as that user is now exposed to the followers of the first user, validating their social graph in real time, which is very different than on facebook.

for example: Joe can connect with Sharon as a collegemate on facebook. They can exchange wall posts on and off. Its personal between them. They may comment on a link and disagee on a topic. A friend of theirs may not see all their feeds and conversation but may see terse feeds of wall posts or comments. If they fall out of touch or grow distant, their communication just slows down. Whereas on twitter, they could call each other out and they validate their relationship, their views, how open they are to agree to disagree for all to see, participate keeping their relationship alive.

In twitter, you can friend anyone by following them without their knowledge or permission. You allow anyone to follow you and it is optional to friend that person back so the relationship gets mutual and allow them to send you a direct message. This is in contrast to facebook where you friend a person and it has to be mutually agreed and accepted before you can view their profile or post on their wall or see their feeds.

The main difference is that people can ignore their facebook messages.But in twitter if you call someone out in an @reply, it is reaching the real person, like an email. They can choose to ignore you or come check you out quietly and still ignore you or follow you or reply back making it a longer conversation. But you reached the real person. Their lack of communication sometimes becomes communication.

A more important factor is that twitter has built a culture where people open up with raw emotions to be more of the real person they are which bonds people together though they start as strangers. I like so many people who help me on twitter or people who share my quirks of going to the car dealer or dentist or losing my purse and feeling stupid.
This puts twitter in such a powerful position of becoming your real identity on the web, where you are really engaged. This is where twitter is becoming competition to facebook. It becomes a great tool for marketers to reach the real YOU! That is the single most reason for twitter to be spread spreading in the enterprise and CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT BE IGNORED!!!

3. Different technology building blocks leads to different capabilities

Facebook announced new profile pages for famous persons is trying to cut into that segment of users who follow famous people on twitter.
What is fascinating to note is this is similar functionality but goes to the fundamental difference between facebook and twittr. They built out of different bricks as building blocks.

twitters fundamental building block is a profile made of tweets. @reply, followers, friends, DM, nudge are layered functionality on top of this.

Facebook’s building block is a profile page. That’s why when Facebook saw twitter get lot of mainstream media, they proactively created Profile Pages , which is a smart, expected move.

I love Facebook, but I am not convinced it will stop twitter's growth!!!

Both buildings are ready for the huffs and puffs and some people want to bet on which house is going to survive the big bad wolf.

My personal take on this is that we are at an early stage in the social media game and this competition is going to create new innovations that will shape the market to the next level. It is not about users on one social networking poking and sharing;we are entering a new level of interaction where realtime interaction, mobile, international and location awareness are going to allow for new ways of interaction for us as consumers and for businesses to engage with us .

4. Don’t underestimate the power of search

Facebook is closed, you cannot search any of your own feeds or status updates or comments or likes. You have a basic keyword search that allows to find friends or applications.
Facebook allows google to crawl public profiles and lets google bring it more users.

Twitter absolutely shines here!

Summize was built using twitter api and later bought by twitter and became twitters their powerful search tool. It also speaks to how open completely open the twitter API is, but that’s a different discussion!

Twitter search allows you to search to find conversation happening on any keywords and subscribe to it as a RSS feed. It is like have a Google SEM engine sending you customers to your RSS feed every 10 seconds.

This is getting marketers excited because now you have the power to watch your brand conversations, you can do live market research to find the pulse of products, brands and messaging.

It is sometimes good, sometimes not good to take, still it is good for the brands to rather become aware of this and intervene. See today's example of evitesucks tweets.

How hard is it to do A/B testing between two messages that you post as tinyurls on a tweet that lead to two landing pages that you can compare traction to?

5. Growth Patterns Tells the Real Story of Divergent Paths

Facebook is growing at 1 Million users/month with increased internal users.
Twitter has an organic growth with more companies joining it and experimenting with it.

Twitter is a community or has several communities built into it with its own set of rules and accepted behaviors.

Eg. Adding #tags, #Fridayfollow at end of tweets on Fridays to recommend new friends to follow etc.

So as new users join twitter they enrich their community and become part of it sooner than facebook where the user has to go through the learning curve for each user one user at a time.

So the twitter story is about faster engagement while facebook is about faster user acquisition.

Folks: Its 2.45am and blogger is acting up and not letting me add pictures. I'll update w them tomorrow. Good Nite. Lemme know your thoughts.

BEST Awards at Bebo SF proves Social Apps are all about engagement

2009-02-18T21:40:00.000-08:00

"Bebo's Engage to Success Today" Best Awards and Developer Meetup was held at Bebo SF yesterday.

It was a special day for me to see the grand finale of my project I started in October to help Bebo lay the foundation of a developer program. I started with an MRD for Developer Outreach and we filled product gaps in the platform by quickly launching Javascript suppport (FBJS equivalent called SNJS on bebo) and engagement metrics and announced the BEST Contest @ BeboDevNite in Nov 2008. Sun has been a loyal partner offering 1 year free hosting on joyent for bebo apps. They also offered the grand prize of a Sun Server to the BEST awards winner.

People Speak But Numbers Speak Louder

The best part of this project for me has been the bebo team and how developers got excited and gave feedback to get SNJS from beta to live. I remember countless spreadsheets and discussions keeping laser like focus on engagement. Bebo Platform is essentially the same as Facebook Platform, so anyone with a facebook app could port overnite to bebo. But the focus was to help developers with engaging apps build on bebo so they can monetize, scale and be successful.

There were 2000 new applications submitted to the contest in 2 months!
Developers email to bebo has grown 8 folds.
Engagement in terms of time spent/user/month for apps has grown by 70% overall.

This just proves that users are returning to use the apps on bebo.

Best Awards Event :

Top four apps were shortlisted as honarable mentions. They get Bebo's marketing support. Judges Dave McClure and Frank Gruber joined us in person. Jesse Stay could not join in person and tweeted his support.

1. Solid Sudoku - play solo Sudoku or challenge friends with a clean, stream-lined interface. Solid Sudoku can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/tx-sudoku.

2. Robokill Trainer with J2Play - liberate Space Station Titan Prime in this classic arcade shooter with RPG elements. Robokill Trainer with J2Play can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/robokill.

3. Bananagrams - form words as quickly as possible using letter tiles and the first player to use all their tiles then declares "Bananas!" and wins the game. Bananagrams can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/bananagrams.

4.Kick Mania - an animated game with low level violence and high level fun. Kick Mania can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/kickmania.

The holy trinity of apps is distribution, engagement and monetization says Mr.Social Network Dave McClure
He had valuable advice to add developers and entrepreneurs on social platforms.

The event warmed up with Rockband, typical bebo style http://qik.com/video/1067075

Amy Berg, Bebo Platform Community Manager set the stage listing the top 5 apps. This was followed by bananagram app demo.

This was followed by Bowling Buddys by John of Playfish. I love all Playfish apps, they are a class apart! They bring real life games with a real life like engagement online. They have one of the best leaderboards ever.

Markus of TheBroth showed kickmania app. It is a cool game to use physics to kick someone.
Funny you can choose different kind of legs and buy shoes with virtual currency.

Dave Mcclure and Frank Gruber did a demo of Solid Sudoku as the developer could not join us. They were awesome with their expert comments and cracked up the audience.

And the Winner was Bowling Buddies! Congratulations Playfish!!! John of Playfish received his trophy and joked saying he will throw the server up in their cloud.

Pictures from bestawards are here - http://twitpic.com/photos/bebodevnite
Tweets from the event are here - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bestawards

The best part of the event was the valley's ever enthusiastic social app developers who hobnobbed with the bebo engineers and the cool top developers and to leave knowing focusing on engagement has really worked to help bebo and the developers! So this is just a new beginning!

Power of Social Media Metrics

2009-02-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

I have been playing with Social Media Metrics as part of my recent work for Intuit with social media strategy among cross-functional groups as a way to measure campaign ROIs.

I feel the same excitement which I felt towards Google SEM metrics tools in 2003 as they evolved with enterprise adopting ppc campaigns. Today we need social media metrics as social media becomes a part of the marketing mix.

Power of Social Media Metrics Tools and ROI (example UCGExpo)

The beauty of social media and why I compare it to Google SEM engine is because the information is all public. The tools harness the data and we can set specific keywords, related to our product or competition or a combination that relates to a particular product or brand.

My friend Bob Miko of pacific dialogue invited me to User Generated Content Expo 2009 in San Jose Feb 9-10th organized by Media bistro of Jupiter Media. There was lot of excitement - good speakers, interactive audience and exhibitors, all very focused on the topic with not much frills on free food or giveaways.

Social media metrics tool SM2 from techrigy shows how bloggers and tweeters loved UGCExpo.

Social Media Impressions - breakup by blogs, twitter, videos from Feb 9 to 12th.
(click on graphs to see larger view)

Demographics of social media coverage

Tone of Social Media Impression is mostly neutral or positive

So the pr folks have achieved more than their ROI. Jupiter Media and Media Bistro can use this as baseline to overlay their future conferences to measure ROI for social campaigns.

Craig Newmark on User Generated Content and Mobile + Social Panel - Day 1 User Generated Content Expo UCGX09

2009-02-10T21:37:00.000-08:00

Craigslist's KeyNote on User Generated Content

I listened to Craig's keynote on Day 1 of at the User Generated Content Expo 2009 in San Jose Feb 9 and 10.

Here's part of the video

Craig Newmark story from UGCX09 - part 2 from sujam on Vimeo.

part 3 -nice lively q&a ( I need to find a way to get all q&a videos clips edited together and will update here later)

My Summary:

Culture of participation
Had no clue about branding just used common sense and did the right thing, just treat the customer like how you would like to be treated.
Realized he was not a manager and found a CEO
Repeat emphasis that this is not altustic
Paranoid of not listening enough to customers
Really enjoys listening to customers and let the community drive itself.
Amazing honesty. Tied his experience to Obama campaign and grassroots movement for us to participate in Government.

Mobile and Social Panel: Beyond the Desktop: Social Content goes Mobile

Excellent mix of panelists, experts across the mobile spectrum.

Moderator: Adam Hirsch, COO, Mashable
Speakers: Philip Miano, National Sales Director, Third Screen Media
Eric Litman, Chairman & CEO, Medialets
Bryan Barletta, Associate Editor, Mediabistro.com
Jonathon Linner, CEO, Limbo

Full Panel video (not including q&a) - (I'll update here once the video is ready on vimeo)

See my Summary from my tweets I did during the event. (I am adding it as a screenshot, pl let me know if you know how to show the twitter search results as a widget here)

Exhibits were 5-6 tables. I saw an interesting company ConnectBeam at the Exhibit Booth.
They make enterprise social software, particularly making it easy to find information posted in profiles/tags inside enterprise searchable using google, exisiting wiki, integrating all the different social apps, thereby saving $$$ by knowledge sharing inside a company. Worth checking!!!

Overall User Generated Content has fresh conference content, excited audience and I left wishing I could stay longer or return on Day 2 too!

Live Blog of DevJam @Myspace, sf monetization panel and OSML by Myspace

2009-02-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

I am sitting at DevJam event @Myspace, will blog live as I find interesting stuff (I am not blogging everything here today!

3.30pm: Monetization panel:
Request to Myspacefrom developers from the panel:

1.Jason of App-o-rama: Can you make the approval process faster? When a developer adds and update it brings the app down for couple days which kills growth.
2.John.H of RockYou: More stability from the platform
3.Nick of MakeaBaby: Tell us as you change things that will break our apps proactively.
Audience Q&A:

Q: How did they get stared and arrive at offerpal for virtual currenct?

Its all about comfort level with the virtual currency company, everyone mentioned Julie of offerpal. They also did A/B testing and found offerpal was at par or better than others.
Q:How do you bring down an inflated virtual currency?
Jason had that experience in space domination game. 2 users reached the top level, we brought it down w their top user's permission.
Nick: We created new virtual goods. eg. W ehad an ipod, added a star in front of it, called it blinkpod and charged it 10 times more.

Q. Do you allow secondary markets?
Jason, no, you don't want someone else to make money that you could earn.
Q From Abdul Rehman (AR): Followup question, users are going to do that eventually. Why not setup an exchange.
A: Offerpal will add that if need arises, not needed yet.

4pm: Chris Cole of Myspace presents OSML
Updated with video here:

Myspace Devjam Feb08 from sujam on Vimeo.

Intuit's First Virtual Conference vconf

2009-01-22T22:46:00.000-08:00

I usually blog from real events. Intuit Academy hosted its first virtual conference (vconf) for customers for two days Jan 21 and 22nd 2009 and I had the privilege to attend as their social media strategy consultant.

It was fun and talking to customers is the best way to understand any real business.

Conference Technology: It was a conference in our web browser and once we logged in, it opened a real player plugin and we were in a second life like environment. At first my pc speakers didn't work and it felt strange to watch characters move around quietly, but once it worked, it was very engaging.

There were Exhibits with staff ready to answer (chat) any questions.

There were scheduled conference talks.

Quickbooks Guru Michelle Long moderated a talk on "Marketing Ideas for Accounting Professionals" at the vconf. See her blog post of her Day1 experience here.

There was a lounge area where one could post announcements or just chat with a fellow attendee.

We had a briefcase where you could collect interesting documents for reference later. It was beautifully integrated with Intuit's current web property and the scheduled chat led to a webex session.

It was social only to the extent that we could find other attendees and chat with them any time.

A great start, time and money saver as a virtual conference tool. As for the conference itself, its one of many innovative social media moves to come from Intuit.

As I was awestuck by the conference, I found Whuffie Factor author and barcamp queen Tara Hunt has joined Intuit at their Partner Platform.

Congrats Tara!

Congrats Intuit Academy on a successful virtual conference!

Facebook Connect makes TV social with cnn live inaguaration

2009-01-21T02:15:00.000-08:00

Today I remember my first TV watching experience in India when I was 9 and a neighbor bought the first tv in my entire neighborhood and invited everyone to their house on a Saturday evening to watch the one movie they showed in the only channel available.

Not long after, tv became a personal family affair with cable and 100s of channels and in my family now its a personal affair as we got rid of the box and watch hulu for what each of us want when we want! Its of course very social as we discuss Lost and Jon Steward and Seinfeld (nostalgically) with co-workers and friends.

This morning as all America woke up to an exciting day for the inauguration of President Obama, facebook took us to CNN.com live to show the live video stream along with a facebook connect feed.

A Screenshot of cnn live here

This allowed us to sign into cnn with our real identities and bring our real social graph to the site in a side bar to post our status and comment on our friends feeds sharing in the anticipation as we waited for Obama, revelled in beautiful music and poetry, fretted about how it felt to become free from the last 8 years of divisive politics, marvelled at Mrs.Obama's dress, took in the weight of the moment and let the promise of hope and optimism wash us.

Facebook had it setup privacy setting to let us decide to send each status update to go public to everyone and did you notice it allowed us to comment on only the ones made by our friends, all feeding into facebook feeds for rest of our friends to watch and join in.

It is not surprising to see the mindblowing Numbers From the Obama Inauguration - 600,000 status updates and 4000 comments/min and 14Mil of us viewing simultaneously by 1pm ET

Facebook Platform vs Facebook Connect

Facebook App Plaform excited me because of the power of the viral play and the entrepreneurial energy of developers. Facebook Connect takes the app platform out into the web (potentially into the desktop and mobile).

Facebook marketing has always been about delivering, building large scale support before a pr launch. Facebook is doing it again with Facebook Connect launching 1000 sites before we saw press coverage.

Facebook Connect Timeline

Launch @f8 July 23 followed by a garage Sep 29 2008	Luke's Q&A to Bay Area Facebook Meetup
Snap Summit03 Oct 2008 - Dave Morin's talk	How-to-add facebook connect to your blog in 8 min

Power of Facebook Connect

Cnn live of the Inauguration with Facbook Connect subtly shows the power of bringing your social graph for an event driven media consumption. As Don Thorson put it, "this is how all tv should be"

If you are have a web app or desktop app you have to tap into the power of facebook connect. Think - social commerce on web sites, and social influencer marketing for user generation and lots more to come building upon access to dynamic facebook user profiles! its a no brainer!

iphone meetup live blogging @timburks good visual design and web vs sdk programming guidance

2009-01-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

I am at iphone meetup at TIPS Palo Alto. Nice Energy in the room here, lot of friendly faces from the facebook world here!

Quick Qik of the audience energy here: (use this to see if you spot someone you met and want to connect back)

7pm: Christopher Allen, author of upcoming "iPhone in Action" book and programming guru is talking about Web Development vs SDK

He compared web development vs sdk development. Interesting to see his comparison of what's compatible with other phone development.

Web App uses similar technology to iphone: Google Android, Palm Pre (goes beyond local storage AQLite on iphone to ability to put a web app inside the app)

7 types of iphone development
- iphone compatible web
- iphone friendly web
- iphone optimized web, not compatible w nokia or android
- iphone web app eg iui app
- Dashcode web
- native app sdk
web app examples google reader, facebook app, hahlo.com, apnews.com, mapquest.com, 101cookbooks.com/iphonerece

Here's part of Chris's talk here:

@ChristopherA drew a lot of audience interaction with excellent Q&A. (See video of q&a part below)

8.15pm: Suzzane Ginsburg of ginsburgdesign, presents good visual design for iphone apps with a Urbanspoon vs Yelp

Summary is urbanspoon is built for iphone, yelp expects you to got the web site and iphone app is a translation.

Here's Suzanne's slides: Awesome presentation. I don't know if Yelp or Urbanspoon who will move fast to hire her!

Suzanne Ginsburg's slide embed.

iPhone App UX Review: Urbanspoon vs. Yelp

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: usability urbanspoon)

There's better HD video being taken by some folks here, will update w those links if you guys can ping me w the urls.

Excellent Twitterville Talk by @Shelisrael

2009-01-13T18:05:00.000-08:00

I started blogging from the talk on "Twitterville--Using Global Neighborhoods to thrive in tough times" by Shel Isreal at the IT/Software development Execs Meetup Group in mountain view.

Listening to Shel sharing his wonderful stories all evening!

Tatyana Kanzaveli organized the event and did an awesome job. Her Flickr stream of the event is here I even got good selection of veggie food :)

Started with his Crowdsourced book building story:

He started by comparing his last book "Naked Conversations" which he co-authored with Robert Scoble vs the new upcoming book "twitterville". Here's a quick summary of what I grasped from this talk:

First phase of social media was about reducing marketing excesses where advertisements create lot of noise while blogs filter to create conversations.
Now, twitter was about optimizing the conversations.
Shel was genuine and his focus was on keeping transparency and the joy of having real honest conversations.

Twitter Story:

Next he shared Twitter's story of how the founders came with it, and how it got traction from SWSX 07.

Twitter for Business:

We got to this part very later and Shel has wealth of stories. He shared the Dell story of how they got started from SWSX07 and made $1million, motrin how they managed the pr fiasco to curb it within a week by coming out and being honest on twitter, Ford story, GM Volt story that broke a news on twitter about a plant closing just as GM was going in front of congress. Best of all was @Comcastcares. Nice mix of pr, communicating with customers for brand management and a customer support example.

Sorry, at this stage, I had to stop and listen so my video doesn't do justice to the evening. I have some zoomed out video from my flip atleast you can hear Shel's own voice. (ok I'll update back once my videos are uploaded.)

Hope you enjoy the initial part of his talk!

Q&A:
This was the best part of the evening. Shel engaged with the audience with the same passion and honesty to hear their stories. I noticed something today! He cares about learning new twitterville stories with a genuine passion and does not pretend to be the expert. Yet he has perceptive answers for audience questions. Here are couple questions I captured:

Question by @cathybrowne What do you think about twitter as a news feed eg Mumbai story.
Shel: "We in social media are feet in the street in every corner of the world. We have information that can be braided into traditional media. point where Mumbai made the key point was when a 19 yr old kid took pictures and posted on flickr, where associated press, bbc , reuters didn't have feet in the street there and used the kids story.
@cathybrowne shared her own twitter story story about a plane stranded passengers that the world didn't know that cathy tweeted about and got media in to change the situation. Looks this Shel got another story for his book.

Q: How can we trust the accuracy of information on twitter?
Shel: Every reporter has to validate the truth of any story within their means. Twitter validates it better by real people respond, retweeting and spreading it around for validation.

Q: When people are tweeting about your company and you are the marketer when is the good time to get involved?
Anytime is good, just be transparent. He addd 'talk to me, have a conversation, don't make it all about your message and do all talking to me". You can use tweets and Direct message (DM) and continue your conversation with the same customer.
Q: Another discussion was about using twitter for specific educational ngo goals.
Spurred good discussion about the community aspect of twitter and tapping into it. For anyone getting started important is to build reputation.

Two overall takeaways from the evening are:

Twitter is about the real-time response from the market, its fast
The real purpose of marketing is to build relationship and somewhere along the way we forgot it as we made ads. Twitter brings it back to the basics of having real conversations with customers.

My personal interest in this topic:

I am a facebook fan, and use twitter a fairly decent amount. I have been wondering about the overlap of our private vs public social graphs. How do you see it merging or moving away for you as a user? How do you see it impacting your social media mix as a business? let me know!

Facebook, Feed Me More Feeds In the New Year!

2009-01-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

2008 started differently for me when a friend posted a facebook status saying "baby looks like an alien in the ultrasound" bringing me into his home as he opened his heart.

All through the year, thanks to my facebook friends, I have
hoped as we voted in my first US presidential election
shared excitement of friend's cool dates
pondered the meaning of life, career and dreams
mused over spontaneous valley events
comforted the heartbreak of atleast one divorce
helped with couple job losses
shocked and pained with friends as Prop 8 passed
supported parenting nightmares with toddler power struggles
stayed up to chat with insomniacs and twitter addicts
shared the joy of new babies and many baby's first holidays
and fretted with growing-up parents as their kids grow up.

My life before my real friends were on facebook:

I have spent 14 yrs of my life mostly in Boston and thelast two years in beautiful Silicon Valley, enjoying America, making it my home and loving it. I have many friends, we have lived in our own worlds and meet at work, schools, temples, churches, gyms, play groups, hobby groups and recreation centers. There, we exchange a common american humor, curiosity towards other person's diversity and chat about what we share in common with sincerity which in my case is a lot of technology aka facebook, social media marketing, startup stories, mommy saga and yoga.

Once we moved to the valley, I was amazed at the diversity and the self segregated societies of the valley that preserve their cultures. Everything was new, our friends were all in Boston and the geek groups were the first to accept us. There's the Chines New Year in SF, Vietnamese Parade in San Jose, Durga Puja in Sunnyvale, Polynesian festival in Foster City, India Day in Fremont, Independence Day fireworks at Stanford, Garlic Festival in Gilroy and several geeky meetups including my own Bay Area Facebook Meetup each month. I've chanced occasional peeks into two separate corteries of 'serial entrepreneurs' and 'hungry wannabe-entrepreneurs', the two prominent groups that co-exist in the valley. I am not even listing the many sports hangouts, charity fundraisers and kids shows. (I cannot share all videos I like as they are in facebook limited by the privacy of friends who posted them)

Facebook has enriched my year by helping me cross the politically correct workplace boundary into the lives and hearts of friends.

In 2008, I have had more birthday wishes than all my past years, and wished everyone with wall posts and virtual gifts. I have visited more places on earth and shared special and scary moments with friends and made real friends of distant business acquaintances as they opened their feeds and their hearts and homes to us on facebook.

I've gotten a glimpse into the real lives of many of my friends who I knew professionally and bonded with family across miles. The best part is feeds come as everyone does whatever they do in their real lives - across boundaries of political correctness into their religions, culture, priorities near and dear to their hearts and ways of lives.

I've seen what holidays are important to each of my friends and what they really do to celebrate their holidays, thanks to facebook.

I've seen my friends Naveed, Raymond, Junaid, Shammara fast for Ramadan and wait for the moon for Eid. I celebrated Diwali by sharing a picture of a Diwali light arrangement we made at home and tagging 30 (facebook's maximum tag limit) Diwali celebrating hindu friends on facebook . I saw ghosts, fairies, Joe the Plumber among my friends. I have gotten a real Xmas cheer as I saw Luke share his Xmas tradition of making cookies at home with his wife. It put a smile on my face as this feed brought back childhood memories of the smell of an Indian sweet called Mysorepagu made by my Mom. Wed 25th was Christmas and the third day of Hanukkah, a gentle reminder thanks to Josh's feed.

For the past two weeks, I've joined the cheer and delays of of travels locals and far, shuddered at the ice storm pictures from my east coast friends, smiled at a cheeky video " All I want for Christmas is some jews" and at Jesse sharing the real christmas story video on facebook asking us to spread it around.

I have truly arrived in America, and though I am known to be obsessed with facebook, this time I think all credit goes to facebook to let my real social graph flow through facebook and getting me one step closer to my friends and to America.

Wish you all a wonderful new year 2009! Thank You all for enriching my life, looking forward to a new year as we continue to grow, share, learn, live and let live our connected lives.

Facebook Connect brings web businesses from Android to Droids

2008-11-30T22:44:00.000-08:00

Enter Facebook Connect! Now Businesses can move from offering Androids (remember data from startrek) with their personalization engines to Droids that can really talk to us!

Executed with steady precision, with a hunger to listen to the market true startup style, architected to make it so simple to adapt, one story at a time - bringing user controlled dynamic privacy, with our real identities, with our real world social graph to our favorite web sites with choice at every stage to let us decide which web actions are shared with our facebook friends!

update: everyone is talking about it - tc looks as it as single signon on the web, carrying your data w you!

Web businesses are beginning to see the power of the real user telling them what they are ready to share with their social network about their brands, about every step of their purchase behaviors. They can grow and scale in each site in beta using facebook connect to build vast repository of data, much more elegant than the works of the web 1.0 personalization engines which always reminded me of Data from Startrek.

With Web2.0 came social media - voice of the consumer everywhere with user generated content. Facebook revolutionized the social network bringing our real social graphs online where we can set our own levels of privacy and share our thoughts, pictures, videos, and comment,send tons of virtual goodies from pokes, cupcakes to vampires and friends for sale.

The old web is stuck with massive sites trying to personalize and customize our experience to reach us as individuals to market just what we want when we want it.

We don't stop to think of the web, we are fatigued signing up for each site, we prefer socializing with our friends, who influence our purchase cycles with our total trust be it that beautiful outfit our cool friend was wearing, or the travel we are planning or the big screen tv we watch the game together, introducing us to new music, telling us about what movie is worth watching.

Show me the money!

Wed businesses can now monetize my presence 10 folds more with perfectly targeted ads, build products to recommend just what I want and use my social network to influence my purchase, all with my permission.

They can bring the power of what Amazon did with "people who bought this also looked at this". If its a gift purchase I can say "no thanks", else send feed to facebook -
tap into the power of whats made facebook apps successful - show my coolness factor to my friends, share naturally for purchases of movies, songs, and all digital downloads and opinions about brands.

Sites can layer and build complete suite of facebook apps as services on top of their current offering as part of their social marketing mix.

Power to the web sites who allow me to login with my real identity from facebook and by getting my trust because of the privacy control, now it is not the merchant selling me stuff, they are giving me just what I want when I want - that beautiful fine line between ads that appear intrusive and those that provide the right deal for the right product that we might just need.

A dream example - beta.citysearch.com

I goto citysearch and it shows me "a Grinchmas at Universal Studio Hollywood ad". Not relevant to me and wasted opportunity to sell me stuff I came looking for and have the need and desire to buy in the near future.

Their beta allows me to login with facebook connect, I log into facebook and they get instant access to the "real me" - age, sex, location and my profile preferences. That takes them 1 step closer to serve relevant ads. I like that better.

But imagine! If they could layer a facebook app right on top of citysearch in their site using facebook connect and could learn what I am upto this moment, and with my permission.

If I am planning to goto Boston for the holidays and want to find local gifts and restaurants to meet my friends, they could facilitate that discussion with my friends (who are on facebook and maybe on citysearch)if they let it happen using facebook connect on citysearch. They could offer a facebook app layered on top of citysearch that allows me to let citysearch know I am looking for a restaurant to go with these particular friends and know our preference (past ratings/reviews by me and my friends on citysearch), and use the power of facebook feeds to facilitate conversations about our current travel and party plans and tie it to citysearch options to facilitate the purchase/recommendations as ads.

Now we have to wait and watch this scale all over the web!

Mashup Camp - The Unconference for the uncomputer today

2008-11-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

I am here at MashupCamp today for little while.

Many cool valley geeks here,some from across the country.

Met Gregory Cypes, OPENAIM evangelist.

Nickels are worth a lot here!
You can vote for the coolest technology with a nickel they give you.

Zembly, Yahoo, Google,AOL Dev Network, wetpaint, are all here!

There are barcamp style talks scheduled in 10 parallel sessions.

Kevin Marks is talking Opensocial Mashups and Christopher Peri is talking about iphone Jailbreak, Yahoo on YOS and many cool mashup ideas.

CodeCamp - Scaling Platform w Bebo, Sun and Yahoo

2008-11-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

CodeCamp was an unconference for 1300 developers in Foothill College on Sat and Sun Oct 8/9 and it ROCKED!!!

Kudos to Van and Peter and all the volunteers for excellent organization! They had lined up sponsors for food, coffee etc and ran on time.

Charged crowd, many volunteered and were excellent audience with tons of Q&A

I moderated a panel on Sat Scaling Platform - panel with Bebo, Sun and Yahoo

My job was so easy, CodeCamp had this cool Confett chat room so audience kept asking me questions and chatting live. ok! I admit it made me look like a total geek with my laptop onstage!

Steve Cohen of Bebo presented Lightspeed mVC framwork, charged the room about Bebo's scale story. 400Mil pageviews daily on 120 servers, using Resin and single Java container! Wow!

Tom of Y! talking presented YOS. He spoke about YQL for normalized data via web services. Discussion is about silo of data.

Marina Fisher of Sun presented Sun technologies Opensolaris and Glassfish.

Scaling Platform Panel from CodeCamp - Sun from sujam on Vimeo.

The panel discussion:

It was a very lively discussion.

Steve has fun Java stories! Yes bebo is build using Java.

OpenWeb Awards Junkies' top 10 to-do list

2008-11-16T17:10:00.000-08:00

Mashable is hosting its 2nd annual open web awards.

Last year the Open Web Awards was a true success of Web2.0 with user's voting 250,000 votes to award winners Facebook, Digg, Google, Meetup, Twitter, Netvibes, woot!, Last.fm and Mahalo.

The first five in there are technologies I user daily and sun cannot shine on a day without any of them, though twitter is extra special and can go up and down and we will still wakeup to go see their funny downtime messages.

This year the nominations are open till today November 16th 2008. The voting rounds will be held from November 19th till December 15th.

Make your vote count, speak up and pick the winners of this year!

What I enjoy about the awards process is to checkout cool technologies and finding how much my friends agree or disagree with the same votes. But also it is a test to true social media marketing as every technology company leashes out its evangelists to find creative ways to get the word out to their base to get their votes up.

As a tech startup you can do old fashioned email to your customers to vote for you. Real winners are those whose customers volunteer on their own to spread the joy of particular technologies they love. Here are some ways:

Level One - Social Media Savvy Happy Customer:

1. First go vote for your favorite technology.

2. Show your excitement with a blog post on why that company is cool.

3. Do a tweet on twitter (w the blog post as a tinyurl or your 140 words of wisdom)

4. Change your facebook status to show the link for your favorite technology voting url.

Level 2: Super crazy unpaid evangelist for your favorite technology

5. Make a facebook group or friendfeed room or twitter bundle for your favorite technology and share links about how cool your technology is and the vote url.

6. Create an event to vote for your favorite technology and invite all your friends to join.

7. Visit all related meetups and pitch to everyone to vote for your favorite technology.

8. Make a video to show your love for your favorite technology, preferably something funky and blast it out to all video sites and tag friends on facebook. Make sure your video sites are all tied to your tweets and friendfeed so your followers get double feeds of everything.

9. Especially if you are in SF, throw a party to celebrate this technology's vote and drink with fellow lovers of your technology.

10. Done? Go get a life!

BeboDevNite Rocked tonite!!!

2008-11-12T01:11:00.000-08:00

BeboDevNite has been my labor of love and it totally rocked tonite!!!

120+ developers all charged, got excited about bebo.

The best part of organizing BeboDevNite has been the bebo team. See them get ready for the event @AOL

We had a series of presentations and some cool announcements.

Cool Presentations:

Blake Commagere (Vampire, Werewolf, Zombie app network famous) presented migration to bebo from facebook, and said it took him only 4 hrs to port 4 apps to bebo.

Bebo Dev Night on 2008.11.11 from Abbas Zaidi on Vimeo.

Sun's announcement - Free Hosting on OpenSolaris for Bebo Apps

Sun announced 1 yr free hosting for bebo app developers.

Bebo Dev Night 02 from Abbas Zaidi on Vimeo.

The Opensolaris hosting is actually on Joyent, and Joyent CEO Rob Boothby was there alongside Sun's Emerging Business Unit leaders Sanjay Sharma and Rajesh Ramchandani!
Sun got a partner Livescribe to demo their smartpen and raffled one which was won by Deepika Bajaj from the audience.

Bebo Demos - We had a lot of Bebo love from a series of presentations by bebo app developers, each focusing on engagement, monetization or scaling apps with their stories - Water Cooler, Make a baby, Smart Change,Knighthood and Zoosk.

Cool Bebo Announcement:
Jessica Alter of bebo announced engagement metrics and Javascript support (in beta)for bebo platform followed by breakout session w bebo engineers. She announced the B.E.S.T contest for developers.

Dave McClure, Jesse Stay and Frank Gruber are the judges and the contest is open till Jan09 first week.

First B.E.S.T Contest Contestant
The highlight of the evening was that Waleed Abdulla, a facebook developer in the audience announced by the end of the presentations that he just signed up for bebo and had ported his app "hello gift" to bebo within 30 minutes as he watched a panel of bebo apps by several developers! Simply made our day!

Let me know if you have an event or blog where you can partner to promote this cool contest.

Send me your app invite as you build a new bebo app and join the contest!

I love the valley, and it feels like a big thanksgiving gathering each meetup seeing a subset of the same group of people, and coming home tired, full (of pizza) and loaded w the latest greatest in the valley tech scene.

Good Nite Folks!

Facebook Connects Social and Enterprise - another step in the right direction

2008-11-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

Today Facebook announced a partnership with Salesforce.com to bring Facebook Connect to the enterprise using Force.com making it easier to build social friendly enterprise apps hosted upon Salesforce.com cloud! (see my wishlist of enterprise apps at the end of this blog post)

Facebook still operates like a startup and has gotten Salesforce to adopt Facebook Connect as a channel into the enterprise. Look at the launch of the partnership - facebook style - honest, humorous presentation by Dave Morin.

I've been super excited about Facebook Economy because I see it extending the web into a whole social platform where I can use technology more seamlessly intertwined with the "real me"

Facebook has been successful in building the platform and getting developer excitement going, theres no doubt about that one!

Many pundits argue (read Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher) that social is real and but the big question is whether it will be on facebook or on a bunch of technologies that all becomes social.

For social to become ubiquitous, it has to go past consumers (who don't make it super easy to monetize it) to the enterprise. For example Google is a consumer company but makes all its money from businesses.

I think enterprise + social has to be lot more than apps on linkedin.

We as consumers get used to status udpates, and comments from friends and sharing apps to expecting some of it in our business life but the real value comes when it improves efficiency for the business.

Linkedin is back with positive pr as a social platform because of its now open app platform. I think it has more to do with very low expectations we have on linkedin and I'll give lot of credit for opening the platform to Linkedin advisor Dave McClure aka Mr.Social Network.

Heres my dream and its all possible with Force.com on Facebook

Communication and Collaboration: Why can't we break the barrier of friends circles inside companies that helps engine the corporate fiction in all our decisions to get real work done across organizations?
Marketing and supply-chain improvements: Why can't business build relationship with customer and build social technologies that integrates their business processes.
Product Development and inventory management: Why can't we as consumers interact with each other and our favorite brands to help them build just what we want at the right price when and where we need it.

If you are a facebook developer you have an advantage over the enterprise developer in that you know facebook platform and viral scaling of your app, now you just have to build it upon Force.com on Facebook!

Meet enterprise social media evangelists

2008-11-04T00:22:00.000-08:00

Force.com on Facebook makes me wonder what is needed for Enterprise +Social to be successful.

Going by my past life of evangelizing the web in large companies where I worked - Fidelity Investments, BMC Corporation and GTE Internetworking(now Verizon) and Harcourt (now Reed Elsevier), I believe that we need cool technology championed by real social architects evangelizing each enterprise from inside, one group at a time, to bring the excitement focused on real business goals to build grassroots teams one at a time!

Corporate Evangelists - My Casestudies

Here I showcase 3 of them from my recent acquaintances.

1 Intuit:

Intuit hosted a Marketing Summit on Oct 28th in Hilton SF, where I was at a panel called "social influencer marketing" with a cool set of people and got a taste of Intuit's commitment to use social to build true customer relationships.

The drivers inside Intuit are kira, Heather and Michael.

2. Dell

Natalie Davis of Dell has built out a centralized Social media group inside Dell.

3. Cisco - LaSandra Brill

Today they all use twitter, blogs, facebook apps inside facebook, and customer forums, where will they go with Facebook Connect for the Enterprise?

Ping me if you have a story of social media marketing or social media experiments in your world!

update: Marta strickland is a social architect who truly gets Social Media and its vision in shaping the future of the web. I met Marta at Web3.0 Conference at an interesting panel.

SNAP Summit 08 SF Roundup

2008-10-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

Its a good event if it still lingers on in the background of your mind as you get closer to the weekend. Snap Summit 2008 was one such 1-day event packed with good content - all focused on the entrepreneurs and tech geeks in the valley.

The Organizers!

Cassie is an energy ball and Christian Perry is the well prepared partner with questions for every session in case there is a lull in the audience, which was very rare.

Lets talk about the talks

I moderated the first panel of the day about Critical User Mass.

We had interesting discussions about arriving at critical mass of users for different types of sites.
Rockyou's Eric Yieh and Siqi Chen of "Friends For Sale" were focused on building metrics from the start.
Anil Dharni of Hi5 shared lot of good examples about scaling to different markets and focusing on engaged users different from new users.
Stephen Hood of Delicious said Critical Mass is not a discrete position but one thats ongoing and shared how delicious focuses on users and is still growing @ 5.2Musers. Delicious was at 300K users during the Y! acquisition.

Next, Max Engel of Myspace gave an excellent presentation about Data Availability.

Heres my qik stream (its starts with zooming in on my panelists and Mr.SocialMedia Dave McClure, and then I sat for the Myspace talk). Myspace is commited to adapting open standards like openid, xrds-simple, oauth, portablecontacts and opensocial

Lets talk about the talks

I attended part of Gordon Peters' "Monetize User Generated Content, which spawned excellent discussions. Panelists were: Seth Goldstein; CEO, SocialMedia, Andrew Chen and Michael Burke of Appssavvy.

Interesting to note in this video is the conflicting advice from the panelists about how to survive the current economy!

Todd Fast, CTO of Zembly gave an arresting presentation about Zembly.

Dave Morin presented Facebook Connect and made a clean case for it!

This was followed by an excited audience Q&A

Julie Craft gave a workshop about Offerpal

Part 1 here -

Offerpal made the point about monetization well by pulling together a panel of three app developers - Markus Weichselbaum of the new KickAss App and Nick of Make-a-Baby app

Ah The Audience!

The audience energy talks about the event and it was excellent.

Tim Burks of iphone meetup was excited about the conference.

Takeaways

Overall a day well spent! Social, apps, and consumer user generation with cool tech products are all in!

Need Your Questions for the Critical User Mass Panel at SNAP Summit Today

2008-10-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaI am heading out to SNAP Summit to moderate a panel called "What is Critical User Mass and How Do You Get There?" at 9.30am this morning in San Francisco.

The Panelists are:

* MODERATOR: Sudha Jamthe; Social Platform Strategy Consultant; AOL/Bebo.
* Siqi Chen; Co-Founder & CEO, Serious Business
* Eric Yieh; Director of Product Development, RockYou
* Anil Dharni; Director of Products, Hi5
* Stephen Hood; Director of Product, Delicious

Critical mass of users is the moment when a social site naturally becomes viral, when it works well on its own, when it is considered a "success".

Ping me with questions, on twitter @sujamthe or on facebook. What do you want to see in this panel?

- Is critical mass a state a site should achieve or is it a repeat event for different stages of the product lifecycle?
- Is this critical mass dependent on your product life cycle or is it dependent on your competition's growth cycle.
- How do you get users to share and help you be viral, especially when you are still small.
-Is there a magical number for the critical mass of users for different types of sites.
- Are there specific ways that product engages users and what that has meant for growth.
- I would like to hear specific examples of success and failed attempted in building critical mass for different sites.
-Is it a different path for a social network like Hi5 vs. a product like delicious

venture panel fom web3.0 conference

2008-10-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

General Session:

• Rebekah Wu, CEO, Right Hand Partners

• Steve Baloff, General Partner, ATV Capital

• Salil Deshpande, GP, Bay Partners

• Lara Druyan, GP, Allegis Capital

• Curtis Feeny, General Partner, Voyager Capital

• Amanda Reed, General Partner, Palomar Ventures

• Prashant Shah, Managing Director, Hummer Winblad

qik live streaming now!

Qik livestreaming of day2 keynote of Web3.0 Conference & Expo - semantic search

2008-10-17T09:44:00.000-07:00

I am here at Web3.0 Conference in Santa Clara only for day2.

I am sitting at the Keynote: The Road to Semantic Search by Scott Prevost,General Manager & Director of Product, Powerset.

I usually take videos using my flip camera. Today I am doing a live video streaming using Qik on my iphone.

Social Media Marketing from Social Summit Conference SF - part2 a Cisco story

2008-10-07T16:24:00.001-07:00

I covered Social Media Summit day1 live with my blog post, tweets and youtube videos.

I sooooo wanted to go back on Day 2 to hear Lasandra Brill of Cisco and Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo but had to stay back at work, sweet work!

Lasandra is a true social media person - shares her experience with pc booting in a presentation in her blog.

The audience always share the real presentation learning and it looks like I missed something!

Here's Lassandra Brill's presentatio slides - Building a Community with Social Media and Web 2.0 - A Cisco Product Launch Case Study

Building a Community with Social Media and Web 2.0 - A Cisco Product Launch Case Study

Does anyone have Ed's presentation summary too?

Social Media Marketing from Social Summit Conference SF

2008-10-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

I went to SF city to start an interesting work project in the afternoon and decided to stop by at the Social Media Summit at Moscone West on Oct 1st.

I believe if I meet an interesting person or learn one thing new, my time at a conference is well-earned, but today I found both!

Social Media according to Charlene Li

I have followed Charlene Li and seen her only at big screens from a distance in conferences and today I missed her keynote before I came in and heard many references to her talk.

Then I met her! She has a gift for articulating the essence of key technologies and their business impact. She spoke about Social Media and why it is important for marketing.

Shel Israel's new Twitter Book

I found Shel Israel is working on a new book about twitter. He was ready to talk about "Conversations" and not about "Brand Extensions".

I attended a session by Eric of Ticketmaster about extending a brand to social media.

It was by far the best presentation I have seen summarizing real life experience of extending an existing brand to social media.

Erik Hom of Ticketmaster at Social Media Summit 08 in SF from sujam on Vimeo.

I work with Demo conference advising them on extending their brand to social media and you have seem my tweets, friendfeed, facebook fan page, youtube videos all from demofall!

Eriks talk summary:

Erik gave a very structured talk for all aspects of extending your brand.
What I liked best was that he was unassuming and shared his real experience of executing on it.

Ticketmaster partnered with ilike and added it to their site to create user engagement. They tried facebook apps, twitter etc with lot of applications built based on real business case.

Their facebook apps did not yield results. Twitter was successful as their affiliates adapted it and found it useful to get real time stats faster than their existing system.

Erik was very clear that his focus was all on real business goals. Users know and related to ticketmaster as a brand but come visit twice a year on average and his goal was to create social conversations to increase that to 4 times a year.

Social Conference Tracking of Mobilize08

2008-09-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

I have this new found hobby of tracking a conference live with all my gizmos while I listen, learn and network at a conference.

Last thurs I was at Gigaom's Mobilize08 at San Francisco. I did a bunch of videos with my flip camera to goto youtube and facebook, pictures from my iphone that I emailed to twitpic to go on twitter and on facebook mobile to goto facebook photos.

My friendfeed will give you a glimpse of my social conference tracking of the conference.

I went in at noon. The audience pulse speaks volumes!

The audience were business folks and lots of VCs all looking for the latest trends in mobile space, very different from the geek crowd in usual valley events.

I blogged the keynote of Richard Miner of Android live with a quick flip video and live blog post here.

My favorite was the promise of Social Media on Mobile - a panel with Chamath palihapitiya of facebook, John Faith of Myspace, and Evan Tana of Loopt and Noelia Amoedo of Hi5 which supports Opensocial.

If you are someone tracking the mobile space, you can see the difference in their approach from answers of Chamath Palihapitiya of Facebook and John Faith of Myspace. The moderator Sebastian worked very hard but ended up grouping facebook and myspace together often.

Here is a snippet, I have more of the videos on facebook. This is the panel that brought me to the conference. I am going to compile rest of the videos of this session and blog about the promise of Mobile and Social and Facebook's opportunity in detail later.

I got the pulse of the audience by talking to the launching startups, VCs, media folks and attendees.

Startup Plusmo has a cool sports App on the iphone, worth checking out!

Pete of Trapster has a speed trap on the Dash GPS. He showed his cool preview of trapster on the iphone and Blackberry.

The conference content was good, rooms were very packed. I met a whole bunch of cool people who were at demofall08 back at mobilize08 all hungry to find the latest mobile startups and trends.

Philip of Nekkei Electronics was back from demo to Mobilize08.

Tim Hay of Venturewire summarizes the conference

This one is from the last panel of the day!

The conference staff and volunteers were wonderful. I missed veggie food. Thank You! Jennifer Santana! gigaom volunteer who is a UC Berkeley student from Inveneo went out of her way to arrange for some for me

Overall a good conference!

Rich Miner at Mobilize08 keynote now - state of mobile space and Android open platform

2008-09-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

Blogging live from Mobilize08 now!
Rich Miner keynote on mobile industry landscape going on now!

My quick live summary:

He first set the stage of whats new, why industry is at a tipping point.
- iphone launch, Android announcement, new wave of openness.

Next he talks about his experience at Orange as a developer and Orange ventures and addresses the challenges:

app signing for each carrier, each network
jave programming is fragmented for app dveloper,
rev share deals for carriers is each different and time consuming for app
developers.
diff between native apps on phones vs java app of developer cannot talk to each other.Why mobile isimportent

Why is Mobile important?
3Bil mobile phone users worldwide, 1 Bil in US for Google to reach its vision.

Then he talks about Android Framework
- Linux Kernal
-Navtive apps can talk to third party app with seamless integration.
- power to developers - long tail of internet now brought to mobile space
- lessons for carriers to think differently to monetize using ads and micropayments and not build walls around content

I feel nostalgic from my first startup Coola experience as we built a device agnostic mobile middleware to connect apps on mobile to web services, we built on Palm Os and added CE client in 2000. Wish Android existed then!

The most interesting part of this talk is his simplicity at expressing the power of Android as the power of developers and the promise to make Android opensource eventually.

VLAB event - Lifestreaming panel by Kara Swisher with Friendfeed's Bret and Seesmic Loic Le Meur (updated)

2008-09-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

I plan to blog live and capture some video with my flip at tonight's event.
update: No wifi in Standford B-school for vlab, so no live blog, sorry!

Friendfeed and Seesmic in the same panel and with Kara Swisher as the moderator, must be fun!

I am friendfeed fan and user and I love the video conversation idea of Seesmic.

I did a post about feedwars in summer, as facebook has all my friends and feeds me update every day but within a private setting as compared to friendfeed. Now with facebook connect feeds, what is friendfeed's positioning? Their rooms concept is comparable to Seesmic's channels (they don't call them channels, what is it?)

Where are we going with livestreaming? Oh I wish my iphone would do Qik without a jailbreak!

Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal

Panelists
Bret Taylor, Co-founder, FriendFeed
Loic Le Meur, Founder, Seesmic
Jeff Clavier, Founder, Softtech VC
Leah Culver, Co-founder, Pownce

See you there!

Update: The panel was fun. Lot of discussion about the future of real time sharing on the web.
Bret Taylor of Friendfeed is so sincere and committed to build a fundamental long-term business.

Seesmic looks more interesting to me after hearing the entertaining and smart ceo Loic Le Muer who is super active on twitter.

Also the fact that Seesmic integrates into friendfeed now is cool..

I took lots of video, most turned out to be greater than 100MB which is youtube's limit. Kara cracked up her moderator whip and get everyone focused on their b-model, what they have learnt as entrepreneurs with her quick wit and kept us on our seats.

Blogging from Yahoo HackDay - Yahoo going Social and Developer Excitement (updated)

2008-09-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

I am here at Yahoo Sunnyvale headquarters for Openhack08.

Just saw the overview of how Yahoo is opening its platform.

Yahoo has executed on the promise on their CTO's talk from Web2.0 Expo in April. I did posts about SEG - social email graph back in Oct 07 and yahoo is heading in that direction now.

I am excited about Yahoo App with Opensocial, their new YML and the architecture of Yahoo OS looks good.

There is good developer energy, I see lot of known faces from the facebook world - Jia Shen of Rockyou, Waleed od Weekend Apps etc. Is Jia going to get us a full set of Yahoo Apps next? very cool

Next Yahoo Apps overview is starting, I'll get some video of it. Ciao.

Updated with a roundup video.

Yahoo Hackday08 Sep 12 2008 - Roundup from sujam on Vimeo.

The icing on the cake of DEMOFall - Entrepreneurs's spontaneous 6 seconds

2008-09-09T23:27:00.000-07:00

I have been lucky to be involved with the awesome DEMO Conference team so passionately focused on helping 72 new game changing startups launch the next wave of products for the past two days in San Diego at Demofall.

The icing on the cake was the spontaneous call by the demo entrepreneurs this evening, who decided to take 6 seconds each to share their appreciation for what demo meant to them and their launch experience at the closing demogods award ceremony dinner.

Here is a quick video which I streamed live onto Chris Shipley's Qik stream using her phone. It was a special moment shared by everyone at demofall tonight and I could not have captured it except for the Qik. Thank you Qik team!

Demo is truly about the entrepreneurs and run so professionally with such eye for detail. Its heart-warming to see the entrepreneurs sincere comments. Good luck to all of them, see you at the next DEMO.

Day 2 at demofall08 - updated w new videos

2008-09-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

Look at the audience excitement! More cool startups launching today.

Here is Katie of WSJ talking about Web2.0 companies she saw at demo today!

I personally like Heycosmo.com and Koollage from today's demos particularly.

Demo organizes the event such that each startup gets 6 minutes on stage and everyone gets to watch the demos with no distraction. Then they open the pavilions where the startups each have a booth. I'll checkout the companies there and write again.

demofall - walt mossberg vs kara swisher panel

2008-09-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

Blogging live from demofall08 - Funny, can't capture this totally, going to try and capture the key topics.

Kara Swisher vs Walt Mossberg on latest tech topics!
Kara- Chrome, why Mossberg gave a negative review?
Walt - no bookmark manager, etc features walt expects. Speed is not ready for prime time.
Google is worried that MS their competitor controls IE hence rush to launch Chrome.
Kara - Google is large and powerful, do they have to do the browser.
Walt - Google believes in webapps, so Google says think of this as a platform.
gmail has done well, still behinf y!mail, but docs slow. So you could think of Chrome as a web operating system.
Walt likes IE8 is good, both IE and Chrome have promise to compete with firefox.
Kara - Google becoming too powerful?
MS inOS, Apple in music, Google reaching that close to 70% almost a monopoly in advertising.
Kara thinks its like a choice between terminator vs Voldemart.

Social Network, facebook (OH How I disagree with this part of the talk !!!)
Kara - In two yrs facebook is not a bigdeal. She compares facebook to AOL.
Walt - social network as a destination site, will it exist in 2 yrs.
Kara - thinks its not going to be one destination site.
Walt thinks facebook can survive if they syndicate across the web. He likes Xobni.

Iphone

Walt articulates amazing adoption of iphone apps. iphone, Rim and Android. He addresses bandwidth - broadband speed in US.
Kara says US is 3rd world of broadband speed in the world.
Kara likes all smart phone touch pad, mobile browser in all.

Q&A now: Role of internet standards?

Q&A: Why are they at demofall and not TC50.
Kara- Getting leactures on journalism ethics by Arrington is like getting parenting tips from Britney spears. It is uneccessary to be rude and compete on the same dates, it doesn't help the entrepreneur.
Walt - added that demo is the best place to find new products and trends, it never occured to me to not come to demo ever.

Walt and Kara have summarized the spirit of all attendees here at demofall, with all excitement on the new products and entrepreneurs!

demofall day 1 live blog

2008-09-08T09:49:00.001-07:00

Chris had a creative colorful welcome by stick figures dancing which is part of demo tradition.
She gave a very eloquent summary of where the info tech world is moving. Web1.o as we all know it, web2.0 which is transactional web, social web, and now coming up the distributed web.

Trying to get part1 of her keynote video to youtube.

This is followed by cool demos.I am doing a tweet of startups I find exciting. I am trying to blog, tweet, check my iphone if a demoer has an app and also take video all at once, so you are better off by just watching my friendfeed or demos' official friendfeed

Cool demos - gloop - peer to peer photo sharing, ffwd=web meets tv, ioSAN fast storage for IT, invision.tv, bluelave technologies, paperless pens etc etc etc, all cool stuff.

demofall08 live coverage and startup nostalgia

2008-09-08T00:11:00.000-07:00

I am in San Diego for demofall08 and plan to blog live as best as I can.

Today the conference opened with a reception at 6pm. All through the day entrepreneurs were seen huddling in small groups charging the air with their upcoming launch excitements.

I had first come to Demofall2000 to launch my first startup Coola and it set the bar high for me about a product launch and induced in me the excitement for startup energy and for tracking new trends in technology.

I am up at this hour as I am too charged with my conversation with Walt Mossberg today. I had an amazing conversation about my past dreams for mobile space from my Coola experience, and his views about mobile devices today - iphone, android, windows mobile and Palm and my favorite topics - Dash, facebook and social media!

I am always a fan of Walt, but his clarity of thinking and ability to capture the history of tech industry and articulate where it can go is very refreshing.

What a difference I feel as an attendee instead of an excited, naive entrepreneur! I am curious about the attendees and will try to capture the real mood here and my learnings for the next two days!

Facebook Garage Palo Alto Live Blog of Fb Connect Edition

2008-09-03T19:26:00.000-07:00

I am listening to Dave Morin present Facebook Connect from Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto.

Julia Lam has done an awesome job with the logistics and facebook developers have loaded this place with amazing energy and support for facebook platform.

7pm: I. Dave Morin presents Facebook Connect

It can be summarized in 3 key points: Feed, Friends, Identity

a) Friends - Facebook has your real friends.
b) Social Context acts as a filter
You can learn more about your friend if you knew the same friend was on digg and had a certain preference.
c) Identity/Dynamic Privacy
People share on facebook because of the privacy setting. Dynamic privacy is all about user control. With dynamic privacy with fb connect users can take this comfort level to the web. When you change privacy setting on facebook, it will reflect on a fb connected web site.

Mike Vernal fb connect engineer presents an App "The Run Around"

Features to show in detail:

Connect users to your site
Option for user to publish an action to facebook.
Friend linking - finding friends on a site who are also my facebook friends.

1. Track state of user to connect user to your site

Facebook tracks three scenarios

a) user not logged into site, not logged into facebook, b) user connected to site not facebook and c) session renewal - Checks if user is using the site and allow a session for 20 min. This will ensure active user from a site to allow feeds to facebook.

2. Identifty - Profiles and Logged-In State
Fb connect give three choice to developers to select the most natural experience to connect user to their site.
a) Embed user info in site using fbml call eg Welcome b) Client library c) Server library

3. Feed - Sharing Content
Register set of template that corresponds to type of story to publish to profile.
Call Fb.Connect.ShowFeed Dialog.

4. Communication - Server FBML & Requests
Client and Server side is relevant
fb:serverfbml

5. Communication - Connect Request - connect friends already using that site to connect up their account. Again in three steps to respect user intent and user privacy.
Step 1: App developer can suggest connections
Step 2: Allow user to send invites
Step 3: Register post authorize URL and rotate it.

6. Dynamic Privacy - Putting user in control
ON facebook - give user control their privacy and relation with applications
On fb connect - user is in control on what info is shared or to opt-out
On your site/app - Give tool to developers. Today users can use friend list on facebook to manage different category of users. You can do the same with fb connect to allow different friendlist of users certain access.

7:58pm : Presentations starting now! signing off to take some videos now.

Facebook Change-thon Developer Event live now

2008-07-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

I am at the fb change-athon event which I (from Bay area fb meetup) helped organize it with Waleed of Weekend appds.

Its a developer nirvana! Breakfast, lunch and dinner served with a room full of fb developers sharing their questions, experience and tips to make the most of migrating to the new profile.

Waleed gave a cool presentation about his experience migrating his App to Facebook

He has posted his entire presentation on his blog selfdebugging.com

Waleed did an awesome job and it was a very interactive with lot of Q&A.

Here is part1 which is the basic outline of all the changes to focus on to migrate to the new profile. (I had done a post from fb Garage 08 with user's Q&A summarizing Facebook's presentation of the new profile launch here). This one is real developers with their real experience migrating to the new profile.

He did a part2 which walked through with real code on step by step guidance on migrating to new profile. The Q&A brought up new tips and techniques and some frustration of what didn't work for some developers. I'll update here after I get these two videos up.

Social Conversations takes grassroots shape at SocialMediaCamp SF today

2008-07-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

I am a believer of grassroots events which propel brands and cut through crap to help us learn what is really happening in any realm of tech space. This is an evolving movement affecting marketing and user generation for brands, similar to how open source impacted software industry.

I am old enough to have started in online marketing with the linkexchange in 95 to portal co-branded deals as traffic drivers to SEO and SEM thru the 2000s and now onto Social Conversations.

So I am here, blogging live from SocialMediaCampSF, I just was lucky to be able to join this amazing energy of grassroots entrepreneurial social media architects.

This is a BarCamp style event where the topic was created on the fly this morning by all attendees.
Chris Heur who founded Social Media Club has spearheaded it and am pleased to report its very well organized, theres lot of good presentations and wonderful hallway conversations.

What I mean by Social Conversation

Microblogs like twitter, friendfeed which makes social browsing bringing all our online activities together for a community of people to follow others and engage in a conversation by comments and a simple google style UI to add a "like" to link an item to our feed.

Ok, I am a huge friendfeed fan, but what I love is they have so many widgets and APIs to seamlessly adapt friendfeed into your online life, its such a natural way to have a social conversation, without stopping to think about it.

Summize was just bought by twitter.

Disqus allows integrating of your comments across the web, similar to mybloglog but for dicsussions.

Some presentations I am seeing and liking here today below includes another social conversation or social browsing tool.

1pm: I saw a demo of Yoona by their evangelist Kevin.

Yoona is a sponsor of this socialmediacamp and they showed a demo. Compared to friendfeed to show socialbrowsing with a Firefox plugin. I'll try it out and update my comments here. Its a young, promising looking startup.

1.30: David Cohn is presenting spot.us crowd funding for journalism.

It is kiva style community funded citizen journalism. This looks very very promising. Dave is so sincere in his presentation.
Summary - users fund $10 or so to consolidate funds to pay a journalist to get a story, all driven by local community. He has started with a grant from Knight Foundation and he is testing it in Bay Area first. He has checks and balance in place to provide validated real content and took good Q&A.

update: 3pm: Qik Live streaming by Qik's Rishi and Daniel

http://qik.com/video/130494

This is a product demo of QIk live video , nice. Daniel did a live Qik of the room and it was funny we could see our audience live as he moved his hands to talk at http://qik.com/appleuniverse. Good quality video.

Dash's GPS Industry's First Over-the-air Software Update

2008-06-30T11:17:00.001-07:00

Its an exciting day today at work at Dash Navigation and my customer's world of Dash Drivers as Dash kept its promise to improve software and add features with an over the air software update to its first Internet Connected GPS "Dash Express".

I am not kidding when I say, I know of customers taking day off to experience the GPS industry's first ever over-the-air wireless software update and try the new features of MyRoute, Search Along Route and improvements of FasterFind and improved performance and new UI.

EVERYONE is talking about it - Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, CrunchGear,VentureBeat, Crave, JK on the Run, NaviGadget, GPS Review and GPS Tracklog ...

As someone immersed in customer conversations at the grass roots level daily, I want to thank our customers who spoke to us and led us to prioritize and bring them just what they wanted next.

Thank You! You Rock!

The Feed Wars - Friendfeed vs Facebook

2008-06-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

I am someone who has consolidated all my net activity on facebook. Every worthwhile site has a facebook app - twitter, wordpress blog etc.

Then came friendfeed. I was introduced to it as a simple facebook app and I could integrate everything worthwhile outside of facebook world to follow friends and find feeds of their activities, interests.

Private vs Public Social Graph: The main difference is that friendfeed is a public world of everything thats open for all to see from the people I follow or the friends who follow me. Facebook is my private world of pictures and comments shared by my circle of friends thats not archived for the world to randomly read.

Seinfeld of the Internet: Friendfeed has become the first site to pull me out of facebook to read random twitter feeds and multimedia digged or bookmarked or commented or shared on flickr or youtube - like a reality tv show in short bursts . Someone called Friendfeed the Seinfeld of the Internet (ping me if you know who said that). But its more than TV, you have control on when you flip channels and read feeds of friends or surf through the tinyurls of links your friends want you to read or get engrossed in a discussion of comments (a lot by Robert Scoble) as if you crashed into a cocktail party discussion about a random topic.

The problem is many of my friends on facebook are on friendfeed. They use twitter to say where they are, facebook status doesn't do it for many. My real dilemma came when I had to decide on where I should post an album of pictures after my facebook meetup. Flickr makes it public for the world. Facebook pictures add a personal angle as my friends acknowledge they saw it by tagging it. Same for videos, youtube is my favorite and I have a channel and followers., but facebook video manages support for all size and formats of videos and friends can tag. I chose to defer the problem and continue to use both with sometimes redundant efforts and friendfeed app feed showing redundant feeds of pictures on flickr while my friends on facebook have already seen the pictures on my minfeed.

Enter Facebook's minifeed imports:

Today I noticed Facebook has a simple "import" option in mini-feeds on a profile. And guess what? We have the choice of importing actions from our public sites onto our minifeed.

One first look this could bring the friendfeed functionality inside facebook feeds, but since we all see what our social graphs show, I think friendfeed is entrenched and its hard to expect my friends to adopt the minifeed as their discussion community with comments. Facebook will have to do more to make this import of minifeed (wish it had a better name than that) to be visible to the world and not lost in my minifeed.

On a different note, this import of minifeed could be facebook's attempt to make the profile page an engaging piece of facebook and allow "profile surfing" as is available on bebo.

Choice is good, but this is not enough to take me away from facebook or friendfeed. This could be fun for us as users if friendfeed survives as a standalone company, else this becomes a smart move by facebook to build friendfeed functionality before Google or MS buys friendfeed.

What do you think?

DEMO Party SF Rocked

2008-06-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

DEMO Party in SF rocked! ok, it was crowded, very crowded with 600 people! Thanks to Ramu of Qik, I managed to capture live videostream of parts of the event in a single click from a N95.

Rafe Needleman shared his nostalgia of how he was involved in the early days in 89 with Steward Alsop and had a demo story about being a repeat demo alum.

Brian Solis you rock! No one can capture more meaningful pictures and get them up faster on flickr on time Brian lets his pictures narrate who was there. I took some pictures, but mostly it was a blur of lot of people excited about DEMO.

Many had been there many times, some PR folks had taken companies to DEMO, some newcomers wanted to go there soon! Its phenomenal on how Chris Shipley goes around the globe and spots the winner companies and provides the fertile launch pad to succeed.

The beauty of the party was many many interesting conversations. I caught some on video as DEMO Stories that I am collecting for DEMO's facebook fan page. Ping me if we you have a demo story, the goal is to share our Demo experience on facebook and start some interesting conversations, you never know, something good will come out of it!

DEMO Party tonite! Yay!

2008-06-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

I am working on a project called "DEMO Stories" collecting real DEMO conference experience of alums to help new entrepreneurs. This goes on the DEMO Facebook Fan page. We have video interviews of Woody Benson and Julie O'Grady and podcasts in a yodio file there.

I am a DEMO alum from 2000 and have since taken two companies to DEMO, one as VP Marketing in Fall07, and another as startup advisor in DEMO08 . I blogged about last year's DEMO party.

Tonite is the 2008 DEMO Alum party in San Francisco! 600 people have signed up. You can follow DEMOtweets or watchout for the Qik live video streaming I plan to do for you!

If you are at the party and have a DEMO story as an entrepreneur, VC or Corporate Development person, I'd love to chat with you.

We have couple interns in Boston and Bay Area and can always add more if you want to do some DEMO story interviews anywhere in the world.

See you tonite.

Facebook Platform is OpenSourced

2008-06-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

We all heard Dave Morin at the fb garage last week. Facebook has opened its platform as open source quietly in its own way here.

It is a lisenced under Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the addition of allowing web services.

What does this mean for the developers?

This is facebook's response to Google's opensocial?
Facebook has 400K developers while Opensocial has been expanding with an industry wide support with developers trying it but waiting for better than beta quality from Opensocial platform. This move by Facebook deters developers from moving to Opensocial because they can now contribute to the platform and improve it to their own choice.
Choice is good and this makes life interesting for developers. myspace is likely to adapt its platform to Facebook style to get fb developers faster.

What does this mean to the Social Media Wars?

One subtle point that goes un-noticed in any analysis I've seen so far is that the lisense has been expanded to include Web services. This is the most interesting piece. This is in line with Facebook's promise of Facebook Connect whereby they plan to open up the social graph to allow access from any web service. This is the bigger step in the Social Media war with Facebook Connect being Facebook's response to Google's FriendConnect and everyone comparing Facebook Connect to FriendFeed etc.

Where is Bebo in all this?

Over the weekend I played with Bebo and wanted to understand the comparison with Facebook platform to see if Bay Area Facebook Meetup would like to see a bebo demo about Facebook migration. Interesting enough I connected with my facebook friends on bebo and haven't heard back from anyone who logged back into bebo. Ok Dave McClure is busy with GSP East, what is everyone's excuse?

I wonder what is the impact for Bebo which has the same Facebook platform lisenced which is not opensourced, right after Bebo's aquisition by AOL. Is this another influence on Facebook's decision to opensource the platform?

What do you think as a developer? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Facebook Garage08 Platformaversary - complete Q&A as I heard it

2008-05-30T01:20:00.000-07:00

Yday evening, May 29th, 600 of us lined up in Palo Alto outside Aquaris Theater for the 1 year anniversary of facebook platform. Caitline O'Farrell pulled off an awesome garage seamlessly again this year!

Ben Ling of Facebook presented a review of the first year of the platform 400K developers from 160 countries in 1 year! And from the audience, its going on strong!

This was followed by a video of the 1 yr anniversary by facebook team here

New Facebook Profile Page

The bulk of the evening was spent, facebook style on really sharing their excitement for the new profile page changes planned and getting feedback from users and listening to them.

Dave Morin gave a presentation about the new profile page. Youtube will not allow large videos and restricts formats, here is the video on facebook!

My Summary:

The new profile page is going to be a totally different look and feel with tabs for everything.
It takes the base philosoply of facebook treating apps as keeping the platform fresh and allows users engagement with apps to produce new content on their profile.
A new feeds item is going to allow feed notification of profile items to show what a user's friends are upto beyond the current news feed. Feels like a comparison to friendfeed, but for everything facebook only, including apps on facebook. This is the coolest feature!
Apps don't have to be installed and this means work for the developer with opportunity to win with engaging apps as each engagement can showcase content on the profile

Q&A by facebook team about Profile Page and its impact on developers and users

The entire platform team was there and listened and answered questions. I thought I got it when I saw the presentation and demo, but the audience had real good questions. I've tried to capture all Q&A, pl ping me if something is amiss!

Q. Waleed started the first question about box profile. Is the box like the canvas page?
Yes but no flash auto play allowed in the box (waleed help fix this, there was more to your q&a)

Q. Jesse Stay asked: Can we comment on the feeds we see in a friends' profile.
No.
My comments: I've refrained from an analysis and to present the Q&A as I saw it for the benefit of fb fans everywhere who couldn't join us. However, this question brings about the general sentiment that users are looking at this new feed as similar to friendfeed. I think commenting on a friend's profile would be cool. We could always do so with a wall post, so why not allow it in context of each feed item? - imho.

Q. Any limits to number of tabs?
6 tabs UI wise is the limit. Additional apps will be added to a drop down menu. User will have the option to re-order the tabs to their choice.

Q.Any change to App directory?
None.

Q. What explicit integration points does app developer has without asking user for explicit permission?
Apps can publish stories. User needs to give permission to add app to profile box and Tabs.

Q. Support for apps developed with Flash in feed dialog?
Adding flash info to short stories is coming.
Feed form - is in the works, not yet ready. A flash developer can use FBJX bridge and do feed forms for now.

Q.Any plans to redesign profile on iphone?
Not at this time

Q. Today wall attachments allow us to give free gifts (or other app interaction) to a user who has not added an apps from a user who has added the app. Will this change?
Yes, it will work only for combination of users who both have the app.

Q.Where will facebook ads be in the new profile?
TBD

Q. Aggregate of feeds?
Ari Steinberg came up specially to explain the profile and news feeds. (I am missing something here, my don't have much, pl help if you heard this question)

Q. Tabs limited to Canvas URL, can there be different URL from server for rest of the App action? (Missed this one too)

Q.How will pages, groups be displayed in the new profile page?
They will fit in the info tab. Groups and Page layout will be made to match the new profile layout later. Way to add apps to pages remains the same.

Q. (my Question) How much work is it for a developer an average app to migrate to the new profile page? What happens if they did no change to an App?
The new profile offers lot of opportunities for the developer to create content thats part of the new profile for engaging apps. If you do nothing canvas page will remain the same, you app will be bucketed into the tab for user to decide if they want to keep it, and you'll lose all other benefits of user decision points to create visibility in their profile page.
(I want to hear from real developers who have let behind first few apps and moved on to newer fb apps on their actual experience on this one)

Q. Can one app add to a user's profile box, boxes, info section, tab etc.?
Profile box and boxes are multually exclusive, rest all can be added with user's permission.

Q. Whats new with feeds, we have mini feeds and news feed now, is it totally different, is mini feed gone in the new profile?

mini feed is old and won't exist in new profile.
Profile feed is the narrative of the owner of the profile. It includes wall and apps inside it.
News feed will show show a user's friends are doing.
Publisher is an upgraded wall attachment and goes to profile feed by user.

Q.Will platform allow developer to create your app tab?
yes

Q. What is the roll-out schedule?
Developers should start getting their apps ready for the new profile page. Users will have a beta opt-in period to try the new profile and give feedback. Then old profile will be eventually discontinued and everyone will be rolled into new profile

Q. Because of App add removal, does this mean an app developer can email users?
Yes, only with user's permission. It will be another option to ask for user permission by app.

Q. Last Question by Dave McClure - When can 3rd party Apps message into the news feed of a user who has not installed the app?
It is already happening now.

After the Q&A we went to the happy hour at Blue Chalk cafe!

Bay Area facebook Meetup folks: Is there any interest in covering this topic in our upcoming meetup? Just post on our fan page wall here

Also, help me clean any omissions or inaccuracies in the Q&A. And do try the sandbox of the new profile here http://www.new.facebook.com/

TIECON08 - Mike Speiser's keynote on startup execution

2008-05-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

I am blogging live from TIECON08 in Santa Clara listening to Mike Speiser

I admire Mike Speiser because I relate to his approach of defining the startup process with an Engg approach. I heard him from a TIECON07 panel last year as an entrepreneur and am amazed that now as a a VC, he has the same advice, with the same passion and clarity.

He founded Bix, raised $7M, spent $700 when he sold to Yahoo, now he is joining Sutter Hill Ventures.

I am going to upload a video of part of his presentation, will do better justice to his passionate advice for entrepreneurs! (will update here once it is ready)

Update: Mike's presentation(pdf) with his notes are at his blog here.

My summary: I've taken 3 key points and as I sit listening to Mike, I remember many entrepreneurs I know who are in early stages building out their startup either from my blog readers or my mentorees from MIT VMS program and everyone of his advice is so true and profound.

1. Iterate, Iterate and find your real product

This is not about speed but about finding the real product-market match that creates revenues. He was making a subtle reference to this other point. The key is not about building technology for the sake of technology or a product thats productizing of your technology by a product manager, but finding a product that generates real revenues with market validation for it.

2. Do not do marketing before your product is ready

As a marketing person and entrepreneur, I find the need to add a clarification here.

Marketing for new entrepreneurs, especially engineers includes everything other than engineering design and development.

I think Mike refers to spending time/focus/money to reach users/customers with outbound marketing efforts like a launch event, PR, speaking engagements, conference exhibits etc.

This does not mean you build a product in vacuum, but you as the entrepreneur need to spend time understanding your customer, reaching them and listening to their feedback to adapt your product to iterate to what really generates money directly or scaling excitement of consumers that can be monetized.

This implies for Web businesses (or facebook app based businesses) that you need to build metrics by which you understand your real user behavior and you have to be super aggressive in reaching variety of customers who would pay.

You iterate here as much as the product and be ready for the chaos of change and hire the early team that can survive, appreciate your approach and help you succeed in adapting to customers.

3. Recruit the best VC

This is another gem of wisdom here. Focus on building product, finding market validation that scales, then go find the best VC.

Do not select a VC only based on giving out less equity but find the best VC who can help you scale your business, aligned with your long-term vision.

Startup energy and entrepreneurship in local geek events - check techcocktail and startupriot

2008-04-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Its been my dream see all local entrepreneurs, angels and startup geeks all over the country connected without losing their local flavors to demystify the startup process for new entrepreneurs!

I came across the Atlanta yenta when I connected with Sanjay Parekh who started Startup Drinks as a world-wide phenomenon from Atlanta, an energetic entrepreneur and fellow angel investor. Sanjay is head down focused on organizing StartupRiot, a cool one day event with 70 entrepreneurs presenting in Altanta on May 19th 2008.

Today I located the Chicago Yenta, and the search process made my day!

During the search I learned that we in the valley tend to rely on upcoming.org for our events, events seem to find me on Facebook, and from my east coast past and as an organizer of the Bay Area Facebook Meetup, I tend to lookup meetup.com for every special interest group.

Chicago is ahead of everyone in sharing events. Techcocktail is on twitter. Techcocktail is the first to bring total transparency and sharing the excitement of the conference planning live on twitter, not just during the event for live micro-blogging.

I found Jason Rexilius from an old ChicagoBarcamp wiki and he led me to find out about Techcocktail conference and follow up mixer event. There is a huge Techcocktail conference coming up on May 29th in Chicago, I am sure its worth the drive or flying to get to it if you can make it.

Techcocktail is a mixer event started by Chicago locals Frank Gruber of SOMEWHAT FRANK blog and SOMEWHAT FRANK TV and Eric Olson, founder of Feedburner and blogger at Olson’s Observations.

All of you in Boston, DC, Chicago and Denver, look for Techcocktail in your local area Its amazing startup energy! Tom Sherman maintains a calendar of events in Chicago at Windy Bits ha, local thinking in the name of the windy city!

Footnote: I cannot shake this thought out of my head after Web2.0 Expo, after hearing AOL, Y! and everyone announce open APIs.

Are we getting ready for the next phase of the Web and like Open source movement changed the face of software development, the barcamps, and techcocktails and startup dinners are scaling up the existing SuperHappyDevhouses, developer garages and Code-a-thons to build a huge wave of localized developer and geek networks to create an interwoven web with a new layer of product and services not even imaginable today!

Anyone there who shares the same vision, I'd love to hear from you!

Web2.0 Expo Roundup -my own video interview collection

2008-04-28T07:03:00.000-07:00

I have covered the keynotes with blogging here ! The main theme was opening of their platforms from Y! Mozilla Firefox for mobile and AOL opening up AIM. AOL is no the most open platform on the web and if you are a developer or entrepreneur you cannot miss it.

Sun's Jonathan shared his vision for Sun and Marc Andresson for Ning. Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs was the most entertaining funny session buried with smart insights in his keynote.

Here is a roundup I did talking to people as I walked the Expo hall. Of course, I carried my Dash Express GPS and people shared their excitement for it!

Watch this to hear web2.0 feedback from Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve jobs, Naveed Anwar, Director AOL Developers Platform and many more users.

At web2.0 Expo SF Keynote Jonathan Schwartz of Sun in conversation with Tim O'Reilly

2008-04-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

I am blogging live from Web2.0 Expo SF today!

Its interesting how we can see how many people are registered for each event on crowdwine, ahead of the actual event. Think of connecting with like-minded people at a conference!

Jennifer Pahlka (CMP) and Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) are setting the stage with details on where we can provide feedback libe on twitter etc.

A Conversation with Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) is happening now!
294 attendees signed up ahead of time, 1000+ are in the room.

I am taking video of part of the presentation, will upload and youtube and link here, I can do better justice to this conversation.

They are talking about Sun using blogs, MySQL purchase, Greening of Data infrastructure (eg Niagara platform which went to $1B run rate in 18mo) .... Jonathan is smart and knows where is taking Sun and has a clear pulse of where the market is going and is confident to influence it by blogging and creating a context where other people can think the way he wants the world to be.

Tim wants us to twitter @timoreilly your questions right now!

Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh talks about opening Yahoo at Web2.0 Expo SF

2008-04-24T21:48:00.001-07:00

It was a good vision and a good presentation. Yahoo announced opening up Search Monkey for Developers as the first step.

I had blogged last Oct about my dream for the Social Email Graph (SEG) and particularly how its a low hanging fruit for Yahoo!

Wow! Yahoo can lead the market to open up search and email, won't that be cool!

What MySpace Knows by Steve Pearman (MySpace)

2008-04-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 Expo has these 5 minute segments on "What a company knows". I am live blogging the Myspace 5 min segment.

Steve Pearman started as a Product Manager then head of Products and now SVP of Product Strategy at Myspace. He shared stats on scale of Myspace.

Steve was personable and very sincere and did justice to his 5 minutes. Looks like Myspace is serious about listening to users and managing spam, we need to watch out!

Summary:
Privacy, Spam controlled from developers and users are the major user concerns.
On what lessons learned from community building on myspace:

Vibrant communities allow for self expression
Operating community is difficult and more difficult by scale
Live and die by goodwill and participation of community, never as good as them.
Listen to community. How?
Community tells you indirectly - 10Bil structured public data, millions of comments, directly users tell Tom.
Major changes, Tom posts blog and gets user feedback.
Check your ego at the door.