Team Power and F8 Virality at Facebook Meetup June2010

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)

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 -

1. shopping with friends,
2. customer reviews from trusted social graph that influences purchase,
3. 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
4. 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!

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

"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!