March 2007

Microsoft is planning a Small Business Summit from March 19th – March 23rd. What’s great is most of the sessions are offered live, free, and online. They have some great speakers lined up including Julie Clark and Guy Kawasaki.

Plus there are all kinds of demos and presentations you can watch to extend your Microsoft platform with the obvious emphasis of Microsoft small business tools.

Granted, it’s no SxSw – but it’s free :)

Tags: Microsoft, Small Business Summit

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Twitter is an increasingly popular web service that allows people to track what other people are doing. Everyone seems to be talking about it and I’ve read of many people adopting it. I, on the other hand, visited the site for the first time today – not to sign up mind you, just to snag the logo for this post.

So why hasn’t an early adopter like myself adopted such a popular service? Well – I don’t see much value in a personal push system of letting everyone know what I am doing. Frankly, I don’t want everyone to know what I am doing.

Beyond that it seems to be creating a lot of noise that I really just don’t care about. If you hang out at the twitter home page and refresh every 30 seconds or so you will see exactly what I mean. Check out these screens

Granted, I don’t know these people but if I did I still don’t think I’d care. If I want to know what someone is doing, I’ll call them or send them a text message. And vice versa if they want to know what I am doing. It should be a pull system – not push.

Criticisms aside, there is a heap of potential for a service like this in the corporate world. We’ve seen RSS rise as an information delivery mechanism that greatly complements e-mail and, in my opinion, will help to create more value to e-mail.

Twitter, or a like-minded service, and the value it can add to calendar/appointment/notification services is analagous to the complementary relationship between RSS and e-mail. For instance instead of a co-worker calling me, IM’ing me, checking my shared calendar, or walking over to my desk – they can simply check my internal twitter to see that I had to run to the post office.

In this sense the push system provides a clear, effective, and efficient message. I don’t have to notify my coworkers I am stepping out of the office – and they don’t have to try several different avenues to find out what I am doing.

Also, in a corporate environment the noise produced by such a service will inherently be reduced. There won’t be messages like ‘i like random characters’ or ‘bite my tounge… bite my tounge’. Messages will be more clear and concise, but more importantly helpful and effective – like ‘ran to the post office’ or ‘out to lunch brb’.

It almost makes me want to create a copycat platform to target the enterprise. Ideas, ideas, ideas….

Tags: twitter

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Let the search war begin. If you use the internet daily it is easy to realize search is in its infancy. If you haven’t yet become a search hacker like myself – the search experience is not that great. Sure, Google is fast and reliable but if it takes you 10 minutes to find what you are looking for – it’s not that efficient.

This is why there is plenty of room for new search engines with differential aspects like niche search (Google Coop), local search, or completely changing how a user interacts with search.

Enter Ask City Search, a new service from Ask that mashes search and maps. So far I have been very impressed with this implementation – which I’m sure Google will copycat very soon.

I’ve written briefly on Ask.com’s search innovations before but their recent city search launch warrants another post.

So, let’s say I want to find coffee shops near my house. Okay, so I draw a circle around my neighborhood and search within that circle – it’s quite simple.

Now, I can save my search and share it with my fellow Beaverdale coffee lovers. Granted, it’s not social network type of sharing. It’s the old fashioned email-a-link sharing, but it’s effective.

I would love to see more innovations in search – and it looks like Ask is up to the challenge.

Check out Ask City Search.

Tags: Search, Ask City Search, Ask

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TJ wrote about Virb yesterday so I will not go into the details about what this service is. I’m not a ‘social networker’ persay – never done the MySpace/Facebook thing.

But I wanted to check this out to see how they presented the data and how they mashed up other social networks into their package. In doing this I found a campaign Virb is launching to get people to switch camps.

“Ok. So you want to leave Myspace, but you want to do it in style.” Well if you do want to, check out their Leave My Space site.

After briefly viewing the comments it doesn’t appear the campaign is going great. It seems to me the switching costs are too high in the social networking area. The costs are the friends and data you have accumulated. My guess – Virb will peak very soon and then sent to the web 2.0 graveyard.

Tags: Virb

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