Twhirl and Alert Thingy are both well built little apps that are getting a lot of attention lately, but neither of them have rethought the way we need to communicate at all.  With Twitter in the picture, we can no longer use the same paradigms from email, RSS, or even IM.  Twitter is omni-directional, mobile, time-sensitive, and overwhelming in quantity.  Voices are rising louder and louder complaining about how they are drowning in twitter messages, and so far applications have only been concerned with enabling users to get even more content, not less.  Every day I realize the harsh reality that I cannot keep track of the entire Internet, and I quite literally dream of a service that would lower the signal to noise ratio.  Here’s where everyone (including Twitter) is missing the mark: Read the rest of this entry »

In yesterday’s State of the Twitter update, Biz Stone mentioned some statistics they’ve been gathering regarding relationship distribution. Half of twitter users follow and are followed by about 10 people, and only 10% have more than 80 followers and follow more than 70. This is a bit of a wakeup call for me to realize just how few tweeps use the service like I do, which is naturally the perspective I use when coming up with cool things to do with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Stalled for want of a suitable icon, I just now sent out the first round of invites to test the pre-release version of Liberatr.  I feel like I’m hyping this up way more than it should be (there’s currently less than 10 people who have used this application ever), but I’d prefer not being overwhelmed if Dave and I royally screwed something up.  Not that something like that would ever happen.  =]

With that said, I’m really confident that we’re providing something empowering to give users the control of their data that they deserve.  I’ve been able to learn and explore and research and play so much since the inception of Liberatr last summer that just backing up metadata seems like only a tiny puzzle piece of what this application can become, but the data architecture that Dave established with Liberatr is the critical foundation to build on for Technarium’s future.

This is just the first baby step.  But we still have to nail it.

TechCrunch owned Inviteshare is a great concept to help spread invites, but it does nothing to make the overall invite process simpler or help me get invites to the people I want to have them the most.  Here’s a quick list of features that would make my life easier:

• Why the crap isn’t this a social network?

  Rather than trusting the participation of strangers to determine who gets my next invite, I want to make sure my network of friends has access first.  Yes, this will make the service less fair since invites will be distributed through the popular cliques first.  But since those are the people I’ll want to use these new services with anyway, the overall experience to actually experience what the site is like will be more realistic, which means better feedback for the companies involved.

• Speaking of social networks, just make it work with Facebook

  My friend network is already in Facebook, so don’t make me create another one.  Facebook also has existing infrastructure to make it easy to see what betas are becoming popular among your friends. 

• Help me track what I’m participating in

  I have a folder in Outlook dedicated to confirmation emails for services I’ve signed up for, which is where I currently start to see which websites to visit to check what I currently may or may not still have invites to.  When I first sign up for something, I’d love to be able to tell InviteShare how many invites I’m given so I only have to scan one page to see what’s in my account.

• Blog widgets

  Admit it, twittering that you have invites to the latest exclusive beta du jour is a status symbol.  Why not enable users to show off what they have available?  One-click invite requesting through the widgets adds value for both blogger and reader as well since it would mark the end of combing through and decoding scrambled email addresses left in comments.

• Make sending invites easier

  Going through InviteShare actually adds a layer of complexity to the invite distribution process since all email addresses are displayed as images.  This is important to prevent harvesting by spammers, but I want to define a list of people I trust to at least have plain text or click to copy access to my email address.  If you had many friends with emails like sh4v3nw00ki3@obnoxiousdomain.com, you’d appreciate this functionality, too.

• RSS feeds for the tumbleloggers

  InviteShare already has big, pretty logos for all the companies in the service…put this in a feed that updates every time I join a new beta and I would be a happy girl indeed.

• Ratings and reviews

  Is the beta you’re interested in worthy of all the attention it’s getting, or is it just a slow news day?  Let users rate the services to help determine if it’s even worth their time to get on the list.

• Get widespread buy-in

  Once companies see how much of a value add these social features are to the invite process, it would be an easy sell to establish partnerships to integrate the process even further.  This could be accomplished without too much pain by extending the existing invite code system (note: this is where someone like Dave steps in to figure out the necessary APIs and architecture).

If InviteShare (or whoever takes this free advice) implements any of this functionality, they’ll be sitting on a marketing opportunity better than gold.  And I damn well better have an invite to the beta.

In preparation for our first product launch, I had originally installed Automattic’s new forum package called bbPress. I’ve always been a forum brat and I like seeing support / suggestions out in the open, so I figured something that integrated in with the Wordpress user system would be a nice fit. I was overall happy with that choice until tonight when I clicked Twitter’s help link and noticed that the bulk of their support system had moved to Get Satisfaction, a site that “provides people-powered customer service for just about everything.” I had been following the site’s progress for some time up until launch, but then found I wasn’t having problems with any of the services I use and lost track of them for several months. Tonight I was pleasantly surprised to find flourishing communities not only for Twitter, but also Facebook, Tumblr, Google, Apple, Pownce, and wide mix of both rising and established companies. Then I asked myself…why should Technarium resonate all alone? What are the benefits of joining the Get Satisfaction movement?

Exposure on Get Satisfaction is a marketing opportunity in itself
As much as I would love to build a flourishing user and support community who lives on this site, it’s hard for a little guy to get started while being that self-contained. Using Get Satisfaction instead of a hosted forum creates an ad-hoc partnership with a fast growing community of folks who have proven that they love fun applications and participating in a knowledge base. Each user’s tumblelog-inspired dashboard creates a golden opportunity to showcase your real product (for better or worse) to an even wider audience.

I’m a big fan of Rubyred Labs
After my experiences with these guys during the brief life of Valleyschwag, it was easy to see that these guys understood customer support. They proved that for all but spaceships and FDA regulated products, it’s better to be open and honest than miss a ton of great marketing opportunities by only owning up to perfection or catastrophe. Anything they believe in is worth a fair shot in my book.

Theming bbPress to look like the site was going to be a pain in the ass
Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m too lazy at the moment to learn how to make a bbPress theme. Get Satisfaction saves the day with easy to embed widgets and RSS feeds for just about everything.

Considering these points, the decision to test the waters of THE Web 2.0 support site was an easy one to make. I would still love to find an application for bbPress (forum brat, remember?), but right now Satisfaction is a force more worth taking advantage of.