Congratulation to Pursway (formerly Datanetis) and Elery Pfeffer
A little more than a year ago I wrote here about Datanetis, a cool company and technology that helps its customers to identify influencers within their customers database.
Datanetis just got funded with a $6 million Series A investment from Battery Ventures, and changed its name to Pursway. It also seems like there are new large customers on board.
Elery is a good friend and I’m very happy for him and his team.
Here is the press release.
Congratulation!
#140conf Boston meetup: real-time web – observations and insights
I had the pleasure of participating in #140conf Boston Meetup this evening.
Jeff Pulver was very inspiring showing enthusiasm, about the “state of now”, twitter, and how the real-time web empowers each and every one of us to make a real change in our world.
I listened to Adam Wallace (@adwal) and Brian Simpson (@Bsimi) from the Roger Smith Hotel telling other businesses that “it is ok not to be perfect”. The brand is not measured by not making any mistake, but by how it reacts to shortfalls. The key takeaway here is that don’t let the fear of bad criticisms to stop you from building your brand’s web presence. The real-time web is the best new tool for listening and responding in timely manner to customers’ incidents as they develop. This tool provides a human voice to the company.
I heard from Kerry Israel (@kerryisrael) about how her re-tweets become the bridge between fans, having similar entertaining experiences, provided by the American Repertory Theater (americanrep). The real-time web people are becoming the glue, the hyper-channels, and the connectors for the rest of the community members.
I listened to a very moving presentation by Alicia Staley (@stales), 3 times cancer survivor, about her experience comparing the pre-internet and twitter era to nowadays. The real-time web helps you not to feel a lone. Not because you have a lot of friends, or followers but because you’ll find support from others in similar situation. It is helpful and rewarding to share both the good and bad experiences with other people. Twitter is also the best place to post a question when no one in your local network has any idea how to solve it, including your physician.
Finally, I had a very interesting conversation with Will Eisner (willboston) from awareness a B2B SAAS offering for building online communities. The real-time web sure plays a big role in this task. I hope to learn more about this field and product in the near future.
It was an interesting evening (at some point more interesting than anyone expected) and I hope to attend the 2 days big event in NYC around April time. Go real!
10 reasons for still buying regular books
10 reasons for still buying good old books even after buying eReader:
- If it does not come in a digital format
- For getting it signed by the author
- To read during take-off and lending
- For beach reading – I don’t want any sand on my Kindle
- Buying it for a present
- If it is a picture book
- If it is a classic, like Moby-Dick
- For children under 6 years old
- If you are on a trip and forgot your eReader
- After visiting one of the indie book store
Any more? Do you think that some of these will change? Will some of these cases, for buying the good old book, shape the future of the publishing market?
picture credit: austinevan
Nook vs. Kindle via Twitter Sentiment
TwitterSentiment – this sentiment analysis tool provides interesting information using Twitter status updates. Since it seems like this holiday season’s most desired gadget was one eReader or another I decided to ask TS about the overall sentiments for B&N Nook and Amazon Kindle. I can see the potential usefulness for this type of application.
B&N Nook – is there a problem? To be fair, it is a small set of data, now.
Kindle – 53% Positive, 47% Negative (here we have a larger set of data)
Also it will be interesting to monitor Apple Tablet (all green) and its rumored name iSlate (in the red). There is really not enough data at the moment though.
Twitter Sentiment and a like has the potential for helping companies to test the water before coming up with new product name, during product launch, and after product adoption. TS also provide a graph view of the data so you can examine it over different time frames. TweetFeel a similar application type shows this data in real-time with aggregation.
Any more ideas for how to use it?
Btw, I still love my Kindle.
How to: watch Avatar and enjoy it
Last week I went to see Avatar. I noticed that there are different reactions to this movie, so I decided to help the few people that did not like it to reconsider. I also like to help the minority that did not see it yet but could miss enjoying it due to having the wrong expectations or focus.
The basics:
- Go for the 3D option or consider 3D IMAX theatre. I saw it in 3D and it was just great. It felt more live and in a movie that the major focus is on treating your visual senses 3D is the frosting on the cake. I did not get any headache or noseache from the glasses, even after 2 hours and 40 minutes.
- Popcorn and large soda
- A couple of good like minded friends (action, sci fi, geeky taste)
Setting the right expectations
The Story
The Avatar story is compelling. It is loaded with all the familiar elements including love/jealousy , good/bad, power/mind, corporate and greed vs. nature and science, brutality vs. diplomacy, character transformation and maturity, the chosen one, nature harmony, you name it. The way I saw it is that the story was just an excuse to move the camera from one vivid scenery to another.
The setup
The movie is beautiful, the people are beautiful, the Na’vi people are elegant and charming, the Pandora planet is one exotic experience that is challenging our color spectrum absorption skills to the max. The fluorescent colors of the land, water, flora and fauna along with the wild landscape that defies gravity stayed with me long after the movie was done. Even few days after,I wanted more. Addictive?
Sigourney
I longed for Ripley from the Aliens series. Sigourney Weaver was there but her leadership, the “I’ve seen it all”, condescending, some time depressed, but most of all “the women of steel and wisdom” act was not there. The cigarette smoking did not cut it for me. I don’t blame her for this. The story did not allow it. The story was not centered around Dr. Grace Augustine (her part) this time. It does not take away from this movie though, I’m just setting the right expectations for the people that noticed her name on the cast list before going to the movie. In a way it was the second Aliens when Ripley’s true leadership manifested, so who knows, maybe it will still happen in the sequel (resurrection is not out of Hollywood realm of possibilities).
Summary
Avatar is a beautiful creation and I don’t care about his creator’s ego, language or history. In my mind it does take the movie industry to a new level. So, when you go and see it make sure that you focus on the right elements of this media this time. Go!
Wishing you a focused 2010
My wish for you for the coming year is the same one I wish myself.
I wish us many focused hours, days, weeks, and months.
Why focused?
For me, at work, there is nothing that feels better than leaving the office after having a focused day or week. I enjoy having this sense of accomplishment seeing the tasks lists dwindling down or after solving a tough problem that was risking the current project schedule or customer success. The opposite, having an unfocused day, takes away so much energy thinking about what that is still left hanging.
Why now?
As soon as we login to the laptop or any other smart device we are at beginning of a constant struggle. An endless cross roads expends from that point on. Even while waiting, watching the task bar expends from left to right while the OS loads application after application to memory, already new communication channels opens up and start streaming bytes charged with high potential energy for driving your next few minutes, or hours away from the original purpose that motivated you to turn the device on in the first place. Outlook, IM, Twitter desktop client, Firefox with open Gmail, Google Wave, Facebook and WordPress tabs to name a few. There is a race for your attention and every program pushes itself in front of the other.
It is so easy to notice, and so hard to resist not to react to, the recent Facebook notification, new Google wave, email from SlideShare or YouTube channel with a bunch of links, follow the current Trending Topic, @reply or IM @friend, reply immediately to that email you were just CCed on with a question that you so know the answer to, but others can handled that as well (and maybe this is their job).
Multi-tasking, enabled by the operating system, along with social media, enabled by the digital multi-media, can create this constant notion of not being on the right thread at any time. And that’s not even includes doing your work. Some times participating in the real-time search race feels more like “what am I’m missing now?” instead of “what is happening right now?”. The truth is that “now” happens all the time.
We some times have this tendency to follow the Shortest job next scheduling algorithm at work. Although this algorithm is great at “minimizing the average amount of time each task has to wait until its execution is complete” it could also lead to tasks starvation (i.e. never getting to address it). It could also lead to developing the habit of replacing short with easy or fun.
Focused does not mean a single goal
When I say that I’m wishing all of you to have a focused year I don’t mean to focus necessarily on one goal only . It could be ideal to be laser focused on a single goal but it could almost be too ambitious of an objective or even an out of balance way of living, it could kill your health and relationships. You may choose to focus on multiple goals this year, and it is a big miss not to participate in the social media party, the key is to be focused at the current task at hand. So, when you work on that paper, problem, long email, and etc, it is OK to be fully present with your eyes, ears, mind and mouse cursor on the current thread. It is OK to tune out for a bit.
Some ideas for keeping your focus on a single task at the time
- Go to Services in Windows and set any application’s with disruption potential “Start-up Type” option to auto.
- Define priority policy attribute and categorize emails by it – immediate response, can wait, to do, follow-up. Keep it simple so it will not take a lot of your time implementing it. There are lots of email handling tips out there just Google “email management tips” and you’ll find a ton of info – just don’t spend too much time reading about it:)
- Break large tasks to manageable goals – this helps with both motivation and focus.
- Treat yourself to some social media action after the task is completed.
- More suggestions here via Delicious
Before leaving this blog post
And before leaving, I would like to share with you this very insightful phrase that I heard somewhere and it stuck deeply in my mind:
“What you focus on expands”
Happy Holidays and have a great focused year.
Picture credit emmaphotos
lazyfeed – new mosaic interface for driving fresh blogs content in real-time
I like lazyfeed! I’ve been using it for few months now and I find it far better than any other real-time content streaming tool. I read a lot of blogs and I like to discover new blogs and bloggers, lazyfeed delivers diversify content fast, and with less effort than the rest. Recently, lazyfeed made some significant improvements to the interface. Now it is even easier and faster to read new blog posts.
From the user stand point lazyfeed delivers new blog posts about pre-selected topics, as they publish. The user adds new topics (filters) and lazyfeed does the rest, finding relevant blog posts . Done! There is a lot going on behind the scene but from the user point of view, new and relevant content gets refreshed continuously, effortlessly!
This is lazyfeed’s second attempt for coming up with the user interface that aims at bringing more laziness (ease) to fresh blogs’ content deliverability. I think that the mosaic metaphor works well in this case. The UI is very intuitive, requires far less scrolling and the Treadmill feature does it job propagating the more active topics to the top. Other than that the site is quite minimalistic. I’m not sure if going forward it will stay this way, but for now, the simple focused look and feel make it very easy for newcomers.
More lazy
Minimalistic or not there are few things that I’d like to see in following releases:
- The feedback button on the side – so I can submit my suggestion there:)
- The option to pause the flow for a single topic (square) and turn the Treadmill off (maybe to pin a square and doc it to the top). Sometimes it is working too fast.
- More control over the topic filters:
- Combining tags operations – and, or, hierarchical (like book and review)
- Exclusion of tags – not
- Favorites or a button for saving on delicious
- Engagement indicators (hints) – hot trending topic, comments, reactions
- Some blog posts are timeless others may be only relevant in the next couple of hours or days. These two types of content requires two different laziness methods. It is the way that the users handles this content that hint on the difference. If a user share it on twitter or facebook the content is mostly transient but if the reader bookmarks the link (saving it as a reference for later) there is a chance that it has longer lasting value.
- The short term relevant content should be served as soon as possible and be rotated quickly. I see it, I read some or all of it and I move on to the next one.
- The long lasting content should be served as soon as possible too but it should be also possible to schedule reading it for later. I know it is great content, I don’t want to loose it but I can’t read it at this very moment. It is the kind of content that I will visit again more than once. I will probably check to see if others left comments and added to the discussion. For example think about very technical blog post – maybe about software. To be very lazy – I like lazyfeed to tell me that there are new comments/reactions on this great blog post that I marked somehow.
- I think that lazyfeed feels a little lonely and is missing some social features. What that make Google Reader great (work) is the content sharing feature. I see some places where crowd-sourcing can contribute to the way lazyfeed filters and delivers new blog posts. Maybe via sharing tags (playlists), sharing blog post within the lazyfeed community.
I like the disciplined way that lazyfeed choose for adding new features so far. Prioritizing simplicity, ease of use and quality over functionality. So, if any one of the suggestion above break this practice please ignore it.
Summary
There are growing number of products that aim at delivering real-time content. lazyfeed focused on ease and simplicity. Pick some topics of interest, sit back and let lazyfeed to do the hard work for you, finding and presenting the most up to date and relevant content. Maybe just like conveyor belt sushi
Real-time search – the missing piece
Shifting the problem from finding content to finding people for search, discovery and filtering is not enough.
The evolution of finding new and engaging content:
Step 1: We started by searching for engaging content using search engine like Google or blog search engine/directory such as Technorati. These search engines operates web crawlers scanning the web for new information, then index (categorize) and rank web pages using different algorithms. As time went by we started adding blogs feeds (using the RSS and ATOM protocols) to our feed reader of choice like Google Reader.
Results: with some effort we managed to find great bloggers to follow, but new content was slow to arrive, it was slow to discover, and even after awhile we ended up with not enough variety. No wonder it was a dead-end!
Step 2: step #1, plus finding the people behind the content, following their feeds on social media tools (twitter, FriendFeed, facebook etc.).
Results: initially, we got faster and richer content , but it got messy very quickly (especially when we auto follow back), it was also overwhelming at times, and lots of people share the same content (whether it is lame or great). Add to the feed stream cacophonies the fact that people are using these channels for chatting with their peers, sharing thoughts and feeling, promoting their business/products/services and we end up with yet another dead-end!
Step 3: step #2, plus lists. Now we can group people into categorized twitter lists, and follow their tweets.
Results: Now, the content is a little less messy because we have more control over the data filtering. The process for building your own list is very slow and tedious at the moment, but you can use other’s lists via listorious or tweepml. On the flip side it requires coming up with a new process for scanning the lists timelines (how frequently? whom to give more attention? adding/removing tweeps), and you can easily end up with too many lists. The worse part is that the people on the list not always share just about the subject that matches the list category. Bottom-line, it is somehow better than step #2 but not by much – another dead-end?
Content by people
In steps #1 we let the crawler to find and categorize the content and it was up to us to find it. In step #2 and #3 we shifted to people search and then we let them drive content to us. This time the crowd took care of the categorization tasks; finding and matching people to domains of knowledge. People categorized themselves and others, built many great lists, follow other lists (indication of popularity) and shared them for us to grab.
The shift
In the process from #1 to #2 we shifted the content discovery problem to people discovery problem. Due to this shift we gained big time in scale, arming the entire web community to search for new content. We accelerated discovery and knowledge gain. We also gained speed over RSS or the web crawler. Among the changes, going from steps #1 to step #3, the focus shifted from filtering content to filtering people (lists).
Small pause to recap: we have categorized content thanks to search engines and tags, we have people grouped by categories thanks to the people, but we still have a lot of noise.
The missing step
In my opinion, we are missing a step. I think that we ought to get back to the computerized categorization. We need a crawler, to categorize and rank the data in the context of the list.
I would like to be able to filter list timeline view by: links only, discussion threads only, and even more important by content that matches the list’s definition in the first place.
If I follow a list that discuss mobile phone technology I want to see only mobile phone technology related content.
Picture credit orangeacid
Twitter lists feature – do you see what that I see?
This week, Twitter opened the new twitter lists features to the public. I had a chance to play with lists for some time now (I was fortunate to see it a little early). In my opinion, it will take some time to fully understand the true meaning and implications of this new feature, the same way that it took us time to understand twitter. Basically, twitter added another level of abstraction between users and their following timelines (now, it is one to many) and that made things a little more interesting. Here are some of my initial thoughts.
What lists show us?
- Now we can see what the others see. Before lists, no two twitter users shared the same timeline view. This new capability opens the possibilities to do remote, join tweeting looking at the very same timline.
- Now we can see how our tweets are seen by others – maybe we over tweet? or a misfit? try following a list containing your twitter user name.
- The list name shows how people categorize us (how are they thinking about us). Check the lists that you are listed on: Authors/readers/reviewers, thought leaders/journalist/bloggers, funny.
Other observations about Twitter lists:
- Lists value depreciate with their size - a small focused list will provide better content than a long list ( a long one is not much better than your timeline)
- Counter intuitive to item #1 – for some reason bigger lists gain more followers
- If you spent the time building a great focused list then upload it to Listorious (kudos for the quick turnaround of this website). It could help to promote your username adding to your twitter presence. Tag it appropriately to be found.
- Lists are another great example for the huge power of crowdsourcing when it comes to organizing large amount of data (the grid computing paradigm). In comparison think about the TweetDeck twitter groups creating feature. Creating a list is a tedious process, keeping those private is a waste. Thanks to Twitter lists and Listorious we have a kind of new and organized real-time search engine in under a week.
- Are we going to see #ListFollowFriday meme soon? E.g #ListFollowFriday @ravenme/iphone The best iPhone app developers
- The next step is making list creation easier. I like to see a merge list option. The merge will create a new list that is a set of users from the original two lists.
- Another next step is adding to the best twitter desktop clients out there the option to upload lists.
- Getting a little wild here: in Twitter Search Advance Options, add search by lists, and search with the option to exclude list or lists.
All in all I think that the twitter lists feature is great. Lists will help getting rid of spammers, finding new communities, getting better content quality, and will introduce an infinite tweets timelines to follow.
Your thoughts?
Picture credit to Irargerich
GO LISTS
HALLOWEEN POST: Haunted tags for you
Halloween via tags
Happy Halloween! Recently, more than ever before, an increased number of people participates in content generation. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the many other content publishing tools enable endless sharing about the coming holiday. I decided to gather some of the celebrating Halloween voices, from all around the web, in the form of tags.
Twitter Search
- Trivial: Halloween #Costume #candy #pumpkin #Decorations
- The scary stuff: #vampire #witch #ghost #Frightened #spiders #webs haunted #cemeteries #horror #bats #zombie
- Search combinations: haunted house, Halloween + recipes, Halloween+Costume, Halloween + Decorations, #Halloween + #movies, #Halloween + #parties
scary costumes zombie film Halloween - Spooky all year round: #Paranormal #Wicca #wiccan #Pagan #Magic #Spell #occult #tarot
Observation/tip about hashtags: For the most part, I got better results on Twitter Search not using hashtags. I got a lot of spam tweets using hashtags. For instance, the search for haunted yields better results than #haunted. There is no need to ignore Hashtags, those are very useful in some scenarios like conferences, meet up, and integration with other media channels that broadcast simultaneously (this is for another blog post, I guess), but apparently, hashtags are too easy to take advantage of.
Blogs and Discussions
- WordPress: blogs about haunted
- BackType: blog comments about Halloween and haunted
- UberVW: discussion about Halloween and haunted
People
Follow @HauntedHouses or find more Halloween tweeps on wefollow and twellow
Website and blogs
- Here is a cool directory if you are looking for haunted houses experience in your area.
- More Americans believe in haunted houses than global warming : A scary Halloween tale. via OneRiot
- Video – America’s Paranormal History via LazyFeed (and the book)
- photo credit Jimmy_Joe
- This old house is not haunted just beautiful!
Google Insights for Search
Looking at few Halloween search patterns in the last 30 days, using Halloween related keywords, revealed that the people in Idaho seems to care the most about Halloween, the people in Utah search the most for Haunted house and Pumpkin, and the people of Connecticut are looking for Halloween costumes more than others, at least based on Google’s data.
Happy Halloween!
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