Twitter Vanity and Twitter Squatters
How much is your Twitter account name worth (not your Twitter following or value of Twits) to you? As an individual, a personality/ celeb or a real brand? I recently took a drive through the oh-so-simple registration, and there’s still a lot of top level twits (TLTs?) available. Remember all of those domain names you couldn’t buy because domain squatters were holding them ransom? Well, my prediction is that the great land grab – this time around a kind of Twitfest Destiny – is back. The year of the Twitter squatters (“Twatters”) is upon us. Read more >>
What’s the “Thread Count” of Your Friend Count?
I had coffee with a longtime investor colleague who threw a nice metaphor in my direction: “thread count” as it related to the depth of your friendships. As we all initiate, accept or add new digital relationships into our lives (yes, I did get ‘social’ with LinkedIn back in its early years with 1,500 linkedins; more recently with ~650 Facebook friends), how do we measure the relative quality of the quantity of friends we connect to? Do we connect to add relative quality value to our own persona, or is it done merely to create a personal, i.e., quantitative, fan club of sorts? Read more >>
Social Media vs. Privacy on the Web
I’ll admit it. I’m a social media junkie. And it’s not difficult to satisfy my addiction, considering the large number of social media sites that are quickly popping up as of late. But it has also got me thinking – considering the popularity of social media sites these days, should we be more concerned about our privacy? 5 years ago, it was only the early adopters who were on sites like MySpace and Friendster and most people were weary of sharing too much on the internet. These days Facebook has well over 100 million registered users, and over 222 million visitors per month. After the jump, a list of some of latest and greatest social media sites, along with ways you can ensure that the whole world knows everything about you… Read more >>
Has MySpace become “MySpaced”?
On reading Techcrunch’s advance review of a WSJ reporter’s new tell-all book on MySpace, I updated my Facebook status with bewilderment that MySpace passed on buying Facebook for $75M in 2004. And I made a Freudian typo… Read more >>
Social Networks as Tech Challenge
CES 2009 Panel: Social Networks & User Generated Media as a Technology Challenge: The Platform, the Content & the Network. Amid 150″ HD television announcements, this past Saturday I paneled a CES/Digital Hollywood discussion on the start-up requirements of social networks – what the technology challenges were, new ways to acquire users and monetize during recession. Read more >>