Say hello and see what I’m up to on more active sites
November 3rd, 2009It’s just that, it’s hard to keep everything up-to-date these days. So come on over and check out my Twitter feed, or the Thingfo site, to see what’s new with me. Or go over to the about me page to find even more links.
ABC News Bring Themselves Into the Social Web With SocialSite
February 28th, 2009Cross-posting Rafael’s blog post about ABC News & Thingfo. From the Thingfo blog:
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During President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress, ABC News featured our SocialSite system on their main and politics pages. During the historic address, which dealt primarily with Obama’s plans to deal with the current economic crisis, a prominent SocialSite widget followed all the Twittering about the speech. We think this shows a giant and admirable step into the world of Web 2.0 for the mainstream media company.
The blog microblink noted ABC’s move, pointing out that although CNN had partnered with Twitter during the ending phase of last year’s presidential election, they had relied on a special Twiiter elections page, while ABC used SocialSite to embed Twitter content directly on their site , embracing the Social Web much more directly than CNN. Microblink had some good things to say about our “aptly dubbed” SocialSite system:
“The widget grabs content from any number of social media outlets and then pulls it all back into your own website. While a lot of websites are still fairly static and non-interactive, the SocialSite widget feeds fresh social content from the users talking about you and your brand.”
Those familiar with our widgets would note that ABC only used the Twitter feed out of many content feeds and types available with point-and-click ease. They chose to hide the “featured” and “recent” view, and enjoyed a number of great new features we’ve recently introduced. I’ll tell you all more about them soon (unless you’re one of the lucky ones to get into our private alpha!). This implementation shows just how versatile SocialSite can be.
Pretty cool. We’re looking forward to sending out some more invites and blogging about more of the innovative people using Thingfo soon!
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Cross-posted from the Thingfo blog
Charlie the Unicorn
February 12th, 2009We interrupt regularly scheduled rants to bring you Charlie the Unicorn, with 33 MILLION views on YouTube. Charlie, take it away:
24 hours at Sundance, live-streaming social media event with Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose
January 17th, 2009www.24hoursatsundance.com is an amazing event that I’m proud to be part of. It’s a one-of-a-kind reality game, streaming live via cell phones, featuring movie/tv/internet producer Ashton Kutcher co-founder of Katalyst Media, and Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com as hosts.
4 top social media bloggers/vloggers are the contestants. And content from all over the social web is aggregated on the 24hoursatsundance site, with specific content for each player. Complementing that are widgets featuring videos at the top, and related social content below from Blogs, Delicious, Qik, Twitter, and YouTube. Powered by Thingfo, of ‘cose.
Check out one of the custom Thingfo-powered video widgets in the sidebar to the right, then head on over to the www.24hoursatsundance.com.
Fake NYTimes is totally achievable
November 14th, 2008This is one of the greatest pranks by the Yes Men, at least for its visibility and scale. If you haven’t seen the Yes-Men, watch their movie. Visit their site. Read their paper.
An excerpt, from New York Bike Path System Expanded Dramatically
NEW YORK — Officials from the Department of Transportation today opened the 9th Avenue bike lane, which now extends the entire length of Manhattan. The festivities were then moved to 2nd Avenue, where ground was broken on a similar path to extend the full length of the island.
With the completion of the 9th Avenue bike lane and groundbreaking on other avenues, New York is on the (bike) path to becoming as livable as other world cities.
With the completion of the 9th Avenue bike lane and groundbreaking on other avenues, New York is on the (bike) path to becoming as livable as other world cities.
Over the next two years, every other avenue will also receive a full bike lane, blocked off from traffic, while every fifth crosstown street will be opened exclusively to bicyclists and pedestrians beginning next month.Mark Blair, a transit worker from Queens, was busy re-timing traffic lights for bicycle speed. “Riding your bike up or down the avenue, the traffic lights are going to change in sync,” explained Blair. “You ride 10-15 miles per hour, and you’ll be hitting all greens.”
“Now that our country is taking its rightful place among the world’s developed nations,” said Mayor Bloomberg, “it is time for our greatest city to take its place among the world’s great cities.”
TechCrunch August Capital 2008 — serious fun
July 27th, 2008Kick-ass roof deck? Check. Blazing Valley sun? Check. Add 1100 attendees from the tech startup world ranging from entrepreneurs, bloggers, vloggers, venture capitalists, strong mojitos and a couple of rappers (MC Hammer and Chamillionaire), and you have a must-attend Silicon Valley event.
Thingfo’s partner Mobissimo sponsored a table to demo our new MobiFriends social travel community. Next door to us was Chris McGill of Mixx and formerly Y News. Great catching up with Chris, Mixx is coming out with a lot of cool features. Me, Kate, Adam, and Szymon demo’d MobiFriends to a parade of interesting people.
After attending two years now, and also going to a lot of smaller meetups and the big conferences while working on Thingfo, I have to say that the TC August Capital event is one of the best networking events of the year.
More of my pics on flickr, and more from Michael Arrington here and Brian Solis here.
Solis sums it up, Tech Crunch August capital
“is to the Palo Alto Web 2 community what the running of the bulls is to Pamplona”.
You just have to be there, because of the atmosphere, the quality of the people and thus, the interactions. Compared to a lot of the smaller mixers and tech meetups, which can be more like a regular bar scene where you can’t talk and there are a lot of people just out to party, or the big conferences where there are several thousand people running between panel sessions, the Tech Crunch event is far better for good networking, conversations, and fun.
Why? First of all, if you’ve managed to get here you’re either a serious player in the industry or seriously trying to get there. People I had a chance to talk with were consistently focused, intelligent and knowledgable. But with those mojitos, beer, wine, and great music everyone was having a blast.
As always, it’s great catching up with friends from Yahoo, from both the “former” and the “current” columns: Sarah Ross, CMO for TechCrunch. Chris Mcgill, CEO and founder of Mixx. Jenn Dulski, CEO and co-founder of centerd. Jeff Weiner, exec-in-residence at Accel and Greylock, who presented a $7,500 check to malaria for none, where he’s on the board. David Beach (still at Yahoo) and also working on 12seconds.tv. Gil Ben-Artzy of Yahoo Corp Dev., the 2nd person to correctly name the old woman on Adam’s t-shirt (Golda Meir). Jen Cooper and Jim Squires now of mixercast.
But as I said earlier, the great thing about the TC events is meeting new people who are at the top of their game. I talked with quite a few interesting people, and it seemed that most really got what I was trying to do with Thingfo.
Monday Morning Blogger thinks it’s better to come and promote yourself with free beer than getting a sponsor table. I met Dominik and I think he is a great networker and self-promoter. But that may be more about Dominik than an average joe trying to pull off that stunt. If you do it wrong you’d come across as a joke, which he didn’t. However, having the laptop and being able to demo allows you to show people exactly what you’ve built. That’s even better than giving away free beer. Ok, fine. Almost as good. But you get my point — if you can demo, demo. (Which means, start building an iphone app for your startup.)
It was a great event, thanks to everyone we met and special thanks to TechCrunch, August Capital and Mobissimo.
(Cross-posted at the Thingfo blog)
MobiFriends in 256 cities, and a new post on social apps
July 21st, 2008In case I hadn’t mentioned it, MobiFriends, the new travel community from Mobissimo and powered by Thingfo, launched last week. The community is growing already, with people from 256 cities and 50 countries already signed up! Amazing how quickly this spreads and I’m also impressed with Mobissimo’s international reach.
To learn more about Thingfo, head over to the blog, where I just wrote about Thingfo as a social application provider. Of course, you can see what I’m blogging about firsthand by joining MobiFriends (add me as a friend) and share some trips and favorites around the world.
Ninja explains the future of online video
May 30th, 2008Pure ninja genius. Thanks to Bill for sending this to me.
Yahoo! Shine…. already shining with user-created blog posts
April 2nd, 2008Wow. Yahoo! launched their new women’s property, Shine yesterday. I have to say, while I’m not the right gender for their target audience, I really like what they’ve done.
Here’s what stands out for me: integrated email and user blogs. (Click the graphic for a larger image. I’ve outlined the key features)
* Love the integrated email inbox. This way, regular Shine visitors can check their Y mail right from the front-page of the site.
* User-created blogs and blog posts! There is already a ton of activity on the blogs, and with comments from fellow visitors.
Now… I am pretty sure that this would be the first Yahoo! property to launch user-created blogs. Which means the Media group, and their new Lifestyles section, continues to blaze some trails in UGC on the major portals. (Y Health was the first to launch expert blogs, back when I was product manager and working with two awesome teams — the Health team and the Expert Blogging team).
The new blogs are powered by the social media system that my next team developed and it brings a huge smile to my face to see these blogs come to life on the new property. Just a few weeks ago it was Y Buzz (also phugc-powered) and now Y Shine. Nice.
If you think that type of user-created content is cool, then check out my new startup Thingfo, and our next-generation community platform. Thingfo enables contextual user-content creation based on the activities of a site’s visitors, and links our customer sites to the social web and their user’s existing social networks. Integrating a successful site with the social web is going to be critical going forward, and Thingfo is here to help.
In the meantime, it’s great to see the continued rollout of some great user-created content from the platforms I worked on at Yahoo!, from the new Y! Buzz to the Shine Blogs. Shine on.
All your Y-Bases are belong to MSFT-us
February 16th, 2008
“Whiteboard Wisdom”, courtesy of chris.newman on Flickr