Partnerships - Social Media

Deep down I guess we all wish the start-ups whose services we like to use would stay as they are forever. Take for example Vimeo, a really great service with an awesome community that never quite made it into the mainstream.

It is basically clear now that Twitter will not be one of those services. If the recent Ashton Kutcher  (@aplusk)/CNN (@cnnbrk) race to 1 million followers taught us anything it’s that Twitter is only going to get bigger.

It was probably inevitable as the actor and comedian Kevin Pollack (@kevinpollak) said; “I love Twitter because it’s not like Facebook where you have to maintain a profile, it’s just there if you have a thought, a question or an idea.” When you couple that simplicity with a service basically built around vanity counting the result is a service perfect for celebrities keeping in touch with their fan base. And celebrities represent nothing if not the mainstream.

Let’s now take a look now at Twitterholic’s 100 most followed Twitter accounts list; most of the accounts on this list are either celebrities or large news organizations (who seem to be increasingly using Twitter as an RSS killer) with few “internet famous” people left in a club they used to dominate. Slowly but surely the ubiquitous tool of the digerati is crossing the chasm.

Then came Oprah. This isn’t the first time Oprah has given a huge burst of exposure to a Web 2.0 start-up she made her first

[Note: this is #2 in a series of posts about Web 2.0 apps that actually get used at Blonde 2.0, see the first post here]

To say that you really ‘get’ Twitter they say you need to do three things; 1) you need to get an @reply from someone you admire 2) you need to post a question and get loads of answers 3) you need to follow someone famous that you’re a fan of. I’m adding a number 4 -you need to access twitter from an external application. 

You won’t be alone, according to Twitter 70% of all tweets come from text messages or applications built on the Twitter API and good lordy there are a lot of applications out there. These apps go beyond just publishing tweets; many applications leverage the main database of Twitter for information about breaking news, stocks, emerging trends and even bacon recipes. 

According to Wikipedia there are over 100 Twitter clones out there and it seems that the Twitter team made a conscious decision to make it ludicrously easy to build a Twitter app. This has been a crucial part of Twitter wining the micro blogging wars (It was nice while it lasted Pownce and Jaiku).

Here are my 5 favorite Twitter apps:

Tweetdeck

AOL sure is in an interesting place these days, they have a brand new CEO (ex Google VP Tim Armstrong), a legacy dial-up access business that more than twenty years after it was launched still makes billions of dollars a year and the rest of AOL split up into three different groups; Platform A which is one of largest advertising networks, Media Glow which includes AOL.com and mega blogs like TMZ and Engadget and the group which most interests me; People Networks which includes AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Yedda, Goowy and the newly acquired SocialThing.

People Networks are now planning an extensive synergy of all these properties (and also 3^rd party outside content) under the banner of “life streaming” where users will be able to syndicate all their online activity into one stream.

I was lucky enough yesterday to have a conversation with Ziv Navoth EVP Marketing at People Networks, Ziv is a very interesting guy; at Bebo where he ran marketing, he grew the user base from 22 million to 45 million users and pioneered numerous innovations including a new business model for media companies to distribute and monetize their content and a new form of online entertainment, combining original productions with brand sponsorship. Since the Bebo acquisition his task at AOL is to expand a network already 90+ million strong. See my full conversation with him below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA2Skt5qduM

Let’s face it the barrier of entry to build a Web app these days is ridiculously low; developer tools are free, there are tons of good script libraries (especially the YUI) and companies like Amazon provide hosting and computing in a pay-per-use model. It seems that any group of kids hacking around is able to simply and cheaply build a website or app and as a result of that there is a huge glut of Web 2.0 apps out there.

So I’ve decided to make a series of lists of Web 2.0 apps that stand out from the rest by the fact that I actually use them. Daily. The first list is of productivity apps, the ones that help me get my work done every day, in alphabetical order:

Box.net
Box.net really does one thing very well, it lets me store and organize my files online. I can access everything no matter where I am and share specific files and folders with other people. Then has a really cool application platform that allows me to use services like Zoho and PicniK to edit my files. This is the future of file storage. 

At Seedcamp Paris I sat down with Mary from Art-And-You, who describes it as all about art and artistic creation, focusing on very accessible art as opposed to the official art market, we talked about Art-And-You, its launch, features and when they are going to roll-out a an English language version of the site. Full interview below.