Archive for May, 2009
Jakob Nielsen Critiques Twitter
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Twitter on May 11th, 2009
Few would dispute that Twitter is the hottest social medium around. The microblogging application, which enables anyone with Internet access to issue short public messages-about where to buy the best red-velvet cupcakes or what the latest tally is on swine flu-has enjoyed stunning growth that has made Facebook and MySpace look like yesterday’s children. An increasing number of CEOs are employing Twitter to communicate and bond with customers and employees.
Nonetheless, it might be time to put some brakes on tweeting, according to Jakob Nielsen, a principal at Fremont (Calif.) Web-usability consulting firm the Nielsen Norman Group and author of 11 books on the way humans interact with technology. Nielsen recently answered some of BusinessWeek.com’s questions about Twitter. Edited excerpts follow.
Nuts: Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code-named Squirrel
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Rumour on May 11th, 2009
Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current Chairman Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet letting his followers know that he was, “Getting ready to embark on something new and entirely different. Excited!” Dorsey is getting ready to launch his next startup, he’s confirmed to us. As the guy who actually invented Twitter, this is notable.
Firing Your Clients –Even During a Recession
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Business on May 11th, 2009
Sometimes, in a recession, the best way to increase profitability is to fire your own customers. I’ve been hearing from a few vendors and agencies, that they’re letting go of their least wanted clients. Why? During a recession, vendors are focused on being efficient with all resources, and in some cases, some clients are net negative in time, energy, resources, and morale.
Using Twitter for HR and Recruiting
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Twitter on May 11th, 2009
There have been lots of documents/posts/articles on the subject in the last 6 months and for a while I thought the world did not need another one. Well in the last 10 days I have decided different. So in the interests of my memebership in the Cult of Done, I present my document on Twitter for HR and Recruiting.
Next-Gen iPhone Will Contain a Compass
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Mobile on May 11th, 2009
IPhone screenshots are easy enough to fake, and lord knows some odd claims come from the Boy Genius Report, but this seems such an obvious addition to iPhone hardware that we’ll bite.
TwitDoc: Proving That Every File Format Will Eventually Be Shareable Over Twitter
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Twitter on May 11th, 2009
Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats. The site has integrated with popular document sharing hub Scribd to make the process as painless as possible – it only takes around 20 seconds to send a document, and you don’t have to sign up to get started.
Who needs ads? TidyRead strips them from websites
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Advertising on May 11th, 2009
Just in case newspapers (and just about everyone else) weren’t having enough trouble making money from online ads, there’s a growing number of browser tools like Readability that let you strip those ads away. TidyRead is a new one that works pretty well and has been rolling out a number of features in the last couple of weeks, including support for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Customers sometimes do not know what they want
Posted by Ara Pehlivanian in Business on May 11th, 2009
The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Of course, it is not always this simple. Often customers don’t know what they want.
