Tag Archives: Blogosphere

“A-list bloggers” comments on Twitter

I always laugh when I hear or see the word “A-list.”

Ah, people and their pride.

Let’s take a look at some of the comments on Kara’s blog and across the “blogosphere.” (Admittedly I laugh every time I type that word).

Scott Heiferman, Meetup.com CEO and maybe one of the lone voices of reason, says

Making a householdword is the great challenge. Not only does the word need to be universally known, but it has to be universally known for something that people need. eBay, Amazon, Google, and Craigslist are universally known, and people need what those words mean: People need to buy & sell & search in their everyday lives. SecondLife is known, but people don’t need it; Flickr could be the word that means photography — the Kodak of the 21st century — but it’s wide value prop is fuzzy, and my non-tech friends still send me their crappy Shutterfly links. I’m highly suspicious of most startups’ potential to reach sustainable householdword status because they’re not really serving real people’s needs. As for Facebook, people need to stay in touch with people they know, so they’re on-track, but I suspect their word is too muddied with pokes & kid stuff.

but popular VC (investor in Twitter) and blogger Fred Wilson chimes in (mildly) optimistically saying

it’s a great point and the second challenge twitter has, after scaling, is to go mainstream.

many think it can’t happen.

i have been slowly but surely turning on my friends who don’t even use facebook to twitter.

none of them work in the tech world (easier to find friends like that in NYC)

i just tell them to text “follow fredwilson” to 40404 and when/if they get tired of it to text “leave fredwilson” to 40404

what’s interesting to me is that some really like it and have been using it with their friends

so i am optimistic, but also mindful that crossing the chasm is not easy and that twitter has a long way to go on multiple fronts in order to truly go mainstream

He then later complains about wanting to temporarily unfollow people.
And the pure bloggers?

Dave Winer says

It’ll catch on, Twitter is powerful. We need more than one vendor though. There was a time when blogs were like this, outside a few thousand people, no one knew about them, and now you’re asking this classic question on a blog. Seems a little ironic, but perfectly natural!

While Dave McClure gives one of the few predictions (and boasts about twittering about the birth of his child):

mmm.. i predict twitter “mainstreams” in ~2-3 years, friendfeed in ~3-4 years.

(altho my guess is both get acquired / integrated into something else before then).

would have been interesting to ask about Digg, which i think has already crossed over a bit.

(ps - i twittered the birth of our second child, including 3 cervix dilation updates… NERD!

Sarah Lacy is surprised by the international ubiquity of Twitter (maybe because text messages are so expensive in the US):

My in-laws asked my husband if it was an invasion of our privacy to “follow us” and while I was out of town my parents– who use absolutely zero social networking or social media sites and are doing good if they read anything I write — sent an email to my husband that read, “What is a Twitter? Is it just like a one-line blog?” I was floored. And, let’s not forget international. Every time I travel outside the U.S. I’m stunned by Twitter’s ubiquity. After all, mobile apps are much stronger outside the U.S. In my own informal polls, people in Europe and the Middle East rank Twitter among the most global companies in the Valley, well above Facebook even.

In short, Twitter isn’t mainstream, but it’s getting outside the echo chamber fast. The problem is it’s not necessarily in predictable ways. It’s in random spurts

Jeff Clavier, an investor in Seesmic (which acquired Twhirl, an application built off of Twitter’s API), who at least realizes that the success of a micro-blogging platform does not mean it has go to be Twitter:

Note that I am making the case for a broad adoption of micro-blogging, or whatever that “super easy posting of a personal status update” is called. As to whether Twitter, Facebook or another yet-to-come service will be the “winner” in the space, who knows. But the broader audience, and the broader need, will be there. As to how you turn this into a business, and make money? There are enough smart people in and around these services, and enough usage, that something will eventually be figured out IMHO.


Matthew Ingram considers Twitter at the early-stage status of Chat applications or a Facebook:

But I don’t think the concept of Twitter is quite as foreign as many people make it out to be — and certainly no more foreign than the idea of “instant messaging” was not all that long ago. And as MG Siegler notes, there are some pretty cool apps being built on top of it.


Dan Farber quotes Steve Gillmour:

In this context, Twitter is a highly efficient way to share, discover, and market ideas. My journalist/blogger friends have taken to Twitter broadcasts of their posts, and on occasion I have Twittered live events, broadcasting my notes and observations to followers, who receive it in real time or for later consumption. You can also “Track” keywords to follow people or concepts without signing up to follow them. “It creates a public/private scenario where discoverability and special social interactions can happen,” Gillmor said.

but maybe more revealing says:


Twitter adds to the overflow of information, but if you find the right people to follow, or lead, it does offer a good ROI for the time spent consuming 140 characters at a time.

DING DING DING DING!

In a moment of pure echo chamber Robert Scoble says

If no one is on Twitter why am I getting a new Tweet every second?

Yeah, Kara Swisher’s friends aren’t on Twitter. Of course they are the same type who would look at you strange back in 1977 if you bought an Apple II for $5,000 like my dad did.

(Maybe he should try reading the Paul Graham essay on how to disagree)

My personal favorite, though, is MG Siegler’s take on Twitter:

Third, even within the tech world itself I’ve seen Twitter “haters” turn into “players” in a matter of months. I won’t name names, but there are several folks out there who had absolutely nothing nice to say about Twitter when they first heard about it and saw it in action. Every single one of those people have now changed their minds and use the service regularly.

To which I reply (via twitter):

The secret of success (should I say now that I don’t have it either?)

I love how so many big mouths over the “blogosphere” get excited about these micro-debates. (I would link to some of these posts but I don’t want to provide even more trackbacks.)

I live in the real world — the one where those who don’t have time to bicker over useless topics for hours live. (And arguably the world in which real people make it possible for those pointless discussions to happen in the ’sphere.)

I love the internet — everybody wants to tear each other down and proclaim victory.

Ever heard of King of the Hill?

Pick up an Xbox (or if you’re cheap just go to Gamestop and play it there) and try a copy of the Halo series, link it to Xbox live, or battle with some friends, and you will see what I mean.

See when you have some virtual guns, grenades, and rocket launchers, its actually quite amazing.

But when all you have is a bunch of pretend know-it-alls running their fingers all over their keyboard proclaiming they have THE ONE SINGLE ANSWER.

Hilarious.

If they really did they probably wouldn’t be blogging, that’s for sure.

If it’s financial status you’re looking for — I haven’t read Bill Gates’ rant about workaholics (for or against) yet.

If it’s a solid family life you’re after — you’re family would much rather enjoy you then listen to you whine and complain about how “right” you are.

If it’s fame you’re looking for –keep blogging, because outside the tech world nobody knows or cares who you are — and they probably never will.

And if it’s beauty you’re after, well, suffice it to say that the sedentary lifestyle which this sort of mind-numbing useless, time-wasting calls for probably won’t allow beauty — but hey, it is possible.

I do really like one post (a positive post) and wanted to highlight one of my favorite excerpts of all time.

Former:

There is no secret formula or obvious path to success. Just one common trait…an indomitable desire to succeed against all adversity and doubt. Very few people have this drive and the leadership ability to attract great people to their cause. This drive is indefinable but we know it when we see it. It is sometimes misdiagnosed as being delusional and fanatical. The difference in diagnosis is success or failure. Succeed and you are a brilliant visionary. Fail and you are a delusional loser. The line between them is very fine.

Latter:

A well-regarded speaker spent several years compiling information on what makes a successful person. He was astounded by his results.

Of course, like most of us, I’d been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of success is hard work, but I’d seen so many men work hard without succeeding and so many men succeed without working hard that I had become convinced that hard work was not the real secret even though in most cases it might be one of the requirements. And so I set out on a voyage of discovery which carried me through biographies and autobiographies and all sorts of dissertations on success and the lives of successful men and women until I finally reached the point at which I realized that the secret I was trying to discover lay not only in what people did, but also in what made them do it! I realized further that the secret for which I was searching must not only apply to every definition of success, but since it must apply to everyone to whom it was offered, it must also apply to everyone who had ever been successful. In short, I was looking for the common denominator of success. And because that’s exactly what I was looking for, that’s exactly what I found.

He expected to find a correlation between gender, race, age, I.Q. or other hereditary factors out of human control; conversely, in his report titled “The common denominator of success” he found something entirely different: “The common denominator of success – the secret of success of every person who has ever been successful – lies in the fact that the person formed the habit of doing things that others don’t like to do…Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don’t like to do.”