Marcoullier.com

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Twitter is a broadcast medium. Users blast tweets to the world at large. Sometimes these tweets are meaningful, sometimes not.  The user’s conceit is that they’re writing something worth reading.

Facebook is a sharing tool. Users proscribe who can view their information. Sometimes it’s shared broadly, sometimes with great specificity.  The user’s conceit is that their information is worth protecting.

The “Twitter vs. Facebook” fallacy is getting old.  Yes, both services are social web sites. And a Ford F-150 and a Corvette both have four wheels and an engine. The users’ goals are diametrically opposed from one another.

When someone publicly tweets, there is an implicit desire to reach as many people as possible. Twitter best serves its users by doing everything possible to distribute their data; the bus contains the value. As friction increases, savvy users will move to competing broadcast services.

Orders of magnitude more people share than broadcast. Facebook needs to ignore users clamoring for public profiles and continue to kill it distributing data in a secure fashion.

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• Facebook just doesn’t seem to get it. Facebook is NOT Twitter. (thenextweb.com)
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“Meta” jokes only delight people with obscene amounts of domain knowledge. That’s why mashups are the domain of music snobs — the more context you build around individual songs, the more excitement when they merge.

(I still can’t get embed to work in this template. I fucking hate CSS.)

This video could have been a trainwreck, a “Yeah, Rivers, I like YouTube too” moment. Instead, when Chris Crocker starts lip syncing one minute in (followed by the Numa Numa kid and Tay Zonday) the video becomes a celebration of the people involved and the “fuck yeah!” area of my brain lights up.I imagine the last scene is what ROFLCon looked like this year.

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Image via WikipediaThe RIAA has proclaimed victory over Russian MP3 service AllOfMP3.com, declaring that the site is “defunct and out of business,” while turning a blind eye to MP3Sparks.com, the parallel service that sprung up days after Russian authorities were forced to shut down AllOfMP3.

Is this win/win or lose/lose?

• The RIAA shut down one popular service and a dozen others sprouted in its place.
• The site continues doing business, although in a neutered fashion – most US services won’t submit payments to the site.
• Consumer still get cheap MP3s, but it’s a pain without the wonderful AllOfMP3 downloading app.

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Inquistr writes that FriendFeed is new hotness and Twitter is old and busted (Remember that meme? It came out right after “where’s the beef?”) and as a result, the former should bust a cap in the latter.

In honor of this great non sequitur, I offer some additional strategy suggestions:

• Pixar should kill AT&T
• Grand Theft Auto 4 should kill Internet Explorer
• Al Gore should kill the music industry
• The “hang in there” kitten should kill NASA
• Frozen Yogurt should kill the war in Iraq

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Source: WikipediaTodd noted today that he tends to post less frequently when he’s doing the more interesting things.

It seems to me that the really great bloggers (and successful self-promoters) do the opposite of this interest to post inversion pattern. The more interesting things are in their lives, the more these people take the time to share their excitement and good fortune with others.

Wise words from the big man. Otherwise, you end up with posts like this one. Sadly, I don’t see my behavior changing any time soon, as I’m addicted to work and have more highly prioritized spending time with Jen and the kids, seeing shows, learning the bass, dieting and getting into shape. Might I suggest following my Twitter feed?

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Dude, this whole thing was started by LOLcats! It’s like lamenting that the phrase “time to make the doughnuts” trivializes the importance of work. Welcome to the elastic language, amigo.

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Had breakfast with Joe Greenstein from Flixster and we talked about the future of web destinations. I agree with Fred Wilson– it’s the data, stupid.

That data gets far more interesting when attached to people. Why settle for the results of Yahoo Term Extractor, when we can attach highly structured data from sources like Flixster, iLike and Shelfari?

Once we turn people into highly structured lists of what they produce and consume, the sky’s the limit (privacy issues aside). I imagine that’s where the semantic web guys are headed. Maybe the lifestream folks will get there first.

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Update: Just reread this post and I want to clarify that I am in no way calling Joe an idiot.   Good job, Eric.  Way to make the friends

Between March 6th and today, I:

• Sat on a panel and then spoke about MyBlogLog at TechStars (with laryngitis)
• Spent six days in Austin @ SXSW (with laryngitis)
• Lost a shoe (temporarily)
• Danced with Heather and Jon (look to your right)
• Heard an absolutely killer mix by Flosstradamus at the People-Powered Party
• Celebrated Jen’s birthday at the local pub
• Brought on a founding CTO
• Closed funding on my new venture, Gnip
• Recovered from laryngitis
• Twittered 75 times

It’s not an excuse, just an explanation.

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I know a lot of smart people who refuse to fly Southwest Airlines because they believe the “cattle call” slows down boarding.  Odd, since Southwest has the fastest turnaround of any air carrier in the US, and I’m guessing the best track record for on-time departures.

So I was surprised this week to see that they’ve added a more granular boarding order to their classic “A / B / C” process.  It seemed like boarding took longer.
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Trent Reznor told his record company off last year. Six weeks later, he released a collaboration with Saul Williams online, allowing people to download it for free and asking them to pay $5 if they liked it. He was disappointed with the results. Yet today the new NIN album is online, available for free, along with a variety of other options.

One wonders if we online entrepreneurs suffer a lack of hubris (sure we’ll fail, but whatever) or an excess (I’ll ultimately get it right). Either way, I’m excited to see the experiments that Trent and others roll out next.

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