Posts Tagged ‘Mashable’

There was a lot of tweeting on twitter today about twiddict. (Try saying that after a late and liquid night celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday.) The premise of twiddict is that it saves your tweets when twitter is down and then posts them when twitter resurfaces. On the face of it, this sounds helpful.

I won’t be using it, however. When twitter is down I get frustrated, like most people. But for me, one of the joys of twitter is the truly ephemeral nature of it. I don’t scroll back through pages of tweets to discover what I’ve missed while I’ve been away from my desk. And I don’t try to make sure everyone I know has seen a tweet of mine by sending them a direct message instead. On top of that, the beauty of tweets are surely their spontaneity. If I’m having to sit and think about a tweet, the only honest tweet I can add to twitter is: “sitting and thinking about a tweet”. And when twitter comes back up, the last thing I want to do is to catch up on reams of tweets that are no longer current.

Twiddict is obviously a bit of fun on the part of its team of Belgian creators. Basing its service offering on the continuing failure of twitter to scale successfully is probably not a long-term business plan. If Twidict becomes an essential tool for twitter users, I suspect that twitter will no longer need to worry about scaling and Twiddict may have to evolve into FriendFeedict instead.

For a slightly more positive spin on twiddict, take a look at Stan Schroeder’s post at Mashable.

I mentioned Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site last week. It comes out of beta tomorrow. Mashable’s Kristen Nicole has an interview with Guy, which you can watch on the Mashable site or below. I’m pleased to say that this blog is on the social media page at Alltop, so check it out. And then check out the whole gamut of sites that makes Alltop such a great resource.

When the Financial Times does social networking, you expect it to do it with flair and a certain panache. However, their release of three ‘Executive Membership‘ forums seems to be taking the idea of niche a little too far. What they’re offering, in fact, is a series of exclusive clubs for high level execs. But at a cost. I don’t know the cost but Mashable is reporting a starting fee of £1700. Per annum. (It’s fair to point out that Mashable are also saying that the site can’t handle Firefox. It looks fine in my Firefox browser, so I assume the FT have fixed this pretty quickly.)

I can’t find any costs mentioned on the site but there is an application form for a brochure, which presumably contains the membership rates. I joined a network that required paid memberships before and left it very quickly. The FT are ladling on the benefits for their members in the three sectors they’ve created but I can’t help but feel dispirited by a network that uses net worth as its entry point. What do you think? Is exclusivity superior to niche? Would you want to be part of a network of financial peers only?

Mashable has just carried two stories about Facebook in the UK.

First, Paul Glazowski interprets a Guardian report that Facebook UK usage is in decline as more a reflection of poor stats, combined with winter being less ’sociable’. Facebook has seen some heavy criticism recently but I think it’s too soon to start dancing on its grave. Following on from yesterday’s debate about building or joining social networks, I would expect to see an increase in niche groupings, which may or may not coexist with larger social networks or simply break away. Federated states of social networks, perhaps.

The second Mashable story sees Kristen Nicole describe a new Facebook app called Celebration. This is being launched by Mars UK and will allow users to send each other real bars of chocolate. Well, almost. In a neat solution to privacy issues - and UK postage woes - you actually send points to be redeemed by the recipient.

I think we’ll see more of these marketing drives hitting social networks. Does it cheapen the network? Or do you think it adds value? Let me know in the comments.