Exploring the 2010 Web

Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, today, at the TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup (live video of the conference is live now on building43, there will be lots of news all day long from this event), told the audience that Twitter is, indeed, going to turn on an advertising model.

This is a huge shift in what Twitter is saying publicly.

But advertising isn’t something many people love. So, how will Twitter make advertising you love?

By building a SuperTweet!

How can they do that?

Well, yesterday, I talked with Likaholix co-founder Bindu Reddy about just that. You can watch our video we recorded about how Twitter could make new advertising, which I say is a piece of building a SuperTweet.

So, what is a SuperTweet?

Well, first, some rules for building new ads and features for Twitter that people will love.

1. You can’t mess with the Tweet. That’s sacrosanct. So, we’re stuck with the 140 character rules, along with the rules of @replies and hashtags and all that.
2. You may NOT introduce new ad models inside the Tweet. You may NOT put ads inside Tweets.
3. You may NOT introduce new ads that look like Tweets.

So, what is a SuperTweet?

It is a Tweet with a metadata payload.

Think about all the metadata that exist OUTSIDE of the Tweet. How about you mouse-over a Tweet to see a new slide-down UI that shows you all the metadata.

What kinds of metadata do we already have?

1. How many times has the tweet been retweeted.
2. Where was the Tweet produced (geolocation).
3. What’s the tag cloud associated with the Tweet (get that from list names).
4. What tool produced the Tweet?
5. What are associated Tweets?
6. What are tweets in reply to this tweet?

But what else could we automatically generate?

Well, let’s say I wrote a Tweet saying “I’m going to see 2012 tonight.”

Couldn’t we tag that Tweet with the word “movie?” Like you can tag a photo on Flickr? Absolutely!

Couldn’t we have a bot that sees that 2012 and movie came through the system and then link to the IMDB database for the movie 2012, like this? Couldn’t you link to Fandango for movie reviews and movie times for 2012, like this?

So, add that all onto the tile that slides underneath this new “SuperTweet.”

But what else?

If CocaCola wants to target movie goers, couldn’t they put an ad into this SuperTweet? Something like “Drink Coke at the movies, show this tweet at the movie theater and get $1 off off a Coke.”

NOW you are getting how advertising could be something you love!

How about a Tweet that talks about a book. Someone could write “Loved Trust Agents by Brogan.” That could link to Amazon so you could put it on your Kindle.

There is ton of things that Twitter could do here to bring ads that people love, thanks to a SuperTweet infrastructure, and yes, I will love it.

By the way, two companies already are showing me advertising I love: Foursquare, which shows me offers from businesses nearby where I check in, and Yelp, who also shows me offers from businesses nearby. These are HUGE value ads for both consumers and businesses and if Twitter ads this new kind of advertising to a SuperTweet they will make billions of dollars.

I’m actually happy that Twitter is getting off of its “no advertising” stance and thinking about SuperTweets.

How about you?

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I use Twitter and Facebook a lot. Probably more than 99.9999% of people in the world. I am in search of the perfect client that will help me use Facebook and, particularly, Twitter (which I use a lot more than Facebook because that is the best place to network with other technology professionals).

I am still looking. The perfect client does not exist.

First, I use my iPhone (and now my Droid) for Twitter a LOT. My wife, @maryamie, uses Facebook on her iPhone all the time.

So, I must have the best possible iPhone client.

This week? That’s Tweetie 2.0 for an app and Dabr for a Web page (Dabr supports lists, which none of the iPhone apps do yet). Yes, I’ve tried all the others and while Simply Tweet is better in places I like the UI of Tweetie better and Tweetie has never crashed, while TweetDeck crashes on me and my friends all the time. Echofon? I don’t like the UI (I know others do, which is why you should check them out for yourself). Others? All bugged me for some reason. Tweetie is very good and all I am waiting for now is support for Twitter’s new features, like Lists, RT’s, and geolocation.

On the Droid I use Twidroid, which does support lists (an advantage of being a developer on the Android platform is that you can release software two to six weeks faster than on the iPhone because there isn’t a centralized approval process you need to go through.

Second, I use both Windows 7 (which rocks a lot more than most Mac fans will admit) and the latest Macintoshes. So, I need a client that runs on desktops, laptops, and netbooks.

The thing is I’ve been trying to live my life completely in the cloud. Why? Because that way if my computer dies, or gets stolen (that happens to laptops) all I need is a new computer with a web browser and I’m back in business.

I also sometimes sneak onto my wife’s computer. It’s nice to just sign onto a web site and get access with my password. If I set up a desktop app for Maryam, then I have to log out and ruin her experience when I want to use that same app, too. So, I tend to stick with web sites.

Plus, I do a LOT of speaking. It’s really great to just jump up on stage, open a web browser, hit a website and have all your info up there.

That’s why I love Seesmic’s Web version so much. Oh, I can hear all the geeks yelling “and it doesn’t take much memory, the way, say, Adobe AIR does.” Absolutely! Google Chrome running on Windows 7 takes less memory on my computer (even with Seesmic Web loaded) than either Seesmic’s AIR version or Seesmic’s Silverlight version (released into private beta tonight).

But there’s a few important things missing from Seesmic’s Web addition:

1. I can’t log into multiple Twitter accounts (I have three now, and will be adding more soon).
2. I can’t log into Facebook. Seesmic’s AIR client lets me do that (I can even write to either my private Facebook profile or my public Facebook page).

I’ve been playing with Seesmic’s Silverlight version tonight on Windows 7. It looks a tad bit nicer than the web version (I suspect Microsoft helped Seesmic build this version, because that’s what the evangelism teams do at Microsoft — I remember a team when I worked at Microsoft who helped MySpace port over to Windows, for instance) but that’s pretty superficial and while the Silverlight version looks better I couldn’t see any features that didn’t exist in the AIR version but there was plenty that was missing. It doesn’t yet support Facebook, for instance (that’s promised to come soon). Anyway, it did support lists and it did support multiple Twitter accounts, so as soon as it gets Facebook compatibility it’ll be the one I leave on my Windows 7 machine.

So, there is no perfect client. At least not for me.

I do have to admit that I like the rapid innovation we’re seeing in the Twitter client business. A few days ago I talked with Seesmic’s team about the rapid innovation that we’re seeing and how tough it is to keep up.

How about for you? Have you found a perfect Twitter client yet? Which one?

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Microsoft exec Ray Ozzie, at a lunchtime session with bloggers at its PDC conference told the bloggers that apps won’t be a differentiating factor on smart phones.

He is wrong. Totally wrong.

Why is Mike Arrington so passionate about his Droid (we argued about it for 39 minutes on the Gillmor Gang last week and then we went to the beach together on Sunday and argued about it some more in private).

I’ve talked about this before. Most of what we argue about is apps.

Droid is better than iPhone because Droid has Google Voice, Arrington says.

iPhone is better than Droid, I say, because I have Tweetie, which kicks ass over Twidroid and the other Twitter apps.

Facebook is better on the iPhone. Noticeably better. Even Chris Brogan (who also is a Droid proponent) said that on his Twitter account.

Anyway, everything about these phones will be about the apps that run on top. Can you imagine a Microsoft exec arguing that Windows isn’t better because of apps? Give me a break. Ray, sorry, but you are off the rails.

If Ray thinks that the best apps will come to Windows Mobile and that the best developers will spend time developing for that platform well, then, Ray is drinking better Merlot than I am.

I’ve seen how even kids compare their phones on the playground. They compare apps and games. The functionality of the phone doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s what’s built on top that gets the kids excited.

Same in business. Last week a VP at Citrix came up to me showing off his iPhone app (it let him get into a Windows box somewhere else in the world and use Microsoft Office).

Even today at the PDC, what did Vivek Kundra (America’s CTO) show his app off on? Yeah, an iPhone. And this was at Microsoft’s own conference!

Ray, the truth is I was there in 2006 talking with the Windows Mobile team when they told me they were going to only build devices for the enterprise. Back then they thought the growth would come from going after RIM. Even Wired Magazine can now see the fumble the team made. They were wrong and now you are wrong. Apps are what will decide winners in this play. For now that’s Android and iPhone. Big time.

But if I were losing developers the way Microsoft is I’d probably say they don’t matter either. It just shows that Microsoft has no secret strategy up its sleeves and has no way anymore to get developers excited about its mobile platforms. Google is now in the best position and Ray knows it.

UPDATE: several commenters here (see comments on this post) say that Ray’s comments were misunderstood. I’ve talked with Steve Gillmor who recorded this lunch session (he’ll get the video up shortly) and it sounds like his comments might be more nuanced than VentureBeat presented them. Cool, let’s get into the comments.

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At the Blog World Expo a few weeks ago someone asked what Twitter is for and I answered “pimping your blog.”

Hey, it works for TechCrunch and Mashable, why not you?

Or me.

So, I’ve finally figured out that I was clueless because I didn’t have a Twitter account for my blog. When people say they are unfollowing me because I’m too noisy these feeds are the antidote.

scobleblog is for following ONLY my blog. I won’t put anything else on that feed.
scoblemedia is for following ONLY when either I post video or am on someone else’s video or audio shows.
building43 is only for items that are posted on building43.

My regular Twitter account, scobleizer, is all that and more.

For instance, if you followed scoblemedia you would have seen the Gillmor Gang video that was just posted to Techcrunch where I argue with Mike Arrington about the differences between the iPhone and Motorola Droid.

As to what my blog is for? Pimping my Tweets! Hope you’re having a great weekend!

By the way, how did I do my scobleblog Twitter feed? I’m pulling RSS into Twitter using TwitterFeed. It isn’t exactly fast (takes several minutes for items to show up often) which is why you’ll see my blog posts first on my main Twitter feed (I manually pimp my blog on that instead of waiting for the slower feed reader to work).

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I visit a lot of startups, the video here is of Posterous, a company that is doing it right. Usually you can tell immediately whether a startup is really run well (which Posterous is). You’ll have your own ability to “smell” real startups when you go on the Startup Crawl in SF on November 20. Start the video to listen to Posterous’s founders and then compare them to your favorite startup. Can you see the difference?

Here’s some things that startups that aren’t run well do:

1. Have plush offices in the most expensive part of town. Come on, who are you fooling? You are burning someone else’s money and you aren’t spending it like it’s your own.
2. You can’t tell me what you do in a single Tweet. See that super complicated Toyota Prius in my driveway? It gets better mileage than your car. If you can’t explain why your product is better, the way I just did with the Toyota Prius, in a short space or time on the phone you won’t make it.
3. If I look around and don’t see programmers. I can smell programmers. A good company is full of them. Posterous, for instance, has ONLY programmers. FriendFeed had something like 13 programmers and one other person. Great ratio.
4. You hire a PR firm. Now this one is dangerous, but the best companies have let their customers do the talking for them. At Rackspace, for instance, they worked to stay out of the public eye and worked on building the best service organization web hosting had ever seen. The best companies, when small, have just gotten good at telling their stories. I still remember when Stewart Butterfield showed me Flickr. He didn’t have any PR flacks with him. Now, maybe a PR company was helping them behind the scenes or to take care of leads and all the other stuff that goes with building a company but it wasn’t the first interaction I had with the company. Nothing like having a CEO or CTO just show you the product and explain why it’s better. 4b: you don’t have a blog and a Twitter account. Even worse if you have a PR firm and you don’t have both of those things.
5. They spend money on the wrong things. I’ve been in more than one startup that had bad chairs and small screens for their engineers but they had an expensive coffee machine. Let me make this clear: you have 18 months to build your business. You have figured out how to get some programmers to work with you. Make them as absolutely productive as they can be. Buy them a decent chair and get them at least two large screen high res monitors with fast computers. Remember SOASTA? Every engineer had a 30-inch monitor both at home and at work along with a MacPro (you can see one of those monitors in the interview I did with them). That was a HUGE recruiting tool and I think it was key in helping them keep their best people and, hey, I hear they are doing well.
6. (This should be #1) They don’t fire fast enough. I’ll be honest, at Podtech me and another guy were pulling the company in different directions. John should have fired one of us. He didn’t. The story got muddled. The rest is history. (In those situations it doesn’t really matter who is right, either, you gotta pick one direction and go with it, startups don’t have enough resources to try out two directions). I’ve seen lots of other startups be slow to fire people who weren’t pulling their weight. Always bad because the best people get pissed and/or leave. Again, you need to have everyone pulling with all their weight in one direction. If that isn’t happening the startup probably isn’t firing people fast enough.
7. You picked the wrong infrastructure. I’ll let you read into that what you want because I’m biased here (I’m a Rackspace Web Hosting employee), but ask great startups and you’ll hear some common themes here.
8. You let VCs control your management team and strategy too early. There’s lots of advice out on the Internet about this one, so I’ll leave it for you to figure out. But your early decisions will have big leverage on your company later. Hire the wrong management team and your company won’t make it to the B-round. I’m not experienced enough to give good advice here, but I’ve seen what happens up front. I remember meeting one CEO of one company that was just, well, let’s say clueless. How did he get hired? The VCs put him in.
9. You have a too cool name and logo. Oh, OK, this isn’t a worst thing, but companies spend too much time worrying about them (it’s a sign that you have too much money before you even have a company and customers, which is a bad sign). That said, I just interviewed a company named rrripple. Now if you end up with a name like that maybe you should spend at least 20 more minutes thinking through your name! (Sorry Rrripple).
10. You say yes too often, particularly in engineering decisions. Look at Posterous (the video embedded on this blog). They have a blog publishing tool. But are their comments threaded? No. Will they be eventually? Yes! Why didn’t they do them threaded up front? Because they set priorities on other things that mattered more. That’s actually a good sign for a startup: if you have only four engineers you can’t do everything. If there’s one thing I like about Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter, is that he doesn’t try to do it all. In fact he prides himself on NOT doing things. It takes great leadership to say “no, Scoble, you can’t have more than 500 members on a list.”
11. Startups pick old technology because it’s familiar. You’re a startup, you should be picking the best of breed for everything you do. If you are using Microsoft Office “just because” then you are making a mistake. Have you considered Jive, SocialText, Zoho, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Wave before making your choices? Have you really looked at ways to make your small company more productive? Or you just going with the same stuff your dad’s company used?
12. You don’t change direction fast enough. Every startup should be looking at its direction every month or so. Are things going according to plan? If not, fix them. But sometimes you just made bad assumptions about what the market would want from you. That’s OK! But don’t take a year to change directions, change quickly and you’ll have a chance to save the company.

What other mistakes do you see startups make?

Aside, if you work for a startup, I’d love to know the tools you are using for a list I’m keeping that I call “weapons for entrepreneurs.” I would love to know what tools/companies you’re using to outrun everyone.

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