friendfeed

Six Apart acquire Pownce – to kill it in 2 weeks.

December 2, 2008 By Dan Thornton

In a slightly bizarre move, blogging platform Six Apart (Movable Type, Typepad and Vox) has acquired Pownce for an undisclosed sum – and it’s immediately been announced Pownce will be closed on December 15th, 2008 – just two weeks away.

The news has been revealed on the offical Pownce blog ‘Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart‘, written by Leah Culver:

” We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all….

*snip*

We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

For our Pro members, we’ll be emailing you soon with more information about your Pro account.”

The post explains Mike Malone and Leah Culver will join Six Apart’s engineering team. Anthony Ha at VentureBeat has said that Digg founder Kevin Rose and Digg employee Daniel Burka who were also responsible for Digg will now be advisors to Six Apart.

The official Six Apart blog offers those who paid for a Pownce Pro account a free Typepad account for a year.

You can see some of the latest messages from users on the Pownce homepage.

You can see the responses from Twitter users on the Pownce closure.

There’s a FriendFeed room set up for PownceExiles to reconnect.

Interestingly, @nickdawson has spotted: http://postpownce.com/ – could be official or fan created. The Whois lookup isn’t particularly helpful, but it looks slightly unofficial so far.

Meanwhile, there’s a surprisingly amount of people using Pownce as normal, although there’s obviously a significant number who are either thanking the Pownce team, or expressing their anger – and it seems like users are mainly migrating to Twitter, with a few mentions of FriendFeed.

Strangely, Twitter has the mass user group and VC funding, but Pownce had direct revenue streams already in place, with paid membership upgrades and advertising.Meanwhile Jaiku, Plurk, Identi.ca etc are all continuing, as far as I’m aware, without a mass surge in users or a revenue model that has been revealed. Will any other microblogging services be under threat in the coming months?

I’ve blogged about my lack of enthusiasm for Digg several times at TheWayoftheWeb, but I don’t think it’s necessarily about the Pownce team ‘failing’ – it’s likely that the impending financial situation, and an attractive offer may have been too tempting to turn down. But it does reinforce my opinion of Kevin Rose’s companies as lacking a bit of customer service – two weeks for people to leave Pownce and shut the door behind them isn’t particularly accomodating.

You can see part of the justification for the closure:

It may be U.S. traffic only, but it’s a pretty fair representation.

Interestingly, from a closer look at the numbers, it suggests that from the ‘big four’, Jaiku would be the next logical service for the chopping block – with Plurk leading the ‘Everything except for Twitter’ group.

My two thoughts are that perhaps the team behind Pownce weren’t seeing the growth they hoped for, and with Twitter being open about monetizing next year, it seemed a good time to exit with some money.

And that perhaps the move to greater federation (e.g. Facebook Connect etc), and aggregation (posting via clients or apps to multiple locations), the prospects of success for a relatively small microblogging platform were diminishing – especially with new services offering the chance to set up private groups (Twingr.com), and services like Drop.io simplifying file sharing.

From a personal point of view, the file sharing aspect wasn’t enough for me to devote enough time on Pownce to build a big community, but I did enjoy popping in for short visits on occasion, and I’m definitely sad to see any microblogging/microsharing service closed suddenly, and without any warning.

How Coke and Pepsi are wasting their online strategy

November 28, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I have to admit that as a non-coffee drinker, I’m pretty addicted to caffeinated soft drinks. To the point where I’ve just shocked myself by working out that, in conjunction with my partner, we spend about £957 per year just on Coke or Pepsi! The fact that I can happily switch between the two main brands without any hesitation probably also makes me a reasonable target for online marketing.

Pepsi:

Pepsi can by schnaars (CC licence)

Pepsi has recently launched a social media promotion to engage bloggers around a new Pepsi logo. They picked 25 top social media and marketing bloggers, sent them empty cans featuring all the previous designs, some full cans with the new design, and even a DVD of history of Pepsi. The approach had some criticism (why target the social media/marketing niche rather than the fans of Pepsi niche?), but the response was fairly favourable – see Jennifer Laycock and Chris Brogan for more. And they even started a room in FriendFeed – The Pepsi Cooler – and that’s where my problem lies.

Pretty quickly people saw the flaw in a room which only allowed contributions from 5 people, and enforced moderation for all comments. You can see some responses to Chris Brogan’s post. The fact that Edelman’s Steve Rubel was involved meant that there was a fairly quick response claiming it’s the tip of the iceberg, and the team were working quickly to approve comments.

The first problem has been that the team are all U.S based – so no approval for 12 hours if you’re in the wrong timezone. I did make the suggestion of getting a representative from other countries involved.
The second is that a topic effectively has to be discussed in the comment of something irrelevant, in the hope the 5 contributors will write about it – I wanted to chat about the fact Pepsi cans in the UK now came with QR codes on them on November 17 – but Bart, who acknowledged by comment appears to have disappeared since then.
The third is that with 5 contributors, there just isn’t the flow of content,contribution and conversation to keep any interest going. There’s now just a contribution every 3 days, which is pretty slow – and hardly anyone is commenting.

Put it like this – if I had a community of 312 members, I’d be pretty disapointed if only 5 of them posted, and only once every three days. They’ve said that ‘we need to make sure the conversation is clean, free of profanity, and does not have any personal attacks’, but if you’re using Friendfeed after targetting 25 leading social media bloggers, you’re not likely to be overun by flame wars!

It’s good that Pepsi has started trying to engage the blogosphere as part of their overall marketing strategy, and that they at least discussed and made a slight attempt to have some conversations – but it’s a akin to listening to Pepsi shouting at us through a megaphone, and then trying to chat back with a sore throat.

Coke:

Coke Machine by KB35 (CC licence)

It’s lucky Coke have also managed to make a mess of things, because it nicely balances the post! Way back in June,08, I wrote about the CokeZone loyalty scheme, which allows users to input a code found on Coke bottles to be rewarded with points, which can then be exchanged for a range of products – some of which are rather good. The problem I had, was that the site was incredibly unreliable and frustrating to use. Things may have improved slightly, but there are still bugs with entering login details, and the site moves at the same speed as evolution.

Luckily, I haven’t actually been fired for using cokezone, which happened to some Coke employees who accidentally infringed an employee limit on collecting points while they boosted and promoted the service (Shel Holtz has all the details).

But they have turned a scheme which was meant to promote loyalty into one of immense frustration.

About a week ago, I happened to be logging into the site to register some more codes when I caught sight of an offer for a Flip Mino on the homepage – with options to enter to win for 2 points, or get one for 300 points. It was something I wanted to make sure I got, so I thought I’d try to collect the extra 100 points I needed (33 1/3 2litre bottles worth!). Now it did state that there was a limited number of the Minos, but bearing in mind there’s been a message saying ‘hurry, just a few left’ on various T-shirts etc since about the time I joined in April or so, I thought there’d be a bit of time.

But there wasn’t.

Turns out it’s a special pre-Christmas promotion with a new product each week. So either all the Flips were handed out or they’ve just been deleted.

So after swearing and realising my mistake, I thought I’d check for some contact details, and maybe try a bit of pleading in case there was one left in a cupboard somewhere.

Now read the following very carefully:

In 2008, on an onlineregistered members loyalty scheme for a major global corporation, with an unreliable site, and transactions to the value of games consoles etc, the contact details for the site are by telephone or post. No email, Facebook, Twitter, GetSatisfaction or Uservoice page. Post or phone! Oh, and some FAQs – (How were people asking these Frequently Asked Questions? And where’s the one for ‘My God, is this the most unreliable site ever?)

How to fix this stuff:

The Pepsi Fix: Allow everyone to contribute and chat. Employ moderation after the event, only if it becomes legally necessary, or of a personal or offensive nature. Employ someone to do the moderation if you need to, or get volunteers around the world to spend an hour each day. And try and make sure there are some Pepsi responses more than once every 3 days. That way, you’ll find the Pepsi fans, not just the top bloggers in a category by ranking.

The Coke Fix: Ideally, remove some of the flashy yet unreliable gubbins and make the site simpler to use. Make the Ts and Cs regarding a week long competition really, really clear, because when a site takes as long to load as yours, I don’t spend any more time on the homepage than necessary. And for the love of God, put some useful contact details or customer service on there!

Two companies with whom I’ve spent significant amounts of money have both engaged with plans which should, on the face of it, been right up my street. And yet somehow, it’s resulted in me realising how much I’ve spent, and the potential health risks of overindulging, because of the quick research I did before composing this post, and because they didn’t commit and go the whole way. And there’s nothing worse than getting halfway to somewhere, stopping, and turning round again.

And do it quick, before I start loading my shopping trolley with bottled water or lemonade

I’m not looking for the wisdom of crowds…

November 24, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’m looking for the wisdom of MY crowd.

A thought that occurred to me commenting on a Robert Scoble post.

I use Google Reader because I’ve selected the inputs.
I get news from the people I’ve selected on Twitter and Friendfeed
I get personal news from the people I’ve selected on Facebook.
I don’t use Digg etc as much as I might because it’s the wisdom of a random crowd I haven’t selected.

Pepsi – the taste of the web 2.0 generation?

October 27, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Although I’d already heard about the new logo, I picked up on Pepsi’s more social activites via Edelman Digital’s Steve Rubel, who is working with them, and having joined up, saw some early commentary from Chris Brogan.

Chris talked about How corporations should view comment polices, and I agree that offensive content needs to be filtered unless there is an age restriction on the community. And also that off topic comments and conversations can detract in a single room (I’d recommend having on-topic rooms, and a general one where possible). After managing and moderating forums including those on www.motorcyclenews.com for about 7 years, I’m fairly well versed in polite emails about offensive behaviour and swiftly editing posts on legal and good taste grounds!

There is pre-moderation on comments – a little annoying for speed of response on a microblogging, lifestreaming, conversation service – and even more annoying when the Pepsi team have finished for the day and comments are left hanging. (Note to Pepsi team – the other side of the world is still awake! Maybe find a Pepsi employee in another timezone to help?)

But it will be interesting to see the response to a couple of comments I’ve made about Pepsi’s Terms and Conditions. (I had an acknowledgement from Pepsi’s John Karpf, so it’ll be interesting to see what evolves.) At the top of the Friendfeed Pepsi Cooler room, there’s a hyperlink to ‘a few notes from our lawyers’. Which links to the Pepsi.com Privacy Policy.

Hmmmm

While I acknowledge the need for Terms and Conditions, and stating the standards for a community are necessary, I could have sworn Friendfeed has it’s own Terms of Service, and doesn’t need Pepsi essentially annexing a room! I’m hoping they find another way to express the principles of the room they wish to encourage in a way which doesn’t seem quite so much like our caffeinated overlords have arrived!

But fair play to them, I’d ignored the new logo, and become fairly loyal to Coke due to the cokezone loyalty promotion, (I’m a sucker for free Xbox games!), yet the prospect of a Friendfeed room has made me take a bit of an interest in what they’re up to at Pepsi. I’ll let you know what comes out of the vending machine at work when I go for a drink!

Interview with Cesare Rocchi – founder of Posty microblogging client

September 16, 2008 By Dan Thornton

One of the better microblogging clients available at the moment is Posty, createdby Cesare Rocchi.

It’s an Adobe Air applications which runs on Windows (2000/XP/Vista), MacOsx (10.4.9 or more), and even Linux! And besides the fact it runs behind proxies, it feeds out to Twi t ter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca.

So I got in touch with Cesare to get an idea of what was behind Posty, and what he plans for the future.

What is Posty in 140chars?

Posty in a small desktop application which allows browsing/updating your profile on twitter, jaiku, pownce, tumblr, friendfeed, identi.ca.

What makes it different from other cross-posting applications?

Posty has one of the smallest memory footprint. Although Adobe Air does not allow developers to fully manage memory usage, Posty is optimized to use as little memory as possible.
To my knowledge Posty is the only standalone desktop application which supports SIX services and allows a rich browsing experience. For example you can watch videos and pictures right in Posty! Check pownce, tumblr or friendfeeed for an example.
Finally, unlike web applications, Posty encrypts and stores sensible data like passwords on your hard drive, instead of third party servers.

How long did it take to create the initial version?

The first version, which included twitter and jaiku took two months to develop.
Let me say that Posty is a project that I develop during my spare time. So when I say “two months” I mean “the spare time that I had during two months”. I can’t quantify more than that.

Was Adobe Air easy to work with? Does it offer significant advantages?

Adobe Air was pretty easy to work with. Posty has grown as a response to two needs I had: to learn Adobe Air and to save some time in interacting with my online communities.

I think I am on the way I expected to be. One of the main advantages of Adobe Air is the ability of quickly changing the layout of the application. Without getting too technical the VBox, a container to display whatever thing you want vertically, is a great idea. So for initial prototypes it is just perfect.
As you project grows you need some discipline to avoid melting too much the logic and the graphics. For example, after the first prototype (which I confess I did just for my personal use), I redesigned the application along the lines of MVC pattern. So if, by chance, I hit my head and I forget anything about Posty, by looking at the MVC structure of my code I quickly “remember” where to put my hands.

How long has it been live? And is it gaining many users, judging by the good response it’s received?

I released the first version of Posty at the end of April. I remember I didn’t even had a website, so the release was made by attaching the air file to an email message.
Posty is gaining users every day and received a good response. I receive emails of encouragement and suggestion. People are also willing to test beta versions. This is fundamental to me, because I get almost immediate feedback on new features or solved bugs.

Are any of the microblogging services more difficult to integrate with? I noticed it took a couple of tries to verify my Jaiku account for example?

Maybe you did it while Jaiku was updating their servers. Yet Jaiku has not implemented an appropriate api to verify credentials, so I exploit a trick. BTW Jaiku to me has a lot of potential and I expect they extend api support to other functionalities. I didn’t find particular difficulties during the implementation. The testing is often the phase which takes more time. Unfortunately some network rely on servers which are hit every second by hundred thousand requests and your testing can get slow. I remember the “flying whale” days of twitter … testing new functionalities was a nightmare. Same for Pownce some time.
A special mention to Friendfeed, which was the most reliable api service I had to do with. And let me “celebrate” to the tumblr api as the simplest and cleanest and well-documented api I have worked with.
Finally, I think I’ll have some issue with Facebook, which I’ll integrate soon and which is known to be a less “friendly” api for desktop applications.

Are you going to continue simply to ask for donations to monetise Posty? Or would you be tempted to introduce advertising?

At the moment I’ll keep on asking for donations. BTW thanks to those who donated so far and thanks to those who will donate. Even a small donation is precious to me. Also encouragement messages, blog posts and suggestions are considered a donation. So if you like Posty, or have an idea on how to extend it, just drop me a line. I appreciated it a lot.

Has it raised your profile throughout the internet?

I can’t tell the difference before and after Posty. For sure my online activity has been influenced by the growth of Posty (read less free time for me and more emails to reply to). But the most evident improvement is that it takes much much less time to send my updates/news across different networks and to address the incoming messages/replies. Attempting a measurement I’d say I spend half of the time and save a lot of clicks.
Let me also mention a cognitive aspect. Posty concentrates in a “place” a set of activities (update twitter, check Pownce replies, etc). Wanna do one of those activities? open Posty. Busy doing other stuff? Just close Posty to avoid distractions. Within a browser this border fades and, at least to me, it is easy to interrupt an activity to update/check my twitter, just because I noticed that a tab on twitter was left open (accidentally).
With Posty I feel I am more focused on my current activity.

Have you got more plans for improving Posty?

Yes. I have many items on the todo list: a brighter look and feel, facebook support, improvements on the interaction with the graphical interface. And a special feature which I am planning since a while. But can’t tell more.

What’s your view on cross-posting? Obviously Posty makes it far easier, but do you think cross-posting is possible without it becoming almost like spam? Do you have any tips for users?

First, don’t just ask questions. Many tend to get without giving. I think giving is important. Contribute with ideas, suggestions, whatever you feel it improves things. Second, choose as carefully as possible your friends contacts. It’s not easy to foresee how active a person will be, but if you see that the last 100 updates are about knitting and you hate knitting you shouldn’t click add/follow. Indeed try to find and add people who share some interest with you.
Final tip. Given that the number of friends/contacts is limited try to remove those who are less active, to make room for people more corresponding to you. You should not fear to click remove.

If you had to pick a favourite microblogging/lifestreaming site at gunpoint, which would you pick?

As for the service per se I’d pick Friendfeed, because their servers are very reliable. You might say that the interface is “spartan”, but I like the service and the scenarios it opens.
If we talk about people and responsiveness I’d say twitter and Pownce. Especially on Pownce I get almost immediate replies. Maybe this is because I was a beta tester and I collected many active friends. Of course twitter is still the most used/discussed/crowded service you can think of. And the one I use to stay in touch with the posty community via: http://twitter.com/_posty.

Make sure you don’t miss more interviews, including one with Blippr founders Jonathan C and Chris Heard on Thursday.