Zetetic

As I’ve written here before, we’re really big fans of the efficiency and simplicity of command lines here at Zetetic. We actively use them at points in the PingMe and Tempo are considering expanding our use of them, in particular to include Graphical Keyboard User Interfaces.

So, some interesting reading:

• Mozilla UI designer Alex Faaborg on the GKUI
• Introductory article on Mozilla’s Ubiquity project
• Don Norman’s article on the return of the CLI for the ACM
• Aza Raskin’s (Humanized.com / Enso developer) blog post on the return of the CLI

While I’m waiting for my Windows VM to reboot, just figured I’d mention that Oracle’s free tool SQL Developer totally rocks. And it supports MySQL for you geeks out there (POSTGRES 4EVA!!!!!)

It makes coding and testing complex PL/SQL fairly painless. It’s built on Java and runs on Mac OS X beautifully.

Recently I met Alexis Rondeau, one of the two clever fellows that created the site Semapedia.org. The site allows you to create 2D barcodes, called Semapedia Tags, that link to information on Wikipedia. The idea is that you print a tag that links to information about a place or thing, then you stick that tag on the place or thing. Anyone with a 2D scanner program on their phone can then lookup the information at the site when they see the tag. Pretty cool! (I’m still trying to get the program for my Treo installed correctly.)

Anyway, I saw this on their blog and I had to share:

so you are on a bus stop and there is a barcode to download the bus schedule. Great Idea, not. The poster with the barcode takes a whole side of the bus stop, why not just print the time table, how often does that change? Why pay for anything like that. If the service behind the barcode would tell you exactly in realtime where the bus currently is located or tell you if any of your friends are on that bus, then we have something a printed time table cannot provide and is clearly more attractive. Haven’t seen any of the other ideas, but for starters, detect needs, find out what current medias don’t provide and so on.

Indeed! Always go for the simplest solution.

My friend Matt Jones is one of the design leads on Dopplr, “an online tool for business travelers.” It’s a rather slick utility for anybody who does a lot of traveling and wants to share that information with others, connect up in various cities, track their travels, etc. That’s not all it does, but those are the very basics of it.

Anyway, Matt has an excited post out on their blog about some new features they just added – mainly the ability for you to not only send in your trip information via E-mail, SMS, or Twitter, but you can literally forward eTickets and various other itinerary confirmations from airlines and bookers straight to Dopplr, and have it enter all the trip info for you. Check out the slick video demonstration!

This is a huge ease-of-use improvement to their already great service, cutting down on double entry and making manual entry much easier. If you’re a reader of our site, or you use our tools, you’ll know we’re total geeks for streaming information into tools and using command-line interfaces. Nice job, fellas!

I’m fresh out of the Seed Conference and it was, hands down, the best event I’ve been to in years. Imagine a full day of intelligent and down-to-earth entrepreneurs talking honestly about their businesses and communities, completely immersing the audience in creative opinions and ideas. I walked out Crown Hall feeling energized.

I don’t think that a play-by-play write up of each talk would even do it justice. Instead, here’s a selection of quotes from the various presenters that really speak to the overall vibe and flavor of the event.

Business

“Deliver more value than you charge for it” – Jason Fried on pricing software

“If Content is King, Marketing is Queen – and we all know who runs the house” – Gary Vaynerchuk

“We don’t have a 5 year plan, or even a 5 minute plan” – Jim Coudal on the ineffectiveness of long term planning

“Build relationships with clients that listen to you, and that you CHOOSE to work with” – Carlos Segura

“It’s about bleeding out of your eyes and working your face off” – Gary Vaynerchuk on how hard you need to work to be successful

“It’s better to fail in a group because you can all blame someone else together” – Jim Coudal when asked if it’s better to fail alone or with a team

Community

“I don’t consume. I put out. I PUT OUT.” – Gary Vaynerchuck on why he’s successful within his community

“If they come you will build it” – Jim Coudal on putting the community before the product

“You may be the client and paying the bills but you are irrelevant to this picture” – Carlos Segura on the need to connect with the intended audience as a designer, not the client

“Your app is having a conversation with your user” – Jason Fried

“I didn’t make the front page of Digg for 18 months” – Gary Vaynerchuk on being patient in the beginning of a venture

“I’d rather talk to the real people” – Jason Fried on why 37signals doesn’t track analytics in their applications

Hiring and the workplace culture

“Its about giving the right people the right opportunities” – Carlos Segura

“Make it fun. In a culture ruled by fear no amount of money can make it right.” – Jim Coudal

Why NOT to pay attention to the competition

“Every minute you spend on your competition is one minute you’re not spending on yourself” – Gary Vaynerchuk

“The more you look AT your competition the more you will look LIKE your competition” – Carlos Segura

“There really is room for everyone” – Jeffry Kalmikoff on the size and scope of online markets

“You can’t worry about things you can’t control and you can’t control your competition” – Jason Fried

Techniques

“Can it make money? Will we be proud of it? Will we learn something new along the way?” – Jim Coudal on evaluating business ideas

“You don’t know if its any good until you build it” – Jason Fried

“More people watch TV that read books in America” – Gary Vaynerchuk about using online video to your advantage

“It would be awesome if…” – Jake Nickell on how a great idea should start

“The person who buys enterprise software is not the person who uses it” – Jason Fried on why that model is broken

“Keep doing the stuff on the side and when something sticks run with it” – Jason Fried on doing side projects with full time work

“People will feel it even if they don’t know why” – Jason Friend on getting the extreme details right

Just Plain Funny

“I’ve answered a million emails while pooping” – Gary Vaynerchuk on the indispensable nature of laptop computers

“Fly in progressively closer circles until you fly up your own butt and disappear” – Jim Coudal on how to perfect your work

“I’m huge in Denmark – I’m like Hasselhoff” – Gary Vaynerchuk on his international community

Disclaimer: I wrote these out in field notes live during the talks (no recording involved), so if there are any inaccuracies just let me know and I’ll correct them.

Over a year ago, when we were first putting together PingMe, a system not entirely unlike Twitter, we had a pretty good idea what the real potential was for a revenue model and how valuable it could be.

A few weeks back we posited these thoughts in public because the discussion of Twitter's likely potential for revenue keeps coming up in the blogosphere and it seems like everyone is missing the obvious: sticking small, meme-sized ads in the tweets themselves, based on context and relationships, and exploiting the nearly unbounded impression space. Nice to see somebody agrees with us about the context part of things, even though I think ReadWriteWeb is getting the means wrong.

I'm pretty sure that if Twitter started sending direct advertisements to their users, as opposed to embedded ones, they'd chase their users away to the clone services that are starting to emerge and which will mature. I don't think people will pay to subscribe to Twitter to escape the ads; when a service has been free for almost two years (a long time on the Internet), that kind of conversion is probably not in the cards (although not impossible). The potential revenue in just embedding ads is so high that I doubt they'd risk angering their user base with direct ads.

On top of that, it was a few months ago that some Tweets were arriving on my phone with an embedded ad for Twitter itself at the end of it, signaling, IMHO, that that would be the ad space in the future.

I should mention that since we started using our direct-embedding method in PingMe messages to briefly mention our other products and brands, we've yet to have any complaints from our users. You can't ask for better than that (well, aside from goal conversions).

Pay close attention - we're about to hand over an idea that could make Twitter...(drum roll, please)...ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

We saw this today on Tech Crunch (which has since been refuted):

Occasional ads in the Twitter timeline ... seems like the only real way to monetize Twitter, aside for premium subscriptions.

It's an interesting idea. We have long thought that the destined revenue model for Twitter is a new means of advertising where miniature ads will be injected at the end of Tweets.

Your messages on Twitter are restricted to 140 characters. This leaves 20 extra spaces, possibly a lot more with short tweets, before hitting the SMS limit of 160 characters. That reserve is perfect for advertising. We've been calling it meme-vertising and we've been doing it with our own service PingMe for well over a year - we use it to advertise our own services.

Here's how it works - we reserve 30 characters in every message that goes out, just enough space to jam a quick meme or ad in there. Anything goes, from "Keep Time with http://KeepTempo.com to "Real men of genius," if Budweiser decided to buy a block of impressions.

Unconvinced? Twitter's ad space would be virtually unbounded because the impressions are based on relationships, not page views. Consider that when Michael Arrington sends out one tweet alone, it could provide 13,104 impressions. In the end someone has to pay for a service, especially given the usurious cost of sending and receiving SMS messaging, and nothing stands a better chance of getting Twitter into the black than this virtually umlimited adspace that they possess.

We suggested last week that there's also money to be made offering business-level service and there is certainly revenue potential with putting ads in the timeline. Yet, I would wager that many Twitter users access the service with a third-party API client and wouldn't see them. I certainly don't think that Twitter would abuse their relationship with users by sending pure spam-tweets to your phone or device. We frankly can't see a better way for Twitter to make loads of money than to use the enormous advertising potential already present in its tweets.

Is it intrusive? To a degree. Although, in the year that we've been running PingMe we haven't had a single complaint, and I think you can see here how it can be done without being an eye-sore:

Note: we haven't yet taken on third-party advertisers for PingMe, but at some point we'd like to. Let us know if you're a local bar that might like to have "1/2 price drnx at Moe's 6-8" show up at the end of a reminder about "Happy hour with Frank tonight at 5."

We're on Twitter, too, follow us at: @billymeltdown and @ocskills

We've seen mention on a few sites about the potential for Twitter to monetizing their service by charging businesses for mobile interfaces. The case study they quote is a mobile interface for Harvest.

We think that it's great that more companies are exploring mobile interfaces like this. Our own small business time tracking system Tempo also excels at mobile entry, letting our users record time through Twitter, iPhone, SMS, mobile web, and even desktop mail (much of this functionality is borrowed from PingMe, a mobile app from birth). While the idea of Twitter as a mobile command line is not new, its always great to see more tools embrace the idea.

So, with a constantly expanding list of services like Twittercal, Jott, Harvest , Timer, RTM, PingMe, and Tempo all using Twitter, it would seem reasonable for them to monetize these relationships.

That said, even as a company that loves Twitter and already uses it in our apps, the big concern is reliability. Tweets get dropped or delayed more often than we'd like to admit, default rate limits can cause issues, web service calls can cause delays, and the APIs don't provide scalability to really large numbers of messages. When the service is free these aren't show stoppers. If charges are involved it's a different ball-game.

If Twitter were to pursue the monetization strategy the right move would be to provide a dedicated business service. Include guaranteed delivery, improved message processing integrations, dedicated API servers, and quicker processing. This would make the offering very competitive with all of the existing SMS and Text-to-email gateways on the market.

Now that would be worth paying for.