Disqus - Latest Comments for jmccusker

Re: louisgray.com: It's Not About the Technology, Stupid

jmccusker — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:17:47 -0000

Louis, the 'flaw' with Twitter, FriendFeed and the like to PR people is that the services do not allow companies to target the users directly. Instead, users hand-pick the content they want access to which is counter to the traditional marketing approaches which leverage captive audiences and allow them to throw in their pitches and introduce audiences to new products.

To me, the real question for Twitter/FriendFeed is how they plan to serve the needs of businesses who want access to the audience they have captured. It's a complicated problem since the audience's motivation is to filter only on the content they know about and want to see while the PR companies want to introduce their products/ideas to new audiences. They seem to be at odds with each other.

Re: Why Are “We” More Willing Than Mainstream?

dpritchett — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:03:49 -0000

I agree about the value added. Often I'll take a quick look at some hot new thing, find no one on or nothing to do with the service, and then drop it for two years. Suddenly everyone's on the new Facebook or Twitter or what have you and I come crawling back.

Re: Why Are “We” More Willing Than Mainstream?

jmccusker — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:14:47 -0000

David hit it right on the head. Most of us have some sort of vested interest in these technologies and have formed a sort of collective around these technologies. What many in our collective fail to see is that the mainstream will not pick up these technologies unless they provide significant new value over what they already use. For instance, email, IM and telephone suffice for the majority of mainstream communications. If any of the present technologies were real game changers you'd see more interest, but for now, these new technologies don't add enough value.

Re: louisgray.com: Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?

jmccusker — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:25:49 -0000

Not really. If you hold to the subscription model of Twitter spammers will have no way in. That design decision by the folks at Twitter simply kills spammers. For that matter, spammers trying to follow thousands of users wouldn't gain any benefit since very few people would follow them. In the design that I envision the people being followed would get the main share of the infrastructure resources while average users would be peppered across fewer systems.

Re: louisgray.com: Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?

robdiana — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 05:22:07 -0000

Yeah, you are probably right about the heavy users. I was trying not to go too deep into it because there are too many infrastructure issues as well. At that point I am almost designing the architecture. Maybe that is a good topic for another blog post :)

Re: louisgray.com: Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?

jmccusker — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:05:08 -0000

Federation is simply the beginning of the solution for a micro-blogging service. You'll also need a dynamic load-balancing system that is capable of spreading the load of requests for content acroll multiple servers. For example, a popular microblogger (eg. Scoble) might be replicated across all servers, while a mid-level microblogger may only be distributed across a few. The average microblogger may only be on two or three servers depending on the redundancy requirements.

Re: How YouTube Is Missing Out On $1.2 Billion A Year By Not Having A Business Channel

jimkukral — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:16:58 -0000

I am checking it out now, thanks!

Re: How YouTube Is Missing Out On $1.2 Billion A Year By Not Having A Business Channel

jmccusker — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:09:21 -0000

Jim - Have you looked at Ooyala yet? They are ex-Googler's creating the platform you seem to be describing. I don't think their TOS limits your content the way YouTube or Blip does.