Startup Mentality

It’s the blog, stupid! May 23, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , 3comments

The title is apropos for the election season, but I'm going to propose an idea here and I hope to get some feedback. Lots of people are talking about the disconnect with comments and conversations happening on Twitter, FriendFeed, and their blog. For example, you make a blog post and (with MessageDance automatically) it goes to Twitter (and thus to FriendFeed), people can comment about it on your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed (and on MessageDance.com). Big-time fracturing of comments. Since you started with your blog, shouldn't you be able to stay on your blog and see all of the comments come back to your blog? There should be no reason why you have to monitor everything to see what people think about what you said — just have it fed back into your blog.

Your blog is the center of your universe

When you post your blog entry, wouldn't it be right to have it say on Twitter that it came "from {your blog name}"? Not from Twirl, the web, or MessageDance — it is actually you and your blog that created the content — you should get the credit! When someone comments on FriendFeed, shouldn't that go back to your blog as a comment, regardless if it was your original post or on a Google Reader reblog by someone else? Same is true for a Twitter reply. Heck, why not make tweets, @ replies, and FriendFeed posts directly from your blog for that matter.

To steal a late 90's term, your blog should be your portal. You start with it everyday and you don't need to leave it to keep up with your friends and your conversations. Your blog is all about you. Keep it all together.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

I sense a disruption in The Force! May 9, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a comment

Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says he will reinvent Nokia into an Internet company as detailed by Anders Bylund of Ars Technica. It’s a clear reaction to the success of the iPhone (with the frenzy of activity around jailbreaking it and the new SDK), the poorly kept rumor about the Google Phone along with the Android platform, and of course the decreasing margins that always come with hardware. I disagree a bit with Nokia’s intention to not innovate in hardware design and Anders’ thought that mobile devices will converge to basically the same feature set because there is a lot to be done in the area of usability and power consumption that a device maker could still differentiate itself greatly. The iPhone is an incredible step forward but there is obvious room for improvements such as data input and power usage.

ALL mobile phones are fast becoming mobile computers (not limited to “smart phones”) with incredible power, storage, and Internet capabilities. While I believe you can still set yourself apart as a manufacturer, it will be the services and software native to the phone that will be an even stronger selling point. For web companies, why build an app or user interface specific to each device when a really good Internet browser is all you need? Safari on the iPhone proves this. Why build a special mobile data integration layer for each device when you can just use the email client native to the phone? Web companies should build their site and services with this in mind and the device/platform companies should optimize their native apps and OS for these simple requirements.

At MessageDance, we recognize that the browser and email are the apps found on virtually every PC and soon on every mobile device. We’re not too keen on being device-specific so we use the ubiquitous tools already available and everyone knows. Using the “Share” feature found on many social sites like YouTube and Digg (and probably on all sites sooner rather than later), our users can send their favorite content to their favorite social destination or their friends’ by using their MessageDance email address. They can create a blog post from their iPhone or Facebook Messages section by simply emailing it to “blog @ messagedance.com“. The blog post also can go automatically to Twitter. All of this is done by a simple yet powerful email address.

Nokia senses the disruption caused by the iPhone and Google. They believe the higher margin business will come from the platform and services built on top of their devices. This is a natural evolution as witnessed in the PC business as well with IBM focusing more on software and services. I hope they will continue to innovate on the devices as well as make the platform and native apps stronger so companies like MessageDance can innovate and develop their offerings to be useful anywhere and from any device.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Email is the Internet’s natural integration layer April 29, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , 1 comment so far

No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to shake off email. While it basically hasn’t changed much in 15 years, it serves its promise of delivering data very effectively. It certainly has its issues with spam, but if email is used in the context of an integration layer for the Internet, its future has never been brighter.

Brad Feld shouts “I Love Email“:

Every now and then the “Email is dead” meme makes the rounds and lights up TechMeme. The right answer isn’t that “email is dead”; it’s that new and exciting stuff is happening around the use of “messaging” and it’s time for some new innovation.

His partner Chris Wand of Foundry Group goes further:

In a time when many folks view Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as the new darlings of the Internet, we still believe that email has been and will long continue to be one of the Internet’s few enduring killer apps.

The keyword that Chris uses there is “Internet”. Email is an Internet app. Its largest value isn’t on the desktop; it’s the ability to transport data.

TripIt has it right with using email as the input mechanism for user data into their system with a transformed output delivered back to the user. Their presentation at Web 2.0 Expo is right on the mark.

At MessageDance, we use email as the engine for our users to share content from their social sites to wherever they choose it to go. They each have a powerful email address (”you”@messagedance.com) they can use to share conversations, videos, and blog posts from sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Digg. Their sharing doesn’t have to start from an email client, but when it does, it can be very powerful, as this blog entry itself was fully written and posted from my Gmail account, including image placements, tagging, and category assignment. It also went to my Twitter account automatically.

It’s great to see our private beta users really spanning the spectrum in the email clients they use and the integrated services they are sharing from. Here are samples I’ve pulled from the shameless snippets we add to the end of their blog posts created with MessageDance.