Archive for the ‘social networking’ Category

On April Fool’s Day, Izea will be shutting down their forums.  The forums were setup back in September of 2006 just a few months after the company launched and served as the primary social networking platform for the first couple years.

Important Boards Information- PLEASE READ

by BrightGirl on Wed Mar 03, 2010 7:06 pm

Image via CrunchBase

Hi Everyone!
Due to falling participation, the rising costs of hosting and our expansion into other support avenues, we have made the decision to close down the IZEA Boards effective April 1, 2010.
Many of the same topics posted here are currently being discussed at http://getsatisfaction.com/izea and we encourage you to visit us there to post any questions you may have or to participate in the discussions there. We will also still be posting major system updates on the IZEA blog, http://blog.izea.com.
In addition, we will still be available by support ticket and through Twitter
@izealove
@izea
@PayPerPost
@SocialSpark
@spontwts
@Sponzai
Finally, I think I speak for the entire team when I say what a pleasure it has been working with you and learning from you all the past few years. The interaction of this community is what makes the job we do fun, challenging and exciting and leads IZEA to better products and services.
And one last shout out to our Boards Mods, past and present who have worked tirelessly in providing information and support. It has an honor to work with you all!
All the Best,
Carri

Carri Bright
Communications Diva
Izea Customer Love

This forum post is followed by a member named RealityTVFan who has had a long technically challenging series of difficulties making it virtually impossible to communicate with anyone through the Get Satisfaction social media network. 

Ergo he can’t even talk to people about not getting satisfaction through Get Satisfaction!

Now, I don’t have near the issues that RealityTVFan has encountered, but Get Satisfaction has always been very problematic for me as well to the point that I just don’t use it/go there/ provide feedback there.

LESSON LEARNED (again) Giving Content for Free to a Network that Voids your Control of Said Content is a Mistake

I started working with Izea about 6 days after they launched back during the summer of 2006.  They set up their forum or boards later in September as their rapid growth dictated that they needed the ability to communicate with bloggers on the web, efficiently and in an area where they could control the message.  Even more important, they needed other bloggers to help each other, benchmark off of lessons learned, and grow together, so that the same lesson could be taught and retaught more efficiently.  This was one of the most successful aspects about what was PayPerPost back then.  It not only accelerated the growth of their blogger network, enabling them to get a second round of venture capital, but it helped them improve their business, and create a sense of community.

The boards themselves were getting thousands and thousands of hits and visitors a day, generating hundreds of forum posts on a forum with no advertising or as we say today, no monetization plan.  So from Izea’s perspective it was a cost center, with a value add that was difficult to measure.

Years later they did eventually ad advertising after the recommendation of many members on the boards, including yours truly.  This apparently might have minimized the cost (bandwidth maybe?) but not enough.  More importantly through Get Satisfaction they were finally able to run with a ticketing process that worked for the company better than the home grown coding they had relied on in earlier years.

But there is a lesson to be learned here for both Izea and Bloggers and it has nothing to do with cost control or even customer satisfaction.

It is a flawed approach to host a conversation in a centralized social media environment (whether it be a forum like this, Get Satisfaction, Facebook, Twitter etc) when you are engaged in a business reliant on the blogosphere.

Sure there are indirect benefits from being part of the conversation and siphoning eye balls away from a centralized social platform, but it is INDIRECT at best and there isn’t much money in that.

When you write on a centralized platform you DO NOT own your content. You have no control and that content is subject to deletion, editing, or worse. When you play with the long tail, that is bad for business too.

Plus, just as a personal example, when this board goes dark on April Fool’s day, I’m going to loose upwards of 1800 backlinks to my site. Also bad for business considering those backlinks are a small factor in promoting my blogs in the SERPs.  Izea may not sell links so much anymore, but that still translates to reduced traffic and influence, which is something they do sell these days.  So by closing down the boards they are going to devalue their own product line just a bit.  

SOLUTION – At Least for Bloggers

 =

Fortunately, there is an open source solution that is almost available. Very soon, none of us will have to rely on centralized social network systems. The days of Twitter and Facebook (and Get Satisfaction too) playing a role as the dominant social platform are likely to go the way of Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL playing a role as the dominant email system and internet logon portal.

What’s that solution called?

Ironically its WordPress and the new 3.0 version combined with other components of WordPress will conceivably give every blogger, writer, business site the means to turn their website into a decentralized social network.  Now we just have to figure out how to inter connect with each other all over again!

You can follow me on twitter ( http://twitter.com/brettbum )if you like, but its kind of a silly place.

Blast Applications BLAP Launches Tweexchange.com

PLAINVIEW, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Blast Applications, Inc. (OTC: BLAP – News) announced today it has officially launched newly acquired and fully developed website, www.tweexchange.com.

Tweexchange.com is the fastest and easiest way to search Twitter Usernames and Internet Domain Names at the same time. Tweexchange.com also unveiled a new integration with GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar. Through the Domain Name search, users can Backorder and Register Domains using GoDaddy. If a name is taken and is currently listed for sale on Sedo.com, members can also try to purchase names through the site using the Sedo API.

This is one of the first sites to launch with this functionality, to ease and reduce the time to action to secure the right name for branding purposes. With domain name investment an established industry, consumers can conveniently secure a Twitter ID to match. Cross-referencing Twitter and GoDaddy with Tweexchange.com also enables their members, for a fee, to be notified when Twitter Usernames and Internet domain names become available from being in a suspended state. Tweexchange.com provides Blast Applications with several different revenue streams contained within one site.

Dino Luzzi, CEO of Blast said, “When you think about Blast, our newest web portal, Tweexchange truly fits the bill. This one stop shop for users to acquire and reserve user names and domain names through two of the largest providers of branding elements on the web today, Twitter and GoDaddy is truly a blast.”

About Blast Applications, Inc.

Blast Applications, Inc. (“Blast”) is a premier creator and developer of applications for iPhone^®, Twitter^® and Facebook^®, that allows users to have more fun, be more productive and make social media sites easier to use and more intuitive than before. Social media sites are growing fast all around the globe. Blast Applications has a unique opportunity to monetize the web surfer’s dedication to sites such as Twitter^® and Facebook^®, and through direct advertising programs tied to the Company’s tools and applications. For more information visit www.blastapplications.com.

Editors Note:

We have covered several different web applications, typically focused on twitter from Blast Applications over the last few weeks.  Almost all of them did not appear terribly useful, but hey the team is at least coding something and trying to make a buck.  This particular service combines the search process of looking for a twitter username and an available web domain into a one stop shop.

In reality, it is not difficult to perform either of these steps separately, but I suppose if you are trying to buy and set up a whole bunch of sites and twitter usernames for some reason (I can only think of spammy reasons why you would even contemplate this, but if you can think of something better, let me know because I’m curious!)

Regardless, this is minutely helpful, but probably not that much of a jump past the status quo.

In general, my advice is only to perform domain searches at EXTREMELY trusted primary domain selling sites, and only run those searches when you are prepared to buy.  I’ve seen too many domainers pull too many tricks snatching domains up from under prospective buyers to let my guard down when I’m serious about setting up a site, and I recommend the same practice for all my clients, friends and family.

When I tried this myself, it seemed a little buggy at the search level, things did not refresh automatically, nor even when I hit the clear button, prepare to hit the refresh button on your browser.

I can almost guarantee that if you use this tool once called Tweact.com, you probably will only use it maybe 1 or 2 other times.  Its a nice example of a gimmicky website that can help you spread a gimicky look around with upside down text.

“Tweact is a fun app that enables users to flip their text and paste it across the social web. Simply type your text and it’s instantly mirrored upside-down. You will shock your friends.”

You type in some text, and the application returns the text upside down such that you can copy it and paste it somewhere else.  You could create something of a mirror image with it, but really why?

The site is monetized with adsense ads, but that probably doesn’t yield a whole bunch of money.  Hopefully, someone got at least a B on this project and picked up some beer money in the process.

If you are wondering why the recent Microsoft and Facebook agreements are so relevant, consider a couple things.  Facebook membership and usage grows at leaps and bounds.  Facebook is becoming one of the primary places for people to go on the internet, and while they are there, they search for things and people.  More people and groups right now than anything else, but that might change soon.

Bing web search is now integrated into Facebook search.  Perform a search in Facebook and if there is no direct search result within Facebook itself, you will see the top 3 results from the web powered by Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.

Recently I completed a web site roll out for a client of mine via Softduit Media.  Its a graphic design site in Iowa called Design 26 (http://graphicdesign26.com ).  The site is relatively new, but rapidly moving up the search results in its niche, including the search results within Bing.

One of the bi-products of that foundational search engine optimization of the site we set up is that the site is now also on the front page results in Facebook for ‘urbandale graphic design’.

If you expand those results, they are also listed a second time in position 6.

From a cultural perspective people are not using Facebook as a search engine, very much.  However, the cultural shift that turned YouTube into one of the largest search engines on the internet behind Google, could also work in another social network like Facebook, but this time the search is powered by Microsoft.  Optimizing for Bing may have never before been so important, but it will be now.

UPDATE – lol my account was reinstated about 15 minutes after I published this article @delbius is a hero, but Twitter still needs a better process.  (see the history below for an update as to the recommendations @delbius provided and the reasons for the suspension in the first place.

About 8 days ago, I hoped to write a blog article about what to do if you twitter account is suspended for no reason, unfortunately, you have NO recourse.  You are just screwed.    Mine was suspended about 11 days ago(about a week or two after the Twitter DNS attacks), and 12 hours after I came back from affiliate summit East in New York City where I had tweeted about the conference quite a bit. 

Welcome to the world of free social media internet accounts.

• You are not a customer,
• you are not really even a user with rights,
• you are just a peon and any networks you build on twitter or other social media networks are subject to being destroyed by any whim, mistake or DNS attack that might take place on that network.

Yes, Twitter does have a ticketing process.  Its actually a third party service, not twitter’s.  Its powered by ZenDesk.

You can go to http://twitter.zendesk.com/entries and fill out a ticket or you can even send an email to [email protected].   

WARNING!

Don’t do both.  The twitter people get really pissed off if you create a ticket on Zendesk and then separately send an email.  I did this by accident.

I had created a ticket on zendesk for twitter.  About 36 hours later the ticket was closed with zero action or reply taken.  As I was following links trying to investigate what I was supposed to do next, I found the email link, so I sent an email.

BAD TWITTER USER!  That’s a very bad TWEET Thing to do!

The email as it turns out created a second ticket.  (I didn’t know, it didn’t say that a ticket will be created when you send an email.

After I went back to the ticket thing, I could now see that I had 2 tickets.    Now, I did NOT want two tickets, because the email ticket was relatively new, and didn’t show just how old my issue really was.  So I next went back into my original ticket and found the button at the very bottom that lets me respond to the ticket which opens the ticket back up.

Around day 7 or 8, I remembered reading and article about @jack one of the twitter founders.  Apparently his wife had recently had a baby, and she had of course twittered a whole bunch while she was giving birth and stuff.  (um ok, what ever floats your boat and I guess in this case pays for your kids college tuition and retirement)

So remembering that, I sent an @ reply to @jack and congratulated him on the whole baby thing (I’ve got 3 kids, and know how great those days are) and in an aside asked why twitter doesn’t respond to support tickets?

Two days after that or about 10 days after my first ticket was created, it was finally assigned to @trihawkathon.  @trihawkathon took the immediate action of promptly closing my ticket without fixing anything.

Oh Gee, thanks Trihawkathon.  So I followed Trihawkathon on twitter and sent him an @ message (couldn’t send a dm because he/she wasn’t following me). 

I received the following reply, which I felt was fairly terse bordering on snarky.  It could be me, it could be the twitter interface that limits people to 140 characters, it could be  that @trihawkathon had a lot of tickets to close that day, it could be that Trihawkathon was distracted with my message while playing Halo 3.  I don’t know, you tell me what you think if you like (I am curious).

I haven’t heard from trihawkathon since, you can see that the message was 21 hours old when I wrote this, so apparently asap! does not mean today, which would have been about noon on Friday, maybe asap! means after I get back from a 2.5 day weekend and work through my monday morning fires.  Maybe asap! means ‘never and don’t let the bird cage door hit you on your tweeting ass on the way out’ or maybe asap! means ‘teehee I’ll just do nothing and hope that the automated zendesk que assigns this crap to someone else while I watch the Adventures of Baron Munchausen and cheer for the French bureaucrat.’

Ticket Number 2 Gets Assigned Finally

On about day 10.5 or 11 my second ticket was assigned to @delbius.  Now this makes me a little happy, because back around July 7th, a whole bunch of people including myself had our accounts suspended for a half day or so.  We later received a blog message stating that someone at twitter had done some review of accounts and had incorrectly filtered our accounts into a list because we used tweetlater (a tool that enables you to vet new twitter followers and schedule tweets. 

I run a lot of contests so scheduling contest tweets is important to me).  Anyway they apologize for the human error and @delbius had my account fixed in two shakes of a lambs tail.  Thank you @delbius for that help back then!

My New Twitter Account

I probably forgot to mention, during all of this my twitter account @brettbum which was suspended was having problems, all my tweets, followers and following disappeared. 

I could not tell who I had followed nor whom was following me.  I couldn’t see what messages I had or had not sent.

I was working on a potential business proposal with the Las Vegas Hilton and suspect that I may have missed some key communications because of this fiasco, so twitter probably just cost me a great business opportunity.

My new twitter account that I set up was @BrettBumeter I don’t mind using my full name, but that last name is a mouthful, and thanks to a yahoo user id created 13 years ago, I typically go by brettbum to make it easy on people.  The problem with setting up a new account is that you can’t import in your following list (the people you want to follow).  I had to start all over again, and only had the one time option of choosing either my gmail or yahoo mail contacts, which was a fifty fifty gamble.  I chose gmail and had about 250 people to follow right away (down from my 1100 people I had followed before the account problem).

I must say it was gratifying to see the new re-follows come in, especially since I had a new account!  I usually don’t follow people that have created fewer than about 50 tweets, and I now had a brand new account.    I’m sure I’m getting filtered by friends working with bulk new followers for this reason. 

Problems with Twitter & its Policy

First, so lets say you don’t like someone, maybe your boyfriend pissed you off, maybe your company has a competitor on twitter, want to seek revenge?

Well even though you are twisted and probably need a shrink more than you need revenge, twitter’s got an app for that.  Well technically its a twitter account.  All you have to do is send a direct message to Twitter’s spam account, maybe get a few of your friends to do it as well.  Before you (or your boyfriend or small business competition) know it, twitter will be more than happy to slap that account down.  (Note this seems to be the process that is followed, as twitter does not communicate with people the actual process is mostly a large black hole so good luck finding out what really happens).

Second, if you run twitter tools on your blog(s), a service that connects your wordpress site to twitter to either send new twitter updates when you publish an article, or bring in twitter updates to your blog, well if twitter crashes due to a DNS attack, it can cause this plugin to make endless calls through your server, which runs the CPU up in an endless loop and can quickly kill your server, as it did mine when twitter was attacked several weeks ago.  My host was pissed and wanted to charge me $50 / month more for my hosting plan due to the overage.

Third, twitter has millions of users, not as big as facebook, but a lot of users.  If you are relying even a little bit on twitter for business relationships or connections, if some employee at twitter wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, or if they run a db query with a slightly incorrect parameter or something, you might suddenly find yourself disconnected from your clients (like I did).  Its also a good bit embarrassing to have your account killed/suspended and be lumped in with potential spammers and what not.  I’m not the litigious sort, but with a master’s in tax law, the law is not foreign to me.  These types of actions border on defamation of character. imho  I am certainly not alone in this nor the last improper suspension, the net and get satisfaction are full of cases of people that like myself have had their accounts suspended without cause nor recourse. 

Twitter happens to sit on a big nest egg of investor capital, which if they don’t fix up this process will probably become a big fat target for some wiley attorney with a boiler plate class action lawsuit ready to print.  Don’t get me wrong, I doubt even if I were to get an attorney and win, that I would personally see any money, not anything substantial, and not anything that would make up for the business that I probably lost due to twitters snafu process/policy.  But that doesn’t mean that a lawyer won’t be able to gather a class of people together and bring in a nice windfall for their firm.  So even if twitter wants to give me the continued finger, they need to protect their investor/shareholder value by fixing this process before they have to set aside a reserve of funds for a class action lawsuit.

History

UPDATE – Account UnSuspended

delbius, Aug 22 11:09 am (PDT):

Hi there,

Your account was suspended because it posted updates that indicated that your account was in actuality compromised. Updates may have been indicative of the Koobface virus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koobface) or indicative of you giving your username and password out to a 3rd party website that promised "more followers fast!" Unfortunately, the vast majority of these third party sites are actually fronts for phishing and have already been implicated in the selling of usernames and passwords. As a result, we are taking precautionary measures and notifying you that you’ve been sending out updates that you may not have wanted to sent out. Some of these sites also have downloaded Koobface onto users’ computers.

Your account should now be unsuspended; please only reopen this ticket if you encounter further issues. It is, however, extremely important that you take the following actions:

a. Scan your computers for viruses / malware, especially if
unauthorized tweets continue to be posted in your accounts even after
you’ve changed the password.

b. Use a password that you don’t use anywhere else and never use the
former password on a compromised account. Create a new and difficult
password unique to Twitter that consists of both letters and numbers

c. Check the Connections page at
http://twitter.com/account/connections and revoke the access
privileges of any third party applications that you do not recognize.

d. Avoid providing your username and/or e-mail and password to
untrusted third-party sites.

e. Remove any updates that you did not post personally; leaving these
updates can result in your account being re-suspended.

You can also visit our help page for hacked or compromised accounts at:
http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/31796

Thanks!

UPDATE

I’m just getting ready to publish this article, I just checked and my account is still toast, but instead of showing 237 tweets on my old account it now shows the number of 4834, so maybe the wonderful @delbius is doing her magic.  Fingers crossed! 

(But the process still needs to be fixed @delbius shouldn’t have to work like a hero all the time)

Ticket number 1

Request 501796

Submitted Aug 13 08:02 am by you

>My account has been suspended for some reason, the account is @brettbum I just got back from affiliate summit, took a lot of mobile pictures of NYC which might have loaded in from Utterli to twitter, but I’ve been doing that for 2 years, so not sure what else might have happened on my account that would cause you to suspend it. Please open it back up again please! [email protected]

Comments

brettbum

• This request is not yet solved, but the status shows that it is. I have received no information, my account still indicates that it is suspended. Please open this request again and please do not close it without actually fixing it or contacting me or something.

Aug-13 2009 05:18 pm.

brettbum

• In addition to my account being suspended, over 4,100 of my tweets are now gone, It looks as if they have been deleted or something? Plus my following and follower number is now at 0.

Aug-13 2009 05:28 pm.

brettbum

• Its been almost 14 hours since I noticed this inaccurate suspension. When is it going to be fixed? (note I realize this has to go through a process, just updating the ticket so that it does not get automatically closed out for no reason again)

Aug-13 2009 09:02 pm.

brettbum

• Its been over 24 hours (23 hours by the ticket counter which seems to time out). Here’s another bump on the ticket process, the account is still broken.

Aug-14 2009 07:22 am.

brettbum

• Pushing up on the 28 hour mark and no response or action

Aug-14 2009 09:30 am.

brettbum

• bump at the 30 hour mark

Aug-14 2009 11:07 am.

brettbum

• note delbius dealt with this situation the last time my account was mistakenly suspended, but it didn’t take 35 hours to fix that time?

Aug-14 2009 01:48 pm.

brettbum

• Its been a day and a half and I’ve heard nothing back from twitter????

Aug-14 2009 04:39 pm.

brettbum

• day 3 bump with no response or activity from twitter

Aug-16 2009 10:17 am.

brettbum

• My account has been mistakenly suspended for over 4 days

Aug-17 2009 09:15 am.

brettbum

• Over 4 and a half days and still no action or response from twitter

Aug-17 2009 08:00 pm.

brettbum

• Its almost been a week and no one from twitter as responded to my ticket.

Aug-19 2009 09:59 am.

brettbum

• I have received no response to my request, nothing has been fixed, this ticket should not have been closed it has been over a week and I have had zero response from any support people at twitter

Here is ticket number 2 accidentally created by my email

Request 506500

Submitted Aug 15 08:48 am by you

My Account Incorrectly suspended 2 days ago: Two days ago my twitter account was suspended. Last month my account was
temporarily suspended and I was later informed that the suspension had been
accidental. I do not spam on my account and I do follow the rules. The
suspension occurred approximately the day following a tech conference I was
attending in New York.

I’m sending an email request to have the suspension removed because the
online ticketing process does not appear to be monitored.

My twitter account is @brettbum under my email [email protected] and my
phone number 555.555.5555. Following the suspension, I have updated my
password.

Best Regards,

Brett

Brett Bumeter, llm

Comments

brettbum

• Its been over 3 days and no one has responded to my tickets?

Aug-16 2009 04:55 pm.

brettbum

• Over a week, why is there no response or follow up from twitter?

Aug-20 2009 10:06 am.

brettbum

• Still no response from Twitter

Aug-21 2009 11:03 am.

brettbum

• bump no ticket response fm twitter

Aug-22 2009 09:35 am.

Other Related Articles on Twitter Account suspensions

• Twitter Suspending Accounts in Droves
• Influx of Twitter Account Suspensions Creating Confusion 
• Twitter Account Suspensions
• Restoring accidentally suspended accounts 

Let’s assume that you are not trying to market your wares on Twitter.  You are just a person and you like twitter.  Every now and then you are inspired to enter a contest where you have to Re-Tweet (RT) something on twitter.  Maybe you can even RT more than once for additional entries for the contest.

Enter the technology that can make this just a little easier, services on the web that enable you to schedule your tweets in advance.

1. FutureTweets – Schedule Tweets
2. Twuffer – compose a list of future tweets, and schedule their release.
3. TweetLater – Offers a Free and a Pro version, enables you to schedule tweets (with pro schedule @ replies and DM’s even) and much much more – The Free version of this service impresses me the most, and it is the one I use.
4. HootSuite – Preschedule tweets & manage multiple twitter profiles
5. TwAitter – enables you to schedule tweets via a tweet calendar

The scenario above is just one example.  There are many more.  You might want to schedule a morning tweet in advance saying ‘Good Morning’ to everyone.  FutureTweets even jokingly mentions creating an alibi.    There can be lots of reasons to consider a scheduler, just like there are useful ways to schedule an out of office reply with email, the trick is to find the balance that makes it useful and appropriate and avoids stepping over the line into distracting and time waisting.

Are you famous on twitter?  Are you heading there quickly?  Then make the right SEO play and insure that you put a realy hyperlink in your Twitter account for your web address. 

Just because every other link on Twitter gets shortened, don’t forget the rest of the world outside of twitter mostly uses real and complete hyperlinks still.  That includes Google and Google is important for your other internet activities.

I’d like to hold up my good friend Warren Whitlock, one of the authors of the Twitter Revolution as a bit of an example.  Warren has over 17,000 active followers on Twitter.  These are NOT just people that hit follow for the hell of it, these are people plugged into twitter and actively engaged in this social network.

He has a shortened link to his book, Twitter Revolution under his profile.

Now Warren does know what he’s doing.  That link goes to his Amazon home page for the book, Twitter Revolution.  But even the Amazon page already has a PR3 all by itself, and even more importantly the Book already ranks number 1 in Google for the Keywords Twitter Revolution.  So if someone is looking for that book, they are going to find it.

I was talking with Warren earlier today and we talked about putting a link to his actual home page at WarrenWhitlock.com.  Now currently WarrenWhitlock.com only has a PR3.  It too comes up in the number 1 slot for Warren Whitlock, but he could funnel off some of that important PR5 juice to his own site and then from there push it around to his other ventures, not to mention to some of his blog articles, other books or a number of different things.  Sending the link Juice to Amazon doesn’t make since now that the book is established.

The fact that Warren has a PR5 on a twitter profile definitely shows that he is doing something more than right!

But after that he’s missing out on some of the benefits of having done that very right.  So the next step is to figure out how to harness that energy from an SEO perspective and do some additional things, very right as well!

On the latest black Monday when over 50,000 layoffs were announced, oil started spiking again, Iceland’s Government failed, and more banks from American Express to Freddie Mac started to show new signs of trouble, silicon valley appears to have smoked some of its own cool aid wrapped up in an Internet 1.0 business plan as they attempted to cook up a Twitter valuation of $250,000,000 like meth addicts on cranked and tweaked on a 4 day bender.   That’s $25 million or in twitter speak a cool twillion (pronounced like Elmer Fudd saying Trillion).

What can you BUY with a cool twillion?

10,000 followers you don’t know, a tweet deck and possibly sore thumbs.  That plus $5 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but hurry now before they both go bankrupt.

So in 2009 in the middle of a recession, 9 years past the dot com bust on companies that didn’t have revenue nor profit plans nor a viable business plan, why are we even witnessing a company possibly churning up $250 million in funding?  Double up on that question when you consider that Facebook as a simple example at least has a revenue plan (viability of ROI in that plan aside).

It is not too late to make a New Year’s Resolution for 2009.  Lets just make this one for all Venture Capitalists of the world.  I promise not to invest in a company that does not earn revenue. 

Lets run the simple number on Twitter. 

• $0 in Revenue per year times 3 years of revenue equals $0.00 in valuation (even less if you computer present value!). 
• $0 in Profits per year times 3 years of profits at those levels assuming 8% growth equals $0.00 in valuation (and that’s being generous not counting costs!)

Sure twitter has lots of users and activity.  I’ve got news for you, so did soup lines during the depression, but that didn’t make those into a possible business enterprise worthy of $250 million although maybe you could find someone to give you a cool twillion for it back then.

Lots of Twitter home pages look pretty, but few have any useful function to them.  I’ll admit that I am a function over form person, even though I do try to keep it balanced out.  But for me a thing typically needs to work well first before it gets all dolled up.  There is the obvious point that some things need to be organized well enough to be useful so I’ll leave that as it is.

Well, over the last few days, I’ve spent far too much time on my least favorite ‘time suck’ activity.  Designing my business cards.    I just really hate doing business cards.  Don’t know why, its just an activity that grates on my nerves like nails on a chalk board.

That said, when I saw this twitter home page today for dhinchcliffe (Dion Hinchcliffe), I was reminded that twitter accounts can not only be pretty but they can be functional too! 

I do not have the optimal layout or design on my own twitter account yet, but I think I’m going to try and apply some of the lessons that dhinchcliffe has applied very well and do a little benchmarking on my own profile.

Where do you stand on twitter?

I’m curious where do you stand on this issue with Twitter.  Do you think too much personal information or business card like info on a twitter account is appropriate, inappropriate, nerdy, to corporate, practical, finally gives twitter real purposes, dangerous for privacy reasons or all of the above and none of the above?

Personally, I like it, but I do recognize that everyone has different perspectives on things like this and that is probably the reason why there are so many different ‘faces’ on twitter. 

Friday, I received this email from CardScan the makers of a device I own.  Its a usb contraption that scans business cards. When I go to tradeshows, I take my card scanner.  I scan cards.

I then have the information electronically and can interact with people much faster and more efficiently. 

When I first purchased this, I thought to myself that I’d even go so far as to not keep the physical cards, which would reduce the amount of paper content that I’d have to carry back home on the plane packed into my luggage.  Well the reality is that I still tend to keep the cards.  For key contacts it can still be useful to have a business card handy somewhere.

Here’s the email I mentioned:

Dear Brett,
As an owner of a CardScan® solution, you’ve experienced first hand how your CardScan contact management system makes capturing important contact information fast and easy. We have always been committed to being the leader in business contact capture and pushing innovation in the business tools we produce.
In 2009, we look to the ever changing business environment and to you, our customers, to continue to provide applications that help make your business prosper. After much consideration, we have decided to focus our efforts on our core products, CardScan® Executive, Personal and Team.

So, as we say goodbye to 2008, we are also going to be saying goodbye to our CardScan® Lead Qualifier and CardScan for CRM products. Not to worry though, we will still be offering technical support for these products through the end of 2009.
For our Lead Qualifier customers, if you purchase additional licenses or Lead Qualifier forms before December 31, 2008, you can save 50%* off the suggested retail price! If you know you will be using CardScan Lead Qualifier at your tradeshows or conferences in 2009 you will be able to stock up on forms and licenses now at half the price!
As part of our ongoing efforts to make contact management easier for you, if you purchased CardScan® for CRM (Microsoft CRM, ACT! Premium, SalesLogix or Salesforce.com) after January 1st, 2008 we are offering you a free** copy of CardScan® Team software.

We hope you understand our decision to focus our efforts on our core product lines. CardScan remains committed to bringing you the very best contact management software possible and to serving you, our customers, in the best way that we know how.
Sincerely,
The CardScan Team

Now, here is the deal.  I do not use their CRM services.  The device I have does require that I log in to their website, but I send all the details from cards to my normal contact management systems.  The last thing I need is yet another CRM tool considering I’m covered on Plaxo, LinkedIn and Facebook, not to mention my offline endeavors which are even larger than my online networks.

So maybe this is a lesson for future companies.  Adding yet another CRM solution into the frey is not necessarily a recipe for success.

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