Summary:

Too early to tell. If you’re not an “early adopter” type, don’t waste time looking at it just yet.

UPDATE: The early adopter phase is growing rapidly, as of today 03/08/11 the user base is 25 million and growing, time on the site per user is increasing too… have a look personally, ready for the business pages launch.

Main body:

Another google product, another twitter stream full of “invite wanted PLEASE!” type messages… I was lucky to get on quite early and shared the wealth as soon as I could.

Initial gut feeling… I like it. I like the use of circles, an idea that I’ve always sort of used on facebook with the friends lists feature… which is horribly clunky. This however works REALLY well, I like it a lot. It will take some discipline to add everyone into circles to start with, but once you have, it’s a simple way of sending messages to certain groups of people.

The people themselves don’t know the name or membership of a circle, just that they got that message from you.

What about business pages?

Good question, at the moment it is only for personal pages, businesses will get additional functionality but there isn’t any more info than that at the moment.

Is there a mobile app?

Yes and the android one is pretty good, the iphone one has been submitted to the app store, but as of today not live on itunes.

I totally agree with Scobelizers article that “your mum wont use it”… yet. I think it’ll be interesting to see whether the changes at Facebook announced this week deaden some of the impact google plus has (especially the video chat “huddle” feature)

It is still in a beta type phase, once business pages are launched and the user base matures I think it could be one to watch, some analysts are saying the +1 button is already wider used than “tweet this”.

Read More

Beware the “tweet n delete” twitter spam twitzend.info

Twitter spam is nothing new, nor are rogue apps that promise followers and tweet on your behalf… but recently I’ve spotted an odd new trend, what I’m calling the “tweet n delete” twitter spam.

I spotted similar looking spam messages on a couple of accounts recently, when I went to view the accounts to warn the owners on the first 2, there were no messages listed, so I assumed the offending spam issue was resolved….

When I saw one from a friend of mine, I replied to him to suggest he check his authorized apps and he replied he hadn’t sent anything, I checked his feed and sure enough there was no spam… then the following day, there was another one from his account – this time I took a screenshot and checked his feed to find it was no longer listed.

<<<<< screen shot of the twitzend spam

vvvvv Screen capture of the feed for that time

 

He was keen not to be sending spam, so sent me his login details – as expected I found the rogue app listed (slightly in disguise) – A quick check of the link from the spam message (tinyurl translated to twitzend.info) confirmed it was the app in question and I removed it.

 

 

Forgetting the fact it’s a waste of time to fake bulk up your following numbers, beware authorizing websites to update your twitter feed.

If you do see a friends account tweeting anything odd, that’s then not listed in their stream when they/you check later, suggest they go to twitter.com, login, select settings (top right) and applications tab to see what is listed and remove ones they don’t need or recognize.

Thanks to @darylhales, club manager extraordinaire, for letting me login to his account to get to the bottom of this one.

Read More

I’ve helped with and organized a few events in my time; occasionally I get asked for my advice on doing so… as happened twice in the last week, so I thought a blog post was in order on some of the things I’ve learnt from Startup-meetup, BarCamp Bournemouth, Ignite Bomo, Meetdraw etc… and also from attending events.

1) Be specific if/when you ask for sponsorship, you get better results – When we asked sponsors for £340 to cover a meal at a conference, we got better responses than when we asked for £100 to be a “micro-sponsor”. I have to thank Mark Ng for this one when he handed Bar Camp Bomo over to us, by far the most useful thing anyone said to us.

2) Get EVERYTHING in a google doc (or similar)  for anyone involved to see: contact details, to do list, speaker contacts etc etc.

3) Don’t rely on committees, assign tasks clearly to specific people. It’s quite well documented that you have less chance that someone will volunteer to do something the more of you there are about. This is especially true of tasks “can someone…” means noone will (usually).

4) Allow people to do tasks their own way. It’s easy to micro-manage every little detail (or end up doing it yourself) – learn to accept that people do things in different ways and that most times this really doesn’t matter. I’ve even witnessed people working at an event say “I was going to do … but I know (the boss) will tell me I’ve done it the wrong way”.

5) Schedule EVERYTHING. Know when you need invoices paid, things booked, press releases sent… I’ve certainly got this wrong in the past on events and it’s on my “must try harder” list.

6) Be open, honest and transparent with your attendees. My pet peeve at events is when you get conflicting stories about why there is a delay / cock up etc… just be open n honest. Customer service 101: acknowledge what has happened, say what you’re doing to ensure it won’t happen again and what the next steps will be.

7) On the day… Don’t panic. Things WILL go wrong, kit will be lost, people will fail to show, someone will complain about something… So what? Try and enjoy your event, make sure you ask for help as soon as you need it and just roll with it.

As ever, I’d love to know your top tips in the comments.

Read More

This week I went to South Coast Connections at the Queens Hotel and spa, where the guest speaker was Bill Morrow, founder of Angels Den.

After hearing the story of how he came to set up Angels Den he set out the five questions start-ups have to answer to secure funding from Angels, perhaps interesting is to hear where most fail; I wanted to share it with you so here it is:

angels-den

Note: this recording was made off my phone so it’s not amazing… and yes, I did ask Bill if it was ok to post it online! (especially to share with the Startup-Meetup group on LinkedIn)

1. What do you do?
2. What is the pain in the marketplace that you solve?
3. How do you solve that pain?
4. How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors in the market place?
5. How much money do you need? (& does the money you ask for show a relation to the valuation I put on your company?)

I especially liked his openness about failure, one for a future Failure Swapshop perhaps?

Read More

Yesterday I got to spend quite a bit of time playing with the new Blackberry Playbook, I know plenty of people who follow me on twitter were keen for me to write my thoughts about it after I sent a twtpic photo of it out…  so forgive me a slightly off topic blog post for once!

Disclosure: I was presenting at a Blackberry Sponsored o2 lunch event, talking Social Networking, Mobile Apps and Relevant legislation (ASA CAP Code etc) – that said, these opinions are entirely my own ( I did ask if it was ok to write a blog post).

So in no particular order, my thoughts:

1) “7 inches felt better in my hand than 10…”

Ok, I could of chosen my words better but hey it made my friends laugh… seriously though, it feels a much more natural size to hold and use with one hand. Which is annoying, I was sure I wanted a 10″ android tablet until using the playbook.

2) I like the way you use the bevel

Swiping from the top brings up a menu, from the bottom it goes to the tasks/launcher screen (as in the pic) and sideways switches between running apps. It’s intuitive and I really liked the fact this leaves the rest of the front of the device free of buttons.

3) Video playback is MIND BLOWING

I watched an HD clip on the device and it really blew me away how sharp the picture was (HDMI out too) plus being a widescreen device it filled the screen. (1024×600)

4) Android apps?

I either missed, or the one I used didn’t have the android emulator – would of loved to try this.

5) Take it to the (Blackberry) bridge

Tethering to a Blackberry device was quick and seemed to work well, from what I saw on my limited play it uses the information from the phone – not syncs it. If I got this right, I think that’s pretty clever, you could give this to your kid, lose it, break it without compromising user details. Internet via 3G worked well.

6) The lag…

Some reports have said it was quite “laggy”, I didn’t really notice this, although I wasn’t specifically trying to run loads of apps (although when the video was running flicking to another app worked just as smoothly).

Overall what did I think?

I was honestly pleasantly surprised at how smooth it was and how good it looked. I LOVED the size, it’s made me re-evaluate which tablet I’ll get (I want one for presenting especially) .

Would I get a playbook? Probably not, but that said, if I was a Blackberry user I would definitely get this device.

For business use in a person to person (think being on a stand at a show or door-to-door) it’s much better to hold than an ipad being 7″ and lighter, with the Blackberry bridge a great combo.

Personally, I’m still set on an android tablet – I had decided on the Asus Eee Transformer… but now I’m looking at 7″ ones…

Read More