EnjoyTech

I love Twitter, but lately, I am getting annoyed by Twitter spam and I'm not the only one. I don't want Twitter spam to become email spam. I don't want to whine about that either, so I spent some time thinking about what Twitter could do to deal with spam. Consider this an open letter to Twitter. Facebook's privacy settings are the new programming a VCR. Google has been criticized a lot about profiting from content farms. I believe that all the major players are playing a catch-up game. A lot of people have stared to complain about LinkedIn spam as well. Quora went into different direction — where they started out with a strict upfront policy regarding who can join Quora, ask questions, answer questions etc. — to maintain the quality of their service. Strict upfront policy hampers new user acquisition and adoption but could ensure better quality where as liberal policy accelerates the user acquisition with a risk of service being abused. I do believe that there's a...

I have been living in the Silicon Valley for a while, and sure enough I haven't forgotten the dot com days. A few days back, on my way to the San Francisco airport, I saw a billboard by aol advertising that they are cool (again!). I also observed that parking lots alongside 101 weren't that empty. I told myself "man! this does feel like 1999". The smart people - entrepreneurs, VCs, and analysts - that I talk to, tell me that we're in a bubble. They call it Bubble 2.0. Perhaps, they're right. The company valuations are through the roof. Facebook is valued around $75 billion and Color , on the launch day, had $40 million in the bank. The angel, super angel, and incubator investment deal flow is bringing all the talent to the Valley and all these young smart entrepreneurs are working on some of the coolest things that I have ever seen. But, there's a talent side that I am worried about. What this influx of easy venture capital has ensued is companies waging t...

I have been answering quite a few questions on Quora . The most recent one was " What are 5 tips to becoming an influencer on Twitter? " This post is a version of my answer on Quora. Being an "influencer" means different things to different people, but I would attempt to describe this in the most general sense. Be unique: Twitter has very low signal to noise ratio. You don't get others' attention if you cannot differentiate yourself and your contribution. Be passionate about the topics that you care for and work hard to craft high quality tweets. Go through a brutal qualifying process to discard the weak draft tweets and post the ones that are of the highest quality. Treat your Twitter account as your personal brand and think what makes any brand stand out. As Seth Godin would say, be the purple cow. Be a great blogger: Let's not forget that Twitter is still a form of blogging; a microblogging. Ask yourself what makes a great blogger? Apply those quali...

I have been following the Chirp conference today where Evan Williams, who goes by @ev , disclosed Twitter growth numbers in his keynote and shared their pains, gains, and priorities. We all know that Twitter is growing fast – very, very fast – but here is the summary of those numbers that tells us what that growth actually looks like: 105 million registered users and they add 300k uses every day 3 billion API request a day (equivalent to Yahoo traffic) 55 million new tweets every day 600 million search queries every day 175 employees 75% traffic comes from third party clients 60% tweets come from third party clients 100,000 registered apps 180 million unique visitors on Twitter.com (you don’t have to be a user) FlockDB, their social graph database that they just open sourced, stores 13 billion edges They started using “Murder” a new BitTorrent platform to transfer files during development. This reduced the transfer time from 40 minutes to 12 seconds Made deals with 65 (telco) carriers...

As it goes " on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog ". Actually people do. Recently AT&T asked their employees to fake the net neutrality . Employees were asked to use their personal email addresses to petition against net neutrality. The internal memo ended up on the blogs and Twitter in minutes. Forcing your brand down your employees' throats is not particularly a smart idea. Is your brand ready for the cloud? This is not a question that many companies ask until their brand gets caught in a cloud storm. The storm is about the customers, partners, and suppliers discussing your products and brand in the public using social media, report problems using the SaaS tools, and engage into the conversations in ways that you never anticipated. Recently Seth Godin announced an initiative to help companies launch brand in public . It stirred quite a controversy and created confusion. He had to pull back. The organizations are simply not ready. The organizations are uncl...