December 2011
6 posts
4 tags
Watchfrom Hungry Academy
I love this idea because it admits one core fact which is still shaping the way businesses that operate online function - there isn’t really an ideal schooling path for this, in my opinion.
While doing this for an engineering team is a start, I’d love to see a Hungry Academy-style approach to building other teams and skillsets within a start-up environment. Almost...
7 tags
The core node.
The core node of the internet changes, over time.
It used to be a specific machine, a specific email address, a specific website, a specific profile.
Lately, the core node online is a person. And the tools that tie other outposts, other data, to the idea of a core, identity-based node, are the ones that are winning.
Which is why I don’t feel like many deeply interesting things emerging...
4 tags
Admit when things don't make sense.
The simplest rule I know of is to just admit when something doesn’t make sense.
And yet, this seems to be the hardest rule to get people to follow, because we’re trained from an early age, to give people what they want.
Humans are irrational creatures. We want things because we don’t have them, because others do, because we see success as related to those things, or status, or...
8 tags
What 'New Twitter' is.
It isn’t an attack on power users, the same way Final Cut Pro X wasn’t a slap in the face to power users.
This is evidence of a core truth: no one changes the game focusing only on what power users want.
I don’t mean this as an extension of the ‘faster horses’ problem. I mean, simply, that your baseline experience shouldn’t be focused on what gets the power...
6 tags
Lessons from PayPal's Fiasco
PayPal made a very big mistake.
Paypal realized this, and fixed it.
But there’s a lot to learn from what happened, and it’s not just about the error made, and not just about the response.
Digital / Social needs to own customer service. This is plenty counter intuitive, but it’s the logical move. When something goes wrong in customer service, very wrong, it will almost...
5 tags
Virality and Teasing the Fat Kids.
One of the biggest dreams of the average brand is still going viral. This isn’t new, but it is getting more irritating.
We could blame Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, and the man responsible for the word Meme entering public consciousness - this is the genesis of the concept of the ‘viral idea’, a self propagating memetic life form that everyone seems to think is...