I’m knee-deep in last minute preparation for this week’s Social Gaming Summit. It should be great and I hope you’ll be there to join us. I was spending some time on AppData and was struck by something – I thought it warranted a quick blog post of my own. I was also inspired by something […]
Read More “Is Zynga Running Out of People to Acquire on the Facebook Platform?”
I’m starting to see the “Sign in with Twitter” button in more places on the web. I’m still trying to figure out what the bigger picture plan is for this service. To me, it looks very similar to Facebook Connect – it’s a simplified way to log into 3rd party sites without having to create […]
Read More “Does “Sign In with Twitter” Make Sense Without an Web Ad Play?”
I saw so many posts about the new Google Nexus phone (I liked the one on TC, so I’m linking to that one) that I wanted to post my quick thoughts. In the interest of fair disclosure, I used to work at Google back in the day and know and respect a lot of the […]
Read More “Google Nexus One Phone and Creating an Android Exemplar”
I was reading TechCrunch’s article on Zynga’s launch of Farmville.com earlier today. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about why Zynga might do this and what it means for the industry. I don’t think it signals a major shift away from Facebook or social networks, but it is an interesting hedge (at best) or a […]
Read More “Is Zynga’s Farmville.com A Sign of Things to Come or a Clever Hedge?”
Last Thursday I had the privilege of hanging out with some really famous bloggers and FriendFeed personalities including Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Eric Eldon, Thomas Hawke, Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter and the FriendFeed team (among many others) to get a good look at the new FriendFeed UI. If you want a more detailed treatment of […]
Read More “The New FriendFeed UI – More About Content, Less About Sources”
I have to admit that the genesis for this post was a conversation I had with some of my business-minded friends during the first half of the Super Bowl. One of my friends, who runs his own venture-backed company, asked the group whether we thought the classic Silicon Valley, venture-funded tech startup scene was the […]
Read More “Would You Spend the Next 20-30 Years of Your Career in Silicon Valley?”
I’ve now posed roughly 30 questions to Aardvark and I think it’s one of the more useful services I’ve used of late. In addition to being useful, I also think it has a reasonable shot at becoming an interesting business as well. In the interest of fair disclosure, it’s worth noting that Aardvark has good […]
Read More “I’m Bullish on Aardvark (and Twitter should take notes)”
I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to offer products that are free or basically free to users on the web. I try not to get religious about free – there’s nothing inherently right or wrong about choosing a business model that incorporates a free component so long as you understand […]
Read More “Thoughts on Free Powered Business Models and Why Time Beats Features”
I was reading Justin Smith’s good post on Faecbook’s delayed payment system and I thought I’d share a slightly longer version of what I left in the comments on his blog: I do think most of the major social networks have looked at payments and decided it’s a tricky business for them to tackle for […]
I was reading a post on AllThingsD about the Twitter+Facebook tie-up that wasn’t. I have been scratching my head since reading that post – it’s good reporting but I still can’t figure out why Facebook would want to buy Twitter. Twitter is building a very interesting community of users with very different norms from Facebook. […]
