THE DREAM IN ACTION

Quick thoughts on big valuations from pre rev startups:

There are a lot of folks that don’t understand why Twitter or other startups like them can be valued at such enormous valuations while showing minimal or zero revenues. I respect your skepticism. It’s tough to understand why these early stage start ups have millions of users but aren’t profitable. Please understand that most of them could create revenues if they wanted to, but just turning on the revenue spout isn’t most important. Turning on the revenue spout when all the pieces are connected properly is critical. I’d like to use this analogy to explain this further.

If your connecting a hose to the spout/spigot and you turn on the water prior to ensuring you have the hose connected properly, you’re going to have a mess on your hands, everyone’s getting wet and the process of watering your grass and using the hose is a failure. However, if you ensure a proper connection from spout, to hose, to sprinkler, you’re going to have a great experience, the grass get’s water and growth occurs.

These companies have already proven that they know how to acquire users, the water is running, now it’s a matter of connecting the pieces properly before they turn it on so that the combination of water (users), hose (business model), and sprinkler (team) are all connected properly to maximize their revenue opportunities.

Excuse errors, first post from my iPhone. (Update: added photo)

Update: Twitter is reported to be profitable after making search agreements

Dear Associate,

Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter. You can access Share on Twitter from the Site Stripe and post to your Twitter account from Amazon detail pages in just two clicks.

The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account (you may be asked to log in to your Twitter account). That message will include a shortened URL that already includes your Associates ID. You’ll have the option to edit this message or simply hit the ‘Update’ button to post to your Twitter account. When Twitter users click on the link in your post and make a qualifying sale, you’ll earn referral fees. That’s it.

Also, did you know that you can stay connected with Amazon Associates by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook and joining our group on Linkedin?

Please tell us what you think of our new Share on Twitter feature using hashtag ‘#AMZNSOT’ on Twitter or contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

Side note: In my opinion Amazon is a perfect acquirer for AdaptiveBlue who makes the in browser social tool GetGlue.com. It’s a perfect opportunity to immediately bring their customers all together and have probably the largest social network on the web. Yes, with the Glue technology implemented  correctly they could surpass FB and the social graph would all center around REAL PRODUCTS. The potential is ridiculous…this topic will get it’s own post in the future.

There is a new trend on the web and both startups and investors are taking note. Fred Wilson has called this trend, “taking the web offline”. Others call it the challenge of “local”. Companies like Loopt and Foursquare are taking this problem head on. As the only web nerd amongst my group of friends I love applications that are appealing to the non-techies (makes me feel normal). I really like the notion of using the web as a tool to improve life, not just keeping eyeballs and activity on the web, and I do think there’s serious lifestyle change and revenue potential in it. The key that makes this all possible is that the web is now mobile.

With the combination of smart phones with decent web browsers and the ability for developers to make applications on these machines, people can “check in”, connect with each other, and find reviews on the fly. I love seeing the Yelp stickers in bar windows because it tells me that the owners care what customers think and if that’s important to them than my experience at that venue is sure to be better. The web is moving away from just the office or home pc and moving into the actual establishment, into the venue, via our pockets. Because we now have the web in our pockets we can interact with a business via the web in real time.

Consider this: Prior to walking into my local pub, I “check in”, pub tender is monitoring Twitter or Foursquare, she see’s that I’m coming, she pours my drink without me even ordering it yet, it’s ready upon my arrival… yea I’d pay an extra couple bucks for that. Extreme example I know, but the information that venues can now access is awesome and will continue to increase. IMHO, they’ll definitely pay for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how and when this transformation will really pick up speed and I’m going to write about it a bit over the next week or so. I think that local is already big and going to increase in importance. Companies like Everyblock who was recently acquired by MSNBC bring you hyper local news, and other services make exploring your city and meeting people close to you easier than ever before.

What location based applications are you using? Everytime your iPhone or BB asks, can we use your location, how often do you say yes?

Over the past month or so I’ve had a similar feeling as I had back in April 2008. At the begging of April 08 I was evangelizing the use of Twitter. It wasn’t popular, it was “nerdy”, Ashton, Oprah, and Tila Tequila were not yet dominating the service but I saw value in it and I wanted my friends and colleagues to be early to the game. I got a lot of push back at the time but overtime people began to try it out. Now my entire family and my fiance’s entire family is on Twitter and they love it. I have tons of friends on Twitter and everyone finds it valuable and useful. Many of them have become evangelists for the service themselves, they love it, I might even say obsessed.

By no means am I taking credit for the growth of Twitter over the last year and a half but I do feel pretty good about the fact that I recognized it’s value early. I’m attempting to do that again.

I need you to join Foursquare. Even if you think it’s a waste of time or “nerdy”, I’m trying to help you avoid being late to the party…again. There are a few key reasons that lead me to believe Foursquare will be huge, at least huge enough for the non-internet person to benefit from. A few of those reason are the huge potential that is location based applications, it’s fun and non-internet people can see why they’d want to join it, and it helps cities work better.

The way Foursquare works is, you go to a venue (bar, restaurant, park, etc.) and check in. Once you’ve checked in Foursquare awards you points and tallies the amount of times that you’ve checked in there. You’ll receive more points at more popular places and if you’re the person who’s checked in at that venue the most you’ll become the mayor. Also, by checking in to multiple venues and checking in often you receive badges for your check ins. The competitive mood of the game works incredibly well for it’s distribution and is quickly addicting.

Here’s why it has so much potential.

1) Location

Location will be is huge for the same reason Twitter blew up; it’s ability to connect people and provide value to them. Twitter allows you to be connected with people regardless of their location, but imagine the benefit of knowing more accurately and more timely the things that are happening in your area, now. This works between friends on a personal level (where is Ryan, I want to hang out) and with businesses on a public level (where is Ryan, I want to know what he likes).

2) It’s fun

I’ve only been on Foursquare for a few months and I always make sure I can check in to the venues I’m going to. I don’t want to miss out on getting the points and raising the ranks in Chicago and amongst my friends on Fsq. I currently hold 4 mayorships, at my local bar, coffee shop, restaurant, and condo complex. I find myself defaulting to the places I’m the mayor because I want to keep the title. I became the mayor because I like going to these venues but it works backwards too. I really enjoy knowing what bars and restaurant my friends hit up even though I’m not with them and more than once I’ve used Foursquare to meetup with friends and it’ll only get better the more folks are on it.

3) Your life improves

Sorry to reference Fred Wilson again, but he recently wrote a post on Urban architecture and how services like Foursquare make cities easier to use. In short, this type of service makes your life easier. They’ve recently, and much more aggressively than Twitter, found a revenue opportunity.  They’ve launched Foursquare for business that will allow venues to provide deals to the mayors and advertise to the patrons. They may even be able to learn about their customers and what other venues they attend. Can you say partnerships?

Early this month Foursquare announced that they would be taking an initial stage of funding from Union Square Ventures & O’Reily Alpha Tech Ventures. I’m encourage that Foursquare will grow to build some amazing things with their $1.35mm that they’ve raised.

Even if you think the location thing is still ‘creepy’ or the extra effort to connect Foursquare to Twitter isn’t worth it, please signup. Whether you don’t have an iPhone or Blackberry, that’s not an excuse either, I use Foursquare through SMS and it’s great. If you don’t sign-up now you’ll be coming back to this blog post in 3 or 4 months saying dang, I wish I would have gotten on before the hype, now it’s so tough to be the mayor of your favorite joint. Trust me, don’t be late to the party.

Learning From Others

As I work on my “Lessons Learned” post after closing down SocialDreamium (post should be ready by Wednesday) there is one main lesson that sticks out above the rest. The one lesson that I couldn’t wait until Wednesday to post is the importance of learning from others experiences! As a first time company launcher I was green to so many pitfalls that I could potentially succumb to. What I attempted to do, and will continue to focus on, is learning from the mistakes of others.

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
- Otto von Bismarck

So, as I continue to focus on this, the next questions become, how do I know who to learn from? How do I access these individuals? And where can I converse with them in order to learn from their learnings? lanjut →

A few months back I was engaged in a conversation about how social media (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.) can really be used to drive tangible changes for a business. As individuals we are able to connect with old friends, stay even more connected with co-workers, and track real time topics, but what do businesses really get out of it all? It’s all kind of fluff right?

Mike Walsh, the CEO of Leverage Software thinks not. Mike is is was an angel investor in Salesforce.com and his company believes that social media can make smart companies even smarter. His business has benefited from actively engaging in the social web and driving benefits out of “intangible” tools. This guest post from Mike gives 10 solid ways that businesses, not just individuals, can increase tangible results like member acquisition, retention, and even drive revenue using these social web tools. lanjut →

In an effort to be a resource for many of my friends who have recently joined Twitter I’ve decided to post a quick list of Twitter safety tips. Many of these tips carry over to other social networks but they are written here as specific to Twitter.

5 Twitter Safety Tips

• Never give out personal information via Tweets. When writing your profile information add your URL but be general with your location. I don’t like the iPhone generated latitude/longitude locations. Just use your city to stay safe. Email is usually safe enough but understand that if it’s on your Twitter profile, it’s in the public.
• Never give out your Twitter password. There are SO many applications that “need” your password, don’t give it to them. Twitter has even created a method for a 3rd party application to use your login credentials without getting to that data. Especially since this has come out no app should need your password. Any good application will now use this system below to verify the use of your Twitter login credentials.
  
• Just like anything else on the web, once you’ve posted it, it’s there for good. Make sure to be smart about sharing content. Especially pictures and other multi-media.
• Keep your profile information brief enough that your comfortable with any stranger knowing it. Unlike Facebook, anyone can follow you on Twitter, you have limited discretion on who follows you.
• If you ever plan to meet someone from Twitter offline (which I have done often and have found to be extremely valuable for networking) make sure you know about that person first. It helps to first have a phone conversation with that person and ask questions that only that person would know to make sure there’s no scamming being done.

5 Tips For Twittering Kids

• First, why are you tweeting, go sign-up for sports!
• Always tell your parents about any threats or negative Tweets and never ever arrange to meet someone offline.
• Only follow people that you know in real life.
• It may help to keep your Twitter feed private and “protect your updates”. This allows you grant permission to followers and gives you complete control over who views your Twitter feed.

• Pretend your parents are behind you on every Tweet!

I know there are so many blog posts on Twitter now days but I was doing research on different Twitter clients and I’ve created a decent lists with my 1 sentence write-up. Still the best list I’ve found is at the Twitter PBwiki.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about the affect of the celebrity attention on twitter. In San Francisco this weekend the topic of Twitter came up (surprise surprise) and a someone who wasn’t on Twitter yet said, “Is Twitter that celebrity thing?” My immediate reaction was, damn celebs, screwing up Twitter for the rest of us, but maybe it is a good thing. Let me know what you think and I hope the resources below help.

Twitter apps

Tonight I was doing a bunch of research on different Twitter apps and how they use Twitter data to track usage, contacts, and (lame) popularity. This isn’t a pretty post but here are the links to the many sites and a not on them.

BEST COMPILATION OF TWITTER APPS – http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

http://tweetstats.com/ -   best collection of graphs from twitter usage. required username not password.

http://bradkellett.com/experiments/tweetdumpr/ -  allows you to dump/download your latest 3200 tweets. we could use this to get data from before sign-up

http://twitterholic.com/ryangraves/ -  popularity rankings in twitter along with friends follow etc by date

http://xefer.com/twitter/ryangraves -  very creative way of displaying time and date of tweets, also had a cool way of showing count of @replys and the convos that go along with them

http://twistory.net/ – syncs your tweets with your calendar so you can recall when you said something or when you found something [Twitter + History]

http://tweetbuzzer.com/ – real time stream tracking brands.

http://flotzam.com/ – an interesting streaming app (with open code) for youtube, twitter, facebook, rss content

http://twitteranalyzer.com/CelebrityRace.aspx – up to the minute info on followers added

http://www.twaitter.com/ & http://tweetlater.com – the 2 best twitter scheduling platforms

http://adcause.com/ – ad campaigns from $1 on Twitter

http://twtqpon.com/ – offer exclusive deals on Twitter with “Qpons”

http://monitter.com/ – livestream topic monitoring

http://www.twitbin.com/ – twitter from browser sidebar

Potential Competition

http://objectivemarketer.com/ – they talk a lot about using data in new/interesting ways

http://bx.businessweek.com/ – from Business Week, getting good traction

http://klout.net/ – tracks a users influence across the web (twitter)

http://www.twibs.com/ – business monitoring on Twitter

http://www.addresstwo.com/ – Twitter contact mgmt system

http://twitturly.com/ – what is being shared and RT’d a lot on Twitter

via vadirajcs

I’m pumped that now my Tweets feed directly to Facebook. All the friends that made fun of me for using Twitter are now commenting and joining in conversations around my Tweets and my blog posts that I share on Facebook via Twitter. This is a huge “crossing of the chasm” for Twitter because the “normal people” are now joining in on web based conversations at a rapidly increasing rate.

Sorry this post is so late, I’ve been thinking/working on it for a while. First, I’ll share why you should use Twitter for status updates, then show you how.

9 Reasons Why You Should Use Twitter for Status Updates

I have found multiple reason for using Twitter. I’ve use the service for almost a year and have been able to meet a ton of cool people using the service. I’ve used Twitter for personal and business cases. It’s a phenomenal communication platform that allows for extreme flexibility in communication. Here are my top 9 reasons why you should use Twitter to update your Facebook status.

1. Twitter allows for mobile status updates – Go to the ‘Devices’ tab under your Twitter account settings and give Twitter your mobile phone number. Then SMS or txt message ‘40404′ your message. This will update Twitter and now also your Facebook status. Easy peasy!

lanjut →

photo via mavericksmath

This thought came from a comment I made on Mashable’s post on personal branding using Social Media. The book written by Dan Schwabel, Me 2.0, inspired the post.

When using social media for branding I would make 2 points.

1) Use the tools, don’t be the tools. Keep in mind that the value of social media comes through communication. You’ll need to leverage the communication but more importantly you’ll need to back up that communication. It is unlikely that you’ll be valuable to a company for social media’s sake. You need to use the social media tools to communicate your expertise or value in other areas of business/life.

2) Don’t drowned. A while back I fell into the trap of losing the productivity battle solely because I wanted to stay informed on what was going on in the social web world. Staying in tune with every update from my Twitter friends and trying to consume tons of data, I was becoming very unproductive. I spent so much time staying “informed” that I was accomplishing much less. I wrote on my blog (http://bit.ly/o07w8) about how I reduced the noise and increase the value of tools like Twitter. If you don’t appear productive, employers will not be attracted to you.

The tools can kill opportunities if used incorrectly.

image via Robert Scoble’s flickr

Over the past 2 months I’ve made some drastic changes to how I use Twitter (which I will share below). When I was in China, as I was reading The 4 Hour Work Week, I realized that my control over my own productivity was slipping from my hands. I spent so much time on non-productive tasks and it was time for a drastic change. I realized that my Twitter habits were guilty of productivity theft and I needed to put an end to it. Here’s the experiment…

Before

At one point, I was following 1001 people on Twitter. At home on my Mac I used Tweetdeck and REACH to manage my twitter followers. The constant flow of Tweets was entertaining for sure but because of my desire to see as much as I could from the “Twittersphere” I dropped other important tasks. At work I limited Twitter but used iGoogle’s Betwittered to follow the streams. It got to the point that I couldn’t even see the Tweets from people I knew personally because of the huge number of people I followed that I didn’t know but were just interesting to me.

I have always been a huge fan of taking Twitter relationships offline. Late last year I met Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING via Twitter. We had dinner one night and now have a solid, offline friendship. Same goes for Steffan Antonas, a Wordpress & Twitter guru out in San Diego. When I was home I met Steffan for drinks and we now stay in touch, sometimes via Twitter and sometimes via email. Another example is Fraser Kelton, VP of BizDev for AdaptiveBlue (maker of GLUE), who I’ll be meeting up with in two weeks on my trip to NYC. These are just a few examples of many more!

There are some incredibly valuable relationships to be had out there and I’ll always love Twitter for making those relationships easier to develop and find. But it got to the point that I couldn’t separate the social networking from the social noise making. I didn’t want to lose the ability to develop those relationships into valuable ones only because I was trying to keep up with so many other people I’d never met.

Realization

As I realized that I had to make this change I first had to decide how. Another relationship that I’ve begun to nurture through Twitter is the founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur. I follow his blog closely and saw him post on his drastic change in Twitter usage.  He had the Twitter folks write a script that would “unfollow all”. He did this because his direct messages got out of control. He was following 23,o00 people and understandably it was overbearing. 

I realized that I wanted to take a similar action. My goal was to get back to my close friends and people I’d met in person. I wanted to see the random actions, “I fed my dog ice cream and he loved it”, from my friends (so I could later make fun of them) but I didn’t need to see these posts from everyone. So how would I do that? What would the affects be and how could I test before making the jump?

Change

In China I basically didn’t use Twitter. This was my test. I think I had a total of 10-15 posts the entire month and it was relaxing. It freed me to focus on what I was learning from my training courses and it freed me to explore China. I reduced my blog posting to ‘travel only’, and I focused on the experiences I was having. I felt freed, I felt focused, and much more productive. I knew that when I got back I needed to apply some of the Tim Ferriss (4HWW) principles to really change my productivity and focus. I would employ the low(er) information diet.

So, when I got back, I promptly got in touch with Loic and asked if he could share the script with me. He couldn’t give me the script but I got in touch with Zac Bowling (@zbowling) and he ran it for me. In a total of about 20 minutes I was following O people. I had completely started from scratch with Twitter and it was scary. I started re-adding people like my parents (yes, they’re on Twitter), my sisters, my college friends, the people who I stated above, and other people that I knew in person. It was easy to find who I communicated with most often using saved Twitter searches in REACH (coming to beta soon!). 

I definitely do need to apologize to some people because I haven’t yet added everyone back that I should. I’m doing this gradually. If I know you in person I’m probably following you (again). However, for those who I don’t know in person I’ve limited my consumption of your tweets to regain my personal productivity. Please don’t take it personally. If we have had conversations, please @reply me and get back in touch, I’d love it. I should say that there is no goal here of having a ridiculous follower/following ratio. I could careless. I only care about the value that I get out of the tool and I’ll take almost any action that will increase that value measure.

After

The results of my experiment have been pretty interesting. Right away I lost about 150 followers. It dropped from 1500 followers to about 1340. Losing those followers didn’t bother me at all. If people are following me only/just because I’m following them then peace. Then, people started following me at a much faster rate and even though I’d lose about 10 followers a day, I’d add about 11. Now my follower number is about 1360 and I sincerely hope to interact with many of those people in the future.

Twitter is very much a two way street. Those who interact with my question type tweets I’ll follow and interact with them, those who don’t, well I guess they’ll continue to just follow my tweets. I definitely engaged in the question tweets of anyone who @replies me or that I’m already following. I’m a huge supporter of the platform and now that my Tweets go directly and quickly into Facebook it’s engaging even more friends!

My productivity has sky-rocketed due to my low information diet and reduction of Tweets to consume. Now I rarely consume Tweets and send Tweets at the same time. By doing this it’s easy to spiral into a Twitter session that lasts much longer than it needs to. I can’ t say I’d recommend this experiment to everyone, but I would recommend identifying what and who are important to you and making sure that the tool enables better communication instead of the tool becoming a barrier to solid communication. 

Below is a hilarious video about the “Twittershere” shared by my sis @taylorgraves

To be consistent with my ongoing effort to connect with and meet as many Twitter friends as possible I decided to interview my 1000th follower. I reach this small milestone about a week or so ago. I got lucky because this #1000 turned out to be an awesomely interesting dude, from San Diego of all places, my home town and as we will mutually call it, paradise. Everyone, meet Dave…Dave, meet everyone.

RG: Who are you and what do you do for work?
My formal name is Daniel Marashlian, M.Ed. (that’s a Masters in Education in Leadership)

And I’m the CTO for Pelotonics, LLC – a software company that is focused on fundamentally changing the way people work in groups for the better. We want to pull the “Google” in our space of Group Productivity. As Google fundamentally changed the way search engines should be.

RG: Where are you from and where do you live now?

I’m from Sedona, Arizona (poor Cardinals, they should have won the Super Bowl) it’s a famous tourist destination. It gets voted like top 10 most beautiful place on Earth like every year. A bunch of Red Rocks and what not… It’s pretty cool. Though I now live in paradise, or as most people say, San Diego!

RG: How/why did you join Twitter?

I just recently found out about twitter about 6 months ago, as Troy Malone (Founder and Chief Evangelist of Pelotonics) hired Marshall Kirkpatrick as a consultant to teach us about the new “Social Media” and what benefits it would provide us as a business in the Web 2.0 world.

RG: What is the coolest thing that has happened for you because of Twitter?

Proving out that if you do it “right” and add true value out to the online community through Blogging, Twitter, etc… That it truly works for marketing and it’s a great base of highlighting the cool and innovative things we’re doing at Pelotonics.

RG: What is your goal with your use of Twitter?

1. Show people how to be more productive through our blog (http://blog.pelotonics.com)

2. Make people aware of Pelotonics and what it can provide

3. Make viable connections to people in ways that I never thought was possible.

4. Provide TOP TIER customer service. We’ve solved many customer issues over twitter. As one of our customers said, “Pelotonics has decided to redefine what customer service means” because we truly provide amazing customer support and input. From our support email, our office line is posted for anyone to have, and PeloTV (http://www.pelotonics.com/media/peloTV.html)

RG: Do you care more about who’s following you, or who you are following?

I personally care more about who I follow. I’m more in the background of the operations of Pelotonics, where Troy is the front runner as he’s the Chief Evangelist. I like to soak up all of the data I can get and turn it into useful information, to see if it will benefit me or Pelotonics in any way.

RG: If you had the power, what business model would you implement for Twitter?

Here are some suggestions (just some thoughts off the top of my head):

1. Limit the number of tweets you can do unless you’re on a paid account

2. No Direct Messages unless you’re a paid user

3. Limit the number of people you can follow or people that can follow you unless you’re a paid user

4. Maybe if you’re on a paid account, you can customize your twitter page to your own CSS

RG: What’s the happiest day of you life…so far?

It would have been yesterday, if the Cardinals won the Super Bowl, but since they lost… I think there are 2…

1. The day I decided to move to San Diego. I LOVE it here, I have truly found home.

2. Me and all of my buddies from Sedona go to Tahoe every year for a boys trip and the first year we went, the last night was sooooo fun. As a group we were unstoppable at the casino, between 6 of us, we took the roulette table for around 25K and just had the best time. It was like a movie, we had the whole table, and there were like 40 people surrounding us just watching and cheering. It was an amazing night.

RG: Care to share the worst? (Optional)

Besides falling in a cactus when I was 12, the only thing that comes to mind is my girl breaking up with me a month ago. It’s been a rough month, I thought she was the “one”. I guess not…. L

RG: Do you have a motto that you live by?

A few, “Go big or go home” is a great one, though mainly it’s, “Be a kind gentle person, and a friend to all” Those are the words on my father’s gravestone, and I’ve always lived by those words. I figure everything else (love, money, etc…) will come if I’m true to that.

RG: Where else can people find you on the web?

www.pelotonics.com

http://blog.pelotonics.com

http://www.pelotonics.com/media/peloTV.html

@danielzev on Twitter

Daniel.marashlian on Skype

Probably some more as well, but they’ll have to find me.

==============

Dan, I just want to thank you for being so open and honest and following all the probably meaning BS that I liberally spew at you on a daily basis over Twitter. I look forward to meeting in San Diego next time I’m home. Cheers buddy. –Ryan

Now you can comment on this blog and it will post to Friendfeed. There are many great conversations going on over on Friendfeed and I’m happy that I’ll be able to reach and engaged that community with this blog.

During a talk with Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk at CES, Scoble mentioned that Friendfeed has a lot of big things coming. A recent blog post I read entitled ‘Friendfeed could kill Twitter‘ (sorry couldn’t find a link) lead me to believe that Friendfeed does have some really great stuff down the line. I’m pumped for that platform to grow and I think it’s great, but for now it’s still a little too early adopter-ish. I’d love to help them get more main stream which is why I’m happy to be on the early side of integrations like this.

I’ve long been a proponent of opening the conversations up and minimizing platform dependability. I also like services that are platform transparent, meaning they don’t need you to know where or how the conversation is happening, but are more focused on the fact that the conversation is happening. Disqus seems to be that way. They are making partnerships that will take their added value and share it with others. The are closer to the source of the value (the blog) and they know that if the conversations they “own” or host are on more platforms their value will increase as well.

Great work to the Disqus and Friendfeed folks for making this happen.

Below is a view from Friendfeed:

One thing I’ve noticed is that it does not appear that a comment made on Friendfeed will come back to post on this blog. I’m not sure if it should and didn’t or if they don’t have that worked out yet but this must occur for there to be significant platform transparency and value add.

My top 5 words on twitter are BLOG, LOVE, GOOD, GREAT, & THANKS.

I’m proud of what that says about me. Jump on Tweetstats and see how people perceive you.

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You probably saw the Hubspot Twitter grader, most people who use Twitter regularly have. And if you have a business online you’ve probably used Hubspot’s website grader. They measure for SEO strengths, etc. Now Hubspot, just (last night), released the Facebook Grader. The measure your friends, strength of friends, and how active and updated your profile is.

I got a pretty solid grade here and I’m convinced it’s all because of how sweet my college and college friends are. I’m assuming other schools are the same way, but when Facebook hit Miami University it was a frenzy. There was mass creapin’ being done. It was college.

Loic had a great idea that they should include if you have a fan page. It would hurt me and help him, I guess rightfully so. Comment with your score!

I’m the 47th strongest facebooker…that won’t last long.

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