mad dog in the fog

A local news station in San Francisco (KPIX) ran a story tonight on Twitter. Robert Scoble (PodTech) and Biz Stone (Obvious) are featured in the video.

Interesting. Earlier today, Justin.tv on Twitter sent out this request for help to the “Twitterati”:

Looking for someone to help scale the site STAT. Will seriously pay you a suitcase full of cash.

Within 3 hours, they had received over 100 responses:

Justin: thanks for all the support! we’ve had like a hundred people offer help!

I’m not sure how many of the responses were from the 325 people who are currently following him on Twitter but I’d say that 100 responses in a few hours is a great response for a job posting that took all of 10 seconds to post.

This is why I think Twitter has an opportunity to challenge craigslist. This was a very efficient, targeted classified ad. It took little effort, it didn’t cost anything (these types job postings can cost a couple hundred dollars). Is this considered spam or is this an effective use of a new communication platform? Should Twitter get compensated in some way if this request resulted in justin.tv finding someone for the job?

Update:
Looks like this is the guy who is helping Justin.tv with the scaling issues.

A local news station in San Francisco called KPIX ran a story on Justin.tv tonight. This is a big step towards mainstream success for this ambitious project. I’m just wondering what he’s going to do with that video feed if he needs to travel on a plane to be on a national talk show. Maybe have a guest Justin fill in?

I am very, very intrigued by the Justin.tv project. The whole thing is kind of mindless but I find myself checking in on what he is up to at least once or twice a day. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Do a TwitterSearch on Justin.tv and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what kind of traffic numbers that they’ve had since they launched last week but judging by the degraded video quality recently, I can only imagine that their traffic has been going up steadily. They got a lot of good initial momentum from a post on TechCrunch. But that can only take you so far. Plenty of promising companies have seen an initial spike in traffic after getting mentioned on TechCrunch only to see there traffic level off or go down over time. I think one of the key marketing tools for Justin.tv has been their use of Twitter and posting their phone number (415-948-3219) on the Justin.tv web site so that he can receive calls and text messages from his audience. I don’t know when they decided to use Twitter as one of their marketing channels but the timing couldn’t have been better. Everybody on Twitter seems to be saying something about Justin.tv. This includes heavy hitters like Thomas Hawk, Scott Beale (Laughing Squid), Nick Douglas, Jason Calacanis, and Dave Winer. Scott has a great post today describing his meeting with him last night at Bar None on Union Street in San Francisco. Many people, including myself, saw Scott’s tweet about heading over to Bar None to meet up with Justin.tv. I ended up tuning in to Justin.tv later that night and saw Scott talking to Justin. I had a feeling that Scott would be blogging about his Justin.tv meet-up so I took a few screenshots and sent them off to Scott. He ended up using one of them in his blog post today.

Yes, I know, this whole thing sounds like a big waste of time but I find this thing to be a really interesting mix of technology, social experiment, and innovative marketing. This is another example of a new form of entertainment where the audience is also the content of his show. And by having an audience of bloggers, he is getting the added bonus of his audience promoting his show. For free. That’s viral marketing in it’s purest form. I predict that we will see Justin on a major talk show in the next month or so (Jimmy Kimmel, Good Morning America, etc.). And it will be fascinating to tune into Justin.tv when those interviews happen. We’ll be able to follow along (from his point of view) when he arrives at the set, hang out in the green room with him, walk on to the stage, and look into the camera and the bright lights when the interview starts.

Update:
After taking a closer look at the chat room on Justin.tv I am less enthusiastic about their chances for mainstream success. That chat room is an unfiltered stream of really hateful comments. They either need to turn that chat room off or limit it to people who have gone through some kind of approval process. Maybe stream messages directed to Justin.tv on Twitter? That way there is at least some accountability for what people are saying.

First off, if they ever go in this direction, Twitter needs to be very careful with how they go about it or else they will lose their loyal users. Maybe they could add a preference setting that allows you to filter out posts related to buying and selling items, similar to the new Filtering feature on Flickr. They might also want to offer a Mature filter to keep out the seedy stuff. I could see some very cool mobile applications built around this. Imagine going to a sold out Arcade Fire show and using Twitter on your mobile phone to find people who are trying to unload unused tickets at the last minute within 0.5 miles of the venue. I would use that.

How would Twitter make money on this? They could charge the seller a fee for showing the For Sale tweet in a prominent location. Or go the craigslist route and charge a fee for real estate listings, job postings, etc.

Today Steve Rubel points out that Twitter is probably racking up SMS fees on the international tweets. He also points out that the site does not appear to be monetized now and that could be a problem. So building on my Future of Twitter post from yesterday, let’s look at how Twitter might monetize a partnership with a big company. Take the Starbucks example. Let’s assume that there are 20,000 people on Twitter who have added Starbucks as a Friend in order to get a few promotions a week - e.g. a free cookie with your coffee, a free tall coffee, etc. If Twitter charged Starbucks a few cents per tweet per follower, the revenue from Starbucks might looks something like this:

20,000 followers
10 tweets (promotions) per week
$.05 cents per tweet for each follower (maybe more???)
that’s $10 K per week or about $40K per month

If you sign up 100-200 companies doing something similar then we’re talking some real revenue. Probably more than enough to offset those international SMS fees.

Last night I listened to an interview that net@nite did with Twitter founder Evan Williams from earlier this month. Towards the end of the interview he talked about ways that they might monetize the Twitter platform in the future. The example that he gave was a movie promotion where you could follow the “tweets” of a character in an upcoming movie. This got me to thinking about where Twitter is going. I’m not saying I’m agreeing with the commercialization of Twitter, but how much longer will be it be until your Twitter page looks something like this?

5/29/2007 Update:
Delta Airlines is on Twitter now. Details about this on Jaunted.

6/4/2007 Update:
Read/Write Web spotted Amazon.com on Twitter.

7/13/2007 Update:
JetBlue (one of the companies that I used as an example in my original post) is on Twitter now.

I met digg.com founder Kevin Rose and lead designer Daniel Burka in line at a local sandwich shop in Potrero Hill today. They were both very cool, down-to-earth guys.

I’ve been testing out YottaMusic’s new streaming music service built on top of Rhapsody. I highly recommend this to anyone who is already on Rhapsody and it’s another good reason to subscribe to Rhapsody if you aren’t currently a Rhapsody subscriber (Sonos is the other big reason). The biggest advantages over the standard Rhapsody client is that it is that the player is browser based and they are building in a lot of cool social networking features, similar to last.fm. Fred Wilson has a good post on this here.

Today they rolled out a YottaMusic badge that shows your recently played tracks and a link to your profile. The service is still in Alpha mode so expect some instability here and there and lots of new features.

I am a huge fan of del.icio.us, so I decided to check out their millionth user / birthday bash at the Yahoo campus (many photos here). I had a chance to briefly chat with Stephen Hood (a product manager at del.icio.us), Les Orchard (del.icio.us engineer), Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Salim Ismail (co-founder of PubSub), and Jeremiah Owyang.