Which Service Has The B...

Two days ago, I received an invite to Pinterest. (I know, I’m late.) After signing up, I pretty much ignored the welcome message, just as I do with most services. But last night I decided to get myself caught up after the Crunchies, and started reading through all my unread emails (even the ones from Nigerian royal’s relatives) and found myself actually reading through the Pinterest welcome email, too. It’s wonderful, and the reason it’s wonderful comes down to just one bullet point: Pin carefully! As one of the first members of Pinterest, your pins will help set the tone for the whole community. Use big images, write thoughtful descriptions, and pin things you really love. Also, no nudity Welcome messages are important because they’re usually the first point of contact between user and service. Good ones “set the tone” for the relationship the user will have with the service, give them helpful tips on how to get going (and be good at it), and usually have some kind of indication of what the format will be. Twitter encapsulates these core qualities perfectly in its welcome message. You learn what Twitter is about, are told having a profile pic and information set up gets you more followers, and signs off using @twitter handles. What Twitter fails to do is tell you that no one gives a damn whether or not your dog needs a walk, or if you’re soooooo tired. And now Twitter is full of people making mundane, useless comments all day long. It’s still a great service, don’t get me wrong. But maybe we wouldn’t be so bombarded by tweets about nothing if someone had said, “And remember, keep it interesting and useful” at the end of the welcome message. Of course, Twitter’s done nothing wrong in its welcome message. As I said before, it’s actually a great one, especially when compared to ones that just tell you you’ve subscribed. Looxcie, another great service, is quite complicated. What’s free and what’s paid, how it works, and how to get started can be tricky topics to tackle. Instead of addressing this right from the get-go, the Looxcie welcome message gives you this: What’s worse, it asks you for Likes and Follows. This wouldn’t be so bad if we were given some information about what to do, but if all you’re handing me in your opening statement is verification that I’m signed up, please don’t ask me to be a fan. I’m fan enough by using your service. A few buttons at the end of the email would suffice, if that’s really how you want to initially present the service. Plenty of services go the Twitter route (like Google+, Skype, GroupMe, Dropbox and HipChat), and plenty of services go the Looxcie route (like Beluga and LinkedIn (which basically just asks you to add more information)). Plenty fall in the middle (like Yammer, Heelo and Disqus), offering a very brief, vague idea of what’s going on followed by links to more information. Where Pinterest separates itself is in recognizing that the service is, when all is said and done, us. Twitter is a smart platform, but what makes it interesting is the users. The same can be said for most services, but instead of looking at what we can do for this or that service, the welcome message focuses on what the service can do for us. That’s not to say that the welcome message shouldn’t tell us about a service’s features and how it works, but isn’t it just as important to recognize that we have plenty to offer the service. I think twice about what I pin after reading that message (so far just an old record cover of NSYNC’s first album), which could lead people to pin less. Perhaps, being “picky” about how users use the site could work against Pinterest. But in my opinion, I feel much more welcomed by Pinterest than all the rest.

Twitter Ads Pushed Kome...

Pro-choice groups ran Twitter and Google ads, while the abortion topic heated up social media sites this week.

MVF Reveals Your Most V...

Ever wonder which of your Twitter followers you should be sucking up to? Well, you can go to MVF and find out. The app is a side project created by two startup guys — Alex Taub, who leads business development at Aviary, and Michael Schonfeld, a developer at Nerve Dating. Now, the idea of measuring online influence is nothing new, but where Klout and its competitors have built fairly complex scoring and measure influence in different topics, Taub and Schonfeld offer a simple app to ask a relatively straightforward question: “Who’s my most valuable Twitter follower?” MVF (which, naturally, stands for Most Valuable Follower) already attracted some attention when it launched a couple of days ago, and since then, Taub and Schonfeld have been adding new features. Most importantly, they’ve improved their method of measuring “value”. Instead of just going purely by follower count (a number that can be inflated by following a lot of people), the measurement now combines total follower count with what MG Siegler dubbed the Golden Ratio — namely, the ratio of number of followers to the number of people you follow. There’s a big viral component to the app, since it encourages you to tweet the result at your valuable follower — in fact, you’re required to do so if you want to see your second to fifth most valuable followers. So folks who roll their eyes at public obsessing/bragging over social influence may soon have something else to complain about, especially after next week, when Taub and Schonfeld plan to unveil a version of MVF for Facebook on-stage at the NY Tech Meetup. (They’re calling it “Most Valuable Friend,” which I find a little unsettling, though whether that says more about MVF, Facebook “friends”, or me is an exercise I leave to the reader.) Oh, and my most valuable follower? Turns out it’s a certain tech blog . I was confused, at first, because I thought TechCrunch could give those guys a run for their money, but then I realized that TechCrunch doesn’t follow me. Ouch.

LeVar Burton Snags @Rea...

While we nerds may best remember LeVar Burton as a VISOR-clad Starfleet officer, he also spent much of the 80s and 90s instilling in children an appreciation for reading. In fact, Burton is still stuck to the idea of encouraging childhood literacy — he launched a new company called RRKidz this past September that’s currently working on (among other things) a “disruptive” new iPad reading app. But when the time came to set up the all-important Twitter account to provide “the latest info on the upcoming relaunch of [Reading Rainbow] as an app,” he found that someone had already laid claim to the @readingrainbow handle. What’s more, the account owner hadn’t so much as made a peep in the last three years. Being a nice guy, Burton tried reaching out to the account owner but was apparently met with silence. So what’s a geek icon like LeVar Burton to do? Why, call on his fans of course. Burton tweeted the following last night to his 1.74 million followers and the official Twitter account: Dear @ twitter I'm trying to contact the individual who's sitting on @ ReadingRainbow but he hasn't Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks! — LeVar Burton (@levarburton) February 01, 2012 Ultimately, over 700 users ended up retweeting Burton’s call for help, which apparently prompted the folks at Twitter to leap into action. The @readingrainbow account ended up in Burton’s control within just over two hours of his initial plea. It’s a pretty impressive turnaround time considering some folks faced with similar situations have had to wait days before Twitter managed to make things work in their favor. Then again, most people can’t claim to have spent time debugging the warp core on a Galaxy-class starship. I crack me up. Incredibly lame pop culture references aside, Burton’s story isn’t exactly a new one. Though Twitter representatives declined to offer specific numbers when it comes to instances of name squatting, they lay out a clear stance against the practice in their (aptly named) Twitter Rules . It’s a potentially huge problem for Twitter — with growth still on the uptick , more and more people look at Twitter as a crucial source for real-time news and insight into other people’s lives. Squatters, be they inadvertent or not, have the potential to mar brands and personal reputations, and Twitter will have to keep their collective guards up if they want people and companies to keep up all that sharing.

Path, Google+ And Jack ...

The world loves to celebrate comebacks from failure, but the Crunchies and the companies it features are all so new that the show hasn’t done much of that. That changed last night at the 2011 Crunchies , with Jack Dorsey, Path and Google+ winning big . Path’s story hits home the most for me. My first tech blog post ever, back in early 2007 at VentureBeat, was about the rise of the Facebook . It featured an interview with Path founder Dave Morin , who at the time was leading the company’s barely launched developer platform. Soon afterward, Facebook exploded, I managed to get a full-time job as a tech blogger… and within a couple years, as is the way of things here in Silicon Valley, Dave and I moved on to new jobs. Then, I watched Path launch as a photo-focused app last year… and struggle to meet high expectations . When Dave got in touch right after I joined TechCrunch about covering the pending launch of Path 2.0 , I excused myself by telling him that other writers who had been following Path more closely were better suited for the job. But we both knew I was also being a skeptic, unlike the first time we talked. Path 2.0, however, turns out to be awesome . The mobile app perfectly combines photos, check-ins, status updates, and other key elements of top social services in an intimate setting, in a way that displaces Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and other leading social services today. I’ve been kicking myself about not covering the relaunch ever since, but that’s what I get for not believing. It very much deserved the Best Design award. Google Plus is the search engine’s latest of several social efforts over the years, but the first one that looks anything like a Facebook contender. Orkut turned out to be a sideshow, the various Friend Connect and OpenSocial platform/standard attempts never really hit it big with developers, and Google Buzz sputtered when the company tried to force it into Gmail in 2010. The guys who got on stage last night had been a part of at least some of the previous launches, so it was vindications all around. The one I know best is Joseph Smarr , who I’ve covered over the years as he worked through his former employer, Plaxo, to build open standards for social sharing. Since moving to Google, he’s been the mastermind behind private lists feature Circles and other key social parts of Plus, that have helped make it a uniquely good fit for what many social network users have wanted. After a decade of work building social products, he earned the Best Social Application the hard way. Jack Dorsey has perhaps gone through the toughest redemption process of all. Having created Twitter in 2006, he left in 2008 as the service struggled to: maintain uptime, roll out new products, and make money. But then he launched payment company Square, which has become a key new way for all sorts of small businesses to take credit card payments. And then, he came back to help lead Twitter last March, while staying on at Square. Since then, Twitter has rolled out a series of product changes that helped make it more mainstream, and in the second part of last year it began growing faster than it ever has before . Even its revenue plans are looking more promising. He got on stage twice last night, once for the social impact that Twitter has made as a key way that people share information around the world, and again because of the job he’s doing leading product development at the companies he founded . The best victories are the ones you have to fight for the hardest.