Twitter Cloning
Nice piece in Wired on Twitter cloning which causes tiny blogs to bloom everywhere.
…the cloning of Twitter is largely an international phenomenon. There’s Nowa from Japan, Robiz from Poland, TexteIn from Germany and Noumba from France. Mambler, a clone from Germany, even has its own Twitter-style shorthand language.
The Twitter mindset is one that meshes easily with blogging’s youth
culture in regions of the world where SMS phone messaging is more
prevalent. Mambler creator Michael Baumann says SMS is widely used by
people under 30 in his native Germany, a main reason for the popularity
of Twitter-style services.
Links & Blinks…
- So, no more fake Rolexs on trips to China then…
- Techdirt – worth a look
- Myspace for PR pros… But why can’t we just hang-out in MySpace?
- Bringing Editorial Calendars into the Social Sphere… Nice post form Steve.
- Meebo rooms launches. Meebo is great!
Bring Back The Cup
New Zealand are back at it, trying to bring the America’s Cup to New Zealand. As much as I was disappointed to see Alinghi and it’s crew of Kiwi traitors win the cup – one of the many good things to come out of it has been the America’s cup web site. It’s got everything you could want (well, it’s close) and more.
Stunning graphics, real-time race scoring and radio, plenty of history and commentary – brilliant. What’s missing? Well – most of the things I normally hold dear – stuff like focused RSS feeds, community (and related ranking of content), blog aggregation… The rest makes up for it though.
Compare this to Toyota’s pathetic effort only available to Kiwi’s onshore. Nuts! It’s a global event with a global audience. What are you thinking!
Team NZ’s presence it very light-weight also. Pretty much a standard site with little sizzle. The downside to this is probably going to be most felt in merchandising and growth of the TNZ community. You’ve got to activate the community through participatory technology or, excuse the pun, miss the boat. Ok, Oracle BMW racing has a bigger budget but that’s no excuse – I know plenty of Kiwi talent that would have done the TNZ site for the privilege. Their site is a stunner. Blog, great photos, live racing and more. Still, in both cases, no apparent RSS -and TNZ has them on downloads and content. I hope they also take them on the water….
Technorati Tags: America’s Cup, Team New Zealand
Links & Blinks
- Worth bookmarking… Google command line strings
- This is sure to make the next Shankland & Hurd interview interesting… Journos to sue HP over pretexting…
- Love this campaign by Fon… classic competitive move.
- Go Kiwis Go! Great win over Luna Rosa…
Verizon Sucks…
Our DSL router recently self destructed. You’d think replacing it would be relatively straightforward. A month or so later our new, upgraded, super-duper router is running and close to or below dial-up speeds. Verizon’s pathetic effort to resolve this issue is only matched by their bizarre business processes. Here are a few gems:
- They send us not one but two routers. One wired, one wireless. Aside from the cost of shipping two routers and resulting customer confusion, you’d think they’d have some kind of common and single device standard to streamline support. Nope.
- They want the old router back, or they are going to charge us. I dutifully pack the old fella up and ship it back. But wait! A week later the old router comes back home with a note. Seems it is "too old" for them to accept back. "Too old"? Nuts! It doesn’t even work.
- Then the service starts running sloooooooow. Seems they downgraded our service for no apparent reason. Quick fix… but why? ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE STILL CHARGING US FOR THE PREMIUM SERVICE!
- Seems that didn’t fix the connection speed anyway. Is still pathetically slow.
- Every call to inquire about the status of our pathetic speed is greeted with the same mindless drivel. "Sir, I can’t do anything until you… Unplug from the wall… Sit and Wait…Plug back in… Open browser… Ahhhhh… I see you have an open ticket… Let me put you through to someone else…. Sir, I know you are frustrated, BUT …. Unplug from the wall… Sit and Wait…Plug back in… Open browser… Ahhhhh… I see you have an open ticket… Ahhhhh… The problem seems to be at our end… I’ve noted this… We’ll see if we can find the problem…" How do possibly expect to a) make customers happy, b) charge them for a service you are not delivering and, c) make money providing such repetitive and mindless service?
- And now, to top it all off, even though we are sill at speeds well below our service level agreement they are claiming to have fixed the problem and there is nothing more they can do. There is something I can do and that is, not pay for the service!
Here’s the rub though – in this age of bountiful choice, it seems the only choice for consumer DSL is to wander into town and use the hyper fast FREE service and our local coffee shop.
