Change of address

Have moved to:

http://www.jimscollins.com/

Facebook on location

Facebook is set to announce in 3 weeks it's new location based platform for the web world to show your friends where you're going. It's hard to tell with Facebook where the hell it's going itself, tagging and posting nonsense is a great way to build communities but not so great as a business model.

If you look at the big 3, Microsoft/Apple/Google, they are coining money out of office/icrap/advertising at such a phenomenal rate the clock must surely be ticking for Facebook to pull out the finger. Facebook still occupies the "limbo" revenue categories with the rapidly-paling Twitter and the ghostly Amazon. So many users, so much potential, so little hard cash??

The new location feature is also being heralded as a direct attack on social location newcomers Foursquare. A social check-in company that is growing at rates last seen by twitter. Although this makes sense for a social network to expand into a location social network the tech world is littered with such disasters i.e.

• Microsofts efforts with Bing, a dominant company entering a seemingly capital-intensive market and falling on their knees.
• Googles efforts with Nexus One/Buzz, although I do agree with companies attempting to at least spread the web rather than a shitty app store.
• Anything that AOL ever did including AIM.

So the jury is still out for Facebook. Can social be profitable? They are making some cash but volumes of users ain't cheap. A social checkin/coupon app/planner app/AR app/(insert other location implementation here) won't really result in huge revenue for them as they've already missed the boat. The worrying part is that selling personal data to evil marketers (!!) is still the only realistic way to produce cash.

Feedomania - the modern day stock ticker

So what to Twitter, Facebook, Blippy, Plancast, Foursquare, Playfire and nearly all the latest startups in the last 3 years have in common?

The feed

We seem to be stuck in some kind of parallel universe where information needs to be fed to us in a 1920s style stock ticker format. Vertical never ending lists that follow a thumbnail-text box with some useless information scattered along the edges.

Web services and real time web are partly to blame, they emphasise short concise messages that can easily be subscribed to but they fail to communicate any form of personality beyond the short text permitted.

Sure we had some web page atrocities created by MySpace where early attempts to personalise pages resulted in some truly buggy profiles, but we've moved so far into the sterile world of feeds that the web is rapidly becoming social stock market that impersonalises interaction and instead focuses on the boring extroverts we usually tend to avoid.

These list sites also seem to assume the only way to grow is to get more and more potential customers onto their lists without focusing on satisfying the existing base.

Take Facebook, I continually find myself getting requests from people I hardly know and possess no desire to. Eventually I capitulate and end up having someones boring updates i.e. "attending auditing lecture today, can't wait to see the gang" pushed through to my feed.

Since Facebook has my network, tracks my usage,  surely it realises that I'd rather see something more interesting from a close friend, say write-up on a music event they went to, a recipe, music they like, clothes they bought, a song they're learning, something happening at work with them. This kind of content generation should be encouraged rather than focusing on creating a web of people I grow less interested in day-by-day.

Look at blogging, relatively few people blog as use facebook but it is in essence a much more interesting way of communicating. It doesn't even have to be as dull as posting an article, you should be able to post email conversations to your blog, add IM conversations, recommend the place you went last night or say how shite it was.


So a plea to the real time web, stop making feeds, start making it interesting.

Innovate 100 - The good, the bad and the hungry

Innovate 100 event was held in Dublin on Monday at the Radisson Blue hotel.

Plush enough surroundings really and free food which was handy for the lesser-well off. Plenty of networking style walking around and passing business cards, no brown envelopes received. As we'd not a single outstanding idea for the event we did feel a bit early stage for it but was good to see people were supportive and freely giving advice.

The morning kicked off with the CEO of Revahealth. Now this to me is a database of doctors profiles but from what the lecture contained it seemed to be fairly heavy staffed. The ROI seemed pretty slow to materialise though so he didn't paint too pretty a picture on going through the business. Google adwords got a bit of a slaying.

Next up was the CEO of Getitkeepit.com, a bill aggregation site. Not a bad looking enterprise and currently just going live so it's fairly fresh. They talked about offshore development for startups and getting technology into service integrators (Accenture et al). Seemed like a good idea if not slightly "mint" orientated. Reckon they might find it hard to pull in revenue from a site like that considering they're hoping to charge service providers to host their bills on the site. No doubt a slew of services will be setup to replicate Patzers cash cow.

Next 2 lectures were some generic Microsoft stuff on partnering and going international. Boring stuff that was no pushing their software.

Ray Nolan, owner of Hostelworld.com  gave the "i'm loaded, don't talk shit to me" speech. He steamrolled through the presentation like primary school student through home time prayers. Making sure to throw in the odd "we stamped out them" and "expedia are bullshit" comments. Funny to watch and he did make some good points at the panel that followed.

He reckoned Ireland's too small to target anything other than a sweet shop at. Probably right but I'm sure there are lots of people with companies doing well (maybe not as well as the 500m hostelworld was sold for).

There was a dragons den style affair to top the evening off where 11 startups presented to the crowd. Honestly the startups were by in large shite (although better than what we have which is currently nada). Typical affairs with a mobile website builder, time managment software, network software, cloud computing analyser. Nothing really unique. The winner was the Sonru video interviewing software which seems to be taking steroids as it's picked up tons of awards around Ireland recently.

Decent event, met some good Po-lice and well worth a visit if just for the free food..

Using RSS feeds with Twitter

Slightly messed up way of doing this but here's how I got it to work. I use Tweetdeck usually for facebook/twitter so I don't have to login and go through the sites to read news. Lately though I've noticed most decent sites in Ireland don't use Twitter that much and keep blogs instead. Ideally I'd prefer to let everything flow through tweetdeck (and read stuff through small popups) so I tried setting up a twitterfeed account. This sounds like it should do the trick but it's pretty useless at explaining what it actually does.

What it actually does is post blog updates to your twitter feed which is rubbish if people actually follow you and your RSS is some useless company that only you are interested in.

Solution? Create another twitter account and post twitter updates using twitterfeed onto it, then follow your new user in Twitter. Stupid workaround but it does work! My twitterfeedRSS is @ilikerashersrss. Updates hourly and is new so don't expect anything useful from it for a week or two.

Innovate 100 tomorrow

Off to innovate 100 tomorrow. Disappointed to find out only 12 companies are presenting but will add a write up.

Bedroom development

Spot the difference...

One is a scene from Peep Show where recently unemployed Johnson sets up a consulting firm "consultius" from his bedroom. The other is the new workspace of an exciting and overconfident company currently making little progress.


Our first site was launched yesterday. Although not going to take over the world it was a good way of testing out what we can do.

Not a whole pile right now apparently but at least it sort-of works.