Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

So Twitter was a big success at SXSW for bringing people together.  As was laid out by Jeremiah Owyang, it was used to revolt against the Zuckerberg/Lacey interview, improve panels, and to find/start parties.

But what empowered Twitter to be so helpful? Most of it’s users were in the same geographic area.

I have Twitter friends from all over the country… all over the world.  There are times when I want to be able to see what everyone in my “global neighborhood” is doing.  That is fine.

There are other times when I want to go grab a beer and I’m curious what everyone else is up to.   What my friends in Boulder, Colorado are doing doesn’t help me find beer drinking company here in Washington DC.

It’d be cool if there was a mobile app that would append my geo-location or maybe just my zipcode on to the end of all my and my friends’ Twitter messages.

In addition to saying I always want to get SMS messages from certain twitter users, I could get SMS messages when tweets happen in my same geographic location.  Seems like this would be useful.

This make sense?

Lee LeFeever and company over at Common Craft have put out another great video!  It’s Twitter in Plain English.  This is a great one to share with your friends and colleagues.  So many folks I know don’t get Twitter and/or think I’m crazy for using it.

There is this whole Twitter vs Pownce debate, which I’ve already weighed in on so I’m not going to rehash that.  Till things get cleared up, there is one thing I ask of you… please please please don’t use Pownce like Twitter.

Twitter is made for telling people that you’re eating a turkey sandwich. Pownce is made for sending me a photo of your turkey sandwich or a cool link.

If I get a barrage of 14 Pownce messages from you, telling me about how you just got on an airplane or are about to eat Chipotle, I’ll probably unfriend you.  It makes Pownce useless

I can take a certain level of noise on Twitter.  Pownce is for more signal and less noise. Pownce is more like sending me an e-mail.

If you found this really cool Wired article or photos of cute kittens, send that to me on Pownce.

I have been a fan of the Web application Pownce ever since it was launched in private beta mid-2007 by the trio of Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Leah Culver.  I was especially pumped when last night Pownce moved out of private beta and opened to the world.

But… I worry that the app has been doomed  from the start because of bad timing.

When Pownce was launched in mid 2007, it was described as a “way to send stuff to your friends.“  I later heard it described as a light weight e-mail or messaging service.  It’s for when my friends want to send me a cool Web site, image, file, YouTube video, invite me for coffee later, or ask me for quick feedback about something.  Makes sense to me.  I’m always sending that kind of stuff around.

Unfortunate for Pownce, when it launched, Twitter was just starting to pick up and get a lot of buzz.  Instead of getting judged for what it is/was, Pownce has been judged as a replacement for Twitter… that it has to be one or the other… not both.

You hear a lot of people say… “only if you could send messages to Pownce via SMS, like Twitter”.  Maybe if the timing were different more folks with use Pownce and see it for what it is.

Pownce is for communicating messages.  Twitter is for communicating my status.

And… to add insult to injury Twitter is beating Pownce around the school yard.  I hope that enough people use it now that its open and it will begin to get an upswing of users.

So… what do you think of Pownce and Twitter?

So instead of just making sure you have your company’s domain name, you need to start thinking about whether you have your company’s username on major social networks.

Geico is learning a hard lesson.  A user on Twitter is holding their name for money.

Interested in purchasing this twitter? Contact me at jondoeb83@yahoo_.com without the underscore!

If Geico ever wanted to use a Twitter account to give company updates, they’d have to use a different name or buy it off the guy.

(Thanks Peter for the tip. )

It’s been fun to watch as Twitter has gone from a fascination of a few to micro-publishing platform that is used around the world.  The simplicity of only having 140 characters to say what you want to say has really helped to increase adoption.

What some are starting to realize is that if you can analyze what comes out of Twitter you can get a sense of the latest buzz, people’s quick thoughts, and opinions.

Politweets is a Web application that tracks what people are saying on Twitter about the different 2008 presidential candidates.  So if I wrote on Twitter, “Obama is on CNN right now.” It’d appeare on Politweets.

The campaign of a savvy presidential candidate should be using a tool like Politweets to track what people are saying and buzzing about themselves.   What’d be cool is if they could filter or sort tweets by state so candidates could just see what people are saying or have said in just a place like New Hampshire or Nevada.

This app is created by the same Washington DC-based folks who did Twittertale, the app that tracks the latest twitters with dirty words.  I expect more great things from these guys.

My friends Jason Garber, Doug March, as well as some of their compadres have just launched a new Web app called Twittertale.   It uses the Twitter API and skims what everyone is saying publicly looking for dirty words and then displays those for the world to see.  Twittertale also displays which Twitter users have the biggest potty mouth, which is also fun.

This is a really fun little application and is perfect if you need a little entertainment while you’re in the middle of doing work.

It also demonstrates some of the cool things that can be done with the Twitter API.

I look forward to seeing more great things from these gentlemen as well as seeing them evolve Twittertale.

Since the dawn of e-mail, it has been used for every type of person to person communication that someone can imagine.

The thing is e-mail was getting used for so many different purposes that messages were getting lost. People were sending messages to say that they were on the way home from work and it was getting mixed in with everything else.

This is where lightweight messaging services like the Facebook Wall, Twitter, or Pownce.  They fill the role that email did but they do it better than email.

The Facebook Wall allows you to say a quick hello.  Twitter says what you’re up to.  Pownce allows you to send someone a quick link or file.   They each only do these simple tasks and they do it better than email does.  Plus with the messages siloed out into these different services, you can process them much quicker.

As Jeremiah Owyang points out, because of these lightweight messaging services, e-mail usage may be on the decline.  It really doesn’t surprise me.

Broadcasting your presence using Web applications like Twitter is a great way to market your brand but it is also a great way to market your blog.  Every time you make a blog post, you can let your Twitter feed followers know.

With the Web application Twitterfeed, this is easy.  All you do is put in your RSS feed URL and your Twitter username and password and you’re all set.  Your Twitter feed will be updated every time your blog RSS feed is updated.  (it actually works with any RSS feed.)

Try it and you will drive traffic to your Web site.

(thanks Search Engine Land)

Robert Scoble, recently made the following comment, assuming that people use Pownce versus Twitter…

All you “pro-Powncers” are assuming one thing: that Twitter isn’t going to come back. I’ve heard rumors of a soon to come update. I love competition!

Am I crazy or do Twitter and Pownce fill two completely different needs?

Twitter is here to answer the question, “What are you doing right now?”  It’s for quick short status updates.  It’s the Web 2.0 version of IM away messages.

Pownce is to send stuff (messages, links, files, and events) to my friends.     It recognizes that we all too often just want to send something quickly to someone.  It doesn’t feel like it should deserve its own email.  Plus things too often will get lost amongst the clutter of email.   Pownce is just like writing on someone’s Facebook Wall.

What would be great is if one of the options in Pownce was to send and receive Twitter updates.

Twitter updates are just one more type of content that you send to your friends.