Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

One question I get asked a lot is “how do I make my content/app/video viral?”  Everyone wants to know the formula or the secret sauce.  While I can’t tell you the formula (because I don’t think there is one), I do think there is a pretty foundation element that you’ll have to have.

If you want your content, to go viral it has to be shareable. People have to be able to pass it from one person to the next.

This week Flickr has made the move of making their content more easily shareable.  In the upper right portion of each page, there is now a big “Share This” button.  You can quickly e-mail the photo, grab a link, embed it, or blog about 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.

It’s really cool to see Ann Bernard and Keith Casey’s Web app WhyGoSolo get so much deserved love from the blogosphere.

They were recently profiled:

• Read/Write Web - WhyGoSolo Bridges Your Online and Offline Worlds
• Frank Gruber - WhyGoSolo? When You Can Find People Online

What the app does is allow you to meetup with folks who want to attend real life local events.  That way they don’t have to go buy themselves and you get to meet someone with similar interests.

While I haven’t tried it out yet, it’s a GREAT idea and I intend to give it a whirl soon.

Plus they’re local to the Washington DC area and it’s great to see a local bootstrapped startup get international Web attention.

As I’ve mused in the past, I don’t think the paper newspaper translates very well into the online space.  With the news of the New York Times cutting 100 of its newsroom jobs,  I start thinking about who/what will be the future of the industry.  Obviously depending on a paper newspaper and paper ads isn’t enough.

More and more I think the future is a personlized start page, like iGoogle or Netvibes.

What does a newspaper?… It takes a bunch of different disparate sources of information from around the world and aggregates them into one convenient space.

What does a personalized start page do? … It takes a bunch of different disparate sources of information from around the world and aggregates them into one convenient space.

Last weekend in California there was the 2008 DEMO conference.   The conference serves as a launchpad for new Web startups.  It’s a great opportunity to see what the new thing is going to be.

Over at the GigaOm blog, they boiled down the four biggest themes that came from this year’s DEMO conference. One struck my eye:

Componentization of the web

The web’s full of pieces: static images, YouTube clips, Facebook widgets and Flash plugins. Startups want to let users rework these pieces their own way.

This is exactly what i’ve been saying.  When people find a Web site or piece of content they like, they want to be able to take it with them and do stuff with it.

This theme is also why I joined the widget platform company Clearspring.

So if you create online content, how are you allowing your users to grab a hold of and do stuff with the useful components?

Okay… so a lot of crazy things have happened in my life but this is on a whole new level…  The Library of Congress/Flickr project that I helped architect got a mention in this week’s Newsweek magazine.

UPDATE: You can see more photos at the WidgetDevCamp DC Flickr Group.  If you took photos of the event, please join the group and add the photos.

So WidgetDevCamp DC was this last weekend… it was awesome!  Here are some photos.  I’ll be writing more about it later.

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.